Disposable Souls

by Phonse Jessome

  She struggled to rise. Her eyes closed again, and she fell back to the driveway. I turned back to Constable MacLean.

  “She’s alive. We need to clear that house now. We’ve gotta get paramedics in here fast.”

  I felt Carla’s blood seep through my jeans as I knelt beside her. Her gun was in a lake of blood. It was probably still operating, but I couldn’t risk it in a firefight. Blood could jam a weapon. I needed a clean gun, fast. I could hear sirens and the sound of two Harleys racing away, engines howling under load. I could feel the sun’s heat on the black leather on my shoulders. I needed to move, to clear that house, but I couldn’t abandon Carla.

  “Sir, should I go around back?” The young cop was crouching beside me now. He looked at my colours, but said nothing. I looked at his name tag.

  “Get me your big gun, Constable Dill. I don’t have a weapon.” Every cruiser has a pump gun in the trunk at the least, a fully automatic C8 if Dill’s cruiser was up to standard. If the shooter was inside, girl or not, I was going to cut her in two. He ran back for the gun. I moved to the front of MacLean’s cruiser without looking back at Carla. I couldn’t help her by kneeling there. The sirens got louder. One would be an ambulance. It would be held back a safe distance from the house until this scene was secure. I couldn’t let them sit there and wait while Carla was bleeding out. The cop shoved a tactical shotgun into my hand, no C8 but more than enough gun.

  “Okay, you go around to the patio on the right side. Go fucking slow, you hear me. There’s a girl here somewhere, and it’s a safe bet she has a gun. Constable MacLean, take the left beside the garage. I just want you two to get eyes on the backyard, make sure she doesn’t run, okay?”

  “Are you going in?” It was MacLean.

  “Yes, I am. Just cover the sides.”

  I moved to the doorway, did a fast pulse check. Samuel was dead. Good for you, Carla. The front door was open about an inch. I moved up the steps and pushed it in with the barrel of the shotgun. I should be waiting. I should have MacLean and Dill stacked up behind me. There is a right way to do it, a safe way. First officer in breaks right, second breaks left. You chase your gun along the wall, looking for targets, knowing the middle of the room is covered by the third member of the team. I wasn’t waiting for backup. I didn’t want witnesses. I knew the house well enough to play the odds. If she was inside, the girl would likely be all the way in the kitchen or down the hall hiding, not lying in wait inside the small foyer. I rushed in and dashed across the floor, slamming my back against the knee wall that jutted into the kitchen entrance. Nothing. I dropped to my stomach and eased my face around the wall. She’d be looking higher if she was waiting. The kitchen was clear, boiling water spilling out of a pot popping and hissing on the stovetop. I saw the pot before I heard the hiss. That was a problem. My pulse pounding in my ears blocked everything else. I had to take a deep breath and gather my senses. Not hearing is as bad as not seeing; it could be fatal.

  The sound of the gunshot was unmistakable, and I probably would have heard it even with my pulse pounding in my eardrums. I rolled back behind the knee wall and pulled my legs under me. The shot came from the hallway beyond the kitchen. I was calm. Being under fire is easier than thinking you might come under fire. When it’s real, you can fight back. I dumped a round high into the open doorway to keep the shooter down as I ran past to take a position in the kitchen. I caught a glimpse of Bobby Simms sitting at the table and spun, putting the shotgun on him. The trigger was about an ounce shy of breaking when I eased up. He was not a threat. I leaned out and took a quick glimpse into the hallway.

  The girl was sitting on the floor, staring at the gun in her lap. She was small, looked to be maybe thirteen. The front of her dress was covered in blood. I thought maybe I’d hit her, but she raised her head and looked at me. She lifted the gun, and I dove to the right. I slid into the patio door in a shower of broken glass as I heard her second shot.

  “Get out. Get out,” she yelled. “I won’t go back. You can’t make me. Fuck the Stallion.”

  I could hear the sobbing from the hallway. I thought it would be easy to shoot her when I saw Carla in the driveway. I tried to put that image back in my head, but all I saw was a tiny, broken girl with a gun in her lap. I couldn’t kill her. I had to disarm her before she shot anyone else. I moved to the wall and inched my way past the kitchen table to crouch next to the opening to the hallway.

  “Hey, are you still there?”

  She answered with another shot. The pot jumped from the top of the stove, spraying water over the floor. She wasn’t aiming, just shooting. I wanted to rush her, but it would be suicide.

  “Hey, let’s talk. Just you and me. Okay?”

  “Fuck you. You think I don’t know a Nomad. You’re gonna kill me. I know it.”

  “Hey, come on now. Why would I want to do that? Just calm down, okay?” I looked at the Nomad patch arching up the front of my vest and wondered at her observation skills during a shootout.

  “Go away,” she cried. “Just leave me alone. Fuck that midget. He killed that cop, I didn’t do nothin’.”

  I waited, didn’t know what to say as her sobs grew louder. I looked around the kitchen for a way to distract her so I could disarm her.

  “You don’t want to do this. Please, there has been enough killing.” I looked over at Bobby Simms’s body. “What happened to Bobby?” I hoped I could draw her into a conversation.

  “Fuck him too, he killed that woman and said I had to take the blame. For killing Sam’s father, too. I already told Gunner I didn’t kill him. That stupid preacher killed himself. I didn’t break any rules. Just leave me alone.” She punctuated it with another blind shot into the kitchen. The sobs stopped; she was angry again. Good, angry is easier to deal with.

  “Look, I am not going to hurt you. No one is, we can sort this out.”

  “No, you’re going to kill me because of that dead cop. I know it.”

  She wasn’t making sense, but she wasn’t in shock. She knew I was wearing Stallion colours. She did not see my back, just the Nomad patch. She had to know the club well to call it from that and the few badges on the front of my cut. She had to be the dancer Blair had gone to see. He said she looked like a kid.

  “Hey, come on. Lolita, right? That cop’s not dead. She’s going to make it. I just want to get you out of here. The cops are coming. You hear that?” The sirens outside seemed constant as more and more officers arrived.

  “I’ll kill them all. I’ll kill you.”

  Her voice sounded different, calmer. Not good. I heard movement. She was standing. I pressed my back into the wall and pulled the shotgun tight to my chest, tilting it slightly toward the doorway. She walked out and swung the gun my way. She wanted out, and I was her ticket. I hesitated and felt the burn as she took a shot.

  The kick of the shotgun hurt more as the butt punched the inside of my left thigh. She fell back into the hallway; her gun dropped beside me. I kicked it away and rolled into the doorway.

  She looked like a broken doll on the floor in front of me. Blood poured from a hole just below her throat. She looked so young. I’d seen dead kids who were a lot younger. You could never unsee them. This one was mine, and there was nothing I could do to change it. Her head was tilted to the side, facing the open door to Sandy Gardner’s bedroom. I wanted to turn it back away from that place. I picked up her left wrist to check, but I knew I’d find nothing.

  The mobile command bus sat in Gardner’s driveway again. The weather was the same, too. That’s where the similarities ended. This time I was sitting inside, waiting for the chief. I was covered in blood, Carla’s, the girl’s, and mine. A compression bandage on my left shoulder leaked red. The paramedic who put it there told me Carla was unconscious with strong life signs when the ambulance left. He figured another five minutes out there and she would not have made it. Maybe killing the girl had an upside.


  The list of people I’ve killed is too long. It was too long when the first man started the list. For a sniper, a kill is intimate. You never forget that shape locked in the centre of the reticle, clear and moving with life one second, and then gone. Blown into the air in a final death spiral by a .50-calibre armour-piercing slug. I’d seen too many men explode like that, and could replay every one. I killed two men in close combat, too. Got caught in a firefight on a narrow street. A close-up fight is a crazy scramble of images and sound. The world flips upside down, and things happen in a timeless kaleidoscope. I remember seeing the bodies after the fight. I didn’t have that same connection with the moment they died; it was all just confusion and motion. I rubbed my inner thigh where a bruise was forming. As I touched it, I could smell the discharge from the shotgun, feel the recoil again, and see the girl floating backwards into the hallway. That was intimate.

  The chief stepped into the bus and stood above me.

  “Jesus, Neville, you okay?”

  “Great.” He’d seen enough combat to know the question and the answer were meaningless.

  “Take that damn vest off, will you? We need to talk about this.”

  I ignored the request.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  I told him what I knew. What I’d heard on the phone. What happened in the house. It was the third time I’d told the story, but I filled in more detail this time, more for me than for him. Best I could figure, Carla had stumbled into some kind of fight between Samuel Gardner and Bobby Simms. I took a sip from a can of soda someone, maybe the paramedic, had given me.

  “Another thing, Chief. That Ford outside matches the one on the security tape from the clubhouse. I think Samuel killed his father. Girl inside said Gardner killed himself, so I’m not sure. She said Simms killed Thelma Waters and was pinning it on her.”

  I didn’t know how Bobby ended up dead. A falling out of some kind? It didn’t matter, no great loss. The girl I’d killed was another thing; she did matter, and she still didn’t fit anywhere in this puzzle.

  “You think she is involved?” he asked, reading my mind.

  “Damned if I know. She recognized the Stallion patches on the front of my vest. Said I was here to kill her because of the dead cop.” What had she said about a midget? Jimmy Williams? Blair? She wasn’t talking about Carla. Adrenaline pushed all the pain from my body and patience from my mind.

  “Why would the club care if she shot Sergeant Cage?”

  I swallowed, tried to hide what I was feeling.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She puts the gang in this until we figure it out.” He looked at my vest again.

  “Snake gave me that tape, Chief. Can’t see him doing that if the club was involved. Could be she was just a runaway stripper afraid the club was looking for its money.”

  I didn’t want him thinking too hard about the club. I thought about Yves Laroche. I thought he’d come from Montreal because I patched back in, but maybe he was here on Nomad business. Would Gunner know? I needed to talk to Yves alone.

  “We’re going to have to pull Snake in, anyway.” The chief moved to the window of the bus and looked out on the driveway. I knew he was looking at the blood where Carla had fallen. He’d been an officer in Afghanistan. He’d lost his own people in battle before. I’d lost Ronald that way, and I still fight my own demons over it. I hoped Carla wouldn’t be added to the list for either one of us.

  “Chief, this is a clean shoot, and everyone here knows it.” It was more of a question than a statement.

  “Yeah, MacLean and Dill say they heard her shoot several times, only heard two blasts from the shotgun. That graze on your arm isn’t self-inflicted. The shooting is not my concern.”

  I waited.

  “Cam, you took over this scene and killed a girl, wearing those colours. You don’t even have a badge. I can maybe finesse that, say you were undercover, but you gotta drop that vest now.”

  “Chief, I want to know who killed my brother and shot my partner. This doesn’t change that. If it turns out the club was somehow involved in that shooting, I have a better chance at justice this way.”

  “Revenge isn’t justice, Cam. You need to think this through.” He looked out the window and then back to me. “Regret is a heartless motherfucker. It will eat you alive, son.”

  “Can I leave?”

  He looked at me and said nothing for a moment. Something passed over his eyes.

  “Go.”

  Someone had pulled my bike out from under the cruiser and stood it on its kickstand. The front and rear turn signals were gone on the left side, so was the mirror. A large black stain under the cruiser told me I’d lost at least half the oil and maybe some gas. It started on the first try, that’s a tight engine. My shoulder throbbed as I pulled the clutch lever. I headed slowly out onto the Waverley Road and wished my brother was still beside me. I regretted yelling those orders at Snake and Gunner like some asshole cop. All they were doing was trying to stand with a bro, and I turned on them the minute I stood beside that cruiser. I knew how that looked. Snake would not let it slide, and I needed the club, now more than ever.

  Monday evening

  Gunner took a drink from the bottle, looked around the table at his bros, wondered about his brother. Snake slammed the gavel into the block at the head of the table. The patches were ready for church. Killing a member was the most serious business ever discussed at the table, and the tension ran high. Yves Laroche sat at the corner nearest Gunner.

  “Let’s do this,” Snake said, looking at Gunner.

  “Brothers, the Hammer has to go down.” Yves spoke first. “Gunner, I am sorry, bro. You know I love you both, but he turned on this club a second time.”

  He was right. Gunner hated hearing it, but Cam was showing all blue and no silver, he admitted. He couldn’t save him. When it was time, he’d do it himself. Cam deserved that much.

  “This has to be on us,” Snake said to Yves.

  “He’s a Nomad. We clean our own mess.”

  “He’s a founder’s son first, a Nomad later.” Grease rarely spoke at club meetings, and everyone turned to him. “I want to know what he did before I vote. I want it from Gunner.”

  Gunner leaned back in his chair, not sure what to say. Cam had made a choice, the wrong choice. Could be his ol’ lady had him twisted up, but even that couldn’t excuse it. Club first, bitches second, always. He’d turned his back on the club again. Worse than that. He was out there giving orders to cops, wearing a Stallion patch. That was not something that could be forgiven. Fuck.

  “He made his choice, Grease.” Gunner stood. “We went to Waverley with him. Had his back. His ol’ lady got shot.”

  “Shot by who?” Grease asked. The others at the table seemed willing to sit back and let Grease and Gunner talk this through before the vote.

  “Don’t know. When we got there, the cops were there. He told us to stay put. Went in with them.”

  “Ol’ lady make it?”

  “Don’t know.” Gunner looked at Snake.

  “I’d say no. I could see her on the ground. She wasn’t moving. Lotta blood.” Snake ran his hand through his hair and looked at Yves.

  “I say we hear him on it,” Grease said.

  “No, no, he never steps in this house again.” Yves stood.

  “Last time I checked this wasn’t your house, Yves.” Snake stood.

  “Wait.” Grease raised his hand. “Man loses his brother and his ol’ lady. Gonna make some poor choices. Maybe we owe him a minute at the table.”

  “You know this decision is not going to be made at this table,” Yves said. “This has to go to Montreal.”

  “No. You can pull that Nomad rocker in Montreal, but if we want him back you can’t take him out. The constitution is clear on that. I’m not saying we want him. I think maybe
we don’t. I’m saying we hear him.” Grease looked at Snake. They were the only two founding members still wearing Stallion colours, the only two left who had helped write that constitution. No one would argue the point with either.

  Snake stood and paced toward the door. He paused, looking at the flag from the mother chapter. He placed a hand on the fabric. Gunner knew it was his father’s signature Snake was holding.

  “Yves, we hear him out and we take the vote with him in the room. If he dies, he dies in this room with everyone sharing it.” He looked at Gunner.

  “If he dies, no one shares in it. I do it alone,” Gunner said.

  “Settled then.” Snake reached back to the tabletop, grabbed the gavel, and slammed it again. Church was over.

  The sun dropped into a red free fall beyond the container pier as I arrived at the clubhouse. The gate was closed, and I had to wait for a hang-around to let me inside. If the hang-arounds were manning the gate, the prospects had to be guarding the house itself. That meant church was in session. Good. Everyone I needed would be in one room. Well, not everybody.

  I parked my bike in the line and dropped my helmet over the remaining mirror. A prospect ran over to look at the damage. Jimmy Williams was standing beside the main door with Phil Murphy. The only way he could provide security was to bring help. I needed answers, and I would start with Williams.

  “Get in the fucking house, both of you,” I told them. “Hey, prospect, take this door,” I yelled at the guy checking out my ride.

  Inside, the main room of the clubhouse was empty. Everybody was upstairs in church.

  “I just killed a girl. Pretty sure she was one of your dancers.”

  They both looked at me. Williams recovered faster. “Where? At the club?”

  “No, she was at Sandy Gardner’s house. Know anything about that?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck what?”