Brimstone Hustle (Brimstone Cycle Book 1)

by Robert McKinney

  My speech doesn’t seem to phase Todd the buyer, because he reaches into his own jacket pocket, still smiling and moving slow as well, for a phone without saying a word. The case surrounding his phone is thinner and more sleek looking than the one I carry, but I still recognize a similar signal setup to my own. He presses a few things on the screen, then returns the phone back to his jacket. My own phone buzzes a moment later, and I look down to check out the new balance on my account.

  I blink. Recheck the numbers, Blink again.

  Four hundred thousand dollars. This man has just sent me four hundred thousand dollars, more than eight times the price my secretary had agreed on him paying when the order was first made. With this kind of money I could pay off the farmland and house that Mary and I shared. We could go on vacation in an actual plane. Jesus, she could even go to grad school without debt. With this kind of money, we’d be actually be ... free.

  Free. That’s the word that makes me start looking for the catch. No one, not in this business or anywhere else in life, gives up anything for free. I’d learned that after making a deal with a devil by the name of Beeze. Nothing comes free. My drops were no different.

  I set my phone face down on the table.

  “What do you want?” I ask the buyer.

  “Come on Robin, what else? My company wants you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You’re very in demand, you know.” He says.

  I don’t know, actually. My secretary, a bald, hard-souled man with an office in Angola, arranges all my meetings. Separating the chaff from wheat is no small part of what I pay him to do.

  “Being in demand is overrated.” I reply.

  “Says the woman now sitting on most of an untaxed half million.” He says, reaching into his pocket again. “That’s the starting bonus. The actual paychecks will have to be taxed, but don’t worry. A cover ID goes along with the onboarding process.”

  Ah. Starting bonuses and onboarding processes. In a business this small, it’s easy to keep track of the lingo that different kinds of buyers throw around. Onboarding means human resources, which in turn means corporations. Add that to untraceable guns, and you have ...

  “Mercenaries.” I say out loud.

  Todd the buyer snorts, his amusement seeming genuine.

  “Come on now.” he says, “This isn’t the 1500s. What I help run is a respectable private military company. Taxes in line and paperwork signed. We have our fair share of ex-spooks and cops and special operators, but we’re desperately short on people with… your sort of talents.”

  “Smugglers?” now it’s my turn to snort. “I find it hard to believe that you can’t hire a few of them to help out on the job.”

  “Ah, that.” Says Todd the buyer. “We do have our fair share of smugglers, mostly the soldiers making ends meet on the side. No, what I need, what we need, is quite frankly, a bastard. Born, made, it doesn’t matter to us so long as you’re a bastard through and through. We’ve done some digging on our end and have tracked down a few of your old jobs. Something tells me that you’re our kind of girl.”

  His eyes shift down to my jacket sleeve, and when I follow his gaze, I notice a small smear of blood on my cuff. The guard from before must have left it while struggling with me. I rub at the smear, but only grind the stain deeper into the fabrics and thread.

  Frustrated, I frown and look back up at Todd the buyer. I like being called a bastard less than most, mainly because Beeze, the person, well, thing, that gave me my start in this business was the kind of guy that more than deserved the word. Still, I’ve done a job or two that ended messy. Not his fault for calling things as he saw them, as they happened to be.

  “I’m a bastard when I need to be, but I know my lane and what’s in it. I know a little of yours too, and that’s not for me.”

  I stand up from the table, leaving the duffel bag at my feet.

  “Thanks for the bonus.” I say, “But I’ll pass on your offer. Contact my secretary if you need to see me again. Do not ask for a refund. He won’t give you one.”

  I walk away from the table, passing by the waitress returning with my drink on a platter as I do. Feeling awkward, I shrug my shoulders in apology for making her work for no reason, and drop a few dollars on her plate to make up for it. She thanks me with a smile worth a cool million more, and I brush past her and into the rest of the hotel.

  Exiting the hotel is easier than entering. All I need is a blind corner without cameras and my lighter in hand. I keep the trip short and I land a few blocks away from my bank in Switzerland before the heat downstairs can make me start to sweat.

  I don’t like going to banks. They remind me of the people I’d grown up around, or rather the anxiety that they’d had when it came to paying bills. The memory of the stern looking faces on visiting collection agents, and the farms that neighbors had sold off bit by bit, makes me think about the job that I’d just turned down. Half a million dollars was a whole lot of money, but something about the offer, or maybe just the man doing the offering, tickled alarm bells in my head. No use worrying about it now, though. I’d managed to take care of Mary and myself well enough with my current business so far. I’ll keep taking care of us no matter what else comes up.

  After rounding a corner and coming within eyesight of my destination, even I have to admit that my current bank’s pretty nice looking, assuming you’re into ornate European buildings. Inside, I make my way to my usual banker, exchange pleasantries, and withdraw half of the buyer’s payment in cash, as is my habit. Like I said, no one can keep me in jail, but a hit to my bank account is still possible. My banker tries to convince me to maybe leave my assets alone for a while longer, but as always I ignore him, thank him, take my money in yet another duffel bag (so convenient), and go.

  The last stop I aim for is the best, in my opinion. It’s a two-story house with four smallish bedrooms, near a freeway that’s just close enough to keep the acres of farmland surrounding it from feeling like an endless sea of corn. A bed of bright yellow sunflowers hugs the front half of the building. Mary always said that adding the flower bed is what made our house a home. I never got the appeal, but I love her, so the flowers, and the gardener who tends them on Fridays, get to stay.

  My drop downstairs is a quick one without complication, and I land on my back porch near the kitchen door an instant later with another puff of brown smoke and fading smell of bad eggs. As I reach for the doorknob, I remember that I’d forgotten to stop and rent something to watch while we test out Mary’s new cookies later tonight. I could make another drop close and get it, taking maybe five minutes round trip, but I want to show Mary the unexpected haul from today’s job. She may worry and fret over the business and where cash like this comes from, but when it comes down to it, she’ll drop it. She’s only human. Just like me.

  I start fishing for keys and have them half out of my pocket when I smell something burning. At first I think it’s the cookies, because there definitely is a hint of singed chocolate buried in the scent. But as my muscles tense up and heart starts beating with a mind of its own, I realize without doubt exactly what I’ve picked up on. It’s a smell that, in this business, you damn well better learn, because if you don’t you may wind up all sorts of dead.

  Gunpowder. I can smell gunpowder, so much of it, that it’s seeping out of the kitchenette.

  My heart continues hammering away in my chest by the time I realize this. It takes a whole lot of shooting to smell gunpowder this strongly. Sure, anyone can catch a whiff of it, hell even choke on it, if stuck inside an enclosed space when a few rounds pop off. But this isn’t an enclosed space like a hallway or smoky gun range. This is my fucking back porch on a summer day with a strong breeze racing from the north to the freeway by the south. If I can smell gunpowder through all this then dozens, maybe hundreds of rounds must have been fired.

  Every single fiber and bone inside me wants to slam open the door and charge inside to see what the hell has happened to my home and
Mary. I keep a lid on those feelings, that driving need, though, because there’s no way to help anyone if you end up quickly dead. Moving through a doorway without getting killed is one of the most valuable skills practiced by close quarters fighters, which isn’t surprising since I’d heard an Army Ranger once call doorways “motherfucking Fatal Funnels.”

  It makes sense when I think about it now. If someone armed is expecting company on the other side of the door, the brightest thing for them to do is just aim at the big rectangle and wait. I don’t have the training, so going through a door covered by a gunman is suicide for me.

  So I decide to say fuck it, drop my duffel bag filled with cash, and ignore the door all together. I flick my lighter, and trigger a drop.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Most shortcuts through hell are over pretty quick. A spark or bit of flame is all that I need to start the process of leaving creation, and my time spent downstairs is usually over before I can blink. Landing where I want after is usually the easiest part of the process because once downstairs, all points on the globe are just within arms reach.

  This time, however, my shortcut hits a snag at almost the exact moment I enter downstairs. In one instant, I’m falling through heat that sears the air all around me, ready to make my landing inside of my home. In the next, I suddenly pulled to a stop, my body hanging upside down from something latched hard and tight to my left calf. The pressure on my leg is excruciating, and I shout from the pain as I dangle in the middle of hell. I’m no stranger to the downstairs, though, so I clamp my jaw tight before I can panic and breath in a lung full of brimstone.

  Still tumbling, I bend over at the waist so that I can get a clear view of whatever grabbed me. I really wish I hadn’t, though, because when I do, I find myself face to face with a devil.

  Like the bush that my pop always talked about on Sunday mornings, the devil hovering in the air along with me burns too. Its grip on my leg is as hot and tight as a pipe wrench left to heat up in an oven. I can feel blisters and bruises growing along my calf. When I look into the devil’s face, I see blisters sprouting on its skin as well.

  Jaw clenching back screams, I watch the devil as burn marks spread in patches of blackened, ruined flesh on its arms, neck and face. The scorched skin and meat spreads across the devil’s body in a wave, covering it from head to toe in charcoal dark scars. A moment later, the burned char starts to flake off, leaving pink, unruined flesh beneath. For a moment, the devil is perfect, looking like a young and well muscled woman, albeit one with wings on her back and a cruel smirk on her face. The moment doesn’t last, though, because the burn marks I’d watched cover her before stop shrinking and start to make a return.

  The devil’s smile fades as the burns start to return, and in moments her face is contorted into a grimace of pain. She takes it out on me, shaking my leg even harder. Her hand feels like a branding iron on my skin - the pain growing more and more by the second. It’s only then that I realize, for the first time in all my travels downstairs, that the oppressive heat of this place doesn’t come from the air.

  It comes from them. The devils - burning up from the inside.

  For a moment, I almost feel sorry for the monster, but that ends the moment it tries to pull me in closer.

  I rear back with the leg not clutched in its grasp and kick the damned thing in its face. My boot lands hard, crunching something under my heel. The devil doesn’t seem to like this much, and starts swiping at me with its free hand then, after a moment, with its fucking wings as well.

  The blows knock me around more as we keep falling through the endless space of the pit downstairs. It hurts but more than that it pisses me off, so I keep kicking at the fucker harder and harder. The strength of its grip, and the heat there as well, never wavers, though. No matter how much I struggle. What’s worse, I can see the hem of my pants leg start to smolder in its hand, ready to take to a full flame.

  God damnit. I’ve been downstairs enough to know something about flame. At the speed we’re falling, with this much wind and air rushing over us, any open flame that comes to life will spread far and fast. Once that happens, a tight grip and burned calf will be the least of my worries if I let this thing keep a grip on me. The thought of that really starts to undo me, finally cracking through the forced feeling of competence and calm that I’d been keeping between me and the goddamn thing on my leg. I look down at the devil again, and see her still smiling up at me, her lips stretched wide beneath the dark, smudged boot marks that I’ve left on her face.

  Wait a minute. Looking closer, I see that those boot marks are more than simple smudges left from the rubber of my footwear. They’re too thick, too dark, and downright too clumpy for that to be all that it is. I aim another kick down at the devil’s smiling face, and as my foot bounces off of its skull, I notice something strange, something odd and black, stretching between it’s face and my boot.

  Rubber. The marks on its face are melted rubber. It must has been burning so hot from the inside, that the damn rubber on my boots was melting off on its face. I look down at the bastard and think of how I could use that. Pain doesn’t seem to phase it, but maybe something else will.

  My left pants leg, still clutched in the devil’s grip, chooses that moment to finally catch fire. The flame starts so small that it’s barely a glow, but expands a second later into a goddamn torch on the side of my leg. The devil actually starts laughing at that, and with my leg on fire and an idea in mind, I raise my free leg back for one last attempt.

  I hammer down on the devil’s face with one final kick. I must be getting tired, because it hits more weakly than the other. The aim, however, is still good enough

  My boot heel digs into the devil’s face, but I don’t let it rebound again. This time, I instead hold it down hard on his head, and drag the shoe up and across his brow, my boots crossing in a line across both of his eyes. The rubber of my boot melts on contact with his body, and sticks to him and his eyes in thick, streaky chunks.

  That does the trick. In one moment, the devil is smiling at me. In the next, he’s clutching at his eyes and frantically trying to scoop the melting rubber free. I don’t wait around for witty banter or a backhand in revenge. I just close my own eyes, focus on my drop, and land, clothes smoking, on the tile floor of my kitchen.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My emergency landing back in creation comes harder than usual. And by that, I mean I find myself sliding across the floor with enough speed to trigger airbags if I’d been riding in a car. The slide sends me sideways along the cold, hard tile until I crash into a table leg and set of folding chairs that Mary and I had squashed into one of the small room’s corners.

  The chairs flip over with a loud, jangling clatter. The table leg I hit along the way, however, decides to stay firmly in place. The impact knocks the wind out of me, or at least the wind I had left after my prolonged trip downstairs. Nothing feels broken, though, so I pull myself to my feet and try to start thinking.

  Despite the burning in my throat and the agony in my leg, it doesn’t take me long to realize how my landing had gone so badly. The momentum you pick up while falling downstairs after making a drop doesn’t follow you to your landing, for the most part at least. I was down there for a lot longer than usual this time. That means that even if I’d only kept a small fraction of the speed I’d built up while falling downstairs, it was still enough to give me a rough time when making my landing back in creation. I’ll have to remember that “for the most part” can still be enough to kill me if I ever find myself in the same situation again.

  One thing is for sure, though. Whatever surprise I’d been hoping to gain by dropping through hell instead of taking the front door was lost the moment I’d crash landed in my kitchen. The extra good news is that the surprise is not needed, because no one is in here except for me.

  Looking around my kitchen, though, I can see that the good news dries up about there.

  The place is a mess. Not the kind that happens when y
ou try a new recipe for bundt cake or hot wings and are less than careful with where the wet and dry mixes end up.

  No, my kitchen, which I’d sacrificed sweat and tears to afford for me and Mary, is practically shredded from end to end by bullet hole scars. One wall, the one across from me and facing the interior of the house has been practically sawed in half by a pattern that I recognize as machine gun fire.

  I do notice that none of the bullet holes carry all the way through any of the walls, which means that either my architect hadn’t cheaped out when he’d installed the defensive upgrades that I’d asked for, or that whoever was here had been using soft, disintegrating rounds. I hope that it’s the former for two, admittedly selfish, reasons. The first is that I’ll be depending on these walls if there’s a shooter inside who’s been too deaf or dumb to show up after hearing my arrival. The second is because disintegrating bullets tend to damage organs than their more standard, fully metal jacketed brethren. That may not sound like much for anyone who’s never tried to help out someone who’s been shot, but it will matter to me if I have to patch up anyone that I may find inside. Especially if that anyone happens to be Mary.

  There’s only one way to tell if I’m in here alone for sure, and that’s to get up and go see for myself.

  I climb to my feet as fast as my aching bones will let me, and move over to the solid block of the kitchen island at the center of the room. From there, I move over to the doorframe leading to the rest of the house. No one is in view when I lean out a little and peek around the corner, so I move on to the next doorway. Then the next. Then the next.

  I repeat the process, running from doorway to doorway and peeking out around corners until I’ve inspected both floors of my house. I see nothing save for more broken furniture and more bullet holes. The damage is excessive, as is the expanded firepower. Enough bullets have shot here to see an Afghan platoon through two weeks in the mountains.