Money Land Read online

  Money Land

  By

  R.S. Guthrie

  Copyright © 2012 by R.S. Guthrie

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The entire world presented here is completely fictional, as are its characters, events, departments, legends, historical references, and other details. Any resemblance to actual incidents or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art: Alexander von Ness (nessgrapica.com)

  To my mother,

  who wanted to

  “be a writer.”

  You were, Mom.

  A damn fine one.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Preface

  I don’t normally write a preface to my books, but I recently had a reader pick up the second book in a series and read it first. She loved the story but felt she would have enjoyed it more had she known the history of the returning characters better. I thought that was fair—once a writer has eight or nine books in a series, perhaps the need to inform the reader they are picking up book number four or five becomes less important, but when there are only two or three in the series, I decided it would be the proper thing to do to let you, the reader (or potential reader) know that this is the second in the James Pruett Mystery/Suspense series, so if you haven’t read the first one (Blood Land), you might consider it.

  I do my best to give enough background story in any “series” book that a reader should be okay if they haven’t read the prior book(s), but I wanted to respect the woman who took the time to comment enough to put this preface in book number two of this series.

  In fact, my editor, Russell Rowland, told me that Alfred Hitchcock distinguished Mysteries by two different styles. The first was the traditional “whodunnit”. From page one the reader had no idea who the bad guy or gal was. I likened that to a boardgame of Clue. The second style he deemed “Suspense”. That would be where you pretty much knew (or thought you knew) who did what, but it was the getting there and the twists along the way that made the read a good one.

  I tend to write the latter. I love twists. I also love putting something right in the reader’s face and daring them to believe otherwise. Because of this, however, I do work hard to make each book in a series capable (hopefully) of standing on its own as best it can.

  For me, as a reader—and being a character-driven author—it is the relationships I develop with returning protagonists, ancillary characters, villains, etc. that make me want to read the books in order.

  Whatever your preference, I certainly hope you enjoy Money Land as much as I enjoyed writing it. Cheers.

  Rob (R.S.) Guthrie, 2012

  “Well, I am no thief,

  but a man can go wrong

  when he's busted

  The food that we canned last summer

  is gone and I'm busted

  The fields are all bare

  and the cotton won't grow,

  Me and my family

  got to pack up and go,”

  Ray Charles, Busted

  Chapter 1

  MARK COULEE sat in the cramped, sweltering office in the near-deserted airport outside Tempe, Arizona, lines of sweat mixing with fear mixing with a sad feeling of complete bewilderment. A scorpion scuttled across the open, filthy floor, making a break for some kind of freedom until Mark stomped on it with his boot. The pattern of insides and scorpion blood formed a design that looked like the Star of David and Mark thought for a moment about his father.

  His dad had been a sometimes-practicing Jew who was what most people call a hardworking man, which meant he spent the bulk of his life working for a company that could not have cared less about who he was, what his dreams might be, how beautiful and loving his wife was, or what was really going on inside his head. He lined the pockets of the corporate executive pigs and all the stockholders and then was laid off unceremoniously without pension, severance, or self-respect.

  Mark’s dad committed suicide. He shot himself through the temple with a .22 pistol he’d never fired before the day he left the world and he did it in a place and time when Mark, then seventeen, would find him lying in a surprisingly trifling pool of blood, the lesser caliber slug having caromed around inside his head like a tiny pinball.

  He’d never been particularly proud of Mark even though Mark had managed to pull good enough grades to get into any college he wanted and had won several full academic scholarships.

  Mark wondered how it was a man woke up one day and found his life resembling that of someone completely different than he set out to be. Perhaps that was the day a man considered turning a gun he’d never fired once in his entire life on himself.

  No, that was NOT the day. Mark had already faced that day—the day his company laid him off—and he’d not considered committing suicide (later when he pondered the “why?” he just figured he got his will to live from his mother).

  But he’d considered since then that he ought to have killed himself that day; instead Mark was now a man who he’d never dreamed he could become; a man he no longer recognized when he walked past a mirror; and a man who harbored thoughts of things he’d never imagined before all this. It wasn’t a physical or psychological condition by any stretch. It wasn’t depression, or low self-esteem, or unfulfilled expectations. He was on the wrong side now. A lawbreaker. To put it in terms of the old Westerns Mark watched alone as a child: he was one of the “bad guys” now. And he worked for even worse people—people that made “bad guys” seem like pretty good catches. Evil men. Heartless men who Mark was certain had no souls—not that they’d once had them and lost them along the way. Men who’d been born soulless and cruel and remorseless.

  Of course Mark believed he no longer had a soul either, at least not one worth saving. He believed he had one to begin with. He’d never been a religious man, but he believed in God, and he figured that there were things God forgave, but he also believed there had to be a line, and that he’d very likely crossed it, if not by his own actions and deeds then by proxy of those for whom he hired out his pilot services.

  Mark swathed his entire face and head with his forearm. The sweating was relentless, as if it came from a faucet. Down his face, underneath his clothing, all the way down into his boots. He hated the heat of Arizona; hated it so much that he’d promised himself a hundred times that the next person who said the words “dry heat” would get a shiv in the eye.

  He stank. He’d not showered in three days because he’d not gotten out of bed in three days due to the stress from what was going down. Much worse than how he smelled, of course, was the person he had become. Most would call him a drug-runner. Or a money-runn
er. Mark wasn’t sure there was really any difference and both might appear on the sheet of charges as they were read in a court of law. He didn’t think there was really much of a distinction. One turned into the other and back again and Mark would fly whatever they wanted him to fly anyway, wherever they wanted him to fly it. It wasn’t as if he had the courage to ask them something as bold as “what are you asking me to fly today?” and he certainly didn’t have the balls to deny them, no matter what it happened to be.

  Normally it was money. Mark flew millions of dollars of large bills north to Canada to be laundered and then back into the United States in smaller denominations and clean of all wrongdoing—from the accountant’s perspective anyway. Mark of course knew the money represented a relentless flow of terrible narcotics into his own country (among others) and contributed to far worse crimes, a truly inconceivable amount of death and harm and addiction, even to children.

  But he’d crossed the line in need of money.

  Could the answer be so simple? Had he sold his soul for the almighty dollar? He and God both knew the answer to that one. Nearly all men sold their soul to that beast at some point. That was practically the definition of a career (though Mark didn’t kid himself that what he’d succumbed to was far, far worse than drudging to a job he hated and dying without having accomplished the things he’d set out to do in life).

  And the irony was that the young Mark Coulee had accomplished all he’d set out to do. And he had not done it with any sort of intent at all to end up a common criminal. He completed Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola at the top of his squadron, served two tours in both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, made his twenty years for military retirement with distinction, accepted a coveted position as a pilot for a major airline—and he had not done all that with the intent to one day fly illegal goods for the Sustantivo drug cartel from the heat-baked desert of god-forsaken Arizona across the country and over the border into Canada.

  Or had he? Was that the path that had always been laid before him and he just didn’t know it? Could God be so cavalier and cruel? He wasn’t even forty yet and his life had disintegrated before him as a dried leaf left too long in the arid heat. Laid off from the airline despite his unquestionably stellar record and reputation as a pilot—one of the best in their large-liner fleet, in fact—because seniority was all that mattered. While Captain Mark Coulee was risking his life overseas for his country, three-quarters of the pilots back home had gone straight from college into flight training programs and began racking up what would later amount to the coup de grace to excellent flyers like Mark:

  Years on the job. Mark had never realized the seniority policy even existed until it sucker-punched him. Why would a company keep someone simply based on time and not skill?

  After his layoff, his wife promptly left him. There were no other similar pilot prospects, not in the current economy, and Marla enjoyed the life of a pilot’s wife too much: the steady money, the house they couldn’t afford, the ability to spend what he earned while he was gone, her substantial time alone to choose carefully whom she would screw behind his back. Thank God they’d never had children; thank God Mark didn’t have to worry about explaining his terrible plummeting from grace to them one day.

  Oh, and Marla didn’t just leave him either; she cleaned out the accounts. The house was already tits up, the Mercedes and Land Rover months behind in their lease payments, the credit cards run up to their limits.

  Destitute. Him, a heralded naval aviator, a decorated war veteran, a hard-working, moral, successful man. Ruined. Pushed to the brink. Run down, run over, and nearly run into an early grave like his old man. For the first time in his life he really had no idea what his next move might be.

  Until his best friend dialed him up on the phone. His best friend who flew for a different major carrier after leaving the military but had fallen out of contact with Mark over the past few years.

  Samuel Jenkins.

  Sammy.

  Sammy talked Mark out of the bottle of scotch into which he’d lowered himself to dull reality and he did it quite easily, actually: by dangling an opportunity to make real money. A shitload. Fifty thousand dollars per flight.

  Mark thought back on that night in the bar; the night Sammy came in, Mark already twelve fingers deep in whiskey, and talked him into throwing away any decency left in his soul for the promise of the big flow of green cash.

  “You can’t imagine how sweet this deal is,” Sammy had said. Mark and Sammy had flown as pilot and copilot before, for almost ten years in the service of their country. They both retired at the same time from the Navy. Then Sammy eventually took another offer at a different airline.

  Men who had fired rounds into columns of soldiers and watched them die horrible deaths in service of Country did not think about such things as seniority at a commercial airline company.

  Mark wasn’t an idiot, not even when he was so drunk he could barely keep his balance on a barstool. He knew nothing legitimate—nothing even in the vicinity of legitimate—paid that kind of cash. But he was beyond all that. Life had kidney-punched him once too often. God had deserted him long before. The next stop for Mark was to sell all his furniture, buy a sleeping bag and gas camping stove and squat in his own home until the sheriff forcibly evicted him and he set up camp under a bridge somewhere.

  He had nothing.

  And so there he sat; in that shitty little airport he’d flown in and out of so many times before. Sitting. Waiting. Sweating. Oh he had hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign banks, but here he was, sweating like a bricklayer, the Cross of David in scorpion blood at his feet. Something had gone wrong, and it had been looming. Whispered looks. Rumors. Mark had just not known when, therefore the days on end in bed, showerless, prideless, and witless. And now it was late afternoon and instead of loading the plane with the money to be laundered north of the border, then waiting for the orange ball of fire in the sky to finally relinquish the day so they could fly the Cessna 172, blanketed in the obsidian darkness of night, Mark was waiting in an office with no air-conditioning; waiting for Cristóbal Casales, son of Enrique Casales. Father and son were two of the most feared men in all of Mexico and Central America, but the word had long ago spread through the ranks of Sustantivo was that Cristóbal redefined all the terms his father had established to put terror in the hearts of the strongest of men.

  Mark was worried, not so much for himself, but for his friend. For Sammy. But his worry—like everything else in his life—was to be partitioned and doled out evenly. Today, Sammy received his share of Mark’s worry; today Sammy was in the hot seat. His copilot—the man who had brought him into the fold and given him a fresh chance to rebuild his world financially. Best man at his now ruined marriage.

  The rumors had been about Sammy. The cartel knew they had a rat. Some felt Sammy had been turned. Of course the gringos were suspected first, but Mark knew it could not be true—if for no other reason than he knew Sammy would never put at risk the money they were making. That was the whole point. That was Sammy’s sell to him:

  “We do our jobs,” he told Mark that night, Mark stinking drunk and desperate for a way out—like the Ray Charles song. “Whatever is asked of us,” Sammy told him, “we do. We don’t make friends; we don’t make enemies. We become part of the machinery. Then, one day, we’ll break free. Until then, it’s like any other job. You clock in, be the best, clock out.”

  So why would Sammy risk all of that? Had he been caught somehow? Had the DEA knocked on his door and told him that the Attorney General would be making only one deal and Sammy’s name had come up? Turn on your lifelong friend and we’ll hand you a cardboard Get Out Of Jail Free card? Still, how could he have done such a thing without Mark’s knowledge? They flew every run together. Drank together. Degraded nice women in the bars together. They even worked out together at the same gym. He never saw it in Sammy’s eyes. He would have seen it there; he was sure of it. Yet now, where was Sammy? In anot
her room. Presumed guilty.

  It felt as if a stone had dropped into Mark’s bowels. If the cartel thought Sammy capable of such a thing—

  Before he could deal with the stone in his guts, the door to the stifling office flew open and Cristóbal Casales burst into the room, larger than life, arms wide open, beckoning Mark out of his chair and into his loving embrace. Two men with mirrored sunglasses and necks like oak trees entered silently behind him, arms crossed, big gun bulges underneath their thousand dollar suits.

  “Marcus, Marcus, Marcus,” the younger Casales greeted him, patting him on the back heartily, hugging him hard as one would a brother, then grasped Mark’s face with his huge, simian hands and stared him straight in the eyes.

  “Cristóbal,” Mark said, his voice shaking, betraying his deference to the man standing before him. Mark Coulee, who had held the rank of Captain in the Navy; the equivalent of Colonel in any of the other armed forces—he had been a Naval aviator and a war hero and Cristóbal Casales could, with a glance, have him pissing himself.

  “Tóba,” Cristóbal said. “I have told you, we are family, and my family all call me Tóba.”

  “Tóba,” Mark said. “It’s good to see you, sir.”

  “No, no, no—no ‘sir’. Family, tu eres hombre. Mi hombre. Mi familia.”

  Casales motioned for Mark to sit back in his chair and then wheeled over a second chair facing him. He sat, locking eyes with Mark once again. This time his expression had changed; a placid, unhappy look had washed away the moment before. His eyes were one color and not readable. Those were not the windows to anything, much less a soul.

  “Do you know who is not family, Marcus?”

  Mark didn’t want to hear him say it. He knew the answer. He just didn’t want the word to be spoken aloud. Maybe somehow if the name were never spoken it wouldn’t be true. And even if it weren’t true, if Cristóbal Casales said the name, it would make it true. Men like this; they did not take betrayal lightly. In fact such men loathed disloyalty more than any other thing in the world beyond theft of their profit (which was, of course, disloyalty itself).