Since I find it useful to remain gainfully employed, chances are you will not hear from me again. I leave what I am disclosing for you to do with as you see fit. Thank you for your time.
She resisted the impulse to read the document a seventh time, further resisted the impulse to delete the entire composition, clicked Send, logged off, waved to the clerk at the counter despite the fact that his eyes lingered too long in the vicinity of her sports bra, and set out on the return leg of her run.
24
One day a nineteen-year-old named Travis Malloy was a private in the U.S. Navy; the next day he wasn’t. It had been as simple as that.
With the ship leaving Kingston after his three days of leave, Malloy just didn’t get back on. He didn’t have a choice: get back on and they’d have busted him, Malloy getting word they’d found him out. And who cared? Malloy didn’t need the navy anyway, the whole deal a sausage fest, thousands of homos sleeping side by side in bunks a regular guy like Malloy wouldn’t even share with a woman.
Now he could share his bed with any woman he pleased.
Travis Malloy had strange, pale freckled skin and short, shockingly red hair. Technically, Malloy was of African-American descent, but aside from a slightly blunted nose and the thick texture of his hair, Malloy was an albino. He fit no single previously defined ethnic category.
Light-complected though he happened to be, Malloy preferred women with skin so dark it gleamed. Get a whore like that, and he’d ball her all night. Yeah, he could sure ball ’em all night, Malloy banging away like the girl was lifeless, which made sense, since by the time he had the girl in bed, she usually was. Malloy mostly asphyxiated them, though sometimes broke their necks, generally doing it as he pulled them through the doorway of whatever room he’d procured for the night-paying in cash to keep his identity a secret. Having performed this morbid act in nearly a dozen ports of call, Malloy figured somebody would eventually make him, so when he finally got word they’d caught on it didn’t surprise him at all. Malloy overheard some idle talk from a couple of the navy fags during leave in Jamaica and bolted immediately.
Kingston was his favorite city in the world anyway, a town overflowing with dark-skinned prostitutes, Malloy finding they were a dime a dozen here, about all Malloy was looking to pay, anyway. He could get all he wanted, pick hookers up everywhere he went-lost souls, wanderers, enough of them here that Malloy had to be careful not to kill too many, since he found he wanted to stay. He met one girl, just the kind he wanted, her mind blown to kingdom come from so much weed Malloy got high just sucking on her lips. She was into some sort of freaked-out religion, a form of voodoo. Initially, the only reason this mattered to Malloy was that she and her religious practices represented an easy way for him to score weed-some good shit in fact. He found the dope was a part of the religion. They smoked it during the ceremonies.
During the time he was balling the voodoo girl, Malloy did pick-up day labor to pay the bills, using a fake name so the navy wouldn’t send the marines after his AWOL ass. He found plenty of jobs, Malloy discovering that labor laws weren’t quite as stringent in Jamaica as in the States; he was, however, getting a little tired of the day-to-day grind, waiting around before the crack of dawn, hoping the labor truck would cruise by with enough empty seats for him to squeeze in. Get work, and you had enough money for drugs and parties; get passed over, and you starved.
From this desperation was born in Travis Malloy an idea, an entrepreneurial scheme that occurred to him mainly because he misunderstood something at work.
Malloy overheard his foreman saying something about the good old days of slavery, a time when you could buy your labor and the labor wouldn’t talk back. The foreman had been telling a joke, his way of complaining about some local hooligans who were trying to form a labor syndicate, but to Malloy the man’s comment contained a different and deeper meaning.
That night his voodoo girl took him to one of her parties. It was a wild one this time, crazy, the whole deal taking place in a vacant warehouse. The thing Malloy noticed was a group of guys, skin dark as asphalt like his girl-maybe six or seven of them, guys so doped up they were comatose the whole time he was there. They stood in corners, sometimes swaying to the music but never doing anything more than that.
It gave him one hell of an idea.
Malloy suckered three of them, one by one, into coming outside. He gave each a line-something about the sweet pussy he could arrange for them in the joint next door-and once outside, he bound, gagged, and shoved each of them into the back of his van. He stopped at three-any more than that, and even the stoners at the party would have noticed these losers missing. Plus, three bodies were all he could fit into his van without stacking them. He figured three would be plenty anyway.
The next morning he drove up to the quarry where he’d been working and found the foreman he’d overheard the day before. He pulled the foreman aside.
“I heard you talking about slavery yesterday,” he said.
The foreman, a thick-limbed West Indian with a gut like Santa Claus, looked Travis Malloy up and down.
“What about it?” he said.
Malloy asked, “Ain’t you the man does all the hiring here?”
“Most of it.”
“What about some shit needs doing, nobody needs to know about it? Anybody ever want you to find people can do that kind of work?”
After a moment, the foreman said, “Maybe.”
Malloy said, “Probably something you might need, you got a job like that you need to fill, is disposable labor. The kind you can use up and throw out when you’re finished.”
The foreman stared at this strange-looking, light-skinned, vaguely African-American freak with the short-cropped red hair.
Malloy said, “If you’re interested, I got some contacts could hook you up with somebody provides that kind of labor pretty cheap.”
After another short while the foreman said, “I’ll think about it.”
Malloy told the fat-ass foreman to have somebody call him. Scribbling his beeper number on a brown paper lunch sack and handing it to the man.
The acquisition of the three stoners presented a small problem: it kept Malloy apart from his voodoo girl while he waited it out. He had to keep the three guys tied up in his house, couldn’t risk bringing the girl by and having her find out. Lucky for Malloy, who couldn’t afford to feed his captives, the wait only lasted a day and a half. The page came directly from the foreman, who asked whether Malloy would be able to come and meet with the foreman’s associates, so they could discuss that concept of his, what did he call it?
Malloy said, “Disposable labor’s what I called it,” and agreed to meet.
He had to go out to a rural park in the middle of the night, but he took a gamble and brought his three captives along in the van. This allowed him to close the deal on the spot-no questions asked, hand over the trio of starving drug addicts for two-fifty cash, more money than Malloy could have made working in the quarry for five or six weeks.
A few months later, about the time his finances were running low again-Malloy thinking about going back out to wait for the day-labor truck-he got another page. It was a new voice, not the foreman and not the people the foreman had brought him to. The voice asked whether he had access to any more of the sort of labor he’d provided to an acquaintance of his. Malloy said that he did and asked how many they were talking here. The voice said two, or maybe three. Malloy thought for a moment before saying, “Going rate’s five hundred a head.”
The voice told him that wouldn’t be a problem.
Malloy had some difficulty this time, had to cruise the hard-core party scene for a few days before he found some suitable addicts. He even had to work the Kingston homo scene to get his third man, but his navy days gave him some experience with that, so he got it together and delivered the goods just the same. Five hundred bucks a head, cash, and Malloy was fucking loaded.