Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling writer with more than thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. Recent releases include The Silence, The Hunt, The Family Man, and The Rage War trilogy (licensed Alien and Predator novels). Forthcoming novels include the Relics trilogy and Blood of the Four (with Christopher Golden). He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award and has been short-listed for World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. A movie of his novel Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 2015, and other projects in development include My Haunted House, Playtime (with Stephen Volk), and Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark). To find out more, please visit www.timlebbon.net.
EDITORS’ NOTE: This story is a crossover between the Joe Ledger series and Scott Sigler’s novel Nocturnal. In that novel, San Francisco homicide inspectors Bryan Clauser and Pookie Chang follow a trail of brutal serial killings tied to a secret, subterranean war that has raged through the city for more than a century.
VACATION
BY SCOTT SIGLER
A spectacular sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge, turning the few wisps of fog below it a reddish orange. A view of Alcatraz Island, old and solid and full of legends. And me — just some guy sitting on a park bench at Marina Green with his dog lying down next to him, big white head in my lap.
A perfect moment. I shouldn’t have answered the phone, but old habits die hard. And then there was the fact that calls to this phone were not to be ignored — especially when those calls came from that man.
I had to jostle Ghost a bit to pull the phone out of my pocket. The white German shepherd glanced at me, just to check that everything was okay, then put his head back down on my lap.
I answered.
“Know what, Church? I’m buying you a dictionary.”
“So I can look up what the word vacation means, I assume.”
I hate it when he does that.
“The least you could have done was let me have the fucking punch line.”
“If you want the punch line, Joe, tell better jokes. Don’t worry, this probably won’t take long.”
That’s the thing with Mr. Church. His probably has a completely different definition from what you’d expect. Yes, a dictionary would be the ideal Christmas present.
In my life, perfect moments are rare. Church had interrupted that moment. I breathed deep, slow, petting Ghost’s head. A big head, because he’s a big dog. As in almost fifty kilos big. I’d had him only a few weeks, and we were already bound by blood. He’d taken a bullet that would have killed me. He’d also torn the hand off a human being who’d murdered the love of my life. I’d never been a dog person, but in my mind Ghost wasn’t really a dog—he was a fellow soldier. He was my pack member.
That bullet hurt him, though. An inch-wide streak of shaved fur on his left shoulder surrounded eight stitches dotting a line of pursed flesh. While he recovered, I’d decided to reward his performance with a “sniff all the things you can” tour of San Francisco.
Of course, this trip wasn’t just for Ghost. I needed recovery time, and not the physical kind. The wounds of Grace’s loss were too fresh. Too raw. I wasn’t ready to deal with people. I sure as hell wasn’t ready to go back to work.
“You promised me time off after Veder,” I said.
“Veder. Curious how everyone in the world has lost track of him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Quite curious.”
I’d buried that assassin on a beach. I pissed on his grave. So did Ghost. The only creatures who would ever see him again were crabs that dug deep to feast on his rotting flesh.
“I need you to track down a lead,” Church said. “Kraken Team was running an op in El Paso. The Mexican cartel seems to be working with some new muscle.”
“And we care, why? The drug business isn’t our business.”
“It is when multiple sightings of that muscle describes them as orcs.”
Most people would have laughed at that. Most people don’t work for the DMS. With the shit I’ve seen, I didn’t second-guess Church, even for an instant.
“Orcs,” I said. “That’s new.”
“Three of them. In gangland circles, they’ve come to be known as Tres Hermanos Orco.”
“The Three Orc Brothers? Fantastic.”
“There are no pictures,” Church said. “No video, just a sketch. The DEA lost two undercover agents to these guys. A survivor of that incident described them, and that filtered back to me. We sent Kraken Team to help out. Found them pretty quickly. There was a firefight. Imura says he landed three shots with an M110 SASS, all center-mass, from a distance of fifty meters. When Kraken Team closed in, there was blood, but no body.”
“Could the other two brothers have carried the dead one out?”
“Spotters saw three big bodies leaving, leaving fast.”
Sam “Ronin” Imura is the best sniper I’ve ever met. If he says he landed three shots center-mass, then that’s a fact. The M110 fired 7.62 × 51 mm rounds—número uno orco should have been hamburger.
“Body armor?”
“Imura didn’t see any, but these were big guys. Easy to assume body armor was involved.”
“So how does this involve me?”
“Blood analysis turned up something funny — a third sex chromosome.”
“Klinefelter syndrome?”
“No, not XXY,” Church said. “Something I’ve never seen before. It’s more like a Z. Here’s where it gets strange. Hu processed the genome. MindReader ran that info through every database you can imagine. It got a hit, but a hit that was erased years ago.”
It wasn’t surprising MindReader could find something that wasn’t supposed to be there anymore. That computer was Church’s creation, a silicon god that seemed to move in and out of the world’s databases like an all-powerful tech phantom.
“MindReader found a mitochondrial DNA match with a Jebediah Erickson, resident of San Francisco. Whatever the Orc Brothers are, their mother is Erickson’s mother.”
“So it’s Quatro Hermanos?”
“Maybe, but Erickson is old. He was in an insane asylum for vigilante murders back in the eighties. That information, too, had been wiped out of multiple databases. If it wasn’t for MindReader, Erickson’s crimes and his time in the asylum wouldn’t exist.”
With the foes the DMS had faced, I knew age was a relative thing.
“You want me to bring Erickson in.”
“Just talk to him,” Church said. “I’d leave this to the locals entirely, but if Erickson is involved, the last thing we want is more good cops dead. See if the guy knows anything about his brothers. Our assets are stretched thin right now. You taking care of this lead saves me the headache of pulling someone off an assignment.”
Were we that maxed out? Maybe. Or maybe Church was giving me a guilt trip for being on vacation. Well, fuck him — I’d earned a few days off. Still, though… a new chromosome, dead DEA agents…