“Um, great coffee, or so I hear.”
He smiled. “We have room in our group for you and your friend, if you’d like to travel with us at least that far.”
“You don’t have to clear it with your commander first?”
“Yeah,” Omega said, “let’s see. We want to bring along an experienced LA county deputy with us who is a former MP, and who has no compunction about using high explosives or doing away with Miranda rights and due process in an emergency. I think he’ll be good with that.”
“Wow. You guys know how to romance a girl, doncha?”
Echo leaned in and dropped his voice. Something about the velvety purr made her flesh ripple with the good kind of shivers. “Lady, you ever want to find out, just let us know. It’ll be our pleasure to show you.”
She realized they both were now intently staring at her.
Yowza.
“Um, you guys have lunch yet?”
Omega smiled. Sexy, seductive. “I could eat.”
“Food,” she quickly added.
“That, too,” he said.
Oh, boy.
Chapter Seventeen
After getting off the phone with General Arliss, Mike Carter, now known as Bubba to the men and women of the Drunk Monkeys, stared down at the man he’d tortured and killed. He’d rigged his building with surveillance and alarm systems that only he knew about.
Having over two decades in military intelligence had helped him out in that regard.
“You have caused me a metric shit-ton of trouble, asshole,” he muttered at the cooling corpse. The man hadn’t given him much information, which he’d pretty much expected.
But the sheer pleasure of torturing that little bit out of him had been worth all the aggravation he’d now go through to move his stuff to another safe house. Once the shit hit the fan after sending Pandora to Australia, he’d suspected he’d need a refuge and had already set one up.
Papa wasn’t the only one with secret accounts at his disposal.
So he’d already moved most of what he’d need to the new location.
Still, it was a pain in the farking ass.
Literally, for him.
He changed positions in his wheelchair. He wasn’t paralyzed, but due to all the damage to his spine and the remaining shrapnel they couldn’t remove for fear of paralyzing him, standing and walking were excruciating exercises in masochism of the really unpleasant kind. There were countless days he’d wished he was paralyzed just so he wouldn’t feel the pain anymore. It was almost worse knowing he could walk for a few minutes here and there, but only if he wanted to spend the rest of the day looped out on painkillers.
And he didn’t want that.
So he’d done most of the moving of his stuff before coming back here to take care of this dangling thread, when he’d received the call from Deputy Gia Quick of LASD, and then he’d had to do some quick digging into her background before he talked with Arliss.
Now he had to focus on the task at hand. Thank goodness he’d had the foresight to move Pandora’s sister, brother-in-law, and niece and nephew to a safe house long before now. He’d set them up with a bank account and told them their new job was staying home and homeschooling their two kids.
After he’d assured them Pandora was safe, but working on a story that might endanger all their lives, they’d agreed to follow Mike’s instructions.
Especially when he told them the bank account he’d given them the debit card for would keep giving them money for living expenses, and the apartment he’d put them in was nicer than the one they’d been in.
He was still monitoring their apartment for intruders, and suspected this was the same guy who’d tripped the door sensor there the night before.
So Mike had been waiting, ready, for him to show up at his place.
The guy who had broken into his apartment in the middle of the night, he’d likely been expecting a helpless cripple. There was nothing in Mike’s official service record to indicate he’d spent all those years after his injury as a top intel agent under General Joseph Arliss.
He might be a crip, but he wasn’t helpless. Far from it.
Mike had been awake and working on his laptop when the building’s front door sensor chirruped and caught his attention. People rarely came and went from their building that late at night. Then the next warning, when the lobby’s stairwell door was opened, had Mike checking out the video feeds.
The guy didn’t belong there.
That he emerged from the stairwell on Mike’s floor sealed the deal. Mike had been waiting while the guy spent the better part of fifteen minutes picking his complicated front door locks—silently, he’d give him all due credit for that—and then easing the door open.
Mike had been sitting back in the shadows of the dark apartment, waiting, night vision goggles on and his trusty tranq pistol ready.
As soon as the guy had turned around, Mike had popped four darts into the guy and simply waited until he’d collapsed. By the time the guy came to in Mike’s bathroom several hours later, where he’d already lined the walls and floor with plastic sheeting duct-taped in place, it was early that morning. While the guy was unconscious, Mike had cut his clothes off and stripped him naked, and had his wrists and ankles securely duct-taped in a spread eagle position to two pieces of two-by-four he’d retrieved from the building’s basement.
He’d also give the guy credit for not breaking during the impromptu crucifixion part of the festivities. Guy had guts.
When Mike started slicing the guy’s abdominal cavity open to play with those same guts, however, that was when the guy finally started talking.
Unfortunately, Ed, which turned out to be his name, didn’t know much at all. He was a contractor hired by a third-party. He had no idea who the money was, only that the guy who’d actually hired him for the job had CIA ties. And that he was doing this alone, per orders, so as not to draw attention to the job. He was supposed to then dose Mike with po-clo to make it look like a heart attack and leave him where he fell.
Interesting.
Mike had severed the guy’s fingers before pushing a triple dose of po-clo into his veins. The fingers he’d dumped into a plastic zip-top baggie, triple bagged them, and tossed them into his freezer.
Now he had to get rid of the body before someone came looking for Ed, or the building super accidentally walked in and found him while doing something stupidly mundane like spraying for bugs.
After removing the screws he’d used to anchor Ed to the wood—his cordless drill was virtually silent as opposed to a hammer and nails—he pulled the lumber free and set it aside, wrapped in plastic. The building’s incinerator would handle those nicely.
As it would Ed.
He’d have to time everything perfectly, though. Many of the building’s residents were at work, but he didn’t want to risk anyone spotting him.
Then he had an idea. Ed, while white, was about his size. A little slimmer. He pulled some old clothes out of his dresser. Then, after securing several layers of plastic sheeting around Ed’s abdomen, and his hands and feet, Mike dressed him.
Most of that Mike could do either sitting on the floor or from his chair.
Now comes the fucking fun part.
He set the brakes on his wheelchair and took a deep breath as he stood. Yep, instant pain, but he’d have to grit his teeth and bear it. He got Ed into his wheelchair and then grabbed his own rolling office chair he sometimes used and sat in that.
Part one, done.
He stuck a hat on the guy’s head, socks and shoes on his feet, and then tucked a throw around him to hide his hands.
All good. He looked asleep, not dead.
Well, not exactly dead.
Aha.
He tied a surgical mask around the lower half of Ed’s face.
Perfect.
After using his surveillance cameras to check that the service elevator and basement were clear, Mike again pulled himself into a standing position with a groan a
nd, holding on to the back of the wheelchair, began the arduous trek out his door, down the hall, and to the service elevator. There, he had to punch in a special code that the building super thought no one else knew. After a moment, the elevator arrived with a groaning creak and the doors slowly ground open.
Residents weren’t allowed to use it alone, normally. They were supposed to get the super to help them if they had something large, like furniture, to move.
Meaning paying him a hefty “tip” if they wanted it done in a reasonable time.
Mike rolled Ed inside and hit the button for the basement. Then he closed his eyes, resting as much of his weight as he could on the back of the chair. It wasn’t made for pushing like a hospital chair and didn’t have handles, the low back more suited for someone who was independently able to get around, like him. It also didn’t have wheelie bars on the back and would tip if he leaned against it too hard.
Finally, after what felt like forever, the elevator ground to a painfully jerky halt and the doors slid open. Mike remembered to look around before rolling Ed out and over to the far corner where the incinerator sat. It was running, as he’d expected with today being a burn day, lucky him. The super only ran it three days a week in the summer, even though it ran every day when it was cold, an integrated part of the antiquated hot-water boiler heating system for the building.
The building’s owners were apparently too cheap to invest in a retrofit kit that could have converted it to an energy plant, meaning it would have been cost-efficient to run year-round.
Usually, trash dumped down two different chutes into the main part of the burn chamber. But there was a hopper in the front where you could dump larger items and they would roll down into the bottom.
Opening the hopper door, he hoisted Ed up and bodily shoved the man inside, head first, until he was all the way in and landed in the chute with a clanging thump. But upon looking, Mike realized the body was partially stuck about four feet down the chute.
Dammit.
No way he was climbing in there.
Duh, the lumber.
Gratefully collapsing in his chair, he slammed the hopper door shut and fastened it, racing back to the service elevator and upstairs again. Five minutes later, he had a garbage bag full of the plastic sheeting in his lap and was balancing the ends of the two-bys on his wheelchair’s foot plate while carefully holding the lumber in place with his knees.
He made it down to the basement again, opened the hopper, and tossed the bag in.
It bounced off Ed, who was beginning to get a little singed, and into the main burn chamber, where it melted immediately.
Fortunately, the unit had a good ventilation and filter system, so eau de charbroiled Ed wouldn’t filter throughout the building like a beastly barbecue. He took one of the pieces of lumber and, having to stand again for the leverage, managed to shove Ed all the way down the chute, where he fell over the edge into the burn chamber.
Whew.
He tossed that piece of lumber, then the other in after it, and collapsed into his chair once more.
Sweat poured from him, soaking his clothes. He was going to be hurting something fierce in an hour, and he didn’t dare take any pain pills for it yet.
He still had to get moving.
Back up in his apartment, he took a quick shower, grabbed the last of what he’d need to take with him for now, and looked around. He had several hidden cameras set up that would relay the video feed to a cloud server. From there, he could use an anonymizer to log into the feed and check to see if anyone had come in. He had sensor triggers on the door and two windows, and you couldn’t even tell he’d murdered a man in his bathroom.
I’m forgetting something.
He nearly smacked himself in the head. He returned to the kitchen, pulled the bag of fingers from the freezer, and dumped them into a small cooler bag with a couple of chemical ice packs. He’d worn gloves while doing everything, so he knew his fingerprints weren’t on the baggies. He would drop it off at a friend’s house on his way to his safe house.
His friend being retired military intel and retired FBI, with lots of friends in lots of places. If the fingers or DNA were on file anywhere in the civilized world, they should have a hit within an hour of processing.
I’m getting too old for this shit.
But he still wore a smile as he locked his door, steadied the duffel bag resting in his lap as well as the soft cooler on top of that, and wheeled down the hall to the main elevator.
This is just like the old days.
While waiting for the elevator, he even laughed. Midnight ambushes, impromptu bathroom crucifixions, and intestinal interrogations?
Check.
Yep, just like the old days.
Man, how he’d missed it.
Chapter Eighteen
Gia wanted to get the discussion off sex as quickly as possible.
Mostly because she could see it might be far too easy for her to totally shirk her duties at this point and shuck her uniform in the name of celebrating the end of the world as they knew it.
Especially with these two hunks.
Dave had been okay. He’d seemed like a nice enough guy at the time, but in retrospect, she suspected he’d pursued her more because of her steady paycheck and benefits than because he really loved her.
Which, to be honest, she’d been okay with. He was a nice guy, he had no record, he worked a decent job, and they had a lot in common.
He just wasn’t very….hunky.
Then again, neither was she, so it wasn’t like she had room to complain. And they’d had fun in the sack.
Well, she’d had fun in the sack and assumed he had as well, considering the results pretty much every time.
She led the two men to the break room. “Help yourself. Or there are several cases of MREs in the storage closet across the hall. What do you two need to get in touch with the rest of your unit?”
Omega walked over to the fridge and started rummaging through it. “Well, as long as your people grabbed our radio and burner cell from our car, we might be able to use those. Otherwise. I need to make a phone call.”
“Question, why didn’t you start with the grenades? Don’t you think that would have softened them up a little?”
“Because,” Echo said, “we can find ammo. Grenades are precious. And they sort of call a lot of unwanted attention upon you that you might not normally want. Gunfire, that’s a universal sound people recognize and want to avoid. A big-assed boom, that might bring people running to see what the fark is going on.” He smiled. “Not to mention I hoped that by lobbing one at them and not at you guys that you would take a wild guess which side of the law we were on.”
It had worked. “You guys eat. I’ll find your stuff.”
She could have sent someone else to do it, yes.
But she needed time away from the men. A deep river of testosterone flowed hot and heavy from the two, and she felt like a drowning woman in desperate need of a lifejacket. Not that it was a bad feeling.
Whew.
That was one nice thing about an apocalypse. She could toss political correctness out the farking window and not give a crap about IA or what they might think of her actions.
She found the impound room where the men’s gear had been locked up. She rummaged through a duffel bag and found a burner cell and a radio.
And lots and lots of firepower.
Leaving the rest right there for the moment, she returned to the break room, where the men were devouring what was left of three-day-old pizzas, cold from the boxes that had been stashed in the huge commercial fridge.
She set the radio and phone on the table. “Glad to see you aren’t picky eaters.”
Omega wiped his hands on a piece of paper towel and reached for the burner. “Dammit, no signal.”
“Might be the building. Sometimes cell service is iffy inside.” But when she grabbed her personal cell and looked, it, too, had zero bars. “Hmm. Usually mine works in here.” She w
alked across the hall to an empty meeting room and stood by the windows.
Nothing.
“Where’s the closest cell tower?” Echo called to her.
“There’s one to the north and one to the south, but I think they’re on the same section of the power grid we are. Maybe their emergency gennys ran dry.”
“I thought they had solar backups?” Omega asked from the doorway.
“Yeah, well, it might not just be the towers that are down. Didn’t you guys say the CaliTeleSatCom facility in Glendale was gone? Might be an overall network issue. Working towers do no good if the servers and central office locations go tits-up. Even I know that much.”
“You made calls.”
“Sure, but our system is different from the public one. We have sat-com backup.”
“True,” Omega said. He turned on the radio and keyed the mic. “Omega to base. Omega to base.”
Static met his attempt.
“Might need to take that outside.”
“I’m not even sure it’ll work with all the hills around us.”
She led him outside the front admin door, where he tried again.
Nothing but static.
Returning to the break room, Echo was now working his way through day-old fried chicken from the fridge. “Your unit have a sat-phone?” she asked Omega.
“Yeah that’ll be our next step,” Omega said. “I hope he’s got it turned on. I know being in LA we’ve been relying on burners. He tries not to keep the sat-phone on any more than necessary to reduce the chances of someone tracking our location.” He glanced at his partner. “You know I’m not stopping on the way back if you have to take a shit because you ate like a damn pig, right?”
Echo grinned. “Shows what you know. I went this morning and I didn’t have anything but a protein bar before dawn.”
“Boy eats like he’s got hollow legs,” Omega said.
Gia knew this was a tiny glimpse into whatever dynamic the two men had, and probably a rare glimpse at that considering the circumstances.
“How about trying that guy you gave me the number to?” she asked.