The Last Savage

by Sam Jones

  The guy in the driver’s seat, a strapping and broad-chested Latino man hailing from El Paso, turned to Billy and said, “That’s South Florida for you.”

  Billy didn’t reply. He just looked in contempt at the Mercury’s AC that was offering him zero relief. He was currently sans cardigan, sporting only a slightly soaked tank top under a red Hawaiian shirt. Faded jeans were in the mix, and topping it all off were his Nikes with the red swish—all in all, a breezy outfit, but the incessant humidity that night made Billy feel like he was wearing layer upon layer.

  Next to him in the driver’s seat was his partner for the day: Special Agent Mikey Santoro, sweating his ass off and wondering how late the night would go as he and Billy waited for a pair of drug dealers to show up and strike up a deal with them.

  But Billy was a little on edge. He didn’t trust the clowns they were linking up with, or the guy that set up the meet.

  Not one bit…

  He checked his watch. “Where are these guys?”

  “Dizzy said they’re always late,” Santoro said.

  “That’s no bueno.”

  “They’re drug dealers. What’d you expect?”

  Billy took a glance around the neighborhood—the place had plenty of green lawns and palm trees all around; there were a few apartment complexes, and the rest were houses. All of it shrouded in the darkness of night with nothing but a few dull glows from porch lights cutting through it. But the bright neon lights glowing like beacons inside the city off to the west was hard to miss. Even from this distance, Billy could practically feel the beats of Billy Idol and Madonna bouncing off the walls of the nightclubs and dance halls, the pulse of the neon-drenched city reverberating through the town like the beat of a tribal drum.

  Billy motioned around the neighborhood. “Whose area is this again?” he asked.

  Santoro looked over. “What do you mean?”

  “Whose neighborhood is this? Who runs it? A specific gang? A dealer? An old-timey barbershop quartet?”

  “No, it’s neutral territory. Why?”

  “Just want to make sure that no one is going to come running out and start poppin’ off shots at us if this thing goes south. Last thing I want is to get killed by someone’s lackey cousin trying to run interference for these bozos we’re meeting up with.”

  “These bozos got connections to Rico Castillo. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  “Dizzy claims they’ve got connections to Rico Castillo.”

  “You don’t buy it?”

  Billy shook his head. “Not for a second.”

  Santoro waved him off. “You’re good, brother. This should be an easy five minutes of our time.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said, “should being the operative word.”

  “It’s just a meet-and-greet. We flash them ours; they flash us theirs. The end.”

  Billy hung his arm out the window. “If you say so…”

  He could feel the steel of his Colt pressing against his side, warm from the weather and his waist, his nose sniffing out something sour, completely on edge along with all of his other senses.

  Easy, he said inside his head, easy…

  Just go over the rules.

  The rules were his mantra, his little prayer that he fell back on in moments of stress taught to him by his mentor, Tom Toobin, when he began his career as an undercover agent. The rules were simple, and Billy always cited them and applied them to high-stakes situations and moments of stress, four simple guidelines that kept his mind focused and his hand steady.

  Calculation.

  Confidence.

  Patience.

  Control.

  Most people would have thought to put “safety” somewhere in the list, but for Billy Reese—especially in this line of work—safety all came down to a matter of charm and luck.

  He patted the small plastic baggie of cocaine in his shirt pocket: his and Santoro’s end of the show-and-tell—a federally confiscated narcotic with purity levels testing through the roof. Hence, how they were able to strike up a deal. If the dealers liked what they saw, they’d make a deal with Billy and Santoro. If Billy and Santoro made enough deals with them, they could get close to the man in charge of the whole shebang: Rico Castillo.

  But it wasn’t the first time the feds had sent in an agent to bring him down. They had tried it before.

  And they had failed miserably.

  Initially, the FBI had no interest in busting South Florida drug lord Rico Castillo. He meant nothing in the bigger picture to them. Whenever his name came across the bigger desks over at the bureau, they’d dismiss it and say, “He’s the CIA or local police’s problem. We want the mob. Not drug dealers.”

  But even though the FBI had no real interest in Castillo at the start, it turned out that he was using the same money launderer as Jersey-based mobster Angelo Giancola, one of the FBI’s initial targets in their war on the mob. The feds were having a hard time trying to get something to stick on Giancola, so when two separate informants for them had reported the fact that Giancola and Castillo were sharing the same moneyman residing in Miami, the FBI decided to try a different angle.

  The South Florida angle.

  See, the FBI knew the money launderer was based somewhere in Miami. They just didn’t have a name. So, they assigned someone the task of going in undercover to found out who the guy was. They’d have one of their agents infiltrate Castillo’s crew as a low-level enforcer, a position that would get them close to Castillo’s operation but prevent them from getting his hands (too) dirty, and get his foot in the door with a few key people who might give a hint where the guy cleaning the money slept at night. Once the agent got close enough to the right people, he would pinpoint the moneyman’s location, and the feds would bring him in, sweat him, and then get their hands on Giancola’s books as well as Castillo’s in the two-for-one bust of a lifetime.

  But it didn’t go according to plan.

  Special Agent Andrew Sykes was assigned to the case. Well, Sykes was itching to get on board from the get-go to be more accurate, and being such an upstanding member of the bureau, and having enough people vouching for him to make the play, the bigwigs calling the shots were all for it.

  “Sykes is tactful,” one of the big boys in a top floor office said. “Let him have it.”

  A competent, tactful, skillful agent, Sykes worked the streets, jockeyed his way to a position on the inside of Castillo’s operation, and kept things fairly low key so no one would flag him down as he went about rubbing shoulders with Castillo’s goons and trying to get a line on the launderer.

  But Castillo apparently took notice to Sykes after a few weeks in, despite Sykes’s best intentions to stay off the man’s radar.

  According to sources on the street, one night Castillo cordially invited Sykes—working under the alias “Rick Seal”—over for dinner at his beachfront mansion. Sykes had been nervous about the invitation to the point that he called up his handler an hour before to tell him he had a bad feeling about it. Sure enough, that bad feeling turned out to be a legitimate warning sign, because at the dinner, Castillo apparently fingered Sykes as a federal agent.

  Forty-eight hours later, Andy Sykes was dead.

  But not before being tortured, dismembered, and cut into pieces.

  Some of those pieces were packaged up and mailed to the FBI in Washington.

  But Castillo had managed to distance himself from the murder of the undercover agent. The FBI had no solid evidence linking him to the deaths of Special Agent Andrew Sykes.

  But they knew he was responsible.

  They just needed to prove it.

  “To hell with the money-launderer angle,” the executive director said. “That op is dead. We want the guy who killed Andrew Sykes.”

  And so it became gospel.

  They’d get someone in close with Castillo, get him to confess about his involvement, and then nail anyone else who was involved to the wall. However, the fact that Andrew Sykes, an undercover FBI
agent, had been fingered and then murdered during the FBI’s first attempt at infiltrating Castillo’s network made it difficult for the higher-ups to immediately give it the go-ahead. The worry was that the agent(s) following up/infiltrating/investigating would also become flagged down for being a fed, just as Sykes was, and suffer the same fate—if not a worse one—than he did.

  But one of their own had been killed.

  A federal agent had been killed.

  And someone, perhaps multiple parties, needed to answer for it.

  The operation was given the go-ahead, but the feds knew they needed someone slick enough to work his way inside and get someone to pinpoint the killer or killers, someone who knew how to make plays, an agent that could blend in and do what needed to be done and maybe even possess the skill sets that Sykes had lacked that would give him the edge.

  The needed someone who was fine with taking chances. Someone who was as unconventional as he was effective. Someone who liked cheeseburgers, Steve McQueen, and—ever since he was six—the occasional bottle of Yoo-hoo milk.

  And so entered Special Agent William “Billy” Reese.

  Everyone knew him.

  Not everyone liked him.

  But he was pretty damn good at what he did.

  Billy said yes to the assignment before his handler even finished pitching it to him over the phone. He was more than aware of the operation already and had been pushing to get in on the investigation after Sykes was killed. When word got out about the death of the agent, Billy was more than slightly miffed, not just because the man was a fellow fed, but because of a much, much deeper connection that the two of them shared.

  They were friends.

  Brothers-in-arms.

  The death of Andy Sykes absolutely crushed Billy Reese. Billy was almost inconsolable for the first few hours after he received the news, walking around like a zombie in his house with the phone still clutched in his hand as he stared at a picture of the two of them on the wall in their Marine uniforms, back when they were younger, dumber, and a little more hopeful.

  It was heartbreaking.

  Heartbreaking as hell…

  The funeral was an even bleaker affair, complete with Billy trying to hold it together while the crisply folded flag was handed to Sykes’s wife and son, Heather and Tommy. Right as “Taps” began trumpeting solemnly, it rained overhead, soaking Billy as he held the umbrella over Heather’s head and mourned the death of his friend. His best friend, both having served in the same unit in Vietnam and later landing at the FBI by happenstance—comrades and cohorts until the end.

  Only the end came sooner than both of them thought it would.

  Once the fact of Sykes’s passing finally settled in with Billy, it ignited a fire inside of him that pushed him to pick up his Colt, request a position on the frontlines, and fight every single day to figure out which asshole pulled the trigger on his pal.

  While also suppressing the darker tenancies of his human nature from giving into his initial impulse to tear the bastard apart when he found him.

  Or them.

  All the agents in the bureau wanted the prick that killed Sykes to pay.

  But Billy Reese was out for blood.

  Normally, the close-knit kind of relationship Billy and Sykes had would raise red flags with the bigwigs over at the bureau. But this kind of assignment required someone who was more than fine with working a gig packed with high risks and terrible odds.

  Billy was that someone.

  Fast-forward to several phone calls, a few plane rides, and a couple of rendezvous with some confidential informants, Billy was side-by-side with Santoro—his alleged partner in the drug trade, according to the fabricated records that were mocked up—gearing up for meet-and-greet with two dealers pushing Rico Castillo’s product, arranged by rat-faced middleman Dizzy Alvaro, a bendy little ziphead who hooked Billy up with said dealers.

  And, according to Dizzy, today’s transaction would entail a handshake meeting with Hector Fuentes—Rico Castillo’s right-hand man.

  It was the closest the FBI had gotten to Rico in months.

  But the terms of the deal never sat well with Billy, the ease of it, the promises that sounded too good to be true. He wanted to find the guy who killed Sykes, no question, but he didn’t like this setup Dizzy had arranged and wanted to back off of it, even though the higher-ups told him to run with it, considering the potential of how close it could get him to Castillo.

  But it still didn’t sit well with Billy. He didn’t trust Dizzy.

  Not in the slightest.

  He sat up and drummed his fingers on the roof of the Mercury, checking his watch and wondering if the dealers were going to be a couple of no-shows. “I can’t believe we let Dizzy set up this meet,” he said, eyes scanning for signs of anything other than the feral cat creeping toward the porch to his right.

  “Why?” Santoro asked. “You don’t like Dizzy?”

  “He’s unreliable and jumpy. Something’s wrong with the guy. I feel like he’s setting us up for a hit and a rip.”

  Santoro huffed. “What’re you getting at, Billy?”

  Billy looked at his partner. “That this whole thing feels wrong. Ever since we got in this car I’ve felt…off.”

  “Is this some leftover mental stuff from the army? Some…sixth sense you’ve developed from ‘being in the shit too long’?”

  “I was in the Marines. And yeah, it’s a sixth-sense thing. This just doesn’t feel right. I can’t explain it…”

  Santoro reclined in his seat. “Well, rest easy. Backup’s a block away. These guys try and pull a stunt, we’ve got a handful of boys in blue windbreakers ready to back us up. We’re good, man.”

  The walkie-talkie stuffed under his seat cackled to life. “Don’t sweat it, Reese,” the voice of an FBI agent reassured him over the airwaves. “We’ve got you covered.”

  “Much obliged, brother,” Billy said into the wire taped to his chest.

  Another element he fought viciously against.

  “We need everything on record,” some paper-pushing goon at the Hoover building mandated, despite the fact that everyone knew what the risks of something like wearing a wire entailed.

  But they made the call.

  Billy just had to live with it.

  He began drumming his fingers on his leg, soft enough that it wouldn’t bug Santoro. “What’s the last movie you saw?” he asked him.

  It took Santoro a second to think about it.

  “In the theatre, or in general?”

  “Either or.”

  Santoro scoured his memory.

  Billy turned on the radio.

  A DJ came on talking about nothing but the current ’80s hits. Then he threw on a beat—“Jump” by The Pointer Sisters.

  Oddly enough it helped with their nerves.

  “Can you guys turn off the radio?” one of the agents called out over the walkie.

  Billy grabbed the walkie and hit transmit. “Negative on your last,” he replied. “Couldn’t make you out.”

  The agent let it go.

  Billy was positive he heard a chuckle from another one of the agents over the airwaves.

  Santoro snapped his fingers. “It was six months ago,” he said, “that’s the last time I saw a movie.”

  Billy looked over. “What was it?”

  “The Wild Bunch.”

  “Great movie.”

  Santoro kissed the air like a chef. “Golden age of film, man,” he said, “Golden age.”

  “No such thing.”

  Santoro squinted. “What do you mean?”

  Billy thought back to a talk radio station he was listening in on the other day, some professor of something talking about looking at things in retrospect. “I heard this guy on the radio,” he said, “and he was talking about when you reflect back to the past. About how nostalgia and looking at events and decades after they happen makes them seem greater than they really were.”

  Santoro smirked. “First time I
saw The Wild Bunch was with my older brother, my mom really didn’t want us to. She said she thought it’d be too violent.”

  “It was.”

  Santoro laughed. “A little bit. Anyway, he snuck us into the theatre when I was seven to see it. This crummy old place a few blocks from our house. You should have seen my mom flip out when she found the stubs in the pocket of his pants when she was doing the laundry the next day.”

  Santoro recalled the memory. “Man,” he said with a beam. “She was pissed.”

  Billy could picture it in his head; the Santoro brothers playing it cool as they bought tickets for one movie and snuck into the other. He pictured the older brother getting chewed out by his mother and little baby brother Santoro laughing his butt off in the background.

  Billy may not have been a friend of Santoro’s. They were only working together for a couple of days.

  But he liked the guy well enough.

  Four more minutes passed before their prospective buddies showed up in a swank new-model Mercedes with cushy leather seats and high-polish paint job. The car pulled in front of the Mercury and came to a stop about five feet in front of it, engine idling and occupants waiting.

  Billy saw two men inside.

  A single honk came from the Benz.

  He exited the Mercury, Santoro following suit.

  “Here we go…”

  2

  “ALL UNITS, STAND by,” said the agent over the walkie to the rest of the team as Billy and Santoro approached the rear of the Benz and came to a stop on either side, hands hovering near their holstered and concealed sidearms.

  Slow and easy.

  “Get in,” the guy behind the driver’s seat ordered, the radio deck inside playing music at a low volume.

  Billy got in on the right, Santoro on the left, both of them now in the back of the Benz as they shut the doors and greeted the men up front.

  The men in the Benz were nearly identical—both of them Cuban, both of them sporting gold jewelry, flashy shirts, and black hair slick with product and perspiration. Based on the fabric of their suits and the quality of their manicures, they definitely had a significant chunk of change lining their pockets.