Chapter 27
“Hello, Mr. Gaines,” I spoke over a burner phone from the driver’s seat of the transit truck.
“Where’s my money?” answered a gravely, aged voice on the other end of the line.
“With the same guy who took it from you last time,” I replied while looking into the back compartments at the multiple bags of cash.
A tense silence followed.
“What is this, a job application?” he questioned.
“Not at all.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You want your money, and I want a meeting.”
“A meeting? There are easier ways of doing that…”
“I wouldn’t want you to show up unprepared,” I chuckled while looking at Jenna in the passenger seat to my right. “You are the man of the hour, after all.”
“Let me guess, you want me to come alone?”
“Of course not. You’re much too cautious for that,” I responded while leaning forward on the dash, staring ahead into the fleet garage in the distance.
“No cops, just your private security. I’m going to drive your truck onto your home turf, and then I’m going to give you an opportunity to take it back. ”
“In exchange for what?”
“In exchange for the guy giving you Muties.”
“What you’re suggesting I’m into is illegal.”
“I have your security footage, Gaines. Play games with me and you’ll never see your money again.”
“…Thirty minutes.”
And then Jenna showed me the text she’d gotten from an IT buddy, confirming our target.
“Five,” I countered.
“I’ll need time to drive over.”
“No, you don’t,” I asserted. “You’re already there.”
And then I hung up the burner phone and tossed it onto the dash, clasping the steering wheel as I pulled onto a roundabout to head toward the garage.
We had them off balance and fortified. I had my girls safe and sound inside a reinforced steel box, all we needed to do was get our guy.
The fleet garage was a former airport, renovated over a massive property with plenty of repurposed tarmac and hangar bars.
As for Gaines, he was in the main office construction, a trapezoidal building with what was no doubt a deluge of various vehicles.
I entered from the western terminal, a lone gray truck in the blurry heat rising from the radiating tarmac. No personnel anywhere to be found, as the place had no doubt been put on a site-wide lockdown.
Except for a single hangar door sliding open to bid us entry, where a small single-engine airplane was parked along with rows of trucks and over a dozen men forming a double-sided aisle flank.
I pulled up to a stack of wood palettes and parked there, turning off the ignition with a number of glaring eyes all staring at me.
And there, right in the middle, flanked by all his men, was a spottily pink-skinned, aging man in his mid-to-late fifties or sixties, serpent green eyes, with rolling curls of white hair and a large wrinkled brow.
He wore a dark blue business trench buttoned shut, with shiny black loafers that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.
Alistair Gaines.
“I’ll go out first,” I stated, grabbing a brown bag of money and slinging it over my shoulder before looking in the back compartment at the blue and violet eyes staring at me. “Whatever you’re gonna do, Mimi, do it quick.”
“Take Barry,” she said, holding out the cute but creepy stuffy.
“I need a free hand for my gun,” I said.
“I’ve got him,” Jenna said, casually taking the bear-bat without a lick of fear or hesitation.
Cassie and Monica looked at each other with nervous shock, keeping their heads down in the safety of the reinforced truck body.
Mimi then took the canister of Ichor and unsealed its cylindrical cap, revealing the liquid gold inside before raising her eyebrows at me. “See you soon?”
“Soon,” I said, then nodded to Jenna and got out of the truck.
A chorus of clicking from the racking slides of submachine guns greeted me as I casually whistled while surveying the metallic rafters of my surroundings, where the main office box was suspended high above the garage.
I figured his preference was to look down on people, mentally noting all of the possible exits and methods of escape, the plane being the most prominent one.
“That’s close enough,” said his much younger lieutenant, a Caucasian with short brown hair, who stepped forward in a matching dark trench with his leather gloved hand up.
“Shoot me,” was all I said as I casually strolled toward them.
Everyone took aim.
“Hold,” Gaines quickly spoke up while looking up through the windshield. “Who’s in there?”
“I’ll be introducing you soon enough,” I said, then tossed the bag at his feet so his minion could bend down and unzip it, verifying the presence of cash.
“It’s legit,” the lieutenant said as he got back to his feet. “Where’s the rest?”
“One sec,” I said, then raised my hand and signaled Jenna with a forward twitch of my index and middle finger.
She stepped out of the truck slowly, her eyes darting all around with Barry clutched in her hands.
“Detective O’Brien?” Alistair Gaines uttered in realization.
“Ah, so you have been acquainted,” I mused while moving defensively in front of her.
“I know everyone working for the city,” he said with a vicious glare. “You don’t know the trouble you’re in, young lady.”
“Actually, you don’t,” Jenna retorted, prompting the twitchy aims of every firearm around us.
“What is that, a bomb? A listening device?” asked Gaines, his eyes falling to the black and pink bear-bat she was holding.
“This is Barry,” she said, tossing the plush onto the concrete floor in front of us all. “A friend lent him to me.”
Gaines returned his attention to me. “Where’s my money?”
“You answer me first…” Jenna vociferated. “Did my dad really die in a ‘gang shooting’, or did you have the balls to do it yourself?”
Gaines chuckled with his chin dropping low. “So that’s it, huh? You’re here for payback?”
“You know what I want, Gaines,” I interjected. “Give me the name.”
“Even if you somehow got past my men, there’s a shipping container full of Mutables just behind me,” he brandished a small remote control that looked like it belonged to a garage shutter. “First I want to know where the rest of my money is.”
“Suit yourself…” I said, then made eye contact with all of his bodyguards. “Tell me something fellas, if I told you there’s a hundred million dollars in that truck for whoever shoots this man, would you be tempted?”
Alistair Gaines chuckled darkly. “You think it’s that easy to turn my own employees against me? It’s more than money than keeps them loyal. It’s respect.”
I looked around at everyone. “That true?”
Silence.
“The money is in the truck, right?” Gaines questioned before turning around dismissively. “Shoot them.”
A cold breeze cut through the warmth of the day as the interplay of light and shadow started to warp and undulate as Barry’s presence seemed a lot, in a word, louder than before.
One by one, his men all began to look nervously at each other, their faces filling with horror as their hands trembled nervously.
Gaines suddenly turned around with a look of bemusement. “What do I pay you for? Shoot him!”
“They can’t…” said Mimi’s ethereal, echoing voice.
And then he looked down at Barry as the plush’s shadow extended, growing to over ten times the height of the bear-bat itself.
Mimi rose from the shadow like a wraith emerging from a tar pit, standing from a crouched position as she picked Barry up while the darkness peeled away from her body like a second skin.
Holy shit.
Didn’t know she could do that.
“They can lie to you, but they can’t lie to themselves,” she smiled ominously. “I wonder what they see now?”
That was when I tackled Mimi and Jenna to body block them with my own, seconds before Gaines’ men started screaming in fear.
The next sound was an eruption of automatic fire as they shot at each other with reckless abandon, spraying bullets and blood spatter as they all killed each other in a simultaneous friendly fire assault.
I listened to the rounds whizzing over our heads as we kept below the crossfire, protecting Mimi and Jenna until the bodies dropped in a circular precession.
Leaving only Gaines alive.
“You girls okay?” I asked urgently, lifting my head to look at them.
“Yeah!” Mimi exhaled with shortness of breath.
“I’m good,” Jenna nodded.
Gaines stumbled backwards as I turned over my shoulder look at him.
“What the hell?” he trembled. “What the hell!”
The old man turned on his heel and ran as best he could, his fingers smashing the button on his remote control as he fled the massacre.
“He’s getting away!” Jenna shouted.
“No, he’s not,” I said, then jumped to my feet and helped both women up before pulling my gauss cannon from my holster.
And then I shot straight into the propeller engine of his plane, shredding its machinations with hot sparks as he yelped in a panic, changing course with his only means of egress removed.
A loud metal bang followed from the blue shipping container before the doors swung open, releasing a horde of grotesque, stone-like humanoids covered in dark blue carapaces.
Jenna drew her pistol and fired, her gun doing little except to chip some of their exoskeleton off.
It didn’t even slow them down.
They weren’t fast, but they were robustly steady, enough to come at us in a slow jog with long claws and arms outstretched.
So I raised my cannon and fired.
A chunky mass of black and blue blasted out of the lead Muties chest, dropping it to the ground before I slung my gun under my elbow to blast the one coming from the left.
“You catch Gaines, I’ll deal with these guys!” I shouted to Jenna.
“Got it!” Jenna hollered back, then took off after Gaines while Mimi fell back behind me.
My gun was powerful, but it needed frequent reloading. I ejected its electro-cell from the side, the steaming metal bouncing off the floor by the time I took out another cell and inserted it.
And then I switched from ‘Slugs’ to ‘Alternate’, with my follow-up shots now propelling pure Ichor from its wide-bore barrel.
I ran forward and aimed ahead, firing into the heart of the horde, exploding their bodies on contact.