LITMIR.BIZ

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it’s Dev at the desk. Some blond bastard by the name of Steele came by, telling me he was called in by you,” the message said. “I have the rest of security keeping an eye on him, but I didn’t want too much of a clusterfuck.”

      Scalia sneered and hit the button for the main desk. “Dev?”

      “He bluffed his way past me, pretending that he knew you,” came the answer from Lebron Devlin. “I got a look at his gear, and I’m scanning his cell for signals. All he has is two pistols, a big fuckin’ hog and a Glock or somethin’.”

      Scalia sneered. “Get everybody to surround him and ready to move in. This guy is trouble!”

      The door clicked and Scalia looked away from the phone for a brief moment. The doorway was filled with a broad, grim-looking bastard in a loose leather jacket, cold eyes glaring from under a brooding brow.

      “No need to go all-out for me,” the guy said. “I’m just here to talk, not to fight. If I were here to cause shit, Dev wouldn’t be talking right now.”

      Scalia swallowed. “So…let’s talk.”

      The blond hulk in the doorway smiled, took a step in, and the door clicked in the ominous silence.

      CARL LYONS COULD SEE the look of realization on Arno Scalia’s face when he opened the door. The Able Team leader knew that he wouldn’t have a lot of time before attracting the attention, and potentially the wrath, of the organization’s security. He was glad that he was able to continue his bluff, riding the wave of audacity and confusion among the mobsters all the way to the boss’s office.

      “So let’s talk,” Scalia had told him, and Lyons closed the door behind him. There was a pleasing quality to the mobster’s uncomfortable silence that only added to his graveyard grin. Scalia wasn’t a small man, and the .45 auto he’d drawn from his desk drawer could easily have caused him some trouble, even with his body armor.

      However, Lyons knew the value of intimidation and also realized the strength of adapting personality to the conversation. When he had been in the lobby, he was simply one of the guys, blowing smoke up people’s asses and getting accepted. Now, when he needed some questions answered, he had slipped into crazy-caveman mode. The grin he wore was pure cockiness, but the glint of determination in his eyes signaled a willingness to spill blood by the bucket.

      Scalia picked up on that insanity, which, coupled with Lyons’s thick, muscular form, was a warning beacon.

      “You…know that I have to maintain some secrecy for my organization…” Scalia said. “Professional…”

      “Yeah, right, whatever,” Lyons cut him off. “If you know why I’m here and suspect who I learned my trade from, then you know that I’m not here to listen to you jack off at the mouth. I want answers or I’ll take blood.”

      Scalia’s lips tightened into a bloodless line, his eyes flicking to the phone on his desk.

      “Sure, hit your panic button, Arno. That’s not going to save your life,” Lyons said.

      Scalia returned his gaze to Lyons’s face. “I’m sure I know why—”

      “Then I don’t have to ask you any fucking questions, Arno,” Lyons snarled. “Don’t stall.”

      Scalia nodded. “You’re wondering about some military stuff that went through here.”

      Lyons nodded. His eyes burrowed into Scalia, who shifted uneasily in his seat and swallowing hard. Lyons knew that while there were ways to get information out of people—and he’d been forced to utilize torture at times for the sake of last-minute expedience—the best interrogators got their answers just by force of will. These types of interrogations were Lyons’s favorite. There was no blood, there was no moral quandary, and the answers weren’t the first lies screamed that made the pain stop. The Able Team commander was not a murderer or a sadist; he was a warrior and a seeker of justice.

      “Well,” Scalia began, “we took the shipment and waited for them to bring their own trucks. We didn’t look inside, especially since the bosses made sure we didn’t fuck it up. They’re scared.”

      “But you know who I come from, don’t you?” Lyons asked.

      Scalia looked down, breaking eye contact. His bald dome was beaded with nervous sweat that rolled down his forehead in rivulets. “I don’t want to say his name.”

      “You do know my friend Mack,” Lyons said.

      Scalia visibly shuddered, his cheeks tingeing green as if he were fighting off a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. “Th…th…they said he was dead.”

      “You think you can kill the devil made flesh, come to collect the souls of you damned petty thugs?” Lyons asked, his voice dropping to a deep, rumbly baritone, tapping every movie about exorcism he’d ever seen as a boy. “The living spirit of murder and terror does not die, no matter how much you shoot him or burn him.”

      The acrid stench of urine suddenly filled the air as Scalia messed himself, tears joining the cascade of sweat droplets crawling down his face. “Oh, God…”

      “If you had any pull with Him, I would never have found you,” Lyons said, standing, leaning forward with his knuckles on the desktop. He was bent close to Scalia’s face, his growl low and unholy. “Confession is your only salvation.”

      Scalia flinched, one eye squinted shut, the other a mere sliver. “Please, Father in Heaven…”

      “Now you find religion, after moving illegal automatic weapons and drugs across the country?” Lyons asked. “Your hypocrisy makes you an even more tasty treat.”

      “Okay…okay…we sent out the crates to Idaho,” Scalia said. “We figured they were machine guns for the militias.” Lyons nodded.

      “To make their own state. You know how crazy they are,” Scalia said.

      “But they are honest in their hatred, if inaccurate as to the cause of their failures,” Lyons returned. “Idaho. Do you know where?”

      “Just that the drivers let it drop that they were headed in that direction,” Scalia said. “They wanted to know the road conditions and such….”

      “How do you know that they weren’t leaving a false lead?” Lyons asked, easing back down.

      “Because I called the slip in, and an hour after that driver left, his corpse was found in a Dumpster three miles away,” Scalia answered. “These fuckers didn’t mess around.”

      “A Dumpster. You and your people take care of the body?” Lyons asked.

      “Not my department,” Scalia replied. “But his ass didn’t go to the morgue.”

      “How long ago was this?” Lyons asked.

      Scalia’s eyes widened.

      “How. Long. Ago?” Lyons repeated with a growl for each word.

      “Three days,” Scalia said. “So they should be in Idaho, even if they made rest stops, though I doubt it. There were multiple drivers for each rig.”

      Lyons grimaced. “We’ll find them.”

      “And what about me?” Scalia asked.

      “You can make it easier for me to keep an eye on this operation, or the next,” Lyons said.

      “Are you kidding me?” Scalia quizzed. “They know that I talked to you…”

      Lyons picked up Scalia’s 1911 and let out a shrill, frightened scream, firing the entire magazine through the door. Once the slide locked open, he turned to Scalia. “This is going to hurt, but you’ll wake up.”

      Scalia was frozen in wide-eyed horror as the big burly blond pulled the biggest revolver he’d ever seen from under his leather jacket. With a flick of the wrist and a sharp, searing flame across his forehead,

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