BULLETS

A novel by

Elijah Drive

Slick knew the stranger who had been sitting next to him at the diner was no murderer because, in addition to cards, Slick also kills people for money. The poor man didn’t have the look, but Slick does, and with the help of a beautiful assistant district attorney, a Navajo state trooper and a homegrown federal agent, Slick sets out to prove the dead man’s innocence. What he discovers, as he digs deeper, is a deadly mystery that threatens not only him, but his newfound friends as well. But Slick hates to have anyone… ANYONE… toss him his shoes and tell him to get out of town.

BULLETS
 – a novel by Elijah Drive.

The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living, dead or undead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Kindle Edition

Cover illustration by

Bosa Grgurevic:
www.Buddhacandy.com

“W
ait, what? You
never eat meat?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing, no burgers, no ribs, not one fucking hot-wing?”

“Nah man.”

“No fucking barbecue, ever?”

“Never,” Slick said.

Stutz stopped digging and stared up at Big Slick, wanting to comment further upon the irony of a black man refusing barbecue, but struggled with how to communicate said irony without offending the six foot four, very dark-skinned man helping him dig a hole in the desert.

Stutz usually never hesitated to air his opinion on the worthlessness of non-whites and whoever was inflamed by it, well fuck ’em, but that was when backed up by four or five of his skinhead buddies, armed boot to belt.

At that particular moment, however, Stutz was all alone in the desert with Big Slick, who was at least a head taller, fifty pounds heavier and holding a shovel. Stutz had longed to say something funny about a spade holding a spade for the past half hour as it was, it was torturing him, but he couldn’t take the chance of pissing the big bastard off, at least not until the job was over and done.

Stutz finally just said, “I don’t fucking believe it. Goddamn vegetarian.”

“I’m a vegan, actually.”

“Vegan, not vegetarian? What the fuck does that even mean?”

“No meat, no fish, no dairy.”

“No dairy? Like, like…”

“Eggs, milk, anything made from eggs or milk—”

“No ice cream? No milkshakes?”

“Nope. No pasta either.”

“Sweet Jesus jumped, I don’t fucking believe it.”

Stutz tossed down his shovel and hauled himself out of the hole, huffing. He dug into a cooler and pulled out a brew. Beer dribbled down his ratty beard as he watched the other man sweat and finish the hole. Slick could read his mind and knew the redneck fucker was thinking that this was the proper order of things anyway, that the black man labored while the white man supervised.

Stutz was one of those white guys with a barrel chest and outsized gut offset by skinny arms that he unsuccessfully tried to draw attention away from with a series of prison tats, swastikas that he hadn’t tried to hide. When Slick approached the truck earlier for the meet, Stutz had been unsettled, to say the least.

“They never said you was … was…” he stammered.

“Wasn’t from around here?”

“You can say that again,” Stutz finally allowed. “You the fella Hadenfeld sent?”

“Yeah. I’m the contractor. You put up a deposit, you got the rest of the cash?”

“I got it, but you get it only when it’s over and done, boy.”

And that was it for talking over the next few hours as they drove to the designated spot in the Arizona desert and got to work. Stutz hated blacks and couldn’t believe he’d gotten stuck with one on this job, but it’d been known to happen. A referral for a hitter was just that, a referral. The broker never asked or cared for the color of the contractor’s skin, and usually the client didn’t either. It was the hit that counted. And usually the hitter was insured for his own protection. But that didn’t mean Stutz had to make nice conversation with the bastard. He held his tongue as they toiled in the hot sun.

Finally, the boredom of the work and afternoon hunger pangs got to Stutz and he announced that the best steak he had ever eaten in his whole goddamn life was at this shithole diner in South Texas and he’d give his left nut for it right at that moment. When Slick said he didn’t eat meat, it shocked Stutz so much he forgot about not talking to him.

“No meat, no dairy? How can you live like that, man? What do you even eat?”

“Fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains. Anything that grows from the ground up or down, I eat. I don’t eat anything with a face.”

“But that ain’t even natural or healthy.”

“Sure it is, it’s very natural.”

“No it ain’t, we need meat, we’re carnivores, have been since the fucking caveman days, clubbing fucking mammoths and making Flintstone fuckin’ burgers outta their ass, you know? We’re carnivores, man.”

“We’re not, actually. We’re omnivores.”

“What?”

“We’re not carnivores, we’re omnivores.”

“Omni-what? What the fuck is that? No fucking way, we eat meat, so we’re carnivores, like wolves, you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about!”

“Carnivores eat meat, but they can only eat meat, they can’t eat other shit. Lions, tigers, wolves, all carnivores, a vegetable diet will fuck them up. Herbivores eat only vegetables, they can’t eat meat, when they do, it fucks them up. Mad cow disease came to be as a result of feeding cows beef product. Cows, sheep, horses, all herbivores. Omnivores eat both vegetables and meat. They need the vitamins from veggies and the protein from meat. Pigs, bears and humans, all omnivores.”

Stutz had to think hard about that for a minute, and thinking hard wasn’t something he was used to doing for any extended length of time. Then he got it.

“Hold on the fuck, you’re sayin’ humans need to eat meat, ’cause we’re whatever you called it—”

“Omnivores, yeah. We need the protein.”

“So if we’re SUPPOSED to eat meat, how can you stand there and say ya don’t!”

“We need the protein, we just don’t necessarily need it from meat. I get it from beans, nuts and soy. But, yeah, meat is one source for all omnivores. Bears eat fish.”

“So hell, boy, you’re making my argument for me. If eatin’ meat’s good enough for bears an’ pigs, why ain’t it good enough for you?”

“Because of how they died—the animals.”

“What’s that even mean?”

“You ever been on a chicken farm, a ranch or a slaughter house?”

“I look city to you, boy?”

“So you know, then, how the animals in those places live and die. They live in torment, often never leaving a tiny cage, never moving, just planted there in their own waste in a dark factory barn and pumped full of chemicals and steroids and then they’re slaughtered. It’s beyond sick. Every time I look at a steak or a chicken wing, the only thought that goes through my head is how awful this creature’s life and death was, and if I eat it, I contribute to that bad karma, and I won’t do that.”

“But … but they’re fucking animals, what do you expect?”

“Humanity.” Slick stopped digging and wiped his brow. “From humans, I expect humanity. I expect compassion. It’s not that the animal was killed and eaten, that’s part of the natural order of things. That’s life. It’s HOW it happened that’s wrong. If I eat a fish that I caught or a deer that I hunted because I had to eat them to live, that’d be different, that’s the natural order of things. But as it is now, where we put living things on a factory belt of torment, it screws the deal.”

“Deal? What fucking deal?”

“Look, cows and chickens and goats evolved, right? They evolved a coping mechanism for survival. Their strategy was to partner with humans through domestication. They give us their skin and meat in return for protection from their predators like wolves and shit like that. That’s the deal.

“The problem is now that we’ve become worse than wolves, we don’t respect the deal anymore, we don’t let the animals live right, we treat them horribly, we give them chemicals and shit and we raise sick food, which, in turn, makes us sick. I don’t eat meat because we don’t honor the deal. We start honoring the deal, I’ll reconsider my position.”

Slick climbed out of the hole.

“Hey boy, whatta doin’? That hole ain’t big enough yet.”

“It’s big enough.”

“Listen, it’s gotta be big enough for three men, they told you, right? I know we’re gonna be planting beaners in there and they’s really small compared to you brothers, but it ain’t big enough for three men. They told ya, right?”

“They told me. The hole’s big enough, trust me. I’ve been doing this awhile.”

Slick stuck the shovel into the ground, opened the cooler and rooted through it. Nothing in there but Pabst Blue Ribbon, which figured. He was so thirsty that he didn’t care, cracked one open and drank. He could tell Stutz didn’t like Slick putting his hand into a white man’s beer cooler, much less sharing any beer with him. Stutz was biting back a ton of words and sooner or later he was going to burst.

“They told ya? So you know how this is supposed to go?”

“Sure, but feel free to refresh my memory, if it makes you feel better.”

“There’s gonna be three of ’em, they’re gonna meet me over by that cactus grove there, next to them rocks, see it? They think they’re only gonna be meeting me, no one else. You’ll be in the brush, behind ’em, and when I say so, you step out. Two of the Mexs are big and they’ll probably be armed, but they ain’t shit, fucking farmers with shotguns is all. You take those two out right away. Got it? That’s your job.

“The third one, you’ll know him because he’s a short bastard, that’s Esteban, you don’t kill him. He’s mine. We tie him to the truck bed. He ain’t gonna die quick, I’m gonna have fun with him first. It’s gonna take a long while ’fore he dies. They told you that, right?”

“Yep.”

“You fine with this, then? You don’t like it when chickens is tortured, you might not have the sack for what I’m gonna do to this fuckin’ beaner. You gonna be cool?”

“Sure. He deserves it, right?”

“Yeah, he deserves it, boy. Trust me. Let’s go set up, we only got an hour.”

“What’d he do?”

“Who?”

“This Mexican, what did he do?”

“Raped a white girl. Fourteen. Only fucking fourteen years old and he raped her ass bad, she’s in the hospital. Some sort of technical bullshit keeping his ass out of jail, but he knows we’re after him. He’s coming out here to pay my boys off for protection. That’s what he thinks, anyway, and he’s bringing his brothers as backup. Only it ain’t gonna go as planned for their sorry asses.”

“Raped a fourteen-year-old girl? That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, it’s a fucking disgrace. Fuckin’ Mexican gang-banger, this Esteban. They do that shit all the time. The beaner gangs around here, they ain’t no joke, you know. Fucking cold, remorseless killers, wanna kill our sons and rape our daughters, we have to protect our borders from the Mexican horde before we’re overrun and it’s too late.”

“Keep America white, right?”

“Yeah, and…” Stutz nodded in agreement before he realized what’d just been said and by who. “You fuckin’ with me, boy?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“You think this is a goddamn joke. Where you from?”

“I live in New York City.”

“Fuck. Figures. You don’t know what we have to deal with here. We got Mexicans swarming over the border every fucking day and night. Take our jobs, our land, our women, our fucking natural resources. You think it’s fuckin’ funny, I can tell, and maybe you even sympathize ’cause you’re dark like them, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll be welcomed with open arms by the beaners, they hate the blacks just as much as they hate white people. There’s a race war going on down here and it ain’t the one you think you’re fighting. You want to end up with Spanish as the official language of our country?”

“
Dios nos Ayuda
!” Slick said.

Stutz spat on the ground. Damn Hadenfeld for sending him this fucker. If he could’ve have done this alone, he would have, but he didn’t dare fuck this job up.

“All right, boy, enough of this jawin’, let’s get set up.”

“Wait, one question.”

“What? And there’d better not be anymore of your lip, neither.”

“Just a question, you said the two Mexicans that are with this Esteban, they’ll be armed with shotguns but not to worry because they’re farmers, right?”

“Yeah, and?”

“But you also said Esteban is a gang-banger. So why would a gang-banger bring a couple shotgun-toting farmers to a meeting with a badass like you?”