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Los Santos, 2006
‘Hey, you!’
Ryan looks up from his hand – one card short of a royal flush, but the King up his sleeve will take care of that – and feels his gut clench.
Four men are storming across the bar towards him, faces red with anger and the heat of an airless Los Santos night. He’s seen them before, not across the table in a less-than-legal poker game, but in the dark parking lot outside, threatening him with the wrath of their boss if he doesn’t pay for “protection”.
‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ he asks, as calm and smooth as he can manage, letting one idle hand run through his thick golden hair.
The three tourists he’s in the process of fleecing are starting to look nervous, and he’d like to save this game if he can. Hustling cards in run-down beach-front bars just doesn’t pay like cheating in Vegas used to. He’s been stringing these chumps along all evening, and the pot is just getting fat enough to take. His royal flush was supposed to be the final winning hand.
‘We fucking warned you, Haywood,’ says the biggest and meatiest of the newcomers. ‘Burns wants his money.’
Ryan tries his best not to curse, and it comes out as a sigh instead.
‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes. I’d like to finish my game.’
I need to finish this game, else I couldn’t pay you even if I wanted to, he doesn’t say.
‘Bullshit, you ain’t running again,’ says one of the mobsters, a top-heavy Hispanic with biceps covered in ugly tattoos.
There’s barely a pause, just enough time for one of the tourists to cough anxiously, then the thug turns over the table.
Ryan shouts in dismay as cards and cash go flying. There goes his chance of a good meal tonight.
There’s an immediate scramble, the bottom-feeding denizens of the bar crawling over each other to grab the scattered cash, but Ryan hasn’t even made it out of his chair before there’s a rough hand dragging him up by the scruff of his neck.
In the chaos, no one pays attention to him shouting and kicking as the four men bundle him out of the back door.
The metal fire-door shuts with a screech and a clang, cutting off the babbling people and the terrible old pop music inside, and it’s just Ryan and four angry mobsters in the piss-smelling alley out back.
‘I don’t have it! I don’t have it!’ Ryan cries, when they shove him face first into the concrete wall of the bar. ‘You just lost it, if you’d waited two fucking minutes I could pay you!’
‘Too fucking late, Haywood. We told you, we see you working these bars again and you’ll be lucky to live to regret it.’
Ryan struggles, but there are too many hands on him, and he’s never been much of a fighter. He relies on brains, not fists.
‘I’ll leave!’ he promises, then cries out as a brass-bound fist hits him in the small of his back. It’s the first of many, and all Ryan can do is try to breathe, try not to be sick when he feels his ribs break, pain spreading tendrils of ice through his body.
They tear off his jacket, sending stashed cards, weighted dice and throwing knives scattering across the filthy ground. Ryan is barely aware of anything beyond pain and the struggle to breathe, but when they throw him down next to a handful of dirtied cards he vaguely regrets the loss of his tools. Moments later, he has worse things to worry about.
Three of the mobsters are dragging his arms out, holding him pinned and struggling weakly against the asphalt. He’s taller than them, but he doesn’t have any real muscle to work with, and they’ve had practice at this kind of grim work. They don’t give him any leverage at all.
‘I don’t like assholes who cheat at cards, Haywood,’ the tattooed leader says, placing one massive boot over Ryan’s right hand, pressing his bent fingers against the rough stones and grinding just enough to rub his skin raw.
‘No! Please!’ Ryan gasps out, horrified. Not his hands. Anything but his hands.
‘We’ll see if you can palm cards after this, you little shit!’
He raises his boot and stamps, crushing Ryan’s curled fingers.
Ryan screams, feeling the delicate bones crunch and snap, skin splitting hot against the asphalt. He keeps screaming as the boot rises and falls twice, three times, four times, writhing hopelessly in his captors’ grip.
‘Ooh, that’s a real mess,’ the mobster says idly, nudging at the mangled ruin of Ryan’s hand with the toe of his boot, making him sob. ‘Have a look at that, Haywood.’
Ryan turns his head, blinking away tears, and sees the bloodied, twitching mess of crushed bone that used to be his beautiful, dexterous hand. The sight is even worse than the pain shooting up his arm, and he turns weakly aside and throws up, gasping and choking as the motion sends fire through his broken ribs.
He lies limp when he’s done, face resting in the acid remains of a too-long ago breakfast, too full of horror to even register the indignity of vomit in his hair. He’s dimly aware of the mobsters laughing at him, and wonders if they’re going to kill him, or if they’ll smash his other hand first.
‘You’re disgusting,’ his chief tormentor tells him, placing his boot on Ryan’s other hand.
Ryan sobs weakly, eyes screwed shut, waiting for a fresh wave of agony.
The heavy boot comes crashing down, snapping bone, and Ryan screams, the sound turning to a desperate, wet cough as he throws up again.
There’s a wail of sirens from the beach-front road, and the hands holding him down lift away.
‘Think someone heard him?’ one of the men asks.
‘Dunno, let’s go.’
The men flee from the sound of sirens, not waiting to see if the cops are looking for them or for one of the city’s thousands of other criminals. Ryan doesn’t much care, desperately glad just to have been left alone.
The damage to his left hand isn’t so bad, just a couple of simple broken bones, by the feel of it, and he’s grateful for the well-timed interruption. If they’d mangled both his hands, he’d have no hope at all. Even as it is, he thinks he might be better off dead.
It takes him a long time to get off the ground, pain setting him gasping at every movement. His ribs are definitely broken, and he doesn’t want to risk them moving too much. The last thing he needs is a punctured lung.
Using his left hand to push himself up makes him feel sick, but at least it’s mostly intact. His right hand looks like crushed meat, lying in a smeared pool of blood. When he finally lifts it off the ground, he’s half surprised that all his fingers come with it. They’re still attached, but only just. There’s no chance of moving them.
Ryan doesn’t have insurance, but he’s not stupid. Without immediate help, he’s going to lose his hand. He has to go to the ER, and try to get as much treatment as possible before they ask him to pay.
He cradles his ruined hand against his chest, hissing at the touch of cotton against raw wounds, and starts a slow shuffle towards Pillbox Hill. It’s a long way, through La Puerta and Little Seoul, and Ryan counts himself lucky that he already looks like shit. No one’s going to bother trying to jump him on the way.
It’s almost morning by the time he makes it, and he misses the main overnight rush of gunshot wounds and mugging victims. The ER is relatively quiet, and there’s a nurse free to fill out his paperwork for him while the young doctor starts looking at his hand. He can’t write anything down for himself, and it’s taking all his will power not to throw up again as the doctor pokes at his hand, trying to straighten out what she can so she’ll get a good picture when she sends him for an x-ray.
Six hours later, he’s out on the street again, painkillers and antibiotics rattling in his pockets, his fingers sewn up and splinted, bound together inside a cocoon of bandages. The doctor had told him, flat but not unkind, that he’s unlikely to use the hand again without major surgery. Needless to say, Ryan doesn’t have that option. The emergency treatment he’s already had was more than he could ever afford. There’s a bill for thousands of dollars burning a hole in his pocket, and he already knows it’s never going to be paid.
He slopes back to the crappy motel where he’s been staying for the past few months, locks the door, and lowers himself gingerly onto his bed. Exhausted and sick, it doesn’t take long for him to sleep.
~
The first few days, Ryan is pretty sure he’s going to die. He might not even care if he does. There’s no food in his room, and he barely manages to keep down water and pills, slowly fumbling the caps off his pill bottles with his splinted left hand. Fever sets his skin on fire, and every movement is a fresh taste of hell. He drifts, somewhere between dreams and waking, wondering how he’d fallen so far. He feels a million miles from the young man who’d left small-town Georgia two years earlier, off to Vegas to make his fortune in the casinos.
Of course, the casinos don’t take kindly to punters counting cards, or hustling other patrons, and within six months he’d been blacklisted at every casino in the city, even the smaller, darker places miles from the famous Strip. Ryan’s a smart man, incredibly quick with his hands, but there was little he could do against the sophisticated face-recognition and highly-trained spotters employed by the Vegas mobs.
In the end, they’d forced him out of the city entirely, and he’d fled to Los Santos, seeking a wilder kind of town. For a while, the move had paid off; plenty of tourists, plenty of idiots easily parted from their money. Unfortunately for Ryan, Los Santos had mobs of its own, and they were rougher than their finely dressed, old-money counterparts in Las Vegas.
He’d been shoved out of Vinewood, then Rockford Hills, slipping further and further into the underbelly of the city. His takes got smaller and smaller, and still the local gangs came after him. He never paid the “protection” they demanded, staying stubbornly independent, choosing to slide away into a new area instead when the heat got too much. That strategy had eventually led him to Vespucci Beach, Rooster Teeth territory, living on the bare scraps he could make in the beat-down bars, and when Burnie Burns’ goons started hassling him, he had nowhere left to go.
In the end, he could only wish he’d made a deal back in Rockford Hills, and kept working the cushy patch where the rich and famous came to lose their money. Surely, even though the idea made him burn with resentment, it would have been better to bend his knee to a crime lord than to endure lying crippled in a shitty motel, racked with pain.
It’s hard to keep his independent spirit during those long, fever-hot days, when he so desperately wishes for someone, anyone, to ease his suffering. He’s used to being on his own, even prefers it, but for the first time since he left Georgia, Ryan feels horribly lonely. He cradles his ruined hand close in the dim room, and cries like his heart is broken.
~
Days pass, his fevers recede, and when Ryan finally stumbles outside, still in his bloodied, filthy clothes, he has stopped wishing for anyone to help him.
He is weak, malnourished, ravaged with pain and lost hope, but he looks out on the dirty parking lot with keen eyes, dry and hard. He has finally learned the worth of his life, and it is vanishingly small. No one would have noticed he was gone, but he’s sure as fuck going to make them notice he’s still alive.
First things first, he needs to get well again, no matter how long it takes. He makes his way carefully down the block to the bodega, and buys the first food he’s had in days. It’s only a sandwich, and it leaves him almost no money, but it’s necessary. He’s not going to get anywhere if he keels over from hunger. He eats it slowly, savouring the taste of sharp cheese and mustard. He knows if he eats too fast it’ll only come back up again, and he can’t afford to waste it.
Step two, back at the motel, is to unwrap his right hand and see what he’s got left to work with. It takes an age to peel back the layers of bandages, and his stomach rolls when he finally sees his hand. It looks bad; misshapen, swollen skin blue-green with bruises and covered in lines of harsh black stitches. All his fingers are still attached, and it seems like the antibiotics are working, and he’s thankful for that, at least.
He can’t move his fingers at all, and can’t tell how much of that is due to the splints and how much is permanent damage. When he touches his fingertips with his other hand, there is still sensation there, except in his ring finger. It seems that there is nerve damage in that finger, but he knows he’s lucky it isn’t in all of them. Hell, he’s lucky he still has fingers at all. If he ever claws his way out of the gutter, he owes Dr Denecour a hell of a favour. She’d done much more than she strictly had to, for uninsured emergency care.
His left hand is mostly intact, but the splint binding up his little and ring fingers should stay on for at least another two weeks, and he isn’t meant to move the hand much, in case the cracks in the metacarpals turn into complete breaks. Unfortunately, Ryan can’t afford to wait that long.
He leaves his right hand mostly unwrapped, now the wounds have sealed, leaving the bare metal splints poking out like Wolverine’s claws. Without the bulky bandages he can stuff it in his coat pocket, and no one will notice there’s anything odd about it.
He tests the motion of his left hand, trying to palm his own wallet, and grits his teeth at the pain. He can manage it, but it’s not as fluid as he’d like. He’s more likely to get caught pickpocketing than he has been since he was a fumbling teenager.
Still, he doesn’t have much choice. He probably couldn’t hold a deck of cards, much less manage a trick shuffle. Thinking about that loss hurts more than his many broken bones, so he shoves the thought aside, forcing himself to clumsily shower and breathe through the pain of changing his clothes. He pulls on loose sweat pants and stuffs his feet into sneakers without undoing the laces, too sore to bend down and tie them properly. Casual as the clothes are, a clean man is less likely to be suspected of theft than a filthy one.
By evening, he’s in the centre of the city, lifting wallets. It’s a nerve-racking process, and he is far more careful about choosing his targets than he would have been before.
He goes after party-goers, obviously drunk or stoned, prioritising their witlessness over their apparent wealth. It grates on his pride to let bankers’ sons go by, wearing thousand dollar shirts and gaudy gold watches, but he has to accept that he’s far from his best, and he always was better at cards than straight theft. This is a matter of survival, not taking down those who deserve it.
He gives up in the early hours of the morning, when the people still stumbling around are thoroughly obliterated but have nothing left worth taking. He has a few hundred dollars in his pocket, enough to keep his room in the motel and buy food for a couple of weeks. It’s earned him a little more healing time, and that was really all he needed for the night.
He buys some long-lasting groceries on his way home and holes up in his room. For the next two weeks he barely leaves, eating and sleeping and waiting grimly for his wounds to heal. He’s determined to get his revenge, but there’s a long way to go before he could take on Burns’ thugs and hope to win.
~
Three weeks after the beating, he takes the splint off his left hand. It’s probably a little early, but he can mostly move it without it hurting, if he’s careful, and he’s desperate to have some measure of dexterity back.
His right hand is barely better than it was when he first left the hospital, though he’s long since cut the stitches out of his wounds. The bones will take much longer to heal, if they do at all, but he’s not willing to wait any longer. He’s getting used to doing everything one handed, using his useless right hand as a counterweight or a flat surface to apply pressure. It’s no good for anything else anymore.
His ribs are healed enough that breathing isn’t a struggle, and he’s feeling well enough to move on with his plans.
He goes down to the mask shop by the beach, watching constantly for unfriendly faces, and takes advantage of the tourist crush to make a theft. He lifts the first mask that takes his fancy; a black, leathery skull that will cover his entire head. When he tries it on in his room, it’s surprisingly comfortable, and it doesn’t take him long to adjust to the restriction around his face.
He goes into Rancho and lurks near a bar, one of the few where he’d never hustled cards. Eventually, one of the Vagos comes out, draped against a scantily-clad woman and clearly drunk off his ass. It’s the work of a moment to lift the pistol from the sagging waistband of his jeans, and Ryan is gone before the drunken pair have made it down the block.
The gun is loaded, and Ryan takes the time to familiarise himself with it, breaking it down as far as he can manage and making sure everything is clean. He hasn’t fired a gun since he left Georgia, but he remembers how they fit together.
If everything goes to plan, he doesn’t intend to fire this one at all, but he needs to know that it’ll work if he needs it. Having survived the hell of his beating, he’s not intending to die any time soon.
With the mask and gun stashed in his coat, he crosses Los Santos and goes to a gas station. He needs more funds, and this seems like the best place to get them. He doesn’t particularly want to shoot anyone, except the fuckers who crippled him, and if he’s lucky, he won’t have to.
He slips on the mask before he gets close enough to need to worry about cameras, and walks boldly up to the counter with his gun in hand.
‘Give me all your money!’ he orders, low and menacing, aiming right at the young clerk. His hand is dead steady, determination to survive and get his revenge burning hot inside him.
The clerk has clearly been robbed before, and he doesn’t make a fuss, or try and reach for a silent alarm. Ryan watches as the man puts the contents of the register into a plastic bag, his heart hammering in his chest.
When the register is empty, he takes the bag, forced to shove his right hand numbly through the handles because he can’t pick it up properly. Still, it works, and he turns and runs. He doesn’t want to shoot the clerk, but he doesn’t want to hang around and let the kid take a shot at him, either.
Down the street, he ducks into the archway of a bridge and hides his gun in the deep pocket of his coat. He pulls off the skull mask, puts it on top of the money, and stuffs the whole bag inside his shirt. With his coat closed over it, it looks like a beergut, and Ryan doesn’t plan on hanging around to let anyone examine it closely.
As calmly as he can, he walks out from the other side of the bridge, and goes to a bus stop several streets away.
He waits, forcing himself into stillness even when two police cars go howling past. When a cross-town bus arrives, he gets on. He buys a ticket, and settles into a seat on the half-empty bus, resting his face against the window and pretending to be exhausted, rather than buzzing with adrenaline.
Surely, surely, it can’t have been so easy?
He has calmed down a little by the time the bus reaches his own area, real exhaustion creeping past his buzz. He goes back to his motel, and no one even looks twice at him, just another young white guy making his way home.
The bag of money is satisfyingly heavy when he drops it on his bed, and when he counts it, he finds nearly two thousand dollars. He hasn’t seen that much money at once since he had to leave Rockford Hills.
I should’ve started robbing stores years ago, he thinks giddily, amazed by his own success. He’d thought it through, planned his route out, but overall it had been easier than he’d expected. He didn’t even have to shoot at anyone.
I can do this again, he thinks. It’s a strange way to make a living, but it seems to be one he can manage with one hand. He can’t ever go back to handling cards, Burns’ men have made sure of that, but it doesn’t take a lot of skill to hold a gun. He can survive.
~
Over the next three months, Ryan robs two gas stations and a liquor store, and manages not to kill anyone in the process. He switches motels after each incident, sticking to overcrowded parts of the city and the kind of cheap holes where people don’t ask questions, making sure he’s as unmemorable as possible.
In between the robberies, he spends time at a gun range, training himself to shoot left handed, and to handle throwing knives again. He no longer has to worry about damaging his valuable hands, so he joins a boxing club, and learns to throw a punch as well as taking one, training himself into using his left hand more than his naturally dominant right.
He’s making relatively good money from his robberies, so he signs up for a Krav Maga class as well. Some of the disarms and hold breaks are impossible, since he still can’t really move his right hand, but he learns enough to feel like it’s worth it. The brutality of the system appeals to him, scratching the faint itch for violence that’s taken root in him since he was injured.
It’s all going well, the pieces of his new life falling in to place, but then the inevitable happens. A robbery goes wrong.
‘Give me the money!’ Ryan growls at the clerk in an all-night liquor store.
The old man does as he says, starting to load the register into a plastic bag, but before he’s finished, the door opens.
A woman walks in, bulky headphones clamped over her ears, clearly not paying attention, but it drags Ryan’s eyes away from the clerk.
When he turns back, the man has a sawn-off shotgun in his hands, swinging it up to blast Ryan in the chest.
He reacts without thinking, pulling the trigger of his pistol and sending a bullet into the man’s throat. He falls back behind the counter, dropping the shotgun and clutching at his bubbling wound.
The woman screams, and Ryan panics. He shoots her in the head, cutting off the scream with a suddenness that feels like going deaf, and flees the store without any money.
There are no sirens, no one has yet discovered the bloody crime scene, but Ryan feels like a hunted man all the way home. He takes the long route back to his current motel, walking the concrete banks of the Los Santos River, lost in thought.
He killed two people. The clerk arguably deserved it, given that he was two seconds from shooting Ryan, but the woman was undoubtedly blameless. The thing is, Ryan is aware that he ought to feel terrible about it, but he doesn’t. He’s more numb than anything, faintly annoyed that he hadn’t even taken any money. He feels a little twinge of regret for the woman’s death, but he’s aware that it’s nowhere near the level of guilt that a good, moral person would be feeling after their first murders. Clearly, Ryan is not a good man.
It was so easy, he thinks, when he finally makes it home and sprawls out on his lumpy bed. One little motion, and they dropped. I could do that again.
He pulls the gun out of his jacket. The odds are that it had been used to kill before he stole it, but even knowing that he personally committed two murders with it doesn’t make it seem any different. It’s just a tool, and one that he’s getting pretty good with. He was always a good shot with a hunting rifle, before, and it hasn’t taken him too long to adjust to a handgun, or to shooting with his left hand. It only takes a single working finger to pull a trigger.
He looks around his dank little room and thinks longingly of living somewhere that doesn’t smell of mould and make his ruined bones ache because the AC is stuck too low. He dreams of perhaps getting somewhere close to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he would need to fix his hand.
I bet there’s more money in shooting people deliberately than accidentally, he thinks. The idea ought to be horrifying, but he finds it surprisingly easy to accept. He gunned down a woman for no reason at all – he’s pretty sure he could shoot someone for a paycheck.
He clumsily strips and cleans the gun, pinning the parts in place with his immobile hand, and stashes it under his pillow. He’s pretty sure he knows the kind of shady place where a novice hitman might find work – it’s much the same kind of bar where he’s spent far too many nights doing card tricks for cash.
He decides that once he’s rested, let the soured adrenaline wash out of his blood, he’ll go back out and start making a few enquiries.
~
To his amusement, it turns out that lurking in the darkest corner of a gang-infested dive bar wearing a black skull mask makes it surprisingly easy to get offered murder-work.
He gives his name as Vagabond, to the few men who bother to ask, finding the moniker suitably ominous, and fitting for a man who has had no real home in years. Ryan Haywood was run out of this particular bar months ago, and he daren’t show his face again, but Vagabond is new in town, looking to build a reputation.
He gets three offers in a single night, and takes a small cut of the offered money up front. It’s enough to keep his motel room and buy more ammunition, and he’s not expecting any of the hits to take long. All three are rival gangbangers, undeniably bad men who run with the Vagos in Davis and Rancho. Even if Ryan had any normal morals, he doubts he’d be bothered by shooting them.
He’s been given pictures of his targets, and it takes him less than two days to track down the first man. Ryan trails him into an alley and puts a bullet cleanly into the back of his skull. He takes a swift photo on a burner phone and is gone before anyone comes to investigate, walking calmly away while the neighbourhood explodes behind him – not literally, of course, though that thought does sound interesting when he considers it.
Something to bear in mind, he thinks, sending the picture to the member of The Lost who ordered the hit. He was right – it was easy. As he waits for confirmation from his contact, he feels nothing at all for the man he just murdered.
He collects his money from a courier, a young man in leather who doesn’t even get off his bike, just pulls up next to Ryan on the darkened beach and hands over a crumpled paper bag.
It contains more money than Ryan’s had in years, and he moves to a better motel that same night. As soon as he gets into his new room he turns the heat right up, preferring to lie and sweat rather than ache with the cold.
He runs down both of the other targets within two weeks, and uses some of the blood money to buy a back-up gun and a handful of grenades. He seems to have a good temperament for contract killing, patient and unflinching, and if he means to keep doing it, he’d better start building up a proper arsenal. He stashes most of the rest of the bills, starting a hoard that he hopes will one day be enough to buy the surgery he needs.
In the meantime, he’s sure there must be something that can help him hurt less and move his fingers more. There’s only one person he knows in Los Santos who might be able to help him, so he returns to Pillbox Hill.
It takes a couple of days of lurking to ascertain which car he wants, but when he has, it isn’t hard to break in. Old cars are always vulnerable to the trusty wire down the window.
When the doctor’s shift finally ends, late on Thursday night, he’s waiting quietly in the back seat.
‘Hello, Dr Denecour,’ Ryan says, when she’s closed her door.
She swears, but doesn’t scream, and his respect for the doctor goes up a notch.
‘What the hell do you want?’ she asks, only a little shaky, turning to look at him in the blueish lights of the parking lot.
‘Let’s say I can’t afford surgery right now. What can I do instead?’ he asks, holding up his hands.
Her eyes widen in recognition, either of his face, or his misshapen hand.
‘You broke into my car to ask that? The hospital is ten feet away!’
‘Which would be great, if I had insurance, or the money to clear my last bill,’ he counters. He could pay it with what’s stashed under his bed, but he’s damned if he’ll give that hard-won money back to the system. ‘I know you helped me more than you had to, and I’m really grateful for it. I wondered if I could prevail upon you to help a little more. I can pay you for your time.’
‘I can’t get you in for surgery under the radar. It just doesn’t work like that,’ she says.
‘I know, doc, I’m not asking for that,’ Ryan assures her. ‘Just, what can I do to improve without it?’
He wiggles his fingers the bare inch they’ll move, looking at her wide-eyed and hopeful.
The doctor stares at him, visibly torn between telling him to leave and wanting to help.
Ryan just waits. He knew that breaking into her car was a risk, but he doesn’t hang around in public unless he must, too wary of old enemies, and he wanted a captive audience.
It was a calculated decision; he knows that without the skull mask that’s already gathering a reputation, he doesn’t look like a threat. His golden hair is growing out, almost long enough that he can start tying it back, making him look soft and angelic, and his blue eyes are beautiful, if you don’t look closely enough to see the ice that has formed in their depths.
He knows his looks have helped him stay out of trouble, helped him avoid the notice of the cops who’re looking for some stereotypical scumbag to pin for the recent trouble.
Dr Denecour bites her lip, staring at him, and when she nods, he cracks a little smile.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ she warns. ‘I remember how messed up your fingers were. Just... don’t kill me if you don’t get what you want.’
Ryan nods. It’s hardly surprising that she assumes he’s some kind of criminal. Hands don’t mangle themselves, and most people who drop into the Pillbox Hill Medical Centre without insurance are on the wrong side of the law.
He’s certainly done a lot of terrible things lately, but he thinks Dr Denecour is one of the rare citizens of Los Santos who is genuinely good, rather than just lawful. He doesn’t want to hurt her.
‘You have my word, doc.’
The doctor sighs. ‘You know where I work, and what my car looks like. Is it safe to assume that you know where I live, too?’
‘I could find out,’ Ryan assures her.
‘That’s not as comforting as you think,’ she says wryly. ‘Let me save you the hassle. 780 Constance Boulevard. Come and see me there, and I’ll take a look at your hands. We’ll talk money when I know if I can actually help you.’
‘Today?’ Ryan says.
‘God, please no. I’ve been on shift for thirty-six hours. I’m off all weekend, give me time to be human again.’
‘Thank you,’ Ryan says, and genuinely means it.
~
On Saturday, he goes and finds the address. It’s a tiny house on the outskirts of the city, a single storey with a narrow porch and bright blue and white paint on the wooden sidings. The neighbourhood is quiet, with white picket fences and kids’ bicycles left on the grassy lawns, as genteel as it gets in Los Santos. Ryan is glad that he left the mask at home.
The doorbell sweetly chimes the Westminster Quarters when he presses it, and it doesn’t take long for the doctor to answer.
‘Good afternoon,’ Ryan says politely, and waits for her to invite him in. He might be a murderer, but he was raised a good Georgia boy, once upon a time. Manners are a habit.
Dr Denecour is wearing a long, green cotton dressing gown and pyjama pants, and her blonde hair is mussed. It looks as though she has only recently got out of bed despite the fact that it’s mid afternoon. Long shifts must really mess with her sleeping patterns.
‘You drink coffee?’ she offers, when he’s sat on an over-stuffed couch in the tiny living room.
‘I do, thanks. Cream and one sugar,’ Ryan says, and gazes around the room as she vanishes into the adjacent kitchen. Her trust is odd, but he supposes that she doesn’t have much to fear from him. He could have murdered her in the car, if he was going to, and there’s nothing in the room that looks worth stealing, to his untrained eye. He never was a burglar. The furniture is old and heavy, fabrics floral patterned, unusual for someone so young.
‘Is this really your house?’ he asks, taking the cup of coffee when she passes it over the back of the couch.
‘It was my grandmother’s, until last year,’ the doctor says, looking around the room, recognising the outdated look of the decor. ‘I haven’t bothered changing much, I’m barely here.’
‘Sorry,’ Ryan says, just in case it’s a sore subject, and Dr Denecour shrugs.
‘We weren’t close. Now, let me see your hand?’
Ryan puts his coffee on the low, dark-wood table and holds out both hands.
The doctor sits in the armchair catty-corner from him, leaning forward with the gleam of a puzzle-solver in her eye.
‘Flex your fingers?’
Ryan tries, gritting his teeth against the tight, aching pain. He’s got perhaps an inch of movement in his fingers, and slightly more with his thumb.
Dr Denecour doesn’t look hopeful, and Ryan tries not to let her frown dismay him too much.
‘You don’t want to hear it, I know, but you’re never going to move it normally, not without surgery.’
She takes his right hand in hers, feeling each finger in turn and shaking her head.
‘Feel the lumps around the joints, here, here, and here?’ she says, squeezing the second knuckles of his middle and ring fingers, and the third knuckle of his little finger. She’s gentle, but the pressure still hurts, except on his numb ring finger.
‘Those are fused solid where the bones were crushed. You’d need the joints reconstructed.’
She keeps going, flexing the other joints, looking for what little can be improved.
‘Maybe these others will loosen up, if we work on them. The tendons are probably shorter than they used to be, but your range could be better than this with regular physiotherapy,’ she says, bending his thumb in towards his palm until Ryan can’t help but hiss in pain. ‘I can’t promise anything, though, and it’ll hurt.’
‘It hurts anyway,’ Ryan says roughly.
The doctor nods. ‘Poorly healed bones and post traumatic arthritis. You’ll probably always hurt, I’m afraid, though if you can get me some cortisone I can give you injections that’ll help. Again, surgery would really be your best option.’
‘I can get any drug you need, doc,’ Ryan promises.
Dr Denecour hums in agreement. ‘In this city, I believe it. What are you on at the moment?’
‘Nothing,’ Ryan tells her. ‘I took the painkillers you gave me at the hospital until they ran out, but I haven’t had any since. They make me feel like a zombie.’
It’s been tempting, on nights when he aches terribly and can’t sleep, to go and find someone dealing heroin or black-market hydrocodone, but addiction isn’t a road he wants to go down. He’s seen what happens to drug users.
‘You’d rather have your head clear than hurt less, I understand,’ Dr Denecour says. ‘Is there anything you’ve found that helps instead?’
‘Heat,’ he tells her. ‘Hot showers, and turning up the heat in my room until I’m sweating.’
‘Good. That’ll help keep you loosened up for physiotherapy. I’d recommend you get some heat packs, too. Actually,’ she cuts herself off. ‘Let me look, I might have a couple.’
She disappears down the hall to what Ryan assumes is the bedroom, and he hears cardboard boxes being shuffled around.
He sips his coffee and tries to ignore the lapping waves of misery. It’s worse news than he’d dared to hope. Unlikely as it was, he’d somehow hoped that the doctor would have a quick fix that would get him most of his dexterity back. Instead, he’s staring down a long and painful road, with no promises at its end.
You knew this, he tells himself, as sharply as he can manage. You knew the moment you saw what that fucker’s boot had done. You won’t get your own hand back. All you can do is get back one that works at least a little.
Dr Denecour comes back with several small cloth bags in her hands.
‘My grandmother had arthritis. I didn’t think I’d thrown these out,’ she says and drops them in Ryan’s lap.
The bags are heavy, and move as though they’re full of tiny beads. As Ryan scrunches one, a faint scent of lavender rises out of the soft cloth.
‘They’re wheat bags. Put one in the microwave for about 90 seconds and it’ll act as a heat pack for at least an hour. Most people say it helps with pain.’
Ryan chuckles. ‘I’d heard of them for old people. Never occurred to me to get one for myself.’
The doctor smiles. ‘Well, you’re a young man. I understand why you wouldn’t make that leap.’
‘I think I’m older than you,’ Ryan says. ‘Obviously you know your shit, but you look too young to be a doctor.’
Dr Denecour laughs outright at that. ‘Trust me, I’m older than I look. I’ve been around the block a few times, and so have you, I’d imagine. People don’t get their hands smashed like that by accident.’
She’s not wrong.
‘I used to hustle cards, and darts, and dice,’ Ryan admits. ‘I can count cards, so I did pretty damn well at blackjack, until the casinos caught on. Then I went into rigging poker games – just an extra card here and there if things weren’t going my way. Pretty much all my skills relied on fast hands, so someone decided to ruin them.’
‘So what do you do now?’
‘Now I’m a very bad man,’ Ryan says flatly. It’s a fact, not an opinion. He’s killed five people in less than a month, and at least one of them didn’t deserve it. He plans to kill more, if someone will pay him for it.
The doctor hums, and doesn’t push the point. She’s not naive, but there’s a wide gulf between knowing in theory that she’s helping a criminal, and knowing the grim details of exactly what he does.
‘What do I owe you, doc?’ Ryan asks, stuffing the wheat bags in his coat pocket. It seems wise to leave before she gets squirrelly about helping him.
‘A couple of hundred, maybe? Let me show you a few exercises for your hand first,’ she says, apparently unfazed by his admission. There doesn’t seem to be much that rattles the doctor, and he likes that.
She hasn’t done medicine off the books before, Ryan thinks, as she teaches him some gentle stretches that might, with time, let him move some of his joints again. She has no idea how much to ask for.
He could take advantage of that fact, but he isn’t inclined to do so. Dr Denecour’s good will is probably the most valuable asset he has.
When he finally leaves, his hand aching horribly but feeling looser than usual, he presses a thousand dollars into her palm.
‘Really?’ she says, fanning out the bills.
‘I owe you,’ Ryan says simply. ‘Right now, all I can do is give you a little extra money, if you don’t mind where I got it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do more.’
Dr Denecour hesitates for a long moment, looking at his earnest face, and the money in her hands.
‘Okay then,’ she says at last, tucking the money into the pocket of her dressing gown. ‘Looks like you’ve got yourself a doctor. Any time you get into trouble, you can come here.’
‘I won’t bring any trouble with me, doc,’ Ryan promises.
Dr Denecour smiles. ‘I’d appreciate that.’
~
With three successful hits to his name, Vagabond has no trouble picking up more work. Ryan plans his strikes, takes his time, and gets away from the next four murders without any trouble at all.
None of the deaths trouble him. If not for his aching bones, he’d sleep just fine. He has a routine during the days; Krav Maga and boxing, practice at the gun range, and surveillance for his next kill. The rest of the time, he holes up in his motel room and reads, or watches television, or does his physiotherapy exercises, working on getting back what function he can. He goes back to Dr Denecour occasionally, when his downtime coincides with a decent break from her long shifts at the hospital.
It isn’t until his fourth visit that Dr Denecour gets sick of being addressed as “doc” in her own home.
‘It’s Dr Denecour, or Caleb, but not doc,’ she says, carefully injecting tiny measures of cortisone into his aching joints. ‘Who are you, Bugs Bunny?’
‘Caleb?’ Ryan asks, one eyebrow raised.
Fortunately for him, she is too professional to hurt him as punishment for his sass.
‘I was supposed to be a boy, now drop it, Vagabond.’
Ryan can’t really argue with that. On the scale of odd names, his alter-ego certainly wins. What does surprise him is that Caleb has heard his other name.
‘Why did you call me Vagabond?’ he asks, as casually as he can manage.
Caleb sets down the used needle and rolls her eyes. ‘I hear all sorts of things, working shifts in the ER. I’ve heard bikers from The Lost talking about a new hitman these past few weeks. They haven’t seen his face, but he’s tall, slim, well-spoken, and apparently left handed, since he never uses his right hand...’
Ryan flushes, suddenly afraid that his identity is far easier to guess than he thought.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Caleb says, seeing his fear. She pats his knuckles gently. ‘I really doubt anyone else would put it together. You don’t spend much time with anyone else, do you?’
Ryan snorts. ‘I don’t spend any time with anyone else.’
‘It’s fine then. You’re safe here, Vagabond.’
The name is almost fond on her tongue, and Ryan smiles, grateful for her absolute calm.
‘I’m surprised you don’t mind more,’ he says, unable to drop the subject without testing his footing just a little.
Caleb gives him a grim smile. ‘You didn’t grow up in Los Santos, did you?’
‘No.’
‘If you had, you’d understand, I think. Moral rules are different here. I don’t care that you kill people. I care that someone hurt you, and you’re in pain, and perhaps I can help. I care that when you’re here, you’re good company. You’ve never threatened me. I’m in more danger with half the people who come into the ER than I’m in when I’m alone with you.’
‘I owe you,’ Ryan tells her. ‘I kept my hand because of you.’
‘Sure, but debts like that don’t mean much to most people. You care, and that’s why I’m not worried. Your compass is no more broken than anyone else’s, in this city.’
‘Most people don’t kill people. You don’t.’
Caleb laughs, and it’s hollow, cold.
‘I’m a doctor, of course I kill people!’
‘Accidentally.’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes, well, they weren’t good people...’ Her blue eyes are bright and steady, and deeper than he’s ever noticed before. ‘Who’s to say a helping hand to get an abusive drunk into a coffin instead of his wife isn’t helping, in the end?’
Ryan feels a shiver go through him. A killer doctor is the kind of story horror films are made from, isn’t it?
But you know her. You decided from the start that she was one of the good ones. She’s still one of the good ones, you just have a little more in common than you thought, he reasons.
‘Good for you,’ he says eventually, and she laughs with genuine amusement.
~
A full year after Burns’ thugs smashed his hands, Ryan finally feels ready to take them on. He’s trained himself to fight, learned how to find people in the underbelly of Los Santos, and how to kill with guns and explosives and knives without so much as flinching. He’s got a reputation that sends gangbangers running at the sight of a black skull mask. He’s got a deadly doctor on his side, and as much motion in his fingers as he’ll ever get without surgery. It’s time to take his revenge.
He returns to Vespucci Beach, carrying his mask and a gun in his pockets. It proves laughably easy to find the thugs he’s looking for. Three of them, minus the man who’d actually smashed his hand, are working their way down the strip of beachfront bars, collecting protection money from the bartenders. Clearly, nothing much has changed for them in the past year.
Ryan meets them under the orange light of a street lamp, calling out to get them to stop when they don’t immediately recognise him.
‘Hey, where’s your friend?’
‘What friend?’ one of them asks, scowling.
‘Hispanic guy. Hench as fuck, really ugly tattoos on his biceps.’
‘He got capped a couple of months ago,’ the biggest guy tells him, looking angry at being asked. ‘Who the fuck wants to know?’
Ryan swallows down disappointment. He can’t even kill the guy, some other asshole got there first.
‘Do you recognise me?’ he asks, holding up his still visibly misshapen hand.
They all look blank for a moment, then the wiry bald guy lights up.
‘Shit, ain’t you that card sharp guy?
‘Oh yeah!’ his friend agrees. ‘Hayfield, or something? What the fuck are you doing back here? Want me to break the other hand?’
Ryan clenches his teeth. It stings beyond words that they barely remember a beating which utterly derailed his life.
‘No, that’s not why I came to find you,’ he says, letting the bottled rage of endless pain finally, finally start to well up in his chest. He turns slightly away from the clueless trio, pulling on his mask with practised speed before he faces them again.
‘Recognise me now?’ he growls, through Vagabond’s grinning skull.
‘Holy fuck!’
There’s a frozen moment which Ryan will savour for the rest of his life, the three men realising that the infamous Vagabond is a man they personally tried to take apart. It was a risk, showing his face and his mask in the same encounter, but he wanted them to know him – as who he was, and who he has become. The sudden fear in their eyes is the sweetest thing he’s seen all year.
Ryan reaches for his gun, and the moment breaks. Two of the men turn and run. The other draws a pistol and backs away, firing wildly at Ryan.
Most of the bullets miss. One embeds itself in his upper right arm like a red-hot poker sinking through his muscle.
Ryan howls in pain, but it doesn’t stop him. He’s used to pain, used to working with just his left hand. He aims, relishing the clarity of the moment, and shoots the man right between the eyes.
There are voices crying out from the nearby bars, faces peeking around the darkened doorways, but Ryan doesn’t care about any of them.
He takes careful aim after the two fleeing men, breathing easy, letting them become targets down at the range, and squeezes off two shots.
Both men fall, screaming, one bullet in each of them. They’re wounded, writhing on the sidewalk, but not dead.
Ryan paces down the street, feeling invincible despite the blood running down his arm, feeling like an outlaw strolling through a desert town while the residents cower in fear.
The closest man is scrabbling for his gun when Ryan reaches him. A shot to the hand quickly puts paid to that, and Ryan has the surreal experience of watching someone else look at the ruined meat where their fingers should be and start screaming.
He can’t help it, he starts laughing, loud and unhinged, echoing down the beach until the crashing waves drown it out.
‘Please!’ the man cries, trying to cradle his hand close without taking the other off the wound in his thigh. Every movement makes him scream again.
Ryan watches, grinning behind the mask. He lets him beg and scream for a minute, the sounds going breathless and thready, then shoots him in the head and walks on.
The other man is bleeding heavily from his stomach, laid out on his back, too weak to muster up a fight when Ryan reaches him.
‘Fuck you,’ he rasps, when Ryan looks down at him.
Ryan just cocks his head to the side, watching the thug’s expression flicker as he tries to hide fear behind bravado and fails.
Ryan waits until fear and anticipation have spread across the man’s face, then lifts his foot and stamps on his head. He’s wearing heavy boots, purchased specially for the occasion.
With his full weight behind the stomp, it doesn’t take long to cave in the man’s skull, leaving him gurgling and bubbling blood through mangled airways. What’s left of him barely looks human, and Ryan takes a good long look, taking in what he’s done, what his vengeance has wrought. The gurgling stops, and he turns and walks away.
Sirens follow him, but he doesn’t run, just makes his way calmly down the beach and vanishes into the dark ocean like a ghost.
It’s a short swim north to Del Perro Pier, even with his right arm useless and bloody. There, he gets into the car he’d left waiting, wraps a cloth firmly around his arm to stem the bleeding and drives towards Caleb’s house.
The doctor is asleep in the back bedroom when he lets himself in, but he wakes her by fumbling with the massive first aid kit in the kitchen. Over the past few months what seems like half the ER has made its way home with Dr Denecour, and there are more than enough supplies to dig a bullet out of Ryan’s biceps.
‘Let me, idiot,’ she says with a yawn, shuffling into the kitchen while he’s trying to one-handedly tear open a sterile pair of tweezers.
‘What happened?’ she asks, as she sprays him with numbing agent and starts patching him up.
‘I finally went for the guys who broke me. The worst of them was already dead,’ he says, and he can’t hide how much that fact annoys him. It feels like being cheated.
‘I assume the others are also dead, now?’
Ryan grins. ‘Super dead. It’ll probably make the news. If Vagabond didn’t have a reputation before, he sure as shit does now.’
Caleb just hums, setting aside the extracted bullet and pulling out a suture kit.
‘Is it over, then?’ she asks eventually.
Ryan thinks about it while she puts in a couple of neat stitches.
‘It doesn’t feel like it’s over,’ he says slowly. ‘The guy was dead, but he was just some thug. Rooster Teeth made me what I am. I think I’ll go and burn their kingdom down.’
Caleb chuckles. ‘Well, you like people to match their names, don’t you?’
Ryan grins, feeling affection for his murderous doctor rise like a bubble in his chest. ‘I do. Let’s see how well Burnie burns, shall we?’