Page 2 of So Smitten

His words were choked short by a jolt of electricity that clamped his teeth together and stiffened him like a pole. He shuddered as fifty thousand volts robbed him of control of his body. The electricity cut short, and he fell to the ground, gasping and jerking as spasms wracked him.

“What…” he choked. “What…”

Electricity coursed through him again, and his teeth clamped shut once more. He tasted blood and realized he had bitten through his tongue.

The electricity cut out again, and a muffled voice said, “Where?”

“What?” Vinny coughed. “Where what?”

The stranger lifted a small remote and calmly adjusted a setting.

“Hey, wait,” Vinny said, “Please…”

His pleas were drowned out by another jolt of current, this one noticeably more powerful than the first two. When the shock cut out again, Vinny felt his heart stumble a few beats before grudgingly resuming its rhythm.

This was very bad.

“Where?” the stranger repeated.

Vinny thought hard. What could anyone possibly want to know from him? It had to be something to do with the gang. If they knew Vinnie, that meant it had to do with the dogfighting ring.

So where what?

The stranger lifted the remote again, and Vinny forgot all about thought, forgot all about anything but saving his own life. “They keep the dogs in an old warehouse on Jackson Street! The fights happen all over the place, backyards usually. They just hire me to pick up the dogs. I don’t train ‘em, I don’t fight ‘em.”

The stranger nodded. “Thank you.”

He adjusted the setting on the collar again, twisting a dial clockwise until Vinny heard a click.

“Oh man,” he whined. “I’m just trying to make a living man.”

Those were the last words Vincent Mariano ever spoke. The man pressed a button, and a surge of liquid heat poured from the collar into Vinny's brain. His eyes rolled back in his sockets, and his teeth clattered like a wind-up toy. His arms and legs drummed the ground, and a burning sensation filled his nostrils as the skin on his neck melted.

The collar stopped, and so did Vinny's heart. His head lolled over to the right, and the last thing he was aware of was Macy trotting happily back to her doghouse, the cupcake in her mouth.

CHAPTER ONE

“Hey, Bold,” Decker called. “Ten bucks says I get Gutierrez to sleep with me by the end of the week.”

Faith scoffed. “Make it a hundred. Your sorry ass couldn’t convince Garth to sleep with you.”

Garth, a six-foot-four, two-hundred-eighty pound behemoth who liked firing his M249 from the hip and had once bent a length of rebar into a pretzel in Faith’s presence, leered at Decker.

“Hell, I ain’t proud,” Decker said, “Be gentle with me, Daddy, and I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

They all laughed at that, and Garth said, “Fortunately for you, I’m worn out after spending the night with your wife, so you get a pass.”

The banter continued, one of the few constants in Kajran, along with long, uninterrupted stretches of mind-numbing boredom, something the banter often relieved, and the occasional roadside bomb, something no one acknowledged and everyone thought about.

They had been fortunate enough to avoid the roadside bombs on the three-hour journey from Gadamsa. The Taliban had been unusually quiet recently, probably dealing with the resurgent offensive toward Mazar-i-Sharif in the North, that—if successful, when successful—would cut them off from Russian support.

How funny that less than forty years ago, they had fought the Russians, but now that the U.S. was the foreign power, they were right in bed with them. Probably the same people that strategized how to kill Afghani people was now planning ways to use them to kill Americans.

Not that there was anything Faith could do about that. Those decisions were so far above her pay grade she would have to pay someone to be allowed to look at the building where those decisions were made.

So she just picked up her rifle, cracked crude jokes with her brothers and sisters, and waited for them to call her number and send her back home.

“Well, what about you then, Bold?” Decker called with a grin, “You want some help keeping warm tonight?”

---