Mark for Blood (Mason Dixon Thrillers Book 1)

by Nick Thacker

  A young gun. Even better.

  “Listen,” I said. “I get it. You’re new on the job, but you’re good. You’ll go places. Won’t take long. But you gotta put up with this bullshit for a few years, prove yourself. You know?”

  “Again, sir, I —“

  “Save it, pal. Get your fancy smartphone out and call your boss. Tell them I need a favor.”

  He looked at me blankly, not moving a muscle. I waited for it — the telltale sign of shifting around to grab a handgun, or a flicker to the rearview mirror to signal backup I hadn’t seen coming — but nothing happened.

  “Name’s Mason Dixon,” I said. “Funny name, not-so-funny guy. I’m going to tell you again. I need a favor.”

  “What — what can I help you with?”

  I looked at him like he had just landed in the middle of a street in a spaceship. “Shit, kid, you serious? You think I don’t know who you are? I’m not buying whatever ‘undercover cop here to help the citizens’ crap you’re dishing out. I. Need. A. Favor. Get that phone out, make it happen.”

  “Mr. Dixon, my orders — “

  “Are to watch the house. Stupid, and a waste of my tax dollars. You know it, I know it. Nothing either of us can do about it, so I’d suggest you take a message and pass it up the chain for me.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll call Truman and tell him a toddler is throwing a tantrum. Won’t do much, I admit, but come on, man, you really want that shit in your file?”

  He stared me down from behind his stereotypical glasses, his jaw clenching and unclenching every few seconds. I smiled, throwing him my best I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-your-excuses glance I could muster up. Finally, after a few more seconds of excruciating acting, I exhaled when I saw him relax.

  “Okay, I’ll pass it along,” he said. “But no promises. I’m just the messenger.”

  I nodded, grinning.

  “What’s the favor?”

  My grin turned back into a full-on smile, this time not trying to hide the excitement in my eyes.

  “I need to borrow your car.”

  42

  “THEY JUST GAVE IT TO you?”

  Joey was seated in the passenger seat of the Chrysler 300, admiring the interior. It was jet-black leather, and aside from a few scuff marks on the driver’s seat and a worn smudge line on the drive knob, it looked brand new.

  I knew better, but I was still impressed. The newer guys in the Bureau got the hand-me-downs from the seasoned veterans, and the guy I’d stumbled up to earlier today was most certainly a newer agent. If not for the way he handled me, I would have guessed it from the trumped-up surveillance mission he’d been assigned to.

  I’d all but confirmed that there had been four field agents assigned to this mission, at least on the ground. There might be a surveillance and reconnaissance van or hotel room somewhere nearby, or even a safe house for the tactical outfitting, briefing/debriefing, and general hangout, staffed by one or two more agents, but there were about four of them providing the front-line support. The FBI didn’t usually tail people the way they’d followed me, but typically surrounded people instead. They would use any number of agents depending on the location, level of surveillance needed, and density of population to keep a solid gaze on the mark.

  Since I figured there were four, that meant three of them were off checking out the Rayburn estate, making plans, and generally staying busy with their assignments. The rube I had encountered had either pulled the short straw or was, in fact, a newbie. Judging by his age, I guessed it was the latter.

  Which made his ride seem that much more impressive. It was outfitted with all the fancy upgrades the FBI liked to hide under the hood for their wheel artists, like the ability for the driver to flick off one or both headlights or brake lights at will, a built-in navigational computer, and heavy-duty bumpers for, I guess, heavy-duty bumping. I figured this had been commissioned as a serious follow vehicle at one time or another, so I assumed a closer inspection might even turn up aftermarket upgrades in the steering pump and radiator, and possibly brake lines.

  Joey simply seemed to be wowed by the cleanliness and shine of it all.

  “You know, if you just take care of your vehicle, it’ll look this nice,” I said.

  He glanced over at me. “Says the guy who got his totaled.”

  “We don’t know if it’s totaled yet,” I shot back. “Billy’s still got it in the shop. Could just need a new fender or two.”

  “Right. Anyway, they just gave this thing to you? What’d you have to do for them?”

  I shrugged. “Just called in a favor.”

  “You knew the guy? At the FBI? Or CIA?”

  I held up a hand. I had played the cards close to my chest, and I wasn’t trying to hide it from Joey that I knew someone at the Bureau, but I didn’t need to be playing twenty questions about it. I’d tell him, but on my time, not his.

  “Knew the guy’s boss, actually,” I said. “No big deal.”

  “I bet it was no big deal. You know someone with the Feds?” he asked again.

  I smirked. “Yeah, he was there a lifetime ago, but I know all the guys that used to work for him. One of them took his old position, and we’re, you know, friends, I guess. And fine — he wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “Him or his boss?”

  “Yeah.”

  Joey laughed, then slid a finger across the oiled, supple glove box compartment. “Pretty nice upgrade from mine, still. Hope we get it back in one piece.”

  “Why? They didn’t take a copy of my license and insurance.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. So how’s this work, then? We just… use it? And bring it back when we’re done?”

  “It’s government, which means this whole deal’s probably got a thousand strings attached to it that we’ll never know about because all of them will be pulled opposite directions at the same time and the pullers will start fighting about it.”

  “So… you’re going to keep it?”

  I threw my head back and laughed. “No. I wish. They’ll impound it for a year before they even start digging around the debrief files and try to figure out where to point the blame finger first. It’ll be two years, minimum, before that kid we ‘borrowed’ it from gets it back. There’s already civvy fingerprints all over the stupid thing, so they’ll probably consider burning it out and leaving it in Southside Chicago as a more efficient option.”

  “Wow,” Joey said. “Must have been a big favor you called in.”

  I threw the car into drive and pulled away from the curb. The kid who’d driven it across the street from Marley’s was already long gone, heading south toward the rest of town to wait for a new ride.

  “Just had to explain to him how much more use we’d get out of it than the guy driving it before.”

  I did a quick turnaround in front of Marley’s and sped up, not wanting to linger any longer than necessary in front of the dead man’s home and place of business. I shuddered, then sped up.

  “Where we headed now?”

  I was pointing south, the direction of our final destination on Hunting Island but opposite the highway that led out of Edisto Beach, but I had one more stop before we made our way to Rayburn’s. We passed Joey’s car in the lot of a gas station, where he’d dumped it after running a few errands himself. He’d met me at the FBI vehicle just as I had gotten the confirmation from the agent.

  “My place.”

  Joey froze in his seat, and when I looked over at him I was surprised to see him staring back at me, wide-eyed.

  “You… you really do have a place?”

  I shook my head. “Why does everyone always do that? It’s not like I live in the bar.”

  “Well I figured it was either there or your car.”

  “No, Joey, I have a place. It’s an apartment.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the bar. You’ll see. Decent place actually, at least to me. Has everything I need, nothing more. But it’s no looker, and we�
��re only going in for a minute.”

  “Weapons?”

  I nodded. “Any preferences?”

  “Something that shoots straight.”

  I grinned. Joey had done some time in the Navy, but hadn’t enjoyed the menial work during the months between deployments. He would have gone all the way to the top if he’d stuck it out, since he was a fantastic worker and had enough of a wit to stay sane, but I understood where he was coming from. My own father had instilled in me the nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic at a very young age, yet took every opportunity to remind me that the Army was for men who didn’t know what they wanted in life. He had served a lifetime, but was mostly disappointed with the lackadaisical effort the brass put into the management and logistics of it all, and according to him, it had slid downhill the last couple of decades.

  So it was even more of a surprise to me when he was livid about my decision to refuse to join up following high school and opt instead for a business degree and the much more exciting life of a bartender. About halfway through the degree and halfway toward bankruptcy I decided I needed some help paying for my education.

  My father was nowhere to be found, so I joined the Army.

  This, for some reason still unknown to me, pissed him off even more than when I told him after high school I wouldn’t enlist. It wasn’t the first schism we’d had in our relationship, but it seemed to be the final one before we’d simply stopped talking altogether for about ten years.

  I looked over at Joey. I knew nothing of this kid’s life, really, except that he was a veteran as much as I was, part of a system that carried with it more history and patriotism than reality and truth. He was Navy, I was Army, but we both had the same chips on our shoulders that had led us to chase a slower, more controlled life. I knew he had lived in Charleston for some time, doing sales at an Internet or marketing firm, or both — I didn’t know anything about that crap — but he’d lost interest in the mundanity after a year. He visited my bar once or twice, then just kept coming back, claiming my Old Fashioned was the best in the state. I didn’t believe him, because I didn’t believe anyone under the age of forty would even know what a real Old Fashioned was, but he kept ordering them and I kept serving them, until the day I ran into him cooking at a stand on the beach.

  I wondered about the kid’s father — did he have one? Or did he have one like I had one, a guy milling about doing whatever the hell he wanted without a care in the world for the wife he left or the kids he’d estranged? I suddenly wanted to know.

  We were driving to my house, a brief stopover before we started the battle in the war I’d signed us up for, two ex-military wash-ups who knew how to make a drink and flip a breaded fish fillet better than we knew how to plan an infiltration and take a target.

  I had my skill set, and I knew it well. Joey had proven himself worthy time and again in specific, isolated circumstances, but this was another beast. We didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into, except that it required four on-the-ground agents of the United States government and countless others in bunkers spread out around the country keeping track remotely. We weren’t sure if this was an easy smash-and-grab or a suicide mission.

  “Joey,” I said, my voice calm, nearly a whisper. “This might be… a tricky situation.”

  “Knock it off, Dixon,” he said. “I’ve been in some sticky spots before.”

  “I know,” I said, “it’s just… this might be different. The rules of engagement are, uh, well they may not matter much.”

  “When have they ever mattered.”

  “You ever see live-fire action in the Navy?” I asked.

  “I was mostly on bases, working remotely. Not too often was I on a ship, and no, I never saw anything nasty while I served.”

  “So this is going to be new for —“

  “While I was serving, I said.”

  I looked over at him in the passenger seat and raised an eyebrow. “So you weren’t always a goody-two-shoes, then? That what you’re saying?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  I nodded, turning again to look out the windshield. I figured as much, honestly. Someone like Joey didn’t just happen to be comfortable with the work we did. From day one he’d been at ease with the way I operated, and what I was doing. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, and he certainly didn’t try to justify anything one way or another, a sure sign of someone not quite ready.

  He had always had a certain coolness about him, especially when things behind the bar got rough. During scuffles he was a good man to rely on, and I felt myself leaning more and more on his abilities lately.

  But I had always assumed that whatever skills he had he’d earned in the Navy. It was an easy assumption, as most of the guys I knew who could act that way under pressure had a history in the military. After a few years of the disorganization they subjected you to, combined with the mindless drone of daily grunt work, you started to change your opinions about a lot of things, like what you cared about. They have a way of breaking you, and even if you don’t stay there and end up a lifer, you leave changed. After enough jogging up and down a hill and pulling yourself on your elbows through miles of barb-wire infested mud, you feel pain differently.

  For me, I started caring less about my own safety and more about the safety of the people around me, and I started looking at my own life as something temporary — because it was. I figured something similar had happened to Joey, but maybe that had all taken place at some point in his life before he’d joined up. Maybe it was a daddy-issue thing, even. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to ask.

  “Well listen, Joey. I, uh, really appreciate your help. If you ever, you know, need anything…”

  “You want to talk about our feelings now?”

  “No,” I said, “I just mean… I’m here. If — “

  He laughed. “Thanks, boss. I got it. I’m good, and I’ll be even better once we get those assholes who took your girl.”

  “My… okay, Joey, time to cut that out. She’s not my —“

  He was grinning from ear to ear, so I shut up and focused on the road.

  “We’re here,” I said, probably a little too gruffly.

  43

  I COULD SEE HIM CALCULATING, trying to price it out in his mind. It was a habit of gun people, and it was an easy way to tell if people knew their weaponry or not. Joey, it seemed, knew quite a bit.

  He frowned, just as he should, when his eyes landed on my Colt Single Action Army, undoubtedly shocked and probably a bit impressed.

  “That what I think it is?” he asked.

  I nodded. “But it’s a 2nd generation. If it were 1st, it’d be locked up tight somewhere, I wouldn’t even show it to you.

  He laughed.

  “Wow,” Joey said, looking at the other gear and weapons I had laid out on the table. “You’ve got all this just sitting around your house?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. I took it all out before I went out to find our ride. Can’t help doing an inventory every now and then, and since we can’t take them all, I figured it’d be nice to give the other ones some love.”

  “I’m fine with that,” Joey said, already taking apart a Taurus 9mm on the edge of my coffee table.

  I had a sparse setup in my apartment, out of both necessity and desire. Not much furniture, and what was there wasn’t much to look at. I spent so much time in the bar, and when I wasn’t down there I was sleeping. Didn’t have a need for a television, as I hated watching or reading anything those idiots called ‘news,’ and my preferred method of entertainment was talking to the oldies and locals, and making up stories about the visitors and judging them on their drink selections.

  So the gun-to-furniture ratio in my house was quite high, but I still had a lot of pieces. Joey was visibly impressed, and even more so after I’d dumped it all out on the coffee table. The table was about six feet long and two feet wide, and it was pretty much covered with weapons and ammunition. Loads of pistols
— I tended to collect those, everything from antiques to conversation starters — but also an Uzi, a handful of working grenades, and two coveted rifles.

  Joey put down the Taurus and picked up a Luger. He held it with the same care and attention to detail as I imagined the German soldier who’d originally held it did, and I watched him for a moment, like a father watching a son.

  “Well,” he said. “What are we going with?”

  “This isn’t a war,” I said, “and we’re looking at four, possibly five bogies. Bigger guns don’t always mean bigger results.”

  “So keep it reasonable?”

  I nodded. “Keep it reasonable. Handguns, maybe a rifle that we’ll use for scoping out the mansion and seeing if there’s an easy shot into the house. Might not even use that, but I’ll pack it anyway.”

  “Will you recognize the guys that took Hannah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’ll be holding guns. Probably looking suspicious. Mustaches too. And frowning a lot.”

  Joey laughed. “We’d be so lucky.”

  “Yeah, I’m not counting on it either, but I’ve seen weirder stuff.”

  I poked around the items on the table until I found what I was looking for. A Sig Sauer P226, worn just the right way and engineered as if it was made for my own left hand. I hefted it, passing it back and forth in my hands a few times, then I loaded a magazine and pushed it into place. Joey followed suit with the Taurus, then we spent another few minutes filling extra magazines and shoving them into our pockets. When we finished that, I went into my bedroom closet and returned to the living room holding two leather chest holsters. Each had attached carrying cases for five or six more magazines, so I tossed one to Joey and we began filling those, too.

  “Wow, you really do have an arsenal here.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit of a hobby at this point. My granddad and I used to camp all the time, and he would always be buying new gear. Tents, stoves, lanterns, knives, you name it. When I got old enough, we started buying guns together, and I guess I was never able to kick the habit.”