The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  The real Jamaica offered breathtaking views of lush tropical rain forests: the soaring, fog-shrouded peaks of the Blue Mountains, where coffee trees grew tall in the nitrogen-rich soil, and the rocky steps of Dunn’s River Falls. It was a place of hard-working people doing their best with what they had and a unique cuisine that I could eat for every meal. The world of the resorts had nothing to do with the nation of Jamaica. It was a false narrative that supplied the island with a steady influx of hard currency. After returning from the USA, I discovered that Dawn had moved to a resort with a nude beach, which sounded a lot sexier than the reality turned out to be.

  The company provided a driver and limo. Parked inside the hangar, out of the sun, I nodded to the inspector as I passed him, and he nodded back. I showed no suspicions, even though the aura surrounding him was a bright red. I’d have to be careful because the Inspector posed a grave danger. As Isra had reminded me, cash only bought civility and cooperation to a point.

  The limo driver spotted Nathan and, once I’d slid into the backseat, he turned to face me.

  “No dogs.”

  “Not dogs,” I said. “Dog. Singular. Yes.”

  “No dog!”

  Nathan stood in the open door, no doubt wanting to enjoy the cold air inside the car. Fishing out my credentials, I opened the wallet to display both badge and license, although I presumed he already knew my profession. While the driver squinted at those, I withdrew the unmodified P320 that was my primary backup weapon and placed it against the back of his head.

  “Yes, dog,” I said.

  Nodding vigorously, he turned back to the steering wheel. Nathan jumped inside. The driver grinned into the rearview mirror.

  “Good doggie!” he said and headed for the driveway we’d used yesterday.

  Surrounded by four police cruisers, each with two constables, we had no trouble on the road to Ocho Rios. At the resort, four of the constables offered to escort me inside, but I declined. Carlos stood at the top of the entrance steps, arms folded, the very picture of “if you want him you’ve gotta go through me first.” Between him and me, and the arsenal hidden on my person, we could take care of ourselves. Disappointed not to glimpse the nude beach, the constables got back in their cars and took off.

  No baggage attendants dared try to slip by the grim muscle boy acting tough and growling at anybody who got too close. Truthfully, asshole or not, I was glad to have him at my side. Then he saw Nathan in the backseat.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Nathan leapt out, trotted up the stairs, and started to hike his leg on Carlos.

  “Nathan,” I called out, and damned if he didn’t turn my way. Could dogs learn their name in a day? And why did he have an aura? The stack of mysteries to be solved kept getting higher. With what seemed like grudging obedience, he walked away from Carlos and peed on a bush. I didn’t know what Isra had done to him overnight, but that was not the same half-dead dog I’d rescued yesterday. He’d gained ten pounds and all of it was muscle. I didn’t disbelieve my eyes, though. Whatever else had changed inside my brain, I accepted what my senses encountered without filtering it through my biases, therefore, if Nathan grew strong overnight, then he did.

  “C’mon boy, let’s find you something to eat. You like steak?”

  He barked.

  The resort didn’t allow dogs, but nobody said anything as Carlos handed me a room key and we headed into the resort. The luggage porters and front desk staff watched us walk through the lobby like this was Chicago in 1931 and we were packing Tommy guns. If anybody objected to Nathan trotting along beside me, they were smart enough to keep quiet. In general, I liked dogs more than people and I’d grown particularly fond of Nathan. I wouldn’t have killed anybody over it, though. A license to kill doesn’t mean that a Shooter can just go around executing people who piss them off or because of an old grudge. There are strict conditions that apply to the legal use of deadly force, otherwise, we’re susceptible to a murder charge same as anybody else. But sometimes it’s useful for the public to believe otherwise.

  Once through the covered lobby area, we crossed an open plaza with a fountain at the center. Two pathways on either side led to blocks of rooms. We headed straight for the beach. A broad set of washed gravel stairs led down to the sand.

  I didn’t intend to ask Dawn why she changed resorts while I was gone, and once I spotted her bouncing in the surf along with a dozen other sea nymphs, I didn’t care. Males circled the women like sharks, mostly bald sharks with guts hanging so low as to hide their junk. Under any other circumstances that would have been fine with me—it made me look better by comparison—but not that day. That day my internal warning system had been turned up to eleven, and it was pegged.

  It wasn’t only that nothing ruins a sun-splashed beach like obese, middle-aged guys with fistfuls of money to compensate for their lack of manhood. That I could have dealt with, if my mission for the day was to pick up a girl, but it wasn’t. I was there to keep Dawn alive until we could evacuate her safely. The threat was all around, except I saw it as a Shooter would have, not a Trashman. The world hadn’t changed but my understanding of it had, and I hadn’t yet fully processed that change. I was still believing what I saw and thinking in three dimensions.

  Fat naked guys didn’t have anywhere to hide a weapon, right? So I thought. The re-programming of my mind increased my thought processes by an order of magnitude, and I was feeling arrogant in my new-found power. I forgot that it was my first day on the job again, with a brand-new learning curve, and that there was a helluva lot more to being a Trashman than a Shooter.

  The chair I selected stood on the concrete apron of an infinity pool some 30 yards from the surf. It was not a recliner. I wanted firm footing in case of trouble. Nathan settled down by my side and a waiter wasted no time taking my drink order. He didn’t blink an eye when I ordered a Porterhouse, blood rare.

  “You want fries with that?” I asked Nathan.

  He barked again.

  “With fries,” I told the waiter. If he objected to my dog gobbling up a cut of beef most Jamaicans would never eat in their entire life, he didn’t say so. There was nothing fair about it, and if I could have waved a magic wand and dropped a side of beef on every hard-working Jamaican’s dinner table, I would have. But I couldn’t, and not eating the steak wouldn’t change that. All I could do was tip well so he could buy his kid a pair of shoes.

  I still wore my travel clothes because I didn’t want to give up the carefully arranged weapons they hid. In addition to the two Sigs in shoulder holsters, I had two Kahr P380s strapped to the front of my thighs, unnoticed because of a carefully tailored fold of extra cloth, two graphite mini-knives with three-inch blades in holsters worn inside my belt, and two Ka-Bars strapped to each calf and held up by connectors also attached to my belt. Just for good measure I added a pair of Smith &Wesson M&P Shields in ankle holsters. Even I was impressed that I didn’t clink when I walked, but as I was about to find out that I needed every bit of that firepower.

  Nathan had licked his plate clean and was holding the steak bone between his paws gnawing happily while I was sipping my second virgin mojito when Dawn spotted me. She stood knee deep in the surf, about 40 feet from where I sat. The surprise on her face betrayed a deeper shock, which most people would have missed. Even at such a distance, though, I saw it. She had never expected to see me again.

  Chapter 19

  Dawn ran toward me wearing a big fake smile, sand covering her back and butt, but not the back of her thighs, the water had washed it away. If she was worried about my fate it wasn’t enough to interrupt her tanning schedule. I still loved her and hated myself for doing so because I now understood the manipulation behind why I felt that way. Her aura confused me, though. It was still blue, only now with streaks of red. What the hell did that mean?

  “Look who isn’t dead!” she said, bouncing up wearing nothing and all the more attractive because of it. Few people can pull off full nudity without displa
ying at least a few flaws, but Dawn was one of them.

  Or was she, I suddenly wondered. Was this more magic? I couldn’t answer that, not yet. At least I knew enough now to ask the question though.

  “And who is this?” she said, crouching and reaching out to scratch Nathan behind the ears.

  “Watch it,” I said. “He’s very protective of me.”

  Instead, Nathan rolled over on his back. She giggled, and it was like I was back in 7th grade trying to work up the courage to ask Regina Tomasino to meet me at McDonald’s after school.

  “He’s a typical male. Hey, we’re about to play drunk dodgeball,” Dawn said, standing up again, “take off your clothes and join us.”

  Not a word about Quantrill or his dead buddies or the disgusted look she gave me at seeing the bloody aftermath of our fight. Nothing about lurking Shooters or contracts or mutually assured destruction, only a bubbly charade designed to impress…who? I didn’t know.

  I had never heard of drunk dodgeball, and while at any other time I would have been more than happy to frolic in some hedonistic playtime, right then I was on the clock. When I declined, she bounded off and I leaned over where Nathan had gone back to grinding his bone.

  “Traitor,” I said.

  He growled.

  One Shot found the seat next to me. I’d seen him when I first got there. He’s hard to miss anywhere, but especially when you’re as big as him and grossly overdressed on a beach full of naked people. I was careful not to show any recognition, like it was a coincidence we both wore dark, hand-tailored suits under the afternoon Jamaican sun. Sipping the virgin mojito, I watched the beach full of people and concentrated on their auras. Red was everywhere.

  Every fiber of my body jangled with danger alarms. Upwards of 100 people cavorted within my sight for several hundred yards in both directions, and red auras surrounded the majority of them. The fat, bald men glowed the brightest red, and that’s when I noticed they all stood about the same height, had the same length arms and legs, and the same size stomachs and heads. I counted at least 30 of them.

  “The fat guys are tangoes,” I said in a low voice that I doubted could be heard over the squawk of gulls, the swoosh of the waves, and general yelling.

  “No shit.”

  The early afternoon sun had nowhere to hide in the clear sky, and sweat trickled out of my scalp, down my neck and forehead into my T-shirt beneath my pink Oxford button-down. Hundreds of identical shirts could be found in the Grove at Oxford, Mississippi in the hours leading up to an Ole Miss football game, or on Wall Street among the middle-aged men trying to appear ten years younger than their actual age. Mine, however, wasn’t cotton, it was another secret DARPA invention. Made from super-thin strands of titanium coated with graphene, they could stop a bullet as well or better than Kevlar, albeit with potentially serious damage to the body around the impact point. Regardless, a broken bone beat having a bullet bouncing around your vital organs every time. Unfortunately, it was not a fabric that wicked away sweat.

  Dawn had drifted away to my left, about twenty feet out into the water. The fat men, who by now I assumed all worked for the Red Nail, migrated with her. I held back. I was there to protect her and recruit her, maybe even sleep with her, but not to initiate open war with a gang that blurred the line between criminals and terrorists.

  The instant I sat down, however, I observed the world with a clarity I’d never before known. In my mind’s eye, I could see events unfolding that had not yet happened and knew without the slightest doubt that in the next few minutes a lot of people were going to die.

  The movements of the people on the beach seemed choreographed in a manner I couldn’t figure out. A tall woman with large breasts, close-cut blonde hair, and rippling muscles looked our way for an instant—long enough for me to see a green aura around her—and followed Dawn through the crowd. A few men left the beach and sat in empty chairs to each side of One Shot and me. The warnings in my mind were like air raid sirens. We were seconds from being attacked.

  Protecting Dawn was our primary responsibility, but if we moved closer it would only draw attention her way. If we tried to hustle her away, it would certainly kick off a fight in which she might be wounded or killed. On the other hand, the fact they hadn’t already initiated combat meant they weren’t yet ready, and that was the time to strike. One Shot sensed it, too.

  “What’s on your mind these days?” he said.

  He was asking for ideas on how to proceed.

  “You remember Ripper Valley, Sarge?” I said, no longer concerned with concealing our identities. They knew exactly who we were.

  “Fun times,” he said. “We gonna do it again soon?”

  We turned and faced each other. Time was short, but no star manifested itself on his cheek, which meant he was going purely by combat instincts. He thought we were about to be attacked, whereas I knew it.

  “How about now? This time I go first.” He understood my meaning: Follow my lead, I know what the hell’s going on.

  “Seems fair.”

  “Exfil to POA?” I said. Exfiltration to point of arrival?

  “KEA and GITFOH.” Kill ’em all and git the fuck outa here.

  He wore sunglasses, but I didn’t need to see his eyes; we both knew what to do. We’d done it before in a place we dubbed Ripper Valley, somewhere in Northeaster Iran. He gave a curt nod, which meant whenever you’re ready.

  “Once more then, for old time’s sake?” I said.

  “Why the fuck not?”

  Most melee fights take longer to tell than to happen, because everything is more or less simultaneous. Such combat is reflexive, with little time for considered decisions, and that is why training is so important. But a prolonged melee evolves into a battle if it drags on too long, and one side usually loses because it runs out of resources to pour into the fight. My former sergeant and I knew those truths from hard experience, which is why we retained the initiative by choosing the moment to begin the killing.

  One Shot had the hard part, being right-handed. Leaping to his feet with the agility of a gymnast, he twisted to his right, drew his LEI-issued P320 from a holster between his shoulder blades, and squeezed off two rounds at the man to my right. I felt something wet and sticky spatter the back of my head but didn’t have time to worry about it. One Shot’s back was exposed to the two men to his left, and they were my business.

  A quarter second behind his move, in one motion, I drew my upgraded P320 from my shoulder holster and fired two rounds, too fast to distinguish one report from another. The pistol’s minimal recoil barely moved my wrist. As it always did, my mind had calculated the firing angles and sent orders to my body at the speed of thought. I never miss. And that is why, in my arrogance, this time I did.

  The first round I aimed at the man on One Shot’s immediate left, then I shifted three inches in front of his nose to fire at the other guy further down. Both men should have died without knowing I’d even drawn a weapon, except both bullets hit the first man in the head, blowing it up like a watermelon hit by a baseball bat. The second round, the one that should have zipped past the first man’s face, instead altered its trajectory, and struck him under the eye.

  I’d forgotten that EXACTO rounds home on the closest target in their flight path, and three inches wasn’t enough clearance for the second bullet to distinguish another target. It interpreted the variance as a miss and corrected course. Only in a brief glance did I see the dead man’s scaly, reptilian face with a long Red Nail tattooed between the eyes. Then everything devolved into a collage of half-glimpsed images and reactions, like a Leroy Nieman painting.

  The second lizard-man—Slivveron is what Ribaldo called them—moved with a speed even I couldn’t match. Before I could shift my aim again, maybe one and a half seconds after squeezing off the first two rounds, he’d leveled a .357 Magnum at my head. I couldn’t outrace a bullet but shifted targets, anyway, hoping to at least take him with me. Too late. He pulled back on the trigger. I fir
ed, too. Maybe the EXACTO round would kill him after I was dead.

  But even as the .357 roared with ignition of the big bullet’s powder, a blur of black and tan fur struck him and knocked his gun hand off kilter to my left, straight toward the ruined head of the man I’d already shot. The bullet smashed whatever was left of the dead man’s skull, spraying me with clots of brains and blood. My own EXACTO round sped past Nathan’s snarling mouth, his teeth sunk deep into the Slivveron’s shooting hand. I guessed it must have already locked onto the creature as its target before Nathan grabbed him. I had aimed for the spot between its wide-set nostrils and the impact blew off most of its face.

  Less panic swept the beach than might be expected, because the Red Nail had put a lot of operatives in play, more even than I’d thought. Like a beach scene in a shark movie, people screamed and ran around like their hair was on fire. Somebody screamed “gun, gun,” as if all of the gunshots weren’t enough of a clue. That went on for maybe five seconds before the real fight began.

  Bodies fell as bullets struck targets or people dug holes in the sand, like we’d done with Afghan moon dust when Taliban mortars opened up on us. Puffs of misty blood indicated bullets finding flesh. One adorably pudgy woman of perhaps 25 keeled over sideways with blood spurting from a ruptured carotid artery. A fat man who wasn’t one of the Slivverons stumbled into another guy who was and got a bullet in the groin for it. The volleyball rolled down the beach toward the water, hissing air from a hole the size of a 9mm round.