The Last Savage

by Sam Jones

  Both of them hit the deck.

  15

  A THUNDEROUS METALLIC pattering resounded throughout the house as bullet holes began puncturing the ceiling, walls, and floor. Billy and Maria quickly dashed behind the couch Hector was on as furniture, plaster, wood, and Hector himself were torn to shreds, every fiber of his white suit stained red as his body was riddled repeatedly with what Billy and Maria made out as suppressed MP5 rounds.

  It was loud.

  Brutal.

  Violent.

  A spectacle made of sparks, debris, and blood going off like a fireworks display.

  The helicopter made its pass over the roof toward the rear of the house, and the gunfire tapered off, Billy and Maria now in the clear and unscathed thanks largely to the recently deceased Hector Fuentes taking most of the damage from the flyby.

  As soon as the spotlight was no longer drowning the house, Billy peered out from his cover behind the sofa and took a look at the red-soaked hamburger meat that used to be Hector Fuentes, his nose turning up and face taking on a sour expression.

  “Yikes…”

  Maria stared at the body with an irate set of eyes—fuming that her questions would remain unanswered.

  Billy could hear the chopper turning off to his left as the spotlight once again began to slowly flood the house. “Maria,” he said as he came out from behind the couch. “It’s coming back.”

  Billy looked left to the back door in the kitchen about twelve feet away—but he knew it was too late to make a run for it now that the chopper was two seconds out from its next pass.

  The spotlight began to envelope the house, the gunfire sure to follow quickly after it.

  Billy shouted, “Find cover!”

  Maria dove behind the fridge.

  Billy rolled into the fireplace about six feet to his right as another hail of bullets tore up the rooftop overhead and began to make a skylight, the rounds just missing Billy and Maria with a few trailers managing to bury their way into Hector’s already deceased body.

  Based on the sounds and the pacing of the bursts, Billy and Maria were now certain they were dealing with a single shooter.

  “Back door!” Billy yelled out as soon as the fire died off and the helicopter passed overhead. “Move!”

  After passing over the roof, the shooter in the chopper loaded up fresh clips in his weapon as the helicopter leveled out and parked itself in front of the house. Maria and Billy slipped out the back just as the skids touched down on the pavement.

  They kept low, running to their right through the alley and toward the back of the convenience store six feet away, finding cover behind a dumpster jutting out in the alley, the helicopter and the shooter now in clear view thirty yards ahead of them out in the middle of the street.

  They watched as the shooter finished reloading and hopped out of the helicopter, clad in black with a matching wool ski mask concealing his face. The shooter slowly advanced on the house, spraying from left to right as the dilapidated dwelling broke apart and began to crumble to pieces, smoke and cordite clogging up the air as several 911 calls two blocks away went out about the insanity playing out in Little Havana.

  “He’s gonna run out of rounds in a second,” Billy said. “Go up the left side of this store here when he does. I’ll move right. You’re gonna flank him when he goes to reload. When I shout—shoot.”

  The shooter fired for another five seconds. The house was no longer recognizable as a house from the excessive gunfire.

  Then his gun fell silent.

  His eyes fell down to his weapons to reload—head down and eyes down.

  Billy gestured to Maria. She quickly ran out of cover and to the left, hugging the left side of convenience store and moving toward the street with her weapon raised and leveled.

  Billy moved right in a crouch about in between the convenience store and the house, got a good view of the shooter on the street, and took aim through the gap separating the properties, close enough that he could practically make out the whiskers on the pilot inside the chopper.

  As soon as the shooter reloaded, Billy shouted, “Hey, dickhead!”

  The shooter, about twenty feet away, exposed in between the convenience store and the house, looked up as he heard Billy call out.

  He raised his MP5.

  But Maria got the drop on him first with six squeezes of the trigger.

  The shooter was taken down in a hail of well-placed shots, bending over backward as he fell to the pavement and shot his gun off into the night sky in one final hoorah. As he fell, the helicopter behind him quickly lifted off in response.

  Maria emerged from around the front of the convenience store, Beretta still smoking and trained on the body of the shooter as she approached him, the helicopter above her now and passing over the roof of the convenience store as Billy retreated to the abandoned lot behind him.

  The spotlight doused Billy as the front of the helicopter passed over both properties and dipped down like a bull about to charge and pitched forward—the pilot seemingly aiming the rotor blades in Billy’s direction.

  Billy then made the only call he could think of making—he turned and aimed his Colt toward the general area of the cockpit and unloaded his entire clip.

  Billy heard glass shattering and groans crying out over the chuff of the motors as the helicopter erratically bucked and bobbed and weaved and wobbled in his direction. Billy ducked and rolled to his left just as the chopper passed within a few feet over his head, the rotors practically blowing him around the ground and the heat from the mechanical monster washing over him in a hot wave as he cleared out of the way.

  The helicopter lifted up one final time, banked to the right, and came down in a fast and wide arc before crashing upside down into a fiery, smoldering wreck in the abandoned lot fifty feet behind the convenience store, the concussion knocking Billy off his feet and the heat from the blast feeling closer than it looked.

  The twisted remnants of the helicopter burned like a giant campfire made of flesh and metal as Maria hustled over through the alley. She helped Billy to his feet, both of them stunned and a little bit pissed. “You all right?” she asked as she watched the fiery wreckage burn bright.

  Billy stood up, and wiped himself off.

  “Juuuuust peachy.”

  They watched the burning inferno as they checked themselves for any cuts, bruises, or punctures from the flying debris. Other than a few scrapes, they were tip-top.

  Billy surveyed the tattered house, the scorched helicopter, and then the masked and bullet-stricken body of the shooter lying in the street with his hands still clutching onto his submachine gun.

  “There’s some kind of joke about ‘frequent flyer’ miles here,” he said. “I’m just coming up short at the moment.”

  Maria rolled her eyes and engaged the safety on her Beretta.

  16

  MARIA AND BILLY fled on foot through Little Havana and returned to the motel, ducking through backyards and alleyways to avoid the red-and-blue heat. The sirens from all the emergency units flocking to the scene of the helicopter wreck rang out for at least a half hour while they laid low, curtains closed and lights off, nothing but the occasional blue-and-red sweep of police strobes flashing past the window every two minutes or so offering any kind of illumination.

  They were in the bathroom, each checking out fresh cuts and scratches they endured back at that now-annihilated crash pad: Billy with a few scrapes on his hands, Maria with a nice gash on her arm, neither of them able to recall exactly how they had sustained them.

  Just another day on the job.

  Billy backed up and stood against the wall, checking his FBI shield that he had retrieved from the drawer and wiping it off on the legs of his pants.

  “Who the hell was that?” he asked.

  Maria was a little on edge, dabbing the cut on her arm with a towel. She had been edgy ever since they left the scene back in Little Havana.

  “You’re asking me like I know,” sh
e said.

  “They were clearly following us.”

  “Clearly,” she snapped.

  “Okay. Take it easy.”

  Maria threw the towel down. “Fuck easy. That whole situation just blew up in our faces. Literally. I hope using that helicopter for target practice was worth it.”

  Billy turned and faced her, the two of them now squaring off.

  For a moment, he thought she might actually take a swing at him.

  “Neither of us,” he said, “could have predicted that the damn air cavalry was going to show up.”

  “Hector’s still dead,” Maria said. “Our only lead is now dead.”

  Another cruiser flew past the front of the motel, the high pitch of the siren much closer than the emergency units that preceded it. Billy got up and took a peek out the window to make sure it wasn’t coming their way.

  The coast was clear.

  “Maybe we should try to check out Hector’s place,” he said. “Maybe we can find something about this little business trip he was talking about.”

  “That’s rich.”

  “Oh, yeah? As rich as whatever secrets you’re keeping from me?”

  Maria turned on her heel. “Excuse me?”

  Billy held his ground. “You heard me…”

  She approached him—he didn’t budge.

  “If you’ve got something to say,” she said, “say it.”

  “Fine. You’ve got another angle you’re working on this case. You’re not in this to take down Rico Castillo’s operation. That’s just what you’re putting on the paperwork.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “No. You are. I saw you get all hot and bothered when you mentioned that guy with the ‘eyes.’ You looked like someone had just rear-ended your car when you brought it up. Look, I’m going to follow whatever leads I can to try to find the guy who killed Andrew Sykes. You don’t want to come, I don’t care. But if you do, I want to know why you’re really doing this, because so far I haven’t got a shred of the real story from you.”

  Maria said nothing.

  Billy had her pegged.

  She took a breath, backed away from the window, and sat on the edge of the bed. “About four months ago,” she began, “I get put on the this case. Hookers were getting carved up, and more than a few of them had clients inside Castillo’s circle. It started as a joint investigation with homicide, but they ended up just handing it over to Vice.”

  “‘Carved up’?”

  “Someone was raping these women and cutting them into pieces. Autopsies showed that some of the girls were also being fed pieces of themselves.”

  Billy cringed.

  Cop or no cop—some things were just unsettling.

  “My job,” Maria continued, “was to poke around to find some answers. So, I weaseled my way into Castillo’s organization. One night, I was sent to meet the moneyman about a little issue we were having. Nothing noteworthy, but the guy had a big taste for working girls and a record for assault, so he was my primary lead in the hooker carvings. I met up with him at a club in South Beach, and he had his ‘date’ for the evening tagging along with him.”

  “Working girl?”

  “Yeah. Twenty. Maybe twenty-one. Very pretty. Told me her name was ‘Analena.’” Maria’s eyes fell to the floor. “She was a sweet girl. Talked a lot about wanting to work with horses. She shouldn’t have been in the line of work she was in, but…Anyway, we’re talking for all of about ten minutes and in walks Hector Fuentes with this…guy. He was a weird-looking bastard. And he had these…red eyes. I didn’t see them at first because he was covering them with sunglasses. But when he left, he took them off and looked at me. It was like being leered at by a demon.”

  A shiver crept up her spine as she recalled his face.

  Billy felt like he was being given the description of a Bond villain.

  “And he was tall,” Maria continued. “Well over six feet. And pale, almost albino, flaxen hair.”

  “Probably European—”

  “Anyway, Hector comes over and chats the moneyman up, and the entire time the pale guy is just staring at Analena. It was…weird.” Maria became lost in the memory for a moment but collected herself and continued on. “So, Hector finishes up with the moneyman and goes to leave. Then the pasty guy starts whispering something in his ear. Seconds later, Hector tells Analena that she was coming with them.”

  Billy felt his stomach do a flip.

  He didn’t like the sound of where the story was going.

  Maria said, “The girl protested. But then Hector promises her triple her rate, and then enforces the new deal by pointing a gun at her under the table. And the whole time, the entire time, that red-eyed freak was doing nothing but staring. The girl had tears streaming down her face when she realized what was happening. She had this…terrified look in her eyes, and they were aimed right in my direction.”

  She closed her eyes, the vibrancy of the memory burning too bright.

  “I tried to do what I could without blowing my cover,” she said. “I tried giving Hector a hard time about it, and the fat idiot gets in my face and tells me it’s none of my business. Before he could say anything else, he heads out of the club with Analena and her pasty-faced suitor. The moneyman didn’t give a shit. He just ordered up another girl as soon as he left.”

  Maria once again turned her focus to the window, parted the curtain a sliver, and stared out at the black skies serving as canvas for her to project the sour memories upon. “I wanted to do something, Billy,” she said. “But I was outgunned and outmanned. I didn’t have my badge, and I didn’t have backup. I didn’t have anything. And this girl was practically begging me to help her…and I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  Maria began rubbing her eyes as if the flashback would somehow become expunged as a result.

  It didn’t.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, looking back at Billy, “if the red-eyed guy turned out to be the one killing these girls. I’ve got nothing else to run with. I’ve just got him.”

  She glanced back out the window, her eyes now playing tricks on her and making her see Analena’s face formed in a grouping of stars off to the east—obscure, ill defined, and as hazy as the leads that she had pursued in trying to locate the young woman who had silently pleaded with her to liberate her from the devil’s clutches.

  “Hector was the only lead I had to track that guy down,” she said. “To track this girl down. And now he’s dead. But because I’ve risen up the ladder so fast in Castillo’s operation, Miami Dade has deemed it necessary to shift the focus of the case from working the hooker angle to trying to topple Castillo’s entire operation. Every time I emphasized how important it was to find this girl, I was shut down. Words like ‘priority’ have been cited to me about a million times, along with about as much bureaucratic bullshit a local government can throw at you. In the meantime,” she said with a shrug, “girls just keep dying.”

  Billy took a beat. “Looks like we’re both just finding a way to make amends.”

  “I’m not making amends,” Maria said. “I’m still looking for that girl. Who says I can’t do that and take down Castillo’s operation in the process?”

  “No one did.”

  “Good, because that’s exactly what I plan on doing.”

  “Great. Then do it.”

  “I will.”

  Billy shrugged. “Well, all right…”

  The two of them went quiet, the hum of the shoddy light fixture in the ceiling like a metronome for their thoughts. It was soothing in a way. Both of them were playing back heavy histories that perpetually haunted their minds, memories that kept them up as much as they kept them motivated. But as miserable as the thoughts of the “lost souls” they were searching or fighting for had made them, both Billy and Maria now found themselves on common ground. This case had affected them both on a level that made it personal.

  They were in the same boat.

  They were on the same te
am.

  It just took them more than a couple of hours to take a step back and realize it.

  “Hector’s place,” Maria said, “is in Key Biscayne. We killed his only bodyguards, so I’m pretty sure we won’t have a problem knocking on the door. Maybe something there will strike a chord. We can’t really do much until our people sort through the mess back at that house anyway.”

  “I’m game,” Billy said.

  “Good. You’re paying for the cab then.”

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  17

  BILLY AND MARIA had taken a cab to the ritzy, posh area of Key Biscayne, the cabbie dropping them off two doors down from Hector’s three-story mansion. “Good God,” Billy remarked as they approached the house, complete with gaudy trimmings and fixtures and paint schemes that only a man with zero taste and a coke habit like Hector could conjure up. “Was Hector serious with this place?” he asked. “Some people should have their property tax doubled for putting up eyesores like this.”

  After they were dropped off, they walked up the street and came up to the thick wrought-iron gate that traced the property, Billy eyeballing the call box attached to a metal post facing toward the pebble-stone driveway that curved up twenty yards to the front entrance.

  “Think anyone’s home?” he asked.

  “Maybe his mistress,” Maria said.

  “No wife?”

  “She split a while ago.”

  Billy clicked his teeth and thought about pressing the call button. He shrugged. Pressed it. “Hola,” he said. “¿Hay alguien en casa?”

  He took his finger off the button and waited. About ten seconds later, a young woman’s Cuban-native voice laced with a narcotic-induced hangover answered in Spanish, “Who is it?”

  Billy looked at Maria. “Should we say we’re the cops?”

  “Why not?”

  “Might spook her.”

  Maria waved him on. “It’s fine. Just do it.”

  Billy thought about it.

  He decided to go a different route.

  “We’re drug dealers, ma’am,” he replied into the call box in Spanish. “We were just stopping by to see if you wanted some cocaine.”