Honorable Assassin (44 page)

If Ginger had not been in the trailer, in
the back, Terry would have headed out. As it was, he left the stool
at the bar and put his back to the wall at a table across the room
from Gordon MacMaster. Evan continued dispensing the spirits but
was imbibing in none himself. Terry smelled something wrong. It was
nothing he could be sure of, nothing that stuck out glaringly but
he was sure he smelled it. He stood with his beer half finished and
stepped through the back again to check on progress.

The unlicensed surgeon was making his way
through the room. It looked as though the ones who had arrived
alive would stay alive. When Terry entered, his uncle stood and
hobbled toward him. “We gotta go, now,” Ginger said.

Terry was full of questions and almost sat
the elder Kingston back down, but instead he helped him down the
steps of the trailer. When they got a few feet from the trailer,
Ginger hissed in his ear. “They tried to give me a shot. They got
men in there in serious condition and they had no shots for them
but they tried to give me a shot. I barely kept them from sticking
me.”

The door opened behind them and the ex-medic
filled it. “Oy mate, you can’t leave ‘til we get that leg stitched
up. That man’s likely to bleed to death from that. Get your stupid
backside back in here.”

Terry ignored the demand and kept walking
toward the van. They stopped to readjust his hold on his uncle,
glanced back and saw the medic pulling a gun from his waistband and
following them. Ginger reached under Terry’s vest and as they
turned, he jabbed the medic in the guts with a stun gun.
Fortunately the man’s finger was not on the trigger or it would
have tightened up and gone off. The crackling of the weapon sounded
like a TIG welder in the distance. It was a minute later when the
shot went off.

The tavern full of drunken patrons emptied
itself through the back door to see the white van moving slowly
across the dirt compound toward the gate. Evan McCormick had no
more patience for the game and pulled his pistol. “Shoot the
traitors.” He exclaimed. They just killed Mickey.” Indeed, Mickey
was lying unconscious outside the trailer’s doorway. The bikies had
been drinking a lot of hard liquor and could not have hit anything
smaller than the van at that range, but something that large was
difficult to miss. The barrage that resulted left nothing in doubt.
They knew they had killed whoever was in the van and Evan moved to
confirm that as it coasted to a stop against the compound wall.

When the shooting began, it drowned out all
other noises. Nobody paid any attention to the sound of motorcycles
here as a rule, they were firing and riding all day every day.
These two should have been noticed, however. When everybody else
was watching Evan, opening the doors of the van, these two
motorcycles charged out of the repair barn, around the back side of
the meeting house, and directly for the steps behind the bar. The
drunks turned too late to see them coming and scattered as the
bikes charged up the steps and through the back door. It was not a
straight run through the bar to the street, but it was straight
enough for a motorcycle as long as the bike wasn’t raked too
long.

Terry and Ginger burst through the front of
the bar, not through the narrow door, but through the window. The
confiscated leathers kept them from being sliced up by the glass
and the helmets protected their eyes.

As he went through the window, Terry saw
Gordon MacMaster with a rocket launcher pointed right at him but
the weapon did not track to follow him; it spit its load of death
into the tavern door, demolishing the building from the inside,
out. It also prevented the Dark Knights from reaching their
motorcycles on the front side of the wreckage.

The Land Rover was running and dirt flew
from the tires as MacMaster followed the Kingstons down the
road.

“How did you know?”

“What?”

Terry spit into the campfire and asked, “How
did you know we would make it out of there alive?”

“I didn’t. All I knew was that if anyone
could have made it out, it would have been you. I was only there
for back up. If they hadn’t let me drink in the bar, I would have
been waiting outside anyway. When the gunfire started I expected
you had breathed your last. If I’d been holding a gun instead of a
rocket launcher I might have shot you myself with those helmets
on.”

“You knew they were going to try to kill us,
though?”

“No,” Gordon said slowly. “I didn’t know
that. In fact I didn’t even suspect it.”

Terry was not convinced but he had no other
friends at this point. The mob wanted him dead, the bikies wanted
him dead and the police just wanted him. “Well, I’ve just about
bollixed this all up,” he said.

“Look, mate,” Ginger began. “You’re still on
this side of the grass so there’s still a chance but I’m afraid
there’s no going back.”

Terry could not help but look at the crude
job he had done sewing up his uncle’s leg. “No, there’s no going
back,” he replied, softly.

“Quit pissing and moaning,” Gordon growled.
“You got what you wanted and now maybe you didn’t want it? It’s
true you can’t go back. Not for 10 or 20 years. It doesn’t matter
who is in charge, the constables or the jackasses, they’ll want you
dead.”

“You knew that was going to happen too,
didn’t you?” Terry opined.

“I’ve seen it happen before. There is so
little honor today.”

Terry heard echoes of his father and his
uncle in the statement and it touched him. “I’ll tell you what,
Gordon MacMaster, I have pledged to be honorable and I pledge it
again. Like the Samurai, an honorable assassin.”

MacMaster just laughed.

~~~

Epilogue

Mr. Streng had been Terry’s solicitor his
entire life. He was sorry to hear that the Viper’s son would need
to leave the country but was willing to facilitate whatever needed
to be done. Large amounts of cash can be difficult to explain,
though it can be shipped a variety of ways. Mr. Streng accepted the
rocket box full of cash that Terry had accumulated, promising to
invest and steward the money according to his best efforts.

Linda Pettigrew was still under guard but
this could not be maintained in perpetuity. The groups that
protected her soon wanted information she did not have. The matron
of the house lent her a car to go to the grocery store. She was
careful in what she said but Linda got the idea that returning to
the house was a bad idea so she headed south and took up residence
in a small town outside Melbourne. Within a year she was married to
the local chief of police.

Evan “Saxon” McCormick survived the
explosion at the compound. He moved quickly to consolidate his hold
on the underworld network the Troys had left in place. He was
ruthless and decisive, but there were too many interests, in a
delicately balanced web that disintegrated once the heads of power
were killed. Evan was not enough of a builder to regain what had
been in place and he learned how valuable a man like Terry Kingston
would have been. He deeply regretted their falling out and tried,
in vain, to reestablish contact with him. The underworld operations
quickly became fragmented as each disparate concern began to slide
further from what had been a central power. Some of the gangsters
were willing to work for him, but Evan found that many were angry
over the death of their leaders, and others simply did not have any
respect for bikies. Since the gangsters were not going to get
legitimate jobs, they all tried to take a slice of the pie for
themselves and the streets ran red with the blood of rival factions
vying for control in the wake of the power shift.

Superintendent Theodore Barlow was
flabbergasted. He had been inches from the perpetrator of so much
death and destruction, and he had been forced to let him go. He was
certain that there would be a time when he once again looked into
the eyes of the child that had been pulled from the ocean, and he
longed for that time until his death. Most men would have retired
from service before this time and certainly in the turbulent wake
but not Barlow. Theodore was destined to die in the service of his
country and while he was alive, he made it his first priority to
capture the man who had pulled him from the burning building; the
man who had danced through the shadowed world of corruption,
carving a place for himself where he could attack from within.
Theodore Barlow saw Terry Kingston as a cancer and he was to be
removed from the body of Australia. Theodore Barlow never again saw
Terry Kingston.

About the Author:

Jason Lord Case spent the early years of his
life in Europe and North Africa, which has colored his attitude and
his writing. Although books and writing have always been his
passion, along the way he has earned a Master’s Degree, supervised
employees in the American Auto Industry, and acquired a Commercial
Driver's License to see America as a long-haul trucker. He lives
with his wife in Michigan, where he does most of his writing.

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