THE AUCTIONEER
The same time a certain ex-football player is professing his innocence in regard to the murders of his wife and her boyfriend, Culver P.D., in conjunction with the FBI, closes a multiyear, multipronged investigation that leads to the dismantling of one of the largest human trafficking rings ever uncovered by law enforcement. Multiple arrests come of this. Multiple incarcerations. Failed men and women no longer able to hide behind their computer screens as they once did. Ten of thousands of images that, on a daily basis, destroy the very core of what makes humankind at least halfway decent, cataloged and scrubbed from the internet. The undertaking was enormous, the coordination to do so even larger, and what can sometimes occur during such enormities is this: specific pieces of intel can fall through cracks. Or in our case, are omitted outright.
“You sure about this?” He was. I knew he was. But since beginning what we had, this was by far the biggest piece of intel outside of “official channels” that Batista had brought my way. Would it work? Almost certainly. Could it backfire and bring everything down around us as well? Absolutely. But as Batista had come to understand, I was willing to take the chance.
“As sure as a man I once knew, one who may or may not have taken a rocket launcher to a two-story off Canal this time last year. That sound sure enough for you?” I feign surprise and step back from the big man, both my hands now facing him palm up. Retreating, I take cover under the canopy attached to what he’d come to call his “day house,” the patio furniture there the same shade of beige as the two-door shed we’d just exited. “Hell, if you’re going to put it that way, John. Makes me think you may have buried the lede.” And that was how, two beers deep into a four-beer night, I first came to know of the Auctioneer.
Before this, however, Batista finishes his tale: bounces me from a shitbird by the name of Brady Hartsfield who, as it turned out, (and far from ever the case, it seemed) held links to Anthony Kincaid—and by links, I mean known associate. Anthony Kincaid being a man I would come to regret making an example of instead of ventilating outright.
Connection made, info and the crack it comes to fall through does what it does, becoming a real-time event. And poof, just like that, one very common name is omitted from a very particular report. Further still, it gets us to here—where men like Hartsfield and Kincaid, if ever granted the knowledge, would never want to be.
“Happens annually, by invitation only. Fucker also said it like he was proud.” Of course Hartsfield did. Seen it happen this way more times than I cared to count. Every piece of shit and the shit-stain above them never seeing themselves for what they were, but only as men doing a job. Not all men, no, but the ones we specialized in, the ones who knew how heinous their acts truly were and continued regardless, these are the men in need of a holocaust.
These are the ones I strive to erase.
“The kid would have none of it, though. Taking a screwdriver to Hartsfield’s upper thigh until the man gives it up. I’m talking all of it, Bishop. Names, a date, and if you can believe it, a goddamn location as well.” The kid was Alex, and he wasn’t so much a kid as a new hire. Not by choice, either. Long story short: months ago, Batista and I create an abattoir as we take a man by the name of Marcel Abrum apart at his seams. The remaining pieces of this man fitting into a wheelbarrow on a stage already filled to capacity with some of the very same body parts, though female in nature. Alex witnesses this all from between the crack of two barroom doors that separated the kitchen and main entertainment floor of Abrum’s strip joint. Apprehended after the fact, after Batista and I have vacated the premises, Batista catches wind of Alex through one of his fellow officers. Puts the detective and me between a rock and a hard place almost before we can wedge ourselves free. But wedge ourselves free we do, offering Alex not only a job, but a service, albeit one that would come to include benefits of a different kind.
“You’re saying he seems to be fitting in?” Batista throws me a look, pretends the burgers need more attention than they maybe require. He and Alex weren’t exactly enemies, but they sure as hell weren’t chummy either. “All I’m saying is he got what he got out of Hartsfield. Do I still think it was a bad idea, us bringing the kid on board? I think you already know my answer to that.” Not much phased Batista, but this kid, Alex, he got under his skin more than I ever thought possible. Either way, he’d gotten us what he had, and I now understood the magnitude of what it represented.
Men were about to die. Correction: men were about to burn.
If the date and location were correct, it gave us a month of prep time. We use it wisely. First procuring cover from three distinct positions, each roughly two hundred yards apart and out from the hangar. Vegetation is sparse this far out into the desert, but we find enough of it to satisfy our needs. The hangar itself is more of the same—not quite derelict, but far from standard. The perfect place to hold a black-market meeting of the minds, in other words. To the right stood lines of engine blocks, most as big as cars, while two pristine Cessnas sat perched and wedged above them. The floor is grey concrete, slick, and in contrast to the domed overhead. Two doors directly ahead, flanked by two on the east side of the structure and one to the west, all of them dwarfed by the entrance.
“We are gonna bottleneck these fuckers! They ain’t even gonna know what hit them.” True, yes, but if Batista and I knew anything, it was this: you couldn’t count on operations like this going according to plan. “I know. Christ. I’m just sayin’.” Batista lets the kid’s comment slide, his only response a slow hand over his face and down a freshly cropped beard. Alex, undeterred, puts up his hoodie, his bleached blond hair now totally obscured.
We move forward, three men bathed by the night. We move forward, three men searching for the light.
As ready as we’d ever be, we stay at an alternate Motel 6 off the 1-5 the day before it goes down. Alex calls early the morning of, letting us know that movement had come into play. A cube van. White. Pulling up with two men—big dudes, bald fuckers too—who pull out folding chairs first, and after Alex watches them set it up, a makeshift podium and stage they place a small table on. After this, another man arrives—short dude in a suit, bowtie and all—and transfers computer equipment from his trunk to the table.
“Stay put,” I say. “We’re on our way.”
There are monsters and then there are monsters. People devoid of what makes most of the population human. The men and women we watch enter that hangar are of the latter kind.
They come in limos, in Humvees, in cars that cost more than most people’s houses. The hardpan off the cracked blacktop kicking up dust along the way as they do. They park in rows, two deep, and just after dusk I mark the count at twenty-four. It includes computer guy, he of the Bowtie, and the two setup guys even though I hadn’t personally laid eyes on them.
“Everyone in place?”
Through the ear comm, I hear them respond that they are. I pause. Take a breath.
Time to light the night.
I walk right in. Like maybe I could have belonged. I don’t, though. Never could and never would. But it’s when I see and hear the man on stage—he of the small stature, tight, light hair, and aforementioned bowtie—that I come to believe I had seen it all. I hadn’t, no, far from it, in fact, but the kid in the picture, naked except for his underwear, projected to life-size onto a screen Alex never mentioned, came very fucking close. One step better is their numbered paddle signs going up and down as each of them continue to bid.
As I would come to do many more times in the future, I take the moment.
Pull the AK up from my side and with both hands squeeze against the metal as hard as physics allowed.
Isn’t until I’m halfway way through the clip that I realize I’m screaming.
They fall, they duck and cover, they scream and attempt to run. I cut them down. Batista cuts them down. And then I watch as Alex comes forward from his position at the rear of the building, following to the letter the angle we placed him on. He’s firing, a man as determined as Batista and me, but then Bowtie is up and into my field of vision, emerging at a run from the line of engine blocks. A gun is in his hand, up and unloading, Alex the target of his rage.
Alex turns toward Bowtie, is hit twice, and even though he’s wearing Kevlar, I catch sight of blood.
We advance, doubling down on the bodies in front of us. I take right of the stage, Batista the left. No one lies in wait. No one but Alex and, yes, he’s bleeding out.
“Go! I got him.” And Batista did, though it wouldn’t be the only time this type of situation would occur. No, there would be one more bullet in Alex’s future, along with an altercation between him and two thousand pounds of American steel that puts him in a body cast for months. But here now, down as he was, I leave him in good hands. The best of hands. In the care of a man who a decade from now would lose parts of his face to a man neither of us had yet to radar.
Up and running, I leave the hangar and re-enter the night.
I see stars instantly, and not from above. Where I took Bowtie for a runner, I should have taken him for smart. He lay in wait, and soon as I’m out the door, he hits me from behind. The hardpan and I greet each other, but the blow, fortunately, fails to knock me out. I roll. Roll again. And roll once more as the pipe comes down hard into the dirt where my head had just been. It’s enough, and from my back I extend a boot as he lunges forward for another try. The contact is good, up into his junk, and I watch and hear the air come out of him in a rush.
It gives me time to stand.
More so, to rage.
I have him by fifty pounds, sixty perhaps. It doesn’t take much. Not once I’m around his neck. “I’ll tell you this much. By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to wish you never even tried.” He slaps at my head, at my arms, and I only release him from the choke hold once he’s gone limp. I pull zip ties from my jacket, apply them to his wrists and ankles, learning long ago to leave at least one of them alive. It’s tough, and I sometimes fail at taking my own advice, but this time I managed.
Breathing heavy, I head back inside, not yet sure if I still had three partners or two.
He was breathing. Better yet, he was up and moving.
“It’s still in there, but the bleeding is under control. Best bet is for us to vacate. Agreed?” I did. We all did. Alex uncharacteristically quiet, but given the circumstances, not unwarranted. I tell Batista to grab the van and met us around back, as I did in fact have a package for us to pick up.
“The fucker who shot me?” I tell Alex yes and then catch him off guard by offering him thanks. “Think you took up the last of the man’s ammo,” I add. “Bastard tried to break my head with a pipe as I ran through the door.”
I get grunt at that, and Bowtie, real name Patel Fanning, aka the Auctioneer, takes a size eleven to the face twice before I tell Alex to knock it off and Batista pulls up. Inside, buckled up, we are back in Culver by dawn.
Batista chooses the safehouse on Buchannon, the one that housed the larger kill room.
I take care of Alex first, and to the kid’s credit, he holds it together better than I thought he would. Bullet out, sutured and bandaged up, we move on to Fanning. Batista has him bound and strung up, his feet just grazing the ground. We use chains now, half-inch double link, as I’ve found the steel elicits in them a fear far greater than when we used ropes. I believe it’s the sound that does it, but who knows, perhaps it’s the touch. Either way, Fanning is sobbing like a child when I approach him, his nose a faucet, his pants the same. Right eye swollen shut, I realize Alex’s love taps did more than I previously thought—the side of the man’s face now slanting downwards, in a way I’d seldom seen.
“Here’s the deal, Patel: you get one chance. Use it wisely, we get to the end of things quickly. You don’t, I will do my literal best to pry it from you.” Not a euphemism, no joke, as men like Fanning deserve everything we inflict upon them and more. They are a blight. They are obscene. Far from what the universe ever intended us to be.
And I want to say I kept my word, but I can’t, a rusted crowbar up in my hand not seconds after we release him from the chains. Above him now, I go in low and between what I take for his bottom two ribs. The man howls and attempts to buck, but we both feel the top part of his hip give way as I apply my weight. The leverage created doing two things almost at once, each in conjunction with the other: an uprooting and distention of skin first, each piece being forced through, looking more like branches than busted bone becoming the show to follow.
Still, I get nothing.
No names. Just screams. Not unexpected, he passes out from the pain.
Which was fine in the larger context, as it allowed us to transfer him to an operating table that had seen its fair share of dirtbags since being installed. It also allowed us to take Patel’s right leg next, below the knee, and when he wakes this time, his eyeline now directly in front of that leg, it takes him a moment to piece it together.
More screams result from this. Further involuntary shutdowns. But no names. Not one. Which meant we’d come to the end of the line. And it happened sometimes, where a situation could be taken no further.
I look to Batista, his apron slick with Fanning’s blood. He’s on the other side of the operating table and then I look to Patel passed out in the wheelchair we’d placed him in. Batista shrugs.
It was enough. I loosen Patel’s tourniquet and let the larger wound flow. Not exactly how I expected things to end, no, but end they do.
Even for men like us.