Knuckles Read online

  This was the fucking drug market, the heroin market, and based on the way the stuff seemed to proliferate in the tri-county area, there were bound to be people trying to knock Tony off, every damn day.

  Dirk’s eyes fell on a prominent poster on the wall above Tony’s head. It was black and white and featured the profiles of two men, their noses nearly touching.

  Peter Glike vs. Jermain Pinker, the text read, Riot 7.

  “I see you noticed the poster,” Tony said, drawing him back. “What do you know about boxing?”

  Dirk shrugged.

  “Enough. I know who wins and who loses.”

  “Yeah? And which one loses?”

  “The one who can’t get up from the canvas.”

  Tony laughed.

  “Yeah, I suppose it always comes down to that, doesn’t it? But what matters most, is why one fighter lays on the canvas. Do you know why?”

  “Because he got popped?”

  Now it was Tony’s turn to shrug.

  “Sometimes, but not always. But sometimes it’s because he lacks the incentive to get up.”

  The man paused, and again Dirk waited.

  “Do you know why a person, a trained fighter, would lack the incentive to rise after falling down?”

  “Concussion? Disoriented?”

  Tony shook his head.

  “No—in my experience, there is only one reason. Fuck, these men have been hit in the head so many times, that their skulls are like blocks of concrete. Besides, even if their brain shut down, their bodies continue to act. Have you ever seen a chicken with a head cut off? It’s like that—the men just stand up after getting knocked down, and put their hands up. No, the real reason is one that dates back to Tyson, Holyfield, and even Ali’s days.”

  Dirk chewed his lip for a moment, then ran a hand through his beard. He wasn’t sure if this was some sort of test, or if the man was just having a conversation with him. Either way, it appeared as if this time Tony was expecting an answer.

  And there was only one thing that Dirk could think of as a universal motivator.

  “Money.”

  Tony smiled.

  “That’s right, money. And in my business, money is king. I need money. If I want to grow this—” he raised his arms, indicating the wood paneling that covered the walls of his office, “—business, then I need money. Lots of it.”

  This was followed by another pregnant pause, but it didn’t last nearly as long and Tony was the one to break it. It was clear that the man behind the desk was choosing his words very carefully.

  “Look, I’m going to be expanding my enterprise very shortly, Dirk, engaging with some very important clients. And I need to generate a lot of cash in order to show them that I’m their guy—a type of investment. Now, my business has been very successful to date, but now I hear that others are trying to take their slice, to steal some of my market share. In order to make sure that doesn’t happen, I need to expand, to form partnerships. And these relationships don’t come cheap. Do you understand?”

  Dirk nodded.

  “So then there are only two things I need to know,” he said “which guy and when?”

  Tony smiled.

  “Now you’re catching on. Your recommendation came very highly, and so far you haven’t disappointed.” Tony indicated the chair opposite him with his chin. “Now take a seat, and I’ll fill you in on the details, on what has to go down at Riot 7.”

  Chapter 10

  Coggins sprinted toward the door and made it there just as the door clanged shut behind the two men with shaved heads.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mumbled under his breath. It had only taken him thirty seconds to make it to the door, but it was too late.

  “Yori! Yori!” he shouted as he pulled the door wide and stepped inside. Coggins leaped over the threshold, nearly stumbling over the fallen body of the elderly woman that had let Yori in.

  The woman’s gray hair was stained with blood, with more of the viscous liquid pooling around her head. Coggins jumped at the last moment, just clearing the corner of her dark blue dress. He considered reaching down to check for a pulse, but a shout from upstairs drew his attention.

  In that moment, standing on the worn carpeting at the bottom of the staircase, the felled woman beside him, Coggins wished he had taken Yori’s advice and looked inside the goddamn glove box.

  But there was no time for that now.

  Coggins took the stairs two at a time. When he hit the top stair Yori shouted again, something unintelligible, garbled, and Coggins turned in the direction of the sound.

  It was a mistake.

  Something hard struck him on the side of the head and sent him sprawling. He saw stars, and his chin banged on the carpeted floor. His teeth clamped down on the tip of his tongue, and he tasted blood in his mouth. Despite his injuries, Coggins didn’t hesitate. He planted his hands and pushed himself to his knees, preparing to turn and face his assailant.

  But the hard object struck him again, this time on the crown of his skull, and the stars that followed were brighter and surrounded by a thick, velvety blanket of night.

  Under other circumstances, the injuries would have sent Coggins spiraling into unconsciousness.

  But that thing would be hiding in the darkness, waiting for him, waiting to call his name, to speak in Alice’s voice.

  To devour him whole.

  Coggins rolled over, wiped the blood that had spilled into his left eye and sprang to his feet with a dexterity that he hadn’t known he possessed.

  The man standing before him was short, with a shaved head and tattoo ink peeking out from the neck of his shirt.

  And he was pointing a handgun at Coggins’s head.

  “Puta, this ain’t got nothing to do with you,” the man wagged the gun toward the stairs. “If you want to live, you should leave now.”

  Coggins squinted hard, trying to clear his head. He held his palms out, showing that he was unarmed. In response, the man closed his eyes and stretched his neck, revealing the top of a skull tattoo.

  “Puta, I’ma ask you one more time. Leave now, or I cap you.”

  “Look,” blood filled Coggins’s mouth and he spat, “I don’t want to—”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a purple vase on a table just a few feet from him.

  “Puta—”

  “I don’t want—”

  Coggins reached out mid-sentence and swatted the vase toward the Mexican gang-banger, while simultaneously diving to his right.

  His shoulder slammed into the wall at the exact moment the shot rang out, punctuating the sound in the small upper level of the old woman’s house.

  Coggins didn’t know if he had been shot—someone definitely shouted—but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out.

  He shoved himself off the wall, lunging over top of the smashed remnants of the vase.

  Coggins’s chest collided with the man’s forearm, driving the hand holding the gun upward toward the ceiling. As he followed through with the tackle, the gun went off again, showering them both in plaster that rained down from the ceiling. The air was forced out of the Mexican’s lungs in an audible whoosh and the gun clattered to the ground.

  While the man beneath him struggled to draw a full breath, Coggins started raining down punches. When his right hand cracked off the man’s jaw, the gang-banger bucked his hips, trying to throw Coggins off.

  But Coggins lowered his center of gravity, rooting himself on the man’s narrow chest.

  He punched the man again, this time connecting with his left eye, sending the back of the man’s head cracking off the carpeting.

  “Miguel!” the man shouted, but Coggins shut him up by caving his mouth in.

  The man’s eyes rolled back, and somewhere far behind him, Coggins heard several more shots ring out.

  He half expected to feel the warm sting of a bullet tearing through his back, lodging itself in his lungs, his heart, maybe, but the sensation never came.
>
  As he continued to turn the Mexican’s face into ground beef, he realized that it started to look more and more like that thing, like Oot’-keban, the thing that Dana had become after Coggins had blasted it with the shotgun.

  “This is for Dana!” he screamed, driving his fist down again. It was like punching a bag of grainy mustard. “This is for Oxford!” Another blow. “And this is for fucking Alice!” He screamed.

  A hand suddenly gripped his raised arm, and he whipped around.

  It was Yori, holding a gun in one hand and the bag of money in his other. A trail of blood from his left shoulder made tracks all the way down to his fingertips.

  “Let’s go,” he said, his eyes wide. “Let’s go, now!”

  Coggins climbed off the Mexican, suddenly disgusted by what he had done.

  He turned away, unable to look at the damage he had inflicted.

  Yori pulled his arm, and before it could register, Coggins found himself running down the stairs, hopping over the old woman’s body, and then fleeing into the sun.

  Chapter 11

  Chris Davis was sitting in the same shitty diner that he had been in yesterday when the news came on the TV above the bar. At first, he paid it no notice, concentrating instead on downing three Advil with a sip of scalding, bitter coffee. But when one of the other patrons, a man with a long, gray beard wearing a cut off jean vest asked the waitress to turn it up, he couldn’t help but listen.

  And when the newscast mentioned a dead Mexican covered in tattoos, and another who was severely injured, his attention was rapt. So much so, that he swiveled his head around to stare at the screen, praying that it was unrelated.

  “Here, in the quaint district of Princeton, South Pekinish, residents’ lunches were interrupted by the sound of gunfire. A quiet, sleepy town, Princeton hasn’t seen this kind of death since the storm. Police reports are still coming in, but we can confirm one man who appears to be of Mexican descent dead, and another who is severely injured. There is also a woman in her eighties, the owner of the home behind me, who has been taken to the hospital with an apparent head injury,” a pretty woman with short blond hair and a heart-shaped face informed the camera. The shot panned away from her, revealing a brick house in the background, with a large American flag hanging from the porch. The screen door was ajar and there were several men in white gowns entering the house. A police officer suddenly came into view, and he reached out and pushed the camera. Aimed at the cameraman’s toes, the audio continued for a moment before the screen went black.

  “You can’t film here.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Step back.”

  “I’m—”

  “I said, step back. Unless you want to be arrested for obstruction, ma’am, I advise you to stay behind the tape with the other reporters.”

  There was a moment of dead air as the news channel switched away from the live feed. A second later, two mugshots filled the screen, and Chris’s heart sunk.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, the coffee cup trembling in his hand. The reporter began speaking as the image switched to stock police footage.

  “The two men have been identified as Juan Lamas and Miguel Gomez, the former now deceased. Both were previously known to police and have been linked to several gang-related murders, primarily in Texas and Arizona. At this time, it is not known why they were in Kinkaid, and what their involvement with the elderly woman—whose name has yet to be revealed to the press—is. There is speculation that this was a botched breaking and entering and robbery, but it is not clear what caused Miguel and Juan’s injuries. We will update you with the details of this case are revealed; the Sheriff is expected to give a statement later this evening. Nancy Whitaker for MRW News, on location in Kinkaid, South Pekinish.”

  Chris stared at the screen long after the station had moved on to the results of the local high school football game.

  Juan Lamas and Miguel Gomez.

  The men’s names and images remained burned in his mind.

  He brought the coffee to his lips, taking a large gulp that scalded the roof of his mouth.

  Chris was in shock. In the course of under forty-eight hours, he had gone from running a failed, small-scale, ultra-small-scale, counterfeit money operation to being complicit in the death of one man and the severe injuries of another.

  But it wasn’t these facts that bothered him most.

  “Fucking beaners—fucking gang banging beaners beating up an old woman,” the man at the bar said to anyone who would listen. “Those fuckers got exactly what they deserved.”

  Elderly woman, in her eighties.

  That was what got to Chris; Juan and Miguel weren’t supposed to get involved in a shootout for fuck’s sake, let alone braining an old woman.

  He shook his head.

  What the fuck were they even doing there? What the fuck—

  “Sir?”

  Chris shook his head and looked up, and found himself staring into the heavily lined face of a woman with a perm.

  “Sorry, what?”

  The woman pushed her lips together in a thin line.

  “I asked if you wanted anything else.”

  Chris shook his head.

  “No,” he croaked, “just the coffee.”

  The woman pulled a bill out of the black apron and put it on the table. With shaking fingers, Chris grabbed the receipt, his mind whirring a mile a minute.

  I have to get out of here, he thought suddenly. What if someone saw me here yesterday with Juan and Miguel?

  He tried to read the bill, but all of the numbers morphed together into an algebraic mess.

  “Three-fifty,” the woman said, realizing his difficulty.

  Chris nodded and pulled out his wallet. He grabbed a handful of ones and was about to hand them over when he realized that they weren’t quite right.

  The type was off center, the paper too thin; they were his counterfeit bills. Chris jammed the ones into his pocket and pulled out a ten instead. He handed it to the waitress and offered her a weak smile. When she reached back into her pouch for change, Chris shook his head.

  “That’s fine.”

  The woman pursed her lips and nodded. She turned and went to walk away, but Chris reached out and grabbed her arm gently before she was out of reach.

  “Is there another way out of this place? A back door?”

  She glanced at his arm in the sling before answering.

  “There is an emergency exit through the kitchen, but—”

  Chris was already on his feet, heading in the direction of the smoke and bacon grease.

  “Hey! You can’t go in there! Hey!”

  He ignored her and waded his way through the kitchen.

  Chris stumbled out of the diner’s rear exit, barely realizing that he was in the center of a dingy alley. Head spinning, his first inclination was to move toward a dumpster bin to his right, bile rising in his throat, but he stopped when he heard someone speaking.

  His heart skipped a beat when he thought that the person was speaking to him.

  After freezing and listening, he realized that this wasn’t the case.

  “You can’t pull me out now… no, not now… listen… listen… listen—I’m close here.”

  And yet it was a voice he recognized, one that belonged to a man he despised.

  “There’s something else going on, something big… I know, I fucking know… the gang bangers… fuck, weren’t working for us… for Tony. I don’t know where they came from, but I can’t back out now. In a week, I’ll know more. Director Ames, it’s something big. We’ll get Tony, but after I find out what else is going on. There might be a new player in town, one with cartel connections… no, I already said that we will get Tony. I promise. And then I’ll be the one to bring him in. You just can’t pull me now.”

  The sound of footsteps mixed with the man’s voice and Chris pressed his back against the brick wall, trying to remain as still as possible.

  The thin man walked right by him wi
thout so much as a glance in his direction. Chris watched Yori turn the corner then he closed his eyes and counted.

  On twenty, he ran to the side of the dumpster and vomited.

  Chapter 12

  “Fucking hell…” Tony muttered into the receiver. Dirk watched the man glance down at a pad of paper on the desk, flipping the pages back and forth nervously. “Fucking cartel? Cartel? Already?”

  Dirk thought he saw a bead of sweat form on the man’s forehead. He barely knew him from Adam, but Dirk had experience figuring people out.

  And Tony Mastromonaco didn’t strike him as someone who got bent out of shape very often. In fact, by all accounts, he seemed like a calm, even-tempered man.

  Provided business was going well, that was.

  “I thought we had a deal with them? You think that they are speeding things up, Yori? Pushing the deadline forward? Maybe they’ve found someone else to deal with?” Tony shook his head. “No, never mind—I’ll figure it out. I’ll get them their damn money.”

  There was another short pause.

  “Get your ass back here, Yori; we have the fight to prepare for.”

  Tony hung up the phone, then took a deep breath, his eyes still locked on the yellow pad of paper in front of him.

  Cartels… get them their damn money… the fight…

  Tony eventually lifted his gaze, a tired smile forming on his face.

  “Look,” he began, clasping his hands together, “things have accelerated, as you just overheard. I need you to speak to Peter.”

  Dirk nodded.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “He’s out there training; you need to speak to him now. Remember what I said: the third round.”

  Dirk nodded and pressed his lips together.

  “The third round,” Tony repeated. “But there is something that you must know about Peter; he’s a stubborn bastard, and spends a lot of time training at Gillespe MMA. The old man there… well, let’s just say the man is as old-fashioned as they come. Might be that he’s in Peter’s head. You need to convince Peter that this is the right thing—the only thing to do.”