Cocaine Cannibals (Patreon)

If God made the world, Branson County was what He shit out.

The farmhouse there lay on a stretch of brown dirt. Only an occasional tussock of withered grass to show the yard could produce life, it just didn’t want to. Nearby, the barn was caving in on itself, as if the roof was being sucked down into the earth faster than the walls that held it up. Finally there was an outhouse, third corner of the sad little triangle the buildings made, and on a shallow grade so that every shit or piss a man had to took went with a climb.

Across the mud-strewn flats of the property, the land gave way to the woods like a thing corroded by acid. The trees were brown, some disease making the bark patchy as hair on an old man, and the leaves on the sparse branches could barely manage a note of green.

The road gave the only relief from the lonely desolation of the farm. It was gray gravel and it stretched all the way to the fence of the property, where some mad bolt of cheapness made the driveway out of hard-packed dirt and a layer of mulch that felt like hell to drive on. Every time you spun your tires, there was a feeling of the rubber not catching anything, like you were stuck here until you were as gray as the sky above.

It was a place no one would want to go, a place few even could go. Days from the nearest city, hours from even the smallest town, and so far down a country road that it was easy to forget the highway even existed. The closest thing to the middle of nowhere that Jacob Lerner had ever personally planted boots on.

Still he felt a twinge of relief at seeing it. He, the six agents on his team, and their witness had made it there unmolested. A convoy of three Land Rovers had departed well before dawn, driven day and night, and finally reached possibly the saddest deed that the FBI had ever confiscated. And now it was only a matter of time until the Grand Jury convened and they livestreamed their witness testimony.

Because whatever else it was, the property was impenetrable. Obscure, for one. Owned by a holding company of a holding company. Easily defensible, with nothing for miles and no cover for six thousand square feet. Motion detectors all along the perimeter. Signal jammers blocking drones. The farmhouse set up with hard-wired cameras in all directions; the footage Lerner had reviewed personally. There’d been no visitors besides his own people, no traps set by the opposition. It was the perfect place to stow a human being and keep him inviolate until he became useful.

Shame they didn’t have a perfect human being to stow.

“This is your safehouse? Jesus Christ, what a heap of shit! Do your witnesses shoot themselves before the Mob can get them, is that why it has such a good record? Holy fucking God, if they do kill me, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief in the morgue! It’ll be better accommodations! Fuck! It probably has rats! If it doesn’t have rats, it’ll be because even rats know that place is a fucking death-trap! Shit! If I slam the door too hard and that shitpile falls apart, can we stay at a fucking hotel? Somewhere with room service, somewhere with amenities!?”

If Lerner looked like most every other FBI agent stamped out at Quantico—long face, crewcut hair, wiry body in a navy blue suit that would be fashionable if it just cost a bit more—Avi Hestrin looked like he’d been put together by the parts left over from the kit Lerner had come in. Short, bulbous, and balding, he fit into his brown suit like dirty laundry fit into a sack. Coarse, curly hair dominated his pointed head, his jaw that wrenched back and forth like a tinker toy, and the backs of his hands. Fat enough that he resembled a beachball set on stubby legs, leading with his swollen-gourd gut as he paced and ranted.

It was a wonder to Lerner that he’d survived so long as a Mob lawyer. Being around that many trigger-happy psychopaths with poor impulse control seemed about as conductive to Avi’s health as a cocaine habit, or maybe frequent visits to a massage parlor without a prophylactic.

Of course, these were other habits Avi cultivated, leading to an acrimonious divorce, leading to a great many illegal dealings coming to light, leading to an offer from the Attorney General: testify or hope orange is your color, because you’ll be wearing it for the next forty years.

Avi’s fashion sense was bad, but not that bad.

Although he did throw on a keffiyeh scarf as he got out of the Land Rover. “I’m serious now! I want an explanation for this! I am not just kvetching here! Why can the Federal Bureau of Investigation not keep me alive in a mid-size city, huh? Somewhere with sushi you don’t have to drive ten miles for. Somewhere with anything you don’t have to drive ten miles—”

“Bruno Capaldi,” Lerner interrupted, and that shut Avi up like shouts, threats, and everything else Lerner had tried hadn’t. “The Luzzatto family triggerman. Every case we’ve built against the Luzzattos has ended with a bullet in someone’s head and I guarantee you, Capaldi has been holding the gun. We put you in a hotel, he’d snipe you. We put you in prison, he’d skank you. I wouldn’t put it past this son of a bitch to get to you even if we parked you in the middle of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. But he can’t do shit out here. Nowhere to fire a long-range round from. Nothing he can sabotage, nothing he can booby-trap. I’ve been planning this for a long time, Mr. Hestrin. The perfect place to neutralize every trick that bastard knows. And now that I’ve got you here, he has two options. A frontal assault, in which case I finally get to put a few bullets in him. Or he gives up and you testify, in which case I get to arrest him. It’s a dream come true, except for the fact that me winning looks like you staying alive.”

If Avi was taken aback by the venom that had come his way after a nine-hour car ride and two hours of silence, it only lasted a moment. “I’m not afraid of Bruno Capaldi!” he spewed. “So the punk got lucky a few times, with some pricks who had to call their bitch or score some coke. They were idiots! I’m smart! I may not be quiet, but I know better than to mouth off some shit that’ll let that asshole find me! These Mob guys… buncha shmegegges! It’s all reputation, that’s all. Not even their reputation! Fucking movies like The Godfather—they think that was for real! Capaldi, he’s the worst of the lot. Thinks he’s a movie star because he knows which end a the gun a bullet comes out! I’d snitch on that motherfucker for free! Hey, is that an outhouse? Am I gonna have to use a fucking outhouse in this fucking—”

Agent Kaplan came back then. “We finished our sweep of the house, sir. Everything’s still in place. No one’s been in or out since we prepped it.”

“What’s that mean, ‘everything’s still in place’?” Avi demanded.

Lerner suppressed a sigh. “We took certain precautions in case Capaldi or anyone else tried to rig the place. Powder on the floorboards, pieces of paper in the doorjambs. Things that would tell us if anyone had been there since we’d last visited.”

“What, you don’t have cameras?”

Lerner suppressed a bigger sigh. “We act out of an abundance of caution. Capaldi’s been known to circumvent cameras. But there’s no way he could’ve hacked the surveillance system and accounted for every way we marked the house to detect intruders. Right now, that house is the one place on Earth I can guarantee you’re in no danger.”

“Yeah?” Avi chuckled, liking the sound of that. “Yeah! So there’s no way he can get to me!”

“No way whatsoever. We have the high ground; there’s no place for him to take a shot. We’ve brought food and water for the next few days; there’s no way he could’ve poisoned it. This place might not look it, but it’s a fortress. One big killbox for Bruno Capaldi and I hope he gives us an excuse to use it.”

“Yeah!” Avi snorted another laugh before his expression soured. “But I still have to shit in a wood fucking Port-A-Potty, don’t I? What, you couldn’t put in indoor plumbing while you were fucking around this place? That’s the FBI for you. My tax dollars at work! Oy, iz mir batim! Es iz mir shver zu leben.”

Lerner held back from giving him a shove as he trudged for the house. Instead, he raised his radio handset to his mouth. “Team 1, patrol the perimeter. Team 2, inside the house. Keep the curtains drawn and don’t let Hestrin near any windows. We’re not taking any chances this time.”

“I’ll tell you something else!” Avi shouted, putting impressive volume in his voice for being winded from climbing to the front door. “I’ll shit on the carpet before I walk up a hill to take a crap!”