Recall Night, page 1
part #2 of An Eli Carver Supernatural Thriller Series
PRAISE FOR ALAN BAXTER AND HIS ELI CARVER SUPERNATURAL THRILLER SERIES
“If you like crime/noir horror hybrids, check out Alan Baxter's Manifest Recall. It's a fast, gritty, mind-f*ck.” -- Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Alan Baxter’s thrillers have complete anatomy--muscles, brains, guts, and heart.” -- Anna Tambour, World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Smoke Paper Mirrors
“Manifest Recall is a blood-fueled bullet train roaring through the criminal underworld. It's a manic story of loss and revenge that starts at a sprint and never slows down.” -- John C. Foster, author of Mister White
“Alan Baxter’s fiction is dark, disturbing, hard-hitting and heart-breakingly honest. He reflects on worlds known and unknown with compassion, and demonstrates an almost second-sight into human behaviour." –- Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-winner and author of The Grief Hole
“Alan Baxter's Manifest Recall grabs you by the scruff of the neck from word one and doesn't let go. It's fast paced, bad people doing bad things to other bad people. Highly recommended!” -– John F.D. Taff, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The End in All Beginnings
“Alan Baxter is an accomplished storyteller who ably evokes magic and menace.” -– Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase
“Alan’s work is reminiscent of that of Clive Barker and Jim C. Hines, but with a unique flavour all of its own.” -– Angela Slatter, World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Aurealis Award winner
“Alan Baxter has joined the ranks of talented authors who seek to push the boundaries of fantasy fiction.” -– The Manly Daily
“Alan Baxter delivers a heady mix of magic, monsters and bloody fights to the death. Nobody does kick-ass brutality like Baxter.” -– Greig Beck, International bestselling author of Beneath the Dark Ice and Primordia
“If Stephen King and Jim Butcher ever had a love child then it would be Alan Baxter.” -– Smash Dragons
“Baxter draws you along a knife’s edge of tension from the first page to the last, leaving your heart thumping and sweat on your brow.” -– Midwest Book Review
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
RECALL NIGHT
ISBN-13: 978-1-950569-05-2
ISBN-10: 1-950569-05-5
Grey Matter Press First Electronic Edition - August 2020
Copyright © 2020 Alan Baxter
Cover Artwork Design Copyright © 2020 Grey Matter Press
Book Design Copyright © 2020 Grey Matter Press
Edited by Anthony Rivera
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Recall Night
About Alan Baxter
More Dark Fiction from Grey Matter Press
RECALL NIGHT
Eli Carver Book II
My name is Eli Carver and I am not a good man.
My hands are soaked in blood that will never wash off, but it’s like the blood of an abattoir worker—obtained while providing a service. People can survive without meat, but a lot of people wouldn’t survive if the assholes I killed were left alive. So maybe it was even a good service. But that’s rationalization.
I knew I was never one of the good guys, but I didn’t realize how bad I was until my world fell apart. When Vernon Sykes, the boss I’d served my whole adult life, murdered my wife and child, I had what can only be described as a breakdown. I found my way back through seas of blood, the body count higher than I ever thought possible, and all but Vernon’s daughter Carly are dead. She was his victim too, and now Carly runs the old man’s business.
So the wheel turns, nothing changes. And I’m still a bad guy, I guess. I just didn’t realize how bad until that blood washed the shit from my eyes. But I’m not the kind to wallow. I did what I did, can’t change it.
I’m trying to be better. I have new code now. I still have no faith in people and I still have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my life, but I must have some atonement still to make, because the ghosts are back. And the ghosts are telling me I’m about to be up to my neck in blood again. They’re not usually wrong.
Maybe some things never change.
THEN
It’s bizarre how I ended up in this mess. Quite the re-entry to life.
After the massacre at Vernon’s place, I survived under the radar in Canada for nearly two years. Rebuilding a life after my breakdown, stealing sometimes, sure, but working too. Taking cash-in-hand laboring jobs, doing some less-than-honest work for less-than-honest people here and there. I don’t really know how to do anything else. But I tried, hiding out after the debacle with Vernon, a long way from the scene of those crimes. In a way it was peaceful for a while, but always looking over your shoulder takes its toll. Then these shithead ghosts started cropping up again. I guess they weren’t part of the breakdown after all. Or maybe I’m lining up to lose it again. That’s an ongoing concern.
“Probably wanna pay attention up here, dude.”
Those words marked their return. Michael Privedi, my best friend. I shot him in the head when we were about twenty years old, to save my skin. It was his fault, he’d crossed Vern, but I guess he still thinks it’s unjust that I took him out. I was following Vernon’s orders or I’d be dead now too. Perhaps that would have been better. Maybe that would be justice. Who knows?
I tried not to look at him on the barstool next to mine, half his head blown away, flesh and bone hanging wet, teeth a rictus grin where his cheek was torn free by the bullet I put in his other ear. His collar burgundy from the blood soaked into it.
“Up where?” I asked quietly. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, talking to someone I knew no one else could see or hear.
Michael nodded upwards, at the big-screen TV above the bar. Following his gaze I was startled to see Carly Sykes, looking hotter than ever, so settled into her role as a matriarch of organized crime. She’s only twenty-two, but hell, she’s a queen. Frowning, I tried to figure out where she was and realized it was a courthouse. That’s where I’d last seen her, maybe six months ago, on the news. Now she’s at it again.
A scrum of reporters surrounded her. Carly smiled like a movie star.
“Miss Sykes, would you care to comment on the verdict?”
“It’s exactly as I always said it would be, I’m innocent and my associates are innocent. This has been nothing but police harassment from the beginning. I know Vernon was a bad man, but look what happened to him! I’m not about to follow in those footsteps.”
A hyuck of a laugh on my other side and that a racist sack of shit called Dwight Ramsey, a weed grower who pushed us too far so I put a hole between his eyes, was staring up at the screen too. “She’s good, ain’t she, cocheese!”
Fuck, I hate it when he calls me that. And he always calls me that. He glanced at me, then turned back to look up at the screen and the bone flower of an exit wound in the back of his head glistened and dripped. I ignored him.
“And that case was never solved, right?” another reporter calls out. “The police still don’t know who was responsible for the bloodbath?”
That would be me.
Then Carly turned, looked right down the camera, like she was looking right at me. Into me. “I told you guys then, like I told the police, I have no idea who it was. I was kidnapped, kept blindfolded, spent most of the time in the trunk of a car. I only managed to get out once it had been parked at the Lake Maurepas house for hours. I went inside to find the…” She hitched a breath, suppressed a sob. It was almost convincing. “The massacre. I don’t think I’ll ever know who it was. I guess no one will.” She stared hard at the camera a moment longer, then one eyebrow hitched, then she looked away.
“The fuck is she on about?” Dwight asked and hawked a wad of tobacco spit.
“You’re a fucking idiot.” Perhaps the only person who hates Dwight Ramsey more than me, Sylvester Barclay, was standing right by the bar. I put a shotgun hole through his torso in Maloney’s bar, on Vernon’s orders. His organs hang in there, shiny. Calls himself Sly, a Jamaican gangbanger and drug dealer, always stoned, but smart as hell.
“What?” Dwight demanded.
Sly tipped his head toward me. “She’s talking to him.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Officer Graney, “she needs him to know he’s in the clear.”
Graney is a sharp-nosed, rat-faced fucking cop I wasted in a motel parking lot during my breakdown. His voice is rough, no doubt from the big hole in his throat, two more in his chest. He’s maybe the only one who genuinely didn’t deserve to die, but how good is any cop really? I guess there are good ones somewhere. Something tells me Graney would never fit in that group anyway.
“How can he be in the clear?” Dwight asked.
Graney shrugged. “She’s done something, pulled s
Could they be right? And perhaps the more pressing questions rose again: Are these assholes really ghosts? Really here? Or is this my psychosis coming back, talking to itself? Regardless, right then, they made sense. But how could I be in the clear? Maybe I needed to reach out to Carly to see if I could learn anything.
“Might be worth a call to one or two of the redline numbers.”
And there was the last of my ghosts, my peanut gallery of mockery and hate. Why these five I’m still not sure, but now the gang was all there with the arrival of Alvin Crake, a shitheel employee at Michael’s dad’s garage. I wasted him for talking shit about the dead, Michael and his father. Of course, Michael and Alvin share the pleasure of haunting me, but they hate each other. Like Sly and Dwight hate each other. Like Graney is full of disdain for everyone, the self-righteous prick. And I pretty much hate them all, except Michael. And he annoys the shit out of me more often than not. What a fucking circus.
But perhaps Alvin was right. Vernon kept a handful of what he called redline numbers that we all had to commit to memory. Landlines mostly, that we could call in emergencies, speak in code. I wondered if Carly kept them up. She knew about them. She knew everything about his business.
If they were right, and I was off the hook, I could go back to the US, return to a normal life. Whatever the fuck that might be. But I was curious if nothing else. Part of me wanted to ignore the whole thing, leave Carly out of my life and stay in Canada, stay incognito.
“You know you have to find out,” Michael said. “You won’t rest until you do.”
Pissing me off again. I stood quickly from the barstool and waved my arms through the insubstantial smoke of all five assholes. “Get out of my way.”
A few confused faces, belonging to real people in the bar, turned to me, but I ignored them and walked out into the cool spring air. I needed to find a pay phone.
I tried the Bourbon Street redline first. No answer. No idea if the place is even still part of Carly’s empire. It’s where I shot Michael in the ear, on the second-floor balcony on a hot, sticky night. Better not to linger on thoughts like that. Michael leaned against the other side of the pay phone glass, looking at me with hooded eyes. Did he forgive me back then, after Vernon was dead at Carly’s hand? How could he? It was his own damned fault, I have to remember that. He fucked up and I wasn’t going to let him get me killed too. He pointed pistol fingers at me through the glass and fired.
I tried the Maurepas Lake house redline next and it was answered after three rings. “Yeah?”
“I need to talk to Carly Sykes.”
“Wrong number, pal.” But he didn’t hang up.
I let the silence drag out for a few moments. I could hear him breathing. “You gonna put her on or what?”
“Why should I? Who the fuck is this?”
“Just tell her it’s the guy with the cable ties.”
There was a moment of silence, then the scuffling of the handset being handed around.
“You finally checked in.” Her voice was smooth velvet, soft and confident.
A thrill tickled through me. If I’m honest, a large part of why I’d avoided even thinking about her as much as possible over the last two years is because of what stirs deep down when I remember her. We went through some major stuff together, after all. Dwight stood outside in the spring sun, thrusting his hips and slapping an imaginary butt. Sly looked on disdainfully, half obscured by a thick cloud of joint smoke. I turned my back on them. “I had no idea you were waiting to hear from me.”
“You saw the courthouse footage from this morning?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
“I figured you’d catch one of my appearances eventually. Right from the outset, I told them I had no idea who it was. And you’d left no one alive to contradict me.”
“But the truck stop while I was out of it. The thing in the motel parking lot.” Graney shot me with pistol fingers that time, mouthing Asshole!
“Yeah, that was the harder stuff to deal with. Took an awfully long time, but all the evidence, CCTV footage, witness statements, it’s all gone. I figured I owed you that.”
Holy shit, that was some powerful string pulling. I stayed silent while I considered it all. Eventually I said, “I don’t want back in. If you did it to get me—”
“I did it because you deserve a second chance. I don’t expect you to come to me, I don’t expect anything. You gave me a new life. I wanted to return the favor.”
“That’s a big thing.”
“Ain’t no big thing.” She laughed softly. “I won’t lie, it would be nice to see you again. I miss you, believe it or not. But if I never do, I get it. And we can’t talk any longer. Just know you’re all clear. Okay?”
I missed her too, still do, I can’t deny that. “Thank you.” And I meant it. Felt like a yoke had been lifted off the back of my neck.
“Good luck.” I heard a gentle smack of a kiss being blown down the line and then the dial tone.
I kept the handset pressed to my ear for several seconds, a tide of emotions crashing against me. Eventually I hung up and stepped out into the cool, sunny day. Holy hell. Eli Carver was back. Now what the hell should I do with myself?
NOW
Turns out, I get myself right into trouble.
“Miss Carlson, so good to see you again. And right on time.”
The guy talking is a long, thin drink of water in a dark suit, maybe fifties, slicked black hair over a pointed face and eyes shaped from a lifetime of narrowed suspicion. But his smile seems genuine enough. He looks directly at me over Bridget’s shoulder.
“And who’s this large gentleman?”
“Just a friend of mine,” Bridget says. “We’re going out after I drop off your money, so excuse him hanging around, yeah?”
“Certainly, I don’t see why not.”
I hear their conversation, but I’m on auto, clocking the layout, checking for exits. Two mooks are hanging behind either shoulder of the tall man, who’s sitting at a table, elbows on the checkered cloth. Dark wood chairs, small gaps, but only two other tables in the small restaurant are occupied. Both by another pair of mooks. So that’s the boss and six heavies. No customers. I guess it’s late enough for that to be normal.
In fact, a third table is occupied. Officer Graney, Sly Barclay, Dwight Ramsey, and Alvin Crake sit around it, lounging back in the chairs, casually passing a joint. Then Michael Privedi catches my eye, leaning up against the back wall under a giant photo of Vesuvius. That’s all five of my ghosts accounted for. I can ignore them.
Michael nods toward the corner. A guy in chef’s whites is looking through the glass panel in the swing door to the kitchen, so that makes seven heavies, potentially. Might be others in the kitchen. There’s another two doors in the back, one marked Restrooms, the other plain. Could be people there too. No idea if the plain door is an office or a back way out, maybe both. But despite the numbers and unknowns, everything seems chill.
“You have the money then?”
“I do, Mr. Lombardi.”
“With the interest as discussed?”
“Yep, 40K, just like we talked about. I’m sorry it all went down this way, but I pay my debts.”
Lombardi nods. “Let me have it. And all this will be done with. Of course, if you ever want to play again, you’re welcome by the club any time. Assuming the money you claim to have is correct.”
“It is.” Bridget pulls a large, thick envelope from her bag, walks quickly to Lombardi’s table and slaps it down, then hurries back to my side. She gives me a tight smile on the way back.
She’s smart, getting back close to the door, and her exterior is cool, but it’s a shell. Close up I can see her hands shaking.
“Stevie,” Lombardi says, not even looking at the envelope. One of the two standing behind him moves around and takes a seat, starts counting the cash. Lombardi is still smiling at Bridget. “We have to check, of course.”
