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.
“Cold, man.” Lucas lowers his hand. “That’s some really cold shit.”
“What can I say? I don’t get to watch much television.” I’m fucking pissed. Garrett’s sent me out here to stab an F-list celebrity in the carotid? No fucking way. Lucas is an idiot, no doubt about it, but he’s also on some fucking franchised TV series. When dealers are murdered in cold blood, it’s rarely ever reported in the news. A cast member of some shitty TV show, though? That’s bound to get a little attention.
My hand’s been closed around the knife handle in my pocket this whole time. I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to stab this guy right in the goddamn heart. That plan’s not going to fly now, though. I left New Orleans so I wouldn’t go back to jail. I sure as shit don’t want to end up incarcerated in Los Angeles. From what I’ve heard, Chino’s no picnic. My hand uncurls from around the knife handle.
“All right, man,” Lucas says. “Just because you don’t watch the show doesn’t mean you can’t show a guy a little respect. I wouldn’t come to your place of work and give you attitude, would I?”
“This is my place of work, and you are giving me attitude. I guess we’re even. Thirty-six grand,” I say, holding out my hand.
Lucas shakes his head. “Garrett said twenty-five. I only brought twenty-three with me on account of the fact that I figured he’s a stand-up dude and wouldn’t mind spotting me the rest until Friday.”
Has he ever met Garrett? I find it hard to believe that he has. No one in their right mind would be going around accusing him of being a stand-up dude if they had actually spent more than three seconds in his company. I shake my head slowly.
“No dice. Garrett has a strict policy about taking product up-front before payment. Doesn’t fucking happen.” I don’t know why I’m giving the guy a hard time. Garrett didn’t give me a specific figure to take from his mark. He said I could keep whatever he brought along to the deal, and the contents of the rucksack is worth about five dollars, max, so twenty-three grand is a win for sure. Now that I’ve decided I’m not going to kill him, I don’t feel bad about being a dick to him, though. It’s like he owes me and he doesn’t even know it. I make him sweat it out for a moment before I look away, sighing. “All right. Fine. But Garrett’s not gonna be a happy man. He’s gonna come looking for you.” Damn straight he is. He’s gonna be raging that I didn’t finish the job. He’ll probably send Raj or Colby out to finish up after me, and then he’s going to hunt me down and have me explain why I sacked out on something he told me very specially he wanted me to take care of.
Lucas, the shitty actor with the shitty dreads, just gives me a loose smile, like he’s not in total control of his facial features. I know the look. Too much coke and your face feels numb as fuck. Too much heroin, and who knows what your goddamn face feels like. Who knows what goddamn planet you’re on. It’s a miracle this guy is even standing.
He has a ratty, torn duffel bag hanging from his shoulder. “Hand it over,” I tell him, pointing.
Lucas sways like a drunken stalk of corn. He allows the strap to fall from his shoulder, catching the bag before it can fall. “I need to get something out of here first,” he says slowly. “Can you hold this?” He holds out a handful of stuff—keys, his cell phone, a pair of tangled up headphones. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? And what am I, his motherfucking manservant? I stare him down, waiting for him to get the picture and start taking this whole thing a little more seriously. This is the problem with living in Los Angeles: there are too many soft-headed idiots here that think the world adores them and wants to bend over backwards to make their charmed lives easier.
Lucas clears his throat. “You are a very unhappy individual, my man. You need therapy.”
Fucking therapy. If one more person asks me who my therapist is, I’m legit going to pop them in the fucking throat. “I need you to get the fuck on with this so I can go home.” The intensity in my voice must finally break through the drugged haze inside his head, because Lucas swallows.
“Sure, man. Sure. Just trying to look out for you.” He unzips the bag slowly, and something about the way his hand is shaking makes me suddenly suspicious. He was easy-breezy a second ago, but now he’s anxious, his lips white, his shoulders inching slowly higher and higher up toward his ears. A realization hits me: he doesn’t have twenty-three thousand dollars in that busted-up bag of his. He has something far more unpleasant. I reach out, stilling his hand on the zip.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me, Lucas. Do you want to die?”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Lucas drops his cell phone, his earphones clattering to the ground after it, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. He stares down at his belongings on the ground, a spider-webbed crack running across the screen of his oversized smart phone, and I can see his pulse hammering in his neck like a runaway freight train.
“Aren’t you going to pick that up?” I ask. Lucas doesn’t know what to do; fear and indecision are warring each other in his bloodshot eyes, plain as day. Slowly, I stoop down, collecting his things, careful not to take my eyes off him, ready in case he finally manages to grow a pair and opens that bag of his. I stand, and the guy hasn’t moved a muscle. Confident he won’t try anything stupid, I glance down at his phone. There’s a message on the lit up, fractured screen, which reads:
G Money: Is it done?
G Money. Why am I not surprised that this dude has a contact in his phone called fucking G Money? Probably some rich Hollywood exec waiting on his high. Or maybe the dude in the busted-up vehicle that dropped him off here ten minutes ago. Either way, I don’t like the sound of the message. Is it done? People don’t generally use a term like that to describe a drug deal. Not in my experience anyway. You got the stuff? You met up with Molly yet? Are you done?
“Is it done?” implies something else altogether.
I narrow my eyes at Lucas holding out his phone to him. He looks like he’s just shit his expensive, torn-up jeans. “Want to tell me why you’re here right now?” I ask calmly. Inside, I am anything but calm, though. My blood is lighter fluid, and I’m just waiting for a match. I’m about to go up in flames.
“Look, man, I’m just doing what I’m told, okay. I owed him a lot of money, and he said this was the only way to wipe the slate clean. He said if I—”
I punch him square in the jaw, lightning fast and hard as fuck. He doesn’t see it coming. No one ever does. Back when I used to fight for money, I could always count on my right hook to hit a guy’s off switch if I had a clean shot at him. I don’t hit Lucas that hard. I don’t want him out cold. I hit him hard enough to let him know he’s walked into a situation he should have run from, but soft enough that he’ll still be able to talk once he catches his breath. He hits the ground hard, ass first. I know how bad the spiraling pain shooting up his coccyx and into his spine is right now, ringing alarm bells inside his head. Grabbing hold of him by the shirt, I lift him up a little and I slam my fist into his face one more time, just to reinforce the fact that I mean fucking business.
“Garrett?” I say calmly. “Garrett told you to kill me?”
Lucas blinks, nodding frantically.
Well isn’t that just the most ironic news of the entire fucking evening? I shove him back down to the ground, snatching the duffel bag away from him. Inside: a sawed-off shotgun, and a “Tickle Me Elmo” stuffed toy, grinning manically up at me. No money whatsoever.
I stare at Elmo. Elmo stares at me.
“Have you ever fired a sawed-off?” I ask, my tone mild.
“What? No. No, man. I haven’t.” Lucas is jittery, crashing from his high. Adrenaline has a nasty way of bringing the mind sharply back into focus. I remove the shotgun from the bag and break it, checking down the barrels.
Buckshot.
I snap the thing closed again. “D’you know how close you’d have to be standing to me in order to kill me with this shit?” I don’t look at him. I stare at a peeling poster on the alley wall. “DJ Customize, Foam & Fuck party, Tuesday May 2nd. $20 entry. Doors at 6:30 p.m.” I have no idea what a foam and fuck party is, but 6:30 in the evening seems a little early for anything even remotely related.
“I don’t know. I have no idea, man. I told him I didn’t have a gun, and he told me to find one and fast. It’s all I could get my hands on.”
“Well. You sawed it off behind the choke. You know what that means?” I show him the gun. He shakes his head wildly. He’s sweating badly, beads of perspiration rolling down his face. “The longer the barrel, the better accuracy you have with a weapon like this. If you saw the barrel off behind the choke, you can forget about accuracy altogether though. The blast pattern of your ordinance is gonna go wide. And buckshot is already designed to do that anyway, so… I’m gonna say you would have had to be real close to kill me with this thing. You’d have seriously fucked me up, but I wouldn’t have been dead. And you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I would have had plenty of time to take out my knife and cut you open from stem to sternum.” I remove the knife from my pocket as I say the words, and Lucas’s eyes round out, the size of polished silver dollars.
“Please, man. Please. I just needed to clear my debt. I didn’t want to kill you.”
I didn’t want to kill him either. He and I are one and the same. We were both sent here to accomplish a goal, though, and it seems as though shaky, incompetent Lucas was actually going to follow through. I crouch down, turning the blade over and over in my hands.
“I don’t really know what to do with you now, Lucas. I was going to let you go, but…”
“Please. Please, man. If you’re going to kill me, don’t fuck me up with that thing. My mom will have nightmares for the rest of her life. Let me go out high. Let me go out so fucking high I don’t even realize it’s over.”
I cock my head to one side, thinking about this. I’m not really fond of blood. It’s messy, and the copper tang of the iron makes my stomach uneasy. If Lucas dies with a hypodermic hanging out of his arm on the other hand, things will be nice and clean. No mess. No intestines gathered around him like coiled, slick, wet snakes on the filthy concrete. No bile or shit from punctured internal organs.
“Okay. That sounds fair to me,” I agree. “Where is it?”
Lucas cries as he removes a slim, flat glasses case from his pocket and hands it over to me. I almost feel bad for the guy. Almost. Inside the case: a spoon, a length of rubber tubing, a lighter, and a small baggie containing about a hundred bucks worth of heroin, which is to say not very much heroin at all. “Is this it?”
Lucas nods miserably.
“I guess it’s your lucky day, then, huh?” There’s a chance he might not overdose on this amount of H. A small chance, but still. Could be someone finds him and calls an ambulance.
I methodically cook up for him while he sits in a strange, accepting kind of silence. I take his arm, ready to tie off around his bicep, but then I notice his veins are all black and collapsed underneath his skin, and I swear under my breath. “Where?” I demand.
Lucas reluctantly toes off his right shoe, then removes his sock, holding onto the balled-up material tightly in his hand as he watches me. The veins in his foot aren’t much better than the ones in his arm, but I manage to find one that still has flow to it. Lucas begins to sob. Somewhere, distantly, I’m aware that most people would feel something in this situation. They might feel…I don’t know. Remorse? Guilt? Fear of being caught? My emotions are running on an even keel as I slide the needle into Lucas’s foot and I slowly press the plunger down. I do it really slowly. He sighs, the panic and fear melting away as the drugs instantly take hold, crashing over him, and then a strange thing happens. I stop. A thought has occurred to me. What a weird gift it would be to this fucking idiot to not kill him right now. He’s not expecting to wake up from this ride. What would he do if he did? Would the surprising gift of life be the wake up call he needs to stop using? Would he hurry straight home, pack up his shit, and leave town immediately? Check himself into rehab?
I doubt it. Once heroin has a hold on you, it rarely ever lets go. It takes a strong will and an iron determination to wrestle yourself free from the grasps of the kind of addiction Lucas is saddled with, and I don’t think he has either.
Still…
I feel strangely benevolent as I withdraw the needle from his foot and place it on the ground beside his unconscious body. Lucas is lost in his dreams, riding motherfucking unicorns and swimming in rainbows, having the time of his life right now, but there’s a very, very good chance he’s going to wake up at some point and want to die.
Let’s see what he does with that.
I slide the sawed-off shotgun back into his duffel bag, and I loop the strap over my head. The rucksack I brought here, filled with chalk and baby powder, gets dumped in the trash as I make my way out of the alleyway.
I walk away. As I do so, I begin to plan the many entertaining ways in which I could murder Garrett Jonas. Not tonight, though. It turns out I really don’t have the energy for murder tonight, and besides…when I arrive home, letting myself into my apartment, I find I have a visitor. In the darkness, someone is waiting for me, sitting in my favorite chair by the window, moonlight spilling across their chest as they sleep.
David.
For some reason, I’m not as shocked as I should be. I never told him where I was going when I left New Orleans. I didn’t even tell him which state I was headed toward. For all my older brother knew, I could have been in Mexico, and yet somehow here he is, crashed out in my apartment, waiting for me to come home.
He wakes up, blinking blearily into the darkness. It takes him a second to locate me in the shadows, then he looks up at me and smiles grimly. “Hey, Tommy. Long time no see.”
“What are you doing here?” I dump the duffel bag unceremoniously on the floor.
“It’s Genevieve.” He pauses a moment, allowing that to hang between us, and then he says, “You know I wouldn’t have come otherwise. You know I would never have risked your safety. This is bad, though. Really fucking bad.” He takes a cigarette pack out of his pocket, removes a cigarette and lights it. He holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat, then exhales heavily, sending twin jets of smoke pluming from his nostrils. His eyes meet mine properly for the first time. “It’s time for you to come back to the Quarter, Tommy. It’s time for you to come home.”