by Chuck Dixon
The Ford lumbered from the ditch to come to a juddering stop on the road. He raised his head to blink into the glare of the remaining headlights. The light on the passenger side was out, bashed in where the truck had struck him the first time.
A footfall broke the brittle layer of frozen snow near him. He reached a hand for the rifle, fingers splayed. A weight came down on his wrist, a booted foot. He turned his head, his vision red at the edges. A girl. The Anglo girl who had run from the barn. She held his own pistolo in her gloved hands, the black eye staring at him. The girl’s face was pale in the electric glare. Her eyes were as dead as the pistol’s.
“You were gonna shoot me?” she asked. Her voice quavered a bit, from the cold or the rush.
“That is the understanding we share,” Rolo said. His voice sounded far away to him.
“You’re gonna die out here. No one will ever find you.” The girl stooped now to pick up the Marlin. All the while, his pistol remained trained on him. She stood, the lever-action balanced in the crook of her arm.
“So, what must I do?” His voice a dry croak.
“You don’t have to do anything.”
She turned and walked back into the lights. He heard the truck door creak, then slam. The beam of light retreated, then turned away. The truck was gone, and the night went black.
Then he died. And no one ever found him.
51
The men who came for him the next morning were military, Turkish army in forest-green camos and black berets. All business. Nothing was said but for soto voce directions from an officer in command of the four-man detail.
They undid Levon’s cuffs and escorted him to the guard’s shower room, where they stood outside while he took a long, hot shower. The dried blood came off his skin and out of his beard and scalp to make a muddy swirl around the drain.
Other soldiers were here. The Prick and his guard staff were gone. The blue uniforms were gone. Everyone was in forest camo. The surveillance room was open, and techs were busy running wires to brand-new monitors. The floor was littered with cartons and foam packing.
Clean clothes were waiting for him in a folded stack. Cotton shirt and drawstring pants. New socks and slippers. An olive-drab pullover.
They walked him from the showers to a break room, where a covered tray was brought to him. The steel mess tray was piled with scrambled eggs fried with chunks of sukuk sausage chopped into them, fresh bread, butter, and a pot of strong, eye-opening coffee.
When he was done, the soldiers took him to the interrogation room. A man waited in the room for him, seated with an open folder of papers before him. The friendly man had a broad, open face and a receding hairline. He wore a tie and a cardigan sweater. A can of Coke was open by his hand. He stood to shake Levon’s hand. They took seats opposite one another and the soldiers left the room, closing the door after them.
“My name is Hank Ferlach, and I’m from the consulate. So, what part of Canada are you from?”
“One hundred and five, almost one hundred and six million.” Brett Tsukuda was breathless from his run down the hallway to the secure room.
“The account is righteous, then,” Nancy Valdez said. “And the US government can make a claim on it.”
“That means this one is probably good as well.” Anita Sharpe held up a piece of paper with the prefix code for the Taipei Monetary Exchange Bank.
“That also means we can break for lunch,” Mark Neubauer said.
“You’re not from Canada, then?” Hank Ferlach asked. His hand was poised, pen ready, but he was uncertain how to fill out the forms he’d brought with him.
“United States. I have my reasons for not wanting that known,” Levon explained.
“If nothing else, your accent confirms that,” Hank agreed. His smile was become fragile at the edges. “Now, why didn’t you ask to contact your own consulate?”
“Because if I had to rely on my State Department, I’d be sitting here until I died.”
“Well, I’m not certain what I can do for you, Mr. Hogue, with you not being a Canadian citizen and all.”
“Do you have a phone?”
“I’m not sure…”
“Do you know what I did to get you here?”
Hank’s smile melted away all together.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“What did you see when you got here, Hank?”
“Well, the military seems to be in charge. It appears there were some murders, and apparently, a rather significant fire, followed by a riot.”
“Do you have a phone, sir?”
Hank dug his iPhone 8 from his sweater pocket and placed it in the middle of the table.
Levon tapped the phone option and keyed in a number.
“You walk in here and take a big, greasy dump on my desk, and tell me it’s a good thing?” the director asked from behind his glass-topped, unshat-upon desk.
“I’m just saying that there’s an upside,” Brett Tsukuda replied, standing where he could look past the director to the gray Potomac drifting by on the other side of the GW Parkway through the quadruple-thick ballistic glass.
“Are you talking about the money? This man is extorting the United States government, and you see that as a positive?” The director unwrapped a cough drop taken from a cut-crystal bowl and popped it into his mouth.
“Not quite extortion. He’s going to give us money.”
“In exchange for what, exactly?”
“His freedom and a return home with total immunity. A pardon, in effect. His record expunged.”
“A Presidential pardon? That’s impossible. And do you have any idea of the political capital it would require, the levers that would need to be pulled, to spring this guy from a Turkish prison? You’ve read the situation reports on our relationship with Ankara.”
“If we don’t free him, he’ll free himself, sir. He’ll be in the wild, and we’ll have no leverage with him.”
The director released a deep, mentholated sigh.
“What kind of money are we talking about here?” the director asked.
“If he’s to be believed, and he has no reason to lie, we’re looking at close to one hundred billion dollars in cash, metals, and other assets. In addition, he has intel on Corey Blanco’s former associates that could lead to a potential Aladdin’s cave of hidden loot. It’s a criminal network with links to terror organizations. We’re talking state sponsors here, sir.”
“The pardon is out of the question. The President would never go for it. I’d advise him not to myself.”
“A stealth pardon. We’ve done them before. Nothing official. Nothing on paper.”
“He would trust us to keep our word?”
“Oh, fuck, no!” Brett laughed with a sudden honk, then recovered. “Sorry, sir. He’ll have some kind of deadman switch set up if we screw him over. He learned from the best. Hell, he was born in a place where feuds are a real thing. He lives by a code.”
“A code?” The director snorted. “What code?”
“As he put it to me, ‘I don’t get mad, I get even.’”
The director unwrapped another cough drop, then squirted a spray from a squeeze bottle up each nostril. He wiped his nose with a Kleenex from a carved wooden tissue box. He slumped back in his chair and made a propeller noise with his lips.
“Take a walk, Brett,” he directed at last.
“Sir, there’s a timetable here…” Brett began.
“I’m going to call the President, and I don’t want you to hear what I’m going to say to him, or the names he’s going to call me.” The director made a shooing motion. “Take a walk. Karen will buzz you when you can come back in.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Fuck you, Brett.”
52
He walked through a man door in the gate out onto a sidewalk that passed a row of mothballed Vietnam-era jet fighters. A blue Air Force gear bag was slung over one shoulder. He breathed deep and took in the smell of home.
She k
new him by his walk. His shaved head and the bushy beard didn’t throw her. He was thinner than she’d ever seen him, but she still knew him. She would know him anywhere.
Merry ran from the visitors’ lot toward the main gate at Arnold AFB to leap at Levon. He caught her in his arms and crushed her to him. She spoke, her voice muffled against the shoulder of his coat. His neck was damp with her tears as he carried her to the waiting truck where Jessie Hamer and her daughter stood, smiling. With his free arm, he embraced Jessie as well. Sandy stood by, eyes gleaming.
“I’m home. For good. I’m never leaving again,” he stated. Merry’s hold on him tightened.
The rear door of the crew cab opened and a dark-haired girl stepped out, smiling shyly.
“And who’s this?” Levon asked.
“That’s Hope, Daddy,” Merry said, smiling through her tears. “Her name is Hope.”
53
SUSPICION OF ARSON IN FIRE AT AREA BUSINESS
Birmingham. Investigators from state CID have released a statement of their intent to look into a suspicious fire at Dixi-Pro Ltd in Fultondale late Wednesday night.
“There’s evidence that this fire was helped along,” according to the press release referring to the three-alarm blaze that destroyed a permanent structure along with a trailer and several vehicles.
Local fire department officials credit an anonymous phone call that alerted them to the fire and allowed them time to contain it before it spread to surrounding properties including a lodge for the Fultondale chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Efforts to locate the owners of Dixie-Pro have failed.
[SEE ORIGINAL DOC FOR NEWSPAPER CLIP]
If you liked Levon Cade you might like: Retribution, by Brent Towns
EVERYTHING COMES AT A COST…
Author Brent Towns keeps the action coming thick and fast, let’s you up for a breath and then drags you back in for more.
After he is betrayed and shoots the two most powerful men in the Irish Mob, John “Reaper” Kane is forced into hiding. He thinks Retribution, Arizona, is the perfect hiding place, but he is wrong. Underneath the old, crusty surface of the dying town, hides the Montoya Cartel, for they use it as a funnel to ship their drugs across the border.
Trying to lay low in a town gripped with lawlessness is impossible for the ex-recon marine, especially after the local sheriff is brutally murdered by the Montoya Cartel’s sicario, leaving an old friend, Deputy Sheriff Cara Billings, the only person standing between them and the town.
Things go from bad to worse when Kane is arrested by Cleaver, the deputy in the cartel’s pocket, for shooting a local gang member.
Enter DEA Agent Luis Ferrero who has expressed to his bosses for a long time the need for a task force to fight the cartels on their own ground. He’s about to get his wish, and to head up his team, he wants the Reaper.
A thrill ride that doesn’t let you go – Retribution is the first novel in the action-packed Reaper Series.
AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON
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Chuck Dixon
About the Author
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Chuck Dixon worked a variety of jobs from driving an ice cream truck to working graveyard at a 7-11 before trying his hand as a writer. After a brief sojourn in children’s books he turned to his childhood love of comic books. In his thirty years as a writer for Marvel, DC Comics and other publishers, Chuck built a reputation as a prolific and versatile freelancer working on a wide variety titles and genres from Conan the Barbarian to SpongeBob SquarePants. His graphic novel adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit continues to be an international bestseller translated into fifty languages. He is the co-creator (with Graham Nolan) of the Batman villain Bane, the first enduring member added to the Dark Knight’s rogue’s gallery in forty years. He was also one of the seminal writers responsible for the continuing popularity of Marvel Comics’ The Punisher.
After making his name in comics, Chuck moved to prose in 2011 and has since written over twenty novels, mostly in the action-thriller genre with a few side-trips to horror, hardboiled noir and western. The transition from the comics form to prose has been a life-altering event for him. As Chuck says, “writing a comic is like getting on a roller coaster while writing a novel is more like a long car trip with a bunch of people you’ll learn to hate.” His Levon Cade novels are currently in production as a television series from Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions. He currently lives in central Florida and, no, he does not miss the snow.
Find more exciting titles by Chuck Dixon and Wolfpack Publishing, here.
