Page 1 of Constantly Cotton

The Long and Winding Road

“MR. JASON,what was that?”

Lieutenant Colonel Jason Constance, Commander of Covert Operations, self-named Desert Division, wondered if it was possible for his stomach to sink past his balls.

He hadn’t been in this much trouble out on the field, looking at a trained assassin through his sniper’s scope. And even then he hadn’t felt fear.

But then, his ass had been the only one on the line.

“Hang on, Sophie!” Jason called to the back seat of the “borrowed” medical shuttle. He blinked hard to clear the grit of sleep from his eyes. He had managed to pull over to catch a nap for an hour or so, but his internal monitor was pinging danger, and he’d started the bus up when he was certain the kids had all dropped off to sleep.

He couldn’t shake the thought that someone was on their tail.

Around lunchtime, his life had seemed so simple.

Stressful—yes. Lonely—hellyes. But… fuck.

Simple was relative.

He was in charge of one of the most complicated, gawdawful tasks on the planet. For years, a powerful man—a commander in the armed forces named Karl Lacey—had utilized his ties to the covert ops community to try to create the perfect assassin. He’d used everything from psychics to behavior modification to outright torture to get men to forget their better angels and to find joy only in the hunt… and the kills.

The results had been predictable. To everyone but Lacey.

He’d set a batch of highly trained serial killers loose on an unsuspecting world.

Jason and one of his best operatives, a man named Lee Burton, had stopped the operation before it went international. They’d had help. Burton’s boyfriend, Ernie Caulfield, a psychic Lacey had trained up and then tried to have Burton assassinate, had been their compass, and a batch of civilians who’d seen Lacey’s psychological Frankenstein’s monsters in action had become weapons.

The fallout had left Jason in charge of Lacey’s old hidden military base in the desert outside of Barstow, with Lee Burton. Jason and Lee had spent the better part of the last eight months tracking down Lacey’s abominations, and it was grim, dangerous, dirty work.

And painful.

They called it Operation Dead Fish.

Not every man Lacey had turned loose on the world had started out a monster. So many of them were left with tortured bits of soul and heart mangled in the wreckage. But it was hard to bring a patient in when that patient was trained to dismember people with his teeth and a plastic fork. Not a lot of their targets were brought home alive to fix.

The only thing that had kept Jason from hollowing out, becoming the man he and his small contingent of fifty or so operatives, agents, and trackers hunted, had been the other part of that fallout.

Burton’s boyfriend, Ernie, was so psychic he really couldn’t function in a crowded city or urban area, but he was also sort of a sweet, goofy angel who liked to feed people their favorite pastries and could pull a future out of thin air with a rather spacey look into the clouds. Burton’s best friend, Ace Atchison, and Ace’s psychotic boyfriend, Sonny Daye, had proved staunch and loyal friends and good soldiers, as had Ace’s friend and employee, Jai, no last name, a mobster who had been “given” to Ace because Ace had risked his life to save Jai’s boss’s granddaughter.

And Ellery Cramer and Jackson Rivers, the lawyer and his PI boyfriend, who had not only stopped one of the first serial killers to escape Lacey’s control but had tracked the man to Lacey independently, had proved invaluable, both in a fight and as allies in a dangerous secret war.

And all of them, in one way or another, had become something Jason Constance had never thought to have when he’d signed his name on Uncle Sam’s bloody dotted line:

Friends. Family. People who knew who he was and cared abouthim—not what he could do for the juggernaut corporation that was the US military.

So Jason had started his morning depressingly early, resolving a crisis that had been brewing for a week and then checking with his far-flung agents, who were currently tracking a number of the rogue operatives through various countries, including their own, and then making contact with his field agents, who were keeping tabs on dangerous targets and trying to find a way to take them out without alerting—or hurting—the civilian population, and then finally with his wetwork agents to make sure that killing people for a living hadn’t turned them into killers who did it for fun.

By lunchtime, all he’d wanted was a goddamned tuna sandwich. That was all. The limit of his ambitions.

And then Ernie had called him, out of the blue, and complicated his world.

Ace Atchison and Jai were chasing down an RV of trafficked children, he’d said. They would need help. “Jason, you know we can’t just let this happen,” he said.

And Jason, so desperate to do somethinggood,and do somethingreal,had agreed. He’d had Anton Huntington, his transport guy, fire up the old helicopter and take him out to I-15, that long stretch of nowhere between LA and Vegas, and he’d gotten there just in time to watch the big Russian ex-mob guy and a staff sergeant with a high school education take out the guy ferrying kidnapped children from Sacramento to Vegas.

Literallywithout trying.

That didn’t stop Ace and Jai from being glad to see him. No. But it did feel anticlimactic. Right up until Jason had called his own CO, Brigadier General Barney Talbot, and told him that he’d intercepted some trafficked children and would like permission to use military transportation to take them back up north to Sacramento.