by Beau Johnson
The detective stands, both hands up over his face and then down his beard. “The operation is movable, I think. Like the houses from a few years back. Rotating every so often. Again, like those houses. Here, this side of Culver, we have a total of eleven strip clubs paying taxes. Care to guess who might own four?”
And there it was: why we’d been able to do what we had in the time that we did. The detective a bloodhound. A man who’d not only come to see things the way they should be seen, but a man who finally acknowledged the badge would never again stand for what it once did.
Time to go to work.
We start with Bottoms Up, the oldest of the four “establishments” Gundy owned. A dive bar, if that, with tits on top for show. The kind of place where the mirrors, pervert’s row, and stage shared almost the same amount of human smear. Outside, to the right of the red neon sign: drinks for a dollar, make you holler.
“Only thing I seen outta place was the extra bouncer, bald guy near the back. Never seen anybody go near him, but never seen him move much neither. Outta three hours, that’s some serious standing-in-the-same-place type of power.” I couldn’t disagree with him, one-armed Billy as forthright just then as he’d been during our entire time overseas. That close to him, there in the van, I see just how much he hadn’t been taking care of himself. His teeth, now down to only a few soldiers if I were to count, in need of as much of a wash as his fatigues. Camo-brown, it’s all I ever saw him wear in all the times I’d asked him for help. Did it matter? Fuck no. It’s just hard to see people you used to run with coming to what they do.
“Spelled off?” Billy says yes, his right arm up and itching what remained of his left. Doing so, he turns toward me, and in that moment, although I try, I fail at keeping thoughts of mints from my mind. Peppermint. Butterscotch. Goddamn fucking Tic Tacs. “Smaller dude, but yeah. Makes me think you’re onto something here, Bishop.”
I agree again, then get a description of the smaller man. Shaved head. Hoop in his nose. A goatee that really wasn’t a goatee at all.
“He’s wearing a shirt too small for his frame too, a white one that hugs what he’s trying to show. Jeans and Doc Martens. You know the type.” I did. Met many. Disposed of more. At that moment, thinking nothing different would occur once I got him into a room and began extracting information I now believed he had.
All told, adding to a pile I started a long time ago.
Three a.m. No stars. Light rain. And TJ doesn’t even hear me come up behind him in the parking lot. The syringe going deep into his carotid and knocking him out before he even turns halfway around. Pressed against his Mustang with my right hand, I open up the sliding door to my van with my left. In TJ goes, his head lolling then striking the van’s floor not near hard enough.
Back at Buchannon, I pull him from the van by the metal in his nose. It doesn’t hold. The blood it brings becoming more than I thought there should be. Downstairs, arms and legs zip tied to a chair, he wakes only after a pair of tin snips ensures his right hand could never again wear rings. He erupts. Roars. The adrenaline his body produces enough to countermand what I’d injected into his system.
“What the fuck are you doing? Who the fuck are you? What. The. Fuccckkk!” I look at him, at his too tight shirt now stained with what continued to leak from his nose, then I look around the room. In my periphery, I can see him do the same. He takes in the cement walls, the dark color and the bone fragments that mark them. On his left are two tables, lower than waist height, upon which lay tools I hadn’t cleaned in years. To his right, a chainsaw. Beyond that: shovels, axes, pickaxes, hatchets, sledgehammers.
Right on cue, he begins to tremble. Slight at first, then accelerating as I fail to answer him again. Once he says Anything man, anything you want I’ll do, we get close to the place I want us to be. “You say that like you mean it, TJ.” His attention, even through his pain, it doesn’t waver, which makes me think he may be smarter than I pegged him for. “But this choice, we both know the duress it comes under. Makes me think you might, in the very near future let’s say, attempt to tell me things how you think I want them to be told. I want you to refrain from this, TJ. Keep your answers clean. Keep them concise. If it helps, picture them for what they have now become: the only thing keeping you alive.” Did he understand? He did, sure. Pain and fear the greatest of equalizers in situations such as these. But like everything else, it didn’t matter. Not how most of them hoped.
I grab a hammer, move forward, and polite as I’m able, ask TJ to explain what went on in the basement of Bottoms Up.
It was true. All of it. Down to Batista’s assumption that they were rolling the operation. Every two weeks, in fact, according to TJ and what remained of his teeth. Further still, it ended up being connected to the houses Batista brought up, the ones from a few years back. Back then, as a deterrent, we used a bone saw, in the end placing eight heads on fenceposts out front of the current house being used to rape children.
Looks like it didn’t take.
Or we failed to get all the parties involved, and someone felt it was their time to be king.
“He confirm Gundy?” I say that he had, but only after I’d taken an ear—TJ, for a few moments at least, more in fear of the man who paid his wage than the man who’d taken his fingers.
“Said the man liked to watch too, there for every video he has made. Makes me think this one is meant to suffer, John.” Batista nods, then hands me the file. We’re up top tonight, at the bigger safehouse, with Culver below us and asleep. As asleep as a city of a million is able to be, of course.
“We need them all this time, Bishop. Every fucking one. You think we can do that?”
Not to the extent he wanted. Not to the extent I wanted.
In the end, I told him what I always told him: we would try.
We tracked a guy for years once, a rapist and serial killer by the name of Gank. Liked to feed his victims parts of dogs did Rudy Gank, which in and of itself is beyond the pale, but in the end, along with a little bit of luck, it becomes the link that bridges the gap. Or so we thought. Years later, to the bafflement of all involved, it begins anew. More girls. All teens. Their stomach content speaking the loudest of all. Copycat? Sure, had to be. But it wasn’t, not how you’d think. Gank had a brother, a partner—a man as determined and demented as he. The first brother went by way of jumper cables I attached to the underside of the piece of equipment he couldn’t control. Batista taking the reins on the other one, a piece of rebar deep inside the man’s colon by the time I enter the fray.
Bench, the other bouncer one-armed Billy told me about, he reminds me of Gank—body just as muscled, head just as bicced. Bench carried a jagged scar over his right eye, though, that ended in a fold just before the bridge of his nose. Bar fight? Car wreck? Couldn’t tell you. What I could was that he cried like a child when he woke up hanging from chains.
“You done?” I’d like to say he was, but no, the big man continued. Angrier by the second, I move toward him, hammer in hand. For a wonder, he settles himself. As much as he can, anyway. Stuttering, stopping and starting, he gives me all the names he can remember, all the ones I asked him to produce if he wanted to keep his legs. As most of them do, he believed me, but I wasn’t in the mood. The memories of Gank, his brother, and all their victims a bright screaming knot in the center of my mind.
I set him on fire instead.
The farther down the rabbit hole we go, nothing changes. Scum on top of scum on top of scum. But we had to be smart. We had to be sane. No bodies turning up. Just missing person reports. All fine and good on the proper side of things, but as the months rolled on, Gundy had to begin to suspect. Gone and removed from the board: six men and two women of his own employ. Alex and Ray even managed to track down a cameraman we never thought we’d get to. In Hanson Falls this was, just as the man was beginning to cross the street.
You don’t say, if I remember my reply.
But Gundy, my big fish and the
man who started this all, he appeared as most of them do—full-on narcissist who believed he was above the things that pulled mortal men down. It’s why he and most of them fail to run. Not until it was too late, of course.
“We should nuke it from afar. Send an RPG to do the job and turn his place to dust.” I’d done it before, back when a man named Toomey believed he too could live consequence-free. I ended up looking this man in the eye before he died, there as I stood on what remained of his bowels. I was young back then, naïve, and ran hotter than I would come to. I’d like to call this wisdom, but no, my hate has yet to recede.
To Batista I say no and remind him of what he said months ago: we had to get them all. We had to be sure.
We needed to see this man die.
Body armor, check: flak jackets over augmented Kevlar designed by Ray himself. Would it stop every projectile? No. But it took the piss out of quite a few, opening up an advantage I’d relied on for years.
We go in at night, under the cover of darkness and heavy rain. From the front gate, we see two sentries on the porch, each of them smoking, each of them sitting. Alex has taken the back part of the estate, coming around from behind a shed/garage large enough to hold a plane. Plan was to take the perimeter first, and Batista and I stay low until we’re close enough to take the sentries out. Done, suppressors doing the job, we are just inside the main door when it all goes sideways and every damn light in the house comes on. I’m wet and slippery, the automatic roar of a MAC-10 sending me toward hardwood like a man who hadn’t eaten in weeks. I look to Batista. He motions left, up the winding stairs. I nod. Roll wide. And fire as soon as a leg enters my field of vision. The man cries out, falls forward, and then the ground is next to make a sound.
Batista gets into a crouch and is off to the second floor as I take the main. As planned, as trained, I go room by room, entrance way by entrance way. I hear shots, two more, each from the rear, and then I’m in a kitchen almost as large as the living room I’d just exited. All stainless steel and marble counters here, with an island the size of—
I catch movement on my left. A blur. Batista walking toward me, Gundy behind him, a knife up under Batista’s throat. I smell wetness. I smell sweat. And as they continue forward, too much Old Spice. “Drop it, you fuck. You come into my house, kill my men!” He’s angry, I give him that, but he’d never be as angry as me. Soft in the middle, salt and pepper hair receding, he was to me a man wanting. Believing he deserved. More than pathetic and beyond the worst of us. Deplorable and thinking himself indestructible at the same fucking time.
“You will not survive this, Gundy. Be best if you remember that a minute from now.” He glares, his face going up a shade, almost past red. “Drop the goddamn piece or I stick this motherfucker! I will end him before you end me and I fucking well know you don’t want that!” The man had me there, but what he didn’t have was everything there was to know about me. Had no idea what it felt like to watch as your sister is fucked to death by six men in masks. No idea how it was to read the report of your mother being found facedown and drowned in the bottom of a dumpster. No idea that before I came to Culver, before everything that happened in Kuwait, I was under the supervision of a man named Richard Buckner, who once showed me a particular trick Batista and I had only ever discussed, let alone tried.
No time like the present.
I lower my Glock, lay it on the marble island. Gundy’s one eye slits, and even though most of his face is obscured by Batista, I see the right side of his mouth curl into a smirk.
I take the moment.
Reach under my jacket and pull the replica grenade and toss it forward, toward the two men. It creates the desired effect. Gundy freaks, pushes off John, and heads for the hills as fast as his flabby legs can take him. Which wasn’t very far, it turns out, as Alex re-enters the picture here, and with a shovel and a sound I can still hear today, introduces Gundy to a different type of makeover. Blood arcs, pressure-ejected from the man’s face like a slick ribbon as he drops back, flat, and narrowly misses a glass coffee table larger than it had any right to be.
I look to Batista, he looks to me. “Well fuck me, it worked.” The big man wasn’t wrong, nor was the bigger man who’d taught it to me. Would we use it again? Sure. Many times. But here, now, Gundy remained, and he needed to be dealt with.
I take the shovel from Alex and make my way to where Gundy lay on the carpet. His robe is open, his paunch exposed, and I take a stance on either side of him, not knowing years from now I would do the same thing to another man, stating that the shovel had become my new best friend. Slow, I place the tip into the hollow of his neck and even slower begin to apply my weight. Doesn’t take long for him to come around. His eyes bulge, his back arches, his hands at the shovel like they were meant to bend steel. It’s too much. I’m too much. Lean over him more, harder, all my weight being given to the task at hand. It begins, metal breaching skin, and when the first slip of blood rushes up from that shallow, this is when I give a heel stomp. Another. And then Saul Gundy is no more. Bone, cartilage, and vertebrae giving way to a geyser that goes not one way, but three.
The rest is cleanup. But before we burn it to the ground, Alex finds a door. A door with too many locks. “Rider!”
We open it to find what Batista and I have seen on more occasions than either of us wished to count. One is brunette, the other blonde, each of them maybe fourteen. Docile, dressed in flannel pajamas, they are everything we hope to prevent, everything we have chosen to fight. They go with Batista, the big man saying once he got them situated, he’d call it in. He’s referring to the Red Onion, Bottoms Up, and the other two strip joints Gundy owned. Us, Alex and I, we stay and do what we’d set out to do, watching from the treeline as the flames grow and the sirens begin to come.
In another time and life, I’d like to think I’d call this a win. But I couldn’t.
Instead, I called it a start.
And only because I’d seen it play out too many times to believe otherwise. One shit-stain connected to another shit-stain connected to another shit-stain. On and on, ad infinitum. Time, of course, proves me right not nine hours later, after Batista goes the anonymous tip route and Ray becomes the one who calls it in. Four hours past this, and every establishment Gundy owned has been shut down, each of them into various degrees of catalogue.
It’s here Batista catches wind that there might be something more.
More than the cameras and cages and the six dead children they find stuffed into barrels. Does it give me pause? That perhaps we shouldn’t have waited and gone in early?
Every day of my life. With every goddamn breath I take.
“Phil Rand, forty-six. A one-time cash infusion of one hundred and forty-six thousand dollars, payable to a one Saul Gundy by way of cashiers cheque a month before Gundy takes possession of Bottoms Up six years ago.” Again, it lined up with those houses from years back. Batista knew it. I knew it.
What I also knew was this: we hadn’t gotten them all.
We’d allowed this particular strain of depravity to continue.
No longer. No more. Not while I breathed.
But Rand proves to be a more difficult find than most. It had everything to do with the raids, sure, not to mention Gundy’s death and the campfire we erected for him, but some men can only go to ground for so long. They get restless, twitchy, and more times than not, it opens doors. Not just on them, but us. Some take the easy way out once this occurs, and good riddance to every piece of shit who chooses this path, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy looking them in the eye as they realized I’d be the one removing them from the board. Pushback came in many forms, however, and the ones who came to believe that a chance at life might remain, these are the ones I ensure suffer most.
They are the ones who deserve no less.
“I guarantee you he thinks the blond hair is helping. Losing the beard, too. But yeah, it’s him, Bishop. Right down to them long-ass arms of h
is.” I tell Batista to stay put, that I was on my way to the motel he’d traced Rand to, but the detective had other plans. It included the house from before and what we’d left dripping on the fence spikes out front. True, it’d be hard to remove Rand’s head in the back of the van Batista was bringing him to me in, the required space for such an undertaking a little more than what it provided, but once I thought about it, how perhaps our message all those years ago wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been, I could see us ending it no other way.
“Don’t start without me,” I say.
And he didn’t. He had him bound, though, and prone, and through the gag I hear the same whimpering pleas I have heard so many times before. I can’t stand to my full height, so I crouch over him, his eyes so afraid, his forehead slick. In khakis, flip-flops, and a polo shirt no longer quite white, he is as they always are once they realize they’ve run out of time: the worst of us laid bare.
“You had a good run,” I say. “And I’m not totally convinced you were part of this from the start, but that money you loaned Gundy, it goes a long way to proving you could have been.” He tries to speak through the gag, tries to right himself. Batista offers him a throat punch for his trouble. I wait. I watch. My mind turning toward children in pajamas. Toward children in barrels. And how men like Phillip Rand are able to go about their days as if it was all meant to be. “But even if you weren’t, you are in there somewhere. A part of those parties. Those videos…” It’s here I realize I won’t be able to finish, the heat I feel but a prelude to what I’m about to do. The sharp hit of piss that enters the air tells me Rand has figured this out as well.