Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) (7 page)

Al slammed his fist on a table. “How many times I told ya, I don’t wanna hear ya talkin’ like that under my roof.”

Michael laughed silently.

“Under the roof of yer
brothel
? They came in to get their muskets polished same as anyone else.”

“All the same a son ought not talk like a sailor to his father. Don’t matter though, you don’t know people with half the sense ya think ya do. I say they took two o’ my best whores away from me, and I say if I don’t see ‘em back in the next few days it won’t be short of my mind to put a bounty on who can bring ‘em back here with a pulse.”

“Ya know Pops, be that as it may be what yer thinkin’, them boys ain’t fellas yer gonna want with bad blood for ya. You seen just like I seen the way the bigger one picked up Fats and threw him out like he was yesterday’s news so it’s pretty clear where we’re standing they got confidence and healthy lot of brute force.”

“Yeah, well so does Fats but you made it pretty clear get the right drop on anybody you can leave ‘em rollin’ ‘round the floor. If Garth was still around, he’d put them boys in their place. And I’m not sayin’ so far I want them boys dead anyhow, I just want my whores back.”

“I got that Pops, I’m just puttin’ the warnin’ out while it seems sensible to do so. Don’t want to see you raisin’ more trouble than it’s worth out of a little thorn in your side again.”

“Aw Christ, get on outta here, Michael! Ya sound like yer goddamn fuckin’ mother, may she rest in peace. I’m runnin’ my business like ya run a business. Yer ever gonna take the reins from me, best pay attention how to ride. Now go play with yer friends, ya worthless!”

Michael shrugged it off and left Al’s to spend his day doing what little there was for a nineteen-year-old boy to do with spare time at the end of the nineteenth century. He chatted up Christina, daughter of the tailor on the other end of Main Street. She’d taken something of a shine to him since about a year back, or so she made it seem. By now, with nothing to show for all for her blushes and smiles save for a stolen kiss every dog’s age, he sometimes thought himself only a means by which she kept away others she didn’t want.

“Come on back with some more money,” she’d say to him, batting her lashes. “We’ll fix ya up’n some fine new leathers, make ya handsomer’n ya already are.”

And she’d smile and wink and he’d do just like she said. He’d be back a couple times a week with earnings from tending Al’s bar and poker games with the drunks, but in so many ways he felt used. Christina was, like so many other youngsters of the time, just an employee of her father’s shop and it sickened Michael a little to think of the amount of money he’d paid to her father just to keep coming in to see her. Then he’d get bitter and angry and think of all the whores from Al’s, most of whom would give it to him free of charge, and he’d wonder why the hand of Christina really meant anything at all.

When Al had had time to cool off, Michael came home and drank in the bar and smoked with some of the customers and talked of business or travel or pussy or whatever they wished to discuss.

At sunset, he wandered half-drunk back onto Main Street and saw Tommy Warden—former sheriff and former-former outlaw from some jerkwater town up north—coming into Al’s. Knowing of the friendship that existed between Tommy and Al, Michael hoped his old man wasn’t still blaming the boys from last night for what happened to Mindy and Mitsey.

Before long the sun was down and the streets turned to what they were in the early nights of electricity. A worn blanket was placed over the sun with little holes so only the smallest fragments of light could seep in to illuminated patches amidst the deep and bare darkness that was the night. Drunk off the ale and still bitter with his father, Michael stumbled down Main Street hollering sexual jeers to the women with whom he shared the evening. His circumstances were to take a new direction when he stopped to take a leak on the Cherrywood Saloon.

Cherrywood was a bar and brothel that competed with Al’s, so Mr. Locke—the scumbag who ran the place—was, to put it delicately, not a friend to Michael. As he staggered by aimlessly, Michael took a moment to observe Cherrywood through the window, having never seen the inside of the establishment before.

In many ways it was like Al’s; dense with sweaty, hairy men winding down at the end of their days; liquor passed around in silver mugs and swung back and forth, spilling onto the floors and walls; whores dressed, half-dressed, and not dressed faking soulful attraction to the beastly brutes they were paid to entertain. But the dancing! Loud, catchy music and men twirling women and arms around necks, singing and chanting so loud and boisterous that the sounds of the two hideous ranchers pounding fists into each other’s faces on the front porch were drowned out by the joyous song of the masses. This was not like Al’s. What kind of a bar was this?

As Michael watched from the window he unbuckled his breeches and balanced himself against the pane with one hand as he relieved himself against the wall. After a moment, Mr. Locke—standing among the crowd with his arm around a cute whore—happened to glance out his window and spot Michael there. Almost instantly he was there, standing on the porch in a three-piece pinstriped suit with a ruffian standing on either side of him.

“Yer Al’s boy, ain’tcha?” Mr. Locke all but swung the words at Michael. “Come three buildings down to piss on my bar.”

Michael struggled to fasten his breeches.

“No, no. Just curious about yer business. I ain’t lookin’ for trouble.”

“Oh, he ain’t lookin’ for trouble, boys,” Locke scoffed to his ruffians and they scoffed back. It was a regular goddamn scoffing festival. “Tell ya what, Mikey. Come on in buy a drink, get yerself laid and all’s forgiven.”

Michael’s heart rate accelerated as he thought of Loki with every last dollar that had belonged to him.

“Mr. Locke, I don’t want no trouble but I ain’t got no money. Yer whores are lovely. I’d love to come back next week or somethin’ maybe.”

Locke scowled and he looked to each of his minions and then back to Michael.

“Ain’t got no money,” He repeated, as though it were a phenomenon he’d never heard of. “Shame.”

Locke gave a vicious glance to the two big men behind him and went back through the front door to tend to his business. The ruffians stepped off the porch.

“Ya ought to know to bring money when you come pissin’ on Locke’s place,” said the bigger ruffian, lumbering along the Main Street boardwalk. “Ya ought to know he don’t none too appreciate it much.”

Both of the ruffians had guns at their sides. Michael wasn’t about to turn this into a shootout, but he wasn’t one for running either. He could take any beating the two could administer and he swore they wouldn’t leave without cuts and bruises of their own. This way maybe next time Locke sicced them on him, the goons themselves would at least be a bit more reluctant.

He balled his fists at his sides as they approached, closing the gap between them a step at a time. The men where ogres, six feet tall and a few hundred pounds each. He didn’t stand a chance at winning this, but he was ready to do some damage.

Suddenly there was a hand on Michael’s back. And there was a fourth man. A man who’d stepped up onto the boardwalk moving so smoothly his spurs never jingled and the sound of boots on wood never commanded a glance from anyone. And there was Tyr, standing at Michael’s side a friend. The ruffians slowed their advance.

“What’s goin’ on here, fellas?” Tyr spoke softly to the ruffians with a hint of glee in his voice. “Gonna talk to my friend here.”

“The hell you are. Your friend there just come from Al’s—”

Tyr interrupted, “You gotta business worth pissin’ on and any and all disrespect to it is the faults o’ y’all.” He breathed the sentence like fire, letting the goons understand they now had a second man to fight. Michael glanced back and forth, more baffled by the moment than either of the ruffians.

“So be it, ya sonofabitch. Ya done walked in at the wrong—” as the smaller of the ruffians advanced on Tyr and swung his fist, Tyr took his hand from the air and grabbed it tightly.

Everything froze. Tyr let his fingers walk along the ruffian’s fist and explore his hand until they found the tip of his little finger and gripped it firmly. The ruffian tugged and fought with this other hand, which Tyr mostly ignored, giving the occasional kick to the other man’s knee or his groin just enough to keep in order, but it was with the pinky that Tyr made his point.

Gripping the whole of the finger in a fist, he pressed up on the fingertip with his thumb, snapping it at the second knuckle. Then he creased the tip of the finger backward like paper and folded again, snapping the first knuckle underneath the second. There was this three-hundred-pound man on his knees in front of Tyr—a child by comparison—screaming in agony with tears on his face. The slender stranger standing over him rolled his finger backward as far as it would go, snapping it again and again and pushing blood and bone and veins backward into the hand like rolling a tube of toothpaste to make sure it was empty. When he had relegated the finger to a squishy tube of skin and meat, Tyr hurled the man’s arm downward into the boardwalk with force enough to crack the rest of the bones in his hand.

The ruffian was an infant burned by the stove, crawling crying and screaming back to daddy.

Tyr watched with a smile. Michael stepped backward leaving the big ruffian face to face with his newfound bodyguard. Tyr swept in closer and tilted his head back, looking upward so he and the ruffian were sharing the same air and the big man could see the lack of fear in Tyr’s eyes.

“What say you?” asked Tyr.

The ruffian just stared in shock. Was it luck on this stranger’s part that he had snatched the other man’s fist from the air? Was this some ranger in town to clean it up? Some outlaw on the run? The guy was less than half the ruffian’s size and ought not to have been a match for him, but based on what he’d just witnessed he was hesitant start shit.

“What say you?” Tyr repeated, eyes on the big man’s eyes and fire behind them.

The big man swallowed his nerves and swung, attempting an upward jab into Tyr’s nose. Tyr caught it quickly and forced the arm to the side, pivoting the big man’s body and kicking out his knees so he dropped to the boardwalk and yelped. Tyr’s right spur located the back of the big man’s knee and pressed down tightly. He gripped the big man around the front of his throat, tight enough so his nails drew blood and the big man could feel it seeping out.

“That’s my spur on the back o’ yer knee,” Tyr told him in a calm, low voice. “I’m giving you a choice I didn’t give your friend to lose use of that leg. He’s gonna lose that finger and all the same if I cut these tendons you won’t walk on this leg again. Now we can fight all night if you want. I like it anyway. But for the sake of your health, for the sake your children, I say you walk away and leave us to our business. Now, what say you?”

The ruffian shook his head, choking out the words through the hand over his windpipe, “I don’t understand!”

“Do you say, ‘I’m sorry, Michael’?”

Silence. The ruffian sobbed for a moment as Tyr dug his spur deeper into the meat of his leg and tightened his nails on his neck.

In his raspy, choking voice the ruffian shouted, “I’m sorry, Michael!”

Tyr let go of the neck. He brought his boot to the big man’s shoulders and forced him forward, sending his face into the ground and breaking his nose on the boardwalk. The ruffian barely acknowledged the newfound injury and was back in the Cherrywood Saloon in seconds, never having looked back.

“Who the hell are you?” Michael blurted out in shock as soon as the ruffians were gone.

“Not important,” said Tyr. “Let’s walk. Or there’ll be more of ‘em sooner’n there have to.”

“A spur as a weapon,” said Tyr, walking side by side with Michael along the boardwalk a few minutes later. “It’s an inspired idea.”

“I fight with whatever I got,” Michael told him. “Do you want something from me?”

“Nah,” Tyr looked at his feet. “My friend’s taken a likin’ to ya, though. Wouldn’t have liked to see ya beat to death in the street.”

“I could’a handled myself.”

“Doubt it. I was watchin’ from ‘cross the street, you looked ready to take a beatin’. You’da stood yer ground, sure, and I can respect that. But we both know they’da been scrubbin’ yer blood off the boardwalk come sun up.”

“And now they’ll be scrubbin’ their own blood instead.”

“I didn’t bleed ‘em save for a little on the bigger fella’s neck.” Tyr licked his fingers. “They’ll be cuttin’ off the little fella’s finger and the other one’s got a broken nose needs tendin’ but they’ll find ‘emselves recovered in a couple days.”

“And what about yer friend? The one that’s fond o’ me? Where’s he all this time?”

“Back at Cherrywood with Katie Locke.”

“Oh? What are they up to?”