Blood Standard

by Laird Barron

  Hank eagerly corroborated the account, and I was reasonably confident that Yellowknife would have as well, if he could’ve done more than gasp and clutch his middle.

  I didn’t want to believe Reba had been stupid enough to tag along with them after what they’d pulled at the Fire Festival, yet I did. Kids, especially tough kids with soft hearts and chips on their shoulders, make terrible decisions. You can set your watch by them. In this case, she probably hadn’t felt much choice in the matter with the Amigos knocking on her door and bum-rushing her to the Suburban like coyotes herding a lamb. If only I’d been on my feet at the time. I understood Lionel’s anguish. He hadn’t intervened, hadn’t saved her, hadn’t understood that she needed saving.

  Where had she gone after jumping from the Suburban? I did the math. No purse, no cell phone, no pals in New Paltz. The intersection on Springtown Road lay roughly four miles from the Hawk Mountain Farm. Easily within walking distance. Why hadn’t she trudged to the farm? Had she fled to parts unknown in fear of her boyfriend? I doubted that. Someone had gotten to her before she reached home. Possibly the Amigos were lying. I sincerely doubted that. My gift for reading people, for sensing their true intentions, convinced me these three morons were too piss-scared to lie themselves an alibi.

  Next suspect: Kari Jefferson, the ditz with a heart of spite. If her own alibi of being at work at the salon weren’t airtight, I might’ve reached for the improbable idea that Reba had called her from a friend’s house, that there’d been a subsequent argument and Kari committed violence against her roommate, dumped the body in a landfill or a swamp or the slow-churning Rondout. It didn’t jibe, didn’t fit, no matter how much I tried to make it so. Where did that leave me? It left me wanting to smash the Three Amigos into a fine powder.

  Galt arrived with the van. He wore a red balaclava and a bush hat pulled low to disguise his eyes.

  We put on a show for Yellowknife’s benefit, and by extension all the other assholes present.

  “You two punks are in for special treatment.” I lifted Hank by the collar and chucked him into the van, followed by Martinez. I said to Yellowknife, “Later, Eddy. Watch your back.” I climbed in and pulled the doors shut as the van rolled.

  Yellowknife didn’t move from the fetal position as we rounded the corner and lost him in the trees. I like remembering him that way.

  * * *

  —

  HANK STAYED QUIET during the dusty, bumpy ride up the mountain to his mama’s shack. I marched him at gunpoint along the driveway right to his doorstep, where Clem and the dogs awaited.

  “Hope you baked a cake, Mrs. Stephens,” I said.

  Clem didn’t shed a tear or hug her prodigal son. She handed me a mason jar packed with cash. The lid had rusted tight.

  “That’s Henry’s trust fund. Tad more than we agreed on. Reckon you earned it.”

  “Thanks, ma’am. Are you sure I can’t take him off your hands? He’s going to bring trouble down on your family. The Feds want him on a murder rap. The Iron Knife and Manitou aim to collect his head. Might get hot around these parts.”

  She spat in the dirt.

  “Trouble ain’t nothin’ but weather. It comes and it goes. Hank, get your sorry ass in the house.”

  I tucked the jar under my arm.

  “Adios, Mrs. Stephens.”

  “Farewell, slick. We’re done. Don’t be comin’ ’round this mountain anymore.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” I hoped I was telling the truth.

  * * *

  —

  THE BLACK DOG MERCS LEFT Lionel and me with our prisoner in the side lot of the Bellwether Motel a mile outside of Kingston. Martinez sat, bloodied and crazed, on a cement backstop. A steady glare from me sent gawking passersby onward with a lively step. Nobody got around to calling the cops, though. I made a note of that.

  Agents Bellow and Noonan showed a few minutes later. Noonan stuck his hands into his pockets and refused to make eye contact as he lagged behind. Bellow was grayer and more rumpled than ever, as if he hadn’t slept since our last encounter. He shook my hand and then knelt and spoke briefly with Martinez. I stepped off a bit to give them privacy, and also to sidle near Noonan.

  “Awkward, huh?” I stage-whispered.

  He twitched.

  “Fool. Fucking idiot. At least Modine is conservative in his evil. Talon is too ambitious. He’s got dreams. Dreams for him, nightmares for us.”

  “That’s your problem, Mr. Fed. I don’t play those reindeer games.”

  “Oh yes, yes you do. Talon belongs to the Blood Path. Never heard of it, eh? Well, why would you? It’s a cabal, a secret society within the Manitou upper echelon. The hardest of the hard, the most vicious among the vicious. These are the skinners and the head takers. The slave traders. Lords of Darkness. They don’t want to parley with or assimilate the other gangs. These hidden masters will settle for nothing less than a pogrom.” He grimaced bitterly. “So, yes, Coleridge, you will play this game. You’ve already been used as a piece.”

  “We’re all pieces, Timmy. I chose the hat over the iron.”

  Bellow called to Noonan and told him to put Martinez in the car. He walked over to me. No, he hadn’t slept in days and his cologne merely masked the reek of booze.

  “You crazy sonofabitch.” He said it with zero affect. “Phil says you stabbed him.”

  “Did Phil mention he slugged a teenage girl and tried to drag her into a car by her hair?”

  “You turned Stephens over to the hill folk. It could take an army years to dig the little bastard out of there.”

  “Get digging.”

  “Coleridge—”

  “I had a deal with the so-called hill people. My policy is to honor deals with the working class.”

  “What am I supposed to tell my supervisors? Wait, never mind.”

  “Good. Now we’re square for Noonan’s antics—y’know, trying to orchestrate my demise, et cetera.”

  “What about this raid? If Martinez had gotten killed . . .”

  “I couldn’t warn you beforehand. I’m sorry.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

  “How do I put this delicately? As we’ve established, your partner is a shitbird. Also, he’s up to no good.”

  Bellow glanced over his shoulder at Noonan, who skulked around by the car.

  “Tell me something new.”

  “The fix is in. He’s marching to a different set of orders from you. His handlers want status quo—Modine in power and Talon in check.”

  “The more I see of Talon, the more I wonder if maybe that isn’t the smarter play.”

  “Can’t help you there. Lesser of two evils is still evil. What I do know? Be wise or Martinez won’t make it to any trial.” I made a pistol with my index finger and put it to my head.

  “I said, tell me something new.”

  “Okay. Watch your step or you may not make it to retirement. My advice? If it comes down to you or Martinez, take a walk.”

  He lit a Benson & Hedges and smoked it. I didn’t think he intended to speak again, but he did after a while.

  “They disappear the girl?”

  “If I thought so, he wouldn’t be breathing.” I relayed what I’d learned while interrogating the Amigos. “We’ll canvass the neighborhood. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Strange. I’ll come at Martinez hard when we debrief. Best of luck, Coleridge.”

  “Agent, you have a girlfriend, a favorite hooker, anyone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go get a good dinner and a lay. And get a full night’s sleep, will you? You’re dead on your feet.”

  “Ha. The irony is what’s killing me. Look in the mirror, sonny.”

  “Difference is, I’m made for the abuse. Darker it gets, the better.”

  “Good to hear. Because it’s going to
get a hell of a lot darker.”

  FORTY-THREE

  For three days, the residents of Hawk Mountain Farm canvassed the neighborhoods along Springtown Road. We knocked on doors, rang numbers, and circulated the word via social networking on the Internet. Calvin worked his magic and a reporter took down the story and it ran in the Kingston rag alongside a picture from Reba’s senior prom.

  Nothing.

  Bellow called to say he’d put the screws to Martinez and Martinez stuck to his story: Reba left the vehicle of her own accord and walked out of their lives forever. I thanked him and fell into a sleep not unlike death.

  I dreamed of moving through a series of pastures in pursuit of our herd of horses. Each gate was ajar or there were holes in the fences. After a while, I lost sight of them except for Bacchus, who cantered a few arm lengths beyond my reach. He stopped at the edge of a blackened plain that went on to the bloody howling heart of the cosmos. He turned in profile and reared and his eye shone white as bone. His whinny pierced my heart with an icicle.

  I awoke to thunder rolling over the valley and the drum of rain against the roof.

  Minerva whimpered in her sleep and pressed against my ankles. What did I have, what did I know? Reba had been a mediocre student in high school and better than average in college. She smoked grass and consorted with bangers and committed minor mischief but hadn’t become a hard case despite her tough talk. She loved horses and possibly Lionel and refused to speak to her father. Her favorite band was Sublime. Her mother loved her. Virgil, Jade, and Lionel loved her. Bacchus loved her, if he could be said to love anything.

  What did I have, what did I know? Everything and nothing. I’m not a detective, I’m merely a man with less exacting scruples than most.

  A white stroke of lightning sizzled and doubled in the window glass. Dreams, nightmares. I don’t consider them supernatural weather vanes. Dreams and nightmares are not predicative in the same sense as omens or precognition. They are the mind’s sandbox wherein scenarios are sketched and enacted, wherein puzzle pieces and kaleidoscope fragments are ever turning, ever colliding, as they are drawn toward some concrete impermanence.

  I walked through a downpour into the barn and flipped on the lights in that dark and cavernous space. I moved as if my body yet remained submerged in dreamtime. All that transpired unspooled with a sense of leadenness, the sensation of sinking into quicksand. I shortly discovered what a part of me had known for a long time.

  But again, I’m no detective.

  In the confusion of her disappearance, exacerbated by the antics of the Three Amigos, and further compounded by the charming disarray of the tack and tools, no one noticed, until I pawed through the errant bridles and dusty crops and unused leathers, that while a dozen riding helmets hung from pegs or lay discarded upon gray shelves, none belonged to Reba.

  I realized with a knot in my gut we’d been fools. She had indeed returned to the farm that fateful day.

  * * *

  —

  YOU ARE A TEENAGER. You have made a number of spectacularly bad choices throughout your young career. You’ve done time behind concrete walls due to these choices. You are smart enough to know that going with the bad crowd will bring you to ruin, but you’re a kid. Your parents are absent and the only other people you trust are either away at work or distracted caring for that huge sick lug with his own checkered past.

  Those bad friends from that bad crowd pressure you and you bail in the middle of the road and walk. Steam boiling from your ears, embarrassment burning your cheeks. By the time you reach the farm, you’ve calmed sufficiently to do what comes naturally and you sublimate your fear and embarrassment into action. Rebellious action. No one notices your disheveled arrival on that hot spring day.

  You grab a helmet, but don’t even bother to saddle Bacchus. No bridle, no bit. You take him from the corral and you ride. Riding Bacchus is the only time in your chaotic life that you truly feel in control. He is real, he is heavy, he is a caged and ill-tempered beast who responds to you, who listens and obeys. The two of you gallop out of the yard and down the Rail Trail, your favorite route. No one noticed your arrival and no one sees you go.

  Bacchus returns, lathered, wild-eyed, bereft of his rider. The only person to take note is Gus, the stable hand. Hayseed Gus is a bit slow; the Walkers took him on as a favor to foreman Coates, who is the boy’s uncle once removed. Gus’s IQ hovers in the upper sixties. He isn’t capable of adding two and two. He merely assumes the big gelding has gotten loose yet again and remands him to the corral without pausing to question why the gate is unlatched.

  You are gone without a trace and everyone who loves you, everyone who cares, hunts for clues in the wrong direction.

  * * *

  —

  THIS IS THE THEORY I LAID before Jade, Virgil, Lionel, Dawn, and foreman Coates at the breakfast table. After a stunned silence came a burst of frenzied activity. There were calls to the police and preparations for a fresh search. Not me, though. Not me.

  I zipped up a windbreaker and found the trail about half a mile past the farm proper and began walking north. Massive old-growth sycamore, maple, and pine churned around me and littered the path with shorn twigs. Leaves and detritus funneled as if into the gold-black throat of the next world.

  Later, I learned that Virgil and Jade organized two dozen riders to sweep along the foothills of Hawk Mountain. By dusk, the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department had coordinated a search-and-rescue operation in conjunction with personnel from local volunteer fire departments and dozens of private citizens. A small army of men, women, horses, and dogs descended upon the region.

  Reba’s fate would’ve revealed itself eventually. My involvement merely sped the inevitable discovery along. That only seems fair since my presence on the Hawk Mountain Farm contributed to her death. Had Jade not been tending to me in my delirium after the Beltane festival, she would’ve spotted the girl and prevented her from galloping off to her doom. Reba would still be in the world.

  Night fell and the storm grew stronger. Starless, and utterly black. At last came the dull and shapeless glow of firelight through the trees. I moved toward the fire, for here was the thing I’d sought unknowing at every crossroad and hollow during the endless hours of daylight.

  Old Methuselah, the itinerant potter and scavenger Emmitt Rogers, lolled in a drunken stupor. His weathered features were decayed granite in the orange and sparking glare of the bonfire. He dressed in moth-eaten fatigues and his beard was snarled and matted. His panel truck provided a lee from the wind, its hood pointed at a track that speared through knee-high weeds toward the distant highway.

  Smoke boiled off into the outer darkness. I emerged from the pall and strode toward his roost. The universe spun like the cylinder of a revolver and the barrel oriented on him. Even the storm froze mid-roar. He cast aside a can of beer and raised his hands in supplication.

  “You’re different. From all the other times we’ve met, you’re different tonight.” His eyes blazed with tears. He tore at his hair and gesticulated. “I’ve dreamed you’d come here. You’re Death.”

  The exhaustion of inevitability, of futility, that a man feels when caught in the teeth of a bore tide, crushed down upon me. None of this was chance; not in the vast, incomprehensible scheme of things. I hadn’t sought Emmitt, hadn’t consciously considered that his squat might place him in a prime position to have noticed Reba and Bacchus when they’d galloped along the trail. I’m not a detective, I’m a bulldozer. Yet, here we were in Pluto’s drawing room as the stars flared to their deaths around us in trajectories plotted before the Catskills or Adirondacks heaved up from the primordial muck.

  It had to be this way. It had to come to this. It’s why the universe had placed the revolver in my hand.

  “What have you done, you sonofabitch?” I may as well have been speaking to myself.

  PART IV

 
ACHILLES

  FORTY-FOUR

  Spring gave way to summer.

  Lionel hadn’t exaggerated. The swelter and humidity almost did in this Alaska boy. At least once a day, and hourly during haying week, I swore to defy Mr. Apollo and sneak back to the wintry environs of my youth and shack up in an igloo. Meg sweetly, albeit ruthlessly, derailed that particular plan with home-cooked meals, a certain mischievous light in her eyes, and the threat of handcuffs. I persevered until the Hudson Valley went from green to gold and red and stole my breath.

  The stretch from June to September was an open wound that closed over a tiny bit every day. Seldom had a night passed that I didn’t dream of Reba Walker and her ride into oblivion.

  Agent Bellow was the first person I called after Emmitt led me to Reba’s cairn in a clearing not far from his campsite. The body was in bad shape, but I recognized the 13 tattoo. I’d kicked Emmitt’s legs from under him and driven him to his knees. I rammed the barrel of the gun into his mouth. He didn’t resist. Mad from guilt, he welcomed a bullet as a mercy. I almost obliged him by squeezing the trigger. Instead, I rang Bellow and waited for him to find us out there in the dark.

  Emmitt confessed to Bellow. He explained how Reba staggered into his camp, blood pouring from her temple. Apparently, Bacchus had startled and thrown her into a tree and then bolted for home. Emmitt made her comfortable on a mat. Tended her skull fracture with knowledge gleaned from two tours in the jungles of Vietnam. His efforts were in vain. She raved and ranted and then fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. Eighteen hours from start to finish.