When it came to shooting through glass, few people had more experience than V and I had the bills from glass companies to prove it. At one point I had to put her on a glass budget because she would spend weeks at a time out on our long range in Arizona making shots through various types of glass. I learned, mostly from her over the years, everything that go wrong when a bullet punches through glass including deflection, deformity, and even fragmentation. After trying various exotic and custom bullets, V finally settled on a new specially bonded 168 grain bullet designed for tactical applications. For all her skill the target still had to be close to the window, so we picked a condo that was all glass along one side and limited depth in the rooms. Over the years she refined her tools to the point that if the only thing between the target and V was a pane of glass, they were already dead.
I pulled around the back of the building to the parking garage, wondering if I put V behind the eight ball with the distance she had to cover. It was a long way. Too late to worry about it now, I was on the Colombian’s stick up cameras. I pulled into a reserved space, paying no attention to the laundry truck at the loading dock, and made my way to the elevators.
We picked the fifth floor condo because the neighbors above and below were gone for the season. The door was unlocked and opened into a bright shotgun style condo with windows all along the side that faced in the general direction of the Intracoastal. It was advertised as having a “water view” but you had to stand in exactly the right spot to spy a flicker of water between the neighboring buildings. Gotta love real estate listings. The shades were raised but the harsh sun was filtered through some wispy inner curtains. The unit was empty save for a single folding lawn chair in the middle of the living room just off from a small kitchenette. The chair was one of the new styles made of fabric with little drink holders in the arm rests. I took a seat and settled down to wait.
Ten minutes later, right on time, my phone beeped. CLEAR the text message informed me. All three of the Colombians were on the move. I turned on my earpiece and slipped it in my ear.
“Online,” I said to the air.
“Ready,” V confirmed, now completely blending with her weapon. I don’t know how she did it, but she could lie like that for hours.
“I smell like a high school locker room,” Q said by way of greeting.
“They’re at the elevators,” Deek informed us.
“Are you on the move, Deek?” I asked, sensing some background noise.
“Affirmative,” he confirmed. “I want to get a peek in that van.”
I really wished Deek had cleared that with me but it wouldn’t have done any good to say no, so there was no point in pursuing it. I frowned anyway.
“I see you frowny face,” V said playfully, meaning she was watching me through her rifle scope. It was something less than a comforting feeling.
There was a knock at the door, which then opened, not waiting for an invitation. Manuel Silva walked in first followed by one of his associates carrying an older but very wicked looking Tec-9. My frown deepened.
The pair checked the apartment, swept the room with an electronic device and, once they were comfortable it was clear, the goon came over to me and motioned me to stand up. I held my arms out while he gave me a very thorough pat search. He took my phone and pointed at my ear and I had to dig my ear-piece out and hand it to him. He looked at it, clicked it off and put it in his pocket. Satisfied, he turned and nodded to his boss and I resumed my seat.
“So, now we talk about our merchandise,” Mr. Silva began as his associate took up station just to one side of the kitchenette so he had a clear field of fire, covering both me and the door. Bad luck for him he decided to stand by the window.
“I will ask the questions, you will answer,” Silva began menacingly.
I sighed heavily. “Unfortunately not. The first thing we’re going to do is establish the house rules,” I said, tapping my chair arm with two fingers on my right hand.
At that moment three things happened in split second secession. There was a loud PANK accompanied by a faint tinkling of glass, the curtain behind the goon puffed slightly and then his head exploded. Well, not quite. The bullet must have deformed hitting the glass because when it struck Silva’s associate just above the occipital bone it deflected and exited the skull just below his left eye, exploding outward with a spray of blood and bits of flesh. The bullet went into a flat spin and whizzed by uncomfortably close to my own head like an angry wasp and buried itself with a loud TWACK in the wall behind me.
Unlike the movies, people don’t pitch over after a head shot, they go straight down like some perverse giant cutting the strings on a marionette. Mr. Silva’s associate collapsed straight down in a heap and then gently slumped over to one side. A goopy pool of blood started to flow almost immediately.
At that moment there was a loud BOOM! from the hallway, followed by a heavy thud as Q took down the guard outside with a bean bag stunner.
Manuel Silva pulled a long slide .45 from inside his jacket and tried to take cover behind the island in the kitchen, he alternated pointing the gun at the door and at me.
“If you remember,” I began gently, “the deal was no guns. So, if anyone, anyone at all, would like to put their gun down, now might be a good time.”
Manuel Silva hesitated, considered the long row of windows and wisely decided to toss his gun on the kitchen island and raise his hands as he backed toward the refrigerator.
“Good choice,” I said easily, “because I’d hate to try and explain to your disappearance to your step dad.”
There was a knock on the door. “Housekeeping!,” a woman with a heavy Hispanic accent announced.
Silva’s eyebrows went up, he looked at me.
“Come in!” I chimed. “It’s okay, they’re with me,” I informed Mr. Silva, still visibly shaken.
A short, solid Hispanic woman with huge breasts pushed a heavy laundry cart filled with cleaning supplies into the room. Behind her were two men carrying a new pane of glass and behind them Q dragged the second unconscious security goon through the door with his hands flexi-cuffed in front of him. Last was a slight younger Hispanic man with a white shirt and tie carrying a portable radio and bucket of supplies to fix the hole in the wall. He walked over to the bullet hole, tracked back to the chair and looked at me. I nodded and he got started digging the bullet out of the wall. Teamwork at its finest.
“Ola, El Gordo!” The Hispanic lady we called Momma Maria greeted me with a beaming smile. “Que posso?”
“Muy bien, Momma,” I said giving her the expected hug. “It’s so good to see you,” I said, switching to English.
“You must come and see my new granddaughter,” Momma demanded. “She is so beautiful.”
“I’m sure she’s wonderful, Momma,” I agreed.
Momma Maria had been working for us ever since the old days and her cleaning crew was second to none. So good in fact she had done work for virtually every three letter government agency there was most of it off the books. There was a saying around the local agency offices that to err was human, but forgiveness came through Momma Maria. Her peculiar type of disposal services were particularly profitable, she even accepted government credit cards.
“Tsk,” she said looking at the body on the kitchen floor, oozing a puddle of blood out of the left side of its face. She donned a big pair of rubber gloves and unloaded the cleaning supplies from the laundry cart, all the time going on with the details of her new granddaughter. Manuel Silva looked on with wide-eyed confusion.
“Put your hands down, you look ridiculous,” I said to him. He slowly lowered his hands but still didn’t look comfortable.
Momma pulled a false bottom out of the laundry cart and lifted some folding panels covered in heavy gauge plastic. Then she clicked a lever and the laundry cart tilted over to the side, one of the plastic lined panels serving as a ramp.
“Por favor?” she said gesturing at the body that was way too heavy for her to lift.
“Sure, Momma,” I said with a nod to Q.
We donned disposable gloves and, after retrieving my earpiece and phone of out the goon’s pocket, we heaved the body up the ramp. Q frowning when his foot touched the edge of the blood pool, which was tainted with bits of flesh and brains that Q collectively referred to as “goon goo.” When the body was most of the way in, Momma rotated the cart upright and the body rolled into the plastic lined bottom of the cart with a wet thud. Q and I tossed our gloves and the Tec-9 into the cart and Momma cleaned Q’s shoe with something in a spray bottle.
“You go outside now,” she ordered all of us.
I replaced my earpiece and opened the patio door and gestured for Mr. Silva to follow me. There was a small table set with a coffee service. I took a seat and gestured for my guest to take the other. I poured us each small cups of incredibly strong Cuban coffee and set out cream and sugar cubes. Q took up station in the hall outside the condo.
“Your associate is quite good,” Manuel Silva said, working out where the fatal shot must have come from. “That has to be more than 150 meters.”
“Two hundred and five,” V confirmed in my earpiece.
“My associate is very good,” I agreed, careful to avoid saying she was very good. Finding out the killer was a woman would certainly offend my guest’s machismo and if he uttered the wrong word his head would explode. He still looked nervous.
“Relax, Mr. Silva,” I said easily. “If we wanted you dead, you’d already be in a laundry cart. All the same I wouldn’t make any sudden moves.”
“This is a very bad situation,” Manuel began, taking a sip of the bitter coffee.
“What is?”
“Roberto,” he nodded at the kitchen.
“Pfft,” I countered. “He wasn’t your cousin, he was a contractor,” I scoffed. “Hired help,” I clarified when Silva didn’t get the reference.
“Still, he was my man,” Silva went on, desperately trying to regain control of the situation.
“Right, and you got him killed,” I reminded him. “When I say no guns, I mean no guns.”
“How will I explain that to his family, to my step father?” he demanded.
This guy was really tedious sometimes. “Not my problem to solve, Mr. Silva, How you explain the disappearance of the hired help is your problem.”
“My other man?” he asked.
“Out cold,” I replied. “He’ll wake up in about two hours with a headache the size of Nebraska, a bruise on his chest, a dry mouth and no clue how he got here.”
He was still trying to find an angle to get back in control of the situation.
“If I can make a suggestion,” I began. “You’re used to being in charge, used to being able to snap your fingers and have people jump. But you’re not running things here, this is our turf. You made a deal, on our turf, and broke it. Not a great start but we can move past that unfortunate beginning.”
He mulled that over a minute and the color gradually returned to his face with the aid of Cuban espresso. He stirred another sugar cube into his coffee with a small spoon.
“What do you propose?” he finally asked, relaxing visibly.
Finally. “I want to give you your bonds back, minus a reasonable recovery fee for my organization, of course, along with a very sincere hope we never see each other again.”
“What about the man who stole them?” he asked.
“Well, there’s a problem with that,” I said heavily. “We believe the man who is accused of taking them was being setup.”
“By who?”
“By associates of one of your business partners,” I explained.
He mulled that over, obviously that idea had crossed his mind as well.
“Then why did he take the product?” he asked, lapsing into the dialog of his family business.
I hated explaining things but sometimes it was necessary. “Look at it from his position. His partner and another man tried to kill him and one of the people involved was a policeman--”
“The policia?” he blurted. “I--we, had not heard that. This is all seems very convenient.”
“The Fat Man never lies,” I informed him.
His eyebrows went up at that revelation and the light finally came on. “So I’ve heard,” he said uneasily, casting another look in the direction of V’s perch. “There were stories from when I was very young.”
“Those days are long gone, Mr. Silva,” I assured him. “We want nothing more than to see your...product...returned to its rightful owners and to go our separate ways.”
“You mentioned a fee,” he said. At last we were getting down to business.
“We normally keep half of what we recover,” I began.
“My papa--stepfather --will never agree to that,” he said flatly.
I sighed. “We guessed that,” I conceded. “And your papa has enough reach to have us looking over our shoulders the rest of our lives and we’d rather not live under that shadow. All the same we are still lethal enough to make a war very expensive. So it would appear to be an advantage for both of us to reach a mutual agreement.”
“What’s your offer then?” he asked, finally on familiar ground.
I explained our proposition, which involved a fee that was well below half but still worthwhile.
“There’s a rat in the gutter by the vampire van,” V informed me.
“Not nice,” Deek replied, though I could hear his smile through the comment.
“Holy shit, you should see this stuff,” Deek marveled. “This is some high end shit here. Military grade, top shelf.”
“Burn it,” I instructed out loud.
“Excuse me?” Silva asked.
“I’m afraid we’re going to owe you a new van,” I informed him. “We have to...neutralize...your technology. I’ll have another car sent over from our motor pool.”
The anger flushed his face again.
“Come on,” I cajoled, “it’s just stuff. This is a good deal. Your papa gets his cash back, a little extra and probably enough to smooth things over with poor Roberto’s family and buy you a new van.”
There was a distant and gentle PFOOM! from down the street that settled further discussion about the van.
“Vehicle on fire,” V informed. Sirens punctuated the observation a few moments later.
“Damn shame, too,” Deek added. “That was a sweet ride.”
Silva frowned. “I will present your offer to my stepfather,” he agreed. “I anticipate he will accept.”
“I hate to add this, but should you or your family try to double cross us, do keep in mind we have your gun, with your fingerprints all over it,” I reminded him. “It would be a shame if it turned up at the scene of a particularly gruesome drug related murder.”
His eyes flitted toward the condo. With the U.S. government’s new global reach they would certainly be able to extradite the younger Silva with evidence like that.
“You keep your end of the deal,” he said after a moment, “and we’ll keep ours.”
I handed him my car keys. “It’s down in the garage,” I reminded him. “There’s a phone in the glove compartment. We’ll text you the location of the meet tomorrow night. You should file a flight plan before you arrive.”
“And no guns?” he asked.
“No, you can bring guns this time if you like,” I told him, “just keep them out of sight.”
He nodded and I rose to leave. “Oh, we’ll leave you a laundry basket so you can get your associate down to the car,” I said over my shoulder.
Momma Maria was vacuuming and the room smelled like bleach and ammonia. The window crew as replacing the trim and the younger gentleman with the tie was replacing the curtain. The laundry basket with the body was already gone. The body would be incinerated and the ash would be ground into a slurry of cement and formed into slightly domed concrete pads fitted with long sections of PVC pipe. Eventually those pads would make up sections of a new artificial reef Fred’s salvage company was using as a diver tra
ining project. The company received an environmental award from the state tourism bureau for that program.
Q was wheeling in the second laundry basket when Deek announced the car was ready, which means he recovered our IDs from the glove box and spiked the electronics, except for the GPS tracking. The replacement car was already rolling.
“We ready?” Q asked.
“All done,” Momma Maria announced pleasantly, wrapping the cord around the holder on the back of the vacuum cleaner. The condo was sparkly clean and there wasn’t the slightest trace of the grisly event that happened barely a half-hour before. The window guys carried out the broken window after carefully applying tape over the bullet hole, trailed by Momma Maria carrying a tray of cleaning supplies and dragging her vacuum cleaner and the young man with the tie, who I guessed was one of Momma’s grandchildren. Apparently the family that cleans together, stays together.
It occurred to me watching them file out it that the forces of decay were already acting on the body in the back of the laundry truck. Once the immune system stops function, bacteria, mold and fungi immediately start to take over the corpse. His body would also help fuel a small enterprise that created jobs and was a source for money that would flow through the local economy. What was death for humans was really an explosion of life and living for a whole host of organisms.
“Your car is here,” Deek informed us. “I’m headed back.”
“I’m secure here,” V announced. “Too bad, the firefighters are cute.”
She sounded almost buoyant and, if she kept to her usual pattern, would engage in a bout of intimacy. Killing someone, especially a man, always put V in a good mood. With a final nod to Manuel Silva we made our way to the elevators.
9
WE FOUND THE car and the valet outside on the street and he handed us the keys with a last look at the excitement down the street. For some reason, known only to them, the fire department decided to use foam on the van and the street was a glorious mess of foam, fire trucks and police cars. One of the news helicopters circled slowly overhead. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered to watch the festivities. Deek would have been long gone before the show started but I was certain he was watching on the building security cameras.
The Rogue Horse Recovery: Book One of the Recovery and Marine Salvage Inc Series (Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc.) Page 12