Rigged (7 page)

Dick didn’t like guns around the trailer because the sparks they made didn’t go well with the meth he cooked, but Clarence was Dick’s handler and wasn’t one to take orders from anyone short of Damon. He was big and mean and reminded Dick of a cartoon bad guy, his body kind of out of proportion, with long arms and torso but short legs. Sometimes he looked normal, but not when Dick was on a spike—which he usually was.

“Charlie Kelly,” the man said as he stepped forward. Dick’s eyes snapped back into focus.

Dick hadn’t moved, not really sure what to make of the situation. He just wanted to leave with the backpack. He knew Damon and Clarence would want him to do that, so that was what Dick wanted to do. Besides, the guy in the doorway sure as hell wasn’t a cop, nor was he some basehead looking to score. He could have been one of Damon’s new guys, but he didn’t scowl like the rest of those assholes.

“Well, what the fuck do you want, Charlie Kelly?” Clarence asked, still moving his long-fingered hand toward the weapon in the drawer.

“First, I suppose I’d like you to stop reaching for what I can only guess is a gun. I don’t like guns, and I can’t imagine that bullets and meth labs go very well together.”

Caught, Clarence stopped moving and just stared at Charlie Kelly, but his eyes narrowed as he sized Charlie up.

Dick smiled a little; he liked it when people said the things he was thinking, as if their tongue had reached into his brain and pulled the words out. He could actually envision it, thanks to the meth he could envision lots of things.

Charlie looked around the trailer. “Is this one of those shake-and-bake operations I’ve read about?” he asked. “Normal labs have all those chemicals sitting around that can blow up on account of the fumes, so y’all just set up shop with a ton of pills and shaker bottles to make stuff quick?” Charlie’s eyes darted around the room, but he looked sleepy-eyed, unimpressed, bored.

The whole thing was strange to watch, and Dick felt as if he were watching some kind of performance, maybe a play, because it was so out of the ordinary. Then again, for a meth dealer and user, ordinary didn’t live there.

“A lot of people don’t know this about me,” Charlie said, “but I grew up in a trailer park. The guys I work with know because that’s what they do. Anyway, it kind of struck me that this place is a lot different from the place where I used to live as a kid. A friend of mine lived there, too,” Charlie pulled a picture out of his pocket and showed it first to Dick and then to Clarence.

She was a pretty girl, brunette, nice smile, the good stuff hidden by that damn stuffed animal, probably good for a throw, Dick’s scattered thoughts told him as he scrutinized the picture.

“When my parents split, I went to live with my dad in a trailer park quite different from this one. Sure, we had dealers and whack-jobs there too. Hell, one guy was shot for selling a bag of oregano to a pothead, and another guy poured milk on the grave of his dead cat every day. When the lady who lived next to us moved out with her kids, they found this huge, eight-foot black circle in her living room from a leak in the roof that was never reported.”

“Is there some point to all this, motherfucker?” Clarence asked in the way that Clarence asked just about every question: not really caring what the answer was.

“Well,” Charlie Kelly said, “it’s just that I’ve noticed that no matter how much you might know the people around you, you really probably don’t. Even if you’re all like family, you might not realize a meth dealer’s living right next door. See, at the root of it all, I think folks just wanna mind their own business. I’m pretty sure your neighbors are the same way, so we should have plenty of privacy.”

Clarence, looking like he was done listening, reached for the drawer again, but Charlie cracked him on the jaw harder than Dick had ever seen anyone get punched before. Clarence, all six-three of wiry muscle, stiffened up and hit the floor, smacking his head on the counter behind him on the way down.

“Shoot,” Charlie said as he tipped his hat back. “I didn’t mean for him to smack his head like that.” He clicked his tongue and looked over at Dick.

Suddenly, the tweeker’s asshole puckered pretty hard. Dick’s last spike must have been pretty weak, as he realized he’d suddenly sobered up enough to feel all kinds of fear. In one fell swoop, the guy in the hat had knocked out one of the toughest, meanest motherfuckers Dick had ever met, and now he was staring him down. Dick felt very small, almost transparent, all five foot five of him, with a backpack full of crystal meth under his arm and no gun within reach. His fight-or-flight yelled at him to run, so he started to back up. The only problem was that he had nowhere to go. He thought about yelling. But what was he going to yell? Help, this guy is stealing my crystal meth? He decided he might be able to reason with the man staring at him with cold eyes that lead into the abyss. “Listen now,” Dick said, “I don’t want no trouble, mister. Do you know whose stuff this is?” he asked, nodding toward the backpack and waving his arms around at the supplies.

Charlie shook his head. “Can’t say I do, but I was really hoping you’d fill me in,” he said, just before the world went dark.

It only took Charlie about ten minutes to tie the two men down, not his best time, but still pretty good. The smaller of the two, the one he assumed to be Dick, was on the crappy Formica foldout table. The bigger man was sprawled on the floor, and Charlie had to use a decent amount of cable and duct tape to hold him there. It took another ten minutes for the two to wake up; they both had glass jaws.

Surprisingly, the little one started to groan first, probably because he didn’t have the bad luck to hit his head on the countertop on the way down.

“What the…?” Dick started to say, then faded out a little.

Charlie walked over and pried his eye open. The little guy didn’t look good, but he was starting to come to. “You all right, fella?” Charlie asked. “Sorry about having to pop you one, but in your line of business, I had no way of knowing if you had a gun in your bag. I’m all about safety first, ya know.”

Dick groaned as his eyes slowly fluttered opened.

By comparison, the big man, Clarence, by Charlie’s estimation, woke a bit more dramatically. “What the fuck?” he said, but it had a kind of a swollen sound to it from still waking up.

Charlie looked back and forth between the two men. “Okay, guys, here’s the deal. I need a few answers, and then I’ll leave you to your, uh…business. What I do before I leave is going to depend entirely on how willing you are to cooperate. I didn’t bother to gag you because I’m hoping this’ll go smoothly, but if you yell, I’ll change my mind.”

“What the fuck do you want?” Clarence asked; it seemed to be a requirement that he swore every time he spoke.

“This girl,” Charlie said, holding up Kay’s picture again. “I want you guys to tell me if you’ve seen her before and where.”

Dick kind of groaned in the way a guy waking up with a hangover might, but Clarence must have thought he was going to say something, because he cursed again and swore he’d kill Dick if he said anything.

Charlie took it as a roundabout, polite way of the man telling him exactly what he needed to know. He walked over to Clarence and looked down. “So you
have
seen her,” Charlie said. “That’s good. That means you can tell me where and who you’ve seen her with, so I can move on.”

Clarence cursed and spat at Charlie.

All Charlie could really muster at the moment was a sigh in lieu of what he really wanted to do, which he knew would come eventually anyway. He calmly walked over to Dick and gently tapped him on the cheek. “Dick, are you awake?”

“Uh…yeah,” Dick said.

“Good. I want you to look at this picture again and tell me where you’ve seen her and who you saw her with. Take your time. I’m sorry I hit you on the head and am now expecting you to remember something, poor planning on my behalf,” Charlie said.

Unfortunately, Clarence didn’t take the time to let Dick think and decided to do some more yelling. “Who are you to be in here making demands, you fucking punk?”

Charlie walked over and put a strip of duct tape over Clarence’s mouth, frustrated that things weren’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped. “Okay, fellas, here’s the deal,” Charlie said, taking off his hat and setting it on the counter. “I’m not much one for prying information out of people. Plenty of guys in my line of work are very good at it and pretty damn inventive. Water-boarding is surprisingly gentle by comparison to some of the shit I’ve seen these guys cook up. I prefer to punch people, call it poor upbringing, since it doesn’t always get the best results.” Charlie sighed again, groaned, and sat down at the table next to Dick, who had started to struggle a little against his restraints.

Charlie cracked his knuckles one by one and looked down at the scars that checkered his fists. “You know, I’m a big fan of those old kung fu movies and I have this friend who knows a thing or two about physics. You know what he told me?”

Dick shook his head weakly, terrified to say a word.

“He said that regardless of what you’ve seen in movies, it’s impossible to pull a man’s heart out of his chest. He said the closest you can get is to punch the chest over and over and over again until the ribs break and splinter and puncture the skin and surrounding tissue, and eventually, you could kind of spoon out what’s left.” Charlie took a moment to look back and forth between Dick and Clarence, both of whom were finally paying attention. “Gentlemen, the girl in the picture is someone that was very near and dear to me, and I’m pretty pissed that she’s dead—even more so that she was found in the gutter, high on that junk you boys cook up in here. Still, I’m gonna make you a deal. There are two of you in here, and I’m gonna kill the man who refuses to tell me what I want to hear. I’m gonna hit that man in the chest
so many times
that I’m gonna be able to scoop out his heart, whether he’s still alive or not.”

Neither man said anything, but Dick’s eyes opened wide in terror.

“Come on, guys. Let’s not be dramatic. Accept the situation as a result of poor life choices. One of you is going to die today. And one of you is going to tell me what I want to know.” Charlie walked over to the door and opened it just far enough to grab the sack he’d left outside on the steps. He heaved it up on the counter. “This,” he said, opening the sack, “is a vibratory tumbler.”

Still, both men remained silent.

“I’m pretty lucky that guy at the gun range had an extra. I thought about getting a paint shaker, but who the hell knows where to get one of those these days. Can you guess what I’m gonna do with it?”

Guessing wasn’t necessary, as both men knew. “Wait,” Dick yelped, and Clarence mumbled something through the duct tape along the same lines. Being the shake-and-bake entrepreneurs they were, they were fully aware that shaking the bottle too much meant the gasses would build up and explode.

Charlie was glad he didn’t have to explain it to them and sound more dramatic, though he was wondering if he could actually punch through a man’s chest. He felt a pang of regret when he realized Dick would have been an better crash test dummy, but the floor was a better surface to get the desired impact.

“I-I know who she is,” Dick said. “I just didn’t recognize the picture right away. Her name is Kay, right?”

Charlie looked over his shoulder, down at the man who was taped to the floor. “It’s not looking too good for you, Clarence.” He turned back to Dick. “Go on.”

“I saw her hanging around with Damon. She’s one of Damon’s girls.”

“Damon?” Charlie asked.

“Yeah, Damon. I thought you worked for him. I mean, no one’s dumb enough to just walk in here and rip Damon off. Obviously you’re one of his guys, right?” Dick started to sweat.

Meanwhile, Charlie walked over to where Clarence was still moaning about something or another on the floor. “Well, Clarence, I guess that’s it for you. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk.” Charlie got down on his knees, then paused for effect. “You know, I’m not entirely sure this won’t give you a heart attack. I guess we’ll find that out together.”

The first punch landed flush over Clarence’s heart with a dull
thud
. Clarence let out a low moan. It was a strange sound to hear, but Charlie hadn’t really knocked the wind out of him, nor had he hit him in the face. It was all a learning experience. The second punch landed a little more crisply, and Charlie felt a rib crack. It all snowballed from there, and as he thought about Kay and all the others who were strung out because of those asshole makeshift chemists, he couldn’t help himself. All he could see was Kay lying there, cold, dead, and pale on the coroner’s table. His mind wandered to her walking around the trailer park, and he pictured her sitting on a couch somewhere, stoned out of her mind and being assaulted by faceless forms. He saw it all and pounded away on Clarence’s chest over and over and over again. Soon, all Charlie could hear was the rush of blood in his own ears.

Somewhere in the background, Dick’s whining voice wailed, “Oh, Jesus, Oh, God,” over and over again.

Charlie face dripped with sweat by the time he stood again and he wiped his chin with the sleeve of his shirt. Clarence was motionless, his eyes bulging with broken blood vessels, and Charlie wondered if it had been a heart attack or some kind of aneurism that killed him—not that it really mattered. He grabbed a paper towel from next to the kitchenette sink and wiped his brow. “So, Dick,” Charlie said, slightly winded, “now that Clarence is out of the picture, how about you tell me a bit more about this Damon?”

Dick was very accommodating. He told Charlie as much as he could remember. He recalled the important details, like where Damon lived, about how many guys worked for him, when major pickups were supposed to happen, and stuff like that. In particular, he mentioned that a major weight pickup was scheduled to happen a few days, unfortunately Damon kept the details of that deal to himself.

Charlie thanked Dick and patted him on the shoulder before he reached down and grabbed Dick’s wallet from his hip pocket, then did the same with Clarence’s lifeless body.