The King (15 page)

If you enjoyed this excerpt from

The Rock Star

then please enjoy this excerpt from

The Casual Critic

Coming soon…

Chapter 1

The Ice Queen looked out from under the wet tree limb at her target across the water with blood in her eyes. Reckoning was at hand. Her hand itched for the cold steel of the rifle. He finger twitched in anticipation of pulling the trigger. Her usual detachment was broken because this was personal…

“What do you think?” she asked as she finished typing and held the iPhone out in front of the dog.

She didn’t actually expect him to read it but still he tilted his massive white and black head, popped his ears up, and looked at her with his startling blue eyes as if to say, “A little over the top.”

She laughed as she reached out and rubbed her hands through the thick, wet hair around his ears, “Yeah you might be right, Jinx, but like the doc said, bad thoughts written down will go a long way to keeping me from bad actions.”

Before she’d saved Jinx, she’d always wondered how someone could talk to their dog. But then the doc had told her that talking to a dog was just an excuse to hear the words she needed to hear out loud. The dog didn’t have an intelligence like a person, but he definitely had a personality. When she spoke, the dog reacted, and that made her feel a little less insane talking to him.

She’d been developing a relationship with Jinx. She’d saved him, nursed him back to health, fed him, gave him a place to sleep, and spent nearly every waking moment of the day with him. In return, Jinx listened to her ramble, looked at the screen when she’d written more of her latest novel, and pushed his head up under her hand whenever he could.

They were connected, and that connection was new to her. Before, she could never be linked to anything. She’d always been instructed that there was an inherent risk in any type of relationship that could be exploited by an enemy.

Even a name was something she couldn’t be bound to. The identification and credit cards in her backpack had the name Zoe Jack on them. That had been taken recently, and would be lost soon. The hair sticking out from under her hat was the brown of the wig that covered her own strawberry blond, green contacts covered her blue eyes, cotton balls in her cheeks changed the shape of her face, and that would all change when she moved positions.

Identities and facial characteristics could be tracked and recognized, and if either of those things happened, she could be found. Bad things would happen if she was discovered.

The dog whimpered. She opened her eyes and found her hand gripping the skin on Jinx’s neck in a balled-up, white-knuckled fist.

“Oh boy, I’m so sorry,” she said as she popped her fist open and started petting him as gently and playfully as she could.

He pitched up from a sitting position and bowed his back under her hands as if to show her that he was forgiving her. The motion helped relax the tenseness that had pushed its way through her muscles. Even the briefest thought at what she would inflict upon anyone who found her was enough to send a quiver of fury through her body.

“Calm, calm, calm…” she repeated as she tried to cool herself down.

She wasn’t that person anymore.

She was going to change.

At that moment she was Zoe, and Zoe didn’t have those thoughts, because Zoe was a happy person, Zoe lived in the present, and never let her head drift into the past.

She held up her phone, about to try and flush those thoughts out by continuing to write her story, but movement behind razor-topped, seven-foot-high, chain link fence let her know that the shift change had started for the defense department contractor at the dock.

Looking down at her watch, Zoe saw that it was 5pm on the dot, just like it had been nearly every day for the months she’d been watching the shifts change. The only occasion the schedule changed was when there was a project deadline, or a larger container ship that pulled up to the dock needed to be turned around a little quicker. Even then, there was just a little overlap, because the contractor didn’t want to have to pay the unionized dock workers the exorbitant overtime rates they’d negotiated.

The contractor had multiple buildings, shifts, and duties. Inside, the workers were involved in research and development, manufacturing, and inventory. Outside, they were the crane operators, supervisors, and riggers who loaded and offloaded the ships that came in through the Puget Sound loaded with parts or maintenance projects, or were taking out finished inventory to the various naval bases for delivery. Inside, a large portion of the workers had security clearances; outside they mostly didn’t. Inside was the high tech kind of work that took intelligence and education. Outside they were doing the grunt work of moving big heavy stuff.

The facility had a similar structure to the military organizations they worked for. Security needed to be maintained because of the projects they were working on and the people they employed. It was the same as any military base or defense contractor she’d been tasked with infiltrating around the world. They tried to vary schedules, shifts, and procedures to avoid the kind of predictability that was in itself a vulnerability. But she’d found that if you watched any facility for long enough you could find the rhythms and weaknesses that could be exploited.

If her goal was to get into the facility, she would come through the water at night. If she needed to get out, she would have placed targeted charges on multiple points along the chain link fences. If she needed to disrupt or slow down the plant, she would have blown the motors on the cargo cranes that loaded and unloaded the ships. Or she would have blown the power lines going in. If she needed to put a bullet in the head of a specific individual, she’d just wait for the right shift change and do it from the exact position she was sitting in right now, on the other side of the fence across the water, up a hill, in a thick grove of trees. It would be an easy shot.

Jinx pushed his head up under his hand as if he sensed that she was starting to get aggravated again. She bent down and rubbed her fingers roughly through his hair, up and down his back.

“Thanks, buddy.”

She couldn’t turn off the training, even as she was trying to change. It was rooted too deeply. No matter how much she wanted to leave it behind, she couldn’t help but see access points, escape routes, and kill boxes.

“I’m not doing that anymore. I’m a new person,” she said as she balled up her fists, closed her eyes and tried to push the thoughts away.

She wasn’t on an assignment, she wasn’t working for anyone else, this was personal. Her goal wasn’t elimination, it was modification.

Zoe opened her eyes and looked at past the fence to the rigger she wanted to find. He was easy to spot. The group of workers all seemed to be friends: joking, happy at the end of the day, talking to each other in groups.

He was the one man walking alone.

*  *  *

Richard Trollingham breathed a sigh of relief as he got into his truck and cranked up his stereo. His co-workers gave him looks, but he didn’t care, there wasn’t a one of them that he didn’t completely despise. He fought back his natural urge to flip them all off, because he was already in disciplinary review for what was called “confrontational behavior” in the workplace. Which was just another way of saying that he called them on their bullshit and wouldn’t back down from any one of them.

The sweet sounds of Metallica played loudly put him in a better state of mind. The speed and aggression of the band seeped into his body, getting him ready to take a few aggressions out as he drove home. Trollingham saw every trip behind the wheel as an opportunity to point out the stupidity of everyone on the road as he played his favorite auto-aggression game, Bumper or Brake.

The goal of the game was plain and simple, just piss off as many people as possible. There were only two rules in the game. If he was behind someone he rode their bumper; if he was in front of someone he slammed on his brake. If he got drivers to slam on their brakes, glare at him in the rearview mirror, hit their horn, or make some sort of obscene gesture at him, then he scored.

If he actually got them to get out of the car and confront him, then he had a legal right to defend himself, in which case he got to beat the crap out of someone with an arguable legal justification. But as long as he’d played the game he’d never been that lucky.

He was happy it was finally raining. The sun had been out for far too long. The sun made people in the Pacific Northwest way too happy. Rain agitated them greatly, while it also added a risk factor to his driving games, and both of those things put a smile on Trollingham’s face.

Speeding up, he brought his car within inches of the car in front of him. Then he slowed down. Then he sped up again, getting even closer. Before he backed off again. No brakes, but he could see the glare in the mirror. He did it again. No horn, but he continued to get an angry stare.

Angry looks were points, so he was scoring. He never kept a running score, and the point meant nothing in particular, but getting the reactions were enough.

He pushed his car up next to the bumper again and the eyes in the rearview mirror flared open in anger.

“What are you going to do?” he asked as he moved aggressively up in his seat, clenching his fists down hard on the steering wheel.

They turned the corner together, Trollingham moving even closer still. But still no brakes or horn, and then the fun ended as he moved into the turn lane and the other car continued straight. The man, someone he slightly recognized from the factory, seemed ready to glare at him and maybe flip him off.

But as they came next to each other at the stoplight, Trollingham stared down at him, ready for the confrontation, and the man made the angry turn, but quickly looked away as he saw Trollingham’s ready face.

The reaction made him laugh.

It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. His face did that to people.

He would push them into furious lather, and they would be ready to throw down, right up until they got a look at him. He rarely got a chance at an actual confrontation.

Staring at the man next to him, Trollingham chomped at the bit for the man to even glance in his direction so he could roll down his window and start to yell, or better yet jump out of the car and take a run at him. But the man just stared forward, a bead of sweat rolling down his jaw, his bottom lip trembling, until the light changed and he screeched away as fast as he could.

“Pussy!”

The game continued as the green arrow flashed on the signal at the intersection and he started to turn. He was in his favorite position, first to turn on a two lane road that had a double yellow line that didn’t allow anyone to pass. It was the perfect place to play the “Brake” portion of “Bumper or Brake” because the law stated without question, no matter what, if you hit someone from behind you were always at fault.

By turning as slowly as he possibly could, he was able to strand a whole line of drivers at the light behind him, all of whom scowled at him with hate-filled eyes. Which Trollingham considered more points in his game.

Deliberately pegging his speed at five miles under the speed limit, he enjoyed watching the frustration building on the face of the little man in the little red SUV right behind him. Trollingham judged the man to be a father of two who needed to get home before his nagging wife found another reason to scream at him. That was too fun to pass up.

The road in front of him meandered up a hill, before it rounded off at the top and headed down into town on the other side. The two lanes of the road were packed with traffic in both directions and bordered by trees on either side.

Trollingham had created a large space between the cars in front of him by going slow, while the cars behind him were bunching up. The rain had picked up, so the road was slick, and the wiper blades were pounding furiously back and forth on the windshields of the cars behind him, which meant their vision would be impaired. The frustration of all those drivers was pitched through the roof with his already slow speed, so they were driving closer than they should in the rain. All of it meant a higher degree of difficulty, which he added to by increasing his speed a little to build up momentum as they started down the massive hill into town.

Then he slammed on his brakes.

The tires locked up a little, and slid across the wet pavement. The cars behind him all went sliding in different directions.

The eyes of the man behind him were wide and scared. He must have thought there was a reason Trollingham had slammed on the brakes.

There wasn’t.

That was the whole point.

Trollingham was disappointed to see that there were no actual collisions, but he still scored a lot of points from the frustration and anger of everyone he’d scared.

But the game wasn’t over.

Slamming his foot down on the gas, he took off down the hill. It took a moment for the man in the little red SUV to regain his composure and start driving again. Eventually he came rolling down the hill, thinking he was going to get up to the speed limit and make it home before the screaming from his wife began. Trollingham kept his eyes on the mirror, waiting for the man to try and make up the time and distance behind him.

And when he got close enough, Trollingham slammed on the brakes again.