by Frank Bill
The lady barefooted across the deck. Down into the yard. Found her husband while her daughter rang the police. “No!” the lady screamed. Started off behind the house. Kneeled down at the maniac dog. Said, “Grim, calm your ass down.” Unlatched the heavy chain. Said, “Now these sons a bitches gonna get theirs.”
At the truck, Tig slung the gas into the rear. Out of breath, he told Jarhead, “You gotta drive. My leg is fucking burgered.”
Jarhead said, “All right.” Opened the passenger’s side door. Heard steps pushing through the damp yard. Then a low growl followed by the lightning-fast roar.
Tig hollered, “Fuck!” Fell against the truck’s bed. Tried to kick. Punched and pushed at the black German shepherd that came up on its hinds. Laid its fronts on his chest, its mouth gnawing into his right arm.
“Get this bastard off me!” He shrieked like a teething child.
With no gun, knife, or makeshift billy club, Jarhead did the only thing he knew to do. Balled his fist and punched the mauling shepherd in its head. Once. Twice. Then its ribs. Grim yelped, fell, and ran.
Tig lay against the truck, breathing heavily. Moisture running now from his leg and arm, smearing the side of the truck. He panted, “You about a mean son of a buck. Gonna have to buy you a few rounds.”
Jarhead helped Tig into the passenger’s side. Told him, “Don’t owe me shit.” Slammed the truck’s door. Heard the sirens coming from afar. “Shit!” Got in on the driver’s side.
Asked Tig, “The hell you want me to go?”
Fuel rimmed Tig’s hands and clothing, combined with the red that seeped from his peppered wounds. He laughed. “Get me to my cousin’s. He take care of me. Pay you good.”
“Just give me some damn directions. Got no idea where I’s at.”
Tig said, “Keep going down this road heading west till you see the signs for Brandenburg. Follow them.”
Jarhead stomped the gas just as the road behind him lit up.
* * *
Liz stumbled through the kitchen door. Three lanterns glowed from the counter, shadowed the packs of smokes she threw onto the table littered with jars, bottles of Heat, coffee filters, rock salt, and Ziplocs. She grabbed a lantern, went into the dining room, picked up the two ten-gallon buckets that held the baggies of meth. Took them into the kitchen. Sat down in a chair, broke the lid open on one of the buckets, pulled out one of the baggies. Fingernailed a snort into her nose. Felt the jolt kick the booze buzz in the ass, pushed the baggie into her pants. Sealed the bucket and waited.
From the back bedroom through the dining room his voice was a fist in the mouth. “The shit you doing?”
He’d become too predictable. Her eyes were two faded stars looking at him. She said, “Got us a buyer. Wants it all.”
“Buyer?”
“Name’s Ned.” She smiled.
Lantern light bounced shadows over the uneven meat of his eye, highlighted Angus’s disgust. “Who vouched for him?”
“I did. Showed me a fat wad of dough.”
Angus’s words sparked with anger. “Showed you his fat prick, probably. Don’t know that many around this county. Could be he’s a narc. We deal with people that’ve been vouched for.”
Liz played dumb, said, “We deal at the factories.”
Angus could ignore Liz’s poor choices in the sack but not to whom they sold meth. He didn’t flinch. Gave her a quick palm to the mouth. Knocked her backward in the chair. Her head rattled against the floor. Angus said, “You wanna be a stubborn bitch hound, I treat you like one.” He spat on her. Stepped back. Pulled a smoke from his T-shirt pocket, a lighter from the table, fired up a glow. Said, “I make the deals. Done let you and them two brothers front that shit at the tavern. Now they’s dead.”
Liz pressed two hands onto the floor, pushed herself up. Blood rivered from her lip. She laughed. “Ned’s gonna get it and you gonna get what you gave, fucker.”
When the screen door cracked open, Angus squinted, noticed the barrel too late. Felt the fire that filled his ears with combustion, his inhale with burnt gunpowder. He hit the kitchen counter, dropped to the floor quivering, eyes rolled into mothball whites.
Liz stood up. “Bastard!”
Ned pushed into the kitchen. Stepped over, nudged Angus’s leg with his boot, leveled the barrel between his eyes. Liz pushed the barrel away. “Let his ass suffer, let him bleed out. Looks like you about got his heart anyway.”
Ned asked, “Got the shit?”
“Right there.” Untrusting, Liz grabbed the buckets of meth. Said, “Let me get somethin’.” Walked through the dark house to the back bedroom. Set the buckets down. Rummaged through the moonlit room. Picked up some of her clothing, pushed it into her rucksack. Saw the outline of Angus’s pistol on his sleeping bag. Pushed it in with her clothing, along with a box of shells. Zipped up the pack. Slung it over her shoulder. Grabbed the buckets. Walked back into the kitchen. Asked Ned, “Where to?”
Ned held the shotgun in one hand, reached his other down onto Liz’s ass, squeezed, and said, “My place, get the rest of this deal going.”
8
Touching the screen door’s handle, the slanted figure inhaled sharply. The musty burn from inside the house couldn’t cloak the memory of what had taken place years ago. He pulled the door open with his big hand while his smaller hand, missing halves of the last two digits, wrapped around a long-edged piece of steel.
From the barn, he’d heard the blast. Remembered hearing several of them that day his family was murdered. But tonight he’d watched two outlines walk from the house after the gunshot. Listened to the rumble of their separate engines. Lights, one after the other, drove down the road. Turned out into the valley and disappeared.
Inside the kitchen, lantern light revealed a table of scattered objects. Car keys. Packs of cigarettes. Coffee filters. Mason jars and shapes the figure didn’t recognize. On the floor below the sink, his head propped against the metal cabinets, lay an array of carnage. The man he’d seen arrive with the woman a week ago, now reamed about the left side of his chest.
The man lay in the exact spot he remembered his father standing when he’d startled him that day long ago, coming in from the woods after hunting squirrel. Creak of the screen door. His father’s face twisted to meet his own. Red beaten with damp. Short of breath. Hair in disarray. Talking in a string of unfamiliar syllables. Then he’d followed the female screams that bounced from the bathroom. Where he discovered his mother, Azell, his sisters—Doddy, who was pregnant, and Tate, slow-minded but beautiful—each bound by twine. Approaching them, he’d felt his father’s hands clamp around his neck from behind.
He shook the memory turned to blemish from his thoughts. Stepped down on the man’s chest. Didn’t see a gun tucked anywhere on the man’s frame. Pressed the piece of steel into his neck. Wanted to see if he’d any fight in him or if it was freckled about the floor and cabinets.
He bore down into the man’s face. One side smooth. The other gnawed. Uneven. His eyes followed the wet scattered about the man’s neck and shirt. It ran from the left shoulder, an explosion of skin, vein, muscle, and bone.
The figure felt the rise and fall of the man’s chest beneath his boot. Turned his attention to the tic of the man’s left hand.
Angus shuddered through the pain. The voices gone. His mouth tasted of desiccated soil and slug shot. The name Ned hammered heavy in his mind like the weight on his chest, the festering ache in his left shoulder.
What the fuck! Angus made out the towering shape pressed down on his chest with unmanaged husks of hair, one arm of length grasping a machete, the other hanging small, malproportioned from its socket. The shape appeared muscled like the bare roots of an oak tree. Wore a crimped white dress. It was staring at Angus’s left hand.
Angus’s nerve endings tensed, his heartbeat thrusting as though he’d had a few bumps of crank. The shadow turned back to him. In one motion, Angus bit through the pain. His right hand grabbed the shadow’s left leg. Shifted
his left hip with his own left leg. Knocked the shadow to his right. Got from beneath the shadow’s weight.
The figure fell into the counter. Lantern light in his eyes. Unfazed, he turned around blinking. Watched Angus push his back against the wall, using it to stand up. Appeared all of the man’s fight wasn’t shed about the floor and cabinets, least not yet.
The rush of blood loss and tic of pain wobbled Angus. Taking in the shadow, he gasped through clinched teeth, “The hell are you?”
The shadow stuttered, “Gr-gr-gravel.”
Taking in the machete that Gravel held, Angus feared its use on him and rushed the beast, shouldered and clutched the shadow. Squeezed and inhaled the scent of a musty rodent bathed in lye. Cut off any chance of a swing or swipe of the machete. Suffocated his one arm. Gravel elbowed his free arm into Angus’s shoulder. Pain chipped Angus’s insides.
Angus looked into the shadow’s face, two angered eyes beneath dead strands of hair. The shadow grunted. “St-st-stop.” Angus ignored his word. Reared his head back. Drove his forehead forward repeatedly. Cartilage separated from red. Lips blued.
The shadow wailed. Let go of Angus. The machete clanged to the linoleum. The ache of Angus’s shoulder dropped him to his knees. He twisted his body. Felt the burn of a rubber-soled boot indenting the side of his face. Then the knot of bone flailing his temple, causing his eyes to dart and his vision to blur, when a hand crimped his wound, his mind went south from the pain and his thoughts ceased.
The shadow who called himself Gravel sat winded, looked upon this man who lay in a home that had been unoccupied for years because of the onslaught that had taken the innocent, innocent that had once been his family. He watched the ooze expand from the man’s busted ball of fiber and thought enough blood had been spilt for tonight. He would mend the wounded man.
PART II
REAPING THE FLAMES
9
Deputy Sheriff Whalen handed the sheet of paper to Detective Thurman. “The shit’s this?”
Whalen replied, “APB on Johnny Earl from a few days back. He robbed a gun shop way down in Hazard, Kentucky. Beat a county cop on a back road outside of Frankfort, Kentucky. Ditched him and his car in the woods. Ain’t been seen since. Could be coming our way.”
Thurman asked, “How’s the cop?”
Whalen said, “He’s breathing. Gave a full description. Johnny Earl said he was on his way to visit kin in Orange County. It didn’t check out. Just passing it along. So what you got on Eldon?”
Detective Thurman told Whalen, “Toxicology from Eldon’s body matched the contents of the glass in his kitchen sink.”
Whalen sat behind his desk and asked, “So he was drinking and—”
“And maybe had a disagreement.”
The two men looked to be in their late forties. But Thurman—unlike Whalen, who was light-heavyweight hard—was power-lifter big. Each had grown up on farm labor, football in their teens. Law enforcement from their twenties into their forties. Both used the police gym in the basement of the station three days a week. Thurman lifted heavy to maintain his Michelin Man physique, keep up with a county-fair-queen wife, two kids, while Whalen lifted medium to light, keeping his striated appearance, looked in his early forties but held the age of fifty and held it well. His ex-wife had remarried a state trooper years ago. They’d no kids.
Thurman’s chest flexed between the cotton of his tan T-shirt and crossed arms, said, “Be the logical guess.”
Whalen sipped the coffee remaining in his mug and asked, “What about the brass casing?”
“Same as those found at the house fire down in Amsterdam. Same prints but no hits in the criminal data base.”
Pushing his hand over stubbled, military-kept hair, Whalen muttered, “Son of a bitch.”
Thurman had more. “Most likely it’s a male and female.”
A hint of hope brightened Whalen’s walnut eyes, and he asked, “Why you say that?”
“Two sets of footprints match both scenes. Size thirteen boot and size six. Same imprints was found on Eldon’s kitchen tile. Had a soil match from Amsterdam. Also, bruises on Eldon’s face are consistent with being beat by a big-ass set of knuckles. No female’d have those mitts wearing a size six.”
“Small-framed woman.”
“That’s my logic. Plus, swab tests come back matching ejaculate from a female, unknown. And a male, Eldon. The dumb bastard was getting fucked when some gal decided to shoot him just before he wasted his glue.”
“Twisted bitch,” Whalen concluded.
Thurman shook his head. “Not your average holster chaser. How the interview with the Chinaman go?”
Whalen exhaled with disgust. “He’s clean. Eldon owed him for some bets is the reason he stopped at the pharmacy. He called it business. Regardless, Mr. Zhong got an alibi. Can’t touch that bastard. I visited the Leavenworth Tavern, Poe gave nothing. Stopped and talked to Flat and Beatle’s pal Ned. He ain’t spoke with them in a while. So he says.”
Thurman said, “Keep a tab on him. At least we’s pretty certain it’s a man and woman.”
Whalen leaned back, bent his corded arms behind his head. “It’s been well past a week since we got the call on the house fire, found Beatle and Flat. I can either wait for another fire or pray for a poached body. Or—”
Thurman cut in, sitting down on Whalen’s desk and leaning forward. “You thought about cruising back roads, checking abandoned houses in the county for squatting meth cooks?”
Whalen lowered his hands from behind his head, pushed himself up from his desk, reached for his hat, and said, “That’s a damn good idea.”
* * *
Fingers lined with gold-nugget rings and tipped by buffed nails laid two photos on the jade table that sat in a numb-gray basement. Slid them to the man on the other side.
The man sliding over the photos needed to find two people. His source told him that these people squatted in abandoned farm houses, cooked and sold meth. The man wanted to get his money back from a pharmacist who owed him an uncollected debt.
The manicured man’s voice was direct. He stared into the other man’s eyes, which sat like tadpoles behind thick glass. The other man picked up the photos. Took in the details of a man and woman. He wanted to know what had happened to the man’s face.
The manicured man told him that the man in the photo had had a chainsaw accident. Used to own a logging business. Now he was the best meth cook around the county. Went by the nickname of Chainsaw Angus.
The tadpole-eyed man smirked, slid the photos into the breast pocket of his white short-sleeved button up. He had on each inner forearm a tattoo that signified his tutelage in a faraway school. A monkey branded his right. A snake branded his left. Mr. Zhong, he knew, had the same tattoos under his sleeves.
The tadpole-eyed man asked Mr. Zhong where he needed to start looking for this Chainsaw Angus.
Mr. Zhong owned five Chinese restaurants in six counties. Had come straight off the boat from the Fukien province. Turned the small amount of family money he’d had into a small profit. Used his businesses as fronts for his illegal bookie operation. He’d never lost a dollar. Always collected what was owed. Eldon was still delinquent.
Mr. Zhong told the tadpole-eyed man that his sources had reported the female used to run with two brothers now dead. They’d frequented a place of drink called the Leavenworth Tavern.
The tadpole-eyed man tipped his bowl-shaped head of hair forward. Then back. Raw light from the ceiling caught his face, highlighted the putty-like scars from years of offensive training as a boy. The knuckles of each hand were flat as the wood and bamboo he’d conditioned them against years ago. His forearms and shins were the same. Years of bones being pounded. Nerve endings numbed. Conditioned into steel.
His name was Fu Xi. Named after one of China’s cultural heroes, the possible inventor of the eight trigrams for the I Ching, the Book of Changes. Mr. Zhong had brought Fu out of China. Now Mr. Zhong paid Fu to clean up his delinquent dilemmas w
hen no other solution was plausible.
Fu slid his small frame from the red chair in which he’d sat. Stood with shirt tucked into pressed brown dress slacks. A leather belt around his waist. Slip-on loafers over his feet. He offered his free hand before Mr. Zhong left Fu’s basement chamber, a makeshift monastery where he’d taught secretly out in the wilds of Harrison County. They shook.
Mr. Zhong paused, then told Fu that when he arrived at the tavern, his sources told him he’d need to speak with a bartender by the name of Poe. That he was a man that knew more than he let on. He was not an ignorant man, though he pretended to be.
10
In the passing hours of daylight and dark, Liz and Ned lay unbathed. Three days of chemical sweat. Cotton-mouth kisses and sandpaper tongues taking turns within each other’s nether regions. Breaking for bumps of the man-made powder, chased with swigs of bourbon, bottles of Bud, cans of Natural Light.
They crashed in the cold, air-conditioned interior of Ned’s tin shack. Cardboard blinds blocked light from the southern Indiana heat outside. Condensate beaded on the glass. Their chalky outlines lay intertwined like albino anacondas nesting.
Wednesday evening, Ned and Liz scrubbed the dead skin of the three-day binge from their flesh. Packed the meth in Liz’s rucksack along with Angus’s .45. Hit the road to Orange County in Ned’s old Chevy. They purchased a sack of greasy burgers for the long ride. Washed them down with two black coffees. No AC. Windows rolled down. Clear blue daylight burning moisture from their eyes, turning their skin sticky once again.
Liz told Ned, “Sure could use a bump.”
Ned gritted, “Gotta wait, unload some of it.”
“Just a bump.”
“Bit—” Ned stopped his words short. “We gotta wait.”
