CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“The Wrong Room”
Wednesday night.
Quinn the Eskimo knelt in his motel room, ground floor end, stripped to the waist wearing black sweat pants. His lean torso glistened with sweat, veins and muscles popping after a forty-five minute work-out. His black hair was cut short, pale blue eyes fixed on some point in the mid-Pacific, miles from Indio, where he was.
Five years. It had taken him five years to catch up with Master Gunnery Sergeant Alec Hathaway who saw something at Surir he should not have seen and had been running ever since. Hathaway was no fool and had that survivalist mind-set so that when the time came he was ready. Benson never could figure how Hathaway got out of the Mideast. He intended to ask the sergeant about that. It was Benson's own fault he'd spent the past five years tracking Hathaway. Benson had come along to insure that there were only two survivors. Not that he’d spent the entire five years on Hathaway. ’He had also performed scores of minor ops from drop-offs to security to intel. He’d performed four sanctions, slightly less than one a year.
Quinn rose silently and turned toward the nightstand on which lay his Old Testament. Why did the motels only have the New Testament and the Book of Mormon? Quinn was grateful there was no Koran.
He picked the Bible up and opened it to the ribboned bookmark. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”
He set the Bible down, went into the bathroom, stripped and took a shower. He toweled off and slipped into olive green cargo pants, black Adidas, black turtleneck and a black watch cap he could pull down over his face. He grabbed his gear, locked the door and got into his battered ’88 Ford F-150 that he’d bought from a Mexican for $250 one week ago sans license or title. Quinn had his own license and title.
He got on the 111 and headed southeast toward the Salton Sea. It was ten p.m. and the highway was feverish with vehicles heading west, heading east. Quinn wondered who they were, what series of events had brought them to this place, driving across one of the bleakest stretches of America, a sort of American Negev complete with its own Dead Sea. He saw illegals, coyotes, dope dealers, gangbangers, and mercenaries. He never saw people, only hustlers or marks.
When Quinn’s father made the difficult transition from the Yukon to Detroit to build a better life for his family he plunked Quinn down in the middle of an inner city school where he was bullied on a daily basis by the mostly black student body for his looks, his hair, his strange manner of speech. He got beat on a lot. One day he discovered Bruce Lee at the Roxy, Special Matinee: The Big Boss and The Chinese Connection, one dollar. Quinn remained in his seat long after the credits had rolled and they’d turned up the light, mesmerized by what he’d seen.
Thereafter he spent every day at the dojo, turning his scrawny body into an anatomy lesson. He was a black belt at sixteen. He was ungodly fast. He fucked up a couple star athletes and word began to get around.
Don’t mess with the Eskimo. They sang “Quinn the Eskimo” behind his back but not so he could hear it. Quinn studied pre-law at Michigan State, which he attended on a gymnastics scholarship. The Agency recruited him when he was a sophomore. He could pass for white, Asian or Latino. He had a gift for languages. English was his second.
And here he was driving to Slab City to perform a sanction. He never really wanted to be a lawyer.
How low did a man have to fall to end up at Slab City, the sad remains of a failed subdivision at the north end of the Salton Sea, now a campground of last resort for losers, fugitives, or those who simply wanted to be left alone?
Hathaway knew how to forge documents and disappear. He’d slipped up when he ordered his favorite cigars from Tobacco Imports in Miami and had them delivered to a post office box in Indio. Quinn had been tracking the company’s orders for years. For five years he’d chased down one false lead after another. Fortunately there weren’t too many as the cigars were very exclusive and very expensive. Quinn figured Hathaway was out of the country for a lot of that time, probably in Costa Rica.
But Quinn had been unable to find him in Costa Rica. So he staked out the PO box in Indio and one day a Mexican kid driving a rattle-trap pick-up stopped in and emptied the box. Quinn intercepted him in the parking lot, showed him a badge and a photo.
“You know this guy?”
The kid was scared shitless. Hathaway, who called himself Meeks, had paid the kid twenty bucks to go and get his ‘gars. Quinn paid him a hundred to show where “Meeks” live, and to keep his mouth shut. Quinn promised another hundred the following day.
There would be no following day.
Quinn saw the sprawling encampment from the highway, glowing low and softly like a phosphorescent swamp. Hathaway was living in a run-down Grand Courier that he’d taken over from an old drunk whom he paid cash. It was still in the last owner’s name, not that anybody gave a shit. Nobody at Slab City paid federal taxes. The only taxes they paid was when they bought food or booze.
Quinn despised them.
He parked his battered truck on cracked concrete near a pile of rubble consisting mostly of concrete with rebars. Plastic grocery bags tumbled gracefully past in the steady breeze. Even at this hour of night it was warm. Quinn got out and looked up. He saw a million stars. There was something to be said for living in the country.
Just not this country.
Quinn carried a 9 mm Sig with suppressor made from a plastic liter Pepsi bottle and duct tape. There was no moon but a million stars cast a glow on the desert. Quinn jogged silently through the streets with names like Lilac Lane, and Moon View Court, heading toward the far fringes of the settlement and Hathaway’s trailer.
It was two-thirty. A faint amber glow emanated from the living room window of the trailer, which rested on concrete blocks with a propane tank at one end. The nearest trailer was ten meters. The old pick-up truck was parked next to the front door. Quinn crouched by a dumpster and surveilled the trailer. He looked beneath the trailer, between the concrete blocks and saw several lawn chairs on the opposite side, and a pair of legs.
The faintest whiff of a Cohiba wafted his way filling him with rage. What kind of patriot buys Cuban cigars? If Quinn weren’t intent on killing Hathaway, he would have arrested him for trafficking in illegal materials.
“And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?,” Quinn mouthed silently to himself. “Then Satan answered the Lord, and said: From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
Silent as the grave Quinn dashed to the propane end of the trailer and slunk around with his back to it. From a crouching position he saw Hathaway, now with a gut, sitting in his lawn chair, the faint red glare of his cigar flaring. Quinn brought the Sig up and approached Hathaway from his left side, no more than a shadow.
Two big hands reached out from beneath the trailer, grabbed Quinn by the ankles and jerked savagely causing him to slam onto the concrete slab and lose his pistol. The real Hathaway who had been hiding beneath the trailer ever since Miguel had told him of his strange encounter was on top of Quinn in an instant, straddling him and beating the shit out of him.
Quinn reached for the eye gouge creating a little room that he used to buck off the much heavier Hathaway, draw back and slam his heel into Hathaway’s crotch. Hathaway was wearing a cup! It provided little protection from Quinn’s dragon stomp and Hathaway folded gasping. Quinn sprang to his feet like a pop-up frog and scooped his pistol.
Both men were breathing hard.
That little prick Miguel.
“I knew…you’d come…” Hathaway rasped.
“Why…why’d you come back?” Quinn said keeping his voice low.
“I just got tired of running. You nearly got me in Sao Paulo. Freelancers in Belize. I thought I was through with the killing.”
For a second both men gasped for breath.
“It was the lab, wasn’t it?” Hathaway said at last.
“Yes,” Quinn confirmed.
“Did you know it was there?”
“We knew something was there. We didn’t know what it was.”
“A lab where they burned people to death. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”
“‘He giveth his beloved sleep,’“ Quinn said, putting two in Hathaway’s head.
***