by Blake Banner
He gave a comfortable chuckle. “You are wrong, and I think you know you are wrong. We can do anything we like.”
“Yeah? Who’s ‘we’? People have tried and…”
“The military-industrial complex. Nobody can touch us. So, are you ready to talk to me?”
He stood and turned toward his tray of implements. Every muscle in my body was screaming, but I ignored the pain and clenched my abdominals, doubled at the waist and reached for my pockets. With my fingertips, I found the four-inch piece of wood I’d taken from the broken chair and slipped it into my palm. Then I flopped back. The colonel came and stood over me. He had a scalpel in his hand. He frowned at me curiously.
“What were you doing?”
“For crying out loud, Colonel, this is insane! Let me down!”
He sat and leaned forward. His eyes were soft and brown. I saw every pore in his skin. He said, “When I start cutting, it will be too late to turn back. Are you ready to start talking…?”
He didn’t get any further. What he said next was just gurgles. I had plunged the piece of wood into the soft flesh behind his jaw. His eyes bulged as his throat filled with blood. I pulled hard with my right arm, till his face was less than an inch from mine. With my left, I released his Glock from its holster.
“Let me introduce myself, Colonel,” I snarled, and it must have looked weird to him, my face upside-down and swollen from hanging there. “I am the meanest son of a bitch in this fucking valley.” I put the muzzle in his eye and blew his brain out the back of his head.
I turned and saw the grunt gawping at me, fumbling for his piece. It’s hard to aim upside down, so instead of hitting him in the chest, the slug tore out his balls. Freud would have said there are no accidents, and my unconscious mind had done it deliberately. Maybe she’d have been right at that. Deliberate or not, he let out a weird, high-pitched sound and passed out. The other grunt came crashing in, alerted by the noise. My friend, Mr. Butt. I made a hole in his thigh and, as he went down whining, I aimed at the ropes around my ankles. I was lucky not to blow my foot off, but the next moment, I was on the floor, winded but alive.
I staggered to my feet and turned. Butt was halfway out the door, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He thought he was going to raise the alarm. I took two strides with an energy that was pure adrenaline, fueled by hatred, knelt on his back and put a 9mm round through the base of his skull. I’d like to have made some wiseass comment to him, but you can’t always get everything you want.
I stepped outside. The main complex was about five hundred yards away and brightly illuminated with spotlights. It looked quiet. I had to make a decision. It was clear the colonel had been involved in some aspect of trafficking across the border. I wanted to know exactly how he was involved, how many people were involved with him and how far up the chain of command it went.
I was pretty sure that the base itself was what it claimed to be—a laser research center—and the colonel and his men were here for the purposes of security. But I was also sure that role was a cover for a deeper operation in which drugs were bought and sold to raise cash for dark ops.
And if that was so, I needed to gather any evidence I could from the colonel’s office. But finding and breaking into the colonel’s office, amid high-tech security, in my condition, was not feasible. I sighed. Maybe I’d have to come back, though two got you twenty that if I did, any trace of the operation would have vanished. So I would have to find my evidence elsewhere.
Over to my right, in the shadows, was the Audi. I went back inside, helped myself to a Glock 19 and a knife, sanitized the scene and set it up to look like a bizarre shoot-out. Then I went and climbed into the colonel’s car. I closed the smoked windows and drove out of the airbase, like I was stepping out for a breath of air. It wasn’t late yet, maybe I was going out for dinner. What the hell, I didn’t give a damn! They saw the car, they saluted and waved me through.
As I turned onto the highway, headed north, I shook free a Camel and lit up, inhaling deeply and gratefully. Then I laughed. I laughed a lot and a bit crazily, but I figured I was justified.
Eleven
By the time I got to Casa Castaneda, it was 10:00 PM. The place was dark and the doors and the shutters were all closed. I left the Audi at the back of the building, in the shadows, and went and rang on the bell and knocked on the door. There was no reply, and when I looked up at the second-floor windows, I couldn’t see any movement or any light.
I wondered if she had taken the kids and gotten out of town till things cooled down. I hoped so, but my gut told me that was too easy.
I went around back again and picked the lock on the kitchen door. I stepped inside and closed it behind me, then stood motionless for a couple of minutes, just listening. The house was completely silent.
I crossed the kitchen and came out into the big dining room. Everything was normal, as you would expect it to be. There was no sign of disturbance or of a fight. I went back in the kitchen and turned on the light. There was a corkboard on the wall with several sets of keys. A quick inspection told me that the set with the green plastic tag was for “home.”
I switched off the light and went out to the front porch. Apart from the occasional headlamps cruising the highway, the night was dark and still. I walked the few steps to her front door and let myself in, closing the door behind me. It was as quiet as the restaurant had been.
I climbed the stairs and went to her bedroom. The bed was unmade, the wardrobe was open and there were clothes spilled on the floor. Her chest of drawers was in a similar state. In her en suite, most of her products were missing, including her toothpaste and her toothbrush.
I went to the kids’ rooms and found the same thing. It looked like they’d left in a hurry. The only problem was, when I had parked the Audi in back, I had seen her truck.
There was a cold burn in my gut that I recognized as something close to panic and I stood a while at the top of the stairs, not knowing what to do. Then I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to find Mendez.
The moon had not risen and the only light I had was from the stars, and the background glow of Alamogordo behind me. The darkness of a desert at night is hard to describe. The cold starlight and the dense shadows are deceptive and misleading, and can be dangerous. It’s not enough to look with your eyes, or even to listen with your ears. You have to look, listen and feel with your whole body.
I had dropped the colonel’s Audi on Sundown Avenue and followed Abbott Avenue to the end on foot. And where Abbott Avenue ended, there the desert began with cold, dry suddenness. There was an expanse of soft, white sand, luminous in the darkness. I crossed it at a quick, silent run and found myself unexpectedly clambering up the side of a gully that had looked like flat desert sand a few moments earlier. As I climbed, it dawned on me that this was some kind of storm drain. When I got to the top, I dropped flat and scanned the wasteland before me.
I could make out seven houses in an area I estimated to be about a mile square. It was going to be a painstaking business, but it was the only option I had. I’d have to go house by house, looking for a black Mercedes. It was a forlorn hope, but many a city has fallen to a forlorn hope.
The nearest house was just a hundred and thirty yards away, slightly to my left, and I made it at a quick sprint through the dust. When I got to the perimeter wall and looked over, I saw that the pool was empty and all the lights were out. The lawn was overgrown and there were signs of neglect among the flowerbeds. So I figured I could tick that house off my list.
The next was just two hundred yards away, across the storm drain, and I could see from where I was lying among the shrubs that it was inhabited. There was a glow around the building, and I could make out the faint throb of music. I didn’t sprint this time, but crouch-ran at a steady jog, scrambled down the sandy bank and then clambered up the far side.
At the top, I found myself at the edge of a large, paved patio that seemed to run all around a large house with a varie
ty of red gabled roofs that would have been modern in 1961. The walls were bare stone and the patio was arranged in broad, uneven, shallow steps that were broken up with exotic gardens.
I took some time to explore the back of the house and saw that there was no rear exit. So I made my way slowly around to the front. I was pretty confident there would be no motion sensors, because the house was open to the desert, and coyotes and other wild animals would trigger them constantly.
I came around the side of the house, froze for a second and dropped to my belly. There was the pool, floodlit and turquoise under a black sky. The music was louder here and there were nine people in and around the water. There were four girls swimming, nude, two guys sitting at a table playing cards, and three guys standing, dancing to the music in various stages of undress.
What made me smile was the red E-Type Jaguar parked in the driveway. I hadn’t found Mendez, but I had a hunch I’d found a rat who could lead me to him.
I pulled the Glock from my waistband, retreated and slipped around to the front of the house. The porch lights were on and there was the muffled sound of music playing inside. I waited a moment, listening. There were occasional voices, too: male voices and female. I knocked. Nothing happened. I knocked again, louder.
A voice called through the door. “Who?”
I put a pink smile in my own voice and said, “Hi! I’m Alistair? I heard you were having a party tonight? And I thought maybe I could crash! You have to forgive me! I am just shameless! But I did bring champagne?”
I heard a snort through the door that was as contemptuous as it was amused. The door opened and a guy stood looking at me. He was mid-thirties, six foot, built and fit, and he had a bulge under his left arm. He had short white hair and pale blue eyes.
Behind him, there was a wet girl in a red bikini managing to combine a gape with a smile. She looked like she did that a lot.
He said, “What the hell you want?”
I put the muzzle of the Glock in his face and said, “Did I say champagne? I meant lead. Back up.”
He took a step back and I moved in, shoving him hard so he staggered back and fell on his ass. I kicked the door closed behind me and the gaping smiler gave a couple of small screams with her red fingernails waving in front of her face.
I said, “Shut up,” with no particular tone of voice.
She swallowed and said, “OK.”
“Come here.”
She stepped close and I popped her gently on the chin. Her legs crossed like a giraffe’s and she dropped. To the guy, I said, “Who’s at the party?”
“Fuck you!”
I showed him a face that said he was being unreasonable. “You get three chances, pal. Ivan is at the party. Anybody else?”
“Fuck you.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Is Mendez at the party?”
A small frown and a glance at the door told me what I needed to know. I stepped behind him and delivered a sharp, low side kick to the back of his neck. He never even knew he’d died.
I was in an entrance hall with the size and décor of a small, camp, baroque cathedral. A vast mirror on the right, flanked by pink marble columns, showed a grotesque reflection of the unconscious girl in her red bikini and the unnaturally twisted body of her friend. At the far end, under a domed ceiling, a Palladian arch opened onto a shallow flight of expanding steps, like ripples in a pink marble pond. I crossed the pink marble floor and peered through.
It was a large, open space. I knew that in modern architecture, they didn’t talk about rooms, they talked about spaces. The far wall was all glass. Increasing the sense of space. Through it, I could see the floodlit pool, rich turquoise with glaring silver highlights. The girls jumped and splashed in silence, like a film with no sound. In the foreground, in partial shadows cast by the bright spots, were the two guys playing cards. And staggering and laughing, also in silence, like a film with the sound turned down, Ivanovich and his two boys, weaving toward the glass wall.
A door, a glass panel in the glass wall, slid open, letting in a blast of noise: laughter, screams, and the mindless throb of music. Now I could see the boys more clearly. The one on his left Ivanovich pushed forward and slapped him on his skinny ass. The kid was barefoot, his Bermuda swimming trunks were damp and he had no shirt. I figured he weighed a hundred and forty pounds fully dressed with his boots on. He had black hair that was real short at the back and too long at the front, like he’d put it on the wrong way around.
He staggered toward the drinks tray, stopped, turned and shrieked, “More gin?” And all three of them doubled up like he’d said something hysterically funny.
Ivanovich and the other kid screamed back in chorus, “Yes! More gin!” They all laughed again; it was obviously an in joke, and the kid with back-to-front hair threaded a drunken path across the floor to make some drinks.
Meanwhile, Ivanovich and the other kid collapsed on the sofa. The other kid was taller and skinnier. He was probably one hundred and sixty pounds of bone. His hair was like his pal’s, only it had slipped around to the side, as he was bald around his left ear and had shoulder-length hair on his right. He was wearing Havaianas and Bermudas with parrots and palm trees on them. He also had no shirt.
I waited, glanced over at the glass wall and saw the two bodyguards get up from their card game, collect their cards and move toward the door. The girls kept splashing.
The bodyguards came in. I could now make out that one was a heavy Slav, about six two, and the other was a tall, white Russian with platinum hair and pale blue eyes. They found a couple of chairs over by the cold fireplace, sat down and restarted their game on the coffee table.
I stepped out from behind the arch and moved down the steps, smiling like I owned the place. It took them a while to notice me. The first was the guy with the back-to-front hair, who turned from the drinks tray, froze and stared at me, swaying slightly, then hurried over to sit on the sofa beside Ivanovich.
At the same moment, the two bodyguards stood up from their game, blinking, with their mouths open, unsure whether to reach for their pieces or not. I ignored them and smiled at their boss.
“Hi. I hope you don’t mind. I heard the music, the door was open… We met at the Pink Lagoon, I don’t know if you remember…”
He was smiling, a little surprised, but not unhappy. His boys weren’t smiling. His bodyguards were glancing at each other, at me, at Ivanovich and at their cards by turns.
Ivanovich shook his head. “I’m quite sure I would remember… Who are you?”
I gave a laugh I hoped was careless and debonair. “I confess I told a small, white lie so I could get close to you.” He liked that, but his bodyguards didn’t.
“I see, indeed, so what do you want from me, now that you’re close, Mr. Mysterious?”
I laughed out loud, like he’d said something witty. “Well, now, that would be telling!”
I was standing in front of them. His two boys were looking at me with sulking faces. He stuck his tongue in his cheek and crossed one leg over the other, with both hands on his knees.
“Well, if you don’t tell, I can’t give.”
I shrugged. “OK, you can start by getting the girls in here and closing the door so we can all party together.”
“I see. So you’re a swinger. And what do I get out of this?”
I grinned in a way I thought was boyish and held up two fingers in the peace sign. “Two things: the ride of your life, and the deal of your life.”
His eyes narrowed, but his smile deepened. “And if I say no?”
I gave him a grin that said we were flirting and I knew he was going to say yes. “Then you miss out on the deal—and on the ride.”
He held my eye and said, “Boris.”
One of the apes who was playing cards said, “Da.”
“Go get the girls.”
The Slav lumbered over to the open door and bellowed out at the girls in a voice the size of a tectonic plate, “You girls! You come now in!”
There was a lot of squealing and laughing, but they all clambered out of the water and wrapped themselves in towels. Then they ran on small feet, with small steps, in through the open door. When they saw me, they stood blinking and smiling, waiting for somebody to offer them a glass of champagne, a line of coke or both.
I said to Boris, “Close the door.”
As he slid it closed, Ivanovich said, “Now what?” His eyes still said he was amused.
I dropped into a chair opposite, crossed my legs and fished a Camel out of the pack in my pocket. I took my time lighting it and blowing the smoke at the ceiling. The two boys flapped their hands in front of their noses and shied away.
I looked over at the girls. “Get dressed.”
They looked confused, like the instructions were complex.
“Put your clothes on, now. Don’t make me get mad.”
There was a little flutter of bare arms and legs as they scattered in search of their clothes and started pulling them on, a pair of skintight jeans here, a skimpy silk blouse there.
“OK.” It was Ivanovich. “So you are masterful. I like that. Now what?”
“How much cash have you got in the house?”
He threw back his head and screeched with laughter. The report from the Glock cut his laughter short.
Twelve
The report tore Ivan’s laughter in half. The noise of Boris’s two hundred and fifty pounds hitting the floor like a sack of wet sand made him turn and stare. He locked eyes with the white Russian, but I already had him covered. Everybody in the room was frozen, like a tableau from a second-rate science fiction movie about time travel.
I jerked my head at the nearest girl. “Keep dressing.” To Ivanovich, I said, “Answer the question or I’ll plug your other boy, and then I’ll start on these sorry streaks of bat’s piss. After that, if you’re still not talking, I’ll kill you and find the damned cash myself. Now talk.”