by Nick Thacker
“Listen,” Salty said, growling. “We’re willing to make you a deal. You turn around and walk away. Get in your car and leave Denver. Never come back, and we won’t take any action against you. Hell, we might even have a place for you once we’ve dismantled the Club and built something better. This doesn’t have to go down the way you’re thinking.”
She tilted her head at Ben. “What happens to him if I walk away?”
Ben angled his head to look at her. There was something in her eyes. Ben didn't know for sure, but he thought she was trying to communicate something to him. A warning. A call to action? He couldn't read her exact intent. But, something was about to happen. He sucked in deep breaths and widened his eyes, trying to make himself ready for whatever might come.
“He dies,” Dalton says. “So does everyone he’s come in contact with over the last few days. That includes your little brother, Bennett. A good man is dead because of him. His name was Rennie, and I’ve known him for almost a decade.”
When the rage came to Ben, it wasn't a slow boil. It started at his feet and shot up through his torso and into his chest like a white-hot flame. He had to force his jaw to unclench so he could speak.
“A good man? Your 'good man' killed my best friend, you asshole.”
Dalton raised the shotgun a little higher. “Let’s watch the language. Have some respect for the ones who’ve paid their dues, unlike you, recruit.”
At that moment, before he even really understood what was happening, Ben lost it. He felt like he'd felt back in the diner, toe-to-toe with the trucker. He'd realized he was going to attack only a split-second before the actual attack.
In a flash, all sensibility left him. His physical response took over, and his brain went to sleep.
He lurched forward, pressing his hands on the underside of the desk in front of him. With a roar, he shoved it up and back, tilting it up as it smacked into Salty first, and then Dalton. It happened so fast neither of them was able to get a shot off.
Salty’s pistol discharged into the ceiling. He tried to back away from the desk, but it bumped into his arm, causing the pistol to come free. Before it could fall all the way to the floor, Ember snatched it, flipped it, and put two bullets into Salty’s chest.
Dalton was tilting, falling backward. The shotgun boomed. Ember cried out. Ben continued to push the desk, ramming Dalton into the back wall. Just like that. In less than a second after Ben pushed the desk up, Salty was dead.
Ben turned to see Ember pivoting her arm to aim the gun at Dalton. The t-shirt covering her right shoulder had been shredded. Blood dotting holes up and down her bicep. Only then did Ben realize Dalton had shot her, and the blast of the shotgun had connected with her shoulder.
The recoil from the shotgun had pushed the barrel up. Dalton lowered the shotgun at her and wrapped a finger around the trigger. A second before he could pull it again, though, Ben smacked the barrel, and the blast took out a chunk of the ceiling. Bits of white drywall rained down on their heads.
She squeezed off a couple of shots toward him, but Dalton had already dropped to the floor and scrambled forward. Under the desk, right at her. He came up between her legs, ramming his head into her crotch. She tumbled to the side. Dalton pushed forward, rising to his feet.
Ben tried to grab him but missed by an inch. The spiky-haired man was out the door in the blink of an eye — sound from the weapons fire pulsed in Ben's ears. His head thumped.
Ember was on the floor, panting. Ben turned her over. She was grimacing, looking at the shoulder injury. Trickles of blood drew lines from her shoulder, down to her wrist.
“Are you okay?”
Tears streamed down her face. “Yes. I’ll be fine. Just birdshot, I think. Help me up.”
He lifted her to her feet, and she pressed her injured arm against her side. Her teeth were clenched, her jaw vibrating against the pain. She held out the gun to him, grip first. "Go. He's probably still in the building."
Ben snatched the gun. They ran out into the hall and Ben saw the door to the stairwell squeezing shut. He pointed, and they ran toward it. But by the time they were in the stairs, he could hear the door slam shut below them. Ember couldn't move fast since every step made her wince harder against the shoulder pain.
At the bottom of the stairs, they jogged into the back parking lot. Dalton was gone. Ben spun around, looking through the industrial area of Northeast Boulder, but he couldn’t see any sign of the escaping man.
“What do we do?”
Ember’s eyes rolled back in her head as she collapsed to the ground.
38
Ben helped Ember up as she swooned a little. For a few seconds, she seemed dazed. Then, several rapid blinks and deep breaths brought her back to awareness.
“I’m okay.”
He wasn’t sure about that as he took Ember by her good arm and escorted her to the parking lot. Huffing, puffing, she wore a deep wince on her face. Her right arm was now covered in blood.
“We should get you to a hospital,” Ben said.
Ember shook her head as she fished her car keys out of her pocket and opened the car door. She drew her two pistols from underneath the seat and inserted them both into the front of her waistband. She looked down at her injured arm. Grunting, she rolled up the shirt sleeve. Red marks peppered her flesh from shoulder to forearm. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, but she had lost a good amount. Ben didn’t know how she was still upright.
She flexed her arm, breathing through the pain. “I’ll be okay. I can shoot just fine with my left hand.”
“I’m sorry about your boss.”
Ember sighed. “I should have seen it coming. I’ve been too busy with contracts over the last year or so. I haven’t seen much of Salty. Now I know why. Next time, I’ll know better. Next time, I’ll pay attention to the warning signs.”
“What happens now?”
“Dalton broke a Club rule. He took a gun into a Post Office and tried to kill a registered Club member.”
“Do you report him? What’s the next step?”
Ember shook her head. “It’s beyond reporting. Today was phase one of his endgame. Getting rid of his enemies. Next, he’ll go back to his Post Office and rally his people. He’ll spin a story about how the government has been infiltrated or something like that. He’ll get them riled up enough to believe anything. Then, he’ll go after the Club government. Once he’s killed them all, he’ll take over. And after that’s happened, no one will be able to do a damn thing about it.”
“And that would be bad.”
She looked like him in the eye. “Yes, Ben, that would be bad.”
The door opened behind them, and Ember spun with her pistols raised. Fagan stood there, the unburned half of the older woman's face pulsing red. She was out of breath, leaning against the door.
“I heard gunshots,” Fagan said. “Salty is dead in his office. What happened?”
Ember nodded. “Dalton was here. He and Salty tried to kill us.”
“What? Salty tried to kill you? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He was The Chef.”
Fagan’s mouth dropped open. “No… Are you serious? He and drake were working together. What does this mean?”
“This means Dalton is trying to start a war.”
Fagan took a few steps toward them, her hands clasped in front of her. “He must have planted the information for my spies to pick up about the football game. I’m so sorry, Ember.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“What do we do now? It’s early, but I can have everyone here in half an hour.”
Ember shook her head. “No. If we go to Five Points with an army, we’ll be the ones starting a war. I don’t think most of the members in the Branch know anything about it.”
“I understand. Still, I’m going to talk to the President. They need to know what’s happening here.”
“Thank you, Fagan.”
The old lady settled her one good eye on
Ben and nodded at him. “Good luck to you, son.”
He lifted a hand to wave, and then Fagan returned inside the building. The morning light bounced off some of the windows, making Ben wince against the rising light. A few birds chirped in a nearby tree.
“I can’t believe I thought it was her,” Ember said, staring at the door Fagan had disappeared through. “And I can’t believe Salty betrayed me like that.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well,” she said as she turned her attention back to Ben. “You have a choice. You can come with me and help me take down Dalton. It will be dangerous. We might be going up against several members of the Five Points Branch, and we’ll have no way to know if they’re in on Dalton’s schemes or not.”
“Okay,” he said, “what’s the other choice?”
“I can take you back to your car, you get on I-70, and you drive out of here. Don’t look back. Forget you ever met me, and never speak a word of this to anyone, ever, for the rest of your life. I’ll keep an eye on your friend’s widow and your little brother, no matter what you choose.”
He stared, a million thoughts racing through his head at once. A chance to leave. Or, a chance to stay and help set things right. One was sticking his head in the sand, the other could lead right to his death.
“What’s it going to be, Ben? Either way, I have to hurry to Five Points.”
He leaned against the car. “I’ll drive.”
39
The Five Points Post Office was an old brick office building on Weston Street, near the train tracks and lost amid the random clutter of warehouses and shipping facilities. Close to downtown Denver, but a world away. Cars and foot traffic were almost non-existent. Ben thought it would be the perfect place to hide in plain sight, which seemed to be what this Assassins Club liked to do.
When they parked, Ben watched Ember intently stare at the building while she gripped the dashboard like she was trying to squeeze it into submission. The bleeding on her shoulder had slowed, and the grimace on her face had lessened during the drive down from Boulder. But, she didn’t seem to be operating at a hundred percent.
She handed him Dalton’s pistol and he examined it, tilting it against the light.
"That's not the same as my Enforcers. It doesn't have a safety if that's what you were looking for."
“I was, actually. I’m not great with guns.”
"You could be if you wanted to. You could do just about anything." She reached over and tapped a finger against his temple a couple of times. "That's your problem. That's what's holding you back."
He swallowed, pushing the nervous bile down his throat. “What I would like is to make it so Dalton can’t hurt my family, and to live out the day. That’s all I want to do. It’s the only thing on my mind at the moment.”
Ember checked the magazines in her pistols and inserted one into her waistband and another into an ankle holster under the leg of her jeans. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure that happens.”
Ben looked toward the building, squinting at it. “Looks empty.”
“I’m sure they want it to seem that way. Just because there isn’t a sniper on the roof doesn’t mean they aren’t ready for an invasion.”
“I thought the Post Offices were supposed to be safe.”
“I thought so, too,” Ember said, “but no one in the DAC assumes anything. If you want to live long in this business, you’ve got to always be ready for someone to stab you in the back. I wasn’t, and you can see how I’ve paid for it.”
“I guess if you get Health and Dental, it balances out.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’d kill just for a 401k. It’s retirement you’ve got to worry about. Unlike golf, being a professional assassin isn’t something you can do forever.”
He didn’t know if she was being serious or not, but it didn’t matter. She continued before he could respond. “This could get ugly, Ben. You need to be ready for that possibility.”
“I chose this, remember? I wanted to come with you. So, what’s the plan?”
“Top floor. I’m reasonably sure that’s where Dalton has an office. Hell, I’d even bet it’s a corner office, knowing him. If we get to him first, we kill him. No warning, no discussion. If we meet resistance in the form of other Five Points members, we have to win them to our side and get them to turn on Dalton. If we have to, we restrain him and send him before the Review Board to account for what he’s done.”
“I guess we can’t just walk in the front door and ride up the elevator?”
Ember shook her head as she pointed to a fire escape on the north side of the building. “That’s our best bet. We have to assume Dalton will be watching for us, or maybe he’s warned people. We have surprise on our side. It may make the difference.”
“Is everyone in the Five Points Branch in on this attempted coup?”
Ember shook her head. “I don’t know, but I doubt it. And because of that, we can’t just go in guns blazing like we did at the warehouse. We don’t want to kill people just for the crime of defending their turf. Despite what you know about Dalton, there are some good people inside that building. People nothing like him.”
“I understand.”
“Fortunately, since guns are banned inside Post Offices, we probably won’t be shot on sight. But again — don’t shoot anyone unless we have to. Unless it’s life or death.”
“Got it. I’m as ready as I’m going to be, then.”
She led him toward the back fire escape, and they climbed the rickety thing. The morning sun warmed the rusty metal, and Ben let Ember lead. Every time she reached her injured shoulder, she clenched her teeth. But, she made no complaints.
At a few points, Ben had to pause when the fire escape shook because of loose bolts jutting out of the brick exterior. Ember had no qualms about racing up. Ben took a more careful approach, especially once they were past the second floor. This was his first fire-escape-based assault of an enemy hideout, and he didn’t want to fall to his death before he got the chance to get inside.
But they both clambered to the top without incident. No one peeking out of windows or waiting for them when they reached the roof.
The rooftop was covered with sticky black tar with swamp coolers and a single shed-like structure in the center. She pointed at it, and they padded over.
Ember picked the lock on the door of the small structure, which led to a maintenance room and a set of stairs down. They both waited in the darkness, still, catching their breath.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Ready.”
Together, they trotted down the stairs and out into an open hallway, where they found five Branch members with baseball bats waiting for them.
40
Ten minutes before, Dalton had pulled his car over to the side of the road. Adrenaline still flooded his system, coursing through his veins, making the edges of his vision blurry. That lack of control, more than Salty’s death, bothered him. Salty’s death did bother him, though.
The man he’d called “The Chef” for the last couple of years had been more than a mentor to Dalton. He’d been a calming presence in Dalton’s life. An angel sitting on one shoulder, keeping his worst impulses in check.
Dalton looked over to the passenger seat of his car. Only a few weeks ago, Salty had ridden there, the two of them going to the weapons depot in Commerce City to plan how they would begin their coup. Of course, then, Salty had intended for Dalton to be the outward face of the revolution. He was to be a silent partner in this takeover of the DAC. He had to maintain his appearance of being the good little Club member.
And always with his rules. Limit the bloodshed. No killing of the governing members of the Review Board. They’d agreed the government of the Denver Assassins Club needed to be removed, but not always on the right way to go about it.
Salty was gone. In some ways, a shame, and in others, a blessing. Dalton was now free to conduct his revolution in the manner he saw fit — and besides that, he now h
ad Ember where he wanted her. She’d killed Salty, plain and simple. The revolution had begun.
And it would certainly not be a bloodless revolution.
Throughout his career in the DAC, Dalton had maintained an outward expression of calm. It was a personal requirement he had for himself, ever since the beginning. Always calm. He had promised himself he would learn to keep calm, no matter what, because his nature was the exact opposite — he was the product of parents who had taught him that anger was the answer to most everything. He’d essentially grown up angry, able to lose his temper at just about anything.
So when he’d taken on this new life, he’d promised himself that while anger could be felt, it would never be let out unless he specifically allowed it.
When a contract would go bad and he'd have to run, he still kept his cool. Angry, but never panicked. And he'd learned over the years how to use that stoicism to make the people around him believe whatever he wanted. He'd intended to destroy the government from within and only use the munitions in the weapons depot if he couldn't eliminate his enemies with quiet lethality first.
But he wasn’t sure if that mattered any longer. The events of the last few days had provided a wealth of new experiences. The munitions were gone. Salty was gone. Ember had intervened.
Ember was predictable in her unpredictability. Dalton knew how to handle her, or, at least, he thought he did.
But this Harvey Bennett character was a wild card. Dalton knew what Ember saw in him; why she wanted to recruit him. He had raw strength and good instincts. He needed training, of course. Someone had to shape him into a proper killing machine. In other circumstances, Dalton would have enjoyed taking on such a challenge.
But not now. Now, Dalton would kill him and be done with it. Bennett had seen too much. It was too risky to leave him alive, no matter what else happened.
And Ember would have to die first because she wouldn't sacrifice her pet project. So, Dalton had to get her alone, or the two of them together, in a place where he had a distinct advantage. Something better than a level playing field.