by DL Barbur
I listened for the sound of a door opening as I kept walking down the street. I was a big guy, 6’3”, and very proudly down to 230 pounds with my new exercise regimen, but the kid behind the driver’s seat looked like he would be willing to have a go at me. In some ways that would have made things easier.
Nobody got out, but they didn’t leave either.
“Did you get the plate?” I said under my breath.
I wasn’t just talking to myself. I had one of those phone headsets I hated so much stuck in my ear. I was also wearing a wireless camera clipped to the lapel of my jacket.
“Got it, Dent,” Casey said in my ear. After the events of six months ago, she was one of my few remaining friends, not that I’d had that many to start with. She’d been a computer forensics and security consultant for the Portland Police Bureau. I’d rescued her from the back of a van before she could be loaded on an airplane and tossed out over the Pacific Ocean. These days we were strictly platonic roommates and business partners.
“I’m running it now,” Casey continued. “I got some good frames of their faces too. In a few more minutes, it’s going to be too dark for that camera to be much good. It’s too small to have much night vision capability.”
I’d memorized the plate number, just in case, a habit as natural as breathing for somebody who’d been a cop as long as I had. As I walked back to my SUV, I thought about what I’d seen.
During my brief walk, I’d learned a couple of things about the guys in the car. Human trafficking victims in the Portland metro area were pretty evenly split between people who had been born in the US, and people born in other countries. Most of the latter came from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Central America. I was reasonably sure the guys in the BMW were from Eastern Europe, and I was absolutely convinced they weren’t professional operatives.
The trafficking ring I’d broken up last fall had been run by rogue American intelligence contractors. They were professionals. They would have never staked out a house in plain view, in a car that didn’t fit the neighborhood. And if an obviously switched on guy walked by and gave them the stink eye, they would have calmly started up their vehicle and driven away.
Nope. These guys were thugs. They probably worked for one of the many Eastern European organized crime outfits that had been setting up shop in the Pacific Northwest since 9/11, when we started ignoring everything but Middle Eastern terrorists. When I’d been in law enforcement, the European gangs had been incredibly opaque to us. We had zero informants on the inside, and very little insight into how they worked.
In some ways, I was relieved. Last fall’s adventures had ended with my best friend dead, me injured and unemployed, and lots of unfinished business left hanging. I’d been looking over my shoulder for six months, waiting for my enemies to make a play for me. Every day that it didn’t happen, my paranoia grew a little stronger.
I was carrying a hot little ball of anger in my belly, and every day that got a little bigger. I’d been a good cop. I’d worked long hours, never had a family, and had damn near died on a couple of occasions, all in the name of protecting innocent people. All that had been taken from me.
I knew the guys in the BMW likely didn’t have anything to do with the events of six months ago, but they still represented something I had hated since my first fight in grade school: people with power that bullied and abused those weaker and smaller than them.
I stopped at the front and rear bumpers of my SUV so I could pop the license plates off. They were held on by powerful rare earth magnets. They held the plates on but made it quick to take them off if I wanted.
I knew what I was about to do was probably stupid, but I didn’t particularly care.
“The car is registered to a car lot on 82nd Avenue in Portland,” Casey’s voice said in my ear. “The lot is owned by a guy named Zakarova? Sounds Russian to me. Maybe Ukrainian? I’ll do some checking. I’m still running the faces through recognition software.”
“That’s awesome, Case. Thanks,” I said as I slid behind the wheel. I disconnected the wireless camera from my lapel and put it in the glove compartment.
“Hey. I just lost the video feed. Everything ok?”
“I turned it off,” I said as I started the SUV.
“You want to let me in on the plan here, Dent?” Casey was starting to sound a little irritated.
“I’m going to go have a little chat with them,” I said, and killed the connection. I put the phone and the headset in the passenger seat. I didn’t want the audio of what was about to happen to broadcast over a cell phone line. I’d learned to be very paranoid about cell phones these last few months.
I drove the couple blocks pretty much on auto-pilot, not really thinking about much. The BMW was still there.
It was late spring and the sunset later every day. Right now it was taking a brilliant red plunge into the west, right into the eyes of the two guys in the BMW. Poor planning on their part. Maybe it would work to my advantage.
I slowed down and pulled way over to the right as I passed the BMW, leaving only a fraction of an inch between my passenger side mirror and the side of their car. Then I cut over in front of them, rolled forward until I was parallel to the curb, and backed up, so close you could have maybe fit a sheet of paper between the two bumpers, but maybe not. I thought about actually bumping into them, just to spice things up a little bit, but I didn’t want any paint transfer from their car to mine.
I threw the SUV into park and was out of it before it even rocked back into a complete stop. As I got out I slid two items out of my pockets. Neither of them was a gun. I hoped I wasn’t about to regret that. I left the SUV running and the door open.
There was a reason I’d parked so close, other than to violate the unconscious space bubble that men tended to project around their cars. To run me over, the driver would have to back up quite a ways, leaving me more time to react. I didn’t need to worry though, the engine wasn’t even running. Amateurs.
I trotted forward, stopped just before the crease where the driver’s door met the front fender. I could see everyone’s hands this way. I gave the younger guy a hard look through the windshield and he couldn’t get the window down fast enough. The smell of harsh tobacco and the sound of some kind of Euro-pop music wafted out.
“Get the fuck away from my car,” he said. English was clearly his second language. He sounded like the villain from a bad 80’s action movie. Apparently, Casey had been right.
“You need to leave the girls alone.”
He smirked. “The girls are our property. We will take back what is ours.”
Well, that confirmed my guess that they weren’t in the neighborhood looking at real estate.
“Your property?” I jerked my chin at the older guy in the passenger seat. “Are you his property? Does he pay you to suck his dick, or do you do it for free?”
I was standing far enough forward that the door didn’t quite smack me in the knees when he flung it open. I was in the pocket of space forward of the door, so he had to get out, step around the door, and then step back in towards me. He was yelling in some other language as he came. I guessed he wasn’t saying nice things.
Behind my right thigh, I was holding an 8” flat sap. It was made of a piece of spring steel and a lead weight, all covered with four layers of leather. I’d bought two, one to practice with, and one to carry. I liked to burn off steam in the garage by cracking two by four pieces of lumber with the practice sap.
He came at me and I stepped a little to his left, and brought the sap up and round, pivoting my hips and driving with my knees and ankles. It connected right with a dull sounding crack, above his jawline, just below his cheekbone. He dropped instantly. Fat droplets of blood hit the side window of the open car door and I saw a tooth fragment ping off the windshield.
I was curious about what the other guy would do. He could get out and run, slide over into the driver’s seat, pull out a gun and shoot me, or join in the fist fight. I thought the gun was
a low probability choice. Most of these guys didn’t pack iron except when they were out hunting somebody.
He opened the passenger door and was pulling himself out of the low slung little car when I turned to meet his gaze. He snarled something to me in a language I didn’t understand.
I brought up my left hand. I was holding a small, but powerful flashlight. You could get on the internet and read all about lumens, candelas, color spectrum, and battery discharge rates, but what I really understood was the thing was ridiculously bright. I’d shined it into the bathroom mirror once, and had a big purple blotch in my vision for an hour like I’d looked at the sun.
I mashed down the button with my thumb and managed to get him right in the eyes.
“Gah!” he said and flung his left arm up to cover his face. Perfect. Now I could see both hands. His left was over his face and the right was hanging onto the door frame. If there was a gun in play, it was either still tucked away on his body, or in the car.
The first guy was on the ground making snoring, gasping noises. I jumped up on the hood of the BMW, hopefully denting the hell out of it, and ran across it. I dropped down in the grass on the other side and brought the thin edge of the sap down on the older guy’s right hand, smashing it between the sap and the door frame. He gave a surprisingly high-pitched yelp, then I backhanded him with the sap where his neck met his shoulder and he dropped onto all fours in the space between the open car door and the car.
Now it was my turn to run around an open car door, only I pushed on it, trying to slam it shut with the guy in between. He gave a grunt.
He was down on both knees and his left hand. His right was a bloody, gnarled mess. I soccer kicked him square in the ass, driving his head forward into the door. That seemed to stun him for a second, so I took a pause to pocket the flashlight and sap, then looked around. The street was quiet. Like most American neighborhoods, everybody was inside, probably looking at one screen or another.
The guy was making sputtering sounds. His hand was surprisingly deformed. I looked at the shifter in the car. Good. It was an automatic. It would be good if one of them could drive the car away. I kicked him in the ass again, maybe this time getting a little bit of his testicles. He retched and a little vomit hit the pavement in front of him.
I stepped on the back of his leg, right above his heel, with my weight on his Achilles tendon.
“Hold still or you’ll walk funny for life,” I said. I wasn’t exaggerating. 230 pounds coming down on that spot could do some things even a skilled orthopedic surgeon couldn’t fix.
“You are a dead man,” he said through clenched teeth. This guy was my age, mid-forties, maybe a little younger. The gangster lifestyle tended to age people. He was smart enough to know that if I planned to kill him, I would have done it already, so for the moment he was compliant. The younger guy would have kept fighting, which was why I’d knocked him out first.
“Stay away from the girls,” I said.
He spat out some bile. “They are whores. I will turn you into a whore. You will beg me to kill you.” He sounded like an 80’s movie villain’s older brother. They were quite a pair.
The conversation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I let off the pressure on his ankle, then teed off again with another soccer kick. There was a rule of thumb in fighting that said you should never do the same thing more than twice in a row, but this really didn’t count as a fight. This time I made sure to angle my foot a little and blast him good in the balls. He gave a moan and collapsed.
I thought about slamming the door on him again as I walked away, but like I said, one of them needed to be able to drive.
I got behind the wheel of my SUV and drove away. It used to be after a fight, I’d feel shaky and a little wired from the adrenaline dump. Now, I didn’t feel anything. I would have bet good money I had a normal pulse rate. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
After a few random turns, I got on a major arterial road, keeping my eyes open for cops. I thought about what I needed to do. I’d probably left a good sized boot print on the hood of the BMW, so my boots were destined for the dumpster. I didn’t think there was any blood on me, but my jeans and my shirt were dark colored, so it would probably be safest to ditch them too.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d gotten quite good at covering up my crimes.
I pulled over to dial Linda’s number. I hadn’t thought to replace the phone headset and it was illegal to drive and dial a cell phone in Oregon and Washington now.
“Hello, Dent,” Linda answered. “That wasn’t much of a fair fight. There were only two of them.”
Shit.
“You saw that? Did your cameras record it?” I was instantly on guard.
“I watched out the window. The cameras didn’t see it, and if they had, they would have had a memory malfunction just after.”
I was relieved. I trusted Linda not to lie to me. I realized we were talking on unsecured cell phones, so I changed the nature of the conversation quickly.
“I told the two uhhhh… vacuum cleaner salesmen that you had hardwood floors, and not to come back, but they are pretty persistent and will probably come to see you again.”
“Yes!” she said, apparently realizing we shouldn’t be too specific about what she’d just witnessed over the phone. “I’m going to move anyway, to a safer neighborhood.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said, glad she was catching on. “Let me know if you need any help, uh, moving the furniture, or you know, with more salesmen.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you, Dent. You’re a good man.”
With that, she hung up. I was thinking about how she’d called me a good man when, I saw the spot of blood, about the size of a quarter, on the knee of my jeans.
Rose City Renegade Chapter 2
The next day I subjected myself to a couple of different forms of torture. I woke up, forced myself into a pair of sneakers, and ran. Even while jogging, I was armed. I slid a little compact 9mm into a Hill People Gear Runner’s Kit Bag before setting out. The little bag kept the gun accessible on my chest, where I didn’t have to worry about it falling out or pulling my pants down.
I was probably most vulnerable during my morning run. It would be a simple matter for somebody to pull up in a car, or even on a motorcycle, and shoot me. For that matter, they could just get a big truck and run me over. But I ran anyway. The constant, grinding paranoia was getting to me. I was tired of waiting for the attack that never came. Making myself vulnerable was my way of defiantly giving a metaphorical middle finger to my circumstances. You want me? Here I am. Come try me.
During last year’s unpleasantness, my old house had been burned to the ground, courtesy of a firebomb. After the remains had been carted away, I sold the empty lot to a nice couple who had just gotten married. Steve was an architect and Rick was a construction contractor, so they were excited at the possibility of building their own home. I was excited to pocket their check, along with my insurance settlement and get rid of a bad memory.
My new neighborhood was one of the last vestiges of what I considered “Old Portland.” It was solidly working class, something that was going away in Portland, as housing prices rose and working families fled to the suburbs. Compared to my old neighborhood, which was rapidly gentrifying, the cars were older and had fewer bumper stickers. There were more than a few work trucks with ladders and tool boxes attached. I liked it.
Every week, I found that I had to do one more lap around the neighborhood before the burn really kicked in. I’d gotten out of shape and complacent working as a detective. I spent too much time sitting at a desk, writing reports, or sitting in a car, drinking cold coffee and surveilling a suspect. In the last six months, I shed fat and gained muscle. The last time I’d been this fit, I was a 21-year-old Army Ranger. There were quite a few things that hurt now, that hadn’t hurt twenty years ago. My knees, my ankles, and my back kept telling me this wasn’t a good idea. I tuned them out, and just kept running
.
I pounded my way around the last corner, pausing to make sure Mrs. Lee saw me as she pulled her minivan into the street. Up the road Jorge and his brothers were piling into their crew cab pickup truck, heading out for another backbreaking day of hanging drywall. One of the many things I liked about this neighborhood was there was no through traffic. I’d quickly learned the vehicles that belonged here, and any newcomers stuck out like a sore thumb.
The house was nothing special, a rambling two-story bungalow that needed paint and a new roof, but I’d bought it cheap, with cash, which made obscuring the purchase through a shell company LLC and a real estate trust easier. It wasn’t bulletproof security, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for people to find me with a property records search.
I scanned the house before walking in. Everything looked good. Doors, windows, and curtains were as I’d left them. The unobtrusive security cameras didn’t look like they’d been tampered with. The only thing different was Casey’s bike was no longer locked to the front porch rail.
I let myself in, passed through the kitchen for a drink of water on my way to a shower and sighed. One of the kitchen cabinets was left open, and there was a dirty spoon sitting in the sink. I maintained a level of cleanliness and orderliness in the house that even I admitted bordered on the obsessive. My roommate, Casey, wasn’t quite so fastidious, and it grated on me even though I knew it shouldn’t.
After a shower, I checked email on my laptop. I was hoping for work. I was spending much more money than I was taking in. What I got instead made my heart stop.
It was an email from Alex.
Dent. I’ve been thinking and it’s time for me to come home to Portland. I’m finishing things up here and will fly home soon. I’ll let you know when I arrive. Alex.
I sat there for a minute at my desk, still dripping from the shower and watching the blinking cursor on the screen. I’d wanted this for months, but now that it was happening I was apprehensive. Alex and I had connected during the tumultuous events of last fall, become lovers, but she’d watched her father shot down right in front us and had withdrawn. Before I’d known it, she was on a plane to Hawaii. She’d ping-ponged back and forth all over the Pacific and Asia, Japan, Indonesia, back to Hawaii, then to Nepal for a month, then back to Hawaii.