by Blake Banner
Emily grabbed me and pushed me onto the sofa, then stood over me with narrowed eyes. “Before we get started, just explain something to me, will you? Why did you go through the whole moral high ground charade of saying you wouldn’t kill Gregor, and then you went and blew the son of a bitch to pieces? I don’t get it!”
I sat a moment, cursing myself for my own stupidity. Then I shook my head and told myself there would be time for that later.
“I said I would not kill him for you. I am not a hit man. I don’t kill people for money. I killed Gregor because it became clear he would not desist. He was a clear and present threat.”
Rand stood opposite me with his ass on the dresser.
“I’m going to blow your kneecap off, and then I am going to cut through every joint in your body with a blunt knife. You know, I know, we all know, that you will tell me where the NPP is, and where the goddamn computer is with the recordings from tonight’s Lacklan Walker Show. Save yourself the pain. Tell me now and then take us to the recording.”
I knew that if I said no, if I gave him a wiseass answer or hesitated too long, he would blow my kneecap off and from there on, it would all be downhill. So I nodded and said, “OK, you win. Don’t blow my kneecaps off. Let’s do this.” I glanced at Emily. “Is it too late to have sex and become an equal partner?”
She winked. “That ship sailed, honey. You blew it.”
Rand wasn’t smiling. Neither was the Colonel. He said, “Quit stalling. Where is it?” He cocked his revolver. “I’m counting to five.”
“It’s in the trunk of my car.”
Rand snarled. “You’re lying. I checked it while you were in Mexico, remember?”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I kept it in my jacket until Emily had Jerry turn my place over. After that, I kept it in my bedside cabinet, and after you checked my car, I put it in the trunk. It’s common sense, Rand. Always keep it in the place that has just been searched.”
They looked uncertain.
I shrugged. “It’s simple. Let’s go look.”
Rand laughed an ugly, sardonic laugh. “Sure. You have a whole goddamn arsenal in there. I’ve seen it.”
I made a ‘give me patience’ face and said, “Yeah, genius, that’s why I put it there, for just such a situation as this.”
They exchanged glances. The Colonel said, “OK, give me the key. I’ll go get it.”
I smiled, reached in my pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to him. “It’s booby trapped.” There was no way they could know, or find out, if I was lying. I watched them exchange more glances with each other and said, “When the guys made it for me, I had them fit traps in the trunk. There’s a button you have to press. If it’s not my thumb, bad things happen.” I shrugged. “If you don’t believe me, go ahead. But just remember what happened to Gregor. I warned him and he wouldn’t listen either.”
The Colonel handed me back the keys. “On your feet. We all go.” I stood. He said, “Put your hands up.”
I raised my hands and we walked in an absurd procession into the darkness on the terrace. I was in front, the Colonel and Rand were right behind me and Emily was behind them. As we started down the steps, Rand’s voice sounded above and behind me, in odd contrast to the gentle sound of the surf.
“I don’t need to remind you, Lacklan, that I am a superb shot. You try and run, I’ll take both your legs.”
“I won’t run, Rand. You can be sure of that.”
We came to the bottom of the steps and I led them through the dense shadows under the house to where the Zombie was parked. My hands were still up. I shook the right one with the keys in it and looked at them in turn.
“I’m going to open the trunk. Don’t shoot me, OK?”
I leaned forward and smiled as they all crowded in. I inserted the key, turned, withdrew the key and very elaborately placed my thumb on the release button. I pressed and there was a clunk. I said:
“OK, now I am going to open the trunk and step back. The NPP is in the kit bag.”
I did exactly as I said. I opened the trunk and stood back. They did exactly what I expected them to do. They all crowded forward and peered in. I had Emily on the far right, Rand in the middle and the Colonel on my far left.
I didn’t waste time. I lunged forward on a wide stance and smashed my knuckles into Rand’s kidneys, putting every ounce of my two hundred and twenty pounds into the punch. A punch to the kidneys is one of the most painful blows a person can receive. He gasped and his knees buckled, but by then, I had jumped up, grabbed the top of the trunk and smashed it down on the Colonel’s head. He staggered back a couple of steps, holding his head in his hands, still clasping his revolver.
I seized his wrist in my left hand and the barrel of the weapon in my right, and levered back savagely. I heard his finger snap and he screamed. I wrenched the gun away and in the same movement drove my right foot into his crotch. He went down on the sand in the fetal position. I didn’t waste any more time on him but turned on Rand. I was acutely aware that he was slumped half inside a trunk full of weapons. He turned his head toward me. His eyes were red with rage. He moved his right hand and I saw he was clutching the Smith & Wesson 500.
In that instant, Emily screamed. It was a high-pitched, hysterical shriek and she threw herself at me with teeth bared and her fingers hooked like talons. She clawed at my face, reaching for my eyes. I staggered back in the sand, stumbled over the Colonel’s prone form and fell on my back with Emily still clawing at my face, and her body weighing heavy on my right arm, pinning down the revolver I’d taken from Harry. I fought to drag her off me, but her hysterical thrashing made her impossible to control. I grabbed her hair with my left hand and dragged her back, yanking my right arm from under her at the same time.
As I did that I saw Rand getting to his feet, leveling the huge cannon of the 500 at me. My first shot went through his wrist. He fired, but the shot went wide into the night. My second shot went through his eye. He swayed and fell back with a dull thud into the sand.
It was only then that I became aware that Emily was sinking her teeth into my wrist. The pain was excruciating and I raised the revolver to club the back of her head. It dawned on me half a second too late that she had pulled my fighting knife from my boot, and now, as she clenched her teeth, biting deep into the bone and searching for my artery, she rammed the knife home into my thigh. I screamed.
She climbed off me, squatting in the sand, keeping hold of the Fairbairn & Sykes with both hands. My body was going into spasm with the pain. I stared at her. She had blood smeared over her mouth and chin. Her eyes were bright and manic. She snarled, “I am going to twist!”
All I could say was, “No, no, no…!”
“I am going to fucking twist!”
“Emily, no! If you twist, I’ll bleed out, you’ll never find it!”
She was still screaming. “I’ll never find it anyway! Will I? You won’t tell me! You won’t fucking tell me!”
“All right! I’ll tell you! Just don’t twist! For God’s sake, Emily!”
“Where is it?”
I looked at the knife. She was still holding the handle with both hands. It was about three inches in, buried in the muscles at the back of the thigh. She had missed the artery by about an inch. I held her eye a moment and said, “Here.” I raised the revolver and put a round right between her eyes. The back of her head erupted and she gently keeled over on her side.
I pulled off my belt, slipped it around my thigh and pulled it tight till it hurt. Then I yanked out the knife and for a moment thought I might pass out. I dragged myself to the trunk of the Zombie and hauled myself onto my right foot, then rested against the open trunk.
Panting and dizzy with pain, I watched the Colonel uncurl himself from the fetal position and slowly get to his hands and knees. He was staring at his revolver, which I had dropped on the sand while applying the tourniquet to my thigh.
“Don’t do it, Colonel. There’s been enough killing. Let it go.”
<
br /> “Fuck you. What have I got to live for? You’ve taken everything from me.”
He staggered forward a step. His broken right hand was just an inch from the butt.
“I don’t want to kill you, Colonel.”
“Fuck you and what you want. You’re just like your father said: a wimp, a pussy, a girl in boy’s clothing. A shame and a disappointment to everybody.” He was kneeling, holding the gun in both hands now, shaking, trying to take aim. “No damn good. That’s what he always said about you. No damn good.”
He struggled to his feet. He was leering now. “You and Robert were both shit, from that English whore of a wife he had. The one he loved, the one he doted on, the one he was proud of, was Ben. Ben was to be his heir.” He laughed suddenly. “And you think a piece of shit like you could kill Ben? You really think you could bring down Ben, your father’s son and heir?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
I pulled the Maxim 9 from the trunk and shot him the way I had shot his daughter, through the middle of the forehead. Then, as his body sank to the sand, I pulled my cell from my pocket and called Special Agent Jeremy Foster. I told him I needed him, a couple of meat wagons and an ambulance, sooner rather than later.
Then I slid down into the sand and passed out among the dead.
Epilogue
The sun flashed and sparkled on the turquoise water. Small waves slapped softly at the wooden hull of JD’s old fishing boat and, while a cool breeze soothed my still tender, swollen face, seagulls wheeled overhead, laughing raucously at some private, evil joke.
He swung his rod, the reel whirred and after a couple of seconds there was a soft ‘plop!’
The ‘plop!’ was followed by a soft hiss as I cracked an ice cold bottle of beer. I wasn’t fishing, I was propped up against my jacket in the back of the boat, trying to ignore the ache in my left leg. JD’s question had been a simple one, but answering it was not so simple.
I thought about it for a while and eventually said: “My father was not a good man. He was a very complicated man. He was a law onto himself.”
JD smiled and stroked his beard. “Hmmm… reminds of somebody, damned if I can think who, though.”
“His marriage with my mother broke down pretty early on and I think he decided he didn’t like her or the kids he’d had with her.”
“I remember your brother Robert. I don’t think anybody liked him very much. What happened to him?”
I almost told him, but shrugged instead and said, “He died ’round about the same time my father did. Thing is, my dad got involved with an organization who were basically a gang of thugs with big IQs and a lot of money. The Colonel wanted to join the gang, and my dad, whatever else was wrong with him, was a loyal friend, and tried to get him in. But neither the Colonel’s IQ nor his bank balance were up to the mark, so he became what they called a ‘friend’ of the gang, and my dad used to give him a helping hand. After my dad died, the gang looked after him.”
“Kind of like the Masons.”
“Except instead of charity, they murder people.”
“OK, like the Illuminati.”
“A bit like that.”
“So, I am guessing at this next bit, but it seems to make sense. When the Colonel discovered he had a daughter, he pulled strings with the gang and got her a job with QPS, because QPS belonged to the gang and was doing research for the gang. She was smart enough for the job—in fact, she was a genuine genius—and her department’s research came up with a device that, if it had been fully developed, had the potential to give whoever owned it absolute temporal power. Kind of like the ring in the Lord of the Rings.”
“Kind of like that.” I took a swig and set about peeling a packet of Camel. I offered him one and he shook his head, fingering his long, straggly hair from his face. I lit up and inhaled deeply, enjoying the gentle sun and the peace. I went on, “I have no idea if it would actually have worked or if it was just one of her crazy fantasies. I don’t know how much testing they had done or how far along they were. I don’t know, but she and Jerry were convinced it would work, and they convinced the Colonel.”
“So what went wrong? How come QPS shut down?”
I laughed. Then I laughed a bit more. “That was my fault. I put a virus into the gang’s central computer network. I had no idea how far it would spread. But the QPS computer network was hooked up to the gang’s, the virus got in and wiped the whole network clean. Everything, their accounts, their passwords, their research—you name it, everything. The whole damn thing went down. So they had to close the research facility.”
“So Emily and the Colonel…”
“And Jerry, they come up with a plan. They were going to try to contact my father’s old friends and get some funding for Emily and Jerry to continue their research. But what they didn’t know, what they couldn’t possibly have known, was that all my dad’s friends were gone…”
“How come? What happened to the gang?”
“Best you don’t know.”
He shook his head. “You are some kind of a son of a bitch.”
“I guess. Anyway, so Jerry, in frustration, contacts Gregor, and while he’s at it, he contacts the CIA as well. The kid is out of his mind. He has no conception of how dangerous these people are. Pretty soon, Gregor has taken over, and he is about to take possession of the device. He’s told his pals back in the Kremlin what Emily has got, and they are as excited as hell about it.”
JD snorted. “Meantime, you roll back into town, and the Colonel hears from me that you’re here and he figures you can help him and Emily out.”
“By getting rid of Gregor, that’s right. Gregor had arranged the drop, and I think Emily was right. He probably intended to eliminate her and hand the device over to their own people to develop. The rest is history.”
We were quiet for a bit. Then JD asked, “So what are you going to do with the twenty-five million?”
“I thought I’d set up a fund to help vets, their widows and orphans.”
He nodded. “Makes sense.” He was quiet again for a bit, then gave a small laugh. “Must have been a shock, though, when the old man turned up with that creep from the CIA.”
“Yeah, I should have seen that coming. She was a damn good actress. I wonder if even she knew who the real Emily was.”
He shrugged and shook his head. “Don’t ask me about women, Lacklan. You think you know one, and five seconds later, she’s a different person.”
I nodded. “I’d known Rand for a few years. We’d crossed paths a few times. I knew he was a dangerous son of a bitch. The Colonel surprised me, though. He knew a lot more about my father than I had expected. Seems they’d been pretty close, and I never knew.”
“He knew about your other brother, Ben.”
I nodded. “Said he didn’t believe he was dead.”
“What do you think?”
I was quiet for a long while. I didn’t know what I thought. “I’m beginning to realize, JD, that everything I thought had started when my father died, when he sent Ben to get me from Wyoming[15], was actually just ending. The whole thing started many, many years ago, when I was a kid.” I stared out at the distant, hazy blue horizon. “When Marni was a kid, and Ben was a kid, too. And my parents were not much older than I am now. That’s when it all started.”
JD snorted. “Dude, stories never start and they never end, they just keep rollin’ along.” Suddenly, he reached down between his knees and felt around in his canvas shoulder bag. After a moment, he pulled out a shiny, featureless black cuboid, about twelve inches long, three inches deep and six inches across. The sun gleamed off the high-polished surface. We both stared at it. I smiled.
He said: “So you had me put this in my fridge, and you posted the case to yourself at a PO box you had your butler open in Sweeny.”
“What magicians call misdirection. You sure you don’t want to try and sell it to the government? According to Emily and the Colonel, it’s worth billions.”
He gave his
slow, rasping laugh. “You know what I’d do if I were the richest man in the world?”
I jerked my chin in a ‘what?’ gesture and swigged my beer.
He gazed out at the vast, blue sea. “I’d open a bar, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, I’d play country music and serve cold beer and whiskey, and on my days off, I’d take a boat out on the water and do some fishing.”
I smiled and grunted. “He is a lucky man indeed who has what he wants, and an even luckier one who knows he wants it.” I held out my hand. “You think we’re far enough out?”
We both looked back at Freeport, small and slightly misty in the distance.
“I reckon.”
He tossed it to me and I stood with care, trying to ignore the pain in my left leg. The weight was good. I drew back my arm and hurled the NPP in a high arc, out into the ocean. It plopped into the sea and sank quickly below the waves.
I sat carefully down again and leaned back against my jacket. JD cracked another bottle of beer, swigged and sighed. “So you’re telling me that thing could just kind of produce anything?”
“That’s what they claimed.”
“Can you imagine,” he said, “If a shark ate that thing, and suddenly started farting tractors, and cars…”
I burst out laughing.
He started to laugh too, wiping the corner of his eye, and went on, “…and like, long strings of yellow rubber ducks…”
“And inflatable sex dolls…”
“This fuckin’ shark, sailing through the ocean…!”
“And all these things every time it farts…!”
And we sat and laughed, and drank beer, and wiped the tears of mirth from our eyes.
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First of all, thank you so much for giving my work a chance. If you enjoyed this adventure, then I would be extremely grateful if you would consider writing a short review for the book on Amazon. A good review means so much to every writer, but means even more for self-published writer like myself. As it allows new readers to find my books, and ultimately allows me to spend more time creating stories that I love! :)