Rough Men (20 page)

Will emptied the contents of the envelope onto his lap.

The manila envelope held three glossy eight-by-ten prints. Will turned the first one over. It was a color picture taken from inside of a hotel room, and in the picture, a young girl, not much older than ten, was crying while she performed oral sex on a man in his early fifties or late sixties. Will thought he might recognize the man, but couldn’t place him. His already upset stomach now roiling, Will passed the picture to Jason, who let Isaac lean in to see.

“Shit,” said Jason. “That is seriously fucked up.”

Will turned over the next picture. In this one, the man was penetrating the girl from behind, and at some point between the taking of the first and second picture, a ball gag had been placed in her mouth, and her right eye had been blackened. Makeup was running down her face and so was a trail of blood, leaking from her right nostril. Will passed the picture on and flipped over the next one.

In the last shot, the man’s smiling, glistening face was clear as day, though Will could hardly believe it was really him. The rest of the picture was too much for Will to look at. He set it on his lap, facedown, and then passed it to Jason.

After just a moment, Jason confirmed what Will had been thinking when he said, “Holy fuck. That’s the goddamn mayor, and he killed that kid.”

“Are you serious?” Isaac asked. “Is that really the fucking mayor?”

That any of them could recognize Mayor Robert Huntington at all would normally have been pretty unlikely—none of them were exactly civic-minded—but the last mayoral election had been brutal, fought over the airwaves for months by two parties all too happy to leverage the country’s toxic national-level partisanship at the local level. Mayor Huntington had been the
incumbent and was running for his fourth term, but the once esteemed man had had his name absolutely dragged through the mud. The tales of corruption went so deep that it seemed no one on the Kent County political scene could be clean. A new mayor seemed the obvious solution—until, that is, the man running against Huntington, one Judd Foster, was arrested for DUI just a week before the election, with a passenger that was not his wife.

That had scotched his election chances, of course. Huntington won in a landslide, even with his reputation destroyed in the doing. Since then, he had been aggressively quashing any lingering or new allegations of corruption and using the police force as a club to do it with, at least according to his opposition. There had been no outcry among the honest citizenry, at least not yet, largely because of Huntington’s unexpected success in bringing the local drug trade to heel. Meth and cocaine had all but disappeared from the streets, and it was presumed that there wasn’t a gang in the city not hobbled by an informant at some level.

That was about to change, Will figured, and these photos were the reason. It surprised him, especially given how exhausted and beaten up he was, how quickly it snapped into focus for him. He could, of course, be all wrong, but he didn’t think so, at least not in the big picture. The photos had been taken, God only knew why (trophies for their psychopath of a mayor to gaze upon and whack off to?), and then they’d fallen into the hands of some unknown entrepreneur and shopped around. MS-13 had put in their bid—and then decided to cut to the front of the line and snatch them, once they figured out (or were told) where they were hidden away. Whoever had the pics would have an ax over Huntington’s neck plenty sharp enough to step in and fill the city’s drug vacuum without fear of police interference—or thanks to the success of the recent crackdown, even an ounce of competition.

Jason was running some at least similar calculus in his head, it turned out. “I say we burn them,” he said. “Just pitch them right
into the fire. They won’t do nothing but get us killed, and I’ve been almost killed enough for a good little while.”

Will shook his head. “The little girl in these pictures is dead, and we’re the only people who can do anything about it.”

“Only if you can figure out how to breathe life back into her. This song and dance has worn me pretty thin. We’ve done just about everything we could to get that goddamn package, and now that we’ve got it, I’ll be damned if it still kills me. No one knows we have it. I guarantee those guys think we died in the fire at the warehouse, and they sure as hell think these pictures are long gone.”

“But we know that they’re not,” reasoned Will. “We have a chance to make this as close to right as possible.”

“Will, be reasonable,” said Isaac. “We’ve already gone to hell and back over Alex and that backpack. I think Jason’s right; it’s over. Jason needs to get to the hospital, and so do I. Just put them in the fire, and live the rest of your life forgetting that you ever saw them. I know I will. It’s for the best.”

A horn honking in front of the gas station interrupted them, and Will took the distraction to stuff the pictures into the backpack and then dropped the AR-15 on top of them. Isaac was helping Jason stand, and Will slung the pack over his shoulder, then made a show of dropping the empty file into the fire.

“Happy?”

“Yes,” said Jason and Isaac at the same time.

Will followed them outside, where Alison was waiting for them in her car. Morning was finally coming.

Alison looked shocked as Will and Isaac helped Jason into the car, and remained that way as Isaac sat in the back and Will took a seat next to her in the front. The clock in the center of the dash had the time, 7:15 a.m. Just looking at the clock made Will dizzy, but his eyes
were drawn to it, as if to remind him that everything really had happened, and there was going to be no reprieve in realizing that any of it had been a dream or that perhaps his mind had exaggerated what had happened to them. Some part of him even wished that he had put the pictures to the flame and that this really was the end.

“I said, what happened, Will?” Alison said, nearly shouting. “What in the hell happened last night? You smell like a campfire gone wrong, and you look terrible.”

“We can explain as we go,” Will said. “Just drive.”

She scowled, the car still sitting in park.

“Please. Drive.”

Alison put the car in drive, then pulled out of the gas station. Will thought he could still see some blood on the road but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t important anymore.

“I’m not really mad,” said Alison. “At least, I don’t think I am. But I was really worried. Why didn’t you call?”

“Well, I should have, around ten thirty, before the shit really hit the fan, but—”

“They took our phones,” offered Jason, “right about at ten thirty, if memory serves.”

“Who took your phones?”

“MS-Thirteen is what I figured,” said Jason, and Isaac agreed with a nod of his head. “They certainly had the war paint to at least run a good impression of MS-Thirteen.”

“Who or what is MS-Thirteen?”

“A gang that started in El Salvador,” Will explained. “They hired Alex and his friends—Chris, Mumbo, and Rob—to rob a bank for them.”

“Only, they weren’t really just robbing a bank,” offered Isaac. “They were trying to steal some pictures to use as blackmail. There’s a lot we still don’t get just yet.”

“I believe you,” said Alison. “I can see how some of the intimate details of the situation may have escaped you guys. Are they dead?”

“Most of them,” Will said. “The kids who were with Alex when he died all are, most of the MS-Thirteen guys we ran into are as well, and we destroyed the pictures they wanted, to boot.”

“Are they going to be able to find you?”

“No,” said Jason from the back. They hit a bump in the road then, and he said, “Oof. Christ, that stings.” He took a breath, then went on. “The only ones that seen us are dead, and the ones that didn’t I think are happy just to get gone. We blew up their meth lab.”

“You blew up the Salvadoran gang’s meth lab.” Alison said this like she was just checking.

“The weather did that,” said Will. “We just happened to be there.”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “I can hear the rest whenever Will feels like telling me about it, but I’m in no rush. Why don’t you guys take a look out the windows, get a gander at how jacked up everything was? You guys might have busted up a few parties, but that storm took out half of the north end.”

It was true. Looking out of the car window and actually trying to see what was going on was incredibly unnerving, as the realization that a gang of bloodthirsty killers had been maybe the least of their worries began to hit home.

The storm had not just forced two vans to crash, destroyed a gas station, and blown up a warehouse-turned-gang-hideout/meth lab. It had also ravaged a number of houses visible from the highway, destroyed several warehouses (Will was sure that one they saw was the warehouse he’d seen being shredded just before the van crashed), among many other ruined buildings. The storm had laid waste to a barn’s worth of cattle; a hundred or more head of dead cows lay strewn about a field, and a long-horned bull was atop a farmhouse, upside down and quite dead. The
Grand Rapids Press
printing facility was the only thing that Will saw that seemed completely untouched, and as they drove past it, he saw that even the
Press
had been hit: the cars in its
parking lot had all been smashed into each other, the pavement, and the building.

Will closed his eyes as Alison drove and fell asleep before they crossed under Alpine Avenue.

Will started as Alison shook him, then sat up straight in the seat. She’d pulled over along the road just outside the city, maybe half a mile from the hospital. The neighborhood visible to him looked absolutely untouched by the storm. It looked as phony as a movie set.

Alison was smiling at him, a thing Will had been quite positive was never going to happen again, and he smiled back. She squeezed his knee, and he felt like everything might be OK. When the look broke, he turned to see into the backseat; Isaac and Jason were as asleep as he had been.

“I wanted to check,” Alison said, “before we get to the hospital. What do you want to happen?”

Will thought about her, his friends, and the contents of the backpack. “Drive to the hospital. I’ll leave you there with the guys. I need to go talk to Lou. I need to run some of this by him.”

“What do you think he’ll say?”

“To be perfectly honest, I have no idea. But we need to have our ducks in a row. The police are going to release Alex to us soon, and we need to be ready to take care of that and act like everything is perfectly normal.”

“What should I tell the hospital about these two idiots?”

“Say Isaac’s your brother-in-law, and he got hurt in the storm. On the way to the hospital, you found Jason hitchhiking, and he was all beat up too. Or anything else that makes better sense to you. Anything but the truth, really. I’d stay as far away from that as possible.”

“That is not going to be a problem.”

“I had a feeling. No matter what, don’t answer any questions from the police that you aren’t one hundred percent on. There are going to be a lot of people fucked up from the storm in there with them, so let that be the cause of it. No reason to get fancy or hung up on details. These two have enough sense to lie their asses off. When you get inside, just make sure that the only story they have is that they were hurt in the storm and don’t know how.”

“You really think that will be good enough?”

“Normally, no,” said Will, grinning. “But that storm wasn’t normal. It could give even the most normal person a horrible night.”

“All right,” she said, sighing. “One more thing, though, don’t grin like that anymore, not until your hair grows back. It makes you look really creepy.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to avoid mirrors thus far.”

“I would keep that up for as long as you’re able.”

“Done.”

“Will, I know what you did was stupid, and dangerous, and that you probably ought to be dead, but I’m still glad you did it.”

“Me too,” he said, trying not to think about the carbine in the backpack or the pictures hidden with it. “Me too.”

The rest of the drive went smoothly, ending as Alison parked the car in front of the hospital, then running inside to see about some wheelchairs for Isaac and Jason. Will turned in his seat and smacked their legs until they were awake. Isaac looked like he wanted to kill him; Jason looked like he wanted to kill him, resurrect him, and then kill him again. Will gave them the grin he’d been counseled to avoid and said, “Rise and shine. We’re at the hospital.”