by Peter Nealen
“Yes.” On the off chance that it was a telemarketer, or somebody more sinister doing some fishing, he wouldn’t identify himself, not right away.
“Colonel, it’s Gomez,” the low voice on the other end of the line said. There was some odd noise in the background.
He frowned again. “Gomez, where the hell are you? You just kind of disappeared on us.”
The other man sighed a little, his breath rasping in the microphone. “You remember how I showed up to the meeting late for the last job? And I said that there was some trouble at home?”
“Yeah, I do,” Brannigan answered with a bit of a sinking feeling. He glanced over his shoulder at the recovery room behind him, where Don Hart and Erekle “Herc” Javakhishvili were watching over Sam Childress as he slept off the anesthesia from his fifth surgery in the last month. “What happened?”
“It got worse,” Gomez said simply. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m in jail in Lordsburg; the sheriff threw me in here for defending myself against four gangbangers. I need some help.”
Brannigan closed his eyes. He had led and commanded infantry Marines for most of twenty-five years. He’d had to bail more than a few of them out of jail when they got drunk and got fired up. He’d never had to do it two-thirds of the way across the country, though.
But there was something in Gomez’ voice. Brannigan hadn’t reached the rank of Colonel, in a Marine Corps increasingly concerned with politics, bureaucratic box-checking, and appearances rather than warfighting, without being perceptive. There was something more going on that Gomez didn’t want to talk about over the phone. And he’d spent enough nights up into the wee hours of the morning, drinking with stricken Marines who had lost buddies, brothers, to be able to hear the note of rage and grief that Gomez was trying desperately to keep in check.
No, this wasn’t just a plea for bail money after a fight out in town. Something was up. “Is it trouble that a lawyer can handle, or should more of us start heading out that way?” he said.
“Probably both,” Gomez replied. He couldn’t keep the bitter snarl out of his voice as he said, “This fat bastard sheriff wants to charge me with attempted murder for throat-punching a punk who was gonna try to stab me.”
Brannigan’s eyes narrowed at that. Yeah, there was definitely something very wrong going on out in New Mexico, and Gomez was going to need all the friends he could get. The young man hadn’t been particularly gregarious as a Blackheart, but he was one of theirs, and Brannigan hadn’t willingly left a man behind in over two decades. He’d be damned if he started now.
“I’ll get Roger headed out there with a lawyer,” he said, “the best that Van Zandt can dredge up. He owes us that much.” Mark Van Zandt, General, USMC (Ret.) had entered the shadowy world of “black” warfare where Brannigan and his picked little team of mercenaries did their work almost immediately after his retirement. He’d been their primary “fixer” for the jobs they’d been handling lately.
There was no love lost between Brannigan and Van Zandt. Never had been. The fact that Van Zandt had supervised Brannigan’s somewhat unwilling retirement from the Marine Corps had only increased the bitterness. But they’d had to get over it, and they were slowly putting the past, and the status games that went along with being an officer, behind them.
There was too much at stake for that kind of petty bullshit anymore.
“The rest of us won’t be far behind,” he continued. “Those we can spare.”
“I understand,” Gomez said, and Brannigan was sure that he did. Gomez had been a Recon Marine in the past, he knew that much. He’d seen the “Jack” tattooed on the inside of his right arm. And for all his brooding, dangerous silence, he was their brother, still. He knew that they couldn’t leave Sam Childress, helpless and unable to walk, without a Blackheart watching over him.
“We’ll be there soon, son,” Brannigan said. “Hang in there.”
“I will,” Gomez replied. “I can’t give up now.”
He hung up.
Brannigan felt eyes on him. He turned and met a pair of icy blue eyes in a chiseled, lantern-jawed face. John Wade had been sitting in a chair in the hallway since they’d wheeled Sam out of surgery. It was illegal to carry weapons in a hospital, but somehow Brannigan suspected that Wade had at least one pistol on him. Wade was a killer, and wouldn’t be caught dead without a weapon, the niceties of laws and regulations be damned. Especially when he was guarding his comrade.
“What’s up?” Wade asked.
“Gomez is in trouble,” Brannigan replied. “We’ve got to go get him out of jail, among other things.”
Wade’s eyes glinted. “What kind of ‘other things?’” he asked, though his tone and the look on his face suggested that he had a pretty good idea.
“I’m not sure yet, but it sounds bad,” Brannigan answered. “He said that the ‘family trouble’ he mentioned before our last trip got worse. And that one of the gangbangers he’s in jail for hitting was going to stab him.”
Wade didn’t move, but he was suddenly just a little bit more coiled. “You think the local thugs went after his family?”
“Sounds like it,” Brannigan said, as he turned to start down the hall toward the elevators. “How soon can you be ready to roll?”
“Hell, I could go now,” Wade said, and Brannigan believed it. Wade lived to get his violence on, and he had little doubt that the big former Ranger wouldn’t hesitate in the least to unleash on American soil. “The only question is Sam.”
Brannigan stopped and glanced back toward the recovery room. “He’s in a hospital, with law enforcement all over the place,” he said, as much to himself as to Wade. “And I’m reasonably certain that nobody managed to identify us on the last job.”
Wade was still watching him with that steely, unblinking stare of his. “Even so, we’ve run into the same American sons of bitches twice now. Whoever they are, if they can afford to hire American contractors for their dirty work, then they’ve got resources.” He grimaced. “I don’t like leaving Sam alone under these circumstances. Somebody is going to put two and two together. And since we don’t know who they are, they could be anybody.”
Brannigan nodded. “And have eyes and ears anywhere,” he finished for Wade. He glanced up and down the hallway, even as he kicked himself mentally for it. It wasn’t as if a little cartoon spy was going to be peering around the corner at them. He knew how the game was played. From a distance, through cameras—that were all over the hospital—and people talking and gossiping after hours, not necessarily knowing or caring who they gossiped to. Credit card records. Phone records. That sort of thing. There were ways of tracking people without ever setting eyes on them, particularly Stateside. That was why he’d never wanted to own the damned cell phone in the first place.
He knew that there was no hiding in plain sight for him. Six feet, four inches tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with salt and pepper hair and a bushy handlebar mustache going silver, he stood out a bit. That was another reason he preferred the wild country, in his cabin up in the Rockies.
But Sam Childress had taken a bullet to the spine in Transnistria, and he needed his brothers’ support, at least until they worked out a decent cover story for what had happened. It wasn’t like they could tell his family that he’d been crippled in combat, on an illegal and deniable operation in Eastern Europe, practically on Russia’s doorstep.
“I’ll get Roger moving out that way,” he said, “and I’ll follow. Once we know more about what’s going on, we can readjust and decide how many we need out there with us.” He blew a heavy breath out. “Hopefully, this is just going to be bit of a legal battle.”
Somehow, he doubted it.
“I’ll be here,” Wade said. “Bags are already packed.”
Brannigan nodded again, then turned down the hallway and started dialing Roger Hancock.
***
Carlo Santelli wasn’t unhappy. He couldn’t exactly say he was happy, though, either, given that
Melissa was currently puking her guts out in the bathroom, just like she had almost every day since getting pregnant.
There wasn’t much he could do to alleviate her severe morning sickness, and it bothered him. It bothered him even more that it had really started while he’d been halfway around the world, trading gunfire with Russians, Transnistrians, and the mysterious Western terrorists they’d bumped heads with twice now. He couldn’t tell her about it, either, which made things worse. He’d been gone when she’d needed him, and all he could say was a bunch of banalities about work, paying for the house, and security contracting. All of which felt weak when looking at his wife suffering.
But what the hell else are you gonna do? It’s not like you could open up a restaurant or anything. Even if you had the first idea of how to go about it, you’d likely be thinking about blowing your own brains out within a month. Besides, John and the boys need you.
It was hard not to think of that as simply trying to justify himself, as the sounds of violent retching died away around the corner with a faint moan. The sink started running, and he hoped that the morning’s bout was over.
When Melissa came dragging out of the bathroom, wrapped in her terrycloth robe, looking haggard, he held out an antacid. She took it and swallowed it, before easing herself down on the bed with a groan. “Thanks, hon.” She lay back. “I wish this would stop.”
“Me too, honey,” Santelli said, entirely sincerely. He hated seeing his wife in such misery. The fact that he really couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t fix it, bothered him even more. Sure, he could help out as best he could, and he had been, but he couldn’t relieve her nausea or stop the twice-daily sessions of kneeling down worshiping the porcelain god.
Carlo Santelli was a problem-solver. Always had been. He’d never been subtle about it; in fact, many people, including his greatest CO, John Brannigan, had compared him to a battering ram on more than one occasion. Which made this problem, that he couldn’t just batter his way through, that much worse.
He felt a simultaneous sense of relief and guilt as the phone rang.
He snatched it up a little too fast, and glanced at Melissa, hoping that she hadn’t noticed quite how fast he’d grabbed it. It was Brannigan. He felt that same, momentary twist of conflicting emotions in his gut, but he answered it.
“Yo, Colonel, we got another job?” he almost winced as Melissa looked over at him. Not the best way to start the conversation with your morning-sick wife within earshot. Good going, jackass.
“Not yet,” Brannigan said grimly. “Gomez is in trouble, though, down in New Mexico. I don’t have details, but he’s in jail, apparently on attempted murder charges. If he’s giving it to me straight, we should be able to get it thrown out as self-defense, but I’m calling Mark to get a lawyer headed that way with Roger.”
“What do you need me to do?” Santelli asked, trying to keep the hopefulness out of his tone while Melissa could hear. Something, anything, but sitting here helplessly.
“If you can, tell Melissa that you’ve got to see about a friend in trouble,” Brannigan said, “and head over to New Mexico. Lordsburg, I think; you’ll have to fly into Silver City. Gomez wasn’t particularly forthcoming over the phone, but it sounded like trouble. Violence type of trouble. Won’t hurt to have a few of the boys nearby, just in case.”
“I got it,” Santelli said. “I’ll…” he stopped. He’d usually swung down to pick Childress up on the way to rendezvous for a job. But Childress was still in the hospital, and wouldn’t be going on any jobs ever again. He swallowed. “I’ll get over there when I can,” he finished lamely.
“Thanks, Carlo,” Brannigan said. “Hopefully it’s just a bit of legal-beagling, and that’s it. Granted, I’ll have Gomez’ hide if that’s the case, but frankly, after last time…”
Santelli remembered Gomez showing up at the last minute, and his cryptic remarks about family trouble that hadn’t been resolved. “Yet,” the taciturn young man had said. He’d said it could keep.
It sounded a lot like it hadn’t.
“We’ll be there, sir,” Santelli said, slipping back into his old Sergeant Major mindset. The Colonel had given instructions, and they’d be ready to move on his word.
“I’ll see you down there, then,” Brannigan said. “Now I’ve got to call Mark.” He didn’t sound thrilled at the prospect.
“Better you than me, sir,” Santelli said.
Melissa was watching him as he hung up, and he had to force himself to meet her eyes. She had that look again; she knew what had just happened, far better than he might have hoped.
But she reached out and patted his hand. “I’ll be alright, hon,” she told him. “It’s just morning sickness. Lots of pregnant women get morning sickness.” She smiled wanly. “I think you’d be better off going and taking care of things, keeping busy, than staying around here and fussing over me like a harried mother hen.”
He flushed a little and shook his head ruefully. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Just one of the boys got himself in trouble with the law. That’s all. I’ll be back before you know it.”
She patted his hand again. “You do what you do, honey,” she told him. But then her hand went to her swollen belly. “But later…we’re going to have to talk. About how much longer you’re going to go adventuring for money.”
Santelli swallowed hard as he nodded and got up. Yes, they were indeed going to have to have that talk. Because he was going to be a father soon, and his kid deserved to have a dad, even an old, balding, busted-up dad like he was, who was home.
He wasn’t looking forward to that decision. But he’d make it when it came time. After all, Carlo Santelli hadn’t built a military career on being indecisive.
Chapter 4
Vincent Bianco sat behind the gamemaster screen and fought the urge to put his head in his hands. He hadn’t GMed in a while, and he’d almost forgotten just how frustrating it could be. Fun, but frustrating. Because his little mostly-veteran gamer group had a way of taking the scenario and running in exactly the most unpredictable and destructive ways imaginable, ways that he couldn’t even have thought of in his wildest, Monster-fueled nightmares.
Tommy, in his role as Detective Dirk Slabarm, was currently about fifteen dice rolls into his most outlandish, out-of-control, no-way-in-hell-would-this-ever-work-in-real-life bluff against the bad guy, a Russian Mafiya boss named Silovitz. Somehow, he’d already driven a car through the gate, shot both guards, blown the car up to cover his infiltration into Silovitz’ mansion, set half the place on fire, and was currently interrogating Silovitz in the middle of a three-way Mexican standoff, which hadn’t ended in a shooting yet because his Fast Talking skill rolls kept coming up twenties.
It was giving Bianco a headache, from a combination of trying to keep up with Tommy’s wild-hair improvisation and just about busting a gut laughing, just because otherwise he was going to tear the GM screen in half out of frustration.
Needless to say, he hadn’t planned on Dirk Slabarm even going near Silovitz’s mansion at that point in the game.
The thing was, and he couldn’t mention this to any of the four players gathered around the table in front of him, he couldn’t help but picture Silovitz’s mansion as looking almost exactly like the dacha where their target, Eugen Codreanu, had been holed up for a while in Transnistria. He’d never set foot inside the place; those mysterious rival contractors or terrorists, or whatever they were, had snatched Codreanu before they’d been able to make the hit. But the dacha itself had been indelibly marked on his memory, and he couldn’t help but make the connection even while playing this increasingly ridiculous game.
“So,” Tommy was saying, in his role as Detective Slabarm, “you kidnapped the girl to put pressure on her father, who was about to rat your entire counterfeit iPad network out to the Feds, to cover for his running cocaine for the DEA.” Ian actually squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to process that, but Tommy was on a roll. “Admit it!” S
labarm wasn’t a smart character, but he was a ridiculously lucky one, so far.
They had to roll for Intimidation and Defiance. As was increasingly predictable that night, Tommy rolled a twenty. The dice had just left Bianco’s hand when his phone buzzed.
“Dude, bad form,” Jules said. “Phones are supposed to be off during the game.”
Bianco didn’t even look at the dice as he dragged it out. “Fuck off,” he said. “I’ve got a friend in the hospital.” Sure enough, it was Santelli’s number. Though he thought Santelli had headed back up to Boston to be with his wife. Something about complications with her pregnancy. “What’s up, Carlo?” he asked, half-turning away from the table. Tommy started craning his neck to see the dice behind the GM screen, and Bianco threw him a glare.
“Vinnie,” Santelli said, his thick Bostonian accent distinctive even over the phone, “something’s come up. Gomez got himself in trouble, back home in New Mexico. There ain’t a lot of detail yet, but the Colonel says he’s in jail, and he wants as many of us as possible down there, just in case. He thinks it might have something to do with the trouble that Gomez was talking about before the last job.”
Bianco frowned a little. He couldn’t really remember any mention of trouble, but Gomez was a quiet man who was hard to get to know. It was entirely possible that he’d mentioned it in one of his rare sentences, but it hadn’t sunk in.
“Any particular rush?” Bianco asked, glancing over his shoulder. All of his buddies were watching him now, the game momentarily forgotten. Tommy was a contractor, Ian was a cop, and Jules worked for ICE. Rob was the only one of them with a “normal” job, and he worked IT for a major defense contractor in Northern Virginia.
“Just as soon as you can break away, I think,” Santelli answered. “It could take a while to get Gomez out of jail, and it all could be nothing. But John wants us down there anyway.”
Bianco nodded, even though Santelli couldn’t see him. “I can be down there in the next day or two,” he said. “Need me to take anything?”