Guilt Kills
Chapter Six
By Cory!! Strode
Even O'Ryan was shocked at how easy everything turned out. He had jimmied the back door, which, amazingly enough, was unguarded. An hour after he went in, Rick and his men had come in, overpowering the few guards that were around, and using their superior numbers to get the rest to either give up or take off. When the music had stopped, O'Ryan knew that they'd been able to secure the downstairs, and the plan was then for O'Ryan to make sure there weren't any guards upstairs.
Rick had been in the building more than enough times on business to know the layout, and he also had a good idea of how many men he would have guarding the place on a Wednesday night.
Now, after an hour of smacking Mikey around, they were starting to get some answers. He'd resisted at first, since he knew that if they shot him, they wouldn't know where the whisky went.
If O'Ryan hadn't been with them, though, Rick wouldn't have given much of a damn about that. In his mind the whisky was gone, and all he wanted was revenge. O'Ryan, however, had been sent down to find out where it was being taken and who was behind it. He also wanted to know, if only to make sure that Nitti hadn't set him up, like Rick had said he had done. O'Ryan hadn't had much in the way of luck since leaving home when it came to trusting people.
Still, he wanted to know that Nitti wasn't trying to set him up. He'd been nothing but straight with both him and Capone, and they had treated him well, helping him adjust to a world he knew nothing about, giving him a job and said they would help in finding Heenan. If it was all a set up then...
O'Ryan didn't know what he would do if it was all a set up.
What he did know was that if Mikey died, he wouldn't know anything, and he would be back where he started. Somehow, the answers were in the man tied to a chair, face covered with bruises, and bleeding from the mouth while saying no one could get a damn thing out of him.
O'Ryan had had to leave the room after a short time, not able to watch as the man was punched, and then smacked while tied to a chair. It seemed so wrong to him, even though it was clear that Mikey was not anywhere near being an innocent of any kind. He'd never seen anyone "worked over" before. It wasn't like beating someone up, or even killing them when they tried to kill you. This was brutal, and it just felt wrong to him.
The added problem was that Mikey wasn't talking.
O'Ryan had to leave the room after a short time, and whenever anyone would come out, they would just look at him and shake their head, signifying that he still wasn't talking. No one would be coming to his rescue either, with the theater shut down, and guards at the entrances and exits.
O'Ryan leaned against the wall, but he could still feel the force of each of the blows hitting Mikey as if they were hitting him. He could feel the shock through the soles of his shoes. He winced as the sick, wet sound of fist or book hitting flesh echoes through the hallway. There were two other men in the hallway, two of Rick's men, nattily dressed as if this were a night on the town for them.
They weren't even paying attention to what was going on behind the door, and were instead talking about some of the girls who had been in the show. One bragged that he had been able to secure the dressing room, which meant he was able to get his own show. O'Ryan didn't listen to what they were saying so much as just trying to shut out the sound of the beating going on behind the door.
After a few more minutes, one of the men from downstairs came up and was walking toward the door to Mikey's office. O'Ryan held out a hand, stopping him, and he looked at O'Ryan, his deep set eyes in a huge beefy face full of threat.
"What the hell do you want, Chicago?" the man said, a thick German accent making his guttural speech hard to understand without concentration.
"It's my turn," O'Ryan said, trying to put the disgust he had for what was going on behind the door aside so that he could appear as if he was just as tough as the other men who were involved in the beating, "I need you to go get my dog. She's going to help with the interrogation."
With that, the German's eyes grew wide and he got a smile on his face that made O'Ryan even more sick to his stomach. It was one thing to kill or hurt people, but to take pleasure in it made no sense to him at all.
The German turned and went back down the stairs, and O'Ryan tried to take comfort in the fact that at least he'd be able to be with Mercy by his side soon. He tried to take comfort in it, but it didn't help.
He walked up to the door and threw it open, and saw that Mikey was sitting, tied to his chair, his hair a bloody mess, his face a mass of bruises, both eyes swollen shut, and having trouble breathing. He wheezed, and O'Ryan was able to tell by the sound Mikey made as he breathed in that he had broken ribs. One of which might even been so broken it had punctured his lung, but O'Ryan wasn't sure, since he hadn't made it that far in the medical training.
There was one huge man with his shirt off, and blood all over his fists, and Rick was sitting in another chair, back to the big picture window, a smile on his face.
"He still won't talk, O'Ryan," Rick said, holding up a hand so that the man giving the beating would stop, "I don't know if I admire that or just see it as major stupidity. Either way, we might have to do something more drastic/"
O'Ryan could feel the room spin; just the tiniest bit, under his feet as he looked away from the bloody mess that was Mikey's face. "Is he still able to talk?" O'Ryan asked.
The man who was beating Mikey reached down and lifted his head up, and Mikey spit into his face, more blood than spittle. The man backhanded Mikey, knocking the chair over and causing Mikey's head to hit the floor with a hollow thud.
Rick showed why he had the nickname of "The Smiler" by letting his face open in a huge smile that showed an impressive row of teeth as he said, "Oh, he can talk, don't you worry about that. He just doesn't seem to want to. Think you can make him?"
O'Ryan gazed out the window, seeing that the first few rays of light from the sun were showing on the eastern horizon. He kept his mind focused on that as he said, "When Mercy gets here, leave him with me. I'll find out where your whisky is, and who paid him to take it."
From the floor, Mikey said, "Bullshit you will."
At that moment, the German came in with Mercy, who was given a quick hand signal from O'Ryan, so minute that the other people in the room didn't see it. As soon as she saw it, she began to snarl and pull hard on her leash, causing the German to have to wrap the leash around his hand and pull back. Mercy strained against the chain, pushing so hard that her front paws were up in the air.
O'Ryan kept looking out the window, as the German was able to pull Mercy over to him, and hand him the leash. For her part, Mercy kept straining, trying to get to the man on the floor, but O'Ryan knew that if she was able to get away from the German, she would go right up to Mikey and stop, so close to him that the spittle from her snarling would drench his face, but she would not attack until O'Ryan gave the word.
She was acting. As was O'Ryan.
The good thing was that, working as a team; they were able to get their act to work.
"I think that is one hell of an idea, kid," Rick said, getting up from his chair. He waved the two other men out of the room and then walked over to O'Ryan and whispered in his ear, "I don't think anyone can make him break, so if he doesn't make it through your work, I won't be all that upset. I'm sure was can shake the place down tomorrow and get the name of who paid for taking my whisky without breaking too many bones."
Rick was laughing like a mad hatter as he left the room, and O'Ryan twisted his hand in another subtle, quick motion, and Mercy sat by his side, staring at Mikey silently as if the previous actions she had been demonstrating had all been a bad dream. O'Ryan went over to Mikey and set his chair up straight. He grabbed a towel that had been left by one of the men to wipe the blood off of his fists after hitting Mikey for a while and wiped Mikey's face off so that he would not have to look at all of the blood dripping.
O'Ryan grabbed his own chair and sat down across from Mikey and spoke very quietly. He didn't raise his voice; he didn't even show any emotion. He just started talking.
"I don't think you know what you have gotten yourself into, sir. The last think Rick said to me was to give me permission to kill you. It's not like I haven't killed people before. I have more blood on my hands than there is on this towel, but none of it is innocent blood and all if it came from people who were able to fight back. You can't. You've lost. You've lost the fight and now, if you and I don't come to an agreement, you're going to lose your life. No more of the pretty girls dancing for you, no more of the nice cigars, no more of any of this."
"Fuck you," Mikey said, "He can't kill me and you know it. If he kills me, he never finds out who took his whisky. You know that!"
O'Ryan nodded, "Yes, I do. But he doesn't. He thinks that one of your men has to know where it is. I think that's a bit simplistic, but I know that we can find someone who will tell us where the trucks were taken, and if we poke around enough, we'll find out who took them from there. You may play tough, but I'm sure that one of your men told on of the pretty girls what a big job he did for you in order to see them without all the fancy underwear. And the girls will talk.
"They aren't like us. They don't know that sometimes you have to take a lot of pain in order to win. The problem is you lost. You took the wrong shipment, or you worked for the wrong guy. I'm not going to beat you. I'm just going to ask one time. And then I'll have to let them finish the job, and you know they will."
O'Ryan's eyes narrowed. He allowed the anger and rage he was feeling to fill his voice, even if he kept it at a low tone and barely above a whisper as he said, "Did you sell the whisky to a man name Nicholas Heenan?"
Mikey looked into O'Ryan's eyes, and O'Ryan saw the defiance in them. This man knew that O'Ryan couldn't kill him, and his sheer defiance was the only thing keeping him from giving out the information that O'Ryan wanted. O'Ryan watched as the man kept staring at him, his defiance slowly fading. It wasn't fading because of the beating, but because what O'Ryan had said was sinking in.
O'Ryan just stared at him, trying to keep an air of indifference. He hoped that would get Mikey to talk. A minute passed, and there was still silence between the two of them. O'Ryan sat, letting the silence sink in for another minute before he said, "What are you going to do Mikey? Do you want to live, or not?"
O'Ryan waited again. He didn't move not even a twitch. Mercy sat there quietly, waiting for the next signal from her master. The silence in the room was palpable until finally Mikey said, "Yes."
"Yes, what?" O'Ryan asked.
"Yes," Mikey said, his voice slurred from his jaw being swollen and probably having had a couple of teeth knocked out, "it was Heenan. He told me to deliver the whisky to him."
O'Ryan's brain reeled with the revelation. All of his searching, and finally, he had been able to find Heenan, almost by luck. He could see Heenan's face as he had remembered it in his vision, laughing as everything around him was in flame. His face lit by an almost unholy glow as he walked through the compound, killing anything that lived.
Heenan.
"Where?" O'Ryan was able to say, more of a dry croak than a word.
"A warehouse in Galesburg. He didn't much give a damn about the whisky itself, just wanted to know if Nitti had bought it. He cared more about screwing over Nitti than anything else," Mikey said.
O'Ryan couldn't put the pieces together. Heenan had released the Dark God, and obviously had access to dark mystic power. Why would he be trying to interfere in the sale of bootleg whisky?
Mikey must have seen the questioning look on his face, because he said, "Look, that's all I know. He paid me twice what most people do, as long as I kept taking out Rick's guards. He wanted them dead, every time."
O'Ryan turned away, and motioned to Mercy to get to the door. She complied, quickly and quietly. O'Ryan turned back to him and said, "You'll need to tell them what warehouse and the address. Then tell them whatever you have to so that they send me alone. They want the whisky, but all I care about is Heenan."
Mikey rolled something around in his mouth and then spit a bloody tooth on the floor. He looked at O'Ryan, the defiance back in his eyes and said, "And do you swear they won't kill me?"
O'Ryan stood up and said, "You should have made that deal before you told me. I can't promise anything now."
With that, O'Ryan turned and left the room. When he got outside the door, Rick and the German were waiting, and O'Ryan had barely shut the door when Rick said, "Did you get him to talk?"
"Yeah," O'Ryan said, disgusted at the look of glee in Rick's face, "he talked. And he'll talk some more. Don't kill him, though. He may have more information Nitti will need. Get a doctor and a dentist here and get him cleaned up."
"Why?" Rick said, "He stole from us, and we've finally got him right where we want him."
O'Ryan looked around and said, "You think Nitti and Capone won't use that fact to take over his business? He's more use alive than dead. Alive, he can start paying money to keep this from happening again, and be a source of cheap muscle. Dead, he just makes you look guilty. Its not like something this big can go down and people won't talk."
Rick rubbed his face and then jammed his hands in his pockets. The disappointment radiated off of him, and O'Ryan was sick all over again. Not to the point of throwing up, but more to the point of wanting to beat Rick as hard as Mikey had been beaten. The fact that he was actually upset that he couldn't kill Mikey made O'Ryan want to get out of there, get a shower, and scrub the feel of being around the man off of him.
O'Ryan didn't wait for an answer, but simply turned and walked. He needed a good night's sleep, the address and time away from these people who would kill someone just as easily as O'Ryan would buy a pack of gum.
* * *
O'Ryan didn't go back to the apartment that Rick had given him, chosing instead to go to the hotel that he'd checked into the night before. He didn't want anything to do with any of the people he had had to deal with that night. The sun was starting to come up when he came in, and both his leg and his shoulder were killing him.
Mercy was very close to his side, as if she would have been ready to cushion his fall if he collapsed. The lobby actually had some activity as he came in, so he was glad he'd left all of his weapons in the car, other than his two concealed knives and one pistol he had in his blazer pocket.
The man at the counter nodded to him and O'Ryan waved back, but didn't go over to talk. He just wanted to crawl into bed and then get ready to deal with Master Heenan as soon as he could. But not tonight. Or today. Or whatever it was.
He trudged up the stairs, thankful that it was only three flights he'd have to climb, but by the time he made it to his floor, the wound in his thigh was burning, and his shoulder hurt so much to move that he was no longer holding onto the railing. The hallwasy was a quiet, dimly lit one, and the rooms were all quiet. Everyone was still sleeping, or quietly getting up to face the day.
O'Ryan unlocked his door and Mercy crouched down before entering, which stopped him immediately. He looked at her, and her eyes were glued to the door, ready to pounce.
O'Ryan felt a bitter taste hit his mouth, and he could feel a buzz at the base of his skull as the adeneline hit. He had a Pavlovian response to the coming danger, one he didn't even have to think about. He drew his gun, made sure it was ready, and then gave Mercy the sign for "stay." She looked at him, and shook off the signal, which she'd only done a couple of times in training.
She didn't want to stand down. She was concerned that O'Ryan wouldn't be able to handle whatever was in the room.
O'Ryan gave a much older sign, from very early in Mercy's training, and one that she had been trai9ned never to shake off. She whimpered a bit, but complied, continuing to crouch, ready to jump into the room at the merest hint of danger. O'Ryan took a deep breath, grabbed the door handle, and turned it so slowly that it almost took him a full minute to get the door ready to open.
He then slammed against it, gun in front of him, turned as he entered the room and pointed it at the bed, yelling, "Don't move!"
The men had no one on it, but in a chair next to the small table in the room was the police man, John Spencer. He sat with a small light on the table, lighting up a pile of newspaper. He didn't react to O'Ryan's threat, but just sat there.
O'Ryan slowly lowered the gun and gave Mercy the "all clear" signal, at which point she came into the room, jumped up on the bed and lay on it, still crouched, and still ready to attack, but not making a move to do so.
"I wanted to show you something," John said, his voice barely above a whisper.
"How did you...?" O'Ryan said, holding the open door.
John motioned for him to shut the door and said, "I'm a cop. I wave my badge in a place like this and people do whatever I ask, thanking me for not coming after them. Now sit down, I have to talk to you."
O'Ryan kept the gun out as he grabbed the other chair in the room and slowly slid it up to the table. John looked up at O'Ryan, his face worn and tired. At that moment, O'Ryan thought that John's face was a map of every bad thing he had ever seen, every mistake ever made, and every person he'd failed to save etched in his weathered skin. "You can put the gun away," John said, "if I was going to kill you, I would have done it when I had the drop on you when you entered the room. I'm shocked you thought I'd be on the bed instead of behind the door to get the advantage. You must still need more training on how us sneaky bastards think."
John pushed the pile of newspaper clippings across the table to O'Ryan and motioned for him to pick them up and look at them.
"I've been thinking about you a lot since last night. Well, two nights ago, now. Us night people, we get that sort of thing all messed up, with Midnight not really being when our day ends. I've been thinking about two things that didn't make any sense to me. On one hand, you work for rumrunners, and even with that New England accent, it's pretty obvious that you run with the Chicago boys. Otherwise, you wouldn't give a damn about Rick the Smiler's shipments. You don't work for Rick, or someone around the department would know it. You have to work for Capone.
"On the other hand, you told me about how you wouldn't kill an innocent, and you only kill when you have no other choice. That's not like a Capone man. Those bastards kill people right and left just because they get in the way."
John leaned back in his chair, and the sun started to shine through the space between the curtains in the room, giving the whole room an eerie glow. O'Ryan looked at the newspaper clippings, all of which were about people being shot, or beaten to death. They wouldn't even say if the person or people behind it were caught, or even if police knew who was involved, but all of them had a couple of quotes from people who had been left by the death.
People who were shattered by grief and had no idea what they were going to do now that someone they loved and counter on was gone. It reminded him of how he felt, seeing the bodies of the Masters and students back at home.
"What do you want," O'Ryan said, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice.
"All of those people were killed because of Capone," John said, simply.
O'Ryan looked at him oddly. "How do you know that?"
"I'm a cop. It's my job to know. Besides, look at how they are reported and what isn't said. There's nothing about the police having a suspect, or knowing the cause for the killing. Just like in this story," and with that, John pulled the front page story that had talked about the St Valentine's Day Massacre.
As O'Ryan read it, then looked at the other stories on the table, John kept talking, "In Chicago, everyone is scared of Capone. The police are scared that they'll either get killed, or they won't get their nice little bonus for looking the other way. The people are scared that if they get in the crossfire of Capone and his enemies, they'll get killed. And the people who work for Capone are scared that if they screw up, they'll get a story like this in the paper.
"I know you aren't stupid, kid. No one who can do that fancy fighting and train a dog as well as you have isn't an idiot. But, I know that you probably don't know a whole lot about how the world works. It's easy to tell you're way too well educated to just be someone's goon. I had to figure that you just don't know the truth. And the truth is that while you don't kill innocents, he does. He kills them by attacking them for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He kills them to make people do what he says. He kills because he can, and no one will stop him."
John stood up and grabbed his coat and hat, "I know you aren't going to change everything just because some small town cop told you so, so I thought I'd get you the stories of the people who have died because of your boss. If you still want to work for him...well...like I said. I'm just a small town cop. But I can't just let someone screw up and do nothing about it. I can't call myself a cop if I do that."
O'Ryan was still reading the newspaper stories as John quietly left the room and shut the door behind him. Mercy got off the bed and sat at O'Ryan's feet as he kept reading the newspaper stories. It didn't matter how much pain he was in, or how tired he was, O'Ryan didn't go to sleep until he'd read every single story and committed it to memory.
©Solitaire Rose Productions 2003