Recall Night, page 7
part #2 of An Eli Carver Supernatural Thriller Series
“What are you gonna do?” Michael asks me. “You got other ways to make money. Get out of this while you can.”
I catch his eye, raise an eyebrow, but I don’t plan to talk to these fools in a public place. Michael stares a moment longer, then tips his head to one side in warning. I look without turning my head and in my periphery see the mook from the restaurant yesterday. He comes and stands alongside me.
“Hey, Danny!”
The bartender looks up, comes over. “Yeah?”
“What time is he in?”
Danny checks his watch. “About a half hour?”
“Okay, cool. We’ll take another round over there when you’re ready.”
“Sure thing.”
Someone is coming in here about 11:30. Is that relevant to me? I jump when a heavy hand lands on my shoulder.
“You having a good day?” the guys says, friendly, but menacing.
I have no choice but to glance up at him. “Yeah.” Keep it simple, not impolite, but make it clear I don’t want to chat. If I plan to stay under the radar, I need to be the opposite of memorable. “Just enjoying a quiet beer.” I offer a half-smile, then turn back to my beer.
“That right?” he asks. “A quiet beer, huh?”
If he thinks parroting me will draw me into conversation he’s wrong. But he’s clearly trying to decide if I’m someone. Keeping my hood up to avoid cameras has probably made me more noticeable after all. So much for being a cipher today.
“Not cool,” Michael says from over the bar. “Talk to the guy.”
“He’s made you,” Graney says, with evident satisfaction. “He may not know why, but you’ve lit up his warning sign.”
Fuck ’em, they’re right. “You having a good day?” I ask, without looking up.
“I’m not sure yet.” He slaps my shoulder once more, then looks over me. “Danny, those beers?”
“On their way.”
The guy turns and walks away.
“Don’t look up,” Michael says. “The other three are all watching.”
“You fucking idiot,” Alvin says, cackling.
“What did you expect, coming into this place?” Sly asks, still smoking. “You know what it was like when you would hang in one of Vernon’s places. Some random dude comes in off the street, you notice. When you notice, you prepare. Fuck me, it’s why I died, and I was prepared.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t good enough, were you,” I mutter.
“Sorry, what was that?” Danny is standing right in front of me, where Michael was before. I didn’t even see them change places. Maybe Sly’s damn ghost weed did get me a little wasted.
I grin up at the bartender. “Sorry, just talking to myself.”
He laughs. “The only way you can guarantee intelligent conversation, am I right?”
Demonstrably, yeah. Well, shit. This has to change. I guess I need a little more practice at my rōnin act. What the fuck was I thinking? I’ve always been a hired gun, a muscle man. I was never some covert operative. Maybe I can be, but not yet, evidently. I guess we play this the old-fashioned way. “One must make the warrior walk his everyday walk” is something else Musashi said. I guess those guys have done that to me. So be it.
I could get up and leave, but I’ve learned nothing and those guys would follow me anyway. Let’s see if I can’t force a little confrontation instead. Might as well play to my strengths. Four on one. I can manage that, if I manage it right. The thing about being outnumbered is that the group always overestimates their advantage.
I get up and head for the bathrooms. There’s movement from the corner table, all four getting up to follow, like sheep. There’s a short corridor leading away from the noise and bustle of the large bar area. I pass the women’s bathroom on the left and head for the men’s right at the end. That’s a good distance away. As I push the door open and walk in I see my ghosts inside, gathered under a window at the back wall, ready for the show. Fucking ghouls.
The door opens inwards and I step around it as it swings closed. The four guys all pile right on in, no caution at all. Like I said, people overestimate their advantage all the time. The first guy is just slowing and turning to look around as the last of them comes in and the door starts to close. Another great line from Five Rings comes to me: “No fear, no hesitation, no surprise, no doubt.” Not for me, anyway.
Let mayhem commence.
I bring the butt of my Glock down on the back of the last guy’s head so hard I feel his skull crack and he drops like a sack of sand, blood pouring from his nose and the split in his scalp simultaneously. My knee is already coming up and I kick the next guy right over the top of the one who fell, driving hard and long, like I’m trying to kick down a door. My foot plants hard into his chest as he turns and the air rushes out of him like an explosion. He flies back into the one behind him, the guy I recognized from The Falcon. The one I kicked goes down gasping, the one he fell into is staggering for balance, grabbing at a sink, and the first one in finally gets a gun out.
I level mine right at him and there’s a sudden stalemate. His gun is half raised, the one from The Falcon has caught his balance and has his hand inside his jacket, but he’s smart enough to freeze there. The one I pistol-whipped won’t be moving for some time, if he ever moves again, blood pooling quickly, dark around his head. The last of the four is still gasping, hands clutching his chest, face scrunched up in pain.
“Carlo, I fuckinʹ told you it was that same guy,” the mook from The Falcon says.
Carlo is the one with his gun half up. “The fuck are you, guy? You’re not one of that dickhead Lombardi’s men.”
“You at war with anyone else right now?”
He looks at me, eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I could be anyone.” I smile at him, show I’m not at all threatened. My adrenaline is pumping like a fountain, but my hand remains steady and my aim true, thanks to long, deep breaths. Control your breathing, control your body. Up to a point, at least.
“Let’s deal with this another way,” Carlo says. “How about you tell us what the fuck you’re doing here?”
I step over the bleeding guy on the floor and use my foot to shove him back hard against the door, make sure we’re not disturbed. I don’t take my eye off Carlo while I do it.
“You gonna die, cocheese!”
“No way you can contain these three,” Alvin puts in.
I ignore them. Graney is frowning at me, and I wonder if there isn’t even a tiny bit of respect creeping through. Although maybe that’s just wishful thinking. And why the hell do I want the approval of some dead asshole cop?
“Watch that one,” Michael says, nodding at the floor.
The one I kicked down has started to get his breathing under control and his hand is moving snail-slow around his back. He probably has a gun in the back of his waistband. He honestly seems to think I won’t notice. Time to stamp my authority on this. I pull the trigger and Carlo’s eyes go wide as a bright red hole appears between them and the back of his head blows out across the white tiles of the wall behind him. Dwight, Alvin, and Graney all cry out as they’re sprayed with gore and dive aside. But the mark up the wall is uninterrupted. My gun is immediately between the guy on the floor and the one from The Falcon. Both know there’s no way they can draw without getting shot. Maybe if they both drew simultaneously, one might survive, but neither wants to be the other one, so they both freeze. Two down, two remain.
Cold-blooded murder has a way of stamping control on a situation.
Carlo slumps to the floor, blood spreading around him like a shroud. I have to hope the noise of the bar and the distance to the bathrooms is enough that the sound of my shot goes unnoticed. It was loud as hell in here, my ears ringing with it. Just in case, I have to be quick.
The guy on the ground is staring, his face now white as the tiles. The one from The Falcon is muttering “Fuck fuck fuck” over and over.
“Shut up. What’s your name?”
His face travels through a variety of expressions.
“Your name, fucker?”
“Terry.”
“And you?”
The guy on the floor swallows, his trembling evident. “Sal.”
“Okay, Terry and Sal. Answer me some questions and you live. First, take that fucking hand out of your jacket, real slow.” Terry does as he’s told. “Now sit on the floor next to your buddy here. Both of you, hands on your knees.”
They do it, looking like a couple of ugly overgrown school kids. If they went to school in a sea of blood, that is. I need quick answers and a quicker exit. Still, at least I feel in my element now. Know your strengths.
“What does Lombardi want?” Terry asks. “Maybe we can help?”
“You think now is the time to negotiate?”
He looks up at me, shakes his head.
“Where’s Andretti?”
“We can’t tell you that!” Sal wails. “He’ll kill us!”
“I’ll kill you now if you don’t.”
They share a look, panicked.
Michael is beside me. “Hurry up, people in the bar are coming.”
“Let ’em come,” Dwight says. “Cocheese here can shoot all a’them too.”
Terry and Sal sit trembling. I need to bombard them. “Who’s Papa Night?”
Sal startles. “How do you know about him?”
“I’m asking, not answering. Talk!”
“He’s a guy Furio knows, some freaky fucking voodoo asshole, I don’t like him.”
“I didn’t ask what you like. What’s Furio doing with him?”
“Don’t know, him and Cora are planning something, have been for ages.”
That gives me pause. “Him and Cora?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s working with him?”
Terry and Sal share another look, realize they’ve said something I didn’t know and it compromises them. “Yeah,” Terry says slowly.
“Cora is with Andretti willingly?” I’ll give them a tidbit, to keep them talking. It won’t matter in the long run. “Lombardi said Andretti kidnapped her.”
They both bark a laugh. “Kidnapped?” Sal says. “Maybe that’s what Lombardi prefers to believe. Cora went to him, she hates Lombardi. She knows strength, she can see which way the fucking wind is blowing.”
“And what are they planning?”
“Don’t know,” Terry says. “They keep that shit private.”
“Where’s Andretti?”
They grimace, look away from me.
“Hurry up!” Michael says.
The bathroom door shifts the corpse pressed up against it, but doesn’t open. Then there’s banging as someone pounds a fist on it.
“Where’s Papa Night?”
“We can’t tell you this shit!” Terry wails.
I shoot him in the face, blood arcing back as he slams into the floor. Sal screams and scuttles aside, but I grab his shoulder and press the hot barrel against his temple. He starts blubbering, piss spreading in a dark cloud around his groin. He stares at the fallen form of Terry, glassy eyes gazing in disbelief at the ceiling.
“Hey! Open up!” The banging on the door increases, the shoving and rattling harder. The body against it starts shifting.
“You gonna get your ass handed to you, dickhead!” Alvin says, literally dancing a jig with glee.
I drag Sal around and heft him up on top of the dead guy, press his back against the door and lean into it, holding it closed.
“Where is he?” I yell, right up close into his face.
More fists bang on the door, it shakes in the frame.
I jam my gun into Sal’s cheek, hard enough to grind the bone. “Where is he?”
“Inner Vision in Maplewood!”
Finally.
“Move it!” Michael yells.
“Die!” Dwight and Alvin shout together.
Sly is laughing, Graney shaking his head. “You’re a fucking thug,” he says.
I pull the trigger, Sal’s blood and brains spray up the door behind him. The banging stops for a moment. I send two more slugs through the door, high enough I hope not to hit anyone, but that should keep them away a moment longer. I grab Terry and the other corpse and sling them like hay bales, all four stacked up against the door. Then I’m at the back wall, levering the window open. Please don’t let it be bars outside.
It’s not. The gap is way too small for me, but I haul myself up onto the ledge, put my feet against one side and drive my back against the window frame. I’m strong, hopefully strong enough. I hope the sound of smashing glass doesn’t send people around to wherever this comes out. Hopefully the gunshots will keep them at bay. Using all my force, and a growl of effort, the window finally bends up in its metal frame, shattering at it does, and makes just enough space for me to squeeze through. I drop to the dirty asphalt below. Some stinking back alley, but there’s a busy road at the end. I run for it.
* * *
I dump the hoodie halfway back to the car, put my oversize T-shirt on top of the shoulder holster, and go around an extra block to make sure I’m not being tailed. Any CCTV in the bar won’t have much to go on, so I should be in the clear. And the other advantage of wasting made men is that the cops usually don’t give too much of a fuck. It’s a public service for most of them and they’re happy to avoid the paperwork. Unless they’re the cops on the mob’s payroll, but that’s a whole other problem. There’s blood on my boots and jeans though, which is a more immediate concern. It’s not too obvious in dark jeans and black boots, but I stop in at the only store I can find, a sports place, and grab some baggy track pants and a pair of sneakers. It’s easy enough to find another quiet alley, double check for cameras, then make a quick change, leaving the soiled jeans and boots pressed down deep in a dumpster full of rotting food and old packaging. It’s all fairly cursory, but it should suffice. I’m in the car and driving away from Newark before I allow myself to think about what I’ve learned.
The five amigos are lined up in the impossibly large back seat if I look in the mirror, but I try to ignore them. They harangue me anyway. Michael won’t be ignored. He leans forward between the seats, the hole in his ear dripping blood. Thankfully I can’t see the right side of his face, where most of the flesh is missing, the exit wound an explosion of bone and meat that’ll never heal.
“You gonna tell him?” Michael asks.
He means Lombardi. It’s definitely a new spin on things, and I don’t know how he’ll react. If he knows Cora left him willingly, will he go apeshit and take the war to Andretti? How scared is Andretti, anyway? He’s laying low, but it seems to me he’s in a far better position than Lombardi. Although he is four soldiers down now, thanks to my work today. And if Lombardi loses the plot and goes medieval, how do I get Bridget’s money back? It all comes back to that. We can’t go on too well without funds. Shit, I can make money in other ways. So can she, for that matter. She’s a professional gambler, we could find a small initial stake, head to some casino far away, and start rebuilding her fortune. But there’s a principle at work here too. One of the twenty-one tenets in the Dokkōdō, Musashi’s Path of Aloneness, is “You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.” This is a matter of honor. If I plan to live this code, I can’t pick and choose.
So how do I move now? If I go back to Lombardi, things could spiral out of my control. I pull out the cell phone he gave me and hit the only number in it.
“This better be good.” His voice is tight, concerned. He’s scared.
“I got all kinds of things to follow up on, so just letting you know I’m on it. Don’t be surprised if I’m quiet for a while.”
“I ain’t your fucking dad, asshole. Do what you gotta do.”
He hangs up. So that went well.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Graney says from the back. He accepts another joint from Sly, who deliberately reaches across Dwight to give it to him.
“Get outta my fucking face!” Dwight shouts, and they tumble back in yet another fistfight.
“Those two should just bone and get it over with, am I right?” Alvin says, grinning like a wolf as he takes the joint from Graney.
I have to pause at that thought. I wonder if he doesn’t have a point there. Dwight is one racist asshole, but is there more to his fear than ignorance and hate?
“You wanna focus?” Michael asks, leaning in between the seats again.
“Shut the fuck up, all o’ya!” My voice is cracked with tension. These assholes bother me more the less centered I am. I concentrate on the road ahead and drive, making my way to Maplewood.
It’s only a fifteen-minute drive and I park up out of the way again, trying to keep the car incognito. I spend a little while buying new boots, jeans and a jacket, because I feel like a heel in these joggers. Back in my preferred uniform, the shoulder holster back above a new T-shirt, I feel like myself again. My available cash is running low, so I hope I don’t need to waste much more. I use some on a big lunch, from a pizzeria opposite a 7-Eleven service station. I figure I need the fuel, and that debacle back in the bar left me starving. Adrenaline dumps and murder always make me hungry.
While I’m there I look up Inner Vision. In all the mayhem, I don’t know what question Sal was answering—is this a place for Andretti or Papa Night? And who the fuck even is that? Some freaky fucking voodoo asshole, Sal called him. Andretti and Cora are working together with him, cooking something up.
“You don’t wanna mess with shit,” Sly Barclay says, sitting opposite me, looking over the empty, greasy pizza pan.
I cock an eyebrow at him.
“Not really my thing, but what I know, I don’t like.” When I keep looking, willing him to go on, he smiles. “First time you ever listened to me, huh? Voodoo is from Haiti, but Jamaica has a version. Called Obeah. There was an Obi-Man near me where I grew up and he was one freaky son of a bitch, man. I didn’t like him. He did wrong stuff. It’s as close as I got, but I learned one thing: You stay the fuck away from that shit.”
“You really believe this ni—” Alvin’s fist shuts Dwight up real fast. Seems like my resident racist is starting to alienate the rest of the crew too. They all had one thing in common before, and that was hatred of me for killing them. It makes me happy to see them starting to turn more and more on each other. Assuming this isn’t all just my own psychosis, because if that’s fighting itself, it says bad things about my state of mind.
