67, Sauce
“I got offered a job to be in a porn once by a total shit bag. Instead of working for the guy, I hacked his computer, shut down his bank account and line of credit, turned off the power to his apartment, cut off his cell service, erased every shitty movie he’d ever made that was posted online, crashed his website, put him out of business and had him homeless on the streets in less than six weeks.” Computer wizard Yen Roar typed furiously on a very small laptop as her eyes watered from not blinking. Without looking up, she said, “Fuck that guy.”
“I had a gut feeling that you didn’t wanna be on camera, and hearing this story, now I know,” special agent Dale O’Connor joked as he soldered some wires to each other on a small circuit board. He was downwind of Roar on a breezy Mexican riviera afternoon so she could not smell the lit cigar he was gnawing on.
“Last I heard, Mr. Shitbag disappeared after not paying back a very violent loan shark.” Sarcastic as fuck, she added, “Poor fella.” She looked up from her computer and actually blinked. Her eyes were tired, but she was used to this type of insane focus when working on her computer. “Should you be drinking while you’re doing that?”
O’Connor was meticulous in his own work, but Roar didn’t know him well enough to trust that he was competent even though he was usually drinking. “Yen, I’m always on the sauce. Even when I’m not drinking, I’m still sauced. It’s what I do.”
She graciously nodded in acceptance but then asked with a hint of concern, “Is it wise to have a cigar lit so close to all those explosives?”
“Wise? Nope. It’s dumb as fuck,” O’Connor conceded. He took a big puff, let the smoke sit in his mouth for a few seconds, then blew it out into the calm Mexican breeze away from Roar. He held the cigar between his pointer and middle finger, examining it closely. “If this happy stick touches these boom sticks in any way, we instantly blow up.” He made eye contact with his special operations teammate and nodded to her with a grave look on his face. He took a sip from a rocks glass half full of whiskey and ice, then set it down as he put the cigar back in his mouth. Ignoring everything Roar had said so far about safety, he got back to work with his soldering iron.
“Um,” Roar muttered, but she figured she couldn’t stop the fool from doing what he was doing. “Well, ah, keep saucing it up, I guess?”
Dale O’Connor didn’t randomly have the title of “Explosives Expert.” He was more like a mad scientist genius wizard when it came to explosives. Even though he’d been drinking whiskey on ice since he was ten years old, somehow he had gotten all the way to age twenty nine without blowing himself up. Yet. “If I ever start a band, it’s gonna be called Fire Sauce.”
“You have to stay alive if you want to start a band, and I’d like to live long enough to be at your first gig, thank you!”
“Don’t worry, Yen,” O’Connor said softly as he chewed on the expensive Cuban from the corner of his mouth. “It’s not the cigar I worry about. We’re only at danger from a bad bit of static electricity once these wires are connected to the appropriate receiver pads. It’s the electric current that sparks the instant explosive reaction.” His hands were big and the wires he worked with were small, but regardless of the alcohol and tobacco he’d already consumed for the afternoon, his hands were as steady as a surgeon.
“Ok then, do you have a plan for, um, whatever, like, making sure this static electricity doesn’t blow us up or whatever?” Roar couldn’t contain her nervousness at his drinking and smoking.
“The human body is the best neutralizer out there for static electricity.” He held the circuit board up and touched the edges. Nothing happened. “That’s it. Touch it and it absorbs whatever random charge it may have. I’ll do that again to the wires before I attach them to the receiver pads, and we all live a long, happy life.”
“Good. I kind of have big plans for my thirtieth birthday coming up this fall, so please don’t blow us up.” Roar nervously put her head down to go back to work. Within a few seconds of looking at her screen, her mind went right back to her project at hand.
“Thirty is a big one. I’m not looking forward to mine.” The smell of melting wire and cigar tobacco made strange bed fellows for O’Connor’s nostrils.
“Well I’m going to Vegas to see an Elvis impersonator, so again I implore you good sir, try not to kill us today.” The words sounded judgmental and forceful. In a last ditch effort to be polite to her new friend, Roar added, “Please.”
“Fair enough.” O’Connor put the cigar in an ash tray and pushed it down wind of the explosives on the table in front of them, then he picked up the circuit board. “We’re set on my end, lady. Since we know he sleeps alone in his bedroom and watches tv every morning, we know there won’t be other casualties. This board will slip perfectly into the back of the flat screen tv and when he pushes the power button on his remote…” O’Connor paused to think of a clever way to say a drug dealer would blow up, but all he could think of was the literal science. “A large amount of very stable gasses will be produced in an insanely short period of time expanding violently outward at an obscene rate and a massive amount of heat energy will get released, obliterating everything both biological and inorganic within a fifty foot radius in the room in the timespan of less than a second.”
Roar paused again from her computer screen and looked up at O’Connor. Shaking her head, she joked, “So you’re saying, boom goes the dynamite?”
With a good chuckle, O’Connor answered, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Without thinking, he let out a high pitched fart that sounded like air escaping from a balloon. “Speaking of creating a lot of gas…”
Without hesitation, Roar grinned an evil grin. “If your ass triggers those explosives instead of that shitty smelling cigar and somehow we live, I promise I’ll make whatever life that remains in you as miserable as you can possibly imagine.”
O’Connor’s face showed no emotion as he nodded, but he appreciated that Roar was his teammate instead of his enemy. “Shitty smelling cigar? It’s a Cuban!”
“If you’re sick, go to the hospital.”
“We’ll get you to Vegas in the fall, birthday girl, don’t you worry.” He held the circuit board and gingerly picked up the thin explosives that looked like a small stack of pencils. “I promise you that this set up is perfectly safe. Hell, I didn’t even put batteries in the remote just in case the power button got bumped. We’ll put the batteries in at the very end, right after we neutralize the static charge from everything by touching it, of course.” He farted again and the sound was louder this time. “I think I need to excuse myself to a restroom. God damned Mexican food is tearing the ass out of me.”
Meanwhile, special agents Bradley McVandalay and Alexi Blacktide were sitting in front of their own computer waiting for a teleconference with the CIA director back in Washington. Blacktide wore a grey tank top that showed off her powerful shoulder muscles. She wished she was outside in the Mexican sun as she ran her fingers through her short, black hair and ruffled it up a bit. Despite being in a room with the door closed, the stale air felt good on her scalp. “Knowing you as I know you, Bradley, do you ever wish you would’ve been a sports bookie?”
McVandalay had been staring at his cell phone watching updates on scores from major league baseball back in the States. He stood up from the small table and stretched out his big six foot frame. He yawned, cracked his neck from side to side, then dropped his arms and shook his head. “Nope, I’d suck at being a bookie.”
“Is there anything else you could do besides being a secret agent?” Blacktide asked.
“I make a damn good barbecue, and my home made sauce is something that causes pregnancies,” McVanalay confidently said.
“You’d think there’d be a market for that with all the infertility back home, you know.”
“When I cook, people bang,” McVandalay said matter of factly.
“Funny, cuz years ago I used to be a bartender. People did the same thing when I was slinging drinks.”
McVandalay grinned. “Booze and barbecue, baby. I don’t wanna spend my life in a kitchen making sauce, and I sure as fuck don’t wanna be a bookie. The only bets I’d get right would be about the Cubs cuz they always lose when I want them to win.” He crinkled his brow and thought about it for a moment. “In fact, I could make a fuckin’ fortune if I bet against them.” He shook his head again and conceded, “but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, betting against my team. It would be worse than dirty money.”
For fun, Blacktide asked, “What’s the dirtiest money you can imagine?”
“Any cash money that has gone through Murdock’s unwashed, dried semen covered, greasy ass hands.”
Blacktide giggled at the joke and innocently asked, “Are Murdock’s hands the secret ingredient to your award winning barbecue sauce that gets people pregnant?”
“Murdock’s hands couldn’t be disinfected if they were soaked for a day in a bucket of bleach, then stuffed in an autoclave for six hours.”
The joke went over Blacktide’s head cuz she didn’t know what an autoclave was, but she assumed it was for sterilizing things. She asked again, “No really, what’s the worst way to accumulate dirty money in your opinion, morally speaking.”
“Hmmm.” The question caught McVandalay off guard. “That’s tough, cuz I’m a hard core voluntarist.”
“I’ve never heard that term before and I don’t see how that pertains to my question,” Blacktide admitted.
“It means I believe that all interactions between people should be voluntary. We shouldn’t be forced to do shit by the government.”
“Yet, you work for the government, enforcing lots of stuff.” Blacktide wasn’t being rude, she was just chatting.
“Sure, but only out of preference, not principle. My principle is that all people should be in voluntary association with each other. My preference is to take out people who cause harm to others. I’ve given this a lot of thought, you know.”
Enjoying the conversation, Blacktide casually joked, “You’re a mess.”
“Nah. I’m just a psychopath who feels no remorse when I kill bad guys, so I kind of fell into this line of work, you know?” He waved off this line of the conversation and tried to steer the chat back to the original idea. “My point is, I don’t consider a lot of dirty money to be dirty. When it’s taken from people, I have an issue. But what some people consider dirty money, if it was all voluntary interactions that made that money flow between consenting parties, then I personally don’t give a fuck.”
Always one to appreciate a good chat, Blacktide had to dig a bit deeper. “Take our current situation, then. We know we’re gonna kill a Mexican meth dealer. Do you think that meth should be legalized?”
McVandalay had a calm way of speaking that soothed anyone he spoke with. “All drugs shouldn’t be illegal, in my opinion. We should treat them as health problems, not criminal problems.”
“Even though this guy we’re gonna kill is pure fucking scum?”
“Oh, I should’ve clarified, my apologies.” Even with the brain of a killer, McVandalay was as polite as a butler. “This meth fucker is scum because he hurts innocent people who aren’t voluntarily associating with him. I don’t care about the drugs. I mean, don’t get me wrong, meth is fucking evil as fuck and I don’t think anyone should do it, but again, I believe that we’re allowed to hurt ourselves, not anyone else. As for killing this fucker, it’s the awful behaviors this guy has exhibited with torturing people and killing non-consenting people that turns me into a remorseless murdering freak show. He’s quite the opposite of a voluntarist.” McVandalay’s calmness was unnerving.
Everything her friend had just said made perfect sense to Blacktide, but she wasn’t articulate enough to eloquently communicate her feelings with the same precision. She nodded and simply said, “Fuckin A, bro.”
The existential conversation came to a halt as their computer screen lit up with an encrypted call from CIA Director Mulroony. “Hey boss,” Blacktide said in greeting.
Mulroony’s mostly bald head and shit eating grin took up most of the screen. He looked constantly stressed and his eyes betrayed a lifetime of sleepless nights. “You’d better have good fucking news for me Alexi or I’m calling all of Team Whiskey home and demoting all of you idiots to pencil pushing status.”
“I’ve missed you too, boss,” Alexi Blacktide answered politely, completely disregarding the empty threat. “As for good news, isn’t that the usual for us?”
“Hah!” Mulroony blurted. “Is Murdock locked in a god damned walk in freezer again?”
McVandalay spoke up this time. “It was a walk in fridge, boss, and he continually reminds us that it only happened one time.”
“Fucking useless,” Mulroony muttered to himself. The agents could tell he needed a vacation, but they knew he was the type of man who’d work himself to death. “Talk to me, Lex.”
Blacktide got right to it. “Roar has hacked into Gosavich’s computer remotely and Mickey is going through the files one by one.” Special agent Mikayla Doniak was a tenacious soldier who wouldn’t quit until a job was done, and she could read and speak Russian flawlessly. “She’s confident she’ll find something to open this case up.”
“Thank God it’s Mickey and not Von Stryker,” Mulroony said harshly.
“Last we chatted with Von, she’s uncovered unlawful connections between Russian weapons makers and state run media outlets that violate Russia’s constitution,” Blacktide added.
Mulroony knew international politics better than anyone. “Russia will always be a corrupt pile of shit, but right now I’m more concerned with this Mexico situation. Did you guys ever find a connection between the meth narco and the general?”
Blacktide nodded, “We did, and we’re taking the narco out tonight. Doc says the remote is ready, and Porter texted an hour ago to tell us that she’s landing with Owens and Boothausen by nightfall, so we’ll bust in, get the bomb set, and hopefully by morning, it’ll be bye bye narco.”
Nodding, Mulroony said, “Good. And, I’m afraid to ask…” he paused and shook his head, then asked, “Did Murdock lose the million bucks in the casino last week like he was supposed to? He didn’t report back.”
Blacktide looked at McVandalay and said, “You fill him in on this one, Bradley. I gotta pee.”
She bailed as Bradley McVandalay answered, “Murdock ended up winning a million bucks from that casino at the blackjack tables.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Mulroony said disbelievingly.
“Some thugs caught him counting cards and escorted him to a back room. He was zip tied but Owens and Boothausen were around and helped him bust out untouched with close to a million in Mexican cash. He hit a few banks to change the piles of bills into various foreign currencies, and he’s stashed several hundred k worth in four of our safe houses from here all the way to Mexico City for any future agents that may need it.”
Processing this information, Mulroony blurted, “The fucker never reported back to Rice, so we simply assumed he’d been captured or killed.”
“You don’t sound sad about that assumption, boss,” McVandalay noted.
“Would you be?” Mulroony answered coldly. “Tell him to fucking check in, and he’s gonna shred papers for awhile next to the mail room until he learns that he’s gotta follow procedure.”
“Last we heard from him, he was holed up in an ocean town, hitting the sauce hard at the local cantina every night and enjoying the sexual company of random lady tourists. You know, it’s what the fucker does, boss.” Mulroony was about to snap a blood vessel as his temples pulsed and McVandalay tried to defuse the tension. “Jesus boss, you’re redder’n hot sauce. A heart attack won’t help you, you know.”
Mulroony’s red face returned to it’s normal shade of pink. “Tell Murdock to fucking check in, sauce or no sauce, or I’ll kill him myself.”
“To be honest, we don’t want that fucker here when we take this meth king pin out in the morning! Plus, he’s laying low because we’ve gotten word that the cocaine narco who owns the casino has a bounty out for him.”
Ever the pessimist, Mulroony looked disgusted. “That fucking guy always makes a mess.”
“Fifty fucking grand to bring Murdock in dead, a hundred grand to bring him in alive. I’m half tempted to get the bounty myself and buy a nice Mexican cottage by the sea,” McVandalay calmly joked.
“Not if I fly down there and put my boot in Murdock’s ass first.”
“Honestly, boss, Rice knew that the casino he hit was a fucking cess pool to begin with. All Murdock did was intentionally stir it up a bit. He’s been wanting a fight for awhile, so this might be good for him. It’ll certainly help him dial in his bullshit.”
“Wanna bet on that, Bradley? I’ll give you generous casino odds,” Mulroony joked. He was clearly peeved but he dropped the subject. “Drop me a line tonight when you’ve installed the explosive, and again in the morning when it detonates. I want that narco dead.”
“Yes boss.”
“And regarding that crooked Army general, tell Alexi that I want him alive and scared. Once we take out all of his nefarious partners, he’ll resign out of fear. We’ll quietly take him out when he’s in the private sector and none of the soldiers loyal to him will pick up arms against their government.” Someone in the background knocked on Mulroony’s door to ask for his attention. “Keep me posted, Bradley. I’m out.” With that, Mulroony unceremoniously terminated the chat and McVandalay’s screen went black.
In the distance, hired thugs from a crooked casino owned by a violent cocaine narco drove from small town to small town intimidatingly showing pictures of a guy they called “el gringo malo” (the bad white guy) to every cantina bartender, asking if they’d seen this gringo spending lots of money and acting flamboyantly, but never openly saying that they were out to kill him even though every bartender knew the fate of the gringo was sealed in coke money and dirty blood.
