Boundless: A Bounty Short

by J. D. Cunegan

  The trick was knowing when to strike. For Jill, that time was now.

  “I was wondering when you’d find him.”

  Jill smiled when she heard the voice from behind. Every so often, her wishes did come true. Fighting the urge to go straight for her sword, Jill instead balled her hands into fists and kept her back to Riggins. She didn’t really want to use the sword anyway; it was for show as much as anything else.

  As far as Jill knew, the blade had never before sliced human flesh. It had come into her family as a gift, a show of gratitude toward her grandfather Wyatt for his heroics in the middle of World War II. Her father treated the sword as if it were one of his own children, and Jill didn’t want to sully that by staining the blade with blood.

  She would do it if she had to, but the katana was little more than window dressing, an intimidation tactic. That and she couldn’t use her gun. Firing a police-issued firearm wouldn’t do much for keeping her identity a secret.

  Riggins’ boots were heavy against the carpet as he approached. “Gotta say, though, finding out you’re a badge was a bit of a surprise. I did not see that coming.”

  By the time Riggins finished talking, Jill could feel his breath against her. Her right elbow shot backwards in a blink, connecting with his nose. As he stumbled back, hands over his face, Jill twirled and kicked him in the stomach.

  Riggins dropped to his knees, doubled over himself. His arms were now cradled against his midsection, blood pouring from his nose onto the carpet. He coughed with such force that Jill thought he might become ill.

  “Guess you didn’t see that coming, either,” Jill said before kicking Riggins again, this time in the chin.

  ◊◊◊

  By the time Riggins regained consciousness, he found himself sitting up against the wall, hands tied behind his back and his legs tied together at the ankles. His chin throbbed and his nose was swollen. Dried blood ran from his nose, over his lips, and down his chin. His stomach was sore, to the point where Riggins thought he might hurl at any moment. The sensation would bubble up inside him, and he would have to suck in as deep a breath as he could muster to fend it off -- and that hurt as well.

  Looking up, Riggins spat blood onto the floor. “And here I thought you fought fair.”

  “Says the guy who threw a knife at me as I walked away.”

  “Touché.”

  He spat more blood onto the carpet. Riggins looked up through hooded eyes at the woman hovering over him, decked out in black leather from head to toe with a sword on her back and what he could only describe as a Terminator eye shining somewhere behind a wall of scraggly, unkempt hair.

  He wouldn’t believe it if he wasn’t staring right at it. All these years, he thought of superheroes as little more than figments of imagination, useless doodles in the funny books or some awful movie that still managed to rake in billions of dollars. And yet… there was one, right in front of him.

  Riggins smiled despite the pain. The rumors had been true. All the rumblings he would hear in the middle of nowhere about the government looking to create super soldiers… he had assumed they were little more than flights of fancy, as if the wrong people had read too many issues of Captain America. But here stood living proof. Riggins still didn’t know her name, but he knew she was former military, and now he knew that she was a cop as well. This was quite the discovery.

  “This how it works now?” He chuckled. “Police can’t do something, they send their pet robot?”

  “What makes you think I’m with the police?”

  “Well, the fact that you were in here earlier today with a badge and gun, mostly.” Riggins shrugged and spat another mouthful of blood.

  “So you’re a spy now.” Jill shook her head. “What happened to the macho my-gun-is-bigger-than-yours tough guy?”

  “Who says I can’t be both?”

  Jill lowered herself into a catcher’s crouch. “Look, I don’t give two shits about you. You could be the second coming of John Riggins, for all I care. What I want is the person who killed Johnny Ruiz.”

  “What about the person who killed Duval?”

  “How do I know I’m not looking right at him?” The smallest of smiles crept onto Jill’s face. “For all I know, the same person committed both murders.”

  “Say that’s all true.” Riggins raised his chin and looked down his nose at Jill. The dried blood on his face wasn’t all that different from the camo paint he had worn the night before. “What then? Sure, I get hauled off to prison, but you haven’t really accomplished anything, have you? A deadbeat’s still dead. And you can celebrate Duval being gone all you want, you know as well as I do someone else is just gonna take his place.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  It probably wasn’t as convincing out loud as it was in Jill’s head, but there was some part of her at least that felt that way. Her job wasn’t really all that macro; a dead body would pop up somewhere and it was up to her to figure out who killed them. In that regard, Johnny Ruiz and Madison Duval were her sole focus. But she was starting to see that if she was really going to make a habit of being a vigilante, sometimes the macro would be unavoidable.

  “You’ll want to,” Riggins warned. “Because the man I work for? He can make your life hell if you’re not careful.”

  “So can my boss. Whose yours?”

  Before Riggins could open his mouth, his head flung backward in tune with a gunshot from behind Jill. His body slumped back onto the floor, and by the time Jill whirled around, she saw five men covered from head to toe in specialized military gear. Heavy-duty helmets, might-vision goggles, Kevlar vests. The most advanced automatic weaponry America’s tax dollars could buy, far more advanced than the guns she had faced the night before, and they were all pointed directly at Jill. Without another thought, Jill sprinted away from Riggins’ body and ran along the wall, hoping against hope that she could outrun the spray of bullets she knew was coming.

  Sure enough, the men all opened fire at once. The burst of gunfire rang in Jill’s ears, and she ducked her head as she bolted full-speed toward the tarp covering the broken window. There was no way Jill was going to get by the men and to the stairwell, and there was nowhere in the empty office to hide. Her only option was to jump, even if it meant a plummet that might severely injure her. If not worse.

  She felt one of the bullets whiz past her ear. Clenching her jaw, and ignoring the dull throb in the back of her left leg, Jill leapt at the tarp. It ripped with ease when she pushed through it. Freefall was instant.

  Jill could still hear the gunfire as her body began its rapid descent. She didn’t dare look down. Her hair whipped violently against the wind. The pressure of the breeze against her face was like a punch.

  But then, much to Jill’s surprise, she landed. Not on the sidewalk, but on a metal plank that swung back and forth when she slammed into it. Scrambling back to her feet, Jill frowned and frantically searched her surroundings.

  As it turned out, she had landed on a scaffolding often used for high-rise window washing. In the heat of trying not to get shot, Jill had never even noticed it. But now she was face-to-face with a thin elderly man grabbing onto the railing and staring at her. His mouth dropped, as did the squeegee in his hand. Jill could only smile and wave in return.

  Jill looked up in time to see one of the military men peeking out the broken window, his weapon trained down on her. She drew her sword and ducked into a crouch, thankful that when the man opened fire again, the bullets all ricocheted off the blade.

  Once the gunfire ceased, Jill sheathed the blade again and grabbed the railing before flipping herself over the edge and somersaulting downward. She then grabbed the bottom edge, still too many stories up to let herself drop to the pavement.

  Gunfire resumed, severing one of the ropes. As the left side of the platform tilted downward and the entire thing started careening toward the ground, Jill flipped back over the railing and cradled herself over the old man. The rope caught on the spindl
e once the platform was hovering just over the second story, at which point Jill lifted the man into her arms and jumped over the edge. She landed with a grunt before setting the man back down to his feet.

  “You alright?” she asked.

  The man, who wore three days’ worth of white stubble on his cheeks, nodded and glanced up at the sky. He straightened the dirty hat atop his head and shrugged, adjusting the strap of his faded overalls threatening to slip off his left shoulder.

  “Don’t s’pose I could get workman’s comp for this?”

  Jill looked skyward, reaching up to initiate her infrared sight again. Another tap of her temple allowed her to zoom in, but the man was no longer positioned by the broken window. If she had to guess, Jill figured they were attending to Riggins. Whoever was controlling Riggins had decided he was no longer of use, conveniently right as she was trying to get information out of him.

  That told Jill she was close, a lot closer than she realized.

  “Sue your employer. That’s what everyone else does.” She looked at the old man again, who appeared to be none the worse for wear. “Listen, I need you to do me a favor. Call the cops, tell them there’s been a murder on the twentieth floor. And whatever you do, don’t mention me. Got it?”

  By the time the man turned to reply, Jill was already gone.

  V

  As it turned out, Riggins was the man’s real name -- just his middle name. Thomas Riggins Bryant had served two tours in Afghanistan and another in Iraq before receiving a dishonorable discharge. What for, Captain Richards wouldn’t say; all he had said was that the incident report was dark and graphic and shouldn’t have to be repeated in the company of other people.

  Thomas had taken several odd jobs since returning to the states before hooking up with a private defense contractor named Horizon Solutions. No one knew what Horizon Solutions did, but the FBI was in the midst of searching for a money trail. If nothing else, they could figure out who was pulling Riggins’ strings.

  That was the theory, anyway. Jill doubted they would get that far. Particularly since once uniforms and detectives reached the scene in the wee hours of the night, Riggins’ body was gone. Were it not for the dried pool of blood in the carpet, there would’ve been no evidence of his death. Sloane was disappointed in the lack of a body, but blood spatter analysis had occupied enough of his time.

  Interestingly enough, that blood pool was the only evidence left. No fingerprints, no shell casings, no fibers, no residue. Even the tarp Jill had jumped through had been replaced. Had Jill not seen Riggins take the bullet right in front of her, she would probably be convinced he was still alive.

  Not that she could say anything about it. As far as Captain Richards and the rest of the Seventh Precinct were concerned, Jill was at home the previous night. The anonymous tip had been made, as she had asked, and there was no mention of the mysterious woman in black leather. There was also no mention of the five gunmen in military garb who had shot Riggins dead and then disappeared without even the ghost of a trace.

  Riggins had killed Johnny Ruiz and Madison Duval. She just knew it. He never admitted it, and there was no evidence linking him to the murders, but Jill knew he was the one responsible. The look in his eyes the previous night alone told Jill all she needed. Officially, both cases would go cold and gather dust in the archive room, but Jill knew who did it.

  More importantly, she knew he would never kill again.

  Jill sat at her desk filling out paperwork for a previous case that had gotten lost in the shuffle. The words were starting to bleed into one another, so Jill dropped her pen and pinched the bridge of her nose before grabbing the navy blue mug on her desk and heading for the break room.

  She stopped along the way, though, when she looked up at the TV in the corner. A press conference was being held in front of the Transamerica Tower. The chryon along the bottom of the screen read Horizon Solutions Shutting Down Amid Scandal, and though she was impressed that someone managed to squeeze “amid” into a chryon, Jill was more interested in the substance of the news.

  In particular, she wanted to know what the man in the white hair and blood-red suit standing at the lectern had to say.

  “Neither Mr. Bryant nor Horizon Solutions reflect or represent the values of my company,” David Gregor announced once Jill un-muted the television. “What began as a company working closely with the Pentagon on utilizing renewable energy in the global War on Terror has become a cesspool of greed and corruption and everything that is wrong with this great nation.”

  “Welp,” Captain Richards said once he was standing next to Jill, “looks like he just saved the FBI a ton of work.”

  “How nice of him.”

  “All of Horizon Solutions’ contracts with the Department of Defense have been voided, and I will begin the process of further examining all of Gregor Enterprises’ agreements with other contractors, public and private. We do not operate outside the public eye. Gregor Enterprises is not, and has never been, in the business of shady under-the-table deals, wetwork, and scare tactics.”

  Jill shook her head. “Why don’t I believe him?”

  “Because you’re smart.” Richards tilted his head to the side before returning to his office. With a frown, Jill muted the television again before following him. Once she was in Daniel’s office, which was nothing more than a glass box overlooking the rest of the Homicide floor, he shut and locked the door.

  It wasn’t until Daniel lowered the blinds, though, that Jill started to get worried.

  “Uh… Dan?”

  “Have a seat.” Richards lowered himself into his leather chair with a grunt, his hands tightly grasping the arms of the chair. His knees popped when he did so, old age and years of relative inactivity catching up with him. Captain Richards had let himself go a little bit since moving up the ranks and taking more desk-heavy jobs.

  But it meant more nights in which he got home at a decent hour, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had to go undercover or engage in a chase. Evelyn was thankful for that, and that was all that mattered.

  “Horizon Solutions was a front,” Captain Richards explained. “Lotta wetwork going on there. Riggins and the men with him were contract killers.”

  “No wonder Gregor looks so pissed on TV.”

  “The FBI believes he was the one ordering the hits.”

  Jill frowned and looked over her shoulder again, even though she couldn’t see the television in the bullpen with the blinds drawn. “But…”

  “I know. I said the same thing.” Daniel sank back in his seat, rubbing his fingers over his mustache. “Look, I’ve played poker with the guy. He seems nice enough. Can’t ever talk politics with the man cause I think I might shoot him, but Gregor’s a pleasant enough guy.”

  “He’s been speaking out against the drugs in West Baltimore for months.”

  “And not out of the goodness of his heart.” Richards opened the top drawer on the left side of his desk, producing an overstuffed manila folder. “My contact at the FBI sent me this. That’s nine months’ worth of transcribed telephone conversations and email chains in which Gregor talks openly about taking out Madison Duval.”

  Grabbing the folder, surprised at the sheer weight of it, Jill laid it in her lap before flipping through several of the pages. The sea of numbers was enough to make her head spin, some portions highlighted in yellow and underlined in red ink. Gregor’s loopy, unreadable signature was at the bottom of seemingly every other page.

  “Gregor ordered the hit?”

  “Looks like.”

  “But what about Ruiz? I thought he was about to rat on Duval to the feds.”

  “He was.” Richards smiled that smile he always had whenever he was doing well at the poker table. One would think he’d have a better poker face, being a cop and all, but Daniel Richards was as easy to read as a children’s picture book. “But he had information on Gregor, too.”

  “So David Gregor used the defense contractor he knew almost nothing
about to take them both out, and then to take out the man who killed them both once someone got close.”

  “And since the only payments we can tie Gregor to are the ones for work Horizon was actually supposed to be doing… the FBI can’t move on him.”

  Jill frowned. “They can’t act on these transcripts?”

  “They never got a warrant.” Daniel shrugged. “Everything in your lap is inadmissible.”

  Closing the folder, Jill hoisted it back onto her captain’s desk with a shake of her head. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. How did they not get a warrant first?”

  “Well, that’s just it. Agent Vincent swears up and down they did. But there’s no record of it.”

  “Digital tampering?”

  “Makes as much sense as anything else.”

  “Okay, but…” Jill chewed on her lower lip. “Why tell me all this? I’m just Homicide.”

  “You’re also just like your daddy.” Daniel’s smile brightened. “Paul never could sleep if there were questions left unanswered. He had to know every single detail, even if it had nothing to do with his case.”

  That much was true. It also helped knowing exactly what Riggins had been talking about a few nights ago when he boasted about how in over her head Jill was. She knew who he was referring to now, and if the FBI was onto David Gregor, then Jill figured that was something she needed to pay attention to.

  It also helped knowing her hunch was right.

  Not that she expected to do much of that in the confines of her day job -- unless a pile of bodies showed up at his penthouse. But it was nice for her alter ego to have something to shoot at now. Whether he knew it or not, David Gregor was shaping up to potentially be her first arch nemesis. Never mind the fact that Jill hadn’t yet thought of a name for her alter ego.