“How can I help you today, sir?” Though he tried to hide it, the man’s accent was unmistakably Russian. Or, at least, Eastern European. He had a calm sensibility about him, but the look on his face told Micah it had been one hell of a day.
“My father died recently,” Micah said. He forced a tear out, but acting wasn’t his strong suit. In the end, it looked as though he may have been dealing with seasonal allergies. “I’ve been thinking about it, about what he would want, and I, I think I want to have him cremated. Is that something you guys do?”
“Yes, and no. We set everything up here, sign the paperwork, but they do the actual process downtown. We have a crematorium for that process.”
“Interesting,” Micah said, hands on his waist in mock surprise. “I guess I just sort of figured you could do it all here with how big this place is.”
“Mostly storage in the back. Caskets, urns, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“City didn’t like my idea of one stop shop,” Marco said. He flashed an uneasy smile that suggested small talk was something he’d rather do without. In his line of work, it was a necessary evil, but he longed for the day when he could just sort out one corpse and move onto the next without wasting a moment dealing with the families of the deceased.
“Probably just trying to get more money out of you.”
Marco laughed. “Exactly. Bunch of crooks. So, you want me to get paperwork?”
“Sure thing.”
***
The sun had drifted far below the horizon, its embers existing as nothing more than a fleeting memory, by the time Micah rolled up to the crematorium. Tucked away within a complex of warehouses, the building of interest had been easy to spot. They placed a similar logo to the one on the business card across a large sign above the front doors. The sign itself was in subpar condition, plagued by years of use in the harsh weather of the Sunshine State, though it remained mostly legible.
Micah walked up to the door and pulled lightly on the handle. No resistance. He stepped inside and saw a collection of small offices, one of which still had the lights on. He walked over to the door labeled Jackson Bloom, Manager, and knocked.
“Yes?” Bloom didn’t look up. It was almost as if he had been expecting company. A thought Micah found a tad unsettling.
“Does Marco of Our Dearly Departed do business here?”
“Yes, he does. Has he…”
Before Bloom could finish posing his question, Micah rushed him. His pistol out, he pulled back his arm and brought it forward forcefully, introducing Bloom’s temple to the grip of the firearm. The surprised man crumpled to the floor.
Micah stepped over Bloom’s body and picked a nearby phone off the receiver. Our Dearly Departed Funeral Parlor was written below the number two on the speed dial. He pressed the button and waited for an answer.
“Our Dearly Departed, how can we help you?”
“Mister Bloom wanted me to call you to see if you could make it down here today. There’s, uh, been an incident.”
“Ah, Christ. Ok, I’ll be there shortly.”
The phone clicked, and Micah bolted into action. It wouldn’t take much time for Marco to make it to the crematorium if he were operating with the slightest bit of urgency. That meant Micah had limited time to prepare. He picked up Bloom’s body and walked over toward the furnace. He stopped when he saw a group of wooden caskets nearby.
Box number one had a dead body inside. It appeared to have been prepped and ready to go, but placed off to the side for safekeeping. Micah skipped a couple boxes before opening a fourth and placing Bloom’s body inside. He didn’t seal it, but left it open only by a crack. He walked back to the office when he heard the front door open. Hurriedly, he hid behind some nearby boxes and listened.
“Hey, Jack, where you at?” The voice was unmistakable. Micah’s ruse had worked. Marco rummaged through the offices, the delay in sounds making it appear he had opened each door and leaned down, hoping to find his compatriot huddled under a desk. “Jack!”
Marco walked past Micah, unaware that he was no longer alone. He cupped his hands around, ready to belt out the name of his coworker once more. The only sound that escaped was a grunt as he fell to the floor. Micah picked the man up, straining slightly under the weight, and walked back over to the furnace. If he were being honest with himself, he felt bad for Marco. An immigrant who had truly lived the American Dream, coming over with almost nothing, but turning what little he had into a profitable business. All to have it end without a say in the matter. Though, Micah had little choice himself. He had accepted the job. Letting it go now, especially with the knowledge of who it appeased, would make life difficult for him.
Fight or flight, I guess.
He opened the furnace door, picked up Marco’s body, and tossed him inside. The poor sap did not know what was about to happen. Perhaps it was bittersweet. His unconscious mind would protect him, for a while at least, from the pain that would precede his death. Best-case scenario, he never woke up. Micah pressed a large red button, surrounded by a steel circle, and walked away.
Chapter 21
Two nurses hastily rolled a gurney through a pair of tan doors, which retreated like the Red Sea at Moses’s arrival. The path they traveled now led to an operating room. On the surface, this wasn’t something that should have seemed all that odd considering the occupation of the gurney’s chauffeurs. However, the building they rushed through wasn’t a hospital. They hurried through a medical wing. The rest of the gargantuan collection of steel and glass served a far different purpose than saving the lives of people suffering from various maladies. It was the headquarters for the Organized Crime Agency, OrCA for short. Not the most memorable of names on its own, but theirs was not one whose exploits would be announced to the masses.
A shadow arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, they burst into existence in the early 2010s to thwart the reach of organized crime in the United States. At their inception, OrCA’s reach was expected to remain within the country, barring unforeseen circumstances. It was quickly apparent that their scope would need to expand to a global scale if they were ever to serve as more than an annoyance to predominantly local outfits. One of their most notable operations had been working with Mexican authorities in the capture and extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. OrCA had sent their own operatives out to the coast of Sinaloa disguised as Mexican Federal Police, and it was their people who tracked the infamous drug kingpin down when he escaped capture following the initial raid at a home in Los Mochis.
Operating as the invisible arm of the CIA allowed them to tackle their problems in ways that could seem unethical without concern over the optics. Not being a known entity had its perks. They rarely concerned themselves with the thought of abiding by local and international law. If they needed to apprehend a target, or worse, they took care of business. Their cleanup crew was among the best, ensuring they could move forward to the next target without the possibility of a past transgression coming back to bite them.
Time continued to roll by as the nurses wound their way through the hallways of the hospital wing of the OrCA headquarters. All that mattered in that moment was attending to the task at hand. They had to get the man on the gurney to the operating room immediately. Their patient awaited state-of-the-art treatments, slated to be administered by a highly respected surgeon. That Ross Sheridan had only the faintest idea of what he had signed up for was of no consequence to them. They had a job, and they intended to follow through with it. No questions asked.
It took only a few minutes, but they were down the long hallway and around the corner, pushing through another set of doors before Sheridan articulated the depth of his confusion. They had given him a large dose of sedatives shortly after signing a few waivers. The drugs hadn’t taken long to kick in. Though he was likely aware, in some sense of the word, that life was trudging along, neither nurse expected that he would ever have any clear memories
of the moment. It may exist in a dream. A fleeting moment. An out-body-experience. Watching himself guided along to an end he didn’t know, unable to halt the progress. Likely feeling so real that he would wake up in a cold sweat, only to forget it inside of an hour.
“Are we… are we there… yet?” Sheridan hadn’t lost his sense of humor. He had stumbled on his words as his lips parted to get the sounds out. The simple task made arduous.
“We may have to give him something stronger,” the nurses said in near unison. They laughed it off as they secured the gurney.
“Is our patient ready?” The surgeon’s voice startled both nurses. Neither had heard her step into the room. She quickly surveyed the pair in front of her, assessing their capabilities based on their response time. The taller of the two had seemed more perplexed about the surgeon’s arrival than the squat nurse, but neither appeared likely to get in her way. Besides, the surgeon was confident in her abilities. She didn’t expect a moment to arise where she would need to rely all that much on outside help.
“Um, yes,” stuttered the taller nurse.
“Actually, ma’am,” the shorter nurse chimed in.
“Just call me Dr. King.”
“Oh, okay,” the shorter nurse said with a smile. “The sedatives we gave the patient haven’t had the desired effect. We may need to increase dosage.”
“Or go with something stronger.”
Nice save, she thought. “Okay. And you two are? I need to know who to yell at.”
“Mallory,” said the shorter nurse.
“Scott,” replied the taller nurse, his hand raised meekly.
“Rossssss,” Sheridan said, his voice trailing off into an inaudible whisper. His gaze bounced around the room haphazardly before his eyes locked onto a nearby wall. The tile-work was significant to him in that moment.
“Ok, I can work with that,” Doctor Avery King announced. She had finished scrubbing in and was ready to get down to business. “Scott, I need you to find the anesthesiologist. Have them administer something with more bite. We wouldn’t want Mister Sheridan here to end up awake for the duration of this procedure.”
“Yes, ma’am. Err, Dr. King.”
“As for you, Mallory,” she said, a wry smile on her face. “I would like for you to prep the patient for surgery. See to it that he can’t move unexpectedly.” Though she didn’t come right out and say it, King was hoping to have Sheridan’s arms and legs bound to the surgical table. His was a procedure which would be minimally invasive, but rare was the operation devoid of risk.
King’s had been tasked with surgically implanting nodes throughout Sheridan’s body. She would start with some relatively low-tech pieces implanted in his wrists. They could display a real-time account of his health metrics. Blood pressure, temperature, the works. Whoever was monitoring Sheridan’s vitals would know he was sick before he showed any symptoms. Some other nodes were more rudimentary, existing solely to track his location.
Standing above all the rest like an Olympic gold medalist on the podium, the pair of nodes King would implant inside Sheridan’s brain served as the proverbial cherries on top. They existed on another playing field entirely, not just compared to the other nodes laid out on the surgical table. The pair of nodes meant for his brain would allow for OrCA to step into uncharted territory with Sheridan. Once they calibrated the nodes, nothing in Sheridan’s world would be off limits. The system for making sense of the way synapses within Sheridan’s mind fired relative to what happened as a result would communicate to the nodes. Eventually, the systems could sift through the noise and discern not only what Sheridan was saying, or what someone was saying to him, but whoever monitored him could even register a passing idea on what he was thinking in the moment.
He was to be one of the first subjects they had tested this procedure on, and most agreed the benefits outweighed the risk. No more concern with wearing wires while undercover, or how to send and receive compromising phone calls. They could complete all communication on a near telepathic level.
Sheridan lay rigid on a surgical table near his gurney. They had bound his legs without his knowledge—though Sheridan was far too gone on the sedatives to care. When the nurse named Mallory walked over to him and tightened the support around his wrist, he tried in vain to lift his arm up. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he was feeling panicked. “Let… me… out. Please.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Sheridan,” Mallory said in her most genuine bless-your-heart tone. “Not to worry, dear. This will all be over shortly.”
Sheridan watched as a stranger walked into the room. Watched as the man approached him with a strange gas mask, the kind he had seen on scientists exploring the wreckage of Chernobyl. Laid there helplessly as the man placed the mask over his face and the world disappeared amid a cloud of green.
Chapter 22
Micah sat in a corner booth at a diner near Las Olas, staring absentmindedly out of recently cleaned window. A cup of coffee in front of him, he tried to wait for his company, but his desire for caffeine eventually beat out his manners. If not for the harsh, almost plastic, sound of the faux-leather seats creaking, he wouldn’t have noticed Castillo sitting down across from him.
“You did good out there,” Castillo said. He grabbed an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the table. “Take this.”
“Thanks,” Micah said. He glanced at the stacks of green within and placed the envelope out of the sight of prying eyes. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yea, I had to pay you.”
“Could’ve just sent it to Perez. He’d make sure I was square.”
“I’m busting your balls, man,” Castillo said with a smile. He ordered a cup of coffee and took a long look at the menu before deciding he’d rather eat something at home. “You’ve been making moves for us lately. Taking out a lot of trash. But I need you to work a different angle for me.”
“Different, how?”
“I need you to collect some money that is owed to me.”
“You’re asking me to be the muscle?”
“Look, if I wanted muscle, you wouldn’t be the first person to pop into my mind.” Both men chuckled at the jab.
“You’re a funny guy, Jimmy. Ever think of doing standup?”
“I tried this one time, but the idiots only understood half of what I was saying. Had some gringo yelling at me to ‘speak English in America!’” Castillo took a sip of his coffee and the smile disappeared from his face. “In all seriousness, this guy Christensen bet 30 stacks on a horse to win some big race. The favorite too, so he thought he had a sure thing.”
“You’d think someone with that kind of cash to throw around betting on anything would know better than to bet dollars just to win dimes,” Micah wondered aloud.
“What fucked it all up for him is the horse went down on the first leg. Freak accident,” Castillo said. “They had to put the damn thing out of its misery. Anyway, this dope, Christensen, has been a ghost ever since. Normally, this is something I would let my bookie take care of, but he hasn’t been able to talk sense into the guy.”
“And that’s where I come in,” Micah said.
“Exactly. Doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Just pay him a visit at work and let him know that it ain’t fun and games no more. Do whatever you have to do to make the bastard realize he fucked with the wrong hombre. Get the cash, and I’ll split a third of the cut with you.”
“Consider it done.”
Chapter 23
Micah drove along the Rickenbacker Causeway with his windows down, relishing in the cool breeze flowing freely through the immaculate interior of the classic Impala. The sun gradually disappeared behind him as he drove further away from the mainland. He watched in awe as the sky warped between shades of orange and purple and red, coalescing into something akin to the Northern Lights. For a moment, he was a kid again, staring at the sky and wondering how it looked outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Did the same p
henomena exist in the cold emptiness of space? Or was this just one of those things that made the Earth special? A reason for it to exist other than just to be one of a million such rocks hurtling around a star far larger than them until something ended them all. He had been an odd child. Had changed little in the years since, just grown surer of himself.
The causeway seemed to go on for miles and miles longer than it actually had. There was something to be said for the way a horizon can trick the brain, even on land. Or a structure approaching that solidity. Back on solid land once more, Micah quickly passed another beach, then a harbor full of boats and yachts. A small forest came into view on his left as his destination materialized off to his right. He turned when he saw a blue and green sign which looked like an overturned letter L with a large screen hanging from the top. The words ‘Miami Seaquarium’ laid out across the protruding portion somewhat haphazardly.
Micah pulled into the first parking lot he saw, directly across from the entrance to the oceanarium. On Virginia Beach in Biscayne Bay, the Miami Seaquarium is one of the oldest structures of its kind in the United States. It opened its doors in 1955 and welcomes over half a million people onto its premises each year. Among its plethora of attractions, which run the gamut of marine life, is Lolita, an orca. Not just any killer whale–it is said that Lolita is the oldest of her kind in captivity. She has been a source of great interest to guests since she first arrived in the oceanarium in the seventies.
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