The chain link was eight feet high. The razor wire added another foot. Lucky unfurled the furniture blanket, gripped it wide and spun it upward and across the top strand. It was a one shot try with the half-inch blades snagging it dead.
Sweat gathered on Lucky’s brow as well as the creases of his palms.
This shit’s gonna hurt.
Up until the blanket toss, Lucky hadn’t once deigned to lift his left arm over his shoulder. The dull ache had been replaced by a pain so acute and burning he imagined the staples used to seal his wound had completely lost their grasp. He found himself with an opioid craving. What he wouldn’t do for a handful of Percocet. He could almost taste the tablet on his tongue.
“Piss on it,” Lucky hissed.
He reached up and gathered handfuls of chain link. The rest was absolute will. Because the tread of his sneakers couldn’t find a toehold, it all depended on upper-body effort. Grip over rusty grip. And so fast, time wouldn’t allow for an adrenalin release. Lucky hooked his right arm over the top strand of blanket-defended razor wire. It sagged under his weight with a single barb busting through to puncture his bicep.
“Shit!” he bitched to the night.
He pushed over the top, making sure to hang tight to the top bar. He let go to keep his good shoulder from separating. His feet touched concrete on the other side and his natural balance took over. His legs, though, were shuddering as if he’d just sprinted a mile without warming up.
Lucky tracked westward, easing closer to the ancient concrete and metal behemoth in search of a way in. He thought he detected a faint electrical hum coming from inside the building, but nary a leaked lumen. If it was a grow house, the owner had sealed it so not a lick of light escaped. And whoever the illegal proprietor might be, he surely wouldn’t allow it to be guarded only at the corners, thus Lucky gripped his SIG .45 and held it tucked against his ribs.
A five-step metal staircase—no more than a half-flight in elevation—hung from the side of the building. Lucky found the bottom step, climbed by mostly feel, and tried the corroded fire door. It sung a sour note as it scraped against the concrete floor, yet revealed nothing but a blackness so opaque it betrayed reason. In the darkest of dark, Lucky’s eyeballs still searched but could land on nothing at all. It was as if a sack had been pulled down over his head.
Reaching out into the void, his fingertips touched something smooth, dry, and so familiar. Plastic. It gave in like a two-ply garbage bag. Stretching. He could feel it vibrating like a sheet in a breeze.
The droning thrum, Lucky figured. They had to be agitating fans, a must for any indoor pot farm. With the muzzle of his .45, he probed deeper until the light-impervious sheet of plastic tore at the edge and released the magenta rays from the banks of grow lamps.
It was as Lucky had expected—only far more ambitious in scale: a wall-to-wall weed farm. The factory floor was a veritable plantation—thousands of green cannabis plants in various stages of growth. Tiered by age. Perfectly fed. A horticulturist’s wet dream.
Damn, mused Lucky, begrudgingly impressed.
This was what required an unfettered electrical feed worth protecting.
This was why that hole in the ground mattered.
This was why Mush Man had been murdered.
A mirror duplicate of the exterior stairwell led Lucky to the farm floor. The unconscious, ten-minute clock in his head had long stopped ticking, replaced by awe-struck astonishment at just who could have built such a ballsy operation.
Lucky realized he was very exposed.
He must have been detected. An investment so appreciable would not be without defenses. Cameras. Armed guards. An encounter was not only expected but damn sure imminent. Lucky’s heart pulsed all the way to his knuckles. He kept his .45 in play, muzzle just south of horizontal, hoping to only wound the first comer. He would need to apply pain to extract the information his DNA demanded.
Lucky’s thoughts were overtaken by the sound of barking dogs. Angry. A hard charging racket. He coolly swiveled toward the sound, but was shaken by the sight. The marijuana plants’ perfect vertical stalks were shaking, agitated by fast-approaching beasts. In the seconds it took Lucky to assess the danger, the guard dogs had covered more than half the distance across the pot field. The quivering stalks betrayed their ever-widening swath as they charged their target.
One attacking dog, he could put down. Maybe two. But three or more teeth-gnashing beasts? Not a chance. Lucky’s only escape was the way he had come in. So he reversed his path. The pivot he made was, he thought, five strides from the foot of the steps he’d only just descended.
His mental math was wrong.
Three swift paces and he was at the rusted stairs. His timing was poor. His toe caught the underside of the first step and, before he could catch himself, his oft-busted face only partially broke his fall. He would have growled a worldly curse if his jaw hadn’t been clamped from the immediate shock of it. His ears rang with blood. Or was it just the reverb from his body slam into the timeworn stairs?
But where were the attacking dogs?
The barking had stalled. The beasts should have been upon him and ripping into his legs. That’s when he heard steps. Light. Dog paws on his left, panting, and wet noses fighting for sniffs at his ears and neck. Lucky forced himself to roll to his left and open an eye. Through semi-blurred vision he saw fur and mutt-ish, slobbering dog mugs radiating a familiar hounds’ stink.
“Oprah,” muttered Lucky.
All four of Mush Man’s sled team were upon him, lapping up Lucky’s familiar smells. He righted himself, re-gripped his pistol and searched the perimeter for human approach. He sighted no one. Not a solitary biped. But then came a not-so-distant voice.
“STUPID GODDAMN DOGS!” shouted a barrel-voiced man. “GET YOUR FURRY TAILS BACK OVER HERE!”
A piercing two-fingered-whistle followed. The dogs’ ears briefly perked, yet they remained expectant and stuck at Lucky’s side.
“Here we go, gang,” whispered Lucky, pressing back up to his feet. “C’mon, yup.”
Lucky climbed the half-flight with all four dogs at his heels until they were outside and well beyond the cannabis-farm’s magenta pall.
As Lucky escaped, Big Otis balanced upon one of the industrial stepladders used for pruning and harvesting. His eyes, hampered by a mix of color-blindness and astigmatism, strained for movement. The best he could catch was the last two dogs scampering up a stairwell and out through one of the fire exits.
“Bomb them dogs,” pissed Otis, already scraping at his fat brain stem to come up with an excuse as to how and why he’d just lost Julius’s smelly mutts. The boss had not just burdened Big Otis with the chore, but had also made him clean up the mess the dogs had made of his condominium, including a kitchen floor smeared wall to wall with their excrement.
Still parked outside the defunct tire factory, Shia remained alert behind the wheel of her Optima, Tim Gilligan strapped in at her side. Both were keenly aware that they were two full sweeps of the second hand beyond Lucky’s order on when to bug out and place the officer needs assistance call.
“Twelve and a half minutes,” jiggled a nervous Tim.
“Shut your mouth,” was all Shia cared to reply, keeping her gaze fixed on the silhouetted monolith framed through her windshield. There’d been reason aplenty for her to follow orders. Leaving Lucky behind while dumping Fat Tim at a convenient corner to thumb his phone for a ride would have left her alone and in possession of her ticket to Washington. The kidnapping and threatened torture of the DWP civilian had been duly captured on her camera phone—all procedure and due process ignored by Lucky Dey. Shia’s mission was accomplished. So why the hell stick around beyond Lucky’s arbitrary countdown?
You should’ve left after two minutes! her inner voice shouted.
“We wait him out,” hushed Shia.
She was half ready to switch on her headlamps and shock the desolate scene with her high beams when—
KER-WHUMP!
&
nbsp; The Optima’s atmosphere felt like the air was being sucked out as one of the rear doors was yanked open. Violently so. Only instead of Lucky folding himself into the backseat, four large and dirty mutts vaulted inside, one after the next, instantly spoiling the last possible whiff of the vehicle’s new car smell.
Lucky joined the backseat fray and pulled the door shut.
“What are you waiting for?” Lucky demanded. “Let’s get outta here!”
“Right,” said Shia, turning over the engine and jetting the car into a stealthy U-turn. “Where to?”
“Nearest twenty-four-hour drugs,” moaned Lucky. “Need Benadryl.”
Big Otis looped the old factory three times, once clockwise and twice counterclockwise, all the while cursing the stupid beasts as well as Julius for not turning the four mongrels over to Animal Control for destruction. None of the four sentries reported hide nor hair of the dog pack. On his last rotation, Big Otis decided to flashlight every oxidized foot of the chain link at dog height. Though his low gaze entirely missed the blue furniture blanket hooked and hanging over a three-foot section of razor wire, he did discover a corroded section of fence pushed through to the sidewalk.
Mystery solved, thought the big man. See ya later mutts. An’ good goddamn riddance.
Big Otis pulled the fire door shut, repaired the blackout plastic with duct tape, and ambled back to the observation platform that had once been the factory foreman’s post. Set up with a folding buffet table, stackable outdoor chairs, and a humming mini-fridge, Big Otis planned to put up his size-fourteen feet, get nostalgic with some Tupac on his headphones, and take his sweet time working up a plausible excuse as to how he lost the dogs.
“You back from fixin’ your fuckup?” asked Frosty, seated at the buffet table, the operation’s lone laptop open to a mosaic of security camera images.
“What you ’bout up in my shit?” angered Big Otis.
“Checkin’ my pot stalks.”
“Then go check on ’em,” urged Otis. “Or you gonna take over my squat?”
“You gonna tell Julius ’bout the bust-in?”
“Wasn’t no bust-in. Was them stupid-ass dogs.”
“You sure?”
“Damn sure. Saw where they pushed themselves through the door and then the fence. You like dogs?”
“Got no problems with ’em,” said Frosty. “And yeah. I’ll take yer squat.”
“Bam!” said Big Otis with a touchdown dance. “I. Am. Gone!”
Frosty didn’t need to look up from the computer screen to know when Big Otis had checked out. His ears tracked the man’s thumping exit all the way to the squeaking door underneath the foreman’s tower. With his eyes fixed on the mosaic, and the digital dexterity of a fifteen-year-old, Frosty enlarged each individual camera frame and rolled back video for a full hour. Next, he fast-forwarded through each camera’s view until he spotted the intruder. White male. Six-feet, Frosty guessed. And no doubt, one-hundred-percent cop. By keying up various camera angles, Frosty tracked the dogs’ path through his cannabis forest to the intruder who had stopped near the bottom of the fire stairs. Frosty chuckled when the white man face-planted on the stairs. But the questions were adding up.
If he was a cop, where was his radio?
Why did he run like he was scared by dogs, only to rescue ’em as like he knew ’em?
Who the hell is that white nigga?
48
“This’ll do,” said Lucky, pushing open the Optima’s rear door with his sneaker. The four mongrels had already been deposited at a local shelter with Lucky’s promise to return and collect them the following day. What was left of the bottle of Benadryl laid on the backseat, cradled by a messy cushion of recently shed dog hair.
“Instructions?” tested Lucky.
“Return Mr. Gilligan to where we found him,” answered Shia. “Go home and wait for the phone to ring. Maybe somewhere between I get my car cleaned?”
“Call could be tomorrow. Could be weeks,” said Lucky. “Listen to your deputy reps. Do as you’re told. And whenever shit gets hard to answer, it’s all on me. I was your T.O. You were following orders.”
“So what about me?” whined Tim Gilligan.
Lucky hesitated as if deciding whether there was an answer better than none at all.
“Get a lawyer,” croaked Lucky before shoving the door shut and double-rapping his fist on the trunk.
He watched the Optima’s taillights until Shia made a left turn and disappeared from sight. The boulevard was empty. Were it not for the occasional streetlamp, the locale might have been mistaken as some post-apocalyptic dystopia—with horizons in both directions appearing endless and uncomfortably unpopulated.
Lucky rotated his view across the four-lane track to the mostly dark strip mall and its lone, light-burning business. The establishment’s sign, once a white bubble-styled fixture backlit by fluorescents, had yellowed over the years. A red plastic W had been pasted where a K appeared to have been peeled away with a dull paint scraper, changing the sign from Pizza King to Pizza Wing. Light from the restaurant bled from a storefront window partially concealed behind a folding security screen. A closer look revealed the green, white, and red panels of the Italian flag painted in liquid chalk.
Using his fingertips, Lucky checked to see if his wound was bleeding through. The fact that it hadn’t leaked since his gas station fix was a testament to the technology of feminine hygiene. He checked his pistol, hooked and holstered against the small of his back along with the two spare magazines clipped to his belt.
He wet his chapped lips, tasting the bitter remnant of cherry-flavored Benadryl. He hoped whatever adrenalin he could summon would act as a bulwark against the doze-inducing diphenhydramine. He smirked to himself, imagining that whatever he encountered inside Pizza Wing there’d also be a parallel chemical cage match raging inside his brain—sedative versus adrenal hormones.
And may the better drug win.
He crossed the threshold of the pizza shop and was hit by a blast of oven heat spilling through the propped-open door. It slapped everyone who entered with a face full of hot, dry air. Lucky noted how claustrophobic the one-table dining area was and wondered how he would manage to maneuver through the cramped space in a scuffle.
To the left was a display fridge with a variety of cold drinks in cans, plastic bottles, and sixty-four ounce jugs. The aging unit thrummed loudly and practically drowned the voices coming from the kitchen. Lucky approached the lift and hinge counter and stood waiting for one of the two aproned cooks to take notice. Both young men were black, in their late teens and, by Lucky’s read, gang-affiliated based on the tattoos creeping out from underneath their respective, sweat-marked t-shirts.
“Counter,” chirped the pizza cook who, between sliding pies around the oven, twirled the paddle like Bruce Lee wielding a Kendo stick.
The younger of the pair wore a red IHOP t-shirt smudged with flour and pizza dough. He wiped his hands on his apron and approached the customer, his gait ever wary with each step closer.
“Help you?” asked IHOP.
“Lookin’ for your boss,” said Lucky. “Gave me his card.”
“Who dat?” asked IHOP.
“Julius,” said Lucky.
“Yeah, man. Julius like owns us. But he owns lotsa places and not like he comes in here much.”
“This is the card he gave me,” said Lucky, sliding it across the counter. “Tell him I wanna talk about the dogs.”
“Dogs?” laughed the pizza cook.
“I’ll eat while I wait,” assured Lucky. “How’s that?”
“Order up whatever,” said IHOP. “But can’t say if the boss’ll come ’round none.”
“Sausage and cheese?” requested Lucky. “Small oughta do me.”
“Somethin’ to drink wid dat?” asked IHOP, writing down the order on a self-carboning pad.
“Can of Pepsi,” said Lucky. He peeled off a twenty, left it on the counter and relaxed into the corner seat of that lone
table for two. Lucky was glad to feel his belly rumble from hunger. A good sign that despite the adrenalin, Benadryl and pain, his body demanded fuel. In that pinprick of a moment, Lucky imagined a mouthful of hot pizza would feel nothing short of sublime.
He popped the soda can with his left hand, and with his right, pulled slightly on the butt of his pistol to test the ease of a quick reach.
Just in case.
“Never thought I’d say puh-leeeaaaaasse put my nigga ass back on the farm!” bitched the hard-breathing voice outside the door.
A shadow crossed the window separating the storefront from the sidewalk. Lucky heard the tick-tick-tick of smooth rolling bike gears. Through cracks in the chalk paint, he made out what he could of the figure. The cyclist sported a multi-colored cycling jersey and was diminutive despite the volume of his voice.
“Used to like workin’ at da WAAAANNNGGGG!” bellowed the cyclist.
Lucky felt sucked into a vacuum. His skin tingled and the hairs on his arms stood as if electrically charged.
The front wheel of a neon yellow bicycle rolled in, stalling halfway through the pizza shop door. The rider, incongruously sporting black cargo shorts with that skintight jersey, propped the bike against the doorjamb and swung a tattered vinyl hot-box onto the counter.
“You gotta tell customers we don’t deliver nothin’ east of Central ’n’ west of Avalon—”
“Wa-wait!” interrupted IHOP with a laugh and fumbling for his phone. “Wanna get me some video of Lil Rod’s complain face.”
Lil Rod?
Lucky’s nerve endings, already tweaked, were fully prepared to leap connections and act with deadly purpose.
Lil Rod.
The move—as pictured in Lucky’s mind—was in a filmic series of skip-frames. As if there were a time-cut between Lucky’s raising his pistol and Lil Rod’s skull being split by a two-hundred-thirty-grain slug. Yet Lucky remained seated. Still. Externally calm. Reminding himself that the ultimate prize was Julius Colón—Pizza proprietor, cannabis entrepreneur, and supposed dog lover.
El ultimo hombre.
The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset) Page 86