Here is a preview from the second Jon Catlett novel South of Cincinnati by Jonathan Ashley…
Prologue
The low evening sun half-sunken behind the upward slope of pavement and skyscraper rendered downtown Music City rife for pillage in the dusky gloaming. I knew these streets. I’d lost a lot of weekends here, the bulk of my youth ardently forfeited to drink and lechery. The abysmal avenues of this broken suburb remained eclipsed in the faint shadow of the Parthenon’s irradiant arches. The Athenian wonder had been replicated to the last detail, reflecting not what crumbling ruins still stand in the birthplace of democracy, but that baronial resplendence that died with the ancient Greeks.
Since my return to the bent life, I’d barely noticed the seasons changing. This town lacked Kentucky’s suffocating humidity. Back home, when came the harsh drudgeries of summer that lingered far into September like a teenager’s first heartbreak, the murder rate always tripled. But the weather was not the only cause this time. Usually there was a peak in shootings when the equatorial temperatures grew too taxing on the poor and marginalized and potentially murderous. But there were other factors that had contributed to this particularly awe-inspiring increase in killings. This streak had started long before the heatwave. When our product hit town in late March, the West End turned into a war zone over night. Low bottom junkies and competing corner boys now ventilated each other with impunity, all over the mahogany kilos my friends and I had begun transporting across state lines last Spring.
The year before I entered the game, there’d been seventy-five suspicious deaths in Louisville. Since January, we’d had a hundred and twenty-eight, eclipsing Memphis and Nashville in violent crime.
And I’d contributed to the problem more than I’d ever care to confess.
This run would mark my first hands on drug deal since I’d thrown back in with my psychopathic sidekicks. I’d stayed away from the dirtier side of the business since the morning my best friend and I survived a shoot-out that would’ve made Sam Peckinpah proud and wistful. In a last-ditch effort to save our own lives and dethrone our former employer, we strapped on Kevlar vests and armed ourselves to the teeth, determined to, if not survive, at least ensure that our adversaries perished with us.
The crooked detective leading us into battle, a brooding country gentleman who ranked prominently among my long list of criminal confederates, had pilfered an array of weapons over the years from dead or pleading suspects. Many of the smaller calibers I’m sure the sergeant, at one time, intended to use as “drop guns.” These token street pieces were perfect for squeezing into the grip of an unarmed suspect shot to death mistakenly or, depending on the officer involved, for motives more sinister.
For our purposes that bright spring morning, such lady guns would hardly suffice. From the sergeant’s extensive arsenal, we chose Glocks affixed with foot-long suppressors, Armalite AR-15 assault rifles manually upgraded to fully automatic subjoined with night vision scopes, and massive pump-action shotguns, Ithacas and Remingtons that could, and did, cut men clean in half with single discharges.
Clad in dark overcoats and knit caps, we could have passed for the poorly aged star attractions of a high school shooter reunion tour. We crossed the city limits, the rural route buttressed by fallow fields of grazing cattle eyeing passing traffic with a gaze as lifeless as that of the killer cop steering us to our fate on Dog Hill, Luther’s farm east of town where three trench-coated gunmen with nothing to lose would make Kentucky history. Some ambitious and surprisingly street-wise crime reporter would entitle the bloodbath, “The Dog Hill Dog Food Massacre.” The writer’s headline I found particularly impressive as most drug-culture laymen are justly unaware that “dog food” is a street name for heroin.
Taste the stuff after it’s been broken down with water and you’ll understand the reference.
Why did we have to kill Luther Longmire?
I’d made the lanky loudmouth Eastern Kentuckian stupidly rich with my connections in the Cincinnati and Chicago heroin trades. Don’t get me wrong. Luther was wealthy before I came along. The man had, for nearly a decade, been considered by both the police and concomitant criminals the most successful marijuana cultivator and distributor in Kentucky. But when we started raking in the kind of money to be made peddling dog food, Longmire, almost overnight, succumbed to that paranoia so common among the powerful, and began murdering anyone who might someday pose a threat to his freedom and finances.
“Can you start loading?”
I blinked twice and turned to face the woman who’d summoned me from my deathly reverie to the rear parking lot of the Sweetwater Music Club where I’d escorted this unsuspecting icon of alternative country music. On the way in, Catherine had treated me to a derelict Nashville street tour, pointing out the Batman building and, as we passed by, Printer’s Alley. A few blocks from the venue, while she performed her honky-tonk ballads, I planned to unload to the local chapter of the Dixie mafia several kilos of Afghanistan heroin. Our mysterious supplier who brought the dope into the country paid less than a grand a kilo. We were reselling them at eight a brick. Tonight’s exchange would net a hundred grand in profit and it was only one of five conducted this week. My cut: just shy of thirty K. Multiply that by twenty; we shipped five days a week (we’d take two off for debriefing), four weeks a month and weren’t planning on slowing down.
“You okay?” Catherine asked from the passenger’s side where she sat with the door open.
Rock ’n’ roll anachronisms of all types lined the club’s sun-bleached adobe walls. Hippies, greasers, mods, plastic men and painted women.
“Yeah,” I said. “I got it. Go do your thing. Socialize. Network.”
“‘Network?’” Her tongue hung limply atop her bottom lip and she feigned a few dry heaves. “Don’t ever use that word around me again.”
“Then why do I have to unload your guitars?”
“Because I want some of these people to think I’m more of a rock star than I am and having a gofer perpetuates the mythology.”
“I think I’m in love.”
“There are just a few people I need to speak with.” She peered past me, through the driver’s window, at two stooges in nudie suits and J.C. Stetsons staring at us like we were the Beatles fresh in from Liverpool.
While Catherine doffed her cowboy hat and rounded the hood of the van to greet the two suits, I closed my eyes and continued to relive the worst moments of my life, the week that Luther Longmire died.
I began with Irina, the woman I’d loved for years then lost because I couldn’t quit using heroin or instigating bar fights or, in the more expansive stages of my addiction, threatening strangers with castration on Facebook, Irina, who I had tried foolishly to win back with money and pomp. I should have known that she’d never be swayed into the arms of the kind of man I’d become.
I never thought I’d get away with all the things I’d done. I never once believed I could forever hide my worst sins from the stubborn and precocious Irina. I simply convinced myself that, after I’d wooed her back, she’d forgive, that she’d look beyond the drug dealing and the unapologetic ruffians with whom I’d surrounded myself. She had forgiven worse. The woman had nursed her dying father to a comfortable end despite what he’d done to her when she was a little girl and the lasting damage the molesting and beatings had left.
A few days before we turned Luther’s farm into the OK Corral, I lost her.
I’d always considered myself impervious to easy detection, at least by Irina, since I conducted most of my business during the day while she was at school or busy looking after her misanthropic, alcoholic mother. We were also estranged and, like most men in their flagrant failure to understand their lovers, I equated frigidity with unloving. I vastly underestimated her heart.
One afternoon, Irina skipped class.
She was studying to be an elementary school teacher. When she had gotten sober, she’d moved in with her mother to go back to college. She’d aced all her papers and tests and never missed a lecture, that is, until the day she couldn’t stand the worry any longer, wondering what trouble her degenerate junkie paramour had brought down on himself.
She followed me from the Highlands to Anchorage where Luther lived.
The day she realized why I had been missing so often since our last falling out, why I never called or answered her texts, Irina was shot to death, gunned down to a pulp right in front of me with a massive .357 hand cannon in the middle of Luther Longmire’s dining hall. Luther’s courtesan cousin held the gun and laughed while Irina bled out.
Later, when we decided to kill the hillbilly kingpin, the bent cop who served for years as Luther’s bodyguard and first lieutenant, explained why he’d saved me from the boss’s goons, why Sergeant Mad Dog Milligan had chosen to betray his master. “He does this every few years and I can’t watch anymore. People who didn’t need to die have, all because of Luther’s madness. This time will be worse. The heroin has him spooked. I knew we should have stuck with weed. You can sell that shit for a hundred years and never have to take a life.” I wondered how the detective had kept his day-job since he worked twice as hard brokering assassinations and coordinating cash drops and heroin re-ups as he did interrogating suspects, serving warrants, or conducting sting operations.
We cornered the old man where he had holed up in his Dog Hill compound.
We let the Mexican farm hands go free. Those unarmed, that is.
We killed everyone else, all except Amara, who we tied up and threw in the back of the van. I don’t know why we didn’t shoot her on sight. I suppose, despite her trespasses, executing a woman was something we all still considered beyond the moral pale.
“We’ll figure out what to do with her after we clear out,” the sergeant had said.
I already knew how I’d cast my vote.
We cracked the safe in Longmire’s office and found nearly one and a half million dollars, which we divided evenly between the three of us. We loaded up as many kilos as we could fit into the van. Then, with a lot of gasoline and what was left of the C-4, we leveled the place, hoping that the burnt bodies would stall the police in identifying Longmire and buy us some time to get our stories straight.
We didn’t anticipate how quickly the KSP could pressure the lab boys and coroners from Frankfort to rush the process.
We drove to an abandoned rest stop a few miles east where I handed over the keys to my business to Paul Frank, my longtime manager, and told him the place was his.
In the cab, we briefly discussed the woman’s fate. Then the decision was made.
I pulled Amara from the van, let her cry and lie and beg a little.
Then I shot her in the face.
Now, a season later, here I was in Music City, U.S.A., still free, peddling heroin twice as strong as the batches I used to bring down from Illinois.
And for the first time since I cradled Irina’s dead body, I was close to a beautiful woman, one I had long desired with an earnestness and innocence I thought I’d long ago forfeited to the loose, whiskey-swilling hussies of the Highlands, to South Louisville juke joints and West End Jones men.
Before she went inside, Catherine leaned into the van and kissed me, a last loving gesture offered to a broken man dying of some undiscovered and wasting disease. “Don’t miss the first song.” She dropped the Bobby Bare Stetson onto her crown and disappeared into the cavernous dark of the Sweetwater.
While she proceeded with her sound check, I found a better parking space. I loaded her extra guitar and various sound pedals through the back entrance reserved for bar staff and entertainers.
The star attraction bent down from the stage as I set her equipment off to the side and asked me if I was all right alone, after all the unfortunate half-truths I’d confessed on the ride down 65 from our bloody Ohio River home. “I’m better now,” I lied and formed my millionth fake smile.
While I’d never seen the light that Hank Williams Senior sang of as he helped build this country-western Athens, I had certainly felt the heat.
The star’s faded pupils peered through the neon twilight that crept in from the open doorways and I stared at Catherine with a poor man’s eyes. I’d probably die long before I could get around to letting her down.
Two men in a rented Honda Civic with Ohio plates watched from the parking lot of the corner drugstore across the Nashville thoroughfare. The cornrowed Californian in the passenger’s bucket brought his work to a close, fitting 9mm hollow-point rounds into the two banana magazines that fit the submachine pistols hidden beneath the back seats.
“He’s leaving,” said the passenger’s partner from the driver’s seat. The elder snorted, swallowing his spit.
The younger said, “We been followin’ him since Louisville. We shoulda taken him there but the client didn’t want it done near the business and the motherfucker has been holed up in that bookstore all day. We coulda ran them off the road and done ’em on the side of the highway. Why the hell did we have to follow him all the way to fuckin’ Nashville?”
The elder scratched his gray-flecked goatee. “We didn’t get paid for two. We got paid for one. We do the girl too, we’re gonna have us a conflict with our man in West Louisville. He’s a cheap son-of-a-bitch and he won’t want to pay extra. We ain’t got the book man away from the store and by hisself yet. But it looks like we’re about to get our chance”
“I say we pull up on him now. Light him up in the parking lot and then head downtown so I can challenge some of these cracker motherfuckers to a karaoke showdown. Show ’em what real singing sounds like.”
The elder reminded his squire that there were too many witnesses.
They watched Catlett enter the van alone and pull out of the bar’s backlot.
The Honda’s engine turned over.
“Guess little corn fed bitch got lucky.” The younger popped his knuckles and glared at the white bread nightclub they’d allowed Catlett’s date to enter unmolested. “Lucky she dealing with some cheap-ass niggas.”
“She got lucky for tonight,” said the elder. “She wants to live to grow old, ofay bitch better start making better relationship decisions.”
1
I was back in town at the behest of my old partner and the two police detectives investigating a recent rash of related killings. Fortunately, the LMPD homicide division only solves, on average, one out of every four of the hundred and fifty plus murders committed within the city limits every year.
Essentially, you had to be a real stupid asshole to get caught clipping someone in Louisville.
I’d rehearsed my story a dozen times on the three-hour car ride back from the Appalachian Mountains where I’d been laying low with my extended meth-head family since the Dog Hill massacre.
I practiced aloud to the mutt puppy my cousin had given me, one of about a dozen half-Chihuahua, half-Jack Russell terriers to survive his bitch Dragona’s litter. The dog closely resembled a baby golden retriever, blonde with floppy ears that, when something caught her interest, rose like antennas and betrayed her south-of-the-border birthright. Her eyes were outlined in black, as if she’d been provided a lifetime supply of naturally reapplying mascara at birth. She lay on her side, curled up in the floorboard of the passenger’s bucket, her sad brown gaze fixed on her strange new caretaker. Back in Cumberland, my crotch-scratching cousins offered only free packs of crystal meth and hard liquor as an alternative to my malaise, offers I repeatedly turned down to the great amusement of my hellion hosts: “Johnny’d rather have him one of them foo-foo drinks them fag bars in the city serve.” I’d decided long ago that if I were to commit suicide, this time I’d do it quickly with a gun or a hand grenade, and not prolong the process by diving head first into active addiction again and hoping for an overdose. Without the little dog’s companionship, I would have likely gone the way of the self-inflicted hollow-point wound. She was more precious than most of what I’d lost to find her.
“Detective,” I said as we hit the mountain parkway, leaving Jackson, Hazard, and the rest of Eastern Kentucky behind for the city where I’d begun my larcenous learnings. “Detective, I only know what I know.” I spoke in a lilt that I’d drop when going through the motions with the cops, affecting the lisped tone of a lower registered Truman Capote. I could say anything to the puppy and she’d invariably wag her at the strange sound of this inflection. “Irina, she had so much life left. Detective, she…I loved her so fucking much. I’m a lesser man without her in my life.” Saying her name caused me a hard, bitter swallow, the image of my beloved with half a head, crumpled like a drunkard’s suitcoat in the trunk of a muscle car. “Irina, listen, wherever you are.” I stopped talking to the fictional cops and spoke instead to the bitterest of my many dead. “I’m sorry.”
“Irina,” I said to the dog.
Then I realized, I had finally provided the mutt with a name.
“Irina. That’s it. The prefect name for a little angel. She would have been your mother, you know, and it stands to reason that you should have her name, by God. She would have adored you too, you vexing little minx.” I patted the passenger seat and Irina hopped up for me to scratch behind her ears.
At least I knew now what to call the precocious little creature. I think even she was tired of hearing me yell, “Little doggy” or “Hey, shithead.” I’d have to be sure not to call her by name around the investigators lest they question my soundness of mind. I wasn’t in the mood to fight a mental inquest warrant.
As I exited off Route 15 and hit the Mountain Parkway, phone reception returned and my cell began ringing. After leaving Louisville, I’d tossed every burner but one, the number to which I’d texted a few old Louisville friends, in case someone died or the city sank into the Ohio River.
“Fuck you, Scotty,” I answered.
“Surprised this number still works.” Scott Morgan cackled like a consumptive brothel keeper. He had once considered himself a proud addition to the shiftless procession of dope fiends and inebriants wandering the streets of Louisville seeking truth and misadventure. We together enjoyed the low life of modern boulevardiers until the day Scott’s marine general daddy ordered him to straighten up or expect a complete and swift severance from the family and the millions papa had accumulated leading poor young men to their violent deaths.
Scott, despite his juvenile criminal record—strictly misdemeanors—and his near religious adherence to anarchy, applied to the state police. He passed all the physicals and psychological exams and begun pursuing a career in law enforcement, abandoning his rowdy friends to settle down with a pretty wife and a picket fence and, hopefully, some tow-headed children to complete the perfect American family portrait. For two years, he’d been working plain clothes with the KSP. He was assigned to cover any armed robbery or murder that fell within the jurisdiction of a county that couldn’t handle the case’s scope and magnitude. If an investigation involved multiple related homicides spanning across the state, the boys in Frankfort would call in Scott and his team. For all I knew, he’d been one of the staties assigned to make sense of Dog Hill.
“I’m surprised you’re calling me,” I said. “I texted you my number in case you needed an alibi for some police shooting, you know, if you blew away an unarmed black kid or and needed me to bring you some crack to sprinkle on the poor little bastard before IAD arrived. Should I purloin you some grade-A freebase and a decent drop gun to place at the feet of some unsuspecting and underprivileged housing project resident?”
“Thanks anyway,” he said, “but the worst projects are out of my jurisdiction. But you might want to consult the LMPD, if you think you have a knack for those services. Those Louisville cops are always shooting unarmed suspects.”
If only he knew, I thought.
“What can I do for you, then, Corporal?” I asked.
“I’ll be in town next week. We need to talk.”
Shit. I wondered if he knew. I mean, he knew I was a junkie. That was why he’d cut me out of his life years ago. Even when I called and told him I’d quit—a lie, I had just snorted a fat line of China white before I dialed his number—he said, “That’s nice,” and found an excuse to get off the line. Kentucky State Police detectives couldn’t afford to be associated with drug addicts.
“Last time I talked to you, you couldn’t be seen with a known junkie. It’d be bad for a statie’s career,” I said to Scott.
I doubted he suspected my involvement in the Dog Hill killings. He was probably in the middle of a divorce or an alcoholic nervous breakdown, a third-life crisis. Scott could drink on duty and pop prescription painkillers with impunity, but introduce needles and his repressed scruples reared their smug, self-righteous heads.
“You said you’d cleaned up. You told me that, remember? You said so in the message. Was that another lie, Jon?”
“I’m clean.” It was the truth. I hadn’t used in months. I’d just killed a lot of people. “Now that I’m not a liability, what can I do for you?”
“I’m at work right now,” Scott said. “I don’t have a lot of time to talk.”
“Then why are we talking?”
“I’m just making sure I can come to you. That you’re straight.”
“I’m straight, Scott. I swear. Haven’t had anything in months. I know that’s not exactly long-term sobriety, but it’s the truth. Do with it what you like.”
“Then expect a call mid-week.” He hung up.
The sun winked above the Appalachians and spread a ruddy glow over the mountaintops and again, for a K-9 audience of one, I recited the version of events I would confess to the two irksome Louisville detectives who had ordered Paul to find me and rein me into the investigation.
Now I had an answer for any inquiry regarding all the missing and murdered people with whom I’d been publicly associated.
The detectives’ first round of questioning had been in a tiny interrogation bowl on the third floor of LMPD headquarters on Jefferson Street, across from the courthouse and the city jail. The police were investigating each of my alibis. I’d told them that James O’ Hearn, whose execution was authorized solely to assuage Luther Longmire’s bottomless bloodthirst, had not contacted me for nearly two months prior to his death. Jimmy was a friend, but a shameless drug addict from whom I’d distanced myself over the years. I said I’d heard he was involved with some undesirable sorts and that—it was just my opinion—he may have been the one to drag my ex-girlfriend Irina back into the drug life. I played the victim well, always have. After the initial inquisition, the detectives, a dipshit pair by the names of Longbow and Hertz, had ordered me not to leave town until I heard from them again. Longbow, the old one, grizzled, bald with a clown helmet of white hair at the sides of his temple, cussed frequently and awkwardly, mixing expletives in nonsensical couplets—cockfag, shitfuck, and my personal favorite, the painfully redundant, pussy cunt—and verbally flailed random accusations, most unrelated to the matter at hand.
“Tell me you’ve never sunk so low you turned to eating Chinese food for breakfast, you little dickfag.” While Longbow asked me if my taxes were in order and how many grams of cocaine I ingested daily, his younger partner sat across the short, narrow steel table, attempting to incite a staring contest. I couldn’t get a read on Detective Hertz. He resembled a young Robert Redford, a handsome, stoic ginger, more collected than most boys of his generation.
I refused to make eye contact with either of them unless asked a direct, pertinent question, keeping my gaze affixed to the two-way mirror, wondering who was watching. A DA? A fed? Probably just a menial higher-up, some sort of city police sergeant or lieutenant making sure these idiots didn’t molest me or beat me stupid with a phone book.
Finally, I they said I could leave. The afterbirth brothers seemed to find my ignorance believable.
They had more questions and declared that they may, in their background check on me, discover cause for at least one more line of inquiry. My mandate to remain in Louisville for any prolonged period left me crushed and sobered. One lesson I’d learned from my recent and tragic misadventures: the longer you’re in one place, the harder it is to leave.
Click here to learn more about South of Cincinnati by Jonathan Ashley.