The Savage(38)
Dorn relaxed his left. Studied the old man who held the AR-15 on him. Skin was loose and mangy with faded ink about his arms. Smiling; his teeth were a decaying corn-oil tint with the ring of memory.
Each man donned military pants. Wore skinning knives and holstered pistols while clutching the black metal of automatic weapons, except for the female, who was no longer blonde, she was cresol-headed and she held a Remington 870 Express Tactical pump-action 12-gauge and said, “Either you’re one lucky stud or you hold some skill for the land and how to survive about it.”
Confused, Dorn wiped the crust of sleep from his eyes and said, “Can’t say I follow.”
The two men chuckled and the female said, “Been eyeing you since you crossed our hunting dogs who was fresh on the scent of the wild boar.”
Knowing his feelings of unease were correct, of watching eyes, Dorn took on a wisp of anger and said, “Been watchin’ me? Why’d you let that crazed Pentecost enslave me?”
The man in the 135 Auto T-shirt quit rubbing the hound’s head, clasped his hand into a fist, shook it, and said, “Remove the hostile from your tongue ’fore I beat you into surrender, it’s our way, how we work.”
Dorn wrinkled his eyes and said, “Work?”
The female said, “Same as the government we once paid taxes to. You know, like letting criminals buy guns, kill, and traffic them so they can track the guns while the bodies pile up, hope to net a bigger bust. It’s our test of natural selection. You survived it. Anyone escape Pentecost Bill and his harem of daughters that loot families, trade they skin to Cotto Ramos, has some skill for survival.” She motioned to the man with the holes through his ears. “This is Poe.” And it came to Dorn where he’d seen the man. The bartender from the Leavenworth Tavern when he and his father sat with Bellmont McGill. The female gave reference to the stubbed man. “He’s Wolf Cookie Mike. You can call me—”
And Van Dorn cut her off. Said, “Scar, Scar McGill. Me, my father, and the Widow met you when offering respects at your father’s funeral.”
“One question has gone unanswered. Who the shit might you be?”
“Van Dorn Riesing.”
Scar chewed on Dorn’s name. Squinted her view as though his name held a deeper meaning that he was unaware of and told him, “You’d be the one whose father shacked up with the Widow.”
“Horace, my father, yes.”
Looking down on August, Scar said to him, “And you’re the skin that’s left of those that have been traded.”
Dorn questioned Scar, “What is it that you know of this trading?”
“What the Pentecost does. Working his way through the rural areas and even some on the outskirts of other counties. Studying homes. Neighborhoods. Killing the fathers. Taking the wives and children. Trading with Cotto for time.”
“Time?”
“Cotto’s taking territory, he’s a gang leader. A captain, it’s how gangs work. The son of a Guatemalan commando type. But he needs leverage from those who know the counties. The land, the people, and its ways.”
“That don’t make sense.”
“It’s what we know. Cotto holds the Pentecost’s wife hostage, along with others, in order to get his bidding done. And it keeps him from the daughters. Each human he brings is payment, buys more time for Bill and the image that he’ll get her back and his girls won’t be taken, whored out. It’s the part of how Cotto is administering vengeance upon the land. Upon the people.”
“Vengeance for what?”
“For the murder of his father, Manny. He worked with my father, supplying dogs for fighting when needed at the Donnybrook and other places in what my father called the hound round.”
“That don’t make sense. None of these people killed his father.”
Hair black as a rotted avocado, pulled tight to a leathery baseball complexion, Scar told him, “It was a working-class type that killed Manny, and now all who held faith in my father, who followed the Donnybrook, whether they’re black, yellow, white, or red, if they live here, they’ll pay for his father’s life with their own fathers’ lives.”
Dorn’s nerves eased, listening to the intel from Scar and the evil that trespassed.
“Only thing he don’t get, man who killed his father is the same that fed mine to rabid hound dogs.” Scar’s arms held lean tissue, veins protruded from biceps and forearms beneath the weight of the firearm within her grip. “Cotto is taking children, the boys, uses the drugs he can no longer sell to dope them up, get them hooked, train them to be soldiers, which ain’t much more than giving them a gun, showing them how to shoot it and load it, keep ’em fucked up, and the mothers who birthed them he enslaves, possibly for whoring or maybe they’re already dead.”
Van Dorn nodded, his hand reached at the hound, worked between its ears. Rubbing its head.
“We have word of where he lays his head. He has his horde of men from the south. Men who’ve lived amongst us for some time illegally. Brought here by our government. By a man they ran drugs for in the CIA. They stashed their dope. Stockpiled it. Broke it down for selling. Now Cotto’s plan involves territory and blood, lots of blood.”
Dorn thought of the Sheldon girl. Her mother and the others with their complexions of ruin. Eyes stamped by the death of their husbands and fathers. Maybe she led Cotto to the Widow’s in order to spare her life. Dorn could forgive her for that and he told Scar, “I seen these mothers, daughters, and sons caged up on a flatbed. Starved of hope. And the men that enslaved them. I killed three of ’em.”