The Reluctant Warrior (Warriors Series Book 2) (2 page)

Shattner stared back at him. ‘Son, don’t you think this is way above your pay grade? Why don’t you get the manager and let me speak to him?’

Back and forth they went till a side door opened and one of the two men came in, the one who had spoken to him last.

‘You? What’re you doing here?’

‘Looking for a job.’

‘Why here?’

‘Why not? You did ask me to come here if I needed help. I need a job. I am a good mechanic. Mechanics work in garages.’

The man looked at Shattner for some time and then jerked his head.

‘Come.’

Shattner followed him, and the man introduced him to Jose Cruz.

Cruz was as tall as Shattner, an inch over six feet, lean and sinewy, a hatchet face with eyes that were probing all the time. He looked Shattner over as Diego, the other gang member, fired off a fusillade in Spanish at him.

Jose barked at Diego and turned away without acknowledging Shattner. Being the boss had privileges.

Diego grabbed Shattner by his elbow and took him to a windowless room, and Shattner’s interrogation commenced.

The night before, Shattner had worked out that he’d crashed into a gang takedown and had thought long and hard about approaching the garage for a job. Two things had finally persuaded him – he needed a job and his savings had nearly run out, and jobs weren’t easy to find for one with a criminal record.

He had also matured and believed that being a loser wasn’t a lifetime sentence.

What he had not expected was meeting Cruz so easily. He had thought gang bosses were harder to meet, but he later came to know that Cruz oversaw every aspect of his business with manic attention, personally recruited every gang member, and enforced discipline ferociously.

There was a gang member who’d had ambitions of his own and started dealing on the side. One afternoon Cruz had him brought to his office, where the gang member was rewarded by the sight of Cruz raping his wife and seven-year-old daughter. When he had finished, he shot them and then sat down to have his supper. He hadn’t uttered a single word to the gang member, who by then was in a state of catatonic shock. The gangster was never seen again. There were many such stories surrounding Cruz.

Cruz’s gang was large, more than fifty members; the six in the garage were kept separate from the gang. The gang members seldom came to the garage, and if they did, it was after the garage had closed for the day and the mechanics had gone home. Shattner was by far the best mechanic they had; he often stayed late working on the cars, and over the months he could identify the gang members and had developed a conversational relationship with many of them – if greetings and grunted acknowledgements could be called a conversation.

The first time Shattner got involved with the gang was four months after he joined the garage. One evening he could hear loud voices from Cruz’s office, Diego and Jose going at it vowel and syllable. He heard a door slamming, another opening, and Diego stood before him, scowling.

‘You? Can you drive?’

When Shattner looked at him stupidly, he made a steering motion with his hands and asked again, ‘Drive?’

‘Come here at eleven. Night, not day,’ Diego told him when Shattner nodded.

The garage was dead when Shattner returned that night, all the lights off. When he stepped inside the parking lot, Diego stepped out, followed by another, a tall, swarthy man with a teardrop tat under his left eye, carrying a brown paper sack. Diego tossed car keys to Shattner without saying a word.

It was the same dark sedan as the night of the holdup. Diego and the other man got in the back, carrying the paper sack, and Shattner drove them down Lott Avenue and parked behind a school. Diego and the other guy, Rajek, spoke occasionally but ignored Shattner.

They were gone nearly an hour, supplying street dealers Shattner surmised, and when they returned, Shattner powered the car up and waited for them to seat themselves. Diego touched his shoulder just as he was pulling away.

He stopped the sedan and turned back to see the barrel of a gun pointing at him, a couple of inches away from his face.

Diego looked back at him impassively, his finger on the trigger, and beside him Rajek grinned silently, exposing teeth that were strangers to a dentist.

‘You know who we are and what we do?’ Diego asked him.

‘I’m not stupid,’ replied Shattner.

Diego swung the barrel against his head viciously, drawing a thin line of blood from his temple. When the ringing in his head had stopped, Shattner found the black bore of the barrel against his face, steady, Diego’s eyes black and empty looking back at him.

‘Young hoods are desperate to join us. Some rob, some sell drugs, many sell their sisters and mothers. And some kill. To prove themselves to us. You just walked in. Not logical. Jose does not like things that are not logical.’

He paused, his eyes black holes in his face.

‘I’m an enforcer. You know what that means?’

‘People shit in their pants when they see you?’

Diego hit him again on the other temple. A thicker stream of blood started running down Shattner’s head.

‘You think you’re smart. How come I’m holding this gun and you’re at the other end?’

Diego extended his forefinger and touched the blood streaming down Shattner’s face. He inspected it for a while and flicked it away.

‘That’s my business,’ he said, nodding at the copper droplets flying away.

‘I am number two. I am also the enforcer of our chapter.’

He paused, enjoying the fear in Shattner’s eyes.

‘I looked into your past, your history, and your time in the army. I spoke to your previous garage in New Jersey, your landlord… everyone who knew you. You are a criminal, just like us. But I told Jose, better to kill you. Your joining us did not feel right,’ Diego continued without any inflection. He could be reading the weather.

‘But Jose is smart. Smarter than me… is why he is boss. He said we need Anglos. Less suspicious.’

‘He said we didn’t need to worry about you. You got kids. Lisa very pretty, no?’ Diego smiled a feral smile.

Shattner went cold.

Diego smiled thinly. ‘Relax, Anglo. You are alive; your kids are safe… for now.’ He leant back in his seat and gestured at Shattner to drive.

Rajek clicked his tongue and looked disappointed. Maybe happiness for him was Shattner’s brains splattered over the windshield.

His involvement in the gang increased. He was used the most as a driver, but soon started distributing baggies to the street vendors and making collections for the gang.

The garage, while a front, was not very successful. The people who brought their cars in were known to the gang even if they weren’t gang members themselves. Shattner figured out the hierarchy of the gang over time. Cruz ruled it at the top, with Diego as his second in command as well as its chief hit man. Then came a handful of Rajeks – the senior members of the gang, and then there were the doers… those who ran the drugs, the rackets, the women.

In his arms trading, Shattner had dealt with many gangs, but this one was different. This one ran like a smoothly oiled machine, a strong chain of command linking the hierarchies and utter ruthlessness shown to those who disobeyed or challenged the gang. Like a military machine. Shattner learnt over a period of time that most of the gang members, including Jose, Diego and Rajek had military experience, some in European armed forces, some in South America or Africa.

Most of those armed forces must have been happy to see the backs of these guys
, he thought.

A month after his close-up with Diego’s gun, he drove Diego to a hit.

Chapter 3

It was at two in the morning.

He drove Diego to an office block, killed the engine, and nervously waited for instructions.

Diego was silent and motionless, his dark eyes seeing nothing and seeing everything. His phone beeped after half an hour, and after a murmured conversation, Diego straightened. In another fifteen minutes, they saw a car make its way from the opposite end of the street, stop about a hundred feet away, and kill its lights.

Two people stepped out of the car and approached theirs, and Diego met them halfway. He bumped fists with them, took wads of cash from them, gave them baggies in return, turned his back on them, and returned to Shattner.

Ten feet away from them, he turned smoothly and drew.

So smooth and balletic was his movement that it took Shattner a couple of seconds to make the gun in his hand. The two reports were muted, hitting the other two in the back of their heads. Shattner didn’t hear the bodies falling; he saw Diego step up to the bodies and fire into their heads again for good measure. He grabbed the baggies and walked back to Shattner leisurely, a thin breeze ruffling his hair slightly.

Shattner felt the cold touch of the barrel to his neck when they reached the first set of lights on their way back.

‘You are too calm, chollo. Maybe you’re a cop?’

Shattner broke. He swerved into the darkness between streetlights and turned back to Diego.

‘A cop? Wouldn’t I have brought the whole force on you guys by now? Remember I’ve seen a lot of shit you guys do and know a lot.’

Diego didn’t say a word but continued pointing the gun at Shattner.

Shattner leaned forward and pulled the gun to his forehead. ‘If in doubt, pull. That’s your motto, isn’t it? Go on, then. Pull.’

Black pools of nothing stared back at him, and then slowly the barrel moved.

‘You have got balls,
chollo. Si
, I grant you that. Now drive.’

Shattner drove back in silence, gripping the wheel hard to hide the trembling in his hands. Diego sat motionless behind him, expressionless, bars of light and dark moving across his face as the car made its way to Blake Avenue.
Probably thinking when he can kill me
, Shattner thought savagely.

The next week, two gang members were busted by the police as they were selling drugs to street vendors near a school. The same school Shattner had driven Diego to. The week after that, a gang member was arrested as he was carrying out a hit on an MS-13 gang member.

The first arrest was shrugged off by the chapter as the price to be paid for being in business; the members were soon bailed. Just like most businesses of this size, Jose had lawyers and PR agents on retainers. The second incident caused uneasiness given its proximity to the first.

The third arrest happened in the subsequent week.

Ten gangbangers were flushed out after the police ran an elaborate sting operation on a prostitution racket owned by Jose. The uneasiness exploded into suspicion.

There was a snitch in the gang.

And Shattner was its newest quasi member.

Diego was with Shattner on every gang business errand now, watching him from behind his lizard-like eyelids. He didn’t care if Shattner knew he was under suspicion.

The gang still used him, and he wondered about that.
Maybe all the members are known to the cops and they’re using me as a foil
, he reasoned.

His phone vibrated on the table, bringing him out from the past. The text message stared back at him.

‘Tomorrow.’

He went to the bedroom window and stared into the dark street below him, wondering if he would return home the next day.

He had heard rumors of a large deal, and it was likely Diego wanted him as the getaway driver.

That, or the summons was for his execution.

He washed his face in the bathroom and stared back at his reflection in the mirror. His hair was even thinner now, his cheeks hollowed out, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His hands trembled constantly, and he had to jam them in his pockets whenever his kids were around.

He took a deep breath, pushing away his constant fear, squared his shoulders, and stepped out of the bathroom.

Diego was awaiting him at the garage entrance the next day, sitting inconspicuously in an anonymous Toyota Corolla. Passersby did not give him a second glance, unaware that they were a few feet from the most ruthless killer in Brooklyn.

He jerked his head at Shattner, indicating for him to get in and drive, and Shattner obliged, taking them down Rockaway Avenue, onto Linden Boulevard and into a deserted industrial area on Wortman Avenue.

He parked beside a Ford Transit, and as soon as he had turned off the ignition, the rear doors of the Transit opened.

Rajek jumped out, followed by another heavily tattooed and armed man. Diego stepped out and opened the trunk of Shattner’s car, and Rajek and the other man started loading burlap sacks in the boot from the Transit. Shattner stood for a moment watching the activity and then helped the transfer. He reckoned there were two hundred kilos that got loaded in the car, and from the smell, he suspected the sacks contained crack.

Rajek and his companion drove off without a word, but not without Rajek grinning at Shattner. Maybe he was wondering how long Shattner had to live.

‘You think this is a picnic?’ Diego growled when Shattner stood staring at the back of the Ford Transit.

Shattner got behind the wheel and followed Diego’s directions, taking the Belt Parkway, moving out of the city and southwards. His suspicions were confirmed when they took the I-95 and merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike.