Pigs

by Daniel James

  Garland thumped over to him, his boots rattling the tables and chairs.

  “You try to project this air of control,” he said, “but I see right through it. You hired us because everyone else either wants you dead or nothing to do with you, and let me tell you, I get that. I really do. Even C.B. and his scumbag partners wouldn’t give a wet shit if you turned up dead. Having spent one very long year with you under my roof, I understand how skilled you are at burning bridges. You’re a goddamn arsonist to camaraderie. But I know behind this cheap front of yours is a man who doesn’t want to be out in the cold, where the law might find you. Some of my troops have already raised the issue of hog-tying you and turning you over to the L.E.O.s for an easy payout. Just to get rid. But I’ll admit, your revenue is useful … for now.”

  Wyndorf shivered in mockery. “You just best remember that if you want me to keep milking my cash cow for your little revolution, you’ll protect me like your fucking life depends on it. I’m your mission. I’m your objective. I’m your whole fucking campaign. Don’t forget that.”

  “Only until this system fails. After that, the global infrastructure, the economy—it’ll be nothing more than a chapter in the new history of humanity. Once that happens, your money won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on, and it’ll be hunting season.” The sincerity in Garland’s eyes spoke volumes about his fanaticism.

  Throughout Wyndorf’s prolonged stay at this ranch of mishmashed patriotism and paranoia, he had yet to truly discern exactly which catastrophic end they were all eagerly anticipating, but what they lacked in a clear, comprehensible ideology they made up for in disturbing combat efficiency. They clung to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock model of impending global demise as if it was their own personal compass, guiding them through the wilderness.

  Wyndorf moved a few inches closer to the taller, wider man, his dark eyes burrowing into those of the warlord of weekend warriors. “You of all people should know that man is the most dangerous game.” He began clapping his hands, as if he was trying to motivate a lethargic cow. “Now, how about we get out from under this day care center for fuckwits and go check out Pitchers, you know, since I’m such a good earner and all.”

  Garland loomed over him like a big white bear for a few more seconds. “Fine.” Wyndorf didn’t even see him slip the Ka-Bar knife up under his throat. “But you make another scene like yesterday, or you pull a knife on me, or anything else which I consider a hostile act, I’ll sever your carotid and leave you to die where you fall, tell the major you were K.I.A.”

  Wyndorf felt the cold tip pressing into his neck and gave the trained killer a vacant smile. “Sounds like a good time.” He pointed toward the back-room armory. “Shall we?”

  Garland marched into the armory and grabbed a suppressed semi-automatic pistol and holster from the rack. “We’re not going to play this like we did at Conway’s. This is purely recon. If your man Roach is there, we’ll handle this quietly and wait until he leaves, grab him when he’s alone.” As an afterthought he grabbed Shauna, his favorite assault rifle, from the neatly ordered stockpiles of firearms and explosives. “Shauna is just tagging along in case this gets FUBAR.” He shrugged into his large duster, to help conceal the feminine wiles of his assault rifle. “You understand what I just said?”

  Wyndorf gave him a half-assed salute. He could tell Garland was waiting for him to leave first, to make sure his sticky fingers didn’t attach themselves to any more incendiary grenades or the like.

  Wyndorf led the way to the compound’s small fleet of motors. Garland pushed past Wyndorf and the red Ford, selecting a silver Range Rover instead. Swapping out vehicles was always good practice. One never knew when the CIA, FBI or even the DHS were snooping around.

  Pitchers

  Roach had got the both of them a quiet booth at the rear of the bar to discuss matters. It wasn’t that hard, really, considering it was his bar. Pitchers was just starting to liven up with the late-afternoon rush: the white-collars finishing up long, alcoholic business meetings, college kids getting an early start on a night of socialising, and the regular bar hogs watering down another uneventful day. Isaac was on his second beer.

  “That’s not your style, Isaac. I might even go so far as to say it was fucking stupid,” Roach chastised him, not impressed with Isaac’s recount of playing the defective detective.

  Isaac considered Roach’s opinion on prudence, then glanced at the ice pack resting on his swollen knuckles, courtesy of his enthusiastically quizzical nature. “No argument here.”

  Roach noticed him twiddle his wedding band a few times.

  “I don’t know what happened.” Isaac looked blank for a moment, trying to recall some missing memory, a name or song lyrics, perhaps. “I didn’t think it through.” He gave his head a shake. “I thought if I could just get a hold of Wyndorf, I could end this quickly. My way.”

  Roach sipped his orange juice, the ice clinking against the glass. “And what happened to going straight?” He seemed to be appraising Isaac, curious as to what the lost years had done to his friend.

  “I am going straight. I mean—I want to. This isn’t taking down scores. Something real bad is hovering around us. And either we take care of them or they take care of us.”

  “So, to recap. The wolf—possibly a bald black guy, or a nondescript white guy—has an unknown number of friends, with a couple of black Audis … and they’re not working with Wyndorf.”

  “I think we just blew this thing wide open.” Isaac sucked his beer.

  Roach chewed a sliver of ice. “Even so, if I’d known that a bit earlier I probably wouldn’t have gone through Payton’s place like a bull in a china shop.”

  Roach glanced around at his bar in thought, watching a minute of the Black Hawks game on the large screen over the bar. Isaac sipped his beer in the quiet moment and admired the hip spot, the roomy brick and neon interior. Of course, with Roach being the proprietor, only the hottest barmaids would suffice. It was a simple business strategy: hire flirtatious good-lookers and watch the suckers roll in.

  “You know, when I heard you owned a bar, I feared for the worst. Figured you might have drunk the place into a pit of debt.”

  Roach smirked and tipped his OJ toward him. “Actually, you’re not too far from the truth. I …” He sighed. “I had some pretty hairy troubles there for a while. I’m five years sober now, though.”

  “No shit?”

  “I go to meetings every Tuesday.”

  Isaac tried to look supportive, but part of him still felt out of touch. This was a friend who had been a huge chunk of his problematic life, and yet he had been willing to let that relationship starve and die because it had been slowly poisoning his aspirations of a noble life. Was he really proud of Roach? He felt like a hypocrite. “That’s great, man. About time. I lost track of the number of times I had to carry your stupid ass home.”

  Roach flashed that youthful smile again. It seemed incongruous with his thick and refined moustache.

  “Remember that time you threw up on the bartender in that rock bar—what was it called? Out by Wrigley Field … Trace. I had to pay him off before he kicked the shit out of your drunken ass!” Isaac laughed and felt some of the day’s dread ease off as he relaxed into the red leather of the booth.

  “Not really, no. But I remember you droning on about it at great length. What were we … Jesus, twenty-two, twenty-three?”

  “Those were the days, huh. We’d pull off a small-time score and you’d spray most of your earnings everywhere in piss and vomit.”

  “Don’t forget charm.” Roach chuckled. “Drunk me could be pretty charming when he had to.”

  Isaac snickered, thinking of the number of disastrous relationships Roach would begin with his inebriated, debonair charisma, only to subsequently destroy with passive-aggressive sobriety. “I don’t know why, but I always found myself waiting for you to ease off the juice after we graduated to Ludlow’s bigger marks.”

&nb
sp; Roach shrugged. “More money, more bottles. That’s what forced Diane to finally tire of my shit.”

  Isaac fidgeted with the glass. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m not.” Roach looked wistful. “She was right. Amazing she put up with my boozing as long as she did.”

  “When was the separation?”

  Roach sifted through the debris of past events. “Seven years ago. It wasn’t on good terms. It finally dawned on her that I was too in love with “the lifestyle”. She moved to Ann Arbor to be with her sister.”

  “You seeing anybody new?”

  “I’ve realised I’m not cut out for relationships.”

  Isaac sipped his beer, trying to come up with some redundant comment which would fork the conversation away from past mistakes, of which they both had many. “You’ve pulled it together now, from the looks of it.”

  Roach glanced around his kingdom of sports-themed drinking, appreciating it as if he hadn’t laid eyes on it in a long time. “It’s okay.”

  The quiet spaces between words was beginning to feel less and less awkward, but Isaac knew reminiscing about the glory days of their sketchy youth wouldn’t solve their problems of today. “So what are we going to do?”

  Roach leaned into the table conspiratorially, his game face slipping back into place. “We wait for my guys Grace and Fitzy to get here. See if they’ve learned any names or leads as to who these guys are. If not, then we can shake more trees with four pairs of hands than three.”

  “We’re 0-for-2 in our disastrous attempts at playing the big dick hero.”

  “Well, what are you thinking? Find a basement somewhere remote and hope they don’t find us?”

  Isaac fidgeted with the rim of his glass. “Aren’t there any other guys who can weigh in and help us out?”

  Roach’s expression took on a downbeat cast. “I don’t have too many favors I can call in at the minute. Particularly when it comes to backing us up against an unknown crew capable of snatching a name like Ludlow from his own home.”

  “That’s not exactly a no.” Isaac pushed the issue with a raised eyebrow.

  Roach shut him down with a non-verbal response, choosing instead to use his fingernail to squiggle moisture trails on his cool glass. “You know, it’s funny. Yesterday Diane warned me about my luck running out. And remember Strauss? He implied the exact same damn thing. Told me that I should think about getting out of the rough stuff. Focus more on this place. Talk about bad omens.”

  Isaac tilted his head. “Or a professional warning.”

  Roach waved the suggestion away. “No, it’s not like that. He and Ludlow have, like, stacks of volumes of history, man. You know that. If there was even a hint of something rotten between them, Ludlow would have told me. He’s still our go-to guy when it comes to shifting the hot stuff. Nothing to gain for him by randomly turning on trusted long-time associates.”

  After being off the board for so long, Isaac no longer knew up from down, but he still trusted Roach’s shrewdness when it came to reading people. He glanced at his pal’s ice-rimed knuckles again. Admittedly, Roach’s methods of reading occasionally lacked subtlety. Despite his soulful eyes, he’d always had a penchant for violence which far exceeded Isaac’s own.

  “If we get through this, maybe you should think about cashing out. Open up another bar on a beach somewhere.”

  Roach solemnly held his gaze for a long pause, and Isaac knew the spinning wheels in Roach’s head were grinding down any notion of retirement into broken junk. Before he got his inevitable answer, Isaac heard the thick glass doors of the bar swing open, ushering in frigid air and street noise, and found himself bracing for the worst. Had the gun-toting wolf sniffed them out again so soon?

  From Roach’s calm reaction, Isaac knew it wasn’t the wolf. He turned slightly in the booth, seeing a chubby guy in jeans and a Celtics jersey with a spring in his step, with close-cropped rusty hair and a trimmed beard of fiery gold. An attractive dark-haired barmaid popped the top off a bottle of San Miguel for him with such practised ease and timing it must have been a daily routine. Behind the big guy wandered in a younger, attractive black twenty-something woman in jeans and a denim jacket, her tribal braids hanging off her shoulder. The woman paused for a brief moment, leaned over the bar and kissed the barmaid. They were clearly more than just friends. The pair of them joined the booth, pulling up free stools from the adjoining table, closing the circle.

  Roach quickly made the introductions for Isaac, aiming a pistol-like index finger at the pudgy pale guy and then the dark lean youth. “Fitzy and Grace.”

  Fitzy gulped his first mouthful of beer and exhaled with pleasure. “You’re Isaac, right?” He extended his non-beer hand, giving Isaac a hearty shake.

  “Yo, Roach told us some of the stories about you two back in the day. One of the old school,” Grace said. She didn’t offer to shake, just smiled all cool and nodded.

  “Christ, kid, I’m only thirty-nine.”

  “S’old to me, pops. I’m twenty-three.”

  Isaac conceded the point. “I feel fifty.”

  Fitzy harnessed his tough Boston accent into a meeker, star-struck speech. “My condolences. I heard about what that sick fuck did to your family. Some shit ought to be off limits.”

  “Straight up,” Grace agreed.

  Isaac didn’t want to get into the matter with people he had only just met, but he nodded his appreciation for the man’s sympathy.

  Fitzy placed his bottle on a damp coaster and flipped back to business mode, telling Roach, “Got some news. Conway’s, it’s—”

  “Torched. Isaac told me. You checked the news?”

  “You were there?” Fitzy asked Isaac.

  “After the fact.”

  Grace passed her phone, an article from the Chicago Sun-Times website already open, to Roach. “Not just torched. Some dude with an automatic weapon dropped everyone in there. Including Conway.”

  Roach skimmed the article and passed the phone back.

  Isaac looked from the two replacements to the leader of his old gang. “The old employment office.”

  “Place is an institution … was,” Roach corrected. “We stopped going there a while back. Back when most of our older eyes and ears got out of the life, got dead or got out of town. The newer locals coming in were mainly wrapped up in different lines of work, but now and then you could still count on the place for some useful sources.”

  Isaac was glad Maggie couldn’t see him now. Sitting here with hoodlums, on the precipice of death and criminality. But what choice did he have? ‘Who’s keeping their ear to the ground now?”

  Fitzy answered. “MacKinnon was an old pal of yours, right?”

  Isaac hadn’t thought about Lou MacKinnon in a long time. “Purely in a professional sense. We performed a few jobs back when she”—he pointed at Grace—“was in diapers.”

  Fitzy nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, we know he’s fallen off the face of the earth. No one’s seen him in over a week. And that guy likes a routine.”

  Isaac and Roach exchanged a glance at this detail. Did Isaac catch the ghost of a memory in Roach’s eyes?

  Fitzy continued listing their lack of available insight. “Man, we spoke to everybody who’s anybody: Alonso, Bowen, Loco Molinero, Green—they’re all clueless on the subject. Nobody knows dick about Ludlow and some wolf.”

  Isaac was no longer paying any mind to Grace and Fitzy’s list of dead ends. He was busy trying to figure out where MacKinnon’s piece fit into the puzzle. Assuming he too had fallen foul of the wolf’s pack, what would they want with him? What had Ludlow done that warranted such extreme action, which also somehow connected to him and MacKinnon? Isaac unspooled the connective thread, surprised and horrified at how quickly the yarn ended. If he was right, it put Roach in the crosshairs too, and explained why the wolf and Wyndorf were not partners. Wyndorf was a target, too.

  Isaac found his voice. “Did Jensen have any other family? A close friend? Someone who, for wh
atever reason, has decided to make a move on us now?”

  Grace and Fitzy looked at him for an explanation, with only Roach grasping what Isaac had said.

  “Who’s Jensen?” Fitzy asked.

  “Alfred Jensen,” Isaac repeated, testing how it sounded. “He was a surgeon. He and his family were killed by the same man who murdered mine. Maybe the reason nobody knows anything about Ludlow is because this isn’t some business dispute. It’s personal.”

  Roach didn’t want to hear this and stared at Isaac, scepticism and belief duking it out behind his eyes. “You think some white-collar friends and family of Jensen are behind this? Like who? A bunch of tough-guy doctors from the country club?”

  “Think about it. MacKinnon had been reliable enough to us and Ludlow back in the day, to the point where he knew about the Jensen cluster fuck. So these guys ask around a little, maybe grease a few palms to find somebody who might be clued up on me and that job. They find MacKinnon, and that guy was reputed for two things: being a so-so thief, but also, for being a useful contact.” Isaac thought about MacKinnon’s final moments and imagined them being deeply uncomfortable and verbose. “They make him give up the full crew involved in that job. Ludlow’s done. But they’re still gunning for us.”

  Roach shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t harm a hair on their heads. That was all Wyndorf.”

  “You think they’d give a shit? Would you give a shit? We were all complicit that night. It makes sense. It’s no secret I was involved. These people could have been biding their time until I got released. Look at the time frame: MacKinnon goes missing, a few days later I step off the bus—my family is killed by Wyndorf but the wolf was there, beaten to the punch. A day later Ludlow gets taken, and now they’re circling me again.” Isaac wasn’t aware how agitated his tone had become, his raised voice catching a few curious looks from some of the drinkers at the bar.