Dead Simple by Jon Land Read Free Book Online

it, and lifted the top. The hundred-dollar bills stacked and wrapped neatly inside were caught in the spill of his beam.

    Tyrell could see Marbles’ eyes bulge behind his thick glasses. “What the hell …”
    “I’ve been busy the past twenty-five years.”
    “Okay, you got my attention,” said Marbles.
    “I need a wire man. Very elaborate setup. One-day gig.”
    Marbles looked up, his light suddenly angled on Jack again, stinging his eyes. “Twenty-five years go by and all of a sudden you flipped your switch back on?”
    “It got flipped back on for me. I bought into something, but that’s done and over now. There’s nothing holding me to them anymore, and four of them got dead for being disrespectful.”
    That made Marbles straighten a little.
    “You understand what I’m saying here, Marbles? I feel like the last twenty-five years never happened, like I’m picking up just where I left off, only this time I’m gonna make this country hurt in a big way. Where it counts. Make them stand up and take notice. Give them something they’ll never forget.”
    “You expect me to just drop everything and come along?”
    “Yup.”
    Marbles picked up one of the black boxes and let it crash to the floor. “Just tell me what it is we’re going for. Tell me where we’re gonna lay this hurt.”
    “A city,” Jackie Terror told him.
    “A city ? ”
    “We’re going to take a whole fucking city hostage.”

SIX
    B laine lay on the porch of Buck Torrey’s stilt house, the crickets and night birds singing around him. He had come outside so the breeze could cool his body, which was drenched in sweat even now, the air like a sauna from dawn to dusk and, after dark, a steam room inside Buck’s stilt house. If his former sergeant major’s plan was to make him forget about his shoulder and hip by making him hurt everywhere else, it was working. They’d been at it for three weeks now.
    Three weeks …
    But it felt like much longer. Blaine couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever been this sore. His early years of training were certainly worse in terms of duress, but he’d been decades younger, which made the pain easier to swallow. No reprieves from training due to injury or hurt at that level, and with good reason.
    You’re in the jungle wounded, shot probably. Or maybe you got winged by a frag, or couldn’t dance clear after hearing the click of the mine you triggered. Alone with your pain for company and the enemy on your tail, closing fast. Stop and you die. Nobody surrendered in the jungles where Blaine had spent his formative years. The Special Forces training he’d endured was meant to build tolerance, as well as character. If you couldn’t take the pain in camp, you wouldn’t be able to take it with a bullet in your leg, or an artery doing its damnedest to bleed out while you humped across twenty miles of jungle.

    The door creaked open and Buck Torrey joined Blaine on the porch, settling his bulky frame on a patch of dry wood, a pair of beer bottles in hand.
    “Woulda brought you one, son, but I know you and booze ain’t exactly in bed together.”
    Blaine propped himself up gingerly on his elbows. “We were once.”
    “All of us were lots of things back then that fortunately got a way of changing, moving on. Life’s not much more than that, from where I’m sitting. Going from one place to another. Packing up. You know how you can tell when an old dog like me’s had enough?”
    “No.”
    “He stops un packing. Just leaves the pieces of his life in boxes, so they’ll be easier to move the next time.” Buck Torrey took a hefty swig from his bottle. “Trouble is, you can’t fit everything in boxes. Knew another guy never took nothing with him. Just bought everything new when he got where he was going, give himself a fresh start.”
    “You’re talking about family, Buck.”
    Torrey’s eyes turned to hot spheres of fire, hiding the wryness behind them.
    “Sir,” Blaine corrected, as he rose to