Brand New Dark

By Beau Johnson

Bishop Rider Lives! And for a dead man, he’s been busy. His story and the parts of it yet to be told being what populates Brand New Dark. Unseen moments pulled from between the pages of A Better Kind of Hate, The Big Machine Eats, and All of Them to Burn. Twenty-five new tales that bridge what came before and expand upon what can only come after.

Come, see what happened in-between.

Come, see how he made them burn.

Praise for BRAND NEW DARK:

“Beau Johnson masterfully crafts sharp, incisive short fiction, and Bishop Rider is the perfect vehicle for his mix of gallows humor and righteous anger. Brand New Dark is an intoxicating blend of violence and bone-deep humanity that lingers with you long after the final page.” —James D.F. Hannah, Shamus Award-winning author of the Henry Malone novels

“Brand New Dark is an utterly terrifying, high-octane mix of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and a Nicolas Winding Refn production, powered by a voice that’s unique to crime fiction. It’s a mega-dose of the darkest in human nature...and murderously inventive.” —Nick Kolakowski, author of Rattlesnake Rodeo and Boise Longpig Hunting Club

“Do you like stories about bad guys being torn apart in new and ever-innovative ways? Then boy has Beau Johnson got the books for you. But Beau does more than just tell tales of unbridled violence, he delivers them with a wit and humour that keeps you smiling, when really your stomach should be doing flips.” —Paul Heatley, author of Cutthroat and Just Like Jesus

“Johnson is keenly aware of the disquieting effect of his stories, and his concise, calculated prose shows a skilled writer who understands exactly how far to push the reader. Brand New Dark is a powerful mix of vengeance, violence, and razor-sharp writing by one of crime fiction’s most daring short story writers.” —E.A. Aymar, author of The Unrepentant

“Johnson doesn’t play nice. When it comes to ultraviolence, he’s doing for crime what Barker did for horror. Brand New Dark will slap you in the mouth.” —Laird Barron, author of Worse Angels

“We’ve been gifted with the return of revenge seeking anti-hero Bishop Rider, told in Johnson’s inimitable style of bite-sized brutality. Dark, bloody, and righteously gruesome, Brand New Dark satisfies the itch for beautifully written crime fiction, where the violence is seen from the corners of our eyes and over our shoulders as Johnson’s relentless pacing propels us forward to a fate we can’t look away from, no matter the cost.” —Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads

“Beau Johnson is like an alchemist. He melds dark violent narratives with searing heartbreaking fragility. A Brand New Dark is the same old Beau. Fearless, poetic and brutal.” —S.A. Cosby author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears

“Are these stories violent? Yes. Are they dark? Yes. Is Brand New Dark a well-written, page-turning collection of vigilante justice crime fiction at its finest? Hell yes. Nobody gives the bad guys a taste of their own medicine like the master of the genre, Beau Johnson.” —Jennifer Hillier, Thriller Award-winning author of Jar of Hearts

“Bishop Rider works—and works extremely well—only because he’s in the capable hands of Beau Johnson. In the midst of Rider’s pursuit for revenge, Johnson never forgets how important Rider’s humanity is, both to the character and to the readers as well. The unflinching violence, limb dislocations and evilness of men never veers into parody, and neither does Rider. And fans of Bishop’s previous tales will be delighted to fill more of his details through Johnson’s fractured but never confusing style of storytelling.” —Hector Acosta, author of Hardway

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Jul 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005832551

Beau Johnson

I’m the scion of two old Virginia families, raised in heaping helpings of the old south and moved north to escape. I’ve been a carpenter, clerk, cabinetmaker, Coast Guardsman, architect, commercial pilot, college instructor, and consultant. Next year I plan to decide what I want to do when I grow up.

Book preview

PREFACE

Awkwarddd. I mean, part of the journey is the end, right? That statement was the very thing I said when I went and killed Bishop Rider in my last book. Something happened on the way to editing All of Them to Burn, however. The man, he would not shut up, even after I removed him from the board. Which has led to this book here, stories that fill in some of the gaps in Bishop’s life. And since I’ve always told his story out of sequence for some I-like-to-make-things-hard-on-myself reason, there’s quite a few. There are other stories as well, adventures neither I nor he had been aware of. They involve Alex the Betrayer, of course, and the reason Bishop lost the bottom part of a leg. They also include Ray, Bishop’s oldest friend and from a war both of them attempt to forget. John Batista makes an appearance as well, and we catch up with Rider’s old partner at different points in the narrative: sometimes when the Detective’s face is intact, and sometimes when parts have been removed. This leaves Jeramiah, the son of the man who set Bishop’s entire struggle in motion. A man who in the end, along with yours truly, allows Bishop to go out on his own terms.

What happened/happens next?

These are their stories.

Back to TOC

COMING HOME

I’d like to say I’m a man who hasn’t been defined by the things he couldn’t control, but I can’t, not when I look back on everything I’ve done. However, the sooner I came to realize as much, the sooner the work began in earnest.

When the bodies began to stack like wood.

It makes me different from the men and women I’ve put down, sure, but not by much. Either way, it allowed me to function. To live and carry on. April now gone more years than she was alive at this point in time. And my mother, facedown in a dumpster filled with a type of water no man would ever drink, found before the video that held my sister’s last breath is circulated. These moments in time, my lack of control in averting them, they gave me what I required—the tools I would need to move beyond the memories I’d been left with.

It means I chose to respond to this life as I have, no matter how I attempt to frame things. But choice can only take a person so far. Conviction and follow-through must be embraced if it’s to mean anything, and lines you’ve been trained to never cross must be crossed time and again if any type of ground is to be gained.

Did we do such things? Did it matter at all?

Looking back, I have to believe it did.

I have no answers as to why Jeramiah chose to write FOLLOW THE CHILDREN upon Levison Ducard’s wall that day. Don’t get me wrong; it was fortunate for us that he did, in time becoming the thing that pulls us from the flames of a citywide manhunt. But when pressed, when I also ask him why he chose to use the Reverend’s wife’s blood to do so, he shakes his head. Can’t say, Bishop. Just felt like it had to be done.

Fair enough. And as the work went on, what he wrote that day, it becomes a calling card of sorts, one we didn’t use every time we found the chance to take a moment or two, but more often than not as the years wore on.

Brings us to Halloran James. Broad, tall, and down an ear by the time he gives me a name, the man lay strapped to a table in a basement that wasn’t really a basement at all.

It’s a start, Halloran, I’ll give you that. But that name, it’s small fry, and we both know as much. Makes me wonder if you’re taking this seriously. It didn’t matter, not as he thought. There was only him, me, and the amount of time it would take to get the information I knew he had.

Most of them give it up early, the hint of pain to come enough to loosen the sturdiest of lips. Once in a while, though, you come upon hard cases who not only ate what you gave them but took joy in showing you they could.

Not my favorite type of shitbird, no, but pretty fucking close.

I’d like to tell you I’m going to take your fingers next, that I’m going to remove them at the knuckle, but you’re a smart man, Halloran, so maybe we forgo the small stuff and get to the part where I show you it’s possible for a man to live without his thighs.

Was it enough? Of course it was. But the name that comes from Halloran’s mouth, it does more than grab my attention: it gives me pause. The name being one I never thought I’d hear again, one I thought had been put into the ground years ago, when Marcel Abrum made a power grab against Mick the Fish and used Danny Dolan and Yolav Odonnavitch to do so. Dolan we’d already taken care of, years after Batista and I dealt with Abrum himself, but Odonnavitch, I never knew...after all this time.

Memories, they can be kind if we allow them to be. If we don’t, they become a knife, gutting and bleeding us one image at a time.

I think of April. Of that video and how those men in masks moved upon her in it. How she screamed.

It was time to end things. It was time to get them all.

The past had come home.

I remember him, Bishop. Big guy, bald, something weird with his mouth. Scars or something. Good memory, Jeramiah being under the age of ten the last time he’d seen Odonnavitch. But here now, us in the van and Odonnavitch pumping gas up the road from our position as he was, the man was far from what I recalled.

Health issues for sure, Jeramiah says and puts down the binoculars. The man might have a couple more months, who knows.

It didn’t matter. That we found him did. Sick. Healthy. We’d end him all the same. If he gave up names, he gave up names. You just never knew.

We exit the van.

It was always going to be something special. A given even before we verified it was actually him. It would involve a little more recon, of course, but it would also involve a place the three of us knew intimately. To where, on a stage that held gold-plated poles, Batista and I had cut up Jeramiah’s father into more manageable pieces before placing what remained into a wheelbarrow.

In a way, we’d be coming home too.

Still standing but boarded up—the years had not been kind. The at-one-time strip club an even bigger eyesore now than it’d been back then. I stop and take in the broken signage, pelted by both rocks and time. Underfoot, broken glass remained, and my boots take on as much of it as they can. I move on, past grease drums and stacks of milk crates that had seen better days, and in through the back I enter a kitchen covered in neglect. It’s damp in here and the air is stale, filled with old ghosts and rat droppings alike. Like fingers stripped of skin, wires stripped of copper reach for me from the walls, bent and wishing they could be more. I leave them behind, push on, and from this kitchen exit out into a bar which leads me toward a stage I knew all too well.

I see we had to bring our own light, I say, referring to the lanterns upon the stage, one on each side of a bound Odonnavitch.

Be nice if we didn’t have to, but hey, what are you gonna do. Jeramiah was right, but I was miles from replying. My head not only looking down and to my left but back to a time when Jeramiah’s father had gotten the drop on me and shotgun barking, Batista comes out from the shadows and replaces the man’s knees with lead.

I step onto the stage, look to the shards of mirrored glass upon it. Jeramiah is to my left, a hatchet already in hand. I begin.

It hurts, doesn’t it? When we find out we’re expendable. It’s why you bolted way back when, I assume, after the stuff with Mick. What I’m trying to understand is what brought you back.

He looks to me, then to Jeramiah. His unibrow as unruly as I remember it. Same as the fishhook scar that ran around the right side of his mouth.

I step to the chair and lower his gag.

Was not Abrum, Rider. It was you. Abrum, he did not want to see it, but you were getting closer to figuring it out every day. He spits, looks up and past me, toward Jeramiah. And you, junior, I will recognize. I know an Abrum when I see one. Perhaps you are wishing for your father to see you here today?

You about done? Jeramiah, as ready as I’d ever seen him.

Done? Little man, I was done the moment I moved back here. The question you should be asking yourself is why I would do such a thing, no?

I knew why. It’s what men like him fed on. And once a man sees his end coming, some hope to ease their suffering any way they can.

She called for you, Rider. I’m wanting you to know this. Edited from the original recording, yes, but no mistake should be made, around every cock they put into her throat she wondered why she was not being saved.

My plan had been to rip the man apart, Jeramiah and I reenacting what Batista and I had done thirty years prior. Different wheelbarrow, of course, but the outcome very much the same. But Odonnavitch, what he says, it changed things, and if I’m anything, it’s a man who’s proven himself adept at rolling with what he couldn’t control.

I take the moment.

The lantern closest to me breaking as I kick it over and forward, the flame racing just as fast.

Jeramiah is onto me and does the same with the one nearest him. The temperature change is instant, on us even before we leave the stage. Odonnavitch is beside himself, frantic but bound, and before we hit the kitchen, I hear his words turn into screams.

Doesn’t stop me from thinking about what he’d said. And then I’m back to thinking about what I said, here at the beginning of this. About the lines one would have to cross and continue to cross if the things we do are to mean anything at all.

Conviction. Follow through.

I would burn them all.

Back to TOC

SLICK RIBBON

Batista has a suspicion as to what’s going on long before the rest of the department catches wind. As am I, he’s always looking, always searching, and if we had anything in common, it’s that.

I’m whole here, too. Intact. Each leg as long and enhancement-free as the other, and the man who doesn’t physically swing the ax but sets the entire debacle in motion still on our side of the equation. But what Batista is onto now, at this time, is what brings Alex to mind—to a time before the time, when this kid (a kid who would grow into a middle-aged man who betrays not only me but Ray and Batista as well) watches from behind closed doors as Batista and I take a man named Abrum apart. A wheelbarrow is involved here, sitting upon the very stage where we turn this man to pieces. A man who’d taken people not just from my life, but human garbage who reveled in the destitute, carving a career out of the backs of women and men alike. He and his piece-of-shit brother both.

Of course, it’s the strip joint that does it—the part that tips Batista to what might be going on. A little more digging and he realizes it’s not so far-fetched an idea to decide there may be an enterprise beneath the enterprise that was the Red Onion. Too many of the same names kept popping up. Too many shit-birds with more than niceties on their minds.

Even with the translator, Bishop, she was hard to understand. We’re at the larger safehouse, the one on Buchannan, and Batista lays it out, pulling up her file as he does so. She’s young, too young, green eyes under curls of long, dark hair. I feel the rage rise up, the heat not new, but I let Batista finish what he’s begun. She got loose, that much is clear, but following up, we found nothing. Not one of the rooms she described. Not one description she gave of any of the men close to resembling any employee at the Red Onion.

I don’t know where he’s going with this, but we’d been doing this too long for me to think he doesn’t have something. If I’m honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t had it all figured out. The big parts, anyway.

The detective stands, both hands up over his face and then down his beard. The operation is movable, I think. Like the houses from a few years back. Rotating every so often. Again, like those houses. Here, this side of Culver, we have a total of eleven strip clubs paying taxes. Care to guess who might own four?

And there it was: why we’d been able to do what we had in the time that we did. The detective a bloodhound. A man who’d not only come to see things the way they should be seen, but a man who finally acknowledged the badge would never again stand for what it once did.

Time to go to work.

We start with Bottoms Up, the oldest of the four establishments Gundy owned. A dive bar, if that, with tits on top for show. The kind of place where the mirrors, pervert’s