Green Ice: A Deadly High Read online

  “Where’s the bathroom?” Mancini hissed.

  Trey pointed the way to the right beyond the reception desk. Mancini finished up as quickly as he could, washing his face and hands with cold water. He took out the piece of paper from his jacket and unfolded it, just to check La Rat hadn’t sold him a dummy. There was indeed an address for a place in Ensenada, scrawled at the top of the sheet and a cell number with the name ‘Hector’ at the bottom of the paper. Next step of the operation, he had to call Eddie Reinbeck, who was Oreilles’s head of operations and right hand guy in LA. Mancini had to confirm he’d made contact with La Rat and was on his way to Ensenada.

  Trey was still trying his best to sweet talk the receptionist when Mancini returned to the resort’s lobby. She clearly wasn’t interested and was politely trying to give Trey the brush off without offending him. Mancini thought women like that probably got hit on at least a half dozen times per shift. She was probably waiting for a wealthy Mr Big Shot to whisk her off her feet and allow her to lead a life of luxury without having to work any longer. Mancini left Trey to it and headed through the doors to the parking lot. He made sure nobody was within earshot when he speed dialed a number on his prepaid cell phone.

  “Yeah?” a gruff voice answered. Mancini knew it was Eddie.

  “I’ve seen the Rat and the trap is set to go,” Mancini said and immediately rang off.

  He made his way back to the reception area and grabbed Trey by the arm. “Come on, we have to go,” Mancini hissed in Trey’s ear.

  Trey reluctantly followed Mancini back to the car.

  “Let’s get this over and done with, then we can maybe let our hair down for a time,” Mancini said, as they folded themselves back into the Thunderbird.

  “Seriously? I’m ready to party right now,” Trey whooped, firing up the car engine.

  “Wait until we’ve got the job done.” Mancini was already regretting even hinting at a night out.

  Trey drove out of the parking lot and they waited at the exit barricade while the security guard leisurely opened the barrier.

  “Keep heading south on Highway 1 until we get to Ensenada,” Mancini said. “We’re around fifty miles or so from the city. We should be there in an hour.”

  Highway 1turned away from the coastline and ran through the center of the town of Rosarito. Several ambulances and cop cars roared across the highway at an intersection, with lights flashing and sirens wailing. The emergency vehicles all headed towards the beaches to the west. Mancini wondered what the hell was going on in the town.

  “You think somebody died?” Trey blurted, watching the emergency vehicles flash by.

  “Probably,” Mancini muttered.

  They continued on through the town and the highway hugged the coastline once again when they were clear of the urban area.

  “Good surf down this way, man,” Trey said. “I came down here with some High School buddies a while back.”

  Mancini nodded, studying the foamy breakers curling over an azure blue sea. He’d been something of a surfer in his youth, before he joined the army. “Looks inviting, you think?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Trey crowed. “I’d give my left nut to bust that surf right now.”

  Mancini also felt the allure of the ocean. At that moment, he wanted to abandon the mission, tear off his clothes and leap into those breaking waves.

  “Maybe on the way back, if things go okay,” he muttered.

  “Hold you to that, buddy. We can rent some boards and go safari along this coastline.”

  Mancini turned up the volume on the stereo, pumping out the Surf Rock at a high rate of decibels. ‘The Chantays’ classic surf track, ‘Pipeline’ seemed to tumble out of the speakers. No other vehicles were on the highway and Trey hit the gas pedal hard. The Thunderbird sped up and began to eat away at the miles between them and Ensenada.

  Trey slowed the car when he spotted a battered, white pick-up truck stopped at an odd angle, with its rear end still on the highway and the cab facing the shoulder.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he muttered.

  Mancini sensed danger. Maybe it was some sort of ruse to make them stop the car so a few pistol wielding bad guys could pop out from behind the truck and rob them at gun point.

  “Don’t stop the car,” he hissed. Mancini instinctively reached into his jacket for his handgun before he realized he wasn’t carrying a firearm. “Shit, I don’t like this.”

  “It’s probably just somebody broke down, man,” Trey sighed. “Stop sacking it, will you?”

  Trey slowed the T-Bird to a crawl but steered around the immobile truck. They looked through the cab windows but couldn’t see anybody inside. The passenger door hung open and the interior light glowed dimly across the truck’s dash. Mancini turned the volume down on the stereo as the Thunderbird rolled parallel to the truck’s hood. A long haired man, dressed in a black vest and denim pants squatted over the prone body of a woman, lying on the ground in front of the truck. Another body of an elderly man lay face down in the brown dirt, a few feet from the crouching man. Both the motionless bodies bore horrific injuries to their throats, as though the flesh had been ripped or torn away. Blood pooled around the grounded figures and heavily stained their shredded clothing.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Trey gasped.

  “No sign of an accident,” Mancini surmised, studying the lifeless figures, then the truck’s front.

  “Hey, buddy,” Trey called to the guy hunkered over the injured woman. “What’s up? Need an ambulance?”

  The guy’s head snapped upwards. He glared straight at Trey and Mancini. Blood surrounded his mouth and he bared his teeth in a snarl like a rabid dog. His hands and lower arms were smeared with blood and clumps of flesh were entangled in his long hair, hanging either side of his lower jaw.

  “Jesus! Do you see that dude’s eyes, man?” Trey croaked. “What’s wrong with his fucking eyes?” His breathing rapidly quickened as he stared into the jet black eyeballs surrounding bright orange pupils.

  Mancini felt his skin go cold, despite the warm climate. He too was repulsively mesmerized by the guy’s piercing glare. The crouching man’s eyes flicked between Mancini and Trey as though he was anticipating his next move.

  “You think he killed those people?” Trey stammered.

  The guy slowly rose from the woman’s corpse beneath him. He padded around the truck, gathering pace with every step towards the Thunderbird. He growled in a low tone that became a high pitched shriek by the time he reached the blacktop. The skin around his eyes and upper forehead looked parched and cracked, almost as though his face was completely dehydrated.

  “Shit, go, Trey, go,” Mancini yelled.

  “Got that,” Trey yelped and dumped his foot on the gas pedal.

  The guy roared and reached out with gnarled, blood stained fingers at Mancini in the passenger seat. The T-Bird lurched forward and the guy’s broken fingernails scraped across the car’s paintwork along the door. Mancini recoiled away from the marauding guy beside the door then turned to watch him chase their vehicle at an unrelenting pace. The guy growled and shrieked as he sprinted down the blacktop, futilely chasing the Thunderbird. Trey glanced in his rear view mirror, watching the crazy guy fade into the distance.

  “Do you think we should call 911?” he asked.

  Mancini composed himself, trying to shake off the initial shock. “No, leave it alone. We can’t afford to get tangled up with any kind of law enforcement. Anyhow, I don’t think the cops are on 911 in Mexico. I think it’s 066 but that’s not the issue here.”

  “What was wrong with that guy? He looked totally wired, man. Was he seriously eating those people back there?” Trey glanced back into his mirror to check the guy was clearly out of sight.

  “I don’t know what the hell he was doing. He was probably out of his brains on some kind of narcotic or other,” Mancini sighed. “We have to just try and forget about it.”

  “But those people were dead, right?
” Trey continued.

  “I don’t know, probably,” Mancini stuttered. “We can’t do anything for them now. Let’s just get on with our job. Don’t think about it. I’ve seen worse shit than that.”

  “Such as?”

  Mancini glanced at Trey. The kid’s face was pale and sweaty and his hands trembled on the steering wheel. Mancini knew he was going to have to calm his driver down or they may succumb to some sort of road collision themselves.

  “Slow it down a bit, will you?” Mancini said. “That crazy bastard has gone now and he won’t catch up with us.”

  Trey glanced in his mirror again but eased off the gas a little. “What if he comes after us in that truck? Maybe he’s some kind of serial killer who chases people in his truck, then like runs them down and eats them while they’re laying on the ground, all busted up and shit.”

  “Calm down, Trey,” Mancini said. “We have to stay focused.” He took out his smokes and offered Trey the pack. He refused at first but had second thoughts and took one.

  “I’m trying to quit these damn things,” he muttered.

  Mancini lit them both with his Zippo and sat back in his seat. “I seen some real shitty sights when I was on the ground in Iraq,” Mancini sighed. “Some of the things I saw in that place make that situation back there look like a kid’s party.”

  “Seriously? What kind of things?” Trey shot Mancini a sideways glance.

  “Ah, I’m not going into all that now. I spent a long time putting that horrific shit out of my mind. But I’ve also seen some pretty bad things at home, on the streets of LA.”

  “Yeah?” Trey was curious.

  Mancini knew he’d have to spin a story to keep the kid’s mind off the scene of carnage a mile or so behind them. He decided on a suitably horrific yarn to recount.

  “A couple of years ago, me and this other guy…Zamora I think his name was, we had to take a trip out to Skid Row to collect a repayment from some scumbag who owed money all over the place. This guy, Brian Dench, his name was. Sounds like a school teacher, right? He was a walking time bomb and was supposed to be a dealer but he snorted more of the product up his nose than he sold. Well, doing that kind of shit soon got him into trouble and he kept missing his repayments. So, he took out loans to cover what he owed and the whole thing soon spiraled out of control.”

  Mancini took a last puff on his cigarette and tossed the butt out of the car.

  “Anyhow, me and Zamora went to his house and we knocked on his door. Surprise, surprise, there’s no answer, which is usual when the repayment guys come knocking. The place is littered with trash and broken windows, a real shithole, you know?”

  Trey nodded.

  “And there’s this real bad smell around the place, like that hazy burning stench you get around the back of those down-market food joints. Zamora looked through one of the windows and he was a big mean guy…he just threw up. I mean, hurled right there on the front porch of this damn place. I took a look through this broken window and saw a sorry excuse for a kitchen inside. The room was totally wrecked with broken furniture, shit and trash all over the place; the walls were brown, covered in grease and blood. And this real bad smell is almost overpowering now. I’m nearly chucking up myself at this point. Then I see the cooker. The cooker is still on, burning at a low heat. This guy, Brian Dench, his severed head is sitting on top of the cooker. Just placed there on the top of the stove, cooking away like a rib roast.”

  “Ah, man,” Trey muttered, scowling in revulsion.

  “Turned out, this Dench guy had also owed money to some extremely badass people, some crew from Panama who didn’t take kindly to his non-payments. They didn’t just butcher Dench, they killed his whole family. Me and Zamora went around back, found the door open and we went inside to see if we could salvage anything worth any money. We found the rest of his family in the living room, his old lady and two kids all laying on the ground side by side with their brains blown out. No doubt the callous bastards did the shooting in front of Dench before they killed him.”

  “So what did you do, man?” Trey asked.

  “We got the hell out of there. The place had been ransacked. Everything worth a cent was gone. But I’ll never forget that smell.” Mancini shook his head. “I’ll never eat a barbecue again.”

  Trey’s face was fixed in an expression of repulsion as he mulled over the story and pictured the scene of Dench’s cooking head in his mind.

  Mancini leaned forward and turned the stereo back up. The track had moved on to the “Bikini Men” playing “Power Bomb.” He glanced at Trey but he didn’t look like he was enjoying the surf tunes any longer.

  “Hey, lighten up,” Mancini yelled above the stereo noise. “Things might get a bit worse when we encounter these guys in Ensenada.”

  “Who are they, specifically?” Trey asked. “I know they like, stole a whole bunch of money and a stash of Mr Oreilles’s merchandise but are they real bad-asses or what?”

  “Put it this way, your dad would probably meet them more in an employment related incident than a social gathering,” Mancini said.

  “And we’re supposed to waste them, right?”

  “If it comes to that. Hopefully, they’ll return the money and the product they stole without a situation.”

  “Yeah, right. Like they’re going to do that without beef,” Trey scoffed. “You do know they’ve blown most of that stash up their asses getting wasted and spent like a zillion dollars in the process?”

  “Maybe,” Mancini muttered. “They pay up what they owe or they’ll face the consequences of their actions.”

  Trey flashed Mancini an incredulous glance. “And there are three of these guys, right?”

  “U-huh.” Mancini nodded.

  “Don’t you think we should have evened the numbers up a little?”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  Mancini stared unemotionally at the road ahead. Trey Coogan turned his gaze back to the highway. He was beginning to seriously regret volunteering for this out of town trip.

  Chapter Five

  Mancini and Trey sat in silence, listening to the stereo for nearly thirty minutes and precisely thirty miles. Trey slowed the Thunderbird when he saw a woman on the side of the road, attempting to flag them down. She stood beside a small, red Chevrolet parked on the shoulder.

  Mancini turned down the music on the stereo and leaned forward in his seat. “Be careful,” he growled.

  The woman looked as though she was in her early twenties and wore a white t-shirt and blue short pants. Her frizzy brown hair bobbed up and down as she furiously waved her arms from side to side above her head. Mancini and Trey recognized an expression of sheer terror on her face as they slowed and drew closer.

  The woman babbled hysterically in Spanish and Mancini couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Trey brought the car to a stop alongside the Chevrolet.

  “What’s she talking about?” Mancini asked Trey.

  “I don’t know…she’s talking too fast…something about…err…a dead man, I think.”

  “A dead man? Where, exactly?”

  “Donde?” Trey repeatedly asked the woman.

  She pointed towards a small shack like building, a few yards further down the road. White paint flaked from the shack’s wooden boarded walls and a hand painted sign affixed to the roof read ‘Bar’ in red lettering.

  The woman turned back to the Chevrolet beside her and furiously pulled on the door handle while still incessantly jabbering. The car door didn’t open and was obviously locked up.

  “What the hell is the problem here?” Mancini moaned.

  Trey shook his head. “Err…I’m not really sure, man. She’s saying something about her and her boyfriend stopped at that bar up ahead and some guy or guys attacked them. But she’s also talking about some dead guy, it’s difficult to understand.”

  “I thought you spoke fluent Spanish?” Mancini sighed.

  “I wouldn’t say I was fluent but I can get by,” Trey snappe
d.

  Mancini groaned and sunk further into his seat. “Tell her to just call the cops and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “A la policia,” Trey shouted above the woman’s chatter. “Err…telefono…llame a la policia.” He glanced at Mancini. “I think that means call the police.”

  “Ah, shit,” Mancini sighed. “So you only speak a limited amount of Spanish, is that right?”

  Trey glared back at Mancini. “As I said, I get by, man. Now, what are we doing here?”

  “We get the hell out of here,” Mancini snapped. “I already told you, we can’t afford to get involved with the cops or any domestic bust-ups, no matter how small. Come on, just drive.”

  “But she looks like she’s in trouble, man.”

  “Not our problem. Let’s go.” Mancini pointed towards the windshield. He noticed three figures approaching from the bar. The bright sun partially obscured his vision and he flipped his shades down from his forehead.

  Trey followed Mancini’s gaze and saw the three guys drawing closer. The woman turned her head towards the bar shack and her babbling elevated to hysterical screeching. The three figures fanned out across the highway and their pace quickened to a trot.

  “What the fuck is going on, man?” Trey hissed.

  The three men were of varying ages and appearances. The guy on the left was the youngest. His hair was closely cropped and he wore an orange t-shirt and blue shorts with no shoes on his feet. The middle guy was around fifty years old, stout in build, wearing a grubby white vest and black denims. The man to the right was tall and thin with long black hair and a bushy moustache, wearing a matching blue denim shirt and pants. All three of them had suffered injuries of some kind and their lower faces and clothing were spattered with blood. As the men drew closer, Mancini and Trey noticed all the trio’s eyes were black with orange pupils, similar to the guy further back down the highway.

  The three guys emitted throaty growls and their lips curled back in snarls as they broke into a run towards the Thunderbird. The young guy in the orange t-shirt was the fastest of the three and soon circled around the car. Mancini regretted not keeping a weapon of any kind close at hand.