Titan Fall - Book 18 of the Damned of the 2/19th

It Only Cost You Five Grand

Lacey. The suburb of Olympia just to the North of the city proper. The 1990's had been both good and bad to it. Rapid urban expansion had made it into one of the middle communities, but meth and heroin had hollowed it out before it could become more solid.

Heather and I had looked at apartments there when I had first gotten out, but the rampant drug abuse had left us looking back at the Centralia area again.

It was raining. Low clouds, lightning in the sky flickering and skittering through the heavy gray sky. It had gotten dark by the time I'd driven to Lacey.

A quick stop at a phone booth outside of Fred Meyer had given me the address I wanted.

On the outside of Lacey, across the street from a stretch of woods that had an exercise trail running through it.

I'd ran that trail a hundred times.

I parked the car, not bothering to wipe it down. I knew what I'd do with it when I was done.

As I walked down the trail, pulling on a set of fingerless weight lifting gloves, I knew how it was going to go down.

Bloody.

They'd come at me when I was with my kid.

There were rules. At least, that's what I'd always been told. You keep families out of it. You keep kids out of it.

But the Russians and the Cartels had moved in. The new breed of US homegrown organized crime, they used families as leverage. The Russians, the Cartels, hell, even the biker gangs didn't leave families off limits any more.

It was fine with me.

The KGB and GRU hadn't left families out of it either.

The mountain definitely had targeted families.

So, if Hollister wanted to play, wanted to put a bounty on me that tweakers and retarded buffalo fuckers off the rez thought they could collect, well...

It was only fair to return the favor.

The sun was low in the sky when I reached my goal. The brush across the street from Hollister's house. I knelt down and went still, controlling my breathing, watching his house.

A single story grayish green house. Large frontroom windows that extended out from the wall at 45 degree angles to form alcoves, two car garage that had separate garage doors, single door with a heavy wrought iron screen door. The side yards and back yard were hidden by a nine foot tall fence. No lights, no cameras.

No patrols. No guards.

If it wasn't for the label on the mailbox I would have wondered if I had the wrong target area.

A car pulled in and two men got out. I ID'd them both quick. Both tough guys, I'd seen the around the tavern and the like since I'd gotten back. One had stepped up on me in the grocery store a few weeks back and I'd been forced to back down since the girls had been with me.

The nerve in my cheek spasmed as I smiled, watching both of them go inside.

The sun slipped below the horizon and I walked to the end of the street, leaving the woods and crossing the street. The alley was halfway down and I followed it. Dumpsters, garbage cans. A few homeless nests, but the homeless were on the prowl or had found somewhere to nod off. Discarded needles here and there, broken lightbulbs, told me all I needed to know.

A block in either direction, the alley wasn't so heavily decorated with junkie refuse.

That meant that some of them were getting the goods in that alley.