Running Cold (The Mick Callahan Novels)

by Harry Shannon

  Wes stopped moving. The big guy in front of him slowed the line by sheer bulk. He kept chattering on an old fashioned cell phone. Blonde buzz cut, gym rat build, battered boots and torn jean shorts. The hiker smelled like dried sweat and fresh sun lotion. He was piled down with ropes and climbing gear and hefting a black, Special Ops sized backpack.

  Wes just wanted to get on the boat and off of the land and as far away as possible from the cooling meat that had been his dad. Self preservation now dominated his thinking, but that rage was starting to gather speed. Giving him a taste for revenge.

  The skinny surfer girl punching tickets let them inch forward. Wes knew the boat went about thirty miles per hour top speed, so the ride to the tiny tourist trap of an island would take maybe an hour from dock to dock. Wes fell in behind the hiker like a running back looking for blockers. The hiker fought his way through the confinement of the doorway and careened up the gang plank. When he went right, toward the center or the back of the boat, Wes turned left and went upstairs and outside.

  The air was reasonably fresh, the sun bitter white. Wes kept his shades on. He hadn't slept a wink since driving by the duplex and seeing his dad carried out on a gurney. He wasn't sure, things had happened fast, but Wes thought he'd spotted Callahan standing there, big black Irish guy with a broken nose. Wes knew his face from the advertisements. Prick. Come to admire his handiwork, probably. Wes knew the thought was kind of stupid and bitter, but it comforted him. He needed someone else to blame. Didn't want to focus on his own staggering ineptitude.

  Insipid '80s rock ballads poured like tepid tap water from the hidden speakers overhead. The deck chairs were sagging white plastic. The rumpled blue carpet had pulled completely loose in places, lay whipped and threadbare in others. Wes wandered to the railing. An impossible large orange freighter dominated the skyline, packed with turquoise colored containers, tattooed in nine places with the name Xin Fei Zhou Shanghai.

  The place looked like a Space Port in a Star Trek movie. Wes wondered, not for the first time, about so-called Homeland Security, how anyone could expect to safely search so many containers. Or even a small percentage of them. It wasn't a cheerful thought. How many containers marked tennis shoes or flat screen televisions might instead contain viruses or dirty bombs? It seemed inevitable that one of these days the American greed for less expensive toys would allow a Trojan Horse to deliver a very scary payload. Wes had that conversation with his dad on a regular basis, it was one thing they'd seen eye to eye on.

  The boat began to fill up with tourists, overweight people in garish colors, screaming children with chocolate smeared faces and sharp, beady eyes full of avarice. For the tenth time Wes wondered if he'd been followed, but then why would someone be on his ass? Roth and Quinn were powerful on their turf, but hardly high-tech pursuers. And yet Wes felt uncomfortable and exposed, intuitively afraid to use his own cell phone. He thumbed through a brochure about parasailing and read about the joys of being 650 feet above freezing, shark infested waters in a harness, at the mercy of complete strangers.

  Wes had heard Rosa Germano was making some bucks working on a parasailing boat. They'd been an item when they were teens. Now and then tried to catch lightning in a bottle again. She was a safe place to be, at least for a time, because she could think straight. Rosa called Wes on his bullshit. Still, the parasailing thing was a negative. With his fear of heights, Wes had no intention of going up, but that gig gave him an excuse to visit. He could ride in the boat, maybe watch her do her thing with the tourists. Catalina didn't have much else to do, a zip line, some exhausted buffalo, a couple of glass bottom boats. Rosa was probably busy enough. She wouldn't mind putting him up for a while. They'd always been good in bed. Wes figured the tips were good, there'd be something to eat at night.

  The boat gathered speed slowly but steadily. A bored crew member in a baseball cap droned on about how, in the event of an emergency at sea, to use the worthless life jacket stowed under the seats. He held one up. It was large, jagged, weirdly orange and stiff. The guy demonstrated how the unit closed around his neck like giant lobster claws before being secured. Looked pretty B movie to Wes, like it ate him up. All this crap might keep you afloat in a busy swimming pool, he figured, but if it was really choppy out there at sea, good luck with that.

  As the boat began to back away from the dock, Wes flashed on a memory from childhood. Cal trying to teach him to fly fish one summer morning near Lake Tahoe. The old man had tossed back a couple of brews and waved him out of the way, then whipped the baited hook back over his right shoulder. He snapped the line back and then cast it another time.

  Wes had felt a sharp pain in his face and then an excruciating tugging sensation. He screamed. Cal had dropped the pole and run back, doing that weird parental thing where you go bananas and scream at your kid for being careless mostly because you're really pissed at yourself for having made such a dumb mistake and then apologize and confuse the whole thing even worse for the kid. Wes was hooked through the nose, clean as could be, barbed tip out the front of the left nostril, blood pouring. It stung like having a pissed off wasp trapped in there would sting. In desperation, the old man got some wire cutters and made Wes down a shot of bourbon. He covered his eyes and cut the barb and pulled out the hook. Hurt like a barbed wire enema, but the bourbon part hadn't been so bad. Not bad at all.

  To this day, Wes didn't like the smell of fish. Wouldn't eat the wiggly, stinky shit. The rest of the trip, he and the old man had a blast, crashing in sleeping bags and doing fart jokes and cooking burgers and Dodger dogs every night. It was a good trip overall, nice memories of the outdoors and of being men together and kind of not giving a shit. Dad . . .

  That was kind of how it was with Cal, there was real love, but it got all mixed up with profound irresponsibility, and you never knew from one day to the next just what you were gonna get. The Army had taught him about responsibility. Weighed Wes down with it. Opened his eyes to a lot of things, including the corruption of his own government.

  The boat gained speed and roared the twenty-five odd miles across the channel. Catalina rapidly became a shadow on the horizon. When they were still several miles away, they could see the parasail folks twisting in the wind way above the harbor. The boat drivers slowing down to drop the tourists knee deep in the cold ocean and then yank them back up. Wes hadn't seen Rosa in more than a year. He felt good about seeing her again. Hoped she wouldn't mind him just showing up like this.

  Feeling seasick, Wes went into the galley. Got some overpriced cookies and a weak cup of coffee at the concession. He inhaled the cookies mindlessly, for something to do and to settle his stomach. It was choppy so Wes had to Frankenstein walk back outside. His seat had now been taken by an athletic looking businesswoman reading a Kindle. No big deal. Wes walked past her to the railing. He watched some dolphins, their gorgeous slick skin shimmering wetly in the morning sunshine as they danced and twisted in the wind.

  Down below the railing Wes spotted a lowered, retractable ramp. It had warning signs around it, the pocked white metal spotted brown with rust. This would not be a good place to fall, Wes thought. Bang your head on that ramp, leave a soon-erased trail of pinkish blood. A man would vanish into the boat's massive wake in ten seconds flat. After that, bleeding, you'd likely be shark food. Done. Over and out.

  Wes couldn't stop thinking about death. He wondered if they would do an autopsy on Cal, what they would find. They better not have hurt him first. . . . He could live with the dead part, already had a handle on it, but if the dudes fucked with Dad beforehand, made him beg, even tortured him, that part would not ever wash out of his soul. It might not even fade a bit, like most wounds do, to only sting at certain times. Wes didn't cry over that idea though, oddly enough. It just made him mad. Real mad. At Callahan as much as anyone. Bastard.

  Catalina loomed closer. Wes debated how much to tell Rosa, and decided on very little beyond how his Dad was gone. Why trouble her pretty head. Wes would just hang for a
while, let her straighten him out. She didn't know any of his friends, but the way most women talked, anything was possible. He just needed a place to lay low for a day or two and think things over.

  Wes let the air bitch slap him. He snapped awake and considered the real, sticky mess he was in. It was a big one, and there wasn't much time. Something had to be done, and done quickly. What had Callahan triggered by going there?

  For Wes, there seemed to be four possible solutions, none of them very appealing. One was to run and keep running. Problem with that was giving up everything you knew and cared about in the hopes of staying alive. Hope because guys like Roth had a reach on them. Wes felt queasy. He'd heard those stories. A man could be in witness protection since black and white television. Then he's out mowing his lawn some day and a goon rides by on a bicycle and whacks him while his kid is right there playing with the dog.

  The second option, however distasteful, was to just pay up. Just steal or borrow the money from somewhere and give Roth what he was owed. Up until last night, that would have been the right option, but not now. Wes wasn't about to pay a man who ordered the murder of his dad. Anyway, he'd heard once that this kind of thing got going, the killing part, it was like combat and there would be no end to it. Not until only one man was left standing. They might want to do him just to be sure he wouldn't come back at them someday. Like the guy on the bicycle, only then Roth would be the old dude mowing his lawn. Pow.

  Third option, go to the cops. The way the McCanns had run their lives, it wouldn't do to have some bean counter, one of those forensic accountants, going over every tax return back through the mists of time. They didn't have much of anything, but Dad neglected to let the government have its taste. Wes sometimes kept book, and knew there was a safe with some cash in it. A few people might talk because they hadn't gotten paid. Shit. A lot of variables, things that could go wrong, some of them damned serious.

  Wes finished his coffee and stared out at the rapidly approaching harbor. Catalina suddenly looked a bit ominous, as if there would never again be a safe place, a refuge from the fear.

  Option number four. Wes sighed. That seemed to be the best game in town. And it sucked. He had to find and kill Roth, and then that big bastard Quinn too, just to be sure. Wes knew he was a lot of things, an asshole with women, a periodic alcoholic, a gambler, a brawler. No Saint in anybody's book. But aside from combat he'd never killed anybody. No, not in civilian life, and Wes didn't really want to start now. Not even with the ghost of the Old Man taunting him, standing there in the shadows by the damp railing, wrapped up like a mummy in that bloodied sheet. That hole in his head, the way it had altered the shape of his face. Such a cruel wound. It was there on the boat, too. In every shadowy corner, in the corridor just out of site. In dreams.

  Maybe do Callahan too, just to clean the slate . . .

  Wes fought back tears. He ducked his head down. A lanky woman wearing a scarf and a thick shawl appeared. She came to stand beside him at the railing, to observe the docking process. He licked his lips and clumsily moved away without making eye contact. The woman stayed by the railing, looking down at the metal steps amid the waves, the white foam beard of a relentless ocean.

  The boat bounced against the dock a couple of times before coming to rest. The passengers appeared familiar with the procedure. Most had already grabbed their suitcases from the luggage room and several were waiting patiently in line. Wes had nothing but the clothes on his back and a few borrowed bucks in his pocket. He edged to the front of the line and slipped out into the hot beach sunshine. Walked down the metal ramp, banging and clanging along. A slight breeze tickled his skin.

  Off in the distance, somebody was running a parasail boat. There were at least two or three operating on any given day. No way of knowing which one was Rosa's. Wes studied the matter. Finally he took a quarter out of his pocket and flipped. Heads. He decided to use his cell phone after all. It seemed absurd to figure Roth was sophisticated enough to vector in on him via satellite. Options were narrowing steadily, this thing was closing in. There weren't many good options left. Wes thought about it again for just a minute. He cupped his hand over the tiny keyboard and sent Rosa a text.

  It said, ROSA ON CATALINA NEED 2 C U ASAP.

  Wes closed the phone. He joined a throng of tourists who seemed determined to stroll through every single one of the shops packed with overpriced tee shirts and new age paraphernalia. Joined those who were heading for the two striped parachutes dangling hundreds of feet above the sparking surface of the ocean. Wes didn't much care for the ocean. Always made him think of the movie Jaws. He'd seen that on TV one time, and had nightmares for weeks about little kids and pretty girls getting chewed to pieces by monster sharks, wide vapid eyes rolled back in their heads, mindlessly chomping away with obscene hedonism. Brrrrr. Funny what you think about sometimes.

  The first boat was bouncing back towards the dock when he got there. Wes waited and watched. Spotted two beer guzzling bozos in life jackets, one of them so fat his package stuck out like pork sausage from those wet cutoffs. Wes turned away. He walked further down the dock, past the ticket booth and a food stand that silently promised catsup-drenched ptomaine fries. And then he found her tying up the second boat, that tight little body in a wetsuit, long curly hair cascading. No makeup and no need for it. Although in her late thirties, she had the kind of body that seemed to prove there was life after death.

  Rosa Germano watched him approach with her head cocked to one side. Wes pictured himself as she saw him, shorts and sunburn, baseball cap backwards, peeling from the nose and shoulders. Always out of money, never short on quips. Every girl's lost bad boy. She smiled and right there he knew he had one last shot.

  "The fuck you doing here, McCann?"

  "I thought I'd work on my shark phobia."

  "You've come to the right place. Want to go out for a spin? 650 feet straight up, only $125.00 if you act now."

  Wes hunkered down near the boat. His toes got splashed. Others were watching, wondering who the lucky guy was. "I'd throw up before we made it out of the harbor Rosa, you know that."

  She briskly worked while speaking, expertly tied up the boat. "So I'm the pleasure of this visit?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Well, don't that beat all?"

  People lost interest, looked away. Wes lowered his voice. "I need to talk to you, it's important. I need a place to hide out, get some heat off."

  Rosa shook her head. She sighed without looking up. "Same old Wes McCann. You can crash with me for a couple of days, but no fucking unless I'm up for it."

  "Scout's honor."

  Rosa collected her tips from a coffee can. She'd clearly done okay. Another girl stood waiting and Rosa tossed her the keys. She held out her arm. West lifted her out of the boat and onto the dock in one smooth motion. Her breath caught in her throat. She'd always liked his upper body strength. Wes knew he'd lost a step or two since leaving the Army, but he still worked out regularly. Women liked it.

  Rosa said, "I'm through for the day and I need a beer."

  They walked up the long dock, lost in conversation, holding hands. Rosa hadn't been serious with anyone in a while, liked her job okay, was thinking about going back to school, maybe studying to be a nurse. She didn't ask much about Wes because they both knew she'd guessed the answers.

  They shared an overpriced hamburger near her apartment. Rosa shook her head sadly at the news of Cal's death but didn't seem terribly surprised. Wes chalked that up to the life they'd lived, so proud of skating near the edge. Rosa likely just figured it was about time one of them slipped over. Not a good thing, but certainly not unexpected, either. Wes liked Rosa. She always had been tough that way.

  They talked more on the way back to her small apartment, a hovel close to a sand dune, only half a block from the action on the beach. The place was louder and younger than the two of them deserved. They shared a hit on a joint and had hurried, needy sex. Wes took her from behind as she faced out th
e window and watched the cars go by. Rosa closed the curtain and they fell back on her bed. After the orgasm, he ended up telling her everything.

  "So what are you going to do, pay him or split?" Apparently his other two options had never crossed her mind. Wes thought that was probably a good thing.

  "I don't have anything to pay him with," Wes said. He rubbed his eyes and stretched. For the first time in two days he really, really felt sleepy.

  "Nothing?"

  "A few bucks in my pocket, some stashed from running book but no serious cash. And whatever my piece of shit car is worth." And then it hit him. "Well, some chick gave me her suitcase in Laughlin but hell, I don't even know what's in it."

  "Kind of a grab bag then."

  He laughed, "I suppose so."

  "Of course there's a girl," Rosa said, dryly.

  "Not like that," We said. "Some girl said she recognized me from high school because of a crush. Guess she went to Notre Dame like the rest of us."

  "What was her name?"

  Wes had to think for a bit, between the pot and the sex and the exhaustion. "Jessie. Jessie Keaton."

  She elbowed him. "Somebody you porked back then?"

  "No, I didn't even remember her."

  "Well finder's keepers, especially if you're bad-ass broke. Maybe she had some jewelry you could unload. Just pay the bastard, Wes. Don't take chances."

  "I know, I know."

  They lay still for a while. Wes almost dozed off. Rosa said, "You going to do that? Sell whatever's in there?"

  "I guess. I emailed her a couple days ago but never heard anything back. Maybe she doesn't even want it anyway. Maybe it's just some underwear and shit."

  Rosa took another toque off the joint. Wes passed. After she exhaled, she said, "You need somebody to be your mouthpiece with this asshole Roth, you know? Like maybe a lawyer."