A response that Maxine could understand the subtext in all too readily. Before things could get out of hand, she indicated to Laurent, “If you want to start your inventory, we’re not going to stop you, Mr. Laurent—we’re not happy with it due to the concerns I’ve outlined to Mr. Creggan—”
“Dale, please…” Creggan cut in.
“In his office in Pickford,” she kept going. “But we’d ask you to be as swift as you can, because we have much to do here, and due to the unfortunate circumstances, we’re already a hand down.”
Creggan nodded to Laurent and the Hats. “Do your thing, boys. Let’s get out of these people’s hair as soon as possible.”
Creggan turned to Donald. “Tell me, Mr. Jefferson. Do you still use that old hunting lodge up in the hills? For a complete inventory, Mr. Laurent and his men will want to see that, too.”
They moved swiftly with Greene in the party, despite his bulk. He was happy to split the contents of the equipment packs with Henry and Tally, and lightening the load for all of them sure made things a little easier. But as with everything good right now, there had to be a downside, and the downside was that Greene couldn’t shut up from talking about himself.
At first Tally hadn’t minded hearing the near stream of consciousness that spilled from Greene’s mouth as he talked about growing up in Atlanta, his school, his friends, setting up his business while still in college, how he’d made his first million, how he’d lost his first million, about his dogs, his cars, his girls and his houses, his clothes, his vinyl collection, his home theater system, his books, his websites, his plans, the kind of girls he liked, and how being single and rich was cooler than a snowball fight in the Arctic with a polar bear, and… and… and…
After a while, Tally found, as they continued walking north, that she could begin to switch Greene off and focus on other things, like her worries about getting to the M-Bar and what she might find there. Would her father have made the same assessment as her and headed there, too? Greene’s words became a background hum, like when she would stream music to her headphones while studying, almost an aid to focusing rather than a hindrance.
That worked for many miles, until it became clear that Greene was possibly wise to the fact Tally, and for all she knew Henry, too, were just sliding over his words like well-waxed canoes across a slightly rippling lake.
“So, tell me about you…”
Questions were another matter. The prompt brought her immediately out of her focus, and Tally was surprised to find that Greene, who up until now had been walking two or three paces behind her, was suddenly right at her shoulder. Henry was still a good eight paces ahead, walking mechanically and exuding a “don’t even think of talking to me” attitude. Chin on his chest, elbows tucked in as his feet ticked and tocked over the blacktop. And so, Greene had come to Tally.
Oh, great.
“Not a lot to tell. I’m in college, I climb, I free-run… well, I used to do those things. Now I stay alive.” She’d kept her answer clipped and precise, hoping that it would send Greene back to his hum.
“Studying what?” he asked.
“Social science and humanities.”
“That’s not going to get you very far in business.”
“Perhaps I don’t want to be a businessperson.”
“Who wouldn’t want to be one?”
Tally waved her arm expansively to the trees and beyond. “I don’t think the prevailing conditions of the world right now are going to make setting up a software company much of a priority. And seeing as all the cars are fritzed, I reckon the bottom is going to drop out of the Ferrari market, don’t you?”
“No, no, that’s where you’re wrong.”
Whoever attacked Greene’s party definitely slit the wrong throats. Tally immediately regretted this thought. Perhaps the supernova-stirred aggression she’d seen in others was working on her, too. She remembered being ready to fight first and ask questions later on the Sea-Hawk when her dad had been threatened. Maybe there was a resurfacing flavor of that here now. So, she battened down the hatches on her aggression and went with sarcasm instead.
“I am?” Tally put her hand to her brow and stared along the highway to the horizon. “I don’t see a lot of traffic, Greene.”
“Okay, you’re right about the cars, but you’re wrong about business. This is a golden opportunity for men like me.”
“Men like you.”
“Yes! Entrepreneurs! People who can see the prevailing conditions; those able to exploit those conditions will be the new kings.”
“Greene, no offense, but you were living day to day out of cans and had no idea where you were going.” Henry had stopped in the road and turned around. The color was high in his cheeks, and he’d obviously had enough of Greene’s pure boasting. “We had to rescue you from a bunch of crazies who’d have gutted you like a fish if I hadn’t come along. You have all the business acumen you want, but it won’t stop a knife across your throat.”
It was the most animated Tally had seen Henry, and she agreed with every word—she did, however, hold back from joining in.
For now.
“Dude…” Greene began, but Henry raised a hand like a crossing guard ordering a car to stop.
“Do not, under any circumstances, call me dude. You’re twenty-five, not a child of the sixties. I don’t care what goes on in your open-plan, softly furnished, vegan safe-space of a workplace, but on the road, where we could get killed at any moment, I want to know that if I’m going to save your ass again, it’s not going to be the ass of someone who uses the word ‘dude’ in anything other than a completely ironic way. Are we clear?”
Tally could see that Greene had been taken aback by Henry’s words. He wasn’t used to being talked to in that way, it seemed. His eyes wavered, and his bottom lip behind his straggly beard totally looked like it was going to tremble.
Tally gently admonished herself to keep from using the word totally like some west coast valley girl. She was from North Carolina, and around there, totally was almost tantamount to dude.
“So, we walk on. We only speak when necessary. We have no idea who is listening, and we don’t really want to alert anyone of our presence. Especially those who might want to steal our stuff. I’m fine with you coming with us, Greene, and it’s great that you’re helping out with carrying the gear, even with your painful shoulder and all, but please, for the love of God, stop talking.”
Greene nodded, and Tally had to stifle a giggle.
Greene dropped back again and they walked on, through midday, at which point they decided to carry on through the afternoon. There were cities nearby, so there was the potential of more people in the area who might come across them. Tally suggested they make camp a little earlier that night since they had made good progress, and the miles had breezed by without the accompaniment of Greene’s rattle.
They came off the road as the sun started to drop, and made camp near a stream that ran through a small forest of loblolly trees. They hadn’t spied anyone all day, and again it seemed they weren’t being followed. Tally made a small fire to boil water from the stream, and Henry set off to see what he could hunt down for dinner.
Greene sat quietly, cross-legged beneath a tree, and meditated.
Tally felt the black hump of anger rising in her, but knew it was the changes inside her caused by the supernova that were causing it. There was no way that before all this she would have given a thought to anyone meditating like that. But now, especially after the punishment her ears had endured already today…. He could at least have helped with collecting the firewood. She resolved to have it out with him later and give him a good telling-off. She didn’t see why Henry should have all the fun.
Henry returned with two fresh king rail he’d shot half a mile away on a marshy area near a lake. He plucked and gutted the chicken-sized birds while Greene practiced his tai chi.
Tally sautéed the bird meat in a small pan and added a can of beans from Greene’s stock. Gr
eene went back to meditating as the meal hissed in the pan.
Henry and Tally had exchanged about a million exasperated glances before Tally poked Greene in the shoulder.
He opened his eyes, and asked with an innocent smile, “Is dinner ready? I’m starving…”
Tally felt the clockwork and springs in her shoulder prepare to unwind and send a punch right into Greene’s smug face, but the shot was never realized because a huge and dirty German Shepard, its foam-flecked muzzle snarling, leapt at the pan of king rail and beans—and a whole pack of snarling dogs followed, barking and yipping.
18
The explosion shook the walls in Berkovich Jewelry and Couture Pieces. Jayce and Elvis exchanged happy glances and Crane punched the air. Only Timothy, who Josh had insisted should come along—because he hadn’t trusted him to not crack and run to Trace or Lacy—showed no emotion, other than to say, “Well, I supposed that’s that, then.”
“Yes, it is,” Josh affirmed. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Next door in Ballantine’s, the vault door was half in and half out of the wall. The C4 along with the detonators, which Harve had passed to Josh well away from Parkopolis on the road to Thunderbolt, three days after he’d first suggested it to him, had blown the concrete around all three hinges away. The explosion had also knocked half of two stairs away on the flight up to the office suite. It took some grunting and heft to get the vault door away from the frame, to where it clanged down on the concrete steps, but when they did, the treasure trove inside was worth it.
“Old man Ballantine sure knew how to pick his product,” Elvis said as they moved into the dark space beyond the ripped-out door. They’d taken oil lamps from Parkopolis to light the inside of the vault, and what they illuminated now showed Josh a collection of fire power that would not only allow him to fight a small war, but several others along the way.
Fireboxes of RPG launchers and crates of grenades were stacked against the far wall of the fifteen-by-fifteen vault. There were AK-47s by the score, with boxes of ammo. There was plenty of stuff in there that was useless, that relied on powered telescopic targeting systems, night vision goggles, and fingerprint-activated technology for rifles and sidearms, but what low-tech weaponry there was in the room would absolutely meet the needs of what Josh had planned.
“I take it old man Ballantine didn’t care who he sold to above or below the counter,” Josh said, picking up one of the shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapons and looking along the wide green barrel.
Elvis shrugged. “He always said politics shouldn’t get in the way of good business.”
“And the feds knew nothing about this?”
“That, I don’t know. But he certainly greased a lot of palms over the years. This sorta stuff was never in the vault more’n a few days. It would come in from the sea, up-river. Be brought in here like a regular delivery and then sent out again.”
Josh shook his head at the reams of legal and moral codes being broken here. “Where to?”
Elvis shrugged. “No idea. There’s always a war on somewhere. The real trick is to sell to both sides. Double your money and double the fun.”
The gall in Josh’s belly at the notion of soldiers or law enforcement officers coming up against this in some dirty little war or a savage defense of cartel concerns was tempered only by one fact… that it was going to be used to bring down Trace and put an end to his madness.
“Okay. Let’s do this.”
“What do you mean we have to escape from the mansion again? Don’t you remember what happened the last time?”
Poppet stood next to Joshua in the room they’d been locked in. Her withdrawal symptoms had all but gone now, and during the day, Lacy had had her working in the mansion’s kitchens, preparing the meals served to Trace and his cronies in the evening. Her hands, which had never really been used to physical work as the pampered wife of a Mafia Don, were now raw and cracked. Her thumbnail was black from where one of the other kitchen workers had accidentally dropped a catering can of pineapple chunks on it, and her hair was greasy, tied back in a bundle.
“Keep your voice down. We don’t know who’s listening in the corridor.” Josh was glad that Poppet had come out the other side of her addiction—for now—but she still had to be reminded that walls had ears.
“You’re insane,” she whispered in his ear.
“That may well be true,” he whispered back.
As Josh explained to Poppet exactly what he wanted her to do, and when, her eyes widened with shock and awe. The audacity of the plan awed her, but the very fact that it was going to happen, and happen in the next hour, put her in a high state of anxiety.
“Just when I’ve kicked the booze. I can’t even self-medicate. You’re an evil man, Josh Standing.”
Twenty minutes later, they were ready.
There’d been no point in trying to smuggle a weapon back into the mansion, so he’d hidden a book of matches in his shoe as he’d approached Thunderbolt and the waiting Jackdaw. He’d spun a story about how, when they’d opened the vault, it had been empty, but they’d managed to come back with thirty more watches and ten pounds of Krugerrands anyway. He’d expected a beating for not coming back with more, but he hadn’t been touched. Harve had in some respects looked relieved when he’d told him. At least it meant that he wouldn’t have reason for going up against Trace in a pitch to replace the other man in the Harbormaster’s affection.
The one thing Josh and Poppet had been allowed to keep in their room were books. Even Trace recognized that his prisoners should be allowed some mental stimulation for the long hours they were cooped up, and so both Josh and Poppet had been allowed to choose a volume from the mansion’s musty library. It seemed a shame to set the leather-bound volume of Great Expectations on fire, but under the circumstances, he didn’t think Charles Dickens would mind.
As Josh prepared to strike the first match, after tearing out a handful of pages and rolling them into a tight wad, Poppet asked, “We do this… you sure they’re going to let us out? They might just leave us to burn.”
“If they don’t let us out,” Josh said, as the match sparked and sputtered against the pages, “then this is going to be the shortest jailbreak in history.”
He struck the match, lit the pages, and passed his great expectations to Poppet.
Josh got into position, crouched sprinter-style just off the arc the door would make as it swung open. Poppet, with her hand over her mouth, stood slightly to the right side of Josh, holding the roll of burning pages out in front of her like a cross to a vampire.
If the routine in the mansion was anything to judge by, there would be one guard on duty in the hallway, who Josh had often heard snoring at his little chair and table in the night. Josh knew that the guard was out there, because they’d heard him getting his orders from Jackdaw after Josh had been taken back to the room after seeing Harve.
Josh lit more pages and left them to burn at the bottom of the door. He hoped that enough smoke was going to seep under the door to convince the guard to open it.
One minute.
Josh began finding it difficult to breathe at one minute ten seconds.
He could hear Poppet saying, “Come on, come on,” quietly to herself.
One minute twenty.
“What’s going on in there?” The voice of the guard, wavering—unsure.
They waited.
One minute forty.
Waited.
Until at last…the door opened.
By that time, the bed was on fire, the drapes by the window were going up, and the room was filling rapidly with black smoke.
As Josh had correctly guessed, the guard had his weapon drawn, and he’d also guessed that it would be pointing at chest height. The burning flames Poppet was holding would give the guard enough of a pause for Josh to explode from his knees, fitting his shoulder under the guard’s arm as Poppet spun out of the way, and then Josh would be under any bullets that were loosed off—with eno
ugh momentum to carry him and the guard across the corridor to crash into the opposite wall.
The guard managed to bring the butt of his weapon down onto the back of Josh’s skull, but it was a glancing blow only. The wind was knocked out of the guard as they connected with the wall and then dropped in a rolling wrestle, Josh isolating the gun arm against the carpet and crashing his elbow down into the guard’s jaw. Josh felt the bone shift and detach as the guard tried a slack-mouthed scream, like that of a man who hadn’t realized all his teeth had been removed, and then Josh pulled the Colt from his hand, turned it to the guard’s temple, and pulled the trigger.
The guard went slack and a puddle of blood began to seep from beneath his head. There was no way Josh could have left the guard alive—he was too much of a complication—but that didn’t make the killing any less hateful.
Josh wasn’t a man of last resorts, but sometimes the moral mountain had to move.
Poppet was out of the room, and she’d taken the keys from the dead guard’s belt. There were three other doors along the corridor which might hold prisoners.
“We have to go!” Josh hissed. “They’re going to be here soon. Everyone would have heard the shot.”
“Well, shoot them then. I’m not leaving the kitchen girls to burn.”
Poppet ran down the corridor opening the doors, telling her friends from the kitchen and service areas to move down the corridor as far from the flames as they could, but not to run or resist Trace’s men when they arrived. They didn’t need to be getting themselves shot.
While this was going on, Josh moved beyond the billowing smoke to the head of the stairs running into the main hallway. It would be from there that Trace’s men were bound to come—indeed, the next phase of his plan depended on it.
“Fire! Fire!” he hollered over the banister down into the hallway. “Bring water! The roof is on fire!”
The corridor was now nearly smoke-filled, and anyone looking up from below might not immediately recognize Josh as the person raising the alarm. As the first of Trace’s men appeared with buckets and wet towels, he shouted, “Quickly! They’re burning! They’re burning!”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 16