by R. B. Schow
He spun the notepad around and slid it her way. She read it, frowned then started to laugh like she thought it was funny.
“Well look at that,” he said. “You have a great smile. If the cops don’t come, you should still use it.”
“You’re married,” she replied, crumbling it and tossing it in the trashcan. “Besides, I didn’t see anything, so the cops can earn their salary by figuring things out on their own.”
“This isn’t a wedding ring,” he said, showing her the ring. “It’s a female deterrent for when I’m at the gym.”
“Sure it is,” she said.
“He told us he was married,” the brunette said.
Turning to her, he replied, “See, the deterrent even works in bars.”
Outside, he called his investigator and said, “I need a ride from the Rum Runner. It’s a dive bar on the corner of N 7th and E. Butler. It shares a wall with Kosher Meat Fish & Deli. You can’t miss it. Big red sign, says—”
“Kosher Meat Fish & Deli?” his investigator said.
“Bingo. It’s directly across from Rainbow’s Barber Shop and El Bravo, which is Mexican food, I think. God, that sounds good right now”
“I know where it’s at,” he grumbled. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Five minutes would be better.”
The man hung up then Scotty went out front and took four pictures of his car and one of the dead cat. The ASU kid walked outside with his friends, saw the damage to his Blazer, then stalked over to Scotty and said, “Where are the guys who did this?”
“They were lying on the ground about five feet from where you’re standing. Just follow the blood drops, maybe you’ll find them.”
“Man, they did a number on your car,” the blonde with the college idiot said.
“Yeah, well…”
“You should probably pay your bills better,” the brunette said.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” he asked. “I can’t hear you through those thin lips.”
When his investigator, Jackson Burke, arrived to pick him up, he got in the car right away. “Thanks man, I owe you one.”
“You still owe me four grand for the last job. Should I put this on the tab?”
“I’m sorry about that, man,” Scotty said sheepishly. “Tough times these days.”
“If you added up all your bar bills and actually made good on the money you owe me, how much of a dent into the four grand do you think you’d make?”
“A sizable one,” he said.
“At least you still know how to tell the truth.”
“Yeah, I remember that much.”
“Do you have any jobs on the horizon?” Jackson asked.
“Not really. Last I spoke with Leopold, he said most of his work was internationally based, and since the borders were shut down and travel restricted, he’s been sitting on his hands.”
“The border is open now,” Jackson said. “It’s WIDE open if you talk to anyone working for Border Patrol.”
“Maybe we’ll get a call then,” he said.
“Let’s hope.”
Jackson pulled up to the curb in front of Scotty’s house and said, “What’s she going to do?”
“Carly?” he asked. Jackson nodded. “About the time, the blood, or me still being drunk?”
“All of the above.”
“Well, she can’t sleep with my friend again,” Scotty said. “So what do I care?”
“She can always sleep with your friend again,” Jackson said.
“He’s not my friend anymore, so if she’s still doing him, it’s just some dude she’s banging on the side.”
“When did you become so pathetic?” Jackson asked, not a hint of humor in his voice.
“Depends on the date and the circumstances.”
“Leave her already,” he said as Scotty shut the door. Jackson rolled down the window because he wasn’t done talking. “Look at how badly you’ve let your life spin out of control over this broad.”
Turning around, he said, “True love can sometimes snip your nuts, Jackson. Maybe one day you’ll find that out.”
“Hopefully not the hard way,” he said before pulling away from the curb.
Inside, Scotty was as quiet as he could be, knowing Carly was sound asleep. He took off his shoes, slid off his pants, and laid down on the couch. It was uncomfortable but it was better than the asphalt he had been laid out on earlier, a lot more comfortable.
Later, when the phone rang, he saw that it was Leopold calling and thank God! But the way his head hurt, the way his entire body hurt, every single word Leopold said to him over the phone felt like a gunshot to his skull. He couldn’t keep this kind of pace anymore.
It was time to change.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
LEOPOLD WENTWORTH
Leopold gave Kiera a pair of black Jackie-O sunglasses and a floppy hat to wear, as well as a COVID mask and a sweatshirt. After that, the two of them walked through the airport’s concourse where they mixed in with the growing throng of travelers.
Unobstructed, hopefully unnoticed, they followed the signs to short-term parking. The Audi was exactly where he expected it to be and he found the key easily. They got inside the vehicle and Leopold fired up the four-hundred-fifty horsepower, twin-turbo V8. The throaty purr was music to his ears.
“Buckle up,” he said to Kiera who was ignoring the beeping sound.
She put on the seatbelt, took off the glasses and the hat, and then sat there quietly while he found his way to the freeway.
When he got an opening, Leopold stepped on the accelerator, launching them forward with a ferocious roar. A huge smile overtook his face. “If you don’t just love the sound of that, you’re not a true adrenaline junky.”
Grinning, he looked over at Kiera who was looking forward without a smile. The childish smile fell from his face in no time flat. “If I were the car, I’d be offended by your behavior.”
She said nothing.
“I met this cold fish a few weeks back,” he said. “Right before I ate it, the fish and I had the most splendid conversation, and do you know what the fish said?”
Not one single discernible muscle moved on the girl’s face. She might as well be caught in a waking coma.
“The fish said, ‘No matter what you think of me, I’m still a better conversationalist than Kiera the human robot.’”
He looked over at her as he said this.
Still nothing.
“And then I ate that fish with whole grain rice and a nice bottle of Chianti.” With her still refusing to budge, he said, “You’re officially freaking me out.”
He had already loaded an address into the phone; he just needed to let Google know he was ready to go. A single push of a button activated the audible navigation. The nearly-human voice gave him the first of the directions that would take them to a liquor mart.
With GPS technology allowing the tracking of cell phones and cars, the last thing he wanted to do was be on someone’s radar with his personal phone. He was still amazed at how the right people could not only reconstruct a crime scene but back-trace the movements of potential suspects. Whatever the case, he wasn’t going to be one of those Dateline Investigations. He was smarter than that. At least, he hoped he was smarter than that.
Neither of them said a word until they reached the liquor store. When he arrived at the store, he pulled the small faraday case from his pocket—the one he kept his cell phone in when he wasn’t using it or expecting a call—and then he slid his phone inside, making it undetectable from the cell phone towers and the ever-prying eyes of the NSA.
From the liquor mart, he drove the last mile to Gill Franklin’s home. He had already memorized directions from the liquor store so finding the place was easy.
Slowing down to drive by the house, he took in as many details as he could. The house looked weathered, the lawn was dead, and his front door was two different colors, red and green. Frowning, it was almost as if someone had replace
d a broken section with the same door of another color and just didn’t paint it to match.
“Have some pride in your place, dumb-ass,” he mumbled.
The Audi was definitely too nice for the neighborhood so they parked it around the corner and walked along the side of the fence that belonged to their target. Gill Franklin was a single, overweight man with no priors but he did have a rather long job and residence history. According to Codrin, this latest house was a rental with his mother as a co-signer.
Looking around, the neighborhood was quiet, save for a few barking dogs and some lady in her backyard on her phone reading someone the riot act.
“Bottoms up,” he said to Kiera as he hopped the fence.
She was over the fence and in Gill’s backyard before he’d even hauled himself over, which made him feel two very specific things. One, he felt confident that when it was go time, Kiera was a loaded gun with the safety off and two, he felt slow and inadequate. He was a businessman who was relatively active while she was a ruthless, heartless, highly-skilled assassin. Was he in over his head here?
Kiera met him at the back door. He tried the knob; it was locked. He wiped the metal surface with his shirt, then turned to Kiera and said, “Any ideas?”
She pushed her elbow against the small pane of glass, applying more and more force but slowly and methodically. The four-inch by six-inch surface of glass finally made a small popping sound as it spider-webbed. Kiera then narrowed the point of pressure, breaking out a small triangle of glass. When the glass hit the floor inside, it was a small enough piece that it didn’t make much noise.
She reached in through the opening in the small windowpane and began pulling the other triangles of glass out of the frame, laying them side by side on the dead grass behind them. When she was done and the window was clear, she wiped each panel where her fingerprints showed, then stomped on them, breaking them into a hundred little pieces.
Without comment, or even a look, she reached inside, opened the door then waited for the sounds of an alarm or a dog. Other than the stuffy, offensive gust of pot-smoke-tinged air, there were only the faint sounds of snoring.
The two of them crept inside checking the nearby walls for the keypad to an alarm system. There was none. He wasn’t ruling out a silent alarm. Kiera, on the other hand, seemed to be checking for some sort of booby-trap system. Guys like Gill Franklin, sometimes they Jimmy-rigged a home security system or set a homemade trap for people like Kiera.
Fortunately for them, Gill was neither smart nor worried.
They made their way into the back of the house where Gill lay in bed over the sheets in a pair of old boxers and a dirty tee-shirt. He was like a beached whale in boxers and a wife-beater. Next to him on the comforter, Leopold saw a half-eaten package of Keebler shortbread cookies. Sitting on his dirty white tank top and in an explosion of curly black chest hair were a handful of tiny cookie crumbs.
“See, this is how it starts,” he said to Kiera. “Eating cookies in bed.”
She looked at him and it wasn’t a pleasant look.
“Have some pride,” he whispered.
Going back to work, he compared the man to the photo Codrin had sent him. He felt confident they were the same person. When he turned to give Kiera the thumbs up, she was nowhere to be found. Then he heard her in the kitchen running the faucet. A moment later, she returned with a metal saucepan full of water.
She looked at Leopold; he gave her a confident nod of approval. She tossed the water at Gill’s face, waking him instantly. The second he shot up in bed, Kiera spun the saucepan around and struck him on the forehead with the flat, copper bottom.
The loud clang of metal striking bone was a satisfying sound to everyone but Gill who was now wiping water out of his eyes and holding a bleeding head.
“What the hell?” he asked, still half-asleep and unable to sit up past his belly.
“Yesterday, you helped a van cross the border illegally, Mr. Franklin,” Leopold said. “I’d like to know who arranged this and who paid you.”
“If you guys are from ICE or border patrol, I already told my supervisor what I did. That’s why I’m still in bed. I’m on indefinite leave pending an investigation.”
“We’re not with any authorities,” Leopold said. “Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know his name,” he said, pulling his hand away and seeing a spot of blood. “The money was in my mailbox when I got home. Five hundred, cash. A courier delivered it I think.”
“Who did you speak with to set this up?”
“An old guy with a scratchy voice, that’s all I know. He was a short-tempered prick, but five hundo is five hundo.”
Kiera took a snow globe off the nightstand next to him and smashed Gill in the face with it. He howled out loud and held the side of his head which was bleeding profusely. Leopold shot her a nasty look. She was interrupting a civilized conversation with the kind of unnecessary violence he wasn’t exactly digging.
But instead of challenging her, he turned to Gill and said, “My friend thinks you’re holding back. If you don’t stop bullshitting us, she’ll find a way to shove that snow globe up your ass. Think about it. It’ll be like having a baby in reverse, but the baby will basically be broken glass in your butthole. Every time you fart, you’ll have to check your underwear for blood-stained glass. This will go on for weeks, maybe even months.”
The man was crying now, the cut on his head bleeding like a faucet. He propped himself up against the headboard, prompting Kiera to come within striking distance of him. Leopold didn’t think the guy was dangerous, though.
Glancing at the two of them, Gill saw the looks on their faces and decided it was time to come clean.
“I heard maybe there was another guy involved,” he said, startled by the sight of so much blood but terrified not to answer right away. “The courier and I are friends from grade school. That’s how I got the job. He told me the dude who paid him worked for the scratchy-voiced guy. My friend said the dude was a damn Fed.”
“A Fed?”
“Yeah, man. FBI.”
“The scratchy-voiced man?”
“No, my buddy paid the FBI guy. I think the Fed works for the scratchy-voiced man.”
“How did he know he’s a Fed?” Leopold asked.
The pot smoke was starting to give Leopold a headache and the continued flow of blood from Gill’s head was concerning. There was a lot of blood, it wasn’t slowing, and it was getting everywhere.
“This dude took down Anthony ‘La Hoja’ Martinez last year,” Gill said. “La Hoja was apparently trying to help the Sinaloa Cartel get a foothold in El Paso. But the FBI guy and his team took the whole El Paso organization down as a message to the Sinaloa Cartel to stay the hell out of Texas.”
“Does he have the guy’s name?” Leopold asked. “The Fed?”
“My buddy has it, but I have it, too. If you just walk away, let me deal with the shit storm of consequences I’m already facing, I’ll tell you who he is.”
He looked at Kiera who appeared docile for the moment. “Deal,” Leopold said.
“Agent Otis Fykes.”
Leopold committed the name to memory. Then he said, “Why did you ruin your whole career for five hundred bucks.”
Gill laughed then said, “First off, that’s not a career. And second, all the guys take cash for suspicious transactions.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“You’re leaving America for Mexico,” Gill said, looking at the blood again, his face a bit drawn. “Most guys try to give you a Benji, but a hundred bucks isn’t even the going rate. Now, for five hundred? Oh, yeah. You could have the president wrapped in plastic in your back seat and every one of those guys would take the cash and let you through.”
Shaking his head, Leopold said, “I remember when we used to love our country, when patriotism meant something, when you guys actually gave a damn about the border.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t like that now. Because if o
ur own government doesn’t care about the border, why should we?”
“Great attitude,” Leopold said.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, mister,” Gill said. “I’m getting concerned about the bleeding, guys. Can I like, get something for this? A tee-shirt or something?”
Leopold turned and gave Kiera a nod, and without pause, she threw a blade-edged side kick into Gill Franklin’s throat so hard and with so much force, the popping sound of things breaking made Leopold jump.
Gill was slammed back against the headboard, his head then dipping forward far enough to hang over his injured neck. Gagging, he slowly tried to reach for his throat. And the head wound? It was an open spout at this point.
Before Leopold could react, Kiera followed up with a spinning heel kick that hit the side of Gill’s neck so hard and with such precision, it visibly broke, his head lolling over sideways, the look of it sick and unnatural. Without a word, Kiera looked right at Leopold with that flaccid, thousand-yard stare.
Unnerved by her and shaking inside from the outburst of violence, he wondered if she was this savage in Russia and Ukraine or if she had somehow become faster and more lethal over the last six months. Only Atlas would know, and maybe Cira. But judging by Kiera’s training in Virginia with Savannah Swann, he figured she was fast becoming the kind of asset Monarch Industries created for men with far larger bank accounts than he possessed.
“Let’s go,” he said trying to play cool. “I have calls to make.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
YERGHA MUGHERI
Yergha crept up on the house that Codrin had identified for him as the target home. He saw the shot-up Suburban parked around the side of the house along with a whole host of other cars in the driveway in front of it. Not a single vehicle was nearly as nice as the Suburban. In fact, most of them looked like nineties wrecks with faded paint, old wheels, and untold amounts of physical wear and tear.
He drove by the house, down the block, and around the corner where he pulled over and parked. Then, he wiggled painfully back into his vest. Breathing deeply, the vest tight, his fear at an all-time high, he said, “She’s probably getting raped right now.”
