Page 9 of Duke
He kept rubbing as he answered me. “Cain won’t show up himself, he doesn’t work like that. He’ll send more guys like the ones back at the house. He’s a crime lord, basically. Like Kingpin fromDaredevil?” He eyed me expectantly. “No? Nothing? Well anyway, he runs a huge, complicated operation which, from what I’ve learned is drugs, mainly, along with some hardware and other black market shit like underage prostitutes. He operates on a cellular basis like the cells of operatives, terrorist style. Most of them don’t interact with each other, so there’s an element of overlap and deniability, plus few of them will have ever interacted with Cain directly.”
He set my foot down and I flexed my toes, and then poked at the blisters on the bottom of my feet. “And why were you kidnapped by a kingpin?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Because my boss pissed him off. He was probably hoping to use me as leverage to get back at Harris.”
“How would he do that?”
“The usual,” Duke said. “Videos of me being tortured or having parts hacked off until Harris agreed to give himself up for me.” He said this casually, as if the thought didn’t bother him a bit.
“You mean that literally, don’t you?”
“Oh, very literally.”
“Would your boss have traded himself for you?”
A shrug. “If there was no other way, probably. But the rest of the boys wouldn’t have let him. Especially Thresh. He’ll probably want to go after Cain directly. They’re probably mounting a very pissed off rescue operation right about now, which is going to be bad for Cain and his guys. ”
“Thresh?”
Duke grinned. “My best friend. Biggest, toughest motherfucker I’ve ever met, and the only man who’s ever beaten me in arm wrestling.”
I just stared at Duke. “Bigger than you?”
“By several inches and at least twenty pounds of muscle.”
“Jesus.”
Duke laughed. “Yeah. Thresh is a monster.”
“He sounds terrifying.”
“Yeah. He’s huge, insanely strong, and knows as many ways to kill you with his bare hands as I do, but…once you get to know him, you’ll find out he’s pretty much a teddy bear, most of the time. Never seen the man angry, like, not ever. Even in bar fights, he’s just…chill. So, yeah, he looks scary, and you should be scared of him if you’re not his friend, but…truly scary? Nah.” He rocked back on his heels and then sat down in the grass beside me. “Now Anselm…he’sscary.”
“And who is Anselm?”
“The wild card on the team. From Germany, I think, but I could be wrong. Somewhere over in that area, at least. You wouldn’t want to get stuck in a dark alley with any of us, but Anselm? I wouldn’t want to be stuck on the samecontinentas Anselm if he didn’t like me. The problem with Anselm is you never know where he is. You piss off Anselm, he’ll put a rifle slug in the back of your head from a mile away, and you’ll never even know what happened. Or you might brush up against him walking down the street and you’ll just…drop dead. You hear people say, oh that guy’s a ghost, you know? Like he’s impossible to keep track of? Well Anselm isn’t just a ghost, he’s a fucking…he’s why people are afraid of the dark man. Anselm scares the poop right out of me, and I’ve known the man for several years.”
I let a few beats go by. “So…what exactly is it you do that you know people like Thresh and Anselm?”
“I’m a private security contractor.”
“Like Blackwater?”
His eyes narrowed. “Overpaid grunts. No, not like Blackwater. I’m the kind of security that billionaires hire to be their personal Secret Service, except we don’t answer to Uncle fuckin’ Sam.”
“So which billionaires do you work for, then?”
“We don’t do long term contracts. We’re more…specialized than that.”
I frowned. “And what the hell doesthatmean?”
“It means I don’t get paid to walk around some rich dick’s fancy ass estate with a taser,” he said. “We get hired when a billionaire’s daughter gets kidnapped for ransom. Let’s say you’re yachting around the Mediterranean or wherever with your mommy and daddy, and someone like, oh, Cain for example, decides there’s money to be made kidnapping your fine ass. So you find yourself locked in the hold of a stinking fishing boat while Cain sends a video to Daddy showing Cain severing your finger and demanding a couple hundred million dollars be transferred into an untraceable Swiss bank account. Your dad, instead of calling the FBI or Interpol, would call my boss, Harris, and hire us. And instead of bargaining with the assholes, we’d go in heavy, shoot their shit up, make off with you, and we wouldn’t leave anyone left alive to talk about us afterward, either.”
“And there’s enough of that kind of thing happening that you have steady work?”
He laughed, and it wasn’t exactly a pleasant sound. “Sweetheart, you havenoidea what goes on in this world.”
“Not sure I want to, either.”