A man stood away from the crowd, leaning against a police cruiser while he watched me, but he was no cop. Military. Had to be. And not just some run-of-the-mill grunt, either. He wore black fatigues, combat boots and sported a M9 Beretta in a shoulder holster. His dog tags glinted against his wide chest. Tall. Good-looking. Sandy-brown hair, cut very short. The Bradley passed within a half dozen feet of him and the guy never looked away from me. He was cut, hard muscles sculpted in all the right places, scars on his lower biceps. Clean-shaven. Looked like he could wrestle crocodiles and turn them into matching handbag and gator-skin boot sets. A real hard case, giving me the evaluation eye.
We locked gazes until the Bradley rumbled past him. He never smiled, but neither did the look on his face seem aggressive or antagonistic. It had been…interested. Intensely interested. So who was he? Competition? A prospective client, please God? A grunt on leave who liked caterpillar treads? Some psycho stalker?
I glanced backward and caught a last glimpse of him ducking under the police barriers and disappearing into the crowd.
What the hell had that been about? I tried to shake it off. I had more important things to worry about, all of them related to money and the sudden dismaying lack thereof. Still…his face lingered in my mind, like drifts of ashes after a fire.
Chapter One: Mercenary Angst in the Age of Reason
Mercenary Wing Rv6-4 “Zero Dogs”
The Zero Dog Compound
NW Hilltop Drive
, Portland, Oregon
1045 Hours PST April 10th
There are moments when I wish I’d been born Amish. This was one of those times.
Three days after the TastyTech Food Corp fiasco and subsequent loss of the city of Portland as a client, I sat hunched over my too-small particleboard desk, my head in one hand, my fingers hunched into a claw on top of the keyboard number pad. On the computer screen, QuickBooks gleefully informed me I couldn’t code 25mm depleted uranium shells as a receivable.
I suppressed the urge to melt the computer down to slag, but then I’d end up scraping the bloody thing off the desktop with an industrial-grade spatula. Four hours of bean counting and while none of our books lined up, the news they did give was grim. Add any more financial stress to my already seething cauldron of anxiety and people around here should really count it lucky I didn’t start more fires.
The good news: we weren’t going bankrupt this week. The bad news: at this burn-through rate we’d be bankrupt in roughly twenty-eight days unless we scored a high-paying gig. Chapter 7 stuff, no reorganizing, just total liquidation. In this economy, few clients would pay top dollar for mercenary paranormal assault teams. Not when you could hire an entire army of pookas for less than the cost of re-tiling your bathroom or putting in that bidet you always wanted. Pixies came even cheaper by the dozen.
I stood up and stretched, trying to work out the kinks in my neck. The initial bass drum beats of a headache throbbed at my temples, and I could feel that internal percussionist in my head warming up for the kettledrums. Sunlight poured from the window in a blazing white square across the carpet, falling across the top of my bookcase and my cactus in its ceramic sombrero pot. The room’s warmth made me sluggish. I yearned to lie down in that pool of sunlight like a cat and nap the rest of the day away. But no, I had to lead the Light Brigade. The time had come to slouch into the valley of death and spread the misery.
The house was quiet. Strange. Usually the air resonated with shouting, the crash of things breaking, drunken singing, weird animal sounds, and enough general commotion to qualify us for a reality television show. The more I thought about it, the more whoring ourselves out to reality TV seemed a viable possibility…
The phone rang. I snatched the cordless off the base, eager for any reason to take my thoughts off the dark cloud of bad news. “Merc World. All your chaos needs. Sale on spatulas and cluster bombs, today only.”
A long pause gestated on the other end, long enough for me to regret saying what had seemed so damn witty at the time. Impulse control. I made a mental note to lease some. I’d been expecting a call from those idiots in Merc Wing Lk12, hence my snark. If I lost a potential client due to spontaneous unprofessionalism, I’d have to commit seppuku with a butter knife.
“May I please speak to Captain Andrea K. Walker?” a man finally asked.
“Speaking.” Beautiful. My full name. Had to be a bill collector. Almost as bad as losing a client.
“Captain.” The voice sounded older but still silky smooth. I amended my guess to politician. Probably seeking campaign donations. “I represent a certain government agency with very deep pockets. I’d like to discuss a very lucrative contract with you. In person.”
So much for my psychic powers. I spun back to my desk and managed to topple a dozen manila folders full of crumpled receipts when I grabbed my schedule calendar. I immediately switched to my competent leader routine, making my voice a bit deeper and talking in complete sentences. “I’m certainly interested. When would be a good time for you?”
“One hour from now would be ideal,” the man said. “Can that be managed?”
I had no idea the last time anyone had cleaned the client conference room—hell, I was fuzzy on the last time we’d even
used
the damn thing—but as surely as an OCD Pandora opened boxes, I wasn’t about to let this whale off the line. “An hour is absolutely fine.”
“Perfect. I’ll be sending an agent directly to you. He will carry credentials, but he may arrive before me. Is this a problem?”
“Not at all,” I lied. It meant I’d have to babysit the chump personally since I didn’t trust any of my misfits to uphold our pristine image of professionalism, sad as that might be. “I look forward to it.”
“Good.” Dial tone followed, the flat line of telephone calls.
So who said the universe didn’t randomly hand out miracles to the undeserving? I did a little hell-yeah dance in my office because no one else could see me. I set the phone down and hammered the intercom button. A crackle of distortion blared over the speakers installed throughout the house. “Listen up, people. We got clients coming in. So let’s not scare them off like last time.”
Twenty minutes later, I thumped down the stairs into the main living area. I had on my full dress uniform, dark gray coat, light gray trousers with black piping, gray cap, fruit salad—a choice bit of jargon referring to my assorted ribbons and medals—and captain bars on my chest and sleeve. I’d taken the time to spiffy up, forced my hair into some kind of order, put on fresh deodorant but skipped the perfume. There were no good floral scents that complemented my image as a soldier of fortune.
As usual, the living room bore a close resemblance to the aftermath of a natural gas explosion. A huge HD television, a mess of stereo and surround-sound equipment, video-game consoles and a nightmare tangle of cords dominated one wall. Through the picture window I could see the sloping front lawn, hedges, trees and wide swaths of green grass complete with a bomb crater where Gavin had exploded munitions in some half-assed practical joke. The rest of the room was strewn with takeout containers, pizza boxes, empty cans, bottles, coffee mugs, a replica of a
LOTR
sword thrust through the drywall, a pair of Scooby-Doo boxer shorts I prayed were clean, and a plastic hula girl upside down in the fake potted palm we’d strung with multicolored Christmas lights.
All of which reminded me, we
really
needed a housekeeper. Our last housekeeping company had fired us as their client within three months, and I couldn’t find the heart to blame them. I also couldn’t find the money to pay a new cleaning company.
Le impasse
.
Rafe sprawled on the L-shaped sofa. Next to him slept our huge mutant housecat, Squeegee, who took up the rest of the couch.
Rafe Lupo
certainly wasn’t the name he’d been born with. According to his file, he’d had it changed from Jim Thatcher after he’d been bitten by a lycanthrope dogcatcher in Scranton, PA. Good-looking enough, but covered in tattoos, so a girl had to really love ink. Rafe also qualified as a total man slut, trolling through club after club and trying to bang anything female and of legal age that smiled in his general direction. He seemed to see me more as his den mother than anything else, which made me exempt from his attentions, even though I was only a few years older. Honestly, I didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted.
Squeegee was our calico cat, all scattershot white, brown, black and rust colors. Oh, and she weighed close to three hundred and twenty pounds. We’d found her in Thailand, enslaved to a smuggler kingpin we hunted down. She was larger than most dire wolves, and when she purred she sounded like an idling Harley Davidson.
I loomed over Squeegee and counted off points on my fingers. “A thousand dollars in Friskies cat chow. Two dump-truck loads of beach sand for kitty litter
this month alone
. And I found a hairball the size of a basketball in the bathroom. Remind me
exactly
why we keep you around, your highness?”
Squeegee rolled on her back, the couch giving a pained groan, and she curled her huge paws in the air, doing her best to look like three hundred pounds of adorable kitten. One eye cracked open, regarded me briefly and then closed again when she saw I was not charmed.
Rafe grinned. “C’mon, Captain, relax. She’s a chick magnet when I take her to the park.”
Squeegee purred and he scratched her head.
I turned on Rafe. “And
you
. I want you home before two a.m. on weeknights. Stop walking through the house naked. And since your New Year’s resolution to attempt thinking with something other than your dick has been a colossal failure, at least
try
and maintain decorum—and finally, don’t have your girlfriends call our business line anymore.”
Rafe’s smile widened, God help me, becoming positively wolfish, and I had to resist the urge to singe his eyebrows. Only one thing really bothered me about werewolves—their eyebrows. Hell, I even liked some of Rafe’s body art (though some of it, like the full-color tattoo of Dogs Playing Shooting Pool on his back, made me want to gouge out my eyes with salad tongs). But those eyebrows appeared as if fuzzy yellow caterpillars had fallen asleep over his eyes. I knew he plucked them, though he vehemently denied it. I also could see them growing back with a vengeance. They were the Chia Pet of eye fur. Pluck all you want, he’ll grow more.
I pinned him with my evil eye and cranked my flaming-ire knob to eleven. “
Also
. We buy our beef in bulk for a reason. I don’t want you sneaking in receipts for that goddamn butcher shop down the road. That meat costs twice as much, and you eat more than anybody here.”
A look of horror flitted over Rafe’s face. “That other stuff is full of hormones and steroids. It’s genetically modified clone beef. A cancer study—”
“
Enough
.” Give Rafe an opening and he’d go forever about how processed food was slowly killing everyone born after 1945. Life could be depressing enough without worrying about how Twinkies had spackled my large intestine. “No more free-range beef. And forget about the organic vegetables. I’m serious, Rafe. We’re going down to ramen noodles and sugar-free Jell-O before the month is out.”
He kept silent for a moment, staring at Squeegee. Then he looked back at me and gave me his best wolf grin. Must be the wolf grin that got those club-hopping women to drop their panties because it sure as hell couldn’t be his eyebrows.
“I’ve got something to take your mind off your woes, Captain,” he said. “Did I show you my new tattoo?”
“Is it any more disturbing than when you had
Joystick
tattooed across your stomach in Gothic script with an arrow pointing toward your crotch?”
He scowled. “Hey, I got that at Mardi Gras.”
And that explained exactly nothing. “I don’t have time for body art—I have an important client meeting in less than an hour. Which reminds me. Don’t let them in through the house. When they page us over the gate intercom, send them around the side driveway to the conference-room door.” We had an external conference room entrance to avoid having a client slog through a drift of Chinese takeout boxes or see something that would make them take their business elsewhere, such as Rafe doing naked yoga.
Rafe saluted and went back to watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
on the widescreen. Squeegee began to snore.
I continued toward the conference room, checking my dress uniform to make sure I hadn’t picked up any stray cat hair. Still looked good, and I’d always loved the way I looked in full dress uniform. Long legs let me cut a striking figure with the right outfit. Wrong outfit and I looked like a stork, or worse, a flamingo with attitude.
A few of the windows were open along the backside of the house, looking out on our training grounds, and a slight breeze blew in the smells of grass and evergreen trees. I lingered near the windows, inhaling deeply. Worry had twisted my stomach into loops of kinked hose. This meeting
had
to come off perfectly, and it’d be a razor edge to walk. I couldn’t appear desperate, but couldn’t seem standoffish either. And, as usual, it was all up to me.
Sometimes being the boss really sucked.
Now, if I were Amish, for instance, I could reconnect to the land, wear a kapp, make beautiful blankets, slow down and cut myself free from my worldly worries. Free from the crushing weight of responsibility and the iron chains of leadership.
Yeah…who was I fooling? Time to put on the big-girl panties and suck it up. Something told me the Amish wouldn’t be pleased to welcome an unrepentant pyromancer into their ranks—blind subservience went down with me about as well as nitroglycerin in a paint mixer—and last of all, I wouldn’t get to play with the grenade launchers anymore. Clearly the Amish career path remained out of the question.
I shook my head and pushed open the door to the conference room, an Englisher with a mission, but sure as hell not one from God.
The conference room stretched along the ground floor of the house’s north side, with a large, east-facing window providing a killer view of downtown Portland. As if meetings weren’t dreary enough, the architect had decided to torment us with the views during After Action Reports and phone conferences.
I waited alone for the intercom call from the gate, musing about this agent the mysterious telephone guy had spoken of. Probably some skinny, paper-juggling bureaucrat who’d never seen a lick of action. Oh well. This job could still save our asses—at least for a while. Dealing with the government meant nearly everything was deductible, reimbursable, or over-chargeable. I almost started to salivate and had to remind myself to hold steady, not seem too eager. I rocked back in one uncomfortable chair and put my feet up on the table, striving for cool, calm and nonchalant.