I was sitting in my car, parked on J. Rose 35, staring at the long white wall that stretched along the street on my right. It was freezing. The crazy weather had transformed into chilly winds and nasty, drizzling rain again. Inside, I felt just the same way—it was drizzling in my soul, and my guilt was biting. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jill, knowing she was right to hate me.

I glanced at my cell phone. It was almost three in the afternoon, and there had been no movement in the area for more than two hours. Earlier in the day, around noon, I had gone to Napasoq Island to collect my car from the Evidence Department, and then I came right here—to the house of this Menelaus guy, hoping to find anything to help me understand his game. The property seemed deserted, however. I was starting to grow impatient already.

Incidentally, his mansion surprised me quite a lot. I expected to see a whole bunch of people around—bodyguards patrolling up and down the sidewalk with grim faces, earpieces, and holsters under their armpits; various service personnel; lots of vehicles going in and out—but I saw nothing like that. There was absolutely no one outside, and it was quiet. The wall was too high to glimpse inside, but it didn’t seem like life was bustling there either. The property looked just like an ordinary house, and the only whiff of security was a dozen or so cameras on top of the wall’s ledge, pointing in different directions.

Since I had nothing else to do but wait, my thoughts kept returning to the events of the past few days. I wondered why my so-called “clients” were trying so hard to make a mess of my life and why they considered me the right person to take part in their sick plans. My intuition told me Bobby and Sharon were rivals, but unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out their rivalry. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why they kept stuffing my pockets with money.

By the way, despite her lying to me, I was keen to trust Bobby—to a point, at least. She was consistent enough in her actions, and up to the moment, her demands didn’t exceed the standard service I offered to my clients. Sharon, on the other hand, was utterly different. She was definitely plotting against me, and I was so mad that I felt I would strangle her with my bare hands if I saw her again. The bitch was rejecting all my calls, though, and I had completely lost the initiative there. I was afraid that, eventually, I might end up in prison because of her.

Nevertheless, she was an amateur, too. The setup with the cars and stealing the cameras seemed rather improvised. I had no clear idea of what she wanted to achieve, but maybe she and her helper knew about Bobby but didn’t know what she was up to and wanted to counteract her game. It was one possible reason for the theft. However, amateurs or not, they had successfully managed to make my life a living hell, messing me up with the Chinese. It was my main concern now. I really hoped the Asians would never find out my true identity or where I lived because if they did, I would be dead meat.

I wearily reached into the glove box and grabbed the flask of whiskey I held there. I took a small sip and kept thinking. There probably wasn’t much point in my hanging around here all day. In the morning, I looked up Menelaus on the Internet and realized there were too many strange things about his business. His company—Global Transportation Service—had the highest capitalization in Europe and was one of the biggest in the world. Despite that, it was privately owned, and its deals were veiled in secrecy. Why would he give up raising funds in the stock markets, I wondered? Why would he give up fresh money? In the light of this, the thought that the house here might be just a decoy suddenly flashed through my mind. The place’s purpose might have been to make people think there was a trillionaire inside while he lived undisturbed a thousand kilometers away. It certainly made sense with a guy like him, and if it was true, my waiting was totally in vain.

“GTS! Yet another global thing in this stupid global case of mine!” I grunted, taking one more sip of the whiskey. Then I put the flask away. “But maybe that’s how it goes with such big shots. They would do everything to hide their private lives from ordinary people, and it’s only natural. Why would DuPont be any different?”

I yawned and kept thinking. His story was like a fairytale. It painted Greenland as being the new land of infinite possibilities. Some twenty-five years ago, the guy started as a pizza boy. First, he bought a bike to make the deliveries, then a van, and then the pizzeria where he worked. In a few years, he expanded, adding some trucks and gradually acquiring almost the entire delivery business in Godthab. His firm grew bigger and bigger, and eventually, the island became too small for him, so he bought a ship, a few more ships, and a fleet and began transporting things around the globe.

Then the aliens came. Upon arrival, they brought new technologies to Earth, which they shared with us even though we didn’t have much to give in return. The newcomers turned out to be a life form based on ammonia, and although they had no problem surviving in our atmosphere, they didn’t feel entirely comfortable in it. That’s why they created the CSS—the Couloong Space Station—and “accidentally” knocked down our ISS during construction. The latter fell on Earth in the area of the South Pacific, and we never built another one again. Since then, our trade and other relations with the extraterrestrials have been happening on their station.

Incidentally, we don’t need another ISS anymore. One of the new technologies the Couloongs introduced was assembling docking stations. These are electromagnetic tubes that shoot entire railroad compositions into low orbit. At the upper end, loading platforms are attached, from where small cargo ships make their rounds to other platforms or the CSS. Every confederation on Earth has docking stations now, and they effectively sent our old shuttles and rockets into history.

This was actually when Menelaus Henry DuPont stepped up and started thinking big. He was the first to buy a space fleet and start doing commercial rounds between the platforms. Soon, his empire grew so huge that it virtually monopolized the entire trade between Earth and the Couloongs. In the meantime, the guy’s name was regularly associated with scandalous deals involving the export of banned goods and minerals to aliens. That was probably why he transformed his company into a privately owned—to protect his business from governmental regulations as much as possible.

I tiredly checked the time on my cell phone. It was close to three-thirty p.m., and I was almost falling asleep. I grabbed the flask again for a sip but stopped because I had to keep a clear mind. Instead, I just looked thoughtfully at it. It was an original flask of White Bear whiskey. There was a beast upon a floating piece of ice on the logo—both being ghosts from the past now. When I was a child, there were many white bears in Greenland, but presently, there are none. The last one died in the Quaanaaq Zoo almost ten years ago, and many other species, like the arctic fox, hare, and reindeer, followed soon. The climate rapidly changed, and the island was suddenly invaded by weird animals like minks, squirrels, silver rats, and others. They came as if out of nowhere, and many had no natural enemies here—the rats in particular. Very soon, they conquered our land entirely.

“Too many things are changing way too fast. We simply have no time to adapt.” I thought, yawning again, and I raised my eyes just in time to follow one of these creatures outside. A silver rat squeezed out through a small hole in the wall and, after a short hesitation, trotted down the sidewalk. The street was still empty and quiet, and it lingered at the curb for a while. Its fur shone gray with a hint of green at the paws and the tail’s end. It looked disgusting.

The rodent stayed there for a minute or two and then approached the manhole, waving whiskers and sniffing at the cover. It turned around a couple of times to lick the fur on its hips, but at some point, it sharply raised its head to look back and forth, alarmed. After that, the animal unexpectedly beat it. It vanished in a split second, as if dissolving into thin air, and only a moment later, the main gate of Menelaus’ mansion started slowly opening.

I nervously jumped up in my seat. At first, I impulsively grabbed the steering wheel with my left hand and reached out to ignite the engine with the other, but then dove back behind the dashboard. It took almost a minute for the massive gate to open completely and the nose of a black Corvic to crawl out. The car went slowly ahead, but it suddenly stopped when the back bumper passed the gate line. The driver thrust his head out the side window to look back at someone shouting something to him inside the yard. This was actually the moment when I gasped, surprised. The guy was the same one who set me up and stole my Ford at the Red Dragon! I couldn’t believe my eyes. The fucking bastard was probably a regular there, or maybe even worked for DuPont, because they clearly knew him inside.

Seconds later, the jerk waved his hand, pulled his head back, and sharply stomped on the gas, leaving the gate to close behind him. I hardly restrained myself from doing the same—revving up my Beijing and pushing it ahead with hideous tires screeching. Instead, I peacefully started the engine and drove down the street slowly, gradually gaining speed. Inside my chest, my heart was booming wildly.

I caught up with the Corvic after a few blocks without it being too obvious. The car headed east on Carpatine Road and then moved north on Langedoc and Rocketeer Bridge. Half an hour later, we stepped on the First Ring Road and turned east along Aqeenaaq Fjord. The man was a nervous driver, jumping on the brakes and the gas every other minute, so I had to follow him from a safe distance. After another half an hour, we stopped by a filthy motel at the end of a small bay on the outskirts of Nuuk, not far from the Second Ring Road. It was almost five, and the light in the sky was already fading away.

I slowly passed the Corvic, putting on a pair of sunglasses, and then tucked my Beijing in the shadow of an old willow tree a little further down the road. After that, I turned my head to look back. The man didn’t seem to have recognized my car and didn’t even look around to see if he was being tailed. He squeezed himself out of his vehicle, crossed the road, and stopped outside the motel’s office to light a cigarette. Then, he simply moved on and turned around the corner toward the backyard.

I jumped out and ran to the place, approaching the opposite corner—the one closer to me. By that moment, it had completely stopped raining. There was a short alley between the office wall and the motel fence, and when I went through, a vast open space revealed itself behind. I saw a large backyard and about twenty small bungalows arranged in a chessboard manner. Narrow paths connected them to the main building, and the grass between was trimmed low. There were also a few trees here and there. I was just in time to see one of the doors quietly shut.

Cautiously sneaking along the office, I moved toward the opposite end of the yard, trying to keep bungalows between me and my target. After a minute, I approached where the guy entered from the backside. The light in the sky was already too scarce for anyone to notice me. A man and a woman were quietly talking inside, but their voices were too muffled, and I couldn’t grasp a single word.

I nervously wondered what to do. Obviously, there wasn’t much point in me staying here and waiting for the jerk to come out. I knew where he would probably go—back to Menelaus’ house. After a short hesitation, I moved around the corner and stopped at the front door, ready to jump back at the slightest noise inside. The blinds were down, and just a strip of light was trickling out along the windows’ edges. I alertly pressed my ear to the window frame and listened tensely. The suspicion was already eating away at me because the woman’s voice sounded so familiar. It seemed like Sharon’s!

My heart skipped a beat, making me press my ear even harder. I just couldn’t believe my luck. Both the guys I pursued were in there! I kept listening to their conversation, trying to keep an eye on the yard at the same time. In a few minutes, it went completely dark.

“I just don’t know. We should do something about him,” I heard the woman in the bungalow saying.

“I’ll take care of it; don’t you worry,” the man replied. “He won’t suspect anything!”

“It must happen discreetly,” she went on, making me wonder who they were talking about. I was afraid it was me.

“I’ll take care of everything. I’ll make the… and get the dickhead to… “ I couldn’t grasp these lines very well.

There was a short silence in the bungalow for two or three minutes after the last phrase. I could hear only a quiet rattling.

Then I heard Sharon’s voice again. “You have to be careful because the damn sleuth is persistent like a dog. He may eventually get away with it.”

“He won’t,” the man assured her.

“Well, he did the last time!” Sharon replied, irritated.

“I’ll see to it that he doesn’t! He may not even survive until then. The Chinese bastards will probably get to him first!”

This time, a more extended silence followed, accompanied by the strange rattling sound. I wondered what they were doing in there. A couple of minutes later, the rattling became sharper and quicker, and I heard Sharon moaning. The man quietly growled, and he spoke again afterward.

“Is everything ready for the trip? You got the tickets?”

“Everything’s fine,” my ex-client tried to comfort him.

“But you got them, right? We’ll need to disappear immediately!”

“I said everything is fine! Don’t worry. The real challenge will be getting from Orfu to Olosega.”

At the window, I stirred uneasily because I hadn’t heard of such places. The voices were so faint—almost impossible to distinguish—and I feared I had heard wrong. “Maybe they’re talking about Corfu in Greece,” I thought.

“We’ll come up with an idea when we get there,” the man mumbled.

“Okay, be careful! This bastard is getting very annoying now!”

“Leave him to me!” Something that resembled a kiss followed, and suddenly, a highly stressful noise sounded too close to my ear. The door started to open.

At the very last moment, I frantically threw myself behind the corner, pressing my back against the sidewall with my heart booming. Then, I quietly kneeled down to grab a piece of rock from the garden. Although I had my Glock with me, I had left it in the glove box back in the car because I was afraid I would lose the jerk when he vanished into the yard here. It was a stupid mistake, and I was sorry now!

I had just stood back up when I heard the door closing. My body shook with adrenaline, but nothing happened afterward. For about fifteen seconds, which seemed to me like fifteen years, no one came around the corner to shoot me. Eventually, I stepped forward and cautiously peeked out from behind the edge of the bungalow. In the light of the office building, I saw the man turning the corner there. He was oblivious to my presence.

Yet again, I wondered what to do. I waited for almost four minutes for the bitch to come out, but she didn’t. There was no sound from inside the bungalow, and it seemed deserted. Nevertheless, I knew it wasn’t. I dropped the rock in the garden, removed my jacket and shirt, put the jacket back on over my T-shirt, and wrapped the shirt around my right hand. Then I sneaked behind the doorframe. The light inside was still on. With my left hand, I gave two short knocks on the door and listened tensely.

At first, nothing happened. Nothing changed at all, and for a brief moment, I thought somehow I had lost the woman. A few seconds later, however, I heard quiet steps inside, and the door slowly opened. I promptly jumped out from behind the edge and grabbed Sharon behind her neck with my left hand while gagging her mouth with the shirt in my right. She was so surprised that she didn’t even try to scream.

I violently pushed her inside, and just when I was thinking everything was alright and I began to wonder how to make her talk, it all suddenly turned upside down. I felt someone sneak up behind me, and the situation reminded me of the one when I lost my cameras. Now, just like then, I couldn’t react at all. I heard a brief zipping near my right ear, and the world suddenly swirled around me. Before losing consciousness, I only had time to think that lately, the events in my life had started repeating themselves in a very annoying manner, and then I blacked out.

©2016 S.T. Fargo
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(www.stfargo.com)