"Fuck! This has to be about the craziest goddamn thing I've ever done in my life!" I screamed out in the roaring wind. And that's saying a shitload! I was running down the Galveston seawall pushing along a cripple that I had duct taped down to a wheelchair and no one was even batting an eye much less trying to stop me to ask just what in the hell I was up to. The son of a bitch even had two big cinder blocks tied down with rope in his lap! Of course, Hurricane Rita was churning her guts out in the gulf and almost the entire island had evacuated and it was like trying to stand inside of a wind tunnel that somebody had dumped a truckload of sand in, but there were still quite a few folks hanging around. Outside! Granted most of them were either surfers with death wishes or homeless folks who had no where better to go. But Jesus Christ, are there no heroes left anymore? Even the people from The Weather Channel and CNN sent down to cover the hurricane weren't paying me a bit of fucking attention. Too wrapped up in their goddamn news broadcasts.
The cable on the island had long gone out so
I had no access to the news other than the radio and
they weren't saying shit as usual. But I knew that
the deadline for the 6:00 PM evacuation ordered by
the mayor had passed by hours ago, so when I had
taped the asshole down into his chair and pushed
him the two blocks up to the seawall I had been
expecting to see almost total desertion. I sure as hell
hadn't expected to see at least ten tattooed,
dreadlocked surfers trying to score the ride of their
soon to be short lifetimes as a pack of the homeless
cheered them on and toasted their courage with long
pulls off their forties of Old English 800 as they
pumped their fists in the air.
All while the cable
news retards babbled in the foreground about the
dangers of surfing during a category 5 hurricane.
So at that point you could say my options
were severely limited. My mission was to get to the
61st street pier and dump this son of a bitch,
wheelchair and all, into the Gulf of Mexico, without
getting caught. Then I had to bust my ass back to
his rattletrap garage apartment to retrieve my 1995
GEO Metro hatchback and get my own ass off that
island before Rita blew it off the face of the earth
just like Katrina had just done a couple of weeks
before to the Big Easy.
And goddamn it! I was gonna complete my
mission! I didn't give a fuck what that fat bitch from
MSNBC thought!
I had never gotten one letter the whole time
I had been in Mexico. Not a single one in almost
twenty fucking years. Since I was a fugitive on the
lam it didn't seem to make much sense to do a
whole hell of a lot of corresponding with people. I
did have a box at the bodega where Javier, the
bodega's owner, would put my grocery tabs and
newspapers from the states, but that was about it.
Javier was quite a nefarious and shady character
himself. Former member of both the Mexico City
police department and Mexico's version of the
DEA, he possessed an impressive array of
underground contacts. Javier had recently sold me a
mint condition Russian AK-47 along with a Soviet
made land mine - why I needed a land mine you'll
find out later. Feed Javier a couple shots of tequila
and a few hits off a bong of some good weed and
he'd tell you stories about hooking a car battery up
to some poor bastard's nut sack.
Anyway, one day the letter showed up. It was typed on paper with a
Department of Homeland Security letterhead and it
was written like a fucking cryptic telegram (even
though I have never received much less seen a
telegram}:
RB was released from the Fort approximately five
years ago and is wheelchair ridden courtesy of an
"accident." He is playing both sides of the fence. A
sometimes paid informant for the G. Is also trying
to sell information to the AB. Mentioning your name
to both parties in reference to various incidences.
Consider yourself to be in grave danger. RB
currently resides Galveston, TX. Suggest you
relocate. Regards.
The author was a mystery but I understood
everything that letter said. Obviously, shitty things
from my past were back to haunt me.
That's what brought me to Galveston during
the middle of the landfall of a potential category
five hurricane. I had no idea when I took off for
Texas that there was a hurricane making a beeline
for the Texas coast.