Black Gold Deception

by Jess Walker

  “Sorry Dexter, you’re the odd man out.”

  “I suppose you want me to grab rocks and make a sling shot like David and Goliath,” Dexter replied.

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Lawrence said.

  They positioned themselves a safe distance away from the parked SUV and waited with their guns drawn for the first SUV to appear.

  The headlights of the incoming SUV rounded the hill. Lawrence tightened the grip on his gun.

  “They’re going for it.”

  It hit the lip dead on. The driver however, made a fatal mistake. He applied the brakes, seconds before the SUV launched over the lip. The force of the sudden stop spun the vehicle around mid-air, somersaulting it forward until the roof collided smack down on top of the water. The impact shattered the windows. The driver bounced off the interior ceiling.

  “That’s what happens when you don’t wear a seatbelt,” murmured Sam.

  “Ahh guys… I see the second SUV coming!” hollered Dexter.

  Moments later, the second SUV hit the lip, but unlike the first, it didn’t slow down. It flew across the entire width of the river. Its momentum came to an abrupt stop when it collided against the parked SUV. The driver was ejected through the windshield and shot out like a rocket-propelled grenade, landing against a tree twenty yards away. He slid off the unmovable tree and lay in a lifeless heap at the bottom.

  The passenger inside the SUV unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, and crawled out. Lawrence recognized him: Bubba. He walked over and stood over him as the CEO crawled. Bubba was hurt bad. His leg was lacerated and bleeding profusely. His eye was swollen shut. Shards of glass were embedded in his face. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a shirt badly ripped and hanging loosely off his body.

  Dexter walked up to Lawrence and stood beside him. A look of pity rippled across his face as he stared down at Bubba.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Bubba sobbed. “I’ll give you anything. You want money, consider it done.”

  He continued to crawl, dragging his injured leg behind him in a trail of blood. Dexter and Lawrence followed. Sam watched from a distance.

  “It’s not about the money!” yelled Dexter, his face reddening with anger. “It’s about your pipeline, about the drugs and the weapons you were going to flood the world with. It’s about all the people you’ve killed, robbed, and blackmailed along the way. It’s about the metal and its endless applications available to you at your fingertips—applications that I’m sure you were going to use to bring more evil than good into the world. You deserve to be locked up. The world will be a safer place without you on the streets.”

  “No!” yelled Bubba. “You’re wrong!”

  In the blink of an eye, he rolled onto his back and grabbed the gun strapped under his pant leg, revealing that his injuries weren’t all that severe. He reached up to fire but was shot down before he could pull the trigger. Dexter and Lawrence looked behind them. Sam stood poised in a firing position with his rifle drawn. Smoke drifted out of the barrel. They turned around and looked down at Bubba. His body lay limp and unmoving. He was dead.

  Lawrence turned back toward Sam to say thank you. He saw movement from the corner of his eye. It was the driver. He was still alive. He stood in the shadows behind the trees, close to where he had fallen, with his rifle aimed at Sam’s back.

  “Sam! Behind you!” shouted Lawrence.

  Lawrence went for his gun. Before he could grab it, a shot rang out. He looked at Sam, expecting to see the worst, but was surprised to see him still standing. The man in the shadows had been shot. A bullet went straight through the center of his head, killing him instantly.

  Lawrence and Dexter looked around, confused as to where the shot had come from.

  “If you didn’t shoot him, then who did?” asked Dexter, confused.

  “Good question,” replied Lawrence.

  He grabbed his flashlight and shone it across the river.

  A flash of red and blue lights lit up the hillside. The police were coming. A lone figure stood one hundred yards up the hill. A rifle was slung across his shoulders.

  “I’ll be dammed,” said Lawrence, “it’s Sheriff Joe.”

  Not many people knew that Joe was a crack shot with the rifle. He could hit a nipple off a pregnant cow from well over fifteen hundred yards away He had served three tours in Vietnam under the 5th Special Forces Group as a scout sniper and had over fifty confirmed kills. He was a master sharpshooter, a legend in the army.

  Joe waded across the ice-cold river to join them on the other side. He inspected his target to confirm the kill and looked down at the dead man with a look of pity. “This is the guy who showed up at the police station. Payback’s a bitch. You messed with the wrong hombre.”

  Sam and Lawrence walked over to him. Dexter remained behind, staring at Bubba’s dead body.

  “Nice shooting,” Sam said. “You saved my life.”

  “It’s all part of the job,” Joe replied.

  “How did you find us?” Lawrence asked.

  We managed to track down the Buick Regal you jacked from Jimmy’s Auto Shop to a parking lot up here.”

  “About that,” Sam said. “I—”

  “Save it,” Joe interrupted. “I understand. Desperate times call for desperate measures. You were pretty easy to find.”

  “And you just followed us all the way up here,” Sam said.

  “Like a trail of bread crumbs,” he replied. “It looks like my arrival couldn’t have come at a better time.”

  Joe turned around and saw Dave wading across the river toward them.

  “Hey, Silver Fox, you better get across that river before your balls shrivel up to the size of a raisin,” he shouted, as he walked toward the edge.

  Dave chuckled.

  Lawrence walked back to Dexter. Sam joined Sherriff Joe at the river’s edge.

  “Everything okay?” Lawrence asked, as he knelt beside Dexter. “You’ve been staring at Bubba like he was your own science project gone bad.”

  “There’s something about him,” Dexter replied. “I don’t know what it is. Can’t put my finger on it. Here, help me roll him over onto his stomach.”

  They rolled him over, and Dexter examined Bubba’s back. A twinge of uneasiness grew inside him. He saw a six-inch scar on the man’s upper back around his shoulder blade and a burn mark stretching down the right side of his back. It hit him.

  He fell to his knees and threw up from the shock and the sudden realization that Bubba was Andy. Andy was short for Anderson—Bubba’s last name. Vincent Anderson was the same Andy, the drug dealer who had killed his mom and his brothers, decades ago in Detroit. A flood of emotion overcame him. He sobbed and relived the experience in his head, the dramatic sequence of events coming back to him in vivid color. Moments before, he had been thrown out the window, he remembered he had injured the intruder badly with a kitchen knife and a pot of boiling hot water. Those wounds were clear as day on Bubba’s back.

  Lawrence bent down beside him. “You okay kid?”

  “No, I’m not, but I will be,” he cried. “Ever hear of the saying that goes something like this: For every man, woman, and child on this planet, the separation between them is only six degrees?”

  “Yes, I have. What are you getting at?”

  “I’ve crossed paths with Bubba before. What he did to me and my family has stayed with me—it’s haunted me to this day. He ruined my childhood, he ruined my life, he’s given me nightmares. He took my family away from me! He made me into the person I am today—the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in-between, all of it because of him.”

  “I suppose you’re right, then,” Lawrence said.

  “Right about what?” asked Dexter.

  “What you said to him before he bit the bullet; the world will be a safer place without him on the streets.”


  “I’ve never been as sure of anything in my life,” Dexter replied.

  “And in terms of who you are today,” Lawrence said, “I would say there’s far more good than any ugly and bad combined. You turned out alright, kid. Your family would be proud.”

  Dexter didn’t say anything. He was at a loss for words. The only thing he could do was nod his head as a continuous stream of tears poured down his cheeks.

  About the Author

  Born in 1974, Jess Walker is a Canadian writer of young adult literature. His books tend to read like an action movie—a non-stop adrenaline rush, full of adventure and danger and mystery at every turn, a real page turner. He resides in Toronto Canada with his wife and three young sons where he works as a high school teacher.

  Other Books by this Author

  North Woods Horizon