Crime Fiction by Robb White
Darren entered Jeffrey’s motel room whistling his rendition of Hank Thompson’s “Humpty Dumpty Heart.” Jeffrey knew his partner was in a good mood or bad mood by the tunes he whistled, an old prison habit of his former cellie, and whether he bothered to knock on his door. Under normal circumstances, Jeffrey would have been pleased to hear what his younger “business associate” wanted, but at the moment he was being orally serviced by the young junkie whose territory included their motel on South Moreno.
“Oopsie-daisy,” Darren said, stopping short of his announcement when he observed the action on the bed. “Catch you later.”
His abrupt appearance and disappearance from the room was farce comedy to him but to Jeffrey another miserable reminder of his advancing age and declining virility. Both were aggravated by too many stays at the Graybar Hotel in a lifetime of encounters with the law. The last bid at Lompoc convinced him he needed to finish off his solar-panel scheme in a blaze of glory and make an exit to someplace warm for retirement. Darren’s interruption put the kibosh on ongoing transaction between him and the young woman desperate for her next fix. As a result, “later” occurred sooner than Jeffrey desired. Darren knocked on the door minutes later.
“This time you knock?” Jeffrey lamented.
“That the one always walking up and down in front of this dump?”
“I was trying to help her out,” Jeffrey replied without conviction.
“You need to up your game, old timer. I’m taking you to the strip club on Dawson tonight.”
“So what’s the big news? I heard you leaving early.”
The two partners had one car to share. Like Jeffrey, it was feeling its age.
“I nailed down those three accounts still up in the air,” Darren beamed from the bed where he lay with his cowboy boots on, hands behind the bed—his relaxed pose. Jeffrey easily recalled it from their prison days. Darren in the bunk below was his guarantee of safety from the prison wolves who liked clean older men.
“Congratulations. Would you turn down the TV, please? I need to think.”
Darren’s baby face belied his strong-arm tactics with the old people they preyed upon. Once he was allowed in the door, it was like inviting the Devil in. He was aggressive and unrelenting until he had their signatures on the contract.
“The Padres still can’t hit worth a damn.” He thumbed the remote on his stomach. , he watched the girl walk past his window. Jeffrey heard a car out front and went to the window; he pushed the heavy drapes aside. The girl was getting into an Uber. Her cell phone was snugged under her chin while she jabbered away so that she could free her hands to stuff the bills Jeffrey had given her into her purse. Darren watched her retreating backside with regret, admiring the rotation of gluteal muscles on display under the tight fabric of her dress, if you could call that flimsy ass cover a dress. The dress rode up to expose her lime-colored panties when she got in. She caught Darren watching and threw him a smile and the finger before shutting the door.
The story of my life . . .
“While you were getting your knob polished, I scored three more from those old chicks. Signed and sealed.”
Darren liked to brag.
“That makes fifteen—no, sixteen, so far,” Jeffrey said, doing the math in his head. “I’ve got one more this afternoon.”
“I don’t think we should split town this soon,” Darren replied. “Lots more pickings out there.”
Increasingly, Darren was turning back into the alpha male; he wanted to make all the decisions lately: where they ate, which motels they stayed in, what bars they drank in. He was no shotcaller back in the joint where the hard boys ran the place. Jeffrey, however, would never be anything but an older con to be taken advantage of and bossed around.
“I’ve been thinking,” Darren said. “We’re cutting that lawyer of yours in for fifteen percent off the top, right. He goes to court, we still pay his fee, billable hours, whatever these lawyer crooks charge, right. He’s eating into too much profit.”
Years ago, an older mentor of Jeffrey had taught him never to cut corners in the important areas, such as a lawyer capable of keeping him on the outside rather than inside where playing don’t-drop-the-soap in the shower.
“We can talk about it,” he said diplomatically.
“You talk to Enrique yet? He won’t say anything to me. Just you, he says, that punk.”
Enrique was their factory boss in Tijuana. His ragtag crew of employees constructed the solar panels out of aluminum frames, glass panes, and chicken wire, everything patched together with silicon solar cells bought from inferior manufacturers. Enrique told him they couldn’t warm a bowl of guiso de pollo, chicken stew, with a futball field of these defective panels.
“Yes,” Jeffrey replied. “Yesterday. Enrique told me they got run out of their maquila and he’s looking for a new place to set up shop. It’ll delay deliveries.”
Tijuana had no shortage of abandoned maquiladoras standing idle after the boom of duty-free factories packed with cheap labor subsided in the last decade. The bigger problem was the outraged families of their victims, once they discovered that their loved one, often a dementia sufferer living alone, had signed a twenty-five-year contract that would gut their estates. According to Jeffrey’s lawyer, the contract he drew up was solid gold. In his words, “tighter than a tick’s asshole,” and would stand up to any fraud claim. The minute their lawyer in his posh office in San Diego got a whiff of the Justice Department sniffing around, Jeffrey would order him to put Del Sol Solar LLC into bankruptcy. Whenever he’d felt heat in the past, Jeffrey absconded to greener pastures and a new scam in another state. This time, he was determined to tie it off with a big bow and leave town with all the money in their joint account and without his partner.
“You want me to come with you?” Darren asked. “You can watch a pro at work.”
“No, thanks.”
“Go get ‘em tiger. Tell her the grid is going down. Get her to sign on the dotted.”
Jeffrey’s line to him when they hooked up after Lompoc. Now he was the junior partner. Myra Palomo lived in the same old-age facility as his other three “customers,” although victims was the term one irate family member used to him when he last visited the place. Fortunately, the managing director was amenable to bribes and he had access to all the residents despite the outburst from the last one he signed up in the facility’s rec room. Gerald was concentrating on his modeling clay figure; several others were drawing ga-ga pictures like kindergartners. Gerald in his mismatched socks liked to read his newspaper by the window. The director tipped him off which ones were the dementia sufferers and the ones with sundowner syndrome—a potential gold mine of signatures that would ensure their relatives would be paying out like slot machines until a US Attorney could bring a case, which happened before.
He found Myra in her room when an aide barged in just as she was about to sign the contract. She gave him the fisheye. He was hunched over her, ready to guide her hand on the dotted line if necessary, when the aide shooed him out the door so Myra could have her lunch.
He wasn’t going to lose out to some minimum-wage flunky because she wanted to spoon slop into an old woman’s pie hole and go smoke a joint behind the building. He knew the kind of employees these places hired. If he were a US Marshal, he’d hang out at these old-age facilities and round up half the employees wanted on felony fleeing warrants. Make Employee-of-the-Month every time.
The same aide stood in front of the door when he arrived, almost sprinting down the corridor to intercept him.
“You can’t go in,” she said. “I don’t care how much you paid the director.”
“Oh, is that right? We’ll see about that.”
Jeffrey pivoted, made a beeline for the director’s office. Twenty minutes later, he was two hundred dollars lighter, and the aide was out of a job.
Jeffrey sat in the car in the parking with the contract and Myra’s signature on it. He watched her come outside the employee’s door with the contents of her locker in her arms. “Qué lástima, what a pity,” he said to himself, watching her head to her car.
***
Delores liked the old people. She didn’t mind their incontinence and messes like some of the other aides she’d seen come and go in her fifteen years of employment at Halcyon Rehabilitation. She always prayed to Our Lady of Guadalupe whenever one of her patients didn’t survive bed check at dawn, a time when so many “went to receive their angel wings,” as Delores liked to say to her family at home.
Delores Bérges had a special fondness for Myra Palomo in Room 14. The old woman often talked with great pride in her son, an Army veteran with many medals for bravery.
Back in her house, Delores had a short conversation with Master Sgt. Jake Palomo. She had his private cell phone number his mother gave her for emergencies. This, she reasoned, was definitely an emergency. “That pendejo,” she muttered and crossed herself.
When the call ended, she went immediately to the statue of the Virgin Mother on a small table in the alcove. She asked the Virgin Mother for forgiveness. Delores had dropped out of high school to go to work in one of those factories on the border for low pay at long hours to help her family. She understood from the photos around the room that Myra’s son was more than a soldier doing his duty. Her nephew Javier served in the Special Forces. He told her things about Special Ops Forces in the Middle East she would never have told Myra about what Special Ops soldiers do that would never be reported in any newspaper.
That was why she went to La Virgen to ask for forgiveness. Delores knew full well she had unleashed the dogs of war.
***
“You’re seeing things, Darren.”
“No, man,” Darren said. “I seen that same car before. The clapped-out Honda that just turned at the intersection.”
Darren declined the blunt he wanted to pass him.
“Don’t worry, man. It ain’t like booze. You won’t go limp. I’ll be pounding nails with it by midnight.”
When Darren was high, he liked to reminisce about prison. Jeffrey braced himself for another rendition of how Darren saved him from gang rape.
“You were lucky,” Darren reminded him. “Check kiters like you have it tougher in the joint.”
Darren was completing his seven-year bid for manslaughter, whereas Jeffrey had wound up doing time with the bad boys from maximum, owing to a judge who looked unkindly on his repeated offenses for white-collar crimes and refused to send him to the camp for non-violent offenders.
“Luckier than Myron Tripalty,” Jeffrey said, playing along with him.
Tripalty was the literal butt of Darren’s jokes, a high-school teacher convicted of sex offenses with his students. He was also the victim of a notorious booty pandit from their pod who went on to become a middleweight contender after his release.
“Old Myron got so tired of being D-Rod’s June bug, he slathered himself with shit to keep his bucky from holding on.”
“I heard it was Vaseline.”
“Whatever,” Darren said, laughing. “He got himself committed to the ding wing after we left.”
Jeffrey hated Darren’s prison slang and often cautioned him about his vocabulary when he was out “selling.”
He reminded Darren that the average senior didn’t need to know anything about “spider monkeys,” hard guys doing lots of time like D-Rod Harris, or certain guards, “ducks,” because they were too friendly or the hard noses who’d get an inmate chalked up for small infractions.
“They gave me one hell of a hoe check when I first arrived,” Darren said, referring to the beating four inmates had given him in the yard. “Concussion, sprained wrists, busted knuckles. I pissed blood for a week. I’d like to know the name of the idiot who downgraded that shithole from maximum.”
“Sweet memories of Lompoc,” Jeffrey said, turning glum.
“Here we are.”
Darren turned into the lot of the strip club on Fourteenth.
“Better gates to enter than Lompoc,” Jeffrey grudgingly admitted.
“You mean pussy,” Darren said.
Jeffery sighed. You can’t polish a turd, he reckoned silently. All you can do is roll it back in the gutter, which was precisely what he planned to do to his partner. His gig with these worthless solar panels was by far the best scheme he’d come up with, a real moneymaker that could go on for years. Darren would kill him if he even suspected he was going to do a bunk with the cash. He’d been cheated by an older cousin once back in Chowchilla that way, and he hated his guts ever since. They were in high school. His cousin canvassed their neighborhood for senior citizens and charged them for roof repair and attic insulation, although they did nothing more than slap silver-brite paint around the eaves and soffits. He spent every dime they made that summer. Jeffrey never spoke to him again.
***
Darren had spotted the Honda Civic but he’d missed the tan Camry that ran parallel to them and stayed slightly ahead, guided by the two men in the Honda. On paper, all four were designated a barracks in Fort Hood, Texas, although they hadn’t seen the base in months because of overseas assignments from the Pentagon. All were combat veterans. One was a Green Beret, another a Navy SEAL, a third was an Air Force Air Commando. To a man, they’d have followed Sgt. Palomo through the gates of Hell if he’d asked them. None had spent more than a few months stateside because they were all war junkies and SOF headquarters was happy to provide them exotic places with which to exercise their deadly skills around the globe.
When the sergeant ended the call with his mother’s aide, he called his comrades after booking a flight and leaving instructions with the director about “future visitors.” He delivered his commands to her politely and without once raising his voice. When he left her office, the director realized her hand on her desk was trembling like one of the old people with palsy.
Wallace and Mikkelson were the “Tom and Jerry” of the team, always spatting and arguing over everything from meals to brands of beer. But when things got dicey, they were single-minded, fearless, and so fast to carry out orders that it seemed they were telepathic.
“Sarge, send us inside,” Wallace begged.
“No,” Palomo responded. “You two will draw attention. You’ve got outside surveillance.”
Six-foot-three, bearded Wallace had more tattoos than a Japanese Yakuza. Mikkelson was slender, blond, and looked like a college student. He was the SEAL with a black belt in Bojuka self-defense and an expert in closed-circle fighting.
“He thinks you look like my bitch,” Wallace grumbled. Mikkelson flipped a nonchalant bird at his partner as they headed back to the Honda to set up post in the club’s parking lot.
“Mike, Tom. Inside. Just watch.”
Hardaway and Dwyer pivoted and headed for the club’s entrance. The 250-pound bouncer with the pot belly and blue neck glyph at the door never gave either man a second look, although his chances of surviving a fight with either Dwyer or Hardaway were less than ten percent. Together, the odds were zero.
***
The Mermaid was dark, dingy when they entered. The bar was close enough to the shipyard to adopt the seafarer’s motif, but the air in the place was anything but redolent of ocean breezes. More a combination of warring smells, none were redolent of fragrances that please, such as sweat overlaid with cheap perfume and cheaper cologne.
Jeffrey’s nose was sensitive to must and mold spores, and he suspected this place that Darren had picked out for “R & R” was a petri dish of microbes, some probably deadly. The center space was dominated by a platform with faded outdoor carpeting with a dance pole jutting from its center like a metal straw in a green cocktail. Bingo chairs surrounded the stage; behind them were rows of mismatched tables and plastic chairs with colored seats. Chirpy country-western blared over the speakers and crackled to a halt once a dancer entered from the back room for her set, which involved a lot of eighties glam rock, especially Bon Jovi. Right on cue, “You Give Love a Bad Name” poured out of an improved audio system as a young brunette in a blood-red thong and string bikini top pranced onto the stage and began her routine.
Jeffrey, a veteran of strip clubs, assessed her immediately as a beginner. She never got past basic moves, mostly a repetition of back bends and back hook spins. Her grand finale was the “Hello Sailor,” a wrist-seat move with legs opened wide for the crotch-flash at the male audience. Darren clapped and whistled. He’d come armed with ones, fives, and a fifty-dollar-bill, which he said was “the closer” for either a lap dance or a blowjob out back.
Neither noticed the two nondescript males at the table catty-corner from their position up front where Darren insisted they go.
The dancers that followed were more experienced but not more attractive than the petite brunette who opened the show. She was followed by a dyed-blonde with orange-pitted thighs. Her massive cleavage seemed to balance that flaw out in Darren’s estimation whose whistles of approval climbed the scales as she contorted herself with some difficulty through both beginner and intermediate moves. She ended her set with a Nicki Minaj or Rihanna number—Jeffrey wasn’t sure of pop music nowadays. Her thong rode into the cleft of her sex to expose a fat labial lip peeking through.
“Ha, look, she’s a baldie,” Darren laughed and stuck two fingers into his mouth for another burst of his country-boy whistle that was beginning to irk Jeffrey.
She was followed by a freckled redhead, a pear-shaped black girl, and a woman with acne scars whose body said thirty but whose face said fifty. It was a quarter to midnight by then and Darren was soused on boilermakers and beer, talking a mix of sexualized nonsense and aggressive smack aimed indiscriminately at the males around them. Jeffrey thought his prison bluster increased with his intoxication. He threw a baleful stare at one middle-aged man who got loud with double entendre comments toward the girls on stage.
The current dancer gyrated and played to the crowd by pretending to adjust her bra strap but intentionally dropping the cups over her breasts to expose the ruby areolae.
“Show us your boobs!” the inebriated lout at the table directly behind them urged in a loud voice; he added some floor stomping for a chorus to a second deliberate wardrobe fail.
“What a cockteaser,” Darren muttered into his drink.
Jeffrey mulled over a ruse to get them to leave soon. Food was always an option. The last time they ventured out. He’d been forced to watch Darren consume a plate piled with pancakes drowning in syrup and powdered sugar, four or five greasy eggs, and a variety of burned meats that would result in an overpowering stench through the adjoining vents between their rooms when he evacuated his bowels in the morning. One more reason to pull up stakes.
Jeffrey noticed every male in the place as a potential threat. The two men at the back table looked like ordinary joes—married men out on a toot. The two beers they’d started with had multiplied into four, hardly a blowout. Either they were too cheap to pay the inflated prices the bar charged or they were too stuck in their bourgeois lives to cut loose.
He dismissed the nobodies in their twenty-five-dollar shoes off the rack at Dillard’s and went back to worrying about his soon-to-be ex-partner and how to prevent him from getting into a dust-up with that bruiser of a bouncer. Jeffrey honed his psychological perceptions about people long before prison. He knew Lompoc was in Darren’s past, and he strongly suspected Pelican Bay was in his future.
***
Jeffrey had been up for an hour plotting his escape before Darren started trouble at the Mermaid. By one, the dancers fluttered around the patrons left, hoping to boost their salaries with commissions on expensive drinks—their lemonade or iced tea passing for whiskey, whereas customers paid Johnny Walker Black prices for bottom-shelf Four Roses rotgut.
Darren left the table to take a piss. He’d been negotiating for something more than a drink from the dyed blonde with the big tits and the hatchet face. A couple minutes later, he staggered back to the table holding his left arm and grunting in pain. The skin below his right eye was puffed.
“What happened in there, hon?” Dye Job asked. “Somebody try to proposition you?”
It was meant as a joke but Darren spat curses at her, called her an “old whore,” which brought the big bouncer over in a hurry. They were escorted out, Darren by the triceps, bent over from the pain.
“So tell me what happened last night,” Jeffrey asked when Darren sauntered over, eyes bloodshot, and unshaven, looking like the thug he was back in the joint.
“Fuck me if I know,” he said, holding his elbow. “Some jerk bumped me on the way out. Next thing I know, I’m sitting in a puddle of piss with my arm half-wrenched out of its socket.”
“You all right?”
“No, Jeffrey, I am not all right,” Darren wheezed. Spittle flew out of his mouth. “I want to look for that motherfucker.”
“Forget it, Darren. We don’t need to go looking for trouble. Low profile, remember?”
“All’s I remember is that sonofabitch jumping me in the can.”
Jeffrey was in no doubt as to who bumped whom.
He saw cons chest-bump a new fish in the yard to see if he’ll stand up for himself. Stupid macho bullshit. He decided not to wait for Thursday’s deposits.
“That guy you—that bumped into you. He wasn’t one of those two guys at the back table all night, was he?”
“Yes—no, hell fuckin’ shit, I don’t know! Who cares?”
Jeffrey suddenly realized it wasn’t the cheap shoes and watches about those two quiet men in the corner nursing their beers all night. They wore their wristwatches with the timepiece facing the inside of the wrist. He’d seen it before in a military town when he was running his long-distance phone scam to fleece military wives. Soldiers wore their watches like that. Jeffrey’s paranoia jumped a notch. One kind of soldier in particular: commandos.
“Darren, why don’t you cool your heels while I run some errands. When I get back, we’ll hunt down that prick.”
“What errands, man?”
“That woman in the rehab facility yesterday? I need to go back for the signature,” he lied. “She’s ripe, just needs a tiny push, and she’s in the bag.” He mimed cinching draw strings.
“You told me you got her yesterday.”
“I was about to. We were interrupted just as she had the pen in her hands.”
“You do that. I’ll call an Uber. Maybe that fucko at the door knows something. Then I’m stopping at the sporting goods store. Get me a Louisville slugger.”
“Great idea, Darren. Knock that fool’s brains out of his head.”
“Fuckin-A-plus, man.”
Moron. Forget irony. Sarcasm was airplane talk with Darren—way over his head.
Jeffrey hurriedly packed up his good suit, threw as much of his clothing as he could jam into a suitcase, and grabbed his go-bag from the closet where he kept his laptop. He arranged the room so that Darren would not notice how much of his stuff was missing when he returned. He drove to the bank then to the Greyhound terminal off Main where he put his luggage into a locker before returning to the motel. It was always goosed the pleasure when you left a miserable soul or two in your wake.
Oh shit.
A Honda parked in the back of the L-shaped motel new from this morning. Jeffrey’s stomach lurched. For a terrifying second, he was back in the joint standing in the chow line staring at the muck behind the steamed glass the servers were about to plop onto his tray. He vowed he would never eat another shit-on-a-shingle sandwich.
Cops, maybe feds, some interstate commerce violation he thought he left behind—
He was never sure what might catch up with him. They’d never arrive lights and sirens if it was a federal beef. This was how they’d do it.
He turned the key and opened the door a few inches; his heart hammered in his chest. The room looked the same as it had an hour ago. Everything but that Honda agreed with his baseline normal. He turned on the TV and sat down.
The room came with a dorm-sized fridge. Jeffrey figured he’d crack open a beer, a prop to relax Darren from thinking anything was up. He reached inside for a beer and popped the tab while staring at some Hollywood nitwit on a talk show talking about himself.
His forefinger was sticky. The top of the can had blood on it. He didn’t remember cutting himself. He rolled off the bed and bent down to the fridge, shoving the cans aside. An entire detached ear lay in the back next to a finger. He recognized the cheap silver ring with the fake gemstone. Jeffrey staggered backward. Part of him knew it was too late to run.
Before he could turn around, he stared at the face of the man who came out of the bathroom. He must have been standing behind the shower curtains.
Three more men entered.
“Hello, shitbag,” the man said. He said it like a friendly greeting.
The punch to his jaw that knocked him out was a blur he recalled later from the trunk of the car where he was bundled with Darren—
More accurately, where he was tangled with another person, both of them bound at the ankles and wrist. No kicking the trunk’s door release for escape. The familiar body odor alone told him the unconscious body beside his was his partner.
Jeffrey’s epiphany was like a light going off in the confined space. He never met the man who knocked him out but he knew him. He’d seen him before in the photos in Myra Palomo’s room at the rehab facility. Clean-shaven in dress unform and in camos with a scruffy beard out in some desert. Standing beside a regimental flag or in front of a barracks. Exotic backgrounds mixed with base camps. In some, he was surrounded by grinning soldiers with dark-skinned men in keffiyeh scarves.
“Darren, Darren, wake up!”
He squirmed around to punch the body beside him with his bound fists, but all he got was a guttural moan. He tried to maneuver his torso to see whether Darren’s eyes were open. He saw the blood-crusted scimitar shape of the incision where Darren’s ear had been removed.
He knew instantly what he had to do. He would give Darren up, make him the mastermind of the con on the old bitch. Convince her psycho son to blame Darren. Offer to return the money—no, add a thousand. He could afford it. Jeffrey had an actor’s putty face; he could grin, cry, express sadness or joy in an instant. These bastards had to know he was just a salesman working for a violent ex-con. He began mentally practicing his speech. He mimicked the facial expressions he would need. In the darkened space of the trunk, his sobs became a tonal counterpoint to Darren’s groans.
***
The three-hour drive to the Mojave was uneventful. The temperature in the trunk climbed into the nineties by the time they stopped. The men inside the Honda kept in constant communication with the other vehicle throughout with walkie-talkies. Mikkelson had run the half-marathon Running with the Devil in the Mojave and knew the terrain. The rolling landscape twisted among pinion and juniper trees with a slow-moving lizard lurking beneath a chainfruit cholla plant. These were the only signs of life in a barren landscape a mere half-hour from Fremont Avenue and the Vegas Strip.
They pulled them out, cut the nylon ties of their feet but kept their hands bound. 0Besides Myra’s soldier son, there were the two from the strip club last night and a bearded giant who carried a knapsack. Palomo removed the cloth gag from Darren’s mouth for him to drink and replaced it as soon as Darren began to curse. He attached a leash to Darren’s belt and one to Jeffrey’s. They were off the highway by a couple hundred yards at a higher elevation from the paved Lovell Canyon Road and close to the Highway 160 junction. It was about ten degrees cooler than the Las Vegas Valley below but building toward a hundred degrees by midafternoon. From this distance, cars passing would consider them a group of desert hikers.
“This is a stun gun,” Palomo said, holding it in front of Jeffrey’s face. He pressed the trigger. The air crackled around the jagged blue arc between the prongs. “If either of you do anything to provoke me or one of my men, you will experience a rapid, involuntary contraction of muscles that will render you immobile. You will not like it.”
He spoke like a drill sergeant addressing a pair of dim recruits.
“Sir, you don’t know me . . .” Jeffrey began, his speech bristling to be released.
Palomo held the stun gun under his nose; the fierce blue volt snapped so close to Jeffrey’s nose he felt his nostril hairs singed. Palomo held a hand to his lips for silence.
They began marching into the desert in single file. Other than a clump of Joshua trees, there wasn’t a single landmark to tell them where they were going. Every half-hour, the slender man walking point checked the compass bearing. No one spoke a word the entire time. They stopped for a water break three times.
“Drink up,” a bearded giant said to Jeffrey. His smile wasn’t reassuring. They came to a sandstone rock formation. Three utility vehicles were parked around the other side in the shade at the base.
“We ride from here,” Palomo said to Jeffrey.
He and Darren were handcuffed to the roll bar on the drive deeper into the desert. The sun baked exposed skin. The backs of their hands burned from being held aloft. The skin under his eyes stung; salt sweat he couldn’t wipe away felt like acid tossed into his eyes. They traveled toward a horizon that was a rippling mirage of water that disappeared before they reached it.
To Jeffrey, it showed planning, not a reckless abduction in broad daylight. He wouldn’t get much time to talk. Darren’s head lolled from side to side as they rode over the rugged terrain. He’d been zapped itth he stun gun. Palomo and the bearded man rode ahead.
They stopped near a jumble of slab-shaped boulders.
Before Jeffrey could get a single word out of his mouth, he was gagged. He and Darren were placed over a pair of massive, slanted rocks with their feet touching the ground. The bearded man produced rope from his knapsack. He tied their arms at the wrists and pulled the taut. Jeffrey let out a gasp as he was pinned to the heated rock. The bearded man secured the ropes to long metal pins by pounding them into the ground with the blunt edge of the hatchet he took from the same knapsack.
Their clothing was cut away with skill by one of the strip-club men with a surgeon’s scalpel.
“I’m leaving your shoes on,” Palomo said. “The desert is full of sidewinders. I don’t want you boys checking out too soon.”
Darren’s eyes bulged; his face was beet-red. Gone was the tough-guy bravado. Unlike Jeffrey, he didn’t cling to hope. A yellow stream of urine jetted from his limp penis.
The bearded man dropped his knapsack at Palomo’s feet. The sergeant bent down and retrieved a pair of latex gloves. He took out jars of mayonnaise, peanut butter, and a small plastic container of an oily liquid.
He stood up to address Jeffrey alone.
Palomo maintained his drill sergeant’s tone. “The Apache of the Southwest used to strip their victims and fix them to rocks like this. They would then cut a hole in their abdomens and pulled out a portion of intestine.”
“Sir, please let me explain—”
Palomo replaced the gag and whipped the knife across Jeffrey’s lower belly. He did the same to Darren.
He returned to Jeffrey, who was lapsing into shock, and continued his monologue. “They greased the exposed tip of intestine. Soon, coyotes would come along to investigate. They’re intelligent predators. Once they had the end of that intestine in their teeth, they’d keep pulling until they removed them from the victim who, of course, would be watching all this happen.”
Jeffrey’s eyes had blurred from pain. “W-why?”
Palomo stood in front of his face, jerked Jeffrey’s head by the hair up so that their noses almost touched.
“Don’t insult me,” the soldier hissed.
He kept staring into Jeffrey’s eyes while his two fingers fished inside Jeffrey’s wound. Time warped, stretched like taffy. Jeffrey entered the gates of Hell alone and afraid.
When his mind stopped circling and settled back to his new reality, he was slathered in peanut butter and mayonnaise from his neck to his genitals.
“The ancient Persians practiced scaphism. Did you know that?”
Palomo acted as though they were having a friendly chat during a bizarre desert picnic.
The sergeant continued: “They force-fed their victims with milk and honey and set them adrift in a swamp for the insects and wasps to invade every orifice of their bodies. When they shit bloody diarrhea, more came, drawn by the odor. Madness saved some before thy died.”
“The desert coyote is smaller than the plains or mountain coyote but he’s an excellent scavenger. His sense of smell is phenomenal. The mayo and peanut butter are for the ants and bugs. This is for the coyote.”
He threw the contents of the plastic container at the foot of slimy blue rope of intestine dangling on Jeffrey’s thigh.
Jeffrey’s olfactory sense had not abandoned him: bacon grease.
He pulled the gag from Jeffrey’s mouth and did the same with Darren’s. Jeffrey couldn’t say anything. He belched a sob. The words he’d prepared so carefully evaporated from his head. Darren produced only a gurgled string of gibberish and whimpering.
“Before we go,” Palomo said to them, “I have one more thing to show you.”
He held out his hand. The bearded man placed an object in his sergeant’s hand. “It’s called a combat emplacement evacuator,” he said. “Army jargon for a shovel. We’ll be back to collect your remains and bury them in one grave.”
The utility vehicles roared off.
Hours later, sunburned raw and covered in biting ants, Jeffrey remembered an old schoolboy lesson: hearing was the last of the senses to go. As clear as a bell in the falling desert light and cooler air that brought darkness and nocturnal feasters, the shrill yips of coyotes in the gathering dusk signaled they had caught the scent.
Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio. Many of his stories and novels feature private investigators Thomas Haftmann or Raimo Jarvi. Betray Me Not, a collection of revenge tales, was selected for distinction by the Independent Fiction Alliance in 2022. Find him at his website HERE.
You can find the other stories he has published with The Yard, HERE
His book “Burning Girl” can be found through our Amazon Affiliate Link or Bookstore
Robb has many books he has written. Here’s a couple.
When You Run With Wolves Amazon Link
“Betray Me Not”. Amazon Affiliate Link
Read more Noir Fiction on The Yard: Crime Blog. You can find us on Facebook and Medium.
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