“How could we possibly affect such things?”
Ramos’ eyes burned into hers.
“There’s only one solution.”
Jessica yanked her hands free.
“You’re talking about murder. We’re not assassins, Theresa, granted, we sometimes work outside the bounds of the law, but we’re not butchers.”
“Your husband is, Doctor,” Burke said. “He’s a natural-born killer, a one man wrecking crew, and I know only one other man like him. Join us, we’re on the same side, we just have different ideas about who the true enemy combatants are.”
“And if we refuse?” Jessica said. “What then?”
“Then we bring forth Kari Shaw and have her testify for real, we’ll do the same if you tell anyone about this meeting. That will place you two on the hook for that DEA Agent that Jenkins’ killed. Even if we lack the evidence to bring you to trial, you’ll be ruined, and you’ll be watched for the rest of your lives,” Burke looked at him carefully. “You’ve grown quiet, why is that?”
“I was wondering how many people you’ve blackmailed like this.”
“You don’t understand; we’re not enlisting every two-bit vigilante we come across. What we need done takes a certain type of man. We have one other man who... well, let me put it this way, he’s even deadlier than you are. Now take five minutes and talk it over.”
As Burke and Ramos moved away, Jessica looked up into her husband's eyes.
“What do we do? I mean how do we get out of this?”
“We have no play here; for now, we’ll just have to react to whatever they throw at us.”
“They scare me.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re zealots, in a sense, they’re trying to build their own secret police.”
They walked over to Burke and he said one word to him.
“No.”
Burke gave both of them a hard look before marching away.
“Let’s go Theresa; they’ve made their decision,”
Ramos stared at them with pleading eyes, but afterward, she shook her head in disgust and followed Burke.
He took out his phone and dialed.
“Hello sir, how may I help you?”
“I need the location of a woman named Kari Shaw, Carly, and I need it now.”
***
When they got back to the car, Ramos watched as Burke slammed his palm atop the roof in frustration, before climbing inside.
“Such a waste, such a damn waste,” Burke said. “I knew that there was a chance that they’d refuse, still, we had to try. He would have been perfect.”
As Burke started his car, Ramos put a hand on his arm.
“Couldn’t we just let them go? I’m ninety-nine percent certain that they’ll never say anything to anyone.”
“I agree, but then there’s that one percent chance. My way, they can’t talk.”
“I like Jessica, Ethan, and I like her father too.”
“Our personal feelings have nothing to do with this, what we’re trying to build here takes commitment, a level of commitment that I thought you shared with me.”
Ramos leaned over and kissed him.
“I do, forgive me; it was just a moment of weakness,”
Burke kissed her back.
“There’s nothing to forgive, honey; this shouldn’t come easy to us.”
“When will you give Tyler his assignment?”
“I’ll call him when we get back to my place.”
“Jessica’s husband, he won’t be an easy man to kill. Are you certain that Tyler can handle it?”
“He’s impressive, but it’s all based on trickery, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Well, think about it. With Stiletto, he misled him into believing that he was injured by leaving a blood trail. In the Sandra Jenkins’ case, Kari Shaw said that he used a fancy car to distract, and in Bel Rey, more trickery. His whole shtick is misdirection. If he wants you to look one way, we’ll then, you’d better start looking in the other. I’ll warn Tyler about that, and without that advantage, he’s less impressive.”
“So you think Tyler has a good chance then?”
Burke let loose a chuckle.
“Tyler Davidson will eat him alive.”
CHAPTER 23
Detroit, Michigan, five months ago,
The street gang called Diablo moved into a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood and turned the other homeowners' lives upside down. Cars came and left at all hours of the night and complaints to the police brought no relief.
When several neighbors banded together to run the gang off, two of their number were shot, one fatally, and it was after that, that their plight made the news.
Three gang members were out on the steps drinking beer one night, when they spotted the figure coming down the street on foot.
From half a block away, they could tell that the man was huge, from two houses away, they could spot the body armor and ten seconds after he reached the front steps, they were all dead from knife wounds.
The figure tossed a tear gas canister inside before entering and then flipped down his protective facemask.
Sixteen people were inside the home when the man entered and began firing, when he left the house forty-six seconds later, there were eleven corpses inside and five people outside running for their lives.
The man spray painted the symbol of a rival gang on the back door and then strode away from the home in as calm and as efficient a manner as when he had arrived, while carrying a satchel full of drug money, the spoils of war.
He reached his vehicle, a ubiquitous white van, and drove it into the city. After exchanging his body armor for a suit, he left the stolen van abandoned near the train station, and with a duffle bag in his hand, caught the train that would take him home.
He left his house four hours later and drove towards work. On the way, he stopped frequently, while dropping envelopes stuffed with cash into the donation boxes of various churches and charities.
As he walked down the hall to his office, the janitor called out to him.
“Good morning, Professor Davidson, early class today sir?”
“No, John, I’ve just come in to catch up on some paperwork.”
“Oh, well, better you than me,”
“Right, see you around, John,”
Professor Tyler Davidson was black, six-foot-ten and muscular from a lifetime of lifting weights. The former Marine was an economics professor and renowned in his field. He was also devoted to his wife, a woman who has been in a coma for nearly a year, after being felled by a drug dealer’s stray bullet.
When he opened the door to his office, he found the computer already on, it was on and it was playing video of him that must have been taken the night before, film that showed him marching towards the drug house, knife in hand, film that showed his face clearly. The camera followed him up the steps and recorded his frenzied attack with the knife and the deaths of the three drug dealers.
The video ended, and that’s when he noticed the man and woman standing in the corner.
“Where were you filming from?”
The man answered.
“The house next door, the owners abandoned it when their neighbor was killed.”
“I would guess that you have other film too?”
“Hours of it,”
The man was six feet tall, thirties and looked to be in shape, he had a pageboy haircut and a goatee, the woman was Hispanic and good-looking.
“Am I under arrest?”
Ethan Burke walked over and stared up at Davidson.
“Let’s talk, Professor, let’s talk,”
***
Bronx, New York, present day,
Kari Shaw answered her apartment door and found Jessica and her husband staring at her. A moment later, she was crying.
“Oh God, oh guys I’m so sorry for talking but if I didn’t my brother would be—”
He raised his hand and Kari
immediately hushed.
“We’ll talk later, right now there’s trouble coming.”
***
Tyler Davidson moved along the hallway of a three-story apartment building, and then sprinted up the stairs to the third floor.
Burke seemed certain that his targets would show up here, in the apartment of a woman named Kari Shaw, and he was right. Tyler had watched them enter the building just minutes before.
This was the sixth mission that Burke and Ramos had sent him on, the sixth, and he hoped his last.
According to Burke, the man he was sent here to kill was deadly. The two FBI Agents had sought to recruit the couple and failed, and so now they knew too much and had to be killed.
Tyler had other plans though, plans to make this new man an ally and then turn the tables on Burke, but first, he had to take him alive.
He wore no body armor tonight, just a simple shirt and slacks, the body armor was employed to not only protect him, but to also intimidate his foes, but tonight, tonight he hoped to make friends. He wasn’t even carrying a weapon.
Tyler rounded the corner of the stairs and peeked down the hall. The door to Kari Shaw’s apartment stood wide open and bright light poured into the hallway.
Tyler recalled Burke’s warning.
“He’s a trickster, this one is, if he wants you to look left, you’d better look right instead.”
There were six apartments on each floor, three on each side of the hall. Shaw’s apartment was the last door on the left. The sounds of a TV filtered from the apartment directly across from hers, and on the floor in front of the apartment next to hers, someone had received a package, but had yet to come home to retrieve it.
The open door beckoned, but Tyler declined, and instead stayed at the top of the stairs. Down below, voices carried upward, as a family returned to their second floor apartment.
Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, and not a sound came from the apartment. Tyler decided to take a chance and began creeping towards the door; when he was right outside it, he spoke.
“Whoever is in there, listen to me, we don’t have to fight each other; we can turn the tables on Burke.”
“And just how would we do that?”
Remarkably, the voice came from directly behind him and he jerked around, only to find no one there. The only thing in sight was the package by the other door.
Tyler understood what had happened just as the needle sank into his neck.
This time he turned and saw the man standing in Shaw’s doorway, the man holding the empty syringe.
Tyler sank to his knees, to then fall back upon the hallway carpet.
“There’s a speaker in the box, isn’t there?”
The man nodded down at him with eyes of death, and then the blackness came, and Tyler whispered one last word.
“Trickster...”
***
“He’s coming around,” Kari said. She was a petite redhead with blue-green eyes.
They were in a van and Kari was turned around in the passenger seat, watching Tyler awaken. Seated next to her in the driver’s seat was Jessica, while her husband sat on a wooden crate in the rear.
On the floor of the van was Tyler, propped up against a corner. He was handcuffed behind his back by two sets of connected cuffs, and his ankles were manacled. After giving his head a shake to clear it, he looked around the van and smiled.
“Hello, you don’t know how happy I am to be alive.”
“Burke sent you to kill us, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but that’s not why I came here. I came here looking for an ally.”
“Against Burke and Ramos?”
“They’re blackmailing me, they have proof that I’ve been acting as a vigilante.”
“What kind of proof?”
“They filmed me at crimes scenes. They’ve been blackmailing me for months. They’re both crazy, you know? They actually believe that they can build their own hit squad to fight government corruption.”
“Why haven’t you killed them?”
“Burke says the proof against me is being kept in a bank safety deposit box. If I kill him or Ramos, his lawyer will come forth with the film.”
“How did you expect us to help you?”
“I’m not sure really, but I wasn’t about to kill the only two people who have a reason to hate Burke as much as I do.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Tyler Davidson; I’m a university professor, economics,”
“What have you done, as a vigilante?”
Tyler hesitated for just a moment, but when he next spoke, his voice was filled with anger.
“I kill drug dealers; they’re a modern plague and I treat them as such.”
He reached over and unlocked the manacles on Tyler’s legs.
“How do feel about biker gangs?”
CHAPTER 24
The Spawn biker club made their home in a red, one-story cinder block building in the Bronx.
The wide building sat alone amid acres of weeds and beneath a section of the Bruckner Expressway. The persistent hum of the traffic overhead could even be heard above the loud, heavy metal music blasting out of the club.
Two men stood outside talking. As Tyler emerged from the tall weeds with a sawed-off shotgun in each hand, they reached for their weapons, but were struck from behind and rendered unconscious.
Tyler nodded at him and he nodded back, and then both men entered the bar, like Tyler, he carried a pair of sawed-off shotguns and wore a black ski mask.
There would be no sharpshooting here tonight. If guns were needed, then they would be needed for wholesale slaughter. A simple count of the number of motorcycles in front of the building placed the odds against them at a minimum of twelve to one.
He was wearing a bulletproof vest over a black turtleneck sweater, with a pair of black jeans and boots. Tyler went all-out. He was dressed in a one-piece bodysuit made with Kevlar that was specially constructed to fit his huge frame. The suit would help protect him from all but a head wound and, fully loaded with accessories such as gas grenades and spare ammo, it weighed just over sixty pounds.
As they entered the bar, Tyler silenced the jukebox with a blast from one of the guns. Three dozen heads turned their way, about a quarter of them women, but only one man made a move to draw his weapon.
“Don’t!” he told the man, but went unheeded, and as the gun was brought up to fire, he pulled the trigger on a shotgun. The man’s face, neck and chest were shredded to hamburger as the force of the blast slammed him against the wall. A few of his friends were unlucky enough to be standing nearby, and were also struck by pellets, but none of their wounds was life threatening.
A man separated himself from the crowd and walked up to them. He was dressed in leather and had a full beard, but not the long Texas goatee that half the men in the bar wore. On the right side of his jacket was a single gold star, a signal of rank perhaps, in any case, he spoke as if he were in charge.
“Tell me what you want?”
“We’re here on behalf of Ronny Shaw. He’s not to be harmed, ever!”
The man looked incredulous.
“All this grief is over that piece of shit Ronny Shaw? Hell, where the fuck did he get enough juice to bring you down on us?”
“He gets out in a month, when he does, he’s leaving the state. We’re just here to see that he lives long enough to do it.”
“Ronny broke the rules. You don’t rat on a brother. Ronny ratted on two of us.”
“And your rules demand death for that? There’s no way to make amends?”
“Amends? Yeah, there’s a way to make ‘amends’, but that would have killed him too.”
“What way?”
“A fight to the death, hand to hand, and Ronny ain’t much of a fighter.”
“What if I fought for him; is that allowed?”
“You’ll fight whoever I say, no weapons?”
“If it makes things even,”
The m
an rubbed a hand along his beard as he gave the matter some thought.
“Throw in a new jukebox and it’s a deal, but your boy there will have to buy it, you’ll be too busy being dead.”
“Who do you want me to fight?”
“Aaron!”
In the middle of the room was a huge man with a bushy black beard who seemed to be the tallest biker in the room, and then he stood up. The man was over seven and a half feet tall.
Behind him, he could hear Tyler mumble the words, “Oh my Lord...” as the man strode forward.
***
They moved outside into the parking lot, and he handed Tyler his weapons.
“Maybe I should fight him. I’m closer to his size, me and the Sears Tower.”
“It’s not about size, Professor,” he said.
Just before the start of the fight, all was silent, even the whoosh of the cars overhead seemed hushed.
Then, the man-mountain named Aaron bellowed and charged at him. He stood his ground, cocked back his fist, and at the last possible instant, dropped to the ground.
The huge biker was unable to stop his momentum and tripped over him. A moment later, and he was on the biker’s back and pressing on a nerve cluster that left the man screaming in agony, but he soon stood up before the big man could reach back and grab him.
The biker rose on unsteady legs and glared at him, and that’s when he hit him in the face, and then again, and again, and again, arm moving like a piston as he pummeled the big man to his knees, only to move behind him and place an arm around the huge neck. As he applied pressure, the giant reached back and tried to dislodge him, but all he could grasp was his left sleeve, which he managed to rip off of him, before falling into the dirt, face first.
The TAKEN! Series - Books 1-4 (Taken! Box Set) Page 21