Kane- Tooth & Nail Read online

He turned off the lights, plunging the cabin into darkness broken only by the orange glow seeping from the woodstove. By the time he slid into the bunk beside her, his clothes had joined her shirt on the floor. The Sig remained on the edge of the table, within arm’s reach because Kane knew better than most that even in moments of living, death was never far away.

  He soon forgot about the gun. Forgot about everything but the ecstasy of the moment as Luna opened herself to him. Not just physically, but spiritually, their souls entwining with the same intensity as their bodies.

  As they moved together, giving and taking from each other exactly what they needed, they gasped out their release like hopeful prayers. Kane knew he would never forget these slivered heartbeats of passion, never forget her gentle touch. The preachers and prudes might call it simple lust, but Kane knew it was something more than that. Something deeper and more powerful.

  Healing.

  They made love long into the night, and as they fell asleep in each other’s arms, Kane drifted into the most peaceful rest he had known since pulling the trigger five days ago. She was an angel in disguise, heaven wrapped in human flesh, and even if only for a few brief moments, she had brought some measure of peace to his troubled soul.

  Chapter Six

  Black Bog Federal Prison

  Some people accused Duff “Goatsack” Cantwell of being a needle jockey and ridiculed him for riding the steroid train to destination Muscle Mass. But Goatsack emphatically denied the allegations and had proof of sorts—oversized testicles. Ask anyone on the SORT team who boasted the biggest balls, and they would, down to the last man, say Goatsack. They not only meant it figuratively but literally as well.

  It was common knowledge that juicing caused testicular atrophy, but Goatsack’s balls were double the normal size. Not only did it prove his muscles were natural and not chemically enhanced, but the extra weight caused his scrotum to sag, earning him the nickname Goatsack twenty-five years ago when he took his first post-training shower after joining SORT. Somebody had pointed at the lathered-up rookie, cackled like a hyena, and announced, “Yo, Duff, looks like you got a goat’s sack swinging there between your knees.”

  Every team member eventually earned a nickname. Duff had been christened with his on his very first day.

  As the SORT team skulked in the woods that ringed their outdoor training area, waiting for their targets to show up, Goatsack mentally acknowledged that a quarter-century was a long time to be doing this kind of work. The endless strength training, endurance runs, obstacle courses, rappelling, low-crawling, and other hardcore shit he and his team were expected to master took their toll on his body.

  Some said SORT was a young man’s game, but he had defied the odds. However, his body—particularly his knees, which needed surgical replacement—had paid the price. He had turned fifty-six four months ago, meaning mandatory retirement was fast approaching. With thirty years of service, his pension would be nothing to scoff at. Factor in all the money Nazareno had stuffed into his coffers over the last few years, and post-prison life would be more than comfortable.

  As much as his knees hurt and his muscles ached, as much as a sweeter life waited for him once he turned in his law enforcement credentials and rode off into the sunset, he loved the thrill of door-kicking too much to give it up just yet. He was a smasher, a shooter, an operator. It was in his blood.

  Speaking of blood…

  Warden Ghastin had summoned him to her office first thing this morning and supplied him with the names of two women Nazareno wanted dead. Goatsack thought the warden looked like crap as if she hadn’t slept a wink, her almond-shaped eyes dull and ringed with black, despite the makeup she had slathered on to hide the flaws.

  None of that meant jack-all to him. He had gone there to receive his kill-list, not ponder the pretty warden’s problems. Besides, he had a damn good idea of what those problems were. It had become obvious over the years that Ghastin had been bent to Nazareno’s will by threat of violence rather than by bribery. She didn’t want to belong to the drug lord; she simply had no choice.

  Goatsack and his team, on the other hand, had willingly embraced their role as Nazareno’s personal hit squad. Before the cartel king had arrived, the SORT team had consisted of nineteen men and one woman, but those numbers had quickly been whittled down. A core of nine remained, the ones loyal to Nazareno—or rather, loyal to his cash—and who had a taste for blood. Goatsack and his boys had betrayed their oaths and broken their badges, turning into murderous mercenaries for more money than the United States government could ever dream of paying them.

  He was perfectly okay with that.

  Crouched at the base of a nearby pine tree, fallen logs and tangled brush screening him from the training field, Shawn “Breezy” Brindisi growled, “Where the hell are those two bitches?” The team had dubbed him Breezy because he was always passing wind. He’d been on SORT for just over eight years and was a skilled tactician. He’d been a lieutenant once but had gotten busted back to a senior officer after he’d caught his wife in bed with a coworker and punched the guy’s lights outs.

  “Steady,” Goatsack said. “Simmer down. They’ll be here. They never miss their morning walk.”

  The training area was shaped like an oval and ringed by a quarter-mile running track. Every morning, shortly after the start of their shift, Yvonne Fariss and Bonnie Little came down and walked a mile on the track, getting in some exercise on the government’s dime while they bitched and moaned and gossiped. Goatsack didn’t know either of the women very well, but their reputation as busybodies was well-documented throughout the prison.

  They would soon realize they should have kept their noses out of Nazareno’s business. The drug lord did not suffer interlopers.

  To Goatsack’s left, the team sniper—Vernon “Yippy” Cayea—used his rifle scope to scan the top of the ridge where Yvonne and Bonnie would first appear, following the gravel pathway that led from the warehouse area down to the SORT field.

  “Any sign of them yet, Yippy?”

  “Negative,” the sniper said, keeping his eye tight to the scope. “But they’ll be here. Those two mouth-breathers never miss their walk unless it’s raining.”

  “Yeah, ‘cause witches don’t like to get wet,” Goatsack growled.

  “I hear that.” Yippy chuckled.

  In position behind the sniper, Tom “Big Belly” Bartlemis asked, “We’re taking these bitches off the count, right?” The team called him “Big Belly” because no matter how hard he worked out, the man could not get rid of his beer gut. It was an island of softness amidst a sea of solid muscle. Strange, because Big Belly rarely drank alcohol.

  “Ten-four,” Goatsack confirmed. “Nazareno wants them deep-sixed and tossed in the bog.”

  “Can we fuck ‘em first?”

  Goatsack stared at him. “The hell did you just ask me?”

  “You heard me.”

  Goatsack shook his head in disgust. “No, you can’t fuck them first. We might be killers, but we’re not psychos.”

  Big Belly looked disappointed at the news, then abruptly brightened up. “Can we fuck ‘em after?”

  Goatsack heard Breezy mutter, “That big-bellied son of a bitch ain’t right in the head, boss.”

  Before Goatsack could reply, Yippy said, “Heads up, boys. Here they come.”

  The SORT leader saw the two women crest the ridge and start down the hill to the track. Yvonne was short but in good shape, her black hair liberally streaked with gray. Bonnie was also short, but much rounder, with frizzy brown hair that tumbled to her shoulders. They both wore windbreakers to ward off the early-morning chill.

  They hit the track and started walking at a brisk pace, voices carrying to the nine heavily-armed operators waiting for them in the trees on the other side.

  “Can you believe they promoted that worthless idiot to business administrator?” Yvonne said. “Like, good Lord, what experience does he have that qualifies him for that position?”
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  “There were way better picks on the best-qualified list,” Bonnie agreed. “You just know he must have lied on his resume. He doesn’t know anything about accounting.”

  Goatsack keyed his mic and spoke in a low voice to his team. “Let them come around to this side of the track. When they’re adjacent my position, me, Breezy, and Belly will move to intercept. Yippy, you stay back and provide overwatch. The rest of you, circle around and box them in. Make sure you take their radios. Last thing we need is them hitting their body alarms.”

  The two women rounded the far end of the track and started moving toward the team’s position. Another hundred meters and the trap would be sprung.

  “And I hear the union president is getting that promotion he’s been bucking for,” Yvonne griped. “Wonder how many grievances he had to shred in order to score that cushy management position?”

  “I know most people like the guy,” Bonnie replied, “but I think he’s two-faced. I don’t trust him one damn bit.”

  “Didn’t you want to sleep with him at one point?”

  “Let’s just say if he had knocked on my door, I wouldn’t have said no.”

  Yvonne laughed. “You’re such a hussy.”

  Goatsack snapped, “Now!”

  The team emerged from the woods, Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns tight to their shoulders.

  The SORT leader aimed his HK at the two women. “Don’t move!” With his linebacker bulk wrapped in a ballistic vest festooned with flash-bangs, flex-cuffs, and extra magazines and his head covered with a tactical helmet, Goatsack knew he probably looked like a human tank rolling up on them.

  Yvonne nearly jumped out of her skin. “Holy crap!” she exclaimed as the team formed a wall of black Kevlar around her and Bonnie. “You boys scared the hell out of me.”

  Bonnie proved to be a bit feistier. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get those damn guns out of my face.”

  Behind her, a tall, lanky SORT member named Michael “Goodbye” Goddeau stepped forward and nudged her roughly between the shoulder blades with the muzzle of his MP-5. “Shut up,” he snarled. “Or I’ll put a bullet in your spine right here, right now, and make you go bye-bye.” That was why the team called him Goodbye—because he was the quickest on the trigger, always ready to kill at a moment’s notice. But he never called it “killing.” He always called it “going bye-bye,” in some kind of psychological glitch that made him feel better about what they did.

  Two other SORT boys—Ken “Duck” Dukette and Todd “Happy” Gladden—moved forward and relieved the women of their radios, taking away their ability to call for help. Then Pete “Sirius” Pelkey and Nicholas “Red Cent” Lincoln slapped flex-cuffs on them.

  Yvonne looked worried. “Is this some kind of drill? A training exercise or something?” She wriggled her wrists within the plastic cuffs. “Damn, you think you put them on tight enough? They’re cutting off my circulation.”

  Goodbye kicked the women in the backs of their knees, collapsing their legs out from under them. They both slumped into kneeling positions in the dirt.

  “Asshole!” Bonnie snarled. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Goatsack crouched in front of them. “I’ll make this short and sweet. Well, not so sweet for you, sorry to say. No, this is not a training exercise. This is an execution. You two babbling bitches have been making noise about calling for a congressional inquiry, and that really pissed off Nazareno.”

  At the word “execution,” Yvonne’s face blanched ghost-white.

  Bonnie proved to be made of sterner stuff. “Heard rumors you jerkoffs were working for that scumbag but didn’t want to believe it.”

  “Oh, you can believe it.”

  “Then let’s get this over with,” she snapped. “What’s the plan?”

  “Simple,” Goatsack said. “Drag you down to the firing range and pump you full of bullets, so it looks like you accidentally crossed a live-fire exercise.” He shook his head in mock sadness. “Tragic, really. You two should have paid better attention to where you were walking.”

  Yvonne looked like she was about to faint. Her eyes turned glazed and glassy with the dull sheen of shock.

  Bonnie spat, “You’ll never get away with this.”

  Goatsack smiled without mirth. “The investigators have already been paid off, the coroner’s report will say ‘death by stupidity,’ and the BOP bigwigs will sign off on that assessment before Nazareno’s money even hits their offshore accounts.” The smile vanished quicker than a sleight-of-hand magician making a card disappear. “Face it, sweetheart, you screwed with the wrong people.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “Funny.” Goatsack smirked. “I think that’s exactly what Big Belly over there wanted to do.”

  Big Belly grabbed his crotch and cut loose with some exaggerated pelvic thrusts. “Not too late, boss. She’s gonna die anyway. Waste of good female flesh, you ask me.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody asked you, so keep it in your pants.” Goatsack stood up and waved his finger in a circle, signaling the team. “Get ‘em down to the range, boys.”

  They cut through the woods, walking along a game trail that clung to the bank above the brook that fed water into the brackish bog. Trout darted in the stream, and deer droppings peppered the path.

  The prison’s outdoor firing range had been constructed on the southern edge of the bog, with a high sand berm serving as a backstop. The range was one hundred yards long, with mechanical targets at one end and covered shooting benches at the other. Farther back, nestled in the woods at one hundred and fifty yards, was a sniper’s nest. Behind the benches loomed a small cabin where the team stowed some of their equipment. A generator shack squatted a little farther up the drive.

  As the SORT team and their two prisoners emerged from the woods, Goatsack spotted two corpses sprawled at the edge of the bog. The foot of one of the corpses—a Hispanic male covered in demonic tattoos—actually rested in the black water that gave the bog its name. The other corpse—a black man with bargain-basement tats that identified him as a Blood—slumped face-down next to him, arm slung across the Hispanic’s chest in a lover’s embrace.

  Goatsack gave the bodies a quick once-over. Looked like they had died last night and been dumped here this morning. The Hispanic had a horrific head injury, his skull split wide open from crown to bridge of his nose. The Blood was missing his eyes—just mushy, gore-soaked craters remained—and his neck was broken, twisted spinal bones bulging grotesquely beneath the death-mottled skin.

  The SORT leader grunted, happy it was autumn and not summer. The summer meant flies, and with these kinds of wounds, the corpses would have been crawling with the things, hundreds of them, enough that the insectile buzzing would have been heard from twenty meters away. But the coolness of fall had killed off all the bugs.

  Duck ambled over and took a look. As the team’s secondary sniper, he lived for headshots, which he nailed with staggering consistency. The team said the only way to avoid being killed by Dukette was to duck, and that had become his moniker. “Losers from last night’s Pit session?” he asked.

  Goatsack nodded. “Looks like. That means the corpse detail will be along shortly. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Ten-four.” Duck began shoving the two women toward the target end of the range.

  Goatsack stared at the butchered bodies for another moment. The Pit was what the inmates called the gladiator-style fights held in the prison’s mothballed textile factory. They weren’t a regular occurrence; they only took place when Nazareno called for them. The combatants battled to the death, often with various weapons. The bodies of the losers were dragged down here to be dunked in the bog, never to be seen again. The winners lived to fight—and die—another day.

  The SORT leader turned away. The corpses weren’t his problem. A couple of correctional officers would escort an inmate work detail down here at some point today and dispose of the deceased.

  His job right n
ow was to create two more bodies. It was a regular murder fest at Black Bog Federal Prison these days.

  As he stepped over to the firing range, he saw Yvonne blubbering pathetically, face wrinkled with fear, streamers of snot oozing from her quivering nostrils. “Please,” she begged. “I have a granddaughter. She’s only five years old.”

  Goatsack ignored the pleas. His blackened, calloused heart had long ago immunized itself against such pathetic, desperate attempts to appeal to his humanity. He accepted blood money from a savage drug lord and slaughtered in his name. His humanity had disappeared in the rearview mirror years ago.

  Bonnie stayed defiant in her final moments. Flex-cuffed, on her knees in front of the targets, she stared daggers at Goatsack. “I’ll see you in Hell, you son of a bitch.”

  The SORT leader gave her a slight nod as the team lined up, weapons at the ready. “You can bet on it, sister.” Then he raised his HK and flicked the selector switch to full-auto mode.

  His team waited, fingers on triggers, for his command.

  He didn’t drag out the moment.

  “Light ‘em up!”

  Nine submachine guns rattled to life in near synchronicity, hurling 9mm death downrange at 1,300 feet per second. Yvonne died screaming her granddaughter’s name—“Charlene!”—while Bonnie stayed hard as nails to the bitter end, screaming obscenities—“Fuck you, assholes!”—as the bullets ripped the life from her.

  The merciless salvos chopped them open and shredded their vitals. They shuddered and jerked and twisted beneath the high-velocity impacts. The hammering force smashed them over onto their sides, dead and blank-eyed as rivers of blood soaked into the dirt.

  When the guns stopped their lethal chatter, silence swept in like death’s cold wind to take its place.

  It didn’t last long.

  “Rest in peace, miserable bitches,” Happy intoned as he performed a tactical magazine exchange.

  Red Cent chuckled. “More like rest in pieces. Hot damn, we shot the hell outta them.”

  Goodbye called, “Hey, Big Belly, you still wanna have a go at ‘em?”