Page 93 of Double Shot
“Bottoms up, let him get to work,” Lach said. She gave a half shrug and tipped the bottle back to take a hit. She coughed and hacked after the swallow, and color bloomed through her face, but she stayed steady.
“Ole Reliable,” I said, and went back to work. The wound was cleaned, and I used a needle and suture to close up the sides of the bite. “How in the shite did the cunt make this kind of bite?” I asked, mostly to myself.
“Her cuspid and first molars are augmented,” Lach said. “Upper and lower, I don’t think they’re stick-ons.”
“No, I would guess they aren’t,” I said. Memories came back of how she liked to bite, and how her teeth had seemed so sharp against my skin, and how I had thought I was being delicate, overly sensitive. I shuddered a little at the thought, those teeth, and her going down on me, how aggressive she had been and how she seemed to enjoy choking herself, gagging herself, on me.
“Easy there,” Sadie said. “Don’t have butterfingers with that needle.”
She turned the whiskey up again, and there was a glint in her eye.
I fucking knew that look.
I finished sewing her up, dropped a few butterfly bandages, and then covered the entire bite with gauze and tape. “It will be bloody stiff and sore later. It’s not just the broken skin, but there will be a lot of subdermal trauma, and probably bruising. Everything else will go away pretty quickly.”
“What do you mean everything else?” she asked.
“Bruises and that,” I said. “When you’re going through a firefight, your adrenalin is so high that you can be shot multiple times and not feel it, not unless it hits bone or something vital.”
“Fuck, did I get shot?” she asked, a little alarmed.
“God, no,” I replied quickly. “You just have, you know, some bruises, nothing major.”
She had used the M79 at close range, she had been a fistfight with a sadist, how she got a bruised face had a hundred different potential answers. None of it was especially bad, and she could pass for having been in a car crash, and airbags, or really needing more sleep.
She handed Lach the whiskey and went to look in the mirror for herself.
“I can’t wait to fucking kill her,” she growled at her reflection. She climbed into the tub with Lach and took the whiskey back from him for another drink.
“Try to keep that bandage dry,” I offered.
“Yeah, sure.” She coughed again.
“There are a few things I need to attend, are you both alright for a little while?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” Lach said. “And I’ll keep an eye on our queen, here.” She smiled and flicked him her middle finger.
“Alright, I’ll be back in a few.”
* * *
The Escadrille Cartelheld the mansion on John Laurens Highway through a small holding company, Lafayette-Indigo Venture Real Estate. It was a shell company, the sort of thing that should have already folded and reverted all of its assets to another company to prevent the thing I was about to do.
Lach and I had our own holding and shell companies, places that only existed in legal documents and online assets. Setting up the hostile takeover of Lafayette-Indigo by the Cromwell-Washington Investment Group took less than half an hour, and three phone calls. I looked into what assets were also in the massive data breach that I had managed to pull off almost entirely by accident.
I emptied two bank accounts and closed them.
There was also a deposit box at a Baltimore bank vault, a list of Escadrille dealers and hubs through the eastern US, and a few businesses that were fronts for their money laundering operations.
I wondered if this was how the Vandal king Genseric felt when he defeated the Romans and burned Rome. I pillaged. I transferred the contents of their bank accounts through overseas banks, and then back into one of our accounts, letting the plunder pay for its own liberation. There was no fee too exorbitant when I was paying with someone else’s money.
The lists of names and criminal operations I clandestinely leaked to different agencies. Individual documents were sent to specific detective’s desks. Others went to the heads of agencies and departments. Poppy fields could be replanted, and there were always going to be third world nations in Asia that would put people in chains to grow and harvest the plants. Building distribution networks, selling the product on the end, under the police and western governments, that was what took longer to build. Burning those fields, that was how to deal damage.
I burned them.
I burned them to the ground.
It would take the Escadrille decades to reverse the damage I was doing. That was assuming that they survived this blood-letting.
