Paradise Burns

by J. P. Sumner

  ‘Josh, it’s me. Have you got the pictures I just sent you?’ I said, as I negotiated my way through the crowds, trying to keep sight of my target.

  ‘I sure have,’ he replied, laughing to himself. ‘Who’s the stripper?’

  ‘That’s what I want you to find out. She’s Jackson’s bodyguard. And as much as I’m sure you’d love to find out she actually was a stripper, trust me - she’s all business. Definitely a pro. Find out all you can about her, as well as Jackson, and why he hired her for protection. Also, dig up what you can on Pellaggio, would you? The game’s just got interesting, and I want to know about all the players on the field.’

  ‘Leave it with me, Bossman,’ he said before hanging up.

  I kept a reasonable distance behind them, and followed them round the corner to where Jackson’s limousine was parked. The car was beautiful and very high end. It was a stretch, with a personalized license plate. I cast an approving, well-trained eye over it as I memorized the number. It was definitely armored, with bullet-proof, tinted windows and run-flat tires. This was a serious vehicle, and it immediately became apparent that taking this guy out isn’t going to be as easy as I thought. I took a couple of pictures on my phone and sent them to Josh, then hung back as Jackson and his leather-clad protector approached the car. I was leaning against one of the small trees that lined the road on both sides, pretending to be on the phone as I casually glanced over at them.

  Jackson ducked into the car first, then the woman put one foot in the car and before she ducked down and in herself, she looked all around the street in every direction, including upwards, which I noted. She had a level of professionalism you don’t find in your typical bodyguards. Not many people would think to look up and check for snipers. I was becoming increasingly concerned with her presence in this equation.

  She looked in my direction. With her glasses on I couldn’t see her eyes, but I knew she hadn’t made me. I’m practically invisible when I want to be, and there’s no way I’d be spotted on a standard surveillance run like this. But even so, her thoroughness was going to be an issue.

  She finally got in the limo, and it sped off up the street, turning left and out of sight at the first set of lights it reached.

  I turned and walked back the way I came, heading for my hotel. My recon trip hadn’t quite gone how I’d expected. I now had more questions than answers, and this straightforward job was a lot more complicated than it had been this morning. And I had a nagging feeling it wasn’t about to get any easier.

  I went back to my hotel room and sat on the edge of the bed, relishing the air conditioning after a couple of hours outside.

  It was a standard size, filled with standard stuff. The window overlooked the parking lot, which was almost empty save for one silver, four door sedan. There was a flat-screen TV mounted on one wall. It was above a table that had a lamp on it. It was facing the double bed, which was unusually comfortable, given the price of the room. The bathroom had a shower stall, a toilet and a hand basin. It wasn’t fancy, but it’d certainly do for a couple of days while I conduct my business.

  I’m not cheap or anything. I have more money than I know what to do with - I’m just not one for all that luxurious, five-star, A-list crap. I’m more than happy in a generic, anonymous, no-frills motel.

  Like this one.

  I’d fired up my laptop and was reviewing all the information Josh had sent me on Pellaggio, Jackson and our mystery woman.

  Josh Winters is a genius. Sure, we insult each other non-stop whenever we talk, but that’s just to get us both through the day. When it all comes down to it, the guy is a legend in so many different ways, I’ve lost count. The things he can do with a computer are astounding. I don’t understand half of what he says or does. But he gets results, every time. I need information, Josh can get it. I need a car or a plane or a gun, Josh can arrange it. I need fake documents, Josh gets them to me.

  My recon trip earlier had set my spider sense tingling. Whenever there is doubt, there is no doubt - that was the first thing they taught me. Trust your gut, and never pull the trigger until you’re satisfied. Some people prefer not to know anything - they just turn up, shoot and disappear with their money. Me? I’m an information junkie. I have to know everything about everything. If you ask a shrink, they’ll probably say I have control issues that need to be addressed or something. But personally, when it comes to this game, I simply want to be the smartest guy playing. As much as I like to get paid for shooting people, sometimes ignorance isn’t bliss. Especially when I’m dealing with the mob, because for all I know, they could be setting me up right now.

  I began by looking at what he’d found on my target. Ted Jackson is a high-ranking employee of a large, multi-national umbrella corporation called GlobaTech Industries. They had numerous subsidiary companies who serviced military contracts - be it private security or Research and Development. They own the land that Jackson was originally going to sell to Pellaggio.

  In his line of work, I can understand him being overly cautious. Military contracts are big business. Like, billions of dollars big. And competition for them and the related research can be fierce to say the least. But handcuffing his briefcase to his hand, riding around in a limousine that would make the President jealous, and hiring a very hot and probably lethal bodyguard still seemed like overkill.

  Having said that, given he’s just screwed over the biggest mob boss in the state, maybe it’s not such a surprise that he’s upped his personal security.

  I turned my attention to my employer, hoping for any detail that would offer an explanation.

  Roberto Pellaggio was a big time mafia Don, who owned half of Heaven’s Valley. On the surface, he’d opened businesses all across the city, which had created many jobs and lots of revenue that he’d re-invested into the local areas. He owned car dealerships, barbershops, nightclubs and casinos. All big business. All legit.

  Underneath all that respectable businessman crap, however, was where he earned his real money. Drugs, prostitution, extortion, you name it. You go down the list of crimes the mob can commit, and they tick every box. The money they earn is laundered through their legitimate businesses, and it disappears back into the city. With the help of some clever accounting, Pellaggio is running a massive, highly-profitable outfit. Also, given how much of his money was invested back into the city, he’s got a lot of pull with all the officials - local government, police, and even some state politicians. On the whole, he was a big deal. Definitely not someone you’d want as an enemy.

  There was a news report from a couple of weeks ago that detailed how Pellaggio had tried to purchase a plot of land near the outskirts of Heaven’s Valley. It detailed how he was looking to expand his empire by building another casino, like Manhattan had said to me earlier. The land was ideally situated near the city limits, so it held appeal to people from neighboring towns and cities, and could, in theory, service all of state’s gambling needs north of Vegas.

  Then, a few days ago, another report surfaced in the business section of one of the local papers explaining how the deal had apparently fallen through. There was a picture of our good friend and future corpse, Ted Jackson. The news report went on to say how Jackson pulled out of the deal for undisclosed reasons, allegedly costing Pellaggio hundreds of millions of dollars in potential earnings.

  I guess that’s why I was called in. No wonder Pellaggio’s pissed.

  SIX

  So, on the surface, it still seems cut and dry: Pellaggio wants to continue his monopoly of Heaven’s Valley. Jackson unscrupulously got in the way of that. I’m called in to send a message and help get Pellaggio back on track.

  But something wasn’t quite right about it. Jackson was also set to make a decent sum of money from selling the land to Pellaggio. While I’m sure there are lots of reasons why he would pull out of the deal, he would surely understand that not explaining himself to the likes of Roberto Pellaggio wouldn’t end well for him.

  I picked up the
phone and called Josh.

  ‘Hey, it’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, Cupcake, whaddaya need now?’ he replied as he answered the phone. I tried to ignore his greeting.

  ‘I’m just thinking out loud here, okay? So, Jackson approaches Pellaggio to sell him the land, knowing they were in the market for this casino venture. Both parties are set to make a shitload of cash. Then, all of a sudden, Jackson pulls the plug, costing both himself and Pellaggio a small fortune.’

  ‘Yeah, seems strange,’ said Josh. ‘If you’re the kind of guy who approaches the mafia with a business deal, you’re probably the kind of guy who’s always on the lookout for the big money deals and does whatever it takes to secure them.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. So there must’ve been a damn good reason for Jackson to pull a move like this, and in such a hurry that he doesn’t even bother to tell Pellaggio. That’s both corporate, and in this case, actual, suicide.’

  ‘Well, that’s why you’re there, after all.’

  ‘Precisely. Do me a favor, would you? Look into Jackson a bit more. Find out what else he’s working on at GlobaTech and see if you can find out if they’ve got anything in the pipeline that might cause him to switch his priorities in a hurry.’

  ‘Good idea. These people work military defense contracts – could be something big came up that dwarfed the Pellaggio deal?’

  ‘I guess their thinking being: what’s a mob boss going to do to them, when they’re working alongside the United States military?’

  ‘Sounds like a good theory. Give me a few minutes,’ he replied, and hung up.

  While I was waiting for him to work more of his magic, I looked at the photograph again of Jackson and his bodyguard that I’d taken a couple of hours ago. I’d uploaded it to my laptop so I could see it more clearly on the bigger screen. Josh hadn’t managed to get a whole lot of information about our mystery woman. Which in itself actually told me quite a bit.

  He’d managed to get hold of a grainy photograph, allegedly taken four years ago, in what looked like the middle of the jungle. It showed our woman, minus the lipstick and leather, wearing jungle camo fatigues and holding an assault rifle. She was flanked by two guys dressed roughly the same way.

  Other than that, there was very little to go on. No names or aliases, no known addresses, no reported sightings in the last few years. She was a ghost. And take it from someone who’s spent half his life staying invisible - it’s very hard to be good at it.

  You typically either gain the skills while serving in the military - which I did, after a decade of black-ops and covert assassinations - or you get made invisible by the military or government directly, meaning she was still in active service. Whether she was on the books or not, and whose books there were, is a different matter altogether. Either way, she’s a variable in this equation and I don’t like it. It’s human instinct to be weary of the unknown. She’s very talented and apparently doesn’t exist, which is troublesome. Although it explains why Jackson hired her for protection. Sounds like she’d do a damn good job of keeping you alive.

  Maybe she was a gun-for-hire, like me? Surely I’d have heard of someone in the business who was good enough to be heard of at all?

  Josh was running searches through active military and government databases all over the world, which was why his results were taking time to come through.

  My phone rang, interrupting my train of thought. It was Josh again.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ I asked as I answered.

  ‘Nothing new on GlobaTech,’ he said, sounding slightly deflated. ‘There’s nothing in the news and nothing on their website or their local servers.’

  ‘So either there was no pressure on Jackson from GlobaTech, or whatever’s happening is classified and not on the public record?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yeah.’

  ‘Well, either way it’s a dead end right now.’

  I got up and paced around my hotel room, thinking. After a few moments, Josh spoke.

  ‘You’re doing that thing where you wear the carpet out walking around trying to think, aren’t you?’

  I sat back down on the bed.

  ‘No... I was just sat here trying to figure this all out.’

  I heard Josh scoff down the phone, knowing full well he was right. I ignored him.

  ‘So what are you gonna do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to speak to Jimmy Manhattan again, try and find out what the hell’s going on. Either there’s more to this than he’s letting on, or he’s as oblivious as the rest of us as to Jackson’s true intentions. Whatever the case, it’s still probably worth having another conversation.’

  ‘Adrian, make sure you don’t say or do anything you may regret later, okay? Just some friendly advice.’

  ‘If this is any kind of set up, they should be more concerned that I’ll do something they regret right now.’

  SEVEN

  Josh had managed to find out where in this city, Jimmy Manhattan spent his time, so I was preparing to go and pay him a visit. I had a lot of questions, and I don’t care who he works for, if he doesn’t give me some satisfactory answers, I’d make his life very unpleasant.

  I was wearing my jeans and boots, with a black t-shirt and my trusty, brown leather jacket. Tucked into the back of my jeans was one of my prized possessions - a custom Beretta 92A1 handgun. It held fifteen, nine by nineteen millimeter Parabellum rounds in its magazine. The 92-series was the preferred firearm of the United States Armed Forces. I always liked this variation over the 96-series, which was designed for the ten by twenty-two millimeter, .40 caliber Smith and Wesson rounds. The reason being, the Parabellums had a higher rate of velocity than their Smith and Wesson counterparts, and as a result had a higher penetration depth. Meaning they ultimately did more damage.

  I might be a stats guy and an information junkie, but when it all comes down to it, I wanna make the biggest bang.

  The barrel was metallic silver, as were the outer edges of the butt. On either side of the butt was an ebony plate with a downward-pointing pentagram engraved in silver. I’ve always liked the moniker of Adrian Hell that I acquired several years ago, and I tried to play on it as much as I could. Thankfully, it stuck, and having expensive, customized handguns with the Sigil of Baphomet on them really adds to the image. I actually have two of them, and if I’m on a job, I wear them both on a custom-made holster at the small of my back. The barrels touch and the butts point outwards forming a T-shape which I can easily conceal beneath whatever top I’m wearing. Today, I’ll just be taking one. I’d rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it, as the saying goes.

  Manhattan works out of one of Pellaggio’s nightclubs, called The Pit. It was situated on the fringe of the city center, surrounded by other popular night-time destinations. From what Josh told me, it was your typical hotspot for neon lights, hot girls and guys looking to either deal drugs or get laid.

  I wasn’t worried about any security he might have there. A nightclub in the morning wasn’t going to be open for business, and any staff that were there would be minimal and probably cleaners. Plus, I’ve already met two of his bodyguards, and we all know they won’t be of any use to him.

  But I wasn’t going looking for a fight, I just wanted some answers. From what I’ve put together about Jackson since yesterday, there’s got to be more to it than Manhattan told me. I intend to ask him, quite politely, if he’s trying to set me up in some way for some reason, or if he’s just plain stupid.

  There’s a polite way of asking that, right?

  Half an hour later, I was walking through the Neon district, as it was known to the locals of Heaven’s Valley, which covered three square blocks on the fringe of the city center. Each side of the street was lined with bars and clubs, separated every now and then by a hotel or fast food restaurant. I could well imagine what this place would look like at night.

  The Pit was on the corner of the second block, with the entrance diagona
l on the street corner, facing north-west toward the crossroads. The building itself covered a quarter of the streets running both south and east of the block. Above the small alcove of an entrance was a neon sign that announced the name of the club. I had no idea what color it lit up at night. I figured blue and white.

  I pushed the doors gently to see if they opened, but they didn’t budge. On the right hand wall of the alcove was a large security keypad with a speaker, and a buzzer to press. I pressed it and waited. After a few moments, the speaker on the keypad crackled into life and a voice came through.

  ‘What?’

  Hardly an advertisement for world class customer service.

  ‘I need to speak to Jimmy Manhattan,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ replied the voice, who promptly hung up.

  Well, that was rude. And a lie. I don’t like being lied to. It makes me trigger finger twitch.

  I pressed the buzzer again.

  ‘What?’ said the same voice, as before, except this time slightly less patient.

  ‘At the risk of sounding disrespectful, we both know Jimmy’s in there. So how about you open the door so I can talk to him? That way, I don’t have to kick your teeth so far down your throat that you need to stick a toothbrush up your ass to get at your pearly whites.’

  There was silence on the other end for a moment, then the buzzer clicked off again. I waited for a few moments, then I heard several locks being undone behind the doors.

  The right hand door opened. I expected whoever opened the door to be stood just behind it, ready to grab me as I walked through, so as I stepped inside, took a step to my left and shuffled sideways, so I was facing to the right. The guy that opened the door made no attempt to attack me - he simply fixed me an intense, indignant gaze as he shut the door and walked back into the club.