Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  And no one would ever call him Pussy again.

  * * *

  McCall had expected the Dolls nightclub façade to have changed now that it had been taken over by Samuel Clemens, a Fort Worth used-car salesman. McCall wondered if he’d see a neon bucking bronco below the DOLLS sign, which would have been changed to COWGIRLS. But the same cascade of silver dolls spilled over the entrance. The usual line of people were waiting outside, and the same burly African-American bouncer was playing God as to who went in. Without a word, he beckoned McCall to enter.

  A young man at the front of the line said nastily, “Why’s that guy so special?”

  “Don’t know,” the bouncer said with a voice like spring rain. “Just is.”

  The silver décor inside the nightclub hadn’t changed. Cocktail waitresses in their silk shirts and tailored slacks glided around the small tables, the dance floor was packed, and more politicians and businessmen and attorneys waited at the bar for their turn to dance with one of the Dolls’ hostesses. When Borislav Kirov had run the club, the word hostess had been a euphemism for beautiful young women who would have sex with VIP clients for blackmail purposes in the small rooms up on the second floor. Music still pounded at earsplitting decibels. The same young Chechen DJ, a big guy with wild black hair, was spinning the records.

  A soft touch on McCall’s arm turned him around.

  He only knew her first name—Melody. She was in her early twenties with beautiful blue eyes and porcelain skin that almost glowed. She wore a shimmering blue dress, showing a good amount of cleavage and legs, but not too much. Her blond hair floated over her shoulders like a golden shroud. McCall had encountered her in Dolls when he’d been trying to even the odds against her Russian friend Katia Rossovkaya. McCall had been forced to kill Katia’s ex-husband, Alexei Berezovsky, an old enemy, who had been running an elite assassination ring. Melody looked radiant tonight, a far cry from the tense and frightened young woman he’d first met. Things at the nightclub were better now. At least, McCall hoped they were. Otherwise he’d have to have another friendly chat with Davy Crockett about this here Texican hoedown.

  “Mr. McCall!” Melody’s voice was as lyrical as he remembered it. “Katia told me your real name! She’s off tonight. Actually, she and her daughter have gone to Walt Disney World in Florida for four days. I’m so jealous! But she deserves a vacation after everything that happened to her.”

  “You know everything that happened?”

  “Not the details, except Katia said you saved her life. And Natalya’s. Everything here at the club has changed. No more special clients wanting…” Melody shook her head and actually blushed. “I’m still so ashamed that you saw me in one of those upstairs rooms with that guy and I was, you know, naked. He was some foreign diplomat. Bakar Daudov would have killed me if I hadn’t gone upstairs with him. But you know what? Mr. Daudov hasn’t set foot in this club in over a month!”

  McCall knew that because he’d killed Daudov when the Chechen enforcer had attacked him in his old apartment. But he just nodded. “He won’t be coming back here.”

  “Not ever?”

  “No.”

  “All those rooms upstairs were torn out and a really cool bar was put in, the Watering Hole. I think Mr. Clemens could have come up with a classier name, but we get real VIPs up there now, and none of the hostesses have to do anything but dance.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “I’ll let Katia know you were in when she comes back to work.”

  “I’m not here to see Katia, Melody. I need to talk to you.”

  She looked surprised. The DJ cranked up another song—Taylor Swift knowing her lover was trouble. Melody glared over at the DJ booth.

  “Too loud, Abuse!” The DJ just grinned and waved at her. Melody turned back to McCall. “Such an asshole. Forgive my language. His name is Abusaid. We all call him Abuse. He likes young girls, and when I say young, I mean jailbait. The rumor is between twelve and sixteen years old.”

  “Do you have proof of that?”

  “No. But I’ll bet there’s a ton of kiddie porn on his computer.”

  McCall made a mental note of that. They sat down at a vacant table in the lounge area. Melody looked expectant. “What can I help you with?”

  “A young Wall Street stockbroker named Blake Cunningham. In his twenties, Tom Cruise looks when he was that age, rich, arrogant, with all of the warmth of a cobra. And I’d say just as deadly. I believe he kidnapped a young woman from a party a month ago.”

  “Kidnapped. Wow. Shouldn’t you get in touch with the FBI?”

  “It’s on me to find her.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Tell me your full name.”

  “Melody Fairbrother.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Lake Geneva. Not in Switzerland! It’s a little town about sixty miles southwest of Milwaukee.”

  “Can you play the naïve Lake Geneva girl in the Big Apple looking for love and excitement?”

  “That’s what I came here for,” Melody said a little sadly. “The naïveté didn’t last very long.”

  “How good an actress are you?”

  “Good enough to fool an egocentric stockbroker.”

  “Blake Cunningham is dangerous. You need to understand that.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s the only lead I have to finding this missing girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Emily Masden.”

  “You’re sure she’s been kidnapped?”

  “No. But it’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

  “So you’d be using me as bait.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Bring it on. After all you did for Katia, for all of us here at Dolls, you think I’m going to turn you down?”

  “You don’t owe me a thing. Neither does Katia.”

  “That’s for us to decide. What do you want me to do?”

  “Meet up with Blake. Somewhere with a lot of other people. I’ll let you know when. Can you leave Dolls at short notice?”

  “Oh, sure, I could twist Mr. Clemens around my finger.”

  “Wherever the meeting takes place, I’ll have your back. There’ll be at least two others watching you at all times.”

  “When do I meet this Mr. Wonderful?”

  “Soon.” McCall stood and looked down at her. “You don’t have to do this for me, Melody.”

  She smiled, the kind of smile that would curl your toes. Along with her figure. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Remember, no matter how charming Blake is…”

  “Cobra. Got it.”

  She jumped up and gave McCall a hug, then moved away to dance with a waiting customer. McCall hadn’t wanted to involve Melody, but he was out of options. He couldn’t use Candy Annie again, Blake would recognize her immediately. He couldn’t use Tara because she reeked of street smarts and she was too old. McCall had the feeling that Blake Cunningham liked his conquests young. Maybe not as young as the DJ Abusaid, but a girl like Melody from mid-Americana who was this gorgeous? Blake wouldn’t be able to resist.

  Now McCall just had to keep her alive.

  * * *

  Helen Coleman sat at an antique desk in her home office. She had mixed herself a Tom Collins, which she sipped with trembling hands. She was on the internet trying to find out something more on the recent US Army personnel deaths in Syria, but there’s wasn’t anything other than what she’d already been told.

  Something was wrong.

  The thought sounded so ridiculous in her mind. Of course something was wrong! Her son had been killed. But it wasn’t that stark, terrible fact that was nagging at her. The two-star general had been evasive about the circumstances of Josh’s death. If Helen heard the words “highly classified” one more time, she’d scream. The colonel had told her that no one in the US observation team had been in frontline conflict, but that her son had been involved in a skirmish in a Syrian
village and had been killed. Captain Josh Coleman was a hero. His body would be flown home for burial at Arlington National Cemetery—but not right away. The general had had no explanation for the delay. The chaplain had offered her spiritual support. The three Army officers had walked back down the path, their burden lifted, her burden of grief just beginning.

  Helen hadn’t been able to reach Gunner. She’d even called Josh’s satellite phone, what the hell, and predictably got no answer. It gnawed at her. She’d been around the Pentagon long enough to know when the truth was being withheld. She might be a high-ranking UN official, but here she was just a mother of a fallen soldier who needed to deal with her grief.

  She remembered something she’d seen on the internet about a month ago. She got on Google and typed in Equalizer. It took her to a personal ad:

  Gotta problem?—Odds against you?—Call the Equalizer.

  There was a phone number to call. She wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper on her desk. But she didn’t dial it. Not yet. She took another swallow of the Tom Collins, letting the sweet taste of gin and lemon juice, sugar and club soda, calm her. The Equalizer was probably some conspiracy theorist who’d love to get dirt on the Pentagon.

  If her son was dead, no one could equalize those odds.

  CHAPTER 13

  Beauregard “Bo” Ellsworth was six-foot-four, kind of good-looking if you found John Wayne good-looking, barrel chested with a close-cropped beard, a real man his five-year-old nephew liked to call him, because he hunted and fished and got into barroom brawls, although he’d told his nephew that was not something he was proud of. Bo had no children of his own; his wife had left him years before after one of his drunken tirades. Something else Bo was not proud of. But he wasn’t a loner. He had stalwart friends who went back to his high school days. He’d wanted to enlist in the Marines, but an inner-ear problem had killed that dream. Bo considered himself a patriot. He believed in the Constitution and the freedoms the forefathers had so carefully worked out to make this new United States of America great. He had been seven years old on September 11, 2001. He’d never got the horror of those images out of his mind. Alan Jackson, the country-and-western singer, wrote a beautiful song about that terrible day titled “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” The lyric that haunted Bo was Did you burst out with pride / For the red, white, and blue / And the heroes who died / Just doin’ what they do? Not trying to be heroes, just doing their jobs as firemen or cops or just folks caught in the nightmare trying to save their coworkers.

  Bo had formed the Texas Minutemen Militia when he was twenty-two. It had started with six members—himself, his best friend, Randy Wyatt; Jeremiah Buchanan, who worked for him; Big Teddy Danfield, who ran Bo’s plant; and Bo’s two cousins Steve and Kyle. Now the TMM numbered sixty, spread out across his hometown, Boerne, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Houston. They were ready at a moment’s notice to defend their state and their fellow Texans. Hell, their fellow Americans, didn’t matter where they lived. That’s what Bo and two of his minutemen were doing outside the Marine Corps recruiting office at 3837 Binz Engleman Road here in San Antonio. Dutifully standing guard in their TMM uniforms, beige and gray with insignia on their lapels. No ranks on their sleeves. Everyone was the same rank, a minuteman. Of course there were senior officers, that was mandatory for discipline. Bo was the ranking officer at this location.

  They all carried Bushmaster M4 assault rifles. They were also armed with Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm pistols in holsters on their hips. They could have had their handguns concealed, but what was the point of that when they were hefting M4s? Although Bo did have the carry licenses for all of their weapons in the glove compartment of his black Ford Explorer XLT SUV in the parking lot.

  Bo had members of the Texas Minutemen Militia at three other locations today in San Antonio, in Kerrville, and a unit in Houston. Two days earlier the US Marine location in Atlanta, Georgia, had been packed with uniformed marines for some kind of an informal seminar. One lone-wolf gunman—a Muslim US citizen formerly from Yemen—had opened up on the office with a Russian AK-47 assault rifle. It had been a bloodbath. Seven marines killed, twenty injured, two of them critically. The usual outrage had been expressed by the White House, with lots of debates about violence and gun control on Fox News, folks who’d never even picked up a firearm pontificating on the pros and cons of issuing gun licenses and protecting the homeland. Texas governor Perry had initiated the Castle Doctrine in 2007, so that folks “lawfully occupying a dwelling” could use deadly force on a home invasion by anyone who unlawfully entered with force. But that did not protect their armed forces. The Atlanta shooter had been killed by police when they’d found him taking a piss at the side of a country road outside the city. Others out there were just like him, paranoid or crazy or brainwashed by the Jihadist ads on the internet, which were produced with the slickness of a Madison Avenue ad campaign. After all of the talk and debates and rhetoric, nothing was really going to stop such an atrocity from happening again.

  Unless someone like Bo Ellsworth and his Texas Minutemen Militia stepped up to the plate. So he’d deployed twelve of his militia to four US Marine recruitment offices throughout Texas. They were prepared to stand guard all day for a week, maybe longer.

  It was the least they could do.

  Bo glanced over in the general direction of the Alamo. The Alamo Mission security forces had recently arrested a Japanese tourist who’d cut his initials into one of the memorial walls with a penknife. He’d received a hefty fine and a slap on the wrist. A hundred and fifty years ago he’d have been dragged out to a tree and hung for defacing a shrine like that.

  The Marine recruitment officer had come out at ten past nine and assured Bo that this kind of protection, albeit appreciated, was not needed. Bo had told him it was very much needed, no trouble at all, and if the TMM had been deployed at the Marine recruiting office in Atlanta, the tragedy there would not have occurred.

  Bo wasn’t surprised when the Feds arrived.

  They pulled up into the west parking lot in three black sedans. Two men got out of each car. They all wore the FBI uniform, dark suits, muted ties; all were in their twenties, except for one guy in his midthirties. He was obviously the senior man and took the lead walking over to the Marine recruiting office. The other agents fanned out until they were facing Bo’s other two minutemen. They didn’t register the arrival of the Feds with even a flicker of interest or emotion. Bo thought they’d make good beefeaters, those British soldiers in fancy dress who stood outside Buckingham Palace in London and ignored the tourists who took selfies or kicked their shins, or the young women who unbuttoned their shirts to catch their eye.

  The leading Fed displayed his ID and picture as he walked up to Bo. “FBI special agent Todd Blakemore, sir. May I ask you what you’re doing here?”

  “Protection detail.”

  “You and your friends—”

  “They’re not friends, they’re members of the Texas Minutemen Militia.”

  “We’re aware of your radical military organization, Mr. Ellsworth.”

  “Nothing radical about it. We’re patriots, doing a job you should be doing.”

  “You’re carrying assault rifles.”

  “We’re issued with Bushmaster M4A rifles. The A in that stands for ‘Armalite,’ not assault. The 2015 Texas legislature allows concealed-handgun-permit holders to carry firearms openly.”

  “Firearms are prohibited from being carried or displayed in front of post offices, federal courts, offices of the FBI, IRS, Justice Department, USDA, the Department of Energy, and the FDA,” Special Agent Blakemore said. “That provision is covered by federal statutes that supersede state law.”

  “This is a recruiting office and not a federal building.”

  “Folks see men carrying assault rifles—excuse me, Armalite rifles—with handguns clearly visible in holsters, dressed in military uniforms, taking up positions in an outdoor mall that could cause public alarm. It has
the potential to exacerbate an already volatile situation. You need to order your men to stand down.”

  Bo took a deep breath. This was so wrong. “We’re under attack. By those Jihadists slaughtering innocent people in the Middle East. They get sympathizers and crazies here at home all fired up. We need to make a stand against them. That’s our constitutional right.”

  “I know what it says in the Constitution,” Agent Blakemore told Bo.

  “Lieutenant General Bradley said, ‘The enemy is underground.’ As Americans, we can’t stay underground. We’ve got to be visible. We’ve got to let the enemy know who we are, where we are, and that we’re ready to fight.”

  “If I can’t persuade you to stand down,” Blakemore said reasonably, “the next thing you and your militiamen will see is a SWAT team arrive in this parking lot with twenty cop cars and Homeland Security backing them up. So, I say again, with all due respect for your rights and your patriot gesture, have your Texas minutemen stand down.”

  Bo heard the sarcasm in the words “Texas minutemen,” but he lowered his M4. He made a hand motion, which Agent Todd Blakemore did not follow, but the other two minutemen also lowered their assault rifles. Some kind of a secret stand down signal, Blakemore thought. Boy, these guys are scary. But he just said, “You need to leave now, sir. Have yourselves a pleasant day.”

  Blakemore walked back to his Dodge Magnum company car, his agents following. But they didn’t actually climb into their vehicles. They waited. Bo gave his men another hand signal, which was basically retreat, even though they were only going to climb into his Ford Explorer and drive away.

  Bo was seething inside.

  What this country needed was a major wake-up call.

  * * *

  He knew they were going to rob the mom-and-pop grocery store as soon as the three men walked into it. He had that sixth sense you developed when you did the job he did. It was all about body language. You probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for it, but he was a pro and knew the signs. The thugs were all white guys in their midtwenties, dressed in jeans, dark hoodies, and Reebok Ventilator neon casuals in yellow, blue, and black.