City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance Page B

Crowe truly angry, but little Leon Berry was pulling it off. Crowe had come there to beat a little sense into him. He was into the Old Man for almost five grand, betting more than he could afford on a series of bare knuckle brawls over the summer, down near the state line. He’d ignored the Old Man’s calls, and eventually dropped out of sight, and Crowe had been the one tagged to track him down and make him see the error of his ways.
    Finding him had been easy. Crowe knocked on his hotel room door, heard him fumbling around in there in sudden panic, and Crowe kicked open the flimsy lock with the heel of his shoe. Leon had been standing by the bathroom door, reaching with one long-fingered hand for a razor blade on the sink. When he saw Crowe, he went still.
    Crowe grinned. “Leon. You don’t call. You don’t write. We worry.”
    Leon said, “There ain’t nothing you can do to me.”
    “Well,” Crowe said, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t we just put that theory to the test.”
    Leon was wrong. Crowe did plenty to him. Only it didn’t do any good.
    This was the sort of thing that should’ve been par for the course. Just another day in the life. But instead, it turned out to be the day that changed everything. Leon Berry was no ordinary squelcher. And this was no ordinary morning.
    The TV was on, and from the corner of his eye, Crowe saw a shot of the Twin Towers in New York, saw a newscaster looking grim, his mouth moving. Leon had turned the volume down.
    Crowe didn’t think anything about it. He had work to do.
    He didn’t know that Leon was one of those rare fellas who are practically impervious to pain. He didn’t know the cops wanted Leon on a felony charge. He didn’t know they were staking him out, in the very next room. He didn’t know terrorists were throwing airplanes at the World Trade Center.
    Didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know. That’s what you get for going into something not knowing .
    He wound up doing a lot more damage to Leon than he’d intended, because Leon wouldn’t stop laughing and carrying on. Holding him up by the collar of his dirty tee-shirt, Crowe smashed his fist into his nose, and Leon only grunted and kept laughing. Crowe said, “Leon. I’m getting bored with this. I don’t wanna keep hitting you. Do us both a favor, and stop laughing.”
    “I can’t… I can’t help it,” he choked. “It’s not… it’s not my fault…”
    And went into another bout of hysterical cackling.
    Later, he would read about people like Leon, people who have some faulty wiring upstairs, messing with their pain receptors. It wasn’t a mental illness. It was a neurological thing.
    Crowe found it amazingly frustrating.
    So he kept pounding Leon and Leon kept laughing and Crowe kept getting more and more angry. His knuckles were raw by then, Leon was missing several teeth, and his eyes shined out of the blood-red mask his face had become. Finally, Crowe saw his eyes shift over to the TV, and something like horror finally came into them.
    That tore it. Crowe couldn’t get the reaction he needed, but something on the goddamn television had affected him. Furious, Crowe hit him one last time, square in the left temple, and Leon went limp, like a hippie being arrested at a protest. Crowe let him drop, and he slumped lifeless to the floor.
    He’d killed him. HE could tell that much without checking his pulse. You do this sort of work as long as he had, you just know.
    “Sonofabitch,” he said. “Leon, you stupid little bastard.”
    He glanced at the TV to see what exactly had inspired the dread he’d failed to create, just in time to see what must have been the fourth or fifth replay of the footage they would wind up playing all week. The World Trade Center was smoking, and the second airliner was just crashing into one of the towers. And the whole goddamn thing collapsed.
    “Sonofabitch,” Crowe said again.
    The cops burst through the door then, guns waving, screaming,