by Laird Barron
Mohawk went through a curtain of beads in back. A minute later, he stuck his head out and signaled me to approach. The next room was much smaller and dimmer. An antechamber lighted by the biggest lava lamp I’d ever seen. Red shadows slithered across the walls.
“Isaiah Coleridge,” said the man seated on a beanbag chair behind a low rectangular table of marble. Early thirties, medium build, dark hair cropped tight. Sharp cheekbones. Sharper fingernails. The light made it tricky to be certain; however, I figured him for Indian heritage. He wore a white silk shirt, short-sleeved. A pendant fashioned from jade. Rings galore. “Donnie Talon. We spoke on the phone. Pull up a rock. Have a cup of mud.” He snapped his fingers and Mohawk threw down a beanbag for me.
I sat and accepted a china teacup of espresso. Strong enough to peel paint.
“Frankly, I’m underwhelmed at your projection of force. You Manitou boys are supposed to have an army.”
“How’s your espresso?”
“Bitter. Like my heart. So it’s good.” Too dim to tell if he got it.
“I acquired a taste for espresso while vacationing in eastern Turkey. There is no substitute for real, blindingly potent Turkish blend. Fuck creamer, fuck water, fuck any dilution. Toss it back and suffer the consequences as a man.” He dabbed his lips with a cloth napkin. “My troops are where they are the most efficacious—performing clan business. Installing a platoon of grunts with automatic weapons around the home base is so damned extravagant. We are in a struggle with the Italians, the blacks, the Asians, the Mexicans. Boots on the ground wins the war.”
I observed how the light cast his face into darkness and limned him with a crimson halo. I felt the heavy gaze of his bodyguards behind me in the shadows. Talon might be tough despite the fact he assuredly came equipped with rich parents and a trust fund. His mannerisms marked him as an elite richie of the first water in a way that poseurs such as Dr. Jefferson could only imitate. Rich, cultured, ruthless, and megalomaniacal. Dude had to be a maniac to squat here in the gothic gloom of a dead city in the hopes of expanding another man’s empire. A dangerous foe, no question.
“Why fight?” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather assimilate the other ethnic gangs?”
“Spend money to make money. Spill blood to get new blood pumping in.”
“All very fascinating. We’ve business. Reba Walker.”
“Reba Walker.” He said her name with implied cruelty. “Your friend, huh?”
I sipped more of the cursed brew and calculated angles and force vectors and wished the shiv was still taped to my ankle.
“Eighteen. Yea tall. Brash. I’m looking for her.”
“I’ve seen her around. You want to know if we have the girl. Fair question. She’s a fine piece of ass. Nubile. Definitely the kind we send to the salt mines. The answer is no, we don’t have her. We prefer our sex workers to come from the Rez or from overseas with the serial numbers filed off. Last thing we want is a concerned citizen like you, a long-lost uncle or Prince Valiant, sniffing around. Terrible business model.”
I set my cup aside and folded my hands on the table. My hands are large and scarred as anvil heads.
“You don’t have her.”
“We do not.”
“You’re sure. Absolutely, positively cross-your-heart sure.”
He crossed his heart with due solemnity.
“Then we come to the next question,” I said.
“I don’t care what happened to your niece. You, a pro hitter, wandering around asking lots of questions and interfering in business is a different story. How can we fix this? Right, there’s a couple ways. One of which you won’t enjoy. Since you’re friendly with the Italians, I prefer not to act precipitously unless it’s required. The nice way, we come to an agreement. What do you say, Coleridge? Can we make a deal?”
“Assuming you can point me in the direction of three characters who saw Reba last. Hank Stephens. Eddy Yellowknife. Philippe Martinez.”
“Yes. Yes. And yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I know them. Whether or not one of those worthies is culpable for a crime against the girl is not for me to say. The boys are in hiding. As to where . . .” He spread his hands and shrugged.
“So, you won’t give them up.”
“I can’t give them up. They’re incommunicado. Orders from the man himself.”
This sounded suspiciously similar to how the Family dealt with internal politics, and it meshed with Agent Bellow’s veiled comments and those by Calvin.
“Would the man be Larry Modine, chief of New York?”
“Well, it’s not a big secret.”
“I try and try to get my head around the whole deal with Hank Stephens. This is the time line I’ve drawn: Stephens defected from the Sons of the Iron Knife. Probably five seconds after the Sons realized, he had Seneca on the woodpile.”
“Hank was scheduled for a lynching. He flew the coop due to necessity rather than newfound love of his heritage. We don’t judge. Much.”
“Right. You also liked the medical-dope pipeline he operated at Grove.”
“Your ‘niece’ and her girlfriend were right in the middle of that action.”
“Come on, Donnie. Once Hank bailed, Reba and her gal pal were the operation. Back to Hank—ancestry isn’t enough for you. The Manitou demand more from recruits. An act of faith.”
Donnie Talon appeared satisfied with my assessment.
“This only gets deeper for you. Understand?”
“I do.”
“Doubtful. But you will—soon. The moment you walked in here, I put a leash around your neck. Every word cinches it, friend.”
“Be a few more notches before I worry. Talk.”
“So be it. My superiors wanted to bring in a white boy. Or I should qualify—a kid who’d pass for white.”
“Equal opportunity employers?” I said.
“We can find a hundred and one uses for a honkey turncoat. However, a blood gift was the price of admittance.”
“Hank blew away a Son to prove his sincere intentions? Ah, that’s what that rascal Horsley didn’t want to tell me.”
“Hank shot his victim parked at a red light. He also dusted a passenger. The passenger was a young fellow whose daddy owns a chain of gun shops. Daddy is pissed. Daddy also has a direct line to the headman of the Iron Sons and enough money and influence to make his concerns heard.”
“Whoops,” I said.
“Big fucking whoops.”
“No wonder the Sons of the Iron Knife are in such a tizzy. Their president lost enough face, he looks like the Phantom of the Opera. You say Hank is incommunicado. What does that mean?”
“Means he’s under lock and key until we decide otherwise. A slew of folks want a piece of that white boy. We should put Hank’s lily-white ass up for auction and retire on the proceeds.”
“I’m surprised the punk is still breathing. Drop him in a hole and your problems disappear.”
“The Mafia might do it like that. Our traditions are different.”
“Tell me with a straight face that you heartless bastards don’t snip loose ends when they become a liability.”
“We do, as a last resort.”
We stared at each other for several moments. The lava lamp burbled and made its darksome light.
“This isn’t official Manitou headquarters,” I said.
Talon showed his teeth.
“Perceptive. I’m not in the habit of bringing strangers home on the first date. What tipped you off?”
“Besides the lack of the aforementioned army? Not enough heads in baskets. Nobody spiked to a telephone pole in the yard. The things that make a home.”
“Does it matter?”
Oh, it mattered. Excepting the obvious soldiers I’d encountered along the way, everybody else was a pretender, a t
hug-life hanger-on. The metallic taste came back.
“Recently, a friend had a dream about my adventures. I’m not the hero in that dream. I’m the Cyclops.”
“Mr. Coleridge?”
“May I have my shiv? Going to need the shiv.”
“Go home,” Talon said. “When I think of a use for you, I’ll snap my fingers.”
I accepted the knife from Mohawk. My hands trembled. Talon’s shadow on the wall bloomed and changed. A death’s-head, of course. I’d passed the point of no return before I ever walked into that building.
“No,” I said. “Put me in touch with our little pal, Hank. Else we can do it the bloody way. I love doing it that way.”
So much worry in the crease of his brow. I loved that too.
One of the soldiers zapped me with a Taser to the neck and a fireworks show lit up my brain. I knocked the table aside in my reflexive lunge for Talon, but he moved too fast and another dose of high voltage went into me and I dropped, paralyzed.
Talon planted his foot on my chest, posing the way big game hunters are photographed with elephant carcasses.
“Such a brave man. Stupidly brave. You’d do well to cultivate a stronger sense of self-preservation.”
When I could speak, I said, “It’s a character flaw. I don’t scare.”
“Maybe I’ll send you to the pits one fine day. Yes, you’ve heard of them? People think the pits are a boogeyman legend. They’re not. We use old abandoned mines in Pennsylvania where nobody ever goes. Circus Maximus lives.” He touched his leather belt. “Human flesh, don’t you know. You’re in the wilderness. However bad news you might be, it doesn’t mean shit to the Manitou.”
“There’ll be a later,” I managed.
“I already told you that, tough guy.” He signaled to his stooges and a boot caught me in the jaw. It didn’t hurt as much as they might’ve liked. I played dead anyhow.
* * *
—
I LAY COLLECTING MY THOUGHTS in the desecrated lobby. A rat lurked in its nest of wires. It watched me slowly come alive; first to my knees, then drag myself upright against the wall. Third occasion I’d been tased over the past decade or so. Occupational hazard. Seldom any fun, this felt worse than usual, although I morbidly appreciated how powerful the little devices had gotten.
Nobody tried to murder me as I exited the compound.
Calvin and Lionel remained where I’d posted them. Still on red alert. Definitely unhappy at my disheveled and roughed-up appearance. But safe and alive could be chalked up as a win in anybody’s book.
The crowd at the pool had dwindled to five men standing around the fallen mama dog. She lay in blood. Her brindle had gone black as if she’d been soaked in tar. One of them knelt, a smoke hanging from his mouth, and crushed the dog’s skull with two leisurely blows from a steel jack handle. The pong-pong of it rang across the courtyard. The puppy crawled toward its mama’s quivering flank but came up short because of the rope leash attached to a bench. It cried mournfully and a couple of the guys laughed, and one kicked it sideways under the bench and it lay quietly.
None of the men paid any heed to us.
We got into the car and sat there, engine idling.
“Isaiah?” Lionel stared at me. “Where to?” His expression indicated he’d asked more than once.
I clasped Achilles’ tags that lay, as ever, against my breast. Etched lettering had worn smooth in places.
“In my dreams, I always jump after him. I jump every time.”
“What?” Lionel said.
“My old dog. He fell. He died.”
He kept studying my expression, searching it for a clue.
Lazy black splotches crowded my peripheral vision. Wind whistled, as far off as the icy blackness around Pluto, and keened in my inner ear. I recalled the warmth of Achilles’ fur under my hand as snow fell and the tundra stretched toward the purple-black of onrushing night. I wanted to ask Lionel if he was better or worse in his dreams. I couldn’t seem to speak. My teeth ground together.
“Amigo.” Lionel gripped my shoulder. He seemed as far away as the celestial chorus priming me for destruction.
I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. Red light flooded the compartment. I didn’t know where it came from. My heart, beating faster and faster, made the redness, made the roaring in my ears.
“What are you laughing about?” Calvin said. “Lionel, what’s going on? We gotta jet.”
“He ain’t laughing.”
“Oh, fuck,” Calvin said when he leaned forward to get a look at my face. “L Dog, tell me this isn’t going down.”
“Nah, brother. I’m with you at Oh, fuck. Get up here and take the wheel.” Lionel popped the trunk, leaped out, and ran around back.
It took a couple tries for me to remember how to work the door handle. I felt clumsy and dislocated from my extremities. Then I was free and walking, unhurriedly yet briskly, toward the exultant dogfighters. Sod swayed beneath my shoes with the yield of a trampoline. With every step I grew larger and more terrible.
I snagged a pair of cinder blocks from the rubble, let them dangle.
The red eye in the sky dilated.
They saw me coming and hesitated three or four heartbeats too many. Disbelief will do that to a man. I stepped through a gap in the chain-link fence and chucked the block in my left hand. It sailed wide. The bangers froze into crouches. Good for me, like the slot machine of fortune coming to rest on triple death’s-heads. I slung the other block underhand at a heavy guy in a yellow coat. The one who’d kicked the puppy. He didn’t duck or dive, as one might logically assume. Instead, he reflexively tried to catch the incoming missile. He caught it, all right, directly in the chest, and his breath followed the thud and he pitched backward and hit the gray-green water of the pool.
I charged. Everything happened fast after that.
Behold the essence of violence. It’s not about martial arts or slick John Woo gunplay. Those things don’t function under the pressure that violence exerts upon its participants. Hand-to-hand combat is decided by velocity and initiative. Ferocity, tenacity, mass, and a reckless negligence toward one’s own continued existence—that’s what wins the battle. Except on this occasion I had no interest in winning.
I wanted to annihilate the world.
One of the smaller dudes had the right idea. He bolted toward the complex like an Olympic sprinter. Another went for his pistol, actually had the barrel swinging around, when his face blanked and he spun and fell, every cord to the mortal coil snipped. A rifle report boomed over my shoulder. Lionel, evening the odds. That left two standing. Jack-handle dog murderer and a young guy with long hair and a goatee.
If the duo had decided to split, they might’ve had a chance. Or at least one of them would have had a chance at escaping. Instead, they stood their ground. These two were accustomed to violence. It had been a friend their entire lives, I could see it in their chiseled faces and in how they braced themselves for the clash, loose and easy. In an instant I glimpsed every blow given and received by them, the backhands they dealt mouthy girlfriends, the beltings from their fathers, the midnight scrums in these pitiless lots of The Battery with fists, elbows, teeth. The film reel dissolved to cigarette burns and blackness because, for them, the story ended here.
As I rushed in, the man who’d killed the mama dog walloped me on the shoulder and neck with the jack handle. Fuck him, I didn’t care. Goatee gave me several quick jabs to the ribs. I didn’t feel any of it. I grabbed jack-handle dude by the collar, lifted him without effort, and slammed him into his partner, one bowling pin against another. Goatee sprawled to his hands and knees. He clutched a pocketknife but wasn’t in much of a position to use it. I kicked him in the eye with my pointy wingtip. The force flipped him onto his back and glued him to the paved walkway.
I yanked straight down on the first guy’s arm. His
head snapped around like a game of Crack the Whip. The jack handle flew. He was probably finished from severed vertebrae, not that it mattered. I drew the shiv and clamped the back of his neck the way it’s done in prison yards. Then I punched all seven jagged inches of fiberglass through his sternum and crunched his breastbone like an eggshell. His eyes widened and focused upon nothing. He gobbled and gagged in mute appeal to the death gods. I gave the blade a twist and wrenched it loose. I changed to an ice-pick grip and stabbed vertically down behind his collarbone the way the Romans did it. Buried it to the hilt twice. Blood squirted up into my face. I let him go. He hit the concrete and began to crawl. After a few feet, he stopped.
Splashing gradually brought me around again.
The man in the yellow jacket clung to the lip of the pool. Not a chance he’d clamber free on his own. His baggy, waterlogged clothes might as well have been cement. Twice I stamped on his fingers. He sagged back and paddled helplessly.
I picked up a telescopic pool skimmer.
“Hey, bro,” he said between gasps. “Hey, man.” He craned his neck as if something in the sky interested him, and flailed his arms.
I rested the end of the pole under his chin and pushed him away from the edge toward the deep green. He clung to the pole. I released my grip and waited. His head sank beneath the surface. Frantic, he mustered the strength to surge upward and breach. He pantomimed climbing a ladder. Three, four, five times. Slower and slower. His arms drifted apart and his coat billowed around him as he slid toward the bottom where white tiles sloped into murk.
Calvin had rolled the Monte Carlo over the grass to within a dozen paces of the massacre. Lionel stood behind the open passenger door, an M14 rifle braced against the frame. Meanwhile, the Manitou foot soldiers at the main entrance were agitated. Two had drawn pistols. The Indian held a cell phone to his ear and spoke animatedly. For a moment the urge to return to the building and murder everyone inside flared incandescent in my mind. I swallowed the urge.
The puppy came alive and pissed herself when I reeled her in by the rope leash. She sank her puppy fangs into my forearm. I wrapped her in my coat. She squirmed and wailed as I carried her to the car.
