Hell of a mess, p.18
Hell of a Mess, page 18
part #4 of A Love & Bullets Hookup Series
No, not hail. Teeth.
Bits of red splattered the weeds. Then bigger chunks crackled branches in the woods beyond. It was raining cops. The Dean’s parting gift.
A pale flash at the edge of the clearing. Soul Patch stumbled upright, his head a bloody mess. The ringing in Bill’s ears was already beginning to clear, allowing him to hear the man’s last words as he shouted:
“What smoke you crackin’!”
A flash from the trees, and Soul Patch’s head exploded.
Fiona trotted through the grass, the smoking gun in her hand, to wrap her arms around Bill’s waist, sink her face against his chest. She was smiling but also sniffling like she was about to cry.
He wove a dusty, bloody hand through her hair. “Hey, sweetie.”
“Hey yourself,” she said.
“Thank you for coming for me.”
She laughed against his throat. “How’d you know which bag was booby-trapped?”
“The Dean was a paranoid fuck. I figured they were all booby-trapped. And I was right.” He tapped the collar around his neck. “Hold on, let me get this fucking thing off me.”
THIRTY-ONE
The storm passed.
The rain stopped first, the last few drops squeezed from a bruised sky brightening in the east. The wind powered for another hour before winding down into exhausted puffs. They watched its dying from their refuge in an office on Oak Point Avenue, which fronted the bay.
Wonder of wonders, the boat Bill spotted in the brush along the island’s northern shore had an outboard motor. They had roared for the Bronx shore as the eyewall approached, bucking and bouncing across the swells so hard Fiona was convinced they would flip and drown within sight of shore—if the duffel bag nestled in the boat’s bow didn’t explode first. But they made it, scrambling over the concrete blocks separating the avenue from the water, then splashing across the parking lot to the first door in the first building they saw: a shipping office.
The assassin used the shotgun to blow off the lock. They sprinted inside, jamming a chair against the broken door and retreating to the windowless kitchen. The power was out, preventing them from using the microwave, but they gorged themselves on energy bars and snacks they found in the cabinets while they ransacked the closets for anything useful.
They found dry workmen’s clothes in the largest supply closet: t-shirts and fleeces with the shipping company’s bright logo, along with neatly cleaned and pressed coveralls. After changing, they moved to the front office, too exhausted to say anything to each other or do anything except sit on the desks and eat and stare out the windows as the hurricane subjected the city to a second pummeling, the glass flickering with lightning. The wind slammed against the broken door, trying to get in, but the chair held.
“This is maybe the understatement of the century,” Bill told the assassin, “But I’m surprised you’re here.”
“I have a way of turning up when I’m needed,” the assassin said.
“I still don’t know your name.”
The assassin shrugged. “I was born a John, but I never felt like a John, you know?”
After dawn, when it was light enough in the office to see properly, Bill found a pair of sharp scissors in a drawer. Feeling the bottom of the duffel bag, he punched the tips of the scissors through the canvas and began to cut a straight line.
He stopped after a second so Fiona could shine a flashlight through the gap.
No wires.
He kept cutting.
“When did you become an explosives expert?” the assassin asked.
“I saw ‘The Hurt Locker’ at least twice,” Bill said, snipping a wider gap.
In slow motion, he reached in and pulled out the bag’s contents onto the desk: a couple hundred thousand dollars in plastic-wrapped stacks of fifty-dollar bills, a sack of gold and silver jewelry, and a waterproof bag with three brightly colored hard drives cocooned in bubble wrap.
“What do you think?” Bill asked, holding up the hard drives. “Crypto? Blackmail images? Some combination of all of the above?”
“I’d bet on crypto. The Dean never stopped talking about Bitcoin near the end of his life,” the assassin said. “All the more reason he deserved to die, frankly.”
“Well, it’s either worth a billion or a couple of cents, depending on the day,” Bill slid two of the hard drives over to the assassin. “What do you say, you keep two, we keep one? Luck of the draw?”
“Sure.” The assassin slid the drives into the large hip pocket of the coveralls. “But if it’s just images of the mayor having sexual congress with a goat, we’re going to need to re-negotiate.”
“I don’t want to know why that was your first thought,” Fiona said, and sighed. She wasn’t cold any longer—the dry clothes had solved that part nicely—but her every bone and muscle throbbed. Tomorrow wouldn’t be pretty. Neither would the day after, unless she stayed pleasantly drunk. How many more years could she keep doing this crap?
Too few.
Time to quit and do something else, maybe.
But what?
They would figure it out.
“We all have our kicks.” The assassin nodded at the piles of cash. “What about those?”
“Even split?” Bill said, glancing at Fiona, who nodded.
“That’s fine,” Fiona said. “We’ll need all of it. Head out of town until things cool down with that billionaire prick, if they ever do.”
“Billionaire prick?” Bill asked, retrieving the flashlight from Fiona so he could stick it into the gap in the bag. The light found the metallic back of a claymore mine, wired crudely to the zipper. Bill shuddered and let the gap fall closed.
“My mission. This billionaire with a penthouse, Boz wanted me to steal a server.” Fiona slapped her forehead, realizing Bill didn’t know any of this. “I found a kid there, they were going to take her kidneys out and put them in this billionaire, so I saved her.” She pointed at the assassin. “Then he saved me.”
Bill nodded his thanks to the assassin. “What happened to the kid?”
“She’s at our place, along with Fireball. I guess we’d have to make a decision about what to do with her.” She found Bill’s cold hand, squeezed it twice.
“I have an idea,” the assassin said, pulling out his phone. “Remember that app?”
Fiona turned to Bill. “It’s an app for criminals. You can bid on jobs.”
Bill’s eyebrows rose.
“While I still have a little bit of battery power, let’s put a hit on ol’ Beau.” The assassin grinned. “Starting off at, say, half a million? Heck, if there’s any crypto on these hard drives, I’ll pay it out of there. Consider it my gift to you.”
“Half a million unless he backs off?” Bill asked.
“Nah.” The assassin flashed teeth. “Guys like him, they never back off. We’re just gonna request his head on a pike. Have them stick it on Fifth Avenue somewhere as a warning to others? Why not? You can order anything these days.”
Fiona felt a chill. It’s a good thing this guy is on our side, she thought. We wouldn’t be alive otherwise.
“Done,” the assassin said, tapping his screen twice before sliding the phone into his pocket. “What say we get some breakfast?”
“I’m not sure anywhere is open,” Bill said.
“It’s New York,” Fiona said. “Someplace is always open.”
Bill pulled a blank piece of paper from a nearby printer, wrote ‘CALL BOMB SQUAD’ on it in large letters, and left it beside the crumpled remains of the duffel bag. Stuffing the money and hard drives and other loot into a trash bag, he kicked the chair away from the door and marched into the light, Fiona and the assassin right behind him. The hurricane’s last winds had battered down the chain-link fence separating the office building from the parking lot next door, revealing rows of cement-mixers and other construction vehicles. They wandered until they found a pickup maybe three decades old but in fine shape, except for a crack in the windshield.
“It’s a stick-shift,” Bill said, squinting through the driver’s window. “Also known as the Millennial anti-theft device. I bet it doesn’t have an alarm, either.”
“I’ll take that bet,” the assassin said. “What you want to put down? A hundred thousand? Two?”
“How about breakfast?” Bill said.
“Fine,” the assassin said.
“The first car I ever stole was a stick,” Bill said, stooping to retrieve a chunk of brick from beside the front tire. “I sold it to a chop shop for enough to buy a PlayStation.”
“You never told me that,” Fiona said.
Bill smashed the brick into the window, cracking it. A second blow, and the shattered glass rained onto the driver’s seat. “I got to keep some secrets,” he said, unlocking the door and opening it. “Keeps the relationship fresh. I win, by the way.”
“Fine,” the assassin chuckled. “Go wild at breakfast. Order a second waffle.”
“I could settle for a mimosa,” Fiona said. “The more alcohol, the better.”
Bill swept away the glass from the driver’s seat before sliding into the truck. Opening the glove compartment, he sorted through the piles of papers and assorted tools until he unearthed a small screwdriver. Slotted the tip into the ignition slot and twisted. The motor roared to life.
“Didn’t think it’d be that easy,” he said, gesturing for them to climb in. “Just think, in a couple more years, there’s no way you could hotwire anything. Some A.I. will come out of the dashboard and strangle you if you try to steal the car. Another one of my skills rendered obsolete.”
Fiona climbed through the passenger side, followed by the assassin. It was a tight squeeze. Fiona placed her hand on Bill’s thigh and squeezed as he shifted the truck into gear and bumped over the fallen fence, veering south toward hazy Manhattan in the distance. They drove in silence, and Fiona imagined they were all feeling what she always felt after a near-death experience: an awareness of the cool air slipping down their nostrils, warming in their throats, expanding their lungs and chests. The texture of fabric beneath their fingertips. The way your eye seemed hyper-sensitive to every detail, especially the extraordinary colors blooming above the city’s skyscrapers, purple and orange over the palest shade of blue.
Bill had to detour around some flooded roads, but they progressed through Manhattan far faster than Fiona had any right to hope. New Yorkers were starting to emerge from shelter, most of them holding their phones aloft so they could record the destruction. On 125th, an enterprising soul had set up a card table and was selling batteries, flashlights, and power tools at an absurd markup. They were far enough south to see something unusual: the ultra-thin needle of the Battery Park skyscraper where Fiona had started off the night’s destruction, well, it looked like the tip of a burning match. The top floor was on fire, black smoke boiling into the bruised heavens.
“Looks like someone took you up on the bid,” she told the assassin.
The assassin pulled out his phone, swiped through a screen, and chuckled. “Looks like every degenerate in the city turned out for that one.”
“You know, we all did pretty good,” Bill said. “Maybe we should make it a permanent thing, go into business together.”
“Why not?” the assassin said. “I need something to do.”
“We’d probably kill each other before the week is out,” Fiona said. “But maybe not. Let’s talk about it over pancakes.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Kolakowski is the Derringer- and Anthony-nominated author of Maxine Unleashes Doomsday and Boise Longpig Hunting Club, as well as the Love & Bullets trilogy of novellas. He lives and writes in New York City. Visit him virtually at nickkolakowski.com.
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Nick Kolakowski, Hell of a Mess
