Razorblade Tears

by S. A. Cosby

  “I told them it was dangerous. I told them, but Derek was mad and Isiah was determined. They didn’t understand what they were dealing with at all. That’s not my fault. If you think I wanted them to die you can take me up on my first offer and get the fuck out of here,” Tangerine said. Ike jumped into the fray.

  “Look, all we want from you is the name of the guy you were seeing. Who is he? We’ll take care of the rest,” he said.

  “I’m not telling you that. I shouldn’t have told Derek and Isiah. I should have just let it go when he broke things off. His life is complicated. I knew that when I met him. Look, I was drunk and I was venting at the party. I was all up in my feelings. That was a mistake,” Tangerine said.

  “Telling Derek about your boyfriend?” Ike said.

  “Yeah. That too,” Tangerine said. Ike could see the resemblance to her mother, but she had more in common with the boy in the pictures.

  “If you don’t want to tell us, tell the cops,” Buddy Lee said. Ike turned and faced him. He couldn’t have been more shocked if Buddy Lee had grown a second head on his shoulder.

  “I want to find the people who did this and I don’t care how it gets done. If you don’t want to tell us, tell the fucking cops,” Buddy Lee said.

  “I’m sorry but I can’t be a part of this,” Tangerine said.

  “A part of this? You are this. It’s all about you. You killed my son and his … husband, but all you care about is saving your own ass,” Ike said.

  “Listen, babyboy, I don’t know if you noticed, but the only person who cares about my ass is me. Don’t come in here laying your bag at my feet. You hollering about how much you care about your dead gay sons because you treated them like shit when they were alive,” Tangerine said. She pushed a lock of hair out of her face. Ike shot up off the couch. His fists were clenched tight.

  “You don’t know shit about me and my son,” Ike said.

  “Oh, I don’t? I bet you tell people how much you loved him, but you only loved parts of him. Not all of him. Not everything. Now you want me to risk my life to make you feel better about yourselves. That ain’t my job, booboo,” Tangerine said. Ike took a step toward her. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “I know you. I’ve always known men like you. You strut around like Billy Badass, but you lie to people about your son and his ‘roommate,’” Tangerine said as she made the sign for air quotes. Ike felt his fists unfurl. The accuracy of her statement made his head hurt. It was like she had been peeping in his window for the last ten years.

  “We know we ain’t shit. You ain’t gotta tell us. We do enough of that to ourselves every day. But that don’t mean our boys should rot in the ground while your boyfriend gets to skip all across God’s green earth because you’re too chickenshit to come forward. I know you know he’s looking for you. He got some badass biker boys trying to hunt you down. He wants them to take the top of your head off. Now if we found you, how long you think it’s gonna take before they do, too? You come with us and you tell the cops, they can protect you,” Buddy Lee said.

  “No, they can’t. Everything that’s going on, it’s not him. He’s tied into a situation that he can’t control. The people he answers to are the ones behind this. Rich-ass wannabe movers and shakers who control everyone and everything in their orbit. He’s as much a victim in all this as—”

  “If you say Isiah and Derek, we are going to have a fucking problem,” Ike said. Tangerine licked her lips.

  “He once told me they wanted him to be a lion and a lion doesn’t feel guilty for eating a sheep. They’ve abused him all his life and they don’t care how broken he is. You have no idea what kind of shit you’re dealing with,” Tangerine said. Her hazel eyes seemed to glow.

  “You don’t really believe that horseshit, do you? He is trying to kill your ass and mount it on his wall,” Buddy Lee said.

  “I’m telling you, you don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s going through. This is way bigger than you think,” Tangerine said.

  “He killed my son. I know all I need to know except his name,” Ike said.

  “Drinks! I hope you like Cuba libres,” Lunette said. She had four glasses on a plastic tray. She sat the tray on the ottoman and started handing out the rum-and-coke concoctions.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Buddy Lee said.

  “My name’s Lunette, not ma’am. You can call me Sugar if you want, though.” She winked at Buddy Lee, who killed his drink in two gulps. Ike held his in an iron grip as he focused on Tangerine. Tangerine took a sip. This time she did bat her eyes at him.

  “You thinking about hitting me, aren’t you? That your kink?” she asked.

  “No. I’m thinking I wish my son hadn’t tried to help you, but that was the kind of man he was. He would help anybody. Even someone who didn’t give a damn about him,” Ike said.

  “Trying to guilt me ain’t a good look, babyboy,” Tangerine said. Ike thought she meant for it to sound hard, but it came out flat.

  “I’m not trying to guilt you. I’m stating facts.”

  Tangerine opened her mouth to respond, but then the sound of a car door slamming came from the front yard. Ike stood. The skin on the back of his neck prickled like a ghost was tickling him. He locked eyes with Buddy Lee.

  “I haven’t had these many guests since before your daddy left,” Lunette said. She sashayed toward the door. The ice cubes in her glass clinked like castanets.

  “Ma, what are you doing? I told you we gotta be careful,” Tangerine said. She popped up and grabbed Lunette by the arm.

  “I’m gonna see who it is,” she slurred. Ike wondered how much rum she’d put in her drink. He sat his glass down on the ottoman.

  “Wait. Let me take a look,” Ike said. He went to the window on the left side of the doorjamb. Peering through the filthy pane of glass he saw a blue minivan. It had parked on the other side of the sedan to the far left of their truck. It was accompanied by three motorcycles. The motorcycles had parked in the gap between the van and the sedan.

  Six men were walking toward the house. They all had on baseball caps pulled low and they were all holding guns.

  “Get down!” Ike yelled. Lunette broke free from Tangerine’s grasp and walked toward Buddy Lee.

  “What is he talking about, handsome?” she asked with a smile as she swirled her drink.

  Gunfire erupted from outside. The interior of the house became a hellscape of shattered glass, wood splinters, and fragmented Sheetrock. Lunette’s body did a shuddering box step as bullets tore through her chest and belly. Her floral housedress was drenched in blood, turning the daisies on it to roses. Tangerine launched herself at her mother even as Buddy Lee reached out for her and tried to pull her down. Ike was on his stomach and pulling himself along the floor. Lunette’s body folded in on itself and crumpled. Her glass slipped from her hand and rolled along the uneven wood floor.

  Footsteps pounded on the porch as Ike reached the dining room table. The front door burst open from one swift kick. just as Ike reached up and grabbed the stock of the shotgun. He pumped a round and aimed at the man in the doorway.

  Cheddar paused. He hadn’t expected to be staring down the barrel of a 12-gauge. Ike aimed at the general area of his head and pulled the trigger. Half of Cheddar’s face evaporated in a red mist of flesh, bone, and brain matter. His baseball cap flew off what was left of his head and fluttered to the floor as his body fell half in, half out the front door. Ike pumped the shotgun again, expelling the spent shell and sliding another one in the chamber. The second man on the porch jumped sideways as Ike aimed at his chest. Ike pulled the trigger and the shotgun roared again even as the third scurried back to the van. The buckshot caught Gremlin where his thigh became a part of his abdomen, blasting him off the porch. When he hit the ground, his large and small intestines began to unspool like a ribbon of saltwater taffy soaked in merlot.

  Ike pumped the shotgun again. The spent shell was expelled again but this time it wasn’t replaced.

/>   “Buddy, shoot!” Ike yelled.

  Buddy Lee popped his head up over the back of the sofa where he had landed with Tangerine under him. He pulled the gun from his waistband and took aim at the four men who were moving toward the house in a crouch. He was a terrible shot. He thought he winged one while the other three ran for cover.

  Ike scurried across to the dead man in the doorway and grabbed the gun in his hand. It was a submachine gun. Either a MAC-10 or Uzi, he wasn’t sure. Ike aimed at the van and the sedan and unloaded.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Grayson screamed as bullets pinged off the sedan. Chunks of metal and fiberglass sprayed his face and eyes. He screamed again and this time it was a wordless howl of unmitigated fury. He leaned the machine gun around the front bumper and fired blind. Dome took a position next to Grayson.

  “My gun jammed!” he howled. Grayson ignored him.

  “Oh God. Oh God, my guts. My fucking guts!” Gremlin moaned.

  Ike leaned back in the doorway as another burst from the third man’s gun ripped through the air. Ike returned fire until he heard the dry click of an empty magazine. Moving on pure instinct he reached in the dead man’s pockets and found another clip. It had been years since he’d handled a gun, but his hands didn’t seem to notice. They popped out the clip and replaced it with ferocious alacrity. He fired off a quick burst just as Grayson peeped around the front bumper of the sedan.

  “Go for the truck!” Ike shouted. He tossed Buddy Lee the keys. Buddy Lee snatched the keys out of the air with his free hand. He dragged a howling and crying Tangerine through the kitchen and out the back door. Ike fired off another burst at the sedan.

  “Fuck this!” Grayson spat out. He stood up and leaned across the hood of the sedan. He swept the barrel back and forth across the porch laying down a line of fire that plucked at the house like the claws of a demon. The expelled shells danced across the hood and rolled off the edge onto the ground.

  Ike scooted under the window, stood, and fired out of the fractured lower pane. Grayson disappeared behind the trunk of the sedan. Ike kept firing in the general vicinity of the sedan, the van, and the bikes until he heard the engine of Buddy Lee’s truck fire up and roar like a tornado.

  Grayson replaced his clip, moved to the rear of the van, and fired at the house again. He didn’t hear the truck start up, but saw it back up, then spin around so that the back window was facing him. He aimed at the truck and fired. The back window shattered, but then he received a rain of bullets from the house that forced him to hit the deck.

  One of his other brothers, Gage, was crawling toward him holding his thigh. He didn’t see the last member of their hit squad, Kelso. He and Gremlin and Cheddar had ridden their bikes. Dome, Gage, and Kelso had taken the van. He’d figured six Rare Breed with guns was more than enough for a nigger, a shitkicker, and a slut.

  He was getting real sick of being wrong.

  Buddy Lee pulled Tangerine down as he floored the truck. Shards rained over the nape of his neck and down his back.

  “Shit, goddammit!” Buddy Lee said as he wheeled the truck in a wide arc, then backed up to the front of the house at an angle. He heard a scream like a horse being gelded as he ran over the legs of the man in the yard, crushing them beneath the weight of his Chevy.

  Ike came running out of the house firing the machine gun as he leapt in the truck bed. Buddy Lee hit the gas as Ike fired at the two men who had scuttled behind the blue minivan. Buddy Lee slammed into the sedan, sending it crashing into the first two bikes. The conservation of momentum sent the second bike plowing into the third. Buddy Lee kept the hammer down, turned left, and headed down the lane.

  Ike let off one last blast from the submachine gun, spraying the rear of the van. The glass in the rear door exploded along with the rear driver’s side tire. Grayson and Dome had kept moving around the van as the truck shot by like a cannonball until they ended up crouched down like a pair of turtles near the front bumper.

  Grayson jumped up in time to see the truck turn left and take off down the highway. Grayson wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Sweat, blood, and bits of metal stuck to the hairs on his forearm. His ears rang with a high-pitched metallic whine. Dome rose and stood beside Grayson. Kelso crawled from under the sedan.

  Grayson stopped staring down the lane and took in the scene swirling around him. Three of his brothers were down. Cheddar was dead. Gremlin was right on his heels. Gage was bleeding out all over the red clay that covered the yard.

  “Dome, they got me in my leg, Dome. I’m bleeding a lot. God it hurts, I’m bleeding a lot, Dome,” Gage rasped.

  “My guts, man. I can see my guts,” Gremlin said. His words were so light the wind nearly snatched them away. Dome and Grayson walked over to their mortally injured brother. Most of the lower half of his stomach was gone or slipping through his hands like a greased eel. He was lying in a pool of blood and shit large enough to soak in like a hot tub.

  His legs looked like breadsticks made by a blind baker. If Gremlin made it, which judging by all the blood he was currently swimming in was highly unlikely, he’d probably have to use one of those shit bags for the rest of his life. He’d never ride again. Grayson knew he wouldn’t want to live that way.

  “We can’t leave him like this,” Grayson said. He pointed his gun at Gremlin’s face. Dome turned his face to the setting sun. The shrill treble of a chorus of crickets filled the air.

  “See you on the other side, brother,” Grayson said.

  He fired a volley of bullets into Gremlin’s face. The staccato burst sounded like someone had dropped a thousand nails on a metal desk. Grayson put the machine gun on the ground near Gremlin’s body. He went over to the demolished bikes. He tried to pick up his bike, but the ape hangers were bent in all the wrong places. The gas tank was leaking. One of the cams had a huge dent. A huge gash zigzagged across the leather seat. The front wheel was caved in on itself. It was a like a child’s first attempt at writing a capital “D.”

  Grayson laid the bike back down.

  “Alright, then,” Grayson said. He knew in his gut that Andy was dead. The idea that two old bastards who should be sitting on the couch draining tallboys had gotten the drop on a prospect was far-fetched but not impossible. As he took in the carnage laid out before him, he realized he’d made two mistakes.

  He’d taken these men lightly, and he’d been holding back. The first mistake was his fault. He would never forget nor forgive himself. The second mistake belonged to a rich boy who had never gotten dirty or bloody or been in a fight. Yeah, he’d paid them, but that didn’t even matter anymore. This had become more than business a long time ago. Now it was more than personal. It was about honor. If he couldn’t handle these two, then he didn’t deserve to be the president. He didn’t deserve to wear the goddamn patch. Might as well take it off and throw it in the fucking trash.

  This was crazy. All of it.

  Cheddar dead.

  Gremlin dead.

  Gage probably bleeding out.

  Not to mention what had happened at the Black’s shop. Grayson rubbed his face.

  His hand lingered on the scar that bisected his cheek. There was going to be no more holding back. No more half measures. All that was done.

  * * *

  “Dome, you got a spare in this thing?” Grayson asked.

  “Yeah, I mean I think so. It’s my wife’s van; I don’t drive it much,” Dome said.

  “What we gonna do with the bikes? We can’t just leave them,” Kelso said. Grayson pulled out his knife and went to each bike. He used the tip of the knife to unscrew the mounting bolts on the license plates. He pocketed all three license plates. The cops might check the VINs, but they could always report the bikes as stolen.

  “You two get the cuts off of Cheddar and Gremlin. Then change the tire. Load up Gage so we can get the fuck out of here. We in the middle of bumfuck, but you never know what nosy-ass neighbor might have called Johnny Law. When we get back to the clubhouse I’m calling a
war party. We gonna drop hell at this motherfucker’s front door,” Grayson said. Dome and Kelso fidgeted in place, shooting worried glances at each other.

  Grayson went back over to Gremlin’s body and picked up his gun. He glared at Dome and Kelso with such baleful intensity that he gave himself a headache.

  “Did I fucking stutter?” Grayson asked.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Pull over!” Ike hollered from the truck bed. Buddy Lee didn’t seem to have heard him. The truck shimmied and shook as he flew down the single-lane blacktop. Ike could see the needle on the speedometer was ticking past ninety.

  “Buddy Lee, pull over so I can get in!” Ike said, using the full force of his voice. He saw Buddy Lee’s watery blue eyes in the rearview mirror. The whine of the engine eased and the truck coasted to the shoulder of the road. Ike hopped out and jumped in the cab. He’d barely shut the door before Buddy Lee took off, tires spinning and gravel shooting up into the air.

  Ike felt something warm and moist against the small of his back. He leaned forward, and as he did, Tangerine slumped over into his lap. He grabbed her by her narrow shoulders and sat her up.

  “Fuck,” Ike whispered.

  Tangerine’s entire right side was bathed in red. A bullet hole the size of a dime in the crook of her elbow was vomiting blood at an alarming rate.

  “What, somebody behind us?” Buddy Lee said. His eyes scanned the rearview and side mirrors. Ike took off his shirt and his belt. He wrapped the shirt around Tangerine’s arm, then cinched it tight with his belt. A huge dark wet spot radiated out from Tangerine and stretched across the truck’s bench seat.

  “She’s hit,” Ike said.

  “What? Fuck shit goddammit to hell! Is she dead?” Buddy Lee asked. Ike put his finger against the side of her neck. He felt a pulse flickering like the frantic wings of a bumblebee.