I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (33 page)

“You made that one up, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did. Who was that?”

“That was one classy lady is who that
was.”

“She’s out of your league, son.” Kane smiled
and Boone found he had to smile back at him.

“Shouldn’t you be outside an abortion clinic
screaming at women or somethin’?”

“I’m actually going down to the red light
district.”

“What are you gonna do—rape and kill a
hooker?”

“As a matter of fact,” Kane flicked his
cigarette down into the canal, “
Yeah
. Want to come
along?”

“No.” Boone laughed. This guy was alright.
Kane, the Wrath of God. “Kind of figured you for the smoking
type.”

“All the shit I seen, cancer ain’t gonna kill
me.”

“They send you to find me, that it?”

“Something like that.”

“How are things back there?” Boone thought
back on what he’d said to Rainford, wondered if Colson was going to
have a problem with what he’d done.

“They’re not happy, but everything is moving
along.” Kane faced the water, his hands clasped over the canal. “We
go in later tonight.”

“Here’s the thing. I don’t dig you man.”
Boone felt like had to say it, get it out there. Kane nodded,
encouraging him to continue. “But what’s a guy like you doing here?
Working for Rainford?”

“I’m not
working
for Rainford,” Kane
looked out across the Singel. “He’s affording me an opportunity. An
opportunity to destroy the vermin and scum.” He said it
matter-of-factly. “I’m going to take advantage of that opportunity,
and when I’m done, I’m going to destroy him as well. He’s next on
my list.”

“Not if I get to him first.”

“Well, we’ll figure that out when the time
comes.” Kane turned back to Boone. “In the meantime, I was you—and
I’m not—I’d try and get some rest.”

Boone had to admit it wasn’t a bad idea. Who
the hell knew what they were going into tonight.

Mitchell Givens, better known to the rap
world as Busta Nutz, came out of the Moses houses with his
bodyguard, Trey. Givens walked falteringly after near half a week
of partying, an almost empty bottle of his favorite champagne in
one hand, Trey helping to keep him up, getting him to the car.
Nearly one hundred hours of nonstop hours of dancing, drinking,
smoking, and fucking.

That morning the moving van had packed up the
speakers and equipment and moved on. Most of Busta’s crew, bleary
eyed and partied out, had gotten back in the Lincoln Navigator and
bounced, a couple sticking around, shacked up with local hooch.

Givens staggered towards his four-door coupe
wearing the same sweats and wife beater he’d been wearing since he
arrived. In spite of the dark, he wore his Nike visor, afraid he’d
forget it if it wasn’t on his head. The heavy gold rope swayed on
his neck.

Trey got him to their whip, a 98
Mercedes-Benz E 350. Got Busta in the backseat, the big man in the
throwback Brooklyn Dodgers jersey walking around to the driver’s
side. Trey put his man purse on the passenger seat next to him and
adjusted the rear view, checking out his diamond Jesus pendant. He
put the rear view back in place, Busta lying on the back seats,
talking groggily to himself, trying to carry some tune.

The Benz came to life, Trey hitting the power
windows, flooding the car with fresh air.

“Yo, brah, put some music on, brah.”

Busta calling him
brah
now. Treating
him a whole other way few days before when his boy Dodd was around.
Busta treating Trey like the hired help then. Which is what he was.
Trey his brother now, because Trey was going to get Givens’ drunk
ass home in one piece, which is what he did. Which is what he was
paid to do.

“You want me to put on one of these mix
tapes?”

“No, brah. Turn the radio on.”

Trey did as he was told, turned the radio on
to Gangsta Khan rapping hard.

“
Nah
-
nah
-
nah
—” Givens
waved his hand where he was lying in the backseat, like he was
trying to ward off some evil business. “Anything but that, brah,
anything but that—” but Trey had already changed to another
station, Swizz Beat’s looping a sitar sound behind DMX’s
vocals.

“Turn it up, brah.”

DMX bellowing his Ruff Ryders Anthem.

Trey guided the Benz down the street,
avoiding the nastier potholes. Busta had his head out the back
window like a dog, Trey hoping the man didn’t vomit. It’d be Trey
cleaning it up if he did. What he was paid to do.

They’d turned a corner and were driving down
a narrow strip of asphalt between parked cars on either side,
potholes big as moon craters all over it. The headlights caught
something and Trey slowed the car, stopping it.

“What you stopping for?”

Trey lowered the volume before answering.
“Somethin’ in the road.” The street here so tight there was no
going around it. “Looks like a bowling ball.” The hell if Trey
would try and go over it, fuck up their ride. Be left waiting for
the bus.

“Go around that shit,” Busta was murmuring in
the back seat, Trey studying the thing in the lights, flicking on
his high beams.

“Shit.”

Trey opened his door but didn’t get out of
the car. He reached over to the passenger seat and took up his bag.
Busta leaned over the front seats and cranked the volume way up,
“
Stop
,
drop
—” DMX growling “—
shut
‘
em
down
open
up
shop
,” not even getting to
the end of the chorus and Busta was already out of the Benz.

“Wait a second.” Trey took his bag with
him.

“What the fuck?” Busta stood above the round
thing in the street, his hands on his knees.

“It’s some nigga’s head.” Looking around,
Trey spotted the body a few feet away, lying there with a stump
where the head should be. “There’s the rest of it.”

Music pumped out of the car.

“A head?” Busta poked at it with his Nikes.
When the thing didn’t respond, he reached down to touch it.
“Day-em. Thas nasty.”

“I wouldn’t go picking that up,” Trey started
to tell him, warn him about germs and disease but it was too late,
Busta holding the severed head aloft in his hands, a look of
curious disquiet on his drunken face. Trey cringed and averted his
eyes, Jesus around his neck looking cool in his shades.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Busta asked
the head and Trey was reminded of that one play did he read in high
school,
Hamlet
by that Shakespeare motherfucker. Hamlet in
the graveyard,
Alas
,
poor
Yorick
, talking to
the skull,
I
knew
him
well
. Funny the
shit that stuck with you.

“Something wrong here.” Busta mesmerized by
the head in his hands, Frankenstein on his mind. “Ya n’meen?”

All stitched together, the hairy flesh of the
lower half of the head looked like it was from some other person or
animal. Yeah, animal was what it was. The upper half wasn’t nothing
to write home about neither, missing its ears, one socket empty,
the other eye closed.

A voice was talking on the radio but neither
man paid it any mind.

“This,” Busta looked at Trey in the high
beams, “This is a
real
god-damned man’s head in my
hands.”

“Maybe he got hit by a bus.”

“No buses comin’ down this street.”

“What you think brah?” Busta stood grinning,
the head aloft. “The cover of my next album?”

The body sat up. Trey was staring at it,
speechless.

“Oh no, brah. I didn’t just see that.”

The arms raised, the hands touching at the
neck stump.

“Now tell me I didn’t just see that,
brah.”

The one eye left in the head he held opened,
but Busta did not notice. He screamed when the mouth clamped down
on his hand. Screamed and flicked his arm, trying to dislodge the
head, but it wasn’t letting go.

Words continued to fail Trey as he watched it
all open-mouthed, Busta stuffing the head under his arm and trying
to pull his hand free—

The corpse pushing itself up to one knee

—Trey watching Busta batting at the head with
the champagne bottle, crying out in pain—

The body standing, swaying unsteadily in the
street

—Busta crying out for Trey to
help
him
Brah
got
-
dammit
, Busta whacking the head
against the hood of the Benz, the head growling around his hand
where it had him fast.

Movement in Trey’s peripheral vision: the
body was coming towards them, a step at a time. He dug around in
his bag, finding the pistol, a little .25. Couldn’t carry much else
in his man purse.

Busta succeeded in freeing his hand, the head
rolling under a parked car. He leaned against the Benz, shocked
into something like sobriety, his hand bleeding freely.

Arms raised, the body took another step
towards them.

Busta looked dubiously at the little gun in
Trey’s hand. “Where’s the chopper?”

“In the trunk.”

“Go get it!”

“Of the Nav.” The Lincoln that left that
morning.

“Fuck. Shoot that bitch!”

Trey took careful aim and fired, the pistol
sounding like a firecracker in the night. The body absorbed the
shot and continued towards them, slowly, relentlessly. He fired
again and again,
crack
-
crack
, firing until the slide
locked open on an empty chamber, the body still coming. Trey took a
step back, away from the thing and its groping hands, rooting about
in his bag for the extra magazine he knew was in there
somewhere—

Busta circled around the body, swinging the
bottle in his hand as if to keep it at bay, but the thing seemed
uninterested in him

—and Trey found the magazine, his back
pressed against the Benz, the thing almost on him, Busta crying
“
Run
,
idiot
,
that
ain’t
doin’
shit
!” Busta’s arm cocked back and he launched the champagne
bottle. The flat bottomed bottle tumbled end-over-end, cleaving the
air above the body where its head would have been if its head
wasn’t just then under a car, the bottle flying on to clock Trey in
his
head.

“Fuck!” Busta wanted to jet, convinced it was
that Khan son of a bitch come back from the grave to get him, Khan
or his ghost: what the fuck had he gotten himself into?

The body had reached Trey and wrapped its
hands around his thick neck, Trey having just righted himself after
getting hit with the bottle. Trey got his own hands around the
thing’s arms but couldn’t get them off him, its grip crushing his
throat.

Busta watched Trey’s dark face get
darker.

Trey went down on his knees and the body
stood over him, choking him, the Jesus pendant jerking up and down
on his chest.

Mitchell Givens ran off into the night,
shrieking in fear, back towards the Moses Houses.

“This your girl Neecy on K-E-A.” Two of the
car doors remained ajar, the radio loud in the night. “Looks like
our boy Gangsta Khan is gonna be alright, alright? Gangsta’s people
are announcing he’s in stable condition and expected to make a full
recovery—”

A block away, a woman on a building’s roof
watched the scene on the street through the scope of the sniper
rifle she’d set on the roof’s ledge. She watched Busta Nutz run
away screaming. She watched the headless body finish off the
driver, the man’s body slumping lifelessly in front of the car next
to his little bag. She watched the body stagger over to the curb,
searching for its head.

She keyed the radio in her hand and when she
got the go-ahead she said, “Looks like Mama Coyle’s boy is on the
hunt.” The woman began to break down the rifle, storing the
components in its case. When she’d finished she looked back down on
the street and caught sight of the body lurching away, its head in
its hands.

Gritz sat alone in his dining room, the table
before him a mess of papers and documents, books cracked open and
dog-eared. The ice cubes in his vodka glistened in the light from
the fixture overhead.

He had a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn,
which was one bedroom too many. The landlord was a friend of a
friend, let him put down a deposit and pay by the month with no
lease. Gritz thinking, when he’d rented it, things would smooth
over with Cathy and he’d move back into their house in Queens.
That’d been months ago. The mortgage on the house was paid off,
otherwise there’d be no way he could swing it and rent this place.
He’d gone for the two-bedrooms, hoping one or both of their boys
would want to come and spend some time with their dad, maybe a
weekend.

That hadn’t happened either.

He had a broad sheet newspaper spread open in
front of him, Mephisto’s Manifesto printed in it. Gritz took
another drink as he looked over the one section with world
population statistics:

Given
:

1350
—
370
million

1804
—
1
billion

1927
—
2
billion

1960
—
3
billion

1974
—
4
billion

1987
—
5
billion

Therefore
:

1999
—
6
billion

2010
—
predicted
7
billion

2025
--???

Yeah, okay, so what the hell was his point?
Sure, this Mephisto guy lived in bizarro-land, was some kind of
nut. And fuck the newspapers for printing this bullshit, ennabling
the bastard. Giving him what he wanted. Cause guys like this, they
always wanted an audience. Notes, letters to newspapers, it all
amounted to the same thing:
look
at
me
.