Killer Instincts v5 (10 page)

I contemplated all this for a while. "Still, my chances would be pretty slim, wouldn't they?"

Richard smiled at me, one eye on the road. "Slim to none, but you can't ever let that fact get to you. I've had to roll a hard eight more times than I can count, but I'm still here. The key is to be prepared, to never think about giving up, and to make sure they are more afraid of you then you are of them."

"I'm guessing that's easier said than done."

"Don't worry, you'll get used to it," Richard assured me.

After another fifteen minutes of driving down a series of ever-worsening desert roads, Richard motored the Suburban up a broad, low hill towards a dilapidated shack sitting on the summit. As we drew closer, I could see that while the small wooden building was pretty run-down, it was far from falling apart. Sturdy wooden shutters protected the windows, and the door looked like it was solid and well-fitted to the frame, without the usual warping and separating that comes from long exposure to the elements.

Richard pulled the Suburban up near the front door, killed the ignition, and drew his pistol, the heavy stainless-steel automatic steady in his hand. "Stay in the car until I call for you. If I go down, get into the driver's seat and get the hell out of here."

I looked from the cabin to Richard, nervous. "You think there's going to be trouble?" I asked.

"I always think there's going to be trouble. That's why I’m still alive."

Richard slipped out of the Suburban and slithered over to the cabin, moving quickly and smoothly. I was incredibly unnerved by how he was able to move from the vehicle to the corner of the building without seeming to cover the intervening distance.

Richard moved around back behind the cabin, and a few moments later, emerged from around the other side. Further scrutiny of the steps and the front door took a few more moments. Finally, Richard waved me out of the Suburban. I gave the whole area a final look-over, then climbed out of the Suburban and walked over to Richard. The entire time, I felt like there was a target painted on my back.

"The dust and sand around here is so fine, it's impossible to enter or exit a building without leaving signs you've been there. No one's been inside or skulking around," Richard explained.

Getting the Suburban unloaded and the cabin returned to a habitable condition took the better part of two hours. Richard went inside first, disarming a series of "surprises" in various locations throughout the small structure. He assured me he only armed them when he was gone for long periods of time, but the thought of a neglected booby-trap blowing me to pieces set my teeth on edge.

Although he lived a few hundred miles away, Richard had bought this cabin several years ago as a "bolt-hole" to use if his own residence was ever compromised. The cabin was simple and rugged, with a main room right inside the door containing a cast iron, wood-burning stove that served as heat source and kitchen range. There were a couple of chairs, a table, and a cot in this front room, along with a pair of large locked steamer trunks. Although the room was without decoration, there were a pair of glass-chimney oil lamps mounted on the walls, as well as a more modern gas lantern hanging from a peg inside the doorway.

In the back of the cabin there was a short hallway with a room on each side. One of these was Richard’s bedroom. It consisted of a cot, a chair, and a wooden chest in the corner, with a candle sitting in a wrought-iron candle-holder mounted to the wall. The third and final room was a storage pantry, containing shelves of canned and dried goods, lamp oil, medical supplies, a five-gallon gas can filled with gasoline in case a vehicle needed to be refueled. There were also several five-gallon cans of potable water and a number of sundries such as large containers of matches and boxes of tools. Several larger implements hung from hooks, such as axes and spades.

All in all, the cabin was clean, well-stocked, and suited to our purposes. I was sure a man such as Richard, who had little qualms about living without the luxury of power or modern amenities, could have set himself up here for a week or three without any trouble. But there was one minor detail missing.

"Here, give me a hand with this." Richard gestured towards the water cans.

We dragged them across the floor and out into the hallway. Stepping back into the room, Richard proceeded to carefully lever up several of the floorboards in the far corner of the storage room. In a few moments, he exposed a hole in the floor nearly a yard square, revealing a small pit underneath the cabin. Richard climbed down into the pit. I could see the excavation was deeper than he was tall, and at six feet Richard wasn't a short man. This was some hidden storage area for those things Richard couldn't afford to lose if someone successfully broke into the cabin.

I could hear Richard rummaging around, and soon he was placing a number of cases and boxes on the storage room floor.

"Take these and put them in the main room. We're going to be needing this stuff over the next month," he said to me from down inside his cache.

The cases and boxes were fairly heavy, and it didn't take a genius to figure out most of them contained weapons and ammunition. Some of them were actually old army surplus ammunition cases, scuffed olive-drab sheet metal containers with orange stenciling saying things like "5.56MM NATO". Others were plastic, aluminum, or even wooden cases that no doubt held firearms. There were smaller cases the size of a lunchbox, probably containing handguns, while others were long and flat and thin, no doubt for longer guns.

Once we had unloaded all the weapons and ammunition from Richard's underground cache, we began organizing the supplies he had brought with him in the Suburban. Several new gun cases and ammo boxes went down into the cache before we covered it back up. More water cans, cases of bottled sports rehydration drinks and packages of energy bars, dried meat and fruit and canned goods, as well as more fuel and other living amenities such as toilet paper.

"There's no running water, but there's an outhouse around back. It's simple, but it's also in good shape and with the right amount of lye and other chemicals, fairly odorless," Richard explained.

I realized why we had so much water. There wasn't even a well here, up on this low, gently sloping hill, and I knew we were going to try to remain isolated as much as possible over the next month.

"The water we brought with us, along with the bottled drinks and the water here at the cabin, should get us through the first week," Richard explained. "We'll take a drive into town now and then to resupply, but the less contact with the locals, the better. They've seen me off and on enough to not ask any questions, but you're new around here. Explaining your presence is just another complication."

By the time we unloaded, unpacked, shelved, stored, and settled in, it was well into the evening, with perhaps only an hour of daylight left. Richard assigned me the relatively simple task of preparing dinner, but I didn't mind. I had already seen this was going to be a mentor and apprentice dynamic like you see in the movies. Trying to argue that "I'm here to learn how to seek vengeance on my enemies, not sweep the floor and cook dinner!" wasn't going to get me anywhere, so why bother with the drama? I knew I needed hardening. My life until this moment had been that of a soft, wealthy, white-collar kid living on easy street. If I was going to dish out what the Paggianos deserved, I needed to turn myself into something much, much rougher around the edges, and be quick about it.

I dug around the pantry and acquired the necessary kitchenware. In moments like this, I was thankful that my family wasn’t in love with the typical “meat and potatoes” Irish diet. My parents were a pair of epicures, and my sister and I were taught the basics of preparing meals at an early age. I boiled some rice and dried beef, then added cans of black beans and tomatoes, along with a little chili powder. Finally, I heated a package of soft flour tortillas on a flat cast-iron skillet.

Richard and I helped ourselves to the meal of simple burritos while sitting on the front porch of the cabin, watching the sun set off in the west. Coming from the urban east coast, you never understand what all the fuss is about until you go to Texas and watch a real sunset in the desert. Sitting on the porch of an old log cabin, next to a grizzled local wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a battered straw hat was just added gravy. Richard even brought along three bottles of Tecate for me, still cool after their long voyage next to some cold packs inside an insulated cooler.

"That's the only alcohol you're going to have for the next month," Richard warned me, "so enjoy it tonight. Starting tomorrow, you're going to need to stay sharp and avoid anything that's going to throw your system out of whack, because you're not going to be very gentle to your body over the next few weeks."

After dinner, Richard and I got down to business. One by one, we opened his gun cases and unpacked the ammunition and weapon magazines, laying everything out in neat and concise groupings by weapon type and category, ammunition and magazines next to their respective firearms. When we were done, Richard began to talk me through an introduction to each weapon.

Richard started with the pistols, working from smallest to largest. The first handgun he showed me was a little revolver, a blued steel Smith & Wesson with a two-inch barrel and substantial rubber grips.

"This isn't a fire-fight gun by any means, it's strictly for backup and close-in work. A lot of people dismiss the snub thirty-eight as a useless gun, but within five feet, a good trigger-man can get all five slugs center mass within two seconds. Get in close and empty it into your target, and I can guarantee you he won't be getting back up. Plus, no hot brass bouncing up into your face in the middle of a tussle, and without empties lying around, there's less forensic evidence."

"What happens," I asked, "if I need more than five bullets?"

"If you can't punch the ticket on some knuckle-dragging goombah with five shots after I'm done with you, I'll eat my cowboy boots."

The second handgun was a sexy-looking little Beretta automatic, matte black, with several fat magazines and what I assumed was a suppressor about half a foot long.

"The Beretta .32 auto is a good balance between stealth and firepower. It's got a twelve-round magazine and it's accurate enough for most handgun shooting. When you fit it with the suppressor, it's quiet enough that anyone nearby, who isn't familiar with the sound of a suppressed handgun, won't know what they're hearing. You could probably shoot a man in one room of an apartment, and someone in the next room would hear a noise like a fist punching a pillow. It's a good gun to have when you're not sure whether you need a combat handgun or an assassination piece."

"The bullets look kinda small," I said.

"It's not the size of the bullet, it's where you put it in a man that counts."

"I feel a little uncomfortable with you saying that to me," I replied, earning myself a stern look from Richard.

The third pistol wasn't much larger than the Beretta, but aside from being a compact handgun, the similarities ended. Where the Beretta was sleek and sophisticated looking, this pistol looked like a child's representation of what a gun might look like, molded from a block of plastic putty. Richard had a suppressor for it as well, although the tube was both wider and longer than the suppressor for the Beretta.

"This is going to be your primary fighting pistol, the Glock 19 nine-millimeter automatic. The magazine holds fifteen rounds, so you've got sufficient firepower, and the nine millimeter cartridge is plenty of punch for a new shooter like yourself. There's no safety catch for you to forget in the middle of a firefight, and the short trigger pull means the muzzle doesn't wander too far while you're taking your shot. It's simple, effective, accurate and reliable. It's also lightweight and compact, so it's easy to carry and easy to hide. You're going to make this little gun an extension of your own hand by the time I'm done with you."

"Won’t that make going to the bathroom a little dangerous?" I asked.

"Don’t come crying to me if you shoot your pecker off, dummy."

We moved on to the three long guns. The first was a stubby-barreled shotgun with a folding stock. At first I thought it was some kind of pump shotgun, but Richard informed me it was actually semi-automatic.

"This is a Remington 1100 auto-loading shotgun. Four twelve-gauge shells in the tube under the barrel, plus a fifth you can load right into the chamber. With some practice, you can get all five shots into a target in less than two seconds, just like the thirty-eight. But, with a man-killing load like double-ought buckshot, that's forty-five pellets. Probably more lead down range than any submachine gun in the same amount of time. This brute will kick like a mule, especially if you're just using the pistol grip and not the stock, but you're not looking for precision. This is the gun you want when you need to walk into a room and tear everything apart in a couple of heartbeats."

"I suppose the same caveat that applied to the little revolver applies to the shotgun," I said.

"If you can't do the deed with five loads of buckshot, I'll eat my boots
and
my hat."

The second long gun was a rifle with a short, overly thick barrel, a folding stock, and a small, sophisticated-looking telescopic sight. A small lever with a round knob reminded me of a deer rifle, but the overall impression was something a lot more menacing and dangerous.

"This is a custom-built weapon based on a little-known beauty called the DeLisle Commando Carbine. It's a bolt-action rifle that fires subsonic forty-five caliber pistol ammunition, and the barrel is actually fitted with a integrated suppressor that's second to none. British Commando units during World War Two would use the originals to silently kill German sentries and perform other clandestine assignments. While it's not completely silent, within an urban sniping environment like you're likely to work in, you'll be able to take shots out to a hundred meters and your targets won't hear a thing except their brains hitting the sidewalk."