The Repairman- The Complete Box Set

by L. J. Martin

  "What efforts? Here," he hands me a letter sized piece of stationery.

  It reads: Daddy, I'm fine. Don't bother trying to find me. I have a new life with people I admire, true environmentalists, and am helping to support their cause. You know I've long been active in PETA. Well, ARA is even more effective in the hunt for justice for those who can't obtain it for themselves. I'm happy. Love to you and Mamma. J.J.

  I drop it back on his desk. "Are you sure she wrote this?"

  "Her fingerprints were on it."

  "Anyone else's?"

  "Two other sets. Which I can provide you."

  "What's ARA?"

  "Animal Revolutionary Army. It seems they're way more militant than PETA ever thought of being. I have a report of their activities…at least what they're suspected of."

  "Her name, J. J.?"

  "Her full name is Jane Jasper Remington…but she's called J. J."

  "Why do you think the FBI is not doing their job?"

  "They reported that an agent located her in Montana at some kind of encampment, and she identified herself then refused to talk with him, only telling him she was fine and to please leave her alone. I flew out there and couldn't get on the property. Armed guards and all that."

  "So, what do you think I can do?"

  "Bring her to me. All I want is a chance to talk with her, to make sure she's not drugged up, to get her out from under the influence of this ARA for a little while. Before she gets involved in something terrible."

  Again, I have to smile. "You know if I take her against her will, it's kidnapping. She's an adult."

  "I want to get her out of there and back to New York State. I have more than one friend who's a judge, and I can get an order to have her committed, but I have to get her back to New York."

  "It's a seven million dollar trust. I get twenty percent for recoveries so I'll expect a million four if I get her back here. I'll need an advance of fifty thousand expenses against the fee."

  I can see the businessman take over his demeanor, as his brows furrow. "That's a lot of money."

  "Kidnapping is a capital crime. You're asking someone to take a lot of risk."

  He's silent for a long time, staring out the window, then turns back to me. "You know we are against firearms and want this violence stopped…all over the country…it's a creeping cancer infecting the people of the United States…and the world for that matter."

  "And I'm a proponent of guns and couldn't be more diametrically opposed to what you profess."

  He furrows his brow but doesn't call security to have me escorted out. Then, his voice low and sincere, he asks, "Can you do this without firearms?"

  "It's not that I can't, it's that I won't. It sounds like you are asking me to go into the lion's den, and I won't do so with a switch in hand. I have lots of scars from holing the short end of the stick."

  "I'll have to think about it. It'll take my counsel a day or two to draw up an agreement."

  Again, I laugh. "Mr. Remington, you don't want anything in writing regarding my employment. In fact, you'll probably want to destroy all evidence of this meeting."

  He shakes his head in wonderment, then gets serious. "How do you know I'll pay you?"

  "Do I look like a guy you'd want to stiff? Trust me, I do my job, you'll pay up."

  That again causes him to stare out the window. Finally, he turns back. "I don't want anyone killed."

  "If it comes to firearms, I'll try and not double tap the bad guys, if there are any bad guys involved."

  He looks confused, so I add. "I'll only shoot them once. If I don't put the second one in their nasty evil skulls, there's always a chance they'll live."

  "Oh, God," he says, and turns a little green.

  I start to get up, but he stops me, "Wait."

  So I slump back down.

  "I had an agency pull a background on you after one of the oil companies I invest in referred you. There's not much in the file?"

  His lip slightly curls on one side, an expression of contempt. But I'm not going to bite. "And I hope to keep it that way."

  "It seems you've killed people before in your business?" He shakes his head.

  "I was in Desert Storm, and yes, a few hajis got in the way of my AR, and my grenades, and yes, in pursuit of justice, I've had to kill some folks…but not since last week."

  "Oh, God. How do you sleep at night?"

  "Mr. Remington, read your Bible—"

  "It says thou shalt not kill."

  "Not in the original version, it says thou shalt not murder. And there's a lot of difference. But if you'll note, the Bible is full of killing. Do you think when God turned Lot's his wife into a pillar of salt, she wasn't dead? And one hundred other instances, including the state sanctioned murder of Christ. Sorry, but I could easily prosecute his killers, without benefit of judge and jury."

  "Still, I don't think I could sleep. That was then, and this is today."

  "And human nature is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, no matter what we'd like to believe…or I should probably say, as I believe you'd like to believe." I sigh deeply. "Mr. Remington, we all drag our own version of gargoyles around, monsters trailing us on a heavy chain, slathering at the mouth, growling, hating everything in their path…at least after you pass thirty and have some history. And yes, the little bastards nip at my butt from time to time. But I deal with it in my own way."

  "Drugs?"

  "Yes, if you consider Jack Daniels a drug. I have no interest in staying stupid for longer than it takes to sober up after a few hits on the bottle…besides, it's hard to look over your shoulder to see who's gaining on you if you're high on some rotten poison, booze included. I consider dope dealers the scum on the gene pool, so no, I don't do dope in the sense I think you mean. But I do do dope dealers when the opportunity presents itself."

  "I don't know how you do that killing thing. By the way, are those Ostrich boots? Ostrich skin?"

  I probably shouldn't, but I laugh. "Yeah, they are…but he died of old age."

  "Bull hocky," he says, and looks at me like I'm Ostrich poop squeezing up between his toes, and I get the impression bull hocky's a major expletive for him.

  He thinks I'm changing the subject. "So, where's the best steak in town?" Everyone likes being asked for their expertise.

  "I like The Old Homestead over in the Meatpacking District."

  I laugh again. "But you don't eat them unless they die of old age?"

  He colors, and doesn't answer.

  I rise. "I'm at the Waldorf. Give me a call if we have a deal. I'm going to take in the Met Museum and the Planetarium this afternoon, and any other tourist thing I have time for, then I'll give the Old Homestead a try." I have to laugh aloud, not a smart thing to do when trying to make a deal with a hypocrite, but I can't help myself, then I add, "I may fly out tomorrow…the next day at the latest. I'll leave my cell number with the redhead."

  "Oh, God," he says again, and mumbles, "I still don't know how you do it."

  As I'm leaving I wave over my shoulder. "Nice meeting you, Mr. Remington. Good luck, whatever you decide. And, at first blush, I doubt that eco-terrorists have your daughter for eco's sake…it's something more than that. Odds are it's purely a money thing."

  I close the door behind me, sensing him still sitting in stunned silence.

  It's amazing to me how folks will compromise their values, or supposed values, when it's their ox being gored.

  3

  He's right about one thing, the Old Homestead has one of the greatest steaks I've had the pleasure of caressing with my tongue. And I earned one after tromping through the Met for several hours.

  My primary business is over, so it's playtime for a while longer.

  The waiter clues me into Cielo, a club not far from where I'm chowing down. Funny thing is, when I wander up to the line to get in, I'm not that far from styling. More than one dude in line has on cowboy boots, but I think Justin or Tony Lama is not the designer of choice;
these are far more flat-soled, far more metrosexual, but what the hell, I'll fit right in. I do give the door guy a look like a bull at a bastard calf when he hits me for a twenty-five buck cover charge. He's big, but gym rat big, and would go down in a heartbeat and cry for his mama if he thought he'd end up with a scar on his booze-puffy mug.

  And the music, after I've done my twenty-minute penance in line, is anything but country, and so friggin' loud, bone shattering loud, it's hard to tell what genre it might be. It takes me another twenty minutes to get a drink, and that's another fifteen bucks for a watery Jack on the rocks…how you can water down a Jack rocks is a little beyond me, but if I have another, it'll be neat.

  I finally see a lady who attracts me, a blond with straight hair to the shelf of a very nice gluteus maximus, and boobs that are palm-filling perfect that you would only have enough left to tease the nipple with your thumb, and the nipples show nicely as she's bra-less with only a little silk between the beauties and the cruel outside world. I sidle over next to her and her lady friend, and over the music, ask, "Hey, how about me buying you a drink and maybe you'll clue me in to what's happening in the neighborhood?"

  Not my finest pick up line, but better than "what's your sign?"

  She eyes me up and down, curls her lip in disdain, then smiles at her friend and says, "Tex here wants to buy us a drink."

  "Fuck yes," her bud says.

  "Preference?" I ask them both, although the one with the butch haircut I'd not planned to have on my guest list.

  In moments I'm back with two sex-on-the-beach drinks, and am now down another forty bucks. But I have high hopes it's an investment.

  I'm pretty eclectic when it comes to my taste in music, but the hammering coming from high mounted speakers, barely filtered through a thousand multicolored, obviously helium filled, balloons, each with a four foot or longer tether hanging down, all highlighted by multi-hewed blue lights, is about all my backcountry ears can stand. After I hand the ladies their drinks, I ask, "What do y'all call that music?"

  Both of them laugh, then butch asks, "Y'all? Where you from, cowboy? Alabama?"

  "Wyoming. And yeah, I've pushed some cattle in my day."

  The prettier one smiles at me, but it's a condescending smile, and offers, "We call that techno…and it's hot. They spin some swaged-up indy rock and some rap in between. You a Tupac man?"

  I can't help but shrug, as she might as well be speaking Swingalli, so I act as if I understand and really look around and check the crowd out. Freaks, about one in four, a few shirtless, all wearing lots of ink and spiked hair of various electric colors, and the others seem to be freak fans…and I'm suddenly wondering what the hell I'm doing here. I guess I'm widening my experience. Of course I've never hit myself in the head with a hammer to see what it feels like, which would also be widening my experience.

  There's a dance floor full of folks, but what they're doing is a freak-fest as far as I'm concerned, with the jerky movements of automatons, which is not particularly attractive to me, and even less sexy. Suddenly I'm beginning to feel a little old, so I ask the pretty one, "Doesn't any place play The Boss or rock with a little more feeling to it?"

  Both of them laugh and shake their heads. "You can't feel this stuff?" Butch asks. "Fuck, man, I feel it clean to the bottom of my well."

  And I suddenly think her well is pretty wide and deep, and as pretty as the blond is wonder if I have any interest in falling in the well of either one of them. Just as I'm wondering, Butch, who's a couple of inches taller than the blond; grabs her by the back of the neck and begins to swab the back of her throat with a tongue like a camel's. Even as slow as I am, I begin to get that they're a couple.

  I give them a sloppy salute and back off, hearing Butch cackle loudly as I leave, then yell after me, "Thanks for the fuckin' drink, schmuck." I wave over my shoulder which is as much of a "you're welcome" as I can muster, then ask a passing waitress "Where's the boy's room?"

  "We don't got one," she says, giving me a coy smile.

  "No head?"

  "It's unisex, Charley. What's your schticht…Midnight Cowboy?" I don't much value the question, so I don't answer with the Unforgiven or Open Range I'm thinking as she wouldn't understand, and wait for her to reply to my original one, and she does. "We got four of those, in the back, on either side."

  I shoulder my way through the crowd, trying not to slop my Jack Daniels on anyone, not that most of them are dressed in a way that a slop would matter, and find a room with the symbol of both a man and woman on the door, and decide that I need to piss more than I need to worry about offending one of the freaks. As I enter, she's exiting, and I'm up against an Orphan Annie fuzzy redhead who's obviously wearing no bra under her tee shirt which says Supa Dupa Fly.

  "Watch it, asshole," she says and thrusts her boobs out as if it's an invitation to do so, but I shine it and them and move on. I'm in a room with two door-less stalls, two urinals, and no lock on the door. I belly up to a urinal, begin to relieve myself, and glance over as the door opens and in comes a girl in a yellow leather outfit that must have cost her daddy a month's wages—even though there's not a lot of it—and she winks at me as she heads for a stall. She's got lots of flowing auburn hair right out of a Pantene shampoo ad, yellow mascara and brown lipstick, but, surprisingly, it all looks pretty damn sexy on her. The girl's got a set of pegs, nicely tanned, made even longer by five inch spike heels. The skirt barely covers the fuzz, if she has any. With the current styles as they are, I imagine she's shaved as close as most the chests of the male gender—if you can call them that—out on the dance floor. It's another quandary to me why a guy would shave, or wax, his arms and chest and then sport four days growth of beard.

  I shake it off, both my wonder and my unit, tuck it in, zip up, and start for the door when I hear her yell, "Hey, big mon, you a real cowboy? You want a wild ride?"

  "Got a date," I yell back, and am gone. It's not that I don't appreciate a beautiful, expensively dressed woman, but one wonders exactly what one's "getting into" in a freak show like this one, so I pass. Besides, in this crowd if you reach down there you never know what you might discover, and if I wrapped my hand around a set of fuzzy nuts I might just rip 'em off.

  I slip through the crowd to the door, wave down a cab, and ask the Pakistani gentleman driving if he knows a nice quiet jazz club near the Waldorf. He shrugs and it dawns on me that I'm lucky he understood "Waldorf."

  My iPhone vibrates in my pocket and I fish it out and see it's an unknown caller, and answer.

  "We need to talk," the voice says, and I realize it's J. Cornelius Remington.

  "Now?" I ask.

  "I'm near the Waldorf. Bull and Bear in five minutes?"

  "I'm probably twenty minutes away. I took your advice on the Old Homestead." I don't mention my incursion into the freak show.

  "I'll be in the bar when you get there."

  "You got it."

  If I had to guess, I'd say I'm very close to being retained.

  4

  J. Cornilius has changed out of his bib and tucker and has on an admirable camel hair sport coat, dark brown slacks, a soft shirt, croc belt and sockless loafers that probably cost a grand. He's at a small table against the window sipping what appears to be a Champagne cocktail, as there's a dissolving cube of sugar in the bottom of a flute filled with a golden liquid.

  He doesn't bother with hello, but as soon as I sit, asks, "How about four hundred thousand?"

  I give him a tightlipped smile and shake my head. "Look, pardner, I came a long ways to see if I can be of service and I came on my own dime. I enjoyed the museum and the planetarium, and a great steak in a classy hundred-year-old joint, so I'm fine with it. I wish you the best of luck finding your daughter and hope you do before she's carrying the whelp of some hippy druggie throwback and you end up with a mentally deficient drug dependent grandson." He reddens as I get up, nod, and turn to leave.

  "Wait," he calls after me, so I pause and look back, and he
continues, "please join me for a drink and we can talk this out."

  I return just as a waiter comes tableside. I order a Jack up. Remington's quiet for a moment, so I ask, "I don't suppose you've ever been shot."

  "With a gun, you mean?"

  "I don't mean a flu shot." I have to laugh.

  "Of course not."

  "Well, I have, more than once, and to risk an understatement, it's no fun. And next time could likely be my last time. There's no negotiation on the price. It's standard for me. My last job was a two point five million dollar fee, so I'm no virgin when it comes to substantial fees...and I damn well earn them."

  "Why are you convinced this will be so dangerous?"

  "Do you recall…" My drink arrives so I hold for a second until the waiter gets out of earshot, "…do you recall telling me you were refused entrance to ARA's compound by armed guards?"

  "Yes."

  "Then my concern is reinforced by your own experience. I'll be happy to lend you a firearm if you'd like to go back and force your way into their inner sanctum."

  He sighs and looks around the room as if searching for someplace to hide. I wait until his attention returns to me and the subject at hand, and finally he says, "One million four?"

  "That's the magic number."

  "But only upon your successful delivery of my daughter, in good health, to me here in New York state?"

  "I only get paid if I perform."

  "Other than the expense advance, which is against the fee. So I'll owe a million three fifty? Will you return the fifty thousand if you're unsuccessful?"

  "No, I won't." I'm getting a little irritated. "You're a regular math whiz."

  "No reason to be sarcastic."

  "Do we have a deal?"

  Again, a deep sigh, but he answers in the affirmative with a nod of the baldhead.

  "I'll expect you to have a complete file for me. All personal data, all account numbers, all credit card info, all past addresses, and the address of this ARA compound, and everything, and I mean everything, you can supply on your daughter. And I'd like it before noon tomorrow as I have a five PM flight."