Havoc by Shannon McKenna
12
Kimball crossed his leg over his knee with a grimace, massaging the burning sensation. It was nerve damage, from the stab wound to the groin that Fiona Garrett had given him, that nasty, bad-tempered cunt. He’d return the favor as soon as possible.
When it acted up, it put him in a bad mood. Rainy weather didn’t help either. And neither did the gross incompetence and idiocy recently displayed by his crew.
They were all standing before him in a semicircle. He’d foregone the usual table and chairs in the makeshift war-room at his new headquarters, outside Granger Valley. These brain-dead, needle-dick assholes didn’t deserve the courtesy of chairs.
He should have sent the new guys he’d just hired to deal with Cait LaMott. Julian and Darius Varens, a twinned set of skilled assassins. Highly recommended for their ruthless drive to get the job done. But they were untested, so he’d sent his veterans.
Bad call. Worthless shitbags.
“You discharged your weapon, in the parking lot of downtown Shaw’s Crossing, in front of the Mountainview Motel, at three in the morning,” Kimball repeated slowly. “After I specifically told you not to.”
“Nobody was there to see it, boss,” Galen said, palpating his bruised jaw and wiggling his loosened teeth with his tongue. “So I don’t think that it’ll be a—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Galen flinched back, tonguing his loose teeth.
“But it was Mace Trask,” Miller repeated. “Boss, the only way to take those Trask pricks down is with a gun. Preferably from a distance, or remotely, using a drone—”
“A drone? I sent three seasoned, well-paid professionals to pull a lone girl out of a hotel room in her nightgown! This was a fucking no-brainer, and yet, you come back to me empty-handed. Like whipped dogs. Taken down by one unarmed man!”
Wilkes spoke up. “She brained me with a lamp when I came in, boss. Then when Trask came in, it got really crazy. He threw me off the walkway into the pool, and he—”
“If you want to die tonight, keep talking, Wilkes.”
In the silence that followed, Kimball studied the photos his hacker team had assembled for him, once they’d pried her name and license plate number from the Mountainview Motel’s database. He let his team stand there, awaiting his pleasure.
So, look at this. Caitlin LaMott. Tom’s daughter. Kimball had thought that he’d fucked that asshole down so deep into his grave, he would never crawl out. But Tom had come back to haunt him in a new form. His daughter. A virologist, just like Daddy.
Tom would be so proud.
She was probably like Tom in other ways, too. In the pictures, she looked difficult, principled, insufferable, like Tom had been. Something about her regal posture, the proud set of her chin. He swiped through the file. Highest honors from Stanford, scholarships, this fellowship and that prize, blah-blah-di-fucking-blah. Uppity egghead bitch.
She had Tom’s eyes. Big, striking. He vaguely remembered Tom’s girl from way back, when she was just starting to bud. That was when he liked them best. Just as they started to get a clue about how much potential trouble they were in, but before they’d developed any tactics to defend themselves against it. They were so innocent and vulnerable in that brief window of time. He loved it.
She wasn’t like that anymore. Caitlin LaMott was too old for his tastes, now. Too tough looking, too full-blown. He liked them delicate, narrow, waif-like. Tom LaMottt’s daughter was a strong, buxom, bad-tempered bitch, judging from Wilkes’s bloodied head.
She’d hit him with a fucking lamp? Wilkes was such a goddamn pussy.
Fate had offered him a break, if he could just take it. When they’d shown him video of that woman entering the cavern with a tracking device, he’d almost had a stroke. His former strategy—the years-long, never-ending secret excavation up at GodsAcre—was no longer viable. That had finished when Otis Trask discovered him, and called the Trask boys home. He urgently needed a short cut. And here she was. All tied up in a bow.
A tracking device would lead him right to his prize. No more needle in a haystack, no more sifting through tons of broken rock. He could finally leave this ass-end-of-nowhere place, and move on to the fun part.
Phase II, where the world was his playground. Where everyone in it his toy.
But as usual, Mace Trask had swooped down and snatched Caitlin LaMott and her tracking device right out of his grasp. Whenever he reached out for what was his, those Trask boys slapped his hand. Before he left Shaw’s Crossing, he wanted them all, Nate Murphy included, moldering in the ground, and their dirty bitch-slut females with them.
“Where are they now?” he asked, without bothering to look up.
Julian, one of the new guys, spoke up. “He took her to his apartment in Demi Vaughan’s complex. Sully said he saw lights. Front room, bathroom, bedroom.”
“He’s fucking her,” Kimball said. “And he wants me to know it. He kicks the shit out of you useless fuckwits, then he takes her home and nails her. Right in my face.”
Darius, Julian’s twin, spoke up. “We can’t be sure of that, without any electronics surveillance inside their—”
“They all do that. It’s their signature move. Trying to establish dominance.”
Galen coughed discreetly. “Boss, why don’t we just gun them down with drones, like we did up at Beecham Lake? We could take them all out without getting anywhere near them. Seems the simplest thing.”
“Does it seem simple to you, Galen?” Kimball asked, with deceptive mildness.
“Well, it’s certainly lower risk, and we—”
“We might get one or two, but we wouldn’t get all of them,” Kimball said. “The one thing we would get for sure is national media attention, while my property is still buried up there in that cave. Also, this ploy could get Cait LaMott killed, and her intel is my best chance to recover my property.” He looked around the room. “Gentlemen? Do any of the rest of you think this is a brilliant strategy?”
Not a peep. So difficult to find competent people with brains and balls. It was also challenging to keep them alive in Shaw’s Crossing. There had been too much fucking turnover since those Trask bastards had started thinning his ranks.
“Boss, I gotta be honest,” Galen announced. “I’m speaking for all of us when I say that if you want to make a move, we need more firepower. Every one of those guys is a trained killer, and Nate Murphy and the rest of their security crew are almost as bad.”
Kimball snapped the laptop closed. “So you’re telling me you’re not up to it?”
“No, I’m not saying that exactly, but Mace Trask took all three of us, and all the teeth on the right side of my mouth are loose. It would be unprofessional not to be honest about the odds of—”
Whack.Kimball spun around, smashing the side of his laptop into Galen’s head.
Galen wobbled, and toppled heavily to the ground, unconscious.
“Unprofessional, hmm?” Kimball took his time, positioning himself, and aimed a crushing kick at Galen’s jaw. Another…then another. He bent over, wincing as damaged nerves from his wound shot bolts of pain up his thigh, and jerked Galen’s blood-soaked hair back. Galen’s mouth gaped. He prodded at Galen’s bloodied teeth, which were knocked every which way, and dropped him, satisfied.
“There,” he said. “I fixed it for him. His teeth are knocked on both sides now. Symmetrical once again.” He wiped his hand on Galen’s shirt and turned back to his men. “So,” he said. “This is our new strategy, since no one has balls to go after Mace Trask directly. We get Cait LaMott away from him. By any means necessary. Once we extract her intel, you can all enjoy yourselves with her, not that any of you deserve such enjoyment. We’ll throw what’s left of her in Mace Trask’s face when we’re done. The first man who figures out how to pry her off Trask’s dick gets a million-dollar bonus, and first crack at her. Once she’s debriefed, of course.”
He gestured at the twins, who were hanging back and getting a feel for things. He gestured at Galen. “Julian, Darius. Get this useless piece of shit out of my sight.”
“Should we take him to the hospital?” Darius asked.
“I don’t give a fuck what you do, as long as I don’t have to look at him again.”
Julian and Darius hoisted the other man up and carried him off.
There was blood and hair stuck to the side of the laptop, gumming up the USB ports. Kimball grimaced in disgust and held the device out to Wilkes. “Clean that shit up.”
Wilkes hastened to obey.