Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  Unconsciously she licked her lips, remembering the brief contact, the thrill, the fear, the excitement, the confusion — so much confusion.

  Dominic was out of her league; so what was his game? She’d known plenty of brown-nosers in her day, but he didn’t seem like one of those. Besides, butt kissers always had a reason — a goal, an angle they were playing and she just couldn’t think of one where he would need her. Other than passing him through the program, what possible use could she be to him?

  It didn’t make sense.

  That left hero worship.

  She’d experienced it herself as a rook under Chuck Creed. She’d looked up to him, developed a little bit of a thing for him. But Chuck, a happily married man, never gave the slightest sign of being interested in her in any way other than friendship and as a working partner. She’d gotten over it after her training program, but it seemed real enough at the time. So maybe it was the same with Dominic; only it didn’t feel like it.

  So what did he want from her?

  Maybe he just wants me.

  She snorted at the thought. No way. Besides, she had too much going on to let herself get involved with a love affair; the cat, John Doe, the asylum.

  The cat.

  She hadn’t seen or heard it all day, thank goodness.

  Her call sign sounded on the radio. She almost missed it because it wasn’t her usual call sign — moving from graves to days switched things up there too — but she remembered just before dispatch had to call again. Dispatch aired a two-car property damage traffic accident, non-injury. How exciting. Sarah hated car accidents. They were nothing but paper work, ticked off people, and numerous trips to traffic and civil court.

  The crash, just south of Alameda on Cherry Street, was a simple rear-ender. A red, 2004, Honda Civic, stopped in the southbound lane, its back bumper and trunk crumpled. Five feet behind sat a bright blue, Volkswagen Jetta with a crushed front end and a starred windshield where the driver’s head had obviously impacted. Oh great, she thought, it’s the Japs verses the Krauts. As Sarah walked up she saw no blood or bits of hair or scalp on the windshield. Good, sometimes there were.

  A big man had his back to her, leaning down at the Civic’s driver’s side window. Sarah saw the driver of the Honda, a young girl with brown hair, crying as she searched through her glove box. The big man stood, yelling at her.

  “You better have insurance, little lady! You had no business stopping like that! How stupid can you be?”

  Sarah heard the girl sobbing. “I’m sorry, but that cat ran out. I had to stop.”

  “You think a stupid cat’s worth my new car? You’re an idiot!”

  Sarah walked up behind him. “Hey, simmer down there, mister.”

  The man turned on her, his face big and red and — it was Big Mike — from the asylum. The man who used to taunt her — to torture her — to watch her in the shower — to tell her how she’d never leave the place.

  He jerked up his hand, face red with rage.

  Sarah didn’t hesitate. She swung her nightstick out of its ring and snapped it out hard, striking his wrist. With her right fist she punched him square in the throat.

  Papers flew from his hand and he staggered backward, his face getting redder and his tongue protruding from his lips. Sarah remembered how he used to wag that fat tongue at her. How he would sneak into her room at night sometimes when she was strapped down and just stare at her.

  She kneed him in the groin; shot the same leg straight down so her heel crunched into his instep; swung up with another right that sunk into his flabby chins until it struck bone.

  The man continued to stagger back, his arms flailing. One of them smacked across Sarah’s face almost knocking her down. She dropped her nightstick.

  The girl in the Civic was out of her car now, cheering Sarah on.

  The man wrapped Sarah up in his big arms. She tried to knee him in the groin again, but missed, striking a jiggly thigh that didn’t faze him a bit. He squeezed her in tight, mashing her face against his flabby chest. Sarah bit into him, shaking her head like a terrier. The man screamed and let her go so fast that Sarah fell to the street. The man started to come forward but stopped as the girl from the Civic hit him across the shins with Sarah’s nightstick. He fell to his knees, screaming. The girl hit him again, this time on the shoulders. She grinned and screamed and kept whacking and whacking with the stick, so fast that all the man could do was cover his head and face to protect himself.

  Sarah made it to her feet, remembered how he had flapped his tongue and taunted her while she was being electrocuted on the table, pulled out her Taser; the red dot of the laser zeroing just below his flapping man-boobs. She smiled, knowing about where the second barb of the two prongs should hit. She fired. A pop, a spray of confetti and the first harpoon punctured just where the red dot highlighted. The second landed where Sarah thought it would, straight in the crotch. Instantly the electricity flowed. The fat man convulsed, his face contorting, then pitched backward where he writhed on the ground for the full five seconds of the charge.

  The young girl cheered louder than ever, jumping up and down and pumping her arms up over her head.

  “Do it again — do it again!” she chanted like a cheerleader at a football game.

  The man panted and held his hands up and open in the universal sign of surrender.

  Sarah knew she shouldn’t, but the girl looked so happy and all Sarah could really think of was Big Mike’s face grinning at her while she suffered. She pulled the trigger again sending the lightning on its way. A part of her said this was wrong, that what she was doing made her as bad as Big Mike. But that was stupid. This was exactly what he deserved — justice — and it felt good. Big Mike danced the electric boogaloo again, his arms and legs shaking, his fat bouncing everywhere. Sarah wanted to do it again and again and again, to watch as he felt what she had felt, suffered as she had suffered, until he begged and urinated on himself. She wanted him to know what it was like, she wanted him to…

  The charge ended and the man sagged to his knees begging and crying, tears and snot and drool dripping from his face. And something else — something that stopped Sarah’s finger from pulling the trigger once again — something that made her blood run cold and her bottom lip start to tremble. The man before her — blubbering and pleading and whimpering, on his knees; his hands clasped before him as though praying — was not Big Mike. He didn’t even look like him.

  Sarah heard the purr; low and long and full of vibrato. She turned her head and saw the cat sitting on the hood of the Civic.

  42

  Cinnamon Twist

  * * *

  Date

  * * *

  Finishing the e-mail she read it over a last time before touching the send button with her miniature finger. The nail was long, perfectly manicured, and able to turn any man into a slave with just a stroke.

  Cinnamon set the iPad aside and sipped her iced tea, a cinnamon swizzle stick adding a hint of spice. She sat out on the deck of Maggiano’s at the Cherry Creek Mall. Men stared as they passed. Two had winked at her, a dozen or so had smiled; the rest simply gaped. She ignored them all. She had plans to make.

  Sending the e-mail had been the first step. It was short and sweet and read; To my protector and future lover. I want to meet you; signed Cinnamon. She’d sent it as a reply attachment to each of the obituaries and the most recent of e-mails she’d received. Sammy had told her not to try and contact or reply to the assassin under any circumstances. He’d told her about the massacre in Chicago and the death of Barney Marco and the man hunting her. But she wasn’t going to tell Sammy about this. No. She had other plans for Sammy; after all the first order of business was, as always, self-preservation.

  Sammy loved her. The assassin was obsessed with her. And now that Barney Marko was dead; both were in her way.

  Cinnamon had listened to Sammy’s tearful confession about his childhood mishap, the damage to his body and increase to his brain and
senses. She’d cradled his head to her chest as he told her about his shooting awards.

  And a plan had formed.

  A mellow bong sounded from her iPad and she saw that she had mail. The message read, “When and where?”

  Fast.

  Cinnamon smiled. She typed, “My apartment. Tonight”. She hit the send button.

  The response came almost instantly. “Yes.”

  A tingle of fear squirmed through her body, but it didn’t feel unpleasant…it felt exciting. She closed her eyes and breathed in the outside smells; let the sun flush her skin, bathed in the early afternoon breeze that flowed down from the Great Rocky Mountains. Life was good. Even for a freak, life was good. She opened her eyes. She would have to be very careful to make sure that she didn’t lose hers.

  Cinnamon made two phone calls, the first to Sammy. That took a little acting, but acting was who she was.

  Her second call went to Elephant Guns. She told the manager she would be taking the night off. She had something planned that promised to be far more exciting than stripping in front of a room full of wild, oversexed men. She had company coming; and she would be ready.

  43

  Sammy Rothstein

  * * *

  Murder

  * * *

  Sammy hung up the phone feeling a wave of depression roll over him. Cinnamon; she called to say she couldn’t meet with him tonight. That she wasn’t feeling well and would see him tomorrow. Sammy pushed the replay button and played back the conversation. He was a certified expert in voice recognition, intonation analysis, and body language, but either Cinnamon told the absolute truth or she was a better liar than he was a detector.

  He should be glad, he had more than enough work to do and this would give him a chance to catch up. But the thought of not being able to feel her body next to his, to caress her perfect, smooth skin, to feel her fingers, her lips, her warmth, had thrown him into a dark funk that he couldn’t shake.

  Plus there was something else. What if Cinnamon was playing him? He’d known enough johns and even cops who’d been played by strippers and whores over the years. Of course Cinnamon was different; she was unique, just as their relationship was unique. But what if it wasn’t? After all look at him. He was nothing. He was older than her, physically unimpressive. What if she was just using him — a means to an end — what then? His hands started to shake. What could she possibly see in him? But then he slowed himself down, this wasn’t the time to go all crazy. Instead he had to think — to carefully ponder.

  She loved him — she did. She loved him because he saw her for what she was and because of their similarities. They were both unique. They were made for each other.

  Sammy got up, went to the special equipment locker, took out the items he would need and left the office. Cinnamon had called from the Cherry Creek Mall, which meant he had to hurry.

  As it turned out he finished just in time. He saw Cinnamon pull into the underground parking garage in her Mustang just as he finished and started his own car. Ten minutes later he sat back in his office looking at the collage of documents spread out on his desk. He felt guilty about doubting Cinnamon. What kind of a relationship could he expect without trust? Sometimes being a cop made it hard to think like a normal person.

  He went to the computer. He’d been doing extensive research on Dominic Elkins. The research had included three phone calls to Marine Corps bases in three different states and five hours of follow up on the internet; but he made headway. Whatever the reason for Dominic leaving the Marines had something to do with an engagement tagged, The Massacre of Khost.

  Dominic had been badly injured there, and several of the men who served with him were killed, including his commanding officer. A group of Taliban terrorists slipped over the border from Pakistan and overran an upscale, high-rise hotel, taking the staff and lodgers as hostages.

  The terrorists set off explosives when they came under fire, killing all the hostages, most of the Marines and themselves. It was, by all reports, a horribly bloody day.

  The failure had been blamed on poor intelligence and faulty leadership. The commanding officer in charge of the raid had been a second lieutenant that graduated with honors from OCS (Officer Candidates School) and TBS (The Basic School); a second lieutenant named Ben Nassif. He lead two successful raids prior to this mission, although in each his men suffered heavy casualties that were later brought into question under a board of inquiry. Staff Sergeant Dominic Elkins had been the NCO (Non Commissioned Officer) in charge of the engagement. Nassif had been killed during the attempted rescue of the hostages and Dominic had been near fatally wounded, although he was credited with managing to save most of his men through an extraordinary act of selfless bravery.

  The strange thing was that Dominic had been shipped to a hospital and then straight out of the Corps. No medals, no awards, no citations, and two months before his scheduled out date. His DD 214 and DD 256 showed that he received an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, but there was an unusual four-digit code associated with the honorable discharge that Sammy had never seen before. It had taken him another hour of research and several phone calls before he was able to find that the code signified the equivalence of an ineligibility for future military service.

  Sammy was familiar enough with government institutions to smell politics at work. Something had happened at Khost that virtually negated what would usually constitute at least a silver-star status if not conduct worthy of the Medal of Honor itself.

  What had Dominic done?

  Sammy went back through the reports and notes he’d taken from phone conversations and copies of reports he’d had e-mailed to him.

  Dominic had been second in charge of a failed mission to rescue hostages. His commanding officer had been killed. He himself had been badly wounded. He’d saved most of his men’s lives.

  Sammy knew the Marines didn’t like failed missions, but it happened from time to time, and he didn’t think they’d sacrifice one of their own just for that.

  So what did that leave?

  His mind was doing its thing, but on a low level, more like an undertow than a tidal wave.

  Sammy closed his eyes and thought back over Dominic’s injuries; three gunshot wounds, two to the chest, one to the upper thigh, a knife puncture to his shoulder, numerous shrapnel wounds. The two chest shots were 5.56 mm rounds. The thigh wound was a 7.62 mm ball round. The knife damage came from the fight inside; shrapnel from an exploding grenade.

  Something about that didn’t quite fit. It wasn’t quite right, but what and why?

  The injuries all seemed consistent with military combat and fit the facts of the engagement as best he could tell.

  The one thing he didn’t have was the actual narrative from Dominic himself. It was completely absent from the military record. This would seem very strange for a civilian police record, but Sammy had no way of knowing if this was divergent from classic military procedure or rather business as usual.

  7.62 ball ammunition was the standard round for the Russian made AK-47, a common weapon for Taliban terrorists. The 5.56 mm bullet acted as the standard round for the M4 Carbine…

  More research.

  In 2007 the United States Marine Corps issued an order that all Marine Officers below the rank of Colonel, and all Staff Non-Commissioned Officers be issued M4 Carbines to replace the 9 mm Beretta M9 pistols. Shortly after, the M4 was upgraded to the M4A4. The M4A4 offered greater firepower and went along with the Marine Corps tenant that every Marine’s first job title was as a rifleman.

  That meant that at least two M4A4 rifles had been on that rooftop in Khost. The Second Lieutenant would have had one, and Dominic would have had the other.

  Of course it was always possible that one or more of the terrorists might have American weapon’s systems compatible with the 5.56 mm round, but it seemed unlikely.

  Sammy opened his eyes and performed a word search in his head going through everything he had read and heard in re
lation to the case, looking for references to how exactly the Second Lieutenant had been killed, and how exactly Dominic had been shot.

  It took about two seconds.

  There were no direct narratives relating to either event. The only reference was that both had sustained wounds due to enemy combatant activities after the rest of the men had entered the air conditioning shaft.

  Interesting. That meant there were no living witnesses except for Dominic himself.

  Back to the phones, then to the internet. Another hour and forty minutes, most of it listening to music on stand by and filtering useless information from the internet’s countless pages and posts.

  This time he hadn’t been looking for information on Dominic. This time he had been looking for information on Second Lieutenant Ben Nassif and he found it.

  Born in Saudi Arabia to an Egyptian father and an American mother. The family moved to America when he was eleven and he’d attended the best Ivy League schools. After graduation he joined the Corps and graduated as a second lieutenant, referred to by most enlisted men as butter bars for the yellow color of the single bar worn on each collar, and requested assignment to the war areas; Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d led three missions before Khost.

  The lieutenant had died from a single shot to the head. The bullet had entered the man’s chin, tunneled upward through both the lower and upper pallet of the mouth as well as the tongue, entered the skull from beneath, tore through the soft tissue of the brain before the velocity and yaw of the projectile caused it to fragment, sending corkscrews and jagged chunks of lead and copper pin-wheeling through his thought centers, while the remaining bulk of the spinning and flipping missile obliterated a widening chasm of the good lieutenant’s gray matter and then exited out the rear of his skull and flattened against the inside of the back of his Kevlar helmet.