CROWS MC SET-TO LOAD

by Bloom, Cassandra

  “You Mack?” his visitor asked in a “we both know who you are; don’t fuck with me”-tone.

  Mack, figuring he was about to be killed anyway, figured there was not point not fucking with his unexpected guest. “Who wants to know?” he asked, trying to sound calm and in control and failing with each new syllable.

  “Malcolm Chobavich?” the visitor pressed on, seeming either not to hear Mack’s sloppy attempt at the tough-guy chatter or not giving a rat’s ass.

  Judging from how well Mack’s tough-guy chatter worked in this place, he wondered why it should work any better with somebody from out there.

  “People don’t call me that,” Mack confessed, feeling suddenly like a deflating balloon.

  If Mack’s air was getting let out, his visitor seemed to be inflating himself with it. He breathed in, smiled a smile that made Mack feel dizzy, and said, “But it’s your name.”

  “What’s in a name?” Mack muttered, then immediately wondered why.

  “Huh?” his visitor asked in a disinterested-yet-challenging tone. He pressed the thumbs of either hand to his index fingers and gave a series of sharp pushes—pop, pop—and then repeated the act on his middle fingers—pop, pop—before working the process on either of his ring fingers. Finally, finishing with the popping of the knuckle joints in his pinkies, he pressed his palms together, seeming to Mack in that instant to be praying, and folded his pressed-together fingers back—nearly bending his hands in half as he did—and filling Mack’s cell with a chatter of groaning joints.

  Mack didn’t want to admit that he jumped a little with each pop; they seemed to him to sound like little gunshots rattling off his final moments.

  “Nothing,” Mack said with a flinch. Suddenly “don’t fuck with me” seemed like good advice, even if it was unspoken advice. “What do you want?” he asked, certain he already knew. “What’s this I hear ‘bout you knowing my sister?”

  Like we both don’t already know…

  “Oh, that?” the visitor’s voice took on a fresh pitch, almost song-like.

  Not so disinterested now, are ya? Mack thought. He dared not speak, though.

  “No, no,” his visitor went on. “I more know of Mia than having had the pleasure of actually meeting her.”

  “That a fact?” Mack asked, his stance regarding this man’s business creeping closer towards curious but no further from skeptical.

  “It is. Are you aware of her arrangement?” the man asked.

  And there it was…

  The subject that Mack was so eager—and yet, at the same time, so terrified—to have brought into the open. It was the subject that scared Mack more than any other, more than the prison rapes and the threats of getting shanked in the showers. Prison was the better of the two evils, after all. That’s why he’d chosen it over trying to make due out there. As far as he was concerned, those bars would keep the Carrion Crew out just as much as they’d keep him in. That was what he’d believed, of course, until the verdict had been passed. Then, in the commotion of being dragged hither-and-thither, passed not unlike a prison bitch from rough hand to rough hand, he was told the cold truth:

  “There’s nowhere they won’t find you, Mack,” some strange voice in that crowd had whispered to him, cutting through over even the shouts of so many others. “Nowhere they won’t find you, and nothing you can do to stop them. Unless, of course, you’re prepared to make a deal.”

  Mack still wasn’t sure just what sort of deal they’d originally had in mind. As far as he knew the deal they’d been considering might have made him a free man—or, rather, as free as anybody could be when in the debt of the Carrion Crew—but those bars were still too damn alluring. He’d committed to a sort of holy scripture written within those bars—subscribed to a dogma of certainty within that soulless cell—and he wasn’t prepared to give in to heresy; wasn’t ready to put his own neck on the line.

  And so he gave them Mia. He’d told them she was good—both a good person and good pussy, but he’d never admit to the latter after the fact—and that, if she thought it would save his life, she’d do whatever they wanted. He didn’t know if this was true, of course, and at the time he hadn’t much cared. He’d be behind bars, and, no matter what sort of threats they threw about, that would be that. If the Carrion Crew didn’t get what they wanted out of Mia by that point and if they still wanted blood to pay back his debt, then it would be her that paid the tab.

  Mack had never been one to feel bad about leaving someone else to pay his tabs.

  Why should Mia be any different?

  But now there was this man standing in his cell, bringing up the arrangement that was supposed to be keeping his ass alive—bloody and sore, sure, but alive!—and looking all sorts of pissed.

  “I should say so, since I was the one who arranged it,” Mack admitted. He figured that his skepticism was justified either way, but his curiosity was beginning to lend itself to a shimmering, glittering beacon of hope. Something about this man and the way he spoke sounded interested, sure, but also disconnected from… well, from all of that. It seemed to Mack that somebody with the Crew, a Carrion, wouldn’t be quite so passive. There was shady business to be had here, no question, but maybe not the sort of business that ended with him shot or stabbed or drowned to death in his own toilet.

  Man, he thought, catching himself glancing around his cell, there’s a lot more ways to kill a man in here than I noticed before.

  The man nodded slowly, and Mack couldn’t help but think that, had he a cigarette between his fingers or a drink clasped within his hand, that would be the part where he’d drag or sip solely for punctuation’s sake. Instead, he moved to crack his knuckles again.

  There weren’t so many pops this time around. Mack still jumped all the same.

  “Just wanted to make sure you understood that.”

  “Understood what?” Mack asked, squinting at his visitor as though he might suddenly recognize him. He didn’t.

  “That you were, in fact, the one who told us to acquire your sister to fulfill your debt.

  “That’s what I just… wait, ‘us’?” Mack’s mouth went dry and he felt like he might piss himself. “Y-you with the Crew?”

  Suddenly that shimmering, glittering beacon of hope felt more like one of the glowing bulbs at the end of a grotesque appendage hanging from one of those scary-as-hell fishes that swam about in the cold, dark depths of the ocean.

  “Mister Chobavich, I am The Crew. You may call me ‘Papa Raven.’”

  A sick sort of numbness crashed down over Mack. He distantly remembered a trip to the ocean, long before prison, debt, and even long before the Creely house. It was late-Summer—one last hoorah before “off to school,” as their father might say—and the salty air held little stinging spit bubbles from the crashing surf. He remembered the sound of the waves, the fishy, nearly rotting smell of the sea, and the glow of sunlight off the distant stretch of eternal ocean water. It captivated him, hypnotized him, and little Malcolm had marched, horny with childhood eagerness and curiosity, dangerously close to where the solid, unquestioned line separating dry from not resided. That line, where the water climbed, waited, and fell back momentarily so that it might climb back again, was a challenge in his adolescent mind. His mother called after with “you can’t,” his father called after with “I wouldn’t,” and Mia, too young to say a damn thing, belched and giggled and cooed.

  Belching and giggling and cooing seemed just as good as “DO IT, MALCOLM! DO IT!” and so he did. He crossed the line, forgot all about it, and kept right on running. The ocean current had yet to start its fresh climb—had almost seemed to retreat that much farther in response to little Malcolm’s daring invasion beyond the line—and he’d felt within him a great swell of empowerment.

  I’m scaring away the water, he’d foolishly convinced himself.

  But the ocean had not been losing its courage, it had only been building up strength.

  And then the wave came.

  The
freezing wall of water that had come crashing down over little Malcolm on that day was a gentle kiss compared to frigid, paralyzing numbness that overtook Mack in that instant.

  Papa Raven. His visitor called himself Papa Raven. And he was the Carrion Crew…

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  “That’s funny,” Mack heard himself say, too numb in body and mind to be sure he’d even meant to say it or why he’d even think there was something humorous at play here.

  “Why?” Papa Raven asked.

  Mack moved to shrug, and it felt like he was trying to drag the Titanic from the ocean floor with his shoulders. “Last guy I talked to with the Crew called himself T-Built. Seemed like a funny guy. How’s he doing?”

  Papa Raven offered his own shrug. It came much easier to him than it had for Mack. “Dead.”

  The word hung there, violent and bloody like a slab of roadkill.

  Mack stared, feeling like there was a punchline waiting for its opportunity to punch once its line was reached. There was none.

  “Oh,” said Mack.

  “Yes,” replied Papa Raven, sounding like he cared little for the fate of T-Built but, instead, for everything else surrounding it.

  Mack figured dollar signs had something to do with that.

  This suspicion was confirmed as Papa Raven said, “And your sister was not without a certain degree of involvement in that matter.”

  “Mia?” the numbness left Mack just enough to allow him to feel an almost staggering degree of doubt. He felt like this Papa Raven guy had just tried to sell him a sex tape featuring the Pope. A buyer knew better than to trust the authenticity of such a thing. But, then again, this Papa Raven guy didn’t seem to be trying to sell him anything. Numb, skeptical, and increasingly curious, Mack pressed, “You’re telling me Mia was somehow involved in some guy’s death?”

  “That is what I just said,” Papa Raven challenged, “yes.”

  So maybe there was a sex tape featuring a guy in a pope hat, but that didn’t exactly mean…

  “You sure we’re talking about the same—”

  “Mister Chobavich,” that “don’t fuck with me”-tone made a fresh appearance with a healthy dose of “or else…” to spice it up, “I’d like to hurry this along. This place depresses me and I’d really rather not be here any longer.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Mack said, looking around at his cell and considering the rest of the prison that, true to that whispering somebody the day his verdict had been passed, had done nothing to keep the Carrion Crew out. Forgetting himself and, moreover, his present company, he muttered, “That’s sort of the fucking point, Papa.”

  “Witty,” the man said gravely.

  But a grave tone was better than being in a grave, Mack decided. This man, this Papa Raven, might have been a high-ranker with the Carrion Crew, but Mack was still alive—still chatting it up and even getting numb-drunk and taking stupid, possibly suicidal risks with his tone—and that meant…

  Well, it meant something.

  But what?

  “Glad you approve,” Mack offered with a bit of fresh swagger in his voice, feeling a bit of confidence coming back to him.

  “I don’t,” Papa Raven said flatly.

  And, just like that, Mack’s confidence receded once more.

  “Oh…”

  “The fact of the matter, Mack,” Papa Raven said the name as though he meant something else, “is that your sister has run off from her duties. She was made aware of the circumstances surrounding her arrangements, and she—”

  “WHOA! HEY!” Mack was interrupting the man before he knew what had come over him, “What? She knew that I’m the one that sold her to T-Built?”

  “No, Mack,” Papa Raven nearly snarled, and Mack never knew that his name could sound so ugly; that one syllable could carry such animosity, could be so condescending, and could convey such impatience, rage, and even carry with it a very real threat. “We were certain that she would refuse to work if she was made aware of that. She was only made aware that her working for us was for your benefit; to keep you from harm.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good, I guess,” Mack said, feeling a sense of relief that made his stomach ache.

  “It was. Yes,” Papa Raven agreed.

  Mack asked, “So what happened?”

  “A rival gang took her,” Papa Raven answered in the same way he’d informed Mack of T-Built’s death.

  “A rival…?” Mack almost felt like he was on the verge of hysterical laughter. “What the fuck? How many you fuckers out there?”

  “Just the two,” Papa Raven said with more calmness than Mack felt he was owed given his outburst. “Mia went willingly, saw fit to convince another of our ‘workers’ to go along, as well. And then she blew up a building with T-Built inside.”

  “Sounds like you guys lost control of the situation big time,” said Mack, who had decided that there was a reason he was still alive, and, dumb or not, he was going to take advantage of it. Maybe—just maybe!—he could get out of this after all.

  “That’s certainly one way to put it,” Papa Raven said with a grin and a dismissive shrug. Then, just as quickly, his face went cold and furious and the cell seemed to go ten degrees colder. “Another way to put it would be that the one thing keeping you alive is no longer an asset.”

  “What do you…?” Mack’s arrogant confidence carried him halfway through the question before realization dawned on him—Then again, maybe—just maybe!—this is the moment I die—and that cold wave, this time carrying a chilling panic, crashed back over him once again. “Oh! Whoa! No, wait! Hold on! There’s got to be some other way! Something that we can work out!”

  “Why on earth do you think I’d be here with you right now if I wasn’t hoping to do just that, Mister Chobavich?”

  My thoughts, exactly, Mack thought, but, after the roller coaster this conversation had represented so far, he cautiously said, “So… you ain’t here to off me?”

  “You think I’d go through all the trouble of coming here if I simply wanted you dead?” Papa Raven demanded, sounding genuinely disgusted.

  “I… uh, can’t say,” Mack admitted. “Not like I know you too good, you know?”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to get to know me, Mack,” Papa Raven said, and his name, still said as though it tasted bad to say, no longer carried the threat of death.

  Or maybe that was just how Mack thought he heard it.

  “That a fact?” he asked skeptically.

  “It is.”

  “So what do you want?” Mack asked.

  “Doesn’t it seem obvious? We want your sister back. We want the man that took her dead. And we want the other gang out of the picture.”

  “Not sure I can do all of that,” Mack explained, not certain he was ready to step into the world of murder, “but I guess it wouldn’t be too tough to find Mia. If she was willing to hit the street to pay my debt then I imagine she’d at least still be willing to answer a phone call from me, right?”

  After all, Mack had never been one to feel bad about leaving someone else to pay his tabs.

  And why should Mia be any different?

  “Our thoughts exactly, Mister Chobavich. Our thoughts exactly.”

  PART 1

  On Cloud Nine

  ONE

  ~MIA~

  I’d been here before.

  I wasn’t sure how or where—I thought I would remember being trapped in a hell like this!—but it was too familiar to not be the first time. Not that it being familiar made it any better. In fact, it made it much, much worse.

  I was trapped. It was dark, uncomfortably warm, and there was a smell. The smell, like me, was trapped. It hung somewhere between sweet and sour; reminding me all at once of thawing meat, fresh mulch under a hot sun, and something earthy, ancient. A deep part of my brain chanted that it was the oldest smell in existence, and another part, deeper still, assured me that I’d one day come to contribute to it.

  I knew that smell. I
knew it the same way I knew I was on the first step of a twelve-step staircase that led down into deeper darkness; the same way I knew that the surface my hands pounded against was a door that should lead to freedom. And I knew that that door—that freedom—was closed and that it would never be opened; that freedom had been stolen from me. And my brother, Mack—though he was only Malcolm in that moment—was the thief.

  I knew all of these things with such a startling certainty that I also knew I must have been here before. But, for the life of me, I didn’t know how that was possible.

  Trapped. I was trapped in a dark, horrible, smelly place.

  Whimpering, knowing what awaited me down in those warm, smelly depths but also knowing it was all my life amounted to, I turned away from the door and started down the steps.

  One…

  Two…

  Three…

  I counted to myself, talking me down the steps like an instructor working me through the motions of some horrible cycle.

  Four…

  Five…

  Six…

  Only halfway down the stairs to my new world and the voice had gone and summed it all up perfectly. A horrible, nearly precognitive fear took hold of me and I had to take hold of the rough, splintery railing to keep from toppling down the rest of the steps.

  Seven…

  Eight…

  My hand traveled along the railing. As the eighth step became the ninth, it went from rough and splintery to smooth and tacky. It was unnerving, and while my eyes had come to adjust enough for me to investigate the spot where my hand lay I knew not to. Keeping my gaze trained on the darkness ahead, I removed my hand from the surface. I knew it would be better to fall the rest of the way into that black abyss than to let my hand spend one more second on that railing a moment longer.

  I thought of my father’s paint cans. I thought of old Band-Aids. And then I thought I might turn around and try for the door again; thought that maybe Malcolm had let go and I might escape from this place he’d trapped me inside.