Blood Lines

21

›› The Bloody Skull

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 2156 Hours

The bar was more a clubhouse for the Purple Royals than a business enterprise. The bikers came there when they were in town, and they circled the wagons there when they were under attack from the outside world.

Victor Gant sat in the back office and gazed at the security monitors mounted on the wall in front of him. Although no sheet of paper showed it, he owned the bar. The business and the employees were wholly subsidized by the Purple Royals.

The people he’d hired to run the place didn’t exactly have it made. But they could at least live well enough. All they had to do was be available for the nights the gang was in town.

And the gang was definitely in town. Word had gotten out-over the phone, by word of mouth, and through the TV-that Victor’s son was dead, shot by a federal agent. Now the place was packed.

Heavy metal crashed through the surround sound system. The dancers worked the crowd, more enthusiastic than they’d been in months because the money was flowing like water. Victor thought the bikers were acting like children; certainly they were creating a mess in the bar.

He tried not to let the men’s pursuit of a good time bother him. But it did. He couldn’t isolate himself that well. He felt Bobby Lee’s absence in a way he never would have thought possible before.

He reached for the longneck bottle on the desk and took a sip. The beer was warm and flat. He didn’t know how long it had been sitting there. Too long.

His eyes roved the security monitors, searching for anything to distract him. Some of the women were attractive, not the used-up specimens the bar usually held. A lot of those women were on their last legs, coked up and decaying from the inside.

Today, not even the new ones held his attention.

You’re bordering on dinky-dao, brother, he told himself. Totally whack. You need to pull yourself together.

But it was hard. He kept seeing Bobby Lee in his mind. The young man had been all the immediate family Victor knew he was ever going to have. And that family had been wiped out in a heartbeat.

Reluctantly Victor dropped his feet off the scarred wooden desk and threw the flat beer into the nearly filled trash can. The glass bottle shattered and tinkled down among the others.

His leathers creaked as he walked out of the room and onto the main floor. Bikers stepped aside in front of him like the Red Sea parting for Moses.

He paused at the bar and called Creeper’s name. Creeper wasn’t the man’s real name, of course, but so many people knew him by Creeper that likely only the law enforcement agencies would know what his given name was now.

Creeper was young and hard. He hadn’t pulled Nam with Victor and Fat Mike and the others, but he’d made his bones in the first Gulf War. The vets got together and argued over who’d had the worst war, those who’d slogged through the jungles or those who’d slogged the desert.

They even each had their own conspiracy theories. The Nam vets pointed to Agent Orange as being responsible for so many cancer-related deaths. The first Gulf War vets had the mysterious “malaise” that had descended on them and might have been part of a biological weapon Saddam Hussein had been bankrolling.

Creeper turned and looked at Victor.

“Hey, boss man,” Creeper said. “What’ll you have?”

“Beer.”

“Coming up.” Creeper squatted and reached into the cooler beneath the counter. He brought up a fresh longneck, peeled the lid with the church key, and slid the bottle down to Victor’s waiting hand.

Victor took a long draw. “You seen Fat Mike?”

“Not yet.”

“Soon as he gets here, send him in to me.”

Creeper shot him a thumbs-up.

Victor made his way back to the office, a pit of roiling rage in his chest. He sat at the desk once more and used the remote control to flick through the television stations.

The need to do something vibrated through him. His hand actually shook as he brought the longneck to his lips. That hadn’t happened even when they were back in the bush taking heavy fire.

News footage of the standoff at the tattoo parlor started to roll on-screen. Victor muted the anchor’s commentary and just stayed with the images.

There behind the glass, he saw Bobby Lee standing with his hostage. He knew how scared his son had been. He looked so young; this was the first time he’d gotten into a situation that was so far over his head.

In another minute, Bobby Lee would be dead-again.

Victor sipped his beer, but he couldn’t turn away from the impending violence.

His cell phone rang.

Victor thought about not answering the call. But he was looking for a distraction of any kind.

He flipped the phone open and said, “Yeah?”

›› 2203 Hours

“Ah, my friend, it is good to hear your voice.”

“It’s good to hear yours.” But you’re a little late calling in condolences. Victor drank some more beer. Tran was his partner in the heroin business. No one knew that. They’d been very careful to set the business up that way. Rather, Tran had been careful to set things up like that.

They’d met in Vietnam. Tran had been a Kit Carson scout, one of the regulars who’d defected from the North Vietnamese army to lead recon missions for the American troops.

That had been back when both sides had figured the Americans were going to win the war.

A Kit Carson’s life expectancy hadn’t been high. If he was caught by his old army buddies, they tortured him as long as they could before they killed him. And his new army buddies weren’t the most trusting. A number of Kit Carsons had gone down under “friendly” fire that was anything but. The Department of Defense had a name for such things too. Misadventure sounded equally innocuous.

Tran, though, had seemed to flourish as a traitor to his people. When the tide of the war had changed, Tran had changed with it by going back to the NVA and claiming to have been a prisoner.

However, the friendship he’d had with Victor Gant had included a lucrative black market trade that involved drugs and women. During the thirty-plus years between, they’d found a way to do business. The latest thing with the heroin was by far the most lucrative.

“I just found out the bad news and wanted to call and see how you were doing,” Tran said.

“I’m fine.”

“You sound a little rocky.”

“I said I’m fine. Drop it.”

Tran didn’t acknowledge that one way or the other.

Victor sipped beer. Both of them were careful not to mention the other’s name.

Tran was based in Vietnam, where he oversaw the poppy growing and the production of raw opium. Back when he’d first gotten everything together, he had contacted Victor and explained how he’d gone into the drug business in a big way. It had taken them almost two years to work out the ocean transport through a shipper based in Singapore.

“I was told there’d been a problem,” Tran said.

Victor knew the man meant he’d heard about the arrest. “It’s taken care of. I negotiated my way out of it.”

“How?”

Victor grinned a little. After all these years, Tran didn’t completely trust him when the pressure started to mount. But that was okay. He didn’t completely trust Tran either.

But it made Victor wonder who among his group was selling him out to Tran.

“I’m going to give them something,” Victor said, answering Tran’s question. “Our southern competition.”

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Are you questioning my decision?”

Tran didn’t respond right away. “What happened?”

“A business negotiation with one of their men went south. His people were taking more of an interest than I thought, and they chose to make everything personal.”

“Couldn’t you have negated that?”

“The guy I had to deal with wasn’t local. He was based in Virginia. The domestic arm.” Meaning the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, and not the CIA at Langley, Virginia.

“I’m sure you did what was best.”

“I did. In fact, I streamlined the pitch I was giving the associate of the Virginia team.”

“And they went for it?”

“I didn’t give them a choice.”

“I see.”

Victor drained the beer bottle and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. It shattered with a brittle pop.

“I didn’t have a choice, either,” Victor went on, his voice tightening till it was edged steel. “The business I’m taking care of at this end isn’t easy. Sometimes deals have to be cut to preserve what we’ve got going on.”

“I realize that. But you have them off of you?”

“Till next time. Unfortunately the reality is that this business of ours is established. People are going to talk. Customers as well as rivals. When that happens, we’ll have to stand prepared to take care of it.”

“What about this man? The one who cost you so much?”

“I’m going to cost him.”

Tran was silent for a moment. “I could take care of him for you.”

Victor took a moment to think about that. The offer came with subtext, but he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. For Tran to offer to reach across the Pacific Ocean to whack the Marine meant that he’d come into more muscle than he’d had before.

The offer also served to put Victor on notice that he wasn’t as insulated as he had been.

“No need,” Victor said. “I’m going to take care of this. I’m going to take the time I need to do it right.”

“I know you see this as a personal challenge,” Tran said. “But you can’t allow any harm to come to what we’ve got going on. We’ve worked too long and too hard to get what we have.”

“You just worry about your end. I’m going to take care of things here. You’ll see.”

“It would be better for you-and for what we’re doing-if you put this behind you.”

Victor couldn’t believe the suggestion had been made. “Put the murder of my son behind me?” His voice was cold and hard.

Tran hesitated for only a moment, then-showing that their relationship had changed over the years-said, “It wasn’t murder. I saw the news footage. He killed a man and tried to kill that Marine. I’m sorry for your loss, my friend, but he’d been given every chance to come out of that encounter alive.”

“He was my flesh and blood,” Victor snarled. “My family.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Victor tried to control the anger that threatened to break loose inside him. “Do you remember what happened when your family was killed?”

Tran’s voice was soft, but a hard edge rang in his words. “I do.”

“Me and you,” Victor said, “we found out who the soldiers were that killed your family. And they were American soldiers.”

It had been one of those incidents that didn’t come out of Vietnam until years later. The military and the media had worked together for a time to shut down all the atrocities that young American soldiers committed while they were overseas.

Everybody back home was so interested in the John Wayne image of the American soldiers, they didn’t think of what it had really been like to be there. There wasn’t a day most of those young men hadn’t been afraid. Never a day passed that sudden, harsh death hadn’t dogged their footsteps through that hellish jungle.

As a result of that fear, the quickness that death could reach out, and the merciless nature of the enemy they’d faced, a lot of soldiers had gone feral and become pitiless killers who saw only enemies in everyone outside their own group.

Chaplains and officers had tried to keep those young soldiers from becoming barbarians. Their efforts had broken down and failed on several occasions. Sometimes those chaplains and green second lieutenants got fragged by the very men they were trying to save.

“We buried your family, me and you,” Victor said. “We dug those graves with our hands and laid your family to rest. Then we found out who those men were… and we killed every last one of them.”

That had been a bloody business. They’d hunted the men down and ambushed them in the jungle. Some of them had gotten loose. It had taken four days to find the last one. Under Tran’s cruel skills, it had taken the man two days to die.

For just a moment, the smell of burned flesh filled Victor’s nostrils at the memory. He didn’t remember any good times from his tours in Nam. But he just hadn’t been able to escape the jungle till Uncle Sam had finally called him home. Even then, the jungle still lived inside him today. It was only a heartbeat away.

“I remember,” Tran said.

“You’d better remember.”

“But in the end, killing those men didn’t bring my family back.”

“I know that. But the idea of the man who killed Bobby Lee walking around breathing the same air that I do offends me.”

“Vengeance is for the young,” Tran said quietly. “We are older now. We know the things that matter. This business we’re doing matters. You’ve got a good life. You shouldn’t be thinking about throwing it away. I’m asking you, as your friend, to let this be.”

Irritation filled Victor. In the beginning, Tran had been the low man on the totem pole regarding the operation. He hadn’t had any contacts. Victor had provided everything.

Now that he had control over the product and thought he could easily pick up another distributor in the United States, Tran wasn’t quite as closemouthed about how the operation was conducted as he had been.

The thing was, Tran also knew what Victor was about. If Tran tried to freeze Victor out, Victor would go over to Vietnam and finish a final piece of the war.

“I can’t,” Victor said.

Tran sighed. “I was afraid that would be your answer.”

“Was there anything else?” Victor asked.

“No.”

“Then I’ve got a few things to do around here.”

“Of course. I just wanted to express my condolences and to check on you.”

“You just take care of your end of things.”

“If you need anything, you’ll call?”

“Of course,” Victor replied.

“Get some rest. You sound exhausted.”

Victor broke the connection and tossed the phone onto the desk. Then his eyes roved over the security monitors showing the street outside.

He zoomed in on the undercover police car parked in the alley across the street. Every time the Purple Royals gathered, Police Chief Tarlton put people there. It would have been comical if Victor had been thinking about the cops and not about getting revenge.