GRAY AREA
George P. Saunders
© 2006
Published by George P. Saunders. Copyright 2006 by George P. Saunders. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
PROLOGUE
The day his wife was murdered, a large part of Lou Diamond’s own life was destroyed. The destruction did not slowly repair itself; the passage of time did not heal the trauma, nor did it give a sense of perspective that life was a journey filled with pleasure and pain, and sometimes loss. For Lou Diamond, the agony of his particular loss would remain a burning harshness in his body and soul that would forever rage out of control.
Where there was once a man who had been a soldier, a lawyer, and a dedicated police officer highly decorated by his peers … now there was only a shell of that former greatness. Arguably, he was still the best cop and field agent in the Los Angeles Department’s elite force known as the Special Response Team. This division handled the most violent of crimes, the most volatile of situations, the worst of the worst when it came to armed robbery, homicide or terrorism. To be an agent with SRT, a man or a woman had to be a special breed. A breed of warrior that had no fear of death … and zero hesitation when it came to the kill.
Lou Diamond was such a man.
His personal mantra, before Maria’s death, was to get the job done and enjoy the private satisfaction that as a result of his efforts the world would be left a better place, safe for a time. Until the next episode of evil reared its ugly head and would again demand the intervention of a man like Lou Diamond to hopefully save the day.
That was then.
Today … there was only the job, minus any sense of personal jubilation at triumphing over the forces of darkness. Today, five years after Maria’s brutal murder, Lou Diamond did his duty robotically and, unlike days long gone by, he found himself enjoying the kill … something he had never enjoyed before outside of recognizing the necessity for it on the varied fields of battle he had known in his lifetime.
There was not a day that passed where Lou Diamond did not wish for his own death, be it either in harness or by his own hand. So far he had cheated the Grim Reaper through the years while on assignment to the SRT … though, in his stead, he had relieved numerous individuals guilty of violent crime from the burden of existence. And he had resisted the temptation of suicide … if for no other reason than that of his eight year old daughter, Sonia. She was his sole raison d’etre for continued existence on this piss-hole of a planet.
Lou Diamond was a man convinced that nothing would ever surprise him again. He had seen it all, done it all. Now, there was only the job and his daughter. Period. End of story.
When Sonia was grown, he would be finished.
Lou Diamond was not afraid of death.
The reason was simple.
As far as Lou Diamond was concerned … he was already dead.
ONE
Los Angeles - 11:15 pm - December 15
It was damn near Christmas in the City of Angels, and Jason Randall, Esq. felt like Santa Claus had just given him an early ho-ho present. He sat back in his chair and watched Marianne Simpson slide a pair of stockings down her shapely legs. She may have been the most beautiful woman he had ever known. In another second, blouse and skirt were quickly removed, followed hard upon by bra and panties. Jason released an unconscious moan of commingled desire and awe.
“Want me, baby?” she whispered, though it was clearly a rhetorical question. Jason’s hard-on bulging through his pants was a standing erection-admission that there was definitely a sense of want in the air. To his credit, he at least managed a nod. His speechlessness was not only due to her exquisite nakedness, her teasing beckoning to him from atop the long conference table here in the Berenson & Marelli law library—the place where they both worked as attorneys. In larger part, it was because Jason Randall had never possessed a woman in a more perilous environment. That was the real turn-on, the hook. He’d had scores of women before – but none like Marianne Simpson. None that were as intrepid (or as reckless) as himself. And never in a place like this.
Marianne Simpson giggled as she reached out for his hand. Jason made a light-speed decision to forego romantic foreplay. He fairly leapt from his chair and stripped away his clothes in what had to be record time. In a few seconds he stood in his socks, every other piece of clothing in a heap near his ankles. Marianne’s clothes were tossed haphazardly on the table. Their joint research into the Arc-Link class action suit had ceased twenty minutes ago … about the same time that Marianne reached for his groin and continued from there. Non-billable stuff to be sure, but Jason didn’t protest. Marianne was like a drug to him; impossible to resist, tantalizing, addictive.
“This is nuts,” he said feebly, giving a one-two glance to his right and left for anyone that might be around, a cleaning person, perhaps. At this time of night on Friday, all partners and associates had long ago gone home. No real problem on that front. No worries. Still…
“Of course it’s nuts,” Marianne cooed back. “Want me to stop?”
She edged closer to him on the table, kissed his bare stomach one, twice, then took him into her mouth. Jason closed his eyes and made a mental footnote summing up the madness of the moment.
He’d been an associate with Berenson & Marelli for two years, a top grad from Harvard Law School, a first-string quarterback that every major firm in the country had courted. Berenson & Marelli had won the bid simply because they threw the most money at him. Marianne was his gender counterpart; Yale, clerk to a Supreme Court Justice for two years, smart as a whip, born to money ... and gorgeous. On paper, both were letter perfect.
Both Jason and Marianne had been assigned the prestigious Arc-Link case by old man Berenson himself three months earlier. The chemistry was instantaneous, galvanized by hours of close quarter study, research, and strategizing. Strategizing had, in short order, led to a fair amount of stolen moments here and there; hurried kisses, gropes, fingering, and once, even a blow-job in the Men’s Room on an early morning two days ago. Aside from the Suck Fest, these other relatively innocuous encounters took place in offices, hallways, or in libraries ... like here, now, just after midnight.
However, tonight, Marianne had decided that fellatio along with grope and jerk games were to be a thing of the past.
Jason kept his eyes closed as Marianne continued to have her way with him. One word repeated itself in his stimulated mind over and over again.
Dangerous. This was dangerous. Dangerous to his career, his job, his future. And yet ...
Fifty feet away, the doors of the service elevator opened and closed. The individual that exited the elevator wore an overcoat and boots. That individual also held a Colt .380 ACP, fully loaded and cocked. It took roughly twenty seconds to reach the law library where Jason Randall, the first string pride of Berenson & Marelli, and Marianne Simpson, top litigation associate and blue blood debutante of Jackson County, West Virginia, 1993, were about to engage in some very vigorous intercourse.
Marianne finished teasing him and lay back on the long conference table, pulling Jason with her. She guided him into her wetness a moment later and let out a small cry. Jason shuddered as he began to drive himself into Marianne with furious abandon, oblivious to the silent intruder even now entering the library.
Jason noticed the gun first, his peripheral vision catching the flicker of light off of the barrel.
Marianne, suddenly switched to a top position and straddled J
ason, grinding hard, screaming with every desperate thrust. She had her back roughly to the shooter, and thus her field of vision was nil. Noticing his lack of commitment to the moment, Marianne analyzed Jason’s expression in an instant then turned to his focus of attention.
There was no time to plead, or even cry out for mercy.
The Colt exploded. And the bullet hit Marianne square in the forehead. She was dead before she slumped over on top of Jason.
Jason let out a stunned whimper, pushed Marianne’s corpse off of his chest, and rolled to the floor. He turned on his naked ass, backpedaling along the carpet toward the nearest wall. The shooter walked forward, relentlessly ... unhurriedly, and methodically. The Colt came up to aim once more.
“Please—God—don’t,” Jason gurgled, hands and arms raising instinctively over his face and chest.
The gun discharged again, the muted sound of the silencer beginning and ending in less than a second. The bullet found Jason’s windpipe. His death was not as quick nor as blindingly merciful as that of Marianne. He clawed for air, more terrified than anything else … pain became an afterthought a second later. The shooter fired again, putting Jason out of his misery.
The shooter put the Colt into a pocket, then turned and walked back down the hall, this time through the fire stairs.
Marianne’s corpse twitched for the next five minutes, the strange paroxysm of stunned nerve endings and synaptic response to sudden death. A trail of blood from Jason’s mouth flowed toward Marianne’s left hand, until it gathered in a pool around it shortly before 12:30 a.m.
TWO
1:01 a.m. - December 15
Lou Diamond was furious. Furious that he had allowed himself to be put in a situation which he now had little control over. Furious, because tonight he realized that his error in judgment might very well cost him his life, and the lives of his two associates.
The man known as Palomito smiled at him. Palomito, the name rolled around in Diamond’s head. It meant little dove in Spanish; a meaning that stood in sharp contrast to the beast that stood before him. Diamond was strapped to a metal fold-out chair, as was DEA Agent Matthews and Sergeant Peoples who flanked him. The smile continued as Palomito approached Diamond and ferociously back-handed him across the jaw with a .357 Magnum. Diamond’s head snapped to the left, pain and fury mounting - particularly fury. He considered the warehouse he was now imprisoned within, tasting blood on his lip. Only one decent fucking exit, he thought. And because somehow, due to a run of good luck, he managed to be trapped in the only empty warehouse in the northern hemisphere, that meant there was zero cover in a potential firefight. This was just a shit-grub deal, no other way to call it otherwise.
Because of his weakness, he thought. Because of his dick, truth be told.
He spit blood and sucked in snot. Christ on a drunken ass, I’m a damned fool. He couldn’t help but force his mind to repeat this a dozen times or so.
“Uno mas, Conyo,” Palomito growled in a strangely feminine voice. Palomito stood over six feet tall, and weighed close to three hundred pounds on the hoof. “One more time and you die quickly. How did you know about the shipments?”
Diamond tasted his own blood and it helped fight off the urge to sink into unconsciousness. He’d been in situations like this before (perhaps not so dismal, so abysmally hopeless, he revised mentally), but it never seemed to get easier. Par for the course after five years on the L.A.P.D. Special Response Team. Shit happened. Sometimes the bad guys catch you and, as these things go, sometimes you find yourself tied to a metal fold-out chair faced with a psychotic drug runner from the backwaters of Columbia, threatening to wipe you out of existence in any number of very sexy and agonizing ways.
Sure, it happened sometimes. But not because of such an egregious lack of judgment and sheer carelessness. Through the pain, even amidst this currently bleak scenario, Lieutenant Lou Diamond couldn’t help but chastise himself for the slip.
Juanita stayed several feet behind Palomito. Diamond focused on her momentarily. Juanita, the pleading child-woman who had convinced him that she was but an abused pawn of the drug-king, Palomito. Juanita, the tearful supplicant, begging Diamond for a chance at a new life. Juanita, the vixen, the temptress and, at last, the lover. She had fooled him. Fooled him good. He had believed she was a victim, a helpless innocent in this whole affair; he had allowed himself to be sucked in emotionally to her plight.
He had even slept with her. There was the kicker. Old Self-Pitying Lonely Dick, he thought. Dumb, he thought, stars swimming in his head, blood oozing into his eyes. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Before SRT, Diamond had chalked up a combined twelve years with the Marines, then later with the LAPD SWAT Division. Taking a break from the craziness of that kind of violent duty, he had been a lawyer for five years—an alleged expert at human duplicity, mendacity and moral skullduggery. A lot of combined experience, and yet he had not seen that Juanita was one of Palomito’s people.
Shit.
“I can’t hear you, Mr. Police Man,” Palomito said, leaning in to Diamond, nose to nose. Diamond remained silent, his mind a blur of options and self-recrimination.
Of all three men lashed before him, Palomito sensed that Lou Diamond, the eldest and most experienced, would be the most intractable. Thus, he shifted gears. He walked to the chair on Diamond’s right and leaned in to Sergeant Peoples.
“How about you, my friend. Feel like talking to me? Or have you ever thought about how long it takes a man to die with a knife in his belly?”
Peoples was twenty-eight, a good cop, three years in Homicide. But the punishment on his body and psyche in the past hour had taken its toll. Defiant tears streamed down his cheek. Diamond knew the young officer had a wife and kid, an unfortunate liability that would weigh unfavorably on Peoples in terms of his ability to keep his mouth shut. Not that Diamond would blame the guy, but dispensing information to Palomito—a top Cartel member to the Columbian C-149 (as that Cartel referred to itself)—would not be a good thing at this point. Not a good thing at all.
“Don’t tell him shit,” Diamond spat at Peoples.
Palomito began to stroke Peoples’ cheek with the .357 Magnum he held in his hand. “Chico, chico. Don’t make me hurt you. Your friend is crazy, I think. He doesn’t not care about life. He is viejo!”
Diamond scowled. Viejo in Spanish meant old. At forty six and weighing in at one hundred and eighty six, minus three feet of small intestine lost in the line of duty, Diamond was comparatively more ancient than his two other hapless companions. But while guilt overwhelmed him at the moment for his earlier indiscretion with Juanita, his desire to get out of this nightmare alive, was huge. He did not want to die like this and he, more than the others, realized that their collective survival lay in silence.
“You should make your friend talk,” Palomito urged Diamond, all the while casually stroking Peoples’ cheek with the gun. “He is so young. Probably has a lovely woman at home, waiting for him. Worrying about his well-being.”
“Kiss my ass,” Diamond muttered again. He looked at Peoples. “It won’t make a difference, Terry. He’ll still kill us.”
Palomito suddenly stood straight up, and cocked the Magnum. “My patience is almost up.”
Diamond closed his eyes, expecting the inevitable blast of the gun that would send him and his companions into the void. The .357 pointed at Diamond. Diamond opened his eyes at last, eyeballing Palomito with crystalline hate and contempt.
Without warning, Palomito put the gun to Peoples’ temple and pulled the trigger.
Diamond screamed as he watched most of what made Terry Peoples think and feel and laugh smash against the far wall in a wet, pathetic lump.
“Oh, you son of a bitch,” Diamond choked.
On the other side of Diamond, DEA Agent Matthews, ten years Diamond’s junior, began to cry. Matthews was no coward but, like Peoples, he had family and the beating of the past sixty minutes had worn him down.
“Listen—” Matthews
began softly, catching Palomito’s attention.
Palomito smiled, then looked at his three henchman, all in their twenties, armed with Uzi submachine guns.
“Me, listen?” Palomito asked as he walked over to Matthews. “No, you listen! You blow up my boat today. You burn two million dollars of my merchandise. This is very un-American what you do. I am feeling very harassed!”
“I got a wife, two kids—” Matthews pleaded.
Things were going down hill quickly, and Diamond knew that time was running out. If something wasn’t done soon, they would all be dead.
“Matthews, shut up,” Diamond urged. He realized that time was the only ally any of them possessed with Palomito. If they resisted giving him information there was at least some leverage, some opportunity for delay. Diamond quickly assessed the three henchman, their location in the room, their approximate distance from where he was tied, the nearest exits. If he could get to one of them, somehow—
“We—we tracked your operation for six months,” Matthews suddenly said, snapping Diamond’s attention back to the more immediate danger of his associate telling all.
“Matthews, goddamn it—” Diamond said.
“Shut up, Lou!” Matthews spit back at him, then turned desperately to Palomito. “Listen, we knew your freight was heroin, cocaine, mescaline. You’re finished.”
Palomito seemed pleased. “Keep talking, amigo.”
“Your partner, Rodriguez, hired us. We all speak Spanish. We were ... convincing. Told him we were ex-cons and needed work. He believed it.”
Palomito nodded, then turned to Juanita behind him. “Remind me to kill Rodriguez, bonita.”
Juanita remained expressionless, but her gaze rested on Diamond. In that one look, Diamond was able to sum up the sequence of events that had lead to this deplorable and foolish outcome.
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