Ice Woman Assignment (18 page)

His name was Eduardo Salazar. Paul had learned his name from the young drug user with the dislocated shoulder. Paul thought this was the easiest surveillance job he had ever had. The man was loud, in every way imaginable. His voice of course, and his manner. And his clothes as well. He wore a yellow silk shirt and a collection of gold chains which must have weighed heavily around his neck.

Even without all that, he would be hard to miss. He carried a scar on the side of his face from a knife or broken bottle that had just missed his right eye. Aside from that, Paul saw the evidence of serious burns on his chin and left cheek.

Edwardo went into a bar called El Noches. Paul stepped out into the night, barely aware of the rain. He had been following Edwardo for the better part of three days, and he had an idea of his motion pattern. He was a small time dealer, who stopped at four places in the neighborhood to take care of his customers, but always ended the evening here. Paul thought he might meet his supplier in this place. He seldom came out that door until noon the next day. He eventually crashed in a small apartment two floors above the bar.

Paul strolled around the end of the building. Out of the glare of street lights, he stared up the side of the blood colored brick wall at the rusting fire escape.

It took Edwardo a couple of minutes to get his key into the lock. He had consumed more than his usual share of rum that night, but he had put every other man under the table. While he no longer did flaming shots, he shared more and more drinking games. He was still as much a man as he was before the red headed black dude caught his shirt on fire.

Finally the door swung open. Total silence. Complete darkness. Home. Thank God he had sense enough to never use the shit he sold to his customers on the street. A simple thing like a dark, quiet room could be terrifying to a guy on the ice. Edwardo, he walked right in. He knew where everything was by now. Sofa on the right, television console on the left with a low slung chair. He headed up the center, over his antique Turkish carpet which he owned just because it was expensive.

Then something dropped over his head and slipped around his throat, and he was bent backward. Edwardo dropped to his knees, feeling another knee in his back. His left hand went to his throat. What felt like a light cord was cutting into him under his chin. His right hand went to the holster inside his waistband and the thirty-eight it held.

Then something like a blackjack or sap thumped into a certain spot on his back, and the strength went out of his arms. He could barely breathe, let alone speak. But he tried.

“Top drawer,” he squeaked out hoarsely. “Stash.”

That drew a chilling, whispered laugh. “I don't want your drugs, or your money. I want information.”

“What?” Edwardo croaked out. The tension on his spine kept him weak, helpless.

“I understand you've seen a couple of my friends.” The
voice behind him was like cracked ice. “I want to know what happened to them.”

Edwardo tried to ask who but all that came out was a long hiss. The strain of the cord was drawing his burned skin tight, covering his face with a raw, burning pain.

“A man and a woman.” The voice was at his left ear. “The man is black, the woman is not. They would have been asking about the drug business, maybe about getting into it.”

Edwardo's panicked brain cast about, sifting through every face he had seen in the last week. The pain in his face stirred the memory of the man who caused his most recent injuries. That man was black, and he had come into the bar with a Mexican woman. They had spoken to Rico, his supplier, and then the trouble had started.

Edwardo vigorously nodded his head when he realized he had the answer. The cord around his neck wasn't as tight as before. He swallowed and said, “You mean the redhead.”

“Yes.” The man behind Edwardo tensed, but the cord did not cut into his neck like before. “Where?”

“Anaconda took them. I heard she intended to hurt them, then turn them loose. They said they wanted to make a buy, but she said they were fakes. She took them out to…”

The sound of three heavy blows came through the door. “Edwardo, what's the hold up man? We waiting for you. Can't party without the stuff, you know.”

Edwardo managed a strangled cry of “help” before he was spun around. A large, heavy fist smashed into him. He felt a short flash of pain just before oblivion took him.

Paul flexed his fingers to stretch them. He wore a black leather glove. The front of the knuckles were padded and filled with lead. He felt with his left to check the damage. Edwardo's nose was broken, and blood was running down his face to the floor.

“You do seem to have a lot of trouble with your face,” Paul said. Shouts in Spanish were coming through the door and something heavy crashed into it. Paul leaped to his feet. There was no back door, so he ran back to the window he had come in through. A second thump shook the door and Paul knew the lock would not resist much longer. He jerked the window open, seeing no need for stealth this time. A stiff wind shoved a sheet of cold rain into his face. The window sill, like the fire escape, was rain-slicked and slippery.

A broad shoulder hit the door a third time and it slammed open. The first man in slapped the wall switch. Even before light flooded the room, three men were filling the air in the room with flying bullets.

After seventeen hours in darkness Felicity decided it was time to move. She reached behind herself, awkwardly lifting her plastic mallet. She needed it in her hand to free herself from the crate she was nestled in. Even with it in her hand, this might not be easy.

At four o'clock that morning, Morgan was still telling her it was a crazy plan. They were standing behind Gold Heart Limited's headquarters. It was a moonless night, and they were miles from the night clubs just closing down. The business district was as silent as any ghost town. Only a tall link fence separated them from the loading dock. Several wooden crates sat on it, probably filled with something nourishing but not palatable.

Security inside the office looked pretty efficient. Outside, well, no one expected serious thieves to make off with any baby food. Besides, where could you go with a crate of the stuff? A fence topped with barbed wire did not intimidate Morgan or Felicity. In heavy leather jackets and gloves they simply climbed and rolled over it. Moving in the shadows, they made their way to the loading dock.

Felicity took a quick accounting and found the least popular crate type. Once crouched behind her chosen large packing crate, Felicity pulled tools from her big black purse. She handed Morgan the crow bar. He shook his head in protest one last time, but she was determined.

Felicity held the light while Morgan applied the bar. In silent slow motion, he fitted it under the head of one of the
big nails holding the crate together. Gritting his teeth, Morgan pulled the nail, so slowly it made no squeak sound as it came away from the green pine board. While he handled this boring chore, Felicity used the drill with no more haste and no more noise than her partner.

It took most of an hour, but the two managed to get the crate's top completely loose. Then they waited, relaxed but attentive, making sure no curious guard had been attracted by their noise. After five full minutes they decided no such people worked there. When they lifted the crate's top off, they did not disturb the silence.

The chosen crate contained powdered milk. They counted twelve cardboard cases in two levels, twelve boxes to a case. Despite all the packaging, powder breathed out, tickling their noses. Morgan lifted out three middle cases from the top layer, starting at one end. Then he reached in to pull out the case beneath the last one he had removed.

As if it were a new revelation, Morgan leaned toward Felicity and whispered “This is nuts.”

“The only way,” she whispered back. “Nothing I haven't done before.” That was only an exaggeration, after all, not a lie. She smiled at him and gave a mock salute. After shaking his head in frustration, Morgan gave her a boost into the crate. With her feet where the bottom layer case had been, she lay back into the space the other missing boxes now left empty. She was grateful for a fairly tight fit. It made her less likely to get battered by moving cases.

“How you can do this is beyond me,” Morgan said.

“You're kidding, right? Aren't you the man who crawled through narrow tunnels in Vietnam?”

“That ain't like being nailed into a box for almost an whole day.”

The last thing Felicity saw before Morgan set the lid in place was his face, as grim and sorrowful as a reluctant executioner. Then she heard the muted hammer blows.
Morgan was holding the nails in place with a wadded chamois the way she had told him. Getting them in this way took a couple dozen modest taps, but it minimized the sound. He had to get the lid on as solid as it was when they arrived.

While Morgan hammered, Felicity fitted straws into the two holes she had drilled. The holes would go unnoticed by a casual observer because they just widened the existing cracks between the boards above her. The straws would make her breathing easier, as long as she kept it shallow. That should prove easy enough, since she would use little energy just lying still. Once the straws were in place, she pushed her purse under her head.

Now, seventeen hours and fourteen minutes later, Felicity reflected that her job had ended right then. Morgan was left with the heavy work, lugging the powdered milk cases to the gate, stacking them there and leaving a note saying they were “an anonymous donation for our brothers and sisters”. And of course, he had to get out of the area undetected.

For Felicity, nothing remained but lying still with her eyes closed. She heard the day begin outside, and played a game with herself, following the activity in the area, picturing how many people were around and what they were doing. In her mind's eye she could see the activity at the docks, much like a bee hive with every worker going about his assigned tasks with the mechanical efficiency of habit.

In time she heard gears grinding, and endured the eerie weightless feeling of being raised on a forklift. She rode on a truck for a brief time, then it stopped and the forklift returned. She heard Tomas' voice directing workers, and soon she was shoved into a corner and forgotten.

For the next few hours her only enemy was boredom. She took occasional drinks from a water bottle and ate
sporadically from a bag of dried fruit and sausage. Primarily, she meditated in a shallow trance state, while her internal alarm clock ticked away the hours.

In the screen in her head she saw Anaconda, her diminutive form dressed to attract attention to her feminine proportions. Felicity saw her sitting like a huge spider at the center of the world, her long, glossy tresses fanned out behind her like some obscene web. So distant, so untouchable, she sent her orders down the lines of her web commanding dozens, maybe hundreds of men around the western hemisphere. Directing them to smuggle and distribute drugs, to steal, to kill on command.

In her mind, Felicity could see those silver eyes shining, hypnotizing and terrorizing anyone who might stand against her. Felicity and Morgan might cut off one or two of her extended limbs, but how could they hurt her as long as she controlled it all long distance?

Then her internal clock told her it was time to move. No light filtered into her tiny temporary home, and no sound squeezed in between the cracks. She tapped against one corner of her “roof”. It moved an inch, and Felicity sighed with relief. They had chosen a powdered milk crate because there were only four that day. They put her in the one positioned to most likely get picked up first, loaded into the truck first, unloaded last. Despite their logical planning, they had no guarantee against something being stacked on top of her for some reason. Thankfully, they had played the odds correctly.

With the hammer, Felicity loosened the two corners she could reach. Next, she raised her numb legs. Her right leg was mostly asleep, and painful invisible needles jabbed it as she pulled her knees up. Twisting, straining, she managed to get her knees against her chest. Then, one good push with her feet raised the top like a coffin lid mounted sideways.

Felicity slipped out of the crate into the still deeper blackness in the warehouse. She used five more minutes sitting still, massaging her legs while she listened. Surely no one else was in the building. As long as she did not turn on a light or make any noise, there was practically no chance of interference.

Felicity's small flashlight could be dialed down to a laser pointer beam or up to a wide cone of light. This time she chose a fairly narrow setting. Using it in two second bursts, Felicity explored the warehouse, looking for anything that was not on its way out. Things were more orderly than she expected, with each product grouped for easy inventory. She moved across pallets covered with canned goods, flour, dried beans, sugar, and powdered eggs. Most were name brand items, corporate donations, but many were government surplus. Felicity marveled at the depth of Anaconda's cover operation, realizing it must be doing quite a bit of genuine good. Was drug traffic financing an actual humanitarian objective?

No. She had met the woman. No driving force existed there but greed and a hunger for power. Any positive by-product had to be incidental.

After exploring the entire huge warehouse Felicity found seventeen crates that could be returning from South America. Unlike everything else in the building, they had no stencils on the outside describing their contents. She was about to try to open one when her internal alarm reminded her of the time. She had arranged to meet Morgan at midnight, but first she had to find the building's burglar alarms. She had noticed an office on the far side of the warehouse. She went to it now, and found an array of controls.

Across the street, on the roof he had looked down from the day before, Morgan sweated in the cool night. He
checked his watch, noticing that only four minutes had passed since the last time he could not resist checking. Had someone discovered her? Was she trapped under four other crates? Had some incompetent forklift driver dropped her Trojan horse, spilling her out in full view of the warehouse's murderous guard?