Authors: Carmella Jones
Chapter 7: Razor
I touched the speed dial on my phone for my daily check-in and waited. For about a week, I had gotten a hang-up when the call connected. That was my signal that the enforcer had no work for me to do. Whenever that happened, I would go to my shop in the back yard, where I had a setup for woodworking, something that had been passed down to me from my dad. I could have set up a shop and made decent money doing custom cabinetry for building contractors when I left the teams, but I had kept it as a hobby, seeing it as a means of escaping the rattrap instead of using it as the exercise wheel in the gerbil cage.
I was already thinking about a design that I planned to carve on a piece that I was working on for one of my SB brothers when the call connected and the voice said “three,” and then clicked dead. The message was clear to me. I was to go to drop site number three to pick up my next op orders. Pushing the wood carving thought out of my mind, I scooped up the keys to my bike and started out the door.
I punched the button on the garage door and watched the door rise all of the way to the top, scanned the driveway, street and surrounding houses from the darkest corner inside the garage and then turned my attention toward my bike. Owning a Harley and riding it on the open road had been a dream of mine for a very long time. As I straddled the bike, backed it out of the garage and turned it around before firing it up, I couldn’t help but remember the first bike I’d ever bought.
I had always been an admirer of motorcycles. I’d bought my first when I’d fallen in love with the action of motocross racing at age 11. From that time forward I had lived and breathed the mixed, two-cycle oil and gas, fuel of the motocross world. I’d eaten my share of rocks, dirt and sand before becoming the top rider of all motocross racers in California.
I’d been insatiable in pretty much every endeavor that I ever took to. It seemed that once I got started with something, I had to be the best of the best at it, even if it was playing a board game. I was never satisfyed with making a good showing or even doing my best. Those things were honorable, but honorable didn’t cut it for me. I always had to win.
I joined the Navy out of high school, buying into the promise of “seeing the world,” just as the recruitment literature advertised. The world consisted of Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Australia. I’d been rated in ordinance, which had sounded like a cool way to go, since I had always enjoyed blowing things up. Like with everything else, I had reached the top in that venture as well and began to look for a new challenge. The SEALs provided that.
Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, or BUD/S, was an extremely trying challenge for me. It was for everybody. I watched a lot of guys, who I thought were sure to make it through, toss in their helmet liner and ring the bell. I’d gotten close a couple of times myself, but simply couldn’t bring myself to quit. When I made it through BUD/S, I knew that I was part of something very special. Neither Marine Recon nor Army Rangers cold boast having gone through the kind of rigorous training that separated the very best special forces team in the world from every other pretender. I had become a part of the most elite of the elite.
I’d excelled at every training challenge and every op that had followed, egged on by Burn, who was nearly as hardheaded as I was, though a lot less outspoken about it. I had always been the type who would walk up, spit in the devil’s eye and call him a pussy. More than once, it had gotten me and Burn into some tough shit, but on every occasion, we’d been able to fight our way out of it and lived to laugh about it.
We weren’t just cocky, we were as well disciplined and precise at carrying out an operation as any other pair on the team, and we were typically called to take on the most difficult challenges. Whenever we weren’t, we either volunteered for them or wiggled our way into taking them away from whoever had. Neither of us wanted to be in the background.
“And that’s what got you killed,” I muttered aloud as I turned onto the street that led to the drop site and tried to force the rising memory out of my mind.
The drop site was a newspaper tube at an abandoned house that was burned out years before and had never been cleared away. No one paid much attention to it, making it a perfect drop site. It was one of dozens that had been set up for the purpose of communicating the enforcer’s next “project.”
When I had left the SEALs, I had hunted for a place to land, not wanting to be anywhere near the typical places that military men hung out. Staying along the California coast would have made that pretty hard to do, so I went further inland and found a place that suited me in a quiet suburban neighborhood. I’d lost my dad and, shortly after that, my mom while I was still in the teams. I’d put the stuff that I’d wanted to save in a storage unit and put the house up for sale. I didn’t see any point in torturing myself by trying to hold onto it and being haunted by the memories. When I found my new place, I’d transferred those things, mostly the woodworking equipment, from the storage unit to my new house and settled in.
Sitting still hadn’t appealed to me much, so I fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams and bought the Harley. It had led me out onto the open road and into the company of those who also road the bikes. Out on the road, I’d made friends and rode along with a guy who had been a part of the Army Rangers. He, in turn, introduced me to the Silent Brotherhood Motorcycle Club, a bunch of guys who had spit in the eye of the devil, lived to tell about it and loved riding Harleys.
At the Sturgis Rally later that year, I’d been approached by someone who had a special proposition for me. That was the only time that I had ever met the man who was referred to simply as “the Godfather.” No names were used and no details were given about what I was being asked to do. I was simply asked if I would be interested in doing for the Godfather what I had done for Uncle Sam. A per-op sum was given, and it was sizeable. The offer was followed by a very direct question. “Are you in?”
I hadn’t even hesitated. The money was great and I would be doing something at which I had gotten very good. I said yes.
“Someone will contact you when you get home,” I was told.
Someone did contact me when I got home from Sturgis. In fact, that someone came to my house, sat in my living room, drank a couple of beers with me and explained the check-ins, the signals and the drops. We rode to each of the drops so that there would be no confusion. Then we shook hands and the man rode away. He never gave me a name. I never saw him again and didn’t expect that I ever would.
After my first job, the agreed-upon sum was direct deposited in my account and I decided that I was really going to like my new job.
The “op orders,” as I liked to call them, were waiting in the paper tube of the burned-out house. I rode up, pulled them out, stuffed them inside my leather jacket and continued down the street as though nothing had happened. Though it was impossible not to be curious about what was contained in the envelope that I’d put inside my jacket, I refused to even glance at the contents until I was back home where I could memorize the information and then burn them in the fireplace. It wouldn’t do for anyone to know anything about what I did.
Chapter 8: Razor
The fact that the call was for an out-of-town op was no surprise to me. Nearly all of my jobs were out of town, in fact. The last one had been pretty rare. The enforcer that I worked for evidently had sort of a region or area to work, most of it in the West Coast. I’d memorized all of the intel that had been provided and then burned the order, but I’d learned long ago that someone else’s intel was never as good as your own. To date, I’d had no reason to doubt what was passed onto me, but I believed in the “trust, but verify” philosophy.
It hadn’t been a bad ride. I’d even made sort of a loop around so that I could come in along the coast. The combination of reds, oranges, yellows and violets against the backdrop of the changing sky and the slow movement of the sun as it sank below the horizon was always a little more impressive when viewed over the ocean. The sun’s setting over the Pacific even worked its magic on my typically cold heart. I pulled off the side of the road to take it in.
My heart hadn’t always been so cold. When I was younger and eager, it had been warmer. I’d been a gung-ho, God-and-country type when I’d joined the Navy. I’d become even more so after I’d made it into the teams. Kicking ass and taking names in the advancement of freedom had been what drove Burn and me to be so eager to lead the pack. Afghanistan changed that for me. I was beginning to question what the hell we were doing over there even before Burn died. After he died, it began to really hit home.
The Russians hadn’t been able to do anything over there in the 80s, so why the hell did we think we could? What I was starting to realize was that it was all about the money. All of that political bullshit that leaders spewed from the podium about pushing back Al Qaeda and terrorist cells and whatnot was just so they could keep lining their silk pockets. The fact that Burn had his brain splattered against the wall because some stupid bastard wanted some imam in Gitmo soured my whole attitude. The only salvation for me was the fact that I had been a short-timer and was due to rotate out of the teams or re-up within 30 days. I rotated out.
With Burn gone, there wasn’t much appeal left to the teams, and I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I was assigned a new swim partner, but thankfully we didn’t actually have any serious ops to tend to before my time was up. There wasn’t anything wrong with him, he just wasn’t Burn. With my parents dead, no siblings to fight with over the inheritance and no Burn, I was alone. I’d told myself a thousand times that it was better that way. I was hanging out with the one guy I could trust: me.
My target, a middle-aged accountant who lived alone in a pretty nice suburban neighborhood outside of Burbank didn’t seem like he posed any threat to the biker world at all. Unless it was all a cover. Dressed in a suit and tie, he got into a four-door Toyota sedan and backed it out of a garage with an automatic opener. He commuted through the rat race that was L.A. traffic and parked in the covered parking garage of a Big Eight accounting firm, spent his day presumably doing what accountants do, and then started back through the rat race. Before going home, he stopped off at a nice, middle-class bar at the edge of the suburbs, tossed a few back with some friends and then headed home. There didn’t seem to be a wife, kids or even a girlfriend anywhere in his daily routine. In short, it was the exact opposite of having any kind of life at all.
Since wearing leather with colors astride a Road King wouldn’t have been blending in, in that neighborhood, I had rented a four-door sedan similar to my target’s, but a Ford. I wasn’t going to drive some foreign-made piece of crap.I sported khakis and an Izod with loafers. I felt like Biff from the country club and decided that, if for no other reason, the guy needed taken out for dressing like a prick. Three days of surveillance, which started on a Monday morning, had established a pattern that I could use to make my move.
At 7:45 on Wednesday night, I was waiting around the corner of the garage when his rice-burner sedan pulled into the driveway and the garage door went up. He parked the car, turned off the engine and got out, pushing the button on the wall by the door that led into the house. Then he went inside. Before the garage door was all of the way down, I had rolled underneath it and was crouching beside his car on the opposite side of the door into the house.
I stayed in that position for three and a half hours, which was actually a pretty short span of time in your typical SEAL op. I’d stayed in one position in a mud hole freezing my ass off for two days during BUD/S and that had been easy compared to some of the shit I did in the snow in Afghanistan. The schedule I had observed had him lights out by 11:00 p.m. and with no signs that he watched Sports Center after he hit the hay. There wasn’t any point in waiting any longer. Besides, I was starting to think I was allergic to the khakis or the Izod.
I slipped on my gloves and moved around the car to the door leading into the house. Crouching by the door, I reached up, turned the knob and peered into the kitchen. I traced my path through the kitchen with my eyes, creating a plan so that I didn’t bump into anything on the way. I rose up, stepped through the door and closed it softly behind me. I paused a moment to listen, heard nothing and moved to the position that I had decided on from the door. I studied the path through the living room from that point to the hallway and then followed the same technique. Thankfully, the guy wasn’t one to clutter up his house. In fact, in a lot of ways, he reminded me of me, except he was a prick.
I moved down the hall, into the bedroom and carried out the op in a similar manner to the one that I’d carried out after the LD party, except there was no nude girl lying beside the guy and the look in his eyes as I sliced into his neck was much more terrifying, rather than having a little bit of defiance in it. I was never given a reason why someone was to be taken out, and I didn’t really need to know. He’d probably embezzled some money or some other white collar shit that had pissed somebody off. It wasn’t any of my concern.
After walking out the front door, getting into the sedan and driving away, I went straight back to my hotel room, went through my cleansing ritual, put on some decent clothes and drove past the shop where I’d parked my bike. I left the car a couple of blocks down the street, tossing the khakis, Izod and loafers into a dumpster on the way back. The shop belonged to a brother SB and he’d asked no questions. I put my key in the ignition of the Road King and kicked it over. The rumble of the pipes was pleasant music after what I’d had to endure for the past several days.
As I drove past the rental car and headed back home, I gave it the finger. “Piece of shit,” I muttered, flexing my wrist and letting my tuned exhaust roar.