American Blood

by Ben Sanders

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  Copyright Page

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  For Thom Darlow and Tom Lucas. Two of the very best.

  PROLOGUE

  Lauren Shore

  She’d never picked this as her scene.

  Bars by night. Some tableau of lost hope with these quiet men hunched glass-in-hand, the shared pursuit of emptiness.

  She knew the feeling. That warm remedy, shot by shot the mind delaminating:

  Present troubles gone.

  Past troubles gone.

  Names gone, and yours included.

  All of it fading until that moment and that drink were the sum of your known world. Sometimes she’d wake lying clothed across the bed, recalling glimpses of city, a big neon montage blurred by liquor. Waiting at a corner. The backseat of a cab and beyond the window the night streaked and lurid.

  And always that mantra: tonight won’t be like last time.

  Which is what she told herself now, in this low-ceilinged shithole. She had a corner table where she could see the door. Jack Daniel’s with a beer back, almost gone. Let it be the last. To her right a guy in a suit sat staring at his drink like he wanted to fall through it. A second guy at a nearby table, same wardrobe and same fixation. Jacket over the back of his chair, a slack noose of a tie at his open collar.

  Just the one bartender, late sixties or so, blue sleeves of tattoos in a faded mess up each arm. A lineup of three guys on stools in front of him: a tall blond man at the far end down the left, two others together on the right, gray and disheveled, a brief murmur swapped occasionally, like discussing grave matters.

  The blond guy was side-on to the bar so he had a view of the room. She hadn’t seen him before, and he didn’t fit at this hour. Stella and a newspaper weren’t the stuff of the ruined. He seemed to register the attention and glanced at her. She looked away toward the door, safe empty territory, so as the two guys in ski masks came in she was looking straight at them.

  Young guys, jerky, probably loaded on something. Sneakers and torn jeans, gloves and jackets that hid skin color. One guy with the bag, one guy with the gun. Voices hoarse and strangled from adrenaline, words dropping out as they screamed:

  “Get on the ground! Get on the fucking ground!”

  Bag man yanked the two guys at the bar backward off their stools, a hand on each collar, arms flailing as they crashed. The guy beside her spilled his drink as he went down, fumbling a phone from his pocket. She could see 911 lit up. A few Jacks ago that could have been her.

  Gunman with his pistol in the barkeep’s face, screaming for him to empty the register. The second guy threw him the bag and began the rounds, patron to patron, wallets, cash, anything.

  Seated at the edge of things the blond man hadn’t moved, still just waiting there. An elbow on the bar, patient, unperturbed, like he’d seen such things before.

  Barkeep with the drawer open now. This wasn’t his first robbery: no shakes as he bagged the cash, “just be cool” intoned on repeat. Gunman finger-to-trigger, barkeep’s head in his sights, urging him to hurry. The second guy moving clockwise through the room, a wallet each from the two guys he’d toppled, headed for the man whispering to his phone.

  “Hey, the fuck you doing?”

  He leaped and stomped the hand, a scream and a dry-wood crack of bone. Broken fingers raised weakly as the guy punched him in the head and then again and again and again, and then he was prone and crawling bloodied and she lost sight of him as the guy with the gun appeared huge and terrifying in her face.

  So frantic that awful moment with the black wool mask like some raving nightmare vision and the smell of his sweat and so loud the screaming her ears rang with it.

  “Money, little bitch, where’s your fucking money?”

  He dropped the bag and grabbed a fistful of her hair, and the gun was cool and hard and the terror so extreme she just couldn’t respond.

  And then somewhere back there, this calm, level tone: “Hey.”

  The guy released her and turned and rose. The blond man was standing easy behind him, arms at his sides, expression almost pleasant.

  “Man, the fuck you doing? Get your fucking hands up.”

  Blond man obliged, unhurried, like he knew where things would end up.

  “Man, shit, get on the ground.”

  Both guys approached, gunman with his weapon up, and as the muzzle touched his forehead the blond man moved his raised hands in a scissor motion across his face and rolled the pistol clean from the guy’s grip and kicked him in the groin and wrapped a hand behind his head as he sagged and smashed his mouth against the edge of a table and lunged sideways and broke the bag man’s leg at the knee with a kick through the side of the joint that crunched like a fall onto broken glass.

  Three seconds.

  Drinkers and barkeep alike stunned and motionless, united in shock. That spilled drink spread thinly on the table, a steady drip off one corner. The bloodied man was on his back, two fingers pinched to his nose. He stretched blindly a moment and found his phone, but didn’t raise it. The backlight was dead, a spiderweb through the screen. The blond man glanced over at his Stella, like making a point to come back to it. At his feet the guy with the broken leg lay sprawled and hissing through locked teeth, injured limb kinked outward at the knee, toes on his good side arched backward in agony.

  Blond man appraised him briefly with little interest and then stepped to the other guy and knelt. The man was on his side, mask pushed up, spitting teeth and blood.

  “You going to stay where you are?”

  No answer.

  “Yeah. I thought so.”

  He stood and stepped to her table. He was in a T-shirt, arms roped with veins, a deep tan like he’d been soaked in resin.

  He said, “Officer.”

  He’d guessed she was a cop. She cleared her throat to try and mask her surprise, Jack and adrenaline making the world swim. She said, “Detective, actually.”

  “Detective. Close.”

  He dropped the clip from the pistol and laid it on her table and drew back the slide to clear the live round. It was a Beretta M9. He placed the gun beside the clip and set the bullet upright on the flat of the slide.

  “Probably best you look after these.”

  And then he went and picked up his paper and left.

  ONE

  Marshall

  Sometimes at night he lay awake and thought of his dead.

  Sins of others but they still robbed his sleep. That boy they’d left in South Brooklyn. That blown tail job in Koreatown. Midtown South Precinct said the transfusion almost saved him. What a prospect: the Big Exit, morphine and someone else’s blood in your veins.

  Sins of others, but he’d still borne witness.

  Complicit. They were still his dead.

  He thought of it as the night brigade. Misdeeds paraded for his musing. Maybe it was cathartic: daytime thoughts didn’t stray there, so he reconciled by dark. Torture and opiate within the same dim reflection.

  He pushed asi
de the sheet and sat on the edge of the bed. The clock readout floated disembodied: a bloodred four A.M. Beyond the window the night lay hushed and starless. He sat there a long time. Now and then the brief light from a car on the street below, the room in soft relief with each passing.

  Four thirty A.M. On the bedside table his phone buzzed with an incoming call. It seemed to hover there on the glow of its screen. He watched it a moment, some feeble thing crawling for the edge. Then he lay down again and answered the call. A blocked number.

  “Is this Marshall?”

  He lowered the phone and cleared his throat gently against the back of his wrist. “Yeah. This is Marshall.”

  “We spoke on the phone couple of days ago. You said you have some stuff we might like to look at.”

  So purposefully elliptic. He gave it a bit of time. He watched the shape of the fan above the bed through a few lazy cycles. He said, “I remember. You still want to talk?”

  “Yeah. You know how these things work?”

  “Tell me.”

  “We’ll give you a general location to get to. Once you’re there, we get a bit more specific.”

  Marshall said, “Okay.”

  “You in Albuquerque?”

  “No. But I’m close.”

  “All right. We’re talking a single-admission ticket. You know what I mean?”

  “I can’t bring any friends.”

  “Exactly. No friends.”

  Marshall didn’t answer.

  “You said you could sample us one key. That still okay?”

  “Yes. That’s fine.”

  “Good. That’s exactly what we like to hear.”

  Marshall didn’t answer.

  “No need to bring any hardware either. In fact, we’ll pat you down, so I’d say empty pockets are probably best. It just helps keep everything nice and relaxed, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  “Well, good. I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

  Marshall didn’t answer.

  “Head up on I-25 toward Algodones. Keep your phone on.”

  The call ended. He laid the cell facedown where he’d found it and got up and dressed in the dark and walked through to the spare bedroom, a finger to the wall for his bearings. The cupboard light clicked on automatically as he opened the door. Waiting for him in the corner the old document safe he’d bought in El Paso. Standing half in shadow, like it knew it was wrought for nobler deeds. He knelt and spun the dial through its left-right routine, fluid and unthinking. Swing of the door almost unbidden. A chamber for his past life: guns, ammunition, the better part of two hundred grand cash. Everything so neat and orderly, like some court exhibit. Three shelves’ testimony to his former self.

  He straightened and removed the 870 from the shelf above and sat down cross-legged. He opened the breech and fed it seven 12-gauge rounds from the half-full box of Magnums in the safe. Same again for the Colt, .45 after .45. Each successive round a little more reluctant as the spring fought him.

  He locked the safe and stood to leave. For an instant the light made art of the scene. This tall backlit figure, a gun in each hand.

  * * *

  He took the Corolla. The duffel with the samples was already in the trunk. Algodones was a forty-minute drive, south and west on I-25, right on the Rio Grande, maybe twenty miles from Albuquerque.

  That stretch of I-25 is hard country. Out of La Cienega and it was arid for miles, barren hills and a few brave tufts of vegetation at the roadside. Like the last vestiges of a more verdant world, scoured to khaki by some vindictive god.

  They rang again at five fifteen. He pulled to the shoulder to take the call. The same capitalized warning of blocked number.

  “Where are you?”

  He said, “I’m on 25.”

  “You anywhere near Bernalillo?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh. You coming in from the north?”

  “Yeah. Santa Fe.”

  “How far are you from 22?”

  “Close. Maybe ten minutes.”

  “Okay. Well, that works out pretty good then. Take a right when you get there. There’s a diner a couple more miles up the road.”

  Marshall ended the call first. A minor victory, but it probably wasn’t a bad thing to maintain an equal hang-up score. There was a psychological benefit there somewhere.

  The diner itself was another fifteen minutes’ drive. A roadside billboard on I-25 proclaimed its existence, together with a bold-print promise of twenty-four-hour service. The place was called Otto’s. It was a plain rectangular structure like an oversize trailer home, lonely amidst a big gravel parking lot large enough to take eighteen-wheelers. There was a trailer-less truck cab parked nose-in by the entry and a Jeep Cherokee way over in a corner. A couple of dust-filmed sedans by a side exit. Above them the stub of an air-con unit slotted through the wall, drifts of steam rendered whitely on that dark vista.

  Grit popping beneath the tires as he turned in. He parked beside the truck cab, headlight glare in tight focus on the cladding, each blemish in searing relief. Sudden darkness as he cut the motor. He sat a moment in the quiet with the engine ticking as his night vision recovered, and then he got out and locked the car with the key. He left the Colt in the glove compartment. Forewarned of a pat-down, it was probably best where it was.

  He rounded the truck and headed for the entry. That cool taste of night. Northward the mountains all camouflaged by gloom. In the east the dawn just breaking. A thin blue seam in gentle flexure across the far edge of the world. A marvel this hard land could be coaxed to such a template.

  A bell dinged as he entered. He let the door fall closed behind him. In front of him the counter lay behind a long glass display of food. A slice of apple pie caught his eye: cold, gelatinous, bulging against plastic wrap. To the left a long row of booths below the front-facing windows. Two guys side by side near the end, facing the door.

  Marshall walked over. They didn’t move, but their eyes followed him in. Both of them hunched slightly over folded arms, coffee cups standing half empty. He stood there in the aisle a moment, awaiting his pat-down, but the guy on the right signaled for him to take a seat. An issue of discretion, presumably. A gun-check in a diner is a fine way to draw attention.

  “Don’t worry about it. Sorry it ain’t much of a respectable hour.”

  There was a wry smile on his face that detracted from the sincerity a bit, but Marshall reasoned even the pretense of civility was better than none at all. In any case, he’d met at less respectable hours with even less respectable people.

  He said, “Sure,” and sat down.

  The vinyl creaked a little under his weight. He slid across and centered himself on the seat. He knew their backgrounds. On the left was Troy Rojas, Hispanic, six years’ worth of Army followed by twelve years’ worth of Walpole. In 1992, just back from the Gulf and high on something, he’d shot and paralyzed a Massachusetts State Police Trooper who’d pulled him over for speeding. Rojas’s crucial error: discussing the events with a Boston PD informant two months later. His colleague on the right was Cyrus Bolt, twenty years of drug offenses on his résumé. Without doubt a consummate shit bag, but perhaps not quite in Rojas’s orbit.

  Bolt had some coffee. He wasn’t an attractive guy: coke-fiend-thin, all lines and sinew. Like something chewed and spat out. He would have been pushing forty. He said, “And what is it that you do, Mr. Marshall?”

  Marshall shrugged in a manner intended to convey versatility. “Bit of this, bit of that.”

  Bolt tipped his mug at him like a little toast and smiled knowingly. “Whatever’s going. I like that.”

  A waitress came over, coffee flask in hand. Hispanic and heavyset, weary like she’d been doing the rounds since this time yesterday. Marshall hoped she was on the home stretch. He took the one remaining mug from the little stand in the center of the table and set it upright and requested coffee only, no food. She leaned and poured carefully, the four
of them briefly captivated, and then she moved on.

  Marshall looked around. Just one other customer. The truck driver, presumably, at a table over to the right. A coffee of his own, and what looked like eggs Benedict in a swamp of hollandaise. Overall not really an inspired choice of venue, given that a diner with one other customer is unlikely to afford much anonymity. Or maybe the waitress was in on it. He had some coffee.

  Rojas ducked his head, smoothed a hand through his hair. There was a waxen gleam to it. “What we normally do, we take the sample off you, check it all out, and then maybe have another talk.”

  “All right.”

  Rojas turned his mug through a slow revolution on the tabletop, watched it carefully. He glanced up. “You got something for us to look at?”

  “I do.”

  Which strictly speaking was the truth, because there was indeed something to look at. The fact that the sample’s value as a stimulant was somewhat tenuous was information Marshall preferred to withhold.

  Rojas said, “What’s your supply like? We’ve got a real issue with keeping enough stock around. So the bigger the better, basically.”

  Marshall said, “We’ve got a hookup via Colombia.”

  An outright lie, but it seemed imprudent to undermine a happy discourse.

  “So stock’s no trouble.”

  “Yeah. Stock’s no trouble.”

  Rojas nodded slowly and mulled on that. He was watching Marshall with something akin to cool indifference. Marshall didn’t mind. He had some experience with the expression and was confident he could affect something of an equal if not greater standard. He did so for a few patient seconds. Then he had some coffee. Bolt had some coffee. Rojas had some coffee. The truck driver looked over idly and had some coffee.

  Marshall said, “You guys out of Albuquerque?”

  Rojas rocked his head, noncommittal. “Kinda.”

  Marshall nodded. He said, “Well.”

  He was quite partial to a good “well.” He liked the quiet, reflective pause that it often inspired.

  He said, “Why don’t we go outside and have a look at my stuff.”