The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 1
THE SUBTLE ART OF BRUTALITY
A Richard Dean Buckner Mystery
Ryan Sayles
Praise for
The Subtle Art of Brutality
“Richard Dean Buckner is just the hero for our modern world: a righteous killer who can step outside convention and right the wrongs; and Sayles is just the writer to drive his story. This is how I like my fiction: unrelenting prose and kick-ass justice.”—Joe Clifford, author of Lamentation
“The brutality is in the prose. Course and violent, Sayles writes like he is seeking vengeance against the world. It’s 21st century noir. Mickey Spillane on meth.”—Tom Pitts, author of Knuckleball
“As subtle as brass knuckles to the face. Buckner is a classic and Sayles is one to watch.”—Eric Beetner, author of Rumrunners and The Year I Died Seven Times
“…Richard Dean Buckner left me wanting more. He is a breath of fresh air in an antiques shop. A biker in a museum. A chaotic, reckless anomaly. You know I’m enjoying something when I deliberately slow down my reading pace to enjoy the novel longer. The Subtle Art of Brutality is a ridiculously strong first novel, starting the new darling of the P.I novels legacy.”—Benoit Lelievre, blogger and reviewer at Dead End Follies
“Gut twisting detective fiction done the way it is supposed to be done. RDB makes Dirty Harry seem a little soft.”—Todd Morr, author of Jesus Saves, Satan Invests
“The Subtle Art of Brutality is a nut busting slice of noir. All of the required hard-boiled elements are present and accounted for…”—Chris Leek, author of Gospel of the Bullet
“The Subtle Art of Brutality is a testosterone-and-meth cocktail, a relentless blast of tough guy intensity. 21st-century hardboiled.”—Warren Moore, author of Broken Glass Waltzes
Copyright 2012 by Ryan Sayles
First Edition July 2015
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Down & Out Books
3959 Van Dyke Rd, Ste. 265
Lutz, FL 33558
http://DownAndOutBooks.com/
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Eric Beetner
Cover photo by Jason R. Photography
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Subtle Art of Brutality
Post Script
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by the Author
Other Titles from Down & Out Books
Preview of Trey R. Barker’s Death is Not Forever
Preview of JB Kohl and Eric Beetners’s Over Their Heads
Preview of J.L. Abramo’s Circling the Runway
To my wife Donna, as all things are.
To Brian Lindenmuth, who took the leap
with me and changed my life.
And to my father.
1
“The worst thing about a contact shot to someone else’s head is getting their brains, hair and skull fragments washed off my face.”
I cock the hammer back. He sobs harder. “If you’ve never tasted a man’s grey matter tinged with gun powder and revenge you have an inexperienced palette.”
The man is on his knees before me, facing away, hands tied behind him, crying, .44 Magnum squeezed against the back of his skull as tight as a waterproof seal.
“Then of course, you have no idea what diseases the guy might have had.” I blow smoke. It crowns his head. “But the money is good.”
Smoke drifts off my cigarette, lazy and weaving in the air. The souls of dead soldiers rising from a battlefield. I drag and watch ruined ashes flutter off the cherry-like leaves from a long-dead tree, tracing spirals through the night down to their deaths before my feet.
Winter in Saint Ansgar might as well be winter in Anchorage, if Anchorage never fully woke up from a nightmare. The sun is shining, eyes are open, but every corner is razor-sharp and every shadow has gritting teeth.
Here, outside on the street, frost dances in the predawn hours like devils of ice cavorting around a fresh kill. We’re south of the river that cuts Saint Ansgar from west to east in a beltline of ice floes and estuary water. Here, in these half burnt-out urban developments, the graffiti and the chalk outlines, people know where they are by the police crime scene tape and stained concrete.
Street lamps keep vigil over the empty traffic ways. Aged guardsmen cast from ironworks during the Great Depression that have seen these streets constructed and then turned over to scum and felons. Here, outdoors, we’re alone as far as the eye can see. It must be extra cold kneeling on frigid concrete.
“Please mister...I have a wife. She’s a worrier anyways and I—you’d love her. She’s blonde and hilarious and and—oh God...my wife is gonna be wondering where I am soon and—”
“Your wife will find out from the police where you have been. Or you can tell me where she is and you can go home right now.”
“Tell you where who is? My wife? She’s at home like I—” He shuts up with a stern whack from my iron.
“Who? For Christ’s sake who?”
“Alisha McDonald.” I say.
“No, no nono—”
“Yes, Francis. Her.”
“No, I had nothing to do with—”
“Missing nine weeks now.”
“No, you sonofabitchno I—”
“Alisha McDonald, age seven, sandy blonde and brown, four-foot-one, last seen—”
“Fuck you, pig, and fuck your mother I am—”
“With you.”
“I didn’t do nothing—”
“You went to the shopping mall—”
“I was cleared!”
“You saw her last. Before she vanished off the face of the planet.”
“I was cleared—”
“Your wife’s family lined some pockets.”
“That little girl is with somebody else—”
“Pocket lining doesn’t clear shit. Death does.”
Desperation and vindication both: “I told her stupid fucking old man I had nothing to do with that little girl! I told him as soon as I turned my back some pervert must of took her! I didn’t even wanna go to the mall! Her old man was probably banging her out himself and then hired some junkie to shut her up! That’s why he asked me to take her to the mall instead of doing it himself! A set-up! He was always dog shit like that! It’s just that the people around him never knew! He hid it well!”
Francis. Like a scorned woman crying to the police about her boyfriend hitting her.
But his next words...those he says with contempt. And worse, honesty. Flat pulse honesty: “Fuck that girl and fuck her old man for pointing the finger at me.”
I let the last bit sink into the air.
“Her old man always points the finger at me.” Like a spoiled child.
“He pointed the finger at you, Francis, because you did it.”
“I didn’t do nothing—”
I strike his head and he collapses forward. Sees stars. Hell, I can see them dance around in his eyes like old cartoons. He groans. Growls. Had enough. He rolls and leaps up. Teeth bared at me.
Unfortunately for him my left cross is just short of a freight train. I bury my fist into the crumpling structure of his mouth. His eyes roll back to white.
No time for unconsciousness.
My cigarette rubs a burnt ashen sore on his forehead. Francis wakes with a searing startle. I shake the sting of a good punch out of my hand and lift him up by the hair. I turn him to face a silhouette waiting in the shadows. His eyes adjust to the contrast of dark on darker. He sees what the shape makes out. Who the shape makes out. Recognition. Horror.
“This is how I see it played out, Francis,” I say. “The girl’s mother trusts you. And why not? She knows you. That is what you want. The girl’s dad knows better but he doesn’t tell his wife for obvious reasons. Something inside is hungry. I know the type. Maybe you’ve been starving it since the incident when you were a child.”
He looks to me. Wants to ask how I know but won’t. To ask how I know is to admit it’s real.
“Your brother told me, friend. But maybe you’ve been feeding that hunger all these years. Maybe after I gore you out, I could dig up your back yard and find a slew of four-foot tall skeletons still with some baby teeth lining their jaws.”
A single tear freshens his cheeks.
“But whatever that hunger is, you give in this time. You plan a nice day at the mall, just you and Alisha. Buy her a soda and a stuffed animal. Listen to the music in her laughter, you cast your smile down onto the little girl. Your next meal. You don’t take her home. You take her someplace else, do whatever it is you do, and stash her away for later use.
“Or you dumped her corpse.” I twist his hair until
“Of course you’re the prime suspect. No security videos, no eyewitnesses. Nothing to prove you didn’t do it. Your wife and her nouveau riche family bought your freedom. I checked. The D.A. owes your father-in-law a blow job or two for all the campaign money, the fund raisers. They release you on your own recognizance; shake down a few convicted child molesters to make everybody else feel good. Slowly loosen the squeeze on you. Just let it slip from memory. You get away scot-free.”
“No!” Clawing at my fingers as I tighten my grip.
“Yes. Too bad I got the case.”
The silhouette walks forward. An apparition appearing before us. The gray of the evening, the jejune bleakness of the situation paints the new man with its sad brush. Washed out, defeated and hollow. His eyes say it all: he just wants an end. No matter how ugly. Or truthful. He wants his little girl in whatever remaining condition she may be found.
Francis takes it all in. The fistful of hair shudders in my fist. Small at first, becoming more pronounced. Francis becomes afraid, ashamed. Dirty. Ignominy and consternation flood about. He becomes a little boy, he pisses his pants and has the demeanor of a beaten dog. Making progress.
“Say it.” I yank his head in a staccato whip. “I know you think you are a man, so be big. Be strong. Say it.” A whisper to his ear.
“I—I never—I mean, oh God...”
“Do not think God will intervene on your behalf,” I say, a snarl. “He might not like me per se, but I have noticed He stays out of my way. God is in all things, but not this street alley. Not tonight.”
Francis starts crying again, his shame surfacing. Our every word a cloud of ice dying in the freezing, rank air. Every one of those clouds containing secrets.
Another whisper: “Her old man told me you did something like this before.” The heat of my breath against his ear must be like a dry breeze from Hell.
Eyes light up in humiliation, the way a boy looks when somehow his mom finds out he’s been sneaking peeks at her clothing catalogs and stuck the pages together. A seedy, pervert breed of humiliation.
He begins to cry harder. Good.
Another breeze: “Little Francis, not straight, not queer, just deviant. Your mom used to babysit kids? And you were what? Fourteen?”
He does not want to hear. The truth of one’s past always has a way of haunting, and where there are ghosts hidden the guilty can only hope they go un-resurrected.
Another whisper: “You called it tickling?”
His sobbing is so messy and intense he cannot speak using vowels. Blubbering. A whole minute, his throbbing eyes focused on that silhouette. I smack him good and hard. “Speak it, before I lift you off the ground by your deranged cock.”
Through his blubbering and his punch-broken mouth he stumbles out: “Back then I—I just...I wanted to figure it out is all; I had such strong urges and no one to talk to. I didn’t mean to hurt—”
“What you meant and what you did are two different things. Your brother told me that kid’s name and I looked him up. Dead. Three years into college. Suicide. His boyfriend said he talked about getting molested as a youngster. Happy now? You did that to a kid your mom was trusted to babysit and you barely escaped with a hair on your ass. And now, all grown up, decades later, and this.”
Our eyes meet. “Alisha McDonald.”
My gun goes to his forehead, plugging into the round wet cigarette burn. “Where is she?”
He stares at the silhouette in the shadows as it grows tense, antsy. Agony.
“Or,” I ask, “did her old man really bang out his eight-year-old, kill her and frame you for it?”
In the shadows Kenneth McDonald cries like a lost soul who has now just realized he is in Hell, and the concept of permanence brings with it a new definition. His child molester brother accusing him of fucking his own kid.
Francis McDonald. One of the thousands of reasons God blessed me with brutality.
“Oh...” Gun to his head. I can hear his diseased heart break. Exposed. Family ties severed. Some things you cannot take back. He stares at his brother in the shadows, crying himself.
At last: “Ken, please forgive me,” he says. Defeated. This is where I want to be. A broken man will squawk. Confess. Plead. Beg and negotiate.
Alisha’s father walks into the buzzing light from the street lamp overhead to face his sibling.
“Where is my little baby?” Ken McDonald asks. His voice quiet, grave and betrayed.
“Forgive me, please.”
“I don’t know what to forgive you for.”
“Forgive me and I’ll tell you. I promise.”
Ken looks on as Francis mumbles something about giving in to temptation. The words come out through wet tears and all-consuming fear, like the speech itself was something hiding from predators and is poking out to see if the coast is clear.
Ken, so softly: “When we were kids you promised that if I lied to Mom about what happened you’d never do it again. How do I know you won’t lie again?”
“Christie knows. She’ll—”
“My own sister-in-law knows? She knows what you did?”
“Yes, but—”
“And she has said nothing?”
“To protect her family name! They have an image! Jesus, Ken! You know that! She caught me burying Alisha—” He cuts off, swift and permanent as the gallows.
Burying. It destroys Ken. His little girl. I know he had expected to never have his baby again, but the finality, the reality, is never the release people think it is.
“I’m so sorry.” Blabbers. “I just—I just—I’ve had to sleep on the couch ever since she caught me and she broke all my things and she was screaming about forcing me into therapy or chemical castration and—”
“Shut up. You. Shut. Up. Now.” No longer his brother. It’s in his eyes. Their family name is the same but from two different levels in Hell now. He croaks out the words like they are sand and he is underwater. The cold distance, the irrevocability of this godless situation creeping in his voice.
The soulless countenance of Ken McDonald changes. His demeanor changes. Becomes alien. Gone cold now. Never fear a man more than when his callousness emerges and you didn’t see it coming.
I squeeze the gun tighter against Francis. “Where?”
“Promise my forgiveness,” the pervert says, so low the dirt hears him better than we do.
After a breath as long as God’s, after he can retrieve his voice since hearing the word burying, Alisha’s father speaks. He does not look up.
“I forgive you for your sins against—” but he cannot finish.
“Thank you.” Such relief.
“Where?” I say. The only word I can insert into this gunpoint conversation.
“Under the new herb garden we planted. The marigolds mark her headstone.”
Ken starts to cry. But he bares his teeth as well.
So desperate now, rooting for mercy anywhere it may be dug up: “She loved marigolds, right? I thought they’d be a sweet gesture, a nice thing for Alisha—”
“You don’t speak her name. Ever,” Ken says through teeth that must be carnivorous now.
I don’t want to ask if they have cooked with those herbs. If they have trimmed the flowers and put them in a vase on their kitchen table.
A diseased man in Francis. A terrible accomplice wearing the mask of a soulmate in his wife. Their own niece, entombed unceremoniously in their yard. Hidden. Cast off.
How many other children? I make a note to look up his previous addresses.
“Let me go now,” the molester asks. “Let me go. I did my part here...”
Ken looks with a galvanized fury. It makes my heart warm.
“Alisha sends her best.” An arctic tone. “You are not my brother. I want you to hear that from my mouth. I will cut your name in two.
