Jack Mackenzie offers up the first exciting chapter of his new novel, The Shattered Men. In the first story in the Wild Incorporated series, you will meet Harry Calhoun, a man who is about to the worst day of his life…
Once he hit the street, Harry stopped running, forcing himself to adopt an easy walk. He slowly headed back the way he and Sarah had come originally. He gritted his teeth as he walked, trying to look nonchalant. It wasn’t easy. After what he’d just seen Harry wanted nothing more than to run away screaming.
The scarred man with the knife had seen him, He’d looked right at him. He’d seen Harry’s face and knew that he had witnessed what had gone down in the alley. Harry’s heart was pounding and his head felt hot. He was witness to a crime and in his experience a witness was not a safe thing to be.
But what exactly had he witnessed?
He shook his head and pushed away the vision of the big gunman turning into so much black powder. He also had to forcibly push the image of Sarah staring up into the sky with sightless eyes, He had to calm himself. He had to think about the situation at hand.
First things first, he thought. Have to try to look casual and blend in. That shouldn’t be too difficult. A young, brown-skinned, okay-looking East Indian man would not look out of place wandering the streets of the Big Apple.
The only problem was his tee shirt
It was bright blue with a lemon yellow logo on the breast. The logo was designed specifically for the Ontario New Hope Evangelical Church’s Mission to the Homeless and it showed a dove with a twig in its mouth winging its way over a cross with the sun rising behind. Harry’s jeans and sneakers were nondescript enough but the godawful ugly tee-shirt was as distinctive as a neon sign and it had to go.
Harry had cash. It wasn’t his.
It had been collected from the good parishioners of the New Hope Church for the express purpose of helping the homeless on the streets of New York. Sarah had it in a leather belt pack. Before he’d scampered out of the alley he’d unzipped the pack and pulled out the cash, trying not to look at the pool of blood that had been growing from underneath the back of her head onto the alley’s dirty concrete. He stuffed the cash into his front pocket and ran.
He had felt a twinge of guilt at that. Not about taking the money (he’d already justified that with the fact that he was now one of New York’s homeless and needed help getting off the streets) but about leaving Sarah’s body in the alley. He tried not to think how long it would take for her to be discovered or how many rodents would be gnawing on her remains by nightfall.
Harry spied a store with an open front that sold candy bars, gum and scarves. He saw a rack with tee shirts. Bingo.
Harry stepped up to the rack and grabbed a black tee-shirt with a Megadeth logo printed on the front. It would do.
As he made his way towards the cash register his foot kicked something on the floor. It was a black leather wallet with a logo he didn’t recognize – a stylized red ‘W’ – on the floor below a wire mesh tray filled with faux leather wallets.
He’d need a wallet for the cash. He picked it up off the floor, then grabbed a pack of Beeman’s gum before cashing out.
The man behind the cash register was an older Asian man. The man scanned the tee shirt and the gum but couldn’t find a price tag on the wallet. “Five bucks,” he shrugged.
Harry handed over the cash and walked out. He ducked into an alley, exchanged the New Hope Church for Megadeath, stuffed the cash into the wallet and popped a stick of gum into his mouth. He stuffed the old tee shirt into a garbage can on the street and kept moving.
As he walked Harry heard sirens wailing in the distance. Some sort of emergency was still going on north of where he was. He could see the occasional fire truck making its way up distant streets. He decided to head South.
He needed to find a bus depot. He had enough cash to buy a Greyhound ticket back to Toronto. The only problem would be what story to tell about what happened and why.
Harry had joined the church mission as part of his community service. The community service was a condition of his parole. The Church group had gone to a lot of trouble to include him in the mission, filling out forms and consulting with his parole officer. Harry was determined to stay out of trouble.
Being witness to a murder wasn’t staying out of trouble. Particularly when one of the murderers knew what you looked like.
Hauling his ass back home was clearly the right thing to do from a survival standpoint, but he’d have to be careful how he sold it to his parole officer.
His parole officer was a plain looking woman with a bleeding heart. Harry had learned quickly that she was a sucker for the right kind of sob story. He could sell his flight back to Toronto as blind panic. It wouldn’t be too far from the truth.
The only problem was the money he’d stolen from Sarah’s corpse – the money he’d stolen from the church. That was a bit of a problem. He could hear her asking the question: “If you were that scared then why did you stop long enough to take the money?”
Harry’s stomach rumbled. He needed a quiet place to think. He spied an unlighted neon sign proclaiming BAR and GRILL and went in. The darkness enveloped him and the muted sound of cutlery and conversation and the smell of beer and smoke instantly calmed him down. He felt his spirits rise as he hopped onto a bar stool and ordered a burger and a Bud.
The beer went down cool and smooth. It had been far too long. He drained the bottle and ordered another while he attacked his bacon mushroom burger. While he chewed he thought about how he wanted the conversation with his parole officer to go.
He could claim that he didn’t take the money. No one had seen him take it. A body left in an alley in New York city with a fanny pack stuffed with cash? Anybody could have come along and taken it. All Harry had to do was claim innocence about the cash. No one would question it. “So where did you get the money for the bus ticket?” his imaginary parole officer asked.
That was a snag. It would be easy to hop a bus and head for home, but he had to do things right. If he didn’t have the cash in his pocket what would he do? Panhandle? That might work. He drained his second beer and finished that last few bites of his burger. As he licked barbecue sauce from his fingers he pondered how long it would take him to raise enough money for a bus ticket by panhandling. Too long for his taste, especially with Scarface around.
The Italian knife man was scared shitless when he ran but he would eventually calm down and realize that the one witness to the crime would have to be tracked down and eliminated. He didn’t want to spend any more time than he had to in this city
Maybe he wouldn’t have to. Maybe he could take a bus home and lay low long enough to…
There was a commotion in the corner. A group of blue collar types were telling the bartender to turn up the TV in the corner. BREAKING NEWS proclaimed the red letters on the screen.
The bartender grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. The image showed a street jammed with emergency vehicles shot from above. Obviously from a helicopter. “…south of Broom Street, near Centre,” the voice over announcer was saying. “As you can see we have a lot of emergency vehicles and personnel in the area. We have unconfirmed reports of responders in full Hazmat gear on the streets. Police have cordoned off a large area covering several blocks…”
Harry stared at the screen. That must have been near where he and Sarah had ducked into the alley – the emergency vehicles and police tape had prompted their detour. Why would…
The big man who dissolved to so much black powder, the one whose bullet had killed Sarah…
Harry felt a bad feeling crawling up the back of his scalp.
Did the big man have some sort of contagion? Harry remembered the man’s coughing fit. What could do that? Some kind of plague? Poison? Radiation?
“…still not a whole lot of information on this situation,” the announcer was saying. “Sources at city hall are tight lipped and there has been no word from Homeland Security. There’s obviously some sort of situation on the ground, but no word yet as to what exactly is going on. The Mayor’s office has issued a statement calling for calm but beyond that we have very little…”
Harry felt lightheaded. It was partly the two beers he’d downed, but the rest of it was shock. He felt himself reeling, his mind desperately racing for a way out of this situation.
“…hold on,” the announcer said. “It looks like… yes, it looks like we’ve got some movement…”.
The camera hovering above the street zoomed in, shaking as it did so. It focused on two figures pushing a wheeled stretcher. Both figures were wearing hazmat suits and the figure on the stretcher was covered with a sheet. Right where the head would be, the sheet was stained red.
“…I’ve just been told that a witness reported seeing two figures in hazmat gear loading the body of a young woman on a stretcher. This footage may confirm that story but it certainly confirms the presence of hazmat suits on the scene…”
Young woman? Sarah!
Harry felt his stomach sink. The burger and beer suddenly felt heavy in his guts. He had to hold on to the bar to stop himself from toppling over. He wanted to get up and go to the men’s room. He felt like the food was going to make an escape attempt at any moment.
The scene changed to inside the newsroom. The announcer, a gray-haired handsome man in a dark suit jacket looked up from his desk. “If you’re just joining us we are following a story that is happening in New York right now. We’re not sure how it is related but we just saw two men in Hazmat suits bringing a body out of an area cordoned off by police. Reports indicate that the body is that of a young woman who was visiting New York as part of a church mission.”
Harry’s head snapped back towards the television screen, his discomfort forgotten. “The young woman was part of a mission to the homeless organized by an evangelical Church based in Canada. The New Hope Evangelical Church in Toronto was working with local churches in an outreach program.”
Harry ran a hand through his hair and was not surprised to find it shaking as he did so.
The gray-haired anchor was replaced with a young woman holding a microphone on the street outside a brownstone. Harry licked his lips. This was getting bad.
He glanced back up to the television and it got worse. The camera panned back to show an older, balding man with thick rimmed glasses. He was wearing a bright blue tee shirt with the yellow logo of the New Hope Evangelical Church on the breast.
“I’m standing here with Douglas Leatherdale,” the reporter announced.
Jesus Christ. Doug. He was the one who’d brought him into the group
The reporter asked him an inane question and he shook his head sadly. “We’re just devastated, obviously,” he said. The camera panned to show the other members of the group holding each other, some looking grim, others sobbing uncontrollably. “To have come all this way..,” Doug continued. “…to help people the way we do… to have this happen to us… “ Doug stopped, his voice breaking. Harry could see he was barely holding back the tears. He could not continue.
The reporter nodded in sympathy. “I also understand that another of your group has gone missing?” she asked.
Oh, no.
Doug nodded. “Yes,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “Harry. Harry Calhoun. He was with Sarah when she…”
Then the television flashed Harry’s picture on the screen. “Harry is described as five foot seven, medium build, of East Indian ancestry. He has short black hair and has no distinctive marks.” the reporter described him unflatteringly but accurately. The picture of Harry was from his driver’s license. Doug had to have color photocopies of all of Harry’s ID for the paperwork. He carried all the church paperwork in a big briefcase.
“JesusFuck!” Harry breathed.
“If you see Harry Calhoun you are asked not to approach him but to contact the police with his whereabouts.”
Harry felt himself reeling. The police? Why?
“We want to emphasize that Harry Calhoun, while not a suspect, is wanted for questioning in the death of his fellow churchgoer.” the announcer explained. “Returning now to our coverage of the story that is unfolding in New York..”
Harry shook his head in disbelief. “The fuck!” he uttered at the television screen.
The bartender gave him an annoyed glance, then looked away. Then he stopped and looked back. His eyes locked with Harry’s and Harry could see an expression of stunned recognition steal over the bartender’s face. He pointed at Harry and managed to shout: “Hey…!”
Harry was off the stool and out the door before he could hear another word.
He hit the streets running, dashed across the street, causing a cacophony of horn honks and tire squeals. He made it to the opposite sidewalk and forced himself to slow down to a walk.
Harry could not get picked up by the police, especially not in New York. They’d call up his rap sheet from all across Canada, chuck him in a cell and it’d be game over for Harry Calhoun. He needed to go underground, not an easy thing to do when your description was being flashed across TV screens all over the city. He needed to disguise his looks.
He ducked into a second-hand clothes store. He picked out a zip-up black jacket, a pair of sunglasses and a New York Yankees Cap. As he opened his wallet to give cash to the tattooed proprietor with a ring through her nose and a cascade of piercings in each ear, a card fell out of one of the side pockets and slapped the floor. Harry stooped and picked it up.
It was some kind of membership card Harry didn’t recognize. It had a picture of a dark haired Native American with a long face and a stony expression. The card said that the man’s name was Eagle Phillip.
“That’s seventeen-fifty,” the proprietor said. Harry nodded, slipped the card back into the wallet and handed the girl a twenty.
Back on the street he felt a little less conspicuous. As he walked he pulled out the wallet and gave it a more thorough look-through.
There had been no money in it, of that Harry was sure. There was little else except for the card and a slip of paper that had ‘Bulldog – 8:00 am’ scrawled on it in pencil. Harry dropped the slip of paper into a trash can but put the membership card back into the wallet. He put his hands in his pockets and walked, hunched over, zigzagging from block to block, trying to put distance between himself and the bar and grill where he’d been spotted. He had to stop and double back a couple of times because of the blocked off streets.
Police had cars set up in front of wooden sawhorses. He tried to look like every other pedestrian looked: pissed off but ultimately compliant. There were people shouting futilely at the cops and firefighters and Harry was thankful for them as it drew the police’s attention away from him.
Before long he was completely turned around. The sun was low in the sky and the shadows were getting longer. Traffic was not slowing any, though and there were still plenty of people on the streets.
Harry spied two city cops walking up the sidewalk towards him. They were scanning the street and Harry thought they were looking at faces. He felt the beginnings of panic seize him and he ducked into a store.
He wandered around, trying to look like an everyday shopper. There was a man and a woman at the till talking to the young Asian woman standing behind it. Harry wandered over to a rack of tee shirts and started going through them, pretending to be interested.
“I was in here this morning,” the man was saying. He was tall and had long black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. “It was the other guy at the till. The older man…”
Older Asian man at the till, Harry thought. There must be hundreds of them in New York.
“…the wallet was black,” the man continued. His voice was deep, slow and deliberate “It had a red ‘W’ on the front.”
“Forget it, Eagle,” his companion said. She was a short woman with freckles and red hair cut boyish short. She wore a white tee shirt and baggy black pants. She spoke with a Southern accent. “You’re always losin’ shit. You’d lose your head if it weren’t attached to your shoulders.”
Harry froze. Eagle? Eagle Phillip? He looked over at the tall man. Sure enough, it was the same long faced native whose picture was on his card. The card that was sitting in the wallet that was in Harry’s back pocket.
Harry looked around and his head began to reel. He’d gotten himself completely turned around. he had ducked back into the store he’d been in earlier.
“Shut up, Chaplin,” Eagle said to his companion. He turned back to the young Asian girl. “Are you sure no one’s handed it in?”
Harry was staring in disbelief at the man whose wallet was in his pocket. The redhead saw him staring. “You got a problem?” she asked.
Harry shook his head and tried to walk casually out of the store, He was just about at the door when the tall man – Eagle – took a step back. The collision knocked off his sunglasses.
“Whoa! I’m sorry…” Eagle said, reaching down a long arm to try to steady Harry.
Harry tried to snatch his sunglasses from where they had dropped, but one of the lenses had popped out.
“Oh, hey,” Eagle said. “I’m sorry…”
“S’okay,” Harry managed to choke out and turned to leave the store. The redhead narrowed her eyes at him as he turned. He was just about out the door when he heard her say: “Eagle! It’s him! It’s Calhoun!”
Read the rest in The Shattered Men.
Read an interview with the author, Jack Mackenzie here.