by Evelyn Glass
“It’s just that the Bandits—the gang in that warehouse—have recently kidnapped the daughter of a low-level enforcer, a man by the name of Michael Morris, Mikey Morris.”
“So what?” My hands on the door, ready to open it. Nate’s in a weird mood today. He ain’t usually the type to call and ramble at me like this. Maybe he’s scared. I don’t know. Readin’ people’s moods ain’t really my specialty. “Spit it out, Nate.”
“It’s strange. The girl who’s been kidnapped has been given to Julian. For marriage, you know. Her dad gave her away, and now the Bandits have kidnapped her and Julian’s nowhere to be seen. What sort of sense does that make? I don’t get it. I’ve heard whispers that Julian’s on a crusade to get her back, but if that’s the case—”
“Goddamn,” I interrupt. “None of this matters to me, Nate. My job is to get in there, get info on Julian’s whereabouts, and get out. Not get all the ins and outs of his love life. Is there anythin’ you need to tell me about any of that? Anything that matters to the mission, right now?”
“Just be careful,” Nate says. “Maybe Julian hasn’t gone rogue or anything like that. Maybe he’s just looking for this girl. And if the girl’s in there, whilst you’re in there, and something happens to her…”
“Ah,” I say. “Right.” Don’t let anythin’ happen to the girl, ’cause if it does and the boss and the Capo decide they wanna make peace, I’ll end up going down for whatever went wrong. “Could’ve just come out and said that,” I say.
“You needed to understand all the angles,” Nate replies. “And I know what you’re like. You’d end up blowing the girl up by accident, lighting up the room she’s in without thinking about it.”
I manage not to scoff. I don’t shoot people I don’t mean to shoot. “Anythin’ else?”
“Be careful. That’s it. Anyway, she might not even be in there.”
I hang up the cell. It’s good that he called me, then, if there’s a girl in there somewhere who I need to try and keep alive. Nate was right, what he said about lighting up the room, but I’ve also been in the game long enough that I’m damn good at telling the difference between a chick going for a gun to shoot me and a dude shaking because he’s about to shit himself.
Climbing from the car, I head toward the warehouse, jogging slowly. The ground is slick with rainwater, so I don’t sprint. I had a few jobs in the early days where I thought sprinting was a good idea, only to find that my boots and the concrete didn’t agree with me. I grip my dusters as I jog, ready to fight.
I’m about to kick in the fake boarded-up door when I hear two men walking from the opposite side of the warehouse, through the car park. All around us, tall buildings with yellow lights stare on, normal people livin’ normal lives, none of them knowing that in a few minutes hell might break loose just outside their windows. I stay close to the warehouse’s wall, in the shadow of the eaves. It’s surprising how many men’ll just walk right by a man standing like this, ’cause in their heads he’s not a man, just a collection of shadow, and they pass right over it.
The Bandits are a low-level gang, with a small turf and a trigger-happy reputation. They’re mostly kids, not bright enough to organize themselves, not much of a hierarchy. Really, havin’ a warehouse is a surprising move up for these shitheads. Two boys walk past me, both of them barely old enough to shave. One is tall, skinny, wearing clothes which are way too baggy for him, which’ll make it hard for him to fight. The other is shorter, muscle-bound, and efficient-looking. I fade into the wall as they walk toward me.
“All I’m sayin’ is, you can’t break a bitch in twice, man. That’s just crazy.”
“If you weren’t a fuckin’ virgin, you’d know that ain’t even true. I broke that girl in a dozen damn times last night.”
The shorter one laughs, so close to me now I can see his pensive features, even in the darkness. “You lie so damn much I bet you don’t even know what’s—”
I move with quick, practiced movements, motions buried so deep in my muscles that I don’t need to think. Darting forward, I take the machete from my leg sheath and aim a powerful over-arc swing at the short kid’s head. The blade thuds into his skull, burying deep between his eyes, all the way down to his nose. By now the tall, baggy-clothed one is turning on me, pulling his gun, but it’s caught on his waistband. I punch him in the gut with my duster, hard, keeling him over. Hit him again, twice more, so that he crumples up and lands on his ass, coughing. Then I kneel down and grab his neck and shove him up against the wall and look into his face.
“That,” I say, “is why you use a damn holster. Likely to shoot your own balls off, carrying a weapon like that. Idiot.” I slap him across the face with an open palm, and he whimpers.
“Get the fuck off me, man,” he cries, but there’s no steel or bravado in his voice. He’s already broken. Of course, I did just put a blade into his friend’s brain.
“Quiet,” I say.
He goes quiet, but I hear the sound of dripping liquid and know he’s pissed himself.
“What do you know about an Italian called Julian?” I ask him. “Heard any whispers around the ’hood? Heard anything at all? Maybe not even by name.”
I squeeze his neck as I speak, letting him know that it’d be no big thing for me to crush his throat.
“I don’t know,” he whispers, looking like a little kid now in all those clothes, nothin’ like the loud gangbanger he was a few moments ago. I see he’s got a tattoo of a cowboy covered in blood on his neck, with the words Blood Bandits painted beneath the image. “I don’t know shit.”
“That’s not very useful to me,” I tell him. “What about a girl? You heard anythin’ about a girl being kept hostage around here?”
“There’s no girl in there,” the kid says. “I know that for a fact, man. I been at this place since it started, and there never been any girls in there, just the workers, just the cookers, you know?”
“Of course you don’t know anything. Useless grunt like you.”
“So you’ll let me go?” the kid says, raising his eyebrows. He’s crying now.
“Nope,” I say. “I’ve been given orders to kill every bastard in here after I’ve gotten what I need.”
He’s starts blabbering then, like they often do. I jab him once in the nose, dazing him, and then jab him again, his nose exploding with blood as my duster breaks bone and messes with cartilage. While he’s sobbing and gasping, I go to the other boy and pull the machete from his head. This is harder’n it might seem, ’cause it’s wedged deep, but after a couple of seconds I pull it free and return to the kid. His still crying, begging, talkin’ about his momma. When I slice through his skull, he finally shuts up. I put my boot on his shoulder, still jittering as his body fails to get the message that it’s dead, and pull the blade free. I clean it on his baggy shirt; maybe they’ll know more inside.
Chapter Two
Chance
I expect to hear men talking the further I get into the warehouse. I’m walking down a narrow corridor, what might’ve once been a place where working men entered early in the morning to go to their lockers and get ready for the day. The wallpaper is peeling, old, the wall beneath damp. I pass what was once a breakroom, with a 2010 calendar on the wall showing a naked Miss February. Surprised HR didn’t have a shitfit about that, back in the day. The rest of the room is a mess: furniture all piled up, sink detached from the wall, but Miss February has survived. I keep on, pistol trained ahead of me, listening. You’ve always gotta listen on jobs like this, ’cause maybe the men know I’m coming. Maybe they’ve got CCTV. Maybe they’re being quiet so they can surprise me. But these ain’t Marines. There are gangbangers, and these kids can’t stay quiet for long.
But the more I walk, the more I start to think that somethin’ strange is going on. This should be a lab of some kind. There should be noise here. Men working. Shooting the shit and playing music and walking around. But there’s nothin’ but silence. This is a big place, I tell myself, a
huge place, the sort of place which once upon a time turned over tons of legal shit in a week. There could be something on the other side, quiet, and I wouldn’t hear it. But nothin’ at all?
When I get to the warehouse floor, I realize why there’re no sounds. The sharp tang of blood is in the air, and my boots shift on the floor. Because I’m not standing on the floor; there’s half a hand under my foot. The warehouse floor is wide and long, empty except for a few tables set up like chemistry sets. And a bunch of torn apart corpses, too many body parts to easily be sure how many dead men are in this room. I see a man with his tongue cut out and stuck in his empty eye socket, another with his fingers where his teeth should be. Feet with the shoes still on are piled up in one corner.
Even a hired killer eventually needs to stop looking at them as bodies, and start viewing them as meat. If they were sides of beef, they wouldn’t be disturbing. I make them that in my mind, and I look for signs any of these cattle are still alive.
None of them seem to be breathing, but most of them wear the same “Blood Bandits” brand the kid outside had on his neck. There’s one who doesn’t, and there’s something about him I don’t like. The body leaves a bloody trail behind him as I drag him across the concrete towards a light where I can get a better look at his face. I swear, and kick his corpse, and swear again.
His name is Andrew Phillips. Detective Andrew Phillips if you’re talking to his mama, a fuckin’ detective for the N.Y. fucking P.D. He was working undercover a few years back, and his bullshit got me taken in for questioning. Vice ran a good op, but I saw him heading into the station as I was heading out—they couldn’t pin a thing on me, and Giovanni got a lawyer to bust me out long before things got hot—but I doubt he noticed me looking at him. Fingered him to Giovanni, and we kept an eye out for him, figuring we’d be able to use his ID as leverage if he ever tried to mess with the Family.
It was one thing to leave a million prints and DNA evidence and whatever the fuck else when I was killing a shit-ton of fucking gangbangers. The NYPD would probably give me a medal if they knew it was me. But this; I’m thinkin’ about all the prints I’ve left. On the doors, on the corpses when I was checking ’em for tattoos. On the bastards outside. There’s a dead cop here, a a dead, fuckin’ mutilated cop, with three of his fingers stuffed in his ears like plugs? His other fingers ain’t on his hands, which means they’re scattered around the room somewhere. To make sure the police never knew about this guy bein’ dead, I’d have to find his other seven fingers, and that’s assuming there isn’t an active wire on this son of a bitch.
“Fuck!” I snarl, kicking him again.
As I shout, I hear somethin’, far behind me, a whimpering. I don’t think, just leap across the room toward the sound, gripping my duster so hard it makes my hands bleed. A dead cop. A dead fuckin’ cop, and now someone alive. Fuck. The boys in blue don’t get lazy when it comes to a dead cop. The boys in blue’ll chase you to the end of the earth when it comes to a dead cop. But if there’s a witness, someone who can say it wasn’t me…
The sound came from under two corpses, a kid who fucking hid under dead bodies to try and stay alive. Most people can’t do that and stay sane. I haul the bodies away from him and he starts to scream. He’s a Bandit, I can see the brand through the blood, but I can’t really make out the color of his tank top or his shorts anymore.
I drag him up by his neck and drag him to the light, all whilst he’s kicking and muttering. “I don’t…I don’t…so much blood, man…so much…help…help…”
Holding him by his neck with one hand, I pick up a chair with the other and set it down, and then set the kid down on it. He was damn lucky, and damn quiet. I barely even hear him. It’s those two things which kept this guy alive. Anything else and he would’ve turned up dead just like the cop, just like his friends. Lucky and quiet. But not lucky enough and not quiet enough, ’cause here I am. But if I heard him in five minutes…
Kneeling down opposite him, I say, “I need you to tell me exactly what happened here, without leaving anything out. You might say you’re scared, they’ll kill you, you can’t. I’ve heard all that shit before. You need to be scared of me, I’ll kill you, and you can. So, tell it.”
The kid’s face is covered in blood and scrapes; he looks tired, so maybe he’s been here for quite a while. Maybe this slaughter happened earlier today and I’ve just been sittin’ out there like an asshole getting ready for a mission which was over the moment I stepped into the warehouse. He mumbles, “I…can’t.”
I punch him across the jaw with the duster, sending two of his teeth tumbling to the floor. He coughs, splutters, and I hit him again. “I ain’t in the fuckin’ mood,” I tell him. “Did you know there’s a dead cop on the floor? Did you fuckin’ know that? That means forensics, that means fuckin’ police sniffing around.”
“Okay!” he wails. “Okay! Okay! Just…please. Let me go.”
“Tell me,” I say, grabbing his shirt and bringing my face close to his, “what the fuck happened.”
He nods, sniveling, and then tells me.
“Listen, man. Just listen to me and I’ll tell you! Please, man, please! So we were workin’, just workin’ like we do every damn day, and then the boss comes in and says there’s some new workers, but he looks sort of shifty, sort of scared, and then these four guys come in, all dressed in black, head to toe, masks and everythin’ so I couldn’t see anything about them, not even their eyes ’cause they were wearing glasses. And then one of these guys, he…Jesus, man, Jesus Christ! He takes out a blade and just stabs boss in the neck. The boss looked really surprised when he dropped, like he’d had a deal with ’em, you know? And then the four men just pull out guns with silencers on them and start shooting. It’s crazy ’cause there are only four of them, man, four, but we’re all like chickens just running all over the place trying to get out and then I just jump down and cover myself with my friends, man, my friends, pull ’em over me like blankets and just lie there as they start cutting, cutting up everyone and stuffing them in different places—”
“No,” I say, stopping him. “No, you didn’t hide. They wouldn’t be fooled by that. No fuckin’ way. They knew you were alive, these bastards, and they must’ve known I was comin’, and they left you here hopin’ you’d see me and I wouldn’t see you.”
I take out my pistol and point it at his head.
“Please!” the man wails. “Please! Please!”
“It’s nothin’ personal,” I tell him, and then pull the trigger.
The force of the shot takes causes him to fly back in the chair, legs kicking into the air.
I stand up, look over the carnage, and then make my way back across the room to the exit. I can’t get rid of the cop, so I have to get rid of every trace of myself. I need to retrace my steps and clean up after myself, try and remember everything I touched, try’n remember where I walked. I’ll work quick and then I’ll get the hell out of here.
“Goddamn it,” I mutter, walking into the autumn night. “God fucking dammit!”
This should’ve been a simple job, but now—
At least that girl ain’t here. Saves me a bullet.
Chapter Three
Becky
My body is screaming at me, my joints aching like I’ve been folded in upon myself for a long time. My mouth tastes all cottony, my tongue too heavy, like I’ve had something stuffed in there. My head is groggy, moving side to side on my shoulders, slumping. I try and support it, lift it, but I find it’s much more difficult than it should be. So for a while I just sit here, staring down at the dirty concrete, wondering where I am and what’s happened to me. I go back over today’s events, my mind clearing slowly. I remember Dad, this morning, looking into my eyes with a pensive expression and telling me I better still be a virgin because Julian is picking me up today. I remember Julian arriving in a suit, short, fat, dark-haired, green-eyed, with fingers which were always fidgeting. I remember wearing a too-short sparkling dress to please him, D
ad’s superior, a Capo I am being forced to marry.
I remember sitting in a restaurant with this man: this man I barely know, but the man Dad expects me to give my virginity to and marry. This man Dad wants to sell me to so that he can pay off some gambling debts, some gambling debts. For the first time in a long time, I think I should’ve gone with Mom to California instead of choosing to stay here with Dad. But I wanted to help Dad, needed to help him, save him from himself. And look where it’s gotten me. Julian stared at my breasts the entire meal, a man more than twice my age at fifty, staring down this nineteen-year-old girl with something in his eye that made me uncomfortable. I like to think the best of people, but I couldn’t think the best of him when he was staring at me like that.
Slowly, strength returns to me, slowly, too slowly. I hate how it trickles into me like an empty gas container trickling into the tank. I remember Julian going to the bar and returning with a glass of wine. I don’t usually drink, but he pressed it into my hand and said, “Drink this. Now.” I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped. This man is a Capo, which means he’s got way, way more power than Dad, who’s just an enforcer. As far as the Family is concerned, I’m just some nineteen-year-old token to be traded with this man. I think about Mom, sunning herself in Cali.