by Ryan Schow
Ice almost died last time.
Eliana came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her body and a towel holding up her hair. There she was again. Gorgeous. He looked away. Unable to even think the things a man like him wanted to think.
“I’m ordering room service for us. The kid picked a meal, and I’m ready, so whenever you want to order, it should take about twenty-five minutes.”
“I’ll just take a cheese sandwich and some fries with a bottle of water,” she said.
“Hot sandwich or cold?”
“Hot.”
While Eliana got herself ready for bed, he ordered room service, then turned on the television. Half the channels were out, and the ones that weren’t were looping news cycles. There were only ten channels. Now there were ten grisly scenes with news anchors giving the blow-by-blow of a nation being eviscerated. Plastered across the top of the screen were the words: DUE TO THE VIOLENT NATURE OF THIS CONTENT WE RECOMMEND KIDS UNDER THE AGE OF 12 NOT WATCH THIS PROGRAM.
“How old are you, kid?” he asked.
The kid said, “Ocho años.” Eight years old.
“Is this too much for you?” Ice asked in Spanish. The kid shook his head, no, his eyes bright but tired. “If it gets too bad, just turn away.”
“Si,” he said with his delicate little voice.
Ice flipped through several stations, trying to get to a broadcast that might give him information on Chicago. When he found one, he turned up the volume and listened as a broadcaster detailed the swift and thorough destruction of the downtown metropolis. Sadly, he watched the DHS headquarters topple onto the next door Post Office below and take out the first several floors of the surrounding buildings. The scores of dead hit him instantly. They showed viewer video clips of drones launching missiles into the buildings, taking them down. He watched an apartment tower collapse, which got the first tears started. And then he watched three men sprinting away from the Office of Emergency Management building as it came down. The men barely got away with their lives. They’d been lucky, because those inside the OEM building were not going to be so lucky.
“Shut that off,” Eliana said.
He turned quickly, wiped his eyes, and saw how mad Eliana was. He looked down at the boy, who was crying, too. Isadoro shut off the TV.
“Sorry, I just…I needed to see what was happening in Chicago. The building where my older brother works, it was hit yesterday. He might not be alive.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, calming down. “I didn’t know.”
Opening her arms to the boy, she said, “Come here,” and he did. She hugged him tight while he cried into her stomach.
“What happened to him?” he said in English.
“His parents were killed before him because they wouldn’t give him up to the Federales. But that is not the worst of it.”
This shook him. What could be worse than that?
“He was taken by men, nearly made to…to—” she couldn’t finish because her body started to shake and tears gathered in her eyes.
Ice fell perfectly still, his breath caught in his throat, his heart all but stopping in his chest.
“Did he get…”
Vigorously shaking her head, she said, “No, no. Almost, though.”
“What stopped them?”
“Me.”
“You?”
“I was taken, too,” she admitted. “Me and another girl.”
“And you stopped them?”
“I did.”
“How?”
Looking down, holding the boy and wiping her eyes because she didn’t want to cry, she said, “I killed them.”
A hard chill raced up his spine.
“By yourself?”
“I watched many bad things happen in my country. The starvation, the corruption, the gangs. My brother was found beaten to death when I was young. He was a policeman who fell in with the Los Zetas cartel. He was a ladies’ man, like you. For that, they tore his arms off, then came to my father’s home to tell him what they had done.”
He just sat there baffled, looking at her and trying to imagine being her in a country like that.
“The gangs recruit boys as young as ten years old. They join for the promise of a better life for them and for their families. Those same boys would come to me, trying to make me their girlfriend, but my father was a mean man, a cruel man. He had one boy I liked beaten so badly he is now permanently maimed. It is a different life we live in Guatemala. One a man like you would never understand.”
“I have a better understanding than most anyone you’ll see here,” he said.
Although that was probably true, it didn’t mean he could comprehend the things Eliana survived that made her into the woman she was today.
“That is what you think,” she challenged.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You’re going to anyway,” she said.
“How many people have you killed?” he asked.
“Before this trip, none,” she said, looking somewhat put off by the question. “What about you? Or have you lost count?”
“I’ve never killed a person in my life,” he said with a grin.
“Liar,” she said, wiping her eyes and smiling.
“I never killed a person who didn’t need killing,” he finally said, his eyes losing their shine as every last ounce of emotion drained from them. This was how he’d spent the better part of the last two years: feeling nothing.
He was dead but stuck in a live body, his soul ripped out of him. It was easy to find that place. This was the place he went to in order to do what needed doing. In the place he was in with Eliana and the boy, it was easy to feel human again, but feeling human meant feeling loss, and in his life, loss was great. No, it was paramount.
“Well on that note,” she said, “we are in agreement. I have never killed anyone who didn’t need killing as well.”
Just then a knock on the door startled them. He rose (gun in hand but tucked behind his back) and answered the door. It was room service with their food.
Smiling wide, he stepped back, let the man through and said, “You are the Jesus Christ of the day my friend!”
The waiter laughed and Ice handed him a five dollar bill for his efforts.
With the TV muted, the three of them ate their meals in near silence. Everyone was starved, completely focused. He couldn’t stop looking at Eliana. The way strands of her hair hung in her face did something to his heart. She tucked her hair behind her ear and he followed the line of her jaw from earlobe to chin. And those lips…
He glanced up at her eyes, saw she’d stopped eating and was looking at him.
“What?” she asked, her face tightening.
“I can’t call you Princess Poopy-Face anymore,” he said. “Now that you’re clean, that is.”
“Is that going to be a problem?” she asked, not terribly angry.
“That kind of makes me sad.”
“Eat your food.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he said, looking at her with a defiant grin.
Inside, he felt sad not because she was clean and he missed teasing her. He felt sad because she reminded him of his wife in a small way. These were the dangers of feeling. Eventually everything led back to her, his wife. He looked down at his food, ate slowly, methodically, and he did not look up at either of them again.
He’d shut down.
No one could stay awake, so Ice shut off the TV, grabbed his gun and slid it by his side. He closed his eyes and winked out quickly. Sometime in the middle of the night, he woke to a small noise. He was a light sleeper, one symptom of being a hitman. Somewhere along the way, after a dozen or more hits, you start worrying about retaliation. More important, you worry about it when you’re asleep, because that’s when you’re most vulnerable.
The noise wiggling into his ears gained depth and shape. Someone was opening their door, trying to sneak into their room. He moved nothing, gave nothing away.
The lock disengaged.
Slowly, his hand found the Glock at his side.
The door handle lowered. Someone was about to come in.
He heard Eliana and the boy breathing in the bed next to them, completely oblivious. He turned the barrel in the direction of the now opening door, slowly slid the gun out from underneath the sheets, rested it on top of the comforter.
He tilted the barrel to center mass at the person now coming in the door.
He counted the voices. There were three of them, maybe four. In that moment, he thought only of self-perseveration. Not where he was, not what was law, not what was right. If people broke in to your room in the middle of the night, if you don’t act, you’re in deep trouble.
Ice aimed for the first of them and fired the gun. The Glock barked out a violent report causing Eliana to jump up screaming. He heard the boy scramble under the blankets crawling as deep as he could get.
Someone fired three shots back, one of them burying itself in the pillow right next to him. Two quick shots exploded from behind him.
Eliana.
Ice was out of bed in one fluid motion, the gun trained on the noises in front of him. He heard the departing footsteps. Were they running? Were they done? They dragged the hotel door shut behind them. The room was theirs again.
Thinking back, when they came in, there were no lights on in the hallway. Had the lights gone out from a downed portion of the electrical grid, or were they turned off on purpose?
In the distance, he heard the concussion bursts of targets being hit. The red lights on the clock said 4:32 a.m.
Were the drones already here?
His head cleared itself of sleep and the pieces started coming together. Someone had the key to his room. Was this an inside job? Had to be. He assessed all of this in seconds as he stepped over the body (he reached down, found the neck – no pulse), both hands now on the gun as he headed toward a potential shooter’s alley.
He quietly popped open the door, then peeked his head outside, glancing down the dark hallway. He heard Eliana behind him. She was out of bed nearly as fast as he was. Now she was at his back, her breathing heavy, his not so much.
“You recognize that voice?” he whispered to Eliana.
“The clerk,” she replied.
He thought so. Opening the door slowly, he stepped back, Eliana backing up so he didn’t bump into her. He reached down, grabbed the dead guy’s ankle, quietly dragged his body toward them, using the leg as a door stop.
The voices at the end of the hallway were hushed, but full of panic. Hotel room doors were opening and the shooters were saying, “Please step back in your room, there’s been an incident.”
He heard voices again. A small flashlight flicked on, but shut back off again just as quickly.
“I saw three,” Eliana whispered.
He knew, but he didn’t say so. He was in the dead zone right then, unconcerned with anything but retaliation.
“I think John’s dead,” one of them said.
“This is stupid!” another hissed. “We should go. We need to go, man.”
“You said no one would get hurt.”
“How the hell did I know the guy was going to shoot without warning?” the front desk clerk said.
“We need to kill him.”
“No way, man,” the other said. “We need to go.”
“We kill them and say they were hit by drones. You can already hear them out there. How soon until they actually get here? They’re our cover. Besides, I told you, they’re fresh off the border. No one’s going to care about them in this town. Not after the drones hit.”
“We’re not murderers,” someone said.
“I think I killed the kid,” another voice replied. “I’m pretty sure of it.”
“You didn’t,” the clerk said.
“I’m going.”
“Yeah.”
The second Ice heard movement, he stepped out and took down all three with three clean shots. No sense in letting guys like that live. Eliana moved behind him, not once firing her weapon in the hallway because it was dark. Ice had stopped to listen.
“Did you get them?”
“Yes.”
Where people were brave enough to pop their heads out of their rooms the first time, they were not so brave the second time. Especially now that the gunfire was right outside their rooms.
Suddenly someone grew a spine, sneaking open their door. Ice didn’t see it because it was dark. He’d heard it.
“Were you robbed?” Ice asked the person.
The voice didn’t say anything. Another door opened. Then another. Ice stalked down the hallway toward the men. He bumped the small flashlight with his big toe as he approached them. Leaning down, he picked it up, turned it on.
He illuminated the pale faces of the dead guys. One of them was indeed the night clerk.
Eliana caught up with Ice. She drew a breath and he felt it right away. Her bewilderment. She was wondering how he hit each of them with just one bullet in the dark and didn’t miss. He was kind of wondering the same thing, but he’d never say that. He’d say he could see in the dark or something cool like that.
“Someone call the police,” he said to the rubberneckers at his back.
“I already tried,” a voice said, “but all circuits are busy.”
“I’ve got 911 on the line,” someone said.
Ice walked over and said, “May I?”
The woman handed him the phone. A bad guy wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t be congenial then offer to talk to the cops.
“This is 911, what’s your emergency?” the dispatcher said, slightly impatient. He imagined she’d already said that twice before he could get to the phone.
“My name is Fiyero Dimas and I’m DEA escorting a prisoner and a child up from El Paso. Four men, one of them being the front desk clerk who checked us in, broke into our room intending to rob us.”
“Did you identify yourself as a DEA agent?”
“It wasn’t necessary. DHS comps the room, so all I needed was a receipt.”
“Not when you checked in, sir,” she said, clarifying. “Did you identify yourself as a DEA agent this morning, as they were breaking in your room?”
He knew exactly what she meant. “No ma’am,” he answered. “When I woke, they were already in the room.”
“How do you know they intended to rob you?”
“They weren’t bringing me flowers,” he snipped. “I’m assuming you know what time it is, yes?”
“I’m well aware.”
“They broke into the room with a master key and I woke to them talking. I’m a light sleeper, ma’am. It’s a prerequisite of the job if you want to live.”
“Are you shot, sir?”
“No.”
“Is there anyone else hurt?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are the men in need of medical assistance?”
“They’re in need of a coroner.”
“Are there witnesses on the scene?” she asked.
“Not to the crime. For that you can question my prisoner. After the exchange of gunfire, which took place first in the room, then in the hallway, four more wits surfaced, but only after the incident had taken place.”
“Tucumcari, Logan and Melrose PD sent all available staff to Amarillo,” she said, sounding tired for the first time. “The entire town’s been leveled so now they’re search and rescue.”
“Meaning what?”
“I need you to get the wits contact info and photograph the scene. I also need you to contact hotel security—”
“One of them is hotel security,” he said, flashing the light on one of them in uniform.
“Jesus, what a clusterfu—”
“I’ll move them to the closest room, tape off the scene, wait for you to send someone in the morning. Unless you can send me a Sheriff now?”
“Quay County is with Tucumcari PD in Amarillo. And in case you hadn’t heard, we’re now getting reports of drone activi
ty here in town.”
“Who’s closest?”
“I’ve already been trying Harding and De Baca County but they’re up to their asses in it, too,” she said. “Hold the line, I’ll try again.” He waited for a long moment before she came back on the line. “Sir?”
“Yes.”
“You said you can secure the scene?”
“I did.”
“And you will get photographs and contact info on the four wits?”
“Roger that.”
“Good. What’s your direct contact line?”
“My personal cell is back in Chicago, but my work line got destroyed in an accident back in El Paso. Whatever’s going on in Amarillo, it can’t be nearly as bad as El Paso. The MQ-1C’s were dropping ordnance on the city.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she said.
“You have no idea. I lost the company vehicle, almost lost my life and my prisoner, had to boost a Civic off a corpse and I still have a few days to go, if I can even make it.”
Eliana tried to take the flashlight from Ice; he let her have it. She shined it on the corpses, finding their bullet holes. She then shined it on the witnesses, who ducked back in their rooms.
“Chicago’s crazy right now,” the dispatchers said. “I’m hearing the worst.”
“These calls coming in,” Ice said, “are they reporting local drone activity as in gunfire or missiles?”
“Mostly gunfire.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling the fatigue hitting him hard.
“Well I’ll have someone out there as fast as possible. Will you still be there at nine a.m.?”
“Assuming we’re not under attack, yeah.”
“I’ll have Sheriff Owsley meet you in the lobby at nine sharp, barring any further disaster.”
“Ten-four,” he said, “and thanks.”
He handed the phone back to the lady who said, “You really DEA?”
“I’m really DEA.”
“So you shoot them all in the back as they were running, Mr. DEA?” Eliana said the second everyone was back in their rooms.