Crusade For Vengeance (Dark Vengeance Book 2) (10 page)

“Milicevic!”  Hanna’s voice called through the building, using Valerie’s pseudonym.  “Someone here to see you.”  Valerie looked up with a frown.  Hanna never did that.  She would either come herself or use her com.  Putting down the screwdriver she was using to fix a much heavier door onto one of the rear rooms, Valerie walked down the corridor to the stairs.

The entire building had changed a lot in the past two weeks.  Deni got the power on within a few hours and after a couple of days scrubbing everything, it became quite habitable.  It helped of course, by Ghetto standards, Valerie brought a small fortune with her.  Items like beds, tables, chairs, kitchen units, cooker, fridge, freezer and all the other things a home needed, were easily obtained.  The permacrete plugs for the windows in the rear section took a bit more work, but a few bribes at a construction site had fixed that.  Once the door Valerie was working on was in place, it would almost be impenetrable.

Deni and Hanna were in their element.  Zeus wasn’t their home turf of Inferno, but as Hanna pointed out on their way in, it was almost the same.  In days they connected with the local street kids, swapping food, cash and sometimes just a safe, dry place to sleep, for information.  One of the downstairs rooms was converted to a dorm with bunk beds.  It hadn’t even occurred to Valerie that was how you would go about getting the local kids’ loyalty.  The girls drew on their own experience and knew how important a safe place to sleep was.

When she got to the top of the stairs, Valerie took in the situation.  The bay doors were open, as they normally were when it wasn’t raining.  Hanna stood at the bottom of the stairs, her pistol visible in its holster at her waist.  Deni was at the back, behind one of the old wrecks, the Mag rifle kept there for just this reason, propped on the hood and aimed past Hanna.

A man stood smiling in the yard, a few metres from the door.  A reasonably new and well maintained wheelie parked behind him, two men and a woman stood by it.  All were armed, the three obvious Enforcers by the car, with Mag rifles and the Boss with a pistol at his waist.  The rifles were all pointed casually the ground.

There was no threat here.  As per Valerie’s standing instructions to whoever got there or to the other defensive positions, Deni would have her rifle aimed at the one furthest to the left she could get a clear shot on.  Glancing behind her as she made her way slowly down the stairs, Valerie could see the four or five kids, who were always hanging around had made it to the bunk room and were peering round the doorway.  As long as they kept their heads down, the permacrete walls would protect them from any stray shots.

Hanna was the most vulnerable.  She was out in the open, but Valerie solved that by stepping past her so she was now in front of the girl.

“You’ll be Ripper, I presume?” she asked nonchalantly.

“Oh, you do know who I am and yet you set up in my territory, in somewhere I’ve said is off limits, without asking my permission.”  Ripper said harshly.  Valerie decided as he finished, it wasn’t worth leaving him alive.  He wouldn’t deal.  The question was, could she kill him and take over his gang without destroying it completely?  Having his network working for her would be much easier than building their own from scratch, no matter how well the girls had done already.

“Yes,” she said in the same nonchalant manner.  “The kids around here did mention you and the fact this place used to belong to the previous Boss.  You declared no one was to use it after you took over.  I just didn’t think someone that petty was worth my time.”

He reacted just as she thought he would and reached for his pistol.  In a blink of an eye, her left hand was clamped on his right, his fingers only just on the pistol butt, and held it in place.  In the same movement, she drew her pistol with her right and jammed it beneath his chin, pushing his head back.

“Move and he dies!”  Valerie shouted.

Caught completely off-guard, the Enforcers all froze, their rifles still aimed at the ground.  Deni waited and held her fire.  All the continuous training worked.  If she killed one of the Enforcers, they would not have frozen.  All of a sudden, they saw Deni’s rifle and Hanna’s pistol pointed at them, while their Boss was held completely at Valerie’s mercy.

“Is Ripper a good Boss?”  Valerie asked the Enforcers.

He may not have realised what he walked into, but Ripper wasn’t stupid.  He immediately saw what Valerie was doing.

“Don’t... Ack.”  She squeezed his hand tighter, the bones rubbing against one another, shutting him up.

“Well?”

“He, erm.  He’s alright, as they go,” one of the men replied, his bald head starting to glisten with sweat.

“Pay OK?”  Hanna called.

“Could be better,” the same man answered.  His eyes darted to his colleagues, but they kept quiet.  Their attention was all on the two girls who had them squarely in their sights.

“How about a fifty percent increase and you all work for me?”  Valerie asked.  “I’m sure you’ve heard how I treat the street kids.  Do I sound like someone you would want to work for?”

They all looked at each other nervously.  A few shrugs and nods went between them before the bald man turned to Valerie.

“Alright.  We’re in.  Erm.  What about him?” he said waving in Ripper’s general direction.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Valerie replied as she holstered her pistol and kept his hand still in a vice like grip.  “He’s not a problem anymore.”  Her right hand slammed forward, palm out, up into his nose.  His head snapped back with a small burst of blood and his body collapsed to the ground, the bone from the nose driven into his brain.

Turning to the three Enforcers she asked.  “Do you know anyone who would have a problem with any of that?”

***

Pulling into the bustling yard, Valerie parked the wheelie, previously belonging to Ripper, to one side and got out.  Cracker did the same from the passenger side.

“Any problems with that lot?”

“No, Guv,” the head of her new Enforcers answered.  “I’ll make sure our people keep on top of it.”  Cracker had been the one to speak up before she killed Ripper.  There was certainly more to him than most people would see from his appearance.  Shaven headed, broad and thickly built with a broken nose, he gave the impression of the typical thug.  He reinforced this by leaving his forearms bare to display his tattoos, which were common in the Ghettos of Zeus.  It was one of the differences not readily apparent when they first arrived.

“Good.  You know where to find me,” she told him and headed into the Workshop.  It had now been fully open for business for a month.  Mechanics were hard at work on several vehicles.  Music from a local radio station played loudly in the background.

With Ripper out of the picture, Valerie left the girls at the Workshop and went with the Enforcers to Ripper’s former base.  There was some resistance at first, but it hadn’t really taken much persuading to convince the rest of his gang to fall in with her, particularly after she dealt convincingly with Ripper’s number two, who took it quite personally, and promised them all a larger cut of the profits.

It didn’t take much time to secure the territory, making sure everyone knew she was the one in charge.  Deni suggested opening the Workshop up as a legitimate business, to make all the comings and goings less obvious.  It was a good idea and even made a difference to the local area.  Valerie learned Ripper’s Protection cut from the local businesses was actually far too high.  They struggled to stay afloat and a lot of them closed down, including all of the local workshops.

Out of work, experienced mechanics were easy to find and now, people had somewhere close by to bring their wheelies in for repair, business was brisk.  Several people came to her for loans to start up shops, bars, tattoo parlours and other enterprises.  Valerie was certain she would not be around to see it, but it was nice to think she might leave this area behind, in a better state than when she arrived.

Several people greeted her as she came in.  She nodded back at them before heading up the stairs two at a time.  The first two rooms were the offices for the Workshop itself and Deni waved from her desk.  It was all her idea, so Valerie gave it to her to run.  It would be good experience for her and Valerie really had no idea how to run a business.  Deni hired some good people, including Cortez, a mechanic with experience as a supervisor elsewhere.

The back rooms were sealed off by the very heavy metal door Valerie installed.  The lock was state of the art and the encryptions had been improved by Hanna.  No one would be able to get in who wasn’t supposed to be there.  The gang members and legitimate workers realised early on Valerie was a private person, though not nearly as bad as she had been on Blaze, so they presumed the back rooms were just her and the girls private quarters.  If they knew the truth, they would have run as far away as they could manage.

A short corridor led to a second identical door.  Valerie made sure the first was shut before going through the second.  On her right was a solid wall continuing past two doors on the left before turning right.  Along there were the actual living quarters, made up of three small bedrooms and a kitchen unit.  The first room on the left held their weapons, ready for easy access and included Valerie’s FPBA.  The second one was Valerie’s destination.

Inside, banks of the most powerful servers they were able to buy commercially lined the walls.  In the centre sat a purpose built desk with wires sticking out all over the place and open ports, showing the solid state circuit boards.  Hanna’s legs stuck out from the bottom.

“How are you getting on?”  Valerie asked her.

“Ettin ere,” was the muffled reply.

“Sorry?”  Hanna scooted out from underneath and took the screwdriver out of her mouth.

“Getting there.  It’ll never be as good as my Rig at the Sun.  Too many off-the-shelf components and while I learnt a lot from Sneaker and Ironworks, when we put that Rig together, it’s a lot different to do it on your own.”

“Don’t worry about it.  You’ve done a brilliant job in not a lot of time.”  Hanna looked around at what she built and shook her head.

“I hope so.  How did it go with Cracker?”

Valerie leaned against the door frame and nodded.  “It went well.  I think the Pimps got the message and more importantly so did Cracker.  The law has been laid down to them and he understands what I expect out of his Enforcers.  He’ll make sure his people live up to their name and keep the Pimps in line.  I’ll give it a week for the word to spread properly and then we’ll do the same for the Dealers.”

“Good.”  The steel in the girl’s voice was perfectly understandable to Valerie given Hanna’s history.  “Valerie,” she continued in a more normal tone.  “What are we doing here?  We’ve put down some pretty thick roots.  I know we need a network of sorts, but this is going a bit far.  Deni said we’ll actually be making money on the Workshop.”

“The people we’re going after will be right at the centre of the Pantheon Family networks and that means they’ll be right here on Olympus, if not Zeus itself.  After the law firm Granath and Dietze, Pomykala put us on to, there will be other layers of protection.  We could be here for a while chasing those leads down.  If you were searching for someone, would you look at a thriving gang, legitimate business or someone holed up in a bolthole somewhere?”

Nodding, Hanna looked thoughtful.  “I can see you’ve done this before.”

Not exactly,” Valerie smiled and shook her head.  “This isn’t standard protocol for a Legion covert insertion onto a hostile world.  Outside of the Pantheon, the criminal gangs are always on the local law enforcements radar and will be tracked or under some sort of surveillance.  The Legion taught us to avoid them.”  She couldn’t help the slight snort of disgust.

“Here, they’re ignored as the Manuals problem and considered to be not worth the police’s time.  I saw how little police attention Sneaker got.  I don’t think anyone in authority has realised just how good the gangs are.  I was very surprised at the competency shown by Sneaker and all the Crew.  Even Tumbler ran her gang smoothly.  When we took over her area, it was very well organised.”

“Huh.  I never looked at it that way.”

“No reason for you to.  I’ve probably got what you call a unique perspective.  Anyway, I need you to look into something for me.”

“Of course.  What up?”

“Here,” Valerie handed over a slip of paper.  “I need everything you can find for the security at that address.  There’s no rush.  If you think you need more work on your Rig first, do that.  It’s more important to not get caught.”

“Valerie, I don’t tell you how to go around killing people, so please don’t tell me how to do my job.”

Holding her hands up in surrender, Valerie smiled.  “Sorry.  You’re right.  I’ll keep my nose out.  Let me know when you’ve got the info.”

“Will do.  What about floor plans?”

“I don’t need them.  I’ve been there quite a few times.  I just need to know what security I need to avoid getting inside.”

“Oh, whose address is this?”  Hanna said frowning.

Valerie took a breath before answering.  “Tom’s parents.  I need....” the words were difficult to say.  “I need to see his mother.  There are a couple of questions I need to ask and... she needs to know what really happened to her son and grandchildren.”