THE DAMNED

by William Ollie

  “You,” he said.

  Scott said nothing. He stepped onto the porch and leaned against its wooden railing. He looked at Warren, the nailed palms, his parched and flaking lips, the dried blood on his forearms, the way his legs trembled as they tried holding him in place.

  “Get me loose.”

  “What?”

  “Help me.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “What! Fuck yes it hurts!”

  “Why’d you have Davey tied up back there yesterday?”

  “The crazy fucker tried to kill me.”

  “Why didn’t you warn us about him?”

  “C’mon, Scott. Get me down.”

  “Why didn’t you warn us?”

  “What are you, kidding me? You already didn’t trust me worth a damn. I’ve got a kid tied up butt-naked to a piss-soaked mattress, and I’m supposed to tell you what, the crazy bastard tried to gut me? With those big old innocent eyes of his, that bitch would’a shot me dead as soon as she saw him. She’d already squeezed off an empty round in my mouth—did you know that shotgun was empty? I sure as hell didn’t know it was empty. Hell, I pissed all over myself.”

  Scott smiled, holstered his weapon and took a step forward. “Listen,” he said. “Listen very carefully to what I have to say, and think long and hard before you answer.”

  “Can’t you just get me down first? Geez, I’m—”

  “Shhh. Listen… Those Devil’s Own pricks, you know them?”

  “Yeah,” Warren said, still whimpering, his trembling legs still locking him in place against the closed door.

  “So you know where I can find them, where their home base is.”

  Warren nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where they take their prisoners, where they hold them.”

  “Yes, yes, all that shit. Just get me down, please.”

  “You’re almost there, little man. Tell me.”

  Warren squeezed his eyes shut. “God, it hurts,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “They took over the jailhouse. That’s where they take their prisoners. They’re using the Ambassador Hotel for a clubhouse. Most of the leaders stay there, them and the people they hold in high regard. They’ve got a meth lab set up in an old rundown motel on the north side of town. That’s where the rest of ‘em crash, the soldiers, they call them. Now get me down, will ya?”

  “How are they running a meth lab without electricity?”

  “Jesus Christ! Please, just get me down… get me down and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “All right,” Scott said. “All right.” He stepped up to Warren. The hammer Dub had used to nail him to the doorframe lay on the porch in front of him. Scott looked down at it, then back at Warren’s hands.

  “How long have you been in that position?”

  “What!”

  “You know, your feet tight against the doorknob, jamming you in place.”

  “Christ Almighty, please!”

  “Why didn’t you just tear your hands away from the doorframe?”

  “It hurts too much.”

  Scott chuckled. “I’ll bet,” he said. The two nails had been pounded flat into Warren’s palms. They had small, round heads that would have ripped a ragged tunnel through his flesh. Scott wondered if he could have ripped his own hands away from something like that. He could have grabbed the hammer and gone to work on the frame, maybe torn it apart in an effort to get Warren down. It would’ve hurt, sure it would have, but nowhere near as bad as just snatching him away from the doorframe.

  Scott reached up and grabbed his wrists—

  “The hammer, get the—”

  “Grit your teeth.”

  —ripped his arms toward him and Warren fell screaming to the porch. He lay there, writhing and whimpering and holding his hands against his chest, crying out in pain while Scott stood back and watched him. Eventually, he rolled over onto his back and held his hands out in front of him. Tattered strips of meat threaded their way out of two trenches the nails had dragged through his palms, and now the blood was flowing again, down his hands and onto the underside of his forearms.

  Scott sat down on the front porch stairs, and Warren said, “Look at what you did. Look at what you did.”

  “I did? You’re the one who brought your biker buddies back here. What exactly was the idea behind that anyway? What, they pay you for shit like that? Give you food?”

  “They caught me,” Warren said, his voice still twinged with pain. “They came outa nowhere and caught me in the middle of the street. They were pissed off. That leader of theirs was about to slit my fucking throat. I didn’t want to bring ‘em back here. I had to—I’d be dead if I didn’t.”

  Scott huffed out a sharp little laugh. “Didn’t want to, huh?”

  “Hell no, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to do with them, but I didn’t wanta die, either.”

  Warren placed the bottom edge of his hands on the porch, wincing as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. “What are you planning on doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All those questions, where they live and where they keep the prisoners. What are you planning on doing?”

  “They’ve got my wife. I’m going to get her back.”

  “How do you know they’ve got her?”

  “I just do.”

  “And you’re gonna do what, walk in there like Dirty Harry or something?”

  Scott sighed, looked down at his feet and shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do—something.”

  “You know how many there are?”

  “Haven’t got a clue.”

  “A lot. It’s not just the small group you saw here today. They’ve been recruiting folks all over the city. Hell, half the cops are with them now, the ones who didn’t haul ass outa here. A lot of them did, you know.”

  Scott didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Look, I know you don’t trust me. I wouldn’t either if I was you. Hell, I tried to kill you back at the pit. But you could’ve left me up there just now, left me up there and went on your way.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t consider it.”

  “But you didn’t do it. My hands hurt like hell, but I’m gonna survive. I’m not going to die with them nailed to the doorway. I don’t know what you’re about to do, or if what I’m about to tell you will be helpful. But I’m going to tell you because I’m grateful—even if you did do it the hard way.”

  Scott smiled. “That was for Lila.”

  Warren shrugged his shoulders, gave his head a little nod. Then he said, “Know what you look like with that harness strapped around your shoulder?”

  “What?”

  “A cop. You won’t last three seconds you walk in like that.”

  Three seconds, thought Scott. Where’ve I heard that before?

  “Back at the pit, you remember what I said when you mentioned your wife?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “There’re two places they take the lookers. The decent ones, if they raise hell and won’t do what they’re told, they get the shit beat outa them and locked up at the jailhouse, so they can be barter-bait later on. If they’re exceptionally pretty, if they’ve got a fantastic bod on them, one of the bikers’ll claim ‘em. One of the higher-ups, and God help ‘em if they don’t go along with them.” Warren looked down at his hands. “Goddamn these bastards hurt.”

  Scott turned and looked at him, chuckled softly and looked out across the yard.

  “They don’t know what you look like, but they do know your story, that you came to seven weeks after being shot in the head. So if you go wandering in there with that bullet hole of yours uncovered, you won’t last—”

  “I know,” Scott said. “Three seconds.”

  “If that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It had taken most of the morning to get the generator fueled and in place. Further delays ensued when a
weary crew of hung-over electricians had some kind of cabling problem. But they finally did get the power back up. Then came Carlo’s men, six rugged guys led by a white-haired old man with a rattling cough and a thick New Jersey accent. He reminded Dub of old man Carlicci with all his bullshit stories about his death dealing days on the streets of north Jersey. Except this guy’s tales were of bank heists and babes, prison cells and men of honor of some bygone era Dub doubted had ever existed in the first place. The golden days, the old man called them, when a man could trust his partner in crime to keep his trap shut, to do his stretch and return to the fold. His name was Wally, and he’d been cracking safes since the late sixties. ‘Piece’a cake back then,’ he’d said. ‘None of this complicated optic wire bullshit’. A stethoscope and a nimble set of fingers, that was all Wally needed back then. He needed a lot more now, though. His muscular sidekicks carried with them industrial-sized drills and lasers, zippered canvas bags of assorted tools and gadgets, acetylene tanks and torches, and enough electrical cabling to power up a Rolling Stones concert.

  Dub could tell just by the way they set the wheels into motion that they were good at what they did, each man a part of the whole, each with a specific job to do, a function to perform. An exercise in precise measures, effortlessly executed as if they were back in prison stamping out license plates. They were good at what they did, that much was obvious. Even so, it was slow and tedious work. ‘Hit and miss,’ the old man told him between his endless supply of stories and anecdotes. ‘A fluid situation’. He wore black framed glasses with thick lenses, a hearing aid and a gold Rolex watch. In all his years ‘on the job’ he’d been through every snag and snafu, every problem ever known to have existed. He sat in an office chair, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and rasping out orders like the old geezer trainer from the Rocky flicks. They’d hit a dead spot and he’d guide them through it. Then he would take them back to his golden olden days of cracking safes from one end of the eastern seaboard to the other.

  It took forty-five minutes to get through two locked doors that led to the vaults. Two hours later they were standing in the main vault. Dub, who had never been so far into the interior of a bank, expected it to be full to the brim with suitcase-sized, plastic wrapped bundles of currency, just like in the movies. But that wasn’t the case. Had he not been there with them to see it for himself, he would have been sure they’d held out on him. Sure, there was money, and plenty of it, just not as much as he had expected. All in all it was a long, drawn out process that left Dub bored nearly to tears. But he had to be there to see it through, because he couldn’t trust anyone to do it for him, not Teddy, nor Bert and Ernie. He certainly couldn’t rely on Carlo and his crew to play it straight with him. So he stood there listening to Wally the geriatric safecracker drone on about how he’d heisted a shit-load of diamonds and jewels from Sinatra back in the late seventies, only to be forced to give it all back to the prick when word drifted up to the mustache-Petes who where backing the crooner’s play. All very fascinating for someone who gave a damn, but not for Dub, who by that point was considering the ramifications of sticking a gun to the old man’s face and blowing out the back of his head. Luckily for the both of them, Carlo and his crew finally gained entrance to the ‘working vault’, something Dub hadn’t even known existed until that day. Two and a half hours later they were back in the booking room, deep in the interior of the jailhouse, staring down at rows and rows of neatly-stacked bundles of cash piled high upon the fingerprint table—Dub and Bert and Ernie, Carlo and his three henchmen. They’d left the old man and his crew back at the bank packing up their gear for the next job. The old man couldn’t have cared less about the money. It was the act that interested him, the act that completed him. The knowledge that he had beat the system and now stood triumphant in its hallowed halls pushed him forward—not the monetary reward, of which he knew he’d get his fair share.

  “One point two mil,” Carlo said. “Not bad.”

  “I expected more.”

  “So did I, the first time,” Carlo told him. “Banks have rules they have to follow, guidelines to stipulate how much cash they should have on hand. This is a respectable haul—very respectable. You’ll see when we hit three hundred grand a couple of times.”

  “Yeah,” Dub said. “I’ll see. I’ll see because I’ll be right there looking over your shoulder.”

  Carlo, smiling, looked at his men, who started to chuckle. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, my friend.”

  “Good,” Dub said. “Glad you see it that way.”

  They divided the money straight down the middle, six hundred thousand for each of them. Carlo’s men filled a large canvas bag with their share of the proceeds. Dub left his where it lay. A smaller bag was hoisted from the floor, its contents dumped onto the table. Diamonds and jewelry, cash and stocks and bonds, legal documents and sealed manila envelopes, car keys and house keys and a myriad of personal items Dub deemed to be useless pieces of shit, all plundered from the bank’s safety deposit boxes.

  “How about this shit?” Carlo asked him.

  “Right down the middle,” said Dub.

  Piles were made, the diamonds and jewelry divided and pushed into two different areas of the table. Carlo bagged his and Dub left his alone. An additional two-hundred thousand dollars had been lifted from those safety deposit boxes, which made both men smile. The manila envelopes were gone through, their contents quickly discarded, most of which turned out to be wills and deeds, and personal letters.

  “Look at this,” Carlo said, and then tossed a handful of photographs onto the table, eight glossy, 8x10 color photos depicting two men having sexual relations, both seemingly unaware their trysts were being recorded.

  “Hey,” Dub said. “I know those guys. They’re on TV all the time.”

  Carlo said, “It’s the fucking mayor, and that protect-the-children Corrigan prick from congress. Man, somebody’s making a pretty penny off these sons of bitches. How’d you like to see these show up in the newsroom if you’re one of those scumbags? Protect the children, my ass.” He scooped up the photos and stuffed them in with his bag of jewelry. “I’m keeping this shit.”

  “For what?” said Dub.

  “Pos-fucking-sterity.”

  “Huh?”

  “Posterity.”

  “Oh,” Dub said, even though he had no idea what he’d meant.

  Carlo and his crew secured their payload and Dub and his two Neanderthals followed them out of the room, down the hallway and into the jailhouse lobby. It was late afternoon. Soon it would be dark, and the place was filling with its usual assortment of bikers and broads, truckers and electricians, all members of Dub’s new world order filing past tables of food and drink on the way to another night of raucous debauchery designed to drive the circumstance of their bleak existence into a drug-induced haze. An old Ronnie James Dio tune blasted from the wall of speakers as they made their way through the room, augmenting an even older Easy Rider flick that rolled silently across the gigantic big screen set up within the thumping sound system.

  They left the room behind and stepped out into what was left of the day. An eighteen wheeler rolled up in front of the jailhouse as Dub and his guests made their way past a couple of bikers who stood at the top of the concrete stairs.

  Carlo said, “There’s your beef.”, and Dub said, “I’ll be damned.”

  An arm shot out of the driver’s window. Carlo acknowledged it by raising one of his own. They were at the street now, directly in front of the tractor trailer rig. The driver leaned out through his window. “Here okay?” he said. He had stopped, directly facing the tanker truck. Dub nodded. Seconds later came a loud whoosh of air as the brakes were set. In one practiced motion, the guy jumped out, cranked down the landing gears, unhooked from the trailer, released his brakes and pulled away, leaving the refrigerated unit behind.

  “You got diesel?” said Carlo.

  “Yeah,” Dub told him.

  “Keep that reefer unit ru
nning and you’re good to go.”

  They walked to the rear of the trailer, Dub and Carlo in front, Bert and Ernie and the henchman following behind them. Carlo stepped back and two of his men stepped forward. They threw open the doors and a cloud of frigid air billowed from the opening.

  “Wow,” Bert said.

  “No shit,” said Ernie, both men staring up at several sides of beef hanging suspended from hooks at the rear of the forty-foot trailer.

  “Gonna be a hell of a party tonight,” Dub said.

  “Damn right,” said Bert.

  “Maybe we’ll swing round and join you, me and the boys.”

  “Swing by anytime you want,” Dub said. “We’re partners, now.”

  “That we are,” Carlo told him. Then he and his three henchmen headed down the street, to their vehicles, where his men climbed into a black Hummer and pulled away from the curb, followed by Carlo in old man Carlicci’s cherry-red Vette.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They sat on the porch for quite some time, neither of them saying much of anything, Scott on the top step, Warren behind him. Warren stood up and Scott told him to sit back down. He didn’t trust him; he had tried twice to kill him and Scott wasn’t about to give him another chance, no matter what he’d said about being grateful to be out of the doorframe. Scott asked again about the meth labs, how they could be run without electricity, and was told about those industrial-sized generators and the rolling fuel depots that kept them churning out the juice. The jailhouse had power, and the Ambassador. Other places too, maybe, although Warren couldn’t say for sure.