The Butcher's Son

by Grant McKenzie

  Contents

  Books by Grant McKenzie

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Portland, Oregon

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Grant McKenzie

  Switch

  No Cry For Help

  K.A.R.M.A.

  Port of Sorrow

  The Fear in Her Eyes

  Speak the Dead

  As M.C. Grant

  Angel With a Bullet

  Devil With a Gun

  Beauty With a Bomb

  For Karen and Kailey

  Who have been on this journey

  from the beginning

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Jack had learned a thing or two about body language over the years, not that it took a professional to interpret his. His message was crystal: Piss Off!

  When the two men entered the bar, Jack kept his head down and his gaze focused on the unexplored depths of his pint glass. For this part of town, everything about the men was wrong: too well dressed, too well fed, clean fingernails and teeth, fresh haircuts and… Jack paused in his observation, reevaluating. Their hands belonged: large in span for wrapping around a scrawny neck, calloused knuckles from beating on slabs of whimpering meat, and trigger fingers obediently trained to squeeze without mercy.

  Down here, they stood out like a pair of one-legged nuns in a titty bar.

  The bartender kept a sawed-off shotgun and two baseball bats behind the counter, which was one reason he was seldom robbed. The other reason was that even bums like Jack didn’t soil where they drank. Everybody needed at least one place that allowed them to be, to sit alone on a barstool and drink the years away. The same couldn’t be said for the junkies, however. In Jack’s experience, they’d shit in their own mouths for a fix.

  The bartender’s name was the same as the establishment’s, McNally, and he stashed one bat at either end of the long bar so he didn’t have to walk too far in order to keep the peace. Through habit and well-earned paranoia, Jack always positioned his stool close to the bat at the end of the bar furthest from the door.

  The two strangers scanned the threadbare crowd before showing a photograph to the bartender. McNally shook his head, which was the same reaction he would give if you showed him a mirror.

  Jack tensed as the men walked the length of the bar. The taller one was more aggressive than his partner. Full of musclebound confidence that came when one was used to everyone trembling in your wake, he spun the drinking men around on their stools, grasped their chins in his meaty paw and squeezed their bones while scrutinizing each face. His own mug wasn’t anything to brag about: a boxer’s nose, chipped granite eyes, and ears that could be used as paddles if he was ever dumped in a lake.

  The shorter man was more observational. He was studying the reactions of those patrons his partner had yet to accost, watching for that telltale twitch of panic that would spark a merry chase. His face was more Cagney than Bogart, and definitely the more dangerous of the two.

  Jack remained motionless except for his drinking arm. It tick-tocked slowly from bar to mouth, the black stout beneath its milky head sliding down his throat with no concern for slacking thirst. After years on the run, there was nothing left in this world that could quench Jack’s thirst — except perhaps a blade across his throat. Even then, Jack figured, he would arrive at Hades’ Gate and ask what time the pubs opened.

  When the two men arrived at his side, Jack was downing the dregs of his pint, allowing a final swallow of that unsullied foam to accompany the tenebrous liquid down his throat.

  The taller ape grabbed Jack’s chin and squeezed, bringing his face close. Jack opened his mouth to show yellowed teeth and exhale sour, sickly breath.

  The man’s eyes flickered in revolt, but before he could pull away, Jack grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him even closer, as though eager for a kiss. The man’s eyes widened in surprise as Jack’s mouth lunged forward, but instead of landing on the man’s lips, Jack’s teeth locked onto his bulbous nose and bit deep.

  The man howled in agony as Jack savagely twisted his head to rip the nose from the hired goon’s face. Hot blood gushed everywhere as Jack shoved the freshly disfigured man aside before spitting the bloody lump of flesh into his partner’s face.

  While the shorter man recoiled in horror, Jack reached behind the bar and plucked the baseball bat from its resting place. With his first swing, he broke the man’s right arm, removing the threat of him reaching for his gun. On the backward swing, he clipped the side of the noseless man’s skull, knocking him into the vacant bar stools and down to the floor. Keeping his momentum, Jack’s next swing glanced off the shorter man’s left shoulder and sunk into his lower jaw and neck.

  The snap of bone was unmistakable and the man joined his partner on the floor, twitching like a marionette whose strings have been cut mid-dance.

  “Leave the bat,” yelled McNally from the other end of the bar, “and go out the back.”

  As the curtain of blood dropped from his eyes, Jack focused in on the bartender. McNally rested the shotgun casually in the crook of his arm.

  “What do I owe you?” said Jack, placing the bat on the counter.

  “On the house, since you didn’t shoot the damn place up.”

  Jack nodded his appreciation. “I’m gonna miss this.”

  “Well, that’s about the saddest t’ing I ever heard,” said McNally. “This place is a shit hole.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jack. “But it was my favorite shit hole.”

  “You better get.” McNally tilted his head in the direction of the front window. “There’s two more coming.”

  “Damn.”

  Jack turned and made for the rear exit, pushing aside a few empty crates to break through the fire door and into a narrow alley that stunk of stale beer, piss, garbage, creosote and salt. He turned to his right, but a sudden flare of oncoming headlights made him change direction.

  As he ran, his heart pounded in his chest and his tired lungs ached. If he had ever been young, he wasn’t anymore. The years had been anything but kind — not that he would have known what to do if they had. He was the punchline, life the joke.

  Jack heard a vehicle accelerating down the narrow alley as its headlights caught his fleeing shape, but if he could make it to the docks there was a chance of escape.

  The sting of a bullet caught him before he even heard the sound. It entered his lower back and broke two ribs on its exit. Jack gasped and staggered, but kept running.

  This is it, he told himself. Christ, how long have I been running? And for what?

  Another bullet whizzed by Jack’s head, so close it cut a groove in the helix of his ear, as the headlights of the pursuing vehicle grew ever brighter. A third bullet entered his thigh, barely missing the long bone, but chewing through muscle and flesh. Thrown off balance, Jack staggered into a doorway, his leg going numb. His pant leg was quickly soaked in blood, too much of it…must have nicked an artery.

  He needed to…ah, who the hell was he kidding? This day had be
en hanging over him for most of his miserable life. Face it, Jack, your luck’s finally run out, and the only luck you ever did have was lousy to begin with.

  Jack freed a disposable cellphone from his pocket and hit the redial button for the only number it contained.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when the call was answered. “Deliver the package. Don’t wait for me. I won’t be coming.”

  Jack smashed the phone to the ground and shattered its plastic shell under his heel. After bending to retrieve the tiny SIM chip from the rubble, he placed it on his tongue and swallowed.

  “OK,” he told himself. “Let’s fucking play.”

  Cocking both thumbs and pointing his index and middle fingers straight out, Jack had a fleeting memory of playing cops and robbers with his young son. His boy was always the cop, a sheriff to be exact because he liked to wear his straw cowboy hat, and Jack was the criminal. How many years ago was that? A lifetime or more.

  Holding up his imaginary guns, Jack burst from the doorway and rushed headlong toward the approaching men.

  He only made it a few steps before a hail of gunfire tore him apart.

  Portland, Oregon

  Ian Quinn stood on the lip of the freshly dug grave and opened his clenched fist. Instead of dirt, a half dozen colorful toy bricks rolled off his fingers to tumble into the open wound. Each brick made a hollow, clicking sound like the tutting of an annoyed tongue as it bounced off the flimsy coffin lid before coming to rest in the dirt that would soon blanket the precious cargo inside.

  “What the fuck is that?” yelled a man in an ill-fitting dark suit who was struggling to break free of his brother’s grasp.

  Both men had been beaten by the same genetic ugly stick that left its mark in severe acne scarring, receding hairline and teeth as crooked as their career plans. The older one, however, was smart enough to know that Ian wasn’t the only outsider attending the burial. Two uniformed police officers stood on the fringe of the sparse crowd, watching for any opportunity of a parole-violating disturbance to send both brothers back to jail.

  “Lego,” said Ian without looking up. “Your son loved to play with Legos. I keep finding these bricks scattered in my car, under the seats, bottom of the cup holders, like a secret stash in case he ever found himself without his sack of bricks.”

  Ian lifted his gaze from the pauper’s grave. His eyes were the color of tempered steel with just a hint of blue, the creases around them etched as deep as knife wounds. “Did you bury his bricks with him?”

  “Fuck that,” said the man.

  “Yeah.” Ian sighed with a weariness that made the words fall from his mouth with the weight of lead. “I guess those six will have to do.”

  “Pick them up,” yelled the man. “My boy don’t need no crap in his grave.”

  Ian’s stare locked onto the delinquent father. Even from this distance he could smell the alcohol on the man’s breath and the distinctive body odor of someone who sweated too much due to the poison he injected into his veins, rubbed into his gums, and inhaled deeply into his lungs.

  “Do you know what your boy’s favorite movie was?” Ian asked. “Or what comic book character he wanted to dress as for Halloween? Or what books he liked?”

  Ian gritted his teeth and strode forward, closing the gap between them. “Did you know there was a ginger-haired girl at school he was developing a crush on? That she had a slight lisp, but her freckles were cool? Or that he was scoring high Bs in math?” Ian stopped on the edge of the man’s personal boundary. “Do you even remember his fucking name?”

  With a primal growl, the man broke free of his brother’s grasp and charged. But Ian wasn’t the same person he had been even a few short months ago. Recent events had changed him, ripped the curtain of civility and stoked a furnace that hardened his heart into a block of weeping iron.

  The child protection officer who the father remembered had been easygoing, if not a touch broken from the tragedy of his own daughter and the failure of his marriage. That man had been willing to turn the other cheek in an effort to broker peace between feuding parents for the sake of the children who were his charge.

  That man would have raised his hands in supplication to halt the charging bull — but that man was no more.

  Instead of backing away, Ian kept his feet planted and swung his elbow hard into the man’s face. The man’s head snapped savagely to the side as his cheekbone cracked and two meth-rotted teeth flew from his mouth in a spew of blood. Dazed, the man staggered perilously close to the open grave before Ian kicked away his footing and shoved him back to his older brother.

  The brother didn’t budge as his dazed sibling bounced off his chest and crumpled at the feet of his ragtag posse of mourners.

  Staring at Ian through eyes that would be more threatening if they weren’t so glassy, the brother wiped a spatter of blood from his cheek. The two uniformed officers had perked up and were moving in to see what was happening.

  “You should leave,” said the brother from behind clenched teeth. “This is a family funeral, and you ain’t family.”

  “This isn’t a funeral,” challenged Ian, anger bubbling from deep in his belly. “This is your twisted family burying the only decent one of you, a boy who was tortured and beaten to death because his father bargained his life over a lousy drug deal.”

  “You got no proof of that,” said the brother. “And you ain’t no fuckin’ cop, neither. You’re nothin’ but a glorified babysitter, man. So unless you’re stickin’ round to suck my dick, it’s time you fucked off and left us alone.”

  The two officers broke through the cordon just as the younger brother was hauled off the ground by his friends. The idiot’s eyes were still spinning, and strings of bloody drool dripped from his bruised mouth.

  “Is there a problem here?” one of the officers asked.

  The older brother and Ian stared at each other in silent defiance before the brother spoke.

  “No problem, officer,” he said. “My brother was overcome wit’ grief is all.”

  The female officer turned to Ian. She moved in close like cops did to smell your breath and study the clarity, or lack thereof, of your pupils.

  “You should leave,” she said. “Let them do their thing.”

  Ian turned away from the officer and glanced over to the opposite side of the grave where two young women stood. With arms linked for support, they both wore black. The sympathetic friend had tried to downplay it, but when the entirety of your self-esteem was rooted in the cat-calls of low men, she couldn’t resist tarting herself up with a touch of peek-a-boo mesh at the bosom, a too-short and too-tight skirt with dark nylons in a spider web pattern, cherry lipstick and bruised plum eye shadow.

  The other woman’s plain, shapeless dress looked borrowed from a scarecrow, while colorless flesh made her appear as close to death as the son she was burying.

  Ian had trouble meeting the fragile mother’s gaze, and she did nothing to help him.

  “We tol’ you to leave,” spat the father, his words slurred behind broken teeth and stiff jaw. “You ain’t wanted.”

  The officer touched Ian’s elbow. “I’d do what he says. You’re not doing anyone any good here.”

  With one final look at the reinforced cardboard box, barely four feet in length, lying on the bottom of a soggy dirt hole, Ian swallowed his anger and walked away.

  *

  LEAVING THE broken circle of mourners behind, Ian headed for a large tree crowning the top of a small, green hillock in the center of the graveyard. From there, he knew he could find his bearings.

  Chin down as he walked, Ian barely noticed the damp, gray drizzle portend the approaching storm drifting in from the west. His attention was lost on the way each blade of grass bent under his weight before springing back upright after he passed. Nature was resilient, humanity less so.

  “Were you trying to get him to break parole or just being an asshole?” asked a familiar voice.

  Ian lifted his chin to see Jer
sey Castle, a detective with Portland PD, and one of his few remaining friends, sitting on a memorial bench under the willow tree. A flowery yellow umbrella was resting by his side, but the tree’s canopy offered enough protection from the light rain that he hadn’t bothered to open it.

  “Mostly the latter,” said Ian.

  “Good, because if you wanted him to break parole, you needed to let him throw the first punch.”

  Ian allowed himself a soft grin. “Noted.”

  Taking a seat on the bench, Ian removed a dimpled metal flask from inside his jacket and unscrewed the top. He offered it to Jersey, who declined, before pouring a healthy swallow down his throat. Knowing it would take little encouragement for him to drain the vessel, he screwed the cap back on and returned it to his pocket. Out of sight, but rarely out of mind.

  “Nice umbrella,” said Ian. “Didn’t know yellow was your color.”

  “It’s Sally’s. She left it in the car.”

  “Sally? She the one who caved in your skull?”

  The hair was growing back to cover an ugly scar that ran across the top of Jersey’s scalp, a war wound from an out-of-town case that he was still keeping close to his chest. Combined with the unusual streak of pigment-free white that nature decided added a note of character to his dark hair, all Jersey needed were a few neck bolts to be mistaken for the Son of Frankenstein.

  Naturally, Ian wouldn’t tell him this; his friend was usually armed.

  Jersey grinned at Ian’s quip, giving away nothing. “You didn’t get enough of being a jerk down there?”

  Ian turned somber as he pointed a finger down the hill, resisting the urge to cock his thumb like when he was a kid, back when justice could be meted out with a simple pew pew and forgiveness came with the announcement of “Wash your hands. Supper’s on the table.”

  “Noah Bowery was six and a half,” said Ian. “He liked to mention the half. A bright kid with an unfortunate harelip that made him look tougher than he was, and the only thing he ever did wrong was being born to a waste of space for a father. The mother wasn’t much better, but she was trying at least. After she entered detox, I supervised visitation for both of them.”