Rough Men

by Aric Davis

  “Shit,” said Jason, “that is no way to enter a bonus round. It is a surefire violation of rule numero uno and is going to make me have to challenge everything else you say.” Jason grabbed the bowl and forced the chair away from Mumbo again, using the bowl as a handle. Will pulled the trigger again, and pretend gunfire roared through the very real battlefield inside of the house while Mumbo whimpered and the knives slid out.

  “Damn,” said Jason, “we are off to a bad start. Last question again, were you recently around a gas fire that burned the fuck out of your throat?”

  “Yes,” Mumbo squeaked.

  “Were you recently involved in a robbery, keeping in mind I can still see the fucking stacks on the table?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you kill someone during that robbery?”

  “Yeah, man, I did,” sputtered Mumbo, blood pooling on the floor under him. “They hired you guys, didn’t they? Someone who knew that little girl that died, right? I shot the fuck out of that place. Chris said it wasn’t a regular one, that we should make it memorable. I didn’t know I smoked a kid until we got home.”

  “I do not give a fuck about a little kid. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there a man with you named Alex during that robbery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good answer, Mumbo. Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Last chance to avoid a really bad death. I’m thinking I hate your clavicles. Did you kill him?”

  “No,” said Mumbo, and he began to weep. “We were friends.”

  “So who fucking killed him then?”

  “Chris did,” said Mumbo. “Chris killed him, and it made no sense at all—at least not to me.”

  “Fine,” said Jason. “I want you to tell me everything about Alex dying.” Jason nudged the chair back toward Mumbo, Will pulling the trigger on the 360 controller again as Mumbo screamed, even though the knives were inches from his ass. “Seriously, buddy, tell me everything. Shit, be selfish. Do it for you. You have no friends left in this world, Mumbo.”

  “It was supposed to be simple,” Mumbo said, blubbering but visibly trying to calm himself. “Chris called me and said we had a job to do. I was happy; I’d blown through all of the money we made on the last one—well, almost all of it. Do you want to know about the last one?”

  “No,” Will said, surprising himself by talking. “We want to know about this one. When did Chris call you?”

  “I don’t know, a week before we did the job?”

  “Go on,” Jason said. “What happened next?”

  “Shit,” Mumbo said, “nothing. Like I said, Chris told me he wanted me for a job and that our friend Rob was going to drive—he’s done that for us before—and that Alex was going to be there too. I didn’t hear from Chris again until the day before we pulled the job on that bank. Him, Alex, and Rob just showed up like it was no big thing. Chris gave me this little AK that he said he wanted me to use on the job, and I said something like, ‘Isn’t that a little much?’ but Chris said no, the fence wanted a sure thing, better too much gun than too little, I guess. Usually, they say a shooting on a job like that gets so much heat that they want nothing to do with the shit you stole in the first place, but I didn’t hear none of that. We didn’t really talk much about it, though. Rob had a bunch of weed, and we just sat here, man, drinking and smoking, passing out and waking up. We ate some breakfast at IHOP and then rolled to the job.

  “Everything went good in the bank, I guess. Or the way it was supposed to, I mean. I’m not a hard-ass like Chris. I’ve killed people before, but I never really wanted to, you know? Chris had seen us all kill people before, though—”

  “Hold on,” Will said, all three sets of eyes in the room turning to him. “You’re saying Alex was a murderer?”

  “Shit yes,” said Mumbo. “Chris had him kill one of my regular pieces of ass because Chris was tweaked on meth and thought she might be snitching. Dee was a good lay, too; that was a waste. We even turned her out on the bank manager too. Shit, killing her was a total bummer. Chris had Alex kill her with the same gun that he killed Alex with.”

  Will could feel the blood rushing through his eardrums, and he steadied himself. The girl Alex had murdered was the one Van Endel had told him about, Cassidy, the sixteen-year-old killed with that shotgun pistol, the Judge.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Will said. “How do I know you didn’t kill her?”

  “I am not going to lie,” said Mumbo, using his eyes to indicate Jason. “I’d tell you if I did. I killed the kid in the bank, I told you that! I’d tell you.”

  “Enough of this shit,” said Jason. “Fill in the rest of the blanks.”

  Mumbo was telling the truth. Alex had murdered a young girl for no reason other than that he was told to.

  “OK,” Mumbo said. “So we get up, get our shit together—you know, ‘lock and load,’ all that movie shit. We drive out there, me and Chris in the back of the van, Alex and Rob up front. Chris was telling us the details again, which we were all fucking sick of hearing. ‘Do the job, get paper, get the fuck out. Rob’s the driver, I’m the guard, Chris and Alex are going in the vault. The manager is in on it; when he leaves, that’s the sign to go in.’ Over and over, he’s saying this shit, man. It was boring.”

  “Did anything go sideways in the bank?” Jason asked, and Mumbo shook his head.

  “What, other than putting lead to so many people for no fucking reason? That was a little sideways. But they were screaming and freaking out after Alex shot one of the suit dudes, and one thing led to another, and fast.

  “After Chris and Alex came out of the vault, Rob pulled the truck around, and we went to the drop. Chris, Rob, and Alex had been there a bunch of times, but I hadn’t. It was an old farm, with a barn that looked like a stiff breeze would knock over. They’d stashed another car there so we could ditch the van. Cops are dumb, you know? They hear about a van, it’s all they can think about for like ten hours. Like, when you see one of those amber alerts for some kidnapped baby. All a nigga has to do is switch cars, and he’s good for like a day.

  “Anyways, we do the job, get back to the barn, and we’re taking the bags of money from the van to the car. Alex said something to Chris—I couldn’t hear what—and then Chris shot him. It was loud as fuck. I come out the van thinking the law was coming in, I got my AK up, and Chris is just standing over Alex, and like, half of Alex’s head is just gone. Me and Rob are standing on either side of Chris, like, ‘What the fuck?’ and he just told us to keep moving the shit. When we were done, Rob pulled the car out, and Chris and I covered Alex and the van with gas. I was a little close when it went up, fire sucked the lungs right out of my chest.”

  “That’s a damn good job, Mumbo,” said Jason, “but these next few questions are very, very important. I want short, to-the-point answers. And telling me that you don’t know where somebody lives or that you’ll have to show us, that’s not going to work, not today.”

  “I know that by now. I’ll be as straight as I can.”

  “Are Chris and Rob both still alive?”

  “As far as I know. They were both here last night.”

  “Where does Rob live?”

  “About five miles from here. He’s off of Ivanrest too.”

  Mumbo told them the address, and Jason jotted it down in a small notebook.

  “Where does Chris live?”

  “You ain’t gonna like this, man, but I’ve been straight with you. I don’t know. He stays with his momma, and none of us was ever over there. Not ever.”

  “You’re right. I don’t like it. Not one bit.”

  Mumbo cringed, readying for the gunshot or kick to the bottom of the chair. Will’s finger was tense on the controller, ready to loose another deluge of imaginary bullets into the wind. “But you know what? I believe you. One last question—anything else you can tell me about this fence?”

  “Nah, man, nothing.” Mumbo
considered that before continuing. “Actually, man, I know one thing, but it won’t do you any good.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Tell me.”

  “Chris was never scared of anybody. But whoever that fence was? They scared the fuck out of him.”

  Jason nodded as if noting what Mumbo had told him, then took a dowel rod and a length of cord from his jacket pocket. Will watched him make a loop in the cord and run the dowel though it before he twisted it to make a bigger loop.

  Mumbo’s eyes got huge.

  “Sorry, buddy, and thanks for the help,” Jason said as he sat on the now violently struggling Mumbo’s chest. Mumbo was screaming, thrashing about spastically, but Jason got the noose over his neck, and Jason began twisting the dowel, tightening the noose.

  Will kept firing the gun on the TV as Mumbo died, even when he was through screaming. A coldness was coming over Will. His son had died for no reason, no reason at all. Just gunned down like a dog by one of his awful friends, and that was that. No, that’s not good enough. I need to know why. I need a reason. I cannot just walk away from this without an answer. Will considered Alison’s words, the steel in her voice when she told him to find the men who did this. And he thought of that night, so many years before, when he’d first laid eyes upon his boy.

  Will was drunk, returning that summer night from a bonfire held out in a Jaycee-sponsored park. The party, of course, had not been sponsored. There’d been a ton of good grass, lots of blow, booze, and chicks who were down to party. His brother, Isaac, had even been there, and Isaac almost never went to shit like that, not since he’d turned twenty-one.

  Walking home, Will felt so young and unstoppable that it was almost miraculous. At first, after Patty disappeared, things had been really shitty, but with the number of available girls in the world, it was hard to imagine why he’d even been upset in the first place. She was cool, but she was gone, and truth told, he wasn’t even sure why his mind kept going back to her.

  Patty had been cool for a while. Always there when he wanted her to be and always gone when he wanted her gone. It was enough to almost miss her, but then she’d gotten clingy after Jason and a few of the other guys had been sent up for breaking into that house. People had said some nasty shit about Jason after that had happened, like maybe he’d made some girl who was there blow him when she was supposed to be gone, but Will didn’t think Jason had it in him. Besides, they were still only in county, with the real trials yet to even get going. Still, the kind of trouble they were in was sobering—or would’ve been, to someone less committed to the idea of getting fucked up every night. Even for a young drunk like him, it had been enough to convince him to maybe slow down a little. After all, he was supposed to have been with them that night.

  Smash-and-grabs had been the thing that year. Break in and take anything not nailed down. They’d make off with a grand or more in televisions, stereos, jewelry, sometimes even other stuff, like guns. There was never much money in it, though. The pawnbrokers they dealt with had to ship the stuff out of the county, sometimes even out of the state, just to sell it without the law coming down.

  That night had been different, though. When he’d gotten the call from Jason about the job a few days before, robbing a house while the family was on vacation, Will had been all about it. It wasn’t until later, after the rest of them had gotten busted after a neighbor saw them, that Will questioned why he hadn’t been there. Not feeling like it that night wasn’t a good enough reason, but it was all he had. Still, there needed to be more. No one just got lucky like that, did they? Or was that the way the adult world really worked—a random succession of either good or bad breaks that could end with you doing life in Jackson or becoming the biggest rock star on the planet? Still, that had been the difference. He’d stayed home with Patty and watched comedies on the VCR—Police Academy and one of the Vacation flicks—but he didn’t even have a good reason for it. He just knew that he didn’t want to go.

  He was on the stoop of his house when he first heard the crying. It sounded like a baby was wailing in his house. Not possible, though. They had no relatives with infants, and it was almost four in the morning, so somebody just stopping by was an impossible notion.

  Opening the door quietly, Will couldn’t help but notice that the crying was only getting louder. He pulled the door closed behind him, letting it ease into the frame, and walked into their family room. It wouldn’t have been normal for his parents to leave the television on, but there was a first time for everything. Walking into the room, Will was stopped dead in his tracks.

  His mother was sitting on a the couch across the room from the television holding an infant in her arms, trying—it looked like to Will, anyway—to calm it down. She was having limited success.

  “Mom,” Will slurred, “what the hell is going on?”

  She patted the space next to her on the sofa, and Will sat, bidden by his mother in that way that is nearly impossible to resist.

  “This,” she said after Will had sat, “is Alex. He’s your son.” The baby had started to coo when Will sat, forgotten tears running down his impossibly tiny cheeks.

  “My son? Who said that?”

  “Patty did, that girl you used to date. She said that he was either yours or another boy’s that she used to go around with—Jason, I think. She said that the other boy was in a lot of trouble and that her son needed a father.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  “Your father has to work in the morning, as you know, and is sleeping with earplugs in. He does not know about Jason, and he is never going to. No one needs to know about that except for you and me. This is your son, and you’re going to raise him right, like I raised you.”

  “I mean about me having a kid—what did he say?”

  “Your father was taken aback, as was I, but he’ll come around, just like I did. He may pull you aside and have a little talk, but I put my foot down. I said, ‘This boy is a Daniels, your first grandson, and you may never get another one.’ He knows that I mean it, too. We are going to raise this boy together, until you get your head straight and get a place for the two of you to live.”

  Will found himself staring at the baby, unsure of what to say. The boy definitely favored Patty, and they’d certainly had enough unprotected sex that it was possible, but what about the other stuff his mom had said? What if the boy wasn’t his? What kind of life was that, raising another man’s child while the other guy just got to go off and do whatever he wanted? That considered, Jason was probably going to prison; it was a foregone conclusion to most in their circle of friends.

  “Mom, when did Patty say she was coming back?”

  “Will,” his mother said slowly, “Patty isn’t coming back. This boy is only going to have a decent life if we can give him one. You might not feel like his father yet, but you will. Give it time. Give him time. He’s your son, my grandson. He’s a Daniels.”

  Isaac was still standing in the doorway when Jason tapped Will on the shoulder. “You can stop shooting now.” Will took his finger off the controller’s trigger, then set down the controller. Jason gave him a look, so he stuck the thing in his jacket pocket before reholstering the Sig.

  The three walked to the car in a group, and when Isaac began to choke on a mouthful of vomit, Jason took the keys from his hand and threw him headfirst behind the wheel.

  “Why in the fuck did you make me puke in my car?”

  Isaac screamed at Jason, vomit dripping from his mouth and covering his lap and the steering wheel.

  Jason looked at Isaac from the passenger seat, smiled, and then slapped him, hard enough to spray the puke from his lips across the windshield. Will, sitting in the backseat now, thought for sure it was all going to unravel now. He had just watched a man be tortured and then strangled to death, and not only had he stood by and watched, but some small and very cruel part of him had enjoyed it. Hadn’t Mumbo been there with Alex? He had, and if they were really friends, he would have killed Chris for shooting
Alex, and none of this would have had to happen.

  “You feel better now?” Jason asked Isaac, and Will was shocked to see his older brother nodding.

  “You slapped me because we just killed a guy, and the cops would have probably tested my puke for DNA.”

  “Exactly. Now, roll down the windows, and drive to a gas station. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  “It’s freezing back here with the windows down!” Will yelled, and Jason called back, “Can you still smell the puke?”

  Realizing that he couldn’t, or at least not as much, Will kept his mouth shut for the rest of the ride. Two minutes later, and one flashing red light, they pulled into a Marathon station.

  “You guys stay put. I’m going to get some towels so we can get most of the sick off of you, and then you can go in the bathroom and wash up.” Jason left the car, and the two brothers watched him walk inside to talk to the cashier.

  “Are you OK, dude?” Will said it in a way that he thought might not be too offensive, but he could tell by Isaac’s tone that he had failed.

  “No. No, I’m not OK. I’m covered in puke, I feel like I’ve got a loose tooth from where he slapped me, and we could be charged with torturing and murdering that man. Not to mention we’re about to go do the same thing again.”

  “I think we have to. If you ask Jason, he’ll say the same thing. Right now, we’ve got the element of surprise. The cops aren’t looking for us, and neither are the bad guys. I have a feeling that everything will stop after we find this Chris guy.”

  Will shut his mouth. They could see Jason returning to the car with a fistful of paper towels, a bathroom key attached to a hubcap by a chain, and a lit cigarette hanging from his lip. Isaac got out, and Jason handed him the towels, then went around to the passenger side and stood next to the car, smoking.