Page 36 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

36.

Time Elapsed from Initial Collapse: 12 Hours

Keep the boss happy.

Never piss off the boss.

Never disappoint the boss.

Despite what absolutely fucking awful circumstances you’ve found yourself in.

Hire Denton drove the hobbling Jeep along a strip of mud, gravel and rocks that passed for a trail.

Which it really wasn’t.

It was a strip of mud and gravel and rocks.

Trails were more or less smooth and more or less obstacle free and wide enough so that—unlike here—you didn’t fall off the side and tumble fifty feet into a gulley if you as much as sneezed or looked away for a half second.

Careful.

Hire was his legal name. Being on the mission he presently was engaged in, he thought again how it would look on his tombstone. Like an advertisement for a day laborer.

Thank you, Mom and Dad.

He could always leave instructions for the undertaker to make it “H. Denton.”

Or just change it.

But that meant going to a lawyer or going to a courthouse and filling out papers and it was really just too much trouble.

Hire was a pool ball of a man. Round was the only word that fit his physique—body and nearly bald head.

“You ready, boys and girls,” he called. “Almost there.” And hummed a song whose name and lyrics he did not recall. Something from a soft rock channel.

Hire continued slowly up the wannabe trail in the rocks and found a flat area, wider, like the landing in a stairway going up to a second story in a tall house. He climbed from the vehicle and looked at the rain-swept landscape.

Desolate.

Overcast sky, rain, mist.

And gray cliffs.

Oh, and mud. A lot of mud.

He knew for a fact it had rained for about ten hours, but he could have been told it was thirty and he’d’ve believed the person doing the telling.

He tapped the gun on his right hip to make sure he knew exactly where it was in case he needed it. He didn’t know that he would, and didn’t know that he wouldn’t.

But Hire Denton was a man who took very few chances.

Just ask his boys and girls.

He walked to the back of the Jeep and scanned the area again to make certain he was alone. He was. But who the fuck would want to be here anyway?

He opened the liftgate and leaned close to a camo backpack.

“How we doing in there?” he whispered. “Comfy? Glad to hear it.”

The boss knew he talked to his friends. But so what? That was his business and his alone.

“Be right back.”

Hire pulled on his fly fisherman rubberized waders and gloves, and a baseball cap, backward.

There was no uncertainty about where he was supposed to go. He simply followed the sound of falling water. Despite all the carnage it had caused and promised to cause yet, the waterfall over the broken Hinowah levee was quite the soothing sound to him.

A man who was accustomed to more, one might say, staccato noises.

Keeping low, he peeked over a formation of rock that looked like something you’d see on Mars. Except it wasn’t. The rocks on Mars were red. Netflix, a special he and Alma had watched.

He studied the levee and, beyond it, the town of Hinowah. He couldn’t see where the water was falling, which he’d been told by the boss was nearly a ghost town now.

Deserted.

You want to empty a town—and leave it free for the pickings—just threaten to flood it to the gills.

Hire now eased closer and studied the levee and the road and the rocks around them carefully. He was fast and moved smoothly, which might have surprised an onlooker. But with his low center of gravity the ballish man had a natural sense of balance. He was also extremely strong and pushed through the water as if it were not much denser than air.

He shivered, despite the gear. People sometimes commented—out of curiosity, not cruelty—that he must be naturally insulated against the cold, being so round.

They seemed to forget that temperature sensors on the human body were not under the layers of fat but on the surface of the skin.

And so, yeah, he got fucking cold.

He returned to the Jeep and, leaving the waders on, drank a cup of hot coffee, black. Then, the core temperature up a few degrees, he walked to the tailgate, opening it manually. He’d disabled the remote on this and his other car, a Mercedes, and the GPS and online assistance.

Radio signals…Not good.

He opened the backpack and said, “Morning, Charlie. How was the ride?”

Charlie of course didn’t answer. He was as inanimate as inanimate objects could be.

Charlie.

For the letter C .

As in C-4.

Or Composition 4, which was the classic high explosive everybody who watched TV or followed the news knew about. The substance was made mostly of RDX, standing for Royal Demolition eXplosive, which the Brits had developed eons ago. You could use his friend Ralphie—yes, RDX—by itself but usually it was better mixed with other substances. C-4 was the most common variation.

For other jobs he might choose Doreen—dynamite, which was based on Nancy (nitroglycerin). Sally (Semtex, from the Czech Republic) was dependable, but like an aging aunt, she had moved into a retirement home, as younger and more efficient descendants took over.

If he had a favorite, it was Bob.

Black powder—old-time gunpowder—was a low , not a high, explosive but it produced a very respectable bang when in a tightly enclosed pipe or container. And the smoke was impressive and, to Hire’s sensitive nostrils, pleasantly aromatic.

He began lifting blocks of Charlie out of the bag. He was, as always, amused that C-4 came with a warning label. Which was not that one should take care because it exploded at twenty-eight-thousand feet per second and could turn a human body into molecules in not much more time than that. No, the admonishment on the C-4 wrapper was: Do not burn—Toxic Fumes.

Kind of the least of your worries when playing with Charlie.

He put the blocks in a backpack, along with detonators and cellular receivers, which had two levels of arming systems. The first used one cell phone call to arm the second, which detonated the explosives when it got a call. There was a one in a hundred thousand chance that a signal matching the detonation receiver would trip the circuit while you happened to be working the detonating stick into Charlie’s tummy.

But that was chance enough to use what he called two-step authentication.

Just like his bank and Facebook and Instagram.

“Okay, let’s get to work, my friend…”

He slung the backpack over his shoulder and started back to the Never Summer. As always, before a job he felt a bit of sadness, preparing to send Charlie into oblivion.

But on the other hand, Hire Denton was also moved by nearly tearful pride and satisfaction that his dear friend was headed for the fate he’d been born to.