Blood Standard

by Laird Barron

  The veteran possessed a lengthy criminal record, much of it related to scuffles with the police, but also a couple of domestic battery charges. He acknowledged that he should’ve brought her to the authorities and that he should’ve sought help, but he lived in terror of the law. When Reba passed away, that terror consumed him, reduced him to a gibbering wreck. Over the years he’d dropped enough acid and smoked enough dope that he was probably already on his way before that awful incident. He buried her with the useless, shattered helmet on her chest, and awaited the gods to punish him.

  The funeral took place in Kingston. Virgil read the eulogy; he quoted Joseph Campbell’s bit about participating “joyfully in the sorrows of the world.” And Calvin stepped up before the crowded hall of mourners and sang Reba’s favorite song, “Summertime.” Good thing I brought a handkerchief. Damned dust in that church kept getting in my eye.

  Jade and Virgil had hugged me at the reception and gruffly warned that haying season was how they separated the men from the boys on the farm. I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded and let it lie. The Outfit had taught me the value of keeping my trap shut. What worked in the underworld proved as applicable to real life.

  “A fucking Shakespearean tragedy” constituted Lionel’s sole observation regarding Reba’s death. He plonked a bottle of Old Crow onto the table. He and I got epically drunk and didn’t speak of it again. Not in words, at any rate.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON, Lionel, Meg, and I sat on the porch of my cabin. Minerva snored at my feet, twitching her ears to fend off the gnats that swarmed from the nearby pond. I’d spent the day mucking the stables. Dusk approached and the cold beer might’ve been the nectar of the gods, for all its sweetness.

  Meg shook her head at her watch and said she had to book. Mac was dropping Devlin at the house in half an hour. She kissed me and ran to her car like a jet pilot scrambling for her F-16. Despite our dating frequently since spring, I had yet to meet the boy. She’d dropped hints lately that such a meeting might be in the works. Any day now. Now that she’d warmed to the idea, my feet were inexplicably chilly.

  Lionel sipped beer. He’d gotten a couple ahead of me, as usual.

  “Does she know what you did for a living before you came here?”

  “The whole truth and nothing but?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She thinks she understands.”

  “Ain’t the same.”

  “The kindest act we can render is to keep our true selves hidden from our loved ones. Our job is to snow them a little. Be the good and honorable person they can hold on to.”

  “Can’t shine a woman on forever.”

  “You’re right. We wind up paying the piper, one way or another.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to hang up your pistolas?”

  “It means I’m doing my damndest to make sure she doesn’t catch on to what a sonofabitch I really am for as long as I can.”

  “Well, good luck with that.”

  “Hey, how about this weather?” I said. “And in other news, I hear Larry Modine of NYC was recently indicted on forty-seven felony counts, including murder.”

  “Donnie Talon is probably so happy, he can raise his shorts without using his hands.”

  The corpses of nine White Manitou gangbangers had appeared in various rivers and landfills over the past few weeks. The grapevine had it, a few more were buried deep or sunk to the bottom of the bay. A leadership change hadn’t saved them in the end.

  Contemplating mortality, I felt the urge to get a stone off my chest.

  “I ever tell you about Achilles?” I ran my thumb over the dog tags. “He fell off a cliff. That’s how I lost him. I tried to grab him when he slid. Had ahold of a bush and leaned way over, nearly caught his paw as he scrambled to get back to me. But, nope. Looked into his eyes as he went.”

  “Rough way to lose a dog.”

  “One-in-a-million accident. I was hunting a captain who’d crossed the Outfit. Tracked him into the mountains and weather set in. Freezing rain. I didn’t know the area. Things went wrong. Icy rocks, moving too fast. Stupid, stupid.”

  “How old was Achilles?”

  “Almost seven. Died three weeks short, around Halloween. It gets cold early up there. I didn’t even have to shoot the captain. Bastard got exposure and died of hypothermia. My first job.”

  “All kinds of deaths,” Lionel said. “The dog, the guy, the innocence inside the kid you were before you climbed into those mountains. Fragile stuff. I keep trying to breathe life back into myself. Keep hoping a good deed here and there will make a difference after what I did overseas. Doubt it, though.”

  “Here’s to old, loyal dogs.” I rapped my bottle against his.

  He chugged the last of his brew, rose, and slapped my shoulder.

  “See you in the mornin’, Hoss.”

  I watched the stars burn through the darkening heavens. His words took me back to my last visit with Dad and something the old man told me during a quiet moment.

  For once, I admire what you’re doing. It’s a doomed gesture, alas. The girl you’re searching for is probably dead. You’re no hero. You are your father’s son. You’ve seen too much, got too much of the bad blood in you. The world is a traveling slaughterhouse. It’s rolling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and deep freezes. Extinction events. Insects devour one another by the gross ton. Animals are red of tooth and claw, and men commit genocide with bigger and better weaponry every few generations. You, son o’ mine, are the edge of the blade that cuts through everything in its path, guilty or innocent alike. You can’t resist what it is in your nature to do.

  Excellent point, Dad. Only a fool believes he can prevail against what has been bred into blood and bone. I had no intention of fighting it.

  * * *

  —

  BY SEPTEMBER, I’d decided to winter at the farm.

  Pitching hay and shoveling manure wouldn’t suffice to keep body and soul together, however. Nor to satisfy the pit that had opened within me when Dawn Walker had glanced over her shoulder at me as she climbed into the car that would take her to the airport. I’d met plenty of widows, widowers, and bereaved children. This time, it hit home, sank in deep, and left a scar. The shattered look in her eyes branded itself into my memory. It haunted me.

  Money greases the gears. To do what needed doing I required more of it and on a semi-reliable basis. Infrastructure was the order of the day. Much of that autumn was spent securing the network and laying the foundation of my new Hudson Valley enterprise. A piece of cake, really. What, with my scintillating résumé and Mr. Apollo’s good word on my behalf? I’d called in favors from associates in Alaska, who’d give me local points of contact.

  The question wasn’t one of whether I could speedily acquire lucrative work. No, it was a matter of setting prices and conditions and deciding which lines to cross. Fresh slate, I reminded myself. Or, if not fresh, at least lightly scribbled.

  Requests came in steadily. Early one week, a young patent holder needed consultation regarding violent threats her ex-partner had made; midweek, I took a meeting with a tavern owner in the Adirondacks about a biker gang that enjoyed busting the place up and stiffing him on the tab; Friday, I did lunch with a rich recluse who thought a secret admirer wanted to kidnap him. The paranoid geezer turned out to be right too.

  There’d be a vetting process until I got a feel for the trade. A calibration of lethal force versus delicacy and discretion. Fixing wasn’t quite as straightforward as my previous existence as a hitter. Every day presented a new problem, an unforeseen complication. Definitely the kind of work that merited hazard pay.

  The only detail that mattered? I didn’t have to do anything or kill anyone that I didn’t really want to.

  Famous last words.

&
nbsp; FORTY-FIVE

  Halloween Day I received a message from Curtis. He told me when and where to meet him. He also said he was sorry.

  I calmly set aside the phone and stared out at the pasture where the horses meandered. A cool, bright morning, the sting of winter yet hidden away. The clouds appeared to have been painted against the sky. Meg and I were supposed to spend the evening in New Paltz watching the Halloween parade followed by supper at Anatolia, the best Turkish restaurant in the valley. It occurred to me to call her and cancel, to apologize for myself and a lifetime of missteps that had led to this crossroads. Instead, I patted Minerva’s belly.

  I put on a suit and combed my hair and went to find Lionel.

  He straightened from stacking bags of grain.

  “I don’t like that smile, Hoss. Or that suit. I saw ’em once before.”

  “This? I’m not smiling.”

  “Yeah.” He hadn’t cried at Reba’s funeral. For a horrible moment, I thought he might finally crack then and there. He coughed and lit a cigarette. “Headin’ out?”

  “I’ve got to take a meeting.”

  “Huh. Can you skip it?”

  “Not this one, my friend. Do me a favor. I might be gone a while. You’ll look after Minerva?” I handed him Achilles’ tags.

  He made a fist and held it at eye level, the chain dangling.

  “Any other dumb questions?”

  “There’s a box buried under that big rock behind my shack. See it gets to Meg.”

  “If you’re gone a while.”

  “If I’m gone a while. Adios, Lionel.”

  “I ain’t saying it. Nope.” He turned his back.

  On the way to the truck, I paused and breathed in the farm. Took a long, lingering look at the barn and the house and the smoke rising from the stack. Whatever bitterness I felt regarding Reba’s death, whatever awaited me down the road, this had been a good run. The best I’d ever had, perhaps.

  Destiny had decreed this a day of reckoning. Time to beard the lion.

  * * *

  —

  CURTIS AND A HALF DOZEN OF HIS CREW occupied the Sultan’s Swing. Bobby the Whip, Salazar, Fat Frank, and a half-dozen hoods who’d probably come up from New York special. The joint sat closed and shuttered. Inside, the lights were dimmed. I, the gangsters, and a handful of waitstaff were it. One of the waiters locked the door behind me. Another confiscated my weapons. I sat at the table with Curtis at the head. Bobby the Whip poured me a healthy dose of scotch. I didn’t recognize the taste except that it was a smoky Highland malt, aged sixteen to eighteen years.

  Curtis puffed on a cigar. Royally at ease for a man presiding over an execution.

  “Got any requests?”

  “T-bone. Rare. Another one of these.” I drained my glass.

  “Get the man his steak.” Curtis snapped his fingers. “And another scotch.” He waited for my meal to arrive and then watched me eat. “You’re fixing. It’s a going concern, I hear.”

  “Braiding pony manes? Terrific. There’s a trick to it. I’m catching on.”

  “Chuck’s moonlighting as your gofer.”

  “Bit more to it than that. He cooks, he cleans, he drives.”

  “Limp and all, huh?”

  “Limp and all.”

  “You understand this ain’t personal?”

  “It’s okay, Curtis.” The steak arrived and I cut into it.

  “Big day today. How you holdin’ up?”

  Somebody chuckled nearby.

  “Isaiah don’t get scared. Not a drop of sweat, not a single tremor. Not even when the Grim Reaper grins at him. Don’t you New Yorkers know anything?”

  Tony Flowers moved from the shadows and sat across from me. “Hi, big fella. The more things change . . . Larger than life and twice as ugly.” He’d brought a friend, the heroically muscular goon who’d worked me over in the basement in Nome.

  I held my knife loosely and nodded.

  “Ah, Tony. I wish you hadn’t made the trip. Nice to see you anyhow.”

  “Duty calls. Besides, I’m freezing my balls off in Nome. It’s already winter there!”

  “This is a vacation, then. Get some sun, see the sights—”

  “—Pull out your fingernails. I kid, I kid. Deluca is extending courtesy. Not a clue why he wastes it on you, you big, stupid pineapple.”

  “Tony!” Curtis said.

  “Sorry, sorry.” Tony Flowers held his palms out in deference. “What I meant to say is, soon as you finish your steak, we can hit the road. Vitale’s waiting and we got a plane to catch tonight.”

  “There’s no rush, take your time,” Curtis said.

  Tony F leaned over and took my knife and cut a wedge of steak. He chewed.

  “Oh, oh! Oh my God.” He stabbed the knife vertically into the steak as a threat of violence to come, braced his hands on the table, and lowered his face close to mine. “A taste of heaven before you slide down the chute into hell, huh?”

  I snatched the knife and drove it through the meat of his left hand and well into the tabletop.

  After a long, disbelieving pause, Tony Flowers shrieked in English and Italian.

  “Motherfucker! You dirty cocksucker motherfucker!” was the gist. The façade of avuncular bemusement completely peeled away to reveal the beast we all knew and loved. His pet goon glowered at me, lacking the conviction to make a move.

  Curtis wiped tears of laughter from his eyes.

  “Settle down, Tony. We’re all friends here.”

  The goon helped pry Tony F free and Bobby the Whip wrapped the wound in a fancy cloth napkin. The napkin soaked through in a hurry.

  “That’s okay, dead man. That’s okay, you fuck. Vitale’s gonna settle this bullshit real quick. He’s gonna let the air out a that fat head of yours. You’re dead, motherfucker!”

  “Oh, Tony Torquemada,” I said. “Now there’s the real you, choking on your own spit. In another life, I can kind of see you burning heretics at the stake.”

  He gnashed his teeth.

  “Come on, gents,” Curtis said. “Enough screwin’ around. The Ferryman awaits.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Curtis meant what he said. The lot of us boarded a rusty barge called Persephone’s Hand and chugged upriver. Gulls wheeled above the boat, riding a stiff breeze that tasted of mud and moss. The chop stung when it sprayed the deck. The boys smoked cigarettes, except for Tony F, who slumped in a deck chair and mournfully regarded his limp arm wrapped in a bloody towel. Nobody said much.

  This wasn’t the Outfit’s traditional method of settling a score. Historically, I would’ve taken a shotgun blast to the face as I sat at a red light or gotten a bag over the head and been transported somewhere private for an evening of torture and murder like they’d planned back in Nome. The Outfit were a bunch of macho characters, but duels and such bullshit didn’t often happen in the Syndicate. Business and professionalism were their watchwords.

  As I’d told Lionel, the Nights are a different breed. Vitale had been gently urged to lay off. Stiff-necked to a fault, he—his honor—demanded satisfaction. Blowing me away in an ambush wouldn’t do. Oh, no. I’d bested him in Alaska, instilled doubt as to his murderous prowess. He desperately needed to set the record straight before this audience of his colleagues. He had to make an example of the infamous Isaiah Coleridge. Nothing less would do.

  We moored alongside a skiff at a rotting dock on a no-name bend in the river. From there, my entourage escorted me along a trail uphill past an abandoned warehouse and through the woods. Leaves crunched underfoot and spread red and brown among bare trees. Eventually, we came to a meadow. Picnic tables were scattered across the pebbly earth. Two wheelbarrows, shovels, and a pickax served as a reminder that this was a killing field.

  Vitale Night and several Deluca wiseguys were present. He alighted from a table and n
odded at me. His black suit cost a lot more than mine and he wore a gray homburg.

  “Natty as usual,” I said.

  “Is that what you want to be buried in?” He spoke in a rasp. His collar hid most of what I presumed to be a nasty scar from the reconstructive surgery.

  The other men took up posts on either side, standing around, trading smokes, or parking themselves atop the picnic tables. They gave us plenty of room.

  “All right, Vitale. I’ve done my part. Your show now.” Curtis handed the smaller man a Glock in its holster. Hospitality and professional courtesy dictated that the local boss provide the visiting hitter armament and logistical support. Vitale Night and Tony Flowers were notorious felons. They dared not travel across the country packing heat.

  Night examined the automatic. Dry-fired it to gauge the trigger-pull weight, bounced it in his hand a few times and whipped it toward an imaginary target. Imagining me, doubtless. An intuitive shooter, he punched the barrel forward rather than taking deliberate aim. Same as my method, except I wasn’t half as smooth. He checked the magazine and slapped it home. He removed his coat and strapped on the holster so it rode high on his hip for a right-hand draw. Brisk and perfunctory as an accountant balancing his figures.

  Fat Frank returned my .357. I holstered it under my armpit.

  Curtis lit a cigar.

  “Vitale, you good?”

  Night handed his homburg to Tony F’s goon. He smoothed his silk vest.

  “I am indeed.” Each word emerged scarred and bruised. Night rolled his neck and shook his arms. He paced a tight circle, eyes on me the whole time. Behind him, Tony F clutched his wounded hand and blew a kiss.

  Curtis squinted at the sun descending toward the tree line.

  “Better get this over with. ‘Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.’”

  “A Stevens man?” I said. “A tip of the hat to you. Here, I thought you were a bunch of illiterates.”