by T. Braddy
“I think you right, boss. I think the hands got to come off. At least one of ‘em.”
The gargantuan, gun-toting minion behind Bellerose spoke in a slow, measured tone, as though he were selecting, analyzing, and then allowing the words to escape him. I’m sure it was the way of things around here, so I chose my next words carefully.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“See, your life will serve a double – maybe triple – purpose here. You are the bait that will draw that fuckstick out here to my crib, and so that is almost enough for me. But why not use you for another, more, huh, personal reason?”
Richie’s cries became more plaintive, less driven by pain more evident of his growing realization that we would end up as mere knick-knacks on a wall somewhere.
“That’s right,” Bellerose said. “Now you got reason to be worried. Haitians, they believe in the purification rite of sacrifice, and I think you two have been dogging my mojo, so what I plan on doing is using the two of you as a sort of...offering.”
“Heads, hands, and wallets, all for the greater good, huh?” I asked.
“This motherfucker right here,” he said. “You weren’t on death row here, I’d consider hiring you for my outfit. I bet you’re a crazy son-of-a-bitch, aren’t you? Got to be, running up in the lion’s den like this and shit.”
All the while looking at my hands. Ignoring my eyes altogether. He was practically drooling at the prospect of dismembering me, and I struggled to put my hands behind me, but his goons kept me in my place. I’d never been objectified in any real, meaningful way in my life, so the almost lecherous manner with which the gangster regarded me made my skin crawl.
“Richie,” I said, as calmly as I could summon, “tell him this isn’t the deal. Tell him. Tell him something.”
“Rol,” he said, still kind of mewling. “It isn’t personal, man.”
“That white boy owes me money, too,” Bellerose said. “What, you don’t remember what I told him last time he showed up here?”
I didn’t.
“Told him not to show his white-ass face here, and what did he do? He showed his white-ass face, and I know I shouldn’t take it as an insult, but I do. I take that shit as him undermining me.”
“I made you plenty of money, man. I got, man, I got you plenty rich over the last few years.”
Bellerose scoffed. “You and your wavering sobriety made it impossible to trust you. You, Richie, flipped on your buddy here for a chance to get in my good graces. Rolson, you want me have him explain to you exactly what he said to me, or do you just want to trust he was on his knees when he last met with me, begging for his life?”
I couldn’t force myself to look at Richie. “I trust.”
“See, and here we are, new acquaintances. Now, let’s get on with what we were going to get on with. Donnell, go tell Brickbat it’s his turn.”
Donnell nodded, left, and returned thirty seconds later, a ragged-looking man with red eyes following along behind him. He was wearing soiled overalls and no shoes, but he carried a hacksaw half as long as his considerable height with him.
I sort of lost the thread for a minute. Spying the gore-soaked teeth of that blade gave me a exceptionally real and bowel-shaking kind of dread.
During my exit from conscious thought, we were led at gunpoint into the depths of Bellerose’s compound, with a whole crew of gun-toting goons surrounding us.
I might have thought about fighting back and just forcing them to kill me on the spot, were I capable of rational thought. But no, my mind was nothing but a blank. At some point, Richie started crying, and at least the sounds of his sobs kept me present and in the moment. Without that, I might have succumbed entirely to shock.
We reach our destination and were strapped to chairs bolted to the floor. The room itself smelled of disinfectant, but another, slightly more unsettling scent lingered in the air. Blood and bile and something else, something I didn’t quite want to imagine.
Bellerose entered last, flanked on both sides by his bodyguards.
“So, here we are, fellas,” he said. “You get to meet Brickbat. Brickbat, say hello.”
The man, whose face was clad in a luchadore mask that covered everything but his eyes and mouth, made a half-human whimpering gesture. His eyes were clear and focused, but he appeared to lack the mental faculties associated with common speech.
“Not many people get to meet Brickbat. He had an accident some years ago. Horrible accident, but one he was lucky enough to survive. Gave him some, well, sordid predilections while in the hospital. I figured, what the hell, I could give him a job. Let him follow his dreams to whatever ends suited him.”
Brickbat stepped forward, moving toward us, but Bellerose clapped his hands twice and the giant man stopped in his tracks. His sluglike tongue slipped across chipped, gray teeth.
“Ferg,” Bellerose said to one of the big men, “Go check their car for the money. Bring it back to me. We’ll already have begun by the time you get back, but that’ll be all right, won’t it?”
The big guy nodded, his jowly face jiggling as he hurried from the room. Something told me this wasn’t necessarily his favorite part of the job. He was out the door and thumping up the steps before our host started his spiel again.
“This ain’t for the faint of heart,” he said. “Ferg, he’s got a penchant for violence, but he don’t dig on the real hardcore stuff. Turns his stomach, if it gets too hairy, know what I’m saying?”
Richie jerked once against his restraints and vomited all over himself. He spat and said, “You don’t have to do this. Please don’t do this. Please don’t fucking kill us.”
The drug dealer’s attention swayed from Richie to me. “Do you second his plea?”
I said, “You’re going to do what you’re going to do. I’ve heard you’ve done this before, so I have no idea why it would be different for me or Richie.”
He shrugged, the magnanimous gesture of a king who appreciates the honesty of a fair subject. “Fair enough. Let’s begin.”
Ferg returned, panting and empty-handed. “It’s not in there,” he said.
Bellerose’s eyes leveled on me. “The money, McKane.”
“It’s supposed to be in there.”
He lowered his chin in a disbelieving gesture. I repeated myself.
“It ain’t there,” said the one with the round face. “I double-checked, ‘less he hid it somewhere.”
“Not hidden,” I said, the very definition of calm. “We didn’t expect to be in this position.”
“Oh, come on,” Bellerose said. “A part of you thought that you might end up here, right?”
“Maybe a little.”
“And no backup plan?”
“None,” I said. “This was my backup plan.”
“And yet, the money’s gone. Seems like that would be a good way to stall for time. Maybe keep me from killing you.”
I couldn’t shrug underneath the restraints. “You’d kill us either way.”
“Right again,” he said. He motioned to his compadres, and that’s what got it started.
The bigger of the three gun-toting hoods went to work on my face, as effortless and emotionless an endeavor to him as loading laundry would be for most people. Left jab – I saw stars. Right hook – I smelled blood, felt a single rivulet trickle down my face. Another right loosened my two front teeth. I spat a wad of bright crimson onto the carpet.
“The fucking money, McKane. Where’s the fucking money?”
I hesitated. Another swing from the giant bent my nose sideways. Maybe not broken, but probably broken. My face felt like a Halloween mask that didn’t fit right.
Blood was starting to pour freely from anywhere it could. I watched it drip into my lap and soak my jeans. Dark red splotches against a dark blue background. Modern art, of a sort.
The giant tilted my chin up and slapped me.
“You act like a bitch, and we’ll treat you like a bitch. How’s about that? One more ti
me, Donnell.”
This time, it was a backhand. I did not expect that. His fingernails left scratches across my cheeks. I looked up, and the son-of-a-bitch was smiling. My face vibrated with a raw hotness. I had been hit harder, but I couldn’t immediately remember when.
“I’m going to need rabies shots after this,” I said. I hawked up a good one and spat blood onto the big guy’s face. “But, then again, so will you.”
The one after that hurt the worst. My teeth clicked together, and I felt like I lost a tooth or two, but for the longest time I couldn’t discern what all I felt. It was just a blank, throbbing hunk of flesh, instead of my face. The pain had become a whole thing, instead of distinct instances of pain. It was as though I was becoming numb.
“The money?”
“No idea,” I said. Something lay on my tongue, so I spat again. Two white shards landed between my feet. My tongue prodded the inside of my mouth, and I found where more than a few of my teeth had been cracked in half.
Bellerose sighed, shrugged, and then nodded.
When the guy behind Richie raised the pistol, I didn’t say anything. It was going to happen, either way. My head sagged, and I closed my eyes, listened. One shot and the wet sound of a man’s life leaving his body was all I heard. He never even saw it coming.
I shouldn’t have smelled the blood, but I did. Above my own, the scent of rich, coppery liquid filled my lopsided nostrils. Might be a while before I smelled anything else, but that would stick with me for some time.
“Brickbat,” said Bellerose, and the hulking, swaying giant ambled over to Richie’s chair. In my periphery, I could see what remained of Richie’s head craning forward at a sickening angle.
For a few minutes afterward, I closed my eyes. I wish I could have closed my ears, as well. The sound of it all was unmatched by any horror upon this earth. Serrated blade on skin and bone, sawing back and forth, amplified by the sound of Brickbat’s near-sexual emanations over his work. Wet, slobbery smacks and breathy grunts, ending in an unrestrained, triumphant series of grunts as the work was finished. A few swipes of a bladed edge, and Richie tumbled to the floor next to me.
When I next opened my eyes, I saw. I didn’t want to see, and I tried not to see, but I saw, nevertheless. Blood seeped from Richie’s wrists, pooling underneath my feet. I nearly lost myself then.
They didn’t even bother to move him. Merely left the body crumpled on the ground.
Poor, sad, broken fucking Richie. Good heart, but a bad head. Got himself killed trying to help me, but maybe it was going to end this way all along, with Bellerose on the other end of the sawblade.
I’ll make this right, I thought, hoping that, wherever he was, he could hear me.
At least they had shot him before going to work on him. I didn’t think I’d be so lucky.
“The money, McKane. Tell us, and you might share a similarly merciful fate as your buddy on the ground there.”
I heaved my chest, trying not to hyperventilate. Trying to keep my head together. It wasn’t working, but I tried. The best I could come up with was one sentence: “It’s in the car.”
The voice that emanated from me didn’t sound like my own, but it got the job done. I knew the money was in the car; I had placed it there myself. What I didn’t know was why dipshit Ferg hadn’t been able to find it.
“Ferg says it’s not.”
For a moment, I couldn’t talk. “Well.”
Bellerose had taken a seat against the far wall, opposite of the entrance. It gave him a full view of the thing that got his rocks off, but without being directly involved. Guess he didn’t have to get his hands bloody anymore. He leaned back in his throne of a chair.
“Start small,” he said. “Start with the pinky.”
Brickbat turned and stared at him. He looked from Bellerose to my hands and then back at his boss. Bellerose held up his left hand and wiggled the smallest of his blunt, cigar-looking digits.
Brickbat nodded, reached into his dirty pants pocket and retrieved a pair of red wire-cutting pliers. Cleaned, well-oiled, and ready to go.
Can’t be, I thought. This cannot be happening.
I willed myself to believe this was a dream, that nothing this horrific could actually happen to me. My eyes darted around the room. I tried to find any little inconsistency in reality that would clue me in to the fact that this was a dream.
It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real.
Emmitt, I thought. Janita. Uncle K. Anybody able to reach across the divide of human experience into the dream world, come in and save me. Pinch me so that I awaken.
I even attempted to commune with nearby spirits. They lobbied me to assist them often enough. Why not ask for a little bit in return?
Like with my pleas to God after my mother’s death, asking for her return, all I received was silence. The sound of Brickbat’s ragged breathing was all I heard, and it came to me in stereo surround sound.
This is happening, I thought. Richie is dead. I’m tied to a chair and about to lose literal and figurative parts of myself.
It was at that point I tried to wriggle free. I lost all sense of myself, and it was something subhuman that emerged in its place. For the slightest moment, I thought I’d be able to rip free of the constraints that held me and escape, punch-drunk though I was.
The backside of Brickbat’s hand, clad in a glove with plastic knuckle covers, put an end to that. My nose cracked, bent sideways, and poured blood. It was most seriously broken, for sure this time.
After that, I was still. It was going to happen. I began to hyperventilate.
I steeled myself for the next step, hoping Deuce would be along to save me for a second time in my life. Same situation. Same dire consequences. But no sign of Deuce. Just the heavy breathing sadist standing in front of me.
A ragged smile worked its way across Brickbat’s lips as he slid my left pinky between the pincers and readied himself. Again, I shut my eyes to the violence of the situation.
I held my breath. Brickbat giggled in that particularly gut-wrenching way of his.
Please, God, I thought. Please God and Deuce and the ghost of Emmitt Laveau, save me from this moment.
And then it happened. A brief moment’s pressure, and then it was over. Done. There was the sound of a branch cracking in half as I felt “the give,” and then it was done.
I still felt the finger. A simple sound, as though I had just popped the knuckle. Taking off a digit was not a complicated endeavor, apparently.
Then the pain came.
I tried desperately not to scream.
I was unsuccessful.
It was fire. It was lava. It was a bolt of lightning striking the remaining stump of my pinky. Cold air and hot fire mixed at the portal at the end of my finger, and there was nothing to do about it but try to rip my lungs free from their moorings with my guttural displays of disapproval.
I had never felt agony like this, including being shot in the stomach. Waves of nausea accompanied the raw pain, and I thought for a second I’d lose whatever food I’d eaten that day. It hurt so badly, I thought the air around me probably ached. No way I could be the only one feeling the full extent of this torture.
Then I looked. Gouts of blood issued forth from the wound, which seemed to pulse in response to losing its other half, but I could have been hallucinating at that point.
I wished to be overtaken by shock, but received nothing but more pain in response.
The arm of the chair was warm with my blood, and I focused on that, focused on anything that would take the pain from my hand. I screamed until my throat burned with the blood that was also pouring in gouts from my hand.
“The other one,” Bellerose said. “Now. Now.”
His voice was hurried but in a subdued way, as though he were turned on by it. Unattached thoughts burst like old stars through my mind, images which bear not repeating.
This time, however, I did fight. None of the zen which had preceded the other amputation occur
red. They weren’t taking another of my fingers with my knowing, calm consent.
The struggle was weak, but I did struggle, to the point that Bellerose had to order his hoodlums to hold me still. When that didn’t calm me, Brickbat flicked open a lighter and held the flame to the metal end of the pliers until they grew red hot, and then he pressed that against the raw, tender flesh of my stump.
In that moment, I saw beyond the human plane of existence. There was no world but the world of hurt, and I was its God. Its emperor. I reigned over a field of rage and anger.
But I didn’t have a chance to mourn the loss of that finger, because the next one went quickly. Just a quick clip, like pruning the branches of a tiny tree.
Didn’t seem at all possible, but this one hurt worse.
The ring finger on my left hand rolled off the edge of the armrest and landed with a smooth, almost soundless plop on the floor of this death room.
My ring finger, the finger which had bound my flesh to something larger than myself. A flawed ring for a flawed finger, representing a flawed relationship. It had been the placemark for my life while I attempted to figure out love.
The blood which flowed from the opening extended from a multitude of sources: it wasn’t just mine, but everyone whose life I had destroyed, and now I, myself, was being offered up for immolation.
I screamed and tried to call up thoughts that had nothing to do with death, had nothing to do with losing three, four, five fingers by way of common garden shears. I thought of the beach, placed myself in a lounge chair on a stretch of white sands unmarked by human interference. Only the sound of crashing waves and the occasional cawing of a bottom-feeding gull interrupted my intense relaxation.
The sky, the sun, the sand, it all created an illusory shield behind which I could hide, but only for the most tenuous of moments. Then the fiery ache of two lost digits would drag me screaming back to earth, back to a shuddering reality.
But that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the man in black shuffling around in the distance of my escapist fantasy.
