“Long night last night?” I asked as she dug for her lighter.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Goddamn tweakers.” Liz had been a medic for ten years and had seen just about everything.
“Here,” I said, handing her my Zippo lighter. “You okay?”
“Thank you. I’m fine—my partner just had to fight with this one asshole.” I’d never met Liz’s partner, but apparently he was a big dude. That was probably for the best, as Liz herself stood barely five foot three. She paused while she lit her cigarette. She then snapped the lighter closed but didn’t hand it back to me.
“That’s an interesting logo on there,” she said, holding my lighter up. It was matte black and engraved with a skull with a switchblade knife clutched in its teeth. I’d had the lighter a long time, and it was pretty scratched up. “Were you in the military?”
I didn’t say anything. Looking over at Liz, I saw that she was studying me intently. “I was,” I said at last. “Air Force. A long time ago.”
“You’re too young to have done anything a long time ago.”
I chuckled. “I enlisted when I turned eighteen.”
“I figured,” she said, handing me the lighter. “You seem like the type. Was that your unit logo or something?
“This? No. I was in the Security Forces. I did one stint in Afghanistan before I got out.”
“What’d you do after that?” she asked.
“I went to work,” I said awkwardly. I didn’t know Liz all that well, and I wasn’t used to talking about myself with people. “I was a security consultant for a few years.”
“Consultant? What kind of work did you do?” she asked.
“Uh, the usual stuff,” I said awkwardly. “Can’t really tell you.”
“Oh, whatever,” she snorted, exhaling smoke.
“No, really,” I said. “I signed a nondisclosure agreement.” Leaving out the fact that my company no longer existed, I made a big show of yawning. “Hey, I think I need to hit the rack.”
“You sure you don’t want some breakfast? It’s my weekend to have the kids. I’m making bacon and eggs in a little bit.”
“Thanks, but I’m really tired,” I said with a sheepish smile. I turned and unlocked my door.
“Hey, Val,” Liz called after me just as I stepped inside. “I do PTSD counseling on the side. If you ever need to talk . . .”
I smiled at her again. “Thank you. I’m okay, really,” I said, before closing the door. I locked it, dropped my backpack on the floor, and plopped down in front of my computer. I had one e-mail waiting for me.
Michael Valentine:
Have you considered my offer? You’re an excellent soldier and you risked your life to save someone precious to us. Our organization could use people like you. I hope to hear back from you soon.
Song Ling
The e-mail was from a randomized address, so I had no idea where it was sent from. It included a footnote with a long phone number for me to call if I was interested, and it said that I could call that number from anywhere in the world.
Leaning back in my chair, I took a deep breath, and rubbed my eyes. I closed my e-mail browser and stood up. I wanted to take a shower and go to bed. I hoped that I wouldn’t have nightmares this time, but I knew that I would. I always did.
VALENTINE
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
January 18
1245
I awoke to the sound of my phone ringing. Noticing my clock, I realized I’d only been asleep for a few hours. I reached over to my nightstand, grabbed my phone, and looked at the display. I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” I asked, my voice sounding groggy.
“What’re you doing, fucker?”
“Who is this?”
The voice laughed. “Has it been that long, bro?”
“Tailor?” I asked.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m sleeping. How did you get this number?”
“Well, get up! I’ll be there in about half an hour.”
“Be where?”
“At your apartment.”
“What? How the hell do you know where I live? How did you get this number?” Tailor didn’t answer. “Never mind. What do you want?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there. Get dressed, I’m taking you to lunch. Don’t dress like a slob, we’re going someplace nice.”
“But—”
“Val. Trust me.”
I was quiet for a few seconds. “Fine. This better be good.” I hung up on him, ran my fingers through my hair, and got up.
Twenty-five minutes later, there was a knock on my door. Now fully dressed and mostly awake, I crossed my small apartment and looked through the peephole. I saw Tailor’s misshapen head, distorted through the tiny optic, his eyes hidden behind Oakley sunglasses. I opened the door.
“Tailor.” His head was slightly less misshapen in person. Tailor grinned. He hadn’t changed a bit. His dirty blond hair was buzzed down to almost nothing, as always. He was dressed casually but still looked uptight. He was wearing a nice leather jacket.
“Val.” He stuck out his hand. I took it, and we shook firmly. “Long time no see, bro.”
“C’mon in,” I said, stepping aside.
Tailor looked around my apartment. “This is where you live? What’d you do, spend all your money?”
“I’ve got plenty of money in savings,” I said testily. “I just wanted to keep a low profile. This place isn’t bad.” Tailor then noticed my blue uniforms hanging against the wall.
“You’re a security guard?” he asked incredulously. “You’ve been in how many wars? And now you’re a security guard?”
“Ain’t much demand for my skill set, you know,” I said, looking for my jacket. “Where are we going?”
“I found a steakhouse.”
“You’re buying me a steak? What? Okay, what the hell is going on?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you about it over lunch.” I looked at him hard for a moment. I was about to tell him to get the hell out of my apartment and go back to bed. Something told me to hear him out, though. I felt that I owed him that much; hesaved my life more than once. I nodded, put on my sunglasses, and followed him out the door.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said from the passenger’s seat of Tailor’s Ford Expedition, looking out the window. Neither one of us had said anything since we’d left my apartment.
“You, too, bro,” Tailor replied, his voice sounding unusually upbeat.
“So, where are we going?” I asked as he drove me across town. We were headed downtown, toward the Strip.
“Ruth’s Chris,” he said. “It’s over on Paradise.”
“Dude, that place is expensive.”
“When did you become so cheap, Val?” Tailor asked. “Besides, I’m buying. Don’t worry about it! You think I’d drag you out of bed and not buy lunch?”
“Yes,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.
“Fair enough.” A lopsided grin appeared on his face. “But I didn’t this time.”
A short while later, I found myself sitting at a booth in the steakhouse, waiting for my food. Tailor sat across from me. We both sipped glasses of Dr. Pepper and talked about nothing.
“Okay, Tailor, what’s this all about? I haven’t heard from you since Mexico. Now you show up on my doorstep and buy me an expensive steak. What’s going on?”
Tailor set down his Dr. Pepper. “Have you thought about going back to work?”
“I have a job,” I said, sounding a little huffy.
“What do you make, ten bucks an hour?” Tailor asked, sarcasm in his voice.
“I make eighteen bucks an hour,” I said, sounding more than a little huffy this time. “And no one shoots at me. Also? I haven’t been to a single funeral since I started.”
“Okay, how’s that working out for you? Are you happy?”
“What?”
“Are you happy doing this? Going to work every d
ay like a regular guy? Is that what you want?
“Well, I . . .” I fell silent, and remained quiet for a long moment. I took a deep breath. “I hate this,” I said quietly. “It’s like . . . I try so hard to fit in, to understand people, to make this work. But I can’t. I just . . .”
“You know what the problem is, Val?” Tailor asked, interrupting me. I raised my eyebrows at him. “You’re a killer.”
“That’s not it,” I protested.
“The fuck it’s not,” he said. “How long have I known you? Four years, right?”
“Since Africa,” I said, remembering my first deployment with Vanguard. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since then.
“Right. And you know what I’ve learned in all that time? You’re a badass. You don’t think you are, and you’ve got that baby face and stupid smile, and you act all quiet and shy. But when you strip all that away, you’re a killer.”
“So?” I asked. His analysis of my personality was making me uncomfortable. I looked around the restaurant, studying the other customers, watching the doors as people came in and out.
“See what you’re doing right now? You’re checking the exits, aren’t you?” Tailor said.
“Fine. So I’m the problem. I’m some kind of badass that can’t understand how to fit in the real world, just like in that old Kurt Russell movie. Is that it?”
“No. The problem isn’t that you don’t understand. It’s that they don’t understand,” he said, moving his arm to indicate the other people in the restaurant. “They don’t live in the real world. They haven’t seen the things that you’ve seen or done the things that you’ve done. Most of these people have never killed a man or buried a friend. Hell, most probably have never even fired a gun. And there you sit, concealing a 44 Magnum, watching the exits, surrounded by people who just don’t get it. You’re a killer, Val, and no matter how long you work a bullshit nine-to-five job, you’re not gonna change that.”
I didn’t respond for a few moments. “You’re more perceptive than you look,” I said at last, rubbing my eyes.
“The question is,” Tailor went on, “what changed? It didn’t used to bother you. I know you have nightmares, Val. Everybody has nightmares. Everybody has regrets. Well, except me. I don’t. But most people do. It didn’t used to eat you up. It’s eating you up now. I can see it on your face. What happened?”
“Mexico happened, Tailor,” I said flatly, looking him in the eye again.
Tailor took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat. “That was ugly, wasn’t it?”
“Ugly? We got stranded in hostile territory, abandoned, left to die. We barely got out alive. So yeah, I guess you could say it was ugly.”
“We got out, didn’t we?”
“Only because of Ling and her people.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tailor said, taking another sip of his soda. “We lived.”
“Tell that to Ramirez’s family.”
“Ramirez didn’t have any family, Val,” Tailor snapped, setting his glass down hard. “None of us did. It’s why we were good at our jobs. It’s why we got the good jobs, the good pay, and the good equipment. It’s why we were on the Switchblade teams in the first place. We had nothing to come home to anyway. Ramirez is dead. Harper is dead. Tower is dead. Everybody dies, Val. You don’t get to pick how or when. I worked with Ramirez longer than you. Don’t you dare use his death as an excuse to mope around like a teenaged drama queen!”
I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look at Tailor. We were briefly interrupted as the waitress brought us our food.
“Is that what’s eating you, Val?” Tailor asked at last, chewing expensive steak with his mouth open. “Survivor’s guilt?”
“You don’t understand,” I said quietly, cutting my steak.
“How the hell do you know what I understand?” Tailor said to me. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, Val. You think you’ve seen some shit? I’ve seen some shit, too. The difference is, I deal with it instead of letting it screw me up. Until you do that, nothing’s going to change for you. Living in this dump, punishing yourself with a stupid job and a stupid life isn’t going to make you feel any better.”
I ate my steak in silence, not sure what to say. We were quiet for an awkwardly long time before either one of us spoke. I set my fork down and looked at my former partner. “What’s this all about, Tailor? I know you didn’t drive all the way to Vegas and buy me an expensive steak just to yell at me about my angst.”
Tailor took a moment to finish chewing before he spoke. “I’ve got a job offer for you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’m listening.”
“You’d have to leave soon. Like in the next week or so.”
“I’d have to break my lease.”
“Will that be a problem?”
“No, I just won’t get my deposit back. Who’s it with?”
“I don’t know,” Tailor said, flatly.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Tailor leaned in, his voice hushed. “I think it’s a front for the government. They’re real hush-hush about everything. They just call it The Project. They’re offering twenty-five K a month, plus expenses.”
I almost choked on my Dr. Pepper. “Christ, that’s like three hundred thousand dollars a year!” My annual salary with Vanguard had been about a hundred thousand dollars a year, plus operational bonuses. I only got paid that much because I was on one of the Switchblade teams.
“Tax-exempt,” Tailor added.
“What? From a US company? No Medicare or Social Security?” By US law, if you were out of the United States for three hundred and thirty days of a year, you didn’t have to pay income taxes. This capped out at eighty thousand dollars. Everything above that was taxable income.
“You get paid what you get paid. They told me they’d take care of the IRS aspects of it.”
“And you’re just trusting these people?”
“Val, they’ve already deposited a twenty thousand dollar signing bonus into my bank account. I trust that.”
“Money talks, huh?”
“Money talks.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“I called Skunky,” Tailor replied, sipping his soda.
“Really? How’s he doing, anyway? Haven’t heard from him.”
“He lives in California now.”
“Eew,” I said, making a face.
“I know, right?”
“You know, you’re not the first one to offer me a job,” I said.
“Really? Have you been looking?”
“No. Every couple of months I get an e-mail from Ling. She wants me to sign up with her group.”
“Val, that crazy Chinese bitch ain’t gonna sleep with you.”
“What? That’s not—”
“Oh, the hell it’s not,” he interrupted, grinning. “Come on, Val, I know you. You’ve got a thing for Asians, and I watched you drool all over her from the moment she showed up. The puppy love was cute, Val, it really was.”
“Hey, that crazy bitch saved our lives.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have been there if Exodus hadn’t hired us in the first place. We were expendable. And we paid for it.”
I sighed. “I know. It’s why I haven’t answered. Her group considers me some kind of hero, I think, because I saved that kid we rescued.”
“Val, her group . . . how much do you know about them?”
“I’ve done some research. It’s hard to find much. They’re like global vigilantes. They kill slavers, drug runners . . .”
“That’s just the beginning,” Tailor said. “They’re a very secretive, very well-funded transnational paramilitary organization. They’re like a cult. They go around the world, shooting people and blowing shit up in the name of the greater good or something. The UN considers them a terrorist group.”
“They didn’t think too highly of Vanguard, either, Tailor.”
“Look,” Tailor continued, “I’m
saying you might want to think twice before getting involved with some crazy terrorist group because you’re bored and you’re trying to get laid. I mean come on, this is Nevada. If you want to screw an Asian chick so bad, just go to a whorehouse.”
My mouth fell open. “You . . .” I cracked a smile and began to laugh. “You’re a dick, you know that?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said matter-of-factly. “Even still, you shouldn’t rush into something like that when you don’t know anything about it.”
“Says the guy who shows up on my doorstep and tries to get me to take a mysterious job with a mysterious company he doesn’t know anything about,” I said, a wry grin appearing on my face.
“Okay,” Tailor admitted, “but we’ll be there together. If there are any problems, well, we’ll deal with it. We’ve been in bad situations before.”
“The money’s too good, Tailor. Something stinks.”
“I know,” he said again. “I think it’s something to do with the Middle East.”
“As in Afghanistan? I really don’t want to go back to Afghanistan, Tailor.”
“No, I think they’re going to send us someplace that the US ain’t supposed to be. I think that’s why the pay is so good, and that’s why there’s so much secrecy.”
“Huh,” I said. “How’d you find out about this?”
“Friend of a friend got me in touch with this guy named Gordon Willis.”
“Who’s he?”
“I don’t know. He’s pretty cryptic about everything, but he’s obviously got a lot of money behind him. All he’ll say is that he represents the best interests of the United States.”
“That sounds, um, ominous.”
“Right?” Tailor asked. “I know, Val, I know. Like I said, the money’s real good. Everything I’ve seen from these people is on the ball. They pay in advance. And their cars have government plates.”
“You’re really going along with this?” I asked.
“I’m already signed up and everything. I ship next week. That’s why I’m here, Val. I want you to go with me. Whaddaya say?”
Dead Six Page 4