THE BOTTOM OF THINGS
It wasn’t the raised ranch we were interested in. It was the structure set further back on the estate. About a quarter of the size of the house, it jutted from the ground at an awkward angle, like the metal siding had been attached incorrectly. The moon above it and to the right showed that the chains about the double doors were not only new, but heavy.
“That third strike, Bishop,” Batista says. “Just the threat of it, it gets their attention every single time.” Worked for me. Vermin giving up vermin being the favorite pastime of any cop, retired or otherwise. Still meant we had to verify the story Batista’s CI had given him.
“And would you look at that: we have ourselves a winner.” But there was something off about Batista. Minute, sure, but there all the same. Back then, however, deep into the middle part of what we’d become, I admit to falling blind to certain things along the way. Like how losing parts of one’s face could impact a man’s psyche, let’s say.
“Paul Rand,” Batista continued, and the big man’s hand goes up to the right side of his face almost instinctively, rubbing at the thinness there, at the meat that’s missing. He grew back the beard in an attempt to downplay things, but the angles of his face, they never played fair, and at times I caught myself flashing back to him in that chair, a straight razor held up under his chin by a dirtbag named Harrison Garrett.
You come any closer, I’ma turn his neck into a hose! See if I don’t!
“Piece of shit looks to be all in too,” Batista goes on, there as our recon continued. We were in the upper part of the house on Buchannan, the files in front of us as deep as the open laptops to our sides. “Solicitation as well as attempted abduction of a minor. We take him alive, might be time for us to show him what ‘all in’ is really about.”
Of course we would. It’s what we did.
All told, there was no other way.
Underfoot and slick, the path was muddy and deep from the rain. “Keep moving,” Batista instructs, pushing Rand from behind as he does. With a stump for a neck and a full head of greying hair, Rand tries his best to hold himself together but continues to lose the battle with each passing step. “Might want to hold that hand up too. I’ll sure as hell drag you before I carry you.”
Rand does as he’s told, his right hand going up on an angle against his open shirt. Batista removed the thumb earlier, after Rand decided he’d play both sleepy and dumb to the reason we stood on either side of his bed. The reduction came fast too, punctuated by a type of screaming that led to different kind of dentistry, one that involved Batista’s left knee twice.
We reach the bunker.
“I’m sick. I know that now,” Rand says, and the way he says it, there in the dark, it’s all I could do not to gut him where he stood. As if reading my mind, Batista slams the butt end of his shotgun into the bottom part of the man’s spine. Rand goes to his knees, both his hands forward into the muck.
I hunker down, hold him by the hair, and tell him to tell us something we didn’t already know. I add that if he did, we’d make it quick, and if he’s lucky, we’d leave enough of him to bury.
This gets his attention. But it was too late. Batista had already removed the chains and lock. Had already pulled open the doors.
He pumps the shotgun. We descend.
And find one more place god failed to exist.
The smell hits us first, full-on and like a bus. The fluorescents come next, flickering to life on their own. We go forward, cement walls crowding us, Batista in front and Rand in the middle. The lights continue to flicker, and as Batista comes to a corner, I watch him tense. He stands there, one second, two, and in those moments, I know what’s about to transpire even before it occurs. His face a sheet of hate, he turns back toward us, the butt end of the shotgun up and moving again, forcing more of Rand’s teeth from their home once it connects. The sound is both solid and wet, and Rand howls in response, going to his knees as he does. His screams are joined by others, however, and this is when everything becomes clear.
I look around the small room and then I look back to Batista. He nods. Bends down and binds Rand at the wrists and ankles and then leaves to contact Jeramiah. The kids, one still crying, the other two just watching, begin to realize things were not as they appeared—that this was far from what had become their norm.
I approach them. Tell them I’m different from the man laying on the floor behind me. I want to say they understood. I want to say they were no longer scared. I can’t. Not without lying to myself.
Malnourished and naked, they hold their wrists to me. Each one is slender. Each one is bruised. I unshackle the boys first, then the girl. The mattresses beneath them as marred by piss and shit as they were by fear. In the corner on a tripod stood a camera, but it was old, ancient, and led me to believe that Rand could in fact be holding out.
Jeramiah and the kids already in the van and on their way to Ray, Batista asks, “We good?” He already knew the answer, though: we weren’t, and never would be.
And I want to say it got us to the bottom of things—that Rand knew more than he’d been letting on. It didn’t, though, things ending right there in that bunker at the far end of the property he’d inherited from his parents. But what I can say is this: I pictured the past as we took him apart. Using it not as inspiration, but as fuel. I go to the place that started it all, Abrum’s, to where upon a stage Batista and I reduce that man to pieces and place what remained into a wheelbarrow. Forward now, and I find myself over Mapone, where I use a spoon to remove his last good eye. It’s followed by Kincaid, my greatest mistake, and how parts of his frontal lobe end up clinging to my boots like chum.
Did it make Rand the same? You’re goddamn right it did.
It always would.
It’s the reason we start with his knees.