Butcher's Road

by Lee Thomas

  “All the more reason for you to leave him alone.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared, daring him to try getting past her. “I’ve told your friends everything there is to tell. My father needs his breath for living.”

  “Then you’ll have to tell me.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “I see it differently,” Lennon said. The sleepless night had frayed his nerves and he found himself overly aggravated with the woman’s attitude. Normally, he knew how to manage a beautiful woman, but rarely had the type he’d met exhibited such strength, and while he might admire the trait, it was seriously grating behind his eyes. He tried to think his way out of the anger, but his temper scratched the inside of his skull like a rat trying to escape.

  “See it anyway you please,” Molly said, fixing him with a scowl. “Now, get out of my father’s room.”

  Lennon shot out his hand to grab Molly’s arm. He’d shake the information loose if he had to. But he didn’t get that chance.

  Molly snapped her arm across her body in a smooth, powerful swipe that knocked Lennon’s hand away before he could fix his grip. Then she slid to the side and with a motion that looked like an underhand toss, she planted her hand in Lennon’s crotch and squeezed until he doubled over. Nausea rolled around his gut and began climbing his throat.

  Anger and embarrassment joined the sick feeling that roiled in his belly.

  “Enough,” a weak voice said from the room in front of him.

  “Dad?” Molly said, turning her attention away from Lennon, whose nuts she still held in her hand. “You’re awake.”

  “Mmm,” the old man agreed. “I wish those were flowers you were holding.”

  Molly turned back to Lennon, who was about to drop to his knees. Mortification blossomed across her face. Quickly, she snatched her hand away, and Lennon could breathe again.

  He leaned back on the doorjamb and gasped in the stink of ammonia. A steady pulse, like drum beats, filled his ears. Over the years he’d grown uncomfortable, even contemptuous, of his wife’s compliance. Looking at Molly Sullivan, he knew a woman like this would never ask his permission for…well anything, and despite the ache in his groin, or rather because of it, he found himself admiring the young woman for more than her milk-white skin, fine bones, and a body of movie star proportions.

  She crossed to her father’s bed and asked, “Why won’t you leave him alone?”

  “Best listen to her, son,” Sullivan whispered, his voice quiet but harsh as gravel. “She’ll change your tune—baritone to soprano in under a second.”

  “I noticed,” Lennon said. He tried to smile to make light of having been bested by a woman, but the expression felt false and he let it fade. “But I’m trying to help Butch Cardinal, and I think you have information I need.”

  “He’s with the police,” Molly said—a warning to her father.

  “Then we have nothing to say.”

  He’s a smart one, Lennon thought. If he were in the old Irishman’s position, he’d keep his mouth shut, too.

  “Will you at least tell me what the man who stabbed you looked like?”

  “I gave a description—”

  “I know. But I don’t want anyone at my department to know I’m looking into this. I don’t much trust them myself.”

  Molly cast a look at her father, who was rolling his head all but imperceptibly on the pillow: No.

  “You set him up,” Sullivan croaked. “Butch was a good guy, a gentleman, and you’ve thrown him to wolves.”

  Lennon knew that Sullivan was speaking in general terms. By “you” he meant the whole crooked brotherhood of the Chicago Police Department, but Lennon took it personally.

  “I need to get a doctor. They’ll want to know Dad is awake,” Molly said. “And you need to leave. Come on.”

  She grabbed his arm, much in the way he’d attempted to grab hers before she’d shown him how little she liked the idea. Yanking at him, she tugged until he quit the bedside and followed her into the hall. Once there, she led him away from the room. Near the end of the corridor at the top of the stairs, she whipped around and fixed him with an ugly glare.

  “He’s in New Orleans,” she said.

  “Cardinal?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “He’s staying with a man named Hollis Rossington. I don’t know the address. I don’t know anything else about it.”

  “So you believe me?” Lennon asked.

  “No,” Molly said. “The fact is, I don’t care. I don’t give two goddamns about Butch Cardinal, but I want you to lay off of my father. He nearly died this morning—twice. So if telling you how to find that muscle head will keep him safe, then I’m happy to tell. But if another one of you thugs tries to strong-arm my dad, and I don’t care if you’re wearing gray flannel or blue wool, I will get my gun and lay you flat.”

  “Duly noted,” Lennon said. “And the man who shot your father?”

  “Old,” Molly said. “Not as old as dad, but getting there. Around fifty. Average height, maybe on the short side, but stocky, and as crazy as a snake on a stick.”

  Lennon thanked her. She scowled at him and set off to find a doctor, leaving him alone to consider what she’d told him. She’d provided a familiar description for her father’s attacker. But if the man worked for Impelliteri, Lennon didn’t know him, which meant he wasn’t one of the usual hitters on the Italian’s crew; he was something different. Outside talent? A lunatic Marco Impelliteri kept crated until a special case presented itself?

  “Crazy as a snake on stick,” he muttered. The term made him smile.

  Lennon started down the stairs. He slapped his hat back on his head and began thinking about New Orleans.

  Chapter 27

  Killing Grounds

  In the far south of the city, Paul Rabin lay on a hard, cold table. The man hovering over him, Dr. Louis Somerville, poked and prodded the hole in Rabin’s side with a cold shining instrument and hummed a popular tune that Rabin couldn’t identify. Rabin swam in and out of lucidity, riding waves of morphine up toward the shockingly bright light, and then back down to a gray murk of random thoughts and images. When he was lucid, his mind absolutely clear, he considered his actions of the past two days—the boy, the cop, the Paddy. Those attacks worried him in that they suggested a loss of control, something he found unacceptable. He’d always been rational when performing his services for Impelliteri and others. Calm and precise. But his conversation with Irene had sent him tumbling; her words had stripped away his carefully maintained character, sending him back to the feral, reckless days of his youth. Before her revelation, he would never have allowed someone to sneak up on him while he was working. For that matter, he never would have casually stood and conversed with the neighbor of a victim, giving her time to analyze his face. As a boy, making a reputation, he’d exhibited such ridiculous arrogance, but he’d thought those days were long gone. Buried. To see them return so virulently was unsettling. He needed to cage the monster again. Needed to rebuild his mask.

  “Went clean through,” Dr. Somerville said. “I’ll get you stitched, and after a couple of weeks you’ll probably be fine as frog’s hair. My only concern is that the bullet may have nicked the liver. Nothing I can do about that. I just do quick patches.”

  Somerville began humming again. He indelicately slapped a wad of gauze against Rabin’s side and fixed it in place with a broad ribbon of tape. Then he helped Rabin roll onto his stomach, where the hard tabletop pressed against his jaw. Instead of watching the doctor, Rabin closed his eyes. He felt a tugging at his skin as the doctor sutured the exit wound but no real pain.

  He slipped deeper into the morphine. It was warm and fluid, like a bath in mud, and memories swam there, sliding up to Rabin and revealing themselves before being pushed away, covered, and replaced by some other long-ago moment. Men died, kneeling before the muzzle of his gun. Men died, tearing their necks apart with fingernails as they tried to loosen Rabin’s rope. Men died, surp
rised by the cold and efficient shaft of his ice pick. A dozen lives on the end of his knives. A dozen more keeping his bullets warm.

  And Rabin wandered the street fair, holding Irene’s hand. Smiling. All around them, nondescript people paraded up and down the blocks. Children ran through the shifting forest of legs, and they shrieked their pleasure to the brisk evening air. Irene looked at them with joy in her eyes, perhaps imagining a mother’s future. Rabin squeezed her hand, as if to assure her he shared her hope for parenthood. His façade, carefully constructed and wholly convincing, covered him like armor. They stopped for glasses of beer and Irene cooed at a cheap brooch made from tin and glass. It lay on a black cloth, which fell over the merchant’s table like velvet in a jeweler’s display. On the far end of the table, Rabin saw a hunting knife. Its thick blade twinkled though it was late evening and there seemed to be too little light for such an effect. Rabin grasped its ivory handle and held the weapon in the air.

  Then his bones and organs and muscles came apart. Every molecule separated, leaving him as a dense cloud, though still able to hold and to control the knife. Irene looked at him and clapped her tiny hands together. Smiling. Rabin felt his cloud-body expand and contract and begin to wring itself. He moved like a tornado into the crowd. Happy children. Young lovers. The aged and the frail. They passed before him and they fell behind him. Up and down the block he flew, rising and falling like a child’s balloon on heavy currents. Ahead of him, Butch Cardinal crouched, arms out in a typical grappling pose, and Rabin wondered how he might recognize a man he’d never met, and then he remembered a photograph in a newspaper. And then he didn’t remember it at all. He knew Cardinal because he’d always known him, was fated to know this opponent. Beside the wrestler, Marco Impelliteri held out an envelope. The gangster’s head was lowered and the brim of his hat concealed the man’s face, but it didn’t matter what expression rode his flesh. It would all be paste soon enough. Rabin shot toward the two men and in moments they disappeared into a frothing cascade of blood and meat. Then he continued through the fair, leaving holes and bloody lines on everyone he passed, and in seconds, no time at all, he again stood before Irene. The knife in his hand had transformed into something red and pulsing and alive. Irene swept her head from side to side, observing her husband’s handiwork.

  No longer suitable for carriages or pedestrians, the streets had become an abattoir. Blood, made black by moonlight, painted the heaps of meat and clothing littering the pavement. Across from the trinket table, a woman sat propped against the wheel of a mule cart. Her eyes were gone, leaving pits that spilled tar black blood down her cheeks. In her arms she held the headless body of a child.

  Smiling, Irene pressed her palms together under her chin as if in giddy prayer. She turned to Rabin and said, “I love you.”

  Chapter 28

  Into Fire

  The clouds rolled overhead, great black foam shot through with steel-gray veins. Though he had dozed for a minute or two, to daydream about beaches and sunlight, a sudden, piercing dread brought on by a momentary recollection of Lonnie Musante’s murder—the twig-snap sound of the gunshots, the blood—flooded Butch’s system with adrenaline. He sat up in the chair in Delbert Keane’s courtyard and rolled his neck to loosen the muscles there. As he did so, his host emerged from the house, scratching his back with his left hand. His right hand was empty.

  “No coffee?” Butch asked.

  “It’ll need another minute to perk,” Keane said. “I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about you.”

  “You really shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. I should be on my way.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Keane said. He had reached the bottom of the stoop and was walking toward Butch, still scratching at his back with his hand. “Stay.”

  “You’ve done enough. Thank you, Mr. Keane.” Butch stood and held out his hand to shake that of his host.

  “You misunderstand,” Keane said. He pulled his hand away from his back. Gripped in his fist was a knife, unlike any Butch had ever seen. Layers of sharp planes wove and jutted like flickering silver flames from the handle. “I can’t let you leave.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Butch said. He had been ready to leave the property believing the charm in his pocket really was nothing but shit on a string as the shopkeeper, Mercer, had told him.

  He slid to the side so that the heavy iron table with its tiled surface separated him from Keane.

  The man gripped the edge of the table and knocked it away. The metal frame clattered. Tiles soared free and shattered on the rock.

  “We’re not done, yet, Mr. Cardinal,” Keane said. “And I’m not letting you leave with the Rose.”

  In the middle of his patio garden, beside the upturned table and chair, Keane crouched in a fighting position. His knife moved with subtle fluidity as he stirred the air with the flame-like blades.

  Butch backed up a step and planted his feet. Already the gears in his head were clicking into place. He understood fighting. Though he felt uneasy about his opponent’s weapon, he was on familiar ground for the first time in days.

  “So you do know what this thing is?” Butch asked.

  “I know it doesn’t belong to you, and I know you’ve killed men, my associates, so that you could steal it. I also know that you are going to give it to me and face a tribunal for your crimes or you’re going to die where you stand.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, and I didn’t steal it.”

  “The tribunal will decide what you did or didn’t do.” Keane stepped forward. He slashed the blade through the air, waving it like a conductor’s wand.

  Butch examined the situation. He checked his immediate surrounding for resources and settled on the heavy chair he’d just vacated. With a smooth pivoting motion, Butch scooped up the chair and launched it at Keane’s legs. The wrought-iron frame cracked against the man’s shins, sending him tumbling to the stone patio. This gave Butch the opportunity to move in, but Keane recovered quickly, rolling backward and getting his feet under him. He again took a fighting stance, facing off on Butch.

  He needed to keep Keane off balance. He stepped wide with his left foot. Keane did as expected and moved his right foot back, which also drew his fighting arm away. Now Keane would have to reach across his own body to slash. It wasn’t a dramatic advantage, but it meant Butch would have more reaction time when Keane attempted to cut him.

  “What is this Rose supposed to do?” Butch asked.

  “That knowledge stays with the Alchemi.”

  “The what?”

  Keane shook his head. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  The man lunged forward, sidestepping the chair. He drew the knife low across his waist and when he neared Butch, he whipped it upward. Butch saw the trajectory of the attack and bent backwards and to the side. The tip of the knife cut through his shirt and nicked his chest. Head filling with the familiar rush of adrenaline, Butch spun out of the way, and Keane’s second attempt missed him completely.

  As he backed away from Keane a scorched scent reached Butch’s nose, and he discovered it came from his own body. The edges of the tear in his shirt were black. They smoked. He felt the sting of blisters rising at the sides of his minor wound. He didn’t know what to make of it. Had Keane heated the blade on the stove fire?

  Keane, his mouth set in a determined frown, came for him again. He held the knife low as he charged. Butch hurried backward until his back pressed against the wall of ivy on the far side of the patio. When Keane was within four steps, Butch faded left and then danced to the right. The bluff worked. Keane turned toward where he thought Butch would be and yanked the knife upward with a vicious slash, drawing a black line along the green blanket of ivy. Bits of vine, smoking and with embers burning at their cut edges, dropped to the patio and smoldered.

  From the side, Butch threw a left jab and connected solidly with Keane’s jaw. He followed with a battering right to the man’s eye, and though Keane wavered, he propped himself
against the wall and remained on his feet. Butch moved in and reached for the man’s wrist to get the uncommon blade under control, but Keane touched his blade point to Butch’s forearm. It scalded like hot grease and Butch relinquished his grip and backed away as Keane came slashing at him. Distracted by the man and his knife, Butch nearly tripped over the wrought-iron chair he’d thrown at Keane, but managed to keep his balance.

  At this point, Butch knew something about his opponent. The man was armed, but he was not an expert with his weapon. If he had been, Butch’s wounds would have been far more severe, or he’d be lying dead on the patio. The fact the man was a lefty threw him. Even though the attacks were easy to predict, they came at uncommon angles and Butch had to recalibrate his thoughts to them. Still, he knew he could win this fight but he needed to keep that blade off his skin.

  He lifted the chair and held it in front of him like a trainer taming a lion. It occurred to him to once again throw the chair and use Keane’s distraction to make his escape, but the man recognized the necklace; he might have the information Butch needed to stay alive, so he couldn’t just run. Not yet.

  “How about you give me the Rose?” Keane said. “Then you can walk. We will find you, but you could consider this a reprieve.”

  “I don’t think so,” Butch said. “Not until I know what it does.”

  Keane leaned to the right then dodged to the left, but Butch anticipated this fake and he kept the chair between them. Sweat covered the older man’s brow. His eyes ticked wildly from side to side looking for a hole in Butch’s defense.

  “You don’t even know what you have,” Keane said. “Why die for it?”

  “That’s the question I keep asking, but no one’s answering it.”

  Butch stepped forward with the intent of backing Keane to the wall. Up to this point he’d let the man lead the fight, but it was time to get this situation under control. Keane went where Butch herded him; he kept the knife up and checked his periphery to make sure he didn’t trip as he backed to the wall. Finally, realizing the corner he was facing, Keane dodged to the left and Butch lifted the chair high and threw it, putting all of his strength behind the toss.