by Sam Jones
Kruger’s final bon voyage.
Billy pulled the Ford into a spot facing toward the street he had just pulled off of in the first of the six parking rows in the lot. His back was to Mr. Thompson, and the three men following alongside Mr. Thompson about two hundred yards away, all of them spaced apart in a V formation with Mr. Thompson taking point at the tip.
Billy took a breath and watched them through the mirrors as they swept the entire marina—every slip, every dock, heads swiveling and eyes searching.
Billy needed to wait.
He needed them to go back to the boat.
After that it was improvisation only.
About five minutes passed before Billy saw Mr. Thompson getting a call on a portable radio. He stopped the thugs with him, turned, and began walking back in the direction they came from.
Billy noted the hustle in their step.
They’re leaving.
He grabbed his Colts and his MP5, stuffed the grenades in his jacket pockets, and hopped out of the car. He stayed in a crouch as he moved right and to the north toward the direction Mr. Thompson and his guys had trotted and adjusted the Ka-Bar in the back of his waistband. Billy moved up the parking rows and used the cars for cover as he hid the MP5 on the inside of his jacket, concealed but positioned at an angle where he could draw it out quickly if the fireworks started early.
As he made it to the row of cars second in from the docks, Billy saw Mr. Thompson and the men slowing down, spacing apart and taking on a kind of half-relaxed, half-defensive stance.
And then Billy saw the security guard approaching Thompson and his boys.
Shit…
Billy knew he needed to change up the play.
The security guard was a balding man in his late forties. He wasn’t a jovial man. He wasn’t a dour man. He was one of those guys who hung out somewhere in the middle, and people either liked or tolerated him enough that his reputation was fairly…decent.
The guard, Teddy Phelps, was a single, middle-aged man with no ambition and enough of a consistent paycheck from his job as a security guard that he lived well enough off in his one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. He was a simple guy, and his job patrolling the docks for forty-five minutes on and fifteen minutes off, eight hours a day, was like being paid to exercise, but not forcing himself to actually have to break a sweat while doing it.
It was an easy job—there were no crimes committed here. No gangs hung out here. Drugs came through, but none that Teddy saw with his eyes. There was no trouble. No suspicious people.
Save for tonight, that is…
As Teddy Phelps was coming back from his last fifteen minutes off, he spotted four men dressed like something from a soft rock music video moving toward what looked like Dock 6, and though Teddy Phelps wasn’t exactly Mr. Intuitive, right away he could smell that something was funny about this particular group of individuals.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a school principal’s inflection. “Can I help you?”
The group slowed to a stop.
Teddy saw that the ghostly looking blond guy was wearing sunglasses at night. “Something wrong with your eyes, pal?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Thompson said as he crept a hand toward the compact, Steyr AUG assault rifle tucked inside his coat, “there is.”
But before Kruger could take out his weapon, a car radio began playing music from the far side of the parking lot facing the street.
Alice Cooper. “Welcome to My Nightmare.”
Billy had doubled back to his Ford in the parking row closest to the street moments earlier and switched on the radio, searching for a station to play what would most likely be his last song ever to draw Mr. Thompson and the trio of fuckbuckets with him into the parking lot. When he came across a hard rock station, he was surprised and more than delighted to hear the opening riff from the title track from Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.
After turning the volume up and softly closing the door, Billy crouched and hustled his way toward the direction of the docks and took cover behind the rear of a GMC on its right-hand side in the second of the six rows closest to the water. Positioned and ready, he raised his MP5 and disengaged the safety.
Mr. Thompson and the goons, thirty yards away from Billy, turned away from Teddy the security guard and headed toward the parking lot.
“Hey,” Teddy said, not planning on pursuing. “Where you guys going?”
The three goons made their way toward the ramp on their left that led up to the parking lot as Mr. Thompson lingered behind.
Ready to rock and roll.
54
AS ALICE COOPER serenaded the marina with his hypnotic and gothic stylings, Mr. Thompson and the three thugs slowly converged on the parking lot. Frosty, itching to kill, the three thugs took point as Mr. Thompson lingered not far from Teddy the security guard.
Back in the Ripley’s Run, Kruger could faintly hear the music and smirked while he swigged his whiskey. “There you are, Billy…”
The goons, five feet apart and moving much like the VC in the jungles of Vietnam—at least in Billy’s mind—ascended the twenty-foot ramp through the lot and let their barrels scan from left to right. They were twenty yards to the left of Billy and the back of the GMC he was hiding behind and closing as Alice Cooper tempted all those around to take a peek into his twisted mind.
Billy waited until the goons turned their heads.
Then he raised the MP5 and let off a burst—a couple of the rounds hit the guy on the far right in the side of his head and blasted off a chunk as the other goons moved for cover.
One down.
From the docks, Mr. Thompson could see the muzzle flash flagging down Billy’s location from the right-hand side of the GMC. He raised the Steyr. The guitar track on “Welcome to My Nightmare” started getting into the nitty-gritty, funked-up riffing as he shot.
Billy, spotting Mr. Thompson thirty yards to his left, ducked down as Mr. Thompson squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flash of the Steyr was like a spider web, and the rounds peppered the left side of the GMC and popped the back tires as Billy kept low and moved to his right toward the hood, sparks flying and shots crying.
Mr. Thompson unloaded all forty-two rounds from his magazine into the GMC, the two remaining goons working with him now breaking off and moving toward the front of the GMC.
Teddy the guard, scared out of his wits, ran off toward his shack to notify the proper authorities. But Mr. Thompson had spun around and let off a five-round burst that tore open Teddy’s back and knocked him down face first onto the docks with a bone-crunching smack.
Billy couldn’t see it, but he could hear it.
It pissed him off even more than he already was.
He took a moment to gather his bearings. He was crouched near the hood on the right side of the GMC. The goons were converging on his hiding spot from fifty feet directly to his left, spacing themselves apart and approaching the vehicle from either side—one moving toward the rear up aisle one, the other moving toward the grill up aisle two.
Billy was boxed in.
Mr. Thompson casually strolled along the docks toward the ramp, taking his time and letting the goons do most of the legwork.
Billy held the MP5 over his head and fired it blindly over the hood of the car. Half the rounds. Fifteen in total. The shooters ducked down and took cover behind a pair of vehicles to the left and right as Billy missed wide and Steve Hunter whaled on his guitar over the radio in the background.
Billy took a deep breath.
Think, damn it.
Calculate!
He reached into his pocket and did the only thing he could think of—he took out one of the grenades, pulled the pin, and waited.
The shooters fired back at the GMC and started moving out of cover.
Billy listened to their footsteps inching closer to his location and made his best guesstimation of the distance.
Thirty feet.
Twenty.
He released his grip on the lever of the grenade and threw it over the hood of the GMC. A half second after he lobbed the grenade, Billy fired off the last fifteen rounds in the MP5 over the hood to push back the shooters. The grenade rolled to a stop near the guy to Billy’s right fifteen feet away as Billy covered his head.
BANG.
The shooter on the right was blown off his feet, the right half of his body torn to shreds from the blast of the grenade as his tattered body slammed against the hood of a van. As soon as the little sucker went off, everyone in the immediately vicinity not involved in the fight became increasingly more concerned at the ruckus being made over at the marina.
A few of the neighbors started dialing 911 just to be safe.
Kruger remained still the entire time inside the little breakfast nook, even as Mr. Thompson rattled off his assault rifle into the security guard on the dock. As soon as Kruger heard the grenade go off, he took a drink. He wasn’t going to start getting nervous.
Yet.
Billy reloaded his MP5 as he half crawled to a Subaru directly behind the rear of the GMC. As soon as he was in cover, the shooter still standing came out of hiding and fired his MP5K in Billy’s direction, missing wide but keeping Billy suppressed behind the Subaru.
Mr. Thompson, finally mounting the ramp that led up into the parking lot, fired off a burst of rounds that tore into the hood of the Subaru Billy was now hiding behind.
Billy went back into quick-decision mode—his eyes lit up when an idea hit him.
Perfect.
He slowly sprawled out onto his stomach and took aim with the MP5 through the gap underneath the Subaru. Tires and bumpers and undercarriages obstructed most everything. But luck seemed to be on Billy Reese’s side in that moment when his gaze landed on the exact thing he was hoping to find in a little opening near the front end of the Subaru: the second shooter’s slightly bent legs, hustling in his direction from ten feet away.
Billy let out a whistle.
The shooter planted his feet.
Billy then popped off twenty rounds and turned the guy’s shins, thighs, and kneecaps into a blood-soaked and ground-meat mess as he cried out into the night and fired off his gun. As soon as the hollering shooter fell onto his left side, Billy took aim and squeezed off a single round into the guy’s forehead.
Have a nice night.
Mr. Thompson stepped foot into the parking lot and sprayed his rifle from left to right, strafing and saturating the Subaru Billy was hiding behind and keeping him in cover. Billy fired off the last nine rounds he had in the magazine through the Subaru’s windows in Mr. Thompson’s direction, glass spraying and showering Billy as he recalled the jam he was in back at the convenience store when that punk-ass tweaker tried to put him in a box.
No paint cans this time.
But once again the universe seemed to favor Billy Reese, as two police cruisers with sirens blaring and emergency lights cutting through the night converged on the parking lot’s entrance to the east, to Mr. Thompson’s left and Billy’s right.
That’s it.
They got all of us now.
But Billy was premature in his thinking—for a moment he forgot that Mr. Thompson was a complete lunatic.
The cruisers turned hard a right into the parking lot, nearly hip to hip as they closed in on Mr. Thompson. Through the megaphone system, one of the officers shouted, “Put the gun down! Now!”
Mr. Thompson responded by pulling a Glock from his waistband and fired off a few shots in Billy’s direction to keep him cowering behind the Subaru, two of the rounds missing Billy’s head by a few inches as he ducked lower and pounded a fist on the door in frustration. Mr. Thompson then fired off every last round from his assault rifle into the windshields of the police cruisers, their emergency sirens now wailing in and out like a B-movie robot powering down. Once Mr. Thompson had emptied his entire magazine into the vehicles, the cruiser on his right veered to his left and the one on his left veered to the right. They rolled only a few feet more before crashing into two parked cars, the cruiser on the left flipping onto its side and the one on the right coming to a dead stop after colliding with the left side of a pickup truck.
“Son of a bitch,” Billy said as he slapped in the last magazine for his MP5.
A click—he could hear Mr. Thompson also in the process reloading.
Now!
Mr. Thompson, still loading a fresh clip, dove to the right behind a sedan as Billy stood and opened fire, squeezing off short, controlled bursts to conserve ammo as he sidestepped to his right and took cover behind a truck with a trailer hitched to the back. Mr. Thompson then quickly rose with his Steyr and responded to Billy’s assault with sheer ferocity as he slowly closed in on the trailer. As half of the forty-two-round clip in the Steyr was emptied into the trailer, Billy said to himself, “Come on, man. What the fuck are you doing?”
He looked to his right, his eyes instinctively landing on the Ford he parked near the front entrance about thirty meters away in the first row—Mr. Cooper still crooning through the radio.
So Billy made another decision. He ran in a half crouch toward the Ford, weaving his way through parking aisles four and five and using the cars as cover as Mr. Thompson pursued him through the maze of motor vehicles.
Billy would move, Thompson would fire, Billy would respond. They played their game for about fifteen seconds before Billy made it to the rear end of the Ford and unloaded what was left of his MP5 in Mr. Thompson’s direction, Billy’s rounds taking off the right rearview mirror and driver’s-side window of a van as Mr. Thompson calmly took cover behind the hood and loaded the final mag he had into the Steyr.
Billy tossed his depleted MP5 onto the pavement, slipped into the Ford and started the engine, his hand drifting and changing the radio to a station playing Latin beats.
“Eres Tú,” Mocedades.
Happy music. Uplifting music.
Music in Español.
Mr. Thompson snuggled the stock of the Steyr into his shoulder and turned out of cover as Billy ducked below the steering wheel and peeled out in reverse, the tires spinning and smoking as Mr. Thompson squeezed off a ten-round burst that laid waste to the back window, “Eres Tú,” still in the midst of its triumphant, gospel-like groove as the gunshots rang out.
Billy put the car into drive and slammed his foot down on the accelerator, turning the wheel hard right and curving his way toward the third parking row, Mr. Thompson walking down the middle of the row as he continued to track and fire the Steyr in the direction of the Ford.
Billy, still ducking low with only a shred of visibility through the windshield, pulled his Colt, aimed it through the windshield as he turned down the center of aisle three, and jammed down on the gas pedal. Mr. Thompson was dead ahead of him, rifle raised and ready as both men waited for the other one to chicken out.
Both took aim.
Both opened fire.
Amaya Uranga sang about love being a fire.
Mr. Thompson ripped apart the windshield of the Ford and the headrests with his rifle, stuffing in the seats fluttering about like snow in a blizzard, the rounds close enough to hitting Billy in the head he felt a sickly rush of panic.
Shoot!
He blindly fired his Colt in reply until it racked back empty, three of the rounds punching their way into Mr. Thompson’s left forearm and the lower part of his abdomen on the right side as the Steyr was knocked from his grip and scattered across the pavement. Recoiling from the impact, Mr. Thompson shuffled back and dove into the parking row to his right, Billy sideswiping the back end of a Mazda in an attempt to hit Mr. Thompson just as he cleared out of the way and began moving back toward the marina.
Billy sat up, reloaded the Colt, and then turned left at the end of aisle three and followed along parallel with Mr. Thompson as he half limped his way through aisles one and two before jinking right toward the wide wooden ramp that lead back down to the docks.
Wide enough to drive a car thr
ough…
Billy then had a thought.
Then he looked at his Van Halen shirt.
Then he made another decision.
Might as well jump.
He straightened the wheel, turned to his left, took his foot off the gas, and opened the driver’s side door as the jubilant horn section of “Eres Tú” rang out.
Here we go again, dumbass.
Ten feet from the ramp, Billy threw open the door, covered his head with his arms, and leapt out of the vehicle. He hit the pavement—hard—and barrel-rolled several times to his left before coming to a hard stop against the left side of a Chrysler and denting in the door. Billy had cushioned the fall well enough that he’d live, but once the adrenaline wore off he would find himself sporting a couple of fractured ribs, a hyperextended wrist, some decent road rash, and a minor concussion.
Add it to the list.
The Ford, now driverless, mounted the ramp and descended on Mr. Thompson just as he set foot on the docks. He tried to dodge left out of the car’s path as it closed in on him like a panther cornering a meal, but it was pointless—the Ford hit him head on and slammed him into a wooden post, pinning the pasty-looking son of a bitch with a hard and sickening crunch as the vehicle came to a stop. Mr. Thompson’s body draped over the crushed-in hood of the Ford as the light pole overhead began flickering from whatever electrical damage the impact had caused, the cheerful beat of “Eres Tú” then slowly and appropriately fading away.
Game over, man.
Mr. Thompson didn’t grunt. Didn’t groan. Even though he was now paralyzed from the waist down with the hot grill of a Ford scorching his genitals, it was nothing more than a minor annoyance to him, nothing more than a little bit of egg on his face.
