Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“Have you had time to think, Dimi?”
The voice was tinny and flat.
Dimi came fully awake in an ice cold drizzle.
Tupo was standing over him, pouring a bottle of beer over him. Yvan was by him holding his hand out. In his fingers was a smart phone held up for Dimi to see. Uncle Symon’s tiny face glared at him from the screen.
“Dimi. Have you had time to think?”
Think? It was all Dimi could to do to keep from passing out again. His ears rang. His vision spun. Every beat of his heart brought a new tide of pain to his skull.
He’d lost his room privileges. He lay in the musty straw of the stable set. Manacles were around his ankles and secured to a long chain slung over a ceiling joist. The gear was part of the bondage stuff left behind by the recent lessees. Before leashing him like a dog, Tupo and Yvan made him take his clothes off. He refused at first, certain they were going to ass-rape him, these sick prison fucks. Tupo pressed the barrel of gun to his head. Dimi shucked out of his clothes.
They chained him. They gave him a beating. No malice. No questions. They took turns. Just following orders. All part of the job.
Tupo gave Dimi a shot to the gut that loosened his bowels. A stream of bloody shit sprayed over his legs. They dropped him to the straw then and went back to their card table.
Uncle Symon had left before the stripping and chaining and beating. Now his uncle was back. Virtually, anyway.
“Get him up,” Uncle Symon said.
Tupo and Yvan lifted Dimi and dropped him in a chair. Tupo handed him what was left of the beer. Dimi sipped, struggling to keep it down.
“Have you had time to think, Dimi?” Symon said from the phone.
“I told you, Uncle. Maybe the bikers know.”
“We spoke to them. They do not know the man. He is a stranger to them. I believe them.”
“I swear to Christ I don’t know either,” Dimi said. Tears started in his eyes. His throat closed with the effort not to sob.
“Something at Skip’s. You know. Skip’s.”
“The place in Tampa? I know it.”
“This man Kane killed our people at Skip’s. Robbed us. This was before he killed your father.”
Dimi licked his lips and nodded.
“Did you sell drugs there? Did you make trouble there with someone, Dimi?”
“I told you and told you and told you, Uncle. I don’t sell drugs anywhere. I’m not a dealer. I’m a wholesaler. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Hit him,” the face on the phone said.
Tupo slammed a fist into Dimi’s face. Dimi heard a wet snap. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“Again. Just to hurt.”
Tupo slapped Dimi across the ear with an open hand. Dimi couldn’t believe, even after the beating the night before, how much it hurt. An explosion inside his head followed by a dagger of pain from his ear. A high whistling sound drowned out everything for a long moment.
“Enough.” Symon sighed.
Tupo stepped back. The assault via Skype was on pause for now.
“You are not telling me the truth. You think that lying will keep you alive,” Symon said inches from his face.
Dimi stared at the fuzzy image filling his field of vision.
“You are a man because you can take a beating. Then we show you that you are no man. We treat you like a bitch.”
Dimi watched Yvan hand the smart phone over to Tupo who held it close to Dimi’s face. Yvan walked away and returned a moment later with a push broom. He snapped the broom handle over his knee, leaving a two-foot section in one fist.
Yvan spat on the end and grinned.
The world pixilated and then went red and then black.
Dimi was off line.
“Jesus Palomino, Gunny,” Isaac said in a whisper.
They were in a block-walled building set into a hillside well behind the cabin. Accessible by a hard-packed walkway and enclosed by a cyclone cage. Gunny hit the combination on the keypad flawlessly. He swung the heavy steel door open to let them in.
The familiar smell of gun oil and Cosmoline. Fluorescents in the ceiling winked on. The room was ten by ten and lined with racks of weapons in protective sleeves. Above the racks were shelves of ammo boxes. The back wall was stacked with cases in wood and high-impact plastic.
“This room is some kind of prepper’s dream,” Isaac said unsheathing a government model Thompson submachine gun in pristine condition.
“Preppers. Screwballs, I call ’em. Got a pack of ’em over the hill diggin’ out their half-assed bunker on weekends instead of golfing or barbecuing.”
“So, why do you have all this shock and awe in your backyard?”
“Just an old jarhead who can’t sleep right without some strike capability handy,” Gunny said smiling.
“You have anything newer than Iwo Jima?”
“Fuck you, Slick. I got whatever the hell you need to get you out of whatever corner you’re in. What are you looking for?”
“A long gun. Something for range and a good scope that’s not fiddly. A rifle, an M4, without all the aftermarket bullshit. And two handguns. One for serious work and the other for hideout.”