Don't Be Cruel

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Don't Be Cruel Page 11

by Mike, Argento,


  He looked at the cabby's license on the back seat. Akbar el Hussein.

  Hussein?

  "So," Wiley said, "Hussein. Bet you catch a lot of shit for that."

  The driver bristled. He had caught a lot of shit for his name. But he tried to be polite. Tips are better when you're polite, he told himself.

  "Yes. People say things. But I take it in good spirit. I love America."

  "Where're you from?" Wiley asked.

  "I come here from Pakistan. I'm originally from Iraq, but left at the beginning of the war and went to Syria and then to Pakistan, yes?"

  "Pakistan, yes," Wiley said.

  Maybe my luck's turning around, Wiley thought.

  Nunn drove through some bad neighborhoods, making several turns on narrow city streets before pulling to the curb. He watched the rearview mirror for a few moments and said, "No Cadillac. We're home free."

  "I wouldn't go that far," Smith said.

  They needed to ditch the RV and get back to Kathy's and then get out of town. It was easier said than done. They were pretty far from Kathy's and driving the RV across town seemed like a stupid idea, and ditching it in Kathy's neighborhood was even dumber. The thing tended to be noticed.

  Smith was thinking about it. He hadn't even noticed Spew get out of the RV and walk around the corner.

  A minute later, Smith was still thinking while Nunn ministered to Traci With an I.

  Things weren't exactly looking up, Smith thought. But they were better than they were just a few minutes ago. Just keep moving and things will work out, he thought.

  The blare of a horn roused him from his thoughts.

  He looked out the windshield and it was Spew behind the wheel of an Escalade. Smith opened the window and Spew yelled, "I got us a ride."

  Fat Sam was sitting behind the wheel of the Caddy, looking for a way around the pileup in front of him when the two men got out of the pickup truck.

  The fat man paid no attention to the pair as they rummaged through the junk in the truck's bed. He was still studying the pileup as the men approached the Cadillac, one of them carrying something.

  The two men appeared in his window. They looked like hillbillies.

  Fat Sam scowled at them.

  One of the men said, "He said a real fat man in a Caddy, right."

  "Yep," the other one said as he raised what was in his hand toward the window.

  Fat Sam took a look at the nail gun and said, "What the fuck…"

  His thought was interrupted by five pneumatic pings and five roofing nails embedding themselves in his forehead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The feds moved at dawn.

  Following Wiley's lead, they were able to track the bombing suspect to an apartment in a seedy part of town. The agents spent much of the single digit hours preparing for the raid. They had several briefings, outlining their plan of attack. They suited up in their Kevlar. They checked their AR-15s, pulling the bolts back repeatedly to make sure they didn't jam at an inopportune moment. They wrote arrest warrants and then went through them with black Magic Markers to redact what they considered was information sensitive to national security. One of the agents simply blacked out every third word in his affidavit, just to see whether the judge would sign off on it.

  The judge didn't even blink.

  They were poised to strike.

  The sergeant led the task force across the street. He raised his left arm and made a fist. Half the squad peeled off and hid in a breezeway between two row houses. The other half of the squad wondered what the hell the hand signal was supposed to mean and stood in the middle of the street to discuss it. The sergeant stood with his back to the target apartment building and waved the agents toward him. He raised his left hand again in a twirling motion.

  There was some buzzing among the squad. They weren't sure what they were supposed to do. Were they supposed to go around the block? Were they supposed to surround something? Were they supposed to twirl around in the street?

  The sergeant finally said, "Let's go."

  And they went.

  One agent splintered the door with a battering ram. Others flowed into the apartment, automatic weapons at the ready.

  They cornered the suspect, who was in bed. They flipped him onto his stomach, and while one agent had his foot on the suspect's neck and the muzzle of his AR15 jammed behind his ear, another cuffed him. They had him in the back of a black Ford Excursion within 30 seconds.

  In moments, the street was deserted as if nothing had happened.

  "What the fuck's going on out there?" Nunn asked.

  Spew peeked out the front window of Kathy's apartment.

  "I don't know, but that's a shitload of cops," he said.

  Nunn walked over to the window and watched with Spew as the cops stormed the house across the street and dragged some guy away in his boxers.

  "What's that on his shorts?" Spew asked.

  "I don't know," Nunn said. "Looks like Marmaduke."

  They were back in Kathy's living room. Kathy told them about the two "Deliverance" brothers who had met with Papa and about breaking some guy's fucking arm during her set.

  Smith was glad she got the information and felt a strange kind of pride in the fact that she was able to break some guy's fucking arm. It was impressive and he had to remind himself to never, ever do anything that would piss her off.

  "Just a suggestion, dear," Smith said, "and I don't mean anything by it, but maybe you should think about quitting."

  "I can handle myself," Kathy assured him.

  "I know you can, breaking a guy's fucking arm and all."

  "And I think I'm still pretty safe there. I think Papa trusts me, sort of."

  "What do you mean, he trusts you?"

  "Well, he trusts me enough to kill the Joad boys when they finish their business."

  The plan was evolving, Papa told himself. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Colin Powell said that and look where he is now, Papa thought. Where is he now?

  It started out simple enough. Take out the insurance on Nunn, have him killed, collect the insurance. Then, he figured he could more than double his money if he insured Smith and Spew and collected when they shucked this mortal coil with the side benefit of getting rid of some loose ends. Wiley would take care of them, he figured. He had no choice. Papa had him by the short hairs. Still, you couldn't trust cops, so Fat Sam would take out Wiley. And then the Hatfield boys would take out Fat Sam. Fat Sam was trustworthy enough. But he was getting sloppy and Papa was getting tired of the whole grunting thing and he really didn't want to have to share any of his money with him. And then, the hard-assed stripper would take care of the Hatfield boys. He'd waved more than enough cash in her face to ensure that. Strippers liked cash.

  And he would take care of the hard-assed stripper.

  That was the plan, as it stood at that moment. It started out simple enough and he felt bad about taking what he thought had been an elegantly drawn scheme and complicating it almost beyond recognition. But what are you going to do? Sometimes, he thought, things just get out of hand. The world, he thought, is a complicated place.

  The real problem, as far as he was concerned, wasn't that the plan was too complicated. Its execution left a lot to be desired. It just didn't seem to be working very well. As far as he knew, everybody he wanted dead was still alive and he didn't have anything to show for it.

  He was pondering this and trying to figure out where he might have gone wrong when there was a knock on his door.

  It was Soshi.

  "I just got a call. Fat Sam is dead."

  Fucking Colin Powell.

  "Oh, and those two guys who look like Tom Petty's retarded brothers are here."

  Just fucking great.

  The Hatfield brothers squeezed into the office, making sure to rub up against Soshi as they entered. Soshi felt the bile rising in her throat and bolted. The brothers sat on the couch.

  "She's nice," Sid said, rubbing his cr
otch.

  "Yeah, she's real nice. She got a boyfriend?"

  Unfortunately, she didn't. If she did, Papa thought, he'd just sic the boyfriend on the Deliverance twins and be done with them, nice and clean. Instead, he'd have to deal with them himself.

  "How the fuck am I supposed to know?" Papa asked. "What do you guys want, other than to bang my bartender?"

  "We got that fat guy in the Cadillac," Sid said.

  "Got him with a nail gun. Right in the head."

  "Look, we even pulled the nails out and brung 'em. Didn't want to leave no evidence."

  Sid showed Papa the nails. There was still blood and what appeared to be bits of brain on their tips.

  Papa leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands. "Tell me what happened."

  "We just did," Sid said. "We saw the fat man in the Cadillac and shot him in the head with the nail gun and pulled the nails out and brung 'em here."

  "Before that, what was the fat man in the Cadillac doing?"

  "Driving. What the fuck do you think he was doing in his car? Shit, he was in the Cadillac. He wasn't just sitting there pulling his pud or nothing. We seen him on the highway and started following him. He was following this big white RV."

  "Was anyone with him?"

  "No, just the big fat man."

  "No one else?"

  "Nope."

  "And the RV?"

  "We seen a RV. One guy throwed out a stick of dynamite and it blowed up a UPS truck. Flipped it right over. That was pretty fuckin' cool."

  "What happened to the RV?"

  "Beats the fuck outta me," Eddie said. "Last we saw, it was goin' down the road after causing this big accident where we killed the big fat guy in the Cadillac with the nail gun."

  Papa tried to digest what Eddie just told him. Fat Sam bought it at the hands of Tom Petty's retarded brothers and everybody else got away.

  "Can we go?" Sid asked.

  "Yeah, I wanna get some from that chick was in here."

  Papa waved them out of his office.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back.

  The plan, he thought, has met the enemy and it is us.

  The feds kept their suspect in a small, windowless interrogation room in the basement of a building owned by a front company representing the intelligence service of the United Arab Emirates. Technically, it was foreign soil.

  The suspect had a bag over his head. Barry Manilow played at ear-bleeding decibels through a sound system. His hands were cuffed and his feet shackled.

  He had no idea how long he had been there. Every now and then, someone would come into the room and check him. Sometimes, they would hit him. Sometimes, they would shout questions over the din of Manilow warbling about Mandy being a good girl.

  Finally, after what could have been hours, or days, or weeks, the music stopped and a man ripped the bag off of his head. He blinked in the bright fluorescent lights and finally was able to see the man seated in front of him.

  "So," the man began, "tell us who you work for."

  The suspect was confused.

  "I work for the Sunshine Cab Company. I drive a taxi."

  "Wrong answer, Haji."

  The suspect thought, who the fuck is Haji?

  "I think you have made a mistake," the suspect said. "I am Akbar el Hussein. I am from Iraq. I drive a cab. In Iraq, I was an ear, nose and throat specialist. I left when the war started and went to Syria and then Pakistan. And then, I came here. You can check all of this."

  "What makes you think we didn't?"

  "Because I am here and you are making a very big mistake," Akbar said. "I can assure you I have no idea why you have arrested me and brought me to this place and played that music that is destroying my will to live."

  "We'll tell you when we're ready."

  The man walked to the door and whispered something to another man. The music died, right in the middle of Barry Manilow warbling about something at the Copa.

  Then it got worse.

  Celine Dion.

  Oh fuck, Akbar thought.

  Fat Sam's carcass was laid out on the medical examiner's table in the basement of the county building. Rolls of fat cascaded from the side of the stainless steel table. The medical examiner poked the body with a pair of forceps and marveled at its sheer mass. He had never seen a body this big. The cause of death was evident – five puncture wounds to the forehead. He gently touched the holes with a gloved hand and turned to the cop in attendance.

  "That'll do it. They look like nail holes. Look. You can see where the heads of the nails were embedded in the fat on his forehead."

  He looked closer. There were some other marks on the deceased's forehead. He wasn't quite sure what to make of them. After some study, it dawned on him.

  "See these marks?" he asked the cop.

  "Yeah, I was wondering about those."

  "It looks like someone used a claw hammer to pull the nails out."

  Smith was behind the wheel of the Focus, looking for the UFO guy on the radio. It beat talking to Spew, riding shotgun and still sulking about blowing up the UPS truck. He took little consolation in Smith telling him, "You're getting closer."

  Nunn and Traci With an I rode in the back. They were leaning against each other, not sleeping, just taking comfort in the warmth between their bodies.

  Smith found the station.

  "Look," the caller was saying, "I agree with what you're saying, but I think you're a little off base. September 11th was an inside job. I think we all know that. But it wasn't done by Rumsfeld and Cheney. That'd be too obvious. And Halliburton and Blackwater too. They'd be suspected immediately. Nope. I have evidence that the plot was hatched to cover up the Kennedy assassination. Listen, they had proof hidden in the buildings and it was the only way to bury it because we were on to them."

  "Interesting theory," the radio host said.

  "And there's more. The mastermind? Lee Harvey Oswald. They faked his death…"

  "They?"

  "The CIA, the Masons and Regis. Man, everybody knows that."

  Smith heard laughter coming from the back seat.

  "Do you really believe that shit?" Nunn asked.

  "No," Smith said. "I just like listening to it. It makes me feel sane. And hell, I could ask you the same thing."

  "Ask me what, that I believe Regis killed Kennedy?"

  "Do you really believe that Elvis bullshit?"

  Nunn sighed.

  "I don't know what to believe. At the time, it made sense. But looking back, I was pretty fucked up. I'm still pretty fucked up, but I'm learning to live with it."

  "We're all learning to live with it."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Smith drove through the mountains, a little more than an hour from town. It was pretty up here, he thought. Nice and peaceful.

  The road cut through some deep woods. The only signs of civilization were the occasional signs forbidding hunting on the land. He kept an eye out for deer. He was a city boy and seeing a deer by the side of the road had startled him. Every few miles, he passed evidence of the critters, a dark red smear on the road left by a deer losing a confrontation with an 18-wheeler.

  Nunn was giving directions from the backseat. "Almost there," Nunn said. "Up here, on the left, the next logging road, take that."

  They were heading to Nunn's cabin in the mountains. It was ostensibly a hunting cabin, or maybe a fishing cabin. Nunn didn't hunt, or fish. He used the cabin for romantic getaways, mostly because its remote location discouraged women from fleeing his company in mid-tryst.

  Nunn suggested it as a hideout. He said they'd be safe there and could lie low until the heat died down or they found their way out of this seemingly fatal predicament.

  Smith wasn't sure about that. Papa had to know about the cabin, and if he were Papa, it would be the first place he'd look. Nunn assured him, though, that the cabin was safe. At the very least, fleeing to the woods would buy them some time.

  They bounced along the logging road, act
ually more like two muddy ruts cut into the side of the mountain, the Focus struggling to climb the hill. After about fifteen minutes, they had reached a small clearing and the cabin.

  It was little more than a shack, a clapboard building with a pitched roof. Inside, it was comfortable, if a little rustic. The main feature was a stone fireplace, just beyond a rug that appeared to be the hide of a late polar bear, its white fur mottled with gray and matted with unknown substances.

  "A bearskin rug?" Smith asked.

  "I've had this place since the '80s. They were big then."

  Nunn and Traci With an I settled into the back bedroom. Smith and Spew bunked in the front room.

  "I got dibs on the rug," Spew said.

  "It's all yours."

  Spew sprawled out on the rug. He sniffed a couple of times.

  "Ed, it smells funny."

  Fat Sam's funeral was at the First Church of Elvis, Scientist. Papa figured there was no reason to wait. He wasn't going to get any deader.

  His family, a couple of aunts and a few cousins, had wanted Fat Sam to be buried Catholic. He had been raised Catholic, but had drifted from the faith. He wasn't exactly a full-fledged Elvisarian, joining just to placate his boss, but it probably better represented his spirituality than Catholicism. He shared The King's devotion to deep-fried food and chili-cheese fries, in particular. Eating chili-cheese fries was as close as Fat Sam ever got to a religious experience, as it was for those who had the bad fortune to witness him devour them. The universal response to the sight was "Jesus."

  Besides, the aunts and the cousins let Papa know they hadn't intended on paying to bury their loved one, and since Papa was paying for it, he'd have the funeral where he damn well pleased. His party, his house.

  Fat Sam had been poured into a casket the size of a commercial refrigerator and lay in repose in front of the altar, still in the hands of his pallbearer, a Komatsu forklift. Mourners passed by, paying their last respects. It wasn't as if Fat Sam had a lot of friends. Most of them had come to the funeral just to make sure the fat man was really dead.

 

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