by Matt Rogers
Monsters
The King & Slater Series Book Eleven
Matt Rogers
Copyright © 2021 by Matt Rogers
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Onur Aksoy.
www.onegraphica.com
Contents
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Books by Matt Rogers
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part I
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
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part II
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Afterword
Afterword
Books by Matt Rogers
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Meet Ruby Nazarian, a government operative for a clandestine initiative known only as Lynx. She’s in Monaco to infiltrate the entourage of Aaron Wayne, a real estate tycoon on the precipice of dipping his hands into blood money. She charms her way aboard the magnate’s superyacht, but everyone seems suspicious of her, and as the party ebbs onward she prepares for war…
Maybe she’s paranoid.
Maybe not.
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Books by Matt Rogers
THE JASON KING SERIES
Isolated (Book 1)
Imprisoned (Book 2)
Reloaded (Book 3)
Betrayed (Book 4)
Corrupted (Book 5)
Hunted (Book 6)
THE JASON KING FILES
Cartel (Book 1)
Warrior (Book 2)
Savages (Book 3)
THE WILL SLATER SERIES
Wolf (Book 1)
Lion (Book 2)
Bear (Book 3)
Lynx (Book 4)
Bull (Book 5)
Hawk (Book 6)
THE KING & SLATER SERIES
Weapons (Book 1)
Contracts (Book 2)
Ciphers (Book 3)
Outlaws (Book 4)
Ghosts (Book 5)
Sharks (Book 6)
Messiahs (Book 7)
Hunters (Book 8)
Fathers (Book 9)
Tyrants (Book 10)
Rogues (Book 11)
LYNX SHORTS
Blood Money (Book 1)
BLACK FORCE SHORTS
The Victor (Book 1)
The Chimera (Book 2)
The Tribe (Book 3)
The Hidden (Book 4)
The Coast (Book 5)
The Storm (Book 6)
The Wicked (Book 7)
The King (Book 8)
The Joker (Book 9)
The Ruins (Book 10)
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Prologue
1
A hot evening wind blew up Hyde Street, carrying dank and rotten smells with it.
To Jack, the stench was all-encompassing.
He couldn’t move like he used to. Cartilage wears away, inflammation flares with each misplaced step, and before you know it you’re old and geriatric and the world’s passed you by. If not for his success in the boardroom, he’d have been forced to grapple with the inevitability of ageing a long time ago. His career kept him on his toes, kept his mind sharp, but soon that would go, too, and there’d be nothing but family and friends.
Retirement wasn’t something he wanted to consider yet.
He shuffled through the Tenderloin as purple dusk stretched over San Francisco, and it wasn’t just the knee pain that made him grimace with each step. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his contact wanted to meet in the grimiest and most crime-infested neighbourhood in the city. The guy was doing him a favour, though, so Jack wasn’t about to protest. He stepped gingerly round a homeless man passed out on the sidewalk, an empty needle still hanging from the injection site in his forearm. The overwhelming scent of urine rolled off the vagrant’s clothes, swept up by the wind. Jack pressed a hand over his mouth, patting down his silver moustache and beard, and kept walking.
He recited what he would say when he arrived. He’d written the speech down on his notepad the night before, but the pad was tucked away in his jacket. Longhand was a habit he’d carried into Silicon Valley and would’ve labelled him a relic of the past if he hadn’t been doing it since he was thirty. Now sixty-seven, the practice finally matched his age.
The night occupants were out on the 300 block when he arrived, a stretch of Hyde Street notorious for its destitution. The junkie with the needle in his arm had been an outlier at the edge of the Tenderloin, but here on 300 it was a sea of poverty and heroin. Jack understood the importance of keeping a low profile, but his contact had gone a little overboard. It wasn’t that his surroundings bothered him. Throw a stone through any high-rise in San Francisco and you’d hit a rich tech guy who likened the homeless to vermin, but Jack had never entertained that stance. He was known by board members past and present as a teddy bear, a passionate director with a heart of gold. Instead of degrading anyone, he looked for the explanation behind actions, using them to devise a way forward, a solution.
Tonight’s meeting was one of the rare situations where he just couldn’t find a clean fix.
Circumstances had forced him down a messier road.
The nature of the meet required him to be outwardly cold and callous
, a world away from his usual compassionate demeanour, and he looked up at the address he’d been given with a face like thunder. A dreary apartment building, old and subsidised. Five vagrants congregated together on the sidewalk in front, mutually lost in a morphine wonderland. Jack could slap them in the face and they still wouldn’t know where they were.
If his contact had come here to maximise witnesses, he wouldn’t find competent ones.
Jack moved wraithlike through a lobby lit by only a couple of brilliant white bulbs, creating an entwinement of glare and shadow. He took a groaning elevator up three floors. It deposited him with a hiss of decompressing metal in a musty corridor that carried the same smells as the street below, only less oppressive. Faint bodily fluids and odour. Far from the gleaming high-rises with sparkling water on tap. He looked down as he passed a skeleton of a woman in her thirties who glared at him like his expensive clothes were a sin in these parts, which they probably were. He knocked on a door.
It opened a crack, closed again, then swung wide.
Jack hesitated before crossing the threshold. ‘You’re Finn?’
A young man in his twenties faced him, a high hairline crowning a beak-like face. He nodded once. ‘From The Chronicle.’
He didn’t look like a reporter. Jack had seen it all, and could always pick up on that indescribable hard edge. Education wasn’t top priority in the start-up world — big ideas and grit usually trumped an MBA — so he’d worked closely with men and women from all walks of life. Finn gave off an aura that he was no stranger to conflict, but that wasn’t cause for concern. An investigative journalist who took stories that required meeting secretly in the dark heart of the Tenderloin wasn’t going to be made of marshmallows.
Jack stepped inside, walked past the guy, found himself in a small studio apartment with windows facing Hyde Street. Or, at least, they would be, if the shades weren’t drawn. It was so dark in the main space it was hard to even make out the furniture. The only light came from an adjacent bedroom.
Jack spoke to the empty apartment as he walked in. ‘How long have you been with The—?’
His voice died as he heard the soft crinkle underfoot, realising he was standing on a plastic tarp.
He whirled around, a twinge in his outer knee masked by panic.
Finn had shut the door. A gun had appeared, only its silhouette visible in the dark. He said, ‘I’m not with The Chronicle.’
‘What…?’
‘Are you armed?’
Jack tried to hide his terror. ‘I-I—’
‘Show me you don’t have a gun.’ He said it like he might let Jack go.
Jack’s hands shook as he stripped off his jacket, turned out its pockets, pulled his tucked shirt out from under the belt, twirled on the spot. He was manic with desperation. ‘This isn’t right…’
Finn said, ‘Isn’t it?’
‘You expect me to talk to you now?’ Jack didn’t understand that his brain was glossing over the earlier revelation, trying to keep the blissful ignorance. Maybe Finn was a reporter who didn’t play by the book. Please, God…
Finn said, ‘I don’t expect you to do anything.’
He put his gun down on a side table when he realised Jack’s possessions consisted of his phone, wallet, and keys.
Then he lifted fingerless combat sports gloves off the same table and slipped them on.
Jack’s chest rose and fell. ‘What are you—?’
‘Don’t want to break my hands.’
‘I’ll go,’ Jack said, his voice a whisper. ‘I’ll just go.’
Finn shook his head.
Jack was only a teddy bear to a point. Past that, he was the man who’d survived decades in Silicon Valley, like some dormant beast resided within. But he was old. It came with limitations.
He charged at the door, hoping to shove past Finn, hoping…
Finn caught him around the mid-section, lifted him above his own hips, then pivoted into a suplex-style slam. The impact — head-first on the cheap carpet under the plastic — broke Jack’s neck. He didn’t even know he was paralysed when he collapsed on his back, the shock was so sudden and all-encompassing. He couldn’t see. Too dark. Finn rained down punches with joints that snapped like pistons when he threw. He punched with the calibre of a professional boxer. It only took ten or twelve consecutive blows, all aided by gravity, to kill the old man.
Finn kept punching.
He’d kept it dark so he didn’t have to see the aftermath. When he finally rose, chest heaving as he sucked in air, he sensed wetness across the front of his shirt and pants. Serious blood splatter. One of his final blows had caved Jack’s face in. He’d felt bone give under the leather padding. There’s a misconception about gloves in combat sports — they’re not used to take force out of the punches, because they don’t. They’re to protect the fighter’s hands. He’d used MMA gloves, only eight ounces each, so the damage was egregious.
He didn’t touch the light switch. He pulled his phone out and took flash photos in the dark from different angles, his handiwork exposed to brilliant light for only a few short bursts. It was enough to make him sick. He messaged the photos off where they needed to go, tucked the phone away, took the gloves off, and made for the shower. There’d be a clean-up crew in later to take care of the mess.
Between gasps of air to replenish muscles now drained of lactic acid, he managed a quick sob.
Best to let it out here.
He only let himself cry when he was alone.
2
In Palo Alto, where status reigns supreme, the high-rise was a symbol of success.
Mary Böhm could remember the first time she laid eyes on Vitality+’s new offices on the eighteenth floor, the wonder she’d felt. She’d been with the start-up for four years now and wasn’t long detached from the days of grinding away in a rented studio space far from the glitz and glam of Palo Alto, its gloomy interior barely large enough for their six employees. Now she was one of fifty or sixty, but you get used to anything. This morning, as she hustled along the sidewalk toward the building, she didn’t even glance up at it.
Too preoccupied with wrapping up a call.
Her mother’s voice came from the phone pressed to her ear. ‘That sounds real nice, love.’
Catherine Böhm had a mid-Western accent with no trace of Mary’s slight German inflection. Catherine had never left the country, favouring the simple life (Mary wasn’t sure whether it was preference or habit), but she’d still managed to meet Walter Böhm, a German engineer who’d immigrated to Louisiana, and they somehow made it work. At least long enough to raise Mary, get her into a STEM degree at LSU, then they quietly went their separate ways. A textbook clean divorce. No mess, no fuss. Mary thanked her father’s precise, clinical nature for that. An engineer to the bones. She still wasn’t sure if he’d ever even experienced an emotion.
Her mother, on the other hand…
Mary said, ‘What is it? Something’s off. You don’t sound like you’re all there.’
A pause. Mary crossed the street, avoiding a trim cyclist on a carbon fibre bike. Catherine took a deep breath. ‘I got a call from your aunt.’
Mary winced, thankful that the expression didn’t make a sound. ‘How’s she doing?’
She wasn’t expecting to hear good things.
Catherine said, ‘That’s what rattled me. She sounds so different. Like she’s a whole new person. Y’know, one of these days I was expecting her to not answer the phone. I thought I’d see something in the news…’
‘She told you she’s different?’
‘No. Normal conversation. But she was upbeat. Happy. She asked questions. When’s the last time your aunt asked you a question?’
Mary said, ‘I haven’t spoken to your sister in months.’
She realised they were still doing it. Not using her name. She and her mother had started referring to her as “aunt” or “sister” around the same time, some kind of unconscious way to detach, bracing for the day she wouldn
’t pick up.
Catherine said, ‘Anyway, you should give her a call. I’m not imagining it.’
‘I will. Gotta go, mom. Just got to work.’
Another pause. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
Mary smiled in the shadow of the grand lobby. ‘Love you, Ma.’
She hung up. She hadn’t needed to go right away, but she needed to make another call before the elevators. Heels clicking on the marble floor, she swiped back to her contacts and touched a name: Jack.
