Death Mark (Mason Dixon Thrillers Book 2)

by Nick Thacker

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess. Let’s hope you’re right.”

  “Okay,” Joey said. “Almost.”

  The Rummer turned to the northeast, just a bit, and continued plowing forward into the deeper waters of the bay.

  “Now!” he yelled to himself. He threw the throttle forward and gunned it for the backside of the Rummer. The force threw me backwards onto the hard floor the boat. I hit my head against the engine compartment but decided to stay down, lying on my back on the floor of the boat. It was far more comfortable than trying to fight the rain and wind and waves at the front of the vessel or try to stand in the middle of it.

  Our journey lasted thirty seconds. I could sense the side of the great ship even before I could really see it. It was black, just like the sky and the water and the horizon, but it had a very definite absoluteness to it that I could feel. The rain sounded like it had gone away, but it was just one of my ears playing tricks on my mind — the Rummer blocked out a majority of the thunderous weather.

  And just like Frey had described, the Handysize carrier rose about twenty feet — maybe less — from the surface of the ocean. It almost seemed close enough to jump to.

  “Grab the anchor,” Joey said. “There should be one in one of the compartments. We can swing it up and over, maybe climb up that way.”

  I nodded, started rummaging through the cases of equipment onboard. There wasn’t much — the gang that owned these boats kept them sparse for whatever reason. Likely they had just purchased them for this mission, not caring much that they were lacking some necessary gear for legality.

  “I’m not sure there is one,” I yelled back to Joey. “These guys didn’t really —”

  An amazing blast of light hit us and lit up everything on deck. I froze, still crouched over the open compartment.

  The sound of a voice crackling through a megaphone reached my ears next. ‘We are sending down a ladder,’ the voice said. ‘Mr. Elizondo would like to speak with you.’

  A rope ladder immediately unfurled and fell down the side of the ship, landing just in front of the pilot’s seat on the convex front of the boat. I looked over at Frey and Joey. All of us were unarmed. Unprepared. Soaked to the core, ready to give in to anything. But the two men stood still, stoic. They just looked up at the shadowy figures leaning over the edge of the Rummer. Three men, two of them pointing rifles at us.

  More than enough to shut me up.

  “Well,” Joey said. “I guess a ladder will be easier to climb than a rope.”

  43

  ROCKFORD ELIZONDO WAS A WALKING contradiction. Dark, deep-set eyes, brown hair, and South American features, his skin was stark white. He looked more Italian or Spanish than American or South American, but his accent was pure New England. Like a rich frat boy, smooth-talking but quick.

  “Welcome,” he said. “It’s good to meet you face-to-face.”

  I gave him a single head-dip nod.

  We were standing in the bridge, high above the rest of the ship, and for the third time that day I was toweling off. My shoes were still wet, my socks still squishing with every step I took, and I knew there would be a couple blisters forming on my toes. To make matters worse, my socks and shoes still reeked of fuel.

  There were six people in the room — Joey, Frey, and me, as well as two of Elizondo’s men, each armed and standing near the two doors. Elizondo himself stood at the center of the bridge, his back to the wide set of windows. He stood with his hands behind his back, a proud leader ready to address his subjects. His mouth was a small line, straight and empty and dead on his face, not a smile but not a frown. The men he had employed as guards tried to imitate their boss’ pose, but their guns gave away their intensity. Each of them carried a modified AK47, the most popular assault rifle available on the black market, which also told me something about the type of men we were dealing with.

  These guys were hired on to fight for Elizondo, to protect him and his product. And the product was massive. I saw the front end of the ship out the window on the bridge, completely covered with stacks of square crates. I imagined each of the crates held four or five fifty-three gallon barrels, and within those barrels, aging rum.

  I wondered how he was planning to get it all into the country unseen.

  “You failed.”

  I frowned. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “I believe I am. But that’s thanks to my men, and my boats. Not you. You sat back, waiting for everything to end.”

  “Seemed like a good way to stay not dead,” I replied.

  “And it was,” Elizondo said. “But it was not what I requested of you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was a request. It sounded a lot like an order. And I’m not really one to take orders.”

  “I figured that,” Elizondo said. “Which was why we took some collateral.”

  “Shalice,” Joey said. I saw his fists clenching at his sides.

  “That her name?” Elizondo asked. “She wouldn’t tell us anything, not at first. I had my men remove her clothes, one piece at a time, until she was just wearing that cute swimsuit you must know.”

  Joey took a step forward, then stopped himself.

  “Of course, by then we didn’t care for her name. I just needed to know who you two were.”

  “And?”

  “And I was satisfied. Navy, Army, you two had a decent service record. Sort of washed up now, though? Just running a bar in a city no one lives in.”

  “Something like that.”

  “But it was this person I was most interested in.” He took a few strides forward and ended up in front of Jonathan Frey. Frey was back to his distributor self, nervous and shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “What’s your name?” Elizondo asked.

  “F — Frey. Jonathan Frey.”

  “The distributor.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you distribute, Mr. Frey?”

  “Uh, well, I have all kinds of —”

  “Liquor, I presume?”

  “Y — yes.”

  “Well, in that case,” Elizondo said. “We’re competitors.”

  He lifted his head just a bit and motioned to one of his men. The man at the port-side door turned ten degrees with his upper body, lifted his rifle, and fired.

  Frey was too slow. He lurched forward but the bullet caught him right in the side. He fell to the floor, the blood already falling out of him.

  I started running, making my way toward Elizondo, but the guy at the other door was tracking me. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye and at the last possible moment changed my strategy. I dove straight down to the floor, just as the man’s rifle coughed, the bullet flew over my head and smacked through the glass, and I hit the hard laminate floor.

  The wind left me, but I refused to stop. I crawled forward, then rolled sideways, keeping instruments and desks on the bridge between me and the two shooters in the room. I heard Joey scuffling, his deep grunts telling me he was engaging one of the men. Good, I thought. That leaves one guy with a gun and Elizondo.

  Suddenly Elizondo was there, in front of me, looking down at me. With a gun.

  Never mind, I thought.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “No, I’m good down —”

  He kicked at my head, missed, and hit my side. It didn’t feel any better than if he’d have hit my head.

  “Get up,” he said again.

  I picked myself up and straightened out my damp pants. Smelled the whiff of fuel emanating from my shoes once again. The smell had always made me feel nauseated. I sniffed, then exhaled through my nostrils to try to push away the awful aroma.

  “Follow me.”

  He didn’t wait, didn’t care to make sure I was following. He just walked toward the port-side door, the man standing guard near it shifting sideways as his boss strolled through. I stepped over Frey’s body, seeing that he was alive and breathing, but holding his bleeding side as he lay on the floor. I w
anted to stop, to help him, but the man at the door tracked me with the barrel of his rifle and I knew what he was implying.

  I nodded and stepped over the threshold and started down after Elizondo, down the same stairs we’d scaled a few minutes earlier. I wasn’t sure why Elizondo had made us come all the way up here, other than some odd power play.

  I remembered Frey’s words. Elizondo was a borderline schizophrenic, a control freak. Perhaps the man just had to do things a certain way. I’d met people like that before.

  The guard followed behind me, then Joey and finally the last guard. Great. Three on two. And the odds were not in my favor: we were still unarmed. And wet, which just made things worse. No one liked fighting in wet clothes.

  44

  WE FOLLOWED ELIZONDO ALL THE way down to a floor below the main deck. If the crew slept in their own quarters on some level of the ship, this deck wasn’t it. I followed the length of hallway that out to the main floor and was stunned. The level was the height of two floors, with at least as much floor space as the main deck. And stretching from floor to ceiling on both sides of the massive room were barrels. Oak. The liquid inside some of them seeping slowly out between the tight cracks.

  “My supply,” Elizondo said.

  “Rum barrels?” I asked.

  “Mostly. Some brandy as well, and a few are the barrels from experimental whiskies my partners are working on.”

  “They’re all full?”

  He smiled. “Quite full. Each of them has fifty-three gallons in it. Checked just this morning by my team.”

  I made a face, still admiring the massive space.

  “And each of the crates on the top deck holds four more barrels.”

  “How do you sneak it all in?” Joey asked.

  “Sneak?” Elizondo turned and faced us. “I don’t understand.”

  “All of this is illegal, Elizondo. Isn’t it?” I asked. “Not to mention your security force out there, shooting up anything that moves.”

  He laughed. An odd, giggly chuckle. “I see. I understand what you think. Yes, I can see how you would believe that. But you might be surprised that I have an import license for everything that you see.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Well, believe what you will. You may have noticed the lack of coast guard vessels outside, as well as port authority. My business has always been in question, but I can assure you that I am nothing if not a law-abiding citizen.”

  “Yeah? Then why go through all this trouble, Elizondo? Why hire these grunts to shoot at us and protect you and bring you in safely if you’ve got the entire United States government at your back?”

  His eyes glistened, widening. “Ah,” he said. A long, slow drawl on the end of the word. “That’s just it. I do not have the United States government behind me at all.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You know who is in charge of what comes and goes into and out of this country?”

  “The government?”

  “Yes. And do you know who decides specifically who gets those import and export contracts?”

  “Uh… the government?”

  “Indeed. And do you know who pays the government for that privilege?”

  “I’m going to say, ‘people like you?’”

  “Yes,” Elizondo said. “But not me. Other people, sure. But not me. I have been working in this field for years, and I’m good at it. But I haven’t gotten the contracts I need to get the one-hundred percent legal products I carry into the United States.”

  Joey scoffed. “Then it doesn’t really sound legal, Elizondo.”

  He glared at Joey. “Well, it would seem that way. But there is not constitutional limit on the total gross amount of product that can enter or leave the country, except in times of declared famine or embargo. So what you’re talking about is called an oligarchy. A collection of a few suppliers that are in tight with the government, forcing them to keep the little players like me out.”

  “You don’t seem so little.” I was hoping a small compliment like that would keep him talking, as he seemed to be enjoying this final bad-guy-tells-all scenario. It would end — this wasn’t a movie, after all, but I was determined to figure out where he was keeping Shalice. At this point I assumed it was either in his private quarters, which would be somewhere near the bridge, or in a brig, which would be belowdecks somewhere.

  That meant we had a lot of searching to do, and we didn’t have a lot of time to do it. And I was quite sure Elizondo wasn’t going to just let us snoop around his boat.

  “You don’t understand — little isn’t a number on a balance sheet. It means that I’m not ‘in’ with the bigwigs that are playing the game in Washington. The American alcohol industry has been highly regulated since its inception, and to this day it is one of the most difficult to get into.”

  “Yeah, I know. I run a bar.”

  At this he actually laughed. I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me or confiding in me, from one business associate to another. I decided to take it as an insult.

  “This is my way of telling the industry what I think of them,” he said. He turned back around to face the storage space, leaving his two guards to do their jobs, which they performed admirably, keeping their rifles low and pointed our way.

  Joey looked over at me, a slight frown on his face. He seems weird, I could hear him thinking.

  I agreed. Definitely off.

  “What are you showing us this for?” I blurted out. “Why now? If you’re going to kill us, just —”

  He laughed again, but this time it fell into the enormous room and echoed throughout the space. It was a bold, hearty belly laugh, completely out of context for the man who’d done it and the situation. “I am not going to kill you, Mr. Dixon. Why would I do that?”

  “Look around, asshole,” I said. “Your men killed how many guys today? My father was one of them.”

  “The man who wanted to kill me,” he said, under his breath. “Seems ironic.”

  “And yet here we are. Joey and I got into this because we were lied to. Whatever you’re going to do to us, I’d sure like to find out.”

  “And you shall. All in good time.”

  “But?”

  “But I thought you’d like to see your little prize first,” he said.

  “Shalice?” Joey asked.

  “Follow me.”

  Elizondo started off again, walking through the natural hallway formed by the towers of barrels that had been stacked on either side of the room. Each tower was strapped down using an interesting combination of buckle straps and cordage, holding the barrels upright and against the walls at the same time.

  I’d never been to a rickhouse before, but I knew enough about the methods of moonshining and making whiskey from my research into the subject. The distillate was mixed, usually cut with a bit of water to a certain proof that aged well, and stored in fifty-three gallon barrels resting on their side for years. For straight bourbon it was four years and up in virgin American White Oak barrels — The Federal Standards of Identity for Bourbon is a jokingly real government entry in the Code of Regulations stipulating what can and can not be called ‘bourbon.’ — while other aged spirits were kept in their barrels for differing time frames.

  The point of a rickhouse was twofold: first, by storing the barrels on their side, the barrels could be moved and sloshed around easily, allowing the distillate to interact more with the oak wood and help with the colorization and imparted flavor profile. The second reason was temperature: the higher a barrel was in a rickhouse, the higher the temperature swings between day and night. In bourbon country, temperatures at the top of a stuffy, non-climate-controlled rickhouse could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, then plummet in the winter months. By rotating the barrels from the top of the house to the floor level, the distillate could benefit from the expanding and contracting of the wood at different times of year. Sunlight, temperature, and regular contact with the wood it was stored in were all major v
ariables for aging a great spirit.

  This ‘rickhouse’ seemed nothing like what I would have expected. It seemed that the barrels had been put in here and on deck not for proper storage and aging technique but to try to cram as many as possible inside.

  Odd. Just like Elizondo.

  We were at the other end of the room, toward the bow of the ship, when Elizondo made a hard right and walked us through another open door and into another hallway. This hallway stretched from bow to halfway back to the stern, following the starboard side of the hull. Individual rooms with simple, narrow doors were spaced on both sides of the hall.

  The crew’s quarters.

  The rooms were numbered in descending order, the odds on the left and the even numbered rooms on the right. We were between rooms 13 and 12, so we were close to the front of the ship. The end of the hallway was about fifty feet ahead of us.

  “She’s in room 2,” Elizondo said.

  “We can see her?” Joey asked. I could hear the elation building in his voice. Hesitant, but present.

  “Indeed you can,” Elizondo said. “In fact, I’d suggest you spend as much time with her as possible.”

  He stopped in front of room 2. I listened, but couldn’t hear anything from inside the room.

  “Why’s that, Elizondo? What’s this all about?”

  Elizondo stepped forward, knocked on the door, then stuck a key in the lock and turned it. The door fell open into the room. It was a sparsely furnished room. A chair, a desk, a bed. A mirror on the wall, a small toilet behind a curtain. No shower or bath.

  Shalice was on the bed. She sat up when Elizondo opened the door. She was in a swimsuit, just as Elizondo had said.

  Joey pushed past him and rushed in. “Are — are you okay?” he asked. “Did they hurt you?”

  She was crying, but she hugged him back. She shook her head. “No. Not really. They roughed me up a bit. Scared me. They — they took my clothes, to get me to talk. I didn’t know what to say.”