Chapter 4

At some point in almost every situation out in the field, a good shamus gets a gut feeling about either the client or the creep or creeps he’s chasing. It was that sort of sixth sense that guided him to a nice three-point landing back on solid ground.

This was a case that started with a favor and was progressing with a promise and now I was uncertain if the entire scenario was something that was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to hide the true facts of what unseen forces were manipulating all the players including me like trained puppet masters from behind the curtain.

I had to admit, I hadn’t seen this degree of deviousness since the Russkies stole our cookie jar at the last election.

I wish I was more like my old secretary Zelda with her ability to line everything up on the wall with the little yellow stickers and narrow everything down to a single path leading right to the fucking bastards that were causing all the trouble. I liked just taking it all in and taking her cue to smash them into little pieces before they did more damage to the client, to me, or to any other innocent bystanders just trying to get by and maybe getting a slice of the pie on the way.

The single one thing that bothered me the most was the trigger finger aspect of racial relations that was as dangerous as any minefield the fucking French were always planting in the cause of peace.

Peace was one hell of a nice word.

Of course, the opposite of Peace was War and in this case, war was the sort of war that probably meant the extinction of the human species from the face of the earth. I remembered being a “Peacekeeper” a long time ago with my armor-plated rounds all sealed up inside hard to open magazine holders and orders to confirm permission to open fire even if under direct attack. That turned out to be a lose-lose proposition no matter how one looked at it unless you were some fanatical prick or cunt with your martyrdom video already edited and stewed to the gills with happy juice to speed you to your target.

This exercise in misdirection was not high on the ladder of what’s headline newsworthy in today’s terms, but it was a lot more dangerous than it appeared on the surface and that made me pause before I took another step without a minesweeper team in front of me doing all the nervous sweating.

Sometimes, even that precaution doesn’t work too well, but that’s another story.

Three-Finger was using the binoculars to check out the warehouses touted to us as a likely place for the blackmailers to use as a Headquarters or a way-station for their smuggled drugs, undocumented aliens or any other cause of chaos on their agenda. I still had this hope that it was all based on simple money-making schemes and was not some political ploy to gain tactical advantage in a dog-eat-dog world.

Three-finger saw them unloading a Ford Express van filled with about a dozen female subjects all wearing hoodies so you couldn’t really see how old or how pretty they were all huddled over and shuffling up the ramp to the warehouse. It was beginning to look like your typical human trafficking operation and I had no doubt that the females represented a sizable chunk of change to the vice lords and that the hypocritical politicians were all getting their slice of the pie as well.

I was certain the whole blackmail thing was tied in with this lucrative illegal trading but my suspicion was that it was totally unintentional and more in the line of collateral damage rather than a direct assault.

Now, we had the choice of taking some immediate action like a smart fella would do if his piece started jamming or look for a substitute to take care of the trouble. Three-finger was all in favor of going with guns blazing and sort the bad guys from the innocent bystanders later but I saw the common sense in calling in the illustrious “Border Patrol” to do some internal cleaning up the old-fashioned way by sending all these pricks to Federal Prison. I hoped they would get a stretch long enough to see me well on my way to Social Security.

Three-finger sulked a little bit, but we passed all the Intel along to a dark-skinned beauty with a bodacious pearl-handled Colt 1911.45 caliber inside a pink hued holster right next to her right tit.

That confirmed the fact she must be a southpaw as far as I was concerned.

I speculated that from the glint in her eye she used only dum-dums and might even have the things blessed by a Sangria priest spitting out the red spray from a recently murdered chicken.

She was talking Spanish so fast that it sounded like machine gun fire interlocked on target of opportunity and right in her sights.

Her name was Delores and I wondered if she had a giant shoe-horn to help her get into her non-regulation blue jeans with absolutely no room left for a hideout gun right at the top of her ass cheeks. That meant it probably was strapped to one of her ankles and would be hard to access unless she was already on the ground and in a spot of trouble.

“Squad Alpha take the rear and remember there are hostages here.”

Her voice was laced with authority and I pined to have her giving me orders of a more relaxing kind when the lights went down low in my humble abode.

The operation went like clockwork and I don’t mean Orange.

With the perps in jail and the whole blackmail scheme looking like Swiss cheese to a constipated ex-cop, Three-finger and I got ready to hit the road and call it a day before we got into trouble for something we couldn’t talk our way out of.

The SWAT squad female Sergeant glommed onto me on the way out of the building and Three-finger shot me a pitying look and got lost without a single word.

“What’s your hurry, big boy? You got a hot date somewhere?”

She was direct and to the point.

I knew there was no getting around it and followed her tamely to her doublewide with the frilly curtains on the windows. We did the two-step Tango in the vertical, the horizontal and sort of at an angle that is difficult to describe. I did her frontways, backways and when she got all acrobatic on me, I just spanked her ass and told her to behave. After that, she was sort of sweet acting and cuddly and that worried me because I loved that sort of ship when push came to shove.

The ride back to the office was sort of a letdown because a part of me wanted to stay right there and get some down time with the Sergeant with the stern voice of command.

I never did regret walking away from the outcome because in a true sense of the word, it was none of my business and I was better off just writing it up to another debt paid and back to business as usual. In actuality that was dangerous enough and there was no need of making things more difficult when it was more important to wrap things up and move on to the next thing before memories made me too overcome with guilt to do the job right.

That was when the phone rang and I knew it had to be another job that would fill my waking hours with anxiety and disturb my sleep patterns with shadows of another time and another place.