I regained consciousness just a few seconds later. The people who cried hadn’t even approached me when the darkness started tearing apart, and rays of bright sunlight pierced through the ragged holes. I hesitantly rose, sitting on the ground. I was still in the parking space, and there was no trace of Marty Cork or Bobby’s car.

“Hey, mister, you okay?” I heard the voices again.

I looked around. There was just one guy—a native Indian man—but weirdly enough, I heard him double.

“Yeah, I think so,” I muttered, surprised that I heard my voice double too. “I’m from the police. I need you to show me the room of the woman who just ran away in that car.”

The guy eagerly nodded his head. He also wanted to call the ambulance, but I decisively stopped him. Firstly, I knew it would take them a whole month until they came, and secondly, I didn’t want to make a news headline out of myself. It was the last thing I needed right now.

Before we headed to the room, I looked around for what Marty had been looking for. A Luger MML—point-three positron—was lying in the ditch between the driveway and the fence. It wasn’t a wise idea to take it because I had no permit for it, and I also didn’t know how many people Cork had killed with it, but I grabbed it anyway. Obviously, I needed a good weapon, and it was just the perfect piece.

Bobby’s room turned out to be on the third floor, facing the street, just as I had presumed earlier. I had difficulty climbing up the stairs because my hip hurt terribly, but the good news was it wasn’t broken—just bruised. I clenched my teeth and kept walking. When we got to the room, I asked the guy to give me a few minutes alone, and he agreed, saying he would be downstairs if I needed him. Indigenous people on the island of Tutuila are actually so charmingly naive! Then he left, and I stepped inside.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to look at in the room. No personal belongings grabbed my eye except for a few articles of clothing in the wardrobe and a small suitcase with some women’s beauty inventory in it. I had no time to waste here, so I hastily searched the pockets of the clothes, finding nothing interesting, and then checked the nightstand drawers. There was nothing again. Since the woman had suddenly abandoned her room, she had no time to gather her stuff. However, when I kneeled to look under the bed, I saw something shiny on the floor beside the right nightstand. It was a silver memory stick, and I took it.

The entire accident in this motel seemed very weird, in fact. It literally changed everything in my head because when Bobby set me up so ruthlessly back in Greenland, I thought she was in the game with Marty and Sharon. The current situation implied something completely different, though. Marty was definitely after Bjornson to kill her down in the yard, and besides, I could see burn holes from the Luger here in the wooden door, too. Plus, the memory stick advocated that she wasn’t expecting the bastard—she wouldn’t have ditched it on the floor if she hadn’t been surprised. So even if they had been together in this before, it wasn’t the case anymore.

I thoughtfully put the memory into my pocket, quickly assuring myself nothing was hidden under the sofa cushions or behind the nightstands and the wardrobe. Then I left the room because I had to hurry. I needed to do a few urgent things before the end of the day.

I briskly walked down to the ground floor, quietly crossing the reception hall without calling the receptionist, who was watching TV in the small service room behind the desk. Then I hurried to my car. All the while, I prayed Marty hadn’t crippled the vehicle—it would have been easy enough since the Ford was a wreck anyway—but the bastard had missed his chance to do so. He probably wanted to follow Bobby as quickly as possible. I started the engine and drove down the road to Pago Pago as fast as gas technology could deliver, and on my way, I connected the memory stick to my phone to check up on its contents.

I found only three folders inside. The first seemed full of technical specifications for an autonomous temperature support system. There were many pictures and charts, and as far as I gathered, the idea was to keep materials from cooling down—at least, the graphs representing various timelines in case of malfunction implied so. However, the texts were too complicated, and I couldn’t pay enough attention to read them because I was driving.

The second folder was also devoted to technical specifications. The files described asbestos jackets, and I presumed they would be used to isolate the stuff in the containers from the environment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite sure because I didn’t have the proper education to understand them. In any case, there seemed to be something terribly wrong with the entire concept here. Since ammonia has a boiling temperature of minus thirty-three degrees Celsius, the containers were supposed to work the other way around—keeping the stuff inside cold, not preventing it from cooling down. Unless, of course, my presumption was entirely wrong, and it wasn’t about ammonia but something else. Nevertheless, I was sure it was about that. It had to be because, on this island, everything revolved around this substance!

The third folder turned out to be almost empty. I found only a few pictures inside, which backed up the idea I had already picked up from checking the other two. There was a boat in the photos—a pretty old and rusty cargo vessel—with a weird sign above the bridge. I couldn’t distinguish it well because of the perspective, but it looked like a few blue balls and some letters. Fortunately, the ship’s name was recognizable enough. It read Southern Star on its bow, and most likely, it was supposed to carry the containers described in the previous folders.

I disconnected the memory stick and put it back in my pocket, thinking. Despite working together in the past, Marty, Sharon, and Bobby were obviously splitting now and competing in whatever they tried to achieve. Bobby engaged Southern Star for her plans, and Marty did the same with Mountain Cougar. After Menelaus’ death, Bjornson was clearly trying to accomplish his idea, and it was probably why Cork followed her here and tried to kill her—he wanted her out of his way. As I thought about it, I suddenly felt sorry for her. Despite everything my little female mantis had done to me, I didn’t want her to fall victim to the sick bastard.

I nervously stepped on the gas and drove the last few kilometers to Pago Pago even faster than the car’s capabilities, pushing it to the limit. It was still six in the afternoon, but I didn’t know when a typical workday ended on the island, so I had to hurry. When I reached the harbor, I stopped with tires screeching, almost crushing in the carts of a few Chinese, and leaped out of the Ford, waving my magical police badge. It immediately produced the desired effect. Then, I quickly followed my usual course past the guy with the oysters, catching up with Spit Master seconds after he had hopped onto his ship but before beating it into the sea.

“Hey!” I shouted loudly. “We talked yesterday. I have the stuff now, and you have the boat. Let’s make a deal!”

The guy turned around to look at me, and upon recognizing my face, he rolled his eyes. I had just one shot to grab his attention and no time. I had to show exceptional business flair.

“Listen, I know you’re not a fan of me, and I’m not a fan of you either! Yet, business is business, and I urgently need two hundred tons of my stuff transferred to Ofu. I also have an overload of five grand in universal currency. So what do you say? Are you interested?”

He slowly took a step toward me and then jumped down.

“Twelve grand!” he announced when he came closer.

“Hey, hey, five grand, universal, is big!” I tried to bring him down from the clouds. “Let’s say seven, then!”

The funny thing was I actually had no problem giving him the entire monetary reserve of all the Chinese states combined, but I wanted to make a plausible businessman out of myself, and I had to be stingy.

“Transport your stuff yourself!” He roared angrily and made to turn around.

“Okay, stop!” I grabbed him by his elbow. “What about ten grand? It’s a good compromise. Don’t be an asshole about it!”

He looked at me for a brief moment while thinking.

“When do you want it done?” he asked me, visibly satisfied.

I remained silent for a while, calculating. I assumed that when Marty met the guy earlier in the afternoon, he negotiated in advance, and he didn’t have his stuff ready yet, so I picked randomly after the weekend.

“What about in three days? Is Monday okay?” I looked at the boatman, closely examining his face.

“Okay!” He nodded.

I puckered my lips, irritated. “Okay” was generally an okay answer, but this particular time, it didn’t work for me. I expected to hear a refusal!

“You won’t be able to do it all at once, will you?” I asked hesitantly.

“No, of course not. Four courses—fifty tons each. It’s two and a half grand per course!” He suddenly frowned, calculating the individual price because he thought I was backing out of the deal.

“Look, money’s no problem,” I was quick to soothe his suspicion, “but the shipping is. Could you do four dates consecutively, at least?”

He looked at me weirdly. “I can do it the same fucking day! Don’t you have your stuff ready? Didn’t you say your supplier’s ship was too big?” He glared at me with disgust. “Why would he want to ping-pong back and forth with his holds half-empty?”

“It’s complicated, okay?” I snapped. “Can I have your service for three or four days in a row or not?”

“Okay,” he said, spitting on the ground, annoyed.

I nearly exploded with suppressed rage when I heard his next “okay.” Now, I had to start “producing” ammonia wildly in order to fill his monthly schedule and hit a busy date!

“Just a sec!” I grunted, drawing away and simulating a phone call with my contractor. After a minute, I went back to him.

“Okay, we have a deal! One last thing, though. We should start the day after tomorrow.”

It was actually quite a long shot. I couldn’t know what Marty was thinking, but I doubted he made plans for the end of the next week or later. If the day after tomorrow was good, too, then the bastard probably wanted to do it tomorrow or even tonight.

The boatman glared at me and lowered his head to spit on the ground again.

“The day after tomorrow’s no good,” he said curtly.

“Well, okay.” I sighed with relief. “Then I’ll meet you the day after!”

Over the next few minutes, we quickly arranged some bullshit details, and during that time, my main concern was whether he would ask for an advance payment or not. Fortunately, he didn’t say a word about it, which saved me the effort of making a fool of myself again. I presumed I would “pay” him on the day of the course—before we left.

When we finished the negotiations, I turned around, anxious to skip shaking hands with him, and hurried to the far end of the harbor. I had another urgent business meeting to take care of. Soon, I found the guy who owned Saranya-82 and told him I couldn’t make it tomorrow at dawn, as we had agreed. I asked for a delay of twenty-four hours, and he wasn’t happy about the idea, but when I offered him seventy-five bucks instead of fifty, his face shone. Unlike Spit Master, he was easy to deal with!

After finishing there, I sighed with relief again and headed to my hotel, dreaming about a long drink from the 3D printer in my room. I had had an unusually successful day! Not only had I arranged everything for my trip to Ofu and found a trace of the Greenland trio I was looking for, but I also came into possession of a good positron weapon. In this train of thought, maybe it was a good idea to try it before using it, but I didn’t know how. The problem was that positron charges tend to go through walls quite easily, and it’s dangerous to fire them in urban areas. It had to happen in a special shooting range for positron guns, where I simply couldn’t go because I had no license for the Luger. The other option was to try it somewhere in nature, but I didn’t have enough time. Things weren’t as simple as they were in the twentieth century anymore! Nevertheless, I needed to find a solution soon because I really didn’t want to learn how to use the gun the hard way.

©2016 S.T. Fargo
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED!
(www.stfargo.com)