by Larry Hoy
“Right, thanks again. I appreciate the help.”
“Sure thing, and be careful out there, it’s a dangerous world.”
The cop grinned, and all Sweetwater could think to do was stand there and blink. Was there some underlying message in the cop’s words, or was he just being paranoid? There was no time to worry about it, because, a few seconds later, the cruiser slipped past his truck and the cop waved. Then, true to his word, the cruiser turned into the first lane of traffic, and just as Moses parted the seas, the traffic did the same. Sweetwater pulled out behind the cop and continued west. But the back of his neck felt like somebody had shot with him a tazer.
What the hell was going on?
Maybe the tire blew out, and maybe it didn’t. And maybe the asshole on his right had been nothing more than that, an asshole, and maybe the cop just happened to show up after he’d been working for half an hour. Nothing but maybe, maybe, maybe…or maybe none of that had happened by accident.
It only took another seven minutes to get to the airport, and Sweetwater pulled into the cell phone lot. A large screen displayed the list of arrivals and departures, showing the flight from Dallas had landed ten minutes earlier.
Sweetwater killed the engine and settled down to wait, but seconds later his phone rang from an unknown number.
“This is Luther Sweetwater.”
“Mr. Sweetwater, my name is Teri Warden. I believe you are my contact.”
The voice on the phone sounded like that of a young girl. What started out as a great day hanging with friends had turned decidedly weird.
“I’m just outside the airport, where should I pick you up?”
“I’m at the B Terminal exit. Flash your lights when you arrive so I know it’s you.”
“On my way.”
As he approached the terminal, he scanned the people to try and match the voice to a face. Most were in groups, and the singles seemed to all be middle-aged businesspeople. He pulled his truck up to the curb and flashed his lights twice. He was about to do it a third time when the passenger door opened and what appeared to be a teenage girl tossed a small suitcase on the floorboard and climbed up into the seat.
“All right, let’s go.”
“You’re my contact?”
“Either that or I’m setting you up to take the fall as a sex trafficker.”
“That’s not funny.”
The girl’s smile would have fit perfectly on a world-weary hooker. “Sure it is.”
“I didn’t see you when I pulled up.”
“Sorry, habit of the job. When you’re my size you work from the shadows. Down to business. Do you have the other Shooter’s creds?”
“Sure, right here.”
She had to be older than she looked. Hell, at first glance, she barely looked old enough to fly without an adult. Then, at second glance, he changed that opinion. The truth was that parts of her body looked very grownup. A cop motioned him to pull out of the terminal, so he did. Fumbling in his pocket, he handed over Bonney’s wallet and ID case.
She pulled the badge and license out of the wallet. Then she connected a short cable to a covered port on the back of the badge, while she attached the other end of the cable to her phone. Luther glanced over while he drove, to try and catch what magic the girl was doing.
“So, what’s that?”
“I’m pulling the audio and data files from the recorder.”
“What audio files? Has that badge been recording what I say?”
“Relax hot shot, we only use it in dire circumstances, but, yeah, your badge records about six hours of sound. The mikes are sensitive enough to pull in normal conversation from about five yards out, and that includes the fact that it’s usually closed up in a pocket. It also has a GPS tracker along with some other data points. It’s all keyword activated, using a proprietary algorithm we developed, so it starts recording whenever it detects potentially hostile words or tones. Welcome to 1984.”
“It’s the 21st Century.”
She glanced to see if he was kidding, then shook her head and went back to fiddling with the badge.
“I heard you were like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like that.”
“Like that what?” he said, not understanding her word game.
Warden grinned.
“Witherbot was right, this is gonna be fun.”
Chapter 13
Southwest Memphis, TN
Traffic was still heavy as they left the airport and got back onto I-240, heading east to avoid any traffic jams through downtown. Sweetwater tried to keep the conversation going but the girl—or woman, or whatever she was, the female named Teri Warden—all she did was focus on her phone. He kept taking quick glances at her, but the glare off the screen kept him from seeing anything.
Without warning, something slammed into the truck, forcing it right toward the guardrail. Red stars raced across his vision as his head bounced off the driver’s side window. It was only by instinct that he turned to the left, counteracting his skid so they hit the rail parallel instead of head on.
“Hang on!”
A glimpse of his passenger in his peripheral vision showed that she’d already pulled out a pistol. That settled that; she was not a kid.
Sparks flew as he bumped against the guardrail at 75 miles an hour. Another hit rocked the truck, throwing both of them hard against their seat belts. Sweetwater fought to keep the wheel straight as black smoke reeking of burning oil boiled from the engine into the cab. He tried to wipe away the tears with the back of his hand as a kaleidoscopic corona of flashing colors gave him tunnel vision. The part of his mind trained as a Marine sniper warned him that if the airbags deployed they were screwed. Then the wheel started to turn in his hands.
Glass fragments from the driver’s side window sprayed his neck and cheek as a bullet zipped past his jaw and shattered the passenger window. Bits of trash and garbage flew out the newly made hole.
“Shit!”
But whoever had them targeted hadn’t reckoned with the mysterious woman. While he fought to keep the dying car from rolling, Warden fired past him, out what was left of his window and into a red sedan. Enough speed had bled off by now to give him back some control over the truck until, with a lurch, the front end dove into a ditch while the rear end went up and over.
The seatbelt dug into his shoulder and chest, and the airbags exploded as the truck flipped over. The roof smashed into the ground, and all the windows shattered, blowing safety glass in every direction. Something hard hit him in the back of the head, and his arms went limp. He was vaguely aware of dangling upside down before he blacked out.
“Hey, you!” said a disembodied voice, followed by a tap on the shoulder that sent him swaying back and forth in his seat belt. “We’ve gotta get you out of there.”
A pounding inside his skull felt like somebody hammering nails into the bone. He concentrated and opened his left eye a slit, but the right one seemed stuck. Regardless, it made his disorientation worse. He looked up to see the ground through the web of the shattered front windshield, and muddy grooves gouged into soft soil leading back toward, what he assumed was, the interstate. Puddled on the ceiling was a pool of black blood, growing larger, drip by drip.
He tried to move his arms and twist free, but his body responded as if tangled in a net. Pulling himself upright using the steering wheel didn’t work either, and left him panting from the exertion.
“Hey, you, can you hear me? Cops and EMTs are tied up someplace else; it’ll be a while before they get here.”
Sweetwater! That was his name. For a second he couldn’t think of it and panicked, but remembering it centered him again. Was that somebody yelling through the window? Probably. He tried to answer, but his mouth felt as though somebody had stuffed it full of cotton, so it came out like “murr.” He ran his tongue over his lips and finally managed to say, “Help me down,” in a thick slur.
“Sure, yeah, I can do that.”<
br />
Sweetwater saw a hand reaching toward him…holding a knife? The face of the man holding it wouldn’t come into focus, and suddenly it was gone. For a second or two he saw nothing, until new faces appeared at the window, men and women.
“Hang on dude, the ambulance is on the way!”
“And the po-po.”
“Mrrr…” he said.
Beside him, the girl-woman from LEI sat cross-legged on the ceiling of his truck holding a bloody rag to her nose.
“You look great,” she said. “The whole swollen eye thing really fits you.”
She fished something from out of her jeans pocket and laid it in his right palm, curling the fingers around the handle of a pocketknife. “Cut yourself down before this thing blows up. There’s gas everywhere.”
“Mrr…”
The helpful people outside his window told him to stay put, that he might have a neck injury or internal bleeding, but Sweetwater’s brain was starting to clear, as was his sense of smell. Like his passenger said, he could smell gasoline now and also caught a whiff of cigarette smoke.
Some dumbass was smoking outside the car!
Adrenaline flooded his body, and he jammed the blade under the belt and pulled. The belt slipped away, and he fell upside down out of the seat. He tucked his head as he fell, but when he hit the roof of the cab, he bounced his head again. Stars popped and spun in his vision.
Sweetwater feared nothing more than fire, so death in a flaming truck kept the adrenaline flowing. The pain vanished as he scrambled to climb out, and arms reached in to help him. His passenger’s voice screamed at someone to put out their fucking cigarette.
Sweetwater felt someone grab at his shoulders and start pulling. He dug his heels and pushed as best he could. He felt bits of glass poking into his back as he slipped through the driver-side window. More hands grabbed his arms and joined in the pull. The smell of gas permeated the air as he turned his head and felt dampness on the grass.
“Go! Go! Go!” someone screamed. Then there was a whoosh! followed by a wave of heat. The hands holding Sweetwater let go and left him flat on the grass. Rolling onto his hands and knees, he put his head down and scrambled away from the burning grass. Heat grew on his legs and someone threw a blanket over him and rolled him through the grass. Finally, the hands returned to his shoulders and started dragging him again.
Once away from the fire, his saviors helped him to a sitting position, where he could only stare as flames engulfed his truck. Thankfully, it didn’t explode, and the oily black smoke boiling into the sky meant that it wouldn’t, a solid sign that the remaining fuel had seeped from the tank before the fire started.
“I only had a quarter tank left,” Sweetwater said to no one in particular. While he was surrounded by people, none seemed to be listening. “It costs fifty bucks to fill that bad boy.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
Still stunned from the wreck, the appearance of the badly decayed form of Eamon Cooper didn’t even startle Sweetwater. Whatever Cooper was, ghost or delusion, he sat cross-legged in the grass beside the bloodied Shooter.
“You again,” Sweetwater said. “So, this is an ongoing thing?”
“Apparently so, but I guarantee it’s not my idea.”
“Or mine,” said a female voice from his other side, one he now recognized.
“You know I didn’t kill you, right?” he said to her.
“Excuses, excuses. You were there to do it.”
“But I couldn’t do it. I want you to know that.”
“Who gives a shit? Dead is dead, but I’m not the one who matters now.”
“Huh?”
Grace Allen Tarbeau turned away, a tendon in her shoulder popping through a jagged spot torn in the dried-out flesh.
“I tried to talk her into warning you about what’s going on,” Cooper said when Grace Allen didn’t say anything more. “But she refused, and it’s her call.”
Sweetwater nodded and blinked, as if this all made perfect sense.
“Okay.”
“I dislike you for accepting a contract to kill me, Luther,” Grace Allen said, “but I do appreciate you changing your mind. So, I’ll tell you one thing: it’s Herbert you’ve really got to worry about. Not Adrian, Herbert. You would do well to remember that.”
“Who is Herbert?”
“I don’t appreciate you that much.”
“But…what about you, Cooper, you could tell me.”
“Sorry, cowboy, I don’t like you that much, either. You took a contract to kill me, too, even if you didn’t go through with it. That stings a bit.”
And they both vanished. Morbid onlookers now lined the bank of the ditch to watch Sweetwater’s life go up in smoke, yet none of them reacted to Cooper and Grace Allen dematerializing like Samantha in Bewitched.
Huh.
So, either they were actually ghosts that only he could see, or smashing his head into the window had caused a concussion. Flames caught Sweetwater’s attention again. Tilting his head, he grabbed a handful of grass and threw it at the burning vehicle. He’d loved that truck; it was brand new. Well, almost new, it was only eight years old, and that was the newest he had ever owned.
The police were the first to arrive.
By the time they got there, Sweetwater had snapped back into the present and forgotten Eamon Cooper and Mrs. Tarbeau. The cops secured the site of the accident and tried to get the traffic moving again. After they verified Sweetwater’s and Warden’s identities, they pretty much ignored them. One cop made sure to give Sweetwater a ticket for failure to control his vehicle, reckless driving, and littering, but refrained from arresting him.
At least the EMTs checked them for concussions and the like. They treated Sweetwater for some minor first-degree burns on his legs by cutting away the bottom of his jeans and rubbing some antibiotic cream on the red areas. Ten more seconds and the fire would have burned him badly, but the quick action of the bystanders prevented it from being much worse. They both refused trips to the hospital, and Warden assured them that she could handle the situation. Why they talked to her and not him, Sweetwater didn’t know and didn’t ask.
When the fire department finally arrived, there wasn’t much left to do except hose down the burned-out hulk and any remaining hotspots. The cop who issued Sweetwater his tickets came back and passed him a small card.
“Call this number tomorrow, and they’ll tell you how you can go about getting your truck back.”
The cop dropped the paper short of Sweetwater’s fingers, and it fluttered away in the breeze, but he snatched it out of midair with lightning fingers. There were reasons he’d made it through Scout Sniper School, with reflexes and hand-eye coordination topping the list. The nasty smile disappeared from the cop’s face, and he stalked away.
“Memphis PD really loves you, don’t they?” Warden said.
Sweetwater’s face had been cleaned and bandaged, but his right eye was swollen nearly shut. He opened his mouth to ask her name, then remembered that she’d already told him, and that it was Teri something…Warden, Teri Warden. With his mouth hanging halfway open, he asked her age instead.
“That’s not a very polite thing to ask a lady.”
“Are you a lady?” he said, although a split lower lip turned it into a mumble.
She shrugged. “I like to think not.”
“So? Your age?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“You’re either twelve, or sixty-seven.”
Warden liked that, and let him see her perfectly straight, china-white teeth in a playful smile.
“Something like that.”
A line of blood had dried under her left nostril, and she licked at it with the tip of her tongue. Sweetwater stared as she dragged out the moment, both of them sitting in the grass as cars roared by on the interstate above and emergency personnel packed up. Finally, as the fog cleared, things began to come back to him.
“We’re hunting a killer,” he declared
, as if it was a great discovery.
She barked a single laugh. “And aren’t we doing a helluva good job of it. I don’t suppose you got a look at the dickhead who did this?”
“No, the first I knew was when my head hit the window. Everything else was a blur.”
“This makes two attacks on LifeEnders assets in one day, or a day and a night.”
“Three,” he said. “I think somebody shot out my tire on the way to pick you up.”
Warden instantly came alert. Gone was any lingering young girl persona, replaced by someone who was used to being obeyed. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner? Shit, my brain’s a little rattled. We need to find a place to hole up.”
“Ya think?” With returning sense came returning sarcasm.
“Hey, this is your burg, not mine. You’ve gotta have a safe house, right?”
“My apartment.”
“Oh great, yeah, nobody would ever look for us there.”
“Well, I do have a place outside town. I only got the apartment because I had the money from my first…job.”
“How far out?”
“A ways.”
“That’ll have to work. Let me get us a ride.”
“You know people in Memphis?”
“I know people everywhere.”
Chapter 14
LifeEnders, Inc. Worldwide Corporate Headquarters, Dallas, TX
When construction began on LEI’s underground, nuclear-blast-proof Command and Control Center Project, CCCP—a tongue-in-cheek swipe by the ultra-capitalists of LEI at the Cyrillic abbreviation for the unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—it was universally dubbed the Kremlin. The contractor joked that he was digging so deep they might bring in a gusher. Once finished, the reality of what he had built far out-stripped even the most awe-inspiring oil well.
The Kremlin was a 300-foot square room with rows of round pillars supporting a roof ten feet high. Hundreds of people, and a few highly secret, experimental cyborgs and androids, manned hundreds of workstations, clacking away at hundreds of keyboards while staring at hundreds of monitors that lit their faces with an eerie blue glow. In many ways, it resembled every secret bunker ever depicted in movies, books, or video games, with two exceptions, the massive ultra-high definition video panels that took up all of one football-field-length wall, while the other three walls each showed live feeds from the beach near Galveston, Waimea Falls on Oahu, and a treetop view of the Guatemalan rain forest.