95, Scuffed

“You’ll never be an air force pilot, Murdock, cuz when they bomb, they’re actually effective.”   Special agent Bradley McVandalay mocked his friend and coworker as he surveyed the scene.  Eight thugs lay dead, shot to pieces by their friend, Dirt.  McVandalay continued his insults.  “You’re as funny as a turd in a toilet.”

“Well that’s a shitty thing to say to me, Bradley,” Murdock spat back.  Special agent Trent Murdock stunk like blu cheese.  “And you have no taste in humor, so I won’t put any credence into your criticisms.”

An involuntary sarcastic laugh blurted out of McVandalay.  “You’re only using the word, credence, because you’ve heard of John Fogerty’s band.”

Without skipping a beat, Murdock retorted, “You might be right about that but don’t for a second think that I even know who that is, further giving credence to my assessment regarding your lack of intelligence regarding humor.”

As the two agents bickered uselessly in the room full of death, their friend Dirt was heaving heavily, trying to catch his breath from rage.  He’d just gunned down eight thugs with perfect shooting, and his adrenaline was through the roof.  His anger had been sparked when the perfectly white shoes was wearing got scuffed, then covered in sugary energy drinks.  

The room was silent except for the two Americans talking pointlessly to each other.  Dirt’s murderous rampage had ended.  He looked over at his friends and finally spoke up.  “Saying I’m a shoe in for shooter of the year was clever, McVanadalay.  You gotta show Murdock some props for that.”  Dirt loved his fucking shoes but he’d been military his whole life.  He could take a joke.

“See!” Murdock said with glee to McVandalay.  “At least Dirt appreciated my comedic genius, again, proving you’re a terrible critic for great comedy.”

Dirt lowered his red hot gun and removed his finger from the trigger.  “Murdock, you smell like rotten cheese and your jokes are cheesier than a creamery, pal.”

“Good one,” Murdock said, nodding in approval of the dumb humor.  Murdock used the butt of his gun to scratch his nose, then lowered it as he added, “I think that joke was dairy funny, Dirt.”

“You stink,” McVandalay said plainly.

“I got the fucking memo,” Murdock answered.

The two others couldn’t help but groan from the awful pun as McVandalay’s wrist watch lit up with a text.  “Report?” was all it said.  

“Shit,” McVandalay muttered, “Miller has no clue that this shootout is over.”

“As far as we know,” Dirt added.  “The other room might have a few more bad guys hiding, so be careful.”  He looked down at his ruined shoes and sighed.  “Goodbye, my loves.  You were good to me.”  He spoke to his shoes as if they were old, comfortable lovers.  Looking up, he snapped a fresh clip into his handgun and got to business.  “Bradley, we’ll search the rest of this place while you call Miller.  I’m guessing he’s outside in a getaway car or something?”

Nodding, McVandalay said, “He’s on the roof with his sniper rifle pointed at the open loading docks.  I’ll let him know we’re good.”  McVandalay turned to Murdock and said, “Make sure no more bad guys are bouncing around in here and let’s find out who those two kidnapped dudes in the other room are.”  As he lifted his watch to call Miller, he said, “Dirt, neither of us speak Spanish so we’re gonna need your help.”

His nerves had finally cooled down but now the heartache of losing his favorite pair of kicks was sinking in.  “On it, amigo,” Dirt replied to McVandalay.

Murdock and Dirt entered the next room with their guns drawn, snapping every which way in preparation to gun down any more bad guys who threatened their existence as McVandalay started chatting with his wristwatch communicator to Miller behind them.  “Murdock, you really do reek,” Dirt said honestly.

“I’m never ordering blu cheese again,” Murdock said.  He could bust balls with the best of his team, but the relentless torture had caught up to him.

Seeing no new bad guys, the two agents approached two well dressed Mexican men.  They had very large, bushy mustaches and were tied up in chairs that were back to back to each other.  The men wore very expensive business suits that easily cost ten grand a piece.  They were scared.

“Hola amigos,” Dirt said with his Colombian Spanish accent.  He smiled widely and his grey mustache twitched.  He asked them in Spanish, “Why did these bad men tie you both up and threaten you?”

Their eyes were big and they did not respond to the bald headed pudgy white American.

Murdock spoke in English to the tied up men.  “You’re safe, as long as you don’t try to do anything stupid.”  He pulled out a large, sharp hunting knife from a concealed sheath and the blade reverberated throughout the big room with a metallic “schwing!”  His stench and the noise startled the men, then they both became terrified as they saw the blade.  “Relax!” Murdock said reassuringly as he held the blade out with his other palm open in the universal “I’m not going to hurt you” gesture, but the businessmen were too freaked out from the gunfight that had gone on moments before as well as how bad Murdock smelled.

Dirt explained in Spanish to the men that they were safe as Murdock cut them free, but then assured them that they’d better not try to do anything stupid or the gringo that smelled like an STD clinic gone wrong would be trouble for them.

“I’ve killed more men than I care to remember,” Dirt said in English to Murdock, “and my instincts say that these two don’t deserve to be killed.  At least, not yet,” he joked.

McVandalay entered the room and briefed his friends.  Miller was gonna pull their large car around and they’d get the two Mexican men in suits to wherever they wanted to be dropped off.  McVandalay nodded to Murdock to silently let him know, “but we’ll drop a bug on them and transmit their comings and goings to our intel peeps at Langley.”

Murdock understood the wordless nod as McVandalay came up to pretend to help.  He expertly slipped a bug in the pants pockets of the tied up men as Murdock effortlessly cut the ropes binding the hostages to the chairs.  “There you go, lads!” Murdock said with a smile, then he quickly put his knife back in its sheath.

One of the men looked at Dirt as he rubbed his wrists.  He looked back a the gringos.  “Gracías,” he said politely with gratitude.

“De nada, amigo,” Dirt said with his usual charm, speaking for the team.  He was trying to be calm, but internally he was wrecked.  He loved his shoes and they were ruined.  He looked at Murdock and said, “I drove here in a stolen car.  Care if I snag a ride with y’all?”

The three Americans and two well dressed Mexicans all walked out of the warehouse as Miller was pulling up in a car that was like a small SUV.  It had three rows for seating.  Dirt and McVandalay sat all the way in the back as the two Mexican men sat in the middle.  Murdock sat in shotgun with the window down to air out the blu cheese smell.  

Dirt chatted with the men and discovered that they were bankers who worked locally.  They spoke in short answers and were clearly freaked out.  Dirt knew it would be tough to get any solid intel out of them.

Twenty minutes later, Miller was dropping the well dressed bankers off in front of a well guarded bank in downtown Juarez that had armed personnel out front.  As the guards saw the two bushy mustached men get out of the car, they realized that something wasn’t right.  A couple guards raised their weapons and started yelling in Spanish, but the bankers put their hands up to wave off the inquiry.  The guards chatted with the bankers as Murdock closed the back door to the car and hopped back into shotgun.  The four Americans pulled off onto the pot holed border town road and sped off without saying goodbye.

Dirt was introspective from the back seat.  “They clearly are laundering money for the cartels from what I gather, but I get the vibe that they don’t want to.”

“Their suits were fucking expensive as hell,” Miller said appreciatively as he expertly maneuvered the large car on the choppy road.

A grin went across Murdocks face as he looked at the dusty buildings with tens of thousands of people walking around.  “If you make a deal with the devil, it’s only a matter of time before he owns you and makes you one of his demons.”

“Dirty money feels wrong when it first starts lining your pockets, but just like drugs, you get hooked,” McVandalay added as he crawled up into the middle row of seats.  “They probably had ok lives before, but then after they started getting bribed by the cartel, they found themselves in over their heads.”

Dirt sat in the center of the back seat and leaned back.  He laterally raised his arms and stretched out like a bird, then shook his head in pity.  “The cartels treat everyone as a pawn in their game for violent domination.”

“I can’t imagine,” Miller said as he waited for a large group of walkers to cross the street at a stoplight.

Dirt said, “Ironically, my sources say that El Padres’ crew have killed a lot of the drug running gangs in America and replaced them with their own gangs.”

“One ring to rule them all,” Murdock said.  “We gotta get to Sauron.”  He sighed and looked off into the distance at some of the taller buildings in downtown Juarez.  “Where in the fuck are you, El Padre?” he asked into the universe.

“Word back in Colombia is that El Daga does not step on El Padre’s toes when it comes to dealing in America.  He’s afraid of the guy.”

Miller looked at Murdock as if to say, “you tell him.”

Murdock cleared his throat and explained, “It turns out that El Padre is a woman.”  Before Dirt could ask questions, Murdock lifted his hand to try and cut off any inquiries before he could paint the picture for Dirt.  “I met her, listened to her, watched her chat on the phone, then heard the same recording of that phone chat but with a man’s voice from a vocal shifting software that her phone was using.  She speaks normally through her phone as a woman, but the people working for her will hear a man on their end.”

Dirt understood, but still didn’t grasp what he was hearing.  “But El Padre means Father, as you know.”

Murdock shrugged, shook his head from the stink of his own blu cheese covered clothes and tried to release his desire to control the universe.  “It’s a brilliant system of misdirection, the more I’ve thought about it, cuz we don’t have any evidence that her people know of her true gender.”

It took a half a minute for Dirt to process the information.  He was in his fifties, but he was pure old school.  Men were men and women were women.  When he finally grasped what Murdock was talking about, he simply happened to be looking at his ruined shoes.  Anger boiled up inside of him.  “How do we kill the bitch?” is all he grumbled.

“Well, you see, that’s the thing,” Miller said from the drivers wheel as the car zoomed around downtown.  “We have no idea where El Padre is at the moment and every lead we have has gone dry.”

“So you’re telling me that your assets got killed,” Dirt said.

“Killed or just missing,” McVandalay clarified.  “But yeah, presumed dead, cuz El Padre is a killer.”

“So am I,” Dirt said again as a single tear fell down his face while he looked at his ruined shoes.

An hour later, Dirt was hanging out a Team Whiskey safe house.  Miller, McVandalay were chopping meat and vegetables for dinner as Laura Lorenz and Mikayla Doniak hung out on the front porch.  Doniak was in good spirits as she sipped a homemade margarita and listened to Dirt tell her about the very brief shootout.  “God, it feels good to kill the enemy fast, doesn’t it?” she said enthusiastically.

Dirt appreciated her vim.  “Damn straight.”  He pointed to his ruined shoes.  “I got these from a very dear friend and seeing them wrecked like this just destroys me.”

Lorenz knew Dirt the least but felt comfortable around him as they chatted.  “Did those shoes ever get you laid, Dirt?”

A huge laugh erupted from Dirt’s belly and his grey mustache twitched from the hot wind of his breath.  “More times than I can count!  Every time I walk into the Hombre Salado in Bogota with these shoes on, it seems I wake up with yet another beautiful stranger in my bed!”

“Doesn’t Hombre Salado mean the man of salt, or something?” Mikayla Doniak asked curiously.

“Well done Mickey, it does indeed!  The salty man.”  Dirt nodded.  “It’s the gay bar in Bogota.”

Neither Lorenz or Doniak had any hesitations about asking Dirt personal questions.  “Do you like it when the fellas buy you drinks?”

“Fuck yes!  The bartenders at that place are VERY generous with their pours, and those shoes got me wasted for free so many times.”  Dirt pursed his lips and exhaled with a “whoo hoo.”  He smiled widely.  “The fellas would get me drunker’n shit, then some lonely chica would take me home and crush my drunken body into a flattened pop can.  It has happened so many times, I’ve lost count.”

Lorenz crinkled her brow.  “So you’re not gay?”

Dirt laughed easily.  “Not that I know of!  But you’d think when I wore those shoes that I was gonna score some serious cock, let me tell you!”  His easy charm and unapologetic homoerotic humor made the two women laugh easily.

A clean and showered Murdock walked out onto the front porch.  “What’re you all laughing about?”

“Hey, you don’t smell like a Mexican land fill anymore!” Dirt answered in his typical jolly tone.  “I was telling the ladies here about every time I’d wear these shoes to a cantina called the Hombre Salado.”

Lorenz chimed in, “It’s a gay bar.”

Doniak added, “In Bogota.”

“And I got laid because of these shoes so many times from boozing in that place that it honestly makes me wonder if I’m making the whole thing up to myself.”

Murdock nodded in understanding.  He’d always wondered if Dirt was gay.  This was his proof.  “Well, rest in peace, sweet love making shoes,” he said said humorously.

The smell of sizzling veggies and meat wafted out the open door from the kitchen onto the patio where they were sitting as Dirt said, “I mean, I didn’t wear them WHILE I was getting laid!  I don’t love them THAT much!”

Murdock grinned, laughed, then walked back inside.  The door closed behind him so he couldn’t hear Dirt say, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I have half a dozen children being breast fed right this moment…”  The door opened back up and Murdock heard the second half of his sentence, “from all the ass in Bogota that these shoes landed me.”  Dirt looked up at Murdocks face in the crack of the doorway.  “What’s up, Murdock?”

“I forgot to ask if anyone wanted a beer.  I got distracted after you told me about wearing your bright ass shoes in that gay club.”

“Yeah, the fellas at that club can fucking dance for hours.  What stamina.”  Dirt shook his head in appreciation of the power and conditioning of young gay men.  “Oh, and I’d love a beer.  Thanks, amigo.”  He looked at his female friends and asked, “Ladies?”

Both women declined the offer for a beer as they raised their home made tequila drinks to show that they were good to go.  As Murdock disappeared, Lorenz asked, “Have you ever been a father, Dirt?”

He again answered, “Not that I know of!  But statistically speaking, I had to have knocked up a muchacha at some point.  I’ve been a dirty man whore since I was eighteen.”  He shook his head and said, “Panama in the eighties was a different universe let me tell you.  The sexuality of young catholic Latina women back then was something to behold.”  He looked at Doniak and said, “Check this out Mickey.”  He pointed to his nose and said, “Do you notice how it’s crooked?  Yeah, I had a girl head butt me when she was on top of me as she orgasmed.  I was in the hospital for three days with a breathing tube and a raging erection.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Lorenz said, shocked.

“Nope.  And I always used a condom.  In ’88, Panama City saw a blistering case of herpes rip through town that ultimately fueled my decision to move to Colombia.”

Doniak couldn’t help but laugh.  “Blistering case of herpes.  That would be a good name for a punk band.”

“Remember, they didn’t have meds for that shit back then.  Nasty stuff,” Dirt said with a shiver.  “No clue how I’ve dodged that bullet…”

The door opened up and Murdock appeared with a beer as Dirt finished his sentence.  “…at the Hombre Salado, cuz I’m telling you ladies, the ass I’ve pulled down there is world class.”  Dirt took the beer from Murdock and said, “Gracías, amigo!”

“Dare I ask what you fuckers are chatting about now?” Murdock jokingly asked.

Doniak gladly answered, “Blistering cases of herpes.  You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Murdock?”

Murdock looked at Dirt, back to Doniak, back to Dirt.  Dirt finished a swig of ice cold beer and sighed in appreciation.  “Some things, when they hit your lips, just make you happy.”

“Like herpes?” Murdock asked sarcastically.

“Never be ashamed, Murdock!” Dirt joked back.  “Just talk to your doctor about the medicines they have these days.  It’ll clear right up for you, amigo.”

Murdock laughed, nodded, then walked back inside.  As the door closed behind him, he said to himself, “Yup.  I knew that fucker was gay.”

“So what’s next?” Doniak asked, changing the subject to their task at hand.

“I figure I’ll finish this beer, then I’m gonna have a heaping serving of whatever those idiots are cooking inside.  That shit smells amazing.”

An easy laugh left Doniaks lips as she enjoyed another sip of her margarita, then said, “I was talking about the mission.”

“I kinda figured, but I never waste an opportunity to dream about eating good food.”  After pondering for a few moments, Dirt said, “Murdock and McVandalay bugged those bankers.  We’ll see who comes to visit them, cuz Lord knows that El Padre will send goons to interrogate ’em.  We’ll be sure to tail those goons and see if we can’t get one step closer to getting that bitch.”  He looked at Lorenz and Doniak, then said, “If either of you two have any better ideas, I’m listening.”

Lorenz took a gulp of her drink.  “Porter is getting Blacktide and Doc to Mexico by nightfall, so we should see them in the morning.”  Lorenz hiccuped.  “That’ll be interesting to work with them now that they’re engaged.”

“Love simplifies some things and complicates others, but those two are good at what they do.  It’ll be good to have them working with us instead of doing their own thing,” Doniak added.

Dirt grinned.  “I haven’t seen him since he got shot up after our mushroom ceremony.”  He took another big swig of his beer.  “I just get the weird feeling that we’ll have some shit that we need to blow up sooner than later.”

In the distance, a few biker thugs made frantic phone calls and swore vengeance for the scene they were examining as they stepped over the dead bodies of their amigos while cursing in Spanish as the smell of death filled the large Juarez docking warehouse.