right under the mail slot. No name on the front. No return address. The thing weighed about as much as a book, and whatever was inside had a book feel to it, rectangular with clean edges.
“How'd you like to go out, big man?” he said to Dog while pointing to the great outdoors.
Dog trotted out with his telltale limp, and Jim waited at the door with the package in his hand as business was conducted on the fringe of bushes by the drive.
As he held on to Matthias the fucker's version of fruitcake, he had to convince his stomach not to issue evac orders to those two roast beef sandwiches Vin had made him.
See, this was the problem: Your head could decide all kinds of things, but that didn't mean your body was all jolly-jolly with the plan of the hour.
After Dog came up the stairs and through the door, he headed right for his bowl of water.
With a lightning lunge, Jim ditched the delivery and got there first, picking up the bowl, dumping it out, and washing the thing with soap. As he refilled it, his heart was beating in a grim, steady rhythm.
The thing was, the package was just slightly larger than the mail slot. So they had been in here. And although it was unlikely that they had poisoned Dog's water, the animal had somehow become family in the last three days, and that meant any margin of risk was unacceptable.
As Dog had his drink, Jim went over to the bed, sat down and grabbed the envelope. The minute Dog was finished, he limped over and hopped up as if he wanted to know what was in the package.
“You can't eat it,” Jim said. “But you could piss on it if you wanted to. I would definitely excuse the mess. Totally.”
Using his knife, he pierced the stiff, thick paper and opened a slit that stretched wide, pouching out and revealing…
A laptop the size of an old-school VHS tape.
He took the thing out and let Dog have a sniff-spection of it. Evidently, there was an approval, because Dog gave it a nudge and curled up with a yawn.
Jim opened up the screen and hit the power button. Windows Vista loaded, and what do you know, when he went into the start menu and called up the Outlook that had been installed, he had an account. And his password was the same as his old one.
In the in-box, he found a welcome e-mail from Outlook Express, which he ignored, and two from a blank sender.
“God, Dog, every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in,” he said, not even attempting an impersonation of Al Pacino.
Jim opened the first e-mail and went right to its attachment—which turned out to be an Adobe file of…a personnel report that was a good fifteen pages long.
The picture in the upper left-hand corner was of a hard-ass Jim knew, and the details included the guy's last-known address, his vital stats, his clearances, his honors, and his deficiencies. As Jim scanned and absorbed the intel, he was mindful of the time clock in the lower portion of the screen. It had started at five minutes, and quickly was down to two, and when the three digits separated by a colon read 0:00, the attachment was cyberdust, as if it had never existed. The same outcome occurred, only immediately, if he tried to forward, print out, or save the file.
Matthias was sharp like that.
So thank fuck for photographic memory.
As for the report itself? On the surface, it appeared as if there were nothing out of the ordinary; it was just your garden-variety rundown on a black-ops guy who was like the e-file—nothing but ether until he disappeared entirely. Except then there were the telltale three letters at the end next to the word status.
mia.
Ah, so that was the assignment. In the military branch Jim had been in, there was no such thing as MIA. There was AD, OR, or PB: active duty, on reserve, or pine box—the last being a term of art used unofficially, of course. Jim was OR—which meant that technically he was liable to be called back in at any moment and had to go or the letters dead were going to appear next to his status. And the truth was, he'd had to blackmail Matthias the fucker to even get into the reserves—although given what he had on the guy, he should have been able to stay there. If he hadn't had to resell his soul.
Well…the assignment was clear-cut: Matthias wanted this man killed.
Jim quickly rescanned the report until he was certain he could close his eyes and read the text and see the picture on the backs of his eyelids. Then he watched the clock zero out and the thing disappear.
He opened the second e-mail. Another e-file to crack and another ticker in the bottom corner that was triggered when he did. This time he just had a picture of the guy, only now the face was battered, with a split in the forehead that had let loose a tidal wave of blood. He wasn't a victim, though. Hisknuckles were wrapped for fighting and there was red chicken wire behind his head and shoulders.
The image the solider was a scan of a flyer for an underground mixed-martial-arts fighting group. Area code was 617. Boston.
The name the soldier was going by was both cheesy as fuck and pretty goddamn accurate, assuming he hadn't changed: Fist. His real one was Isaac Rothe.
This file lasted only a hundred and eighty seconds, and Jim hung out, staring at that face. He'd seen it a number of times, on some occasions right beside him while they worked together.
Dog nuzzled his way into Jim's lap and curled up, putting his face on the keyboard.
Yup, Matthias wanted the guy dead because Isaac had bolted from the fold—so it was a standard job and standard rules applied. Which meant if Jim didn't do it, someone else would—and the chaser would be that Jim woke up dead in the morning, too.
Pretty damned simple.
Jim ran his hand down Dog's flank and worried about who would feed and care for the little guy if something bad happened. Shit, it was weird to have something to live for…but Jim just couldn't deal with the idea of the animal lost and alone, hungry and scared again.
Lotta cruel motherfuckers in the world who couldn't care less about a scruffy ugly-ass dog with a limp.
And yet the idea of killing Isaac was repugnant. God knew Jim had wanted out of the service bad, so he couldn't blame the guy for leaving: A life that was led in the gray borderlands between right and wrong, legal and illegal, was a hard one.
If only the idiot had had the sense not to do anything with a public presence, even an underground one.
Then again, they would have found him eventually. They always did— The twin sounds of Harley engines pulling up to the garage brought both his and Dog's heads around, and Dog immediately started wagging his tail as those growls silenced down below. As boots came up the stairs, the animal leaped off the bed and headed for the door. The knock was loud and it struck only once.
Dog paddled at the door, his excitement making him appear even scruffier than usual, and before the poor thing expired from ecstasy, Jim got up and walked over.
As he opened the door, he met Adrian's cool eyes. “What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
Jim crossed his arms over his chest as Eddie knelt down and showed love to Dog. Given the way the animal reacted, it was hard to believe the bikers were playing on Devina's team, but just because they weren't pally-pally with her didn't mean they were legit: All Jim had to do was think of the shadows he hadn't seen and the confusion in Chuck the foreman's voice when he'd been asked about the pair.
Made a guy wonder just what the fuck was standing on his doorstep. “You two are liars,” Jim said. “So that makes talking kind of pointless, doesn't it.”
As Dog rolled over onto his back so Eddie could do some serious belly rubbing, Adrian shrugged. “We're angels, not saints. What do you want from us.”
“So you do know those four English whack jobs?”
“Yeah, we do.” Adrian glanced pointedly at the refrigerator. “Listen, this is going to be a long conversation. You mind beering us?”
“Do you exist?”
“Beer. Then talk.”
As Eddie got to his feet with Dog in his heavy arms, Jim held up his palm. “Why did you lie.”
