Page 25 of Triple Threat

When things were right, I would talk to her about these things.

I had this burning feeling I needed to apologize to her, for dropping her.

Did she think I had forgotten about her?

How mad at me would she be for losing her?

A handful of yellowjackets outside of Nashville let me put a few more hours on the road before I surrendered to exhaustion and checked into a shitstain of an interstate-side motel. I saw hookers before I checked into the room, but I wouldn’t have fucked them with a dead man’s dick. The escorts that I would spend my money on were almost a form of royalty, not desperate creatures turning tricks for… I shuddered and tried not to think about it. About Sadie and the state that I’d found her in...had she?No. She wouldn’t have. Not the Sadie I knew.

I slept for a few hours, shoes still on my feet and a Desert Eagle pistol within easy reach.

I saw Memphis while the sun was rising, crossed the Mississippi River before deciding that the local country ham was wasted on a biscuit and discarded both out the window. No wonder diabetes and high blood pressure were a national crisis. Arkansas was overcome with only one stop for fuel. Lunch was a nameless BBQ stand outside Texarkana. It was good, good enough that I felt a moment of sadness that this would probably be the only time in my life that I would ever see this place. It went against most of my own instincts but when I went back to get a few brisket sandwiches for the road, I gave the old man behind the counter a hundred-dollar tip.

I drove toward what I considered the puckered butthole of Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. I deviated from what would have been a straight shot through the city, but all the Chinese owned toll roads and the thirty some odd dollars I would have to pay to use those roads angered me on a fundamental level. The detour was validated by my own sense of victory over those assholes.

It was near sundown when I pulled the truck into the parking lot of the rundown hotel across the highway from the truck stop in Oasis. It was a small town in the middle of nowhere, existing outside of the triangle of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. It was dreadfully flat, and everything seemed burned by the fury of the sun. I felt like I had driven two hundred years into the past, looking at sun-bleached buildings, cracked asphalt, and businesses that only survived because of the lack of competition. The surroundings were bleak, a few cracked plastic fast-food joints, an olive drab army surplus store, and the machinery that was constantly in motion, pulling oil up out of the ground.

This place was so small and miserable that there wasn’t a single big box store to be seen. It seemed like the largest buildings around were either oil tanks or churches.

I felt a strong desire to return to the mansion on Bootlegger Head. It was green and wet; the sun wasn’t a hateful thing beating down on us there. Again, my thoughts wanted to wander to Sadie. I couldn’t afford to be distracted, thinking about being on top of her, inside of her, not when there was wet work to do. I had to close my eyes and concentrate on clearing my mind.

Focus.

The nearest airport was in San Antonio, and if the Death Squad had eyes on any airport for incoming trouble, that would be the one. I mean, that would certainly be the one that I would watch.

Roan was planning on some sort of technological wizardry where it would look like the potential assassins and heat would be coming into the Dallas airport and heading toward them, starting in a day and a half, or two. That would set the Death Squad looking over the horizon for their foes. They had to know their reckoning was coming. Why else would they have retreated to a fortress in the middle of Texas?

I drove past the road loading north from Oasis to where the Final Prophecy Center was.

The compound was somewhere between laughable and frightening. There was one hill, probably the only hill in the thousands of square miles of central Texas, and right on top of it, there it was. Squat corrugated steel, a pointed steeple, it absolutely had to be religious nuts, like the Branch Davidians in Mt Carmel.

One of the things that those wanna-be cultists forgot about or didn’t plan for was utilities, or the property upkeep.I doubted that these fuckers would make the same mistakes.

There was a single motel near the compound, and as I drove through its parking lot, I saw one of the Death Squad members. A rangy young man with a patchy black beard, shaggy hair, and a sleeve of peanut butter cups on the hood of his truck, harassing a few women with his attentions as they walked by. Part of me knew that taking care of him would feel like a public service.

How many creatures like him had harassed Sadie?

While the Death Squad seemed to have eyes on the seedy motel, they didn’t seem to be minding any of the rental houses or apartments, or the easily overlooked Manzana bed-and-breakfast.

There was nothing of interest in Oasis, just oilfields and scrub. The place could just as easily have been northern Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even Egypt where there weren’t any pyramids or giant stone tombs.Roan and I definitely wouldn’t have made such an egregious error in overlooking the place, but these guys were scrubs by comparison.

The couple that owned the B&B were friendly and gracious, glad for a customer paying cash. I picked the room on the second floor, facing the hill and compound in the distance. There was a little bit of small talk. They mentioned that the compound had changed hands a few times, and they were glad that the old occupants were gone. The new tenants seemed okay, kept to themselves, and the only noise they made was that helicopter that came and went.

Interesting.

The room was perfect, as was the small veranda attached to it. I carried my bags up and unpacked. Two bags were my usual travel companions, low profile and made for aircraft luggage compartments—my clothing, toiletries, the normal things everyone needed when traveling. The other two were the interesting ones. The attaché case with its handsome red leather contained a quadrotor drone, control handset, and a wireless repeater.

I could fly the drone, or Roan could. I pulled it out and checked it for damage, wiping the lenses of its robotic eyes, and making sure everything connected properly. The batteries were green, and in less than ten minutes, all the internet connections were made and the screen on the control console was showing me the inside of my room. I clicked a few buttons and cycled through the visual modes. Low light was blinded by the daylight, thermal looked fine, and the digital and optical zoom worked fine. After a few seconds, Roan pinged in that the drone looked fine and was online. He couldn’t take control of it until I released the rotors, a clever little red clip that kept the machine from wrecking itself if he tried to launch it too soon. He would be my eyes in the sky.

The second case was much heavier than it looked and it contained no fewer than six firearms. It was lockable, fireproof, impact resistant and I could attach it to the undercarriage of almost any vehicle I cared to drive. It could roll through anything short of a complete vehicle disassembly inspection, or an x-ray backscatter scanner.I opened it up and ran my hand lovingly over what was inside.

A .45 Longslide pistol with red laser dot. T-800 approved.

A 9mm Beretta 92FS with compensator. Good for killing vampires, werewolves, and whatever else got in my way.Just kidding. It would be nice, but all I had for target practice these days were scum, soldiers of fortune and various other sundry mercenary types.

Also in the case, was a 7.62mm Heckler & Koch SR9. It was an import and gift, a splendid jackal sniping rifle.

Next up, a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, because sometimes you need a really big bullet.

---