"Fuck! This has to be about the craziest goddamn thing I've ever done in my life!" I screamed out in the roaring wind. And that's saying a shitload!
I was running down the Galveston seawall pushing along a cripple that I had duct taped down to a wheelchair and no one was even batting an eye much less trying to stop me to ask just what in the hell I was up to. The son of a bitch even had two big cinder blocks tied down with rope in his lap! Of course, Hurricane Rita was churning her guts out in the gulf and almost the entire island had evacuated and it was like trying to stand inside of a wind tunnel that somebody had dumped a truckload of sand in, but there were still quite a few folks hanging around. Outside! Granted most of them were either surfers with death wishes or homeless folks who had no where better to go. But Jesus Christ, are there no heroes left anymore? Even the people from The Weather Channel and CNN sent down to cover the hurricane weren't paying me a bit of fucking attention. Too wrapped up in their goddamn news broadcasts.
The cable on the island had long gone out so I had no access to the news other than the radio and they weren't saying shit as usual. But I knew that the deadline for the 6:00 PM evacuation ordered by the mayor had passed by hours ago, so when I had taped the asshole down into his chair and pushed him the two blocks up to the seawall I had been expecting to see almost total desertion. I sure as hell hadn't expected to see at least ten tattooed, dreadlocked surfers trying to score the ride of their soon to be short lifetimes as a pack of the homeless cheered them on and toasted their courage with long pulls off their forties of Old English 800 as they pumped their fists in the air. All while the cable news retards babbled in the foreground about the dangers of surfing during a category 5 hurricane.
So at that point you could say my options were severely limited. My mission was to get to the 61st street pier and dump this son of a bitch, wheelchair and all, into the Gulf of Mexico, without getting caught. Then I had to bust my ass back to his rattletrap garage apartment to retrieve my 1995 GEO Metro hatchback and get my own ass off that island before Rita blew it off the face of the earth just like Katrina had just done a couple of weeks before to the Big Easy.
And goddamn it! I was gonna complete my mission! I didn't give a fuck what that fat bitch from MSNBC thought!
***
I had never gotten one letter the whole time I had been in Mexico. Not a single one in almost twenty fucking years. Since I was a fugitive on the lam it didn't seem to make much sense to do a whole hell of a lot of corresponding with people. I did have a box at the bodega where Javier, the bodega's owner, would put my grocery tabs and newspapers from the states, but that was about it. Javier was quite a nefarious and shady character himself. Former member of both the Mexico City police department and Mexico's version of the DEA, he possessed an impressive array of underground contacts. Javier had recently sold me a mint condition Russian AK-47 along with a Soviet made land mine - why I needed a land mine you'll find out later. Feed Javier a couple shots of tequila and a few hits off a bong of some good weed and he'd tell you stories about hooking a car battery up to some poor bastard's nut sack. Anyway, one day the letter showed up. It was typed on paper with a Department of Homeland Security letterhead and it was written like a fucking cryptic telegram (even though I have never received much less seen a telegram}:
RB was released from the Fort approximately five years ago and is wheelchair ridden courtesy of an "accident." He is playing both sides of the fence. A sometimes paid informant for the G. Is also trying to sell information to the AB. Mentioning your name to both parties in reference to various incidences.
Consider yourself to be in grave danger. RB currently resides Galveston, TX. Suggest you relocate. Regards.
The author was a mystery but I understood everything that letter said. Obviously, shitty things from my past were back to haunt me.
That's what brought me to Galveston during the middle of the landfall of a potential category five hurricane. I had no idea when I took off for Texas that there was a hurricane making a beeline for the Texas coast. That time of the year there was always something stirring in the gulf but it seemed like it always hit Florida and with the ass pounding that New Orleans just took who would think that another major one was on it's way. Anyway, at that time I was just flying by the seat of my pants. My radio wasn't picking up much on the trip coming across the desert and I had bigger things on my mind such as my radiator exploding or the engine seizing from the watered down gas I had purchased in the backwater towns I drove through. Or even worse, would my ancient fake identification hold up at the border check? When I crossed the border at Brownsville (my first time in the good old USA in almost two decades - the border guard barely looked at my ID - so much for the vaunted post 9/11 security) the news radio stations were hysterically forecasting the imminent land arrival of Rita, so I was about the only vehicle headed in the northeast direction. By then it was to late to turn back - I was just going to have to take the chance that "RB" hadn't evacuated from the island.
Texas is one big goddamn state and it took me almost another eight hours to get to Galveston.
The reports were that the main evacuation route for the island was via Interstate 45 that ran out of the north of end the island through Houston, so I opted to come in on a county road on the west end. The place was like a ghost town when I rolled in and the winds and rain were really starting to pick up. I could barely keep the tiny GEO on the road. I met two cop cars and one sheriff's vehicle on my way into town and neither of the three paid a bit of attention to me although the sheriff gave me kind of a weird look as I passed by. One of those "What the hell is he up to?" and What the hell, it's his funeral!" looks, followed by a shrug of the shoulders to his partner. The city of Galveston itself is not a very large city and incredibly easy to navigate in, especially when most of the city has evacuated - news reports had the majority of people's asses stuck on the freeway - or is bunkered down. With the aid of a coffee stained ancient Rand McNally and the address from the letter - whoever had penned the letter had been kind enough to give me "RB's'" address - I found the place in less than ten minutes.
He hadn't moved up the food chain much in the last thirty years that was for goddamn sure but I'm sure it beat a prison cell. I was parked in front of a ramshackle garage apartment that was located in an area that was going to be fifteen feet underwater if the hurricane stirred waters of the gulf breached the seawall which was only two city blocks away.
There was a dim light burning upstairs and a window a/c rattling on the side of the shanty. The garage door was halfway open so I grabbed my six cell flashlight, (handy for both seeing things in the dark and beating people over the head with) bent under the garage door, and found myself standing behind a battered Ford van from the early eighties. I flicked the light on and looked at the Texas plates. Handicapped and expired. Shining the light through the windows showed me that "RB" was subsisting mainly on generic cigarettes, Hardees burgers, Snickers bars, and Old Milwaukee.
Slowly I creeped up the short flight of stairs and wound up on a short landing that was so shaky and termite infested it felt like I could fall through it at any second. I gently placed my ear against the door. Nothing. I went into sort of a football stance and rushed the door, intending to break it down with my shoulder and not realizing that the door was open and slightly ajar. I hit the door, shot straight through into the apartment, and rolled ten feet inside, finding myself at the foot of a wheelchair. There sat "RB" in all his glory. With a bullet hole right straight between the eyes. Other than the bullet hole, the wheelchair, and short twenty or thirty pounds, he looked remarkably almost the same as the last time I had seen him. Laying side by side on the moth eaten carpet were two items that I had seen before, although not recently. A cheap chrome .22 Saturday night special that I had seen "RB" murder a man in cold blood with - I would bet a dildo for a doughnut that it was also the pistol that had sent "RB" to the pearly gates - and an old wallet of mine, still containing all my long expired identification, that had been stolen from me years ago by a midget who had also taken the opportunity to shoot me.
Just the fact that that these two items were together proved that I was in very deep shit. The rest of the apartment revealed nothing although it was cockroach infested, filthy beyond belief, stunk like a dump at low tide, and featured a clothesline that ran the length of the room which held about ten colostomy bags. The whole apartment was really one room with a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom with a door just big enough to fit the wheelchair in. Whatever money "RB" had must have had and it couldn't have been much by the looks of the place, had been invested in computer equipment. One wall was lined with monitors and printers, but even though I was far from being a computer geek, even I noticed that the CPUs had all been removed. He also had an unusual array of photos and documents framed on his walls. A dishonorable discharge from the Navy (I didn't even know that you could actually get a DD certificate - why the hell would you want one?). A release form from Leavenworth prison. And a collage of photos obviously taken in the Philippine Islands - woman shooting ping balls and smoke rings out of their vaginas - were prominently displayed, and a photo of good old "RB" feeding a baby chicken to an alligator at Momma's, an infamous PI nightclub known for it's bootleg narcotic sales and hookers with venereal diseases.
It looked like I was certainly being set up, but whoever was doing it must have misjudged the timing of the hurricane bearing down on the island and the discovery of "RB's" body along with the set up evidence. They may have miscalculated by several days by the pungent odor of both "RB's" decaying and his apartment. Although I'm sure the place was pretty rank even before he started to decompose in the tropical heat. Getting rid of the gun and the wallet would be no big deal but disposing of "RB" would be a little trickier. And there was no question that he needed to be disposed of. Rattling around in his cranium was a bullet that ballistics could most certainly match to a murder that happened over in the Pacific almost thirty years ago. I decided to dump his body in the gulf and let Mother Nature take her course. I rooted through a closet and found a Navy watch cap that I jammed over "RB's" forehead to hide the bullet hole and then pulled out the kitchen drawers looking for some rope, but luckily also found a roll of duct tape. I taped the body down in his wheelchair and then went down into the garage to find a suitable anchor.
***
The water and waves were crashing up and over the pier as I pushed the wheelchair to the far end of the fishing platform. The force of the winds and water had busted up most the timbers, supports, and rails so getting "RB" into the drink would be no problem. It was beginning to become almost impossible to stand up in the wind. I stopped and took a deep breath and took a look around. It was just us two all alone. If anyone had seen me, no one seemed to care. A cop car slowly cruised down the seawall but didn't even tap his brakes. At this stage of the game everyone had their own problems to worry about. Winding my arm up I hurled the pistol as far into the gulf as I could. I looked down at the corpse. I swear that the son of a bitch's mouth had curled up into a sneer. Fucker was mocking me even in death.
"Goddamn it, Ricky! You just couldn't leave it alone, could you? You just couldn't fucking couldn't leave things alone! You asshole, look at the shit you've got me into again!"
I took a running start and pushed the wheelchair off the end of the pier.