Jackson Read online

  Jackson slowly made his way to his feet again, struggling to stay upright as his body wavered with every step. He wasn’t sure what they’d given him, but it was still having an effect on him.

  He had the list in his hands. As he went to stuff it in his pocket, he saw something on the back. It was a note, and he could see the name Max. Max. Jackson patted his pockets and didn’t have his phone anymore. He rolled the dead man over to check his front pockets and found a phone underneath him. He’d had it in his hand when he fell.

  Jackson searched through the messages on the dead man’s phone and saw a text sent to Max. When Jackson read it, his heart ran cold. Max had gone to collect Deli and to bring her here. Wherever here was …

  Was this a solidarity effort on the part of the remaining bad guys to question and then kill Jackson, hoping to take Deli out of the equation at the same time? As he surveyed his surroundings, Jackson realized he was in a small construction trailer. There was a desk but nothing else in the room. His gaze landed on the window blinds. He walked over and ripped out one of the cords. He was hoping for a knife or something more deadly, but nothing much was here. As he peered through the windows, darkness peered back. He couldn’t see any sign of anybody else around but knew the first man had left with the third guy.

  Where had those two men gone?

  As Jackson watched, a vehicle drove slowly up a road toward him. When it entered through some double gates, it stopped right in the middle, so the gates couldn’t be closed. As he watched, Deli got out of the passenger side, and Max got out of the driver’s side. Shit. This was so not good.

  Shouts came from his left, likely from a building he had yet to see. He tried to open the door in front of him, but it was locked.

  He raced back to the windows. The construction trailer was old and warped. With difficulty he managed to shift the frame on one of the windows and then pop it out. He jumped up and out. Two men approached Max and Deli. Jackson watched as they were both led to another construction trailer.

  As the men disappeared, Jackson ran from his hiding spot over to the second trailer and crouched down low. He slid along the side, trying to hear what was going on.

  “Why have you brought me here?” Deli asked defiantly.

  “Because you keep sticking your nose in other people’s business.”

  Jackson recognized Hobo’s voice. But then who was the boss man?

  “You keep murdering people,” she snapped. “That’s bound to bring attention to anybody.” After a moment, she asked, “And why Max?”

  “Yeah, Max, why you?” The boss man’s voice held a sneering quality to it.

  “I don’t have anything to do with this,” Max said warily. “You’re just using me as a tool here.”

  “I need both of you put down like the dogs you are,” the boss said. “Hobo, take care of it, will you?”

  Odd shuffling noises came, as if a fight had ensued inside the trailer. Jackson raced around to the door, opened it up to see a giant stranger—Hobo, he guessed—holding a gun on both Deli and Max. The boss stood by passively, watching. Didn’t appear to be armed.

  As Jackson tried to ascertain if Max was a good guy or a bad guy, Max took advantage of the moment of surprise with Jackson’s arrival. He slugged Hobo and grabbed the big man as Deli reached for Hobo’s gun arm and pulled his trigger finger, firing the gun into the floor—four times by Jackson’s count. Chaos reigned as Hobo shifted, trying to rid himself of Max, while lifting Deli right off her feet.

  Hobo was a big monster of a man at about six four, easily three hundred pounds. This was the guy the neighbor had described.

  Hobo lined up his shot for Jackson. But Deli opened her mouth and bit deep, clenching tight onto Hobo’s muscled and tattooed arm. Hobo roared, and, with his other hand, tossed Max off to the side and then punched Deli a glancing blow.

  She went down but scrambled right back to her feet again. Jackson raced forward, going for the giant’s knees and toppled the huge man to the ground. With Deli again hanging on to Hobo’s gun arm and Max pounding his good fist into Hobo’s face, Jackson managed to get the gun away from Hobo and pushed it against the man’s forehead.

  The mountain of a man froze.

  “So, Hobo, I suggest you reconsider your plan,” Jackson said softly.

  With Max now straddling Hobo and pushing against the pressure points on his neck, Jackson raised the gun to face the boss who’d been issuing the orders to kill. And stared at a gun already facing him. “So you do some of your own killing, do you?” Jackson asked in a mocking tone.

  “If I have to,” he said. “And how the hell did you get out of that damn trailer anyway? I should have let Hobo kill both of you in there.”

  Jackson shrugged and slowly made his way to his feet. “Are you really planning to kill four of us?”

  “Hell no. Only three of you,” he said. “Hobo’s worked for me for a long time.”

  “And has Hobo figured out he’s a liability yet? Like the man in my trailer was? And that, once this all is cleaned up, which I presume is the killing of the three of us, that Hobo needs to be taken out too? And what about the unconscious guy you put in the hospital?”

  The boss man shook his head. “Hobo won’t listen to you. He knows how this goes down.”

  “What the hell do you want with those new high-tech gun models?” Deli asked as she slowly straightened.

  The man looked at her in surprised. “You know about those?”

  “Of course. James was videotaped removing them from the truck.”

  The boss snorted. “I’m a dealer. I deal in information and in products. And, in this case, somebody wanted the plans for those guns, but I couldn’t get them. But I could get the models themselves. They could do what they wanted from there.”

  “So you don’t care that these weapons will be used against Americans?” Jackson asked.

  “I don’t give a shit about Americans,” the boss said. “I’m taking my money and heading a hell of a long way away. But, in order to do that, I need them first. And James was the last one to have them. Only we can’t find them now, so he must have passed them off to her,” he snapped in frustration, pointing to Deli.

  “You mean, you were taking your money and heading a long way away,” Max said, holding his injured arm. “If you’re the one responsible for shooting the hell out of me and my partner, you won’t like where you’ll be going now.”

  “As soon as the government figures out he’s a traitor and involved in acts of treason,” Jackson said in a low voice, “he’ll go to a nice private little jail, and he’ll wish he’d never gone down this path.”

  “You’re the ones not getting out of here alive. Have you ever considered how many bullets your girlfriend there fired from that gun? Your gun is empty, and mine isn’t.”

  Jackson eyed him carefully. He remembered hearing four shots, but he hadn’t heard six. He just smiled and said, “Let’s find out, shall we? There’s still three of us against you.”

  “But, once I put a bullet in your head,” the boss man said in a hard voice, “your girlfriend will go to pieces, and your buddy here will lose a lot of that fire and ice. He’s already injured. Won’t be anything for Hobo to knock him out of the running.”

  Jackson didn’t dare take a look at Hobo, but he sure as hell hoped Max had used some of those nerve points to take Hobo out of business. Even ten minutes with an unconscious Hobo would be a huge blessing right now. Jackson motioned with his gun. “You better either shoot me or hand over that gun right now.” He handed the phone he’d picked up from the dead man to Deli. “Make some calls.”

  She grabbed the phone, and the boss turned the gun on her, only Jackson stepped in front of her as she bailed out the back of the trailer.

  “And now you are running out of time,” Jackson said. “You’ve got less than ten minutes until this place erupts.”

  “I don’t need ten minutes,” he said calmly. He raised his gun, but Jackson had already barreled forward,
firing at the gunman. Max plowed into the boss man from the side as Jackson hit him in the knees. The man went down, his gun firing harmlessly over Jackson’s head, but Jackson’s gun had fired true. The man lay on the ground with Jackson and Max holding him down, a bullet low in his belly.

  He rolled over, gasping in pain.

  “Who the hell were you taking those boxes to?” Jackson yelled at him. “I want to know who your contacts are for the sale of these models.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, now groaning louder.

  With a glance to Max, Jackson asked, “Is Hobo truly out?” He handed Max the cable from the blinds. “Give me a hand.”

  Max hopped up and the two quickly tied up Hobo’s hands and feet together behind his back, such that they only tightened if Hobo struggled. Even if Hobo did wake up, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  As soon as he was secure, Jackson went back to stemming the flow of blood from the boss’s body. It gushed heavily. Jackson’s shot had nicked an artery.

  Max appeared with a towel he had found somewhere and handed it to Jackson. Swearing softly, he folded it up and pressed it over the boss’s gunshot wound. While Jackson did that, Max searched the boss’s pockets and found a cell phone and a wallet.

  “Found a name in here. Not that sure we can believe it though,” Max said. “We’ve got a Bruce Bellego.”

  “Come on, Bruce. Stay with me here. You’re bleeding pretty heavily.”

  “Bastard,” Bruce groaned. “You better not have fucking killed me. This was to be my new beginning, my chance to make a life for myself, instead of this bloody drudgery of working nine to five for the government.”

  “Where the hell do you work anyway? And Hobo? Where did he figure in your new beginning?”

  The boss gave a half cough. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Hobo was never part of that. I would have taken care of him soon.”

  Max squatted beside Jackson. “Bruce works for the military, in the supply department.”

  The two men looked at each other grimly. “Well, that explains how he knew about the prototypes and how they were located. He still had to have somebody in his crew at the training camp.”

  “Unless he was there himself,” Max said. “We often have men keep track of all the gear.”

  Jackson nodded. “That makes sense. But he probably was watched as he loaded it up. So had to send off the coordinates to make sure somebody else collected it. Was it worth it?” Jackson asked Bruce. “You realize, if you live, you’ll go to jail and will never see daylight again, right?”

  But Bruce didn’t waste energy answering him. Instead he gasped an odd groan.

  Jackson realized Bruce wouldn’t last much longer. He looked at Max. “Make sure Deli’s okay. I can’t leave Bruce. He needs medical help, and he needs it fast.”

  Max raced out the door to find Deli. She returned moments later and crouched beside Jackson. “Oh, wow, he doesn’t look good. Will he make it?”

  “Not for long,” Jackson said. “Hobo over there will. But this guy is bleeding out too fast.”

  They were both crouched in a pool of blood that widened by the second. She went to Hobo and checked his pockets, pulled out his wallet and some papers. “He doesn’t have a cell phone on him.”

  “It’s probably on the desk. Or check the chairs around here. We need it to get to his contacts and to make sure everybody in this nightmare is rounded up. Bruce won’t be talking anytime soon.”

  “It doesn’t look like Bruce will be talking ever again,” she said soberly. “We can add another dead man to the list.”

  “Let’s hope it’s the last one. We need to investigate the men they’ve been talking to. That should roust out any other stragglers in this scheme. Plus we need those prototypes.”

  “I suggest we search James’s apartment, even the complex or the underground parking garage. He was canny and could have hidden the rifle boxes in a lot of places. How much money do you think he got for this?”

  Hobo answered, now awake. “One million bucks upon delivery, which never happened,” he said. “I was supposed to get one hundred Gs myself. James wanted more money for his part. He got a bullet instead.”

  “Well, I think that’s a pretty damn small payment for spending the next thirty-plus years of your life in jail,” Jackson said to Hobo quietly. “There are a lot of dead men. And no way you’re getting off on those murder charges.”

  Hobo stared at him, his eyes black. “You could turn that gun and shoot me too,” he said. “I won’t last in prison.”

  Jackson snorted. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you killed three innocent men.”

  “They were all part of it,” Hobo said. “There wasn’t an innocent man among them.”

  Jackson froze and glanced at Deli to find her staring down at Hobo.

  “Are you serious?” she asked Hobo.

  His eyes turned to her. “Sure. I mean, except Max and Barney. Hopefully Barney will recover from his coma, as he had nothing to do with this. James was involved. Magnus was lying from the beginning. He caught James retrieving the boxes from the vehicle and forced James to tell him what he was up to. James folded like the wimp he was, and Magnus figured he could blackmail us to get a cut of the pie. So he was put down.”

  “And …” she asked, her voice hard, and yet, low. “What about Carney?”

  Hobo shrugged. “I don’t know if Carney had anything to do with it or not. But he sure as hell wasn’t doing his job if both James and Magnus were pulling stunts like that shit. Besides, he’s not dead, is he?”

  She nodded. “You’re right. He’s not. I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t involved.”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “What about the original driver, Chester?” Jackson asked. “The only reason I ended up driving that rig in the first place was because the original driver couldn’t make the run.”

  “He got sick. Sick to his stomach. We said, No way, not a good enough excuse, so the asshole shot himself in the foot to get out of driving the truck. That wasn’t allowed either. But you can bet he was involved right from the beginning. He took good money to drive that vehicle. Imagine our shock when we found out it wasn’t him driving.”

  “You’re the one who shot at Max, who crashed his vehicle?”

  Hobo nodded. “But I didn’t kill him. They just had shitty luck and crashed. But still, I didn’t kill them.” He motioned toward his boss, bleeding out beside Jackson. “Bruce here, he did all the killing.”

  “Bruce says you did all the killing,” Jackson said, wondering at the lies they’d each produced to blame the other.

  “Of course that’s what he’d say,” Hobo said. “But I didn’t. That’s all on Bruce. He gave all the orders, and Manny followed them all the time. Until Bruce ordered me to kill Manny in the trailer.”

  Bruce gasped, his face turning pale, his body turning cold as he shivered uncontrollably. “Liar,” he snapped. “You did the killing. I might have ordered it, but you did it.”

  Hobo shook his head. “Too bad you won’t be around to prove that,” he said calmly. “Looks to me like you’re a goner yourself. And, in that case, it’s my story against yours.”

  “But we’re here.” Deli’s voice was hard. “And I’ve got it on tape.” She held up her phone, the red light indicating she was still recording the conversation. “And his dying words place the blame on you for those murders that he ordered, but which you executed.”

  Hobo glared at her. “I’m not behind bars yet, you bitch. You better watch your back.”

  She smiled, squatted beside him and said, “But you see? I don’t have to watch my back. I don’t even have to watch my front because you’re the one tied up here, ready for the cops to collect like a trussed-up turkey. You’ll have fun in jail. Guys your size will be tested to see if you’re as big and as strong and as badass as the other inmates are. You know what? You might like that. Might find yourself a nice little boy, have a nice little cuddly life together.
”

  Hobo’s face turned furious. “I’m not some fucking fag.”

  In the distance they could hear sirens. Cops and an ambulance.

  “You never know,” she said. “Time served for three murders, plus God only knows how many other charges they’ll throw at you, so that’ll be an awfully long sentence. We’ll see how you feel about being all alone for a good fifty years, if not one hundred years for your crimes.”

  Hobo struggled against his bindings. “I won’t make it,” he said. “Shoot me now.”

  “Hell no,” Jackson said. “That’s way too easy an end for you. You’ll get to live a nice long time in a nice small cage just for you.” Jackson sent Mason a text. All over but need to turn James’s place upside down for the prototypes. He was the last one to have them.

  On it was Mason’s almost instant reply.

  Jackson grinned. It was nice to know you had friends who had your back.

  Chapter 14

  “Is it over? Or just this part? I presume the investigation will continue until we can find out who Bruce was selling the prototypes too?” Deli asked, her voice quiet and hoarse. “So much death. So much pain. And for what?”

  “Sorry, sweetheart. It’s over for us. The investigation will continue, but we aren’t likely to ever hear anything more on it. If the military ever learns more. In cases like these, the gun dealers go underground or disappear completely, so there is nothing more to find.” Jackson tugged her into his arms. They’d just finished being questioned at the crime scene by the police. The coroner was here, but the ambulance had left. Now they were surrounded by the stark reminders of the aftermath of major crimes. He rubbed her back slowly, her head resting against his chest. He loved the closeness, the connection with her. But he hated that it had come through so much danger. “I was so worried about you,” he whispered against her ear.

  She reared back, looked up at him and asked, “Isn’t that my line? You know how scared I was when Max came into the apartment, and you were gone? I thought for sure Max was a bad guy.”