Knuckles Read online

  “Look in the glove box,” the man said, turning his hawkish face back to the road.

  Coggins didn’t like where this was headed.

  “Where are we going?”

  Yori didn’t answer; instead, he asked Coggins to look in the glovebox again.

  Coggins shook his head.

  “I don’t carry. That’s not what I do. Tony or one of the others should have—”

  Yori shrugged.

  “Suit yourself. Tony said that we can count on you, so I’ll take his word for it. But I think you should look in the glovebox.” The man chewed the inside of his lip. “If I were you, I’d look in the glovebox.”

  Coggins squinted at Yori, wondering if the man was just naturally strange, or if his behavior was influenced by the product. Tony frowned upon his men using, especially, on the job, but that didn’t mean it never happened. In fact, Coggins had witnessed two of the four men he had driven with take a bump or two.

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  Yori shrugged again.

  “Let me tell you a little something about this business, Coggins,” Yori said slowly. Coggins wasn’t interested in what the man had to say, or about the details of the business—see rule number one—but when Yori slipped a matte black pistol from his waistband and lay it across his lap, he had Coggins’s full attention. “And of life in general,” he continued. “Once you attain a certain level of success, there’s always someone else who wants to jump in and try to take advantage of your hard work.”

  Yori slipped the magazine from the grip, made sure it was full, then jammed it back into place.

  “And today, we are going to make sure that we keep what we’ve earned… capiche?”

  Chapter 7

  “Tomorrow,” Chris informed the two men sitting across from him. “The skinny guy with the long arms will leave the gym at around ten. Wait in the parking lot, then follow him. He’ll probably have someone else with him, so make sure you aren’t made. And if you are, well… you don’t know me, I don’t know you.”

  The shorter of the two Mexicans leaned in close, his elbows resting on the cheap linoleum table that separated them.

  “Gringo,” he said in a whisper that made it difficult for Chris to understand, “We gonna cap ‘em?”

  Chris squinted hard; he was beginning to think that maybe recruiting these two men was a bad idea. The last thing he wanted to do was steal from Tony, especially given the fact that the man had been so… forgiving. But aside from pinching one of the dead drops, he was at a loss as to how to come up with the cash owed. He had tried to confront the man who had sold him the printer, but the man had ghosted him.

  And, besides, this wasn’t exactly stealing from Tony. He had heard through the grapevine that Yori would be making the next pick-up. Which meant he was actually stealing from Yori, and that he would have to face the consequences, not Chris.

  At least, that was the scenario that he had acted out in his mind.

  “No,” he said with a sigh. These weren’t the smartest tools in the shed, but he had no one else to turn to. Both Juan and Miguel were “friends” from another failed scheme from a number of years back. Rumor had it that they had since become involved in the lower ranks of one of the more prominent cross-border cartels, but they had heeded his call nonetheless. “No, you are not gonna ‘cap ‘em’, Miguel. Just wait for the men to get the money, then you just flash your guns, and take their gear. No need to even speak to them, let alone ‘cap ‘em’.”

  Chris raised an eyebrow, feeling that his words weren’t quite sinking in. Back when he had first met the two, they had had reservations about stealing an unattended ATM. This immediate suggestion of ‘capping them’ was unnerving, to say the least.

  Juan, who had since acquired a large, black skull tattoo on the hollow of his throat that extended beneath the collar of his white t-shirt, spoke up next.

  “What if they shoot at us first?”

  Chris had to give it to the man; he had a valid point. From his previous dealings with Tony, he knew that the man loathed the use of guns. Obnoxious bang-sticks, he liked to call them. And when firecrackers went off, people took notice, started to watch. Given his business, calling attention to himself was far from desirable.

  But Yori… he wasn’t like Tony.

  “They won’t,” he said, trying, but failing to sound confident.

  “But if they do? Then what? I cap ‘em?”

  Chris rolled his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to have the death of Tony’s right-hand man on his conscience, no matter how much he despised the man.

  “No, no capping, Juan. No matter what, don’t shoot. Just scare them, take their money.”

  The man frowned, and Chris found the need to reiterate the point.

  “No shooting, understand? Just grab the money and get your asses back here.”

  Chris glanced about the shitty diner as he spoke. They were the only patrons, and their waitress, a portly woman named Gertrude, was smoking a cigarette out back.

  “They usually leave the gym at ten, return no later than noon. I’ll see you the next day, right here, no later than one o’clock.”

  The men exchanged a look and then said something in Spanish that Chris didn’t catch. The shorter of the two, Miguel, smiled, revealing a gold tooth.

  There was another possibility, Chris realized as he stared at his own reflection in the tooth: the two wannabe gangbangers could simply take the money and never be seen again.

  But if that was their prerogative, then he couldn’t see anything he could do about it. It would simply mean that he would have to find another way to get Tony his money.

  Or, alternatively, he could just bail, take a train to Montreal. Lay low for a while. He glanced down at the makeshift sling he had made out of an old t-shirt and grimaced.

  He should have probably left before any of this went down.

  Chris shook his head, clearing his thoughts.

  “No later than one—you got it? Then we split the money three ways. Comprende?”

  “Sure,” Miguel replied with a grin.

  It wasn’t the most reassuring of expressions, but for the time being, it instilled hope in Chris.

  He wouldn’t be leaving the tri-county area anytime soon.

  Maybe not for a long time.

  “Good. Now, wait ten minutes after I leave before you go.”

  Without waiting for a response, Chris stood and left the diner, a small smile creeping onto his own face.

  ***

  Chris sat patiently in his car the following day, which was parked on the street opposite the parking lot of Tony’s Gym.

  The two gangbangers, Juan and Miguel, were in their own car, which was idling pretty much just outside the gym’s front doors.

  “Fucking guys,” he grumbled. He raised his hands to slam the steering wheel, but stopped when pain radiated across his entire left side. “Gahhh,” he groaned, leaning back against the headrest, eyes closed.

  He had forgotten about his broken arm. A shudder ran through him as he recalled the sound of the bone breaking, the dull, resounding crack. The broken arm was only the beginning; if he didn’t have the money by Friday, if Juan and Miguel failed, then he would have more to worry about.

  And seeing how obvious the two dumbasses were being, he wasn’t counting his chickens.

  Eyes still closed, Chris sighed heavily, trying to figure out how he had ended up here.

  Raised by a single mother who spent most of her time trying to hack the local lottery, and then using any money that she did win at the casino trying to double it, triple it, as quickly as possible, his start was far from prodigious. His mother’s get-rich-quick gambling cycles left Chris at home alone nearly every day from as early as six years of age. Even when he was old enough to go to school, he never did; his mother forgot to enroll him and was never around to take him there anyway.

  And then his mother, bless her soul, had realized that the cute seven-year-old boy with the dark hair
and dark eyes had the potential to be a more effective get rich scheme, with much lower overhead.

  Chris’s first scam had been at the discretion of his mother; it was simple, and for that reason, it worked very well. The first day on the street corner holding a sign that his mother had scrawled something on that he couldn’t read, he had pulled in nearly three-hundred dollars.

  And this streak continued for close to two weeks before Children’s Aid poked their noses in where they didn’t belong. His mother could have kept him, he supposed, if she really wanted to, if she petitioned hard enough. After all, the courts were reluctant to take a child away from a single parent and put them in the system.

  Because once in, Lord knows, you never came out.

  But she hadn’t fought quite hard enough; in fact, she hadn’t fought at all. Evidently, Chris, the child she had never really wanted, had served his purpose. Penelope Davis, Penny to most, had taken the nearly three grand that her son had earned her and he never saw her again.

  If it weren’t for Father Callahan taking me in…

  The door to Tony’s Gym suddenly opened, and Yori stepped out followed by a man he had never seen before. A man with sunken cheeks, dark circles around his eyes and a red beard. He looked less like a man who had seen a ghost, than one who lived as one.

  The two men walked briskly to Yori’s car and got inside. Chris ducked as they pulled out of the lot, and then sped down the street. Less than a minute later, he popped his head up just in time to see Juan and Miguel follow after them.

  And then Chris was left to wait until one pm tomorrow to see what his fate would be at the end of the week. As if in protest, a pain shot up from his broken arm and seemed to lodge itself in the back of his brain.

  Chapter 8

  Despite Yori’s insistence, Coggins didn’t look in the glove box. Instead, he resigned himself to standing in the usual spot, leaning against the man’s Cadillac with his arms folded across his chest. They had pulled the car up to a drop point that Coggins had never been before: a small, one-story house in an unusually quiet suburb in south Pekinish. Unlike the other drops, this one wasn’t an abandoned warehouse or vacant building. What was more surprising to Coggins was that instead of going to a garbage bin or the mailbox to pick up a plain brown bag full of cash, Yori actually walked up to the front door of a small, brick house in the middle of the street.

  Coggins looked around as Yori waited for his light knock to be answered. It was nearly noon, and aside from the American flags that fluttered from the porches of the identical houses on the street, there was no one around—there was nothing moving at all.

  He didn’t even hear birds chirping.

  It’s too quiet.

  The sound of a creaking screen door drew his gaze back to the house. An elderly woman who looked to be in her mid-eighties, her back stooped, her hair neatly permed held the door open with a thin arm.

  What the hell?

  Yori smiled and took her hand in his. The woman didn’t smile back. The man said something that Coggins didn’t pick up, then he turned back to face him. Yori nodded to Coggins, and then the woman invited him inside.

  Coggins squinted. This didn’t seem like a regular drop. And why would Yori need a gun for this pickup?

  And the street…it was way too quiet for his liking.

  His heart started to beat a little bit faster in his chest as he glanced around nervously.

  Once an action junkie, now Coggins could only hope for an uneventful afternoon.

  He had had enough action back in Askergan to last a lifetime. In fact, if he went the rest of his life without firing another gun, then he would die a happy man.

  The calmness of the street reminded him of his trek through the snow as he made his way to the Wharfburn Estate all those months ago. After his encounter with the dog, and when the wind died down, the air had been still, empty.

  Much like it was now; the calm before the storm.

  His thoughts soon transitioned to Alice, her pretty, pale face filling his mind. A smile almost crossed his lips in that moment, but then he heard that horrible sound, the sound of her heels clicking on the hardwood, of her head rhythmically bouncing off the floor as she seized.

  You let it happen to her. You let it happen, and you couldn’t even be man enough to go see her in the hospital or in the long-term care facility.

  Coggins clucked his tongue, and he tasted the sour remnants of shitty whiskey on the roof of his mouth. He wanted a drink so badly now that his hands were starting to shake.

  Movement in his periphery snapped him out of the reverie.

  There was a boy of about seven or eight riding his bike in a circle in the middle of the road, not twenty feet from where Coggins stood. He had a baseball card jammed in the bicycle spokes, and it made an annoying brrt brrt brrt sound with every revolution of the wheel.

  What the hell? Where did he come from?

  The kid, who was wearing a backward Blue Jays cap, his tongue jammed in the inside of his cheek, continued to turn in tighter and tighter circles.

  He didn’t seem to notice Coggins.

  Coggins just stared, mesmerized by the way the bike seemed to fold on itself.

  As he watched, the color of the boy’s blue baseball hat, his blond hair that poked out from the brim, and his green shirt became a blur, melting together into one amorphous shape.

  Coggins’s mouth fell open, and he blinked rapidly several times, trying to see the boy again.

  But the boy was gone. In his place was the scaly green creature, with thick black lips that had been stretched way too far.

  When the thing’s reptilian head turned to face him, Coggins staggered as if he had been punched in the solar plexus.

  “You think you killed me?” the horrible black mouth asked, “You think you killed me, Coggins?”

  Coggins took a step backward, trying desperately to put distance between himself and the hallucination.

  “You didn’t kill me—this has only just begun. This is bigger than you, bigger than all of Askergan. This is about the Marrow.”

  The final word was uttered like a curse.

  “No,” Coggins gasped, tripping over his heels and falling onto his ass. The hard pavement sent a shock of pain up his spine and he cried out.

  “I am ancient, everlasting. I am Oot’-Keban!” the thing’s mouth—Dana’s mouth, Alice’s mouth, the mouth with the lips, all rubbery and stretched beyond any normal limits—opened wide, and he could see deep inside that black pit.

  Coggins felt himself being sucked into that void, and it was only then that he realized that it wasn’t completely black at all. There was something in there, some sort of… ocean.

  Waves; he could hear and even see the tops of rolling whitecaps.

  His consciousness began to waver, and his eyelids started to flutter.

  Let go, a voice inside his head said. Just let go. Join Alice and let go.

  What he had seen, what he had done, would last forever, and no amount of whiskey was going to make it go away.

  Just let gooooooooooooooooooooooo…

  “Mister? Hey Mister!”

  Coggins’s eyes rolled forward, and he found himself lying on his back, staring up at the sky, the hot sun beating down on him.

  “Mister, you okay? Hey mister!”

  Coggins groaned and pulled himself to his feet, rubbing the goose-egg on the back of his head.

  He coughed, and then wiped the spit from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  What the fuck just happened?

  The bike had stopped spinning in circles, and the boy was standing on it, his right foot firmly planted on the ground like a kickstand.

  “Wha—what happened?” he asked quietly.

  The boy shrugged.

  “Looked like you saw a ghost, then you just fell,” he answered simply.

  With another grunt, Coggins managed to pull himself to his feet. He brushed the dirt from his jeans and then looked toward the house that Yori had
entered.

  “Shit!” he hollered as he broke into a run. Halfway to the screen door, he turned back to the kid on the bike. “Go inside, kid! Get inside right now!”

  Chapter 9

  “Dirk Kinkaid?”

  Dirk nodded.

  “You’ve come highly recommended.”

  Dirk cleared his throat.

  “I come—”

  The man named Tony shook his head and held up his hand, stopping him mid-sentence.

  “But that means very little to me. In this game, you need to earn your place, you understand?”

  Again, Dirk nodded.

  “Of course.”

  “Good.”

  The man was handsome, if on the bigger side. Dark hair, tanned skin, a smooth, youthful face. Dirk knew him to be in his mid-forties, but he didn’t look like he had crossed the four-century mark as of yet.

  For nearly a minute, the room was silent, and Dirk bit his tongue, resisting the urge to break it.

  Earning your place also meant remaining quiet, unless directly asked a question. To bide his time, he glanced around the room.

  For a man who his Captain referred to as an up and comer in the heroin business, someone who always seemed to be just out of their reach, one step ahead of them, Tony didn’t come off as a particularly menacing or even threatening figure.

  Which didn’t bode well for the man, Dirk knew. When your major product was heroin, you had no choice but to rule with an iron fist.

  Dirk had seen it before. Even small time dealers got hit hard by competition, and if they ever got big enough then the cartels got involved.

  And then all bets were off. There was no room for a nice criminal; this wasn’t forging bad checks or ripping off large corporations through insider trading.