Darlington

By Tripsy South

Tommy Darlington is one hot mess: a former Army Ranger who walks through life as a closet anxiety-depressive. He’s also the largest distributor of pimp body parts in the good State of Florida. 

Sarasota’s de facto hit man works for Tampa Bay’s hidden hand, the secret billionaires who conduct their dirty business well

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adagio Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781944855215

Book preview

BLOODSMOKE

"Darlington. This guy the best we have?" The Old Man filled two glasses with 150-year-old whisky. Had its own otherworldly glow, a spirit of crimson hues on the verge of wildfire. He handed one to Alfred.

Slowly and imperceptibly, the Old Man’s skin unfurled into a rictus, the furrows of his brow growing deeper, ploughed by years of violence and sinful thought. He sneered at Alfred’s dark-gray, hand-stitched Brioni suit. Fresh outta some pizza oven, he thought.

Ran his huge sausage fingers through a shock of rich bimetallic hair that seemed to wave and slither of its own accord.

Alfred took the glass, couldn’t summon the required single nerve to meet his boss’s glare. No, but he does things quietly and to standard, leaves no mess for someone else to clean up, or for a curious detective to discover.

Skin around the Old Man’s mouth drew in slightly, straining under something that tried to claw its way out. Unbuttoned another snap of his fifty-year-old Stetson shirt, sat back in the overstuffed club chair, exhaling the unspoken comment he wanted to loose on Alfred. Sounds like the best to me.

He’s small time, Alfred said, dismissing the Old Man outright. He absently loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top mother-of-pearl of his crisp white shirt, thought better about adjusting anything else and getting comfortable.

What are you looking to have in your stable? Some high-end killer in bespoke Armani and Prada? A Hollywood version of the real thing? Eyes yawed in Alfred’s direction, locked on their target.

The two men sat in front of an ancient fireplace, built during the reign of Andrew Jackson. Dutifully burned day and night with old-forest oak that cracked and popped its presence every now and then. House was secluded in a forest of a thousand trees and deadfall from a hundred years of come and go, all cycles of weather, sun and the celestia. The heavy stone walls and triple-tiled roof kept the interior chilled down to 70 degrees, even in the dead of a Florida summer.

No living soul within 20 miles.

He’s not what I expected in a fixer, that’s all. But he gets things done. As an afterthought, Alfred mumbled, Sir, its three small letters falling harmlessly to the floor, noticed only by the dust bunnies.

Family? The Old Man drew harder on the whisky, threw a lasso around a few words that tried to escape. Poured himself another; didn’t offer one to Alfred.

High school sweetheart or something. Novelist. Not bad at all. Couple of hit books maintain them in cash, so they live comfortably. Little condo out on North Longboat Key.

His work for us, all this gratis? Filled his lungs with whisky that diffused up and burned into an evil countenance.

Near as we can tell, she doesn’t know a thing about his little side business.

What else he do?

Paints.

The Old Man took careful aim at Alfred’s eyes: "Houses or Picasso?"

More like Picasso. Actually, he’s excellent but won’t get out there in the market. Keeps a very low profile.

His glare pulling off Alfred, it softened as it aimed somewhere up in the vaulted rough-hewn rafters: Smart boy.

Yes, but it’d be good for him to do something other than drive his own taxi. He needs a creative outlet.

Drives a cab?

TommyTaxi, if you can believe that.

Both men snorted what may have been a laugh. Alfred’s was a derisive one. The Old Man was genuinely amused.

Did well on that last job. How’d it end? The Old Man knew the answer.

A corner of Alfred’s mouth rose imperceptibly. Was it pride? Local law enforcement called it a suicide.

Good frame-up?

It’ll work, yes.

The Old Man turned and leaned into Alfred: "Not like last time with that . . . sicario you brought in from downtown Puerto Rico. Disaster."

Not turning to his boss: Unfortunately, these types are all pretty much the same.

The Old Man’s mouth pitched up slightly: You’re a snob, Alfred. A high-bred, white-collar snob. Bet you’ve never even been in a fist fight your entire life.

Alfred looked nervously over at the man who gave him all his marching orders, remained smartly silent.

And I’ll bet this Tom guy’s never been over to your house, has he? Hell, you don’t even thank the kid for a job well done, do you? The Old Man laughed at his underling, reached over with a grizzly paw and patted him on his arm, cutting the tension a bit, but knowingly adding a whole new level: Don’t worry, I’ve been in this business too long just like you, so I’m a bit of one, too.

That was a lie: the Old Man came from nothing, sweat blood in bust-ass blue-collar shitwork, crawled up the ranks and over every warm body in his way, even buried the bodies himself.

No response from Alfred. Looked straight ahead. Tom will do right by us, Viktor. And then we’ll give him another job. And another. And he’ll keep doing well . . . until you have him, ah, accidentally— Alfred regretted that last statement before the finish.

The Old Man’s head turned slowly, eyes narrowed. Patted him on the arm again, claws out this time.

Alfred flinched noticeably.

You need a vacation, son.

Alfred recoiled again, knowing what the Old Man meant: he would be shuttled out of the office for an indefinite period, while they found a younger replacement, someone maybe not so uptight and snobbish with the hired help.

Alfred, your problem is simple: you’re an asshole wound up too tight. Your strings are thinned in places that make you vulnerable to snapping at an inopportune moment. Can’t have that, can we?

No response from Alfred.

Darlington sounds like good people to me. Keep him around. What do you think? Didn’t give a damn about Alfred’s reply. Took a long sip of his drink, held the glass in front of him, watching the flames meld with the ancient whisky and dance wildly through the flutes, reminding him of that bouncy little redhead. Teeth, tits and ass on a stick of dynamite, that one, he thought.

I think he should show his paintings somewhere, get his face out there. Alfred felt his entire body quiver.

The kid needs to be brought along slowly.

Alfred’s small voice: I hear Malaysia is considering new artists for government installations. Maybe we could make some calls. Quivering, and now a painful itch inside his shoes: traumatic neuropathy.

Just make sure he stays on the payroll, son.

Another whisky.

I’ll see if we can’t get some of his work out there, maybe use a different name for Tom. Be good for him. Now shaking, Alfred tried desperately to maintain a small measure of control.

Bring up one of the girls, Alfred. The little blonde thing this time.

It’s only a matter of time before Tom—ah, Mr. Darlington’s artwork is discovered, then he’s off to Paris. He leaked slightly into his silken underwear.

Make it two: blondie and Tina. She’s still with us, eh? The redhead? The Old Man put a firm hand on Alfred’s arm, stilled his shaking.

Through an all-body shudder, he felt the Old Man’s grip tighten up up up over his chest and farther up around his throat, cutting off blood to his next thought.

Alfred dropped the glass.

*********

Cell phones suck. They annoy me more’n no-see-ums and pimps.

The one on the night stand next to my head buzzed and vibrated. Thought it was a mosquito so I slapped at it ‘til I figured out it wasn’t the State Bird of Florida.

It was Alfred: Tommy. We have a job for you. Trail Motel, room 204 in the back. Single occupant, male. One seventy-five. Expedite.

He went on for another minute, filling me in on my next bull’s-eye and where I’d pick up my cash, then the usual: no goodbye and a cut connection. Hell, at least the guy paid on time and in untraceable bills any Sarasota bank would kill to have on deposit.

Drove to the motel in between fares, since there weren’t many calls I felt like taking. They were all local gigs out to SRQ, the airport between Sarasota and Bradenton. Tried not to hate a place that ferried people on their way to their dreams, while I was stuck in this hellish paradise.

Did a coupla 360s around the parking area and neighborhood, parked about half a mile off Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.

Why is it that every town in the US with a sizable Black presence had a Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard . . . in a rundown section of town? Could you imagine that—Beverly Hills with a Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard?

Sarasota was no different, but the town’s power council ensured it was well away from the good upstandin’ white folk on the ocean side of the tracks.

I disliked the name on several levels, not the least because it was too long to pronounce and use in everyday conversation, it was a screaming insult to The Man Hisself, and it was saddening that no one had made an effort to find a suitable diminutive, kinda like a nickname.

Me? To honor the man, I called it King.

Simple.

Parked somewhere along The Boulevard Dedicated To The Man Hisself and walked back to the motel, passing a few street prostitutes who, even at a freshly harvested fourteen looked a haggard fifty. At least I knew what they’d look like in thirty years, if they survived that long: much the same, except gray in the skin and low in everything else.

Sadder still was knowing a typical streeter’s half-life was about five years on the long side, six months if they were really unlucky.

Their pimp was their handler, mentor and slave-owner, and he was the one who determined the early or late grave. I came to know every pimp in Sarasota and Manatee Counties by name, face and demeanor. There was always only one type: rotten-mean shitheads who devalued girls into a very short life of pussy for profit, then sold them for a short stack of 100s to some john or cop or local state representative who put three or four of them up in a small house north of town for $500 a month, and visited them a few times a week in blessed conjugation, then returned home to their Catholic lives in upmarket Osprey or on South Longboat Key.

Every full moon or so, my fangs and claws popped out and I made one of those pimpins my little pet, especially when I couldn’t sleep, got tired of watching Banshee or Bloodline, or when Rachel and I were a few degrees out of phase. Many a pimp spent the last minutes of his beautiful life wondering what 5’10" and 180 lbs. of cruel fate had dumped him inside the gaping maw of a Dumpster, with thirty fast-burning seconds left on his game clock.

Everyone I knew said I had a calming demeanor and was pleasant to be around, so at least those pimpins received a sympathetic send-off and a one-gun salute en route to their next port of call, on the coast of kingdom come.

Cell again. Rachel. I let it go to voicemail, then listened in: Tommy, you better be making some money, you loser. I’m writing my ass off today and I wanna celebrate in Margaritaville next month, so get off your lazy—

Enough was enough: I folded my sweet Rachel, stuffed her back in my pocket, hoping to stamp out her little brushfire before she scorched my Levi’s.

Great sex revives the dead, she once told me.

Wished I’d come up with that one, but at least I could implement the thought later on when I got home and sexed her into little submissive sighs.

Room 204 was at the back of the building and it faced a stretch of King that had a long line of 60-foot palm trees and six-foot-high bushes along the street. I moseyed through an opening in the bushes and up to the motel where several partiers were laughing and pissing in the pool. Looked inviting enough to most tourists and weekenders escaping their duties and responsibilities, especially since they were all girls, about 19 or 20 years old, and obviously not from here.

In less than two notes, I guessed they were all from some holler up in Kentucky. The thick fertile air of Florida this time of year made it easy to make out the scent of a few molecules of Jack Daniels coming off the girls.

Once again focused on my primary, I moved upstairs and walked past 200 . . . 202 . . . and 204, stopping the briefest of moments to sense what was up across the two inches of sun-dead stucco, cheap laminated wood, and toxic Chinese drywall. Curtains were open a crack:

One man sitting on the bed . . .

Watching Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 on the flatscreen . . .

Drinking a Golden Monkey IPA . . .

Freshly showered, wearing a towel around waist . . .

Smoking a cigarette . . .

Several lines of pink blow on a small pocket mirror just to his right . . .

A/C struggling on max at 68 degrees . . .

Warm exhaust streaming under the window, betraying a recent meal: Little Caesar’s Meat Mania, lotsa crushed peppers. . . .

Didn’t notice me go by.

At the end of the walkway, I stopped in front of a door, room 212, looked back toward 204. He wasn’t curious enough to step outside and look up and down the walkway.

Down the stairs at the other end, then underneath the walkway, back to the other side and up again. Slowly this time.

Got to his room and stopped in front of his door, waited. Nothing. The tv was still on and he was still sitting on the bed, the coke field now down to forgotten dust particles.

My presence there didn’t register.

Most people stumbled over the obvious in their mundane lives and kept right on walking into the next moment. I noticed everything, even surveyed the air molecules in front of me over and over as they floated past on journeys to who-knows-where. We all have this enigmatic affair, the subconscious, which is the quantum motor behind everything we do in life. Mine was abuzz full throttle here inside my skull, a mushy tangle of gray and black matter.

Rachel fancied herself the clever one, but she really had no clue what drove her own behavior. I smiled at that and reminded myself to mention it to her sometime.

The guy was oblivious to my presence, so I just stood there in front of his door: he got up from the bed and dropped his empty Monkey in the trash can outside the bathroom, got another one from the reefer, sat back down again in the same spot as before, not one inch to the left or right.

Creature of habit.

All I needed to know for today.

*********

Ever seen air flash-freeze between a man and a woman?

I blinked once, taking a snapshot of her expression.

Eight seconds passed as she hovered there in front of me, all those once-soulful dancers of air now forming a solid block of ice between both of us.

The love of my life and me.

Blink two.

Another eight seconds.

Blink three.

Then she drifted closer to me, right in my face: Fuck you, Tommy.

Rachel was my only real pain in the ass at the moment, although I could name a few pimps who gave me a dirty itch, the kind you wanted to scratch off with a cheese grater. If only this woman knew what I really did for a living.

Past girlfriends had little problem sharing emotions, and that’s why I did whatever I could to keep them in my closet world, the unadulterated Tommy I kept hidden from soiled humanity. Each girl with her characteristic slap, kick, jab. One with a solar-plexus punch that rolled and bounced my eyes like ball bearings across a marble floor.

Each as different as the palette of an artist’s protovision, my women defined my entire miserable life . . . guiding me down paths I never would’ve listed on my To-Dos, running the errands of love.

Since high school, Rachel had methodically experimented with every offensive maneuver on the map, ‘til she came up with what worked best against me: the stinging verbal assault. Her simple little fuck-yous were hollow-point bullets, machine-gunned so fast at the center of my face that I only had time to react to my own pathetic response to her volley, never once addressing my actual intended target: each painful dismissal.

Even if I actually had the necessary reaction time, I wouldn’t know what to do with it: how to execute a low-flying missile that always evaded my operational radar and managed to obliterate its target—me.

Mine was always just a wide-eyed look of shock, mashed up with despair and heartbreak. Too busy wrestling with fright to be angry at her, by the time I got around to where I was supposed to be pissed, I’d melted again.

The fear of losing her. The lust of having her.

All rushing to gain first tracks, my emotions kept missing their designated mark. Stunted and bruised growth in many ways. Over the years, I struggled to redefine each feeling. Anger was no longer anger. Hurt was something altogether different, a welcomed misery. When I felt what I thought was madness, I dismissed it as something else entirely. I did feel and deal with things. In an unexpected and seemingly surgical way. In my job, I wasn’t permitted the luxury of normal feelings, you might say.

Heart on a hard, I pressed on.

Rachel, someday I’m gonna tell you a little story. I’m sorry, Rach. It wasn’t my fau—

You were snoozing during coming of age, Tommy—

Got it the first time you said it, Rach. Like, years ago.

This girl had no problem sexing me twice a day, but when her thunderbolts unleashed on me, I was still the little kid from down the block, the guy she used to laugh and thumb her nose at, while she dated guys four and five years older. I was the little brother figure she toyed with, yet still loved in some odd way that haunted me for many years. And defined those paths into the wretched unknown.

Who could blame her? She was intelligent and thinking, 5’7" and then some, about 125 firm pounds, sexy banana-blonde curls, and richly sculpted Italian slash Russian features.

Clean and untouched, even by a single probing finger, until she was 23. I know this fact because I’m the man who unzipped her Levi’s and released her from virginal chains and all that Jesuit chastity her mother preached like Matthew from the age of 18 months on. She’d been programmed like a PlayStation, but somewhere along the way had hijacked her mother-written code and reworked it into her own vision, something even she struggled to define.

Rachel wasn’t simply the love of my young life, she was my life, long before old age set in, washing away other, mostly insignificant, childhood memories and the little horrors of adolescence and puberty.

If you got it years ago, then why are you such a fuck-up, TommyBoy? TommyTaxi. What a joke. You’re a Disney cartoon, Tommy.

Like I’ve been trying to tell you for a while, Rachel, there’s a little more to me than you’ll ever want to know. Cartoon.

Her insults were always delivered piping hot, with an ironic smile that said maybe she was half-kidding. Or not. The enigmatic smirk said it could go both ways but I secretly knew which way it usually played out.

I wasn’t destined to make old bones with anyone, Rach.

Don’t go there. Her head rotated slowly toward me, eyes scanning my face for just one sign of weakness.

We’re there, Rachel.

You always do this. Still trying to find a chink in my paper armor.

No, only lately. This time I looked her dead on. You’re looking for excuses. Again.

Always putting the blame on me, Tommy.

That’s when she backed away a foot or so, turned her head to the wall, seemed to continue the conversation there instead of with me, soon as she saw that look slide over my face, a look that said, Don’t do this now, Rachel.

Regret was a constant companion these days: out of fear and anxiety from my real job, the one I tucked away from Rachel. I often said or did something to piss her off, then I’d get just a little defensive and that hidden monster clawed ever so closer to the surface.

I don’t know you anymore, Tommy.

My dry smile said it all. I mumbled something to my own distant wall: You have no clue, MyLove.

With that, she slipped away and all I could do was watch, my heart dropping farther down my chest, desperate to return to its rightful place upstairs.

She came back down and shot a paper airplane at me. Smacked me in the center of my forehead and crashed to the floor.

Bent down and unfolded it. A poem I had recently written for her, somewhat of a promise that so far had gone unfulfilled.

I had titled it Cycles after all the endless iterations of good and bad with Rachel:

Loaded with chains and sorrows,

I step into many uncertain tomorrows

While storms and tempests convulse the sea,

and sweep away trackless paths that bring you safely to me

I am thus wrecked against the breakers of an unfortunate life,

and relegated to traverse all terraqueous ground in tearful strife

I consult the withered hags of my destiny,

they fail to treasure up aphorisms and maxims of ecstasy

Now deeply tinctured with false beliefs,

I go forth bravely, my heart heavy with griefs

Hoping that planetary influences oppose my fate,

and continue to keep me from my beloved mate

I hold out for smiles abundant and frowns a-few,

and many a year at home, my love, with you

But my future is assigned by a distant celestial orb,

whose grievous infidelity I cannot accept, let alone absorb

I take comfort that centuries will roll over the meanest of my history,

and flatten it into a beautiful truth of mystery

My dreams now a-glimmer on a distant horizon,

I set sail again, all the more wizened

Now filled with the pleasures of a voluptuous court,

my beliefs never again will I abort

No longer am I filled with the repetition of evil thought,

nor the acidic residue of all that is naught

The great planets, sitting in judgment over me,

lay me to sleep in a field of unfractured glee

I then hum incantations of the ancient and new,

that once again bring me safely home to you

*********

I hate nice guys who do stupid things. Really stupid things.

Something sooo stupid that yanks them outta that Nice Guy category and stuffs ‘em into Bad Guy territory, a dark place where unforgiving men with silent billions and a dark-adapted soul make one call that trickles down to my cell phone and wakes me up at some odd hour, that doggone mosquito buzzing in my ear.

Nice guys don’t deserve what I have to give them. But someone out there thinks they do so I carry on and try not to think too much about it. Nice guys don’t always finish last, but they almost never finish first, usually a distant second at best.

Room 204 had won the lotto, though, inventing some software that could hijack a person’s computer, sit there like an invisible glacier, undetected by virus hunters, and continually suck up all the data on a hard drive or any external drive attached to the computer, directly or wirelessly. Whatever software and hardware lived on 1s and 0s, this program could swallow it all and surreptitiously stream it over to servers in India, Pakistan or some Fill-In-The-Blank-istan.

He’d rented a midsize at the airport, left it parked out back by the pool, nothing inside except the smell of new used rental car. This guy was conservative, though, and even had a bottle of ammonium cleaning solution and some paper towels in the back seat. Clean freak? Probably not, just someone who knew he could get MRSA or Ebola from touching a contaminated steering wheel. Or arrested for having cocaine dust on the dashboard.

You coming in or not!? One of the daisy-brain bikini-teens by the pool.

Even behind the anonymity of oversized Dollar Store sunglasses, her sparkling blues zeroed in on my muscled forearms and did a slow finger-walk all the way down to my crotch.

Looked over at her and nodded imperceptibly, and kept on walking.

Be here all day, mister, she said in a lower Kentucky drawl, a little sultry spiced in. Didn’t work well on her, but the effect was cute. Made a note of it: the cute, not the girl. Wasn’t into 19-year-old kids. These girls couldn’t touch the love of my life on any level—except maybe in kindness—so I never gave them a second look. In my line of work, I hoped they would do me the same courtesy. For her sake, I prayed she hadn’t read too much into that little nod.

He was still on the bed, watching an old episode of Californication: Hank Moody was sitting in Dean Koontz’s office, doing his impression of Popeye.

Probably hadn’t moved all night. New lines of coke on the little mirror. If Hank had been there, this guy’s coke woulda been hoovered up yesterday.

In my old flips, I padded up the stairs near his room and again stopped in front of his door. This time, though, I knocked four times.

The door opened and he peeked out and said, Hey, what’s up? You the pizza guy?

Dayum, he was even smiling. A nice guy, no cares at all, like he was just in town for a few days on business, not sampling the stale bikinis downstairs. Just a nice guy. Who did a very bad thing to a whole lot of bad folks.

His coming-out party was sliding into servers at InstaSomething and ripping off every square nanometer of data over a month, and then presenting tidbits of it to the Board of Directors at their annual meeting, which he also crashed as a waiter carrying around bottles of champagne. When he managed to squeeze his way to the head table, he dropped small gift-wrapped flash drives in front of each director. If he’d done his own due diligence, he would’ve discovered that the majority of the directors all worked in the intelligence community, mostly for the CIA and Mossad.

By the time he reached the loading dock, alarm bells and klaxons were sounding throughout the Agency, not to mention a hundred other intelligence and security firms across the globe. Hitting InstaWhatever was only a distraction from the real job: stealing data from every single entity in the Department of Defense, plus hundreds of other clandestine organizations, departments and sections, and private companies and firms.

He could’ve created a website that made WikiLeaks look like a grade-school kid’s blog, but his motive was entirely different: he wanted the recognition and he wanted a very high-paying job in the security industry without having to gain asylum in Russia or Peru.

While he’d correctly calculated his escape route, he had inaccurately estimated the power and depth of the world’s intelligence and security apparatus, which was led at the very top by men in dimly lit offices somewhere over there in Europe and spread throughout every government and transnational corporation across the globe. Or so I heard.

And now here he was, holed up in a medium-rent hotel room, good cable and firm bed, plenty of Golden Monkey in the reefer, and some young sex at the pool if he so chose. Slice of heaven to most nice guys from outta town.

Stewart Parrish?

Not the pizza guy, are you? Clearly resigned, he opened the door all the way, let me in.

Broke my heart I had to do this. Wanted to wag my finger in front of his nose and lecture him. You weren’t very careful.

H-h-how did you find me? Sitting on the bed again, in his favorite spot, staring at Hank, now uncharacteristically mute, he absently grabbed an empty beer can and upended it like it was full.

Someone got a call, they called a someone, that someone called me.

So really you—

Your last option.

He looked perked up, looked at me. Option?

A nice guy who didn’t just pull the tiger’s tail, he had the CO Jones to tie a ball of fire to it. Nice guy who thought he would get off easy, get paid for having invented something cool and useful to a large organization, retire to Belize or Costa Rica, work from some designer hut on the beach. All the while never once considering the domino effect his route would have.

His was a dream world and my job was to shatter that world.

Nice guys always thought they had a plan, a way out. Stewart was no different and, like Rachel, never once considered the consequences of selfish action. If only they had some degree of introspection, but they subconsciously feared what lurked beneath so they buried it deep and away from prying eyes and thoughtful minds.

If we look hard enough, we can see the end of something, maybe a goal or wish or dream, but we never even think to see the means to get there, all the sacrifices and pains and collateral damage. If we could just