The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  The Trashman

  Hit World Book One

  By

  William Alan Webb

  PUBLISHED BY: Hit World Press

  Copyright © 2021 William Alan Webb

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Dedication

  To Roger Zelazny, for showing the way.

  * * * * *

  Cover Design by DW Creations

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  Foreword

  Being the first in a series, you might be wondering what to expect from this book and all those that follow, and the truth as I write this is…I have no idea.

  Okay, maybe I have some idea, since I’ll have finished writing this book before you read this foreword, but as I typed that sentence it was the truth. Nor will I edit this foreword after I’m done writing, so what’s to come is new and exciting and, I hope, compulsively readable.

  Therefore, rather than focus on the what, let’s talk about the how.

  So how did the Hit World Universe come to exist?

  In the early 1990s the virtual place to be was AOL, and if you wanted to find a chat room or message board there were few other choices. First, you had to call until you got through, and by “call” I mean using a land line phone. Yes, those once did exist and were used by people. And while you were doing that, nobody else could make a call to or from that phone number. Then, once you got through all the beeps and clicks, you might finally get online where pages sometimes loaded in as fast as a minute.

  It was great. With download speeds of 300 kb you had plenty of opportunities to make a sandwich, or watch a football game, or wait for someone to hang up so you could log on.

  But like I said, there really wasn’t another choice if you wanted to communicate with others via the hot new thing called a “message board” or, even more thrilling because it was in real time, a “chat room.” And for lovers of crime fiction, one of the most active book boards was named “Hardboiled,” where readers and authors hung out to discuss everything you can imagine, with mystery novels being the main attraction.

  Robert Crais of Elvis Cole/Joe Pike fame was a regular. So were Harlan Coben, Max Allan Collins, Robert J. Randisi, Laura Lippmann, S.J. Rozan, Michael Connelly, and even, on one memorable occasion, Elmore Leonard, to name only a few. This was before most of them had made it big, Leonard and Randisi being the obvious exceptions.

  One man in particular who stands out as a contributor was James W. Hall. He is now an Amazon #1 bestselling author. That is, #1 in the entire Amazon store, an accomplishment that couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. At the time, though, he stood out not only because his fiction was so incredibly entertaining and well written, but also for a series of vignettes he wrote over a year and a half period just for the entertainment of that particular message board. During that time, for every holiday he wrote a short piece in the noir style of Raymond Chandler (except in 3rd person) about a downtrodden P.I. named James Holliday.

  Every one of them was a gem and some were laugh out loud funny. Heck, I think even Laura Lippmann wrote an entry, and I’m pretty sure S.J. Rozan did, too. Anyway, to join in the fun, I started a story of my own in that same 1940s Raymond Chandler-Dashiel Hammett style and got about 500 words into it before I quit.

  Then, sometime around the turn of the century, AOL did one of those genius things that corporations sometimes do that make you scratch your head wondering what overpaid idiot dreamed up such lunacy (like substituting self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores in place of human-run registers thinking people wouldn’t mind doing the store’s work for them, or New Coke) AOL shut down all of their message boards and wiped the archives clean. A decade’s-worth of communities wiped out at the whim of some corporate minion who must have been blackmailing the CEO to have a job in the first place. The losses included Jim Hall’s iconic Holliday series, gone forever at the flip of a switch.

  In mid-2017 I was doing an infrequent cleaning of my office and dug up a CD from one of my office drawers that read “Fiction stuff 2002.” There, to my shock and delight, I found not only the beginning of this story but also all of Jim Halls’ James Holliday stories, thought to be lost forever. I asked if he had kept copies and he said no, so I sent them to him along with the nascent story of mine. He encouraged me to finish it, stating “I’d steal at least ten lines from the first page alone, if I thought I could get away with it.”

  Whoa…heady stuff, even if he was just being nice. Still, it inspired me to finish the story. Once I did that, I enlisted input from Herika Raymer, a friend and editor who was in the process of editing my story The Granite Man for an anthology in the Cthulhu Universe. She provided critical input that helped me refine the new story into something of which I was extremely proud.

  So that’s how the short story “Kill Me When You Can” came to be. It gestated for nearly three decades and has now inspired a series built around its premise, Hit World, and it all started circa 1993 on a long-gone AOL message board.

  From the very beginning, I envisioned Hit World as a shared universe, a playground for all of my writer friends to write stuff for fun, and maybe also make a buck or two, but mostly just for the shared experience. A private little universe where we could tell stories that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. At this point, Hit World was a non-magical place with a distinctly noir flavor; think Humphrey Bogart playing John Wick with a license to kill. What’s not to love, y’know?

  When I asked Larry Hoy if he would be interested in co-writing a story in the Hit World Universe, or he asked me, I can’t remember which now, he asked for details of what Hit World meant. I didn’t have any, and if shared universes need one thing, it’s a “bible.” I told Larry everything I knew about it, and he both fleshed it out and wrote the history, being the First Follower who took my concept seriously. (For those not familiar with the concept, the First Follower is a critical person to the success of any venture. They are the proof of concept.) In Larry’s case, he became the co-creator.

  But just as a short story grew from that original fragment, so the Hit World Universe kept growing in my mind in a way I never expected. It became too big to contain, and when Larry and I approached Chris Kennedy with the idea of CKP picking it up, he said “yes” and helped us solidify the concepts and paths we wanted to pursue. In short order it outgrew the original idea and became something more like John Wick with a license to kill who joins Men in Black, as composed by Hieronymus Bosch.

  Writing it was exciting for me in a way that has rarely happened. This book acted like a magnet for every strange and wonderful idea I’ve ever had but couldn’t figure out how to write, each one lingering in the scary parts of my brain for decades, just waiting for this book. I don’t want to spoil things by mentioning specifics here, but there’s everything you could imagine, including the kitchen sink, and having written that, I now have to figure out how to fit a kitchen sink into this story.

  So there you have it. What began as an inside joke 30 years ago has now grown into an entire universe, and my little story “Kill Me When You Can” has now become The Trashman, while Larry and my companion
to that original, the short story “Shoot First,” is now the second novel, titled A Bullet for the Shooter.

  I’m still mystified how all of this creative stuff works; I only know that if you don’t like this book, it’s not my fault…blame Larry. He egged me on.

  William Alan Webb, August 6, 2020

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword

  The Hit World Universe

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Cast of Characters

  About William Alan Webb

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War

  Excerpt from Devil Calls the Tune

  Excerpt from Book One of the Mako Saga

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  The Hit World Universe

  September 11, 2001, was the blackest day in American history. A dozen hijacked airliners wiped out most of the American government and brought America to its knees. The population screamed for blood, but the government was in chaos. The senior surviving member in the line of succession was a junior Senator from Oregon who nobody had heard of outside his native state.

  The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians all eyed the United States to see if the time had come for military action against American interests worldwide. The new president had only just been appointed and didn’t have the political capital—or will—to risk World War Three. Indeed, he was on record as publicly blaming America for worsening relations with the Muslim world prior to the attacks. He called for restraint and refused to commit the U.S. military to go after those identified as responsible. “We brought this on ourselves,” he said in a nationwide broadcast.

  But Americans were having none of it, not even the constituency that had elected him. The wealthiest of the wealthy went to work behind the scenes, committing tens of billions of dollars to show America’s enemies what happened when you dared attack us. The terrorists jeered and vowed more attacks, trying to provoke a response.

  It worked.

  The answer was the formation of a lavishly funded group of mercenaries hired by those wealthy private citizens. The mercenaries sped to the Middle East set on bloody revenge. The president threatened to arrest everyone concerned, but America’s law enforcement agencies sided with the mercs, and he never pushed it beyond threats.

  Impeachment loomed.

  The money to finance the mercs was funneled through a dummy corporation called LifeEnders, Inc. They attracted the best black ops people America had, plus select others from friendly nations, with many either on detached duty from the U.S. armed forces, arranged by loyal officers who defied the chain of command, or they left the service altogether. The billionaires who supported them spared no expense to supply them with the best equipment available. They even lured some top-flight freelancers out of the shadows and into the fight. As always, money talked.

  Within months, most of the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks were being executed on live American pay-per-view television, along with officials from the countries who supported them. Outraged protests from enemy states, and America’s own president, fell on the deaf ears of the American public. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clarified that American military capabilities were at full strength and on high alert, but the president ordered them to stand down. Officially, the military obeyed. Privately, they defied their commander in chief, and let America’s enemies know it. Rather than risk nuclear war and worldwide Armageddon, foreign countries backed down.

  But Americans didn’t want to limp along with a rump government that was wildly unpopular and had proved unequal to the emergency. As the federal bureaucracy struggled to restore itself and fill critical positions, the population demanded power be turned over to private corporations wherever possible. These new Corpses, a derogatory name for the corporations, replaced the bureaucracy with results.

  With impeachment likely to succeed in deposing the president, and as a presidential recall petition passed 90 million signatures, America held a special election on September 11, 2003. Though challenged by the traditional parties, the Supreme Court deemed such a vote legal. Both parties nominated the usual candidates saying all the usual things, but the mood in America remained angry and combative, and through the summer a populist movement grew to draft Charlton Heston for president. The two political parties laughed off his efforts, but they misjudged the mood of the country. The actor won in a landslide write-in campaign, and with him, both houses of Congress swung toward revenge- and security-minded independent candidates. When the actor took office in January 2004, he had the strongest mandate of any president in American history.

  LifeEnders, Inc. grew out of the mercenary group that struck back in the Middle East. The corporation found and eliminated threats to America, worldwide, with the speed and technique of a scalpel. When terrorist organizations were discovered within America, LifeEnders, Inc. found and eliminated them. Terrorists couldn’t hide from their reach, and there was no appeal on their judgment.

  As time went by, LEI, as LifeEnders, Inc. came to be known, also tried to end murder within America’s borders; killers were met with swift Old Testament justice. But that didn’t work. First, there were too many murders, and second, the regular police angrily opposed such intrusions into their areas of responsibility. So the government passed all the legislation and—more to the point—set all the corresponding fees and tax rates to finance private, legal assassinations under the quasi-governmental LEI. Non-contracted killings remained murder, with all the usual punishments, but contracted murder through LEI was the law of the land.

  The street name for this new reality was Hit World.

  Chapter 1

  The blonde was bleached, like raptor bones frozen in Cretaceous mud. Lumped into a chair beside her, the guy’s fleshy jowls sagged like raw bread dough. Jewels glittered on most of their twenty fingers, and they both smelled nice, like those French-milled soaps hotels put in the little baskets in the bathrooms.

  “You’ve read the contract, I assume?” I said. “You know my fees?”

  “The terms are acceptable; the money is no problem,” Mr. Delvin said with a dismissive wave, as if I was just another underling. Experience taught me that when people said “money wasn’t a problem,” it was a problem. People for whom money really wasn’t a problem didn’t have to say it.

  I leaned back in my padded swivel chair with the lumbar support and fired up a smoke. His piggy little eyes widened as I inhaled.

  “Would you mind putting that out?” he said, as if I’d committed a crime, which, technically, I had. It’s just that after all the other shit the world had been through in the past couple of decades, enforcing anti-smoking laws wasn’t high on anybody’s agenda.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I meant that I would mind.”

  His eyebrows shot up. I guess my client wasn’t used to somebody else being in charge. As for Blondie, she stared at the cigarette like it was a well-chilled martini, or a male stripper with three legs.

  “So, who do you want dead?” I asked.

  The word dead got his attention and his demeanor changed, like he finally figured out this was my office, not his. The man glanced to either side, as if he could spo
t my hidden cameras and microphones, and wiped his generous forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Exactly how confidential is this conversation?” he asked. His right thumb and index finger tapped each other like John Bonham hammering a drum kit; he was the kind of mark I loved playing poker with, rich and unable to hide his anxiety.

  “I’m bound by the ethics of my profession and my organization,” I said. I pointed to the twin frames holding my license, my certificate of membership in the North American LifeEnders Association, and my franchisee authorization. “As well as by all applicable laws. It’s as confidential as the doctor-patient, lawyer-client privilege. It’s all spelled out in the contract.”

  “You have no cameras or microphones here?”

  “Of course not,” I lied. Four microphones and six cameras caught everything.

  “Well, you see, it’s just that we’ve heard—” He glanced at Blondie, aka Mrs. Delvin, who reached out and rubbed the back of his hand. “We’ve heard things. People like you who carry out the contract, then inform the victim’s family who hired you. Drumming up business so to speak.”

  You’ve seen my commercials during the daytime talk shows, usually packaged with some ambulance-chasing lawyer’s promise to get you money the insurance company doesn’t want you to know about. I was the grinning guy who came on at the end and said, “If they don’t pay, let us slay.” On city buses and billboards that was shortened to, You pay, we slay. At no point was there ever an ‘us’ or ‘we,’ only ‘me,’ but it sounded better if people thought you were big.

  Assassins, by and large, are a live-and-let-live sort, slow to anger. Ours is not a business that lends itself well to quick displays of emotion. But what Mr. Delvin was insinuating was the deepest insult someone in my profession could suffer.