by John Etzil
“Why? What have I ever done to you?” He sounded contrite now, but he couldn’t fool me. I’d been following him through HFS for more than two years. I knew more about Sam and his family than Sam did. Not just the criminal enterprises he ran, but his personal life too.
HFS had every eavesdropping hardware imaginable in his house. We called it “Sammy’s Smarthouse,” SS for short. Every single room of his six-thousand-plus-square-foot house had multiple smart home devices, each one hacked and turned into our personal wiretap and pinhole video camera. I had a front-row seat to one of the most violent criminal enterprises ever to hit the East Coast. Sam had his greedy little fingers in anything that made him money, from heroin to small arms, to pimping little kids—he sold it all. He ran his empire like a little Napoleon, and at last count he had twenty eight dead bodies to his credit. And most painful of all, one dog.
To top it all off, he was a selfish lover.
Karma was a bitch, and it was time for Sam to get his dose. I looked over at him and smiled.
“I’m fucking Sally tonight,” I said.
“What? Yeah, you wish.”
“No, seriously. You know when she goes to yoga on Sunday evenings? Where you have your simpletons follow her to make sure that she’s being a ‘good girl’?”
“They follow her to make sure she’s safe, you moron. Hey…wait a minute…how’d you know about that?”
I laughed. “Yeah, sure they do. Well, she walks in the front door and runs right out the back door and into my van. She’s naked in under thirty seconds. We drive around to the front, park next to your dumbass hammerheads in their Chevy SUV, and while you think your wife’s in yoga, stretching and sweating, she’s riding me like a coked-up whore.”
He smirked a dismissal. “What’s wrong with you? You’re sick. You think I believe that horseshit?”
“And that mole under her left breast that you always made fun of? Well, I happen to love it.”
I kept looking straight out the windshield, and I could see him staring at me through my peripheral vision. I paused for a minute before continuing to give his walnut-sized brain time to think. Then I delivered the dagger;
“You know that thing that she does with her tongue under your balls, where she strokes your cock and buries her face in your nuts while she plays with herself until she comes? Well, she does that with me too. Except, she really comes, none of this pretend stuff like she does with you.” I stuck out my chest like a proud father after his kid hit a walk-off home run in the T-ball World Series.
“Ain’t that freakin’ awesome?” I looked over at him and raised an open hand. “High five, bro!” Then I looked down at the handcuffs. “Oh—that’s right, you can’t.”
I delivered the second dagger;
“Anyway, two weeks ago, she rode me with my cock up her ass.” I glanced down at my crotch with a raised eyebrow, then smirked at him. “No easy feat, if you get my drift.”
He looked straight ahead and shook his head side to side. “No way.”
“Swear to God, no shit. Don’t believe me? Come on, you remember that night. She came home and you asked her why she was limping? She told you she stretched too hard during class and must have pulled a muscle. You were like, “No more of that yogi bullshit for you.” Remember that? I laughed for like ten minutes when she told me that. Yogi. Sheesh.”
I let that sink on for awhile, then continued;
“Anyway, I know you don’t go that way with her, but she loved it, man. You should have seen her face, you would have been so proud.” I paused again for theatrical effect. Minutes went by before he broke our silence with a series of head shakes.
“No. No. No. You lie.” His voice was low and lacked feeling, like he was in a drug-induced daze. “Not my Sally. She would never do that to me.”
“Yeah, your Sally. Who do you think hired me?”
“No. No! You lie. Shut up, you bastard!” He pulled against his chains and kicked out with his feet. “Fuck you, you lying bastard.” He stared at me, eyes glaring daggers, and spat on my face.
I whacked him with my blackjack. Damn my impulse control issues. Just when I thought I had it under control, I went and did something risky.
Like most things in life, we tended to overanalyze and think too much about even the simplest of details. I nailed him in the same exact spot on his forehead. So much for worrying about fatigue throwing off my aim.
A few minutes later he came around, and I continued my made-up mental assault. “You know that four million dollars in cash in your safe deposit box at Wells Fargo on Livermore Street? Her and I are splitting it. Fifty-fifty, pal.”
Sammy looked straight ahead and his body started to quiver. My words were taking its toll on the tough guy mobster. The shit I was spewing was all gathered from HFS surveillance, so that part of it was true. With that part being accurate, it only made sense that he’d believe everything that I said. After all, how would I know all of those things unless Sally had told me?
He slouched in his seat and cried like a little girl who’d witnessed her new kitten flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. I continued.
“Oh, and by the way, your daughter’s next, Sammy. Did I mention that I’m one of Barbara’s mentors at Penn State? Yeah, baby, nothing like a little freshman meat to make an old guy feel young again.” Now I really stuck my chest out. “I can’t wait to hit that. Yummy! I’m just glad she looks like her mom, and not you.” I laughed.
“Why?” he asked. His voice so low that I had trouble hearing him.
I leaned towards him and cupped my ear. “Eh? Come again?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why? Shit, Sam, I’ve been spying on your fat ass for over two years now. I’ve seen all the shit that you’ve done, the drugs that you sold, the young girls you pimped, the guys you killed. I’ve seen it all. But I’m HFS, and HFS doesn’t care about anything but terrorism. And since you’re not a terrorist, they just turn all that shit that I accumulated on you over to the FBI, and forget about you. But since HFS’s domestic spying is illegal, the FBI’s hands where tied.
But I couldn’t forget about you, and my hands aren’t tied. Once your cell phone signal got within one hundred miles of me, the fun started. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. You visiting my little out-of-the-way town. I usually have to hunt down the shitheads that I kill. But not you. You fell right into my lap. Thanks for making it easy for me.”
“That’s it? No. Wait, please, I’m really not like that. You have to understand, I can’t run a business without being tough as nails.” He sniffled, then stifled a cough as he explained what he meant. “We live in a brutal world. If those thugs, those street criminals, if they see that you’re soft, they’ll be all over you.” He wiped his runny nose on his shoulder. “A man’s got to earn respect in this business, and sometimes you have to earn that respect the tough way.” He looked at me to see if he’d scored any points.
I didn’t acknowledge him, and he must have taken my silence as a sign that he was winning me over, so he went on.
“You know, you got some big balls, fella. I could use a guy like you in my operation. We could work things out between us, no hard feelings, and you’d be in for some big paydays. I don’t know what those KFC dicks pay you, but I can triple it, no problem.” He smiled again, this time a little wider, trying hard to win me over.
“You killed my dog.”
“What? Oh, that. You can’t blame me for that. I mean, come on, what a fuckin’ beast that dog was,” he laughed. “My life flashed before my eyes. I thought I was gonna crap in my pants. If you’re half as brave as him, you’ll fit in with my crew just fine. Besides, he was just a dog. You know they eat dogs in China, right?”
What an ass. I couldn’t show any emotion and give him the satisfaction of getting to me.
I cleared my throat and composed myself.
“It’s too bad. Sally was really attached to London. She’s gonna be very upset when I tell her that you killed hi
m.”
His mouth opened and I could see him staring at me through the corner of my eye. I ignored him. Shithead.
I checked my GPS for the third time to confirm that we were on the east side of Jeffrey’s Ledge.
“We. Are. Heeere!” I announced, doing my best to sound like an MMA announcer. I looked over at Big Sam and laughed. The wrinkled forehead look of confusion on his face was priceless. I wanted to snap a photo and post it on Facebook so bad, but for once, I was successful in controlling my impulses.
“Here? What the hell you talking about, here? We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.” He turned in his seat and looked all around us. “I can’t even see a light anywhere.”
I reached over, undid his seat belt, and unlocked his door.
“What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?” The panic in his crackling voice rose with each word and reached an octave that I’d never heard from a post-pubescent male. So much for the tough guy mobster lore.
“I’ll tell Sally you said hi.” I turned the yoke hard to the right, and the little Cessna went into a steep bank. I placed my hand on his hip and helped “Big Sam” slide out the door, his greasy hair an unexpected aid to his exit. Good riddance.
Even over the roar of the three-hundred horsepower engine, I could hear him screaming on his way down to the Atlantic Ocean.
I leveled off the small plane, leaned over, and pulled his door shut. I shivered and goose bumps rose on my neck. Holy crap, it was freaking cold at this altitude. I looked up at my outside air temperature gauge that hung on the top of my windshield next to my compass and saw that it was in the low teens.
Did I mention that I love math? I mentally calculated the wind-chill factor for a falling body, which is 35.74 + 0.6215T − 35.75V ^ 0.16 + 0.4275TaV × 0.16.
Wow. Minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Holy shit, that’s cold!
No wonder he was screaming.
To give the radar watchers at the air traffic control room an appearance of a normal flight, I continued flying south along Victor 167, a highway in the sky that runs from Maine to Cape Code, for another fifteen miles before punching in the GPS coordinates to my home airport and turning westbound.
I climbed up to four thousand five hundred feet, which was an appropriate altitude for west bound flight, and engaged the autopilot. I reached behind me and grabbed my thermos of coffee that Debbie had made me. She always made the best coffee, and even after a couple of hours my Thermos brand travel mug kept my Colombian dark roast toasty hot. That coffee was a godsend.
It was late, I’d been up for a long time, and I still had a ways to go. With winds aloft, I had at least another hour of flying before I reached my private airstrip in Eminence. This time Debbie would be waiting up for me.
On the ride home, I had plenty of time to think about what had transpired over the last few days and how I’d handled the situation. True, I had done some bad things, but nobody was perfect. Under the circumstances, my behavior could be excused. Right?
Perhaps, but that didn’t stop the feeling of remorse that swept through me.
What kind of man had I become? Telling lies about another man’s wife? Jeez, I should have never done that. Words hurt. I vowed never to do that again. I prayed for forgiveness and hoped that karma wouldn’t come back and haunt me for saying those terrible things about Sally.
I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes to touchdown in Eminence. By now, “Big Sam” would have splashed down and sunk to the bottom, and he’d be rolling down the sloped sea floor from Jeffrey’s Ledge to his final resting place in Wilkinson Basin. When he reached bottom, he’d be under nine hundred feet of ocean, his galvanized chains securing him to the seabed to feed the critters forever.
35
Debbie and I sat at our cozy table for two by the fireplace in the Lakeview House lounge. Soft rock music played in the background, and we ogled each other over joined hands like lovesick teenagers. I raised up my frosty beer mug, clinked it softly against her wineglass, and smiled harder than I had in a long time.
We had been sharing a room here since yesterday. We were checking out tomorrow, and I was sure I’d remember this stay for the rest of my life. Eating, drinking, and great sex. She slid one hand under the table and walked it up my thigh, then looked at me with a sly grin.
“Ya know, you really know how to spoil a girl.”
I grinned, the ear-to-ear kind. I could tell she was tipsy because she never complimented me like that unless she’d had a few drinks. No matter how many times a woman tells her man he’s a great lover, it never gets old. I stuck my chest out, the pride oozing from my face.
We did lots of texting too. Me on Sam’s phone, and she on the two stooges’ phones. We’d been going back and forth since I’d dropped Sam off, replicating the stupid shit these three Neanderthals sent to each other so that their associates would think they were still alive. We even had a contest going to see who could come up with the dumbest lines. We were about tied.
In between the texts to each other, I’d managed to send out a few to one of Sam’s associates, Tough Tommy.
Sam: How you doing?
Tommy: Can’t complain. Hows your trip
Sam: Barely surviving with these two numbskulls
Tommy: Better you then me
Sam: Might have that way out for us
Tommy: Way out? Whatcha talking about
Sam: You know, endgame that we spoke about
Tommy: What? Who is this?
Sam: Whatcha talking about who is this. I had that whatchamacallit that I told you about and it went well. I could get you out too if you still want
No response. I waited a few minutes, then texted Tommy again.
Sam: You okay?
Still no answer. Two minutes later, Fatty’s phone vibrated. Debbie picked it up, read the text, and started to type. I slid my chair over to get closer to her and look over her shoulder to see her Shakespearean replies.
Tommy: You with Sam?
Bruno: Yeah, eating dinner. Good fuckin food here. What’s up? You okay?
Tommy: Yeah, I’m fine. Sam’s acting sorta funny
Bruno: Whatcha talking about?
Tommy: He’s saying things that don’t make any cents
Bruno: He’s just trying to save your ass you numbskull
Tommy: What? Call me!
She powered off the phone. “Let him think about that for a while.”
She topped off her sentence with her Hollywood smile. Skinny Jerry’s phone vibrated. She looked down and read it. “Hmm, it’s from a ‘Tommy.’” She faked a surprised look on her face. “You want this?” She held the phone out to me.
“No, thanks, babe, you’re doing a great job.”
Tommy: Where you at?
Jerry: Dinner. You okay?
Tommy: Of course I’m okay. Wise everybody asking if I’m okay?
She placed the phone down on the table and took a sip of wine. She gestured towards the phone. “Let him think for a minute.”
I nodded my appreciation. “Damn. You are good.”
Tommy: You their?
Jerry: Sam didn’t tell you?
Tommy: Tell me what?
Jerry: He can get us all out. Better call him
Two seconds after she hit send, Sam’s phone rang. I let it go to voice mail. Tommy tried calling a few more times, and then I shut the phone off for some peace and quiet.
We finished dinner and took our drinks back to our room. Debbie grabbed her iPod and turned on some Barry White. She showered while I double-checked that the three stooges’ phones were off and stuffed them in my lead-shielded bag. I threw our phones in the bag too. I covered the flat-screen TV with a towel before getting naked and slipping into bed. Wouldn’t want to give any of those HFS workers an inferiority complex.
Debbie came out of the bathroom. Naked.
36
The two of them looked like Hollywood’s version of government stupids. Navy suits, dark red ties, sunglasses, white skin, midfo
rties or maybe older. I made them as soon as they pulled up my driveway in their navy-blue Ford Taurus. Christ. What did these FBI hammerheads want?
I watched them through the feed of the security camera on my laptop. They exited the Ford, looked around, and made their way up my front steps.
I couldn’t resist, and decided to play a little joke on them. I pulled out my Glock.
Before they had a chance to knock on my front door I swung it opened and pressed my Glock against the forehead of the first one.
“You’re trespassing.”
I swear I could see his pupils dilate through his Ray Bans. I smelled shit too, but the odor faded fast so they must have just farted. Guess my Dirty Harry imitation wasn’t good enough. I made a mental note to brush up on that before I used it again.
They both raised their hands in surrender and the lead guy let his ID fall open. “Whoa. Heh. Uhh… Leo Kennedy, FBI. You can put the gun down. We’re looking for Sheriff Lamburt.” His voice cracked like an excited teenager who just found his father’s stash of Penthouse magazines.
I studied his ID, my eyes going from it, to his face, half a dozen times. I enjoyed seeing the sweat gather on his upper lip. I nodded acceptance and smiled. “Sorry, fellas, we’ve been having some Amish gang trouble here lately and I wasn’t expecting visitors. Can’t be too careful, you know.”
They turned and looked at each other, seeming to wonder if I was serious or not. I holstered my Glock and stuck out my hand with my best used car salesman smile. “Sheriff Lamburt, good to meet you fellas.”
Their handshakes were limp and moist. Yuck. Sometimes I hated my job.
“Do you always answer your door pointing your gun at people?” Kennedy asked. His tone was harsh, a real tough talker now that he knew I wasn’t going to blow his head off.
“No.”
I stepped to the side of the doorway to let them pass. “Come on in and warm up. It’s cold out there.”