Rough Men (14 page)

Jason took the phone that he’d stolen from the dead man’s pants out of his pocket and began to do something with it—Will couldn’t tell exactly what—and then he put it to his ear and began to ascend the stairs. When the sound of a ringing phone came to them, barely audible over the thumping bass and spoken bravado, Jason and Will ran up the stairs, Jason kicking the door open, both of their guns up and ready.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. There was a skinny white kid in the room holding a large stainless-steel revolver, but he was pointing it at the floor, distracted by that god of the modern era, his ringing cell phone. On the bed behind him were two girls, one white and one black. All three of them were naked. Just loud enough to be heard over the rap, and with both of their guns trained on the kid—it was hard to see him as anything but a kid—Jason said, “Drop the gun, or you’re dead. Do it now.” There was a moment of hesitation, and the kid dropped the gun to the floor.

“Girls, off the bed,” Jason said, training his gun at the black girl as Will kept his own slightly shaky barrel on the kid. “You first,” Jason commanded, pistol still on the black girl. “Go downstairs, and do it slowly. My partner down there has an itchy trigger finger. You’ll want to ask him if you can come in.”

The girl slid off of the bed and bent slowly to retrieve an article of clothing from the floor. She was beautiful.

“Did I tell you to get your shit? Get your ass down there.”

The girl just shrugged, and Jason’s pistol followed her until she was down the stairs and gone.

The kid smiled thinly at Will as the girl left, looking at his gun, then at Will, as though trying to show that he hadn’t lost all control of the situation.

Jason pointed his pistol at the blonde white girl on the bed. She looked furious. “You look like you want to do something very stupid,” Jason said to her. “And if you try and do that stupid thing, I will kill you. I know that you might think I’m bluffing, that my partner and I won’t shoot you, but we will. We will end your little meaningless life and then go out for pancakes and never give you another thought.”

The girl, looking even angrier now, slid slowly off the bed. Will kept his eyes on the kid, who was making it obvious that he was going to try for the gun at his feet, the gun that he had very likely used to kill Alex. Will’s resolve, and grip on the pistol, went back to iron, how he’d been before Mumbo. If the kid could see the difference, he wasn’t showing it.

“Get your ass downstairs,” said Jason to the angry girl, “and if my partner isn’t ready for you, sit on the fucking couch so he doesn’t have to kill anyone else tonight.”

The kid just kept smiling. When the girl was gone, Jason walked to the kid’s revolver, picked it up, and handed it to Will, both of their guns back on the kid. Will felt numb with the gun in his hand, the gun that had very likely killed his son. He wanted to kill Chris and leave, but that wasn’t enough, not yet. Not even close.

“Chris,” Jason said, the kid’s smile crumbling at the sound of his name, “we need to talk, buddy. Rob is dead downstairs, and I had to kill Mumbo just to find you guys.

“Now, first things first,” Jason went on, “our man downstairs is going to hustle your ladies into the basement, and then we’re going to go for a little ride, make sure the law isn’t coming after those gunshots. Just my two buddies, me, and of course, you, asshole.”

Chris spit in Jason’s face. Jason shook his head and smashed Chris across the face with his pistol, likely breaking his nose and dropping him to the floor of the room.

“Will, go make sure your brother is having fun, and help him get those bitches down to the basement. I need to tie up this motherfucker’s wrists.”

Will did as he was told, quite sure that Jason could manage Chris easily enough, and headed down the steps. Crossing first through the kitchen and then emerging into the living room, Will thought the situation felt surreal, like something in one of his books. Isaac had the three girls on the couch, though the first one, the one Will had hit on the head, was still unconscious and sitting in a pile of piss, with her gag lying on her breasts. Rob was where Will had last seen him and was still quite dead.

“We need to get the girls in the basement,” Will said. “You two that are still mobile, get your asses moving. Find something to tie them to, all right?”

“Sure thing,” said Isaac, and as he spoke, Will found himself hoping, not for the first time, that neither he nor his brother would slip up and use each other’s names. “Get up. Get your butts in gear.”

The girls obliged, first standing with bound wrists and gagged mouths, then walking silently, with Isaac following them. Will regarded the unconscious one, finally settling on holstering his
pistol in his over-the-shoulder rig and then hoisting the girl up. For someone who looked like she subsisted on a diet of cocaine and semen, she was surprisingly heavy. Will managed her weight as best he was able. It had been a long time since he’d lifted anyone, even Alison, and he could feel his back screaming at him.

Will could see Isaac at the bottom of the steps, binding the girls’ wrists together around a pole, the girls back-to-back against it. Struggling against his girl’s weight, each step was a small hell. Will could hear Chris and Jason arguing as they came down the steps from the room upstairs, and that was just enough to distract him from the fact that the girl he’d thought was unconscious had come to life.

She had his Sig out of its holster before Will even had the chance to react. “Put me down, motherfucker,” the girl said, screeching, “before I fucking shoot you!” Will was moving to oblige her, he could feel the barrel pushing into his stomach, but at the last minute, he changed his mind, giving her a twist and bucking her off of his shoulder, then driving her to the stairs with his hands.

She landed on her right shoulder on a step—her collarbone or something in her shoulder crunching and the pistol flying from her hands—and then her neck collided with the next step down, making a sound that reminded Will of separating chicken bones. The girl slid down the rest of the steps, clearly dead, her neck bent at an impossible angle. The girls tied to the pole watched her slide to the bottom, then began violently thrashing against their restraints and attempting to scream through their gags. Isaac walked to the steps, picked up Will’s pistol off the floor next to the dead girl, pulled a cord attached to a light, and the brothers left the girls to struggle in the darkness.

Jason was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. Chris was still grinning like an idiot, but there was some new damage to his face, and he’d also acquired a limp. His nose was still bleeding too, but just looking at his stupid smile made Will want to smack
him, even with his injuries, and want to do much worse things as well.
This man killed my son, and the gun he did it with is in my pocket.
As hard as it was not to just shoot Chris and leave, that would have been the end of it, and the real reason for Alex’s death would always be a mystery.

“Get your ass moving,” Jason said to Chris. “C’mon, let’s get in the car, go for a little ride. And remember what I said, play nice.”

Will and Isaac followed Jason and Chris outside. There were no sirens, at least not yet, and Will was happy for that small bit of luck. Jason had his jacket off and folded over his arm, presumably to conceal a gun, because the hand under the jacket was pushed into Chris’s back. Isaac unlocked the car and got in, Chris and Jason got into the back, and Will sat up front again. “Drive,” said Jason, “ten minutes anywhere, and then drive us right back here.”

Isaac drove the Camry off Chris’s street, took another turn, and was back onto Ivanrest, a much busier street, bordered by a mix of residences and businesses.

The adrenaline from being in the house was starting to wear off, and Will’s realization that he had shot a man was starting to weigh on him. The girl was different somehow, not his fault. Even if he had bounced her off the steps, she had been ready to shoot him, and with her wrists bound together as they were, the bullet could have gone anywhere.
All she had to do was let me get her downstairs
, thought Will, though he had not yet let his mind decide what Jason’s plan for the fate of the girls might be. After all, the girls had seen their faces.

“This is a waste of time, motherfuckers,” said Chris, no swagger in his voice, just ice. “I’m not going to give you shit, and that money, other than the few g’s that idiot Mumbo just had to have,
is long gone. The real check is yet to come, so you boys missed motherfuckin’ payday by a hot minute.”

“You think this is about the money you stole?” Will said from the front seat, anger unsuppressed in his voice. “This is about my son, Alex.”

“Oh shit,” said Chris, all bravado gone, finally. “You ain’t after money at all, is you?”

“Well,” said Jason, “some of us wouldn’t mind finding your score, but this is more about getting information, and if you don’t have any, this is going to be a long night, with no morning to follow it.”

“Well, shit, you put it like that, just ask away. I’ll tell you everything I know. Hey, my man, front seat. Alex was a friend of mine. He was a cold motherfucker, a good dude too. But you said you his father, no offense, but Alex always said his dad was just some drunk-ass writer. No offense. Mumbo tell you I shot him?”

“Yes,” said Will.

“See, now that’s the problem these days,” opined Chris. “Mumbo was about to die either way, and I bet he gave me up like vegetables on his plate. You at least have to hurt him?”

“I hurt him very much,” said Jason. “He forced me to.”

“Hey, I’m not judging that. Sometimes that’s how it has to be. Shit, truth of it is I’m glad you had to put the screws to him a little bit. Dude was always a little soft.”

“Why did you shoot up the bank?” Jason asked. “It made no sense to do that.”

“Shit, that’s exactly what I said. Alex shot that dude, and then Mumbo just went off. Shit happens. But the thing is, none of that happened because of money. Everything there was a smoke screen. You going to want to be careful we go any further on that shit, though. Even by just coming after me, you guys have thrown your hat into some nasty shit, and seeing as how I’m expecting to hear from my man soon, I have a bad feeling some of this shit might get stuck to your shoes too.

“Now, before you come back and tell me that you’re not worried about some punk motherfucker like me, you need to know that just because you got the drop on Mumbo, which was probably just luck, and the drop on me, which was just damn good luck, doesn’t mean you guys got a chance with the big man. He’ll chew you up and spit out a bunch of crushed-up bones.”

Jason chuckled. “It wasn’t luck that let us get the jump on you. It was plain old cockiness on your part and nothing else. You should have been sitting with your friend, armed and waiting for something like this to happen, and you should have been with Mumbo.” To Isaac, he said, “This is far enough. Drive back to the house.”

Chris piped up. “Man, see that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve been sitting tight as two nuts in a sac, waiting for some shit just like this to happen.”

“Hey, check it out,” said Isaac. “It’s all ice-age snow, and now it’s raining. That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, it’s nuts, crazy,” said Jason. “Chris, I want to know who this guy is and what exactly you were really doing at that bank. If it wasn’t for money, then why did you pick that spot, and why did you shoot Alex if he was such a good friend? I’m really having a hard time with some of it, mostly because it all sounds like total bullshit.”

“It happened like this.”