White russian, p.8
White Russian, page 8
Over the years Harry had owned a parrot, a monkey, a pig, a mudskipper, a miniature pony, and a few more inappropriate creatures I’d intentionally forgotten.
“Waddlebutt isn’t stupid. He’s a social animal. Just don’t take his stones. Or try to pet him. Or look him directly in the eye. Or make any sudden movements.”
“Yeah. Real social.”
“We should probably just back away slowly.”
“Where the hell did you get a penguin, anyway?”
“I got a guy. Hey, did you know that penguins are one of the only animals that have no inherent fear of man?”
“Fascinating,” I said. I wasn’t actually fascinated.
“You want to feed him?”
“No.”
“There’s some shrimp in the crisper.”
“I don’t want to feed him.”
“You guys need to bond. The best way to bond is to share a shrimp cocktail. Works on the ladies, and also works on penguins.”
“No, thanks.”
Harry nudged me. “Stop being a baby, Jack, and just give the poor waterfowl some shrimp.”
I sighed. What the hell.
I reached for the crisper drawer, and Waddlebutt pecked my hand.
“Go slow. He thinks you’re trying to steal his rocks.”
“He drew blood,” I said, squinting at my fingers. That’s when the smell hit; rotten fish and ammonia and dirty diaper.
Harry picked up a bottle of Febreze, and began spraying it everywhere.
I began to gag. “Jesus, McGlade. He smells like a spoiled ass sandwich.”
“He just needs a bath,” Harry said. “Rosalina! Bath time!”
Rosalina padded over. Waddlebutt chirped at her, and the dog swallowed him in one bite.
I glanced at Heckle and Jeckle, wondering if this happened all the time and maybe they knew what to do. But they just sat there, expressionless, two sacks of suspicious potatoes.
“Shouldn’t we stop this?” I asked McGlade.
“It’s okay. They’re friends.”
Waddlebutt’s little bird head poked out of Rosalina’s gigantic, floppy jowls, and the dog trotted over to the rear of the Crimebago and spat the penguin out into a bucket of water.
Waddlebutt screeched, splashing around, flapping his flippers.
“He can’t get into his bucket by himself because he’s short and flightless,” McGlade said. “Isn’t this the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Waddlebutt stuck his butt out of the water, lifted his tail, and squirted a stream of yellow feces three feet across the room, onto Harry’s carpet.
I lowered my face into my hand and rubbed my eyes.
McGlade frowned. “He’s not potty trained yet. We bought him kitty litter, but all he does is defend it like he defends his rocks.”
“You’ve become a parody of yourself, Harry.”
“Nature is miraculous, J-Dawg. You’ve lost your childlike fascination with the world. That’s why you’ve got so many more wrinkles than I do.”
“You don’t have wrinkles because you’re too fat for wrinkles.”
“So we’re back to body shaming?” he gave me a sidelong glance. “I can’t help but notice that muffin top spilling over your pants. And are grey roots in fashion this season? If they are, you’re ready for the cover of Vogue.”
“You really want to do this?” I said. “You’re a squatting fat guy.”
“What’s wrong with squatting fat guys?”
I held up my index finger, paused for dramatic effect, and then poked Harry in the shoulder and gave him the tiniest push. Gravity took over, and he toppled, rolling into the mess of bird poop.
“Squatting fat guys have poor balance,” I answered.
McGlade flopped around, like a fat man who had been pushed over.
“Aw, c’mon! Dammit, Jackie, this is my only blazer that fits.”
“Maybe you should consider dieting.”
He tried to sit up using his stomach muscles, failed, and then rocked himself forward and back until he got onto his butt.
“FYI, I am dieting. I’m currently on the all carb diet.”
“Which diet?”
“All carb. For breakfast I had a potato sandwich. Nothing but bread and boiled taters, topped with spaghetti.”
“That sounds amazingly unhealthy.”
“Impossible. The spaghetti was plain. I didn’t put any sugar on it, like last time.”
“It’s called a no carb diet, McGlade. Not an all carb diet. Carbs are what make you fat.”
He tried crossing his arms, couldn’t because of his weight, and then scratched his elbow, trying to make it look like that was his original intent. “Don’t be stupid, Jackie. Everyone knows it’s sugar that makes you fat.”
“Sugar is a carbohydrate.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve reduced my sugar intake to only two Snickers Bars per day.”
I saw no need to argue with him. It was like talking to your television, expecting it to respond.
McGlade grunted, trying to look over his own shoulder, unable to. “Is my jacket stained?” he asked, showing me his back.
It looked like he’d rolled around in penguin shit.
“Can barely notice,” I told him.
Heckle and Jeckle began to cackle. I saw they were recording this.
“My face better be blurred out,” I said.
“This is B reel,” said Heckle.
“Not streaming,” said Jeckle.
“We’ll alter it before posting,” said Heckle.
“You got that lens filter on?” asked McGlade. “The one that makes me look thinner?”
“Of course, Private Dick McDude,” said Jeckle.
“They’ve got a lens filter that makes me look thinner,” McGlade told me, as if I hadn’t just heard the whole exchange.
“No such thing.” I took out my cell. “They’re trolling you.”
“Is there a such thing?” McGlade demanded of his videographers.
They chuckled.
“How about that lens that makes my dick look bigger?”
“That one is real,” I said. “It’s called a zoom lens.”
Heckle and Jeckle cackled.
Waddlebutt squawked.
Rosalina barked.
I checked the GPS map on my phone.
We weren’t even out of Florida yet.
This was going to be a really long trip.
DAYS AGO
THE COWBOY
The hunch had been correct. The man in the picture had been Herb Benedict.
Small world.
So small that some things aren’t even coincidence. They’re eventualities.
Herb Benedict falling into the Cowboy’s world wasn’t luck. It was inevitable.
While hackers and coders maintain the darknet, it’s surprisingly primitive and low tech from a visual standpoint. It took geniuses to figure out Tor and VPNs and encryption, but they made it easy for luddites to surf and explore. Because of the unsophisticated criminal element that took to the deep web like bees to pollen, many destinations look like AOL websites circa 1998. But the black market doesn’t require bells and whistles. When the Cowboy logged into the slavery store to check what was available to buy, and saw Herb’s blurry, low-res picture, it was a galvanizing moment.
But there was no way to be sure it was actually Herb without putting him into the shopping cart and buying with bitcoin.
Even at delivery, the Cowboy hadn’t been entirely certain. Herb looked ten years older than recent social media pictures, had lost a whole lot of weight, and was all scarred up. He also had the dead look; what Cowboy called it when slaves gave up on living and were just waiting to die. So it was hard to tell if this was the right man.
But the idiot cop had come right out and identified himself.
That’s fate.
Using CyberGhost to anonymously log into the net on a cell phone, the Cowboy visits Harry McGlade’s blog, The Mansplainer, and posts to the latest comments.
They call me the Cowboy. Search for me and my content on darknet. I collect teeth. I also collect people. Here’s someone I recently picked up. I’m in Nebraska. Catch me if you can.
Then the Cowboy adds a picture hosting URL, with the blurry photo of Herb.
Perhaps this is too soon. It’s still more than a week before the final delivery. The smarter move is to wait until the Cowboy owns the land train, and gets the project rolling.
But the Cowboy hasn’t felt this excited since childhood, and literally can’t wait.
More than a decade ago, Harry McGlade had taken something away from the Cowboy. Not long after, his friend and Herb Benedict’s old partner, Lieutenant Jack Daniels, had taken something even more valuable from the Cowboy.
These debts need to be paid.
If only I’d acted sooner.
The Cowboy spent years training for a showdown that would never happen. The deceased Lieutenant had been an excellent shot, and the Cowboy had ached to gun her down. The same way Jack had gunned down…
Stop it. Thinking about it just makes me angry.
But after all the practice, all the Gunslinger Showdowns, and all the fantasizing, Jack Daniels had been killed by someone else in Baja.
Lesson learned; don’t put off until tomorrow what you should do today.
The Cowboy almost went after McGlade right then. But instead, got seduced by the dream of darknet stardom. To own a streaming website to compete with Snuff-X. Live torture and death, twenty-four hours a day.
And it wouldn’t befall the same fate as Usher House.
Usher House was a clandestine, underground abattoir where the rich and deviant could indulge in all manner of pain and suffering without having to travel to some underdeveloped, third world country. Sure, you could visit the Philippines and take a child sex tour, or if you knew the right people in Romania and had the cash you could spend some quality time playing real-life Torquemada, torturing kidnapped victims to death. But Usher House had been on American soil, not in some shitty, third-world hellhole. You could also hunt humans for sport, shop for transplant organs, make your own snuff films with state-of-the-art video equipment and a professional crew, and indulge in the finest cannibal cuisine on the planet.
For the record, people didn’t actually taste like chicken. They tasted like stringy pork.
Unfortunately, having a death factory in a single location was just begging for the authorities to bust you. And all the deviant types that gathered there didn’t always play well with each other. On top of all that, it was also expensive, and exclusionary.
Usher House, majestic as it was, fell like its Poe namesake. And that was probably just as well, because with new technology came a paradigm shift.
America had gone from being a nation of doers, to a nation of voyeurs.
Birthrates were dropping because couples were bingeing on Netflix rather than making love. Amazon paid almost a billion dollars for Twitch.tv, a live streaming video platform where a hundred million visitors a month watch other people play videogames. YouTube has become the most popular site on the Internet.
Why do something when it’s so much easier to watch other people do things?
Charging some rich sheik fifty thousand dollars to hunt and eat a little boy was trivial compared to charging a hundred thousand viewers fifty dollars each to see the live stream of the same event.
With the anonymity of the deep web, and the lessened risk, you could attract many more visitors than Usher House ever could, and be much more reasonable in your pricing.
Even so, illegal websites got raided all the time. The world police were pretty good at finding criminals online and locating them in real life. Ask the poor bastards at The Pirate Bay, forced to shut down and move every few months.
But what if the servers were mobile?
Enter the LeTourneau Overland Train.
One of the largest vehicles ever built, commissioned by the US military in the 1950s for hauling equipment across Alaska, it consisted of fourteen massive cars on sixty gigantic wheels, each with its own electric motor and independent steering, capable of carrying over a hundred and fifty tons of cargo. Built to traverse rough terrain and handle all weather conditions, it was perfect for Yuri’s mobile poppy farm. The Belarusian had pimped it out with modern tech, including electronic camouflage, hybrid energy, and radar.
It was perfect for growing opium without being discovered by the Feds, and just as perfect for the Cowboy’s planned, movable reboot of Usher House.
So the Cowboy continues playing lapdog to the megalomaniac Russki, pulling teeth and keeping order, until Yuri no longer needs the land train.
Then the Cowboy plans to make McGlade the first honored guest of Usher House 2.0, streaming that asshole’s death to a bitcoin-paying group of worldwide degenerates.
It’s a solid plan. Worth the wait.
But seeing Jack’s former partner, Herb Benedict, for sale on a slave darknet site, was too irresistible to pass up. It was also the perfect lure for McGlade.
It shouldn’t complicate the Cowboy’s plans. McGlade is an idiot. By the time the Cowboy allows him to get close, Yuri will already be out of the picture.
It’s all coming together in such a lovely way.
The Cowboy powers down the cell phone, then takes off the duster jacket, opens up a few shirt buttons, and examines the Level IIIA carbon nanotube body armor underneath.
The two .22lr slugs hit the Cowboy in the breastbone and stomach, and the impact spots are sore. There will be bruises.
It shocks the hell out of the Cowboy. To be hit—twice—at that distance, with a short-barreled derringer, should have been impossible.
But Herb’s diminutive companion had either gotten ridiculously lucky, or was one of the best marksmen the Cowboy has ever seen.
If the Cowboy knew how good a shot that man was, there would have been no playing around. If the guy had aimed higher, or the Cowboy hadn’t replaced the standard Bond Arms stock .45LC barrel with the much smaller .22lr, there could have been serious injury, or even death.
The Cowboy never underestimated someone to that degree before.
It won’t happen again.
But the Cowboy needs to learn more about this man, and how he acquired these skills. After putting the coat back on and adjusting the balaclava, the Cowboy heads for the Punishment Room in #12. Unlike a commuter rail train, the land train has no traversable connections between cars. Each car is as big as a semi-truck trailer, completely enclosed, connected by massive hinges longer than eight meters in length. The only way to get from one section to the next is to exit the car and walk on the ground, only possible when the land train is parked.
Yuri parks as often as he can. Moving the beast requires a ridiculous amount of energy, and the batteries deplete fast but take comparatively long to charge. Happily, the Great Plains stretch out over 1.3 million square kilometers, and there are plenty of spots to hide. It’s the most uninhabited part of the United States. Fewer than 400,000 people live here. Rural flight has left thousands of towns abandoned, making for plenty of places to hide from the authorities.
Or satellites.
Every so often, drunk on vodka or high on something stronger, Yuri will brag about how cheap the entire operation is to run, between the green energy and the miniscule payoffs to local law enforcement to look the other way. In Belarus, a poppy farm would have cost millions in bribes alone. The LeTourneau subsists on a fraction of that.
And it will soon be the Cowboy’s.
After climbing down the ladder to reach the ground, the Cowboy walks across the plains, dusty earth and rocks crunching under booted feet, and then ascends to Car #12.
The Punishment Room is only a small compartment in the pantry, no wider than a large closet. It smells like human piss and shit and puke and blood.
The smell of uncontrollable fear.
Herb’s short companion is naked, wrists bound in two pairs of plastic riot cuffs because one didn’t seem like it would be strong enough. Riot cuffs are a double loop of zip ties, used by law enforcement because they can quickly and easily be applied with just one hand. For the Cowboy, this is essential, because the other hand is always occupied with the Vaquero.
The cuffs are connected to a sturdy chain attached to the ceiling, and the Cowboy takes a moment to study this man. His skin is a roadmap of bruises, wounds, and scars, including two that are still bleeding. The graze on the man’s hip, from the High Noon outside, and the side of the man’s head where part of his ear used to be.
The Cowboy comes close to killing this man. But there are questions. Taking an ear is punishment enough.
For now.
The Cowboy switches on the wall camera, waits for the blinking light to make sure it’s on, and then faces the man.
“Who are you?”
The man stares, but doesn’t answer. There is no fear in his face. In fact, there is no expression at all.
The Cowboy has gazed into eyes like that before. Emotionless, but alert.
“You’ve killed before,” The Cowboy says. It isn’t a question. “Are you military?”
No answer.
“Who trained you?”
The man continues to stare.
The Cowboy places a gloved hand on his broad chest. Trails it down the man’s hard stomach, going lower, and lower, watching his eyes.
Nothing there. Just two holes.
Even when the Cowboy cups his balls.
Even when the Cowboy squeezes.
The man grunts. His body tenses up.
But the eyes show no fear.
The Cowboy admires that. Envies it, even.
“Talk to me, and I’ll stop hurting you. I promise.”
Silence.
“Let’s start with something easy,” the Cowboy says. “What’s your name?”
Again, no answer.
This might take some time.
After one more hard squeeze, the Cowboy releases the man. The man untenses, hanging limp by his wrists.
It’s a common acceptance that everyone breaks. The reason torture is so unreliable as a way to gather information is because captives reach a point where they will say anything to make it stop. The truth, yes. But lies as well.
