A Time of Torment (23 page)

Eventually, Griffin had settled on mindless bullying as the pursuit at which he excelled, supported by a coterie of younger men and women who were almost as vacuous as he was, and superficially blinded by this wanton young god in their midst. He’d had his share of girls, too – his, and a lot of other people’s – but a confused fragment of his being had always held itself apart at even the most intimate of moments, watching a version of himself in the throes of sexual performance while wondering why he wasn’t enjoying it more.

Fags – that was how he thought of them: rarely queers, or homos, just fags – got a particularly hard time from Harpur Griffin. He hated fags the way the pastor at his local church said God hated them – and God, according to Pastor Ricky,
really
hated fags, despised them more than Muslims and abortionists and feminists, and that was saying something, because God had no truck with any of those other folk, no sir. Pastor Ricky would get so worked up about all the fags in their midst that his face would turn purple, and he’d have to wipe his mouth with a big white handkerchief where the spittle had accumulated. Pastor Ricky saw fags everywhere – he had a nose for them – which was probably how he’d found the one with whom he’d been arrested in a men’s room not far from the Charleston Civic Center, performing what his assistant pastor subsequently described as an ‘unspeakable act’, although the assistant pastor’s view was that Pastor Ricky had been tempted into the performance of the act in question by Satan, who had been angered by Pastor Ricky’s unstinting refusal to capitulate to the forces of liberalism. This, Harpur Griffin thought, was a pretty ambitious spin to put on the whole affair, but he admired the assistant pastor for throwing it out there nonetheless.

Later, over coffee in the adjoining hall, members of the congregation wondered how a man as staunch as Pastor Ricky could have been brought so low, both figuratively and, since he’d been discovered on his knees in a men’s room, literally. Griffin had known, though, because he and Pastor Ricky had often hated fags together, in their way. You had to understand their degradation, Pastor Ricky used to tell him, and Griffin had been quite happy to try, just as long as he and the pastor were on the same page about loathing them and all their works.

Sometimes, in his more enlightened moments, relatively speaking, Griffin suspected that he might be slightly confused about his sexuality.

Griffin had grown up in Turley, the beating heart of Plassey County, which seemed as good a reason as any to find someplace else to live as soon as was practical. Slowly, and not entirely of his own will, he’d drifted north, and in the absence of anything approaching a skill set, fell into small-scale criminality until he eventually progressed to larger-scale forms of aberrant behavior to which he was conspicuously ill-suited, which was how he’d found himself serving time in Maine State Prison. The first half of his term had been hard, and the remainder of his sentence wasn’t looking as though it was going to be a whole lot easier, when the Cut came calling.

Growing up in Plassey, Griffin knew all about the Cut. Because he wasn’t bright, and had been trying to impress what he liked to think of as his ‘crew’, he’d even gotten in the face of some of their boys when they’d crossed paths at Oakey’s, which was when his troubles had really begun.

Oakey’s was situated about midway between Turley and Mortonsville, and was popular with the post-teen crowd for its liberal attitude toward IDs, as long as the kids drank in the room out back and responded appropriately to ‘the Bell’, a buzzer that sounded at any sign of a police presence, as all kinds of business were transacted at Oakey’s, compared to which serving alcohol to minors counted as the barest infraction of the law. If the Bell sounded, all alcohol in the possession of minors was to be dumped in a plastic garbage can with holes in the bottom that stood over a drain in a corner, and beer and liquor was to be substituted with flat soda from a dispenser maintained expressly for that purpose.

Anyway, on the night in question Griffin was not breaking the law by alternating shots of Canadian Mist – he had always been classy, he thought, even back then – with Miller High Life, as he had turned twenty-one three months earlier, although everyone else with him was conspicuously underage. (As Griffin got older, the crowd around him stayed the same age. Only the faces changed.) Griffin didn’t know what the three boys from the Cut were doing at Oakey’s. Had he been a little soberer, he might have realized that, whatever the reason for their presence, it probably meant bad news for someone, and he should probably not try to find out if there was any more to spare for him. But by the time one of the Cut boys brushed by him on the way to the men’s room – or he brushed by the Cut boy; it was all kind of fuzzy – Griffin was pretty soaked, and high on the adulation of his younger acolytes.

But Griffin also knew more about the Cut than was wise, because not everyone in the Cut embraced seclusion to the same degree. Griffin might have slept with men, but it didn’t mean he was above sleeping with women when the opportunity presented itself. It had only happened a couple of times with the woman from the Cut, but the act had served to dilute some of Griffin’s caution. The Cut was no longer as mysterious and threatening to him now that he’d had one of its women.

So when the Cut boy’s shoulder hit him, Griffin didn’t back down. Words were exchanged, and Griffin was only a breath away from crowing about how he’d screwed a Cut woman when one thing led to another, culminating in Griffin throwing a punch that, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, would have missed entirely, or struck a glancing blow, but in this case connected perfectly with the Cut boy’s jaw, dislocating it instantly and sending him stumbling backward through the door of the men’s room, where he slipped and fractured his skull on the tiles.

The red mist cleared from Griffin’s vision, and with it came the realization of the identity of the boy he’d just hit. Griffin hadn’t recognized him at first, not with the baseball cap low on his head, and a new growth of sparse dark beard on his face. He was looking down on Marius, the younger son of Cassander Hobb. He had just struck a prince of the Cut.

Which was when the Bell sounded.

Griffin had never sobered up more quickly. Nobody in Plassey dared raise a voice to the Cut, never mind a hand. What he had done might just be enough to earn him a shallow grave. Marius’s two buddies were in the main room of the bar, and the men’s room was otherwise empty, so Griffin did the smart thing, or maybe the only thing, as far as he was concerned: he climbed out the bathroom window and ran to his car, where he waited for the cops to go into Oakey’s before he started the engine and headed south. Unfortunately, he only had $40 left in his wallet, which wasn’t exactly enough to start a new life elsewhere, so he headed back to the apartment he had been renting on the edge of town ever since his parents kicked him out on his ass. He was sharing it with a stoner named Cody, who kept his cash in a rolled-up sock in his bottom drawer. Griffin relieved Cody of $373, with the full intention of probably paying him back sometime, packed a bag, and returned to his car. He’d just managed to get it started again – it could be temperamental, code for a piece of shit – when a truck blocked his way out, and the men appeared.

Griffin recalled pleading with them as they pulled him from the car, and then something impacted on his face, and he didn’t remember anything else until he woke up days later in the hospital. The doctor informed him that he was lucky: the pressure of bleeding on his brain had almost killed him. But Griffin knew that he was luckier still: he’d heard the tales, and knew that he could have been burned alive.

After that incident, he never touched Canadian Mist again.

Cassander came to visit him on the day he was due to be released from the hospital, his busted right leg in a cast along with his broken left arm, which made balancing a bitch, and no mistake. Cassander was one of the leaders of the Cut, although folks who claimed to know said the Cut didn’t have leaders, not really, but they were full of shit. Griffin knew a leader when he saw one, even if the Cut woman hadn’t told him about the hierarchy that ended with Cassander and Oberon. But Cassander hadn’t been among those who’d beaten him up. They’d all been younger men.

Griffin tried not to show his fear, although inside he was wondering if Cassander had come to finish the job. He managed to wet his mouth enough to ask about the boy, and was told that he was recovering in a hospital in Charleston. Griffin replied that he was glad, and he was: if Marius had died, or been left a vegetable, then the Cut would have found a way to burn him after all. He wasn’t surprised that the cops hadn’t come calling, though. That wasn’t the way the Cut did business.

Cassander didn’t say much. He just stared at Griffin for a time, as though wondering how something so dumb hadn’t been dealt with by natural selection long before it had entered the orbit of the Cut, before informing Griffin that he might want to consider finding somewhere else to live in the very near future. Griffin, who’d been thinking along the same lines even before he’d ended up in Oakey’s that night, confirmed that he would oblige just as soon as he could walk without falling over – or even sooner, he added, noticing the cloud that passed across Cassander’s features at the possibility that Griffin might be considering postponing his departure for any reason.

‘That was my son you hurt back at Oakey’s,’ said Cassander, ‘but I guess you already knew that,’ and Griffin felt his every muscle tighten painfully.

‘If he’d died,’ Cassander continued, ‘then you’d have died, too. I wanted to have you killed, and so did my older boy. He wanted to do the job himself, matter of fact.’

Griffin just about managed to keep from throwing up. Everyone in Plassey County was wary of Lucius Hobb. He wasn’t just crazy: he was cruel into the bargain. If there was a species of animal in West Virginia that Lucius hadn’t tortured to death at some point, then it was only because he hadn’t yet managed to capture it.

‘But,’ Cassander continued, ‘someone else pleaded your case in private, just to me.’

He leaned in closer to Griffin.

‘There are those among us who’d castrate and burn you if they knew you’d been with one of our women,’ he whispered. ‘You remember that.’

Cassander patted Griffin’s busted leg – harder than Griffin might have liked, to be honest – and informed him that he’d be watching Griffin’s progress in life with interest. Griffin had assumed this was just a turn of phrase, but it turned out that Cassander had meant it. So it was that about halfway through his sentence at Warren – nine years, after appeal – a message was delivered to Griffin from the Cut: a debt was still owed for the injuries suffered by their boy, and he could work it off by doing them a favor.

He could make Jerome Burnel’s life a living hell.

Which was what Griffin did, aided by a supply of contraband – narcotics, pharmaceuticals, nicotine – that found its way to him on a regular basis, and which he used to secure his position by paying off his own harassers and redirecting them toward Burnel. A price was put on everything, from sexual assault to spitting in Burnel’s food, and Griffin paid it every time without dispute. Mostly, though, he was happy to do the job himself, assisted, when required, by two trusted cronies. As a result, Griffin’s remaining years at Warren had passed more than tolerably. He’d even been able to indulge his penchant for homosexual rape without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Pastor Ricky, he thought, would have been proud.

Harpur Griffin’s debt had finally been paid in full that week, when Burnel was lifted from the streets of Portland. It had all gone smoothly, and the Cut had even come up with a small cash bonus for Griffin’s efforts, some of which he had been spending at the Porterhouse when Charlie Parker appeared.

This brought Griffin back to what he knew of the detective, which wasn’t good, even allowing for the fact that, as already established, he didn’t much care for conventional news outlets. He’d kept the worst of it from Lucius and Jabal at the Porterhouse, but he didn’t believe that Parker’s reputation could remain hidden from them for long, not in this day and age. The Cut might not have believed in leaving a trail by the overuse of cell phones or computers, but some cursory inquiries would dredge up enough about Parker to make them concerned.

And Parker had waited until right at the end, just when Griffin thought that he’d stonewalled him to a standstill, before lobbing his grenade: the Dead King. Thing was, Griffin didn’t even know what the Dead King might be. He’d only heard the name used after he left Plassey, when he briefly fell in with some guys in Huntington who’d had their own difficulties with the Cut. They were led by a man named Cort Leebone, who had been dumped from the Mongols motorcycle gang for – well, Griffin wasn’t entirely sure why Leebone had been shown the door, but he was certain that it fell under the general heading of an inability to get along well with others. Leebone was now of a mind to court the Bandidos, and ally his little gang with them as puppet members, for four others had followed him out of the Mongols, and he wanted something with which to demonstrate his bona fides.

The biker gangs had continued to circle the Cut, despite the death inflicted on an unfortunate Pagan some years earlier. Some of their members were the kind of men who hadn’t the sense to simply skirt an obstacle in their path: they needed to knock it down. The Cut’s refusal to let them even ride the roads in Plassey County was a source of discontent, but wiser heads had decided that a confrontation with the Cut simply wasn’t worth the trouble, although this decision was open to revision should sufficient intelligence about it become available to support an assault.

That information was what Leebone hoped to present to the Bandidos as his calling card, but it was proving more difficult to obtain than he had anticipated. One of his numbers had already been shot and killed in a garage in Wheeling, having been sent to Plassey to recce the Cut in the guise of a weekend rider, and Leebone was of a mind to ascribe his murder to ‘those fucking hillbillies’, as he called them. Having learned of his own difficulties with the Cut, Leebone had approached Griffin, but there was little that Griffin could offer him that he didn’t already know, beyond what the woman had told him.