One Rough Man

by Brad Taylor

He took it, saying, “I told you, it’s Pike. Pike Logan.”

  She started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, keeping the conversation going. “Really? If I were going to book you for assault, that’s what I’d write down? What was the name written on your birth certificate?”

  “I’ve been called Pike for a long time. It’s my name now.”

  They rode in silence for a few minutes before she tried again.

  “If you live at the marina, you’re either passing through or working as a sailor. Which is it?”

  “Neither. I moved here about two months ago. I don’t like paying rent and couldn’t afford a house. A guy was selling a beat-up thirty-seven-foot boat that needed a lot of work. The plumbing was okay, and the slip was paid for a year. I bought it, and now I live there.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty romantic.”

  “It puts a roof over my head.”

  Jennifer waited for more, but he said nothing.

  “That’s it? Nobody buys a boat just to live on. They buy it for a reason. Come on, what’s yours?”

  She saw him grimace at the question.

  “I told you why. There isn’t any deep meaning. It’s just a damn boat. A place to live. Do we have to keep talking about it?”

  She let it go. Luckily, they had turned onto Forty-first Avenue and were only seconds from the marina. The rest of the ride was spent in silence.

  “All right, we’re here. Where do I go?”

  “Just park it anywhere. I can walk in from here. What do I owe you for the ride?”

  Jennifer hesitated, and then said, “Does your boat have a bathroom? I really have to go.”

  She regretted saying it as soon as it came out. She really just wanted to use the bathroom but was sure he would take it a different way. She didn’t want him to think she was attracted in any way. When she saw his face, she realized that he was embarrassed as well.

  “Ahh . . . yes . . . I do have a bathroom, but it’s a dinky thing that requires you to pump it to get it to work, sort of like a floating outhouse. You’re welcome to use it, if you want. Just don’t complain about the mess.”

  “Okay. If you don’t mind, I’ll use it and go on home.”

  Jennifer walked down into the galley of the boat and was repulsed by the mess. Doesn’t this guy know that underwear doesn’t wash itself? Man, how could he live in this filth? She was really wondering what the toilet would be like, and figured she’d be doing the squat-and-hover like she was at a sleazy truck stop in between Mississippi and Louisiana. She looked around in an attempt to find something to talk about to break the awkward silence. She was just about to ask him if dirty socks were commonly used as insulation when she saw a picture of a very pretty woman on the shelf above the foldout bed.

  “Is that your girlfriend? She’s gorgeous.”

  “That’s my wife. She’s dead, and I don’t want to talk about that either.”

  The words hit Jennifer like a cold shot of water. Next to the woman in the picture was a small child. She wisely decided not to ask who that was. Pike showed her the toilet, which was surprisingly clean, and how to operate the pump that flushed it. After she finished, she came out, trying to look cool leaning against the doorjamb, saying, “Thanks. I guess I’ll head out now.”

  There was another moment of awkward silence. It looked to her like Pike didn’t know what to say. She was wondering if he was going to spit out some sort of Tourette’s syndrome rant when he finally said, “Well, I appreciate your help tonight. Thanks again for the ride.”

  With a wry grin, Jennifer said, “You don’t lie very well. Thanks for the use of your bathroom.”

  Pike gave her a smile that reached his eyes for the first time. The effect diminished his Halloween mask appearance. He ought to do that more often.

  “You don’t lie very well either,” he said. “I meant it.”

  Jennifer left the boat, wondering if she would ever see Pike again. She also wondered why she cared. He was attractive enough in a weird, Grizzly Adams sort of way, but he had a personality that seemed to swing between outright asshole to limited tolerance. He had moments of humor and kindness that almost seemed to be fighting their way out.

  She had reached the front of her car before she saw the two men standing behind it.

  She stopped where she was, immediately feeling unease and toying with running back to Pike’s boat. “Can I help you guys?”

  The taller of the two moved to the driver’s side. “You can help yourself, that’s for sure.”

  The shorter man, surprisingly fast, circled around behind her.

  27

  I pulled out my bed and sat down, thinking about Jennifer. What in the hell was that all about? Who throws their body on a complete stranger in a bar fight? And then offers to take them home afterward? Especially someone like me? That took a lot of guts—or stupidity. I wasn’t sure which, but I was leaning toward guts. She didn’t act stupid. I was starting to feel a little bad about the way I had treated her. I thought about the vile things I had yelled at her by her car and felt a wash of shame. Jesus, what an asshole. I was surprised she’d let me in her car.

  I looked in my small mirror and felt the anger come back at the sight of my beaten face. Lately, after I get a few beers in me, I begin thinking about beating the hell out of someone just to release a little of the pain. I hadn’t sunk so low as to simply punch the first person I saw, but I could usually count on some blowhard to be around as the night wore on. I had found out early on that I must look like a mean bastard, because blowhards usually backed down when I confronted them. I solved that dilemma by acting like I was too drunk to brawl. The problem with this cycle was that some sort of switch goes off after I pick the fight and I end up taking an ass-beating. I just can’t bring myself to crush whoever I’m fighting. That’s probably a good thing. All it would take is one fight to get out of control, and I would then be viewed as a menace to society, the fall from grace complete.

  Outside, I heard, “Pike!”

  What now?

  Scrambling up onto the deck, I saw Jennifer running flat out down the gangway to my boat, followed by two other men.

  Before I could say anything, she ran right by me, shouting, “Help me!” as she went down into my boat. I turned back around and faced the men.

  They had reached the deck of my boat and stopped. They looked completely out of place for a marina. One was squat, with a bullet head and no neck. He had a ridiculous hoop earring in one ear. The other was taller, and more distinguished, with glasses and a little gray at the temples. Both were wearing suits.

  The taller one spoke. “This is none of your business. Just step aside. We’re her cousins. We told her some bad news about her uncle, and she took it the wrong way.”

  They both advanced onto my deck as he spoke, with the Neanderthal guy circling to my left.

  “Get the fuck off of my boat.”

  Neanderthal spoke for the first time. “No, you get off. I promise, I’m much worse than that pissant college boy that kicked your ass. I’m not going to stop with a couple of punches. Step aside.”

  From Neanderthal’s position I was having a hard time keeping both men in sight. They clearly had done this before, and I could almost smell Neanderthal’s eagerness to tear into me. The fight was coming, because there was no way I was getting off my own fucking boat. I gave one attempt to stop it, since it wasn’t really fair for Neanderthal to think the frat boy had won on skill.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t want any trouble. Just leave and there won’t be any need to call the police.”

  Neanderthal said, “You’ve already got trouble,” then swung a hard right cross. Idiot.

  I raised my left arm, forming a triangle against my head in order to protect it. I took the brunt of the blow and wrapped my left arm around the man’s right, trapping his elbow. I brought my right arm underneath the elbow and wrenched against the joint with great force, causing it to splinter upward, against the direction it was intende
d to go. Before the damage had even registered in Neanderthal’s brain, I put his head between my arms at waist level in a guillotine choke, preventing him from harming me while I tried to determine what the other man was doing, an unknown threat still on the loose.

  While we danced around, the taller man pulled out a double-edged Gerber Mark I boot knife.

  “Let him go, or I’m going to carve you up.”

  I stared at the knife to make sure it was real, feeling a perverse sense of joy. In fact, it was more like elation, as if I had just rubbed off a winning lottery ticket. He had pulled out a lethal weapon, which legally allowed me to escalate to lethal force. I can let the beast loose.

  I locked eyes with the knife-wielding man and grinned. Instead of cutting off the blood flow in the Neanderthal’s carotid arteries and simply causing him to pass out, I jerked upward with all of my strength, snapping his neck cleanly. I continued to pull until I felt his vertebrae separate and his neck begin to stretch like a weak rubber band.

  I dropped that lifeless sack of shit and took off at a dead sprint toward the tall man. He looked at me in amazement and brought his knife hand up, preparing to rip me open. I faked in, causing him to slash early. I dodged the sweeping blade and trapped his knife hand in between my own two hands. Controlling the blade, I ducked under his arm, bringing the knife with me and turning his arm into a pretzel. I continued to rotate until his joints gave, first at the elbow, then at the wrist. It sounded like a kid twisting bubble wrap. I completed the circle and ended up facing him head on, still holding his knife arm, which had turned into a useless piece of bone and gristle. I looked deep into his eyes and rammed the blade straight into his fucking skeevy heart.

  He remained standing for a full second, his mouth a perfect O, looking down in disbelief at the knife sticking out of his chest, still held by his own destroyed arm, his hand facing the opposite of where it should be. He fell over backward onto the deck.

  I looked around for other threats and found none, either on the boat or on shore. All I saw were the two people I had butchered. My rage disappeared. I knew that I had crossed the final threshold. I’ve just killed two people in cold blood. I’m a fucking psychopath. I’ll be put down like a rabid dog, and I deserve it.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured I’d better call 911 but decided to check on Jennifer first. I called her name and descended into the galley. She came flying out of the forward hold, hugging me and crying uncontrollably. She stopped sobbing and began babbling something about her uncle and the danger he was in.

  I held on to her arms and pushed her back a little until I could see into her eyes, saying, “Whoa. Slow down. It’s okay now. What did those guys want?’

  “I don’t know. They said that my uncle was in trouble, and that if I wanted to help him I had to give them a package he had sent. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I never got a package, but when I told them that, they said that it was going to be very painful for me if I continued to lie. The shorter one began talking about what he was going to do to me if I didn’t give them the package.”

  I already knew something screwy was going on, because Neanderthal had mentioned my fight at the Windjammer. These guys must have had Jennifer under surveillance, and an effort like that meant that somebody wanted something very badly from her. I found it hard to believe she was completely in the dark. Great. Just perfect. I had broken up some sort of sleazy criminal exchange.

  “Who are those guys, and don’t give me ‘I don’t know.’ Bad guys hunting you for no reason only happens in the movies. What are you into? Drugs or something?”

  Jennifer shook her head violently. “I’m not into anything. I don’t know what they’re after. Something about my uncle, I guess.”

  “Who’s your uncle?”

  “He’s on a research expedition in the Guatemalan rain forest. I have no idea what they could want with him, or with me. I’m telling the truth. They were definitely after me because they knew my uncle’s name. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  She broke down again and began to sob, sinking into a chair. I didn’t buy a single bit of what she’d said. I didn’t think the crying was an act, because they probably had threatened her with all sorts of vile shit, but I was sure she was lying about not knowing what was going on. After interrogating hundreds of suspected terrorists, I had a cynical view about a person’s innocence when the facts didn’t jibe. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I have heard a terrorist say something stupid like, “I swear, I didn’t know that the car in my garage had four hundred pounds of TNT in it. I just took it in for an oil change. . . .”

  I figured Jennifer and her uncle were involved in some sort of drug smuggling scheme, and would leave it at that. Research expedition. Yeah, right. Researching how to get some product across the border.

  Whatever she was into, I now had a new concern. I had just whacked a couple of unsavory individuals. These types of thugs had bosses who remained in power by being the biggest badasses in the jungle. They wouldn’t let this go, but would be coming for me to make sure everyone knew what happened to somebody who interfered. On top of that, there was no way the cops would believe that I had nothing to do with whatever was going on.

  I thought about my options, which is to say I realized I had very few. I could simply get on my boat and start sailing somewhere, getting someplace safe and starting over, but in the two months I had owned the boat, I had done absolutely nothing with it. It was less seaworthy now than when I’d bought it. Not that that really mattered, since I barely knew how to sail and had about four hundred dollars to my name. That pretty much eliminated the water option. I could leave the boat and do the same thing on land, but my finances made this even more unattractive. At least with the boat I’d be taking my house with me. Without it, I’d either be sleeping outdoors or running out of money in a matter of days.

  I cursed and punched a bulkhead, the anger coming back with a vengeance. Jennifer recoiled at the violence, but I didn’t give a shit.

  “You’re going to tell me what’s going on before the cops get here. I’m not going to get rolled up into whatever bullshit, amateur-hour scheme you and your uncle are into.”

  “I don’t know! Jesus, I’m supposed to be on spring break! If you don’t want to talk to the cops, fine, I won’t mention you. I’ll just say somebody yelled at the jerks and they panicked and ran away. You’ve done your good deed, you don’t have to worry about any police activity, since I’m sure that you’ve got an arrest record a mile long. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t want any police officer to think that you and I are somehow involved in something either.”

  Is she drunk? I looked at her in amazement, then remembered that she hadn’t been around for the finale of the fighting. “It’s a little bit late for that. The two apes up top are dead. I killed them. I’m involved whether you like it or not, and I don’t like to be involved in something I have no control over. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Jennifer looked at me, stunned. “You killed them? How? Why on earth would you do that—”

  “Because the assholes that wanted to talk to you pulled a knife on me. It’s done, and now I’m involved in a mess I want no part of. Who’s your contact? Who sent those guys?”

  Jennifer simply sat there.

  I backed off. Scaring the shit out of her wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I leaned back, thinking about what I knew. My gut was suddenly saying she wasn’t lying. When I thought about it, I realized the woman who’d helped me tonight didn’t seem like the type involved in anything like drug smuggling. It just didn’t add up. Someone like that would have waited until I was unconscious, then picked my pocket. I stopped that line of thought. Don’t be fooled by the package. You don’t know her at all.

  Either way, it wasn’t my problem. I needed to figure a way out of this mess and quit worrying about whether she was guilty. I went back to the deck, feeling the clock ticking rapidly. It was a miracle that nobody around the marina had hea
rd the ruckus, but it was only a matter of time before someone wandered by. Thinking it through, I realized that it would be much, much better if I called the police, or if Jennifer did. Every second of delay was going to look suspicious.

  I searched both bodies. The only things of value were a couple of wallets with driver’s licenses from New York and New Jersey and a couple of cell phones. I checked the contact list of both phones. They were empty, which indicated in and of itself that these guys had something to hide, although that was blatantly obvious at this point. I switched to the call history of the phones, hoping that these guys weren’t that diligent with their operational security. The shorter man—Anthony from his driver’s license—had no incoming calls, and about twenty calls to 1-900 numbers on the outgoing list, thus was little help. The taller man, or Edward, had two incoming calls, one from overseas by the look of the number. His outgoing-calls list only contained two numbers, one of them matching up to the overseas incoming number. I went back to Jennifer.

  “Do you know the country code of Guatemala?”

  “I think so. It’s either 520 or 502.”

  “Well, one of the guys has an international phone number starting with 502, so he’s calling Guatemala. Does your uncle have a GSM phone that works outside the U.S.?”

  “No. He always communicates over the Internet. Most of the places he goes don’t have cell phone service, so he doesn’t bother.”

  I hit redial on the phone, wondering who was paying the bill for this call.

  Jennifer stood up. “What are you doing? Who are you calling?”

  “I don’t know who’s going to answer, but I’m getting my ass out of trouble with whoever is after you. You might want to do the same. I’ll pass the phone to you when I’m done.”

  I stood waiting for the connection to be made. Finally, a man with a heavy Spanish accent answered in English. “So good of you to call. I assume that it’s done? Do you have some good news?”

  “Uh, no. We don’t have the package. And the guy who owns this phone won’t be getting the package. He’s now out of the picture for the long term.”