Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

I was ready to make the trek downstairs in desperate hope that a couple ibuprofens and maybe twenty minutes of SportsCenter would be enough to lull me into a dreamless sleep.

  I’d just pulled myself into a sitting position on the side of the bed when I heard it.

  A noise at the back of the house. Maybe just the air conditioning traversing the ductwork.

  Then again, maybe this was “the call.”

  I slipped on a pair of Adidas cross trainers, pulled my Glock from the side table, checked the clip and made my way downstairs.

  At the back of the house, the shadows of two men trying to crowbar the security pad of my shed.

  Another man approached the shed, low and quick. He seemed pissed at the two men and gestured toward the house.

  I made my way in the dark to the front of the house.

  A bearded man crouched by my door, the low metallic sound of a picklock scratching at the keyhole. I let him scratch and took a position near the sofa below the window.

  Doorknob turning.

  The door slowly opening.

  The jet-black barrel of a 9mm semi-automatic peeking through the door.

  Then the bearded man stepped through.

  I stood and brought the barrel of my gun to his throat. He fell, gasping, clutching his throat. His gun slid across the floor. A second skinny man wearing a white T-shirt and black leather vest rushed through the door, baseball bat raised. Before he could take a swing at me, a large silhouetted third man appeared behind the skinny guy and clamped a shadowed hand over his mouth.

  A muffled scream from the skinny man. The bat dropped, clanging on the floor.

  The skinny guy limped quickly out of my house, leaving the bigger silhouetted man standing with a blood-soaked hunting knife gripped in his right hand.

  Tomás.

  “Two more in back,” I whispered.

  I grabbed the first man’s 9mm and gave him another good crack on the head before Tomás and I made our way around to the back of my house.

  “Come on, asshole!” someone called from inside the truck to the limping man.

  The limping man scrambled into the truck bed and the truck rumbled away.

  An unconscious man wearing a black Blutsbrüder Motorcycle Club “cut” was sprawled in my narrow driveway near the shed. Someone was standing over him. I leveled my Glock at the standing man.

  “Hey,” Tomás laughed. “It’s Man-Bun!”

  “Usually out for a walk at this hour,” Trent T.R. Ogilvy said. “Clears my mind. Nourishes the soul.” He pointed to the unconscious man at his feet. “This especially helped clear my head.”

  I said, “Another guy in the house.”

  “Rendered neutral?” Ogilvy said.

  “Rendered neutral.”

  Ogilvy knelt and began rummaging through the unconscious man’s pockets. Tomás and I ran to the front of my house just in time to see the man I’d laid out in the living room hobbling his way down Markham Street toward what looked like a tricked-out Harley-Davidson.

  “No,” I said catching Tomás’s forearm. “Let him go.”

  “Gerald Brecker,” Ogilvy said, holding a small flashlight over the unconscious man’s driver’s license. “332 Palm Grove Drive, Spring Lake Township.” Ogilvy brought the beam of the flashlight up to me and said, “I take it you’re not acquainted with Gerald Brecker of Spring Lake Township?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “And, of course, there’s this.”

  Ogilvy brought his flashlight to Gerald Brecker’s left forearm: A tattoo of an angry bearded man wielding a large hammer inscribed with Scandinavian rune symbols. Beneath the bearded man tattoo were script-style letters: “BMC” followed by the German words “Heimat. Bruderschaft.”

  Homeland. Brotherhood.

  “I don’t think you gentlemen want to be around for part two of this. Just in case the cops get involved,” I said. Then, turning to Tomás I said, “And just what the hell are you doing around here?”

  “Haven’t slept good since the threats against Elena,” Tomás said. “Some nights I read. Some nights I cruise the neighborhood. Tonight’s your lucky night.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You read?”

  “Excuse me, gentlemen. There’s a ‘part two’ to this?” Ogilvy said. “I take it part two doesn’t involve the police?”

  “No,” I said. “It does not involve the police. And it doesn’t involve you either, Trent.”

  “Well,” Ogilvy said, standing and stowing his flashlight away. “I have to differ on that particular point, as I’m the one who put in considerable effort in taking this gentleman down.”

  Tomás held up his bloody knife. “It’s midnight on a Monday and I’m a cholo holding a bloody knife over a neo-Nazi. What else I got to do?”

  “What about Elena?”

  “At baby girl’s house for a couple days,” Tomás said, meaning his daughter. “Nothing ever happens in Ferndale, ’cept maybe a stoner steals a pair of Crocs.”

  “Okay,” I said to both men. “But this ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  Neither man said anything.

  I punched in the code to open my shed.

  Ogilvy and Tomás dragged the unconscious Gerald Brecker into the shed.

  “I assume you have zip ties?” Ogilvy said as I closed and locked the door.

  Nineteen

  Carlos and Jimmy had built the shed at the back of my house with painstaking detail. One of those details included a double layer of stone wool soundproofing; they’d known there would be times when they worked late into the night and maybe needed to cut a length of pipe or piece of wood. More recently they’d taken to restoring the Olds/Hurst 442 they’d gifted me in their off hours.

  The soundproofing would come in handy this early Tuesday morning as we sweated Gerald Brecker.

  We tied the neo-Nazi biker to a metal chair ten feet in front of the Olds 442 and set up three very bright work lights on stands around him.

  He was conscious now, and not liking it one bit.

  “What—what’re you gonna do?” Brecker said, swallowing hard and squinting against the work lights. “You can’t do this! It ain’t right, goddammit!”

  “Trying to put a beatdown on me in the wee hours of the morning ‘ain’t right,’ Mr. Brecker,” I said. “I’m sure the only part that ‘ain’t right’ to you is the fact that you got caught.”

  “My brothers’ll be back for me,” he growled. “Locked and fucking loaded, asshole.”

  “One of your biker brothers is miles away nursing his right shoulder and probably a perforated kidney,” I said. I pointed to Tomás and said, “Courtesy of this man—”

  “Hey,” Tomás said, waving to Brecker. “How’s it goin’, jizzface?”

  “Another one of your playmates I’m pretty sure has a broken jaw, busted nose and dislocated right arm.” I pointed to Trent Ogilvy and said, “Thanks to this gentleman.”

  “Cheers, mate,” Ogilvy said with a nod to Becker.

  “And I knocked your other buddy so hard in the throat he’ll be sucking breakfast through a straw for a month” I said. “So, I don’t think your scary neo-Nutsy buddies are coming back for you anytime soon.”

  “These are the weapons we took from your friends,” Ogilvy said, pointing to the weapons he’d arranged in a semicircle in front of Brecker: two 9mm semi-automatic pistols, a piece-of-shit revolver, three long-blade knives, a set of brass knuckles, a retractable metal baton and an aluminum baseball bat. “Who uses brass knuckles anymore?” Ogilvy wondered out loud.

  “And an aluminum baseball bat?” I said to Brecker.

  “Fuck you, mud boy,” Brecker growled.

  “You’re more than welcome to make a play for any one of these weapons,” I said to Brecker, “if you manage to struggle free from your bindings. But I can assure you—by t
he time you reach any one of them, you’ll be in pieces. And those pieces will then be fed to a mutant strain of walleye in the Detroit River with teeth as big as my real estate agent’s dentures.”

  “What do you want?” Brecker said.

  “Who sent you,” I said, casually checking the clip and chamber of my Glock. “Why. How much. And who holds the purse strings. Or are you just garden variety, stupid-as-fuck white supremacists, come to steal from lower-to-middle-class blacks and Mexican-Americans?”

  Brecker nervously assessed each of us individually—me, Ogilvy and Tomás—then cut his eyes to the semicircle of weapons laid out in front of him. He struggled against his bindings before mumbling, “You’re breakin’ the goddamn law.”

  “Oh, so now you wanna talk the law?” I laughed.

  “This is bullshit,” Tomás grumbled before walking to one of five toolboxes kept in my shed. Retrieving a pair of snip crimpers, he walked back to Brecker. Kneeling, he removed Brecker’s right boot and sock.

  “Hey!” Brecker said. “Hey, what the fuck, man!”

  “Yeah, Tomás,” I said. “What the fuck?”

  “You’re gonna talk. Right goddamn now,” Tomás said to Brecker as he fit Brecker’s little toe between the snip crimper’s blades.

  “Who, what, why and how much,” I said. “Or swear to God, Tomás will cut—”

  Bone snapping.

  Blood spirting.

  Screams.

  “Jesus, Tomás!” I said. “What the fuck!”

  “I thought you said ‘Cut it!’”

  Brecker, his eyes rolling back into his head, thrashed about in the chair. Ogilvy moved quickly and stuffed a rag in Brecker’s mouth to stifle his screams.

  “I didn’t say ‘cut it’! I was just threatening the guy! Fucking hell!”

  “Well,” Tomás said, “you need to enunciate, goddammit!”

  “Frankly,” Ogilvy said as he gagged Brecker, “I thought you gave the order, too.”

  “Oh my God! Seriously, guys? Really?”

  Brecker passed out.

  It was ten minutes before he came around. I brought a fifth of tequila, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and Tylenol from the house. Ogilvy cleaned and dressed where Brecker’s little toe had been.

  “You—you cut my fucking toe off,” Brecker cried. Then, trying to bring the pills I held in front of him into focus, he said, “What’s that?”

  “Pain killer.”

  He gladly took the pill, washing them down with the shot of tequila I poured into his mouth.

  “Let’s try this again, pendejo,” Tomás said.

  Contrary to extensive studies conducted by the CIA, State Department, DOJ and the Pentagon, it seems torture does on occasion yield honest and vital information. In this case, Brecker opened up like a well-watered rose in full sunlight . . .

  . . . or like a man who’d just had his little toe clipped off.

  He belonged to the local neo-Nazi chapter of the BMCs, headquartered in a biker bar called Taffy’s on the Lake, on the less affluent outskirts of Spring Lake, nineteen miles northwest of Detroit. The group—twenty or thirty, mostly men—dealt marijuana, PCP, MDMA, crystal meth and pharmaceutical grade oxy knock-offs from Canada mostly to teenagers and lake rats. At least that’s all Brecker—a grunt in the organization, I assumed—knew of. Occasionally they got a batch order for oxy, pot and Viagra knock-offs from an ambulance-chasing attorney with a big lake house and a long-rumored but never proven appetite for underage girls.

  And occasionally they got an order from “some Greek guy who owns a strip club.”

  “What’s the lawyer’s name?” I said.

  “Olsen,” Brecker said, surrendering to the tequila and painkillers. “Barney Olsen.”

  I poured another shot of tequila in him.

  “‘You want justice?’” Tomás said. “‘You want Barney!’ That guy? The fat fuck on the billboards and buses?”

  “Yeah,” Brecker said. “Him. You cut off my goddamn toe, you piece of shit spic!”

  “You got nine more,” Tomás said.

  “Fuck you!”

  Tomás walked to the toolboxes and retrieved a sizable pair of metal shears.

  “Oh, God!” Brecker pleaded. “Jesus! No! No, please! I’m sorry, man!”

  After a moment, Tomás put the shears back in the toolbox.

  Brecker said the BMCs got a cash infusion of a couple grand from Olsen just to rough me up and warn me away from looking into “his business.”

  “And what’s ‘his business’?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Brecker said close to tears. “And I don’t fucking care. It was good money and the club needed it.”

  “Olsen probably pulls down a couple mil a year chasing ambulances,” I said to Brecker. “And you and your buddies come after me for beer money? Fucking hell. I always knew racists were stupid, but I had no idea they were this retarded.”

  “We don’t use that word anymore, August,” Ogilvy said invoking the royal “we.”

  “Twenty grand ain’t no beer money,” Brecker said. “You’re gonna have BMCs straight up your jungle monkey ass when I tell ’em what you did to me! We’ll see who gets cut up then!”

  I knelt in front of him. “I’m guessing you won’t be going back. I’m guessing your buddies are gonna tell Olsen that I’ve been taken care of. But, hey—the ‘nigger’ might need another tune-up. I’m guessing they’ll squeeze him for more. You? They see you gimping through the door and they’ll wonder how much you squealed. And bikers don’t like squealers. Maybe you’ll end up with another club. Maybe some hydrocephalic half-wits shooting squirrels for stew and running pathetic army drills.” I pushed the barrel of my Glock to the center of his forehead. “Either way, you’re done.”

  Brecker squeezed his eyes shut and began weeping.

  Then he pissed himself.

  Once the shed had been hosed down and Brecker’s toe had been flushed in my downstairs toilet, I thanked Ogilvy for the assist and told him to go home. Then Tomás and I drove Brecker to the outskirts of Spring Lake and rolled him out of the bed of Tomás’s truck near a dried-out marsh.

  I stood over him, and said, “If I even think you farted in my general direction, I’ll find you and kill you. Understand me, Gerald Brecker?”

  Then I got back in Tomás’s truck and we drove off.

  We were silent for a moment before Tomás said, “Swear to God, Octavio—I thought you said to cut his toe off.”

  “Can we just get some breakfast and not talk about it?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Breakfast,” Tomás said. “But no sausage links—”

  Tomás and I did some serious carbo-loading at a Denny’s on our way back to Mexicantown.

  There was a chance—slim at best—Gerald Brecker would hobble his way to the cops. My guess was he already had an extensive petty crime rap sheet including an affiliation with drug-and-gun biker lake rats. More trouble than maybe a little toe was worth.

  “You think Markham Street would alibi us if he did go to the cops?” Tomás said.

  “I think Markham Street would swear on a stack of King James bibles we were saving a box of kittens from drowning in the Detroit River.”

  Tomás gave me a sly smile.

  “For a Catholic kid, you sure take a lot of liberties, Octavio.”

  “‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’”

  “Yeah. Like I said . . .”

  It was eight on Tuesday morning by the time Tomás finally dropped me off at my house.

  I was about to call FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell to let her know that her mythical white whale had given us a very real dorsal fin slap on the ass when I got an uneasy feeling. Like a trail of someone’s residual electricity dissipating in the air.
>
  I pulled my Glock and tripped the safety off.

  There.

  Eleven o’clock.

  Elevation, eight feet.

  Descending the staircase, fresh out of my shower and wearing only a white towel, was a petite young woman with reddish-brown skin and wet, coal-black hair. She was athletically built and pretty in a stoic, uninterested way. Like a magazine model who found everything save for her own existence excruciatingly boring.

  The pole-dancing stripper who’d winked at me in Leto’s strip club.

  The saleswoman leaving Duke Ducane’s SoundNation recording studio.

  “If I put my hands up, the towel drops,” the young woman said plainly. “I don’t much give a shit. But you. What’s your take on that?”

  “Who the hell are you?” I said.

  “I’m the IT Department.”

  Twenty

  Unconcerned by the business end of my 9mm, the young woman resumed her staircase descent and walked to my kitchen. Without a care, she proceeded to open my refrigerator and give the contents careful consideration.

  “So,” I said. “The gun’s not impressing you?”

  She pulled her head out of my refrigerator, gave me a hard look and said, “Yours ain’t so big and scary. Is that real salsa? Like, homemade? No gluten or GMO shit? You got any chips?”

  I put away my less-than-scary gun.

  “You know, it’s really not nice to fool us old folk,” I said, reaching into her large desert camo Army surplus backpack on my sofa. I held up the wig and bikini she’d worn at Leto’s Gentleman’s Club.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But it is so much fun. Don’t you got any Mountain Dew or Gatorade?”

  “Put some clothes on and I’ll fix something.”

  She started to grab her backpack.

  I stopped her. “No. The backpack stays here.”

  Inside of her backpack were two laptop computers, an assortment of flash drives held together on a big loop-style keychain, well-worn Vasque hiking boots, a couple pairs of khaki shorts, two graphic T-shirts—one for an ’80s rock band called Redbone, the other for an EDM band called A Tribe Called Red—underwear, toiletries and a Marttiini Lapp hunting knife in a leather sheath.