Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3)

by Owen Laukkanen

  Between thinking about the size of the boot and hoping the socks they shoved in my mouth were clean, I forgot to count the bends and twists in the road to work out where we were going. No big deal, I knew where we were going. If I’d been dead I’d have guessed at a discreet burial site somewhere deep in Leigh Woods. But as I wasn’t dead, yet I was in the boot of Ellis and Machin’s car, I figured we were on the way to Frosty Farrow’s place.

  Frosty, despite his nickname, is a fiery bloke. He runs his rackets hard, with Ellis and Machin his front-line enforcers. The fact I was still alive was not a good sign, it probably meant Frosty wanted to watch me die. And if he was going to watch then it’d be a slow and painful death. I don’t mind slow—preferably over another 60 or 70 years with no noticible symptoms—but I’d rather skip the pain part. And the being watched, I’d like to skip that too.

  Those morbid thoughts were about to overpower me when the boot popped open and Ellis and Machin lifted me to my feet. I was feeling a little shaken by this point and needed a drink—it felt like years since I’d had a sip of beer or a sniff of whiskey. I could only hope that Frosty was either in a hospitable mood or that he’d grant me a last request before I died.

  The hands which lifted me out of the car maintained their tight grip and turned me around to march me towards Frosty’s lair. I freely admit I wished I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Whatever Frosty wanted it wasn’t going to be pleasant. The best result would be if he had some work on offer. You know me, I’m always ready to do a job and I’m not that fussy either. But if he’s asking me it’s because everybody else has already turned him down. And it takes serious balls to turn Frosty down. The work, therefore, must be a king-sized shit of a job.

  So, you wonder, why couldn’t I turn him down too? Because my name would be last on his list of asking, two or three below the dross at the Sally Army joint. If he accepts a no from me then he accepts the job won’t get done. And there’s no way Frosty would ever accept a scheme he’s cooked up won’t get done. I either do it, and probably get busted, or I don’t do it and face the consequences. Even in my panicked state I couldn’t help thinking I’d stand a better chance escaping from a prison cell than a grave.

  Like I was saying, a job would be the best of it. The worst of it? I’ve heard a lot of tales. Flailing a man alive, emasculation, disembowelment, all manner of fun selected from Frosty’s Bumper Book of Medieval Torture Volume 2. My problem is a vivid imagination. If someone tells me they’re going to cut my balls off, I picture them doing it ‘til I almost felt the pain. Then I’d have to feel it all over again when they actually did the cutting. I have a good memory too so I’d be reliving it all once it was over.

  “Sit down, Smith, you half-arsed little scrote.”

  That was Frosty, who seemed to be in a good mood. He was sitting in his conservatory wearing nothing but a dressing gown and a pair of boxer-shorts. A fat cigar stuck out from between his thin lips. Skin, dark from years spent holidaying in Spain, was spread wrinkled over a body which has shrunk in some places and ballooned in others. I didn’t want to stare him out in case he took it personally. I didn’t want to look at his pigeon chest or his gibbous gut either. This left his crotch, no no no, his bony ankles, or the ceiling. I opted for the ceiling.

  Whilst I was doing this opting Ellis found a chair and twisted me into it.

  “What are you staring at my ceiling for, you fucking weird little freak? Look at me: I’m not made of shit.”

  I tried to focus on the bridge of his nose. He has a scar there, I wouldn’t have noticed but it’s highlighted by his deep Spanish tan. Frosty’s gnarly face looks as if someone’s had a go at embalming it. Short and sparse grey hair has been sewn into his skull. His nose, pitted with holes and covered with blackheads, must have been broken once a week every week for twenty years. It has bends which make me feel dizzy just looking at them. His yellow teeth took a personal dislike to me and kept snarling from around the cigar. My mini-contemplation of Frosty’s head was brought to an abrupt end by the encroaching presence of Machin and Ellis.

  The two goons stood on either side of me, each rested a grizzled hand upon my shoulder. Frosty lit a new Cuban cigar, coughed up some phlegm, which he gobbed into a bin, and said “I’ve got some questions for you.”

  “Do you worst,” I said.

  “Last night there was a game on, a game I was running. Some little fuckers came in and helped themselves to the winnings. And when someone takes something from me I like to take something from them.”

  “Like their life,” Machin said. He and Ellis started laughing.

  “What miserable swine would steal from you, Mr Farrow?” I said, hoping that would be enough to convince him it wasn’t me. Which it wasn’t by the way.

  “I know you, Smith, and this job has got your mucky fingers all over it. They even used an explosive to get through the front fucking door. I also know you get mouthy when you’ve had a few. So,” he said and produced a bottle of Jack Daniels, “you’re gonna ‘ave a few.”

  For a moment I thought I’d landed in an obscure form of heaven. Had Frosty really dragged me across the city to drink a bottle of Jack? He must have known that I’d have come willingly if he’d told me there was a drink in it. I reached towards the bottle while looking around for a glass and not caring too much if I found one.

  Before I could lay my hands upon the bottle the iron grips of Machin and Ellis had me restrained in my seat. I caught a glimpse of Frosty rising from his chair as my head was jerked back. Ellis had a handful of my hair and was using it to hold my head in place. I stared at the same cracks in the ceiling I’d been looking at when I first arrived. This time I was trying to avoid the view straight up Ellis’s hairy nostrils. Machin’s rough fingers clamped around my jaw and forced my mouth open. Call me slow witted but I was starting to get nervous.

  Frosty took glorious delight in pouring the booze down my throat. At first I tried to drink but I couldn’t swallow fast enough. I choked and the whiskey spluttered back up before dribbling into my eyes. Frosty held off for a moment. Half-blinded, with snot pouring from my nose, I started to struggle. I was thrown to the floor where I began retching. Just as I was getting used to my freedom they yanked back into my seat. My head was pulled back and Frosty started pouring.

  With the bottle empty, the questioning began. “Where were you last night?”

  It took me a while to work out what’s going on. The room had started to spin and my eyes had difficulty keeping open. I felt as if I’d been punched in the guts, which I may well have been. I could hear Frosty talking and Machin replying. A door opened somewhere. There was a short chuckle before a jug of water was tipped over my head.

  “Where were you last night?” Frosty asked again.

  “I was in the boozer.”

  “Which bloody boozer?”

  “The Cherry Tree, I always drink there.”

  “Who saw you?”

  “Machin, for fuck’s sake, Machin. He was there all night too.”

  “Is that right, Norman?”

  “Yes, Gov. He was on the pool table. Got on everyone’s tits, him lying on the table when they wanted a game. Eventually he fell off, with a bit of help from Jo the barmaid.”

  Machin and Ellis started laughing again. Sounded like two donkeys being castrated.

  “Jesus Christ, Norman,” Frosty said. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I told you to go fetch him? I mean Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Frosty was talking to me again but all my concentration was being used to stop myself from throwing up over his shoes. Then I was in the car, back seat this time. We stopped on a few occasions and I took the opportunity to vomit in the gutter. Come to think of it, that might have been why we stopped. Next thing I know it’s Sunday morning and here I am drinking a jug of water and thinking about Greenbank Lucy.

  • • •

  Lucy answers the door, she looks worse than I feel. Her bottom lip is swollen and her right eye is puffy and brown.
There’s a small plaster stuck over her left eyebrow.

  “What happened?”

  She opens the door a little wider for me to enter.

  “Usual,” she says.

  The ash from her cigarette falls to the carpet. She hardly notices. My guts are twisting in on themselves. I can feel the hangover about to send me down on a self pity trip.

  “He’s got no right,” I reach out and touch the side of her face.

  “It’s not about right or wrong, he hits me and that’s all there is to it. I tried to leave him once but he waited outside my mum’s house ‘til I showed up. Then he beat shit out of me while his brother drove us back here. Poor Sammy was cowering in the corner of the van. He’s said he’ll kill me if I ever called the cops and we both know he would. So what choice do I have? I’d stab him in the guts but then he’d be dead and I’d be doing time and who’d look after Sammy?”

  “The man’s a Bastard.”

  “Forget about it, Harry, it’s only pain and bruises.”

  She slumps down into the sofa and I flop down beside her.

  “You look rough,” she says.

  “I feel rough.”

  She takes my hand and we sit in silence a while.

  “You could leave again, don’t go visiting your mum this time,” I say. “Take little Sammy and up sticks.”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go and I’ve got nearly no money. This house is in both our names. I’ll need his agreement to sell and then he’ll find out where I am. He won’t stop at a few slaps if he catches up to me then.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder. If I’d only managed to hold on to some of the cash that’s passed through my fingers over the years. She shrugs my arm away and stands up to go and make some tea. While she’s in the kitchen I make a dash for the downstairs lav. I’ve got a bad feeling I’m gonna puke.

  I don’t puke but I do stick my head under the cold tap a while. Just as I start towling my hair dry I hear the front door burst open. The sound of voices fills the hallway. One of them I recognise, little Sammy.

  “What’s going on?” Lucy says.

  “Take the brat, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  I recognise that voice too, her husband. There’s another voice, less distinct, must be coming from out on the street. I can’t be certain but I’d say it was his brother. My hand pauses at the door handle. A big part of me wants to get out there and smack her husband’s face in. And, if it were just me and him, I probably would, although he’d beat the living crap out of me without breaking into a sweat. I scan the floor of the toilet hoping to find a discarded poker or heavy lead candlestick. There’s nothing but a stray pube so I take a seat and wait—with one proviso—if he hits her I’ll ‘ave ‘im. I may even land a few punches before he works out what’s happening.

  “What’s going on?” Lucy asks.

  “We need to get away for a few days, ‘til things cool down.”

  “What have you done?”

  “None of your business but we knocked over a game Friday night and it’s getting hot.”

  Front door slams and a few moments later a car screeches away up the road.

  “You can come out now,” Lucy says.

  I open the bog door and peer around it into the hall. Sammy’s holding his mum’s hand and looking dejected. I pull a funny face and wink at him. For that I get the briefest of smiles.

  “I thought it best to keep out the way,” I say.

  “I’m glad you did, don’t want to spend the rest of the day cleaning your blood off the carpet.” She sends Sammy to the living room to play with his toys. We stay in the hallway.

  “Where they off too?”

  “Probably his cousin’s place on Exmoor. He’s got a farmhouse a mile outside Porlock. They always go there when they’ve got to hide out.” She heads back to the kitchen to finish making the tea.

  “I need a breath of air,” I say and make my way out to the back garden.

  Once outside I close the back door and take out my mobile, “Hello, Mr. Farrow, how well do you know Porlock?”

  Highway Six

  John L. Thompson

  The glow of the New Mexico sun was high in the sky and bright enough to chase the shadows into hiding. Jack watched the desolate highway with casual interest from a rocky outcropping that was a high vantage point overlooking the highway known simply as Highway Six. The narrow asphalt road snaked its way through the desolate landscape of tumbleweed and shallow rocky canyons. He shifted an M4 carbine that was slung across his chest to a better position, cursed silently and continued waiting. Mitch, his old combat buddy, sat on a nearby boulder with an AK-47 resting on his lap while he studied the same stretch of asphalt through a pair of binoculars.

  “We should use the .50 Cal.” Jack sucked in the acrid smoke from his cigarette and broke the long silence between them.

  Mitch paused, lowered the binoculars. “We’ve already had this discussion. The IED is in place and we can’t turn back now.”

  There was a long pause before Jack spoke again to change the subject. A soft breeze kicked up a small dust devil across the road and it reminded him of what the Natives had said about this stretch of land. “They say this stretch of highway is cursed.”

  Mitch had resumed his watching of the road. “Whose ‘they’?”

  “The local Natives…Pueblo people.”

  “Indian locals?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No serious.” He sat up on the boulder to a more comfortable position. Sitting for the past hour had rubbed a sore spot on his ass. “I remember that some Wells Fargo armored truck guard got murdered along this stretch of road back about ‘94. The Natives kinda stay away from around here.”

  Mitch shrugged his shoulders. “I was in middle school back then.”

  “Yeah, I was in middle school too but I remember all the news coverage.” He crushed the remaining cigarette under his boot heel. “It always stuck with me though for some reason.”

  “How did this guard get killed?” Mitch continued watching the highway.

  “Ambushed. A couple of bad guys were waiting along the side of the road. The Wells Fargo guards come driving up in a rental van…”

  Mitch interrupted him. “Wait, rental van?”

  “Yeah, their normal armored truck broke down or something so the Wells Fargo guys rented this van.”

  “No armor?”

  “No.”

  “That’s stupid. So let me get this right. The Wells Fargo guys come bee-bopping down the road in this rental van. The bad guys were waiting at some bend in the road and hit ‘em. What’d they use?”

  “I heard some .223 and 7.62 casings were recovered at the scene.”

  “And these bad guys shot the van to shreds.”

  “Pretty much but the interesting thing is that the case is unsolved. Feds been looking for them ever since.”

  “How much did they get away with?”

  “Nothing. A hit-run thing. Maybe got scared when the surviving guard shot back. They shagged ass and disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? How the fuck can that be? There’s nothing out here and nowhere to go.”

  “It’s easy enough to disappear around here. The Laguna Reservation is right over there.” He pointed out to the vast open lands to the south. “Easy enough to haul ass through there since the local cops ain’t allowed on the Natives land. It’s considered a ‘Sovereign Nation’.”

  Mitch snorted. “Sounds like it was an inside job.”

  “You think so?”

  Mitch lowered his binoculars. “Of course it was. Look at it this way. How the fuck do a couple of bad guys know that the van was going to be a rental that day? How did they know that the van was going to be carrying no armor? How do they know that the van is going down this stretch of road at this exact time frame?” He shook his head and held his hands out in disbelief. “I doubt these bad guys just woke up and decided to do a hit on an armored truck that morning at so
and so time and know that van was going to be a fucking rental to boot. No way. It sounds like someone was giving out info to these guys. Maybe some fuck-stick guard that worked with them hoping for a nice cut of the action passed on the info.” He shook his head and went back to watching the road. “Those bad guys sound like a bunch of amateur dumb-shits. Nothing like the Muj that we both have had personal experiences with. Even the US military never went out on missions without some armor.”

  Jack nodded. They had their share of blowing the insurgents into the haji-afterlife but even though the Muj were untrained insurgents, they were still a far better caliber of people than the two bad guys that had botched the robbery of the Wells Fargo van. “You may be right but I still think the Natives are right about this land though.”

  “Superstitions never made people rich. I don’t believe in anything being ‘cursed’. The Iraqis…remember that one hadji bastard claiming that Allah and his prophets were going to come down and turn the deserts red with American blood?”

  Jack could remember the incident all too well. It had cost them several of their buddies’ lives and an innumerable amount of wounded over a course of several months. Every mission had turned into a major fire fight. It was only through a five-hundred pound bomb courtesy of the Air Force that put an end to the radical cleric who had deep ties within the Al-Queda organization. “Yeah, he said something about it was ‘destiny’ and written in the Holy Book or some shit.”

  “All of it was superstitions made to incite riots and killing and all that shit. But what happened? We painted the deserts red with their blood.”

  Jack and Mitch had spent a couple of tours in Iraq doing missions, house to house searches, KBR convoy escorts and had dabbled in disarming IED’s. The training in IED’s was invaluable in learning the construction of a simple device that could disable just about anything the US Military had in terms of wheeled or tracked vehicles.

  When they finally had come home to a hero’s welcome, the newness of a civilian life had eventually worn off. The jobs were not fulfilling, women came and went and money was forever out of reach it seemed.