Lazaru took a quick glance down to his desk where a creased map lay at the center. His gaze returned to Headlong, then darted between myself and Smith.
“Is this some kind of sick, fucking joke?”
Headlong sort of shook his head and shrugged in confusion all in one movement.
“For one thing, I only deal with Kermit the Frog – not the rest of his Muppets. Where the hell is, what’s his name…?”
“You mean Larry.” Willy interjected, helping his boss out.
“Yeah, that’s it, fucking Larry. He’s the only one I do deals with from you bunch of river snakes.”
I’d forgotten all about Shaved Head or Larry as he was affectionately known.
“Ah, he’s dead.” Headlong pointed to Smith and I. “These guys took our boat and killed most of our guys but I managed to…”
“And the second thing,” Lazaru interrupted. “Look at these two. For a start, they’re guys and not even particularly good looking ones.”
Smith gave me a glance and a slight objectionable shrug.
“I couldn’t even sell these guys on to Cody, who runs the gay night scene. What the fuck do you think I’m going to do with these two, you stupid motherfucker?” Lazaru’s voice rose in volume, the deep growl echoing around the walls.
Headlong shook his head and his eyes dropped to the floor as though he was a scolded, sixth grade child.
“I thought maybe you could use them in some way,” he muttered. “The big guy is strong and can use weapons and the other one is kind of cute…in a boyish way.”
Willy and the guy in the orange suit tried to stifle their sniggers. Lazaru looked aghast with his wide mouth hanging open.
“You are some sick-ass motherfucker,” he hissed. “Are you some sort of pedophile, you piece of shit?”
“No, nothing like that, Mr. Lazaru,” Headlong blurted. “But I just thought some guys might find him attractive.”
“Get this cocksucker out of here before I shoot him in the face,” Lazaru roared, standing from his chair and waving an angry fist.
“Mr. Lazaru.” Smith stepped in. “Can I just explain our situation? It will take one minute of your time.”
Lazaru gave Smith a long, hard stare then nodded and sat down.
“Go on.”
“These river snakes kidnapped our friend.” Smith turned to Headlong. “We were out there simply trying to survive and this guy and his associates took our friend and we believe she’s here somewhere. They told me something about getting a good price for females. Her name is Batfish and she looks like a Goth and she has a lot of tattoos. We hoped we could find her and take us back with us, Mr. Lazaru.”
Lazaru stared at Smith and kind of wobbled his head from side to side, as though he was torn between decisions.
“We have a considerable number of girls working around the city and I don’t know them by name. Well, the parts of the city we’ve managed to keep free from the zombies. It took us months to clear an area and make it disease free, you know. It was a lot of hard work.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Lazaru but we wouldn’t even be here if this jerk and his buddies hadn’t taken our friend against her will.”
“Hey, watch your mouth,” Headlong protested.
“Quiet!” Lazaru barked. “You’ve had your say.”
I knew Smith was trying to appeal to Lazaru’s compassionate side. I doubted the Trading Dog had much humanity but could see he was weighing up whether to allow us to move on freely or take all three of us out into the street and probably execute us.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Lazaru paced the room in a circle around the three of us. I got the impression he was weighing up our immediate futures. Willy leaned against the inside of the door, quietly humming a tune and the dude in the orange suit was grinning at us as though he was enjoying the tension in the room.
Headlong nervously shuffled his feet, probably in need of another fix. I gazed at the floor between stroking Spot’s head, inwardly praying he wasn’t going to crap on Lazaru’s rug. Smith stood rigid with his hands folded in front of his belly, occasionally glancing at the guy in the orange suit still sitting in the chair by the desk.
“Okay,” Lazaru finally said. “I’m a fair man but I’m also a business man. I can’t let you leave with your friend for nothing, providing you find her, of course.”
I felt we were about to hear the downside to the situation, which was bound to be worse than the upside.
“I’ll give you twelve hours to find her and get back here. Two of you can leave the city with the girl but one of you stays and works dock duty or on one of the check points. Deal?”
We didn’t have much choice.
“That’s a very generous deal, Mr. Lazaru. Thank you very much.” Smith proffered his hand for Lazaru to shake but the big boss just stared him in the eye.
“The clock is ticking,” he whispered, jabbing a finger in the direction of a grandfather clock in the corner.
Smith’s eyes flicked to the clock face hands and saw it was a few minutes before midday.
“We’ve got until midnight?”
Lazaru nodded. “If you don’t come back, I’ll find you and I won’t be so generous with my offer. And don’t forget, I run all the clubs, bars, shops, restaurants, whore houses, drug dens – you name it, I run it. ALL of it. You and your cronies cause any kind of trouble; I’ll get to hear about it. I have eyes and ears on every street corner. You start any problems and I’ll come down on you like a ton of zombie shit. Understand?”
Smith nodded. “Yeah,” he croaked. “I got it.”
Willy had already opened the door behind us and was whispering with Mohawk and Dreadlocks, presumably relaying the terms of our fate.
I offered an unreturned nod to Lazaru and the guy in the orange suit before we thankfully stepped out of the stuffy room.
Headlong protested and whined like a bitch when Mohawk and Dreadlocks refused to give him his rifles back. Mohawk motioned with his head to the knife still lying on the corridor floor.
“You’ve got a weapon there, asshole,” he said.
Headlong muttered obscenities and picked up the shank. Smith and I had already started down the stairway. Headlong was out of sight and we were hurrying through the door to the bar when I called to Smith.
“We have to stay with Headlong.”
“Why?”
“He’s our insurance for getting out of this place. He’s bound to want to stay here as he’s got no place else to go.”
Smith stood in the doorway and scowled at me. “Ah, he’ll be busy getting drunk or snorting shit up his nose. We’ll find him in one of the bars later after we find Batfish. Come on, man, we’re wasting time.”
Headlong clattered down the stairs behind us, swearing and moaning under his breath.
“Hey, Headlong,” I called. “We’ll meet up later, yeah? We’ll try and find Batfish first then we can meet up and tell Lazaru you’re staying put.”
“Hell, you got to be crazy!” he wailed. “I ‘aint the one who’s staying here. You saw the way he spoke to me. I’d be as dead as a dodo within a day. We all probably will be anyhow. He’s just playing with us like a cat plays with a mouse before he kills it.”
“Shit…we assumed you’d be the one to stay here, seeing as you like it so much,” I moaned.
“Why the fuck did you assume that? I’m broke and I ‘aint even got a shooter. I’d be killed out there on the street.”
“Fuck,” I yelled and turned to Smith. “Now what the hell do we do?”
“Let’s start by finding Batfish,” he said, with a degree of calm.
“Unfortunately, we’ll have to stick together.” I grabbed Headlong by the scruff of his neck and dragged him into the bar.
“Hey, watch it, boy,” he protested.
Peaches turned from his bottles and watched us leave the bar room. We stood in the street, turning each way without a clue where to start looking.
“Okay, where do we star
t, Shithead?” Smith growled at Headlong.
Headlong shrugged himself away from my grip and glanced up and down the road. “There’s shit loads of girly bars along this street,” he sighed. “She could be in any one of them and the girls don’t usually even appear until after dark.”
Smith grabbed the front of Headlong’s shirt and pulled him close. “We don’t have that long, do you understand? If we don’t find her in twelve hours, Lazaru and his men will hunt us down anyway. He doesn’t really give a shit if we find her or not.”
“Okay, I hear you,” Headlong squawked.
Smith tightened his grip and Headlong made a croaking noise and his face reddened.
“Now, I could have and maybe should have wasted you a long time ago but now we’re stuck together in this shitty situation and we need your help to get us out of it. Do you comprehend, yes or no?”
Headlong nodded his head and croaked a noise that Smith must have taken as a positive answer. He released Headlong from his grasp and shoved him backward. Headlong held onto his throat and let out a series of wheezing coughs.
“You’re the only one who knows the city so where do we start?” Smith asked again.
“You nearly choked me, man.”
“We’re wasting time here,” Smith impatiently boomed.
Passersby on the street flashed us worried, inquisitive glances, wondering if they were going to witness more violence on their patch.
“There’s a lot of clubs along this street and then there’s the side streets. We’ll start from here and work our way up to Esplanade Avenue and then back towards Canal Street. But like I said before, this street covers thirteen blocks, not including the alleys and side streets.” Headlong spun around and flapped his arms in frustration.
“Let’s go,” Smith barked.
We entered the first girly bar and asked around if anyone had seen or heard of Batfish, with Smith and me reciting very bad descriptions of her. We were met with blank faces or shaken heads. People rarely spoke to us or completely ignored us.
The multi pierced barman in the second club we ventured into produced a shot gun from under the counter and told us to stop asking questions and leave immediately. A slow talking man mountain of a guy wouldn’t even allow us access to the third bar we tried. The giant said we looked like a bunch of trouble makers to him.
A seemingly hopeless task lay ahead of us. Smith and I had come all this way, fighting our way through a total shit storm but now it looked as though we were going to fall at the final, impossible hurdle.
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Okay, we need to reevaluate our planning,” Smith suggested, as we slumped at a table inside a small bar.
Headlong surprisingly bought us a round of beers without complaining. I sipped the long neck bottle and waited for Smith to tell us about his new strategy.
“Headlong said that the girls don’t come out until after dark, right?”
Headlong nodded.
“So we start the search again during the evening.”
I breathed a sigh of frustration. “That will only leave us a few hours to find Batfish.”
“It doesn’t mean we sit around doing nothing,” Smith continued. “We use the time to form Plan B.”
“Which is?”
“We need to find ourselves some weapons, cash, a vehicle and secondary route out of here in case it all goes to rat shit.”
“How do we do that, buddy?” Headlong asked, with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“I had a big bag of cash on my boat before you guys took it,” Smith snapped in reply. “And we had a load of weapons with us. Those guys took the lot. There must be somewhere that the dock crew stashes all the non consumable goods that comes in from the river?”
Headlong cocked his head to one side, deep in thought.
“What do we need cash for?” I asked.
“We may need to pay for information and we may need to pay to meet the girls in question. You’ve seen what people are like here. Everything has a price and we don’t have nothing else to trade.”
Headlong glanced down at the table but jabbed a finger in Smith’s direction.
“I seen those dock guys dragging some boxes onboard that paddle steamer when I came up here once. We had to wait before we could moor up while they unloaded a yacht and I noticed those guys stowing these metal boxes on that steamer.”
“Yeah, it makes sense,” Smith said, nodding. “I doubt if Lazaru would store everything at his bar. He sends someone down to the docks every time he needs cash, guns, booze or tins of food. That’s how he keeps control of the population. The incoming girls probably get taken to their respective clubs or safe houses straight away.”
“What about that damn pig meat?” I chipped in.
“Ah, I know that gets taken to the old brewery, right by the docks. They put it in the cellars to keep it fresh then they grind it up for burgers and hot dogs or cut it onto ribs.”
“Then what happens to it?” I was curious.
Headlong shrugged. “I suppose it gets sold on to restaurant owners, burger stands and anyone else with cooking facilities, I guess.”
“No wonder everyone looks so sick here if they’ve been eating that crap,” I bleated. “Those pigs were fed dead zombies before they were slaughtered. That could possibly trigger the disease to anyone who eats that pork.”
Smith raised his hand to silence my rant. “How did your crew get paid for the cargo you delivered, Headlong?”
Headlong took a swig of his beer before he answered. “We got a green light in the city. As much booze and as many girls as we could handle, for a limited time only, of course. The better the cargo, the longer our free period lasted.”
“So how did the bar owners and girls define whether you were delivery crew or not?”
“You got given a credit note or more like a piece of orange card with a date stamped on it and signed by Buggy. That’s the dude with the orange suit that you saw in Lazaru’s office. He’s kind of his right hand man and takes care of all the deliveries coming into Orleans.”
“Who is Lazaru anyhow?” I asked. “I mean what was he before all this started?”
Headlong sniffed. “I heard he was some kind of gang leader in the city. I do know he had his own private army and he’s still got most of his guys with him. I guess that’s how he managed to clean up his patch and keep the zombies out.”
“Look, guys, we’re moving away from our objective here,” Smith interrupted. “We need to get close to that paddle steamer and get onboard.”
“Couldn’t we just rob someone?” Headlong suggested. “We could rob someone who has a few dollars and a gun.”
“We could but that sounds like a plan with ‘fuck up’ written all over it,” Smith sighed. “I’ve seen what they do to people in this town who get caught stealing. Anyhow, I’ve got a better idea. They use vehicles to transport the meat from the docks to the old brewery presumably?”
“Yeah,” Headlong said.
“Good, then here’s what we’re going to do.”
Smith leaned forward across the table and told Headlong and I his proposal. I must admit, I was slightly skeptical we were going to pull it off.
We downed our remaining beer and left the bar. Headlong led the way through the narrow backstreet towards the old brewery. I tried to remember the route to get my bearings in case we had to retrace our steps. We took a right and I saw a sign telling me I was now on Toulouse Street but the buildings didn’t look any different from Bourbon Street. Becoming lost in the French Quarter seemed a fantastically easy feat to accomplish.
Spot got his drink from a puddle in the gutter then proceeded to take a piss up one of the balcony support poles.
The walk to the old brewery took us around fifteen minutes. Not too much time wasted. I was disappointed that the old brewery wasn’t an old, colonial style building with dusty, wooden rum barrels in the windows. It was a vast, block shaped, cream colored construction, renovated into a s
eries of modern shops, although now used for meat storage inside the lower levels.
Headlong showed us the way around the back of the building, where the transport docks were situated. A white GMC truck was parked next to a windowless, gray shack with a grubby ‘Office’ sign on the door. Headlong opened the door and walked inside the shack. Ten seconds later he returned with the keys to the truck.
“I know Sammy is supposed to be in charge of keeping this truck in working order,” he said, tipping us a wink. “I know Sammy is supposed to keep that office locked but he never does. And I know where Sammy keeps the truck key hidden. Nobody ever comes around here so he thinks it’s safe to leave the office unlocked.”
Headlong was ranting on like he was a right smart ass and the guy was starting to piss me off again.
“Come on, let’s just get going, can we?” I pleaded.
Headlong drove while Smith and I rode in the back out of sight. We didn’t want to be seen by anyone freely driving around in one of Sammy’s vehicles, which were ultimately Lazaru’s vehicles. He turned out of the transport dock and hung a right, back along the road outside the old brewery’s main entrance. The truck interior smelled strongly of bleach or disinfectant, which on reflection was probably better than pig carcasses.
Smith leaned into the driver’s cab between the front seats. “All right, Headlong. Don’t park too close to the dock. We don’t want Sammy to see the truck and remember, keep him talking and away from the paddle steamer for as long as possible.”
“No worries, pal.”
I flinched at the fact Headlong was now part of our crew. I didn’t know how long our new found friendship or alliance or whatever it was would last.
He bumped over the railway crossing and pulled the truck over behind the left side of some single storey buildings near the dock but out of sight of where the Navy boat was moored. Headlong left the keys in the ignition and got out the driver’s door.
“Okay, I’m gone,” he whispered. “Don’t be too long in there.” He closed the door and hobbled off towards the docks.
I tied Spot’s leash around the back of the head rest on the passenger seat and followed Smith out of the side sliding door. We looped around the side of the one storey buildings and hurried across the open ground towards the paddle steamer. We took cover in a small clump of trees, slightly to the left of where the Navy boat was secured. I saw Headlong talking to Sammy and his two friends further along the dock.
The Left Series (Book 2): Left Alone Page 26