The Trashman Read online

  Arms still folded and his face unreadable behind the shades, One Shot stood beside the car without moving. Unsure exactly what to do I joined him.

  “Safe travels, my ass,” he said without glancing at me. Then he stalked around the car’s front, brushing past the still-bewildered constable standing there, and slid into the front passenger seat. The driver rolled down his window and One Shot called to me from inside. “If you’d rather go with the cops, just say so.” Seeing no other course that didn’t end with my immediate arrest, I got in behind the driver and reveled in the chill blast from inside.

  Chapter 7

  From a tourist’s standpoint, Jamaica was at its best when you could afford a five-star all-inclusive resort with gourmet food and top brand liquor, where the most strenuous part of your day was leaving your recliner under an umbrella on the beach to use the restroom and having an attendant spritz you with rosewater when you returned. There are worse ways to spend your time while waiting for somebody to sever your carotid artery. But although Jamaica was and is a tropical paradise for those with enough money, there is one thing beyond your control: it’s always hot and humid.

  If you don’t like to sweat, then you can stay inside for your whole visit and check your email, or play the newest game craze on your phone, and then tell everybody what a great time you had on the vacation it took you four years to save for. Me, I preferred going where the scantily clad girls hung out, but if somebody else didn’t, it was their money and who was I to tell them how to waste it? What I did not come to Jamaica for, however, was an impromptu, barefoot 400-yard sprint on a mostly empty stomach while being chased by armed men who wanted to ask me questions about a dead man-like creature I didn’t kill. My lightweight sleeveless T-shirt with a marlin on the front couldn’t have been more soaked if I’d worn it while swimming.

  When I slid into the limo’s burnished leather backseat, I felt like I’d sat on a block of ice inside a meat locker. Steam rose from my overheated body and the blasting AC reminded me of running to and from a Finnish sauna in the deep snows of February. The driver took a right out of the gate onto North Coast Highway without a word to me. As we passed the parked constable cars, One Shot didn’t so much as twitch. Holding his hand down at his side, one of the younger cops gave us the finger. I didn’t blame him.

  Shivering in the back seat, I asked a couple of times about what was going on, but only after we were west of Trelawny did One Shot even acknowledge I was in the car. By then, the shirt was stuck to my back with the salt from my own dried sweat.

  “We are meeting a corporate jet at Sangster International.”

  I wasn’t surprised that he’d lied to the cop. I took a minute to digest that and then got right to the heart of the matter.

  “Is this still part of the dream?”

  Bandying words wasn’t One Shot’s style; he was direct and generally humorless.

  “It’s not a dream and never was.”

  “C’mon Sarge, those things back there, you’re telling me they’re real? I don’t think so.”

  “I’m not telling you anything, I’m carrying out a mission assigned to me, nothing more.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone wants to see you.”

  “Suddenly I’m a popular guy. Could you be a little more specific?”

  “No.”

  It didn’t make sense. My first instinct screamed warnings about this being part of an elaborate hit, maybe pushing me out the emergency exit over Cuba or something, but that theory fell apart at the first touch of logic; I wasn’t that important. Not only that, but legitimate contracts could have taken me out with a simple bullet, knife, or drowning. Killing people was easy when you didn’t have to hide what you were doing. To top it off, One Shot was green.

  “Gimme something, man, for old time’s sake if nothing else. We were in the room together. Just tell me where we’re headed, and I don’t mean the airport. In general, it doesn’t even need to be a city, or even a state.”

  “No.”

  “What about a direction?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t tell me why, either, I’m guessing?”

  “No.”

  “Or who?”

  “Hell no.”

  “We’re close to an hour from the airport, and I can keep this up the whole way.”

  He made a pretense of thinking about it. “Somebody wants to see you,” he said again.

  Aside from Quantrill saying that exact same phrase, it sounded familiar…had I read that in a book? I thought maybe I had.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all you get.”

  While it doesn’t sound like much, it was more than he’d intended to give me. Having no skills of deception, he didn’t always recognize them in others. Whoever wanted to see me obviously had major clout at LEI. How did I know that? First, I had no doubt now that the contracts on my life had all been pulled, at least temporarily, which explained my continued existence. Nobody short of—hell I didn’t know of anybody who could do that. Second, the company sent a corporate jet to get me? Again, that wasn’t something a middle manager could arrange, it took serious juice. I was an original LifeEnder and I’d never even seen a corporate jet. And third, whoever had summoned me had sent a Class A asset to fetch me, One Shot, who, as I’d seen, held a First Class License to Kill. That he just happened to both save my ass and use a trump card that likely burned any of his possible future operations in Jamaica, couldn’t have been a coincidence, since that was a heavy price. So while I had no idea who had gone to so much trouble to see me or where they were or what they wanted with a disgraced former Shooter, the one thing I did know was the level of power they commanded.

  Since Jamaicans drive on the left, like most former British colonies, I was further disoriented when, without warning, the car swerved into oncoming traffic. I hadn’t buckled my shoulder strap, so I flew across the seat into the passenger side door. A split second later it jerked back into the left lane and I wound up on my side. Before I could yell, the driver beat me to it. Staring into the rearview mirror he spewed curse words so fast I couldn’t keep up.

  “What happened?”

  “A dog in the road,” One Shot said, as if a bug had smacked into the windshield.

  “Did you hit it?” I craned around in my seat to look out the back window. A sense of utter panic overwhelmed me. “Where?”

  He continued to stare out the windshield without responding.

  I began to untie the drawstring for my swim trunks.

  “Stop the car!”

  This time he turned, and while I couldn’t see his eyes, I didn’t need to; the slight downturn at the corners of his mouth said it plainly enough, Fuck off.

  “Tell him to stop the car, Sarge,” I said.

  Instead of answering me he turned to face the front again. “Stand down, Corporal.”

  The tone was in his sternest sergeant’s command voice, but we weren’t mercs anymore, and I didn’t have to follow his orders, so instead of arguing further, I acted. The limo must have been a hastily arranged rental because it lacked the most basic security precaution, a bulletproof glass divider between the front and rear seats. Lifting my butt, I slipped the cord out of the swim trunks’ elastic waist band and threw it around the driver’s thickly muscled neck. Crossing my hands, I tightened the cord. Made from a nylon blend it cut into my palms and slipped, but other than reaching around and threatening to stick my fingers into his eyes it was all I had. The problem with doing that was how fast it could go south, and contrary to appearances I wasn’t in a hurry to die in a fiery limo tumbling down a Jamaican highway.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  The driver turned to One Shot, showing no ill effects from my improvised garrote, and then turned back to me. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know what was going on behind the green lenses.

  “It’s a fucking dog, Steed,” One Shot said.

  “You don’t go to the movies much, do you?”

&n
bsp; “I’ve seen the fucking movie a dozen times; we all have. But I didn’t steal your car and that’s not your dog. Now let it go before you irritate Carlos.”

  “I’ll kill us all if he doesn’t stop this car.”

  “Unless you’ve got a Ka-Bar up your ass, I don’t think so. Not with that string anyway.”

  He had a point. The driver’s neck was about the same thickness and density as a 20-year-old pin oak, and my strangulation threat had the same effect as trying to saw down such a tree with a butter knife. Defeated, I unwound the cord and was considering the fingers-in-the eyes thing when One Shot did something I didn’t expect.

  “Turn around,” he instructed Carlos. “See if you can find the goddamned dog.”

  Cars, tour buses, and ramshackle, homemade internal combustion vehicles of every imaginable shape and size, whizzed and/or rattled past the limo until Carlos whipped a U-turn just ahead of a weaving tractor trailer whose driver must have had a first-class source for ganja. We’d gone further than I thought past where Carlos had brushed the dog, a mile or more, and he blocked traffic by slowing until I spotted it lying in some weeds across the highway. He parked on the shoulder, partially blocking the road and causing a fast backup of angry Jamaicans shaking fists and leaning on their horns.

  I got out to check on the dog, but some dipshit in a silver Mercedes chose that moment to pull around the limo and running me over in the process didn’t seem to be a concern. A last second leap backward saved me from getting a fender to the knees, but oncoming traffic prevented the Mercedes from getting around. Worse, traffic going the other way slowed down because it was partway into the opposing lane.

  That left the asshole driver’s black-tinted window right in front of me. I motioned for him to back up. Instead he put the window down enough for me to see a white-skinned middle finger aimed my way. My impulse was to twist if off, but that was a sucker play; without a gun he’d simply roll up the window and drive away, dragging me with him. I searched the ground for a rock or some other weapon, until One Shot made that unnecessary. In my peripheral vision I saw the barrel of a huge handgun pointed at the car’s windshield.

  It was a fifty-caliber Desert Eagle, which looked small in One Shot’s fist, the signature weapon of an Army general from my favorite series of books. I always thought it a ridiculous firearm for any serious purpose, especially wearing two of them in crisscross shoulder holsters like the fictional general, but it sure was fun to visualize those huge slugs ripping open some bad guy. Now I was pretty happy to see one in real life. The driver of the Mercedes didn’t share my enthusiasm for oversized weaponry and backed up so fast he bumped an old farm truck that was next in line.

  One Shot didn’t bother hiding the cannon once he’d pulled it, which stopped all traffic in both directions. That was overplaying his hand, since LEI credentials only let you kill people you were hired to kill while in Jamaica, not shut down the only highway on the north coast. Somebody had to have already called the constables, maybe even somebody important enough for them to respond, so I hurried across the pavement and found the dog lying in the weeds.

  He was a maga, the Jamaican term for a street dog, a mongrel, and so thin from hunger his spine stuck out. I expected him to be dead or dying from getting hit by the limo and I feared I might have to put him out of his misery. I’ve got this thing about seeing animals suffer, especially dogs; I can’t stand it. Humans generally get what they deserve, but given half a chance, a dog wants nothing more than to hang around and chew up your socks, not because they don’t like you but because they do. Nothing smells more like you than your socks.

  The dog didn’t appear to be injured though, just starved and covered in ticks. I touched his nose, and he licked my finger, turning one brown eye toward me as if asking me for just a little nibble of something to eat. Without thinking I scooped him out of the dirt, braced my knees, and stood, groaning; even starving he wasn’t small. I staggered across the pavement, more from his awkward size and the heat of the asphalt on my bare feet than from his weight. Despite One Shot still wielding his Desert Eagle, the Mercedes driver laid on his horn as I passed in front, obviously pissed that I’d delayed him over for some half-dead mutt. Others joined in, and pretty soon it sounded like rush hour in Mumbai. Carlos had opened the rear passenger side door and after I laid the dog on the seat, I stalked back to One Shot and asked for the pistol.

  “If you kill him, I can’t get you out of it this time,” he said, handing me the gun. I knew he had another one. Nobody relies on a Desert Eagle as their primary weapon to shoot somebody; they rely on it to prevent needing to shoot somebody, because getting hit by such a massive round is like having a nail driven into your body with a sledgehammer.

  I’ve shot damned near every weapon that shoots in my life, whether the ammunition was bullets, arrows, quarrels, and even prototype laser rifles, but I’d never before so much as picked up a .50-caliber pistol of any variety, much less an Eagle. It was lighter than I’d expected and it had a nice balance for what amounted to a handheld cannon. I also never miss…ever.

  “Ammo load?” I said. The Mercedes probably had bulletproof glass. In the Caribbean, such high-profile cars often did, and if the magazine contained hollow points I’d need to rethink where to shoot.

  One Shot smiled, something I’d only seen him do once before. “Custom API,” he said. Armor-piercing incendiary…fuck yeah!

  “I’m not gonna kill him,” I said. “Just teach him some manners.”

  “It’s no sweat off my balls either way; I only said you’re on your own this time. Jamaican cops show up again, I can’t save you. But whatever you’re gonna do hurry up, I’m already gonna get my ass chewed for being late.”

  Morning sunlight gleamed off the chrome barrel as I hefted the gun like Dirty Harry about to blow away some punk who interrupted his lunch. The honking stopped, not just from the Mercedes but for several cars back in the line. I really wanted to fuck with him a while, maybe shoot out all four tires and put another round through the radiator. What stopped me was the dog. He needed immediate attention, so instead I stalked up to the driver’s window, aimed the pistol where I thought his head might be, and jerked it back to simulate recoil. Then I walked back to the limo, handed One Shot his Eagle, and slid into the backseat. With any luck, Mercedes Man was now sitting in a puddle of his own making.

  I laid the dog’s head in my lap and stroked his muzzle. Bloated ticks stuck out all over his back and stomach, but I didn’t dare pick them off for fear of leaving the heads in his body. Carlos pulled another U-turn as sirens wailed in the distance and headed for Montego Bay at twice the speed limit. To my surprise, One Shot ordered Carlos to find a vet that was open and could treat the dog immediately with a flea and tick bath, food, and a fast exam.

  “How come, Sarge?”

  He knew what I meant: Why help me save one half-dead stray? But although he was the size of a Pro Bowl defensive end, One Shot had more brains than brawn. People often underestimated his intelligence to their detriment. He realized that I had already put two and two together about my new-found importance and knew that I had leverage. Because killing whoever the guy was wearing the lizard costume back at the resort was one thing, while dragging me off to wherever I was going was quite another. LEI might now want me eliminated quietly for some reason, or maybe they decided that I should be tortured first. It wasn’t usually their style to do that sort of thing, but who could really say for certain? Or maybe there was a third choice I didn’t know about.

  And if they wanted me tortured, then sending me to a Jamaican jail cell for ten or twenty years might be a worse fate than killing me outright, and yet there I was. Then, allowing me to rescue the dog, One Shot handing me a loaded gun—at least, I assumed it was loaded—and now heading to a vet instead of straight to the waiting LEI jet, none of that added up, ergo, something else was happening. Something which I wasn’t aware of, but everything indicated they wanted me alive for some reason, and that gave me eno
ugh leverage for One Shot to humor me.

  Option three it was then.

  I forgot I’d asked him a question until he answered.

  “The brickyard,” he said. “That’s why.”

  To that I could only nod. The brickyard. Now I understood.

  Chapter 8

  We pulled off the main highway, the A1, into a dilapidated neighborhood on the first hillside south of the ocean and east of Montego Bay. The vet clinic was a white clapboard building with a partially rusted out sheet metal roof. My feet crunched over the crushed coral path and up two bowed wooden steps as I carried the dog. Inside I didn’t see any diplomas on the walls, but most Jamaicans I’ve met have bigger problems to worry about than de-worming their labradoodle. I’m not sure if the white-haired old man who examined my dog had even been to veterinary school.

  “Rabies test don’t come cheap,” he said when I came through the front door carrying the dog. “Where he bite you, mon?”

  Sitting in a wicker rocker with a cigarette between his fingers, his eyes looked like road maps, but whether from insomnia or rum I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. I laid the dog atop a table of rough wood covered with dark stains.

  “Didn’t Carlos call you?”

  “Oh, you’re that man. You want me to put him down?”

  Based on his tone, he sounded pretty irritated at having his morning interrupted for something as trivial as killing a stray mutt, and if I’d said yes I think he would have bludgeoned the dog with a hammer and been done with it. Very few things make me want to kill somebody without getting paid to do it, but indifference to the pain of animals was high on my list, only topped by inflicting said pain.