by Laird Barron
Kari dropped her hands and gaped. Comprehension shone through the dull outrage and sniveling.
“Daddy! I don’t—”
Dr. Jefferson shook his head in warning. He’d assessed my demeanor and methods and arrived at an opinion about how far south this fiasco might be headed.
“Tell him so he can leave my house.” He removed a pen from the block and pushed a memo pad across the table at her. “Write it down if you’re afraid to speak it aloud.”
I said, “By the way, doc. Might want to count your samples and prescription pads. Kari’s dealer pals would never pass up an opportunity to exploit easy access to the candy store.”
“Jesus Christ,” Dr. Jefferson said. “Kari?”
She swayed, her eyes bright and huge and fragile as a child’s. How many occasions had a subset of this psychodrama played out between them? What do you fear? How did it make you feel? Where did he touch you? It’s all right, write it down like a secret.
I gritted my teeth and pressed on.
“Hank’s in the wind. Who’s your buyer now?”
“I don’t know him.” The light in my eyes caused her to gulp hard. “It’s some guy.”
“His name and his number. Right this goddamned instant.” I laid it on thick—beetled brows, flaring nostrils, and spittle.
“His name is Goliad.” Kari said it clipped and cold, her little-princess act in shreds. “He’s a banger. Friend of Hank’s. I talk to him only when I have to.”
“Write it down like your daddy said.”
She blinked the tears away and wrote the number on her daddy’s business card. Then she looked at me. The artful sadness wiped clean and replaced by something glacial and ancient. The skull beneath the flesh.
* * *
—
ON MY WAY OUT OF that Gatsby-style shindig, I buttonholed Dr. Peyton as he hesitated with a pack of cigarettes near French doors that let into the garden. Apparently had returned from Seattle early. Easy to recognize from his staff photos. Fortyish, slight, dressed in a silk shirt and slacks. Knockoff Gucci shoes. From his house to his clothes, he barely accomplished a façade of making it compared to the bigger fish he swam among. No surprise he’d signed on to sell black-market meds hand over fist. I didn’t require him for my plan to gain an audience with the Manitou and I doubted the gang had ever spoken to him directly. Nonetheless, I intended to make a splash.
I leaned against him and used my size and weight to casually muscle him into the darkness. My left hand maintained a solid clutch on his testicles, guiding him like a rudder. Old hat move on my part—over the course of a long and sordid career I’d grabbed more junk than a fluffer in Burbank.
I asked him for a light with a broad smile. From two feet away it would appear as if we were chummy and a little drunk.
“No more scrips under the table,” I said close to his ear.
Peyton tried to answer. His throat clicked.
I gave his balls a tweak.
“No more scrips,” I repeated.
“No more scrips,” he said. Right or wrong, men are seldom in the mood to debate their innocence when their nuts are in a vise.
“Give me your cell phone.” He did and I dialed Kari’s connection with my free hand. A man, presumably the mysterious Goliad, answered on the third ring.
“Hold on a second and I’ll patch you through to Dr. Peyton. Dr. Peyton of Smyth and Coe, the fella who makes it rain Oxy.” I gave Peyton the phone. “Tell the nice man what you just promised me.”
Dr. Peyton said, “Uh, this is Dr. Peyton. I’m done. I’m out. Please don’t send anyone around.” He hadn’t the foggiest idea who he was talking to. He would’ve said anything to make the pain stop. I wondered what it said of my character that I’d spared Kari physical abuse and yet had no qualms inflicting it upon this pathetic creature. The road to redemption is paved with schmucks, perhaps?
I took his phone, shut off the power, and slipped it into my pocket.
“Disobey me and I won’t report you to the cops, I’ll come to your house and put a hurt on you. Four out of five doctors agree, it’s tough to wipe your ass with a hook. We clear?”
“Clear . . . We’re clear,” Dr. Peyton said. His eyes shone.
“Mind if I borrow your phone for a day or two?”
He shook his head enthusiastically.
“Excellent. Damn, that was good for me.” I released him and he slumped, clutching himself. “Enjoy the party, doc.”
PART III
THE GORDIAN KNOT
THIRTY-ONE
It rained all night and in the morning the sky was black except for a funnel where the sun burned through. A giant red eye glaring down upon my cabin at the edge of the woods. I dialed the White Manitou banger, Goliad.
“Hi, gonad,” I said when the guy picked up.
“Goliad.” He cursed. Heavy breathing, then, “Who this?” Either he was too stupid to read caller ID or he’d decided on caginess.
“Your mystery date. What time I come to pick you up, honey?”
“What? You trippin’, man? Who this?”
“The dude who cut off your supply with Dr. P.”
Nothing for a few seconds.
“You trippin’, punk.”
“Hey, no sweat, gonad. Make your calls, then hit me back.” I broke the connection and fixed breakfast. Fried three eggs and half a pound of thick-cut bacon. Coffee, black as night. I ate breakfast while the red eye in the sky closed and it rained again. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. Already, the slow trickle of adrenaline filled my mouth with a metallic taste.
The phone beeped. Gonad’s number.
“Good morning, trouble,” a different voice said.
“Morning,” I said. “You must be important. Let’s have a sit-down. Talk-turkey time.”
“Why would I agree to that? You could be anybody.” By anybody he meant a cop.
“My name is Isaiah Coleridge. Check around. I’m legit.”
He hung up. I poured more coffee and sipped it. Handing him my name without quid pro quo was a calculated risk. That said, his network would have obtained the information anyway.
My long affiliation with the mob—and the muddy circumstances regarding my current status—would give the Manitou pause before summarily whacking me, or so I hoped. The criminal organizations were locked in a cold war. I banked on the theory that neither side would escalate tensions via a casual murder unless it got voted on and sanctioned. More important, everything about me would appeal to a gang who preferred to recruit disaffected minorities.
Essentially, this was me crossing my fingers.
The callback came forty-five minutes later.
“Quite a rep you got, Coleridge. You were on-the-job for Chicago.” He didn’t give me the satisfaction of saying the Isaiah Coleridge! but I chose to assume it was implied.
“Once upon a time.”
“Looking to audition?”
“Try again. I go for a better class of hoodlum. I’m looking for a girl. Dear friend of mine named Reba Walker. One of your homies knows her—Hank Stephens.”
Silence suggested a gathering of wits.
“A puppy crying for attention, that’s what you are,” he said, still composed. “Making a scene.”
“This isn’t a scene.”
“No?” He sounded amused.
“In the old days, I would’ve blasted and stabbed my way through your gang.”
“In the old days, you had a posse to back your play.”
“Make assumptions about the status of my posse at your own risk.”
“I like you. What’s the angle?”
“Tell me where to find the girl or Hank Stephens. I’ll take either.”
The guy chuckled. Pure evil.
“Too bad you went at our doctor friend so hard. The doc is small potat
oes, but our potatoes. Pitch me the case for why you don’t meet with an untimely fate before the week is out. Guy in your line doesn’t have much of a life expectancy.”
“First, you’ll get a bunch of foot soldiers killed. Your bosses will love all the machine guns and fireballs going off in downtown Newburgh.”
“Machine guns and fireballs? Really?”
“Ever watch that famous war movie? That’s how it’ll be.”
“Which one?”
“The one where everybody dies.”
He waited several beats. Other voices muttered in the background.
“Okay, my friend. Brashness is its own reward. Be at the corner of Hughes and Battery. One hour. Else we come hunting.”
“Two hours,” I said. I walked outside and stood under the dripping eave.
Lionel trudged along the path, his slicker splattered in mud. He chucked aside his pitchfork.
“We on?”
“We’re on.” I gave him the short version. “This is dangerous. They decide to whack me, they’ll do anybody along for the ride.”
“I’ll secure firepower,” he said. Happy at last.
* * *
—
PROBABLY NOTHING TOO TERRIBLE would happen. Probably.
Were violence a foregone conclusion, I wouldn’t dream of leading us into a shooting gallery. Machiavelli once wrote about being unable to control fortune; however, a wise man digs channels to guide the flood. Thus, I got busy with pick and shovel. I put the revolver into the Monte Carlo’s glove box and tucked the jade war club under the seat with my favorite Randall fighting knife. None of these items would escape notice by a remotely competent security sweep. Nonetheless, I wanted them near to hand if matters went south.
I’d dressed in my number three suit—charcoal gray, a patched-over bullet hole in the thigh. My business suit. Not snappy, not shabby. Loose enough to cover the fiberglass shiv taped to my ankle; I kept the blade because if I didn’t leave a weapon for my enemies to confiscate, they’d be on their guard. From what I’d researched of the White Manitou, the rank and file were warm-up-jacket-and-sweatpants types. I pictured myself a black knight preparing to wade into the melee against peasants. If a knight meant to astound and demoralize a yokel mob, he had to dress the part.
Lionel was the wheelman. Haggard, chain-smoking Marlboro Reds; a vision of how he’d been in days of war. Water pearled against the windows and warped the universe into a black-and-white Impressionist’s canvas. The interior flushed blue from smoke and stained light. I closed my eyes and relaxed by counting all the enemies I’d rubbed out. That always made me feel better.
Calvin joined us in New Paltz. Lionel had called him and explained the mission. He climbed in back and fist-bumped Lionel over the seat. I didn’t bother to order him to go home, or warn him that there might be real trouble, or say he didn’t owe us anything. His expression told the whole story. This guy had routinely entered war zones. A drive to the shady side of Newburgh wouldn’t rattle him.
“I knew her, Horatio.” He struck a match and lit a joint. He took a hit and passed it to Lionel. “We broke bread. She had an eye for photography. I let her borrow my camera for a few minutes. Still have a dozen shots she took of the farm on my hard drive.”
“No shit,” Lionel said.
I returned to my meditation and visualized our vehicle as seen from the eye of a crow. So fragile and insignificant amidst the thunder, the rushing wind, and the infrequent strokes of lightning. Three men connected tenuously by loose affiliation and camaraderie were headed directly into the belly of the beast on behalf of a young woman none of them called blood. I bore witness to a strange and wondrous event that felt suspiciously like a miracle. Rain dappled skull patterns upon the glass. That omen concerned me not a whit. I opened my mouth wide and took in several gulps of oxygen.
Newburgh sprawled by the sluggish Hudson River. Three centuries and counting. An imperial beauty gone long in the tooth and whose glamour had tarnished. The evil in her heart seeped through, blacked and crumbling as her warehouses, her factories, and her streets. Trees and shrubbery grew dense among benighted neighborhoods, albeit not in the manicured and tidy fashion of New Paltz but as an expression, or a warning, of the primeval wild that lurked always ready to overrun the works of civilization.
Newburgh, decaying Newburgh, collapsing back into the savage and superstitious darkness of the days when men first hacked its geometry from the forest and the marsh. Poetically fitting that the Manitou nested here, hatching plots.
We thudded across a set of train tracks into The Battery, which in the old days had been dubbed the artisan, vandal, or cutthroat’s quarter, depending upon the decade. Here spread the rest of the city, inverted like a photographic negative. Abandoned storefronts with the windows smashed. Graffiti-slashed ruins of America’s halcyon era. Rusted street signs. Broken glass in the street and dead vehicles. No police in view, but plenty of scrawny stray dogs. Plenty of scrawny stray kids brandishing sticks and bats as they prowled. Had this been a fork in a jungle path, skulls would’ve adorned a pole, proclaiming this the territory of one murderous tribe or another.
The rain slackened as we waited on the corner of Hughes and Battery. Here were the slums of the slums—abandoned lots, heaped with festering garbage, and rows of derelict brownstones. Sidewalks were crooked and split. The whole place appeared to have been hit with a mortar barrage, then left to decay.
I leaned against the hood. Calvin rested on the trunk. Lionel remained behind the wheel with the motor running. Both of them were carrying.
A door opened in the burned-out tenement to my right. Opened isn’t quite the term—a skinny kid in a gray hoodie picked the door up and propped it against the wall when he emerged from his spot.
“Yo, roll on in,” he said. He jogged toward an apartment complex half a block down and across the street. We idled along on his heels and eased through a covered accessway into a courtyard where weeds ran riot. Cars sat on blocks. Pieces of indoor furniture were scattered from hell to breakfast. Cinder blocks and assorted junk littered the walkways. Crows hopped and cawed, picking through trash and dog shit. As for the complex proper, two-thirds of the windows were blown in or boarded over. This was the land that time forgot.
Lionel parked about a hundred feet from a buckled chain-link fence that hemmed in a swimming pool. A mob gathered near the pool. Black, Latino, Indian, and a couple whose hoodies made it difficult to tell. Two of them restrained pit bulls on choke-collar leashes that didn’t stop the dogs from slavering and barking. The louder was a brindle bitch accompanied by a scarcely weaned pup that cowered on her flank. Mama dog’s teats sagged and swayed as she lunged. The handlers kept the beasts separated by centimeters while money traded hands amidst hoots and jeers.
The kid jerked his thumb toward the central entrance; a pair of metal doors guarded by a squad of foot soldiers. The thugs wore goose-down jackets, despite the humidity. A couple of them hefted machetes. Tattoos and scars and bad haircuts for the whole posse. They did a bang-up job looking mean.
I told my companions to wait. Neither were happy about it, but they stayed put.
At the entrance, an Indian with all kinds of piercings patted me down. His buddy ran a wand over me; got the nooks and crannies too. Nobody said anything. I followed the kid inside for my audience with the lord and master of all that ghetto opulence. Behind me, the dogs were tearing each other apart.
THIRTY-TWO
First floor of the White Manitou hideout, the Wigwam, as I’d heard Calvin refer to it, constricted into a nightmare of torn carpeting, spent syringes, and ground glass. Dark and pissy. Holes in the walls exposed wiring and pipes. An army of ne’er-do-wells had scrawled epithets and cryptic variations on the White Manitou sigil—a stylized wolf’s head, jaws agape—into a grim, repeating mosaic. Here and there, figures lay on the floor or in stairwells. I covered my nose to block the re
ek of sewage and decay.
Against my better judgment, I boarded an elevator minus its ceiling tiles. The snaking guts of the shaft were exposed as the car rose to the fourth floor. The kid didn’t speak. He faced the red-glowing number plate with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. I stepped out of the brassy coffin onto clean blue carpet. The inset lamps shone pure and bright. The fixtures were shiny. Walnut paneled the walls. It even smelled minty.
My guide buzzed number 456 at the end of the corridor. Another metal door, painted white and framed in baroque red scrollwork. A bust of a demonic wolf glowered from the lintel. The door swung wide and two men took possession of me. Both wore leather jackets, tight pants, and combat boots. The one in a pink-and-blue Mohawk frisked me while his partner, cauliflower-eared and flat-nosed, gave me a patented tough-guy glare. He ordered me to turn around and I recognized his voice.
I favored Cauliflower Ears with a deadpan expression.
“Gonad? Is that you?”
He didn’t dignify my query with a comment.
Mohawk found the shiv taped to my ankle the other guy had missed. He smirked and made it vanish up his sleeve. He checked my ID and snapped a picture of me with his cell phone. The ID I’d given him was kind of fake, as it listed an old Alaska address.
“Man, visiting gangsters has gotten worse than going to the DMV,” I said to no applause.
They prodded me into a long, well-lighted room. I took stock. Solid, serviceable furniture that had seen much use. Windows with a view of the courtyard. Bags of weed and pipes on a coffee table. Hardwood floor, which meant it’d be slippery if I had to juke or jive. Three younger men played video games on the flat-screen with the sound muted. Five more watched from couches and chairs. Everybody dressed casually, everybody drank bottled beer. I spotted three handguns and a Bowie knife.
