by Beau Johnson
“Here’s the deal, Patel: you get one chance. Use it wisely, we get to the end of things quickly. You don’t, I will do my literal best to pry it from you.” Not a euphemism, no joke, as men like Fanning deserve everything we inflict upon them and more. They are a blight. They are obscene. Far from what the universe ever intended us to be.
And I want to say I kept my word, but I can’t, a rusted crowbar up in my hand not seconds after we release him from the chains. Above him now, I go in low and between what I take for his bottom two ribs. The man howls and attempts to buck, but we both feel the top part of his hip give way as I apply my weight. The leverage created doing two things almost at once, each in conjunction with the other: an uprooting and distention of skin first, each piece being forced through, looking more like branches than busted bone becoming the show to follow.
Still, I get nothing.
No names. Just screams. Not unexpected, he passes out from the pain.
Which was fine in the larger context, as it allowed us to transfer him to an operating table that had seen its fair share of dirtbags since being installed. It also allowed us to take Patel’s right leg next, below the knee, and when he wakes this time, his eyeline now directly in front of that leg, it takes him a moment to piece it together.
More screams result from this. Further involuntary shutdowns. But no names. Not one. Which meant we’d come to the end of the line. And it happened sometimes, where a situation could be taken no further.
I look to Batista, his apron slick with Fanning’s blood. He’s on the other side of the operating table and then I look to Patel passed out in the wheelchair we’d placed him in. Batista shrugs.
It was enough. I loosen Patel’s tourniquet and let the larger wound flow. Not exactly how I expected things to end, no, but end they do.
Even for men like us.
Back to TOC
MEN OF THE CLOTH
I have done things. Many things. Rendered limbs, performed decapitations, stabbed and shot and taught certain people how to fly. In the beginning, I even minored in rocket launcher for a time, sending an RPG into a residence that housed a man whose reputation preceded him. There have been strangulations, shock therapies, and multiple hammers paired with multiple jaws. All for the greater good, for what I perceive to be the greater good, and for April and Maggie Rider as well. But what I’m about to admit to now, it’s something I have yet to do.
I’m going to admit I was wrong.
About Alex, his inclusion, and certainly his demeanor which, in hindsight, I should have recognized from the start.
“Don’t go beating yourself up too much. I mean, if I could come to stand him, what chance did the rest of us ever really have?” A nice try, but no, and Batista knew as much. Didn’t stop me from replaying the last twelve hours in my head as best as I could. The hood over my head, the darkness it brought, and then I remember being hit from behind and a different darkness comes up to shake my hand. After this comes motion: me in a vehicle of some kind. A trunk. Then being hauled from this trunk. Arms under my arms, my feet dragging. Then a voice...
I was never here.
A voice I had conversed with for years.
Alex.
Then an entrance way and my head taking another hit as I’m forced through said entrance way. And then yet another voice comes to me from the past, belonging to a man I would very soon wish I’d killed when I had the chance.
Mapone.
A no-eyed piece of human garbage who I tried to make an example of but failed at so spectacularly that I’m now minutes away from paying in flesh and bone to the tune of sixteen pounds.
It’s not Mapone who does the deed, however, and it’s here my recollection becomes murky. Or out of left field if left field had a left field to be precise. One of Mapone’s guy’s—I’m assuming one of the men who dragged me into Mapone’s office—he goes and does the honors and removes the bottom part of my right leg with a roar and an axe. One swing so clean it takes a moment for my mind to register the event has actually taken place.
Pain is next. Becoming all things in every way. It’s beyond me, through me, and what I assume burning alive feels like. Gunfire follows, but it’s not my own. Seems I had an admirer of sorts, and one who’d been years in the making. A man who at some point during his life decided to make mine a priority.
Enter Jeramiah Abrum.
A man who couldn’t have been older than nine when Batista and I took a hatchet to his father—his dad, after I dedicate years of my life to finding out who was responsible, coming to be the man who set in motion the events that led to my family’s demise.
And this kid, a kid who was no longer a kid, he tells me he wishes to make amends for what his father and uncle had done.
I might have said “Great” at this point, but I can’t recall. All I remember is being in the back of a car, some car, my leg on fire, and then I wake up in what I take for a hospital room but isn’t a hospital room at all.
Surprise after surprise on top of surprise.
Seemed my savior was not only handy with steel, but he’d also inherited quite a fortune despite/because of his mother and father’s unfortunate choice of lifestyle. I was in someone else’s safehouse is what it meant—and being attended to by only the finest help money could buy, it would appear.
The irony is the first thing that comes to mind regarding how this kid comes into his cash, but what he enlightens me to next, this is what kills me.
“I told you I’d help you. I want to help you. If you let me, I’ll even help you walk normally again, more or less.” I look to him from my bed. We’re in the same room I wake up in, the same white room a thousand hospitals the world over.
“Define more or less.”
Jeramiah smiles a smile I recognize even after all the years between his father and now. He opens up the file folder he’d been holding and passes me an image more bionic than prosthetic, and what would soon attach to what remained of my right tibia. The fibula came into play as well, but it’s the larger bone that ends up taking the brunt of my weight. One part polycarbonate resin, one part titanium alloy, fully detachable, and no heavier than what it would be replacing, I’m informed I would effectively become good as new.
And me without my Steve Austin T-shirt.
Brings us back to Batista, as the man tries to shift some of the onus. I can’t accept the gesture, never would, but tell him if we looked at it from any angle, it should be this: we had a benefactor now, and an influx of cash that would allow us to stay a step ahead of not only shitbirds, but the badge as well. He agrees up to a point, but suggests, even before I do, that we had a long road back to where we’d been.
He wasn’t wrong. And it takes a year.
A full year of us missing out on disposing of walking, talking garbage. But then it is time. I feel I’m strong enough. And we start with Bobby Lebec, Mantooth, and a couple of Mantooth’s cronies who end up falling wheelchair first from the top of a church. It’s these men who have been on my mind, or rather, men quite similar in nature.
In the longest way around possible, it meant in the very near future, I would be teaching another group of men to fly.
You’d think it had to end at some point. Yes, you’d think. But age, in regard to deviance and how it’s craved by particular men, it knows no bounds. Not where self-interest is concerned.
Enter the Blackmore Orphanage and its governing body. Located on the east side of Culver, it loomed from above: a thirty-six-room old Victorian that had been a boarding house before its time as an orphanage. It had been also whispered about for years.
Whispers and accusations, yes. Incriminating evidence leading to any type of arrest, no.
Isn’t until a nanny cam comes into play that the whole thing is broke open.
Rounded up, it appeared for a while justice would prevail. Not so. Not in Culver. Not when people in higher places grow accustomed to the reach they intend to keep. The governing bo
dy—Drysdale, Buttons, Maich, and Gould—and the case against them evaporating almost overnight, each old man sent to sit on other boards of other orphanages throughout the six boroughs that made up Culver.
Or so they thought.
“Gould and Buttons are slam dunks. Each lives alone and, last time I checked, there was more than enough room in the back of this van for two.” I agreed, but then Batista starts in on Drysdale and Maich who, for lack of better words, would prove the harder capture. “You sure about that?” He looks to me from the passenger seat, newly shaven face up and out of the computer screen as fast as I’ve seen in quite some time.
“A man has to eat, right?”
And eat he did, five out of the next seven nights I tailed him. Best part being Wednesday, when low and behold, a certain other “man of God” removes himself from the passenger side of Drysdale’s car. It’s Maich, and both men are wearing the same modified version of fedora and long coat you didn’t see much of anymore. Through the light rain, each worked a cane as well, although only Maich’s gait seemed to require the assistance. Either way, the following Wednesday the same get-together occurs, though this time at a Denny’s off the 1-5. One Wednesday more, and it began: the who, the when, the why, and the place all coming together like we’d done this a time or two before.
They are weak men. As morally bankrupt as you’d think once they begin to piece together what might be planned. Maich becoming the crier of the bunch once we exit the vehicle.
Batista introduces his face to the side of the van for his trouble. The shiny, chemo skin that was his nose exploding like a full pot of sauce being dropped to the floor.
“Stop! Stop! As I’ve tried to tell you, you are mixing us up with someone else. We here, we are all men of the cloth. We—” Drysdale doesn’t get to finish, Batista this time deciding to go lower, into the man’s ribcage, and then we have two men bent over outside the back of the van. The other two, Buttons and Gould, they only look up toward the orphanage, each as momentarily shell-shocked as the other.
“Come on, you pieces of shit, I believe you know the way.”
Of course they do. Maich being the only one who attempts to wander off the beaten path. Back in line, we single-file make the journey up concrete stairs and around an overgrown front yard to Blackmore’s front doors, closed and vacated since the initial investigation began. The decaled glass remained frosted but, same as the oak it was set in, it had seen better days. Same as the interior but to a lesser degree. No furniture either, all of it gone to auction some time ago. Not quite a given, but Batista and I had gone in earlier, set up what we needed to, and now here we were, all tasks nearly complete.
“Keep moving,” I say as the one in front, Buttons, slows down as we approach the stairs of the main landing. “All the way up is where we need to be. You need help, you ask your God. When you do, maybe ask him to enlighten you to the reasons we are gathered here today.” I get a whimper at that from Maich, the front of the hunched man’s jacket now stained maroon. It gets them moving, though, and soon we pass the third landing and arrive at the fourth.
It’s here they see the ropes and how they’d been tethered.
Nooses, actually, but who was I to argue?
“You know why we’re here. Deep down, you do. You either step into them willingly or you don’t. Either way, what you think is about happen, it will happen, each of you a willing participant or not.”
I want to say it worked, but I have never been so lucky. To reiterate: these men were far from strong. And it’s not entirely hard sending them over the banister as it is awkward, but then an unexpected bonus occurs once Buttons reaches peak velocity. He doesn’t just break his neck as one might think, and it’s more my fault than Batista’s, as I was the one who set up the rope, but that far down, enduring that much gravity, it forces a separation as unexpected as it was violent.
“Well, would you look at that,” Batista says.
And I do. Mentally adding a new entry to the list of things I’ve done.
The rest is as you’d think: elderly men and their liver spots fighting as they could to survive but failing in every regard. We leave them there too. Not hanging, of course, as gravity continued to have its way. Of them all, however, it’s Drysdale’s head that manages to do what none of the others could and somehow remains in place, blood and spinal fluid still dripping into the small of what used to be his back, even as we close the door behind us.
Fitting, I suppose, but as with anything, only if you were there.
Back to TOC
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES
It’s never been easy. But if I’m honest, it’s never been all that difficult either. Not once I begin. And maybe I’ve always been this way—what is taken from me being all that was required in order to unleash what was there from the start. The fact remains, the possibility exists. I’m not a good man, that much I know, having failed to fall on the right side of things most of my life. We are choice, all of us. We are determination. But we are also habit, born into a world crippled by greed and self-interest, and were one inclined to look hard enough, a moral decay that grows bolder every day. It means the struggle continues, involving whoever, whenever. And Jeramiah and I, we choose to stand in its way.
“You about done?” He was, and I hit the garage remote to let him know I understood as much. Enclosed, Jeramiah pops the trunk, and the wide eyes of Steve John Evans do their best to acclimate against the light while simultaneously searching for any and all means of escape.
In a different time and place, he’d have his crew to help him out, men by the names of Vachon, Martin, Yuhaz, and Fronchank. Hard men accustomed to doing hard things but in the end beg us to put the chainsaws away. We oblige them, sure, just not how they thought we would.
It left Evans, a big man with a bigger goatee and an appetite for preying on people less fortunate than he.
“I believe you can surmise how something like this works.” Sweat runs from his forehead and down the side of a nose that had seen better days. Where a double chin sat most of the time, a third had been given birth to—the angle we had him at as uncomfortable as it looked.
“You come out slow, keep all sudden movements to yourself, the three of us will get along just fine. You choose to try and run, things won’t end how you think they might. Clear?” He nods that it is, but I see Jeramiah brace himself as Evans begins to shimmy himself up and out of the vehicle. He’s gagged, his hands zip tied, but his ankles remain free. A mistake at times, sure, but here now, it works out fine. Evans as compliant as they come, even facing a situation he probably never once thought he’d find himself in.
“Smart man,” Jeramiah says, but keeps his Glock in place. Me, I lead the way, and Evans follows, down into a room he may or may not know he’d ever escape from.
He gives it up early, even before we get him strapped to the table.
“Wignall! His name is Wignall!” All well and good, but it didn’t stop the train. And Jeramiah, as he’s wont to do, he starts low, at the ankle, continuing up and on each side from there. Only at the knees does he stop to change appendages. Last, he takes Evans’s head, each chin separated by a single, grunting swing.
What I think but do not say: no matter what the naysayers suggest, the gym, it does a body good.
Wignall reminded me of Patel Fanning.
“Doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Before your time, kid.” But I give Jeramiah what I recall. Fanning being a dirtbag who called himself the Auctioneer. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe Batista just presented him that way and the name stuck on our end. Regardless, he was what he was: a nasty piece of shit in an eight-hundred-dollar suit.
What my associates and I are offering you is innocence in its purest form. Each of you being chosen for something you possess as well. First in regard to your standing. Second because you understand discretion and everything it requires.
Men like that, they aren’t for this world. And he doesn�
��t come right out and say he’s selling children to the highest bidder on that recording Batista gets hold of, but yes, it’s exactly what went down. For how long? Who knows? Batista catching wind of it, securing it, and eventually giving us access to a hangar where more than just an auction goes down being the part none of them saw coming. And of all his guests, only Patel survives our time in the desert, but not for long. Not after a rusty crowbar, his ribcage, and I receive time to tell stories in the dark.
Anyway, Wignall, he looks like he and Patel could have been twins. Same boxy face, same wide-set eyes. Where Patel had been a buck-sixty dripping wet, though, Wignall nearly doubled him, pushing muscle up on through a six-and-a-half-foot frame.
Bigger men have died by man hand, however.
Bigger men would continue to keep this streak alive.
But it takes longer to locate him than it should have. The man going to ground quicker than most which, in my experience, proved he was probably smarter than I wanted to admit. Unlike the men he’d employed, the consensus being he sensed us circling and, like it or not, we all but ensured he wouldn’t be coming up for air anytime soon.
Until he did.
“You’re never going to guess who showed up for work today.” I didn’t even need to ask. I heard it in his voice.
I was on my way.
But I’m too late. Not for it all, but for the walking into that bar and serving Wignall a bullet for myself part.
At Buchannan is the text I get from Jeramiah, and after I get there, before I enter the room, he tells me Wignall was in and out of his place in under a minute.