Time for another drink.
And then, what the hell, go out to work. Better than sitting here alone in the dark with a bottle of tequila and a .45.
***
“Seen enough?” Marcus said.
“Hours ago.”
“Time spent in reconnaissance is never time wasted.”
“I saw that movie.”
“The one with Charley Sheen?”
“Har, har, har.”
“Lead on, SEAL. I like the way you crawl.”
They quietly stowed the optics in dark canvas drag bags, then made their way down the hill, slowly and stealthily crawling till they were on the far side of the hill away from the sprawling farm house. Stood, and walked quickly through the brush. They didn’t need the AN-PVS-5s they carried; the almost full moon shed more than enough light, and they had already cleared their egress trail before they had set up. They were silent, pausing every five to eight steps for a heartbeat or so to listen, to hear if there were any footsteps or rustling brush or hushed voices, and then continued. It took them almost forty five minutes to make their way back to the pull out where their Dodge Ram was parked. Discipline won out over the desire to snipe at each other; not a word was exchanged until they were in the truck, the engine running, and they were wiping their faces with baby wipes.
“I’m too old for this shit,” Marcus said.
“What do you think?” Joe said.
“Hmm. Won’t be a cake walk. But not insurmountable. Wish we had better intel about the layout inside. She’s only got eight shooters, and the two guys that do all the heavy lifting. So say ten. We’ve got six, but we have superior firepower. And we’re better looking. So I say we stealth in close and hit them long hard and continuous.”
“I don’t think we should do it that way.”
“So what the fuck else is new, Joe? You got a better idea, kick it out.”
“I think we should stealth in, take them out quietly, do it suppressed instead of heavy. That way we don’t run the risk of the people the next farm over hearing and calling the sheriff. Then we got plenty of time to clean out their warehouse, and if we leave some bodies to do the lifting, it’ll go even faster.”
Marcus considered this. “You mean kill them later?”
“If at all. They’re in this for the bank. Make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
“You know, for a guy who’s never done nothing but swim and watch movies, you come up with some good ideas. We’ll run it by D and Jimmy, see what they got to say.”
“How come Jimmy don’t play with us on our game?”
Marcus shrugged. “Man goes his own way. That’s his business. I’m glad to have him take my back any time.”
“You got history with him?”
“No. We been to some of the same schools, played in some of the same sewers. He’s good people, just making his way differently.”
“What the fuck is he doing bouncing drunks?”
Marcus shrugged. “Not my problem.”
He turned the truck in the direction of Lake City, glowing in the distance beneath the moon.
“Moon’s coming full, my friend.”
***
“Eight ball in the side pocket,” Dee said. She leaned over the table, stroking the cue between thumb and forefinger slowly and lasciviously, then bridged the cue and rapped the cue ball sharply. The eight ball cracked into the side pocket, and she slowly straightened, every man’s gaze shifting from her ass and legs to her proud breasts and flat belly. “Pay up, cowboy.”
The lanky machinist in the straw cowboy hat laughed and shook his head, put a handful of wrinkled bills on the stack beside her.
“Guess I got took in a big way,” he said.
“You play, you pay, big boy,” Dee said. She leaned over and brushed her lips against his, her nipples brushing his arm. “Come back when you got some more money, honey.”
He strode off, his face red.
“So who’s next?” Dee said.
“You should give the boys a rest,” Deon said. He was leaning against the wall, watching the show. The other men laughed. She wasn’t getting any more takers. Dee looked him up and down, then picked up the stash of cash and riffled through it. At least a couple of hundred bucks in two hours. Not bad.
“You want to play?” Dee said.
“No, not my game,” Deon said. “I’ll buy you a drink, though.”
“Sure, handsome. Where’d you get that accent?” She put her cue back in the rack, struck a pose in front of him, hip cocked, fist on hip.
“Africa. South Africa.”
“I loved that movie!” she gushed. She tucked her hands around his arm and steered him back towards the table he’d been at. “You be Robert Redford and I’ll be Meryl Streep, okay?”
It was a good arm, she thought. Lean and very hard, not the bulky show muscle you got with a lot of gym rats in LA, but the long muscles of someone who earned his strength in doing something with his hands besides jerking off, pumping weights and injecting steroids. She bumped against something on the left side, just over the hip bone, a good sized pistol from the feel of it, primary? Maybe a secondary or a back up.
She steered him back to his seat, waited till he pulled the chair out for her, settled herself pertly in place, crossed her legs and pumped one foot restlessly.
“What would you like?”
“I’m warm. A beer, I think. Corona. Reminds me of the sun!”
Thieu came over, gave her the look. Brought back a beer.
“Cheers,” Deon said.
“Chin chin!” Dee said. Sipped her beer. And debated with herself about when and how to kill her date.
***
Deon and his new lady love left early, not quite midnight. The witching hour. I watched them go, New Girl hanging on his arm, laughing at all the right places, breast shoved firmly against him. Deon with his usual huge grin, a wink to me as he went by.
“Night, oke.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I said.
“I bet that leaves the door wide open,” New Girl said, winking at me.
“Yeah,” I said.
She shrugged. “Next time, honey. You got to step up you want to get to first base.”
“Sure.”
I stood out on the sidewalk, looked up at the night sky. Watched them disappear around the corner. Took out my cell phone and tapped out a quick text message: WATCH YOURSELF. SOMETHING NOT RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE. Sent it.
Wondered.
Back inside on the stool, I felt for what was missing in the ambience, the feeling of the place. Something had gone out of it, something dangerous. Because that woman was not what she seemed.
I felt someone coming, turned to see.
Nina.
And she was hammered.
“Hey Jimmy,” she said. “How you doing?”
“How you doing? You been at it someplace else?”
She shook her head no. “Drinking alone. Bad habit I got. Looking for some company. You off yet?”
“Not till 2, Nina. But I can take a little break in place. You want something…maybe some coffee?”
She considered this. “Wide awake drunk? Probably a good idea, Jimmy. Coffee, black. IV drip.”
I laughed. “We can do that.”
I got her coffee in a giant to-go cup from the kitchen, almost a quart’s worth. She pulled a stool up beside me and held the cup between her hands.
“Two of us on the door tonight, huh?” she said.
“Best protected place in the city.”
“No shit.”
“How you doing, Nina? Don’t seem yourself tonight.”
“Very observant. That’s something I like about you. You always see what’s going on. Don’t always say something about it, but you always see what’s going on.”
“That’s a blessing and a curse. As you already know,” I said.
Nina took a long pull from her coffee cup, winced as the hot coffee burned her lip. “I already know.
” She wrinkled her nose at the taste. “This is awful.”
“It’s free.”
“There’s that.” She sipped again. “Tell me something, Jimmy.”
“What?”
“What you doing in this place?”
“Working.”
“Don’t be cute. You know what I mean. Why this place? Why you?”
“Kinda personal, isn’t that?”
“We’ve killed together. That’s more intimate than fucking. Don’t you think?”
I was struck by how funny my life was. I never thought I’d be having a conversation like this with a beautiful, broken nosed cop on a bar stool in a bar in Lake City. The last time I’d had this conversation had been in the team room in the ‘Stan…
“It is more intimate. That’s something civilians don’t understand.”
She nodded sagely. “That’s right. They’re not in The Club.”
The Club.
Yeah.
That’s something they don’t tell you in the Police Academy, or in basic training. How killing together, trusting your life to another killer in the moment, is an act requiring the same kind of trust to be naked and vulnerable in front of another human in the act of love. Perverse, isn’t it? That’s why civilians don’t understand the bond between those of us in The Club. Why we would do anything for our brothers, or our sisters, in arms. Because the bond of blood in The Club is more than anything, more than anyone outside will ever understand.
So she deserved a straight answer.
“Because it’s easy,” I said. “I don’t want it to be complicated. I want it to be easy. I come in here, I keep the peace, have a drink, have some laughs. Keep it simple, keep it light.”
She stared into my eyes, and for the first time I noticed the flecks in her hazel eyes; in her left eye was one that was star shaped, a black fleck that distracted me. She was so beautiful…and the ruin of that nose made the rest of her seem almost angelic in comparison.
“What happened that you have to have simple now?” she said.
Such a simple question.
And impossible to answer.
I sighed. Thought of the mountains in Afghanistan, the bodies spilled in the snow, across the rocks…
“It’s a choice, Nina. Spend enough time, and maybe you won’t want the fast and the furious anymore. Maybe you’ll settle for simple. Quiet and easy.”
“Your life isn’t so quiet and easy, Jimmy. You got your fingers in some things that aren’t so quiet and easy. You still looking for the edge, Jimmy? Once you get that taste, it’s not so easy to leave it alone, is it? Thumping a drunk, having some laughs, banging a good looking stripper…it’s not enough, is it?”
The heat and anger in her voice took me off guard. She was pinning me with those eyes now.
“You working now, Nina?”
“Yeah. Tell me about what you’re into outside the bar, Jimmy.”
“Not a fucking thing.”
I give as good as I get when I’m pressed.
She looked away, drank more coffee. Her shoulders rose and fell with harsh breathing.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m having a night. You’re just an available target.”
“Somebody as handy with a shooter as you might consider staying home, cooling off,” I said lightly. “Wouldn’t do to go around killing people, even though they might deserve it. Might even be asking for it.”
“The bosses frown on that,” Nina agreed. “Though there is no shortage of people who are only alive because it’s against the law to kill them.”
“Now that’s an interesting thought.”
“Fuck you, Jimmy.”
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t have to do some work here and send you on your way, do I?”
She looked at me, incredulous, then laughed. “I’d like to see that shit.”
“You’d be a handful, that’s for sure.”
“More than a handful, boy friend. I got more than a handful.”
For a moment the heat off her was like an oven door, briefly opened and then slammed shut.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” I said.
“Why not? We’re practically fuck buddies.”
I let that slide. “What’s up with the nobody comes near me thing?”
She touched her nose, and then tapped her elbow against her pistol, hidden under her leather jacket. “You don’t know me well enough to ask.”
“Who does?”
“Nobody.” She stood up, set the unfinished coffee down. “Thanks for the coffee. See you around. Tell Lizzy I said hey. Me and her, we’re going to catch a drink some night. I like your woman.”
“She’s not my woman. She’s not anybody’s woman.”
“That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say, Jimmy Wylde. Remember you said that.”
I watched her march out, and wondered who was going to pay the toll on her dark highway tonight.
Chapter Forty Two
This South African had endurance, and that was always a good thing in Dee’s mind. She’d got off twice, and him once, and they were back at it again, and he didn’t even need any corn flakes to get him up again. For a guy who was in his forties, maybe creeping up on fifty, he could rock and roll in the sheets department. She eased herself back on top of him, reached down and grabbed his cock and eased it in, wiggled around till he fit just right, then started to ride him, leaning forward, her hands on his shoulders, his hands on her ass…
Damn! This boy could ride.
It was going to be a shame to kill his hard ass.
She felt the tension roiling in her lower belly, and her careful rocking became faster and faster, frantic, and then she dug her fingernails into his thin hard chest as she bucked on him, hard and harder…
After, lay back and stared up at the ceiling, the two of them side by side, not touching, body heat radiating between them. She let herself bask in the glow. His place was a small suburban house in a nice neighborhood. Sam Suburbanite. Neatly furnished, comfortable in an ascetic bachelor basic. No sign of weaponry or of his work except for a couple of Janes books on the coffee table. She had the same ones in her work room at home. Even the art work on the walls looked as though it could have been rented. Maybe it was.
He rolled out of the bed, paused, walked naked out into the hallway. He was very lean, no fat on him at all, just flat muscle, nothing to his ass it just dropped straight down from his back to his legs. Interesting scars. Shrapnel on his lower leg, it looked like, two definite gunshot wounds on his abdomen and a long surgical incision, couple of miscellaneous pockings, a big discolored patch on his back like a burn or a scrape.
Deon came back in, holding a glass of water wrapped in a paper towel, handed it to her.
“Thanks!” she said. Drank it off in one long swallow, handed it back. “More, please.”
He grinned and walked away, brought her another glass.
“You do this very well,” she said. “House broken and all. Who trained you?”
He laughed. “You’re a good one, girly.”
“Girly? I like that. I am surely girly.”
“Yes,” he said. “You surely are.”
“Do I get to stay, or are you the love em and leave em type?”
He thought about that. “You might use me again if you stay.”
“Oh, I’ll definitely use you. Use you right up.”
“Then of course you can stay. I’m never one to pass up a challenge.”
He eased back onto the bed, moved with an economy of motion that reminded Dee of James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven; he moved with an absolute economy, nothing wasted. And stillness. He had that in spades. In Dee’s experience, only really excellent athletes, and experienced killers, had that kind of stillness in repose.
He was a fine bedroom athlete, and she had no doubt that he was an experienced killer.
It was funny how her mind worked, she thought. She often had sex with her targets, as no one was more vulnerable than a fresh
ly fucked man who thought he had the upper hand all across the board. She relished the memory of some of the faces, when that soft contented or casually arrogant look of the satiated male morphed, for just an instant, into sheer terror as the realization of their death sank in. That’s why she liked the knife so much. Sudden sting, and they clapped their hand to the gaping mouth that appeared beneath their chin, and she ducked the arterial spray and watched with interest as the life faded out of them with their blood. Or sticking them was good -- penetration back. The truth was, she didn’t hate them; just mostly didn’t care one way or another. Shooting was fast and efficient, but she hadn’t brought one of her suppressed pistols with her. There was a Walther TPH with a Gemtech suppressor in her kit bag back at the hotel, but tonight she was going light. Only a Hideaway Knife tucked into the fold of her thong, which she had palmed before Deon got that far. He’d be a handful with just a knife, but then, Dee thrived on challenges.
But that wasn’t what was on her mind.
She liked this man.
She’d date him if she didn’t have to kill him. And she sure liked him better than Irina. She toyed, albeit briefly, with the thought of offering him a buy out. That wouldn’t be good for business, and she’d taught herself, God knows, how to be a businesswoman and stick to the plan instead of being swayed by what her pussy wanted. Or had it in it lately.
So onto logistics. Pretty simple -- wait till he was out, cut his throat, step back and watch him bleed out. Go out to her car and get the crush proof can of gas out of the trunk, sprinkle liberally over the body, light and leave. That would take care of her DNA trace, not that she worried too much about it. While the TV shows made much of it, there still was no such thing as a nationwide database of DNA from unsolved murders, and her cover profile was such that she’d never get in the database. Well, never say never, but say it’s extremely unlikely.
Well, kill him now or kill him later?
That was the question.
She laughed, and he turned to look at her, questioning.
“Just girl think,” she said.
“So tell,” he said.
“I’m just wondering…your house doesn’t say much about you. Most people, they have things, personal things, that tell a little story, or a big one, about themselves. Your place, no offense, it could be anybody’s house. A guy’s for sure, but any guy’s. And you're not any guy. Do you just rent this place furnished or what?”
Johnny Wylde Page 23
