Hell on Wheels (21 page)

“Will do,” Becky replied, and he heard more keyboard rattling.

“Ali,” he turned to find her standing beside him, golden eyes getting wider and wider by the minute, growing right along with the assembly of his sniper rifle. “I’m going into the house to observe and secure our position. I need you to stay here and keep quiet, okay? No matter what you hear, you do not come out of this garage.”

She swallowed and nodded. He could see her rapid pulse hammering away in her neck, and she looked like she wanted to faint.

Once again, he acknowledged the ball-twisting truth that she just wasn’t cut out for this shit.

“I’ll need a weapon,” she said, her voice steadier than he would’ve guessed.

Whoa. Or maybe she
was
cut out for this shit. Nothing she could’ve said would’ve surprised him more.

“Way to go, sista,” Becky barked her approval of Ali in his ear.

He hesitated only a second before bending to pull his reserve from the top of his left boot. He handed her the Colt .45 and watched in growing admiration as she press-checked the chamber to make sure the first round was loaded.

So, Becky was right. Grigg
had
taught baby sister a thing or two. Nate wasn’t much for man-on-man action, but if Grigg had still been alive, he would’ve kissed the sonofabitch smack on the mouth right at that moment. Whatever Grigg had intentionally or unintentionally involved Ali in—and Nate would bet his left nut it was
un
intentional—at least Grigg’d tried to prepare her to handle it.

“Don’t open that door for anyone,” Nate told her as he shouldered his rifle. “I’ll announce myself before comin’ in.”

He turned to head out the side door then stopped and swung back to face her. His conscience was eating away at him, and he cursed himself for the hundredth time for letting her come along, despite her obvious familiarity with a handgun. What had he been thinking? Oh yeah, he’d been thinking how wonderful and torturous it was going to be to have her pressed all along his back for fifteen straight hours.

He’d underestimated both.

It was far more wonderful than he could have guessed and far,
far
more torturous. “It could be awhile,” he told her, searching her frightened face. “You gonna be all right in here?”

She nodded her head so bravely he just couldn’t help himself. Sighing in defeat and resignation, he stomped back over to her, looped an arm around her slim waist, and dragged her toward him until she was crushed all along the length of him, and her eyes were flying wider than ever.

Then he kissed the bejeezus out of her.

Kissed her until he could no longer ignore what is was he was supposed to be doing. He stormed out of the garage’s little side door, trying not to think about the way her eyes had gone all dreamy and glassy, or the way she’d lifted a hand to her chest as if to hold her heart in check.

The woman was going to be the death of him.

“About time you did that,” Becky chimed smugly in his ear.

“Can it,” he told her.

“I’m just sayin’—”

“Don’t just say anything!”

Geez, he was
so
losing it.

***

“Yo.”

Senator Aldus grimaced at the salutation.

Johnny Vitiglioni had about as much class as a music festival Port-o-potty, but Aldus figured a guy whose specialty was Colombian Necktie executions didn’t really spend much time polishing his social skills.

“I’ve got another job for you and the boys,” he said without introducing himself. There was no need. Johnny knew exactly who he was talking to.

“I’m listening.”

Of course the fool was listening. Aldus paid Johnny a ridiculous rate to make sure the guy was always ready to listen.

“Yes well, let’s hope you do better with this one than the last one.”

“Hey, dude, I told you Rocco—”

“I don’t care,” Aldus growled. “Besides, what’s done is done. Hopefully, this next assignment is a little more to Rocco’s taste.”

“Wha’ didja have in mind?”

What did he have in mind? Death, that’s what. And an end to this pain-in-the-ass situation.

“There’s a man traveling with the woman I hired you guys to mug.” Thinking of Zoelner quitting when his target was out on a motorcycle—a statistically dangerous device—where it could’ve been so
easy
for the ex-CIA agent to simply wait for a barren strip of road to careen into the guy, made Aldus’s blood pressure boil. Of course, clean-up would’ve been a problem, but that was a moot point. Zoelner was far too high-minded to engage in such nefarious tactics.

Thankfully, Johnny and his boys had no such hang-ups.

“And?” Johnny prodded when Aldus had been silent for too long.

“And they’re on some big, loud Harley. Probably on the road between Chicago and Jacksonville. They need not to be.”

“That’s a pretty big swath of country, dude,” Johnny drawled.

Good God.

Aldus abso-fucking-lutely hated being called “dude.”

He wasn’t a
dude
. He didn’t ride a pony, wear a Stetson, or yell, “Git along li’l doggie!” Nor did he bum around some beach smoking pot and waiting lazily for the next big wave while drawing unemployment.

He was a goddamned senator of the United goddamned States of America, and if he ever made it to the big office, he planned to make it a little harder for the
dudes
of the nation to skate by so easily.

“That’s why I’m sending two additional addresses to your secured email account,” he told Johnny, trying to hold on to his patience. It was never an easy task, and this…
situation
only made his already volatile temper worse.

And the fact that he’d had to stop in to buy a brand new prepaid phone only illustrated that point. “One of those addresses is the man’s residence in Chicago,” he went on to explain. “The other one is the woman’s parents’ house. You still have her home and work addresses?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now, they will most likely end up at one or the other of these locations within the next twenty-four hours. When they do, I want you to take them out.”

“An accident like the last job?” Johnny asked.

Aldus wished it could be that easy, but he was finished taking chances. This had to end now.

“No. It’s imperative their bodies are never discovered.” He needed assurance that if Alisa was somehow carrying the files on her person, they’d never reach the light of day. “I mean
never.
Encasing them in lead and dropping them into the Mariana trench still isn’t going to cut it.”

“The what?”

Oh, for crying out loud.
Johnny was a walking, talking, stupid Italian mobster cliché. Francis Ford Coppola would absolutely love the little prick. “Just make sure you dispose of the bodies in such a way that no trace of them will ever surface. Is that clear?”

“As fuckin’ lead crystal, dude.”

Aldus felt the vein in his forehead bulge.

“Hey,” Johnny said, “I’ve got two pictures of dudes on my screen here. I thought you said it was a man and that Alisa woman we were taking out. Neither of these is her.”

Wow, this just gets better and better. Someone sign Johnny up for Mensa.
Sometimes it was so depressing to know the world was populated by idiots.

Lucky for Aldus, idiots were easily manipulated. Just look at his constituency…

“That second man,” he said slowly so Johnny the Dimwit could follow, “means a bonus for you and the boys. I want you to make sure he receives your specialty.”

“Ah,” Johnny chuckled, and it sounded sort of sick, like the laughter of a little boy pulling wings off a butterfly. No doubt Johnny had done his share of wing-pulling as a child. “Dude must’ve pissed you off, huh?”

“Yes,” he ground his back molars together, “the
dude
definitely pissed me off.”

The sound of his wife talking to their housekeeper out in the hall caused him to glance down at his eighteen karat, yellow-gold Cellini Prince Rolex.

He was due in session in twenty minutes. Time to wrap it up.

“Call me when it’s done,” he told Johnny and didn’t wait for a reply before ending the call.

Now, he’d go listen to his peers drone on and on and
on
about making emergency supplemental appropriations for border security.

What a
colossal
waste of time.

In his not-so-humble opinion, the Chinese had it right all those years ago. Build a wall, supply it with armed troops in guard towers, and kill anyone stupid enough to try and cross that big-assed line you just drew in the sand.

Chapter Eleven

After hauling his ass into the attic of the empty house—Christ, he needed to lose about fifteen pounds in order to make the fit through that narrow opening even slightly comfortable—Nate secured his camouflage M-40 A5 USMC issue sniper rifle on its bipod and hunkered down.

He used a string of detcord coiled in a spiral to blow a loophole in the attic wall beside the window and, as always, the feel of the weapon in his hands was like coming home. It simply became an extension of his arm.

Those armorers at Quantico sure knew how to put together one smooth-working machine…

Sierra was his rifle of choice when honing in on a target within a thousand yards.

The ol’ girl could do a far sight better than that, evidenced by the time his mark had pulled a fast one and left via a warehouse a good two hundred yards farther away than he or Grigg had planned for. Still, that greasy al-Qaeda operative was leveled by 671 grains of diplomacy before his cache of bodyguards ever heard sweet Sierra’s barking report.

As he lowered his eye to the scope and took a brief pass of the park across the way, he tried to forget those days in the field.

Talk about boring. Hours and hours of systematic recon inevitably followed by about half a minute of insane, ball-shrinking activity.

Grigg had loved to quote other snipers. And one of his favorites had been,
Sniping
is
poetry
in
slow
motion, up until the moment you pull the trigger
.

From the pull of Nate’s trigger, it was twenty measly seconds to the time when their gear was stowed and hidden and they were hell and gone from their hide site. Twenty seconds of balls-to-the-wall, get-it-done-or-die activity. Toward the end, they were doing it in eighteen.

They were that damned good. That fast…

A man was walking in the park, he observed as he instinctively switched to tactical breathing. Three big breaths and then exhale.

The guy had on a University of Louisville baseball cap, a blue button-up shirt, and nondescript, white sneakers. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans as he strolled along, head down between his shoulders, watching the sidewalk in front of him.

Perhaps the guy was simply out enjoying the balmy summer day, but then again, Nate hadn’t lived to the ripe ol’ age of thirty-three by taking chances. Saturday-in-the-Park Dude appeared to be about the same height and build as Mystery Man.
Can
you
dig
it? Yes I can. And I’ve been waiting such a long time…
And, geez, he’d been spending far too much time around Ozzie—who broke into lyrics every other sentence. At least Nate could say he had better taste than the kid. In his not-so-humble opinion, Chicago beat out ’80s glam rock any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

“Come on, look up. Let me get a peek at you,” he whispered into the silent, sweltering attic.

Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped down his temples. The dust and insulation particles floating in the air made his lungs itch. There was a decaying mouse carcass in the corner perfuming the space with the sickly sweet scent of death.

The guy in the park didn’t cooperate with his whispered demand.

Go figure. No way was Nate getting
that
lucky.

Then an elderly woman passed by with her overweight wiener dog—the poor thing looked like it was about to split its skin—and Mr. Saturday-in-the-Park bent to give the little chubber a scratch behind the ears.

Nate saw his chance.

Pulling out the high-powered guidance laser from his jacket pocket, he kept his eye on the scope and, with a flick of his thumb, the red line of the laser streamed to life. Focusing on his target, he aimed the thin stream of light.

One thing was for sure: it would be enough to scare the shit out of Mr. Saturday-in-the-Park if he was anything other than a complacent civilian out for a little stroll. Because the mind of a complacent civilian didn’t immediately associate a red laser dot as coming from a weapon. Oh no. That type of instinctual reaction was only earned through training and experience, through having lived in a heightened state of awareness where the first thing to come to mind in any situation was not the possibility but the
probability
of an unknown threat…