by BT Urruela
“You’re so fucking boring, Charlie. Seriously, man,” Trigger said, his body rocking as if music was playing in the van.
There wasn’t any.
“And you’re a fucking spaz who needs a little less steroids and a lot more Ritalin,” Charlie retorted, without looking up that time.
“And you two need to just fuck and get it over with already,” Dimitri said, shooting a playful glare back toward them. “Now, shut the fuck up. He’ll be out any minute. I, for one, would like to get this shit over with and grab a bite to eat, thank you very much.”
Knuckles threw his thick hand in the air. Still looking out the windshield, he said, “Seconded.”
“What’s the word on method?” Trigger asked, passing Dimitri an eyebrow waggle.
“He’s done. We gotta kill and dump,” Dimitri responded, though his gaze was set back out the window like Knuckles, waiting for any sign of movement, waiting to kill yet another poor soul.
“Well, I know that, dickbreath, but how?” Trigger had one hand on each of their seatbacks.
Knuckles remained unaware, but Dimitri stared at the hand full of rings, and then at Trigger with a cocked eyebrow. “Quickly,” he said, and then turned his attention back toward the house.
“Can I do it?” Trigger asked in a giddy tone.
“Do what?” Dimitri didn’t look back that time.
“Kill him.”
Dimitri did turn back toward him then, his brows scrunching, and he passed Trigger a look of disapproval. “Yo, Trigger, man, I get what our job entails. I understand it takes a bit of apathy, but shit, man, I think you’re liking this a bit too much these days. You might wanna think about getting back on those meds.”
Charlie nodded. “Yeah, man. I told you, he’s got issues.”
“Like you can talk,” Trigger said, scoffing. “You seem to enjoy yourself quite a bit when you’re removing limbs, Chuckie.”
“I don’t enjoy it. I’m just good at it,” Charlie responded, and Dimitri shot him a scrutinizing look.
“Yeah fucking right, Charlie.” Dimitri laughed, shaking his head.
Charlie smirked, closing his book and setting it to the side. “I mean, what’s worse? Liking to kill or somewhat enjoying the dismemberment process? It’s like Biology class with the frogs, man.”
Knuckles let out a throaty laugh and shook his head. “I think everybody in this goddamn van is in need of a straitjacket and an ass-load of therapy.”
“Pot meet kettle,” Trigger snarked.
“I said, everybody, motherfucker.”
Dimitri motioned for them to quiet down, his focus shifting back out the windshield as his peripheral caught movement. “Shut the fuck up. He’s leaving the house.” He slapped a hand against Knuckles’ arm. “Move up … slow.”
Knuckles crept the van forward as the man, mid-forties and balding, with a thick wrinkle of concern in his brow, walked to the Civic in his driveway. He passed nervous glances back and forth but didn’t notice the van down the street as it continued toward him at a snail’s pace.
Once the man reached the Civic and rifled the keys out of his pocket, his nervous eyes still flitting about, Dimitri shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”
Tires squealed as the van took off, drawing the man’s attention, but not with enough time for him to do much of anything about it.
As the van skidded to a stop just before the driveway, and its side door slid open, the man the enforcers were after froze, his eyes wide and hands up defensively. Then, he turned in a panic and sprinted toward the house. By the time Trigger and Charlie reached him, he had already stumbled on the top step of the porch, lying curled up in a ball, a sobbing mess.
“No, no, no … Please,” the man cried as they grabbed for him. “Please, please …” he squeaked out again before Trigger punched him hard in the jaw, quieting him, and then Charlie grabbed each of the man’s wrists and dragged him ungracefully toward the van. Trigger quickly grabbed his feet, and the half-conscious man wriggled like a worm in their grip.
Reaching the van, they dumped him inside with a thud just as Dimitri climbed from the passenger seat to the back with zip ties in hand. He worked the man over to his stomach and bound his hands as Charlie and Trigger hopped inside. Charlie slid the door closed and the van sped off.
Dimitri was able to tighten the zip ties before the man came to fully, and the van took the highway toward Jefferson County, the killing and dumping grounds for 3SMC for generations.
“Please, I can pay you … I can,” the man said weakly. The morning sun, fully risen by that point, glistened off the sweat that coated the man’s balding head, and forced his eyes to slits. The man’s nose was crooked, blood trickling down his lips. “Please, I have the money.”
“You have no money,” Dimitri said flatly, shaking his head. “If you did, you would’ve paid us already. We’ve given you countless chances. This … this is your destiny, my friend.”
“I do! I do! I can get it!” His bound hands lifted in the air as he pleaded. The tears streamed. The van rolled on. Destiny awaited.
Dimitri wondered then how many tears he had seen shed in his life? How many hands bound together in a desperate plea? How many lives snuffed out in a moment?
“Wait …” Trigger put a pointer and thumb to his chin in thought. “You have the money, or you can get the money? Those are two very different things.” He had a wide grin on his face, a cat toying with a defenseless mouse. He knew the man would die that day. It was as good as done. Anthony Christopher the Third, the disheveled man who begged for his life, had a gambling addiction, and any money he could’ve ever hoped to acquire in his life would’ve been lost on a pony or a shitty hand of blackjack one day. If he had any more life left to live, that is. It wasn’t their first encounter with Anthony, but it would be their last.
“Yeah, yeah, I can get some. I can!” The man’s desperate eyes flitted from Trigger to Dimitri and then to Charlie. “Please, I beg you!”
Dimitri shrugged. “You’ve made your bed, Anthony. Twenty-six thousand, seven hundred is what you owe, six warnings are what you’ve been given, three fingers are what you’ve lost—” Dimitri motioned to the man’s right hand, where three nubs were in the process of healing and took the place of his pointer, middle, and ring fingers. “And you’ve still yet to pay a dime. You leave your home. You leave your family to fend for themselves while you hide at your mother’s house? C’mon, man. Who you fucking kidding? You don’t got shit, Anthony. You know it …” Dimitri motioned to the rest of them. “They know it. And I know it. You, sir, have sealed your fate. Let’s hope your brother gets the message and makes better decisions than you.” Dimitri passed Trigger a nod and he promptly pulled a case from beneath the passenger seat. He opened it and riffled out a clear plastic tarp, rolled up neatly.
The man whimpered and trembled at the sight of it. Dimitri and Trigger grabbed the man by his arms and worked him onto the tarp, his body writhing like a freshly caught fish. When he was completely over the plastic, Dimitri glanced toward Charlie and nodded. “You get him, Charlie,” he said.
Charlie pulled a seven-inch bowie knife out of the case and in one fell swoop, he buried the blade into Anthony’s sternum until the bolster met bloody skin.
Anthony let out an unearthly groan, but it quickly became a wretched scream when Charlie twisted the blade clockwise and then counterclockwise, again and again. Blood bubbled and then poured from the wound as Dimitri and Trigger guided both the man and the knife still inside him to the ground. Christopher sucked at the air, gasping for breath, before his fluttering eyes eventually closed, and they never opened again.
Trigger remarked on how odd the man’s face looked before he fell, as he removed the knife from his sternum, but Dimitri was distant; frozen, his gaze lost, his mind transfixed on the man who bled to death at his feet. On the animals that would clean him to polished bone before his body was ever discovered. How scary it felt inside his head sometimes, and how the noise grew louder with
every life he took, the whispers of the dead.
Trigger slapped a hand against Charlie’s arm. “He all right?” he asked, motioning toward Dimitri.
Dimitri wasn’t alright, he was lost in the dead man’s eyes—his face whitening as the burgundy blood framed his splayed-out silhouette. He felt the grip of panic in his guts and tried breathing through it.
“Hey, Dimitri. You good, bro?” Knuckles eyed his best friend in the rearview as he pulled the van to a stop.
“Huh?” Dimitri muttered, staring blankly.
“You look like you’re gonna be sick, man.”
“Yeah, I-I just don’t feel so good. Let’s get him out of here, huh?” Dimitri swallowed thickly, a shaky hand motioning toward the body.
Charlie leaned over and grabbed the man by his hands, then turned him over onto his side as Trigger slid the van door open, exposing the edge of a forty-foot cliff, a sea of trees and overgrowth beyond it. The two of them worked the body toward the open door and dumped him out, and he went crashing into the trees, branches snapping, leaves rustling. Dimitri took a moment, looking out the door and down the cliff. He thought of how many bodies had been left in places just like that one, waiting to be eaten by wildlife. He cleared his throat and then said in a hushed tone, “We forgot to cut off his dick.”
“Oh shit, the gift for his brother?” Trigger asked.
Dimitri simply nodded, his lips pinched tightly together as he stared a little longer, and then he snapped his fingers for them to get moving. And to break himself of the trance.
“You wanna tell me what’s been going through your head? And don’t tell me nothing, Preach. I know you better than that.” Dimitri leaned his back against Preach’s kitchen counter with a cold beer in his hand. He read his mentor’s face and the frown lines that seemed to have deepened over the past year. Even more so the past week.
What do you mean?” he asked.
“You just haven’t been yourself lately. Something’s off. Something other than the club. You’re missing some of your edge.” Dimitri took a small drink of beer but his eyes remained on Preach. They had always spoke bluntly with each other, never held back their feelings, whether anger or love, so when Preach had been exceptionally quiet, Dimitri knew something was on his mind. He could almost see the words on the tip of Preach’s tongue, desperate for escape.
“I could say the same about you, Dimitri. I heard you didn’t handle the job yesterday too well,” Preach finally said, an eyebrow arching.
Dimitri scoffed and shook his head stiffly. “Those fucks can’t keep their damn traps shut, can they?”
Preach just shrugged.
“Anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about you, and what’s going on in that half-senile brain of yours. Something’s fucking off, old man. Now spit it out.”
Preach let out a heavy breath, a grin on his face but sadness in his eyes. “You know me well, don’t ya?”
“Of course I do.”
“I take it a simple ‘nothin’ is wrong’ won’t suffice?”
Dimitri shook his head.
“And you won’t take ‘the club is turnin’ to shit’ as a worthy excuse?” Preach cocked his head.
“Worthy, sure. But not enough. Not what’s going on here. So, tell me.”
Preach peered at his protégé for a long few moments, before he eventually said, “You’re a perceptive little shit, you know that?”
“You raised me, Preach. Give me a little more credit than that. I know you better than you know yourself.”
“And vice versa, kid,” he said. He hesitated, and then nodded as if he had come to accept that Dimitri wouldn’t budge. “All right, fair enough. You’re not gonna like what I have to say though.”
“Try me.”
“It ain’t the easiest thing gettin’ older, you know. It has its benefits, of course, but …” Preach hesitated again, glancing out the small kitchen window with a scrunched brow, and he took a puff of his cigar. He let the smoke out with a heavy sigh, and continued, “When your own mortality is starin’ you dead in the face, and you’re still rollin’ over to an empty pillow every mornin’, the reality of it all can be a little … overwhelming.”
“You got some terminal illness you’re trying to tell me about, Preach?”
“Nah.” Preach chuckled, waving him off. “Nothin’ like that. I’m just sayin’, I’m gettin’ older and bein’ alone ain’t gettin’ any easier.”
“You’re still pretty young, Preach.”
“You tell me that same thing when you’re lookin’ back and sixty years of your life has passed you by. More gray on your head than brown. And more of it comin’ out your damn ears than on your head.”
They both laughed.
Preach continued, “When your bladder reminds you of its existence every ten minutes, then you come talk to me. Okay? Right now, it’s some scary shit. You know, my wife may not have been what I wanted deep down, but I loved that woman endlessly. Losing her, Dimitri, it was … I understand a little bit of what your dad suffered. And Rachel and I weren’t even together nearly as long as your parents.” He fought the tears by scanning out the window again for nothing in particular.
Dimitri dropped his head and muttered, “I know. I know.”
“It’s just hard. I miss havin’ someone. I miss lovin’ someone. I miss bein’ loved.”
“What’s stopping you?”
Preach narrowed his eyes on Dimitri. “It’s hard enough findin’ a woman in this world who can hang with all the bullshit this patch brings, but a man? And to keep it secret from everyone? It’s just … a death sentence.” Preach shook his head stiffly. “You know that. I’d be run the fuck outta town. Or hung by my scrotum and used as a piñata at the next barbeque. No, thank you.”
“Why not move out of the city. Doesn’t mean you gotta leave the club, just get some distance. Enough to find a little happiness.”
“Leave the South Side? Are you kiddin’ me? Your father would never forgive me.”
“My father’s dead.”
“Even so.”
“My dad isn’t of your concern anymore, Preach. He’s just gonna be bones, man. Live for yourself now. And if you have to say ‘fuck off’ to this club and every bigot in it, well then, so be it.”
Preach shook his head. “Ain’t that easy, son. Ain’t that easy at all. I can’t just turn my back on everything we built. This has been my whole life.”
Dimitri’s smile faded as his gaze shifted to the floor. His brow wrinkled and a look of contemplation passed over his features.
“What?” Preach asked, drawing Dimitri’s attention. “I see your mind is wanderin’. I can always tell by how many lines are in your forehead,” he said with a chuckle.
“Did Pop know? About you, I mean?”
Preach frowned, swallowing thickly. “It’s my greatest regret in life not tellin’ your father. Him, and my wife before she died. She deserved to know too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was scared he wouldn’t understand. Shit, her too. And that they’d both leave me. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. So, I held it in. Your pops … he was my brother, the only person I had, after my wife passed and I ventured up here with nothin’ but a backpack and a chip on my shoulder. When I finally faced my demons and accepted who I was, I felt like I’d let him down if I ever told him the truth.”
“Dad would have never judged you for it.”
“It’s easy to say that as an outsider lookin’ in. Not that I don’t agree with you. I think he would’ve understood and backed me up regardless, I truly do, but at the time, it gutted me to even think about tellin’ him. Your pop, he was a rough dude. A man’s man. He knew nothin’ about that life. Didn’t wanna know.”
Dimitri nodded in understanding. “I get it. I mean, I can’t imagine what it’s like holding onto something like that, not being able to share the true you with the people you love most, especially in this world. But I do believe he wouldn’t have ever looked at you
differently. He loved you the same as you did him.”
“He had so much goin’ on upstairs, all the time. Barely slept. Always worried. He didn’t need my bullshit.”
Dimitri scoffed. “Oh, I remember. He didn’t much care for mine either.”
“I didn’t need to lay more on him. Even if he would’ve been okay with it, he would’ve worried about me. And he would’ve worried about the club finding out, like you do now.”
“You think it’d go over that bad with the guys? I mean, really? I’m pretty sure a few of them are probably fucking other guys.”
Preach shot him a pointed look. “You’re fucking kidding me, right? The guys would burn me at the stake. And the ones who are likely gay act the most homophobic. They’d be the ones lightin’ the first match.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just want you to be happy, Preach. And I can tell you’re not.”
“I could say the same about you, Dimitri. You obviously ain’t happy with what you’re doin’ here anymore. I can see that. Why not branch out?”
“There you go, deflecting again. Branch out, Preach? Really? This is all I fucking know. It’s all I’ve ever known. And you know once you’re patched, there’s no out other than six feet deep.”
Preach rolled his eyes. “I’m the president now, Dimitri. What I say goes. You think I’d hold you to that?”
“Would you give others the same treatment?” Dimitri arched an eyebrow, a smirk on his face. Preach’s lack of response let him know he had him. “Exactly. You can’t give me special treatment when you wouldn’t give the same treatment to the others. And even if you were to abolish the ‘patch or death’ mentality, what would that do to the organization? How many of these pissy, young, newly patched fucks would wanna stir up some shit, branch out, thinking it’s easy to do what you do. Thinking you’ve weakened in your old age and you can be overthrown.”