One Minute to Midnight (22 page)

Takers.
NWO, a new word for hate.

The news is nothing more than
electronic static designed to keep humanity from thinking about
real world problems. Hell, much of the world doesn't have clean
drinking water, and it's getting worse. World leaders are all in
bed together, like one giant orgy ushering in their new Pharaoh in
Washington. World politics is the kind of confused ordeal when you
don't know where assholes end and mouths begin. Politicians and
corporations alike have become war pigs spreading fear for profit,
and they do it all while keeping you controlled.

My phone rings. What day is it again?
Oh, right, Tuesday. I'm meeting Peach at The Burnt Bean coffee shop
today at two. I'm looking over at my latest unfinished oil painting
with disinterest. A grove of trees hidden behind some unnamed lake
where a half painted blue boat sits motionless, resembling a
child's toy, and I want it to sink. I imagine there are tiny people
on board going down with it. The work is a commission once
finished, but painting water and trees holds as much interest for
me as a small child being forced to watch paint dry while the other
kids play outside. I wanted to paint the existential horror of it
all. Really shove it in people's faces, you know? Get them to think
for once. But that won't get you paid. Besides, I see the blank
look in people's eyes as they pass by on the street, doe-eyed,
slack-jawed, and completely done from working their J.O.B. Thinking
is work for which you don't receive a paycheck anyway, which is why
most people don't do it.
My watch reads one forty-five. Peach's face appears on my smart
phone along with her number. I touch the answer button which is
where her right nipple would be and smile. Internal jokes are
sometimes the best form of entertainment.
"Hey, what's up?" I ask.

"You there yet? You're not ditching me
again, are you?" Peach asked.

"No, I'm on my way. Just spacing out
here at the shack."
The new order of the ages had begun in a quiet war, using silent
weapons like fiat currency backed by empty promises instead of gold
and rising interest rates designed to snuff out the middle class.
The end game was to keep the public poor and stupid from birth, so
that subjugation could begin in kindergarten and stick with the
kids through adulthood. College was a joke, and unless you were
specializing in becoming something like a doctor or a lawyer, and
God knows we need more of those assholes clogging up the system,
you were going to be paying for that education for a long, long
time. A barrage of lies from ignorant politicians, preachers, TV
talking heads, and rampant materialism from first world citizens
"doing their part for freedom" had been blamed for setting the
globe on a political path of uncertainty, and it was all controlled
by people that these puppets had no idea existed.

The New World Order is a viral
infection of society, the new slavery, a plan to seize it all at an
equal a cost. Ignorance and poverty have become the modern day
weapons and require no bullets or gunpowder. Debt is a socially
acceptable four letter word, and once the banks have you it's
damned hard to break out of their clutches. Credit cards,
mortgages, car loans, even your credit score for Christ's sake
could destroy you in the great land of dreams. We were all reduced
to numbers sometime around World War I. It just took a few decades
for the masses to realize what was going on. That's how traps work.
You're snared before you know what happened and then BAM, lights
out. Mass mind control is easily accomplished through media outlets
and they run twenty-four hours a day. The average person can freely
sift through eight hundred channels of mindless garbage and find
nothing to watch except reality TV shows, which are anything but
real by the way. Before my cable was shut off, I caught myself
sitting there in front of the television for an hour straight
flipping through channels to find something. Anything to allow me
to unplug from my life for a few minutes.

The phone rings again.

"Hey Peach, I'm on my way."

"Did you see the news?" She sounded
low.
"No. You know I got no TV. What happened now?"
"Richie Gonzales took a dive from his apartment building this
morning. Fifteen floors straight into a rose bush," said
Peach.

Damn, now that’s a hard blow. Richie
and I had been friends for twenty years, but he got in bad with
some local mobsters a while back, and I'm guessing he couldn't
repay the debt before they got tired of him stringing them
along.

"Do they know how it happened?" I
light a cigarette.
"Witnesses say they saw a guy leaving Richie's apartment after the
hit the ground," said Peach.
"I'll be at the coffee shop in a few minutes. Thanks for letting me
know."

That's the exact type of thing I'm
talking about. Tears are welling up, but I push them back. Richie
had a lot of school loan debt and wasn't making enough at work to
cover his rent and the loans, so Richie's job began garnishing his
pay. He used credit cards to survive until they wouldn't give him
any more credit, so then he turned to a guy named Garcia for help.
Garcia loaned him enough money to pay off the credit card guys, and
his student loans, but now he was into Garcia for over a hundred
thousand dollars. Garcia may or may not have been this guy's real
name, but that doesn’t matter because it didn't make him any less
of a dangerous dude, and you didn't want him pissed at you. It had
to have been him who called the hit on Richie. Garcia was a local
pimp and street hustler turned drug kingpin. He once set a guy on
fire with gasoline in his car because the man owed him a dime bag
of weed. Now I guess he could add Richie to his long list of
problems solved.
I’m sad and fed up. My head feels like a grenade about to blow and
as I take one slow drag after another from my cigarette my heart
pumps blood like an over-torqued engine. I’m going to find out
exactly what happened to Richie. Going up against Garcia is the
last thing I want to do, because not only is he crazy, but he has
guy's with guns around him all the time. It might not have been him
that did it, but I am pretty sure. Poor Richie and what a
day.

I walk through the door of the Burnt
Bean, and Peach is sitting there with two large coffees. She comes
over to give me a hug.

"I'm so sorry, babe." She
says.

"Thanks, Peach. After this, I need to
speak with Pete Gorillo. He's working at the Stop and Swirl car
wash over on fifty-third."

"You're not going to anything
dangerous are you? I don't want you going back to jail. I won't
make it this time, Warner!"

I never saw myself working behind a
slushy machine, so since I knew how to fight I became one of those
guys who appear in your house when you owe money to bad people.
Maybe you get some teeth knocked out, a bat to the knees, or a
little worse, but I never killed anyone before.

"Of course not. I just want to talk to
him. Maybe he knows who did this. Look, Pete was always hanging
around with Richie, the two were tight. So, if anyone would know,
it's him."

"Don't get involved in this." Peach
warned.
We drink our coffee, and while she talks I think and stare at her
pretty face. I love to watch those blond locks fall in front of her
blue eyes. She sweeps them away, they fall back. I would have
shaved my head from sheer irritation, but she's been sweeping her
hair from her eyes for so long she doesn't notice anymore. Peach
wears tank tops in the summer that show off the tattoos covering
her arms and shoulders, and the tank top she has on now has the
Superman emblem on it. Not quite a sleeve on each arm, but she's
getting close and it's getting sexy. Girls who get tattoos are my
kind of people. You don't just get a tat, it's a permanent life
choice burned into you with a white hot needle for hours, as you
sit, like a statue, increasing your pain tolerance.

"So, do you want to go with me to the
concert, or not?" Peach asks.

"Yeah, sure. Let's do it." I had not
been listening.
Had I paid attention to my girlfriend, my life would have taken a
different turn, this confession would never have been written, and
I would not be listening to the sound of police sirens coming
closer to my apartment. Peach would also still be alive. The
concert we missed was Bad Religion, and they were playing at the
Bijoux tonight for the first time in almost twenty years. Those
guys put on one a hell of a show. We leave five minutes later to go
find Pete. This part of my life can't be blamed on economic
hardship, but it is a symptom of the greater issue. Humanity has
been pitted against each other by a handful of rich puppeteers
lurking in the shadows and we're in an eternal struggle to keep our
heads above water. But how many people question why? Humans are the
only inhabitants of this planet that have to pay to live here.
We're two blocks from Pete's car wash, and I'm driving Peach's
car.

"You're just going to talk to Pete,
and then we can go, right?" Peach asks.

"That's right, just a quick stop and
we can go to the show."

I park in front of the car wash, but
before I get out I take the pistol Peach has hidden beneath the
seat. She's always got that gun. I know I'm about to put my nose
where it doesn't belong, but Richie was my brother and I've got a
bad temper. Unrestrained anger accompanied with poor judgment is
the catalyst for a human bomb.

"What are you doing with that thing?
Damnit, do not make this day any worse than it already is." Peach
shakes her head. She's getting angry.

"What? This is just a little security.
Don't worry so much." I said.

I get the silent stare, and deep down
I know she's right. I should get back in the car and forget about
it. Anything I do in retaliation will never bring Richie back but
I'm hard wired for violence. Pete sees me coming and turns to walk
back inside the store.
"Peeeter! I must have a word with you." I say.
He turns back around, he's staring at the ground like a kid who's
about to get beat by his dad.
"You hear about Richie?" I ask him.

"Yeah, his mom called me. She said she
was trying to reach you too, but your phone was
disconnected."
My land line had been cut off because of four months of overdue
payments, but the cell was always on me. I guess I never gave her
that number.

"How'd she sound?" I ask.

"She was a mess, Warner. Incoherent
babbling and she wanted to know who would do something like this to
her baby. Just kept saying it over, and over. It was a hard call,
dude."

On second thought, I'm kind of glad
she hadn’t reached me.

"You know who did it?" He
asks.

"I think you know do I have to say it,
too?" I ask as he looks around uncomfortably. "You know where
Garcia is now?"

"He's over at Mamma's Pizza. Up on the
fourth floor of the building there is an office Garcia and his guys
have been using as a headquarters. Dude, if you go over there
you're joining Richie." Pete said.
"Think nothing of it. I was just curious, that’s all." I
say.

I leave Pete, and head back to my
apartment to get the other pistol. Mamma's Pizza isn't far from us
and so far my genius master plan is to shoot my way in, and figure
it out from there. I’m used to breaking in and getting the job done
as a collector for the mob. Peach is livid and wants out of the
car.
"I love you, but think I have to break up with you, Warner," she
says, tears in her eyes.

"Look, Peach. I'm just going to go
take care of this thing and then I'm done."

She should have run for her life. I
park in front of my apartment, run upstairs, pass by the blue boat
in the oil world, get the Beretta out of my nightstand, and then
slip it in my concealed carry holster. I've got two extra fully
loaded magazines with hollow points, one for each back pocket.
Hollow points send a message. In less than a minute I'm back in the
car and we're driving again. Peach is silent and I turn up the
stereo as Step Up by Drowning Pool comes on. My exhilaration is
mixed with fear, and there it is. My dark tower, Mamma's
Pizza.

I pull into the alley and park beside
the fire escape.
"I'm coming back, don't worry I've done this type of thing a
hundred times."

"You've never killed anyone." Peach is
staring at her feet.

"I'll be back." I kiss her on the
cheek, but she's a mannequin.
There’s an entrance beside the pizza shop that leads to all the
offices upstairs, so I open the door and begin climbing my way up.
It's quiet, and the alley is clear, but my fear of heights is
giving me vertigo when I reach the fourth floor. Through an outside
hallway window, I see the door to the office Pete told me about and
things begin to come in focus. It's unlocked, so I slide it open
and time slows as I approach the door. I can hear men inside
laughing, and then I hear the unmistakable voice of Garcia.
The next few minutes are like a time warp as I kick in the door. It
knocks a big guy down on the way open and I whip my guns out. The
first guy to go is the dude who fell. I put one in the back of his
head with the Beretta, and then use Peach's LC9 to put two into the
chest of another Garcia goon. He drops like a hot rock. Footsteps
come pounding up the stairs and I shoot this next guy in the knee
caps, sending him back down in a bloody, screaming mess. He tumbles
backward, smacks his head on the stairs and is knocked unconscious.
There won't be any more interruptions from that
direction.