by Jack Quaid
After the last of the mourners had left, Angus went up to his parents’ room and sat on his mother’s side of the bed. Her things on the bedside table were exactly where she had left them. She had hand creme with the lid still open next to a brush with strands of hair still on it. There was a half-finished novel with a book mark that Angus made for her in third grade separating the pages of a story that his mother would never know the ending to.
He didn’t cry, and he wasn’t sad.
Angus was angry.
He wanted to punch. He wanted to fight. He wanted to scream. At anything, at anyone, it didn’t matter. Angus just had this thing inside him that had to get out and destroy everything.
He sat there on the edge of the bed until the sun went down, and then he sat in the dark until the door opened and Russell sat on the bed next to him.
‘I guess by now.’ Russell struggled with finding the right words. ‘I guess by now you’ve realised that I’m not like other fathers.’
‘No shit.’
A week ago, he would have gotten in trouble for language like that. Russell let it slide. Last week was a long time ago.
‘You know what I am.’
Angus nodded. ‘I have a fair idea.’
‘Just so we’re clear,’ Russell said. ‘If someone somewhere happens to need a bullet put in them, I’m pretty good at arranging that.’
Angus had never seen this side of his father. Russell wasn’t speaking to him as a father spoke to his fifteen-year-old son. That time was gone. It disappeared with a single gunshot. He spoke to him as if they had both seen behind the curtain of the world and saw it for what it really was. A place where desperate people did desperate things, the good guys didn’t always win, and more times than not, somebody got hurt.
‘You have two options,’ Russell continued. ‘Your mother’s sister, Helen, you met her today, she lives in Paris. It’s a nice place. She has two kids, your cousins, I spoke to her. She said you could stay with her.’
‘For how long?’
‘You can go to school there. You can go to college there if you like. Make new friends and eat French food, it will be a good life.’
Angus paused. ‘And what about this other option?’
‘I can’t protect you,’ Russell said as his voice grew stern. ‘But I can teach you to protect yourself. I can teach you how to hit a target a mile away with a rifle. I can teach you how to not only survive a gunfight when you’re outnumbered ten to one, but to walk away without so much as a scratch. I can teach you twenty different ways to kill a man with your bare hands.’
‘And then what?’
‘We find the people who took your mother, and we kill every last one of them.’
Six months later people started to hear the stories about a young kid and an old man robbing Santa Blanca drug dealers all across Chicago.
Carlos thought the stories were all bullshit. But his cousin Hector had a friend who was babysitting a safe house for the Santa Blanca cartel on the South Side. He was sitting on maybe 700k of ice and had three of his buddies to back him up just in case any of the gangs in the area grew some balls and tried to start some shit. They had AR-15s, so if shit was going to get started, they had the firepower to end it.
Anyway, this friend of Hector’s was sitting on all this ice, just playing babysitter, when at three in the morning, the power cut out while they were watching reruns of the 1992 playoffs on ESPN. It was an old house with old wiring, so none of them were really surprised. They were more pissed at missing the game than anything else. So Hector’s friend went outside to the switch box and flicked the button for the fuse. The house came back alive with all the lights, the television, and the sound of the game. He came back into the house, locked the door behind him, grabbed a Dr. Pepper from the refrigerator, and made his way back down to the living room, to his boys, the ice, and the game.
When he reached the doorframe, he stopped dead and dropped the can of Dr. Pepper. In the time he had taken to reset the fuse, grab a can of pop, and come back, some kid had knocked out three of his AR-15 armed buddies. They were on the ground, bleeding from here, there, and everywhere. One of them groaned, and the other two could have been dead for all he knew.
The kid had a bandana around his face that covered everything from his nose down. All Carlos could see were his cold blue eyes that pierced through the strands of long blond hair.
Hector’s friend felt the weight of the rifle on his shoulder. An AR-15 was the kind of weapon you used when you were not in the mood to fuck around. It was not the kind of weapon you used in the confines of a house, and it certainly was not much use when it was slung over your shoulder, much like Hector’s friend’s was at that moment.
He went for it anyway, but he was too slow. Way too slow.
The kid raised his twelve-gauge and blasted a shell into Hector’s friend’s leg, almost blasting his knee clean off. Hector’s friend hit the ground, and through the pain and the screams, he tried to reach for the AR-15, but the kid kicked it away.
‘Tell Maria Garcia we’re coming for her,’ the kid said.
And then he was gone.
So was the cartel’s 700k in ice.
Over the past few months, Carlos had heard a fuckload of stories just like that one. Always through a friend of a friend of a friend. This kid beating on dudes, taking their gear, junk, and cash, and disappearing again like a fucking ghost.
If he saw a kid with a shotgun, Carlos thought, then that was going to be one dead kid with a shotgun. Stories or not, people were nervous, and Carlos was brought up from El Paso to try and catch this ghost.
He arrived in Chicago a week prior. Maria Garcia had called him personally and asked him for a favour. He thought it was nice of her to frame it that way, when they both knew he had no choice. He was a solider for the Santa Blanca and would do whatever he was asked. Anyway, he thought Mrs. Garcia was a nice lady. She always asked him about his mother, and when his daughter was in the hospital after she was hit by a speeding car, Mrs. Garcia covered all the costs. She also sent a sicario to take care of the driver.
If it weren’t for Mrs. Garcia, Carlos would be on the streets or in jail by now. El Paso wasn’t known for its job opportunities, and Carlos wasn’t what you’d call studious anyway. By the time he was twelve, he had already been in trouble with the police, and it was looking like he had a bright future in prison ahead of him. It would have gone that way, too, if Mrs. Garcia hadn’t taken him under her wing. She taught him how to be smart, how to calm his temper, and how to lead his small little gang of misfits. They pulled a number of small robberies and jobs for Mrs. Garcia, but it wasn’t until she asked him to kill an up-and-coming drug dealer that Carlos was really part of the Santa Blanca cartel. He was thirteen years old and didn’t think twice when she asked. Manny, the drug dealer in question, was hard to find, and Carlos spent a week looking for him. Then Manny’s father died, and Carlos knew that this son of a bitch wasn’t going to miss the funeral. He waited until everybody was at the wake, rang the doorbell, and asked for Manny. It was as simple as that. Carlos put two in his chest and one in his head.
When he told Mrs. Garcia how he killed him at the wake of his father, she laughed for the longest time. Carlos wondered sometimes if she was all there in the head.
Carlos may have thought the kid with a shotgun was a myth, but he was pretty damn certain that the ten million in cash and product that the Santa Blanca cartel had lost over the past six months wasn’t.
Angel and Juan Perez were two of Santa Blanca’s best sicarios in Chicago. The brothers were from a small town near Durango where they worked their father’s avocado farm until the Gulf cartel shot their father in the street after some perceived disrespect. The brothers were tribal. Family was everything, and they didn’t give a fuck. They wanted the son of a boss who had flippantly put a bullet in their father and made their mother a widow. They wanted that pig dead. But the Perez brothers weren’t stupid. They knew people didn’t just go out and
murder the son of a cartel boss, not unless they wanted to be next on the chopping block, so they buddied up with the Santa Blanca cartel and offered them a deal. Protection for service. The boys would kill, beat, and steal for Santa Blanca if they could bring honour back to their family and bury a bullet in the back of that pig’s head. Maria Garcia gave them her blessing, and in that blessing, she had soldiers for life.
They didn’t speak a word of English. They didn’t drink. They didn’t do drugs, and they didn’t do any of the stupid shit that came from drinking too much booze or doing too many drugs. Carlos liked them. They did what they were told and shut the fuck up about it, unlike all the young kids who wanted to be gangsters—always hot under the collar and wanting to start some shit. No, Carlos thought, the two farm boys would be perfect.
Over the next week, Carlos leaked information to every dealer and corner boy in Chicago that the Santa Blanca cartel were consolidating their product to one location, a warehouse on the South Side. He then sent word to every safe house under their umbrella that on a specific day at a specific time, a semitrailer would pull up to the front of the safe house and those dealers were to load whatever product that wasn’t on the street into the trailers. Over the course of the day, thirty-six safe houses were to be consolidated into the back of a semitrailer and taken to a central safe house until this kid and old man, or whoever the fuck they were, could be taken care of.
But it was all bullshit.
There was a semitrailer, and on a particular day, it would cruise around the city of Chicago, and it would pull up at Santa Blanca safe houses, but no product would be loaded into it, and it wouldn’t go to any central safe house. All of Santa Blanca’s product would remain exactly where it was: on the street. The only thing in the rear of the semitrailer was Carlos, Angel, and Juan. Each of them armed to the teeth with M4s, Remingtons, and bad attitudes.
For seven hours on a cold winter morning, the three sicarios waited in the rear of that truck. They stomped their feet on the hard floor to get the blood flowing and try and warm up, but Chicago was Chicago, and for most of the time, they stayed cold. They had a signal with Manny, the driver behind the wheel of the truck. Every time he stopped, he sent a blank text message to the phone in Carlos’s pocket. If he stopped to ‘pick up’ a load, he would send a text message. If he stopped for a coffee, he would send a text message. If he stopped for a piss, a text message was sent. If a text message wasn’t sent and the doors to that semitrailer opened, Carlos had instructed Angel and Juan to squeeze down on their triggers and not stop until their magazines were empty.
In the late afternoon, the sicarios felt the truck pull over to the side of the road and the rumbling engine shut down. Carlos held the cell phone in his hands, and he waited for the text message from Manny.
Thirty seconds passed.
The sicarios swapped a glance.
Angel and Juan shouldered their M4s.
They took aim at the double doors at the end of the container.
Their fingers around the triggers.
Carlos wasn’t so eager to jump to any conclusions, but as another thirty seconds passed and still no text message from Manny up front, he had no other choice but to raise his M4 and take aim at the double doors.
And waited.
And waited.
Then he heard the clunk of the massive vertical leaver that opened the doors shift up and pull open.
Light blasted the container, and the sicarios opened fire.
The three of them did just as they planned. They hammered down on those triggers and didn’t let up until their magazines were empty and they heard the click of the hammers hitting the empty chambers.
Gun smoke filled the container. It put a sting in Carlos’s eyes. He blinked down hard and took half a step forward just as a breeze that came off Lake Michigan sucked out the last of the smoke, and that’s when he saw them.
Fuck me, Carlos thought, the rumours were true. They were fucking true. There he was, a blond kid, bandanna, and blue eyes. He couldn’t have been much older than Carlos’s sixteen-year-old, but when Carlos looked into this boy’s eyes, he didn’t see the eyes of a boy with nothing on his mind but sports, video games, and girls. This kid had eyes that Carlos had seen a thousand times on the streets of El Paso, in the drug labs of Bolivia, and in the eyes of men who were on their knees by the shallow graves they had dug themselves. It was murder.
The man standing next to him wasn’t any less of a threat. Carlos pegged him as fifties, and judging by the comfortable way in which he held that MP5, he was most likely ex-military, and if he wasn’t, he had certainly put in the hours at the range.
And there they were. Just standing at the other end of the container as if they weren’t about to get their fucking heads blown clean off. The boy had his hand on his hip and a bored look on his face. The ex-vet even had the balls to glance at his watch.
Carlos dropped the mag, slammed in another, and heard Angel and Juan do the same.
Weapons were nestled into shoulders.
Fingers wrapped around triggers were squeezed, and the three sicarios lit up that container.
After a couple of rounds, Carlos eased off on the trigger and knew it was a waste of fucking time. He lowered the barrel until he was aiming at nothing in particular and peered through the smoke at the old man and the boy.
‘Not the result you expected, was it?’ the boy asked.
What Carlos, Angel, and Juan didn’t know, and there was no possible way to know, was that the ammunition in their M4s and the magazines on their hips had been swapped out with blanks.
As far as gunfights went, they were standing there with nothing but their dicks in their hands.
Despite the advertisements, there wasn’t much room in the trunk of a Nissan Skyline. Nevertheless, Russell managed to squeeze Carlos into the back. There were complaints, there was a pistol whipping, and after that, the complaints quieted down.
Seven days ago, Angus kicked in the door of a second-rate drug dealer so far down the line in the Santa Blanca cartel that all Angus and Russell took off him was twenty-three dollars and half a pack of cigarettes. What they did get was a story; the cartel were consolidating all their product to one location to stop it from being ripped off. Five days ago, a dealer by the name of Mac-10 told them the exact same story, and then three days after that, they heard the story from a midlevel dealer in Oak Park. The first time they heard it, the story sounded like bullshit. The second time it sounded plausible, but the third, fourth, and fifth times they heard the story, it sounded exactly like what it was: a set up.
Then they came across Manny Azteca. This piece of shit used to run long-haul white goods from Texas to New York when, one night after being wacked off his face on OxyContin, he drove head-on into a family on their way home from a dance recital. Manny Azteca did his time inside and came out with a clean bill of health and a positive attitude. Neither lasted. It was hard for a long-haul driver to get a job hauling electronics after they killed a family of five on the road. Luckily for Manny, the Santa Blanca cartel wasn’t so picky. He knew how to handle a big rig, but what he didn’t know was how to keep his mouth shut. He spent half of the last week bragging about this big job he was doing for the sicarios. He told anybody who would listen, and sooner or later, that little nugget of news came back to Angus and Russell. It only cost fifteen grand for Manny Azteca to turn rat and give up the Santa Blanca cartel. For an extra five grand, he even let Russell swap out the ammunition in the back of his truck with blanks.
Where Manny was now, Angus couldn’t say. He had twenty thousand dollars in his pocket, and if he had any smarts about him, he would disappear. Although to Angus, Manny Azteca didn’t look like the smart type.
Angus climbed behind the wheel, cranked up the Skyline, and pulled out into the traffic. Less than a minute later, they were just another car lost in the flood of Chicago peak hour.
He glanced at his Swatch watch. It was the only thing Angus had kept from his old l
ife. He wore it not because it was the last birthday present his mother had given him. He wore it simply because it told time. But occasionally when he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, for a brief moment, he would forget everything that had happened, and for that brief moment, he would become a teenager again. That moment was only ever small, and it left him as quickly as it came, but in that moment, he had a glimpse into what his life might have been.
They left the day his mother was buried.
He could only take two bags.
Angus filled them both with clothes and walked out of his childhood room for the last time, leaving the stuffed toys on the bed and the model-car collection on the shelves.
‘It’s only a house,’ Russell said as they pulled out of the driveway. ‘Nothing but an empty building.’
Neither of them felt comfortable in the home after what happened, and Russell suspected Maria Garcia and the Santa Blanca cartel would still be gunning for him. He had a safe house in Northern Indiana by lake Michigan that was on five acres. In the past he had used it to build his rifles, make ammunition, store his weapons, and train. From the outside it looked like nothing more than a worn-down farmhouse with flaking paint on the weatherboard walls and rust on the corrugated iron roof. Inside, it was a completely different story. The five-room home had been completely renovated with a modern but sparse kitchen, two bathrooms, and a basement that had been converted into a gym with weights, a rowing machine, a boxing bag, and various hand-to-hand combat weapons. Upstairs, the rooms were mostly empty except for the largest one, which had the windows blacked out, and on all four of the walls hung weapons from floor to ceiling. Machine guns, pistols, shotguns, sub-machine guns, grenade launchers, and enough ammunition to invade hell or put a hole in the side of the world, depending on your mood.
Angus wasn’t a morning person. He was more like a three o’clock in the morning person, but when Russell banged on his bedroom door at five am, he rolled out of bed, put on his hoodie, and within a few minutes, was in the basement gym working out. After a five-mile run on the treadmill and another five on the rowing machine, Angus was ready for the range. Come rain, come hail, and come shine, Angus was out on the range. Small arms at fist like .38s and .45s all the way up to the hand canons that, when strapped to his hip, made him walk with a limp.
