Hostile Takeover (12 page)

24

W
hen I woke up and remembered how FUBAR I was, I decided I was done. The gods were hitting me over the head with the message that this was the dead end of the road, and I didn't disagree. Without money, there was no way for me to survive. I was too weak to try to pull a job, and after the fever nightmare, I didn't really want to. I also realized that what happened with Alice was weighing on me much more than I thought. As much as I tried to tell myself I really didn't love her anymore, without her in my life, my future looked pretty bleak. I tried to imagine myself at forty, like Jean Reno in
L
é
on: T
he Professional,
drinking milk and sleeping in a chair with a gun in my hand, and I knew I would rather die than fulfill that prophecy.

So, my plan was to drink as much mescal as possible and chase it with a bullet from the dead bandito's gun. My last hit.
At least it will be an easy gig,
I thought as I went to work on the bottle. By sundown, I was stumbling around like a Bowery bum, singing and punching holes in the walls. I reached under the couch and grabbed the gun.

“
Dios mío
,” I shouted at the
cucarachas
, scattering them.

It was a gold-plated .45 with a platinum Virgin Mary inlaid in the grip, a filigree of roses on the barrel, and the words
Flores para los muertos
inscribed on the top of the slide.
Perfecto
, I thought.
Looks like Jesus loves Luis but everyone else thinks he's an asshole.

I gathered up my bottle and my shiny new gun, and walked along the beach until the lights of the town were in the distance behind me. I sat down among the rotting piles of litter and drank the rest of the rotgut mescal, swallowed the worm, and watched the moonlight filter through the clouds and dance across the water. I was about to give myself last rites when I heard loud voices and the sound of a car coming up the beach. A pickup loaded with a bunch of young people partying in the truck bed tore past me.

At the wheel was Mexican Mel Gibson.

I thanked the Blessed Virgin for my fortune and shot out his front right tire. The pickup swerved violently, pitching most of the revelers and booze bottles into the sand, and skidded to an abrupt halt. While the women cursed and gathered themselves, the men drew their weapons and searched the darkness for something to kill. They never saw me coming. The Virgin Mary and I dropped their sorry drunk asses in fewer than thirty seconds and I put a bullet through the mouth of Mexican Mel Gibson just as he opened it to curse my name. The women scattered and I got my money out of the truck.

As I walked away, I looked at the litter of bodies. They were all a bunch of kids, late teens, early twenties at most. All of them carried the ridiculous gold-plated hardware indicative of cartel boys. Looking at them, I thought about Sue and the other young HR recruits. Was I just going to abandon them all and leave them at the mercy of Alice? Hell no. I'd worked my ass off to try to save theirs, and throwing myself away with the used condoms and Doritos bags on a filthy Mexican beach felt like a betrayal of epic proportions. Not to mention the fact that it meant I was going to throw in the towel to Alice without a fight. She had proved she had it in her to run those recruits into the ground if her hair-trigger temper got the best of her, and I couldn't allow that to happen.

I walked into town and made a collect call to a fixer I had on the West Coast, an Irish gunrunner who I had used in the past to
acquire military hardware. Guy could get you an M1 Abrams Tank within twelve hours if you had the cash. I told him I'd gone dark in Mexico but needed gainful employment to stay sharp and prep for a big job in a few weeks. I asked if he knew anyone looking for a decent triggerman. He mentioned a farm boy named Griner in Sonora, but was reluctant to hook me up with him because the guy was some kind of hardcase son of a bitch. I told him I could handle it. The Irishman took down my address and told me I'd be contacted within a few days.

Next morning I woke up to a black cloth hood being shoved on my head by two of many gloved hands that quickly bound me with zip ties and duct tape and stuffed me into what smelled and felt like the hungry maw of a black, nondescript panel van. The familiar prick of a needle sang me to sleep while visions of Alice being riddled with bullets danced in my head.

25

Gran Desierto de Altar, Sonoran Desert

Six weeks later

S
uck dirt, Nancy.”

Griner strode around me, his huge, mud-encrusted boots stomping heavily on the grass, crushing the helpless blades to green pulp. I pumped out twenty one-handed push-ups while he jabbed his rock-hard finger into any part of my body that was exhibiting incorrect form. When I was done, I leapt to my feet and he was already walking away from me. For six long weeks I had been the reluctant pupil of a black-eyed Arkansas hillbilly who wore overalls and no shirt and looked like the love child of Charles Manson and Aileen Wuornos. The day I arrived via the black bag express at his sweltering wasteland of a training ground in the middle of the most godforsaken desert in the world, he took one look at me and told me he wouldn't send me to kill a rat in his mama's shitter.

I agreed to train with him because I had no place else to go and figured I could use a brushup. I had also had the distinct feeling that if I refused, he would have buried me up to my neck in a fire ant hill. Being a professional for so many years, I thought I was hard. I thought I was at the top of my game.
I was wrong
. As an HR intern,
I'd been beaten, shot, stabbed, burned, electrocuted, and nearly drowned, but all of these things combined paled in comparison to Griner's training. In six weeks, he peeled away the layers of weakness until there was nothing left but bone and sinew. He built me from the ground up with a relentless onslaught, the likes of which I am guaranteed never to face in the field. In this respect, it is the finest training I could have ever received. If my hatred for him hadn't been so venomous, and my desperation to get out of there and get on with Alice so urgent, I would have thanked him from the bottom of my black heart. But he had taken most of what was left of my money for his “services” and still hadn't sent me out on a job. So much time had passed I was beginning to worry that when I got back to New York, Alice might already be dead by someone else's hand, along with Sue and all of the recruits.

The other problem I was beginning to see was that Griner figured because he trained me, he owned me, and I owed him a debt. And being in his pocket was about the last place on earth I wanted to be. So, as I went through his usual blood-and-guts routine that day, my brain was working overtime to find a way out.

“Hurry up, Suzie, or I'm gonna give ya a beatdown!” Griner bellowed.

I sprinted to where he was standing by the corrugated-metal warehouse. Inside that warehouse was his carnival of horrors meant to “make your balls drop and turn you into a man.” The heat was stifling in there and I knew I would be required to fight my way through a gang of shirtless psychopaths that Griner had bought like livestock from the warden at a nearby Mexican penitentiary. They would be armed with ax handles, chains, horse whips, and any other rusty implements Griner had lying around. If I didn't get there fast enough, he would just tie me up and let them beat me until I pissed my pants.

When I caught up to him, he flashed his sadistic grin and, with
the wave of his oily Confederate flag bandanna, set his dogs on me. They were vicious, half-starved mongrels who had attacked me the first day I arrived there. After that, they had a taste for my blood. The alpha charged and leapt directly for my throat. I grabbed him by the mouth in midair and heaved him effortlessly at the other advancing dogs. He bowled them over and they scattered, whining and snapping. When he saw he had no backup, he ran to his pack, braying and covering his asshole with his tail. Griner laughed and locked them in their chicken-wire pen. This was his idea of entertainment, only because he was a mongrel himself.

He examined my hand and farted a “humph” of approval through his mottled, sneering lips. There was no blood. There had been no blood for weeks. My hands and feet were no longer instruments of my senses, sending the language of touch to my brain. They were knotted lumps of scar tissue. The nerve endings were destroyed by the merciless bludgeoning of wood and stone and by the flames of Griner's oil barrel fire. I could punch through a solid hickory door and use the same fist to smash a cinder block. I could kick through six-inch glass bricks barefoot without so much as a scratch.

I didn't walk on hot coals. I walked on fire.

Griner's philosophy was simple. Weapons are unreliable, noisy, and leave too much evidence behind. The more complicated the weapon, the more undesirable it is as a tool of the trade. Guns were a joke to Griner. We would go into the Mexicali slums for what he called “rooster fucking” and he would start trouble with the lowest snake-eyed degenerates he could find. They drew guns and he shoved the barrels up their asses before they could even think about pulling the trigger. To Griner, a hand holding a gun or knife was just another point of leverage, an invitation to have your arm torn out of the socket, which I'd seen him do more times than I cared to count.

To Griner, the only true weapon was the body. He didn't see
elbows, hands, feet, or heads. He saw points, edges, and rock-hard bludgeons. With the right amount of force and placement, a finger is ten times more deadly than a knife. Of course, Griner was not the originator of this method. It's a very old kung fu style called “Iron Palm.” Legend has it that an ancient Chinese master whose daughter was raped and nearly killed by a roving gang of thugs created Iron Palm. So that she could never be hurt again, he slowly turned her body into a mass of hardened scar tissue and bone through the use of corrosive chemicals and repetitive hand and foot strikes on canvas bags filled with sand. Definitely not a Disney family. She eventually became one of the most feared warriors in China and never used a weapon. And as revenge for never getting to go to the prom, she caved her father's face in with her heel while he ate his breakfast.

As I said, I was running out of money and getting tired of playing grasshopper to Griner's Master Po. So, I had asked him that morning when he was going to send me out on a job, but he just grunted incoherently. Later that day, after vanquishing the dogs, I knew I'd made a mistake bringing it up.

“So you think you're ready to swing, eh, pussy mouth?”

“Yeah,” I said with unwavering confidence.

“Bullshit. You're still a dickless crybaby.” Griner laughed sadistically. “When you can take
me,
then you're ready.”

To make his point, he hawked a massive gob of chewing tobacco in my face. When I wiped my eyes, I saw the long sunlit string of rancid brown saliva running from his mouth to my face bow and snap, leaving a quivering drool pool on his chin. I could feel the black rage filling my eyes. When he raised his hand to wipe off his chin, he exposed his rib cage. Without thinking, I focused all of my energy and slammed my open palm into his ribs. The impact shattered his rib cage, driving sharpened fragments of bone into his delicate lung tissue. He growled in pain, gasping for air, and settled himself, closing his body to me like an armadillo slipping into its
armor. It was on. To maintain honor, he would have had to kill me or die trying. There was nothing in between.

“No better time than the present, you inbred fucktard,” I said.

“Boy, you ain't got the sense the good Lord gave a shit fly. Now I'm gonna have to swat you like one.”

Then he advanced, savagely pummeling me with rapid-fire side kicks. The broken ribs were just a distraction for Griner, and I knew it. He used his arms to protect his torso but that made no difference. His feet were even more nimble than his hands, powered by whiplike muscles. But thanks to Griner, my hands were like granite and they absorbed the strikes. My own ribs were rattling from the kicks to my elbows, which I used to protect my sides.

Then he unleashed a roundhouse kick that slammed my own fist into my head. I dropped to my knees, fighting to stay conscious. In that moment, I had to act or die. Griner punctuated this fact with a kick that rang my head like a bell. I could hear the distorted cacophony of his dogs in the distance, chewing their mouths bloody on the chicken wire as they desperately tried to escape their cages to assist Master Griner. At that moment, my only thought was about what
they
would do in this moment. And that's exactly what I did.

Griner went for the kill with a foot aimed at my temple. I ducked and launched myself off the ground with all of the force my powerful legs could deliver, my hands outstretched and shooting for his throat. He grinned and grabbed my wrists with his clawlike fingers, pulling me toward him for the knee that I could see rising to crush my face. But instead of attempting to free my hands, a move that would have only facilitated Griner's kill shot, I opened my mouth wide and sank my teeth into his throat. Having learned from the dogs, I knew the exact action to ensure a kill. My canine and front incisors gained purchase on his larynx and surrounding blood vessels and I closed my jaw down as hard as I could. Like the dogs, I matched Griner's struggles with violent side-by-side motions of my
head, gnashing, tearing, goring. The ocean of blood that filled my mouth nearly drowned me and I fell away, retching and gagging. I looked up, expecting Griner's kill shot, but instead saw that I had mortally wounded him.

I staggered to my feet. Griner's thug posse, made of men who have seen and done it all, stood with their mouths wide in horror. Even the dogs had quieted in their kennels. Griner's face was a ghostly pale, mottled grimace, his lips white and his hands clutching desperately to stave off the bleeding. He attempted to rise into a crouching position, his instinct still driving him to fight, but I knew he only had a few seconds of life left. So, I took that opportunity to impart some wisdom of my own.

“The body may be a weapon, Griner,” I said. “But the best weapon is the one you don't see coming.”

I brought my heel down on the back of his neck and shoved his face in dog shit.

“To answer your question,” I said. “Yes, I'm ready.”

And I stepped down hard, snapping his neck like a dry twig.