“Falcon!” I yell out. Holy shit, I’m going to have to make a run for it. How far will I even make it?
“I’m en route!” Winn yells.
“What?” Puo and I call out at the same time.
“I’m going to crash the hovercar into the gatehouse! That should give you the distraction you need—”
“Then what?” I can’t help but yell at him. We need that hovercar to get away. And I need Winn alive. All that will accomplish is to strand us here and either kill Winn or make him a dilapidated and beaten bargaining chip.
“Use the anti-gravity,” Winn rushes, “fall as fast as you can into the sky. Once above the guns’ range, just hover until Chameleon comes to pick you up.”
“In what?” Puo screams. He’s holed up at an old farmhouse we rented in the middle of nowhere.
“I don’t know,” Winn snaps. “I can’t think of everything!”
“What about you?” I ask of Winn.
One minute thirty-nine seconds.
There’s a silence on the line.
“Falcon, don’t you dare!” I say. You valiant idiot!
“Dare, what?” Winn says. “I’m putting the hovercar on autopilot and bailing. I love you, Queen Bee, but I’m not stupid.”
Grrr. “I meant about the hovercar. Crash into the west tower—they use it for storage and it’ll be unmanned,” I say to spite him and then I stick my tongue out at him by habit. But then why say you love me if what you’re about to do isn’t stupid and dangerous? You’ve only said that once before. Right before you left. My stomach does a flip.
“West tower. Got it,” Winn says. “Twenty seconds to the gatehouse! Get ready!”
I use the retina controls in my helmet to queue up the anti-gravity routine, setting it to free-fall upward at its maximum speed.
“Bailing now!” Winn bites off.
I strain to hear anything though the comm-link, but almost immediately I start to hear larger gunfire up ahead in the direction of the gatehouse. The voices near me start shouting and start to move off.
I slow count to five; the gunfire and commotion grows more intense by the second.
I activate the anti-gravity button with the retina controls.
Oof! I’m jerked upward so fast it knocks my breath away. Normally you feel it in the gut first. This feels like someone attached a cord between me sitting still and a hovercar flying at full speed overhead.
Water sprays off me as I tumble into the winter sky. I catch glimpses of the ground below me—mostly the red-hot flashes of gunfire around lights of the main gate. There are two goons running along the path toward the main gate.
KA-BOOM! The hovercar explodes on impact. The west tower of the gatehouse is a smoking mess of debris. I really hope no one was in there.
One thousand feet and climbing.
“Falcon, are you okay?” I ask as I struggle to get my breath back.
“Yeah—” Winn starts to say.
“Great,” I cut him off, “then start running in the opposite direction of the big fireball.”
“Roger that,” he says, the cadence of his breathing suggests that he’s already running.
Dust and smoke billow out into the air. More goons are converging on the gatehouse. A hovercar takes off near the gatehouse. It stays low and heads straight for the main gate. Please don’t look up.
Twenty five hundred feet. Six seconds until the defenses are back to fully operational.
“Chameleon, what altitude do the guns start tracking at?”
“Ten thousand feet. Why?” He also sounds like he’s running.
“Oh, no reason. Just five seconds left and I’m barely at three thousand feet.”
“They won’t actually fire unless your below five thousand feet and your tracking to enter their air space.”
“Or leaving it?” I ask.
“Uhh ... good question.”
Great. Thirty-five hundred feet. Two Seconds.
One second.
Oh, God. “Falcon,” I shout. I’m not going to make it. “I—”
“No you don’t!” Winn yells. “I’m not going to take an I-think-I’m-going-to-die declaration of feeling. You’re going to live! And you’re going to admit how you feel about me in person, preferably naked on a bearskin rug with wine and Leave it to Beaver on the television. Got it?”
Well that’s quite the picture.
“Bearskin rug,” Puo huffs. “Classy.”
Zero.
Red flashes of gunfire erupt below me, spitting out streaks of light that pass right by me.
“FUCK!” I scream. I can feel air change around me, feel the red-hot lead searching for me, feel death sprinting through the night.
Winn and Puo shout for updates. But my heart is caught so far in my throat I can’t talk. All I can do is squeeze into as tight a ball as I can and wait to be ripped to shreds.
CHAPTER THREE
WINN HELPS CORRAL me into the back of the older-model four-door hovercar that Puo’s driving at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. I had been bouncing there, at fifteen thousand feet, for fifteen minutes, alternating between falling up and down over several hundred feet. I feel like a piss-poor martini that’s about to throw up—kind of Puo to go to through the trouble of picking Winn up first.
I flop over Winn to land in the seat next to him and struggle to unlatch my helmet with my hands shaking. God, I hate being shot at. Even worse is when it’s a machine gun aimed by machines. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever had that pleasure before today.
Winn takes mercy on me and unhooks my helmet and helps me pull it off.
“Ow,” I say as the bottom of the helmet smushes up against my nose.
“Sorry,” Winn mumbles. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just ... just give me some space.” I take a couple of deep breaths as the shakes work through me. I really fucking hate being shot at.
How’d it miss me?
Puo’s the one that answers, not realizing I didn’t mean to say that out loud. “It’s your father.”
“What does that mean?”
“He probably programmed it to scare the crap out of anyone falling upward, knowing full well who that’d likely be.”
I digest that for a few seconds, continuing to let the shakes work their way out. I let out a long exhale.
Puo glances over his shoulder at me from the driver’s seat and gives me a fortifying head bob.
“Where’d you get the car?” I ask to distract myself. “It smells like a ...” then I put it together. “... farm. You stole Hank and June’s car?” The nice old couple we rented the farmhouse from. They’re really old and really sweet—it could’ve only been better if the husband’s name had been Ward. They live on a different part of the property.
Puo shrugs. “Yeah. There wasn’t time to ask them. And not ‘stole,’ borrowed. They’re nice people. I’m sure they won’t mind—if they notice. And why do you call them Hank and June?”
“That’s their names,” I say
“Yes, but you don’t know them.”
“Whadda ya mean?” I ask. “I love June. June was named after June Cleaver. How could you not love that?”
“She never said that,” Puo maintains.
“C’mon, why else would someone name their kid June?”
Before Puo can respond, Winn clears his throat and then says, “We’ll need a cover story. In case we’re stopped or if the cops come around tomorrow asking if we saw anything.”
It is late at night. That’s all we need right now: a report of a stolen vehicle. And since we’re new tenants, we’ll be suspect number one. My mind is already off and racing.
Puo says, “We could say we were just playing in the car when the emergency brake came off. Gee whiz officer, we’re real sorry,” he adds in his best Leave it to Beaver impression.
I bark a laugh. “Try again,” I say, although the laugh has me feeling a little less shaky.
***
Thirty minutes later Puo, Winn, a
nd I are sitting at the round pea-green metal table in the claustrophobic kitchen on the first floor. I’m out of the anti-gravity suit and back in jeans and a charcoal knit sweater with a layer of long underwear underneath for good measure. A rapidly cooling cup of chamomile tea sits in front of me. “Can you reach behind you,” I ask Winn, “and grab the honey?”
Winn obliges. He doesn’t even need to push his chair back. The kitchen is tiny, like the rest of the rustic two-story farmhouse. I reach behind me and open the fridge to grab some skim milk—and now I can’t decide if the tininess feature is a positive or negative.
I pour the milk and honey in the tea and push it toward Puo. “Can you pop that in the microwave, please?”
“Please?” Puo mocks. When I don’t respond he bows formally in his seat. “It would be an honor and delight to microwave a refined lady’s tea such as yourself. Never before has this poor servant encountered such refined manners, such civility—”
“Puo!” Yeesh. This what I get for being polite.
“My deepest and humblest apologies, milady.” Puo takes my mug and sets it in the microwave behind him with a clink. “But your transformation doth surprise me—”
“Doth?” I snort. “You’re stretching it, Puo.” I pinch my nose and hold my pinky out.
Winn follows suit. He’s sitting across from me, his black curly hair tousled from his tumble out of the hovercar and run through the woods. There are some fresh bumps and scraps amid the bruises from his interrogation in Vancouver that haven’t even healed yet.
Puo peters out under my and Winn’s judgment.
“Can we get back on point?” I ask through my pinched nose.
Puo scowls at both us. “Fine. Can’t expect you two to appreciate ye old English.”
“Oh, I appreciate it,” Winn says. He drops his hands onto the table from pinching his nose. “But that was a butchering of it—”
“What?” Puo asks defensively. “Whadda ya mean?”
“Well, for starters—” Winn says.
I bang my forehead on the table. “Guys! The Cleaners! Meeting with Durante. My father. Focus!”
“Right,” Puo says. The microwave dings and Puo retrieves the warmed tea for me.
I cup the mug, feeling the warmth spread through my cold fingers. Why is it so cold in here? The tea is warm and sweet on the tongue, a pleasant subtle undertone of chamomile.
“The Cleaners were watching us tonight,” I say quietly.
“No,” Puo says, “they were watching your father’s compound, not us.”
“They knew I was there,” I say. “They sent an assassin after me through the water.”
“Do they know about the abilities of the anti-gravity suits?” Winn asks. “Were they able to anticipate your drop?”
I slowly nod my head yes. “They definitely saw something they couldn’t explain when I saved your McGuffin ass—”
“We,” Puo cuts in to correct.
I continue over Puo, ignoring him, “—by jumping onto the hood of their hovercar in midair.” Whoops. Didn’t quite think that through, did I?
“But do you think,” Winn continues, “based on that, they could anticipate your drop?”
“I doubt it,” Puo says. “Anti-gravity suits aren’t exactly common—”
Yeah, as far as we know we’re the only ones besides one American Special Forces group to have them.
“—They wouldn’t be able to recognize them or have a point of reference to understand what they do,” Puo finishes.
“Well—” I think it over. “—they know I can jump fearlessly between moving hovercars several thousand feet in the air. They’d be unbelievably stupid to think I did that unaided.” Although, it’d be nice if Cleaners were that stupid.
“They might know how you entered in a general sense,” Winn says, “but then how did they know when to strike?” Winn asks. “Did they detect you in the feeds tonight?”
Puo shakes his head and says, “No. I only monitored the feeds near the compound. I didn’t mess with them at all. There’s nothing there to detect.”
“And the skies?” I ask about the possibility of the Cleaners having some unknown surveillance in the area.
“Were clear,” Puo finishes immediately. “That’s something I was scanning for. No suspicious radar. No lingering hovercraft or drones.”
“Well,” I say following Winn’s lead, “how’d they know where my entry point would be? I could’ve dropped anywhere.”
“Well,” Puo says thinking out loud. “Given what we do, your affinity for water is pretty well established. So it makes sense that they would look to the river as how you would make your entrance.”
I take another sip of my tea, savoring the warmth of the tea on my tongue and the heat of the mug in my hands. But how did they know when I would be in the water? They either saw me drop or they knew when.... “Puo,” I ask, “could they have been watching the defense grid? Could they have seen it go down?”
“No,” Puo says. “It’s a closed system. There’s no way to hack in from the outside. They’d have to—”
“Have an insider,” I finish for him. Like we did. Durante messaged Puo directly about the air defenses. “Someone to alert them when the defense grid went down.”
“And someone,” Winn says, “to inform them of the Boss’s movements.”
“That’s how they knew,” Puo says, leaning back. “The insider not only alerted them to the defense grid, but also the sewer defenses that lead to the wine cellar being down. It was like a big non-blinking arrow.”
Shit. “So there’s a mole in my father’s organization, and the Cleaners are aware of our anti-gravity suits in some fashion or another.” That’s a pretty shitty matzo ball.
“What about Durante?” Puo asks, meaning whether he could be the mole. “He has the most to gain.”
I shake my head no. “He shot the assassin sent after me. He also could’ve taken me out at any time.”
Winn says, “Not if there was information he wanted from you.”
I still shake my head no. “Too convoluted. The Cleaners attacked Durante’s men to get to me. And what information would he be after?”
We all fall silent as we try and think through the situation.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Puo asks into the settling silence. “If the Cleaners knew we were coming, why weren’t they jamming us? Particularly after they announced their presence.”
My mouth falls open at the thought. Why weren’t they jamming us? “Would they be jamming themselves?” I ask.
“No,” Puo says. “We’re not in the water, there’s a lot more bandwidth to work with in air.”
“Maybe they know you’ll work around it,” Winn suggests.
“And I would,” Puo says. “But disrupting communications is kind of a textbook thing to do. As soon as we reestablished comms they would disrupt that, continuing to harass and sow confusion.”
“So then they wanted us ...” Winn trails off into the disturbing thought.
“To be able to talk,” I finish for him. “And there’s only one reason to do that: to follow us.” To get us all together. “The attack was a feint.”
Puo jumps up from his seat and kills the lights in the kitchen.
Winn slides out from the table and plunges the rest of the house into darkness.
We all hold our breaths, listening, straining against the imposed silence of the new found darkness.
“They would have followed the hovercar,” Winn whispers.
The hovercar we discretely put back outside Hank and June’s house a half mile away. “Shit,” I whisper. “Puo, pack everything up here. Get it outside and hole up in the tree line behind the house.”
“Got it,” Puo says. “What about you?”
“I can’t leave Hank and June to deal with the Cleaners alone.”
“I know,” Puo says. “I meant, what’s your plan?”
“Tell them to run,” I say.
“And if the Cleaners
are already there?”
Uhh ...
Winn chimes in grimly with, “Still have that underwater gun?”
CHAPTER FOUR
WINN AND I move silently through the pine-tree forest connecting back to Hank and June’s house. We’re wearing the helmets from our anti-gravity suits solely for the nightvision. They cut off the soundscape—soft classical music makes sure to drown out any ambient noise—but they do allow us to whisper to one another over the comm-link without being overheard. The rest of our anti-gravity suits are back at the house—we probably look like a pair of lost motorcyclists too stupid to take off our helmets.
The house should be over the next hill. I stop and lift my helmet up over my ears briefly to see if I can hear anything.
Nothing. No sound, only the creak of dried branches from the wind. A cold gust stings my wrists, cutting through the gaps between the end of my sleeve and pair of thin black gloves I’m wearing. My army-green hip-length belted winter coat protects me from the worst of the gust.
I’m nauseated at the thought that we led the Cleaners back to this innocent old couple. If the Cleaners were willing to blackmail a Boss in Vancouver, kidnap the Atlanta Boss, start a wide-spread war, and then launch a frontal assault on a Boss’s estate all in a bid to get to me, there’s no telling what they’ll do to this couple.
I savor the scent of the pine forest before shoving my helmet back down as I continue to lead Winn through the woods.
“What’s the plan?” Winn whispers over the comm-link.
“I don’t know,” I say. Then, to try and sound like I know what I’m doing, I add, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.” It could still be that the Cleaners haven’t shown up, or they could know we’re at the rental house, or ... some other wishful reason I haven’t thought of that would leave the old couple out of this, and make the underwater gun that Winn carries unnecessary.
I hate guns. They’re violent, obtuse and can be wielded by any idiot. Puo and I have carefully cultivated a career without ever having to use them, taking the viewpoint that it would be a personal and professional failure to have to resort to such a lowbrow tool. And now we’re running headfirst into an unknown situation with Winn carrying one.
The Brummie Con (Sunken City Capers Book 4) Page 3