Acts of Nature

call from some contact, set up a meet at an obscure diner somewhere, and went over a plan. The only advantage now was the way things like the shooting in Venezuela seemed to disappear. When you do work for the corporations, matters like a few dead paramilitary smudges in the outback can disappear under the heap of more “important” and income-producing affairs. Harmon had rented this place because it was cheap and he could pocket the rest of the expense like he’d done with the extra forty grand he’d split with Squires from their latest trip. He knew Crandall would never ask for verification. It was a corner space in an old-style strip shopping center. The east wall was theirs alone. The west wall they shared with a Chinese restaurant and take-out place. Every time the Chang Emporium brought an exterminator in to spray, the cockroaches and monster-sized palmetto bugs would migrate through the cracks to Harmon’s side of the wall. The infestation had scared away two receptionists already but Harmon didn’t care. He just went ahead and pocketed her salary as well and never bothered with a replacement. It wasn’t as if they were busy.
    “I ain’t racist. I like the black folk just fine,” Squires grumbled from the back. “Least they ain’t so stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight.”
    Last time they’d been sent out to do a security check on one of GULFLO’s Gulf rigs he and Squires were doing a routine search of the worker’s lockers, pawing through their personal stuff, knowing from years of experience what to look for. These guys were never too creative when it came to hiding their dope—the meth that kept them going at the dangerous and boring-as-hell jobs they held, the coke that gave them something to dream about, and the downers to keep them level enough not to lose an arm in the drill works. One day Squires came up with a handful of some kind of animal teeth the size of a tiger’s all strung out on a leather cord.
    “Pop the tops!” he’d told the big Cajun rigger whose foot- locker he was searching.
    “Don’t know what you askin’, me?” the old roughneck said, staring into Squires’s eyes like a dare.
    Squires had seen all manner of hiding places for the worker’s chemical stashes including the one like this where they hollowed out the bones they used as jewelry, filled them with cocaine, and then capped them with a silver attachment that looped onto a chain or cord to form a kind of necklace.
    “You carrying a little nose powder here, boy?” he said to the pair of unblinking, swamp green eyes.
    The man just spat a string of tobacco juice to the side but when Squires selected the largest tooth on the string and started twisting at the clasp, the dark-skinned rigger raised his right hand as if to wipe the spittle from his chin and then in a blur of movement and a spin of elbow so quick it caught Harmon flat-footed, the man had stepped chest to chest with Squires and had a blade to his neck.
    “You don’t touch a man’s prayer beads, you, less you preparin’ to bleed,” the rigger said through his clenched teeth, and Harmon was amazed to see the bundle of teeth back in its owner’s possession.
    But there was no hint of fear in Squires’s face, even as the knife edge pressed hard against his jugular. The Cajun seemed only mildly baffled by the security man’s stoic response until everyone in the silent bunkhouse heard the muffled snick of a gun hammer being cocked and the rigger must have felt the hollowed pipe of an HK Mk23 special ops handgun muzzle being pressed up into the rounded notch at the bottom of his breastbone. During the man’s pirouette, Squires had come up with his own practiced sleight of hand.
    “You might cut me, boy. But I’ll blow your heart through a hole out your back before you see a drop of my blood hit the floor,” Squires whispered.
    They stood eye to eye for three seconds and an eternity before the rigger finally backed off.
    “Ain’t no powder in these,” he said, holding the teeth out. “You look yourself. I ain’t no doper, me.”
    Now Harmon was shaking his head at the memory, looking across the office at the back of Squires’s computer. They’d found plenty of stash that trip but not in the tiger teeth. Squires had been wrong on that one account, but almost before the incident was over it was if he’d already forgotten it. That was the beauty of the guy. No memory, no conscience.
    Blessed are the forgetful, some old philosopher once