Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good), page 2
“That’s not good enough! You owe it to yourself to have a little more common sense than this!”
I was mad! Didn’t she read the newspapers and see the news at all? I dealt with monsters of every kind on a daily basis. This world was made up of bad people, who wouldn’t think twice about gobbling up an innocent girl such as her for breakfast.
I leaned down and pulled a 9mm out of my ankle holster. It was a smaller gun, but it would do the job. Anna’s eyes grew large as she saw the pistol in my hand. For being a woman Anna didn’t have much in her purse and the pistol fit easily into it.
“But I don’t have a permit!” She exclaimed.
“Consider this your chance to do something highly illegal then. Do you know how to use it?”
She nodded, “I shot some of my father’s when I was younger.”
“Good, it’s fully loaded and ready to go. Make sure to keep it with you and use it if you have to.”
I caught her looking at me curiously and I asked somewhat defensively, “What?”
“You really do kill people don’t you?” I nodded as I felt myself being led off track again by her pretty eyes.
I pulled out a wad of cash from my pocket and stuffed it into her purse alongside of the gun. She immediately bristled, “I’m not that kind of girl!”
“I’m well aware of that! This is a gift with a purpose! Taxi to work and taxi back home from work! Got it?”
She brushed some tendrils of hair away from her eyes and nodded slowly with a shocked looking expression across her features as she looked at me. I gave her purse back to her and she opened her door and partially stepped inside. She turned back to me and I could see some of her humor was back.
“You don’t make a very good stalker. I think we should move you from stalker status right up to boyfriend.”
She stepped close and swept a hand around the back of my neck and pressed her lips to mine in a quick kiss before stepping back a little breathlessly saying, “Goodnight, honey.”
I stood there staring at the closed door not at all my usual self. I brought myself under some semblance of control and knocked on the door.
The instant, “Yes?” From the other side gave proof to the fact that she hadn’t moved away yet either.
“You forgot to lock your door.”
“Oh yes, thank you! Good night.”
“Goodnight.” I said hearing the dead bolt close shut with a click.
It had been a long time since I’d said that to anyone. In fact it would have been my mother who was the last to hear such words, but that had been a long time ago and in a different language. I walked down the dimly lit hall not liking the place my girl was staying in.
Whoa! When had that special classification status of ‘my girl’ happened? I guess the answer to that was, when I had been promoted to ‘boyfriend status’ a couple of moments ago. No one who knew me would believe any of this!
On a hunch I stepped into a darkened doorway at the end of the hall and waited. About five minutes passed and I was just about to go, when Anna opened her door and stepped out into the hall. She didn’t have a coat or purse with her so I guessed that she was staying on the premises. In fact all she did was step across the hall and knock on the door. It opened after a moment and I saw the vague outline of an older woman standing there. Nothing nefarious in that so far.
Anna handed her a wad of cash, which was no doubt the taxi money, I thought as I felt my jaw tighten. Things must be threadbare thin for her to value her own skin so little. A boy stepped out into the hall and sort of listlessly stepped across the hall to enter Anna’s apartment.
Anna said something to him, but he didn’t respond and I saw a sad look come over Anna’s face as she watched him go by. It looked like Anna had a son. The boy’s behavior was odd.
Anna was the type of mother every kid would have adored having, warm, caring, affectionate, and even fun. The boy had to be about six or so and he’d just walked by her like she didn’t even matter!
Anna was a single mom with a kid that seemed to have some issues. No wonder she didn’t have two pennies to rub together. She had probably owed the old woman back money for watching her kid while she was at work. I stepped out of the dim hallway and continued on out of the building determined to fix some of what I saw wrong with this situation, but I couldn’t do anything right now. I was leaving the country in the morning and I’d be gone for several days, but when I came back things were going to change.
Chapter Two
Anxious for More
Anna looked around after she had dropped off Kevin. No sign of her stalker friend. A smile came to her lips as she started down the dirty walled hall.
She hadn’t intended to go so far last night, but she was glad she had. The quiet guy with the hat and the calm unflackable demeanor had intrigued her from the start. He hadn’t been so calm last night though. She’d rattled the cage he put around himself pretty hard.
It had been so fun! Fun that is up until the moment he had told her what he did for a living. She shivered as she felt the extra weight of her purse from the pistol contained inside.
He took people’s lives and yet he was trying to save hers, what an odd combination. What are you doing Anna?
That was a hard question to answer, but right now she really hoped her quiet admirer would be back at the bar tonight. She’d said he was her boyfriend, but that was really up to him to decide. She just hoped she hadn’t scared him off.
It had been nice having someone to walk her back to her apartment in the night. She hadn’t had to fear that every shifting shadow was some possible assailant. He would be mad with her when he found out she’d spent the taxi money elsewhere.
In a way it was nice to have someone mad at her. It meant at least someone cared whether she lived or died. She’d given up on her faith when the hits had just kept on coming. The stranger’s charity was the first bright spot in her life in a long time.
She swallowed down her apprehension as she stepped out onto the street. Her walk to work wasn’t much safer in the daylight then it was at night. Someone whistled and she cringed inwardly and hurried on.
“Hey you, miss, stop!”
She glanced toward the voice and saw a taxi driver with his head stuck out a window. Unsure of what was going on she diverted slightly and stepped out toward the cab.
The taxi driver had a picture in his hand, “Yep, you’re the broad. Get in.”
Anna her face cautious asked, “You were told to come pick me up?”
“Yep. Been paid to bring you back too.”
Anna straightened up. How had he known?
“This man, did he have a hat?”
“Sure did. Now I don’t know about you miss, but I don’t like staying around this neighborhood anymore than I have to.”
Anna nodded and got in and sat still in the back seat as the driver pulled away from the curb. He looked in the rear view mirror at her, “Names Bill miss, guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
“How much is he paying you to do this?” Anna asked in a small voice.
“Enough lady and then some! Take it from me sister you need to latch on to this one and not let go!”
The rest of the drive was quiet and Bill dropped her off at the curb in front of the bar. He rolled his window down and handed her a card.
“You can reach me with this number day or night and I’ll be here.”
“I don’t have a phone.” Anna mumbled out embarrassed.
“He said you might not. Told me to give you this. Chargers in the bag.” Bill handed her a sleek looking phone and then handed out a small bag.
Numbly, Anna took both, thanking the taxi driver and entered the bar. Her eyes drifted through the vacant bar to land on the corner seat on her side of the bar. Why? Why was he doing all this? All she’d done was talk to him! She looked heavenward for a second. Maybe she’d given up on faith to soon.
The afternoon passed and the evening wore on. Her boyfriend was a no show and her frustration with his absence was mounting. She wanted to thank him. Play around with his shyness and see his eyes light up in shock when she surprised him.
She must have polished the corner area of the bar where he sat half a dozen times now. She had to face the bitter truth. He wasn’t coming. At least not tonight anyway, maybe tomorrow night would be different.
“Hey Anna!”
It was Jim and he was holding something out to her. It was a manila envelope.
“This came for you in the mail today. I forgot to give it to you earlier.”
Anna took it and glanced at Jim. “Could you cover for me for a while?”
He nodded and Anna slipped into the back room and out the alleyway door. It was cold, but she didn’t notice as she opened the manila envelope eagerly. The first thing she saw was the money. Several thousand dollars of it!
There was a piece of paper too, which she pulled out and opened. “Anna, please use the taxi! If Bill’s a jerk I can arrange for someone else to take over till I get back. I’ll be gone for several days. I look forward to admiring you again soon. P.S. You don’t have to hide your boy from me. Sincerely, your boyfriend.”
Anna’s lips began to quiver and then a sob escaped as tears tracked down her face to wet the paper clutched in her hands. She slid down to a squat with her back against the brick wall of the bar as she reread the short letter, which was far longer in the depth of its meaning.
She folded it up and put it back in with the money. She’d told him that she wasn’t the kind of girl that gave sexual favors for money last night at her door, but the truth was that she had been on the verge of becoming one of those girls.
She just couldn’t make it! Despite all of her sacrifices and how hard she tried she just couldn’t earn enough money. She could have had a payout and been on easy street, but Kevin and all the others just like him deserved more and she was determined to see that they got justice.
She’d been on the verge of selling her body and losing pieces of her soul, and then last night had happened. Her gentleman killer by day and stalker by night was turning out to be a blessing in disguise.
Her hands folded together over the manila envelope and she started to pray. She prayed that this upswing in her life would continue as well as for the safety of her boyfriend wherever he was.
Chapter Three
Vigilante Justice
The noise of the rain forest was almost deafening in its intensity. I sat as still as a rock, sweat beading down my face adding to the messy camo face paint I had smeared across it and my arms. I watched the figures moving around the outside of the cocaine factory, which was tunneled underneath the rain forest floor.
I was waiting. Waiting for the peasants to be gone for the day. My private war didn’t include them. They had little to say in being forced to do the labor they were. The drug operation I intended on busting up today wasn’t going to change anything in the bigger picture. The flow of drugs out of Latin and South America would go on virtually unchecked. Whatever damage that I, as one man, could wreck would be minimal at best, but justice would be served on some today, who richly deserved it.
An Escalade pulled into the damp mud of the compound and a richly dressed cartel lord got out laughing about something. I stared at him in utter distaste of the hypocrisy of his existence. There were many like him and I hated them all.
He had seven children, a beautiful wife and a great big mansion on the hill an hour’s drive from here. After he finished checking up on this facility he would head back to his palace of a home in time for supper. He’d get there early and be greeted by his wife, who was genuinely enamored with him, perhaps even in love with him.
She of course knew what he did and the kind of man that he was, but she didn’t care about that. The children of America were far away and out of sight and thus out of mind. What was important to her was that her kids were safe and living in a utopia like setting.
In worshipful seduction she would greet her husband in a revealing dress and likely lead him away for a private exchange before dinner meant to secure her continued status, as number one in her husband’s eyes. She knew he had a woman in every city he visited, but that didn’t matter overly much, as long as she held onto the lucrative and secure position of being his wife.
Refreshed after a shower, the cartel lord would saunter out onto his immaculately maintained lawn, and throw a baseball with his son for a while, complement his daughter on the proficiency of her attention to her riding instructor’s advice, as she practiced on top of a several million dollar horse in the south paddock.
Finally it would be time for dinner. His children would be dressed in their finest, as liveried servants brought out a feast prepared by private chefs. The cartel lord’s wife would lean on her husband’s arm listening to his every word, as the twin oversized globes of her chest, living testimony of a plastic surgeon’s creation, threatened to spill out of her several thousand dollar dress, that had been flown in from Paris, especially for her.
They would all cross themselves as properly practicing Catholics did and then eat the feast prepared, while the peasants in the nearby village starved or got by on half rations, because their output of refined cocaine was low for the month.
Despite this imposed hardship on the poor, the family was blessed regularly by the local priest, because after all hadn’t they put a new roof on the mission building and gave generously of their pocket change every mass. After dinner the cartel lord would beg leave of his family claiming business in town as the reason.
He’d choose one sports car out of his collection of twenty seven and motor leisurely to where his lieutenants were holding a man accused of stealing something from him. They’d beat the man for hours, until he would confess to anything just to escape the pain of the next hit.
A lieutenant would step forward and slit his stomach open and in horror the tortured man would watch his entrails spill out onto the floor as those in attendance of his last moments alive would laugh and make fun of his look and cry of abject horror, as the man watched himself die.
It was never really a matter of the man’s guilt or innocence, but rather just a reminder to the lower peasant class of the abject power and influence of the cartel’s leadership. The message of the cartel’s heavy handed tactics, ‘they could do anything they wanted to so don’t get in the way and do as they said and you might die anyway, because your life is not your own and isn’t worth much anyway’.
The cartel lord would wash up and head back to enjoy his children’s evening theatrical recital followed by a night of enjoying his expensively put together wife. In the early hours of the morning he would bumble about online trying to figure out how to invest his latest installment of drug money best and worry about the rise and fall of his stock options. In the morning another body would lie in a roadside ditch unreported, even as the victim’s family was kept from openly mourning for the loss of their loved one.
Somewhere in America a concerned couple would step into a hospital room and find their former honor roll student lying on a bed an almost unrecognizable pile of bones and skin, as she clings onto a life of lost opportunities and broken dreams.
They’d had no idea this was happening to the daughter they both loved. Who would do this to their precious daughter?
The answer, the daughter did it to herself. She’d gambled her future for a temporary feeling, while the cartel lord who had helped to steal her innocence decided on the color of number twenty eight of his sports car collection, as his wife lay spent on the bed behind him worn out from her efforts of pleasuring him.
To such men, fear of them is everything, even his wife was not immune to it, as her efforts in part to please him constantly was a statement of her own fear of losing him to another woman. Such a man is often untouchable by law, as money speaks louder in the courts of men than the need for justice and those not busy pleasing him find themselves in too much fear of him to do anything to stop him.
That’s why I was here. Such monsters, as the one walking around in front of me didn’t deserve to continue enjoying their pleasurable existences forged on the backs of countless suffering individuals.
The big man on campus got back into his Escalade and cruised off into the jungle. Soon thereafter the peasants were released for the day. It was time. I shifted my position, as I swiftly crept through the thick undergrowth up behind an unwary guard.
I pulled him down into the vegetation, as I buried my knife in his back. He gasped against my hand and then lay still. I moved on to the next guard and then the next. Finishing them all off the way I had the first one.
I went down the steps and into the underground facility. There were five men gathered around the table laughing. They stopped laughing when they saw me and reached for their guns.
I shot all five and as they were still falling I swung my backpack off and put it on the table. I zipped it open and punched the timer. While my pack was loaded with explosives, the purpose of it wasn’t a big explosion, but rather a searing explosive blaze.
The bags of white powder stacked to the ceiling all around me would never make it to market. I left the underground bunker slinging my rifle up as I reached topside. Guards from further out were running to the compound because of the sound of the shots. More were coming in jeeps from a barracks down the road. I only waited around long enough to eliminate the guards in my path with several bursts of fire from my rifle.
I let the greater force coming up the road from the barracks get a good look at me before I lit out into the forest. The bomb in the bunker exploded and a fireball gusted out of the bunker’s opening shaking the ground under me with its concussive force. Smoke began to pour out of the bunker as the fire grew intense. That was one smoke cloud I wanted to avoid at all costs!
I stopped in brief intervals to fire back at the herd of gunmen that had taken out after me. My return fire temporarily sent them ducking for shelter along the way. The sound of automatic gunfire rocketed through the forest as bullets sliced through the understory vegetation both far and near to me. I looked for my marker trees as I began my dance of death over hidden tripwires. I cleared the field of minds and continued on.
