by Shaye Marlow
A few more reached the stairs up from the beach.
Gary fell back to my generator shack, and then dropped another man on my lawn.
I saw movement from the corner of my eye. One of the men was creeping along the edge of the woods. Just twenty feet ahead of our hiding spot, he stopped and peered around a tree. He brought his gun up, waiting for Gary to stick his head back out.
My gun hand twitched upward. He’d said try not to shoot anybody, but I wasn’t going to let Gary get shot. Even if he had told me some half-truths about his past.
“Stay here,” J.D. whispered. He dashed out from behind our cover. He crossed the distance without seeming to touch the earth, and slammed a hard kick into the man’s side before he had even turned. He struck his gun arm, the gun went flying, and then the other guy was just completely screwed. I winced as my brother ruthlessly pounded the man to the ground.
When I glanced toward Gary again, I saw he was fighting someone hand-to-hand next to my generator shack. The two seemed evenly matched, and the punches and kicks being thrown were brutal.
Movement on the lawn drew my attention to one of the men he’d felled. He was crawling toward his gun. And Gary was standing in the open, completely exposed.
I didn’t even hesitate. I shed my cover and flew through the woods, disregarding devil’s club and any bullets that might be flying my way. I sprinted out and kicked the gun out of the thug’s hand just as his fingers started to curl around it. Then I stood over him, breathing hard, my gun aimed at his forehead.
I almost shot him when somebody grabbed me from behind. A hard arm wrapped around my throat, threatening to cut off my air, and a cold muzzle pressed to my temple.
“Drop your gun,” a voice growled in my ear.
I dropped it, and the man dragged me along so that our backs were against my new shed. I could feel his knees pressing against the backs of my legs as he hunkered down, using me as cover.
When I looked up, I saw that the man Gary had been fighting was on the ground, and Gary had popped back out of sight.
“Gary, I’ve got your girlfriend!” the man yelled. Was this one of those situations where I was the last to know? “Drop your weapon and come out here,” the man ordered. When I struggled against him, he dug the tip of that gun into my head, so I wised up and quit.
Gary peered around the building, and then stepped out, tossing the rifle away. The man holding me made a sound of satisfaction.
On our right, Rory stumbled up the steps from the beach. A huge guy came up after him, his gun pressed to my brother’s back.
“I know she’s got three brothers, and I wanna see all of you, hands up, or I shoot her,” the man yelled.
“How do you know that?” I asked, tugging at his arm, trying to give myself some breathing room. I looked over at Gary, worried about him. He was watching me with a look that easily transcended ‘worried’. Maybe I was his girlfriend.
“Gentleman by the name of Brett,” my captor said. “He was actually pretty eager to sell you out.”
I growled as J.D. and Zack stepped out of the trees and tossed their guns onto the ground.
“Let them go,” Gary said. “It’s me you want. I’m the one who shot your men.”
Seeing them all so vulnerable, weaponless in the face of armed thugs, was making me angry. I tugged on the arm around my neck again. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, trying to buy them some time. My blonde hair had fallen loose, and I hoped I looked like a complete ditz. I needed them to underestimate me.
“Oh, you didn’t tell your girlfriend what you did for a living, how you were able to afford that helicopter?” the man said, caressing my temple with that damn gun. His foul breath was against my cheek as he said, “He killed people for us.”
“Who is us?” I asked, making sure my voice came out high and fearful. It wasn’t much of a stretch.
“They’re criminals. A drug cartel operating out of New Orleans,” Gary said.
I stared at him. He wasn’t denying it. He just stood there, looking wonderful, and he wasn’t denying it. Damn me for always falling for the wrong ones.
“Gary betrayed us,” the man hissed from behind me. “He botched a job, he got caught, and he rolled over on us.”
I glanced at my brothers. J.D. was eyeing the guy holding Rory, and Rory was eyeing J.D. They both glanced over toward me as the man holding me began to rant about what a traitor Gary was.
Mocha chose that moment to make her entrance. She darted in from around the shed, and sank her teeth into my captor’s calf. Snarling, she yanked his leg right out from under him.
He shouted, his gun hand flying out as he tried to catch his balance. We stumbled sideways, and his grip loosened.
I took my opportunity. In one swift movement, I stepped to his side, thrust my knee in behind his, and reach up over his back and around his face. I dug my fingers into his fucking eyes and yanked him over backward, slipping his hold.
Gary surged forward, knocking my captor to the ground almost before I was done with him. The man’s gun flew out of his hand, Gary got his hands around his throat, and they started grappling.
“Run!” Gary growled.
I hesitated. I heard a shot, and turned to see that Rory and J.D. were fighting the man who’d been holding a gun on him. He was so frickin’ big, J.D.’s blows weren’t doing much. A few feet away, Zack was on the ground holding his side.
The blood leaking from between his fingers crystallized things for me. In a millisecond, my fear morphed straight to anger. Like hell I was gonna run. Nobody hurt my brothers. Nobody but me.
I scooped a gun off the ground.
Behind them, another man limped up from the beach, his eyes trained on them, his gun lifting.
I shot the bastard. He toppled back off the stairs.
I heard a branch snap, and whirled to shoot another one approaching through the woods. This one went down with a yelp, rustling brush as he fell.
I swung around, training my gun on the giant my brothers were wrestling with. They were moving fast, but the man who’d shot Zack was a pretty damn big target. I waited for my opening, and then I shot him, too. J.D. and Rory rode him to the ground.
Gary was on top of the guy who’d held me, pummeling him with angry fists. That fight was all but won, so I turned my attention to Zack.
Keeping my gun ready in one hand, I hurried over to my bleeding brother and knelt next to him.
“I’m okay,” Zack croaked, when he clearly wasn’t. He was kinda pale, and it wasn’t a lot of blood, but the bullet hole was in his abdomen, and that couldn’t possibly be good. I bunched his shirt over it and helped him apply pressure.
J.D. and Rory had restrained their guy, and I glanced over at Gary, wanting to help him, but saw that I didn’t need to. The man who’d seemed to be their leader was barely fighting anymore, his punches weak pushes and bats to Gary’s shoulders and sides. His face was a bloody mess.
Gary leaned back slightly—and then he snapped the guy’s neck.
I looked on silently with all three of my brothers as he climbed off the guy he’d just killed. Gary was breathing hard, his fists bloody.
His eyes went immediately to me. “Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded dumbly. I had no idea how I felt about all this. My brother was bleeding on my lawn. My newly minted boyfriend was some sort of hitman. I’d just shot three people. And I had a dozen dead and injured men on my property.
His gaze fell to Zack. “We need to call EMS.”
What followed was a flurry of activity. The State Troopers came in their helicopter first, securing the scene. Then the air ambulance landed. They bundled Zack and two others onto gurneys, and left. The Troopers swarmed over my property, taking pictures and gathering evidence.
They took the five of us to Anchorage, where they took our statements. Rory, J.D. and I were released that evening, after it became a pretty clear case of self-defense.
Zack had had a bullet extracted from his g
ut, and was making jokes by the time the three of us showed up at his bedside. I sat with him in the hospital overnight, but it was obvious he was going to be fine. So the next day, I caught a flight home.
The Troopers were still doing their thing in my yard, but they let me into my cabin. I fed the dog, and then I sat down at my writing desk. I looked out my big picture window at my lover’s cabin, and the bullet-peppered helicopter sitting out front. It was pretty out, not much different from the day he’d flown into my life.
A long crack in the glass obscured my view. I followed it up to a bullet hole in the upper corner of the window, which I could just imagine letting in mosquitos. There were some things I couldn’t fix, but this…
I went and got my duct tape.
They didn’t let Gary go for two more days.
In the meantime, I’d cleaned up after our little cookout. My brothers weren’t coming back out, so I’d packed up their things and sent them to town.
I’d laced their clean underwear with itching powder. I had hesitated momentarily on Zack’s, because he’d been shot and was in the hospital and all. Then I remembered a thirteen-year-old girl, near-naked in front of her entire family, her dress ripped from her by a flaming penis-mobile. Of course I spiked his, too.
Thursday afternoon, Gary stepped out of a float plane onto his dock. I had been trying to limp along, pretending it was life as usual, and that I didn’t care, but the worry that they might not release him at all had been consuming my thoughts. It was painful, not knowing if I’d ever see him again.
So it was with a crushing kind of relief that I saw him step out of that plane. I’d gone out on the deck as the plane landed, and it was from there that I watched him approach.
He held my gaze as he climbed the steps up from the beach. He disappeared past the corner of the cabin, and a moment later, I heard the latch click as he let himself in.
“I thought we talked about trespassing,” I called, turning to watch him through the open sliding door.
He paused as he noticed the ugly strip of grey tape across my window, and he must have been realizing it was covering a crack that had been caused by a bullet. From his shootout. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll pay to have it fixed.”
“There’s a couple bullet holes in my siding as well. And one in my freezer,” I added, even though we both knew the freezer had already been fucked. It’d been funny to watch the Trooper take a whole frozen roast with a slug buried in it. Even funnier, all of the Troopers had been really impressed with the gigantic pike on top of it.
“All of it,” Gary said, watching me carefully. “I’ll fix all of it.”
“Don’t bother with the siding,” I said. An Alaskan cabin hadn’t really ‘arrived’ until it sported a few bullet holes.
I liked that uncertain, squirmy look on him. The hitman looked uncertain. It was priceless, really.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Can I explain?”
“Please do,” I said, cool as a cucumber.
He stepped out into the light on my deck. “I was a sniper in the marines,” he said. “I did that for the last seven of my nine years, and…I was ready to try something else. Maybe something where I wasn’t killing people. So I got out. I was living with my friend down in New Orleans, and I was doing minimum-wage type carpentry jobs. I’d been looking into going to helicopter school, because I’d always loved to fly, but it turned out the GI bill didn’t cover the initial Private Pilot, and only paid for parts of the Commercial rating. So I was trying to save up money, but I wasn’t making enough to save. I went on like that for several months.
“And then one day, my friend came up to me, and he said he had this job for me. He showed me a picture of a drug dealer, and he said someone was willing to pay forty thousand dollars to have that man killed. He told me about some of the things this guy had done. The assaults, the murders…he was a really bad guy. Probably much, much worse than the people I’d killed when endorsed by the military. They were offering forty thousand dollars for me to wipe this scum off the face of the earth. That was most of my helicopter school right there. I said I’d do it. And I did.
“Well, a month later, here comes my friend again with another job. Another low-life, another forty thousand dollars. I was working my way through helicopter school at that point, and I’d found out it’s hard to get the hours of flight time that you need for people to employ you as a commercial helicopter pilot. One of the best ways, it looked like, was for me to buy my own helicopter. And the way I figured it, a few more of these jobs, and I’d have it. So I did it. And I did another. And another. Pretty soon the organization started to trust me a bit, I suppose. They came to me directly, and I started to learn things about them. Things I wished I hadn’t known.”
Gary took a deep breath. “I got the helicopter. And I got some money put away beyond that—in stocks,” he said with a wry little half-grin. “I was just thinking about telling them the next hit would be my last, when I got caught.”
“If you got caught,” I asked, “why aren’t you in jail?”
“The DEA offered me a deal. If I testified against my employer, the drug cartel I was working for, they’d grant me immunity. I could go free. They even offered me witness protection, if I testified.” He shook his head. “I think they only knew about the one attempted hit of mine; they were never able to pin the others on me.
“So yeah, of course I testified. These were criminals; I owed them nothing. I put the boss away, and a half dozen of his higher-ups. The man that was here, the one holding you, was his second-in-command and one of the only ones that got off. The cartel broke up with so many key players gone. So he was out of a job, and he was pissed.
“Like I said, they offered me witness protection, but I declined. I didn’t want to live in hiding, or have a US Marshal keep me company for the rest of my life. So I took my commercial license, and my helicopter, and I moved up here. I’d always wanted to come to Alaska. I figured there’d be work, and they’d have trouble finding me if they tried.”
“So, they’re not pressing charges at all, for,” I waved my hand at my bullet-ridden yard, “this.”
He shook his head. “Self-defense. And actually, I think the DEA’d been hoping they’d try something.”
I looked at him a long moment. He and I both knew he hadn’t needed to snap that last guy’s neck. The man had been defeated. Gary’d basically killed him in cold blood.
“Why did you kill the one holding me?” I asked.
Gary held my gaze. “He would have kept coming back,” he said. “I never would have been safe. You never would have been safe. It was actually one of the easier kills I’ve ever made.”
“And what about the three thugs on the riverbank?”
He winced and looked guilty as fuck.
“That really was their boat we saw when we were looking for mine, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It was. I knew if I let them go, they’d lead the others right back to me.”
I didn’t ask him what he’d done with their bodies, but I had a pretty good idea. That river had a way of making things disappear.
“So you’re a killer,” I said. I suppose it should have been disturbing to me, but I’d been coming to terms with it these past couple days.
Life was tenuous in the Alaskan bush. Things died because people killed them. I killed fish daily. Just last week, my brothers had killed a bear. It was a bit of a leap from fish to bears, from bears to people, but it wasn’t that big. That bear had threatened me, could have killed me, so we’d killed it. Those men had threatened us, and Gary had dealt with the threat.
I’d spent the last couple weeks with this man. He was loud, yeah. But he wasn’t evil.
“Hitman is the official term,” he said. “But I’m trying to quit. Trying to change. Like I told you, I just want peace and quiet, and to fly my helicopter for a living.”
I scoffed. “Peace? Quiet? Bullshit. What about that huge party you had? If you’
d just moved up, where did you even get all those friends?”
“I’d stayed in town for a couple months, long enough to realize I didn’t want to live there.” He shrugged. “What can I say? I make friends fast. People seem drawn to a handsome, single guy with a helicopter. As to the party: It was the Fourth of July.”
I grunted.
He stepped a little closer, and his expression softened. “Will you forgive me?” he asked. “I know you didn’t hear it, but what I told your brothers is true. I think you’re amazing, and I want you in my life.”
“Hard to stay out of it when I live right next door,” I grumbled.
His gaze was discerning. “You’re not really mad right now,” he said. “I’ve seen you mad. But something’s bothering you. Tell me what it is.”
I sighed. “They took my guns,” I admitted. ‘Evidence’, the State Troopers had said.
“Oh.” He held out his hand. “Come with me.”
“If I want to live?”
He grinned. “I’m not gonna hear the end of this, am I?”
“Nuh-uh.”
He snagged my hand, and pulled me from my cabin. I trailed behind him across my lawn and down the steps to the beach, very aware of his warm hand wrapped around mine. He’d touched most parts of me, but he hadn’t ever held my hand. It felt…really good.
As we walked over to his place, I noticed that we were wearing in a trail between our two cabins.
He led me up his lawn, past his maimed helicopter, and into his cabin. He tugged me into his bedroom, and for a moment I thought he was just gonna toss me on the bed and have his way with me.
But instead, he slid the closet door aside, and revealed a gun safe. And then he opened the safe door, to reveal…guns. Dozens of guns.
Drawn like a moth to a flame, I stepped closer.
“You can have anything here,” he said. “Hell, you can have them all if you want.”
I finally tore my gaze away from the forest of blue steel beauties, and I looked up at him. He had a look in his eyes, one that said he’d give me the world if I wanted it.
