the door. Locked and barred, a side thrust kick wasn’t going to get him in. Shit. There was no way he was getting inside the office without a key. Then he saw Loomis’ aging ’59 Chevy Biscayne.
The car wasn’t locked, no reason to, everybody knew that the driver’s window had been broken out years ago. The keys were in it, but usually that wouldn’t have made any difference, because usually it was inside the fence with the dog, and usually Loomis was asleep in the bedroom behind the office with that AK-47. But he wasn’t sleeping in his bed tonight and Jackson had forgotten to put away the car. Maybe he forgot about the dog, but Earl didn’t think so. Jackson wasn’t stupid, he would have wanted it to look as natural as possible. He would have let the dog loose.
He climbed into the car, started it up, took a breath, put it in gear, cranked the wheel, pointing it toward the gate, and floored it. The impact stopped the car, the gate held and the dog went crazy, barking and snapping on the other side of it like a saber-toothed hell hound. He threw the car in reverse and backed away. Then Earl looked to the office, put the car in gear and braced himself for a second impact. The barred door crumbled under the car’s onslaught. He backed away, climbed out of the car and started toward the office. The dog was howling now, angry and raging, sending chills charging up Earl’s spine.
He knew Loomis kept a pair of bolt cutters, so that he could remove the lock if your rent was two weeks past due and put his own lock on. If you wanted the key to Loomis’ lock you paid your rent. He found them behind the counter, next to the AK. He picked them up along with the rifle and started toward the gate.
“ Hey, you wanna fuck with me now, boy, you wanna fuck with me.”
The dog became silent as Earl approached, glaring.
Earl clicked off the safety, raised the rifle in a smooth one-handed motion and put a bullet between the dog’s eyes. It went down quiet and quick. Then the other dog, the junkyard mate, started howling like a werewolf, but it didn’t matter to Earl, because they were at least a couple of miles from the nearest human being. The fucking dog could howl itself to death for all he cared.
The lock snapped in the bolt cutter’s jaws like spaghetti sliced by a scissors. The stench hit him before he hit the light. Blood, urine, feces, but no bodies. The counterfeit CDs, the porno videos, the cocaine were still there, along with his weapon, sitting on an open box of compact discs. He picked it up, glad to have it back.
He didn’t know what Jackson had done with the bodies, but it was a fair guess they’d never be found. Not a bad plan. When Earl washed up at the bottom of the river with Loomis the investigation would eventually get the police to the warehouse and his gun. Still a good plan, only now it would be Jackson’s body along with Loomis’ floating in that river.
But then he thought about the broken lock, the dented gate, the smashed in office, and the dead dog. He had to destroy any evidence that he’d been there, and he remembered the two out-of-staters that he and Jackson had torched. He had a siphon hose and an empty gas can in the unmarked.
An hour later he was home, dying to get his aching muscles under a hot shower. A shower would also wash his conscience clean and clear his mind. Just a little hot water, that’s all it would take, because it wasn’t the first time he’d shot someone for the money. But before, a voice in his head told him, it was a drug dealer and a couple of robbers, men he didn’t know, with families he’d never see. But that time, he answered the voice, he’d only netted peanuts.
The briefcase in the back seat of his unmarked must have a half million or more in it. For that kind of money he’d go hunting with Johnny Lee’s daddy for six months of Sundays and never even think of the boy. He looked at his feet and frowned. He’d tracked in some dirt on the new carpets. He’d have to clean it up as soon as he got out of the shower. He wanted everything to be perfect for Maria when she got back.
He slipped off his shoes, careful not to get any more dirt on the rug. He had his hand on the belt buckle, when he saw the flashing red light on the answer machine. He stepped out of the jeans and went over to the phone.
“ Earl, it’s me,” Maria’s voice came soft and low through the small speaker. “I won’t be coming home. You can feed yourself, or let Josie down at the diner feed you, or starve for all I care, but you’ve seen the last of me.”
He stood there in his jockey shorts, jeans under his left arm, right fist clenched and listened to the silence after the message. He had a car full of cash. Josie was young and luscious, he had a good job, he was looked up to. He knew he should be satisfied, but no woman walked out on Big Earl Lawson.
“ Son of a bitch,” he said as he threw his jeans onto the carpet. He picked up the phone and called the airline. It didn’t take him long to find out about the bombs on the plane or where she was. Shit, the plane was on the ground for less than an hour and she was calling it quits.
Chapter Ten
“ They stole my car.” The blue veins on his forehead were pulsing, his neck cords were throbbing, his hands were shaking, but his speech was clipped and calm. “I don’t care if he is your friend, I want him arrested and slammed in jail. I want him put so far away that I’ll never have to hear his name again. I want him buried so deep, that he’ll wish he was dead. I want him to suffer for the rest of his life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“ Calm down, George. This is another day. It won’t do any of us any good if you have a stroke,” Dani Street said. She’d never seen him mad, never heard him swear.
“ Don’t tell me to calm down. You aren’t shit without me.”
“ Cool your jets, George, and try to remember who you’re talking to.” He bit into his lower lip. She knew he was a man who suffered orders and taking them from a woman tripled the salt.
“ Sorry,” he said, the color beginning to fade from his face.
“ That’s better,” she said.
“ But he stole my car,” he repeated, and she shook her head. He was a smart man, but he was bullheaded, like a lot of Trinidadian males. She was afraid he’d worry about his car like an old woman until it was a festering sore that he had to do something about, and she couldn’t allow that to happen.
“ We need you, George,” she said. “It’s your plan. We can’t make it work without you. I can take care of Ramsingh. The Salizar brothers can move the coke. I can bury the money so deep the US will never figure it out. Kevin can whip your armed forces and police into shape and guarantee that they remain loyal. But without you we might as well fold our tent and take the show on the road.” She reached into him with her steady gaze and held his eyes. She waited a few seconds, blinked and turned away. He liked to think he was the stronger of the two and she saw no harm in letting him believe it.
“ What about your friend Broxton?” he said.
God he was stubborn, she thought.
“ He did steal my car.”
“ Come on, you had no business having your security people go chasing after him like that. Bill Broxton may not be the smartest man on earth, but he didn’t get where he is by being stupid. Credit him with a few brains. And why did they have to use your car?”
“ Not enough cars to go around,” he said.
“ And whose fault is that? You have five thousand police and only a hundred cop cars. It’s a wonder the criminals don’t rule the island.”
“ We’ll get more cars when I’m prime minister.”
“ Every election they say that and the police are still walking.”
“ Can we talk about Broxton? He’s here to keep Ramsingh alive.”
“ Of course he is. Credit me with a few brains, too. He won’t be a problem. When the time comes he’ll go one way, Ramsingh will go the other, and Ramsingh will die.”
“ When?”
“ Soon.” She couldn’t blame him for being upset. She should have done it by now. But she had that thing about Ram. He was her father’s friend. He was her friend.
“ If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re stalling. But you wouldn’t stall, would you?”
She clenched her fists. She’d been so stupid. The odds that anyone would put her travels together with the Scorpion’s jobs were one in a hundred thousand, maybe one in a million. But it had happened. George Chandee had been captivated by her, probably because she was that rare thing in his life. A woman that wouldn’t go to bed with
