Wheelman, The

The naked guy staggered a bit. The punches and kicks and hits by the two-by-four seemed to have had an effect on him, after all. He fell to his hands and knees and visibly shivered. Then he looked up at Andy, hand outstretched in a hold on a minute position.

“Pound him, Andy!” yelled Fury, his voice strained and slightly higher than usual.

The naked guy was shaking his head no. He gestured with his right hand as if he were holding a pen and writing a note. What was he trying to say? Did he want to sign something?

“For fuck’s sake, hit him!”

There really wasn’t much of a choice. If Andy didn’t do something, Fury would anyway. And God knows how pissed Fury’s vor father would be if Fury told him Andy had hesitated to help. For better or worse, Andy was Fury’s guy. Andy took a few steps back, found the two-by-four, and approached the naked man.

There was no pleading in his eyes. Just waiting. Almost a dare. Maybe even a glimmer of disappointment in there, too.

Andy swung the two-by-four like a T-ball bat, imagining the naked man’s body as the T and his head as the ball. Hard.

The Cold Steel Grave

LENNON WOKE UP AGAIN WHEN THE LIP OF THE PIPE scraped his chest. The hazy memories of the last few minutes loaded themselves back into his brain. It was all pain and fuzz and white noise, and flickering images of the inside of a black vinyl bag, and beatings, and looking at some dumb college kid, and then blackness again. He reached out to grab something, anything. His fingers scraped against concrete, then slipped around cold steel.

Shit.

The pipe.

The memory came back. These two jokers were dumping bodies down a pipe. Holden’s body. Bling’s body. Now, his body. Whatever’s buried here stays here for at least sixty years.

His fingers found the edge of the pipe, and he clamped down as forcefully as he could.

“Let go fucker,” a voice hissed, and he felt a fist hammer the base of his spine. Lennon’s arms and hands went numb, but he kept holding on. The fist pounded his back again, and then his ass. Then more fists. Someone grabbed his legs and hoisted them up in the air. Then a fist smashed into his balls, and the fight was over. Lennon’s fingers released their hold on the pipe and he felt himself sliding down it.

Arms, legs, out. That was the only thing he could do. Skin slid against steel. Lennon pushed his arms and legs out farther, as hard as he could. Flakes of acned rust on the inside of the pipe caught against his skin, shredding it. But it also slowed his descent. A few panicked seconds later he stopped falling.

Lennon was naked, upside-down in a construction pipe by the Delaware River, arms and legs torn to shreds and his testicles hiding out somewhere in the vicinity of his rib cage … but he had stopped falling. He’d take victory where he could get it.

Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream. He would have loved to scream. Lennon pushed harder against the confines of the inner pipe. He wasn’t going to fall. No fucking way.

“He’s stuck,” a voice said up above.

Pause.

“Shit.”

Another pause.

“You’re dead, motherfucker, so you’d better give up now and drop. You want a bullet? That it? A nice couple rounds of hot lead up your ass, finish things off nice and quick?”

Lennon pushed harder against the pipe wall. This was no way to die.

“Get that two-by-four and see if you can push him down. I’ll get the gun.”

The slab of wood made a bonging sound against the side of the pipe. Then Lennon felt a hard jab on the back of his left thigh. Then another, more forceful this time. The rust dug deeper into his skin. The wood slammed into his butt cheek, painfully, almost causing Lennon to let go.

The next jab missed his body, rushing into the void between Lennon’s chest and the pipe wall.

This was it.

Praying that three limbs could hold him up, Lennon’s left hand whipped out and grabbed the wood. He felt it jerk upward, but Lennon held firm, then yanked back downward. The force of his pull almost dislodged him from the pipe entirely, but he held on as the rust plunged even deeper into his skin.

The two-by-four was in his hand now; the guy above had lost it.

“Shit. He just grabbed the two-by-four.”

“It don’t matter,” said the other voice. “Fucker’s going down.”

Lennon looked up past his body to the opening of the pipe. A revolver was pointed back down at him and a meaty thumb started to pull back the hammer. So he did the only thing he could.

He shoved the two-by-four upward as hard as he could.

Wood snapped the guy’s wrist. Surprised him completely. Hand popped open. Revolver tumbled out and down. Barrel caught the lip of the pipe. Weight of the gun dumped it inward. The gun fell down the pipe.

The gun landed on the underside of Lennon’s genitals. He let go of the two-by-four, then reached around for the revolver. Grasped it. Grasped it like a fifteen-year-old with his first tit.

Come on, fucker. Take a look.

Look down.

His shaking thumb pulled back the hammer.

“Aw, you son of a bitch—”

The guy looked.

Lennon squeezed once, and the guy’s head sprayed apart.

He could hear the other guy screaming, but that wasn’t his concern now. Lennon had heard the two of them talking before. The guy he’d just shot was obviously the semipro; the other guy seemed to be along for the ride and needed directions at every turn. And now he’d lost his boss, his two-by-four, and the gun. Hopefully, they didn’t have another gun. Lennon wouldn’t have to worry about him for the time being.

Now his worry was getting out of the pipe.

There seemed to be two ways out. Some smart, clever way, and some exhausting, painful, bloody way.

Lennon couldn’t think of any smart, clever ways, though he tried. He thought about slowly gliding farther down the pipe, expending precious skin real estate, but eventually hitting the bottom, where maybe he could dig until he hit water, then hold his breath and float back up to the surface like a cork. But there was no way of knowing what was below. Might be tightly packed mud; might be bedrock. This wasn’t his river—fuck, this wasn’t his city. Lennon then thought about slipping down farther until he found the two-by-four again, breaking it apart and trying to wedge pieces up in the pipe, and then using them as a makeshift ladder. But again, there were no guarantees that his strength would hold, or that the two-by-four could be broken. Most likely, it was fresh, strong wood; this was a construction site.

Upside-down, the blood continued to rush to his head. He couldn’t hang like this forever. Enough blood in the brain and some foolish idea would seem reasonable, and then he would die. And this was a stupid way to die.

So it was down to the exhausting, painful, bloody way: Push hard, shimmy upward, and hope his skin held out until the surface.

It was the only sane option.

And hey, nobody ever said crawling out of your own grave would be easy.

Fifteen minutes later, Lennon’s toes scraped the lid of the pipe. He pushed hard one last time, pressed his legs out in the air, and wrapped them around the pipe’s edge. His muscles had been worked beyond exhaustion, ripped and burned and crying out for rest to repair themselves, but he pushed them one last time, clenching his entire body up to gain the leverage to grab the lip of the pipe with his hands and finally, to pull himself out. Lennon flipped over, stumbled on his heels, then collapsed to the concrete.

The other guy was there waiting for him.