by Frances June
SEVEN
PRINCES
OF HELL
"Saul"
Frances June
Copyright © 2019 Samantha Cummings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
ASIN: B07Y4WWQND (e-book)
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
Front cover image by Samantha Cummings.
Book formatting by Samantha Cummings.
Published in Great Britain by Amazon.
First published edition 2019.
www.samantha-cummings.com
Chapter 1
I f the rats don't kill you the demons will. Maybe not real demons but the emotionally manipulative, ancient-history kind. The ones that call you up outta the blue at 3 a.m to tell you your baby brother's been murdered and left for dead, floating face down near pier 90 all the way down on 54th.
The cigarette hanging from my lips glows too bright for this time in the day. I hardly inhale because I'm trying to quit but sometimes the smoke just slips between my teeth and licks its way into my lungs; the burn is good, the buzz not so much. It's too early on an empty, whiskey-less stomach, but I don't put it out.
No coat is thick enough or warm enough for New York winters but I still try to pull my coat closer around me whilst I wait for the cab to arrive. Even at 5a.m the streets smell like too many people and garbage. Morgan didn’t stir when I got the phone call so I left her sleeping upstairs. She’ll be pissed when she sees I sent her a text to explain why my side of the bed will be cold when she checks. She never liked Billy when he was alive so she's going to be less than impressed when she finds out his corpse pulled me back into the fold.
If I’m honest, I didn't like him all too much either but family duty screams louder than Morgan when she smells smoke on my breath.
Christ, this morning is cold. It takes longer than I'd like to check the time on my phone; 5:15 and Ash is as late as he always is. When the cab idles around the corner my hands feel like ice blocks. If I wanted hands as yellow as the cab I'd consider actually holding the cigarette but it tempted me too much; the pull, the flicking, the repetition in the ritual that I keep trying so hard to kick.
Without using my hands I drop the butt and dig it into the concrete with my toe. There's something satisfying in the scrape of rubber against concrete; I picture digging my heal into someone's hand until the satisfaction of the crunching and screaming ignites a siren in the distance.
There it is, one of those demons that lingers, threateningly, always around the corner ready to kill.
"You ready?"
Ash mouths the words at me through the window, too smart to roll it down and let the frost in the air freeze his dick off. His most prized possession.
All I can do is nod and wait for him to slide over to the other side of the cab. Even though it's petty I enjoy the fact that the sweat-crusted leather might trash his $300 pants. Even from outside the cab he looks like he's dressed for a meeting in Wall Street.
My own reflection in the glass is a little less impressive. If I didn't know my own reflection, I'd assume I was one of the hobo's who slept in Hell's Kitchen Park.
The cab lurched forwards, pushing me back into the seat a little further than I’d hoped to go.
"Pretty nice digs, bro. When d'ya move in?" Ash smoothed his blonde hair back with a well-manicured hand that made mine look like they'd been smashed by bricks too many times. Which they had. He had artist hands and he knew it. The vain prick admired his cuticles in a bemused fashion, like he was wondering what colour to paint his nails.
"Three years ago - stop that!" I knocked his down harder than necessary.
"I'd know that if you took my calls once in a while," He crossed his arms and leant back into the seat like he was in the back of a limo. "How's Morgan?"
"Fuck you." I counted to ten and when the rage continued to bubble I counted to ten again. And again. And again until we'd been quiet for a long time.
If there was one thing Ash wasn’t it was a fighter. He knew well enough to leave me once he'd pushed my buttons and Jesus did he like to push them.
All twenty minutes later, after we watched the Empire State Building slice past us, I felt calm enough to resume conversation.
"Morgan's fine. Much better now she's clean and tested negative for any kind of STD." I counted again.
Five minutes later and we arrived at the medical examiner's office where they'd taken the body of our baby brother.
The street was empty, bar the cars parked overnight and the usual work trucks that seemed to constantly buzz around the city, doing God knows what.
A gust of wind actually shook the cab, carrying on down the street and through the bare tree branches that were all to reminiscent of death. Bile rose in my throat for the second time this morning. Suddenly that enjoyable taste of cigarettes from earlier tasted like the trees and the air.
"Before we go in there are you going to be able to keep it together?" Ash buttoned his coat up to his neck and paid the driver a bill that looked to exceed the tab. The driver didn't offer change and Ash didn't ask for it.
"As long as the others step the fuck off I'll be OK. Let’s just get this over with."
*
It wasn't the family reunion we wanted but it was what we got.
Out of all of my brothers Billy was the last one I thought would get killed in some grotesque manner but life always liked to sour the lemons.
He’d been a good kid. Cheeky, sure, but it was a charming way and he had been so skinny and short it was easy to forgive him for just about anything. When he finally had a growth spurt and shot up to 6"4 the year he turned 17 it was harder to see him as just a scrappy kid anymore but no one hated Billy, then.
Sadly, like all of us unlikely street urchins, he also grew into his talent of ticking off the wrong people and not getting out of the way when the bullets started raining.
"Well look who washed up looking like Father Monroe!" Liev stood up from the dank metal folding chair that lined the hallway and strode over to greet us.
"Fuck you." I could already tell this would be the most used phrase of the whole ordeal.
The woman at the desk looked up under heavily drawn eyebrows like it was the worst thing she'd ever heard. I wondered if she knew she was sitting feet away from dead criminals. Life ain't peachy.
"Right, you hate us all, yada yada." Liev backed off and nodded to Ash as he sauntered past to greet the others.
We were seven brothers. Six now, I guess.
Raised by the aforementioned Father Monroe in the Bethlehem Home for Children. A fancy name for a run-down orphanage. It had been a sweet deal for a while. The seven of us had not a soul to rely on in the world but we found each other. Quite the motley crew.
Monroe took us on like some special little project and promised to keep us together no matter what; even at the cost of our right to families.
At the time we thought it was a great feat. We could always be together because no one wanted to adopt one of us when we were contracted as a group. Then came the change of system when fostering became an option. Suddenly there were rules Monroe couldn't get around so he took us away to a place he found in, hidden in the bowel of Hell's Kitchen.
I've looked into the orphanage s
ince and heard there was a fire in '72 that ripped the place to the ground and they never rebuilt. I guessed that's why they never came after the old guy who basically kidnapped seven young boys.
It's not like he was a bad guy but things took a turn when we did what we did to get by and those things weren't often inside the lines of the law. We'd been raised to fear God but we also feared hunger and death so we stole and then we prayed for forgiveness.
Monroe eventually turned to the drink and disappeared one night under the cover of not wanting to hide from the police anymore; as far as I was aware none of us had heard from him since.
Not that I kept in touch with anyone either.
"So who has the least obscured version of the truth?" I looked around at them, wanting to see a reaction to the verse we'd heard so often from Monroe after we'd been caught with our hands in the missionary box.
As expected Benji was the first to crack.
"We don't know what happened, I swear, man." He could never keep his mouth shut and he was never great at keeping secrets which is why Monroe looked to him first and why I was now. Fucked if I knew how I could take after someone not blood related.
"Will someone just tell me why I'm out of bed at this ungodly hour to identify the body of my brother?" Clenching my teeth never stopped me from the rage that was always bubbling beneath the surface so I did what my anger management coach told me to do; find something which makes me relax.
I got out a stick of gum from my pocket and folded it into my mouth, finally ridding myself of the stale smoke. Chewing, for some reason, always made me calmer. Must be why those old hicks out in the country chew tobacco. That and the addiction.
"The hell you thinking, coming in here with that attitude?" Luke, the oldest of the lot of us with the back hair to prove it, stepped up.
The others immediately took a back step and the desk woman shot daggers before her eyes flicked to what I assumed was an emergency alarm.
"I was just feeling like I got a call to say my baby brother is potentially dead and now maybe I am having a hard time wondering why I am stood out here with you all when all I want is to go home." Employing statements with 'I' was another anger management trick my coach had me do.
There was no doubt I'd bent the policy a little but it sure as hell made me feel better.
Ash's giant hand slapped Luke's chest to push him away from me. I hadn't even realised how close we'd gotten, and how close the desk bitch was to hitting that alarm, but I could pretty much count the anger lines that ran across his head. That part of me that liked to think of the pain I could cause wondered if those lines ran all the way through his head like the age rings in a tree.
Of all of us me and Luke had the most tumultuous relationship. That was a word I'd learnt from an early age; how Monroe would explain it.
Even after Ash's dick dive into my relationship with Morgan I still counted him higher in ranks than Luke just because Ash at least had the decency to be semi-apologetic after he'd screwed me over, literally.
A door next to the desk opened and an old guy in a white lab coat which announced him as 'Dr. Lami', with him came the scent of sterilisation which always set my heart pounding.
"You are all here to I.D John Doe?" He spoke with an upper state accent which put him at odds with us immediately.
He seemed to notice that when he looked up to see six full grown men in various states of social leveling before him.
I hated that I was the one who looked like the bum from the park when I was the only one of us all who'd finally got their shit together; finally living on the level.
"What do you mean, John Doe?" I turned to Ash at the exact moment a cop walked through the door. A cop I knew all too well.
"None of us have seen him yet." Ash said quietly. His annoyance at the new arrival didn't go unmissed by me. For once we might be on the same page.
The new information took a few seconds to trickle through to my brain but it couldn’t comprehend it.
"But we know it’s him, don’t we? He had I.D on him-"
"No I.D, no teeth, no fingerprints, nothin'" The cop answered, keeping his head down and not looking at anyone of us directly.
He pushed right through our group, striding down the hallway in that purpose driven way he always walked. We followed as a group like a backwards version of the fellowship from Lord of the Rings. All the reasons in the world to stick together and yet we'd all rather be anywhere else.
"Who invited Officer Dick?" Liev practically snarled. It was only when Ash composed himself the way he did before anything; smoothing his hair, straightening his cuffs, that Liev attempted to do the same although he couldn’t keep that shit-sniffing scowl off his face.
Under the flickering lights everything was grimmer, my stomach churned. A weaker version of myself would have puked at what was to come.
We followed the doc and our uninvited uniformed guest down a short hallway, the air getting stale and fresh at the same time which sparked more alarm bells and my stomach clenched in protest. The last time I'd felt this was the day my relationship with my brothers ended once and for all.
"I was the one who got called in on the case, and I'm actually a detective now, not that my promotion will mean shit to any of you." The cop stopped and opened the door that led into a place so brightly lit it seemed in bad taste.
If I thought the temperature outside was ball-freezing, then the temperature at the threshold to that room was cold enough to shrink your prostate.
"You'll always be a beat cop to me." Liev wasn’t great at being cool-headed so his snotty comment just sounded pissy, like a kid giving adult lip.
We all trailed into the room, like a well-rehearsed lineup.
"Deadbeat, more like." Benji clapped Liev on the shoulder.
I lingered. Sucked in breath. Ran thought all my anger management tools in my head one by one. My gut was telling me to leave now before whatever we found in that room changed me.
"Don't take it too hard, Jack, you know what they’re like."
Jack’s hand idly rested on the gun on his hip and I pretended like I didn’t notice and that I was standing around to be nice or something. I wasn’t.
Put it off. Put it off. Put it off.
My old mantra returned to me like a steady drum. I could row to this for a while.
"It's hard to forget. I'm glad you got out Saul. Man, if it had been you out there I don't know that I'dve had the decency to call the others." He ran his hand through his cropped hair, the light catching the grey that had started to colour his temples.
Shit, when did we get so old?
"And I'd appreciate that... look, before I go in there, I need the details. What are we looking at here?"
Jack had been one of us, once. A kid with nowhere to come or go. We'd spent time in the orphanage together but when the place burnt to the ground and Father Monroe whisked us off into the unknown Jack had been one of the unfortunate few who'd been rehomed out of state.
To any other kid another move might not have seemed that much different. There were always kids coming and going from the home for whatever reason the adults deemed reasonable; mostly it was kids they couldn't scare into submission with their promises of divine justice.
For us, though, kids from New York, moving out of State was like moving to another planet. We were born and bred.
Like a lot of kids like us, Jack had bounced from one family to the next until a cop and his wife took him in and adopted him despite his colourful rap sheet of misdemeanors which had usually involved seven other kids. From there he'd followed in his adoptive father’s footsteps and a line had been drawn between us.
He moved back to the city and we’d crossed paths, all of us. It was never pleasant.
Young, looking to impress his superiors and clean up the streets he'd romanticized in his absence. And us; a group of criminals who'd garnered a pretty bad reputation. It was a recipe for disaster.
"I can't tell you much; ongoing investigation and
everything, but I can tell you what you'll see; burnt fingertips, teeth pulled, beaten to a pulp and no I.D on him when we dragged him out. This was a professional hit, man, I haven't seen anything like it in a long time... brutal, I mean."
From the look on my face, he could tell he’d said too much.
"Shit, sorry..."
"No, you're right. I'm gonna see it anyway. Shit. What did Billy get himself into this time? He was a low-level thief he didn't get into anything deeper than maybe a few computers off the back of a truck."
It didn't make sense. The morning was starting off on the wrong foot in absolutely the worst way. Bad feelings that got worse were not my usual breakfast.
"You've been gone, Saul, you've missed something. Look, this is on the D.L, but Billy got himself on some pretty serious contact lists in the past few years. Someone even linked him to the Garuda gang recently..."
Yet another reminder of why I severed contact with them all. The Garuda gang were in pretty deep with the cocaine trade, there was even talk of them being involved in black market deals and people trafficking.
"Billy and the Garuda? You gotta be shitting me, Jesus! What, and the others all know?"
Jack didn't get a chance to answer other than shrug in one of those 'maybe I know more but maybe I can't tell you' ways.
"You coming in here or you bailin’ again?" Luke grabbed me by the collar and hauled me into the room. I decided ripping his arms off and beating him to death with them wasn't the best way to retaliate so I counted to ten. Again.
Jack closed the door, the metal hinges groaned like they knew what was coming. Even the walls could tell the drama was about to start and they closed in around us, trying to get a closer look.
Every hair on my body stood on end. My coat lacked the warmth it should have offered but I pulled it closer around me anyway. I saw the others do the same. Even Ash, in his fancy suit and calm exterior, shuddered.