71, Interrogation

“I would cover the bed with rose petals and lay your angelic body down lightly, then kiss you as softly as a gentle rain.”  Special agent Trent Murdock was leaning against the bar of a rough and tumble Mexican cantina.  A few Mexican thug bikers drinking quietly in a corner couldn’t stop looking over at him and looking away.  Murdock took no notice of them as he continued hitting on a very beautiful Mexican bartender.  “It would be my life’s greatest joy to hold you in my arms.”

The bartender spoke decent English and although she didn’t understand all of his words, she was letting the American gringo try to sweep her off her feet.  “You’re funny, meester,” she said with a thick Spanish accent.  She gave him a seductive smile and put her arms on the bar as she leaned over.  The low cut top she was wearing showed off her ample cleavage.

“You’re hotter than a Mexican soap opera star, darlin,” Murdock said lazily.  He tried not to look directly at the beautiful woman’s boobs, but his brain was locked in with his peripheral vision.  He gave her the best grin he could give without seeming desperate.  “In the morning, I’ll make you a tasty breakfast of bacon, eggs, and more love making.”  To hell with being smooth.  Time for the direct path.

“I like you, meester,” the bartender replied with a huge smile.  She thought the gringo was cute and couldn’t help but fall for his charm.

The two bikers nodded at each other and got up from their pub table.  Without saying a word, they began walking towards the bar in Murdock’s direction.  He didn’t see them or have any idea they were approaching.  He was thinking with his dick which blinded him from his surroundings.  

Out of the blue, an American voice called out from the front entrance.  “Murdock, check your laces!”

The voice snapped Murdock out of his horny revelry.  A subconscious brain wave told him to obey the command.  He immediately ducked as one of the bikers threw a punch at the exact spot where his jaw was only moments before.  The animal survival inside of Murdock’s brain that was as wild as a wolf took over.  

By pure instinct, Murdock’s fist was now balled up and firing an uppercut fueled by the incredible power of his rock hard core.  It connected with the attacking biker and smashed the man’s jaw into a dozen fragments inside of his skin and connective tissue.  In that instant, the biker’s brain went completely offline as his body collapsed to the floor.

The other biker was a few feet away and lunged for Murdock, but the American brought up a knee with neck breaking force to the exact spot where the biker’s face was.  It too connected with the jaw of the biker.  In the course of less than two seconds, both bikers had started as attackers and finished with broken jaws.  Both men were crumpled up and knocked out unceremoniously on the floor.

Murdock calmly looked around and saw no one else attacking him.  He politely turned to the bartender and said, “I apologize for that, miss.”  He could see that her eyes were huge and she was clearly freaked out.  He sighed knowing that there was no chance he could hit on her any longer.

“Those men are very bad men, meester.  Very, very bad men.”  The bartender was clearly freaked out as she slowly backed away from Murdock.

Murdock sighed.  “I’ll take the trash out for you as soon as I’m done enjoying this delicious margarita,” he said with mild defeat.  He took the last swig of his drink and enjoyed its salty sweetness.

The American voice that had called to him earlier was approaching Murdock now and he heard it say, “You’re such a fucking idiot, dude.”

“I’ve missed you too, Bradley,” Murdock said dryly.  He turned to shake the hand of his fellow special agent and friend, Bradley McVandalay.  “What brings you to these parts, brother?”

“You bring me to these parts, fucker.”  Without looking down McVandalay gestured to the two crumpled thugs on the floor.  “Obviously you’ve got someone looking for you,” McVandalay said plainly as he stepped over the two biker thugs.

Murdock shrugged.  “Porter called me fifteen minutes ago and said they have two peeps tied up in her van who had a picture of me and were apparently showing it to a bartender in hopes that he’d tell them how to find me.”  

“She’s outside waiting for me to get you, and I walk into this shit show?  What the fuck was going on?”

Murdock put his hands up as if he were innocent and said, “I’ve been a good boy, Bradley!”  He looked at the female bartender.  She was now all the way over on the opposite side of the bar and she looked very nervous.  “Well, I was trying to be naughty tonight, but clearly that ship has sailed.”

“Or sunk, dumbass.  There’s a price on your head.”

“Hmmm,” Murdock contemplated.  “I’ve had one other run in at a bar a couple of nights ago where I took out a couple of other bikers like these two here, but I thought it was because I was hitting on a different muchacha.”  Murdock looked at his two wannabe assailants and said, “These guys are wearing the same biker colors as the other guys that tried to jump me.  Interesting.”

McVandalay and Murdock were both six feet tall and each weighed two hundred pounds, but they both had the insane strength of someone a hundred pounds heavier.  McVandalay bent down and picked up one of the thugs by his limp arm pits.  “Grab that one and follow me,” McVandalay ordered.  He didn’t struggle as he dragged the man easily across the cantina and out the front door.

“I hate it when you boss me around and don’t say please,” Murdock said as if he were butt hurt.  He picked up the other thug and despite his powerful strength, he struggled to drag the unconscious Mexican biker towards the door.  When he was halfway to the exit, the thug’s boot got caught on a table forcing Murdock to lose his grip and drop the body.  “Oops!” he said as the back of the thug’s head made a thud on the floor.  “Sorry about that!” Murdock lied with a smile.  “Wait a minute,” he said to himself, “I didn’t pay for my drink.  Dammit.”

McVandalay had already walked back into the cantina and heard Murdock say those words.  “Go settle up and fucking hurry, dude.  I’ll get this asshole loaded up.”  He picked up the remaining thug and easily dragged him out of the front door.

Murdock leisurely sauntered back to the bar.  His nerves were just fine, but the bartender was still in the back corner of the bar, clearly spooked.  He gave her a huge smile and a nod, then said, “Gracias,” in a very calm tone.  He pulled out a wad of cash and left five bills with large denominations on the bar, then gave one more small nod before he walked out of the bar.

The hot Mexican afternoon stole the air from his lungs.  “Fuck me running and twice on Tuesday,” he said in regards to the heat to nobody.  He silently hated the heat, but he’d just had a stiff drink, then a fast fist fight.  Today was turning out to be an ok day.  He smiled in the oppressive sunshine.

“Jump in, Murdock!”  Pilot Porter was parked on the opposite side of the street.  She was behind the wheel of a fifteen passenger van and with her typical beaming smile and bubbly personality she said, “We gotta get going!”  Murdock knew that Porter was a crazy bitch, but he was grateful for her incredible ability to drive or fly anything better and faster than any human on Earth.  “The air conditioning is awesome in here!  Get a move on!”  She rolled up the window and her smile beamed through the glass.

“Dibs on shotgun!” Murdock yelled out, but McVandalay was already getting into the passenger seat.

“Fuck you!” McVandalay yelled back as he slammed the passenger door shut.

Murdock crossed the street, walked around the van and opened the sliding door.  He was amazed to see four bodies piled on top of each other.  “Holy shit, are these other two dead?”

“Nope!” Porter said with happiness in her voice.  “Doc is at the safe house with a case of Irish whiskey.”

Without looking back from the passenger seat, McVandalay added, “You know what that means.”

A grin and a groan came out of Murdock as he crawled over the piled bodies and slid the door shut.  “It means I get to get really drunk and interrogate the fuck out of these guys.”

Porter gleamed, “I’ve already got a hundred bucks that you and Doc set a record.  Death bet me that you can’t beat last time. I think you two are just starting to find your rhythm.”

“Fuck that bitch,” Murdock said of agent Death.  “She doesn’t need to know that I’ve kept two adderall on me at all times for this exact scenario.  I’ll make Doc look like an amateur.”

A few hours later, the four very evil thugs woke up one by one as Murdock slipped smelling salts under their noses.  They all had broken jaws.  They were each tied to a chair with their hands zip tied behind their backs and gags in their mouths.  Ropes and zip ties bound their bodies and legs to the sturdy, heavy wooden chairs as they sat on the far side of a table that was pushed up against each of them to their sternums, holding their chairs against a wall.  Each prisoner had a metal collar around his neck that that had small green blinking lights.  Their evil was apparent as anger overtook each of them upon seeing Murdock in the flesh.

Special agent Dale O’Connor sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table.  He sloppily poured himself some whiskey into a glass but somehow didn’t spill a drop.  He was already drunk as piss.  He hiccuped, wiped his mouth, and smiled a toothy grin at all of the prisoners.  His bloodshot eyes looked deeply at each thug and he could see all of them mentally processing what was going on.  He could tell they were trying to figure out how to kill him.

Despite being so drunk that he could barely keep his head up, he greeted them in perfect Mexican Spanish without slurring one word.  He told them that they were prisoners, that they’d made terrible life choices when they’d agreed to be thugs for El Padre, and that they’d each tell him everything they knew about their boss.  If not, he’d torture them until they’d die.  He omitted telling them his method of torture.

O’Connor raised his glass to the four bad men and said, “Saludos.”  He took a sip of his whiskey and smiled as the fire water rolled around his mouth.

Murdock sat next to him and said, “Death says we can’t set a new record.  Porter’s got a hundred bucks on her that we can.”

With a drunk smile, O’Connor said, “I’m more sober than I’ve ever been to start an interrogation.  You’re the one I’m worried about.”

“Me!?” Murdock protested.  “I’ve barely had one sip and you’re already half a bottle deep.  I’ll be fine, fucker!”

With a hearty drunk laugh, O’Connor said, “Then you tell Death that a fool and her money are doomed to part!”

With that, the torturous bickering began.

“That’s not how the saying goes, dummy,” Murdock quipped.

“Oh great, now you’re gonna start giving me the great quotes of all time with that fucking peanut sized brain of yours?  Pigs have a better chance of flying, pal.”

“Fuck you, Doc!  A pig can fly up your ass for all I care.  You fucked up the saying.”  Murdock was beginning to get passionate.

“Like you’d know, you fucking pin head!”  O’Connor took a sip of his whiskey and enjoyed the taste, then let his own emotions get heated.  “That’s right!  You have a head like a pin, fuck face!”

“That’s racist,” Murdock said plainly.

“To what fucking race, you racist piece of shit?” O’Connor asked passionately.

The four men looked at each other from the sides of their eyes and realized they couldn’t turn their necks.  A few of them struggled a little bit in their ropes and were shocked by their collar.  In turn, each of them realized that if they tried to wiggle loose, they’d be shocked.  The shocks were painful as fuck, and each of them had a sinking feeling that it was karmic justice for all of the suffering and pain they’d inflicted on innocent people in their lives.  

The Americans went at it.  “Fuck you, Murdock!  You don’t speak a fucking lick of Spanish but you’re calling me racist?!”  O’Connor blurted out an insult in Spanish to Murdock’s mother, then told the thugs they’d die in their chairs if they didn’t tell him everything they knew about El Padre.  Without skipping a beat, O’Connor went back to insulting Murdock in English.  “You have the intelligence of a boot that’s just stepped in fresh dog shit.  Scratch that!  The dog shit is more intelligent than you!”

Murdock had been taking a sip of whiskey as O’Connor had been insulting him.  He put down his glass and spat, “Says the alcoholic asshole who won’t stop talking about rugby!”

“Rugby is a sport for real men, not pussy ass bitches like you!”

“That’s racist,” Murdock said calmly.

It was going to be a long night.

Two days had passed.  No one had slept.  Murdock and O’Connor had not slowed down with their bickering and drinking.  Six empty bottles of Jameson sat on the table and the Americans hadn’t slowed down one bit.  All four thugs were in pure pain, all of them on the verge of giving in.  Regardless of the fact that the agents weren’t speaking Spanish, their constant bickering and random emotional upheavals were absolutely draining the mental and spiritual energy of the captured men.  Their broken jaws screamed in pain, their bodies ached, and they stunk of piss, having urinated themselves several times.  The Americans were hardened killers with no empathy to bad men.  They continued their childish insults as the torture continued.

“The compression on that first Metalica album is perfect!  You have the taste of a homeless alley cat!”

“Idiot!  The raw master on Guitar Hero of that album is way better in every way!  The lack of compression shows their true musical ability and creates a raw emotion unparalleled by the shitty production done by that garbage man of a producer who drowned a perfect piece of heavy metal art with too much compression!”

“Did you really try to say Guitar Hero is better than the original, you fucking shit bag?”

“Guitar Hero is the exact original, you fucking dumb shit!  It’s the same god damned tracks but they’re uncompressed, you ignorant fuck!”

“What kind of fucking douche bag plays video games and brags about the music?  Oh wait, I know!  A bag of douche that’s douchier than douche!”

“That’s sexist.”

The bickering was intense.  It was as if each man were plugged into a never ending power source that fueled their arguing but lowered their IQ to lower than that of sliced cheese.

Pilot Porter had her ear to the door of the room where the action was.  She smelled a whiff of piss from under the door and recoiled in disgust.  “My god, they’re really on a roll.  I don’t know how they do it,” she said to her friend and teammate, special agent Death.

“No way they make it five days.  I can hear them slowing down,” Death replied.  She didn’t care that she had a hundred bucks riding on the bet.  She hated losing at anything, and since she couldn’t conceive of anyone who could possibly drink for five days straight without sleep while still fighting over useless, trivial shit, she didn’t have the mental power to believe it was even possible.  “I can smell the piss from out here.  I’m telling you, five days?  No way.”

“Death, this is Murdock and O’Connor we’re talking about here.  They’re pissing into a pitcher and not even emptying it.  They’re half the reason that room smells as bad as it does.”  Porter found herself slightly disgusted at the details and momentarily questioned her life decisions to work with such savages.  “They have two cases of Jameson.”

“Two?”  Death shook her head in disbelief.  “Fuck.”

“I’m telling you, they’re on a different level than they used to be.”

“Not even they can endure that piss smell,” Death said.  “One of them will crater and they’ll quit for a few hours, I’m telling you.”

“You’re in denial of their…” Porter couldn’t find the word.  “Their, um, abilities.”  The thought of that piss smelling room was enough to make her guts queazy.  “I need to step outside and get some air.”

A day later, Death and Porter didn’t even make it to the door before the smell of rotting piss greeted their nostrils.  They could hear O’Connor and Murdock yelling at each other from behind the door.

“John Mayer is not a mimic!  He’s one of the most brilliant original guitarists of our time!”

“You are dumber than a log of shit!  Not just a pile of it.  A whole fucking log of shit!”

“OH, AM I?  Says the man who’s zipper has been down for the last sixteen hours!”

“Why are you trying to look at my dick, you fucking sicko fucky fuck?!”

“You’re bigoted toward gay men!”

The two women looked at each other.  Porter said simply, “One of those bad guys has to be dead by now.”

The next morning the two women couldn’t even make it down the hallway without choking on the stench.  O’Connor and Murdock hadn’t stopped yelling at each other for four straight days and their voices reverberated through the door all the way down the putrid piss smelling hallway.

“Fuck you, Doc!  It wouldn’t shock me to find a dead cat in your god damned pants!  You smell worse than a hoarder!”

“You smell like a dead, decaying skunk drowned in its own menstrual cycle on the side of a Nevada highway in July!”

“That’s sexist!”

“Says the man who has no regard for women?!”

“Oh ho, really, you fucking fucktard shit bag fuck face!!!”

Death looked at Porter.  “No way any of the thugs are alive.”

The women had opened every window in the place and put fans that blew the stench outside into the courtyard of the safe house, but the smell was still oppressive in every way.  They stuck their ears in the hallway that lead to the interrogation room but didn’t even have to strain their ears to hear the incessant drunken fighting between the agents.

“You should apologize to the planet for wasting oxygen that a productive, good human could use!”

“Says the man that has only consumed things his whole life and never produced a damn thing, like the useless fucking leach to the planet that you are!!!”

On the evening of the fifth day, Death had to admit defeat.  “Porter, I don’t know how you knew, but you were right.  Don’t rub it in.”  She handed over a hundred dollar bill to the pilot and added, “A fool and her money shall indeed be parted.”

“It’s not your fault, Death.  Anyone with any self respect couldn’t do what they do.  I get the feeling they’re possessed.”

“I feel that way sometimes when you’re flying us around.”

Porter’s face crinkled up and she admitted, “Maybe you’re right about that.”

A moment later, the smell of piss became unbearable.  The two agents had exited the room, each of them holding two completely full pitchers of piss.  O’Connor looked identical to how he did five days previously.  Blood shot eyes, shaky limbs, and slurred speech.  “Success, ladies.  We know everything about El Padre we need to know.”  Without stopping, he walked right by them.  “We have four more of these we gotta dump out in the gutter.”

“Jesus, you two fucking wreak!”  Agent Death felt nauseous at their stench.  “Are any of those thugs even alive?”

Murdock blurted, “They were dead on day three.  We were just having a drink and working a few things out this past two days.”

Both women had to run out into the back yard to escape the stench.  Five minutes later, O’Connor and Murdock were using the hose in the front yard to clean themselves with luke warm Mexican tap water.  They’d stripped down naked and had no shame of hosing each other down.  They took turns showering and changed into clean clothes, then walked into the backyard to fill their friends in.  

“Our buddies at the hazardous waste treatment center are gonna clean that room and take care of the corpses.”  As they were saying this, a large van pulled up with six men who hopped out in hazmat suits.  They were in and out of the safe house quickly with the bodies of the four bad men and drove off with no fan fare.

“I need a drink,” O’Connor said calmly.  “Work is kicking my butt lately.”  He looked at Murdock.  “Great work in there.  You’re amazing.”

“You too!” Murdock said with shining positivity.  “Lemme pour you one last glass before we crash, buddy,” Murdock said lovingly.

“Thanks, brother,” O’Connor said with serene respect for his friend.  It was as if the bickering had never even happened.  Neither man looked frazzled in any way.  

Murdock gave a huge grin to his lady friends.  “We’ll fill you two gorgeous women in tomorrow morning.  I’m gonna sleep well tonight, lemme tell you!”  Murdock was in crazy good spirits considering he hadn’t slept for five straight days.

The two men walked silently into the house as if it was just another leisure filled hot summer’s day in Mexico.

In the distance, a wealthy, violent narco known as El Padre paced back and forth in a posh mansion office while yelling into his cell phone demanding information as he tried to discover the fate of four of his hardest, most evil enforcers, and why they hadn’t checked in with him for over six days.