Calderon and Peterson were not that different.
The only difference was why.
But was that ‘why’ good enough? Calderon wondered about that. Peterson had kids killed. Kids Justin’s age and younger. So had many mercenaries killed children in the past. Did the ‘why’ of it really matter at all?
They were just as dead.
As dead as Justin when he finally stopped kicking.
Knock-knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock.
As dead as pretty little Susan Peterson was going to be, if her husband didn’t come through for her.
Knock-knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock.
The knock-knocking kept echoing in his head.
Was Calderon finally cracking up? What the hell?
All of these missions. All of this killing. All of the times he almost died himself. And the only thing that had ever given him PTSD was the death of his nephew.
Knock-knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock.
They were just as dead…and Calderon still didn’t feel the slightest bit bad about it. But that one little thing kept wearing at him over these months, and finally, he wanted to quit. Justin.
Maybe now was the time to retire to that island full of naked women and eat and drink until he got fat, happy and laughing, and he’d never think about the past. Not the killing. Not Justin’s death. Not ever again.
Just leave the blood to someone else and retire.
Knock-knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock.
“Knock-knock?”
The voice came from behind him, and he turned around quickly.
“You’re not used to being snuck up on, are you?” one of the female mercenaries asked with a light laugh. It was Keeler, the woman who had taken Susan to the head earlier.
“This would probably be the first time ever,” Calderon agreed.
“What were you thinking about?” the woman asked casually, not really interested.
Calderon took a puff from the cigarette, dropped it, and crushed it out. He took a deep breath before turning back to her and saying, “Retiring.”
“Retiring, huh?” the gruff woman responded with a laugh. “Well, let’s hope you’re not abandoning your listening post ‘til the job’s done.”
“Not at all,” Calderon said. “When I go, I’m taking that shit with me.”
“Ha-ha. That makes sense now.”
“Well, that shit’s expensive,” Calderon added. “I’m still listening, actually,” he said and pointed to his ear.
“Ah, Bluetooth. Anything good?”
Calderon laughed. “Sometimes, it’s interesting. Like listening to an old radio show or something. This Pocase guy is certifiably insane.” He shook his head in thought. “But most of the time, I’m just making sure everything gets recorded, and if anything important happens, I can cue the boss.”
“Anything important happening now?”
Calderon cocked his head and said “Uh, yeah, sounds like that Pocase fella is getting stopped by a cop.”
“Ouch. Looks like we might be slicing up that bitch after all, then.”
Calderon narrowed his eyes. This woman, Keeler, was cold as ice.
He changed the subject. “The rest of the time I’m just watching that old TV to pass the time.”
“TV, huh?”
“Yeah, the boss didn’t ask for video monitoring.”
“No? How do we know the prisoner really ripped out his teeth, then?”
Calderon chuckled. “You’d be amazed what people will do when they think they’re being watched. I left a couple of button cameras in there. Not much. The boss hasn’t had much interest. Peterson’s not being watched. The TV is, though.”
“I’m surprised you get a signal out here,” Keeler laughed.
“Oh, just barely. One local station. Looks like they just have a lot of old reruns licensed. You’re welcome to watch with me.”
She scoffed. “I believe I’ll pass. Shouldn’t you be monitoring the device up there, though?”
“I multitask. I’m good at my job,” Calderon informed her.
“So I hear from the boss. He said he demanded you.”
Calderon coughed and then asked, “Is that why you came out here? Check to make sure I’m doing my job?”
“Not exactly.” She smiled. “Actually, I just wanted a cigarette, and I don’t have any.”
“Ah,” Calderon said.
“Can I have one of yours?”
Calderon was already reaching for the pack. He lit one for each of them, then handed one to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he responded in his usual uninvolved way. “Uh, hell, I’m, uh, Calderon by the way. You’re Keeler?”
“I am Keeler,” the woman confirmed, offering her hand. She was a sporty type woman. Lots of energy. Cute in her own dangerous way. Something didn’t feel right quite about her though. Something felt…off. It was as if Keeler was just a few steps removed from humanity. And that was a hell of a thing for someone like Calderon to think, considering his own background.
They shook hands and Calderon asked, “Do you know the boss?” It was an attempt at friendliness and also at figuring the younger woman out.
“Somewhat,” Keeler answered. “We’ve worked on a few things before. And I’ve been training at this compound for the past few weeks. I’m not supposed to say his name, though.”
“Yeah, my contract said to just call him ‘Boss.’”
“Well, it works. Beats codenames.” Then, without even a beat, she looked at Calderon and asked, “So, do you think we’re going to have to gut the bitch?”
Calderon blinked for a moment. Even in their line of work, such casual reference to butchering another person seemed odd. “What do you think?”
She laughed. “It doesn’t bother me much either way, as long as I don’t have to clean it up afterward.”
Keeler took a long drag and exhaled one long white streak of smoke.
“Yeah, it’s just a job,” Calderon said.
“Just a job. Hey, are you really retiring?”
“Seems so.”
“Why?”
“My business.”
“Of course, Mr. Mystery.” She laughed and coughed out smoke. “Truth is, I kinda hope she does die. One less crazy rich bitch in the world. She probably hasn’t worked a day in her sad little life.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not really,” Keeler said. “Just a good reason not to care if she does die.”
Calderon chuckled a bit, then said, “But you said you actually do want her to die.”
Keeler snickered and finished her smoke. “Yeah, I kind of do. I’ll do it if the boss wants me to. I’ve done jobs like that before. Torture. Executions.”
“And you like it?”
She laughed and gave him a playful, almost seductive smile. Was she flirting with him? “I get off on it.”
“Killing?”
“It’s just a job,” she echoed him. “But what a job it is! I can’t believe you’d want to retire from these thrills.”
“How do you mean?”
She took a deep puff, then looked at him again with that seductive, yet silly, grin. “You know, it takes a very special kind of person to do what we do. Not just the skills, but that too. I mean it takes a really special kind of person to do our work well. Practice it, you know? Love it enthusiastically!”
Calderon studied her up and down, sizing her up. “And you love it enthusiastically?”
“Most of it. The thrill of it.” She seemed to think for a moment, though Calderon got the impression she didn’t really have to think about her answer. “Yeah, I do. I get off on that ‘I am become death’ feeling, like I said.”
With that, Keeler let out a joyful laugh. It was childlike for such a tough woman. She really did love the thrill, didn’t she?
Any other day, Calderon might laugh with her, just to keep up the appearance of camaraderie. She wasn’t his type of person. She wasn’t professional,
it seemed. Oh, well-trained, sure, or she wouldn’t be there, but she didn’t take the job professionally. She took the wrong parts seriously and the wrong parts as funny. He would have laughed with her and moved on any other day, never to work with her again.
This day, however, he was decidedly annoyed.
“So, it wouldn’t bother you if this innocent woman got raped and murdered, just because her husband couldn’t come up with all that money?”
She thought about it for a moment, then turned to look Calderon in the eye. She was a relatively pretty girl. Short, practical brown hair, brown eyes, no makeup. She didn’t need makeup to be attractive, but she didn’t seem to care if she was attractive either. She looked like a soldier. She simply, and this was nothing to do with her gender, didn’t strike Calderon as a professional soldier.
Instead of answering after that moment, she said, “Can I have another one of your cigarettes?”
“Uh, sure.” He nodded and pulled two more out. “So, it doesn’t bother you?” he asked as he handed her a lit cancer stick.
“What, like you’ve never killed anyone innocent before?” she mocked.
“Oh, I have, yeah,” he said. “I’m not an angel.”
“Neither am I.”
“I can tell. But maybe, I’ve been thinking, maybe we’re not all that different from the Petersons,” Calderon admitted.
Keeler pushed him backwards playfully and said, “If they’re like us, they deserve to die for sure.”
Calderon didn’t laugh. Instead, he was careful to stay in the shade as he had trained himself.
“I’m serious, though,” Calderon said. “I mean, look at her. Different background, sure, but she’s about your height and weight and build and even age. You two probably think the same way about a lot of things. You know, had things been different, you could be in her same situation right now.”
“Strapped to a chair about to be cut up by mercenaries?” Keeler joked.
“You know what I mean.”
She sighed and shook her head. That half-smile never left her face. “Yeah, I know. And, ha-ha, you’re right. We are a lot the same. Physically, at least. We have the same body type. I noticed that while I was wiping the bitch’s ass.”
“Uh-huh.”
She laughed again. “But, no. I wouldn’t want her life. I like what I’m doing now. Look at us, okay? Why do we have the same body? I’m constantly working on my training. She’s probably taking yoga and wasting her time on a Stairmaster watching reality shows.”
This time, Calderon did chuckle. “The difference is why,” he said.
Keeler laughed back. “Yeah, exactly that. We’re completely different. Her life doesn’t offer any thrills for me. Besides, I don’t have any sympathy for bitches like her who don’t think about anybody but themselves.”
“Did she say something to give you that impression?”
Keeler laughed again. “Nah, just like you, I won’t talk to her. But I know the type. Spoiled princess. Rich beau. Thinks everyone else is trash. She’d probably look down on me for staying fit by training instead of, you know, her way. The easy, pristine way.” Keeler took a puff and made a sour face as she analyzed Susan Peterson. “You know, if I knew for sure she was going to die in the end, I’d probably do this job for free, you know it?”
“Really?”
Keeler scoffed, “Well, yeah, why not? We get plenty of money to do what we love. I started out doing it for free anyway.”
“You started out as a mercenary for free?” Calderon asked, skeptically.
She laughed to herself. “No, not that. Mercenary work is just the wrapper around the real job. Mercenary is just the nice word we use instead of killer for hire.”
Calderon narrowed his eyes. What she was saying was not accurate. Mercenaries did more than their fair share of killing, and sometimes, it got ugly like this job, but killing was hardly the only part of the job. Often, it was peacekeeping, guarding, threatening violence to prevent violence. There was training, espionage, listening.
Killing was the outcome, often, and many mercenaries such as Calderon himself had grown numb and emotionless to the killing, but Keeler…she seemed to be suggesting she was in it for the killing above all else. As if the money was even secondary to her enjoyment of that death. No life mattered to her more than her love of ending life. Yet, Keeler had accused Mrs. Peterson of thinking only of herself. Irony.
“You’re saying you kill for free outside of the job?” Calderon asked, genuinely curious, but chilled inside.
She looked up at him with her brown eyes. She no longer looked tough and badass, but like an innocent young woman or even girl.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
“That’s a big part of our job,” Calderon said.
“Yeah, it is. But this one…I don’t know. I feel like you’d understand.” She looked up at his face, studying it. Her speech slowed, and she moved to a more thoughtful tone. “I think maybe you retiring has to do with you losing something. I think maybe I can help you get it back. I think maybe I can trust you.”
He exhaled and tried to hide how much this woman disturbed him. She read him right, mostly, but maybe she didn’t quite understand the difference of why. He said, “Trust me. I’m listening.”
She sighed an exhale of smoke as if to prepare herself for this speech. “It started, for me, with the kill. I started doing it as soon as I could lift a gun. Junkyard near my dad’s place? Rats everywhere. I started going down there all the time to shoot them with my old twenty-two, and I’d just leave them there, or I’d take the bodies and put them into lots of cool shapes and hope I freaked somebody out. Even spelled out a few threats here and there in rat bodies, you know, just for fun. That’s how I ended up being a sharpshooter, practicing on rats, you know?”
“That’s a good start,” Calderon agreed, and he meant it. The ability to hit small, moving targets was a coveted skill in this line of work.
“Then, later on, I used to take pets from the neighbors, bring them there, and hunt them. Dogs. Cats. Even a rabbit once. Guinea pigs are no fun, though. They’re just fatter, slower rats.”
Calderon was starting to get to a new level of discomfort. Up until now, he had been satisfied talking to Keeler because she kept his mind off of Justin. But now…if the difference was why, her ‘why’ was disturbing.
“You killed a lot of pets that way?”
“Sometimes. But the problem there was I ended up having to hide the pets, and I usually hate cleanup. See, if they never find the pets, then they just ran away, right? If they find a big pile of dead pets, then somebody out there is killing them, so they find me. Not worth it. You know the expression, ‘truth or consequences’? Well, the truth is, I hate consequences, so I ended up hunting other shit after a while.”
“Like what?” Calderon said, eyes narrowed.
“Deer. With my dad, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Squirrels.”
“Right.”
“Armadillos.”
“Interesting.”
“Even a razorback or two.”
“Wow,” Calderon said, impressed but without mirth.
“And all of them were all the same to me, you know?” She finished her cigarette, stomped it, and then put both arms up, flexing them in an intentionally comical, victorious way as she sang out “The thrill of the kill!”
“The thrill of the kill indeed,” Calderon chuckled, hiding his disgust as he listened to her.
“That’s what I think people miss. ‘I am become death.’ It’s all about the thrill of the kill. Any kill. It’s all the same,” she said.
“No matter what it is?”
“No matter what you kill. And then…well…” she whispered that next part, “I graduated.”
“From high school?”
She laughed and slugged him in the arm. “No, fool! Well, I mean, yes, I did, but that’s not what I meant. I meant I graduated to the next level of hunting. I sta
rted killing people.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Bums. Homeless guys. Hobos. Drifters. The people nobody ever would miss. Some of them were strong, so I ended up using them for knife practice. I got real good too,” she said, with excitement.
“Bums.”
“Yeah, bums. And I’m a cutie, too, so getting them to follow me was never hard. A lot of the time, they even thought it was their idea.” Keeler affected a deep voice and thicker southern accent to get her point across. “Look at the cute tomboy girl over there. I gotta get me some of that.”
“And you killed them,” Calderon said.
“It wasn’t always easy, but I didn’t want it easy. I wanted the challenge. That was my thrill. I learned to fight, use knives, different guns. So, by the time I joined the army, I was real good. They gave me the training I needed, sent me off to Afghanistan, and I had myself a time.”
“Lots of killing, huh?” Calderon asked.
“Some. Rules of engagement, though.” She nodded, then took another cigarette he offered her. As he lit it for her, she continued. “Can’t kill willy-nilly. I did a few and just hid them. Did my time, discharged, went soldier of fortune. Natural outcome, I guess.”
“I guess,” Calderon said, still unnerved. “I’ll bet you’ve got some stories.”
“Oh, not as good as yours, I’ll bet, old man,” Keeler laughed, playfully, still looking Calderon up and down.
Calderon faked a laugh and lit his own cigarette. “I do get around,” he admitted.
“That!” Keeler said. “Exactly that. That’s my very favorite thing about doing these jobs?”
“Getting around?”
“Yeah, sort of,” she said.
“More than the killing?”
“Well, it all goes back to that, right? We travel, we keep training, we learn the right tools for the right jobs.” She looked at Calderon and he nodded, so she continued. “See, my favorite way to test my equipment is in public. On the streets, you know?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
She pouted for a second and then said, “Okay, so when you get a new weapon, you probably like to go out to a shooting range and test it out, right?”
“Right. Target shooting. Adjust your sights, get used to the trigger.”
“See, I do that, but I prefer to do it on the streets. Like, if I get a new sniper rifle, I like to go to a public park or something.” Her eyes got wider, more excited, more insane the more she described it. “Then, I climb way up in a tree and I take aim. It’s much more like what we do for a living.” She smiled, puffed, and went on with her story. “Moving targets, right? And completely unexpected. Nobody expects that!”
Cargo: an edge of your seat thriller Page 15