“Because we don’t want to waste them,” Brightman said with all honesty. “The chances of success are very slim. No sense getting highly-trained soldiers killed when we’ve got people like you.”
“And if I don’t do this?”
“You’ll either spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison or you’ll go to the death house.” Brightman smiled then, something better up his sleeve. “But there’s more incentive… John. You don’t mind me calling you John, do you?”
“Yeah, I do. That’s what my friends call me. You can call me Slaughter.”
Brightman was unperturbed. “As I said, there’s more incentive. There’s your brother to be considered.”
Shit.
This was how they made it personal. Slaughter had one brother, Perry, who was known as Red Eye for the copious amounts of dope he used to smoke. He’d been a hang-around—a potential prospect for membership—with a few different small 1%er clubs out east, then drifted west to Illinois, got nailed on a few petty charges, did some county time, and the last Slaughter had heard of him was that he was hooked up with some half-ass religious cult. That was Red Eye to the core: always looking for something.
Slaughter butted his cigarette. “All right, lay it on me.”
So Brightman did. Red Eye had been busted. The feds took him down on charges of treason, sedition, arms trafficking, and six counts of terrorism for plotting the military overthrow of Chicago with a fanatic known as The Puritan, who headed an ultra-right wing Christian fundamentalist militia known as the Legion of Terror. They were like the Seventh Day Adventists. With guns.
“Shit,” Slaughter sighed.
“Yes, shit indeed. He’s being held in a federal correctional institution.”
“And if I don’t play ball he stays there?”
“No, he gets the death penalty.”
Well, there you had it. Slaughter knew there had to be an agenda behind all the resources and manpower spent bringing him in and here it was. Not only an agenda, but one with serious incentives to back it up. There was no choice. Not really.
“He goes free if I do this?”
“He’ll do five years, maybe. But no more.”
“I suppose that’s something.”
Brightman leaned back in his chair. “From where you’re sitting, Slaughter, it’s everything. Your life. Your brother’s. You get Isley back and everything’s clean. If you don’t… scratch one brother.”
“What if this woman’s already dead?”
“Then bring us her corpse.”
“Shit.” Again, no choice. “So I have to go in there alone? One fucking man?”
“I wouldn’t even expect that of a murdering, raping animal like you, Slaughter,” Brightman explained. “I’ve put together a team for you. We’ve cleaned them out of prisons across the land just so you’ll have company.”
“A team?” Oh, this was going to be good.
Brightman thumbed a button on his intercom. Within seconds two soldiers with automatic weapons strolled in and behind them, chained together were some of the most vicious, degenerate criminal types that Slaughter had ever seen, and he knew each and every one of them. Brightman had secured the release of the remaining six members of the Devil’s Disciples. And here they were. All of them flying their colors, all of them grinning, and all of them looking for a good fight.
Slaughter figured they weren’t going to be disappointed.
He started laughing. “The shit is on, my brothers.”
The gang was all there: Irish, Moondog, Shanks, Apache Dan, Fish, and Jumbo. They’d been released from hardtime federal pens like Atlanta and Lewisburg, state hellholes like Rahway in New Jersey and SCI Greene in Pennsylvania. For the longest time—after he got Brightman out of his hair, that was—Slaughter just stood there staring at his brothers, blown away by it all, nearly beyond words. Seeing them, he was reminded of all the Disciples that had died during the Outbreak and in blood wars with other clubs.
Brightman let them have the conference room all to themselves and all the beer they wanted with the stipulation that they kept it and themselves in there and did not cause trouble elsewhere. So for the first hour or so as they put down the brew and exchanged war stories and tales of lock-up, they got caught up on things. In a lot of ways it was like Church, the monthly club meeting. They talked about Brothers like Cherry from the Pittsburgh chapter who’d thrown his bike on the I outside Altoona two months before the Outbreak. His funeral had turned into a drunken brawl. Slaughter learned that Charley Sweet from the Baltimore chapter had died in a shoot-out with the state police and two others—Creep and Toot—had died in a car crash while being pursued by ATF agents. Pegleg, who had first brought Slaughter into the club twenty odd years before, had died in Rahway from spiking some China White that had been more strychnine than heroin. The list went on and on.
There were so many gone that it became depressing.
If it hadn’t have been for incarceration, Slaughter knew, the six Disciples with him would probably be dead, too.
Yeah, give three cheers for life in-stir, he thought.
What there was in that room was all that was left of the Devil’s Disciples Nation: seven hard-living, hard-riding animals. This was his crew. At one time there’d been thirty guys in the Pittsburgh chapter alone and that, of course, didn’t take in the Baltimore, Harrisburg, Youngstown, and Bayonne chapters, or the newer chapters in the UK and Denmark.
Seven fucking guys including me.
That’s it. No more. Probably never will be any more, he thought then. And I have to lead them to their deaths so I can grab that Isley, the bio, so they don’t cook my fucked-up, whacked-out brother.
Slaughter was glad Apache Dan was there because next to Neb, he was his best friend in the world. The feds had dropped him thirty years on a RICO conviction six years before. Nobody was happier to be out than him. Moondog was the sergeant-at-arms, warlord of the Pittsburgh chapter. He’d been the guy that walked around with a baseball bat at club meetings and rapped guys in the head if they got out of hand or spoke out of turn. He was absolutely brutal and fearless and the very man that could plan and stage a raid into the guts of the Red Hand. He’d been doing ten years at USP Atlanta for arms trafficking. Shanks and Irish were from the Youngstown chapter and were good boys. They’d been whacking guys for the Youngstown Italian mob and were doing life at Lewisburg on murder conspiracy convictions. Fish was out of Baltimore. And Jumbo—all 350 pounds of him—was from Pittsburgh. Fish had been sitting on a twenty-five year stretch for narcotics distribution and Jumbo on fifteen years for extortion, hijacking, and racketeering.
Once everyone had a good shine going, Slaughter stood up and laid it all out for them. What was at stake, what they had to do, and how slim their chances of survival were.
“Nobody’s forced into this shit, man,” he told them. “This is really my beef, my brother, my life. Any of you boys want out you just say so and nobody thinks less of you.”
“You heard the man,” Moondog said.
“Shit,” Shanks said.
“Fuck that noise,” Fish said. “I’d rather die out here than rot inside.”
“Ain’t that for sure,” Irish told him. “I gotta eat that creamed beef on toast in Lewisburg one more fucking time and I take my own life.”
A few laughs at that.
“Shit,” Fish said. “You oughta try the green bean casserole at Rahway. Motherfucker, it’ll shrivel your balls.”
“Bullshit,” Shanks said.
Jumbo said, “John, this is a get-out-of-jail-free card for us all. And there ain’t a man here you haven’t helped and you haven’t gone to the mat for. We’d all rather die at your side, high and free, than be picking nits at the graybar hotel.”