Darwin's Nightmare by Mike Knowles Page A

floor between the two men were baseball bats.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked.
    Steve paid no mind to my question as he finished with the hood. The gong sound of his skull hitting the hard metal was replaced by the sound of a skull falling into blood and teeth. The sound was like raw chicken falling off a counter onto the floor. Steve never once looked at me or said a word. His wiry body rippled under his thin white shirt as he grabbed each man by a foot. He didn’t even flinch when one of the men began shrieking because Steve was pulling on the leg that was obviously damaged. Steve walked right past me, dragging the bodies into the street in front of the bar. As he walked back in he ran his fingers through his hair, removing the rubber band; his face once again becoming hidden.
    â€œTime to put out new peanuts,” was all he said to me.
    I found out that night, through the grapevine, that the two men were collectors. After Steve’s repeated refusals to pay, they had decided to step things up by coming into the bar with bats.
    The next day, I went to the office and found Steve waitingoutside the door dressed in khakis and a white T-shirt. The veins in his forearms pressed out hard like overfilled balloons, and his hair was up in the topknot.
    â€œWhere can I find your boss?” was all he said.
    I could see that he was ready to go through me to find out so I said, “Tell me.”
    Steve said he went for napkins, and when he came back Sandra was gone. A phone call came a few minutes after he walked in; it told him that to get his wife back he had to pay up all the “rent” he had missed. The kidnappers gave Steve three hours to get together all the money. Steve was no idiot; he knew that after what he’d done there was no way Sandra was coming back. He might get pieces of her, but she wouldn’t be back as he knew her.
    â€œThe good thing is the time,” I said. “They want the money so they’ll keep her alive until they know they’ve got it. How much time is left?”
    â€œTwo hours.” Steve’s gaze was out the window; his fists were tight, clenching imaginary ghosts.
    We left the office together and took my car downtown to Barton Street East; I parked in a public parking space, and we moved on foot over the pavement. The concrete had been repaved with chewing gum and cigarettes, making the rough surface smooth with urban grime. As we rounded the corner of an alley to Barton, its stream of people flowing by unyielding, I stopped and spoke to Steve. “This building around the corner — the barbershop — is the gate; Mario is middle management for some heavy hitters on the east side. Everything on the street goes through Mario. You do this and you are on everyone’s radar.”
    Steve looked at me for about one second, long enough for me to see pure fury, pure hate. He turned and walked into the crowd, vanishing amid the faces. I followed, trying to keep up, but Steve moved fast, his thin bodygliding through the human traffic. He entered the barber-shop without hesitation. As I followed in his wake, I eyed the barber pole spinning. I took a breath and thought about nothing, relaxing so I could commit to what I was about to become a part of. I was helping Steve, and back then I never once thought that I shouldn’t — never once. I took one last look at the pole spinning white then red, and got ready for a lot more red.
    When I opened the door the chime didn’t turn any heads my way. Two barbers were unconscious on the floor. Beside the barbers lay a man in a finely tailored black suit. Six feet above his body was a fine spray of red on the white wall.
    I moved through the room and into the next. The door to the office had been torn from one of the hinges; it hung on like a loose tooth. In the doorway, face down, arms cradling his head, lay another suit, dead. I could see the defensive wounds that had leaked onto the floor