Chosen One Protective Services

“We’re stopping at a no-tell motel?” Agent Rodney Burrows asked, thoroughly confused.

“Yep!” George grinned. “It’s the last place anyone would think to look!”

It wasn’t much, to be honest. A pair of flat buildings off the road, with a sturdy ice machine under an awning, and an office at the head of the shorter building. The sign said VACANCY, and there were only a few cars in front of the doors, but that didn’t matter. If everything had gone to plan, what George wanted would be in the office.

The office was closed. Empty. George shrugged, walked back to the government car, and grinned wider at Burrows. “Hey, give me your jacket for a second.”

“What? Why?”

“I want to show you a magic trick!”

Agent Rodney Burrows had gotten a little wary over the last hour or so. George couldn’t say why, but he was used to it. People tended to become very unreliable when they spent more than a few minutes with him.

“What kind of magic trick?” Rodney asked, cautiously.

“I’m gonna make a problem disappear.”

Rodney looked dubious, but he handed his jacket over.

George picked up a rock, held it clenched in one fist, and wrapped the jacket around his forearm, one-handed. Then he hammered the glass of the office door until it broke, used the jacketed arm to clear out space, and reached inside with his free hand until he could fumble it open.

“What are you… people will hear!” Rodney squeaked.

“Keep your voice down. This lot of hooligans is too busy shagging dames and eating marijuana to care,” George growled, doing his best Mike Hammer again. Did they have marijuana in the Mike Hammer books? He didn’t know. He’d only really skimmed them, and even then mostly focused on the bits that involved dames and shaggery.

“I had to time this perfectly,” George said, as he walked in and flicked on the lights, looking around for what he knew would be here. “A suspicious package, arriving right before closing time last night, to be delivered to a certain Mister Nemo in room three once he arrived.”

“Nemo?”

“It means no one, in a different language!”

“Which language?”

George didn’t actually know that, so he did what he did whenever he was asked a question that he couldn’t answer, and ignored the fact a question had been asked in the first place. “The point is, that Mister Nemo will never arrive, so it sat… here… until…”

The package wasn’t in the office.

George started ransacking the office. He found a toolbox, dug out a claw hammer, and bashed the locks on the desk and the filing cabinet, but there was no package to be seen. While he was doing this, while fragments of wood and metal were flying, Rodney Burrows’ face was growing more and more horrified.

“Fucking keep it down!” Someone shouted from outside, and Rodney winced.

“It has to be here!” George growled. “Unless…” his mind raced a mile a minute. “Unless the lazy bones dropped it off at the room! Ha, that’s it!” He turned to the keyrack on the wall, searched through the keys. Most of the little cubbies had two sets of keys in them, but the one for 103 had only a single set. “Occupied! We still have a chance! Come on, Burr— I mean, Yellow Hat, I’ll need you covering me. This could get ugly. Actually, hold on. We need to make sure they can’t call in reinforcements, first.”

“Reinforcements?” Burrows squeaked.

“Oh yes. These are clearly hardened criminals, Yellow Hat. They committed mail fraud. And they’ll be armed and dangerous, clearly with backup.” George pulled a small crowbar from the toolbox, and raced outside.

Burrows followed, hesitated, went back in to grab the toolbox, and caught up with him as George was eying the lonely set of telephone poles that stretched off into the distance. “Um,” Burrows asked, “What are you doing?”

“What I must.” It took George three tries, but finally he managed to hurl the crowbar up and get it touching two wires at the same time. There was a SNAP, a bright blue spark, and smoke drifted up from where the wires met the sockets. “There, that’ll fix it. Come on, we only have a short window to act, here. Their handlers will figure out what we’ve done in a few minutes if we’re unlucky.”

“I…” Burrows followed, and his eyes grew wide and white in the flickering white light of the now-unstable bulb outside the first block of rooms. “Wait!” he said, as Rodney pulled a claw hammer out of the toolbox, and used his free hand to ready the keys. “We… we have to knock, we can’t just go in, we don’t even have a warrant, this is against all procedures—”

“Eight minutes!” George shouted. “No time!” The key clunked in the lock, and he shouldered the door open, throwing himself against it twice until the bolt and chain broke and shattered. A woman screamed. A man swore. In the darkness, George moved fast, ran to the end of the room where the bathroom turned off from the main room, checked it fast. Nobody in there. Someone was fumbling out of bed and George screamed “FBI! EVERYBODY DOWN OR I WILL SHOOT!” He dropped the keys, flipped the lights on, and turned to see a pale, naked, flabby man staring at him in horror. Behind him, a much younger woman gathered the sheets around her, screaming.

The man put out his hands, palm outwards, clearly about to use some secret Commie martial art. George swung the claw hammer and bent one of them the wrong way. The man dropped to his knees, screaming and cradling his busted wrist, and George roared “WHERE’S THE PACKAGE?”

“Oh Jesus!” he heard Rodney yell between the screaming, but that was the last thing he heard. The man was trying to struggle away, clearly to get to the guns he’d stolen, and George used the hammer to subdue the perp. Once he was no longer resisting, George shot a look at the woman, who stopped screaming and shrunk beneath the sheets until only her upper face was visible, eyes big and horrified.

“Where is the package?” he said, softly. He was dimly aware of the sound of Rodney vomiting somewhere outside, but that was fine. Not everyone was cut out for violence. Fortunately George was here to do what had to be done.

“I don’t… I… I don’t… what package?” the woman whimpered. “Oh god, did his wife send you?”

A harlot! George whisked the sheet away, and she screamed, and curled into a fetal position. “There was a package sent to this room. You stole it. WHERE IS IT?” he roared, looming over her, hammer raised.

”Please, no, God no!”

“If you’re lying, I will arrest you. And it will be just you and me and this hammer in a cell. For a very long time.” George lied. “And your commie boyfriend here will ride an electric chair down to hell! THIS BADGE MEANS I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT TO YOU, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“I’m not! I mean… I understand! Please, I’m nobody, he’s nobody, HE’S A YOUTH PASTOR! Doug is just a youth pastor! We’re not… this is insane!”

“INSANE? YOU’RE FUCKING CALLING ME INSANE YOU UGLY BITCH!” He brought the hammer down on the bedpost, and she screamed and hid under the sheets.

“GEORGE! STOP! GEORGE!” Burrows yelled. “THERE’S A PACKAGE IN THE DUMPSTER! PLEASE GOD THERE’S A PACKAGE OUT HERE DON’T FUCKING KILL HER!”

He heard cars roaring away from the motel as he moved out into the courtyard, saw lights receding into the distance. A few doors stood open, and George felt powerful. The criminal’s accomplices had fled, rather than engage a true American hero.

Burrows was pointing, shaking, at an open trash bin. As George moved over to it, Burrows hurried into the hotel room.

George dug in the dumpster, and grinned ear to ear, as he saw a familiar-looking box. He pulled the box out of the dumpster, grimaced when he saw it had been opened. The proper sequence of events, what had to have happened, was obvious to him now. The hotel owner had gotten a mysterious package for a resident, and broken the law by opening it up. Then they’d mistaken the good guy guns that were in it for bad guy guns, and dumped it in a fit of cowardice. For a moment he berated himself internally, then shrugged and forgave himself. After all, who had ever heard of a Texan who DIDN’T like guns?

The .357 magnum revolvers fit nicely into the custom holsters he’d had made for them, and the ammo pouches full of speed loaders went easily on his belt. The final thing in there had been completely untouched, left in its paper wrapper, and George felt his satisfaction rise as he drew out the authentic SS officer’s cap that his uncle had brought home from the big war. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the eagle insignia on the front of it.

It was so hard to explain this to people. Everyone was so judgmental! George had learned early on that there was no point in explaining the early childhood days he’d spent with his German nanny in his father’s mansion, listening to the crackling radio, the powerful one that could pick up the transmissions from Germany. He had never been able to adequately describe how it felt, listening to a true leader explain how to properly protect your people. How no sacrifice was too much for your country, and how all commies and other undesireables needed to die for the world to become perfect and pure.

His Dad had understood least of all, but Dad wasn't here, and there was nobody to spank Georgie now! “Fuck you Dad, they were COOL!” George shouted into the night. George felt stronger as he slid the cap onto his head, felt his resolve strengthen, as he marched back into the hotel room. Time to make sure there were no loose ends.

The woman wasn’t there. He glared at Burrows, who looked back, pale-faced and shaking. “WHERE IS SHE?” George roared.

“The bathroom,” Burrows stuttered. “We… we should go. Time. Time’s short, right?”

“Right!” George felt a burst of happiness. Finally, Burrows was taking this seriously! “All right. We’re armed now. Let’s go stop the bad guys!”

*****

Many miles away, in a small but nice house on the outskirts of Denver, the phone rang and rang until Solomon’s wife nudged him awake, and made him get out of his nice warm bed to answer the damn thing.

It wasn’t until he got out to the kitchen, that his sleep-bleary mind realized that the ringing wasn’t coming from the simple, black plastic phone over the kitchen counter, next to the refrigerator that was covered in crayon drawings from his grandchildren. No, this was coming from the office. And that meant trouble. Agency trouble.

“This is Gable,” the Executive Assistant Director of the Denver branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation answered, once he had the receiver in hand.

It was a very shouty sort of conversation, and his part of it went like this:

“What?”

“No, I never sent anyone down to your region. Why would I? I don’t remember that specific lead, but if that’s what it was, we probably reviewed it and concluded it didn’t merit investigation.”

“I signed no such order. Why would I poach on your turf, Hank? Especially for something that wasn’t verified.”

“What? Who?”

“GEORGE?”

“George is the… he’s the intern!”

“Frankly he got the job because his father’s THAT George Lidd— yeah, that guy.”

“No, he’s a lying little fuck up with a chip on his shoulder. If his family wasn’t connected he wouldn’t have gotten in here. We’ve been trying to keep him bored with busy work until he gives up and transfers so his father doesn’t—”

“I DIDN’T GIVE HIM ANY AUTHORITY!”

“I DIDN’T SIGN— oh God. Check the signature. Check it against the last memo you have from me. I’ll wait.”

Solomon waited, massaging his temples. Eventually he rose and got a cigarette. He hadn’t touched them since the war, but George tended to have that kind of effect on people.

The next part of the conversation was a lot less shouty. But a lot more serious.

Finally, Solomon sighed. “Yeah. I agree. Send them in quick, but do it quiet. I’ll be down there myself tomorrow, to help clean up this mess. And there WILL be a mess. That little shit’s got a weird kind of charisma that gets people believing the constant bullshit he spews. But hey, at least we’re catching it now. God willing, maybe there’s a chance we can clean it up fast and keep this all quiet.”

*****

Burrows was fidgeting hard by the time that they reached the Colfax address. He fidgeted harder when George put on a burst of speed, and went right by it.

“Didn’t we… isn’t that where we’re going?” Burrows asked, almost begging.

“And yet, it’s the only place out on this route where I saw lights,” George said. “Now why is that? Something’s up!” he pulled off the road abruptly, and Burrows shrieked and covered his face as they rolled through the scrub brush, the car shaking and shuddering as it bounced on the terrain, sending stray rocks ricocheting, sprays of cacti and sage grass into the air, and otherwise doing bad things to the transmission.

“Lights?” Burrows asked. “I didn’t see any lights—”

“Not on the buildings, but between them,” George shouted, over the grinding coming from underneath the car. “They’ve got guards out with flashlights! They’ve probably seized Mr. Colfax, and are packing up his inventions right now! I expect it’ll be a mysterious fire, after all’s said and done, to cover up how they shot the ones they didn’t need.”

Burrows digested this. Then he glanced back. “Holy shit, there IS a light!”

“OBVIOUSLY!” George shouted. “LISTEN TO ME YELLOW HAT! THIS IS NO JOKE!”

“Okay, okay,” Burrows puffed his cheeks out. “We at least need to get a closer look. What’s the plan?”

“We drove past a good ways,” George grinned, glancing between the dark space out front and Burrows behind, as he explained. “They’ll think we’ve turned off. And once we’re far enough away, we’ll park and creep up on them. Have you ever used a garotte before, Yellow Hat?”

“Wait, what?” Burrows blinked. “No! Why would we… there could be more civilians there! And shouldn’t you be keeping your eyes on what’s ahead?”

“Don’t sweat it, Burro— Yellow Hat! I’ve taken all the combat driving courses that the FBI offers! I’ve been trained in this!”

“Wait, hold on, we have combat driving courses?”

“THEY’RE ABOVE YOUR CLEARANCE LEVEL!” George yelled, and floored it, to prove that he was an excellent driver.

Forty-three seconds later, after they managed to crawl out of the car before the river completely flooded it, George shook the water from his cap, and surveyed the farm. “All right, minor setback. No worries, we can commandeer new transportation from the commies. Now we’re going to have to be quiet for this next part. Is this your first nighttime operation?”

“Yes… no! Why are we… what’s the plan? Tell me the plan, first.”

George surveyed the farm, watched the lights bob and point their way. He looked back to Burrows, who seemed even more nervous in the moonlight. Moonligh! That was a problem. “We’re going to have to crawl, Yellow Hat. We’re going to have to crawl up on them. It’ll be a ways, but we don’t have an alternative. Kiss the Earth. Tell it sweet nothings. Hump it like it’s a Tijuana hooker and you don’t have enough to pay her! Drop and give me twenty! Wait no, not that last part. Go down and don’t come back up! Also like a Tijuana hooker!”

Burrows started crying.

“Damn it man!” George shouted. “Stop crying, they’ll hear you!”

Burrows cried harder.

“Relax. I did lots of this in the army,” George said, pulling both his revolvers, then going to his belly on the cold sandy scrub, and scrabbling, all knees and elbows, across the soil. “I spent so much time in Korea doing this sort of thing that they named outposts after me.”

Midway through, they passed a trio of men with flashlights heading toward the wrecked car. George held his breath until they were past, covering them with his revolvers in case they turned, or Burrows fucked it up somehow.

But they didn’t, and George almost felt a sense of sadness as he lowered the guns, and beckoned behind him, shooting hand signals that he made up on the spur of the moment, but were totally intuitive and easily understandable. Then he rose to his full height, and crept the last few hundred feet to the first outbuilding.

It was some kind of animal shed, going by the smell and the shuffling inside. They were awake. Fearful. Would they give him away? He glanced back to check on Burrows, couldn’t find the man in the darkness. They’d used the shade of the structures to crawl up, hide themselves from the moonlight, but now it hindered him as much as it helped.

That was fine, he told himself. He was used to going it alone. Used to nobody else taking things as seriously as he did. He’d just have to show them! Show them all!

*****

Buford Buxley was having a bad night.

It was bad enough that he’d been woken up in the middle of the night by Josh Huxford banging on his door, and telling him that the idiots had burned the power station. But it was worse news, to hear that there’d been a man shot from it.

He’d specifically gone to bed early and unplugged his phone just to have plausible deniability on all of this bullshit, and while he’d expected a few dead Mexicans to come out of it, he certainly hadn’t expected a white man to eat a bullet.

That was a problem. Dead Mexicans weren’t a big deal in Texas, not to a sheriff. That was just the price of doing business, and it was a trade he’d made early and often, mostly with his father’s approval. But a bunch of dead Mexicans PLUS a massive power outage, AND a dead white man? That would make the Dallas papers, and with that loudmouth uppity King fellow preaching some bullshit about equality, somebody might even pretend to care about the migrants and it might even go national.

National meant scrutiny. Scrutiny meant problems. Scrutiny might mean losing his job, or worse, the nice little extra funds he pulled from a variety of different sources to pad his bank accounts and guarantee his ungrateful ex-wives and all their deadbeat kids had nice lives far away from the shithole that was Cooperston, Texas.

So he’d rounded up his posse, all the deputies he could trust to keep their mouths shut, and gone and had a quiet word with a furious Mark Bridger. And he’d gotten enough of the story to understand what he needed to do. Not the full story, not enough to the point where he might have to perjure himself, but enough of an explanation to where he thought he saw the way ahead. And the way ahead lay in getting Steven and Cyrus Colfax into a nice quiet cell, until he could figure out how to blackmail them into signing a confession that would get them sent up the river.

“Fact is,” he’d said to Huxford as they drove out to the Colfax farm, “we probably should have dropped the dime on Bunktown long ago. Border Patrol’s had their peckers up for a good score for months.”

“I mean, Bunktown ain’t never missed a payment,” Huxford said, fiddling with his deputy’s star. “So how was we to know they’d get dumb and snatch kids?”

Buxley snorted. “Nah, they ain’t that dumb. But you know who is? Those chickenfuckers who voted my ass in. Problem is, the rich assholes who sign their paychecks and tell them who to hate are smart. They know that they couldn’t a got through the drought without Bunktown. And if I’d sold them to Border Patrol the rich assholes who needed Bunktown would be tellin’ the chickenfuckers to vote me out, and that would have been that. But now the drought’s over, so the town don’t need ‘em no more is how they see it. And shit, I ain’t gonna call Border Patrol up here for nothing if I don’t have to. Those fuckers are all corrupt and crazy.”

“Goddamn right they are,” said Huxford, who’d helped Buxley bury three women’s corpses in the desert to cover up a local politician’s extracurricular activities.

“Anyway, if that’s how the farmers wanted to play it, fine.” Buxley rolled his eyes. “But they went and got dramatic, and here we fuckin’ are. So listen. We got to settle this without no more drama. If the bleeding heart and his boy don’t wanna come quietly, we ain’t going to make them. Hell, if they want to stand us off with guns, then we back off, we put up a perimeter, and we wait. Because I guarantee you we’re gonna get suits from Dallas coming out to see what the hell happened, and if we got a known drunk and his crazy military son holed up in their farm pointing guns at the law, then they’ll buy whatever story we want to tell’em.”

But when they’d arrived at the Colfax farm, it had been empty. They’d searched, and found nothing save for signs of a hasty evacuation. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it did mean that they’d have to waste a little time and set up a different kind of story.

“Able!” he’d said to one of the patrolling deputies. “Walk with me a ways.” He put his arm around the man’s shoulder, as they went behind the barn. “Need you head back to the evidence locker and get those bags of bolivian marching powder we left off the ledger.”

“Ain’t that stuff for the Senator?” Able whined.

“The Senator will get his nose candy later, he owes me for ignoring those pretty little girls he gets from Border Patrol. Look, just get the stuff, bring it back here, hide it somewheres, and then we’ll find it.”

“Um… why go through all that trouble?” Able asked.

Buxley closed his eyes. Able was usually reliable, but always dumber than an armadillo on a freeway. “So we can say in court that we found it here. Because we will have.”

“Oh. OOOOHHHH say, that’s purty clever!” Able grinned, showing mismatched teeth.

“Just get it done. Now.” Buxley squeezed his shoulder.

Able had gone on his merry way, and Buxley soothed his nerves by getting some shut eye in the Colfax’s porch rocking chair, while his men turned the place upside down. Normally he’d see about trying to pocket a few souvenirs himself, but he knew the Colfaxes were too poor and too honest to have anything worthwhile.

But he hadn’t gotten much sleep.

Something woke him up, and he snorted out of a dead slumber, blinked his eyes to see the deputies gathering to the north, and shining their lights out into the dark.

“What the hell?” he asked, as he got his frame upright, and hitched up his gun belt.

Huxford looked his way. “Car went past a little way back, turned into the scrub. We watched it crash into the river, then the lights went out.”

“Fuck me running. Colfax’s truck?”

“Naw, it was a car.”

And in a split second, Sheriff Buford Buxley connected the dots and drew exactly the wrong conclusion.

“Able got into the shit,” he muttered. That dumbass was trying to drive while all coked up! “Fuck! It’s Able. Go take the boys and see if he’s managed to drown in three feet of water.”

“Sure. Ah, sir? We got a bunch of documents here the Colfaxes left behind. Might be some clues or something useful. The unread stuff’s over there, and the read stuff’s at the end of the porch.”

“Huh, all right,” Buxley found his flashlight, clambered down off the porch, and ambled over to the documents as his three deputies headed out to see if Able was still alive.

The sheriff used the flashlight to read through them, one by one, flipping everything he didn’t find useful to the pile of read stuff. Most of it was old bills, loans, and other things. Most of it was pointless, up until he came to the birth certificates. And there was one in them, that didn’t match the others.

Buxley’s eyebrows raised, as he whistled, and read it again twice, just to make sure. “Well Steven Colfax, you dog… Didn’t think you had it in you.”

Gravel crunched behind him. “About time you got back,” Buxley said. “Hurry up. I found something we need to get back to the station. We can use it to get them cooperative, but I need you to go hide all the read stuff before the feds get here.”

And then a madman shot him. Repeatedly.

*****

“What have you done?” Burrows shrieked.

George lowered his revolvers with trembling hands.

“I’ve killed a commie.” He whispered, and just for a second, he doubted himself. Just for a moment, he watched the shadowed figure twitch and bleed, and wondered if he’d done the right thing.

Only for a second. He knew what he’d heard. And he’d done what he had to. No, there was no room for doubt in George’s heart. No fear. He’d burned that out of himself long ago.

Burrows DID have his doubts. “You’re mad. You’re stark raving… he was LAW ENFORCEMENT!”

“You heard him as clearly as I did!”

“All I heard was boom boom boom! You shot him FROM BEHIND! Oh shit, the smell is…” Burrows slapped a hand over his mouth, ran back, and hurled his guts onto the farmyard.

“Red stuff! He wanted to hide all the red stuff! Red is the color of COMMIES! THAT’S PROOF!” George said, rallying. “HE WAS COVERING UP EVIDENCE!” He gestured at the pile of papers floating to the ground. The pile that was now quite literally red, from the spreading pool of blood. “HE WAS TELLING HIS LACKEYS TO HIDE IT BEFORE THE FEDS GOT HERE!”

But while George was screaming at Burrows, he couldn’t help but notice that those flashlights they’d passed were coming back towards the farm. They were coming pretty fast, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what they’d do once they got here. They were three against two, and Burrows would be no help in a firefight!

He holstered his empty guns, and grabbed Burrows. “Come on man, run! They’re keeping him at the police station! Run!”

The first bullet cracked past him, and that gave Burrows urgency enough to get upright and flee for his life. It was real to him, now.

Half a minute later they were rolling out of there in a stolen police car, and George felt the click of every little piece of fate falling into place.

He would finally be the hero he'd always known he'd become!