A Billion Ways to Die

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Authors: Chris Knopf
in front of me and the rear door opened. I stepped in without hesitation and the truck sped off. The interior smelled new and it was appointed like a luxury car. The driver was a pale Anglo guy with a buzz cut and sunglasses. The guy in the passenger seat was thin, Hispanic, with long unkempt hair and an oily pretense of a beard. Also in sunglasses.
    No one spoke.
    Back in the coffee shop, Natsumi followed our progress on her iPad, linked up with the GPS in my smartphone. In her camera was a clear enough image of the SUV to make out the license plate. Nothing on the men, since the windows were tinted and highly reflective of the brilliant Floridian day.
    Not long after we pulled into an alley. The Hispanic man got out and walked away, fast. I stayed in the backseat as we continued on. The driver was cautious and deliberate, his eyes constantly scanning the environments we moved through. In the face of the larger peril, it made me feel secure.
    We crossed a bridge, drove into an affluent enclave and stopped at an iron gate. The driver punched a code into the keypad and the gate opened for us. The home inside the walls was all glass and steel. The driver frisked me with exceptional thoroughness, though I got to keep my clothes on. Then he brought me to a side entry that opened into a large space with twelve-foot, floor-to-ceiling window walls, an intimate seating area and a grand piano.
    At the piano the general was improvising around a Duke Ellington classic. Quite artfully. The driver left me standing there to wait out the performance. I spent the time looking out the giant windows at the sailboats sliding across the blue water and the row of South Beach hotels rising like a citadel above the opposite shore.
    He reached a logical break point in the song and turned to me.
    “Do you play?” he asked, in English.
    “Not a note.”
    “The piano kept me alive when I first got here from Cuba. I stay in practice, just in case.”
    “Seems prudent.”
    He wore a collarless black linen shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, white linen pants tied at the waist and bare feet. His two-day growth of beard was silvery white, matching his hair. He stood up and pointed to a pair of love seats, the only seating in the room. We sat across from each other, the general with his feet tucked up beneath him in a modified Lotus position, mine firmly on the ground.
    “Do you have a back-up plan?” he asked. “Should your career buying and selling information turn sour?”
    “I crewed on a sailboat for a couple days recently. That could work.”
    “My brother and I paddled here in a canoe. Destroyed any desire to be out on the open water.”
    “Does he work with you?”
    “He’s dead. The result of working with me.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Me, too. Most of what I do is perfectly legal, depending on how you read the law. Unfortunately, every country seems to have a different interpretation. Applied according to the interests of the moment.”
    “I need to locate a Latino mercenary who was part of a specific operation on a specific date and time. I don’t know if it was legal.”
    “That’s what you want to learn?”
    “No. That’s important, to some degree, but I need more basic information.”
    “Such as?” he asked.
    “Who the mercenary was working for.”
    “To what end?”
    “That’s a private matter,” I said.
    He put his fingertips together in a prayerful gesture, gazing off to the side, as if to better hear his internal dialogue. Though physically robust—slender and clear-eyed—he looked weary, as if warding off an irresistible lassitude.
    “Of course,” he said. “Tell me what you know of this Latino mercenary, and I’ll see what I can learn.”
    I described our capture and interrogation, including as much detail as I could remember, not knowing which particular would be the most useful in his search. I left out the substance of my conversations with Alberta and her colleague, which he surely

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