Kade
Duster and I stand at the far edge of the Portland docks, next to an abandoned warehouse and on the very edge of the water, which would glisten in the late-afternoon sun if it were not for all the filth running through it making it hard to see the bottom. Duster, who still looks like that blonde-haired little kid to me, stuffs his hands in his pockets and walks to the edge.
“They’re taking their time,” he says.
The men are ranged all around us. Mountain, called Mountain ’cause he’s about the biggest bastard any of us has ever seen. Earl, with his grey hair and his chewing tobacco and his way of looking at you without really looking at you. Glover, Barge, Noname, Fowler, Copeland. All of them in the Tidal Knights leathers, all of them packing pieces, all of them waiting for this Portland shit to be over. A month, we’ve been down here now. One goddamn month and fuck all has been sorted. I hear the impatience in Duster’s voice and it takes me back, all the way back to the trailer park. He’d had the same impatience in his voice back then.
“They’ll be here,” I say, though I’m not so sure. Italians are always a risky bunch, with their rituals and their made-men horseshit, thinking that because America has collectively decided they’re cool and mysterious that they are in fact cool and mysterious. Me, I only care about their guns and business. Business is all that I give a shit about when it comes to men who don’t wear the Tidal Knights leather.
Duster spits into the water and then turns to me. “I don’t like this, Cross.”
I don’t even bother telling Duster to use my first name. We’ve been calling each other Duster and Cross for so long neither of us can remember calling each other anything else.
“Yeah, me neither,” I say. “But this is their last chance. We’ll meet. We’ll sort it.”
Duster shrugs and paces over to me, turning and looking out over the water at a cargo-leaden boat drifting out to sea. “Do you remember that book I had?”
“Goddamn, Duster.” I laugh. “You’re always desperate to go down memory lane.”
“Fuck yourself. Do you remember it?”
He’s talking about an old travel book he found almost soaked through with rain in the trailer park. He dried that thing out for days and then made sure anyone who touched it handled it gently like it was some kind of ancient document. That’s where he got the name Duster, as far as I can remember, but it might’ve been because he was damn good with bikes, too. I don’t know; it was a long time ago.
“You know I do.”
“That was the shit, man,” Duster says. “I remember when we spent a whole afternoon under one of the trailers just looking at that and thinking about all the places we’d go.”
“Was Portland in the book?” I ask.
Duster grins. “Don’t think so. We didn’t get as far as we planned, Cross.”
“Nah, but we got far enough, I reckon. You’re just getting antsy.”
He spits again. “Damn right I am. The fuck is wrong with these people?” He nods down the dock, about a half-mile, where dockworkers load and unload cargo. “I know we’ve paid them off, but damn, why are we meeting in broad daylight, and why here?”
“Their leader is a man named Manuel,” I say. “Apparently he’s sketchy, maybe ill up here.” I tap the side of my head. “That’s what they tell me, anyway. Doesn’t trust us enough to meet us at night.”
“I remember back in the park when Noah Marsh kept us waiting when we were meant to trade some porno mags with him. Do you remember? Noah Marsh, two years older than us, and we sat around in that junkyard for two hours like goddamn idiots waiting for him to show. When he didn’t, I wanted to leave it. You remember? I wanted to go home but you said, ‘Fuck that,’ and dragged me to his parents’ trailer. He came out . . .”
“Him and three of his pals. Yeah, I remember.”
“And they started in on us, and did you we stand tall, Cross? Did we stand fuckin’ tall?”
“Boss,” Scud mutters.
Scud is the third in command, a lean, taut man who I don’t know too much about except that he gets the job done without question.
We turn and watch as the Italians drive to the waterfront in black tinted-windowed cars, four in total. The cars come to a stop and the Italians step out, dressed as usual in sleek suits with slicked-back hair and not a tattoo in sight, wearing big gold rings and chains, some of them with their shirts open and their chests on display to better show off the chains. Their leader, Manuel, is a wide man who’s always sweating, a bald shiny red head, and thick fingers which constantly worry at each other like ten wriggling worms.
He looks at me, nods, I nod back, and then he waves a hand.
We form a circle, the Tidal Knights one half, the Italians the other. Three Italians carry a crate between them into the middle of the circle.
“Thanks for coming,” Duster says, a little too loudly. He looks Manuel directly in the face. “We’ve been waiting a while, you know?”
I tap Duster on the arm. “They’re here now.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“We are here now. Listen to your boss.” Manuel squints at Duster.
“Sorry, amico, but he’s not my boss.”
“Enough shit,” I say. “Let’s get a look at the merchandise.”
“I will show you,” Manuel says.
He waddles to the crate, waits as one of his men cracks it open with a crowbar, and shoos them away and kneels down next to it. This is an effort for him, involving huffing and clutching at his knees with one hand and holding his other arm at the side for balance. But eventually he’s down near the guns: assault rifles, both SWAT-grade and Middle Eastern; submachine guns; handguns; grenades and flash-bangs and tear-gas; bulletproof vests. An all-you-can-eat buffet for gun nuts.
“Christmas has come early, Cross. Let’s see old Mr. Matthews give us detention now, eh?”
I grin despite myself. He’s right. Christmas really has come early.
Then Manuel starts handling the guns in a way that reminds me of my father, of the way my father would carelessly dance around the trailer with the revolver, waving it here and there, until eventually he waved it at the wrong angle and tripped and pulled the trigger and the top half of his head fell away like a section of rock dislodging from a cliff and tumbling to the land below.
“Maybe you shouldn’t—”
Manuel is as crazy as they say. He looks down the barrel of an AK-47 and his hand strays to the trigger.
I don’t think I’ll ever know if he wanted to do it or if it was an accident. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why his men, who clearly saw how it happened, assumed it was some kind of trick. I don’t think I’ll ever understand any of this shit.
He looks down the barrel of the AK-47 and he pulls the trigger. The bullet enters through his eye and exits through the back of his head. The fat man falls aside like all the bones and tendons and all the shit that holds him together has just been snatched from his body. “Uh,” he mumbles, as blood pours from the bloody eye socket. “Uh, uh, uh.”
And then the Italians are firing on us before anybody can talk any goddamn sense.
And then the Tidal Knights are firing back.
I wrench my pistol from my waistband and open up on them, hitting three men with ten bullets, and then kneeling down in the gravel to reload. Viper’s teeth bite into my side. Or that’s what it feels like. Two snake’s teeth biting down on my side.
“Fucking bastards!” I roar, snapping a clip into the pistol and opening up again, blood seeping through my shirt and into my leather. “Fucking idiots! The goddamn fool shot himself!”
Around two-hundred birds flutter from the eaves of the abandoned warehouse and fill the sky as bullets ricochet off gravel and slap into the water.
The Tidal Knights fire bullet after bullet into the Italians, peppering their cars, until there are more Tidal Knights left than Italians. The remaining Italians climb into their cars and roar away, one of the cars making a thunk-thunk noise as its burst tired grinds against the concrete. I grit my teeth, watching them go, the smell of gun smoke and blood and shit all around me, my ears ringing from the repeated gunfire, my eyes hazy from sweat, stinging.
“Boss,” one of the men mutters.
Someone snaps: “What the fuck was that?”
“Fuckin’ killed himself.”
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, fuck—Duster. What the fuck? Boss. Boss.”
When I see Duster laid out on the floor with bullet holes in his chest, I forget about my own wound. I walk on my knees across blood and spent cartridges and lean over him. He stares up at me blankly. Duster has always had an open face, the sort of face people like. He was always the popular one at school, the one girls giggled over, the one the bullies would leave alone because he could make them laugh. He was always the emotional one, the one who said if he thought something wasn’t fair. He was always the one who wasn’t scared to talk about the past, even though the past held bad shit for both of us.
He grins at me; blood seeps between his teeth, staining his gums, and drips down his cheeks.
“Sorry—Cross.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “I guess—I ain’t so—handy—after all.” He laughs, a nasty ragged sound.
I look around at the men, willing somebody to do something, but then I see it in their faces. They know death. We all know death. And Duster’s dying.
We gather round, looking down at him as he breathes his last.
When it’s over, I stand up, gritting my teeth at the tugging pain in my side, and limp to where Manuel’s fat dead body rests.
“Fuckin’ bastard,” I hiss, kicking the corpse. “Fuckin’ idiot.” I kick him again and again until the blood turns my leather crimson.
“We have to go, Boss,” Scud says. “We need to get to a safehouse. Rest up.”
“I know,” I say. “Pick Duster up. We’re not leavin’ him here.”
“Yes, Boss.”
Scud lays Duster over the back of his bike. I climb onto the back of Mountain’s bike, riding secondary because of this damned wound, head feeling like it’s about to just slide clean from my shoulders, and the Tidal Knights ride out.