Returning his eyes to Barb, he dug a handful of thick zip ties from his pocket and dangled them in front of her face. “Time to hit the road, sweetie.”
In this world, or more precisely, in the previous world, there were several things Barb hated with resolute passion. She hated bullies, she hated Brussels sprouts, and she hated being called sweetie. She extended her arms, trembling from the exertion of choking Howell, wishing desperately she had the strength to show this smug bastard just how much she hated that name.
22
The kidnappers stopped at an abandoned convenience store for a late lunch. Every window was shattered and the interior of the store was carpeted with damp-smelling trash. Birds flew in and out of the windows, carrying material for nests. Rats still found edibles where the people couldn’t. The area was overrun with them, much to the disgust of the travelers. The flat metal awnings over the pump provided some relief from the sun, though, which was strong even in the midday of fall. They cooked up a couple of boxes of spaghetti in a big pot and squirted a bottle of off-brand ketchup in it for sauce. It was a depressing and sobering meal, a statement of the times.
All eyes turned to the road and the clopping sound of approaching horses. Guns were put back down when everyone recognized the returning Lester and the captive Barb. They were confused by the horse Lester led on a tether. A man lay on his belly across the saddle, his hands bound to his feet beneath the belly of the horse. People assumed it to be Howell’s body, an indication he’d met some unfortunate fate.
Lester dismounted and cut the rope holding the body in place. Ragus oozed from the horse like a clump of mud separating itself from the wheel well of a truck and slid to the ground. He rolled to his back and moaned, raising his zip tied hands to rub at the back of his head which had met abruptly with the hard ground.
“I may have hit him a little too hard,” Lester said.
“Who the hell is he?” Top Cat demanded, squaring off with Lester.
Lester glared at his boss, not intimidated by the man’s stance in the least. “I told you we were being followed. You should have listened.”
Top Cat didn’t respond, unable to argue with the presence of the man on the ground in front of him. Top didn’t take it all at face value, though. He wouldn’t put it past a man like Lester to lie right to his face or to orchestrate this whole scenario just to make him look bad. The man had never liked him, had never liked his position within the organization. There had always been jealousy and resentment.
"Where's Howell?"
"Dead. They killed him."
“They killed him?” Top Cat confirmed. “As in the boy and the woman?”
Lester nodded.
“Are you sure of that?” It was an open accusation. No subtlety, no inference.
“You think I killed him? How would that benefit me at all?”
Top Cat ignored the question. There would have only been one benefit and that was to make Top Cat look bad, which would have been reason enough. “Where’s his body?”
“I’m assuming it’s where I left it. Right there beside the road.”
“That the best you could do? You couldn’t bury him or bring him back for the rest of us to bury?”
Lester shrugged. “He weren’t no kin of mine.”
“How did he die?” Top Cat asked, sounding like a cop interrogating a suspect. He was certain if he asked enough questions he’d get some telling detail Lester was leaving out.
“They choked him to death.”
“You didn’t try to stop it?”
“By the time I got there, he was already dead. His eyes and tongue was bulging out like a squashed frog.” Lester stuck a hand in his shirt, his face scrunching in pain as he scratched at raw, irritated skin. When he was done, he returned to the same stoicism.
"You knew we were being followed and you used Howell for bait," Top Cat concluded, shaking his head with disgust. “It makes sense now why you wanted someone you didn’t like to stay back with her."
Lester bristled at the accusation. "His death is on you," he growled, pointing a finger at his boss. "I warned you and you didn't listen.”
"So you hauled this asshole back here to rub it in my face?" Top Cat said, gesturing at Ragus, still floundering around on the ground.
“Yeah, pretty much. And to show these other men who has their backs.” Lester acknowledged this loudly, wanting all the assembled men to hear what he had to say.
Top Cat looked hard at Lester, seething. "I know where you're headed with this. You sure you want to go there? You’re just determined to keep pushing, aren’t you?”
Lester wasn’t scared of Top Cat. They were roughly the same size, but Lester was pretty sure he’d been in a lot more scuffles than Top had. Top had been an employee at the college where their boss, Bryan, worked. In the physical plant, some kind of fancy maintenance man or something. Lester had been a pipeliner. His days had been brute physical work. Sometimes there were men you didn’t get along with on those jobs and the men settled them with fists. What happened out on those jobsites in the middle of nowhere usually stayed there, even if it resulted in black eyes and bloody noses. Lester was certain if it got physical that he was coming out on top.
He shrugged noncommittally. "I’m not taking it anywhere, Top. This is just where the road leads. I have a feeling we’ll end up in the same place, regardless of what we do today."
Top Cat knew Lester was probably right. This had been brewing for a while but had stayed under wraps because neither man wanted to lose his cushy position at Douthat Farms and all the benefits that brought. Their boss would not tolerate infighting and would usually banish both men rather than take sides. But here on the trail, without supervision, this was coming to a head. Top Cat was beginning to wonder if they would both make it back to camp alive. Maybe it was just going to be one of them. The question was just whose body got left in the dirt.
"My advice to you, Lester, is to put this behind you. We got shit to do and you’re just wasting time and energy."
The tension was thick. Every man and every captive was mesmerized by the drama playing out in front of them. It was like high noon on the streets of an Old West town. They were like the townspeople watching from windows or board sidewalks, waiting to see if this conversation ended with gunfire.
"So now that you’ve rubbed it in my face, what are you going to do with that one?” Top Cat nodded at Ragus. “Kill him and leave him for the worms? Hang him from a tree?"
Lester shook his head. "I don’t think so. The boy is stout. We could put him to work back on the farm. He might take some of the load off the rest of us."
"If he’s that stout he might fight back. He might be more trouble than he’s worth."
“Maybe we can cut him in a way that will make him less trouble but still allow him to work. Cut out his tongue and one eyeball or something."
"That’s your problem," Top Cat said. “He shits the carpet, you clean it up.”
"Understood."
Turning his attention to Barb, Top Cat approached her horse and assessed the woman. "This one doing any better?"
"Good enough. She rode here with no complaint. I reckon she’s good for the rest the day, anyway."
“Saddle up!” Top Cat yelled.
“I could use some lunch,” Lester protested. “At least some rest. It’s been a long damn morning.”
Top Cat gave the man a cold look. “You’d have got rest if you hadn’t been off on your own mission. Your choice. Now get everyone saddled back up and let’s get on the road. We’re burning daylight.”
23
Riding down the road, Conor had nothing but time on his hands. He was making a good pace and his horse was comfortable with it. Vigilance was so natural to him at this point in his life that his mind wandered, even as his eyes and the limbic region of his brain watched for danger. He could feel in his bones that he was gaining on the kidnappers. Any moment he expected to come around a corner and find Ragus in the road ahead of him, rid
ing along with the Henry rifle slung over his back.
He hoped the boy was doing okay with the killing. He hadn’t grown up with violence the way Conor had. It was surely a new thing to him and he’d probably had a hard time pulling the trigger on a man for the first time. It was never easy. Despite training, despite bravado, and despite knowing it was the best course of action, it forever changed you.
Conor had to assume Ragus did it the same way he himself did, by reaching into that inner rage and using it to his advantage. Losing someone who was a vital part of you changed a person. Conor had lost his wife; Ragus had lost his mother. Those experiences left both of them with a vast well of frustration and a sense of injustice. If Ragus learned to tap those emotions as Conor expected, it would help him manage this cruel and unpredictable world.
There had been a lot of death around Conor when he was growing up. From his earliest childhood, he remembered the troubles, or what the rest of the world called the Northern Ireland Conflict. Conor knew it as a war, a guerilla war that was fought in the streets and homes of his town. It affected where he could play as a child and who he could play with. It affected who his mother could talk to in the grocery store and who she avoided. It affected where his father Pat and grandfather Sean could work. Hell, it even affected which pubs the men of the family could drink at. They were Irish Republican Army, or IRA. Conor’s father usually referred to those men, their comrades, as the lads.
Conor knew the men of his family and the lads met frequently, both at the pub and in private homes. When he was younger, he had no idea what they were meeting about. In his child’s mind, he just assumed perhaps all adults went to as many meetings as the men of his family did.
He was around seven years old when he was let in on the secret. He popped into the basement one day to see what his father and grandfather were up to down there. Wherever they were, he wanted to be. They were full of stories and played with him. He was also at an age where he was pulling loose from the apron strings, seeking the company of the men in his life more than his mother and grandmother. Conor found them in the back room of the basement that his father used as a workshop. The walls were lined with tools and a beat-up kitchen table set in the center of the floor served as a workbench. His father and grandfather were sitting at that table in old chairs. Pat was using a popsicle stick to take pink goo from a can and smear it around a section of thick water pipe.
“That smells bad,” Conor said of the goo.
The men looked up in surprise. Pat looked guilty, like he was about to send Conor back upstairs, but Sean opened an arm to Conor and waved the boy over.
“There’s things you need to know if you want to be part of this family, lad,” he said. “There’s people that feck about without a care in the world and there’s people who feel a sense of duty to do what’s right. We’re a family with a sense of duty to do what’s right for us and what’s right for our people.”
Conor didn’t understand much of what was being said at that moment. He had no frame of reference for words like duty and he wasn’t sure what his grandfather meant about our people, unless he was referring to the members of their own family.
Sean told him about the troubles and why there was war going on in their country. Although Conor didn’t understand the details, his grandfather made a basic concept very clear to him: There’s them, there’s us, and you’re one of us.
Sean and Pat allowed him to watch them assemble a bomb for the first time. When the pink goo, which his dad called body filler, completely covered one side, Sean dumped a worn paper sack of steel nuts and ball bearings into a bowl. Conor reached to pick one up but his grandfather grabbed his hand.
“Only with gloves, Conor. You don’t want your fingerprints on them.”
Conor knew a little about fingerprints from television. The bomb itself was a rather abstract thing to him, though. His grandfather explained that it was like a gun that killed a lot of people at one time.
It was a gray afternoon in his ninth year when Conor saw a man die for the first time. A couple of squaddies, British soldiers, were raiding a house in Conor’s neighborhood. They didn’t find the man they were looking for, only managing to break a few things around the household and make his young wife cry.
“Those fuckers,” Conor’s dad cursed. He stood fuming in the front window, ranting about the way they rolled in like an occupying army and disrupted the lives of decent people. Then he disappeared for about five minutes, running next door to Conor’s grandfather’s house. When he came back, he was sweating and panting. Conor asked what he’d been up to but his father didn’t answer.
His grandfather showed up and the three of them watched the street through a gap in the pulled curtains. Conor didn’t know what he was watching for, only that his grandfather had waved him over and told him to watch.
“They’re leaving,” his dad whispered.
“Shhhh!” his grandfather hissed.
The soldiers climbed back in their vehicle. When the driver climbed in, there was a loud pop, then a deeper rumble that shook the entire house. Sean nodded with satisfaction. Conor would later understand, as he dissected the bombing from a professional’s perspective, that his dad had used a quick and dirty method to take out the vehicle. He’d taped a pipe bomb to the fuel tank and tied it into the brake light circuit. When the driver pressed the brake pedal, it applied voltage to the triggering device and detonated the bomb.
“Close the curtain now, lad,” Sean said.
Hoping to see more action, Conor ran up to his room and looked out from his window. The military vehicle the squaddies had driven into the neighborhood was aflame, all of the windows blown out by the explosion. A soldier, his clothes burned and his face soot-blackened, was crawling up the sidewalk, trying to put distance between himself and the burning vehicle. He left a trail of blood behind him. There were bones exposed from both legs and an arm hung awkwardly from a joint that didn’t exist previously.
When the soldier got as far as he could go, he rolled onto his back and began screaming for help. He continued to scream for several minutes and no one came to help him. Conor wondered why. He went down to the kitchen where his dad was sharing a toast with his father.
“There’s a man hurt in the road,” Conor said. “Should we go help him?”
Pat and Sean looked at each other, the smiles fading to seriousness. Sean took Conor up in his arms.
“We don’t help squaddies, Conor,” his grandfather said. “We’re at war and they’re the enemy we’re at war with. When we make bombs, this is why we make them. We take the bastards out one at a time until they decide to get out of Northern Ireland and leave us the fuck alone.”
It wasn’t until that very moment that Conor understood the purpose of the bombs he watched Sean and Pat make. It was not a fun activity he and the family did, like working on an old motor bike or repairing a car. It was not a craft project. The bombs were tools of murder or justice depending on your viewpoint, and bombs were the family business. It all came together at that point.
“Aye, that bloody screaming,” Pat said, slamming his glass on the counter. He walked to the front door and stared out.
“We should probably disappear for a while,” Sean said. “There’ll be more of them here soon and this was right on our doorstep. They’ll go house to house.”
“I’ll be damned,” Pat muttered, his attention captured by something outside.
“What?”
“Mrs. O’Kane.”
“What about her?” Sean asked, wandering up to the door, Conor still in his arms.
“She’s out there in the street trying to help the bastard,” Pat said incredulously. “What does she not fucking understand?”
Conor could see now that was exactly what she was doing. The old widow next door, Mrs. O’Kane, was crouched in the street comforting the British soldier. Sirens could be heard in the distance. Help would be there soon but the poor bastard would probably die anyway. She was just trying to ease hi
s suffering, to prevent him from having to die alone.
“Fucking slag,” Sean hissed, setting Conor down at his feet and pushing by his son.
Conor and his father watched from the doorway as Sean strode boldly across the yard, crashed through their sagging, peeling gate, and stomped into the street. Mrs. O’Kane watched him curiously. In front of God and the entire neighborhood, Sean whipped a revolver from his waistband and shot the squaddie in the forehead. The soldier’s screaming stopped abruptly, only to be replaced by Mrs. O’Kane’s.
Sean spun on her and aimed the gun at her head, his face screwed into a mask of rage. “I suggest you get back to your house, bitch, and you keep your damned mouth shut.”
The way the words slithered from his mouth, oozing with venom, made it clear that he was not to be argued with. Mrs. O’Kane stood and backed away from Sean, finally turning and running to her home. She slammed the door behind her.
It was a complicated moment for Conor. One moment his grandfather was carrying him in his arms, hugging him and talking to him with nothing but affection. Less than a minute later, he murdered a man in the street and was threatening an old lady who gave Conor macaroon bars and Galaxy Truffles. He wasn’t certain how to process that experience at the time but it was a pivotal point in his life. He was certain that he probably presented such an enigma to his own daughter when she learned who he truly was. He was a loving and jovial man who killed for a living.
The men of Conor’s family disappeared for a few weeks after that bombing but were never formally accused. No squaddies raided the house and terrorized his mother. No one ratted out his grandfather for topping the man in the street. Conor expected that to be the end of the story but that was not the case.
While Pat and Sean were laying low and visiting relatives in Cork, a group of the lads paid Mrs. O’Kane a visit. They took her for a ride and everyone in the neighborhood watched her go willingly but she was never seen again. Rendering aid to the mortally wounded enemy of the people was a betrayal the lads could not overlook, even from a kindly old widow.
The Mad Mick: Book One of The Mad Mick Series Page 16
