Page 2 of Triple Threat

I checked into my room, changed into casual clothing, and started stalking. Radamir’s profile placed him as a heavy drinker and whatever the proper term was for a womanizer, but for gay men. Roan and I decided to have a race – who could find Rad first. He was off, doing the keyboard warrior thing, and I picked up the phone. I told the receptionist, using a thicker European accent than earlier, that in more words and more polite terms that I was a wild and crazy man looking for other wild and crazy men, and inquiring as to where to find them.

Fifteen minutes later, I was strolling through what was easily the loudest nightclub on the island; a place full of throbbing music and pulsing light. It was also the biggest sausage party I had ever seen. There was more sweaty meat in the club than had been at the Budapest sausage fest. I hadn’t seen so many mesh shirts, bare chests, and gold chains in one place. I felt underdressed and subdued. I didn’t have much experience playing that level of gay. That might make things difficult.

Radamir appeared, moving in the uneasy and broken gait of a man who was on a cocaine bender and fucking his brains out. A younger looking man was at his side and looked hurt when Rad brushed him away. Once he got what he wanted, he had no further use for a person. I ordered a Negroni and watched him work.

He was a butterfly, no attention span, and only had eyes for the prettiest boys. His hands had tremors as he flirted, joked, and groped through a herd of young men.

I slipped into his outer circle, being charming and chatting. I did my best to look like a first-timer, a man who was flirting with the notion, suppressed urges, and the like. It only took three drinks to move from the edge of his circle to leaning next to him. Getting his attention took bitching about the bathtub gin they were using to make the Negronis and gimlets. When I put my hand on his thigh, I had him hooked on my every word.

Half an hour later, Rad invited me back to his suite where he was having an after-party.

The after-party was the Slavic version of a rap video. The music was too loud, and it was crowded, and everyone was doing drugs. It was a mess, and the music was foreign. I knew more than a few languages but never really managed Russian, so couldn’t follow any of the lyrics. The bonus was that if anyone was armed, they had small weapons. I didn’t have to worry about rifles, or RPGs. Those made for a rough day.

Rad was going to have a worse day, even if I wasn't there to kill him. Whatever the human body’s limit for cocaine and erectile dysfunction pills was, he was trying to find it.

When the two of us were alone, I wasted no time with flirting or playing coy and went straight to business. The struggle was short. I knocked him out with a sleeper hold, then improvised a noose and helped poor distraught Radamir Verba hang himself. Suicide or auto-erotic asphyxiation; either way, it was a good cover and tied up the loose ends well.

I snapped a picture of him, in all of his deceased shame, and sent it to Roan. Roan would make sure that our employer received the proof of death, and we would be wired the remainder of our fee.

I spent two more days on the island, waiting until Rad was finally found. His entourage didn’t go looking for him until the hospitality bowls of drugs ran out and their own stashes were exhausted. That’s when they found him, dead almost a day and a half at that point. The report was clean and clear – there were no drugs found in his room, though there had been plenty when I left. The toxicology report was expected to show hideous amounts of illegal pharmaceuticals, and the lack of a suicide note leant the impression that his self-termination was likely highly impulsive, and for a man so recently estranged and divorced, this wasn’t so unusual.

The flight home was more relaxing. I skipped the gin. That was an important factor. No gin was better than bad gin.

My car, an unimaginative and easily overlooked silver sedan, was waiting at the Ocean City economy parking lot, and the four-day parking fee was just as much robbery like everything else based around aircraft. It was a bit of a drive from Ocean City up to Indigo City, but one of the rules we had was that we never used the nearest airports – Indigo City’s airfield or BWI, Baltimore/Washington International. There was a single clause to this, the bug-out rule. If we were in a compromised situation, all of our travel paths and plans ran out of all the other local airports and so if there was a counter-op run against us, they would button down all of those other airfields. There was no reason, other than intuition, for them to even consider the small field there, and they’d most assuredly be looking at BWI.

Roan was anal about contingency plans. He had turned our shared home into a fortress and had plans for a dozen different threats. We had an ‘official’ bug-out plan that involved scooting over to Dulles as fast as possible for an international flight straight to Mexico City. That one broke so many of our own rules that any competent professional would recognize it for the decoy that it was. We weren’t worried about professional hitmen; we were concerned about some blundering governmental task force getting involved. When those dolts stepped in, they would take the bait so hard that they would probably lock down Dulles in the process.

That was one of the reasons we were settled down in Indigo City. It had more exits that almost any other city in the vicinity. Rail ran north and south, so escaping into DC, Boston, NYC, or even Canada would be easy. There were airports everywhere. And there was the actual port in the city; acquiring a boat could be easier than a car in some cases.

A person staggered into the road, a glimpse of pale skin flashed almost flare-like under the glare of the LED headlamps, and I grabbed the brakes.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

The sedan was heavy, but the brakes were enormous ceramic things, and it had tons of fancy electronics under its hood. As fast as my reflexes were, the car had already spotted her and was braking on its own. I pulled the wheel to the side, and it slid to a stop just a few feet away from her, but not before the car met the guardrail and slid down it a good twenty feet.

Fuck.

She stared at me with big doe eyes, a mane of blue hair around her head. I expected her to bolt, like a wild animal. She had the look of a junkie, maybe a homeless person, maybe someone who brewed their own kombucha. Fucked if I knew.

What I didn’t expect was for her eyes to roll up into her head and for her to collapse.

Fuck.

I got out of the car and rushed to check her pulse; it was there. She was breathing too, and nothing really seemed to be broken. She was fairly dirty – clothing worn and ratty, and mismatched running shoes. She definitely looked like a homeless case close-up. Rule one was hitmen didn’t call the police. Hitmen also didn’t take people to the hospital. Too much security, too many alert eyes, too manyquestions.

I turned her face into the headlights from the car.

“Sadie?” I felt her name clench in my throat when I saw her face. She was older, I was too, but she looked decidedly unhealthy, cheeks gaunt, and her eyes were bruised and sunken in. When I picked her up, she felt light, lighter than a grown woman should, and I could feel her ribs through her clothes. “You’re safe now Shady, I won’t lose you again,” I whispered as I sat her in the back of the car. I felt my voice crack. My common sense said bodies ride in the trunk, but this wasn’t a body. This was my long-lost Sadie Brooks. Someone I had known as a child, someone I thought I would never see again.

“What happened to you?” I asked her unconscious body, buckling her into the seat. I was thinking back to when I had lost track of her, when she fell out of the system. I had no idea that she had still been in Indigo City; so close, but still impossibly far away.

The drive back to Bootlegger Head was tense. I tried to do my best impersonation of a chameleon, one eye on the road, and the other on the back seat. My mind raced, trying to plot out what had happened in the years since we last spoke. I hadn’t started my career leaning toward becoming a hitman, but what she had talked about; I couldn’t really remember. Military for the GI bill, then college; maybe social work. I felt a protective urge that if someone was after her, threatening her, they would be in for – not a world of hurt, just a very sudden end.

I parked the sedan in the garage and carried Sadie up to my bedroom and put her on the bed for now. She was still breathing, but here in the better light, I could see the bruise blooming on her hip and thigh, once I’d dragged her jeans down. I inspected the lump on the side of her head.Had I clipped her with the front fender? Had she hit her head falling in the road?She would probably be okay, but would definitely require medical attention far better than I could provide. Still, for right now, she was stable.

Roan was going to be annoyed – no one came to Bootlegger Head, we didn’t have guests. We didn’t have visitors. Even the rare visits from utility workers and the professionals who handled things like roof damage and landscaping were barely tolerated.

I went down and unloaded the rest of the car, trying to figure out how to break it to him.

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