“You almost get Jessica killed and now I’m the asshole?” I screamed. This made Jackie look up and over at me. I waved him off and he went back to his conversation with the cabbie.
I heard Ronald breathing into the phone and in my mind, I could see him white knuckling the phone. Then in a low and mean voice, he said, “You’ll have ten grand in your account by the end of the day. You spend any of it on booze or any other drug, and I swear to God, there is nowhere you can hide.” Then he hung up.
This was perfect because that’s when Phil walked into the Shaft.
Chapter 9
When Phil entered the bar he took a moment to scan the bar stools, looking for me. I raised my hand just high enough to get his attention. Spotting me on my perch, he ambled over to where I was seated. Jackie saw him coming and moved to intercept, but before he got there I waved him off.
Confused, Jackie did a half stutter step, stopped, and looked from Phil to me, unsure of what to do. To Phil’s credit, he never saw me wave Jackie off. Raising his own hand, he pointed to the bar in front of me and gave Jackie the universal sign for two drinks. I am now shaking my head vigorously to Jackie and motioning him back to the cabbie. By now, Phil has reached the bar and is himself confused.
In a last-ditch effort, Phil said, “Its Jackie the German, as I live and breathe. Just set me up with whatever Walt’s having. In fact, make mine a double. I’m sure I’m behind.”
“Hey Jackie, gives us a minute, will ya?” I asked.
“Sure Wally, and ah, what about those drinks?”
“Later,” I said.
“Since when do we not drink in a bar?” Phil asked me.
“As of right now we don’t, because you’re on the clock,” I said.
“Yeah, well if that’s the case, it would have been nice if someone could have at least paid for my time to show up and not drink,” Phil grumbled.
I waved cold hard cash under his nose and watched his eyes grow to the size of dinner plates.
“So, is this enough for you to show up and not bury your nose in a bottle?” I asked him. “Because if it’s not, then I’ll find myself another broken underpaid P.I.,” I added heatedly. The conversation with Ronald was doing laps around my skull. His words about the money were eating a hole into the side of my head and the implied threat had caused my throat to go dry.
I kept hearing the venom in his voice and knew somewhere in our conversation I had stepped across some imaginary line that had always been there. I wanted a drink bad, but I knew if I gave in now and ordered a round of whiskey, I wouldn’t stop until I was carried out on a gurney.
The insult and injury he had slapped across my face burned hot. My face was flush with embarrassment. I hadn’t meant for the crack about my lack of money to come out, but in the heat of the moment, I had used it like a weapon against him. But what really had sunk the hook well and deep were the obvious reservations Ronald had about my abilities to provide any support; that my value was diminished to the point of being without weight and lacked any good measure.
“Hey, what the fuck brought that on? What’d I ever do to you?” Phil said, the hurt and injured feelings coming through.
“Sorry Phil, I was just on the phone with Billy and, well, you know how it goes. Just because you’re in a bar, you’re treated like you got a problem, you know?” The lie rolled neatly off my tongue.
I could see the injury I had done in his eyes and the lie with which I had used as the basis of my backhanded apology had landed flat and with no effect. And now the embarrassment Ronald had hung around my neck was starting to accumulate weight.
It’s the thing you learn in the program. We injure everyone around us but have little regard for the pain and suffering we have done. I knew there would be a point when I would have to start the steps over and this conversation would be discussed again, but at the moment I needed to get Phil on the move on these two cases. I also needed to move out of The Shaft before the spiders started crawling up my spine and into my head, and began to feast on my symbiotic need for the embrace of the hot amber liquid that was standing stoically behind the bar. The siren call of my thirst had been just beyond my reach. I could feel the sweat popping on my forehead, my tongue starting to get thick and my throat closing off, making it harder for me to swallow my own spit.
“Rickets!!” I yelled.
The cabbie and Jackie turned, their faces dissolving into confusion and then into concern. Phil just stared open-mouthed, the hurt morphing into concern, his eyes darting from side to side looking for both the threat and the exit.
“Everything all right Walt?” Jackie hollered.
“Yea, I’m fine. Sorry.”
“No worries man. No worries,” Jackie said.
“You need a ride, just give me a shout,” The cabbie said.
“Right after I make the decision to check out,” I answered back.
The cabbie just stared. I turned from them both and looked back at Phil.
“We square?” I asked.
His eyes slid off of mine, his head beginning to bob up and down. “Sure man, it‘s all good.”
“Good,” I said.
And then I told him about the two jobs and how I wanted them to be resolved. He agreed and gave me his list of demands for his time. We went back and forth a few times, but in the end, I held firm and he capitulated to my demands. These were very reasonable because all he had to do was follow my instructions on how to find the evidence I needed, to get the results that were expected, and do it in the time frame I needed it done in.
Nothing to it if you’re not an alcoholic…
Chapter 10
When Ronald hung up the phone he was furious at both Jessica and Walt. Jessica had told him of her call to Walt and about him accepting the invitation to help Ronald find out who was trying to kill them.
He really didn’t want Walt poking around with him because Walt had morals and a conscience. Both of those items of character had not been apportioned by God when he kicked Ronald out of heaven and into the world. Or maybe it was the devil himself that had inflicted Ronald upon the world.
Right after the shooting, Ronald had canvassed the house for intruders and also had taken the time to take an inventory of the damage the shooter had done to his house. For the most part, it was all surface stuff. The bullets had done a fairly effective job at smashing the TV and turning the windows into dust, and he now had a lot of organic air conditioning. Plus the furniture was bleeding stuffing. Other than that, the shooter hadn’t breached the walls of the house or for that matter, the interior of the yard.
What he did find was the perch out by the tractor that the shooter had used, and a couple of the improvised gun nests he had fashioned. But more importantly, he found blood and lots of it. Ronald followed the trail of blood for a hundred yards before returning to the house. He knew the wound was a bleeder and in this weather, the blood would maintain its red hue. The cold would work to his advantage in tracking the shooter.
It had taken a long time for Jessica to calm down. This was why the shooter had escaped into the night without Ronald affecting a chase. By the time she was calmed down and he had assured her the bad guy was gone, the sun had crested the horizon and had begun to climb into the morning sky.
Normally in the morning Ronald and Jessica liked to get up at daybreak, make some coffee, and then get caught up on the morning news. But this morning, none of that took place. Instead, Ronald had gone back into the gun room and picked out a vest that he put on under the adobe colored print camo he had made himself.
Around his waist, Ronald strapped on a Colt .45 1911, and onto his shoulder, he swung an MP5. In the pockets of his BVDs, he put in some extra clips of ammo for both guns. He doubted the shooter would be far, maybe a mile, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t made it that far on foot.
Ronald kept rolling over in his mind who knew where he lived and would have both the resources and the manpower to try to kill him. There were a few candidates who were
on both lists, but in the world where he had made his living, none of them were enemies or for that matter would agree to hit him at home.
He frowned as he turned over the list of people in his mind again. But those thoughts only remained until he was walking out of the house. Now it was time to track. Time to hunt down his prey. If this guy was lucky, he would be very dead when he found him. Because if he wasn’t, then the shooter would wish he was dead for a long and very painful time.
Ronald went back outside and quickly covered the hundred yards where the tracks had wandered off into the desert. Removing the MP5 from his shoulder, Ronald began to track the shooter across the hard-packed adobe floor. The tracks were stumbling and hurried from the house to about two-hundred yards. Where the shooter had tried to cross a dry creek bed, he had fallen and rolled around before he had gotten back up. In the adobe dirt, Ronald found bullets that looked like they came out of a pocket. He also found a nice Ka-Bar knife. Ronald removed his backpack and took a field bag out of one of its many pockets, then placed the bullets and the knife in it. That done, he stood and looked down at the tracks some more. Then he half-climbed, half-walked up to the other side of the creek bed.
Reaching back into his backpack, Ronald removed a pair of field glasses and surveyed the adobe floor. The nice thing about the frozen ground was that it didn’t absorb the blood, so he could see the blood tracks for the best part of half a mile. Through his glasses, he could see a rock outcropping and trees a little over a mile away. The tracks were steering in that general direction. He knew from experience that if that’s where he had gone, then it was very possible the shooter had climbed to the top of those rocks and was just waiting for the perfect shot to end Ronald’s life.
He slid down till he was back on the adobe creek bed and then began to move upstream and away from the rocks. There was a good place a mile up the creek bed where he could exit and then, using the natural terrain of the adobe floor as cover, could approach on foot and unseen until he was close enough to glass the area over and ensure the shooter wasn’t holed up and waiting for Ronald to step out into the opening.
Because of the potential for a gunfight, Ronald used the better part of three hours to cover the mile upstream and then the two miles circuitous route back to the rocks. The temperature hovered around twenty-seven degrees, but felt warm to him as the sun was on his back for the first part and in his face for the second. The rolling adobe floor acted as a wind buffer for him and made the twenty-seven degrees feel a lot more like forty-five.
By 2:00 p.m., Ronald had found a nice and secure hollowed out log that had been set near a natural break in the floor. This allowed him to combat crawl alongside the log. From there, he glassed over the rocks and the trees for the better part of ninety minutes. Part of his approach to the rocks had been circling around far enough for him to determine whether the shooter had gotten to the rocks and whether he was still there.
Now, as the hands of time pushed towards 4:00 p.m. on a winter day, he knew the best idea would be to allow for enough light to dimish in the sky for him to switch over to night vision, just to make sure he wasn’t walking into his own funeral.
His phone buzzed for the third time. He reached into his pants, took it out, and read the text message from Jessica.
‘Where r u?’
He typed back, ‘About a mile from the house. Looking at those rocks and trees north of us.’
‘Why?’ Jessica typed.
Ronald looked at the screen and half smiled to himself. Only his Jessica could ask such a question.
‘Because I’m bored. Why do u think I'm doing it?’ he typed back.
‘Ur just going to get urslf KIA. Pls come home.’
‘Soon as I’m sure the threat is gone,’ he typed.
‘Can’t we just call 911?’ she texted back.
‘???? Really, Jess.’
‘Just saying we are the victims. And victims call 911,’ she texted.
‘U call and I can’t come home,’ Ronald texted back.
‘Fine,’ she answered.
Ronald closed the phone and took a minute to switch over to night vision. Thirty minutes later, he was satisfied that the rocks were devoid of any hidden threat. Taking no chances, he now used both the night vision and the darkness to cover the remaining seventy-five yards to the rocks.
When he finally got to the rocks he could see the body of the assassin lying on his side. A pool of blood had formed beneath him. Ronald stared for a moment, letting the heat of his anger bleed off of him. He really wanted this guy to be alive. The fact that Ronald had hit him during the firefight spoke more to the randomness of bullets and how they had found their marks, than any skill he had used in shooting back.
Ronald crouched down on his haunches and with his right hand, he took out his own Ka-Bar knife and began to sift through the shooter’s belongings, looking for ID or any information that might lead him to the owner of the hit. Finding nothing in his cursory search, Ronald made sure all of the belongings of the hitter were policed before hoisting him up into the fireman’s carry and taking him back to the house.
Fifty yards to the south of the house, Ronald had built a safe house complete with a tunnel back to the main house. He hadn’t used it last night because at the time he had felt his ability to get Jessica across the room safely was in the single digits. And he didn’t use it afterwards because the threat had been removed. Also, he knew he would need it later on, when he found the hitter.
Ronald used his foot and tapped the bottom of a faux tree. This triggered the top to slide back, revealing a set of steps that led down into the safe house. He carried the body down to a table and then dumped him onto it. Next, he sloughed off the articles of war he had with him and then walked over to the wall, where he flipped open a hidden panel and closed the trapdoor overhead.
He turned and looked at the body for a long while. In the harsh light of the room, the face was easier to see, but he still didn’t recognize the button man. Ronald started to do a more aggressive search of the man and his belongings, but as he was just getting started, his phone buzzed again.
‘I swear if ur not home in the next two minutes I’m out of here and calling the cops!’
‘I’m down at the shelter. B right up. Promise,’ Ronald typed.
He exhaled deeply, then turned and made sure the overhead door was locked before he opened the tunnel door and walked back to the house. On the way back to the house he smiled in the dark. He was the killer of all killers and he feared no man. But if his wife was mad, he came a-calling just as pronto as any lovesick dog.
For her, he had quit the life and gone legit. But now things were different: the life had come back calling his name. And he knew the only way to get out for sure was to put a permanent stamp on his retirement.
That body in the shelter was his invitation back to dance with the devil. And as the devil knew, Ronald Jacobs always stepped up to the plate.
On the back of his safe house he had installed a door that sealed itself from the inside, using a vacuum system he had to shut off before he could open the door and walk the fifty meters back to the house. When he had built the safe house he had done so not out of fear of a nuclear war, but out of concern someone would come for him. The money he had made while he was working had afforded him everything he wanted. In his case, this had been a nice home in the adobe desert with a fortified bunker and enclosed tunnel. The tunnel sank twenty feet below the surface and connected the main house to the bunker, which he and Jessica had stocked with enough food and water for them to live comfortably for a year.
Because he understood the potential fallout of what he did for a living, Ronald had made sure the house, tunnel and bunker were all self-sufficient and completely off the grid. The city, state and county had no idea how much electricity he consumed or how much water he drank. They also had no plans that showed any of the improvements he had done either. If they were going to come and get him, Ronald had wanted the element of surprise to
be on his side and not theirs.
Ronald never liked any of the terms associated with his chosen profession. The names that had been bestowed on men like him were, in his opinion, self-aggrandizing and stunted the truism of what he and others like him did.
These were largely invented by old-time rag men whose imaginative musings were given voice in newspapers and dime store novels. It glorified or belittled not only the men and women who were paid to kill but it also further dehumanized the targets that they sought. These, in turn, then made the whole thing appear to be either romantic or heroic.
The reality was he was simply a man who had been hired to assist others, of means, in taking care of an internal problem. He provided a kind of intervention service, pure and simple. But if pressed for a description or a title, Ronald Jacobs always gave the same answer. “I’m in the business of providing various services to those who can afford to pay the tab,” or “I am a Human Resource Consultant.” This last statement he always delivered in a laconic tone, with a lot of heavy sardonic smirking.
When he had gotten into the business of killing, it had been an accident. Ronald had taken a job in the oil fields down in Texas right out of high school. He had saved the money he had made from working for his father as a guide during the winter months and a dozer operator in the summer that was owned by Walt and Jessica’s dad, and had bought a ticket to travel there. Walt and Ronald would trade off shifts, working around the clock at times.
When he arrived on the deck of the Sundance oil rig, which was anchored a hundred miles off the coast of Texas, the air of the gulf was hot and close, almost as if he could reach out and touch it. The water below the rig was a color of green that Ronald had never seen before. Back home, the water always looked like chocolate milk and the air was never this close or this hot.
Oil rigs by nature are a cacophony of unique sounds and smells. They exude a power that belies the tides that roll underneath their metal decks. This was no exception. The diesel fuel that moved through its metal pipes and electronic couplings provided a rich and full-throttle sound of well-oiled machinery that was pumping and vibrating around the clock as the drill bit pounded the seabed below, in the hope of finding gas and oil. The shouts of roughnecks over the sound of the wind and the rumblings of giant machinery added to the illusion that the rig was as alive as the ocean floor it was anchored to.
On The Devil's Side of Heaven Page 5
