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Dark River

Chap Taylor

September 27, 1:33 PM

Billy Dunn had been off the prison bus for thirty-seven minutes. As he stood in the parking lot of the McAlester, Oklahoma bus station, savoring his first cherry slushee in two years, he had to concede that his immediate options were limited.

It’s not that he didn’t have strengths. Billy was smarter than many folks suspected. He looked like the cover of a romance novel with his shirt off. He was both loyal and fearless. But aside from the slushee, all he had to show for twenty-seven years on the wrong side of the law were eight broken bones, two stab wounds, a graze from a .22 rifle that left a permanent furrow across one ass cheek, and a belt buckle that spelled out Prison Rodeo Champion in fourteen-karat gold filigree. As three killers emerged from an SUV in the bus station parking lot, it suddenly occurred to Billy that it might be that belt buckle that finally got him killed.

The three men leapt from a black Suburban and closed the distance before Billy had a chance to react, pinning him against a brick wall.

“That’s a pretty belt buckle,” the leader said. “Win that at Big Mac?”

Billy assumed he was the leader because he was the one talking, but there was really no way to tell.  The three men looked identical, like they belonged to a CrossFit gym patronized by white supremacist golfers. They were aggressively fit, muscles straining skin so pale as to be nearly translucent. They wore matching polo shirts, buttoned to the neck, and chinos made out of some kind of athletic fabric. Strangely, all three had blue eyes.

As Billy took a half-step backward, trying to figure which one he was going to hit first, he felt something cold start working its way up his spine. Billy didn’t get scared. He did, however, know enough to get cautious sometimes. There was something disturbing about these three, beyond the obvious fact that they had ambushed him in a bus station parking lot. A librarian he had once seduced in Wichita had told him eyes were windows to the soul. He believed it. He had jailed with killers whose eyes glowed evil. But these three had something he had never seen; their eyes seemed vacant, like blue glass portals into empty space, like windows to the fact that they had no souls at all.

“If you know what it is, then you know where I got it,” Billy replied.

“That would make you Billy Dunn, yes?”

The cold feeling spread from his spine to the pit of his stomach. How did they know his name? But he had just invested his last $3.27 in the slushee and this Nazi golf team was fucking with the experience.

“To be honest, friend, people who end a question with a question annoy the shit out of me. Also, maybe go ahead and fuck yourself.”

The leader smiled. He had the most perfect teeth Billy had ever seen. “The reason I ask, word is you used to boost cars for Clay Miller in Tulsa. Word is you could’ve skated on a two-year auto beef if you had whispered some names into the DA’s ear. But you didn’t. And now here it is, two years later, and you’re at the bus station with no one to meet you and fuck all but a slushee to your name. Seems a poor way to repay your loyalty.”

The mention of Clay Miller’s name surprised Billy even more. It also jogged something in his memory. Just before his release, he had heard rumors of a new gang. Not in the prison system yet, but on the streets of the Southwest. Whispers of some truly terrifying crews being decimated in Amarillo and Oklahoma City. A meth ring in Lubbock who had disappeared into thin air. Billy hadn’t believed it. Convicts were like old women on the yard, telling fairy tales to felons. But just now he was starting to wonder if the men who had him pinned against a wall were proof those stories were true. The White Circle, they had called it.

As if he could read Billy’s mind, the leader smiled again. “Clay’s down in Dallas now. Did you know that? He’s hiring an army. Wants to be boss of the whole city. I guess he’s too important to remember the release date of a lowly hot car booster. But we don’t forget. We value loyalty. And we could use a cowboy like you.”

Were they trying to recruit him? Billy hadn’t cliqued up in prison when the stakes were a lot higher than they were in a bus station parking lot. He sure as shit wasn’t riding with any gang that required him to dress like Urkel. But truth be told, he had been wondering why there hadn’t been someone waiting to pick him up. Not Clay. Clay Miller was on top of the mountain. But why hadn’t Eleanor come to get him? He’d done two years and never mentioned her name.

Thinking about it, Billy forgot the cold warning in his belly and started to get mad. And since Eleanor wasn’t there, his anger transferred to the three white weirdos who were. He nodded like he was open to the idea and popped the lid off of the slushee with his thumb. He was going to throw it into the leader’s face, hopefully buying himself enough time to lay out one or both of his wing men. And if this bus station parking lot was where he was going to cash in his chips, at least he would permanently stain that goddamn polo shirt.

His slushee arm had just started its forward motion when a giant Comanche crushed one of the wing men’s skulls with a pipe wrench.

The White Circle soldier – if that’s what they were – dropped like a bag of meat. The leader saw the reaction in Billy’s face before he heard the wet crunch of pipe burying itself in cranium. He spun toward the Comanche, pulling up his polo to reveal an inside-the-belt holster containing a ZEV Technologies OZ9, a Ferrari-level upgrade to your basic gangbanger’s Glock that Billy had never seen on the street. The leader’s movements were fast and smooth and Billy would have been genuinely impressed if the Comanche hadn’t swung the wrench faster, connecting with the pale man’s temple like Rafael Palmeiro on a fresh tab of Winstrol. The Zev went flying one way and the leader went flying in the other, eyes up to Jesus as he landed in a heap.

The Comanche had seemingly appeared from nowhere. It had all gone down so fast that Billy and the surviving White Circle soldier were still standing in the same places they had been when the assault began. Billy stared into the albino’s weirdly ageless features. The White Circle soldier stared back. He didn’t turn to face the Comanche. He didn’t look scared. He just stared blankly at Billy like he was waiting for a transmission from the void behind his blue eyes.

The Comanche moved toward him but he was still three steps short when the White Circle man cleared another Zev from a holster at the small of his back. He was even faster than his leader and he might have put a bullet into the big Indian, but he didn’t. Instead, he planted the Zev under his chin and pulled the trigger. Blood and brains geysered from the top of his skull. He folded to the pavement like a skin suit.

Billy had seen plenty of violence in his life but what had just gone down was so far beyond his previous experience that he just stood there, two beats behind comprehension. Brain and pieces of skull were spattered across his Panhandle Slim shirt. Another beat and he realized that he was still holding the slushee, the top was off, and it looked a lot chunkier than it had when it came out of the nozzle in the convenience store. He threw it away.

The Comanche turned to look at him, still holding the wrench, and Billy braced for what was about to be a very short fight.

“Want a ride?”

2:40PM

An hour later they were speeding down US-69, heading for Dallas. Billy sat uneasily in the passenger seat of the Comanche’s Escalade. He was still wearing whatever part of the White Circle soldier he hadn’t been able to wipe off with convenience store napkins. Even more disturbing, the three dead men were piled in the back of the SUV, cocooned in garbage bags and duct tape. The Comanche had come prepared and it had taken less than a minute to heave them into the Cadillac and disappear.

Billy took a slow breath and asked the obvious question, “Who were those guys?”

“They’re nobody. Just mutts nipping at Clay’s heels.”

“And you’re not worried about dropping three bodies in broad daylight?”

“If the McAlester City Bus Station had a hard drive, we have a guy who’d wipe it,” the Comanche replied. “But what they have are two VCR’s from the Bush administration and  cameras that haven’t worked since Obama’s.”

“How about driving to Dallas with three dead bodies in your truck?” Billy asked. “I got out of prison this morning. I’d like to avoid going back before dinner.”

The Comanche turned toward Billy like a battleship sighting in on a row boat. He was six-foot-six, muscles straining the seams of an expensive-looking cowboy suit. A neck tattoo of Quanah Parker peaked over the collar of his shirt.

“Want to join them?”

Billy did not. He had figured out the Indian’s identity. And he wasn’t all that sure he wouldn’t have been safer back in the parking lot.

The Comanche’s government name was Francis Yackeyonny. He was Clay Miller’s number two and chief enforcer. Billy had heard that on the rez they called him Pia Mupitsl, which translated as something like “Giant Cannibal Owl.” It was a creature from Comanche mythology, a hairy giant who walked with a cottonwood tree as a walking stick and ate children. It fit Francis Yackeyonny like that wrench had fit his baseball mitt-sized hands.

So Billy did something completely out of character. He counted slowly to three before responding. “I was starting to think you boys had forgot me.”

Francis turned back to the road, “You shut your mouth and did your time. That earned you a ride to Dallas ‘cause Clay is putting guys on. But don’t get confused. You’re just a grin in a pair of Wranglers. You get left in a ditch, no one cries but your mama.”

“That last fella …” Billy started, genuinely confused. “Why would he eat a bullet ‘stead of putting it into you or me?”

Francis gave him a second look that implied there would not be a third. “You know that strong, silent thing Eastwood does in all his pictures?” Billy nodded.

“You should do it now.”

Two hours later, Francis pulled into a truck wash in the Fort Worth stockyards. As soon as the automatic door finished descending behind them, he exited the Escalade, leaving the keys in the ignition and Billy in the passenger seat. As Mexicans in Hazmat suits swarmed the truck with cleaning supplies and a bone saw, Billy realized that he was supposed to follow.

He trailed the Comanche across a Texas-sized parking lot, toward an interconnected complex of warehouses. A giant neon sign identified the place as Levon’s Ragtag. Billy didn’t believe in heaven until he followed Francis inside.

It was like nothing he had ever seen. Levon’s was an R-rated Western playground of saloons, speakeasies and a concert hall that looked like a dude ranch had mated with a bottle service nightclub. Billy saw mechanical bulls, axe-throwing and a sign that promised a prosperity gospel church service, Sunday mornings in the strip club. Francis ignored all of it, leading Billy to a small bar off the main concourse with a 1970’s vibe. Kenny Rogers and the First Edition concert posters decorated the walls.

There were fifty men inside, packed shoulder-to-shoulder,  paused mid-action like they were playing a game of freeze tag. Most were obviously cooks. They wore cheap jewelry and leather blazers. The rest were club security in radio earpieces and stab-proof vests. It looked to Billy like they had interrupted some kind of underworld audition. Then he realized that he and Francis weren’t the interruption. Every man present was staring toward the middle of the bar, watching a dark-haired woman in a business suit frisk a lesbian bodybuilder.

Billy reacted. The musclebound woman having her pockets emptied was none other than his old boss from Tulsa, Eleanor Murphy.

The two women could hardly have offered greater contrast: Eleanor was spread-eagled against a small stage, wearing leather jeans and a tank top. She was built like a 1980’s action hero, with huge fake breasts and a butch girl’s pompadour. She had been pretty once, but years of HGH had grown the bones of her face into a mountain range. She looked like the kind of mistake a frustrated housewife might make after three margaritas and a plastic baggy of bi-curious.

The woman in the business suit was shorter. Her cheekbones signaled a mix of Mexican and Indigenous heritage. But it wasn’t until she stepped back that Billy saw the badge clipped to her belt. It read Texas Ranger.

“Usually I top but I’ll switch for the right girl,” Eleanor quipped over one of her cantaloupe-sized shoulders.

“Stand up.”

Eleanor turned to face the smaller woman.  She leered, “Now do my front.”

Lightning fast, the Ranger punched her in the left breast. Eleanor buckled, barely managing to catch herself on the lip of the stage, exhaling like a deflating balloon.

The dark-haired woman turned to the crowd, unclipped her badge, and held it up for everyone to see. “My name is Jimena Sharp. I am a Texas Ranger. And none of you are smart enough to get away with what you’re planning.” Her eyes scanned the crowd, “Where you at, Levon?”

The man who answered was an ancient gangster in a Western suit that looked like he had stolen it from a Hee-Haw dressing room. “I’m here, Jimena. Ain’t left this place since Sam Houston whipped you people at San Jacinto.”

“I’m an American, Levon. I love white Jesus and football. And before San Jacinto, my ancestors decorated the Alamo with the heads of your gabacho grandfathers.”

Behind her, Eleanor straightened up, rubbing her injured breast. Billy watched her catch sight of Francis in the crowd, then land eyes on him. Her reaction told him she had not spent much time lighting candles for him in the two years he had been a guest of the State of Oklahoma.

Jimena shifted her attention to the assembled hoods. “Do yourselves a favor … Drive over to Big Thicket and sign yourselves in to the Polunsky Unit. Save Texas some taxpayer dollars. Because Clay Miller will never be the boss of Dallas. And any dumb shit who follows him down that path will end up shot, melted in acid, or mainlining pentobarbital, courtesy of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.”

She brushed back her jacket to reveal the Kimber .45 on her belt. As she turned to make sure Eleanor knew that she was included in her warning, she saw that the big woman was staring at something. She followed her gaze to Billy. 

Billy felt something twist.

Jimena broke the stare and moved toward the exit, pausing just long enough to fix a gun barrel look on Francis, “Tell Clay I will do whatever it takes to stop him.” Then she turned to Billy as if she had just realized he was standing there.  “Nice T-shirt,” she drawled. And she was gone.

Billy looked down, puzzled, and only then remembered that one of the Mexicans at the truck wash had handed him a T-shirt to replace his soiled Panhandle Slim. It featured a cartoon Mexican bandit, complete with sombrero and a bandolier of bullets across his chest. A blond cowgirl was kneeling in front of him, performing an act not usually depicted on T-shirts. “Levon’s Ragtag,” read the caption. “Multicultural since 1963.”

Three beats later, another woman entered the bar, red hair flowing like napalm. Her name was Maeve O’Sullivan. And Hell followed after.

October 31, 9:42 PM

Five weeks later, Clay’s most trusted captains met in his office, but the star of the evening was Billy Dunn. Because Clay Miller was on the verge of becoming the Boss of Dallas and Billy was the man who made it happen.

Halloween was the biggest night of the year at the Ragtag. Outside, lines stretched across the parking lot as the valets jockeyed enough pickups to start their own dealership. Inside, five thousand Christians unleashed their inner pagan, unaware that what they thought of as a children’s holiday was originally called Samhain, the Celtic festival of the dead.

High above the club, Clay turned away from the wall of windows in his office. He was a powerfully-built man in his 50’s, wearing his standard uniform of a black Kiton suit from Stanley Korshak and a 1000X Stetson. He didn’t look like a man who had everything. He looked like a man who wanted more.

“I want them gone. Tonight.” His captains exchanged confused looks. Eleanor was the first to speak, “You sure, boss? Them ginzos ain’t meant squat since they shot Kennedy.”

The fact that they were even discussing the Italians was a testament to Billy’s achievement. It had been his plan which delivered Dallas to Clay; a plan born from Billy’s realization that the biggest obstacle to his criminal career had always been his own sense of loyalty.

Barely a week after the Comanche had driven him from the McAlester bus station to Dallas, Billy had targeted one member from each rival syndicate in the city. Pretending to be an undercover cop with ironclad evidence, he convinced those gangsters that their only chance of survival was to testify against their own crew. Then he leaked to the leaders of each gang that they were being betrayed. In a few short weeks, the most powerful crews in Dallas destroyed themselves in a frenzy of paranoia. Once one rat had been discovered, it had to be assumed there were more. Suspicion went viral. The traitor hunters were presumed to be covering up their own treachery and were themselves eliminated. As the violence took on a life of its own, Clay’s organization had moved into the vacuum, taking over the most lucrative rackets in Dallas without firing a shot. The Aztecs, the AK Boyz, even the truly terrifying African Black Axe were gone, leaving a handful of elderly Italian-Americans who called themself the Dallas “Family” as the last obstacle to Clay’s domination of the city.

Billy noted an unhealthy shine in Clay’s dark eyes as he answered Eleanor, “Maybe the greasers in Dallas don’t mean shit, but there are serious guineas in Houston. Camorra. ‘Ndrangheta. And an army can’t advance with an enemy in its rear.”

Houston? Another round of looks was exchanged. They hadn’t finished taking over Dallas. Houston had twice the geographic area and a million more people. It was also a city with an even more dangerous constellation of criminal crews.

A career bank robber from Galveston spoke up, a respected hard case named Thompson, “All due respect, Mr. Miller, nobody said nothing about Houston. We’re still trying to digest Dallas. Maybe the smart play is to get organized here before we start thinking about H-Town? Or bushwhacking a bunch of Eye-talians who already have one foot in God’s waiting room?”

It was a perfectly reasonable response. And it killed him.

Clay turned to Francis and raised an eyebrow. Instantly, a Bowie knife appeared from a quick-draw rig under the Comanche’s suit. It flashed through the air and nailed the bank robber’s head to his chair.

Clay waited two beats for effect. “Anyone else think we should focus on consolidation?”

No one did.

Francis rose from his chair and crossed the room to pry his knife from Thompson’s face. “Maybe we should ask the cowboy?” he deadpanned. “He’s the man with the plan.”

Watching him wipe his knife clean on Thompson’s slacks, Billy thought very carefully about what he was going to say next. If Clay was on the verge of becoming the Boss of Dallas, Billy was now Prince of the City. The worn out Wranglers and sweat-stained cowboy shirt were gone. As he reclined on Clay’s office couch, the boots he propped on the coffee table were Tony Lucchese’s. He had left an $80,000 truck with the valet, its leather seats christened by a series of admiring women, including a thick-thighed Mexican named Juanita who cooked him homemade molletes and a Chinese girl who did a high-wire act over the MMA cage. The other girls at the Ragtag called her “Flamingo” for her ability to make things disappear down her long, pale throat.

But success does not breed friends in a criminal organization. If Billy’s star was on the rise, it meant the others felt themselves eclipsed. The dearly departed Thompson had just proved there was no honor among thieves.

Clay was staring at him. “What do you say, cowboy? Want to take a run at Houston?” 

Before Billy could answer, he heard the armored door to Clay’s office creak open. A moment later, Clay Miller was no longer the biggest threat in the room.

“Did you know the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer?”  Billy turned to see Maeve O’Sullivan standing behind him. She was looking across the room, taking in the surprise on Thompson’s permanently divided face, “Guess that won’t be a problem for him.”

If there was a dark queen of Samhain, it was Maeve. She was in her 20’s, thin to the point of medical emergency. From the moment Billy laid eyes on her, he had wanted to stay as far away as possible. Everyone knew Clay was obsessed with her, but she was the kind of woman who made powerful men feel weak. And that was a threat to them all. What’s worse, from the day Billy had arrived, she had been playing a dangerous game.

She had asked that Billy be assigned to drive her on her shopping expeditions to Highland Park Village and her gym sessions at the Crescent Club. She had asked him to “help with her packages” in the various changing rooms, as she paraded in a La Perla thong. Billy even suspected that she watched him over the video cameras he knew were hidden in his room, making razor sharp digs about his performance with the parade of Ragtag girls who joined him.

It didn’t seem to Billy that she was trying to seduce him so much as provoke him. But that was Maeve O’Sullivan. She had skin men wanted to bruise and she used it against them.

Every eye in Clay’s office was on Billy as she reached out and flicked his earlobe with a blood red nail. “Pussy got your tongue?’ she asked. Clay’s eyes were molten black holes. Billy knew that he needed to answer the man in the 1000X Stetson or start praying…

Downstairs in the club, Jemina Sharp stared up at Clay’s office windows.  Originally from a dusty town near the border, she had earned a scholarship to Texas A&M, but left school to join the Rangers when her sister had disappeared.

Poured into jeans that fit like a second skin, dark hair tucked under a blond wig, she aimed exactly enough interest at the cowboys staring at her cleavage to blend with the crowd. But her real focus had been forged in the agony of family tragedy. With a handful of exceptions, the cops in Dallas were stupid or corrupt. She was neither. She knew Clay’s outfit was behind the destruction of the city’s gangs. Just like she knew it was too late for her sister. But there were dozens of young girls who disappeared in Dallas every year, many of whom ended up the dead-eyed commodities of Clay’s organization. And Jemina intended to save them by any means necessary.

November 1, 1:34AM

The Italians operated out of an old roadhouse on Route 80. It had been a ring-a-ding bacchanal in the Rat Pack days. Now it was an artifact. A rusted neon sign promised “Steaks, Chops, Seafood,” but the majority of the letters were long since dark. As Billy and the hit team exited their vehicles, only the letters C-H-O-P beamed down on them.

They moved across the parking lot, Eleanor in the lead, flanked by Billy and three of Clay’s toughest hitters. Pia Mupitsl brought up the rear. Francis had a Desert Eagle in one hand and his giant Bowie knife in the other. He looked like he intended to use both.

Inside latex gloves, Billy’s hands were damp around the stock of his Mossburg. Shotguns were Clay’s signature. The goulash they made of the human body was its own kind of psychological warfare. Maybe that was contributing to the strange feelings coursing through Billy’s body. Or maybe it was the weird figurines he had found in his room just before they left: Two stick figures, tied together with twine.

One figure had been natural wood. The other had been painted black. Billy had no idea what kind of True Detective bullshit that was supposed to be. He suspected it had something to do with Maeve. He had no proof, but just the thought that Clay’s Irish concubine was trying to cast a hex on him only contributed to a cascading series of emotions he did not like.

The restaurant appeared dark but one of Clay’s dirty cops had been inside earlier and confirmed the Italians were there. They approached the entrance. As Eleanor reached for the handle, her face scrunched in disgust. “The hell is that?” she whispered.

Close behind her, Billy smelled it, too. It was the stink of scorched meat.

Smoke the color of diarrhea was leaking out from under the restaurant’s front door. There was enough of it that the front of the roadhouse had started to take on a hazy, otherworldly appearance. Behind them, the lights of downtown Dallas beamed at them from the rational twenty-first century. In the roadhouse parking lot, Billy was starting to get the feeling that something very different waited for them inside.

He didn’t want to be there in the first place, but Clay had made it clear that he could either join the hit team or get used for target practice. The truth was, for all his adventures on the wrong side of legality, Billy had never killed a man. Now, Clay was making sure that smiling Billy Dunn would be a murderer, just like the rest of them. And it was at exactly that moment that Billy recognized the unnamed feeling winding him ever tighter.

It was fear. For the first time since a social worker carried him out of the bar where his mother had been murdered, Billy was afraid.

They entered the restaurant. The lights were out. The air was dense with smoke. From somewhere deeper in the roadhouse, they heard the muffled bleating of a smoke detector.

“We should have brought flashlights,” Eleanor whispered. As if on command, one of the other shooters clicked on the Streamlight attached to his shotgun. The beam illuminated a 1970’s Halloween decoration taped to a wall; a buxom witch, naked but for a Playboy grin and the black hat she was using to cover her intimacies.

Billy turned away and walked into the first corpse. It was leaning against the bar, dressed in a John Wayne Gacy clown costume. In life, he had been almost as tall as Francis. He was shorter now because his head was on the bar next to a plastic Jack-O-Lantern and a spilled bottle of Cutty Sark. Amazingly, his body remained on its feet, somehow balanced against the Naugahyde lip that ran the length of the bar. Even more amazing, the hair on the severed head remained a perfect Brylcreem wave, unmussed by decapitation. But the look on its swarthy, Italian face was one of pure terror.

“Oh, God.” Sounds of shock and horror echoed through the smoke. More gun lights clicked on, revealing that what they had thought was wallpaper was actually geysers of arterial spray. The walls were literally painted with blood. As Billy staggered back from the bar, he almost tripped over an elderly waiter sprawled on the floor, his server’s jacket dyed black with gore.

There were corpses everywhere. Wiseguys. Customers. Someone had massacred an entire restaurant full of people. And they weren’t just dead. The bodies had been annihilated. There were entrails hanging from the chandeliers. Some of the victims looked like they had been partially eaten.

“What … the … fuck?” One of the hitters began mumbling a Hail Mary. Another coughed wetly, on the edge of vomiting. Illuminated by her own gun light, Eleanor’s eyes were shocked white, darting around in terror. Only Francis appeared unaffected, “It’s coming from the kitchen.”

The bleating of the smoke detector got louder.

Billy entered the kitchen first and was immediately hit by a wall of infernal heat. He felt like he was breathing through a straw. He could barely make out two huge pizza ovens against the far wall. Shit-colored smoke was pouring from the closed oven doors. On the ceiling, a smoke detector beeped uselessly as its battery light flashed a red warning at Billy.

Eleanor entered the kitchen behind him. Then Francis. The Comanche crossed the kitchen and opened one of the ovens. The rest of the Italians were inside.

Eleanor screamed, but not at the sight of geriatric gangsters roasting in their own ovens. She was staring at an old fashioned butcher’s block. A dozen human hearts were stacked in a pyramid. A length of intestine encircled the organs. It had been dredged in flour like tripe and neatly arranged … in a white circle.

2:12AM

The Escalade sped west toward the Ragtag. Francis was behind the wheel, Billy in the passenger seat. From the back seat, Eleanor’s voice was numb with fear, “I thought the Italians were the last gang left,” she whispered. “If the Italians were the last gang left… Who did that?”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re dead.” But even Pia Mupitsl sounded like he was trying to convince himself. It occurred to Billy that hearing uncertainty in the giant Comanche’s voice might be the most terrifying moment of the night.

“And you’re not worried that there’s some other crew out there, capable of that?” 

Billy opened his mouth to answer but Francis shot him a look. He addressed them both, “I’ll drop you at the work cars. Burn your clothes. Burn the cars. Meet at Levon’s.”

Five minutes later, he dropped Eleanor at a stolen Jeep in a strip mall parking lot. Ten minutes after that, Francis pulled to the curb halfway across the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. An old Yukon with tinted windows was parked on the far side of the roadway, facing in the opposite direction.

Billy climbed down from the Cadillac.  Francis pulled away.

Billy was distracted as he crossed the bridge. He had come to a decision. He was a thief and a liar and a seducer of women. But he wasn’t a murderer. There was something at work in Dallas darker than human greed. Billy’s mother had raised him Christian and enough of it had stuck that he recognized the demonic when he saw it. He had some cash stashed in his new truck. As soon as he made it to the Ragtag, Billy was taking what he had and running.

He was halfway across the roadway before he realized the Yukon’s engine was running. He was taken by surprise when three sicarios climbed out, carrying AK’s. He was even more surprised when the driver’s window rolled down, revealing the wizened face of Levon McKitrick.

Levon had been selling black tar heroin and teenage runaways when Clay Miller was stealing grade school lunch money. There was a reason Clay’s club carried Levon’s name. Billy had heard that old Levon was the boss before an ambitious young gangster named Clay Miller had shown up. Now, Clay was the boss and Levon was little more than a mascot. But what was he doing here, waiting for Billy?

Levon’s lips curled into the kind of smile you see in Tijuana before they turn you into hydrochloric soup. “Evening, pilgrim, ” he said. And Billy knew he was about to be murdered.

He got one hand up in a vain “stop” gesture before the first barrage hit him.  He flew backwards and bounced off the bridge’s handrails. He sagged, caught himself, and was trying vainly to pull himself up when another stream of bullets drilled him from knees to neck.

Billy sprawled to the roadway, blood spurting from a dozen wounds. Fighting his way up from shock and trauma, he watched the three assassins cross the bridge as Levon climbed down from the Yukon. His vision was already beginning to tunnel, compressing around Levon like an iris shot in a silent western.

They gathered around him.  Levon had a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from his lip. For a moment, it seemed like he might explain his betrayal. But Billy watched him change his mind.

“Get her done.”

The sicarios emptied the rest of their magazines into Billy. Then they dumped him in the river.

XXXXXXX

For most of the year, the Trinity was a glorified trickle, running through Dallas in a concrete sluice. But it had been a strange autumn. One storm after another had barreled up from the Gulf, scouring the city and swelling the river. The Trinity had doubled in size, then doubled again.

Billy drifted south in the storm-swelled waters, under the bridge at Commerce Street and then the Margaret McDermott. The current carried him under the Trinity River Bridge at Sam Houston Street. It carried him a long way, for a long time.

Then, deep in the moving waters, he opened his eyes.

At least, he thought he did. Billy didn’t actually know if he still had eyes, or how he was able to think. All he knew was that after a time of seeing nothing, out in the water, he saw a spark. It was a thing so small, he had been unaware of it his entire life. He hadn’t noticed it in any of the foster homes, or card rooms, or in the bedrooms of good girls who wanted to be bad. But there it was. It was in the river, and he was in the river, and they were drifting.

After a while, he came to understand that the spark was made of things that separated him from men like Clay and Levon. His lack of cruelty. His occasional act of kindness. The time he fought three Nazi Lowriders over a little black girl they intended to sell. It had cost him forty-four stitches but the girl still sent him letters care of the post office, detailing her progress at the magnet school where she was valedictorian. What Billy finally understood was that the spark was the bare minimum of human decency, and that even with all of his mistakes that had been enough, because given the hand life had dealt him, he should have had no decency at all.

He watched the spark continue down the river and disappear, somehow knowing that wherever it was going it would be with his mother, in a place better than this one.

It was then that he became aware of a woman on a bridge above him. Her hair was blowing in a wind he could not feel. And even though he was beneath the water, she could see him. She seemed to be motioning him to come out of the river.

Billy wanted to go up to her but he didn’t know how. Levon’s sicarios had blown out his knees. Also, he was dead. And dead men without knees don’t climb bridges. For a long time, this seemed like an insurmountable problem. But as he waited in the river, trying to understand, he became very cold. And then he became something else entirely.

November 2, 9:55AM

On the second day of Día de Muertos, Clay called another meeting. The flat screens in his office were filled with maps of Houston. But that wasn’t all. Maps of New Orleans, Atlanta and Miami also beamed down on Eleanor and the others. No longer satisfied with just moving on Houston, the Boss of Dallas now planned on becoming King of Crime in the southern United States. The level of slaughter that would require, the amount of law enforcement attention, the ferocity of the cartels and syndicates operating in those cities left even Pia Mupitsl looking uneasy, but Clay’s captains knew what had happened to Thompson, so they kept their concerns to themselves.

They knew Billy was gone, too, although no one knew the details. Francis confirmed dropping Billy on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, but after that the young cowboy had vanished. Was it retaliation by a survivor from one of the vanquished gangs? If Clay had given the order because of the Halloween scene with Maeve, he gave no indication. Neither did Levon, who had himself been missing since that night.

But even that wasn’t the only thing bothering Clay’s men. In the previous forty-eight hours, a mysterious insurgency had sprung up in what they had thought was conquered Dallas: Soldiers missing. A stash house robbed. Just that morning, the biggest underground casino in Chinatown had burned down with six-figures of Clay’s money inside. Someone was fucking with them. But they didn’t know who, or even if the various incidents were connected.

“I asked if you had something to say?” The menace in Clay’s voice snapped Eleanor back to attention. She had been staring at a satellite view of the Port of Miami, fantasizing about boarding one of the giant cruise ships before it was too late.

Eleanor hadn’t slept since Halloween. She couldn’t close her eyes without finding herself back in the roadhouse kitchen, staring at the blistered hand of the Dallas underboss hanging from his own pizza oven. She heard herself answer, “What if the trouble we’re having… What if it’s some kind of message?”

Clay was getting angrier, “What message?”

Eleanor knew she should stop talking, but she couldn’t help herself, “A message from someone who wants us to know they’re coming.”  That’s when they heard the wooden thunk from one of the monitors. A moment later, they heard it again. Thunk. The sound of metal impacting wood, coming from the monitor covering the axe-throwing range downstairs…

He had his back to them when they entered. Whoever he was, he was dressed all in black. He was balancing a throwing axe on one finger like a basketball player balancing a ball. He turned to face them with the smile of a man who had your wife’s panties in his pocket.

It was Billy Dunn.

For the first time since Halloween, Eleanor felt an emotion other than fear. She stumbled across the range and threw both arms around Billy, hugging him tight to her oversized pectorals. “Oh, man… We didn’t know… I’m so glad …”

A moment later, a shudder passed through her body. She backed away in confusion. The man in front of her looked like Billy Dunn. If he had been in the mood to drop his pants, she might have seen the same .22-caliber crease on his ass. But there was something different about him: The gleam in Billy’s eyes. The adventurous possibility of his grin. The sense that for all his larceny and promiscuity, he was trying to make it through life doing as little harm as possible. That was gone. What was left behind was made of judgement and retribution. What was left behind was an obsidian razor in a black cowboy hat.

If Clay noticed Eleanor’s reaction to Dark Billy, he gave no indiction. “The hell have you been?! You think you can just fuck off, chasing pussy or whatever the hell you been doing?!”

“I apologize,” Dark Billy replied. “It was unavoidable… since Levon tried to kill me.”

“What?!” Clay looked legitimately surprised.

“On the bridge. Halloween night. Him and three sicarios.”

“Levon McKitrick and three sicarios tried to merc you on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge?”

“Is there an echo in here?” The tone in Dark Billy’s voice was mocking him.

Clay exchanged a “Can you believe this guy?” look with Francis, but the big Comanche wasn’t looking at him. He was staring at Dark Billy. He didn’t look afraid, exactly. He looked like a man who had taken a hundred souls, finally seeing a ghost. “How did you get away?” he asked.

“I went in the river. And then I came out.”

Francis heard what Dark Billy had just told them. Clay didn’t. “Why the fuck would Levon want to kill you?”

“Well, that’s the bad news, boss man,” Dark Billy’s tone shifted. “I’ve been doing some covert reconnaissance. Levon is staging a coup. He wants to take back what used to be his.”

“Bullfuckingshit.”

“You been having some trouble while I been gone? Some of the boys go missing? Maybe we’ve taken hits on some money places?”

That shut Clay up. Dark Billy continued, “You put on a lot of guns to take down Dallas. I think a lot of those guys don’t work for you. I think they work for him. And they are setting you up to take the long, hard fall.”

Clay dealt in treachery. He was naturally disposed to believe the men around him did the same. He took a moment, digesting Billy’s accusation, “Why would Levon kill you first?”

“Because he knew I’m the one loyal gunslinger in this whole chickenshit outfit.”

Dark Billy’s words were a gauntlet thrown down before Clay’s captains.  Clay turned to Francis, the first hint of suspicion in his eyes, “You said you dropped him on that bridge?”

“I said it ‘cause it’s true.”

“And you didn’t see any of this go down?”

Dark Billy interrupted, “Check the traffic cameras on that bridge. Either it’ll show Levon trying to kill me, or the footage will have been erased. Either way, it’s proof I ain’t lying.”

Clay was still staring at Francis, reading every muscle of the big Comanche’s face. He turned back to Dark Billy, “Let’s say I believe you. What’s your plan?”

“Make me your chief of security. Give me the authority to hunt down the traitors. I will purge this gang by fire and sword ’til what’s left will follow you to the gates of Hell.”

The corner of Clay’s left eye twitched. He turned to the others, “Anybody got a better idea?”

None of them said a word.

“As of this moment, Billy’s in charge of security. He tells you what to do, it’s the same as me. And God help any of you Judases if you sold me out.” He stalked out of the room, leaving his captains staring at one another in uneasy apprehension.

“What do we do now?” one of them asked Dark Billy.

Dark Billy recovered his throwing axe. “Well, son, I can’t speak for the rest of you, but there’s a Mexican girl I’m hoping is making molletes for lunch.” He spun and launched the axe. It flashed down the range and split the previous axe he had thrown in two.

Later, across town, Francis stepped into his underwear.

“Does he know?” The man on the bed was naked, his muscular body so pale as to be almost translucent.

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we kill him, either way?”

“Nóka túhurak rêkèwé tohkê’ya.”

The man’s blue eyes flashed with annoyance, “You know I don’t speak Indian.”

Francis hesitated before translating, “It means… Maybe somebody already did.”

Back at Levon’s, Dark Billy stood under the shower in his suite, letting the hot water beat down. He couldn’t feel it. All temperatures were the same to him. But he knew she would want it hot.

He heard the outer door open and close. He heard every step as she crossed his room and slid into the enveloping steam of the bathroom. Of all things, she was wearing an old pair of men’s overalls. Dark Billy’s first thought was that maybe she was a fan of Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

Maeve looked him up and down, “You belong to me now.”

Dark Billy said nothing.

An old-fashioned straight razor appeared in her hand. In one smooth motion, she severed the shoulder straps of her overalls. They fell to the bathroom floor, revealing nothing underneath but two gold nipple rings and a stripe of red pubic hair. Dark Billy slid back the glass shower door and she stepped inside.

An hour later, on his way out of the suite, Dark Billy made sure to look up at the camera he knew was hidden in the ceiling light fixture. He had been wrong about one thing. It hadn’t been Maeve who was spying on him.

On the other side of the complex, a terrified Eleanor slammed her laptop shut. How did he know she was watching? How was he able to see her through wireless space? She didn’t understand any part of what was happening. All she knew was that when she had gone to hug him, he had felt cold as an autumn river. And when he had walked out of the axe-throwing range, he had left a trail of wet bootprints across the floor…

November 9, 10:11PM

The Cajun slid to the floor, his brains on the brick wall behind him.  Big as a cypress and twice as hard, he had run a home invasion crew in Thibodaux before joining Clay’s conquest of Dallas. In the aftermath, he had been been awarded a lucrative chain of pill mills. Apparently, that hadn’t been enough because he had secretly backed Levon’s insurrection.

At least, that’s what Dark Billy told his embattled boss.

In the days since Clay had made Dark Billy his chief of security, he had purged half the gang, murdering Clay’s men with gleeful abandon. Others had deserted, terrified by a man in black who radiated cold like a frozen graveyard. The whole organization was in chaos but with every new “traitor” Dark Billy uncovered, Clay demanded he redouble his efforts. It never occurred to anyone that Dark Billy was applying the same strategy that Live Billy had used to conquer Dallas in the first place.

Dark Billy eased open the stairwell door and began to climb. He was one flight below the warehouse roof when a grenade came bouncing down the stairs. The explosion was deafening. Smoke and debris filled the stairwell.  Moments later, the hesitant shuffle of descending boots became audible as Levon’s last two sicarios inched down the stairs to confirm their kill…

Levon heard a scream like two souls being sucked down to Hell. A moment later, Dark Billy emerged onto the roof.

The old gangster was standing against the parapet, the lights of the Union Pacific yard behind him. He looked down at the .45 in his hand and considered trying to use it. He looked up again and didn’t, because Dark Billy was standing in front of him. Somehow, he had crossed the warehouse roof in the blink of an eye, without making a sound.

Levon felt his bowels loosen. He dropped the pistol.

“I killed you,” he said.

“Can’t argue that point,” Dark Billy replied.

“How’d you find me?”

“I told Clay the Cajun was working for you.”

“He wasn’t.”

A Burt Reynolds smile snaked across Dark Billy’s face, “Yeah, but when I said he was, he didn’t have much choice but to run to you for protection. And I just sort of followed.”

For a moment, Levon stared at the figure before him, suspended between terror and self-pity. Self-pity won. The old gangster gathered himself and dug a tobacco pouch out his jacket. He began rolling a cigarette, trying to keep Dark Billy from seeing the tremble in his hands.

“I knew a hoodoo woman. Lived in a holler where no one went, if they was smart. One night, after we finished our business, she told me about what she called a ’spirit of retribution.’ Other folks use the word ‘revenant.’ It means something dead that comes back to settle a score.”

“What she said was, a thing like that don’t come back on its own. Somebody has to call it. Somebody has to have something they want so bad that they’re willing to act against the natural order. ‘Cause that’s what you are, ain’t you? Something unnatural? Called back to rob me once again of what is rightly mine?!”

Levon dug a Zippo out of his pocket. He wedged the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and tried to light it but his hands were shaking too badly.  Dark Billy took the lighter and lit the old crook’s cigarette. Then he let Levon see what was waiting for him.

The old man’s eyes flared wide, his pupils so dilated that he looked like a cartoon character. A thin steam of saliva leaked from the corner of his mouth. “No,” he croaked, “Not that…” He sank to one knee and held up a shaking hand, as if he could deflect the vision of his judgement.

Dark Billy let it play up to the edge of Levon stroking out, then ended it. “There are two certainties in the universe,” he explained. “The first is that nothing is ever destroyed. It just changes into something else. The second is that for every action, there is always a reaction.” He let that sink in, “I’m the reaction to lifetimes of evil. And I’m just getting started.”

Painfully, Levon pulled himself to his feet. His face colored with bitterness, “I know a few things, too. I know there’s something out there, hungry and pale. I know it’s coming. Maybe it’ll even come for you.”

His voice got louder, “That hoodoo woman told me that a ‘haint like you ain’t invincible. You can be killed if someone knows how. ‘Cause the man you were has gone to his reward. You ain’t nothing but a shadow of another soul’s intention. And if that soul goes to their reward…”

Dark Billy shot the old pimp in the dick with his own .45. Levon jerked forward, keening like a banshee in the Ulster hills.

“You spent your life selling young girls’ virtue to strangers. I’m all the reward you deserve.”

Somehow, inch-by-inch, Levon managed to straighten, clutching his blood-wet crotch. He dug for breath and defiance, a wicked secret in his eyes, “I been a gambler all my days… And just because this one is my last… It don’t mean I’m out of cards.”

Moving faster than a dick-shot old man should be able, he turned and hurled himself off the roof.

Dark Billy picked up his still-glowing cigarette and stepped onto the parapet. Looking down at what was left of Levon, he took a drag and gave some thought to what those cards might be, and how he might use them to win the whole game.

In Clay’s office the next morning, Eleanor stood the middle of the room, holding a remote. “You think he’s hunting down traitors? Let’s see who the real traitor is…”

Clay was behind his desk. It barely 10AM but he already had a tumbler of  Rip Van Winkle in his hand. Francis, Dark Billy and the few surviving captains were scattered around the office as Eleanor cued up her video.

Francis eyed Dark Billy. The man in black was less than an arm’s length away. Francis reached inside his jacket and slid the Bowie knife from its sheath, measuring a spot halfway between Dark Billy’s shoulder blades. He had the knife almost out of his jacket  when he heard Clay ask, “Why do you have cameras hidden in my club?”

Francis froze and looked up to see the screens in Clay’s office fill with video of Maeve sneaking into Dark Billy’s room. Along with the others, he watched Maeve move through the suite. They were watching video from the camera Eleanor had hidden in Billy’s light fixture, taken the day Dark Billy returned from the Trinity River.

The footage switched to another angle, from a camera hidden in the bathroom. They watched Maeve enter. Someone was in the shower but the air was clouded with mist and it was impossible to see through the condensation on the glass door.

As onscreen Maeve dropped her overalls, Eleanor smiled triumphantly. As the shower door slid open, Eleanor turned to Clay, waiting for his reaction. And she got one. Clay’s face filled with incomprehension, then understanding, then a fury so overwhelming his body seemed to levitate out of his chair like mercury in an overheating thermometer. What Eleanor didn’t expect was that the fury would be aimed at her.

As every man in the room turned toward her in shock, Eleanor looked back up at the screens in confusion. Someone was violating Maeve in the shower. Only it wasn’t Dark Billy.

Eleanor stared at the monitors, at a complete loss. She had watched Dark Billy penetrate Maeve’s body in every possible fashion. She had never laid a hand on the redhead. But there she was, on six giant screens, fingering Clay’s criminal muse in Dark Billy’s shower. It was only then, as she fumbled with the remote, trying desperately to terminate the video, that she remembered the Mexican girl who danced in the floor show downstairs. The one she had bullied into her bed. The one who cooked homemade molletes and who had graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a degree in computer science.

Eleanor had just enough time to see Dark Billy grin before one of Clay’s men charged her. Eleanor backhanded him, sending him careening across the room. Another jumped on her back. She reached over her shoulder, got a hold of his shirt, and body slammed him. She turned to try for the office door and ran straight into Francis. Big as she was, the Comanche had six inches and fifty pounds her. Eleanor looked up at him, eyes wide. Then she looked down to see his Bowie knife in her abdomen. She dropped to the floor. Dead.

As the surviving captains tried to grapple with what had just happened, Francis looked up to see Dark Billy staring at him. And the Comanche decided if he was going to kill the man in black, he was going to need more than a knife.

November 10, 3:01AM

Hemingway said men go broke gradually, then suddenly. Maybe that’s how justice comes, too.

Clay had a dozen men left who were either too dumb or too desperate to run. Two of them were standing guard outside the Ragtag in the driving rain.  One was a carjacker with a weakness for angel dust and other men’s teenage daughters. The other was an arsonist wearing Rod Stewart’s haircut, circa Every Picture Tells A Story.

The arsonist exploded, hit between the eyes with a .338 Magnum. The carjacker turned in horror to see dozens of albinos pouring from a line of black Sprinter vans. They wore matching slickers and carried custom AR builds. The ones who didn’t had fire axes.

The carjacker tried to retreat into the Ragtag but the guard inside the front entrance had seen what was coming. He slammed the door and locked it. The carjacker was still pounding on the door, begging for admittance, when one of the White Circle soldiers planted a fire axe in his skull.

The front entrance exploded inward and attackers poured inside. Roused by their own sense of self-preservation, Clay’s remaining men put up stiff resistance but it was too late. The White Circle rolled through Levon’s like a steroid tsunami.

Up in his office, Clay dragged a Russian PKM from a closet and smashed out the windows overlooking the club. The once-powerful gang boss now had a Hitler-in-the-bunker look about him. Disheveled. Eyes red. His dreams of conquest on the ash heap of history. He charged the bolt and opened fire, raining bullets on the main concourse, tearing through mechanical bulls, White Circle soldiers and his own men with equal ferocity, blazing through a 200-round box until he was standing ankle deep in belt links and shell casings.

He was struggling to load a new belt when the magnetic lock on his office door whined and Francis shoved through the door, carrying Maeve over one shoulder and an infant-sized coffin under his other arm. They looked like red-headed Fay Wray and Comanche King Kong but it appeared that Fay Wray had given as good as she got. Pia Mupitsl’s face was raked with bloody furrows and one of his eyes was beginning to swell shut. He tossed her onto a couch. The armored door remained open behind them.

Shocked to see his mistress dumped on the furniture, Clay turned the PKM toward Francis. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!”

“I found this in her room.” Francis set the coffin on a glass coffee table. It was two-feet long, made from nineteenth-century barn wood. He opened the lid.

There was no infant inside. Instead, the coffin appeared to contain the raw materials for some kind of spell: A lamb’s heart, fresh from a butcher shop. Broken glass bottles, leaking colored powders. A small statue of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. And in the middle of the pile, stained with lamb’s blood, a photo of handsome Billy Dunn.

From the couch, Maeve roused and wiped blood from her mouth.  “None of that is mine. Someone planted that in my room!”

“How ‘bout this?” Francis dug an old Kodachrome photograph out of his jacket and held it up for Clay to see. It was a wrinkled image of a little red-haired girl and a much-younger Levon, looking like John Travolta, circa Urban Cowboy. “She’s Levon’s granddaughter.”

Shock and soul deep betrayal filled Clay’s face. From the club below, the sound of fighting resumed as the White Circle recovered from Clay’s barrage and rolled closer to the office.

“Levon killed Billy Dunn. She brought him back as some kind of monster. Now, he’s wiped out your whole gang. And those freaks downstairs are here to finish the job. There’s only one way to stop them…”

Before Francis could explain what that was, from inside Clay’s suit jacket, his phone pinged with an incoming message.

“You’re going to want to get that.”

Clay and Francis spun to see Dark Billy on the other side of the office. The man in black was smiling. Clay reacted with shock, looking back and forth between Billy and the still ajar office door, struggling to grasp how he got inside.

On the couch, Maeve realized she was free from attention for a brief moment. She slid one pale hand under her dress and dug her straight razor from her underwear.

Clay’s phone pinged again. “You’re really going to want to get that.”  Feeling strangely compelled, Clay dug out his phone and clicked on the incoming text.

Francis’ eyes never left Billy. “I know what you are, pʉeh tʉyaai. And I know how this ends.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“The only way to kill a thing a witch has made… is to kill the witch who made it.”

Dark Billy froze, staring at the Comanche. For the first time since he emerged from the river, something like fear appeared on his face. Then the dam broke, fear turning to raw terror at the apparent realization that Francis knew his secret. He sank to his knees. It looked like maybe he was going to beg for mercy.

Oblivious to the drama in front of him, Clay looked up from his phone, shock and fury in his eyes. He held up the phone so Francis could see the screen. The text he had just received contained a video from a convenience story surveillance camera on the far side of the McAlester bus station parking lot.

Francis pulled his eyes away from Dark Billy to watch the White Circle Suburban pull up. He watched three White Circle soldiers pile out and box Billy Dunn against a wall. But visible on the video was the fact that one man remained inside the SUV.

It was him. Moments later, they all watched Francis leap from the SUV and attack the White Circle men with whom he had just arrived.

At exactly that moment, with Dark Billy on his knees and fury in Clay’s bloodshot eyes, Maeve attacked. She vaulted from the couch, slashed at Francis with her razor, kicked the coffee table and all of its supernatural ephemera toward Billy and lunged for Clay.

She almost made it. As she passed him, Francis made one scything swing with his Bowie knife and her head separated from her neck. Momentum carried her body three more steps until it collapsed at Clay’s feet, hosing him with a geyser of blood. Her razor clattered across the office. Her head sailed in the opposite direction, landing behind the wet bar in a plume of scarlet hair.

Drenched in his lover’s blood, Clay looked like a man suffering a heart attack in the middle of an earthquake. Across the office, Dark Billy watched Maeve’s head land. He threw back his head like a character on The Simpson’s and wailed “Noooooooo …”

He kept on wailing while Francis grinned cruelly and waited for whatever supernatural devastation was going to strike Billy down.

He continued to wait.  Dark Billy continued to wail.

Dark Billy kept wailing and Francis kept waiting until it was obvious to that he was completely, totally, Deadpool-fucking with the giant Comanche. His wail turned to laughter as he rose to his feet. For the briefest moment, the old Billy Dunn reappeared, light-hearted and laughing at the delusions of evil men. He wiped a tear of laughter from one eye.

“Right theory, Kemo Sabe. Wrong witch.”

Now it was Francis’ turn to look like a man having a heart attack. From downstairs in the club, the fighting reached a last, desperate crescendo and went silent. A moment later, footsteps began to climb the stairwell to the office.

Dark Billy turned to Clay. The would-be King of Crime was frozen in place, still holding his Russian machine-gun, staring down at the headless corpse of his Irish obsession.

“He staged that whole ambush in the bus station parking lot so I would come back here and tell everyone he saved me. But the truth of the matter is he sold you out to the White Circle.  Now they’re at your door… which he has conveniently left open.”

Dark Billy hardly got the words out of his mouth before Clay unloaded a belt of Russian bullets into Francis. The giant Comanche exploded, stutter-stepping backwards across the office in a stream of fire and lead that was only interrupted by another gunshot from the door.

Clay stood straight up like a little boy told to correct his posture. He dropped the PKM and looked down at the bloody red stain spreading across his shirt. What was left of Francis collapsed to the floor. And the first White Circle soldier entered the office.

His name was Kane. He had been the blue-eyed man in Francis’ bed. His men filed into the office behind him.

Clay was still on his feet as Kane reached up and removed his perfect white teeth. They were dentures. Underneath, his real teeth were filed into jagged rows of fangs. His men did likewise. Then they swarmed Clay Miller like a pack of ravenous dogs and tore him apart.

Kane watched the carnage for a beat, then turned to deal with Dark Billy.  He reacted … Because Dark Billy had vanished. And the albino killer realized he was afraid.

November 10, 6:20AM

Dawn threatened from the eastern horizon, competing with the emergency lights of the armada of ambulances, fire trucks and police SUV’s in the Ragtag parking lot. Jimena found Benny Aguilar standing over the body of Clay’s carjacker, face down just short of the entrance, wearing the fire ax like a Stetson.

“Ranger.”

“Benny.”

Aguilar was assigned to the District Attorney’s Organized Crime Division. He was wearing an old-fashioned rain slicker and had a cup of Café de Olla in his hand. He nodded toward the headless arsonist a few feet away. “We’ve got two outside, maybe nine or ten in. Career shitheads from all over the southwest. But you want to hear something funny?”

“If I didn’t have a sense of humor, I wouldn’t have joined the Rangers.”

“When the call came in that World War III had broken out at the Ragtag, we were already gearing up to raid this place.”

“Really?”

Aguilar nodded, “We got the craziest tip from a walk-in. Some Albanian neckbreaker, swore that Clay Miller was behind all of the underworld mishegoss over the last few weeks. Said that he was executing some kind of covert plan to take over organized crime in Dallas. ”

“That is crazy.”

“That ain’t all …” Two minutes later, they were inside, staring down at the body of a White Circle soldier.

“Watch this,” Aguilar knelt down. He pinched one of the dead man’s corneas with his free hand. When he straightened up, he had a blue plastic lens between his fingers. “There’s half-a-dozen scattered around. No ID. Fingerprints burned off with acid. All wearing blue contact lenses.” He took a sip of Mexican coffee, eying her. “Qué carajo está pasando, Jimena?”

A crew from the Medical Examiner was wheeling Clay’s body out of his office as Jimena and Aguilar entered. Clay’s blood-stained 1000X Stetson was balanced on the white plastic body bag. Jimena eyed a human-sized bite taken out of the brim.

The office looked like a horror movie. A small orange tent used for biological debris covered Maeve’s severed head, her flame-red hair poking out from beneath. Aguilar wolf-whistled and made the sign of the cross, “Sweet Baby Yeezus.”

He noted the security cameras in the corners of the room. “Any chance we can get the footage?”

“Sí, Señor Aguilar,” a State Trooper named Brown was supervising the crime scene. “But you’re not going to like it.” He nodded to a technician behind Clay’s desk.

The technician typed commands into Clay’s desk top. Flat screens around the office flared to life with security footage from the end of the White Circle assault. The assembled cops stood silently, watching Francis kill Maeve and Clay kill Francis. They watched albino bodybuilders penetrate the office. They watched them swarm the mob boss and literally tear him to pieces.

“Jesus Christ.” Several cops turned away.

Aguilar took another sip from his coffee. “You’re awful quiet.”

Jimena hadn’t said a word since they entered. Her eyes were fixed on the screens, “Can’t see this requires much commentary.”

“No. But I would like to know who they’re talking to…” Aguilar pointed at the closest monitor. “The big Native is reacting to someone. Clay, too. Angry at ‘em. Scared. Except I count six different angles and I don’t see anyone else in the room.”

“We noticed the same thing.” Brown nodded at the screen nearest him, “It’s like they’re talking to the Invisible Man.”

Aguilar caught sight of something on one of the monitors. “Stop. Can you rewind that? Go back a few seconds and freeze.”

The technician typed more commands.  “Now, play it forward. Slow.”

The technician rolled the video. On multiple screens, they watched Francis cut off Maeve’s head. They watched a look of shock spread across the Comanche’s face, staring at something they could not see, waiting for something that did not happen.

“Push in on the case behind him.” Visible behind Francis was a mahogany gun case with glass doors. Inside were Clay’s collection of hunting rifles. One door was partially ajar. Combined with the overhead lights, the effect was to create a reflection from across the room, allowing them to see a different angle of what appeared on the video to be empty space. Except in the reflection on the glass door, it wasn’t empty.  In the reflection on the door, they were looking at Dark Billy Dunn. 

This time, Aguilar looked like he wanted to cross himself for real.

Trooper Brown’s voice was uneasy, “Anybody recognize him?”

After a weighted silence, Jimena responded, “I do.”

Two hours later, she and Aguilar were at the Dallas County Medical Examiner, staring at a corpse on a stainless steel tray. The body was riddled with bullets and bloated from ten days in the Trinity but there was enough left to recognize.

Oblivious to the confusion and dread raging across Aguilar’s features, the coroner’s assistant glanced at her tablet. “Dallas PD pulled him out of the river yesterday. ME says he died Halloween night.”

Lying on the slab was the body of Billy Dunn, the man they had just seen in footage taken in Clay’s office the night before.

That night, Jemina attended midnight Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows. She wore a black dress and a lace mantilla. She did not take Communion.

When Mass ended, she remained in her pew as the other parishioners filed out. After a few minutes, unaware that anyone remained in the church, the sexton dimmed the lights. Jimena continued to sit in the dark, the only illumination vast banks of votive candles, until she was absolutely sure that she was alone.

She made her way to the front of the church and knelt before a statue. According to the Catholic Church, Our Lady of Guadalupe had appeared to a Chichimec peasant on a hill outside Mexico City, five hundred years before. She was a figure of enormous veneration and her statue was garlanded with dozens of flower necklaces. But Jimena knew her by a different name. For a thousand years before the Spanish came, the hill of Tepeyac had been a sacred place where Aztec women worshipped Tonantzin Coatlaxopeuh, the goddess who crushes the serpent.

Jimena prayed very hard. After decades of gang-inflicted misery, crime was down across Dallas, mostly because all of the criminals were dead. More amazingly, she had found evidence in Clay’s office that her little sister might be alive! But she was starting to realize that there were things she had not anticipated. Things she might not know how to control.

When she finally rose and made her way to the exit, she left a small offering behind. At the foot of the goddess were two small stick figures. One natural wood. The other painted black.

Two hundred miles southwest, one of the things Jimena might not control was rolling through the night in Clay Miller’s Super Duty Ford. The truck’s navigation was set for a megachurch outside Baton Rouge but Dark Billy didn’t need it. He knew where he was going. There was a cancer growing across the Southwest and like the man said, if you want to kill evil, you have to kill the one who made it.

Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” came on the radio. Dark Billy grinned at the irony. He turned it up. When you’re an avenging spirit, called back from death to save the world, it paid to have a sense of humor.

CUT TO BLACK

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Chap Taylor is a screenwriter, television producer and educator. He co-wrote the film Changing Lanes, starring Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson and was a Consulting Producer on the NBC drama series The Blacklist. He is an adjunct professor of screenwriting at NYU. This is his first published novelette.

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