The Trashman Read online

  “That hurt,” Quantrill said.

  He stood over me as a single drop of viscous, cough-syrup colored fluid dripped on the cobblestones near my nose. I got a good whiff of his armored feet but all I smelled was athlete’s foot spray. On my hands and knees, nearly hyperventilating from the blow, I would have jammed the fork into his foot except it was bent double from striking him in the neck. I glanced up in time to see the poniard raised high over his head for the killing stroke. His human face grinned horribly, like a badly drawn comic book villain.

  If I didn’t do something, in half a second I’d be dead, but I’d never been hit that hard before, and no matter how urgently my brain screamed for my body to fight back all I could do was heave for breath while on my hands and knees. I was gonna die without know why, same as many of my targets, and some part of mind giggled at the irony.

  I heard a meaty thunk-crack, followed by a spray of droplets on the back of my head. Quantrill crumpled in a heap faster than a politicians’ moral compass. Bloody bubbles popped out of his nostrils. Goo leaked from a hole in his left temple and puddled on the stones.

  A black-suited man holding a crowbar stood behind Quantrill. Purple-red blood drained off the sharp end like maple syrup. Still stunned from getting hit, I nevertheless knew what kind of force it would take to drive such a heavy piece of iron all the way through a human skull, not to mention whatever Quantrill was.

  He took longer to die than I would have expected from somebody, or something, with such a massive head wound. They say the human body is remarkable, except Quantrill had the whole Creature-From-The-Black-Lagoon thing going on. Yet despite the stream of blood and brain matter running out of his ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and wounds, he retained enough awareness to turn those trusting puppy dog eyes my way. He mouthed something I didn’t hear, coughed wet, bloody coughs, and what looked like a tear rolled down his cheek as his last breath escaped. Or maybe it was just sweat. We were in the tropics.

  When he died, the reptilian body reverted back to being entirely human…he went out of focus for a second, and then he was a Beach Boy again. My sick sense of humor laughed internally again; weren’t monsters in disguise supposed to revert to their natural state upon death? Of course, I imagined the whole thing anyway, or worse, was drugged.

  Except the man with the crowbar stood holding it in fists the size of volleyballs, legs braced wide apart, squinting at me like I was a porterhouse seared over mesquite and served with a side of fries. Was I next? With my oxygen levels returning to normal, I wondered if the Pittsburgh Steelers might be missing a defensive tackle, until my eyes began to focus again. I rocked back on my heels, braced against the wall, and pushed myself to my feet. It still hurt to breathe.

  “I guess I’m next,” I said, trying and failing to muster a sneer. He was still a blur. My heart pounded so hard it felt like it might blow out my eardrums. But he saw me shift my eyes down the alley, back the way I’d come, and curled his upper lip in disgust. He tossed the crowbar aside with a clang.

  “Don’t be such a fucking drama queen.”

  That voice…

  “One Shot?”

  Pointing behind me, he indicated two more of the lizard-delusions bleeding all over the pathway.

  “Who else would drag you out of a shit sandwich like this?”

  “But how—”

  “We’ve gotta move fast; things are in play now. Let’s get rid of these bodies before somebody sees.” If a grizzly bear could speak, that’s what he’d sound like. He pointed with his chin, indicating my hair. Patting it, my fingertips came away wet with the strangely colored blood and pinkish-gray brain matter. “Goddamn, you need a shower.”

  Whirling with more agility than a man that size should possess, he dragged the first body into the bushes.

  Chapter 6

  “This is the weirdest dream I’ve had in a while,” I said, finally getting some breath back.

  One Shot had his hands under Quantrill’s armpits to drag him backward toward a hedge. “You’ll see how much of a dream it is when one of these lizards pops a cap in your ass.” Then he dropped Quantrill and stood, finger pressing a tiny device in his left ear. “Shit,” he said into a microphone in the earpiece. “Yeah, I’m coming.” The eyes that met mine had the intense squint I knew from a hundred firefights in the hellholes of Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Meet me at the front gate, and hurry.”

  “Hey, what about these…things?” I called after him.

  “Ditch ’em, and hurry.”

  He turned to leave.

  “The blood?”

  “If anybody sees, tell ’em it’s raspberry syrup.”

  He took a step.

  “What if I’m not there?”

  That got his attention and he half-turned to look at me.

  “Then all the contracts are back in force.”

  Three steps later and he disappeared around a corner.

  Back in force?

  My mind couldn’t cope with what had just happened. I needed time to think, but then an electric landscaping cart passed the alley’s entrance behind me. The driver didn’t look my way, but that was pure luck. I couldn’t chance being caught with three dead guys, or whatever they were, a gory weapon at my feet, and no LEI credentials anymore.

  Still jittery from the last round of adrenaline, I snapped into action without thinking about what the hell was happening. I needed to dispose of the bodies. Believe it or not, this wasn’t something I had much experience with. Shooters didn’t deal with cleanup, that was built into the fees paid to LEI, and several companies had contracts for that kind of work; the messier the cleanup, the more they got paid. When I had my own franchise, I had to escrow ten percent of the fees I collected for such purposes, as well as carrying my own Collateral Damage insurance. Rules, rules, rules.

  The pain in my chest had receded to a dull bruised feeling, so I psyched myself enough to drag Quantrill’s body into the bushes past the other end of the alley. I crouched to slide my hands under his armpits and looked up into see Dawn Delvin standing five feet away, arms crossed, nostrils flaring.

  Well, shit…

  Her eyes burned into me with…hate wasn’t exactly the right word, more like angry disappointment, an expression I hadn’t seen since the day I showed up to kill her in the Guatemalan jungle. Oddly enough, when I saw it this time I didn’t believe it for a second because if I’d learned anything about her in the past month, it was that, unlike me, Dawn had a deep streak of analytical cunning. Types like her often hated action people like me, seeing us as impulsive and dangerous. I knew she didn’t give a shit about Quantrill, or the other two whatever-they-were. That’s not who she was, so her anger was about something else, maybe my indiscreet way of handling it?

  “You’re such an idiot,” she said.

  “What did I do? He attacked me!” I pulled up my shirt to display my already-purpling upper stomach.

  She shook her head, wheeled, and walked away. I couldn’t help watching her.

  What was it about her that made me care so much? And what the fuck were these creatures to her?

  I looked up, hearing a cry from the alley at my back, the direction One Shot had taken. There, a tall Jamaican lady in a hotel uniform stood near a door, key in hand, no doubt the back door to the clothing shop inside the pink-painted wall, now laced with sprays of the sticky blood. Wide-eyed, she met my eyes for a second, and then vanished inside, slamming and locking the door behind her.

  Uh-oh.

  With no LEI credentials, I could be tried for murder like anybody else, assuming the lizards were classified as “men” for legal purposes. Even though I hadn’t killed Quantrill, gambling my life on the Jamaican justice system sounded like a sucker bet. Tourist Kills Amphibian Tourist in Jealous Rage! That added a salacious element to the more accurate Shape-shifting Monster Killed while Assaulting Tourist!

  My internal stopwatch clicked “On.” Experience had taught me that I had no more than a minute before resort security wo
uld show up, and since I knew they wore sidearms—by habit I noticed such things—I figured there was a better than even chance they would shoot first and bury my body under one of the Purple Garden flower bushes ringing the hot tub. Press like that was bad for business.

  Now I wished I’d worn sneakers instead of sandals. You can’t run in sandals, so rather than stopping to unbuckle them I stepped on the heel strap with the opposite foot and pushed it all the way down until my foot slipped free. Then I repeated the process. Once that was done, I left the bodies where they were and ran like hell for the front gate.

  Some people’s feet have soles toughened over the years that allow them to walk on rocks and debris-covered ground without injury or discomfort. I’m not one of those people.

  The concrete pathways inside the resort gave way to a tile-floored pergola that emptied into a curved, cobblestone-lined driveway where cars and buses disgorged guests. Fortunately, the sun hadn’t yet turned the asphalt into a bed of coals, but the roughness of the pavement tore up my feet, so I ran in the lush, manicured grass.

  Yells alerted me that I was being chased, while the whine of electric motors told me they had golf carts. The vehicles weren’t appreciably faster than a man could run, except the gate lay three hundred yards beyond the resort’s front entrance. However, instead of gulping the wet Jamaican air into lungs burning from the buildup of lactic acid, thanks to my recent workouts, I was just starting to loosen up when a black limo stopped at the main entrance one hundred yards in front of me. The same man-mountain who killed Quantrill, my old Sergeant, One Shot, stepped from the back seat. He stood with feet apart and arms crossed beside the car, partially blocking the driveway, his black suit a sharp contrast to the bright greens, reds, and yellows of the flora surrounding the resort’s entrance. He somehow looked like he belonged there, as if everything surrounding him existed by his permission. You can’t fake that kind of aura, you either have it or you don’t, and he did; you could sense it, even at a distance.

  Even as the golf carts closed within ten feet of me, he remained absolutely still, watching. That calmed me, because I knew from experience he would intervene before letting me get caught.

  Morning sunlight picked out every fold of his face, but it remained impassive. Behind wrap-around shades his eyes gave away nothing. I kicked up my knees in a sprint to the finish as sirens wailed on the highway leading to the resort, and unless he protected me, I was trapped.

  Sweat slicked my body as I passed him and hit the car, using it to break my momentum. The security guards jumped out of the golf cart—three of them—and ran toward me. That’s when One Shot stepped into their path.

  “Wah gwaan?” he said, in that distinctive voice that brooked no argument, the one the best noncoms are born with. What’s going on?

  “T’ere’s been a murder,” the oldest guard said. “An’ dat man needs answer some questions. Now, move out da way.”

  I had to hand it to the security guy, it took guts to stand up to One Shot. Or maybe a lot of stupid, it’s hard to tell sometimes. That’s when two police cruisers screeched to a halt and three officers jumped out, guns drawn and, more to the point, aimed at me. But that didn’t visibly bother One Shot, probably because they weren’t aimed at him.

  “Mi dey yah, yuh know?” One Shot said, running all five syllables together like it was a single word. It was a common phrase on Jamaican resorts and meant “everything’s good.”

  “We know no such thing,” said one of the police officers, a short man with two metal bars attached to each shoulder strap. Of the six guards and cops, only his aura had any red. His accent was more British than Jamaican. He had a 9mm Glock aimed at me over the limo’s trunk, and, for some reason, that was the moment I realized the car was still running, with a driver behind the wheel. “Put your hands up, sir. Do it now!”

  The security guards backed up at the sight of the pistol, as well they should have. The cop’s finger was on the trigger not the guard, which either meant he was ready to put a bullet in my head or was a clueless moron who’d seen too many reruns of T.J. Hooker and didn’t know the meaning of trigger discipline.

  “Iree, Inspector,” One Shot said, in the same tone he’d used with clueless officers before and sounding not the least bit worried. Easy for him, I thought, the fuckin’ bullets would probably bounce off. “Before you do something you can’t undo you should see my credentials. They’re in my inside coat pocket.”

  The security guards had drawn their guns by now. Unlike the cops, who had fanned out with one to the front of the limo, one to the back, and the inspector still aiming at me across the car’s trunk, the guards’ hands shook as they pointed their pistols in my general direction. I told myself that if a firefight broke out and I could duck down quick enough the Jamaicans might all kill each other. Which was bullshit, as I well knew; I’d be the first to die.

  “I’ll look at your credentials in a minute, sir, but now I need you to put your hands up. Both of you.”

  Even as my eyes looked from side to side trying to find a way out, my arms went straight up. Straightening his tailored black suit, One Shot had other ideas. He was offended.

  “You really should look at my credentials now, Inspector.”

  “And you really should put your hands in the air now, sir!”

  I could sense blood in the air, mostly likely mine. My guardian angel and I seemed about two heartbeats from our last. Glancing at my reflection in the limo’s blacked out windows I saw I appeared much calmer than I felt, although my hair was spiky from sweat. When you’ve faced down and killed suicidal terrorists in dark caves in Pakistan, the hardest part about facing a twitchy Jamaican cop who pointed a gun at you wasn’t the fear of getting shot, it was suppressing the reflex to react. As for One Shot, he could have been the King of Jamaica for all the nerves he showed. Hell, for all I knew, he’d used his bin Laden bonus to become the King of Jamaica.

  “Commissioner Hartwell will not be pleased if you shoot me, Inspector.” Whoever Commissioner Hartwell was it was the perfect name drop. The other two constables turned their heads toward the inspector, and I knew One Shot had scored a direct hit. I guessed Hartwell must be their boss. “The commissioner’s personal authorization for me to operate in Jamaica, with the full cooperation of the Constabulary, is the credential I’m trying to show you. I doubt he would like you getting my blood all over it.”

  One Shot tossed a foldout, a burnished burgundy leather case onto the truck, and I damned near gasped out loud, something no veteran Shooter should ever do. I only stopped myself after a tiny intake of breath that, thankfully, nobody heard over the car’s engine. I recognized the leather case, it was official LEI issue, and you never voluntarily gave it up. I’d had one just like it, meaning One Shot was a Shooter. That complicated everything.

  What was it he’d said earlier about the contracts going back in force? In the heat of the moment it hadn’t sunk in, but it did now, and I was no longer sure that going with him was such a good thing. What good was I to LEI, except as fertilizer? On the other hand, while Jamaica was my favorite tropical playground, I doubted their jails matched the hospitality of their resorts.

  The inspector spoke to the other two in patois. “Kip yuh guns aimed at him.” Then, holstering his own, he opened the wallet like there might be a Brazilian wandering spider inside waiting to bite his hand. Once convinced it wasn’t booby trapped, he examined the contents, looked up at One Shot several times, and then back down, obviously comparing the ID photos to the actual man.

  “Your name is One Shot?” he said after half a minute.

  One Shot was a legend from before, when LifeEnders was a mercenary organization hunting the terrorists who took out our government, and I’d never heard him called anything except One Shot. He was in the room when Osama bin Laden died on live pay TV. I knew because I had stood next to him. In the intervening years, he’d gained a hundred pounds of solid muscle, lost a lot of hair, and his voice had dropped two octaves. And,
apparently, he’d gotten his license to kill.

  “It is,” he said.

  “That is an unusual name.”

  “I am in your country at the request of your government, and, as you can see from the document you’re holding, you are ordered to assist me in any way possible. That does not include delaying us at gunpoint. If your men don’t lower their weapons right now, I’m going to rip those guns out of their hands and shove them up your ass, Inspector.”

  That sounded like the One Shot I’d known. But I had to give the inspector credit for having bigger balls than most podunk cops, because he came back at One Shot and didn’t sound afraid…much.

  “My men would cut you down before you took two steps, Mister One Shot. Despite your obvious lack of respect for the Jamaican Constabulary, we are not quite so backward as you seem to think.”

  “I didn’t say you were bad cops, Inspector. You’re just not me.”

  That proved it was definitely the same pompous asshole One Shot I’d known and loved. I generally have a high tolerance for bullshit. I don’t like it, but I’ve learned to ignore it when it’s in my best interest. And although about only three minutes had passed in real time, even I’d had enough of him at that point. One Shot was damned good at what he did, but I’d forgotten what an overbearing prick he could be. The inspector spoke his next words like they were coated with a mixture of peanut butter and dog shit.

  “Holster your weapons,” he ordered, staring down the security guards until they complied. “You are free to go, gentlemen. I am afraid that other duties prevent my escorting you to…Sangster International, I presume?”

  “No,” One Shot said. “We have business elsewhere.”

  “Safe travels to you.”

  A courtesy bus filled with new arrivals had stopped in mid-turn at the entrance, the driver no doubt wondering what the hell was going on and what to do. The security guards looked to the older man, who had stepped away with a phone to his ear. The constables, by their angry frowns, were trying to shoot death rays from their eyes, while in the branches of the tall palm trees lining the driveway near the main gate, green-bodied Jamaican Amazon parrots squawked in disappointment at the lack of gunplay.