Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1)

by Tony Wiley

  Mike nodded.

  “Bought it two years ago,” he said. “A thousand acres. Very quiet place once I got rid of the cattle and the help. No neighbors for miles.”

  Morrison couldn’t help noticing the satisfaction on his face. He knew how important it was for someone who had grown up poor to own some land. And Mike had grown up real poor. Dirt poor as a matter of fact. Just like himself. Real estate was concrete, physical proof that you were no longer destitute. Contrary to stocks or government bonds, it was there, in your face. Tangible. You could walk on it. You were the master of something real. Morrison himself had started to think about buying some property. But then he was arrested, and he moved to a different world.

  “Bought anything else around?” he asked.

  Mike heard him but did not reply. Morrison realized that Mike wouldn’t say anything substantial until he had shown him what he wanted to show him. Whatever the hell that was. So he kept silent and took in the scenery.

  After a few minutes, they got to a clearing. There was a yellow tractor lying still in the sun, a rusty old one fitted with a backhoe. Its bucket was resting on a mound of freshly dug-up earth.

  The sight troubled Morrison. He stiffened up in his seat.

  Mike skirted to the left of the mound and screeched to a stop so that Morrison would have the best view of what lay behind.

  It was a hole in the ground.

  No surprise there.

  What struck him was its size.

  Eight feet long. Three feet wide. Six feet deep.

  Pretty self-explanatory.

  Chapter 6

  “Get out,” Mike said. “Get out.”

  Morrison figured he had badly misjudged the whole situation, and he cursed himself for it. It looked like Mike didn’t want to talk after all. Or show him anything. He seemed to have planned just the opposite. To watch. To stare at him while he went down in that hole and took a bullet to the head. Just then, Morrison damned his passivity. He had let them lead him quietly from the outskirts of prison to this place. But then again, what could he have done? They had outnumbered him from the start, and they were armed.

  Whatever his circumstances, Morrison thought it was now time to do something quick. He couldn’t afford to let things slide anymore. He had to put his spin on.

  He stayed put in his seat and said, “What’s the matter, Mike? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Mike himself stepped out. “Just get out, Morrison,” he said.

  The tone was neutral. Almost bored. Behind, the two guys jumped out of the Jeep and rejoined at one corner of the grave where they could easily cover the open angle. They motioned with their guns. Get moving.

  Morrison lifted himself from the seat and stepped onto the soft, long grass. He only had to take two steps to stand at the very edge of the hole, but he refrained from doing so. Whoever had dug it was skilled. The perimeter was as sharp as if a giant cookie cutter had been stamped in the fresh earth.

  “What’s all this for?” he said. “Who just did three years of prison? If someone should be mad, it’s me! I kept my mouth shut! I didn’t rat on anyone!”

  “We don’t think you’re all that innocent,” Mike said.

  Wait a minute. He had said we, not I. And Morrison was pretty sure this we didn’t include the two thugs with their guns. These guys were just hired hands who were paid to obey and do things, not to think.

  “Who’s we?” he said. “Who doesn’t think I’m straight?”

  “You’re not the only one who’s done some time.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “And Harris?”

  “No.”

  “And Cowgirl?”

  “No,” Mike said. “But what about Tommy? He’s still inside. I’m sure you were gonna mention him, right?”

  So that’s what this was all about. Mike and Tommy had sided together. Surprising, thought Morrison. In their loosely associated group, those two had never been the closest. They didn’t call Mike “Junior” for no reason. Early on, Tommy was the one who had put the emphasis on his more junior status.

  “Tommy was arrested more than six months after me,” Morrison said. “On a charge that had nothing to do with mine.”

  “You knew he was working on that deal too,” Mike said.

  “I was not the only one.”

  “But you did know.”

  “So did you.”

  Mike scoffed. “I didn’t have anything to do with his arrest.”

  “Me neither,” Morrison said.

  “That’s not what Tommy thinks.”

  Morrison lost it. He went back at him with a passion.

  “How on earth can he think that? What rational arguments can he invoke to back this up? It’s ridiculous. Remember, I had to serve all my time. A full sentence. Not a day less. Not even an hour. One hundred percent full sentence. Don’t you think I would’ve gotten something in return if I had sold Tommy out? You think I’m an idiot, Mike?”

  “Some of the charges against you were dropped.”

  “That’s what you pay lawyers for! Some parts of the state attorney’s case were not rock solid. My guy managed to pry them away. Not because I gave Tommy away, because I did not.”

  “So you say.”

  “Damn right I say!”

  Morrison’s resolve seemed to impress his opponent. For a man literally peering into his grave, he was steadfast and resolute, not edgy and hesitant as one could have expected.

  Mike went back at him from another angle. “You were careless, Morrison,” he said. “You cost us a lot of money.”

  “I lost a lot of money too. And I lost three years on top of that. You didn’t.”

  Mike shook his head.

  “It was such a sweet deal. How could you get caught?”

  “Sheriff Sanford was lucky. What can I tell you? That was pure dumb luck. If I hadn’t hit trouble with that car, we would’ve been laughing. Instead, she got to peer into the back of it, and here we are.”

  “Bottom line, you were in charge of that car. So it’s your fault.”

  “Sure, whatever. I’ll take it. But it’s crazy to mull over this. That was the past, this is now. We have to look forward.”

  “That was a ten million dollars deal, Morrison. Only two were found in the car. You’re pretty relaxed about it. Tommy says there’s something funny about this.”

  At that precise moment, Morrison thought about the key hidden in his shoe. Thank God they hadn’t found it.

  “Maybe our inside information wasn’t so good after all,” he said. “Maybe there only ever would be two million dollars. Who knows?”

  “Don’t you want to know?” Mike said.

  “Water under the bridge. I prefer to focus on what lies ahead.”

  “Seems easy for you to look forward.”

  “Prison tends to do that to you.”

  There was a pause in their exchange.

  Then Morrison got it.

  Inside, he half-sighed with relief. He finally understood what this was all about.

  This was a pre-emptive strike.

  They were worried about what he would do once he got out of prison, so they had decided to undercut him. Don’t you want to know? Now that he was thinking about it, Mike’s question seemed genuine. Not just rhetoric.

  And to be honest, it was a question he had asked himself. He had pondered over it in his prison cell far more than he let on.

  In retrospect, the whole deal that had led to his arrest seemed patchy and frayed. No operation ever went one hundred percent according to plan. It’s impossible. But few went as bad as this one. Morrison was thirty-three. He had dropped out at sixteen. Always made a living outside of conventional society. Yet that was the first time he was ever arrested. Before, he had always managed to lay low. No doubt, that whole operation had been one unmitigated disaster.

  In the meantime, the realization didn’t change anything about his situation. He was outnumbered three to one. Two guys were
still pointing their guns at him. He was alone with only his bare hands against them, staring at a deep hole ready to swallow him for all eternity.

  Mike still had the upper hand. He still called the shots. But now, at least, Morrison knew he was about to ask him for something.

  “Take a hard long look at this hole,” Mike said. “This is where you’ll end up if we don’t get good answers to our questions.”

  So that was it. Morrison had been ready to move on from that deal gone bad. But obviously not Mike and Tommy.

  “Why didn’t you try to find out by yourselves?” Morrison said.

  “We did. But we went nowhere. Tommy thinks you can have a shot at it.”

  Fight or flight? It’s a conditioned response, deeply embedded into the sympathetic nervous system. The result of thousands and thousands of years of hard and brutal trial and error. Without it, the human race would’ve become extinct long ago. Morrison’s own ability to make the right choice was stellar. Honed into a sharpened and polished skill by years of his own personal Darwinian experiences. Right then, he knew he would have to fight this out. No question. If Mike, and especially Tommy, had set their sight on this, no way could he avoid it. They were serious. If he fled, they would find him. And where would he go anyway? Thailand? Belize? Mauritius? Morrison had absolutely no intention of leaving the United States. That’s where his future lay.

  So he simply said, “What’s in it for me?”

  “One-third of what we can recover in the process, if any.”

  “You’re not gonna let this go, are you?”

  “No way,” Mike said.

  “OK,” Morrison said, “done deal.”

  Mike nodded to his guys and said, “OK, you can relax now.”

  Morrison shook his head and said, “Christ, Mike, you didn’t have to dig that hole …”

  At the corner of the grave, the slicked-back hair guy put the safety catch back on his gun and slid it into his holster. At his side, the blond guy didn’t drop his. Instead, he just swiveled on his feet a quarter of a turn, toward his left. Where the slicked-back hair guy was standing. In a swift move, he raised the gun to his partner’s head and shot him twice.

  The move caught Morrison completely by surprise.

  He just stared with a grimace as the dead body fell forward in the grave in a spray of blood and brain matter. Goddamn guns. He really hated them.

  The echo of the shots rang out high above while the body landed with a muted thump at the bottom of the dirt pit. A pool of blood quickly formed around the mangled head. Arms and legs rested at an impossible angle that only the dead can withstand.

  “Turns out I did need that hole,” Mike said. “That’s lesson number one. Don’t mess with me. Don’t do anything behind my back. That guy did. Look at him now.”

  Morrison shook his head, and then he looked away from the lifeless body.

  “That’s not how we did business,” he said.

  “Guess what?” Mike said. “The world has changed.”

  Chapter 7

  Morrison figured that the ace digger was the dead guy. As soon as his ex-partner’s body crashed at the bottom of the hole, the blond guy jumped on the tractor, started the engine and floored it for a couple of seconds to get some heat into it. Then he went to work. Rather clumsily. He started by putting the tractor’s backhoe in its resting position. Then he used the front loader tilted at an angle to push the mound of earth back into the hole. This made enough sense. But he operated the beast with half-assed moves, like he knew the theory but seriously lacked in the practice department. The tractor kept jerking back and forth in semi-controlled short bursts. No way could this guy have dug such a precisely sharp-lined rectangular grave with this digger. So if it wasn’t the blond guy, then it had to be the dead slicked-back hair guy. Morrison knew Mike could never operate a tractor if his life depended on it.

  “Come on, we’re going back to the house,” Mike said.

  Morrison climbed into the Jeep after him. As Mike turned it around, Morrison gave a last stare at the grave. It was now almost filled with earth. In a few minutes, the blond guy would finish leveling off the surface. In a month’s time, nothing would show. The grass and wild flowers would grow back, and you would never suspect there was a slicked-back hair jerk rotting in the dirt underneath.

  The Jeep hummed back toward the house on the meandering path. As he sat beside Mike, Morrison stared into the empty space, still shaken by the execution. Goddamn violence. He hated it. Always had, always would. He himself never used it. Well, not exactly. He never initiated it. This would be a more appropriate way of putting it. In his mind, violence was for idiots. For dumb, witless idiots. Like the Italians. All those connected guys. Those mafia guys. All hollow swagger. Brainless creatures. Violence, threat of violence, is all they had. They weren’t smart enough to do without it.

  What he hated most about violence was that it was a spiral. A vortex that took you deeper and deeper in, and that you couldn’t ever escape. It was a black hole that drew your mass to its center where you would be crushed, obliterated, vaporized. If you established your position with violence, you’d have to defend it with violence. In the proceeds, you lost your freedom. Nothing you could do but continue to follow that narrow path. And it led to a dead end. Sooner or later, you’d run into someone stronger than you. And then what would you do?

  Morrison preferred to be smart. That way, you could preserve your freedom. You devised smart operations, carried them out, then went back to the shade. Laid low. In and out. OK, on the freedom front, his stock had taken a serious beating these last three years. No question there. But he had enjoyed a long stretch of success before. And besides, he was in it for the long term. He knew the odds. He played the long game.

  The Jeep threaded its way back to the house on the long, meandering dirt track, raising a cloud of reddish dust as it bounced from deep ruts to crested bumps. Morrison looked at Mike on his left. His partner was all absorbed by his driving duties on the tight and twisty path. Obviously, he no longer shared his outlook. When they had formed their alliance for that operation three years ago, violence had been deliberately excluded from the script. But Mike was Mike. Not an idiot. Not at all. But not so sharp either. Too much inclined to take the easier path for his own good, to cut corners. Morrison looked at him again. What was he up to now? What was his line of business these days? Morrison had no clue, but for sure he’d need to find out. What he was sure of was that he would be an uneasy partner. Before his prison sentence, Morrison had been in front of him in the pecking order. Didn’t call him Junior for nothing. But now, Mike seemed intent on showing that the trend had reversed. At least that’s what he seemed to think.

  Morrison looked around. It was one hell of a property. Must’ve cost a fortune. A sly thought occurred to him.

  “You bought this place with Tommy’s money, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Mike didn’t really answer. “I’m looking after his interests while he’s inside.”

  Morrison beamed. “That’s what I thought. You don’t have enough money of your own for a place like this.”

  Mike sneered sideways at him and said, “I bet after three years in the can, you’re not so flush yourself.”

  “You’re right. I’ll need money. Thanks for offering.”

  While he fought the wheel with his left hand, Mike dug into his coat pocket with his right. He fished out a tight roll of bills and threw it on Morrison’s lap.

  “This should get you started,” he said.

  “I’ll also need a car.”

  “You can take one of the Navigators. I’ll give you the key inside.”

  “A cell phone.”

  “Check in the glove box. I think there’s a prepaid there.”

  Morrison thumbed the button on the dashboard in front of him and rummaged through the compartment. While he did so, he said, “And a place to crash.”

  Mike cracked a grin. “No problem,” he said. “There’s now one more free room in
the house. You can have it.”

  Morrison found the phone. An old flip model. He opened it and tested it by calling a pizza chain whose delivery number he remembered. It worked just fine.

  They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  The house came at them from its back, showing a wide open terrace shielded by a sloped shingle roof that led to a big swimming pool complete with a waterslide.

  “You want a gun?” Mike asked.

  Morrison waived off the proposition. “No thanks,” he said. “I haven’t changed my mind on those.”

  Mike shook his head in disbelief. Morrison didn’t pay too much attention to him. Instead, he kept his gaze focused ahead on the cluster of vehicles now becoming visible. The three big black Navigators he had seen before still sat in front of the garage. Next to them now stood one more car, a BMW X3. Rather intriguing. For in its immaculate, plain arctic-white paintjob, the delicate German SUV stood out in stark contrast with its three massive macho cousins.

  *

  The house was one of those that looked a lot bigger once you’ve stepped inside. The illusion was probably down to its perfect proportions, the harmony of its exterior lines concealing its substantial volume. It was also older than it looked from the outside and full of details that you just didn’t see anymore in new constructions bar the odd McMansion. Like the big hardwood winding staircase and the matching trimmings. Morrison was no expert, but he would have guessed oak or walnut. Went back to a time when massive pieces of lumber were still abundant and the craftsmen who turned them into pieces of art still abounded.

  At the foot of the stairs stood a credenza. Mike opened the single drawer and fetched a set of car keys. He gave them to Morrison and led him upstairs.

  There were a few creaking steps along the way. If you missed the sound of the door opening then slamming shut downstairs, you sure couldn’t miss someone making his way up to the second floor.

  A woman seemed to have picked up on this. She was waiting for Morrison and Mike on the landing.

  “I heard gunshots,” she said to Mike.