Killer Instincts v5 (13 page)

"This is a lot of firepower," I said.

"Trust me, always better to have too much than not enough,” Richard replied.

I got into the cab of the Suburban, and propped against the seat between me and Richard was the suppressed Uzi submachine gun. A black gusset bag, contents unknown, also lay on the seat between us.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"You'll see," Richard answered.

We drove in silence for perhaps half an hour. Soon after pulling away from the cabin, Richard slipped what appeared to be night-vision goggles over his eyes and killed the headlights. We were driving through the darkness of the Texas desert, and a thin crescent moon illuminated the countryside in the dimmest of shadows. I felt certain that wherever we were going, it wasn’t for the purposes of a "field exercise", and I was filled with a deep sense of foreboding.

Richard turned off the road and drove the Suburban down a rutted gravel trail at the bottom of a low, narrow gulch, going slow with the windows down, stopping and listening every so often for anything unnatural or out of the ordinary. Eventually we arrived at the end of the gulch, surrounded on three sides by steep hardscrabble rock and tough brush. Richard killed the engine and we sat in silence, listening to the motor tick and ping as it cooled down, the only sounds that reached our ears. I checked my watch; it was 2:30 in the morning.

After a short while, Richard took off the night-vision goggles and put them in the bag. He slipped out of the Suburban, taking the gusset bag with him. He motioned for me to take the Uzi, and put his finger to his lips, indicating we move silently. I opened the door to the Suburban as quietly as I could, taking the submachine gun with me as I climbed out and gently pressed the door shut until I heard it click. Turning from the door, I discovered Richard had silently made his way around to my side, and without saying a word he motioned for me to follow him up the side of the gulch.

We walked through the desert night, silent and careful but making good progress. With my eyes fully adjusted to the moonlight, and with my senses strung taut, I had little trouble avoiding a misstep or finding a dry branch underfoot. Richard was positively a ghost; he made no sound and was constantly having to slow down to wait for me. I was sure he could have doubled his pace while moving just as quietly.

Finally, Richard fell back alongside me, and put a hand on my shoulder to indicate caution. We slowed down almost to a crawl. I soon realized we were coming to the edge of a wide valley, easily half a mile across. I could see, perhaps three or four hundred meters away, a couple of lights, maybe cabins close by each other. I looked to Richard and saw him pull a pair of heavy-looking binoculars out of his gusset bag and peer through them at the lights down below. It was a few minutes before he took the binoculars away from his eyes. Richard then turned and handed them to me.

I brought the binoculars to my eyes and looked down into the valley. The binoculars were night-vision, and what I thought to be a pair of cabins was actually a couple of trailers and three parked automobiles, two trucks and a van. One of the trailers was boxy and rectangular, with several windows and a small chimney at one end, sending a lazy curl of smoke up into the air. It looked like the mobile field offices you’d see at a construction site. A set of rough wooden stairs was placed in front of the door, and the windows had a dim light glowing from within, partially hidden as if behind thin sets of blinds. The other trailer was a towable campground-style family camper. The three windows I could see from this angle were lit with a flicker that I assumed meant someone was watching television. Next to each of these trailers there was a heavy-duty pickup truck. Each truck was more than capable of towing either of the two trailers out of the valley. The van was large, capable of seating at least eight men, and nearby I saw a portable gasoline generator. I could detect the faintest growl on the wind when the breeze blew right, and cables snaked from the generator through the rocks and dirt to both trailers.

Richard touched my shoulder, and when I glanced his way, I saw his finger pointing to the left of the trailers. Bringing the binoculars up and slowly panning to the left, I came across a man, walking along the valley floor, holding what I guessed was an AK. I watched the man for several minutes, and it became evident that he was a guard or sentry, slowly circling the encampment on a perimeter patrol. I brought the binoculars away from my face and turned again to Richard. He motioned with a nod of his head that we should begin to walk back the way we came.

As we moved back away from the valley, knowing there was an armed man, certainly a criminal, not too far away added an extra dose of caution to every step I took. When we were perhaps another five hundred meters away from the edge of the valley, Richard stopped us and stepped in close to me so he could whisper and be heard.

"What did you see? Tell me all the details."

I told him everything: what I saw, and what I surmised. My best guess, it was a temporary camp set up by an unknown criminal element, smugglers or drug dealers or other criminals who needed a base out in the desert.

"You're pretty close. Those aren't exactly drug dealers, they are drug makers. Cookers, actually. They're cooking chemicals together to make methamphetamine. The boxy trailer is their lab, the chimney is their ventilation, the generator is providing power. The camper is their bunkhouse. Chemicals and generator came out here in the van, they set up the trailer and get to work. In a single night they can cook up a hundred grand worth of drugs."

"How did you know where to look?" I asked.

"I've had my eye on them for the last couple of months. They move around some, but tend to use the same few remote locations over and over again. I planted a little seismic transmitter along the road leading into this valley a couple of weeks ago, been checking every night to see if it's noticed movement. Tonight it picked up the right sort of ground vibrations; three large, multi-wheeled vehicles and two towed bodies without engines. It's the only traffic - other than the occasional dirt bike or jeep - that ever gets out here, so I knew it was these dummies."

"Okay, but how did you find out about these guys in the first place?"

"Was out hiking around here a while back, just getting out into the desert to keep myself sharp and familiar with the land. I came across some tire tracks and signs of spilled chemicals, a fire pit, recent trash. These boys aren't exactly the "carry in, carry out" types. Didn't take a detective to figure illicit activity was going on, so curiosity got the best of me and I started checking this valley regularly. Found them one night, so I decided to take a look. Worked my way right into the middle of their camp, scoped out the cooking trailer, the camper, the whole operation."

"Why didn't you do anything about it? Least you could have done was report it."

Richard gave a small shrug. "Curiosity, mostly. Nobody pays me to be a law enforcement official, so I wasn't about to do the job for them. Also, if I was going to report anything, anonymously of course, I'd want more information and a bigger fish to snag on the hook than just some armed tweakers cooking up ice out in the middle of the desert. There's probably a hundred cooking camps scattered throughout Texas this very moment."

"So what are we doing?" I asked.

Richard gave me his grimmest smile, barely illuminated in the moonlight. "We're here for a little target practice. You need some seasoning, son."

It took me a moment to understand what Richard meant. "Wait, hold on. You want me to go down there and kill a bunch of drug dealers?"

"Like I said, they’re probably just the cookers and their guards, not the actual dealers. Although if their operation is small enough, they might sell directly to the street vendors, which would then make them dealers."

I waved my hands in front of my face. "Whatever, who cares. I'm not going to just walk down there and kill a bunch of guys cooking up drugs out in the desert. That's just nuts."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why is it nuts? They’re brewing up pure poison. They sell that garbage to moms, dads, kids, everyone. These criminal delinquents ruin lives. Their poison ends lives. Taxpayer money gets wasted fighting a losing battle against drugs because we don't have the stomach to do what really needs to be done in order to win, and that's to hunt the slimeballs down and blow them away. What's wrong with that?"

I looked at Richard in disbelief. "What do you mean, what's wrong with that? Everything! We can't just throw aside the legal system and go around shooting every drug dealer or dope grower in the country. There has to be some kind of order."

Richard had to keep himself from laughing out loud. "Listen to yourself. What are you paying me to help you accomplish? Step outside that 'legal system' of yours and blow away some greaseballs who managed to dance through some hoops and get away with murder, literally. Why is it okay for you to consider shooting up the Paggiano family, but not these turkeys?"

Before Richard began to chastise me I was already cringing inside, because I recognized the hypocrisy of what I was saying as it was coming out of my mouth. Organized crime family, meth cooking trailer trash. Two categories of people in this world that were both deserving of some extremely capital punishment. So why did I consider taking my revenge on the Paggianos to be acceptable, while the thought of killing people who directly contribute to the misery of innocent lives was somehow anathema to me?

Richard could see me working it out in my head, and he knew the answer before I did. "It's because the revenge is personal to you; that's how you can justify it. You don't know the rednecks down in that valley, and you don't know the people who deal their drugs, or the people buying and using, either. So you can't work up that righteous indignation, you can't make it a crime of passion."

I shrugged and looked a little embarrassed. "You're right, I just can't justify it to myself."

Suddenly, Richard stepped in close and gripped my shoulder. I looked down and almost shouted in surprise when I realized that he had drawn the heavy black automatic without me even seeing it. The muzzle hovered an inch from my gut.

"That's real gosh-darn unfortunate, because if you need to 'justify your actions' before dropping the hammer every time you've got some jerk in your sights, I might as well spare you the trouble of going on this little crusade of yours and blow your kidneys all over the desert right here and now. Killing isn't about weighing the morality of every trigger pull, it's about putting people who deserve to die in the ground so the people who don't deserve death can go on living their benign, meaningless lives a little while longer. That's it. Do you think you can shoot Pauly Paggiano in the face for what he did, but you can't go down and cap the filth brewing up poison going to some single mother in need of a fix? Well, what makes you think you can shoot Paggiano's bodyguard, who never did anything to you? I mean, he just works for the family, right? Once you start letting that nonsense corrode the wiring between your brain and your trigger finger, you might as well put one in your own brainpan, because you're done."

"So you'd go down there and kill everyone just because you think they deserve to die?"

"Just because I think they deserve a bullet doesn't mean I'm going to go down there and give 'em one. I'm a retired mercenary, not a serial killer, and I’m not a vigilante, either. I kill when there's something in it for me: money, information, self-preservation. If I started making it my life's work to bump off every jerk who needed burying, I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of the retirement nest egg I've set aside!"

"So if it's a for-profit venture, where's my profit? Or, for that matter, where's yours? You could’ve taken my money and never bothered to bring me out here. What's the angle for you?"

Richard still hadn't taken away his automatic, but he let out a little grunt and his arm lowered a fraction. "What's in it for you? You need to get your dipstick wet, son. You've got to pop your combat cherry while I mother hen, before you go out on your own and take your vengeance. On-the-job training in this line of work is a recipe for an early and permanent retirement, but if I can guide you through your first firefight, watch your back a little so you don't make any rookie mistakes, help you Monday-morning quarterback a little afterward, maybe you won't get dead the first time you run into some of Paggiano's hired goombahs."

"You still didn't answer me. What's in it for you? There's no guarantee one of those guys isn't going to get lucky and end you too."

"Two reasons. First, you paid me to teach you to kill, and I'm going to make sure you get your money's worth. You don't learn to kill without doing some killing, so here we are. Anything less, and I won't have fulfilled the spirit of my contract with you, and believe it or not, I'm a man of my word. I'm not sending you away without doing my best to make sure you can do the job."

"And the second reason?" I asked.

Richard grunted and holstered his pistol, then turned and started walking back towards the valley. "I made your uncle Jamie a promise to prepare you the best I could, because I owe him a debt from a long time ago. That means even more to me than the money you paid. I can always return my fee to you. I can't repay Jamie what I owe him."

I watched Richard walk away, and a sudden resolution came over me. I had been given a peek, a sliver of understanding and insight into the sort of world Richard came from. I knew now that he was right. I made an oath of vengeance to pay the Paggianos back, believing they deserved to die and thinking I would be able to kill them, while at the same time thinking there was no way I could kill men I didn't know, who ruined lives every day with the drugs they created. Not only was it naive, but the self-rationalization would get me killed long before my task was completed.

With my mind finally clear of doubt, I turned and followed Richard back into the desert night.

In vengeance, there are no half-measures.