by Beau Johnson
Inside, he brings the ghost of nicotine with him, but I keep my eyes on the Brownstone, the one fourth in line, in particular.
“No big man tonight, I see.”
“You see correct.” Would I have liked the detective there with us? Sure. But the city needed Batista more that night if I recall, and work, as with most things, it sometimes got in the way.
“We got this then. Me, you, and these Bethune boys. They ain’t going to know what hit them.” He was right, of course, as the element of surprise was ours, but Batista’s exclusion, it would change things. Not only making what we were about to embark upon somewhat harder in the end but placing us on a trajectory we’d be hard-pressed to come back from. What I must also admit is this: I failed to see what Batista saw in Alex from the start. I can’t say this was by choice either, not with any degree of certainty, as what I needed done, it was happening as I wanted it to. That being said, yes, the blinders, they may have been up after all.
Yes. They may have been up after all.
It goes pear-shaped fast. We not only miss the extra man, but from the second floor, he gets the drop on me early. I scatter, diving. The Kevlar taking one in the side as I hit the stairs on my back and return fire while attempting to negate my slide. Not good. Any of it. And this guy, cursing at me as he was, he wasn’t coming at me suppressor-free.
Doesn’t stop me from hearing Alex roar, however, and then glass, big glass, shattering from somewhere below. It coincides with a round from my Glock that finds its mark, and then the only thing the bearded piece of shit from above is interested in is plugging the leak I’d created in his neck. Two bullets more and he no longer needed to worry.
Downstairs now, in the kitchen and then through the kitchen, out onto the small patio covered in glass where I find the older Bethune, Bill, but the man, he’s no longer with us, the shards of glass sticking out of his eyes not as natural an occurrence as one might think once you’ve been chucked through a pair of patio doors.
Translation: it appeared as though Alex had had himself a moment.
Along with gunfire, rubber screaming on asphalt comes next, and I go to them both. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one. Outside lights, inside lights, all of them coming on as fast as people are pulling back curtains or stepping outside. And I wish it had gone smoother, and more times than not it usually did, but law of averages and the number of times we’d accomplished the same thing eyes-free was bound to catch up with us sooner than later.
Tonight was that night.
No sirens, not as of yet, but as I make my way to the street, I watch it occur: see Alex as he tries to remove himself from the situation he’s found himself in, but just as fast Jamie Bethune adjusts, and Alex, those headlights bearing down on him, he attempts in a last-ditch effort to jump the Camaro whole, but the speed at which the vehicle’s accelerating could only do what physics allowed it to, meeting Alex in the middle and breaking him in ways I can still hear today.
Bethune bolts, gone into the night, and I make my way to Alex. Down on my knees, I take his hand, his body at angles it shouldn’t be, blood up on his lips, that damn hoodie through it all remaining in place.
“Don’t leave...me, Bishop. Please. Don’t leave.” But I do leave him. I had to. If I wanted to continue, I had to. But there, upon that cold concrete, his body broken and his eyes like glass, it didn’t matter to Alex, us having discussed this very scenario or not. What did was he thought he was dying, and I left him as the sirens came.
This is what he never gets over.
This is why he gives me up to Mapone.
And I want to say I can’t blame him, but I do and always will. He knew the stakes. Each of them did the moment they chose to sign on. And if I had to do things over again, the only detail I’d change is to ensure I looped his large intestine around his head before I attached it to that trailer hitch. I’d make it so I could drag him longer than I come to.
I’d make it so his body followed me for days.
They save him, but he’s in a body cast for months, and once he’s back living with his mother, ends up spending more than a year in rehab learning to walk again. The number of pins and pieces of metal holding together his pelvis, knees, and right tibia enough to build a pipe bomb, maybe two. More severe was his lung, punctured; eye socket, blown; and a shattered clavicle that required not two surgeries, but three.
All told, it’s a miracle he survived at all.
But survive he does.
We eventually collect the younger Bethune during this time frame as well, adding a little something special to the time he had left once we do.
“I’m not saying you’re a stupid man, Jamie, but Christ, I can’t say you’re a smart one either.” On his knees, his arms above him and in chains, sweat and tears fall from Bethune’s face in equal measure, but Batista, he keeps at him, the big man into the heart of a bicep by the time I join them.
“It was the drugs! It was the drugs! No way I woulda done kids if I’da been sober!”
Batista, shirtless and slick with sweat himself, he wasn’t talking about the scenario that put Jamie and his brother on our radar. What the detective was on about concerned Alex and how Jamie chose to run him down.
“Who…who the fuck is Alex?”
It was enough. More than. And Batista switches off to a sledgehammer to drive his point home. First until each of the man’s calves had surrendered bone and then as a right ear is pulled along for the ride as most of the man’s upper jaw is sent west across his face. Blood, teeth, and a portion of that same jaw hitting the wall to the left about the same time I hear his bowels let go.
Beyond this remained two things: disposal and a cold war that would last until Alex sells me out to a man who had yet to step foot in Culver. It allowed for a certain type of parallel to be drawn as well—from that night on the street when Bethune runs Alex down to years later when we finally catch up to Alex and, with a Bowie knife, Batista opens him like a fish. One move more and it’s this other street Alex ends up laying upon—pushed there from the second-floor balcony of the Super 8 we track him to—that creates this through-line. More of his insides on his outside, he lay there, attempting to tell me we never cared; that it had always been about us and never about him. But that’s the thing Alex never understood. Not even as I tethered him to that hitch. It was never about us. It would fall apart if it was. It was about who we stopped and who we saved. A boy’s club we were not. An after-school special we were not. We were what we have always been. Everything I never planned to be. Everything I never wanted to be.
I would burn them until I couldn’t.
I would piss on their graves.
Back to TOC
GREATER THAN THE SUM OF MY PARTS
Has my life been greater than the sum of its parts? It had to be, and only because of the men who end up coming to see things the way I’d come to.
I’ll remove Alex from the frame straight off, and only because his betrayal came to outweigh his contribution. I do that, I have to bring up Batista and how he retires after losing parts of his face. And Ray. Christ. Poor Ray.
It left Jeramiah, the son of the man who helped kill my mother and sister.
The son of the man who saves my life not once, but twice, and only because of a mistake I can blame on no one but myself. The first time involved a man by the name of Anthony Kincaid—facilitator to the depraved and all-around nasty piece of shit—who I leave alive as an attempt at a message. It doesn’t work. Not as I intend. And years later, as it becomes clear that I’d allowed something to fester, it breaks me in ways I no longer thought I could be broken into. It ends, of course, parts of it anyway, but the damage had been done, ensuring the fight remained and remnants of Kinkaid’s subscriber list would continue to pop up from time to time.
But it’s Salazar Mapone who brings Jeramiah into my life. The second “mistake” I never should have made. With a spoon, I relieve Mapone of the only eye he had left, and u
pon the lawn he lay, leave him clawing at his face the only way blind men can. After Kincaid, you’d think I would have learned. After Kincaid, you’d think I would’ve rammed that spoon all the way through to the back of his skull. I do, however, and everything changes. Because I don’t do this, it allows Jeramiah to track Mapone and me down, the kid even infiltrating Mapone’s crew before they abduct me—doing so because of the guilt he says he feels over what his father put into play. It means years removed from April and my mother’s murder Jeramiah would step up in an office that housed a blind man, his cronies, and an axe that would have taken more than the bottom part of my right leg if he hadn’t intervened.
Does it mean there’s a god? No, not after everything I’ve seen. What I can say is this: that axe, I dream of it still.
“You tell me what I want to know, Jerry, this situation has a chance of ending differently than it’s going to.” Not the total truth, but close enough to get the information I believe the man has. Enough to get Jerry to nod his head in a way he’d yet to. The man quite different from the one we found sleeping on a couch in a basement not forty minutes ago. That man had been indignant, righteous even, even after Jeramiah fed him parts of a wall.
The construction site we now found ourselves in? Jeramiah’s idea all the way. “The man thought he got away, Bishop. Built a brand-new business to go with a brand-new life. Be a shame if he didn’t get to see it one last time. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I couldn’t. Not then and certainly not now.
Jerry continues to nod, as agreeable as a man in his position has to be, there as I hunker down to remove his gag. Behind me, Jeramiah revs the excavator, its bucket jerking twice in response to the surge of fuel. The lights atop the cage bounce in tandem to this, rocking, and the shadows that come momentarily shift up and over Jerry’s face like unstable curtains. I stare at the man, at his JERRY’S CONSTRUCTION T-shirt, then I look to the zip ties that bind him to the stakes I’d driven into the ground myself. I see him as the businessman he is, the cropped beard, the running-to-soft middle, but I also see him for what he’s always been, twenty years removed or not: a predator who needed to be put down.
“You’re going to tell me who you’ve kept contact with, Jerry. You do, Jeramiah puts the machinery away.” He nods again, the sweat from his skull racing and glistening in his beard.
“Good,” I say, and remove the gag. We regard each other once more. One second. Two. I look back to his bound appendages, feet first this time and then up to his hands. “Well,” I say, and before he gives it up, he says what he has to. “I’m not a bad man. I’m not. There are people out there…they’re worse than I could ever be.” I agree and tell Jerry as much. What I also tell him is he should have thought about such things long ago, like maybe before he paid to watch children being destroyed. He mewls at this, a pathetic little sound, and as it had before, his face attempts to recede into itself.
It’s all I can take. I stand, step back, and give Jeramiah the signal.
The reply is instant, the excavator revving up again, but this time, as the bucket descends, its motion is slow, deliberate, and from my angle looks like the top half of a dinosaur’s jaw as it pierces Jerry where Jerry would never again wear a belt.
It’s hard to hear the screams, sure, but they’re there, along with arterial spray and the sound of hips that not only give way but are obliterated by a pressure not many men get to feel.
The big machine eats, continues to eat, and then because Jeramiah is the man that he is, he lets the metal have a few bites more. Taking earth, legs, and intestines that shine in the overhead lights as he pulls the bucket back up. I watch the light in Jerry’s eyes go out. I watch the steam rise like mist from what used to be his middle. I want to say it’s an ending that fits. I want to say it’s the one he deserved.
I can’t, though. And never would.
It was time to finish things.
“The Covenant House. Got to hand it to him, Bishop. As hiding in plain sight goes, this is one for the books.” Again, Jeramiah wasn’t wrong, as “Head Mentor” at a boy’s facility for boys who’d been sexually abused, Phil Davies—the name Jerry so graciously let slip—proved he was as bold as they came.
Doesn’t stop us from taking him apart, however. If anything, it ensures the thin man receives a little something more, and as I take the axe and take his leg off at the knee, I tell him as much. As proof, a pile sits to his right not ninety minutes later, arms on top of legs, the expanding pool upon the concrete creeping and thick.
“Just a name, Phil. One name. One name and there’s no more blowtorch, no more cauterizing. Just me and this axe and a date with the underside of your chin.”
Does he hear me? Could he? At first, yes, and only after he’d been secured to the chair. Into his first shoulder, though, this is where I believe I lost him. A shame, really. But it’s happened before. Dead ends a part of the job. Would it stop us?
Not likely. Not if I could help it.
Not if I remained greater than the sum of my parts.
Back to TOC
CALL ME ISHMAEL
When they come for me, and they do come, the heads-up I receive comes courtesy of Ray and the security measures he’d set up back around year one.
“You plan on doing this, only a matter of time before someone catches on. I’m not talkin’ the law either. You know patterns more than anyone I know, Bishop, and the scum you plan on taking on, some of them might too.”
He was right, of course, but the time it actually takes for a coordinated effort to materialize is years in the making. Luck is involved here too, but I’ve found the universe, more times than not, it tends to fall on the side of people who refrain from exploiting the innocent. Not always, no, and better men than I have been unwise to lean on such a fact, but lean we sometimes do, and more of us, if we choose to be honest, we feel this is enough. It’s not. Never has been. Never would be. Not when human garbage is involved.
But here, now, with the silent alarm tripped, I watch a bank of computer screens from the house on Buchannan as the house by the airport is approached under the cover of night by men in balaclavas. Secluded, the Drummond house sat back from the street some fifty yards, its nearest neighbor a hundred yards to the right. Attached to a carport and shielded by pines, it was the latest and smallest of our safehouses. Jeramiah’s way of contributing being what it came down to. I appreciated the gesture too, just not as much as I appreciated the hardware that continued to allow me to walk limp-free.
“Where are you?” He’s close, and I give him the situation there on the burner, right down to how I thought we could end up on top of a situation that was clearly meant to bury us.
“If you’re lucky, their transport will be nearby. Find what you can. I’ll meet you at the Ronson house once you’re done.”
“You think it’s related to the Middleton thing?” I didn’t know and told Jeramiah so. What I also relay is this: the time for turning back had exited the equation about thirty seconds ago, the airport house an acceptable loss, and depending on how fast he was driving, he may want to cover his eyes.
Disconnected, I stand and watch as they continue their advance, seven of them now, my finger above a button I’ve been prepared to use since Ray upgraded this particular safe house as well. Breach completed, last one through the door, screen door closing behind him, I hit EXECUTE and do more than make the world a slightly better place in the process.
I light the night.
Even better, there’s a body occupying the van Jeramiah comes up on. The driver, Lester Dorr, he’s muscled and unibrowed, and even before we have him up in chains, I notice he’s down to half the number of ears he began the day with.
“Lester here, his boss is a man named Reggie Carbone. So, no for the Middleton thing, I guess, but this Carbone, he supposedly has the world’s biggest hard-on for you, Bishop. I mean, it’s what I’ve heard.” Lester looks from Jeramiah to me, and I can almost see him doing
the math. His voice is deep rust, the kind you get from a habit that involves more than two packs a day. “People like Reggie may be greedy, they may be selfish and evil as fuck, but you know what some of them ain’t? Stupid.”
Attitude averse, I take his other ear and ask him to elaborate.
“Motherfucker, you know who I am? I will cut off your head and use it as a cunt!”
Jeramiah grabs a hammer, “Lester, something tells me you say that to all the ladies.”
It’s enough. The man exhales, his body loosens. “You’re a ghost,” he says. “Or at least you used to be.” He continues. Gives up names and places. Many of them I recall, some not so much, but in my defense, there’d been a lot of years between that particular point in time and the first man I put into the ground. Either way, our attention spikes when a one-armed man enters Lester’s story. “This guy, he’s hanging around the Red Onion and asking a few too many questions, know what I mean?” I did. And in the length of that one sentence, it becomes abundantly clear I had no one but myself to blame for our current state of affairs. If I was right, one-armed Billy and a little recon mission I sent him on years prior was coming back on us in ways I never foresaw.
“Someone then snaps a picture of this one-armed guy, but it’s the other guy in the picture, this other guy being you, that Reggie can’t leave alone. Calls him his white whale. Whatever the fuck that means.”
I knew what it meant. Had been cutting the heart out of my own for years. The difference between the two of us coming down to similarities I couldn’t dismiss: Reggie, he wasn’t Ahab. Sadly, neither was I.
“And the industry Reggie’s in, the service he provides, it ain’t goin’ away, Rider. You may think you’re righteous. Christ, you may even believe it, but man, know this: he is coming for yo—”