This was kind of a scary paradigm shift. Bob had always been the good one and I had been the bad one. Simple. “But you’ve always been so . . . law-abiding.”
“There’s a higher law, and it’s time that these men had to answer to it.” Bob was truly angry, red-faced and nostrils flaring, like the very idea of Gordon’s outfit offended him to his core. “I’ll take the risk.”
“You’re familiar with them?”
“You have no idea,” Bob stated coldly. “Let’s just say that you don’t know as much about me as you think you do and leave it at that. I can’t let you go in there with just these guys.” He gestured at the other three. “Who are they, anyway?”
“You can call the big kid Nightcrawler since he’s so worried about me telling you his name. The old guy is Hawk. The other kid goes by Reaper.”
“Okay, then I’m Colossus and you can be Wolverine. Doesn’t anybody have a normal name in your business?”
“Actually, I go by Lorenzo,” I responded, slightly embarrassed.
Bob just stared at me. “Seriously? Wow, man, that’s devious. And what part came as a surprise when Big Eddie found his way past your masterful secret identity? You were only raised by Lorenzos.”
Reaper walked up. “If we’ve all got superhero names, then Jill should be Aquaman since she’s been kidnapped twice.” I just looked at him like he was stupid. “What? Didn’t you ever watch Super Friends? Aquaman . . . you know, always got captured? Never mind.” Reaper wandered off.
“Super Friends was off the air before that kid was born,” Bob said.
“I know, but he spends a lot of time on the Internet.”
“You guys done screwing around?” Valentine growled as he approached. “Let’s get going. We’re kind of conspicuous hanging around in all of this crap,” he said, indicating the pouch-laden plate carrier and battle belt he wore.
He was right. We needed to get going. “We’re not here to arrest them,” I warned Bob.
My brother shook his head sadly. “Willis’s men aren’t the type you can arrest. They’re a bunch of professional killers. Castoffs who’ve gotten kicked out of every reputable organization there is because they’re too violent, too crazy, or too corrupt. Operations like his attract them like flies.”
“How do you know all this?” Hawk asked suspiciously. Switchblade hadn’t always been a respectable mercenary company, so Hawk had developed an appropriate paranoia about the law.
Bob shrugged. “A man has to have a hobby. Mine is collecting trivia about scumbags.” My brother was being evasive. Somehow he knew exactly who Gordon Willis was, knew something about his organization, and apparently hated them with a passion. “The old work-camp is over that rise. We used to use it to hole up Mafioso witnesses out of Vegas. Word is that Willis’s men are using it for something now.”
“Let’s get these cars hidden, then sneak up on the camp and see if we can spot Jill,” I suggested, hefting my AR-15. “If we’re lucky, maybe we can get her out with minimal shooting.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that.” Bob turned, opened the back of his Suburban, and pulled out a long black Remington 700 sniper rifle, with a suppressor, bipod, and US Optics scope. He worked the bolt and chambered a round. He put the heavy barreled rifle over one shoulder. Bob almost seemed to be looking forward to this. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did. “When the shooting starts, take them hard and fast.”
“That’s what she said!” Reaper quipped.
“You. Stop talking,” Valentine ordered.
Reaper grinned, gesturing with his stubby shotgun. “Then let’s go.” The bravado was forced. The kid was tough, but he wasn’t a warrior like the rest of us, but God bless his techno-geek soul, he was ready. “Let’s smoke these fags.”
Hawk adjusted his old South African army vest. “Yep.” Then he spat on the ground.
Valentine raised an eyebrow. “Smoke these fags?” he asked, looking at me incredulously. “What have you been teaching this kid?” I held up my hands in surrender. A general has to fight with the army he’s got.
The five of us climbed the sagebrush-and-scrub-tree hill. The sun was rapidly setting. I suggested we track farther to one side so that we could attack out of the sun. Valentine didn’t seem to care one way or the other, Bob and Hawk thought it was a good idea, and Reaper was used to following my orders.
We picked our frequencies and checked the radios on the walk in, and they worked fine. We had no plan and no intel. Our group had never worked together before, and there wasn’t a lot of trust.
“So why do you guys use those old Belgian rifles?” Reaper asked Hawk and Valentine at one point, displaying his ignorance. “Those are the same kind as those rusty poacher guns from all over Africa, right? Why don’t you get something new?”
Hawk grunted. “They’re all over Africa because they still work, kid. Besides, you can dress ’em up if you want. Look at his,” he said, indicating Valentine’s railed-up FAL. “You can bolt ten pounds of crap on it if you want.” Valentine’s rifle was fitted with a Tijicon scope and had a flashlight bolted to the hand guards. It looked heavy, but he didn’t seem to mind. “And it’s at least a manly thirty caliber, unlike Lorenzo’s pussy twenty-two.”
I paid Hawk’s opinions on terminal ballistics no mind. I’d lost track of how many people I’d killed with a short-barreled 5.56 over the years. I preferred lots of little bullets to a few big ones, but then again, anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting five to seven times.
“M-16s are poodle shooters,” Hawk said. “That’s all they’re good for.”
“I’m pretty good with a FAL,” Valentine answered Reaper, not looking up from the trail through the sagebrush.
“How good is pretty good?” Reaper asked. The kid just didn’t know when to quit.
“Look,” Valentine said levelly, pointing the knife-edge of his hand at Reaper. “This isn’t a game, okay? You need to focus, or you’re going to get yourself killed. Now either lock it up or go wait in the car!”
Reaper seemed taken aback by Valentine’s harsh words. “Okay, okay! Sorry. I miss a lot. That’s why Lorenzo makes me use the shotgun.”
“Super,” Valentine muttered. “You know, we really ought to be quiet.”
“Kid’s right. Quiet down. They might have sentries posted at the top of the hill,” Hawk suggested.
“They won’t,” Bob replied. “They’ve been operating above the law so long, they think they’re untouchable. The idea of us coming to them will never even enter their minds.”
“I hope you’re right,” Hawk muttered.
After half an hour of walking, we hunkered down in the rocks overlooking the old prison work camp. It looked like a ghost town out of an old western movie. There were several wooden buildings, in two horizontal rows heading away from us, paint long since peeled, signs long since faded. One larger building was directly below us, newer, built out of cinder blocks; it looked like it had been a truck stop or some sort of garage back in the days before the freeway bypassed this little settlement. Fence posts stuck out of the ground like random teeth in a broken jaw, the barbed wire mostly rusted away.