Raw Wounds

by Matt Hilton

  ‘You’re an old man. I wouldn’t insult myself by punching you in the face.’

  Darius rolled his neck. He curled his fingers and braced his wide shoulders: he was still a formidable man even in his later years. ‘Old man, huh? I could still rip your head off your skinny neck.’

  ‘Face it, Darius. When my dad called you out you wouldn’t meet him like a man, you sent Roman. So let’s not kid each other. You’re not going to do anything now. Not when you can sic all these young ones on me.’

  ‘Let us fuck him up like you said you would,’ Francis argued, with a nod at his brother, who looked equally eager to get stuck in. But Darius ignored them. He smiled again at Po, his white moustache bristling.

  ‘I’m tempted to cut you loose and see …’ Darius shook his head. ‘But you’re right. It’d be selfish of me to kill you all by myself. I will give all dese boys what they want.’

  ‘That’s what this is about for you? Killing me?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You haven’t grasped the bigger picture.’

  ‘The bigger picture is putting you in a grave.’

  ‘And where does that leave you then? You know I’ve friends who won’t let this drop.’

  Darius laughed bitterly. ‘Take a look around. Do you see any friends? Where you’re going nobody will ever find you. Dey won’t have a clue what happened to you.’

  ‘You don’t think when I came here I didn’t have a contingency in place?’ Po was lying through his teeth, but Darius couldn’t know that. ‘Didn’t you think it was maybe a little convenient the way I was just standing out in the open like that, confident that once you heard Emilia was on her way to the hospital, one of your “boys” would be sent over to pick her up? You heard somehow, right, and you sent Jean to meet her? I knew he’d spot me—’ he turned and smiled sarcastically at Jean Chatard – ‘and being as dependable as any trained mutt he’d get straight on the phone to round up a few of your boys. I allowed myself to be taken. Don’t you maybe think I’m more in control of this meeting than any of you realize?’

  More than one of the men surrounding him glanced nervously around, imagining Po’s allies – or worse, the cops – suddenly announcing their presence in this remote place. It was a desolate location alongside a bend in the coulee, but effectively it offered little escape back up the trail they’d come down. If a raid was launched, their only option of escape was to dive headlong into the water and swim for it.

  Darius didn’t buy Po’s story. He was thinking about what Po had just said but with another emphasis. ‘So if help’s coming for you, maybe we should get on with dis.’

  ‘Would better serve you to hear me out, Darius.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can say would change my mind, even if you begged me. Francis, Leon. You know what to do.’

  The sons came forward.

  Po had hoped it wouldn’t come to a fight, but the situation wasn’t under his control at all. He steeled himself, planning if nothing else on getting in his licks with the few weapons remaining to him. His hands were still tied, but he had feet and a head that he’d use to give him some room to manoeuver.

  But the brothers didn’t come on. They waited until one of their cohorts had fetched twin axe handles from one of the vehicles parked nearby. Francis accepted one and gave a couple of practice swings. The wood whistled to his satisfaction. Leon grasped his axe handle across his chest, studying Po for where a blow would hurt most.

  ‘Don’t go hitting him in d’ head,’ Darius cautioned.

  His instruction had nothing to do with pity; he didn’t want Po knocked cold before he was sufficiently punished.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A scream of frustration threatened to overwhelm Tess, but she fought it down. The last thing to do now was lose it, but she was burgeoning on a blow out, and finding it more difficult by the second to deny her instinct to call the police. Po hadn’t wandered off alone for some private thinking time. He’d been taken, and knowing him and how he would ordinarily react to a threat it would have been under violence. The prime suspect in his abduction was Zeke Menon. So that was who she concentrated on finding: where Menon was, then so would Po be. Except she wasn’t positive she’d found Menon at all, although she’d tracked the pickup he’d driven earlier in the day back to this swathe of churned-up land to the east of Catahoula, adjacent to Bayou La Rose. Heavy terraforming of the swampy landscape was underway, with construction crews laying culverts and something akin to a raised levee on which concrete stanchions had been poured to support the pipeline destined to cut through the area, before skirting New Iberia to hook up with the existing pipelines bringing light sour-crude from the Gulf of Mexico to the off-shore oil port at Houma.

  From the front seat of Pinky’s SUV she could see Zeke Menon’s work truck parked alongside similar pickups all bearing the construction company’s logo, but of the tall man in the grungy baseball cap there was no hint. She had to ask herself: why would Menon even be here this late in the evening when his workday would have ended hours ago? Likely he’d parked the pickup and gone off in another personal vehicle, but she’d been unable to identify a ride belonging to him from any DMV records. She had found no contact details for the man, and repeated calls to Po’s cellphone in the hope that somebody would pick up had found it turned off.

  There was unexpected activity on the site. A small convoy of vehicles had arrived minutes earlier, and men had decamped to enter a large compound that must serve as a temporary operational base. Several of them looked like important business people, wearing suits and ties and shiny shoes – totally inadequate wear for the muddy site – while others looked as if they might be private security contractors. Tess assumed that some sort of managerial meeting had been called to deal with an emerging problem: she hoped said problem wasn’t Po. She doubted it, but how could she be certain without taking a look?

  Pinky was all for invading the construction site, and Tess was with him. But caution held her back, and therein lay most of her frustration. Po could be in immediate danger, and she wanted nothing more than to rush to his rescue, but what if they were wasting time here when her partner had been taken elsewhere?

  ‘And won’t we look stupid if we drive away from here without checking, pretty Tess?’

  Pinky was as equally frustrated.

  She gripped the front of her jacket, bunching it in her fists. ‘I know, Pinky. But what if we’re wrong? What if Po isn’t even here and we go poking around where we have no right? Those guys by the cars, they look like they mean business.’

  He checked out the trio of tough-looking individuals who’d remained outside the temporary office buildings. One of them had grabbed the opportunity to have a smoke; the other two were kicking back, sharing jokes while they waited for their charges to reappear. They were suited, their jackets a size too large to cover the concealed weapons they carried. ‘Glorified chauffeurs, them,’ Pinky announced. ‘They’re too busy talking BS to notice us if we sneak inside.’

  ‘I wouldn’t underestimate them if I were you,’ she said. ‘They don’t look overly alert, but they’d have to be blind to miss the two of us.’

  The ground surrounding the compound had been stripped raw of cover, with just an occasional heap of dirt to offer concealment within a dozen yards. The only reason Pinky had gotten them this close without notice was because they’d arrived prior to the convoy of vehicles and parked two hundred yards from the front gate, their lights extinguished. But as soon as they moved the car, or even got out, they’d be spotted.

  ‘So we wait until their backs are turned. We find another way inside other than strolling in through the front gate.’

  Tess studied the tall fence surrounding the compound. It had never been designed with the intention of withstanding an assault; it was more a boundary marker than anything. ‘You think you can climb that thing?’

  ‘You should know by now, I’m not built for aerial acrobatics, me, but I’m pretty sure I could use my other at
tributes to bust a way inside.’ Pinky made a long sweep of the visible perimeter. ‘You see up there …’ He indicated a spot where the fence sagged inwards. ‘Bet you a dollar to the cent I could pick that up enough for us to scramble under. It’s out of the line of sight of the Three Stooges over there.’

  ‘We have to.’

  ‘You’re going to get muddy, you.’

  ‘Least of my worries.’ She was more fearful of Po getting bloody.

  ‘You still got that gun?’ Pinky asked.

  Tess had considered leaving the gun behind at their motel when she and Po returned to the hospital, but had buried it deep in her purse instead. She dug it out, and quickly checked it over. It was a Glock 20, with a Bar-Sto precision 10mm barrel, loaded with 10mm Hard Cast ammunition: serious stopping power, some might even argue overkill. She hoped she didn’t need to use it beyond a threat.

  ‘You OK handling a Twenty, Tess?’

  ‘I’ve fired ten mil before. I’ll handle it.’

  Pinky had armed himself the same. The recoil from such a powerful handgun was no problem to him, and he wouldn’t have worried about Tess if she had full use of her damaged shooting hand. It was a cannon for someone who’d almost had her wrist severed only a couple of years ago. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, throw the frickin’ gun at ’em.’ He winked to punctuate his joke.

  ‘If it comes to it, I’ll throw you at ’em,’ she countered. ‘At least that way I’d be confident of hitting my target.’

  Pinky laughed, but it was grim humour. ‘If any of them have hurt Nicolas …’

  ‘Let’s try and stay positive,’ said Tess, feeling anything but.

  They waited. An opportunity to move came a few minutes later when the smoker offered his buddies his pack. They bunched together, sharing the single lighter. While they were huddled against the breeze blowing off the bayou, Pinky slipped out the car and went immediately around the back. Tess ducked out too, and joined him, keeping the SUV between them and the trio of guards. They backed away until they were obscured by the deeper night, then immediately tracked across the road and into a copse of trees yet to be torn out by the excavation equipment. It wasn’t easy going, undergrowth snarling their every step, brittle branches strung with Spanish moss clawing at their heads and shoulders. Tess felt something squirming in her hair. She ignored it, fighting the qualm of disgust that shuddered the length of her spine. They were making enough noise to alert the guards as it were, without voicing her revulsion at what was worming its way towards her scalp.

  Finally they crouched at the edge of the copse. Tess dug for the critter, even as Pinky also wiped bugs off his face, and thumbed at the corner of one eye. ‘Well, that was unpleasant,’ he whispered.

  They were now at an angle where the buildings within the compound concealed them from the view of the guards. Open ground stretched between them and the fence, but if they hoped to get inside and search for Po they’d no option but cross it. Pinky went first, staying low, his feet digging deep into the churned earth. Once he was at the fence and had tested its integrity, he waved Tess over. She followed the deep plough marks her friend had already made in the muck, so the going was a bit easier for her, yet still hard going. She crouched beside him, breathing deeply at the exertion. Mud clung to her sneakers in clumps and stained her jeans almost to the knees. Pinky was filthy, and had managed to wipe mucky fingerprints down one cheek. ‘If Nicolas is in there,’ he whispered, ‘I’m going to kick his tight ass for making me crawl through the dirt for him.’

  ‘Take a ticket,’ she replied, ‘and join the queue.’

  She checked her weapon, ensuring none of the invasive dirt had found its way into the mechanism. It was all in order. But crawling under the fence with the gun in her hand was impossible. She’d left her bag in the SUV, so tucked the gun inside her jacket and deep in her waistband. Pinky dug under the edge of the chain-link, and heaved up. There was plenty clearance for Tess to squirm under. Once she was in the clear, she stood, got both her hands on the fence and reared back. Pinky squeezed through, the twisted loops of the lowest links scraping his back and leaving small punctures in his jacket. He got through with his hide intact, but was filthy to his elbows and mid-thighs. ‘Dump Nicolas, stick with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to all the interesting places, me. Can’t promise we won’t get as filthy. He-he!’

  Tess shook her head at his shameless flirting. Moments like this and he was still going for laughs. But that was what she enjoyed most about his company. If she’d been here alone she’d be fraught with worry, and on reflection she realized she was no longer as frustrated with the unknown as she was eager to put a lid on it. She took out her gun again, and after checking that they hadn’t been observed they jogged together for the side of the nearest building, a modular pre-fabricated cabin on skids. The other buildings were similar mobile structures, and large metal shipping containers. She assumed that as the pipeline progressed the mobile hub of activity would follow.

  The first window she peeked through showed her a deserted canteen. There was no hint of Po or that he’d ever been inside. She was more intent on taking a look in the largest unit, where the recent arrivals had gone, but to get there unseen was pushing their luck. Floodlights surrounded it, and the lights inside were so bright that it was difficult looking directly at it. Surrounded by barren earth the building had the look of an alien spaceship that had touched down on a desolate planet. Approaching it they would be in the full wash of its lights. Tess was smaller, fleeter than Pinky. ‘Watch my back?’ she asked. ‘I’ll go take a snoop.’

  ‘If he’s in there, you tell me, and I’ll come on over.’ Pinky moved towards the front of the unit and settled himself at the corner where he could watch the trio of inattentive guards. He held his Glock 20 alongside his right thigh. Tess mimicked him, wedging the barrel alongside her thigh as she moved rapidly for the next building along. Because of the floodlights bringing day to the area around the main cabin, it offered deeper shadows alongside the nearest building and she used the concealment they offered to move closer. The final few yards would be traversed in the light, but there was nothing for it. She checked for the guards but couldn’t see them, and Pinky was no longer in sight. Trusting that if she couldn’t see them then she too must be invisible, she crept forward and placed her back against a wall. She was five feet from the nearest window. She moved for it, sliding gently along to make as little profile of her silhouette as possible.

  A venetian blind hung slightly askew when she bobbed up for a peek. It helped her, because she wouldn’t easily be spotted by anyone inside chancing a glance her way. The suited men she’d watch arrive were gathered around a central table or leaning against filing cabinets set along the opposite wall. One silver-haired businessman looked familiar, but only in a cookie-cutter manner that made diplomats and politicians alike. She knew instantly he was the highest-ranking individual in the room. He was wearing a faint sneer, as he listened to a man sitting kitty-corner to him at the table. Tess couldn’t get a good look at the speaker’s face, but she picked up on his body language, his gestures and mannerisms and knew he was uncomfortable with his report. In identifying the company to which Zeke Menon’s truck was registered, she’d checked out who was helming the local project and assumed that the uncomfortable man was the project manager, Alistair Keane. Her research hadn’t been in-depth enough to identify the silver-haired man, and assuming any of these people had a clue what a minor player like Zeke was up to might be stretching credibility beyond its breaking point.

  Their conversation was too muffled to make anything out, but she listened keenly for any mention of Po. She thought she heard Cleary mentioned once by the man she believed to be Al Keane, but he could have said ‘clearly’: besides, the name meant nothing to her … or did it? Hadn’t the thug to whom Po introduced his knife tip to his nostril mentioned someone called Cleary in relation to the Menons? The driver had acted fearful of Cleary as she recalled, but had been at pains to call him
a retard too. It wasn’t important. Po was all that mattered, even Emilia’s unknown fate meant little to her at that moment.

  She moved away, skirting the building. At the rear the illumination was ambient, allowing her easy progress but also more cover. She checked more windows at the back but the small anterooms were empty. She began to think that she was wasting time, yet she couldn’t leave without checking the other buildings. She’d never forgive herself if she neglected to find her lover, locked in one of the cabins or shipping containers. To save Po she would do whatever it took, which came as an epiphany as bright as a detonating flare. Apparently it didn’t take much for her to put aside years in law enforcement when she was prepared to push her way inside that building at gunpoint and demand her partner. She was tempted, but again had to ask if she were wrong about Po being there.

  Low-key approach, she cautioned herself. Check and see. Then base your response on your findings.

  The trio of guards, chauffeurs, or whatever they were, were still engrossed, so she slipped across to the next cabin, which looked like a site office, and to a side window. There was no light from within and the window was encrusted by dust stirred by machinery. She used her sleeve to wipe away some of the grime, but it didn’t help much. No … that wasn’t entirely true. She could see dim light coming from under a door in the rear. She couldn’t ignore it.

  She crept round the side of the cabin, but making a full circle around the building she found no window for the adjoining room, and certainly no door. She placed an ear to the wall and listened. She could swear she could hear laboured breathing, until it occurred to her that she could hear the breath whistling in her own lungs, and her raised pulse inside her head. Had she heard a subdued murmur, a brief scuffling? When she glanced down, her jacket had caught on splinters on the wall. She gently eased away. Disappointed at failing to find Po, she turned to scan the other buildings. She could see now that most of the shipping containers weren’t locked, and some doors stood open. They continued various items of equipment she couldn’t identify, others were stacked to the roof with boxes of what she surmised were parts used on the pipeline or the excavation vehicles. She couldn’t see one that raised her suspicion about what it held.