by Hart Hanson
“Stop, I beg you,” said Lucky. “This Situation is Containable. Please tell Mr. Skellig what you require.”
Smart. The “Mister” suggested to Willeniec that we weren’t close, that these people were nothing more than employees to me. Why try to use them as leverage?
Lucky isn’t only an interpreter. He’s a trained hostage negotiator. Another reason he is so successful in his sexual life.
“Mr. Skellig knows what I want,” Willeniec said.
“Barrels?” I asked.
“I told you he knew,” Willeniec said.
“Today was my first day driving for Avila,” I said. “I don’t know anything about barrels. I thought being an asshole to you would earn me a bonus.”
Willeniec struck Ripple again, this time using the butt of his gun to chop down onto Ripple’s bladder. Ripple screamed behind the gag and pissed himself, his whole body shaking.
Willeniec laughed.
Lucky was right. Willeniec was the kind of sadist who dug secret torture chambers beneath his basement. The next time I told him I didn’t know anything he’d up the ante by putting a bullet in someone’s head. Probably Lucky’s. Willeniec meant to kill us all—Lucky, then Ripple, then Tinkertoy, saving me for last so that he could show my corpse to Avila in order to get those barrels.
What I had to do first was open up the possibilities in this situation, expand the elements, take some small measure of control until the opportunity I needed presented itself. What did I have to barter with Willeniec?
(Pain.)
The man got off on inflicting pain. I’d show him a painful dilemma he could inflict on me and he’d take it like a cat after a baby bird.
“I get the situation. But let the boy down. And sit her up before she chokes to death.”
“Which one do you like more?” Willeniec asked. “You can’t have both.”
He poked Ripple with the barrel of his Magnum and kicked Tinkertoy.
“Who do you pick? Gimp boy or nigger girl?”
I prevaricated, plastered a look of anguish on my face. “Sorry, Ripple.” Then pointed at Tinkertoy.
I allowed my feelings to be heard in my voice, mostly for Willeniec’s enjoyment, but for Ripple too, wondering if he could possibly understand.
Willeniec stepped back as I moved toward Tinkertoy to sit her up, ensuring that he was far enough away (eight feet) that I wouldn’t have a chance to tackle him before he could pull the trigger—two, maybe three times—yet close enough that he wouldn’t miss. As I sat Tinkertoy up against the wheel of the haunted limo, I saw that she clutched a twelve-inch dog-bone wrench in her hand.
And there was my opportunity.
I straightened up, purposely banging my head on the wheel well as hard as I could, opening my stitches. I cursed and bled. Willeniec laughed, enjoying himself immensely, which distracted him enough that I could palm Tinkertoy’s wrench without his noticing. I slumped against the limo, blood streaming down my neck, and tilted my head back to regard Willeniec, needing the blood to flow but stay out of my eyes.
“Ouch,” Willeniec said. “That has to hurt.”
I reached out to pull Tinkertoy’s shirt back across her breasts, keeping Willeniec’s eyes moving where I wanted them moving.
“I’m going to ask once more,” Willeniec said, stepping over toward Ripple. “I’m going to ask where the barrels are, and if you don’t tell me, I’ll shoot Cheeto boy’s balls off.”
He yanked Ripple’s urine-soaked cargo shorts down and off his stumps in one swift movement, pushed Ripple’s penis aside with the barrel of his gun, grabbed a pair of pliers from Tinkertoy’s workbench, seized one of Ripple’s testicles in the jaws, and squeezed.
Ripple cries out in agony.
I leap to my feet, blood streaming, holding out my left hand in supplication, drawing Willeniec’s eye again.
“Stop. Please. Jesus Christ!”
Willeniec releases Ripple. Through what must be sheets of pain, Ripple lashes out with the stump of his right leg and catches Willeniec on the side of the head; it’s like being hit with a roast beef. Willeniec stumbles back, wrenching his revolver up to shoot Ripple in the center of his body mass.
I throw the socket wrench like a tomahawk. The wrench strikes Willeniec in the face, busting his nose. Willeniec swings his gun around and fires at where I was but I’m not there anymore; I’m chasing the wrench, following its trajectory as fast as I can. I seize Willeniec’s pistol, twisting, dislocating his thumb, breaking his wrist.
I strike him in the throat with the barrel. I feel his larynx crumple.
Willeniec stumbles and gasps, his mouth moving like a goldfish’s. He collapses against the hood of the Caddie, amazed and angry, not yet understanding that he is Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
Willeniec kicked and retched while I yanked the gag from Ripple’s mouth and lowered the hoist, then used the same pliers Willeniec had used to torture Ripple to cut through the extension cords that bound his wrists. Ripple sobbed in agony, but he reached for his pants, so I helped him pull them on. I opened the back door of One and set Ripple down on his back on the seat. I reached for a bottle of water in the door and opened it for him, but he wasn’t interested.
I headed over to Willeniec and rifled through his pockets, searching for the handcuff key that would free Lucky. Tinkertoy still slumped against the front wheel of Three, her large, liquid eyes fixed on Willeniec’s face as he died.
Willeniec gargled in panic, making almost the exact same sound he’d made mocking Lucky’s Farsi, heels kicking at the floor like he was trying to escape. He clutched at my clothing, weakening fast, perhaps realizing at last that he was about to die. I didn’t see the precise moment when Willeniec knew for certain he was dead because I was getting the handcuffs off Lucky and helping him to his feet. By the time I turned around, Willeniec was all but gone.
“Wait! Hold me over him,” Ripple sobbed from the backseat of One. “I want to shit on his face while he still knows what’s happening.”
“Too late,” Lucky said, “he’s dead,” flicking his eyes at me in accusation.
“He had a gun pointed at Ripple and his finger on the trigger,” I said. “I had to kill him.”
Lucky nodded but did not meet my eyes.
“Go outside, see if anybody heard the shot.”
“If they did, then what? Shall I kill them?”
Lucky was unhappy with me.
“Then come back in, find where the bullet Willeniec fired at me, to kill me, ended up.”
Lucky looked once more at Willeniec, looked at me, nodded his apology, and went outside.
“I was waiting. For him. To come close. Enough to hit. With the wrench,” Tinkertoy said. “I never thought. Of throwing it.”
“That wrench saved us,” I said.
Lucky reentered and shook his head. No sign that anyone in the neighborhood had heard the shot. The criminal who had run this place as a chop shop had done a lot of soundproofing so that cars could be taken apart at night.
“The bullet. Is in. The wooden beam.” Tinkertoy pointed at the rough-hewn beam between doors one and two.
“Gouge it out,” I told Lucky, “and hang something over the hole.”
“For the Sake of Clarification, you intend to cover up what’s happened here tonight?” Lucky asked.
“That’s exactly what I intend.”
Ripple leaned out of One and gagged. Tinkertoy placed a wastebasket in front of him and he vomited.
Rubbing his chafed wrists, Lucky asked, “Why don’t we call the authorities and tell them we were attacked by this sadistic intruder whom you killed in self-defense?”
“This sadistic intruder is the authorities.”
“What kind of authority?”
“He’s an LA County sheriff’s detective.”
“Still, Skellig, you have a
trusting relationship with Detective Delilah Groopman—”
“Who is the lead investigator in the murder of a bodyguard in which my role is unclear. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
“Still—?”
“We have to make it so that this . . .”
“. . . murder . . . ?”
“. . . killing never happened. We don’t know how many other cops are involved. I’m already a suspect. No matter what, you’ll be deported back to Afghanistan. Tinkertoy’s psychiatric history won’t help. They could pop her back into the loony bin. That leaves Ripple, on his own, to convince a court of law that we were in the right to kill a cop.”
Even Lucky knew that Ripple lacked a certain credibility.
Lucky groaned and clasped his hands beneath his chin, moving them like he was a nervous monk at prayer. Ripple vomited again. Tinkertoy dragged herself to where the wrench I’d thrown at Willeniec lay on the floor. She picked it up, hauled herself to her workbench, and scrubbed it with a wire brush, using solvent, working her strong brown hands, being useful.
“A cop,” Lucky said. “Very bad. Very bad indeed.”
“Suck it up, Buttercup,” Ripple said.
“Additional consideration: we call the police, it becomes a matter of record that Willeniec came here looking for those barrels. Who knows who else is after them?”
“Yes,” Lucky said, “I see. But I wish we could take some time before Initiating a Cover-Up—”
“I’m glad Skellig killed the fucker,” Ripple said, “even if I get executed for it.”
I regarded the lifeless corpse of the man I’d killed and confronted the age-old question of murderers.
How long until daylight?
PERTURBATIONS AND OBFUSCATIONS
Following Phase 2 of my plan to get away with murdering a policeman, I treat my ragtag band of murderous adventurers to breakfast at Callahan’s Diner, just up the street from the scene of the crime. I figure the sooner the staff of Oasis Limo are out in the neighborhood, normalizing our situation, the better.
But I’ve jumped too far ahead because breakfast occurred more than six hours after Willeniec choked to death on the ragged gristle of his own crushed Adam’s apple.
Phase 1 consisted of cleaning up the crime scene.
There wasn’t much blood and most of it was mine from purposely smacking my head on Three’s wheel well and opening up my stitches. I decided to leave all that mess where it was. No one ever got put on death row for their own blood.
Of course, Willeniec had bled from his broken nose, but most of that blood was on his suit jacket. Some had pooled in one half-closed eyeball, but his heart wasn’t beating long enough to produce much more than half a pint.
Minute traces of blood and skin on the wrench would make for DNA evidence, but Tinkertoy cleaned that up before Willeniec even achieved official brain death. The rest of Willeniec’s blood coagulated down the sides of his head into his ears and hair, with a very small amount ending up on a bit of matting near Tinkertoy’s tool bench.
Tinkertoy burned the mat to ashes with a blowtorch while I hoisted Ripple onto my back and—preceded by Lucky, opening doors and pulling down ladders—carried the kid up to the hot tub on the roof beside my penthouse. Ripple waved off my offer of Vicodin in favor of rummaging through his I LOVE JESUS fanny pack for medical marijuana, choosing between candies, chocolate, tongue sprays, tinctures, tea, vaporizers, eatables, and smokables.
While Ripple let himself float away from the pain, Lucky entered with the first aid kit to clean and restitch my scalp wound.
In order to ensure that Ripple didn’t slide happily to the bottom of my hot tub and drown, I secured him to the handrail with a belt and headed back downstairs, where Lucky and I hoisted Willeniec’s body onto a blue polyethylene tarp that we used for tying down loose loads. We spread out an inventory of Willeniec’s belongings on the same tarp.
Weapon. One bullet discharged.
Cell phone. Battery removed.
“When he’s reported missing,” I said, “at least his GPS won’t lead here.”
“Perhaps he didn’t want anyone zeroing in on his location,” Lucky said, “indicating that he Strayed from Protocol.”
“Good for us,” I said.
Watch. High-quality quartz Seiko.
“Just for telling time and date,” Lucky said, “not one of the smart watches tethered to satellites.”
Despite the fact that he looked like a runner, Willeniec was not wearing a fitness bracelet of the kind that connects to your computer or mobile phone to record heart rate, distance covered, altitude changes, or how many calories you’ve burned walking.
“No wedding ring.”
“Thank God,” Lucky said.
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have somebody,” I said.
Car keys.
Gun, wallet, the bullet we gouged out of the beam, the watch, cell phone, battery, his weapon; all of these we shoved inside Willeniec’s sports coat pockets. The car keys I kept.
We swaddled Willeniec, A., like a baby in the blue tarp and duct-taped the whole enchilada.
Lucky and I hoisted said corpse-size blue enchilada into one of the two 2011 Ford Transits I’d bought from a bankrupt florist and which we now rented out on a jobber basis to local businesses.
We climbed back upstairs to extract Ripple from my hot tub before he parboiled. I wanted to put him in my bed, but stoned Ripple got stubborn on the issue and insisted upon coming downstairs to help, despite his ashen color.
I loaned him basketball shorts and a sweatshirt. We carried Ripple back down to Dispatch and put him on the couch, hoping he’d get some sleep.
I left with Willeniec’s car keys and trotted in a slow, clockwise spiral, keeping the world headquarters of Oasis Limo Services at the epicenter, regularly pushing the lock/unlock button on the fob until blinking running lights told me I’d found Willeniec’s vehicle—a nondescript black Chevy Tahoe—three blocks away from Oasis, tucked behind a guitar store called Truetone Music.
What to do next merited careful consideration.
Willeniec, on his own time, not on the job, wouldn’t be reported missing until he failed to show up for his next scheduled shift at the Whittier sheriff’s station, whenever that was. Since he’d been driving an official vehicle when he executed the warrant at Avila’s place, it was best to assume that Willeniec hadn’t taken vacation time or a leave of absence to threaten and torture civilians.
For a moment I wondered if he might have been impersonating a cop but decided, in the end, that it didn’t matter. The most prudent course was to assume he was the sheriff’s son-in-law and the mayor’s best friend since childhood.
In the same spirit, it was smart to be conservative and assume that Willeniec, A., was due to start his shift at, say, seven tomorrow morning, maybe eight, given that some detectives think that eating breakfast is part of their workday. By about nine or ten A.M., someone might start asking questions. How much vigor was put into the subsequent search would depend upon Willeniec’s work habits, whether he had a partner, and how much his coworkers gave a shit.
Safest bet: behave as though Willeniec was popular and high-profile, with a partner who owed him his life; assume that every cop and sheriff’s deputy in the county would go on high alert when Willeniec didn’t show up for the following shift. They’d know that he hadn’t come home, and everybody he knew (girlfriends, boyfriends, buddies, landlords, personal trainers, busybodies, moms, and assorted other concerned human beings) was personally calling his boss to demand Willeniec’s whereabouts.
Ain’tnobodynobodyain’tnobody, Willeniec rasped in my ear.
Nary a diphthong of regret or apology or anger in his ruined voice, no sense of irony that he was now helping the man who’d killed him less than an hour ago.
All my ghost voices are like that.
; Maybe the people I’ve killed are appreciative. (Does that make me sound like some kind of psychopath?) Maybe the Great Beyond is so fantastically wonderful that the people I send there are compelled to come back to help me out of sheer, unfettered gratitude for releasing them from this torturous world.
Like Ripple says, we are all inmates of God’s concentration camp.
The guitar sellers at Truetone might wait until noon to have the Tahoe towed from their minuscule parking lot, which would (presuming it was registered to Willeniec) shortly thereafter set off alarm bells.
If the Tahoe was discovered here, would anyone make the cognitive leap to Oasis Limo three blocks away?
Was Willeniec working this barrel deal alone?
Had he confided in anyone where he was going?
The battery removed from the phone suggested that Willeniec was a rogue cop, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have partners in crime or wasn’t working for someone. I was tempted to walk away clean, because the second I even touched that Tahoe, much less got inside, I’d be shedding forensic clues: hair, skin, DNA (you know what I’m talking about; you watch TV).
All law enforcement needed was a partial fingerprint, and mine are stored in the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System because I was in the military.
Ergo, the smart thing to do might be to stay a minimum of ten feet from Willeniec’s Tahoe, go home, nap for a few hours, and then saunter down to watch the sun come up from the end of the Santa Monica Pier, wait until all the fishermen and surfers looked the other way, and toss Willeniec’s car keys into the bay.
Except—Willeniec was after Avila and it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Willeniec’s Tahoe had been found only a few blocks from Avila’s driver’s place of business.
Notebookmynotebooknotebook, Willeniec whispered.
At Avila’s place, Willeniec had written my info in a brand-new notebook.
At the storage unit, I’d (idiot!) handed him my business card with an obnoxious attitude that practically dared him to come after me.
Neither the notebook nor my business card was on Willeniec’s cold, dead person.