Read Online Crazy Cool by Tara Janzen - Free Book Online Page B

there been another gun besides the Remington? Another gun besides the rifle he’d paid five thousand dollars for some underpaid grunt at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, to steal off the firing range? The rifle he’d had this reject Army Ranger drive all the way across the country so he could use it to kill another idiot in Denver?
    “I left it on the roof, just like you said.”
    Perfect. The police would find it, and find Christian Hawkins’s fingerprints all over it. This time when the street scum went down, he was going to stay down. Birdy’s employer had waited years for justice to be served again, and it was Birdy who was going to give it to him—again.
    “And the fireworks?”
    “They kept everyone distracted.”
    A stroke of genius. A dramatic stroke to be sure, but everything about the Prom King Murder had been dramatic, a media circus full of spectacle. Birdy had wanted to recreate that atmosphere, to savor it, and besides, he liked a little drama, if it was of his own making.
    “How about your part of it? How’d that go?” the ex-Ranger asked.
    Perfectly, of course. Birdy always executed his own plans perfectly.
    “Katya Dekker needs better locks on her doors,” Birdy said drolly.

C HAPTER
    6

    Rosalia, Colombia
    I T WAS HOT, a hundred fucking degrees even at midnight.
    Kid Chaos watched the last drop of condensation roll down his beer bottle onto his hand. Eight empty shot glasses were lined up in a neat curve on the other side of the beer, flanking a fifth of the local firewater, real rotgut cane whiskey. The bartender called it
aguardiente.
Kid called it novocaine, but the only damn thing it was numbing was his hunger. He hadn’t eaten in two days, not since Hawkins had left, and he hadn’t stopped drinking since the Marines had been extracted late this morning.
    It was stupid, not eating, but every time he tried to eat, he threw up. The only thing he could keep down was beer and rotgut.
    The Marines had offered to go UA for him, Unauthorized Absence, so he wouldn’t have to stick the god-awful waiting out alone, but he’d turned them down. They’d had their asses on the line for him and J.T. for three weeks, long enough for a mission that had gone bad, and actually, it was easier being alone—easier to get drunk, easier not to talk.
    And the waiting was over now. It had ended about oh- seven-hundred that morning.
    Lifting the fifth, he tilted it and ran it over the top of the shot glasses, filling them all. Eight was his lucky number. He didn’t know why. He’d been eight when his mother had finally left for good. In eighth grade when he’d crashed his brother’s motorcycle and broken his collarbone. Eighteen when he’d joined the Marines.
    Setting the bottle aside, he picked up one of the shot glasses and downed the whiskey.
Geezus Kee-rist.
He sucked in his breath and gave his head one hard shake, waiting for the fire to go out or work its way into the empty pit that was his gut.
    How in the hell, he wondered, was he living on this stuff? Or maybe he wasn’t living on it. Maybe it was killing him, and that’s why it felt so bad.
    A movement in the corner of the room made him go still, except for the finger he tightened around the trigger of his M249 SAW, the big motherfucking machine gun cradled in his lap.
    The drunk at the far table gave him a woozy look, then dropped his head back down in a puddle of spilled booze and passed out all over again.
    Kid eased up on the trigger. He and the drunk were the only two people left in the shack that passed as a cantina in Rosalia, Colombia, a collection of hovels and huts a couple of kilometers from the infamous Caño Limón pipeline. Everyone else had cleared out at oh-two-hundred, at exactly the same time a beat-up old pickup had roared through town and made a real quick delivery, dropping a long box off the bed without bothering to stop.
    It was just as well that they hadn’t stopped. The SAW put out seven hundred rounds a minute,