“Maybe.”
“Don’t wake me if the jets come. I don’t care anymore.”
“You found something worse than death, huh Gus?”
“Yep. Your company.”
*
Nick and Gus sat at a table outside The Harbour Club Bar in Port of Fujairah. They sipped Scotch on the rocks, the first alcoholic beverage since leaving the States. A selection of finger foods covered the middle of their table which they snacked on with relish. After docking The Majid with the usual porting complexities, both men wore plain black slacks, shoes, and dark knitted shirts. They had kept their beards, but trimmed them.
“Now this is more like it, Nick. It’s nice this business trip to hell could end on an upbeat note. I heard about this place. It’s as impressive as any seaport bar I’ve ever been in.”
“Our contact should have been here by now. We’ll give it another ten minutes, then we hit the trail. I’ll leave a note on their on-line drop to be more… okay… there he is, Gil Montrose. Keep looking at your drink. He’s maneuvering toward us. Play the part we rehearsed if this end game doesn’t pan out as we’d hoped.”
“I will, Nick.”
A few minutes later, the guy Nick had picked out walked over to their table with a drink and sat down. Florid faced, medium height, clean shaven with sparse brown hair, he smiled while toasting with his glass. “I see you made it back, Nick. Nice work. We already have confirmation. I wish you could have avoided the gunboat. That was a bit of a problem.”
“I’m sure it would have been neater for me to complete the assignment, and then Gus and me to end up at the bottom of the ocean, but we’d rather stick around. Gee, an Iranian gunboat takes on the wrong ship at sea… boo hoo. I’ll light a candle at next Sunday’s mass. Did you transfer our payment, Gil?”
Suddenly, the aforementioned Gil is frowning down at the table as if in deep contemplation. “About that… Nick… I-”
Nick batted Gil’s drink into his lap, grabbing the man’s jacket in his fist. He yanked the stunned Gil towards him. “The last thing on earth you want to do, Gil, is fuck with me. I’m not some daisy freshly plucked from the garden. Maybe you’ve heard tell of a certain bureaucrat named Frank Richert who decided he could play me.”
“I…I thought the rumors were an urban legend.”
Nick patted Gil’s cheek. “I’ll give you two minutes to put my money into the account it should already be in. If it doesn’t appear in total, I’m going to disappear, and hunt down everything you ever cared about since you first sucked your Momma’s tit. You made a mistake, Gil. You assumed I didn’t double check the people behind you. I know they had every intention of paying me for the outcome I furnished. That means you thought you could screw me behind their backs. Want to guess what happens when you do something in this deal that sets a psycho killer like me on the hunt for what’s owed him?”
Gus placed a satellite uplinked laptop on the table in front of Gil, opened and on-line. “Here you go, Mr. Montrose.”
Nick released him. With shaking hands, Gil transferred the money without hesitation. He turned the laptop for Nick’s viewing. “Very good, Gil. Don’t forget what I’ve said about playing me. Now get out of my sight.”
Nick and Gus watched Montrose’s exit with differing views.
“Damn, Nick, you sure called that one. What the hell made you think Montrose was going to screw us?”
Nick chugged his drink down. “Depression mostly, Gus. Except for Rachel, Jean, you, and Deke, the list of people I can completely trust I can count on one hand. This isn’t a business for trusting people, my friend. You’ve known me for a long time. We’re brothers. We’ve done so much shit together, even talking about it would make most sane folks puke. Sometimes, things can’t be left to chance.”
Gus finished his drink with a blackness creeping into his consciousness. “You’re going to kill him.”
Nick looked over at his friend with a cold neutral stare, at the same time motioning for a waiter. “Sorry, Gus, maybe this is the time for you to get out on your own in a different city once I get you back to the States.”
The waiter arrived, all smiles, and with only a hint of an English accent. “Two more, gentlemen?”
“Yes please.” Nick put a fifty dollar bill on his tray. “Please bring us another tray of your most delectable finger foods too, and a couple of iced teas.”
“Ah… yes of course, Sir. I’ll be right back with your drinks.”