Page 1 of Double Shot

Chapter One

Lachlan…

Federal agencies are now reporting that the events near Indigo City represent the culmination in a week long confrontation between multiple criminal organizations that ended with an explosion powerful enough to be felt across the entire city and even to the far side of the bay.

The video was grainy and low quality, but the fact that the news helicopter camera had shown anything was proof that their gear was good, but not military grade. I could make out the hulk of the house, but there were almost no details. Even the holes torn in the side were nothing more than dark spots in a shadow. Then there was the ‘puff’ as the first stage of the weapon fired, reducing the fuel to a vaporized cloud. The second explosion ignited the aerosol and smashed the house like it had been made of match sticks.

The camera swung violently away, as the concussion wave threw the helicopter up and away like a child’s toy. A second feed started – security footage from a distant location – only catching the flare of the second main explosion.

State and Federal agencies are asking people to please stay away from the historic Bootlegger Head area, as the investigation into the explosion and the apparent underworld battle that occurred continues.

A reporter interviewed a man in a drab off-the-rack suit. Her pluck and use of sharp words bothered him. He responded to her questions with a deadened monotone. He said that everything was under investigation, and people with information were being asked to come forward, and that the “goshdarn med’ya”needed to stop running off at the mouth.

I hit the pause and rewind button. The video zipped back to the start and began playing again, and I watched the house vanish in a puff of flame. It looked like such a small thing, nothing like the explosions in movies. There was no giant churning pillar of black smoke and flame, just that intense fireball, and then everything was dust and shattered ruin, over and over again.

“You’re just torturing yourself, stop,” Sadie said in her characteristically soft voice.

“I can’t accept it,” I said, pressing my hand against the side of my face.

The last six months had been nothing but hell, and the only thing that had gotten me through it was the angel with her hand on my shoulder. Sadie had more experience than I did surviving this sort of loss; this hardship.

In a way, she rescuedme.

It was fair, I had picked her up off the side of a highway, and she picked me up off the floor of the bedroom in a house I had hated. I turned the laptop off and put it back on the desk.

“There was nothing we could have done differently.” She gave my shoulder a firm squeeze, a gesture of her support. “You know that.”

“There was, there had to have been.” I looked up at her. “We played the game for years and never lost, not even once.”

“That’s the thing Kyle; eventually? Everyone loses.”

She was right, and Roan knew it, too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gone through all the preparations, and there wouldn’t have been those videos on the recovery drives in our bags. I suppressed a shudder. She wrapped her arms around me, and I could feel her face against the back of my neck, her warm breath against my skin.

“C’mon, how long have you been watching that?” she asked.

“Too long,” I admitted. Watching it was almost an act of penance. Maybe if I watched the house destroyed enough times, the damned fireball, and everything blown to fuck all, it would either make sense or the ache in my heart would go numb from it. Six months hadn’t done it, but I had the rest of my life to go.

It was hard to believe that six months had even passed since the battle on Bootlegger Head. Six months since everything went up in flames and death. The bullet wounds had healed, and the stitches were long gone. Doc Max had shown up after I passed out, but Sadie had let her in, and had helped the doc take care of me. We had only stayed at the Daughton house for three days. I spent most of that time in a painkiller haze.

She took care of me after Doc left.

After I could move on my own again, we restocked our bags and left. I didn’t have a way to blow the Daughton house, but starting a fire was easy enough. We stayed and watched long enough for the blaze to fully engulf the structure, flames billowing out of the windows after the heat broke them. Even if it was declared arson, it would be chalked up to vandals and not an insurance scam. The house was owned by a real estate holding company, legally. There were loops and tricks in the paperwork that had made the house ours until the moment something went wrong, and then it would be in the portfolio of a multi-million-dollar shell company.

Roan’s legal sorcery at play.

He was a fucking wizard, the things he did. Even the way he did them.

A week after the bomb, we had been in much more comfortable housing. The Eastermont Hotel sat high in the West Virginia mountains, not far from the shadow of Raven Rock. In decades past, when Cold War tensions had run high, VIPs and dignitaries had frequented the hotel. That way, if the bombs flew, they would be close enough to the Doomsday bunker under Raven Rock, where the president and all of his men would seek shelter.

That was where the two of us started picking up the pieces of our lives. The Recovery Drives had all the data we needed to do that – a ton of foreign bank accounts, dossiers of contacts and potential associates, the sundry people and agencies that held all of our finances and holdings, completely unknowing of who we were and what we did, and something we didn’t expect.

There were videos that he had made, contingent upon his demise, on how to go through with getting back everything we had built. Some were harder than others to watch. The easy ones were the older ones, financial fallout plans that had been laid months or years before, before Sadie had come into our lives. The hard ones were the new ones, the files he had recorded in the last few days. He knew that something was brewing and had gotten everything lined up, fully prepared for any possible outcome.

“Aye, mate,”he had said, wearing the purple tie Sadie had gotten for him at St. Henri. That trip felt like it had been in another century. “Down here, updating some of the bug-out and recovery stuff. The last few days, yeah? You were there.”He sat back, brushed the front of his tie, and took a breath.

The video had jumped. He’d stopped recording for some time before jumping back in.

“So yeah, the last few days, we all know something is going to go down, so I’m putting this into the bug-out, if everything goes completely tits up, there is a chance that one of us won’t make it out of the house. With my leg being the way it is, I would put odds on me holding the line while you get Sadie to safety. If you’re watching this, I’m going to assume that is what has happened.”He paused and took a drink.“Because if I got out, I don’t need to watch my own video on the recovery drive.”He had laughed a little about that.

---