Soldiers of Fame and Fortune Full Series Omnibus: Nobody’s Fool, Nobody Lives Forever, Nobody Drinks That Much, Nobody Remembers But Us, Ghost Walking, 12 Book series...

by Michael Todd

  Unlocking the door downstairs was easy—so easy, in fact, that she walked in without thinking. The outside fog wisped in through the door and revealed a laser tripwire across the entrance a few paces ahead, not attached to the regular system. Billie’s instinct clicked in and she stopped abruptly and waved her arms in circles to catch herself. She bent forward at the waist and grabbed the back of a handy chair. Sweat poured down the back of her neck and she took a moment to regain her equilibrium. A quick glance to the right identified the box for the device and she frisked through her pocket, retrieved another disc, and frisbeed it over. The laser vanished and she sighed with relief.

  “Tricky motherfucker.” Hickock walked over, snatched the disc off, and shook her head.

  After a short moment to refocus, she glanced around the room. A door directly ahead stood open and led to the living room. One to her right was open to the kitchen. She didn’t know the layout of the house at all but decided the kitchen might be a quieter route. Creaky floors were usually abandoned in favor of tiles, for one thing, and it might, in turn, lead her to the bedroom where she assumed Marcus was sleeping. That, or he had an entrance to a secret lair, which wouldn’t have surprised her in the least.

  Billie maneuvered carefully over the tiled floor. She had made it about halfway when the lights flicked on and she froze. Marcus shuffled nonchalantly into the room, yawning and half awake. He obviously hadn’t seen her and walked to the cabinet to pull a glass out and fill it with water. As he drank it, he slowed as if he realized someone was in the room with him. Slowly, she drew a syringe from her pocket, held it down and behind her, and pushed the lid off with her thumb.

  He yanked a drawer open and fumbled inside before he whirled with a gun now in his hand. The idea had merit, and his reflexes were good, but his lack of experience proved to be his undoing. In his haste, his lost his grip on the weapon, which flew from his hand. She chuckled and stepped forward to catch it in mid-flight. He backed up against the counter. “What do you want? I don’t have anything here. This is my fucking home.”

  Hickok put one hand on his shoulder and deepened her voice, thankful that she’d “borrowed” the suit which concealed her identity. “We don’t have time for this needless panic.”

  She stabbed him swiftly in the neck, injected the serum into his system, and yanked the syringe out. He grimaced and clutched the wound as his eyes widened. Billie replaced the syringe in her pocket and caught him as he fell. She folded at the knees and supported him down to the floor. “Relax, this won’t hurt at all.”

  Marcus’s eyes shifted back and forth as he tried to make sense of what had happened. Billie shushed him gently and took his hand. He might have been part of an elite force of soldiers, but he was not the guy in the field. For one thing, he didn’t have the guts for it, and in that moment, she realized he had never even been in danger in his job. He was always the voice in her ear. She held his hand tightly and supported his neck with her other arm.

  He tried to focus on her concealed face and wheezed slightly as he fought the drug’s effects. “I never thought I would be killed by my own company.”

  Billie glanced at her watch and eased his head onto the ground. She retrieved her bag, withdrew five or six empty pill bottles, and scattered them around the floor. The serum had specifically been created to match each of the drugs labelled on the containers. There could be no doubt that it would look like a suicide.

  She glanced at him once more and ran her fingers gently over his forehead. “Remember, Marcus, not everything is always as it seems. See you on the flip side.”

  Marcus’ face wrinkled in confusion and his eyes narrowed as if he recognized the voice behind the mask. Before he could say a word, though, the serum took hold. His body slowly relaxed and he exhaled a shuddering breath as his heart stopped in his chest. She tilted her head and studied at him for a moment before she stood and reminded herself that he would be alive once more in a very short time. Right now, there was no need and no time for distracted emotions.

  Hickok hurried to the counter and located a pad of paper and a pen. She tapped the end of the pen to her mask for a moment and smiled as she began to write. Thankfully, his scrawl was reasonably easy to replicate.

  To Whom It May Concern. She shook her head and started a new page.

  Oh, Dark Cruel World. Here I lie in my final resting place, alone and cold in this world. I had many loves in my life. My job. My robots. Myself. But in the end, my greatest love of all was Billie. In testimony to the cruelty of this world, Billie was taken from me in an act of violence and unnatural order. I will never be able to go on now. So it is that today, I take my life, swallowing the instruments of medical science and allowing my body to fall to their power. I shall join my one true love in the afterlife and never again have to feel the twang of pain of losing the one you love. Whoever finds my technological creations, treat them with love and kindness. They were all I had left, but in the end, the lonely hole Billie has left in my heart will never be filled, even with the sweet sound of a whirling machine coming to life in my hands. I bid you farewell. Sincerely, Marcus Deacon in a sorrowful goodbye, but the peace will find me.

  She read and reread the letter as the laughter built deeper and deeper in her chest. Finally, she laughed so hard at the dramatic suicide note that she could barely see. The tears pooled in her eyes and only a snort could emerge from her throat. She eventually managed to calm herself and stooped beside Marcus to slide the note into his hand. “You are so going to kill me when you come back to life and read that shit. Seriously. But oh, my God, was it worth it.”

  A sense of urgency reinstated itself and she glanced at the timer on her watch. She had only a couple of minutes and she hurried through the house and out into the back. It took seconds to remove the box from the electrical components and slip it into her bag. Still snickering, she raced across the yard before the security system clicked on and scrambled up the wall. At the top, she used her untraceable phone to call nine-nine-nine.

  “Um, yes. I walked past 556 Browning Road and through the gate, I could see a man on his front porch. He was crying and downing what looked like a bunch of pills. He said something about his sweet lost Billie. I think you might want to check on him. He took a full bottle of whatever was in his hand.”

  She hung up and laughed. The whole situation was seriously amusing, even though she knew Marcus would have a different view.

  Chapter Two

  Once she’d rappelled into the neighbor’s wooded area, Hickok huddled down and changed out of her mask and suit into civilian clothes. A few seconds later, she’d dragged her hair into a ponytail, replaced her army cover, and pulled the curved rim down to shadow her eyes. She sat there and waited as the sirens pulled up one at a time. After about ten minutes, she crept through the woods and out onto the sidewalk and stepped leisurely around the corner to the gate, which the cops had broken to gain entry. A coroner’s truck had parked on the side of the street, unable to get through the rows of official cars that blocked the driveway.

  Already, the police had strung tape up and people began to collect at the line. They all talked quietly, wondering what could have happened. Billie stood at the outside of the group and listened to the two women who talked close by. “He was a mysterious young man. Kept to himself and never even waved when he drove past.”

  Billie grinned because she knew how much he hated living close to neighbors. He wanted people to leave him alone unless he initiated an exchange. She scanned the police as they walked around and watched as they wheeled a stretcher with a body in a body bag from the house and up to the coroner van. She moved casually past the line to where the cops had crowded together to discuss the incident.

  She turned her back and maintained a relaxed posture while she listened closely as they talked. One of them shook his head. “I don’t know who the guy was or what he did to have a house like this, but something made him unhappy enough to kill himself.”

  The other cop shru
gged. “I guess we all have our demons. Although that was enough drugs to kill a fucking elephant.”

  Another colleague walked up with the suicide note sealed in a plastic bag. “Have you read this yet?”

  The others took it and each read it before they handed it back. The cop with the bag sighed. “Poor sod. He looked like some tech genius. There was shit in there I’ve never seen on the public market. And the alarm system was a bitch to turn off. Also, there was a laser tripwire right inside the door. It’s like the fucking Royal Mint in there.”

  One of the other cops handed the man his clipboard. “Based on that note, he was in love with someone named Billie. It sounds like he shafted our victim pretty good. Just another sad love song gone wrong.”

  The officer with the bag looked at the note again. “This Billie character bit the dust too. I wonder if the guy knew how much our victim loved him? It sounds like it was some Romeo and Juliet shit.”

  One of the others laughed. “There you go again, making up some back-story crap. They were probably both crazy. Either way, I gotta get this shit back to the station and close the case. At least it’s an easy open-and-shut one.”

  Billie grinned and covered her mouth to hold back the laughter when she realized they had totally pegged Marcus as a gay man who’d killed himself over his lost love. It was as priceless as fuck. She strolled farther down the block and waited at a distance until the coroner’s van pulled off. The markings on the side of the van and the ambulances indicated that it would go to St. Joseph’s.

  She ambled down another two blocks toward the city and hailed a cab. “St. Joseph’s, please.”

  The driver merely nodded and glanced briefly into the mirror. Hickok kept her head lowered so her cover shielded her face from view. She didn’t want to worry that some small-town cabbie had seen her out there if anyone chose to ask questions. The vehicle moved slowly through the city traffic. The sun had barely begun to rise and people were already making their way to work. The cab pulled up in front of the hospital and she handed him twenty pounds.

  He went to hand her change but she shook her head. “Keep it. Thanks.”

  She slid from the car, entered the building, and strode past the front desk as if she knew exactly where she was going. Once she rounded the first corner, she swung into the bathroom and locked herself into the last stall, where she retrieved her suit and changed quickly. She attached her bag securely to the suit. Once she was sure no one was in the bathroom, she turned the camouflage software on and headed out. She couldn’t risk the possibility that someone might see her moving through the hospital or ask her where she was going.

  A fair number of people already bustled along the hallways, and it took her some time to maneuver through so they wouldn’t feel her brush past them. When she reached the elevator, it was empty, by some miracle, and she pressed the basement level button. Before the doors could close, though, someone else hurried in and pressed level five. It went down rather than up, and the person stood there confused as Billie snuck past her and out of the open doors to the basement.

  When she reached the morgue, she cracked the swinging doors slightly open. Two men rolled Marcus’s body into the cooler but there was no sign of the coroner. As they walked out, one of them asked, “Do we leave a note?”

  His colleague shook his head. “Nah, it’s like a delivery service. She knows if there are new bodies and they will be tagged in the cooler with notes. This one is an autopsy and family turnover as soon as the police find someone to call.”

  The men left through the back entrance of the morgue and closed the garage-like door behind them. Hickok stepped in saw a sign that read, Coroner out. Leave body in hall. Be back in fifteen. Make sure info is with body.

  She hung the sign on the door and latched it shut from the inside. Once she’d deactivated her camouflage, she pulled her helmet off and shook her long brown hair out. Billie moved quickly into the cooler, pulled Marcus out, and wheeled him closer to the door. She unzipped the bag and wrinkled her nose. “You don’t look so hot, my friend, but don’t worry. I have just the serum you need.”

  Conscious that the hospital would soon resume its daily schedule, she checked her watch and looked out the back door window. She knew she wouldn’t be able to take the body without anyone noticing, so she’d had to find a reasonable substitute. On such short notice, she wasn’t able to get a body that looked exactly like Marcus, so she’d improvised the best way she could. As she waited for the replacement to arrive, she set a few tools out on one of the large metal tables. She glanced at the window while she arranged her things, irritated by the mental tick-tock that nagged in her mind to remind her that her window of opportunity would soon vanish. She wasn’t at all sure she could explain her presence in the morgue with one of the fresh bodies.

  With everything now ready, she glanced around the room and realized it was probably her first time inside an actual morgue. It wasn’t as creepy as she had thought it would be, but then again, she was the one who killed her friend and was about to steal his dead body. Creepy seemed like her middle name at that moment.

  Lights at the loading dock drew her attention to a white van that pulled up outside. She hauled the garage door open and waited as he backed up the ramp. The vehicle stopped and a large man with a full beard stepped out of the cab. He wore a large T-shirt, the front inched up enough for his belly to show. When he pulled up on his black coverall pants, his gun holster moved with them. He glanced at Hickok in her suit and narrowed his eyes. “Are you Billie?”

  She nodded. “That would be me.”

  He opened the back door and gestured at a body that lay inside. She handed him an envelope of cash and he riffled through it quickly. While he counted it, she ran back into the morgue and returned with an empty gurney. “Here, put him on here.”

  The man leaned forward and with a grunt, flung the corpse over his shoulder and stepped forward to lay him on the bed. Billie didn’t ask any questions. She merely examined the body quickly to ensure that he’d resemble Marcus, at least in the manner of death. The last thing she wanted was any exit or entrance wounds from a weapon or worse, broken bones.

  Hickok nodded. “Looks good.”

  “Sure thing, lady. You pay us, we sack ʼem.” He shrugged, his earlier curiosity seemingly vanquished by the chunk of cash.

  She chuckled a little uncomfortably when she realized she might be the weirdest one in the room but definitely wasn’t the creepiest. Billie unzipped the body bag and the man helped her remove Marcus and place the new body on top of it. She went to work quickly and undressed Marcus, careful to keep his clothes tidy in order to put them on the other body.

  As she peeled his shirt off, she snickered. “Look at you, stud. Working out all the time. Who knew?”

  She glanced at the man for hire, who looked away to hide the strange look he gave her. It took a good few minutes to switch the clothes and dress the new “Marcus” in the satin pajamas and the real one in a Metallica T-shirt and ripped jeans. She laughed as she tied the Adidas tennis shoes on her colleague’s feet. “You will have a field day when you wake up.”

  She tucked the replacement into the body bag and zipped it up, then pushed the gurney into the cooler. When she emerged once more, her accomplice nodded at Marcus. “Is this the one we’re taking with us?”

  Billie nodded. “Yeah. But be careful with him. He won’t be happy if he wakes up to bruises.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Wake up? You know what? Never mind. We don’t ask questions. My orders are only to load you in and take you wherever you need to go.”

  She winked at him as she gathered her things. “That’s probably a good idea. Shit can get pretty weird in our world.”

  While he loaded Marcus’s body carefully into the van, Hickok withdrew a small black box from her bag. Cords ran from the device to a small brick of explosives— enough to burn the morgue and the bodies so they wouldn’t be easily recognized, but not enough to hurt the rest of the hospita
l. The device itself and the incendiary material would completely melt away to make it look like a gas fire. No one would be able to claim foul play. Of course, the company might not be fooled, but it was the best she could come up with at short notice and they would have a hard time proving anything.

  Once she’d set the timer on the bomb, she scrambled into the back of the van and banged on the wall between her and the driver’s area. They accelerated away from the hospital and Billie wasted no time before she retrieved the last syringe of blue goop and kneeled beside Marcus. She traced her fingers down his chest to locate his the fourth intercostal space between the ribs, inserted the needle carefully, and administered the serum directly into his heart. Once she’d capped the syringe and put it back in her bag, she watched him and imagined that the goop moved through his veins. It would have helped if his skin glowed bright blue or something. At least then she would know that her gamble would actually work.

  For several moments, he remained completely inert but suddenly, he bolted into a sitting position and screamed at the top of his lungs. Hickok lunged forward and clapped her hand over his mouth. “Jesus, someone’s gonna think there’s a nine-year-old girl in this van and I’m kidnapping her. Stop screaming.”

  Marcus’s body relaxed and she removed her hand cautiously. He put one hand to his chest and the other to his face and glared at her. “I thought…I thought you had killed me.”

  She smiled guiltily. “I guess technically, I did kill you. And I knew it—I knew that last remark caught your attention.”

  He blinked at her, confusion etched in his features. “Why the fuck did you kill me? And how am I alive now?”

  Billie took a deep breath and grabbed one of the blankets from the back to drape it around his shoulders. “I’m giving you your life back. After you saved me so many times, I figured it was the least I could do. But to keep the bosses from hunting us down, I had to make it look like you were dead. What’s the best way to make a death convincing?”