Fatal Justice (Jack Lamburt #1)(32)
She smiled, but didn’t answer me.
I got on my knees and untied her. She reached up, put her arms around my neck, pulled me down and kissed me right on the lips. I thought I was going to lose my balance, so I put my hand out to brace myself, and it landed on her breast. Purely accidental, I swear.
She stopped kissing me, and I thought she was going to chastise me for feeling her up at a totally inappropriate time. She gestured down to Ostrich Boy, his red forehead still locked tight between her legs, looking like a plump tomato ready to burst.
“I’m okay with how you can’t control yourself with Barry playing in the background and all, but this is a little too kinky even for me. Perhaps you can properly dispose of douchebag, and then we can pick up where we left off?”
34
“HHMMppff. HHMMPPFFHH!”
My passenger woke up and tried to speak. I looked over at him and shook my head in disgust. Shithead.
I reached out and ripped the duct tape from his mouth so hard I left a bright red rectangle on his face. I balled the tape up and tossed it out the window.
“Fuck!” he screamed and leaned forward in pain. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, save it, dipshit.”
“You’re a dead man, do you hear me, a fucking dead man. Nobody does this to Big Sam and lives to talk about it.” He pulled at the handcuffs which I’d chained and padlocked around his size-forty-something waist.
I nodded to his lap. “Having some trouble there, Fat Sam? That chain can hold fifteen thousand pounds, so don’t even bother.”
“You’re the one with the fuckin’ trouble. I don’t know who you think you are, but I know that you’re a dead man. A fuckin’ dead man!” Spittle flew from his mouth, and he yanked violently at the chains, left and right, up and down, like a rabid animal snared in a trap who could smell the hunter closing in on him for the kill.
“Easy there, chubby, you don’t want to hurt yourself.”
“Fuck you, you piece of dog shit.” Drool came out of his mouth, and his face was so beet-red from anger that the red rectangle around his mouth blended in with the rest of his face.
I was afraid he might have a stroke, so I took out my blackjack and whacked him in the forehead, careful not to hit his nose so he wouldn’t bleed all over my interior. The last thing I needed was to clean up another goddam mess. As it was, it’d probably take me a good twenty minutes to contain and clean up the oil slick his hair had left on his seat.
I looked over at him and shook my head in disbelief. What a freakin’ bastard. After all he’d been through, his hair was still perfect. I felt like hitting him again, but held off.
My blackjack shot to his forehead wasn’t forceful enough to knock him out, but it stunned him enough that he just sat there in a silent daze for a few minutes. I sighed and relaxed. Finally, some peace and quiet.
It was a clear night, so I dimmed the dashboard lights down and leaned forward to glance up through the windshield. The night sky was filled with stars. There were millions of them, and I could even see the Milky Way. It was so close it looked fake, like being at a planetarium. It always amazed me how clear the night became once you escaped from the air and light pollution of the big cities.
A few minutes later, my peace and quiet was interrupted by childlike sniffling coming from my passenger. Oh well, the silence had been great while it’d lasted.
I looked over, cursed him again for his hair, and saw tears streaming down his chubby cheeks mixing with snot from his nose before bubbling up at his lips. There was a big red bump on his forehead where my blackjack had kissed him. It matched the red rectangle around his mouth.
For a second I almost felt sorry for him. Then I thought of all the HFS intel I’d gathered on him and what he’d done to Debbie and Mary Sue. And London.
I felt like hitting him again. The only reason I didn’t was because I’d been up for so long that I was beyond fatigued, and I didn’t trust my aim. Missing his nose and avoiding a blood fest with two shots in a row in a moving vehicle would be pushing my luck. A man’s got to know his limitations.
“Why? What have I ever done to you?” He sounded contrite now, but he couldn’t fool me. I’d been following him through HFS for more than two years. I knew more about Sam and his family than Sam did. Not just the criminal enterprises he ran, but his personal life too.
HFS had every eavesdropping hardware imaginable in his house. We called it “Sammy’s Smarthouse,” SS for short. Every single room of his six-thousand-plus-square-foot house had multiple smart home devices, each one hacked and turned into our personal wiretap and pinhole video camera. I had a front-row seat to one of the most violent criminal enterprises ever to hit the East Coast. Sam had his greedy little fingers in anything that made him money, from heroin to small arms, to pimping little kids—he sold it all. He ran his empire like a little Napoleon, and at last count he had twenty eight dead bodies to his credit. And most painful of all, one dog.
To top it all off, he was a selfish lover.
Karma was a bitch, and it was time for Sam to get his dose. I looked over at him and smiled.
“I’m fucking Sally tonight,” I said.
“What? Yeah, you wish.”
“No, seriously. You know when she goes to yoga on Sunday evenings? Where you have your simpletons follow her to make sure that she’s being a ‘good girl’?”