by Eric Beetner
I rushed the short man, threading my way past his outstretched arm to bring the heel of my palm square into his nose. It spread like Smucker’s boysenberry jam. I helped him into a back dive, and he went reeling into the Galaxie. The crown of his head caught the rear bumper and he crumpled to the ground and lay still.
If I thought Lurch was out of the fight, I was in for a surprise. I heard a grunt and twisted back just in time to take a roundhouse kick from him in the gut. Twisting avoided a blow to the ribs and a debilitating fracture, but as I folded over his shin and flopped to the ground, it was hard to gauge the immediate benefit. Lurch jumped forward and began aiming further kicks at my head.
I brought my arms up to protect my skull and tried to roll out of range. His partner’s prone body stopped my progress. Lurch skipped in for the kill. He feinted at my stomach then aimed the toe of his wingtip straight at my throat. I barely managed to block it with my hands, but it stung like hell and I knew his next kick would find its mark.
Except there wasn’t one. I heard a sickening thump, and Lurch collapsed to the ground like a rope ladder. A split second later, one of the twenty-five-pound plates from my bench press came clattering down beside him. It rolled on its edge for a foot or so, imprinting a trail of red blood behind it, and then went into a flat spin like a quarter tossed on a bar.
I scrambled to a sitting position. My heart slammed kettle-drum beats. I looked at the plate, I looked at Lurch, and I looked at the deserted street in front of my trailer. “What the fuck?” I said in summary.
“Up here.”
Winnie stood on the roof of my trailer, arms akimbo, staring down at me.
“What are you doing up there?”
“That’s kind of a stupid question, isn’t it? You just saw what I was doing up here.”
I eased to my feet, holding my bruised stomach muscles with one hand while I tried to detach the Taser wire with the other. “I meant, why did you go up there in the first place? I told you to wait in the trailer.”
“How did I know you weren’t working for them? That you hadn’t gone to call them?”
She had a point. I was too busy doubting her story to think about how it looked from her perspective. “Okay,” I said finally. “Then the plate from the bench press...”
“Was intended for you. I brought two of them since I know you have a hard head.”
“Thank you for that. But if you had two, why didn’t you use one a little sooner?”
“Let me answer that question with another. Why, after convincing them you were a neighbor, did you walk right up and let them know you were onto their game? I thought you had something better in mind.”
“Oh.”
Winnie dropped to her haunches, turned, and lowered herself over the side of the trailer. She hung from the edge of the roof for a moment then let herself fall to the ground. Her landing was a bit wobbly, but no one observing her would guess that she was a quadriplegic. She went past me to squat by the short guy. She peeled back an eyelid to check his pupil then pressed hard on one of his nail beds. She did the same for Lurch. “Dead,” she concluded. “Both of them.”
“Terrific.”
“Far from it. I needed—correction, we needed—to question them.” She came up to stand beside me. “Now we need to get rid of the bodies.”
Chapter 4 - Winnie
Winnie helped Riordan pull the bodies from the front of the trailer to a dark corner of the second carport behind the covered auto. They searched both men, finding a set of rental-car keys on the shorter one and another Taser and a 9mm automatic on the taller. Neither had a wallet or ID of any sort.
“What’s with all the Tasers?” asked Riordan, holding the stubby weapon to the light.
“They have their reasons. One I already told you—they want me alive. Also, guns aren’t the best thing to use against me unless you get a head shot. I don’t feel the shock and pain of being hit, so I might just keep coming at you until I bleed out.”
“Glad you can be so dispassionate about it.”
She ignored his comment. “And although I’ve never been jolted with one, I’m sure a Taser would completely scramble the signals from the transceiver. It would probably affect me more than it would a normal person.”
Riordan shrugged and flipped the Taser onto the stomach of the shorter man. He nudged the body with his toe. “And you were planning on getting rid of them how?”
“You’re the local.”
“Yes, I’m the local. That means I can tell you where to get a tasty margarita or a good deal on tires. It doesn’t mean I am familiar with popular body-dumping grounds.”
“Get creative. Exercise your right brain a little.”
“Let me see the car keys.” She passed them over, and Riordan examined the handwritten tag from the rental-car company. “Okay. Come with me. I’ll bet I know where they’re parked.”
“Your famous visitor’s lot?”
“You got it.”
She followed him on a circuitous route through the trailer park, sometimes crunching through the gravel yards of other residents, sometimes walking along darkened streets. The place seemed almost completely deserted. At the back of the complex, a road descended to a swale of unpaved desert with a few parking places marked with white rocks. Her Lincoln was there, lodged in front of a saguaro cactus that had been maimed repeatedly with a .22 rifle. Beside the Lincoln was a white van.
Riordan pressed the clicker on the key fob. The van chirped in response and its door locks flicked open. “Open sesame,” he said.
Standing at his shoulder, she watched as he pulled the driver’s door open and looked inside. There was nothing remarkable in the passenger area, but when they walked around to the back and opened the cargo door, they found a mattress on the floor and two pairs of handcuffs locked around metal tie-down loops.
“Your intended home away from home,” he said.
She nodded then reached to take hold of a large duffel bag that was lying on top of the mattress. She pulled it in range and yanked down the zipper. Inside, she found two pump-action shotguns, another 9mm automatic, ammunition for both, duct tape, several sets of PlastiCuffs, two pairs of military-grade night-vision goggles, two body-armor vests, and still more Tasers. There was also a leather case containing three hypodermic syringes loaded with a cloudy liquid.
Riordan whistled. “All the party fixins,” he said, scratching his armpit reflectively. “Wonder what the hypos are loaded with.”
“Probably some kind of horse tranquilizer.” Winnie picked up one of the automatics and squinted at the markings on the slide. “Numbers have been filed off.”
He took the gun from her and checked the other places where the serial number would be stamped. “Yeah, every one of them.” He returned it and fished out a vest, holding it out for them to examine. “Hmm, what’s that say?”
She leaned in. She could barely make out an insignia printed in gold ink: a tiny fortress with text jutting over the top. “Praetorian.”
“Sounds familiar. Ring any bells for you?”
It did sound familiar, but apart from the association with ancient Rome, Winnie couldn’t place it either. “No,” she snapped. “And I don’t care if it says Fisher-Price toys. We can use it. All of it.”
“Use it how? To start World War III?”
“If we have to. Now, what was your idea with the van? We put the bodies in the back, and...”
He threw down the vest. “And drive it to the north forty of the long-term parking lot at the airport. They won’t open it for weeks, and if we’re careful about wiping everything down, they won’t be able to tie it to us when they do.”
“You almost sound like you’ve done this before.”
“No comment.”
Riordan got behind the wheel of the van and Winnie got in the Lincoln. They drove to his trailer, where he backed the van up close to the bumper of his old car to block the view from the street. They loaded th
e bodies in the cargo area, wiped the van down, and stowed the duffel bag in the trunk of his car. Then they caravanned out to the airport, where she waited in the cell-phone lot while Riordan went to the long-term one. Before leaving the trailer, he had put on a baseball cap and pulled a hoodie over it. She realized he was worried about cameras at the entrance of the long-term lot and was pleasantly surprised that he’d had the presence of mind to obscure his appearance.
Winnie had been waiting in the cell-phone lot for less than twenty minutes when she saw him ambling through the forest of sodium-vapor lamps in the lot like an overgrown gangbanger. He nodded at her when he saw the car and went around to the passenger door.
“Any problems?” she asked, once he was seated beside her.
He shook his head and pulled off the long rubber gloves he’d been wearing. “Except the damn gloves. They stink of Lysol.”
She laughed. “If you were a proper criminal, you wouldn’t have to make do with the gloves you use to clean the toilet.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. You hungry? I never had dinner, and we can talk while we eat.”
She realized she hadn’t eaten herself since breakfast. She glanced at the Lincoln’s dashboard clock. It was 11:20. “I’m game. Is there anything open? Or are you proposing to cook something?”
“I’m proposing to let a guy named Denny cook something. He works 24/7.”
“Delightful.”
He directed her to a Denny’s about three miles west of the airport. They got a booth in the back and ordered from a gum-chewing waitress who appeared to be obscuring a tattoo on her neck with heavy makeup. Riordan ordered a chicken-fried steak. Hoping for the best, Winnie got something called Tilapia Ranchero. She knew it was crazy to order fish at a Denny’s this far inland, but she was careful about what she ate and didn’t want to pollute her body with red meat or fried food.
Riordan had pulled the hoodie off his head. Now he removed the baseball cap and took off the sweatshirt. After brushing his hair back in place, he leaned back in the booth and regarded her. He wasn’t an entirely unattractive man—not that his looks had anything to do with what they had to do next.
“You said you came to me for help,” he started. “Then you mentioned something about starting a war with that cache of weapons we found. What exactly do you have in mind?”
She snorted. “Isn’t it obvious after tonight? We need to help each other stay alive and keep out of the backs of vans.”
“Okay, but I get the definite sense you have something more offensive than defensive in mind. We could stay alive by moving to Tahiti.”
“If that’s a proposition, I’ll pass. Yes, I need your help with more than just running away. The first thing is something that has to do with me—with my particular situation.” She explained about the problems she’d been having with the transceiver. “I need a way to get it fixed, but I can’t risk making the problem worse or breaking the transceiver entirely.”
“That is a problem. But you don’t expect me to open it up and attempt surgery, do you? I can barely replace the battery on my cell phone.”
Winnie did have some idea that Riordan could at least take a peek inside to look for obvious loose wires. She brought her hand to the back of her neck and squeezed. It was one of the few places in her body where she had any sensation and the muscles were tied in knots. “I at least need you to pull guard duty while somebody else looks at it. I can’t risk losing my ability to move without a protector.”
“Sure.”
“And how about helping me find someone to look at it?”
Riordan hunched over his water glass, jockeying the ice cubes in the glass with his knife. “What sort of person do we need? A digital computer expert? Palm Springs isn’t exactly Silicon Valley, you know.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson. There is a computer chip with specialized firmware in the device, but it also contains a radio receiver and transmitter. I guess you could say it’s a mix of digital and analog. Humans are analog, after all, and the transceiver’s ultimate purpose is to relay nerve impulses from my brain to my spine.”
He set the knife back on the table and looked up at her. An impish smile came over his face, erasing about ten years’ worth of mileage. “Hey,” he said, “I know just the guy.”
Click here to learn more about No Hard Feelings by Mark Coggins.
Back to TOC
Here’s a sample from Matt Hilton’s The Devil’s Anvil.
Chapter 1
‘Keep your head down this time, Billie, and don’t move. They won’t see us if you stay still.’
There were three men in a GMC Suburban hunting us, two in the front and one in the back. The bottle-green SUV was canted on its chassis, the right side sitting in a deep rut in the road where it crested the hill, the other wheels on the grass embankment. One of the men held something to his face, the glint of moonlight off lenses betraying a set of night vision binoculars. He scanned the road and the forest on both sides. His friends relied on their unassisted vision as they checked out the road both front and back.
They couldn’t see the woman or me.
Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Womack was scrunched in a hollow in the forest floor, with a stack of broken twigs piled in front of her offering further concealment. I was ten feet away, crouching behind the bole of an ancient fir tree. A storm had torn down the upper half of the tree during a previous season, and the tangle of its brittle branches hid me from the watchful eyes of the hunters in the Suburban.
‘Where are the others?’ Billie whispered. ‘What if they’re moving in behind us, Joe?’
‘It’s always a possibility, but I won’t hear them if you keep talking. Do as I say, keep still and stay silent.’
Billie was a spirited woman, not someone who ordinarily took orders lightly. But I was glad to find that this time she knew I was speaking sense, and that it was best to keep her head down.
The Suburban didn’t move. The men inside continued to search the woodland, but none of them was looking our way. The road before them wasn’t an easy track to negotiate, not even for an off-roader. Best-case scenario was if they reversed back the way they’d come, took another route through the forest. Yet it seemed they weren’t ready to give up on the hunt. I listened. Distantly I could hear another engine, alternately revving and petering out as a second SUV pushed its way along another trail. The terrain was hilly, densely forested, and though there was no way of pinpointing the direction of the second vehicle it sounded far off and of no immediate concern. A helicopter kept buzzing overhead, but the canopy was too thick for its crew to see us. More worrying were the searchers on foot who for all I knew could be close.
Occasionally I heard the crackling of twigs, but again the sound was distant. Didn’t mean that a more accomplished stalker wasn’t nearby. My friend Rink could move through this forest without setting a foot wrong or leaving a distinct track, and there were plenty of trackers as skilled as him, some more so. Truth was, the people hunting us were more capable than many. They didn’t rush trying to flush us out; once they’d got in position, they were controlled and methodical in their search. Someone guiding them was laying down a search grid and sooner or later they’d stumble on to our position.
I was armed, albeit lightly, with a SIG Sauer P226 and a folding knife. But those that sought us came with heavier armament: rifles, automatic pistols. It was serious artillery to bring down an unarmed, untrained woman. Our only advantage was that those chasing Billie didn’t realise who was with her. The only person who could have told them about me was in no position to do that. He was lying at the bottom of a ravine with a broken neck.
The man with the binoculars swept the ground before us, but continued past without being alerted to our presence. He must have said something, because the driver brought the Suburban forward a few yards. The big car tipped like a seesaw as it negotiated its new position, but it inched forward again. Then, once out of the deepest ruts
, the driver steered it down the hill and so close that I could smell the exhaust fumes that plumed from the tail pipe.
‘They’re going to see us...’ Billie’s voice was high-pitched, fraught with anxiety.
‘Hold your position. They’re not aware of you, and things will stay that way unless you move.’
‘Please, Joe,’ Billie said. ‘Don’t let them take me.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
My pledge might have rung empty to her. Billie had come to me for protection, and in her mind that might mean firm and resolute action, not hiding like rodents in a burrow. But I was one man against many, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, and her best hope for safety was that we’d go unnoticed by the hunters. I was itching to do something more telling than crouch behind the fallen tree, and if it had been only my life on the line I’d have probably gone for broke. I bit down on the urge to shoot it out with the men in the SUV.
They passed us by.
I sighed as the Suburban jounced a route along the trail and headed up the next incline. I followed the big car’s progress, seeing it through drifting rags of blue smoke that hung in the cold moonlight like will-o’-the-wisps. As it crested the next rise it paused again as the men inside checked the terrain for any telltale signs.
Billie adjusted her position so that she could check where the car was and I heard the crackle of twigs beneath her elbows. The sound was a faint rustle at most, but in the stillness of the forest she might as well have jumped up and down, waving her arms and yelling ‘Over here!’ A corresponding crackle alerted me to the location of something moving through the brush. I hoped in that fraction of a second that it was merely a forest creature, startled by our proximity, but knew our luck was out.