"Takes One To No One" [novel in progress]
Chapter 1
Harry “the hood” Dominguez was just finishing what he felt would turn out to be just another day in the Greater Los Angeles area. As he put the finishing touches on his true to life blog for the night, he was thrilled to see that his prior entry about half an hour ago had been viewed over seven hundred times already. His blog wasn’t making him any money, but it had a certain thrill to it as he exposed his innermost secrets and seemed to attract enough viewers every day to roll up the counter near a thousand a day. Some days he published a lot. Some days he published very little. But he always managed to touch base with his audience in some way every day. He had a catchy web address, OZENOZ.com, the name of a rap act he had been working on developing for near a decade now. The only catch was that he didn’t want to play the role of the artist himself. He was an actor, but no musician, and certainly no rap artist. Though the words on his blog flowed from him with a natural ease and poise, the fast paced rhythms put to time of rap were a little over the top for him.
No, Harry was putting together his act to find a local talent and promote him all the way from the ground floor to the top. He would manage the act, get it signed, help on the lyrics, help with show bookings and merchandise for which he had countless works of art already conceived. This was not the topic of his blog tonight, however.
Prior to hitting the publish button on his speculative piece on the future of independent film in the matrix of independent network entertainment channels already airing vast amounts of specialized media online, he checked the whereabouts of his audience. He was surprised that a pretty solid number of these hits were coming from Saudi Arabia, near the capital. He also noticed that there were a few in Pakistan, nearby. He wondered if that princely heir to a fortune he had met years back had finally connected with his blog, and was checking him out with some friends.
Then he hit the publish button, and the night truly began. He rarely felt the piece was perfected until it had been published, and then he went back to edit it in post publishing priority order, when he felt the “vibes” of his readers could affect his editing. Tonight, when he looked over his piece, he was shocked to see that what he had written was not what was published. What was published was a manifesto of sorts into his dope dealing business, and the damned stiff arming of the Fed’s who would have him put away for life. It read that he harbored great resentments on those who were watching him as we speak, and their disastrously demented and diluted duty calling from their higher ups, which ran as high as The President himself.
Harry broke out into a cold sweat. He checked out the window of his apartment, and sure enough, there were two white vans sitting parked outside. One was so bold as to have a satellite dish perched on its flat exterior roof. This could be it for him, if he didn’t act now. Harry’s connect, Damian had just ran over three pounds of crystal methamphetamine and was still enjoying pizza and beer in his bedroom when Harry burst in.
“Fuck man. Don’t talk. Look out the window.”
Damian peeked out the bedroom windows as if he was a crazed meth addict himself. He turned ash white, and then turned to Harry with a wide eyed look of shock.
“I know.”
Harry grabbed the painter’s bucket which held the meth in it, and headed for the bathroom. This was a lot of product in street value, but it came direct from a chemist who made it a lot cheaper who would appreciate his immediate and best line of distribution protecting them all from a major bust which would open deeper investigation. Harry moved into the bathroom that lay in the far corner of the bedroom. With one final look at Damian and a crazy ass cackle, he proceeded to dump so much product in the toilet, it flushed itself. Several seconds later, there was nothing left to conceal, and there would be no Federal case for them if indeed the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who sat parked outside decided to make their move tonight.
“Fuck man.”
Harry returned to the living room where his laptop lay open to his blog, OZENOZ.com. As he looked over the entries, he found that the entire blog had been worked over. He was being setup! He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t leave this open forum now so completely compromised lay open to anyone to read this filth about him, supposedly from him. He took a network snapshot of the web site; a backed up cyber space stored copy of the website as it currently stood, and then deleted the blog from existence. For the first time in over a year, there would be no OZENOZ.com tonight for his selective audience.
Noises of a heated sexual manner came wafting through the living room from the guest bedroom down the hallway past the kitchen and reminded Harry of his other house guests. Lucky and Lucy were in there, and they needed to be made aware of the situation. Harry grinned, and relished the thought of getting another look at Lucy in action. He walked up to the door, and knocked.
“Fuck, oh fuck! Yeah! Who is it? What do you want?” a breathless Lucy intoned from within the walls of the spare bedroom.
Harry realized he had no way to explain without being overheard by the Fed’s monitoring outside. He turned on his heel to look for a notebook to write what was going on down, so that it could be communicated silently.
“It’s Harry! I’ll be right back!”
Inside of the dimly lit spare bedroom, Lucy climbed off of Lucky, who she had been mounted on in mating bliss. Her body was that of an athletic twenty something, though she was thirty- three, and her tits glistened with sweat that lined their upturned curvature which was accentuated by her small, erect, perky red nipples. She smiled at Lucky, and rubbed her crotch as she pulled him out of her, giving a promise of more to come.
“Fuck, that was good.” Lucky said in a casual tone.
“Damn straight, lover boy. Only the best catch that to attest. I need to do you more often.” Lucy bantered back.
“If I did you more often, you would be walking funny all the time then. And we can’t have you walking like a heart attack and vine whore now, honey!”
The room was furnished in cheap knock off motel furniture that Harry had procured from a remodeling West Hollywood motel. There was thick shag carpeting, a queen sized bed, two dark oak motel nightstands with drawers for the Gideon’s bibles, one with an mp3 player alarm clock , and a large oak entertainment system piece with a fifty inch smart television that was playing “Back To The Future” off of an online movie database at the moment. It was the scene where McFly was caught peeping tom on some unfortunate suburban victim by his son, sent from the future.
“God, wouldn’t he like to be peeping on us?” Lucky remarked with a sly grin.
Just then Lucy screamed at the top of her lungs, “Oh my God, the window! The window!”
Just outside of the bamboo design venetian blinds that were half open, a face was peering in from the black of the night outside. It was a dark night with no moon, and the details of the strangers face were somewhat obscured by tree branches just outside of the window. Lucky sprang immediately into action, almost levitating out of the bed to pull on his Armani jeans. In an instant he was dressed and he ran at full speed from the room, while trying to zip up his crotch and pull the button enclosure shut. He ran full speed past the kitchen, through the living room, and past Harry’s bedroom where Harry stood, puzzled, and out the front door.
There were two of them outside, Lucky saw as one darted from the side yard across the street. The other one, he had cornered and he attacked immediately. He caught the stranger trying to disentangle his European travel bag from the tree branches, and it gave him just enough time to sprint to his location in the side yard. He balled up his fists, and immediately began to pummel the stranger with them in quick half cocks of his arms. He was hitting him hard and fast, and the stranger seemed so dazed by the assault, he wasn’t even fighting back.
The intruder tried to run past him to escape out the front yard and through the gate, but just as he reached the front rose bushes, Lucky threw his leg out and tripped him hard into the dirt of the flower beds.
“That’ll teach ya! Ya fucking fuck!” Lucky screamed at the top of his lungs.
Just then, an LAPD patrol car came to a screeching halt in front of the residence. Two cops came streaming out of the car, straight at the entangled two. Lucky was now kneeling on the intruder, hitting him repeatedly in the face. There was blood all over, and he couldn’t tell if it was from the stranger’s nose, or his knuckles from trying to bash out the fellows teeth.
“LAPD! LAPD! Freeze! Police!”
“Fuck man, this guy was peeping in the windows in our yard!”
“So you call us, not beat him up!”
The policeman swarmed on the two of them, violently flipping the two onto their stomachs and immediately cuffing them behind their backs.
“Ouch! Yo, man! Those cuffs are too tight!” Lucky protested.
“Do you live here, sir?” one of the officers asked.
“No sir, I am just visiting a friend when this here fucking creep comes peeping in the window at me and my girl!”
“And you thought you’d take the law into your own hands. Guess what, he’s beat bad. And you, buddy are going downtown with us. He needs an ambulance, as he may have a concussion and he definitely has a broken nose. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t sue. Let’s go, on your feet.”
The officer radioed in for an ambulance, and then read him his rights. Two minutes later, without even checking within the residence, Lucky was carted off in the back of the cruiser towards Central Booking.
Harry was trying to calm Lucy down inside and keep her from running out into the open in her silk nightie and making the situation worse.
“Fuck! They took him! He wasn’t in the wrong! Those lousy fucks never get it right, do they Harry?!” Lucy wailed at him.
“No, that’s not the name of the game. Busts to make money for the justice system are the name of the game, Lucy. And exactly why I don’t need you wandering out there right now.”
He wrote on the notebook he had fetched from his bedroom. “FEDS. Two white vans, outside parked watching and LISTENING. Don’t talk about it, or any drugs. Please.”
He watched Lucy’s face as she read the notebook.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Lucy passed out to the dining room windows and peered through the curtains out into the streets of Culver City. Her form went rigid and she walked briskly backed to Harry’s side and grabbed the notebook and pen and wrote.
“Did you get rid of the meth?”
Harry nodded in the affirmative.
She wiped her hand across her forehead to signal her relief and said “I need to smoke.”
Damian came out from the bedroom at that moment, and looking very pale indeed announced “I am moving on. This place is a hotbed of shitheads tonight. I am getting on getting on while the going is good,”
“Don’t blame you brother. Drive safe.”
“You know it.”
Harry closed the door behind Damian, and bolted its locks. He then systematically checked all of the doors and windows in the house to make sure they were secure. Once that was accomplished, he checked on Lucy to make sure she was alright. She was in the spare bedroom, fixing herself a “spike” of some “black”, or some of the heroine that Damian had brought with him for her earlier. Harry watched as she drew blood, and then injected a large amount of the drug directly into her veins on her upper thigh. She withdrew the needle, unaware he was watching, and lay down on the bed and was immediately in a deep nod. Harry figured she would be a lot calmer now, and probably stay the night. Hell, he wasn’t driving her home that was for sure.
Harry then returned to the front of the house and the kitchen. He retrieved a beer from the fridge, and drew a large slug from it to ease his nerves. Thinking twice about his need for calm and soothed nerves, he withdrew a half gallon of cheap whiskey from the cutting board next to the refrigerator and opened it. Removing a rocks glass from the cabinet above the sink, he poured himself a three fingered shot of whiskey, and knocked it straight back as soon as it was poured. Enough. He needed to be relaxed, not drunk.
Harry returned to the living room and his open laptop. The most curious thing was happening from its desktop. Files were opening from no command of his own and dropping into an open e-mail application and sending to an unknown address.
“What the fuck?!”
Harry removed the battery immediately and reset the system. He then rebooted the computer, and entered the desktop area again. Going to the wireless network properties on his server’s website, he made sure that the maximum security was being used for his internet. He found that all of the settings had been reset to open and that his network was wide open. After doing this, he ran a bug sweep of his computer with his network security software. When this was finished, he opened the web browser to his web address, OZENOZ.com. To his surprise, the site was still up and had just published a new article, not written by him. He checked his e-mail account immediately, to see if the publication had e-mailed him a copy of the new article. There he found the most disturbing thing of all.
Harry’s talent agent had written him a letter, dropping him. They said that they had received a barrage of correspondence from his e-mail address concerning matters of a very private nature. Harry’s bank had written him a letter. They had closed his accounts due to fraudulent account activity; activity Harry had not done himself. Harry’s social networking account was closed due to “abusive behavior”. The car lot he had been making payments to on his car for over a year had written to say that they hadn’t received a payment in over three months, and had begun to receive abusive letters from him, and they would be repossessing his car. Even his sister had written to say that she was questioning whether she would make the trip from back home in the next month due to the letters she had been receiving. Letters Harry had not written.
Then he noticed the final straw to suspend his disbelief. As his website, OZENOZ.com altered in its content, he noticed also that the hit counter was spinning off its top. Somehow in the last hour, he had received over a hundred thousand visits in the most unwelcome of times. His world was coming off of its hinges, and he had an audience to witness it all go nuts. Then he noticed the comments section of his blog, and the multiple conversations going on in it. It was filled with people of Middle Eastern descent. Harry shook off the cobwebs, and dived into his new fan mail with a hearty sense of restraint and a healthy sense of skepticism.
Tom Hartman and Dick Strayer were now working overtime, but that was to be expected at their desk post trying to sift through vast amounts of numerable collections of data from various sources at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They were squeezed tight into the space around Dick’s computer in the office he had convinced higher ups to give him when he retired from taking outside assignments, watching what may have been the best fireworks display they had seen to date. The entire network seemed to have gone nutty about an hour beforehand, and they hadn’t yet pinned down a source. There were reports of a lot of strange activity all the way from social media corporations well into the financial sector, which was a heavily guarded concern at the moment. The most fascinating thing at this very second, however was that the virus seemed to have also taken to targeting a select few individuals within U.S. borders and was playing an infinite number of fascinating games with their accounts. Why should international terrorists have these select few to torment? Dick’s gut told him that perhaps the answer to tracing the entire attack and its future ramifications lay in these collections of smaller victims.
Minutes before, a New York City blog writer had sent a report to the C.I.A. citizens report page which had been streamlined straight from intakes to Dick and Tom’s desk. This guy was no ordinary blogger, and his blog had taken to publishing on its own in the last hour. It spelled out the details of his underworld dealings, and the writer, before taking his own life minutes before Federal agents moved in to bust his apartment for a large shipment of narcotics, he had taken the time to fill in the blanks of what he saw was going on. This had been his letter:
To Whom This May Concern;
I am David O’Donnell, New York City writer and dope fiend. It seems to me that I have been put a move on by a very sophisticated hacker who has simultaneously turned me in, and turned me out at the same time. Never before has my blog gained such attention. The hits are all rolling in from the Middle East, which raises all sorts of warning flags in my brain. The blog published an article an hour ago that I hadn’t written about the ins and outs of my dope dealing business, which I have been using to support my meager writers income. I fear the Fed’s are at my door, and there is no way out for me. This not my concern, as I will end this life as I know it in a few moments here. That part is over, as far as I am concerned. What concerns me is that on trying to look up some of the contacts who had made more notable comments on my blog in the past hour, I stumbled onto a weapons dealing forum selling missiles. The purveyors of this group welcomed me as if I had been expected, and made me an offer to join their ranks. Me, a terrorist? Not likely. I am leaving the gates to all of my internet wares open and my entire equipment running for you. If you get this in time, check into DavidODonnel.com, and all of the surrounding accounts and things. I hope at least in my last acts I have managed to achieve some good.
Semper Fi,
David O’Donnell
From this letter, Dick and Tom had run down the list they had of surveillance being newly put into place by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from an inside source who was double Dutch door auctioning his career for a little on the side. This was the difference between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.; the C.I.A. did it at any means available to get the job done. Much more serious offenses were at stake here. They then ran down the list of initial hits on the O’Donnell website and found their origin in Saudi Arabia to be a false lead. It was a masked I.P. address actually originating in Pakistan. This was most peculiar, and led to all sorts of arguments over the implications of taking the time to mask their location on a simple New York City Blog visit.
“Dick, they don’t want us yanking their pants down. They haven’t had a chance to get busy yet.” Tom exasperatedly commented while staring wide eyed at the I.P. addresses activity in the last twenty four hours.
“If we yank their pants down now, I have a feeling they will get busy anyway. I mean they will have their pants down after all.” Dick rebuffed, feeling proud for the moment of their upper hand on the situation.
“But if we yank ‘em and they just moon the world and continue then we know there is something a lot bigger in their junk than what we first expected.”
“Well, get ready for the full moon, because I just got permission to move audio satellites on it. And get this; we are key word sensitizing the entire affected area that could house our perps to localize our peep session. And we get visual reconnaissance within twenty and we even get the big cannons on it in case we need them for real.”
This concerned Tom. They were no secret, these laser cannons we had put in place with the satellite weapons defense system during the Reagan era. The public had very little idea just how much modification had gone into installing their advance tracking systems from recent space stations. These puppies were lasers that could now track to within five feet at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and would vaporize a man if fired on him from orbit around the Earth. If the big wigs were authorizing their availability, this was a serious threat. Tom could just imagine the rows on rows of C.I.A. specialists racking their brains in the hallowed corridors of the Pentagon, where the field duty level desk jobs were mainly located. There they kept the higher ups, and the super brains which were above field duty anywhere but from a desk. The fascinating part was that Tom and Dick were still calling a lot of the shots here from Langley tonight. They now had birds of prey under their control.
“Tom, let’s track this west coast surveillance hit down and see what we make of it. This guy, Harry “the hood” Dominguez in Culver City. I’ve got a bad feeling about the west coast involvement on all this and my gut tells me it’s the way to go. Like my wife says, I always go with my gut.”
“That’s not what I heard, Dick. Something about the name…”
“Shut up, ya punk kid! You can’t even shake Dick! You get that one?”
“Yeah I get it. Shake dick, funny ha ha.”
“You know Dick, son. And knowing Dick in this business means you go with your gut. What’s your gut tell you?”
“My gut says I missed my dinner seven hours ago when I ran into this nasty business. And I know, Dick. I know Dick. So let’s go with your gut. It’s got better reserves.”
“You are full of them son. You are never going to make rank when it’s time for you to leave the field. You remind me so much of myself when I first got in it makes me worry about you, you know.”
“None to whit, Dick. Nothing to it, really, just a bunch of starry eyed Chiclets looking for a double oh seven at the seven eleven every day, really.”
The office assistant, Mike ducked his head in to take orders on the late night coffee shop.
“Hey, making the midnight run to Cup of Joe’s, what do you guys want?”
“A whitefish salad everything bagel, and a coffee, two shots of espresso. Black.”
“Okay, Dick, the usual. And for you, Tom?”
“You know, that sounds good, I will take the same.”
“Make it a double. Got ya. See you boys in about twenty minutes, and then you can pay me.”
“Pay you? You mean this doesn’t go on an expense account?”
“What do you think this is field training or something, Tom? No.”
“Well, shit, Mike, I only have a hundred dollar bill on me.”
Dick chimed in, “Rookies. I got ya kid. Go ahead to it, Mikey. We’ll be here when you get back, that’s for sure. This may be until the morning comes if we can’t close our sights on the primary objections here. “
“Conscientious objector, Harry “the hood” Dominguez it is Dick” Tom exhaled and bashed his head against the desk in frustration.
Together, Dick and Tom looked over Harry’s blog and pieced together what they could of his set up. They opened up his blog account and looked at the origins of the hits taking place prior to the hostile takeover. Then they perused his personal accounts as quickly as they could, and noticed he fit into the same pattern as Mr. O’Donnell.
“Tom, grab a laptop and go over the earlier entries into the blog and see if there are any personal comments that stand out from tonight’s widespread audience.”
“You got it!”
Five minutes later, it yielded a victory. Tom tracked the name of a wealthy Middle Eastern heir to the last lineage of the Libyan royal family. He then tracked his business down to a large mostly junk tech imports products business hosted on a very back door web site. Minutes later, they were observing without leaving their footprint, an all out bidding war for arms stolen from Afghani stockpiles and more recent heists.
“Good work, Tom. We may have our primary concern source here. What concerns me is that he wasn’t looking for new bidders. So what was he looking for?”
“A new weapon would be my guess.”
“I like the way you think, Tom. I have compiled a list of the satellites his company has launched into orbit since its inception in two thousand and nine. That’s when the fucker inherited like six hundred million in oil ducats they say from what I read of our files on him. I want to track where they are at now, if we have to by visual goddamn it. I have a feeling he is doing something up there that enabled this hack to run so deep. But I also have a feeling that this hack was an offshoot of the bigger prize, and a useful diversion.”
“I’m on it, Dick. When Director Priorey gave us the go on our recon earlier he also opened up the orbital trajectories log from our observation stations in various universities around the U.S. with extensive lens capabilities and engineering perks to our big tubes up there in orbit that record all local activities standard in data recording by law. Any and all satellites put into orbit anywhere at any speed for any purpose have to have this data print record of all local activity built into them. Was set by law, said to make for safer flying and less space junk, but it also really gives us real time access to the live whereabouts of the whole network that is up there flying around at any given time. What I will do is run a real time cluster warning log check, checking for groups of birds out there doing unusual trajectory changes this night.”
“Son, if you didn’t just confuse me so much, I would kiss you. That’s what I always tell my wife too, so don’t worry. I’m as straight a dick as you’ll ever have offering. What I’m saying is quick dickin around Dick and get yer Dickey’s in the mud before we have a mudslide!”
“I got ya Dick. I got ya.”
Their coffees and whitefish salad bagels arrived and with the exception of the coffees went untouched while they worked on a huge amount of data to be sifted through. Finally at about quarter to two in the morning, Tom found what they were looking for.
“Dick I have a cluster from our man that took place at two AM Greenwich Time. I’ve got the lats and longs on it, but it’s a whole congealment of various types that seemed there to block up one of our defense systems birds of serious prey. Get this, it’s harboring a nuke, there captain! Two hundred megatons of raw fucking turn Saudi Arabia to glass with one long blast. Should we check on her with the Pentagon?”
“Give me the I.D. on our bird and I’ll phone it in. From what I’ve been reading Tom, this very night is the night of a new system wide programming change based on new fusion physics theorems which overtake the holographic data ones. Now I’m no physicist, but don’t you think that if you retie the shoe, there’s gonna be a gap in the race?”
“Scary shit. Hope we’re wrong on this one, ma man. Hope we’re wrong.”
Five minutes of waiting on hold with the Pentagon later, they had their answer.
“Dick, this is Director Priorey. We are all real glad to hear of your finding. We tracked down our bird, and she’s been flying stray for several hours now. We seemed to have lost control over her flight panels and thrusters in that confusion you just tagged as the point of contact. We haven’t lost her arming controls yet, but there is someone working on them, we can tell. He or she has already aimed it for Southern California and put it on immediate launch status, but they haven’t got the codes to launch. With this new information, we are just going to do the sensible thing. Create our own cluster fuck and disable every one of that god damned fools ragged rigged bird’s until we have her back and coming about. I owe a great debt of gratitude to you this night, Dick. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Now that you mention it, I have been trying to get this fresh kid I have under me up on a good one in the field. Can I have some slack to further look into this and see if we can’t come up with a suitable field operation for him and me to tag team? Him from there, me from here, you know?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Strayer, just give me a call at close of business tomorrow.”
“Thank you Mr. Director. I will make sure and do just that.”
“Dick, going back to this missile auction, I have bids coming in from a Los Angeles I.P…. I went through the back door and broke open his account to get his real information from the damned oil rat’s registrar pages. He is one Curtis White, studio executive for a major film company in Studio City out there in Hollywood.” Tom briefly filled him in.
“Which is it, Tom? Studio City or Hollywood? You don’t know Los Angeles do you?”
“Uh, no sir. I grew up on the east coast. In any case, I got all of his contact information and just for kicks traced the numbers cross checking for any contact and bingo! He called one Harry Dominguez at five p.m. Pacific Time yesterday evening.”
“That’s all there is to it, Tom. You my boy have the rare privilege of having done the preliminary research and fact finding that built your very next field assignment.”
“Dick, I am not done. When I checked further, I found that one of Harry’s ex girlfriends had a spy software installed on his phone and has been recording all of his phone calls. I got to listen in to what he and Curtis were discussing. Get this; Curtis is getting the heat put on him from a drug supplier overseas to help seal the recruiting for an assassination attempt to happen there in Los Angeles. Harry didn’t take him seriously, and Curt got well, curt, and hung up.”
“And let me guess, then you checked into Curtis chats on the ICBM’s auction and got the rest?”
“Great minds think alike. Dick, they are gunning for the President. They have the spot narrowed to Los Angeles. And they are very serious. As serious as that harnessed nuke tonight killing a couple of innocent millions.”
“My boy, it looks like you are going to get to know Los Angeles after all!”
“Dick, you’re a dick.”
“Naturally. It’s a Zen existence. Central Intelligence Agent’s are the stiffest dicks around. You should be proud.”
“I have a feeling I am about to learn to be as stiff as I can be. Am I going to be under you?”
“I’ll leave that one alone. But yes, Tom, I must say you eavesdrop as well as you data decrypt, son! Yes, I will be your arms at the desk here at home while you get some jacked up field pay time. Don’t worry, we will get you all set up to make it as comfortable as we can. And besides, maybe you’ll meet one of those beautiful California women they’ve got out there. Just remember, they’re not for shaking your Dick.”
“I got it, Mr. Strayer. I got it. No shaking my superior.”
“Who said it was superior?”
“Just a Zen thing, Mr. Strayer. Just a Zen thing. Goes with the operation.”
“You fixed already?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Get locked and loaded, and meet me with your travel gear and credentials at seven p.m. tonight. I want you on the red-eye to LAX.”
“You got it. Just one last question?”
“Shoot.”
“Shoot first and ask questions later, does that count in Hollywood where it all gets on film?”
“You worry me, kid. Go home and go to bed. Oil your piece or something.”
“You got it. Got some packing to do, with or without my booty call.”
“You had better be packing her good. As good as you’re going to get it and as close to the real playing the field even if you’re not getting laid, just remembering what your Dick said earlier. At least you’re not getting laid out. Those days will be here, mark my words. Los Angeles is no joke, Tom. Not with the bunch you will be dealing with. And try and not get made, will you? Ruin my record.”
“Takes one to know one, sir. Takes one to know one.”
“Make sure it takes you to no one. At least not the god damned President, for Christ sakes!”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You are one of the best, Tom. Like you said, takes one to know one.”
“To no one.”
“No one?”
“Know.”
Chapter 3:
Harry and John were in Harry’s as of yet not impounded Mustang on a mission the very next day. Word had it that the activity from the night before had gotten to the authorities from an old chum of theirs, named Sarge, who was thought to be hiding out downtown on skid row.
Just to be sure, they took the long way downtown, cruising all of Sarge’s hotspots along Wilshire from Santa Monica all the way to the downtown jewelry district. John was the cleanup man for the crew, an ex- military sniper who retired from the business of killing off United Nations hunted drug manufacturers into the business of cleaning up for his associates in the very same manner. He was a very neat shaven thirty something odd year old man, with a high and tight fade, who preferred to wear Hawaiian shirts and khakis as his work wear every day. If he wasn’t on a hit, he was on the beach in Venice, sipping Mai Thai’s, that was his style, his motif.
At Seventh and Wilshire, they took a right and headed for skid row. John screwed a silencer on to his piece, not that it would matter down here. At Seventh and Cecelia, John told Harry to take a right.
“Let’s go buy the idiot some flowers. I’ll walk up on him like his long lost buddy and pull the piece out of the roses. Blood red roses. Two to the head, and we’ll be gone before he’s bled.”
“Only flowers that fuck is gonna get on his grave! I like your style, Johnny. But you are paying for them. I’m kind of short on slush fund cash since we took the hit last night. Gotta pay him for that fucking three pounds of shit still! Or else my genius chemist says he is taking his prime product elsewhere!”
“Damn, that’s a lot of shit!”
They went around the block, to the florist on the other side and John ran inside to make his purchase. When he returned to the car, he announced, “Talked to a guy in there I know who knows Sarge. Says he’s been hanging out at the Midnight Mission and blowing huge wads of cash on dope. Nobody could miss him, he said, last night he smoked so much he wound up schitzing out at two am when some chick refused to blow him. Beat her up all the way down the block, then, get this, gives her two hundred dollars to keep her yap shut.”
“Why don’t we send somebody in there to get him and meet us at the end of Spring? Make it look like we heard he has cash, and we have some prime product! Send in the flowers with our calling card and a bag of some of that coke you been tooting all morning attached. Shit any good?”
“You don’t see me doing much of it do ya? As good an idea as any I got. Yeah, too many fucking witnesses in there to pop him at the Mission.
They parked the tinted windowed Mustang at the end of Spring Street. A wandering bum came over to clean the windows and beg for change, and John warded him off by showing his gun when he cracked open the window.
“Who you think we can get?”
“On second thought, hold up!”
John waved over the bum and told him what to do. He gave him a five and promised him five more when he finished if he came back in an hour. He asked if he knew Sarge, and he nodded that he knew of him, “Fuck that bum been buying ounces crack like its pocket change, everybody has their eye on him!”
The guy agreed to run the errand, and take the roses to Sarge at the Mission with the card. Harry stuffed a small bag of some medicinal grade powder into the envelope and wrote a short note: “We are on the first line rock product of this before it gets cut, or rocked. You wanna get rocked? Come see us in the Mustang at the corner of Spring St. West. One G minimum.”
That was sure to get his attention, this stuff would make his whole face numb with one sniff and one “g” minimum was perfect. Word had it that there were over ten conspiracy charges impending on the snitch from Sarge, who got ten grand for the information when it led to the arrest of one of the other distributors the night prior. The way he was going, he would be out of money, and friends, by the end of the week. Actually, the way he was going he would wind up dead, and nobody would ever care to investigate any further than the end of his pipe. What a fucking sad, sorry lot when a brother turns to snitching and then does it up right under their noses.
They sat and watched the street action for about ten minutes, before they saw what they wanted. Sure enough, here came a wandering Sarge down the street from the East, counting out a grand in hundreds like he was King Tut of the strut police and stuff. He was just peeling off hundreds and waving them around. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a long while, and the pant leg of his jeans was torn like it had been gnawed off by a pit bull. He was wearing a long trench- like leather coat that was in the window of Wilson’s downtown going for like two grand, and they could practically smell it in the car.
Harry spoke up.
“I am taking his cash and his jacket. Fuck it. The cops ain’t gonna wanna know anything more than the fucking deals he’s been doing in the last day before they close the case, and his casket.”
When Sarge was about a half a block away, John rolled down the window just enough to get the long silencer barrel out and took aim. His first shot missed wide right and hit the cement wall behind Sarge, who immediately knew what was up.
“Fuck! Missed the fuck!”
Sarge reached inside of his leather jacket, and removed a Smith and Wesson twenty – two. Without hesitating and on full blast for the local police substation to hear hen popped off a round at the Mustang. He ducked into a boarded up doorway in the wall of the building next to him, and took cover from John’s return fire. Just as he entered the crevice, John scored a hit on him in his right arm.
“Take that ya lousy snitch! Ok, drive up on him, now! And then gun it out of here, they heard shots down the block, you know it!”
Begrudgingly, Harry drove East on Spring towards where Sarge was hiding. When they got directly in front of the doorway that was giving him cover, Sarge took a headlong charge at the car, screaming.
“Heeaaahhhhh! I am gonna fucking kill you motherfuckers!”
He was popping off shots at John’s window, and one of them exploded the rearview mirror. John steadied himself, took a breath, took dead aim and hit him directly in the middle of his forehead. Sarge went down like a bag of rocks, and didn’t move.
Harry jumped out of the driver’s side and ran over to the body. He stripped off his jacket, and checked his pockets for cash, pulling out what looked to be about five grand and ran back to the car just in time to hear sirens down the street. He pulled a quick u- turn and got the hell out of dodge.
“Fuck did you see that shot? Shit, ma man, he looked like a fucking dot head or something! That was pristine clean and under fire too! I haven’t lost it!
The rest of the ride home was mostly quiet, save John singing along to the radio.
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