by Sam Jones
The kid gestured to the metal desk in the corner stacked with busted-up plane tires. Billy found the phone, dialed Heather and Tommy’s number in Atlanta, and held the handset to his ear, tapping his finger on the desk and trying to convince himself that he was just experiencing a bit of general anxiety manifesting into irrational suspicions.
The phone rang for about ten seconds before the other end picked up.
Billy then discovered right away that his anxiety was justified and his suspicions rational when Kruger greeted him with a chilling “Hello” from the other side of the line.
42
BILLY NEARLY COLLAPSED to the floor when he heard Kruger’s voice, that Jim McKay quote about worst fears seldom being realized popping into his head and making the situation more abhorrent than it already was.
“You are,” Kruger said to Billy through the receiver, “as some people would say, ‘a hard man to kill.’”
Billy’s grip tightened around the handset, his mind going to dark places as he thought of the possible fates that Heather and Tommy Sykes had fallen prey to.
“I swear,” he said into the phone, “if you’ve hurt them—”
“Hopefully, I won’t have to,” Kruger said, cutting in. “But only if you do as I say. Exactly as I say.”
Billy sat on the edge of a tool case. Maria could see how wracked he was with affliction and entered the office like a kid would with an on-edge parent.
“Talk,” Billy said into the phone, doing everything he could to contain his rage.
Kruger said, “You’re not going to derail this op. To make sure that happens, I’ll be holding onto my wife and my son as collateral.”
Kruger then gave Billy a series of coordinates.
Billy told him, “That better be directions to your grave.”
“Very Charles Bronson of you,” Kruger said, “but that’s actually the location where you and that bitch Delgado are going to meet a contact of mine at fourteen thirty hours. That contact will then give you another set of coordinates where you will meet my people and me at fifteen hundred hours. Just the two of you. If you notify anyone, if you mention a word to a single person around you, law enforcement or otherwise, I’ll cut my family up into pieces and make sure I keep saying your name in their ear as I do it. Don’t fuck with me, Billy. I know you know I’ll do it.”
Billy kicked the tool chest so hard it was pushed into the wall where it impacted the desk sporting the stack of tires, causing them to fall and roll along the floor.
The kid mechanic took that as a cue to leave.
“You don’t have the balls,” Billy said to Kruger. Pacing. Fists clenched and teeth under enough strain from gritting that they might crack.
“We’re past the point of gauging what I will and won’t do,” Kruger said. “These people don’t mean shit to me anymore. I have the means, I have the ability, and you know that doing what I tell you to do is the only way to prevent the worst from happening to them.”
Billy could hear it.
He could hear the veracity.
He could hear nothing but the truth.
It was in that moment his heart finally came to terms with the fact that Andy Sykes had been dead for a very long time, and that Kruger, the demon that took over his body, was now the sole occupant of his flesh and would destroy anyone and anything in his path.
“Fourteen thirty hours,” Kruger repeated to Billy. “You and Delgado. You turn yourselves in, and Heather and Tommy walk free. If anything happens, if my planes touch down and my people walk into an ambush—they’re dead. If I even think you might do something stupid—so will I. But if you comply, if you comply, they live.”
“Bullshit,” Billy said. “You’re not going to cut them loose. Not after they know that you’re still alive.”
A pause on Kruger’s end.
“Maybe. But I plan on keeping them alive until you’re for sure, in fact, dead. They may die. But at least you have a tiny sliver on hope in preventing that from happening with this option. Don’t you think?”
Billy closed his eyes.
Sykes may have been dead, but Kruger still knew everything that Sykes did. He knew how Billy thought. He knew what door Billy would take.
He knew that Billy would have no choice but to do as he commanded.
“Say it,” Kruger said.
Deep breaths, Billy…
“Fourteen thirty hours,” Billy repeated as he looked at Maria. “We’ll be there.”
“Good,” Kruger said. “Don’t be late.”
Kruger went to hang up.
“Kruger,” Billy said, calling him by his alias for the first time.
Kruger waited.
Billy took a deep breath before he said, “I’m going to choke the fucking life out of you.”
Kruger snickered. “My man…”
And then the line went dead.
Billy slowly lowered the handset back into the cradle and stared at a spot on the wall for several moments.
Then he threw the thing across the room and managed to obliterate it into a bunch of pieces.
Maria stood there, unshaken. After a beat, she said, “Kruger?”
All Billy could do was nod. “He has his family,” he said. “He’s taken them hostage. He wants a straight-up trade: us for them.”
Maria put her hands in her pockets, let the info soak in, and asked, “Where?”
“He gave me a bunch of coordinates. Somewhere far away from this deal he’s got going on, I’m sure.”
“He’s making sure we don’t get in the way of whatever’s going down in Bogota.”
Billy shrugged. “And we won’t.”
He ran his hands through his hair. He thought of how dire the situation was and how limited their options were. “Look,” he said. “I have to go, but you don’t have to go with me. I just…I need you to not tell anyone what’s going on. Kruger will know if I deviate from the plan, and I can’t have that happen.”
Maria moved toward him. Slow. Calm.
Her decision already made.
“What time do we need to be there?” she asked.
Billy felt comforted.
Still in this together.
“Fourteen thirty hours tomorrow,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “let’s see where this party is taking place, shall we?”
They eighty-sixed the deal with Tony, paid him off, cut Nicky the Nickel Nurser loose, and pinpointed the coordinates that Kruger had given Billy, a place far from Kruger, far away from the action, and smack-dab in the middle of nowhere.
Mexico.
43
BILLY AND MARIA caught two of the last four seats on a flight departing from Miami International, had a stopover in Houston, and then made the last leg of the trip into Playa Encanto.
The entire plane ride over was tense. Maria and Billy were seated in the back of the fuselage, crammed into a tight space that they might have been pained to share a few days ago, but with their minds focused elsewhere and the stakes running high, the inconvenient seating was negligible.
About three hours into the flight, Billy was—as Billy tended to get—a little antsy.
“I can feel you moving around in your seat,” Maria said.
Billy, chin on his fist and elbow on the armrest, gave her a look. “I’m not moving.”
“You’ve got like…micro twitches going on.”
His eyes went wide. “What in the hey-now are micro twitches?”
“They didn’t teach you about that in the FBI?”
“Did they teach us about made up stuff? No.”
“I meant to say that I can feel you twitching. That’s all.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’ll try to stop then.”
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
They shared the silence, somewhat alleviated by another one of their fighting-about-nothing moments. In a way, it was like they adopted the role of bickering couple when the
y were in public spaces such as this to cover for their jadedness, a way of dealing with the stress.
Also, they just liked each other, so trying to piss the other off was a small pleasure in and of itself.
The flight seemed interminable, the seconds feeling like minutes and the minutes feeling like hours. It was hard for them to not tap their feet and fingers as time dragged on.
Around hour six, Billy leaned back and recalled the days in grade school when he would start in on a decades-old tradition that all the troublemakers in classes across the nation would employ when the curriculum was just a little too dull for them to offer their complete attentions.
He sang.
A catchy little tune, well within the public domain, that (most) kids knew well. The goal with the song was to start at a considerate volume, then get progressively louder with the chorus as you sang in a loop until it got the better of the innocent bystanders around to hear it.
“Johhhhn Ja-cob Jin-gle-hei-mer Schmidt, Thaaaat’s my name toooo, When-ev-er we go out, The people al-ways shout…”
Maria tried not to smile as she looked over at Billy.
“You totally know it,” he whspered.
The cupid’s bow of Maria’s upper lip curved upward in delectation.
A wily look came over her eye as she sang, “Johhhhn Ja-cob Jin-gle-hei-mer Schmidt, Thaaaat’s my name toooo…”
“When-ev-er we go out,” they sang together, “The people al-ways shout, There goes John Ja-cob Jin-gle-hei-mer Schmidt, LA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA!”
The elderly and slack-faced priest sitting in front of them turned around and held a finger to his lips. “My children,” he said slowly with a voice wearied from the taxing years.
“Sorry,” Billy said.
“Sorry,” Maria said, both of them coming off like a pair of bashful children.
The priest sat back in his seat.
Maria stifled her laughter.
Billy did as well.
Five seconds passed.
In a very hushed tone, they then sang out, “La-da-da-da-da-da-da…”
But once the clowning façade was dropped, once their minds were able to focus again on the tasks at hand, they colluded and planned and schemed in the back of the plane en route to Kruger’s mystery location.
It was going to be a blitz. Billy was almost certain. Maria too. But nonetheless, other people’s lives were at stake, Heather and Tommy Sykes’s lives were at stake, Maria’s justice was at stake, and whatever odds there were, however slim the chances of survival—they had to try.
So there were plans to be made, locations to be scouted, and people they would need to kill. But until that time came, they had only one thing in front of them that they were required to terminate: time.
Most of it was spent with Billy biting his nails from the tension, blaming himself for Heather and Tommy’s predicament, and praying—for the first time in his life—that God would spare them. He was pissed, tired, and angry, his head feeling like it was about to split open from the pain, even though he was chewing on Vicodin like tic-tacs.
He felt like absolute shit. The worst he ever felt in his life. This feeling that all the brash approaches he had taken in the past couple of days were coming back to cash the check he knew he couldn’t cash.
But even though Billy was on edge and uneasy, he was still as unwilling to back down from the fight.
By the time they had arrived and settled in Playa Encanto, they had only a couple of hours left until Kruger’s contact gave them the final coordinates, and a half hour after that until zero hour. The human condition was finally catching up to them in the form of growling stomachs and sore bones when they dropped their crap at the motel, a problem that could only be properly remedied with a plate of food and a couple of drinks.
Billy and Maria knew they might be marching to their deaths, and they both agreed there was nothing wrong with indulging a shot or two of something high shelf before that happened.
Fortunately, Playa Encanto was a touristy spot, so that meant there were plenty of places that could assist in their mission of getting a little liquored up. The sleepy seaside paradise was a breathtaking location in Sonora, filled with gorgeous, colonial-inspired architecture, a thrilling cornucopia of sea life, and crisp and clear blue waters that one only saw in dreams manufactured by Disney. But even though it was a relaxing backdrop for most, Billy and Maria were too wound up to appreciate the beauty. They had a lot on their minds. They had a lot of things weighing them down.
There were people to kill.
There were people trying to kill them.
And they just had to hope they did the killing first.
After arriving in Playa Encanto and checking into a cheap motel, they laid low for a couple of hours, going over theories and demolishing the last of their peanut packets from the plane to cover for the dogshit excuse for a brisket they had been served. At fourteen hundred hours, they wandered a mile and a half down to the set of coordinates Kruger had given Billy: a giant palapa situated directly on the beach with nothing around but sand and water. Metal lamps hung throughout gave little lighting to the small shack. The place sat a maximum of about thirty people. Music played on a decent pair of speakers the owner had set up. Latin dance tunes coated everyone’s eardrums and booze painted their faces a pleasant shade of red. And topping it all off was the sign staked into the sand out front with an easy, memorable slogan:
NO GENTE SOBRIA
POR FAVOR
It was Billy Reese’s kind of joint.
And he knew that Kruger (Sykes) knew that too.
He and Maria approached the bar. The bartender spotted Maria immediately (who wouldn’t?) and waited for an order. She ordered a plate of nachos with chicken and then pointed at the beer sign and held up two fingers.
The bartender knew the score.
Moments later, beers were fetched and laid out in front of Billy and Maria, cold and ready for consumption. Maria quickly snatched up one of the bottles and headed for a table as Billy waited for the food. “You got this one,” she said as she went for a walk.
Billy didn’t mind. He was too jaded. Too worried. Too uncertain as to how the next hour would play out to care how much per diem he was blowing through. Maria could ask him for a grand and he’d fork it over without question, so bankrolling a bar tab was a nonissue. Hell, the guy who exchanged the currency for him back in town screwed him on the rates.
But they were running out of funds.
Again, Billy was too mentally and emotionally preoccupied to care.
He took out a few pesos he had converted and handed them to the bartender before joining back up with Maria with the hot plate of nachos topped off with Al Pastor, the whole greasy, protein-filled concoction enough to put a person down.
Maria had taken the table facing the water, a thick sucker made out of wood with a pair of dinky and rusted metal chairs on either side. Billy sat across from her, took a scan of the bar, and then stared out at the water. He took a moment to breathe in the air, the hints of salt clearing his sinuses and his senses as Maria took her share of the food.
For a second Billy felt relaxed.
For a moment he was okay.
“You see anybody?” he asked Maria, eyes scanning.
Maria was ten steps ahead of him, already having surveyed most of the limited clientele in the bar.
“Negative, Billy Boy. But I’ll keep you updated.”
She continued eating, dabbing at her mouth with a paper napkin she snagged from a pile with a smooth rock on top of it acting as a paperweight.
More time passed. More sips and swigs and bites occurred. After a couple of minutes, Billy could see Maria’s brow scrunching right before she asked him, “How can he do something like that?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Kruger. His family. How can someone do something like that?”
“Take them hostage?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed.
It was a fucked-up situation to say the least.
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” Billy said. “He’s definitely not the same guy I knew from before.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Billy didn’t know where to start. The life story on Sykes was lengthy. If he had to build a psych profile, he’d need a filing cabinet or two for the paperwork. There were a strong number of instances that Billy could recall that could have pushed Sykes into being the head psycho honcho bad guy he was now.
But it had to have been the war.
Speculative, but most likely that’s what messed that shitspitter’s head up.
Sykes had hit some kind of breaking point in his time over in Vietnam. Billy saw it on the poor bastard’s face the second he picked him up from the airport in Long Beach after his discharge. The man had changed. Billy could tell as he was pulling up in his Challenger T/A up to the sidewalk from twenty feet out—a look in Sykes’s eye, devoid of passion, devoid of love. Even in the way he walked, he was like an entity coasting through the realm of the living, a specter haunting the earth, a shell of his former self. Sure, there were glimpses of the old Andy Sykes that came around every once in a while, and eventually he came back around when he married and Heather gave birth to Tommy.
But then he changed again.
And he turned into Kruger.
It was like the raven-haired CIA man said: “This is not the first time someone flipped out over there in the shit. It was a long war. A lot of things happened.”
Billy had taken too long to respond to Maria’s question. By the time she caught on to the fact that she wasn’t going to get a response, she changed the topic of conversation by asking him, “Were you ever married?”
“I was wondering when you were going to ask that,” he said.
“I’m curious,” Maria said. “I want to know.”
“Why? You looking for a green card?”
“Eat me.”
They connected eyes.
“Yeah,” Billy confessed, “I was married.”
Maria’s mouth opened like someone had told her she won the lottery.
“Oh, come on,” Billy cut in midreaction. “I’m not that bad looking.”