by Sam Jones
Martin Black phoned Stan Hope after King had bit the dust. He told him he needed a clean-up job for two rooms: a body, a bloodstained carpet, and a couple of holes that he had cut out of some windows.
“Let me guess?” Stan Hope asked. “Put it on your tab.”
Black promised him he’d pay him back and Stan responded with what sounded like a grunt mingled with a belch.
Black also mentioned that he left the sniper rifle in one of his rooms and the body he needed disposed had claimed he was FBI right before he died.
Stan said he’d look into it.
After Black made the call, he left the strip and headed for a diner on the outskirts of the city. It was far away and scarcely occupied enough to lie low while he rallied a plan.
He was prepared, should trouble come knocking.
I’m kicking ass lately.
And I haven’t smoked.
Shit, why did I think about it?
Now I want one.
The place smelled faintly of bleach, tobacco, and coffee. It was designed to look like a ‘50s joint, but judging by the ancient television set above the counter, and the over-saturation of Billy Joel records on the jukebox, it was probably erected sometime in the ‘80s. The red leather booths and sparkling countertops hadn’t been changed or kept up since their placement thirty years ago. All of them were covered in a thin layer of soot and nicotine. The glimmer of the sparkled countertop was filtered through a thick, yellow, and chipped layer of plastic. It looked like snowflakes were drowning in a pool of bile.
Black took a booth in the far back, facing the door. He stuck with an order of coffee, bacon, and eggs. The waitress, an older woman who looked like she worked there since the joint opened due to the fading of her nametag that said ‘Joe,’ was consistent and timely with the refills.
Black finished eating, pushed his plate to the side, pulled out King’s burner phone, and placed it on the table.
The Lunar Club. Midnight.
Might be an ambush.
Or he actually might want to negotiate.
Whatever was going on, Black felt the timetables were starting to wind down. Whatever Roenick was doing, whatever use Amanda was to him, it was all going to culminate in the immediate future.
All this started with a hit on a husband.
Now there’s a whole league of mercs guarding her and some pompous, German asshole holding onto their reins.
And the FBI???
What’s really going on here…?
Black looked at King’s burner phone as the question ruminated in his mind.
He picked it up and hit redial.
Roenick had injected Amanda with a sleeping agent. The resistance she put up left Roenick with three, quarter-inch deep scratches down the left side of his face and across his eyelid. She kept her grip on him, her nails soaked in his blood, even as the drug took hold of her and sent her into the land of sleep.
Cassie placed Amanda in the one of the downstairs bedrooms. It was the same one where they had stuffed the owner of the house after shooting him in the head several days prior when he rejected Roenick’s offer to buy it.
Prophet then guarded the door as Cassie assisted in cleaning Roenick’s wounds in the kitchen.
Roenick gashes were deep enough that it looked like they had been done with a pocket knife, tissue below the skin exposed. The scars that would heal over his injuries were not going to look pretty.
Amanda caught him in the face with a quick, cat-like strike that caused him to stumble back. He never once displayed any agony as he corrected his stance, continued walking forward, restrained her, and injected the serum into her neck.
Cassie, who stood idly by while it all went down, had felt Amanda’s actions were just.
She had removed the bullet in Roenick’s shoulder, cleaned it, and stitched the wound. Luckily enough for Roenick, no real damage was done and his mobility didn’t appear to have been affected.
He’s the goddamn Terminator.
As soon as she had applied the last strip of medical tape to the square-shaped gauze she laid over his wound, Roenick’s cell phone rang. He answered it. “What is it?” he asked.
“I want to know who you are,” replied Martin Black.
Roenick stood up from the stool he had been perched on and wandered towards the pool area. “Can this not wait until midnight?”
“I’m having second thoughts,” said Black.
“I told you I can give you what you need.”
“Quit holding back and just tell me, you piece of Euro trash.”
“A Commitment Waiver with Amanda Dubin’s signature on it plus one hundred thousand dollars. I know who you are, Martin Black, and I know who you work for.”
On the other side of the call, Martin Black took a beat.
“And the girl?” he asked.
“The girl is mine. That’s the tradeoff. I know she hired you to kill her husband, and you succeeded. Her fate is none of your concern. Your job, your only concern, was to kill her husband, and you did that.”
It was something in his last words that clued Martin Black in.
Roenick said them in way like Tara would.
“You were a Contractor,” he said to Roenick. “Weren’t you?”
“Are you surprised?”
“No. It makes sense. A former Contractor would have resources to do what you’ve been doing. What happened? They cheat you on your Reverence? Or did you just get bored after you hit your twenty-five-year mark and decide to stir things up?”
“I never made it that far, Mister Black. The Trust never even bothered to give me a heads up before they decided to put a hit out on me.”
“What happened? You forget to file your taxes, or something?”
“No, no, no. My ‘mishap’ was quite more elegant than that. As far as I know, the Executives spread the rumor that I had a Re-Val.”
He’s Marcus Silver…
Black’s stomach knotted and his heart began pumping with the same adrenaline rush a lottery winner or someone who had won a bet would receive.
It left him speechless as Roenick continued on—
“You know, I don’t believe that Re-Val’s even exist. I think it’s just a scare tactic the Executives use for dogs like you to keep you from shitting indoors. Who’s yours? Hindermann? Trask?”
He’s a perceptive son of a bitch.
“Trask,” Black responded, unable to help himself.
“I always liked her. So cold. So calculated. So unrelentingly full of lies. I wonder how many she’s told you.”
“A fair amount.”
“You probably don’t even know the half of it.”
Black paused to figure out his next angle while Roenick waited with a left-side smirk that scrunched up the cuts on his face and cause the wounds to re-open and bleed.
“Martin?” Roenick asked.
“I want the girl,” said Black.
“You want that Commitment Waiver. And the money.”
“I’ll just get it after I rip out your throat and take her.”
“I’m offering this the easy way. Are you really going to roll the dice on some suicide mission for a woman that you have no real, vested interest in? All you need is the money and the CW. I’m offering both. And then some.”
He’s being honest.
Roenick held the phone to his chest as a familiar, invisible pain resurfaced.
He closed his eyes, swallowed his agony, and held the phone back up to his ear.
“Let’s think about another option. A new choice you can make. You, Martin Black, are a valuable resource. Your training, your knowledge. All the things The Trust has given you are being squandered and ground into oblivion underneath their boot heels. What real loyalty do you have to them? What possible future do you have as long as you remain their servant?”
A short-lived one.
Everything that Roenick was saying provided Black with an oddly clear perspective – a simplistic, severely and fundamentally true and ea
sy way of thinking.
“Why not work for me?” Roenick pleaded with gusto. “Why not be on my side? Why wait for twenty-five years to discover that your fate is nothing more than a bullet to the back of the head and a shallow, unmarked grave?”
Black said nothing.
He had no retort.
“Meet me at midnight, Martin. The Lunar Club, as I told you before. Let’s negotiate a truce and find a common ground that you can thrive upon.”
Black held the line for a solid seven seconds before he replied—
“Okay.”
Midnight struck at The Lunar Club. Strobe and techno lights of all colors swept and rebounded off of the water and set a glow that reached up into the night sky. Steam rose from the union of bodies congregating around the pool area.
If Las Vegas was hell, The Lunar Club was the circle that housed sexual deviants.
The place was located on the north end of the strip, on the rooftop of the newly opened Oasis hotel. Shirtless thick-necks and breeze-brained floozies were packed shoulder-to-shoulder around an 80-foot pool, shaped like an eclipsed moon. EDM music was blasting through the speakers, the track organized by a DJ named Dick Atler, whose preexisting, gawky frame had been over exercised and protein-fueled to the point that he looked like a parody of himself. His tiny head and comical, Jay Leno-shaped jaw seemed to be dwarfed by his bowling ball biceps and basketball shaped shoulders. His body looked like (and his IQ held the same equivalent as) the wooden mannequins that artist’s used for sketching, if the mannequin took too many steroids and prided himself at creating electronic beeps that he called music, which were organized with a keyboard because he was too deficient to learn how to play a guitar.
Fuckboy.
As DJ Dick kept changed over the track, Martin Black entered the scene from the back lobby, where a row of elevators served as the only entrance or exit out of the building.
He scanned the pool area for any familiar heads—
Couple bouncers walking around but they’re not paying much attention.
Black made his sweep. He approached the first bar he could find (they were peppered around about every four feet) and rested his elbows on the counter.
Thirty seconds later, the burner phone he took off King rang from inside the pocket of his pants.
He answered; Roenick’s voice began relaying instructions—
“Move fifteen feet ahead and three feet to the right. Miss Palizzi will be at a table waiting for you.”
The line went dead. Black kept a hand close to the area of his holstered Beretta as he walked fifteen feet ahead and three feet to his right.
As promised, waiting for him at a table that was practically enveloped by people, was Cassie Palizzi. For a moment, he was stunned to see such a drastic change in her appearance – blonde hair, no tattoos. He had caught glimpses of her back during the sniper rifle incident, but now her new look was in front of him in 4K definition.
Black’s thoughts ran to Kristen Bell.
However, no matter the aesthetic changes to Cassie, she still held that same, familiar essence that Black felt the last time the two of them shared a table.
He straightened his composure, approached her, and sat down. He saw that Cassie’s face was now sporting a hard shade of weary. When his eyes fell upon the bandage across the bridge of her broken nose, he felt bad. “Sorry about the face,” he said with genuine remorse.
Cassie shrugged. “Shit happens.”
She looked at his face.
She was mildly happy to see it.
The two shared the soothing sounds of silence, both of them catching their breath and taking a minute to themselves, despite the fact that the environment around them was not exactly prime real estate for conversation. But, it was public, and a crowded place always cut down on the violence factor.
Sometimes.
“Where’s Roenick?” asked Black.
“He’s going to call in a moment,” said Cassie.
“I’d order myself a drink, but I’m worried I might end up with a tummy ache from whatever extra shot you might put in it.”
Cassie looked away.
Fuck you.
“Don’t suppose you got a cigarette?” asked Black.
Cassie shook her head.
“How long has it been since you had one?” she inquired.
“Few days.”
She pouted out her lower lip and nodded.
“Good job,” she said. “You should keep going.”
“Thanks. I’ll try,” he replied. Flat.
A jock with a deliberately tight, fluorescent muscle tee brushed past the table. Black picked up hints of a cigarette on the man’s shirt. The trace chemicals permeated his brain and sent a quick, familiar shock to his system that could only be provided by nicotine.
“Where’s your boss?” asked Black.
Cassie drew in a deep breath and held it. She began to unconsciously bite a tiny corner of her bottom lip as she stared off to the east, towards the lights of the freeway leading out of the city. Part of her wanted to abandoned her post, rent a car, and drive away.
She released the air stored up in her chest. “You know,” she said. “I’m not sure why Roenick does the things that he does, half the time. He used to be one of you guys, and you all seem to have some pretty kinky personality traits, succinctly putting it.”
Black smiled. She was spot on.
“That we do,” he said.
Cassie’s phone rang.
She snapped back to the present and put her mind straight.
Black did the same.
Both of them were ten shades of calculated and cool.
Cassie nodded to Black and slid the phone across the table. He picked it up and answered. “Enough of the games,” he said into the receiver.
“I agree,” replied Roenick.
“Then show me that adorable, Aryan face of yours, and we can get cracking.”
From Roenick’s position, hidden and shrouded, but not far off, he tenderly touched the barely healing scratches on his face, stitches binding the wounds. He was so accustomed to the invisible pain living inside of him by now that he never once winced at the searing sting of Amanda’s claw marks.
“You understand my need to be cautious,” he said to Black. “In case you’re planning on trying something at the last second.
“I get it,” said Black. “What, uh…”
How do I even phrase it…?
“What is it you can do for me?” he asked Roenick.
“Exactly what I have been saying to you this entire time. You want freedom. I’m here to give you that freedom.”
“In exchange for no longer pursuing the girl?”
“Precisely. If you do say yes, you’ll have to leave the country for a while, at least until I finish with Amanda.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I still can’t trust you. At least until this is over.”
“And when it is over, then what?”
“I’ll find you. I’ll be sending you away with something in the meantime…”
Cassie produced an oversized envelope sporting the thickness of a brick from her jacket.
That’s a hundred grand.
Easily.
“That’s more than you’ve ever been able to keep on you personally, correct, Mister Black?” asked Roenick. “Assuming The Trust still pays out that joke of an allowance they give you to live on.”
They do.
I can barely afford a Netflix subscription.
I should cancel it…
“I’d be lying if I said your offer didn’t sound immensely appealing,” Black said to Roenick.
“Then what is the hold up?”
“I don’t feel like I can have a working relationship with someone that won’t meet me face-to-face.”
Black hung up the phone and tossed it down on the table. Left behind glasses with lipstick smudges and half-drunk beer bottles spilled and clinked across the table as Black stood and headed for t
he exit.
“Martin,” Cassie said after him.
It did nothing.
He was done.
Black shoved his way through the crowd. At one point, an inebriated thick-neck complained that Black stepped on his foot and attempted to push him. Black spun around, grabbed the guy by his cluster, and twisted them with grip meant for arm wrestling. He pushed the thick-neck into a lounge area and walked off as the crowd covered his tracks.
Two seconds. Flat.
Under the radar and undetected.
Black continued towards the elevators and made it another twenty feet, parted through a group of girls, and found himself staring at a man in black clothing with stitched-up cuts down the side of his face—
Roenick, aka, Marcus Silver.
“Mister Black,” Roenick said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Black waited, hand near his pistol as Cassie came up behind him, following the same, ingrained procedure he was.
“You’re not as tall as I thought you’d be,” said Black.
Roenick nodded towards the opposite end of the pool area.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said as he turned and began slowly pacing around the edge of the pool area.
“You and your fuckin’ walks…” Cassie said under her breath.
Black relaxed, took a look at Cassie, scanned the crowd for any other suspect faces, and followed after Roenick.
Keep those eyes peeled…
They strolled, side-by-side, like a couple of old farts in the park and Cassie trailing them like a somewhat incognito bodyguard. She was keeping an eye out for any threats among the primates who were drinking and splashing and stripping.
“I have two of my men posted up with sniper rifles, so please don’t do anything rash,” said Roenick.
“So,” Black said. “You’re really Marcus Silver?”
“Depressingly generic name The Trust gave me, is it not?”
Black puffed his chest out. Shifted gears. “What is it you want with Amanda?” he asked.
“I think it would be better if I kept you in the dark on that one.”
“You want me on board, you need to tell me what I need to know.”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Then maybe we should just start shooting each other.”
“That’s your prerogative. But with the amount of bodies here, I think that the outcome would be dire for the both of us if we draw our guns out in the open. People are a lot more tense about firearms, lately.”
