Highway to Vengeance: A Thomas Highway Thriller (3 page)

The winners get commended. Everyone else
gets berated. More pushups for all but the winners, this time with
feet perched on the boat. Thirty seconds to catch your breath, and
then it’s back into the freezing water. Out, back, out, back, out,
back, out and back again. Ten times. Twenty times. Building
teamwork. Suffering together. Learning to be a SEAL.

Next comes elephant walks. Carrying the raft
at your side. One-mile race. Winners get a thirty-second rest.
Losers get wet and sandy and do more pushups. Then the rafts go
above your head. You race again. This time two miles. More pushups
for the losers. Plus wet and sandy again. The instructors yell at
you that winning is a conscious decision. That you are only losing
because you don’t want to win badly enough. And there’s no room in
SEALs for losers.

Then the boats are at your side again. More
races. Above your head again. More races. Five miles total.

Finally the last evolution of the day
arrives. Log PT. The same six-man boat teams. A 150 pound telephone
pole for each team. Start with log presses. Lift. Right shoulder.
Over the head. Left shoulder. Back over the head. Right shoulder
again. Set down. Repeat twenty times.

Running up and down the twenty-foot high
sand hills, carrying the logs over your heads. Up, down, up, down.
Thirty times, maybe more. Then log pushups. Fifty of them. Then log
races. Winners get a break. Losers head over to Ol’ Misery for
punishment. Four-hundred and fifty pounds worth of telephone pole.
Ten log presses to warm up. Then the instructor cuts you a break,
tells you in order to get back to your little log, you just have to
extend Ol’ Misery over your heads for 45 seconds. You get it up,
barely, and hold it there. Shoulders burning, arms quivering,
wrists screaming. Every second seems like an hour, a day, a week, a
year, but you’re almost done. Just five seconds left. Then one man
gives out and the log slips down. The instructor shakes his head
and mockingly tells you how close you were. Back to the beginning.
You repeat the log presses. Five more. Then another attempt at 45
seconds. This time you make it. Head back to your own log. More
presses, more races, more yelling, more punishment, more pain.
Always more pain. No way to prepare. Like a kick in the balls, you
just have to suck it up. Put out for just one more second.
Continually.

Finally the day is over. It’s 2PM. Eleven
hours of constant exertion and your body is screaming in pain. Legs
chaffed. Skin burned. Hands bleeding, torn raw. Muscles jell-o.
Lower back knotted and barking. You want to just curl into a ball,
sleep for a week. And then the instructor reminds you that this is
only the first day. You still have five months, three weeks, and
four days until graduation. And no day is going to be as easy as
this one just was. But you can’t think about that. You have to take
it one day, one evolution, one minute, one second at a time. It’s
the only way to survive. You can do it. You will do it. You live
for this shit. Bring on tomorrow. You can’t wait.

Welcome to BUD/S. Hooyah.

CHAPTER
THREE

Almost exactly 72 hours after my wife was
murdered, I found myself sitting alone in front of the eight-foot
long, four-foot wide, six-foot deep, still-uncovered rectangular
hole that held Josie’s coffin, and inside that, her body.

Every waking minute since Josie’s death had
been hell, but the previous two hours I felt like I’d been residing
in the ninth circle. Wave after unending wave of anonymous faces
offering up hollow words of regret, apparently oblivious to the
uselessness of their words.

Neither the speakers nor the words uttered
to me mattered in the least, but I nodded my thanks to every
concerned individual, going through the motions of courtesy that
were expected of a grieving husband, the whole time wishing I’d had
the balls to not even show up. It’s not like Josie would have
cared. She knew how much I loved her; hell, chances are she
wouldn’t even have wanted me to come watch her suffer the indignity
of being put under the ground forever.

But come I did, and suffer through the
process I had, sitting in my little plastic chair while everyone
around me pretended like they shared my pain.

I knew better.

Nobody here shared my pain.

They might tell me that they were sorry,
that they felt terrible, or that it was such a horrible accident,
but what they were really thinking was, ‘Thank God it wasn’t my
spouse.’ I could see it in their eyes, plain as day, when they
didn’t know I was looking. I could hear it in their voices, loud
and clear, even though they did their best to hide it.

But that was all right. I didn’t blame them
for thinking these things; in fact, if the situation was reversed,
I’d be thinking them myself. It was just human nature.

The important thing was that the whole
process was now over, which meant I could go to work on hunting
down the men responsible for her murder without any further
distractions.

I looked up and saw Willis standing a few
feet to my right, waiting silently, his huge frame towering over
me. He had a briefcase in his right hand. I waved him over.

He set his briefcase on the ground and sat
down next to me, the cheap plastic chair groaning and bowing under
his weight. For a moment, I thought the damn thing was going to
break. But it held. For the time being, at least.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” Willis
said.

“Positive.”

“All right. Well, unfortunately, everything
I found about Mr. Russo points to him being a decent, upstanding
member of society who runs a completely legitimate business.”

“No scrutiny at all from the law?”

“Not even a blip,” Willis said. “Hell, even
word on the street is non-existent when it comes to this guy. Of
course, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not dirty, it just means
he’s good at hiding it if he is. So then the question becomes; is
he hiding something?”

“And the answer?”

“Without a doubt.”

“Based on what?”

“Based on every single aspect of Russo’s
operation being absolutely perfect,” Willis said. “Everything from
his books to his bank accounts to his tax records are completely
spotless. There’s not one thing that’s even slightly out of
place.”

“That doesn’t sound very incriminating to
me.”

“Oh, but it is,” Willis said. “Nobody keeps
their books that clean unless they’re trying to hide
something.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me
that Russo’s so clean, he has to be dirty?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,”
Willis said.

My face must have reflected my disbelief, as
Willis began to elaborate without being prompted.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve investigated
thousands of guys like Russo over the years and even ones that turn
out to be legitimate almost always have something going on
somewhere that’s not on point. A typo here, a little mistake there,
something. But this Russo guy has nothing out of place, absolutely
nothing.”

“And you think that means he’s trying to
hide something,” I said.

“I don’t
think
he’s trying to hide
something,” Willis said. “I know he is. And not only that, but
whatever he’s into, I guarantee he’s not going at it alone.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Killing that kid in his own jail cell and
making it look like a suicide? That takes some serious juice. If
Russo had that kind of pull, I would have heard about it during my
investigation.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So who do you think
he’s working with?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Willis said. “But
based on everything we know, my guess is a Mexican drug cartel,
maybe some high-level human traffickers, someone like that. But
whoever it is, they’re no doubt some heavy hitters, so be sure to
step lightly.”

“Come on Willis, give me a little credit. I
can step lightly when I need to.”

Willis laughed and clapped me on the back of
the shoulder, practically dislocating it. “I know,” he said. “I’m
just making sure your head’s in the right place.”

“Always, my friend. Always.”

“Then on that note, take a look at this.”
Willis pulled a manila folder file out of his briefcase and put it
in my lap.

“What’s in here?” I said.

“A bunch of info on Russo. I figured even
though I didn’t find anything concrete, you’d still want to have a
little talk with him, so I went ahead and got some personal
information on the man. A couple of recent pictures, home address,
business address, make and license of his vehicles, plus a couple
of other nuggets I thought might be helpful.”

Willis grabbed the file, flipped through the
pages. He pulled one out and handed it to me. “Like this one, for
example.”

I read over it. It was a summary of the
specs on Russo’s house. He lived in an 1800 square-foot, one-story
house with four bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms, an attached
garage and a wine cellar. Hardwood floors. Master Lock deadbolts
throughout. And most importantly for my purposes:

“No alarm system,” I said.

“Nope,” Willis said. “Apparently, Mr. Russo
feels like his gated community offers him enough protection.”

I laughed. Willis joined me.

“I guess my master criminal theory just took
another hit,” I said.

“Just a little one,” Willis said. “And on
top of everything else, Russo lives alone.”

“No family at all?”

Willis shook his head. “His kids are all
grown up and his wife divorced him four years ago. He doesn’t even
have any pets.”

“What about a girlfriend?” I asked,
half-joking.

“He’s got a little something on the side,
but nothing serious,” Willis said, taking the question at face
value, oblivious to my lack of sincerity. “He always meets her
somewhere else. Not once has she ever come back to his place.”

I chuckled softly, impressed as usual. It
was impossible to overestimate Willis, he was that good.

“How did you get all this stuff?”

Mimicking my earlier tone perfectly, he
said, “Come on, man, give me a little credit. I’m an investigator.
I can find stuff when I need to.”

“You’re hilarious,” I said. “But I’m
serious. The level of detail is insane.”

Willis shrugged. “What can I say? I’m damn
good at what I do.”

“You can say that again.”

He opened his mouth to do so but I gave him
a look and shook my head. He smiled and shut his mouth without
repeating the comment. I laughed under my breath and dove into the
folder he’d given me.

I took a couple minutes to flip through the
rest of the pages. There was lots of good stuff in there, too much
to take it all in right now. I closed the folder, left it sitting
on my lap. “What about the other parts of the equation?”

“All taken care of,” Willis said. “The rest
of the items you’ll need are waiting at your crash pad, along with
your new car. We’ll head over there right now.”

“Let’s go.”

CHAPTER FOUR

We made our way through the streets of
downtown San Diego and into the warehouse district just east of the
home of the San Diego Padres, Petco Park.

The state-of-the-art ballpark was the jewel
of the recently renovated downtown San Diego, and once completed it
had drastically raised the prices of the surrounding area,
especially in the warehouse district.

I knew that Willis had owned a number of the
buildings prior to Petco being built, but I’d always assumed he’d
sold them all for a healthy profit after the ballpark was
completed.

Apparently not.

We turned into an alley at the end of one of
the streets and stopped behind one of the few warehouses that
hadn’t been renovated into a newer-looking building. We climbed out
of the car and headed towards a door in the side of the building.
Willis unlocked the door and we stepped into complete darkness.

He flipped on the lights, revealing a large,
surprisingly well-maintained warehouse, nearly empty, save for a
few stacks of boxes piled up in the far corner of the building.

The walls were brick all the way to the
ceiling. There wasn’t a single window. Or a piece of furniture. Or
anything else that led me to believe that I could actually live
here for any extended period of time.

“You expect me to crash here?”

Willis sized me up. “Where did you think I
was going to set you up? A high-rise apartment with a view of the
harbor? Maybe a maid service and a personal chef?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But I was
expecting something a little bit . . .”

“Nicer?”

I shrugged. “Not necessarily nicer. Just
more conventional, I guess. Someplace with some actual furniture,
or, you know, maybe a bed.”

“Listen to you, all domesticated and shit.
Less than three years removed from the SEALs and you’ve already
gone all soft on me. What the hell happened to you, Highway? You
used to be the man.”

My anger spiked. I turned my head, gave him
a glare.

Willis laughed and wrapped a massive arm
around me, engulfing me in a bear hug. “I had you going there for a
second, didn’t I?”

“More than a second,” I said, struggling to
dissolve my anger. “I was about to go toe-to-toe with you.”

“That was the whole idea; I was trying to
get your blood flowing. You seem a bit out of it. And I know you’ve
been through a lifetime worth of bullshit over the past couple of
days, but if you’re intent on going after these guys starting
tonight, you’ve got to be running on all cylinders. Otherwise
they’ll turn you into dog meat.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be
fine. I’m just saving up my rage for a more useful time.”

“As long as you got it wired, that’s all
that matters.”