Angel: Part V - A Novel By Thomas A. Hall - Parts 1, 2,3 and 4 can be found at the bottom of the page
"She used to work for the government. She just killed her husband. She’s in bed with drug dealers—and she may be the only person left who can save the world"…
Evan
Evan woke up slowly. His head hurt and it took him a moment to remember what had happened. As he thought about it, he realized that he was on someone’s shoulder and was being carried. While considering this, he was abruptly thrown down and shoved into a car. He didn’t want to open his eyes or make any sound as he tried to assess his surroundings but found that he was looking around anyway. What he intended, and what he did, weren’t connecting. In his jumbled brain, the words of others took on the same significance of his own thoughts.
“Man, that chica was hot!” Nicki exclaimed.
“Yeah,” Juan said, “Who was that?”
Diego said, “Hey, el estupido! Silencio!”
Evan thought groggily, “What chica?”
Diego pointed back at Nicki, “You! Check our amigo here. I think he’s coming around.”
Nicki grabbed Evan’s chin roughly and turned his head towards him. “Yeah, I think he’s faking it.”
With that, Nicki shook Evan. Evan pretended to just be coming to and said, “Wha-what? What’s going on?” His words were slurred and that wasn’t fakery.
Nicki said, “Hey, Boss, what do you want to do with this guy?”
Diego answered, “Just keep him quiet for now. We’ll deal with him in good time.”
Evan grunted as Nicki pushed his face towards the side of the car.
Nicki said, “You heard the man. Shut up!”
Diego drove towards Hialeah. He pulled into a warehouse complex off Red Road and drove toward a bay in the rear. Nicki jumped out and unlocked and opened the garage-style bay door. As Diego parked the car and turned off the engine, Juan jumped out and, opening the rear door, grabbed Evan and pulled him out of the car and onto the floor of the warehouse bay. Nicki came around to the same side of the car and grabbed Evan from behind. The two men lifted Evan and carried him, feet dangling above the floor, to an old steel office chair. Dropping Evan into the chair, they produced more zip ties and fastened his arms and legs to the chair.
Evan looked around and saw that he was in a mechanic’s car repair shop. In front of him was a hydraulic lift. It was holding a Toyota pick up truck at what would have been eye level if he were standing.
Diego walked over and stood in front of him. “Hola, Señor,” he said. Evan noted that the speaker’s voice seemed calm, very calm. Diego nodded and Evan’s head was jerked back by Nicki so that he had to look up towards Diego’s face.
“Perhaps you don’t speak Spanish, Señor?” asked Diego.
Evan just stared at him. He still felt out of it and wished his head would stop pounding. “Whichever one of these guys hit me, did a good job,” he thought.
“I speak Spanish, but I prefer English,” he answered. It hurt his head to speak, but even as scrambled as his thoughts were, he had a pretty clear idea that not speaking was going to make him hurt a lot more. “What are you doing? Why are you holding me here?”
Diego said, “All in good time, Señor. First, why don’t you tell us about yourself? We are very interested in your export business.”
Evan tensed as he heard the question, “How did they know he had an export business?” He answered, “My export business? What do you want to know? I export American pharmaceuticals to South America.”
Diego replied, “Si, so I have heard. However, I don’t know many people in South America who pay for expensive American drugs. You must have a very privileged clientele, no?”
Evan said, “Well, not all American drugs are terribly expensive but, it’s true, some of them are only purchased by people of larger financial means.”
Diego responded, “It looks like the business has been very good to you. With a house on the ocean in Golden Beach, you must be doing very well. But my interest is in another part of your business. I want you to tell me about Halpan.”
Diego watched Evan’s face for signs of surprise at the name “Halpan.” Nothing.
Evan calmly said, “Halpan? What about it? They have been a supplier of some pharmaceuticals.”
Diego, with a slight edge in his voice, said, “Tell me what those products were. My associates and I are particularly interested in a virus recently developed by them.”
Evan arched an eyebrow and asked, “A virus? I don’t know what you mean. Halpan did research on a number of different fronts, but I don’t know anything about a virus.” He shrugged and looked confusedly around at Diego, Juan and Nicki.
Diego smiled and Evan knew that things were about to get serious. With a suddenness that surprised Nicki and Juan, Diego kicked over the chair Evan was tied to. Evan and the chair landed on the floor with a scraping thud. With another kick, Diego shoved the chair towards the hydraulic lift. Evan, although on his side, could see that his head was under the lift.
Diego pushed the lift control button and the truck began to descend. He leaned towards Evan and said, “Would you like to change your answer now?”
Evan no longer looked calm. His right ear was bleeding from being scraped across the concrete floor and he was squirming and gasping as he tried to move from under the lift. He tried to move, but Diego motioned to Juan and he held the chair in place.
Just as the lift was about to crush Evan’s face, Diego pushed the control button and stopped the descent. He said, “Now I will ask you again, tell me about the virus?”
Evan looked at him awkwardly as he lay under the lift. He hesitated and Diego said, “Okay guys, which way do you think his brains will squirt when I push the button again?”
Evan could feel the cold steel of the lift on his cheek. He moaned and said, “Halpan came up with a virus that kills people. The head of the company developed it to kill drug dealers and producers. He was obsessed with stopping the drug business. I was caught importing cocaine into the U.S. and he was able to pull strings and get me off of the charges. But, he then wanted me to fund the project and export the virus to Colombia and, I think, he wanted to export it to other places in the future.”
Diego said, “That’s much better. Now, tell me, what is his name?”
Evan answered, “His name is Juan Arvelo.”
Diego asked, “Where is the virus now?”
Evan said, “I don’t know. Really! I don’t know!”
Diego leaned over and patted Evan’s leg, which was sticking up in the air and attached to the overturned chair leg. “I’m sure you are telling me the truth, Señor, because if you don’t, we will test the lift on your skull.” He smiled in a particularly menacing manner. “Where do you think it is?” he asked.
“All I know is that we sent some of the virus to Colombia a few weeks ago. Since then, I only saw Mr. Arvelo once. When I saw him, he was with another man and seemed very angry, as if he had lost a friend. He told me that he would be arranging for a larger shipment of the virus to be sent to Colombia soon. However, I haven’t seen him since.”
Diego asked him, “When was that last meeting?”
Evan said, “Last Thursday.”
Diego said, “Okay, this is very helpful. Now, who was the other man with him?”
Evan said, “I don’t know who he was. He didn’t speak. He just looked on as Mr. Arvelo talked.”
Diego replied, “What did he look like?”
“Probably just under six feet tall, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His hair and eyes were brown.”
Diego asked, “So, why were you at the Tropic Resort in Sunny Isles last Friday?”
Evan looked surprised, but answered, “Mr. Arvelo asked me to help him. He was going to take down a famous drug dealer, Victor Cruz. He was obsessed with catching him. He asked me to help him trap the guy in his hotel room.”
“Who were the two men in your house?” asked Deigo.
Evan said, “They are my security guards.”
Diego said, “Why does a pharmaceutical distributor need security guards?”
Evan looked at him disdainfully and responded, “I told you I was a drug dealer. Even though I haven’t been dealing lately, I still have to watch my back.”
Diego said, “I see…and who was the woman?”
Evan said, “She is the liaison with Mr. Arvelo. Her name is Kim. I don’t really know her, but she was put there to keep an eye on the operation. I don’t think Mr. Arvelo trusted me!”
Diego said, “This has been very helpful. However, we may yet have some more questions for you, so my associates are going to have to keep you for awhile. If you continue to cooperate, you may survive. If you don’t, well, this lift is only one of the options to be considered.”
With that, Diego nodded at Juan and he pulled Evan from under the hydraulic lift and set him upright in the chair. Diego turned to Nicki and said, “Take our friend to the house in Southwest Ranches and hold him there. I will contact you later.”
Turning back to Evan, he said, “You will be our guest for a little while. These two will be your escorts. If you behave, they will treat you well. If you don’t behave, they will simply drug you and leave you in a coma until I am ready for you.”
With that, Diego nodded at Juan and Nicki and walked over to the Bentley. He climbed in, but soon came back out. He held a photograph up to Evan’s face and said, “Is this the man who was with Juan Arvelo?”
Evan looked surprised, but nodded his head, “Yes, that is him. Who is he?”
Diego replied, “No matter. Gracias.”
Returning to the car, Diego again climbed in, this time starting the car, and waited while Nicki opened the bay door of the garage. Backing out, Diego drove away. As he turned onto Red Road and headed north, he called Angel on his cellphone.
Database
When Angel got home, she immediately grabbed the power cord from her own computer and tried it with the laptop she’d taken from the house in Golden Beach. It fit. “Thank God for the ubiquity of Dell computers!” she thought.
She had been concerned that the laptop would power down and she would then have no access to the files without knowing the password. Although she knew people who could break into virtually any computer and gain access to whatever files were there, she didn’t want to have to explain to them where the computer came from nor what the files meant. Thankfully, the woman she’d shot must have been working on the computer when they raided the house. Whatever her password was, it was still in effect and the computer was open to Angel’s search.
Angel looked at the open files on the desktop. The dead woman had been surfing the internet. She was on a shopping site! Angel suddenly felt queasy as she looked at the picture on the screen. It was a pretty, vintage Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-around dress. She thought that she might have looked at the same dress and, indeed, had a similar dress in her closet. She thought of the dead woman’s lifeless eyes staring up at her from the floor of the house she’d left a few minutes before and then, consciously berating herself, said out loud, “Get a grip! She was trying to kill you!”
Shaking off the unease, Angel opened the “history” menu on the computer and looked to see what sites had been recently visited online. There were several other shopping sites, a travel magazine site and two different airline websites. Scrolling further, she saw that there were entries for Halpan and for PETA’s sites. The PETA sites included both the local and international webpages.
“Okay, let’s see what PETA offers,” she mused.
The PETA South Florida site showed photos of four bearded men in tee shirts and shorts standing in what looked like a cow pasture in the Redlands area of South Miami. They were grinning at the camera and holding up their fists. The caption under the photos read, “Members vow to defend animals from farmers’ cruelty.”
Reading further, Angel recognized that these must have been the guys who beat the farmer she’d heard about from Diego. Although they didn’t admit to doing anything of the sort, the author of the article coyly noted their compassion for caged animals and their willingness to stand up to those who would abuse animals in this way for profit. She wondered how it was that they could think it a good and honorable idea for the four of them to attack a single farmer and beat him nearly to death. “Ay, Dios mio, Papi,” she muttered, “What is the world coming to?”
Scrolling further on the website, Angel saw an article on fundraising that mentioned the opportunity for others to support the efforts of PETA through their contributions. The article mentioned that the Miami chapter of PETA had recently been the recipient of a “major contribution” by a local pharmaceutical manufacturer and thanked Mr. Juan Arvelo for his “untiring efforts on our behalf.”
Glancing at the top of the page, Angel noticed a menu item “Earth Day – April 22nd.” Clicking on the link, a clock appeared. Angel gasped when she saw it. The clock was labeled “The End” and was set at 11:57. She thought to herself, “Dear God, these people are nuts!
Beneath the clock was an article, authored by Juan Blanco, describing how this coming Earth Day was going to be the day when a new initiative was launched to stop animal abuse and reduce environmental abuse by humans. Angel read the article and thought, “That’s it! They’re planning to release the virus on Earth Day!”
She moved on, checking the emails on the machine, putting a USB “memory stick” drive into the USB port, she downloaded the current and archived emails. “There could be some interesting reading here,” she thought. As she thought this, her phone rang. Now recognizing the number, she answered and said, “Yes?”
Diego simply said, “It has been confirmed. Juan Arvelo was working with Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco. I will call you again tomorrow after 10:00 a.m.” With that, he hung up.
Angel lowered the phone from her ear and wondered what had happened to Evan Rodriguez. Mentally moving on, she recognized that “Juan Arvelo,” her ex-husband George Ramirez, by his involvement with Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco, had now confirmed the suspicions of Victor Cruz and Diego that Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco was the ringleader of the group seeking to destroy mankind with a deadly virus.
Thomas A. Hall
You can read parts 1,2 & 3, here, by following the links
1. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-chapter-1---a-novel-by-thomas-a-hall.html
2. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-part-ii.html
3. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel---pt-3.html
4. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-part-four.html
Evan woke up slowly. His head hurt and it took him a moment to remember what had happened. As he thought about it, he realized that he was on someone’s shoulder and was being carried. While considering this, he was abruptly thrown down and shoved into a car. He didn’t want to open his eyes or make any sound as he tried to assess his surroundings but found that he was looking around anyway. What he intended, and what he did, weren’t connecting. In his jumbled brain, the words of others took on the same significance of his own thoughts.
“Man, that chica was hot!” Nicki exclaimed.
“Yeah,” Juan said, “Who was that?”
Diego said, “Hey, el estupido! Silencio!”
Evan thought groggily, “What chica?”
Diego pointed back at Nicki, “You! Check our amigo here. I think he’s coming around.”
Nicki grabbed Evan’s chin roughly and turned his head towards him. “Yeah, I think he’s faking it.”
With that, Nicki shook Evan. Evan pretended to just be coming to and said, “Wha-what? What’s going on?” His words were slurred and that wasn’t fakery.
Nicki said, “Hey, Boss, what do you want to do with this guy?”
Diego answered, “Just keep him quiet for now. We’ll deal with him in good time.”
Evan grunted as Nicki pushed his face towards the side of the car.
Nicki said, “You heard the man. Shut up!”
Diego drove towards Hialeah. He pulled into a warehouse complex off Red Road and drove toward a bay in the rear. Nicki jumped out and unlocked and opened the garage-style bay door. As Diego parked the car and turned off the engine, Juan jumped out and, opening the rear door, grabbed Evan and pulled him out of the car and onto the floor of the warehouse bay. Nicki came around to the same side of the car and grabbed Evan from behind. The two men lifted Evan and carried him, feet dangling above the floor, to an old steel office chair. Dropping Evan into the chair, they produced more zip ties and fastened his arms and legs to the chair.
Evan looked around and saw that he was in a mechanic’s car repair shop. In front of him was a hydraulic lift. It was holding a Toyota pick up truck at what would have been eye level if he were standing.
Diego walked over and stood in front of him. “Hola, Señor,” he said. Evan noted that the speaker’s voice seemed calm, very calm. Diego nodded and Evan’s head was jerked back by Nicki so that he had to look up towards Diego’s face.
“Perhaps you don’t speak Spanish, Señor?” asked Diego.
Evan just stared at him. He still felt out of it and wished his head would stop pounding. “Whichever one of these guys hit me, did a good job,” he thought.
“I speak Spanish, but I prefer English,” he answered. It hurt his head to speak, but even as scrambled as his thoughts were, he had a pretty clear idea that not speaking was going to make him hurt a lot more. “What are you doing? Why are you holding me here?”
Diego said, “All in good time, Señor. First, why don’t you tell us about yourself? We are very interested in your export business.”
Evan tensed as he heard the question, “How did they know he had an export business?” He answered, “My export business? What do you want to know? I export American pharmaceuticals to South America.”
Diego replied, “Si, so I have heard. However, I don’t know many people in South America who pay for expensive American drugs. You must have a very privileged clientele, no?”
Evan said, “Well, not all American drugs are terribly expensive but, it’s true, some of them are only purchased by people of larger financial means.”
Diego responded, “It looks like the business has been very good to you. With a house on the ocean in Golden Beach, you must be doing very well. But my interest is in another part of your business. I want you to tell me about Halpan.”
Diego watched Evan’s face for signs of surprise at the name “Halpan.” Nothing.
Evan calmly said, “Halpan? What about it? They have been a supplier of some pharmaceuticals.”
Diego, with a slight edge in his voice, said, “Tell me what those products were. My associates and I are particularly interested in a virus recently developed by them.”
Evan arched an eyebrow and asked, “A virus? I don’t know what you mean. Halpan did research on a number of different fronts, but I don’t know anything about a virus.” He shrugged and looked confusedly around at Diego, Juan and Nicki.
Diego smiled and Evan knew that things were about to get serious. With a suddenness that surprised Nicki and Juan, Diego kicked over the chair Evan was tied to. Evan and the chair landed on the floor with a scraping thud. With another kick, Diego shoved the chair towards the hydraulic lift. Evan, although on his side, could see that his head was under the lift.
Diego pushed the lift control button and the truck began to descend. He leaned towards Evan and said, “Would you like to change your answer now?”
Evan no longer looked calm. His right ear was bleeding from being scraped across the concrete floor and he was squirming and gasping as he tried to move from under the lift. He tried to move, but Diego motioned to Juan and he held the chair in place.
Just as the lift was about to crush Evan’s face, Diego pushed the control button and stopped the descent. He said, “Now I will ask you again, tell me about the virus?”
Evan looked at him awkwardly as he lay under the lift. He hesitated and Diego said, “Okay guys, which way do you think his brains will squirt when I push the button again?”
Evan could feel the cold steel of the lift on his cheek. He moaned and said, “Halpan came up with a virus that kills people. The head of the company developed it to kill drug dealers and producers. He was obsessed with stopping the drug business. I was caught importing cocaine into the U.S. and he was able to pull strings and get me off of the charges. But, he then wanted me to fund the project and export the virus to Colombia and, I think, he wanted to export it to other places in the future.”
Diego said, “That’s much better. Now, tell me, what is his name?”
Evan answered, “His name is Juan Arvelo.”
Diego asked, “Where is the virus now?”
Evan said, “I don’t know. Really! I don’t know!”
Diego leaned over and patted Evan’s leg, which was sticking up in the air and attached to the overturned chair leg. “I’m sure you are telling me the truth, Señor, because if you don’t, we will test the lift on your skull.” He smiled in a particularly menacing manner. “Where do you think it is?” he asked.
“All I know is that we sent some of the virus to Colombia a few weeks ago. Since then, I only saw Mr. Arvelo once. When I saw him, he was with another man and seemed very angry, as if he had lost a friend. He told me that he would be arranging for a larger shipment of the virus to be sent to Colombia soon. However, I haven’t seen him since.”
Diego asked him, “When was that last meeting?”
Evan said, “Last Thursday.”
Diego said, “Okay, this is very helpful. Now, who was the other man with him?”
Evan said, “I don’t know who he was. He didn’t speak. He just looked on as Mr. Arvelo talked.”
Diego replied, “What did he look like?”
“Probably just under six feet tall, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His hair and eyes were brown.”
Diego asked, “So, why were you at the Tropic Resort in Sunny Isles last Friday?”
Evan looked surprised, but answered, “Mr. Arvelo asked me to help him. He was going to take down a famous drug dealer, Victor Cruz. He was obsessed with catching him. He asked me to help him trap the guy in his hotel room.”
“Who were the two men in your house?” asked Deigo.
Evan said, “They are my security guards.”
Diego said, “Why does a pharmaceutical distributor need security guards?”
Evan looked at him disdainfully and responded, “I told you I was a drug dealer. Even though I haven’t been dealing lately, I still have to watch my back.”
Diego said, “I see…and who was the woman?”
Evan said, “She is the liaison with Mr. Arvelo. Her name is Kim. I don’t really know her, but she was put there to keep an eye on the operation. I don’t think Mr. Arvelo trusted me!”
Diego said, “This has been very helpful. However, we may yet have some more questions for you, so my associates are going to have to keep you for awhile. If you continue to cooperate, you may survive. If you don’t, well, this lift is only one of the options to be considered.”
With that, Diego nodded at Juan and he pulled Evan from under the hydraulic lift and set him upright in the chair. Diego turned to Nicki and said, “Take our friend to the house in Southwest Ranches and hold him there. I will contact you later.”
Turning back to Evan, he said, “You will be our guest for a little while. These two will be your escorts. If you behave, they will treat you well. If you don’t behave, they will simply drug you and leave you in a coma until I am ready for you.”
With that, Diego nodded at Juan and Nicki and walked over to the Bentley. He climbed in, but soon came back out. He held a photograph up to Evan’s face and said, “Is this the man who was with Juan Arvelo?”
Evan looked surprised, but nodded his head, “Yes, that is him. Who is he?”
Diego replied, “No matter. Gracias.”
Returning to the car, Diego again climbed in, this time starting the car, and waited while Nicki opened the bay door of the garage. Backing out, Diego drove away. As he turned onto Red Road and headed north, he called Angel on his cellphone.
Database
When Angel got home, she immediately grabbed the power cord from her own computer and tried it with the laptop she’d taken from the house in Golden Beach. It fit. “Thank God for the ubiquity of Dell computers!” she thought.
She had been concerned that the laptop would power down and she would then have no access to the files without knowing the password. Although she knew people who could break into virtually any computer and gain access to whatever files were there, she didn’t want to have to explain to them where the computer came from nor what the files meant. Thankfully, the woman she’d shot must have been working on the computer when they raided the house. Whatever her password was, it was still in effect and the computer was open to Angel’s search.
Angel looked at the open files on the desktop. The dead woman had been surfing the internet. She was on a shopping site! Angel suddenly felt queasy as she looked at the picture on the screen. It was a pretty, vintage Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-around dress. She thought that she might have looked at the same dress and, indeed, had a similar dress in her closet. She thought of the dead woman’s lifeless eyes staring up at her from the floor of the house she’d left a few minutes before and then, consciously berating herself, said out loud, “Get a grip! She was trying to kill you!”
Shaking off the unease, Angel opened the “history” menu on the computer and looked to see what sites had been recently visited online. There were several other shopping sites, a travel magazine site and two different airline websites. Scrolling further, she saw that there were entries for Halpan and for PETA’s sites. The PETA sites included both the local and international webpages.
“Okay, let’s see what PETA offers,” she mused.
The PETA South Florida site showed photos of four bearded men in tee shirts and shorts standing in what looked like a cow pasture in the Redlands area of South Miami. They were grinning at the camera and holding up their fists. The caption under the photos read, “Members vow to defend animals from farmers’ cruelty.”
Reading further, Angel recognized that these must have been the guys who beat the farmer she’d heard about from Diego. Although they didn’t admit to doing anything of the sort, the author of the article coyly noted their compassion for caged animals and their willingness to stand up to those who would abuse animals in this way for profit. She wondered how it was that they could think it a good and honorable idea for the four of them to attack a single farmer and beat him nearly to death. “Ay, Dios mio, Papi,” she muttered, “What is the world coming to?”
Scrolling further on the website, Angel saw an article on fundraising that mentioned the opportunity for others to support the efforts of PETA through their contributions. The article mentioned that the Miami chapter of PETA had recently been the recipient of a “major contribution” by a local pharmaceutical manufacturer and thanked Mr. Juan Arvelo for his “untiring efforts on our behalf.”
Glancing at the top of the page, Angel noticed a menu item “Earth Day – April 22nd.” Clicking on the link, a clock appeared. Angel gasped when she saw it. The clock was labeled “The End” and was set at 11:57. She thought to herself, “Dear God, these people are nuts!
Beneath the clock was an article, authored by Juan Blanco, describing how this coming Earth Day was going to be the day when a new initiative was launched to stop animal abuse and reduce environmental abuse by humans. Angel read the article and thought, “That’s it! They’re planning to release the virus on Earth Day!”
She moved on, checking the emails on the machine, putting a USB “memory stick” drive into the USB port, she downloaded the current and archived emails. “There could be some interesting reading here,” she thought. As she thought this, her phone rang. Now recognizing the number, she answered and said, “Yes?”
Diego simply said, “It has been confirmed. Juan Arvelo was working with Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco. I will call you again tomorrow after 10:00 a.m.” With that, he hung up.
Angel lowered the phone from her ear and wondered what had happened to Evan Rodriguez. Mentally moving on, she recognized that “Juan Arvelo,” her ex-husband George Ramirez, by his involvement with Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco, had now confirmed the suspicions of Victor Cruz and Diego that Javier Carlos Rodriguez Blanco was the ringleader of the group seeking to destroy mankind with a deadly virus.
Thomas A. Hall
You can read parts 1,2 & 3, here, by following the links
1. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-chapter-1---a-novel-by-thomas-a-hall.html
2. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-part-ii.html
3. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel---pt-3.html
4. http://www.weeklysouthernarts.com/angel-part-four.html
