by Matt Rogers
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Seriously, we are. None of us are hurt. Slapped around a little, but that’s it.’
Harvey stepped forward and said, ‘We’re okay, man. Thank you so much.’
‘You feel okay now,’ Slater said. ‘You’re ecstatic. As you should be. You feel on top of the world. But it’ll hit you later on. Might be tomorrow, might be a few days from now. It’s going to bring a range of emotions you probably haven’t felt before. See psychologists, okay? If it gets bad. Promise me you will.’
Casey nodded. ‘Promise.’
He could see it in her eyes. The look of a deer frozen in headlights. She seemed to have her wits about her, but all four of them were operating on autopilot, and it was no goddamn wonder. Slater couldn’t recall a time in his life where he’d been without conflict, but if he could he never would have been able to handle a situation like this. Sure, they were young and foolish, but they held themselves together with remarkable composure, and for that he gave them credit.
‘Come on,’ he said, shepherding them toward one of the giant pick-up trucks scattered across the clearing.
Jake, Harvey, and Whitney piled into the backseat, and Casey slotted herself into the passenger seat.
Slater eyed Ruby warily.
She stood with her shoulders slumped, reclaiming the same innocence she’d possessed a few minutes earlier. A natural tendency, Slater figured. She must have spent days impersonating a terrified hostage. She wasn’t able to shake the guise so effortlessly.
But her eyes said everything.
They were cold, and detached, yet somehow still ablaze with interest.
Slater cocked his head. ‘What happens now?’
‘You want to take responsibility for them?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘That’s why I came here.’
‘They’re not my concern. Go for your life.’
‘I want to speak to you. After this.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Humour me that, at least. There’s a lot of things I need to know.’
‘There’s a lot of things I need to keep secret. I’m not telling you anything.’
‘I know Russell Williams.’
‘Could be bullshit.’
‘Five-nine. Short brown hair with flecks of grey. Slate eyes. He’s from Northern Maine. Looks a bit like George Clooney.’
Ruby said nothing for a long time. Silence fell over the clearing. Casey and her friends stirred restlessly in the truck. Slater stayed perched on the side step, awaiting a response. Ears perked. Eyebrows raised.
Finally, she said, ‘Where are you taking them?’
‘Quibdó.’
‘The capital?’
‘Safety in numbers. Especially as far as they’re concerned.’
She nodded. ‘Smart.’
‘So?’
‘I’ll meet you there.’
‘Where?’
‘You said something about a force.’
‘What?’
‘A division. Of the government. I assume you work for them.’
‘Used to.’
‘So you’re rich.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
He said it with a certain level of sarcasm.
Her mouth upturned into something resembling a half-smile.
‘You’re rich,’ she said.
‘Okay. Your point?’
‘Find the most expensive hotel in Quibdó. Book the most expensive suite available. I’ll find you.’
‘That’s not enough to go off.’
‘Yes it is,’ she said, and looked him deep in the eyes.
He saw capability there.
She would find him.
He nodded. ‘Okay. But please find me. I need answers.’
‘You sound desperate.’
‘There’s something forming in my mind. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I need reassurance.’
‘What if I can’t give you reassurance?’
‘Then there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘You’re not making it likely that I’ll follow through with this.’
‘Follow through with it. There’s something in it for you.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘I’m good in bed.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘We all need a release every now and then. Open invitation. Find out if you want.’
Then he swung into the cab and slammed the door closed, sealing Ruby off from the five of them.
He twisted the keys in the ignition, stamped on the accelerator, and floored it out of the clearing. Descending back into the hot oppressive night. Leaving the death and devastation behind. Forgetting the cartel ever existed.
There were dozens more out here, no doubt.
Cut the head off a snake, and two more take its place.
But it didn’t matter. He had the college kids. They had their whole lives ahead of them. That was enough satisfaction for one day.
And he was tired as hell.
It was a couple of miles before he noticed Casey glaring at him. He looked across. ‘What?’
‘Really?’ she said.
He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s a tactic. Maximise confusion. She couldn’t possibly have been expecting that approach. And it’s worked before. I guess there’s something tantalising about me. It’ll get her to Quibdó.’
‘What were you banking on?’
‘That she wouldn’t anticipate me saying that.’
‘And?’
‘And it’d leave her confused. It’d put her on the back step. She’d be trying to break that down. Was there any hidden meaning behind it? Did it refer to something she’s privy to? She’ll be dissecting what I said for hours.’
Casey said nothing. Just stared straight ahead.
Slater muttered, ‘Or it was just the truth.’
He barrelled deeper into the jungle, heading for the capital of the Chocó Department.
His whole life in turmoil.
38
He should have known they wouldn’t conduct the journey in silence. Slater would have preferred that. He always favoured peace and quiet in the aftermath of brutal conflict.
He noted how insane his life must be if he had general principles of operating after murder.
Was it murder, though?
It sure felt like it.
He clammed up for the first portion of the journey, all his concentration on the inky blackness ahead of them. It was like something out of a video game. Their surroundings revealed themselves one miserable foot at a time, glowing bright, illuminated by the glare of the headlights, and then a moment later plunged back into darkness. It created a halo-like effect around the truck, swamping the rest of the jungle in mystery.
Slater didn’t want to know what lay out there.
Aside from the obvious jungle predators, he knew Santiago’s cartel wasn’t an anomaly. He’d spent half his career wrapped up in this shit. These lawless territories in the dark heart of countries like Colombia stewed with gang wars, narco infighting, and obscene violence. He’d just experienced it first-hand, but he knew he was simply scratching the tip of the iceberg. He didn’t want to venture any deeper. It would only lead to gridlock. There was too much devastation swept under the rug in this jungle, and he could spend his whole life on a rampage through the trees and only deal with half a percent of the narcos.
He knew that from personal experience.
He got on a main road — really, nothing more than a slightly wider dirt path, but in comparison to where they’d come from it felt close to the heart of a major metropolitan city. There were street lights interspersed every few hundred feet, all weak and flickering, some dead, but they indicated something resembling civilisation wasn’t far off. The trees backed away, their tendrils sneaking into the gloom, exposing the night sky.
Slater buzzed the driver’s window down a crack and breathed fresh air.
It was no different to the air deeper in t
he jungle, still hot and rancid.
But it comforted him all the same. Call it placebo. Call it whatever you wanted. He sensed a weight off his chest, a metaphorical cinderblock lifted. There was dry blood encrusted on his scalp and tremors in his hands and a dull throbbing ache in his gut, but he was alive, and the kids were safe.
He lapsed into silence, pulled a smartphone wrapped in a shock-resistant case from his pocket, and nodded with satisfaction at the absence of cracks in the screen. He drove with one hand and navigated to an offline maps application, setting the destination for Quibdó.
Casey noticed. The soft glow of the screen bathed the interior of the truck in a small halo of light. She looked over and spotted where they were headed.
‘You been there before?’ she said.
Slater barely noticed her voice, entranced by the co-ordinates. They were four hours from the capital city if they kept their current pace. Surprisingly close. In another fifty miles the unkempt dirt road would merge with a highway and take them right up to the southern end of Quibdó’s city limits. He breathed pure relief and tossed the phone on top of the dashboard, where it came to rest in a shallow groove. It would bark at him if he made a wrong turn. Not that there were any turns to make. Not out here.
‘You got a signal?’ Casey said, persevering even though she hadn’t got an answer for the first question.
The darkness ahead became hypnotic. Slater stared at it, conjuring all kinds of demons that might stew in the night. Most of them from his own mind. He replayed the events of the night over and over again, like a VCR stuck on an incessant loop.
His eyelid twitched.
‘Hey,’ Casey said.
He looked across. ‘What?’
‘You don’t talk anymore?’
‘Adrenalin wore off.’
‘You don’t want to talk?’
‘You must be a clairvoyant.’
She almost bit at the snark, then held her tongue and settled back in the seat. A poignant silence radiated from the back seats. Jake and Harvey and Whitney sat mute, squashed shoulder to shoulder, none of them so much as breathing heavy. Slater knew why. Instincts. They’d been fearing for their lives for the last half-day. That didn’t fade easily. Not when it was their first time.
You always remember your first time.
Slater remembered his.
When the gangsters at the port took his mother, he was only thirteen. He stormed down there with a chip on his shoulder, cursing out men who had no business being cursed out, completely oblivious and mostly uncaring of the consequences. He even beat the shit out of one of the perimeter guards. No combat training — in fact, he’d never even thrown a punch in his life before that moment. But unbelievable natural athleticism and a genetic reaction speed nearly unrivalled in modern combat history counted for something. He almost killed the guy. The low-ranked thug hadn’t been the one to put his mother on the boat and ship her to Saudi Arabia or wherever the hell they take women for sadistic purposes, but he might as well have been. By the end of it, his face resembled a swollen pumpkin.
Slater had planned to continue his rampage all the way up to the foot of the mob. But they’d caught him at the perimeter and shoved a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger and it jammed. Then they told him to fuck off back to the hole he lived in and not bother them again.
And to consider himself lucky for not joining his mother, wherever she was.
He’d followed their orders. Because nothing rivalled that first time.
The primitive part of his brain firing up, screaming, Holy shit!
Death’s right there. Do whatever they say. Crawl away, apologise, do whatever you need to do to stay alive.
So he’d backed off. Retreated. Looked at the floor and said he was sorry. He let them hit him a few times too. To make up for what he did to their grunt. He took it in stride. It cracked his nose real bad. And then he went back to his room and told his dad he’d got in a street fight. Not that the old man noticed. He was too busy grieving and drinking. He also knew who’d taken his wife. But he didn’t have the spine to do anything about it.
Slater’s father got a gun under his chin a couple of years later, too. But it was his own doing.
And it didn’t jam.
Casey said, ‘You okay?’
Slater wiped his eyes. There were no tears, but there might as well have been. He hated showing vulnerability. A natural instinct. He stuffed all the emotion back down inside. Deep inside.
‘Fine,’ he muttered, and kept driving.
39
The monastic silence ended when Slater realised he would need to babysit the four of them out of the country.
They were two hours separated from the jungle encampment, and the shock was setting in. He noticed when Casey squared away, shrinking toward the passenger door and planting her chin to her chest. Her eyes glazed over and she stared at the dashboard, detached, replaying the memories of the evening. The same uneasy quiet resonated from the back seat, and Slater figured the three in the back had gone into shock the moment they left the clearing. They probably thought they were floating through a dream world, leaving their old lives firmly in the past. Emotions and sensations they hadn’t considered feasible were now at the forefront of their minds.
Slater let them be for as long as he could. He’d needed that initial quiet to process the slaughter of a dozen narcos. It had been quite some time since he’d killed anyone.
But now he was fine.
Just another horrific memory to add to the bank.
He said, ‘We’re an hour out.’
Casey nodded.
No word from the back seat.
He said, ‘El Caraño Airport is near Quibdó. You won’t be taken in the city. Too busy. Too much room for error. They all prey on the small towns. You understand?’
Casey nodded again.
Still no word from the back seat.
‘I have places to be,’ he said. ‘So I’ll drop you off somewhere discreet and then you need to find your way home. Can you do that?’
‘Here?’ she said, her voice soft, her eyes widening.
She glanced out the window. Still nothing by desolation.
Slater shook his head. ‘In Quibdó.’
‘Places to be?’ she said, almost mockingly.
‘Don’t know what you’re implying.’
‘This is a strange fucking world.’
‘You’re in shock.’
‘How can you flirt with someone in the middle of all of that? Who was that girl? What the hell is going on?’
‘I know as much as you do.’
‘You were calm enough to flirt.’
‘Is that a sin?’
‘It’s just weird.’
‘You managed well enough at the bar.’
She shot him daggers, sideways, across the centre console.
From the back seat, Jake said, ‘What?’
Slater threw a glance over his shoulder and saw him sitting there, shoulders hunched forward, white as a sheet. From the shock. Not from the accusation. Social gossip didn’t mean anything anymore. Slater understood. Now their perspectives had shifted. Nothing mattered other than being alive.
Slater turned to Casey and said, ‘It was normal for you. At the bar. Because you’re comfortable in that setting. I just happen to be comfortable in settings like what you saw back there.’
‘How?’
‘You get used to everything.’
‘That’s not an explanation.’
‘Yes it is.’
From the back seat, Harvey said, ’You do that all the time, man?’
‘Frequently enough.’
‘And you’re still alive.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Lucky?’
‘I like to think so.’
‘Crazy shit, bro.’
‘Yeah,’ Slater muttered. ‘Crazy shit.’
‘I’m sorry we fucked up so bad,’ Harvey said. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For my part in it, at least. I
can only speak for myself.’
Under her breath, Whitney mumbled, ‘Sorry.’
She would be quiet for the next few days. Maybe weeks. And for good reason.
Jake said, ‘I’m so sorry, man.’
‘Don’t apologise.’
‘Why not? That’s the least we can do.’
‘I was your age once.’
‘You were dumb like us?’
By then, Black Force had already recruited him.
‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Happens to all of us.’
Except for a select few.
Like me.
‘Just research where you’re going next time,’ Slater said.
‘So that’s it?’ Casey said. ‘This is the end of the road? We’ll never see you again?’
‘When we get to Quibdó,’ Slater said. ‘Then we’ll part ways.’
‘How can we repay you?’
‘You can’t.’
The truth.
She said, ‘Do you need money? We can all transfer you. For the rest of our lives. We owe you that much, at least.’
Still young, still dumb, still foolish.
He said, ‘I’ve got money.’
She said, ‘I don’t know what else we can offer.’
‘Go and live good lives and do good for people,’ he said. ‘Sounds simple, but that’s enough.’
‘That can’t be the only reason you pulled us out of that mess.’
‘It’s reason enough.’
‘Why do you do it?’
‘Habit. Probably.’
‘Like you said before…?’
‘You get used to everything.’
‘Do you have a death wish?’
‘Probably.’
The conversation petered out, mostly because Slater couldn’t take his mind off the woman with the amber eyes.
Ruby.
What the hell was she?
A trained killer like him, and one of the best actresses he’d ever laid eyes on.
Russell Williams.
How did it all connect?
He floored the accelerator, stifling the questions running through his head, making himself concentrate like a hawk on the uneven road to ensure he didn’t plunge off the trail and kill them all. It lifted him out of his thoughts. Casey protested, and there were mutters of disapproval from the back seat, but Slater ignored them completely.