Crimes in Southern Indiana (16 page)

“Watch your lip, Jonathan, Carol's my wife.”

“Carol was
a coathanger whore 'fore you come along, don't wanna think about how many lives she ended 'fore they even took shape.”

Anger hardened in Bellmont's joints like arthritis.

“Ain't warnin' you again, Jon, she's your goddamn daughter!”

“Warnin's ass,” Jonathan said. “Aggie spoiled Carol. Damn girl was always blowin' her coin on clothes and booze. Then wanna borrow money from us.”

Bellmont walked
off behind Jonathan, unable to fathom how many times he'd helped the piece of gristle kill, string, and process venison. He stared at the plywood shelving of twine, nylon rope, and an assortment of blades, pliers, and bone saws. Then up at the hook above Jon's head. Thought killing an animal was for survival. Nourishment. Watched Jonathan finish his beer. Reach for another. He didn't pour it into
his glass. He took it from the bottle and Bellmont said, “Carol and me is gonna start up our own business.”

Jonathan said, “With what? Two of you is broke as a two-dollar whore.”

Trading his beer for cords of nylon, Bellmont worked the rope into a noose, said, “Gonna use the land you got here.”

Jonathan almost spat his beer through his nose and said, “My land? The shit you talkin' about?”

The rope was electric in Bellmont's grip as he told himself this was for Carol's and his survival. Jonathan was in mid-turn as Bellmont lassoed the rope over his head, strung it up over the rusted hook in the ceiling's rafter, jerked the nylon, hoisted Jonathan up from his chair, and said, “Ever hear of Donnybrook?”

 

Ali feinted right. Angus twisted to Ali's left. Ali's jab reached. Angus peppered
Ali's forearms. Shined the scars that pouted above his lids. Cauliflowered his ears with left-right hooks.

Around the pit, men and women shrieked. Beers and glasses of whiskey sloshed.

Aft er the third advance, Ali was winded. Stepped back. Angus took to the angles. Scourged Ali's ribs. Got them ready for the sauce. Ali dropped his elbows, trying to protect his torso. Angus painted the undersides
of Ali's jaw. Made him chew on cankered silt.

Ali's corner man hollered, “Move your ass, Ali.”

Ali staggered, liquid dribbling like strings of violet grease from his lips. Angus doubled up his left and right, giving Ali the sauce just below his navel, taking his center. Ali hit the ground. Angus stoked the grill. Laid his right shin into Ali's throat, took Ali's left arm across his left knee,
applied downward pressure until Ali's wrist fractured. Angus smiled down at Ali's screams of submission, knowing he was seared.

From the crowd, boos and cheers showered down on the fighters like rain.

“Wasn't even a fight,” Carol said, counting the stack of worn bills. Five hundred in green. Maybe this would be enough to convince Bellmont to get off his ass and take care of business. This, and
Angus. Maybe he'd be their first fighter. A big mitt enclosed her shoulder. Mule, scouring the pool-ball bulge of his crotch with one hand, pulling her tight, said, “Now you owe me a couple drinks.” Carol twisted from his grasp, said, “Don't think so.” She walked toward the gravel lot and her Iroc. Mule hollered, “The hell you think you're goin'?” but she ignored him.

 

Jonathan's heartbeat
jarred his temples. Rope hairs dug into his neck. Bellmont kept his knees bent and his weight dropped as he pulled.

Jonathan huffed, “Mother…fuck—” The noose dammed the passage of breath from his mouth. Fingers dug between rope and throat. His face went the color of a pickled beet, his whites twined with slithers of pink vessel. Denim-covered legs kicked stiff, sweat iced Bellmont's body as
he struggled to tie the rope around a four-by-four that framed the plywood shelves. He stood half shaken, walked in front of Jonathan's body. Kicked the hickory chair over. His eyes had already wheeled into the rear of his head.

Carol and he had watched the Friday-night blood feuds behind the tavern for more than a year. Watched the wagers being chalked and paid for the men who delivered the
pain. Watched the booze being sold. The dope being smoked. The men and women corralling around the indented earth like feral mongrels.

In a state of intoxicated despair, Bellmont forged an idea more lucrative than a Friday-night scrapping session. Seeing all of the money that exchanged hands on Friday nights, Bellmont told Carol of the stories from his daddy, of his idea to deliver the two of
them from their days of scraping by. At Donnybrook, they could charge people sixty to a hundred bucks for three days of watchin', but a fighter's fee would be around five hundred bucks. That wasn't counting the betting and the boozing or purse for the winner after three days of fighting. He thought if people wanted to sell drugs, they could but he'd get a cut of it. And they'd do it year after year,
because now they'd have a place to do it.

Outside, car lights shadowed through the basement window onto Jonathan's outline. He hung from the rafter like a water-soaked towel weighing down a clothesline. His worn overalls already blotted dark at the crotch. Puddled onto the basement's creek rock floor. The smell of feces was a permanent testament on the air.

Outside, a car door slammed. And within
minutes the screen door upstairs screeched open and Carol yelled, “Bellmont, you in here?”

Bellmont shouted, “I's downstairs.”

Feet rushed across the floor planks. The basement door squeaked. Carol burst down the wooden steps. Bellmont turned, Jonathan's knees bumping against his shoulder; he smirked and said, “The son of a bitch done dropped his bladder but his chest is still pushin' wind.”

Winded, Carol eyed her father, hanging like fresh-cut tobacco from the webbed rafter, and said, “Wondered if you was over here. Done checked the cabin. Seen the basement light through the window.” She wiped a tear from her eye, realizing Bellmont had done it, the old man was near dead, and she said, “Bastard always was tougher than a cast-iron griddle. Think he's done?”

“How the shit should I
know, never made nobody commit suicide before.”

“Won't believe what I come across tonight?”

“What?”

“A bad piece of loin goes by Angus, handed Ali his walker for the retirement home.”

“No sh—”

Out the basement window, a truck engine grew in pitch, more car lights shadowed. Gravel clanked against tires. A door opened and a man's voice hollered, “Where the shit you at, Carol McGill?”

Bellmont
looked at Carol. “The fuck is that?”

“Aw hell, must be Mule Furgison.”

“Shit's he doin' here?”

“Bought me a drink at the tavern.”

Bellmont felt the scrapes on his face kindle and said, “Bought you a drink? You know what I just did here to give us a better life?”

Upstairs the kitchen's screen door opened.

Carol red-eyed Bellmont, said, “I'll fix it,” and ran up the basement steps before
Bellmont could stop her.

In the kitchen, Carol yelled, “Shit you think you're doin' here, Mule?”

“Th ink you gonna prick-tease me, Carol, you got another thing comin'.”

Carol demanded, “Get your hands off a me! My husband is right downstairs.”

Bellmont heard feet shuffle across the kitchen floor. A table scuffing linoleum. Carol screaming, “Quit it, Mule!” A palm bounced a few life lines off
her skin, wilted her backwards onto the kitchen table.

Bellmont ran up the steps. Took in the mammoth shape of Mule standing in front of his dazed wife laid out like a slab of meat on a butcher's block, her knees bent and hanging over the table's edge.

“Piece of inbred hash. Get the hell away from my wife!”

Mule whirled into two fists pounding his face. Stunned, the big man fell back. His right
hand pawed for the snap of his ASP's case, pulled the ASP free, thumbed the button. Extended the steel baton. Mule came at Bellmont, sledged the steel section across Bellmont's nose. Cartilage butterflied. Bellmont's legs quaked. He knelt to the floor on one knee, tongued the blood, and screamed, “Fuckin' shit!”

Carol shook off Mule's palm branding her flesh, crunched up from the table, and
reached her arms around his five-gallon bucket of a neck, wrapped her legs around his whiskey-barrel waist, and rooted her fingers into his tresses and ripped at the layers. Mule grunted. His left hand pawed for Carol's head. She sank her teeth into the back of his neck.

Mule dropped the ASP. Slapped both hands backwards at Carol. Bellmont grabbed the ASP. Notched Mule's shin. Parted his knee.
Mule staggered backwards. Carol released her anaconda grip, fell onto the table, spitting skin and hair.

Bellmont worked his way up Mule's torso, beat the grizzly's thighs, made his knees hinge to the floor. Bruised and oozing, Bellmont told him, “Any man think he's gonna get himself a whiff of my wife best sit a spell and reconsider.” He brought the ASP down over Mule's head, rolled him into
a ball of dough. Bellmont raised the ASP again and Carol came from the table, screamed, “Stop, 'fore you kill him!” She bear-hugged Bellmont. He looked down over her shoulder onto Mule's parched profile, shading into blackberries and rust.

A craving spread through Carol's frame as she tugged his face to hers, feeling the savage jolt of lips and the violent twitch of their tendons. She fingered
the buckle of his pants, pushed them down to his ankles. Kicked her shoes free, unbuttoned and squirmed from her own pants. Bellmont held the length of steel in his right, ripped her panties from her with his left, keeping his eyes on Mule, who lay on his side, his ribs raising and lowering slowly. Carol flung Bellmont against the kitchen wall, locked her legs around his waist. Met the stab of his
pelvis into hers as she bucked a violent teeter-totter of cold, hard love.

Aft erward, they stood sheened and panting over Mule, who lay like a tree that had been chopped and derooted, pulp ebbing from his lips and nose.

Carol looked at Bellmont and asked, “Now what?”

 

The silence from the basement was overwhelming. It drowned out Mule's bubbling gasps. Bellmont looked at his wife, at his
hands, around his new kitchen. “I'll load this piece of shit up in his truck, drive him home. You follow me, bring me back here. We get some of his bloodstains cleaned from the floor.”

“We gonna let him live?”

“Yeah, most he's gonna be doin' for a while is spreadin' the word about how others ought to not fuck with Bellmont McGill and his wife.”

“What about Daddy?”

“Leave his ass hangin' like
meat in a cooler, make sure he's really dead. We make the call in the mornin'.”

“And we start new?”

Bellmont abraded Carol's stomach, thinking about the child they both wanted but hadn't been able to have, mashed his lips against hers, and said, “Yeah, we start new.”

Loss lubricated the sixteen-by-sixteen pit where four canine legs twitched muscle beneath soiled fur. Red the color of roses drooled from the teeth of Boono, a black-tan Walker hound. Puddled onto Ruby's lifeless golden cur hide. The referee declared the winner.

Outside the heated glow of the pit, Iris stood like a bastard child with a clubfoot and Elephant
Man features, fighting back the mucus and the tears of his loss. He watched opal-skinned men dressed in bibs, some with T-shirts, others without, count crumpled bills to the winning bettors of Boono. While tobacco-skinned men in denim sagging below their asses traded small squares of cellophane for cash from grizzly-faced white men whose arms were graffitied up with Marksman crosshairs, American
flags, M16s, and big-breasted females.

But not Iris. He was deep in the hole after his third hound, Ruby, was beaten.

Going over all that he'd lost. The wife. The morals. And now, the dogs. Five fingers lay heavy as regret over Iris's right shoulder. The words of Chancellor's broken southern Indiana tongue rang in his ear.

“Mr. Iris, looks to me you's about fift een grand in the hole.”

Iris
kept his back to Chancellor and said, “Ain't got it.”

Chancellor chuckled in a deep bellow and said, “Them's three words I don't never care to hear.” He went silent among the hopped-up screams of unshaven, gap-toothed men swilling drinks and snorting the crystalline powders from their purchases. Knowing Iris was a renowned trainer of coonhounds, he drawled, “You got two choices. You labor my
dogs under my rules for a few fights, work off what you owe, or—”

Chancellor paused, waited for Iris to acknowledge him.

Iris turned around. His cataract eyes met the pugilistic glow of Chancellor Evans, whose hair thorned up into oily intestinal nails, framed his floured skin and bristled beard. He had hubcap shoulders attached to iron-ore arms. Stood with a black shirt worn to the shade of
spent charcoal. A .45-caliber Glock was tucked below his navel. Chancellor was a war veteran of Afghanistan who returned home, hating America for the war it had started and never finished. He ran guns throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. Had meth brought in for his family's mid-level dogfighting ring and, after all the generations before him, he was now eyeing the big-money fights.

Anger
festered behind eyes split with red vein. Iris swallowed his pride and asked, “Or what?”

Chancellor smiled. His metallic blue eyes rolled down toward the pistol tucked in his front, came back to Iris as he lifted his hand to his temple, index finger pointing, thumb high like a hammer, and he said, “Or one of the Salvadorans can take ye out behind the barn, put a nine to your pan.”

When Chancellor's
supplier for meth caught his abandoned cookhouse on fire on Lickford Bridge Road, he'd gotten word of men who pushed a purer form of amphetamine within the small riverboat towns that ran east along the Ohio River. He approached these men and worked out an arrangement for them to supply extra muscle at the dogfights and drugs to the locals who worked the power plant and automotive and oil factories
in the surrounding counties. Aging men and women who callused their grips for a wage and craved carnage. The men Chancellor approached were the Mara Salvatrucha. He conceived the MS-13 gang to be soldiers like him and his men, playing by the rules of the grotesque. And they agreed.

Iris's bones itched with fear and crashed with loss. What he wanted was to kill this savage to whom he'd gotten
indebted.

Iris sucked up his pride, leveled his tone to Chancellor. “Know a lotta faces are here to wager. See somethin' bleed. I gave 'em that. I work off what I owe. Not a penny more.”

Chanellor's lips shaped into a smirk and said, “Clean that dog of yours outta my pit. Take 'im out back, toss him in Crazy's truck with the others.” Iris turned, felt his insides go warm. No burial for his hounds.
He made his way through the shadowed frames. Walked toward the lighted pit where Ruby's motionless shape lay as a testament to his mistake, stepped over the wooden wall decorated by the dead. Wrinkled bills for the next round of bets were passed.

 

Gothic clowns morphed from Crazy's shoulders, inked into ropes down around his elbows. Daggers ripped over his forearms and beneath the cuffed wrists
that twisted behind his back.

Crazy had been IDed as Felix Martinez, a man who worked at a local chicken factory by day. By night he networked a cocktail of mayhem, stealing, cashing out dope, and when needed transporting dead canines.

Detective Mitchell stood in the interrogation room, eyes spent, carbon hair matted against his head, a jawline of stubble. He had run Crazy's prints, scanned
his sheet. Discovered Felix was an MS-13 lieutenant. Wanted for car theft s, misdemeanors, and even tied to a few malicious-wounding charges in other states. His ID was falsified.

Crazy leaned into the metal chair more than he sat in it. His black-and-white skull-and-crossbones boxers rimmed out of his loose-hanging denims, which were spotted with crimson.

Mitchell leaned down in front of Crazy.
His words bounced within the eight-by-eight room of carpeted floor and wood-paneled walls as he asked, “Name Iris got any meanin' to you?”

Mitchell had been investigating the bloated hides of dead dogs scattered down in White Cloud, Indiana, from two months ago. Where a single road of gnarled blacktop led to a few fishing cabins spread out along the Blue River and the antique gas station that
hadn't operated since the sixties or seventies. The dogs, dumped behind the station, had been discovered by a local.

The dog's necks had been torn out by teeth. Flies had taken shelter within their ears and nostrils, depositing larvae, swelling their eyes. The innards had begun to reek of decay. His hunch was he was tracking a dogfighting ring.

Mitchell had no leads, knew dogfights didn't happen
every week, they were spread out. He had been staking out the gas station on weekends. Parked his old truck within the shadows of willow trees and waited. Headlights cut through the dew of Sunday morning. Inhaling a cigarette and sipping cold caffeine, Mitchell watched a Nissan truck putter to a stop, then reverse next to the gas station and kill the engine.

From it stepped Crazy in his T-shirt
with sagging jeans and big white tennis shoes, a wool ball cap cocked to the east. “The fuck?” Mitchell muttered. “Damn fish outta water.”

The young man dropped the tailgate. Cradled out several stiff shapes. Threw them down the same embankment of dried leaves and rock. Mitchell unholstered his piece and got out of his cruiser.

Now Crazy sat smelling of tainted hides, staring holes in the white-and-gold
table before him, and said, “No hear of him.”

The dogs Crazy had dumped had been tagged, the letters I.P. branded within the left and right inner ears of each hound. The owner's initials. Iris Perkins. A local breeder, hunter, and legend amongst the coon hunters of Harrison County. A man Mitchell's father had hunted with when he was a boy.

The dogs could have been stolen and sold. But no reports
had been filed on missing coonhounds. Mitchell said, “Them dogs was killed by other dogs. Meanin' they was part of a dogfighting ring. Big fuckin' no-no 'round these parts. We love our dogs here. I wanna know who runs it.” Crazy said nothing.

“Fine, your prints tell me you got forged documentation. You've a sheet that's been opened for a bit, it'll likely take you some years to close it, servin'
time in prison.” Crazy didn't even blink. “World's most dangerous gang, that's your title. 'Course, you do time your face and ass'll be gettin'used in all kinds of dangerous ways.”

Crazy was still calm.

Mitchell said, “And they's the duff el bag of cash I found in your truck.” Crazy lifted his gaze from the table, eyed Mitchell but didn't say anything. Mitchell had gotten his attention and said,
“You's fucked.”

Mitchell exited the room. Let his words worm through Crazy's head. He walked to the break room, refilled his takeout cup with coff ee. Went over to another room and set the thermostat of the interview room's A/C to 58. Let that fucker freeze. Knowing he was from way down south, couldn't be used to the cold.

In the room, Crazy thought about how everything started thirteen years
ago in El Salvador, where poverty and hunger had run cold, pained his mother's and father's guts in a drift wood shack with a tin roof nestled upon a mound of dirt and dreams of saving enough to immigrate to the States. Until Crazy found a new family, which was green script entwined with crossbones, daggers, and teardrops from forehead to heel. They hopped trains to the north. Crossed the Rio Grande.
Paid the coyotes to bring his set leader, Angel, and him to the Midwest with ten other members six years ago. They'd an objective: spread out to the small cracker-ass redneck towns. Get a job with other immigrants. Blend in. Start recruiting members for the MS. Set up trafficking routes for drugs and humans.

Now he was second in charge of that family, directly under Angel. But the thieving, smuggling,
and killing had taken its toll, making him question when he'd be the next statistic. He started skimming cash from the dope he and his set smuggled from another MS set who delivered by boat along the Ohio River and sold throughout Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. He and his homies exchanged cash from the previous sale of product after they'd gotten their cut. Loaded the new product. Sometimes
cellophane bricks of weed, other times meth. Crazy drove the drugs in one car while another ran interference if needed for the conservation officers, as well as the state and county cops. Then they broke it down, cut it up for resale to the locals throughout the surrounding counties. Crazy planned to take the money he'd stolen, disappear, begin a life without violence.

Recently, Angel had formed
an alliance with a local gunrunner who held dogfights, thought it would help to spread their reach deeper into the rural landscape. A cracker named Chancellor Evans, who held bouts every couple months for locals and out-of-towners. His supplier had been busted after his cookhouse found a spark and burned to the ground, or so he thought. Angel and Crazy got word of its location, rigged it to burn
to get more meth territory. As an added bonus, he helped sling amphetamines and provided some of his clique's extra muscle for Chancellor's fights. The deal Evans laid on the table was simple: supply the narcotics and get a 30 percent cut on his take. Angel took it. Crazy was drafted to dump the losing dogs, only tonight he'd planned on dumping the hounds and disappearing with the money he'd been
skimming over the months, piling the cash up and hiding it in the spare-tire compartment behind the seat. But tonight the cash was sitting next to him because he was planning to run away, start over, and the cop came out of nowhere.

He'd been sitting for what seemed like hours. The joints of his arms and legs ached, his skin pimpled. He was cold and stiff. He wanted out.

Mitchell entered the
room with a steaming cup of coffee. He sipped it. “Ahh,” he said, “somethin' to take the chill out.”

Crazy sat up in the chair, shivering.

Mitchell eyed Crazy, remembered the dogs: one golden, one fudge, and one raven. But what Crazy had dumped was chomped and clawed into Chiclets of red. Necks busted with gums smeared and teeth filed to points. Hinds and fores sprained and broken.

Crazy sat
silent, inhaled deeply, exhaled.

Mitchell took in Crazy's candy-corn scars, knife wounds. And his eyes, bottomless pools of unknown savagery. Mitchell sipped his coffee. Crazy wasn't playing hard, he was hard. Mitchell wanted to get inside Crazy's head. Try to flip him. The dogs weren't going to work. He thought of the way Crazy had looked up from that table when he mentioned the cash and he
said, “Shame, all that money you had. Know what happens to it? Twenty percent automatically goes to Uncle Sam. The other eighty goes to the department. Buy us new equipment.”

Crazy's sight was burning when Mitchell said this. All of the work he'd done. Time and risk taken to not get caught. And Crazy said, “Muthafucker.”

Mitchell smiled. “Not only do I got your money, I got your plate number,
know where you work and sleep.”

“That money belong to me.”

The bag had been sitting on the seat with a change of clothes, deodorant, and soap. His Nissan had a near full tank of gas. Was Crazy stealing from the hands that fed him? Plannin' to run away with money earned from the dogfights? It was a long shot but Mitchell would take it. He threw out his lure and said, “Bet it belongs to your set,
your gang.”

Enraged, Crazy repeated, “Belong to me.”

Mitchell said, “What's it worth to you?”

“Worth?”

“Yeah, what would you do for it? I could get word to your gang, let 'em know you're dirty. Cut you loose and see how long you last.”

The chill in Crazy's bones was breaking him down. He wasn't afraid of Angel anymore, Angel was going to come after him anyway once he left, but he'd risked
his life over the course of a year skimming that money and this pig was trying to make him walk the coals.

Mitchell told him, “You give me names. Locations. Maybe we can work somethin' out.”

Somethin', Crazy thought, meant ratting out Chancellor, whom Crazy had stolen some of the money from. The rest he'd stolen from the MS. If the MS or Chancellor discovered he had turned rat, he'd be hunted
and maimed. He was standing on a cliff with a bottomless drop.

“I say anything I'm dead man.”

Mitchell had him and said, “Waive your rights, turn informant, get me what I need, I get you assurance and relocation.”

Crazy said, “Relocation?”

“Federal protection. New name, job, home in another state, but you gotta give me everything you know.”

If Crazy wanted out, this could be his only chance.
Staring through Mitchell, he said, “What about money?”