by Chuck Dixon
The upper floors were fully consumed by flames. A tower of black smoke blotted out the stars. Ash and embers fluttered down onto the street and rooftops. Explosions within the building could be felt as well as heard. Showers of sparks bloomed from windows sending broken shards to drop down in a crystalline rain of tinkling glass.
Men streamed out of the hotel through a thick haze of smoke, faces covered with their shirt fronts. Other men came from the crowd with bottles of water to help them wash ash from their eyes and mouths. Despite the danger, there was a festive atmosphere for the men watching the fire. No effort was made to save the building. ISIS was many things but serving as volunteer firemen was not among their missions.
Some shook fists and made dire threats of God’s wrath upon the infidels who caused the fire. But most were enjoying the spectacle and shared experience. They oohed and pointed as though watching a fireworks display. Some fired their rifles into the air, caught up in the moment. The French hotel was, after everything else, a symbol of the kind of colonial oppression they had been taught to hate. And hate trumped everything else. They longed for, thirsted for, objects for their rage. A burning infidel hotel was red meat for them.
Yasin watched a pair of men rush from the smoke. They wore gas masks that gave them a comical look like cartoon ducks. One of the men carried a young girl in his arms, her face strapped with a mask as well. They ran across the boulevard from the hotel. The larger of the men turned his goggle eyes toward Yasin. He parted from the other man and ran to where the two boys stood. The other man, carrying the girl, waded deep into the men crowded in the street.
The big man stepped directly to Yasin and caught his arm in an iron grip. Yasin tried to pull away, his own hold on his little brother’s arm tightened.
The man lifted his mask. It was the man, the white man, from the rooftop.
“Run,” the man said. He released Yasin’s arm and wedged himself into the crowd and was gone.
Yasin yanked his brother’s arm and together they ran. They ran hard and they ran far.
They were blocks away when they were knocked flat to the pavement by a shockwave that roiled the ground like an ocean wave. Windows all along both sides of the street shattered in an all-encompassing din louder than thunder. Yasin raised himself from the ground on skinned knees. His brother was crying, holding hands clapped over his ears.
His brother’s crying was silent. The world was silent. The only sound was a high-pitched whine wavering in his ears.
He looked back toward the burning hotel. All that remained was a cloud of gray dust rising from the ground. The fire was gone now. The building was gone.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“Ain’t no better feeling than being alive after so many wished you evil.”
55
“You look like shit,” Hector Ortiz said.
“Don’t you have a job somewhere?” Levon said.
“It can wait.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I heard some crazy gringo motherfucker came into camp with a little girl.”
Hector found Levon outside an aid station near the Yazidi encampment. Levon was still in his filthy clothes, his hair matted with other men’s blood. He took water and a plate of food from the volunteers but wouldn’t move from his place outside the tents.
“Your friend only found one of his daughters?” Hector said.
“The other one committed suicide weeks ago.”
“Shit. That’s a tough one.”
“Bazît’s in there with her. She’s dehydrated and detoxing. They kept her drugged. I’m hoping that means she doesn’t remember much.”
“Fuck,” Hector said.
A tent flap parted. Hejar hobbled to Levon, an aluminum crutch under his arm, his leg stiff with a cast from knee to ankle. The back of his hand was bleeding from where he’d torn an IV line out.
“He wants to see you,” Hejar said.
Levon left Hector to follow the boy to the tent.
The girl looked younger than she had back at the Azur. Younger and more fragile. Color back in her skin. The black clothing was gone. Her thin arms and legs were bare under a simple white shift. Purple bruises with a yellow halo on her wrists. She had been bathed and her hair washed and combed. A hydration line had been run into her arm.
“She will be fine. Her body anyway,” Bazît said. His eyes did not leave his daughter as he spoke.
“What will you do? Will you go back to your work?” Levon said.
“This is not the end. Oh, Daesh will leave Mosul and Sinjar this year or next. But there is much more to do.”
“What about Kani?”
“I have family in Kirkuk. I will take her there, stay with her until she is well.”
“And you?”
“The Kurds have risen, taken their place in the fight against the Sunni. The Yazidis have as well. This is the beginning of the fight, not the end. The Arab will come for us. The Turk too. I will carry a rifle.”
Levon said nothing. Bazît turned from the sleeping girl on the cot to look at Levon.
"There are no words for what you have done for me, Levon Cade. I could spend a lifetime and not express my gratitude in full."
“Not about getting even. I was only making good on my word. That’s all.”
Bazît gripped his friend by the arm.
“You must make me a new promise.”
Levon looked into his friend's red-rimmed eyes.
“You must promise me, Levon Cade, that you will never return to Iraq.”
Levon nodded.
56
Nancy Valdez sat in her cubicle, sipping tepid coffee. Her desktop was clean. The computer tower, keyboard and monitor gone. A sad little box of her personal possessions sat on the floor by her chair. A double row of cardboard file boxes lined one wall. All neatly taped and labeled with case number and dates. Her final job as task force leader was to wait until some marshals came to haul the boxes away.
Laura leaned into the entrance to her cubicle.
“We’re going to dinner when this over,” Laura said.
“Marcoon too?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you’re going to get drunk.”
“Maybe. Yeah. You coming with?”
“No thanks,” Nancy said.
“Do you good.”
“Trust me, you do not want my company tonight.”
“Did they reassign you?” Laura took a seat in the guest chair.
“A counterfeit case in Des Moines. It’ll get me out of DC awhile.”
“Not me or Chad. It’s back to staring into a monitor eight hours a day for us. Tony’s talking about early retirement.”
“Sorry. Sorry to all of you.”
“It was worth it, Nancy. I’ll miss it but it was a trip while it lasted. We were like real detectives.”
“But we didn’t get to solve the mystery.”
“Yeah. I’m going to have a hard time sleeping for a while over that.” Laura stood now.
“We all are. Well, maybe not Chad.”
“You sure you’re good?” Laura paused at the cubicle opening.
“Go, go!” Nancy said. She fixed a smile on her face, made shoo-shoo motions with her hands. And Laura was gone.
She was left alone with her thoughts. A case without a resolution. A mystery with no more clues. She hated that. Most of all she hated the bureaucracy that prevented her from staying on the case. Hated them for pulling her back when she was so close. And more than that, the painful realization that she would never know why her team was pulled off of Levon Cade so abruptly.
They’d shit-canned her investigation at a meeting first thing that morning. She was called into unit supervisor Sylvester’s office but he wasn’t there. Instead a deputy director himself gave her the bad news. There were two men with him that she was not introduced to. They wore visitor badges. The deputy director did not defer to them directly but the vibe was there. They were in charge.
“We’re goin
g to handle this through other channels,” the deputy director said.
“Another section in Treasury, sir?”
“That’s need-to-know. You’ve done solid work here but it’s been decided that this will move forward elsewhere.”
“Will the new investigation take over the tap on George Cade?”
“Who is that?”
“The uncle, sir. The suspect’s last known address.”
“No. We’re off that tap.” He glanced at the two visitors. One of them nodded. One nod.
“Yes, sir,” Nancy said.
“Thank you, Agent Valdez. Trust me that your work on this will be remembered.”
Back at her desk, she ran that meeting over in her mind. Someone pulled the plug on her; someone way up the chain. She’d probably never know who or why. She’d have to find peace with that. But that peace was a long way off. It wasn’t something she’d find in Iowa chasing funny money.
A pair of uniformed officers came with a hand truck for her file cartons. She took up her box of personal items and made her way downstairs and out through the security exit. It was drizzling on the street as she made her way to the parking garage on H Street. The box went into the trunk of her car. It would come out when they assigned her a new desk once she was back from Iowa. If she ever came back from Iowa.
The drizzle built to a drumming downpour that hammered down on her car as she drove out onto the street. She sat in the beep and creep traffic watching the rain streak the grime on her windshield. She dug in her coat for her phone, tabbed the screen on. Her thumb scrolled down to Bill Marquez’s number and hovered there for a breath or two.
“Shit.”
She tossed the phone onto the dash and pulled through the intersection toward the Beltway and home.
57
Merry stepped into the stall, her nose wrinkled in deep disapproval.
“Uncle Fern let Montana get fat,” she said.
“She’s healthy otherwise. You’ll ride that off in a few weeks,” Jessie said. She handed Merry a bridle over the stall wall.
Merry bridled the pony while Jessie threw a blanket over the animal’s back. Together they cinched the saddle in place and Merry led the pony out into the crisp afternoon. Junebug, the spotted Alpine goat, skipped to the edge of the wire fence and bleated after them. They walked to a waiting trailer, the back door open and ramp down.
“The long trail still has snow on it,” Jessie said.
“Short trail’s fine. Sandy coming with us?”
“She said she is. I hope she is. She promised to get Brewster and that new roan ready to ride.”
They were coaxing the pony, its ears plastered back, up onto the ramp with kind words and a handful of hay when Uncle Fern called from the porch of the cabin.
“Phone call for you, Merry!”
He held the door for her, a smile wrinkling his face. She ran past him to snatch up the kitchen phone. Merry listened for a bit, the phone clutched tight to her ear. Her eyes got wider as she listened.
“Daddy!”
T H E • E N D
If you liked Levon Cade you might like: Retribution, by Brent Towns
EVERYTHING COMES AT A COST…
Author Brent Towns keeps the action coming thick and fast, let’s you up for a breath and then drags you back in for more.
After he is betrayed and shoots the two most powerful men in the Irish Mob, John “Reaper” Kane is forced into hiding. He thinks Retribution, Arizona, is the perfect hiding place, but he is wrong. Underneath the old, crusty surface of the dying town, hides the Montoya Cartel, for they use it as a funnel to ship their drugs across the border.
Trying to lay low in a town gripped with lawlessness is impossible for the ex-recon marine, especially after the local sheriff is brutally murdered by the Montoya Cartel’s sicario, leaving an old friend, Deputy Sheriff Cara Billings, the only person standing between them and the town.
Things go from bad to worse when Kane is arrested by Cleaver, the deputy in the cartel’s pocket, for shooting a local gang member.
Enter DEA Agent Luis Ferrero who has expressed to his bosses for a long time the need for a task force to fight the cartels on their own ground. He’s about to get his wish, and to head up his team, he wants the Reaper.
A thrill ride that doesn’t let you go – Retribution is the first novel in the action-packed Reaper Series.
AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON
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Thank you.
Chuck Dixon
About the Author
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Chuck Dixon worked a variety of jobs from driving an ice cream truck to working graveyard at a 7-11 before trying his hand as a writer. After a brief sojourn in children’s books he turned to his childhood love of comic books. In his thirty years as a writer for Marvel, DC Comics and other publishers, Chuck built a reputation as a prolific and versatile freelancer working on a wide variety titles and genres from Conan the Barbarian to SpongeBob SquarePants. His graphic novel adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit continues to be an international bestseller translated into fifty languages. He is the co-creator (with Graham Nolan) of the Batman villain Bane, the first enduring member added to the Dark Knight’s rogue’s gallery in forty years. He was also one of the seminal writers responsible for the continuing popularity of Marvel Comics’ The Punisher.
After making his name in comics, Chuck moved to prose in 2011 and has since written over twenty novels, mostly in the action-thriller genre with a few side-trips to horror, hardboiled noir and western. The transition from the comics form to prose has been a life-altering event for him. As Chuck says, “writing a comic is like getting on a roller coaster while writing a novel is more like a long car trip with a bunch of people you’ll learn to hate.” His Levon Cade novels are currently in production as a television series from Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions. He currently lives in central Florida and, no, he does not miss the snow.
Find more exciting titles by Chuck Dixon and Wolfpack Publishing, here.