by Rick Murcer
Fort Myers.
More accurately, North Fort Myers.
It only made sense. There were three strip clubs in the entire area. From Fort Myers south to Naples. The best was Angel Station, second best Candy Assets. The third one, Real Dolls, was out in the boondocks. I know, I checked it out. And it was unpleasant, to say the least. Most likely a front for a biker meth lab.
These guys pulled into the parking lot of Candy Assets.
It made sense the Albanians had control of at least one of the strip clubs in the area. Hell, they might have all three.
I parked on a side street and went inside.
The place was cheese incarnate.
They had tried to re-create some kind of candy-store decorations, but it mostly amounted to a bunch of photographs of women licking lollipops.
So creative.
I took a seat at the bar.
“I’ll take a Heineken, please,” I said to the bartender. She was a tall redhead with an apron that parted down the back to show off a silver thong between two bright-white ass cheeks.
“Seven dollars,” she said.
I pushed a ten across the bar. “All set,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said without emotion and walked down to the end of the bar. Not gonna lie—I watched her the whole way.
I considered what my best plan would be, and then the solution presented itself.
Her name was Java. She was dark-skinned (again, the creativity!), probably Native American, and she wasn’t young. Her boobs were small and obviously real, which meant for a stripper her age that she either had ethics or not enough cash for the procedure.
If it were for ethical reasons, my plan wouldn’t work.
If, however, it had to do with a financial issue, I might have a temporary employee sitting next to me.
I pulled out a fifty and told her what I wanted her to do.
She said, “Easy money. I like it.”
•
The two men were reflected in the mirror behind the bar. I took a long drink of beer, then turned with a look of irritation on my face.
“Awfully tough to see tits and ass with you two standing there,” I said. “Actually, I do see asses. Two of them.”
They were both big, thick thugs. Heavy arms and foreheads the size of toasters.
“A girl said you were harassing her,” the one closest to me said.
“So fucking what?” I said. I loved playing an unruly customer. It was my favorite role. “Isn’t that what they’re here for, douche bag?”
“No, that’s not why they’re here,” the second one said. “I think maybe you should step outside, sir.”
“You know what, asshole?” I said. “If Fama tells me to leave, I’ll leave. Until then, buy me a beer, or a lap dance, or just fuck right off.”
The redhead glanced over from the end of the bar. I waved her over.
“These two meatballs are buying me another Heineken,” I said.
They didn’t say anything to her, so she gave me one, a slightly curious look on her face.
The thugs left, but one of them came back after a little more than half of my beer was gone.
He spoke.
“Mr. Fama would like a word with you, sir.”
It may have just been me, but his “sir” sounded a bit sarcastic.
9.
He sat behind a desk, an iPad in his hands.
I recognized him instantly. He was a short man, wide, with a beer belly and man-titties. His face was the very definition of bulbous: big, thick lips and a blubbery nose. A heavy forehead that hung over his eyes like a bone visor.
“Do you have one of these?” he asked, tilting the iPad toward me.
“Nope,” I said.
“It’s the new one. Look at how nice this picture is,” he said.
He turned the screen to me. It was a video of a young girl having sex with three men at the same time.
For a brief moment, I wondered if it was Kiki. But it wasn’t.
“I can tell you don’t like this, even though you are pretending to not care,” he said, pointing at the video.
“How old is she?” I said.
“Old enough.”
The other two guys laughed at the boss’s joke.
I looked at Fama. I knew his first name was Bruno, and that I had last seen him about a year ago at a brothel in Detroit, from which I had pulled Kiki out at gunpoint. Bruno Fama hadn’t been in charge then, but he’d been present. So had his little brother, Darko.
“So you remember me?” Fama said. “Because I remember you. You cost us some money. Maybe you want to pay me back now. We take credit cards. Everything but American Express. Their merchant’s transaction tax is too much. Fuckin’ robbery if you ask me.”
“Don’t think so, Bruno,” I said.
He gave a half-shrug and an I-could-care-less smile.
“What is it they call you?” he said.
I just stared at him.
“The Garbage Collector, right?” He laughed. “Maybe that is why you carry such a bad smell with you, no?”
The other guys laughed some more. No one is ever as funny as the boss. Just ask these guys.
“So why did you dump her in the river right across from me?”
“What on this Earth are you talking about?” he said. He put the iPad down on the desk again. The porn video was still playing.
“You’re just going to piss me off by lying,” I said.
He chuckled.
“You know,” he said. “After you stole one of our products back in Detroit, we put word out that we wanted to get to know you.”
I nodded.
“No one wanted to tell us anything,” he said. “But then a couple weeks ago, some friends of yours—lawyers, I believe—called me and said they’d heard a rumor you were in my neighborhood. They suggested I give you a gift, sort of like a . . . what do they call it . . . a Welcome Wagon?”
He picked up the iPad again and started tapping on the screen.
“We already knew how much you liked Kiki,” he said. “In fact, your lawyer friends said they’d heard that you and Kiki had become very good friends after you abducted her.”
I shook my head, but it was the truth. I’d made a mistake. Kiki’s relatives had asked me to deliver her to them, sober. I’d taken her to my place on Drummond Island and helped her kick the drugs. It became more than that, briefly, until I reunited her with her family. That was the last time I’d seen her, until we met again. On the river.
Fama continued his story. “And since it was time for her to go, we were going to feed her to the crabs, but then someone had an idea. Maybe it was me. That we could turn her into . . . what do they call it? The gift that keeps on giving, right? And you still haven’t said thank you! So rude.”
This got a big laugh from the assholes.
I knew the only reason Fama was telling me this was because he planned to kill me.
I smiled at him.
Fama laughed. “I can see you cared about her. I don’t give a shit and two halves about these bitches. These girls aren’t people to me. They’re product.”
“I bet that’s not what you tell them, though, is it?” I said.
“Tell them? I don’t talk to them, you idiot.” He held up a finger. “But I do fuck them. I believe I fucked this girl you talk about. Crystal. Kiki. I break them in, make sure they can suck dick like nobody’s business, then I am done. It’s like a test drive. Kiki told me I was the best fuck she’d ever had.”
I’d had enough of Fama. But I knew this wasn’t the place. Still, I wanted to make sure he would come after me as soon as possible. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him.
“So were you in the KLA too?” I said, gesturing at the red double-eagle on his forearm.
He didn’t bother glancing down. He knew what I was referring to.
He also didn’t answer.
“I almost said the ‘army,’ but it wasn’t really an army, was it?” I asked. “Just a bunch o
f criminals running around, killing kids and raping young girls. Sort of like a training ground for Albanian scum.”
I let out a big sigh.
“Guess some things never change,” I said.
To his credit, he kept his face still. His dark eyes were flat.
“Goodbye, Mr. Garbage Collector,” he said. But his voice had lost any trace of joviality.
“How are Darkie’s ribs, by the way?” I said. “That guy is a pussy. Just like every Fama I’ve ever met. You guys probably want to go to prison so you can take it up the ass every night.”
Fama got to his feet, and the two thugs moved toward me.
I didn’t bother waiting for a response.
“Thanks for the beer, guys,” I said to the thugs.
They didn’t try to stop me.
10.
One thing I learned during my housesitting stint: a river makes a lot of noise. Day or night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, either the river itself is creating sound or something on the river is making noise. Maybe it’s an alligator. Or a snake. Or a fish.
In this part of the Estero River, odds are the sound is man-made.
A fisherman returning from a long day out on the Gulf. A late-night kayaker. Or a pontoon boat full of drunken retirees.
But it was simply the sound of an occasional bird call and the splash of a fish jumping that accompanied the arrival of my friends from Albania.
They had waited until after the club closed. By my estimation, it was around three in the morning. There was a slight cloud cover, just enough to mask any light from the stars.
I stood among the palmettos and scrub oak, next to the post that held the motion detector for the driveway. There were two posts, and the installer hadn’t bothered to try to camouflage them.
I figured my late-night visitors had spotted them on their first trip to see me.
And I wasn’t wrong.
They parked the same car about ten feet from the detectors, shut the engine off, and got out.
They must have agreed on the best approach because they split off, one going to the right, the other going to the left.
Toward me.
The motion detector was on a short, metal pole that had been buried directly in front of an oak tree. In order to get around the motion detector, he would have to step behind the tree. The ground behind the tree sloped down toward a gulley that had been dug to drain rainfall toward the river.
When the thug stepped behind the tree, his head dipped down. I came out of the scrub oak without making a sound and executed one of the finest sucker punches of my career.
My fist crashed into his jaw, and I felt bone give way—in his face, not my hand.
He toppled forward, and I caught him before he landed in a stand of small palmettos. I lowered him gently to the ground.
I patted him down, then freed the 9mm from his shoulder holster.
From the other side of the driveway, I heard someone whisper.
“Pudge.” He sounded annoyed.
“What the fuck, you takin’ a piss?” he said.
I circled back behind the big car, then into the woods behind the second man.
I took great care not to brush up against the larger palmettos on this side of the drive. When their fronds rubbed together, it sounded like a violin lesson gone terribly wrong.
The second guy had come out of the woods and now stood in the middle of the driveway on the other side of the motion detectors. Subtlety and stealth were clearly not lessons taught in the KLA.
“Quit fucking around,” he whispered, this time with a bit more volume.
I stepped up behind him and put the muzzle of Pudge’s gun behind his left ear.
“He’s not taking a piss,” I said. “But he probably did shit his pants.”
•
I pulled the Albanians’ Lincoln, with Pudge safely ensconced in the trunk, into the parking lot of the Estero Bay Preserve. It was a huge tract of land, thousands upon thousands of acres, a lot of it swamp, that had been “saved” from developers. It had several walking trails, including one that went for eighteen miles.
I popped the trunk, pulled the second thug out, checked to make sure the duct tape was still across his mouth, then marched him into the preserve.
We walked for at least two miles until we got to a stand of dead trees, all standing in about two feet of water.
I stripped the duct tape from his mouth.
“Fuck you!” he said, and he pressed his lips together. Before he could spit, I whipped the barrel of the gun into his teeth.
He fell on his ass.
I put the muzzle of the gun against the top of his head.
“So what was the plan?” I said to him.
He hesitated, so I pressed the muzzle of the gun into the vertebrae of his neck.
“The boat,” he said. “He was going to take you out on the boat.” He then described to me in great detail what Fama had planned for me.
None of it was a surprise. Fama had mentioned something similar about his original plan for Kiki.
“So what did she do? Why’d he kill her?”
He shook his head. “She did the one thing he never lets his dancers do.”
I waited.
“She tried to leave,” he said.
That’s what I’d figured. I tried not to think about Kiki’s failed escape. Maybe it was guilt or maybe disappointment that she hadn’t tried to contact me. I would have helped her.
She had to have known that.
“Call him,” I said.
“Pudge has the phone,” he said.
I pulled it from my pocket. “You mean this one?”
Fama was on the call history, so I held down the call button.
When I heard him answer, I put the phone to the thug’s ear, and he said what I told him to say.
After I disconnected the call, I introduced the barrel of the 9mm to my hostage’s temple. It was a fairly vicious blow, but I was pretty confident I hadn’t fractured his skull. I take pride in my violence, to the point where I’m arrogant enough to consider myself a craftsman of sorts.
I took apart the cell phone and threw the pieces out into the brackish water.
I didn’t know if alligators made it out this far and if they would be able to turn Sleeping Albanian Beauty into dinner, but one could always hope.
11.
The white Lincoln Town Car’s headlights caught Fama’s Range Rover as it pulled into the marina.
Fama got out first, followed by yet another one of his thugs.
“Pudge, you asshole, turn off your lights,” Fama said.
I left them on but got out of the car with the 9mm in my hand.
“Oh, hello there,” I said.
They were both caught off guard. Fama’s bodyguard made the first move.
I shot him in the knee.
Fama didn’t move.
Keeping him in my line of sight, I went to the bodyguard, dug the gun out of his shoulder holster, and kicked him in the ribs.
“Help him up,” I said. Fama bent down to help the man, and I cracked him on the back of the head with the pistol.
He went down like the sack of shit he was.
“Roll him over,” I said to the guy who was now sitting up but holding his knee. When he leaned over to grab Fama, I cracked him on the back of the head too.
I was four for four in rendering my victims unconscious. Those were All-Star type numbers.
I slipped the gun into my waistband, then dragged Fama by the heels down the dock to his boat, described to me in great detail by my Albanian friend now sleeping in the Estero Preserve.
The boat was a cabin cruiser, several years old, that looked like someone had tried to convert it into a crab-fishing boat but had given up.
I dumped Fama without ceremony on the deck at the back of the boat, then did the same with his companion. I dug through the bodyguard’s pockets, found the key to the boat, fired up the engines, untied it from the dock, and eased out
of the mooring into the Estero River.
The little marina where Fama kept his boat was much closer to the Gulf than the dock of my house-sitting job. From which I’d launched my kayak trip that had started this whole mess.
The bends of the river were familiar to me by now, and even in the early morning darkness, I soon found my way out into Estero Bay.
I put the engine at a slow idle and went to the back of the boat, next to a large plastic tray bolted to the gunwale.
Beneath it was a small storage compartment. I opened it, and found the large, razor-sharp meat cleaver Fama’s associate had assured me would be there.
Next, I went to the pile of crab traps, grabbed three, and set them next to the cutting board.
I dragged Fama and propped him against the side of the boat, then lifted his right arm and laid his hand across the board.
“This is for Kristen,” I said.
The cleaver cut through his wrist with a whisper and a thud. His Rolex slid right off the stump and landed on the deck.
The pain roused Fama from his sleep, and he let out a garbled scream. He half stood, which was perfect for me. I grabbed his hair, slammed him face-first into the cutting board, and lined the blade’s edge along Fama’s neck.
“This one’s for me,” I said.
I chopped down, and Fama’s head popped from his neck, then rolled off the cutting board onto the boat’s deck.
With a knee, I pinned Fama’s headless torso against the side of the boat, grabbed his other arm and chopped off his left hand. I grabbed it, dropped it into the first crab trap, and tossed it over the side. I went to the console, eased the throttle forward, and went another hundred yards into the bay.
Again, I shifted the engine to neutral, went back, grabbed the next hand and its matching crab-trap container, and tossed it over the side.
Back at the console and still navigating from memory, I eased the boat forward, past Coon Key to the mouth of San Carlos Pass, near the Estero Boulevard Bridge.
Fama’s head went into a crab trap, and this too went over the side.
I was glad Fama’s associate back in the Preserve had told me how Fama had planned to get rid of my body. I hoped Fama wasn’t mad at me for stealing his idea.
