"That seems fair. You already gave me one, even if it was a shitty one."
He grinned, took enough out of his wallet to cover the meal and a generous tip, and placed it on the counter. "I don't know, I might feel a little more talkative tomorrow."
"I'll look forward to it."
Alex watched him leave as she collected the empty plates and glass. He fist-bumped Marcus on the way out.
"What the fuck is wrong with me?" she asked under her breath and forced her focus back to work.
Chapter Thirteen
A quick drive later in the evening was exactly what he needed to get his mind off Alex.
She was nice enough and hot as hell. He wanted to talk to her more, to get to know her and hear about what made her tick, which was fairly unusual for him. Most of his time with women who weren't in the military was spent trying to get into their pants.
He would need to rethink his approach, decide what he wanted and what he could offer in return, and get back to her about it.
Things were a little more comfortable in his new living space, and he fell asleep rather quickly. The combination of good food and booze was enough to put him out like a light.
What annoyed him was the fact that something buzzed demandingly beside his little bed and woke him at around two in the morning. Given that his phone was the irritant, he muttered an imprecation and pushed himself high enough to snag it from the table it rested on.
"Fuck it.” He pushed upward on the bed and turned the device on. The notification wasn't anyone trying to reach him—not intentionally, at least. Someone had triggered the security measures around the building and buzzing was to alert him.
Taylor had a sinking feeling that it would turn out to be a pack of stray dogs. In his half-awake state, he wondered if they actually had stray dogs in the US and if they did, whether they were in packs like they had in Casablanca when he'd gone there to experience some semblance of civilization.
But no, they weren't dogs. Three dots on the motion sensors told him that they moved very deliberately toward the front entrance.
"Fucking assholes." He heaved himself off the bed and resisted the urge to fling the phone across the room. "It’s two in the fucking morning and now, I have to deal with these ogre pricks. Again."
It had to be the same gang that had sent Drew and his cronies to try to intimidate him. This time, he knew, it was no longer a matter of intimidation.
An example needed to be set or they would have problems with the locals in the area they extorted from.
Theirs was a business that relied on intimidation more than anything, and if word got out that one man had avoided having to pay them by beating the shit out of their people, very few others would continue to pay them for protection.
He could understand that, but damned if he would pay them now or ever. The asshats had made it personal.
Now wide awake, he dragged his laptop closer and called up the footage of the cameras around the building to give him a view of the men who approached.
This time, there were only three. Despite the lower number, though, these goons looked better prepared for a fight than Drew's people had been. They were each armed with pistols and knives.
Their weapons were probably not what he needed to focus on, he realized after a moment, but rather the jerrycans of what he could only assume were gasoline.
"Oh, hell no." Taylor hissed with quiet fury, pushed off the bed, and pulled a pair of pants on. "If anyone burns this place to the ground, it'll be me for the insurance money."
They clearly wouldn’t leave him much time to prepare for it either.
He would have to give a little thought to traps he could set up and shit like in Home Alone. His would be considerably more deadly, obviously, but the concept remained.
The idea in his head was that his defenses would simply handle all intrusions without him and would-be arsonists would be killed in the maze of traps he would leave for them so he could get a decent amount of sleep.
"Fucking assholes." He shook his head. "Interrupting a businessman's sleep is not good for the economy. Seriously, do these guys want us all in some kind of gasoline-induced recession because no one lets us get any fucking sleep?"
He picked Betsy up from where she leaned on one of the nearby walls and hefted the bat in his hands. The intruders approached the front entrance of the former grocery store which did provide a small window of time for him to prepare. But they would still be between him and the weapons he stored near the back entrance.
From the looks of it, they were miles above what the previous crew could achieve given that they had already picked the lock and were on their way inside—to where he didn't have any cameras set up yet.
"Damn it," he whispered as he crept down the steps while he stowed his phone in his pocket. He took slow, deep breaths as he moved through the hallway toward the abandoned aisles of the grocery store.
Their conversation was audible before he was even close enough to see them.
"Did we have to do this at night?" one demanded. "And this late? The guy leaves at the end of business hours. If we’d given it an hour, maybe two, and then headed in, we'd still have been home in time for bed."
"The boss doesn't want any mistakes this time, which is why he chose the three of us," a second grumbled and sounded like he would have preferred to be in bed at this late hour as well. "The last guys fucked up, so we need to set an example. We only have to set the whole place on fire to make sure the guy knows he needs to pay up if he wants to work in this area."
Taylor smiled grimly. These guys thought he was gone for the day.
It was a reasonable assumption but if they had bothered to scout a little, they would have seen his truck parked at the back. He assumed the idea was apparently not to burn the place to the ground with him in it, but they really needed to up their criminal skills or countless people would be unintentionally crisped during their careers.
That was just unprofessional, and annoying for those crisped.
Then again, if they had any skills, they wouldn't be criminals in the first place. Or, at least, not the kind who visited someone else's place of business at two in the morning with arson in mind.
If not for the very real seriousness of the situation, he’d have found it funny. Instead, he focused and moved silently around the aisles they currently discussed using as a starting point for their fire.
They at least seemed a little more professional now that they had their whining over with and would be ready for a fight. They even lowered their voices somewhat. While still not the best in the business, they wouldn't be as easy to deal with singlehandedly as the others had been.
It was all for the best. Having been rudely awakened at this ungodly hour, he wanted a real fight.
He’d fucking earned it.
"Hey!" one of them shouted as he approached and stayed low while he advanced quickly. They reacted in seconds and brandished their weapons while they searched for a target in the darkness, but he reached them before they could identify him.
The first fell back into one of his comrades and dropped his revolver when Taylor pounded his chest with the bat. Both intruders fell to the ground and he turned his attention to the man who was still on his feet with a Beretta in his hands. Thankfully, he seemed unable to find the safety and generally seemed unfamiliar with the weapon.
What the hell?
Taylor pushed forward, drove his shoulder into the man's midsection, and pounded him into the aisle wall to knock the breath out of him. Before the thug could recover, he pivoted in place, thumped the gun out of his hands with the knob of the bat, and smacked the other side into his throat.
The man gasped for breath as Taylor took a step back and stayed low as he swung the bat hard into his left knee. He continued the movement to bring it up and deliver a forceful blow to the left side of his head. The attack felled him without so much as a whisper except for the clatter when his head impacted with the floor.
Some
might call it harsh but when it came to survival, it was necessary.
The other two realized how deep in shit they were but unlike the previous team that had tried to run from their imminent doom, they tried to scramble to retrieve their weapons instead.
Taylor didn't care which was the smarter of the two choices. It wasn't like they would end differently either way, and he intended to deliver an even stronger message to whoever had sent them. Their response to his attack was irrelevant. They had started this, and he would finish it in the best way he could—with extreme prejudice.
A small part of him whispered that he was no longer in the Zoo and that extreme measures were no longer necessary for survival. It was easy enough to shrug it aside and respond to the instinctive drive that pushed him to do what he knew best. He had some issues to work out. Even he could admit that.
But in that moment, he considered it irrelevant.
The first man fumbled with the revolver he'd dropped and Taylor attempted to use a baseball bat as the world's most useless hockey stick. It worked well enough to skitter the weapon a few yards out of reach.
He stepped on the intruder’s hand, stamped hard enough to hear a crunch in the wrist, and brought the knob of his weapon to bear on his back.
The third man had retrieved his pistol and leveled it at his adversary’s head, but he simply swung the bat up and around and hammered his hand upward so the gun fired harmlessly into the ceiling. Another strike knocked the weapon out of his hand entirely and was quickly followed up by a third blow to the man's shoulder. He sprawled awkwardly and cried out in pain.
"You dumb fucks simply don't get it." Taylor glared at his opponent, who writhed and clutched his broken shoulder.
"What?" the thug asked.
"Well, not you precisely. I've already deduced that you three weren't told who would be waiting for you here if you tried to attack it. You're only the low-level foot soldiers, grunts really, who were told where to show up and what was expected of you."
"I'll have you know—"
"Yeah, yeah, I know you are the best guys that could be called on short notice, and yes, you make more than the average worker does in a year," he continued as he gathered the fallen weapons while they watched him warily. "I was talking about your bosses. You know, the guys who know what happened to the last team they sent here and decided to go ahead and send in another. You should really think about finding another place of employment. Provided you get the chance, that is."
"Oh, God, you love the sound of your own voice, don't you?" the man asked and pushed into a seated position. "Why don't you save us the torture of another monologue from you and call the cops already?"
"No, I don't think you understand." Taylor shook his head. "You guys came here in the middle of the fucking night with every intention of burning my place to the ground with me in it."
"We didn't know you were here."
"And that makes it all better, right?" He snorted derisively. "I have a thing against fire. Shoot me, knife me, punch or hit me with a blunt object…cool. It’s kind of expected in my position. But when you set me on fire is where I see it as personal."
"So…you're not going to—"
"No." Taylor hefted the bat and swung it at the man's head. The impact could be felt all the way into his hands and the ring of the aluminum was all he could hear for a few long seconds. "I won’t call the cops."
He would have to move them himself, which sucked. His grin became smug and feral. But not as much as the amount of suck that would be waiting for these dumbasses when they woke up.
If they woke up.
Something smelled like ammonia—a really strong smell that seemed to claw into his nostrils with such intensity that he recoiled from it instinctively in an effort to escape from the stench.
Bruce wasn’t entirely sure it would improve, but it couldn't get any worse.
When he opened his eyes, though, he realized exactly how wrong his assumption was. They hadn't really thought this whole thing through.
They had been sent in to deal with some dude who was being problematic with his protection payments. It was the kind of thing they were tasked with all the time and were paid rather well to do so, too.
Sure, Big G had other guys to do the actual intimidation and the occasional trashing of a place, but when a real message needed to be sent, Bruce, Con, and Cal were the ones he called in. They mostly dealt with rival gangs and the like with the occasional divergence into serious arson and assassination—usually when the targets were asleep.
He still thought they could have scheduled it a little earlier to allow them to get in and out of this place in time for them to head home before the sun began to rise. It was funny how the mind latched onto minor resentments even when faced with much bigger issues.
Either way, it seemed like they wouldn’t make it anywhere. He looked around the room they were in and it gradually dawned on him that things would definitely become far worse.
Already, they were well on the way to what he might call seriously in the shit.
It looked like they were in something like a walk-in freezer but it wasn't on. There was no sign of the meat that used to be stored in the room, thankfully, but the poles and hooks they used to hang from remained. Bruce, Con, and Cal were now suspended on these, bound by what looked like old wiring.
Memories of what had happened previously began to seep in slowly. He recalled how confident they’d been when they had arrived and how they’d expected it to be empty. The guy with a bat had waded in unexpectedly and disabled them one by one to leave them each with their own personal and probably permanent injuries to remember him by.
Bruce could feel the pain in his wrist and head. Con looked like he nursed a broken knee and a concussion as well, while Cal had what appeared to be a broken wrist but not much else.
Had the guy simply given up?
It didn't really matter, though. They were strung up like three Christmas hams, ready to be carved by the man who put the smelling salts he'd used to wake them up with away.
"You can't hold us here like this," Bruce said. He knew it was a weak argument, but hey, the guy had turned the other team over to the cops. Maybe he could be persuaded to do so again.
"You can't break into my place of business like this," their captor responded, picked up the baseball bat he had used against them from a nearby table, and rested it against his shoulder. "We appear to be at something a legal impasse that I'm…ninety percent sure will be decided in my favor. Although I doubt those odds will remain the same if they ever find your remains and realize what I did to you."
"What you—"
"Self-defense is one thing,” Taylor spoke over him. “Obviously, but the kind of fucked up shit I have in mind supersedes that,” he continued and moved to where Con had a little difficulty staying awake to pat his cheek lightly. “A line has to be drawn somewhere.” Taylor turned to Bruce. “Wait, does Nevada have any duty to retreat laws?"
Bruce looked hastily at his cronies while his brain wrestled for a way out of this murder dungeon.
"That's what I thought," the man said. "It's all a moot point anyway, given that no one will actually find your bodies, but it's always good to know. See, the nice realtor who sold me this place never really thought about how easy it is to hide bodies around here. There's a furnace in the back that needs a few bits and pieces fixed but is still functional. It's like these people didn't even look into the possibilities a place like this presents."
A chill shivered down his spine. The guy was talking like a serial killer would and rambled on about terrifying topics as if he discussed sports or the weather.
It wasn't helped by the fact that he reached into a duffel bag and withdrew what looked like a ten-inch-long scimitar knife, thin and wickedly curved, as well as a knife sharpener. He began to work the blade to an even sharper edge than it had already while he paced at the opposite end of the room.
"Honestly,” Taylor called over his shoulder. “I didn't
think I would do this much blood-letting now that I am in what is supposed to be the civilized US. But, as it turns out, you irredeemable dumbasses simply can't take a hint."
"We were only here to give you a message," Bruce said and tried not to let the tremor he could feel in his legs seep into his voice. "To get you to pay like everyone else in the neighborhood."
"I have no intention to pay anything," he said and shook his head vehemently. "And, you know, I happen to believe in killing the messenger…"
"Bruce."
"Bruce, I do believe in killing the messenger," he continued. "You know why? Because it sends a fucking message."
He tried to inch away as his tormentor pressed the now razor-sharp blade to his neck. Most people tried to look intense when they wanted to be intimidating and waved a weapon around to show the people they didn't give a fuck.
It worked—sometimes, anyway—but this guy's deadpan delivery was far more terrifying. He wasn't trying to intimidate. It was exactly like he said. He wanted to send a message.
The blade dug a little deeper into his neck and even drew a little blood until something buzzed nearby and broke his captor’s concentration.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," the man exclaimed, pulled away from him, and returned to the table where his phone was. "Goddammit,” He looked at Bruce. “Did you guys bring friends? What's with all this traffic? This ain't fucking Halloween and I don't have any candy."
He shoved the phone into his pocket and walked toward the only entryway—a door, Bruce realized, that couldn't be opened from the inside—and gathered everything that might be used as a weapon on the way.
"Hang tight there, little buddies. I'll be right back." The man closed the door behind him.
The silence that settled over them was palpable as their captor walked away.
"Don't hurry back," Con said softly in the darkness.
"We're in no rush."
Hired Killer (Cryptid Assassin Book 1) Page 12