by Beau Johnson
“You do know me, Danny. Of me, anyway. Might be hard, but between Jeramiah getting you here and then up into these chains, I’m going to assume a smart guy like you can figure it out.”
“Rider.” And it’s not quite a snarl, but there is venom to it all the same. It came mixed with Jack, coffee, and by the look of the fingers on his left hand, somewhere north of two packs a day. Dragon breath, in other words, as foul as he and his horse-shaped face.
“Thirty years can do a lot to a man. As both our appearances now attest. We’re going to discuss a few things, Danny. You know that much at least. It will involve Abrum, your relationship with him and his brother, and a point in time that might not mean anything to you but is everything to me. These things, they happened before you went in. If it’s an easy conversation or a hard one, that’s going to be up to you as well. You know this. I know this. We either cut through the shit right now and you give me what I want, or you don’t. Either way, we both know you aren’t leaving this basement.”
Time can change a man. It also holds the power to enact the opposite in some men, making them no worse or better than they’ve ever been.
“I ain’t tellin’ you shit.” And it was a snarl this time, along with some spit.
I step toward him, blade in hand.
“Let’s see how much we can take off that middle of yours before you do, then.”
In the end, it wasn’t much. Two pounds, maybe a little more. Enough to get me what I wanted, though.
Each name he gave me, thirty years on, late to the game.
But it’s never been a game. Never could be and never would be.
None participate either, not directly, but they do facilitate. And one, Jon Robinson, he’s found behind an abandoned IHOP with his jaw half removed, the better part of his tongue shunted and shoved three feet south of where it originated. Made me think the man liked to talk more than was good for him. Made me also think someone wanted to leave a message that couldn’t be misconstrued.
Removed from the board as well was Abrum’s backup driver at the time, man by the name of Parks. Succumbing to cancer two years after it all goes down, it left Velencio Jones and Marcus Jane. We start with Jane.
“Hillside retirement home. Been there the last six years. Seems Marcus has a wee bit of everything wrong with him too. Shingles, skin cancer, legs that can no longer hold the size he’s let himself become.” I catch the smile in Jeramiah’s voice as he states this. Nose deep into the intel we’d be using in the next few weeks, I flashback to the hatchet I used to remove his father’s head before he, Jeramiah, looks up from the computer. How it stuck in the man’s neck and the number of tries it took to displace it.
“Might make the visit a little easier is all I’m saying.” True. And I’d managed something similar before. Strangely enough, of all the people for it to involve, it was Jeramiah’s grandfather. Had I ever told him I lit that man on fire? No. And I can’t say I ever would.
“Maybe,” I say, and move to top up both our cups. “But either way, we’re going in hot.”
In hindsight, we needn’t have worried.
Beige ceiling. Grey carpet. White corridors marked by nature prints every eight feet or so. Each a requirement to the inside of Hillside retirement home. Outside, the three-story building stood above the ground it was built upon. Not looming, but practical, as many retirement homes the world over are. The grounds around the grounds are an entirely different story, however: except for the entrance, the property itself encircled by a stone wall four feet high. The grade not as gradual as it probably should have been when first constructed, but Jeramiah and I, we’d worked with less. Beyond this wall, at the bottom of the drop, lived rock beds and forest, each in contention as to the last thing Marcus Jane would see. His wheelchair hitting the wall at such a clip that for a brief moment the man would come to know what it felt like to fly.
“I don’t know what this is about. The younger gentleman said something about family?” But he did know. I knew he did. I’m sitting on the bench to his right, Jane in his wheelchair where Jeramiah placed him. Above, skinless and like bones, branches of a white birch bend and reach for us both.
“Think harder,” I suggest.
“You’re the brother?”
“I’m the brother.” He’s wearing a 3x light blue crew neck and dark green track pants. His hair is thin, wispy, and the breeze continues to state as much. Tears come last, down each side of a bulbous, pockmarked nose.
“I didn’t know they were going to use the room that way. I never knew beforehand. I never saw their masks.”
He wanted a response. Most of them do.
I rise and move behind him instead. Release the brakes to his wheelchair and move him through the grass, past the concrete walking path, and over the raised lip clearly meant to prevent what was about to occur from occurring at all.
No tears now. Only screams. And I watch as he tries to remove himself from the chair as it picks up speed. He’s unable to, of course, his size holding him back in ways not many foresee. For one quick moment, the chair appears as though it might tip, but then everything becomes as it should, as time and space runs out and Jane and the wall collide, his arms pinwheeling as he’s thrust forward and up until I see gravity reassert itself and my mind, as it should, turns to the rock beds below.
Jones is a different day of the week altogether. In better shape, with the use of his legs, it takes both Jeramiah and I to subdue him.
“I was doing a fucking job,” he says before we get to it. We’d tracked him to a little clapboard house off Hanover Avenue—low-income inside as well as out. We find him at his kitchen table, cigarette in one hand, coffee mug in the other. I smell bacon as well as tobacco, but under it all, something unwashed hung in the air, like fermented fruit. “You wanna take it up with anyone, take it up with the man who paid me.”
“I already have.”
Maybe it was something in my voice. Maybe it was something in Jeramiah’s stance. His eyes narrow. His body tenses. And then it’s on.
He rifles his mug at Jeramiah’s head and comes at me low, his shoulder up into my gut in an attempt to lift me. No go. Not with the stove to my back as it was. He roars and attempts it again with the same result. This time I take him in a headlock, the man raging against it at once. But just as fast, he goes still as the sawed-off pressed to the side of his head allows him to understand that Jeramiah was now up and beside us both.
“You win. You fellas win. You boys are tougher’n me.” But he wasn’t cowed, even with his hands up and the steel against his skull. Eleven words later, and I understand why.
“Shame the same couldn’t be said about that sister of yours.”
We never get him back to the place on Buchannan. We never get him up in chains. I lose time as well, just a moment or two, coming back into myself as I’m looking down at Jones and what remained of his face. Unrecognizable, he’s more pulp than bone, more muscle than skin, parts of my right leg up to the knee sharing the same color and consistency of what now occupied the floor.
Not how I thought it would end, and if I’m honest, far from the win I look for. But dead was dead. Deserved was deserved.
It would have to do.
Back to TOC
FOR BATISTA
“Thirty mil for twenty years? That’s got to be a joke.” It wasn’t. But it remained front-page news regardless.
“And to use what you guys thought of as a defense, man, the balls on this guy.” It was never ironclad, only a theory Batista and I had about Matheson at the time. Both of us uncertain he’d orchestrated things on his own. Granted, it never panned out, and Matheson goes down for all four murders anyway, but still, the thought had surfaced. Fast forward a decade and a half: Batista’s retired, and out of the blue, a certain piece of shit begins claiming a frame job, the extra DNA found at his place planted there amongst the bodies.
This isn’t what opens his cage, however, but instead b
ecomes the foot he wedges between doors. Motions for mishandling of evidence and then outright suppression of the same being birthed on the heels of the original appeal.
Takes years, yes, but Matheson wins the appeal. Not long after and he’s out walking free. Isn’t until a week later that this same man, a man who’d been trying to combine four women into one at the time he’s caught, drops his biggest trick of all and decides to sue the city over wrongful imprisonment and defamation of character.
Please.
Two other things come to mind, and I let Jeramiah in on both. One, there’d been a copycat, a man we catch not long after Matheson is put away. Dirtbag by the name of Kowalyk. He died hard, and in the basement of the Ronson place, I take pieces from him in the same manner he attempted to take them from two others. Second, patience and I have never really gotten along, not as we should. It meant Matheson, hot as he was, and against every course of action I have ever taken, had ensured himself a little more time amongst the living.
We move forward, Jeramiah as invested as I’d ever seen him. He doubles up, he and Ray doing their thing, and I still applaud the number of bulldozers they procure, the hole they create, and that one fine morning in May they ensure it all comes together—Jeramiah’s money at work in ways I could have never foreseen.
Isn’t until I remind him of Ducard and how that turned out that he comes to understand why I continued to wait. The good Reverend Ducard’s death putting us on a radar I wished no part of. We’d taken precautions, sure, but the Reverend was too high-profile, and falling through the bottom of a glass pool attached to the side of his high-rise proved too sensational an event for many to give up. Isn’t until the message Jeramiah writes on Ducard’s living room wall—FOLLOW THE CHILDREN—is taken for what it was that interest in “two unknown but still at-large subjects” begins to recede.
Takes time, but it all comes out, the media and public turning against Ducard’s ministry almost overnight.
“Not looking to repeat past mistakes. I get it.”
“In part, yes,” I say. And I know he understands. But it would always come down to the same thing. What we did, it could only be contained for so long. Assholes go missing. Assholes turned up dead. Happens every minute of every day of any given week in parts of the world darker than ours. But, patterns being patterns, they emerge. Eyes begin to see. And like it or not, it remains a constant I cannot change.
“But seeing where Matheson’s at now, yeah, I’m thinking it’s time.”
And it was, the circus that had become Matheson’s life not so much a circus anymore. In some circles, sure, he still held the spotlight, but as for the daily news cycle, not so much. Weekly either, for that matter.
“Time to go to work?”
“Time to go to work.”
He’d bulked up too, his stint inside taking him from the thin shitbird he’d been to the muscled one he’d transformed himself into. Meant there’d be a routine to his day, and Ciotti Fitness ends up fitting the bill.
Morning it goes down we follow him close, watch him park his Lexus, see him enter the building, and then slide the van in beside. An hour later, he emerges, gym shorts traded for beige khakis, muscle tee for an untucked blue button-down. In his hand, a black duffel that I make a mental note to grab as well.
“Hey, you got the time?” I slide the van’s side door open just after he begins to answer Jeramiah, and to Matheson’s credit, he does catch on. It doesn’t matter, not in those few seconds, as he’s far slower than the speed he needed to be—the syringe deployed into his carotid as fast as I pull him into the vehicle. He’s out in seconds, Jeramiah returning to the driver’s seat about the time I’m zip-tying Matheson’s not inconsiderable wrists behind his not inconsiderable back.
Thirty minutes later and we arrive where it would end, with one-armed Billy waving us into his barn where he, or more so his pigs, would do as they’d been trained to do.
One goddamn piece at a time.
“Long time, Bill,” I say and exit the van. Coming around from the driver’s side, Jeramiah does the same.
“Got you set up in back, last stall next to the first pen. Ain’t been mucked out in a while, but seeing how I’ve participated in a version of the festivities to come, I didn’t see either of you caring much about that. Doesn’t mean I don’t want you to do it like I asked. Remember, little pieces first this time.”
He’s never changed, a man who cut to the heart of what he wanted to say now as he did when Ray and I first met him. Didn’t help he still wore the same type of fatigues he did forty years ago either, but then again, some of us needed structure more than others, and one-armed Billy, long as I’ve known him, he’s been this kind of man.
Still, I promised nothing.
It’s never been about fear. Power, either. Everything we’ve chosen to do coming down to one basic truth: some people, they just need killing. Matheson no different than the rest. May have taken us longer in getting him to this place, yes, but getting him here we did—Batista’s absence notwithstanding. But if I knew anything about the detective, it was this: the look on Matheson’s stubbled face as he began to reconcile the sounds to his right would have been enough for the big man.
“Prize-winning, I’m told. Although I can’t say I’ve ever seen proper documentation to support the claim.”
Matheson looks round to my voice, to the torn lawn chairs Jeramiah and I sit in.
“I have money.” I’d heard worse responses, sure, but nothing so forthright; so this is how it’s going to be. Once Jeramiah lists off the names of the women he chose to rip apart, however—this is when his demeanor changes.
“I have to say, of all the ways I saw this going down, Jody, you becoming indignant was not one of them.”
“I beat the system fair and square. I even made them pay me! You think anything you do I can’t come back from?”
Sometimes the crazy, it’s just too fucking crazy.
And I want to say he understood, but I couldn’t, not for certain, even as my hammer makes it all the way through that first knee. Even after Jeramiah removes both his feet and throws them into the pen, I remain unconvinced. Only as he watches the pigs in under a minute strip the flesh off of each do I finally see it hit home.
In honor of Batista, the man who originally caught the case, we make it last.
For the women and the families Matheson destroyed, we ensure nothing of him remained.
Back to TOC
IT NEVER CHANGES
Most times you catch a man doing something he shouldn’t, he responds one of two ways: sheepish or aggressive. There is an alternative to both, however. A third response I don’t often see.
Enter Manson Lane and his shit-eating grin.
“You ain’t supposed be here, newbie. Turn around now, we can still be friends.” He doesn’t even pull up his jeans, just turns back and from behind continues to jackhammer the corpse he has over the operating table. Stick-thin, ball cap worn backwards, and with a face full of acne, he realizes his mistake early. But by then it’s too late, and I’m halfway across the makeshift operating room.
A festering hole, the room is a furnace, blood and other liquids slicking the tile floor in blotches. Overhead and canted at angles, industrial lights flicker as I plow into him at full speed. He buckles into the weak metal, the lights flicker again, and the body he’d been violating post-mortem is thrust beyond, legs up in a V before they disappear down the other side.
I take the moment.
Grab Lane by the back of the neck and send his face to the tile as he’s scrambling with his pants. I feel bone buckle even before he attempts to scream, the amount of pressure I’ve used close to everything I could give. One more time and he’s out, and it’s all I can do not to continue.
I go to the girl.
She’s as I thought. Early twenties and in shape. Her naked body a roadmap of dead mouths, each one ripped open at every possible point an organ could have hid be
hind. I can’t leave her. I don’t. Take her and shit-grin back to the place on Buchannon and tell Batista he’d been right.
Something new had come to Culver.
We just didn’t realize it’d been there all along.
It started slow, and up until Lane and the room I find him in down by the docks, Batista said chatter in regard to trafficked body parts showed no spikes. Nothing that raised the usual flags. Came down to a change in management is what it did, and even though they looked new, they weren’t—they just weren’t as good at concealing it.
“That true, Manson? You part of a restructuring phase?” It would take a little more persuading for him to give it up, but give it up he does. It involves his right eye, but it works, the man informing us that he himself was new, and the surgeon they paired him with, guy named Murphy, was far worse than he could ever be.
“You don’t say.”
“I just do ’em dead, like you saw. This guy, he doesn’t even knock ’em out sometimes. Just straps ’em down and starts to dig, big old smile plastered across the bald fucker’s face. He’s the one you should be doing this to. Not me.” The irony is hard to ignore, but the piece of shit strung up in front of me, he’d never see things from the point of view he should. Not now. Not ever. I remove his other eye as proof.
“Please, man…please! I’m just the clean-up guy!”
“You’re more than that, Manson. You just don’t know it yet.” True. And only after he gives up an address do I relieve him of his teeth, the majority like jagged stones as they hit the concrete floor.
The address is another warehouse, located past the tract housing that made up the larger parts of East Culver.
“City-owned,” Batista says. “Tried to make it as a meatpacking plant back in the nineties. Shut down for good in ’01. Shouldn’t even have power, really.”