Hell To Pay

by Andrik Rovson

  He did miss one girl, Carly Anne Bottoms, fairly young, nothing wrong with that, old enough to handle what they did, and the casual parting the next morning. They'd connected, over a beer, an Aussie gal whose accent had charmed him as much as her lean, very tanned body, what they all looked like down there, living outside ten times more than the normal American, who looked pale and wimpy by comparison. She'd been a bit too practiced at it, as young as she was on her 'walkabout' right out of high school – living the life and the game. She hooked up for fun, on a whim, with a vast number of males. Her smile led to his scalp, then she pulled out the hook – catch and release. It let him feel what females normally do, when a guy sweeps them off their feet then leaves in the morning, friendly but absent that charming glow in his eyes and warmth in his voice. That had taken a bit of the fun out of it. That was the moment he'd turned his thoughts to Cathy and getting serious, leaving the game behind.

  When he opened the heavy steel entry door the Texas sun struck him like an alien heat ray. Peak of the summer here in El Paso could take your breath away when you moved out of the standard near arctic temperature that predominated in government buildings everywhere. It was some GAO standard, along with the gray metal desks and chairs, indestructible, lasting through generations and endless wars, hot and cold. He swore Grant left his initials carved on one rickety wooden desk he'd used in ROTC summer camp in Virginia.

  He quickly stepped back inside, like his body wanted to stay, get that jump in rank and the privileges it entailed, not that officer housing would impress Cathy. She'd grown up immersed in privilege he couldn't comprehend – used to a mansion. Anything the government offered, short of the Commanding general's quarters would be a big step down. He got a drink from the fountain that provided icy cold water, probably the only drinking fountain on the base that did. Ever the tactical thinker, he saw it was positioned on the hall the commanding general walked every day going to his office. Looking across the hall the current President smiled at him, alongside the Armored Division Commander, a two star whose forced smile matched the President's. Command did that, you were never happy with what you did, how those above you viewed your actions and how efficiently those below carried out your orders.

  That was all history now, and he shook his head, putting himself straight for civilian life, what he'd wanted when he'd got short and started counting down the months, weeks, then days until that final wake up this morning. Done. Steeling himself for a new life outside the Army, he went outside again.

  “Are you Jacob Estes Bowie, sir?” asked a harried corporal with a command braid off his shoulder, an officer's assistant, a very high officer, who'd rushed out from the bowels of the building he'd just left.

  Jabo assumed it was some last minute appeal, a trick to get him to re-up, offering a mission that he couldn't refuse, or a cherry on the top of some kind, maybe full bird Colonel?

  “Yes, that's me,” he returned the soldier's salute, thinking it might be his last ever, wishing he had a camera to take a picture, maybe the soldier had one. He was about to ask...

  “Sir, you have to come with me, it's...” he was out of his element, uncomfortable he'd been tasked to be the messenger, “it's your family, come with me, hurry.”

  That changed things and he forgot about having his picture taken. His grandfather and grandmother, on his father's side were the only family left in the Bowie clan, beside him. At least his branch of the prolific Bowie tree that arose from the loins of James Bowie who'd died in the Alamo, but not before siring several sons who'd carried on his name, one of which was his progenitor. He was proud of his heritage, but it wasn't something he'd earned, pure genetics, a tradition he'd felt obligated to live up to, a reason, a big reason why he'd gone into the ROTC then diverted into the shadow world where he'd thrived for nearly four years, a black warrior in a black fight that nobody could ever know about – the opposite to his famous, very well known ancestor, James Bowie.

  “In here sir,” a different man in a suit awaited him, two of them. One was older and in charge, while the other looked up then stared at the blank wall.

  “You Bowie, okay, sit,” he was all business. When he was ready he pulled out a report in a folder and dropped it on the table. They stalked each other for a moment, two tigers in a small cage, Jabo Bowie, special forces officer and Marlon Tasker, SAC El Paso area.

  “It's all there, pictures if you want to see, but there's nothing recognizable, what's left after a napalm attack would be similar,” Marlon's eyes were sympathetic but uncaring, wanting to get through this so he could start asking questions. “As far as we can tell it was random, they weren't targeted, wrong place, wrong time, all because of a young girl he'd found on the road going home last night.”

  That summed it up, all the agent knew beyond bullet sizes, trajectories, a shooting location with no empty shells, the footsteps were generic boots probably thrown away by now. The impressions from the shooter's layup matched up with some impressions they'd got around the border station. It was pure luck, since the onlookers and first responders tromped all around the edge of the fire, destroying crucial evidence, picking things up, they were even missing a gun off the body of one of the patrolmen. When they found out who'd taken it from his crime scene there would be hell to pay.

  What the heck were people coming to? It was probably useless, the other pistol was, its composite lower half melted and warped by the intense heat, enough to make their bodies catch fire, partially. It was an ugly scene, one of the worst he'd ever investigated. Up all night, he'd tasked a local agent to find next of kin and they'd found their only direct descendant, his parents dead, along with his grandparents on his mother's side, old age and a hard life. First Lieutenant Jacob Estes Bowie was in Fort Bliss, only a few hours away by car, less by the helicopter he'd been flying around in since seven thirty last night, when he got the call on the shooting and fire at a Customs and Immigration Enforcement Border Station Three Six Five.

  The guy who'd shot them was very organized, careful and thorough. From his boot prints, what few had survived, he'd walked the perimeter, circling the entire scene, which is why they'd found his tracks on the far side, opposite the road, near the creek where they'd discovered the checkpoint commander, a lieutenant named Alcazar, which sounded Arabic but was Spanish even though she looked as white as anyone. White, what the hell does that mean? For Tasker, race was a box you checked on a form, if you felt like it.

  Race was a dying myth, what future kids would ask about, the purebreds who were alive today and gone tomorrow, leaving a mixture that shaded through a spectrum of hair, eye, and skin color without any direct, historical or genetic line into the past and it's highly distinct body types. Like humans long ago, who'd never truly been separated into pure races, the inclination to cross lines, drawn to the different, the new, had always done this to human appearance, further expressed in inherited traits and abilities. If language worked the same way we'd all be speaking a combination of words from every civilization, past and present and particular languages would have disappeared thousands of years ago which was partially true, given the conglomeration English had become over the last millennia and the way it had spread to every country in the world.

  “Are they both dead?” Jabo asked, tapping his fingers on the folder. When the FBI SAC nodded curtly his fingers froze, feeling like the thick manila folder was their coffin, holding their remains.

  “How was it for them?” Jabo looked off, not wanting to know but he had to, since he was the final survivor of their branch of the Bowie line, what he felt was the direct one, since the other branches had moved out of Texas or didn't care about their heritage and history like he'd been raised to do. For them it was a name, not a focus of intense life long pride and obligation.

  The older agent asked the younger one to get them both a decent coffee and Jabo said the BX had a Starbucks, giving him directions. Those damned shops were everywhere across the planet, never further than ten minutes from anywhere you
were standing, unless it was the jungle or the desert Jabo had haunted for nearly all of his career. After the other agent left, Marlon retrieved the file from Jabo. He wanted to be certain he was recounting exactly what they'd found out rather than summarizing from memory. He'd been going for over twenty four hours straight and didn't trust his brain to recall things the way he felt he needed for this young man who'd lost everything last night.

  “The older man, your grandfather, Jonah, died instantly, head shot, felt nothing,” he flipped the page, and saw the gruesome shot of his grandmother who'd instinctively curled up in a ball, trying to hide from the flames covering her body and the inferno the truck became, burning her to a blackened crisp in a few minutes. There was no need to show him this stuff.

  “Your grandmother burned to death in the fireball the pickup's gasoline tank made when it lit up as well as a secondary explosion with it's own fireball caused by the guard shack blowing up.” Tasker clicked on the file on his laptop and they both watched the single camera's distorted view, mounted on a building sixty feet away. The image was fogged at times by smoke that coated the lens quickly, but it allowed a general sequence of events to be constructed and a timeline for the explosions. Sadly it provided no details on the man who'd appeared at the edge, barely visible, the top half of the camera lens covered with thick soot. It had recorded him from the waist down as he strolled around the edge of the roaring fire, observing his destruction. He wasn't a first responder, arriving too soon after the shootings so it had to be the sniper who'd killed them.

  The FBI agent looked in Jabo's eyes to see if he had anything to do with this. There was a large ranch near the Big Bend area, always a potential oil and gas site, not that far south of the last known Permian oil fields discovered at the turn of the 1900's but never extensively drilled until Howard Hughes's company developed the diamond tipped drill in the thirties. If he'd wanted the ranch before his grandparents died naturally, this would have been the way to do it, hiring a friend from the service to take them out and make it look like a deranged gunman, or a hired gun, an extreme theory he didn't think possible with this decorated soldier, but in his line of work you had to cover every base before excluding it.

  “You sure it's them?” Jabo asked then cringed when the agent nodded, slower this time, hurting a little, but nothing like the agonies Jabo was feeling, his eyes sinking away like he was dying inside, living through the terror and torture his grandmother had felt, burning up alive – with no one to help her.

  There was a short period when Jabo drifted off, thinking and feeling as his mind twisted in chaos, then he changed. He came back, but the person who returned wasn't the same one he'd been when he walked into the room, fresh out of the Army and ready to get married and start a new life with a very beautiful, very rich, new wife.

  Marlon had only seen eyes like that one time before, when he was interviewing a psychopathic killer without a shred of conscience who'd worked his way through three houses, in as many weeks, showing up in the middle of the night to kill everyone inside, then he'd arranged the bodies, taken pictures, and posted them on a fake facebook account, since it was the era of social media, including psychotic serial killers. His social duty done, he'd chopped them up and tossed them in a local bayou where they'd turned into gator food and disappeared. Caught at a traffic stop, driving his first victim's Camaro, his only mistake, after spraying it a different color using thirty cans of spray paint, then switching the license plate to a different Camaro of that general color, yellow. But his was a strange neon yellow with patches of the original bright red underneath. A quick check of the VIN and he was jailed then linked to his crimes with secondary evidence, prints and genetic material he'd left behind.

  Jabo stared right through the agent like he wasn't there, seething and not worried about what he was broadcasting. His intentions were crystal clear. He was going to find the man who'd killed his beloved grand parents and take him out, slowly and painfully.

  “What do you know?” Jabo asked, taking back the folder to open it up, going to the agent's scribbled notes on the crime scene, absorbing it like he did a mission briefing, which it was, a rapid assembly of all the known facts concerning the five dead people and the one who'd survived, Anna Alcazar. After he'd read the entire folder it was burned it into his mind. It was another of his freakish skills he'd unlocked in the military, an eidetic or photographic memory, no different from a digital camera, taking in anything his eyes saw and storing it away.

  “Is officer Alcazar awake yet?” the notes had said the first aid crew had diagnosed a coma they didn't try to alter when they drove her to the hospital in Alpine before being airlifted to the Army Hospital on the same base Jabo had just mustered out of. They'd bandaged her cut scalp which was her sole wound besides the puncture in her arm they'd also wrapped and treated with a topical antiseptic before injecting her with a broad spectrum antibiotic. In Jabo's previous world she was good to go.

  “No, not yet, but we get her first, not you,” he sensed a pissing match with Jabo who was burning for revenge, but in a focused very deadly way that unsettled him. This man's physical and mental powers were at his peak. His skills had been honed and worked to a fine point, an ideal human spear that could strike out and kill anyone. “This is our job, we'll find him.”

  They had a short standoff then Jabo stood up, thinking of the man in civilian clothes who'd offered him a job only ten minutes ago, along with an O-5 rank and the power that would come with it, equivalent to a Battalion commander or a highly placed staff officer in a division, someone whose requests could not be ignored or diverted to higher authority. He'd be a small god in his world, where captains ran teams and majors ran the special forces equivalent of companies. A lieutenant colonel would run an entire, independent unit up to an expeditionary force, call his own shots, make his own rules and form his own battle plans without much oversight. That's how it worked in his world, where higher rank meant nothing if you weren't on the teams, not a enrolled member who'd done the work and knew the job. Otherwise you were a taxi or ran the gas station.

  “I gotta go,” he thanked the busy senior agent, knowing he could have sent an underling. The FBI SAC offered to send him a copy of the folder and keep him 'in the loop' which they both knew he wouldn't do, not all the information he'd find. Everything would go in a bigger folder, what he'd edited down to this one, for Jabo's consumption, centered solely on his grandparents and their deaths. When Jabo left the room he'd be on his own, would need to find his own sources on the investigation, then start building his own folder, internally, since this was absolutely personal and way off the books – a side job he'd run as soon as possible. He'd made a fateful decision, ending his civilian life just as it had restarted.

  “Can you call Mr. Brooks?” he asked the woman at the discharge/transition desk where he'd checked in this morning at eight sharp. A few hours earlier he'd been ready to get it all done in one day so he'd be out of the Army, an instant civilian, off base and eating dinner with his gorgeous fiance' and her parents at some local, very expensive restaurant, one he'd never known existed here in dusty El Paso.

  “Yes, well I think so, he's a busy man, I think he left,” she tried to cover for her lack of information then found the place she'd written down his cell phone on her blotter, recording it after he'd walked away, telling her not to write it down anywhere, to deep six it if she had. But ever the good clerk, covering her ass, she'd jotted it down, since he was only human, like anyone else and it was only a phone number.

  Jabo followed her finger and reached over to tear off the corner of her blotter she'd used, the last unmarked bit of paper on this month's sheet that she'd replace next week with the clean, untouched one underneath, starting a new month. “I got this, thanks.” Ignoring her scowl, he walked away quickly.

  He punched in the number as he walked back to the room the mysterious government man had used, one near the division commander's office, showing his power and hidden rank, whichever one i
t was.

  “Brooks?” he asked the man, who hesitated, since it was a cover name, made up for the day to talk to Jabo then discard like the SIM card the generic ring tone on the cheap cell phone reminded him he needed to crack and toss.

  “Jabo, we can't talk on this, where are you?”

  “Same room,” he clicked off, knowing the man would appreciate his communication security. Anyone hearing the conversation would only know his nickname, and Brook's cover name, as well as the fact they'd met or at least both knew that his reference to a 'room' meant.

  He sat down on a bench in the hall then got up and paced. His anxiety was unlike him, always the coolest, most rational and measured thinker in his team and group. You could write a manual listening to his description of an operation, start to finish. Once begun, execution always followed the plan until it went to shit, then everyone looked to him, following his lead, knowing he'd see a way out, or an even better way that trumped the original.

  Now that mind was working out how he'd start tracking down this sniper who'd killed his grandparents, the two border patrol officers and the young girl, who was obviously his target, still not aware her family was dead as well. The FBI SAC had conveniently left that out. He'd seen plenty of collateral damage in his years in service, accidental or intentional deaths, close relatives of the man they were targeting. Tough shit in his book, knowing how they venerated, nearly worshiped a fighter who'd 'heroically' bombed a village market or worse, a school, killing no fighters or soldiers, only civilians and children, like it was a glorious battle requiring courage and planning instead of mindless death and destruction that advanced nothing only terrified and saddened the living – or in his case, made him into an unstoppable angel of death.