Shank
Page 1
Shank
Hit World Book Five
By
Robert J. Krog
PUBLISHED BY: Hit World Press
Copyright © 2021 Robert J. Krog
All Rights Reserved
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and 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’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Dedication
I'd like to thank Bill Webb and Larry Hoy for including me in this world, my publisher and editor for putting up with me, and my wife and children for the time it took to write it.
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Cover Design by Shezaad Sudar
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Contents
Dedication
The Hit World Universe
Prologue
Book 1: King Tut’s Cat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book 2: The Penny Fever
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book 3: King Tut’s Cat, Part 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book 4: The Angel of Death
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Book 5: Down by a Hand
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
About Robert J. Krog
Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy
Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War
Excerpt from Devil Calls the Tune
Excerpt from Book One of the Mako Saga
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The Hit World Universe
September 11, 2001, was the blackest day in American history. A dozen hijacked airliners wiped out most of the American government and brought America to its knees. The population screamed for blood, but the government was in chaos. The senior surviving member in the line of succession was a junior Senator from Oregon who nobody had heard of outside his native state.
The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians all eyed the United States to see if the time had come for military action against American interests worldwide. The new president had only just been appointed and didn’t have the political capital—or will—to risk World War Three. Indeed, he was on record as publicly blaming America for worsening relations with the Muslim world prior to the attacks. He called for restraint and refused to commit the U.S. military to go after those identified as responsible. “We brought this on ourselves,” he said in a nationwide broadcast.
But Americans were having none of it, not even the constituency that had elected him. The wealthiest of the wealthy went to work behind the scenes, committing tens of billions of dollars to show America’s enemies what happened when you dared attack us. The terrorists jeered and vowed more attacks, trying to provoke a response.
It worked.
The answer was the formation of a lavishly funded group of mercenaries hired by those wealthy private citizens. The mercenaries sped to the Middle East set on bloody revenge. The president threatened to arrest everyone concerned, but America’s law enforcement agencies sided with the mercs, and he never pushed it beyond threats.
Impeachment loomed.
The money to finance the mercs was funneled through a dummy corporation called LifeEnders, Inc. They attracted the best black ops people America had, plus select others from friendly nations, with many either on detached duty from the U.S. armed forces, arranged by loyal officers who defied the chain of command, or they left the service altogether. The billionaires who supported them spared no expense to supply them with the best equipment available. They even lured some top-flight freelancers out of the shadows and into the fight. As always, money talked.
Within months, most of the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks were being executed on live American pay-per-view television, along with officials from the countries who supported them. Outraged protests from enemy states, and America’s own president, fell on the deaf ears of the American public. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clarified that American military capabilities were at full strength and on high alert, but the president ordered them to stand down. Officially, the military obeyed. Privately, they defied their commander in chief, and let America’s enemies know it. Rather than risk nuclear war and worldwide Armageddon, foreign countries backed down.
But Americans didn’t want to limp along with a rump government that was wildly unpopular and had proved unequal to the emergency. As the federal bureaucracy struggled to restore itself and fill critical positions, the population demanded power be turned over to private corporations wherever possible. These new Corpses, a derogatory name for the corporations, replaced the bureaucracy with results.
With impeachment likely to succeed in deposing the president, and as a presidential recall petition passed 90 million signatures, America held a special election on September 11, 2003. Though challenged by the traditional parties, the Supreme Court deemed such a vote legal. Both parties nominated the usual candidates saying all the usual things, but the mood in America remained angry and combative, and through the summer a populist movement grew to draft Charlton Heston for president. The two political parties laughed off his efforts, but they misjudged the mood of the country. The actor won in a landslide write-in campaign, and with him, both houses of Congress swung toward revenge- and security-minded independent candidates. When the actor took office in January 2004, he had the strongest mandate of any president in American history.
LifeEnders, Inc. grew out of the mercenary group that struck back in the Middle East. The corporation found and eliminated threats to America, worldwide, with the speed and technique of a scalpel. When terrorist organizations were discovered within America, LifeEnders, Inc. found and eliminated them. Terrorists couldn’t hide from their reach, and there was no appeal on their judgment.
As time went by, LEI, as LifeEnders, Inc. came to be known, also tried to end murder within America’s borders; killers were met with swift Old Testament justice. But that didn’t work. First, there were too many murders, and second, the regular police angrily opposed such intrusions into their areas of responsibility. So the government passed all the legislation and—more to the point—set all the corresponding fees and tax rates to finance private, legal assassinations under the quasi-governmental LEI. Non-contracted k
illings remained murder, with all the usual punishments, but contracted murder through LEI was the law of the land.
The street name for this new reality was Hit World.
Prologue
A Delivery Room
The nursery nurse dropped wailing, newborn Augusta Peterson to the cold, yellow tile of the delivery room floor as she walked from her mother to the scale to clean her up and weigh her. Augusta’s heart stopped. She was bleeding from her head, and the furious doctor believed she was dead. Mrs. Peterson was unaware of what had happened. Exhausted from ten hours of labor, having seen and released her infant into the supposedly competent arms of the nurse, she’d passed out. Mr. Peterson had just stepped out to smoke the customary celebratory cigar with his brother, who clapped him on the back and told him, “Well done, old boy.”
The nursery nurse, too stunned to move, stared in disbelief at the infant on the floor as a pool of blood formed around her head. The delivery nurse and the doctor moved into action immediately to save the child’s life. The nursery nurse—her name was Janet—backed up to the wall, mouth open behind her mask, eyes staring and heart pounding, though she didn’t feel it. She felt only horror, a gripping fear in the pit of her stomach, a terrible racing energy in her veins, and roaring in her ears. All she could hear over that roaring was the now panicked voice of the doctor saying, “We’ve lost her!”
Janet lunged forward, thrust the doctor and nurse aside, and picked the baby up, cradling her. The child was plainly dead, but Janet held her to her chest and prayed aloud, over and over again, “Oh, God, let her live, let her be good, let no one harm her. Take me instead.” She clutched the child to her as the doctor and delivery nurse tried to take her away to work on her again.
It was kaval at work, surely, the magic in her bloodline. The infant healed on the 10th iteration of what was effectively an impromptu spell. Janet, still holding her, fell back, cracked her head on the tile, and died, a pool of blood forming on the floor around her. Augusta was clutched in her arms, secure, breathing, wailing the distressed cry of a newborn thrust into a cold, bright world without her consent.
They didn’t believe in magic—but they’d seen it. They decided to report events differently from the way they’d occurred, telling only the mother what had actually happened. The hospital staff was told that Janet had tripped over her own feet—she was getting on toward retirement age, after all—but had protected the child rather than break her own fall. And that was that.
Mr. and Mrs. Peterson, having already chosen to honor a deceased aunt with the name Augusta, chose to give her the middle name Janet.
She was proof against harm from other human beings. She’d never been struck in her life. She was good-natured, positively congenial all her days, and so long as she never deigned to strike another, none could strike her. She knew it intuitively, just as she knew that two and two make four. She first articulated it to herself in middle school, when she was tempted to slap Becca Jeebers for saying, “Volleyball just isn’t your game after all, is it?” when her team lost the intramural volleyball championship over one bad play.
She wasn’t scared of Becca, but she didn’t want to sink to that level, so she let it go. It wasn’t even that she thought she had to go on being protected by the sacrifice of Nurse Janet, it was simply that it would have been degrading and wrong. She accepted the deal because she didn’t want to hurt people anyway, and maybe she could turn the situation to some good, as a way to help others.
She did. Without ever having to hit a bully, she protected the little guys. All it took was her walking arm in arm with Billy Jenkins between him and Jake Caphor for Jake to trip and fall, trying to throw a punch at Billy’s head. Jake’s accomplice, Greg Smith, tripped over him, and that was that. They were too busy blaming each other to stay on Billy’s case.
The charmed life was good to her. She made it work for her friends too.
Book 1: King Tut’s Cat
Chapter 1
The Clawson Residence
Gordon Shaw arrived at the Clawson mansion in Memphis’ ritzy Belle Meade neighborhood and was shown into Mr. Clawson’s posh, soundproof office by his confidential secretary, an attractive, leggy blonde in her late 30s who was trying to look as though she were still in her early 20s. She had the muscle tone of a religious gymgoer. Shaw’s hungry, predatory gaze weirded her out, and she left him to her employer’s tender mercies gratefully.
Shaw perused the room. The walls were hung with paintings, both landscapes and portraits. The portraits were of girls and boys in their teens, bathing, swimming, wrestling, and looking out windows dressed in pajamas. Over the doors and windows of the room, he saw the kaval sign ketket, ancient Egyptian for “silence,” he’d been told. Shaw knew the man employed a sorcerer—a real gatandi—from time to time. Between intentional structural additions and magic, no sound would escape Clawson’s office. There was a daybed against one wall with baby blue sheets, but a pink pillow. Everything was clean and neat. His examination swiftly completed, Shaw sat in a plush armchair and leveled the same reptilian gaze across the mahogany desk at Clawson.
Clawson himself was well-groomed, well-manicured, well-dressed, fat, and smug. His hair was dark and sleek, and his teeth, flashing across the desk in a condescending smile, were straight and white, despite his love of coffee and red wines. Shaw knew they were transplants, just like the hair, from a compatible donor who’d been paid well for them.
Clawson took his time looking the shooter over. Shaw regarded the multimillionaire indifferently. He was a multimillionaire himself, and money didn’t much impress him, except as a means of keeping score. He lived an ordinary life, far below his means. His own desk was a coffee table in his apartment living room. Clawson had a high-end tablet computer and two hardback books that were clearly only for show—The Life and Times of the Marquis de Sade and Great Expectations. His paperweight—holding down a stack of papers that would have been collecting dust except for housekeeping—was, as Anastasia Clawson had told Shaw, a replica of the iron dagger from King Tut’s tomb.
“My wife is planning to have me killed, Mr. Shaw,” the smug fat cat began. He paused, as if such news should elicit any kind of response from a LifeEnders contractor.
Shaw didn’t so much as blink, and, after a pause, Clawson went on, unperturbed. “I’m going to beat her to the punch.”
Shaw smiled slightly, pulled out one of the cards he’d had printed for the occasion, complete with price list, and flicked it onto the desk for Clawson’s inspection. The fat cat ignored it.
“She’s a clever woman, my Anastasia—sophisticated, raised in a class of society outside my experience, but not terribly business savvy. I married her for her connections; she married me for my money. I think she honestly expected me to remain faithful—out of form, if nothing else. I had no such intention and was frankly surprised when I realized her vows had been spoken sincerely, in spite of her mercenary reasons. I’ve offered her my full consent if she wishes to have affairs of her own. Would you believe, she refused?
I even set her up a few times, figuring she’d see the advantages of doing it my way. I fired her driver, for instance, and hired a young bodybuilder of good breeding, well-educated on a variety of subjects in which she was interested. She just wouldn’t go for it. It’s not in her makeup, she said. She wanted marriage counseling, private getaways to ‘rekindle the romance,’ and so on. Naturally, I’ve indulged her as far as I’m able, but my infidelities will not abate. Having gained the connections I needed, I’ve offered her the typical solution, divorce, but her mercenary heart and elite pride have been wounded. She won’t be satisfied with my generous severance offer, and she can’t stomach the idea of a failed marriage. She hates failure.”
Shaw didn’t find any of this necessary information, even when taking a contract, as the reasons were unimportant. He allowed the man to continue, anyway. It was the least he could do, under the circumstances.
“But I think it’s my habits that
most offend her. I like young girls, you know, and she’s just turned 30.”
The slight but distinct emphasis of disgust with which Clawson spoke of her age elicited a soft snort in response from Shaw. He liked women with experience, himself. Clawson either failed to note or disregarded his response.
“I like boys, too.” Clawson smirked. “I can afford to buy paramours whenever I want them. I can afford to do anything I like with them. I require them to be no older than 19. The truth is, though she won’t admit it, I’m a man of highly refined and aesthetic sexual appetites.
“Clean, young bodies with no sign of the corruption of age are what excite me,” he continued, but Shaw was getting bored. The man could clearly go on and on, expounding on his personal aesthetic for hours. Shaw had an aesthetic too—clean kills performed professionally.
“Are you willing to meet my price?” he interrupted, gesturing at the card sitting ignored on Clawson’s desk.
Clawson blinked at the interruption, but smoothly slid the card closer and glanced at the service charges. “I believe number five is the level of service I require,” he stated. “She is my wife, and I owe her as little pain and inconvenience as possible. She doesn’t need to know I did it or that she’s even dying by assassination, and I would greatly prefer that you not use a knife.”
“I don’t use knives if I can at all avoid it,” Shaw interrupted.
Clawson looked at him with an upraised eyebrow. “Your nickname, Mr. Shaw?”
“I earned the moniker ‘Shank’ early in my career due to an unfortunate and messy circumstance in which I had to improvise due to a firearm malfunction—my Mauser had a ‘failure to feed.’ I ‘shanked’ the victim with a fragment from a baby gate that broke under us in our struggle. I had to stab him over a dozen times.”