Without my wallet I had to borrow a hundred bucks from One Shot, which I waved in front of his face with two fingers. His body stiffened and his sleepy eyes opened with sudden interest.
“Ben Franklin can be your new best friend if you move your ass. I want a flea and tick bath, worming meds, and a bag of kibble, a big one. You’ve got twenty minutes.”
White eyebrows shot upward like my ex-wife’s dad’s when I asked his permission to marry her, and the old guy probably had the same thought as her father, “Are you out of your mind?”
A wall clock read 0941 hours when I said that. At 1003 I carried Nathan out. That was my dad’s name and it seemed to fit the dog; I loved my dad and missed him. I laid Nathan as gently as I could on the cool leather of the limo’s backseat. He smelled like disinfectant but seemed to understand that it was for his own good. Weak brown eyes locked onto mine as he lay on the seat, panting. His coat, mostly black and tan, was still wet and I worried about him catching a chill.
“You good?” One Shot said. Despite his neutral tone, I sensed that if he had been able to shoot lasers from his eyes then his expensive shades would have had holes burned through them. Aside from delaying whatever mission he’d been given concerning me, a wet, half-starved mongrel lay on the supple white Corinthian leather. I didn’t know why that was a big deal though, since LEI would surely reimburse him.
“Go,” I said.
Carlos took off in a spray of crushed shells and we hit the A1 again. Within ten minutes the airport came into sight That’s when the back window shattered in a spray of bullets.
The heavy glass absorbed most of the bullets’ energy, so even as they ripped into the back of the driver’s seat none penetrated Carlos’s body armor. Nathan screeched like he’d stuck his paw into a light socket and tried to sit up, but I covered him with my body as broken glass cut the through the interior. Carlos jerked the limo back and forth, and I struggled not to roll onto the floorboards as the jagged shards spun through the air. Bullet holes in the door gave me a glimpse outside. A stream of bullets had ripped into the asphalt to the limo’s left and torn an oncoming Audi nearly in half.
From my position shielding Nathan, I looked up and saw One Shot aiming the Desert Eagle with both hands, trying to draw a bead on whoever was shooting at us. But he’d gotten the name One Shot because he never hit the target with just one shot. Despite his name, accuracy was never his strong point, whereas it was the one thing I did better than anybody else. I’d never known why I shot so well; like the warning senses and auras it was just something I’d always had. Some people paint masterpieces without training, Mozart could play a concerto after only hearing it once, and I always hit where I aimed.
“Sitrep!” I yelled over screeching tires and the whimpering dog.
“Songars, two of them. Bigger than I’ve ever seen before. We can’t lead ’em to the hangar.”
Fuck!
Big drones with machine guns slung under their bellies. For a moment the shooting had stopped, and I held out my hand.
“Gimme the gun.”
One Shot only hesitated for two seconds before passing it down to me. We’d been in a lot of firefights together, and he was still breathing partly because I could hit things when others couldn’t.
“One in the chamber,” he said.
I nodded. Having handled the gun earlier helped, the weight didn’t throw me. The first shot required planning, but the second shot would take longer as I had to deal with the recoil and didn’t know how strong it would be. Carlos kept swerving across the highway and even I couldn’t hit anything when he did that, so I shouted for him to straighten out on my word. It was risky, because I had a semi-automatic pistol with a seven-round magazine against two flying gun platforms. Standard Songar drones fired 5.56mm NATO rounds with a maximum ammo load of 200, but I couldn’t count on either one of those things being true of whatever was trying to kill us. It might fire a heavier round or a larger capacity, not that it needed either one to finish the job.
Then Nathan cried out in terror, a terrible howl like a damned soul being dragged into Hell and my focus narrowed as my brain ignored everything except destroying the soulless fucking machines terrifying the dog. He tried to get up, but I held him down. I didn’t care what happened to most people, including me, but cruelty to animals was guaranteed to drive me into a rage. Whoever sent those things after us was about to lose two very expensive toys.
“Now!”
Carlos straightened the car, and I waited one second to let the shifting momentum settle. Then I sat up straight, turned, rested the gun atop the back seat and fired two rounds at the first drone, my wrists absorbing the heavy recoil. Armor-piercing rounds would have smashed them regardless, but the first round must have hit the machine gun barrel at the same time the drone opened fire, because it spewed shell casings in its wake but no bullets left the barrel. Then it blew up, maybe from the second round, maybe from something else. I didn’t notice because I had already shifted to fire on the second Songar. I put four rounds downrange even as return fire hit the trunk and shredded a back tire. Carlos tried to hold it steady and not veer off into the surf, which was within twenty yards of the highway at that point. Any more hits and the car would have rolled.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about that. I hit the second one, too, and it skittered off to one side like old videos I’d seen of B-17s going down over Germany in World War Two, still firing. Streams of bullets ate up the sand near the water’s edge before the machine hit the beach and pinwheeled off into the waves.
After a deep breath, I handed the pistol back to One Shot and brushed glass out of Nathan’s fur, careful not to let any of the slivers accidentally slice him in the process. With all of the tick bites it was hard to tell if he’d been cut, but mostly he needed somebody to tell him it was over and that he was going to be okay. I hugged him and whispered that I’d never let anybody hurt him again. He trembled and whimpered and did something that damned near made me cry: he licked my hand. In that moment I swore that whoever sent those drones was going to die.
Bits of the limo fell off as Carlos took the exit for Sangster International Airport, but instead of heading for the terminal he turned down a gravel access road that was restricted to “Authorized Vehicles Only” and led to a gate that was barely big enough for the car to glide through. By the time a lone security guard waved us on without bothering to check our IDs and without even a raised eyebrow at the shot up car, only shredded remnants of rubber still clung to the rear wheel.
The rim sparked on the concrete as it gouged out a trench in the tarmac leading straight to the double doors fronting the LEI hangar. Blue lights flashed along the highway, and I heard police sirens, distant but closing fast. We weren’t hard to follow. I saw them coming over the limo’s roof and calculated we had less than a minute until they surrounded the car. One Shot never yelled and rarely raised his voice, except to be heard in noisy surroundings, but now growled at me to get my ass inside the hangar. When I stopped to lift Nathan, Carlos glanced up at his boss with a lifted eyebrow that clearly meant What the fuck is the deal with this guy?
“Leave him, Steed, he’ll be all right now,” One Shot said. “We gotta be in the air by the time they get here.”
He was right about us taking off, and I didn’t care. I knew what they’d do to Nathan if I left him behind; he’d be dead before we cleared Jamaican airspace.
“Then you’d better hold those fucking doors open,” I said, being as gentle with the dog as I could manage. That’s when Carlos grabbed my elbow.
“You heard the boss,” he said.
“If you don’t let go, you’re a dead man. Ask your boss if that’s an idle threat.”
Despite outweighing me by 50 pounds, all of it muscle, Carlos narrowed his eyes to study me, trying to judge if it was a bluff. It wasn’t. Size advantage or not I would have killed him, and I guess it came through in the intensity of my gaze.
“Bring the fucking dog then,” One Shot said. “
Carlos, tell Cevvy we take off in thirty seconds, with or without tower permission. Go!”
Those could have been 30 seconds we didn’t have. Even as Carlos pushed through the double glass doors into the hangar lobby, three police cruisers with lights and sirens raced. One Shot glared as I passed, but he held open the doors for me. As I passed out of the late morning heat and into the blessedly cold lobby, he spoke into my ear with more than a trace of disgust.
“Just like the fucking brickyard.”
Trotting across the hangar floor with Nathan whimpering at every jolt, One Shot helped me up the ladder into the already taxiing aircraft. I’d expected some variation on a Lear Jet, but while I didn’t have time to stop and admire the silver plane with the red and black LEI logo on the nose, I could tell it was a 737. As the ladder was folded up into the fuselage, I saw constables running toward us inside the hangar, with at least one talking into a radio or cell phone, no doubt telling the tower not to let us take off. They were in for a surprise.
Our pilot, Cevdet, turned out to be a wiry Albanian with crazy eyes and ears like an Indian elephant, not normally the resumé you’d want for someone trying to keep a flying missile from becoming a crashing one. Except for all of its staid corporate façade, LEI wasn’t a normal business, and its operatives weren’t normal corporate functionaries, all of which is a long way to say that Cevdet’s recklessness saved our ass.
We taxied toward the eastern end of the runway at triple the usual speed. Boeing didn’t design the 737 for ground racing and the airframe wobbled as our speed increased. The interior had only single chairs—about double the size of a typical recliner—which could turn a full 360 degrees. Spinning one around using my knee, I sat as gently as possible in the one nearest the front, gritting my teeth as Nathan’s full weight was pressed into my arms. I didn’t loop the seat belt around him because if I was thrown forward, I didn’t want my body to crush him against the strap. His brown eyes turned my way with what I swore was gratitude. One Shot sat behind me and Carlos took a seat across the aisle.
“You and your fucking dogs,” One Shot said.
Banter helped distract me from the vibrating aircraft and the distinct possibility we would all die at any second in a fireball. Poor Nathan only whimpered.
“You’re repeating yourself,” I said.
“It’s worth repeating.”
“Dogs’re better people than most people I know.”
To that, he half-nodded. Truth was truth.
“We should have left you,” Carlos chipped in, which pissed me off. Who the fuck was he, anyway, beyond just a steroid-built musclehead? He wasn’t a Shooter; that much was clear, otherwise he would have been outside the car back at the resort. Had it come to gunplay, a Shooter would have been able to argue legal standing, whereas hired muscle can only cause trouble by starting a fight with no credentials to back them up.
“You could have left me, yet you didn’t,” I said, not in the mood to take any shit. “And do you know why? Because I carve up brain-dead fucks like you just to stay in practice.”
I’d marked him for a needle jockey from the start. You could tell by their barely suppressed anger and the way their skin always looked ready to split. Like all needle jockeys, his brain was too awash in a soup of synthetic ’roids to think beyond the next lift session.
“Knock it off,” One Shot said. “Both of you.”
“You’re lucky I don’t kick your ass,” Carlos said, ignoring his boss and not bothering to mask his threatening tone. Much to my surprise, Nathan lifted his head and growled. “And don’t be surprised if that mutt winds up strangled.”
One Shot was out of his seat and across the aisle before the words had faded. One massive hand wrapped around Carlos’ throat and the other was drawn back like a jackhammer, his eyes wide. I’d only seen that expression a few times, and it usually ended with somebody dead. Carlos must have been shocked at the pressure crushing his neck, the muscles of which looked like mature tree roots, because he nodded. Unmistakable fear crossed his face.
“When I say knock it off, you knock it off, understand?”
“But he—”
“He’s a LifeEnder; you’re not.”
A sharp turn that could have buckled the plane’s landing gear stopped the conversation as it threw us sideways. Commercial aircraft flashed past the windows on our right as we passed them on the taxiway. No more than 40 yards to our left was the Caribbean Sea. The plane started bumping as the left wheel skirted the edge of the taxiway onto a crushed coral buffer ten feet wide. I wasn’t scared, death holds no fear for me, but lingering and painful third degree burns over most of my body was a different story. Our pilot really was nuts.
Once at the foot of the east-west runway, Cevdet turned sharply again, and again without slowing down. The plane yawed hard left, and I visualized the landing gear bending underneath my butt right before snapping. Once again thrown around, Nathan whined and I stroked his head, and by some miracle of engineering, the landing gear withstood the strain.
Cevdet straightened out on the runway as the sunlight of mid-morning reflected off the mirror-black wings, filling my vision with purple spots and my eyes with tears. Flashes of blue appeared on our left as constables’ cars raced across the grass infield to cut us off, as if a jetliner pilot could jam on the brakes and skid to a stop. Rather than plow into them, Cevdet firewalled the throttle and the jet leapt forward like a Belgian Malinois on the scent of something dead.
Pressed back in my seat, half-blind and buffeted as the rate of airflow over the wings increased, through my peripheral vision I watched us pass an Airbus A320 which was also taking off. I flashed back to the movie The Battle of Britain where two Spitfires took off side by side, only these were massive jetliners, not single-seat fighters. I hoped for their sakes they could also avoid the idiot who ordered the cops onto the runway. Our landing gear left the ground seconds before theirs did, leaving that pilot to struggle in the turbulence left by our jet wash instead of the other way around.
“What if they send fighters after us?” Carlos yelled over the scream of the engines.
One Shot stared at him with no expression for several seconds, which I knew from experience meant Are you really that stupid?
“They don’t have an air force,” I replied, more than happy to put the lumpy asshole in his place. “Just some helicopters.”
“Thanks,” he said, with a sarcastic tone that meant fuck off. “Next time I don’t ask you, don’t answer.”
We locked eyes, and I pointed at him.
“Anything happens to my dog, and you’re a dead man.”
“I’d love to see you try.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” One Shot said. “That’s why you’re not a Shooter yet; you’re too stupid to recognize who to be afraid of.”
Chapter 9
We had barely left the ground when all the windows closed, and a series of recessed LEDs flicked on to light the interior. Once our severe angle of climb leveled out, Cevdet made a series of sharp turns that were designed to either throw off my sense of direction, or elude any pursuit, but since I knew for a fact that the Jamaican Air Wing only had rotary-wing aircraft, the second reason made no sense. Therefore, the elaborate charade was for my benefit. Curiouser and curiouser.
That’s when a small, very shapely brunette wearing an LEI flight uniform emerged from the cockpit. The whiteness of her teeth contrasted against the olive hue of her face. I put her at five feet tall in heels and maybe a hundred pounds. She knelt beside my chair and I thought, Now, this is service. Looking for a way to get Nathan off my lap, I stopped when I heard her cooing. She wasn’t there for me.
Scratching behind Nathan’s ear, her expression must have mirrored mine when I first saw Dawn, because she was smitten. Nor did Nathan object to her touching him. As she ran her fingertips along his upper lip, Nathan closed his eyes and made what must have been a dog’s version of a cat’s purr.
“Poor boy,” she said.
; “I’ll be all right now,” I said. That drew an expression every heterosexual male in the world would recognize, one that meant You’ve got to be kidding. “You have a name?”
“Isra. It means Nocturnal Journey.”
“I’ll bet it does.”
“Go take a shower,” One Shot said, “before she kills you. Fresh clothes are in the closet.”
“She wouldn’t hurt a fly,” I said.
“Just like every other dumbass,” he said, “you’re too stupid to recognize danger, too. How did you survive this long without me saving your ass every five minutes? If you were on her list, you’d look her up and down, lick your lips, and go out grinning.”
My grin faded when I realized that I was grinning.
“You’re a Shooter?” I said to the top of Isra’s head.
She lifted her eyebrows and glanced at me for the first time, nodding.
Oh fuck.
She was a Shooter all right, I could see it now in the coldness of her eyes. How could I have missed that? But of course, I knew the answer; I missed it because she used her body to make me focus on how best to get her clothes off and not how best to keep her from killing me. I missed it because I ignored the red tint to her otherwise green aura. I missed it for the same reason who knew how many men had died while staring into those angelic eyes? A lot was my guess, and apparently I was as bad at spotting dangerous women as they were.
The shower had thick, plush towels with the LEI logo, expensive shampoo, and plenty of hot water. A toothbrush and toothpaste in plastic had been laid out for me, along with shaving cream and a razor. Once I was cleaned up, I opened the closet and stopped short, a Brooks Brothers suit hung there, charcoal with thin, dark gray stripes, along with a white shirt and patterned red tie. A pair of polished black Cole Haan shoes sat on the floor with dark gray socks tucked into the right shoe. The instant I saw the ensemble I knew it would fit me perfectly, since it was mine.
The Trashman Page 8