Jeff Sherratt - The Brimstone Murders

“Time’s up! Get out ofthe truck, now!”

I opened the door slowly. Holding my arms high, I climbed down from the cab. As soon as my shoes hit the ground, the guards closed in. I stood in the middle of a tight ring of thugs, their AK-47s pointed at my gut.

Ben Moran, a malicious scowl on his face, cut his way through the guards. At his side dangled a.45 semi-auto, his finger hooked through the trigger guard. He carefully dropped it in the pocket of his bib coveralls. I figured it was the gun Sol wanted me to bring along for protection. The gun I shoved under the front seat of the truck.

The wind was right, and I could smell his stench. He smelled like evil, like the decay of a dead rat. “O’Brien, I want some information,” he said. “You play ball, and you won’t suffer.”

“Hey,” I said, lowering my arms. “I’m just helping a friend. The guy took sick and asked me to take his route.”

The back of Moran’s hand flew at my face. I blocked it with my forearm, and got a rifle barrel jabbed in my gut. I doubled over, and a guard pounded my back with the butt of his weapon. I yelled as I dropped to the tarmac.

Moran snarled, looking down at me. “You were warned, but you had to press on. Didn’t you?” His voice matched his face: ugly. “Straighten up, act like a man.”

I hunched up onto my knees, bent over like an animal with my hands planted on the blacktop. Nauseous and woozy, I shook my head as if the movement would cast out the pain and restore my vigor. It didn’t.

“You’re not so tough. Without that Jew bastard Silverman and his boys around you’re nothing.”

That’s me. Jimmy O’Brien, wimpy lawyer. Cracked ribs, a bleeding gash in my side-and I hollered when the guy whacked me with his gun. What a softy. But now, I was starting to get irked.

I stood, a little wobbly on my feet, and got right into his face. “Listen, you miserable excuse for a human piece of crap. I came out here to get my client. You murdered his mother, and then grabbed him at the courthouse. I want him back.”

“Is that so?”

“Where is he?”

“Now, you listen to me, you miserable excuse for a lawyer. First of all, I’d nothin’ to do with his ma’s death. Anyways, Robbie Farris came here of his own free will. He was a messed-up heathen just like you, and we taught him respect for the Lord; put the fear of God in that boy. That’s what we do around here. We redeem lost children.”

“Yeah? Well, he stabbed his professor twenty-seven times. Murdered him. So what does that say about your concentration camp redemption tactics?”

“Enough of this! Tell me what you think you know about me and our little gun club.”

“I’m not going to tell you squat.”

He slapped me across the face. I winced, but it didn’t hurt that much.

“Ah, hell, you don’t know nothin’, or you wouldn’t be snooping around like a damned fool all dressed up in a milkman’s outfit.” He turned to the guards. “Get Mr. O’Brien out of my sight. I don’t want to see him again.”

Moran started to walk away, but he stopped and came back.

Then he did something weird. He raised his hands high above his head. While looking at the sky he turned his body slowly in a circle and in a deep booming voice, chanted, “If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance unto mine enemies.” He stopped for a moment, and then, with eyes blazing, he rushed at me, shouting. “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh.”

I didn’t know what to make of it. That is, until I thought about what he was saying: some kind of Bible quote, a passage that somehow justified capital punishment. My God , was the son-of-a-bitch going to have me executed?

“The Lord has spoken. Take him away.” Moran lumbered off, dusting his hands.

His words hung in the air, frozen, then shattered and fell to the ground when I realized that the madman was going to kill me.

I couldn’t die today.

With a strength that I didn’t know existed in my wounded body, I grabbed one guard and flung him to the ground, smashed another in the face, and stove off blows from the remaining guards. But they kept coming at me. The momentary adrenaline rush was waning fast. I had to hold up. I had to get free somehow.

I fought and struggled against my captors, but there were so many of them. Finally, it was over. My arms gave out and the last of my energy drained away. Two men grabbed me under my arms, holding me erect, while the rest formed up in two columns, one on each side of me. Cradling their guns across their chests, they started marching me away.

“We’ll take him to the back wall, drag him if we have to,” one of them said.

One guy poked me in the ribs with the muzzle of his gun, and I yelped.

“Hey buddy, don’t worry, your hurt will be gone in a few minutes.” The guards laughed.

“Yeah, we got a sure remedy for those nagging aches and pains.” They laughed some more.

I tried digging my feet into the hard surface, but the more I resisted, the harder they pulled on my arms. We were still in the front area of the camp, about fifty yards from the main gate. The guard indicated that the wall was in the rear. They’d have to carry me there. I wasn’t going to make it easy for them. I jabbed an elbow into the gut of the guard on my left. He flinched. I came across at him with a right fist to his jaw. It connected and he went down. A flurry of fists and rifle butts slammed into me, and I went limp. The world was turning white, and I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer. But, I kept at it, hanging in there by sheer determination. At one point I got my hands on a guard’s weapon and almost wrenched it away before he twisted it out of my grip. A rifle butt flashed past, then more fists, a club… The sky tilted. I started to drop. But I can’t. I have to get free, survive, resist and fight back…

I had to keep fighting. Oh, God…

A crash echoed across the grounds. The air vibrated with ear-cracking bursts of heavy-duty, military machine gun fire. A riot had erupted.

Shouts and curses from the guards next to me pounded in my ears. I looked up. Sol’s black armor-plated limo had crashed through the gate. The big limousine was roaring straight toward me, trailing a voluminous cloud of white smoke. The horrific gunfire was coming from the car.

Some guards dropped to the ground and covered their heads; others ran seeking protection from the blazing machine guns. I stood, dazed. It was funny, I didn’t see any slugs hitting the ground, and I knew Sol didn’t have any machine guns. The limo skidded to a stop right next to me. A door flew open. A hand reached out and yanked me into the back seat. We roared away in the smokescreen Sol had laid out. Three seconds later we were through the gate-the gate guard dropped his gun and ran for his life. Now we were out of the compound, racing toward Barstow on the dirt road that led into the base. The limo’s machine guns were still blasting away.

“Turn off those goddamn guns,” Sol hollered above the din to Cubby the driver.

The noise instantly stopped.

“It a tape recording, hooked up to a speaker system under the car,” Sol said. “The smoke’s real, though.” A huge grin surfaced on his face. I didn’t know if he was grinning because I was safe now, or because he had a chance to play with his tricked-out limo spy stuff.

“What took you so long?” I asked and managed a smile.

“Hey, we were having lunch in the car, waiting. When the beeper thing went off, I had a bottle of ’62 Mouton Rothschild open. I didn’t want to spill it. I had to re-cork it perfectly or it would’ve oxidized.”