Chapter 12
TWELVE
The man who came, Wilson, was fast and good.
He’d given his bank account number, and by the time he drove up in a non-descript-looking off-white Transit van with the logo of an electrical-supplies shop on the sides, Outlaw had had the money transferred.
Outlaw believed in paying well. You got what you paid for.
And anyway, it was the client who was paying. He’d just add that amount to the bill.
It was the wonderful thing about working for the money men. They could fucking well afford anything. All they wanted was for their problem to go away and they were willing to throw money at it to ensure that it did.
Outlaw did his briefing inside the van as Wilson drove them to the warehouse.
The old man was trussed up in the back. Getting him out of the house had been a snap, he’d weighed as much as a girl and he’d been sedated.
The nurse’s body was in the back, too, and would be weighted with heavy chains, abdomen slashed open.
It was improbable given the weight of chains attached to her, but the gases that formed in the stomach could possibly carry her to the top.
Slashing her open took care of that. Outlaw never took chances.
“We’ll get the geezer set up and then get his daughter here. I’ll have her meet up with you. As soon as I get what I need from her, we’ll just drop them over the side of the wharf. Where is it exactly that we’re going?”
“South side of town,” Wilson said. “The docks around Fleetridge. This warehouse was impounded because the owners were using it as a drug clearinghouse and now it’s slated for demolition.
Next month, in fact. There won’t be anyone there.
There won’t be anyone in a three-mile radius this time of night. ”
“Perfect,” Outlaw said. His instinct had proven correct. Nothing beat local knowledge. And Wilson was proving real efficient. Outlaw liked men who did what they were told without unnecessary talk.
He’d made it a habit to hook up with former soldiers and so far it had worked out fine.
He’d refined his search parameters even further, sticking to men who’d tried out for Special Forces and hadn’t made the grade.
They were perfect. Depending on where in the long, grueling process they dropped out, they’d had the best training on the planet without that fuck-you, my-way-or-the-highway attitude all Special Forces soldiers developed.
To a man, SF soldiers only followed orders when they made sense to them, which made them useless to Outlaw.
Outlaw didn’t need for his men to understand, just to obey.
There was also the fact that a man who had been an SF soldier had his pick of civilian security jobs, low-hanging fruit for all of them. There didn’t need to be anything else on the resumè. If you’d been a SEAL, a Ranger, Force Recon, that’s all anyone needed to know.
There were plenty of guys who’d nearly made it, but when they mustered out of the military, no one would give them the time of day. If they were lucky, they became rent-a-cops, low-level security, cheap bodyguards for minor punks. Not a one who didn’t need money.
They’d trained and trained hard, and yet, since they couldn’t make that final cut, their lives were over. But they were manna from heaven for Outlaw, who didn’t need that razor edge the elite soldiers had. All he needed was good, solid muscle with some brains behind it.
Outlaw had mostly uncomplicated jobs to do for clients who had to remain anonymous. The SF dropouts were efficient, took orders and were glad for the work, since they were shut out of the top-tier security work Special Forces soldiers gave each other once they were out of the military.
They wouldn’t give the dropouts the time of day. Outlaw had once seen a former SEAL cross the street to avoid a man who’d rung the bell four days into Hell Week.
He treated his men with respect, paid them above market rate, and got excellent service.
He’d learned well from the money men.
She was swimming in the Pacific, way out beyond her comfort zone. The strong tide was slowly carrying her out to sea, however hard she fought against it.
It was getting dark, the last slice of the sun drowned in the vast ocean’s blackness and there were no lights on shore.
A wind started up, blowing from land, creating wavelets rippling out that would reach all the way to China.
Never a strong swimmer, she was tiring fast, swimming as hard as she could to shore, yet never coming closer.
The wind intensified, grew cold, sapping her strength. A wave crashed over her head unexpectedly and she drank water, icy salt water. She surfaced sputtering and frightened and shivering.
She drew in a deep breath and set out once more for shore. For what she hoped was shore, a big black mass rising out of the dark sea, cold and unforgiving. She tried to speed up her strokes, but it took all her strength merely to resist the increasingly strong tide.
Another wave crashed over her head, driving her under, and she crested the surface just as her breath gave out, gasping and treading water, looking around her in a panic.
It was all black, all dark now. Which way was shore, and safety?
It was impossible to tell. She struck out again, hoping it was the right direction, her strokes uneven.
She fought down the waves of panic, the deadliest enemy at sea, as she fought the strength of the waves that wanted to carry her out, away, toward the vastness of the open sea.
Exhausted, she gulped in air, only to find it was salt water instead. Her limbs were flailing now, she was so cold it was hard to coordinate her movements. She treaded water, turning in a full circle, fighting panic.
Darkness, everywhere. No lights, no sounds from shore to orient her. No ships on the horizon, nothing.
Staying still like this, she rode the waves as they grew taller, trying to time it so she wouldn’t dissipate her strength.
Rising, rising, a faint ripple of light as the wave crested in foam, then the drop to the trough, over and over again.
Up, cresting, plunging down…another wave crested fast over her.
She hadn’t expected it, she had no air in her lungs.
Oh God! It was pitch-black beneath the waves! The swirling water had tumbled her into a somersault and now she didn’t know which was was up and which was down. She tilted her head back, but there was nothing to see, not even reflected starlight on the surface.
She started kicking, arrowing as fast as she could…up? Please God, let her be kicking upward. In a last spurt of strength, she scissored her legs harder and faster, lungs burning, aching to pull in the breath that would fill her lungs with air. She had a second left, maybe two…
She was going to die here, all alone, in the cold, dark ocean, everything so silent except for her beating heart. It thumped against her rib cage, hard, as she kept her hands outstretched, hoping to break the surface, but all her hands encountered was cold water.
She was dying, panic ringing in her mind like a bell, ringing, ringing…
Nicole sat up in bed with a gasp, sweating and shivering, completely disoriented in the dark. With a shaking hand, she groped until she found a lamp and turned it on, blinking blankly at the room.
The ringing continued, on and on. Her cell phone!
Nicole dove for her purse, lying on the floor, scrambling for the phone. Maybe it was Sam. He wasn’t here. The house had an unmistakeable empty feeling. And, she now saw, there was a note on the dresser from him.
She glanced down at the little window. Not Sam, her father. Was something wrong? Had he taken a turn for the worse?
“Dad?” she said breathlessly. “Are you okay?”
“Not your father, bitch.” A low, deep, man’s voice. Slightly raspy, somehow familiar…
“Who is—” And suddenly she knew. That low, raspy voice had spoken vicious things in her ear only hours ago. The intruder.
“Look at your screen.”
Nicole turned the phone so she could see the screen and gasped.
It showed her father, pale as ice, tied to a chair.
He was trembling badly. Not fear, those were muscle spasms unchecked by the medication he’d clearly not had a chance to take.
While Nicole watched in horror, a large man’s hand off-screen took a knife and traced a long line down her father’s face, from temple to chin.
At first she thought he’d brought the wrong edge of the blade to her father’s face, as an admonishment. Look what we could do to him if we wanted to.
But then a small red line appeared, growing larger and larger, gaping open, blood starting to drip off her father’s jaw onto his pale gray pyjamas. Looking more closely, Nicole could see that the knife had cut deep into the flesh, possibly to the bone.
“Stop it!” she screamed into the cell phone. “Don’t you dare hurt my father!”
The hand reappeared, this time holding a gun.
A big black gun that looked enormous next to her father’s frail figure.
Deadly black metal against her father’s pale, wrinkled skin.
The gun angled downward until the muzzle pressed into her father’s knee.
It was driven so hard into her father’s flesh she could see the material of the pajama pants ruching around the muzzle.
Then the screen went dark.
“Oh, we’ll do more than just hurt him,” the deep, vicious voice came back on. “You saw that gun.”
Nicole listened, heart pounding.
“I said—you saw that gun!” the voice roared.
Nicole tried to get her voice to work but her mouth and throat were too dry. No sound would come out. She coughed, managed to croak, “Yes. Yes, I saw the gun.”