Haitian Harbinger

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Haitian Harbinger Page 24

by Lincoln Matt


  “Alright,” Holm said, sounding skeptical. “So how’re we planning to get out of this thing if everything does go according to plan? I imagine they’ll expect us to ride to NOLA on the damn ship with them since we’ve come all this way.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. “Worse comes to worst, we just go with them. It’s not a super long trip.”

  There was only so much brain space I had at once, especially after that blow I took earlier.

  “We just go to NOLA? With a bunch of Haitian drug lords?” Holm asked. “Okay, then.” He laughed under his breath. “I don’t know about this one, Ethan.”

  “I said worse comes to worst,” I pointed out.

  “This whole mission has been worse comes to worst,” Holm said.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Frankly, though a lot of shit had gone down, we’d gotten lucky more than a few times down here. I figured we just needed one more.

  Eventually, we rolled up to an area and parked a ways away on the beach from where there were what looked like two ships off in the distance. There was a small dock, and a few Haitian men were hanging around there, moving some things onto one of the ships. It looked to be big crates.

  The ships themselves weren’t large. There was one smaller white one that reminded me of Holm’s motorboat that he used to go fishing back in Miami. The other was a bit bigger, far from a yacht but not a single person’s boat either. It was made of wood.

  “Think this is it?” Holm asked, glancing between the ships and me and back again.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said with a shrug. “Might as well check it out.”

  “Alright, then,” Holm said, undoing his seat belt.

  “How much is left in the tank?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the gas gauge.

  “About a half a tank,” Holm said. “Which is enough to get us a fair way’s out, but not all the way back, I’d guess.”

  “Enough to get back to the Dominican side of the border?” I asked.

  “If we want to risk getting shot at,” Holm said.

  “Better than riding to NOLA with a bunch of drug lords,” I pointed out.

  “That is true,” Holm said. “So, we do have an exit plan.”

  “Well, half of one, anyway,” I said. “Which is better than we could have.”

  Just as I was about to climb out of the passenger side of the car, my phone buzzed. I reached down to see that Clyde was calling me.

  I glanced back up at the ships and the men ahead of us. We were a good distance away from them, and they didn’t seem to have noticed us yet, but that could change any minute now. I didn’t have any time to take the call.

  Reluctantly, I sent Clyde to voicemail. We would have to deal with whatever it was later, even if he had important information for us. We couldn’t miss risking a single beat with these guys, as far as I was concerned.

  “Who was it?” Holm asked.

  “It’s not important right now,” I said. “Let’s go figure out what we’re dealing with here.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Ethan

  Tentatively, Holm and I approached the men on the dock. The crates they were loading were large and looked heavy. They were sweating in the hot sun, but there was a cool, pleasant breeze coming off the water.

  I took a deep breath, taking in the cool scent of salt in the air, and preparing myself for what was ahead.

  One of the men off to the side saw us first when he stopped to rest. He pointed at us and called something out in French. Then they all crowded around the front of the dock to meet us, physically blocking us off from the crates. I had no doubt that this was intentional.

  “Hello,” Holm said when we approached them. “My name’s Daryl Williams, and this is my associate Clifton Beck. Do any of you lot speak English?”

  “I do,” one of the men, who had been in the middle of loading a crate on the ship, said as he pushed through to the front of the group. He glared at us with suspicion and skepticism. “Who are you, and what do you want? You do not look Dominican.”

  “We’re not,” I admitted. “We’re from a place called New Orleans. That’s where you’re headed, isn’t it?”

  The man exchanged a look with a few of the others around him, and they communicated amongst themselves in French momentarily.

  “You are from New Orleans?” he asked sharply when he turned back to us.

  “That’s right,” Holm said, making a show of sounding cocky. “Now, we think you have something of ours…”

  The man looked alarmed at this.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, laughing nervously and running a hand through his short, curly hair. “I don’t even know who you are. In fact, I should order my men to shoot you now!”

  I noticed here that the men standing on either side of him had their hands on what were no doubt weapons tucked beneath their clothing.

  “Now that would be a big mistake,” I warned, placing my own hand at my side and demonstrating that they weren’t the only ones who were armed in this scenario. “You wouldn’t want to end up making a mistake like that when you’re so close to getting what you want, now, would you?”

  “Who are you?” the man snapped. “Are you police?”

  Holm and I looked at each other and burst out laughing in unison.

  “Police? Us?” Holm guffawed. “Good one.”

  “We already told you who we are,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “James,” the man said cautiously. “But that is not what I meant.”

  “Good to meet you, James,” I said, holding out my hand to shake his.

  He stared at it for a moment, but then took it. The men next to him exchanged wary looks.

  “Now look here, we’re missing one of our guys, calls himself Abel,” Holm said. “Any idea where he's gotten off to? He owes us.”

  “And we’re not about to let him get off so easy, you understand?” I added.

  “You… you are friends of Abel’s?” James asked, giving us a terrified look that almost matched Ricardo’s when we’d mentioned Jake Wallace, or Abel, to him.

  He muttered something in French to the other men around him, and I distinctly heard the name ‘Abel’ in there somewhere.

  I remembered that Samuel and Junior hadn’t looked quite so terrified. Abel was just another gangbanger to them. This meant that these guys weren’t too high up on the totem pole in the cartel. They were just cargo haulers. They didn’t know any more than Ricardo probably did. We had to get them to tell us where to find whoever ordered them here.

  “‘Friends’ is a bit of an overstatement,” I corrected. “He works for us, and he promised us this haul you’ve got here to sell to our clients, distribute in our networks. And we haven’t heard from him in a while. He was supposed to check in with us.”

  “So we got worried,” Holm added. “He’s not the most trustworthy bloke—you know the business we’re in as well as we do—so we thought we’d hop down here and see if we could have a little chat with him. But we’ve got to figure out where he is first, you see?”

  “You just got the last shipment not long ago, did you not?” James asked, shifting uncomfortably on his feet at this. “You already need more?”

  Holm and I exchanged a worried look. Dammit. Well, that answered our first question, alright. This drug—whatever it was—was already on the streets in New Orleans. Which meant it was only a matter of time before it spread to the rest of the States.

  “We just want to make sure we get what’s ours,” Holm said. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I… I suppose so,” James stammered. “But we do not have the answers to your questions.”

  I noticed that these guys all looked pretty nervous, and it wasn’t just us that scared them. Their reaction to the mention of Abel was proof enough of that.

  I remembered how scared Ricardo had been of being sent on assignment to this ship. Terrified that once he fulfilled his duties, t
hey’d test the drug on him, just for the fun of it. I imagined that these men harbored much the same fears.

  “Look, we get it,” I said quietly. “But if you could just tell us if you’ve seen our guy, heard anything about what he could be up to, we’d appreciate that courtesy.”

  I hated to do it, but my hand drifted to my side again, reminding the men that Holm and I were armed and had no qualms about shooting random people if we didn’t get our way. It worked like a charm.

  “Okay, okay,” James said, holding his hands up over his head wildly to show us that he would cooperate. “I do not know much about this person. I’ve only seen him a handful of times. Last time I saw him was four days ago, by the voodoo shop where we used to be headquartered.”

  “Funny, we were just over in that direction,” Holm said. “What was he doing there?”

  “I don’t know,” James said. “Let me ask the others.”

  A frantic exchange of rapid French commenced between the men. They all seemed to be talking at once, and they all seemed to be frightened.

  Finally, James grabbed one of the men, a particularly short and scrawny one, by the shoulders and shoved him in our direction.

  “This is my friend Stanley,” he said. “He thinks he heard about something happening to your guy Abel.”

  The guy just kind of stood there, staring at us with an almost vacant, terrified expression on his face.

  “Well, what does he say?” Holm asked after a moment of this had passed in uncomfortable silence.

  “Go on, Stanley, tell them what you heard,” James coaxed.

  The smaller man looked back at his friend. Clearly, he did not want to do this.

  “Does he speak English?” I asked.

  “Some,” James said.

  We all waited some more, but Stanley did not look like he was going to talk to us any time soon.

  I glanced down at my watch.

  “Look, guys, we’re not running on time, here,” I said impatiently.

  James elbowed the man in the ribs, and he finally acquiesced, though he looked straight down at the sandy beach instead of up at Holm and me.

  “I… I believe I hear of them talk to each other,” the man stammered, stumbling over his words. Clearly, ‘some’ English was not much. “Abel and the others.”

  “The others?” I asked. “Who are the others?”

  Stanley just blinked and stopped talking in response.

  “I think he means the higher-ups,” James said. “That’s what he told us before. Basically, what you do in America, the guys that do that here.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding along. “Go on.”

  It took Stanley a minute to start up again, but he did nonetheless.

  “So they talk about want more now,” he said. “Abel says he want more now, for you.”

  “More of what?” Holm asked. “Of the drug?”

  Stanley nodded and shuddered with almost his whole body. Several of the other men shifted uncomfortably as well. Clearly, Ricardo wasn’t the only one in the cartel’s rank and file who was desperately afraid of whatever it was Samuel and Junior had concocted out of their family recipe.

  “Go on,” I urged again since Stanley didn’t seem to get that he should do so on his own. “What else did they say?”

  “Well, they do not like what he say to them,” the man said simply.

  “What does that mean, they didn’t like it?” Holm asked.

  “Are you saying that we aren’t gonna get the product we’re owed?” I asked angrily, remembering who Holm and I were supposed to be in this scenario.

  “I… I…” Stanley stammered, looking up at me for the first time with terrified eyes. His whole body appeared to be trembling now.

  “No, you get, you get!” another of the men cried, gesturing wildly in the direction of the crates. “Go to you!”

  He and the other men were staring at where they knew my gun was resting at my side.

  “Okay, okay,” I said hurriedly, holding up my hands to show them that I meant them no harm. “But why was Abel upset about the amount of product, then?”

  Stanley looked back at James, almost helplessly. They started conversing in French again.

  “Hey, come on,” Holm said aggressively, stepping toward the men as he adopted his American gangbanger persona. “How about you keep us in the loop here, alright?” He rested his hand at his own side, reminding them that he had a weapon he could use against them, too.

  “Okay, okay,” James said, holding up his arms in submission again. “We understand. Stanley, he just isn’t sure how to describe it in your language.”

  “Why don’t you give it a whirl for him?” I asked dryly. I imagined that Daryl Williams and Clifton Beck wouldn’t be nearly as patient with their interrogations as Robbie Holm and Ethan Marston.

  “Yes, of course, of course,” James said, nodding to me deferentially. “He says that he thinks… well, please can you promise us that you will not… how do you say in America… shoot the messenger?”

  “We won’t blame you for our guy being an idiot,” I chuckled. “We already know he’s an idiot. Why do you think we followed him down here?”

  “Okay, okay,” James said again, laughing nervously under his breath. “We thank you for this understanding. Okay, so Stanley says he thinks your guy wants to take the… well, what is in those crates, please don’t make me speak of it.”

  I nodded to him to say it was okay, and that Holm and I understood his meaning.

  “Well, Stanley says that Abel wants to take it to another place in your country, work with other people to do this,” James said, wincing preemptively as he said the words as if he was bracing for an impending blow and an outburst of anger from these American gangbangers.

  Holm and I exchanged a look. We had to keep up the act.

  So Holm took several more steps toward James and Stanley until he was practically looming over the two men.

  “Are you telling me,” he said through gritted teeth, emphasizing every word. “That our guy was trying to break into other markets without us?”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger, don’t shoot the messenger!” James cried, holding his hands over his head again and turning away from Holm as Stanley cowered in front of him.

  “Look, Daryl, I’m not any happier about this than you are, but we promised,” I said, grabbing Holm’s arm and pulling him away from the Haitian men. “Plus, they could still be useful.” I cast a sufficiently self-important glance at the cowering men.

  “Alright, alright,” Holm relented, making a show to look disappointed about it as he stepped away from James and Stanley.

  All the Haitian men visibly relaxed as Holm retreated.

  “So, what’s going on?” I asked. “Our guy’s stepping out on us and pissing off our suppliers? Where is he so we can knock some sense into him?”

  “We do not know,” James said, shaking his head. “None of us know where he is or how you can find him. We have told you all we know. We are sorry we cannot give more, but we hope that you will leave us alone now.”

  The man winced again as he said this, anticipating another adverse reaction. He looked like he regretted saying it as soon as the words stumbled out of his mouth.

  “What did you say to me?” I asked, taking a step toward the man, though I didn’t get nearly as close as Holm had.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” James cried. “I do not think before I speak sometimes. I do apologize.”

  “We’re done with you when we’re done with you. You got that?” I asked, jabbing my finger in his chest.

  I thought the man might combust from the fear. It was odd, they had weapons of their own, and they outnumbered us. But it was as if they were conditioned to be submissive and afraid of any authority figure to do with the cartel, and they thought that Holm and I fit that bill.

  “Alright, then,” I said, stepping back into my original position. “So, who can we talk to that might be able to answer our questions?”

>   James looked like he really didn’t want to answer this one.

  “Well?” Holm asked after a brief period of silence. He jutted out his chest in a threatening manner.

  “I… I…” James stammered.

  “Oh, come on, don’t you become a blubbering mess on us now, too,” I complained. “Answer the damn question!”

  I rested my hand on my gun again for emphasis.

  “Uh, we are not sure about telling our… what is the word… superiors that you are here,” James admitted, wincing for a third time as if he were afraid I would strike him.

  “And why is that?” Holm asked, scoffing at this.

  “You seem afraid of us enough to talk to us,” I pointed out. “And mind you, that was a good decision on your part.” I kept my hand on my gun as I spoke.

  “Yes, well…” James began, his voice trailing off as he searched for the right words. “It is not the same. You, you will go back to America. These men will always be here, watching us. And if they know we talk to you, and we say something they don’t like… well, they will… they will do things to us that we don’t even want to say out loud.”

  “They’ll make you take it, you mean,” I said. It wasn’t a question, and there wasn’t any need for them to answer. “They do that a lot as a punishment?”

  Holm gave me a questioning look, and I knew that this line of questioning was crossing over the thin line between Clifton Beck and Ethan Marston. But I had to ask it. We had to find out more about this drug and what it was doing to people.

  “And to test,” James said, his voice suddenly much smaller. “They like to see what will happen. To see who will die and who won’t. They want to make it so that happens less. We know you know this, it has already happened in your country, though the police there haven’t found out yet.”

  Holm and I exchanged another look.

  “Right,” I said. “We’ve been able to keep a lid on it so far.”

  What was going on in New Orleans? Were these people already killing American citizens? My blood was boiling, and it was all I could do to keep from bashing someone’s head in. I settled for clenching my fists at my sides.

  “Yes, we give our best batch to you,” James said, and I could tell that he was trying to sound reassuring as he gestured in the direction of the crates. “But still they cannot stop it from happening sometimes. Here in Haiti, no one cares. But where you come from, well, we understand it is more dangerous for you.”

 

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