Page 31 of Road to Ruin
CHAPTER TEN
TOMMY
“Fuck, man, do you even have a license to drive this thing?”
West drives like a maniac. He throws his head back and howls, his voice ripped away by the wind. It’s sweltering at this time of year in New Orleans, but he insisted on driving his flashy silver Porsche Boxster with the top down, forgoing any chance of the AC working. With only two seats available, David has had to follow behind us in the rental we got from the airport in Houston. I said we’d both follow behind in the rental, but West wagged his finger at me, shaking his head. “That’s not how this works, Tommy Boy. You and I ride together, younger brothers, comrades in arms. If you insist on bringing Dave with you,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the man in question, “then he can come in his own car.”
David hates being called Dave. Hates it. I can see him in the Boxster’s rearview, still scowling about it now. West puts his foot down, swerving sharply, and suddenly there’s an eighteen-wheeler between our car and David’s. “Slow down,” I say. “You’re going to lose him.”
“I’m afraid that’s kind of the plan. David is weak shit, Tommy. Weak. He annoys Alex, and he seriously fucking annoys me. What good is he going to be to you at this meeting anyway? He’s going to say something dumb and piss Alex off, and then Alex will probably kill you both. Is that what you want?”
“I want you to slow the car down so he can catch up,” I growl.
“Not going to do that.” He shoots me a glance out of the corner of his eye that almost seems apologetic. “You can either fight me here and now, try and wrestle control of this highly powerful sports car from me without crashing it into a barrier or another vehicle, subsequently getting us killed. Or you let me take you to Alex and we can try and have this meeting run smoothly. Yes?”
I’m an excellent driver. Fucking amazing, actually. But these little sportsters are a nightmare. Twitchy fucking things. West is right: if I try and take control of the car right now, we’re probably both going to end up dead in a mess of blood, bone and mangled steel on the side of the road. “Anyone ever told you you’re a cunt?” I mutter under my breath.
“Repeatedly, actually. Which I don’t understand, because I’m the nice Bastien brother.”
My phone starts ringing. It’s David. I look down at the screen, groaning…
…and then I turn it off.
******
Alex Bastien is wrapping a length of duct tape around someone’s neck when we find him inside the abandoned warehouse close to the river. When we were kids, David and I used to come here and read old, faded copies of Penthouse we’d stolen from under the floorboards of our next-door neighbor’s potting shed. I was the one who showed Alex this place. It’s secluded, cut off from the other shipping and freight warehouses down by the water, and also difficult to get to unless you know that you can cut across the cracked, weed-choked, disused UPS airstrip that runs parallel to the river.
Alex looks up from the task at hand, and I see the guy he has tied to the chair in front of him has his hands cuffed behind his back, and a thick plastic bag over her head. The opaque plastic draws in tight around the guy’s head as he sucks in a worthless breath. He cries out, panicked and struggling, and Alex lashes out, bringing the butt of a gun crashing into his captive’s temple.
“I know you fucked her,” he says matter-of-factly when he sees me. He’s not surprised by my presence, it turns out. “I know you screwed her on the hood of that car of hers. I’ve got to say, Tommy, I’m not very happy about that.”
“But when are you ever happy?” I answer.
He rocks his head from side to side, the corners of his mouth pulling down—a “point-well-made” gesture. “If you’re trying to get back at me for marrying your sister, it won’t work. I don’t care about Nikita anymore.”
“I didn’t fuck her because I wanted to get back at you. I did it because she’s beautiful, and I’m attracted to her. And because she asked me to.”
“Fair enough.” Alex holds his gun out, handing it to West, who takes it from him. He picks up the roll of duct tape at his feet and tears off another long piece. Turning to the guy strapped to the chair, he begins to wind it around his neck too.
“Diligence is important,” he states. “Double checking your work, y’know?”
The guy’s face has gone purple through the thick plastic of the bag. He’s taped at the ankles to the chair legs, but his feet begin to kick and stamp at the floor—not the struggling attempts of a man trying to wrestle himself free, but the jerky, spasmodic movements of a man seizing as he dies. I look down at the floor, and there are three dismembered fingers lying there on the bloodstained concrete. They’re all from the guy’s right hand—his thumb, his index and his pinkie.
I suppose when I was a teenager, walking in on a scene like this might have freaked me the fuck out. Believe it or not, there was once a time when I wasn’t desensitized to blood, and murder, and death. It would be easy to say that Alex introduced me to such intense violence and cruelty, but the truth of the matter is that I’d already undergone my baptism of fire years before I met him. Alex was not the man who showed me death for the first time. He was merely its harbinger.
“I see you’re making friends,” I say. “Who is that?”
Alex wipes his cheek with the back of his arm, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. “It’s your cousin Rob,” he says, a little out of breath. “He wouldn’t tell me where Junior is, and you know how it goes. I don’t get what I want, I lose my temper.”
“What the fuck!” I rush forward, shoving him out of the way. I tear at the bagover Rob’s head, but my fingers can’t rip the heavy duty plastic.
“Here. Use this.” Alex holds out a knife—a seriously fucking cruel, serrated one. Its blade is covered in blood. I snatch it from him and cut through the bag as quickly as I can, yanking the plastic away. Rob drags in a desperate, ragged, endless gasp, his back bowing, eyes bulging…
Only it’s not Rob. It’s a guy in his late forties, grey stubble marking his jaw, a dark black blur of a very faded, old tattoo beneath his right eye, which is blue and not brown.
“Haha!” Alex crows. “Just fucking with you. Although someone had better tell me where Junior is soon, otherwise I really will start going after your family members.”
I bend over at the waist, hands braced against my thighs, breathing just as hard as the guy tied to the chair. “Sickfuck! Jesus, Alex.”
