by John Bruni
Jack pointed to the bushes. “We hide and wait for Wayne to show up.”
2
After waiting for nearly an hour, Jimmy said, “I’m getting mud all over my clothes.”
“Me, too,” Jack said. “Your point?”
“I’m sick and fucking tired of waiting here. I’m getting dirty, my legs are cramping up from kneeling and I’m hungry.”
Jack grinned. “Bitch.”
Jimmy ignored him. “How much longer can this take?”
“I don’t know, but you should shut the fuck up. It’s not like we’re playing war games with water guns on a hot summer day. This is the real thing. We fuck up, we die.”
“I understand, but couldn’t we find a better hiding place? I mean, this really—“
“No, we can’t. This is the closest we can get to the gate without being seen. The instant these guys show up with . . .” He trailed off, squinting his eyes. “Shut the fuck up. They’re here.”
A car pulled up in front of the gate with Bob and Keith inside. They could see Wayne’s unconscious body leaning against a back window. Bob reached out and punched in a code. The gates parted slowly, just enough to let the car in.
“Quick,” Jack whispered.
The two of them got to their feet, and Jack slipped easily through the gate. Jimmy lagged behind, his legs prickling over with pins and needles from kneeling for so long. He stumbled forward, unable to feel his feet. The gate started closing as he approached.
He gritted his teeth and gave it everything he had. He barely got through the gate before it locked shut behind him. Ahead of him, Jack ducked down behind a row of bushes. Jimmy threw himself at the ground directly behind Jack.
“Follow me,” Jack whispered. “And whatever you do, don’t lift your head.”
Jimmy, panting, felt a burning stitch slice through his side. “Fuck, man. Wait a minute, Jack.”
“We don’t have a minute. We gotta’ go now. Hop to it, Monaghan.” Jack slithered forward on his belly as quickly as he could, and Jimmy groaned. He forced himself to follow suit, but he just couldn’t keep up with his friend.
The car went much faster. Jack found himself falling behind quickly. He slipped across the grass like a ferret while Jimmy fumbled behind him like a crippled duck.
“Come on!” Jack hissed. “We’re almost there!”
The car parked in front of the garage, and the door eased up, revealing a couple of people waiting, both dressed in doctor’s whites. They stepped aside, letting the car in.
“No,” Jack mumbled. He watched the door descend. He leaped to his feet and ran for the garage, hoping the guards at the door wouldn’t see him break cover.
The door closed five seconds before he reached it.
“Fuck,” he moaned.
Jimmy appeared next to him, panting like a dog. “Those guys almost saw us, Jack. What the fuck?”
“We needed to get in that garage,” Jack said. “Now we have to face the guards and hope they don’t die loud.”
“I’d just be satisfied if they died without killing us,” Jimmy said.
Jack took a deep breath and opened the duffel bag, which had been slung over his shoulder. “Take some guns. We’re going to use them as a last resort. We’ll try to use knives on the guards, but they’re armed. I saw some big motherfucking guns hanging under their capes. I highly suggest you take something.”
“I have a gun,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t mean the handgun. Take something bigger, like a shotgun.”
Jimmy picked it out of the duffel bag, surprised by its heavy weight.
“It’s loaded, so be careful. And grab some ammo, just in case. The big red ones.”
Neither of them noticed the camera watching them. Yet they lucked out again, since no one would watch the footage until much later.
3
Since Wayne Richards’s confirmed capture, the people in the observation room had convened to the parlor, where they awaited the winner. Coppergate sat at the center of the room with his assistant standing behind them. Everyone else sat on the couches. Charles and William shared one, talking about the wagers of the day. Charles had won most of them, but William managed to be a good sport about it. Edward had a couch to himself, as did Elizabeth.
Edward looked at the time. He’d been up for an entire day and change without sleep. The coke definitely helped, but now that he didn’t have any more, he could feel himself coming down. He wanted nothing more right now than his bed. He didn’t know how everyone else managed to stay up this long. Maybe Coppergate had some kind of drug, but the others had steadily been drinking over the course of the day. They should all be haggard.
“I should like to stand for this momentous occasion,” Coppergate said to his assistant. “Give me my legs.”
The assistant knelt on one knee and opened the suitcase on the floor. Coppergate’s mechanical legs shone from within. No flesh-colored, lifelike appendages for him. Nope. He tried to go as far as possible when it came to intimidating people.
He pulled back the blanket that covered his lower body. His dick hung limply but thickly between two skinny leg stumps. The scar tissue around these and the base of his cock were sickeningly reminiscent of spilled milk gone sour, and everyone in the room found something else to hold their attention.
The assistant, however, had a cast-iron stomach. She took one of the robotic legs and knelt down before Coppergate, pushing his cock to the side so she could fit the metal cinch around a leg stump. Once attached, she jammed some electrodes and other probes onto and into Coppergate’s flesh through scars that already existed. These connected to Coppergate’s nerves and activated the leg. Once done with this, she moved on to the other one before dropping the blanket back over his lower body.
At this point, Coppergate prepared the billion dollar transfer and waited.
4
Bob and Keith watched as the doctors dragged Wayne’s unconscious body out of the back seat and onto a gurney, which they then wheeled away. A third doctor came out, holding up his left hand. “Payment in full, authorized by Richard Coppergate.”
Keith took his payment first and watched the amount in his bank account go up a thousand dollars. Not much, but still, not bad for just a couple of hours of work.
Bob watched with the glee of a child on Christmas Day as the numbers of his bank account climbed considerably more than Keith’s. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t money. These numbers represented booze and fuckslingers and poker games.
“Nice doing business with you,” he said. “Give my regards to the boss.”
The doctor nodded.
Bob called up a taxi to take him away from here while Keith saw a guard walking around the back of the house. “Hey, I know that guy. I served with him. I’m going to say hi. I’ll see you later, Mr. Whiteman.”
Bob didn’t listen to him. He just watched as Keith took off out the back door of the garage to see his old army buddy. Still on the phone with the cab company, he stepped out of the garage and started down the drive to the gate.
5
Jack held his shotgun in one hand and the knife in the other as he did his best to step lightly. Over the years of dealing with trespassers in the woods, he’d discovered how important stealth had been to his own survival. He’d had plenty of occasions to practice it, and now he moved without a sound toward the door guards.
Jimmy, on the other hand, had shoes with hard soles, and he breathed heavily as he walked. Twice, Jack had to turn to face Jimmy with a finger to his lips.
The two guards stood on the porch, but they left a lot of room between them and the door, which gave Jack some space to sneak up behind them. They talked to each other quietly about the chicks they were banging. It sounded like bullshit to Jack, just a couple of guys lying about the trim they’ve gotten over the years. Maybe if they’d paid more attention to their surroundings, they’d get the chance to actually get more pussy.
Jack stood directly behind one of them, and he
waited patiently for Jimmy to get behind the other. He saw Jimmy holding his breath, and his face turned beet red.
Jack nodded and reached around his target’s neck with his knife hand, yanking it across the man’s throat. Blood gouted from the wound, but since Jack knew well enough where to cut, he made no noise, not even a gagging sound, as he clutched at his open wound. Without hesitation, Jack turned the guard around, plunging the blade into his eye, dropping him like a sack of bricks.
Jimmy didn’t do quite as efficient a job. When he tried to slit his target’s throat, he didn’t get it right because the guard saw Jack out of the corner of his eye and turned his head. Instead of getting the windpipe, Jimmy cut the guard’s jugular and carotid. Blood poured down the guard’s body like a red waterfall, but he could still make noise. Worse, instead of grabbing for his wound, he reached under his red cape for the gun.
Jimmy panicked and jabbed the blade at the guard’s throat again, this time getting him just under the adam’s apple. The guard fell down the steps of the porch and thrashed wildly, but he couldn’t make any noise from his throat.
Jack looked down at Jimmy’s work. “A bit messy, but not bad. This your first knifing?”
“Yeah.” Jimmy watched the guard’s movements as they slowed to a creep, like a wind-up doll running out of juice. He thought about shooting Toby, and he realized that his second killing hadn’t bothered him in the slightest.
“Now let’s get inside and fuck some shit up,” Jack said. He knelt down next to his guard and riffled through his pockets. He found the keys in no time and turned to use them in the front door.
“Hey! You! Stop!”
Jack and Jimmy turned to see who the newcomer was, both holding their shotguns at the ready.
6
The older doctor set up the ray carefully and stood back, watching it with a smile. They’d already implanted a new chip into Wayne’s left hand so that Coppergate could make the final transaction. Now the other doctor, his protégé, stood by, waiting for an explanation.
“Mr. Coppergate is adamant that we not actually remove a bomb from a subject’s neck. Never. However, we are supposed to neutralize it. Considering Mr. Coppergate’s situation, he is justified in his thoughts. It really is necessary that he retains the ability to detonate the subject’s head if said subject becomes unruly.”
“How do we neutralize it?”
“A simple procedure with this ray. It eliminates the timer set in the bomb and turns it into a transistor that responds to a pulse emanating from a control only Mr. Coppergate has access to. It is set in one of his teeth. The one all the way in the back of his mouth.”
“Brilliant,” the apprentice said.
“I’ll bet they didn’t teach you that at Harvard.”
“No, sir.”
7
Keith met up with Jenner, the guard he’d known in the army, and they shot the shit for a bit. Jenner was on guard duty, so he asked Keith to walk with him as he made his rounds. They talked about the last place they’d been stationed together, where one of their friends had hooked up with a local fuckslinger and his dick had fallen off.
“I don’t know whatever happened to him,” Jenner said.
“As soon as he got back home, he got an implant,” Keith said. “Nothing like the real thing, but it worked, I guess.”
“You’d think with all these ridiculous drugs these kids have today, like the one that lets you transmit your tattoos and body mods to other people, you’d think that we could get something that would grow a dick back.”
“Maybe they’re working on something now.”
They rounded the corner of the house and came out in front just in time to see two people take out the door guards. Keith froze and realized he recognized both of them from Wayne Richards’s LiveStream.
A set up. They’d been set up.
Jenner brought up his gun at the ready, and the two of them approached the front door. Keith whipped out his own gun from under his arm. “Hey! You! Stop!”
The two on the porch whirled around, and Jenner opened up on them. Keith pulled the trigger of his gun twice, but surprise had thrown him off. He knew his bullets had gone astray without checking.
Jack and Jimmy dropped to the ground, hiding behind the marble porch steps. Jimmy hyperventilated, never having found himself in a position like this in his life. Jack, on the other hand, had been in many violent situations in his years, from his first beating at the hands of peckerwood third graders to the day his parents had been murdered by racist fuckers in their very own home. Jack knew what to do, and he did it quickly.
He whipped the shotgun around the stone steps and fired it at Keith. He’d loaded up with scattershot, and it turned Keith’s head and chest into bloody gruel. Some of it even caught the other guard, but he acted like he’d merely been stung by a mosquito. He kept firing. Jack took cover and waited.
“Jack! What the fuck are we going to do?”
Jack ignored him. When he heard Jenner’s gun click, and he heard the clip being ejected, he popped up again and fired the other barrel.
Jenner joined Keith on the grass. Their blood mixed together and soaked into the ground.
“So much for subtlety,” Jack said. He hopped up on the steps, ran up to the front door and kicked at it with all his might.
He bounced back with a yelp and nearly rolled down the stairs. He cursed loudly, holding his foot.
Jimmy went to his side and helped him up. Jack gingerly stood on his injured foot and leaned against Jimmy. “Fucking door’s metal. We need one of the guards to open it up. Drag him over here.” He pointed to the closest guard.
Jimmy grabbed the corpse under its arms and dragged it to the door. Jack took its hand and placed it on the panel just below the door bell. The front door eased open, and they finally entered, guns ready and reloaded.
8
Bob nearly reached the gate when he heard loud popping noises coming from behind him. He peeked over his shoulder and looked back toward Wingate’s mansion. He could see the guards on the porch, or at least what had happened to them. He saw another guard and Keith with their guns out, going up against a pudgy white guy and a nigger. Keith and his army buddy did not win.
A part of Bob thought he should probably go back and check on things, see what’s going on, and to perhaps aid his employer. But at the same time, they didn’t pay him nearly enough for this kind of thing. He knew they’d probably give him more than a hardy thank you if he went back and saved the day, but why bother? They had guards. More would probably come out and handle the situation.
In the end, he decided not to step into someone else’s department. He went through the gate, locked it behind him, and waited for his taxi to show up.
Chapter 26
1
“What the fuck was that?” Edward stood suddenly, but his legs didn’t want to cooperate. They quivered a bit too much, maybe because he’d been sitting for a while, but he thought it more likely that he’d been unnerved by what had to be gunshots. He didn’t even notice that he’d cursed in front of Coppergate.
The old man ignored him. “I think I may have been too hasty in sending our guards away so soon. I’m sure Charles’s guards can handle it.”
Charles jumped up and ran to the window, looking out over the front of the property. “Uh, I think the guards are dead, Richard. And, um. I think I see that hitman you sent out with Bob. He doesn’t look too good.”
Elizabeth joined him. “Yes, they’re dead.” For the first time Edward could remember, he saw something other than cold disinterest in Elizabeth’s eyes. A touch of fear? Edward, who considered himself an expert on the subject, thought it likely. He thought about putting an arm around her to comfort her, but he didn’t want to risk an ass kicking.
Coppergate turned to his assistant. “I hope you have your weapon on you.”
She reached under her suit and unsheathed a rather large .45.
“Excellent,” Coppergate said. “Charles, how a
bout you?”
“I have rifles in my study,” Charles said. “I used to go hunting with—“
“Retrieve them. Quickly.”
Charles nodded, but before he could move, an explosion rocked the room, and his head turned into a red mist.
2
Once inside, Jack stopped Jimmy. “Listen, there’s something we need to be clear on, okay?”
Jimmy, under the impression that they’d been in a hurry, thought now might not be a good time for a conversation. But he saw the look on Jack’s face, and he knew it would be better to roll with it. “Yeah?”
Jack took a deep breath. “Wherever we find these rich bastards, they are all guilty, okay? No matter who they are, what they look like, anything, they are guilty as fuck. You must not hesitate to kill all of them. Even if they beg for their lives. Understand?”
“That’s a bit cold-hearted,” Jimmy said. “I mean, if they’re begging—“
Jack couldn’t mince words, not when they were this close to the end. “They are all responsible for Steve’s death. They might as well have killed all those people themselves and God knows how many others over the course of the years. They must all die, even if there are children.”
“Oh, now that’s ridiculous,” Jimmy said. “I’m not going to kill kids.”
“That’s fine. I don’t think there are any here. If there are, I’ll take care of it. Nevertheless, everyone must be killed, even if there are women.”
“I don’t know . . . I mean, women? I really don’t like violence against—“
“As far as I know, there should be only one woman, and she’s just as guilty as the others. No matter what made her that way, she’s an evil fuck. If we don’t take a scorched earth policy with these people, it’ll come back on us. Are we clear?”
