Rising Phoenix (20 page)

“Now let’s get the hell out of here—we’re late as it is.” The driver’s tone suggested that he was Carlos’s superior.

“What do you want me to do with this piece of shit?”

“You shoot off that gun an’ we’re gonna have trouble,” he warned. “They’ll be able to hear it from here.” The driver walked back around the truck and began surveying the drums. Finding the one without a top, he stuffed a rag into the opening.

Carlos grunted in frustration as Hobart continued to slowly free his pistol.

When the driver’s door slammed shut, Carlos finally made a decision and gave Hobart a vicious kick to the face. He could have avoided it easily, but there was no sense in pissing the man off anymore.

Through watering eyes, he watched Carlos pull out his penis and begin to relieve himself on his chest. As he felt the warm fluid seep into his clothes, he briefly considered pulling the gun. The thought passed quickly, though, and he just lay there quietly as Carlos zipped his pants up and walked back to the truck, cackling.

The moment the truck disappeared from view,
Hobart jumped up and jogged slowly across the road He managed to make it down to the forest bed before the light from the receding truck completely disappeared. He stripped off all of his clothes and strapped on his night vision goggles. He headed quickly away from the road, remembering a stream that ran fairly straight north to south. It took him about ten minutes to reach it, and he walked into its center and began scrubbing. The mountain water took his breath away at first, but no more than the mingling smells of kerosene and urine. The water stung the open wound in his leg, drowning out the throbbing coming from his blood-spattered nose. Finally he put his goggles on a rock at the side of the stream and washed the blood from his face, carefully feeling the bridge of his nose. Broken. Another battle scar to add to his collection.

The trip back to his truck went much faster than he had anticipated. Visibility was poor, even with the goggles, though it was sufficient to avoid large objects such as trees. They did manage to pick up one of the pipes that he had thrown from the back of the truck, giving it an eerie greenish white glow. He gave it a wide berth.

Back at the Range Rover, he quickly dressed and pulled out onto the road. The smell of kerosene hadn’t been completely eradicated, so he rolled down the window to circulate the air.

He tried unsuccessfully to push the thought of the poison from his mind. It hadn’t made it to the gash worn into his leg, but had it penetrated his skin? Had the poison mixed well enough to cause the fumes to
be dangerous, or had it been forced to the bottom when it was dumped in?

He wished that Peter Manion were still alive. Even if the news was bad, he’d rather know now. Wondering for the next two weeks was going to be a hell of a lot worse.

T
he good news was that it had been a week since his kerosene bath in Colombia, and he felt fine except for the dull throbbing in his nose. Of course, that didn’t prove anything. Manion had warned him that the effects of the mushrooms would be negligible for almost two weeks. And then you’d be dead.

The bad news was that he hadn’t heard a word from Robert Swenson since he had given him the go-ahead. Hobart was struggling to keep his mind from running endless worst-case scenarios. Its current favorite was that his partner had been captured and was at this moment giving him up. He had briefly considered moving from the warehouse, but where to? Better to just sit it out and keep his eyes open. In the interim, a bullet-proof vest and extra clips for his .45 had found their way under his jacket.

He had planned to have a ballpark time frame on the arrival of the tainted heroin before putting the ads in the paper, but it didn’t look like he was going to have that luxury. In the scenario currently branded
into his mind, the heroin didn’t even get poisoned—Swenson was caught going in. In any event, his best guess was that the first wave of bad coke was going to hit the American shore in about four days. His estimate wasn’t based on scientific study or statistics—it was really just a guess. There were too many variables to get a reliable estimate. Shipping schedules, modes of transportation, Coast Guard activity, final destination. The list went on.

Crabbing a handful of tissues from a box off the desk, he walked to the open filing cabinet behind him and pulled out three Federal Express envelopes, careful to keep the tissues between his fingertips and the flimsy cardboard. He tossed them on the desk and sat down. It wasn’t quite the elevating moment that he had hoped for, but the ads had to go today. He had probably already waited too long.

The climax to all of the preparation seemed to dissolve in light of Swenson’s disappearance. All Hobart could do was hope that his partner hadn’t been caught until he had finished what he was there to do. Or better yet, that he had been shot leaving the refinery area.

Hobart switched on the computer in front of him, and pulled up Word.

He stuffed each envelope with a copy of his letter and a copy of the ad, careful not to touch the paper with his fingers. He mentally thanked FedEx for its self-sealing envelope—the FBI was doing amazing things with saliva these days.

He opened the front door carefully, scanning the street. Fortunately, this section of Baltimore housed almost no Hispanics. A Mexican drug enforcer would stand out like a man in a tuxedo. Not spotting anyone who looked like they were from much farther south than D.C., he stepped out onto the street and set the alarm. His eyes continued their slow sweeps of the neighborhood. The fact that no one had tried to knock down the warehouse with machine guns was a good sign. Maybe Swenson was killed after all. The thought of his old friend’s bullet-riddled corpse lying on a dilapidated airstrip in Mexico was sad, but not as sad as the thought of his own bullet-ridden corpse lying next to a dilapidated warehouse in Baltimore.

He glanced at his watch as he pulled his truck out into the quiet street.

Four thirty. Just in time for the fucking rush hour. Maybe the aggravation of the Beltway would be enough to get his mind off Mexico.

The traffic had been even worse than he expected because of a fender bender that left two middle-aged men fistfighting in an overgrown grass median.

Instead of getting his mind off his problems, the cramped confines of the truck and mindlessness of driving had focused his thoughts into an ever-changing and increasingly morbid collage.

It was almost eight o’clock when Hobart pulled back into his parking space in front of the warehouse. The three FedEx packages were now irretrievable, locked in a drop-off box near the Capitol building.

The street was as he had left it. The group of children playing ball in the alley alongside the warehouse were still there, though the bright winter sun had been replaced by shadowy streetlights.

The warehouse wasn’t as he had left it.

The perimeter security was on, but the interior systems had been disabled. Hobart shut down the door alarm and moved quickly inside, pushing the door shut with his foot, and drawing his gun out of sight of the people on the street. Something else had changed. What was it?

He had left the lights on, as they were now. The furniture all looked untouched. Then it hit him—there was a quiet, almost imperceptible, hum coming from the office. He vividly remembered shutting off the computer after using it.

Hobart moved silently across the floor and darted into the office, his .45 held out directly in front of him and his finger already squeezing gently on the trigger.
No one. He walked quickly around the desk. The computer screen glowed a soft gray.

Someone had been trying to access the letter that he had just written to the newspapers. Hobart flipped the switch on the computer’s side and walked back to the door of the office. The outer room was still empty and quiet. He slipped through it and down the hall toward the warehouse, peering into the empty bathroom as he passed. The door to the warehouse was open, and he heard the unmistakable scraping of furniture being moved—as though someone was searching for something.

He stood motionless for a moment, back pressed firmly to the decaying brick wall beside the open door. It couldn’t be the cops—no way—he hadn’t done anything yet. The Mexicans? How could they have bypassed his security?

No point speculating when the answer was fifteen feet away. He jumped through the doorway and leveled his pistol at the head of a man wearing dark sunglasses and carrying a large box. The man dropped the box while Hobart was still in motion. The sound of breaking glass was followed by the strong smell of beer.

“Jesus, John. Don’t shoot,” the man cried. He sounded like he had cotton balls in his mouth.

Hobart didn’t instantly recognize the soft, round face before him, but the voice was unmistakable. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked, sliding the gun back into its holster under his arm.

Robert Swenson pulled off his sunglasses, revealing black circles around red eyes. His cheeks bulged comically. “Pretty nice, huh?” He bent and collected a few unbroken beer bottles from the open top of the box. “You haven’t been keeping the ’fridge stocked.”

“Did you do it?” Hobart said, ignoring Swenson’s comment.

“Why yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Yeah, it’s done. Shit should hit the streets in a week or two.”

Hobart sighed heavily, feeling the week’s anxieties melt away and the burning in his stomach fade with them. He took the beers from his partner’s hand and walked back to the office, sitting in the chair in front of the desk. Swenson took his usual place behind it.

“Doesn’t look like things went too great for you, either,” Swenson said, pointing to Hobart’s swollen nose. “Did you get the job done?”

“Yup. And the ads went out in FedEx today.”

“I figured that’s what the file ADLET was.” He pointed to the blank computer screen. “Couldn’t get in though—didn’t know what your password was.”

Hobart pointed to the beers on the desk. Swenson grabbed them and put them in the refrigerator, pulling out the last two cold ones and handing one across the desk.

“So where the hell have you been?” Hobart asked.

“Fucking bad luck’s all. I was too close to the airstrip and got spotted. Some guy taking a piss where he
shouldn’t have been, you know. Anyway, they kicked my ass good—thought I was DEA.” He took a pull on his beer, shaking his head at the memory. “They kept me in a back room in the hangar I told you about for a few days. To make a long story short, they were waiting for their boss to give the okay to put a hole in my head.”

“Did he?”

Swenson smiled mischievously. “You’re gonna love this. So the boss shows up. We talk for a couple of minutes and I stick with my story about wanting to charter a plane. By the end of our conversation, I’m pretty sure I’m a goner. Then he quotes a Bible passage to me—kind of out of the blue, you know. I guess that was supposed to be my Christian burial. Anyway, I recognize the quote from one of Blake’s sermons—you know how good my memory is for useless shit—and I cite it. So that leads to a big conversation about God and the Bible. Turns out this guy’s some kind of combination murderer/dealer/Christian soldier. So we talk Jesus for about another hour and he just lets me go. Actually, he didn’t only let me go, he made his soldiers apologize to me and take me back to my hotel.”

His story finished, Swenson leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the desk. “So what’s with the nose?”

Hobart related his adventure with the drunk guards on the truck, leaving out the part about lying in the tainted kerosene.

Swenson laughed loudly, seeming to take perverse pleasure in the image of his ever-serious partner getting pissed on. “We’re a couple of sorry old farts, aren’t we? All we have to do is fool a bunch of drunk dumb-shits
with second grade educations, and we both get caught and beat up.” His laughter faded into a quiet giggle. “Thank God, it’s over.”

“You said it,” Hobart replied, holding his beer up. His partner leaned forward, and the bottles clinked quietly as they touched together.

The Reverend Simon Blake padded down the stairs in the new slippers that his daughter had bought him for Christmas. They were a bit small, but he could never bear the thought of taking back anything she bought him. As soon as she forgot about them, they would be relegated to the box at the top of his closet. They would make a nice addition to the ugly ties, useless electronic gadgets, and one very large belt buckle stored there. Erica insisted that the children pick out his gifts themselves.

A cold blast of air tried to blow his robe apart as he opened the front door, but the belt tied across his ample belly managed to hold. He trotted out onto the frost-covered porch, retrieved two newspapers, and rushed back to the house. The sun was peeking up over the trees at the end of his property, quickly turning the frost into gently quivering dew.