Charlie Hustmyre - House of the Rising Sun

A sleepy-looking black girl answered. Ray said, “I’m here to pick up Dylan for work.”

She sighed and rubbed a hand across her face. “You got the wrong apartment.” She raised a finger and pointed upward. Ray went up the stairs to apartment 1405, second floor, all the way on the left. He put his thumb over the peephole and knocked. Not a gentle tap but not a police pounding either. A business knock.

A voice on the other side said, “Who is it?”

“Security,” Ray said.

“What?” came the answer.

“Security. I need to talk to you about your car.”

The dead bolt turned. Ray glanced around. No one was in sight.

I sure wish I had a gun.

The door opened a crack. The chain was on. Ray slammed his shoulder into the door and tumbled through.

In the den, a long-haired white guy staggered backward. The door had smacked him in the forehead. He held his head with one hand, a pistol with the other. The longhair raised the gun. Ray knocked the gun aside, stepped in real close, and smashed his elbow into the longhair’s jaw.

The guy dropped hard and the gun clattered to the floor. Ray kicked the door shut, then scooped up the pistol. A. 40 caliber, stainless-steel Smith amp; Wesson. The man lay on his back, shirtless, with a blood-soaked bandage covering a wound on the left side of his stomach. The bandage was held in place by a wide gauze wrap that encircled his torso. He wore a pair of black sweatpants. Across the back of his right hand stretched a spiderweb tattoo.

Hello, Dylan Sylvester.

Ray stomped his heel on the wound, bringing a sharp cry from Sylvester and fresh blood seeping from the edges of the bandage. “That’s for shooting at me the other night.” Ray stomped again, more cries, more blood. “And that’s for trying to shoot at me just now.” Ray knew he had been lucky. This could easily have gone the other way, with him lying on the floor bleeding. It reminded him of something Sergeant Landry used to say, It’s better to be lucky than good… But when your luck runs out, you better be good.

Holding the Smith amp; Wesson in one hand, Ray grabbed Dylan Sylvester’s tangled mass of hair with his other hand and dragged him across the floor to the sofa. “Get up,” he said as he kicked the wounded man’s shins and forced him to his feet, then shoved him back onto the sofa.

Sylvester had both hands pressed against the bloody bandage. Slouched down on the sofa, he rocked back and forth, moaning as Ray stood in front of him with the pistol pointed at his face. He wanted Sylvester to get a good look at the muzzle, just the way Ray had the other night. “I don’t have time to fuck around,” Ray said. “You answer my questions, I’ll let you live.”

“Fuck you.” Dylan Sylvester spit his words through clenched teeth.

Ray jammed his foot down on the man’s stomach.

Sylvester howled in pain as he curled into a ball and started coughing. After a few hacks he was spitting up blood.

“In a minute,” Ray said, “you’re going to feel some real pain.”

When the coughing stopped, Sylvester sat up and eased his hands into the air, surrendering. “Okay, okay. What do you want to know?”

“Your crew, who else was in it?”

Sylvester shook his head. “What crew? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ray had to give Sylvester credit. He had guts, although it looked like some of them had leaked out. Ray leaned forward and clubbed Sylvester on the head with the pistol. As the guy started screaming, Ray snatched up a sofa cushion and shoved it into Sylvester’s face, pinning the armed robber’s head to the back of the sofa. If the neighbors heard him, they might call the cops.

After Sylvester quieted down, Ray pulled the cushion off his face. The wounded man held both hands to his head, and Ray saw a trickle of blood running between his fingers and down past one ear. Payback is a bitch. Ray jammed the sofa cushion against Sylvester’s left knee and pushed the barrel of the gun into it. “Homemade silencer,” Ray said. “I’m going to start with your knees.”

Sylvester’s face showed panic. “I… I’m the only one left.”

Ray had a feeling he might be telling the truth. “Who were the others?”

Dylan Sylvester’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Then he said, “Scooby, Wop… and Eddie.”

“Where’s Wop and Eddie?” Ray already knew where Scooby was.

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

“There wasn’t supposed to be any shooting. Nobody was going to get hurt.”

Ray turned the pistol around in his hand and looked down the muzzle, remembering how it had looked pointed at his face, remembering how it had sounded as the man in the skull mask fired at his head while he lay on the floor feeling like his skull had been caved in. Ray flicked his hand out and cracked the barrel against Sylvester’s head again. “That’s for Pete.”

Sylvester rocked backward, squeezing his head in both hands. “That was Scooby who shot that guy.”

Ray watched Sylvester roll around on the sofa in agony for a minute. Then he said, “Tell me the whole thing, from the beginning.”

Sylvester looked up at him. “You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you?”

Ray shook his head. “Not if you tell me what I want to know.”

Sylvester stopped moving but kept his hands alongside his head. “A dude I know named Scooby-he’s the one set it up-he came to me and said he had an easy score for us. Said it was all arranged and we were gonna make big bucks off it. He even got money up front.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand. Me and Scooby took fifteen hundred apiece, split the rest between Wop and Eddie.”

“What do you mean it was arranged?”

“Somebody inside had it all set up. There wasn’t going to be no resistance. We just had to go in hard to make it look real.”

“Who set it up?”

Sylvester shrugged. “That was Scooby’s contact.”

Ray raised the pistol over his shoulder like a club.

Sylvester screamed, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I swear.”

The shitbird’s eyes said he was telling the truth. Ray lowered the gun. “What about me?”

“What about you?”

“You recognized me, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but I had no idea you were going to be there. If I had known, I swear on my momma’s life”-Sylvester made the sign of the cross-“I never would have taken the job. You think I want to pull something where a cop who arrested me is working a detail?”

“I wasn’t working a detail.”

But Sylvester hadn’t heard him. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known you were there. I swear.”

“You tried to put a bullet in my head.”

“I’m sorry about that.” Sylvester folded his hands in front of him, pleading. “I didn’t mean it. I swear to God. The gun just went off by itself. I never hurt nobody in my life.”

“What happened after?”

Sylvester looked relieved when Ray didn’t hit him again. He relaxed, dropping his hands into his lap. “Next night we were supposed to meet the guy and give him the money. Scooby said we’d get twenty grand out of the deal. He wanted me to drop the money, take Wop and Eddie as backup.”

“If it was his contact, why didn’t he go?”

Sylvester shrugged. “Now that I know what happened, it don’t make no sense him not going. But at the time all I was thinking about was them Benjamins.”

Ray nodded. He understood doing stupid things for money.

Sylvester said, “Scooby said the guy knew exactly how much we took and not to try and short him. I was supposed to turn over all the money to him. I had it in a canvas bag. And he would count out our share and give it to me.”

Pointing to Sylvester’s bandaged stomach, Ray said, “I’m guessing things didn’t go according to plan.”