Kill Count Read online

  Kill Count

  A Team Reaper Thriller

  Mark Allen

  Brent Towns

  Kill Count

  A Team Reaper novel

  By Mark Allen

  Kill Count is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 Mark Allen

  Based on Characters Created by Brent Towns

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Wolfpack Publishing, Las Vegas.

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64119-621-5

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-64119-622-24

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

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  About the Author

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  Kill Count

  Chapter 1

  Lebron’s Bar & Grill

  New York City

  As soon as the three men entered the bar, John ‘Reaper’ Kane knew they were going to be trouble. It might have had something to do with the skeleton masks covering their faces, but was more than likely the stubby Micro-Uzis they whipped out from beneath their long, loose-fitting coats. They sported a pair of the submachine guns, one in each hand. A piss-poor tactic for precision shooting, but perfect for saturating a room with bullets.

  “Down!” Kane yelled, his right hand reaching under his jacket for the Sig-Sauer M17 semi-automatic holstered on his hip. With his left hand, he grabbed the edge of the heavy wooden table and with a grunt, flipped it over, sending beer bottles, silverware, and napkins flying everywhere. Right now, making a mess was the least of his concerns. The solid oak table was at least three inches thick, more than capable of stopping the 9mm rounds that were about to blister it. The wood wouldn’t hold forever, but hopefully long enough for the team to return fire and take out the hitters.

  His teammates—Thurston and Traynor—reacted instantly to the threat, dropping down behind the overturned table and drawing their own Sigs. Mike Reardon—the DEA agent who had called this meeting—also drew his Glock 22 sidearm as he crouched down to avoid the imminent fusillade.

  A woman screamed.

  Swiveling his head to the left, Kane saw Reardon’s wife Becky framed in the bathroom doorway, eyes wide as she saw the automatic weapons pointed at them.

  “Becky!” Mike yelled. He started to rise to his feet, but Traynor pulled him down.

  With no regard for his own skin, Kane threw himself into a sideways leap that he hoped would put his body in front of Becky. He fired a round in midair, the gun bucking in his fist. Not that he expected to hit anything—that kind of acrobatic marksmanship only worked in the movies—but he hoped to make the three gunmen hesitate.

  It didn’t work. As he hit the floor at Becky’s feet, the Micro-Uzis cut loose with their distinctive full-auto staccato. Skidding to a stop against a barstool, he got his sights on the nearest gunman and drilled a double-tap into his face. The skeleton mask collapsed as the target’s head snapped back in a spray of blood.

  Adrenalin pulsed through Kane’s system. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized that Becky had stopped screaming. The rest of the patrons had taken her place, crying out in pain and terror as auto-fire chopped them down, tearing through flesh and guts to rip the life right out of them.

  In the blink of an eye, the bar became a kill-zone…

  Twenty minutes earlier…

  Another day, another backstreet bar. The thought put an amused smirk on Kane’s face as he walked down a New York City street that wasn’t the worst the Big Apple had to offer but was definitely a block or two off Broadway. There were no glitzy, neon-lit tourist traps beckoning down this street, though some instinct warned him there could be traps of a deadlier kind. This was a street of sinners, not saints. Who knew what danger lurked amidst the winos and whores?

  Then again, he always felt that way lately—a constant tingle at the base of his neck, as if expecting a bullet. Too many days on the killing fields maybe. When you lived by the gun, sometimes it felt like you were forever in the crosshairs. He shrugged off the feeling, wondering why their contact had insisted on meeting so far off the grid.

  He was accompanied by General Mary Thurston, the overseer of Team Reaper, the one who ultimately called the shots. She greenlit the jobs, and without her blessing, there was no mission.

  To Kane’s right was Pete Traynor. The former DEA undercover operative strolled along like he didn’t have a care in the world, as if they were taking a nighttime walk down a Cancun beach instead of a seedy side-street.

  Kane treated himself to a quick glance at Thurston. If she noticed him looking, she gave no indication, keeping her gaze straight ahead as they headed up the block to their meeting place. With her athletic build and long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, she was definitely easy on the eyes, but Kane wasn’t really interested. Not only was Thurston the boss, but he and Cara had just recently ended things. He wasn’t ready for another woman in his life.

  As if reading his mind, Traynor asked, “Talked to Billings lately?”

  Kane looked over at the ex-DEA agent. With his linebacker shoulders and rugged, mountain man beard, Traynor wasn’t nearly as enjoyable to look at as Thurston. “Sure,” Kane replied. “I talk to her all the time. She’s a teammate.”

  Traynor grinned. “Not what I meant, Reaper, and you know it.”

  “What I know is that you can change the damn subject and tell me about this friend of yours we’re meeting.”

  “Mike? The guy’s one of the best undercover agents I ever worked with. Not sure there’s a corner of Mexico he didn’t run an op in.”

  “Riding a desk now, right?”

  Traynor nodded. “Even the best can’t stay under forever. He got burned, and they managed to pull him out just a half-step ahead of a cartel sicario. Then they put him behind a desk here on the east coast overseeing undercover ops.”

  “What’s up with meeting in some shithole bar? Hasn’t your buddy ever heard of an encrypted phone?”

  Thurston said, “Cut him some slack, Kane. They kidnapped his son. He doesn’t know who he can trust right now, so you can’t blame him for being skittish.”

  Traynor slapped him on the shoulder with a hand big enough to palm a cinder block. “Look on the bright side. Meeting in a bar gives you an excuse to have a beer.”

  Kane pointedly looked at the dingy surroundings. “Wherever we’re going, I’m betting they only serve rotgut.”

  Traynor shook his head. “Nah, I doubt there’ll be any Coors Light at this place.”

  Two blocks later, “this place” turned out to be a small but cleaner-than-expected establishment simply called Lebron’s Bar & Grill. Neon beer signs glowed in the front window. It was basically just one long recta
ngular room with a mahogany-and-brass bar running down the right side and two rows of wooden tables on the left. There was no dancefloor as this was clearly the kind of place you came to drink, not bust a move. A jukebox squatted against the back wall next to the unisex bathroom, playing an old hair-metal ballad. Something about flying to the angels.

  The clientele ran counter to Kane’s expectations. No dirtbags or deviants, just seemingly normal people scattered about, mostly solo, with a few couples mixed in. Down at the far end of the bar, a well-groomed black bartender mixed a Jack and Coke for an overweight man in a rumpled business suit perched on a stool.

  As they walked in, all eyes focused on them for a moment. Kane knew his 6’4” frame cut an imposing figure, and Traynor wasn’t much smaller. Add in the fact that they were accompanied by a beautiful woman and it was just about impossible for them not to turn heads.

  But it wasn’t just that, Kane knew. It was also the way they involuntarily radiated primal violence that captured attention. On some subconscious level, everyone in the room sensed that warriors had just entered their vicinity.

  Traynor pointed to a couple in the far corner, huddled at one of the tables. “There’s Mike.”

  They were both nursing beers, but to Kane, they looked like they needed something with a lot more kick to deal with the misery etched on their haggard faces.

  The bar returned to normal noise levels as the team approached.

  Traynor gave Reardon’s hand a firm shake. “Good to see you, Mike. How’s it going?” He immediately shook his head. “Sorry, man, stupid question.”

  Reardon weakly smiled away the faux pas and gestured to the woman sitting beside him. “You remember my wife Becky?”

  “Of course,” said Traynor. “Good to see you, Becky.”

  She was a thin, plain-looking woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a mousy demeanor. Her red-rimmed eyes betrayed recent bouts of crying. “I hope you don’t mind me tagging along,” she said. “After what’s happened, I just don’t like to be alone.”

  Traynor nodded. “Perfectly understandable.”

  He introduced them to the rest of the team. They took their seats, ordered beers, and got right down to business. Everyone at the table knew this wasn’t a social call that required small talk and chitchat.

  Thurston cut right to the chase. “Mr. Reardon, please tell me exactly what it is you want from us.”

  “That’s easy,” Reardon said. “I want my son back. If the bastards who took him, end up dead in the process, so much the better. But all that really matters is getting Jeremy back.”

  “I wanted to name him Ichabod after Ichabod Crane from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Becky offered. “It’s my favorite story. But Mike said it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment by the time he reached middle school, so we went with Jeremy instead.”

  Kane could be cold at times, but he wasn’t callous enough to tell her none of that information mattered. Besides, he recognized it for what it was—the nervous babble-speak of a scared mother. “When you contacted Pete,” he said, “you indicated you know why your boy was taken, but would only talk about it in person.”

  Reardon nodded. “I don’t know who I can trust.”

  “Explain.”

  Reardon said, “I’m not sure how much Pete filled you in, but I oversee undercover ops for the DEA.”

  “He mentioned it, yeah.”

  “A few weeks ago, rumors and scuttlebutt from informants started trickling in about dirty agents getting into bed with one of the Colombian cartels to help them establish a cocaine pipeline into the east coast. There was even talk that they had partnered up with some new Islamic terrorist group for some unknown reason. I didn’t think much of it—this kind of shit gets tossed around all the time by snitches looking for a payout—but then three days ago, they—” He paused, lowered his head, and swallowed down hard on the lump in his throat. When he looked back up, his eyes glistened with unshed tears. “They took Jeremy.” As he said the words, he white-knuckled his beer bottle. Any tighter and the glass would shatter in his hand. “Those bastards took my son. He’s only ten years old.”

  Whatever tears Reardon restrained, his wife more than made up for. They flowed down her cheeks in rivers of liquid grief. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice barely a choked whisper. “Please excuse me.”

  She fled into the bathroom and just before the door closed, Kane heard her sob. Couldn’t say he blamed her. She was a mother with a missing child, and that kind of heartache exceeded anything he could imagine. The scumbags who had inflicted that pain upon her didn’t deserve to keep sucking God’s good air.

  “How do you know your son’s abduction had anything to do with this DEA-cartel alliance?” Thurston asked. “Pardon me for being blunt, but kids are taken all the time.”

  “They took him to make me talk. They sent me a note the next day,” Reardon replied. “They think we’ve got someone undercover in the cartel, and they want me to give up the name, or they’ll kill Jeremy.”

  “Is there a UC?”

  “If there is I didn’t put him there.”

  “So you don’t even have a name to give them if you wanted to.”

  Reardon made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “Exactly. There’s nothing I can do to get my son back.” He looked pointedly at Kane. “But if what I’ve heard is true, you guys can.”

  At that moment, Kane heard the click of the bathroom door unlocking. At the same time, the bar’s front door opened and three skeleton-masked men in long coats barged in and whipped out a quartet of Micro-Uzis.

  “Down!” Kane flipped the wooden table and drew his Sig.

  Becky Reardon froze in the bathroom doorway and screamed.

  “Becky!” Mike yelled.

  Kane threw himself toward the woman.

  He hit the floor at Becky’s feet as the machine-pistols cut loose. As he skidded to a stop against the fat man’s barstool, he took out the nearest shooter with a pair of bullets to the face.

  Adrenalin thundered in his ears, but he still heard Becky’s screams turn into wet gurgles. He looked up and saw her twitching spastically in the bathroom doorway as slugs ripped her open from neck to navel.

  Above the roar of automatic fire, he heard Reardon’s anguished cry.

  The bar was a kill-zone. The air seethed with bullets. One of the gunners kept Traynor, Thurston, and Reardon pinned down behind the table, steel-jacketed salvos shearing splinters from the wooden surface, hammering relentlessly at the makeshift barrier.

  Having executed Becky, the other gunman sprayed the room with indiscriminate fire. The bartender ducked behind the bar, but the patrons had nowhere to go. Streams of lead chopped them down. Death and destruction ruled the night as the blood-spewing victims crashed to the floor.

  Since there was nothing he could do for Becky, Kane started to bring his gun back into the game. But just as he went to raise the Sig, the overweight man toppled from the barstool with a 9mm hole between his eyes and pinned Kane’s arm beneath his dead weight.

  The skeleton-masked attacker turned the Micro-Uzi on Kane, tracking a line of fire towards him. Kane pressed himself as flat as possible behind the corpulent corpse, using the thick body as a shield. He felt the thudding impacts of bullets slamming into dead meat and knew it was just a matter of seconds before some of those bullets punched all the way through and drilled into him.

  There was no time to pull his arm free. But he had enough wrist movement to angle the Sig toward the gunman. He stroked the trigger. The bullet skimmed just above the floorboards and smashed into the guy’s ankle. Behind the mask, the man howled in pain as bone ruptured into jagged splinters that tore through his flesh like shrapnel. He fell sideways and landed hard on his shoulder.

  While the gunman was in mid-fall, Kane wrenched his bruised arm out from under the bullet-ripped corpse. By the time the guy hit the floor, Kane was already on the trigger. A tight-grouped triple-burst shear
ed off the top of the man’s head.

  On his peripheral, he glimpsed Reardon low-crawling toward Becky, who was sprawled in the bathroom doorway like a blood-soaked rag doll. Her lifeless eyes stared straight ahead into whatever awaited beyond the business end of a bullet.

  The last gunner swiveled toward Kane, apparently perceiving him as the most immediate threat. But without his comrades for backup, the man was woefully outgunned. The second his fusillade stopped hammering the overturned table, Traynor and Thurston popped up like pistol-packing jack-in-the-boxes and smoked him in his tracks. The guy died hard, head and chest punched full of holes.

  Kane rolled onto his back as Reardon slumped against the bullet-shattered jukebox, clutching his dead wife in his arms, uncaring about the blood getting all over him. Grief twisted his face into an agonized rictus. “No, no, no,” he kept saying as if repeating the word over and over would somehow bring her back. “No, no, no, oh God, please, no…”

  Kane climbed to his feet and put a hand on the DEA agent’s shoulder. “Sorry, man.” He left it at that. There was nothing more to say, no words to ease the agent’s pain.

  He walked over to his teammates. His right arm ached from being pinned under the dead man’s weight, but other than that, he was fine.

  Traynor’s eyes burned with anger. “Tell me we’re going after the sons of bitches that did this. Tell me we’re gonna find his boy.”