by Sam Jones
Kruger said, “I don’t know what to tell you, Lou. But that stuff from back in the day really came back to bite us in the ass…”
The color completely drained from Lou’s face.
The undertone in Kruger’s statement was like a shock to his system, the triggering of a deeply suppressed memory that he had kept buried for years, convincing him up until this very moment that his transgression in the Far East had been left in the past and expunged from his memory bank.
But he was deathly mistaken.
“What are you talking about?” he asked Kruger, trying his best to hide the desperation in his tone.
Kruger moved over to the console near the television that controlled the music system: a Denon DCM-1300 CD player. “The Company is onto us,” he said. “I’m not sure how much they know, but it’s definitely put some added pressure on the situation.”
Lou’s eyes were wandering and filled with anxiety. “I thought they buried what happened back there…”
“Afraid not, brother,” Kruger said. “Turns out a roll of film surfaced from that day from someone in the unit. You and I are in a couple of them.”
Lou closed his eyes. “Shit…”
“Yeah,” Kruger said, his finger hovering near the play button on the stereo. “That’s exactly what I said. But fortunately, I know who it is…”
Lou looked up at Kruger, yearning to know.
“Let’s just say that it’s not the first time a superior officer has screwed over his own men,” Kruger said.
“Motherfucker,” Lou hissed, red in the face, momentarily forgetting about the fact that he was feet away from a guy who was probably moments away from killing him.
“Yeah,” Kruger said. “That’s what I said, too…”
Phil Collins stopped singing. The outro on the song came to a close.
Lou’s anger swelled as Kruger pressed eject on the CD player and prepared to load another disc. “I always knew Cappy would crack under pressure,” he said as he popped in another CD. “It was just a matter of time.”
Kruger pressed play.
The new music began percolating out of the speakers: Tears For Fears, “Head Over Heels.”
The soundproof walls absorbed the pop rock hit flawlessly.
Kruger pointed to the speakers as the soothing sounds of synthesized beats filled the air around the condo. “I’m never here,” he said admiringly. “But this was absolutely worth the purchase.”
Lou held his hands up in submission. “Hey, man. You know I won’t tell anyone anything about what happened back there. You know that.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that,” Kruger said, every word cold and lacking any morsel of true emotion. “And I’ve got people infinitely more important than you that I’m gonna have to take off the playing board as a result. I’m not letting what we did blow back on us. I have to protect myself. You’d do the same thing.” He walked over, got down on one knee, and placed a hand on Lou’s shoulder. “It’s just how it is. So please, don’t take this personally.”
In a flash, Mr. Thompson came up from behind Lou, placed him into a headlock, and doused him in the face with a spray bottle filled with an off-color liquid, Lou never having the chance to squirm or resist due to Mr. Thompson’s strength and speed.
Mr. Thompson released Lou.
Lou stood up and backed away as he feverishly wiped the liquid off of his face with his shirt. “What the was hell that?!” he screamed as he swiped a hand at Mr. Thompson’s face and knocked off his sunglasses.
When he looked into the man’s eyes, for a solid second Lou was even more unnerved than he already was—Mr. Thompson had a rare condition that affected both of his retinas called “ocular albinism.”
It essentially meant that his eyes were red.
Lou was speechless as he stared into Mr. Thompson smoky-red pupils with an incredulous and terror-stricken expression.
“Hey, Lou,” Kruger said as he inched closer to him, “that stuff he sprayed you with, long story short, is going to kill you in sixty seconds.”
Lou spun around and looked at Kruger.
Deer in the headlights.
“You’re going to start convulsing and bleeding from every orifice in your body,” Kruger said. “It’s going to hurt, too. Really badly.”
Lou began to panic, his body braced against the sliding door that led to the balcony as his eyes darted around and his heart beat against his chest with a frantic and ferocious rhythm. “No! No! No!” he pleaded. “Why?! Why, man? Why?!”
Kruger stepped closer to Lou, about four feet away as he folded his hands behind his back. “Loose ends,” he said, “That’s all this is. Just be grateful in knowing that I’m granting you the luxury of being able to choose how you die: from that shit that was sprayed on you”—he looked to the sliding glass door and the balcony outside of it—“or from taking a dive out the window behind you. Trust me when I tell you that one of them is going to be significantly less painful than the other…”
Lou was certain he could feel the mystery juice starting to take hold, that whatever concoction had been brewed up and sprayed on him was soaking into his pores and working their way into his bloodstream.
He felt like he was breaking out in a fever as he looked out the sliding glass door behind him and the one-step shortcut over the balcony to the lobby that he was seriously considering making.
Kruger checked his watch. “Forty seconds, Lou.”
Lou’s throat began to tighten.
The very limited options became crystal clear.
For the past fifteen minutes, his future was guaranteed—a house on the beach, no one to answer to, and plenty of cash to burn over three lifetimes. His priorities were zero, his companion would be the ocean, and his past sins would no longer weigh him down.
Now, in all of an instant, he was coming to grips with his imminent demise and trying to quickly discern which way of checking out of existence would offer him the least amount of pain.
He made his choice.
Lou opened the sliding glass door, threw himself against the balcony’s railing, and paused.
He shot a look at Kruger.
“I’ll see you in hell, you bastard.”
Kruger saluted him.
“Save me an spot on the boat ride over, buddy.”
Lou looked away, leaned back, threw all of his weight forward, and dove off the balcony and toward the pavement as Tears For Fears kept spinning in the background.
Lou fell.
The world spun.
For a quick moment, about a half second before he made impact, Lou was oddly at peace.
CRUNCH. His body made impact with the roof of his very own white Bimmer. The roof dented inward, permeated glass was shattered, and Lou’s twisted and contorted body bled out from several orifices as a jogger passing by screamed out into the night.
“Thank you, Mr. Thompson,” Kruger said as he adjusted the cuffs on his sleeve.
Mr. Thompson said nothing as he picked up his sunglasses and placed them back over his unsettling red eyes.
Kruger walked toward the balcony and took a quick glance over the railing at Lou’s sprawled-out corpse, the jogger fleeing for a telephone as she hollered out into the night.
“I can’t believe he actually fell for it,” Kruger said as Mr. Thompson then placed the spray bottle—filled with nothing more than tap water tainted with food coloring for the sake of appearances—next to the potted plant by the door, which, most likely after tonight, would never be watered again.
“Grab the bags,” Kruger said. “And call the rest of the crew up. Let them know we’re headed to Georgia.”
“No problem,” Mr. Thompson said.
Kruger turned and faced him “Now. What was this ‘problem in Miami’ all about?”
“Our men trailing Hector Fuentes said that FBI agent you were trying to catch and Maria Velasco just killed her own crew and escaped with Hector.”
Kruger closed his eyes. “Splendid,” he s
aid. “And that’s why we have backup plans. Give the men the green light. Tell them to take out Reese and Velasco. I wanted him alive to see what he knows, but to hell with it. Just get rid of the both of them.”
Mr. Thompson nodded.
An hour later, Kruger and his compadre were out of the state, all his West Coast accounts were closed, and the whereabouts and identity of “Michael Dodgeson” were—like Lou Prince—nothing more than a distant memory.
14
MIAMI. ONE IN the morning.
Billy, Maria, and the handcuffed and scratched-up Hector Fuentes were at a one-story shack off West 7th Avenue wedged in between an abandoned apartment complex and a long-since-deserted and boarded-up convenience store. It was a designated crash pad that Maria and her people in Vice used on occasion when they needed to hide out in a pinch, complete with boarded-up windows, a dirty wooden floor, and a mattress thrown on the floor in the back bedroom. An alleyway ran perpendicular to the house, convenience store, and apartment complex, with a vacant lot covered in weeds to the north and a series of apartment complexes past it. It was a crummy part of town. The entire neighborhood that surrounded the house was no longer inhabited, save for the scattered denizens and vagrants who wandered among the grounds.
Billy, hauling Hector into the shack with a tight grip on the sensitive and pain-susceptible part of his elbow, shoved the plump man toward the couch and told him, “Take a load off.”
Hector sat.
Slowly.
Maria went for the kitchen, Hector’s jacket in her right hand, her thoughts as scattered as the torn and tattered furniture peppered throughout the rusty shack one could barely justify calling a home. She tossed his overpriced jacket on an overturned chair as she posted up near the sink.
“Where’s the head?” Billy asked her.
“Down the hall,” Maria replied without looking. “First door on the right.”
Billy pointed a finger at Hector. “Watch him.”
As he moved toward the bathroom, Maria turned around, pulled out her Beretta, leaned against the kitchen sink, and kept her attention on Hector as the bathroom door closed with a soft thud.
Hector looked at Maria. “What are you?” he asked with a rasp in his tone, parched and weary from the night’s events.
Maria just stared.
“Vice?” he asked. “DEA?”
Maria said nothing.
“CIA?”
Maria remained rigid.
Hector said, “Doesn’t matter what you are. You need to cut yourself loose from this guy. He’s bad luck.”
“Feeling’s mutual…”
Hector looked tense, like a guy who was overdue on putting change in his parking meter, light sweat beginning to accumulate on his already oily and dirt-stamped brow and a jitteriness in his right leg. He closed his eyes and sunk down into the couch, the splintered wooden frame creaking under his weight. “He’s going to kill me. That crazy bastard is going to kill me.”
Maria drew a deep breath through her nostrils and approached Hector. “Who is he?”
Hector remained in his trance.
“Cooperation is your only option,” Maria said to him. “Otherwise your immediate future is going to be a living —”
“Spare me,” Hector said as his eyes snapped open. “Agent Reese is a dead man, and if you stick with him, if you don’t cut loose of him right now, you will be too.”
Maria took a beat.
She looked around the corner to make sure that Billy was still occupied in the bathroom as she got down on one knee in front of Hector.
“Where is he?” Maria asked, quiet enough that only Hector could hear. “The ghost man?”
Hector perked up.
He knew right away whom she was referring to.
Maria grabbed him by the collar and reeled him in, her hours at the gym and Jiu-Jitsu training showing as the muscles of her forearm twisted and rippled when she pulled Hector’s dumpy body in close.
Hector swallowed.
Maria moved in closer, and with more choler now in her tone asked, “Where do I find the guy with the red eyes?”
Billy peeled off his Hawaiian shirt followed by his white undershirt peppered with dirt stains and stood in front of the cracked and scratch-riddled mirror in the bathroom to get a good look at his current condition. His body was covered in scratches and welts; Billy recalled how he acquired most of the wounds but discovered several new ones for the very first time.
Just another day.
He ran the water and made sure it wasn’t rusty or tainted. As the faucet dribbled, Billy leaned forward and checked the welt on his cheek from where that fat bastard Hector kept whacking him over and over again. A bruise was going to form undoubtedly, but it could have been much worse.
It was pretty much the only reason Billy wiggled out of the cuffs early—he was just tired of taking a beating. He had been hoping to get craftier and milk his time with Hector to get some answers, but he knew he was taking just one hit too many.
He had to make the call.
After they cuffed Hector and hightailed it out of Gold Coast Video, Maria stopped off at a pay phone and called in the scene to one of her cronies over at Vice and told her to pass it up the chain accordingly. The shooting and the bodies would come back up for both of them later down the line, so it would look pretty bad for them if they didn’t flag it all beforehand.
During the call, Maria couldn’t help but notice a helicopter passing back-and-forth about three miles away.
After splashing some water on his face, and taking a moment to breathe, Billy put his shirts back on and walked out of the bathroom to find Maria aggressively questioning Hector.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Maria took a step back. “Not great…”
“We can’t stay here,” Hector said. “We need to leave. Now.”
Billy grabbed the chair from the kitchen and sat on it backward an arm’s length from Hector, still a little damp from his quick rinse. “In a minute,” he said. “But I’ve got a few questions for you first.”
Hector hung his head. “You don’t get it. He’s going to kill me.”
“Who is? This Kruger fella?”
“Si.”
“And he wants me,” Billy said. “Yes?”
“Si.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
Billy cracked his neck. “Wonderful…”
Hector held up his shackled hands. “Look, I was just supposed to take you to a warehouse in Key Biscayne. Someone else was going to pick you up from there.”
“And what was going to happen after that?”
“I don’t know. I was supposed to leave town after I handed you over.”
“Where? What for?”
Hector took a beat.
Hung his head again. “I was supposed to leave town tonight,” he said. “I’m closing some accounts…”
“Where?”
“I want a lawyer first.”
“No. Not until you talk.”
“That’s not how this works. I know the rules.”
“I know you know the rules. I’m saying: fuck the rules. And you said that Kruger is going to kill you. If that’s true, then I’m your only hope. If that’s the case—you’re going to do what I want first before I do a damn thing for you.”
Hector shook his head, his world upside down and his fate now in the hands of the federal government. “Castillo and I ran this operation together,” he said, the memories of the glory days of his empire flooding back to him. “And it was a successful one. After Kruger killed him and took over, I’ve been his lap dog. He’s held me against my will and forced me to run the business for fear of having that sick bastard with the eyes of the devil tear me to pieces.”
Maria jumped in. “Where is he?” she asked. “Where is that guy? The one with the eyes?”
Billy tossed a glance in her direction. “Who are you talking about?”
Hector said, “It doesn’t
matter. You have to get me out of here. He’s going to kill me now. No question. Son of a bitch was probably going to do it already…”
Before he could grill the guy further, Billy felt his ears perk up as a faint chopping noise began to slowly gather somewhere off in the distance: chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff.
He walked over to the front windows covered by two sheets of plywood with half-inch gaps in between the boards that gave a slight glimpse of the street outside. Billy looked through the gaps and saw the milky glow of the moon shimmering on the wet asphalt of 7th Avenue, everything still and humid as he scanned the street and searched out the source of the incoming chuffing.
Hector’s bald held was turning red from the stress. “Please,” he pleaded. “We can’t stay here!”
Billy squinted as he spotted something off in the distance.
Hang on a minute…
Maria paced. “Tell us how I find that guy with the eyes,” she said to Hector, out of earshot from Billy.
“You have to get me out of here.” Hector was practically shouting. “Now! Take me to the police! The feds! Anyone!”
Billy saw a spotlight on the ground from several blocks out creeping its way toward the house like a shark closing in on a distressed seal.
Uh-oh…
Maria was leaning over, face to face with Hector, the veins in her neck jutting out and patience creeping toward its boiling point. “What’s the problem, Fuentes?” she asked. “Why can’t you tell me what I need to know?”
Hector was practically soaked with sweat as he pointed his cuffed hands toward a wide-eyed and slacked-jawed Billy Reese. “They’re already here…” he said with a creak as the color completely drained from his face.
Maria could hear the chuffing and looked over toward the front of the house—Billy was pulling out his Colt with a fraught expression on his face as he backed away from the windows and shouted, “Maria! Get down!”
Before she had a full moment to process what was happening, the house began to shake, and a half second later, the roar of an AS350 A-Star helicopter overcame her senses and drowned out any surrounding noise as a blinding white light drenched the house and made everyone go momentarily blind.