by Beau Johnson
Not always, no. That’d be unrealistic. But like this spoon here, there’s a first time for everything. And even though it may look a little large for the undertaking, I’m sure we’ll make do. If not, well, maybe start praying to that God you used to believe in.
Unlike you, I’m good either way.
Back to TOC
MISSION BOUND/POT COMMITTED
My sister’s body is never recovered. The same could not be said of my mother’s. Her neck broken, Maggie Rider is found facedown in the bottom of a dumpster, the majority of her head submerged beneath a liquid that wasn’t really liquid at all. I put her to rest in a cemetery beside a father I never knew, and when I can, I take solace in knowing I’d been able to do that much. April is a separate memory altogether, punctuated not by dumpster sludge or ruptured vertebrae, but a recording I have yet to un-see.
The day six men in masks first rape then rip my sister apart.
It’s the reason I have chosen to do what I do. It’s the reason I have never stopped. It’s also the reason I have at times gotten ahead of myself.
I could blame the rage. I could blame my hate. But mostly it’s a combination of the two, coupled with what a particular type of person believes in: the assumption that a certain kind of life could be lived consequence-free.
It means I’m great at parties. Ones I put into motion, anyway.
“You have anything left to say, now would be the time. A name you may have forgotten. Who knows, could make this end differently if you do.” Otto looks down to me from the hoist, his milky right eye a thing of fury. In dark blue coveralls that proclaimed Don Otto “did it by the book,” he’s chained at the wrists and suspended three feet off the ground. On either side of us are stripped-down vehicles, their hoods up, engine blocks out, the entire body shop thick with the smell of rubber and oil.
“I know I’m not leaving this place, so fucking go ahead, get on with it. Fucking guys like you, you think you’re better than guys like me. You ain’t better. You’re fucking weak.” He was right about one thing: I wasn’t better than him. I never would be. The axe I was holding proving his entire goddamn point.
“You ready, boss?” Jeramiah asks, and as we move into position on either side of a man who was more monster than human, the caged lights above us flicker, and I reiterate to Otto that we’d only be needing half of him to get our point across. Perhaps a tad more.
“Wait...just...wait,” and I smell what he can no longer contain before I hear it begin to drip from his boots. But it’s too late, as Jeramiah is not only mission bound, but pot committed, his axe and its pathway into a love handle and the meat it finds there before I’m even halfway to mid-swing. We might have stopped there, sure, and it may well have yielded us another name, but sometimes the time was just the time, and sometimes things hold a momentum of their own.
It takes longer than you’d think too, and I admit our rhythm could have played a part in this, but once Jeramiah hits the man’s spine for a second time, six feet quickly turns into three. Parts lingered, however. Not only dripping and swaying but continuing to drop as we begin to towel off.
We weren’t finished, though. And Jeramiah, he uses Otto’s blood to write FOLLOW THE CHILDREN on the closed bay door in front of us. He underlines it too, and this part, it wasn’t new.
Did it work? It had in the past, steering law enforcement in directions I felt we could not go. Not if we wished to continue. It also pulled us from the fire once upon a time, back when we taught a certain Reverend how to fly.
I’d like to say it continued to do so. I couldn’t, though.
If anything, those three words, they end up changing the game.
It creates a task force is what it does, but one I wouldn’t know about for years. The possibility of one forming had crossed my mind, and I own up to the thought. Doing so does not absolve me of abusing what we started, however. If anything, it takes me back to what I said about getting ahead of one’s self, and how, if one weren’t careful, it was entirely possible to become beholden to the very thing you were trying to extinguish. It showed no matter how many pieces of shit I put down, no matter how many we burned, we can in the end become our own worst enemies.
Some more so than others.
We’d survive, of course, and make a few new friends along the way, but we had unfinished business to attend to first—the name Otto had given us for starters, the one Jeramiah and I extracted before taking away his need for a belt.
“Harken, John J. On paper, the man seems legit. You dig a little deeper, bingo, shit-bird extraordinaire.” Jeramiah shows me what he’d found, a video he’d taken of men moving girls from one fuck-house to another.
“And it’s not just those six girls, Bishop. Harken, this thing, however big it is, he’s not only been at it for a while, but in it for the long haul.”
“You see a way in?” I ask and pass him back his phone. We’re beside the Ronson place, the east side of Culver down and to the left of us. Lit up, it appeared as any other city did while it slept. If only it were true.
“Funny you should mention that.” He says, then smiles. “How fast you think Ray can modify a Crown Vic?”
No question: fast enough.
By night, Harken was the monster I knew him to be, and one I had crossed paths with more times than I care to acknowledge. By day, however, he wore a suit and tie, and on the money side of Culver, fooled the world into thinking him an investment banker. Slick hair and a slicker smile, he kept himself in shape. Would it help him? Not in the end. Not once I relieved him of his hands.
But our plan, like the driving service Harken was partial to using and our eventual co-opting of it, it had to be modified as well. Harken was too big a fish not to make a message of, but as ever, precautions had to be taken. It meant we wouldn’t be storming the fifty-fifth floor of his building as Jeramiah wanted us to. Nor would we remove Harken’s hands and feet and leave him to dangle from outside his office window in an attempt at changing the narrative. No, Jeramiah and I, we tried that dance before. I didn’t care for the taste. Not once I understood just how close the CCPD had gotten to us.
It meant a new plan was in order. One that would draw the same amount of attention but none of the heat. And no matter how many ways I envisioned it going wrong, it had to be done.
“If it works for you, Bishop, it works for me.” Jeramiah’s arms rest on the railing of the bridge we would use, the one that sat in front of the skyscraper Harken worked in. “And from here, shit, they’re all going to see him on their way to work anyway. If anything, maybe it’s a better plan.”
In the end, it was.
How far can connections take a man? With regard to Harken, quite far it seemed. And once Harken, his car salesman–like smile on full display in the back of the Vic, spouts the address he wants him and his business buddy taken to, everything doubles. Guilt by association? You’re goddamn right.
I drop the locks. I start the Vic.
Harken’s buddy, a less-than-athletic redhead sporting a ponytail, he takes it upon himself to start the night’s festivities, hitting the displayed champagne first, pouring two glasses and passing one to Harken. “A toast for what’s to come,” he says. “For the fun times ahead.”
It doesn’t take long after that. Not once the sedative kicks in.
What does is the time it takes to transfer them to the van and how awkward it becomes to remove appendages as we were. The bone saw does what it was meant to though, but Ponytail bleeds out before we get him into the chains and over the side of the bridge. Harken, however, is all eyes and slurs and groggy screams as Jeramiah takes him under one arm and I grab the other.
The placard—FOLLOW THE CHILDREN—is already over his chains, there between his necklace of feet, and in time, it does in fact net us the gains we hoped it would, just not as we thought. Harken would never know this, of course, and as he continued to stare and absorb the place his hands used to be, we send him to the place h
e needed to be.
In the van, we don’t look back. Not mentally, anyway. My mind already forward and onto other things. Fuck-houses, mainly. And one in particular. Jeramiah changes lanes, merges again, and in time takes an off-ramp we both knew was coming. Would the house be empty? Or would it be full? We didn’t know. Not at the time.
Either way, we pressed on. We finished the work.
Back to TOC
LONG PAST GONE
Before Batista was fully on board, I had Ray and one-armed Billy. From a different time and place I’d also like to forget, they knew war as I knew war, each of them not only understanding why I leave Kuwait early but choosing to join what I begin.
“You ever need a change of scenery, Bishop, just drop on by the farm. My pigs, you know what they like.” In the years that followed, I take Billy up on this proposition more times than I probably should have, and every time goes pretty much the same, with Billy greeting me in dirty fatigues and a smile that consisted of more gum than teeth.
Early days, indeed.
Ray, on the other hand, though shorter than Billy, proved a little more adept at hygiene. He was also the man who shielded Billy from the IED that took away Billy’s ability to catch fastballs. Ray took on metal himself, sure, but the homemade Kevlar he’d added to what they’d given us over there did what he believed it would. It’s what sends both of them back into my life and, honorably discharged, back into a different kind of war.
“Drain cleaner and a hacksaw, Bishop. I’m in for either, but together I’m pretty sure it’ll get us the answers you’re looking for.”
The man, he wasn’t wrong, but as the three of us go forward, the answers I chased revealed themselves slower than I liked. It doesn’t stop us, however, and in a basement retrofitted by Ray himself, reductions occur, ends are met, and names that never knew I existed are given up between screams and blood.
I take these moments. I embrace them. Ensuring they work.
Which leads us to a point in time I don’t much care for but accept all the same.
Kincaid.
“Man has his hands in some very nasty pies,” Ray says, and the overhead light coming in through the passenger side of the van cuts the picture of Kincaid in his lap in half. Prophetic? Perhaps. But what would come to remain of the man’s face would be nowhere near as seamless. “Not saying it’ll bag us anything with regard to your sister, but this fuckstick, he needs to be put down.”
Truer words had never been spoken. But I was young then. Raw. My ambition and grief combining in ways I could not see.
It meant I allowed a man to live when he should have died, and the carnage that followed, the network he creates, the subscriber list that comes of it, it follows me still.
Mistakes, I’ve made a few.
He’s in a bathrobe when he opens the door. My greatest mistake, the man I would let live not once, but twice, greeting me in light blue terry cloth that’s not even cinched at the waist.
I punch him in the throat.
He gasps for breath, hands to the affected area, as I walk past him. Ray comes in behind me, flak jacket open, black duffel bag in hand. Setting it down, he goes forward, room by room, and once his sweep is complete, joins us in the kitchen where I already have Kincaid strapped to a chair. The room here is large and modern, and stainless steel coats the majority of it. Fronted by an island, more steel hung from above; pot, pans, all of it looking as though it hadn’t been used.
“You play nice, this’ll all be over soon. You don’t, well, you look like you’re the type of man who can figure things out.” His hair is that of someone who sleeps hard, slick and matted to the sides of his head. His eyes, however, are fire, and even before he begins, I knew I’d need the gag.
“You have fucked the wrong dog, buddy! You have any idea who I am?”
I assumed the question was rhetorical. Ray, and the way he introduces Kincaid to the butt end of his sawed-off, did not. Teeth come next, parts of them anyway, falling and bouncing off the man’s knees before they tic to the floor.
“Fuckkkk!” But it’s all I give him—no more until he understood this for what it was. I pull out the gag.
“First we’re going to talk about those movies you make. The ones you feel the need to star in. After that, you’re going to give us some names. Nod if you believe.”
He did. The fire in his eyes not as blazing as it had been. Ray, like their time together with the shotgun, is beyond this, of course, and in protest takes an axe to the top of Kincaid’s right knee for the trouble. Kincaid’s body spasms in response, then goes rigid, and we lose him for a good twenty minutes. Enough time so when he does come back around, we have that right leg gone, cauterized at the knee, and the rest of him bound to his kitchen table that continued to drip in ways it wasn’t meant to.
Shin in hand, Ray steps forward, “I take it we understand one another now?”
He did. Of course he did. But what he tells us, the names he gives up, it sends me to a place I have yet to return from.
And for the second time in as many years, my life, it changed again.
But it wasn’t the only name. The Bone boys are given up too, along with the Abrum brothers. Odonnavitch is spoken of. Dolan. Even after that shit with Mick the Fish.
It’s too much. It’s not enough. It’s a smoking gun and whispers that run up your spine in the dark.
Abrum: the man who put my mother and sister into the ground.
But I wasn’t done. Not then. And this is what forms to become my mistake.
I wanted to make an example of Kincaid, so men like him would think twice before doing the things he’d done. But men like Kincaid don’t think. They only take. Steamrolling upon lives they deem weaker than their own.
Believing they deserved.
It’s why I take a bolt cutter to Kincaid’s penis and then do the same to his nose. Why I choose to remove his other leg at the knee and then both arms at the elbow.
I wanted him as living, breathing proof. For others to know that a man like me was out there, and at any time, what remained of Kincaid could be the thing that remained of them.
I wanted him to bleed.
And he did, but not before he’s found, a wheelchair and catheter becoming his new best friends. The middle of his face much like the inside of a deflated football by the time they close him, but alive all the same.
All because I had yet to learn.
But I would learn, and I do. Both Abrum and Kincaid long past gone at this point in the proceedings.
And no, it was not a perfect plan. Not at the start. But for April and my mother, it got me to the places I needed to be. The places I wanted to be.
It allowed me to say goodbye.
Back to TOC
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
They kill the youngest Acosta boy last. Doing so at the behest of Satan. Was it true? Fuck no. Hearing voices in one’s head rarely is. But it’s the strategy each brother chooses to employ, sticking with it until they realize they couldn’t, and then they are put away.
Twenty-five to life for each family member. You carry the one, it puts Jamie and Bill Bethune behind bars well into the next century. Best case scenario, they go through some heartache inside, each man learning what it’s like to have something stolen from them. Fingers, maybe. Perhaps some spleen.
But let’s say you add one integer more, say a shit DA who doesn’t disclose what they should have in the first place, and suddenly a century becomes a decade, and decimal points removed from the equation, somewhat less than that.
“Both brothers? On the same day?” Concern slides across Ray’s lined face, his glasses off the top of his head as he means to look closer at each man’s jacket.
“They want to make a spectacle of it. Some district attorney with reverse engineering on their mind. Either way, it gets stopped as soon as we find a window.” We’re in Ray’s garage, and not far from Boyle Heights and the place on Buchannan. He grabs
a lawn chair, sits, his dark blue coveralls riding up to show me his aversion to socks remained alive and well. On either side of us, running the length of the garage, sit two worktables, each full of “toys” in varying degrees of development. Did all of Ray’s “toys” work? No. Not all. But the ones that did, those are the ones I’ve only ever cared about.
“I’m in. You know this. Makes me think there may be another reason you’re here.” Good old Ray. If I had a conscience, he’d be it. And this isn’t a knock toward Batista, as John has always been the best at what he does, but with regard to things involving Alex, let’s just say the detective has always been less than inclined.
“The kid has always been volatile, Bishop. Then again, so have you.” The man had me there. Not totally, as I’ve always seen myself as polished volatile, but I took his meaning nonetheless.
“Might be time we parted ways is what it’s gotten to. Think I just needed another set of ears.”
And I did. I just wish I’d discussed it at greater length. If I did, I maybe start things earlier. Maybe save myself some pain, part of a leg, and a hunt that lasts for years. Either way, we get to the bottom of it, but here, now, the larger concern was not Alex’s incoming betrayal, but instead two dirtbags, a deceased family of four, and a payment that had come due.
Time to go to work.
I hear him before I see him. Up on the passenger side of the van, a shadowed body in the dark, his boots dragging. He doesn’t open the passenger door of the van right away either, just stands there in profile, his hoodie up, what light there is casting shadows down over his angular face as he finishes his smoke.