by Mark Allen
“We lost the target when he took out the light. Guy’s packing some serious heat.”
“Where are Patrols Two and Three?”
“Out back looking for this asshole.”
“I don’t want to hear looking, I want to hear found. Got it?”
“Ten-four, boss. We’ll keep looking.”
Kain nudged the nape of the guard’s neck with the shotgun. “You can stop looking. You found me.”
The man stiffened, but made no attempt to turn around. He was smart enough to know he had just been checkmated.
“Toss your weapon,” Kain commanded.
The guard complied.
“Now call the others back here.”
The guard asked, “Who are you?”
Kain caught the quiver in the man’s voice. Hard to be a tough guy when you’re riding the wrong end of a twelve-gauge. “Just do what you’re told.”
“Okay.” The guard raised the radio to his lips. “Patrols Two and Three, this is One. Come in. Over.”
A burst of static, then: “This is Two. Three’s standing by.”
“Return to my position ASAP.”
“Ten-four, we’re en route.”
The guard lowered the radio. “I just helped you kill two of my friends.”
“Friends are overrated,” Kain replied. “All they do is fuck you over.”
“Sounds like you need a therapist.”
“And you need a coroner.” Kain triggered the shotgun. The guard’s skull exploded. The headless corpse flopped face down on the grass in a twitching heap. Working fast, Kain knelt beside the body, plucked a fragmentation grenade from his bag of tricks, and pulled the pin. He carefully lodged the fragger underneath the corpse so the dead weight kept the arming spoon from popping up. He then snatched up the dead guard’s radio and ducked around the corner of the house just as the two other gunmen rounded the opposite corner. He watched and listened from the shadows as they crouched down beside their deceased comrade.
“Crap, man, he’s dead!” one of them said. “The bastard killed him!”
“That’s an understatement,” the other replied. “His whole damn head’s gone!” He grabbed one of the dead man’s arms. “Help me roll him over.”
Neither of them saw the grenade in time. Kain watched as they vanished in a volcano of smoke and fire, shredded by shrapnel from soles to scalps. The concussive blast imploded the large bay window nearby, spraying glass into Perelli’s living room.
The radio Kain had taken suddenly squawked to life. “Patrol One, this is Johnson. Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on out there?”
Kain pressed the radio to his lips and thumbed the transmit key. “Death,” he said quietly. Sure, it was overdramatic and cheesy as a Chuck Norris movie, but messing with the enemy’s mind never hurt. A little psychological warfare could yield a critical edge when the bullets were bouncing all over the place.
There was only silence from the other end. A full fifteen seconds ticked by before the radio crackled again. “Who is this?” Johnson demanded. “And what do you want?”
“I’ve got a white rose to give to your boss.” The white rose was Kain’s signature, a ritual he started five years ago, following the death of his wife. Anyone involved in the criminal underworld would recognize his calling card.
And apparently Johnson did, for after another long pause he said, “Kain?”
Kain dropped the radio to the ground and stomped it to pieces. The time to talk was over. Now it was time to kill.
Kain stepped over the three shredded sacks of blood and guts sprawled lifelessly in front of the house and climbed in through the shattered bay window. He found himself standing in a large family room. Plush wall-to-wall carpet covered the floor beneath the mess of broken glass. A marble coffee table provided the room’s centerpiece around which was arranged black leather furniture with chrome trim. To his right, Kain saw a large entertainment center recessed into the oak-paneled wall, complete with a flat-screen plasma TV so massive it could have doubled as the movie screen at a drive-in theater. Overhead dangled a large ceiling fan, the bamboo blades hanging motionless.
He tensed as a sudden yowl sounded from somewhere nearby. He heard a young girl cry out, “Purry! No!” followed by the telltale patter of someone running on bare feet. Whoever it was, they were coming his way. Kain dropped to one knee and aimed the SPAS-12 at the living room’s only entrance. A woman, voice raw with terror, screamed someone’s name. “AMYYYYYY!!!”
Kain’s combat senses were redlining as the footsteps came closer.
Closer…
His finger curled around the trigger, taking up the slack.
Closer…
A black and white streak rocketed through the doorway. Amped up on adrenalin, Kain almost blew the cat into a red smear, but restrained himself at the last moment. The feline raced along the back of the leather sofa and vanished beneath the antique piano in the far corner of the room.
A second later a little girl ran into the room, crying, “Purry! Purry!!” She jumped onto the couch and scrambled toward the other end, calling for her pet. Right behind her was a woman wearing only a short, filmy nightgown that did nothing to hide her curvaceous body. She didn’t even look at Kain; just lunged across the sofa after the little girl. Her short gown slid up over her waist, exposing her perfectly heart-shaped ass.
It was almost Kain’s last sight on earth. With images of satin buttocks dancing on his retinas, he nearly missed the movement on his peripheral. He threw himself sideways as Johnson spun into the entrance and fired his Glock-17 in one smooth, well-practiced motion. Kain felt the slug sizzle past his ear and then he hit the floor, landing hard on his shoulder. Broken glass dug and scraped at him but the pain barely registered, forced into submission by more pressing needs such as not having his internal organs scrambled by a bullet.
Still skidding along the carpet, he triggered the shotgun and took out Johnson’s legs, churning everything below the knees into chunky pulp. Johnson went down like a cut-string marionette, screaming out of a face twisted in agony. Huddled on the couch, the woman pressed the little girl’s face to her chest.
As he climbed to his feet and stalked toward Johnson, Kain felt the familiar iciness seeping through him, leaching away concepts like compassion, sympathy, and mercy. Right now, with the pungency of blood and cordite polluting the air, there was no room for such emotions. His eyes brimmed with glittering, wolf-like savagery. The crackle and crunch of glass under his boots sounded strangely ominous in the unnatural quiet that had settled over the house in the wake of all this violence. The woman softly whimpered but she was nothing more than background noise and he ignored her as such. She was scared out of her mind and way too frightened to try anything, especially with the kid clutched in her arms.
Despite the agony of his buckshot amputation, Johnson still made a game attempt to raise his Glock as Kain approached. Kain kicked it out of his hand, snapping the black man’s wrist in the process. He could literally smell Johnson’s fear, a rankness that seeped from his pores. Few men could stare into the Reaper’s eyes without fear and as it turned out, Johnson was not one of those few. “P-p-please,” Johnson blubbered. “D-don’t k-k-kill me, m-m-man. I’m b-b-beggin’ y-y-you.”
Kain had expected better from Johnson. The man had spent the last twenty years living by the gun and should have known that when you play with guns, you’re eventually going to eat a bullet. Kain himself suffered from no delusion that he would die peacefully in his bed of old age; when his time came, he would go down hard and bloody on the killing field. That’s just the way it was.
Kain’s cold gaze raked Johnson’s face as if scouring skin from skull. “Suck it up, fella. It’s your turn to dance with the devil.” He pressed the muzzle of the SPAS-12 right over Johnson’s frantically-beating heart.
Johnson closed his eyes. “Oh, G-G-God. I don’t w-w-wanna d-d-d-die.”
“Who does?” Kain said and pulled the trigger. Johnson�
�s chest came apart like a blood-stuffed piñata whacked by a professional baseball player. The force of the point blank impact smashed him flat on his back so that his dead eyes stared up at the ceiling.
The threat neutralized, Kain turned toward the woman and child huddled on the sofa, wondering who they were. They had not been listed on the stats sheet. The young girl appeared to be five or six, her rumpled My Little Pony pajamas indicating she had been sleeping. The woman looked to be in her late thirties. Her large, doe-like eyes gazed at him in shock and fear. By any man’s standards, she was beautiful, her oval face framed by sleep-tousled dark brown hair. Her negligee was so scant and filmy that she might as well have been wearing nothing; Kain could see her every curve, the firm swell of her breasts, the smooth expanse of her thighs.
For a flickering instant he felt desire, something he had not experienced since his wife died. But the moment lasted for no longer than a single heartbeat before he crushed the emotion as if it were an unwelcome insect that would soil him if allowed to linger.
As Kain walked over to them, the woman clutched the little girl even closer and tried to shrink into the sofa as if hoping some magical door would open up and whisk them away from this nightmare. “Please,” she said as Kain towered over her, shotgun still in his fist, “don’t hurt us.”
Kain canted the shotgun over his shoulder, pointed away from the two huddled, miserable, quivering creatures on the couch. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Rene Perelli,” the woman said, “and this is my daughter Amy.”
Peter Perelli’s wife and kid. Why hadn’t they been listed on the stat sheets?
Amy lifted her cherubic face from her mother’s chest and peeked out at Kain with frightened eyes. “Are you gonna hurt us, mister?”
Kain ignored her and looked at Rene. “Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Don’t even try to play dumb. You know why I’m here.”
Rene stroked her daughter’s curls comfortingly. “How much are they paying you? What’s the going rate for a man’s life these days?”
Kain’s voice was hard as bullets as he rasped, “You don’t tell me where your husband is, your little girl is going to grow up without a mother.” It was a bluff—Kain would never harm a woman or child—but Rene didn’t know that. He had demonstrated his ruthlessness by executing Johnson in cold blood right in front of her eyes; as far as Rene knew, Kain would not think twice about dropping the hammer on her with the same dispassion he would use to flush a dead goldfish down the toilet.
Desperate tears dripped down Rene’s cheeks. “And if I do tell you, she’ll grow up without a father.”
“That’s life, lady. Sometimes children pay for the sins of their fathers.”
“Please,” Rene pleaded. “Just walk away. Whatever they’re paying you, Peter will double it.”
Kain had heard the pitch dozens of times before. He stared at her, stony, stoic, waiting.
“There must be something you want!” Rene was on the verge of a total breakdown. “Something that will make you walk away!” She was holding it together through nothing more than sheer willpower and that appeared to be fraying fast.
Time to up the ante on his bluff. Kain whipped the shotgun off his shoulder. Pressed it under her chin, forcing her head up. “The only thing I want,” Kain snarled, “is your husband.” He felt like shit, making this innocent woman squirm on the end of his gun, but it had to be done. Her choked sobs ripped at his conscience but he forced himself to ignore them. “Where is he?” Kain demanded. “Where’s your husband?”
“Right here,” someone said and gunfire filled the room.
Kain hurled himself backward the instant the first syllable left Peter Perelli’s lips. By the time the mobster actually fired, Kain no longer occupied the space where Perelli had aimed. The bullet sailed by Kain’s face, close enough for him to feel the disruption of air as it passed. He landed on his back and swung the SPAS-12 toward Perelli, who was frantically trying to reacquire him in the sights of his pearl-handled .38 revolver.
Kain triggered the shotgun. Buckshot slammed into the wood molding framing the doorway in which Perelli stood. Slivers exploded everywhere. Several of them found Perelli’s flesh, slashing open a dozen small cuts on his face and neck. Perelli snarled in pain and fired a wild shot. The bullet clipped the corner of the coffee table and ricocheted into the arm of the sofa, mere inches from where his wife and daughter cowered. Perelli fired again and again, wild and reckless, flinging lead with no regard for the innocents in the room, endangering his own family.
Kain put an end to the mobster’s panicked spray-and-pray antics with another shotgun blast, blowing the revolver into scrap metal and tearing his hand to dripping red tatters.
“DAAADDDYYYY!!!” Amy pulled away from her mother and ran to her father. She wrapped her tiny arms around his waist and as Kain climbed to his feet, he saw blood on her pajamas. This kid was going to need some serious therapy after tonight. But right now she didn’t seem to care that her father was bleeding all over her. She looked at Kain with eyes full of tears and void of understanding. “Don’t hurt my daddy anymore.”
Kain slung the shotgun over his shoulder, drew his Colt .45, and locked eyes with Perelli. “Get her out of the way.”
“Please,” Perelli said, blood streaming from his mangled hand. “I have a family.”
“Yeah, I saw how much you care about your family when you were chucking bullets all over the place a minute ago. Won’t tell you again, Perelli—get your kid out of the way.”
Perelli searched Kain’s eyes, but whatever he sought—mercy, hope, salvation—he apparently didn’t find, for he looked down at his daughter and said, “Go to Mommy, honey.” He sounded resigned, broken.
Amy balked, hugging him tighter. “No! I don’t want to! I want to stay with you!”
“You can’t, honey, not right now. Go to Mommy.”
Kain glanced at Rene. She hadn’t moved from her position on the couch. Tears spilled down her face as she looked at her husband with anguished eyes.
Amy reluctantly peeled herself away from her father and returned to her mother. The look she gave Kain was that of a little kid who has not gotten her way. Were the tears dappling her dimpled cheeks tantrum-tears or grief-tears? Did she grasp the severity of the situation? Did she understand she was about to lose her father forever?
Kain wanted out of here. He kept his gaze fixed on Perelli, but he could feel Rene and Amy’s accusing eyes on him. The sensation made his flesh crawl. He felt like they had x-ray vision, could somehow stare through his flesh and bones and see the aching, blood-drenched hollow that was his soul. Enough of this existential crap, he thought. Time to finish the game.
He pressed the end of the .45’s suppressor against Perelli’s forehead. It would be quick and clean. Well, maybe not clean. Little hard to be clean with a .45 at point blank range.
“Please.” Perelli’s voice trembled. “You don’t have to do this. Let me set things right. Tell Giadello I’ll make it up to him.”
“Little late for that.”
“What about my little girl? She’ll grow up without a father.”
“Should have thought about that before you pissed off Frank.”
“You’re one cold-hearted son of a bitch.”
Kain didn’t bother with a reply. Just pulled the trigger.
The suppressor reduced the shot to a muffled cough, but Amy and Rene jumped as if the Colt had fired at full roar. Rene let out a horrible cry and hid Amy’s face against her breast.
The bullet blew through Perelli’s skull and slammed his body backward. He hung there for a moment, crucified to the wall, then slumped to the floor in a sitting position at Kain’s feet, head hanging with chin on chest. Blood dribbled into his lap.
“You bastard!” Rene sobbed. She looked as if she had aged twenty years in the last five minutes. “How could you?”
Good question, Kain thought. He didn’t know how he could do what
he did, how he could spend his life trading carnage for cash. He just did it and then did his best to ignore the questions that seemed to be forever circling inside him. And when those questions got too loud to ignore, a bottle of Jack Daniels had a way of shutting them up, at least for a little while.
He reached into his pocket and took out a white rose. The petals were crumpled, but still glistened like silk. He dropped it onto Perelli’s body, watching as it tumbled through the air like a feather from an angel’s wing. In Kain’s mind, he was not seeing Perelli, he was seeing his wife floating in clear, cool water, her eyes closed forever. At his feet, the white petals turned red as Perelli’s blood slowly seeped into the rose; in Kain’s mind, the water in which his wife lay began to turn blood-red as well.
Then, as if some internal switch had been flicked, he abruptly pulled himself back to the present and walked away without a backward glance. He didn’t want to see the grieving face of the woman he had just widowed. He did not want to look into the helpless eyes of the little girl he had just left fatherless. All he wanted to do was get away from here, away from the lives that were now broken and mangled because of him.
Outside the night closed around him in a cool, velvet embrace that offered no comfort. He walked through the darkness that was silent save for the soft sobbing of a heartbroken child. As he hiked back down the hill to his Jeep, he told himself that the tears in his eyes were from the wind, nothing more.
He had never been able to lie to himself worth a damn.
CHAPTER 3
Kain rendezvoused with Silas at Ardee’s Diner and Truck Stop two days later. As before, he set the meet for pre-dawn when the shadows still clutched the sky.
They had the place to themselves this time, but they still sat in the same rear booth. Steam drifted up from a cup of coffee in front of Silas who busily worked his way through a plate of fried eggs and sausage with ferocity akin to Godzilla tearing through downtown Tokyo. He reached for the pepper and in a rare moment of clumsiness knocked over the shaker. It fell with a soft clunk, spilling a few black grains that lay on the table like ashes. Silas idly brushed them away with the back of his hand and for some reason Kain heard the sound of little Amy Perelli sobbing again. A cold fist clenched his whiskey-soured guts as that ruthless voice inside reminded him that he himself brushed away human lives as easily as Silas swept away spilled pepper.