7. Six

I woke up to the sound of someone banging on the side of my trailer.

“Boone!” came Leo’s panicked voice along with more pounding. “Boone, let me in! This is important!”

I groaned and sat up, which was a mistake. My head throbbed and the back of my throat burned. I smelled like the urinal in an abandoned brewery, and it felt like the whole damn building had come down on top of me. Every time Leo’s fist rattled the side of my trailer, it was like he was tapping right against my optic nerves.

Fighting nausea, I threw open the tiny bedroom window. “All right. Fuck, what is it?”

“I hacked into Xavier Laskin’s computer like you said.” Leo swallowed and reached up to adjust his glasses.

If my face didn’t hurt so bad, I would’ve rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and? What’d you find?”

“I got the files you wanted, but there’s something else. Something you should see.” He shifted the laptop he was cradling in his arms like an infant.

I scrubbed my hands over my aching face. “Fuck. I’m too hungover for this shit. Get your ass in here and start some coffee. Let me jump in the shower. Key’s under the mat.”

I went into the bathroom, noting that Xion’s room was empty with a little drop in my chest. The kid had been good enough to put me to bed the night before and then gotten up to go to work. There were fully functional adults ten years his senior that weren’t responsible enough to do that without someone prodding their ass. Maybe I didn’t give him enough credit.

I took some painkillers before I dragged myself through the shower, put on some fresh clothes, and brushed my teeth. When I finally made it out to the kitchen, Leo was already typing away, his LED headphones over his ears blasting rap music in Spanish. My head throbbed along with the bass line, so I hooked a finger around the headphones on my way past and tugged them off.

Leo caught the headphones before they could fall. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Turn it down.” I grabbed a pair of mugs from the cupboard and filled them with coffee, shoving one at Leo. “What’d you find?”

He eyed the coffee mug I’d handed him like it’d bite him. “Best Gay Uncle Ever?”

It took me a minute to realize he was reading the words printed on the side of the mug.

I shrugged and leaned against the cabinet. “It was on sale.”

Leo sighed and put the mug down without taking a drink, turning back to his laptop perched on the kitchen island. “We have a problem. Actually, a few problems.”

“Did you get the files on Harold Spencer?” I asked, stirring what I hoped was sugar and not salt into my coffee. Xion thought he was funny, switching them on me all the damn time.

Leo pursed his lips like I’d insulted him. “Of course I did. Only reason I got away with what I did was because a new patch for Slasher Heroes released last night. I was able to get temporary remote access thanks to piggybacking a keylogger and…” He stopped and winced. “Sorry. You don’t care about that.”

“It’s not that I don’t care,” I said, rubbing my head. “I just don’t understand a damn word you’re saying.”

Leo waved a hand. “None of that matters anyway. The first problem is that he knows I was in the system, and he managed to get right back into our system through a backdoor I didn’t know was there, which I’m pretty sure was put in manually when we did that job for the Laskins a few months ago.”

I frowned. “I thought you said you were watching Xavier the whole time.”

“Yeah, he somehow did it right in front of me.” He smirked and shook his head, then pushed his glasses up his nose. “He hassome cajones, that’s for sure, but I know something he doesn’t know.” He almost sounded like he was impressed. That didn’t come easily from Leo.

“Can we stick to English, please?” I took a sip of my coffee and winced. Of course Xion had swapped the sugar for salt. Again. The prick.

“Okay, so when I was in his system last night, I wasn’t the only one.” Leo looked up at me. “Someone else has been digging around in there, like a lot. In order to complete what I had to do, I had to first stop the other hacker from hacking. I thought at first that Xavier lured me into a trap, but that wasn’t the case. I traced the second hack to another backdoor, one that if I didn’t have the background I do, I wouldn’t have found. We’re talking XKeyscore level shit here. And when I tried to backtrack it, I found some Alice in Wonderland shit. Whoever’s on the other side of that second hack is using mirrors on mirrors on mirrors to bounce their IP, and anyone who tries to get into that system will find himself looking at the mother of all polymorphic code viruses. Cabron made me toast my hard drive.”

I put my hands on Leo’s shoulders. “Do you have the files or not?”

“Yes, because I was able to—”

“Shhh.” I put a finger to his lips. “Just pretend I’ve never seen a computer in my life. Explain it to me like I’m an idiot who thinks a CD drive is a cupholder.”

“Okay…” He frowned and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, thinking hard. “I hacked into Xavier’s computer last night, but so did someone else. When I tried to figure out who the third party was, they lured me into a trap that hit my computer using a program that makes the NSA’s spy program look like it was written by kindergarteners. They got into the central router and downloaded our personal information before I smashed it with a hammer to stop them. Is that simple enough?”

I stared at him. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was hungover or because his story seemed so impossible, but it took me an extra long time to process what he was saying. “All our personal information?”

He nodded slowly. “Work orders. Social security numbers. Passports. Service records. Bank accounts. Everything. Potentially every device connected to the network is compromised and needs to be replaced, including the store computer.”

“Well, fuck.” I didn’t know what to say except for that.

Whoever’s backdoor Leo had stumbled across was probably pissed, and now they knew everything about us. Not only that, but they’d been spying on the Laskins, too, and now the Laskins knew it.

Leo sucked in another deep breath. “There’s more.”

“Shit, how?”

“Well, it’s the files.” Leo spun his laptop toward me. “This is probably the only safe device right now since I didn’t have it connected to the network and still haven’t connected it. It’s running on a mobile data device I keep in reserve. This Harold Spencer guy is just the tip of the iceberg according to the Laskins’ research. It looks like they’re going after a whole network of sick fucks called MAPers.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“MAP stands for minor attracted persons,” he explained with a sigh. “These guys are hiding behind new terminology and pretending that it’s a sexual preference and not a crime. They go so far as to claim they should be treated like LGBTQ folks. Makes us all look bad. But that’s not the worst part about this. These assholes are taking it one step further and have a whole message board set up to exchange pictures, set up meet ups, and some of them are even using it to sell access to kids.”

He spun the screen around and I leaned in for a closer look. The website looked like an old school messaging board. On the surface, the sale posts didn’t look particularly malicious, but the minute I clicked on the first link, I almost had to throw up. There was a picture of a little girl in the bathtub who couldn’t have been more than six, and whoever had put up the caption was claiming to be her foster dad. He was selling her and his two other foster kids by the fucking hour to the highest bidder.

I pushed the computer away, disgusted.

“It gets worse than that,” Leo said quietly. “There are literal babies on here, put up for sale by their parents, and there’s a whole section devoted to medical workers pimping out their patients, corrections officers in juvenile detention centers promising access, priests, teachers… There’s a whole fucking economy in here.”

I crossed my arms, mostly in an attempt to calm my stomach. “And the Laskins think they can take them all out?”

Leo shrugged. “You’d have to ask them what their plan is.” He tugged his glasses off, polishing the lenses using his shirt. “Can I ask you something? What does any of this have to do with us? I mean, this isn’t normally the kind of job we do. Unless someone’s put a hit out on this Harold guy?”

I considered telling Leo the truth. He was smart as fuck, and chances were good he’d eventually figure everything out if left to his own devices. I had to give him a satisfactory answer, one that led away from Xion, or else he’d keep digging. “There’s a job,” I said cautiously.

Leo slid his glasses back on and blinked rapidly. “Who’s the client?”

“Someone who appreciates privacy.”

There was only one way this could end. One way or another, Harold was a dead man, whether it was me or the Laskins who pulled the trigger. Maybe I should bring him to Xion. Let him do it. He was the victim after all. Shouldn’t he get to administer the punishment? It was a better option than being sicced on Xion’s enemies like his trained attack dog.

I lifted my eyes to the kitchen window. He was out there in the yard somewhere, probably working on that ’69 Camaro of his. I’d come back pretty fucked up the night before, but I wasn’t so far gone I didn’t remember the way he looked down at me, the way tears had rolled down his cheeks, how badly I wanted to kiss them away.

Don’t ever make me cry again or I’ll fucking kill you.

If I was ever his reason for tears, I deserved his vengeance.

“Boone?”

“Hm?” I didn’t turn away from the window, still half lost in my thoughts.

Leo put his arm on the island and leaned toward me. “Is there something going on with you and Xion?”

I wrinkled my nose. “No. He’s a fucking kid, Leo.”

“He’s twenty.”

“He’s traumatized,” I countered, moving away from the window.

Leo snorted and shrugged. “Who isn’t these days? At twenty, I was helping the military run drone strikes. Twenty is old enough to vote, old enough to kill… Old enough to be in love.”

I shot him a warning glare. “Whatever there is between Xion and me, it’s as far from love as you can get. He threatened to kill me last night.”

Leo rolled his eyes and closed his laptop. “Murder is a legit love language. That’s why cats bite the heads off their prey and bring them back to you. It’s a sign of love, Boone.”

I snorted. “If Xion starts bringing me headless corpses, I’ll keep that in mind. In the meantime, I’m supposed to be his guardian.”

“Until we hand him over to whoever’s got that bounty out on his head, right?” Leo tucked his laptop under his arm before elbowing me with a knowing smirk. “Unless you’re getting cold feet about that? I’d understand if you were reconsidering. Four million dollars or a lifetime supply of some good vitamin D… Hard decision.” He smirked and winked. “Pun intended.”

“Very funny.” I walked over and opened the front door for him, a clear signal that I wanted him to leave. “Out. From the sounds of it, you’ve got a lot of work cut out for you getting our systems back online.”

Leo sighed and mumbled rapidly in Spanish as he saw himself out.

I shut the door behind him and fell against it. No dick, no matter how good, was worth four million dollars. Certainly not from Xion. He was the only person who hated me more than I did.

I went into town because the fridge was empty. Normally, I just sent Happy into town with a list and didn’t bother with my own shopping, but I needed to get out, remind myself that there was a world beyond the junkyard and Harold.

It didn’t work. I saw Harold in every man I passed, or elements of him. I couldn’t pass anyone without wondering if they were secretly a killer, or a child molester, or a monster. The grocery store shelves seemed closer together, like they were growing narrower by the minute, closing in, crowding me.

Sweat beading on the back of my neck, the sun beating down hard. In the desert, it’s impossible to escape, especially up so high. The view through the scope is a mess of faces, a rainbow of colored cloth and bright vegetables, but I only care about the man in the suit. He’s there with his daughter, smiling at her, showing her a red, juicy tomato. When I pull the trigger, there will be more red in the market and one less terrorist.

But she doesn’t know. She’ll only know her daddy is dead. She’ll grow up hearing he was a hero, a martyr, a freedom fighter. She’ll grow up to take his place, so there really won’t be one less at all. I am the facilitator of a vicious cycle of life, death, and vengeance, one that’s become a gaping wound. One that will swallow the whole world.

A bang brought me back to the cereal aisle with a flinch, but it wasn’t the bang of a high-powered rifle. Some kid was repeatedly running his mother’s cart into the shelving. Sweat drenched, I rushed out of the aisle toward the dairy. I jerked open one of the coolers and stuck my head in, trying to remember how to breathe.

God, how long had it been since I thought about that? It’d been seven years since I got my honorable discharge, and that came months after that trip to Yemen. Before that, there was Mogadishu, and before that I was in Kosovo. Same thing everywhere I went. Uncle Sam pointed, I shot. No questions asked. Just pictures exchanged, locations given, and bodies delivered. At the time, I told myself I was doing the right thing. I was serving my country by eliminating high value targets. Who they were and what they did didn’t matter. That wasn’t my department. I didn’t need to know. I just needed to shoot and disappear.

For eight years, I was a ghost with a gun.

And then Yemen.

Yemen wasn’t even the worst job, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After Yemen, I vowed I’d never be that man again. I had to be more than someone’s fucking weapon.

So now I was the boss. I called the shots and picked which jobs we took and which ones we passed on. It wasn’t morality that drove my decisions, either, because me and the Dogs had done some shady shit. It was a feeling, one that I trusted more than anything, and that feeling was telling me that killing Harold for Xion was right.

Shit, since when did I kill people for someone else without getting paid for it? I sounded like a lovesick puppy, and I was far too old for puppy love. I was too old to be chasing twenty-year-old tail too, too old by far.

Maybe I should just give in, fuck him, and get it out of my system. Then we could move on. I could turn him in, collect the money, and we’d be done with each other.

Except now that I knew about Harold, I couldn’t just ignore him. I had to do something, even if that meant walking a delicate line with the Laskins and putting off my payday. They were probably going to take him out anyway, right? So what if I threw them another bone? Maybe Leo could find something else on the ring of pedophiles they were investigating, someone higher up the food chain for them to chase. Then they wouldn’t care that I took out a low-level player like Harold. It was a win-win plan.

I just had to be careful about how I handled the Laskins when it came to Xion. One way or another, they were going to find out about each other. I fucking hated being the middleman.

Someone cleared their throat behind me, and I realized I’d been staring at orange juice for too long. With a sigh, I closed the cooler door. I walked all the way across the store, stepped into the men’s room, locked the door, and got out my phone. The sound of the dialer echoed through the empty bathroom as I pressed the phone to my ear.

It rang twice before Annie Laskin’s cheery voice answered. “Hello?”

“Annie, it’s Boone,” I said and took a deep breath. “We need to talk.”