Blood Standard

by Laird Barron

  Calvin drove out through the covered access tunnel. The hail of gunfire I more than half expected didn’t come. I cradled the pup tight, muttering inanities into her ear. She struggled for a bit, then fell into exhausted sleep. She whined in her dreams, wanting her mother. I knew the feeling.

  We were halfway home before I realized I’d been slashed.

  THIRTY-THREE

  In the end, when I’m laid upon a slab, the scars that crisscross my naked corpse will form a road map of benighted territories. This day I’d added several points of interest and a fresh traveler’s advisory.

  The Monte Carlo barreled along at eighty-five and damn the traffic lights. Me in the backseat, arms wrapped around the pup. Nameless, faceless dead lay in my wake. Three, possibly four, men snuffed in a matter of thirty seconds. Not a personal record. Close, though. What set it apart from other occasions of wanton ultraviolence in my history of misdeeds? Nobody had pulled my strings. I owned it utterly.

  I watched the tops of the trees drift by and thought perhaps Dad had it right. I was Oppenheimer’s dread in microcosm, a miniature atom bomb. A destroyer of small things. Not worlds, nothing so grand, but individual bodies, individual lives. In little more than a week I’d crossed purposes with mercenaries, gangsters, white supremacists, hillbilly moonshiners, gangbangers, and Feds. Blood had spilled. As ever, blood was the currency of my existence. Blood was the standard.

  It would always be this way. Men with guns, men with knives, men with evil intentions. My world, my tribe. My calling.

  * * *

  —

  VIRGIL REDEEMED A MARKER with a cranky semi-retired veterinarian of long-standing acquaintance. They cleared a sturdy table in Virgil’s workshop and made me lie across it. Jade folded towels and slipped them under my neck.

  “You’ll be fine, son,” she said.

  Dawn Walker arrived. She took a long, cold look at the mess. She cupped my cheek with her palm and cried.

  The vet, a bluff iron-haired fellow with an Amish-style beard, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He briskly scissored off my expensive tailored shirt. He felt my neck and examined my side.

  “Hmm. Massive hematoma. No broken bones. Three shallow lacerations. One deep puncture wound. Nothing major got nicked. I can sew it up, give you antibiotics, but there’s a risk of peritonitis. Get X-rays.”

  “Stitch me, doc,” I said.

  “Didn’t expect to spend my golden years patching holes in wanted desperadoes,” he said.

  “I’ll vouch for him,” Virgil said.

  The old veterinarian stuck me with a syringeload of dope and I soon became lost in the radiance of the lamp bulb above the table.

  When the mists thinned and I became fully aware of my surroundings, my ribs were stitched and swaddled in thick bandages. I slumped in a plush office chair with a blanket draped over my shoulders. The vet packed his black bag and departed after admonishing the Walkers with dire predictions regarding my inevitable demise via inflammation and infection, if not misadventure.

  Jade and Virgil watched me from their perch on a bench.

  “Here we are again,” she said.

  “Did we ever leave?” he said. “You got a death wish, boy?”

  “Hush. He doesn’t have a death wish. He’s an oaf.”

  “Ever see anybody metabolize anesthetic so quickly?”

  “Being a lush is good for something, I guess,” she said. “How do you feel, Isaiah?”

  They’d given me a paper cup of lukewarm water. I sipped it to clear the rust from my throat.

  “Like a million, minus nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand,” I quipped through gritted teeth, nauseated from blood loss.

  “Saved by fat,” she said. “Like trying to stab a walrus with a toothpick. Virg would’ve had half his organs pierced.”

  “Vital ones,” Virgil said.

  I laughed, which proved to be a mistake. White-hot sparks burned through my insides. I caught my breath and said I’d best get a solid night’s sleep to be ready for morning chores.

  “Nonsense,” Jade said. “I’ll not have you splitting yourself wide open after the effort we put into sewing your sorry carcass together. Show some respect. You will rest at least until your innards cease oozing forth. No sass.”

  I opened my mouth to sass and she wagged her finger.

  End of discussion.

  * * *

  —

  THUS, FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS of my miserable life, I convalesced at the farm and stewed. I made calls and went over the facts of the case a hundred ways from Sunday. I watched home movies Jade and Virgil had filmed of Reba at Christmas and birthday parties. Most were taken during her adolescence. She’d smiled more as a little girl.

  Depression isn’t my style. I tend to fight the blues like I fight any other opponent—tooth and nail. The dolor that colored my mood wouldn’t submit so easily. The devil on my left shoulder, with his horns and tail, reminded me that I’d failed. Failed to extract Reba’s whereabouts from the clues, failed to extort the information from her known associates, failed to force Donnie Talon’s hand, and failed to locate that missing link, Hank Stephens. A goose egg for Team Coleridge.

  Simple math. Because of these failures, the opportunity to find Reba Walker among the living had likely evaporated. I felt as if the investigation had shifted from a search-and-rescue to a search for a body.

  Jade and the vet were right—the slashes were flesh wounds except for one that glanced off a rib and went in a couple of inches. Nasty and debilitating, albeit far from life-threatening as long as I didn’t get infected or push too hard and burst the stitches. Fat might have helped. The jacket even more so.

  Defying doctor’s orders, I toddled around the farm and worked to civilize the puppy. I named her Minerva after the goddess of wisdom. Maybe she’d live up to her namesake and it would rub off on me. After bathing and combing her, I beheld a gorgeous brindle with alternating black and white paws and brown eyes. I took her to the clinic and had her wormed and vaccinated. They estimated her to be around eleven weeks old. Skinny and flea-bitten, but in good health. An alpha female, the vet said. Her initial shyness had waned and she followed me during my rounds, slept curled against the small of my back at night. Sudden noises caused her to startle. No more cowering, though. She’d growl until I patted her and promised all was well. A fierce pup who’d grow into a large, aggressive protector, if I knew anything.

  Two new females. My life got more dangerous every day.

  * * *

  —

  LIONEL AND I SAT ON MY PORCH after splitting a cord of firewood. Virgil came around and looked us over. He squinted and spat tobacco.

  “Come on, boys.” He got a fire going in the sauna. “Do you good. Get in there. I’ll check on you in a bit.”

  I stripped and went inside. Lionel followed. Dark and cramped. The ceiling lowered over us like a coffin lid. We steamed for a while.

  Eventually, Lionel spoke.

  “What is it with you and animals? Honestly, dude. You’re a good guy to hang with and so forth. But, damn, underneath you’re cold as an ice cube. Don’t get me wrong—I like that. Man needs to know his partner is a cool customer. Except, there’s this whole other side. First you get riled over a bunch of walruses. Then you lose your shit about dogfighting, with predictable consequences. Ever get that pissed over actual, you know, human beings?”

  “Innocence,” I said.

  “Innocence?”

  “There’s an innocence you only find in babies, old folks, and the mentally challenged. And beasts.” I nearly told him about Achilles. The words didn’t come. Not then. Instead I said, “Sorry about your rifle.” The other night I’d staggered into his cabin with a thank-you bottle of scotch and found him taking a hacksaw to the M14. Subsequently, the pieces were scattered in various bodies of water.

  He wiped s
weat from his brow with a rag and told me not to worry, it hadn’t been particularly valuable. We tacitly avoided the subject of Reba and stuck to bullshit. How did I feel? The weather. Minerva.

  Finally, after a long silence, I said, “Was that guy your first kill? Outside of the war?” I meant the one in The Battery who’d gone for his piece and got blown to kingdom come for his troubles.

  “Outside of the war? Yeah.”

  “He would’ve drilled me if you hadn’t taken him. I owe you my life.”

  “Come on.”

  “No, really. Nothing is the same as before I came east. I’ve lost a step. Maybe two steps.” I touched the lump of bandages where it pressed through my shirt.

  “Looked fast enough from where I stood. Think anybody will come after us?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You seem cool about it.”

  “It won’t amount to anything with the law. The cops don’t care about what happens in The Battery. It’s the underworld. The gang might be another matter. Those weren’t Manitou bangers, luckily. They were prospects. Have to expect Talon will put the squeeze on us.”

  “Okay.” Lionel rubbed his eyes with a cloth. “I’ve talked with Virg and Jade . . .”

  “Are they afraid?” Regular folks had a tendency to like me until I showed my fangs.

  “No, man. I think they love you. I been under fire in two fucking war zones and I ain’t seen anything ballsier than what you did back there. Nah, we’re trying to figure how you’re still alive. Alive and walking around, no less.”

  “My boss, an old guy named Apollo, used to call me Mr. Unkillable.”

  “Got stabbed a lot, huh?”

  “I’m a klutz.”

  The tiny door to the enclosure creaked and Virgil stooped inside with a towel wrapped around his middle.

  “Sounds serious in here.”

  He ladled water onto the heated stones. The resultant hiss and fume of steam comforted me in a way I hadn’t expected. Steam and shadow clouded the faces of my companions. The red glow of the coals made it seem as if we’d descended into a cavern, deep in the bowels of the earth, and hunkered around a primordial flame.

  “I rolled a tractor in the back forty,” Virgil said. “Eleven years ago this summer. Broke my legs and my back. Got my good days and my bad days. Never been the same. Fact is, time has done caught up with Jade and me.”

  “You, sir, are one tough sonofabitch,” Lionel said.

  “Used to be, sonny boy. I damned well used to be.” The old man pinched my biceps with his gnarled fingers. “Now you listen, Isaiah Coleridge.”

  “Please, I bruise easily.”

  “You’ve been moping around. I don’t like it. Neither does the missus. You’ve got miles to go yet.”

  “I’ll suck it up, Mr. Walker.”

  He leaned forward so I could see his eyes shining red, so I could see he had my number.

  “Nobody ever truly changes. Not even the heroes in the epics.”

  “Did my father call? That’s his favorite saying.”

  “Shoot straight, boy. What’s behind it all? Man can’t go on like you are without asking himself the hard questions.”

  “Amen,” Lionel said.

  “Mr. Walker—” I shut my mouth and tried again. “Penance.”

  “Aha.” He released me and drifted back into the murk.

  Fate had tracked me across the years and four thousand miles of Canada and the continental USA. It had finally caught up. I understood that part of the great mystery, at least.

  “Can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Hah, you’re doing fine. First honest talk since you came here. Change isn’t always necessary. It’s enough to dig beneath the surface and unearth another layer. Pretend you’re busting rocks in the pen. Keep peeling back the layers.”

  I smiled uneasily.

  “Addition via subtraction, eh? What happens when you run out of layers?”

  “You’re dead, dumbass. Speaking of death, I bet you wondered why we didn’t ship you off to Kingston General when you got pneumonia after the Fire Festival.”

  “My mother was a traditionalist,” I said.

  “A traditionalist?”

  “She refused to take us to a Western doctor for almost anything. She called hospitals death houses. Made us kids swill her own home remedies that would scour the bark off a tree from the smell alone. That’s probably why bullets ricochet off me.”

  “It wasn’t pneumonia,” Virgil said. “Wasn’t a fever born of plague. Your sickness came from the inner darkness, Isaiah. Those days and nights you spent clawing at the sheets? You were sweating out evils. No hospital could fix what’s wrong. There are demons in you, battling for your soul.”

  “So, you were smoking them demons out?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think you missed some,” Lionel said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Detectives Rourke and Collins came for me in the afternoon.

  “Get in the car, handsome. I’ve got free candy!” Collins gestured to me from the rolled-down window on the passenger side. With her frazzled blonde ’do and perfunctory makeup, she could’ve been a world-weary soccer mom in a cheap suit.

  I got in back and tried not to let on how woozy I felt. The car smelled of stale fast food, Aqua Velva, and cigarette smoke.

  She twisted in her seat and regarded me through the mesh partition.

  “Oh, honey. Your poor face. Gets worse every time I see you.”

  “It’s a good look for him,” Detective Rourke said.

  The only witness to my departure was old Emmitt. He’d parked on the road near the main house to tinker with the running lights on his van. I inclined my head at him through the dusty window. He watched us go past, a wrench poised in his fist.

  We rolled through the countryside and into Kingston. They cuffed me, hands in front with my coat draped over them, and led me through the back of the police station into an interview room. The dynamic duo, me, and a table.

  Rourke attached a light chain to my cuffs and looped it through an eyebolt in the table. The sort of arrangement cops had in place for ax murderers, outlaw bikers, and similar maniacs. He clamped a manacle around my ankle and shackled me to a D ring in the floor. That’s when I decided I might be in a lot of trouble.

  Collins placed an opened can of Coke in front of me. I remained calm. I needed to figure their angle. Shakedowns and rousts came with the territory, the same as getting punched and shot at. Or stabbed. Despite the fact these two bozos were in Curtis’s pocket, they still had jobs to protect. I’d expected fallout from The Battery debacle. On the other hand, it paid to be cagey. Cops who answered to more than one master could be running any number of games.

  “Isn’t someone supposed to read me my rights?” I said.

  “You don’t have no stinkin’ rights,” Rourke said.

  “We aren’t required to give a Miranda advisory,” Collins said. “Haven’t you followed the Supreme Court? It was all over C-SPAN.”

  “You aren’t under arrest,” Rourke said. “The restraints are for your protection.”

  “Super. I’m free to go?”

  “Absolutely. Once you burst them irons and break down a locked door.”

  We all shared a laugh at his wit. I glanced over at the long rectangle of one-way glass. Bruises, old and fresh, patterned my mug in yellow and purple with jags of autumnal brown. At least all my teeth gleamed when I smiled for the camera.

  Rourke placed a manila folder and a recorder on the table. He asked me to state my name for the record.

  “It defies logic,” he said. “A six-month stretch for simple assault. Four months for battery. Three months for battery. Ninety days for obstruction of justice. Suspended sentences out the wazoo for, what else, assault and battery. Miraculous. In all those
years, doing what you do, you didn’t notch a single felony. I mean, that’s kinda rare, Coleridge. Mafiosos usually got a rap sheet a giraffe could wear for a floor-length stole. Contract killers are more circumspect. I make you for a hitter.”

  “If you say so, Detective.”

  He flipped pages and shook his head.

  “You’ve never been held accountable for the maiming, torture, and murder you committed on behalf of the Chicago Outfit and Mr. Lucius Apollo in particular. A lot of missing wiseguys in your old neck of the woods.”

  “Alaska is a hazardous environment.”

  “I gotta hunch it’s a lot less hazardous with you in the wind.”

  “Were I guilty of heinous deeds, surely you crackerjack law enforcement agents would’ve swooped in and settled my hash.”

  “Keep running that lip, boy. You and your fifty-cent words, that college education. Despite the leg-up Apollo bought you, it’s no surprise you turned out rotten. Like father, like son. Mervin killed your mama. Hit her with an oar. Left a mark on you too, didn’t it?”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Detective Collins said. “Is that true? Did your daddy bash your mama’s brains in?”

  “Says so right here.” Rourke tapped the folder. “Two went out onto Black Loon Lake. One came back. Papa Coleridge claimed it was an accident. Coroner ruled death by misadventure and the powers that be swept it under the rug. Must be nice to have juice with Air Force command. Anyhow, that’s about the time you took up the thug life. Military brat to teen menace. Gangs, fight clubs, eventually the Outfit. Your path went downhill on a bobsled with no brakes.” He bared mismatched silver and yellow teeth and flicked a glance toward the security camera scoping us from the corner.

  Detective Collins accepted a pair of photographs from the folder and slid them before me. Before and after pics. The first—Dr. Peyton smiling into the lens at a family dinner. The second—Dr. Peyton’s severed head smiling soullessly from an open mailbox. The White Manitou had sent me a love note.