Final Target

by John Gilstrap

“I promise to be a good boy.”

  Azul turned away and summoned a police officer and another of his thugs. They gathered in a brief huddle, during which Tomás could not hear what was said, but when he saw the policeman’s face pale, he knew it would be bad.

  Tomás sat passively as the men carried his brother’s body into the house, and then looked away as others used a garden hose to douse the smoldering remains of his father’s corpse before dragging the still-smoking body up the front walk and into the house, where they dumped it in the front room.

  He could only assume that the two gunshots marked the murders of his mother and sister. Later, after he witnessed other atrocities committed upon others who had betrayed the Jungle Tigers, he came to realize that those gunshots were a small mercy. Better to be dead than to suffer that kind of torture.

  He remembered the smell of more gasoline, and he remembered the erupting fireball as the house he had called home since the day he was born became his family’s crematory. He remembered that Azul said something to him, a curt smile on his ugly face, but he couldn’t remember the words.

  All he knew for sure in that moment was that he could never go to church again because of the lie that rested on his soul, and the mortal sin that lay in his future. One day, he would kill Alejandro Azul.

  Over the course of the next day or two, Tomás lived off of the charity of his neighbors—the charity of the cowards who did nothing to help save his family—but that didn’t last long. They had their own families to raise, after all, their own children to protect.

  And at twelve years old, he was a threat to all of that.

  Within six months, he landed at the House of Saint Agnes, where at least he didn’t have to forage for food anymore. Gloria was nice enough—at least she tried—but Tomás and the other residents didn’t make it easy on her. Lots of bellies to feed and dozens of bits of clothes to scrounge and mend.

  Tomás could not understand why Alejandro Azul showed such base cruelty in creating the orphans who resided in Saint Agnes, only then to provide for them later. Nando’s theory was tied directly to the promise that Azul had extracted from Tomás on the night of his family’s murders. “It’s possible that as you grow older and stronger—and Alejandro grows older and weaker—that he will want you to have memories of him that are not all terrible.”

  Clearly, Nando did not understand the depths of the horrors that his students had endured. That was the word the headmaster used when referring to the children of Saint Agnes. All residents were expected to earn their keep, the boys through physical labor and the girls through chores and sexual favors for anyone who demanded such things, with the blessings of Alejandro Azul. And made easy by Nando and Gloria.

  In their own way, the gringo soldiers were the best of the degenerates who visited Saint Agnes on a routine basis. They seemed always perched on the edge of rage as they dropped off the weapons that would later be picked up by Jungle Tigers. They moved with their heads on a swivel—that was the phrase Tomás had heard more than a few times, and it was a perfect description of their behavior. He’d seen squirrels less stressed by their environments.

  The gringo soldiers projected menace, making it clear to all they encountered that they were to be feared, but they rarely raped the girls. In fact, Tomás could remember only one time when that happened, and that was the last they ever saw of that soldier.

  One in particular was friendlier than the others. He called himself Alan, and he always thanked Tomás for his help when moving the crates of weapons and explosives into the basement of the school building. About eighteen months ago, Tomás had screwed up the courage to ask Alan for a lesson in shooting. After some perfunctory resistance, the soldier had finally agreed.

  It wasn’t much of a lesson—no shots were fired—but it was enough to familiarize Tomás with the rifles’ moving parts. He knew where the safety was, and he knew how to load magazines and change out magazines. In his spare time, when he had a chance to sneak downstairs into the basement—always in the dead of night—he practiced handling the weapons. He saw how the gringos and even the Jungle Tigers slung the rifles over their shoulders and across their chests and backs, and he practiced those movements, too.

  Somehow, he must have known that this opportunity would arise someday. You could call it a miracle, he supposed, but it was clear that he had divined this day, and he had foreseen the opportunity to extract vengeance on the Jungle Tigers.

  * * *

  As Jonathan listened to the story, he felt his blood pressure rise. The story of brutality at the hands of the cartels was one that had been repeated hundreds of times every year, but it was difficult to hear it recited in the first person—and by someone so young.

  “Do you swear that every word of that story is true?” Boxers asked.

  “On my mother’s grave,” Tomás said. His eyes remained clear, and his voice strong.

  “You didn’t ask for advice,” Jonathan said, “but I have some for you, anyway. Revenge is a dangerous motivation. It makes you take chances that are unwise.”

  Tomás remained silent, perhaps oblivious.

  “And one other tidbit,” Jonathan said. “After the revenge is carried out, it never feels as good as you thought it would.”

  Something happened behind the kid’s eyes. A flash of humor, maybe? “Even if it felt one-tenth as good as I think it would to kill that son of a whore, it would be the best day of my life.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Jesse Montgomery had made his decision. It was unequivocal. This law-abiding life was a pain in the ass. Not so much literally, as was the consequence of his previous non-law-abiding life, but in the sense that it sucked every day.

  It had been a long thirty-month hiatus. Life’s banquet had become a shit cake. Technology had left him in the Stone Age, the only jobs he could get were jobs nobody else wanted, and it didn’t seem that he would ever rise above constant suspicion and food-stamp wages.

  And then there was Bitchy Betty, Jesse’s parole officer, who apparently lived for the day that she could throw him back into the slammer. Whatever happened to the POs of legend—the ones whose caseloads were so heavy that they couldn’t do their jobs? Or the POs who were flat-out lazy and shirked their responsibilities? Why did he have to draw the pit bull?

  Jesse woke as he usually did, two minutes before his 5:00 a.m. alarm. The clock was an old-school Baby Ben with luminescent hands and guts that needed to be wound every night. Given the thinness of the walls of the rattrap that his landlord had the balls to call an apartment building, he was certain that the resonant ticking could be heard by his neighbors. And why not? He could hear every one of their moves and words. Every move, and every word. And, man, oh, man, were they a loving couple. With lots of stamina. The husband (boyfriend?)—his name was Larry or Logan, something with an L—was clearly talented in his bedroom skills, and the wife/girlfriend, also an L name, grew positively operatic in her pleasure.

  Jesse confessed to an occasional vicarious thrill as he listened, but he wished they could tame their libido cycles. Audible passion at three in the morning was annoying as hell.

  And yes, he was jealous. He needed a girlfriend. Yeah, I’ll get right on that, he thought.

  He grunted as he sat up in the droopy hammock of a bed and swung his bare feet around to the green-carpeted floor. Yes, green. The color of peas. Jesse refused to consider the probability that that was not its original color. He spun the switch on the bedside lamp, igniting the energy-saver bulb, which would come to full brightness about the time he was coming out of the shower, and as he stood, he planted his hands at the base of his spine and stretched backward. He was rewarded with a ripple of cracks that sounded a lot like bubble wrap.

  He’d have turned on a television if he had one, but Old Man Carlisle wanted an extra thirty bucks a month for TV—in addition to the cable connection—and that kind of scratch was not in the cards. For the foreseeable future, Jesse Montgomery would putt-putt through life in subsistence
mode. If he could eat that undefinable crap they slopped on his plate in the joint, then he could make do with peanut butter and jelly and public transportation on the outside.

  No frills. Not until he got fifteen thousand dollars in the bank. That was his “screw you” money. With fifteen grand at his fingertips, he could have options. It would take a couple of years, he knew, but in that same time, Mr. Grossman, his boss at the scrap yard, had told him, he could be making twelve, fourteen bucks an hour—more if he kicked ass and took names.

  But ass kicking and name taking all started with getting his own ass to work on time. According to Baby Ben, he had exactly forty-seven minutes to shit and shower and jog to the bus stop. No problem. Easier still because this was Wednesday—pizza day at the yard—so he could skip his breakfast PB and J. He’d done the math, and for every meal he skipped, he saved nearly a buck, the equivalent of six minutes of work. Time was money, and money was time.

  Mornings had rules, an appropriate order in which events must unfold. The first priority was taking his morning dump. At twenty-seven, Jesse had the bowels of an old man. Things didn’t move for him if he didn’t have privacy, and the locker room at Grossman Iron and Metal brought precious little of that. The stalls had doors, but they opened the wrong way, and the locks didn’t work very well. Taking care of that bit of business at his apartment made a big difference in whether the day was going to be a good one or a not-good one.

  Next up was shaving and teeth brushing, which had to be completed before the shower made the mirror opaque. One splurge he’d allowed himself was an electric trimmer, which allowed him to sport the stubbly face look that women seemed so turned on by, even as they expected you to be all trimmed up down there. He didn’t get it, but the rules were the rules. As his father had told him ages ago, the road to insanity was lined with attempts to understand what turned women on and why. It was, after all, the result that counted.

  Old Man Carlisle didn’t believe in actual hot water, either. It wasn’t cold, thank God, but at full on, there was zero chance of getting scalded.

  By the time he was done, dried, and dressed in his work uniform, he still had thirty minutes to get to the bus stop. He gave one more brief thought to a sandwich and pledged to be a pig at the pizza trough instead.

  Jesse’s apartment building called itself the Refuge. From the design alone, he knew that it had started life in the 1960s as a motel. Jesse lived on the second of two floors. His decaying front door opened directly to the outside, as did all doors at the Refuge, and as he walked out into the heat of the day, he stayed close to the wall, as far away from the rusting guardrail as possible. From the way it bounced when he walked, he imagined that the upper walkway, with its spalling concrete, was poised to collapse one of these days, and he knew from his engineering classes in prison that the closer he stayed to the wall, the less force he projected onto the structure.

  Old Man Carlisle had told him on the day he let the room that the first floor was reserved for old folks, cripples, and addicts—not to make their lives any easier, understand, but to limit the landlord’s liabilities.

  Jesse knew it all sucked, but it beat his previous digs all to hell, and he was allowed to step outside anytime he wanted to. For now, that was better than being rich. Every day was a new adventure, a fresh chance to make a difference and change the future. He really believed that, and on the days when his faith flagged, he reminded himself that he really believed that.

  But the best mood in the world couldn’t survive an early morning encounter with Bitchy Betty. Officially called Officer Falkner—Elizabeth Falkner—she stood at maybe five-five, weighed in at under a hundred pounds, and had the disposition of a wet cat. Jesse had lost track of the number of times he’d had to piss in a cup for her over the past eighteen months, but he was pleased that she’d all but stopped tossing his apartment in search of contraband. Jesse had never been much for contraband to begin with. He couldn’t afford a gun, and the strongest drug he’d ever tried was called Budweiser.

  He caught his first glimpse of the parole officer as he approached the bottom of the rickety metal steps. Parole officers didn’t wear uniforms, and as far as he knew, she wasn’t armed, either. Though he bet she could throw a mean knee if an encounter went south.

  “Good morning, Officer Falkner,” Jesse said as he walked toward her. “If you need me to do a whiz quiz, it’ll be a while before my system is refilled.” As he spoke, he cast a glance at the man who stood next to her. Six feet tall, give or take, he had a lot of dark hair, which he wore precisely combed, and he was wearing a priest costume, complete with the little square window in his collar. The priest smiled at the bladder bit.

  “Good morning, Jesse,” Betty said. “Are you a law-abiding citizen today?”

  “Doing my best,” Jesse said. “But if we’re going to talk, we need to walk, too. I’ve got a bus to catch.”

  “You’ve got a few minutes for this,” Betty said. Her sharp edge seemed a bit duller.

  “No, I really don’t,” Jesse said. “Mr. Grossman doesn’t like tardiness.”

  “I’ve already spoken with him,” Betty said. Something passed between her and the priest as they looked at each other. “He knows you’re going to be late.”

  Jesse took a step backward. He couldn’t explain why, but he felt threatened. “Why would you tell him that?”

  “Because I think you really need to speak with Father O’Malley here.”

  Jesse eyed the other man, whose face looked nice enough. His priest hands were in his priest pockets, and he bounced lightly on the balls of his priest feet. “Father O’Malley?” Jesse asked. He found himself smiling. “Like in The Bells of St. Mary’s?”

  “I’m tickled that your generation would even know of that movie,” the priest replied.

  “You didn’t know my mother,” Jesse said through a smile. “I guarantee she was at least twelve times more Catholic even than you. She left my father and me to become a nun.” He looked back to Betty. “What’s going on, Officer Falkner?”

  She took a deep breath and scowled. “I’ll be one hundred percent honest with you. I have no idea. But I have a boss, and that boss told me to do exactly what I’m doing. Father O’Malley wants to chat with you, and at the end of the chat, he’s going to make you an offer. I don’t know what that offer will be, but my boss says to tell you that you’re free to take it or ignore it.”

  “What kind of offer?” When Betty didn’t respond, he looked at the priest again.

  Father O’Malley responded with arched eyebrows and pressed lips. We won’t talk in front of the PO.

  “You know that nothing you just said made any sense, right?” Jesse remarked.

  Officer Falkner gave a bitter chuckle. “Oh, trust me, I know that much. I’ve been wading through this mystery since last night.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “I got a phone call.” Betty clapped her hands a single time, marking the end of the conversation. “Look, I’ve done what I promised to do. From here on out, you’re on your own. Both of you have a nice day.”

  Jesse reached out to stop her, then recoiled from her glare. One did not touch one’s parole officer. “You’ve got a record of this meeting, right?” he asked. “I mean, if I disappear or wash up on a riverbank, you’ll remember that we were all here.”

  For maybe a second, Betty looked as if she might answer that question, but then she pulled back. “Have a good day, Jesse.”

  * * *

  Dom D’Angelo had masqueraded as Father O’Malley more than a few times over the years, but he’d never gotten used to it. Stealth was important, for obvious reasons, but when dealing with frightened people like this, it felt a little too much like lying for the wrong reasons.

  He told himself that in the long run, anonymity protected everyone.

  Dom understood that first impressions often were wrong, but he had difficulty equating the Jesse Montgomery he saw with the Jesse Montgomery he’d been told about.
This one looked like a kid, twenty-five years old at most, normal height, with unkempt black hair and a shadow of a beard that didn’t quite make it above his jawline.

  And he looked frightened. Not in a cowering kind of way, but there was a wariness about him that telegraphed distrust. And why should it be otherwise?

  “I promise you can trust me,” Dom said.

  Jesse looked like he was fighting an urge to follow his parole officer. Dom got it. He’d seen it dozens of times in the faces of men and women who’d recently been incarcerated. As much as prisoners detested their time behind bars, those months and years provided structure and predictability, exactly the opposite of what freedom offered. And there was nothing routine about this encounter.

  “Jesse. Really. I’ll drive you to work.”

  “The bus is fine,” Jesse said. “Feel free to walk me there if you’d like.”

  “Would it help if I told you your uncle Paul sent me?” Dom pressed. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and offered it. “You can call him if you’d like.”

  Jesse’s unease deepened. “Which Uncle Paul?”

  “Boersky,” Dom said without dropping a beat. “He’s a deputy director of the FBI.” He made a point of looking at his phone again to re-emphasize the offer. “You’re welcome to call him to verify.”

  The kid wasn’t processing any of it. “How do you know him?”

  “We’ll talk in the car,” Dom said. “I’m a priest, your PO vouches for me, and I drop a relative’s name, along with an offer to let you call. I think I qualify for at least a little bit of a break. Here’s one thing I promise. I’ve got something to say that you’ve never heard before.”

  Jesse cast one last longing look back at his parole officer and then shrugged. “What the hell?” he said, and he followed Dom to his weatherworn Kia sedan.

  When the doors were closed and the air-conditioning was on, Dom looked over to his passenger. “It’s okay to relax.”

  “Says the guy who understands what’s happening.”