Butcher's Road

by Lee Thomas

  Butch struggled to keep his eyes on the scene below.

  Though he told himself it wasn’t possible, Mr. Brand, the man Detective Lennon had shot that afternoon, stared up at Butch. In his hand he held the copper staff. With a flick of his wrist, the staff drooped like a ribbon and then climbed up the man’s skinny arm, wrapping itself like a snake as it rose to his bicep. Mr. Brand saluted Butch and then made his way into the house.

  Light blossomed from the crystal chandelier hanging over the foyer. Butch blinked away the sudden glare. A moment later Brand appeared in the foyer. He walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

  “Mr. Cardinal,” he said.

  “You should stay down there,” Butch replied.

  “I intend to,” Mr. Brand said. “And you’ll come and join me.”

  Butch aimed the gun. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d better be a good shot,” Mr. Brand said. “Better than your friend at any rate.”

  “So you’re invincible?”

  Mr. Brand laughed. He parted the lapels of his shirt, revealing a bib of golden metal beneath. “No, Mr. Cardinal, just very well prepared.”

  Was he supposed to believe that a thin mesh of metal had stopped Lennon’s bullet? And then he did believe it, because there was no other explanation. After the things he’d seen, was this really so miraculous?

  “Where’s your pal?”

  “He’s crossing the courtyard now. Would you rather speak with him?”

  “I’d rather you both left.”

  Hayes stepped into the foyer and surveyed the house with a slow, sweeping glance. Though not as badly injured as his friend, Hayes’s jaw was swollen and the color of a plum.

  “We should talk first,” Mr. Brand said. He cocked his head to the side and continued smiling, eyeing Butch as he might a dog doing tricks. “It’s become clear that we’re on the same side.”

  “I suppose you attacking me with a knife this afternoon kind of threw me off.”

  “That’s when we realized we were on the same side, Mr. Cardinal,” Mr. Hayes said, stepping up to the side of his companion. “The metals live for you, the way they live for us.”

  “And that automatically makes me a good guy?” Butch asked.

  “Not in and of itself,” said Hayes. “But we tracked down your detective friend after he left you this afternoon. He clarified several issues for us.”

  “He’s okay?” Butch asked.

  “We didn’t harm him, if that’s what you’re asking. We had a pleasant chat. He seemed extremely relieved and grateful to find Mr. Brand in such good health.”

  “Okay, so you’re the Alchemi,” Butch said.

  “We belong to the Alchemi, yes,” Hayes said. “I imagine Mr. Keane told you about us.”

  “Not really. He didn’t say much of anything useful.”

  “Well, we’d be glad to answer any questions you might have. If you’d rather not chat, we would be happy to take the Galenus Rose and be on our way. We have no interest in harming you, unless you interfere.”

  “The Rose is a fake,” Butch said.

  “I can assure you it’s not,” Hayes replied.

  Butch kept his aim on Hayes and fished beneath his shirt until he had the worthless piece of metal in his fist. He yanked, snapping the chain, and tossed the necklace down the stairs. Hayes caught it. His eyes lit with excitement and then dimmed. Hayes frowned.

  “You’ve made a replica,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “No,” Butch said, “I didn’t. That is the same piece that Musante gave me in Chicago. I didn’t even know what it was supposed to do until this afternoon.”

  The men at the bottom of the stairs exchanged a glance. Neither looked happy. Hayes turned his attention back to Butch. “Then I suppose we can guess what’s become of the original.”

  “I think so,” Butch said. “Lonnie Musante. He didn’t die in Chicago, or if he did, he didn’t stay that way.”

  • • •

  The standoff on the staircase lasted only another minute. Butch lowered the gun. He didn’t exactly trust the men, but he knew they believed his story. Killing him wouldn’t get them what they wanted, and if Dauphine Marcoux was right, they’d want him on their side. Butch put the gun in his waistband and walked down the stairs. He remained tense through the introductions, shaking the men’s hands, but they made no suspicious moves. They followed him into the parlor on the far side of the foyer. Both men stood as Butch sat on the red velvet settee. He’d been on his feet for hours, and fatigue was setting in hard.

  “You understand it is difficult for us to believe Mr. Musante succeeded in keeping the Rose for himself?” Hayes asked. “The idea presents a number of questions.”

  “I think he screwed his boss, too,” Butch said, ignoring Hayes as he tried to put things together. “The way Musante set this up, it wasn’t just to throw your people off his tail. My guess is Impelliteri paid a good deal of money for the Galenus Rose. That’s why I’ve got every hood in the country looking for me. He doesn’t know I’ve got a fake.” Butch noted the frustration on the men’s faces and found it insulting. They’d lost their bauble and a bit of their time; he’d lost his entire life because of Musante’s game. He was further aggravated to realize he’d played the game exactly as Musante had intended. “The whole time I was in Musante’s place he was warning me about what was going to happen. He told me there was a shooter outside, told me we were both about to die. He kept on about it, and I couldn’t figure out why, and the simple answer was, he wanted me to escape. Musante knew I’d be framed for the crime because he had a cop execute the hit, and the cop had to blame someone. He also knew that would mean my name would be in the papers fast so Impelliteri had himself a target. He wanted all eyes on me—cops, Impelliteri, you guys—so he could do whatever was necessary to vanish forever. It didn’t matter if I got caught a day later or a year later or never got caught at all. He just needed a window of time and a decoy.”

  “But Mr. Musante was cremated,” Hayes said. “We have witnesses who can account for him at every point between his house and the furnace. Believe me, we considered this possibility from the beginning.”

  “Then someone made a mistake or was paid off,” Butch said. “Unless whoever sold the thing to Musante sold him a phony.”

  “We believe he had the original.”

  “Could he have used it to fake his own death? Would it have brought him back from two bullets to the chest?”

  “Very possibly,” Hayes admitted. “Long before it came under our protection it was used by religious zealots and high courts as an instrument of torture. During interrogation prisoners would be abused to the point of death, and if they managed to maintain their secrets, then the Galenus Rose was used to heal them, so the torture could start over again.”

  “Why wasn’t the Rose found on Musante?” Butch said. “The police would have collected any personal items on him. Hell, the cop who murdered him would have had plenty of time to grab it, if he knew what he was looking for.”

  “They wouldn’t have seen it,” Hayes said. “By the time your authorities reached Mr. Musante, the Galenus Rose was already at work. On an injured body, The Rose dissolves and takes on a consistency not unlike mercury before fragmenting into microscopic motes. For a moment a mist is visible above the skin, and then nothing. It makes its way to the wounds and it repairs the damage. With wounds as serious as those Mr. Musante incurred, it might take days for the Rose to complete its mending. His body could be searched inside and out and the icon wouldn’t have been found.”

  “Then I think you have your answer,” Butch said. “And since he has a serious head start, he could be about anywhere in the world by now, laughing it up at all the feeblos he had dancing for him.”

  “That’s disappointing,” Hayes said.

  “Yeah,” Butch agreed. Disappointing was one way of putting it.

  Hayes sighed and checked over his shoulder, eyeing Mr. Brand.
The burly man stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He nodded at Hayes, telegraphing agreement to whatever silent question Hayes had asked.

  “Mr. Cardinal,” Hayes said, “would you be interested in helping us find Mr. Musante?”

  Yes, Butch thought.

  He would be very interested in tracking down that son of a bitch.

  Chapter 41

  Blood Loss

  Paul Rabin leaned against the wall of the corridor and peered into the courtyard. He observed the men standing in the house and the corpses on the flagstones. One man had been shot multiple times. That was interesting but it was the pieces of men near the portico that genuinely intrigued him. He admired the skill of those murders. The bodies looked as if they’d been run across a buzz-saw blade, and he wondered what kind of weapon could produce such thorough and efficient cuts. A sword? A scythe? He’d like to have it, whatever it was.

  Again a crowded street scene unfolded in his mind, men and women and children lined up like daisies to be messily felled by the sword or axe that had disassembled the two men, and as the fantasy began to take hold, each death of the faceless mob drawing him farther from reality, a bolt of fear startled Rabin out of his reverie. Such fugues had become too common. Irene’s confession (or maybe it was that Irish bitch’s bullet) had broken some manner of vessel, releasing these occupying thoughts at every turn like pleasant, yet distracting, toxins. He pressed a hand to his wound and increased the pressure until he winced from the pain. The sharp ache cleared his head.

  He recognized the wrestler standing inside and studied his heavy expression. When he’d begun this job, Rabin had hoped to go toe to toe with the big man, tear the fucker apart with his bare hands just to see if he could, but that plan had leaked out of his side onto the table of Dr. Somerville. He didn’t have the strength for a brawl just now. A gun would do. All he needed was the necklace. The Galenus Rose. He would take it back to Chicago and cure Irene, and when she was feeling better and in her right mind, he would be cured, too. They would go back to their happy life, and she would do her needlepoint and ask about his day, and he would lie to her, and she would let the lie settle like a mote of dust among all of the other motes he’d brought her over the years. And he could put the monster back in its closet and maybe he wouldn’t feel the pulsing desire to kill every fucking thing he set his eyes on.

  Rabin suppressed a growl deep in his throat. He needed to keep his focus. No one had to die here, no matter how badly he wanted it. It would be far easier to demand the charm at gunpoint, and once he had it in his hand, he could turn around and leave. He wasn’t working for Impelliteri now and he didn’t give a damn about the wop’s revenge game. The wrestler was nothing but smoke, quickly dissipating. Soon enough he’d be in a cell or dead and there was no reason for Rabin to do anything foolish with so many witnesses (victims) on hand.

  The wrestler and the two men in black trousers walked to the patio door. The larger of these men pointed at the bodies on the flagstones. He was speaking but Rabin couldn’t hear what was being said. Like a silent film etched with scratches, the scene played out beneath the rain. The shorter man, the thickly built one with the strangely underdeveloped arm, nodded and pointed at the bodies himself. The wrestler watched the exchange but added nothing to it. His face remained heavy and sorrowful as if he’d been recently widowed.

  Then Cardinal turned away and walked into the house. One of the black-trousered men, the taller one, followed, leaving the stocky deformed man alone in the rain.

  With so many distractions and the swelling anticipation of a kill, Rabin had forgotten about the listening device he’d taken from the boy Humphrey. He felt foolish for having ignored such an asset, and he quickly retrieved the device from his pocket and affixed it to his head. The rain amplified, sounding like a thousand hammers falling on a field of tin, and voices overwhelmed him, coalesced in a nonsensical chorus until the individual conversations came clear.

  A dart of pain ran through his wound and Rabin grit his teeth against it. He relinquished his view of the courtyard and pressed against the wall to ride out the misery. A wave of nausea passed through him and his head swam. Rabin removed his hat and turned his face into the rain in the hope that the cold splashes would keep him from passing out in the corridor. He’d lost consciousness on the train ride to New Orleans and twice more in his hotel room, and though those episodes had proved harmless he couldn’t risk incapacitation. Not now. Not when he was so close.

  He inhaled cold wet air and felt a weakness in his legs. Silently he cursed and began to pant for air. The world toppled to the side for a moment and then righted and the spell passed, leaving Rabin shaken, but awake, against the wall.

  “When the others come—”

  “We won’t be here when the others come. How long is it going to take to clean up those bodies?”

  “Mr. Cardinal, if these men know about the Rose, they present a danger to the Alchemi and we must meet them head on.”

  “They’re hired thugs. They don’t know anything, and they don’t care about anything except whatever piece of a reward they’re going to get.”

  Rabin struggled with another flash of pain. All of the noises, the voices, and the sounds were confusing him, so he pulled the device from his ear and deposited it in his pocket.

  When he again looked into the courtyard he was surprised to see a fire guttering near the portico. The stocky man was burning the bodies.

  How? Rabin wondered.

  With all of the rain, a match would never have stayed lit long enough to ignite the remains, even if they’d been doused in kerosene. Dragging the last body, the gunshot victim, away from the shattered doors, the stocky man stumbled on the flagstones but managed to right himself with hardly a break in his step. He hoisted the dead man in the air and dropped him on the low pyre in the courtyard, and then the man did something wholly surprising to Rabin. He removed a knife from a sheath at his back and plunged it into the corpse’s belly.

  A moment later, the body erupted in flames. Rabin gasped at the sight as the fire consumed the pile of bodies in only a handful of minutes. The rain did not diminish the flames, but it seemed to act as a hindrance to the smoke, which hovered in a low cloud over the sizzling bodies.

  After the corpses were reduced to sticky black ash, the stocky man retrieved his knife and returned it to the sheath in his belt. Then he gathered up two tommy guns before making his way into the house. As he walked inside, Rabin’s gaze was locked on the handle of the wonderful weapon. Oh, the things he could do with a blade like that. The marvels he could perform. And again he was in the street amid a horde of humanity—cutting, slicing, and now burning his way through the neighborhood, leaving atrocity in his wake as he tore a path all the way home.

  Chapter 42

  Enter, Monster

  Butch stood with Hayes and Brand in the foyer of the big house. Light bathed the tiled floors, revealing footprints and streaks of mud brought in on the men’s shoes. Outside, the blackened remains of the shooters glistened like heaps of polished onyx.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Butch said.

  “No reason for us to remain,” said Hayes.

  Butch uncrossed his arms. “I’ve got a couple of things to get out of my room. It won’t take a minute.”

  He led them outside, skirting the black stain on the flagstones. The insistent rain rapped on his head and shoulders, cooling him after the heat of exertion. At the bungalow, he unlocked the door and ushered the two men inside. He didn’t bother closing the door. He wouldn’t be long.

  He left the two men and walked to the guest room. Memories overwhelmed him here, and he struggled against them. Amid all of the pain, the sickness, and the fear, this room had proven a sanctuary, but only because Hollis had shared it with him. Now he was leaving the man behind. He couldn’t decide whether it was more selfish to abandon Hollis or to keep him involved in this bloody business. In the end, it was clear he couldn’t ask Hollis to give up his life, a go
od life from what Butch had seen, just because he was tired of being alone. Even without the ever-present possibility of violence, Butch had no right to ask that of the man.

  He took his money clip and wallet from the nightstand, and immediately left the room behind.

  As he walked through the parlor, he said, “That’s it. Let’s…”

  Except the kitchen was empty. Butch threw a glance at the spiral staircase and the landing above. No sign of the men. He turned to the open door and peered into the courtyard.

  Hayes stood with his hands up; his weapon, the metal rod, lay on the flagstones at his feet. Brand stood rigid, arms at his sides. An older man, perhaps the age of Hayes, stood behind Brand, holding the ornate blade of Keane’s dagger to the stocky man’s throat and pointing a gun at Hayes. The intruder’s mouth was open and the corners turned up, though the expression was not a smile. When combined with the dark, stone-hard eyes, Butch could not say the expression reflected anything more than the man’s insanity.

  “At last we meet, Mr. Cardinal,” the intruder said. His voice was as dry as the shed skin of a snake.

  “Who are you?” Butch asked, his voice raised to be heard through the downpour.

  “Rabin. But what’s in a name?” The old man’s head canted to the side and his eyes widened. A sigh hissed through his open mouth.

  But who was he? A local hitter who’d gotten wind of an easy bounty? It wasn’t likely. Butch remembered something that detective, Lennon, had said, something about a wild card, an employee of Impelliteri’s who had attacked Rory and Molly Sullivan. Yes, he could see how a man like this could get Rory to talk, especially if Molly were at stake.