Austin Camacho - The Payback Assignment

“Well, I never wanted to be your brother exactly, but I guess I’ll settle for a friend. I can always use one of those.”

Just before dusk, the tall thin man with the ice blue eyes stooped under the yellow police tape. Stumbling over broken brick pieces, he walked up to the detective standing over the body. The detective looked at his neatly pressed white shirt, tie, and light blue suit, and accepted his card. After reading it he smirked and shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay, so no surprise, you’re an attorney,” the detective said in a nasal Yonkers accent. “But the name don’t ring any bells.”

“No reason it should,” Paul said in his even, accent-free voice. “I represent the owner of this building. When he hears about violence in the South Bronx, he gets curious. When he heard it happened next to his building, he asked me to check it out.”

“Tell him he better either relax or buy property in a better neighborhood,” the detective said. “Actually, this one looks pretty routine. Spanish guy, around thirty. Took a good shot in the face. Broke his nose. Some scratches too. Then I guess they got sick of playing around and shot him. Probably over drug territory. Either that or a jealous girl friend. Believe me, there’s nothing odd or special about that.”

“How many times?”

“Eh?” The detective’s mind was already elsewhere.

“You said he was shot,” Paul said, keeping his voice polite. “How many times?”

“Oh.” The detective lifted a note pad and scanned, as if looking for some nonessential bit of information. “One bullet. Nine millimeter. Through the heart, low and inside.”

“Powder burns?” Paul stared down at the corpse’s face, showing no emotion.

“Nope. Wasn’t that close.”

“But he wasn’t running I see,” Paul said, squatting down. “That’s an entry wound in his chest.”

“Hey, who are you, Columbo? Why don’t you go chase an ambulance or something?”

Paul responded to the policeman’s ire with a smile. “You’ve been very helpful, detective. Mind if I check the inside of the building while I’m here?”

“Help yourself. Just stay out of my people’s way.”

“Oh, I always try to do that,” Paul muttered under his breath. He stepped up the outside stairs and entered the darkened hall. He noticed the broken light bulb hanging above him. With his automatic held close to his right thigh he climbed the stairs, avoiding the broken ones. At the top he examined the body in the hall, sitting up against the wall. It was J.D. Griffith, a merc and a gunfighter. He knew the man only by reputation, but that reputation was excellent.

The apartment door was ajar. He pushed it just enough to slip through and pushed it almost closed behind himself. Once inside he drew a penlight from his jacket pocket and quickly checked the room. To his seasoned eyes, scattered shell casings and bullet holes in and around the tattered couch told a story. Not far away he found a splotch of blood on the floor behind the easy chair. It was too red to be the result of a bullet wound. Blood from a shallow cut, he thought, or from someone’s mouth or nose after a blow. Further in he found the fat man Stone had saddled him with. No need to touch him to know what had happened. The left side of his neck was torn, and a hole above his left eye was crusted over with dried blood.

“Amateurs,” Paul muttered. His contempt for them was so often justified. Pocketing his light, he slipped out of the flat and down the stairs into daylight. Across the street he got into his brown, two door mid sized Chevrolet and pulled away. He would let the police discover the mess upstairs on their own.

A block away, he was still shaking his head at the incompetents who turned up in his profession. He had offered the fat man and his Mexican friend a chance to step up, to play in the big leagues. An error, certainly, but perhaps not a waste. Natural selection had cleared the field of two men who did not belong there.

And he learned that he had certainly underestimated this Morgan Stark.

What a wild nightmare, Morgan thought. He had been trapped in a circuit of sensory overload. He had experienced the sex act both as a man and as a woman does, simultaneously. For a man who had not known fear in years, it was as close to terror as he could come. Thank God it was over.

But when his eyes popped open he realized his dream had been reality. His cheek was pressed into a soft stomach. His right hand rested on a creamy thigh. The rest of the visible world was varying shades of blue. The sheet he was on, the comforter he was under, the walls, the ceiling, the carpet, all blue. Images of the rest of the previous evening returned, and he remembered where he was.

“Finally awake, sleepy head? About time. Must be a couple of minutes after six.” Felicity was sitting up, propped against two pillows. His head was in her lap and the fingers of her right hand were in his hair. With her left she scanned the Sunday New York Times. A pot of coffee sat on her nightstand, next to a plate of Danish pastries.

“Morning,” Morgan smiled up at her. “Do you ever look at a watch?”

“Never,” Felicity said, holding a Danish to his face. “I just have this weird time sense. Now bite this.”

The smell of fresh baked pastry awakened his hunger. He filled his mouth with the Danish, which was warm and just short of too sweet. He sat up and Felicity handed him coffee. It was hot, black and strong. Perfect. How did she know?

He could not remember the last time he had just sat in bed with a woman. She looked so comfortable and relaxed – comfortable with her nakedness, comfortable with him. He had to admit that he was pretty relaxed too.

“So you have a clock in your head and can see in the dark?” Morgan said, playing with her hair.

“Yep. I think the time thing’s a side effect of my photographic memory.”

“Jesus, you really are some kind of freak.” He meant it as a joke, but regretted the words as they came out.

“This from a man who tells me he can find north without a compass and judge distances down to the centimeter. And let’s not forget that danger sense. You must have been designed to be a soldier.”

“And you to be a cat burglar,” Morgan said, reaching over to snare a chunk of newspaper.

“Looking for the sports section?” Felicity asked.

“Actually, I always start with the international news. Got to keep up, you know. That’s how I know where my next job opportunity’s likely to be.” He looked up, noticing Felicity was deep in the fashion news and the society section. The significance of their choices was not lost on him and, he guessed, not on her either.

After being shot at and shot, ambushed, lured and captured, set up and pursued over the last three days, exhaustion had kept him asleep through nearly fifteen hours. Morgan had slept for the first time in years without a gun within easy reach. Now, fully rested and relaxed, his mind started wandering around the present situation, peeking at it from all different angles.

“Morgan?” Felicity’s voice shook him out of his reverie.

“Yeah, Red?”

“You know, I didn’t think a person in your line of work would be so literate. What made you become a mercenary?” she asked, not looking up. He thought for a moment, sipping his coffee. He could never remember anyone asking him that question before.

“Well, you know, when I was in the Army, crawling through tunnels, killing commies, I guess I felt like I’d come home. After Vietnam ended, I was discharged, but the idea of coming back to New York after that, it just didn’t feel right. So, I wandered for a few years, trying to see everything, do everything I could think of. After a while I just started picking up merc work because it seemed like a way to go back to doing what I figured I did best. It hasn’t been a bad life, really. Got to admit, I still envy you, though.”