Roughhouse

by Dan Cummings

  Noakes pulled up a wooden chair and slouched back in it, sipping the imported beer and staring at the growing pile of poker chips. ‘Tonight…it was personal. It had to be done.’

  ‘And is it over?’

  A weak voice mewled in the back of Noakes’s head, talking about eye for an eye politics. About possibly offering a truce to Karp. ‘I hope so.’ His voice was as soft as the beating of moth wings.

  Garth nodded. ‘Well, bit of advice from a wizened old fart like me, if you’re going to carry on living this life, your poker face will eventually improve, it’s just a question of how many bodies you’re prepared to drop to look cool.’

  The rest of the players seemed unconcerned by this dialogue, too invested in the large pot on the table. Cal folded his hand like a bear pawing the table, saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m out,’ and found some mild consolation from his beer.

  ‘This person,’ Garth asked, ‘I assume it had to be done?’

  Noakes looked at the leathery, inked-up arms of the old jailbird, wondering how many shallow graves he was instrumental in, then looked at his own more modern and vibrant tattooed arms. ‘It was payback. He was a friend of the fucker who killed Lloyd.’

  Mac tapped ash into the overflowing tray and fixed Noakes with his dark eyes, ‘The ball player? Pity, that young ’un had some skill.’

  Garth cleared his throat. ‘What caused this personal business?’

  Noakes still seemed amazed at the brazen balls of Karp, you never really knew what somebody was capable of until pushed. ‘They’re just some punks from Hawthorne High. We’ve had some beef.’ Noakes swayed his head tiredly. ‘It was nothing really, stupid shit. Staubach flipped his lid and I should have stepped in to cool him off. Too late now.’

  Garth jabbed a skinny pointer towards Noakes, ‘A fucking school kid? No affiliations? Shit, Jason, you better control that hothead before he takes you down.’

  Noakes seethed in self-recrimination. ‘I’m the one to blame. I allowed myself to get carried away with Staubach’s bullshit. I allowed it to escalate. It’s on me.’

  ‘You need to be smarter than that.’

  ‘I know. But nothing leads back to me. Grainger cleared it, got Hurst to lend me some of that naughty trippy shit he’s been cooking. It looks like he got fucked up and had an accident. Besides, the body is in the middle of the Haven and you know the police won’t do shit in there.’

  Garth hated the impetuousness and arrogance of youth, but he supposed everyone at this table was the same back in the day. ‘That’s not an excuse to flip the middle finger to fate. Grainger has some clout in the department sure, but if enough of a ruckus is kicked up it won’t stop the rest of the department from sticking their noses in.’

  Noakes listened to the warning without challenge, accepting that Garth was speaking sense. He was wondering what the best course of action would be to placate the implacable Shit Storm. Karp too, since he was an unknown quantity who could turn out to be a bigger loose cannon than Staubach. It wouldn’t be easy, but he didn’t want this revenge to play itself out to the bitter end. It was unnerving at how much easier murder, or manslaughter in this instance, came to Staubach. He and his knife had been complicit in Noakes’s third kill, the uppity dealer called Linc, and it had washed over him like water off a duck’s back whilst Noakes fought like hell to hide the shakes in his hands. Right now, Staubach was probably slamming his regular coke-skank without a care in the world, whilst he sat up with twilight vultures calming his nerves with a beer and conversation.

  ‘There’s nothing to tie me to the body,’ Noakes insisted. Garth accepted the young prospect’s conviction with yielding eyes. Maybe his poker face was better than he gave himself credit for, as internally his guarantee of plausible deniability didn’t liberate him of concern. The room seemed much smaller all of a sudden; the stink of tobacco and ancient dirt and oil was wrapping him up in a junkyard shawl of suffocating panic. ‘I’m gonna head home, sleep it off.’ The cracked black leather creaked as Noakes got to his feet.

  Mac looked at the old clock hanging on the wall, his lugubrious eyes heavy, ‘That might be the smartest thing I’ve heard all night. No more collections are due, and I’m sure as shit done throwing money away on this cheating prick.’ He scorched Garth with a glance.

  ‘What can I say, Mac. It was just my night.’ Garth showed his old nubby teeth, gathering the cards and chips.

  ‘It’s always your night, asshole.’

  ‘Yet, you keep playing.’

  ‘Thanks for the beer.’ Noakes turned to leave.

  ‘Think about my offer, sonny,’ Garth advised, his voice appealing to Noakes’s struggling sensibilities.

  Noakes nodded him farewell and left the office with as much swagger as he could muster. Crossing the empty lot he could swear he felt eyes on him. Maybe it was a fox in the impenetrable murk of the fields and woods beyond the lights and road, or perhaps it was just the gaze of internal doubt. Dropping into the driver’s seat, he wasted no time firing the engine into life and reversing out in a tight J-turn onto the road. The passage of his thoughts followed the winding bends and arrow straights of Wilmslow Road, potential problems and solutions swooping out from the dark treelines into the headlights of his reasoning. He briefly broke his concentration from the lane to the horse mask, the visage which had hid his troubled eyes, the farmland character responsible for another dead body.

  What if Karp’s crazy enough to rattle the cage anyway? He might blab to every cop in town and beyond before Detective Alvey or one of the others puts a bullet in him.

  Alone, he allowed his stone-sculpted deception to slip away, his eyes and emotions freed from their lockdown. He worried a cigarette from the crushed and beaten pack in his jeans and burned it with his dad’s zippo, the smoke a temporary reprieve from his problems.

  Maybe a truce is possible, he nipped away at the shallow wound of doubt, glancing at the mask again. If not, would he have to finish this now? A home invasion? No unnecessary victims, just charge straight into Karp’s house, snuff him and take his phone. Shit, it would be a big brass-balled induction into his criminal endeavours. No, don’t let desperation make a fool of you. Grainger, he’d have to talk to him tomorrow, find out if the video was the stupidest fucking idea in the history of his short life. And if it was, his life might be even shorter. Family or not, Noakes wasn’t sure if Grainger would allow a fuck-up to hang around if it was attracting too much attention.

  ‘You look stressed,’ came a stranger’s voice.

  Noakes almost swerved the speeding Firebird off the road and into the guard rail, his cigarette dropping and burning a smouldering hole in his shirt. ‘THE FUCK ARE YOU?!’ Managing to correct the wild turn, his foot was about to stamp on the brake when a wide, powerful, strangely damp hand forced his thigh down in place, jamming his foot on the accelerator pedal.

  ‘Just don’t crash and we’ll be fine,’ the cultured, unperturbed voice soothed. In the gloom of the car, aided weakly by the backwash of the headlights, all he could make out was the horrible mutated form reclining in the passenger seat. The wide, glistening, bulbous head and stout body, slender limbs with huge hands and feet, and of course, the pinpoints of light in what must be huge, grapefruit-sized eyes. Shooting manic glances between the lonely dark road and the horrid slimy critter riding shotgun, Noakes used a free hand to reach for his Glock. Frogmore used his own free hand to clasp around the deadly operators like a wet vice. Noakes howled as his strong digits were broken like bread sticks, the crush discharging a single deafening boom, the bullet turning the windshield into a frozen spider web. The gun fell to the floor, it might as well have been on the bottom of the ocean for all the good it would aid him now. Hissing in agony, his right hand a mangled clump of broken fingers and pain sweat beading his brow, he tried to guide the speeding machine one-handed through the gaps in the web.

  ‘Now you’ve got one hand and compromised vision,’ Frogmore said admiringly. ‘You must like a challenge. As to you
r question, I’m just a friend of a friend.’ Frogmore kept his hand firmly on Noakes’s thigh, the denim becoming warm and moist from the fluid seeping from the clammy palm, the red lights of the TURBO CHARGE gauge going from NORMAL to HIGH as the needle wavered over to 70mph and levelled off.

  ‘No, NO!’ Noakes cried, trying to rationalise this to himself. ‘This isn’t real. I breathed in some of that shit. Delayed reaction, that’s all.’ He was hunched over the wheel, still trying to prise his boot from the gas pedal, his gnarled claw in his lap.

  ‘Then why can’t you move your leg, silly?’ Frogmore asked playfully. ‘Bit of a bend up ahead, I hope you’re a good driver.’

  Noakes’s lip trembled, slobber and mewling sounds of panic slipping out with his hyperventilating. Unable to slow down, his bulging eyes were fixated on the curving rail shining dully in the wash of his headlights. With each second it grew larger, more detailed…more formidable. Frogmore used his right hand to cover his eyes, playing up his faux terror and peeking through the long webbed fingers. ‘Oh…here it comes.’

  Noakes screamed and wrenched the wheel single-handed, straddling both lanes haphazardly and with what felt like the speed of sludge, careered round the bend in a squeal of death-courting rubber. Breathing harshly, Noakes moaned his relief in relentless terror, knowing that the next bend would be impossible to make at this speed even with both hands.

  ‘Oh, must not have been going fast enough. Let’s remedy that.’ The big green paddle applied more pressure to Noakes’s thigh, the needle pushing up to 90mph.

  ‘JUST WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU?’ Noakes bellowed psychotically. The burst of challenge flagged, limp and impotent, replaced by the keening of the terminally hopeless. ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘I’m a good jumper,’ Frogmore smiled in the dark, the needle piercings of his eyes’ light unmoving from Noakes’s face like he was eyeing up a particularly obese and tasty fly. ‘And I’m a creature of simple needs. You want to take Neil away from me. I can’t allow that. We’re something of a package deal.’

  The distance burned down between the roaring car and guaranteed death. Frogmore noticed the break in the guard rail from a truck crash five years ago — the repaired section of metal standing out against the older rail — go blurring past. ‘It was near here where I first met Neil, you know. Down in that valley. Rawlins Pond. It’s rare when people from different worlds manage to strike up such a strong rapport. A miracle.’

  Noakes heard the monster’s rose-tinted reminiscences with detachment, too busy choking on fright to understand what was being said to him. ‘I won’t touch him, I swear, I swear. I fucked up, I’m so sorry about Matt. I won’t go near Neil, please, just let me slow down. I’ll do whatever you want.’ The bend was approaching, a sharp hairpin curve, and a wall of pines rising up from the valley drop off like a god’s wooden palisade. Noakes’s sweaty palm squeezed the wheel.

  ‘What if I want you to die?’

  A noise of trapped desperation groaned out of Noakes’s clenched teeth. Impact was seconds away. He ragged the wheel with all the strength he could muster, knowing it would be useless. He was right. The second before he collided face-first into the wheel and eternal oblivion, Noakes felt the pressure ease from his thigh. His final moments were lonely, much like the road. His entire world condensed into a split-second sensory explosion of crushing metal, the vivid visual clarity of the dashboard, the tension in his tattooed knuckles and his brief scream of impending death. The Firebird’s hood crumpled inwards, the engine block buckling upwards like a vertebra dislodged from a metal spine, but velocity carried the car’s muscle through the barrier and off into the black, precipitous, tree-studded gloom of the sloping forest.

  All in.

  Chapter 31

  Sam ate his cereal over the kitchen sink, completely accustomed to the clinical, almost reptilian indifference which existed between his parents as they rushed about in their self-important white-collar routines. It was like living in an expensive terrarium. Oddly, this morning he was fascinated and quietly joyous at how little he cared. So they were assholes. Water is wet and the sky is blue, it was just a fact and it wasn’t going to tarnish his life any longer. It was amazing how accurate Neil and Matt had been about the shift in perspective which occurs from weed abstinence. It had only been a couple of days but already he felt…purposeful? Is that what he was feeling right now? Optimistic? He hadn’t changed his opinions on school and the usual life goals of most but he definitely felt more receptive to the future. The gummy coating tarring his neurons was slowly being scrubbed clean.

  Passive goodbyes were muttered from both rival breadwinners, their farewells extending to their only child too, before they briskly vacated the house and jumped into separate cars of the professional calibre. Sam had long since stopped pretending to bid either of them a good day and instead continued to finish off his cereal, trying to hold on to this glorious sense of positivity. The digital clock on the oven told him it was time to get a move on, so without the usual spot of teen angst, he placed the bowl in the dishwasher rack, gulped his OJ, made sure his van keys were in his pocket and prepared to exit this house of dour memories and long-wilted relationships. Just before he reached the front door, his phone rang.

  *****

  Neil was already waiting curb-side outside his house when Sam slowed to a stop.

  ‘You alright?’ Sam enquired, dialling down the volume on the rock music.

  Neil looked like a small-time criminal growing twitchy before a smash and grab. He scurried into the passenger seat, slammed the door and without preamble, said, ‘We need to talk.’ The dread in his voice emptied Sam of any of his good cheer.

  ‘Sounds ominous.’

  Neil knew there was no good way to break this to him, so he just came right out with it. ‘Matt was murdered last night.’

  ‘What?’ Sam blinked, a hundred questions competing for supremacy behind his eyes. ‘W-Was it…was it them?’ His tone burned with scorn and hatred.

  Neil looked at his house then up the street, watching neighbours leaving for work and school. He was jealous of all of them right now. ‘We’re skipping school today. Take us somewhere quiet, there’s a lot you need to hear.’

  Sam parked the van at the old skate park. It was quiet apart from a few young stunt junkies. Holding Neil’s phone with a shaky hand, Sam watched through blurry eyes as Noakes stared into the camera. Matt had just tumbled off the roof and out of sight to a series of zoo-like whoops and cheers. The camera lens followed to get an unobstructed view of the ledge which Matt had just dropped off. Staubach, in a mouse mask, was leering over the edge, entertained by the demise of a classmate he had known since middle school, whom Sam and Neil had known since they were Hawthorne freshmen.

  ‘I know that kid loved his drugs, right, Karp?’ Noakes was in close-up again. ‘Staubach told me that he’s the one who got you and Sam into them too. Such a bad influence. You see where drugs get you?’ There was a brief pause, almost infinitesimal, where it seemed like Noakes was searching for the iron to push him on. ‘I might have been willing to let shit slide between us, but you killed Lloyd—’ Sam twisted his neck in absolute shock towards Neil, the last of the colour draining from his chubby cheeks but he remained mute, needing to watch the rest of the video before broaching the issue. ‘I don’t know if you’ve always been nuts, but I do know that it was the last mistake you’ll ever make. My uncle owns the hogs in this town, there’s no one for you to turn to, to help you. You attempt to go to the police, I’ll find out, and I’ll bring someone else you love up here. Your pal Sam or maybe that piece of ass you’ve been hanging with, I’ll see what mood I’m in.’

  Staubach finished braying and joined Noakes, resting an arm on his shoulder. ‘See ya soon, Karp. See ya real soon.’

  Sam let the phone drop to his lap. ‘You killed Lloyd?’ His voice was as delicate as fine china.

  Neil had been staring out the window, hypnotised by the walls of colourful graffiti. H
e couldn’t bring himself to watch Matt’s final moments of suffering again. The question didn’t produce any outrage or hurt. His voice was simply monotonous. ‘You know I never. I was out with Lindsey that night, remember?’

  Sam wiped his red-rimmed eyes. ‘Why the fuck would they think you killed him?’

  Neil was an inanimate dummy propped up in the seat, his eyes unfocused. ‘Let’s call it a misunderstanding.’

  Sam grabbed the phone from his lap and slammed it to Neil’s chest. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  Neil shut his eyes, accepting his friend’s anger, and fumbled the phone with both hands. ‘I err, I don’t know how to start this.’ He sighed so long that his chest almost crumpled inwards. ‘Crazy as it sounds, it makes the rest of this seem normal, so please, just hear me out and hold off on any judgement.’ Sam stared at him, looking fragile and unsure whether he wanted to hear any more. ‘Noakes is already dead. A friend of mine killed him not long after that video was made.’

  ‘What friend? You don’t have any other friends.’

  ‘Nobody knows him, but he’s the only one who can help us now.’

  Sam’s eyes accused him of being insane, ‘Neil, who the fuck are you talking about? Some online psycho you’ve befriended?’

  Neil shook his head slowly. ‘It’s somebody I met when I was thirteen. But it was a brief friendship. Turned out he was trouble, but, right now I’m lucky to know him,’ he laughed, and it sounded like something cracked inside his mind.

  Sam took a deep breath to compose himself. ‘So this friend of yours killed Lloyd?’

  Neil nodded softly. ‘That was an accident…allegedly. He was just looking out for me.’