by Brent Towns
Swift let out a low-and-slow whistle. It was starting to look like this alliance with the cartel—and the abduction of Jeremy Reardon—reached right into the upper ranks of the DEA. The thought left him with a cold feeling squirming through his guts like a clump of frozen maggots.
Intel on the Razor proved far easier to access, as it wasn’t hidden behind any top-secret protocols. Heck, a rookie secretary in some Podunk field office could look at it if she wanted to.
The icy knot in the pit of his stomach expanded as he stared at the monitor and scrolled through the files. Razor was bad news any way you looked at it. A troubleshooter employed by the cartels, a coldblooded killer who liked to cut throats with his weapon of choice: a straight razor. According to the reports, Razor had a taste for torture, often skinning his victims alive and cutting them into pieces until they died, laughing as they screamed. The photos accompanying the reports were pure nightmare fuel, nothing but white bones gleaming through butchered meat. The DEA’s most recent intel pegged the monster’s location as somewhere in Colombia, currently working for Miguel Sanchez.
Swift studied the surveillance photo of the madman on the monitor. It had been taken through a top tier telescopic lens because the image was practically high-definition in clarity. Razor’s eyes were those of a dead fish—cold and soulless and void of even a scintilla of emotion. The eyes of a psychopath who could peel the flesh from a sobbing child without his conscience so much as twitching. If he even had a conscience...
Swift could barely stomach the thought of this merciless killer being involved in the abduction of the Reardon boy. Thinking about Jeremy in Razor’s torturous hands was enough to make him want to throw away his keyboard, gear up with all the full-auto firepower he could carry, and go monster-hunting. Instead, he gnawed worriedly at his lower lip as he sent all the intel to Reaper’s phone. Right now it was Kane, Cara, and Axe’s job to kick down doors, bust open heads, and kick bad guy butt. His job was to give them the information they needed to keep on ass-kicking.
And nobody kicked ass better than Reaper.
Swift called him back. “You should have everything you need on your phone,” he said when Kane answered.
“Yeah, I got it. Thanks.”
“Just note that Nash has a cabin on the Shawangunk Ridge near the Mohonk Preserve. Word is probably circulating by now that the players are being blitzed, so he may have bugged out. If he tucked tail and ran, that cabin is the obvious choice. Directions are in your intel packet.”
“Copy that. Any luck on that other thing?”
“Not yet. I’ve got some analysis programs running in the background, sifting through what limited data is available so far, but nothing has pinged yet. I’ll stay on it.”
“Just as long as our mission remains primary.”
“Always. Never doubt it.”
“I never do,” Kane replied. “Thanks again, Slick.”
“Stay frosty out there.”
Swift hung up and sat back in his chair, slumping a bit to rest his bones. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes to relieve them from the stress of staring at monitors for hours on end and silently wished his boots-on-the-ground teammates good luck. Hopefully, the gods of war would smile on them.
Because he would bet dollars to dimes that things were going to get a lot bloodier before they got better.
Reardon residence, New York
Mike Reardon sat in front of the television with a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and the TV remote in the other, aimlessly flipping through the channels as he left sobriety in the rearview mirror. The bottle was half gone, and he was feeling no pain. Well, no physical pain. As for the emotional pain… there wasn’t enough bourbon in the world to drown out the heartache he felt over the death of his wife.
He and Becky had just reconciled a little over a year ago. There’d been no affairs, no cheating; they had just sort of drifted apart and eventually separated over the usual “irreconcilable differences” people always cite when they can’t pinpoint an exact reason. But it hadn’t lasted long before they both realized they didn’t want Jeremy to grow up in a split home. Becky had moved back in, and as the months progressed, they slowly but surely rekindled the romance they had lost somewhere along the way.
Now she was dead, the rekindled fire in her heart snuffed out by assassins’ bullets. They’d already gotten hits on the gunmen’s prints. Turned out they were low-level hitters for the cartels, streets rats with firepower, meaning his job had reached out and killed his wife. She was dead because of him.
He tilted his head back and dumped more alcohol down his throat. The bottle was almost empty, but he had another one ready to go. Tomorrow he had to meet with the funeral director to pick out a casket for Becky and no way on God’s green earth he was doing that without a hangover. The booze burned going down, but he didn’t care as long as it nudged him closer to unconsciousness. Right now passing out into a black, dreamless oblivion seemed like a sweet mercy.
He thought of Jeremy, alone, scared, completely unaware that he would never see his mother again. He refused to even consider the possibility that his son was dead too. He prayed to a God he was no longer sure existed and begged Him to keep his boy safe. He would do anything to save Jeremy, and he figured a little prayer couldn’t hurt. With luck, Reaper and his team would bring his son home safe, but if not, a little divine intervention wouldn’t be a bad backup plan. In Heckler & Koch, we trust, but God rides shotgun. Or something like that.
He kept hitting the bottle and staring at the TV, now stuck on some retro-channel playing one of those old sitcoms that would never get greenlit in today’s PC culture. The more he drank, the more annoying the laugh-track became, grating on his ears. His wife dead, his son missing… what right did they have to laugh?
He drained the bottle down to its last dregs, then threw it at the television, shattering the screen. The annoying tinned-can laughter mercifully shut up.
He sensed the intruder behind him a split second before he caught the man’s reflection in the fractured spider-web of the TV screen. He tried to spring up from the couch but was way too drunk for that, so instead he just sort of lumbered to his feet and turned to face the invader.
The man was dressed in black from head to toe with a balaclava masking his features. Reardon knew the mask was a “good” sign. No mask usually meant the person intended to leave no witnesses alive to identify them. Corpses point no fingers. This guy had clearly come for nefarious reasons—nobody breaks into a house wearing a balaclava to sell you Girl Scout cookies—but murder most likely wasn’t on the menu tonight.
Reardon recognized the knife in the intruder’s right hand as a Spyderco; the blade coated black to avoid reflecting light. He preferred Kershaw knives himself, but there was no denying the Spyderco was a quality piece. The man’s left hand held a Heckler & Koch HK45 compact tactical pistol with a suppressor. He looked like something out of a video game or a B-grade action movie, standing there in all black with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.
Reardon cursed himself for leaving his Glock in the bedroom. He was a damn fool, and even his booze-soaked brain knew it. He’d been too worried about drowning his sorrows in Jim Beam, forgetting the old adage that pain is a champion swimmer. Now it looked like he might pay a steep price for the tactical error.
Of course, if he could make it to the kitchen, there was a wooden block full of knives—everything from little paring knives to thick-bladed meat cleavers—sitting on the counter. Not as good as his Glock but better than nothing.
As if reading his mind, the intruder moved to cut off his access to the kitchen. “Not gonna happen, Mikey. Settle down and let’s get this over with.”
“Who are you?” Reardon demanded though the slurred speech dulled some of the toughness. “What do you want?”
“You can call me Omega,” the masked man said. “And what I want is to deliver a message.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Afraid it’s not that kind
of message, Mike.”
“You work for the cartels?”
Omega just stared at him, not responding.
“You know where my son is, you piece of shit?”
“I’m not here to answer your fucking questions, Mike. I’m here to cut you down to size.” Omega raised the HK and smacked a bullet into Reardon’s kneecap.
While undercover in a biker gang that had been running heroin along the Texas/Mexico border, Reardon had once had his testicles plucked by a sadistic senorita, beaten like a pair of punching bags, and then squeezed in a pair of rusty vice-grips. But all that pain paled in comparison to the abrupt agony of his knee shattering like hammered ice when the bullet hit home.
He immediately corkscrewed to the floor, banging his ribs off the coffee table before landing on his back. The empty liquor bottle lay near his head from where it had ricocheted off the TV and bounced onto the floor. Through the pain that threatened to black him out, he had the thought that the bottle might make a good weapon. Well, maybe not good, but better than nothing.
But before he could even start to reach for it, Omega hurdled the couch and closed on him in an instant, knife a black-steeled blur, and Reardon descended into a slicing, slashing hell.
As the blade carved open his flesh, Reardon tried to fight him off, but it was useless. He was a kitten trying to fend off a grizzly bear. Omega was clearly a tier-one operator; drunk and crippled, Reardon didn’t stand a chance.
He raised his arms to block the Spyderco’s stabs and slashes but only succeeded in getting them cut up too. Omega was careful not to kill him, but the assassin opened dozens of wounds in nonlethal sections of Reardon’s frame. Some were skin-shallow cuts, some were tissue-deep tears, and others bit in all the way down to the bone. Blood flowed freely, staining the carpet.
As Omega sliced a trench down Reardon’s lower jaw from ear to chin, he growled, “Here’s the message, Mikey—call off your fucking dogs.”
Reardon didn’t even try to reply. The room spun and blurred, his eyes hazed with crimson from all the blood spattered on his face. He just laid there, enveloped in a cocoon of pain from which he knew he would not metamorphose into a beautifully scarred butterfly, but a broken, beat-down bug.
Omega placed the tip of the knife a hairsbreadth from the DEA agent’s left eye. “You hearing me, Mikey? I need some kind of acknowledgment. Or do I need to take one of your eyes to make my point?”
“I hear you,” Reardon managed to croak when he really wanted to scream. There was only so much suffering a man could endure before breaking, and he could feel the threads of sanity snapping like razor-kissed rubber bands.
Omega kept the knife-point nearly pricking Reardon’s eye, and for a couple of heart-stopping seconds, he thought the assassin was really going to plunge the blade through his pupil like a grill skewer impaling a cherry tomato. But then Omega wiped the Spyderco on the shredded remnants of Reardon’s shirt, deftly folded the knife one-handed, and tucked it away. Now you see it, now you don’t, please enjoy your lacerations.
He reached up with a gloved hand and patted Reardon on his slashed cheek like you would pat a well-behaved dog on the head. “That’s a good boy, Mikey. Don’t make me come back here or I’ll paint the walls with your blood.”
Rockland County, New York
Kane, Cara, and Axe studied Swift’s intel as they chowed down on dubious egg salad sandwiches that looked like they might have been fresh somewhere in the last three days and lukewarm fountain cola from an all-night gas station on the Rockland County line. As body-fuel went, it beat going hungry, but Kane hoped he didn’t get a gut-ache during the back end of the blitz.
“At this stage of the game, it’s a longshot that Nash is still lying low at home,” Axe opined. “I agree with what Slick said. If this guy is SOD, then he’s no fool, so he must have bugged out by now, and that cabin is the logical choice.”
“Still a gamble,” Kane replied. “For all we know, Nash could be running for the border.”
“Can only hit the targets we have and hope Lady Luck is riding with us,” Axe countered.
“Too bad she’s such a fickle bitch,” Kane said. “But you’re right. Right now, the cabin is our only play.”
“Somebody should still check his house,” Cara suggested. “Cover all the bases.”
Kane nodded. “Time to split up. Axe, Cara, you two head for the cabin. I’ll recon the house. I should reach my target first, so if he’s not there, I’ll give you a heads up.”
They both nodded in acknowledgment.
Kane’s phone rang. Looking at the number, he said, “It’s Traynor.”
Axe muttered, “That’s not a good sign.”
Kane answered, cutting right to the chase. “If you’re calling me, something went sideways.”
“That’s an understatement,” Traynor replied.
“What happened?”
“Somebody hit Mike Reardon right in his damn house, that’s what happened.” The anger came through loud and clear in Traynor’s tone. “He’ll live, but he’s hurt pretty bad, Reaper. They shot out one of his knees and cut him all up. Brick and I are heading over there now. Arenas is staying with the plane.”
“Can Reardon ID the attacker?”
“Negative. The hitter wore a mask. Called himself Omega. Told Mike to call off his dogs.”
“Yeah, well, he’s got a better chance of face-fucking a rattlesnake and not getting bit. You go take care of your buddy. We’re moving on to the next phase of the blitz. The sooner we take these bastards down, the sooner Reardon will be safe.”
“Roger that, Reaper. Give us a shout if you need anything.”
“The only thing we’ll be needing pretty soon is body bags,” Kane said grimly.
Reardon residence
When Traynor and Brick arrived at Reardon’s house, they found the DEA agent lying on the floor in a blood-splattered mess. Brick got right to work. For a big man—6’3” in his bare feet—the former Navy SEAL, now Team Reaper combat medic, was surprisingly gentle while tending to the wounds.
“I could probably stitch up most of those lacerations,” he announced. “But no matter what, he’s gonna have to go to a hospital for that knee.”
“I’m right here,” Reardon said, voice weak from shock and blood loss. “Don’t talk around me.”
“Right. Sorry.” Brick looked him right in the eye. “The bullet hit dead center on your patella, or kneecap, as it’s more commonly called. Nothing but shattered bone and torn up tendons. I’m good, but I’m not that good. You need a surgeon and some top shelf painkillers.”
“And not the kind named Jim Beam,” Traynor added.
“Will they be able to fix it?” Reardon asked, grimacing. “Give it to me straight.”
“I don’t see why not. Probably looking at a full knee replacement and you’ll most likely always have a limp, but you’ll live.”
Traynor called for an ambulance. When he hung up with the dispatcher, Reardon gave him one of the most miserable looks he had ever seen on a human face. “Pete,” the DEA agent croaked hoarsely, “maybe we should call it off. Tell Reaper to stand down.”
“That’s crap talk, Mike, and I think you know it,” Traynor replied.
“Crap? For god’s sake, Pete, look at me. Whoever these people are, they sent someone to my house to carve me up like a damn turkey. What if they do something like this to Jeremy? I could never live with myself.”
“They hurt you, Mike. No doubt about it. Hurt you bad.” Traynor paused. “But they didn’t kill you. They let you live because they still want something from you, and that’s the same reason you gotta believe your boy is still safe.”
“Yeah, they want something,” Reardon echoed. “Something I don’t have. Something I can’t give them. Something that doesn’t even exist.”
“They don’t know that,” Traynor reminded him.
“Pete, I’m begging you, call off the blitz. You’re going to get Jeremy killed.” Tears spilled from the corners
of his eyes, cutting clean tracks through all the blood. “I never should have called you.”
Traynor recognized the tone of voice, somewhere between dull and desperate. His buddy was broken, his soul crushed, his cross of suffering too heavy to bear. Hard to blame him. Son missing, wife dead, kneecapped, slashed to hell… right now, Reardon was a modern-day version of Job and God was dumping all sorts of tribulations down on his head. That kind of bad shit would shake any man’s faith.
“I get where you’re coming from,” Traynor said. “Honestly, man, I do. But you did call us, and you can’t un-ring that war bell, buddy. We’ve got three damn good people, the best of the best, out there ghosting through the night to run down the scumbags behind all this shit. Reaper will storm the gates of hell if that’s what it takes to bring your boy back. But one thing he will not do is turn his back and ignore a DEA-cartel alliance. That’s too big to walk away from, and you know it.”
Traynor believed every word he said. Nothing would pull Reaper off the hunt. He and Brick would get Reardon to a hospital and get him patched up; meanwhile, Kane would continue to tear apart this corrupt alliance piece by dirty piece. Those who had kidnapped Jeremy Reardon would pay. Those who had ordered Becky Reardon murdered would pay. And those who had viciously attacked Mike Reardon would pay.
Pay in blood, damn straight.
What had happened here tonight was terrible, but it would not make Reaper hit the brakes, not by a long shot. If anything, it would steel their resolve. They were a covert fast-reaction team, emphasis on the word fast. Leave the bureaucratic bullshit and handwringing for someone else. Team Reaper hit the ground running, and they didn’t slow down until they completed the mission or died trying.