The Unbelievable Mr. Brownstone Boxed Set One (Books 1-3): Feared By Hell, Rejected By Heaven, Eye For An Eye (The Unbelievable Mr. Brownstone Boxed Sets)

by Michael Anderle

  “These guys are brighter than I thought,” James muttered.

  There was nothing worse than clever thugs. They could actually be dangerous.

  He grew bored with thinking about how he might lay waste to the warehouse. Instead, he pulled out his phone, wondering if he should give Alison a call. She had sounded like she was fine during their last conversation, but she’d also wanted him to call again soon. He just wasn’t sure if the next day was too soon.

  James frowned, wondering how much a call from Mexico to Virginia might cost. He really needed to get some sort of international plan for his phone if he was going to be spending much time outside the United States. Not that he was short on cash, but international rates were still murder.

  Maybe I could set her up with some sort of VOIP app or something. I mean, shit—what if Shay wants to go to Ghana or something next time. How much would that fucking cost?

  He shook his head, wondering how he’d gotten on this thought track. It was like he thought wandering halfway across the world with Shay would become something common.

  James was a bounty hunter, not a field archaeologist. He was in Mexico right now to help Shay out because it’d end with him getting something he needed from the Professor, not because they were partners.

  He shouldn’t have even been thinking about going off to exotic locales with her in the future. There were more than enough bounties to keep him busy in California, let alone North America if he got bored in the City of Angels for whatever reason.

  A soft chuckle escaped his lips when he thought about how quickly things had changed with him in the last few weeks. James had spent years with no one close to him other than Leeroy. The Church was there to save his soul, not be his friend, even though he helped them. He knew how much pain and stress he caused poor Father McCartney. Now he had something approaching a friend in Shay, and with Alison he had something like a family.

  Hell, he’d even hung out with the off-duty cops a few times. He was a damn social butterfly at this point.

  James still wasn’t sure what to make of all this. It felt like a good thing, but at the same time it complicated his previously simple life. Maybe no one who wanted to care about others could in truth have a simple life.

  When Shay emerged from the warehouse, he watched her for a few moments, looking for any sign of trouble. No tension lined her features and her movements exuded relaxation, so her conversation must have gone well.

  The gang got to exist another day.

  He returned his attention to the phone and deciding whether he should call Alison.

  The driver-side door opened, and Shay slipped into her seat. “Don’t do it.”

  He looked over. “Don’t do what? You just got here.”

  She gestured toward his phone. “I bet you were going to call Alison, weren’t you?”

  He looked back. “I just had my phone out.”

  “Don’t call her. You’re acting like an overprotective dad. She needs a little space so she can figure out where she fits into that place. If you’re on with her every day, even if she wants you to call, she won’t be able to transition from her old life into her new one.”

  James silently put his phone away. He didn’t want to lie about what he’d been thinking, but he also didn’t want to give Shay the satisfaction of confirming she’d been right.

  The woman confused him. Sometimes she seemed to be able to read his thoughts and others, she seemed completely puzzled by something simple and basic he’d said—as if he were some sort of weird Oriceran transplant.

  “Let’s get going,” Shay said, starting the Forerunner back up. “If I hurry and we’re lucky, maybe I can find the Blade and we can get back to our rooms before sundown.”

  James pulled out his phone again, not to call Alison but to check the North American Bounty Hunting Alliance app. It wasn’t as up-to-date as the various city department apps when it came to bounties, but it would do for the moment.

  First, he tried to limit the bounty area to Mexico and search.

  Sorry, too many results. Please add additional criteria and search again.

  He almost laughed. Of course looking for all the bounties in an entire country would be too much. He had to limit his search parameters just when checking Los Angeles. There were so many scumbags out there.

  James limited the search area to Baja California Sur and the level to five and above.

  Five records meet your search criteria.

  He read through the possibilities. Three out of the five were very far north, and a lot farther than he wanted to drive. The fourth was some sort of revolutionary army leader in exile from Colombia.

  James didn’t mind pissing people off, but he didn’t want to get involved in politics unless he had a good understanding of what was going on. Even though he took people down for money, he wasn’t a mercenary. His job used his strength to make the world a better place, and he never wanted to forget that.

  He also wanted to be one-hundred-percent sure the target had it coming. He knew that not all bounties were fair or warranted, which is why he chose his carefully. Not pissing off an entire revolutionary army group was high on his list of smart moves.

  Having eliminated four out of the five bounties, he looked at the details of the last, hoping for something worth pursuing. The final level-five bounty belonged to a man living in the same mountain range they were already driving toward, one Jose Padilla, who went by the name “Sombra.”

  James grunted in satisfaction as he skimmed the details. Sombra was the kind of target he’d been born to take down. The man was a necromancer who kidnapped innocent people. Apparently the Mexican government had become so disturbed by his activities at one point, including raising a rather sizeable force of reanimated corpses, they’d sent fighters to bomb the mountains in an attempt to kill him.

  “Motherfucking zombies,” James muttered. “I hate things that can’t be afraid.”

  “What?” Shay asked.

  The bounty hunter glanced at the time. They’d arrived in Mexico early, and Shay’s city business hadn’t taken that long. If she didn’t take all day finding the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, he’d have plenty of time to start tracking down Sombra without even having to sleep first.

  “I’d like to take a little detour after your job,” James informed her.

  “Oh, have some sightseeing you want to do?”

  “Nah, want to take down a necromancer.”

  Shay laughed. “That’s fun, too.”

  14

  Shay frowned as the rough terrain shook the vehicle. She missed the smooth ride of her Spider on a city street, but at least their target destination would be coming up any minute. Vast canyon walls surrounded them on either side, and mountains rose in the distance.

  Light caught Shay’s eye, and she slowed the Forerunner before bringing it to a stop. She narrowed her eyes, staring straight ahead.

  “Problem?” James asked.

  There were caves in the distance, obscured by dust. Finding her destination pleased her, but the faint semi-translucent shimmer in the air worried her as well.

  “You see that, Brownstone?” Shay inquired.

  “Yeah, I see it. Fucking magic.”

  Shay slowly exhaled. “That must be the cloaking. From what I’ve read, you can’t actually see the caves unless you’re already looking for them and know generally where they are. Neat trick.”

  James shrugged. “It might also kill you on contact.”

  “You’re barrels of fun, Brownstone.”

  “I try.”

  The tomb raider shook her head. Brownstone was right. She couldn’t be sure about the secondary effects of the magic field. Dying in the middle of the desert didn’t strike her as fun.

  “Wait a second,” Shay muttered. “See that?”

  “The lizard?”

  “Yeah.”

  She narrowed her eyes. An iguana skittered across the parched landscape only a few feet from the field, seemingly oblivious to it.<
br />
  “Come on, cross it, you lizard sonofabitch. Let’s see if it fries you. Take one for history and archaeology.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “It’s not like all that barbecue you eat comes from volunteer animals.”

  James snickered. “At least they died for a good cause.”

  Shay smirked at his reply.

  The lizard rushed through the field after some tiny prey Shay couldn’t make out from a distance and there was no crackle of electricity, no screech, no explosion. The animal kept running. If the magical field had done anything to the creature, it wasn’t obvious.

  Shay threw open her door. “That’s promising.”

  “Unless the magic turns people into iguanas,” James suggested with a grin. “Then it’d make sense it wouldn’t affect iguanas.”

  “Hey, as long as I’m not dead I don’t care. I’ll pay you if you get me turned back.” Shay opened the back door of the Forerunner and pulled out a backpack and a utility belt. She already had a gun with several magazines. Unlike Brownstone, she didn’t expect that she’d be killing any armies anytime soon.

  James opened his door. “Finally, something other than sitting around.”

  “Stop,” Shay called.

  The bounty hunter turned to look at her.

  “From what I’ve read, this place might have a lot of traps and shit,” Shay explained with a sigh. “And I’m not worried about any bad guys inside, so you just stay here. You’re great at killing bad guys, Brownstone, I’ll give you that, but I think it’d be pretty embarrassing if you died in some six-hundred-year-old trap.”

  “Seriously?” James grunted. He obviously didn’t like being on the bench, but Shay wasn’t about to budge on this.

  She slipped on the belt. “I’ll deal with what’s inside. Just make sure that if I come running out, no one pulls a fucking Indiana Jones on me where I run into guns.”

  “Carlos Rodriguez always uses drones to deal with that sort of thing,” James offered.

  “Yeah, and I always wondered how he was getting such great signal to his drones when he’s deep in some cave.” Shay shook her head and finished adjusting her backpack.

  “If you can use a movie example, so can I,” James told her. “Hey, I wonder if there really is some big warehouse where the government keeps ancient magical artifacts.”

  “Probably.” Shay closed the back door and then leaned into the driver’s side. “Look, Brownstone, just so you know… This might not be the final site.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some of the background research suggests this might only lead me to another place. Just saying there’s a good chance this might not end today. I wasn’t sure before, because I thought they might have just been speaking metaphorically. That’s why I didn’t mention it. But now that I see the magic around it, I’m guessing it’s a bigger chance.”

  James shrugged. “Gotta raise the staff at the right time and see where it shines?”

  Shay snickered. “Something like that.” She gestured behind them into the empty dry wilderness. “Just make sure no one sneaks up on us, Nazis or otherwise.”

  “Go find your magic Chinese weapon or a map or whatever shit you need,” James suggested. “And I’ll deal with anyone else.”

  “Don’t kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  The bounty hunter’s only response was a grunt.

  The field archaeologist slammed the driver door shut and took a deep breath, which she held until she passed through the magical field. There was no pain or discomfort, and best as she could tell she was still hot as ever and not an iguana.

  Shay grinned and waved to Brownstone. He gave her a little salute, and she turned to hurry toward the caves.

  They’d parked close enough that the initial hike only took ten minutes, though the vehicle and her backup were mere specks in the distance.

  Three different caves confronted her now. If she’d had any doubts about being in the right spot, the faded classical Chinese characters carved above the caves erased them. Despite the dry climate, the centuries of wind and dust had taken their toll.

  Shay reached into a pocket in her backpack and pulled out her augmented-reality interface goggles. Shay hated the things, since they were about as fashionable as Brownstone’s coat, but they were still useful. A few quick taps on her phone and they were ready to help earn their cost.

  “Let’s see how well this translation program works.”

  The tomb raider might lack Brownstone’s photographic memory, but she wasn’t a slouch in the foreign language department. Unfortunately, however, she’d never studied any Chinese dialect, let alone classical Chinese.

  Words overlaid some of the ancient Chinese characters inside the goggles, though most remained unintelligible.

  ... blade… honorable and strong…

  Pass… find… noble…

  Stand… speak… Mandate of the Heavens.

  “Seems like the right spot, at least,” Shay mumbled.

  Now she just needed to figure out which cave contained either the treasure or the information she needed for the next leg of her journey.

  Shay stepped closer to the caves’ mouths.

  “Command: adjust lighting filter by ten percent. Command: add contrast overlay.”

  The characters popped a bit more, but not enough to help with the translation. Something else caught her eye, though; something much smaller.

  Shay closed on the first cave mouth and looked up. There were light scratches next to each character; intricate series of lines.

  “Command: heighten contrast by ten percent.” She waited. “Command: heighten contrast by thirty percent.”

  They weren’t just lines. She recognized the patterns. They were from the I Ching. Every Taoist priest worth a damn would have been familiar with the ancient book. The lines formed patterns called hexagrams that were used for divination.

  “These have to be here for a reason,” Shay murmured, tapping her lips. She tried to think like an ancient Chinese priest, then laughed. “I can barely figure out what modern men are thinking.”

  The admiral’s fleet would have contained both Buddhist and Taoist priests, but all her information suggested the Taoist priests had been responsible for the Green Dragon Crescent Blade.

  Shay sucked in a breath. The men had landed in a strange and foreign land, an area they were sure that no one like them had ever visited. They’d gone through the trouble of erecting a powerful concealment barrier, but they couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t stop locals from stumbling upon the caves if they already knew about them. The priests would have wanted to make sure that they could recover the ancient relic, though…or at least that someone else could. Burying the entire complex would have made that impossible, since they wouldn’t have been so deluded as to think a huge imperial force could be sent across the ocean. That suggested traps and magical means of hiding the artifact.

  Knowledge. They knew no one native to this part of the world would understand their culture or methods. They’d probably planned to recover it much sooner, not six hundred years later when we had the internet to make it easier.

  Shay frowned slightly. The resurgence of magic on Earth meant their mystical defenses might even be stronger than when the priests set them up.

  She shook her head. She didn’t have time to worry about that. First she had to figure out which cave contained her target.

  A careful examination of the hexagrams revealed three sets of twenty-two, for a total of sixty-six. Shay frowned. Something was wrong. There should have been only sixty-four hexagrams. The I Ching was far older than the fifteenth century, so she was sure this wasn’t an issue of lost hexagrams.

  The minutes passed as she painstakingly checked each hexagram with the help of an app on her phone. The hexagrams on the first two caves were normal, but over the right-hand cave, she found duplicates of the patterns for radiance and force.

  Either the priests had gotten sloppy, or they had been tr
ying to leave a clue that they thought only an educated Taoist priest could decipher.

  Good enough for me, Shay thought, stepping toward the cave on the right. She pulled out a small flashlight and strapped it to her arm.

  The tomb raider spared one last glance at the characters above the cave before entering. Her light caught site of a skeleton about thirty feet in, an iron spearhead embedded deep in its skull and a rib. The clothes had long ago rotted, but the poor bastard provided proof that she wasn’t the first person to try and recover the treasure.

  She grabbed a handful of small but dense weights from her utility belt. Unlike her recent trip to Peru, several of her preliminary readings had suggested the place was likely trapped, meaning she needed to exercise far more caution than she had when collecting the Rod of Supay.

  Shay tossed the weights in a wide arc. One landed with a soft clunk, as if metal met metal.

  Sighing, the archaeologist knelt and pulled off her backpack, then rummaged around before pulling out a tiny drone. A few quick taps sent her drone aloft and interfaced it with her goggles.

  “Command: filter one.” Shay took a step forward. The drone moved behind her, its buzz sounding like the world’s largest mosquito. It transmitted its feed to the corner of her goggles. “Command: filter two.”

  Not exactly X-ray vision, but the new filter did let her detect density differentials on the ground’s surface. There were some sort of metal plates underneath the dirt, and a series of them continued deeper into the cave. Not stepping on them would probably help keep her alive.

  “Jeeze, guys, it’s like you moldy old assholes were trying to hide some powerful ancient magical weapon or something.” She grinned as she made her way deeper into the cave. “Too bad technology is its own kind of magic.”

  Father O’Banion sighed. The drinks he’d pounded had filled him with whimsy and happiness…and then two assholes had strolled back into his bar and ruined everything. It was the same slick-suit-and-hair crew from before. He’d hoped his earlier warnings would have frightened them off, but some people obviously needed to be reminded.