by John Etzil
Ostrich Boy’s friends laughed at him and smacked the table with childlike glee at her rejection. Sure enough, he took Mary Sue’s reluctance to share in his Kodak moment personally, and got all pissed off. He stood up from his chair and shouted towards her, loud enough for everyone to hear. “What, I’m not good enough for ya?”
She kept walking, the scowl of disgust on her face so obvious that even drunken Bobby noticed it and stopped his conversation with Debbie to look at her. At least something good came out of Ostrich Boy’s juvenile tantrum. I made a mental note to thank him.
Fatty tugged at Ostrich Boy’s belt, waving him to sit back down. “Jeez, Sammy, take it easy, we’re only messin’ with you. Besides, she’s just a kid, young enough to be your daughter.”
His words fell on deaf ears. I’d read enough reports and eavesdropped on enough witness protection candidates to know that guys like Sammy lost their temper fast, and took abnormally long to regain their composure. Small penis insecurity, no doubt.
He smacked Fatty’s hand away. “Don’t ever fuckin’ touch me. She needs to learn some respect.”
Wow, tough guy. I yawned.
He shot daggers in Mary Sue’s direction one more time before sitting down. He took out a cigarette, flipped open a gold lighter, and inhaled deep. He exhaled so hard that the smoke traveled across two tables before being sucked up by the smoke eater that hummed from the ceiling. You didn’t need to be Dr. Phil to see that this guy had deep anger issues, which made sense since he was a suspect in twenty-eight missing people cases. Missing, as in dead. Just that their bodies haven’t been found.
That’s a few more bodies that I could take credit for, but at least I only killed bad guys.
I was off duty and planned on coming out to relax and spend some time with Debbie while she worked the bar, but once I was alerted to Ostrich Boy’s proximity, everything changed. I did a quick mental inventory of my hardware to make sure that I didn’t forget anything.
Glock 17? Check, in my right hip holster under my untucked flannel shirt.
Spare magazines? Check, one in each cargo pocket of my Vertx tactical pants. A total of fifty-one nine-millimeter rounds. Wait a second. Fifty-one divided by three is seventeen. I love math. I could shoot each one of them exactly seventeen times. With my Glock 17. Hmm. Coincidence? I didn’t believe in them.
Enough. Back to work on my mental checklist.
Osprey silencer? Check, left cargo pocket.
Cable tie handcuffs? Check, coiled up in my back pocket.
Swiss Army knife? Check, right cargo pocket.
Blackjack? Check, right next to my Swiss Army knife.
It might seem like I was sporting a lot of hardware, but when you’re six foot six, you can get away with carrying an arsenal and folks won’t notice. Even if they did, they wouldn’t dare ask.
Attitude? Oh, um, not so good. I needed to work on that. The mental health experts say that the first step in solving a problem is admitting that you had one.
I had one.
I shook away the vision of shooting all three of them in the parking lot and stuffing their bodies in their trunk in a compromising sexual position before taking a photo, posting it on their Facebook pages, and driving their car into the woods and setting it on fire.
I grimaced and chastised myself for thinking such crazy shit. Jeez, what the hell was freakin’ wrong with me? I could start a forest fire, for God’s sake.
I blamed my temporary lapse of judgment on the warm beer in my hand, looked down at it, and drained it before it could do any more damage.
The three of them finished their colored drinks, threw some cash on the table for Mary Sue’s tip, and headed over to the bar to pay their bill.
Ostrich Boy tried to make eye contact with Mary Sue, but she ignored him. Good girl. Fatty stayed behind, dug into his pocket, pulled out another bill and dropped it on the table before falling in behind them. He must have felt guilty for his friend’s behavior and wanted to make it up to Mary Sue.
Fatty and Skinny split the bill. Once they were done paying they just stood there, hands in pockets, while Ostrich Boy, hands moving a mile a minute, flirted with my Debbie. In the mirror behind the bar, I couldn’t help but notice his bleached thousand-watt smile as he tried to woo her. I grinned at the thought of his expensive pearly whites being shattered by the heel of my boot as he lay unconscious in the parking lot.
My fantasy was interrupted when it dawned on me that during his entire conversation with Debbie, his two friends had stood with their backs to the bar, overlooking the crowd. They stood out like the Secret Service agents you see at political gatherings, except they didn’t have those coily earpieces and weren’t dressed as nice. I realized that they were as much his bodyguards as they were his friends, which made sense since he was a bigshot in the underworld. I made a mental note that if it came down to it, I would drop the wingmen first.
After a few more minutes of bantering with my woman, Ostrich Boy turned and signaled the two hammerheads that he was finished and it was time to leave. They sauntered over toward the main entrance, bought a pack of smokes from the old-style pull-knob cigarette machine, and left.
I had no idea why they were in our little out-of-the-way town. My experience had taught me that men like them never just stopped in out of the blue. They were here to meet somebody or conduct some type of illegal business. Maybe it was a drug deal, or maybe they were here to kill somebody who’d wronged them, but I was just happy to see them leave. Good riddance, hopefully forever. They were somebody else’s problem now.
Except that I couldn’t let it go. I was torn between letting them leave and forgetting about them, or being more proactive. I hadn’t planned on doing my third job tonight, but I couldn’t help but think that I shouldn’t be looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I was still unsure how I was going to handle this, so for future reference, just in case, I decided to see what kind of car they were driving and jot down their license plate number. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to follow them and see where they were headed either…
“Back in a second, boys,” I told my pool cue whiffers. “Hold my place in line.” I glanced at the table and saw that there were still a full set of balls spread across it. Looked like their ratio of seven missed shots to one made had grown a little worse. Must be the beer. I figured I had an hour or two before my turn came up.
I made my way towards the back door, keeping a wary eye out for a sneak attack from Frances, and slipped out unmolested. The clear cold air was a nice change from the stuffy smoke-filled bar, and it felt refreshing to take a deep breath and not cough out someone else’s exhaled smoke.
Since I’d arrived a few hours ago, the temps had dropped and a coating of snow had covered the ground. Not an uncommon occurrence for this time of year in upstate New York. By now it had stopped snowing, and I could see the moon and a few stars through the parting clouds. The effect of the full moon on the fresh snow had an eerie fake-looking brightness to it. But fake-looking or not, it was bright outside, and I had to be careful not to be spotted by my prey.
I stayed in the moon’s shadow on the backside of the Red Barn to keep out of sight, and as I made my way towards the front corner of the building, I could hear the three of them laughing and cursing. They reminded me of my drunken frat brothers in my freshmen year at Notre Dame, except they were twenty five plus years older, less mature, and dumbed down by a couple of hundred IQ points.
They sounded far enough away that I wasn’t concerned they’d see me when I poked my head around the corner and peered into the parking lot. Before I spotted them, I heard Ostrich Boy talking about Mary Sue. Other than the cursing, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his tone was bad.
His maniacal laugh was even worse.
4
I located my quarry and watched them stumble and slide over to a black Cadillac SUV. On the third try, Ostrich Boy found the correct pocket that held his key fob and chirped his door unlock
ed. He climbed in, started the engine, and backed out of his spot without unlocking the other doors. He didn’t look both ways, either. What a douchebag. He probably even texted while driving.
I memorized his New York plates, which read “KING REX.” King Rex? Rex was the Latin word for King, so in effect his license plate read “KING KING.” Idiot.
He slammed the oversized SUV into drive and accelerated across the parking lot. His two partners in crime scampered through the snow to keep up with him, banging on the windows and smacking the roof while they cursed at him. “Open the door, you fuck.”
I had a good view of him behind the wheel and saw him laughing hysterically like an overtired kid who drank too much caffeinated soda. He’d pull away, stop, wait for the two buffoons to come sliding through the snow and catch up to him, and pull away again once they got their meaty hands on the door handles.
The fatter of the two took a hard spill on his ass, his fat jiggling like a cartoon character. An “Ooh, shit” wheezed from his mouth when he landed, and he sat there breathing heavy in the snow for a second, dazed from the sudden stop. In his struggle to catch his breath, he sounded like he’d just sprinted a mile. In reality it couldn’t have been more than fifty feet, but I had to cut him some slack because he probably hadn’t run that far since he was in grammar school. If ever.
I had to work hard not to laugh out loud at the comic stupidity I was witnessing, and despite them bringing up highlight reels of the Three Stooges in my head, I knew these three dumb bastards were armed and dangerous. Especially Ostrich Boy.
According to HFS, a little known government spy agency, he was a stone cold killer who took special delight in torturing his victims until they pleaded with him to kill them. Then he’d torture them some more.
After another minute or so of proving his superiority, Ostrich Boy seemed to have grown bored of playing his high school game and he let the two cold and out of shape middle aged adolescents into the big Cadillac. I could hear him laughing when they opened their doors.
I walked over to my vehicle, started her up, and left my headlights off. The snow was light enough on my windshield that my wipers cleared it away in no time.
The big SUV made a quick left turn onto Route 10, and I followed them from a safe distance. They traveled less than a half mile before making a right onto Sawyer Hill Road. After a couple of hundred feet, they made a left turn into the parking lot of the Lakeview House, a small B&B that overlooked Summit Lake. Hopefully this was their last stop of the night. I drove past them and pulled over to the side of the gravel road.
During the day, Sawyer Hill Road didn’t have much traffic on it. This time of night it was downright desolate. I got out and walked over to the Lakeview House, arriving just in time to see the three stooges stumble up the front steps.
Once they were inside, I watched them through a window on the front porch. They bypassed the small bar that greeted you as soon as you entered and headed up a flight of stairs to the second floor, which housed the guest rooms of the old house. They moved out of sight, and a couple of lights came on within seconds of each other. The three clowns had entered their rooms. Hopefully for the night.
I went back to my truck and sat for a while, watching in my side-view mirror to make sure that nobody left the Lakeview House. The last thing I wanted to see was any of them returning to the Red Barn.
While keeping watch I toyed with the idea of screwing my silencer on and sneaking in and killing them in their sleep, but right away decided against it. I was better then that. I’d come up with a more suitable plan, one that didn’t involve an innocent maid finding three murder victims, something that would scar her for life.
Thirty minutes went by with no sign of them and I figured that they’d had enough booze for the night and would spend the remainder of it sleeping it off, so I decided to leave them be. I started my vehicle and hung a U-turn. In two minutes I was back at the Red Barn.
The place had emptied out and I grabbed one of the many open stools at the bar. Good to be home.
“Where’d you go?” Debbie asked, taking a break from hand-washing the pile of glasses that had accumulated while she was busy fielding compliments and popping beers. She poured a Molson Triple XXX into a frosted mug and set it in front of me. Yum.
“I had to check on something.”
“Sure,” she teased. “I turn my back for a second, and the next thing I know you and Frances disappear for an hour. Care to explain yourself?”
“No way. I’d never admit to that.” I raised my mug and made a toast. “Here’s to hot sex with a nonagenarian.” I took a swig of beer, and another. Icy-cold beer was God’s gift to man. Ranked right up there with warm pizza and hot women.
Debbie scoffed at me. “Stop trying to impress me with big words.”
“Nonagenarian means someone between the ages of ninety and ninety-nine.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “I know what it means. You pronounced it wrong.”
“Oh.”
I looked at my watch and it was already after midnight. “Wow, getting late. I’m going to head back to the Hill in a few minutes and let London out.” The Hill was slang for Eminence, a small hamlet with a winter population of eight, if you counted household pets. It was surrounded by about a million acres of state-owned forest land and if you ever wanted to live the quiet life or disappear, Eminence was the place for you.
London was my German shepherd I’d inherited from my wife after she’d passed away. After she’d been murdered.
London was almost thirteen years old, and even in his advanced age he was smarter than most of the Red Barn customers put together. Not counting me. There’s no way he’d even know the definition of nonagenarian, never mind pronounce it correctly.
I took out a ten from my wallet and laid it down on the bar.
“Don’t you insult me.” Debbie grabbed the bill and stuffed it in my shirt pocket. “I’ll be over in about an hour. Throw a few logs in the fireplace, I have a feeling that after a hot shower, I’ll be wide awake for a while.” She winked at me and licked her lips in a gesture so subtle that you wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it. I looked for it. All the time. When she licked her lips like that, holy cow, was I in for a good time.
She grabbed a wet dishtowel and started the cleaning ritual in preparation for closing. This was my favorite time of night. I sat there, chin on hand, unashamed and with building excitement. I watched her from the side as she leaned forward and wiped down the bar. Her large breasts tested the strength of her bra and stretched her T-shirt to the max with the perfect amount of firm sway. God I loved her.
I finished my beer, walked out to the parking lot, and hopped in my truck. All of the customers had left and the lot was empty except for a few vehicles belonging to the employees. I started my truck and grinned to myself. I’d be at my log cabin on my two hundred and ninety-two secluded acres in about twenty minutes. Let London romp around outside in the snow for a bit, and start a nice fire.
I pulled out onto Route 10 and made a right. I don’t know why, maybe cop paranoia, maybe a little prodding from a guardian angel, but when I passed Charlotte Valley Road, I looked to my right and I saw the back of a Cadillac SUV parked on the side of the road. Its lights were out, but I could see the moonlit engine exhaust rising in the cold air.
Ostrich Boy.
5
Damn. My heart pounded in my throat, which all of a sudden had a case of the dries. I didn’t want to hit the brakes and draw attention to myself, so I kept going. Ostrich Boy had no legitimate reason to be here. He should have been back at his guest room in the B&B, passed out from all the booze, dreaming of Debbie, or Frances, if that was his thing.
I turned left onto Wharton Hollow Road, then a sharp left onto Creamer Road, which brought me back to Route 10. I made a right and headed back to the Red Barn.
St. Anna’s Church was a couple of hundred feet before the Red Barn on the same side of the street. I pulled into their empty
parking lot, made my way into a corner spot far away from their lone streetlamp, and killed the engine. I got out, soft closed the door, and walked along the dark sidewalk towards Charlotte Valley Road.
Maybe the SUV didn’t belong to Ostrich Boy, and was just a coincidence? But I didn’t believe in them, so I crouched low and stayed in the shadows as I approached. I needed to get close enough to read the license plate without being detected. If it was a match, I needed to see how many people were inside the big SUV. After that I could formulate a plan.
The temperature had dropped and it felt like it was well below freezing. With each exhale I could see my thick breath illuminated in the moonlight. I only had a flannel shirt on, but my adrenaline kept me warm and my Glock always gave me a warm fuzzy, so I didn’t feel the cold. Long gone was that pleasurable feeling that came with fantasies of Debbie and me cuddling in front of my fire place.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tucked the right side of it behind my back and into my belt to give me unrestricted access to my Glock. I loved those guns. They had no safety, so with a little practice you could outdraw anyone. We didn’t exactly live in Wild West times, but it was nice to know that when the shit hit the fan, you’d be fast on the draw and could fire without having to worry about thumbing off a safety.
When I reached the intersection of Route 10 and Charlotte Valley Road, I crouched behind a shrub on the lawn of the two-story clapboard house that sat on the corner. From there I could see the SUV up the street, and the Red Barn across from it. The SUV was no longer idling, and that concerned me. A lot.