Guns (John Hardin series)

by Phil Bowie

  Strake came out onto the porch and immediately slapped the man’s face sharply three times. The man shook his head and gazed dumbly at Strake and then at Davis. Strake moved close and asked him something in a low voice. The man shook his head and protested. He was reviving now and he stood awkwardly to relieve the tension on his arms. He shook his head again as though to clear it, the white hair disheveled, a pitiful overweight figure, but not begging. Strake spoke to Davis, who roughly tore away the man’s flowered shirt, wadding up some of it and stuffing it into the man’s mouth, binding it in place with a strip of cloth tied around his head.

  The man’s back was covered with densely matted white hair and he was thick around the waist.

  Strake loosened his tie and held out his hand and Davis gave him the knife, the blade bright in the porch light. Strake suddenly stabbed the man in the right shoulder and stepped back to avoid the blood. The man threw his head back and screamed against the gag but the sound was muted to a throaty croaking. Strake asked him something again, the jungle sounds and the distance making the words unintelligible. The man shook his head again, vigorously.

  Strake stepped in and stabbed him in the left shoulder. The man writhed and tried to stand straighter to diminish the pain and Strake waited for three seconds and then stabbed him in the groin. The man was trembling violently now, the excess flesh around his middle quaking involuntarily, and he was emitting strangled noises. It was obviously agony for him to stand but also agony for him to sag against the ropes. Davis stood to one side watching impassively. There was a wet black slick spreading out on the porch floor. Strake asked him something again. The man could only move his head from side to side weakly.

  Cowboy was numbly rooted in place, not believing what he was seeing, unable to move or breathe. Strake held out his hand again and Davis reached under his jacket to bring out a chromed pistol. Cowboy started forward saying, “No, no,” in a dry cracked voice that he wanted to be a shout but was barely above a whisper and he moved two lead-footed steps forward to begin running but Strake took deliberate aim at the man’s head from four feet away and fired a single shot, the man instantly convulsing and then going limp on the ropes. Cowboy again froze in place, breathing rapidly and shallowly and feeling sick.

  Strake scanned the darkness for several long seconds as though he could sense somebody watching, his face hooded in shadow, and then he and Davis went back inside.

  Cowboy was stunned by the savagery of what he had seen. He choked down bile as he stared at the limp figure tied to the porch uprights, the head thrown to one side. Utterly still. He wiped at his coldly damp face with his hand and finally turned to walk dumbly back down the hillside track. If Strake knew he had seen the killing what would he do? Strake and Davis could not fly out of here themselves. But once back in the States Strake might well decide it would be wise to eliminate a witness. He thought, I could take off myself and fly to Caracas. Tell the police there about it. But he was in a foreign country illegally, and might well at a minimum be held indefinitely as some kind of accessory. Strake had too many connections here, several of them presumably powerful.

  He broke into a run and when he got back to the plane he shut the air-stair behind him and went to the cockpit. He used paper towels to wipe away the sweat, took a slug of tepid water from a plastic bottle, and laid out an instrument approach plate binder on the copilot’s seat as though he was in the process of updating it.

  It was thirty interminable minutes before he saw the lights of the Land Rover winding down the hillside. It stopped on the apron and the lights went out. Strake and Davis got out of the front seats, Strake minus his tie and holding his suit coat wadded up in one hand, carrying the metal briefcase in the other. They walked quickly to the plane and Cowboy opened the air-stair.

  As Strake brushed past him to take a cabin seat he said, “Take off and go back to San Juan for fuel. Leave the transponder off. Don’t talk to anyone until you contact Puerto Rico.”

  “What do I tell San Juan ATC?”

  Strake was staring at him intently. He said, “Why are you sweating that much?”

  “I just went outside for about ten minutes to check the runway for any loose gravel. The mosquitoes chased me back at a dead run.”

  Strake said nothing for several seconds, then, “Tell San Juan that you filed from Ciudad Bolivar, and while they’re filling the tanks re-file for Fort Lauderdale. Leave the transponder off until you approach San Juan.”

  Strake stayed back in the cabin for the entire flight to Teterboro.

  The next afternoon, from a pay phone outside a convenience mart near his apartment, he called one of the numbers on the card that he had kept hidden in a dresser drawer. A woman briskly said, “Yes?”

  “I need to speak with Mr. Nolan Rader.”

  The woman said nothing. Within a few seconds the man answered, “Rader. What can I do for you?”

  “This is Cowboy. We need to talk.”

  21

  HE SAID, “I SAW STRAKE KILL A MAN.”

  They were in Nolan Rader’s black Explorer parked on a shadowed street two blocks from Cowboy’s apartment. It was just after dark and there was a vaporous rain drifting through the casts from the streetlights.

  “Where and when was this?”

  “On a private ranch in Venezuela, the night before last about nine o’clock their time. These are the coordinates.” He handed over a slip of paper. “I watched it happen and I didn’t do a damned thing to stop it. I don’t know why I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “You were right there with him when this went down?”

  “Not exactly. He had told me to wait in the plane. The ranch house was a mile away up a hillside, through thick jungle. Strake and Davis were driven up to the house. After about an hour and ten minutes I got out of the plane to look over the runway for debris. I heard shots. I ran to check it out and from a distance of maybe three hundred feet I saw the killing. Davis tied the man spread-eagled to porch posts. Strake questioned the man—he was middle-aged, thinning white hair, thirty pounds overweight, five ten or eleven. The man either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Strake what he wanted to hear even after Strake stabbed him three times very deliberately and very…precisely. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It froze me. Then Strake borrowed a pistol from Davis and shot the man once in the head. They don’t know that I saw it. And there were other shots. At least four. I think all of them were from inside the house, because they were muffled. I have no idea what it was all about, but I don’t think they went there to kill; I think something happened there that set Strake off. You were right about him. I’ve never seen anything as coldly vicious as what he did to that man. I’ll testify, sign a statement, whatever you need.”

  Rader was silent, gazing through the windshield at the slick street and tapping a forefinger on the steering wheel.

  “Well, what’s the matter? Isn’t this what you wanted from me?”

  “Hey, take it easy,” Rader said. “I’m glad you came to me with this but you have to understand it happened in a foreign country. That makes things tricky. There are jurisdictional questions. What agencies should get involved up here and down there? Right now there’s only your word against Strake’s, and he’s got all the connections and the clout. There’s not even any record of him or his plane being in Venezuela at the time of the killing. I’m going to start checking this out first thing in the morning. But it will take time.

  “Meanwhile, I’d like you to go on as though nothing’s happened. Keep working for him. Start watching things closely. Be careful if you take any notes. Commit as much as you can to memory. Try to get all the names of people and companies Strake deals with and all the meeting places and times. See if you can find out the names of any banks he uses here and offshore. Any shipments anywhere. Even if the information seems worthless or disconnected.

  “This could take a while; I won’t lie to you. But now you’ve seen what kind of degenerate your boss is. I want to hail all over his pa
rade, grapefruit-size, and I’ll appreciate your help in making that happen.”

  “How should I keep in touch?”

  “We’ll meet weekly as long as we can set it up safely. Call me next Wednesday from a pay phone. Go out for a run, like tonight. I’ll check you for any tail and then pick you up. If I need to get to you in a hurry a woman will call your apartment making like she’s a casual girlfriend. She’ll suggest a meeting at which I’ll show up. We’ll only do that as a last resort. Are you up for this?”

  “I’ll give it a while. I don’t really know what I’m doing with this kind of thing.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just start gathering all the information you can. And be careful.”

  They met a week later, Rader picking him up in the black Explorer again as he was out running on a specified street near a postage-stamp-size public park a mile from his apartment.

  Cowboy said, “What did you find out about the killing in Venezuela?”

  “The man was Enrique Suarez, a former Venezuelan Army general lately out of favor with the government because of his suspected ties to a Colombian drug cartel, but still with a lot of old powerful friends. They think he was a middleman on a deal Strake had going with a Colombian guerrilla faction, possibly financed in part by another cartel. It looks like one of Strake’s shipments of M-16s and ammo got hijacked. Maybe Suarez hijacked it himself, sold the guns to whomever, and made up a story for Strake; we can’t know for sure. We think you’re right about the murder being spur-of-the-moment, though. Suarez must have told him whatever story and for some reason Strake wouldn’t buy it so he killed the dude. Simple as that. They found a long-time Suarez bodyguard dead inside the place, along with the bodies of a middle-aged prostitute who apparently serviced the general on a regular basis, and an ex-army guy with a game leg who cooked and cleaned at the ranch. The prostitute had been beaten to death, probably by Davis. Snapped neck.”

  “So, what’s going to be done about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s out of my hands. I’ve told you just about all I know myself. At least all I can tell you. I’ll keep pushing for progress reports and fill you in as I get new information. Now, what have you got for me?”

  He reached inside his jacket and handed over a six-by-nine spiral pad filled with handwriting. “This is what I could remember or reconstruct from all the way back to the day I went to work for Strake. Trips, dates, people, what I know of his warehouse inventory, everything. I have my flight log for accurate dating. It turned out I knew more than I thought, really.”

  Rader thumbed through it in the weak light coming in his side window and said, “Is this in some kind of weird code? Just kidding. Your handwriting is even worse than mine, but I’ll decipher it. It’s good, this is good. We can compare this stuff with intel we’ve collected from other sources, you understand. Say we already know some bent deal went down in Dallas on a certain day, and now we know from you that Strake and a couple of his buddies were there for sure that same day, you see? So we do some more nosing around with that in mind and maybe sniff out something we can put to good use.

  “Just keep it up. Try to get him talking more. Make friends with his secretary or his accountant or maybe one of his part-time goons and see what they know. Do it easy. Be mister casual. Take small steps. Strake thinks he’s immune and I’m betting he’s getting more reckless. You hang in there and we’ll eventually deep-fat fry this guy.” He gazed into the distance pensively.

  “Why do you say he thinks he’s immune?”

  “What?”

  “You said he thinks he’s immune.”

  “Oh, nothing. I just mean he’s literally been getting away with murder and all kinds of other mischief and he must think by now that nobody cares. But believe me, some of us care.”

  Strake continued assigning routine business matters to him, giving him the use of an office in the warehouse, but remaining guarded about most of his affairs, and when Cowboy tried to cautiously approach Davis he found the big man to be even more closed-mouthed and hostile. But he observed what he could and began filling the pages of another notebook with flight dates and destinations, meetings, overheard parts of conversations, glimpses of office correspondence, and people he happened to see in the offices.

  There were twenty-three employees at the warehouse, including the office staff and three shifts of security guards, so it was difficult to do too much digging without somebody noticing.

  Strake’s secretary Margaret was a matronly woman who worked with a solemnly brisk efficiency. One day when she had gone into the file room adjacent to her office to get him some routine information he had asked for, leaving him alone, he flipped through her Rolodex, noting the names of three independent long-haul truckers and quickly memorizing two names and phone numbers of Bahamian banks. He had just returned the Rolodex to where it had rested and had straightened up beside her desk when she came back in, a file in hand. She scowled at him for two seconds, but he smiled and she seemed to dismiss whatever trace of suspicion had stirred her. He had full access to the warehouse inventory lists so he hand-copied all the items and quantities.

  He taught himself how to operate the office computer system and began gleaning some information from it. He assumed that if anyone became too suspicious he would be able to pass off his digging as merely an avid interest in how the business functioned. The pages in another notebook that he kept in the bottom of a dresser drawer in his apartment began to fill.

  He was in the small furnished duplex apartment late one gray Saturday afternoon, with his boots crossed up on the coffee table, light classical music on the stereo and a cold beer at hand, reading a Larry McMurtry western novel that he’d found in a neighborhood book store. He had a collection of western novels that included Zane Gray, Elmer Kelton, Max Brand, William W. Johnstone, and L’Amour favorites, some of which had helped pass the time as he had waited in some FBO or another for whomever was paying him to fly at the time.

  The bell rang and when he opened the door he was taken aback. All he could manage was, “Well, hello.” A cab was pulling away from the curb.

  She said, “This seemed like an innocent idea an hour ago, but now I feel absolutely…awkward.”

  “Mrs. Strake.” He realized she’d been drinking.

  “I’ve been out shopping and I thought I’d stop for a while to talk. You’ve been cordial to me in the past. Maybe I should just go.”

  “No, please, come in.”

  She was at that not-quite-drunk stage, taking pains to enunciate clearly and moving with care. She sat at one end of the couch and crossed her legs, resting her purse on her lap. She wore a conservative gray pants suit.

  She said, “Do you have a drink?”

  “I don’t have anything on hand right now,” he lied. “How about a cup of coffee or a soft drink?”

  “A soft drink then. Please.”

  He went into the small kitchen and poured a Pepsi over ice, then brought the glass in and placed it on the coffee table. She left it untouched.

  The silence stretched out. Then they both started talking at the same time. She smiled and said, “Please, go ahead.”

  “I was just going to ask how your plans are coming for that art gallery.”

  She brightened. “I’ve been working on it.” And she raised a long-nailed finger in the air to emphasize the point. “I think I’ve found the perfect place, near the Billage…Village. An old store that’s gone out of business, with reasonable rent, considering, and it’s large enough for now, with an old high tin ceiling, so it feels even more open. I can see it renovated and well lit with a big central sculpture for focus, and paintings hung in theme groupings around the walls. And on, you know, pa…partitions. I have not approached Louis about it yet. I want to be sure I have all of the information straight first. Sometimes he is not the easiest person to talk to.” With her fingers held like a comb she carefully raked her blond hair back over her ear to hold it in place. She focused on him and smiled. “You are an attract
ive man, do you know that?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think Louis wants to make you his right-hand man or something.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No. I just know it.” She shook a finger at him. “But let me tell you something. Don’t you ever get Louis angry with you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He can be…he can be unreasonable. Dorothy, our maid, said once, ‘There is a dark current in him. I think he can be violent.’”

  “Have you felt threatened?”

  “No, no. You see ours is a marriage of arrangement. He likes to live well. I do, too. I am his showpiece. In return I have fine houses. Jewelry. Travel to beautiful, exotic places. One day I hope to have a child. Why am I telling you all of this?”

  “I have an idea,” he said with a smile. “Suppose we walk to the corner, to a place called Gina’s. We’ll have an early dinner and you can catch a cab home from there. I’ll just need a few minutes to change into something presentable.”

  “Do you think I came here to seduce you?”

  “No. I think you just might want somebody to talk to. You chose me. That’s okay.”

  She appraised him for a long moment. “This Gina’s. Do they have anything besides pasta?”

  “Great salads. Good steaks. Lobster tails. I’m buying.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I’ll slip it in on my expense account.”

  She smiled. “Then I would be pleased to dine with you, sir.”

  At the small restaurant he ordered thick New York strips for both of them.

  “Well, you were right,” she said. “I just wanted somebody to talk to.”

  “We all need that sometimes.”

  “I stay in that house too much. I don’t have any close family left. Or many friends. I don’t drive. One of Louis’s people usually drives me when I want to go somewhere. But sometimes I just want to feel free. Like today. Do you know I took a horse-and-buggy ride through Central Park? I went to see a new exhibit at the Guggenheim, and I did some shopping on Fifth Avenue, and then I had a few drinks in a hotel lounge. That’s where I got the idea to see if you were home. I looked you up in the phone book.”