I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (19 page)

One nodded at the others and then at Bowie,
who was placing his newspapers and lottery tickets on the hood of a
car. Bowie put the bag with the prescriptions on top of the tickets
and newspapers. There was no breeze this afternoon and he wasn’t
overly worried they’d blow away.

He turned and faced the three, who all stood
together looking at him.

“What?” The tallest one asked. He wore a pair
of sunglasses on the top of his head.

“You guys hang out here every day.”

“Yeah. So?” challenged Lips.

“You know a lady walks by here? Big lady?
Heavy lady with thick ankles?” As he spoke, Bowie looked at each
one of them, testing them, seeing who would look down, who would
look away.

“So what if we know the bitch?” Peanut head
spoke up. He had a blank look on his face, like he was a criminal
mastermind or mentally retarded. Maybe a little bit of both,
thought Bowie.

“That’s Mrs. Coyle. Let me tell you about
her.”

“Maybe we don’t want to hear about the
b—”

Bowie cut him off with a smile and a raised
index finger. “No, you’ll like this. Trust me. She’s been a den
mother for the Cub Scouts for thirty, thirty-five years now. Any of
you guys ever in the Scouts?” He didn’t wait for them to answer.
“When all the crackers in the neighborhood were up in arms twenty
years ago when they built the projects, she was one of the few
voices in the community who said, ‘Wait, give these people a
chance. They need a nice place to live, too.’”

The tall one with the lips was giving him the
look. The other two were focused on Bowie’s sneakers.

“Do you know she named one of her cats after
Leroi Jones? Do you even know who Leroi Jones is?”

The kid with his hair in a bun scoffed and
looked at his tall friend.

“Your friend thinks what I’m saying is
silly,” Bowie said to the tall kid.

“What choo sayin’ is fuckin’—”

Bowie ignored the kid with the bun and
stepped closer to the tall boy, the kid as tall as him. Bowie was
still smiling. “Maybe you give him a message for me, right?”

The tall kid looked wound up, ready to
spring.

“Tell him,” Bowie held up his left hand, the
fingers splayed, “This is my left hand. And this,” he raised his
right hand and fluttered the fingers, “This is my pimp hand.”

When Bowie clenched his left fist three sets
of eyes were drawn to it. But it was the open palm of his right
hand with which he slapped the tall kid across the face, knocking
him down.

“…and my pimp hand is strong!”

Peanut head reached for something in his
pants but Bowie beat him to the draw, clearing the Glock.

“Whatcha gonna do? Huh?” Bowie waited to see
what the kids would do next. The tall kid was on his hands and
knees and those oversized lips on his face were bleeding, the blood
mixing with his tears.

“Come on. Man the fuck up.”

None of the three looked like they were going
to do anything.

“You ain’t gonna do shit,” said Bowie. “None
of you. You—” he addressed peanut head, “Let’s see what you
got.”

The kid reached into his pants and delicately
returned a knife.

“You bring a knife to a gunfight? Boy, you
are
as stupid as you look. Drop it on the sidewalk.” The kid
did what he was told.

The tall kid was sniffling, trying not to
cry.

“This kid got blow job lips,” Bowie said to
the boy with his hair in the bun, speaking of his friend. “Look at
him now, crying like a little bitch.” He addressed Lips. “Man up,
son. Man hits you in the face, you hit him back. Or you weak, get
it?

“And you.” He returned his undivided
attention to the kid with the bun. “You like to talk shit.” Bowie
reached out and yanked the chain and medallion off the kid’s neck.
“I hear a lot of bitch in your talk. But you ain’t sayin’ shit now,
huh?”

He held the pistol on the kids and held the
medallion up so he could appraise it.

“Piece of shit.” He tossed it back to the
kid, who dropped it and looked like he didn’t know if he should
pick it up or not.

“Get the fuck out of here. Now. And don’t
come back ever. You see that old lady, you don’t say shit to her.
You see that Chinese lady just walk by with the baby—you look the
other way. Now get the fuck out of here I said.”

The three scampered away without looking
back.

Bowie stuffed the pistol back in his jeans.
He kicked the knife on the sidewalk down the storm drain in the
street. He ignored the medallion on its chain, leaving both there.
Bowie retrieved his papers, instant lottery tickets and the bag
with his mother’s prescriptions.

When he got to the apartment where they
lived, his downstairs neighbor, Lou, was nodding his head
approvingly.

“Punks,” said Lou.

“Yeah,” agreed Bowie. “Punks.”

Her brother called himself Boone, and though
it wasn’t the name their parents gave him when they adopted him,
Jennifer cared and respected him enough to call him by the name he
had chosen.

“Boone, pass the ketchup, please.”

Four year old Greg and his six year old
sister, Jill, were on their Uncle’s lap and Boone was bouncing them
up and down.

“Have you been to see dad lately, Boone?”
Jennifer knew he hadn’t. Their father was in a nursing home in the
grips of dementia.

“I don’t want to see him like that, Jen.”
Jill had hopped off his lap and Boone had a hand on either of
Greg’s little arms.

“I think he’d like to see you,” Jennifer
said. “He likes seeing the grandkids.”

“Is that right?” Boone asked the boy sitting
on him.

“Yeah!” affirmed Greg.

“Yeah, but sometimes he calls me other kids’
names,” said Jill.

Boone smirked.

“Boone, you want some coffee or tea?” Derrick
called from the kitchen.

“Coffee.”

“What about you dear?”

“I’ll have a glass of tea,” Jennifer answered
her husband.

“This little piggy went to the market.”
Greg’s big toe disappeared between his uncle’s thumb and index
finger. “And this little piggy stayed home…”

Jennifer did not get to see her brother as
much as she would have liked. He was a tough man to get close to,
and she felt she and her family were as close to him as anyone
could be. Derrick liked Boone, though she could tell he was also
wary of him. Boone was like a pit bull, loveable in spite of their
reputations. The verdict was out on whether they were bad by nature
or upbringing.

But what a life her brother had had. One
summer when Jennifer was twelve and off from school, her mother and
father had taken her to Europe to visit an orphanage. They’d been
negotiating with broker agencies to adopt a child. Jennifer clearly
recalled the barely concealed squalor of the orphanage, and the
hard and cruel manner of the adults in charge of the children
there.

She remembered very well the first time she
saw the boy Boone. He was seven and the orphanage attendants, both
burly men, struggled to manhandle the child into the room where
Jennifer and her parents waited. He’d had a black eye, which the
director of the orphanage in his broken English chalked up to the
child having fallen. At the time, Jennifer’s parents had thought
that Boone might have been fighting with the other children, but
something inside her had told Jennifer that the adults of that
inhospitable place had done this to the boy.

When the attendants left, Boone had sat
quietly in the room with Jennifer and her parents. The boy had been
silent and guarded. Her mother and father had sat there smiling
dopily at him, saying kind things to him in voices better suited
for a three year old.

There was a seriousness and an intensity to
her brother even when he was seven. Jennifer, who, with Derrick,
had adopted her own two children, wondered if she would have
adopted the boy Boone twenty years ago if she had been in her
parents’ shoes. She hated to admit it to herself, but she thought
she probably wouldn’t have.

Their relationship had never been as close as
Jennifer would have liked. Boone was a tough cookie to crack and
always had been. He was constantly in trouble with his school and
the local authorities, which caused a great deal of stress for
their parents and his relationship with them. Boone was the kind of
kid who adults spoke of as a “problem child,” the kind of kid the
public school labeled as emotionally disturbed, the kid the police
escorted home on more than one occasion. And that didn’t count all
the times their parents had to go and retrieve him from the
precinct.

But Jennifer never doubted that Boone loved
her and her parents as much as he could. When she was twenty and
home from college, Jennifer went on a date with a boy she had known
in high school. They had a few drinks and one thing led to another
and Ian got aggressive and wouldn’t take no for an answer and
Jennifer wound up walking home with a black eye. Her parents were
outraged and demanded to know what had happened so they could call
the police, but Jennifer had brushed them off as she’d wiped the
tears from her eyes.

She vividly remembered Boone’s reaction.
Fifteen-year-old Boone had walked over to where his sister sat
without a word. He took her chin in one hand and turned her face up
to the light so he could study the black and blue around her eye
socket. He hadn’t said a word. He’d gone outside at ten o’clock at
night and got on his bike and rode off into the dark. Their parents
were too busy crowing over Jennifer and how she needed to contact
the authorities that they hadn’t noticed Boone’s absence.

When the police showed up at their door at
midnight it wasn’t the first time, but this time the story was
different. Boone had bicycled over to Ian’s house, knocked on his
door, shouldered past Ian’s father, marched up to the young man’s
bedroom and promptly set upon him in his bed, beating his savagely.
When Ian’s father intervened, Boone had thrown him a beating,
breaking the fifty-something-year-old man’s arm. Boone beat Ian to
a pulp in his own bed until he was satisfied, Ian’s mother
screaming frantically and watching the whole thing. Boone had
calmly walked out of Ian’s house and sat down on the front porch,
waiting for the police.

Boone was fifteen years old. Ian had suffered
two broken eye sockets, a broken jaw, five broken fingers on one
hand, a broken clavicle, and two fractured humeri. His ribs had
been smashed and one of his lungs had been punctured as well. Ian,
everyone said, had been lucky to have lived, but Jennifer had
believed that Ian had lived because Boone hadn’t wanted to kill him
that night.

Jennifer was forthright about her date with
Ian and the presiding judge showed mercy on her parents, giving
Boone six months of supervised living in a group home and a couple
hundred hours of community service instead of a stint in juvenile
hall.

By the time of Boone’s sentencing, Ian was
dead. Two weeks after he’d come home from the hospital, Ian had
mysteriously died in his bed. The coroner stated that Ian’s death
was not attributable to the beating he’d taken at her younger
brother’s hands, which kept Boone from facing a murder charge. The
police had come to question Boone and his family, of course, and of
course Jennifer had said her brother was home all evening the night
in question, listening to his heavy metal in his bedroom. But she
had known, even then. She had known who killed Ian, and she had
never said a word. And she never would.

On the night Ian died, Jennifer had walked
past Boone’s room and knocked on his door. When he hadn’t answered,
she’d pushed it open and looked inside. She would often find Boone
lying on his bed with his hands behind his head, staring up at the
glow-in-the-dark solar system their father had affixed to the
ceiling when they’d brought him home from the orphanage. But that
night her brother’s bed was empty and the window was open.

No, Jennifer knew, her younger brother loved
her very much in his own way, and she knew he loved her family now.
Boone was just emotionally incapacitated, unable to express that
love. His relationships…Boone hadn’t had many friends when they
were growing up. Early on he’d been attracted to what her father
labeled the “wrong crowd.” But Boone inevitably wound up alone,
usually after a knock-down dragged-out brawl with one or more of
those boys.

And the girls he brought home….Jennifer
suspected her brother was sexually active from a young age, but the
girls and women he was with weren’t ones her mother and father
would have approved of. They were usually covered with tattoos and
piercings and might as well have been labeled damaged goods. Boone
never seemed to want any of the girls he knew to meet his family
anyway.

“Here we go.” Derrick came in with the coffee
carafe and tea pot, placing each on hot plates on the dining room
table.

“How’s work, Derrick?” Boone asked.

“It’s nice to have the week off.” Derrick
worked on Wall Street, trading things Boone had never heard of.
Jennifer had heard of derivatives but couldn’t tell you what they
were or how they worked. What mattered was that Derrick knew them
inside and out and did rather nicely for their family. That, along
with the money she made as a school psychologist, afforded them a
comfortable lifestyle in a five bedroom house in the suburbs.

Derrick, Jennifer knew, wouldn’t ask Boone
about his work. Neither would she. The few times they had asked in
the past, Boone had some bullshit story about what he did for a
living. She didn’t like putting him on the spot, putting him in a
position where he had to lie. Her brother didn’t dress rich, but
the fact was the guy was always flush with cash, showering gifts
and money on his niece and nephew. If asked, Boone said he was an
independent contractor, but never gave any details as to what that
meant or what his business was.