“Lucky for you, your skull is softer than the truck,” Mike said to the moaning man. “You didn’t leave a dent.”
Marcus moved around the driver’s side of the truck and swept the feet out from under another gangster, who toppled forward, his descent accelerating as Marcus gave him a hard shove at the back of his head. The man’s face smashed against the fender, his nose flattening and spraying blood onto the tire and the gravel.
The last man, standing behind the gang leader, started like he was about to fight, then thought better of it and dropped to knees as if pleading for his life. Snake stayed frozen to the ground, Lonnie’s pistol still trained on his chest.
“Your friends are messed up and you’re outnumbered,” she said, “now what?”
The gang leader stared, a look of shock in his eyes, unsure of what to do.
Lonnie grinned, “Looks like you’re the one who’s got no balls…Snake.”
Marcus stepped in front of the man. The gang leader faced him, tightening his expression, trying to pull on a tough gang banger mask to hide the obvious terror his eyes showed. Before he could move to protect himself, Marcus’s fist snapped into his face, flattening his nose and almost instantly blackening his eyes. The pistol fell from the man’s hand and he dropped to his knees. Blood streamed from his nostrils like water from a spigot.
“I don’t tolerate some punk calling my wife a lesbian,” Marcus growled, “and nobody threatens her.”
Marcus snatched the pistol from the ground. Snake made no move to stop him. Marcus, a gun enthusiast by hobby, recognized the model of the weapon right away, a Smith & Wesson M-39-2. By the intricate engraving, he could tell it was a special edition, probably worth thousands of dollars.
“And just where did you get a piece of crap like this?” he asked.
“Pawn shop,” Snake said.
“Yeah, right,” Marcus said. “You don’t even know what you’ve got, moron.”
“You’ll be sorry you let me live,” Snake sputtered. Blood droplets arched into the air as he spoke, the words came out nasal and suppressed.
Marcus glared down at him. Snake’s expression verifying that he regretted what he’d just said.
“I can change that,” Marcus jammed the butt of the pistol into the side of Snake’s head. The tough guy let out a short whimper and dropped to the ground with a heavy thump, like a side of meat dropped to the butcher's room floor.
“Did you just kill him?” Hilde asked.
“No,” Marcus replied, “but his head is going to hurt like crazy when he wakes up.”
He motioned to the gang member who stayed with his leader. “Get him out of here or you’re next.”
He immediately complied, grabbing Snake by the shirt and unceremoniously dragging him into the dark recesses between the train yard buildings. The other gangsters dragged themselves and their unconscious mates the same direction until they had all disappeared the way they came.
Chapter 9
Steven Farrah strode out the door and into the deepening shadows of the massive fuel tanks that loomed above the comparatively tiny building. The soles of his Stamford loafers crunched on the gravel as he crossed the short distance to the white Audi and got in. He started it and sat back in the soft leather seat. The engine idled smoothly, belying the power under the hood. There were not many things he had indulged himself in since moving to America from Britain. He was not big on food or drink, did not dance or go to bars, and found most movies boring. He was a man whose entertainment consisted of a limited selection of classical music — only the relatively quiet pieces — engineering problems, mathematical equations, and the nightly Sudoku puzzle that helped him relax before bed. The only exception was driving his Audi.
As the 5.2 liter V10 engine purred, he pressed the play button on the console's media center. Farah leaned back, closed his eyes, and let a serene smile slide across his lips as the thirteen-speaker Bose surround-sound system came to life with Gabriel Faure 's Requiem In Paradisum. The haunting melody voiced in Latin by a choir of boys and men floated ghostlike from the speakers, filling the space of the vehicle, soaking through his tension. His mind drifted to his university days, recalling a quote by the composer that his music professor had made the class memorize: "It has been said that my requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”
He opened his eyes, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the small building, making a three-point turn that set him back on the shipyard road toward to the security booth at the port’s exit. The window of the booth slid open as he approached, and an overweight security officer leaned out with a clipboard in one hand and a large celery stick in the other. He bore black stubble on his cheeks and double chin. The semi-transparent beard was probably an attempt at the macho look, but if that was the case it failed, instead leaving him looking unkempt and hung over.
“Hello, Thomas. Beautiful night, what,” Steven said with a clean upper-class British accent. Most likely unknown to Thomas it was not his natural accent. His was the thick, slang filled dialect of Manchester where Farrah had grown up, with its hard, industrial city sound that so many Americans, and even many British, found as hard to understand as Jamaican English, or inner-city gang lingo in the US. As a teen, Farrah had worked hard to sound more like the upper-class English gentry than the working class Mancunian of his schoolmates.
“Yes it is, Mr. Farrah,” Thomas said, handing the clipboard down and leaning his elbows on the window ledge, the fat of his ample gut squeezing into the frame. “Done already? Was it an easy fix?”
“Well, my part is done at least,” Steven said as he took the clipboard. “As far as it being an easy fix, let’s just say it was an easy problem to identify and come up with a plan to fix. Leka and Kreshnik will be installing the hardware for the next several hours. I get paid to figure out a solution, and they do the manual labor. Of course, the difficult part quite often is knowing what to look for, isn't it?”
“Yeah, I guess that's why you get the big bucks. You know what to look for.”
“Well, I don't know about big bucks,” Farrah said. “Tech-Cor is a pretty stingy company.”
Farrah used the pen attached by chain to the clipboard to initial the “out” column next to the signature where he had checked in earlier. He handed it back to Thomas, who initialed it, added the time and date, and replaced it on its peg inside the booth.
“Maybe so, but I know you guys got a killer contract for the pipeline maintenance here. And I know that late night call ins like this pay more per hour than I make all day. Which would be why you've got an Audi and I've got a beat-up old Ford Ranger.” Thomas pointed to his own vehicle parked on the other side of the road. “So I figure you're not doing too bad, eh?”
“Well, I won't lie to you, Thomas. It was good enough to move to Alaska all the way from Britain.”
“Yeah, I should’ve got me some training like that when I was in the Army. So I could get a career, something like the kind you got. Instead, I did six years in the infantry, and all I got is a bum knee and me standing here in a five-by-eight box all freakin' night.”