Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Frankly, I’m hoping you never have to, Jimmy,” I said. “But like I said then, I’ll say now; you’ve put your stamp on Markham Street. And when I’m not around, it’s yours. I don’t trust anyone more than you and Carlos to take care of it.”

  “I don’t know what you into, Mr. Snow,” Jimmy said, “but if you need backup—”

  “You’ve been backing me since we met,” I said. “Your only job now is to be the best version of yourself.”

  With Jimmy settled at his new house, I got Lucy back to Carmela and Sylvia’s.

  On the front porch I gave her the same kind of envelope I’d given Jimmy. She stared at it for a few seconds. “What’s this?”

  “Something for your future,” I said. “Don’t open it now, okay? Just—you know—put it somewhere safe—”

  “Is this, like, your last will and testament?” she said. “’Cause that’s kinda creepy and I don’t want to be responsible for, you know, making burial arrangements or having you cremated. How’m I supposed to do that shit and I can’t even make decent chili?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not my last will and testament. It’s something for you. But don’t open it for a while. Promise me.”

  She stared at the envelope for a moment more.

  Then she hugged me. Long and tight.

  When she released me, I could see her eyes were wet.

  “You’re a moron,” she said, quickly wiping her eyes. Then she turned and walked into Carmela and Sylvia’s house.

  Thirty-seven

  By nine-thirty of a steamy Friday evening, the sun was fully submerged beneath the leaden horizon. It was still a stagnant, suffocating eighty-two degrees with a sauna-like drizzle threatening to become a full-on sweltering rain. Perfect weather to sleuth around the dismal confines of a shipyard along the Detroit River.

  I was dressed in heavy tactical black and sporting twenty pounds of weaponry and ammo. Tomás, dressed the same, was carrying even more weaponry and ammo. The rest of our gear was under a tarp in the bed of his truck. Hopefully we wouldn’t need any of it.

  We’d parked on West Fort Street near an old two-story dock warehouse that had fallen into disuse. Using the low, slump-shouldered buildings and jagged shadows as cover, we made our way on foot south to the Nielsen Emery Terminal. In this part of town, the only company we expected was the occasional homeless vet and rats the size of Buicks.

  Halfway to the terminal, Tomás decided he wanted his new Winchester SX4 rifle with him. He’d left the rifle in the bed of his truck.

  “Be a shame for her to miss the sights, being new in town,” he said.

  I didn’t mind the delay. It gave me more time to scope activities at the terminal and possibly find an answer to the question “What the hell am I doing?”

  When Tomás returned he had a surprise for me.

  Lucy Three Rivers.

  “She was hiding under the tarp in my truck bed,” Tomás said.

  “Goddammit, Lucy!” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “After you left Carmela and Sylvia’s I wondered what you were up to,” she said. “So, I opened the envelope. I know I wasn’t supposed to—but you hand me an envelope, I’m gonna open it. You really got that much money to be handing out? I mean, thanks, but I don’t want you to die so I can get some stupid money. Plus, you never asked me if I unspoofed your phone. I heard what you and Tomás were talking about. The dock. The women. The shitty bastards holding those women. I want to help.”

  She was dressed in a black T-shirt bearing the words “Fade to . . .” rendered in white, black jeans and black Converse All-Star high-tops. Strapped to her right hip was her 10mm handgun. Strapped to her left thigh was her Marttiini Lapp hunting knife. Under her eyes were thick dashes of black paint.

  “Swear to God, Lucy—”

  “Let me do this,” she pleaded. “You’ve helped me more than anybody ever has. Besides Skittles. And my mom.”

  I drew in a slow, deep breath of the thick, hot air in an effort to bring my blood pressure down from the stratosphere.

  “People are probably going to get killed tonight, Lucy,” I said. “I don’t want one of those people to be a kid who hasn’t seen her twenty-first birthday yet.”

  “I lived most of my life freezing my ass off on a rez outside the Sault,” Lucy said. “I’ve seen old women die of exposure and babies die of malnutrition. And I’ve seen elders cry over the bodies of young bucks who drank themselves to death or blew their brains out because they felt even the fucking gods forgot their names. So, don’t you ever talk to me like I’m a baby with a talcum powdered ass, dude. You can call this whole thing off on account of me—and eight women get shipped off to God only knows where to do God only knows what. Or I’m with the hunting party. Your choice, Sherlock.”

  I gave Tomás a hard look.

  “Don’t look at me,” Tomás said. “I kinda like the kid.”

  Still seething, I held a rigid forefinger an inch away from Lucy’s face and said, “You do what I say when I say it. You put me or Tomás or any of those women in danger, I’ll shoot you myself. You are non-lethal backup only. Do you understand me?”

  She looked at me for a moment before saying, “Can I give an Indian war whoop?”

  “Goddammit, Lucy!”

  “I’m kidding!” she said. “Yeah, I understand. Now let’s go be heroes.”

  I turned and walked away.

  Behind me I heard Tomás chuckle and tell her, “You’re a piece of work, kid.”

  Tomás has always had a good singing voice. A nice baritone that brings old Mexican folk tunes to soulful life. Late in the evening at backyard barbeques, after my father and Tomás had drunk their fill of beer and tequila, Tomás—feeling both ebullient and maudlin—would sing Mexican folk songs. My father would accompany him on his Fender acoustic. My mother and Elena—though certainly displeased by the amount of booze the two men had consumed—would nevertheless swoon at the music.

  Tomás even sang at his daughter’s quinceañera and her wedding. Both times had him sweating bullets. He’d never sung sober before.

  Tonight, Tomás was singing “You Belong to My Heart.”

  He was also doing a wobbly drunk walk and dragging a rotting plank of wood across the chain links of the port security fence.

  I hid in the shadows in front of the wide truck gate entrance near the guard shack, ready to cover Tomás. Lucy was crouched low ten feet behind me and quiet as a mouse.

  “Hey,” a young, lanky, zit-faced guard said, approaching Tomás from the guard shack. “What the hell you doing, man?”

  “My—my Maria—she’s gone,” Tomás whined as he banged on the fence with the wood plank. “She’s just—fucking gone! Puta!”

  “Hey, listen,” the guard said. “You need to get gone. I mean now. This is private—”

  “I can’t live without her! I don’t want to live without my Maria!”

  Tomás—more of an old-school method actor than I would ever have imagined—slammed his body against the chain link fence and, weighed down with faux grief, began sliding down the fence, weeping. The guard fumbled out his Taser and came within inches of the fence and Tomás.

  “Listen, bro,” the guard said, “I don’t wanna have to use this, but—”

  Before the guard could finish his sentence, Tomás had the black barrel of his HK Mark 23 auto .45 through the fence and inches away from the guard’s chin.

  “How much do you make an hour, amigo?” Tomás said, shedding his sloppy drunk theatrics. “See, I’m thinking it ain’t nearly enough to take a bullet for. Am I right?”

  “Yessir.”

  I came out of the shadows and stood behind Tomás’s right shoulder.

  “What’s your name?” I said to the guard.

  “Lloyd,” the guard said, quivering. “Lloyd Hormsby. Sir.”
>
  “Good strong name,” I lied. “Listen, Lloyd Hormsby, you got a chance to be a hero tonight. But first you’re going to walk down to the gate and open it for us, right, Lloyd?”

  “Wrong.”

  I felt a cold metal gun barrel press into the base of my skull and a gruff voice behind me said, “Tell your buddy to lay his piece nice and easy on the ground or he’s gonna have your brains all over the back of his shirt.”

  Slowly, Tomás laid his .45 on the damp ground.

  “Here’s what’s gonna happen next, assholes—” the voice behind me said.

  The gun barrel eased away from the back of my head. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the gun appear over my right shoulder, dangling upside down by a forefinger hooked in the trigger guard. I grabbed the gun and spun around.

  Behind me was a tall, beer-bellied older guard showing me the palms of his hands. Riding him, piggyback, was Lucy Three Rivers, the tip of her six-inch hunting knife held in the guard’s left nostril, a thin crimson line of blood slowly following the blade’s shimmering edge.

  Tomás quickly picked up his gun. “Open the gate, Lloyd Hormsby. Now.”

  Hormsby stood as if trying to pull himself out of a waking nightmare.

  “Goddammit, ya dumb country fuck!” the older beer-bellied guard growled at his young partner. “Do what he told you to do!”

  Tomás turned to the beer-bellied guard and said, “You got a ninety-pound girl riding your back and holding a knife up your nose. I don’t think I’d be calling Lloyd Hormsby a ‘dumb country fuck.’”

  “Lloyd,” I said calmly. “It’s time to go.”

  Blinking himself back to life, Lloyd Hormsby nodded that he understood and began taking measured steps toward the gate-mounted controls forty feet away.

  Thirty-eight

  Zip-tied, gagged and seated on the floor of the grimy guard shack were the Magnificent Mr. Lloyd Hormsby and his unpleasant beer-bellied boss. I crouched by Hormsby and said, “It may not feel like it now, Lloyd, but you’re doing a good thing. A brave thing.”

  Lloyd grunted and nodded. I’m sure he felt a bit less than brave hog-tied and gagged with one of his own dingy tube socks.

  I looked at Lloyd’s partner and said, “You? You’re gonna die a lonely alcoholic binge-watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix.”

  “Uk ooo!” Lloyd’s boss grunted. Which, in the language of the recently zip-tied and gagged, translated to “fuck you.”

  “You set?” I asked Tomás.

  Tomás had been studying the six CCTV monitors. “I got seven guys. Three by a south stack of cargo boxes, two by the freighter smoking, one walking our way—ninety seconds—and one taking a piss in the river by a loading gantry. I’m sure there’s more, Octavio, but this equipment was considered crappy a decade ago.”

  “Sound like good odds to you, compadre?” I said, smiling up at Tomás.

  “Even Steven,” Tomás said, returning my smile.

  I turned to Lucy. She was kneeling by the two subdued guards, casually twirling her hunting knife. I said, “You stay here.”

  “You kidding me?” she groused. “I gotta babysit these two shit stains?”

  “You,” I said with a bit more emphasis, “stay here.”

  “Thirty seconds.” Tomás crouched by the CCTV control panel and racked one in his new rifle.

  “Fine,” Lucy grumbled.

  The beer-bellied guard suddenly tried to call out, banging a shoulder heavily into the wall of the guard shack. Lucy quickly pulled her 10mm from its hip holster and brought the butt of the gun hard across his face, knocking him unconscious.

  Too late.

  The man approaching the guard shack got the message.

  “Rover One! Rover One!” the man said into his walkie. “We got uninvited!”

  Kicking the door of the guard shack open, the man saw Lucy and the two guards huddled on the floor. He brought a black muzzled TEC-9 machine pistol to the three of them. Simultaneously, Tomás and I stood: I put two rounds in him—one center mass, one in his head. Tomás sent him flying out door with a blast from his new rifle.

  In the lethal space of a tenth of a second, the party had started.

  “Rover Three,” a frantic voice crackled over the dead man’s walkie. “What the fuck’s going on? Rover Three? Goddammit!”

  Tomás and I exchanged a glance, then we both looked at Lucy.

  We had to move out. Away from Lucy. Away from the two guards.

  “Lucy!” I yelled. “Stay low!”

  “Yeah! Right! Go!”

  We did.

  Tomás and I ran toward the Federal Shoreland freighter, keeping at least thirty feet between us.

  The freighter’s engines were slowly spinning up.

  The kidnapped women must have already been loaded on board.

  Two muzzle flashes.

  Bullets shredding the blacktop between Tomás and me. Tomás drops and rolls behind a discarded cargo container. I run for the cover of dumpsters near the warehouses.

  Bullets hammer into the metal dumpsters.

  With every second, the engines of the freighter spin faster. It’s only moments away from embarking. I glance up at the dock’s control tower and decide it’s time to give the dock master a wake-up call: I fire the remaining clip in my Glock 17 at the control tower. Maybe—just maybe—two of the seventeen bullets will hit the tower’s window, diverting the dock master’s attention away from moving the freighter safely out of port.

  I switch out clips and take a quick look around the corner of the dumpsters.

  On foot, a BMC biker with a TEC-9 is twenty feet away from being on top of me.

  He fires, the bullets thudding into the dumpster, narrowly missing me.

  I push the dumpster.

  Hard.

  It rolls toward the man, distracting him. I spin out from behind the moving dumpster and fired three shots.

  He drops.

  No time to bust an arm patting myself on the back. More shots ring out, finding the concrete to my left. On my feet, I grab the dead biker’s TEC-9 as I pass his body.

  Any man or woman who served in combat can tell you about the cold-sweat terror of a night firefight: the pyrotechnics of tracer bullets searching for warm flesh; the sound of bullets thumping into the earth inches away from you. Is that sweat or a buddy’s blood spraying? Is that breathing mine or the enemy’s?

  The anomalous weightlessness and unbearable gravity of seconds slowly stretching into an eternal black hole.

  I heard the thunder of Tomás’s rifle twice to my eleven-o’clock position, maybe forty yards away. It was time we got back together.

  Suddenly . . .

  . . . silence.

  The second worst thing about a night firefight is abrupt silence.

  Is this that solitary moment before a bullet hits the heart?

  “Whoever the fuck you are,” a voice echoes through the cascading darkness and grey mist, “you need to stop fuckin’ around right now. Lay your weapons down, come out and we won’t kill you.”

  “You promise not to kill us?” I yell back, checking the clip of the TEC-9 and trying to calculate the location and range of the man’s voice. “Because I’ve been lied to before. Winifred Brousse. Seventh grade. She said she liked me, but she didn’t like like me. She like liked my best friend Tony Alvara.”

  “Okay, smartass,” the voice booms. “Have it your fucking way.”

  Two bursts from an automatic rifle.

  While I was echo-locating whoever had been talking, they were echo-locating me.

  And they were pretty good at it—the shots came within six feet of me.

  “Enough of this shit,” I grumble to myself. I spin out from behind a stack of concrete pipes, elevate the barrel thirty degrees and unload the TEC-9.

  A shooter per
ched on a gangplank thirty-feet up and some thirty feet away took most of the bullets. His body tumbles through the air before slamming hard to the ground and shattering at least 183 of its 206 bones.

  I roll back to cover.

  “You still among the living?” I call out in Spanish.

  “If you call this ‘living,’” Tomás replies in Spanish. “You?”

  “Havin’ the time of my life.”

  “All right!” a voice calls through the darkness. “Enough of this shit, goddammit! Say something, bitch!”

  My heart stops.

  There is a moment of cruel silence. Then, “I’m sorry, August!”

  Lucy.

  “They—they shot those two guards,” Lucy said. I could hear her choking back tears. “They just—they killed Lloyd Hormsby! Like he was nothing!”

  “Seriously, dudes,” the man laughs. “Where’d you get this one? Some fucking carnival face-painting booth? Jesus! How desperate are you guys?”

  “Fuck you, dick-breath!” Lucy yelled.

  The sound of a slap.

  “Stop wasting my fucking time and come out!” the man shouts. “Or tiny tot gets a bullet between her tits!”

  Seconds after Tomás and I lay down our weapons, we’re surrounded by nine battle-hardened BMC bikers with a variety of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. The biker who had talked us out—a tall, pocked-face maniac with a black moustache attempting to cover a harelip—had a fistful of the back of Lucy’s shirt collar in his left hand and an M&P 380 auto in his right. Lucy’s wrists were cuffed behind her back.

  “Okay, so let’s talk about who sent you,” the man said while holding Lucy. “You associated with anybody—the Osoverde brothers? Pavel Ochinko? Maybe that fat fuck Xiang Lao?”

  “We just came to get the women,” I said. “No association. No plans other than cut ’em loose from your stink.”

  “Oh, my God,” the man said. “Really? I mean, like, white knight shit?”

  “Your Birmingham safe house is blown,” I said. “Your ICE associates are under FBI surveillance and they can’t wait to toss you losers into super-max. The girls, the drug mules, the coyotes—it’s all about to fall. It’s time for you to bug out. So why not just let the girl go? Keep us, but let her walk.”