We man-hugged.
“You guys really tore this place a new one,” he said.
I looked around. He was right. Grunt Boy and I had pretty much leveled Jun Kwai’s shop. There wasn’t a shelf, a drink display, a magazine rack, a cooler door, or a wall of cigarettes that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. The flood of spilled soft drinks and beer and milk and orange juice was an inch deep on my boots.
Not to mention the spilled ice.
And the Skittles and the M&M’s all over the place.
And, of course, the dead mercenaries.
“The cleaners are going to have a bitch of a time with this place,” Mark said.
“You’re using cleaners?” Cleaners were our support staff, the guys who came in and erased all evidence that the team had been there. They weren’t used that often, but when they were, they were a wonder to watch. They could make evidence of a firefight disappear in a moment’s notice.
“Actually,” Mark said, “that’s classified.”
“I’ve heard that word a lot tonight,” I said. “What gives?”
“What gives is it’s classified.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Seriously. You really stepped into the shit tonight, Joe. You gotta stop doing that.”
Seriously, I thought. I used to be one of these guys. I hold a top-secret clearance, even now. I looked around and realized that, at one point or another, I had been to a school with every single one of the guys in Mark Roberts’s team. They couldn’t tell me what was going on?
But of course they couldn’t.
I knew that.
I was once part of the team. I was on the outside now.
I was what the guys affectionately called a FAG. A former action guy. A friend of the team, but no longer one of the team.
“Let me take you outside, okay?” he said.
I knew the drill. Mark and I were friends. Had been for a long time. But he had a job to do, and part of that job was evacuating those who had no business knowing what his job was.
That meant me.
“Sure,” I said.
I followed him out to the street. As I stepped onto the sidewalk I heard glass crunching behind me. I turned and saw Grunt Boy walk up to a team member who had Jun Kwai firmly in tow. He put his hands on Jun Kwai’s shoulders, just as he’d done when he’d saved the man’s life earlier in the evening, and seemed to straighten his shirt. Only this time I saw him remove a long blue vial, about the size of a cigar, from Jun Kwai’s inner pocket. He checked it, I guess to make sure it was still intact, then caught me looking at him.
He held up the vial. “Trust me,” he said. “This right here. Everything that happened here. This was worth it.”
With that, Mark led me away from the building.
We headed over to an unmarked ambulance and he asked me if I needed anything.
I told him I was good.
“Cool,” he said. Then he looked me in the eye. “In just a bit we’re going to release your radio so you can call in the fire. Cool?”
“What fire?”
“Cleaners, remember?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.”
“And this is classified.”
My turn to look him in the eye. “Screw you, Command Sergeant Major.”
And we both laughed.
Nick Stewart carried the vial back into the store. It’d been a hell of a week, but they had the formula at last.
He found Mr. Church standing in front of the cookie aisle. The man was tearing into a bag of Oreos.
“Here it is,” Nick said, and put it on the shelf in front of Mr. Church.
“That’s excellent,” the older man said, though how much older Nick could never tell. The man could have been forty-five or maybe sixty-five. There was just no way of telling. He was one of those people who defied description.
“Anything else?” Nick asked.
“You had help, I see.”
“That cop, yeah. Former Ranger, I’m pretty sure of it.”
“He handled himself well?”
“Very well.”
“Oh. That’s excellent.” Mr. Church twisted open an Oreo cookie and ate the filling first. “Someone we should keep an eye on, perhaps?”
“I think so, yeah.”
Mr. Church finished off the rest of his Oreo, apparently lost in thought.
Nick knew better than to fill up the silence with small talk. With nothing more to say, he quietly bled back into the night.
Joe McKinney has his feet in several different worlds. In his day job, he has worked as a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a DWI enforcement officer, a disaster mitigation specialist, a homicide detective, the director of the city of San Antonio’s 911 call center, and a patrol supervisor. He played college baseball for Trinity University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was the manager of a Barnes & Noble for a while, where he indulged a lifelong obsession with books. He published his first novel, Dead City, in 2006, a book that has since been recognized as a seminal work in the zombie genre. Since then, he has gone on to win two Bram Stoker Awards and expanded his oeuvre to cover everything from true crime and writings on police procedure to science fiction to cooking to Texas history. The author of more than twenty books, he is a frequent guest at horror and mystery conventions. Joe and his wife, Tina, have two lovely daughters and make their home in a little town just outside of San Antonio, where he pursues his passion for cooking and makes what some consider to be the finest batch of chili in Texas. You can keep up with all of Joe’s latest releases by friending him on Facebook.
THREE TIMES
BY JENNIFER CAMPBELL-HICKS
Emily Grant’s assignment that day: cover the historic unveiling of the Freedom Bell. She walked from the newsroom, only a few blocks away. Hundreds of people had gathered outside the Liberty Bell Center in the muggy summer heat, waiting for the July Fourth festivities to begin. Emily wove her way through the crowd to the building’s entrance.
A uniformed guard eyed her. “What’s the name, sweetheart?”
Sweetheart? She cringed.
“Emily Grant. Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“Credentials?”
She flashed her work ID, which he checked against a list.
“Over there with the others.”
The others were reporters, photographers, television camera operators, and TV talking heads — local and national — crushed along one wall, roped off like dangerous animals.
“Good idea,” Emily said. “Wouldn’t want us mingling with the First Lady and the Washington bigwigs. You never know, we might bite.”
“Next,” the guard said.
Scowling, Emily walked through the metal detectors and inside.
She spotted the Inquirer’s photographer Craig and joined him against the rope line. The toll from decades of chasing down news was etched into his weathered face. He nodded to her while he fiddled with his camera’s buttons and dials.
Emily looked around the open, airy hall. She’d meant to bring her daughter, Mia, here but hadn’t found the time. They’d moved to Philly only a few months ago, after Mia’s father left them. Not that Emily blamed him. Doug wanted stable, and she’d been anything but. As always when she thought about Doug, her fingers sought out the small silver medallion hooked to her purse zipper. Three months sober, it said.
Across the hall stood the Liberty Bell, encased in glass, Independence Hall visible through floor-to-ceiling windows behind it. The bell radiated history, more than its copper and tin, the very soul of its era. Everyone felt it. Visitors, journalists, dignitaries, guards, they all kept glancing its way.