The Sand Trap (32 page)

Gord laughed. “It sure did. We fucked until
she cried 'enough!' and I was so tired and sore that we could not
go on. I honestly don’t know if she came or not. I was just
concentrating on the old in and out and I was inning and outing
like I had not done for twenty years. So yup, those pills do just
what they say they will do. I took the one that is supposedly only
good for four hours, but you can get one that works for a whole
long weekend. They actually advertise that benefit. All I can say
is that would be some woman to put up with that for three
days.”

“So it worked,” she snuggled up against him
putting her head on his chest. “Gord, if it is important to you,
keep the pill available and use it. But I can tell you it isn’t a
big thing for me or most women I know of.”

Gord kissed her forehead. “You're an
understanding woman Monica, but let me tell the rest of the story.
The pill did exactly what the golf channel ad said for sure –
including the warning section. Do you remember the warning at the
end of each ad concerning erections that last longer than four
hours? Well six hours into mine Gail started to think that it was
quite funny. It was not to me. A stiff, blood engorged cock for
such a long time hurts like hell. Not to mention that it had been
vagina rubbed raw by this point. So if you had been in the
emergency room of the Ottawa General Hospital at 3 am on that night
you would have seen a very embarrassed grey haired man come into
the emergency room bent over with a blanket around his waist. Then
you would have seen the emergency room nurse break into fits of
very unprofessional laughter when that same idiot removed the
blanket for just a second to explain the problem. But most
embarrassing of all, you would have heard that same grey haired
fifty-something year old idiot scream when the emergency room
doctor, a female to boot, stuck a very big needle into his very
sore member.”

By this time Monica was laughing so hard she
couldn’t lie down anymore since it was making her choke.

“So, no more little blue pills and enough of
my whining about senior sex. I think you have some things you need
to explain,” Gord demanded as he suddenly remembered the Tai Chi
fight, the revelation that Monica was actually forty-two years old
and the urgent sex.

“OK,” Monica agreed as she stood up and
walked over to her purse she had thrown on the chesterfield. “But
get me a drink first. Not the wine. Pour us each a glass of the
Bushmills. We will both need something stronger than a Malbec."

Gord followed her over to the computer table
where he had put the Bushmills and retrieved the two wine glasses.
They were both standing naked beside the chesterfield. “Hope you
don’t mind a taste of Merlot with your malt?”

Monica turned towards him and opened her
mouth to answer when suddenly he saw her glance towards the stairs
at the other end at the room. She shouted, “Get Down!” as she
launched herself at him and they crashed to the floor behind the
chesterfield. Gord felt the hair in her crotch rub against his
thigh as she straddled him and moved forward to the end of the
chesterfield.

It took him a second to realize that the
pfft pfft pfft he was hearing were bullets racking the front of the
chesterfield and, as if the shooter grew bored with the furniture,
the automatic fire walked slowly and methodically over, around and
up all parts of the wall of electronic equipment. It sheared the
necks off his two guitars. He automatically covered his head as
bits of wood and electronic parts flew all over the room.

There was only a fraction of a second of
silence as he heard the soft metallic sound of changing magazines
from the other end of the room. Then he saw that Monica had reached
her purse and to his surprise pulled out a large handgun and in
that fraction of silence she rolled to the end of the chesterfield
and took a shooter’s stance. Before she was upright in her stance
she fired four quick shots and the groans from the other end of the
room told him she had hit something. The automatic fire started
again and Gord watched, in slow motion, as red holes started to
emerge on her body, starting from her crotch and moving upward. A
new red belly button emerged. One emerged right in the middle of
her left breast, and just before one popped out in the middle of
her forehead she dropped her gun and turned her head toward Gord
and smiled. With the impact of the last shot she toppled over
backwards and lay motionless in the morass of glass and wire from
the destroyed stereo and recording equipment. In all his years with
CIDC he had never seen anyone shot ...or for that matter even die.
To watch it happen to a friend and lover was more wrenching than he
could ever have imagined and he had a fleeting thought of
compassion for the lovers of all of the people he had killed over
the years.

The shooting stopped and the silence was
suddenly strange and brought a sense of finality, or perhaps
reality to what Gord had just seen. There were no further sounds
from the other end of the room except for what Gord thought might
have been the soft sound of a magazine of fresh ammunition going
into a pistol. After the shock and speed of the events he was
starting to gather his wits a little and began to analyze his
situation. Someone was trying to kill him, Monica was dead and he
was lying naked in his grief behind a chesterfield with no weapon.
He could see Monica’s gun beside her body but he would never make
it to the weapon before he met the same fate as her. He had taken
weapons training and was actually a crack shot, but this pistol was
out of reach. He reached the conclusion very quickly that he was
done. All that the killer on the other side of the chesterfield had
to do was to walk around the end of the chesterfield and finish him
off, and someone would find two naked bullet riddled bodies in his
empty house. He wondered for a second if that would discourage the
new buyer?

An accented voice from the other end of the
room reduced his options.

“Stand up Gord Salmy.”

Gord was frozen to the floor. His
linguistics expertise told him right away that the speaker was
Korean. He’d have to hear a little more. Although the English was
very good, he was pretty confident the speaker was North
Korean.

“We know you have no weapon and I doubt
there are any more naked women with big pistols hiding behind the
chesterfield with you. So just stand up,” the voice ordered in the
North Korean accented English.

“Why should I make it easy for you to kill
me?” he yelled from hiding. “If I stand up you are just going to
kill me anyhow. You have just murdered my friend. “ Gord choked up
a little as he looked over at Monica's body, her eyes wide open and
her mouth frozen in its last smile. Why give you an easy
target?”

“You are an easy target now. I am just
offering you a little honour in your death. To be able to look your
killer in the eye. That is much more than you gave my brother.”

Gord realized that the voice was right,
although he didn't know what was meant by the brother thing. There
certainly wasn’t anything he could do lying naked on the basement
floor behind a chesterfield. He took one last sad look at Monica
and then scanned his wall of electronics. The large digital clock
was blinking erratically at 6:47 pm. The old tube amplifier was
smoking and one of the tall old magnet type speakers had been
sheared in half by the fusillade of automatic gunfire. And there
was his cache hidden behind the wall. He wondered what the new
owners of the house would think when they remodeled a bullet
destroyed basement and found his assortment of herbs and insects
hidden behind the wall. He had bigger problems now, so he slowly
stood up, the early arthritis in his left hip suddenly quite stiff.
He was glad for once that he was farsighted and not nearsighted so
he would not need glasses to see his killer. Gail and the kids
would get a big insurance settlement and, since they had half
forgotten him now anyhow, he didn’t suspect the mourning period
would be long. It was odd, despite the killing he had done, he had
never thought of his own death. He hoped it would be as fast as
Monica’s.

He grunted as he stiffly rose from the
carpet behind the chesterfield and stood naked in front of his
killer, suddenly quite calm and prepared for his inevitable death.
There were three of them; at least three of them standing. Thanks
to Monica two more were lying on the floor with blood dripping from
their balaclava covered faces. Two tall men in black balaclavas
were positioned along the back wall at the bottom of the stairs,
standing in a military stance with automatic machine pistols at the
ready. A third, much shorter person, also in a balaclava, was
standing six feet in front of them holding a pistol much like the
one that Monica had used.

“Come around and stand over here on the
mat,” the shorter man ordered. He pointed at the gym mat he was
standing on.

Gord couldn’t see whether it mattered if he
was killed where he was or eight feet closer to the weapons. He
walked around the end of the chesterfield and stood looking at the
shorter man.

“Put your underwear on. Your prick is
ugly.”

Gord was confused. He’d heard of the honour
of dying with your boots on, but dying with your underwear on was a
new one. He reached down and separated his Stanfields from his
jeans where he and Monica had left them just a few moments earlier
and pulled them on.

The man turned around and handed his pistol
to one of the guards by the wall and turned back to Gord. “I would
like your death to be a little slower and more painful than your
friend over there. Such resistance was not anticipated and I regret
that she had to die, and even more that my two companions are dead.
They were my friends.” He took off his balaclava and a few things
started to fall into place for Gord. The Korean accent. The
“brother” comment. What Gord had done?

“How did you find me?”

“Does that matter?”

“Just curious I guess. I have been doing
this for a long time and no one has ever traced anything back to
me.” Actually Gord was stalling for time. He didn’t know why. His
basement was soundproofed so it was unlikely any neighbour had
heard the gunfire, so he didn’t expect the posse to break into the
house to save him. It just seemed like a good idea to stay alive as
long as possible.

“I know – twenty-five years -- nineteen
killings.”

Gord was aghast.

“You could only know that if you infiltrated
Agency data. That’s not possible.”

“You people are so foolish,” the speaker
snorted. “Where do you think your processors are made? Who provides
your software? We have “nanos” hidden in computer systems all over
the developed world. Once a tall Canadian was identified walking
down the tunnel after the fight in the washroom it was easy to find
out from CDIC files who was in Korea when my brother was murdered
and put the pieces together from there. But I have to admit if it
hadn’t been for our chance encounter in the washroom we would never
have suspected foul play. Whatever you used we couldn’t find a
trace of it in a thorough autopsy. If we had more time I would get
you to teach me some tricks.”

Gord took small comfort in the notion that
his methods were still so undetectable.

“But why all of this?” Gord waved his hand
over the destroyed room and Monica’s dead body. “You are clearly a
professional like me. There are much cleaner and more efficient
ways to kill someone you don’t like. And killing an innocent
bystander is not acceptable. She was my friend.”

It was then that Gord noticed the true look
of hate in the man’s eyes.

“You killed my brother. You humiliated me in
that filthy washroom and now I will kill you with my bare hands.
You caught me by surprise in Seoul. There is no surprise now.” The
man took the classic starting Tai Kwon Do position and sent a quick
jab to Gord’s throat. If it hadn’t been for Gord’s special gifts
that first jab would have broken his windpipe and he would have
lain slowly choking to death on the gym mat in his basement. Gord
saw it coming and to the surprise of the assailant he fended the
blow off with his right hand. The blows came one after the other
and Gord realized that he had never faced anyone as skillful or
someone as fast in delivery as this man. He was younger, very
strong; the blows were starting to hurt and he was aggressively
angry. On the other hand Gord was exercising every morsel of his
spatial awareness, and this combined with his own skill allowed him
to fend off the blows and this was clearly frustrating the
attacker.

“Your file said you were non violent,” the
man offered, taking a break from the attack. “You surprise.”

“It’s just a hobby,” Gord replied, not
letting down his defenses. “We’ll have to play golf together
sometime.”

The attack came again, too fast for Gord to
launch his own attack. Open palms, leg sweeps, elbows, pointed
fingers. Gord drew from a deep reservoir of Tai Chi positions to
defend himself the best he could. And then it was over. Gord
actually watched it in slow motion and couldn’t do anything to
avoid it. His assailant spun around on his front foot and with his
back to Gord somehow sprung from this hidden position to lash out
with his back heel on Gord’s knee and the knee that put him out of
hockey years ago now put him out of this fight. As Gord went down
he thought how he’d like to know that move and he watched the
approaching palm heel just before his face exploded in a sea of
red.

And he was gone.

PART THREE: MEXICO
2012-13