Arsen

by Kathryn Thomas

  ***

  Arsen called Phil as he motored north on I-10 and got their location. They had the guy stuffed in the back of the Blades’ van, the same one they used to deliver their orders to the UPS sorting facility for shipment.

  It was close to six by the time Arsen met Phil, Zane, and Berk. He parked his car in a Home Depot, then stepped into the back of the van. “What can you tell me?”

  “Not a fucking thing. He hasn’t said anything other than he was going to skull fuck us and we were dead. The same old shit they always say.”

  Arsen sat down on the floor beside the man. “Let me tell you how this is going to work,” he said slowly pulling out the case, giving the man plenty of time to think. “I’m going to inject you with a truth serum and you’re going to answer all my questions. The only question is, am I going to fry your brain and leave you a drooling vegetable or not. That, my silent friend, is entirely up to you.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Arsen nodded. “I’m going to give you a moderate dose first. You talk, we’ll dump you out somewhere, and in a few hours, assuming someone doesn’t mug you, you’ll be fine. But if you fight the drug, then I’ll have to keep increasing the dosage. You will talk, I can guarantee that, but how much of your mind is left after you talk, that’s the tricky part.”

  Arsen made a big production of opening the case and filling the syringe from the vial, holding the needle up to the light and thumping it dramatically. “Hold him,” he ordered.

  The man was already bound to the tie-down rings in the floor of the van, but Phil and Berk jumped on him and held him still while Arsen injected the drug. He did it slowly, more slowly than required, to heighten the effect. He pulled the needle out of the man’s arm and carefully put it away.

  “I’ll tell you nothing, you motherfucker!” the Horseman snarled, but his eyes were wide with fear.

  “For now, you’re right. But in an hour, after the drug has had time to work, we’ll see.” Arsen smiled his most threatening smile.

  They rode for forty-five minutes, their prisoner slowly slipping into a half-sleep, half awake, dream like state. “Hey, buddy!” Arsen said, nudging him with his foot as the four men sat in the floor.

  “What?” the Horseman asked, his voice slow and thick, as if he was drunk or half asleep.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Phyllis. Randall Phyllis.”

  Arsen grinned at his men. “Did you get beat up a lot in school, Randy?”

  “Yeah. God I hate my name.”

  “That so?” Arsen asked. “What do you want to be called?”

  “What?”

  “What do you want me to call you? Since I’m your friend, I want to know what you liked to be called.”

  “You’re my friend? You gave me drugs!”

  “It’s some good shit, isn’t it? I only give the good stuff to my friends.”

  Randy smiled. “Thanks, man. It’s some good shit.”

  “So, what do your friends call you?”

  “Snakebite.”

  Arsen rolled his eyes and grinned at Phil. “Okay, Snakebite. Roger wants me to go to the lab and check it out. He said to see you and you would take me there. Do you know where it is?”

  “Yeah. Maryville. Why does he want you to look at it?”

  “You’ve been having some quality problems, haven’t you?”

  Snakebite nodded. “Yeah. Chimp, he’s a chump. He doesn’t know his ass.”

  “Chimp? Is that the chemist?”

  “Yeah. We call him chimp because he’s so hairy. His girlfriend is hot though. I’d fuck her. I’d slide my cock right between those big titties of hers and—”

  “Where’s the lab, Snakebite?” Arsen asked, cutting him off before he had to listen to any more of that fantasy.

  “I can show you.”

  “Just tell me. I don’t think you’re in any shape to be riding, do you, pal?”

  Snakebite smiled. “No. That’s some good shit you gave me.”

  “The best,” Arsen agreed. “Just tell me the address and I’ll tell Roger you took me there, just like he said.”

  Snakbite shook his head. “Don’t know the address. Know how to get there, though.”

  “What can you remember?”

  “Man, I don’t know! It was this guy’s house. He wanted to expand and agreed to work for us. He thought it was funny as shit we were copying those fucking Blades. He said the Hearts and Daggers was some quality shit. Best out there.”

  “You can’t remember the address?”

  “No. It’s somewhere off 83rd.”

  Arsen snapped his fingers and pointed at Phil. “You can’t remember the street name?”

  “No. It was Indian something.”

  As Phil tapped on his phone, Arsen paused, trying to think out to proceed. “Was it the name of an tribe, like Apache or Cherokee, something like that?”

  “No, nothing like that. If Roger wanted you to see the lab, why didn’t he tell you where it was?”

  “He was on the phone and couldn’t remember the address. That’s why he wanted you to take me.”

  “Oh. Roger is such a prick sometimes.”

  Arsen grinned. “You got that right, brother.”

  “Indianola?” Phil asked.

  “Is the street name Indianola?” Arsen repeated.”

  “Maybe. I can’t remember. I know it was Indian-something.”

  “That has to be it,” Phil said.

  “You don’t remember the house number? How do you find it?”

  “It’s the white shithole on the left side. I bet this guy’s neighbor’s love him.”

  “You said it was blue?”

  “White! Jesus, why don’t you listen?”

  “What’s on either side of it?”

  “Man, I don’t know! There’s a yellow house across the street. The guy has a couch or something in the front yard.”

  “Show Zane,” Arsen ordered, and Phil moved up to sit in the passenger seat.

  “You’re doing good. We’re going to look now.”

  “You have any more of this shit?”

  Arsen grinned. “As much as you want.”

  Snakebite grinned and nodded. “Awesome.”

  ***

  Forty minutes later they rolled to a stop by a white shithole of a house with yellow house on the other side of the street with a couch sitting in the carport. Arsen slid the door open. “That the Chrome Horseman club house?”

  “No. That’s outside of town.”

  “This is the place you said.”

  “No. This is where we make our molly. You think we would have such a shithole for a clubhouse?”

  Arsen slapped Snakebite on the shoulder. “That’s right. You told me.”

  “Jesus. You never listen.”

  “I know. Sorry about that.” He looked to Zane and Phil. “Where’s his bike?”

  “We left it in a park near where we bagged him,” Phil said.

  “Let’s go back there and drop him off. He’ll be coming out of it in an hour or so.”

  “We’re just going to let him go?” Berk asked.

  “Yeah. He won’t remember any of this, so why not?”

  “Because we’ll have to deal with him later?” Berk’s tone make it sound like a question, but it clearly wasn’t.

  “And where do you suggest we dump his dead body? Are you sure you didn’t leave prints or nobody saw you grab him? If he turns up dead, a whole lot of shit is going to start going down. We let him go…” he shrugged. “He’s just one more stoned out junky. The horsemen will get theirs after we’ve had time to plan.”

  Berk nodded. Arsen’s arguments made sense, but it galled him to let this asshole just walk away. “Maybe someone will roll him.”

  Arsen grinned. “I think we should put his wallet out where someone can easily find his ID, to help him get home. What do you think?”

  Berk smiled, feeling a little better. “I like that idea. After all, we want him to get home safe.”r />
  Chapter 25

  The Blades rallied at the nearby elementary school, waiting in the parking lot until all the members were there. They were going in force to make the takedown quick.

  “We have no safety equipment with us, so when you get there, don’t touch anything!” Arsen cautioned his men. “There’s a reason we use respirators and nitrile gloves in the plant. Getting sulfuric acid or mercuric chloride on you will absolutely ruin your day. Go in, take down whoever we find, but let me handle the chemicals. Any questions?” There were none. “Let’s do this quick and quiet.”

  They rolled up to the house in four vehicles and stopped out front. Arsen kept his men back out of site as he walked up to the front door and rapped. “Chimp? Roger sent me.”

  “You know I hate it when you call me that,” the man said as he opened the door.

  The Blades stormed into the room, but there was nobody in the house other than the man, and a woman who appeared a moment later to see what the commotion as about.

  “What do you want?” Chimp asked, his eyes wide. He wasn’t a big man, but as Snakebite said, he was covered in hair, sporting a thick beard and arms that wouldn’t look out of place on a wolf-man.

  “What we want, Chimp, is for you to stop making molly,” Arsen said softly, then nodded to Phil, standing behind the man and holding his arms.

  Phil quickly wrapped a wire around Chimp’s neck and jerked it tight. Chimp struggled in silence, unable to breath to make a sound, clawing at neck, trying to get his fingers under the wire, but after an eternity, his struggles slowed and he collapsed. Phil rode the body down to the ground, but kept the pressure on until he was sure the man was dead.

  Arsen stepped to Berk, holding the woman, his hand around her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. “Here’s the deal, sister. He’s going to turn loose of your mouth so you can talk to me. If you scream, he’ll snap your neck. Got it?”

  He nodded to Berk who released her mouth. “What do you want?” she breathed. “I’ll do anything you want!”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” Arsen peeled five $100 bills off and handed them to her. “If I ever see you in Arizona again, if you talk to anyone, you’ll end up just like him. We found you once, we can find you again. Now get out! Run!”

  The woman didn’t hesitate, bolting from the house and running down the street. “Why’d you let her go?” Berk asked.

  “We don’t kill women if we don’t have to. That’s the difference between us and the Horsemen.” Arsen looked around the lab in the house. It was a disaster, and it made his skin crawl just seeing the setup. Open containers with no labels, no ventilation, no nothing. They were doing the community a service by shutting this lab down. The man wasn’t completely stupid, and he found a box of gloves. He pulled two out and put them on, handing the box to Zane. Zane pulled two, and passed it on, until the box was empty.

  Arsen pickup up a couple of containers. “Jesus Christ, would you look at this?” he said, sitting the box down. “There’s enough mercuric chloride in that box to kill every person on this street, and he has it in an open box. What a moron.” He picked up several other containers, but held them well away from his face. After several minutes of inspection, he started giving orders.

  “I’m going to separate the toxic from the safe. Find something we can dump it into. The toxic stuff…I guess we’ll bag it up and take it with us and dump it in our hazardous waste stream at the plant. Zane, you and the rest of the guys start breaking down the equipment.” He raised his voice. “If you don’t have gloves on, don’t touch anything! Zane, put all the equipment in the shower. We’ll rinse it down before we leave.”

  “Why are we doing this? Why not just burn the place or something?”

  “Because there are houses close on both sides, and a fire station isn’t far from here. Second, I don’t want to leave the equipment. They’ll just setup somewhere else if we do. So we’ll take it back with us. Some of the reaction vessels we can sell on ebay or something. The rest we’ll sell for scrap or just throw out. But I want it out of here so they can’t reuse it.”

  “We could just smash it.”

  “Too much noise and takes too long. Leave the glassware!” he called to a brother picking up beakers.

  “And why are we taking the chemicals?”

  “What do you suggest, leave them here?”

  “Why not? Or pour them down the drain.”

  “Because that rubs the chemist in me wrong.”

  Zane shook his head. “Whatever. This is your show.”

  ***

  They spent an hour tearing the lab down. They found several five gallon buckets in the back of the house they repurposed. All the safe chemicals went into one bucket, the toxic items were triple bagged in sealed plastic bags, then placed in another. They’d also found a several large bags of molly, bagged and ready for sale. Those went into van as well for disposal. They didn’t want the drugs, but they didn’t want to leave them for the Horsemen either.

  The equipment they were taking was given a good rinse to remove anything that might be on it. It bothered him they were potentially dumping heavy metals and other nasty substances into the Phoenix waste water system, but the quantities were low enough the city’s treatment plant would be able to handle it.

  Satisfied they had done all they could, four brothers smashed the glassware while the remaining brothers piled the equipment into the van. Arsen sat the two buckets of hazardous waste, the lids sealed with duct tape, into the van and slammed the door. “Let’s roll,” he told Zane. “Straight back to the plant, and be careful. I’ll meet you there.”

  Berk joined him in his Caddy, and they followed Zane and Phil in the van all the way back to the clubhouse. When they arrived, he took charge of the chemicals, chucking the non-hazardous chemicals into their dumpster. The toxic chemicals and molly went into their hazard waste tote while Zane, Phil and Berk unloaded the rest of the equipment from the van. Task completed, he breathed a sigh of relief. If Zane had an accident on the way back to the clubhouse, and spilled the contents of the two hazardous buckets, they would have to scrap the van. There would have been no way to get the chemicals out of all the nooks and crannies, so the acids would have eaten a hole in it, eventually, and the risk of poisoning by mercurial chloride was too great to keep it around. He would rather die a dozen times in a gunfight than die once from mercury poisoning.

  “How long do you think it’ll be before the Horsemen know?”

  “Tomorrow sometime,” Phil shrugged.

  “Berk, tomorrow I want you to power-wash all that shit we brought back. We’ll get it cleaned up, then I’ll have Alex put the stuff that will sell on ebay. The rest we can scrap.” Arsen ordered.

  “Anything else?” Berk asked.

  “No. We did good tonight. Nothing we did will stop the Horsemen, but killing their chemist is going to put a big crimp in their style.”

  “I like the fact we’re making money off busting up their lab,” Phil grinned.

  “And we took a shit load of the fake Hearts and Daggers off the market too. What did you do with it, anyway?” Zane asked.

  “Cut the bags open and dumped it into the waste tote. By now it’s just part of the chemical stew.”

  Chapter 26

  On the way home from the clubhouse, Arsen realized he hadn’t called Quinn. “Shit,” he muttered. He debated calling her now, but he was only ten minutes from home, and it was late, a little after midnight, so he decided not to bother.

  The house was dark as he moved to his bedroom. “You didn’t call,” Quinn said from his bed.

  “No. I forgot.” She turned the lamp on and sat up. He expected to see her in some form of sleepwear, but she was still fully dressed.

  “I’ve been worried.”

  “Smooth as glass,” he replied. “I told you to not worry.”

  “You don’t know how they are! They’re ruthless. They won’t hesitate to kill everyone. The Riders thought we could reason with them, but you see h
ow that came out.”

  “You haven’t seen us when we’re pissed off,” Arsen teased.

  “Your club is—”