by Rob Ashman
Today Mechanic had a little surprise for Walker.
‘We need to meet the others,’ she said, catching him off-guard.
‘But I thought I was to handle my guys?’
‘I want to brief them personally. I need to look them in the eye and be sure they understand what to do. We must move quickly and with Silverton embroiled in his business now is a good time.’
‘Okay, I’ll contact them, they’re both on standby awaiting my call. Have you figured out when we go?’
‘When Silverton decides the time is right to go back on the gambling trail, that’s when we strike.’
‘Where do you want to meet?’
‘At the warehouse – it’ll be good to take another look at it anyway.’
‘I’ll set it up,’ he said and left the room in search of the public call boxes.
In less than an hour Mechanic and Walker crunched the tyres of the limo over the dirt track and parked at the disused warehouse. It was a vast building which had once been used for grain storage but was now a derelict shell. Its location in the middle of nowhere was perfect: about three miles west of the main road to the dam, an ideal place to switch vehicles after the drop.
Walker pulled aside a section of metal sheeting and they squeezed through. The floor was a patchwork of broken concrete lit by blinding shafts of sunlight where the roof was missing.
Mechanic looked around, the place was empty.
‘Where are the others? I thought you said they were here?’
She turned to find Walker holding a gun.
‘There are no other guys. The same as there was never a plan to take Silverton. You played me for a fool and you lost, big time.’
‘Put the gun down, Walker, and stop screwing around. We got business to attend to here. There’s three million dollars at stake and I don’t play games with that amount of money.’
‘Drop the pretence, Jessica Hudson, or whoever the hell you are. Your acting stinks. Now take your gun out real slow and toss it over here.’
‘Walker, what is this all about? You and I are working together. What are you playing at?’
‘Just do it.’
‘What the fuck is this about, Walker?’
‘Do it now.’
Mechanic shook her head, withdrew her gun and slid it across the floor.
‘The way you took out my boys you have got to be a professional. So I did a little digging and guess what? You’re not ex-military or ex-police and you have no record of any weapons training. Nor do you appear on any search on close protection training. You come up as plain Jessica Hudson and that doesn’t figure. By all accounts you’re an office worker, well I don’t buy it. You don’t get that good practising on a firing range.’
‘You’re talking shit, Walker,’ Mechanic protested. ‘I got lucky with those guys, that’s all. Now can we get back to business?’
‘Bullshit. There was nothing lucky about what you did and you know it. No, Jessica Hudson, you’re well-trained and for some reason you got a watertight cover story. And therein lies the difficulty.’ He circled around Mechanic, the gun pointing at her head. ‘If you’re what I think you are then we both have a massive problem.’
‘I don’t get it. What problem? What are you talking about?’
‘You figured out the kidnap plan and wasted my team, so my obvious next step is to take you out because you’re a risk. You’re a loose end. My problem is you’ll want to strike first. This is all about loose ends, Jess, and who gets to tidy them up first.’
‘Walker, where are you getting off on this?’ Her voice was shaking.
‘You didn’t fool me for one minute with the ‘we need to kidnap Silverton’ routine. It was too obvious. You were playing me in order to get close enough and pull the trigger.’
‘Walker, we’re in this together. What happened in the past has gone. I don’t like you but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to get rich.’ She was pleading with him.
‘That’s horseshit. Your only target is me, I saw through it straightaway. I have to congratulate you though on your meticulous planning. It’s a work of art. Shame we won’t be using it.’
‘Walker, put the fucking gun down. We can work something out. I don’t want to kill you, we can get rich together.’
‘It’s been a pleasure working with you.’
Walker squeezed the trigger.
There was a metallic click.
He pulled it again – click! He looked at his gun and flicked the safety catch on and off – click!
Mechanic put her hand to the back of her head and removed the 9mm revolver which was duck-taped in place between her shoulder blades. She blew a hole in Walker’s left knee. He screamed and fell to the ground clutching his shattered leg.
‘It doesn’t work without this.’ She reached into her pocket and held up the firing pin between her fingers. ‘I did say you were sloppy.’
She picked up her gun from the floor and replaced it in its holster. Walker was writhing around in the dust with both hands on his knee trying to stop the blood.
‘You should take your gun into the shower with you. Leaving it around your hotel room, you don’t know who might mess with it.’
‘You fucking bitch!’ Walker made a grab for his right ankle where he kept his snub-nose revolver. She fired and his ankle exploded in a shower of blood and bone. The gun spun across the floor.
‘You are so predictable,’ she walked around him, ‘very predictable. Not even you are stupid enough not to work things out. And you are pretty dumb, Walker, pretty dumb.
‘I’ll fucking kill you.’
‘I doubt that.’
Walker was crippled on the floor and sobbing with pain, his legs covered in blood. Mechanic removed her jacket and placed both guns on the ground.
‘What do you want?’ hissed Walker. ‘I have money, I can pay.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ she said moving towards him. ‘Money is nice but sometimes silence is better.’ She drew an eight-inch serrated hunting knife from under the back of her shirt. Walker’s eyes flicked between Mechanic’s face and the blade as it circled in the air glinting in the light. She knelt by his side.
‘But sometimes to fully appreciate the quality of silence you need to first endure some noise.’ She plunged the blade into his thigh. The force of the blow lifted Walker off the floor and the point exited the other side of his leg. He screamed and squirmed on the ground clutching the handle.
Walker dragged himself across the concrete to get away from Mechanic, leaving a bloody trail in the dust. She brought her boot down hard on the back of Walker’s head smashing his face into the floor. His head bounced back. She stomped again.
He cried out and rolled onto his back spitting blood and saliva into the air. Mechanic lay down next to him and cradled his head against her chest in a lover’s embrace.
‘There, there,’ she said softly.
His nose was a bloody pulp and part of his top lip was hanging loose where his broken teeth had severed it. His right eye was closing fast and his face was swelling with purple bruises. She adjusted her position and wrapped her legs around his body, clamping him in place. Walker coughed blood onto her shirt.
‘You fucking bitch, I’ll—’
‘Shhh, not so loud.’ Her left forearm tightened across his windpipe. He struggled to pull the knife free.
‘They can get a little stuck,’ she said reaching down and curling her fingers around his. ‘It’s the serrated edge, makes it hard to get out. It needs a twist.’
She rotated the blade and yanked it free. Walker screamed as the searing pain jerked him off the floor.
Mechanic held him tight.
‘They can be such tricky little bastards,’ she said in his ear. Walker’s cries were choked off as Mechanic crushed his windpipe.
‘Now, Walker,’ she whispered sliding the blade beneath the waistband of his suit. ‘It would appear you have far too many body parts in place.’ She forced the knife upwards
slicing the front of his trousers and underwear wide open. Walker’s eyes bulged from their sockets as he fought for air. His hands clawed at her arm clamped tight across his throat.
‘So I need to remedy the situation.’
The blade flashed and a stream of blood and tissue spilled across the floor.
17
Chuck Hastings scowled over the top of his half-moon glasses.
‘I thought you were suspended,’ he barked as he descended the last few steps into the basement.
‘I was, or rather I am,’ Lucas replied, not caring one way or the other.
‘Then how did you dig this lot up?’
‘Consider it the work of a concerned citizen, sir.’
‘Give us the room,’ Hastings bellowed and eight people scurried past in a blizzard of white boiler suits.
‘You’re fine in here,’ Lucas said, ‘but not in there.’ He pointed past the hinged section of wall into the room beyond. ‘It wouldn’t be good to compromise the crime scene.’
Hastings scowled at him.
‘Thanks for the unnecessary guidance. You need to have a damn good explanation for this.’
Lucas scanned the interior of the basement. ‘Pretty simple. Mechanic built this as a safe room, a place to go when things got too hot and she needed to disappear for a while. Which she did.’
‘How did you know it was here?’
‘I didn’t until an hour ago. There had to be an explanation of why we couldn’t find her after the shootout with Harper. I figured we couldn’t find her because she never left.’
‘Where is the eternal drunk Harper?’
‘Probably midway down a bottle of cheap whisky by now. Not heard from him in weeks.’ Lucas had decided he had no choice but to call the discovery into the station but there was little to be gained by implicating Harper.
‘What’s here altogether?’
‘A stash of food, cooking gear, bedding, clothes and some medical stuff. Everything you would need to hole up for a few weeks until things cooled down.’
‘Let me get this clear. You had a miraculous moment of clarity and worked all this out by yourself, did you?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Lucas. ‘Anyway the doc said it would be good therapy for me to return to the scene after what happened. You know, facing your demons and stuff like that. So I thought, why not?’
‘You did good finding this place but you have to back off, Lucas.’
‘I thought, if I could be of help then …?’
‘Goddamit you’re suspended. You need to go home, put your slippers on and reacquaint yourself with your wife and daytime television.’
‘But my mind is still full of this case, sir, I can’t seem to switch it off.’ Lucas was toying with his boss and enjoying every moment.
‘Find a way,’ Hastings said firmly. ‘That’s a direct order. You’re already in a ton of trouble, don’t make life worse for yourself.’
Lucas stopped talking and stared at the floor like a schoolboy in the principal’s study.
‘Have you found anything out of the ordinary? Anything which gives us additional leads?’ his boss asked opening the door into the room behind.
Lucas was not about to give away his prize deduction to his shit-for-brains boss. He might be a concerned citizen but he still harboured dark thoughts about killing the bitch himself.
‘Not really. You might want to take a close look at those white buckets at the back.’ Lucas threw him a pair of white overshoes. ‘SOCO were all over them, they seemed important.’
Lucas left the basement as his boss entered the room to conduct his own forensic investigation.
Two thousand miles away Mechanic sat quietly in Silverton’s hotel suite. She flicked through a newspaper with an overwhelming feeling of calm. Butchering Walker had gone completely to plan and the psycho-bitch side of her personality was very contented indeed.
She summarised her position. There were no loose ends, she had a new employer who liked her and the money was good. Unusually for Mechanic, all was well.
Killing Walker was a piece of cake, but disposing of his body had been another matter. He was a big guy and the hole in the cavity wall which she’d planned to use wasn’t big enough to conceal the body. She’d contemplated cutting him up and feeding him into the recess one piece at a time but that needed tools which she didn’t have. In the end she resorted to a tried and tested method, a dousing of gasoline and Walker’s lighter.
It was six thirty in the evening. She had only seen Silverton briefly to say ‘Hi’ before he buried himself in the office with the phone grafted to his head. Then in true Broadway style he burst through the double doors, his hands held aloft in triumph.
‘Nailed the bastard!’ he said, crossing the room towards the drinks trolley.
‘That’s excellent, Mr Silverton. Does that mean we’re back on the party trail?’
‘Sure does, Ms Hudson, it sure does. Where the hell is Walker? I tried to get hold of him but no one has seen him.’
‘Don’t know, sir, he didn’t say anything to me, but then I think he’s still brooding a little since you took me onto the payroll.’
‘He’ll get over it, and I don’t need him anyway, I have you.’ Silverton reached into a closet and retrieved his Stetson. ‘Saddle up girl, I’m feeling mighty lucky.’ He galloped around the room waving his hat in the air, riding an imaginary horse.
Mechanic smiled and flinched at the ‘saddle up girl’ reference. She had no idea how good a businessman he was, but in his spare time Harry acted like he was in a John Wayne movie.
She glanced at her watch. ‘I need to make a quick call, Mr Silverton.’
‘Sure thing, take your time. Get your shit together cause it’s gonna be a late one.’ He belly-laughed his way through the bedroom to the shower.
Mechanic cursed under her breath. It was Thursday and she couldn’t miss another visit. She reconsidered.
‘Mr Silverton, sorry about this but can I take a couple of hours off? I have some personal stuff which needs my attention.’
‘Sure, I can live with that. Meet me back here when you’re done. Make it quick.’
Mechanic thanked him and left. She was already late.
18
Honeydew House sat at the very outskirts of the city. It was a quaint, well-maintained property with a white picket fence set in a couple of acres of land. Its nearest neighbour was three hundred yards away and you had to drive to get anywhere.
It was as far out of town as you could go, located on the boundary of the city limits. Sitting on the front step you looked at the sprawling city of Las Vegas, and sitting on the back step you looked out across the Mojave Desert.
Mechanic pulled her car off the dirt road and steeled herself for what was coming next. No matter how many times she did this, it always tore her apart.
The house belonged to Jeb and Jenny-Jay Huxton who until four years ago were a normal married couple with a socially awkward daughter who seemed unable to date guys. But being gay in a God-fearing family was never going to be an easy option.
Jenny-Jay was a retired nurse with thirty years’ clinical service. She’d worked in every department a busy hospital had to offer including midwifery, which she enjoyed the least, saying it was too damn noisy. Trauma was her speciality and the care of the terminally ill.
She was an excellent nurse and shunned the numerous opportunities for promotion which came her way. She would throw her head back and laugh at the very suggestion, saying, ‘You can’t do the Lord’s work pushing a pen.’
She would have continued past her thirty years’ service if it wasn’t for a young drunk who, one cold November night, fell out of a bar and into his car. He drove five miles up the road, lost control and ploughed his vehicle headlong into another one travelling in the opposite direction. That car was driven by her daughter.
The collision propelled him through his windshield, killing him instantly. Mary-Jay Huxton was much less fortunate.
The
seat belt kept her in place but couldn’t prevent the steering column crushing her chest and the engine block smashing her legs. Her broken body was fixed over time but the lack of oxygen to her brain could not be healed. It left her with locked-in syndrome at the age of twenty-six.
Her mother quit her job, set up a critical care unit at home and devoted herself to nursing Mary-Jay. Her father, Jeb Huxton, set about every member of the drunk guy’s family with a baseball bat when they were eating lunch one Sunday afternoon after church. He received a six month spell in jail and Jenny-Jay began her slide into depression and denial.
She didn’t visit him once, instead she devoted her energies to administering to her daughter in their remote farmhouse and carrying on as though nothing had happened. After all, the events of that fateful November night were the Lord’s will, and He sends trials to test the true believers. And the Huxton family were the truest of believers.
Jeb did his time and came back home to a completely different woman. To put it in non-clinical terms, she’d gone batshit crazy. She had totally lost her grasp on reality and was in full blown denial. Jeb found the best way to deal with this was to go back to work, attended church on Sundays and pretended all was well.
Medicines, dressings and personal hygiene items don’t come cheap. Jeb earned enough to pay the bills but it was tough. So when the nice young woman offered to pay handsomely for Jenny-Jay’s services, it was the Lord sending her a saviour. The new girl who came to stay was about the same age as her daughter and so well-mannered.
She and Mary-Jay got on like a house on fire. You couldn’t stop them chatting and laughing together. They both had the same wicked sense of humour and the new girl was a great companion. After a brief trial they agreed as a family to let the new girl stay – it was a wonderful arrangement, things couldn’t be better.
It was a damn shame both women were largely brain dead. Each one was locked in her own silent world and looked after by her ever-attentive nurse.
