Johnny Wylde

by Wynne, Marcus

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe I’m not as interesting as you think I am.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Did you ever smoke?”

  “What?”

  “Smoke. Cigarettes.”

  “A long time ago. Why? How did you know?”

  “You just seem like someone who used to smoke.”

  “See? You can look at people and know things about them. That’s interesting. Not many people like that.”

  “You’re like that, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a girl, we’re supposed to be like that.”

  “You’re not a girl. You’re a woman.”

  She wiggled, shifted her bottom away from the cooling wet spot. “I’m glad you noticed.”

  “What hotel are you staying at?”

  “The Hilton.”

  “Nice place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of business are you in?”

  “Personnel, human resources. Boring stuff. You sure are asking a lot of questions. Plan on making me into a steady or something?”

  “You won’t be around long enough for that.” He paused. “Will you?”

  “Just passing through, Safari Man. Just a ship in the night.”

  “What kind of boring stuff?”

  She rolled out of the bathroom, conscious of his eyes on her, went into the bathroom, tossing it off over her shoulder. “Insurance, life expectancies, that kind of thing.”

  In the bathroom, she drew on her own stillness. He knew something, felt something. Who was hunting who, right now? There was a tingle in her stomach that set her on edge. She took a breath, calmed herself, peed. Smiled at the mirror, touched her teeth with her tongue. Came back out.

  Deon was sitting up in the bed, his back to the headboard. He spun one of her spike heels in his left hand. In his right he held her Hideaway which she had tucked into her shoe when taking off her thong. She stopped, weight forward on the balls of her feet.

  “Like my knife?” she said.

  “I do,” Deon said. “I’ve read about these. Never handled one, though. You really can hide these any place, can’t you?”

  “That’s the point of it. Pun intended.”

  He grinned and touched his finger to the point of the chisel shaped blade. “Very pointy. Ever use this thing?”

  She sat down next to him, reached out and took it from his unresisting fingers, laced it onto her hand. Mock threatened him with it. “Only on boxes.”

  “Voice boxes?”

  She laughed. “Good one. No, FedEx boxes mostly. Girl’s got to be careful in today’s world.”

  “You keep it in your shoe?”

  “No, handsome.” She pulled out her thong, showed him the flat kydex sheath sewn in the lining. “Right here. Where I can keep it warm.”

  She slipped the knife back into it’s sheath. “Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She dropped the thong beside the bed, turned on her side, and wiggled back so that her back was against his side. She felt him turn to the side away, pause, and then turn back, curl her up against him, his arm around her.

  No killing tonight.

  Ah well. At least she got laid good.

  And tomorrow is another day.

  ***

  Nina drove down to Lake Harrison, parked her squad next to the bandstand. Got out and walked down to the little dock where the sailboats and a few skiffs were tied up. The waxing moon rode high in the black sky. There was the clink of chains, metal on metal, and the squeak of the wooden dock boards beneath her feet.

  Nothing else.

  A long time ago, back in Minneapolis, she’d stood on a deck a lot like this one. Not alone. There was a tightness deep in her chest, armor squeezing around her heart to protect it. Anger in her belly. But at who? Herself? Him?

  She didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. Just wanted to be done with him.

  But she didn’t know how to get him off her mind.

  She sat down at the end of the dock, let her feet dangle above the dark waters, leaned back on her palms, face up as though bathing in the moon light, as though the light was washing through her, taking away what was dark.

  But there was so much of it.

  She laughed, and remembered the Catholic Church of her youth. Confession? What would a priest make of what was in her mind? It didn’t matter anymore. She had left the need to confess behind long ago. Especially to a neutered man. What would he know about what happened between men and women? How could he understand what was in her heart? She knew, though, that there was something greater than herself, something powerful, some Spirit that reached out to protect and to infuse and to punish…and that was part of her job. Part of her mission, part of why she was here, right now, in this particular moment, in this particular place. To be a tool in the hand of that Spirit.

  Damn, she thought. Too much tequila and I’m a philosopher.

  She took a deep breath, felt the energy flow into her, her head clear as though a fog had lifted.

  Thought about Jimmy.

  Went back to her car and drove home, alone.

  ***

  I parked a block away from my building, got out, looked up at the night sky. I liked the light of the full moon. Everything had that silver gleam around it, as though outlined with one of those silver paint pens, standing out distinct against the dark. I stood and listened for a moment, the sounds of the city: the hiss of traffic, voices, indistinct in the distance, fading; the slam of a car door; the rise and fall of a siren; my heart beat.

  Then the sounds of my foot steps on the pavement.

  One of the things I love about full night, the deep of the night, is the sense of complete and total isolation -- I’m part of everything I see, but not. Wherever I was, I moved through it, but I wasn’t really there. Just a ghostly presence, invisible to all others. I was alone on the street, tuned in to what was around me, and it felt good.

  My apartment building loomed, and in my window, high up on the 4th floor, I saw a light on in the window.

  Lizzy was up there.

  I stopped and stared up at the lighted rectangle, only a few others in the building. Wondered how I felt about having someone there to leave the light on for me. It felt good, that I knew…but for how long? And why would I even consider trying to make it a permanent part of my life? And why wouldn’t I?

  That was a tough question in the middle of the night.

  But then the middle of the night is a good time for tough questions.

  There was that issue of deservedness. Was that a word? I laughed. I didn’t know. Of course I deserved it. I deserved good things, finally. I’d paid my dues and then some. And what I felt was the nagging remains of a way of thinking that had long outlived it’s usefulness.

  But it did linger.

  Why?

  I let myself in the entrance, checked my mail. A handful of bills and a flyer with coupons for the IGA and Kroger’s. Walked up instead of taking the elevator, feeling the good flex in my calves as I rounded each floor in the stairwell. Stopped outside my door, and let my senses expand, felt her presence inside.

  She wasn’t in the front room.

  I locked the door, went quietly to the bedroom, peeked in the crack of the door and saw the rise of her hip and the swoop down to the narrow of her waist, the rise and fall of her thin shoulders with the deep slow rhythm of sleep. I undressed quietly, laying my gear out on the floor beside the bed, slipped beneath the sheets beside her. She wore a cream silk negligee and nothing else. I eased up behind her, draped an arm over her, pulled her close. She stirred, and when I buried my face in her hair, pressed my lips against her neck, I felt the smile, heard her sleepy voice.

  “Hi, Jimmy…”

  “Sleep,” I said. “Just sleep.”

  Chapter Forty Three

  “Why is he not dead?” Irina demanded.

  The two women were in their designated room in Nordstrand’s. Dee was trying on a new pair of heels.r />
  “These look just like Manolos,” she said. “But half the price!”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you,” Dee said. “Don’t micromanage me. You don’t know how. I’ll get it done my way.”

  The ice in her tone took Irina aback, something she wasn’t used to.

  “It needs to be done soon.”

  “It will be done when it’s the right time for me. I understand your time line. But this is going to go the way it goes. He’s not a soft target.”

  “You were with him?”

  Dee stood up, new shoes in place, turned and admired the line of her calf. She wore a summer dress today, cut to just above the knee, low cut in the back.

  “Oh, I like these,” she said. “Must have, I think.”

  Irina fought with the tide of rage rising in her, felt the red rising up out of the collar of her Armani suit in a tide across her face.

  “When will you do it?”

  “When I see him next.”

  “I’m supposed to have a meeting with him soon. I don’t want him to make that meeting.”

  “Don’t bother me with this again, Irina. It’s not how I work. And we’re not going to do this again. Ever.”

  “That’s correct,” Irina said. “But you have a job to do right now.”

  Dee waved her hand at the sales girl. “Honey? I’m walking out with these. Wrap my other shoes in the box, will you?”

  She handed the girl a Platinum AmEx card. “Charge it, sweet heart.”

  She turned and stared Irina in the eye. In their heels, the two women were practically the same height, right at six feet.

  “Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do, Irina. I’ll get the job done. But I don’t tolerate this kind of treatment from my customers. We’re done when this is done. And don’t think about pushing me. Some jobs I do for free.”

  She spun on her new heels and went to the counter.

  Irina glared at Dee’s back, and thought about what she would need to do in the very near future.

  ***

  “So how do we play it, Jimmy?” Deon said.

  We were all sitting in the front room of Deon’s second safe house, Marcus and Joe’s crash pad for the last week. I took a long pull on my Starbucks triple shot mocha, considered that.

  “I like the idea of stealthing in, minimal casualties,” I said. “I don’t know about buying them out. Anybody you can buy isn’t worth keeping around full time. Irina, her main guy Ruiz, they’ll have to go away. The rest are just hired help, they’ll disappear into the woodwork when we roll away. We want the product, and the message to stand. But that means Irina has to go away.”

  “I don’t like killing women,” Joe said.

  Marcus laughed. “That’s because you’ve never been married.”

  Deon didn’t like it, either. I could tell by his face. But he knew it was going to be necessary.

  “Is there any way to get her out of the picture without killing her?” I said.

  “Naïve, oke. Or wishful thinking. Leave her alive, even without her product and her crew, she’ll find a way to come back at us. She has money stashed away somewhere, a little bolt hole to go to if she needs to. Resources. Like any other fight, kill the head and the body will die. She’s the head, what’s left of it with Sergey out of the picture.”

  “That settles that,” I said. “Your other guys good to go?”

  “Yes,” Deon said. “They don’t need to know what we’re talking about. They’ll be there, do their jobs.”

  “What about the product?”

  “I think we should take what we want, but not all. Leave the authorities something to puzzle over when they come and pick through the rubble. It will throw up a nice smoke screen for us.”

  I thought about that. Yeah. That would work.

  “Okay, then,” I said. I leaned over the coffee table to the big sketch pad I had laid out. “This is how I’m thinking we’ll do this…”

  Marcus interrupted. “When do you want to do this?”

  “Sooner the better. Light of the full moon. How’s that strike you?” I said.

  Marcus threw back his head and bayed like a wolf.

  “Fucking maniac,” Joe muttered.

  “I second that emotion,” Marcus said. “So let’s hear the plan…”

  ***

  “They’re going to come for us,” Ruiz said. “If your hitter doesn’t take him out right away. Maybe even if she does. We need to be ready for that.”

  “What do you need to be ready?” Irina said.

  “Money. To make sure they stick around. You’re going to have to come up with some incentives for them, who we have left.”

  “Why do you stick around?” Irina said.

  Ruiz smiled lazily, looked at her. “Money. Maybe there are some other incentives for me. Maybe.”

  Irina considered that. “Maybe. Maybe not. How much money?”

  “At least a $5K bonus for each of the men. Right now. With the promise of more, and a raise, when we see this through.”

  “All right,” Irina said. “See to it. I’ll get you the cash.”

  “And what about me?” Ruiz said. “My incentives?”

  She gave him a cool smile, crossed her legs. “We’ll see.”

  He shrugged, sauntered out of the room. She watched him go with mild interest. Perhaps it was time to end this, she thought. She could take what she had, which was considerable, sell the product, and go elsewhere, do something different. Las Vegas perhaps, where some of her acquaintances mentioned something in girls. There was always a market for Eastern European girls, and Irina had a good eye for woman flesh. And man flesh, as far as that went.

  But there was the matter of Sergey.

  She wasn’t going to leave without making someone pay the blood toll for him. And once that was done, then she could feel free to leave, free to start over somewhere else.

  If that was what she wanted to do.

  ***

  Outside the farmhouse, in front of the converted barn, Ruiz spoke to the other gunfighters and the two handlers.

  “Hey hermanos,” he said. “The bitch is going to give you all $5000 in cash for a bonus. I got it for you, you kick back to me $1000 each. There will be a pay raise, a big one, after we have done what we have to do.”

  “Are they coming, Ruiz?” a tired looking white man, Erdmann, said.

  “I think so, mano,” Ruiz said. “She has somebody going after the jefe, but I don’t think it’s going to happen before we get hit. One big fight, and then it’s all over.”

  “She’s going to need to give me more than that for a big fight,” Erdmann said. The other nodded in agreement.

  “I’ll see what I can do for you, mano,” Ruiz said. “But that’s what we got right now.”

  They went back to their jobs -- the fighters walking the grounds, driving down the road to spell the two at the gatehouse, the handlers back into the barn to stack and pack boxes with product -- ammunition, rifles, pistols, hand grenades…

  Ruiz watched them go, took out his cell phone, entered a number.

  “Yiiisss?” Deon said.

  “I think we can make that thing happen,” Ruiz said. “I’ll come and see you…”

  “At the store, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Till then.”

  Ruiz disconnected, smiled at nothing. Thought of a new rancho in Costa Rica, and a pretty little house maid to go with it.

  ***

  “So what you got, besides hang over?” LT Fabruzzi said.

  “Whole lot of not so much,” Nina said. “I’m thinking I need to go out, brace Komorov once again in her place. But I’m telling you, and I’m surprised to be saying this, but I think we need the Feds in on this.”

  “What the fuck you talking about? Feds, we don’t need no stinking feds!” Fabruzzi laughed at his own joke. “Seriously, what the fuck?”

  “This is heavy gun running shit, Oozy. ATF territory. They got the best under
covers, they know how to roll with this shit. Look at the firepower we’ve seen go down. Dump this shit on the Feds. We got our guy, crispy critter or not.”

  “I can’t believe this is Nina Capushek talking to me right. Nina, is this you? Or is it somebody dressed up like you? What the fuck, feds? No fucking way. Those bodies are ours, on our fucking street. It’s all one big case. Keep working. I’ll let you know I think we need the feds in here. What the fuck?”

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this any more, Oozy. There’s something going on, something we don’t have a full handle on. You ever think the Feds might already be in on this shit?”

  “Why? Why you say that? What do you know?”

  “Just a feeling, Oozy. I worked with the Feds enough to know. That’s how they do things -- keep all the cards hidden, everybody in the dark, till it all rolls up on them. That’s how they like it. Neat and tidy, but all their way. They don’t care who they use or how bad they use them. If it gets them the big collar, then hey, big collar they got. They don’t give a fuck. And something about this whole thing stinks of Fed.”

  “Undercovers? You think they got undercovers on this? Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know, Oozy. It’s just a feeling.”

  Fabruzzi stalked back and forth, waving his hands as wildly as his greengrocer grandfather had. “Feeling? What the fuck? Feeling? Feds? What the fuck do I need that shit for? Huh? What the fuck, Nina!”

  Nina shrugged. Looked and felt tired. “That’s what I got.”

  “Well, get the fuck out of here and get me something else! No Feds! I’m not bringing the Feds in on this!”

  Nina got up, arched her back. The sight of her tits interrupted Fabruzzi, as she figured it would. “Be careful it ain’t the Feds bringing us in, Oozy.”

  She stalked away, Fabruzzi’s words falling on her hunched shoulders.

  “What the fuck do you mean by that? What the fuck do you mean?”

  ***

  “Do you like to shoot?” Deon said. He sat across from Dee in a little independent coffee house called Jumping Jive, sipped a mocha, studied her face.

  She was doing a straight doppio, two shots of espresso with plenty of sugar stirred into it. An unusual drink for a woman, Deon thought, but then, she was an unusual woman.