The Deadly Kiss-Off Read online

  I recalled Chantal telling me that her relationship with Les was “complicated.” Always the queen of cool understatement, that gal.

  When they had entered the high-powered arena of arms brokerage, they found that having a male partner gave Chantal a shield of acceptance and a level of buyer confidence that two women without a man would probably not have received. And it was hardly a challenge, after so many years’ practice, for Les to continue presenting to the world the identity that made her most at ease.

  Les had once had a bad experience with a guy who resembled Crespo in many details; hence her rare unease at the prospect of sharing the back seat with Crespo on the ride from the airport. But her resiliency and spunk were more than sufficient to meet him in professional situations with other people around.

  After our invigorating romp, I felt, for one poignant moment, a surge of guilt at this flagrant though unplanned infidelity to Nellie. But then I recalled the suave Latin leer of Onésimo Dambara and told myself I was just evening out the balance sheet. Chantal and Les would soon be out of my life, and Nellie and I would resume our solid monogamous relationship on a fresh footing as soon as she got home.

  * * *

  I woke up around 8:00 a.m., alone in the suite. It was the morning before the evening that Lina, Algernon, and I were to infiltrate the testing grounds and plant our fool’s gold, and I was feeling as ready for such strenuous, dangerous activity as a one-armed climber staring up the face of El Capitan.

  I picked up my scattered clothes, dressed, and headed down to the hotel garage, where I had left the Lexus.

  All the way to the condo, I could smell Chantal’s perfume on me. I was just glad Les didn’t wear men’s cologne, which would clash.

  Stan was having breakfast alone: a plate of microwaved burritos and a twenty-five-ounce can of Foster’s.

  “Where’s Sandy?” I said. “Off to work already?”

  “I guess you could say that. She never came home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She called and said she wasn’t gonna be home last night, simple as that. Which is more than you bothered to do. Jeez, you think I don’t care if my roomie is safe or not? I was practically outta my head with worry! I called every hospital in the area.”

  I actually believed Stan for one whole second, until he broke into a shit-eating grin.

  “I probably should be in traction in the hospital by now after what I went through.”

  “Oh, poor baby. Tell Papa all about it.”

  Suddenly famished, I sat down, grabbed one of Stan’s burritos, and bit off half. After washing it down with some of his beer, I laid out the whole scenario for him without going into undue detail.

  Stan whistled with sincere appreciation. “What a brilliant pair of deceitful horny bitches! My hat’s off to them. And you, too, Glen boy! You continue to surprise me with your resourcefulness. But you know you’re supposed to call your partner for backup when you’re outnumbered in a dangerous situation like that.”

  “I was overstimulated and confused.”

  “Okay, I’ll let ya off this time. But please keep that rule in mind for any such future occasions.”

  “There aren’t going to be any repeats. I took a bribe to keep quiet about Chantal and Les. It was a one-time payment, which I intend to honor. Besides, Nellie’s going to be home soon.” I paused, trying to phrase my next question delicately. “Uh, it doesn’t bother you that Sandralene was somewhere else last night?”

  “Haven’t we been all over this territory before? Me and her got an understanding which is more or less elastic—up to a point. Besides, I knew Caleb would treat her right.”

  Stan had spoken the name I hesitated to utter.

  “Just a few weeks ago, you were jealous as all hell of his attentions to Sandy.”

  “That was before I knew she would come back to me and everything would be just like it always was. And also before that big doofus saved my fucking neck from taking a plunge off the roof of Lura’s place. I figure those two things changed the whole situation. Never let it be said that Stan Hasso is a guy who can’t learn new stuff and change his mind. And besides, I feel sorry for old Johnny Reb. He’s been lusting after Sandy in his polite hayseed style since they were kids, and that is a hell of a lot of years of blue balls to inflict on any poor guy—especially when the prize dangling under his nose is a girl like Sandralene. It’s good she can help him finally take the edge off.”

  I dispatched the burrito and felt a wave of fatigue. Maybe finishing Stan’s beer hadn’t been the best idea.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. “Wake me around three.”

  Stan got me up on schedule, and I imagined I felt rather peppy. A cold shower, followed by coffee and more food, helped solidify that delusion.

  “Let’s stop at the factory before we go the hotel,” I said. “I want to see if Caleb’s heard anything from Luckman.”

  We left the house, with me carrying a bundle of clothes for tonight’s mission.

  At Luckman Enterprises, we found Caleb and Sandy busy accepting a delivery of parts, so we didn’t interrupt. Caleb was reading off the stenciled contents of the crates while Sandy checked off the corresponding items on the bill of lading. Their public professional attitude to each other seemed basically unchanged from yesterday—an amiable coworkers’ companionship. But every now and then, Caleb would let a look of helpless smitten adoration stray Sandy’s way.

  When they had finished, Stan and I came forward. Caleb shook Stan’s hand with unashamed manly candor, and Sandy gave Stan a moderate kiss. Yesterday’s melancholy air had evaporated from the Southerner’s affect, and although he wasn’t actually smiling, he seemed to be radiating happiness from the inside. I imagined he was restraining himself from bouncing around like Tigger.

  “Heard from Luckman?” I asked.

  “I did. He and Rosa were going to the movies and supper tonight.”

  “Good, good. How’d he sound?”

  Caleb looked a little less upbeat. “Not too chipper, but hanging in there.”

  “We’ll have to settle for that,” I said. “Okay, Stan and I are off to Chantal’s. Wish us luck.”

  I got a solid back-thumping from Caleb, and a full-body clinch from Sandy, which, had I not been temporarily depleted, would have activated all my gonadal circuitry and hydraulics.

  At the hotel, Chantal’s room held all four of our coconspirators—five, counting Algernon.

  Chantal and Les greeted us with meticulous adherence to the old baseline business formality we had established from day one. My estimation of the quid pro quo had been accurate. Stan actually managed to refrain from any off-color innuendo.

  Eddie and Lina were dressed ninja-style, all in black, and soon so was I—not quite so professionally as they, but in a good enough approximation: sweats, toque, gloves, soft-soled but rugged shoes.

  Lina handed me a stick of shadow-black war paint. “We’ll use this on our faces, but not quite yet. It’s only five o’clock, and we won’t go in until oh-one-hundred hours, at the exact time Vin Santo has arranged the diversion. Meanwhile, we can have some supper sent up. No alcohol, though. Gotta be sharp, and you don’t want to have to pee in the middle of the op.”

  “Where’s Algernon?” I asked.

  Lina un-Velcroed a special oversize pocket on her pants, and the giant rat peeked out. “The star of the show is chilling in his dressing room.”

  Sandwiches came. We killed time playing cards. I lost a hundred bucks or so. I think Algernon was peeking out of his pocket and reading my hands, then relaying the info to his owner. At one point, Les threw down her cards in disgust. Stan could not resist saying, “Man up, Les, man up!”

  At midnight, the four of us left the hotel by the fire staircase. In the car, we painted our faces, slouched down, and let Stan drive.

  45

 
Eddie Greenfriars handed me the pair of night-vision binoculars he had brought along so I could enjoy an eerie false-color view of the fenced-off lot where tomorrow’s test was to take place. Military vets had the neatest toys, I was learning, and for the first time I began to see some of the allure of that vocation.

  We were hiding nearly two blocks away, standing just inside the mouth of the alley that Stan had selected as the place to stash the getaway car. (We were using Chantal and Les’ rental, its plates smeared with mud. There was no sense in taking a chance that someone would spot and later remember Stan’s one-of-a-kind Jeep or my slightly less distinctive Lexus.) The time was five minutes to one in the morning, and the four of us were alone in the cold November streets of this mixed residential and retail district, which still had a slightly louche and off-putting reputation since half its older buildings were still underoccupied.

  Though the lot’s back fence was ungated, Crespo’s men patrolled it nonetheless. We had counted six, walking alertly up and down the four-acre domain. I felt a little queasy thinking of the measures they might take if they encountered intruders on the property.

  Lina had Algernon’s thin but strong lead looped around her wrist, although the rat was still in her cargo pocket. For the thousandth time, I patted the shoulder bag that contained the ANFO props. I sent up a silent prayer, to whatever deity might be listening, that I could maneuver through the obstacle course and plant them successfully. I received no immediate assurance back.

  Crespo had promised to limit his planted samples to thirty, for we had bargained with him that if we could not justify the device with thirty attempts, ten or twenty more would do neither party any good, and he had agreed with that logic. I had fifty samples so I could double up at some sites. Also, I was to scatter one or two lures apart from Crespo’s seeds. These would produce what would appear to Crespo as false positives in the LBAS. Similarly, I was to leave a couple of Crespo’s samples unattended. Going undetected by Luckman’s deficient machine, these omissions would register as failures also on the part of the LBAS. These “flaws” together should produce about an 80 to 90 percent success rate, thus making the device’s powers more realistic than would a perfect score. Or so Chantal had reasoned, and we concurred.

  Eddie rolled the tool he was in charge of—an aluminum floor jack with its long levering handle—back and forth on its wheels, across the span of a few inches. The lightweight device had been well oiled for silent operation, and was rated for two tons of lift—far more than needed to hoist a section of the chain-link fence. Eddie’s unconscious nervous actions were making me jumpy, but I said nothing.

  Inside the car, behind the wheel, Stan sat looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I could have sworn he was daydreaming, probably about getting home to Sandralene.

  Lina consulted her phone for the time. “Get ready …”

  Right on schedule, the MS-13 boys arrived. It was nice to see that the killers had good work habits and could follow instructions.

  The first sign of their D-day assault was a simultaneous burst of gunfire and expletives. I heard a lot of “cabrons” and “chingadas” and “hijoeputas.” “¡Mara Salvatrucha siempre!” seemed the most popular battle cry. Crespo’s guys began to return both bullets and team smack talk.

  Instantly, Lina and Eddie were off running, hunkered over, with me close behind. Eddie pushed the floor jack in front of him like a hockey player sweeping his puck down the ice.

  The gangsters had instructions not to massacre the Sombra Negra watchers, which they might easily have accomplished, but rather just to draw them away from the site. We didn’t want the whole place cordoned off tomorrow with yellow police tape. And in fact, we counted on any responding cops to follow the hurly-burly down whatever distant blocks it might traverse, and never peg the test site as the origin of the disturbance.

  Suddenly, we were at the fence, and I was pleased to see I could still breathe almost normally, though my heart was pounding like a jackhammer.

  Eddie shoved the plate of the jack under the fence and began pumping like crazy. The fence groaned and lifted, and in a few seconds, there was a gap big enough for Lina and me to belly-crawl through.

  Lina had estimated that we would need ten to twenty minutes of unimpeded access to track down all the samples, depending on how far apart they were scattered. Algernon could operate that fast.

  Eddie stayed by the jack, lying flat and awaiting our return and exfil. (I was really digging the military-speak. It helped me imagine I would come out of this alive.)

  Once inside the chaos of the ruins, I wished I had night--vision goggles that worked as well as the binoculars. But those had been deemed expensive and bulky, and worse than useless for an untrained civilian such as I. So we had to work with the available ambient light. Distant streetlamps illuminated bits and pieces of the obstacle-strewn terrain, but they made more shadows than they dispelled.

  It felt weird to be operating as a team without talking. But, of course, we couldn’t risk alerting any remaining guards.

  Lina tapped my shoulder in the agreed-upon signal. At the end of his taut leash, Algernon had found his first score. Sweaty-palmed under my gloves, I fumbled with the pinch clasps of the messenger bag and got it open. Reaching inside, I came up with an ANFO-treated candy-bar wrapper. I traced the lead to where the giant rat quivered in obediently suppressed excitement, his nose pushed into a jumble of bricks. I couldn’t see whatever Crespo had planted, but I had to assume it was there. I stuffed the candy wrapper into the crevice.

  A whispered short burst of Swahili, and Algernon and Lina were on the move again.

  I continued to hear distant exchanges of gunfire and profanities. Probably no more than ninety seconds had passed since the ruckus kicked off, but it seemed like ages to me. So far, no good citizen had alerted the cops—or, if someone had, the men in blue were slow to respond.

  Algernon’s next foray took us close to the front gate. I could see one silhouetted guard stationed there. But he was straining forward, as if eager to join his comrades, and all his attention was directed outward, not into the empty lot. But if he should turn …

  Better not to think about that.

  This time, I could see Crespo’s sample: a small metal box about the size of an Altoids tin. I partnered the box with a flattened Styrofoam cup rich with ANFO.

  After that, the rest of the operation blurred into a mad, timeless scramble across weedy potholes and unstable tumuli, which kept me too busy to freak out. I began to feel a spooky mental rapport, not with Lina but with the rat, as if Algernon and I were some kind of unified symbiotic organism. It almost seemed that I could anticipate where he was going to stop, a few seconds in advance of his actual discoveries. I would slap down the new ANFO trigger, and we’d be off in a flash.

  Once, I took a bad step into a hole and got that sickening premonition that I had really jacked up my ankle. But although my foot came out of the hole a little sore, the necessity of continued movement seemed to restore it to full though aching use.

  I remembered to skip a couple of saltings and place a couple of false positives, as planned.

  I sure hoped Lina was keeping count of how many samples we had hit, because I had lost all sense of number. Our calm frenzy of motions seemed to form one continuous blur of insane activity, racing through a cold labyrinth of debris that smelled like decaying lumber, leaf mold, and stagnant puddles. All I knew was that when I reached into the satchel now, it was practically empty.

  The noise of police sirens suddenly entered my consciousness, although I suspected they had been wailing for a while. I also heard some aggrieved and angry voices approaching, not exchanging smack talk, but doing a play-by-play recap of the evening in Spanish.

  Lina gave me the double tap in the small of my back that meant we had to book it. She scooped up Algernon and got him safely stowed in her big pocket.

  I
had lost all sense of direction in the darkened wilderness, but Lina hadn’t—Ranger training to the fore! I stuck to her like a shadow.

  Eddie popped up from his prone position and got ready to jack down the fence, and I finally began to feel I could indulge in a little optimism.

  Lina and I got through the gap, and Eddie started to lower away.

  Then the MS-13 gangbangers, in an otherwise laudable demonstration of hireling initiative, couldn’t resist staging one more vindictive assault. They began firing in the direction of the Sombra Negra dudes, who, though still some hundred yards off, were reconvening on the property. Of course, the vigilantes began firing back.

  No one saw us, I think. We weren’t a target, but that made no difference to the errant bullets that I felt whizzing by.

  Suddenly, Eddie clutched his leg and went down, with only the smallest repressed sounds of pain. I moved to aid him, but Lina shoved me toward the jack, then went to her husband’s side. She whipped out the tactical one-handed field tourniquet she had shown me back at the hotel—with some black-humored japes about its uses—and tended to his leg. I got the fence down and the jack retracted.

  Then a car screeched up alongside us. I prepared to be arrested or executed.

  Stan had the jack stashed in the trunk and the trunk lid closed, in about three seconds. Then, he picked up Eddie as if he were a duffel of dirty laundry and flung him onto the back seat. Lina and I scrambled into the car, her in back, me up front. Stan vaulted into the driver’s seat, and we were off.

  No chasing bullets, no pursuers, no evidence whatever that we had even been spotted by Crespo’s allies, much less connected with the disturbance.

  Stan said, “Saw everything through the binocs. Thoughtcha could use a hand. Ya think Vin Santo knows a reliable doc for bullet wounds who doesn’t keep such good records?”