The Savage(75)
Cotto recruited gang members from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, young men who knew the routes of smuggling and survival. Kids long abandoned by their families. Young men who wanted more than the streets they ran upon but held no mercy to others. Those who understood territory. And he thought of that day when word came from Ernesto, as he sat in a leather chair, the buzz of ink vibrating from a needle that lined and shadowed textures about his forearm in the Southside Tattoo parlor as Bart Willis created the shapes of faces without meat or eyes or hair. Bony and skeletal. Symbols of death. And Ernesto told Cotto, “Your father has been murdered.”
Through the door he stepped, those memories of their time before all of this ruin. Plotting and planning, he came back to the Midwest not just to reap vengeance upon those who had a role in his father’s slaying: Purcell the prophet and Jarhead Earl, thieves who’d robbed the Donnybrook, viewers to the man who shot his father dead in the face, Chainsaw Angus. The man who’d take Bellmont McGill’s life as well. But also to scourge the Midwest with his drugs, to overshadow a deal with Plato Reign, a CIA mercenary, and rule the territory with his own brand of soldiers and what ever he deemed necessary. No outside gangs or dealers could do business unless they went through him. Used his drugs. His prices.
But it’d taken so much time to track these men down. Angus being the most difficult. Unseen. Unheard. Rumor was he lay hidden in Harrison County with a Chinaman. Purcell and Jarhead had been a different story; every so often rumor of their trespass came about, letting Cotto know they were bunkered down somewhere in the surrounding counties until Cotto spotted, followed, and erased their existence, thanks to the Pentecost.
Now, entering the confines of Bill’s chicken coop, a place where he was known to detain women and children for Cotto. Forced to become a pair of eyes and ears after Cotto’d taken his wife while Bill begged for mercy.
The waft within the barn-sided walls was suffering. Smells of piss and shit and the eruption of bloat and bloodshot from the heft of man who lay about the hard earth with a thin coating of dust. Complexion seared with sweat, his arms blown up like lengths of zucchini or squash that had overripened, sat too long before picking. Only it was not from the labor that creates muscle but from venom. Around him one daughter kneeled, the others lay looking worse than their sire. The one daughter held a cold, ragged square of cotton and a bucket of liquid to dip it within. Horror glazed the girl’s eyes as she took in the shape and appearance of Cotto, who raised his eyebrows, with his skeletal complexion and the ink of thorns around his head as though he were a deity.
“The Pentecost has fallen.”
Bill’s chest rose and dropped as he looked to Cotto. Wheezing escaped from his mouth as though he were finding his breath in a kazoo; amongst the sweating and slobbering, his lips parted with words salivating from his tongue. “It is another devil who has arrived. I’ve fought the other and survived his magic, but if I must battle another, God will not be so kind as to spare me, but He will surely take me to the heavens, and for that I am prepared.”
Cotto shook his head and laughed. “Who might this devil that you speak of be? Is he the one who has brought disfigurement and bloat to you and your offsprings’ appearances?”
Bill struggled to speak. “A boy who has grown into a man, a man whose father and himself helped me more over the years than the count of hog I’ve gutted and butchered in my life. Boy goes by the moniker of Dorn, Van Dorn.”
Cotto’s eyes lit up like two bonfires infused by propellant. His pulse ignited to heart-attack beats and he asked, “When?”
“When what?” Bill rasped.
“When did this Dorn encroach you?”
“Long … long past the disappearance of this day.”
Cotto shook his head. “I need not your hick scripture of dialect, one day or two hours or more? How much time has elapsed?”
“You … you raise questions like that of … the Sheldon girl who crossed within my misery only moments before you. Why must you hunt and bring harm to all these characters I’ve known? Enslaving my wife, making me do deviances for you. All you’re doing is placing these people’s backs to a wall and they will not surrender, they will duel till they’ve nothing left.”
“Maybe if you’d have made known sooner the whereabouts of Jarhead Earl and the prophet, you’d still be in the company of your wife. Now what words did you offer the Sheldon girl?”
Bill wheezed. “How was I to know that it was he you searched out? You spoke only of Chainsaw Angus at first, a man who has been wiped from this earth. Unseen for years.”
Enamel nearly chipped with the grit of Cotto’s anger-streaked tone. “Your words to the Sheldon girl—” Pausing, he clenched one hand into a fist, the other gripped and rested on his sidearm, and he finished with “What did they convey of Dorn, his direction, did he travel alone, armed, what did you offer her?”
Bill’s nerves rattled with fear. Fear of living. Fear of dying. With the venom browning his veins, poisoning his stream of air, he no longer recognized which was worse. “Th-that this young man known as Dorn, he’s of some form of devilry. He’s of one with the serpents.”
Standing up, Cotto shook his head. He would have this young man as his own, a master warrior-soldier, much like Cotto and his father. Eyeing each of the Pentecost’s daughters, the fallen and the lone breather, taking her curves of skin, pallid as goat’s milk, he aimed his rifle end between Bill’s eyes, his finger tickled the trigger, and the girl’s eyes ignited like fresh embers with an abundance of air. “You have gone blitzkrieg in mind, Pentecost. I will not repeat myself, the Sheldon girl, what exchange did you have with her?”