Bad Penny

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Coalville, Utah

  1. Cowboy Donut

  2. White Hat

  3. Sam

  4. Nova

  5. Killer App

  6. Eden

  7. Pinto

  8. Yolanda

  9. Crosswind

  10. Truck Stop

  11. Precious Cargo

  12. Locks

  13. Bang Bang

  14. Stolen Assets

  15. Rusty Shooter

  16. Dirt

  17. Threefer

  18. Sugar Beets

  19. Instructions

  20. Carmen

  21. Gun

  22. Carrots

  23. Gear

  24. H. C. and Sons

  25. Tail

  26. Target

  27. Backup

  28. Gorozas

  29. Tony

  30. Anything You Say

  31. Five-Star Accommodations

  32. Ms. Cross

  33. Crème Brûlée

  Dear Reader

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  By John D. Brown

  About the Author

  Bad Penny

  John D. Brown

  Frank, an Army Special Forces vet, screwed up, went to prison, and is now out, living in small-town Wyoming and trying to go straight. But then some old "friends" from the big house come to collect on a favor, and everything goes totally nuts, forcing Frank to go outside the law to save the one thing he cherishes most.

  Copyright

  BAD PENNY

  Copyright © 2013 by John Brown

  All rights reserved

  Published by Blacksword Enterprises, LLC

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from John Brown. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  Cover design copyright © 2013 Shai McDonald

  ISBN 13: 978-1-940427-05-8

  ISBN 10: 1940427053

  First edition: December, 2013

  Revised May, 2014

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Dedication

  In memory of George Obrist, one of the good guys

  Prologue

  Coalville, Utah

  JESUS GOROZA, the man with tats running over his limbs like demons, thought the woman they were following on this deserted piece of interstate was FBI.

  Ed Meese, the driver, the man with the scar on his neck, didn’t think that was the case at all. She was in her early-twenties, a bit young for the FBI. And she was driving an old 1990s Buick without another soul in sight. Wouldn’t the Feds have sent backup at the first sign of trouble? Of course, maybe she’d convinced her bosses she was clear, convinced them that the big FBI agent had everything in hand, and they’d pulled back the cavalry.

  Meese shook his head. Cops were idiots.

  The two men had been keeping back, playing it safe, giving the woman plenty of room. It was just after four a.m., the sun still more than an hour off. Hardly a soul out here. Just them and her driving in the dark, the two men waiting for her to make her mistake.

  Up ahead the woman slowed, then took the exit to a small out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Utah town called Coalville. In a big city, there would have been cars. There would have been some bustle. There would have been witnesses.

  There were no witnesses here. Not on these streets.

  There were hardly any homes. Meese figured there were at most a few dozen, and they were all strung out along a main road that stretched for ten miles or more. All of the houses were dark. A bunch of hick farmers dreaming about cows.

  A brightly-lit Best Western hotel and a Texaco gas station stood on one side of the interstate. A lone Sinclair gas station stood on the other. The woman came to a stop then accelerated up and across the overpass toward the Sinclair gas station on the other side, the side that you couldn’t see well from the interstate. The side she obviously thought might give her cover.

  “Bingo,” Jesus said.

  In a big city, the Sinclair would have been ready for business. In this know-nothing town, it was dark and locked. The pumps, of course, were on. And the station’s sign with a green dinosaur on a white background towered above the place and shone out into the fading night.

  But there was no attendant standing guard over the cash and cigarettes to observe the woman. No one to see her stop and start the pump. No one to see her go try the bathroom door around the side. No one to see the two men pull up to the station a few seconds later.

  Meese said, “Looks like your offerings to the White Lady paid off.”

  Jesus opened the glove box and pulled out the semi-automatic. “I told you she wanted mescal.”

  Prayer, mescal offered up in a glass five days in a row, and cigarette smoke blown into the Lady’s skeleton face.

  Meese pointed at Jesus’s gun. “You remember: this whore isn’t worth anything to us dead.”

  “She’s worth less dead,” Jesus corrected.

  “A lot less. Hand me some ties.”

  Jesus reached into the glove box again and came up with a bundle of long white plastic zip ties and a roll of duct tape. These weren’t garden variety ties; these were nice and fat and designed for human wrists.

  Gas stations always had cameras. Meese spotted two here. So instead of rolling up into the well-lit area by the pumps and the woman’s car, he pulled around the corner into the dark night shadow below some trees, threw it in park, and cut the lights. He and Jesus put on their ball caps and pulled them down low so their faces would be in shadow. Then they got out and quietly hustled up to her piece of crap Buick just to make sure nobody was in it, then silently moved to the side of the building to surprise her when she came back from the bathroom.

  Meese slipped the ties into his back pocket and took a position by the corner. Jesus stood back with his gun to head her off in case she tried an end run.

  High above them the green and white dinosaur sign buzzed with electricity. In the distance, someone in a pickup with some pipes got a little frisky and floored it. The roaring motor echoed from the other end of the still town. Whoever it was might have had the opportunity to witness the one exciting thing to happen in that farming town that day, but they were headed in another direction, and the roar of that motor faded in the distance.

  The woman came around the corner. She saw Jesus. Her eyes went wide. She turned to flee, but Meese was right there. He lunged for her.

  She swung for his face. Connected. But he had taken plenty of blows from men a lot bigger and stronger. He’d taken harder blows as a kid.

  He tackled her. Right there on the asphalt. Slammed her down hard. She was a fine little thing, slender, and strong.

  She cried out, threw an elbow, kicked, almost wriggled free. But he outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. And he was strong. Years of strength built up in prison.

  Meese grabbed her by her dark hair and smacked her head into the asphalt.

  She screamed, but Meese rolled her over and punched her hard in her slim gut. A pounding blow like a sledge hammer that knocked the air right out of her.

  The scream cut short. Her eyes went wide with t
he shock and pain.

  Meese reached around and grabbed one of the zip ties. It was almost eighteen inches long. It took him only a second to loop it around her ankles and feed the one end into the locking mechanism. Took him no time to yank it tight.

  By this time the woman had her breath back, but she wasn’t going anywhere. He rolled her back onto her stomach, wrenched her arms behind her back, and zip-tied her wrists.

  The woman screamed.

  “Tape,” Meese said.

  Jesus ripped off a length of duct tape, then knelt down and slapped it over the woman’s mouth.

  She tried to scream again, but found it just didn’t work the same when her mouth was shut. Sounded more like a growl.

  Meese patted her down, checked her pockets. No guns, no knives, no hidden microphones. Just a man’s wallet with a driver’s license and a piece of plastic. Where was her phone?

  They hauled her up. Meese hefted her slight weight over his shoulder. He was happy their quarry had turned out to be a woman, and not some fat cholo with a death wish.

  Jesus ran to the Nissan. Meese followed, lugging his cargo through the light by the pumps to the dark street.

  Jesus opened the trunk. The trunk light came on, and Meese stuffed her inside. She fit pretty well. A lot better than some big guy would. But she was going to kick and growl and that wouldn’t do. It would be annoying if nothing else.

  “You ready?” Meese said.

  Jesus fished around in his shirt pocket then nodded.

  Meese said to the woman, “I’m going to rip this tape off. This is your last opportunity to scream for help. I figure you deserved a sporting chance. Here we go.”

  The woman looked up with desperation and anger in her eyes.

  Meese grabbed her by the forehead to hold her face firmly in place. “One, two, three,” he counted and ripped the tape back.

  The woman opened her mouth to scream, but Jesus was there with a bottle of grape flavored Benadryl. He deftly grabbed her nose with his fat fingers and pinched it shut, then he glugged a great quantity of the medicine into her open mouth.

  The woman choked and swallowed and coughed and came up for air like she’d almost drowned.

  “You think that’s enough?” Jesus asked.

  “It will have to be for now,” Meese said, because he was starting to feel the prickles on the back of his neck. Starting to feel his early alert system sounding a warning. “Time to go.”

  Meese wiped her mouth roughly with the sleeve of his shirt to clean off the Benadryl, and then he brought the duct tape back across the woman’s mouth and sealed it shut. Jesus snapped the trunk down.

  The woman bumped and growled inside.

  “We’re going to have to drop her car,” Meese said. If they didn’t, whoever opened this station up would see the car, wonder about it, and go to the camera recordings to see who’d left it. And then they’d call the police. On the other hand, a car dropped on the side of some road far away from the station might not attract any attention for days. And when it did, chances were nobody would be thinking of looking at gas station recordings.

  Jesus put the Benadryl back in his pocket.

  “Keep your prints off that car,” Meese said. “Use a couple of those blue towelettes above the squeegee bucket.”

  Jesus nodded and turned back to the Buick. Meese skirted around the back of the Nissan. His alarms were in full swing now, sounding like a fire drill. He threw open the driver’s side of the Nissan, slid in, and shut the door, safe behind the dark tinted glass.

  A few seconds later the Buick appeared in his rearview mirror, bumping out onto the road. Meese put his car in gear, made a U-turn and headed back toward the main drag, Jesus following in that Buick. Fifty yards later he came to the intersection and signaled with his blinker as a good citizen should to make a right turn. As he did, an old guy in an old pickup approached the intersection from the cross-street, turned, and drove right past him. Meese waited and watched in his rearview mirror with curiosity.

  A few moments later the pickup’s brake lights flared. And then it turned into the Sinclair and pulled up to the pumps.

  “Cheese and crackers,” he said. He did have a sixth sense alarm. No doubt about it.

  Meese smiled, gave the car some gas, and made his right turn.

  They dropped the Buick a few miles away on the curb by a church then rode south for a few miles to the next little hickville and found another entrance to the interstate. Jesus fiddled with the woman’s phone, trying to force it to reveal its secrets.

  The woman in the back kicked.

  “That’s going to drive me crazy,” Jesus said.

  “Twenty minutes and the Benadryl will chill her out,” Meese said. “If not, we’ll take care of it. The next hour we’ve got miles and miles of empty road.” He was thinking of her slim hard body. Thinking of what she might be wearing underneath. Thinking about how sweet she’d probably feel. They wanted her alive and ready to talk. Meese could deliver that and still handle the merchandise. He hoped she was a cop because that would just be the frigging cherry and whipped cream on top.

  Jesus reached into his bag of Red Vines, pulled out a couple of whips, and took a bite. “How’s the temperature?” he asked.

  Meese looked at the gauge on the dashboard. “It’s out of the red for now, and that’s all I care about.” Then he turned and accelerated along the on-ramp. He switched on his blinker again and pulled out onto the dark freeway.

  Miles behind him one pair of headlights moved toward them along the interstate. Miles ahead of him a pair of red taillights zoomed away. Alongside the interstate, the town slept on. The whole thing had lasted all of fifteen minutes, in and out, and not even the cattle in the fields had taken notice.

  * * *

  In the trunk, the woman breathed in through her nostrils and tried to calm herself. Her heart was beating like a bird in a cage. She fumbled around behind her with her zip-tied hands for the emergency trunk release and found nothing but the bones of the car.

  It was close and dark like a coffin. Except you wouldn’t smell motor oil in a coffin. You wouldn’t hear the drone of the tires on the road or see the pinpricks of red leaking around the housing for the rear lights. But it was a coffin nevertheless.

  She’d known they’d find her. Eventually. Just as they found the others. The faces of those she’d worked with appeared before her and stabbed her with a pang of regret.

  She adjusted her position, took slower breaths, tried to keep the panic away. She told herself she’d known the risks—they all had. Told herself she’d do it all over again. Told herself this wasn’t over until it was over. Then she prayed to the Holy Mother. Prayed for eyes to see her chance.

  Prayed the men would make a mistake.

  1

  Cowboy Donut

  ONE STATE AWAY and seven hours later, Frank Shaw sat in the back office of Cowboy Donut and silently prayed that God would overlook his many sins and give him a break. But it appeared God was out this morning because Frank was facing the owner of the Cowboy Donut, watching yet another job interview begin to swirl the toilet.

  Trying to get a straight job as an ex-con was a lovely experience. Kind of like being dragged behind a bus. No matter how tidy you looked or how sharp your resume was, it all came down to two questions: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime” and “What were you in for?”

  Ms. Mary Rogers, the sun-cured owner of the Rock Springs, Wyoming doughnut establishment, had just popped the second question. She was probably in her fifties and had two-tone hair that seemed to take its inspiration from a badger—all bleached on top and dark underneath. She was no nonsense. She reminded Frank of the hard-nosed sergeant who played a guerilla chief in Robin Sage, the culminating, four-week-long, large-scale, unconventional warfare exercise that he and about 300 others had to pass to join the Green Berets. There had been no pulling the wool over that man’s eyes.

  No pulling the wool here. And he’d be an idiot to try. First of
all, he was going straight. Second, any employer who didn’t have a carrot for a brain was going to run a background check. And it was clear Ms. Mary was not running on carrots.

  So Frank dropped his bomb—voluntary manslaughter, a security job gone bad. He’d been protecting the wrong kind of noun for the wrong kind of people, which led to six fine years in prison.

  First interviews were like first dates. And Frank had basically just told this date he had an Ebola monkey virus that would make her eyes bleed and then asked her for a kiss. That, of course, was yummy to women everywhere.

  Ms. Mary narrowed her eyes. “What else am I going to find on your RAP sheet?”

  “That’s it,” Frank said. “Just the one unfortunate incident.”

  “Murder is a pretty big incident.”

  “Manslaughter,” he corrected. “Not murder.”

  She made a noncommittal sound and looked down to study his resume a bit more, like maybe something new would pop up there.

  He’d done this now a couple dozen times and knew the best thing was just to keep quiet, let them peacefully work through their Judas-Priest-there’s-a-killer-sitting-across-the-desk-from-me moment. As he waited, he looked around the office and back out to the kitchen. The shop reminded him of a Starbucks, except instead of the mermaid logo, these folks had mounted a pair of longhorns above the menu board. The horns must have been almost seven feet from tip to tip. The place smelled nice: sugar, fried dough, and freshly ground coffee percolating on the side. Someone had been at the floor with a wicked broom and mop, leaving the tiles to gleam in the late morning light.

  A number of customers sat out front at the tables with newspapers, laptops, and phones, enjoying the music and free wi-fi. Rows of doughnuts stood invitingly in the well-lit display. Frank wasn’t a connoisseur, but, as far as the doughnuts went, they looked good enough. There were your sprinkles, your chocolate cake, and your regulars. He didn’t know if they’d win at the national doughnut bake-off, but who cared? They looked a heck of a lot better than any confection he’d gotten on D block in cell 38.