No Such Creature

“Urban legend,” Max said. “No such creature.”

“Legend, huh?” Zig drank down half his beer. With each gulp his Adam’s apple bounced higher and higher up his gullet as if it might ring a bell and win a prize. “Lemme tell you about this urban legend, kid.” His face loomed forward across the table, blinking and foam-flecked. “The Subtractors is a group of individuals, a secret organization, call them. No one knows who they are, only what they do. And what they do is not pleasant. They prey upon thieves, see? They hear about a tasty job going down, they get their hands on one of the likely crew, and they, I don’t know how else to put it, they subtract parts of his body until he reveals where the score is tucked away. Bolt cutters are their tool of choice, although they have been known to use straight razors, exacto knives, whatever’s handy.”

“That’s sick,” Owen said.

“Scares hell out of me.” Zig jerked his head toward Max. “Gramps never mentioned them to you?”

“Naturally not. I keep rumour, superstition and falsehood off the curriculum.”

“The Subtractors exist, kid. And if Pa Clampett here was a decent father figure, he would have warned you about them.”

“Sounds like something out of a Tarantino movie,” Owen said.

“Doesn’t it?” Max said. “The distinct tang of fiction.”

“You don’t believe me?” Zig said to Owen.

Owen shrugged.

Blinking ferociously, Zig opened the buttons of his shirt, top to bottom, eyes fixed on Owen, a smirk on his face. He pulled open his shirt.

“Whoa,” Owen said, and looked away.

Zig turned to Max, displaying his chest like a stripper.

“Hmm,” Max said. “And they didn’t return them when they were finished?”

“That’s all you got to say?” Zig said. “Urban legend? No such animal? If that’s the case, where the fuck are my nipples?”

“Do I need to remind you,” Max said, gesturing at Sir Slots-a-Lot’s shining armour, the maces and lances, “that we are in a restaurant?”

“Just don’t tell me the Subtractors don’t exist,” Zig said, buttoning up. “Happened three years ago. Me and a couple of colleagues got into the customs house in San Francisco. Had a tip on some icons that were being held there. Next thing I know …”

“Your tits were in the wringer.”

“Razor, actually.”

Owen was still having trouble catching his breath. “Did you tell them where the stuff was?”

“Course I did. What do you think I am? Superman?”

“I would have told them after the first one,” Max said. “In fact, I would have told them before the first one. I would have handed them a map and a key.”

“Unfortunately, the Subtractors don’t work that way. They had ’em off and in a jar before I could say jack shit. They hadda show they were serious, see? I had five more seconds to tell ’em or I’d be sitting here singing soprano.”

“I don’t imagine your colleagues were too pleased.”

“No, I imagine not. Lucky for me, in the process of helping themselves to our score the Subtractors killed both of ’em. Paper put the number of bullet holes at thirty each.”

“That was lucky,” Max said. “Have you thought about cosmetic surgery?”

“I don’t know,” Zig said with a shrug. “Kind of a conversation piece.”

Later, on their way back to the Rocket, Max told Owen to be sure and keep away from Zig if he should bump into him anywhere else in town. Despite his surface friendliness, the man was a violent pig, a rapist, and possessed of nothing resembling a conscience.

“If he’s so awful, why were you so friendly to him?”

“That, my boy, is one of the cruelties of incarceration. One must choose one’s friends from a very murky pool.”

FIVE

It started over a disagreement concerning a pack of cigarettes-a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights-but it quickly escalated to the point where Zig was banging the guy’s head on the floor.

Being a berserker, an unknown quantity capable of exploding over the smallest of provocations, had worked well for Zig up to that point. It had worked for him in the juvenile detention facilities where he spent most of his teenage years; it had worked for him in his time at Rikers; and it had even worked reasonably well for most of his ten years (sexual assault, aggravated assault, attempted murder) at Sing Sing.

He was a decent talker, and he had sunny periods during which he was able to nurture relationships that almost approximated friendships, but always, sooner or later, he would explode and someone would end up in hospital, and it was never Zig, despite his deficiencies in height, weight and reach.

Until the cigarette thing. Unfortunately, the head he was banging on the cement floor of the TV room-a privilege he had earned during one of his sunny periods-belonged to one Teddy Kern, favourite punk of no other than Khalid Mossbacher. Khalid Mossbacher, until his incarceration for murder and conspiracy, had been a hip-hop star famous for his abs and biceps.

It was only a matter of time. The messages started arriving well before Kern was out of hospital: messages yelled down the wing after lights out, messages that arrived with Zig’s food. He even began to hear messages in the clanking of the prison’s old radiators, though he hadn’t the first clue about Morse code.

Khalid going to pop you-that was the mildest note he received. Others were more exuberant: Khalid going to dismantle you. Khalid is going to torch your ass.

He thought about faking cardiac pain. At best, that would get him into hospital for a few days. But when it was over, he would still have to return to the wing to face the righteous wrath of Khalid Mossbacher. The only way Zig was going to survive was to get transferred to another wing, and the only way you got transferred was if there was a credible risk of grievous injury or murder. His predicament certainly met that standard. But the catch was, if you snitched about your problem, the risk of getting murdered increased tenfold.

So Zig didn’t say a word to anyone. Within a week he had scored cocaine from one source, a razor blade from another. One night, when the whole prison seemed to be asleep, he made the cocaine into a paste and rubbed it into himself at the crucial points. He sat himself on the floor and, with his back to the door, tied himself to the bars. He cut off first one nipple, then the other, slipped his free arm back into his bindings, and let loose some hellish shrieking.

Worst part of it was, the cocaine paste didn’t work all that well.

Guards came running, the wing was locked down, and Zig was wheeled off to the prison hospital. In the circumstances, his claim that his life was under imminent threat was deemed credible, and he was transferred to another wing where he was not known. Max’s wing.

It was while recuperating in hospital that Zig came up with his money-making idea. He’d had lots of money- making ideas over the years, but incarceration tended to dampen entrepreneurship, and somehow they had never come to anything. The Subtractors had long been the stuff of criminal legend; Zig had been hearing about them since he was twelve. Since their victims were thieves, they could hardly report matters to the police.

You’d expect there would be lots of thieves hobbling around missing toes and fingers and what have you, but somehow, despite his long association with the profession, Zig had never run into any of these victims. And yet everyone claimed to know someone who had been kidnapped, maimed, and let go, and most criminals believed the gang existed.

Now, as Zig contemplated the missing nipples under his bandages, he began to see possibilities in the Subtractors’ business model. He knew hundreds of thieves and robbers; he even knew their MOs. All he had to do was keep up on the crime news-dead easy in this Internet age-and do a little guesswork. The rest was simple.

So, shortly after his release from Sing Sing four years previously, he had set about bringing the Subtractors