The Hammer Falls Read online

  Horace sighed. “My whole life, there’s been damn few for me to care about. We tend to die young. The women around the pit fighting scene tend not to be brainy types or stick-around types.” He gave her a long look. “I got me a shitload of pit buddies, training buddies, and fuck buddies, but real friends are hard to come by, the kind who’d throw a death match for you, or face down a drone with you, or drive across the entire goddamn country just to see you.” Surprise swept through him as his eyes teared. “Trouble is, there’s just no telling who I’m going to care about.”

  At that moment, he noticed she was closer, almost touching him with her sleek calf. “And what if they don’t care about you?”

  “That’s what usually happens, but it’s never much mattered.”

  Another long moment passed as she seemed to ponder the implications of what he said. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  He cracked a half smile. “I’d advise against it.”

  A tension appeared in his chest, like an invisible cord tugging him toward her. It was not something he expected, even as it took hold of him.

  She looked down at his hand with an amused smile. “You resisted a remarkably long time.”

  “Wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with a hydra. Still not.”

  “Afraid I’ll bite?”

  “I don’t mind a little biting. More like too much else on my mind.”

  “Your beautiful little dancer?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Too soon for that.”

  “You’re afraid of the L word then.”

  “I’m not afraid of much.”

  Her voice turned playful. “There is much meaning we attach to that word. Much weight. Sometimes too much.” She chuckled, a deep, genuine sound. “Who would have thought that Horace The Hammer Harkness was so sentimental?”

  “Trust me, sister, it surprises me, too.”

  “I, on the other hand, lack sentimentality.” Her fingers slipped into the collar of his brand-new silk shirt of glossy, textured black, stroked his neck. “For us, it is time to seal our bargain.”

  He huffed a little smile. “My word’s not good enough?”

  “Your word is not what I want.” She slid closer and lifted a leg over him, straddling his lap.

  There had been only a month of his entire life where one woman had held his undivided attention, and that was a lot of heartbreak ago. After last night with Lilly, she had been floating constantly at the verge of his thoughts, wandering into the spaces between crisis moments. As he sat there with Roxanne’s warm flesh across his thighs, her heat growing against his crotch, her eyes gleamed with her unrefusable intention to take him. It was something she had decided to do. He was the gladiator, the slave; she, the noblewoman drawn to his power.

  An image of Lilly, comatose in her hospital bed, flashed through his mind. Lilly stumbling on the stoop, not from poor footing but from tungsten razor blades perforating her chest cavity.

  Lilly’s fist slamming into his cheek.

  Lilly’s blood on his hands.

  The sound of her voice as she cried his name, gasped his name, burbled his name.

  Roxanne’s hands slid up his chest, up the sides of his neck, behind his head, drawing herself closer to him, those luscious lips bending toward his.

  She paused and raised his chin to look into her eyes. “Let me dispel the last of your qualms, Horace. Gods are not meant for only one lover. We pass through the world, taking what we want and, if we are benevolent, giving joy in return. There is so little joy in the world. Why deny ourselves? By this time tomorrow night, we will be either successful or dead. I do not intend to leave this world without us having fucked each other into oblivion.”

  He pushed her back. Horace Harkness was no one’s slave. If she was going to use him, he would allow it—but on his own terms. “You’re going to get me close enough to Mogilevich to stove in his fucking head.”

  Her eyes glittered. “Yes,” she hissed.

  He seized her head in both hands and kissed her, and instantaneously he felt the heat explode from her. Her firm shoulders were toned and silky. Her body was as firm and taut as any of the twenty-year-old pit girls he had bedded in decades past but steeped in the kind of experience no twenty-year-old possessed, the experience of loss and pain, great triumphs and ecstasies untold, pressing down against him as the supersonic wind whistled past outside and the universe filtered through the windows. His arms squeezed her to him, and the heat within them began to build.

  A deeper, darker, colder intent germinated inside him. A woman like this would use him as long as she needed and then discard him. How many of her former lovers were now dead? She would use him to kill Yvgeny Mogilevich, and if he didn’t survive the attempt, her grief would be slight. But he had a purpose, too, and he needed Roxanne Sukova to succeed. His entire life had been spent dealing in the two most primal kinds of currency—death and sex. Love was a luxury to be enjoyed when the hard shit was done.

  With an uninterruptible hour and a half before landing, they took their time. Clothes peeled away, piece by languorous piece. Naked, they danced with each other to slow techno-jazz. His fingers slid across matching circular scars on her back and abdomen, three sets of them, a long scar below her left shoulder blade. In a world where scars could be erased like an errant pencil mark, she wore her wounds like badges.

  Her hair gleamed in the soft light, brushed his chest and belly as she leaned against him. Her dark eyes glimmered like polished onyx. Her erect nipples caressed his belly, the soft swell of her breasts pressing against him, the downy thatch of pubic hair stroking his thigh.

  As they swayed together, his penis surged and relaxed against her belly in unhurried waves. He ran his fingers through her luxuriant raven hair and felt a narrow band of stiff plastic encircling the base of her skull. What abilities lurked within the wetware buried in her brain he would guess at later.

  Her hands played across him deftly, softly, like a warm breeze, squeezing his buttocks, up and down his hips, cupping his scrotum, stroking him. Conscious thoughts drowned in a cauldron of primal desire.

  She gasped as he shoved her onto the couch, her expression shifting to a feral, hungry grin. When he stepped up to her, she produced a condom, put it on with her mouth, then turned away and bared her haunches for him.

  That was how he took her, seizing her hips and driving into her. Fast, then slow, harder, then softer, using his decades of experience to prolong the act, squeezing every last dram of pleasure from her, into her, and she squeezed him back with her deepest core.

  As their bodies succumbed to the other’s want, deep shuddering breaths exploded from her but she did not cry out, as if she were bottling up that energy and applying it elsewhere.

  When their bodies separated, they sagged back into the couch, sheened with sweat and each other.

  In the silent, diminishing radiance, beside this spent goddess with her eyes half-lidded, lips parted, his thoughts turned unbidden toward the future.

  From here on out, pleasure would be a difficult thing to come by.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  At 6:00 a.m., the desert chilled them as they walked from the gangway of the hyperjet to the waiting limousine. The sun was an imminent emergence on the horizon, painting sky and desert with broad swaths of color.

  Horace honestly had never expected to return to Vegas alive. Across town he had a ratty one-room apartment that contained the scraps of his belongings, a change of underwear, even a couple of hand weapons if the Russians hadn’t tossed or torched it. He wished he hadn’t lost Gaston’s electro-fiber dagger in the drone attack. Might come in handy where they were going.

  He hadn’t owned a home for many years, not since he’d had to sell his palatial house, purchased at the high point of his career, to pay for his fruitless, globe-trotting search for Amanda and their son. Since then, he had bounced from one shabby roach motel to the next,
even living for a while in an old school bus converted into a camper—a vehicle he’d had to abandon when the ancient diesel engine had thrown a piston—during a stretch of time when a particularly vicious gash on his leg needed to heal, and there had been no sponsored regeneration available, and he had had to choose between food and repairs.

  He’d gotten used to leaving things—and people—behind. Might be a hard habit to break.

  Tina and Bunny eyed Horace and Roxanne with the expressions of those who sensed the waves of carnal afterglow emanating from their companions—a mix of envy and embarrassment, plus a wistful sadness in Bunny’s case and a touch of accusation in Tina’s.

  Roxanne behaved as if nothing at all had happened, as if “sealing the bargain” equated with a handshake, and that suited him just fine.

  As they crossed the tarmac, he pulled out his netlink and made a call. “Pick up, Jack, goddammit.”

  The lack of answer was unsurprising at this hour. Jack’s days tended to start around two in the afternoon. So Horace left a brief message telling Jack to call him.

  When they were all in the back of the limo, Roxanne pulled out a datapad. “Bunny,” she said, “You will be my driver tomorrow evening. You’re well-acquainted with traffic patterns and interfacing with the limousine’s control package. The one we’ll be using is being fitted with an enhanced communication suite that will increase your reach and data transfer rate.”

  “Will it have cup holders?” Bunny said.

  “Cup holders?”

  “For my tea.”

  Roxanne laughed. “Of course. And there’s one other thing. Horace asked that I look into having the lock on your AI removed.”

  Bunny’s eyes bulged. “What, really? Just like that? You can do that?”

  “Your parole officer will receive the message when he arrives at his office today. Whether he acts on this directive or ignores it like most corrupt officials playing petty power games, we do not know yet.”

  “Golly, thanks!”

  “I want a fully functional slicer, not a crippled one,” Roxanne said. “And as for you.” She turned to Tina. “You and I have things to discuss as well. Your identity will have been flagged as a member of Trask’s organization. You will need temporary facial reconstruction also, and a finger prosthetic like Horace’s.”

  Tina sat up straighter. “I like my face! And the way I walk! I don’t want some brain-slicing chip fucking up my coordination.”

  “I like your face, too. Very much, in fact. But it’s that or they will put a bullet in it the moment you walk through the door.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, assuming another identity, becoming faceless, wasn’t that the ancient ninja’s highest aspiration? To remain unseen in plain view?”

  Tina grinned a little at that.

  Roxanne said, “The chip will not interfere with your coordination. It will give you the gait and posture of a runway model. We will have to go shopping. You are going to be my date.”

  “Your date!” Tina sat up straight again. “I thought I was going to get to wear some cool suit and shades or something and walk around next to this bruiser.” She thumbed at Horace.

  “Oh, my dear, you are far too beautiful to be a simple bodyguard. You would draw more eyes in that capacity, and probably draw more eyes to Horace.”

  A flush spread across Tina’s cheeks at the way Roxanne’s eyes burned into her. “I thought you were straight.” Tina glanced between Roxanne and Horace.

  “I am whatever I need to be,” Roxanne said.

  “But what about protection, armor?” Tina said.

  “Unfortunately not an option for those of us who must dress scantily. For us, it will be evening gowns only. The advantage is that we will be perceived as minimal threats.”

  Suddenly Roxanne flung her datapad at Tina’s nose. With lightning reflexes, Tina’s hand flashed up and caught it on edge. A split second later, she was across the cabin and shoving Roxanne flat against the seat, datapad raised like a cleaver.

  Roxanne held up her hands. “Forgive me. It was a test.”

  Tina bit her lip, scowling, and edged back to the seat beside Bunny. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  With fluid grace and core strength, Roxanne righted herself. “Until this is over, I am the nicest person you are likely to meet.”

  In that movement, Horace saw real physical training in Roxanne, much like Vincent’s. Perhaps all gangsters thought it wise to train for combat. Horace wondered again what stories her scars told, and how many more scars were invisible.

  Outside the windows, the airport dissolved into familiar shreds of encroaching desert. But they were not headed for the Strip yet. On either side of them, a dusty, decrepit expanse of trailer parks lay staked out in the desert to die.

  “Say,” he said, “where we going?”

  “To see my surgeon,” Roxanne said. “You did not think we could do this in a hospital, did you?”

  “Does he have running water?” Horace said.

  It was not among the trailer parks that the limousine eased to a stop, but before the front gate of a chain-link fence surrounding a storage facility. Hundreds of storage cells lay behind endless rows of orange, steel garage doors. Tumbleweeds and dust filtered down these man-made arroyos. The gate creaked open, and the hover-drive kicked up storms of grit as the car slid through the opening.

  Tina said, “You’re going to be cutting on my face in an environment like this?”

  Roxanne said, “We do what we must. If we are compromised by a single camera with a tapped feed, we’ll all be dead and this will all be for nothing.”

  Tina’s face scrunched, and she crossed her arms tight.

  Bunny’s eyes fixed on Roxanne. “This is not just a storage facility.” Roxanne just tilted her head in acknowledgment of Bunny’s perception.

  The limousine stopped outside a larger building with a flaking sign that read CLIMATE CONTROLLED STORAGE, waited for a towering garage door to scroll open, and eased inside. The closing door sealed them into a cavernous, concrete garage. Signs in six languages covered the walls with protocols on how to use the storage units.

  The air in here was comfortably cool and dry, with only lingering traces of the dust that followed them inside. A sleek, red sports car, gleaming with fresh polish, sat nearby. The metallic ticking of its cooling power plant echoed in the yawning space.

  Roxanne led them to a heavy steel door in a cinder-block wall, passed her wrist near a reader, and opened the door. More long hallways of narrow steel doors, painted orange like those outside. The air here was cooler still and smelled of industrial cleaners.

  Up a freight elevator to the third floor, down another long hallway into a remote corner, and finally before a door identical to all the others, Roxanne waved her wrist past another reader, and the door slid upward with a rattling clank.

  Inside was a cell, perhaps four meters by eight. Plastic sheeting swathed the walls and floor. Air scrubbers hummed somewhere nearby. A surgical station occupied the center of the chamber, beside which stood a tall, pale man and a short, plump, dark-skinned woman, both dressed in scrubs. The man was arranging instruments on a tray, the woman working the holographic interface to the regenestation that occupied most of the far wall.

  “Doctor,” Roxanne said.

  The short woman approached, her gaze climbing Horace with growing amazement. “Ma’am,” she said.

  Roxanne introduced Doctor Athena Gilchrist as “one of the best reconstructive surgeons no one has ever heard of.”

  The doctor grinned at her. “We go back a ways, don’t we, ma’am?”

  Bunny’s eyes fluttered for a moment until her awareness returned to the moment with a crinkled brow. “Good shielding,” she said to Roxanne. “Good netsec, too.”

  “Nut sack?” Tina said.

  “Netsec,” Bunny said, rolling her eyes. “Network security. I can’t get anything in or out of here.”

  “And neither can anyone else,” Roxanne sai
d. “As I said, precautions. Now, shall we get down to business?”

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “Who’s first?”

  “This one,” Roxanne said, gesturing to Tina. “We have things to do later.”

  Tina swallowed hard and blanched.

  The doctor said, “Don’t worry, little girl—” Tina’s face twisted at that, “—I am, in fact, an actual surgeon.” She gestured to the man behind her. “This tall drink of milk is my nurse. I graduated from Harvard Medical School, and I’ve done something like two thousand procedures like this. I help Roxy from time to time, when the cause suits me.”

  “That many people need to run from their face?” Tina said.

  “That’s the world we live in,” the doctor said. “Now, come on. We’re on a strict timetable.”

  In the harsh fluorescence, Tina’s eyes glimmered with controlled fear.

  “It’ll be all right, kid,” Horace said. “We’ll still like you if your nose falls off.”

  When Horace woke up that afternoon, the tall, pale nurse reconfigured the operating platform into a reclining chair. He was cold, clothed now in only a sterile gown.

  Horace’s face felt thick and wrong. His nose looked swollen, like he’d just been walloped with a two-by-four. He grimaced and worked his lips—at least they felt normal. Trying to raise his hands, he found them clasped within thick, padded straps. His eyes watered at the sensation of something in them.

  “One moment,” said the nurse as he unbuckled the straps.

  Horace touched the tender flesh of his face.

  The nurse held up a mirror and showed Horace a stranger, a man so profoundly changed that he checked to see if the mirror was real.

  “Good work, right?” said the nurse.

  “That is one ugly motherfucker.” No trace of any incision remained. His brows were heavier, his nose thicker, wider, even appearing to have been broken a few times, his cheekbones bulkier. “What happened to my baby-blues?”

  “Brown contact lenses. Check this out.” The nurse pressed a button on his datapad.

  Horace jerked in surprise as: