THE BONE MERCHANT PROLOGUE

“From times, in the towns, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be going at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on a volcano, but on the rotten seat of a latrine.” 

                                  —Gustave Flaubert

EON CITY—2008

The Bentley Continental blew through the yellow light at Aiden and Cardinal Boulevard at over fifty mph.

It fishtailed on the asphalt, tossing its four occupants to the left, then to the right, before straightening out and continuing into Dung Row’s business district.

“Slow the fuck down,” Jimmy ‘Ground Round’ Doyle told the driver, a pimply-faced nineteen-year-old named Steven Hayes. “You trying to draw attention to us?”

“Sorry, boss,” the kid muttered and slowed to a less conspicuous thirty-five mph.

“Better,” Doyle said, staring out the passenger window at neon signs advertising everything from Patty’s Pizzeria to live nude girls. The old neighborhood hadn’t changed that much. The crumbling bricks and vibrant colors of his youth still served as a backdrop for the night’s Danse Macabre.

Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks. Clubbers, boozers, sex workers, perverts, druggies, and dealers all huddled together under the pretense of community. Some hunted for easy prey, while others looked too vulnerable to be anything else. The mood was predacious. You could almost smell the blood in the air.

A barker stood outside one of the seedier strip joints called GARTERS, loudly encouraging passersby to check out the show inside. “Girls, girls, girls!” he called in a deep baritone.  “Come watch ’em take it all off! Nude! Naked! Gyrating in the buff! Don’t be shy! Come on in! Indulge yourself in a little sin!”

Some sleaze handed out XXX-printed pamphlets outside a liquor store with mesh-covered windows. Across from him, a dealer cheated a pair of teenagers at three card monte. One of the dealer’s shills stood by, grasping a weapon in his pocket on the off chance the teenagers were sore losers.

Further down the street, a pimp roughed up one of his girls on the stairs of a rattrap motel, presumably over a trick gone bad. Her cries were drowned out by some doom-sayer wearing a sandwich board and shouting that the end was nigh. A purse-snatcher sprinted past, grasping a blood-stained Baroncelli in one hand and a .38 in the other. Nobody tried to stop him.

Throughout all this, pushers worked the crowds, selling everything from teeners and tooies to poppers and kitty tranquilizers. Money and drugs freely exchanged hands. There was no attempt at subtlety, and for good reason. Cops avoided Dung Row for the most part. It was easier that way. Trying to clean up these streets was like using a sieve to scoop water from a sinking boat. It wasn’t happening.

The Bentley took a right at Cardinal and Rowan, where a gaggle of punks loitered in front of an old brownstone, talking shit, and harassing anyone in a skirt. One of the punks tagged the building’s sandstone façade with an upside down cross inside a triangle.

Doyle didn’t recognize the mark. Hell, why would he? These punks were nobody special. Just another gang of wannabes prowling the night—a motley crew of nobodies surviving by their wits and an affinity for violence.

Most of them would be dead or locked up by their mid-twenties. One or two might have what it took to join the majors. Maybe one of them would be smart enough to realize prison was the same whether you robbed a liquor store or stole the Mona Lisa. So go big or go home and die in poverty.

Doyle learned that lesson when he wasn’t much older than these punks were now. He smiled at the thought. Where would he be had he never set his sights higher than his old neighborhood? Probably still holding up mom & pop shops between stints at Hawthorne Penitentiary. That, or feeding the worms in Potter’s Field, he supposed.

“Hey, how ’bout cranking up the AC?” Eddie Niall called from the back seat. “Feels like a Turkish bath in here.” Joe Coleman, who sat beside the man with his doctor’s bag clutched protectively in his lap, seconded the notion.

Doyle grunted in reply and turned the knob to full blast. Cool air whooshed from every vent in the car but did little to ease the stifling heat. This didn’t surprise him. The newscaster said it was one of the hottest Julys on record, hitting the mid-seventies. Doyle thought it felt closer to the upper eighties.

Still, he refused to roll down the windows. The tinted glass helped hide their faces from prying eyes. Not that he expected trouble from the locals, but when the evening’s plans included murder, it was best to play it on the down low.

Dung Row was the epitome of a low-income neighborhood. Housing was cheap, streets were unmaintained, and sanitation was nonexistent. While the area had no fixed boundaries, most agreed that it lay between Cardinal Boulevard to the north, Saints Avenue (or “Skank Ave.” due to the amount of flesh on display) to the west, Miller Park, with its dense trees and grassy knolls to the east, and the southern Sheenagh River, where a graveyard of scrapped ships decayed in the frigid waters that flowed in from Lake Michigan.

Irish immigrants founded the neighborhood in the late nineteenth century, christening it New Dungarvan after one of Ireland’s major coastal towns. However, people took to calling it Dung Row almost from the start.

Doyle was familiar with the area’s less-than-stellar reputation. And had he and his companions been your average tourists out for a night of fun, they might have had something to fear from the roving gangs, hopheads, and flesh-peddlers who regularly preyed on the dewy-eyed and uninitiated.

But Doyle was no tourist. A captain in Irish mobster Donald Roeser’s flourishing empire, the man had gotten his start on these very streets. He began as a lookout and runner, but his vicious nature, coupled with an above-average intellect, quickly propelled him through the ranks.

By thirty-three, he was part of the command structure, a trusted enforcer in Roeser’s organization. It was a role well-suited for a man of his talents. In a dog-eat-dog world, he was a pit bull with teeth bared, ready to kill at his master’s command.

Tonight, Doyle would put those skills to use. Two men were marked for death, and he was set to pull the trigger. The Bentley’s other occupants were along for backup, but Doyle doubted he would need them.

“We’re just here to tidy up the mess,” Steven Hayes, aka ‘Stevie Boy’, said. The kid acted as Doyle’s personal driver and bodyguard. Sharp-eyed and even sharper-tongued, Stevie had an almost sixth sense when it came to trouble.

He had expressed his concerns about tonight’s business several times since picking Doyle up outside his home on the north side of town, a modest brick mansion as far removed from Dung Row as one could get and still be within city limits.

Doyle also had his reservations, but this matter was too important to trust to lackeys. The skipper needed a snitch silenced before he could blab to the wrong people, and he needed it done quickly, quietly, and before the night was over.

To say Roeser was on shaky terms with his Russian counterpart, Ivan Kvantrishvili, would be an understatement. Of the Gayatra—that is, the five families that made up Eon’s criminal underworld— Mad Ivan proved the most difficult to manage.

The man was getting too big for his britches, looking to expand his territory into areas that didn’t belong to him. Roeser wasn’t blind to the fact that some of those areas lay dangerously close to his own.

This hadn’t escaped the attention of the other families, either. Hell, anyone with eyes could see Kvantrishvili was testing his boundaries. The ruskie wanted to see how far he could push Roeser before he pushed back. Meanwhile, their “partners” would sit tight and wait to see who came out on top.

Not that there was any doubt who that person would be. Roeser was top dog in Eon for the simple reason that he didn’t let anybody push him around. Especially not some half-baked dipsomaniac with delusions of grandeur.

Still, he couldn’t kill Kvantrishvili without just cause. That was the first rule established by the Gayatra (suggested by Roeser himself, no less) when they came together to run this city fifteen years ago.

If one boss suspected another of treachery, he was to gather whatever evidence he had and present it before the Council. Only then, through a unanimous vote, could one family proceed against another.

Finding that evidence, however, was another matter. While the skipper wasted time chasing his tail, Kvantrishvili was free to orchestrate his downfall. Roeser had no intention of being knocked off, so he took the initiative. This involved breaking another cardinal rule by planting a spy in Mad Ivan’s organization.

He did this by promising to help a low-key Russian enforcer named Andrei Gavrikov forge documents for his wife and three daughters back in Russia. In exchange, Andrei provided him with details about his boss’ activities.

Little did the twerp realize, Roeser had no intention of keeping his word. Doyle shared the skipper’s reasoning. Why contribute to this country’s immigration problem when a bullet to the head was a much quicker solution? Roeser planned to off the pinko even before his frantic call earlier tonight, claiming his cover was blown and he and his cousin needed extraction ASAP.

Roeser couldn’t afford to leave a loose end like that walking around. If word of his dealings got back to the other families, he would have a hell of a mess on his hands. So, he dispatched Doyle and his crew to handle the problem. It was a job the captain would be foolish—not to mention suicidal—to turn down.

How the Russians found out they had a traitor was anyone’s guess. Andrei must have given himself away somehow. More than likely, he had blabbed to his cousin, Valentin Antonovich. That would explain why they wanted to defect together.

Valentin was a big player in Kvantrishvili’s command structure and most likely the one who brought Andrei into the fold. Doyle figured the snitch had confided in his cousin, hoping to use him for information. But something went wrong along the way, landing the cousins in hot water with their boss.

Roeser was delighted by this turn of events. Andrei was a nobody, barely worth recruiting, but his cousin had a head full of secrets waiting to be cracked open and extracted. Doyle’s orders were clear: find out what the pinkos knew, kill them, and dispose of the bodies. There could be no evidence linking Roeser to either man.

Doyle had no problem with the killing part, but extracting the information would require a bit of finesse, something a man with the moniker “Ground Round” wasn’t exactly known for.

That was why he brought along Eddie Niall and Joe Coleman, the clan’s top reaper and handyman, respectively. Niall was easily one of the fastest guns Doyle had ever seen, while Coleman, with his bag of tools, could make a vic sing with minimal effort—though he often liked to prolong his questioning for the sheer sport of it.

Coleman’s job was to gather the intel while Niall kept an eye out for trouble. There was always the chance that tonight’s meeting was a trap. Kvantrishvili might’ve learned of Andrei’s betrayal early on and used that knowledge to feed them false information, including tonight’s “extraction.” And killing one of Roeser’s captains would certainly send a message to the other families that Kvantrishvili meant business.

Such possibilities made Doyle want to sit this one out. He was no longer the risk-taker he’d been in his youth. Doyle was more responsible these days, married and looking to settle into the business side of things. But Roeser chose him specifically for tonight’s job, citing his need for that raw talent that had made the man legendary in barroom brawls and back-alley beatdowns.

Doyle didn’t like it, but that wouldn’t stop him from carrying out his orders. He would kill the men he needed to kill and then go home to his wife, Barbara, and two kids. After tonight, his future in the organization was assured. Hell, maybe Roeser would allow him to break away and start his own clan. One in a more prosperous section of the city, far from the filth of Dung Row.

A fella could dream, anyway.

“We’re here, boss,” Stevie Boy said over some rock song blaring on the radio. Doyle straightened in the passenger seat and gathered his thoughts. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. There was a heaviness in the air. A sense of dread that had weighed on him since leaving his house tonight.

He rubbed his thumb over the rosary in his pants pocket. The feel of the beads gave him little comfort. What was it his old gram used to say about nights like these? If’n you’re not careful, Jimmy, ye might find the Devil ’imself dancin’ in the moonlight.

No, sir, Doyle didn’t like this setup. If it were up to him, he would have Stevie Boy turn the car around and let the traitors fend for themselves. But how would that look to the skipper? Roeser was counting on Doyle to clear this matter up with the Russians. If he chickened out now, he might as well throw in the towel because he wouldn’t be given a second chance.

He could say goodbye to Barbara with her sweet smile and flirty eyes, to little Jimmy, who so desperately wanted to follow in his old man’s footsteps (as if), and to Heather with her cute dimples and pigtails, always wanting Daddy to hold her. He could say goodbye to all that because there would be no life for him to go back to. There would be no life for him, period.

So get your act together, man, for their sake.

Doyle studied the alleyway where the meeting was to take place. It was little more than a twelve-foot gap between a boarded-up laundromat and a drug store turned hobo hotel. Just wide enough, he figured, to accommodate the Bentley while leaving room for them to get out and conduct their business.

That was good, at least. On the off chance this was a setup, the alley’s narrowness would keep them from being surrounded.

Hooligans busted out the streetlights ages ago, leaving the alley in total darkness. It wasn’t exactly the most inviting of locales, but at least the meeting was taking place on Roeser’s turf. Had this confab been in Russian-controlled territory, they might be heading to their deaths. As it stood, the Russians would be fools to try something here. Not unless they wanted to start a war between the families.

Doyle flicked his hand impatiently at the radio. “Turn that shit off and give the signal. Let’s see if our boys are here.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.” Stevie Boy snapped off the radio and gave the car’s headlights three brief flicks. A mirrored response came from farther down the alleyway, followed by three seconds of darkness. Then a fourth flash. It was the prearranged signal. The pinkos were waiting for them as planned.

“You want I should hop out here?” Niall asked. “I could stake out one of the roofs, make sure there’s no surprises waiting for us.”

“Fuck no,” Doyle said, “If there’s any surprises, I want you right there covering my ass.”

“You sure this is a good idea?” Stevie Boy asked. Doyle could hear the nervousness in the kid’s voice. He sympathized, but it was too late to back out now.

“Let’s just get this over with.” He looked over the seat at Coleman. “You ready to do your part when we need you?”

The handyman patted the bag in his lap. “Just give the word, boss.”

Doyle nodded to Stevie Boy. “Okay, go in slow. And keep on the headlights. I want those fuckwits blind.”

“Revved up like a deuce, Cap’n.”

“What?”

“Nothin’.” Stevie Boy put the car in drive and moved slowly into the alley. Doyle thought of a hunter warily approaching the den of some feral animal.

“Stop here,” Doyle said once they were nose-deep between the adjoining buildings. He didn’t need to explain further. They all knew it was better to keep some wiggle room between them and the enemy should they need to beat a hasty retreat.

The four men checked their pieces. Doyle thumbed off the safety on his S&W Governor and placed it in his jacket pocket rather than back in the shoulder rig. This would make it easier to reach in a hurry.

Not that he would rush himself. Doyle was notoriously calm under fire. Sure, the other guy might be quicker on the draw, but Doyle knew it was accuracy and not quickness that won the day.

He nodded to Niall. “Do it.”

The reaper opened the car’s back door and stepped out. He shielded his eyes from the Russian’s headlights with his left hand while the right gripped the pistol under his arm. He remained behind the door on the off chance their quarry wasn’t in a negotiating mood. “Okay, we’re here!” he shouted. “You the guys that called this meeting?”

Long seconds passed without an answer. Doyle sensed the others growing anxious and ordered them to stay calm. The other car’s headlights remained on, but he heard its doors open and shut. Two silhouettes appeared outlined in the white light emitted by both vehicles.

“Andrei Gavrikov?” Niall called, half-drawing his pistol.

“Da, it is me,” came a thickly accented voice.

“You boys come alone?” Niall asked.

“Da, as your boss say.”

“Turn off your lights. Let’s have a look at you.”

“You first.”

Doyle sighed. This was getting them nowhere. The pinkos were wary of treachery, and with good reason. They were the fish out of water here. Doyle opened the passenger door and got out. “Cool your jets,” he said. “We’re all friends here, Gavrikov. Skipper sent us to fetch you, just like you asked.”

“Roeser here?”

“C’mon, you don’t think Roeser was gonna show up himself?”

Doyle stepped around the passenger door with his hands stuffed inside his pockets. His right hand rested on the Governor’s handle. The weapon fired alternating rounds of Colt .45 calibers and .410 shotshells. The first chamber housed a jacketed hollow point.

When the time came, he would fire through his jacket and incapacitate Andrei. The shot would stun his cousin, Valentin, allowing him time to draw his revolver and take out his right knee with the shotshell housed in the second chamber. The act would ruin a perfectly good jacket, but it couldn’t be helped.

Andrei backed up a couple of steps. One hand slid behind his back. “Deal vas to talk to Roeser.”

Doyle removed his left hand from his pocket and held it up, palm out. “Okay, okay, don’t blow a gasket. Roeser sent us to fetch you. Get in the car, and we’ll take you to him.”

“Ve follow in our car,” Valentin said from behind his cousin.

Doyle gave a half-shrug.  “Whatever floats your boat, man.”

Andrei hesitated, and his hand returned, empty, to his side. He exchanged a look with Valentin. The moment was perfect. Neither man was paying him the slightest attention. Doyle’s grip tightened around the revolver. He was about to pull the trigger when he caught movement to his left.

Instinctively, he turned in that direction. However, he had stared too long into the pinko’s headlights, and it took his eyes precious seconds to adjust. At first, he saw nothing but darkness, permeated by flashes of light that danced and wriggled in his retinas. He heard more than saw the figure sitting on the ground, so close he could’ve reached out and touched him.

“What the fuck?” Doyle drew the Governor and pointed it at what looked like a hobo nestled between a pile of moldy garbage bags.

The cousins homed in on Doyle’s revolver and drew guns from their waistbands. “Lzhets! Roeser say nyet guns!” Andrei shouted in a combination of English and Russian.

Niall had his pistol out and pointed at the cousins in a heartbeat. Stevie Boy quickly joined him. Both men favored the 9mm Luger, whose blue-black finish gleamed in the headlights.

“Drop those guns, cocksuckers!” The reaper remained behind the car door, using it as a shield. His pistol never wavered.

“Let’s see ’em on the ground and those wee hands in the air,” Stevie Boy chimed in. He ventured out from the car in a crouch, his pistol clutched in both hands.

The cousins hesitated. Doyle glanced over his shoulder at Andrei. “My boys can shoot the nuts off a squirrel from half a block away. I’d do as they say.”

Andrei exchanged another look with Valentin, who muttered something under his breath before tossing his gun on the ground. “Pizdets!” Andrei shouted and did the same. He glared at Doyle. “Roeser say you vill not bring guns.”

“And you believed him?” He nodded to Stevie Boy. “Check ’em.”

The kid hurried over and kicked the guns out of reach. “Funny you brought your own shooters, though, ain’t it?” He frisked first one man and then the other before stepping back and giving Doyle the thumbs up. “They’re clean.”

“Guns vas for our protection,” Valentin explained.

“Sure, they were.” It didn’t bother Doyle that the cousins were armed. They would’ve been fools not to be.

He turned back to their boy in the garbage, meaning to deal with him first. A clandestine operation like this couldn’t afford witnesses. Which really sucked. Now they had three bodies to dispose of instead of two. If he was lucky, he might get home sometime before dawn.

To his surprise, the hobo was no longer in the garbage but standing right next to him.

Doyle let out a not-so-manly yell and backed away. How was the guy able to move so quietly? And why wasn’t his face visible in the headlights? It was as if the shadows clung to him, obscuring everything but a ratty old hat that looked straight out of a Crocodile Dundee movie. There were even animal teeth lining the band, with one missing near the front.

Relax, it’s just some trash pirate looking to sleep off a hangover, Doyle assured himself. From the smell of the guy, this wasn’t his first roll in the garbage. He stank so bad, Doyle’s eyes watered. More than that, the scuzz smelled sick, like he was dying of cancer or something. Hell, killing him would be a mercy.

Doyle pointed his gun at the hobo’s shrouded face. “Tough luck, pal, but this here’s a private party.”

Before he could pull the trigger, something heavy landed on the Russians’ car. The impact caved in the roof and shattered the windows in a granular spray of tempered glass. The cousins stumbled back with their hands held up to shield their faces. Andrei lost his balance and fell on his ass with a surprised grunt.

Doyle turned to face this new threat, but the car’s headlights blinded him. He squinted and called for the perp to show himself.

Something moved in the light. Something as big as a bear. Doyle didn’t hesitate. He fired point-blank at the thing. The jacketed hollow point would have dropped an ordinary man, but the thing in the headlights didn’t even flinch. It moved forward, its huge silhouette towering over Valentin.

“Nyet!” was all the Russian could say before the thing sliced off his head with what looked like twelve-inch-long claws.

Doyle fired again. The second round was a .410 shotshell. At this range, the buckshot should have perforated the thing. Instead, it shrugged off the blast and threw Valentin’s head at him like a makeshift missile.

The head glanced off Doyle’s shoulder, spinning him in a half-circle. His revolver went off and the bullet passed through Stevie Boy’s left hip. The kid fell to the pavement with an ear-piercing cry.

Andrei babbled something in Russian and crab-walked backward on his hands and feet. A keening noise sounded deep in his throat. The thing reached down and grabbed him by the shoulders. The keening turned into an outright scream as the thing tore Andrei in half and tossed the pieces down opposite ends of the alleyway.

Lord, make haste to help me, Doyle thought. This couldn’t be happening. What in the name of Christ was this abomination?

He stepped over Stevie Boy, who wallowed on the pavement, grasping the bloody hole in his hip, and wailing like a madman. Doyle ignored the kid. All that mattered to him was getting out of here. He wasn’t going to die like this. Not in some rat-infested alleyway in the middle of the damned night.

Stevie Boy clawed at Doyle’s $300 dress pants. “Don’t leave me!” he wailed. “For God’s sake, Jimmy, don’t leave me!”

Doyle heard Niall blazing away next to him. The reaper’s shots had no more effect on that thing than his did. He slapped the man’s arm. “Grab Stevie! We’re buggin’ out!”

Niall hesitated, cursed, and made his way to Stevie Boy. He kept his 9mm trained on the thing in the high beams while he wrapped one arm around the kid and pulled him to his feet. “Stop cryin’ an’ move yer ass!” he shouted.

Doyle provided cover fire as he backwalked to the car’s driver-side door. Without lowering his gaze, he reached behind him and pawed for the door’s handle. He had just found it when the car roared to life.

No!

He spun around to see Coleman behind the wheel. In all the chaos, he had forgotten about the handyman. Coleman had wormed his way over the seat and was looking to make off without them. The little weasel.

Doyle heard Niall let out a shrill scream that was quickly cut short. Stevie Boy wailed and begged and pleaded until his cries also ceased. Doyle knew he was next if he didn’t do something fast. He clawed at the driver’s side door. “Joe, you fuckhead! Wait for me!”

Coleman didn’t bother with a response. Putting the car in reverse, he began to pull out of the alleyway, but he didn’t make it far before Niall’s corpse (or what remained of it) slammed into the windshield. Coleman lost control, and the car skidded into the laundromat’s brick wall.

Serves you right! Doyle thought with bitter satisfaction. You twisted, sadistic, scum-sucking bastard! Serves you right!

Coleman tried in vain to get the Bentley unstuck. He had mere seconds before their attacker landed on the hood. It tossed Niall’s corpse aside and slammed its claws through the windshield. Coleman cried out in terror. The thing pulled him from the car and slammed his head into the brick wall hard enough to burst it like a melon.

Doyle stared in disbelief. Even in his wildest days as a mob enforcer, he had never seen anything so brutal. This thing—this creature—was unstoppable. Doyle forced himself from his prone state. He had to get out of here. Had to get back to the skipper, warn him that they had a new player in town—one who played for keeps.

If he made it to the other end of the alleyway, he could slip around the Russians’ car and lose himself in the twists and turns of the neighborhood. Roeser had safehouses all over Dung Row. All Doyle had to do was reach the nearest one. Then he could lay low until the danger passed. But if he was going to go, he had to go now.

Doyle turned to run but came face-to-face with the hobo with the ridiculous hat. He stood with his long, boney fingers clasped in front of him. His grin was visible through the swath of shadows. A dead man’s grin, thin and rictus.

“Fuck you.” Doyle shoved the Governor in his face and pulled the trigger. The hammer struck spent rounds. He was empty. Empty and out of time.

Footfalls sounded behind him. Doyle let out a shuddering breath and slowly turned around. The creature towered over him. A hulking shape with a mouth full of pointed teeth and eyes that burned like hellfire.

The Devil in the moonlight, Doyle had time to think. Then the creature was on him. His death was quick. He never felt a thing.

Less than an hour later, a homeless man stumbled over the bodies while looking for a place to relieve his bladder. His frantic call to the police launched a full investigation, though it was more out of macabre curiosity than a sense of justice.

The police considered Doyle and his crew little more than parasites feeding on Eon’s underbelly. Their sudden departure was no great loss to the world.

Nor, they reckoned, were the dozens that followed.

Look for The Bone Merchant, available soon from Wamingo Publishing.

The Bone Merchant is copyright, 2024, Jeremy Lee Riley. Distributed through Wamingo Publishing. Artwork by Sharon Riley and Heather Fournier.