Rob Thurman - Slashback

“I know.” He bounced again. “But his face .” He laughed and handed the knife back to me, not pretending he didn’t covet it. “People can be so stupid. I betcha when he tells his friends how it happened I’ll be seven feet tall and so full of muscles I almost couldn’t fit in the car.”

“Rambo in the most cunning disguise.” I started back down the street searching for Junior’s truck. I didn’t spot it again until we were at home. There it sat in his driveway. I groaned. “Hookers. . I mean, prostitutes disappear every day for different reasons. I’ll check the papers for the next few days, but even then, we won’t know.”

“You won’t know.” A hand patted my arm as we crossed the street. “You’re smart, Nik, but sometimes I don’t think you’d know the house was on fire ’cause you were waiting for the oven timer to beep. You think too hard about the little things and not about the big things.”

Cal smiled happily and it wasn’t a good kind of happy, not for me. I’d seen this particular brand before. I tensed myself for what was coming. It would be painful and it would make my brain hurt, but there was no getting around it. Cal’s mouth could not be stopped.

“Hey, you know what? We could burn down his house.”

Cal

Present Day

I liked fire.

Not in a sick arsonist burning down a nunnery full of kittens way. But if something had to be burned down or up or sideways, I didn’t mind being involved. It was better than fireworks and no annoying noise. . or not until the fire trucks arrived.

“It’s an abandoned bridge. Yeah, they were going to fix it up but of course they haven’t gotten around to it.” I waved a hand at the Google Earth pictures Niko had printed off. . never mind, we all knew what High Bridge over the Harlem River looked like already. “It’s stone and metal. Can’t burn that. But we can get a garbage truck, soak the garbage in diesel fuel for more smoke and a longer burning time, push our way through the concrete barriers off Amsterdam Avenue with the truck, drive onto the bridge, dump the garbage, light her up with my flamethrower, and torch the fucker. Or at least half of it. We need the other half to fight on. If Jack Sprat doesn’t notice that then we’ll get him a Seeing Eye dog and forget worrying about his homicidal and blind ass.”

This was perfect and going right at the top of my resume.

“You cannot have come up with that on the spur of the moment,” Niko protested with what sounded a good deal like suspicion and hope mixed into one. I tried to get a fix on whether he was proud or appalled. I was hoping for both. I did love to mess with Nik.

“Sometimes I get bored. When I get bored, bam, mental mass destruction is my hobby. I’ve had this one on file for a while now.” Did I say that smugly? A little. I asked Goodfellow as Niko appeared too scarred for words, “It’s a gift, yeah?”

“It is that. I could not be more proud if you were a trickster yourself. I wish you’d been around for the whole Trojan horse event.” Something wistful and somewhat secretive shifted behind his expression but he kept that gleeful grin on his face. “Somehow there would’ve been at least a thousand pounds of flaming horse manure involved. Homer would’ve loved penning that part of the tale.” He took out his cell. “Garbage truck. Give me three minutes.”

“You can locate a full garbage truck for us in three minutes?” Niko sounded curious despite his automatic caution. After a few years the combination of Robin and me was beginning to send him into Stockholm Syndrome I thought. About time. It would be better for his mental health if he closed his eyes and enjoyed the roller-coaster ride.

Robin smirked. “In five minutes I could find you a tanker truck of boysenberry-flavored self-warming body oil and six men and women willing to apply it. Care to put it to the test?”

While he made his call, I was digging out the fruits of one of my own from under my bed. I’d made the call last night after our encounter with Jack to my weapons supplier, Rapture. She’d recently added delivery service-you got your weapons in an hour or ten percent off. . and as always a free cupcake from the bakery that served as a front to the best weapons dump in the tri-state area. That was what I loved about NYC. You could get anything delivered.

I’d decided to up the ante, weapons-wise. Since explosive rounds didn’t work and I couldn’t open a gate and turn Jack into an explosion himself, the bastard, for fear of turning us or innocent bystanders into the annoying potential of hamburger-textured collateral damage, I went with a nice piece I’d been going to hit up Nik for Christmas. An MP7A1 Heckler and Koch submachine gun with suppressor. Compact, not quite twice the size of my Desert Eagle and with the added bonus of forty armor-piercing rounds. If that didn’t make a dent in Jack, I didn’t know what would. He was too damn fast to depend on the leftover grenades I’d also shoved under my bed.

Oh yeah. I made another grab. We needed the flamethrower. This was shaping up to be a party.

“I have the garbage truck and the location to pick it up.” Robin disconnected his cell and checked his watch. “Two minutes forty-five seconds.”

Niko gave Robin and me both a curdled expression: Goodfellow with his smugness and me with an armful of weapons meant to make people go dead in the night. “I know the two of you want me to praise your excellence in thievery and your preparation to kill anything that might escape Jurassic Park .” I did love that movie. “But any encouragement on my part would only push you to greater heights and the eventual destruction of Western civilization. I’m going to get dressed. Cal, unless you want to fight in a T-shirt that says ‘ With a good spotter, snipers can find the G-spot every time ’ and a pair of sweatpants, you might want to as well.”

I decided that wasn’t a bad idea, more as I didn’t want Goodfellow volunteering for the spotter position. I went with the usual black shirt and dark jeans for night-fighting, but didn’t take my leather jacket as usual. The MP7 hung from a shoulder strap and I dug a knee-length black coat out of the winter-wear pile of clothes on my floor. Nik and Goodfellow went with the long dusters to cover their swords but the last thing I needed was to get snagged climbing over some fifteen-feet-tall chain-link fence and hanging there like an idiot-locked and loaded and nowhere to go. The flamethrower I stuffed into a large duffel bag and hoisted it on my shoulder.

Back out in the living room, I gave the most evil fucking grin I had in me. “Is this gonna be fun or what?”

It was not fun.

I plowed the garbage truck through four Jersey barriers, destroying the top half of the walls on either side of the bridge with the garbage truck-I’d remembered the bridge being wider last time I was in the neighborhood, but what the hell? They were planning to renovate anyway. Braking at the middle of the bridge, we dumped the diesel fuel, obtained from Goodfellow’s car lot, into the garbage, then covered the last half of the bridge with it. Backing away, I lit it up with the flamethrower. All-you-can-eat arson-come and get it. If Jack couldn’t see that. . if Russian cosmonauts couldn’t see that from space. . then I didn’t know how to do my job. And while there were a whole shitload of things I didn’t know how to do, my job wasn’t one of them.

It was a good plan and all we needed was Jack to show up and he had. It had looked like it was our turn now. An enormous cloud of billowing black, as dark as the smoke rising from the flames of the burning diesel fuel, had appeared, blocking our way off the bridge. That was fine. We weren’t looking to run off. We were looking for a fight. There had been the spark of those electric blue eyes, the crackle of what I thought might be lightning in the cloud and then it was gone. Jack had vanished-but he’d left some friends. And he did his little trick a few more times. He was a low-flying ace strafing us with bombs of the undead.