Death Club

by Ty Patterson

  It was not a big problem though. He had some places to start. The first place would be the hotels Carter had checked into. Maybe he had left a forwarding address. He would put a trace on the cards Carter used in the hotels. He left the bathroom and looked at the moaning human mass that was Bevcic and wondered if he should kill the Ukrainian.

  No need. Who will he tell about me? Even if he does, nothing exists about me. I am invisible.

  Gruzman didn’t know it but he had just made his first mistake.

  Zeb was in a quandary. The Oregon high desert needed to be dug. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t ask the sheriff or the state police to do it without revealing his hand. He had no interest in letting them know he had a parallel investigation running.

  He went to Tony’s and filled himself up while he pondered over the problem. As it turned out, the solution was easier than he thought, it was something he should have realized earlier. He was back in his SUV when he saw Garav heading purposefully to Tony’s, his cell pressed to his ear.

  I can call him.

  Zeb lost sight of the sheriff when he went through the swinging doors, but that was okay. He pulled out his phone and turned on an application. He waited for Garav to pick up. His cell was busy. He waited for a few more moments, wondering if he would see Cherie and Morgan again. He tried Garav’s number again.

  It rang, but the sheriff didn’t pick up. Maybe he was one of those who didn’t take a call from an unknown number. Zeb kept trying again and after the fifth attempt, Garav’s impatient voice came on.

  ‘Sheriff Garav. How can I help you?’

  ‘Sheriff, you need to dig ten feet to the left of Klattenbach. Six feet under, and you’ll find another body.’ The app converted Zeb’s voice and made it sound bland and accent-less. The application could turn a male voice into a female’s, make an American sound British. It was just one of the handy tools that the twins had equipped their team with.

  ‘Body? What body? Who are you?’

  ‘Sheriff, I don’t have much time. There’s another body next to where Klattenbach was found. Ten feet to the left. Six feet under.’ Zeb gave him the exact coordinates. ‘You need to dig up that body.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Garav’s said tightly, astonishment giving way to anger.

  ‘Your problem, Sheriff. In twenty-four hours, I’ll call the state police. Maybe they’ll act quicker.’ Zeb hung up and drove away.

  Garav had no choice. He would dig.

  Chapter 15

  Cleetus dug through the trash can in downtown Miami, rooting around for food, loose change, clothing, anything that he could use. Once he had found a pair of shoes which had kept him warm two winters. Another time he had found a camera. An honest-to-goodness camera. He had sold that to a pawnbroker and boy, had he enjoyed life for a few months!

  Cleetus was a drunk who lived on the downtown streets of the city. He had been called a tramp, a hobo, a walking piece of filth. Cleetus didn’t care. The streets gave him all the food he needed. Strangers tossed him coins once in a while. The doorways gave him a home and if he was really desperate, the food banks and the homeless shelters were close by. Cleetus didn’t like going to the shelters or the banks. Seeing people just like him, depressed him. On the street he was his own man. He was free.

  Cleetus had a beard that reached to his chest and that interfered as he leaned over the can and jammed his hands inside, deep. He swept his beard to the side and rooted inside till he found a hotdog, intact in its wrapper. That was breakfast, sorted. Now for lunch.

  The ring startled him. The can was black, as dark as him, and was large and round. He had his head inside it and the sound echoed in the narrow space. That sounded like a cell phone. Maybe it was someone behind him.

  He extracted his head with difficulty and turned around, glaring. A man had the right to sift through a trash can without being disturbed, hadn’t he? There was no one behind him, though. People were giving him a wide berth.

  He dove back into the can when the ring sounded again. It came from the can. Was it a cell phone? Maybe it was one of those shiny ones. He could sell that. It would feed him for days.

  He tossed out wrappers and plastic bags. He flung dirty clothes, beer cans. Someone seemed to shout behind him. He didn’t look back or stop. He was on a treasure hunt. The cell, if it was that, rang a third time. Cleetus panted as he reached low and at last his seeking fingers felt something hard. With buttons on it.

  It was a cell.

  He grabbed it greedily with a triumphant yell and straightened. ‘I got a–’

  His voice died as he stared stupidly at the device in his hand. It wasn’t shiny or new. It wasn’t aluminum or silver. It was black, stubby, and was one of those old phones that had outlived its life.

  He was readying to throw it back in the bin when it rang again. What the heck? He accepted the call.

  ‘MIGUEL, WHERE ARE YOU? YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO CALL EVERY DAY? ARE THE FLASKS SAFE? WHY AREN’T YOU GOING TO THE FIGHT?’

  ‘Huh? Whatcha calling about?’ Cleetus grunted.

  ‘MIGUEL, ARE THE FLASKS SAFE?’

  Cleetus patted his hip. Yeah, his flask, filled with cheap rum, was safe in his pocket. Why was this dude getting hot and bothered about it?

  ‘I got it,’ he growled, thumbed the call off, and tossed the cell back in the can.

  What a waste of time that was! Why couldn’t people throw away perfectly good cell phones and make life easy for Cleetus?

  Pico threw the phone hard against the wall of his house, his eyes narrow slits of fury. Its battery came off and went sliding several feet.

  Hector came rushing into the room, took one look at his boss, wisely held back his words, and assembled the phone. Pico had gathered himself when he had finished and took the cell back.

  ‘Get the woman. Maria,’ he ordered.

  Hector grinned silently. He knew where this was heading. This was the fun part.

  High above in the sky, where the sun never set, a satellite flew lazily in its orbit. It had no deadlines to meet, no place to get to, and nothing to stop its journey.

  The satellite was powered by sunlight, of which there was no dearth. There was no friction in the air to stop it, and it would keep going around for a long, long time. The satellite had only one job. It scooped up billions and trillions of calls from that circular planet beneath it, and sent those to a receiving station on earth.

  That’s all the satellite did. It was a postman. It took something, data in its case, and delivered to another location. It would keep doing that till its solar panels were incapable of generating energy to power it.

  The satellite picked up the call to Cleetus, blissfully unaware of who Cleetus was or where the call originated. It just didn’t care.

  The receiving station was in a white-walled, glass-fronted building in an office park in Virginia. The building was, ostensibly, the office of an internet start-up that had developed a ground-breaking application that would change the world. Or so it proclaimed. It had lots of men with facial hair and a few women. Tee shirts and sneakers were in abundance.

  If a visitor had approached the office, he or she would be told politely that the person they were meeting was busy. Wasn’t available to meet. No one was ever around to meet. The reason for that was simple; the office was a clandestine operation owned by a deep-black outfit. It sucked in call data from satellites in the air, split them into smaller packets and distributed them to various supercomputers in the country.

  Werner was playing Go, the oldest board game still played, with its Swiss Miss when it received the packets. It barely noticed. The Lee Sodel maneuver that his lady had executed was an interesting one. In any case, it had enough chips and neural networks to deal with the incoming files. Go was more important. The Swiss Miss, a supercomputer with svelte lines was even more important.

  One part of Werner opened the packets and started processing them. Its neural network searched for keywords and correlations. One such keyword, r
ecently entered by Zeb and the twins, was fight. Now, there were literally millions of calls that had the word in it, but Werner wasn’t a supercomputer for no reason.

  It traced the receiving phone’s location. Downtown Miami. Another part of Werner set about tracing the phone’s ownership. Yet another neural circuit hunted the origin of the call. It came from Mexico, from deep in the drug cartel country.

  Werner didn’t just search for keywords. It put together sentiment, tone, context, and much more. Werner wasn’t human. It was better. It shrugged wryly at his lady, ‘Sorry, babe. Gotta go. The twins need to see this.’

  It flagged the call to Meghan and Beth. And sent another flag to Zeb. Zeb, that dude! He was darned lucky he had Meghan, Beth, and Broker on his side. Werner shook its head dolefully. What was the human race coming to, when it had folks like Zeb dealing with supercomputers?

  Bevcic didn’t know if he would live. Whoever had interrogated him had been so skillful that he hadn’t killed him outright. A physician had come to see the Ukrainian and had tut-tutted almost silently. Bevcic saw it in the man’s face. He would live. Or die. The next twenty-four hours would determine that. It wasn’t that he had lost a lot of blood. It was the damage to internal organs that was critical, possibly fatal.

  Bevcic lay in his room, conscious of everything, trying to rise above the pain, with just one thought in his mind. He had to inform Mr. Carter. He would know what to do, and hopefully, he would extract vengeance on behalf of Bevcic.

  The Ukrainian raised a hand limply and a hood rushed to his side. ‘Get me outta here,’ Bevcic whispered.

  The underling shook his head firmly. ‘You aren’t going anywhere. You gotta rest. Doc’s orders.’

  Bevcic grabbed his shirt, surprisingly firmly, and dragged his face down. ‘GET. ME OUT.’

  Three hoods carried Bevcic carefully and laid him on the rear seat of their ride. One hood cradled his head, while another sat near his legs. The third hood drove out cautiously and joined the traffic. ‘Where to, boss?’

  ‘The garage,’ Bevcic whispered.

  ‘Which garage?’

  ‘The one Carter told about,’ Bevcic struggled to rise to an elbow, frustrated with the slow uptake of his hoods. Go to that garage if you have anything for me, Carter had said. Bevcic hadn’t revealed its existence to his interrogator. Maybe he would have if the stranger had questioned him for longer, but thankfully, he hadn’t.

  Zeb was still in Dalton when he got Werner’s flag.

  Flasks. Fight. Miami. Mexico.

  Werner had run the caller’s voice prints through its vast database and had come back with a likely identity. Pico. A chapter head of the Crescents, an upcoming drug cartel in Mexico. It had tried searching for Miguel, but there were like millions of Miguels on the planet. It would need more tags or context to get a better handle on this particular Miguel.

  Something about a flask and a fight. Bevcic’s man had said something about a fight. The phone in Miami was a disposable one, its SIM card bought at a Walgreens, a year ago. The receiving phone was located in a trashcan opposite a bank that had a security camera looking street side. Werner had attached an image of a man bending over the can. Werner identified him as Cleetus, who loitered downtown’s streets and well known to the cops.

  Cleetus wasn’t whom the call was for. It was for whomever had thrown the phone away. Didn’t Bevcic say something about Klattenbach and a fight? The link was so slim that it was barely existent. Not actionable, was what those in the secretive intel world would say.

  Zeb wasn’t going to act on it.

  He shut down his screen and drove to the edge of the desert, took a wide detour around Klattenbach’s spot and parked his vehicle two miles away. It was sunny, and while the SUV was matte black, he covered it with an anti-reflective cover and set out with his backpack and binos.

  He settled on his belly four hundred yards away, under the cover of a rare, thick growth of green. He had made himself comfortable when the distant growl of engines got his attention. He trained his binos and watched the sheriff wait, hands on hips, as a second cruiser rolled up.

  A brief discussion ensued and then shovels were removed from the second cruiser, and the digging began. The ground was hard and it was slow going with the sun looking down fiercely at them. The diggers, two of them, rested occasionally and glugged from their water cans. Zeb could read their body language whenever they stopped; the dig was a waste of time.

  He lip-read one of them asking the sheriff, ‘Are you sure, Chief? Sure looks like rock and gravel, down here. Not much else.’

  ‘Get to it,’ was the irritable reply.

  Six feet wasn’t too deep to shovel, but it was the heat and the hardness that made it difficult. The men got back to it, determinedly, their implements ringing dully on the silent desert.

  One officer jammed his body behind a shovel as he attempted to drive it deep when he stopped suddenly and shouted hoarsely. The other slowed, stopped, and bent down, as Garav pressed forward and leaned over them. The crouching man rose and whooped and high-fived his partner and Garav’s face split into a smile.

  There was a body down there.

  Marcello Descadeo was the identity of the second body, Werner reported to Zeb the day after the find, after snooping into Garav’s and the state troopers’ files. The identification had been made quickly because of the man’s tats. The outstanding warrants in Colombia, Mexico, and the U.S., helped.

  Hitter for a Colombian drug lord. Rapist. Killer. Drug dealer. Descadeo had been wanted for a multitude of crimes on both sides of the American border. Now he was dead and no law enforcement agency would be spending any time on regrets.

  Werner came up with another snippet of information. Law enforcement agencies, both state and Federal, across the country had created a Sightings list that they shared informally with one another. The sightings were nothing but reports of which criminal had been seen where. The intel came from snitches, from police officers, from retired cops, from anyone connected to law enforcement. Someone recognized a felon in a bar in Toledo, it went into the sightings. The cops followed up sightings as and when they could and quite often arrests followed.

  It was a tool, like any other, available to the law authorities. It was a list that Werner could access too, and it told Zeb that Descadeo had been seen in Portland at the same time as Klattenbach’s disappearance.

  ‘Do you know what Descadeo was interested in?’ the supercomputer asked Zeb.

  ‘You mean other than killing or raping?’

  ‘Yeah. He was a bareknuckle fighter.’ Werner brought up articles from Colombian and Mexican newspapers that mentioned the dead man. They weren’t substantiated, but Zeb wasn’t planning to go to a court of law.

  Zeb shut down his screen and stared blindly out of his SUV. Klattenbach. Fight. Miami call. Mexico. Fight and flasks. Descadeo. Fight.

  The Miami call was now actionable.

  Zeb dumped his duffel to the rear and headed out of Dalton, making plans, arrangements, making a mental list of who to call, when his cell rang.

  It was Doug. ‘Got something weird for you,’ he said and Zeb prepared himself to listen to another of the man’s ailments. It wasn’t an ailment Doug had called him for.

  ‘This dude visited me, yesterday. He was barely alive. Maybe he’s dead now,’ he broke off abruptly and yelled loudly. ‘PIRELLI. DAN, THE MUSTANG NEEDS PIRELLIS.’

  ‘These mechanics,’ he grumbled to Zeb when he picked his phone again. ‘I gotta think for them.’

  ‘The dying dude?’ Zeb prompted him.

  ‘Yeah, about that. Three men carried him. Said he was Bevcic. Said you knew him.’

  Zeb had known Doug for several years. He had saved the older man from a brutal mugging several years back. On finding out that the vet owned a garage, he had put forward his proposition – keeping vehicles ready, and helping out vulnerable women - Doug had readily agreed and the two had become firm friends. Zeb knew enough not to hurry the garage owne
r. He would get to it in his own time.

  ‘I didn’t know you had roughed him so bad. He said it wasn’t you. He had another visitor in the night. He was smooth. Scary smooth. This stranger wanted to know about you. Bevcic didn’t have anything to give. He hauled himself all the way, to tell me. To pass it onto you.’

  ‘Bevcic described him?’

  ‘Yeah. Did more than that. Bevcic had a camera in his bedroom. Don’t ask me why. The stranger had shot out everything else, but he didn’t find the camera. I’m sending you the images.’

  ‘Bevcic. How’s he?’

  ‘He’ll live. Still close, but the doc said he’ll live.’

  ‘He’s with your doc?

  ‘Yeah. Has his men around him. He’ll be safe.’

  ‘Watch your back, Doug.’

  ‘I will,’ Doug wasn’t perturbed. ‘I’ve got Cory. He’s a good man. Returned from Iraq a few years back. Good with a gun. And other things. Some of my other men are good too. Don’tcha worry about me.’

  Zeb reached out for the end button when Doug called out.

  ‘Zeb?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You watch your back, you hear? Bevcic said this dude was as scary as you.’ He laughed. ‘You are planning it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Planning what?’

  ‘I can hear you thinking.’ Zeb heard a sound, like a palm slapping a thigh, and Doug chuckled. ‘He thinks he’ll come after you, all stealthy like.’

  ‘He’s already in your sights.’

  Chapter 16

  As Zeb was heading out to Portland, thinking about the newest wrinkle, Privalov was in Miami, making last minute preparations for the fight night. The Everglades. That’s where the Death Club’s Fight Night would take place. That very night.