Brimstone Hustle (Brimstone Cycle Book 1)

by Robert McKinney

  That’s the problem, he’d once told me, with making their deals. When a devil trades a power to a human, he loses it himself. They can still grant that same power to as many other people as they like while making their deals, but they can’t use the power for themselves until the bargain holders have died.

  The dead part had worried me a little back then, because why not kill me and gain the power back once the deal was complete? That’s when Ole Beeze had reminded me of the unspoken small print that went with all of their deals. Devils can’t kill the people that they’ve made bargains with. It’s a good thing to keep in mind, and about the only reason I’d ever risk angering him.

  It’s also why most devils prefer brief forays of violence and the burning that waits them downstairs over the chance to wear a human body in creation for a week. Making deals can be a hassle, even for devils like Ole Beeze. I think that’s why I’ve never heard of any devil dog being granted anything close to immortality.

  “It’s no problem, Beeze.” I say. “Besides, I need to make a stop and get a few supplies first.”

  “Supplies? Oh my, is someone planning a party?” Ole Beeze smiles again. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  ”These men took my sister, Beeze. If anyone tries to stop me, I plan on getting downright biblical.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I get some distance from the church house, make a drop, and land on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. I’m standing on a forest trail and am surrounded by green leaves. I walk down the trail for a bit until I come to a rock stained with a splash of white paint. I leave the path at the rock and head west in the dying light until I come to another rock, this one larger and wholly unmarked. I push it away and uncover a bombproof crate buried underneath.

  I’d chosen this place years earlier because it shares a time zone with the U.S. east coast. It’s easy to get disoriented when one makes as many drops as I do, so it pays to have a familiar fallback that helps me reset.

  A reset isn’t what I’m after at the moment. What I need is the bags full of diamonds, spare cash, weapons, burner phones and other equipment stacked inside of the formerly rock covered crate. While this fallback cache isn’t the most recent that I’ve made, it’ll be more than enough for what I have planned.

  I start picking up items and laying them aside, double checking to make sure that what I need is all here. The diamonds inside are good for any kind of bribe that I could think of, but I don’t plan on paying anyone off in what’s to come. I have similar feelings about the Glock tucked into a Sidecar holster with a spare magazine. While I’ve known my fair share of people who’d shoot first and ask questions never, I know that if the bullets start flying, I’ve already lost.

  No, the items I set aside each have a specific purpose. A spotting scope and stand with enough zoom to count the feathers on a bird’s wing from half a mile out. A pair of smoke grenades, four flash bangs, and a flat, hardback book-sized slab of putty with wires attached that an old Navy contact of mine would have recognized as a breaching charge. A stuffed medical kit, about the size of an insulated lunch box, rounds out the collection of items. I pack them all into a duffel bag, close up the cache, and start walking back to the trail though Puerto Rico’s sea of green tropical rainforest.

  It starts raining not long after I reach the side of the trail. The drops are cold enough on my skin to make me shiver, and for a moment I consider giving into impatience and making a drop right here and now. The moment passes when I consider the risk that would be. I’d been reckless today with a lot of my drops, and I doubt my luck will last if I come face to face with another devil again. If that happens, and I end up trapped and killed downstairs like the other devil dogs I’ve heard of, there won’t be anyone left to take care of Mary. I’m too close to be stupid, so I put my head down and put in the work of trudging, ankle screaming, through the growing mud of the trail.

  Despite all of my tough talk, it’s hard enough to keep your spirits high when caught in the rain on a good day, which this certainly isn’t. The last few hours have been the most tiring, most stressful that I’ve ever known and my body, mind and spirit are feeling the weight.

  I just stand in the rain for a minute and let the raindrops land on my head. Three years. When this is done, I’ll be giving that to Ole Beeze. I don’t know how I’ll explain it to Mary, or if she’ll forgive me, or even how I’ll keep her safe while Beeze has me. She’ll have to be strong for both of us while I’m gone. I know that I won’t be able to do it. I won’t be anything, not in a way that matters, until Ole Beeze is finished and I serve out my term.

  Worries do nothing for Mary though, so I go back to moving. After a few dozen steps I’m able to put the discomfort and selfish need to take a breather under a tree behind me. I hike until I’m a quarter mile or more away from where I’d landed in the forest. More than enough space to drop again without worry.

  I wipe the rainwater from my face and adjust the duffel bag strap on my shoulder. While I’ve been running around the globe looking for clues, Mary’s been out there somewhere. Alone and scared. She’s been waiting long enough for her big sister to show. I flick my lighter, knowing I won’t make her wait any longer.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My drop takes me to one of the dozens of storm surge evacuation camps that “temporarily” sit inland of coastal Florida. Climate change is by no means a gentle thing, and the people in this state know it better than most. Though hurricane season had just started, Florida had already been hit twice. The news said that the governor declared mandatory evacuations a couple of weeks back. No one heeded them, because everyone near the coast had either moved to Colorado, Montana, or somewhere else high above current sea level if they had enough money. Those that didn’t had been sent to underfunded camps starting back when the tides started rising during my own high school years a decade ago.

  There had always been too many camps for the National Guard to take care of, which I think is why my treacherous buyer, Tom Angler, is here. While mercenary work will always be in demand, the bodies needed for old fashioned combat duty fluctuates a good deal from year to year. The smart corporate warlords, of which Tom Angler was one, kept their bottom lines steady by providing an endless stream of overqualified guards to whatever refugee camp had a need for something close to order. Most of the guns for hire that I’d known in my time treated stints at the Florida camps like a boring paid vacation. More fistfights, fewer landmines - that kind of thing. A quick Google search with one of my burner phone confirms that the camp Ole Beeze had sent me to is one guarded by ESR Services - my enemy’s shop. Given how badly he’s chewed his way through me and mine lately, I hope that here, on his home turf, his guard will be down.

  It isn’t.

  I learn this less than a minute after landing on a hillside half a mile north of where the camp is located. I setup my spotting scope and start surveying the lay of the land, tracking civilians, guard rotations, and aid truck deliveries. At least five hundred civilians and two dozen guards are milling about in the campground, which blankets a half dozen football fields worth of space. The guards are all armed, and not with pistols, either. Each one of them carries a machine gun like the pair I’d seen in Angola before.

  Overkill if you ask me, but then again, I’ve never dealt with a Gators fan.

  A few more minutes of surveying shows me that most of the guard patrols are concentrated near a cluster of prefabricated buildings at the center of the camp. One has a roof covered in antennas and dishes, while the other has the bright red cross of a medical clinic. My gut tells me that I’ll find Mary in one of the two. My only problem will be getting inside without being spotted or shot.

  Making a drop straight into one is likely a bad call. For one thing, the place could be the wrong spot, and if it isn’t I won’t be able to make another drop with Mary nearby without attracting the wrong kind of attention from more devils downstairs. No, the smart play will be to land at the edge of the camp, create
a distraction, and make my way deeper on foot. I’m not particularly confident in my old fashioned sneaking skills, but when I think over my options, this is all that I’ve got. Mind made up, I repack my scope, make a drop, and land next to a collection of tents near the corner of the camp.

  I give a quick look around and find no one to see me. Good. I use the alone time to set up my distraction and start sprinting towards the center of the camp.

  The smoke grenade that I’d left to blow on a timer goes off with a hiss when I’m a few tents away. The grenade sends a brightly colored tail of smoke into the air, and in seconds I can see, as well as hear, the camp reacting to the new threat. The first guard I pass doesn’t glance my way, as he’s too focused on seeing what the hell’s burning green in the campground behind me.

  The second guard I pass is another story. I go by him at a run, my eyes set on the pair of prefabricated buildings now coming into view. He doesn’t tell me to stop, but he does open fire with his light machine gun at me. The basic drawbacks of that weapon are the only thing that keep me alive. Though “light” when compared to heavy hitters like a Browning machine gun, the weapon is still a bitch to handle in a fight, especially if fired on the fly from the hip or a standing position.

  I’m too far ahead of him to see if he’s taken the time to aim at the shoulder or let loose from the hip. Whichever one he chose, it wasn’t enough to tag me with the first few rounds of his burst, and he’s not strong enough to keep the weapon on target as the following shots through his barrel up high. I see bullets smack into the ground to my left and ahead of my feet before trailing off and high over one of the prefab buildings ahead of me.

  I come closer to the buildings and see that the one that he’d sprayed has a red cross on the side. The place where I was most likely to find Mary.

  I feel a flush of anger and a burning sensation in my chest. If that guard’s loaded his weapon with the same shit I’d dodged in Angola, then each of those bullets would have punched through the thin walls of the clinic. Any one of them could have just smashed through Mary. For a moment, I’m disappointed that I’d left my cache Glock behind, because if I’d had it, I’d have turned right then to gun that guard down in the streets. I don’t have the gun, though, which is probably a blessing. A pistol won’t match up well against a machine gun, especially if the former is being fired by me. With no choices, I keep running until I make it to the clinic then onwards to the door.

  It’s unlocked and comes open when I slam into it at more or less full speed. My entry’s noisy, and for the second time today, I scare a hallway full of nurses as I scramble to a stop on the other side of the door. I close it behind me and dance away from it as fast as my bad leg will take me.

  No one follows me through the door, and when I risk a peek through one of the windows lining the prefab building’s outer wall, I see one of the last things that I’d wanted to see. The guards are coming. Not a handfull, like I’d seen when checking the camp out with my scope, but dozens, converging on the building from every direction.

  Seeing that many men show up, and do it so quickly, makes me realize something as my heart sinks. The number of people that I’m seeing outside is far far more than what’s needed to keep the peace in a camp this small. This is a trap, and one that I should have seen coming. I don’t know where the bastard who took Mary has been hiding them all, but I do know something else for sure.

  Every one of these fuckers is coming for me.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My bag of tricks won’t hold that many people off. All I can do is find Mary and run.

  I turn away from the windows and go deeper into the building. For a moment, a nurse walks towards me as if he’s going to say something, or even try to stop me. That ends when I reach down into my duffel bag and pull out a flash bang. The thing is (mostly) non-lethal, but apparently he doesn’t know that, because he raises his hands and backs up from me.

  I brush past him and go through the door at his back, entering a cramped little room filled with a pair of movable hospital beds. One of them is empty. On the other is a girl with a bright yellow flower at her bedside.

  She’s propped up in bed and holds a flower in one of her hands. One arm and both legs are bandaged in fabric, and I can see the weeping edge of a burn on the curve of her cheek. She’s awake, and despite all the commotion outside isn’t turned towards the window. She just sits there, open mouthed, staring at me.

  Mary.

  Hands shaking, I walk over to where she sits in the bed. I smile at her, my eyes wide and brimming with tears. She blinks when I come near, and soon the tears come to her eyes as well. She cries, clutching my hand even as I slip it out so I can brush back her hair and kiss the top of her head.

  “I knew you’d find me.” She says. “God Robin, I just knew it.”

  I close my eyes for a long moment, drinking in the smell of her hair and the sound of her voice. All day I’ve been shaking myself to pieces inside, trying to keep it together enough to do what needed to be done. I’ve bled for this, burned for this, and now I’ve found her. It’ll soon be over. We just have to get out of here first.

  I hold my finger up to my lips and she nods back to me, her jaw clenching tight. I know that part of the tension on her face has to be from the pain - Lord knows I felt how badly a burn mark can sting. But I also know Mary, and with an escape from here in sight, she’ll be just as focused and determined to get through this as I am.

  It only takes me a few seconds to find a wheelchair worth stealing tucked away in the room. I wheel it over to the side of Mary’s bed then come over to help her get into it. She’s already moving to help me as I do, and despite her burns, keeps quiet whenever I bump one of her bandaged limbs into the side of the bed or the railing of the chair.

  Getting her settled in the chair without putting too much pressure on her bandages takes a little while, but we get it done. More importantly, we get it done quietly. Once Mary’s settled, I run over to one of the hallway windows to see the situation outside. What I see doesn’t please me, because what I see is nothing.

  OK, that’s not true. The collection of tents lined up row by row and the handful of aid trucks parked outside of the clinic are all there, but the people are gone. When I’d entered the building, I’d been able to see at least a few civilians in view, though none of them seem to be hanging around now. The camp guards, the dozens that I’d seen surrounding my earlier are similarly gone, and that’s what worries me most of all.

  Though I’ve been busy with Mary for a rushed minute or so, that’s not nearly enough time for that many people to clear out of the way. The lack of civilians makes sense, especially if they’d had some rough run-ins with the camp guards before. They’d have seen the men with big weapons flowing in, and would flee as far as they could to stay out of this mess.

  The lack of guards, however, makes not one lick of sense. While I can imagine some of them pulling back to hide behind the concealment of the masses of tents nearby, at least some of them should have been in my view. The wind is blowing hard out there, making the tents shake enough that a wobble or two would eventually show a glimpse of a man hidden behind. The guards I’d seen coming are not hiding out there.

  Or maybe they are, but are closer than I have expected.

  If I was on their side and had to choose something to hide behind other than a tent, I’d get as close to the walls of the building as I could, so that someone peeking out from inside couldn’t see anything flattened on the side of the building without exposing themselves to the men hiding there.

  I also think about the breaching charge I have packed in my own duffel bag. Getting close would also make sense if they’d had a few charges of their own to use against me. With one of them, they could press up close to one of the walls, blow a hole somewhere I won’t expect it, and flood in moments later to bury me with their sheer weight of bodies or just light me up with a machine gun while leaning out around the hole.

  None of those o
ptions is something I can reliably deal with, and I realize that I’ll have to fall back on a decision I’d been avoiding. We’ll have to make a drop straight out of here. It’s closer to my arrival point than I’d like, but there’s still a chance, albeit a small one, we can make it through downstairs without being noticed. It’s not a safe bet, but it’s the least bad decision that I can think of with the time that we have. I start moving back towards Mary, ready to risk a drop and get her away.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I almost make it back to her when one of the guards outside takes the choice out of my hands by setting off a breaching charge fixed to one of the prefab building’s walls.

  There’s a pressure. I don’t know how else to explain it. Not a noise, not even a bang, but an actual press that squeezes me right down to my bones. My inner ear goes haywire, and the next thing I know I’m blinking, writhing and choking on the dust that’s now filling the air. I don’t even realize that I’m laying on my back until I see the boots of a mercenary come to rest beside my face.

  On the other side of the boot, I see another shape. All the crap in the air may have made my vision blurry, but I can tell that whatever the shape is has been broken and bent.

  No.

  The thought comes to me as I try to crawl towards the shape. The shape may be broken, but I’m going to stay strong. That’s what Mary needs from me. That’s what I need from me, if I’m going to get her out of this thing alive.

  I come closer, but stop when something hard, maybe a boot, makes contact with the side of my head. The blow snaps my head to the side, and stars start to swim in front of my eyes.

  “Stay down.” Says a voice that I recognize. I’m scared, but I can’t let him see it. I have to stay strong. Show no weakness, for Mary.

  “Hi Tom.” I say in the direction of the boot. I try to keep my voice light, and probably fail.