Authors: Carmella Jones
Chapter 3: Viktor “Sabre” Svetleachni
Some fucking bitch screaming and running down the hall was the first thing I heard on Saturday morning after one hell of a party the night before.
“What the fuck?” I roared as I shot up out of bed and reached in the nightstand drawer for the .357 that I kept there.
The girl’s screaming had penetrated throughout the house in spite of the fact that the stereo was still hammering out tunes, though, to be fair, it was a ballad that was playing instead of something hardcore, otherwise I might not have paid any attention to the sound.
Fuming at having been brought out of sleep in such a way, I stood up, making my way toward the bedroom door with the pistol leveled in front of me. The two girls who had joined me for a ménage à trois during the party sat peering at me, wide-eyed, through the mess of hair covering their faces. “Don’t move,” I ordered.
Not bothering to clothe myself, I opened the bedroom door and started down the hall. There were other people in the house who had been awakened and reacted in the same way, one of whom had already arrived in the doorway of the middle room down the hall.
“Oh fuck!” he exclaimed turning his head toward me. “It’s Clap.”
The expression on Gonzo’s face wasn’t a new one to me, and I knew what it meant. Gonzo, standing naked with his revolver hanging at his side, didn’t enter the room. He just turned his head and stared.
“Jesus, Gonz,” I said as I came to the doorway and started to lower my pistol. “Go put on some fucking shorts.”
Gonzo backed away and let me enter the room. It didn’t take a forensic specialist to tell me that the massive pool of blood staining the sheets under and next to Jeffery “Clap” Clapton’s neck meant that he was dead. Without touching anything in the room, I moved up closer to the victim and took a look at the fatal wound. It was a very precise cut that was intended to bleed the victim out quickly, but without the arterial spray. Whoever had done it knew exactly what he was doing. That’s when I also noticed the ace of spades lying on his chest.
“Shit!” I exclaimed and then called out. “Gonzo!”
“I’m right here,” Gonzo responded quietly from behind me. Instead of going to put on some shorts, he had followed me a couple of steps into the room.
“I thought I told you to put on some fucking shorts!”
Gonzo turned away. Being told to do anything a second time by me wasn’t a healthy practice to get into.
“Better get some of the shit cleaned up in this house before the cops get here!” I called out to Gonzo as he took off.
I wasn’t worried about the place being clean, necessarily, but I damned sure didn’t need for the cops to see narcotics or drug paraphernalia in plain sight. They’d be plenty interested in going through the house using “probable cause” anyway. Julian “Gonzo” Gonzalez knew what needed to be cleaned up, and he’d make damned sure that it was.
Turning away from Clap’s body, I walked out the door and down the hall back to my bedroom. “Get dressed and get out!” I told the two girls who were still waiting in my bed. I’d hoped to resume what the three of us had been doing the night before, but Clap going and getting his throat cut had ruined that. I tossed some clothes on the top of the dresser aside until I found a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, slipped them on and then went to retrieve my cell phone from the nightstand.
I had known Al Gentry since we were kids. He and I had played football together in high school, had gone through Marine basic in San Diego together and had the luck to be stationed on the same base during a couple of our assignments. In fact, it was Al who had started calling me Sabre while we were in the corps. I never went by anything else after that. Though our lives followed different paths after we were discharged, we were brothers and loyal to one another to the end.
Al was a member of the detective division of the police force and was well aware that I didn’t always work inside the law. However, because I had been a buddy for a long time and because I scraped a few dollars of my profits off the top to share with him, he could be counted on to look the other way in certain circumstances. Finding Al’s personal cell number in the directory on my iPhone, I pressed call and waited for Gentry to pick up.
“What’s up?” Gentry answered. He knew better than to say my name when he answered the call.
“I got a problem that needs your attention.”
“What are we talkin’ about?”
“A body. It’s pretty messy.”
“Hold on a sec.”
There was a pause on the line, though I could hear movement in the background on Al’s end. After several minutes, he came back on the line.
“Somethin’ you did?” Al asked.
“No. Found him this morning. Throat cut. Professional job. And a playing card on his chest.”
“Ace of spades?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Not another one.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve got a professional working the area. This will make his third. Doesn’t leave anything that forensics can use. Hitting bikers.”
“Enforcer?”
“I’m calling it a serial, at least when I’m around others. But yeah, I’m guessing that it’s an enforcer. Probably one of those special forces pukes trained by our own Uncle Sam.”
“Fuck! Can’t we call this something else, figure out a way to shift it? I mean, Jesus, Al, I don’t need the FBI snooping around here.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but it ain’t gonna be easy.”
“Do what you can.”
“I always do.”
“All right. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi.”
When I disconnected the call, I tossed the phone on the bed. I’d ignored the two girls after telling them to get dressed and then made the phone call to Al, but when I heard the shower running, I realized that they were still there. “Nobody listens to a fucking thing I say anymore,” I muttered, and then smiled as I considered the fact that I’d probably have just enough time to join those two hotties for a little bit of Saturday morning fun.
Pulling off the shorts and t-shirt, I made my way to the shower. The two girls had already started without me, but it wasn’t such a bad display, though I hated to have to watch it through the steamed-up door and from so far away. I opened the shower door and slipped in. “Just in time,” the brunette, who was on her knees in front of the blonde, purred.
It wasn’t going to take much work to get me ready to go, but the brunette took hold of my growing rod anyway. Just as she was getting started, however, I heard Gonzo calling out in the bedroom.
“Sabre! Where the hell did you go?”
“Shit! I’m a little busy!”
“I don’t think this can wait.” Gonzo had moved to the doorway of the bathroom. He was getting a view of what was going on, but the steamed-up version.
“Sorry, ladies. Some other time, maybe.” I pushed the shower door open and reached for a towel, muttering as I dried myself off. “What a fuckin’ morning.”
Gonzo had moved out of the doorway when I got out of the shower.
I turned and took one last glance in the direction of the show that was going on inside my shower. If I wasn’t going to get any, I didn’t want them to either. “Seriously, ladies, you need to get dressed and get the fuck out of here. Place will be crawling with cops in about fifteen minutes.”
Chapter 4: Razor
I was a part of two proud traditions, both emerging out of World War II. The first, from which I had just retired, had been born during the landing of allied forces on the beaches of Normandy. A handful of men possessing the courage of lions had been trained to go in advance of the invasion forces and blow up the obstacles that the Germans had used to try to prevent the Allied landing. In the Pacific, that same force had been used to measure the depth of the water and recon the landing beaches in advance of the amphibious landings and the U.S. Marines, who falsely claimed that they were always the first to set foot on the beaches. It was President John F. Kennedy who gave them the name that they had carried since 1962: SEa Air and Land assault teams, SEALs. It was in the deltas of Vietnam that their reputation as silent and deadly killers began to reach legendary proportions, and it was then that the tradition of leaving an ace of spades on the body of an assassinated leader was also born.
I’d become known as Razor by my SEAL buddies after BUD/S training and throughout my special ops career, and had continued to carry that designation in the second tradition that I was part of, one born in the aftermath of World War II. There were no veteran’s services for dealing with PTSD or any other combat-related psychotherapeutic treatments available as the Great War came to a close. When they returned home, groups of veterans began to come together and form ad hoc “therapy” groups. Most of them were centered around Harley Davidson motorcycles, which had become quite popular because they allowed those same veterans to take to the open roads of America and feel the freedom of the wind in their faces and gave rise to MCs, motorcycle clubs that defied the authority of the American Motorcycle Association and proudly displayed a patch on their leather jackets to identify themselves as such.
Besides the MC patch that identified them as rebels, members of these new clubs also bore “colors,” or special patches identifying to which club they belonged. In California, a number of these clubs rapidly became popular hangouts for veterans returning from the war. Names like Hell’s Angels, Boozefighters, Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington and Highwaymen began displaying their colors and developing what was to become referred to as outlaw bikers. As time passed, many of these outlaw biker clubs began to take part in prostitution, drugs and other black market trading. Along with it came territorial rivalries and, consequently, mob-like hits against their rivals or all-out brawls.
Though independent of any higher authority, there was one man who all bikers respected and listened to whenever he spoke. He was one of the first, the most powerful and the one who enforced a form of order among the clubs. Working for him were enforcers, badass men who were swift to carry out whatever orders were given to them without question. They didn’t often get their own hands dirty, but passed out assignments to others, avoiding even the slightest direct connection to the victims to prevent the authorities from tracing their crimes back up the chain of command. I, a precision killer, trained by the U.S. Navy, carried out the orders of one of those enforcers.
I lived by a couple of mottos: “You can sleep when you’re dead” and “The only easy day was yesterday.” My body, however, had different ideas that morning. The all-nighter that I’d pulled was working heavily on me as I parked my jet-black Harley Davidson Road King. The styling of the bike had something of a retro feel, which appealed to me. I’d tricked it out in chrome, but stayed away from flames and that sort of thing. The only décor found on the bike was when I put on the saddlebags for a road trip. They had the insignia of the Silent Brotherhood on them.
I pushed the button on the garage door and watched it come all of the way down before I entered the house. More than one careless person had been attacked in their home because an intruder had slipped in under the door before it had closed all the way. I wasn’t going to be one of them.
The suburban home looked no different from any other in that neighborhood. I was not only a master of blending in, but I preferred to live in an orderly environment. I crossed through the kitchen and picked up my cell phone from the bar where I’d left it. A cell phone was of no use to me when I “went black,” which was the term I used whenever I was given a job. I touched the speed dial on my phone and waited.
“Yeah?” the voice said when the call connected.
“Yeah,” I replied and then pressed the button to end the call and set the cell phone back on the bar. I went to the sink and found a pan that was typically used for baking bread, pulled the knife out of the scabbard under my jacket and tossed it into the pan. I filled the pan with water and a special cleaning solution that I’d concocted to get rid of all traces of blood or DNA. I’d do the same with the scabbard and my clothing later.
From the kitchen, I made my way to the master bedroom and the shower that was waiting for me. Stripped down and in the shower, I cleansed myself thoroughly, going through something of a ritual that I had started when I was an active SEAL. I recalled the hit and walked through the process slowly, one time only, while I was in the shower. It was my way of shoving it into a back corner of a dark closet in my mind. Once I was out of the shower, I would think of it no more.
Exhausted, even after the shower, I pulled on a pair of shorts, lay back on the bed and started flipping through the channels on the 50-inch flat screen mounted to my bedroom wall. There were several college football games on. With most of them, I didn’t care about either team. When I came to a game between the Oregon Ducks and the Arizona Wildcats, I lowered the volume and put down the remote. I didn’t particularly care to listen to the commentators. It would probably be a blowout, but since I liked the Ducks, I wouldn’t be too bored by it.
The soft noises of the game took effect on me and, in my state of exhaustion, within minutes and I began to relax into sleep. The relaxation part didn’t last long, however, as the image of Taylor Bernard popped into my head. Taylor “Burn” Bernard had been my swim buddy in the teams. And, of course, the other members of their team had considered themselves clever when they came up with Taylor’s nickname to match mine, a label that had been given me because I had been so efficient with a knife. “Razor and Burn” had lasted about 30 seconds until some brilliant frogman put it all together, and from that point forward we were referred to as “Razor Burn.”
Swim buddies were a tradition that dated back to the use of UDT, underwater demolition teams in the Pacific Theatre. Swim buddies were paired for life. They did everything together from the moment they were attached until one of them died or got out of the teams. In the case of me and Burn, it had been because he had died.
In reality and in my dream, the scene played out exactly the same. We were in some shithole house in Afuckistan, as we referred to it. It was a simple snatch ‘n’ grab op. The team set up a perimeter and the two of us were sent in to grab some imam who the brass wanted to ship off to Gitmo. The plan was to grab the imam and
di di mao
, a leftover term from Vietnam, which meant “get the fuck outta there.”
I had cleared the room, I thought, and gave the signal for Burn to follow. What happened next still replayed in my dreams without fail. In slow motion, I saw Burn enter the room and from the corner of my eye, in the same instant, a raghead with an AK47 step out from behind a closet. Before I could turn to neutralize the enemy, I watched a round enter Taylor’s head, right below the rim of his helmet, and blow out the back of his skull.
I snapped upright in my bed and tried to figure out where I was. The soft droning of the television and the cheering of the Oregon fans as the Ducks scored a touchdown brought me back to reality. “Fuck sleep,” I muttered. “It’s overrated anyway.” I got off of the bed, got dressed and went into the kitchen, scooping up the keys to my bike and heading out the door.
My first thought was to turn my bike toward the Panhead, the bar where Silent Brotherhood types would go to get a drink and blow off steam with their brothers. I really just wanted to be by myself, but not anyplace where I might fall asleep. At the intersection of the street leading out of the suburb where I lived, I took a left turn instead of a right.
Maybe I’ll go get a bite to eat somewhere
.