by L. J. Martin
There’s one small metal building, and one car parked nearby. A web search has said there’s no fixed base operator and no radio control. The wind is out of the northwest, so I head for the north end of the strip as they’ll land into the wind. The paving is short enough that any plane landing there will have to use up most the strip, and then will have to dodge the potholes. They sure as hell are not flying a Citation into this shithole, more likely a 210 or something even smaller.
Now, if only Gashi is aboard.
I position myself three quarters of the way down the strip, hiding the van in a nearby ravine that only hides about the bottom half, take both the M4 and the .308 and move up near the strip and find a comfortable spot at the base of a thin screw-bean mesquite, and decide that’s my makeshift hidey hole. Just in case something happens to me, I haul the suitcases of dough up the ravine a hundred fifty yards until I find a place where the bank is deeply undercut and I can hide the suitcases and jump up and down on the bank and collapse it and hide the goodies. Then I return to my poor excuse for a hidey hole.
And my wait is not long. The aircraft makes a flyby and I recognize it as a Comp Air 7, single engine, but STOL and with a good payload. I know this airplane as a lot of guys who want to land where no one else does, or can, use it. She’s turbine powered with over six hundred horses, balloon tired and can get in and out of places few planes can. And she has a big payload of a ton, plenty for three or four guys and twelve mil in hundreds.
I can’t tell how many guys are aboard, or if the fat man is among them. I guess the pilot is merely checking the wind direction.
They make a wide sweeping turn, I guess checking the area for vehicles, and I know they can see the van as its white will stand out clearly in the desert.
I have absolutely no interest in killing some poor sap who’s been hired to fly these guys, and hope it doesn’t come to me having to abort to avoid doing so. He makes a long approach and touches down, and I lay the .308 on the fat tire on my side of the strip. He slows, and slows, until he’s only a hundred yards from my position.
Squeezing one off, the .308 bucks in my hands, the tire goes flat, and the plane swerves my way and rolls to a stop. The sun is reflecting off the windscreen so I still can’t tell who’s on board. I’m going to feel pretty stupid if I’ve just risked some mining company’s plane ground looping and killing everyone on board.
But my doubts are quickly squashed as guys pile out of both sides and the guy coming out the pilot’s side is carrying an automatic pistol with a thirty shot clip and as soon as he hits the tarmac is firing. But he doesn’t see me and is shooting at what’s showing of the van. But I’m not so lucky with the guy who comes out of the passenger side. He lays the barrel of another weapon across the wing strut and dirt kicks up all around my location. I should have had a flash suppressor on the .308 as he made my location. I keep my belly and my face in the dirt until he has to change the clip. Then pop up and, I think, drop him center-punched with a .308. But before I can correct to the other guy, that one’s on me and spraying my location. Again, I’m eating dirt.
When he runs his clip out I rise up and to my surprise, the first guy, who must have been wearing a vest, is shouldering an RPG. These guys came ready to play for keeps. I’m six feet from the edge of the ravine, and spring backwards until I fall over the edge and am three feet lower than the surface.
The explosion, at my former location, does not spray me with shrapnel, but does rock my world and my ears are getting nothing but a shrill ringtone. I move twenty feet down the ravine, unsling the Heckler Koch I’ve taken from the other bad guys, and come up over the edge with a sweep of fire that should get their attention, only to see the guy with the RPG being loaded. We fire at the same time, only this time he’s not firing at me and I drop again and turn to see my van go up in a cloud of smoke and fire.
Damn it, my ride, and not only my ride, but my second ride. My Harley Iron is now scrap metal. I wish I had left it for Skip.
Damn, damn, damn if that doesn’t piss me off. I switch the clip around and come back up to see both guys outside the aircraft are down. And not moving.
I hope, hope, hope that fat man Gashi is in the back of the aircraft, and move to where I can’t be seen by anyone inside and approach from directly in front as the Comp Air 7 is a tail dragger and the long nose hides me.
When I’m close enough, and as no one has appeared, I side step with the Heckler Koch on my shoulder and see no one else in the plane. I move on up and do a quick check to make sure no one is hiding in the rear, and no one is.
Two guys down on the tarmac and that’s it. Gashi has sent a trusted aide to pick up his dough.
I wipe down my weapons then put my Glock in the hands of one of the dead guys and my .308 in the other guy’s grip, and take their weapons. The long gun is an AK47 and the auto pistol an Uzi. The cops will have a hell of a time figuring out who shot who and why.
Gashi, who wants to kill us, is still out there somewhere.
And if he wanted to kill us before, he must be a madman now that we have his dough. And I’ll bet he figures out who picked his pocket.
So, my next job is lined up for me. Find and finish Edvin Gashi, if I have to chase him all the way to Albania. I don’t like having to watch my six at all times.
I go back and make sure the dough is well hidden, ditch all my weapons and accouterments including my Kevlar vest, in the desert at the first badger hole a quarter mile from the airport, then start hoofing it out of there in earnest before the badges show up…if anyone even heard the gunfire. I can hear the ammunition going off in the burning van I’m leaving behind, then the crack of my stash of flash and fragmentation grenades. If the cops don’t hear that, I’ll be very surprised.
I’ll have to call it in stolen as soon as I hit Vegas, and, of course, deny knowledge of any of the tricks of my trade that the van contains…damn it.
On my way, I call Sol and ask him to head for the hospital in Blythe, where, with luck I’ll find a way to get to before the cops start looking for a perp. It’s a two-mile walk to the Grubstake Social Club so I make it at a hustle, and, by the time I arrive a half hour later, have still not heard sirens. There’s a service station with a store attached and I stop and buy myself a tee shirt, “Geologists know Schist” which I presume is some kind of mineral. Now I look like a local, or at least a snowbird who comes to hunt rocks. I find the men’s room and change, leaving my camo shirt in the trash.
I make the saloon and decide to take the time to clear the gun smoke out of my throat with a Jack Daniels on the rocks, and as luck would have it, there’s a freckle faced redhead who looks much better in her tee shirt than I do in mine, not to speak of the skin tight leggings. And she’s only two stools from me, so I sidle up.
“How you doing?”
She stares straight ahead. “Great, not that it’s any of your business,” she says.
“Jesus, girl, what’s in your pretty little craw?”
“Men.”
“Okay, I’ll turn on my feminine side.”
That almost gets a smile out of her, and at least she turns to face me.
I give her my most harmless smile, and raise my voice an octave. “And, as one girl to another, I’ll buy us a drink.”
That earns a smile.
So I charge forward. “Now, girlfriend, tell me about this son of a bitch who did you wrong.”
And that gets a laugh, and I’m encouraged as she looks me up and down, as I’ve already done to her and liked what I saw. “I left the prick in Phoenix.”
“Crying his eyes out, suicidal I’m sure.”
She laughs again.
“Okay,” she says, “I give, you can go back to being what you so obviously are.”
“Which is?” A smart guy, like a good trial attorney, never asks a question when he’s not sure of the answer, but I like her answer none-the-less.
Her voice gets a little husky. “All man, I’d guess.”
“Yo
u, girl, are a good guesser. Is there someplace around here I can buy us some supper.”
“Can’t do it.”
“Don’t break my heart this early in our budding relationship.”
“I’m heading for Blythe and just stopped for a beer. My mom is waiting to console me.”
There is a God.
Here’s a look at the next in THE REPAIRMAN series, JUDGE, JURY, AND….
Judge, Jury, and…
by
L. J. Martin
Prologue
My phone suddenly plays Okie from Muskogee, and I'm trying to remember to who-the-hell I'd assigned that ring?
There are only a half dozen folks in the world who have my cell number—real honest-to-goodness-always-answer cell number as I have had dozens of throwaways from time to time…for good reason as the kind of phone calls I get and make are the kind you don’t want others to know who made, or God forbid, hear and record. Particularly others with acronyms like NSA, FBI, CIA, ATF, NCIS, JAG and a hundred other groups and organizations around the world who might lose their sense of humor if they listened in.
So when my real cell phone chimes at 3:00 AM I’m pretty sure it’s a very good friend or close associate. But who? When I get my eyes focused—a few too many Jack on the rocks with my buddy Pax—I smile as I remember and hit the answer button. “Commander, how the hell are you?”
“Semper Fi, fuck face,” Commander Thomas Scroder growls in his normal gruff tone.
“I see you’re the same old foul mouthed squib. I figured some irate husband would have shot your dumb ass by now.”
“Yeah, right, and I figured you’d be in the pokey for molesting some seventeen year-old school girl.”
“Hey, hey, bite your red stained tongue. I make them show me their ID before I molest these days. Besides, you jealous old fart, it’s the girls who do the molesting in this century. It’s a new world out there.”
“Jealous ain’t the half of it.”
“Okay, so, let’s see…you need bailing out, you need to borrow some dough to get some hussy an abortion, or you’ve got the clap and need me to get you in touch with a corpsman? Which is it?”
“If memory serves it was me who bailed you out, me who loaned your buddy Pax the dough as some lady in San Diego accused him, and me who loaned you my private stash of Triple X when you contracted some crawly little critters. So you got it all backward. How’d you know my tongue is stained red?”
“Commander, I keep up with everyone who I figure will cause me trouble, and last I heard you were retired to some sunny spot in Italy…and I know you drink the cheapest swill available.”
He’s silent for a moment, then asks, “Any chance this is a secure line?”
“No way.”
“Need one. How can we talk?”
“You still in Lamborghini land?”
“I am. Doing private security. We’ve got crews in Africa and burka-ville.”
“And your email address is still the same?”
“One of them is.”
“Stand by. And by the way, I don’t answer to reveille any longer. It’s three friggin’ AM here.”
“Too bad, jarhead. It’s noon here and I’m about to set down to a Tuscan T-bone and a jug of Barbera with essence of dark cherry and blackberry.” That makes him guffaw. And me laugh. He’s the last guy in the world who’d be a wine, or any other kind of, snob.
“I hope you choke. Stand by.”
“Roger that.”
Commander Thomas Scroder, Commander Scrotum to those who might have a decent head start, was likely directly responsible for my not ending my Marine Corps career busting rocks in Leavenworth. He sat on a panel of General Court Martial, one of five who determined my fate after I disobeyed an order, raided a Haji compound and broke in on a family busily stoning a couple of young girls. Young ladies whose crime was speaking to me, an infidel, and who paid for it by having their gray matter spread all over the yard among the goat crap.
As it happened, the men of the family happened to be armed, and happened to swing a couple of AK47’s in the direction of my squad…and we cleaned house.
Among those who took a trip to seventy two virgin-ville was a Major General in the Iraqi Armed Forces.
My mistake, not that I wouldn’t do it over again.
As it came to me later, Scroder argued for many hours with his panel mates until I was drummed out of the Corps, but with a General, not a Dishonorable Discharge and a few years of free lodging. So I owed him big time, and it was over a year before I was able to pay him back.
Word came to me that he was stationed in D.C. and his kid was using and dealing to keep up a habit. I hate dope dealers and dissuaded young Scroder’s dealer from breaking young Scroder’s legs when he couldn’t pay up, by breaking the dope dealer’s legs. Thomas the 2nd went to rehab, and on to college, and is now a George Washington University educated D.C. attorney…and I became a hero around the Scroder homestead. And we’ve done each other a few favors since…even though Scroder is a squib.
So I find a throwaway phone and send him an email and he sends me back the number of a payphone, hard to find these days even in Rome. And two hours after our first conversation, we are talking again, only this time me on an untraceable and Thomas on a payphone…and believe me, we didn’t use names.
“So, my good friend,” I started, “how’s Junior?”
“Making more money than God and driving me wild with stories about the crummy town we worked in, and he still does.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Got a few folks I need to send away, and we can’t do it. At least not so anyone knows who did.”
It’s my turn to be silent a moment, and he waits until I ask, “So, I take it these are folks none of us will miss?”
“Not only that, but it’s my belief a good many of your friends and neighbors won’t be around if they don’t take a trip.”
Again I’m silent. “And this is something the acronyms can’t handle?”
“Not with this administration. Not with the attitude in the country these days. Not with our debilitated armed forces. These guys are Hungarians doing biz with Pakistanis and Afghans, or so we believe. And they are well connected.”
I sigh, then ask, “How many?”
“A half-dozen or so. They have their hands on a suitcase.”
“A suitcase? Is that what I think it is?”
“It is.
“We’re being watched closely by the acronyms or we’d handle it. We’ve been warned we can lose all our contracts if we stick our nose in…so we need an independent. They're trying to negotiate a deal, and you know how that will turn out, Mr. Independent.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“When can you leave? You’ll need a team.”
“How many?”
“You and four or five, if they’re good.”
“It’ll take me a couple of days.”
“We’ll bring you some of the necessaries. Lot’s more will be awaiting your arrival.”
“The quicker the better.”
“You still hanging with that other worthless jarhead with the game name?”
“You bet.” We often call Pax, Paxman, so I know exactly who he means.
“Can you be at his place at eight your time...he does open at eight?”
“Yes and yes. He just got it rebuilt and himself put back together after both got busted up.”
“I heard. Watch for a tall blonde, Sophie, and keep it to business. She’s related. Besides, she's dog butt ugly.”
I laugh. “The ugly ones try harder. Finally, I get revenge.”
“You’ll get a boot up your ass….That's not quite all of it. We sent a few of our guys in and they dusted a half dozen and captured of them. Now they want fifteen mil in cash to release them."
"Sounds like you've got a plate full for me."
"And Blackthorn, my company, has a plate full of money for you and your boys."
With th
at we ring off.
Looks like I’m headed for Italy, and then God knows where else. God works in mysterious ways, as I have business in Albania, just across the Adriatic from Italy…a double-dickhead who killed a friend of mine is most likely there, as that's his home turf. So maybe, just maybe, I can kill two birds, or more, with this one trip…to risk a pun.
Chapter One
Pax, my best buddy and fellow Corps brother, is headquartered in Vegas, the original of his six Internet Service Provider offices in as many west coast cities.
The last bad boys we tangled with, a bunch of bad ass asshole Albanians, blew his office to pieces seven months ago, killed three of his employees and damn near killed him. I've spent the last six months working with the architect and contractor to put his headquarters back in working order.
I enter from the rear parking lot, and as I know Pax is yet to work full time and not getting in the office until mid-morning. I don't go up to his office, but rather, go to the front to see the new receptionist I hear he's hired. My old buddy, Rosie, who had the job, was one of those killed, and I still have a hard knot in my stomach and will till I get revenge.
To my surprise, it's a guy working the phone, to my very, very much greater surprise, there's a gorgeous blonde in a mid thigh skirt in one of the waiting room chairs, thumbing through a Guns and Ammo.
Walking over I extend my hand to the new receptionist. "Hi, I'm Mike Reardon."
"Bruce...Bruce Richardson. Nice to meet you. I've heard lots—"
"Reardon?" the blonde interrupts.
I turn, pleasantly surprised this one knows my name. Then wonder. "You a process server or?"
"I'm or. I'm Sophie McAmber. You know my Uncle Tom. Where can we go to talk...in private?"
"Your uncle said you were the original mud fence." I've got to laugh.
"And you say?"
"One has to believe one's commander."