To my outlaws, outcasts and misfits,
Hope you had a great week. I was up in Hamilton, Ontario, where even the sparrows look like they just got out of a fight over a five dollar bindle of blow. The town has some crunch to it but I do love it.
Hope you enjoyed Rafael’s story last week. I will be hosting new writers as well as dropping some new episodes of the podcast. First up will be one of my favorite poets working today - Jessica L Walsh, whose latest work - Book of Gods and Grudges - is a stone cold masterpiece.
But today, I am proud to present Part Three of Rumor Bay - a serialized batch of madness for your enjoyment.
For those just joining, here is a recap of Rumor Bay Part One & Two.
Part 1:
The Duffy brothers, Danny, the brawler, and Declan, the schemer, are on the run from a botched Miami heist, their car loaded with drugs, cash, and guns. Declan needs to piss, which leads them past a "BRIDGE CLOSED" sign and into a town that doesn’t exist on any map: Rumor Bay. It looks like Mayberry if Mayberry was built for the world’s most dangerous criminals.
They hit a bar that feels like a fever dream of sin and vice. There, they meet Irina, a seductive woman pretending to be French but is actually a legendary Russian assassin with body parts in her freezer.
They're "rescued" by Cosimo, an aging Calabrian mob boss in sublime linen, and soon learn the horrifying truth: Rumor Bay is a government-sponsored luxury prison for elite, dangerous criminals too radioactive to keep in the real world. And now, the Duffys can’t leave.
Part 2:
Irina kicks around the oafish cop Cutter and learns that the Duffy brothers’ car, the one full of contraband, has mysteriously vanished. Meanwhile, Cosimo wine-and-dines the brothers with espresso and insults. He tries to recruit them into his power play against Irina, but when he learns the car is missing, tensions explode, literally, into fists, blood, and champagne.
Later, Danny confronts Declan, realizing the whole detour was a setup. The shocking reveal: The Mad Dog, the island’s most feared and feral inhabitant, living off the grid, is Maureen Duffy, Declan and Danny’s long lost, estranged mother. The other shocking reveal? Declan orchestrated the car’s arrival so their mother would be armed and ready.
Part 2 ends with Maureen, scarred, smiling, and free for the first time in decades, barreling down a jungle road in the beat up Buick, with the trunk loaded with cocaine, weapons, and purpose.
The brothers, meanwhile, remain trapped. Cosimo doesn’t trust them. Irina wants them dead. Cutter’s not even pretending to be a cop anymore. With war brewing between factions and Maureen armed to the teeth in the jungle, the Duffy brothers are in deep. And the question isn’t whether they’ll make it out, it's who they'll become before this is all over.
So without further ado, Part Three of Rumor Bay.
And away we go!
“What do you love?” somebody said in a whisper.
Declan’s eyes flashed open to see Cosimo standing in the door way dressed in a royal blue and gold silk robe with matching blue and gold velvet slippers.
“I am sorry to wake you. But I must know, what do you love?" Cosimo said again, this time a little louder, closer to his real voice, but still low.
Declan shook the expensive silk sheets off him and sat on the edge of the bed, still groggy from the night before.
“That’s a pretty heavy question to ask a guy first thing in the morning,” Declan replied.
“An old copper trick. Spies too. Asking questions right before you go to bed or right when you wake up. Your guard is down, so maybe the truth slips out.”
Declan looked out the bedroom window at the morning tide rolling in. The back steps of Cosimo’s house burrowed right into the sand. A man who looked to be in his thirties laid out on a deep blue lounge chair in nothing but a pair of speedos. The man was tanner than anybody Declan had ever seen, with perfectly slicked back black hair that glowed in the sun. Every piece of the man was lean muscle. He looked like a statue.
“That is my brother,” Cosimo said. Cosimo had quietly closed the distance between the two and now stood directly next to Declan, both now staring out the window.
“That is what I love. My brother. He is beautiful,” Cosimo said, “The most beautiful human I have ever known. And his looks are the least interesting thing about him. There is only one thing on this island that Irina wants and can’t have it.”
Declan caught on.
“She wants to fuck your brother but your brother’s not into her?”
“My brother is not into women at all. That is why we are here. On Rumor Bay. The time and place I come from, the world of crime, the honor, the loyalty, the code, they refuse to tolerate people like my brother. They were going to kill him, for no other reason than who he was. There was nothing I could say or do. So we left and came here. I ended my old life so my brother could have a new one.”
Declan didn’t know if Cosimo was telling the truth or telling a tall tale to feel him out, to see which side of the century Declan lived in.
“I’d do anything for my brother too,” Declan finally replied.
“So you love him more than anything?” Cosimo asked.
Declan gave it some thought, settling into being awake, and being in front of a stone cold killer in a silk robe asking questions about love.
“I guess trouble, if that’s the right word for it,” Declan answered, “More than anything, I guess I love trouble.”
“I don’t understand,” Cosimo said.
“When I was a kid in grade school, all the teachers, especially the nuns, would say, “Declan Duffy, you’re nothing but trouble.” And at first I hated it. But then I realized, it wasn’t the trouble I hated, it was the consequences.”
“Who does like consequences?” Cosimo said.
“Assholes and ignoramus,” Declan answered, “But what I’m getting at, is one time the whole class came unglued, even the good kids, even the ones with pennies in their loafers, I mean everybody came off the rails, screaming, shouting, the teacher looked like she was having a nervous breakdown. It was sheer madness, and I stood on my desk, put my arms out and just let it seep into my soul, the madness, the trouble, the chaos... That’s what I love.”
“More than anything?” Cosimo asked.
“More than anything,” Declan answered.
“More than your brother?”
Declan thought about it again, then replied, “The way I see it is, I love trouble more than anything, so when I bring my brother some trouble, he knows I’m giving him the most precious thing in my life. So I guess, in some way, creating chaos is the best way to show my brother I love him.”
“You just perfectly described being Irish,” Cosimo said.
“Thank you.”
“And your mother. The Mad Dog. Do you love her as much as trouble?”
Declan held Cosimo’s evil stoic grin.
“I have been dealing with men and power since I was a young boy and I am still alive and thriving. You think your little charade yesterday could fool me?” Cosimo said.
“You bug this room or something?”
Cosimo smiled, letting Declan know he did just that.
“Should have figured,” Declan said.
“But you didn’t.”
“But I didn’t.”
“And now here we are.”
Declan glanced around and for the first time realized his brother was not in the room.
“Where’s Danny?”
“I have him at an undisclosed location. If you do not help me not only lure your mother out of the jungle, but get me that car filled with drugs, money and guns, I will kill Danny in front of you. Then kill your mother in front of you. Then if you are lucky, kill you.”
Cosimo smiled and clapped his hands, “You know what? I like this trouble business too.”
When Cosimo turned to leave, Declan said, “If you take Danny and me to the jungle right now and let us go, we’ll let you live.”
Cosimo turned and laughed, “You have no power in this situation, young man.”
Declan smiled, like he knew something Cosimo didn’t, which for a tiny moment, unnerved Cosimo. Then Declan said, “If I have no power, why am I still alive? You have nothing but hope. I have nothing but chaos and madness. Let’s see who wins.”
Cosimo’s smile was replaced with the face of the stone cold killer who had ruled over Calabria for three decades.
“Yes,” Cosimo replied, “Let’s wait and see who wins. If you think chaos is powerful, wait until you experience the power of patience and revenge.”
“I love him,” Maureen Duffy told her mother, “More than anything.”
“You’re seventeen,” Maureen’s mother replied.
Her mother’s worse nightmare was coming true. They raised Maureen “right,” sent her to the right schools, with the right teachers with the right opportunities and hopefully eventually the right connections. But the one thing her parents could not control, could not shield her from, was love.
And Maureen was in love. Bad.
Freshman year in high school, she fell in love with a charming Irish kid who grew up in the next neighborhood over, the blue collar one, but was still in the same district as their prestigious public high school.
He said all the right things and did all the right things, but Maureen’s mother saw something in his eyes that her trusting and loving daughter could not see - trouble.
But Maureen couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear or see it. So they ran off and got married. It broke her parents hearts.
At first everything was fine. They both went to the same college. She quickly got pregnant and had their first child - Danny. Then the second - Declan.
She was the perfect mother and he the perfect father. He got a prestigious job downtown and worked 12 hours a day seven days a week. He was never home, but the home he built in his absence was storybook - a Tudor on the North Shore of Chicago two blocks off the lake.
Then one day the FBI showed up and said her husband had been arrested. They refused to tell her anything else, but said she would never see him again.
“Pretend he’s dead and move on,” they said.
So she tried, but because she is Irish, she wanted to both love and kill him.
She became consumed with seething rage and resentment. How could she be so stupid? Why didn’t she listen to her mother? How could she let her husband, who she always thought she was smarter than, outsmart her? How did she get fooled so completely?
So she set out to find and to confront him. What she would do or say once she actually found him, she did not know, all she did know was that she needed revenge.
The wording of the FBI led her to believe that he was still alive and most likely in the Witness Protection Program. If he was in prison, they would have just told her. But the more research she did, the more dead ends she found.
Revenge consumed her, so she asked her mother to watch her two young boys so she could get her shit together. Out of spite and pride, her mother refused.
Then one day, while scouring the darkest corners of the web, she found a series of clues that presented and insane theory - that her husband had been an assassin for an Irish crime family in Chicago, that worked for both the Chicago Outfit and Mexican Cartels, and was now living on some top secret island that housed the world’s most dangerous criminals.
“He’s on a fucking island while I’m here stuck raising these two lunatic boys!” she thought.
So she set off on an adventure. She was a young woman who fell for her high school sweetheart, who had two children with that man, a young woman who had faith that everything would work out, who was betrayed and lied to, who now had hatred in her heart that she could not shake or ignore, that fueled and ruled her, and now found herself driving a small skiff in the middle of the night toward the northern edge of a mysterious island.
All she had with her was the backpack she wore when she took the kids to the park, filled with a few granola bars, two go-gurts, a bottle of water and some wet naps.
She slowly crept past a weathered wooden sign that read - Welcome to Rumor Bay.
She moved through the shadows of the small sleepy Main Street, past a barbershop and bar, past the small police station, down a block of quaint beach bungalows until she arrived at one that was bubbling with laughter.
She crept to the front and peered through the window, to see her husband (they were still technically married) laughing with a thin, beautiful woman who spoke with a thick French accent. A woman she heard her husband call Irina.
Maureen watched her husband make love to this woman Irina, kiss her good night and then leave to walk home. But unbeknownst to her husband, Maureen was following behind.
“I miss you,” Maureen whispered in the darkness, a few feet behind him.
He whipped around, pulled a knife and whispered back, “Who’s there!”
“Your wife,” Maureen said, moving forward into a patch of moonlight.
His face dropped, “Mo, what the fuck are you doing here? How.. How did you find.. I wanted to… there was nothing I could do.”
He slipped the knife into his back pocket as his eyes nervously jutted around.
“Nothing but leave your sons behind, your wife behind, to move to some island and fuck some French whore.”
“You gotta get outta here before they find you. You’ll get arrested. Or worse. This island is messed up, Mo. It’s kill or be killed, like prison but worse, because it gives you the allusion that you’re free. Please.”
“Let’s go. You’re coming back home. To your family. To me.”
“I can’t just go back. That’s the first place they’ll look.”
“Then we’ll go on the run together. You and me. And the kids. Whatever it takes.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“Both. You’re a good person. The best. That’s why I never told you anything. So that if I got caught, you wouldn’t know nothing so you would never have to lie.”
“So the whole time I never knew the real you? You were playing a character?” Maureen asked.
“I guess so,” her husband replied, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Maureen said, “Can I give you a one last hug before I go?”
“Of course,” he said. He opened his arms for her and she fell into them. He still smelled the same, felt the same, every ounce of him that carried her heart was there for him.
As she pulled away from the hug, she took the knife from his back pocket, and stabbed him in the heart. He bled out in front of her, eyes filled with terror and betrayal, glaring into her, a mixture of confusion and then finally peace.
She dragged him into the bushes, cut his head off. then stuffed it in her backpack. That night she walked as far as she could into the jungle. She found a long thick branch which she sharpened at the end. She stuck her now ex-husband’s head on the end of it and set it into the middle of the tiny trail as a warning to anybody foolish enough to find her or even worse, ask her any questions.
She continued trudging until she collapsed from fatigue and the emotional heft of killing both her husband and her old self.
When she awoke, she was born again, a new woman, submerged in the aftermath of spent rage, and at the same time enthralled by a new found chaos and madness, which she found oddly comforting, like a warm blanket on a cruel cold winter day. For her whole life, things needed to make sense, things needed to bring comfort, people needed to feel loved and safe, and now there was nothing to do but conquer.
But what about your sons, she thought?
They are tough kids. They’ll be fine. All the hurt, all the betrayal, will make them stronger, just like it made her, and when the time was right, and she was fully healed, she would find a way to reach out to them, and then everybody would be back together again - one big happy family.
Declan paced the room, wondering where Danny was at.
“Dance with my brother,” Cosimo said from the door way, catching Declan off guard again.
“I’m cool,” Declan said, “Not much of a dancer.”
“I am not asking. I am telling,” Cosimo said.
“Look man, I know you said those Italian guys were giving your brother shit for being gay, which is fucked up, but I don’t wanna dance with him, and he’s a good looking guy, I’ll give him that, but one, I’m not into guys, and two, you can’t make somebody dance with somebody else. The guy who doesn’t want to do it is gonna be acting all weird, and the guy wanting to dance with somebody is gonna see that the other guy is acting weird, so it’s gonna be all weird, and to make shit even weirder, I already told you I can’t dance, so it’s gonna be a weird guy who can’t dance trying to act like he wants to dance but not really hiding his disdain for the whole situation…”
“My brother loves dancing and has nobody to dance with his entire stay. You are new. He doesn’t know you. Just be nice. Dance a few songs, and I will let you and your brother live another day.”
“That’s why you’re keeping me alive? To dance with your brother?”
“Maybe.”
Cosimo walked Declan through the bungalow to a door which led downstairs. There was a small bar along one wall, three tables with four chairs each, along another, a small dance floor and a wall that was just mirrors.
“Antonio, this is my new Irish friend Declan,” Cosimo said, “He loves dancing, just like you.”
“‘Sup, Antonio,” Declan said, “Love is a pretty strong word. But I’ll try my best,”
Antonio stood. He was dressed in a tailored light blue linen suit with light blue loafers and no socks.
“Is my brother making you do this?” Antonio asked sincerely.
Cosimo gave Declan a glance like if you say anything I’ll shoot you in the balls.
“Nah. Sometimes I like dancing. I’m not very good at it, but you know, sometimes you gotta dance.”
“Stop talking,” Cosimo whispered to Declan, then nudged him toward his brother. While Declan awkwardly strutted over to Antonio, who stood graciously and shook Declan’s hand, Cosimo headed over to the small bar and put on a song.
Antonio smiled. Declan shuffled side to side like he was at his first grade school dance. But Antonio unbuttoned the top button of his jacket and spun around and moved like he was on skates, like a modern day Fred Astaire, free and one with the music and life itself.
Declaim was impressed, so impressed, he even tried to mimic a few of Antonio’s moves, even a weird Mick Jagger chicken walk/spin move and almost knocked over the table. Declan laughed and so did Antonio. Cosimo remained suspicious.
The song ended and Antonio took a sip of his wine.
“I’d like a drink if you’re handing them out,” Declan said.
“I’m good,” Antonio said with a pleasant smile, then turned to his brother Cosimo, “No more music, dear brother, I’m going to go for walk on the beach.”
Then Antonio turned back to Declan and said, “You are a better dancer than you said, but no offense, you are not my type.”
Declan was at the wonderful age in his twenties, where even though he was not gay, he took offense to not being everybody’s type all at once.
“What do you mean? How come I’m not your type?”
“Well, I don’t like ginger’s, that’s for one, and two, I can see that my brother has put you up to this. I love him for it, but this is not how it works. Love must be real or nothing at all. Even if only for a moment, a dance, even for just that little.”
Antonio left.
Declan turned to Cosimo and said, “I told you he’d figure it out. It got weird, just like I said. And for the record, it’s a little dark down here. If he saw me in the full light, I’d be his type for sure.”
Cosimo watched his brother leave, then hung his head, like he was about to cry. He took a long, deep, burdened breath, then without a word, turned and left.
Declan sat down and finished Antonio’s wine. Then Declan took his own deep burdened breath and wondered just how much trouble he’d put his older brother Danny in, by getting him sucked into all this madness. He began to second guess himself, to wonder if chaos and madness was the best thing he could give to his brother, or if there was something else, something better, that he did not know about.
Danny was alone in a dark room. He slowly shuffled in side steps, and gently, as quietly as he could, knocked on the walls. Back in Chicago, when pulling jobs was slow, he sometimes hung drywall for a guy they went through Foster Care with. He knew that these old bungalows were just wooden 2x4 studs and stucco, so he was feeling out how far about the framing studs were.
When he felt like he found a bit of an opening, he backed up across the room, took a deep breath then charged forward like a wild rabid animal, slamming into the wall and almost knocking himself out. He split his head open and blood poured down over his eyes. He stumbled back across the room and charged again. And again. And again. Until finally he broke through the wall and collapsed on the other side.
When he came to, he was covered in crusty blood. He didn't have a mirror, so he knew didn’t know how bad he bled out. All he did know, was that he was alive and most important - free.
He remembered the map of the island that Cosimo laid out when he first rescued them, that the jungle was in the middle of the island, east of Cosimo's coastal compound of bungalows.
Covered in blood, flesh torn open to a mysterious degree, Danny did the only thing he knew - he ran towards his mother - a mother he had not seen in years. So he ran toward a memory.
He was smart enough to know that running pumped more blood and right now there were more torn up holes in him for the blood to leak out, which meant it was a real threat he would die before he got there, died before he got a chance to see his mother again.
But right now, he was less scared of death than the chance to see the woman who left them, who abandoned them, because unlike Declan, his younger brother, who longed to see his mother, Danny had a seething resentment, rage and revenge, so deep, powerful and conniving, he never even shared it with the person he loved the most - his younger brother, the very younger brother he got tasked with raising once his mother abandoned them - the mother who Danny swore to himself, if he ever saw her again, would kill her on the spot.
And so Danny ran, slathered in his own blood and madness, toward the woman who left him as a child, hoping he would arrive before he died so he could fulfill the promise of revenge he made to himself as a young starving boy.
©Mick Betancourt
Much Love,
Mick
My new fave of yours!