Grinder (9 page)

The sound of Denis's screams gave his father strength, and Guy surged off his back onto his hands and knees. Before he could get any higher I cut him off, pistol-whipping him on the top of his head. The greasy hair on his scalp offered no protection, and his body slammed to the floor.

Denis still screamed while he clawed at his leg. He tried to cradle his leg, but each time he attempted to touch his shin his hands flinched away as though he was touching fire. I walked past him and righted the chair. I looked at it for a few seconds and realized two things: the chair would no longer help me do what I needed to do, and I had to shut Denis up. In this neighbourhood most people would ignore screaming, especially those who knew what really went on in the back room of the store. But if I let Denis do enough yelling, eventually someone would call for help, either from the cops or from the boss, Dom the Bomb. I picked up one of the pieces of extension cord and walked back to Denis. I flipped him over and looped the cord around his face like he was a horse. I put my foot in the centre of his back and pulled with two hands. The cord fought against his strained lips and teeth until it gave up a little slack as it slid into his mouth. I choked up on the cord and held it in my left hand as I pulled Denis's left arm behind his back. I stepped on the wrist with my heavy boot and heard him whimper a little louder against his gag. With the one hand immobilized, I turned back to his bit and tied it off behind his head. Once it was tied, he could no longer scream — he was only able to grunt through his bit as I finished tying him up.

I kept my foot on his left arm and pulled his right hard behind his back. I put a knee on his spine, brought Denis's hands together, and tied them with extension cord, feeling no remorse for his predicament. His feet followed without a fight. Any movement of his feet would have meant excruciating pain for his damaged shin. Once he was restrained, I flipped him over and looked at the gunshot wound. Blood leaked through the hole the bullet made, and the fabric of his pants tented on jagged shards of bone that were pushing out from around the wound. I took another piece of cord and tied a tourniquet around Denis's leg four inches below the knee. The knot was tight, and within a minute the blood loss was already tapering off. I used the rest of the cords to tie up Guy; his battered, unconscious body offered no resistance.

The situation was a disgrace. I spent years meticulously planning jobs to go off without a hitch, and here I was knee-deep in a father-son massacre. What I had done inside the cleaning-supply store was everything I wasn't; it was crude, blunt, and out of control. I was being used and it was only the beginning. I let the anger wash over me for ten seconds before forcing it back down. I had to force my teeth to unclench when I noticed the grinding was an audible sound inside my head. Inside I knew that the state of Denis and his father was not because of me. I had no real intel on either man or their boss. All I had was some names on a slip of paper. Paper provided by a man who was teetering on the edge. Paolo forced me to move on two men I had never seen at a pace he knew to be reckless. He was not the calculating man I had known anymore; he was a grief-stricken uncle and a vindictive mob boss. Both sides of his personality were pushing me hard to find out who took Army and Nicky. When I did, I wasn't sure who would be taking revenge. As bad as the situation was, it would only get worse unless I became the one controlling the chaos. I had to make sure this clusterfuck never came back to bite me or Paolo, because if it did, it would bite Steve and Sandra too.

With his father still out, Denis had nowhere to look except up from the floor at me. I pulled the recorder from my pocket and turned it on.

His sweaty, pale-white head began to shake back and forth. “No,” was the message I got.

“I'm going to take off the gag and we're going to talk,” I said.

His head shook harder, pleading with me to leave the gag on. He grunted at me and bucked on the floor. His teeth gnashed at the cord in his mouth as though he was trying to hold it in place. I used two hands to roll him onto his front. Denis squirmed harder, trying to move farther away from the counter — farther away from me. I grabbed the cord tied around his head and pulled his skull from the floor with it. His body arced up in an armless upward-facing dog while I slid the knife in sideways between the cord and his hair. The knife was razor sharp, but I still had to saw at the cord for a couple of seconds to get it off. The sudden release and lack of hands sent his head straight to the floor. His skull impacted like a melon falling in the produce aisle. The sound was flesh, bone, and teeth breaking and bruising.

Denis moaned into the floor until I rolled him again.

“No!” His word came as a loud mumble. He was not afraid of me. He was afraid of his boss. Paolo said Bombedieri was still working — just under the radar. Whatever he did, it scared Denis more than being tied up with a hole in his leg. He wouldn't talk into the tape recorder. He wouldn't unless I became the scariest thing in his universe.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He shook his head hard, almost banging both sides of his face on the floor with the frantic side-to-side motion.

“Denis, talk to me and I leave. Don't, and I stay here with you and Dad. I don't like soccer, Denis, so I'll have nothing to do here but work on you. I just want you to tell me a few things so I can leave.”

He stopped shaking his head and looked me in the eyes. “No,” he said.

I stared back at him and said nothing. I grinned at his smashed face. He looked at my face and he found in it something unsettling because he stopped staring at me and began to strain his neck in the direction of his father, looking for help that would never come.

I stepped past the bodies into the sales area. I walked past the different floor cleaners until I came to a display of bleach, the bottles stacked in a pyramid on the floor. I hefted one of the bottles off the top of the pyramid and checked the label. It was concentrated bleach. I turned the bottle further and looked at the warning label. Words like “severe” and “damage” popped out at me. The label also warned of sensitization if the bleach hit damaged or broken skin.

I carried two bottles behind the counter and set them on the countertop. Denis had shimmied himself past his father to the doorway leading to the back office. I grabbed him by the leg and dragged him back beside his father. I put one heavy boot on his ankle and stood on it with my full weight. For a second I felt his bones move and crack; it was like standing on thin ice. He screamed even after the cracking stopped. I contemplated gagging him again, but the screams stopped when I began unscrewing the bleach bottle.

“No, no, what are you going to do?”

I didn't answer. I pulled the safety seal and hefted the bottle up with my left arm. My work in the city had once left the arm useless, but I had worked to make it strong again. The months of work it took were hell, and once I finally became whole again I got dragged back to the city so the whole process could start over again. Denis wasn't responsible for that, but he was part of the machine that was. He could point me in the direction of the people who set the wheels in motion. A fact that made it easy to tilt the bottle.

The milky liquid fell from the mouth of the bottle to the ruined pant leg. At once, the cotton fabric of the pants began changing colour, becoming lighter and whiter with each splash. The liquid soaked the pants and flooded in the hole left by the bullet. Denis's legs shook hard trying to move away, but his ankle was pinned under me. His restraints made any momentum he could have gained impossible. All he could do was scream as a half bottle of bleach hit his legs as though it were some sort of chemical waterfall.

His screams woke his father, and the old man looked on in horror while he struggled against his restraints. Denis's eyes were wide in his ugly face. The bleach burned the skin, but worse than that, it made the wound more sensitive. The bottle had not lied about sensitization — every nerve ending in the wound was on fire because of the bleach.

I put the bottle down and looked at the newly pale pant leg I had created. Denis was all screamed out; his mouth just silently opened and closed. His face had gone more pale, and his bloodshot eyes bulged out, unblinking. I was now the terrible centre of his universe. Bombedieri no longer existed. I was all he could see.

I picked the bottle up again with my left hand and the recorder with my right. I tilted the bottle halfway and felt the liquid settle at the edge of the mouth.

“Tell me about what Bombedieri is into, Denis.”

“Oh, God. Oh, God.”

There was still some residual fear of Bombedieri in Denis's mind. I let a little more liquid hit his leg to wipe it away.

Denis screamed before he started talking in fast, rambling sentences. “He runs the neighbourhood. He controls everything: drugs, gambling, girls. He even pays off the cops.”

“More,” I said. “What has he done recently?”

“He killed those bikers. He shot them. Him, and Tony, and Phil, and me. We shot those guys in their car and left them there in the field. No one knows it was us, but we did it.”

I didn't know anything about bikers, but the information was important. Information could be used more places than MasterCard. It also proved that Denis was involved with everything his boss did. Denis didn't sit on his hands in the back room all day, he was a player. If Bombedieri was involved with Army and Nicky, Denis would know.

“What about kidnapping?” I said.

“What? No. We don't do that. There's no money in it. Oh God, my leg is on fire. It's burning.”

I splashed more bleach on the leg, and Denis screamed through every octave. I shut the recorder off and asked my last question.

“Bombedieri take Armando and Nicola? Is he working an angle?”

The pain moved to the back of Denis's mind for a second as he looked up at me. He realized he had no idea who I was or why I was there. He probably thought I worked for the bikers he crossed until I asked about Army and Nicky.

I splashed more bleach and asked again. “Did your boss do something to Armando and Nicola?”

“No! Jesus, no! He hated those two, but when we told him we wanted to hit them for all that shit they pulled he said no. He said we couldn't do it now. That it would fuck up our operations in the neighbourhood. He said they were off limits.”

“You sure?” I said as another splash hit the pale pant leg.

“We didn't touch them, I swear. We were too busy with the bikers to deal with those fucks. Please, no more. Please. Please!”

I cued up the tape and played it back. As the tape played, I stopped being the centre of Denis's universe. I was slowly eclipsed by Bombedieri. “You're going to run,” I said. “I'm gonna pass this tape on, and you don't want to be here for the fallout. You and your dad need to get out of here and never look back. You gave up your boss, and there's no way he'll let you off for that. Especially after the bikers get their copy.”

“I'm dead, then,” he said, exhausted.

“Your life here is over, but you're not dead. Not yet anyway. You two need to go, and go far.”

I wiped the bottle with my sleeve and left out the front door. Denis didn't move as I walked away from him. He just lay silent on the floor, letting shock set in, temporarily taking him away from his death sentence.

I used my elbow to open the door as I left the cleaning-supply store. Once I was outside, I casually stopped to look at the hours of operation. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and wiped the door handle as I leaned in to see the hours posted on the glass. I nodded my head as though the opening and closing times pleased me, then walked away from the store to my car.

Denis had to run. He and his father had to clean up the mess I left and get as far away from the city as they could. The tape I had on Denis was more deadly than a cruise missile. If the tape got out, which he believed it would, there would be nowhere safe in the city for him. I counted on his fear, on the utter terror Bombedieri put in him, to send him running.

I walked up the street to the car, watching every window and alley. I had seen no one watch me go in, but I knew that fact didn't cover me going out. As I moved up the street, I passed a kid sitting cross-legged on the pavement playing a guitar. His black leather case was closed beside him, and I had to step over the neck of it as I walked past him on the sidewalk. The kid didn't look up at me while he played; he kept his red head down. He didn't even pick up the pace of the song to earn a donation for his effort and skill. He just played his song, oblivious to the world.

I saw my car up ahead, and on the trunk sat two men in their early twenties. Instinctively my hand began to swing closer to the front of my pants as I walked. I still had Denis's stubby revolver tucked in my waistband. The two men, if you could even call them that yet, were in faded ripped jeans and old unlaced high-tops. They were at an age where they weren't children anymore, but at the same time they could never be considered men. The only word that came to mind was “punks.” One was blond, and his hair stuck out from under a sideways baseball cap. The hair was meticulously placed so that it shaggily hung over one eye. The other had long, greasy black hair that made it hard to see most of his face. His long beard covered everything below his nose so the only bit of skin I saw was a small patch of forehead. Both of the men looked pale and strung out. Their knees bounced on the bumper to an irresistible, soundless, chemical-induced beat. The dark-haired one shoved the blond with a heavily tattooed elbow as I got closer. Both looked at me. My mind raced as my eyes met the two pupils I could see peeking through the mess of hair on each punk's face. There was no way these two were after me. They were white punk-rocker kids — about the farthest thing from Paolo and his organization — and yet there they were, waiting on my car.

I stopped three cars away, my hand near my belt, and looked at the two punks on my trunk. Before I spoke, something pulled at my mind. The guitar player had his guitar case closed. He wasn't there for money, so he had to be there for something else. The guitar was no longer being strummed — I couldn't hear it — but I could hear singing. I recognized the words as being from an old Ramones song.

“Beat on the brat. Beat on the brat. Beat on the brat with a baseball bat. Oh, yeah . . .”

As the song behind me grew closer, I watched the two punks on my trunk tense their shoulders and squint their eyes as though they were about to be hit with a snowball. Just before the second “oh, yeah” of the chorus I tried to roll forward. My head and shoulders started the roll, but the baseball bat that smacked across my lower back ended my attempt.

I fell to my knees and fought to pull air back into my body as the two skinny kids jumped off my car using the bumper as a springboard. I watched the two pairs of feet approaching as I listened to the singing continue behind me. The guy had moved ahead in the song and was laughing as he sang, “What can you do-oo.” The singing was terrible, but it bought me the seconds I needed. I got a quarter of a shallow breath and rolled off my hands and knees onto my back. My right hand groped for the pistol and yanked it free from my waistband. I had the gun out and moving to the centre mass of the red-headed punk standing over me, but the ball bat to the back did the trick. I was slow on the draw, and the kid above me had time to swing the bat low, connecting with the snub-nosed revolver in my hand. The gun went off when the bat connected with it, but the shot went wide.

“Holy shit! He's got a gun,” one of the voices behind me said. The voice was not full of fear; it was equal parts laughter and excitement. “Give Dirty Harry an encore.”

Another swing didn't come. The punk with the bat had stopped his attack. His face was down, and he was checking to see if he was shot. I knew there was no way I could pull the other gun from the tight pocket on my thigh without getting brained by the bat, so I kicked out instead. The toe of my heavy boot found the soft spot between the redhead's legs. He cringed and then crumpled in on himself, collapsing to the pavement.

I got to my feet just as two sets of hands began laying into me. The punches were wild and everywhere at once.

“Come on, Dirty Harry, make my fucking day,” one voice said as a fist hooked into my ribs.

A kick to the side of my leg wobbled me, and I heard, “Oh ho, that was lucky. I was lucky that time, Harry. How lucky you feel now?”

It was as if I was being swarmed by bees with knockout power. I covered my head and tried to weather the storm, but a punch to my exposed and injured back changed that. The blow to my back straightened my body as though an electric current was shot through it. The two punks behind me saw me straighten, and they began to focus on the back of my head. I bent forward and kicked out behind me like a barnyard mule. My foot found something solid, and I heard a grunt. I staggered forward, still covering my head, trying to get away from the three attackers.

A hand grabbed my ankle, and I looked down to see the red-headed singer holding on to me with two hands. I kicked out with my right foot, and my boot split his eyebrow open. The blow was enough for me to get my feet free. I kept staggering forward until I was shoved face first into a parked car. The punk with the hat and the bangs had done the shoving; he was still untouched and ready to go. I pushed off the car and flung myself backwards into the punk's body. Once our bodies connected, I leaned forward and then slammed the back of my head into his face. The impact had me seeing stars, but I was free to run again. I looped around the car and began stumbling up the street towards my car, using the other parked cars on the street as a buffer to separate me from the three punks. I fumbled for my keys and managed to get them out five feet from the bumper.

“Batter up, motherfucker.”

I heard the words in conjunction with the feeling of the bat. The impact hit me in the back again with such force it made my teeth rattle. I bounced to my knees, not even feeling the pavement. The car keys fell from my fingers, and I pitched forward. I saw the pavement accelerate towards my face then lurch to a stop and reverse away from me. Three sets of hands stood me up and began beating me. Fists pummelled my face and guts all at once.

“Get his ass into the van.”

“Ah, come on, Mickey. My fucking stomach hurts from that asshole's foot. Let's use his car. We were gonna jack it anyway. This way we don't have to come back for it. Harry here won't mind. His feet are burning up anyway from all that kicking. Ain't that right, Harry? You got a real
hot foot.”
With the last two words, the kid with the beard, that I had kicked, stamped down hard on my foot with his heel. The boot absorbed the impact, and I didn't feel a thing. I screamed out anyway to avoid a second blow somewhere softer. The impact of the foot stomp on the steel toe must have hurt the punk with the beard. His worn-out Converse high-tops would offer no protection against that kind of activity. He took my scream for gospel as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. There was no way he was going to try for another stomp.

Mickey, the redhead the punk with the beard was talking to, pressed a hand to his damaged eyebrow. Out of the corner of my eye, I got a good look at him. He was tall, six feet five at least, with red hair — real red, not dyed. His arms were large but not muscular. He was probably stronger than most people simply because of his unnatural size. He had thick leather bracelets on his wrists and a pair of dead eyes that gave his face a sort of zombified look. He seemed to manage talking without moving his lips. He sighed. “Fine, fine, whatever. Let's just get this fish back to the whale. You two put him in and drive him back in his piece of crap. I'll get my guitar and follow you back in the van.”

“Righteous, let's get some fucking drive-through on the way back. I'm jonesing for a Frostee.”

“Gonzo, you are taking him straight back. We can't fuck this up. You heard what the whale said.”

“Ah, come on, Mickey. Me and Ralphy just want a snack. Look at Ralphy's mug, that asshole cracked the side of his face. He probably needs to get his head in a cast. He needs something cold, something soothing, something chocolate.”

Ralphy stopped adjusting his sideways hat and tried to speak. He failed on his first attempt and brought his hand to his face in pain. Through the hand cupping his face, he finally got out, “Yeah, dold.”

“Plus I don't want to eat that shit the whale puts out. I hate that Italian shit. I want a burger with extra cheese.”

Ralphy nodded and forced a “mm-hm” through his hand.

Mickey shoved Gonzo and Ralphy hard, and they almost dropped me. “Get him back to Domenica's. Then we can eat. Got it?” He poked Gonzo hard in the sternum with the top of the bat for emphasis. Blood trickled down his face from the wound I gave him with my boot. Mickey felt the blood and swiped it away with the edge of his hand.

“All right, all right, shit. Just wanted to eat is all. You're so fucking critical. Fucking guy from Oasis was like that, and look where they are now.”

This seemed to really piss Mickey off. “Oasis is a shit Manchester band. Up on stage singing about champagne supernovas and shit. They champagne super suck. Now get his ass in the car before I make
you
ride in the trunk.”

Mickey's anger spurred everyone into motion. I was thrown backwards against the bumper and the rear of the car rammed into my lower back. The blow crumpled me to the ground, pushing the small specks of gravel on the pavement into my knees. Mickey's tall frame loomed in front of me, and I swung for it. The punch got no help from my back, making it less than a weak swat. The other two laughed at my offence, and each took a handful of shirt and collar. One of their shaky hands lost its grip on my coat, so my ear was used to pull me off the ground.

“Hey Mickey, Harry here kicked me and he messed up Ralphy's face. We should get a chance to get him ready for his ride.”

My eyelids fluttered as Gonzo launched his fist into my head. He put his weight into it, and both of us went down. With double vision, I didn't know which of the six men around me to grab on to. Twice I got it wrong before my hands found the one that had hit me.

“Get the fuck off me, Harry!” Gonzo shrugged my weak grip off and got back to his feet.

Ralphy stood over me with his identical twin. He cradled his cheek and grunted twice through his pursed lips at the tall redhead. The redhead seemed to understand the grunts and replied, “Yeah, fine, but make it quick.”

Ralphy began to stomp me in unison with his twin. I tried to block out one, then the other, until I figured out which one was really Ralphy. The stomps weren't that hard, but they were fast and rhythmic.

Gonzo was bent over the side mirror adjusting his hair and beard. He stopped twirling his greasy hair to laugh. “He's playing your tune, Mickey.”

Mickey looked at me hard and then began bopping his head to the tune of the feet bouncing off my ribs. He began to sing along with the beat; the song was near the end of the chorus. “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.” There was a pause and then two more stomps: “Oh, oh.”

Mickey looked around the street and stopped thinking the beating was so funny. “All right, all right, get him in the car. The whale wants him alive and like ten minutes ago.”

Once again I was in my car, but this time I landed on the fabric floor of the trunk on top of the spare. The shocks bounced with my weight, and the lid closed before I could even turn over.

As soon as the lid closed, I began to feel my body. Nothing was broken; the kids had cracked a rib at worst. Ralphy had sacrificed power to show off his musical talent on my midsection. Two teeth were missing from the side of my mouth where Gonzo had hit me, and one of my eyes was swollen, but it didn't matter — I couldn't see in the dark anyway. I knew the double vision would pass quickly, probably before the trunk lid opened. I was beaten up, but my head was clearing. The three punks had not frisked me after they saw the gun. I was alive in the trunk, and still armed.

It was hard to breathe with my rib cage resting on the spare tire. I adjusted my body in the cramped space until I found the least uncomfortable position. The fact that I wasn't frisked meant the three punks had probably never done this type of thing before. Another clue was their urge to stop for drive-through with a live body in the trunk.

Once I figured out that my back wasn't going to get any looser in the quarters I was in, I worked the nickel-plated revolver I took off Johnny back on the island out of the concealed thigh pocket of my pants. I got the gun free as the car roared to life and jerked away from the curb, causing my back to spasm again. I bit my lip to stifle the scream and thumbed back the hammer on the revolver. I stayed in my cell, in the trunk of the car, sore, angry, and holding a dead man's gun.