The Last Savage

by Sam Jones

  Kruger waved Salazar off. “Billy Reese is a fly on a windshield.” He cocked a look at Mr. Thompson. “You have no reason to be consumed with such paranoid what-if’s.”

  “Yet Reese already got in the way of me wanting to personally execute Hector Fuentes.”

  Kruger hunched forward, elbows on his knees, perturbed at Salazar’s insistence on beating an already dead issue further into the ground.

  “Look, Mr. Salazar,” he said. “Worrying about Reese is a counterproductive exercise. Everything is on schedule with our arrangement. All the transportation and security for the final shipment is in place. Three days from now, you will run nearly forty percent of the South Florida drug trade, and I will be far away on a beach somewhere taking in a sunset.”

  “A dreadfully common fantasy, no?” Salazar said with a sneer.

  “To each his own,” Kruger said. “Either way, I find my narrative to be a more than fitting and fulfilling way to live out whatever remaining years I have. All that’s missing for me is the bankroll to make that happen.”

  Kruger smiled—Now give me my money.

  Salazar returned the smile, motioned to one of his men, and placed down his glass. Moments later, the bodyguard returned with a business card and held it out in front of Kruger. Kruger looked at the card, the name of a Swedish man and a Swedish bank printed on the front.

  He knew what was coming next and began grinding his jaw.

  “I’m going to assume,” he said, “that you don’t have my money with you…”

  Salazar flicked the card with his thumb. “That card is from a bank. That bank currently has an account open with fifty percent of your money from this deal deposited within it. Only I have access to it. Once you’ve completed the deal, the other fifty percent will be deposited, and then I will transfer the account over to you. Should you fail, should there be any kind of hitch in the plan, the funds will be withdrawn, and the account will be closed.”

  Kruger was pissed.

  He was really pissed.

  “That wasn’t what we agreed upon,” he said to Salazar. “The deal was for you to deliver me half of my cash when we met up here in Chicago.”

  “Well, the deal has changed.”

  “And how am I supposed to pay my people with money I can’t touch? I apologize, Don Salazar, but I didn’t expect to walk in here today to find out that you’re…” he clicked his teeth, “changing the rules.”

  “And I didn’t expect,” Salazar said, contempt in his tone, “that the CIA would be trying to track you down.”

  Kruger huffed—the Don knew everything.

  He should have known better.

  “It’s a minor inconvenience, Don Salazar,” he said. “Nothing more.”

  Salazar shook his head. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  “Well, then what you’ve heard is wrong.”

  Salazar moved closer. “Oh. So this ‘special unit’ I was told you were a part of during the war is not a true story?”

  Kruger, for the first time in a while, was the slightest bit nervous.

  He remained motionless, searching for some bullshit to shovel.

  Salazar took it all as a confirmation.

  “I have my sources too, Mr. Kruger,” Salazar said as he walked back to the panoramic window. “I did not get to the position I’m in just to—”

  Kruger stood up. “Spare me,” he said. “I’ve heard this bit before. You’re a sophisticated, cautious, intelligent guy who has to drum up a whole speech to coddle his insecurities. But quite frankly, Mr. Salazar, I don’t give five fucks on a Monday about how powerful you are. I really don’t. I know what you’re capable of; you know what I’m capable of. We both know we’re more than well equipped to do terrible things to one another, so why don’t you skip out on the part where we measure our manhoods and just tell me how you plan on playing the rest of this thing out…”

  Salazar was taken aback by Kruger’s bluntness.

  He admired it.

  Though he wasn’t sure just yet if he was going to let it slide.

  “You’ve acquired Castillo’s operation for me,” he said. “This is something that I have fought to do for some time, and you handed it to me in months. It was easy for you, as if it had been nothing more than a quick trip to the local grocer. You’ve given me what I’ve wanted on a silver platter, and something like that deserves a substantial reward. But,” he said as he picked up his glass, “you have attracted a significant amount of heat on a state and federal level. You’re radioactive, Mr. Kruger, and what I should do is kill you, cut my losses, and simply walk away.”

  Kruger didn’t blink—Take your best shot.

  “We conclude our deal in three days,” Salazar continued. “As long as that shipment arrives, I will continue to honor that deal. But only if everything is delivered and on time and without any problems. Only then will you have your money. But if anything happens, should anything go wrong…”

  Salazar came nearly nose to nose with Kruger, the expensive product in his hair glistening under the lights. “I will fucking kill you,” he said, “and ship your head back to those pigs you used to work for in Washington. Comprende?”

  Kruger took a moment. The guards behind Salazar were still, but the glint in their eye was like that of a pit bill—revved up and ready to attack. He looked Salazar in the eye, took a step forward, and came within one inch of his face.

  “Comprende,” he said.

  “Deal with Billy Reese,” Salazar said as he turned back and faced the window. “That’s all I have to say on the matter.”

  Kruger took that as his cue.

  He looked at his men and motioned to the door.

  “And Mr. Kruger,” Salazar called out.

  Kruger turned around.

  “Don’t ever disrespect me like that again,” Salazar said. “Otherwise I’ll kill your wife and child just to make my point with you.”

  Kruger said nothing. The threat should have bothered him.

  But it didn’t.

  He simply walked out of the suite, no reaction or rebuke as Mr. Thompson and the goon trailed behind him.

  “That prick,” Kruger spat as they walked out of the hotel. “If I didn’t have everything riding on this, I’d kill that Colombian cocksucker.”

  “What now?” his goon asked as they emerged onto the sidewalk outside the hotel, Mr. Thompson beside him. “Should we go after Reese? Tie it off?”

  “No,” Kruger said. “Forget about Reese. We’ve got bigger problems right now.”

  “Such as?”

  Kruger took a second to think as they moved down the street. “If the CIA is coming around because of this bullshit from my old unit, they might be trying to get a line on me through some of the people we have working the deal we’re about to close.”

  “What do you want to do about it?” Mr. Thompson asked.

  Kruger moved partway into an alley away from the citizens that were passing by them and out of earshot. “We’re going to hit reboot. We get rid of the original people we hired: Hendrix, Yurek, Kelso, Smith and his guys. We kill them. All of them. The deal’s still on, but I want to be cautious in case the company’s been tailing anyone.”

  “You sure?” the goon asked.

  “Absolutely,” Kruger said. “If the spooks are trying to sniff us out, they’re probably tailing one or more of those guys by now.”

  “Who’s going to fly in the stuff then?”

  “The shipment is still locked up in the warehouse. We get new men. We get new planes. All that takes is a phone call.”

  “That’s a good chunk of people.”

  Kruger shrugged. “To hell with them. We can’t risk it. Don’t use any of our people when you get rid of them, though. I want everyone lying low for the next couple of days.”

  “Who do you want to use?” Mr. Thompson asked.

  Kruger thought about it. “Chaz and Pete are still hanging around the seedier parts of South Florida, last I checked…”

 
; The goon looked dismayed. “Chaz and Pete are morons. Any time they’ve been commissioned for a hit, those guys just storm whatever place their mark is in and tear the place apart with machine guns.”

  “Sounds effective.”

  “They’re careless. They might get caught.”

  “Or killed. Either way, it won’t blow back on us. The cops have been trying to deal with Chaz and Pete for a while. If those cretins go off the deep end, which they might, the police will just kill them for us.”

  Kruger was confident of the plan.

  But he was also failing to see that he was starting to creep toward being that guy who made mistakes.

  He looked at both of his men. “Success is the only acceptable outcome,” he said. “You understand? We’ve worked too hard and too long to get cheated at the eleventh hour. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that scenario play out. So, from here on out, if any part of this is compromised, if you two or anyone else holds up the show in any way, shape, or form—I’ll cut your throats and bleed you out as slowly as I possibly can, drip by goddamn drip.”

  Both men silently acknowledged their boss.

  “Reese’ll still be looking for you,” Mr. Thompson said.

  “Let him. I told you no one is going to derail this. Not even Billy Reese.”

  Kruger’s thoughts then dwelled on Billy. He knew the man. He knew his tricks. He knew his mind. This whole thing was a chess game between two old friends now, and if there was anybody who could cause Kruger’s entire plan to become derailed—it was Billy Reese.

  Kruger knew he couldn’t risk letting him live. As long as his old friend was alive, he’d be looking for him.

  He needed to draw him in.

  He needed to tie it off.

  Then a thought occurred to Kruger, a way of tying things off, an easy, elegant, and viciously twisted solution that would force Billy Reese to surrender.

  Kruger turned to Mr. Thompson, poked a finger in his chest and said, “I have an idea.”

  34

  MARIA HAD ARRIVED on the scene about thirty seconds after Chicago PD drew down on Billy. She approached with extreme caution while they threw the cuffs on him, gave them her gun, and identified herself as an out-of-town cop on assignment. They were skeptical at best, taking her into custody and placing her in the back of a cruiser until they could sort through the bullshit. Both of them were cleared several phone calls later, after a bit of fact checking, and some corroborating from an FBI agent named Ferris.

  No harm, no foul.

  Sort of.

  After Billy was arrested and Maria was talking their way out of it with the local beat boys, he and the kid driving the Trans-Am were taken two minutes away to the hospital to deal with their injuries. The kid—as Billy had predicted—had a significant but survivable GSW (gunshot wound) in his shoulder that landed him extended room and board over at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

  As for Billy, the lovely doctor with a wicked brain had done a full exam on him and discovered that his shoulder wound was nothing more than a minor graze through the deltoid, easily sewn up with about thirty stitches.

  Lucky, lucky.

  On top of that he had a bruised jaw, a bruised right cheek, a bloodshot left eye from all the punches he had taken, and a peppering of welts and bruises the size of a baby’s fist scattered along his torso. As for the skin that Mr. Thompson had taken from his back, the doctor was able to clean the avulsion thoroughly before patching it over with some bandages. They couldn’t do much about the missing skin itself—time and Billy’s body would have to do the work themselves. They doctor then advised Billy to keep his mobility as limited as possible as it healed, but she knew the request was a long shot.

  All in all, Billy was pretty banged up—a little worse for wear with injuries that had chipped a few years off his life expectancy, a formerly new(ish) model car that had been rolled and dented and dinged up not long after it had been driven off the lot.

  But he would function just fine.

  After giving him all the necessary X-rays and CT-scans, the doctor prescribed him Vicodin for the pain to be used on an as-needed basis.

  Now sign for the bill.

  Nineteen hours after Kruger’s meeting with Salazar in the hotel—and a few Vicodin pills later—Billy was face to face with a now-exacerbated SAC Rebecca Ferris in his hospital room. She was standing across from his bed, arms crossed, fingers curved and balled into fists, equal parts concerned for his condition and the overall state of the investigation, which was a shit show to say the least.

  “Feeling okay?” she asked him, gaze on the floor.

  Billy waved her off, sitting on top of the covers in a gown with his legs out and crossed as he leaned back against a pile of pillows, tired, hungry, and tethered to an IV.

  “Some asshole tried to turn my back into a checker board and then shot me,” he said. “All things considered”—he motioned to the Vicodin resting on the stand to his left and displayed a slightly doped-up grin—“I’m actually kinda peachy at the moment.”

  He smiled and gave a thumbs-up that would make Gary Coleman’s character on Diff’rent Strokes proud.

  “Let’s talk about this,” Ferris said.

  Billy waved her off. “In a moment,” he said as he reached out for the portable radio and turned the knob.

  Ferris gestured at the radio. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “An orderly,” Billy said as he switched the thing on. “Gave him a couple of hundred bucks for it. They have no TV here. I was losing my mind.”

  “Was that your per diem?”

  “Look at you. You’re so smart.”

  “You spent hundreds of dollars in tax payer money on a used portable radio?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a little hopped up on pain pills right now, boss-boss, so let’s keep it on the hush-hush.”

  “Billy—”

  “I’m on a break,” he said. “I got my ass handed to me like five times in the past forty-eight hours. I’m taking a second to unwind.”

  He tuned the radio and landed on a station playing a song called “Claridad,” the beat and Spanish lyrics and pacing more ideal for dancing than relaxed and easy listening.

  Billy bit his lip. Squinted. “There we go. He clapped his hands and swayed back and forth in his bed. “Now we’re having a good time.”

  Ferris walked over and shut off the radio.

  Billy stopped his swaying and held up his hands. “There’s a nice way to do that.”

  “I know you like to let loose when you’re stressed,” Ferris said as she pulled up a chair and took a seat in front of the bed. “And usually I grant you that outlet. But quite frankly, I’m not in the mood to deal with your dumb shit at the moment, so just can it.”

  Billy looked away. He knew she was right. He was just trying to goof off to blow off the steam.

  But he was acting like an asshole.

  Takes the edge off though…

  But despite his best efforts, this time around it wasn’t working. He frowned, hung his head, ran his fingers through his hair, and kept his mouth shut.

  Ferris took a moment and a breath. “You’re sure it was Sykes—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Positive.”

  Ferris paced. “This doesn’t make any sense…”

  Billy looked out the window. “Sykes turned to the other side. A good guy was corrupted. It happens. Makes plenty enough sense to me.”

  “Why did he want you alive?”

  “He kept babbling on about some ‘operation.’ He didn’t tell me anything about it. He just wanted to see if I had any clue as to what was up. Obviously, I don’t.”

  “An operation?”

  “Yeah. He’s up to something. I just don’t have the slightest idea what it is. Same reason I have zero clue as to why he came to Chicago.”

  “Was there any—”

  “Look,” Billy said, irritable and a little fried, “the
fact is that Andy Sykes turned; he’s the one that’s been calling the shots on Castillo’s operation, and now he’s got something in the works. We had him. Then we lost him.” He rested his head back against the pillows. “Can you call the nurse? My head’s killing me…”

  Ferris moved toward the door. Lying on the chair by the door was a small mound of different colors wrapped in a tied-off, plastic grocery bag—Billy’s gear. He’d been eyeballing it every few moments, desperate to switch over to a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

  This hospital gown is itchy.

  Fucking cool it with the starch, people…

  Billy got off the thought and asked Ferris, “What’s going on back at the office?”

  He could already tell from the way Ferris was pacing that it wasn’t good.

  “Brogan’s throwing a fit,” she said. “Especially after everything that happened here.”

  “What about Chicago PD?”

  “They’re pissed.”

  “How pissed?”

  “Pretty pissed.”

  “Sweet. So what now?”

  Ferris took a moment.

  She said nothing.

  Billy sighed.

  He hated it when she withheld stuff from him…

  “Don’t suppose you got anything off the cameras at the Greyhound station, did you?” he asked.

  “Only cameras they had were for the ticket counters, entrance, and parking lot,” Ferris said. “There were a couple of back shots of the guys that followed you there, but other than that there was nothing useful.”

  “No plates on the car?”

  “Negative.”

  “Wonderful. What about the locker? The one with the fake bomb in it?”

  “Chicago PD checked it out. Someone must have cleaned out whatever was in it before they got there.”

  “And there’s no point to try and lift a print from the locker, so…” He sighed. “What else? You get a hit on anything?”

  “We ran a check on those bodies you left behind in Little Havana with that helicopter wreck.”

  “Oh, right,” Billy said. “The Air Cav guys. Who were they?”

  “Body of the pilot is pretty charred up. Gonna take a while to ID him.”