Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “As the saying goes, homeboy,” the biker said, pulling Lucy up to her tiptoes by her shirt collar, “that ship has sailed. And from the sound of things, you have no idea—not a fucking clue!—who you’re dealing with. And that’s sad. It’s so sad I find myself wanting to tell you who you’re fucking with—but, I mean, if I told you I’d have to kill you. Which is looking like an inevitability anyway.” He pressed his face into the back of Lucy’s neck and took in a deep breath of her. Then, performing for his band of biker cutthroats, he said, “What do you think, brothers: Toss her onto a moving freighter—hoping to miss the propellers—and collect another ten grand? Sell her for parts? Or maybe all aboard the train?”

  Ten of the men chanted “Train! Train! Train!”

  Two made a “Woo-woooo!” sound and laughed.

  One made a choking sound.

  The biker making the choking sound suddenly stumbled toward the man holding Lucy while clutching his throat.

  He crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from his neck.

  A dull pop twenty meters away.

  Another man’s head blossoms red, spraying Lucy and her captor with blood and brains. Lucy’s captor throws her to the ground and begins firing his gun into the assassin’s cover of darkness. Lucy rolls and quickly brings her legs through the loop formed by her handcuffed wrists so that her hands are in front. Her captor suddenly levels his weapon at her. Lucy deflects the gun with her hands and plants a knee in the biker’s nuts. Twice. Then, swinging onto his back as if mounting a horse, she brings the chain links of her handcuffs around his neck and pulls him into her. Choking, he desperately tries to bring his gun over his shoulder to fire at Lucy’s head. He only manages to shoot off his right ear. He drops to the ground, unconscious.

  “Don’t kill him!” I yell to Lucy. “We need him!”

  I could only hope she heard me.

  Tomás and I grab up the weapons of the dead and begin firing: Tomás takes out three of the bikers in short order. I manage to drop four. And our avenging guardian angel puts assassin’s bullets into the heads of two more bikers. The last man dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, lacing his fingers behind his heads. A position I’m sure he was familiar with.

  Echoing footsteps on a freight container.

  Tomás and I brought our weapons up.

  “I don’t ask for much,” suspended FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell said. “Just the occasional Save-the-Date for when the goddamn festivities begin.”

  “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” I said, admiring O’Donnell’s tactical look, smartly accessorized with a Barrett M98B sniper rifle. “How’d you—”

  “The kid called me,” O’Donnell said. Then, gesturing with her head, O’Donnell continued, “Uh—looks like Lucy’s got some ’splainin’ to do—”

  I turned: Lucy had backed her mustached captor against a cargo box, her six-inch hunting knife embedded to the hilt through the bottom of his chin.

  “Okie-dokey, honey,” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling the six-inch blade out of the man’s chin and mouth. “That’s enough of that.”

  “You fucking piece of shit!” Lucy screamed at the biker as he choked on his own blood. Lucy, crying and inconsolable, kicked at him. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, you skunk-fucking bastard!”

  A cell phone in the man’s pocket began ringing.

  I hand Lucy off to Tomás and say to the man as he spits blood, “You mind?” Then I pull a flip phone from the man’s jeans and answer.

  “May I presume the merchandise is on its way?” a man’s cultured voice says.

  “Yeah,” I tersely grunt.

  “Good,” the man said. “Miss Olivier will have your shipping fee the day after tomorrow, seven thirty at The Whitney. And please do clean yourself up this time.”

  “Sure.”

  The man disconnected. I pocketed the bleeding man’s phone, then turned to a still furious Lucy and say, “It’s over.”

  “Yeah,” Tomás said, pointing to the freighter. “It’s sure lookin’ that way.”

  The Federal Shoreland freighter was slowly churning away from the dock.

  Thirty-nine

  The freighter hadn’t moved far from its dock and it wasn’t moving fast—but it was under way.

  “I’ll mobilize the Coast Guard,” O’Donnell said.

  Frankly, I wasn’t listening to O’Donnell. Instead I found myself pointing to a tall mobile gantry, its cargo loading arm still slung over the deck of the moving freighter.

  “You know how to work one of those things?” I said to Tomás.

  “Yeah,” Tomás said brightly. “Back in ’93 I did a short stint as—” Then he gave me a look. “Oh, you are just bullshitting me, right?”

  “Bring ’em home, marine,” O’Donnell said with a definitive nod to me.

  By the time we reached the gantry, the Federal Shoreland was slowly beginning to churn away from the dock, powering up to make its entry into the channel leading to the Detroit River’s freighter lane. Tomás would have to extend the upper loading arm another eight to ten feet if I were to have a good shot at landing on the deck.

  He fired up the gantry and I began climbing the scaffolding of the loading arm.

  From that height I could see numbers beneath the ship’s name. Numbers that corresponded with the numbers written on the back of the photos of women I’d pulled from the biker club’s Spring Lake bar headquarters safe; ship registration numbers.

  At the very top of the scaffolding I climbed out onto the loading arm and gave brief thought to my namesake, poet Octavio Paz . . .

  “One of the most notable traits of the Mexican’s character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is familiar, even complacent in his dealings with it.”

  . . . and then I jumped.

  Somehow, I managed only to break my left pinky finger before rolling and coming to my feet on the freighter’s deck.

  Sprinting to the wheelhouse, I pushed myself through the door and leveled my Glock at the two men standing at the glowing control panel.

  “Who the bloody hell are you?” the grey-bearded man I assumed to be the captain said as he glared at me. Instinctively, his younger first mate raised his hands, appearing ready and able to piss himself.

  “I’m the guy telling you to turn this boat around. You’ve got eight women stowed away, probably held hostage in the supply hold of this ship.”

  “There aren’t any women on my ship,” the grey-bearded captain snarled. “Now explain yourself, son. Who the hell—”

  “I’m the guy with the gun telling you to turn this goddamn tub around. Now!”

  “You pointing a gun at me won’t make turning a hundred tons of steel around any faster or easier.” We stared hard at each other for a moment. Then he glanced at his first mate and said, “Go down to the supply hold. Radio back.”

  “Aye, sir,” his first mate said before walking a cautiously wide berth around me and out of the wheelhouse.

  “Stop the goddamn engines,” I said.

  “If I stop the engines, then she drifts,” the captain said. “And if she drifts, then it’s likely we run aground in a channel wall. And if that happens, nobody’s going anywhere. Best to navigate into the channel where I’m better able to maneuver. What would they be doing here, these women?”

  “I don’t know if you’re playing dumb or if you’re being straight with me,” I said. “But let’s assume for a second you’re being straight: These women have been kidnapped and are being trafficked. This ship is one link in a pipeline from Canada through Michigan then south, east and west. And my guess is, you and other freighters have been transporting women like this into prostitution, domestic slavery and maybe even black-market organ sales for the past year.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Yeah,” I said, still holding my gun steady on
him. “Dear God.”

  As we waited for the First Mate to return, we simply stared at each other with me holding him steady in my gunsight.

  “Am I your first?” I finally said to the white-bearded captain, who appeared unimpressed by my presence.

  “My first what?”

  “Pirate.”

  The wheelhouse door opened behind me.

  “Okay,” his first mate said. “We’re all just gonna breathe easy, okay?”

  His forearm was locked tightly around the neck of a frightened-looking young brown woman. Pressed against her temple was the short barrel of a revolver.

  “What the hell are you doing, McKenzie?” the captain blurted.

  “You,” the first mate named McKenzie said to me. “Put your gun down. Easy, okay?”

  “McKenzie, I’m your captain!”

  “Sir! Just—just shut the fuck up, okay? Please? I don’t want to hurt anybody. Swear to God I don’t.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “You don’t want to hurt anybody? ’Cause it looks to me like that’s exactly what you’re prepared to do. The way I see it, you’ve got three very bad choices.”

  “Come on,” McKenzie pleaded. “Put your gun on the floor. Please.”

  “Crappy choice one,” I said. “You kill me and toss me overboard. Then you kill your captain and somehow make it look like an accident. After that you deliver the girls, collect your pay and disappear. And there’s nothing more pathetic than an amateur trying to disappear.”

  “Jesus Christ! Will you just put the gun down!”

  “Then there’s shitty choice two,” I said, slowly bending to appear as if I was complying with his request to place my gun on the wheelhouse floor. “You see the profound error of your ways and pray for the mercy of the court at your sentencing. And for a crime like this, I don’t think mercy is in the stars.”

  He laughed, confident he was only hours away from a life-changing paycheck.

  “Then there’s three, which isn’t really a choice,” I said, still holding onto my gun and crouched near the floor. “It’s more of a lousy permanent condition.”

  “Condition?” McKenzie said, not knowing whether to point his gun at his captain or me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Three is somebody on this boat pulls the duty of washing your brains off the wall behind you.”

  He issued a quick, nervous laugh. After a second or two of seeing the deadly intent in my eyes, he brought the barrel of his revolver to me . . .

  . . . but not fast enough.

  Even at an awkward, crouched angle, I fired.

  The bullet grazed the top of the young woman’s left ear before entering McKenzie’s mouth at a thirty-degree angle, exploding the back of his head and painting the wall behind him with blood, teeth, bone and brain.

  His remains collapsed to the floor.

  The young woman, screaming, ran to me and I held her. In Spanish I told her it was over, that she was safe, and that we’d get her home.

  Behind me, the captain radioed the shipyard.

  “This is the freighter Federal Shoreland,” he said. “We are returning to port.”

  “Say again, Federal Shoreland?” a voice crackled back. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yeah,” the captain said, staring at his dead first mate. “Pretty big one.”

  Four DPD cruisers had arrived on the scene, their lights flashing.

  O’Donnell called the FBI knowing that the first thing they would do upon their arrival would be to put her in cuffs.

  Of the eight women in the freighter’s supply hold, five were undocumented Mexicans and one was Honduran. They had all made secret homes and quiet lives of servitude in Detroit and Ann Arbor. The last two were a black girl and a white girl, neither past the age of fifteen, holding hands and looking as if they’d just barely survived the world-ending fires of the apocalypse.

  Three of O’Donnell’s FBI colleagues surrounded her; one agent had his handcuffs out and ready. After a minute or two, the agents started to walk away. One of the agents stopped, turned back to O’Donnell and tossed his handcuffs to her.

  “When you see the boss,” the agent said, “put ’em on, okay? Makes everybody’s life easier.”

  The agent saluted O’Donnell, then walked away.

  “Goddammit, August,” O’Donnell said with an exasperated sigh. “Why do you do shit like this?”

  “You’re gonna have to shoot me to stop me, Megan,” I said. “You gonna shoot me?”

  “The temptation is always there, August.” Then, continuing to stare at me through narrowed eyes she said, “Ah, hell. Goddamn bullet would probably ricochet off you and catch me in the forehead.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I hustled the undocumented Mexican and Honduran women to Tomás.

  “Get them to Father Grabowski,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  Tomás started to move the six women to his truck, but a uniformed Detroit cop intercepted him.

  “Hey, whoa, hold on,” the cop said, taking a stance in front of Tomás and the women. “Who are you? Where are you taking these women?”

  O’Donnell stepped in between Tomás and the uniform, flashed an FBI ID she had no right to flash and said, “This man is with me. These women are witnesses to a federal crime and vital to an ongoing FBI investigation. They are being taken into protective custody. Is there a problem, officer?”

  The officer ran his eyes over Tomás, O’Donnell and the six women before jerking a thumb over his shoulder and walking away.

  I called Father Grabowski, waking him out of a dead sleep, and gave him a heads-up. With his network, in less than four hours he’d probably have the six women praising Baby Jesus over a good breakfast in Windsor, Ontario.

  “I’m going to hell for this,” O’Donnell said, standing next to me and watching the swarm of Detroit police and now State police and FBI agents; forensics people in white moon suits photographing bodies and weapons, yellow cones marking shell casings, the dockmaster being scrutinized. And the last of the living BMC bikers being marched to squad cars. “I am definitely going to hell for this.”

  “Where’s Lucy?” I said.

  “Four blocks away in my car,” O’Donnell said. “I left her a flask of Irish whiskey.”

  “She’s not legal.”

  “Then I am definitely taking the express handbasket to hell.”

  “Pretty girls don’t go to hell,” I said. “They go to Tuscany. Besides. The way I see it, you get a spanking in Director Phillips’s office. Then he pins a medal on you. You might even get your picture hung in the cafeteria—‘Employee of the Month’!” We watched the methodical documentation of the dock carnage for a minute or two. Then I said, “Those four shots you took tonight? Outstanding! I owe you big time, Megan.”

  “Yeah, well, a woman really shouldn’t just rely her looks,” she sighed. “It helps to have a skill. And by the way—it was only two.”

  “Two?”

  “I only took two shots tonight, August,” O’Donnell said.

  Forty

  For as much as I believe in God, the possibility of miracles and the existence of angels (and the willingness to admit I am far from being one) I doubt very much any of God’s legions of seraphim carry sniper rifles.

  So, who made the other two sniper shots at the dock, catching a bad guy in the head and giving Tomás, Lucy and myself a new lease on life?

  Drinking a beer on the stoop of my house two nights after the dock firefight (and after answering several hundred questions posed by Detroit PD, State cops, FBI, Homeland Security, ICE and DEA, with my trusted attack-dog attorney David G. Baker vigorously defending my dubious virtue) I had a feeling I couldn’t shake. That uneasy feeling of having been watched over a period of time from a distance. Every movement documented and annotated, every breath lo
gged and tagged, every uttered word entered into an invisible ledger.

  I didn’t like the feeling of someone doing to me what the Marines had taught me to do so well: put a human life in the crosshairs and wait patiently for the killing moment.

  Between sips of my beer, my eyes kept landing on the house of a new neighbor. Trent T.R. Ogilvy.

  Qui audet adipiscitur.

  Who Dares, Wins.

  Ogilvy was former SAS, which made him if not a brother-in-arms, at least a distant and highly respected cousin. And if anybody could shoot out the eye of a flying sparrow at two-hundred yards it was British SAS.

  But all indications were Trent T.R. Ogilvy was who he said he was; a late-stage hippy with a ridiculous man-bun hairstyle doing socially conscientious works through an internationally recognized charitable organization. All while grossing out a few neighbors with his morning front porch yoga routine.

  Whatever his background, Ogilvy had at no cost brought computers and Wi-Fi to people living in Detroit’s information deserts.

  Who says America doesn’t need foreign aid?

  Lucy had checked him out. As deeply as she burrowed into his digital footprint, he appeared only to be Trent T. R. Ogilvy, trust fund kid from an aristocratic English military family that possessed eight decades worth of commendations and decorations from the Queen herself. Ogilvy, it seems, had even served briefly with Prince Harry in Iraq.

  Maybe I should just sit on my stoop, listen to the white-noise of traffic on I-75, drink cold Mexican beer and count my lucky stars.

  Maybe I should just be grateful for two nights without ICE patrols creeping through the ’hood while they reassessed what kind of State-sponsored terror organization they wanted to be when they grew up.

  And maybe I should just get back to flipping houses and daydreaming about Tatina naked in my bed. Or naked in her bed.