He stood there screaming and waving his arms around. “I know she ain’t got no money – what’d she do, fuck you to keep you quiet? Bitch ain’t nothin’ but a goddam slutty whore! You might as well git to talking, old man, ‘cause I’m gonna beat your ass ‘til you do, you—”
I shot him in the foot.
Dumb bastard. You don’t bash someone in the face and then stand around hollering without following up.
Aside from the .357 Magnum I carried in a shoulder holster under my jacket, I’d taken Simon’s advice on keeping a secret weapon and kept a mini .45 attached to a spring release up one sleeve and a knife up the other. I’m fast and I’m strong but I’m not stupid enough to try and go toe-to-toe with someone twice my size while my head is ringing and with what might possibly be a broken nose, so I’d hit the release for the mini. He was lucky I only shot him in the foot.
He howled and fell on his ass and grabbed his foot. Then he fumbled at a pocket. I kicked him in the jaw and he went over like the sack of shit that he was. I reached down, sprinkling his blue plaid shirt with blood from my nose, and extracted the little 9mm he’d been trying get. I stuck it in one of my inner jacket pockets. I was only a little unsteady as I turned and clomped over to my nearby jeep, hauled out a rag from the back seat, and mopped my nose.
I leaned on the side of the vehicle watching him for a few minutes, then, since he was still dozing, I went over, patted him down for any other weapons, and confiscated a pocketknife. I left the bundle of money I found but took his keyring on which there were two identical keys. Both turned out to be for his pickup truck. This indicated the idiot kept his spare on the same ring.
While I waited for him to come around, I went inside his untidy hut and removed the rifles and the shotgun I’d glimpsed on the walls during my quick scan. There were more rifles sitting in two corners, and I pulled open the drawers of a chipped and peeling cabinet that used to be white, and found several handguns. I found fifteen firearms in all. There could’ve been more but if so they were well hidden. I swept all the ammunition I could find into a plastic garbage bag I found on the floor.
I was gaining an understanding of why he stayed in that shitty place and knew I’d guessed right on why his wife refused to come back to him. She’d said she had her reasons for not wanting to return and asked me not to tell him where she was. She hadn’t elaborated and I almost told her no because he was paying me well, and with the other half I’d get on returning with her whereabouts, I wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. Then I looked at her a little closer.
She likely was a nice-looking woman when she was younger and she still didn’t look bad, but she had scarring down one side of her face and her wrists looked as if they’d been bound so tightly at some point that it left permanent marks. She limped when she walked and a scar on her lower left leg looked like an old bullet wound. Some of her teeth were broken. I could tell she was embarrassed about how she looked. I also guessed she was terrified of him. I made no indication to her of what I’d noticed; I’d simply nodded and said okay.
Her husband was right about one thing: she was broke. She’d borrowed fifty bucks from someone in the house and tried to give it to me but I told her to keep it. Folk sometimes offered money to buy my silence on their whereabouts and frankly, I’d sometimes taken it, but I could never have accepted money from someone in her predicament, even had it been more than I was being paid to find her.
Harlow was an overbearing man, more than able to intimidate a woman. He looked as if he might’ve been a linebacker at some time in his youth, though by the time I met him he had run to fat. I’m sure one of the reasons he hired me was because he’d heard I was good and always found whoever I tracked. I was also soft-spoken and sometimes mistaken for a much older man because of my gray hair and lined face.
Because of the misconstrued age thing, I’m sure Harlow thought he could scare me the way he’d scared his woman and, since I was smaller than he was, whip my skinny ass if it came to that. While he was asking around to find the best tracker, he should’ve also been finding out other facts about me. I’m sure someone would’ve told him that I don’t easily scare, and that I’m not as old as I look. Perhaps then he wouldn’t have made that mistake. Of course, one would’ve thought he’d at least know that weapons were part of the tools of the trade for a tracker.
If he’d kept his fist to himself and waited a minute, I was about to tell him that he didn’t owe me anything else. What he’d already paid me was a lot, more than enough to cover all my expenses and keep me out of dishwashing for a while, but now I felt it only fair that he give me the full balance. I put all the guns and ammo in my jeep, and went back over to him. I put away the mini, hauled the gun from my shoulder holster, and waited.
He finally groaned and stirred. He came up on his elbows and stared at me squatting beside him with my .357 pointed at his head. I think I’ve mentioned my big feet. My friend Simon taught me to use them well and they can do serious damage, especially when I’m wearing boots. I hadn’t kicked him hard but even so his jaw was swelling fast. It likely was broken but I had no sympathy for him.
“You probably can’t speak well right now, Mr. Harlow,” I said quietly. “That’s all right, you don’t have to. Now, I like sex as much as the next man and your wife is good-looking, though, I’ll bet she looked a lot better before you got your hands on her. However, in spite of your suspicions, she and I did nothing together. Don’t go by my gray hair and lined face; she’s almost old enough to be my mother” – not that I’d never had an older woman but I would never have done what he indicated, even had she offered, which she didn’t, because that wouldn’t have been ethical – “and she’s also a very nice lady. You should’ve learned to appreciate what you had.”
I eyed him for a moment in silence. He didn’t try to say anything so I continued. “Before you demonstrated your unwillingness to hear me out, I was about to inform you that I wouldn’t be charging you for expenses since you were so generous with my retainer. But you have offended me so I’ve changed my mind. If you wish to retain one good foot, give me the rest of my fee. My full fee. Then I will go my way and you will only have to limp on one side.”
I rose to my feet keeping my gun on him. The bleeding stopped but my nose throbbed. I touched it with a careful hand. It felt bulbous. I studied him as I calmly waited.
His eyes went wide and he mumbled, “Uh, wai’! Wai’! ‘Ou kin ha’ it! Don’ shoo’! He fumbled at his pocket and pulled out the rubber-band bound wad of money I’d found and left there. He tossed it to me.
I caught it with my free hand and stuck it in a pocket. I didn’t count it. “If this is not the correct amount, Mr. Harlow, you understand I’ll be back.”
From the way he winced when he moved his head up and down, I believe his jaw was in as much pain as my nose.
I regarded him lying there with blood seeping through the hole in the top of his shoe and his mouth gapped open because he couldn’t close it. His woman survived the Event yet he’d treated her so badly that she ran away and hid from him. I thought of Zoni and as sometimes happened, the rage I’d felt deep inside since that day tried to take over. I always tried to keep it from escaping and I’d never shot anyone except in self-defense, and even then hadn’t killed him. I almost pulled the trigger. Instead, I took a couple of deep breaths and pushed it down.