The Deal (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 2) Read online

  “I’m no investigator, sir. I’m just a guy with bad luck and a chip on his shoulder.”

  Whitcombe’s booming laugh filled the empty cabin of the plane as he shuffled about in his seat. His eyes flicked up and down over me quickly. “You served,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He knew I’d been in the Marines, or the military, at least. “There’s something about us vets; some say it’s the way we walk or hold ourselves, others say it’s the look in our eye. But I don’t believe any of that shit. I think it’s the fact that we don’t suffer fools lightly; we’re confident in the actions we take and the words we say. We are who we are, and we don’t apologize for that.”

  “Afghanistan,” I said. “I volunteered for Syria, too, but they wouldn’t post me. Something about my mental condition. I’m fine. It’s just better that I try to stay away from those places, where men like you and me try to forget the past.”

  He didn’t deny it, just inclined his head sadly.

  “Is there any point trying to forget?” he asked.

  Chapter Eight

  It happened so quickly. Piper didn’t even realize it, but the woman had disarmed her. She felt a soft, sharp sting in her wrist, then the woman was holding the chain.

  The man stepped into the room. He held a bundle of jangling keys, walked over to Piper and the woman, knelt down, and undid the manacle around Piper’s ankles. He took one of her arms while the woman took the other. At the door, he spun her around, placed a blindfold over her eyes, and then they walked her out of the room and down what seemed to be a long hallway with plenty of turns and winding corridors. Piper tried to keep count of how many lefts and rights she’d taken and in which order, but before long she was completely disoriented.

  The woman’s words kept echoing in her mind. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have done anything—shouldn’t have tried to escape, shouldn’t have killed the dog, shouldn’t have been there when she was taken. She was meant to be at home, looking after her little sister and preparing for her exam. But then the study had become too much for her. Her friends were going out. They wondered if she would join them. Of course she would. Stupid, Piper. Stupid.

  They continued to wind down corridors then she felt herself being led up some stairs. The temperature of the air changed and the smell moved from dank, underground, and cold to something a little more fresh and airy, summery even. Then the man kicked Piper’s legs out from under her. She felt the hard timber of a seat beneath her and then the footsteps, both heavy and light—male and female—became quieter and Piper was alone. At least, she thought she was.

  She couldn’t hear the tell-tale sound of breathing, couldn’t hear any shuffling, just the tiny movements of a person trying to stay still. Piper wondered where they had taken her and why. She figured when she failed with the chain and her ploy to escape, they would have her killed right then and there; they would have allowed what had happened to Frankie to happen to her, albeit without Brutus’ input. Instead, they had brought her back up above ground, leaving her feet unchained. Cautiously, she lifted her hands, still bound together by cable ties up to the blindfold. She listened for any movement; not sensing any, she slowly lifted the blindfold away from her eyes.

  Across from her sat an elderly man, somewhere between his sixties and his seventies. He was tall and thin, and he wasn’t wearing a ski mask. His hair was white; kindly wrinkles and crow’s feet stretched away from his eyes. He wore a uniform. It was some years out of date, with medals across his chest.

  He smiled a broad, beaming smile at her that Piper recognized from somewhere. Piper couldn’t quite place it but she had a good memory for faces and had certainly seen this man before. Was it the night she had been taken? Had he been there at the restaurant? Or was it sometime earlier, from long ago in her past?

  Piper made to place the blindfold back over her eyes, but the man tutted. “No, no. Keep it off. Do you know how hard it is to sit perfectly still?” Piper figured it was rhetorical so she didn’t answer. The man didn’t seem to mind.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked, as if he expected her to. Piper furrowed her eyes. He smiled again at this, and beamed. “But you’ve seen me before, no?”

  Piper nodded. “You look real familiar and all, sir, but …”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Riley Baxter.” He held out his hand and then realized that hers were still bound. It all came back to Piper. She remembered him on the news, flanking the Defense Secretary during all those conferences about the ongoing wars and America’s involvement in them.

  He nodded. “You do remember.” The recognition was clear in her eyes. He was good at reading her, she could tell.

  “You can’t just abduct people. It doesn’t matter what rank you are, or what you’ve done,” Piper said, and Baxter smiled again.

  “I need your help, Piper. I have a mission for you.”

  She closed her eyes. This couldn’t be happening. She thought of Frankie in the corner of that room, the room she’d only just been dragged out of.

  “You can’t just kill people willy-nilly!”

  “There’s a reason for all this,” said Baxter. “It’s a matter of the utmost national importance. This here is a special team. I founded it myself. We track down war criminals, hunt them down, and get them to admit to their crimes publicly. We’re hunting someone very important right now, someone whose involvement in an operation gone wrong cost the lives of countless Americans and innocent Afghanis.” Piper shook her head in disbelief. This couldn’t be happening.

  “Have you ever read any work from the journalist, Ray Hammer?” Baxter asked.

  “He’s your target?” asked Piper.

  Chapter Nine

  Whitcombe reached into his suit jacket pocket, pulled a flask out, and held it out to me. “You look like you could do with this, boy.”

  He was right. My mouth was drier than a desert boot forgotten in the sand. Fuck twelve steps. I took the flask thankfully, took a long draw on it, almost spat it out. “What the hell is that!”

  Whitcombe laughed again, his big, booming, deep laugh. “Put hair on your chest,” he said. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  I knew he was correct in that assumption; he certainly shouldn’t be drinking on the job nor offering his poison to anyone else, let alone the prime suspect. Which I had to believe I was, given the circumstances I found myself in.

  I inclined my head. “No harm done, hey? I needed that. Thanks.”

  “No,” Whitcombe shook his head. “What I shouldn’t be doing is telling you what I’m about to tell you. You’re a witness and a suspect in this matter, but we have some other evidence that points in a slightly different direction. We know you were late for your flight—the attendant at the gate gave us the heads up—and we have security footage of you running through the terminal. We have a few other pieces of evidence.”

  I highly doubted this. Witnessing the carnage that had been caused by the murders outside the plane. There was no way they could possibly have any evidence, any way of identifying the victims. To my knowledge of jet engines, the rotors at the front of the engines, the propeller blades would have chewed up most of the evidence at the first instance. Anything that made it through there would have been super-heated and gone through a second set of propellers blades before being pushed out onto the tarmac, the windows, and strewn behind the plane. There would be no way they could possibly identify the remains. Not for a long time. Barely anything could have survived the twin sets of propellers, the intense heat, and the propulsion across the runway.

  I raised an eyebrow and Whitcombe continued. He noted my quizzical look. “You’re right, we don’t have much. But our investigators did just pull a couple of pieces of metal out of the blades at the front of the jet engines. There were pieces of metal on both sides. Some had been severed and some hadn’t. Some were only mangled. What they think they’ve got are two dog tags.” He paused for effect here; and he let me see what he was thinking, written large across his face. br />
  “This was targeted. A message. The other pieces of metal seem to be from some form of silver tiara-type thing, and there are also a couple of zips, pieces of torn fabric. Seems that they may have been inside suitcases. It’s hard to tell if they were alive or dead, though. We won’t know that for a long time yet, and we won’t know who they were either.”

  “Did the dog tags say anything?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Whitcombe and I waited, the classic journalist tack. It had worked in military interrogations too, but I preferred not to think about that.

  “They said, ‘Prom Queen 1’ and ‘Prom Queen 2’.”

  “Matches the tiaras,” I said.

  “Yes,” replied Whitcombe, “So we’ve got two dead queens. Does that mean anything to you, Mr. Hammer?”

  I shook my head but I felt a sweat starting to break out. Could it really be?

  Could it be him?

  Chapter Ten

  Despite the smile plastered on his face as he handed the attaché file to Piper, Lt. Colonel Riley Baxter was fuming.

  Piper was supposed to be the ace up his sleeve, his penultimate move, his bargaining chip. He knew she was bright, one of the top in her class. He’d read all the transcripts, looked over her flight logs. She was quite the pilot as well. She’d aced the aerobatics courses and managed the pass the advanced flight training at Edwards Air Force Base. She was one of those one-in-fifty-years students. That’s why, the Air Force brought her down here from Colorado Springs, and precisely why Baxter chose her.

  But her attempt to escape had completely blindsided him. That’s why it upset him so much, the fact that he had allowed her to surprise him. Control was Baxter’s middle name. He didn’t have to go about tracking down war criminals in this way, but he enjoyed the game—it had become a sport for him—and the more enjoyable he made it, the more likely he was to succeed.

  It never used to be like this. It had all started after Baxter retired, when he realized that he didn’t have much interest in his life. He still played chess every Thursday, midday at Chess Park, but it didn’t give him the buzz that a game of poker did—the potential of winning and the threat of losing everything. He’d become good at winning over the years, so good that it became something he thought he could now factor into his hunt for the people who’d been involved in some of the greatest war crimes of the most recent decades.

  They needed to be brought to justice. Baxter reminded himself of this every night when he went to sleep and every morning when he woke with that dreaded feeling of trying to get out of bed but not being able to go back to sleep either - the cold depression that comes with an early morning. He’d get up and go for a walk around the neighborhood and tell himself that he could do this—that he could track them down and make them pay; that a slow death is what they deserved. Because in this field, in the military, justice was so often covered up, plastered over, and pushed under all the other things that had happened to make a person the way they are.

  He understood the trauma that soldiers faced. He’d seen things, witnessed them, and not done anything at the time. But now he was atoning for that. Now he was making up for it, and he was going to take down anyone who’d committed crimes on the battlefield or in the theatre of war.

  This was his preoccupation with Hammer. A soldier doesn’t just change his name and leave the military completely behind if he’s done nothing wrong. And that incident in Afghanistan, the shooting of that unarmed family, was committed by Hammer’s Fire Team. He was sure of it and he would get to the bottom of it one way or another.

  The guy had always been a maverick. Baxter had commanded Hammer, or as he was known back then, Benjamin Miles, on a previous tour of Afghanistan. They’d bonded, gotten to know one another, and then drifted apart, as friends so often do. He hadn’t seen or heard anything from Miles—now Hammer—for years and years, and then suddenly, his photo popped up in the paper, under a Lonely Hearts column. He was the writer of the questions, not one of the Lonely Hearts, but it had sparked Baxter’s memory and set this course of action into play.

  Baxter had considered it from every angle and had worked out exactly what he would need to do to bring Hammer out of the woodwork, to remind him of his crimes. Baxter wasn’t sure exactly what Hammer’s punishment would be at this point, but he would he would come up with something painful and slow. It was his job. He had made the conscious decision to atone for his own lack of action. He was determined to make rogue soldiers pay. He just hadn’t figured out exactly how to do this to Ray Hammer, but he was damn sure it would involve some kind of game, and poker was something he’d heard they’d played the night before the massacre. Poetic justice.

  Piper finished reading the attaché file in front of her. She looked up at him, her brow furrowed, and he gave her another of his winning smiles.

  “Do you think you can handle it?” asked Baxter. Piper’s brows furrowed further, knitting in the middle.

  It was a shame it had to come to this and that she hadn’t been content to wait for her time in the game. She’d pushed forward and forced him to change his plans. But that was the nature of the game. That’s what made it exciting—the thrill of the unknown, the threat of making the wrong move at the wrong time, despite how carefully you planned it all and how well-intentioned your ideas. Baxter always loved that about a game of poker with friends. They played three times a week - Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays - and over the last few months, he really refined his game.

  He felt he was ready for the big league and this was a chance to test it, in a forum of his own design. In the ultimate game of life and death.

  The two Queens had already been played. Now it was time to put the pressure on and force Ray Hammer to play his hand.

  Chapter Eleven

  By the end of my chat with Whitcombe, we were the best of buddies. We had finished his flask. The awful sting of tequila in my throat had eased. Hell, for a Deputy US Marshal—an inspector, no less—he was a pretty great guy. He’d even let me look around and take some photos of the crime scene once the forensic guys were done, before the clean-up crew came in to lose their lunch, no doubt. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  I got what I needed and decided to head home. I phoned Ed’s house and got his wife on the line. She blew kisses at me for a few minutes then put her husband on.

  That son of a bitch really knew how to rile me up. “Hammer, what the fuck are you doing calling me?” he said. “You should be on a plane by now to the middle of butt-fuck nowhere.”

  I let him rant and rave until he blew himself out, and then I told him what happened at the airport and the story I was working on.

  “We could never print that,” he said. “People will have kittens or they’ll vomit all over their newspapers.” I didn’t remind him that what we printed was about as good as vomit anyway and certainly as putrid.

  I was almost home now: The Uber was just pulling into Central Avenue. The shops were closed and the sun was going down. I tried to push the carnage out of my mind and at the same time, formulate a beautiful sentence to start my story. Never bury the lede. I pitched a few ideas to my editor and he told me they stank.

  “Worse than the trash I usually write?” I asked.

  He told me he didn’t think so. “Much the same,” he said, “Keep working on it. You can do Bougainville next month. And if the uprising’s over, there’ll be something else going on somewhere. Sounds like another excuse to lie around in LA.”

  I told him I didn’t need an excuse—I could lie around in my underwear in LA if I wanted. But I was ready for a story and this one piqued my interest.

  “What was that you said about the dog tags?” Ed asked.

  “Just that they found some churned up in the propellers of the jet engines.”

  “You think this is military? That’s why you’re so keen on it?”

  I ended the call. Luckily, he knew me well enough not to try to call me back when I was in one of these moods.

  The Uber drive
r pulled up outside my house. I eyed the chair and coffee table on my porch through the tinted window and thought about all the booze I had hidden, locked away in a cabinet having disposed of the key. I asked the driver to go to the nearest bar. I needed a drink. There were no lights on at home—there never were unless I was there—but no amount of light would change the black, all-encompassing depression I felt creeping over me. How could someone do something so horrific to another human? How could they churn them up - two people, two jet engines? And for what? And was it actually the message it seemed to be?

  Two queens.

  The image took me back to a night many years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan: huddled inside a makeshift camp, a small gas cooktop for warmth, cards so well-handled the corners were bent, the edges frayed, two dames looking up at me from the dirt floor. It couldn’t be. Not after all these years. I’d changed my name, left my home town, and moved to LA—to the sun, the town of fiction, make-believe, glitz and glamour—away from the brutality and pain of war.

  I tipped the driver, walked along the sidewalk a little, then slid into the side entrance of the bar. My usual haunt ... a little too usual. The barman didn’t even look up when I entered. Neither did anyone else. I was a fixture here, part of the furniture. Everybody knew me and I knew everyone else—not by name but by sight. Most of the others were regulars, just like me.

  I placed an order and went to the restroom for a slash. I checked the cubicles; there was no-one in them. I stood at one of the urinals. I’d just let fire with a full stream and was relaxing into it when a big hairy arm wrapped around my neck and pulled me backwards.