“You won’t get away with this,” Sal said, glaring at me. “I know people. Powerful people. They’ll hunt you down—”
I threw him violently against the driver’s side door. His stupid head struck the black metal with a loud clang, and he slid down onto his hands and knees leaving a thin trail of greasy blood in his wake.
Ignoring his ridiculous comments, I jerked the driver’s door open, taking care to smash it into his slumped form. Sal flopped onto the rain slicked asphalt as the body of the driver slid out of the seat and collapsed on top of him. I grabbed the driver by the waistband of his slacks and tossed him the rest of the way out of the car. Then I slid into the seat, trying my best to ignore the gore squelching between my back and the seat.
I shifted the car into reverse before grabbing Sal by his right wrist. As my fingers closed around his blackened flesh, his tattoos faded a touch, and my left hand darkened a little.
“What did you do?” I growled while pressing lightly on the gas and twisting the wheel.
“I didn’t do anything,” he wheezed as the car began to crawl backward, dragging him across the asphalt by his arm. He tried to keep his balance for a second by sort of hop-crawling along before completely collapsing onto his chest and getting his fat ass dragged across the parking lot.
“I wouldn’t lie,” I replied, stepping on the gas. The car lurched backward and one of his expensive leather shoes came off. “I’m not in a very good place for dealing with not getting what I want, and even if I was, people tend to get hurt when I don’t get what I want very quickly.”
“I swear, I don’t know what’s going on with your hand,” he said, and as he said the words, his tattoos glimmered like the last fading vestiges of a dying incandescent bulb. “This has never happened before.” His voice had taken a on a high-pitched squeal whine.
“Whatever,” I said, pushing the car into drive and stomping on the gas. The car rocketed forward, and Sal’s arm popped from its socket. The sound of it was strangely satisfying, but not as satisfying as the scream that followed it. Yeah, I was really fucked up.
“Please, Mac. I don’t know—”
“Where is my family?” I growled, cutting him off and easing up on the gas so we were moving at a pace he could almost keep up. “Baal said you took them.”
“I got rid of your family that day. We never thought you’d succeed, let alone still be alive.” He swallowed hard, and the truth of his words filled the entirety of his being. “Please. I was just following Baal’s orders.”
“I believe that to be true,” I said, taking my right hand off the wheel and grabbing the door. I slammed it hard on his shoulder. It felt so good, I did it a few more times. “Are they alive?”
“I have no idea,” Sal cried, tears running down his piggish jowls. “I buried them in the desert. I suppose it’s possible.”
“You suppose it’s possible?” The words left my lips in a snarl of rage that turned my vision scarlet. The urge to hurt him just for the sake of it filled me to the very brim, and as I thought about crushing his windpipe with my bare hands, a realization struck me. I couldn’t kill him just yet, but hurt him? I could do that. I could do that all day.
I gunned the car, sending us flying forward. I stopped after about twenty feet or so because I reached the end of the parking lot. Sal’s pants and shirt had been reduced to bloody tatters, and this wasn’t as displeasing to me as it probably should have been. No, instead I wanted to hurt him more. A lot more.
“Please, Mac. I don’t have them,” He squealed, snot and blood running down his face as he tried to keep himself together and failed.
“Where are they, Sal?” I cried, and my tattoos exploded into literal flames that danced across my skin. “Where did you bury them?”
Before Sal could answer, his own demonic arm exploded in a shower of gore and sinew. Pale gray steam rose from the wound as Sal collapsed onto his stomach clutching the ruined cauterized remnants of his shoulder.
“What did you do?” he screamed, only I hadn’t done it. So who had? If I was a betting man, I’d put my money on Baal, but I couldn’t be sure. Still, it made me wonder if my own arm had a similar self-destruct mechanism. I was really hoping that wasn’t the case.
I ignored his question, leaping from the car and putting my boot on his throat. I batted the gray mist from my face with my right hand. As I did so, it caught flame, burning up like a cloud of gasoline vapor set ablaze. A surge of energy jolted through me, and before I realized what I was doing, I’d hauled Sal to his feet with my right hand.
As I lifted him off the ground, his collar clutched in my right fist, I realized I could see into his thoughts, could choose between each and every one of them. They were all laid out before me, mapped with gray fire. I followed along that Hellish landscape until I found what I was looking for. I knew where he had buried my sister and nephew, and with any luck, they were still alive.
“Goodbye Sal,” I said, reaching back and grabbing the shotgun off the seat of the car. I shoved him violently against the side of the car and jammed the shotgun up under his chin. “Any last words?”
“I—” I cut off his words by pulling the trigger, splattering bits and pieces of brain and blood across the car in a hail of buckshot.
Above me, lightning crackled through the sky. Sal’s body slumped forward, spilling gore into a puddle of muddy rainwater. I reached up, running my demonic hand through my hair in an effort to calm myself and quell the adrenaline surging through my veins. I was anxious to grab Danton and rescue my family. I was so close to saving them, I could practically taste it, but there was no telling what I would find when I went back in the club. For all I knew, everyone inside the club was dead, and Frankie would greet me with an axe to the face.
I turned back toward the entrance to the strip club, and as I did so, the sound of sirens filled my ears. Had they been there the whole time and I’d just heard them now, or had they been approaching quietly and just turned them on?
Before I could run back into the club, two police cars came screeching into the parking lot, lights strobing ominously. It wouldn’t take long for them to connect the dots between my gore-covered clothing, the headless corpse at my feet, and the shotgun in my hand. As soon as they did, I was screwed. Fuck.
Chapter 20
In an effort to not get my ass blown away by the cops, I preemptively dropped the shotgun and put my hands up. “What seems to be the problem, officers?” I asked, taking a few steps away from the car in a vain attempt to hide the bloody wreckage of Sal and his car behind me. I really did not have time for this, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be rescuing anyone if I got myself shot full of holes.
So far, the police hadn’t filled me with lead, but that was probably because they were still in their vehicles, but now their doors were open. I was t-minus three seconds from getting my face smashed into the asphalt and having some unnecessarily tight handcuffs snapped onto my wrists. I wanted to avoid that outcome, but I also didn’t want to kill a bunch of police who were probably just doing their jobs.
At least one of them was likely to have a spouse and children, and with all the terror flapping in the night, I’d be damned if I’d be the one to take out good men and women. Doing so would make me no different than the monsters, and despite evidence to the contrary, I didn’t think I was a monster. At least I hoped I wasn’t a monster. If I was, well, I wanted to be a lot more like Dexter or the Punisher and a lot less like Lex Luthor or the Joker.
“Don’t move a muscle,” called the first cop out of the car. She was tall for a woman, standing a few inches taller than me with one of those Amazonian builds that suggested a lot of time in the gym. She had one hand on the butt of her revolver as she watched me carefully from beneath the hood of her blue cap. Rain splattered across her uniform, plastering it to her body in seconds. It made me wonder why she wasn’t wearing a raincoat or a jacket.
“Okay,” I replied, stopping in my tracks. “There’s a bunch of terrorists inside the club with guns. I barely made it out here.”
“Shut the fuck up, Mac,” called her partner as he pulled himself out of the car. He was a huge man in every sense of the word because he reminded me of a sumo wrestler who had been poured into a police uniform and forgotten when to say stop. “We don’t need to hear a word out of your stupid fucking mouth. Just get in the fucking car before anyone gets hurt.” He grinned at me, stretching his fat jowls wide to reveal white, glimmering teeth. “It’d be a shame if we had to hurt you.”
“How do you know my name?” I asked before I could stop myself. I was reasonably sure I’d never met the two cops before, but then again, I was basically an amnesiac. I had little memory of my past beyond waking up in a dumpster a few days ago. For all I knew, these guys regularly roughed me up for protection money. Well, if that was the case, I’d be happy to go all sorts of Dexter on them.
“What part of ‘shut the fuck up’ do you not understand?” asked the sumo wrestler, waddling in front of the car and leaning heavily on it with one hand. “Can you not hear me? Do I need to speak slower so your stupid Irish ears can understand me?”
“What was that?” I asked, cocking a stupid grin at the cop. “I couldn’t hear you with all the wheezing.”
I knew I probably shouldn’t have said those words, but what I hadn’t expected was for the guy to appear in front of me before I could blink and bury his baton in my stomach. As the air whooshed out of my lungs and I collapsed to the ground on my knees, he reared back and brought his baton down in a blur of speed. I didn’t see it connect so much as I felt everything in my brain fracture into spotty darkness. Well, fuck him then. As soon as I stopped seeing triple, I was going to go all sorts of Zack Snyder Batman on him.
As the two other cops got out of their car and stood there looking at me, I collapsed onto the rain slick parking lot in a truly impressive display of powerlessness. It wasn’t one of my finer moments to be sure.
“Police brutality,” I coughed moments before the sumo flipped me over on my back and kneeled on my chest with the full extent of his massive weight. I suddenly found it extremely hard to catch my breath, but that could have been because my ribs were screaming in agony.
“I’d like you to take note of how there are exactly zero cameras in this lot.” The guy gestured around the rain swept parking lot of the Brass Monkey with his baton. “Even if you weren’t a Cursed piece of shit, no one is going to do shit if we beat you up because no one will ever know.”
“Gil, he won’t be any good to us if he’s dead,” said one of the cops from the other car. He was a tall, thin man who looked better suited to desk jockeying than actual field work.
“When I want to hear shit, Pat, I’ll squeeze your head,” Gil snapped, not taking his eyes off me. Instead, he reached down and grabbed my face with one meaty hand and squished my lips together. “Ricky will trade for him as long as he’s still breathing. There’s a lot we can do to him and keep him breathing.”
I pulled my face out of his hand. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I snarled as horror and fear rushed up inside me and filled me to the brim. “What have you done to Ricky?”
“We haven’t done anything yet,” said the last of the cops, an Asian girl with looks straight out of a “me love you long time” massage parlor. “But we will if you don’t come with us nice and quiet like.”
“Why the fuck would I come with you?” I said, trying to ignore the crushing weight settling on my chest. It was hard to do, but I was Mac Brennan, and something, something. Fuck, he was heavy.
“Look, it’s simple,” Gil said, leaning down close to me so I could smell the stink of raw meat and beer on his breath. “Ricky is first in line to take over now that Pierce got himself thrown out of a plane.” He licked his lips. “We want her to step down and let our Alpha have the territory.” He slapped my cheek hard enough to rattle my teeth. “You’re what I like to call leverage.”
“What makes you think I’ll help you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. Yup, I was going to definitely go past Batman. I wasn’t sure what that would be, but it would damned sure end badly for Gil and his pals, assuming, of course, I could get Yokozuna off my chest. “Or that Ricky will go for it?”
“That’s the best part. It doesn’t even matter. If Ricky doesn’t want you bad enough to step down, we’ll turn you over to Baal. He put a million bucks on your head. It’s tough to be sad when you’re splashing around in that kind of cheddar.” He leaned in close to me and sniffed. His nostrils flared so wide that, for a second, I thought they might engulf me completely. “But, before you start to worry about how Baal is going to pull off your fingernails one by one or make you swallow an entire tackle box full of fishhooks, know that Ricky will go for it. She has imprinted on you. I can smell it.”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how his words made me feel. Part of me was glad I wouldn’t be forced to swallow the contents of a tackle box, but oddly enough, I was worried that this guy could smell the imprint. If the imprint was that obvious, was it truly possible our feelings were real? Of course the obvious answer was… don’t listen to douchebags who want to use you as ransom.
“Mac, do you have donuts in your pocket, or are the werepigs just happy to see you?” Danton asked, coming out of the strip club fingering his cross. He was covered in sprays of black goo but was otherwise in good shape. I guess Frankie hadn’t been that formidable after all. He whispered something I couldn’t catch, and silver light spilled across the sodden parking lot.
Gil pulled away, shielding his eyes from the light. The smell of charred flesh filled my nose as the cop’s skin went from okay to horrendous fourth degree burn in a nanosecond. I took my chance, using all my strength to throw the enormous cop off and crawl away. It was harder than it should have been in no small part because I was practically seeing double.
Before I could get to my feet, the Amazon was on me, wrapping her arms around my throat and choking off my air supply. I reached back in a desperate attempt to stop her while the other two cops rushed toward Danton, who was busy backing up toward the door, his once-blazing cross all but dead in his hand.