Take Me, Outlaw(60)

Ditch lowered his Glock, and scratched his head with a dazed expression. “Did...did they just do a drive-by and forget to shoot, or...?”



“They didn't forget anything,” Bard replied, looking down at the sidewalk in front of the Nest. “Look.”



We all followed his gaze. A medium-sized unmarked cardboard box had been dropped on the ground.



An uneasy murmur rippled through the crowd of Reapers, and the word “bomb” was whispered more than once. Bard stood and looked at it for a long moment, furrowing his brow. Finally, he called over Boomer, a Reaper who'd served with an IED disposal unit in Iraq.



Boomer had been honorably discharged after one such explosive accidentally went off, shredding part of his face in the process and damaging his brain enough to cause occasional seizures. The tissue from his perpetually-bloodshot left eye down to his jaw was still a mess of lumpy grafts.



Boomer sucked his teeth thoughtfully, squinting at the package and muttering under his breath. At last, he looked up at Bard, forced a grin, and shrugged. “Well, it doesn't look like a bomb, chief” he said. “No wires or cords, no ticking or buzzing, none of that shit. Then again, I once saw a cell phone jammed with plastique that looked harmless as fuck until some asshole held it up to his ear and it got remote-detonated, so if they went that route...”



“How can we be sure?” Bard asked, cutting him off.



Boomer sighed heavily. “Wish I could say I was glad you asked that. The best way to be sure would be to bring in a remote-controlled detector, to scan it for chemicals, electronics, all that shit—then use a pressurized water charge to cut through the works cleanly so it doesn't blow. But since we don't have a remote detector or any of that other stuff, the second best way is for me to pick the fucker up with my hands and hope it doesn't blow, then take it someplace safe to open it carefully and hope it doesn't blow that time, either.”



Bard raised his eyebrows. “Well. When you put it that way, I guess you'd better get to it, then. Soonest begun, soonest done.”



Boomer let out a wry chuckle. “Uh-huh. Okay, I'm gonna need you all to just, uh, take about twelve big steps back from this thing, okay? Even a couple more than that, if you can. And if you've got cell phones on you, you'd better turn them the fuck off right now. You get a call and this thing even gets a whiff of the wrong signal, we could all end up as instant gazpacho.”



This colorful image was more than enough to make all of us immediately comply. Boomer waited gamely. “Everyone's phone off? Good. Okay, time to test how steady these mitts are after a decade and a half of hard drinking.”



As we all looked on, wide-eyed and tense, Boomer gingerly gripped the box by the sides with both hands and lifted it off the ground. He slowly straightened his body with a steady, almost graceful motion, and rotated his body on his heel until he was facing the Nest. He paused, and then leaned his head over, turning it until his ear was almost touching the top of the box. After a long moment, he lowered his nose to the box, inhaling deeply several times to detect chemical odors. He nodded to himself, satisfied, and then began to slowly walk the box toward the Nest with the fateful, funereal stride of a pallbearer.



“Nic, get the door for him, please,” Bard said mildly. I glanced over at him. Even though his voice sounded level and his expression was neutral, his face was the color of Swiss cheese.



I gently stepped over to the door, opening it. Boomer stepped through, then turned to me and winked. “My nose itches,” he cracked. “Pray for us all.”



Ha ha, Boomer. But I understood. He was probably practically shitting himself with terror, and gallows humor had always been his favorite coping mechanism. Besides, as he'd often commented, “Shit, a face like mine? I'd better be fucking funny.”



Boomer disappeared into the Nest for what felt like a year, even though a digital clock in the window of a nearby pawn shop told us it was only four minutes. When he came out, we breathed a collective sigh of relief.



“No bomb?” Bard asked tersely.



Boomer shook his head. It was often hard to precisely read his expression due to the mask of thick and mottled scar tissue, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that he didn't seem relieved at all. If anything, he looked far more concerned than he had before.



“No bomb, chief,” Boomer replied, “but, uh, still nothing you're gonna like. You'd better take a look at this.”



We filed back in. The box was sitting on the bar, its cardboard flaps open to reveal the contents.

A severed human ear sat on a wad of bloody cotton. Several flies had already started to hop and buzz all over it, and I waved them away to get a closer look. An all-too-familiar barbed wire earring hung from the lobe. No one had to say it out loud—we all knew who it had belonged to.



It was Growler's.



Next to it was a folded scrap of paper. Bard reached into the box for it, and I could see a gentle tremble in his hand. He unfolded it, read it, then sighed heavily and tossed it onto the bar for the rest of us to see.



The handwriting was a messy scrawl that seemed almost mocking: “Ho ho ho! Guess which pieces you'll get next???”



The room filled with rumbles of anger and disgust from the Reapers. We liked thinking of ourselves as badasses, invincible, untouchable. Sure, we'd embraced the eternal motto of “Shit happens,” and there was a certain acceptance that death could come suddenly for any of us, in a fight or a crash. But the idea that one of us could be snatched off the street like this, tortured and mutilated, while the rest of us were helpless to stop it—I wasn't used to that idea. None of us were.



I turned to Bard, feeling my chest tighten with rage. “Now do we go to war?”



Bard nodded slowly.





Chapter Ten

Growler



Losing the ear wasn't much fun, but I'd certainly been through a lot worse before in terms of pain. A quick slash, a spill of warmth, the brief but inevitable shock of seeing a piece of yourself detached and held up between someone else's thumb and forefinger, and then the stitches were a little rough. To be honest, the stitches were probably the worst part of the ear bit—even a big, dumb dude like me could tell that meant they wanted to make sure I didn't lose too much blood.



Which probably meant they had worse planned for me, and wanted to make sure I stayed alive for it.



Which, y'know. Kinda sucked, when I really let myself think it over.



Losing the fingers—three of them, so far—was no picnic either. Each of those took a long, heavy, meaty series of twists and snaps for the bolt-cutter to work its way through the bone. Worse, they didn't bother stitching those wounds. No, for those, they preferred to heat up a fireplace poker and straight-up cauterize the fuckers, until they sizzled and smelled like frying steak. I didn't know whether I'd end up surviving this, but I knew that if I did, I probably wouldn't be ordering up a T-bone at a diner anytime soon.



Of course, there was the very high probability that with all of this digit-cutting going on, my pecker was almost certainly on the endangered species list. And with it, its lifelong companions, Righty and Lefty. That was a king-hell bummer to consider. I mean, okay, with all these scars of mine I'm no oil painting, and I'd only get pussy occasionally compared to some of the other Reapers—but occasional pussy was still a far better fate than just feeling a weird itch in my pants whenever a hot chick walked by.



The man with the scalpel and the bolt-cutter had used layer upon layer of duct tape to secure me to a stiff wooden chair, stark naked, in a cramped room that was dark and cold. It only took about fifteen minutes on the hard surface for my ass to feel like it had been whacked twenty or thirty times with a fucking canoe paddle. After that, he had inserted a couple of IVs in my arms and taped them into place carefully, positioning the tubes so I couldn't bite through them. As he did, he explained that one needle was to keep me nourished and hydrated, while the other was to keep me constipated. Once that tape went on, they had no intention of taking it off, even for a bathroom break. At least until they were ready to take off the limb it was holding down.



I'd never seen Mr. Bolt-Cutter before—a tall, thin guy with very dark skin, muddy brown eyes, and a head full of curly black hair—but I knew who he was as soon as he walked in wearing a white surgical mask, produced a scalpel and deftly sliced my ear off with it.



We'd all heard of him—mostly whispers and spooky stories. Sure, Vole may have been Giovanni's favorite errand boy, but when it came to the really bloody stuff, Big G had always relied on Tommy Buonasera, or Tommy Bone-Saw to his friends. He was often referred to as Giovanni's favorite nephew, but with these Italians and their “family” bullshit, it was hard to tell whether they were actually related or what. The Bonaccorsos had paid Tommy’s way through medical school with the promise that he'd be their “private physician” and patch their guys up whenever they got into scrapes.



Tommy went along with it, but it turned out that the kid was kind of a psycho asshole who showed a serious preference for torturing and killing guys instead of saving them. His knowledge of anatomy made him pretty fucking good at it, too. He could make it so quick you never even felt it, or he could stretch it out for weeks, even months. So even though he got to keep being the family surgeon, he also became its top hired killer, especially for “message jobs” where things needed to be really ugly.