Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“Fuck you. Is that short enough?” O’Brien and Hunter continued walking.

“Asshole!” Schulman shouted, turning to her cameraman, “Cut.”

Mike Gates drove across the Fuller Warren Bridge into the heart of Jacksonville. He punched the car’s radio station selector trying to find a newscast. There was an odd sound, like static created by approaching lightning. The sky was clear.

“Bastards!” he grunted. He turned off the exit into West Bay Street and parked his car in the lot adjacent to the Omni Hotel. Gates got out and walked up to a taxi, the driver reading the paper. “Can you take me to JaxPort?” Gates asked.

“Sure, get in.”

Gates got in the backseat and the driver asked, “Where to at JaxPort?”

“The old Pier 13 … should be a warehouse near there.”

“I have an idea where it is,” the cabbie said, pulling out of the hotel lot. “Place is in a rough part of the docks.”

“I’m representing a developer. We’re looking at it purely as a speculative buy. Condos could be in there in a couple of years.”

The cab driver pulled into a service road that led down to Pier 13. He drove slowly past a discolored Chiquita Banana sign, long ago faded from salt air and time.

“Park by the dumpster,” Gates said. “I’ll be down by the water. Wait for me.”

“I can’t stay too long, understand? Got other customers-”

“Here’s a hundred.” Gates tossed the bill on the front seat. “Wait for me. I won’t be long. Then you can take me to the airport.”

The driver stuck the money in his shirt pocket. Gates climbed out of the car and walked toward the rusted and broken Pier 13. The place looked creepy, he thought, including the old pier, which slept derelict-like by the dark water. He glanced at his watch, lit a cigarette, and watched a tanker leave the port across the wide river, heading for the Atlantic Ocean.

The cab driver watched him. He pulled the hundred dollar bill out of his pocket and held it up in the fading sunlight.

There was a noise. Maybe a rat in the dumpster. The cabbie looked toward Gates standing by the dock as the rubber lid on the dumpster flew open. A shotgun blast fired directly into the open window of the cab. The cabbie’s face was blown off. His jawbone propelled out the passenger window.

Zahkar Sororkin pointed the barrel at Gates. “Hands up! Drop your gun!”

Gates did as ordered. Sorokin climbed from the abandoned dumpster, 12-gauge shotgun aimed at Gates’ chest. “Kick the gun away from you.”

“No! What’s going on? Borshnik and I have a deal.”

“Kick the gun!” Sorokin yelled, stepping closer. “Do it or this shotgun will take your head off. They will find pieces of it in the river. The catfish will eat the soft parts.”

Gates dropped his pistol. “I want to see Borshnik.”

“And he wants to see you.”

Mohammed Sharif and his caravan were less than five miles from the docks. He made a call. “The boat must be there in half an hour. The Americans will block all roads. They will not think to monitor their ports and Intracoastal Waterway … they never do.”

O’Brien drove his Jeep up I-95 at almost ninety-miles-per hour. Hunter sat in the passenger seat, holding the GPS in his lap. He said, “There is no movement from Gates’ car. He’s in downtown Jacksonville, near the river.”

“Maybe that’s the location. Could be something there, a building, store, auto body shop, whatever.”

“Or he could have found out we’re tailing him and left his car in a parking lot.” Through his dark sunglasses, Hunter looked at the GPS screen. He punched in a satellite image of a map, scaled closer. “Looks like Gates is at Riverside Avenue. I’ll start making the calls. We’ll bring in F-16’s if we have to … they won’t crawl out of there.”

“First, we bring Jason out alive.”

Robert Miller had just ordered his third Irish whiskey when his cell played the first few bars from Mozart’s Requiem . He lifted the phone from the bar, looked through his bifocals and saw that it was security calling from his condo. “Mr. Miller, this is John in security at-”

“Yes, what is it?”

“You’d asked me to call, sir, if anyone was inquiring about you.”

“Yes, what do you have?”

“Well, sir, two men were here. Said they worked for the government, but they didn’t show ID. Looked like FBI types. Told them you weren’t in, and they left”

“When?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“Thank you.” Miller pressed the disconnect button and looked up at the bartender, a woman in her mid-thirties. He asked, “Do you have children?”

The bartender smiled. “Yes, a son. He’s seven.”

“What’s his name?”

“Andy.”

“As you raise him, give him confidence and humility. It’s often difficult to do. Many people can’t connect the two. But, together, they are powerful attributes.”

The bartender thought for a beat. “Yes sir, they sure are.”

“Can you make arrangements for me to stay here tonight? At my age, capacity for fine drink isn’t what it used to be. A nice sleep would make a world of difference.”

“Would you like a lower level room, or something near the penthouse?”

“Why go near the penthouse when you can go to the penthouse?”

“I agree.” The bartender smiled.

Miller slid a platinum America Express card toward her. “Put everything on there, and while you’re at it, give yourself a two-hundred dollar tip.”

“Yes sir! Thank you!”

“Oh, by the way,” Miller gestured toward the pool beyond the smoked glass windows of the bar. He looked at an older woman sitting alone at a table beneath an umbrella surrounded by royal palms in a lush tropical setting. She had long gray hair, which she wore in a braid over her shoulder. “The lady out there, the one about my age ….”

“Yes sir?”

“Do you know her?”

“Yes sir. That’s Mrs. Lewinski. She lives in one of the condos across the street. Comes over here sometimes. Husband used to come with her. But he died about three months ago. She always orders a mint julep. She likes a view of the beach. Nice lady.”

“I imagine she is,” Miller said, watching the woman under the umbrella. “Send her a dozen of the hotel’s finest red roses mixed with sprigs of mint. Put it on my card.”

“Yes sir.”

Miller entered the penthouse, the Atlantic wide and blue beyond the large veranda. He fixed a drink from the bar and opened the French doors to the veranda, the salty breeze from the ocean warm against his face. He set the drink on a glass table near fresh-cut flowers, and braced his hands on the railing. He glanced at his hands. They looked like old claws with age spots the size of dimes. The taste of diseased tissue rose from his lungs to his throat. The wind tossed his white hair as he stared out across the Atlantic. Heat lightning pulsed through a tumbling stretch of purple clouds over the horizon.

“You do give up your dead sometimes,” he mumbled. He looked down at the parking lot twenty-five floors beneath him. Robert Miller climbed on a chair and stepped up onto the ledge, felt the wind in his face, looked at the sea one final time before plunging off the balcony and free-falling like a fledgling bird toward the dark asphalt.

A glass of cold water splashed across Mike Gates’ face. His head pounded. Gates was groggy, his vision blurred as if he’d opened his eyes wearing a dive mask underwater, a surreal perspective around him. He was strapped in a metal folding chair, stripped to his underwear, his feet in metal buckets filled with water. Wires ran from his ankles and wrists. He shook his head. This wasn’t happening .