by Sam Jones
“Not at all,” Black said as he produced a twenty-dollar bill and placed it in the palm of the manager’s hand.
“Oh,” the manager said, “a tip isn’t necessary.”
“Oh, please. I insist. Consider it a contribution for your kid’s college fund.”
“I don’t have any kids.”
Black took back the twenty and pocketed the bill.
“Well, you fucked up. Now I keep it.”
The manager frowned as the bill disappeared.
“Now,” Black said, “if you’ll excuse me, I have to go face the wrath of my better half.”
Black brushed past the now sulky manager and swiped his card key through the slot. He opened the door with just enough room to slip in without exposing the man crawling across his floor and leaving a bloody trail like some sort of injured snail.
The manager attempted to crane his neck in order to spot Black’s bitter ‘girlfriend,’ but the door was closed on him before he ever had the chance to catch a glimpse. Unsatisfied, he let the issue go and went back to his office on the ground floor. Over the course of the next half hour, he sat there thinking about the twenty bucks and wishing that he hadn’t mentioned the fact that he didn’t have any children.
Back in the room, King looked up as Black casually set down his Beretta, phone, and jacket on the nightstand. King gritted his teeth as he realized was face-to-face with the guy that had made him a paraplegic.
“You mother fucker… I’m gonna kill you…” he said.
“Save your strength, Trailer Trash,” Black replied as he got down on one knee and looked King in the eyes with the same cold and calculated stare that once sent shivers up Amanda’s spine.
“You’re gonna need it.”
Black tied up King to a chair. The MP3 player had been collected and Teddy Pendergrass was now singing out lyrics about fleeting love with a smooth and silky pitch.
In the time he had closed the door on the manager and bound King, Black made a quick analysis of the bullet wound in King’s lower back and deduced (thanks to his semi-extensive medic training) that the man was paralyzed from the waste down.
But his upper torso still had the ability to feel pain.
“I’m worried Cassie, or one of your cronies, might come back, so I’m going to limit our time here to around five minutes. Five minutes is your timeframe,” Black told King.
King wiggled his wrists, which were restrained to the arms of his chair with zip ties, same with a slightly oversized one that was pinning his neck against the frame. When he turned his head down, Black pointed to the sparrow with the Nazi symbol on his neck. “Cool Nazi bird,” Black said.
King hawked into the side of his mouth, produced a bloody loogie, and spit it on the ground in response.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Black said to him. “I’m sweating my ass off. First I thought it was the heat, being that I’m a little irritable, but I’m starting to think it’s the physiological reaction I’m having to the nicotine withdrawals. I quit smoking… As of right now.”
Black shook his head as he removed the carbon fiber knife from his pocket. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” he said. “Why should you give a shit?”
King parted his dried and parched lips that were aching from dehydration. “You best cut me loose, boy,” he said.
Black checked his watch—
Four minutes left.
“We’ve wasted a whole minute,” Black said as he stood directly in front of King.
“You don’t get it,” said King. “You gotta cut me loose...”
“You going to kill me?”
“No, you dumb bastard. You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“Is this guy that big of a badass? I mean, everyone keeps talking very spookily about him and I haven’t even caught his name.”
“His name?” King said with a laugh. “You want to know his name? His name is Fuck Your Mother.”
Black smiled right before he stabbed the knife into King’s left hand with a hard and wet thunk. He muffled the man’s screams by placing a cupped palm over his mouth.
“I don’t relish torture,” said Black. “So don’t make me keep this up. I’m killing you before I walk out of here, that’s just the facts. The choice you have to make is deciding whether that death is swift or elongated. You diggin’ the picture I’m painting for you now, you Ku Klux Kunt?”
King nodded as the veins in his neck bulged.
“What’s his name?” asked Black as he removed his hand.
“Ro… Roenick!” King said through heavy and hot panting.
“Where are they holding Amanda?”
“A compound. Not far from here.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know… Only him and Palizzi and the guy watching her know the location.”
“Sure that’s not a lie?”
“FUCK YOU!”
Black backhanded King with enough force that it made his knuckles throb. Then he checked his watch—
Three minutes left.
“Where’s Amanda?”
“You don’t get it!”
“What don’t I get?”
King leaned in and whispered through choked breaths as Teddy Pendergrass hit a high note—
“I’m FBI!”
Black locked eyes with King and saw his soul fleeting through his pupils.
He’s not lying…
Black went to ask King another set of questions, but right then King began to choke on blood that was gathering and coagulating in his throat, the corners of his mouth trickled red.
The bullet traveled.
“Damn it!” Black yelled as he began cutting King loose.
King convulsed and twitched. As soon as the final zip tie on his neck came off, his head cocked, his eyes rolled back, and he fell onto the floor. He gasped one, final gargled breath of air before he passed into the unknown.
Black shook King and smacked his face in a vain attempt to bring him back to the light.
“Damn it,” he said. “I keep killing you guys too quickly.”
It was the ammo. It was a grade too high.
Or maybe I fired an inch too low.
Black searched King’s pockets and found spare clips, a faux leather wallet with a phony Nevada driver’s license, and a burner phone, which after a quick inspection by Black revealed itself to be encrypted and untraceable.
This is gonna come in handy.
He grabbed King by his left arm and dragged his lifeless corpse into the bathroom like a sack of dirty laundry. After he placed him into the tub, he re-inspected the body for something that might hint at a connection to the FBI. Other than the battle scars and racist tattoos, there was nothing else to back up the claim.
He wasn’t lying.
I could see it in his eyes.
Whatever it meant and whatever the connection implied, it wasn’t good. All it meant to Black was that the government was now an ingredient getting mixed into this mound of shit being called a cake.
He took out King’s burner phone, went through recent contacts, and pressed the last number that the phone had called. It rang for two turns before the other end picked up—
“Go,” said the person on the other end of the line.
“Hey, this is Martin Black. I just wanted to let Roenick know that I was in town, and I’m planning on fucking his shit up within the next few hours.”
Dead air. Silence filled a five second gap before the other end responded—
“Please hold.”
As he waited on the line, Black went into the bathroom to wash blood off the hand he had cupped over King’s mouth. He placed the phone on speaker, and he scrubbed them with a vanilla-scented hand soap that had the Bally’s logo engraved onto it.
As Black dried his hands, Roenick came over the line—
“Mister Black. I see you have a talent for disruption.”
Black picked up the phone, shut off the light to the bathroom, and closed the door.
“I’m not going to stop until I get the girl back,” he said. “If I have to kill every single one of your people to get to her, I will.”
More time went on. Black grew antsy as he waited for Roenick’s reply.
“I know what you want,” Roenick said. “I can settle this for you, once and for all. There will be no further need to pursue the girl.”
“Is that so? What’s your plan then, sport?”
“Midnight. The Lunar Club. I’ll give you what you want.” The line went dead followed by a flat line beep.
Black gathered his things and exited the room as a thin river of blood began to pour out from underneath the bathroom door.
He made sure to leave the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle as he walked out.
Amanda Dubin was in the living room. She was now wearing a gray sweater with matching sweat pants that O’Reilly had given her. The monochromatic, inmate look topped off her prison-like situation.
There was no television or means of electronic entertainment so her time was spent focused on a table lamp and fantasizing about bashing the base of it against the back of O’Reilly’s head.
When a couple hours had gone by, she requested some sort of reading material. Mostly to inconvenience him.
If I can’t move right now, I’m going to at least annoy him.
“Hey. Lucky Charms,” she said.
O’Reilly, a few self-made stitches now holding his split lip together, looked up at her from the kitchen area to the left of the living room.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Can I get something to read? I boring my tits off over here.”
He walked to a large chest of drawers shaped like an oval resting on avian-like pegs the size of melons. O’Reilly pulled opened the top drawer, produced a brown, leather bible that hadn’t been cracked open in decades and pulled open the front flap with a smirk. “Here you go, lass. This is appropriate.”
He read an inscription on the front cover—
“Courtesy of the Gideons. Apparently, this was stolen from The Drake Hotel in Chicago.” He tossed it over by Amanda’s feet and moved to scour the pantry for food.
Amanda stared at the bible for a few moments, the black leather and silver lettered publication sent her mind back into the past, to the time she spent at a foster home with Dan and Michelle.
From ages two to twelve she lived with a lovely couple, who were just shy of being in their sixties at the time. They were a well-known and well-reputed pair of individuals, who had dedicated their lives to helping kids in need, being that they could never have their own.
Dan, funnily enough, looked a good amount like Dan Aykroyd and Michelle bore a striking resemblance to that lovely woman, who seemed to portray a decent amount of the warm and slightly off beat TV and film roles of the 90s, Joan Cusack.
Amanda was a classic cinema type of gal.
For a girl who had no knowledge of her past or her parents, Amanda’s placement with Dan and Michelle was more than a lucky one. Her and her foster siblings, which shuffled faces every few years, were a cordial unit that seemed to function remarkably well in a system that seemed to have many downsides.
Dan was a Catholic. Michelle was a Protestant.
Needless to say, there were a lot of bibles around the house. Amanda cracked one open, once or twice, but the stories seemed far-fetched and outdated to her. Whenever she did finish reading most fables, she felt the need to say, “Laaaame.” And do it with enough volume for others around her to hear.
More so, the bible never answered any of life’s questions for her.
They just felt like dull riddles.
It was when Amanda turned eleven that she developed the sagacity for questioning authority. She was always prompting the question ‘why?’ Her frustration with life reached a pinnacle as every part of it seemed to lack logic or a sense of justice.
One day Dan, who was always dressed in his blue or red flannel shirt with hairy arms sticking out, was doing dishes at the sink, which had curtains with drawings of pine trees hand-sewn into them.
I miss those curtains.
Dan noticed that Amanda was sulking over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After a few sighs and grunts and heavy-handed page turns from Amanda, Dan smiled, shut off the sink, dried his hands, and walked over to the table.
“What’s wrong, Mandy Pants?”
Amanda opened her mouth. A week earlier, the (at the time) eleven-year-old, was sporting a bruised chin from a schoolyard shuffle, incited by a girl calling her an orphan. Even though she had won the match, she ended up explaining her injuries to Dan and Michelle as being a result from a trip down some stairs.
Amanda threw down Huck Finn.
“This book sucks,” she said.
“You don’t like it?” asked Dan. “I loved it when I was your age!”
“The words Jim says aren’t spelled right. It’s like… someone who can’t spell words right wrote this.”
“Mark Twain made Jim talk and sound how someone like him would have really sounded like at that time in history. If you say his words out loud, they make more sense. Try it!”
Amanda read it out loud.
It made more sense.
She smiled.
“But the N word,” she said with a frown. “That’s totally not okay. Right?”
“It’s not.”
“Then why did he write it?”
Dan thought of the most appropriate and truly rational answer he could think of—
“I’m supposed to say ‘it was the times,’ sweetie. But that still doesn’t make it kosher.”
“What’s ‘kosher?’”
Dan laughed.
Amanda wasn’t sure why he did, but she laughed as well.
After that, she bucked up, and helped Dan finish the dishes, Dan teaching her more lingo and appropriate slang she had never heard before as splashes from their occasional soapy water fights speckled the pine tree decorated curtains.
It was a rare and treasured moment that she always remembered fondly amidst a history of angst.
I miss those curtains.
A lot.
The pine tree keychain was something she bought at a gas station. It was after Dan and Michelle’s funeral, which resulted from a car accident two years later.
At least that’s how I remember it…
Amanda looked back at the bible that O’Reilly tossed over and picked it up from off the floor. She opened the book and immediately searched for Luke 9:24. She came upon the passage and read it out loud at a low volume for fear of O’Reilly’s prying ears—
“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”
She closed the book and tossed it on the table, the same feeling she had whenever she read the bible had returned in familiar form. For her, the effort to look the passage up was a bit of a runaround and a reach to get to the punch line.
Fuck you, O’Reilly.
Knocking at the front door. O’Reilly looked through the peephole and undid the locks. Cassie Palizzi stormed inside in a fevered hustle, breathing with the huff and guff rhythm of a bull while she asked O’Reilly about Roenick’s whereabouts.
“He just called me. He’s on his way back,” said O’Reilly.
“King is dead,” Cassie said.
“Shyte. Who did it?”
“Who do you think it was?”
“That bastard Black?”
Cassie gave him the thumbs up.
Then she looked over at Amanda. She held her stare for a few moments before something caused her to break the gaze and head back out the front door, O’Reilly following her.
After about thirty seconds of nothing, Amanda realized that she had been left completely alone.
What were those guys in the jumpsuit putting in the back of the house?
Defiance fueling her system, Cassie stood and made her way toward the back of the house, slowly. She came to the front door; her bare feet
hit the orange shag carpeting that had become thick over the course of terrible upkeep. They felt like vines attempting to root her feet in place.
She could faintly hear O’Reilly and Cassie going back and forth with one another. Cassie seemed to be burning up more oxygen than O’Reilly. After a few beats, Amanda hooked a left and moved towards the back of the house via a dark hallway with dim lighting. She was escorted by a chill, thanks largely in part to a trapped concentration of A/C that had managed to amass in this particular part of the house. The chill caused her skin to go goosey.
There were doors. Three off them. All of them closed.
The one on the right she knew for sure to be a bathroom. It was the only one she had been allowed to use during her involuntary stay here. The door on the left and the other one at the far end of the hall was uncharted territory.
She started with the door on the left and slowly opened it—
Nothing.
The end of the hall seemed to be where the winning door waited.
She walked up to the door and twisted the knob.
“It’s locked.”
She spun around to see that O’Reilly had slipped back inside and snuck up on her like a panther on the prowl.
Amanda, upset but not surprised, took her palm off the handle and knocked on the door.
“This where you keep your pot ‘o gold?” she asked.
Roenick arrived back at the house, Cassie waiting for him out front. He got out of his cherry-looking Mustang. Traces of white paint were on all four ties.
Where have you been, big brother?
Roenick stepped out of the driver’s side, Miss Prophet from the passenger. Cassie all of the sudden felt the urge to kick the woman in the shins, as soon as she got closer, but she decided to be the bigger woman and let it slide.
Just shoot her if the opportunity arises.
Make it look like an accident.
Cassie approached Roenick as he moved towards the house. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Taking care of some business with Miss Prophet.”
Prophet never bothered to acknowledge Cassie. It was deliberate.
“King is dead,” Cassie said to Roenick.
Roenick stopped in his tracks and slowly turned around.
“Am I to assume Martin Black was responsible for that?” he asked.