Agent Shield and Spaceman

Frankie took a step backward, keeping his eyes on the serpents as they writhed on their hooks. While still out of striking range, the snakes lashed from one side to the other, desperate to sink their fangs into his skin. Two choices and two choices only. The first was letting them enter the pit and taking a few down quickly and wear down the rest. That might be the smart move if his opponents were smaller but the sheer size of the snakes argued against that approach. So, on to Plan B. While the snakes still descended into the pit, Frankie dashed forward, leaping in the air. His knife flashed and two of the snakes hung limply, blood raining down. Another jump and he caught a third by surprise. A fourth snake nearly caught him in the shoulder but he deflected it. He landed badly, out of position for the remaining serpents as they dropped from their hooks. Normal snakes might have slithered away but not the tiger snakes. Frankie snap rolled right, dodgi...

Watching the snakes descend, Marcus decided the moment to leave had arrived. Whether Two-eyes survived or not was out of his hands, but the mission had to succeed. D could fill out the lost agent report, he was going to trace the snakes back to their source. Luther Van Krossen was standing some distance behind the bleachers and Shield approached him about previous night’s offer of a tour. Van Krossen jumped at the chance to avoid witnessing the slaughter. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said holding open an access door behind the barn. “Gunther gets entirely too much pleasure out of these little events.” “I’m surprised they happen at all,” offered Shield. “Even in Texas this kind of thing must raise a few eyebrows.” “Fewer than you think,” he said but didn’t elaborate. The Thulewaite Pharmecutical factory was apparently contained underground. Suggesting this was a little unusual, Luther explained that the heat demands for their process were rather extreme. Indeed...

In this part of Texas, mornings wake up befuddled and lost, as if unsure about what sort of day they will become. Even in the fieriest depths of the summer, one might wake up with a chill, seeing dew on the ground. This hesitation only disappears in the mid morning, when the sun resumes its jurisdiction in the high, open sky and sears the land into submissiveness. Frankie Two-Eyes woke up at 10:30 am and slowly unraveled himself from the sheets. Sweat coated him like a slime trail; he wanted nothing more than to just flop off of the bed and lay on the cool floor like a beached fish. The humidity was palpable, a miserable wet thing pressing down on his face and lungs. His head felt like a dropped egg, wrapped back together with masking tape, his every motion inviting dire nausea. Carefully peeling off his night shirt, he staggered around until he found some water to splash on his face. He wrestled with the room’s window, looking to open it to a breeze, gave up wh...

After this cynical observation, Shield felt the residual enjoyment of the party drain away. Fatigue – for the party, for these people – settled into his bones. Time to call it a night. “Tomorrow will be the tough part,” he murmured in the room he shared with Agent LeHaze. “We have the information, now we have to find some way of acting on it.” She cast skeptical eyes towards him. “Or,” she paused. “Or, we could turn this over to the regular law enforcement agencies. The FBI, the Texas Rangers, hell, the Fish and Wildlife Department would work…” “Fish and Wildlife, are you kidding me?” Shield gave up pulling off his left shoes and flopped back on the bed. “That agency is hopelessly compromised with Eisenhower appointees. Asking them to close down the Thulewaite Ranch is like asking Richard Nixon to run the Justice Department.” “Be careful what you wish for,” said LeHaze, brightly. “That’s not a wish,” he growled back and then exhaled sharply. Shield had a sudden...

Spaceman reclined in one of the leather chairs towards the back of the room, entertaining potential customers with tales of old Morocco. Attuned to the ebb and flow of such gatherings, Spaceman took immediate notice of each disturbance, no matter how small. In the brief between one conversation and the next, a man had appeared by the bookcase, dressed almost entirely in black with a deep blue shirt open at the neck. Spaceman noticed other party-goers went to elaborate lengths to avoid contact with him, walking around him and talking through him as though they couldn’t see him at all. Spaceman also noted this interloper was staring back at him. Asking a debutante about the stranger, the girl confessed not knowing much about him other than his name: Nickolas Necropolis. “He’s a business associate from Greece,” said a nearby rancher hand rolling a cigarette. “Kind of an ugly reputation in these parts.” “Ugly?” Spaceman smiled, “And yet still invited to all the best parties.” ...

Spaceman liked riding in cars. Not driving them, that required concentration. But to be able to sit back in the decadent embrace of soft leather, the pulse of acceleration launching him from one place to another, automobiles offered a sensation second only to junk. Speaking of which… He snuck a hand into the left breast pocket of his seersucker jacket to withdraw a blue lacquer snuff box. Once applied to each nostril, the china brown flattened his thoughts into a weightless, trembling membrane, and he spared no more consideration of the armed goons hunched to either side of him in the back of the Rolls Royce. He sat serene in the palm of God, sweet darkness lapping against his skin. From a certain perspective, Thulewaite’s decision to send armed escorts was a good sign. Gunther was more of a royalist than the typical Texan plutocrat; things that fell into his domain belonged to him and elicited his responsibility to guard his possessions. Spaceman fe...

Frankie held up a folder of Melvin Lain and tried to believe in him.  Melvin was a new identity, not too storied, consisting of a folder only a few documents thick. There were suggestions on make-up and accent, sketches of personal past, and vast areas left to the ingenuity of the agent. Virgin territory. Well, Frankie thought to himself, Melvin is supposed to be wealthy so let’s go about making him look the part. He put a few tailored suits together on the bed and mixed around bow ties, cummerbunds, and cufflinks until he had something that looked so bland and dismal it had to have cost a million bucks. He’d be made the instant he put on anything that didn’t belong on him; Melvin was nouveau riche, a Detroit technocrat with ambitions of joining the jet set. He wasn’t going to “get it” yet. He made sure the suit almost fit him but the glasses he chose were unfashionably thick and didn’t match the shape of his face. He exfoliated his hands and applied liberal amounts of moistu...

“It will not doubt be a relief to you, Mr. Duncan, that your wife is nearly finished.” Agent LeHaze, now Mrs. Duncan, applied the last touch of mascara to her eyelashes and pulled back from the vanity. Marcus glanced over, aware they were running behind but determined not to show it. He had finally gotten word from D and they would need to rush to meet the rendez-vous. Tugging at the cummerbund, Shield grimaced. “Oodles.” LeHaze had been fidgeting with her makeup and dress all night in preparation for going out. Shield didn’t quite see what the big deal was. They were meeting Agent D at the Spiny Toad, a little roadhouse just inside the town limits. Agent D had flown into Dallas last night, she was liable to be exhausted. “The plan,” he said, to fill the room with a sound other than female agent’s pacing, “Is to meet her at the rendezvous point, establish mission parameters and follow first contact procedures. There should be no complications. This ...

The touchdown in Dallas went without incident. Equally unproblematic was the trip south by government vehicle to Waco. The town was uncharming, reminding Marcus of all the dusty locales he had tried to forget over the years, including his own benighted hometown in Upstate New York. Dull, self-satisfied types milling about in taverns and crisscrossing from the same dozen or so shops. People too ignorant to know what was being done in their name, too dumb to care. Marcus drove to a better part of the town and pulled into a long driveway. Their destination was hid by a stand of old birch trees; an impressively ornate red mansion, done in an American Gothic style with black trim and a battalion of statuary dotting the lawn. A valet assumed responsibility for their ride and luggage, while the three of them, Marcus, Frankie, LeHaze, headed into the interior of the Crimson Elephant Courtyard. The inside was no less imposing. Every square inch of wall was either covered...