by Lucas, Helen
Our official story was that I was a nightclub owner and Winston was my head of security. Bolo had seemed uncomfortable with the idea of a woman taking part in negotiations but as soon as we revealed how much we knew about the price of cocaine in Miami (and, after all, who would know better than us, the FBI?) he seemed to relax, ready and willing to cut a deal for us.
And now, it had all come to this—it had all come down to this meeting in a deserted dockyard, lit only by the ghostly glow of street lamps and ships drifting out to sea.
“You locked and loaded?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper. I had a bad feeling about this. A feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.
“I sure am,” Winston replied, cocking his pistol. We had to be ready for anything.
The last time I had this feeling? It was when Fred was deployed.
The last time he was deployed. The last time I said goodbye to him. I had the dead, sick, nauseous feeling in my stomach of someone who knows that she’s talking to a living corpse. I had it now and I hated it.
I wanted to get this over with, but I was afraid of what that might bring.
A trio of black cars approached, like harbingers of the apocalypse.
“This’ll be them,” Winston muttered. I reached into the back seat of our SUV and seized a suitcase. It was full of cash—real cash. We couldn’t risk Bolo noticing counterfeits, since he would invariably check. But every fourth bill was marked—not enough to draw suspicion, but enough that we’d be able to track Bolo’s spending. If he got away. If we didn’t.
If things went wrong.
We both exited our car, the last piece of protection left for us as we strode towards the cars.
A group of about twelve men left the cars. Centered among them, with guards flanking him on either side, was Bolo—looking like some sort of horrific voodoo demon, grinning in the darkness.
“Well, well, well…” he cackled gently. “I didn’t think you’d all show up.”
“We’re here,” I replied. “Let’s see the goods.”
Bolo jerked his head and three of his guards broke off, jogging around to the back of their cars. The kilos of cocaine, wrapped into neat little bricks, began to spill out of the trunks of the identical black cars. It was as if these were demonic little sprites, building a castle of misery out of black and white, playing a children’s game the entire time.
But this was no game.
One of the guards approached us. He handed a gleaming white brick to Bolo, who drew a switchblade from his back pocket, a clean, long Italian model. He sliced a tiny, perfectly thin cut into the brick of cocaine, just enough to tease out a slow stream of powder. He spread it over his finger and snorted it, shuddering in pleasure.
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
He tossed the brick to Winston, who ran the cocaine along his finger and lifted it to his nose without skipping a beat. Winston shuddered too, but I knew he’d be able to keep his wits about him. This was something we’d planned for—Winston was no stranger to drugs, given where he’d grown up, after all, and he would be at least familiar with the rush coursing through his veins right now, not to mention the crash that would be coming in about twenty minutes, give or take.
Winston turned to me and nodded.
“It’s clean. Solid stuff.”
“Right. Then we’re getting our money’s worth…” I said, my voice tight.
“Speaking of which…” Bolo hissed, his lips twisted into a cruel grin.
I held up the briefcase and cracked it open. Bolo approached, his grin still gleaming as he peered ever closer at the cash.
“No sequentials. Bolo like, Bolo like,” he growled.
“Are we good?” Winston asked impatiently. From where he stood directly in front of me, Bolo peered up at the other Haitian standing next to me, peeking over the rims of his horror show glasses.
“We good…” he said slowly. “You look familiar.”
My eyes widened in spite of myself. In spite of my years of training. No. No. No. Fuck.
“You look like… The Bragg boy at Roseland…”
Roseland was the name of Winston’s housing project growing up. The same as Bolo’s.
“We lived on the same floor,” Bolo growled, though his growl was slow, drawn out, as if spilling out of a dream. “But you became a cop and I became a gangster…”
I dropped the case and drew my pistol in a single smooth motion.
“FBI. Bolo Lacroix, you’re under arrest…” I started to say but I lost my balance when Winston threw his hand out, knocking me back and out of the way of the salvo of fire coming from Bolo’s guards.
“Fucking rats! Fucking cunts!” Bolo screamed, drawing his own pistol, unloading into Winston. My partner crumbled like a paper doll, making horrific noises that I had never heard a human make.
We were being monitored this whole time, though. Two helicopters lit up the skies over the dock, with agents pinned to the sides, prepared to rappel down to back us up.
“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation…” a loudspeaker began. “Lay down your weapons and place your hands on your head. You are surrounded…”
I saw Bolo take off running and I found my trigger. I unleashed two well-placed shots into his leg, sending him sprawling.
The other gangsters had already begun to scatter. I rolled onto Winston, his dark face terrifyingly pale.
“Bragg, Bragg, Bragg…” I gasped, tearing away at his shirt, desperate to stop the bleeding.
“Claire…” he grunted, blood spurting out of his mouth. “Bolo… Arrest Bolo… Otherwise…”
I knew what he was going to say.
If we didn’t arrest Bolo, then this all would have been for nothing.
I pressed my lips to Winston’s sweaty forehead and took off running, into the darkness, into the dockyard.
Bolo was easy to track. He left a trail of blood in his wake. And even if he hadn’t, he was no professional. He screamed at me the entire time, staggering loudly from shipper container to shipping container.
“You fucking… Fucking bitch!” he screamed as I took careful, slow steps, my pistol up and level.
“Bolo, it’s all over. We’ve got an ambulance waiting to take care of that leg…”
“Fuck you, cunt!” he screamed. I pivoted around a corner and almost ate a mouthful of lead from his sidearm.
“Bolo Lacroix, you’re shooting at a federal agent right now. I don’t think I need to tell you what kind of suck you’re going to be in when this is all over.”
“Eat me, cunt…” he yelled, his curses degenerating into a long string of incomprehensible Creole slurs.
I could have waited for back up, but I was mad. And I wanted the satisfaction of taking Bolo down myself.
And, to be completely honest with you… I didn’t care if I lived or died. I hadn’t, not since Fred died. It’s probably what made me such a good agent.
I reached inside my flak vest and found a flash bang. I clicked its fuse and lobbed it gracefully towards Bolo. A brilliant burst of light cut through the muggy Miami night and as it dissipated, I dashed around the container, my gun drawn.
I found Bolo propped up against washed out green shipping container, his blood splattered all around in a lewd, disgusting pattern, as if he had been trying to offend us in death. He squinted at me, started shooting, but his rounds went wild and in a second, I was on top of him.
In the academy, we learned Krav Maga and my instructor had always told me I was a natural. My knee connected solidly with Bolo’s jaw and then I slammed the barrel of my Glock onto the bridge of his nose, shattering it with a sickening crack. As he screamed, my fists connected with his throat, his face, and then my elbows, for good measure.
I worked my hands around onto his sweaty neck, under his unwashed, bloodied dreadlocks. I forced his face down into the concrete, taking no pains to be gentle. I took special pleasure in grinding his glasses into the pavement as I forced his arm behind his back, and then the o
ther, finally slapping handcuffs onto him in triumph.
“You’re under arrest,” I whispered. “You have the right to remain silent…”
As I dragged his beaten and broken form back to the meeting point, I saw the results of the sting: the entire dock was full of cops, FBI, and ATF, milling around, taking reports, treating wounds. All over but the shouting.
And then, there, in the middle of it, I saw a form being loaded into an ambulance, covered in a white sheet deformed by huge red splotches.
I pushed Bolo into the arms of a nearby cop and took off running, hoping against hope that the body beneath the sheet wasn’t who I thought it was. He wasn’t wounded that badly. He wasn’t. He wasn’t.
He was. I knew it.
Doug Wong, my boss, caught me before I could reach the ambulance.
“No, damn it!” I screamed at him, sending a hard jab his way. He caught it almost effortlessly, his hands like steel vices gripping. God, how was a desk jockey this strong?
“Powell, relax, relax… There’s nothing you can do.”
“No! No! No!”
“Claire, Claire, Claire…” he said, repeating, his voice firm. “You got Bolo. You and Winston did.”
“And he’s…”
“Yes.”
I pushed Doug away and watched the ambulance take off, knowing that it was going to the morgue and not the hospital.
“I’ll kill that cock sucker…” I hissed, turning to the cop who was loading Bolo into a squad car. I started off, reaching to load another magazine into my pistol as Doug caught me.
“No, you won’t. He’s going to get a trial. He’s going to tell us the details of his operations. And we’re going to shut him down and put him in jail for the rest of his life.”
“Fuck, Doug, he killed Winston…”
“Winston knew the risks. He was a good agent. He was ready for this. He knew the mission.”
A sob wracked my chest as I leaned against Doug, my tears staining his suit jacket and flowing onto the flak vest he wore beneath it.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said coolly, almost too coolly. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”
He led me to his car, a comfortable, used BMW that I knew Doug took impeccable care of.
We pulled out of the dockyard and got onto the highway, heading downtown—to headquarters. After all, I was still wearing something like three-thousand dollars worth of government equipment.
“I know this isn’t a good time, Claire, but I’ve got another assignment for you. One you’ll have to start right away.”
I rolled my puffy, tear-stained eyes at Doug.
“Is it to get some rest? Relax?”
“No. The opposite. I know you, Claire. I know you don’t work like that. You need work to mourn and that’s fine. So, I’ve got work for you.”
Thank god.
To be honest, that’s what I needed. What I wanted. The thing I had been dreading was the leave they would invariably give me—six weeks paid leave, a nice friendly counselor named Jennifer (she’d be tall and blonde, I knew it) and a whole bunch of flowers and candies when I got back to the office.
Gag me. I don’t have anyone to go to. Just a studio apartment full of ghosts.
“Are you familiar with the Damned MC?” Doug asked after a few minutes, seemingly mesmerized by the steady rhythm of the passing street lights.
“Not the biggest biker gang in Florida, but definitely the scariest,” I replied. “All former military, so they’re more disciplined than your usual bikers, and they’re all combat tested. Plus, you can probably bet on any given one of them having pretty severe PTSD, which makes them unpredictable… Though I guess that’s not politically correct.”
“You can be politically correct when you get out of this car,” Doug replied. “This is my personal car, so we’re talking just as friends. Colleagues, after work. Not government employees.”
And then, as if to underline that point, he took his hands off the steering wheel to fumble around with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Once he had lit up, he rolled down his window and tapped some ash out onto the highway as it sped by.
“They’re bat shit insane and they’re ambitious. We’ve kept an eye on them for the past five years but we’ve been so worried about the Cubans and the Haitians that we’ve let them expand unchecked. Now that Bolo’s out of the picture, they’re going to make a big play for territory and business. But we’ve got someone on the inside.”
“A mole?”
“Sure. He’s been giving us info for the last few months. A former addict who saw the light.”
“Doesn’t sound reliable.”
“You’d be surprised. He’s given us enough to lead to several arrests over the last few months. But we’ve been holding off.”
“Holding off why?”
My mind was fully engaged with this case now—it was enough to take my mind off Winston’s death—this was the perfect therapy. More work.
“Because we think we can make a big arrest with your help.”
“Fatman.”
“That’s right.”
I nodded gravely.
“All right. What do I have to do?”
“Go home. Relax. Take a shower. A counselor will call you in the morning but you don’t have to meet with her. Not if you don’t want to.”
“Good. Because I don’t want to.”
“I know,” Doug said with a grim smile. “I know.”
He pulled into the parking garage attached to the Miami federal building, flashed his badge to the night attendant, and then pulled into his personal space.
“Take a day or two to decompress and get some sleep. Then, I’ll give you a call and we’ll arrange a meeting.”
“A meeting with the mole?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s his name?”
“John MacKinnon. But he goes by Fang inside the club.”
“Fang…” I repeated slowly. The name, his real name, John MacKinnon—that sounded familiar.
“Just about all these biker types have pseudonyms,” Doug said with a shrug as we parked.
“Makes sense.”
He nodded.
“Listen, kiddo. Get yourself cleaned up. Get some rest. I have to assign you a counselor, but I can’t make you go to the sessions. I’ll call you in a day or two and we’ll set up a meeting with Fang.”
I knew he was being nice, giving me time to unwind and relax. To rest.
But the fact was, I hadn’t rested in three years. Not since Fred died. My mourning was ongoing, and I had been deferring it by working, working constantly, days and nights, weekends, barely sleeping, and when I wasn’t working on cases, I was working on my body: constant exercise, running marathons, training mixed-martial arts, lifting weights.
My parents were worried about me. Fred’s parents were worried about me. I couldn’t tell if Doug was worried about me, but probably, to him, I was just a good agent: a useful pawn in his game, a game he had been playing for nearly a decade, to annihilate the organized crime syndicates that control Southern Florida.
But now, I was being forced away from work for a few days. I knew what would greet me back at my apartment: ghosts. Specifically, Winston’s ghostly, pallid, blood-gushing face, telling me to arrest Bolo, telling me over and over again that we had to get him, asking me if I was locked and loaded, asking me if it was time yet. Saying, still, that we have to get Bolo.
We got him, buddy. We got him.
FANG
About a mile off the highway, only to be found via picking your way through semi-industrial wastelands, dockyards, warehouses, and factories fallen into disuse, is the Damned MC Clubhouse.
It’s hard to find, and that’s how we like it. What’s more, once you’re there, it’s a little slice of paradise on earth.
Sure, it looks like a shack. Really, two shacks: one is the garage—that’s where all sorts of “work” happens, by which I mean one of two kinds: working on your
ride, or working on your body. The two are basically one in the same for any good member of the Damned, because your bike should be an extension of your body. Most guys will knock out a few deadlift sets or squats in between fiddling with their rides.
Others take a more structured approach. I fall into that camp. I was strong when I got out of the service, and lean, but the months of immobility as a result of my injuries, plus the addiction, started to make me soft, skinny, but flabby. Once I joined the Damned, I tried to stem the tide of addiction by adopting the most rigorous of physical training schedules: an hour of hitting the heavy bag in the morning, every morning, with two hours of weight lifting in the evening four times a week, plus regular pick up basketball and football games with the guys.