Once More to Die

by Jim Johnson

  María Elena began to understand how it came about that Tommy had money stashed seemingly all over the place.

  “It was funny,” continued Phil, “the Vicar was so effective that the Mexicans ganged up and went after him. They set up ambushes, sent gangs of them all trying to kill him off. This was their territory and other Mexicans claimed other territory so they couldn’t just move elsewhere. A lot of ’em didn’t make it back to Old Mexico. They even sent a known killer after him, a gunfighter out of Sonora. Top of the pyramid guy. The two played hide and seek and never resolved it between them.”

  “Juan Pablo?”

  Phil looked at her in surprise. “You know of him?”

  She nodded.

  “One tough fucking Mexicano,” said Phil.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  He cocked his head at her in question, but she thought maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. Tommy was seldom if ever forthcoming. So she did not explain further.

  Not wanting to drink, she wandered outside and went over to the gas station. It was stocked inside like a mini-food store. She looked around a found a rack full of baseball caps. She picked three, a #88: Dale Earnhardt, jr.; another 18: Kyle Busch; and an old #15: Tim Tebow. NASCAR and NFL, a neutral balance. She also bought a biker’s lady skull cap and a leather pony tail holder. She decided she liked pony tails and this would help.

  As she put her purchases in their jeep, the Bear and Tommy returned out of the desert in an old pickup. They pulled up next to the jeep and Tommy got out with a blanket covering several long packages. He moved into the lee provided by their Jeep. “Never know when the feds got their glasses on you.”

  Another lesson. She nodded.

  Soon they were heading north on the north/south crossroad splitting the bar and the service station quick stop.

  Ten miles to the north, Tommy pulled off onto a faint desert trail and drove for about two miles. He stopped in a clearing devoid of brush and cacti. María Elena wondered why they called this desert land when it wasn’t all mountains of sand like in the movies. In the clearing sat an old picnic table.

  Tommy spread a blanket over the picnic table and spread out the weapons he’d bought. There was enough ammunition for an army at war, she thought.

  About two hundred yards out was an embankment. Tommy produced a silhouette human target and she took it and affixed it to the embankment.

  When she got back, Tommy had the AR-15’s loaded and ready. They fired about a hundred rounds each to get used to the weapon and the recoil, and one full auto load each. Tommy sighted in one of them with the scope.

  “Never really liked sniper work,” he said, “not even in Africa, though I did more than my share. We had guys there who could really shoot and they took out the enemy one by one from a distance time and time again, but they kept on coming. It makes a different war when the enemy doesn’t care whether they live or die. Kinda like the terrorists nowadays. Onliest thing you can do is kill ’em and keep killing them.”

  María Elena felt a chill. This wasn’t “her” Tommy talking, this was a killer, born or self-made, it didn’t matter, but a killer, cold and professional none the less. This thinking scared her for she’d known what she was getting into: after all, had Tommy not killed a bunch of them chasing after her? But in the light of day, she began to understand a professional killer. She’d kind of known that, but she hadn’t put it in those terms. She’d been thinking, sure he’d killed plenty before, but that was more of a byproduct of his situation than the focus of that situation. She began to understand she was dealing with a real hitman here. Is he a mass murderer? Shit, scary thought. Rephrase that to a mass killer. That didn’t sound right, either. Make that a wholesale hitman. Better yet: an upgraded “Tommy this and Tommy that”. All she knows is what she’s seen; he’s been tough, murderous even, but on her side: a good guy. This is what she chooses to believe. Maybe he was right; he never killed anybody who didn’t need killing.

  She crossed herself. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And she also began to understand that the odds against them were no longer overwhelming, not with Tommy. They were sort of even now. Should she take comfort in this? Suddenly, she was no longer pessimistic about the future.

  Out here in the middle of nowhere, the shots did not reverberate or echo as much as the movies seemed to show. The sound was not as dramatic as it was in south Florida, likely a function of very low humidity here. And she was getting used to the hot desert sun, even though she was wearing her new #88 Dale, jr. hat.

  Tommy was sitting at the table watching her curiously. “You okay there, Florence?”

  She sighed. She wasn’t going to solve anything here today. “Yeah, sure. Just wondering.” She sat down opposite him and unscrewed the top of the can of gun oil.

  Tommy was breaking down his scoped AR-15. “That session back there at the biker bar got you thinking.”

  She started to disassemble her own AR-15. “Make that wondering.”

  “I got some stuff I don’t need you to know worse than I don’t need you to know some other stuff. But we established no secrets between us back at the cabin.”

  She doused a rag with gun oil. “Phil the barkeep told me some things and got me wondering. One was I’m thinking about going with a pony tail some.”

  Tommy nodded. “You look good in anything, Pocahontas.”

  “Thank you. The other thing is the drug runner mule war that you had going on back in the day.”

  Tommy screwed on the extension rod to the barrel cleaning brush and pushed it in and out. “We get done cleaning these, we should oughta clean our handguns, too. ’Bout time.”

  “Yes, Tommy. Go on, please.” She went to the Jeep and got their handguns, most secreted inside the Jeep in various hideouts. She brought them back and carefully set them on the side of the blanket. She removed the rounds from the cylinders of the revolvers and magazines from the automatics, checking the chambers, too.

  “First of all, you note those bikers back there? Even in my day we didn’t use a so called gang name or whatever. Not that Hell’s Angels kind of stuff. We didn’t want people to know anything about us. It was a money making enterprise, and apparently still is. We were entrepreneurs. By the same token, we never named the bar. Called it the ‘No Name Bar.’ My thing was robbing mules, drug runners so to speak. Some of them ran drugs while they were leading in families or groups of Mexicans and Guatemalans and Hondurans and others. They were fat with money. I never really hurt them; I just stuck them up and took their money, their stuff—the mules and guides, not the regular folk.”

  María Elena began to wipe down the handguns and oil the moving parts.

  “One day,” Tommy continued, reassembling his AR-15, “I knew the trail and ambushed these three guys. Just held them up. They had plenty of money and a backpack full of marijuana. I took their weapons and money and pot and let them go. They were all acting sort of weird, so I stopped and wondered.” He shook his head sadly. “I back-tracked them. I had a trail bike I used for running out there near the border.” He stopped as if remembering. He checked the magazine for the AR-15, loaded it, put it in the weapon and jacked a shell into the chamber. He pulled the magazine out and replaced the one round and reinserted the magazine. He set the weapon down and leaned back. “You know I ain’t fond of rape.”

  “I do.”

  “Soon, I found the family that those three hombres had led across the border and then deserted. One father, one mother, one teenage daughter, and one younger daughter, I don’t know ages real well, but the kid was maybe seven or eight. They were all lying under an old, dead mesquite tree. The wife and daughters had been brutally raped, um, front and back, and killed. The father was wounded but tied up and made to watch the rape and murder. He had to go to hell to get better. The funny thing? The three rapist and killers had tossed the women’s underwear into the bare branches of the tree like some kind of fucking flag. Now they call it a ‘rape tree.’ Jesus fucking Christ, what a scene. Me,
I been to war in Africa and seen rape and pillage and plunder, but that day took the cake. Fuck. The old man, he was in purgatory. I went over with my knife and began sawing through his bonds. His eyes begged me.”

  Tommy stopped talking.

  María Elena moved to his side. “You don’t have to finish.”

  “Yes, I do, hon. Jesus, I do. He said, ‘Señor? Por favor?’ Well, I fucking knew what he wanted and didn’t waste any time. As I brought my pistol up his eyes turned grateful. Then I put a bullet in the poor bastard’s head.” He shook his own head and wiped sweat from his forehead with his arm.

  “That wasn’t the end of it, was it?” she asked.

  “No. Right then, I heard a whimper and saw the young girl move. I wrapped her own shirt around the wound and hopped on my bike and carried her off. I was going to the nearest hospital, come hell or high water.” He took a deep breath. “Her hair was long and black and her eyes pleaded with me, but she didn’t know what for. She flat didn’t understand what the world was all about right then. It was awkward carrying her and negotiating draws and hills and cactus and rocks and what all. I flew over that terrain, jumping sand hills and ravines and wheeling like an off-road biker—which, in essence I was. Then she bled out and died before I got a couple of miles.” He sighed again. “I took her back to be with her family. I dropped her off and chased down those three rapists and killers. Caught up with ’em at a road where another guy in a pickup was waiting for them.” Tommy grinned. “You should have seen the look on their faces. Nobody had a weapon showing except the new truck driver. He had a small automatic and I shot him from afar. The three started running in different directions and I chased each one down and killed them.” He shook his head. “I drove the truck with the bodies in it back to the mesquite tree. There was a shovel in the truck and I buried the family. The four dead guys I left for the vultures. But apparently some other mules came upon the remains first and the word got out.”

  María Elena collected the weapons and put them in the jeep. She brought back a couple of bottled waters from the cooler. “That would explain a lot. Soon you were at war.”

  He grinned. “A good one, too. After that, I took no prisoners. The downside was that they started crossing the border elsewhere. My income took a big hit. But enough of them came across to keep me going. The Border Patrol should have paid me. Soon they were sending hit teams and gangs to get me, and the other guys liked that for a while as it made for good sport for them. That’s when old Juan Pablo showed up. We accidentally met at a bar one day in some town, maybe around Yuma or more toward the border. Neither one of us wanted to alert the law so nothing came of the encounter. We even shared a drink. I told him what had happened; he understood and told me he was a family man, too. But he’d already taken their money and his family was in jeopardy if he didn’t pursue me. We left from different exits and played tag for about three months.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, my income was down, and there were too many hit teams looking for me and it made the whole area nuclear hot. My guys, the other bikers, were feeling the heat, too. So I packed it in and headed for Tampa and became an independent contractor there.”

  María Elena ticked off on her fingers. “Correct me if I’m wrong. Running the numbers as a kid in Tampa. Judge sent you off to join the Marines. In the Middle East when your time was up, you mustered out and joined the French Foreign Legion. When that was done, you wound up in southern Arizona in a biker gang. After that you were a hitman—I mean, contractor—“

  “It wasn’t all shooting work,” Tommy said.

  “Okay, contractor. Eventually, the feds and the staties nailed you and you went away to hard time and escaped and finished up in the Everglades.”

  “And here I am, just your luck, Pocahontas.”

  “It is my luck, sweetie,” she said.

  “We done talking about me? Never mind, we are.” He began reloading. “Lately you’ve shown a rather lethal turn. What I’m saying is, is you done good at the cabin, you done good saving my ass, and you done good down in Nogales.”

  “A lethal turn?” She frowned. “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “You would not; that’s why I’m bringing it up. I think you showed incredible acumen in both instances without having to learn the rules beforehand—sort of like I did.”

  “Rules? Rules for what? Lethality?” She helped finish reloading weapons and magazines.

  “You betcha, Florence. That dustup at the cabin was instructional in a lot of ways. For instance, shoot what you can. And keep doing it until something or someone else appears. Then shoot them. You done that at the cabin. And you want to win, not be honorable. In a gunfight do whatever it takes: like running over them with your vehicle. Ain’t fair, but they’re dead and we are not. Keep shooting until everybody’s dead or you’re out of ammo. And speaking of that, given the opportunity, always reload. If you ain’t pulling the trigger, feed shells into the cylinder if it’s a revolver, change mags or snap rounds into the magazine. Know how many shots you have and how many you fired. If possible, always be on the move. It keeps ’em guessing and you safer. And it scares them good. Moving targets are harder to hit. When you’re shooting, you don’t have to do it in a hurry unless you’re very good at it. More important to hit the target than to scare them.” He smiled. “Although upon infrequent occasion, it is beneficial to scare them and it keeps their heads down while you flank them.” He paused for breath. “And go for the kill, otherwise what’s the point? Make your kills clean and quick, for seldom is there any reason to draw it out; and you never know if they will recover enough to shoot you while you’re screwing around or reinforcements or cops will show up.”

  “Yes, professor.” She began carrying weapons to the Jeep.

  “You’re pretty bright, college girl. Point is, use your head to maximize your advantage and ability to live through it all.” He grinned at her. “Now that I think about it, I ain’t seen you panic yet, and you’ve been a couple of places where you ought to have panicked.”

  “Thank you, Tommy.”

  “I guess that means I’ve been a good influence on you.”

  “Yes, Tommy.” She stuck her tongue out at him. But as they finished loading, she admitted to herself that he was right: she’d learned a great deal from him. And not all of it had to do with killing people or shooting guns.

  Before they left, he found a broken board lying around, one which had held targets. He went off through the desert scrub out of sight and returned in five minutes. He brushed the sand off of a plastic bag and opened it. Inside she saw rolls of bills. Another stash.

  A ten-foot high dust devil followed him out of the desert and they ran for the Jeep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: HIM

  They came into Las Vegas heading south on U.S. 95. They’d been staying in Pahrump and today came into Vegas from the north. On one side of the road, they passed a lonely prison surrounded by rows of barbed wire and guard towers. It was so isolated and locked up it gave Tommy chills. Some miles later, on the other side of the road they drove past Creech Air Force Base where they fly the Predator drones all over the world.

  The police car began to shadow them almost immediately when they drove into town.

  “The rule of thumb I’ve established is: do it efficiently, cold, quick and clean. No layers of complexity. The more complicated you make it, the more chance for mistakes for it to go wrong, and for you to leave traces of yourself. Do it simply, and then get out and away. Leave ’em guessing.” He smiled grimly. “That’s my professional opinion.”

  Tommy saw the cop eye them from another lane. You’d think law enforcement would have more important things to do early on Friday evening. He wondered if this wasn’t a bad luck omen.

  “I see him,” said María Elena. “We’re going a bit faster than the speed limit, but we’re running with the traffic.”

  “Problem is,” said Tommy, “we don’t know whether the guy who sold us this Jeep a
ctually processed the paperwork.” The guy had obviously known the two were not street legal or they wouldn’t have bought the Jeep for cash as they did. Not to mention the fact that they’d paid him to fake insurance. “Our ID will hold up, but you never know about the registration.”

  They were already in Vegas, heading south. They passed a sign for W. Cheyenne Ave., a hospital, and another for Cheyenne Village. The cop slotted in behind them.

  “Jeez, if this traffic isn’t enough,” said María Elena.

  She whipped into the exit lane. The cop followed down the exit ramp.

  “Sort of slump over to the right,” she told him.

  “You got a plan?” he asked as he tilted to his right and leaned against the window.

  “I do. But maybe he’ll peel off.”

  The cop stayed behind them as they hit the light on green.

  “We might be able to outrun him, but they got lots of cops and radios. We got one Jeep.”

  “He’s up on the steering wheel,” said Tommy watching from his side mirror. “He’s gonna pull us over.”

  “Did you know Kyle Busch is from Las Vegas?” she asked and whipped her own steering wheel to the right.

  MOUNTAINVIEW HOSPITAL

  She followed the signs to the emergency room and pulled up in front.

  “Play sick,” she said. “If he asks you have an episode of malaria coming on, you’re cold and clammy, and you need to get treatment quick. I’ll be right back.”

  As the cop came up behind them, she opened her door and ran inside. Tommy knew their weapons were well concealed, but they could afford no scrutiny. He saw the cop get out of his car and watch María Elena run inside. Christ, Vegas was hot as Nogales, maybe more so, even on an early Friday night. The cop hesitated, not certain what to do. That meant he hadn’t run the tags yet or that the results were inconclusive.

  The thing he did notice was María Elena. She was dressed in her black pullover dress, showing a lot of leg and a lot of cleavage. And her hair was piled atop her head in some kind of fancy formal affair he couldn’t name if he had to. She looked good.