Page 4 of Road to Ruin
CHAPTER ONE
TOMMY
Sex. Sweat. Cigarettes. Salt.
The air is full of all four as I navigate my way through the packed dance floor of Elysium nightclub. Barely dressed bodies heave and writhe against each other to a demented, heavy bass line as I forge a path toward the innocuous, shadowy exit at the rear of the vast room. The knife in my hand is the kind you’d use to skin a buck. It’s fiercely sharp with an evil-looking serrated blade. Maybe people catch flares of bright red and blue light exploding from the polished edge of the weapon as I slip through them, and maybe they don’t.
I’m only twenty-eight. My haircut is on point. The t-shirt I’m wearing cost about three hundred dollars, and my jeans are the perfect balance between skinny and skater. Nothing about me singles me out of this crowd, marking me as out of the ordinary. I could easily be one of the preppy hipster guys grinding up against the heavily perfumed, fake-breasted, botox-injected women that surround me. I am different, though. I’m not here to party. I’m not here to get high or to fuck. I am a salmon swimming upstream against the current, on a mission, focused with purpose. My purpose is simple:
I am here to kill a man.
As I reach the exit, hidden amongst the shadows at the far edge of the dance floor, the DJ in the box on the mezzanine level switches up the song and the crowd loses their shit. I don’t know the music. I haven’t been keeping up to date with the latest artists, so I don’t know who the rapper is or what he’s so angry about, but the heavy beat underpinning the lyrics is intoxicating. I haven’t dropped a metric ton of MDMA like everyone else in the place, so I can’t feel the thump of the drums rushing through every molecule of my body the same way they can. But I can imagine…
I hit the flat metal bar on the exit and push it open, ducking out through the doorway before anyone can notice me. Outside, the night air is humid and sticky, just as stifling as it was inside the club. Welcome to Los Angeles in August. My shirt clings to my back as I jog down the narrow metal staircase before me, my boots ringing off the steps, the sound echoing around the high walls of the tapered alleyway. Hurrying toward a series of dumpsters shoved up against the crumbling brickwork at the mouth of the backstreet, I stoop down and move some of the swollen black garbage bags that have been piled on the ground. Trash. Trash. Trash. No black rucksack.Colby said it would be here. He said he’d left it—
My hand stills on something waxed and tough, the touch instantly familiar. Squinting into the darkness, I unearth the bag from its hiding place, wrinkling my nose when trash can juice pours out of one of the garbage bags and chases up my arm. Well, that’s just fucking perfect. Still, when I lift the bag out into the light, I recognize it. It’s mine. The bag I’m looking for. If it was filled with money or coke, Garrett Jonas, owner of the Elysium nightclub, might have posted a watchman to guard it. Make sure it was picked up by me and no one else. Since it’s filled with baby powder and chalk dust, I reckon it’s fairly safe to assume no one has a beady eye on me right now, though. I shoulder the bag, trying not to breathe through my nose—God knows how long it’s been sitting there for, it fucking stinks—and I take up my position at the foot of the stairwell I just came down.
I check the watch on my wrist. Nearly one in the morning. The guy Garrett wants me to string up and make an example out of has eight minutes to show up before he’s late. I fucking hate when people are late. I saw at least three women back on the dance floor I’d like to take a run at and I can’t do that if I’m waylaid out here. I shouldn’t be distracted by pussy. I should be focused on the task at hand. Problem is, I’d rather be anywhere than here. Technically, I could have turned the job down. I could have stayed home and gotten high, watched the UFC, jerked off and gone to sleep. Garrett Jonas isn’t the type of dude you say no to, though, especially when he suggests he might be really disappointed if you don’t help him out.
I watch the minutes tick by painfully slowly. The music from inside the club is still churning and pumping, the crowd still cheering every time the DJ transitions to a new track. Ten minutes past one. Fifteen minutes past one. This guy is more than late. He is officially tardy as fuck. Perhaps he knows Garrett’s mad at him and has arranged to have him murdered. He could have driven by the club and decided tonight was a bad night for a pickup. He might have heard whispers and rumblings of discontent. Either way, it doesn’t look like he’s going to show up.
I decide I’ll give it ten more minutes, then toss the rucksack and the chalk powder in the motherfucking dumpster, go home and eat some pie. I’m pretty stoked on the idea, actually. It’s not my fault Garrett’s mark hasn’t shown. It sure as fuck isn’t my fault that he gets so shitty with people and wants them bumped off so frequently either.
Typically, I’m just about to lose the bag and head back inside when a rusting black sedan rolls up and parks at the mouth of the alleyway and a tall guy with waist-length dreadlocks climbs out of the passenger seat.
I know he’s my guy because he’s wearing shades. Who the fuck actually wears shades at one-thirty in the morning, I hear you ask? Drug dealers, that’s who. The tall guy slams the car door behind him and staggers a little as he steps into the alley.
“You the pizza boy?” he calls out, pointing at me. He laughs, then, high and manic, hysteria cut with what I’m guessing is a fuck load of heroin coursing through his veins. He’s got the faded, washed out look of a junkie about him that makes me dislike him immediately.
“Yeah. I got your delivery,” I answer, tapping my hand against the side of the rucksack. “That’ll be thirty-six thousand dollars, asshole. Plus tip.”
Down on the bayous of Louisiana, a single, solitary figure presides over one of the earliest settlements founded in the United States. Alexander Bastien, the king of New Orleans, is a hard-edged, crazy bastard. He hates drug dealers. Even more than the pushers, he despises the users, though. My former boss would pay his employees a grand to bring him the ear of a fool cooking meth in the French Quarter. Bring him the ear of a meth addict causing shit in the French Quarter, though? That would earn you five grand, easy.
“Like any industry, the narcotics business operates on a supply and demand model. If you remove the demand, who’s going to go to the trouble of supplying? If all the addicts in this beautiful town all dropped down dead overnight, the coke and the heroin dealers would all pack their shit up and move to New York instead. I’m telling you now, Tee. Every eight ball and baggie you come across, you spike with rat poison and formaldehyde. I want them bleeding out of their motherfucking assholes as they die, you hear me? No mercy for the weak.”
No mercy for the weak.
The Bastien family motto is “Bienveillant et Gentil. Règles Sur Tous.” “Benevolent and Kind. Rulers Over All.” Alex didn’t have a benevolent bone in his body, though. “No Mercy for the Weak” suited him down to the fucking ground. I was always surprised he didn’t change the coat of arms hanging over the entranceway to the Bastien mansion. Anyway, Alex’s hatred for drug addicts rubbed off after a while. It was inevitable. Five years working for the bastard and I ended up just as jaded and cruel as he was, even if it was only temporarily.
The guy with the dreads weaves as he walks towards me. I can imagine the look on my face all too well: Disgust. Contempt. Annoyance. The guy slows down even further when he gets close enough to see my expression. “Whoa, Cochise. Who shit in your cornflakes?”
“You’re late,” I snap.
He holds up his hands, laughing in a high-pitched, infuriating way. “Apologies, my man. I had a few things I had to take care of. Garrett not paying you by the hour tonight?”
Garrett is most definitely not paying me by the hour. He’s paying me (very healthily) to get a specific job done, and I want to get it over with so I can pick up my money and get the fuck out of here. I just raise my eyebrows at the fucked-up thirty-something year old standing in front of me. “What’s your name?” I ask.
He cocks his head to one side. “Ain’t no one ever had to ask my name before.”
He’s probably right. Garrett gave me an extensive description of my mark, and this guy matches that description down to a tee. Not many pasty white dudes with stringy circa 1990 ska band dreadlocks kicking around out here in Los Feliz after all. Not that I’ve seen, anyway.
“Just give me your fucking name,” I growl, pushing away from the wall. “I want to know who I’m dealing with.” This is no joke. I’m about to end this guy’s life. He looks like he got reversed over by an eighteen-wheeler and he’s fucked out of his mind, but somewhere out there someone cares about him. They care if he lives or dies, and they’re going to be pissed that I’ve come along and cut his shitty existence short. I need to know what sort of connections he has. I need to know if I’m gonna have to watch my back.
“I’m Lucas,” he drawls, shrugging his shoulders. “Lucas Braddon. Don’t you recognize me, dude?”
I squint at him. “Should I?”
Lucas opens and closes his mouth like a fish out of water. “C’mon, man! Lucas Braddon? I’m a series regular on Las Vegas P.D. Y’know? Oscar Dela Fuentes? The quirky lab dude everyone thought was a serial killer in episode fourteen? They brought me back! I got a twelve-episode contract, motherfucker.” He holds his right hand up in the air, presumably for me to high-five. I don’t high-five him, though. I give him a look that could sour milk.
