Blood Trust (12 page)

McKinsey’s expression darkened as soon as he noticed the handgun. “D’you have a permit for that weapon, son?”

Slim was off the chair in a flash, his Doc Martens banging loudly against the floor. “Who you calling ‘son,’ fool?”

Compounding his error, McKinsey flashed his ID. “The United States government, that’s who.”

Slim had the .45 out, the muzzle stuck in McKinsey’s face, before the agent knew what was happening. “Ain’t no United States government in
this
part of the world, motherfucker.”

“Easy.” Naomi held up her hands placatingly. “Let’s all stand down.”

“Tell
him
that,” McKinsey said in a voice that was thin and strained to the point of breaking.

“She ain’t gonna tell me, nuthin, motherfucker.” Slim cocked his head toward Naomi. “Why you bring these fools into my house, anyways?”

“We all need someone to laugh at,” Jack said, before she could answer.

There ensued a kind of stunned silence, during which McKinsey’s face turned red and Naomi’s mouth formed a tiny O. Then Slim started to laugh. He laughed so hard he could no longer keep up the pretense of being pissed off. He stepped back, slid the .45 back into his jeans, and returned to his beat-up old lounge chair.

“Fuck!” His forefinger jabbed out at Jack. “I know whys you brought
this
motherfucker, um-hum.”

He nodded, and then brought out a pack of rolling paper and a plastic bag of pot, deliberately, to Jack’s way of thinking, antagonizing McKinsey further. The agent stiffened and Jack saw Naomi’s hand grip his arm.

“Why don’t you go back outside and make sure we aren’t disturbed,” she said in a soft voice.

After hesitating enough to regain a modicum of self-respect, McKinsey said, “Fuck this shit,” and, shaking her off, stalked out of the shop with a gunshot bang of the front door.

“Nice fucking sonuvabitch,” Jack said, which returned Slim to a state of helpless laughter.

At length, he wiped his eyes, rolled his joint, lit up, and offered to share. They both declined.

“Straight’n’narrows, the two of you.” But it wasn’t said unkindly.

“The badge,” Jack prompted.

“The what?”

Jack pointed to the small metal object he was holding.

“Oh, you mean this? What the fuck, do I look like Sherlock-motherfucking-Holmes?” He lifted his head and hollered, “Grasi! Get your ass over here!”

A moment later, a dark-headed kid, who could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, sauntered into the back room. His starkly corded body marked him as a gym rat. So far as Jack could see, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He wasn’t muscle-bound like a lot of gym rats; rather, he’d sculpted his body to become a lean, mean, fighting machine. The normally laughable description that reminded Jack of a scene in the comedy
Stripes
was never more apt.

“We call him Grasi,” Slim said, “because he’s got some fuckin’ unpronounceable foreign name, don’t you, Grasi?”

Grasi grinned. He wore black jeans, custom high-tops, and an anachronistic leather vest over a white T-shirt that showed plenty of his chest. He had a ton of bling around his neck, and tattoos, most of them amateurish-looking. “Can’t buy a fucking vowel to save my life.”

Slim tossed him the octagonal badge. “You got a name for this?”

Grasi deftly caught it with his fingertips and held it up in front of his face. In almost the same motion, he tossed it back to Slim. His eyes slid sideways. “Never seen anything like it before.”

Slim sighed. “And there you have it, sports fans.” He shrugged as he handed the badge back to Jack, and said to Naomi, “I always try to be of service, but…” Again his shoulders lifted and fell.

“Thanks, anyway,” Naomi said. “It was worth a shot.”

Grasi turned to go.

“Hold on a minute,” Jack said. “Can you show me where the bathroom is?”

Grasi nodded disinterestedly, and Jack followed him out into the shop proper.

*   *   *

P
ETER
M
C
K
INSEY
stood with shoulders hunched, hands thrust deep into pockets containing any number of concealed folding weapons whose honed steel both energized and soothed him. He was oblivious to the light rain or the passing vehicles. With chin jutting and lips pursed, he was sunk deep inside his thoughts.

He had met Willowicz six months into his tour of duty in the Horn of Africa. Willowicz’s name was different then, but the man was the same. McKinsey and Willowicz felt an immediate kinship, possibly because they held the same worldview. Their intense and uncompromising gung-ho attitude was nothing more than a facade beneath which existed a rich layer of nihilism. The interesting thing was that neither was conscious of this Nietzschean tendency; they would have vociferously denied it, even if confronted with the truth.

They were fearless, which meant that they were reckless in everything they did, skating along the edge of the black ice of death without ever succumbing to its embrace. They killed, maimed, tortured, and slaughtered the intractable enemy with the righteous zeal of Crusaders or priests of the Spanish Inquisition. They liked to invoke God’s name while they laughed, splashing in blood and gore, grinding guts and organs to the consistency of motor oil. Spurred on by the seemingly limitless enmity they encountered every minute of every day and night, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to their enemy to make him give up secrets out of the agony they inflicted, never thinking for a moment that these secrets might be concocted in order to end the pain. But no matter how many of the enemy they destroyed, the full measure of the satisfaction they craved never materialized. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how much pain they inflicted, they could never engender in their prey the terror they longed to see. These people were different, inhabiting an entirely different plane of existence than the Americans.

“They’re not human,” they would tell each other, over the stink of their high-minded work or, later, during bouts of heavy drinking. “If they can’t feel terror, they can’t feel any emotion. They’re for sure not human.” If it wasn’t satisfaction, it was impossible, during those sessions, to know what emotions McKinsey and Willowicz felt.

That was then. Today they were back home, in different jobs, but with precisely the same mind-set. The trouble was, neither of them could leave behind their time in the Horn of Africa. Like a malarial fever, their exploits rose into their consciousness, regular as an ocean tide, dragging with it a swath of man-made sludge: cracked skulls, congealed blood, fractured bones, and bits of gray matter. It was not enough; nothing was enough. And so the two of them existed like creatures of the dark, bloodthirsty, vampiric, unwilling or unable to readjust to a civilization hamstrung by laws that entangled the forward thrust of their urgent missions.

He didn’t like being left out of whatever was happening back inside Slim’s crap-joint, but he recognized he only had himself to blame. Seeing these people lounging around with .45s in their belts infuriated him. If he had his way, he’d fire-bomb every one of them. Fuck civil rights. People like Slim didn’t deserve to hide behind the laws that were meant to put them in the slammer. He belonged facedown in the gutter. Not for the first time, McKinsey wished he were back in the Horn of Africa.

“I dream about that place,” he’d said to Willowicz as they’d sat in the gray late-model Ford. There was no need to be more specific, they spoke in the shorthand of war when they were together.

“Every night,” Willowicz said. “But sometimes I think it’s a place I made up.”

McKinsey stared out the window at the grayness. “What are we doing here?”

“Our jobs,” Willowicz said. “Like always.”

McKinsey nodded, but with the air of a person staring at something he could see with no real clarity.

“Everything was clear-cut over there,” Willowicz said, as if reading his friend’s mood. “Here, nothing makes sense.”

“We did what we wanted, what was needed. Now what? We put one foot in front of the other. Like old men whose lives are behind them.”

“We’re in a goddamn fog of unknowing.”

McKinsey let out a long breath. “McClure changed ME’s on us. The new one, Egon Schiltz, isn’t on our payroll.”

“Then we’ll put him on it.”

“Sadly, no.” McKinsey sounded disgusted. “Schiltz is a personal friend of McClure’s. He won’t bite and, what’s worse, he’s sure to inform his pal of the approach.”

Willowicz shifted in his seat. “Then I’ll kill the fucker.”

“Good idea. That for sure won’t alert McClure.”

Willowicz drew his neck in like a turtle. “Or we can do nothing. Like toothless old men.”

A short, poisonous silence ensued.

“Fuck it!” McKinsey kicked open the door and launched himself out.

Leaning over, Willowicz said, “Be careful of that dirtbag McClure.”

McKinsey made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and started down the ramp.

Now, with the rain in his face, he shook out a cigarette and lit up. Smoke drifted past his eyes, obscuring a world he despised, a world in which he did not belong.

*   *   *

G
RASI POINTED
out the grubby door of the toilet and started off toward the front of the shop.

“Hey,” Jack said, “what’s your real name?”

The teenager turned back. “Everyone calls me Grasi.”

“Even at home? Even your mother?”

“I have no mother.” Grasi said this matter-of-factly, without a hint of remorse or self-pity.

Jack came toward him. “‘Grasi’ is a Romanian word. It means fat. You aren’t fat.”

“It’s a fucking joke, man.”

“You Romanian, Grasi?”

The youth stuck out his jaw. “What the fuck of it?”

Jack shrugged, even as he lunged forward, grabbed hold of the bling around Grasi’s neck, and yanked it off.

“Little fuck-nuts!” With a soft
snik!
a switchblade appeared in Grasi’s fist.

As he advanced, Jack threw the bling back to him. All except one piece: a gold pendant in the shape of an octagon. Jack had noticed it when Grasi was supposedly studying the badge. When he spoke, Jack knew he was lying.

Jack held the pendant and the badge side by side. “They’re identical,” he said.

Grasi flicked the tip of the wicked-looking blade.

“You’re smarter than that,” Jack said. “I’m not your enemy.”

Grasi laughed. “Fuck you, you’re not my friend.”

“That depends.” Jack kept his eye on the tip of the blade. “I’m the only one who can keep you out of jail now.”

“I ain’t done nothing, fuck-nuts.”

Jack held up the pendant and the badge. “These say you’re lying. We’re investigating three very nasty homicides. This badge is our only clue. D’you get it? You know something I need to know. If you hold out on me, I’m going to throw your ass in jail for suspicion of murder and obstructing a federal homicide investigation. Believe me, you won’t like it in federal lockup. The inmates there eat your kind for breakfast.”

For a moment, Grasi looked around, his eyes rolling madly. Then he licked his lips and flicked the switchblade closed. “Thatë. My name is Thatë.”

*   *   *

W
ITH THE
iron poker’s fall, Alli felt a scream bubbling up into her throat. She forced it aside, converting it into a shout of defiance, as she ducked behind the wingback chair. The poker slammed into the padded top, splitting the fabric, flaying off stuffing, as it would have Alli’s skin and flesh.

Rudy, expecting her to make for the door, backed up to stand squarely in her path. But Alli had no intention of heading for the door, at least not yet. She lunged toward the fireplace and grabbed the ash shovel, which was unwieldy but with its wide head approached the defensive-offensive combination of a medieval mace.

Rudy, seeing her struggle with the shovel, laughed.

Good deal,
Alli thought. In situations like this her diminutive size was a tremendous advantage. Because she still carried the appearance of a young girl, she was treated as such. She waited, showing Rudy how difficult it must be for her to hold the shovel for any length of time, let alone swing it as a weapon.

“You’re dead, you know that,” Rudy said as he came at her, poker held high.

Alli didn’t bother to answer. Instead, she watched the weapon, its increasing arc, as Rudy, massive shoulder bunched, drew it back and swung it at her.

The poker made a whistling sound, like a bird in flight, or an arrow. She waited for the last minute, as Jack had always instructed her, then brought the broad shovel head into the path of the arc. A hard ringing, like a struck bell, and sparks flew. She staggered beneath the power of Rudy’s blow, more than was necessary to steady herself.

Rudy, a fierce grin plastered across his face, moved in, cutting off her line of retreat, backing her up against the fireplace.