“What is this stuff?”
“I was drinking that,” I said testily.
“I think you’ve had enough, Mike,” she said firmly.
“Just leave me alone, okay?” I snatched the bottle back from her.
“Mike, please, just tell me what happened. I’m here for you. Talk to me.”
“No, goddamn it, I don’t want to talk about it!” I snapped. “I just want some peace and quiet! You think all because you screwed me it gives you the right to march in here whenever the hell you want?”
Sarah huffed loudly and quickly stood up. “Look, I read the report, okay? I know what you found in there.”
I let out an obnoxious drunken snort. “Oh do you? So you know that he cut her open, cut out her organs, and put them on his shelf like bowling trophies?”
“Oh my God,” Sarah said. We’d kind of left that part out of our report.
“So don’t barge in here and tell me I can’t have a goddamned drink!”
“I’m just trying to help you.”
“I don’t need your help!” I shouted, slamming the plastic bottle down on the concrete floor. “You’re not my damned mother! She’s been dead since I was a kid. You know what? I get by just fine.”
Sarah’s expression softened a little. “How did she die?”
“She was murdered. I came home one day and found her cut to pieces, just like that girl. My dad’s dead too. So are half my friends. You know what? I don’t care. I kill people for money. Shooting people is my job. I can handle it. I always handle it. I don’t need your help. I don’t need your pity. And I don’t need you. So just march your little ass the hell out of here and leave me alone!”
Sarah’s eyes flashed with anger. “I don’t need this. Go ahead, drink it all! Drink yourself to death if you want. I hope you choke on it!” She turned on a heel and stormed out of my room, slamming the bathroom door behind her.
A pulse of anger surged through me. I picked up the ancient puzzle box and threw it against the door as hard as I could. It crunched loudly as it hit, and fell to the floor, broken. I stared at the bathroom door, breathing heavily. I just wanted to be left alone. I just wanted Sarah to come back. I wanted another drink. I didn’t want to drink anymore.
A sickening pit formed in my stomach as I realized what I’d done. Good job, Ace, I thought. You managed to drive her away, too.
“Shut up,” I said aloud. It’s not my fault. I had a bad night. There was comfort in self-pity. I lifted the plastic bottle to my lips and began to gulp down the rest of the pungent mystery alcohol. It burned on the way down, and I thought I was going to throw up. I let the empty bottle clatter to the floor.
I slumped back against the wall and closed my eyes. The room was spinning, and it wouldn’t stop. My thoughts became even more sluggish than they were before, and it was difficult to concentrate on anything. I had a hard time remembering what I was so upset about. I drifted off to sleep.
LORENZO
The van slalomed around the corner as we headed back toward town. I bounced painfully against the wall. The girl I had rescued was sitting next to me, head flopped back on the seat, totally out. Apparently she’d been drugged by the bad guys.
“Easy, Carl, don’t get us killed.”
“Don’t you tell me easy! Plan, Lorenzo, we had a plan. Who the hell is this broad?” He swung us around a truck full of sheep, and when I say full of sheep, I mean that literally, like it was piled full with legs sticking out the top. “She was not part of the plan. I would have remembered that.”
“They were going to torture her. I couldn’t just leave her. She sounded like an American before she passed out. We can just drop her at the embassy gates and take off.”
“Is that what you think now?” He gestured out the window at the Zubaran police vehicles streaking in the direction we had come from. “Cops crawling everywhere. And you forgot, because of the mobs of angry assholes, they evacuated the embassy.”
To accentuate his point, I saw a man on the sidewalk getting the hell kicked out of him by some of the Zubaran secret police. “Okay, our place is closer. Get us off the streets.” The whole city had gone nuts.
“I’m not taking her to our place. With what we’re working on, nobody can see that.”
“Do it, Carl.” I ordered. My crew was loyal, and I seldom had to pull rank, but this was my crew, and it wasn’t a democracy. The driver swore, his beady eyes glaring at me in the rearview mirror. We reached the compound in minutes. We entered through the attached garage so no one would see us carry the girl in.
Reaper met us at the door. He had a Glock shoved in the front of his pants. “What happened out there? Police bands are screaming about some massacre. Did you get the box? Hey . . . who’s the babe?”
“Lorenzo decided he’s Batman, sneaking around at night and rescuing people,” Carl spat. I ignored him and carried the girl up the stairs and into the apartment. I laid her gently on the couch. She was still out.
“Where’s the box?” Reaper asked.
“Somebody beat us to it and whacked Adar.” I put the DVD in his hand. “The shooters are hopefully on this, and we need to figure out who they are. We need that damn box.”
“On it, chief.” He ran for his computer.
I flopped onto the couch next to the girl. My hands were starting to do the post-action shake. No matter how many times I did something like this, that part never changed. Carl sighed, folded the stock of his stubby Galil, and set it on the coffee table.
“Pretty bad in there, I guess?” he asked slowly, sitting down. We had been working together for over fifteen years now. We’d met in Africa, where he had been working as a mercenary, and we had both gotten screwed over by our respective employers. Working with me had proven more lucrative, and we’d been together ever since, through all sorts of craziness, and it still took me a moment to realize that Carl was trying to be comforting. He just wasn’t very good at it.
“I shot three of them. Took out some more with a grenade.” I shrugged. “The guys before me made a real mess.”
Carl regarded me suspiciously, wheels turning, probably wondering if I was going soft on him. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.” He gestured at the girl. “And what do we do with her now?”
I studied her for the first time. She was young. Probably in her twenties. I had thought that she was from the Philippines when I had first seen her, as most of the servant girls in Zubara were imported from there or Indonesia. They were literally a slave class. Now I wasn’t so sure. She would have been unusually tall for a Filipina and didn’t look quite like most of the servant girls I had seen here. She was snoring peacefully in a drug-addled haze. One eye was badly bruised, and it made me glad that I had shot those men.
“I couldn’t leave her. You should have seen the girl upstairs,” I said. Carl didn’t respond. Acts of mercy were few and far between in his life. I patted her down: no documents, no passport. Something caught my eye. “Check this out.” I held up her wrist. She had a gold ring on one finger.
“What’s that say?” he asked, squinting his beady eyes.
“California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.”
“Think she stole it off a tourist, I hope?”
“I’m thinking that we’re going to need to come up with a pretty good cover story for when she wakes up.” I gestured around the room. Hundreds of pictures were tacked on the walls. Posters of Al Falah, Adar, building schematics, road maps, and miscellaneous paper littered every corner of the room. A scale model of the Phase Three target was on the coffee table, and there were at least ten visible guns, and that wasn’t counting the RPG in the corner.
Carl took his time responding. He would have just left her there. Hell, I don’t know why I hadn’t just left her behind. We were thieves, not heroes. “You’re the one with the imagination. I just drive good and shoot people.”
“Guys, come check this out,” Reaper called excitedly from the other room. “I’ve got your shooters.�
��
We entered the makeshift computer room and hovered over Reaper’s shoulder. He was playing some Finnish goth-metal over the speakers. “I’m skipping past the torture porn. This Adar guy was one screwed up son of a bitch . . . and here is where your shooters come in.”
“Why isn’t there any sound?”
“Audio’s all screwed up, chief. It’s all static. The DVR probably didn’t burn the disk properly.”
“Slow it down.” There were two men, dressed in camo, faces smeared with black greasepaint. They were armed with blocky submachine guns. One was just over six feet, kind of stocky, and left handed. The other was thin, a lot shorter, probably about my size. Both were Caucasians. “They’re Americans.”
“How can you tell already?” Reaper asked.
“That’s Remington A-TACS camo. Not that common. They’re either Americans or Canadian airsofters. Look how they move, too. Pretty typical Western CQB doctrine.”
The two had entered the room at the same time, weapons shouldered. The shorter one covered the room to his front, while the taller one peeled off to the right. They’ve done this before.
Their professionalism seemed to fall apart a second later as the bigger one froze when he saw the girl hanging from the ceiling. Adar turned toward the shooter with a strange look, almost a smile, on his face.
The shorter of the two shooters kept his weapon pointed at Adar. The other one just flipped out. First he said something to Adar, but the Butcher didn’t seem to respond. He just stood there, smiling. It was creepy. The shooter then dropped his subgun, leaving it to hang on a single-point sling, reached down to his left thigh, and drew his handgun.
“What the hell is that?” Reaper asked.
“That’s a .44 magnum,” I said as the shooter put a round into Adar’s left knee. The kneecap exploded into blood and pulp, and the Butcher of Zubara dropped to the floor. The other infiltrator flinched and covered his ears as the powerful weapon discharged.
From there, the shooter proceeded to take Adar apart piece by piece, systematically. Adar tried to say something, holding up his right hand, only to get it blown off. The next round went into Adar’s left bicep, mangling his arm in a spray of blood.
The shooter’s accuracy was impressive. The fourth slug went into Adar’s gut. The fifth went into his neck, nearly taking his head off. The shooter then reloaded automatically, mechanically, without thought. Damn, he’s fast. He had the gun reloaded and the cylinder closed before the emptied speed loader hit the floor. I absentmindedly pulled the .44 shell out of my pocket. I flipped it end over end between my fingers as I watched.
After the execution, the two shooters seemed to argue for a moment, then cut the mutilated girl down.
The pair then quickly ransacked the bedroom. Before they left, the tall one dropped the Ace of Spades onto Adar’s bleeding corpse. A grotesque grin remained on the Butcher of Zubara’s face.
“Who are these fodas?” Carl asked.
“Who the hell carries a revolver anymore?” Reaper asked.
Somebody who’s really good with one and knows it, I thought. “Like I said, Dirty Harry.”
“Look at these guys!” Carl was pissed. “What’s with the camouflage? Kids these days all want to wear camouflage and gear and play dress up! How are they going to explain that if they got picked up by the cops?”
“They’d just shoot the cops.” A professional should never be this brazen when there were more subtle ways available to pop somebody. “Play back when they’re arguing.” The taller shooter was young. He didn’t have a killer’s face, but there was no hesitation when he’d stitched those massive slugs through Adar. “He’s definitely American. Looks pretty corn-fed. He’s a pasty northern Midwesterner, probably has a cheese-wedge hat at home.”
“How can you tell when you can’t hear what he’s saying?” Carl asked suspiciously.
“It’s in the way he moves. I do this for a living, remember? His mannerisms, his gear, his clothing, all point to the USA. He might as well be wearing an Uncle Sam hat.”
“I guess. Well, when you play an Arab, I don’t recognize you, down to the dress and the perfume. You say he’s American, I believe you,” Reaper said.
“Go back a bit.” Carl frowned. “These guys have to stick out. How many Americans are in Zubara?”
“Officially? A couple thousand,” Reaper replied automatically. “And thousands more assorted Europeans. Mostly in Al Khor. If these guys have been operating in the poor side of town, they’d totally stick out.”
“Reaper, grab my notepad from the living room. We’ve got contacts in every district. I’m going to give a few of them a call.”
Reaper nodded, adjusted his Glock, and left the room.
“Kid’s gonna shoot his balls off, carrying his gun like that.” Carl said. Reaper flipped him the bird on his way out.
“We don’t have very good health insurance in this business, either,” I muttered, studying the faces of my new adversaries. These men were standing in the way of me completing Phase Three. Until I had that box, all of our work was worthless. Without that box, our families belonged to Big Eddie. I did not know who these mystery shooters were, but my new mission in life was to find them and kill them if I had to. I blew up the picture until it became grainy, zooming in on the tall one. These men knew their business. This was going to be a challenge.
There was a sudden crash and a surprised yelp from the living room. Carl and I both drew our guns and moved apart. I disengaged the safety on my STI and pointed it at the doorway. Carl took up position behind the desk, CZ extended in front of him.
“Reaper?” I shouted. “You okay?”
Our guest had awoken. Reaper stumbled into the doorway, his arms raised in a surrender position. The girl stood behind him with his Glock 19 pressed into the base of his neck. I didn’t have a shot.
“Sorry, chief,” he said slowly.
The girl glared over Reaper’s shoulder. The drugs must have worn off enough for her to come to, and she was obviously angry and confused. Her eyes darted about between us. “Nobody move! I’ll shoot this guy right in the head,” she ordered. I had been right. She was an American, and she apparently knew how to use that Glock. “Who are you people? What am I doing here?”
“That’s kind of complicated.”
She tightened her grip on the Glock. I could imagine a 9mm exploding through Reaper’s head. “Give me the short version, asshole!”
“Okay. So there I was, minding my own business . . . and I ran into some very bad men who had you tied up and were taking you into a house where you were going to be tortured to death on video. I, uh, rescued you.” The girl looked kind of out of it, disoriented and scared. She was still under the influence of whatever drug they had given her. And her finger was resting on the trigger that decided whether one of my crew lived or died. “We’re friends.”
“You expect me to believe that?” she shouted, blinking rapidly. Reaper cringed as she banged the Glock into the base of his skull.
“Look, we’re not your enemies. See?” I slowly placed my 9mm on the table and stepped away. “Carl, put your gun down.”
“But—”
“Do it!” I ordered. Even worse than her killing Reaper would be the noise. Our complex was crowded with rental villas, and I had no doubt that Zubaran fuzz would be crawling all over a gunshot call within minutes. Carl grudgingly responded and placed his CZ on the floor. “My name is Lorenzo. I saw that you were in danger, and I helped. I brought you back here, because the streets are covered in cops, and all hell has broken loose out there. Let me help you.” Why had I brought her to our hideout? Damn needless complications.
“Okay, I don’t think you’re with those men that grabbed me, but who are you, really?” She was scared, but she was hard, and her grip on the gun didn’t loosen. “You’re an American, at least.”
“You first,” I suggested soothingly. Plus it gave me a moment to try to think of some sort of plausible cover story.
“I’m with the US government,” she snapped.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. “Good,” I said as calmly as possible. If I had brought a fed or a spy back to our hideout, it was either screw the mission or kill her. Neither one sounded like a good option. I caught Carl casting me a look, letting me know how stupid he thought I was. “We’re on the same side. We’re on a top-secret mission. And if you blow Special Agent Wheaton’s brains all over the walls, you’re going to have some explaining to do to your superiors, and I probably won’t be able to get the security deposit back on this apartment.”
When you have to lie, you might as well reach for the stars.
“Are you Dead Six?” she asked unsteadily. Her eyes had narrowed to dangerous slits, and her teeth were a hard white line on her darkly tanned face. I paused, not sure how to answer. “Are you with Dead Six?” she repeated.
Fifty-fifty chance on this one. “Yes.”
“I knew it!” she shouted as she stepped back from Reaper. The muzzle of the Glock was swinging toward me. The 9mm hole looked unnaturally large as the contents of my stomach turned to ice. I threw myself to the side, but I already knew it wouldn’t be fast enough.
Click.
Reaper disdained holsters, and since he tended to just shove the gun in his pants, he usually carried chamber-empty. Carl and I called him a sissy for doing that, but as I hit the floor, I was mighty glad Reaper was a sissy.
The girl apparently knew guns, and she instinctively reached up with her left hand and began to rack the slide. The world seemed to dial down into slow motion as Reaper spun and charged her, his stringy black hair rising like a halo. He hit her hard, and they both disappeared into the living room.
I was up in a flash, moving toward the scuffle. In the corner of my vision, I saw Carl scooping up his gun. Reaper and the girl were wrestling for the Glock, the muzzle pointed upward between their faces. He was much taller, but she was stronger than she looked.
Beginning to lose the struggle, she let go of the gun and threw her elbow into Reaper’s temple. His head snapped back like his neck was a spring. Our techie went to the ground in a heap, but at least he took the Glock with him.
Dead Six-ARC Page 18