Dead Six (67 page)

This was kind of a scary paradigm shift. Bob had always been the good one and I had been the bad one.
Simple
. “But you’ve always been so . . . law-abiding.”

“There’s a higher law, and it’s time that these men had to answer to it.” Bob was truly angry, red-faced and nostrils flaring, like the very idea of Gordon’s outfit offended him to his core. “I’ll take the risk.”

“You’re familiar with them?”

“You have no idea,” Bob stated coldly. “Let’s just say that you don’t know as much about me as you think you do and leave it at that. I can’t let you go in there with just these guys.” He gestured at the other three. “Who are they, anyway?”

“You can call the big kid
Nightcrawler
since he’s so worried about me telling you his name. The old guy is Hawk. The other kid goes by Reaper.”

“Okay, then I’m Colossus and you can be Wolverine. Doesn’t anybody have a normal name in your business?”

“Actually, I go by Lorenzo,” I responded, slightly embarrassed.

Bob just stared at me. “Seriously? Wow, man, that’s
devious
. And what part came as a surprise when Big Eddie found his way past your masterful secret identity? You were only
raised
by Lorenzos.”

Reaper walked up. “If we’ve all got superhero names, then Jill should be Aquaman since she’s been kidnapped twice.” I just looked at him like he was stupid. “What? Didn’t you ever watch
Super Friends
? Aquaman . . . you know, always got captured? Never mind.” Reaper wandered off.

“
Super Friends
was off the air before that kid was born,” Bob said.

“I know, but he spends a lot of time on the Internet.”

“You guys done screwing around?” Valentine growled as he approached. “Let’s get going. We’re kind of conspicuous hanging around in all of this crap,” he said, indicating the pouch-laden plate carrier and battle belt he wore.

He was right. We needed to get going. “We’re not here to arrest them,” I warned Bob.

My brother shook his head sadly. “Willis’s men aren’t the type you can arrest. They’re a bunch of professional killers. Castoffs who’ve gotten kicked out of every reputable organization there is because they’re too violent, too crazy, or too corrupt. Operations like his attract them like flies.”

“How do you know all this?” Hawk asked suspiciously. Switchblade hadn’t always been a respectable mercenary company, so Hawk had developed an appropriate paranoia about the law.

Bob shrugged. “A man has to have a hobby. Mine is collecting trivia about scumbags.” My brother was being evasive. Somehow he knew exactly who Gordon Willis was, knew something about his organization, and apparently hated them with a passion. “The old work-camp is over that rise. We used to use it to hole up Mafioso witnesses out of Vegas. Word is that Willis’s men are using it for something now.”

“Let’s get these cars hidden, then sneak up on the camp and see if we can spot Jill,” I suggested, hefting my AR-15. “If we’re lucky, maybe we can get her out with minimal shooting.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that.” Bob turned, opened the back of his Suburban, and pulled out a long black Remington 700 sniper rifle, with a suppressor, bipod, and US Optics scope. He worked the bolt and chambered a round. He put the heavy barreled rifle over one shoulder. Bob almost seemed to be looking forward to this. Maybe I
didn’t
know him as well as I thought I did. “When the shooting starts, take them hard and fast.”

“That’s what
she
said!” Reaper quipped.

“You. Stop talking,” Valentine ordered.

Reaper grinned, gesturing with his stubby shotgun. “Then let’s go.” The bravado was forced. The kid was tough, but he wasn’t a warrior like the rest of us, but God bless his techno-geek soul, he was ready. “Let’s smoke these fags.”

Hawk adjusted his old South African army vest. “Yep.” Then he spat on the ground.

Valentine raised an eyebrow. “Smoke these fags?” he asked, looking at me incredulously. “What have you been
teaching
this kid?” I held up my hands in surrender. A general has to fight with the army he’s got.

The five of us climbed the sagebrush-and-scrub-tree hill. The sun was rapidly setting. I suggested we track farther to one side so that we could attack out of the sun. Valentine didn’t seem to care one way or the other, Bob and Hawk thought it was a good idea, and Reaper was used to following my orders.

We picked our frequencies and checked the radios on the walk in, and they worked fine. We had no plan and no intel. Our group had never worked together before, and there wasn’t a lot of trust.

“So why do you guys use those old Belgian rifles?” Reaper asked Hawk and Valentine at one point, displaying his ignorance. “Those are the same kind as those rusty poacher guns from all over Africa, right? Why don’t you get something
new
?”

Hawk grunted. “They’re all over Africa because they still work, kid. Besides, you can dress ’em up if you want. Look at his,” he said, indicating Valentine’s railed-up FAL. “You can bolt ten pounds of crap on it if you want.” Valentine’s rifle was fitted with a Tijicon scope and had a flashlight bolted to the hand guards. It looked heavy, but he didn’t seem to mind. “And it’s at least a manly thirty caliber, unlike Lorenzo’s pussy twenty-two.”

I paid Hawk’s opinions on terminal ballistics no mind. I’d lost track of how many people I’d killed with a short-barreled 5.56 over the years. I preferred lots of little bullets to a few big ones, but then again, anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five to seven times.

“M-16s are poodle shooters,” Hawk said. “That’s all they’re good for.”

“I’m pretty good with a FAL,” Valentine answered Reaper, not looking up from the trail through the sagebrush.

“How good is pretty good?” Reaper asked. The kid just didn’t know when to quit.

“Look,” Valentine said levelly, pointing the knife-edge of his hand at Reaper. “This isn’t a
game
, okay? You need to focus, or you’re going to get yourself
killed
. Now either lock it up or go wait in the car!”

Reaper seemed taken aback by Valentine’s harsh words. “Okay, okay! Sorry. I miss a lot. That’s why Lorenzo makes me use the shotgun.”

“Super,” Valentine muttered. “You know, we really ought to be quiet.”

“Kid’s right. Quiet down. They might have sentries posted at the top of the hill,” Hawk suggested.

“They won’t,” Bob replied. “They’ve been operating above the law so long, they think they’re untouchable. The idea of us coming to them will never even enter their minds.”

“I hope you’re right,” Hawk muttered.

After half an hour of walking, we hunkered down in the rocks overlooking the old prison work camp. It looked like a ghost town out of an old western movie. There were several wooden buildings, in two horizontal rows heading away from us, paint long since peeled, signs long since faded. One larger building was directly below us, newer, built out of cinder blocks; it looked like it had been a truck stop or some sort of garage back in the days before the freeway bypassed this little settlement. Fence posts stuck out of the ground like random teeth in a broken jaw, the barbed wire mostly rusted away.

There were several vehicles parked on the broken asphalt around the garage, new vehicles, black sedans, a Chevy passenger van, and another G-ride Suburban. There were a couple of men standing around the cars, smoking, talking, long guns visible slung from their backs.

“Damn, there’s a lot of them,” I said.

Bob extended the bipod legs on his sniper rifle and hunkered down, scanning through his scope. “I’ve got three in the parking lot. At least one moving inside the garage.” After a moment he stopped, then cranked up the magnification. “Hector, take a look at the window on the left.”

“Hector?” Reaper laughed. “Your real name is Hector?”

“Shut it . . .
Skyler
,” I answered. Reaper was immediately silent. Valentine snorted as he tried to suppress a laugh.

“Yeah? Well, what the fuck kind of name is
Nightcrawler
?” Reaper asked defensively.

“It’s French,” he replied, looking through the scope on his rifle. He then turned to my teammate. “You know that’s not actually my name, right? Just like you. Reaper isn’t your real name.
Skyler
is your real name, and I think it’s pretty.” Valentine cracked a smile again.

I shushed Reaper before he could retort. Bob moved aside and I got behind the Remington. It took a moment to find the right window on 14X magnification. The glass was gray with filth and hard to see through.
“That’s her.” Jill was slumped in a chair, long black hair obscuring her face. Seeing her there filled me with fresh anger.

The terrain leading up to that window was rough enough that it gave me an idea. I didn’t want to endanger the lives of these men any more than I had to. I moved into a crouch and examined each of them in the fading light. “Okay. Here’s the plan. I’ll sneak up on that building, break in, and secure Jill. If everything works out, I can get her out of there before they ever even know we were here.”

“That’s just stupid,” Bob said. “There’s no way you could sneak in there under their noses.”

Reaper just looked at him and grinned. “Dude, you have
no
idea. Your brother could steal cookies from the Keebler elves.”

Hawk reached over and tapped Valentine on the arm, gesturing down the hillside. “Check out that ravine,” he said. He’d always had a good eye for terrain.

Valentine nodded. “While you’re crawling through the weeds, we’ll take Marilyn Manson here and head down that way. It’ll put us closer so we can back you up if this all goes to shit.” He looked to Bob. “You good enough with that rifle to give us some cover?”

My brother nodded. Before I had dropped off the grid, Bob had already been a champion rifle competitor. When we were teenagers, I had spent my free time boosting cars, while he had shot coyotes for the local farmers. Bob was better than me at most things, and shooting was probably toward the top of that list, and that was before he had joined the Army and become some sort of Green Beret or something.

“He’ll do fine. We all will.” This was it. This wasn’t a heist, it wasn’t a job. These men were here to help me. This was a rescue mission. I’d led many crews, but usually for money. I didn’t know how to motivate people with pure intentions. Awkwardly, I put my hand out, palm down. “Thanks, guys.”

Reaper enthusiastically put his on top of mine. “Anytime, chief!”

It took a moment before Bob followed suit. “No problem, bro.”

Valentine looked at us incredulously. “Are you guys for real?”

“I’m not really good at saying thank you, okay?”

Valentine glanced over at Hawk, who just shrugged, then back at us. “You guys are so
gay
.”

Reaper yanked his hand back, embarrassed. Okay, so maybe it was corny. I took one last look at my friends—and Valentine—nodded, and disappeared into the weeds.

Chapter 28:
The Calm

VALENTINE

Lorenzo’s little buddy tagged along as Hawk and I made our way down the ravine, practically crawling along as we went. There were several cars parked outside of the building that Jill was being held in, and there were armed men standing watch outside. They didn’t seem particularly alert, but it wasn’t quite dark yet and I didn’t want to blow our cover.

I was most worried about them spotting Reaper. Where Hawk and I were dressed in earth tones and flat colors, Reaper was dressed entirely in black. Black sticks out pretty clearly against a dusty brown hillside in the Nevada desert. Worse, the kid just didn’t know how to move. We had to crawl along more slowly than we would have otherwise, making sure Reaper utilized available cover and concealment.

Lorenzo, on the other hand, moved like a ghost. I tried to track him as he crept down the hill parallel to us, but quickly lost sight of him in the sage. Grudgingly impressed, I had little doubt Lorenzo would make it all the way down without being spotted.

LORENZO

There was probably only a few minutes of weak daylight left coming over the hills by the time I crept up on the cinder-block wall. My load-bearing equipment was coated in dirt, twigs, and dead sage. I hadn’t been seen.

“
Looking good
,” Bob’s voice said in my ear. “
Guards are leaning on the cars out front. I don’t see any movement in the back room. There are a few men inside the next room.
”

Crouching below the window, I cradled my nose-heavy AR in my strong hand and reached up and tested the window. It was the multi-paned, hinged type. It moved slightly. It was unlocked. Just then my phone began to vibrate. I pulled it out of my pocket, glanced both ways, still clear, and flipped it open. “Hello?” I whispered.

“
Mr. Lorenzo
.” It was the digitally altered voice. I could hear the real voice through another broken window fifteen feet away. “
Where are you?
”

“I’m going through Las Vegas now,” I whispered. “Bad reception here.”

“
You will proceed to Quagmire, Nevada, and wait for further instructions.
” The normal human voice came through the window a split second before the distorted voice.

“Sorry, you’re breaking up.” I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket.

“Lost him. He says he’s in Vegas,” the voice said. “Send the strike team to Quagmire.”

“Should we take the girl, sir? He said he wanted to see her alive.”

“They all say that. Keep her alive long enough to talk on the phone if we need her. Then put a bullet in her. Remember, we want this Lorenzo alive. Eddie won’t give us anything for him dead.”

Eddie?
How could Gordon the government guy be involved with Big Eddie? This didn’t make any sense. Valentine must have picked that up from my microphone. “
I recognize that voice. Gordon’s here. You don’t touch him. He’s mine.
”

“Let me get Jill first. Then you can go on a killing spree,” I whispered.

“
A bunch of men in SWAT gear are loading into the passenger van,
” Bob noted calmly. There was the sound of a door sliding shut, and then a large engine revving. They were going to set up an ambush for nobody. I crouched lower as the headlights briefly swung past the cinder-block wall.