Levon Cade Omnibus

by Chuck Dixon

  “Hope it’s okay I stopped by like this,” Levon said stepping onto the gravel.

  “Knew you were comin’. Heard you pulling off the county road.” The man’s scowl deepened.

  “Couldn’t be the motion alarm a mile back helped, you lying bastard.”

  Merry stood by the truck, looking between the men uncomprehending.

  The man with the shotgun’s scowl vanished into a broad smile of welcome.

  "About time you come to visit me, Cade. Who'd you bring with you?"

  “My little girl. Merry.”

  “Well, I’m anxious to meet the little princess your daddy talks about all the time.”

  “My daddy talks to you about me?” Merry skipped around the truck to take the man’s offered hand. He held it out waiting for her to take it.

  "All the time, sweetie-pie." The man pulled her close in a tight hug. He smelled like fresh cut wood and cinnamon.

  “Honey, I want you to meet Gunny Leffertz,” Levon said.

  Gunny Leffertz said:

  “The older I get, the more I know that the rarest thing in the world is having someone who honestly, truly, and purely gives a shit about you.”

  38

  Dinner was pasta and venison sausage in a marinara followed by freshly baked apple pie. Coffee for the grown-ups and creamy tea for Merry.

  The cabin was like something out of a fairy tale to Merry. The great room had high ceilings with open beams. The fireplace of river stone was big enough for her to walk into without stooping. A big Irish wolfhound slept on a rough weave carpet before the hearth. The kitchen came off the great room as did the bedrooms and two bathrooms. She helped Joyce, Gunny’s wife, clear the table.

  Joyce was as nice to her as Gunny was. She talked to Merry as they washed and dried the dishes together. She told Merry that she met Gunny in Hawaii a long time ago when they were both in the Marines. When Gunny lost his eyesight and retired, she retired too and they got married and they built this cabin in the Mississippi woods.

  “Gunny can’t see?” Merry said.

  “Blind as an old bat,” Joyce said.

  “But he doesn’t use a cane or bump into things.”

  “That’s because we’ve lived here long enough that he knows where everything is. He even fools me sometimes. But you take him down to Tupelo and he’ll walk right in front of a bus.”

  Joyce laughed. Merry joined her.

  “Was he hurt being a soldier?” Merry said becoming grave all of a sudden.

  “Marine, honey. Never call a Marine a soldier.”

  “No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

  “Well old Gunny got a piece of steel in his head from a roadside bomb back in— Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  Merry nodded with enthusiasm.

  “Back in Desert Storm. A piece of metal no bigger than a pin. And it was in a place where doctors couldn’t get to it. Over the years, and because Gunny wouldn’t take it easy like they told him to, the piece of metal moved to press on some nerves and he lost his sight over time.”

  “My daddy never talks about when he was fighting.”

  “Some daddies don’t.”

  “He met Gunny back then? They became friends?”

  “Gunny was a teacher at a very special school your father went to. Gunny says Levon Cade was the best student he ever had.”

  “What did Gunny teach him?”

  “You’d better ask your daddy that,” Joyce said putting away the last dried plate into a cabinet.

  Merry nodded. She would ask him.

  Levon and Gunny sat out on the front porch listening to the trees creak in the wind. They were sharing some high-grade lightning made by a neighbor.

  “What kind of trouble you in, Slick?” Gunny said.

  “Why do you think I’m in trouble?”

  “This man can’t see. Don’t mean this man is blind. You bring your little one up here out of the clear blue. She’s packed to stay but you’re not. You want to keep lying to your old gunny?”

  “Wasn’t lying. I only wanted to know how you smelled trouble.”

  “You stink of it, Slick. Now tell me a story.” Gunny settled back in his chair.

  Levon gave him the long and short of it. When he stopped talking Gunny had some questions.

  “These Russians. How big is their outfit? What’s their reach?” he said.

  “They’re not mafia. The Vor gangs are smaller. Like the plazas the Mexican cartels authorize. They’re connected but not that high up.”

  “How far up the chain are you going to have to go?”

  “That’s up to them, isn’t it? I need to find their command and control and either get a promise from them or take them out,” Levon said.

  “Promises ain’t worth shit from anyone. You leave one of them alive and you’re gonna be hidin’ for a long time,” Gunny said.

  “Me and Merry are going to be our own witness protection. I don’t want that life for her but I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Your little one okay with staying here a while?”

  “I told her there were wild ponies.”

  "I mean she okay with you going away and her stayin' with Joyce and me?"

  "I'll stay till tomorrow night. Give her some time to get used to it. Hearing the two of them giggling in the kitchen, I think she's ready to adopt Joyce as a grandma anyway. Might not even miss me."

  “Bullshit,” Gunny said.

  They sipped the hard corn liquor. There was an aftertaste of apples once the fire died down.

  “I need some ordnance,” Levon said after a while.

  “We’ll have a look in the morning. You take anything you like.”

  “I can pay for it.”

  “And if you try to you’ll be pickin’ that cash out of your ass.” Gunny turned to Levon with his badass stare that still worked even if the old Marine was stone blind.

  39

  He was naked and hurting and cold.

  “Have you had time to think, Dimi?”

  The voice was tinny and flat.

  Dimi came fully awake in an ice cold drizzle.

  Tupo was standing over him, pouring a bottle of beer over him. Yvan was by him holding his hand out. In his fingers was a smartphone held up for Dimi to see. Uncle Symon's tiny face glared at him from the screen.

  “Dimi. Have you had time to think?”

  Think? It was all Dimi could to do to keep from passing out again. His ears rang. His vision spun. Every beat of his heart brought a new tide of pain to his skull.

  He’d lost his room privileges. He lay in the musty straw of the stable set. Manacles were around his ankles and secured to a long chain slung over a ceiling joist. The gear was part of the bondage stuff left behind by the recent lessees. Before leashing him like a dog, Tupo and Yvan made him take his clothes off. He refused at first, certain they were going to ass-rape him, these sick prison fucks. Tupo pressed the barrel of a gun to his head. Dimi shucked out of his clothes.

  They chained him. They gave him a beating. No malice. No questions. They took turns. Just following orders. All part of the job.

  Tupo gave Dimi a shot to the gut that loosened his bowels. A stream of bloody shit sprayed over his legs. They dropped him to the straw then and went back to their card table.

  Uncle Symon had left before the stripping and chaining and beating. Now his uncle was back. Virtually, anyway.

  “Get him up,” Uncle Symon said.

  Tupo and Yvan lifted Dimi and dropped him in a chair. Tupo handed him what was left of the beer. Dimi sipped, struggling to keep it down.

  “Have you had time to think, Dimi?” Symon said from the phone.

  “I told you, Uncle. Maybe the bikers know.”

  “We spoke to them. They do not know the man. He is a stranger to them. I believe them.”

  “I swear to Christ I don’t know either,” Dimi said. Tears started in his eyes. His throat closed with the effort not to sob.

  “Something at Skip’s. You know.
Skip’s.”

  “The place in Tampa? I know it.”

  “This man Cade killed our people at Skip’s. Robbed us. This was before he killed your father.”

  Dimi licked his lips and nodded.

  “Did you sell drugs there? Did you make trouble there with someone, Dimi?”

  “I told you and told you and told you, Uncle. I don’t sell drugs anywhere. I’m not a dealer. I’m a wholesaler. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “Hit him,” the face on the phone said.

  Tupo slammed a fist into Dimi’s face. Dimi heard a wet snap. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  “Again. Just to hurt.”

  Tupo slapped Dimi across the ear with an open hand. Dimi couldn’t believe, even after the beating the night before, how much it hurt. An explosion inside his head followed by a dagger of pain from his ear. A high whistling sound drowned out everything for a long moment.

  “Enough.” Symon sighed.

  Tupo stepped back. The assault via Skype was on pause for now.

  “You are not telling me the truth. You think that lying will keep you alive,” Symon said inches from his face.

  Dimi stared at the fuzzy image filling his field of vision.

  “You are a man because you can take a beating. Then we show you that you are no man. We treat you like a bitch.”

  Dimi watched Yvan hand the smartphone over to Tupo who held it close to Dimi's face. Yvan walked away and returned a moment later with a push broom. He snapped the broom handle over his knee, leaving a two-foot section in one fist.

  Yvan spat on the end and grinned.

  The world pixilated and then went red and then black.

  Dimi was offline.

  Gunny Leffertz said:

  “You can never have enough gun.”

  40

  “Jesus Palomino, Gunny,” Levon said in a whisper.

  They were in a block-walled building set into a hillside well behind the cabin. Accessible by a hard-packed walkway and enclosed by a cyclone cage. Gunny hit the combination on the keypad flawlessly. He swung the heavy steel door open to let them in.

  The familiar smell of gun oil and Cosmoline. Fluorescents in the ceiling winked on. The room was ten by ten and lined with racks of weapons in protective sleeves. Above the racks were shelves of ammo boxes. The back wall was stacked with cases in wood and high-impact plastic.

  “This room is some kind of prepper’s dream,” Levon said unsheathing a government model Thompson submachine gun in pristine condition.

  “Preppers. Screwballs, I call ’em. Got a pack of ’em over the hill diggin’ out their half-assed bunker on weekends instead of golfing or barbecuing.”

  “So, why do you have all this shock and awe in your backyard?”

  “Just an old jarhead who can’t sleep right without some strike capability handy,” Gunny said smiling.

  “You have anything newer than Iwo Jima?”

  “Fuck you, Slick. I got whatever the hell you need to get you out of whatever corner you’re in. What are you looking for?”

  "A long gun. Something for range and a good scope that's not fiddly. A rifle, an M4, without all the aftermarket bullshit. And two handguns. One for serious work and the other for a hideout."

  “Let’s go shopping.” Gunny grinned and ran his fingers along the racked rifles and shotguns.

  Levon picked out a cut-down M-4 with a heavy rubberized forestock. Gunny told him it had a reinforced action and worked as smooth as a duck’s ass. For the long gun he stayed with the classics: a Winchester model 70 in a Rynex stock. The handgun choices were a Sig Sauer nine and a hammerless Colt snubbie in .38 special, both in stainless.

  “These are all off the books?” Levon said.

  “Hell, not only are they not here now, they never was anywhere,” Gunny said, pulling down fresh boxes of ammo and magazines for the Mike and Sig.

  Before they were done Gunny insisted Levon take a shotgun, a cut-down Mossberg Mariner with a pistol grip.

  “Nobody was ever sorry they brought one of these along,” Gunny said.

  “You know you’re not getting any of these back, Gunny,” Levon said.

  “I’m countin’ on it. You use ’em and lose ’em. Just bring your ass back here to your little one.”

  “I think I have what I need here.”

  “How about a few bricks of C-4, Slick?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  They made four trips from the arsenal to the gravel lot in front of the cabin. Levon dropped the tailgate of the Avalanche.

  “You can’t take the truck you came here in. You drove it up from Tampa. They’ll have the plates,” Gunny said.

  “I’ll switch plates somewhere on the road.” Levon lifted two plastic ammo cases up onto the gate. Gunny put his hand on Levon’s wrist.

  "You'll take our Range Rover. She's old but she runs good. You switch plates on her and you're in stealth mode again."

  “Can’t do that.”

  “You will or you ain’t leaving here.”

  “You were never able to keep me any place I didn’t want to be, Gunny.”

  “That hurts. That’s cold, Slick.”

  Gunny’s smile broadened as his grip on Levon’s wrist tightened.

  “All right. I’ll take the Rover. Joyce won’t mind?”

  “She won’t.”

  A final squeeze and Gunny released Levon’s wrist.

  They loaded the Rover and went inside the cabin for breakfast.

  41

  “The girl. It has to be the girl,” Dimi said to the phone held before him.

  “What girl? Who is this girl?” Uncle Symon’s face filled the screen.

  “A girl. I was in Skip’s. College girl.”

  “All of this for some bitch? What is this bullshit?”

  “The police came looking for her. They came to Skip’s. They learned nothing.”

  The image on the screen shifted then settled. Uncle Symon’s dark eyes studied Dimi’s face across the space that separated them. The secret to Dimi’s entire future was in those eyes.

  “What do the police know, Dimi?”

  “Nothing! No one told them anything. Not a fucking word, uncle.”

  “Who was this bitch? Who would come looking for her?”

  “I have all of that. I mean, I can get it. I sold her driver’s license and credit cards. I can tell you who.”

  Dimi gave the name and location. Symon wrote them down then broke the connection, cutting off his nephew as the man began to plead to be released.

  Symon selected a cell phone from the row on his desk and called Karp and Nestor.

  42

  There was something liberating about it all.

  Dr. Roth rode back home in the back seat with Marcia’s body in the trunk. The two men removed him from the car, the smaller man holding his elbow to help him into the house. The larger man hefted Marcia from the trunk and carried her up to the porch and inside.

  It was all so unreal. He was naked in broad daylight. His wife was being brought home with half her skull missing. Over the border hedge in the front yard, he could hear a neighbor's leafblower whining. Children shouted at play somewhere down the street. High overhead the contrail of a commercial jet cut the sky in half. All around life went on even as Jordan Roth's world teetered at the edge of oblivion.

  The smaller man kept watch on Jordan while he pulled on clothing and packed three more changes into an overnight bag with no attention to coordination.

  “Your pad?” the smaller man asked holding out a hand for the zippered bag.

  “In my office.”

  The smaller man gestured and Jordan led the way downstairs. There was a sharp chemical smell in the air. Gasoline. Coming from the cellar.

  The larger man rejoined them as they were leaving the office. He had three dark bottles cradled in one arm. He’d been in the cellar. Jordan was curious as to what vintages the man chose to take. They exited the house together. Jordan was allowed to sit in the ba
ck seat. His bag went in the trunk.

  He looked from the rear window of the car as they backed down the driveway to the street. A fog of smoke was rising from the basement window wells. A fire.

  A pyre for Marcia.

  They left the Roths’ now-former address, and the tony neighborhood they’d called home for thirty years, for a golden strip lined with shopping marts, car dealerships and standalone stores.

  The car made its way east in fits and starts, stopping at every Walgreens, CVS, Target and Walmart. The car would park in the fire lane while the doctor would write a prescription for various Schedule Three drugs. Tylox, Oxycontin, Empirin, Fiorinal, Ativan, Halcion, Librium, Valium, Xanax, Amytal, Nembutal and others in generic and brand names. His captors were knowledgeable of doses and legal prescription amounts.

  The two men took turns entering the drug stores and returning to the car after fifteen and twenty-minute waits. The big man did not want to talk but Jordan found the smaller of the two a willing conversationalist.

  The smaller man, the pretty boy with the predator's eyes, explained that they were using a collection of credit cards under various names to make the purchases. So, the pick-ups were essentially free to them. A fortune in forbidden prescriptive narcotics and depressants worth many times their market value in the right places. This was all a bonus above what they were being paid for their current assignment.

  The doctor wasn’t certain if they meant to keep him alive for his surgical skills or merely until his prescription pad was empty. This couldn’t go on for long. Even now the fire would have been discovered. Jordan and Marcia Roth would be feared dead in the fire. Was there an apparatus to shut down his status as a qualified scrip writer once it was determined that he was either missing or deceased?