Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  On his own. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Mike had driven back to Edie’s and switched cars, taking care not to appear too obvious as he wiped his fingerprints from everything he’d touched and swabbed the blood from his forehead. In his rental, he’d driven until he found a pharmacy with a drive-up window, and bought a pair of aluminum crutches and the biggest bottle of Motrin in stock. By now, his leg, lower half twisted into a cockeyed hook, was swollen nearly double and throbbing like a bastard. Check the mirror; he was ashen and sweating like a drug addict in withdrawal. Next stop a liquor store, where he restocked on George Dickel Sour Mash. Last trip was to a hardware store in a shopping plaza — no drive-ups here. After an excruciating twenty minutes, he spotted a promising-looking punk walking past the car. Black clothes and Magic Marker tattoos. Mike paid him twenty dollars to go in and buy him a length of rope, easy money, no questions asked.

  He returned to the motel, trying grimly to juggle everything at once, and to call his walk a hobble was charitable. He nearly fell face-first into the floor once he got the door open. He dropped everything and dragged himself to the phone and called the airport. He could catch a departure to Miami, layover in Atlanta, at eight-fifty that night.

  It would do. Only one matter to take care of in the meantime. First, had to work up that nerve, deaden those feelings, and he began his own prescription. An afternoon of Doctor Lancer’s faithful bottled elixir.

  Later. Mike eyed his travel clock, twenty-five past four. Much more of the sour mash, and time would become too abstract a concept, which meant it was probably time to take care of business.

  Curtains drawn, lights dim, this brutal afternoon of total self-reliance. The TV yammered too loud, some aged western, John Wayne and lots of gunplay, all of it hazy from too much pain, just enough whiskey. Got everything?

  Ah. The rope.

  “Shit,” he moaned, and popped more Motrin, solid food to go with the sour mash. Do it, just do it.

  Mike scooted down from the bed into the floor. Crabbing back and forth, he uncoiled the rope and ran one end toward the bed’s headboard, looping it around one leg and bringing it back. He fumbled out a functional noose and brought it back to where he sat by the bed’s foot. Scooted back nearly to the wall and braced his good right leg against the end of the bed. Plenty of rope to spare.

  He finally turned his attention to the remnants of his left leg. The best for last. Amazing, he could sit here and stare at the surreal thing as if it were someone else’s. The foot angled to the right and his shin bent in the middle like a secondary knee that buckled inward. It had swollen to stretch painfully against his grass-stained pantleg, and this would be a hell of a lot easier if bell bottoms were still in fashion. Knee to ankle, like one monstrous sausage, and he didn’t want to see the flesh beneath the fabric, a sickly pastiche of bruisework.

  Leave it all alone? He was drunk enough to live with that idea for now. But no, man of the world, he had a plane to catch, and couldn’t travel with a leg this badly misaligned.

  He fed the noose over his foot, tightened it around his ankle, none too snug, none too loose. Brought a pillow down from the bed, popped one corner into his mouth and bit hard. He looked at the TV; John Wayne would have bitten a bullet. When in a pinch, improvise. Pillows muffled more noise anyway.

  Mike leaned back into the floor, flexing his right leg against the bed, testing for solid footing. A couple of light practice tugs on the rope, the gentle pull on the noose a preview of more painful things to come.

  His entire body broke out into one thick sheen of greasy sweat, son of a bitch, what had gotten into him, thinking he could do this on his own, and he snatched up the bottle and downed one last shot in case the pain killed him, and he wrapped the rope around his hands and ground his teeth into the pillow and yanked the rope back as if he were the last holdout on a losing tug-of-war team.

  Biting into the cheap foam pillow, shrieking through clenched teeth, oh fuck oh fuck it hurt it HURT, and his leg erupted hot and thick and molten, and twisted straight with a meaty crackle, and every tendon and ligament and muscle fiber and chip of bone and screaming nerve went on full-alert overload, and the backwash of nausea swept him under, arms losing all strength while the gray haze dimmed his eyes, and he twisted his head around just in time to vomit a rancid puddle over his shoulder into the plastic waste can, and then he collapsed, flat. Empty.

  Drifting, timeless netherworld of tortured sleep, no rest from the waking world. Sickly mingling of life and dreams, the stink of whiskey and bile. Undigested pills floating in the trash, and brown water stains on the ceiling, some new breed of map. Take me there, no hell on earth could be worse than this.

  One hour, two, and the world again, Oklahoma City back in hard focus, John Wayne having given way to … somebody. He sat up — it was tolerable — and released his foot from the noose. He could write this up in an article, true-life fuckup detective, and no one would ever believe him.

  Truth was stranger than tabloids.

  The survival instinct was strong, and if it wasn’t a case of grace under pressure, he still got by. Mike caught his flight on time, stinking drunk, clothes looking ready for Goodwill. Lurching about on crutches, praying he wouldn’t fall. He hobbled into Miami International near two in the morning, little the worse for the additional wear, but plenty bad enough.

  Finally, the hospital. X-rays showed that he’d broken both bones in his lower leg and cracked four ribs to boot. No wonder it hurt to breathe. He received a cast from mid-foot to a few inches above the knee, barely escaping the need for steel pins imbedded into bone and emerging through the cast for traction purposes. They put him on IV antibiotics and pumped him with Demerol 100 every three to four hours for the next four days, days that coagulated into a blur.

  When he finally came out of it, pain medication downgraded to Tylenol with codeine and anticipating discharge in a few days, he knew something was different. Proof positive, the nurses on his floor were as safe as in their mothers’ homes. Not a single pass, not one hearty ploy for extra sympathy, let’s see where this sponge bath leads, shall we? He was old.

  And inside, something quite apart from bones had been broken.

  I killed her. I really killed her. Just as much me as him, because I dragged her into it.

  Mike’s first evening at home, in an apartment utterly devoid of any discernible style of decor. Unless Late Post-College classified as an art form. The furniture was mostly rattan, with several posters on the walls, a few cheap prints. Homegrown shelves of brick and pine. Be it ever so jumbled, there’s no place like home.

  His dining room was merely an extension of the living room, and he sat at the table. Leg stuck off to one side like some new piece of furniture. George Dickel before him, on the rocks tonight. Class. Company coming.

  Earlier in the day, prior to discharge and pickup by a sometimes girlfriend, Mike had phoned the offices of the Vanguard and hooked up with Ramon down in the photo labs.

  “Still keeping in touch with your brother?” he’d asked.

  “Which one?”

  “The one your mama still cries about.”

  Ramon, laughing softly, “That still doesn’t narrow it much.”

  Cuban immigrants, Ramon’s family, Marielitos from the early eighties. They had done decently for themselves, only one true black sheep. Ramon’s older brother Julio took the honors, dirty job but someone’s got to do it. Which was not to say he wasn’t making more money than the rest of them put together.

  “Julio, right?” Ramon had said. Chuckling. “Whatta you need, Mikey? The pain pills you been getting aren’t enough?”

  More complicated than that, Mike had explained, then told him what he wanted. Julio’s friends, associates, these guys were no one to screw with on any level. Lots of ties to South American high-profit cash crops, inventors of the Colombian necktie: slash the throat and pull the tongue out to hang from the wound. The mere thought of indebting himself to Julio gave him the jitters.

/>   But then, so did Gabriel Matthews.

  Ramon had told him to sit tight while he checked. He’d called back an hour ago, good news, but Mike hadn’t worried. Ramon was stand-up. He gave you his word, you could bank on him keeping it.

  Mike’s dining table had perhaps one square foot of open space left. The rest was covered with a computer and phone modem, plus stacks of papers and partial articles and recent issues of the Vanguard. His editor had put him on sick time, reluctantly, and he would be spending another couple weeks minimum here doing the stir-crazy routine, but at least he could manage a little work in the meantime. Mostly cranking out stories, usually embellished, based on oddities coming over the AP wire.

  Regarding the Dawson excursion, Mike had blatantly lied. Something brewing there, most likely, he’d told his editor, but he had met with a mugging before he could close on it. She wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t think she believed him, but he stuck with it. He’d had enough time flatbacking in the hospital to build the yarn to its tiniest detail. Publishing the truth was no good; his byline could red-flag him for further retaliatory abuse, possibly fatal.

  The table also held all his private files on Dawson Ministries, on top all the pieces of literature in which Gabriel Matthews was mentioned or pictured. Not even half a dozen. The guy definitely kept a low profile. Like a shark cruising below the surface. Present, and deadly, but unseen until too late.

  The doorbell rang, and Mike swung himself up to a foot-and-crutches tripod. Made sure he was balanced and crossed the apartment in a series of movements that still seemed alien, insectile.

  Ramon’s face was spread wide in the peephole. Mike undid all three locks and opened up, and Ramon shut the door after himself. Army surplus pants and a Day-Glo orange T-shirt and a tiny emerald in his ear; looked as if he had come straight from work. Except for that heavy paper bag in his hand.

  “You look better than you did a week ago,” Ramon said on the way to the table. “I give you that much, at least. I guess.”

  “Up yours. I look spectacular.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yeah. I see it now.” Very exaggerated. He set the bag onto the table with a solid clunk, then helped Mike get situated into his chair again. “You’re a lucky guy, Mikey, you still got your health.” Ramon fetched himself a glass, poured two fingers of sour mash. “How much longer you got to spend in that thing?”

  Mike rapped his cast. “Another five weeks or so.”

  Ramon shook his head, profound sympathy. “Puts a definite cramp in your style. Maybe you should take yourself to a ski lodge, see what kind of action you can score there. Ski bunnies, they’re used to working around things like that.”

  Mike snorted. “How would you know? You’ve never been north of Pensacola.”

  Ramon drew up proud and scholarly. “I read it in the Vanguard.”

  Mike smiled crookedly. “Yeah. Anyway. I think maybe I’m due for a break as it is. I think I’m developing a resistance to penicillin.”

  “You’ll live longer.” Ramon nodded, drained his glass and set it aside. “Maybe.” He opened the sack. Out came a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Show and tell time.”

  He unwrapped an oilskin cloth to reveal an automatic pistol. It looked a little like the old army-issue .45s, but less clunky, more streamlined. More lethal. Nickel plated. Along with it came an extra magazine and two boxes of cartridges.

  “Okay look, this is not my field, okay? I’m just delivering. I can tell you what my brother told me.” Ramon looked almost apologetic. “This is a Smith and Wesson ten-millimeter. It’s the model the FBI issues agents now, more stopping power. They had it developed after that shootout down in Miami a few years ago, time those two psychos took out five agents. You shoot something with this mother, it’s gonna go down and stay down. Serial number? Gone, okay? It’s unregistered, untraceable.” He shoved the whole bundle across to Mike. “Never let it be said my brother stocks inferior merchandise.”

  Mike hefted the thing. Heavy. Probably recoiled like a monster, too. “Thanks for doing this for me. I owe you a big one.”

  “How about an explanation and we call it even?” When Ramon got no answer, he pressed on. “I mean, you take off to snoop out some TV preacher, I figure the worst is, you come back with a handful of tracts and a bunch of eye makeup on your shirts. But no, you come back looking like you been stomped by the Hell’s Angels and wanting to buy a gun on the sly. So what’s going on?”

  Mike stared across the table. “I don’t know. Honest truth. I really don’t know.”

  Ramon nodded, hit his glass with another finger of whiskey. “Okay, fair enough. But level with me this much, you didn’t get hit by any mugger while you were there. I don’t buy that, and nobody else does much either.”

  “This is just between us? Goes no further?”

  Ramon nodded, yeah yeah yeah.

  Mike shrugged, here goes nothing. “I got banged up diving out a third-floor window. I’m lucky it wasn’t any worse than this.”

  “Wasn’t just a jealous husband this time, was it?” Ramon looked able to laugh, but wouldn’t let himself.

  Mike, staring into space, the recent past, ghosts of guilt. “Not even close.” He pointed to a blurry background picture of Gabe in one mailer. “This fuckhead. He killed a woman right in front of me. Bare hands, two seconds, that’s all it took. And then he started coming for me. What, I’m gonna see if hitting him with my camera works? I did the best I could.”

  Ramon eased out a pent-up breath, shook his head. “Just you watch your step with these people, Mikey. I’m serious. And if you need anything else, you let me know. Okay?”

  “How much for the gun?”

  Ramon waved it off. “It’s a freebie. Compliments of my brother. He was asking me who it was for, and why, all that, I had to tell him what I knew so far. He said you could have it for nothing ‘cause he can’t stand those TV preachers like Donny Dawson. Said they treat God like they’re selling used cars, and he hates that. You believe that, man? This guy, he sells toot and rock and ice to kids in schoolyards, and somebody like Dawson offends him. Funny world, huh?”

  “Yep.” He lifted the gun again, acquainting himself with its balance. Five or six weeks in the cast, he and this piece had plenty of time to become friends. “I’m laughing more every day.”

  Summer 1193/England

  It had been five days’ ride north to Huntingdon, and the horses traveled it well. The steeds of knights were bred for power worthy of their riders.

  Baron Walter of Kent had taken along three of his finest who remained from the recent Jerusalem journey. Gaunt and hollow-cheeked upon their return earlier this year, but alive, a luxury no longer afforded many of those who had sailed east with them. Famine and disease had taken more lives than warring, but for those who endured was the singular honor of returning with their red cross — first worn on the breast of their tunics while traveling east — now worn on their backs.

  They were iron men. They were cruciati, the cross-bearers.

  They were the crusaders.

  They arrived at Widdershank Abbey in the afternoon, met on the road, just past the gates, by one of the monks. Others toiled the fields adjacent to the monastery, these Benedictines doing what they saw as God’s work here in the midst of seclusion, their lives full of constant prayer, constant work.

  Walter and his escorts dismounted while the guest-master was fetched to lead the other men to their lodgings. He gazed upon these formidable gray stone buildings with their gables and arched windows. Holy ground, maintained by a brotherhood of humility that had forsaken the rest of the world. He thought he must look quite the peacock among all these black robes. His bright blue tunic, chest emblazoned with his family’s crest of sword and cross, leopard and star.

  With only a monk now for an escort, he entered the abbey. His second visit here in three months. Perhaps this time answers would finally be forthcoming.

  Beneath vaulted ceilings, he waited. Save his king, there were few men for whom he woul
d consent to the indignity of awaiting arrival. A man of God was an exception, a reluctant one at that, but this time he waited with a feeling close to fear. A trained warrior could always master fear in the face of any enemy — Walter had looked upon a sea of Moslems and not blinked — but in these days of peace, he could no longer be certain of the faces he should stand against.

  Abbot Baldwin didn’t keep him waiting long. A small man with hair like iron, he walked with the authority of a nobleman. Obviously accustomed to obedience from all who lived here.

  “Even in summer,” Walter said, “these places are too chilled for me now.”

  “We never notice. Such is the blessing of hard work.”

  “Your missive said a monk of yours could understand some of the writings I brought.”

  Abbot Baldwin nodded once. “Brother Maynard. He’s quite old now. The records show he came here in 1152, after returning from the Holy Land. He was a prisoner of the heathen for a time.”

  “And I can see him?”

  “Come. He is in the cloister,” and the abbot led the way.

  A few years ago, before leaving for Palestine, Walter had not understood a place such as Widdershank, or the men who lived past its gate. A monastery in general, well, yes, that he could. Each man was born to serve God in his own way, whether by taking up cross and sword to serve as Christ’s earthly warrior, or by devoting oneself to daily prayer and hymns and selfless charity.

  But Widdershank was different. Most of the monks here had once been men of the other breed, soldiers who’d pledged themselves to the code of chivalry. Years ago, Walter could not comprehend it. After living a life of battle and tournaments, the indulgence of fine foods and wine, the pleasures of women, why suddenly turn and deny all these joys? Exchanging them for ceaseless toil and endless regimens of petty discipline? Such a man seemed less a man than one born to the Church, or so Walter had believed then.