Passing Through the Flame (18 page)

“—but in the long run, I’d put my money on steam—”

Alone again with Beck, Sargent felt a strange confusion in his gut, that mixture of rage and frustration that he had felt when confronting chickenshit brass in the Nam. Stupid soft bags of guts he could blow away in a second, and yet except for two minor fraggings, he had always swallowed their crap while longing to kill them. They had a way of pulling rank and making you eat it. Jango had done that to him now. He kept a tight grip on the Luger, but he kept it in his pocket.

Beck leaned back against the banister. “Now will you tell me what’s under your skin?” he said quietly, reasonably. The very reasonableness in his voice grated on Sargent’s nerves like sandpaper.

“Some fucker tried to kill me,” he said.

“You’ve got a rotten temper, Chris. Someone like you is bound to make enemies.”

“Can it, Jango. You know what I’m talking about. A
professional
tried to off me.” Rage ripped through Sargent as he remembered walking out to Carlos’ house with the package of coke under his left arm, and the sun beaming high in the blue sky over the jungled hillside, mirrored far below on the flat calm sea. The terrible run down to the coast was over, and he had snorted a good portion of the merchandise with Carlos and washed it down with a couple of tequilas. He felt stoned, a little drunk, and loose as a goose. Walking fat and happy down Carlos’ driveway toward his car without a care in the world, a stupid sap with his guard relaxed, expecting nothing.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty yards from the Toyota when it happened. A flash of sunlight on metal behind a tree across the road from the car, a gunshot sound, he dived for the ground whipping out his Luger; it happened all at once. Instinct and luck were all that saved him.

He saw the long glint of a rifle in the underbrush; then another bullet ripped overhead. But he had hit the deck with the car between himself and the assassin, and the man in the underbrush had an impossible angle. Sargent began crawling toward the car on his belly. Then he saw a figure moving in the underbrush, angling up the road for a clear shot.

“You lose, buster,” he muttered. In a quick coordinated series of motions, he rose into a crouching run, pumped six rapid shots in the general direction of the assassin, and sprinted for the Toyota. He reached the car before the man in the bushes could recover from ducking, blasted a final blind shot in his direction from the Luger, and crouched down behind the cover of the car. A shot from the underbrush roared through the car window above his head, showering him with glass. He opened the back door of the Toyota, grabbed his M-16 off the back seat, flipped it to rapid fire.

He moved to the front of the car, stuck his head up over the hood for a second. Instantly, there was a flash of fire in the underbrush and a bullet missed him by about two inches. This baby was good.

But not good enough. Sargent whipped the M-16 into position and emptied half the magazine in the direction of the muzzle flash. Gouts of foliage went flying in the air, there were three shrill screams, then silence. The M-16 might not be the most accurate piece in existence, but then, it didn’t have to be.

By this time Carlos and his boys were running down the driveway waving pistols like Keystone Kops. They fumbled around in the bushes for a minute or two before they found the body. He was thoroughly dead, having taken shots in the heart, the neck, the belly, and the head. He was a dark-skinned gringo. He was wearing a T-shirt, black jeans, and Wellington boots. There was not a scrap of identification on his body.

Carlos tugged at his long mustache. “
Un soldado,
for sure,” he said laconically. “You are having a disagreement with the other gringos?
Muy malo
, Chris,
muy malo.
This one was an
asesino
, how do you call it, a contract man?”

Red rage boiled through Sargent as he remembered how close he had come to buying it. The bastard had to come from either the organization or Beck. “Even Carlos had it pegged as a pro job,” he told Jango.

“Well, that’s one of the hazards of the game,” Jango said mildly.

“Look, Beck. I won’t mince words. Either the organization sent him after me or you did. Which is it?”

For the first time, there was a flash of anger in Jango Beck’s eyes. Slowly, very slowly, it transformed itself to something else, something cold and reptilian.

“If I wanted you dead, Chris, I certainly wouldn’t resort to anything as gross and chancy as hiring a gunman. You’re insulting me, suggesting that I’d attempt anything so crude and boorish. And ineffective. You know that’s not my style; therefore, you know I didn’t try to have you killed. Don’t you Chris? And would I bother to lie to you?”

Sargent felt energy draining out of his body and into Beck as if those eyes were drawing substance out of him like vacuum pumps. He’s right, he’s got no reason to kill me, and a hit man
wouldn’t
be his style.

“If not you, then the organization. Why? I thought we had a deal with them.”

Beck shrugged. “We did have a deal with them,” he said. “But they’ve become greedy. Now they want the whole coke trade too. Or at least they want the marketing end; they’re willing to let us run the stuff for them for a price. Naturally, I have no intention of letting myself become an employee of such people, nor do I intend to give up the coke trade if I don’t have to. It’s a matter of principle.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before they started shooting?”

“Because I didn’t know they’d start shooting until they started shooting. You now have my permission to deal with them as you see fit. Except that nobody of importance in the organization is to be harmed.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? They tried to kill me! They’ll try again. Let me tell you, Beck, any of their men, and I mean
any
, that get in range are going to be dead meat. Anyone the organization has in Mexico when I get back is a dead man. That’s first priority. I’m going to wipe those bastards out, and I’m going to do it fast.”

“You’re not listening to me, Chris,” Beck said. “This is a high-level business dispute. It involves not only the coke trade but other areas of mutual interest. I’m trying to negotiate a settlement on my level, and the talks are at least proceeding in a civilized manner. But the negotiations would blow up if you started offing organization people of significant stature.
They
might even put a contract out on
me
.”

Sargent came very close to whipping out the Luger and blowing Beck’s head off. The gall of the bastard! While the organization has a goddamned contract out on me, I’m supposed to pull back and handle them with kid gloves so they won’t come gunning for Jango! So as not to jeopardize his “high-level negotiations,” he says! And where have I heard
that
one before?

“That’s the same bullshit we got fed in Nam! Don’t wipe out the dinks, it’ll screw up our fancy negotiations. I say if the people you’re negotiating with all end up dead, then you’ll get what you want.”

“And I say I’m the boss of this outfit, Chris,” Beck said quietly. He lounged against the banister of the stairway with a ghost smile on his lips and a snake’s heart in his eyes. “Who do you think handles the payoffs to the Mexicans? You think the Mexicans aren’t on the take? You think we didn’t have to pay for that helicopter you destroyed, for the Federales you killed? You think politics isn’t involved, and in the States, too? If the Mexicans wanted the Green Mountain Boys badly enough, they’d get you. With CIA help. I see to it that they don’t, and I keep the U.S. out of it. Without me handling this end, you wouldn’t last six weeks. So don’t get any stupid ideas about going into business for yourself.”

“But they’re gunning for me! What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Defend yourself. Defend our shipments. But no all-out war with the organization. As I said, I’m discussing this matter and other matters of mutual interest with high-level organization people, and I expect to come out on top. In the meantime, we’ve got to keep the shooting contained on the lower levels. The organization understands this. You’d better get it through your head, too.”

“Lower levels! They’re shooting at
me!
”

Beck shrugged. “Yours not to reason why....”

“You fucking—” A red mist descended behind Sargent’s eyes. The Luger was out of his pocket and aimed at Beck’s head before Sargent was even aware of what he was doing. His finger began to squeeze the trigger—

With the calm and sudden grace of a striking rattlesnake, Beck sprung at him from his deceptive lounging pose, grabbed his gun hand by the wrist, yanked it upward.

Beck’s grip was surprisingly tight, but Sargent was the stronger man, and steadily, slowly but inexorably, his superior strength began to force his arm down toward the horizontal against Jango Beck’s resistance. However, at the same time, Beck’s strange black-in-brown eyes were locked on his, blasting out psychic energy, staring him down as the eyes of an ordinary man might sap the will of a dog. Here it was Sargent’s red killing rage against Beck’s black impenetrability, and the contest was just as unequal as the contest of physical strength that Sargent was winning.

Then Jango Beck abruptly did the unexpected. He smiled and suddenly relaxed the upward pressure of his arm, in fact brought Sargent’s gun hand down to the horizontal himself, aimed the Luger straight at his own face. “If that’s what you want, you go ahead, Chris,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were thinking at the time.”

Sargent felt his finger go slack on the trigger, felt his grip on the pistol loosen, felt the urge to kill slacken, without understanding why.

Beck let go of his hand. The weight of the pistol pulled his outstretched arm down about twenty degrees, so that the Luger was pointed at Beck’s chest instead of at his face. Beck had been holding Sargent’s aim for him himself; Sargent suddenly felt entirely ridiculous.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Chris,” Beck said. “I’m going to turn around and walk back up these stairs, because our discussion is now over. I’m not going to look back. You can shoot me if you want to, but you won’t, because you’ll be thinking—about how much money you’re making and where you’d be without me.”

And he bowed ironically, turned, and began walking up the staircase, his huge bush of curly black hair bobbing insolently with every step.

For a long foolish moment, Sargent stood with the Luger in his hand pointing at the empty space where Jango Beck had been. Then, spasmodically, he swiveled and aimed it at the back of Beck’s head as Beck walked deliberately up the loop of the spiral staircase. A hot fore image formed in his brain—a bullet smashing into the back of Jango Beck’s skull, splinters of bone, red bits of gore, gray brains exploding from that jouncing forest of hair, that sly mouth silenced forever, those mocking eyes as dead as two dull pieces of black ash.

Kill you, you fucker, nobody talks to me like that—and he thought of the money he was socking away in Switzerland—I should shoot the motherfucker, then off every organization type in Mexico, we could do it in six weeks—women, dope, booze, Greek villas, the freedom that money could buy—but where does that leave us, with no distribution in the States, no one buying off the Mexicans, but I should kill Jango before—where he had been before Beck picked him up, scuffling around San Francisco with a heavy skag habit—Jango Beck was the head of the operation, and if you cut off the head, the body would die.

Spirals within spirals, the conflicting imperatives chased each other snarling through Sargent’s mind, as Jango Beck continued to walk slowly and confidently up the staircase. What am I going to do? What the fuck am I going to do? Goddamn you, Beck!

His finger on the trigger began to tighten of its own volition, nerve and muscle resolving the mind’s dilemma—and then Beck disappeared from view around the ascending spiral of the staircase.

His body roaring in adrenalin rage, Sargent took two quick steps up after him, heard voices coming down the stairs, paused, froze, stuck the gun back in his shoulder holster. He stood there for a moment, a volcano of frustrated energy trapped in frozen flesh.

Then the whirling red fog in his mind propelled his body into random motion. He tore blindly down the stairs, across the corridor, and out onto the balcony. As he emerged from the house, he bumped against a big well-built man in black slacks and a tie-dyed tank top.

“Watch where you’re going, asshole!” The big man turned on Sargent, his fair skin reddened with anger, his arms moving threateningly.

Sargent hardly noticed him as he chopped him in the chest with his left forearm without slackening stride. The big man grunted, started to come for Sargent. Then he looked Sargent full in the face and faded back away.

“—man did you see that guy’s face—”

“—death on the half-shell, baby—”

“—the monsters that show up at Jango’s parties. Someday someone’s gonna get killed—”

Chris Sargent half saw the terrified looks on the balloon faces of the stupid dinks as he paced the crowded balcony in a search pattern for something he had forgotten but would know when he saw it. He half heard the chickenshit things they were saying—he could pick up mainly the emotion, the fear, as if they were speaking Vietnamese or Lao. Let them talk, let them look, let them shit in their stupid pants, the useless, parasitic stupid fuckers!

He longed to inspire that same craven sweat-reeking fear in Jango Beck, to see Jango whimpering, drooling, crawling, begging for his wretched shitty life just before he got a dumdum in his stinking brain! That’s where Jango belongs, down on the ground licking my boots in fear just before I blow his head off.

I’d love to see someone make a move now, I’d just like to see some guinea son of a bitch try it! Make your move already, make your goddamn move! Goddamn your stinking soul, Beck, I’ll come for you sooner or later, I swear I will! His brain afire, Sargent bulled his way across the balcony and into Jango Beck’s maze, an unguided missile on a collision course with unknown fate.