by Sam Witt
“They shot first? You were just defending yourself?” The Long Man leaned back in his chair, his body curving into its confines, thin legs dangling to the floor. Shadows flickered behind him, long and tattered, spreading from his shoulders into the darkness of the room’s high ceiling. “But you are making progress despite all the violence?”
“I have this.” Joe fished Walter’s phone out of his pocket. “One of their smurf’s phones. Someone in this contact list is behind those girls. I’m sure of it.”
“Are you? Because I wonder if that is the case.” The air in the room shuddered, and the Long Man was suddenly beside Joe, offering him a heavy crystal glass half-filled with amber whiskey. “Here, calm your nerves.”
Joe was grateful for the distraction and the time it gave him to gather his thoughts. The Long Man rarely talked to Joe except to point him toward black magic. He’d never questioned the Night Marshal’s methods, and Joe found this whole meeting both annoying and terrifying. He wasn’t sure that he could be fired, but he also didn’t want to wind up stuck in one of the rooms he’d just passed, a curiosity for the Long Man’s amusement. He took a healthy slug of whiskey and let it work its magic before he spoke again.
“There aren’t many people who could work up those girls, unless they had outside help.” He took another drink. “Walter was bringing them that help. He’d have called his buyer, at least once. Or they would have called him. The name of the person who was buying his shit is in this phone somewhere.”
The Long Man snapped his spidery fingers, and one of the mastiff’s padded into the room with the handle of Walter’s cooler in its enormous mouth. It dropped the container at the Long Man’s feet and loped back out of the room.
“I assume this is the help you meant? What do we have here?” He popped the top off the cooler with his bare left foot and wrinkled his nose like he’d just smelled something beyond foul. “Now, this is unexpected.”
Joe kept his mouth shut. If anyone knew what those things in the cooler were, it would be the Long Man. Anything Joe had to add would just sound ignorant.
The Long Man’s hand darted into the cooler as if he were reaching into a bear trap. He tossed one of the little boxes in the air, caught it with his other hand, bounced it between his palms for a few seconds. He snared it between his index fingers and pushed against the wood until its thin walls shattered. Something small and white dropped into his palm. He balanced it on his open hand, pointed at it with his free index finger. “What do you plan on doing about this?”
Joe drank the last of his whiskey. “I don’t even know what the fuck that is.”
“It’s a Kirshnir Marg, a —”
“I didn’t ask what it was. I know it’s more Left-Hand Path bullshit for me to deal with. My plan is pretty simple. I’m going to look at all the people in this phone’s contact list. I’m going to start visiting them, one at a time. I’m going to talk to them until one of them tells me something useful. Then I’m going to follow that chain to its end and blow holes though every person along the way.”
The Kirshnir Marg landed on the arm of the sofa with a melodic ping. Its proximity curdled Joe’s stomach and filled his veins with bubbling kerosene. He wanted to slap it away and bolt from his seat, but the thought of touching it froze him stiff.
“And you think that’s the best way to pursue this?” The Long Man stretched across the room to settle next to Joe on the couch. “Or are you taking this all a bit personally?”
The Long Man seized Joe’s injured arm before the Night Marshal could react.
“Don’t,” Joe started, but the Long Man’s black-eyed stare silenced his objection.
Skeletal fingers probed the edges of Joe’s wound. The Long Man’s index finger tugged at the stitches Stevie had sewn in the night before, slipped under them. Joe could feel his boss inside him, a cold violation that made him dig his fingernails into the sofa’s arm. One by one, the stitches popped free until the last one was out and the Long Man’s finger left Joe’s flesh.
The Long Man twisted Joe’s arm roughly between his hands, one cold grip winding left, the other to the right. Joe grunted at the sudden blast of pain. Blood spurted from his now-open wound and stained the couch’s embroidery. When the pain subsided, Joe could feel his nerve-damaged fingers again. The Night Marshal flexed his hand, but the Long Man did not release his grip.
“Despite the protections your position affords you, Jonah, you are still just a man.” The Long Man looked into Joe’s eyes. He squeezed his hands tighter around his arm.
“So are the people doing this. The people who’ve threatened me and mine.”
“I’m not so sure. Whatever is behind this has real power. It knows things.”
“Knowing won’t stop me from shooting it.”
The Long Man sighed and wrested Joe’s arm up, hard. He levered Joe off the couch and onto his knees and twisted Joe’s arm until his face was pressed into the deep pile of the carpet. “Could you kill me, Jonah?”
Joe’s lungs worked like bellows, pumping air in and out in panicked gasps. His heart pounded against his ribs, and sparks of light streaked across his vision. It felt like someone had torn his shoulder apart, filled the empty socket with broken glass, then rammed the pieces back together.
“No. I don’t think I could kill you.”
The Long Man helped Joe back to his feet. He reached out and smoothed the wrinkles from the front of Joe’s shirt. “Then what makes you think you can kill whoever’s behind this?”
“You trying to scare me off this thing?”
“On the contrary. I’m trying to keep you focused on this thing.” The Long Man held out his open hand to reveal Joe’s badge, straightened and gleaming. He leaned forward and pinned the badge to Joe’s chest. “But you need to understand that if you sound the horns of war, I may not be able to protect you from what answers the call.”
“I don’t remember asking you for protection.”
“What about your family? Do you want protection for them?”
Joe clenched his fists and ground his teeth. “My family has no part in this.”
“Everyone connected to you has some role in this. Your actions will determine how those roles will be played.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“We shall see. I’ve advised you as best I could.” The Long Man put an arm around Joe’s shoulder and turned him back toward the entryway. “Leave the Kirshnir Marg here, where I can keep an eye on it. You can leave the body here, as well. Just put it on the drive, the dogs will see to it.”
“He deserved better than that,” Joe stopped at the door. “In the end, he tried to do what was right. I’m not going to feed him to your overgrown lapdogs.”
“Maybe you’ve learned more than I thought,” the Long Man said. “Leave him on the drive, I’ll see to it that he gets the burial you think he deserves.”
The Long Man led Joe to the front door and watched as he walked to his truck and moved the body from the pickup’s bed to the asphalt. “There is good and right still in the world,” the Long Man said. “But you have many enemies, Night Marshal. Some in places you may not even suspect.”
“I’m pretty good at telling who my enemies are.” Joe swung up into the cab and leaned his head through the open driver-side window. “Pretty much everyone who knows how to sling a spell falls into that category.”
“Think about what I said. Before it’s too late.”
The door to the Lodge closed, and Joe felt a piss shiver of fear race up his spine. He wondered what the Long Man had meant, and feared he wouldn’t figure it out until it was far too late to do him any good.
CHAPTER 33
JOE THUMBED THROUGH Walter’s seemingly endless list of contacts as he wrestled the old truck over ridges and down through valleys. So many of the names he saw were familiar, he didn’t know where to begin. He dug back through memories of the drinks he’d shared with the sheriff before their relationship had soured, trying to remember all the mu
ndane, bullshit crimes he’d heard Dan whining about. Drunk driving accidents where there was more smeared on the side of the road than they could scrape into a body bag. Men who got high and tried to beat the demons out of their wives and children. Douche bags and their shotgun duels over the honor of skanky girlfriends. Small-town life in Missouri.
But this list of names showed Joe something else. Meth had woven a stranglehold web through Pitchfork County, snaring men and women and kids. He let his subconscious mull over the list of names as he drove, tying it together with what little he’d bothered to hear when Dan was talking. The Vogel Farm bubbled up through Joe’s memories, a place Dan had bitched about for years.
“Some days,” Dan had whined over a foaming mug of sweating beer, “I want to go out to the Vogel’s with a captive bolt gun and put all those tweakers out of my misery.”
To hear Dan talk, the place was infested with meth freaks who gathered around Bill Vogel like he was the messiah. Bill’s name was in Walter’s phone. Joe figured he could go in, bust a few skulls, get what he needed from Bill and be gone. Maybe even scare a few meth heads straight in the process, get back in Dan’s good graces.
“Let’s have us a chat, Bill.”
Joe guided the truck along the old farm roads that stitched Pitchfork into a quilt of valleys and fields. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming for him and for his family. The half-made girl’s threats were more frightening than Joe wanted to admit, especially after his sitdown with the Long Man. Joe wanted to get this over with, and if he had to slap around a few dipshit meth addicts to wrap things up, he felt pretty good about that. Despite what the Long Man had said, Joe knew all too well that the scumbags who sucked blood from Pitchfork’s underbelly responded to violence with great respect. Bill Vogel was as good a place to start practicing that theory as any.
To call the Vogel place a farm was giving it more credit than it deserved. The rutted road that led up to the front of the farmhouse was lined with rusting pickup trucks and peeling cars mounted on cinder blocks. A gaggle of losers sat on the sagging front porch. A couple of them perked up as Joe got closer and ran into the house. The others stood, forming a loose barrier in front of the door.
Joe stopped the truck in front of the porch and hopped out of the cab with his shotgun in hand.
A girl with hair the color of a dirty carrot stabbed a bony finger at him.
“This is private property, mister.”
“Fuck you, miss,” Joe said. He shouldered past the girl and almost made it to the front door before a bad idea bloomed in her boyfriend’s thick skull.
The tweaker put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and pulled. “Hey, man.”
Joe didn’t waste any words. Rage exploded with such ferocity he felt like it would boil right out of his forehead in a cloud of brimstone. He turned into the man’s pull and added a little spin of his own. Then he jacked the shotgun’s stock up under the addict’s chin so hard he knocked three of the man’s teeth clean out of his head.
“Don’t fucking bleed on me,” Joe snapped and kicked the stunned junkie off the porch.
The girl looked at Joe like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to kill him or fuck him, an animal hunger flickering behind the veil of drugs she’d drawn over her own eyes. Joe gave her a little shove, and she fell flat on her ass next to her bleeding boyfriend, eyes burning holes in Joe’s back as he walked away. The rest of the junkies watched the whole scene with dull eyes, as if their poisoned brains couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing.
The door was closed, but Joe could still smell the pissy chemical stink of an active meth lab. He hoped they’d let him finish his questions before they blew the farmhouse into orbit. He kicked the door open to get their attention.
“Hey, assholes. Where’s Bill?”
Survival instincts and meth jitters sent a pack of filthy tweakers darting from the squalid living room like a school of clown fish hauling ass away from a barracuda. Four little kids sat in the corner, clustered around a portable Nintendo contraption. One of them looked up at Joe, snot running out of his nose and crusting on his lip, then went back to his game. A cold splash of despair dropped the temperature on Joe’s rage. He’d have to be more careful than he’d originally planned, or one of these kids would end up hurt or worse.
A greasy biker with the biggest belly Joe had ever seen on a meth addict struggled to get up from the floor, but his riding chaps had come unbuckled and were tangling up his legs.
“Hi there, big guy.” Joe tapped the shotgun’s barrels on top of the biker’s graying mane. “Where’s Bill?”
“I don’t know no fuckin’ Bill.” The fat man slapped at the shotgun.
Joe popped a knee into the biker’s face, smashing his nose flat and splattering red in every direction. The biker was so stunned all he could do was lie on his back and choke on his own blood. Joe nudged him with the shotgun to get his attention. “I don’t like it when people touch my toys. Where’s Bill?”
“I don’ know,” he blubbered. “I swear man, I don’ know no Bill.”
“The cook, fat fuck.” Joe kicked the guy’s crusty glass pipe and it rolled under the couch. “The guy who brings the meth?”
“Ain’ no guy. Sally brings the shit down to us.”
“Where the fuck is she?” Tension built in Joe’s shoulders. This place was everything that was wrong with Pitchfork. Desperate, hungry people looking for some way to ease the pain of their pathetic lives, some quick fix to push back the darkness that threatened to snuff them out. When the darkness ate them hollow, they’d graduate from meth to baleful prayers, sacrificing their shriveled souls to any god who might offer them hope. When hope ran dry, they’d take hate. If they had to suffer, then fuck it, everyone else would suffer, too.
“Leave him alone,” a rail-thin woman begged from the doorway into the kitchen. She hugged the wall so only a crescent-moon sliver of her face and one bony hand were showing. “My man never hurt nobody.”
Joe didn’t have time for this shit. He needed answers. He stomped across the room and tangled his fingers in a handful of the woman’s scraggly black hair. He yanked her out of the kitchen and into the living room, ignoring her screeching protests. “This one yours, fat boy?”
“I don’t know where Sally is, man. Somewhere upstairs, maybe?”
Joe tilted the shotgun so its barrels were pointed at the woman’s pockmarked cheek. “Why don’t you get your pants on straight and fetch her down here for me, big guy?”
The woman was crying tears that stained her cheeks blotchy red. “Don’t shoot me, mister. Not in front of my kids.”
Two of the Nintendo club waved at the woman, then went back to their game.
“Something tells me you aren’t much of a mama to those boys.”
“Fuck you,” she shot back.
The fat man got his chaps on and scuttled past Joe.
“Hurry back,” Joe hollered after him. “My trigger finger’s getting twitchy.”
The woman stiffened in Joe’s grip. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please, man, I’m just tryin’ to get right, okay? I don’t want no trouble.”
One of the boys watched Joe with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Joe didn’t want to look at the kid, wanted to ignore him and finish what he’d come to do. He had bigger things to worry about than some little shits who were going to grow up and cause trouble that Joe would be too old and tired to deal with. But he couldn’t look away from the brat and those quiet, damning eyes.
“I don’t want the blood of your brood of punks on my hands today, so here’s what you’re going to do,” Joe whispered into her ear. “Take all those kids and march them the fuck out of here before things get messy. Do not say a word. Don’t yell or make a scene. Just take the kids and get the fuck out.”
Joe pressed the shotgun’s barrels tight against her face. “Nod if you understand me.”
She nodded. Joe eased his fingers out of her wiry hair and gave her a little shove.
&n
bsp; “Fuck you, man,” she shouted and ran for the door. “My man’ll kill you for touchin’ me.”
The kids chased after their mother, but their legs were stiff from sitting for who knew how many hours, and they moved like broken puppets. She stood in front of the fly-specked screen door, motioning for her brats to get a move on. The kid with the portable video game kept it clutched to his chest, like it was the most valuable treasure in his crappy little world.
They were almost to the door when everything went to shit.
“Hey,” someone said, and Joe turned away from the kids and back toward the kitchen door. An aged jerky strip of a man stood in the doorway, a pistol in each hand. “You lookin’ for somethin’?”
“Sally.”
“Oh. That’s bad luck, man.”
“Yeah?” Joe tensed and pointed his shotgun toward the idiot. “Let’s just settle down before somebody ends up with a hole where it doesn’t belong.”
“Cool.” The tweaker’s arm popped up, and Joe dove for cover behind the filthy couch.
A pistol roared from the kitchen, and Joe felt the buzz of the bullet over his head. Still standing in the front door, the black-haired addict fell hard, a chunk of her head missing from the outside corner of her left eye to back past her ear. Freed from the cage of her skull, her brain swelled and oozed out into the smoky air.
A second shot whined past Joe’s head, and the Night Marshal flattened himself against the bug-infested carpet. The kids were still in the house, tangled up with each other and the ate-up woman’s corpse, pushing at one another in their panic. More shots tore through the air and one of the kids screamed as a bullet cleaved his hand in half. Joe watched another shot shatter the Nintendo into a million plastic splinters and punch the boy holding it right in the throat. The bullet shredded the boy’s neck apart, and his head flopped back between his shoulders, eyes staring at nothing.
Joe popped around the end of the couch and unloaded both barrels into the kitchen. The hail of lead transformed the jerky man’s left arm into raw hamburger and sprayed a constellation of bloody holes across his belly.
