Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller

by Chuck Driskell

  Neil turned away first.

  ~~~

  One hour later, a damp, salty wind blew in from Flushing Bay, rushing over the tarmac of Long Island’s North Beach Airport in Queens. Neil leaned into the heavy breeze, holding his trilby hat in place, his body buffeted by each gust as he awaited his two pieces of luggage. In the distance, another DC-3 roared down the runway, crabbing sideways into the crosswind as it finally levitated into the wet, morning sky. Neil turned to look in the direction of Manhattan, unable to see anything beyond the dingy Queens skyline. From this distance, Manhattan was obscured by the gray and fog of the passing weather. This would be Neil’s quickest ever visit to the world’s center of commerce, a place he and Emilee had visited several times.

  Just as his heartache was about to strike full force, the airline employee appeared with his luggage, a rolling trunk and a standard grip. Neil tipped him as the Russian woman reappeared and stood very close to his side on the blustery tarmac. As a brief tempest of stronger wind made her grab his arm for support, she leaned to him and spoke into his ear. “I wish I had gotten a chance to know you better.”

  Neil pulled his head back so he could get a better look at her. “Thanks for saying that,” he answered, not really knowing exactly what she meant, or how else to respond.

  She curled her finger, beckoning him in as the roar from another airplane filled the area with a thunderous drone. “Tread carefully now,” she said, squeezing his upper arm. “What you’re doing doesn’t begin in Austria. It starts right here, today, in New York. Word is already out about your estate sale and identity change.”

  Neil frowned, narrowing his eyes as he pondered how in the hell this Russian, who had boarded in Chicago, could know what he was doing. The woman, still gripping his arm, leaned in again.

  “You can make no mistakes, understand? There will be but one chance. Many powerful people want you dead.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “The people who killed your friend, Jacob. They’re after you now.”

  Neil knew he’d been burnt so he decided to drop his ruse. “Nazis?”

  “Yes, Nazis. Americans, too. Trust no one.” She patted his cheek. “No one, at all.”

  “Including you?”

  The Russian twisted her lips into a small smile before turning serious again. “Please, save our children.”

  With that, she turned, barking instructions to the driver of her hired car as she motioned with her elbow-length gloved hands. The short man hustled her suitcases into the back as she held her overcoat tightly around her waist. Before she entered the Cadillac, she looked back one final time at Neil. There was no facial expression other than a distinct voltage in her wide coffee eyes.

  Neil watched the black car drive away, spinning its tires as it disappeared, headed west into the morning traffic on Astoria Boulevard. Alarms were going off in Neil’s mind and, after a moment, he realized he had been holding his breath.

  Who was she? How did she know what he was doing? This was foreign ground for Neil. He wasn’t used to being made and, in fact, had never dealt with such a situation before. He analyzed what she had said: tread carefully; it starts here; no mistakes; only one chance.

  “And many powerful people want me dead,” he whispered.

  She hadn’t made a lucky guess, because she mentioned Austria. His paperwork, in the event she’d somehow gone through it while he had slept, only went as far as New York. Everything else was booked in another person’s name and he didn’t have the itinerary yet.

  Neil thought back through his planning for a moment. He’d left no loose ends. After a moment of reasoning, he tabled the strange encounter. He’d have to worry about it later.

  His focus now turned to what needed to occur on this dreary Thursday morning. It wasn’t until his own hired car was fifty feet over the East River that he realized there was something peculiar going on inside him. Something different…

  For two full years he had been dealing with Emilee’s death, mostly by drinking himself into a stupor. Initially there had been the typical emotions involved with a tragic death: shock, anger and sorrow. On the second day after her murder, the slimy, underworld hood named Lex Curran was identified as the chief suspect. The police arrested him before Neil could even get back to San Francisco. Upon arriving, he rushed straight to the police station, forced to sit in the police captain’s office for hours on end. Neil was a simmering volcano. After nightfall, there was a commotion outside of the office. The captain appeared, stepping into the office and pulling the door shut.

  “We have to release the man we apprehended.”

  Neil had bolted from his chair. “Do you think he did it?”

  “I do, but I think his cronies are coverin’ for him. We’ve also got a witness, but he didn’t identify a picture of your wife.” The captain shook his head. “May take a day or two but we’ll get Curran…just need to do our due diligence and upend these alibis he’s managed to come up with.”

  “You definitely think he did it?”

  “Absolutely and without a hair of reservation.”

  Neil didn’t respond. His mind was already made up about what he would do. But it was at that exact moment when Lex Curran and his attorney had slithered from the back of the station, the lawyer barking orders and acting as if it were his citing of numerous statutes that had done the trick. Until then, Neil had no idea who Lex Curran was, didn’t even know his name. But upon seeing him, he knew in a flash the man was guilty. Curran’s sneer was wicked, his eyes knowing as he smugly sauntered around the station.

  Neil was going to take great pleasure in killing him.

  While Neil had stood there, transfixed, gazing at the killer of his wife and unborn son, Curran turned his head and obviously realized who Neil was. Curran shrugged off his lawyer’s oily grip and walked to the office.

  “Looks like I’m a free man, Reuter,” Curran drawled. “Guess I’ll go back to the neighborhood…see what other kinda trouble I can get into.”

  To say Neil leapt at him was an understatement. No sooner had Curran spoken the words than the police sergeant and captain lurched in anticipation of what might happen. They were a second too slow.

  Neil threw his coffee at Lex’s face as he dug his hands into the soft flesh around the criminal’s neck, the two men going down in a scrabbling heap in the hallway. Neil’s powerful hands were like steel traps, trying to exterminate the man he knew had raped and killed his wife. Once the policemen were able to get Neil off of him, the coffee-drenched Lex Curran exacerbated the situation by blowing kisses at Neil while Curran’s lawyer dragged him away.

  As they walked to the lawyer’s car, Curran’s lawyer even tried to have Neil arrested for assault. The captain wouldn’t hear of it, earning the threat of a lawsuit from the lawyer. Outside by the car, Curran begged every reporter present to take pictures of the claw marks on his neck where Neil had managed to draw ten points of blood.

  “And he burned me with hot coffee,” Curran added.

  The murder of Emilee Stonington Reuter was an immediate boon to every newspaper in the Bay Area, but that didn’t mean the reporters cared for the man who had presumably killed her. One reporter “boo-hooed” after Lex mentioned the hot coffee. Seconds later, the reporter was hunched over, holding a bloody nose.

  Neil went after Curran that night, after midnight. He never found him. He repeated his actions the next day. Again, Curran was nowhere to be found. The police proved Curran’s alibis were false. Additionally, they produced several pieces of incriminating evidence and put out a warrant for Curran’s arrest.

  They couldn’t find him either.

  Jakey came home for a month, primarily to look after Neil. Using every trick they knew, the two men rousted the entire underbelly of San Francisco, twisting arms and offering bribes for any scrap of information on the fugitive. Their efforts were fruitless.

  Lex Curran had vanished.

  Neil recalled one heart-rending evening man
y weeks after the murder, when he sat in his study, alone with his vodka and sorrow. He’d heard the crunch of gravel and the squeak of brakes, peering out of his window to see the headlights go out on the plain brown Plymouth parked in front of the mansion. Neil stood in the turnout at Hillside, trembling with anger and rage as he listened to the precinct’s captain, Yarborough, explaining Curran’s disappearance. The chief detective on the case, a Greek fellow named Kalakis, sat in the car. The window was partly open, the detective no doubt listening to every word.

  Captain Yarborough was a short barrel of a man with a quarter inch of steely hair and a florid face dotted with ruptured capillaries. He lit both of their cigarettes and leaned back on the fender of the unmarked car, narrowing his hazel eyes at Neil. When he spoke, his boyhood Scottish accent lilted through only at the tail end of his sentences, like a curlicue at the end of a beautifully penned word.

  “I know a bit of what ya done in the military, and I think I know what ya prob’ly did to Lex Curran.”

  Neil shook his head. “No, I didn’t. If I had, I’d be sleeping right now.”

  The policeman studied him, the only light from the gas lamps on the house throwing top-down shadows on their faces. “I believe ya, Mister Reuter.”

  “I really don’t care if you do or don’t. That bastard’s disappeared and I fault you for letting it happen.”

  “We’re bound by th’law. I don’t like it anymore’n ya do. Believe me.” The captain held the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and folded his arms over his indigo uniform. “But I know what you’re gonna do if’n ya ever do find Lex Curran. God knows if I was in your place I’d probably do it tonight, if’n I could find the slippery bastard.”

  Neil stared at the ground as he pulled on the cigarette.

  “But, listen to me, Mr. Reuter…look at me, please.”

  “What?”

  “You’re too important a man to all those who depend on ya to throw your life away over south wharf, career criminal trash like Lex Curran.” The captain’s face broke into a knowing grin as he glanced around. “Ya follow?”

  Neil simply stared.

  “I think ya do,” the captain said, sweeping his arm at the mansion. “So, why don’t ya use some’a this money of yours to put a quiet bounty on this fella’s head to find him. And when ya do, just make sure when ya kill that focker, you’re sufficiently insulated. Use someone ya trust and have a tight, undeniable alibi. Maybe ya could be outta town or attendin’ a party with hundreds of people. I can promise ya that, if’n we have anything close to a shade of gray on ya, there won’t be an investigation.”

  Neil flipped the cigarette onto the pea gravel and straightened, towering over the short policeman. “Thanks for the advice.” And, as Neil turned to go back inside, he paused and turned. “But if I ever do find Curran, I’m going to kill him, and it’s going to be long and slow. There’s no way I’d ever give someone else that pleasure.”

  Captain Yarborough removed the flask from his wool uniform coat and took two hard swallows. He nodded his understanding and lifted his flask in a toast to Neil; then he and Detective Kalakis drove away.

  Since Emilee’s death, Neil had spent a fortune searching for Lex Curran. During the first year he went to Curran’s bar once a week, bracing the new owner who had innocently purchased it at auction from the city. As if he could still pick up on Lex Curran’s scent, Neil would charge into the bar’s storeroom and office, the new proprietor protesting feebly. After finding it clean, Neil would usually mumble an apology before plopping down at the long, sticky bar, drinking vodka on ice, ignoring the stares of the old geezers who sat there, day in and day out, soaking their livers the way a janitor drenches a dirty mop. As the months droned on, Neil’s searching decreased while his drinking increased. After a year, when the San Francisco Police had all but given up, Neil’s drinking outweighed his searching by 10-to-1.

  By the time Neil departed for Austria, he’d all but given up his search.

  Lex Curran was long gone—taken from Neil, in a way that was perversely similar to the way Emilee and his unborn child had been taken from him. All he wanted was a chance to avenge his family. Emilee had been so good to him, so patient with him, never deserving to die the way she had. His character demanded he avenge her, and the only way he had been able to tamp down his raging regret had been with alcohol.

  Neil’s eyes were rimmed with redness. He gnawed on his lip as both his hands dug into the rear bench seat of the hired car.

  And though he couldn’t describe it, Jakey’s letter had triggered something inside of Neil. He had been nearing his personal rock bottom when the note had arrived. Something had been about to give—though Neil didn’t know what. He wanted to think he wasn’t the type to take his own life in an overt manner, but drinking himself to death would have been perfectly acceptable, and he had been well on his way. One of those drunken days, Neil would have eventually blacked out from the vodka and never woken up. But Jakey’s message had awakened him in a different way, and he now had a purpose. A mission.

  A mission he had to fulfill before he died.

  The hired car ground to a stop in a line of cars just like it. Chelsea Piers buzzed to the right of the cars, while Manhattan’s West Side loomed to the left. Neil wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, fortifying himself with deep breaths.

  There was work to be done.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Salvatore Kalakis, known to his friends as Sal, exited the bus at Columbus and Stockton Streets, hustling through the bay area mist into his police precinct. In the detectives’ room, the familiar smell of male body odor and gun oil mingled with the diluted aroma of Harry Cato’s weak coffee. Cato’s special brew irritated Sal to no end.

  How early does that fella get in every day?

  Sal vowed to be in prior to six tomorrow. For today, he would have to wait until the tepid Cato-coffee was gone before racing to the percolator to make a proper pot, strong and bitter and with a dash of sea salt, in the Greek style like his mother had taught him many moons ago.

  Eyeing the pot as he stepped to the communications table at the back of the room, Sal grumbled when he noticed no one had consumed even a single cup. “Damned Cato,” he growled. Sal grabbed a Chronicle, still warm off the press, taking it back to his cluttered desk. He scanned the headlines and second page for anything that might interest him.

  Germans, Neville Chamberlain, more Germans—the lead story was yet another piece about an anti-Jewish law passed in Germany. That damned psychotic Hitler was thirsting for someone to go to war with. Sal had served in France during the Great War. He still walked with a slight limp as the result of a knee mortar that had lived up to its very name. Now the Germans were back on the charge—led by the Nazis this time—building a war machine and enlisting every man, woman, and child. At least there was the relative solace of the sports page, which he spirited out from the thick paper. After skimming the headlines, he glanced around for Harry Cato. Not seeing him, Sal tiptoed to the back of the room and poured half the pot of coffee out the open window, laughing at the surprised protests from the sidewalk on Columbus Street two floors below. Sal pinched off his grin and hurried back to his desk.

  He was just settling into the comfort of the sports page when a young patrolman burst into the room, carrying with him the distinct smell of the ocean. “You Detective Kalakis?” the kid gasped, his splotchy cheeks expanding and contracting with his heavy huffing.

  “Yeah, why?”

  The policeman bent over and rested his hands on his knees, gasping oxygen as perspiration gathered in a great droplet under his rounded chin. He looked as if he had just run a marathon. “Got…a…message…for…you…from…Cap’n…Yarborough.”

  “Get your breath, kid.”

  The young officer took a few more great breaths, finally able to speak normally. “Cap’n took the call from us in the middle of the night.”

  “Took what call, and why didn’t he radio me instead of forcing y
ou into an early heart attack?” Sal asked, his forced gruffness replaced by brusque concern.

  “Said he only wanted you to hear it, for now,” the policeman answered, taking a final massive breath before resuming a normal posture. “He said to tell you…” his eyes went skyward as he paused. As if trying to divine the message from thin air, the young cop opened his hands. His mouth opened, but no words escaped.

  Sal redlined at the kid’s hemming and hawing. He jerked the paper so hard the sports page ripped in half. “You gotta be kidding me! What? What? What did he tell you to tell me?”

  “Just making sure I get the name right.” The patrolman seemed to recollect it as he nodded confidently. “Okay, I got it. Cap’n said to tell you, and only you…he was very specific about that.”

  Sal spoke through clenched teeth. “Spit it the hell out, kid.”

  The patrolman nodded, finally seeming to grasp that Sal was about to decapitate him. “A man named Lex Curran…he’s been missing.”

  “No shit, he’s been missing,” Sal snapped. “What about him?”

  “Well…we found him a few hours ago, hung up on the rocks, out near the Pacific.”

  “Found him?”

  “Yes, sir. And he has a bullet hole smack dab in the middle of his forehead. There are distinct powder burns around the bullet hole.”

  “What?” Sal blared, standing so quickly that his chair shot straight backward. The chair rolled with such force that it struck the communications table and sent Harry Cato’s remaining coffee splashing all over the grimy green linoleum.

  “The powder burns, detective, typically mean that the murder weapon was fired at close range.”

  “Where exactly is the body?” Sal asked, ignoring the greenhorn patrolman’s patronizing forensics tip.

  “South of the new Golden Gate Bridge, out on the Baker Beach side. I can show you.”

  “Let’s make tracks,” Sal said, grabbing a set of keys from the board on the wall as he motioned with his hand.