by T. Braddy
He didn’t belong there.
He was an interloper, an unwanted stranger, and that unsettled me even more than my real fate somehow. At least until the two blood-spattered blades of the handheld garden shears slid across the first knuckle of my middle finger.
The unimaginably dank breath of my tormentor filled my nostrils, but at least I could have a reprieve from the scent of blood and Richie’s loosened bowels.
“I’m gonna take off the rest of your fingers before I take your paws,” Brickbat said, lips curling down to reveal a jagged skyline of teeth.
I spat into his mouth, the bloodiest, phlemiest wad I could muster, and he reeled in anger.
His hand sailed around and caught me right under the eye, but that didn’t matter whatsoever. Nothing mattered. Crush my eye socket. Take out my teeth, one by one. Tear my ears with common pliers.
Brickbat shoved the blood instrument into my mouth, reaching for my tongue or my remaining teeth. This was it. My bladder let go. My nerve diminished, and I let out tortured, unfettered sobs. I saw my death laid out before me like half-assed blueprints.
Between my screams, however, I heard something.
Not just a something, but a distinct something.
A small pop came from somewhere inside the building. Only I seemed to hear it, and Bellerose didn’t react whatsoever. Was I losing my mind, or had I heard a gunshot?
The second one I definitely heard, and so did they, because Bellerose’s eyes widened, and he nodded for one of the sweat-stained lackeys to investigate.
All the while, Brickbat readied the saw to finish the job. “I’ma take your tongue and your teef, you dickspit, and then I’ma take something else you care about, hee hee.”
The hook-shaped blades disappeared from my vision and grazed my pants.
“Brickbat,” Bellerose said. His voice was wavy with nerves. “Goddamnit.”
Brickbat turned, stood up, and faced his ostensible master.
“His fingers,” he said. “Want his fingers.”
“Hurry,” Bellerose said. He sounded like he was in some other world, as though he were watching this from some perch far, far away. In fact, he sounded really, really high. “Use the saw blade. Get those motherfuckers off his hand.”
Brickbat shrugged and slipped the shears into a blood-caked pocket before retrieving a handheld saw from behind me.
The blade descended on my left wrist and rested there. Brickbat was a big man and could lop off my hand with a single thrust of the serrated edge of the blade, but for some reason he didn’t. I looked up and saw that his head was tilted at an odd angle – an even more odd one than usual – and he was looking at the door to the murder room. The torture den. His eyes were alive with the kind of terror reserved only for people who have no idea how fucked they really are. And Brickbat, it seemed, had no inkling. He was staring at the door, wondering who was shooting. Who might be dumb enough to go Tarantino up in this compound.
Bellerose stood unevenly, leaning on the desk to keep himself upright, and he pointed to his men. “Put whoever that is in a bag with two snakes, and throw the bag in the river.”
A few of the remaining men trundled out of the room, nearly tripping on one another, leaving some wide-eyed gun-jockeys, a halfwit masochist, and Bellerose himself.
“Well,” Bellerose said after a time, filling the void of the silence. I whimpered into my lap, watching a near-constant string of blood dribble from my split and mangled lips and pool on my jeans. My goddamned hand hurt so bad I wished for whoever was killing Bellerose’s men to sever me from the mortal coil before turning the gun on these sick motherfuckers.
Brickbat didn’t finish the job. I didn’t know if it was fear or a sudden realization that he was nearer to death that he’d have liked in this moment, but some force stayed his hand.
Several more gunshots echoed in the distance of the compound, and at some indistinct point the door flew open. In walked a bloodied, smiling Limba Fitz.
nineteenth chapter
“You don’t get to kill him!” he screamed, wielding two pistols, one for each hand. “You don’t. I do! I do, goddamnit.”
The room was filled with benches that themselves were covered with instruments of torture, and Donnell and Ferg ducked behind them, extricating their pistols from their shoulder holsters.
Fitz simply walked into the room and popped off a few shots each at Ferg and Donnell, who were so pinned down that they couldn’t return fire. Fitz knelt calmly behind a bench of his own. When he glanced in my direction, we made eye contact, and he winked.
Ferg stood up, meaning to unload on Fitz, but Fitz had the drop on him. He leapt over the bench, firing with the free hand, and shot the gun right out of Ferg’s hand. Unfortunately for Ferg, the shot also took most of the hand with it, so he dropped to the ground, screaming and holding what remained of his fingers.
Serves you right, you bastard.
Donnell didn’t go down so easily. He kept an angle on Fitz, firing over the top of the bench. Bellerose had ducked underneath his desk and was screaming unintelligible commands at his last remaining henchman.
Between volleys of gunfire, the only sounds that could be heard were Ferg’s screams and my moaning, an act to keep the pain at bay and to help me stay conscious. If I happened to end up in darkness, it was all too likely that it’s where I’d stay.
This back and forth went on for a while. Eventually, however, Donnell made a mistake. Misjudged the number of rounds in the clip, and that signed his death certificate. The moment the gun clicked, Fitz was over another bench and running toward him. The big guy flung the weapon, but it missed, and Fitz was on him, swinging his pistol at the guy’s face like a one-handed axe. Pistol-whipped him until only gurgling sounds could be heard.
“Saved my last bullet for you,” he said, rising up and heading toward Bellerose’s desk. “One in the chamber, exactly. You ready to take it, big man?”
“I ain’t done shit to you, wildman,” he said. “You got what you come for, and then some. We was just having some fun with him.”
“You assholes don’t get to decide what kind of fun you have with him. I do. I made that insanely clear when I spoke with you. And here you went, ruining the fun. You think I can chase him down now? You think I can test him out, see what he’s worth? No. No, I can’t. And that’s your fault, Bellerose.”
The front of the desk where Bellerose had been sitting exploded in a spray of wood pieces. Shotgun blast. Fitz spun and fell to the ground but got up quickly. He was bleeding from a few pronounced spots, but he seemed to be holding up just fine.
“You’re lucky I’m in a hurry, else, I’d take my time with you.”
Over in the corner of the room, Ferg was crying for his mother.
“I’ll deal with you,” Fitz announced to the weeping giant. He grabbed a saw from atop one of the tables and stalked over to the man. I was spared the sight of the gutting Ferg endured, but it sounded like something straight out of an abattoir. Only, Fitz giggled with the morbidly cheerful determination of man sated only by the completion of an act, which raised my remaining hairs to razor-sharp points. Saw on bone continued for what seemed like an eternity, until finally the serrated ends of the blade met with the concrete floor.
A sound I’d also never forget, so long as I lived.
Hearing this violence somehow palliated my own crippling pain, but as soon as the gunfight ended, the agony returned with unbridled severity.
This was when, I suppose, Bellerose thought he should take his chance. He leapt up, holding a hand cannon, and emptied the clip into Fitz’s direction. Fitz didn’t so much as move, and every ejected round miraculously passed by him.
Fitz wheeled around, fired once, and then started running toward the desk. By the time he topped the steps, Bellerose was leaning back in his plush chair, holding a wound in his neck. His eyes wide and fearful, he shook his head ever so slightly as Limba Fitz towered over him.
“We had a deal,” he said. “Yo
u violated that deal. You violated my trust, and I don’t handle that very well. I have a code, as well I imagine you do. It is iron-clad. I don’t break my promises, and I promised you that I would deliver on my end.”
He stood up, patted Bellerose on the head, and padded down the steps. I flinched as he passed me by, grabbing a claw hammer from one of the benches in the room. He sauntered back to the injured dealer, walking like a man whose number has just been called at a deli, and went at him with the blunt end of the tool. For what felt like the hundredth time tonight, I closed my eyes, tried to block out the aural shock of what was happening.
I started to lose my handle on reality. I didn’t hear the screaming, didn’t hear the flat, dull phwump of the hammer on bone. I was fixed at such an angle that I couldn’t witness the broad swings Fitz delivered against rounded edge of Bellerose’s frontal bone. I only heard the resulting sounds, like cracking hard-boiled eggs.
At some interstitial point, the raw, searing sensation of my two lost fingers subsided to a distant, almost intellectual throb. I knew I felt something, and it was agonizing, but I couldn’t discern the particulars of my personal torment.
I looked down, peering indifferently at the bloodied red stumps. Didn’t even look like my hand. The mass of destroyed tissue could have been attached to one of the corpses in the room – Richie, maybe – and I suddenly scrabbled together bits and pieces of hope that indicated maybe this was one of my now-customary hallucinations. Yeah, maybe I had dreamed this, and Emmitt Laveau – or maybe great uncle Kweku – would step out of the shadows and laugh and laugh and laugh.
We sure got you, they’d say. We sure put one over on you. That’s what you get for forgetting about us so quickly, McKane.
I would get out of the chair, only it wouldn’t be a chair. It would be my bed, and I’d go out on the front porch with a bowl of cheese grits and bacon and sit and eat it in the morning sunshine. Willie the Dog would dance around in the front yard, looking for a place to do his business. Maybe I’d go see Allison, and we’d get to know one another better. She’d help me forget about all the sad business with Winston, all the horrific details of Vanessa’s past, and then she’d look at me and say, “McKane. McKane, you motherfucker. Can you hear me? Are you fucking dead, McKane?”
No. Wait. That wasn’t Allison’s voice.
She stared at me for a moment and then tried again.
Her lips parted, and she said, “Get your head out of your ass, you pale motherfucker.”
A disembodied hand smacked my face. My eyes opened. Head leaned forward, drool seeping onto my lap. I had fallen asleep. I tried to scream and could only manage a plangent sob.
In the air was the must and stink of a man covered in the blood of strangers. I squinted through swollen eyes to see Limba Fitz leaning forward. He said, “That whole sickening business is over. What’s say we get you the fuck out of here?”
“Okay, man,” I said.
Despite all the violence he had perpetrated on countless inhabitants of this compound, he was surprisingly gentle hoisting me out of my chair. He untied the straps, carefully moving my disfigured hand, and helped me to my feet.
As soon as I put some weight on my knees, they buckled. Seems they were feeling sympathy for my knuckles, which leaked a confounding amount of blood.
“Fucking Christ, man,” he said. “That is fucked up, what they did to you. You won’t be able to do shit with that gouting blood, now will you?”
I shook my head. A slight gesture.
“You want that fixed?”
A nod.
“Okay, then. Fuck, man, why didn’t you ask? I can’t have you dying on me before I kill you.”
He disappeared from my sight, which, to be honest, was focused entirely on the ground by my head. Blood and dirt and gore intermingled in a sickening art installation, and I smelled the expired remains of a thousand men in the cracks of this floor.
I blinked away unconsciousness until Fitz reappeared, carrying a hand torch and serrated knife. He was smiling in a way that told me he would enjoy this.
I didn’t care. I wanted this fixed. The pain I could handle. I wasn’t superhuman, but I had been put in some pretty shitty situations in my day, and I was prepared to endure another one.
Or so I thought.
Fitz sparked the torch and set the blade against it until it was red hot.
I started to shake my head.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Only way to stop that bleeding without going to a doctor, and, well, no reason to do that, is there?”
I drew my hand into myself, and Limba, looking disappointed, kicked me until I relented and held it out.
The man stepped on my wrist, placing just enough pressure that I couldn’t wrestle free, and before I had time to react, was pressing the blade against my gaping, bleeding stumps.
The pain was not endurable. It was not within the zone of proximity to endurable.
Good thing was, I was out before I really felt the brunt of the pain.
When I next came to, I was moving. Well, maybe the better way of saying it was that someone was moving me. My good arm draped across shoulders, I ambled forward, half-dragging my feet. My hand was a blinding light of pain, but somehow I found the wherewithal to edge ahead.
Guess I had no choice but to do that.
“You awake?”
I groaned deep in my throat.
I staggered around for a bit before I found my legs. I stepped on something that I hoped was a bullet casing.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, thickly.
“Well, let’s hop to it.”
The barrel of his searing hot pistol singed my neck at the hairline, a hot stove eye against my skin. It was fine. Anything to deny the agony of my missing fingers.
“They’re gone,” I said. “My fucking fingers–”
“Are gone, yeah yeah. Stop at the end of this hallway; there’s a bathroom with all the first aid shit you could ever need. I’ll fix you up before we go. Can’t have you bleeding to death on me.”
“But you’re going to kill me,” I said. I sounded like I’d been drugged, and maybe I had.
“Yeah, but not that way. That’s a fucking shitty way to die.”
He sat me down and doused my fingers in alcohol – and held me fast in the chair when I attempted to wriggle free of his grip – before wrapping the missing digits in gauze. He gave me a shot of something, and my hand went largely numb after that. It was like having someone else’s arm swinging from my shoulder socket.
“All set. Now, we go.”
He forces me up and out of the bathroom, guiding me along by a very specific point in the middle of my back. It was kind of funny. I could barely walk, let alone fight back, and yet he kept the gun ready to take me out.
“Guess that’s why you’re the professional,” I said, as we reached the driveway, filled with ridiculously expensive-looking cars.
“Guess so,” he said, leading me to the driver’s side of a nearby car. “Watch your head.”
I plopped into the driver’s seat of the vehicle and leaned back, wanting to sleep.
“Drive,” he said.
Leaning up, I asked him, “Why didn’t you just make the trade? Me for the money? It was in the trunk. You knew where it was, and I didn’t try to hide it this time.”
Fitz looked at me with those doll black eyes. You’re a lunatic, they said. “I wasn’t going to give that fuck money,” he said instead. “If Bellerose thought that, he’s dumber, even, than I thought he was. My bossman has been complaining about that guy for years. We just didn’t have a reason to come down here and deal with him until you waltzed into the picture. And now look at all the ways you’ve helped us, Rolson McKane. We should put you on the payroll, but Christ, you just keep helping us for free.”
I shrugged. Sounded about right.
My mind wandered, and I thought about closing my eyes, actually started to go through with it, but Fitz leaned over and twe
aked my nose, and I screamed. Pinwheels of light skittered out across my field of view.
“Drive,” he said. “Don’t wreck this brand new piece of automotive engineering, or I will drag you in front of every single person you love and fuck them in the gunshot wounds I make in them before I kill them. Do you get my fucking drift, you motherfucker?”
“I got you,” I said, pressing the ignition button. My mouth seemed to move independently of the brain. “Do you need the money?”
“I already got it out of your car. That’s why homeboy couldn’t find it a little while ago.”
“Huh.”
I didn’t have to act yet. I just had to think. Had to think about what to do next, how to make some room for myself to fight back. But for now I had a hand cannon trained on my temple. My brains would land in somebody’s front yard before I realized they were gone.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s going to be a turn-by-turn thing,” he said. “Think of me like a GPS.”
“I can barely – think,” I said. “How can I drive?”
“Carefully? Wait a second, I have something that might help.”
His face was scored with crisscrossing rows of scar tissue. Maybe old acne, as well. The five o’clock shadow hid some of it, but not particularly successfully. He was, because of all that, a pretty heinous, dangerous-looking dude.
From under the seat of the black sedan, Limba Fitz retrieved a pint of Jim Beam. Four hundred, seventy-three milliliters of pure, golden bliss. Six months ago, I’d have fought Fitz for the privilege of guzzling it down. But I was sober now, and if this delinquent wanted me to indulge, there was an unseemly motive behind it.
When he pushed the bottle across the seat to me, I pressed myself against the driver’s side door. Physical contact was bad. Physical contact with the bottle meant I might as well take a drink. Take a drink until the drink takes you, my old man used to say.
But the pain in my hand. Despite the shot Fitz had given me, I experienced something akin to anguish. It was that pain that helped my disease along. You’re in pain, man. The booze is just a painkiller, and all you have to do is–