by Blake Banner
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Blake Banner
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.
Published by Lone Stone Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-987987-97-3
ISBN-10: 1-987987-97-3
First edition
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
WHAT'D YOU THINK?
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One
Tularosa, New Mexico, USA. Thursday, August 1, 2019, 6:17 AM.
I don’t know who I am.
I remember it was dawn. The desert was an empty place, colored a dusty pink by a swelling scarlet sun. The sky was pink, washed with white-blue. It also was a desert. As above, so below: empty of birds, empty of clouds, empty of life. The earth was empty of everything except dead dust, dead trees, dead bones and scaled predators with cold-blooded eyes.
And me.
I was there, my mind empty of everything except the pink, dead earth and the pink, blue sky. I was the Observer.
At first there were no questions, just the unquestionable fact of existence. Then, silhouetted against the pink horizon, a saguaro, like a man watching me watching him. Time, whatever the hell that was, passed, and then there was molten sunlight fanning out slowly across the horizon, and the saguaro shifted from dark shadow to black stencil, and I knew day was coming.
And I knew I existed, because I wondered whether I did.
Then, like the fanning sun, my consciousness spread. I was aware that I was in a car. There was a windshield separating me from the desert. And there was a steering wheel in front of me, and a dash. I had my legs, my hands, and my body, sitting in the seat. I observed all these things, and still knew only that I was, but not who I was.
It was deep in the dark hours of the night. I was in a club. There was a throbbing noise, like a panicking heart. It was everywhere, so that the hundreds of people milling around me had to shout in each other’s ears to make themselves heard. Even though they could not hear each other, they were all laughing, like everything was funny.
There was a bar, and the guys behind the bar kept throwing bottles in the air, spinning them and then making drinks from them. They weren’t smiling or laughing, they were focused, sweating, working hard.
There were more women than men. Most of them were barely dressed, in clothes that revealed their breasts and their legs. One of them came to my table. She was pretty, young, black, with a beautiful body and very white teeth that gleamed in the strobes and laser lights.
“You want some company? Buy a girl a drink?”
I frowned at her. “Do you know me?”
Her face changed. Her expression said she was offended. She walked away and started talking to another man.
I was watching another man. He was known as Ivory on account of his exceptional teeth, and because he liked to play the piano. He was sitting two tables away on my right. He didn’t know I was there. I was Mr. Average, Mr. Cellophane. Also, somehow I knew, people tend to check out what’s on their right, and ignore what’s on their left. So I sat behind him, on his left. He had five women with him and two guys. They were all laughing a lot. They snorted coke a few times right there at the table. Most other people went to the can to snort, but he did it right there, in front of the management. Nobody paid any attention. A lot of the other patrons came to his table and spoke to his guys. His guys went away with them and came back with money, which they gave to him. I’d followed a couple of times on previous nights and confirmed for myself that they were selling cocaine and heroin in the johns. I bought some to be sure.
That was when I’d decided to kill them.
There were things I knew. I didn’t know how I knew them, but I knew they were right. I knew if you decided to kill somebody, you had to plan it and set it up carefully. And I knew how to do that. So I had watched him and followed him for a week. During that time, he and his boys hadn’t noticed me.
My car (if it was mine) helped. It was a thirty-year-old, matte black Jeep Cherokee. It looked rough, beaten-up, but under the hood it had two powerful electric motors and two lithium ion batteries. Its acceleration was insane and it was powerful and fast, and totally silent.
I didn’t know where I’d gotten it from, but I knew I had it.
I checked my watch. It was 2:00 AM. I rose and pushed my way through the swarm of bodies. The two apes on the door didn’t notice me leave.
I stepped out into the night. The desert air was cold and above me there were a billion stars strewn across luminous, turquoise infinity. I paused to look up at them. I could hear the relentless croaking, sawing of frogs on the night air, probably from the water reservoirs near the high school.
I crossed the broad, sandy lot and climbed in the car, slid behind the wheel and pulled the door closed with a soft clunk. Looking back across the lot, the name of the club was a glowing neon scrawl against the sky, Area 53.
It was a short drive from Area 53 to Ivory’s place on West 1st Street. I took the second right down La Luz. There were no streetlamps, only the uneven blacktop, occasional copses of trees, and the powerful glow of the starlight above the desert. It was half a mile of straight road and I covered the distance in just under thirty seconds, turned in at West 1st and pulled in fifty yards past his house, then climbed out and sprinted back to the walled building.
It was the kind of place that wanted to be a palatial Mexican villa, but never got past big Spanish bungalow. It was one story, surrounded by an adobe wall six feet high and two arched gates with heavy wooden doors, one leading to the garage, the other to the front door. The yard was big, maybe seventy feet square, and there were poplars and cypresses growing along one wall.
I knew from the local realtor that Ivory, aka Delroy Jackson, had bought it four months earlier, cash, and that he had not installed any sophisticated security systems, in spite of frequent burglaries in the area. My gut told me no crook in his right mind would dare burgle Ivory’s house, for fear of reprisals, but also that the last person Ivory wanted poking around his house in the event of a break-in was the sheriff, for fear of what he might find there: anything and everything from unlicensed assault rifles to large stashes of heroin and cocaine.
Right then, there was a dark SUV with tinted windows parked outside the adobe wall. I
used it as cover, though there was no real need, and a small jump and a scramble had me over the wall and dropping onto the lawn on the far side. A floodlit, turquoise pool lapped quietly over on my left. I saw the rottweiler get to its feet and come trotting toward me.
I knew Ivory had a dangerous guard dog and I had come prepared. I had a thick cloth bound around my left forearm and a large hunting knife I had bought a week earlier. I waited, on one knee, pressed up against the wall. The dog broke into a run and lunged at me. Next thing, its massive form was all over me. I could feel the huge power of its jaws crushing my arm, and the stench of its body smothering me.
I remembered something in that moment. I remembered being taught that if somebody is trying to kill you, if you think about their hands, their weapon, or their smothering force, you will die. In that moment of immediate death, you have to ignore them and focus your mind exclusively on your own weapon. I knew that, though I didn’t know how or why, and I plunged the broad blade of the knife deep into the dog’s neck, below its ear, and cut deep across its throat.
It didn’t let go. It bled profusely from the cut. Its body convulsed and went into spasm, its paws clawing at the lawn beneath us, and eventually it groaned and lay down and died. I prized open its jaws, pulled out my arm and ran for the house.
I’d examined it before on a couple of visits while Ivory was at the club. I knew the front door was like the door to Fort Knox, but the sliding, plate-glass doors that led to the pool were less of a challenge. I had bought a diamond-tipped glass cutter for seven bucks and, knowing there was no alarm system connected, I cut a circle of glass by the lock, reached in and turned the key. The door slid open without a problem. Ivory was a small-time crook with visions of grandeur. In a small New Mexico town, he was known for his ruthless cruelty, his willingness to kill his rivals and torture their associates. So his main defense system was fear. His main problem was that I was not afraid of him.
I left the glass disk on the coffee table, checked the time and went to the entrance hall to remove the light bulb from the fitment. Ivory was a creature of habit, and I knew he would arrive within twenty minutes, with at least six hookers. I also knew that all he would do was feed them coke and fall asleep.
I returned to the living room and settled to wait. Twenty minutes later, I heard the heavy, electronic gate sliding back in the driveway and the crunch of tires on the gravel drive. I pulled the hunting knife from my boot, walked into the entrance hall and stood waiting by the door, by a small table beside the light switch. Outside, I heard car doors slam, voices, male and female, laughter. Shadows moved against the glass panes at either side of the door. The key sounded loud in the lock.
I checked my heart rate. It was at a steady sixty. The door opened and Ivory stumbled into the dark room, holding a laughing girl in each arm. Warped slabs of moonlight followed him. He was three feet from me. The nearest girl, a tall blonde, was almost touching me. Across the hall, a dark girl who sounded Latina had turned to support Ivory and was telling him to stay on his feet.
A third girl came in, and then a fourth. She was followed by Ivory’s gorillas and then two more girls. The hall was crowded and there was a lot of laughing and screaming. Shouts of, “What happened to the lights?” A guy made monster noises and a girl screamed. A big hulking shadow, one of the two goons, reached for the light.
I reached down, took hold of the thumb, turned the wrist belly up and sliced through his wrist, cutting deep, so the tendons, veins and artery were severed. There was a scream and a hot spray of blood, which I directed at the crowd of girls. The screaming spread, causing panic, more screaming, racing feet and a stampede of dark bodies in every direction. Confusion.
I reached around the gorilla’s neck while he clutched his wrist, hooked my arm under his chin and broke his neck. As he went down, I pulled his Glock 19 from his holster under his arm.
I let him drop, hunkered down and flipped on the light. There were four half-naked women fighting to get through the door to the living room, a fifth was lying on the floor with her hands over her head, and a sixth was squatting on the floor covering her face and crying. Ivory was shading his eyes with one hand and pulling at the girls with the other while his gorilla was covering his eyes with his left and waving his piece around with his right. I shot him between the eyes.
Then I stood and pistol-whipped Ivory across the back of his head. He fell awkwardly to the floor and the girls ran. When the last one was gone, I closed the door and shot Ivory in the back of the head. Then I wiped off the grip of the Glock and put it back in the gorilla’s hand.
I spent the next hour exploring the house, looking for where he kept his stash of drugs and cash. The safe in his den was empty, but I found it eventually in an outhouse by the pool, roughly five hundred grand in cash in a big sports bag, two kilos of heroin and two of coke.
I took it all into the living room and made a stash of the dope on top of Ivory. I siphoned a gallon of petrol from the SUV, doused the drugs and the bodies and went into the kitchen to turn on the gas hobs and the oven he had there. I took one of the gorilla’s cell phones and left Ivory’s phone in the oven. Then I left the house.
I made my way out of the arched gate and along the road to my car. The street was quiet and still and the stars were brilliant above, but a silver moon was rising in the east and the sky was turning pale. The cooling air chilled my skin and made it shudder. I climbed into the car and drove silently down Clayton to St. Francis Drive, and then headed north and east along Central Avenue, where I turned into the Knotty Pines Motel. I had a room there and parked out of sight at the back, under the big pine tree. There I climbed out and dialed Ivory’s number.
I waited. It rang once and the small, electric charge in the phone sparked the gas. The detonation echoed across the small town. In my mind’s eye, I saw it ignite the gasoline and set fire to the furniture, the doors and the drapes, and the bodies lying dead in the hall.
I wiped the phone clean of any prints and placed it carefully on the roof of one of the RVs in the RV park at the back of the motel.
Then I went and let myself into my room. It was small, with a TV, a double bed and a chair. It had an en suite bathroom too, where I stripped, put the blood-soaked clothes into a plastic bag I had set out earlier, and took a shower to wash off all the blood from my face and body. Finally, I had a large Bushmills, lay on the bed, listening to the distant wail of sirens, and slipped into a deep sleep.
* * *
Back then, I knew who I was. I was a killer, a destroyer.
It was night in the desert, a night with stars and a vast, golden moon, and icy air that froze the blood. I was an eagle flying under that moon, with its freezing light on my feathers. Far below, upon a hill of dry sand, there sat a man with his face in his hands, weeping for all that he had lost; weeping for the hollowness inside, the gaping emptiness of his soul, an emptiness he felt physically, as a sickening void in his belly, that made him curl in on himself and fall to the ground, to the cold, dry sand, with his knees drawn up to his twisted face and his hands clenched over his head, crying to the night.
“No more, please, no more!”
I gaze down on him with the impassive detachment of the eagle, and far across the dusty plane, in the frigid moonlight, I see the burning palace, enveloped in translucent blue flames, and I know that within, there is death: death of body, death by gashed, bleeding throat, death with unbelieving eyes, death of heart, death of soul.
Death of mind.
I am not sleeping. My body is heavy and paralyzed. There is an eagle in the room watching me, but I cannot move. I can see its eye. I can hear its voice as it speaks to me by firelight: “The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell and a hell of Heaven.
“Better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
Two
I took five hundred bucks from the sports bag and stepped out into the early morning of Tularosa. The sky was already turning a stark blue-white. I cro
ssed the parking lot toward the shade of the pine trees where I’d left my car, when the air erupted. It seemed to slam the ground, raising dust and making me stagger. I looked up and saw a Fighting Falcon, F-16, vanish, whining, toward Alamogordo. For some reason, it made me smile, and I climbed into my ancient Jeep and moved out of the parking lot in search of coffee.
Unaware of what I was doing, or why, I followed the general direction of the Falcon along Central Avenue back toward the center of town, and then took St. Francis Drive toward Highway 70 south, headed for Alamogordo, with some idea about having breakfast there.
Instead, less than a minute out of town, I saw a diner. There was nothing special about it. It was laid out to be reminiscent of a ranch, with a wooden fence all around, a big gate, twelve or fifteen feet high, and a sign hanging from the crossbar that said Casa Castaneda. I didn’t know why the name meant something to me, but it did. I slowed and spun the wheel, then rolled in through that big gate. I parked up near the entrance and climbed out. I looked at my watch. It was eight thirty.
I trod through the dust with the sun rising behind me, and pushed through the door. The early sun lay in angular forms across the wooden floor. There were Mexican paintings on the walls and carvings and ceramic pots stood displayed for sale on shelves and tables. I was surprised to see that the stuff was good.
There were tables and chairs set out in a dining area, and beyond it a counter with food displayed in glass cabinets. Behind the counter, there was a woman, about five-five, with black hair pulled back into a knot. She was busy and efficient. I crossed the room and leaned on the counter.
“Is it too early for breakfast?”
She gave a small laugh without looking at me. “I guess that depends what time you wanna get up. I had breakfast at five!”
She stood and turned to face me. Then she froze. I tried to read what I saw in her face, in her eyes. There was fear, but also anger and, bizarrely, hope.