Vendetta Target: Six Assassins Book 5

by Heskett, Jim

“Excuse me,” he said, barking over the music.

  “You’re excused.”

  The brute grinned. “Are you a cop?”

  “What if I am? Are police not entitled to blow off steam by throwing singles at fake knockers any more?” When the guy furrowed his brow in consternation, Ember rolled her eyes. “I’m not a cop, lunkhead.”

  He glanced toward the table and raised his eyebrows. Because of the angle, Ember couldn’t see anyone over there, but it didn’t matter. The guy must have learned what he needed, because he turned back and said, “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “What? Why? I’m not doing anything wrong. Just enjoying the black lights and the music.”

  “You’re bothering our patrons.”

  “That guy? I didn’t bother him at all. I just asked him a question. Can’t a girl get a drink?”

  “Not you. Maybe you’re not a cop, but you’re something, and you’re not welcome. I’ll escort you out. If you don’t want to go willingly, I’ll ask my friends to help me make sure you get to the door safely.”

  He stepped back to clear a path to the door. As he did, he unbuttoned his coat strategically to let it fall open so Ember could see the armpit holster there. Intense eyes flashed at her. It wasn’t the most subtle threat, but she knew better than to test him again.

  No reason to start a brawl here, with all these civilians in various states of dress or undress.

  “I’m going,” she said as she glanced at her watch. 9:40. If she couldn’t walk around freely, then finding the bomb would become a lot trickier.

  Chapter Seven

  BAM

  Brody “Bam” Jenks straightened his legs underneath the table. Due to his long and lean size, he often was uncomfortable in meetings, since the conference room at the Five Points Branch Post Office only had low tables. They weren’t exactly kid-sized, but his knees bumped along the underside any time he moved. And he didn’t want to think about all the gum—or worse things—stuck up underneath the germ-infested tables like fossils.

  He didn’t mind being uncomfortable, actually. At least it meant he could feel something.

  Also, he was experiencing a flavor of discomfort he definitely did not enjoy because he was still a little stoned from earlier. Being high on weed was his second-favorite thing in the world, but not in this environment. He had forgotten about this Branch meeting tonight, so he’d been all settled on his couch with a perfectly rolled cone-shaped joint, a bag of chips, and a PlayStation controller in his hand. Then the notification had popped up on his phone. He cursed, licked the half-smoked joint to put it out, then he blew through it to clear out the remnants of smoke. Bam had learned from experience that leaving stale smoke to wallow inside joints made them taste bad later. He certainly intended to smoke it down to a grimy roach and then leap back into some Call of Duty after his responsibilities were done for the night.

  Those mouthy gamer fools out there deserved headshots. Each one made Bam’s heart sing. Sometimes, it was the only thing that worked for him to quiet the noise in his head.

  But now, he sat in his chair at the conference table, eyes dim and low, head buzzing and body feeling light and floaty as he kept his mouth shut and listened. Not that it was against the Club or Branch rules to get high, but they did frown on members being impaired during official business. Slim chance anyone would call on him to offer an opinion, anyway. As long as he kept his head down and mouth shut, this would be over soon enough.

  He was supposed to care about all of this. He hoped his outward expression mimicked something like it.

  Yawning, he checked his phone, expecting to see half an hour had elapsed since the meeting began. But it had only been nine minutes. Nine. He resisted the urge to groan.

  There were about twenty people around the table shaped like a picture frame, open in the middle, running around the length of the room. Only half of the total Branch membership seemed to be here. The rest were out of the state or out of the country, completing contracts and making money. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Slicing throats and dropping air conditioners from atop buildings to send messages to the people who needed to receive them and also collecting a hefty paycheck along the way? Not this administrative and political crap, arguing over who did what and when. Outside of the work, everything was pointless details.

  One member was speaking, the Branch Historian. He had dominated the meeting up until this point. At least, Bam thought the guy had been the one speaking the entire time. He kept drifting off and losing focus.

  Bam had a lot more than Call of Duty and fatty joints on his mind. Ember Clarke was his focus, because he had six more days to make sure the bitch got what was coming to her. Everyone else at his Branch called her that word, but he didn’t actually hate her. He felt nothing toward her, really.

  Either way, justice would be served: Ember deserved to die for what she had done to Niles.

  If all was going according to plan, Ember would be fumbling around the Pink Door titty bar, scouring closets and bathroom stalls, thinking she had until midnight to find and defuse a bomb. But the bomb would actually go off in about twenty minutes, hopefully collapsing the building down on her.

  And if she somehow managed to find and defuse it, he had the next one ready to go.

  The problem was, he had promised her five bombs over the course of the week, but he only had two in his possession. In hindsight, that was something he should have thought through first, but too late for retroactive planning now. He’d committed to this course, and he had to find a way to make it work.

  “Let me be as clear as I can,” the Branch Historian said, stabbing his index finger into the wood of the table, “is that this pansy-ass aggression against us can’t go unchecked any longer. If those mooks in the Westminster Branch think they can keep interrupting contracts, stealing them out from underneath us, messing with our supply lines and then looking all innocent during Review Board inquiries… we have to do something. I’m not content to keep reporting shit up the chain to the Board. It’s pretty clear they have their heads up their collective asses and want no part in what’s best for Five Points. It’s time we took it to the next level. It’s time we came to a decision about our future.”

  People in this Branch were all about revolution lately. It had started a few months ago with a guy named Dalton who’d had a plan to launch a civil war in the Club. That hadn’t worked out so well for Dalton, and things seemed to quiet down after. At least, according to the face Five Points wore toward the rest of the DAC. But there was no doubt a contingent of people who still wanted to follow in his footsteps. They idolized Dalton and made him a figurehead for their unrest. Bam’s mentor Niles had been one of those people. At least, until Ember had snuffed him out.

  Bam’s concentration on the ranting Historian faded again as he honed in on a stray mustache hair atop the Historian’s lip. As the guy talked, the lone hair was sticking up, and Bam kept wondering if it tickled his nose. How could he resist the urge not to rub his nose or smooth out his mustache?

  Then Bam realized his friend Payton was standing near the refreshment table in the back. Payton, a shrimpy guy with acne scars and a barrel chest, held a cup of coffee in one hand and a little stirrer stick in the other. He was staring blankly at the Historian, stirring a cup of coffee with slow and deliberate movements. Bam hadn’t noticed him in the room until that point. Had he walked in late, or was Bam higher than he’d thought?

  Bam stood up and wandered over to the table. “Sup, Payton?” he mumbled as he pretended to size up the coffee and doughnut options. He kept his voice low and his back to the proceedings at the conference table. With the Historian going off like this, spewing a non-stop barrage of word salad, Bam doubted anyone would pay attention to them. Still, he didn’t want to get called out.

  “All good,” Payton said, speaking while barely moving his lips, like a ventriloquist. “Did you hear about what happened to Tanner?”

  Bam glanced back to make sur
e no one was watching. “No. What happened?”

  “Review Board gave him a year suspension for accidentally killing a civilian on a contract.”

  “A year? Seriously?”

  Payton nodded. “It’s messed up. You never know from one day to the next what they’re going to do. He’s still coming to paintball, though. They can’t ban him from that, at least.”

  Someone from Highlands had done the same thing a month ago and had only received eight weeks’ suspension. No surprise that the Board went harder on Five Points. They had always treated this Branch like the redheaded stepchild, and they barely attempted to hide their disdain.

  Bam knew Payton intended to steer this conversation into more talk of revolution, but he didn’t want to get into it. Sooner or later, people would notice them chatting back here. Bam picked up a cup and dumped powdered creamer into it as he shuffled a little closer to Payton. “You know those two things we got?”

  Payton nodded, keeping his eyes front and center.

  “I need three more.”

  Now Payton gawked at him. “Three?”

  “Yeah, three. Can you work something out?”

  Payton shrugged. “I can try. No promises, but I’ll look into it. Give me a day or two.”

  “Good man,” Bam said, then he nodded at Payton and shuffled back to his seat. With three more bombs, Bam would have all he needed to take care of Ember. And plenty of time left to toy with her along the way.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. Ember was currently looking for a bomb she’d been told would explode at midnight. She had no idea she only had about fifteen actual minutes until detonation.

  Chapter Eight

  EMBER

  After her unceremonious exit from Pink Door’s literally pink front door by the brawny bouncer, she stood in the parking lot for a minute, thinking over her options. Going back inside the ground floor didn’t seem like one of them. It’s not as if she had a blonde wig and brown contacts she could don. Not even a giant pair of plastic glasses with a fake nose and mustache. She didn’t imagine they would put up her picture next to the front with a sign ordering the help not to admit her, but she should consider herself banned.

  Ember studied the building. There were still the apartments up above to explore. That might even be a preferable spot to search. Niles’ sexual orientation was common knowledge, so it didn’t seem like a strip joint that specialized in all-female dancers would be a suitable place for him to hang out, let alone his favorite spot. Definitely not for the drinks: the menu Ember had scanned featured a handful of different “mules,” each a mix of ginger beer and a different type of booze, and each featuring a name that was as well-thought-out as how they must taste.

  The place was a dive. Whatever other business ventures operated out of those back rooms, Ember would have to ignore that, for now.

  But the apartments above? Maybe Niles had a relative or a drug connection or some other person who lived up there who he visited often, thus causing him to have a few business cards on hand that he’d picked up previously. Or maybe not.

  All of these assumptions seemed so vague, Ember had a hard time relying on them.

  She rounded the building as a few flakes of fresh snow tumbled from the sky. Milky clouds blanked out the stars and the moon but provided enough light for her to see. There were streetlights here, but every one of them along the side street was busted, same with the homeless shelter on the other side of the street. Over by the shooting range, they were all fine. She imagined no one wanted to vandalize the shooting range. Probably not a smart idea.

  There was now only one guy standing out in front of the homeless shelter, shifting back and forth, rubbing his hands together. As soon as Ember made eye contact with him, he lifted a hand in greeting.

  “Got any change?” he asked from across the street. “I hate to ask, but I’m not having a great night.”

  “I’m not either. Sorry, man. I don’t have my wallet on me, and I don’t carry cash.”

  “No problem. God bless.”

  Ember pointed up to the apartments. “You hear anything from up there? Loud noises, guns, shouting, anything like that?”

  The homeless guy shrugged. “Naw, I don’t think so. Not tonight, at least.”

  “Right. I hope you find someplace warm to spend the night. Sorry I can’t help you out.”

  “Don’t worry about me. If you’re going up there, just be careful.”

  He gave her a grave look, then a wave, and then proceeded to mope south along the sidewalk, paying no attention to her. An odd little exchange, but Ember seemed to have had a life stuffed with those sorts of exchanges. Maybe it was something in her face that inspired people to say random things to her.

  She thought about Zach. Whenever there was a blank spot in her mind, he seemed to pop up. More and more each day. Ember wished she could fold herself into his chest as his arms went around her. At the moment, she didn’t think she would need anything else to be happy. Just Zach.

  Around the back of the building, a set of rusted fire escapes snaked from the rooftop down to the second floor. The bottom one hung suspended in the air, maybe eight or nine feet off the ground.

  She braced one foot against the wall and leaped, but missed the bottom rung completely. On her second attempt, she smacked her hand against the bottom rung, making it clang. Cold, throbbing, she had to shake out her hand afterward. Then she jumped again, barely managing to grasp it with one hand, and then she wrenched the other up.

  Placing her feet on the side of the building, she muscled through the accumulated weeks of soreness and pain to hoist herself to the next rung. She pulled her lower torso high enough to get her feet under her and then had no trouble after that.

  Ember paused at the second-floor landing, a steel grate bolted to the outside of someone’s dirty and paint-flecked window. She squinted through the window into a kitchen. The lights were off, no sound and no reflected glow of a television anywhere to be seen.

  “Pardon me,” Ember said as she raised the window. No lock, and the thing made plenty of noise as it rattled up the track until she could fit through. If people were home, they would have heard her.

  She landed in the tiny kitchen, brushing paint flecks from her arms as her feet found sticky linoleum underneath. The apartment still returned nothing but silence. Just the rumble of dance music from the strip club below coming up through the floor, like the ground disturbance in a house near an airport. What an awful place to try to sleep at night.

  Holding her breath, she padded into the living room. A rathole of an apartment, the kind of place she knew from movies about slumlords, where residents in stained wife-beaters sweated under the oppression of no air conditioning and fluorescent lighting.

  Ember pressed her ear against the front door, letting the vibrations of the building normalize so she could listen for anything distinct in the hallway. She felt in her back pocket for the knife.

  She slipped out into the main hallway, immediately noticing the collection of stains on the gaudy brown carpet underfoot. She counted five other apartments on this floor, all of them shut. Three of them had no soliciting signs taped or thumb tacked to their doors.

  She checked her watch. 9:53. A little more than two hours left on Bam’s countdown.

  Ember started at the door closest to the near end, listening to each. The first two were empty, or at least quiet, but from outside the third she listened to a few seconds of a man and a woman arguing about him wasting too much money on lotto scratch cards from the convenience store. The fight quickly evolved from scratch cards to finances in general, and how they would pay the rent next month. She wondered what she would do if this quarrel turned into a physical fight. It was none of her business, of course. After another minute of arguing, things calmed down on the other side of the door and Ember stopped worrying about it.

  Past the apartment doors was an opening that she assumed led to the staircase up, and Ember approached it foot over foot, not wantin
g to show her head to the open stairway until she could get a good listen. She paused at the edge with her center of gravity low, ready to bolt. Deep breaths in and out to calm her thumping heart.

  But no noises came from upstairs, so she padded up to the next floor. Every single one of the doors up here was open. Must be no one living here. She passed the first room to see an empty apartment stripped of everything except for a folding table. It caught her interest, so she went inside and noted cards on the table. Poker, with places for four. An ashtray sat on the table with a dozen butts in it. No lipstick or glittery lip balm residue on any of them. Ember held her hand over the ashtray and didn’t feel any warmth.

  This room screamed mafia hideout or temporary witness protection safe house or drug den, or some combination of all of those things. Definitely not a place any normal person would live.

  Then she noticed something interesting. One window shade had been pulled up, with a towel stretched out and lying in front of the window. She knelt in front of it and noted a clear line of sight from here to the shooting range. This felt like the perfect spot to sit and stake out the place. The towel down could have functioned as a sort of cushion for sore knees and butts — perfect for an extended observation stakeout session.

  “Were you here, Niles?” Ember whispered. “You and some boys planning to rob the shooting range? That’s ballsy as hell.”

  This room had a single closet, and Ember sulked across the floor, careful with her steps. The wooden boards underfoot looked creaky, and if this apartment was supposed to be empty, she didn’t want to alert whoever was underneath her. Considering the layout, she was right above the apartment with the arguing couple.

  She pulled back the door and there it was. A hunk of something white. C4? It was sitting in the middle of the closet floor, beckoning her.

  She leaned a bit closer and examined it. Without even needing to touch it, she could tell it had the plasticity and malleable appearance of polyisobutylene, the perfect additive for a homemade “plastic” explosive.