by Mark Nolan
Vigilante Assassin
Mark Nolan
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Nolan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To all the war dogs, police dogs, search and rescue dogs, service dogs … and their hard-working K-9 handlers. Thank you for your service.
Contents
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
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
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
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Email Signup
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Vigilante:
A person who seeks to avenge a crime by taking the law into his or her own hands.
—Black’s Law Dictionary
Pacific Heights, San Francisco
Laura Stephens awoke before dawn with a sense of deep foreboding. She reached out to her husband, but Gene wasn’t beside her.
She went to the kitchen and saw that he’d brewed a pot of coffee. She poured two cups and carried them to Gene’s study, thinking he might be in there trading stock options online. It would be good to have coffee and a few minutes of conversation alone with her man before they both went to work.
Gene wasn’t in the study, though the lights were on. Lauren smelled something unusual—something vaguely disturbing. She wasn’t sure what it could be or where it was coming from.
Had he already left for work? No, he usually ate breakfast with the kids—and anyway he would have sent her a text message if he’d needed to leave the house without saying goodbye. She checked her phone; no new texts from him. Where was he?
She walked down the hallway, and opened the door to the garage. His SUV was still there.
Maybe he’d gone for a walk in the dark before breakfast. He’d never done that before, but there was a first time for everything. She checked the alarm system, but the digital screen showed that the alarm had stayed on all night, just like always.
She blew out a breath. Gene had to be inside the house—but where?
She called his phone and it went to voicemail. Anxiety rising, she took deep breaths the way she’d been told to by her therapist. Her fears might be irrational, but ever since she’d become what some people called “rich and famous,” she’d been getting hate email and online death threats from stalkers and trolls. It had made her paranoid, afraid to be in her own home, and she’d insisted on having an alarm system installed.
After the calming breaths, she called him again. This time she left a voicemail. “Gene, where are you? I’m getting worried.” She wanted to raise her voice, but the kids were still sleeping.
The children!
Fear coursing through her veins, she ran down the hallway and threw open the door to her nine-year-old daughter’s room. She found Chrissy in bed sound asleep, snuggled up with her softball glove instead of the teddy bear she’d favored for so long.
Lauren closed the door with a sigh of relief and went to the next room. She watched her son, Ben, her six-year-old, turn over in bed and mumble something in his sleep. He was a sensitive child with an active imagination and was probably dreaming about the bedtime story she’d read to him the night before.
Maybe Gene had been sleepwalking, and had fallen down and hit his head. Or maybe he’d had a heart attack or a stroke. He might be on a bathroom floor in need of medical help. She wrung her hands and wondered for the umpteenth time why they had bought this mansion. Who needed all these extra rooms that they never used?
She searched the house. First, their bedroom. Gene’s favorite shoes were still in his closet, but his house slippers were not. She didn’t find his wallet or car keys on the dresser. Next, the exercise room—plenty of spouses had dropped dead on treadmills. He wasn’t there. She then checked all the bathrooms, and the spare bedrooms. There was no sign of him. Every time she called his phone, she got no answer.
In the living room, Gene’s overcoat hung in the coat closet. She checked the pockets. No phone. The coat smelled familiar, with a trace of his cologne, and she ached for him to hug her and say everything was okay.
Headlights cut across the room, and Lauren turned to see a car driving up the long driveway that divided the acre of front lawn. That would be Isabel, the nanny, coming to make breakfast for the kids and get them ready for school. Or, at least, it should be the nanny. Who else could it be at this early hour?
Lauren wondered if she should go to the master bedroom and get her pistol. She was somewhat afraid of guns, even though she owned one for protection.
Get a grip. With her palms sweating, she called Todd, the head of security at the high-rise building where Gene leased an office for his real estate firm. “Todd, this is Lauren Stephens. I’ve been trying to call Gene, but I think his phone battery is dead. Have you seen him this morning?”
“No, ma’am, he hasn’t entered the building.”
“I’m worried about him. When I woke up he was gone, but his car is still in the garage and the alarm system has been on all night without interruption.”
There was a pause, then Todd said, “Would you like me to send one of my guys to your house?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Lauren ended the call.
She turned off the alarm, opened the front door to let Isabel inside, then closed and locked the door behind her. She explained the situation to Isabel, who then went to the kitchen and began preparing breakfast for the kids.
Lauren paced back and forth in the living room until another set of headlights approached the house. The new vehicle, a white SUV, had a bar of yellow lights on top, but they weren’t flashing. She was grateful that at least the neighbors wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary to gossip about.
To her surprise, Todd got out of the car. He looked like a college football player and was dressed in a security uniform of a light blue shirt, navy slacks and a windbreaker. Lauren unlocked the door and let him inside.
“I decided to come over myself,” Tod
d said.
“Thank you.”
“Where have you looked so far?”
“In the bedrooms, bathrooms, and the garage,” Lauren said.
“Does this house have an attic or basement?”
“An attic, no basement.”
Todd checked the attic and found nothing. In the garage, he looked inside the cars and opened their trunks. Then, retracing the steps Lauren had already taken, he searched the house, looking in closets and under the beds.
Finally, he went outside and walked the perimeter of the mansion, shining his flashlight in the dark.
Back inside, he told her, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ve looked everywhere except your kids’ rooms. You should check those, and if he’s not there, contact the police and ask for the Missing Persons Unit.”
Lauren felt a chill run down her spine. The reliable man who was the father of her children and her partner in life, a missing person?
She wondered who she might lean on for help. Her parents were both gone. She’d been an only child. Many of her friends had fallen away when she’d become financially successful. Most of the people she met these days wanted something from her.
As she caught another faint whiff of that strangely disturbing smell, she felt alone, afraid, and vulnerable to … something.
Chapter 2
Jake Wolfe bolted upright out of a dead sleep, disoriented and sweating. Driven by survival instincts born from his years in the Marines, and later in the CIA, he reached for his nightstand and grabbed his pistol from a hollowed out constitutional law textbook about the Second Amendment.
He held the weapon in front of him with both hands. His eyes flicked back and forth, looking for someone to kill.
Then, he took a deep breath, as the remnants of a recurring violent nightmare about his covert paramilitary operations faded away and reality set in.
He was on board a boat, the Far Niente, out on the San Francisco Bay and anchored in a quiet spot. He was borrowing the power yacht from his friend, Dylan, and he loved to spend the night on the water, away from the crowds and the problems of the city.
His adopted Marine war dog, Cody, came over to him and huffed, waiting for orders.
Jake scratched Cody behind the ears and whispered, “It’s okay, buddy, I just had the dream again.”
The dog, a yellow Labrador retriever and golden retriever cross, nodded and looked at Jake with wise eyes.
Jake got out of bed, and his body felt stiff with the aches and pains of old war wounds, especially in his thigh where he’d been shot and had nearly bled to death. The cool dampness of the Pacific Ocean air magnified the pain, but he loved being on the water so much it was a small price to pay.
His girlfriend, Sarah, was still sound asleep. Smiling, he gazed at her for a moment as she lay there; seeing the face of an angel, her beautiful bare shoulders, and silky dark hair on the white pillow. All that and a personality that pulled him to her like iron to a magnet.
Turning away, he found a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt on the floor, put them on, went out the stateroom door and closed it behind him.
In the hallway, Cody sniffed Jake’s thigh, sensing his alpha’s pain. He whined and pushed his head against Jake’s stomach.
“I’m fine, Cody,” Jake said, and patted his dog on the back. He walked to the galley, opened the sliding door and let Cody out onto the deck.
Cody went to an area of artificial grass to relieve himself.
Jake walked back to the galley, which was close to the sliding door, brewed a pot of strong coffee and poured a cup. He opened a cupboard, grabbed a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream and added a shot to his coffee. He took a sip and nodded his head in satisfaction.
He put the Baileys back in the cupboard next to a bottle of Redbreast Irish Whiskey. Jake stared at the whiskey for a moment, shook his head, closed the cupboard and pushed that temptation out of his mind. He’d gone down that road once when his close friend, Stuart, had died of a heroin overdose. After that, he’d promised his family and friends he would steer clear of the whiskey prescription to dull the emotional pain that was his constant companion.
Cody came back into the galley and trotted to a water cooler with an inverted five-gallon jug on top. When he pressed his right paw down on a blue lever, water poured out of the spigot, down through a plastic tube Jake had attached and into a large bowl on the deck. Once the bowl was full, Cody took his paw off the lever and drank his fill, then raised his head and looked at Jake with water dripping off his snout.
Jake smiled. “You like that Stinson Beach spring water, Cody?”
Cody licked his nose, barked once and nodded.
“You’re probably wishing there was a lever to fill your food bowl, too, huh?”
Cody raised one eyebrow, then sniffed his empty food bowl and gave it a lick.
Jake headed out onto the aft deck to do some fishing. It was still dark outside and a thick fog had blanketed the Bay. Visibility was minimal, but Jake could see the muted glow of the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance as he cast his line off the back rail of the aft deck.
Cody sat close to Jake, as always, like his shadow.
Jake drank some coffee, and reveled in the freedom of being out on the water. He didn’t need to travel very far from shore. The water was a natural barrier to the endless cars, people, and trouble. It offered a refuge from civilization, and it just felt so peaceful. Peace was what he wanted most in life right now.
He was thankful that his friend, Dylan, was letting him borrow the Far Niente. Dylan was one of those Silicon Valley software millionaires. He currently lived in Dublin, Ireland. All the large American software and internet companies had branch offices in Dublin. Although Dylan owned the boat, he never used it. He was a world traveler and a serial entrepreneur who only came home to California once or twice a year.
Jake patted Cody on the back. “This is the good life eh, buddy? When I got fired from my job last month, it was a blessing in disguise.”
Cody wagged his tail, and thumped it on the deck. Thump, thump, thump.
“But I still need to make a living so I can buy the essentials—dog food, beer, and fuel for the boat, right?”
Cody barked once and nodded his head. He’d been trained for three different jobs: as a Marine IED detection dog, then as a patrol dog, and finally, after he was retired from the Marines due to a lingering injury, he’d been retrained as a civilian service dog. He could understand over a thousand words, and more than a hundred hand signals and whistled commands.
On paper he seemed like the perfect service dog. The problem was that he’d once had to kill an enemy combatant while deployed overseas. He’d saved the lives of his Marine platoon, but now, much like his owner, he couldn’t let go of his war training. He was too independent to be a normal service dog; only a former war dog handler like Jake could offer the firm leadership he required.
A foghorn sounded from the San Francisco end of the Golden Gate Bridge with a low, drawn-out blast. There was a quiet pause, and then another foghorn answered with two distinctly different blasts from the midspan of the bridge.
In the quiet stillness after the foghorns ended, Cody stood up and growled. His hackles stood on end and his tail stuck straight out as he sniffed the air while showing his teeth.
Jake paid close attention. He trusted Cody with his life; if his dog sensed that something was wrong, he believed him. Opening a tall storage cabinet, Jake grabbed a pump shotgun with an illegal Salvo 12 silencer attached, and reached into a drawer for a pair of night-vision binoculars.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up and the sixth sense that he’d honed in combat warned him of impending danger. He could almost smell it, if such a thing was possible.
He heard a little song in his head. He’d been told it was similar to the way some people with epilepsy heard a tune just before they had a seizure. It had started happening after he’d had a near-death experience.
He searched the darkness t
hrough the binoculars. There—something was behind them in the water. An inflatable dinghy emerged from the fog and headed straight toward the glow of the Far Niente’s running lights.
Jake recognized that type of boat—he’d used one just like it on night missions in the Persian Gulf. It was approximately ten feet long and powered by a quiet electric motor. The one man on board steered the dingy and held a rocket propelled grenade launcher across his lap.
A familiar anger burned inside Jake’s chest. Some of his best friends had been killed by RPGs. Did the terrorists still have a bounty on his head, or was the man seeking revenge for somebody Jake had assassinated?
One thing was certain—if an RPG hit the Far Niente’s one-thousand-gallon fuel tank, the resulting fireball would destroy the boat, and kill him, Sarah and Cody.
Cody stared at the raft and sniffed the air. One of his back legs—the one that had been injured in combat—trembled.
Jake whispered, “Cody, take cover.” He gave a hand signal and pointed at a spot behind the aft rail.
Cody ducked down prone on his belly, out of sight. He kept his intelligent eyes trained on Jake, waiting for orders to dive off the boat, swim to the raft, and attack the enemy.
