by Haris Orkin
“Yes, I understand that’s your cover,” Flynn said. “But your innate intelligence is rather obvious.”
“You are not dealing with reality! Look at me! I didn’t finish high school! I’m a fucking tweaker!”
“Do you really think that’s a believable cover?”
“It’s not a fucking cover! It’s who I am!”
“I know you’re not authorized to reveal your true identity. Not even to me. But just know that we’re on your side and we’re here to help you. Right, Sancho?”
Sancho didn’t answer. He just sighed and watched as the approaching lights of Palmdale illuminated the dark desert sky.
The satellite navigation system began to beep and a red flashing dot appeared on the map. The calm, feminine, English voice of the navigation system said, “Please exit east at Avenue S.”
Sancho scooted down as Flynn drove by Pete Kursky’s compound and did a reconnaissance run. The house was a sprawling six thousand square foot Spanish style McMansion on five acres of desert real estate. It was covered with salmon-colored stucco and brightly lit with motion sensing security lights. There was no landscaping. No grass. No trees. Just a dozen Harleys, a few pickup trucks, and one monster four-by- four parked in a front yard made up entirely of cement. A tall, black, wrought iron fence topped with razor wire surrounded the property. The only entrance appeared to be an automated gate.
Sancho watched as Flynn took in every detail. He parked a quarter mile down the rural road in front of the next closest house and raised the Aston Martin’s roof. Flynn locked down the clamps and turned off the ignition, cutting off the navigation system’s ever-polite voice just as she was telling them to turn the hell around.
“James, listen to me, man.” Sancho looked at Flynn hard. “We gotta think this through.”
“I already have.”
“Dude, they’ll kill you.”
“They will,” Dulcie said. “They’ll fucking kill you!”
“If you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for,” Flynn replied as he opened the Aston Martin and climbed from the car. He tossed Sancho the keys. “Be ready to move.”
Sancho watched as Flynn quickly made his way towards Kursky’s place, disappearing into the darkness of the desert night. Occasionally, they caught glimpses of his silhouette.
Dulcie slapped the back of Sancho’s head. “How could you let him go?”
“How the hell was I supposed to stop him?”
“You didn’t even try.” Tears filled Dulcie’s eyes.
“You gotta phone?” Dulcie nodded. Sancho put out his hand.
“Who you calling?”
“Just give me the phone.”
“You’re not calling the cops, are ya?”
“Dulcie!”
“You can’t call the cops on Kursky. If he finds out we called the cops on him…”
“How’s he gonna find out?”
“They have cops on the payroll. They’ll see the phone number and they’ll know it was me.”
“Give me the fucking phone.”
“We should just get the hell out of here.”
“Dulcie…”
“Start the car and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“I’m not—”
“There’s nothing we can do for him. He’s fucking dead. The cops can’t save him. It’s too late. Just start the fucking car!” Sancho grabbed for her purse and Dulcie fought him for it. He dumped the contents out in his lap and found the phone. She tried to grab it and he pushed her away, opened the car door and stumbled out. She climbed out after him. “Give me back my fucking phone!”
Sancho punched in 911 and spun to avoid her as she slapped and kicked him. He put it up to his ear to listen but the phone didn’t ring through. It just made a forlorn beeping sound and went dead. Sancho looked at the screen. The text read: Call Failed.
Dulcie kicked him hard in the cojones. Sancho gasped and bent at the waist. She snatched the phone out of his hand, threw it on the ground and crushed it beneath her shoe. Sancho fell to his knees, his hands clutching his injured groin.
“Why’d you do that?” Sancho groaned. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Sancho tried to focus. The intense agony slowly dissipated and he was finally able to breathe. Dulcie’s fear and anger gave way to remorse as she watched Sancho kneeling in the dirt, cradling his injured huevos, struggling to catch his breath.
“Are you okay?” she asked him. Sancho didn’t answer. Dulcie stepped closer and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” whispered Sancho.
“If they hurt him…If they…” Tears turned to mud on her dirty face as she glanced up the road at Kursky’s McMansion.
Agent Johnson watched the Kursky compound through a night vision monocular and caught sight of an intruder scaling the wrought iron fence. The trespasser climbed quickly, gracefully, avoiding the razor wire as he leapt over the top and landed, cat-like, on the other side of the fence. Johnson sat in the front seat of a van parked on a hill overlooking Kursky’s property. He glanced at the short, Hispanic man in the rear of the van. Agent Cordero wore headphones and monitored a laptop.
“Someone jumped the fence,” Johnson said.
“What?” Cordero said a little too loudly. He could hardly hear with the headphones on.
“Someone jumped the fence!”
“Better not be LAPD.”
“Nah, they know this is a DEA operation.”
“What?” Cordero shouted.
“They know we’re here!”
“Who?”
“LAPD!”
“So, who do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” Johnson said.
“What!”
Johnson reached back and pulled the headphones off his partner. “I don’t know!”
Cordero hit a button and now the voices from the Kursky compound filtered over two small speakers.
“He is such a fucking jerk,” Kursky said.
“He’s totally selfish,” another gruff voice added.
“I don’t know why she doesn’t just dump him,” Kursky growled.
“Who they talking about?” Johnson asked.
“Who do you think?”
The DEA agent nodded and took a swig of Red Bull.
“So, who the hell jumped the fence?” Cordero asked.
“Don’t know,” Johnson replied. “But if he’s a hitter he’s in for a rude fucking surprise.”
You could have put Mike Croker’s entire house in Pete Kursky’s living room. The pitched ceiling was thirty feet high and the beige carpeting ubiquitous. The walls were a lighter shade of beige and bereft of anything other than paint. A strangely ornate chandelier hung down from the ceiling, illuminating the huge blank expanses of nothingness. A seventy-three-inch HDTV was surrounded by a glass and ersatz chrome entertainment center complete with a stereo, a DVD player, a DVR, a PlayStation 4, and two huge speakers. Five other speakers stood on stands strategically placed around the massive black leather sectional sofa and the three black leather La-Z-Boys. Every chair and couch cushion had a massive biker’s ass planted comfortably in its recesses.
Pete Kursky and nine of his cohorts drank beer and ate pizza while watching a rerun of “Sex and the City” on the giant HDTV.
Carrie Bradshaw quietly dressed while Big slumbered. Her inner thoughts via voice-over were picked up off the surround sound speakers by the mini-microphone hidden in the tiny white plastic piece that kept the pizza box from squishing the pie.
“When it comes to relationships, maybe we’re all in glass houses and shouldn’t throw stones,” Carrie said. “Because you can never really know. Some people are settling down, some are settling, and some people refuse to settle for anything less…than butterflies...”
A commercial for the Sit and Sleep Mattress Gallery abruptly took the place of Carrie’s face and Kursky immediately muted the sound
.
“He’s not right for her,” Kursky said.
A lean, muscular biker with greasy blonde hair took a long pull on his beer and burped. “She doesn’t know what the fuck she wants. I think she’s afraid of commitment.”
“I don’t agree,” a short hairy biker took a hit of a spliff. “I think that’s exactly what she’s looking for.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s not afraid of it.”
A fat biker with thinning gray hair pointed at the screen. “I’d fuck her.”
A biker with a red ZZ top beard shook his head. “I don’t know, man, I think she’s kind of horsey. I mean, what’s that fucking thing on her chin?”
“That Samantha’s hot,” the muscular biker said.
“I’d fuck her,” the fat biker added.
“You’d fuck me,” Kursky said.
The guys all laughed and suddenly everything went black.
Agent Johnson, watching from the van, was surprised to see the house go dark. “The lights just went out.”
“You think a fuse blew?” Cordero asked.
“Or the guy who jumped the fence cut the power. What are they saying?”
“Nothing.”
“Turn up the sound.”
Agent Cordero turned up the sound. The silence was deafening. They listened intently and moved closer to the speakers. Cordero cranked the volume all the way up and then both jumped at the sound of an earsplitting boom.
Dulcie heard the shotgun blast, looked at Sancho and then squinted up the road, into the darkness, towards Kursky’s compound. “We gotta get the fuck out of here.”
Sancho started running towards Kursky’s.
“Where the hell are you going?” she shouted. But he didn’t answer her. He disappeared into the gloom and Dulcie couldn’t believe it.
“You took the car keys! You took the fucking keys! Hey, asshole! Don’t just leave me here!”
In the absolute darkness of Pete Kursky’s living room, bikers tripped on furniture and bumped into walls. They cursed and collided, yelled and pushed and fought to find a way out.
“Everybody shut the fuck up!” Kursky yelled and the bikers all shut the fuck up. “Was that a fucking shotgun?”
Another massive blast shook the room.
“Indeed, it was. A Benelli 12-gauge pump-action shotgun to be more precise,” Flynn explained. “Which I believe belongs to you, Mr. Kursky.”
Kursky turned to face the voice’s owner, but since the room was utterly devoid of light, Kursky saw exactly the same thing he saw facing the other way. Darkness.
“Who the hell are you?” Kursky’s voice was full of bravado.
“Someone wearing night vision goggles,” Flynn said. “Which means I can see you, but you can’t see me.”
“You’re that jerk-off from Tiny’s,” one of the bikers said.
“That asshole who ripped off Mikey,” Kursky added.
“Indeed,” Flynn answered. “And if anyone makes a move to stop me, I will not hesitate to expunge them.”
There was a long pause and then someone said, “Do what to them?”
“Pull the trigger on this shotgun and obliterate them.”
“You can’t take us all down,” Kursky pointed out. “If we rush you—”
“You will die,” Flynn replied. “You know this shotgun is a semi-automatic. I can fire it as quickly as I can pull the trigger. Of course, if you don’t agree with my assessment, you’re welcome to try and prove me wrong.”
Kursky had no come back to that and no one made a move. “What do you want?” Kursky asked, his voice tight with anger.
“Q.”
“Q?”
“Q,” Flynn repeated.
“What’s a Q?”
“Not what. Who.”
“I don’t have a frickin’ clue who—”
Flynn pulled the trigger and the shotgun boomed.
Outside, Sancho jumped at the sound of the blast. The security lights were out and the grounds were so dark Sancho couldn’t see squat, which is why he walked face first into the side of Kursky’s McMansion. His brain lit up with pain as the stucco scraped the tip of his nose.
“Coño,” he whispered as he fished around in his pocket for a lighter. Sancho was a reformed smoker. He hadn’t had a cigarette in months, but he still carried his lighter out of habit. It was a chrome Zippo with a pirate’s skull and crossbones. His Uncle Ernesto had given Sancho the lighter on his sixteenth birthday. Ernesto had forgotten to buy Sancho a gift, so he gave him the lighter. Ernesto had no need for it anymore since he was dying of emphysema. The Zippo contributed mightily to Ernesto’s demise, but today this lighter may save someone’s life. Sancho lit a flame which danced in the wind and held it close to his body, cupping his left hand around it to keep the flame alive. A second later he saw the circuit breaker box. The metal door was open and squeaking in the breeze.
Back in Kursky’s pitch black living room, Flynn fed more shells into the chamber and said, “That was my last warning shot, gentlemen. There won’t be another.”
“But we don’t know any damn Q,” Kursky claimed.
“Who the hell is he?” an unseen biker to Kursky’s left asked.
“He’s a brilliant scientist who’s currently working for your boss. Under duress, of course.”
“You mean Goolardo?” Kursky was clearly confused.
“Goolardo.” Flynn let the melodious name roll off his tongue.
“I’m just a dealer, dude. I don’t know shit,” Kursky’s fear beat out the bravado now.
“You don’t know about the plan?” James asked.
“What plan?”
“The plan.”
“Goolardo has a plan?”
“Are you feigning befuddlement or do you truly not know?”
“What?” Kursky wasn’t feigning anything.
“Maybe I need to talk to Goolardo.”
“Dude, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Where is he?” Flynn demanded.
“Who?”
“Goolardo.”
“I don’t know,” Kursky said.
“Somehow I think you do.”
“I don’t! All I have is a phone number.”
“Well that’s a start.”
“If I give you his number and you call Goolardo, he will not be happy,” Kursky said.
“Yes, but if you don’t give me his number, I won’t be happy. And I have a shotgun aimed at your face.”
“He’ll kill me.”
“Which means you’re dead if you do and dead if you don’t,” Flynn quipped. “Of course, if you don’t, you’re dead a lot sooner. Say by the count of three.”
“Come on, man, what are you trying to—”
“One…” Flynn heard panicked scrambling, tripping, crashing. “Two…” Running, colliding, grunting, glass shattering.
A millisecond before Flynn could say three, someone flipped the main switch on the circuit breaker, turning on every light in the compound. Flynn found himself facing the seventy-three-inch HDTV. His shot gun was aimed directly at Kim Cattrall’s naked booty. Kursky and all nine bikers were right behind him. Before James could turn, the fat biker cracked him across the back of the head with a fireplace poker.
Flynn went down hard.
The biker with the ZZ Top beard was outraged. “He ain’t wearing no damn night vision goggles!”
Chapter Fifteen
Kursky popped the top on a light beer and sat his colossal hiney on a La-Z-Boy. He took a sip and made a face. The light beer clearly sucked, but Kursky was determined to lose some of the unsightly blubber that made up so much of his body weight. Fifteen years previously, he was in pretty decent shape. For a twenty-four-month period, in his late twenties, he actually had visible abs. Some people said he looked a lot like Dennis Quaid. Well, one person. His mother. Now, however, he looked like a chubbier version of his big brother Randy.
Kursky could still remember when teenage girls would check him out. Not anymore. Now h
e was just another tubby old dude.
To Pete, losing weight meant regaining his youth. That was the reason he went to Jenny Craig. That was why he was denying himself and suffering constant hunger pangs. He wanted younger women to look at him again. Not out of fear, but desire.
Delaying gratification always pissed Pete off. Combine that with his continuous hunger and Pete’s short fuse was now non-existent. The slightest provocation made him absolutely crazy, which was why he so thoroughly enjoyed kicking James Flynn’s ass.
Flynn lay curled on the floor in a fetal position. Kursky had started the stomping, kicking, punching and cursing and it was all so satisfying and invigorating. But now he was out of breath and needed a break and a cold beer. He loved bonding with his buds over a serious ass-whooping.
He watched from his bar stool as the eight other Slaves of Satan beat Flynn unmercifully. Picking up his satellite phone, Kursky punched in a number. Moments later he heard Mendoza’s voice.
“Mendoza.” His voice was flat and without affect. Mendoza spoke from the back seat of a black Mercedes limousine. He wore a Bluetooth headset and gazed out the tinted window into the darkness.
“We got him,” Kursky said.
“Who?”
“The guy who ripped off Mikey.”
“Do you know where the money is?”
“No.”
Mendoza noticed a spot on his tie. It looked like blood. “Chingado,” he whispered. Kursky listened, but that was all Mendoza said. Mendoza opened a bottle of soda water, poured a little on a handkerchief, and rubbed the bloody spot on his tie. Finally, he said, “Do you know who he works for?”
“Not yet, but—”
“Do you fucking know anything!” The spot wasn’t coming out and that seriously irritated Mendoza.
“I know he knows about some plan,” Kursky said, hoping to mollify Mendoza with this new bit of probably useless information.
“What plan?”
“Goolardo’s plan.”
Mendoza stopped rubbing the spot. His forehead wrinkled with concern. “What else did he say?”
“Nothing. Do you want me to—”
“He had to say something. Did he tell you what the plan was?”
“No, do you want to find out—”
“No! Don’t talk to him! Don’t touch him. Don’t lay a finger on him.”