WALKABOUT 2 - The Back of Beyond (Part 15)

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81

The bullet intended for me hit Peter in the throat, near where I had been biting.

Simone, stunned by the blow to her head, staggered, trying to reorient herself. Jasmine started running away—probably a sound strategy—leaving me, covered in Peter’s blood, to fend for myself. Peter lay dead at my feet.

It all happened so fast. Only a few seconds ago, we were all alive.

Simone shuffled toward me, knife in hand. Looked at her dead brother, then me. Then Archer.

“They were moving,” Archer said. “I missed.”

With the bullet wound being so close to where I had been chewing on Peter’s neck, and the blood all over my mouth, of course she would believe him. Simone turned her attention back to me.

“Peter was supposed to be the one,” Simone said. “The club was ours, by rights.”

I glanced at Archer, who stood with the gun at his side, pointing at the ground. He raised himself up to his full height, brought the gun up, pointing at me.

“My man, Vince Thomas, he led the D.A.’s before Flynn,” Simone continued. “When he died, Flynn took over, before Vince’s body was cold.”

I didn’t give a shit who ran the Death Adders All I cared about was saving Shelby. And to do that, I needed to stay alive. So I had to keep Simone talking. “Why would you be the rightful leader?” I asked, wiping Peter’s blood from my mouth.

“I majored in finance at university. Worked for a couple of investment firms before hooking up with Vince. He turned over the club’s money matters to me. I’ve taken income earned by the club and invested it.” She looked down at Peter, sighed.

I was surprised she was so calm. Maybe she was just numb from the shock of losing her brother.

“I’m very good at laundering money,” Simone went on, “Establishing and overseeing legitimate businesses. One of which is a funeral home here in Coober Pedy.”

“It would never do to have a woman, much less a bloody rowl, as Flynn would say—a gang whore—in charge of the Death Adders,” she said, “but he kept me on to make him and the club rich.”

“So it was you who hired us—I mean, you who hired Mulligan and Jasmine—to kill him, so you could put Peter in charge?” I said. “Not that Jacko guy?”

“Jocko,” Simone corrected me. “And you’re spot on. I set up bank accounts, email accounts, and cell phones in Jocko’s name. He’s loyal to the club, but he and Flynn are rivals. Flynn wants to patch over to the Princes of Hades, an American MC.”

“What’s an MC?” I asked.

“Motorcycle club,” she said. “If we were to align with them; I would be out of the loop. No influence, no access to the funds. Peter would be just another bikie. We deserve better than that, after all we’ve done for the club. Jocko is against it as well. Several of the club members will follow his lead. We’re due to receive a shipment from the Princes tonight. I told Jocko about it.”

“A shipment?” I said, “What kind of shipment?”

“Cocaine. Half a million street value.”

I wanted to ask if that was US dollars or Australian, and wondered what the current exchange rate was, but then I brought myself back to the situation at hand—staying alive, helping Shelby. None of the other stuff mattered. “So you were working together with him?” I said, “Against Flynn?”

“No. Serving Jocko was not on our agenda.”

“So, you made him believe you’re siding with him?”

“Of course,” Simone said. “Initially the plan called for Mulligan and his partner to get rid of Flynn. As a precaution, I set up Jocko. It was a perfect plan.”

“Yeah,” I said, “except for the part where it didn’t work.”

“After the failed attempt on Flynn, we had to resort to Plan B. Let Flynn and Jocko make war. Peter and I will pick up the pieces after they destroyed one another.”

She looked down at her dead brother. “Or rather, we would have.”

With no emotion in her voice, Simone said, “Archer, put Peter in the truck bed. I’ll take him to the funeral home.” She turned to me. “As for you, Mr. Hamilton—of course I now know you’re not Mulligan—you will die here.” She advanced toward me, waving the blade in a menacing manner. I took a step back, then another, and another. She kept coming. I turned to run.

82

I remember falling, and sudden impact. A few years before I retired, I missed a step getting off the airplane in Newark, and tumbled all the way to the bottom of the metal stairway.  I had to take a couple months off work for a separated shoulder.  Hard to say for sure, but I think this fall hurt worse. 

No idea how long I lay there, contorted in a semi-inverted fetal position before I regained consciousness. Blood flowed from the top of my forehead down into my right eye, and severe pain in my right shoulder. I remember thinking after all the abuse my body had endured in the past few weeks, maybe it would be a blessing if this were truly the end.

In the meantime, I was still alive, and would be for a while at least, so I struggled to maneuver into a sitting position, on a pile of rocks, nearly passing out as the pain increased with each movement. The body of Billy Thorn lay twisted and broken a couple of feet away.

“I had plans for you, Mulligan,” the voice of Archer came from above. I couldn’t have been unconscious for long, if he was still around.

“I was looking forward to killing you myself,” he said. “But nothing more fitting than leaving you here to die slowly, I reckon.” A stream of hot piss rained down upon me. No getting away from it. The best I could do was turn my head and use my left arm to shield my face. “In case you’re thirsty,” Archer laughed. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find your partner and shag her before I snap her neck.”

I heard Simone say something to him, and then, a moment later, Archer came plummeting down. Lucky for him, I couldn’t get out of the way in time, and broke his fall. Not so lucky for me.

So, there I was, at the bottom of an abandoned opal mine shaft in the Australian Outback with a dead body and a lunatic biker who wanted nothing more than to kill me, near a town called Coober Pedy. A week ago, I’d never heard of it.

83

Page County, Indiana

It was another couple miles to the Page County Airport. Sheriff Bridges called his sister on his personal cell phone.

April Meyers picked up on the first ring. “Hello? Mike? Have you found her?”

It pained the sheriff to hear the anguish in his sister’s voice. “Not yet. I was hoping she might have come home, or you might have heard from her. Anything?”

“No.” April’s voice was faint, high-pitched, squeaky. “Tell me she’s alive, Mike.”

The sheriff opened his mouth to reassure her, but the words wouldn’t come out. “I’ll find her, sweetheart,” he finally said. “I swear to you; I’ll find her if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“Nothing solid,” he replied. “Checking out a few things. Talking to people she knew,” he said, then realized he’d used past tense. “People she knows.”

“You let me know the minute you hear anything,” April said. “And I do mean anything.”

“I will, Sis.” He paused a couple beats, then said, “April, I need to ask you something. Kind of personal.”

“Is it related to Shelby’s going missing?”

“Maybe yes. Maybe no. I don’t know yet.”

“Okay, I suppose.”

“Tyler Hamilton.”

“What about him?”

“You know him?”

There was a slight hesitation, then, “Yes.”

“Spill it, April.”

“He was Shelby’s birth father,” April said. “He was married, so . . . ” Then, “Why is that important? He died a while back. Drowned in the river.”

Although he knew the truth to be somewhat different, Bridges said, “Yeah. That’s right. Listen, April, I gotta go. Love you.”

“Wait a minute! You didn’t tell me why—”

Sheriff Bridges ended the call as he turned off the main highway onto Airport Road.

84

“Oh, God,” Archer groaned, struggling to a sitting position, his back against the wall of the mineshaft, legs jutting out at forty-five degree angles in front of him and overlapping my own outstretched legs. 

I was still trying to sort things out so they made sense. Not so long ago I was your typical retiree. Bored, grumpy, thinking about what I used to be. How did I become an international killer on the run, chased and attacked by both sides of the law? I wouldn’t believe it possible if I read about it in a book, or saw it in a movie. Like my father said after seeing the movie, Forrest Gump, “There ain’t no way all that could happen to one man.” And yet, it did. And it wasn’t over yet.

Simone, the raven-haired woman with the scar was the one who hired me—I mean, Mulligan—to kill Flynn. The whole business on the cruise ship, which I was oblivious to at the time, was nothing more than a way of setting up a trap for Flynn.

It was all out of my league, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Unfortunately for me, it was all a part of the package I signed on for the moment I assumed Jared Mulligan’s identity.

85

Page County, Indiana

Sheriff Bridges walked into the crematorium through the unlocked rear entrance, where the hearse was parked, its rear access door wide open. He placed a hand on the hood, felt the residual heat. It hadn’t been there long.

The email from Ty Hamilton sent him to the local airport. The hangar was empty. No sign of anything unusual, other than a pair of surgical gloves lying on the floor in one corner, behind an empty trash can. Someone had been careless, left a clue.

The sheriff had been to the crematory before, and knew where to look, hoping against hope he would not find what he was looking for. The sheriff peered through the partially-open door to the cremation chamber, moving a few inches at a time, “slicing the pie,” as the technique is called, viewing portions of the room from various angles without exposing himself unnecessarily.

Perry Winters, funeral director and Page County Coroner, was standing between a gurney with human remains wrapped in plastic and another with an unfolded cardboard box. Bridges watched as Winters leaned over to lift the body from the gurney, then pivot with his back to the door. It was then, when Winters was most vulnerable, he entered the room, gun drawn.

“Working alone today, Perry?”

Winters stiffened momentarily, then continued with what he was doing, placing the body on the cardboard box with care.

“Mike! I . . .  I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. Where’s my niece, Perry?”

“I don’t know, Mike.”

The sheriff moved closer. “Where’s Shelby?”

Winters eyes widened, darted from the sheriff to the body on the gurney and back again as he took a step back. “None of this was my doing, Mike,” Winters said. “Not in the beginning.” He glanced left, then right, looking for an escape route. “It’s The Princes of Hades, Mike. David Stevenson, my assistant funeral director and my son Jimmy, they owed the Princes a lot of money. Mike, I had no choice. I swear to God.”

“Drugs,” Sheriff Bridges said. It wasn’t a question.

Winters nodded. “Jimmy’s an addict. I had no clue, Mike. David got him started on it. This whole thing, it just got out of control, Mike. It started out harmless enough. We match up donors with people who could afford to pay, but couldn’t wait for their number to come up on the recipient list. We saved a lot of good people, Mike. We used the hangar for privacy. No one bothered us there.”

“The airport manager, Fred Jones,” Bridges said, “He had to be in on it, too. No way you could do something like this under his nose.”

“Yeah. His grandson needed a kidney. We had a doctor who lost his job due to his lifestyle. Cocaine. It just all came together. Two, maybe three days a month, we’d use the hangar. Fred just looked the other way.”

“Kidneys are one thing. We all have two. What about hearts and livers?”

Silence. Then, “I won’t lie to you, Mike. We found donors among the homeless in places like Indy and Dayton. And a few hitchhikers along the interstate.”

“We’ve done a lot of things together over the years, Perry. Things that required us both to look the other way for one another. But this . . .”

“Made us both a lot of money, too, Mike. I wanted to let you in on this, but . . .”

“None of that matters right now, Perry. I have a sister who is out of her mind worrying about her daughter. Now, I came here to find my niece. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, old friend. Its’ your call.”

“Mike, they’ll kill me,” Winters said. “They’ll come after my son. My family.”

His Glock pointed at Winter’s chest, Sheriff Bridges took a step closer. Reached behind his back for his handcuffs with his free hand. “Turn around, Perry. Put your hands behind your back.”

Perry Winters hesitated, which is a big mistake when a law enforcement officer intends to cuff you. More so, if it is Sheriff Mike Bridges. In the blink of an eye, he holstered his duty weapon, closed the distance between them, threw the county coroner to the ground, and cuffed him.

“Damn, Mike! You didn’t have to do that! You hurt me, you son of a bitch!”

“You shouldn’t have resisted,” Bridges said as he patted him down.

“I wasn’t resis—”

Bridges knelt with one knee placed on the back of Winters’ head, mashing his face into the pavement. Finding the gun, he said, “What do we have here?”

“I have a permit to carry—”

“Shut up and listen, Perry,” Sheriff Bridges said. “I will kill you. Here and now. I will go after your son. Unless. You. Tell me. Now!”

Perry Winters nodded. “Alright. Alright. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Bridges grabbed Winters by the back of his collar, yanked him up into an upright sitting position.

“She’s dead, Mike,” Winters said, nodding to the gurney “Shelby is dead.”

Sheriff Bridges said nothing, inhaled slowly, held it for several seconds before exhaling. He felt the urge to execute Winters on the spot. Use Winters own gun. Make it look like a suicide.

Winters said, “The Princes of Hades, they told Jimmy and David, to pick her up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I swear. We’ve never had a specific person before,”

“So they took her to the airport.”

Winters said “They were supposed to keep her for only a few days, until the Princes said to let her go. While she was there, they decided to take one of her kidneys. But then a few days later, word came down. Mike, they took everything. Just a few hours ago.”

“Everything?”

Winters nodded. “Both corneas. What would her quality of life have been if they’d stopped there?” He closed his eyes, shook his head as if trying to clear it of the image. “Then they took the other kidney. Both sides of the liver. Heart, both lungs, her pancreas.”

Sheriff Bridges stood, walked slowly. He leaned toward the plastic shroud to gaze upon his niece one last time. “Rest in peace, honey,” he said, then kissed his fingers and placed them on the plastic covering her forehead. He turned, walked back to Perry Winters. Stood over him menacingly.

“Mike, think about this,” Winters said. “If you arrest me, you will go down with me. I’ll tell the judge everything, Mike. I’ll tell them about the payoffs you’ve accepted over the years. All the times you’ve let things go on that you ought to be arresting people for. You being on the take from Larry Brown and his dog fighting operation, his chop shop, his selling marijuana. God only knows what else he’s into. I’ll be ruined, obviously, but you could go away for a very long time, too, Mike. Your reputation will be ruined. Your career will be over. You won’t be able to show your face around Page County again. You’ll be scorned everywhere you go. Prison would be a blessing for you. Your sister will hate you. She’ll hold you at least partly to blame for the loss of her only child. Or, you can avoid all that. Think about it, Mike. All you have to do is walk away right now. Act as if you never saw anything, Mike. It will be easy.”