Machine's Work: A Hyper-Violent Crime Thriller (Assassination City Book 1)

by Jack Cuatt

  They walk down the hall and up thirteen flights of stairs. The climb is a test of Machine's recovery. He's winded by the time they reach the metal door accessing the roof. His hands, arms, legs, face, and chest ache. His skin itches under the fresh bandages. He’s a walking wound.

  They step out into the cold, humid night.

  Cinders grind and shift under their heels. It's not raining now, but soot-pregnant clouds hang over Low Town's ragged landscape. Lightning streaks the polluted sky like dead veins in cancerous flesh.

  The roof is littered with rusted aerials, air-conditioners and heating units. A warped satellite dish stands at the corner closest to New Town. Kyokuto walks in that direction.

  A four foot wall encompasses the roof. Kyokuto passes the satellite dish, leans against the wall and looks toward the brightly lit cubes of the new city. Machine stops beside him and checks the perimeter out of habit. A dark skyline dotted with electric and fire light.

  Kyokuto reaches in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, shakes the pack carefully, ignoring the filter tips, and extracts a hand rolled cigarette. He ducks behind the wall, lights up and leans against the wall, puffing the joint, covering the ember with his hand. Machine smells the too-familiar odor of marijuana. He glances at Kyokuto and then back over the city. Kyokuto offers the joint, but Machine waves it away without looking. He has no use for drugs, and doesn't understand why others do. It dulls the senses. Slows you down. Makes you meat. Kyokuto shrugs and blows smoke into the fog then puts the joint back between his lips and inhales again. Machine stares straight ahead, drinking in the darkness, feeling a hundred miles away from the man beside him, isolated by what he is, a born chopper, descended from three generations of killers. Low Town is Machine's world. All he has ever known. Repulsive, but he can't imagine leaving it. It's a part of him. Or perhaps he is a part of it. It's all the same.

  His thoughts wander back to his mother, but that only deepens his depression. He shoves her picture away and thinks of the present. Of what his next move will be. About the Militia, the Ghost, and Mike Sculli.

  Kyokuto puts the joint out half-smoked and stares red-eyed into the darkness.

  “I like to come up here,” he says sighing. “It's relaxing. No one around.”

  “How often do you smoke that?” Machine asks abruptly. Kyokuto doesn't seem foolish enough to let drugs run his life, and marijuana is pretty mild stuff compared to what's available, but he needs to be sure.

  “A couple of times a week,” Kyokuto answers without resentment or shame. “Only when I have nothing going on. Down-time.” He giggles. “Or up-time. It’s all in your perspective.”

  “Is that all you do?”

  “That's the monkey,” Kyokuto giggles again. The laughter dies in his throat and for a moment he stands with his lips pressed tightly together. When he starts talking again, it's fast, low and without pause. The drug has that effect; people want to expound and explain when their brains are least capable of it.

  “Been doing it since I was twelve. Five years now. My mom turned me onto it before she got jacked.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was hustling the Avenue 'til the Children of The Blood Militia took her out.” Kyokuto quits talking abruptly, his lips compressed into a grim line.

  Machine doesn't say anything. Tragedy is a staple of life in Low Town, only your own pain matters. He watches a gunship glide low over the ground, thirty feet from New Town's east wall. The ship's floodlights crawl over the wall and the forty-foot asphalt killing field that bounds the city, picking out a patrol of four black dots. Jesus creeps. The light uncovers the four men briefly then abandons them to the night as the helicopter makes the corner and follows the wall out of sight.

  “They raped her. A dozen or more of them. Some had seconds. Then they branded both cheeks,” Kyokuto spits the words into the fog. “She went nuts, fucking crack-head. The cops found her in an alley scratching her face, clawing at the burns, blood everywhere, her right eye gone. They took her to the hospice. It was still open then.”

  Machine nods without looking at Kyokuto.

  “I saw her once, there at the Hospice. She was all fucked up. Bandages over her face, eye swollen closed. Her head was twice its normal size. 'Infected,' they said. The virus.”

  Kyokuto takes out the pack of cigarettes, ducks and fires one up. He stands back up and blows smoke. It's getting colder. The teenager's breath mingles with the fog. Machine shifts his feet but says nothing.

  “I went back there,” Kyokuto says through a mouthful of smoke, looking sideways at Machine, cupping the cigarette in his hand so that only a small pink glow escapes between his fingers. “She was gone. I didn't dare ask any questions. Just walked my ass back out the door, past the nurses, back to the street. If I had told them who I was they would have sent me to a youth farm. I hung around here a few months. The girls my mother knew watched out for me as much as crack-heads can. I ate, I had clothes, and usually somewhere to sleep. One of the girls, I don't remember the name, dead now, had a regular trick that was a county clerk. He checked the hospice's records. She was euthanized.” He flicks a look at Machine. “You want to hear all this shit?” He asks.

  “If you want to tell it, I'll listen.”

  “Not much for conversation, are you?” Kyokuto asks dryly, his eyes shifting to the Seaboard Building under construction in New Town. Jade green glass, a new color for the spectrum.

  “No.”

  Kyokuto sighs. “Mom was a whore, but I know who my father was,” he says, and Machine can't help a quick look. Kyokuto catches it. “I know who he was,” he says firmly. “My father was Yakuza. Pretty big here before the Moral Revolution. He and my mom were a regular thing. Not a trick. It was before she started smoking that shit.

  “Anyway, I knew he was in New York, or had been. I got one of the girls to buy me a bus ticket. She gave me money for food. A few bucks. I hit New York the next evening.” Kyokuto drags on the cigarette. “I know this sounds stupid, but I always thought New York City was very far away. The bus ride was only ten hours. It caught me by surprise. I almost didn't get off. Thought the fucking driver was making a mistake.” Kyokuto drops the cigarette butt and grinds it out with the toe of his running shoe.

  “I don't know why I'm telling you this,” he says, laying his arms on top of the wall and looking out over the city. “Maybe because I think we're a little alike.”

  Machine grunts noncommittally. He sees a small parallel but it stops there. Circumstances. Fathers who were gangsters. Kyokuto is still human; Machine has the soul of a corpse.

  “Well, anyway, I found him. No big reunion scene but he took me in. He was a chopper. A warrior.” Kyokuto gets out another cigarette and bends to light it. “He worked for the clan because he was part of it. He could survive without it like a brain or heart could survive without the rest of the body. My grandfather and great-grandfather were Yakuza. My father was born Yakuza and he died that way.” Kyokuto inhales, squinting against the cigarette's lazy plume. “That was three years ago.”

  The gunship makes another gliding pass along the wall. The floodlights reveal only blank asphalt this time. The Jesus creeps have moved on.

  “How did he die?” Machine asks, sensing that Kyokuto wants to tell it.

  “The Clan Council found out about me, the half-breed. They demanded my life. He had shamed the clan by his union with a prostitute. He agreed to do what was required for the sake of honor. But he couldn’t do it. He got me out instead.

  “He had cash put aside. He brought it to the apartment in a flight bag. He wouldn't say anything. Wouldn't explain. Hustled me to the car and to the airport. Bought a one-way ticket for me to Holland and left me to wait for the plane.” Kyokuto's voice grows more distant by the word. “I didn't board. I wanted to know what was going on. I got a cab back to the apartment. My father was dead. Killed himself with a Katana. Very traditional,” he adds bitterly.

  “The explanation, his apology to the clan,
was in a roll on his desk sealed with his sign. He offered his life for mine. It was clear I should head on my way and not look back. You don't fuck with those guys.

  “I left him there, hunched over that sword. A hard thing to do, but what he would have wanted. He wasn't sentimental.” Kyokuto chuckles sardonically. “In the whole time we were together, four years almost, he didn't say more than a hundred words to me. I didn't know how he felt until it was over. He would have wanted that too. He was a cold-blooded motherfucker. Just like your father.”

  “My father was an animal,” Machine says into the void. “A murderer, a junkie, and a thief.”

  “But you're looking for his killer,” Kyokuto says. “You must have felt something for him.”

  Machine's muscles tense and his fingernails dig into his stitched and scabbed palms. “I wish I had killed him myself. I'm looking for my mother's killer.” It comes out harsher than he intended, the old anger still alive. He continues more quietly. “Someone has to pay for that.”

  “That's square,” Kyokuto nods, allowing the subject to drop. “Someone always has to pay. That's why I'm in Wino's crew. My mom was a crack-head, but she never hurt anyone. What they did to her…” he trails off with a shake of the head.

  “My focus is a little narrower.”

  “The Children of The Blood Militia?” Kyokuto asks pointedly.

  “And the Hammerskins.”

  “Then I believe we might be of assistance to each other.”

  Machine nods.

  “Tomorrow,” Kyokuto says, “I’ll introduce you to the rest of the crew.”

  Machine nods, stretches, and yawns, feeling more relaxed than he has in weeks. The idea of downtime is starting to appeal to him. Rest for the mind.

  Kyokuto drops his cigarette in the cinders and precedes Machine to the door. Downstairs, they retire to their separate rooms.

  34

  The next afternoon, Machine and Kyokuto exit the building together. They don't speak during the fifteen minutes it takes to walk back to the Zone. Both keep their eyes moving and their mouths shut until they reach Washington Avenue.

  “I want you to meet the fellas,” Kyokuto says under his breath. “I think we can do each other some good.”

  “Is that how they're going to feel?” Machine asks, lips barely moving, eyes roving the almost empty street.

  “We all have a responsibility to recruit for the crew,” Kyokuto replies. “They trust my judgment.”

  Machine looks at him sharply. “You're not recruiting me. I'll help you, you help me, and that's the end of it.”

  “What?” Kyokuto asks in surprise. “Fuck, man, I thought we were coming to something. A partnership.”

  “I have one partner; it holds fifteen rounds,” Machine replies inflexibly. Friendship is beyond his experience. Trust is not in his makeup.

  Kyokuto's eyes flash. “I should have expected some bullshit like this. A chopper ‘til the fucking casket drops.”

  A jungle-juice wino in busted-out tennis shoes and a mangy rabbit-fur coat looks sideways as he shuffles past the pair of teenagers. Kyokuto lowers his voice, but not the level of his anger.

  “You're working for a pimp and a pusher, Machine. You better check the path you're on; you might not like where it leads.”

  Machine says nothing for a long moment. He isn't sure what Kyokuto expects, and he doesn't really care. Machine has his own agenda, and nothing will be allowed to interfere. He reminds himself how much he owes the young man beside him, but will repay that debt on his own terms.

  “I know what I have to do, and I'm doing it,” he says as he pulls the prepaid from his pocket and stops on the sidewalk.

  “What's up?” Kyokuto asks, still angry.

  “Checking in.” Machine dials the number to the apartment in New Town after turning slightly to block Kyokuto's view.

  Kyokuto notices and makes an exaggerated show of looking the other away.

  “You have no new messages,” the female monotone tells him.

  Machine stows the phone.

  “Are we cool, or what?” Kyokuto asks.

  “I owe you my life,” Machine responds simply.

  “All right,” Kyokuto says, but he doesn't look happy.

  “I've got things to do.” Machine stresses the “I”, making it clear Kyokuto isn't invited.

  “Me too,” Kyokuto sighs, still looking at Machine searchingly. “You'll think about what I said?”

  “Yes. And you remember what I said.”

  “Okay. I'll start checking on Crest.”

  Machine nods his thanks.

  “Later,” Kyokuto says and turns away.

  Machine heads to a bodega on the corner, stops and buys coffee and a sandwich.

  Back on the street with an almost full stomach, he heads for Horace's garage, intending to retrieve his clothing, find a new flop and start looking for Finnegan. Maybe the junkie's dug up something by now about Sculli.

  35

  Machine checks in at the Bentley Arms, the same hotel he had stayed in while his father was MIA. He hits the streets at twilight, looking for Finnegan.

  Despite Kyokuto's assurances about the Hammerskins, Machine avoids the converted movie theater the Children of The Blood Militia use as a headquarters. He heads uptown, checking the crack-houses and shooting galleries. He spots the red-headed cripple stumbling down Lexington, a half block up, on the opposite side.

  Machine dodges across the street, ignoring the blaring horn of a rust-green gas burner, and walks fast through the crowd of people out for a night in the gutter. He catches up with Finnegan at the corner, standing on the curb, rocking with a tide only a junkie feels, his bloated arms bent back on themselves, waiting for the light to change. A bum with a rusted shopping cart loaded down with paper bags and two stud hustlers in leather pants wait with him.

  “Hello Finnegan,” Machine says in the junkie's ear.

  Finnegan jumps sideways then sees who it is and resumes his slouch, smiling lazily. His eyes are glazed yellow. He’s high, no surprise there.

  “Machine. My brother,” he says dreamily.

  “Walk with me,” Machine says as the light turns green. The bum and the male prostitutes step off the curb two steps ahead of Machine and Finnegan.

  Finnegan shuffles his feet and hums a fast-food chain's jingle as they cross the street. Machine endures the stench of piss and sweat with every jerky movement Finnegan makes. They keep moving past liquor stores and strip clubs until, at the midpoint of the block, Machine pulls Finnegan into the alley.

  “Find out anything?” he asks as Finnegan leans back against the wall of the building and smiles up at a narrow slice of polluted sky. His pupils are pinpoints.

  “Nope,” Finnegan says and laughs.

  “I've got a name for you. Ghost. He's the chopper I'm looking for. Heard the tag before?”

  “Militia of the Holy Cross,” Finnegan says, nodding his head sagaciously. “Supposedly these kids were trained for suicide missions by the Children of The Blood Militia. They cleaned up the liberal agitators. Assassins. This Ghost was supposed to be one of them. Kid was crazy for Jesus.” Finnegan snickers and wipes drool off his lips. “But he and the rest of the little fuckers were chopped, the rumor is, to cover it up.”

  “You don't believe it?”

  Finnegan shrugs. “I don't disbelieve it.”

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “I ain’t even sure he exists,” Finnegan replies with a rotten-tooth smile. “But if he does, I’ll find him.”

  Machine takes out his wallet, peels off two hundred in twenties and passes it over.

  “Solid!” Finnegan stuffs the cash into his jacket. “My brother. I got you covered.”

  Without further conversation, Machine brushes past Finnegan and exits the alley. Finnegan goes back to staring at the sky.

  Machine stops at a Greek place on the corner run by a Nigerian family and buys food. Enough for two. Next he stops at a drug store for bandages, a
box of surgical gloves and peroxide. Still thinking about an army of children, and a killer named Ghost, he heads in the direction of Kyokuto's flop.

  Machine finds Kyokuto sitting at the table smoking a cigarette and looking impatient.

  “Hey,” Kyokuto says through a gray cloud of smoke.

  “Hey,” Machine returns, dishing out hot pastrami subs and garden salads in clear plastic containers. It's the most nutritious thing he's eaten in days.

  “Cool,” Kyokuto says, dragging a salad and a sub across the table. He takes a bite out of the sandwich as Machine pulls two bottles of water from the sack.

  “Fellas want to meet you,” Kyokuto mumbles through a mouthful of pastrami.

  “Is there a point in meeting them?” Machine asks as he unwraps his sandwich and opens the water.

  Kyokuto shrugs. “Wino was cool about it. Tic-Tac wasn't. He's all right though, just cautious. He's willing to meet you before he decides.”

  Machine bites into the sub. Chews and swallows. “When?”

  “Tonight. Down on the Avenue. Things work out, we'll head for the shop after that. Show you how things work,”

  “What about Crest?”

  “He's shacked up with two of his cousins over by the river. One of them is a woman. Sick bastard's fucking her. They're cooking crank. He's split the Hammerskins or they split him. Going to make a killing selling crystal. If Kukov doesn’t kill him first.”

  “We have time to pay him a visit before we meet your crew?”

  Kyokuto chews and swallows. “What're you planning on doing?” he asks apprehensively.

  “Snatch him. Ask some questions. Kill him when I'm done.” Machine replies.

  “Cold-blooded.”

  “There are very few people in this town that wouldn't look better in a box.”

  Kyokuto shakes his head then flashes a grin. “Jesus. I'm glad you're on my side.”

  “You might change your mind before I'm through. I don’t take prisoners. I won't leave anyone a clear shot at my back.” He wants to make that clear.