Prime Beef
Chapter 3: Prime Beef
2020 – The Twirling Tassel
The bar is a well-known hangout. Not for actual Dogs of Hell. They spend their time in their fortresses, their compounds of trailer-parks, networks of drug labs prone to explode, and mobile-home brothels prone to being sites of grisly crimes. The Twirling Tassel is instead well-known for serving the adolescents vying for initiation into the gang. Here, they come to play at being hard, they come to rehearse the motions that will one day be their life. They come to brawl and threaten, and shout off-color threats at the women who worked there, only to laugh when the girls scurry away half in tears.
In a motel room, the man prepares himself. He opens up a simple wooden case, reveals a row of antique watches. Each is labeled with something like: 50M – Gangster (Russian Tattoos); 32M – Dockworker; 26F – Paralegal. Identities stolen from people he’s met, faces and details, scents, touches, remembered and recalled through intricately worked glamours. The clockwork components are key – each gear inscribed with holy symbols that aligned into new combinations with every tick. A method that circumvents most forms of magical detection. The man selects a cheat digital watch marked 20M – Marine. This particular face was stolen from a drunken marine in Japan, reeling through the streets of Okinawa. He slips it on his wrist and looks at himself in the mirror. He sees a skinny kid. Scrawny, sinewy, ready to scrap, with an arrogant dusting of patchy facial hair and close-cropped hair.
He dresses himself in ratty jeans, a white t-shirt, an unadorned leather vest. He tucks a bowie knife into his belt at his right side, and a coiled rosary on his left. Into one boot, he slips a wooden wand, short and stubby and practically twitching with aggressive energy.
“My name is Ribeye,” he grunts to himself in the mirror. “Yeah, fuck you, like the steak. I’m fucking prime beef.”
At the Twirling Tassel, he finds more or less what he was expecting to find. A timeless place, an archetypal location, a bar, a tavern, a festering house of vice and sin, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. He swings his pick-up into an empty spot in the gravel parking lot and takes a moment to enjoy the desert air. Above, the stars are shining in their familiar patterns, undisturbed by the sound of revving motors and the muffled music thumping from the bar. The man – Ribeye for now – steps out of his truck. His boots crunch across the gravel, a dull orange in the buzzing streetlights. Each step brings him closer to the bar’s saloon doors, closer to the porch where a few men are leaning back against the bar’s outer wall, smoking.
The scent of the smoke is sharp and unfamiliar.
“Hey,” he calls out. “I’m looking for someone.”
Nobody replies, but one man – older, bearded – glances his way.
“I said,” Ribeye says again. “I’m looking for someone.”
The beard takes a long drag off the joint between his fingers, and grins: “Feel free to get lookin’.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.
The man sighs, and steps through the doors of the Twirling Tassel. He feels his eyes making a circuit of the room, taking in its geography, its general layout. To his right is a long bar, two women with half their tits hanging out work behind it, scurrying back and forth and looking slightly shaken. To his left, the room opens up. A wide area of tables, and then a few alcoves with pool tables and pinball machines. Broken televisions hang in the corners. Everything is vaguely rustic, with exposed beams and pillars of unfinished wood holding everything together. He picks through the faces, cataloguing them away, drifting past all the male faces, looking for…
She isn’t here. This is where they were supposed to meet. And now…
“Fuck,” he sighs, and approaches the bar.
One of the women drifts towards him.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m looking for someone. Blonde, about five-foot-five…”
“Big tits, nice ass?” the woman sighs. “You and everyone else in this dive. Can’t help you there. What are you drinking?”
“She would have been a new face,” Ribeye presses on. “She probably would have been looking for work?”
“Work?” the bartender is immediately suspicious. She glances up and down the bar, sees that nobody is paying attention to their conversation. “What kind of work?”
“Normal work,” Ribeye shrugs. “Bartending, waitressing, y’know…”
The woman hesitates, then shakes her head.
“Nobody’s come by.”
“Listen,” Ribeye says. “She might be in trouble, and I’m supposed to be looking out for her, so anything you can tell me…”
“What are you, a cop?” the bartender says, raising her voice a little. Someone next to Ribeye side-eyes him, then goes back to his half-empty mug of beer. “I don’t talk to pigs.”
“I’m not…” Ribeye grimaces, “Listen, I’m about the furthest thing you can get from a cop. I’m just looking out for my own, surely that’s something you can understand.”
“Don’t call me… never mind,” the bartender says, and bites her lip, and Ribeye fixes his gaze on her, not sure if he’s pleading with her or trying to hypnotize her“Oh, whatever. Fine. About a week ago, this girl came by, seemed real taken with the… with the types that hang out around here. Wouldn’t listen to me when I said they were dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Ribeye says. “Sounds like her.”
“Said her name was Liz, said she was looking for paying work,” the bartender goes on. “I said we could take her on day-to-day, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning the kitchen, that kind of thing. She seemed in a bad way, she took it.”
A moment of hope. Perhaps she was just out of sight, cleaning up some mess.
“Is she here tonight?”
“No,” the bartender shrugs. “Just yesterday, someone rolled through that really sparked her interest, and she rode out with him around lunch.”
“And who was it?” Ribeye says.
Before the bartender can say anything, the man beside him slams his mug down on the bar. Heavy, loud, meant to interrupt.
“Don’t you say another goddamn word, bitch,” he growls. Ribeye looks his way, sizes him up and down. There’s a bulge at his waistband, his shirt hanging over it in an unsuccessful attempt to hide it. The grip of a knife is in plain view, and Ribeye has no doubts that it can be out and working in a split second.
“Butt out, this is no business of yours,” Ribeye says.
The man looks at him and begins to laugh. Ribeye can’t help but tense as he feels the laughter spread through the room. Slowly, everyone falls silent, until all that’s left is this man, and his laughter going on and on until it dies out in silence.
“No business of mine,” the man chuckles. “You dumb fuck.”
Ribeye shifts one foot back and glances over his shoulder. People between him and the door are closing ranks. Too many people to fight.
“This is exactly my business,” the man says. “I’m Howard fucking Tassel.”
“Tassel is your…” Ribeye can’t keep the surprise from his voice, “that’s your name?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Howard Tassel says. “You surprised?”
“Well,” Ribeye shrugs. “Sure. I thought it was, y’know…” He twirls his fingers near his nipples and grins at the faces assembled around the room. Tough crowd. Nobody even smirks in return.
“Then I’m learning a thing or two about you,” he says, raising his voice for all to hear. “You sure as hell aren’t a candidate for any of the clubs around here, because any one of them would know who I am.”
The sweaty mass of armed men and the boys that aspire to one day be like them nods and murmurs in assent. Ribeye scans the crowd again. The women are gathering around the edges of the scene, the boys are pushing forward, eager for blood. The men are hanging back, eyes on Howard. They’re all practiced at this, the younger ones not so much. No discipline. Untested. If Ribeye can make an example of some of them, the rest might scatter… leaving only the men and Tassel.
But then again, Tassel is close.
If I can just get to him first…
“So I’m sitting here,” Tassel says, “in my bar, practically my home, and I hear someone that I know isn’t a member of a club, and I know isn’t a candidate for any of the clubs, asking a lot of questions. You know what that makes me think?”
“That maybe you aren’t the thinking sort?” Ribeye says, and thinks to himself, Keep him talking.
Tassel laughs, “No, see it kinda has me thinking that you’re a cunt fuck of a pig.”
“A cop?”
“Yeah,” Tassel says. “So, last chance to tell me if you are.”
“I’m not a cop,” Ribeye says. “Swear to God.”
“I didn’t think so,” Tassel says, “Because any cop would know… telling us you’re a cop might have saved your life.”
And he nods.
Ribeye moves faster than anyone else. He grabs the empty mug from in front of Tassel and spins in time to see someone lunging for him. He swings the mug into the side of someone’s head, and the glass shatters. It doesn’t do much against his attacker, who only roars, veins popping out of the sides of his head. Two thick, rough hands clamp around Ribeye’s throat, and he finds himself swinging through the air, legs limp as the air leaves his body. The biker slams him against the bar, and Ribeye’s arm finds an opening. He slashes upwards with the broken glass and stabs it into the biker’s armpit. He draws it out in a spray of blood, and stabs again and again, until the man is slumped against him, and blood is leaking everywhere.
Before he can catch his breath, a throng of hands reaches forward to pull the corpse away from him, hollering for blood. Ribeye scrambles backwards, and rolls over the bar. As he goes, he reaches for the wand in his boot. He comes back up to his feet, holding it with practiced ease, pointing at the nearest face.
“What the fuck kind of Harry Potter bullshit,” the face says, and Ribeye thrusts it forward, brushing his thumb along a rune on the grip. The air ripples, and the biker’s head snaps back. Everyone around him stumbles, reeling as something unseen and powerful like a jet engine stirs through the air, building and building, and…
Ribeye throws himself to the ground, tossing the wand into the air as he goes. The wood bursts, and the energy is released in a sudden torrent. A screeching wail echoes through the bar, as people scream and fly in a sudden rush of wind. Tables and chairs and pool equipment lift up into the air, a sudden swirling vortex of soft bodies and things that can easily penetrate soft bodies. Ribeye crawls to the end of the bar, towards the front door.
Above him, behind him, all around him, come screams, and the sound of wood shattering against wood. A scream arcs towards him on the vortex, and is suddenly cut short. An eight ball smashes into the bottles of tequila and whiskey behind the bar, and drops with a thud a few inches from Ribeye’s hand. It’s slick with blood. Ribeye’s fingers snatch at it, slip, then grasp it and he thrusts it into the left pocket of his vest.
At the end of the bar, Ribeye hauls himself up to his feet, pressing himself against the bar and holding on for dear life while the whirlwind rages. It’s only after a moment of standing there, panting, that he realizes:
The bearded biker fills the doorway, the only exit, eyes wide and wild. In his left hand, he holds a gun, in the other a half-burnt joint, still trailing a calm line of smoke.
“Fucking what the fuck are you guys putting in these damn things?” he screams at nobody in particular, and he swings his gun across the room. It stops on Ribeye, and he takes one final puff of his joint. The beard splits to reveal another ferocious grin. “Find what you’re looking for?”
“No,” Ribeye mutters. “Everyone’s being maddeningly unhelpful.”
And he throws himself to the ground again a split second before the bearded biker opens fire. The shots come slowly, randomly, as if the biker has to re-learn how to work a gun with every new shot. Above him, bottles of alcohol burst, glass and booze raining down over him, slicing his arms and making them burn. He reaches the opposite end of the bar, and the spell comes to an end.
Ribeye throws himself over the bar, and a bullet splinters the wood in his wake.
“Come on, motherfuckers,” he hears the bearded biker screaming, still near the front door.
The interior of the bar is destroyed, but those who haven’t been impaled by bits of broken chairs and tables and pool cues, are already recovering, rising, reaching under their vests for guns and knives and whatever else they’re going to use to carve Ribeye to bits.
Prime beef. Fuck me.
He dashes through the kitchen, dodging his way past a confused cook. He spots a hallway, a door. Escape. Ribeye throws himself down the hallway on panicked feet. He knows he needs to calm down, knows he needs to start thinking again, but another gunshot seems to shatter the hallway to pieces.
A sharp yank on the door, and he finds himself staring at the inside of a walk-in fridge. Shelves lined with moldy fruits and vegetables glower at him, a bin of putrid meat leers up at him. Trapped.
Ribeye spins around, but people have already found him, filling up the hallway, squeezing in, jostling against each other for the opportunity to get to this moron who thought he could just walk into their bar. Ribeye sighs, and draws the bowie knife from his belt.
The crowd settles down, and shuffles aside to let someone push their way to the front of the crowd. It’s Tassel, knife drawn, face alight with malicious glee.
“Making a last stand?” Tassel says. “Gonna see how many of us you can take out before you die?”
“If I die,” Ribeye says.
“Cocky fuck,” Tassel says. “All right, then. Let the kids have this one.”
Ribeye grips his knife tighter, and lowers his center of gravity.
“Come on, man. Don’t send the kids,” Ribeye sighs.
“This’ll be good for them,” Tassel says.
And the kids in question surge forward. Ribeye watches them approach, clumsy and eager, and he can only think one thing: murderous intent.
So I might as well make it fast.
Ribeye sidesteps the first swipe, and buries his knife up to the hilt in the kid’s throat. He wrenches it free with a squelch that fills the hallway, and spins underneath another slash. Ribeye’s knife flashes, and an arm goes limp, blood spraying from a long cut along the wrist. A third kid dodges back, taking a few experimental swipes at Ribeye, but before he can get his footing, someone behind him shoves him forward. Off-balance, he lunges for Ribeye’s gut.
Ribeye dodges back, coils like a snake, and lunges forward, plunging his knife into another throat. His blade gets stuck on something (Bone, his long years of killing men whispers to him, wedged between two vertebrae), and he twists and turns the body as a human shield, absorbing stabs and angry slashes from more knife-wielding assailants.
Finally, Ribeye’s knife comes free, but he stumbles, he stumbles, and the first of the knives finds its mark. Half the length of one blade buries into his shoulder. He raises a hand, as if to ward off the next blow, but for his trouble watches with morbid detachment as a knife passes through his hand. Blood sprays into his face. His own blood.
For a moment, everyone’s quiet. Ribeye stumbles, falls to his knees.
“Take his balls before he passes out,” Tassel nudges one of the boys forward. “I want him to die without balls.”
And then the lights go out.