Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Read online

  But moving fast is what Trapp himself would have done, and so he was here.

  As he popped the trunk of the Corolla and removed a gallon jug of water, as well as a couple of smaller – empty – plastic bottles. Next to those he placed his black backpack on the ground, which was stuffed with everything he might need tonight, from binoculars to ammunition. Finally, he removed one of the sets of license plates that he’d stolen from the impound lot.

  They now sported a Velcro rear, just like the ones presently attached to the vehicle in front of him. It took the switching time down from thirty seconds to just five – and more importantly, eliminated any possibility that he might lose the multitool in a critical moment.

  Another variable, he thought with a wry smile. So what have I missed?

  After quietly pressing the trunk shut and pulling on a pair of gloves and a beanie hat in place of the baseball cap, he started carting the supplies up into the abandoned concrete shell that was once supposed to have been transformed into luxury apartments.

  At least, that was what the branding promised, still partly visible underneath layers of graffiti and dirt on the wooden fence that circled the site. Trapp wondered exactly how pleasant they would truly have been. This wasn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood which young professionals payed top dollar for.

  Probably why the developer went bust.

  A metal ladder still ran up the side of the building, secured by looped nylon rope at every story. Trapp gave it a shake and came away mostly satisfied that it would hold. He had a pack of cable ties on him for just this purpose. He only needed to scale it once to finish the job.

  It only took two trips up the ladder to haul up all the supplies he had brought with him, plus a garbage bag within which to cart out the trash. That was a vital part of the job, he knew. If things went the way he thought they would, then the LAPD, FBI, DEA and probably even ATF would come down on the scene hard. It would be alphabet soup – and it might only take a stray hair or a fingerprint for them to make him their prime suspect. He didn’t think his army file contained a sample of his DNA, but they definitely had his fingerprints.

  He moved around as far away from the edge of the concrete shell as was possible, keeping his frame low in order to minimize visibility from outside. His cover was just about workable – capable of surviving a grilling under the cover of darkness, but it wouldn’t hold up to any more forensic examination than that.

  He set his gear down on the right-hand corner of the third story behind a sheet of blue canvas that was billowing in the late evening breeze. He crouched down low and reached out to grab the bottom of it, pulling it toward him and instantly silencing the flapping sound it was producing. He secured it, and for a short time his position was entirely obscured from the outside.

  It didn’t take long to assemble his hide, which consisted simply of netting with dark fabric attached to break up his form. Mostly, Trapp was relying on the darkness to shield him – that and the element of surprise.

  They don’t know you’re coming for them.

  The bulk of his gear was set back a few feet from the edge, along with the remote switches. Once the rifle was assembled and loaded, and several spare magazines of ammunition set alongside his firing position, he allowed himself a couple of moments to rest.

  But not long. Trapp checked his watch, noting that it had now been two hours since he’d placed the call to the Odysseus press office. That was too quick, wasn’t it? No matter how wealthy these assholes were, they weren’t the US military. Surely they didn’t have a strike team ready to deploy at any moment on American soil.

  Did they?

  As he pondered the question, Trapp reached out and pulled away the section of blue canvas that shielded him from the street. Once it was gone, his position afforded him clear visibility of Chino’s entire house, including both the front and back yards – in short, all conceivable directions from which an assault could come.

  He scanned the street, committing every garbage can, streetlight, and piece of trash to memory. Of which he possessed a good one, trained by bitter experience on the roads of Iraq that any change in his environment could spell danger. He didn’t expect to encounter any IEDs tonight, but if anything changed, he wanted to know about it—fast.

  Thankfully, Chino’s neighborhood was of no interest even to those who resided within it, and there were few enough of them. Both the street and sidewalk were empty at this time of night.

  Next, Trapp lowered his right eye to the scope on his rifle and searched for the telltale white mark he’d left on the inside of the fence that ringed Chino’s backyard. It was more difficult to make out in the gloom, but just barely visible. Certainly obvious enough to hit even through iron sights at a distance of just 40 yards. Unlike with a pistol, he’d back himself to put a half dozen shots within a one-inch grouping at a hundred with the rifle in his arms on a bad day, so that wouldn’t pose much of an issue.

  “Just try me,” he murmured into the darkness.

  The excitement didn’t come until just past midnight. Zero dark, in the lexicon of the life he had so recently left behind. It was a time of night at which the human eye naturally begins to weary.

  “Get fucked!” a voice yelled from between two pools of light thrown by the well-spaced streetlamps that studded the area. Trapp spun toward the sound, leading with the barrel of his rifle.

  It hit a scaffolding pole that extended a couple of inches out from the shell of the building and resulted in an orchestral clang that made him cringe. Instantly he froze, hoping that the damage wasn’t already done.

  A drunk stumbled into view, carrying something in his right hand and shuffling in the telltale fashion of a man more than a few cups deep. He swayed in a zigzag pattern from one side of the street to the other, singing lustily, though not with any lyrics that Trapp recognized.

  He wasn’t even sure they were words.

  He watched the drunk lever his arm back and hurl whatever he was holding in his right hand down at the ground with all his force. Whatever it was – a glass bottle, by the sound–exploded against the road surface, causing Trapp’s heart to beat a little faster.

  As the man walked directly underneath a streetlight, now cursing himself for wasting his drink in a fit of pique, Trapp studied him through his magnifying scope. He was light-skinned. Caucasian, probably, or perhaps Latino. It was difficult to make out through the filth layered on his skin. Even from seventy yards away and forty feet into the air, Trapp’s brain filled in the smell of the clothes on the hobo’s back.

  There but for the grace of God go I.

  It was the truth, and Trapp knew it. Perhaps if he had carried on down the path he was traveling before he met Shea, he might have ended up just like this man one day. Perhaps he still would.

  “Get your head in the game, dumbass,” he whispered.

  The time for introspection would come later; he had no doubt about that. Plenty of dark nights of the soul lay in his future. Tonight was dark, too, but it was for the living.

  The homeless man chose that moment to stumble over his own feet and pitch head-first toward the curb.

  “Dammit,” Trapp grumbled beneath his breath, anxiously straining his eyes through the scope to make out whether the guy was even still breathing. Had he hit his head on the way down?

  Is it even your problem if he did?

  Trapp didn’t want to answer that question. Not right now. Because answering it meant either calling emergency services on his own position or watching a man die and doing nothing to help.

  Thankfully, the drunk gave him an out. It took thirty interminable seconds, but he finally moaned something inaudible, then twisted over so he was lying on his back. His cries carried up and down the street, louder and more pronounced every time. “Ow, oww, owwww…”

  At least you’re alive, buddy. It was looking like it could go either way.

  The hobo pulled himself toward the sidewalk an inch at a time and propped his back up against a str
eetlamp. In the glow, Trapp noticed a rivulet of blood dripping down the man’s forehead, and although he knew he should feel compassion, he didn’t.

  Instead, he was irritated.

  This damn drunk was right across the street from Chino’s house. If the shooting started, he’d be liable to get a stray round right through that bleeding head of his.

  Trapp listened to the man’s moans ebb from his lips for the next thirty minutes, never moving his eye from the scope. By the time he fell silent, occasionally throwing a mournful look at the smashed liquor bottle on the street a few feet away from him, he felt like he knew him better than his own family.

  Although that wasn’t hard.

  A creeping, parasitic worry wormed into Trapp’s brain. Could this man be an Odysseus operative? Was it possible they had already sent a mercenary to watch Chino’s house?

  His finger tightened on the trigger, trembling as he pictured squeezing it, imagined the round’s powder charge sparking into gas and flame and smoke and sending a bullet rifling down the barrel, across the short gap of empty air, and between the drunk’s eyes.

  And then the man stood.

  If anything, his gait was even clumsier now than it had been when he first ambled into Trapp’s line of sight. Maybe he really had hit his head.

  Trapp watched in numb shock as the man on the street below fumbled with his belt – or at least, the string that appeared to be holding his pants up – and dropped them to his ankles. He shuffled along another half a dozen steps, ending up standing in front of a garbage can.

  “Oh, come on…” Trapp muttered. But he couldn’t bring himself to look away, even as the sound drifted up on the breeze, and a dark trickle of liquid ran out the base of the garbage can and into the street, pooling a few yards from the hobo’s feet.

  He jerked his eye away from the rifle’s scope, remembering to maintain his situational awareness. He was too focused on this guy. His gut feeling was that the drunk was exactly what he seemed to be.

  And even if he was an Odysseus mercenary, then Trapp knew it wouldn’t serve him to focus his attention on only one location. The major weakness of his tactical plan was that he was only one man, covering two access routes against an unknown number of assailants.

  Finally, the sound of urination faded away. The hobo slowly pulled up his pants as Trapp returned his eye to the scope. In the same woozy, unsteady fashion, the man trudged up the street, leaving the puddle of smashed glass, and another of dark urine, behind.

  Trapp kept watching until he was sure the man was gone, only then removing his eye from the scope a final time.

  As he did so, a black SUV turned around the corner and tapped the brakes.

  34

  Trapp’s watch read 0304 as the SUV rolled to a stop outside Chino’s front door. The second he noted the time, he understood what was happening, and that it was for real. A couple of hours before dawn was the period of the night in which the human body was at its lowest ebb.

  “Shit,” he whispered as endless waves of adrenaline were injected into his veins. His vision started to narrow, his palms to sweat, his heart to thump inside his rib cage. He reached for the row of radio switches and pulled his hand back like he’d been stung. It wasn’t yet time.

  Pull it together, soldier.

  The rear door on the right-hand side of the SUV opened slowly and quietly, startling Trapp, who had expected the assault to begin instantly and with vigor. His finger twitched on the trigger, and for a second the urge to open fire was almost overwhelming.

  He understood the urge for what it was: a natural reaction to the fear swelling within him. Millions of years of evolution were urging him to throw himself into battle without waiting to think. The body’s inbuilt subroutines hadn’t yet caught up to the relatively new era of the dominance of the human brain.

  Or firearms.

  But he called instead on his training to suppress the urge to throw himself into battle and simply watched as a man jumped out of the back of the SUV. He raised something to his shoulder.

  Gun.

  The realization flashed like a lightbulb in Trapp’s mind. If this was Iraq, then his rules of engagement would have allowed him to open fire. But he was operating under a different command now – and more pertinently, he was on his own. He couldn’t allow himself the catharsis of opening fire on just a single individual. He had no brothers by his side to handle the others who would inevitably pour out of the vehicle below and train fire on his position.

  No, his only option was to wait them out. To hold steady until they stumbled into his trap of their own accord.

  He detected a sound like a man spitting, and the bulb in the streetlamp above the SUV shattered, instantly plunging the circle underneath into darkness. A second later, two further spits rang out, and by the time the glass was falling through the air to tinkle against the surface of the road, Trapp’s mind had categorized the sound as that of a BB gun being fired.

  Okay, non-lethal, then. Does that change things?

  It was smart, he realized, even as the light faded away beneath him. The men in that SUV were no doubt equipped with night vision goggles. They would be as at home in the dark as the day. Unlike him.

  But that advantage won’t last.

  His eyes took a few seconds to adjust, and even then he knew that it would be long minutes until they were fully adapted, by which time this scuffle would be over, or he would be dead.

  As a final streetlamp died, the neighborhood was plunged into almost complete darkness, lit only by the city glow reflecting from the sky overhead. As the glass finished falling to the ground, the three remaining doors of the SUV swung open quietly, and an equal number of men emerged into the night.

  As Trapp squinted through his scope, one eye closed, he wasn’t even certain that they were armed. Acid rose at the back of his throat, and he felt almost nauseous from the waves of adrenaline assaulting his body. He wanted to light these bastards up, to give them no quarter. He wanted their last thoughts to be of shock as lead fell like rain through the air around them.

  But then he thought of Shea. How she would react if she woke up – no, when – and he told her what he’d done in her name?

  No. Do this right, or don’t do it at all.

  They were well trained. That much was instantly clear. The four men moved as a unit, splitting into two groups: one for the front of the dilapidated house, one for the rear. Trapp watched as they flashed hand signals at each other, indicating where to move and when.

  And as he watched, a flicker of rage ignited in his stomach, burning away the nervousness and the nausea. He had been in their shoes more times than he could remember, fighting on a foreign battlefield against an enemy that lurked around every corner.

  But he had done it for his country, not for the promise of coin or wealth or power. When the Army extended his deployment by months, he complained – but never argued. Because sometimes you had to eat shit for a cause that mattered.

  These Odysseus mercenaries had no such honor. And the mere fact they were operating on American soil – American streets – was simply abhorrent to his very soul. He had sworn an oath to protect America against enemies both foreign and domestic. And though he was no longer in the employ of the US military, his duty hadn’t changed one bit.

  Then he saw it.

  A raised rifle outlined against the wood as the rear assault team snuck around the fence that surrounded Chino’s backyard. It was no toy this time. It didn’t change anything, and yet it also changed everything. The rules of engagement were as clear here as they had been in Iraq.

  If they were armed, he had every right to open fire.

  And still, he waited. This had to go perfectly. There were four of them and only one of him. He had two advantages on his side: surprise and the benefit of a raised and concealed vantage point from which to carry out his attack.

  But in a gunfight, the weight of lead has a way of winning out. So Trapp knew that it was vital to even the odds be
fore the Odysseus thugs realized it was time to return fire.

  He pulled his eye back from the scope and studied the scene. The two men at the front of Chino’s house were clearly visible now that his eyes were halfway adjusted to the gloom. One was twisting the latch that held the front gate closed. With his ears straining to pick up every sound, spurred on by the adrenaline flooding his system, the metallic squeak sounded like a scream. Inside the house, though, it would have been inaudible. Had Chino been inside, lying in bed or watching television, he would have had no warning of what was to come.

  Trapp glanced to the right, searching for the two men who constituted the rear assault team. He couldn’t see them, which meant they must now be obscured by Chino’s backyard fence. They could be only moments away from executing their assault.

  He breathed out, returning his eye to the rifle’s scope and pivoting back to the front of the house. The rear entrance into Chino’s home was locked, bolted, and had a sofa pushed up against it for extra measure. Unless the Odysseus mercenaries were packing heavy explosives, they would be held up longer than they expected.

  The two mercenaries at the front of the house were positioned on either side of the front door. One had taken a knee, crouching in front of the lock, and had his rifle slung over his right shoulder.

  “Bad move.”

  Trapp reached for the first of the radio switches. The battery was already connected, and half a second after he depressed the button, a spark fired about 50 yards away as current surged through the wires of an electronic igniter. The spark was connected to a length of firework fuse that was linked to another and another and another. They burned in turn.

  He held his breath.

  A muffled command carried on the early morning silence. By the time it reached Trapp’s position, it was inaudible, but the meaning was clear. They were about to begin their assault.