Jackboot

by Will Van Allen

  “Oral.”

  “What?” he barked.

  She let drop the towel, her body steaming in the cool sea breeze drifting through the open door.

  “You want to talk about pinheads or go for round two?”

  The light of the TV outlined her willowy curves. “Don’t know why we can’t do both,” he grumbled.

  “If you think you can.” She smiled and he felt empowered and virile, like he was twenty again. Thirty. Thirty-five tops.

  Powering off the TV she took her Chardonnay from his hand, drank deep, leaned up and kissed his mouth, then frowned.

  “You had another cigarette. That’s one less you get tomorrow.”

  Shrugging, his hand found her breast.

  She curled into him. “The Viagra’s on the night—Oh!”

  “I don’t think we’ll need that tonight.”

  And they didn’t.

  CHAPTER 42

  AUGUST

  Elk, Washington

  “Texas.”

  “Yep.”

  “Two days’ time?”

  “Yep.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yep.”

  McConnell put a foot up on the porch rail, leaned back, took a drink of iced tea. “New flavor?”

  “Added more ginseng. Figured you needed it.”

  He gave the hacker a look. It had been quite the sexually arduous week, attested by his rubbery legs. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. It’s what I do. Help you out, even if that means help you boink broads.”

  “Boink?”

  “Broads.” The hacker sipped his Dew, dribbling on his black shirt that read I failed the Turing Test.

  We all grow up in stages. Eventually. Hopefully.

  A breeze kept the porch somewhere between pleasantly warm and uncomfortably hot as the sun set over the house, drawing the shadows out. It was a nice day. He wished the hacker thought so. “Texas.”

  “Yep.”

  He clucked his tongue. “She won’t be happy. Neither will Katie. Damn it.”

  “No one said being Mr. Flynn would be easy.”

  “Any word on the others?”

  “Free and clear as I understand. The good news, cash is king and it’s already laundered. EFTs aren’t as convenient as they sound; still got to get to it, move it around, and that creates records.”

  McConnell grunted. Drank more tea.

  “One point two mil.’ Not a bad payday,” Mitch said. “The bad of course is it sounds a bit shady. You’re going in there blind.”

  “You worried?”

  “No. But I’ll be here cooking up a nice Vitello Tonnato just in time for Assumption Day. Chilled veal in tuna sauce, that’s an A-plus final right there, you beer-swillin’ heathen.”

  “I’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

  “Good idea. Put some space between you and your second wife. I know how smothering and demanding you can be.”

  “Jesus Christ. Things change, Mitch.”

  “For you. Things have changed for you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this again.”

  “Oh, you just decide? If you just looked at the new docs, you—”

  “What we did was enough.”

  “Debatable. Highly debatable.”

  “If it’s as big and bad as you say we should both walk away. You do that when you hack, right?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Mitch—”

  “You got the girl, you got your kid, you got the money. I get it.”

  “I’m still gonna come out here.”

  “Sure you are.”

  McConnell stepped into the sunlight, stretched his healthy if sexually worn body. He had lost big this year. He had won big, too. “You’re the closest friend I got. You know more about me than anyone else. You know what I did, what we did. I’m not going anywhere, except Texas and back. I’ll be out, we’ll be out to visit often. Katie and Marissa both want to meet you.”

  “Right. Meet the mad hermit!” He waved his arms around. “Aaah!”

  “Aren’t you leaving soon? You were just talking about your island not a half-hour ago.”

  Mitch sulked back into his chair, now doused completely in shade.

  McConnell couldn’t make everyone happy. There was only so much of him to go around. He sighed, sat back down, nursed his tea. The shadows ominously clingy now. He didn’t care for it.

  Mitch slapped a flash drive on the small table between them. “Texas.”

  “Yep.”

  “Leaving in the morning.”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t get killed.”

  Spokane, Washington

  It could have gone better with Katie. She had answered the phone excited to finish up her room and settle in, thrilled she wouldn’t be stuck for the week out at the lake with her mom and Jerry. When he explained something just came up, it was important, she screamed loud enough to make the phone speaker rattle.

  “I’m not important?”

  It charged swiftly downhill from there.

  “Smooth, real smooth,” Carrie said, adding her two cents. “No pontoon jokes now, huh?”

  Marissa had been less loud but more skeptical.

  “Really? I mean, really?”

  “It’s just a retreat thing. Men beating drums, crying about their de-masculation, getting to know their feminine side.”

  “Emasculation. And I thought I was your feminine side? You said Mitch never left his house.” Those lawyers, always paying attention to the details. The good ones.

  McConnell shrugged. “He’s trying to break out. Look, if you really don’t want—”

  “Don’t do that.” Her eyes narrowed. “So you want me to believe you’re going to the woods with a bunch of sweaty, smelly men to cry like babies, with no phone access, and taking your hermit friend along?”

  “Would I make up something that absurd?”

  They were sitting on the sofa. She looked delicious in her cherry summer dress. “Cerise,” she had corrected him. Whatever, the earth seemed to stop its spin.

  She did her eyebrow arch thing, then shrugged. “You’re a grown man, you want to go traipsing through the woods I can’t stop you.” Then she slapped him.

  “Ow. What the hell was that for?”

  “So you don’t forget what you left. Now take me to bed or lose me forever.”

  They made it as far as the hallway.

  “She can hang with me.”

  Naked now, leaning against the sink, she was flawless in the soft light from the open fridge as she nibbled on a strawberry, her eyes aglow.

  “I don’t think Carrie would be too amenable to that,” he said, drinking down juice from the jug.

  Marissa dismissed that obstacle with a wave. “It’ll be good. Katie and I’ll go out on the town, pick up boys. I’ll get Karla to go. It’ll be an educational field trip.” She tilted her head. “What are you looking at?”

  She was flawless in any light.

  She sucked on her strawberry. “Tu vas regretter de me regarder comme ça.”

  “You really think you can convince her to let you take Katie?”

  She popped the berry in her mouth, fingering him to come closer. “Trust me. I’ve got tact.”

  He left early the next morning. Not much sleep but he wasn’t complaining. The final leg of his criminal career, the sooner he started the better. Then he could return to not sleeping much and not complaining again.

  Untangling himself from her arms, a kiss and untangling himself again, he took his bag, his pistol and a thermos of coffee. On the road again. Into the shining light of dawn.

  Elk, Washington

  In robe and sandals, Mitch gazed into the old trailer in the barn as the early sun warmed the morning chill and ate up the shadows and dew that dappled his toes. He kicked the foreboding gun case. “Don’t get yourself killed, you stubborn bastard.”

  Mind if he left the rifle out here?

  No prob.

  Ba
ck him up with the men’s retreat out in the woods as an alibi?

  Of course.

  Yes to finding out about his brother; yes to procuring the rifle; yes to helping him kill the people he wanted dead. Then McConnell had said no and dumped him. Wouldn’t even read the new docs, just dismissed them and Mitch as irrelevant again. All McConnell wanted was the girl—girls, don’t forget the daughter. He shouldn’t hate him for that. He didn’t.

  He wiped at the dew beneath his glasses, locked the trailer, shut the barn door and hurried to the porch. McConnell’s melee with the Terrible Trio had revived memories anew, just when he was putting them to rest again. He wished McConnell had killed those bastards. It’s what the big dunce was good at—the only thing. He wished he could kill them. God hates a coward. There was no God. So who hated him?

  Safe on the porch, he caught his breath as Ollie moseyed up the pitted gravel drive next to the orderly garden, all subdued with a morning hush. Beyond the old, peeling rickets, and further, the road disappeared among the wheat around the bend. He saw himself stepping off the porch, suitcase in hand, taxi to the airport, the farmhouse receding into past, his future dangerously more material ahead. Dizzy as he checked his bag, people bustling around him. On the plane, a cocktail to settle his nerves, a smile from the cute blonde stewardess: What adventure was he embarking upon, now? Heart a flutter, the engines roared, leaving the ground, leaving home, leaving lightness…Light-headedness…

  He dropped hard on his butt, smacked his head against a porch beam. He had stopped breathing. Stars swam before his eyes as he gulped in air, his hand finding loyal Ollie. Ollie, his stalwart familiar, but how much longer? The lab grayed more every day. What would he ever do without Ollie, his boon companion?

  What would he do without McConnell again?

  Sanderson, Texas

  Thirty hours and eighteen-hundred miles later the nation’s arteries emptied McConnell at the end of civilization. The west end of Texas anyway, a tiny town, outpost really, twenty-two miles shy of Mexico, as the crow flies. A sign of a lone cowboy riding beneath a bluff read “Sanderson - Cactus Capital of the World.”

  The good folk of Sanderson had not given themselves an undeserved epithet. Saguaro sentinels certainly did stand tall over prickly pear and barrel cacti on the low drab hills overlooking the lower and drabber town, more populated with pinyon and pecan than people. He drove the silver Jeep Liberty from one end to the other, all of two minutes through the quaint and quiet, peering down streets lined with single-wides, depressed adobe and dehydrated shacks with beat-up old trucks and aging sedans in sunbaked dirt yards. The desert was everywhere. It sucked at the moisture of your skin, your mouth, your eyes.

  He pulled into Uncle’s convenience store and stepped out into the dry heat, cracking his back. Scabs mostly healed, sweat made it itch like mad. There was the payphone. Dialing the number per instructions, he said, “There’s a chair and table in town.” A click and the other end hung up. Stepping inside he bought some bottled water, then drove back the way he had come, eyes bouncing between the streets and the rearview, looking for trouble, looking for the antiquated Outback Oasis motel right where the instructions said it would be. The weathered woman in the office checked him in, not batting an eye, not in that temperature, conserving her strength.

  They knew he was here. He was supposed to wait for what came next. Antsy, crossing the main drag that served as both highway and Oak Street, he walked around the truck stop, footsteps puffing up dust, stopping at the railroad tracks and taking in the hills, too far to walk to and too hot to stand there and sweat over it. He returned to the small room and its impotent, rattling air conditioner. Even now, the payoff; waiting, wondering, and now sweating. He catnapped restlessly until dinner time, took up a table outside the Roundhouse Cafe, gnawed a T-bone, sucked down a Negro Modelo, sampled some Prickly Pear Sherbet (surprisingly good) and watched the sun languorously dip further west, and with it the town’s malaise. He was being watched or so he thought. He looked around at the few others in the café, inside and out, glanced at the mildly increased traffic cruising slowly through the speed zone. He couldn’t spy the spy. Maybe it was his nerves. Maybe.

  As night came on so did the Border Patrol, eight trucks driving through town. He had a bad feeling. His pistol was under the passenger’s seat, in boots, jeans and a T-shirt he had no way to conceal it. Even if he had it on his person what cold comfort that would be. He was a sitting duck.

  He could just leave. A long drive to return empty-handed, not to mention the risk taken in the heist itself. But he could just roll on out of town, keep north and never look back, unless they followed him, found him on the open highway in all that wasteland in between. Killed him and buried him never to be seen again.

  The desert breeze stirred his brownish-sandy hair. He was done with disguises. Hell, he was done with this shit altogether. Back onto Oak and headed west. He had his bag in the backseat, always ready for a quick getaway. Glancing at the Outback Oasis as it passed him on by, he glanced down and saw the white plastic keychain of his room key in the console and swore.

  He had left something behind. Fingerprints. He U-turned.

  Entering the room, the TV caught his eye. Taped to the dark screen was a folded note. A Google Map with a route from the motel to the middle of a football field to the northeast. It looked to be about half a mile away. 2300 was circled in bold black next to the words, “WALK DON’T DRIVE.”

  He glanced at his brother’s watch. Ten past nine.

  Maybe they were just playing it safe, by midnight he’d be cruising home with a couple million dollars. Maybe by midnight he’d be dead, left for the coyotes or lizards or whatever they fed people to down here.

  He finished wiping down his prints. Whatever happened he wasn’t coming back here. Leaving the key on the nightstand he returned to the Jeep. The highway was dark, the truck stop closed for the night. That was the great thing about small towns; everyone called it a night early.

  Twenty minutes ago he’d been set to leave. Was he going to let a map to the treasure change his mind?

  Tucking the pistol in the small of his back, reassured by the cool metal against his skin he left the SUV and walked towards the stadium. That money was the promise of a better life. For his daughter. For Marissa. At least that’s what he told himself. Women. Always complicating things. Or was it money? Or was he just too damn obstinate for his own good, had to see the damn thing to the end?

  Heading north along the foot of a looming ridge that blacked out the stars, a half-moon fresh in the sky, his back itched, slick with sweat that collected around the hard metal of the gun. A car passed going west, another east. He kept the ridge on his left with ragged, sand-choked yards of what might have once been a small trailer park on his right. Mostly quiet, he heard Walker, Texas Ranger through an open window somewhere. Following the map, he took Mansfield left, up a gravel road, through the open gate, crested a hill. Below, the dark football field, two of them actually, the far one with a darker ring of track around it, nestled in a corner pocket of the low hills. Great place for an ambush.

  He kept left to the road that ran between the first field and what looked like the gymnasium.

  He was an easy kill out here. Any clown with a night scope could drop him from anywhere in that dark. He felt uneasy, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and froze when two figures slipped free of the shadows ambling his way. At fifty feet he said, “That’s close enough.”

  They slowed but didn’t stop. In jeans and long-sleeves, one wore a baseball cap. Other than that it was too dark to make out much else. “The chair is against the wall.” Mexican accent.

  “It’s too big for the table,” he said, the return passphrase.

  The two conferred in Spanish, still coming onward.

  “Where’s the money?” McConnell asked.

  “Mi amigo. Come. Quickly, it’s not safe.”

  It was wrong. “Stop.”

  They kept coming. He pulled his pi
stol as a shot blew up the night and whizzed by his left ear.

  He dropped to the ground as the two split up, both running at angles left and right and shooting at him. He shot back, heard a shout and one dropped to the ground. The other was quickly closing. He swung to aim, not fast enough—

  The world flooded with light.

  He raised his hand to his eyes but it was too late, he was blinded. “Drop it! Suelte el arma!” Several gunshots, a grunt of pain.

  “I said drop it, asshole, or you’ll join ’em!”

  Phantom red after-image stained his vision.

  “Last chance, boy.”

  He set his gun down.

  “Get your dick in that dirt!” Footsteps, a boot in his back and he sprawled. An engine turned over and drove the spotlight closer as the boot was replaced with a knee. “Hands on your back. Move it fucker.”

  His eyesight returning. A door opened, closed and a dark uniform stood next to the glaringly bright light, hand at hip.

  “Kill that fuckin’ thing,” said the knee in his back. He heard groaning. “And do something ’bout that.”

  “Cuff ’im first. I don’t like the look in this gringo’s eyes.”

  “I said hands on your back! You gonna test me, boy? I’ll put a bullet in your head right here!”

  He felt something cold press against the back of his skull and stopped resisting.

  Wrists bound, not by the cold metal of cuffs but plastic zip-ties. Hands patted him down. “Clean other than the firearm. Fucker’s got himself a Desert Eagle.”

  “Don’ say?”

  Yanked up like a freshly cut barrow and propelled into the light, he was bent over the hood of a white SUV. Looking sideways he could vaguely make out the uniform. Border Patrol.

  “You arresting me?”

  “You a fuckin’ illegal?”

  “No.”

  “Then we ain’t arrestin’ ya.”

  More moaning. “Will you fix that already?”