Nature of the Game

by James Grady

When he stopped, the smile he gave Jud was new.

  “I’ll get the money.” Jud deliberately turned, gave Dean his back, and headed toward the trailer door; toward the blue bag.

  And Dean pushed him, both hands slamming into Jud’s back, Jud sensing it too late to do more than stagger forward and crash into his closed trailer door.

  “You’re not the man anymore!” screamed Dean.

  Pushing off the trailer door, Jud whirled around, hands arcing up for blocks, for snake strikes, balance shaky, and Dean …

  Out of range, eyes wild and circling away from Jud’s charge, Jud circling with him as Dean stepped back, hands blurring under the duster …

  Swinging out a pump shotgun, its black bore seeing Jud.

  “FREEZE!” yelled a man by the café. “DROP THE GUN!”

  Dropping, rolling in the dirt, earth and sky spinning for Jud. A tumbling upside-down image of a firing-stance man at the edge of the café; gun, sports jacket, rolling, a tall man with short hair.

  Shotgun roars and buckshot slams into the back corner of Nora’s Café as Jud scrambles toward the trailer door. Dean chambers another shell.

  Wes whirls back around from the building’s edge that caught the buckshot, snaps two from the Sig, close but duck back quick …

  Shotgun blast. Plaster flies off the café wall.

  Inside, Jud flops inside the aluminum trailer.

  The blue bag, grabbing it, sliding the loop over his head as he dives deeper inside and roaring buckshot blows out the trailer window, glass shattering, curtain flying.

  A pistol barks twice outside. Bullets slam into the right corner of Jud’s trailer.

  Dean’s there, he thought. That’s where he found cover.

  One way out, the trailer only has one way out.

  Dean’s around the corner to the right, he thought. Around the corner all the way. With a shotgun. And there’s a stranger with a pistol hugging the café wall off to the left.

  He could have shot us both, thought Jud. Didn’t. Drew down on Dean.

  The shotgun and pistol roared. Another bullet slammed into the corner of Jud’s trailer. He heard a crack. A jagged line zigzagged through the trailer’s blue mirror. In the dim light, Jud saw his image, warped and in two halves.

  “I won’t die in a tin box,” he mumbled.

  The short-barreled .38 had six rounds.

  Enough, he told himself. Enough.

  Bullets slammed into the side of the trailer. The blue mirror crashed off the wall. The shotgun roared.

  His ears rang with gunfire, his heart raced, and think, he had to think. Firefights. Alley in Madrid. Café in Tehran. Laos. Bong Sot. Grenades and rockets and don’t let them overrun the wire, don’t—No, down, stay down, back. This time, he said, breathing deep, hyperventilating. Do this time.

  Think!

  Give the stranger your back. He didn’t shoot it once, maybe he won’t again. Dean is the killer you know.

  Out the door fast, he thought. Zero the corner where Dean is, get out, get close. Lay down suppression fire. Count your rounds. Duck low and jump wide around the corner, then …

  Then, he thought.

  Bullets crashed into his trailer and he heard Dean laugh.

  On your feet, soldier. He climbed off the floor. Held the gun in the two-handed grip he’d learned in the Secret Service, where they’d taught him to stand tall in a gunfight and take the bullet for the Man.

  You aren’t the man anymore, Dean had said.

  Shotgun roared.

  Yes, I am, thought Jud, moving to the door.

  Yes, I am! And he kicked the door open …

  Out, sunlight blinding sunlight. Gunsmoke. Men yelling. Muffled woman’s screams. Pop! Muzzle flash by the back of the café, bullet zinging past him, muzzle flash and gun and bright white threat: don’t think don’t aim don’t die point and fire.

  His .38 roared twice at the threat he hadn’t anticipated.

  Nora fell back against the café wall, the owner’s pistol she’d fired at Dean dropping from her hand, twin red roses blooming on her white blouse.

  Dead.

  Jud knew she was dead as soon as he recognized her over his gunsight, two rounds gone. Knew it before she slid to the ground, eyes gazing in the bright sunlight.

  The rattle-rack of a shotgun round being chambered to his right and he didn’t care, didn’t matter. A bullet zinging across his path didn’t matter as he stumbled toward Nora.

  “Jud, drop!” yelled Wes. He squeezed off a round behind the dazed man staggering across the killing zone.

  Blood sprayed from Dean’s shoulder and he dove out of sight behind the trailer as Wes changed ammunition clips.

  Where’d Dean go! thought Wes.

  Jud, shuffling. Wes knew the look on his face, had seen it on a dazed sergeant, a man blown over the edge, long gone, not there, not in the battle, the dust, the gore, not returning fire, not running, not taking cover … gone.

  Wes knew the woman was dead, too. Knew how and knew why and what it had done to Jud—knew all that in a heartbeat, in a crystal moment of clarity snapped into the chaos of battle.

  “Take cover!” he yelled to Jud, his eyes never leaving the trailer—which way would Dean go? Wes yelled the only thing he could think of to snap Jud out of it, to get him down, get him safe until. Maybe get him to use his gun—on Dean.

  “Marines!” Wes yelled to the ex-soldier. “Relief force!”

  Jud stumbled toward the dead woman.

  Change position, thought Wes.

  There’d be no relief force for him. The Gs who’d trailed Dean and homed Wes in on this café were parked off the side of the road a mile each direction from the café. They’d follow any surveillance subject who drove past, but they wouldn’t help Wes make contact. Nor would they come to his rescue.

  Keep your enemy pinned, force him to reorient.

  Gun zeroed on the trailer, West sidestepped through the open toward a Jeep parked between the adobe house and the trailer.

  Her blouse was red. Jud reached toward her. Stopped. She was dead. He’d killed her. His gun slid from his hand.

  Revulsion sucked him up like a tornado.

  Gone, he wanted to be never been, not here. Gone. Nothing else mattered.

  The flies were already buzzing her face.

  Through the café, past where Carmen was wedged between the refrigerator and the stove: “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega …” Door, front door.

  The black car.

  Beside it, a Chevy rented from the Las Vegas airport. Red. Wes’s Gore-Tex briefcase on the front seat, a suitcase hastily thrown in the back. Keys left in the ignition for a quick start, quick pursuit.

  Only being gone mattered. Next thing Jud knew, he was in the Chevy, headed down the highway.

  Behind the café, Wes heard a car go.

  Screaming, Dean screaming coat flapping shoulder bleeding handgun blazing charging from behind the trailer firing …

  At where Wes had been.

  Wes shot him five times.

  Left him dead on the sand. The woman slumped against the wall—dead. From inside the café came sobbing, hysterical prayers in Spanish.

  Wes circled around to the front of the café.

  And found only the black car.

  EXPEDITED DEMISE

  This was the third time in his life that Jud had run away.

  The second time had been just weeks before, after the man in the Oasis Bar had died. Jud ran then, found Nora, only to have to run again this third time, leaving her dead in the sand.

  The first time Jud ran was Miami, 1978.

  Miami, the liquid city. Bright, tropical, the big heat. But the running had been clean, because that first time, in Miami, 1978, it had been all business.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Art Monterastelli had told Jud as they sat at the white-clothed table spread with bowls of fruit and plates of bacon and eggs. Art tilted a silver pot to fill each of their china cups with sweet Cuban coffee.

&n
bsp; “Business,” said Art. Whether he was in the jungles of Southeast Asia, on the desert of Iran, or amidst the beaches and sun-bouncing skyscrapers of Miami, blond Monterastelli never tanned, never burned. He wore his smoked sunglasses.

  “Aren’t we friends?” asked Jud.

  In Miami, Art wore his blond hair long and wavy, like a 1950s teenage heartthrob. That day, he wore a pink shirt outside his linen pants. He was thicker in body, more lined in the face.

  They sat on the back veranda of Art’s Miami home. To be precise, it was Miami Beach. Off North Bay Road. They were casual. And too not-alone.

  In the shadows by the French doors sat Raul, flat eyes, tropical suit, swarthy face. Raul was Art’s numero uno and an officer in Sigma 77, a paramilitary anticommunist group dedicated to la lucha—the struggle. Rumors in Miami said that Sigma 77 helped plant the bomb that exploded that October at a New York City Cuban newspaper that had dared to support el diálogo—overtures between exiled Cubans in the U.S. and Castro. A Washington, D.C., policeman once flew down to Miami to interview Raul about the 1976 car bomb that killed the former ambassador from Allende’s short-lived Marxist Chilean government a mile from the White House.

  In Miami, where a third of a million people were Cuban and from a culture wedded to the romance of el exilio and la lucha, making Raul his numero uno was political genius on Art’s part. Raul’s Spanish was invaluable in the business. His soul was long gone, lost perhaps when the CIA deserted him with the rest of the 2506 Brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, perhaps afterward in Castro’s prisons. Refugees who knew Raul as a boy in Havana whispered that he’d been a monster even then.

  Those Miami days might find Raul whispering with other exilios in a mirror-walled Little Havana café or on a shuttle flight to Washington, D.C., or Guatamala. He’d worked for JM/WAVE, AM/LASH and MONGOOSE, the CIA’s covert wars against Cuba, helped arrange assassination plots the CIA subcontracted to the Mafia. He knew the Cubans arrested as Watergate burglars, fellow exilios dedicated to la lucha, all of them friends of men in Washington who went to the streets of Cuban Miami when they needed warriors who wouldn’t shirk the crusade. Raul knew people everywhere; more importantly, he was known, though no one could ever be sure who he was at any given moment: currents within currents in liquid Miami.

  Sitting in the shadows, Raul had his suit coat open. Jud saw the pistol in his waistband.

  Behind Jud, leaning against the veranda’s thin, black, steel railing, was an ex-biker from Carmel who Art had leveraged out of a jam in Mexico. These elegant Miami days, the biker kept his goatee trimmed and wore a sports jacket over his tattooed arms and a slung Uzi.

  Over Art’s left shoulder, in the far corner of the veranda, Jud saw a wiry ex-South Vietnamese Ranger coiled in a wicker chair. Art had recruited him out of a refugee camp when he heard how the Asian claimed a berth on a refugee boat.

  A wide lawn stretched beyond the veranda to a canal. Green water slapped gently against the wood of Art’s dock. A quarter mile up the channel from Art’s shore, charred pilings from a burned dock poked out of the ripples like stubby black fingers. Raul lived on one side of Art, the only Cuban in the neighborhood. The prominent Florida lawyer who owned the house on the other side of Art secretly derived his wealth from Art. There was a chain link fence surrounding Art’s property. The real security was invisible, from infrared cameras and motion sensors to land mines that Art switched off when the Haitian lawnboy came to ride the power mower.

  Jud sensed more than saw something in the shadows of the gazebo on the lawn between the canal and the veranda.

  Kerns, he thought. The only man in the organization besides Jud who was good enough to guarantee a shot at that range.

  Inside the house were a servant and two gunmen Jud had hired for Art. And Monterastelli’s seventeen-year-old mistress.

  The Miami heat was thick and sweet and as fragrant as the coffee they sipped.

  “Friends?” said Art. “Perhaps. But business rules. Your fun days ended when you left the old team.”

  “I didn’t leave,” said Jud. “They threw me off. Unstable, reductions in force: which of their stories do you want?”

  Art sipped his coffee. “You should have picked your time to leave them, not the other way around.”

  Casually, as if this were a social breakfast, Art said, “Did the firm pay you much when you were playing locksmith in Washington, black-bagging embassies and other places?”

  “I wasn’t working for them then,” lied Jud.

  “Who did you hang out with in D.C.?” asked Art.

  “You got a problem?” said Jud. To defend, attack: “You want dates with the women in D.C. I fucked or what?”

  “If the or what matters.” Art’s gaze was flat. “Did someone send you to look for me?”

  Jud frowned. “Are you nuts?”

  “That’s your reputation.”

  The two men laughed. The biker behind Jud joined their sanctioned mirth. The Vietnamese and Raul kept silent.

  “I found you on my own,” said Jud. “You bought that then because it was true, because it made sense, and because I could run security for your program.”

  “But you’re walking away from this good deal, just when we’re expanding to ten planes of weed a month.”

  “Not my fault about the crash,” said Jud.

  “I believe that,” said Art. “It was only a matter of time until a plane went down in the Glades. It was coincidence that you were on it. Or convenience.”

  “I didn’t find it convenient,” snapped Jud.

  “The police did. They found your driver’s license on an empty C-130 with enough stems and seeds to make a case. They picked you up in your penthouse, no problem.”

  “You don’t kill cops,” said Jud, “you buy ’em.”

  “Killing’s never bothered you before.” Art shook his head. “That’s so unlike you: in the field unsanitized, dropping nondeniable gear.”

  He rang a silver bell. The servant cleared the plates. Art leaned back and turned his sunglasses up to the sky.

  “Hot,” he said.

  “It’s Miami,” answered Jud.

  “I talked to the Italians,” said Art. “They said no one was ever able to buy that judge before.”

  Jud’s neck tingled. “Nobody ever met his price before.”

  “How did you come up with a million and a quarter?”

  “The lawyer handled it.”

  “Ah, lawyers. Where would we be without them?”

  The two men sat in the heat. Watching each other.

  Art spoke first. “So much money passed through your hands and never stuck. You’ve wasted a fortune—penthouse, Porsches, pussy.”

  Jud laughed, and Art laughed with him.

  “I’ll get by,” said Jud.

  “You’re broke, but you want to go.”

  “I don’t want to, I’ve got no choice.”

  “If you’re right about those cops being pissed off because you walked away. That they want revenge or other meat.”

  “You think I’d roll over on you?” said Jud.

  “Would you?”

  Art’s sunglasses never left the sky.

  “I’m not that stupid,” said Jud truthfully.

  In the shadows, Raul grinned.

  For the first time that morning, Art truly smiled. “What would they say about us back on the old team, eh?”

  The blond man’s smoked glasses stared at Jud.

  “You never know what they think,” said Jud.

  “They’re insulated,” said Art, “not inscrutable.”

  Raul spit on the veranda.

  “Who ran the show?” asked Jud.

  “Don’t you know?” asked Art.

  They laughed again, neither willing to give an inch.

  “You’re glad to be done with guys like that,” said Jud.

  “Who says I’m done with them?”

  “You like your own game too much,” said Jud. “You’re too deep in it, and too
smart to mix plays.”

  “You know that, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But do they?”

  “What does it matter?” asked Jud. Change the subject. “I’ve got loose ends to tie up. I’ll exfilt day after tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Boston.” Jud shrugged. “Connections. No heat.”

  “You should be more of a lizard,” said Art.

  “Gecko, right?”

  “Yes,” said Art, remembering with Jud.

  Jud stood, carefully keeping his hands in view. He carried no gun, wore no sportsjacket over his shirt. Art rose with him. So did the Vietnamese. Raul kept his chair.

  “Come by for lunch tomorrow.” Art shook Jud’s hand with a firm, dry grip. “I want to give you some traveling cash.”

  “No need for that,” said Jud.

  “If you don’t take care of your people,” said Art, “they don’t take care of you.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Besides, you remember Heather’s friend? The redhead with the tight ass?” Art grinned. “I’ve arranged to send you away with a bang.”

  All the men on the veranda laughed. Jud waved good-bye, took his time walking through the house with its Baccarat crystal and abstract art. Three Dobermans were locked in the study. The two bodyguards he’d hired for Art wished him well. The teenage blonde who was too cool to have been a cheerleader strolled to the French windows leading to the pool. She wore a bikini.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  Do you know you’re a liar? wondered Jud.

  He didn’t worry about starting the silver Porsche. Parked this close to Art’s home, they wouldn’t have bombed it. Even in Miami, 1978, that was too bold.

  Jud drove south on Collins, cut over to Ocean Drive, where scrawny, gray-haired men sat on the porches of tourist homes, staring out at the waves, not hearing the women chatter.

  His mirrors showed no one on his trail.

  Be cool, he thought. The heat’s making you crazy. Art knows nothing. Kerns wasn’t in the gazebo, all those guns were there just because. Besides, you’ll be gone in six hours, cover Art’s curiosity with a phone call: Had to leave early, sayonara.

  He flipped on the radio, cycled the band from the newly labeled genre of light rock to Latin disco to jazz; left it on jazz, a cool saxophone. He rolled up his windows, used the A.C.