16.
Greg
Greg’s skin burned, and not just from the flames that had scorched him. It was strange that his circulatory system was still able to funnel blood to his capillaries, to let him feel like he was blushing in humiliation even though it was probably just his metahuman healing working to repair the burn damage that had been inflicted on him before he’d remembered how to put out a flame.
This whole scenario had been a cascading series of mistakes. Embarrassing ones, again. That he had burns seemed appropriate, since the burn of shame was perhaps the most acute and long lasting of the injuries he’d just acquired.
He steadied himself, head back against the soft cloth seat. He had time, and reliving his stupidity might just be the best cure for preventing it in the future.
1. How had he not known that Percy Sledger was, in fact, that idiot Bruce Springersteen? Because Mark McGarry hadn’t told him, of course. Was it intentional? Probably not; Greg’s past association with Springersteen, or Sledger, or whatever he was calling himself now, was irrelevant. He would have taken McGarry’s contract to kill Sledger even knowing full well who he was.
2. What were the odds that after failing to report that Sledger was, in fact, a metahuman, McGarry would fail to tell him that the accomplice that Sledger had sought shelter with was, in fact, Sienna Nealon? And how had Sledger found her where every major law enforcement agency in the country had failed? Had he been in constant contact with her since her flight from the law? These were questions that he had no answers for, and it drove him slightly mad. Greg did not care for the unknown or the uncertain.
3. Nealon certainly seemed to be helping Sledger now. She’d cost Greg his M2 Browning, which was one of his favorite tools. Not that it was irreplaceable, but it was another annoyance heaped on those already caused by Percy Sledger. He’d already cost Greg time with the chase, and now the contract—which paid a flat rate—was rapidly working its way from a profitable short-term contract with minimal risk into a longer-term amorphous quagmire with a risk quotient that would have sent any reasonable actuary fleeing in fear.
4. Normally he didn’t even ask this question, but since this case had caused him so much trouble, it was practically begged—why the hell did McGarry want Springersteen dead? He was an idiot, true, and Greg had known that when they’d worked together. An annoyance? Even more true. But worthy of spending the money and time of a high-dollar professional assassin to kill? Debatable. No, there was probably something more going on here, something Greg would likely never have access to, in terms of a motive. Normally, he was fine with these unknowables; he made it a practice not to examine the reasons for the contracts he took, because it was better not to open that door. But now that it was open …
No. All of this was irrelevant. Greg still had a job to do, though it was getting to be a more troublesome one with every encounter. The last two attempts had ended in failure, so perhaps now it was time to do something even bolder, more destructive. Unfortunately, McGarry had now tacked Nealon on to the pile of trouble that Greg had to deal with per the contract, and without any additional fee.
But … he’d done that as an almost casual aside, when he hadn’t known who it was. The contract itself was typically Greg’s guide—the words, not some offhand instruction given after a series of failures.
Killing Nealon wasn’t worth the trouble. Sledger was the contract. It wouldn’t bother him to kill Nealon if it were easy, but it wasn’t a coincidence that a great many people who had thought that killing Sienna Nealon would be easy were now dead.
Perhaps, though, he could make one final attempt at her. If he failed, then he’d at least make sure he killed Sledger, and grandly, to be sure it was done. After that, he would disappear from the scene, making sure she couldn’t find him—which would be easy, of course—and leave her to her mourning, or whatever she might feel over the death of Sledger. Based on his own feelings, Greg expected it would be a sort of casual indifference to knowing the idiot was dead. Oh, what a shame, and move on with life, as one would do when hearing that an old co-worker had fallen down an elevator shaft.
Of course, the manner of Percy Sledger’s death was destined to be rather more dramatic. Now it was just a matter of following his clue to them …
Greg lifted the phone he’d picked up in the ruins of the Portland apartment. It had, fortunately, still been unlocked when he’d picked it up, the owner clearly not setting the screen to go off in what he would have considered an intelligent time frame.
As a result, now Greg had in his hand a very large clue as to the next stop on his quarry’s itinerary. It would be a pleasant enough reunion, he supposed, to see Jon Wiegert again …
17.
Sienna
It was, surprisingly, not too difficult to find Jon Wiegert’s plane over the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was flying a little lower than a commercial airliner, and of course looked different, as planes designed for skydives tended to. It didn’t have one of those cool back ramps, instead opting for a rear door that wasn’t open yet as we approached, which, I hoped, meant that Wiegert hadn’t ejected himself out of the plane to perform his dope-ass, insane stunt yet.
When we were about two hundred yards behind the plane, being buffeting by its wash, Friday started scrambling around in my grip, fishing in his pants for something. I was prepared to close my eyes in case things went lewd, but he lifted his gimp-like mask out of his pocket a moment later and started to put it on.
“Do not put on that ridiculous mask,” I snapped. I probably could have been a little nicer about it, but frankly, seeing his stupid expressions had given me insight into his personality that I’d never possessed when I’d worked with him. Also, the prospect of hanging around with a dude wearing his mask seemed more likely than anything to draw the sort of attention that runaway fugitive Sienna Nealon did not need at present.
“Do I tell you not to put on your ridiculous face?” Friday shot back, not even slowing in his quest to put the damned thing on.
“Lose the mask or lose your head,” I said succinctly.
That stopped him for a second as he pondered my threat. “Literally?” he shouted over the rotor wash.
“Very literally,” I said. “That propeller up there will literally be the last thing you see, the last thing that ever happens to you. And possibly the worst,” I added as I increased speed, bringing us forward and up, as though positioning to drop him into the left wing prop.
He chewed that one over for a second. I could practically hear the thought bouncing around in an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine in his head while he contemplated my threat. “Worse than the time I accidentally got my pubes caught in the bowling ball return and it waxed me?”
I almost stopped dead in flight. I only caught my sudden decrease in momentum when I felt the wind resistance slacken obviously and the plane started to pull away. “… I … do I even want to know how that happened?”
“It was an honest mistake.”
“…” Because what the hell do you say to that?
“Also, it kinda bruised my junk. Maybe gave me an impromptu circumcision, but fortunately it grew b—”
“Okay, stop,” I said, trying to keep from vomiting on the top of his head. But not trying very hard, because honestly, he had earned it. “Yes, me dropping you in a propeller would be worse than everything, ever … except for that, I guess.”
“I need to put my mask on.” Now he was dangerously close to whining.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Jon’s not going to recognize me otherwise!”
He had a point there, based on Greg Vansen’s reaction to him. Still, that prompted a question: “Why the hell do you wear that mask all the time?”
“Oh, who cares?” he asked, shoving his face into it and mumbling something I couldn’t hear over the muffling effect of the leather and the roar of the plane’s props. “There. That’s better,” he said once he got the mouth hole properly aligned. “Hey, the door
is open!”
And sure enough, the door on the side of the silvery plane’s body was, indeed, open, and a guy was standing there, a surfboard-like apparatus strapped to his feet. He was standing there, ready to jump, a GoPro camera strapped to the top of his helmet, and talking to someone behind him in the cabin of the plane. I couldn’t see them, but I assumed it was a camera crew, catching his EXTREME AWESOMENESS (I imagined lots of exclamation points to indicate the EXTREME-ness of this feat) from both sides of the jump. Hell, there was probably a ground crew watching from below, too.
I lit my hair on fire, because I didn’t want the new, raven shade to be caught on film. If there was a ground crew filming, I’d probably already blown that, but whatever. I’d been too busy contemplating how an idiot got his genitals caught in a bowling ball return to consider the importance of preserving my flimsy disguise.
Jon came jumping out of the plane a second later, and he wasn’t flying, at least not obviously. He had a parachute on his back which he’d clearly planned to use in order to hide the aid his powers were giving him to pull off these stunts, but he didn’t deploy that immediately either, instead launching into a downward spin, which was kind of mesmerizing since his snowboard was painted in seriously psychedelic colors, complete with prismatic coating that caught the reflection of the sun.
I bet it looked great from above, which was probably why they’d done it, but I didn’t have a ton of time to pick a less auspicious moment to approach Jon. For all I knew, it could take hours for him to get down on the ground and away from any entourage he might have, in order for us to undertake a calm, reasoned discussion about why Greg Vansen was currently trying to kill the idiot clutched in my arms. By then, for all I knew, Friday might be dead. Which would be a shame for several reasons, the leading one being that I’d have to go back into hiding, or possibly avenge him. Neither of those options were very appealing, especially when considering that avenging a moron like him would probably extend beyond simply tracking down assassins and expand into a broader quest that involved the destruction of an unsuspecting bowling alley’s ball return.
How the hell did he …? Never mind.
“Hi, Jon!” Friday screamed as I maneuvered in closer to Wiegert, who was doing some pretty wicked tricks now, inverting himself and pointing the snowboard down as he broke his spin to look at us. The way he arrested his corkscrew momentum was a dead giveaway to me that Jon Wiegert could fly like I could, but maybe on camera it could be explained away. I didn’t really care.
“What the—Bruce? Is that you?” Jon asked, his expression only partially readable beneath a thick set of safety goggles and partially obscured by a helmet and breathing mask. I hadn’t even noticed the air being thinner up here, but it was.
“It’s me!” Friday shouted. I still didn’t know what to think of his penchant for picking singer names as his nom de plumes, but I suspected if I went much deeper down this rabbit hole with him, it wouldn’t have been a stretch to find out that he’d once called himself Brit Spears. You know, because it sounds vaguely dangerous, even absent the association with a person who once attacked a paparazzi’s car with an umbrella, something that was now totally on my bucket list.
“What are you doing here, man?” Jon shouted over the rush of air. All I could see was his eyes blinking furiously, probably trying to figure out why his most annoying co-worker ever had suddenly appeared in the middle of his skydive freefall, carried by America’s Most Wanted, a woman with her hair presently en fuego like I was a politician’s pants.
That’s hateful rhetoric, Harmon opined, unfairly maligning a particularly vulnerable segment of the population.
Oh, shut up. You know you’re a silken-tongued liar and a sack of shit like the rest of your kind.
“Greg Vansen is trying to kill me!” Friday shouted over the roar of air blasting past us in our fall. I would have suggested we stop, maybe have our chat right there, but it seemed rude to either make Jon blatantly display his powers or else seize him by the parachute and force him to make conversation with us.
“What?” Jon ripped at his mask and popped it off, and his confusion was obvious once I could see his expression. “Why?”
“We thought you might know,” I said, figuring the sooner I inserted myself into the conversation, the less awkward it would be when I tried to box Friday out of it so we could, you know, direct it like reasonable adults.
“You think I might know why Greg Vansen is trying to kill you?” Jon just sounded flummoxed at that.
“Yeah!” Friday said, defying my mental wish that he would go silent. “I think it has something to do with Panama!”
“Like what?” Jon asked, as perplexed as a man could be while strapped to a snowboard and dropping toward the earth at almost two hundred miles an hour while being quizzed about random events in his past.
“Friday—err, Bruce,” I said, “was hoping you might remember something about Panama that … uh … explained why Greg might want to kill him.” When I said it out loud, I realized how enormously flimsy that chain of reason sounded, and it kind of made me want to plummet to the earth so I could find a hole and hide in it. Or maybe just reverse course and zoom off at supersonic speed, dropping Friday and all his troubles somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, where they could trouble me no more.
Either/or.
“Dude, I don’t have a clue why Greg would want to kill you,” Jon said, shrugging his shoulders as expansively as his flight suit and safety gear would allow. “I didn’t even know he did kill people anymore. I haven’t seen him since … I don’t know, Afghanistan, probably.”
“Good times,” Friday said reflexively.
“Yeah, no, not really,” Jon said. “Look, whatever you guys got going on—”
I had a suspicion about what Jon was going to say, but I didn’t get a chance to hear it, because a missile exploded about ten feet below me, and I didn’t recognize the whine of the AMRAAM until it was already detonating. Pieces of shrapnel and the blast of the explosion concussed me, but fortunately I was insulated from it somewhat by the body I was holding in my arms.
Friday, however, was not so lucky.
Friday jerked as pieces of shrapnel from the missile peppered him, causing him to spasm in my arms. A piece of the missile caught me in the right hand and ripped off my pinky and ring fingers, and another hit me mid-forearm in the left, causing my nerves on that side to go dead, everything below the elbow going suddenly numb.
I gasped in pain, and instantly lost my grip. “Wolfe!” I screamed, but it was too late.
Friday’s limp body fell out of my grasp, entering a slow spin toward the earth as I stared at him, my hands utterly useless, the Sierra Nevada mountains racing up to meet us.
18.
Greg
“The right tool for the job,” Greg said. He liked to elucidate his thoughts out loud; it made it easier to solidify his thinking when he did.
In this case, the right tool for the job was an F-35B Lightning II, a military aircraft with short takeoff and vertical landing capability. Greg steadied the plane as he brought it in close. He’d already loosed one AIM-120 AMRAAM missile and watched it detonate just beneath Bruce Springersteen, but that was not nearly good enough.
He had to confirm this kill, lest the slippery Hercules somehow survive.
Guiding the plane close, he thumbed the weapons display to the machine gun mounted in a pod beneath his wing, and pointed it toward the rapidly falling figure of Springersteen.
No, this time … he wouldn’t get away.
19.
Sienna
“Sonofabitch!” I screamed as Friday tumbled out of my grasp. I tracked around as I spun and fell, finally catching the source of my current troubles: an F-35B that was closing and switching to vertical flight mode, coming to a hover as it pointed toward Friday. I could see the engine in the rear of the aircraft rotating down like a spray nozzle, redirecting the thrust it had been using to fly at supersonic speeds so that it could h
old position and rake the hell out of me and Friday.
And in the cockpit, hard-eyed and staring at me from beneath a pilot helmet that couldn’t hide his identity, was Greg Vansen, that little bastard.
“Get Friday!” I shouted at Jon Wiegert, my hands yet to heal. I’d done the whole air-to-air combat against fighter jets thing before, and one thing I knew was that my ability to dogfight was a lot better than theirs.
Or so I thought, until Vansen unleashed the 25 mm cannon under his wing at me as I streaked across the distance between us.
“Yikes! Eep! Shit!” I shouted in the thin mountain air as I dodged the blazing yellow tracer rounds streaking through the sky at me. Last time I’d fought drones, not planes, and when planes had shot at me, they’d had the good sense to keep their damned distance. That had spared me from being shot at by this volume of fire, which was not that dissimilar from what Greg had unleashed on me in my apartment just a few hours earlier.
A round skipped off my shoulder and threw me into a spin as I closed the last hundred yards to Greg’s F-35B. I’d planned to smash into him dead on, but instead I skimmed off the cockpits, bashing into the glass and injuring myself in the process as I bounced off and did an ass-over-teakettle roll, feeling the serious pull of the intake for the vertical flight mode as I over flew the back of the plane. It tugged at my shirt, and might have sucked me in, if not for the momentum I had going when I flipped over it.
I righted myself about a hundred feet past the F35, which was damned good timing since Vansen was already spinning the aircraft around to deal with me. He had the cannon going again, hanging off the wing on a mounted, detachable pod. That was annoying, so I shot a compacted light web at it as the barrel came around. It wedged solidly in there and the damned thing blew up as he fired, making a hell of a noise and leaving a bigass, black, smoking pockmark where before it had been hanging from the wing on a strut. It also made a few little holes in the body of the aircraft, one of which started to smoke.
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 8
