by Sam Jones
Twenty minutes later, Billy and Maria were on the plane and taxiing across the tarmac while the retired Lenny and Jeanette Ashton were booking a couple of one-way tickets to Hawaii, their one-month vacation now extended by a couple of weeks for a stop-off in paradise.
Before hopping on the flight, Billy and Maria purchased some new clothing that would hold them over before they could buy more permanent replacements in Chicago. They ended up spending a few bills on a blue Members Only jacket and red polo shirt for Billy, and acid-washed jeans covered up with a denim jacket for Maria. The costs didn’t bother them. It was all bureau money, and Billy and Maria had plenty left to fund another trip across the country.
But, dutiful as always—they held onto their receipts.
They were only chagrined at the lack of choices of clothing they found at the “Rubio’s high-end fashion” store in the airport, and the few selective minutes they had to pick something out. It was less-than-stellar attire in their opinion. Billy wasn’t a fan of polo shirts, and Maria despised acid-washed jeans.
It just wasn’t their style.
They were seated toward the middle section of the Boeing 757, a cloud of smoke hovering over their heads from the robust gentleman in the lime green suit parked directly in front of them in the smoker’s section.
Billy glanced around the aisles at all the slumped and weary heads against the headrests, his eyelids heavy and his temples throbbing. Maria, finally sitting down for the first time in hours, felt the soreness of the evening catching up, her muscles knotted and burning and her feet throbbing.
One day was ending, and another was beginning. Both of them were running off fumes, the only lead they had was some indecipherable clue in the form of a locker key, and the tacky clothing they were wearing was enflaming an already-irritating situation.
“Where are you from?” Billy asked Maria, trying to sound cordial enough to maybe open the floor for some mindless chitchat to alleviate the stress.
She closed her eyes. “Please don’t.”
“Oh, come on,” Billy pleaded. “Do we really have to play this ‘cops not meshing, I don’t like you, you don’t like me’ routine?”
“It’s six in the morning, Billy.”
“Nothing wrong with being friendly.”
“At six in the morning there is.”
Billy shifted in his seat and turned toward Maria. “Come on. Give me something. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill and zero leads. We might as well fill the time.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Come on, Delgado.”
She turned her head. “Okay, man. You want to talk? Tell me about this Sykes guy.”
“Sykes?”
“Yeah, you keep mentioning him. Who was he?”
A beat. “Sykes was executed when someone inside Castillo’s operation flagged him down as a federal agent. It’s why I’m here.”
“I heard something about that.”
“What did you hear?”
Maria paused. “That they cut him to pieces.”
“Lots of them…And Sykes was a good friend of mine. A really good friend of mine…”
Maria could hear the dismay in his voice. “I’m sorry to hear about that.”
Billy shrugged. “That’s why I’m curious to talk to your friend with the red eyes. The guy that cut up your girls may be the guy that cut up my guy.”
A beat.
“Listen,” Maria said, “We’ve got a shit lead, but we’ll work it nonetheless. We’ll work every angle we have to out there. Once we find out whoever Hector was supposed to meet in Chicago and why, then we grill them until they lead us in the right direction. We’ll find this Kruger guy. We’ll figure this whole thing out.” She looked out the window as she realized she was holding her breath. “We have to.”
Billy smirked. “You’re all pep talk now, Delgado. A couple of hours ago you were skeptical as hell.”
“Because this is the only lead I have,” she said with a shrug. “And I’m gonna run with it.”
Billy pouted his lip. “Fair enough…”
A beat.
“Get some sleep,” Maria said to him, leaning back and shutting her eyes. “We’ll be there soon.”
Billy reached forward and grabbed the in-flight headphones. “Not happening,” he said. “Think I’m gonna be up for a while.”
Maria shut off the light overhead and reclined her chair back a couple of inches. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Just keep it down, though.”
One beat passed.
Two.
“You got any gum?” Billy asked.
Maria faced him, perturbed from her head down to her feet. “What?”
“You got any gum?” he asked again.
“No. No, I don’t have any gum.”
“No mints? Certs? Altoids? A Clorets, perhaps?”
She faced him. Squinted. “A what?”
“Clorets,” Billy said. “They’re the fresh breath experts.”
Maria turned away. “Billy—”
He huffed in his palm and sniffed. “I need it, man. My breath wreaks something sinister.”
“Dude.”
“Okay,” Billy said, facing forward and keeping a lid on it, a hint of smile forming in the corner of his mouth. “I’m shutting up.”
Another beat passed.
Then another.
And another.
Then he did a drumroll on his thighs. Jittery. “Sure you don’t wanna watch a movie or something?” he asked Maria. “Flight attendant said they’re playing Police Academy 2. Supposed to be a riot.”
Maria drew a deep breath. “Reese,” she said, “I’m gonna pull my gun.”
He nodded. “Copy that.”
She showed him her palm. “Kindly fuck off.”
Billy held up his hands in surrender and smiled. “Fucking off now.” He then placed the in-flight headphones over his ears and surfed through the music stations; the opening riff to Billy Ocean’s “Mystery Lady” inspiring him to subtly gyrate his hips in his seat the moment he landed on the Soft Rock hits channel.
Smooth and easy….
As he moved to the beat, an older woman two rows ahead, about seventy years of age, picked up on the volume and turned in her seat to get a better look at the perpetrator, adjusting the baseball-sized specs on her face as she leered at Billy with a disapproving curl of her lip.
Billy caught her stare. “Channel five,” he mouthed as he pointed to his headphones. “Billy Ocean.”
The woman grunted her chagrin and looked away, hoping that the music would die down after a few moments.
But it just kept on going.
Moments later she glanced at Billy again with the same surreptitious glare. Billy, unfazed, winked at the woman teasingly and said, “What’s cracking, grandma? Where’s the beef?”
The woman huffed and quickly diverted her gaze.
Billy stifled a smile while the music continued to play.
A laugh slipped out of Maria’s nose in the form of a quick snort.
20
SEVILLE, GEORGIA.
Inside a timeless rural farmhouse surrounded by a sprawling stretch of silver birch trees, Victor Ellroy was puttering around in his kitchen, taking all the time in the world to brew the perfect cup of coffee. The man was in his golden years, and after a lifetime of everything running at one hundred miles per hour, he was damn sure going to milk every second of what was left to enjoy the things he used to take for granted: the trickling of a water in a brook, the optimistic smell that accompanied the wee hours of the morning, the aroma of coffee grounds during his first cup of the day, measuring and calculating every step of the process down to the drop.
He loved his life of solitude. He enjoyed the freedoms he never had before. His two tours during the war and a decade as a patrolman for the LAPD had taken its toll—on his knees, his sanity, and his marriage.
Victor had worked every day of his life for a break, and now he had finally gotten one. It took him years to
earn it, but he earned it, complete with the framed, commonplace drawings of bass fish on the walls.
And then at 8:01 a.m., while Victor Ellroy was preparing to measure the first scoop of grounds for his cup of morning glory, three knocks came at his door, and the man practically went into cardiac arrest as a result.
No one should have been at his house.
He was living in a part of the state where only a couple of hundred other residents dwelled and everyone kept pretty much to themselves. The only person who ever came around was his food-and-supply guy, but that was a once-every-six-months visit, and Buddy had stopped by sixty-eight days ago exactly.
Still, it was the intrigue of a mystery visitor and the fact that it might be Buddy that motivated Victor to answer the door.
He moved out of the kitchen with a drag in his step, thanks mostly to his shit knees and back, arriving at the front door about thirty seconds after the knocking began, even though the door was only ten feet from the kitchen.
Victor drew a deep breath. Every word was an effort nowadays. “Who is it?” the old man asked, his bottom lip drawn in as he leaned in toward the door.
“Jehovah’s Witnesses,” a more-than-familiar voice said from the other side.
Victor shut his eyes.
“Damn,” he said, with a slight bit of youthfulness in his tone as a bad memory reentered his life.
He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I’m an old man, son,” he said, a breath taken between each set of words. “I’m already dyin’. Is it really worth the trouble?”
A pause.
“I’m afraid it is, old man,” the voice said from the other side.
Victor braced himself against the door and shut his eyes. He took a beat, put his glasses back on, straightened the suspenders over his bulky red flannel shirt, and opened the door.
Standing at attention were four men, all dressed in some kind of all-black No Wave–style clothing one would find in a big city like New York: The Chinese guy to the left sported a fedora that was two sizes two small and resting too far back on his head.
The guy in the center was a towering pale figure with a blond crew cut and sunglasses over his eyes. The guy to the right had a long black blazer with padded shoulders, a style that Victor Ellroy found to be just as silly as it was impractical. In front of all three, the collar on his trench coat turned up and a sardonic grin spreading across his face, was a man named Simon Kruger, his arms open like a long-lost relative as he moved in toward Victor for an embrace. “Hello there, you wrinkly old fossil,” he greeted Victor with Christmastime-like warmth. “Get your dyin’ ass in here.”
Kruger hugged Victor like an uncle, and he held on tight, Victor remaining rigid as his eyes stayed glued to the pasty-faced freak in front of him.
He also couldn’t help but notice that all of them were wearing leather gloves.
Kruger broke the hug and motioned toward the inside of the house. “Well,” he said, “are you going to invite us in or what?”
Victor motioned over his shoulder and led the way. None of the goons bothered to frisk or check him.
He wasn’t a threat.
Just by opening the door, the man had already accepted his fate.
After Victor closed the door, Kruger’s men moved into the living room adjacent to the foyer, standing tall with their hands behind their back as Kruger meandered about in the kitchen.
He stopped and examined the island countertop with coffee brewing materials neatly laid out in a row. “Christ,” he said with a slight bit of aversion. “You got really colorless in your old age.”
Kruger took a porcelain cup situated next to the bag of bold-roast coffee grounds and moved over toward the pot, his eyes searching around for the final product.
“Coffee ready?” he asked. “I need a pick-me-up.”
Victor moved toward the pot on the stove with the hot water, turned the knob, and ignited the flame. “Need to heat up the water,” he said, his eyes fixated on the pot.
“How long?”
“Five minutes,” Victor said, the timing of his morning ritual calculated down to the second.
Kruger looked at the Casio watch on his wrist and did the math. “I suppose we got time.”
Victor said nothing, still concentrating on the yet-to-boil pot on the stove while Kruger gave himself a tour of the cabin.
“It’s been ten years,” Victor said after what felt like a half hour of silence.
Kruger shrugged in a “what can you do?” manner. “Loose ends,” he said while he approached a framed painting of two boys fishing during dusk on the wall.
They looked like they were brothers to Kruger, based on how similar their looks were and the overall familial tone of the painting.
“Always knew you’d come calling around here one day,” Victor said as the water came to a boil. “What took you so long?”
Kruger turned to the man in the fedora and held out his hand. Fedora reached into his pocket, grabbed a twenty-dollar bill, and slapped it down into Kruger’s palm.
“What the hell is that all about?” Victor asked.
“We had a bet going on if you would say that or not,” Kruger said as he forked a thumb at fedora. “I won.”
Victor measured the grinds resting inside the crumbled paper bag to his right and added it to the boiling water teaspoon by teaspoon with surgical precision. “You’re a man now,” he said. “But you’re still just as stupid as you were when we last saw each other.”
Kruger rolled his eyes as he moved to the living room and sat on the well-worn recliner near the television set. “Now that hurts,” he said, patronizing the old man. “You don’t see me giving you a hard time for looking like a weathered old frog…”
Victor killed the heat on the stove and placed a lid on the pot. He then reached over to the ledge above the sink and grabbed a cooking timer and set it for five minutes. “I thought I was careful,” he said as he placed the clock down and listened to the click-click-click of the timer counting down the seconds. “I changed my damn name and everything.”
Kruger reclined the chair and relaxed. “Definitely took longer to find you. But you probably shouldn’t have floated those goddamn photos to the press. That sure as hell didn’t help.”
Victor remained silent and staid, but his heart felt like it had definitely skipped a beat.
“I turned those in anonymously,” he said, defeated. “I didn’t think it would blow back on me.”
“You wasted your time,” Kruger said. “Spooks got ahold of the photos. They’re the US government, buddy. You can’t fuck with them. It’s only a matter of time until they find you. Hell, I’m surprised they haven’t already.”
Victor shook his head. “I should have just moved.”
“You should have just killed yourself. Then I wouldn’t have had to fly all the way to Bumfuck, Nowhere, to resolve my grievances with you…sir.”
Victor stepped away from the stove and braced himself against the kitchen island. The whole cabin rested in silence, nothing but the click of the cooking timer becoming audibly louder as time fleeted.
Kruger looked at his men. “Tear it apart.”
The goons began overturning furniture, amenities, and every square inch of the cabin—searching.
Victor looked at the floor. “I gave the press the only copies,” he said.
“I figured as much,” Kruger said. “Guy like you didn’t want the memories that haunted you lying in a drawer in all their black-and-white glory. But we still need to be thorough.”
Victor looked away.
Kruger was right.
A few minutes passed—the goons found nothing.
“Zip,” the guy in the fedora said.
Kruger looked at Victor.
“Well,” Victor said. “How do you want to do this, kid?”
Kruger quickly hopped off the chair, took three long strides over toward Victor, and came within an inch of his face. He said nothing for several moments. All he did wa
s breathe and let his eyes go maniacally wide. His lips curved into a grimace. Then he lifted up his hands and cupped Victor’s face in between them with a gentle embrace. “You can go easy,” he said. “Even though you dicked me over.”
“I suppose,” Victor said, “you’re gonna say ‘it’s nothing personal’ now.”
Kruger shrugged. “Would it help?”
Victor’s lip curled. He took a deep breath, released it, and said, “You plan on killing all of us?”
“I already dealt with Prince and Koletar. I got lucky with Tibault and Cross. Alcohol poisoning did it in for them.” He winked. “It’s just you now.”
Victor huffed as the ticking of the kitchen clock became unbearably amplified inside his old ears. As the ticking ramped up, Kruger pulled Victor in close and stared him straight in the eye.
PING!
The cooking timer went off.
Coffee was ready.
“You sweet old bastard,” Kruger said as he released his grip. “I think I would have liked you in another life. You would have been that wise old sage I would have consulted for advice during times of hardship and distress, but…life is life. No use in wallowing over what could have been.”
Victor shot back. “Watch what your shoveling there. May I remind you that you were the one who landed us in this shit storm in the first place?”
“Don’t forget the silver lining to that whole event, sir,” Kruger said. “We ended up landing a big score. You missed out on a consistent payday. Instead you let your damn conscience get in the way.”
“What we did was wrong.”
“Being sent off to do the bidding of rich men while poor kids died is wrong. We were given a death sentence. We just decided to take something for ourselves before we floated up to that spirit in the sky. You should have just kept your mouth shut and gone along for the ride, old man. You’d be living high off the hog.”
“I did keep my mouth shut. I let you barbarians take what you wanted for fear of my own safety, and too many days have passed where I can’t look at myself in the mirror anymore for not ratting you people out for what you did.”
