The Bonus

by A. J. Adams

  They were understandably pissed, and opened fire. One bullet nicked my neck, and I got another in the chest. I went down in a shower of blood, and everyone, including me, thought that was the end.

  When I came to a few hours later, it was pitch black and all I could see was the Milky Way, spread out above me. I lay there for a while and decided I didn’t want to be hanging around there in the morning because the Taliban boys were bound to be back, so I got up and went home. I’d covered a couple of miles when I ran into Mac. He was driving a jeep and wearing night vision goggles.

  “Bloody hell, buddy, you look like shit!”

  “Got fucking shot.”

  “I can see that.” He got out and started slapping field dressings on me. “How the hell did you get hit? You’re supposed to be a professional, man. Don’t they teach you to duck when the shooting starts?”

  “Fuck that. We stand tall.”

  “Not a problem for you, is it? It must have been as easy as hitting a barn door.” Hearing Mac’s cheerful voice was like a miracle. He got me into the jeep and grinned at me. “You’re a caution, you are. Come on, let’s go home. If we rush, we’ll make it before anyone notices this jeep is missing.”

  “You commandeered it?”

  “Of course not!” Mac sounded shocked. “I’m just parking it.”

  “Thirty miles out of Kabul.”

  “You know how it is. You’re driving along on autopilot and suddenly you realise you’re way off track.”

  Much later I found out that when my team had reported me dead, mown down in a haze of bullets, Mac simply shrugged and said, “The devil is slow to take his own.” Then he stole the jeep, the night vision gear, and came to find me.

  Typical Mac. He’s always kidding about. You’d never guess that underneath all the surface charm he’s the hardest bastard in Kabul. You can’t have a better man on your side than Mac either.

  When we got back, they were turning the camp over. Apparently the car belonged to a UN bigwig on a diplomatic mission and the night vision gear had been a gift from the President. Anyone else would have been in deep shit but amazingly, Mac got away with it. The top brass announced it was a terrific example of bravery and comradeship (Mac’s rescue; not my being shot) and the UN official dined off the story for months.

  As for me, they got the bullets out without a problem but when infection set in, they had to ship me stateside. When I recovered they said I’d taken too much damage to go back. So they gave me another couple of medals (bet you didn’t know all you need to do is take a bullet!) and transferred me out of the Corps and into a black ops unit. After a few weeks of training, they sent me to Gitmo.

  Guantanamo Bay detention camp. It’s a hellhole. Everyone in there has something to hide and it was my job to uncover those secrets. Forget the routine sleep deprivation, drugging them up with hallucinogenics, beatings, rape and waterboarding – we did much worse. When there was some heat over our methods, we moved to black sites.

  Black sites are Gitmos without the publicity. We’ve got a couple of facilities hidden away in the former Eastern bloc, places like Romania where they need cash and don’t ask questions. As the ocean is no man’s land, and can’t ever be called American soil, there’s a couple of ships drifting around the ocean that you wouldn’t want to board either. I’m a marine, so I got sent to one of those ships.

  As I said earlier, I have a talent for terror. They gave me a couple of tough cookies to debrief, and I went at it hammer and tongs. Don’t ask me exactly what: it would make you lose your lunch.

  You might think that people like me are evil. From my point of view I’m a fighter so there’s no point in talking to me about the 7th commandment. No point in talking to me about the Geneva Convention either. When you pick up a gun and threaten my country, I’ll do what it takes to stop you; and I’ll play by the rules. But if you use terror tactics, then the gloves are off and you can expect to get what you deserve.

  So I’m ok with what I did. Except that after 18 months of it, I got the twitches. I remember exactly when it was too. I was having a talk with this man about his plans for putting together a dirty bomb. We’d gotten to the point where he’d confided that he had planned to set it off at a theme park, thinking that aiming at kids would give the whole project some extra PR, but he was reluctant to tell me who was going to deliver the core.

  I was getting pissed, so I put the question to him rather forcibly and when he stopped screaming, I made him understand how urgent it was by showing him a picture of his kid, a pretty little thing, all dressed in pink frills.

  “I can have her collected from school and flown out here. Lots of guys on board who like them young. And she’s pretty.”

  “She’s six!” he gasped.

  “So what? There are no innocents. Talk or I give the order.”

  He heard the truth in my voice and so he talked. In fact, I could hardly keep up. Luckily we record everything. What with all the yelling and groaning that usually accompanies a debrief it’s routine; we don’t want to miss anything, you see. Afterwards I shot him and threw him overboard.

  By the way, that is standard procedure. If you die in prison, the family gets the body back but if you end up on a black site, you disappear. It’s a kindness really. After I’ve had a go, you don’t want to see the remains. And in this case his family didn’t even know what he’d been up to. He was a mole, sent in by the Taliban. We’d cottoned on to him early, let him sit pretty until he was activated, and then we snatched him up just before he could get anything solid into place.

  We never bothered his wife and kids. They thought he was a good man, so we let them think he died in a car crash. It was bad enough for them to lose a husband and father, so why break their hearts further by letting them know the truth? War’s a dirty business but you do your best to keep civilians out of it. That’s why you wear the uniform.

  And that’s what got to me. If he hadn’t talked, I would have wanted that kid. Me. I’ve never been an advertisement for sensitivity but that episode made me realise that I’d lost it.

  So I quit. With the budget cuts it wasn’t hard. I sent in my papers, got another medal as a leaving present, and that was that. I went back to Austin and decided I’d build instead of destroying. I started a small construction company, building extensions for family homes. You know: lift a roof and put in an extra storey for when the kids come along, or adding a couple of extra rooms because grandma is too old to live alone.

  After about eight months I had done some good work and people were beginning to look for me. That’s when I met Lauren. She had moved into a house that needed “a bit of fixing”.

  Lauren was all honey: brown hair, hazel eyes and creamy skin dotted with freckles. She had legs longer than the Chase Tower and an ass that wouldn’t quit. I fell for her, and I fell hard. I made my pitch, took her out for a drink and an hour later we were in bed. We were married a week later.

  I should have seen something was wrong but I wasn’t exactly big on personal relationships. I joined the Corps when I was 17 and the only hook-ups I’d had since were temporary and commercial so it didn’t bother me that Lauren wasn’t rushing to show me off to her family, or that she didn’t seem to have too many friends.

  We’d been married a month when Arturo came to visit. Isabella, our second cousin on our mum’s side, was graduating from college and Arturo decided he’d make a huge fuss over her. He’s always been very hot on college education, especially for girls, as he reckons it gives independence – an important thing if they marry the wrong man. Being a bad man himself, Arturo knows what he’s talking about.

  I had visited Arturo since I’d gotten back but as Lauren and me had a Vegas wedding, this was the first time they were meeting. Also, although I’d hooked up with Arturo, I hadn’t been in the mood to socialise much so this party for Bella was my chance to reconnect with everyone I hadn’t seen since I enlisted.

  I wanted Arturo to come and stay but he decided a hotel would suit
him better. He’s independent that way. I don’t mind. I’m the same myself.

  He took the red eye so I picked him up from the airport, dropped him off at The Four Seasons and told him I’d come find him later. Just before I drove off, he asked me to look after a parcel for him, saying he didn’t want Bella coming round and seeing it.

  I took it home, shoved it in a closet and went to work. I had some problems at the site and when I finally got back, I found the place crawling with cops, saying they’d found drugs in the house. Two ki’s of coke—in Arturo’s parcel.

  Lauren was in floods, crying. She was frightened of going to jail. “Let them wire the place, honey,” she said. “If they see we had nothing to do with it, they’ll let us off the hook.”

  I agreed immediately. As it was late, I’d already told Arturo I’d catch up with him the next day. So they wired the house, they told us to sit tight, and backed off to their surveillance positions, waiting for Arturo to show the next morning.

  As soon as Lauren went to sleep I quietly let myself out. I didn’t worry about the DEA spotting me; I passed right under their noses and they didn’t suspect a thing. I found Arturo drinking whiskey in a whorehouse down town.

  “How did you find me?” he asked amazed.

  “Forget about that. What was in that parcel?”

  Sensing trouble, Arturo put down his whiskey and chased away the blonde who’d been sitting on his knee. “An armadillo.”

  That stopped me. “A what?”

  “An armadillo. You know, like a teddy bear. One of those stuffed toys. Bella loves them. She’s got like 50.”

  “We’re being set up.”

  You might think I wanted to believe Lauren but you see, I’ve known Arturo all my life. He’s a criminal, he’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he wouldn’t in a million years ask me to hold product for him. I knew he’d gone into his father’s business, but Arturo wouldn’t even talk to me about it.

  “You’ve got your path,” he told me. “I’ve got mine. We’re brothers, right, but we don’t talk about our business. Yours or mine. It’s better that way.”

  So I knew it was a set-up and I had a cold feeling that Lauren was at the bottom of it.

  I had a drink with Arturo, went home, snuck past the DEA again and went to bed. The next day, I stopped Lauren outside the house, well away from the recording equipment. “Honey, we need to talk.”

  I didn’t give her time to alert anyone; I just pushed her into my truck and took her to her office. The DEA thought I was being the good husband and the stupid fuckers didn’t see me walking her out of the back, and into a waiting car that Arturo had arranged.

  By this time, Lauren was nervous. She was even more nervous when I told the driver to slow down so I could pitch her bag and her cell phone in a garbage can.

  When she protested, I shushed her. “I’ll explain when we get there.”

  Always let the subject think there’s an easy way out. Keep the hope alive.

  We went to a nice quiet warehouse, owned by a connection of Arturo’s and I sat her down. “I think we’re being set up,” I told her.

  “What?” Lauren was all bewildered. She did it beautifully.

  “Tell me what went down yesterday.”

  “They said they had a tip. They came in with a dog, and it went straight to the cupboard. To your brother’s package.”

  “Did you see them open it?”

  “No. But they said…”

  “Arturo showed me what was inside,” I told her. “It was just a stuffed toy.”

  Lauren went very still. “Are you sure?”

  “Certain. They set us up.”

  She thought about it. “Kyle, please, just do what they ask. If they’re that keen to get him, what would they do next?”

  “You think they’d try it again?” I pretended to be persuadable and I let her ramble on, talking about all the things they might do and how it would be better for everyone if we just went along with it.

  All the time she was talking, Lauren was kissing me, touching my hands, hugging me. “And you never know,” she went on, “maybe the armadillo was stuffed with coke!”

  I looked in her eyes and I saw she heard herself foul up. That fatal slip of the tongue that comes from talking too much.

  “But don’t you remember, Lauren?” I reminded her quietly. “You said you hadn’t seen inside the box. How did you know it was an armadillo?”

  She shrugged, laughed and put on another act. This one was called, ‘sex bomb agent falls for the mark’.

  “Oops! You got me! Oh well. At least we had a good time, right? The house wasn’t real, and the job wasn’t real, but the name is Lauren and we are truly married. Say, you don’t want a divorce, do you? I was kind of enjoying myself.”

  I’d known it from the moment I saw the DEA in my house but I just couldn’t believe it.

  “I fought for this country,” I said to her. “I did all the dirty work without once questioning orders, and this is how they repay me?”

  She dropped the act completely then, showing me her true self.

  “Look Suarez,” she growled. “Your brother’s dirty and we want him. So knuckle down, marine, ok?” Then she smiled at me, and leaned forward to kiss me. “You can have me instead.”

  That’s when I shoved her away. I pushed her so hard that she slammed backwards. There was a bit of rebar sticking out of a wall and she piled into it. She went white, gulped a few times, and died before my eyes. The steel had penetrated the back of her skull.

  It was an accident but I wasn’t sorry. Actually, I didn’t feel anything very much. I disposed of the body, making sure they’d never find enough of it to make an ID. Another skill learned courtesy of the US of A.

  After that, I went to Bella’s party, and when it was over, I moved to Mexico and joined Arturo. The world’s fucked up, right? So I might as well be with my family and get paid for what I do best.

  I don’t like to talk about that time of my life, but Chloe had earned the right to know what had happened. I gave her a summary, and when I finished, she was crying. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  Finally she wiped her eyes. “Jesus, Kyle,” she said. “I thought I’d been fucked but they did a number on you too.”

  Can you imagine that? She was crying for me! For me, for Christ’s sake! That really got to me. I wanted to be a better man, just for her. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. I knew when I took the job with Arturo that I was in for life. I can’t walk away and stay alive. I’ve too many enemies.

  “Pitufa, I can’t change the past.”

  Chloe was quiet. She knew what I was saying. “And the future?”

  This was easy. “From now on, there’s only you.” I meant it. I’d never touch another woman again. But I had to be honest. “But Chloe, the way things are...”

  “I know.” She sounded tired.

  We sat in the dark, looking at the stars. Thinking things over, I had a glimmer of an idea. “I’ll talk to Arturo,” I said slowly. “We’ve a rep for being hard. It means we’re feared but we also make a lot of enemies. Maybe it’s time we acted like those moustache Petes, the old gangsters who left women and kids out of it.”

  “Think he’ll go for it?”

  “Yes. If I can show him it will contribute to the bottom line.”

  She kissed my neck. “A thousand mile journey starts with a single step.”

  “Chairman Mao.”

  “I thought it was from ‘Walking Away From Abuse’.”

  “I think Mao would have been part of the problem rather than the solution.”

  “Fuck him then.”

  “Fuck me instead.”

  After that we enjoyed three days of make up sex. Chloe went all out, and when we finally came up for air, I’d worked my way every single one of my favourite porno scenes, twice. And believe me, I have the finest collection of XXX-rated DVDs in the country.

  As everyone was lying low after the week before, I managed to offload the little things
that needed taking care of onto Chema and Quique but on the fourth day, it was business as usual.

  I was expecting to have to deal with a tonne of shit from the men, so when Pepe Rojo walked in, I was set to jump down his throat but he took one look at me, one look at Chloe who was playing with Raoul on the deck, and then he shook his head, saying, “So it finally happened.” He sounded pretty depressed about it.

  “What?”

  Pepe shrugged. “Knew it the second Quique told me you decked that English guey.” He looked out at Chloe. “Interesting girl. You’re lucky.”

  The others came to the same conclusion, and that was the end of that.

  The next four weeks were the best in my life. I’ve had a tonne of women but I’d never had a partner before. Not that I involved her in my business! I’m sure she has a good idea of what I do, but it’s something we don’t talk about. We slid into a comfortable space where if I had a bad day, I’d tell her, and Chloe would accept that I’d want some time alone - or offer a massage and a therapy fuck, her expression. If she was feeling jumpy, she’d come to me. It was perfect, and we were happy.

  I should have known it was too good to last.

  Chapter 14 Chloe

  So in the end, it all turned out to be a huge misunderstanding, like those stupid operas where everyone is running around in circles, convinced the maid is the mistress, and that the king is a queen or some other such nonsense. I have to admit, I really thought it would end in tears, but I never would have guessed in a million years that it would be Kyle weeping!

  After we had our heart to heart, and Kyle told me he was crazy about me (me!) I was in heaven. We stayed in bed for three days, and I think we worked our way through every position known to man, and a few more. It was amazing, terrific, a revelation - and I came out of it a new person.

  All my life I’ve put on an act. The streetwise orphan. The sweet slave. The ‘don’t fuck with me’ courier. They’re all gone, and now there’s just me: Chloe. I’m not sure who Chloe is yet, but she’s the sort who stands on her own two feet - supported by a dark angel with rocks for muscles. Of course, it wasn’t suddenly all perfect. I still go weak at the knees sometimes, especially if Kyle’s in a bad mood, and I still get nightmares but for the first time in my life, I know that I matter. I love and I am loved. Sappy, isn’t it? But it feels bloody marvellous.