Return of the Reaper novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Yard
Doyle breaks four men in the Cavanagh yard without killing one, takes a box cutter to the ribs, and collapses in an ER lot.
Lila did not know how long the van drove.
When the door opened, she was lifted out by one arm, and her shoulder burned.
They carried her up a lot of stairs that smelled of beer and wet brick.
She cried until her nose ran, and a man told her twice to be quiet.
The second time he squeezed the back of her neck until she was.
The room at the top was long and cold, with a barrel against one wall.
They threw her onto a camp cot, and her head hit the metal frame.
A man knelt and pulled a plastic strap tight around her ankle and locked it to the cot leg.
It bit into her skin, and she kicked, and it bit deeper.
"Where is Mister Pie?" she whispered. "I want my daddy."
Nobody answered.
Then the sandy-haired man in the suit came in and pulled up a stool.
He held up a phone and pointed it at her, and the red dot blinked.
"Tell your father to hurry, sweetheart," he said.
Lila pressed her lips together and shook her head.
He took her chin in one hand and squeezed until her teeth cut the inside of her cheek.
"Say it nicely."
"Daddy, come," she said, and her voice broke into pieces.
"Again."
When she cried too hard to say it, he slapped her once, not very hard.
He looked at the clip, nodded, and left her there with the light on.
Doyle Roark parked the bakery van two lots down from Cavanagh Towing and Recovery and walked the rest.
Rain beaded on the shoulders of his jacket.
There were six wreckers parked in a row inside the chain-link fence, and a prefab office sat at the back with a window glowing yellow.
He counted four silhouettes through the blinds.
He went over the fence where the razor wire had been cut years ago and never replaced.
The office door opened before he reached it.
A heavy man in a Carhartt jacket stepped out with a cigarette and stopped.
"Hey. You can't be back here."
Doyle hit him once, very precisely, under the ribs.
The man folded without a sound, and Doyle lowered him onto the gravel.
Inside, a radio was playing country music.
He opened the office door with one finger.
Three men sat around a desk with a box of donuts and a van key on a red tag.
The lanky one with a scar through his lip had his phone out and was laughing.
"Listen to her. 'Daddy, come.' I swear, the little one has lungs."
Doyle closed the door behind him.
They all looked up.
"Which of you drove the van?" he asked.
The lanky man's smile stayed on his face a second longer than the rest of him.
Then the man at the desk lunged for a drawer.
Doyle slammed the drawer on his hand and kept leaning on it until the bones went.
The man screamed, and Doyle hit him once in the throat and let him fall.
The lanky one swung a wrench.
Doyle let it pass his ear and caught the wrist coming back and turned it until it cracked.
The third man had a box cutter pushed out to its full length.
He came in low and fast, and Doyle twisted, but not far enough.
The blade opened his jacket, then his shirt, then the skin over his left ribs in one hot line.
Doyle grunted and drove his elbow into the man's temple.
He took the box cutter out of the man's hand and put it through the man's palm into the desktop.
The man's scream went up into the rafters.
It was over in under a minute, and nothing in the room was whole.
One man was out cold, one had a hand like wet paper, and one sat holding a wrist bent the wrong way.
Not one was dead.
Doyle stood breathing evenly, blood running warm into his belt.
He picked the lanky man's phone off the floor and saw the clip still playing.
A small face with a split lip, a hand on her chin, and a red mark rising on her cheek.
He watched it to the end.
Something in him went quiet and cold and very old.
Then he lifted the lanky man by the front of his shirt and sat him against the desk.
"You hit her," he said.
"Man, that was Cade, I didn't."
"You held her down in the van."
The man's eyes slid away, and Doyle took two fingers of his good hand and folded them back until they snapped.
The lanky man made a noise.
"Where did the van go?"
"The Gaslight. Perry Street. Third floor, the old cooper's room."
"Who is with her?"
"Two guards. A cot. They cuffed her to it so she wouldn't run."
"Cade said keep her scared till Saturday. I swear I just drove."
Doyle looked at him for a long time.
"Cade told you to call him if I showed up."
"Yeah."
"Call him. Tell him it took one minute."
He took the van key off its red tag and put it in his pocket.
He taped all three men to the desk legs, one by one, and dragged the fourth in from the gravel.
His left side had started to burn badly.
He pressed his palm against it and felt it come away wet.
In the lot, the rain was harder.
Every step back to the van pulled the cut apart a little more.
He got behind the wheel and did not trust himself to turn on the wipers.
The nearest hospital was Buffalo General, twelve minutes away, and he did not remember all of them.
He remembered a red light he ran, and the owl rolling off the dash.
He parked across two spaces in the emergency lot and got the door open.
The air outside was cold and bright with hospital lights.
He stood up, and the whole lot tilted slowly sideways.
Then his knee gave.
He was on the wet asphalt, still gripping the stolen phone, trying to find the owl.
A pair of running shoes squeaked to a stop beside his face.
Somebody knelt, and a hand pressed hard against his ribs.
A woman's voice said, very calmly, "Okay. You're okay. Stay with me."
A pause.
Then, in a different voice entirely, quieter, almost afraid:
"Mr. Roark?"
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