by Peter Nealen
And from the look in Tammy’s eyes, she was sensing it, and she wasn’t happy about it.
“Roger, I’ve been as supportive as I can be,” she said. “I didn’t complain when you were out surfing, or racing, or skydiving. I didn’t even complain when John Brannigan dragged you off to war again. I told myself that you just needed to get it out of your system, that you were still in transition.” Hancock suppressed a wince. That had been a transition that had already taken almost four years, and was still nowhere near finished. In fact, if he was being honest with himself, it had flat-out stalled since joining up with Brannigan again.
“But this is getting out of hand.” Her voice was starting to sound choked. Oh, hell, here we go. “I barely see you anymore. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. You care more about your damned adrenaline rush than you do about me! You’re retired, for fuck’s sake! It’s not like we’re hurting for money. This was supposed to be our time. And you’re pissing it away, running after your glory days like you’re an eighteen-year-old grunt again!”
“What do you want me to say, Tammy?” Hancock asked, throwing his hands up. “You knew what I was like when you married me. What was I supposed to say to John Brannigan when he came saying he needed my help? I owe the man damned near everything.” He pointed an accusing finger. “And you didn’t complain much when I went out with him then.”
“Because it was just one time, Roger!” Tammy snapped. She had clearly worked herself up while waiting for him, and he could sense the blowup coming. He wanted to take his phone and get out. Combat he could handle. He didn’t like fighting with his wife, though it seemed to be getting more and more common, over the last few months. “Now you’re gone half the time or more!”
“I can’t just walk away,” he said, trying to keep his tone level and reasonable. What did she want him to do? “I’ve got a commitment to these guys, now. They’re counting on me.”
“You’ve got a commitment to me, Roger!” Tammy all but screamed. “And you made it long before John Brannigan came back into your life!”
Hancock kept his face carefully still. “That’s different,” he said.
“You’re damned right it’s different!” she snapped. “You’re not married to Brannigan, or to any of the rest of them! You didn’t sign a contract, you didn’t swear an oath, you just volunteered when he asked! And you can un-volunteer, Roger! You don’t have to go!”
Yes, I do. But how was he going to explain that to her? She’d never been there, never felt bullets snap past her head alongside other men who were closer than brothers. She didn’t get it, and now it was threatening his marriage.
But he couldn’t explain it. Not now. Not when she had already confirmed that Brannigan had called again. There was action ahead, and he was already slipping into that mode of thought, even before he knew the details. It was how he was wired. There were preparations to make, training to do, logistics to arrange. Carlo Santelli was probably going to handle most of the logistics, but as the XO, it was going to be Hancock’s responsibility to double-check.
“Look, we can talk this through when I get back, okay?” he said. “You’re right, I’m not married to John or to any of the rest of the boys. You’re still important to me. But you’ve always known that I’ve got to live two lives. Maybe I have been concentrating a little too much on one of them. When this one’s over, we’ll go for a good little vacation, get reacquainted, catch up, and fix this. Okay?” He stepped closer and took the phone. She resisted a little at first, but finally let it slip from her fingers.
“It might be too late for that, Roger,” she said quietly. “If this keeps up, eventually you might come back, and I won’t be here.” She turned her back and left the kitchen.
Hancock stared after her for a moment, but it was too late to try to fix things right then. He looked down at the phone. Brannigan had called, and he was already in that world, already mentally preparing for the next step. He found the listing and hit “Call Back.”
***
“Breathe in, breathe out, slow steady squeeze,” John Wade told his daughter.
Karen Alquist—his bitch of an ex had refused to allow his daughter to keep his name—lay in the prone on the shooting mat, her eye to the peep sights that he’d installed on the Ruger 10/22 that he’d gotten her for her birthday the year before. It was a good rifle to learn to shoot on, though he had to keep it for the weekends that he got with his daughter. Her mother had thrown a fit the first time he’d taken her shooting, but he didn’t care. He hoped she had an aneurysm and died.
The shot broke cleanly, and he squinted through the spotting scope he had set up on a short tripod next to her. He would do some of his own shooting later; right now he was focused on training Karen.
“Just a little low,” he said. “You’re still anticipating.” He looked down at the small blond girl. “Is the recoil really that bad?” He wasn’t asking because he expected her to say it was, and his tone made that abundantly clear.
“No, Daddy,” she said, biting her lip a little.
“See, you know that already,” he said. “You’ve got to make yourself remember it when you squeeze the trigger. The recoil won’t hurt you.” He put his eye back to the spotting scope. “Try it again.”
As much as he hated his ex, John Wade doted on his daughter. Of course, being a retired Ranger, and considered one of the more intense and hardcore of them both before and after he had retired, his form of doting was a little different from most people’s. For Wade, doting on his daughter meant making her the meanest, best-prepared little hellion he could. He’d had her enrolled in martial arts classes since she had been four. Of course, the ex had screwed that up, too. She never missed an opportunity to disrupt his plans, the more infuriating the better.
Karen got back down behind the rifle’s sights, took a deep breath, and squeezed off another round. The .22 only made a muted pop in comparison to some of the stuff that Wade had in his gun safe, not to mention some of the firepower that the Blackhearts had utilized over the last year or two.
His phone buzzed, but he ignored it for a moment, checking his daughter’s shot impact. “Good hit,” he said. “Still just below center, but you’re in the black. Good shooting, kiddo.”
Only then did he roll to his side and pull his phone out. It was still buzzing, with “John Brannigan” displayed on the screen.
“Wade,” he said by way of reply, bringing the phone to his ear.
“Wade, it’s Brannigan,” the Colonel said. “Got a job. Be at the usual place in twenty-four hours if you’re coming.”
“I’ll be there with bells on, Colonel,” he said. There was no hesitation. It meant cutting his week with his daughter short, but that was the way it had to be. He lived for the fight, and Brannigan had gotten him back into it. “I’ve just got to drop my daughter off with her aunt.” He knew his ex wouldn’t be available. That was the other way she screwed with him.
“I figured you would be,” Brannigan said. “See you tomorrow.”
“Do you have to go to work again, Daddy?” Karen asked, looking up from her rifle.
“Afraid so, kiddo,” he said. Karen pouted a little. “It’s what I do,” he said. “And it’s what pays for ammo for you to shoot. Look at it this way; at least you’re going to be staying with your Aunt Sarah for the rest of the week.”
She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look at him. She never did, when the friction between him and her mother came up. He didn’t say anything further.
Those are the breaks, kid. Maybe if your mother hadn’t turned out to be such a psycho bitch, we wouldn’t be in this situation. He knew that Karen heard a lot worse from his ex about him. He generally just let it drop when his daughter got that crestfallen look. He didn’t know why; it wasn’t like he was big on manners in general, or taking the “high road.” He just didn’t do it.
He sighed. “Come on, let’s finish the mag. Then we’ll go.”
She shot well. But it was clear
that her heart wasn’t really in it anymore. He almost berated her for it; these were skills that had to be practiced regardless of feelings. But once again, he let it go. She’d learn.
They policed up the brass and headed for the car, Wade’s mind already thousands of miles away.
Chapter 4
“That’s the fourth time you’ve looked down the hall in the last ten minutes, Don,” Vincent Bianco said, frowning. The big man was sitting next to Childress’ hospital bed, reading a book on his tablet. It was something new, a sort of “game novel,” that was called a “LitRPG.” He still wasn’t sure about it; he liked playing the games, but he really wasn’t sure that they meshed well with novels.
Don Hart turned back from the doorway. He’d moved his chair next to it, just outside of the “fatal funnel,” and had been fidgeting there for some time. He shifted his prosthetic leg for the fifteenth time, and Bianco could just see the outline of the pocket pistol that Hart had smuggled into the hospital the last couple of times they’d come.
“I’m just checking,” he mumbled into his beard. “Thought I recognized somebody.”
Bianco watched him. Something was off. Hart had never been the most emotionally stable of the Blackhearts, but he’d always been more prone to depression and alcoholism than to this kind of manic paranoia.
“What’s going on, Don?” he asked, his voice pitched low so as not to carry outside. “You ask me to start taking shifts with Sam, you risk a felony charge by bringing a gun into the hospital, and now you’re acting like somebody’s going to come and throw a flashbang in here and come storming in, guns blazing.”
“He’s not so sure they’re not,” Sam Childress said from the bed. The beak-nosed, gawky-looking young man was poring over a laptop computer, and didn’t look up as he spoke. Bianco had gotten him into the tech side of intel support during the Blackhearts’ little sojourn in New Mexico and Chihuahua, and since it was the only way he could see to stay in the fight since a bullet to the spine in Transnistria had turned him into a paraplegic, Childress had embraced it with an intensity that seemed strange, given his backwoods hick roots. “He says he saw somebody posted up in the hallway a while back, watching the door.”
Bianco glanced at Hart. “Really? Why didn’t you say something?”
“He did,” Childress said. “To me. But…”
“But when I looked again, the guy was gone,” Hart said. “I might have seen him a day later, but I can’t be sure.” He looked up at Bianco, frowning. “If somebody is surveilling this room, I can’t be sure. I’ve just got the heebie-jeebies, that’s all.”
“Obviously,” Bianco said, his frown deepening. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Again, Hart was a bit of an odd duck; he’d never quite fit in with the rest of the Blackhearts, as hard as he’d tried. He was competent enough, but emotionally he was a bit of a wreck. His commitment to helping Childress through his crippling injury had seemed to help get him on an even keel again, but now Bianco was wondering if things hadn’t gone sideways in his head in a whole new way.
Before he could say much of anything else, though, his phone rang. He grabbed it quickly, but not before the Battlestar Galactica theme echoed through Childress’ room.
“Wow, dude,” Childress said, as Bianco put the phone to his ear, flushing red. “That’s nerdy, even for you.”
Bianco just flipped him the bird. “Yes, sir,” he said. He’d seen that the call was from Brannigan as he’d answered.
“Vinnie, are you at the hospital right now?” Brannigan asked.
“Yes, sir, I am,” Bianco answered. “So is Don.”
“Good,” Brannigan said. “Means I don’t have to make another call. Get your crap and get out here to the usual assembly area. We’ve got a job.”
Bianco knew better than to ask for details over the phone. Brannigan didn’t even like having a phone, and sure as hell wouldn’t say where they were going or what they were doing over it. But there was one detail that had to be addressed.
“What about Sam, sir?” he asked. “Don’s got a bad feeling that somebody might be watching him, and we don’t really want to leave him alone.”
There was a pause. Bianco almost winced. He could imagine the look on Brannigan’s face at only then finding out about Hart’s concerns.
“Does he, now?” Brannigan said. “Well, don’t worry about it. I’ve got some people coming out to look after Sam. I talked to Ben Drake about it after that last unpleasantness.”
Bianco didn’t know Drake; he’d been before his time. But he knew the name. And it was a name to conjure with. Drake was the new “Grand Old Man” of the Marine Corps; if Ben Drake didn’t have the contacts or the resources to fix it, whether it was a training problem or family troubles, then it wasn’t to be had.
The “unpleasantness” that Brannigan was referring to, of course, was the murder of Mario Gomez’ parents and younger brother, while the team had been in Transnistria, a breakaway post-Soviet hellhole of a “republic.” Clearly, the Colonel had taken the threat seriously, and had taken steps to head off a similar incident.
“Roger that, sir,” Bianco said. “We’ll take off as soon as Drake’s guys get here.”
“They should be just about there already,” Brannigan replied. “I called Ben this morning, and he said he’d have two local guys there in a couple hours.” There was a brief pause. “Carlo’s staying back for this one, so I have more calls to make. Get moving as soon as the Old Fogeys get there.”
“Will do, Colonel,” Bianco said. Brannigan hung up.
Hart was looking at him with a frown. “We got a job?” he asked.
Bianco nodded. “We’ve got a job,” he said.
“Where?” Childress asked.
Bianco looked down at him. “He wouldn’t say, not over the phone,” he said. “Just that we’ve got a job, and as soon as a couple of guys get here to look after you, we need to head out.”
Childress nodded, his mouth tightening. He’d embraced his intelligence cell role, once it had finally sunk in that he wasn’t ever going to walk again, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still sting when the other Blackhearts headed out without him. It was going to take a while. “Let me know as soon as you have any information,” he said. “You know the secure email setup.”
“Of course I do,” Bianco said. “I set it up.”
“We’ll keep you in the loop, Sam,” Hart said. He was glancing out the door again, and his eyes suddenly focused on something, his hand hovering close to that lump in his pocket.
A barrel-chested man, clean-shaven and white-haired, stood in the doorway. His dark eyes, surrounded by deep crow’s feet, scanned the room. “A man in a hospital bed, a big guy who looks like he’s about twelve, and a bearded guy with a prosthetic leg,” he said, in a gravelly voice that spoke of many years and many more cigarettes. “Pretty sure we’ve got the right room.”
“Who are you guys?” Hart asked. He hadn’t relaxed, and his hand was now in his pocket, on the grip of his pistol. Bianco was starting to get nervous.
“Don…” he started to say, but the oldster cut him off.
“I’m Gary,” he said. He jerked a thumb at the tall, lanky, bald man behind him. “This is Bob. We’re a couple of Ben Drake’s Old Fogeys.” He looked Hart in the eye. “John Brannigan probably ain’t gonna be too happy if you shoot me, son,” he said. “Especially since it’ll just make me mad, and you’ll get a hell of a beating before you get hauled off to prison. Either way, you’ll be out of whatever he needs you for.”
“You know Brannigan?” Childress asked.
“Only by reputation,” Bob said, as the two older men stepped through the door. “But if Ben Drake speaks highly of him, that’s enough for me.” He eyed the three younger men skeptically. “Not entirely sure about his choice of trigger pullers, but I guess it’s a seller’s market, these days.”
There was an awkward silence. “Well, don’t just stand there, boy,” Gary said, looking at Bianco. “You’ve got work t
o do. We’ll stick around and keep an eye on your brother, here. Get moving.”
“Roger that,” Bianco said. He couldn’t think of much else to say.
“Keep an eye out for a younger guy,” Hart said. “About six feet, fit, brown hair, with a tribal tattoo on his neck. Looks like a meat-eater. I think I’ve seen him a couple of times, now.”
Bianco bit back a comment. They still didn’t know if the surveillance was real, or a figment of Hart’s imagination. But Gary didn’t get sarcastic, or even show much reaction beyond meeting Hart’s eyes levelly and saying, “We’ll keep our eyes open. Nothing’s going to happen to your boy here. You’ve got our word on that.”
Hart stared at him for a moment, then nodded briefly. He turned to Childress. “We’ll be in touch, Sam,” he said. “Don’t get in too much trouble with the nurses.”
Childress snorted, still watching Gary and Bob. Bianco had to grin a little bit. One of the nurses assigned to Childress’ case was a bitter old battleaxe of a woman in her fifties. The other was a dude.
He gripped Childress’ hand. “Hang in there, brother,” he said.
“You guys be safe,” Childress said. “I don’t need another roommate in here.”
Or another funeral to attend. That part went unsaid.
***
“When am I ever going to get to stop bailing your ass out?” Joe Flanagan asked, killing the engine and the lights.
“When you no longer need me to inject some excitement into your life, Joe,” Kevin Curtis replied from the passenger seat. “Otherwise you’d do nothing but sit on your porch and chew on a piece of straw, or whatever you hayseeds do in your spare time.”
“We make our money going into foreign countries where we’re not supposed to be and killing people,” Flanagan pointed out as he climbed out of the truck. “I’m fine with spending my free time fishing, hunting, and spending time with Rachel, instead of driving down to this desert den of iniquity because you think you’re in trouble, again.”