Chapter 3

Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes.  The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes.  ReKill is the second book in the series that started with  ReWire

Download John Cameron’s Newest Thriller ReKill Now

The boss stood. It wasn’t easy. It was even tougherpushing back from the table. It wasn’t real Kobe beef, but it was still fantastic. Who would have thought beef from drunken cows could taste so good? Damn it. He felt it again-his right knee. Something was wrong with it. Stupid doctors. Why go see them if all they were going to tell him was, “Lose weight?”

He didn’t need a doctor to tell him to lose weight. He liked to eat. He didn’t like exercise except one kind and mostly that was lying on his back now or sitting in a chair. Sure elevated his heart rate though.

He looked forward to the chat with Bad, even though he was an idiot. Bruce Allan Dummy was more like it. Of course, he would never say that out loud. As much as Bruce feared the hold the boss had on him, the man was capable of immediate and immense violence.

His driver opened the passenger door and held out an arm to support him. He grabbed the man’s arm and the handle and lowered himself onto the rear seat of the Mercedes. Maybe it was time for liposuction? He knew he would dig the pain a little. He picked up the throwaway phone. At precisely seven-seventeen PM, Pacific Standard Time, the phone rang.

“How did it go? Without detail, be specific.”

There was a fifteen second silence on the other end.

“I dropped off the message personally, just like you said. From what I could see he understood how serious the message was this time. His former running buddies are a reminder of how serious the message was. I’m pretty sure his answer will be the one you want.”

“That’s the answer I needed! Now, I want you to head up to Redding, California. Bring David with you. Check into a hotel. When you get there let me know. I will have another message for you to deliver.”

“Did you say Redding?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus fuck boss. Redding is even deader than this hellhole. Do I have to?”

“Yes,” he said and disconnected the phone.

He dropped the throwaway phone into the slot between himself and the driver, knowing knew his driver would destroy it. He asked his business phone to dial Karl Heyworth.

“Dialing Karl Heyworth.”

The phone rang three times before Mary answered, “Zoning Commission, Karl Heyworth’s office, Mary speaking, how may I help you?” Her voice sounded like warm silk.

“Hello, Mary.”

“Hello Mr. Smith. Mr. Heyworth’s in a meeting. Allow me a few moments to see if he can take your call.” Mary’s tone turned professional and a little frosty when she figured out the call was from him. Bitch. She was a hot bitch for sure, a natural red head with Nicole Kidman skin. She thought she was better than. He liked to get her kind alone and completely humiliate them.

“Sure.”

He listened to the zoning commission’s message on hold while he waited. “…our most important customers-you, the business people who take the risks and raise the capital…” What complete and total crap. The bureaucrats hated the people they were supposed to serve. The bureaucrats knew they had better educations, were certain they were smarter, so they were jealous. Their typical customer with work boots and a baseball cap had a better life than they ever would and actually did something useful.

“Mr. Smith, great to hear from you! How are you?” Heyworth was a suck up. If he thought he sounded genuine, he was stupid too.

“Karl, I see the little item I asked your help on hasn’t been fixed. Do you need me to send some of the fellows to help out? I know how short staffed you are.”

The boss wished he were in the room with Karl so he could fully enjoy the man’s fear. He could barely taste the man’s fear over the phone.

Heyworth laughed, at least the boss thought it was probably supposed to be a laugh. “Absolutely not, Mr. Smith. I will have that detail taken care of in a week, two at the most!”

“Good, good, Karl. I’m sure you will. Oh, congratulations on your daughter’s third place finish in the cross-country race at sections. One of my men happened to be at that race, and took a lot of pictures. One of them is a nice close-up of your daughter taken mid-course. Would you like a copy?”

“That.., that would be great!”

Now Heyworth should realize how serious he was. If you didn’t want people to have a hold over you, you shouldn’t take bribes. And, you shouldn’t have kids.

Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes.  The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes.  ReKill is the second book in the series that started with  ReWire

Download John Cameron’s Newest Thriller ReKill Now

He dozed in the big, ugly, brown recliner Lee threatened to give away every time the Veterans’ charity had curbside pickup. She sat on the window seat, feet curled under, in blue tights and his ancient gray 49rs sweatshirt that had somehow become hers. His phone rang from the sideboard with Mike’s new ring. He hoped she would answer so he wouldn’t have to get up. He watched her move from cross-legged sitting to walking as he wondered how he deserved so elegant a creature.

“Hey, Mike. Jack’s just waking up,” she said arching her brow to ask him if he was capable of talking yet. He nodded and waved her off as she started to walk the phone over. Movement was finally a little easier. Lee sat back down on the window seat.

The charcoal sketch of the buildings as they dropped away toward the bay took shape under her precise hands. She looked around absentmindedly and held out her left hand, palm down. The charcoal pencil that dropped to the floor when she stood lifted from the rug and floated into her open hand. Daybreak had been cloudy and cold with the smell of coming rain heavy in the air. By early evening the view over the roofs of the Marina district out over the Bay was better than any tourist had a right to expect.

Mike called from the forty-five hundred square feet of efficient luxury in the Trinity Alps he called a cabin. The sound of his daughter’s guitar cords ripped the usual deep silence. He heard Mike shout for her to take a break and laugh at something she shouted back before he said, “Sorry about the noise, Jack. Heather’s getting so good I hate to stop her.”

“What’s up, Mike?” Mike had called three times during the week to talk about some unnamed thing. He hadn’t had time to listen, knowing the man well enough to know it was too important to hurry. He asked Mike to call him on Sunday afternoon when he could take all the time his friend needed.

“I was going to give you details over the phone and email files, but I don’t want to plant any ideas. Would you two come up for a couple, three days? Do you good to get out in the woods.”

He hung up promising he would call back later that day with travel details.

Lee asked, “Road trip?”

HE and Mike had a connection that went deep. Neither of them realized the connection at first. Mike’s name was actually Miguel Octavio Reyes. He’d been a warrant officer Huey pilot in Vietnam flying medevac. Jack had to be dusted off twice, once in the Gulf and once in the unnamed place. Their wars were twenty-five years apart, but they were still connected. Mike had been shot down three times in Vietnam. The last time he was shot down Mike lost his right arm from just below the elbow down.

Mike said he used to have a deep, puckered scar on the inside of his right forearm from a childhood fireworks accident. The scar itched, especially in the humid, disease-ridden Petri dish of Vietnam. He swore the spot on the missing arm itched to this day. He said changing to being a lefty had been tough and very strange. Other than that, he didn’t say much. Like most men who’d seen brothers killed or killed other men’s brothers, they didn’t talk about it. They tried not to think about it.

Like all DealMaker partners, Mike’s financial karma was very good: in other areas-not so much. The worst of it hadn’t been losing the arm. His worshipped young wife was staying with friends in Carmel. She brought their new baby boy when she hurried toward Travis Air Force Base. Beloved wife wanted to meet the flying hospital that carried her newly one-armed husband.

Maybe she was driving a little too fast in the Tule fog of a miserable February day, just south of Sacramento. She drove I-5 toward Sacramento to take I-80 over to Travis. Friends said she hadn’t driven the delta because of a radio report about a construction bottleneck on Highway 12. The fourteen-vehicle wreck sandwiched wife’s Mustang between the burning gasoline truck and the flatbed carrying ready-mix. The autopsy said child died on impact. His beloved wife cooked, trapped in the wreckage.

Over the next ten years Mike spent a few spells in VA hospitals drying out. Mostly, he didn’t bother. One day he was driving near Pittsburg, California, coming home from his mindless job unloading fertilizer at the petrochemical plant. He said he could hear voices calling out to him from the pea-soup ocean fog. The voices told him to drive his pickup into the next bridge abutment. While he was seriously considering this suggestion he came upon a seven-vehicle pile-up. Quick work with his fire extinguishers and the big winch bolted to the front of his four-by-four helped save all but one out of a family of six. One of the truckers didn’t make it either. Mike broke bones in his foot kicking windows in to get people out. After that he took a big part of his life back.

“YES-road-trip.” He told her about Mike’s call and his unnamed troubles. She knew something was up from her talks with Heather, Mike’s daughter, but hadn’t pressed for details. He heard Heather and Lee talking on the phone about clothes and music and such. He didn’t quite know how his girlfriend and the almost twelve-year old daughter of one of his partners connected, but they had.

Jack still wasn’t a hundred percent. Their battle with the Church of the Seven Sisters had taken a toll on both of them. His knee and shoulder operations, on top of the concussion and pneumonia, took the juice right out of him. He was eager to test the knee on a hike. Thankfully, the tear in the meniscus was tiny and the cartilage undamaged. There had been a little more damage to the shoulder than the doctors originally thought. The first day after shoulder surgery he lived on Vicodin and tried to sleep sitting up in his recliner.

Lee said, “I’m not sleeping alone, shoulder or no shoulder.”

The next day he came home from physical therapy to find an adjustable hospital bed in their bedroom. For six weeks he slept sitting up in bed with his arm in a sling and his true love next to him.

HE wanted to fly into Redding and rent a car. It would have been better to fly into Weaverville, but the airport was closed-again. Lee had fallen in love with driving on what were to her wide-open roads, so they drove. Early spring in the central valley of California, still officially winter, was beyond beautiful. The grasses were hues of new deep greens. The earth was still moist. Of the natives, the Valley Oaks were his favorites.

The mighty Oaks grew along rivers in the run-off areas a little up the hill so their bases weren’t underwater, except in the wettest years. It was as if each of the big Oaks had its own ecosystem. Their secret branch networks didn’t reveal themselves until mid November and didn’t lose all their leaves until January or February. In winter they stood stark, home to squirrels and birds that didn’t migrate. When the Tule fog moved over the banks of the estuaries and spilled out onto flat land, it was as if they stood guard above it. In late spring the twigs at the far end of the branches showed green as the trees slowly came back to life. He counted nine different shades of green and Lee, with younger female eyes, said she saw fourteen. He bowed to youth and superior genetics.

Along streambeds and overflows the riparian world was different. Flocks of migratory birds enjoyed clouds of insects. More rice farmers flooded their fallow fields in winter now, providing hunting grounds for egrets and herons. The white blur of the hovering North American Kite, ready to stoop, appeared often enough to feel like a mile marker. The quiet confidence of the car and driver along with the filtered heat of the sun warming his face through the window lulled him into semi-sleep.

Off in the distance to the West the coastal range reared up as a blur. To the East the air was too full to see the foothills, but the white tops of the Sierra peered through. Anything above five thousand feet was still under a heavy blanket of snow. Winter had been brutal. The giant storm that nearly killed them was just a hint of what came later. Wherever they crossed the Sacramento River, it ran full and strong.

The river ruled the interior valley for tens of millions of years before they built the dam near Shasta. The new natives figured that was the way it had always been. If Shasta blew, as live volcanoes will, a wall of hot mud fifty feet high would slide down the course of the old Sacramento. Some of it would be contained, but much of it would push out to the hills on the west and east. The rich soil, fed by millions of years of floods, would be richer still. If anyone had the will to rebuild the farms and orchards, towns and villages, the area would be more fertile than before. Accuweather.com predicted a short and dry spring. The great reservoir at Shasta was nearly full.

They planned to stop in Redding for a late lunch. He’d thought about building a vacation home north and east of Redding. The area had some of the best trout fishing in the continental US. Sometime back he lost the urge to hunt the elusive trout. Most of the urge was gone after he’d been in Redding one day during a heat wave. 111 degrees and it wasn’t close to being a record.

Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes.  The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes.  ReKill is the second book in the series that started with  ReWire

Download John Cameron’s Newest Thriller ReKill Now

Chapter 1

He hoped the man resisted so he could mess him up. If the man was armed the boss might let him get away with a kill. Then he could have some fun with the wife and daughters to make sure they did what needed to be done. If the man was unarmed, it would be an execution, and the boss would be pissed.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his right hand. Of all his old tattoos, he missed the one the on his right hand the most. He had his initials tattooed on the back of his right hand when he was in juvie. BAD were his initials back when he was Bruce Allen Douglas. When he thought of himself, and he thought of himself a lot, he thought of himself as one bad man. But, Bruce Allen Douglas was dead. He was dead and his ashes were scattered on the ground. There was nobody to claim them.   But, here he was.

It was too hot. He walked along the trail flirting with a boy in spandex on his five thousand dollar bicycle. Then he flirted with one of the scorching hot women as they ran by. Hey, that was funny. Scorching hot. He knew he looked good. If these boys and girls knew what he had in mind, they wouldn’t be so eager. Maybe they would. A lot of them liked it rough, they just didn’t know it yet. After he killed the dogs and delivered the message maybe he’d take one of the bitches into the woods.

Bad hated the fucking woods. One of his fosters tied him to a tree in the woods for two days. The man beat him with a chain first. He almost fucking died, but when got bigger and went back to kill him, he was already dead. The booze got to him first.

He winked at another one of the fag bike bitches. They didn’t know they were bitches. They thought they were men. Men didn’t wear spandex and ride five thousand dollar toys you peddle. Did he want a girl bitch or a boy bitch today? Decisions, freaking decisions.

You could say one thing for the rich bastard. He was punctual. Right on time and there he was. The man walked toward him with his German Shepherds. Alsatians, they called them in Europe. Fucking European fags. Alsatian. Sounded like somebody sneezing. He stepped out of the bushes.

Dogs didn’t like him. Somehow they knew. The smaller of the two dogs named Frodo or some shit, leaped. Dog didn’t know to stay on the ground, stupid fuck. He stepped in, locked the neck, whipped the dog in a hip throw, heard the dog howl and felt the crack as the dog’s spine splintered. He dropped the dead dog on the path.

He felt the man’s fear wash over him like warm rain. And underneath it, like filling in a pie, was the other dog’s fear. Bruce grabbed the other dog as it sat peeing itself and killed it quick. No time to play.

He looked up into the rich bastards eyes, enjoying the man’s fear, more like warm syrup now, thick and sweet, and said, “I told you, bitch. I told you to let the loan go back to the bank. You wouldn’t listen and now you’ve killed your dogs. Don’t kill your little girls or that fine wife of yours. I’ll take my time with them and make you watch. Let the loan go back to the bank.”

BAD stood in the heat, smelling the fear from on the man and the death smells of the dogs, feeling the sun beating down, swelling from the man’s fear and the rush from killing. Damn it was too hot here, he thought as he turned and walked back into the bushes. He wondered where he could get a beer. Maybe that Sushi place he saw when he turned off the freeway?

Warning: This book contains rough language and violent scenes.  The rough language is not gratuitous, nor are the violent scenes.  ReKill is the second book in the series started with  ReWire

Download John Cameron’s Newest Thriller, ReKill Now

Introduction:

Mike asks his friend Jack to help him stop the powers that be from building a private prison next door to his mountain paradise.  Two more likely prison sites weren’t chosen  because of the Endangered Species Act.  Mike proves the studies eliminating the other two sites were wrong, and probably fixed, but the government won’t listen.

Jack talks Mike into using the same tactics to stop the prison.  The Friends of the Trinity Vole is formed and soon the little critter is on the endangered species list and the prison is stopped dead.

Mike discovers he has cancer and takes a dive off a cliff.  Only Jack knows he wouldn’t.  Mike lived for his daughter Heather, and wouldn’t abandon her, no matter what he faced. Jack calls in an outside expert for the autopsy which shows no cancer and that Mike was thrown off that cliff to fall over four seconds to a crushing death.  Jack will make sure it takes Mike’s killer a whole lot longer than four seconds to die.  But, what if the killer he stalks officially died years before in prison?