by CM Genovese
At times like these, you automatically go into a negative thought process. He could have been the nicest teenager in the world, but I couldn’t help thinking he was an asshole.
The car was completely quiet inside. I considered turning on music, but I wanted to be able to hear Holly if she called out for me or if she called on her phone.
Four minutes had passed, and I was getting nervous.
Then the phone rang.
It was Holly.
My finger had just mashed down the green “talk” button when her scream came through the line. She shrieked in pain.
“Noooooo!” she cried.
“Holly,” I said.
“Get off me!”
The phone went dead.
I couldn’t even remember getting to the second floor of the apartment building. I must have left the car, shut the door, climbed the stairs… but if I did, it all happened in a blur. The only thing I did remember was passing two men on the stairs. They were two Samoan men. One was missing his two front teeth. He was a big guy. The skinny man next to him wore a backward Pittsburgh Penguins cap. The two men snickered as I passed them, and I thought that was odd.
When I got to the door to apartment #206, all was silent on the other side.
I didn’t bother knocking. Holly had to be inside. It was unlocked, so I pushed my way in, and walked numbly through the entrance hallway. Pictures of a family were on both sides. A young man and woman with a baby and a dog.
The smell hit me first. It smelled like someone had shit themselves.
Alexander Pride, the man who’d ordered the pizzas, was in the living room. His T-shirt was ripped down the middle and his stomach was slit open. It was his shit I was smelling. He lay on the floor, already dead, with his hands still holding his wound. His dog, a black terrier, lay dead on his thigh. Later, I heard the dog’s neck had been snapped.
Leanna Pride, whose body I never actually saw, was found later in the bathtub. She’d been raped and beaten to death.
A baby cried in one of the back rooms, but it felt like it was coming from another world. Some dream land far away from this one, because what I saw in the dining room shook me to my core and didn’t belong in the same realm as an infant calling out for its mother.
Lying on the table, with blood running from between her naked legs, was Holly. Her jeans had been cut off her and still dangled from around her ankles where the knife had stopped cutting.
Her shirt was slit open at the middle.
She’d been stabbed twelve times on her stomach and chest. One nipple was missing.
Her eyes were still open in terror. Tears had pooled at the corners.
On her shoulder was a bite mark.
Next to her dead body were two pizza boxes. One was open and two slices were missing.
They ate pizza while they raped and stabbed Holly to death.
My body trembled, and I couldn’t breathe. I leaned over and fought back the urge to vomit.
With shaking arms and legs, I glanced once more at Holly’s body. So beautiful, so young, and so gone.
The baby continued to cry, its soft pleas for attention became the desperate screams that led to gasping for air. My body moved numbly through the house until I found him, no older than six months or so, a baby boy in a blue onesie lying in a dark room. He smelled like shit, but I didn’t have time to turn on the bedroom light let alone change a diaper. I needed to be out there with Holly. My innocent Holly.
My back was to the bedroom door when I heard it creak. I wheeled around, expecting to find a gangbanger behind me, but what I saw standing in the bedroom doorway stopped me in my tracks. It was a woman in a tan nun’s habit. She stood there unmoving, blocking my exit. A black shadow seemed to cling to her, keeping her features hidden.
In her hands was a book, but somehow, I knew it wasn’t the Bible I was familiar with. The nun’s face was lowered, her gaze on the floor where it remained shrouded in darkness. Her eyes lifted to meet mine, her head still lowered, so all I saw were red orbs behind her thin tan veil.
Slowly, the nun’s hands came up, her sleeves hanging loosely from her bony pale wrists. Her long, thin fingers ended in black nails, more like a demon’s claws. She was reaching out, either for me or the baby. I was frozen in place and my bladder threatened to relieve itself right there on the bedroom floor. The baby stopped crying. All was silent except my breathing.
Then I blinked and she was gone.
Disappeared.
Vanished.
And I was left standing there thinking I’d lost my mind. Had I snapped at the sight of Holly’s body?
Holly’s body.
Nervously, I made my way back into the dining room with the baby held tightly in my arms. My eyes fell on that bite mark on her shoulder. It was odd. A row of bottom teeth, but the top, right at the middle, was a gap.
Like someone missing his top middle teeth.
The men on the stairs.
Something came over me. It was like I was sitting in the passenger seat of my own body. I wasn’t the driver. A madman took the wheel. My teeth gritted so hard I thought they might shatter, and then I was racing out of the building, taking the stairs several at a time, the baby now only a nuisance I was stuck with on this mission.
There, in the parking lot, walking away from the apartment complex and down the street into the neighborhood, were the two men I’d passed on the stairs. The yellow and black Pittsburgh Penguins emblem was like a target on the one man’s head. It helped me home in on him.
I had no gun. No knife. I hadn’t thought to grab one from the apartment. I hadn’t thought at all.
The two guys working on the car looked at me and the one smoking the joint, who was still smoking a fucking joint, had the audacity to say, “What you lookin’ at, fool? You got a death wish?”
I lowered my gaze to the toolbox sitting on the ground and rushed toward it, ignoring the shit this guy was saying to me the entire time. I squatted down next to the box and skimmed through it until I found a hammer.
Perfect.
“You just gonna go through my shit, motherfucker?” the guy with the joint asked.
When I stood up, wielding the hammer, he backed up a step. He wasn’t the one I wanted. I could come back for him later.
“Hold this,” I said, handing him the baby. He hesitated for only a second before flicking away his joint and taking hold of the infant.
I turned and marched after the two men who were laughing and walking down the street as if they were on their way to a fun night out at the bar. No worries or concerns about the people they’d killed upstairs. No remorse for what they’d done to Holly.
“That bitch had that tight pussy,” the guy with the Penguin’s hat said.
Holly was an angel. She was perfect, and this piece of shit was talking about her like she was a slab of beef.
My hammer hit him first. Right in the center of the Penguin’s emblem. The chunk of metal drove straight into his brain, much deeper than I thought I could ever put it. I felt the skull cave where I hit him, and he went down hard. His body spasmed on the ground.
The other guy, the one with the missing teeth, turned just in time to meet my hammer face to face. The ball at the point of the tool hit him in his left eyeball, and the gelatinous body part exploded. The man screamed and reached out to fight me, but I’d already pulled my weapon back and across my body before letting it fly again. This time I slammed it into his jaw. His teeth crushed under the weight of it, and he went down, stumbling to his side on the ground. He tried to hold up his hands to stop me, so I hit his right knuckles with the hammer and smashed them.
The man howled and I heard other people around me.
“Holy shit!”
“This motherfucker’s crazy!”
“Get ‘em, holmes!”
“This white boy’s fuckin’ ‘em up!”
Everyone was talking, but none of the words mattered. All I cared about was getting revenge for Holly.
The guy with the Penguin’s hat was dying in a puddle of his blood. His body was still shaking when I reached out and brought the hammer down on his throat. He finally went still, gurgling and drowning in his blood.
“Mutha… fuck… I don’t… fuck…” the guy with the missing teeth muttered unintelligibly.
I wasn’t finished with him.
“You killed Holly,” I said.
“Fuck…” he sputtered, coughing blood.
“You killed Holly.”
With that, I swung the hammer down and buried the claw end in the man’s mouth.
“Holy fuck!” someone said.
When the hammer was lodged between his lips, his body shook and his hands came up in a desperate attempt to try and free himself, but his strength was gone, his teeth were shattered, and a maniac was about to end his fucking life. I reared back, lifted my leg, and heel-stomped the hammer into his jaw. His mouth crumbled under my shoe, and the man went silent.
The first thing I saw when I glanced up was the old black limo I’d noticed earlier. It was parked closer this time, right across the street, and I swore its headlights looked like horns. The driver was watching me, but I still couldn’t see him clearly.
Behind him, the rear window rolled down only slightly and a I swore I saw a clawed hand. Fingers slid through the narrow gap and touched the glass. Long, broken black nails tapped against the surface of the window. Then they retreated, slid back into the darkness, and the window closed.
Sirens wailed in the distance and I looked at all the faces around me, knowing I was headed to prison. My hands were covered in blood.
When I looked toward the spot where the limo was parked, it was gone. I never heard its engine come to life, and its taillights should have been visible down the street. It was like it had vanished.
Both men died that night.
It turned out the attack on the Pride family was a paid hit by the Russian mob using a local Samoan gang to do its dirty work. One of the Pride’s had ordered the pizzas beforehand and Holly knocked on the door at the wrong time. Her only crime, her only mistake, had been showing up thirty minutes too early… or too late. If I’d delivered the food, things might have ended differently.
I should have done time, but I walked away that night with the hammer still clutched in my fist. I ended up at a bar, hiding in the back by a dumpster. I was convinced that black limo was driven by the devil himself. His nun came from hell’s orphanage and wanted the baby and me to join them in the fiery pits. The baby was gone. I’d left him behind. But I knew the limo would pull into that parking lot any minute to drive me off to hell.
I sat and listened to the muffled music playing inside while men hollered, women shrieked with laughter, and the world went on with its whimsical party while I held onto my knees and rocked back and forth to ‘Bartender’ by Hed PE.
It wasn’t the devil who found me. It was BP. Bi-Polar Bear, the president of the Royal Bastards Anchorage Chapter. He asked me who I was hiding from, and without even hearing my story, he took me to his motorcycle club and hid me.
The cops didn’t care much about finding the vigilante killer of some gangbangers who’d murdered three people.
Shortly after I started hanging around the Royal Bastards clubhouse, it came out that I’d wanted to go work at the Alaska pipeline. That was how I got my nickname. That and once I started fucking my aggression out on some of the club whores, rumor spread that I was pretty good at laying the pipe.
Holly was the first woman I ever trusted, and that was how I let her down.
She was dead.
Pipeline was born.
And that black limo would haunt my dreams from that day on.
2
Rain and I were a different breed of biker. Sure, we could cuss, fight, and fuck like the rest of them. We did our fair share of that. Well, I did. Rain had been tied down ever since his social worker ol’ lady, Cassie, got her hooks into him. Now, he usually road alongside me and played wingman while I tried to find the kind of woman he had.
Cassie was a good girl. A great woman. She knew my brother’s issues, and she did her best to adapt to him rather than change him. Rain had all sorts of PTSD after getting his throat slit open in prison. It made him jumpy, and he had a temper like none of us had ever seen. We found that out when Cassie got nabbed. Rain would have killed every Russian on earth to get her back.
After getting to know Cassie, I believe she would have done the same for him.
Where are you going to find a love like that?
Only one woman, after Holly of course, could have come close to that with me, and she’d chosen to go a different direction.
Back to what I was saying about Rain and I being different.
While most of our Royal Bastards brothers preferred wild parties at the MC or binge drinking at one of the local bars, we often opted to hit Paddy’s, an Irish diner/bar where we could sit and enjoy a drink while chowing down on the best burger you’d find in Anchorage.
Carla was the waitress there. She had been for as long as we’d been coming around. Half the time, she was the only employee, aside from the cooks working in the back of the house.
Paddy’s wasn’t doing so great though and I feared it was only a matter of time before it closed down. Old man Callum O’Connor, Paddy’s grandson, owned the place now and he never came around. He seemed fine with collecting whatever profits came out of the place but didn’t really care much for making any improvements.
The problem with Anchorage was restaurants, bars, and nightclubs came and went. The clientele wasn’t loyal. If Paddy’s didn’t adapt and grow with the customers, it would die soon.
There was a van parked out in front of Paddy’s when we pulled up. We parked our bikes next to it and weren’t in any rush to enter.
“So, what’s it like to be married?” I asked.
Rain shook his head. “I ain’t married.”
“Might as well be. Cassie owns that ass.”
“I own Cassie’s ass.”
“That too. We need to come up with one of those nicknames for y’all. You know, where you combine the two names? Maybe Rassie. Or, no, she kind of wears the pants so maybe Crain.”
Rain laughed. “Fuck you.”
I was the first one to notice the guys inside. Four of them wearing masks. Multicolored. One red, one green, one blue, and one black. It looked like the dude in the black mask was in charge. He held a shotgun at Carla who was behind the register.
“For fuck’s sake,” Rain muttered.
He wasn’t much of a talker. When he spoke, his voice came out soft and raspy. We liked to joke that he sounded like Steven Seagal. Oftentimes, he’d unwittingly touch his scar as he spoke as if it hurt him to force his voice out.
“Want to go in?” I asked.
The guy in the red ski mask noticed us through the glass doors and said something to his buddies.
“Might as well,” Rain said.
I pushed cautiously through the double doors with my hands already raised above my head. Rain came in right behind me.
“Whoa, motherfuckers!” Red Mask said in a thick Russian accent.
His harsh attitude clashed with the relaxing sound of Frank Sinatra singing ‘The Way You Look Tonight.’ Old man Paddy had always had a thing for the standards. The Rat Pack and many of the other old crooners were on constant rotation at the diner. I’d always thought it weird for an Irishman to have such an appreciation for music that seemed to be dominated mostly by Italians. Personally, I loved the music. It helped me relax and was one more reason for me to like hanging out at Paddy’s.
“Don’t mind us,” I replied.
“Hi, gentlemen,” Carla called out to us like she wasn’t standing in front of a loaded shotgun. It was clear she was trying to remain calm. Her voice was shaky with nerves. “What brings you in tonight? Heard about our deal on desserts? We’ve got bread pudding, custard, shortbread… two for six dollars.”
“They’ve got great bread puddin
g,” I said to the robbers.
“Fuckin’ bread pudding,” Black Mask replied. He, also, had a Russian accent.
“It’s no Pani Popo,” Green Mask joked. This one only seemed to have a forced accent placed on those foreign words, whatever they meant. He definitely wasn’t a Russki.
“Shut up, idiot,” Red Mask said with a raised hand, like he was about to backhand the guy in green.
“Everyone be calm,” Blue Mask said. Like the guy in the green mask, he didn’t have much of an accent.
“Maybe you should put the guns down and leave,” Carla suggested. “Nobody has seen your faces and you clearly weren’t expecting any Royal Bastards to show up.”
“Fuck the Royal Bastards,” Red Mask said as he lifted his mask high enough to spit at her. “Dumb cunt.”
Carla flinched and wiped spit from her eyelash.
“Whoa now,” I said. “Don’t you think that was uncalled for?”
“Why don’t you try spitting in my face,” Rain said.
“Did you say fuck the Royal Bastards?” I asked the robbers.
“What if I did?” Red Mask replied.
“If you did,” I said, “my brother and I are going to take that gun out of your hand and beat you to sleep with it.”
Red Mask laughed, but it was an unconvincing gesture. He was scared, pretending he wasn’t.
“Boys,” Carla interrupted. “This doesn’t have to go sour. I run Paddy’s. If it’s cash you want, I’ll give it to you.”
“What if I want a piece of blonde cougar pussy?” Black Mask asked.
Red Mask laughed.
“What?” Black Mask replied. “Isn’t that what it’s called when there is an older woman? A cougar? Cougar pussy, no?”
“Yes,” Carla answered. “I believe that’s what it’s called, but I’m afraid that’s not on the menu. Now, if you’d like the bread pudding I mentioned—”