Ruger looked at Tony and smiled as he watched the man slowly die.
He found it fascinating to watch as Tony tried to cling to consciousness, tried to deny the coiled snake of pain in his gut where the Jamaican’s bullet had capped him. Gut shots were agonizing, Ruger knew, and he marveled at the manner in which Tony tried to bull his way through what must be searing pain. Idly, Ruger wondered if the loss of blood was providing Tony with some kind of insulation against the pain. God knows he’d lost a lot of it. Tony was sitting in a lake of it, and more of it was pooled around his feet. The fresh-cut copper smell of blood teased Ruger’s senses, and he wondered, not for the first time, why no one had ever made an aftershave that smelled like fresh blood.
The car rolled past a sign that read: WELCOME TO PINE DEEP! Ruger felt a cold wind blow through his chest. It was scary, but he liked it. He mouthed the name of the town, silently tasting it. Pine Deep. Yes. He closed his eyes and for just a moment he thought he heard a voice say: Ruger, you are my left hand. But no one had spoken. He opened his eyes and stared at the unfolding black road, feeling the prickle of expectant excitement in his chest, but at a loss to understand why it was there or what it meant.
Boyd asked again what the fuck was wrong with Tony, and Ruger watched as Tony tried to say something but only managed to blow a small bubble of viscous red between his purple lips. Ruger was fascinated by the bubble as it expanded, filled with Tony’s ragged breath, and then popped. A mist of tiny droplets dotted the windshield.
“Yo! Tony!” Boyd snapped.
“Shut up, Boyd,” whispered Ruger. He always spoke in a whisper. It was all he could manage since a spic in Holmesburg Prison had stabbed him in the throat during a small dispute between Ruger’s own Aryan Brotherhood and the brown-skinned critters on the Block. The spic had wanted to kill him so bad he had a hard-on, an actual hard-on, as he drove a sharpened spoon into Karl’s throat. Ruger could feel the hard length of the man’s dick when he had grabbed the spic’s groin and squeezed it. Makeshift knife in the throat or not, Ruger had all but ripped the man’s pecker off before one of the other Aryan Brothers had stepped in and cut the spic’s throat with a sliver of sheet metal that he’d stolen from the machine shop. The other Brother had taken the rap for the kill, which was fine for Ruger because he didn’t get any time added to his stretch. The spoon had not really done him much harm, just a nick on the larynx and a bit of pain. Big deal. Pain didn’t mean a goddamn thing to Ruger. Pain was just a “thing” that sometimes happened. And if his voice was now a hoarse and ghostly whisper, well, that was fine. It scared the shit out of a lot of people, and it made them listen closely to whatever he had to say.
“What the hell, Karl? He almost wrapped us around that truck!”
“He’s doing fine,” Ruger whispered. “Just fine.”
Tony turned and looked at Ruger for a moment, his brows knitted together and glistening with cold sweat.
“Fine, my ass!” Boyd said. “He took one back there.”
“So did you. So what?”
“Yeah, but I only got clipped and I ain’t driving the fucking car. Look at him, man! He’s halfway to being dead.”
More than halfway, Ruger thought. “He’s fine. Aren’t you, Tony?”
Tony glanced at him again, his eyes bright with fever but seeing only about half of the things he was looking at. He tried to speak, wanted to actually agree with Boyd, wanted to stop the car so one of them could drive. Boyd had only been shot through the left biceps; he could drive if he had to. Ruger hadn’t even been touched, but when he looked in Ruger’s eyes, into those icy reptilian eyes, Tony couldn’t find the courage to say anything. He felt trapped by that ophidian stare and by the bullet in his belly, completely unable to understand why Ruger was pushing him to drive. It didn’t make any sense to him. Ruger was a survivor type, so why would he risk dying in such a stupid and pointless way? Tony had never been able to figure Ruger out, and lately it had been even harder. He knew that Ruger was one evil son of a bitch, but now he thought that he was a little crazy, too.
Maybe more than a little.
Boyd had seen Ruger go crazy on the Jamaicans back at the warehouse. He’d shot nearly all of them himself and then instead of fleeing like anyone halfway sane, the crazy fuck had taken a shovel from the trunk and used the blade to chop them up. Boyd had thrown up watching it and when he’d tried to pull Ruger away, the psychopath had wheeled on him, his faced streaked with blood, and had given him a look that made Boyd want to piss his pants. He nearly did.
“Aren’t you, Tony?” Ruger asked again, leaning on the question and nudging the driver’s shoulder with the tip of a long white finger.
Tony nodded, just once, and then concentrated on the road. For a few minutes he managed to keep the car steady, but with each mile, each minute, it became harder to do. It was like trying to hold on to something from a dream.
Boyd shook his head disgustedly and sank back against the cushion. His arm hurt like all hell, but the bleeding had stopped. He had a towel wound around it, and kept it in place with steady pressure from his good hand. Tears burned in his eyes, but he turned his head and looked out at the night, hoping that Ruger hadn’t seen them.
Ruger, of course, had. His cold eyes missed very little. He saw Boyd’s tears just as clearly as he saw the blood and the life seeping out of Tony’s gut. He upped the wattage on his smile and chuckled low in his throat, too low to be heard over the roar of the engine.
Three minutes later, Tony crashed the car.
Chapter 3
(1)
“This place is a slaughterhouse.”
Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro nodded but said nothing. He and Detective Vince LaMastra stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway of the warehouse. Ferro was tall, his younger partner much taller, and their shadows stretched far across the bloody floor. There were corpses and spent shell casings everywhere. The stink of cordite hung like a pall in the close air of the warehouse, but beneath the gunpowder reek they could smell the blood, like freshly sheared copper.
Ferro tapped the shoulder of a uniformed officer who was busily sketching the scene in his notebook. “Al, who’s been called?”
The officer looked up. “Hey, Sarge. Some mess, huh?”
“Yeah. OK Corral. Who’s been called?” he asked again.
“M.E.’s on his way, and the photographer’s already around back taking some shots. A BOLO’s been sent out already for Ruger’s car.”
“You’re sure it was Ruger?” LaMastra asked, brightening.
“Yeah, the surveillance team got a positive on him and was about to make the call to you guys when this shit storm went down.”
“Where are they?”
“Northeastern Hospital. Ruger must have sniffed them ’cause he fired a clip into the van when he and the others took off.”
“Jim and Nelly hurt bad?”
Al snorted. “They’re lucky as shit. Cuts from glass and debris, but they hit the deck on the first shot and all the other rounds just tore up the can. Missed them completely.”
“What
