Abnormal End

By Joseph Francis Collins

A KILL CODE SURVIVOR
In KILL CODE, Jackie Winn narrowly survived attacks by ruthless assassins
Now, she's fighting for her life again

HER ALLY
Leo Marston, retired sniper assassin, is at her side; friend, lover and mentor.
Despite their difficult pasts and uncertain future, they band together to combat the enemy

THE CAUSE
Terrorists directed by fiendish software unknowingly unleashed by Jackie in KILL CODE to cast an entire city into darkness and anarchy

THE FIGHT OF HER LIFE
It will take all of Jackie and Leo's wit, skills and some exceptional luck to avoid disaster and an ...
ABNORMAL END

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Francis Collins
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501473562

Book preview

Chapter 1

Bullets smashed through the front glass of Leo Marston's coin store moments after Jackie Winn had set down her computer and travel bag in front of the counter.

She hit the floor so hard that she got a mouthful of carpet pile.

The counter over her head exploded. Shards of glass rained down on her head and body. Damn it! Jackie thought; she hadn’t planned on using her new leather coat as a flak jacket.

An overwhelming crescendo of automatic weapon fire strafed the counters and walls.

She pawed at her right hip where her Beretta was normally holstered. Of course she came up empty. She had just gotten off an International flight from Berlin, Germany after spending a week at a computer security conference. She’d stopped by the store to say hello to Leo and then it was home to rearm. Jackie had missed the weight of the gun on her hip and now, really missed it.

Then there was the sound of return gun fire. Single shots. Much louder. Leo. The guy was no more than three-feet from a loaded gun anywhere he was in the store. They had been dating for months and she still hadn't figured out where they were all hidden.

Silence settled as abruptly as the mayhem had begun. She looked up and saw him standing over her, concern etching his face.

You all right?

The man was cool as the proverbial cucumber. She bet his pulse hadn't increased by three beats while hers pounded like the roar of jet engines in her ears.

Then she saw blood dripping down his arm.

Oh, my God. You're hit...

He glanced at the blood dripping on the floor. There was a matching bullet hole on the sleeve of his upper left arm. It's nothing. The shooters are dead and the cops are on the way—I've already hit the hold-up alarm.

Careful not to cut herself on the broken glass, she climbed to her feet.

How can you be so sure they're dead?

His face twitched like the question was absurd. Three shooters. Four shots. Winged one of them, but I got him when he popped back up. Dumb fucker.

The man was a phenomenal shot, and could probably have taken out the bad guys with a rubber band gun much less the huge revolver he held in his hand. N-frame Smith and Wesson. So, that narrowed it down to a magnum of some sort. Leo didn't do anything small, including his firearms. It was probably some exotic magnum shooting depleted Uranium bullets at sub-light speed or something like that.

She'd sort it all out later. Being a gun-geek in training was a lot of work without already being giddy from the adrenaline rush. 

What happened?

The customer that Leo had been talking with popped up, his face white and peppered with broken glass. He stuck his finger in his ear and wiggled it. He'd been on the ground when Leo was shooting and was probably gonna be deaf for a couple of weeks. Not that her ears weren’t ringing. He was lucky he was alive.

Jackie figured that they all were.

You all right? Leo shouted at the guy.

The man nodded, his voice shaking, What the fuck happened?

Jackie would kind of like to know that too. But, instead of answering, Leo hitched his chin. There's a first aid kit in the back room. And, while you’re back there, make sure that my safe is locked—don't want the police snooping through my things when they get here.

The famous safe. Leo had a partner in the coin store, Rob Gates. Each had a safe that held personal collections, cash, bullion, and in Leo's case, a very specialized target rifle. She'd only seen the contents of Leo's safe once and besides the obvious things, there were locked sections that she didn't know what they contained. It could be his shrunken head collection for all that she knew. She also found that he refused even a hint of a discussion as to what was in the safe. The one time that she had brought it up, he clammed up like a Guantanamo Bay terror suspect.

She found the safe locked like she had expected and the first aid kit. It was fully stocked and then some.

Stepping carefully over the broken glass, she made her way back out to the store.

The customer, a man in his late forties, dressed in designer jeans and a silk shirt had made his way over to the chairs in front of the store and had sat down, still wiggling fingers in his ears. With the way Leo loaded his ammo, he probably had flash burns down his back—it was a good thing that silk didn't burn.

Where's Leo? she asked, glancing around the store. He’d disappeared. His magnum was sitting on the counter.

What?

Where's Leo! she shouted while the guy continued to work his jaw and struggle with his hearing.

Leo stepped into the store through the front door. He was still dripping blood all over the place.

He said, pointing at the first aid kit, I don't think I'll need that, for now.  

Jackie knew it wouldn’t be pretty but she walked outside. The three shooters were laid out in poses of violent death, sprawled out like they'd been swatted by the unseen hand of God.

She choked back the sudden taste of bile that came up in her throat. Bullets didn't do pretty things to bodies and whatever caliber Leo was shooting had destroyed large sections of their anatomy.

The first one had taken a hit in the center of his chest and had landed so that you could see the gaping hole in his back. A Mac-10 lay just beyond his cooling hand.

The second one had taken a hit on the left side of his chest, from the side. The bullet had blown out the other side. There was a pool of vomit intermixed with blood, along with another Mac-10.

The third guy had taken a shot in the left arm, apparently a glancing blow, and then was hit in the head. Brains, bits of skull with hair still attached were blown all over the hood of a car. A Tec-9 was still clutched in his hand.

If these guys were local neighborhood bangers, they were carrying an extreme amount of firepower. Automatic weapons were a big no-no as using them earned hard federal prison time—much better to use a stolen Glock that could be easily ditched and replaced. She didn’t have to be an expert to recognize someone had really wanted them dead. The big question – the scary question – was why did they come after her and Leo? Or were they after Mr. Silk Shirt?

In the face of all this carnage, she couldn’t keep that question to herself any longer.

Why?

Leo was busy sorting through the wallets of the dead men.

Don’t know yet, but this is interesting, he said.

Trying to keep her mind from the gory scene, she gladly glanced at Leo to see what he’d found. He held a credit card.

She looked at it—nothing special, just a credit card. 

What's so special about it?

Nothing, except that all three of them have one, from the same bank. What are the odds of that happening?

They have a gang banger bank? she suggested dryly.

The coin store was in the northern part of Albuquerque, New Mexico. North enough from the more prosperous, touristy part of town but close enough to the seedy edge that the store was able to purchase interesting things from people living on the downside of the economic edge. And, it did collect various level of the criminal element. She'd seen Leo stand down three gang bangers who were soliciting protection money one afternoon. She'd been so scared that she'd almost wet herself, but Leo had magically produced a sawed off double-barreled shotgun. First his hands were empty, and then it was there, twin tunnels of death pointing at their faces with someone who didn't give a shit about killing or dying behind the trigger. Leo had stared them down with eyes measuring them for closed caskets; they’d quickly decided that discretion was the better part of staying alive. It turns out if you were crazier than they were, they could respect you and an uneasy peace, of sorts, ensued.

These aren't gang bangers, Leo said.

How do you know?

I know the locals. The locals have tats. These guys don’t.

Leo carefully replaced the wallets keeping the credit card that he had found on one of them. The crime scene was going to be a mess anyway so he probably could get away with it.

Leo stood as squad car pealed around the corner, its siren blaring.

Jackie saw Leo palm the credit card and held up his hands.

She had enough dealings with the local police in this area to know that they ended up shooting first and asking questions about the bodies after wards. So, she did like Leo and she lifted her hands too.

###

Leo’s arm ached and his ears rang like he’d been hit in the head with a sledgehammer. He'd also slid the coin that he'd been showing into the space between the two counters where it was effectively hidden. No sense in leaving a $30K coin out where someone could steal it. There were enough reasonably expensive coins laying on the counter to show that it was a coin deal in progress.

He slid the credit card he'd palmed down the back of his shirt collar hoping it wouldn't be noticed during a quick pat down.

Hands in the air, one of the officers shouted despite that both he and Jackie had already done that.

Turn around away from us, lace your fingers behind your head, the other said.

As he was turning, he saw that one of the officers looked very nervous and his finger was on the trigger of his Glock—if the guy sneezed, someone would end up getting shot. It would suck to have survived a gun battle against three people armed with automatic weapons to be zapped by a green, twitchy cop.

He was roughly patted down, his keys and wallet taken, his hands cuffed behind his back and he was forced down on the hot concrete of the curb. Jackie suffered the same rough treatment. 

Damn, it was going to be hard to get the coin deal he was working on completed. The fish, Mark Hanna, was being gently reeled in when the shooting started. He was trying to build a set of uncirculated Morgan silver dollars, and the Carson City 1893 Leo had tracked down, was very hard to find, bringing at wholesale almost $20,000. Leo expected to get $30K plus for a coin that he had paid $15,000 for, not a bad profit, until the nitwits the sub-machine guns had screwed up the entire deal.

His arm had taken a glancing blow, maybe through and through, maybe just a scrape. No matter, he’d taken a hit and still was able to take care of business. Another advantage is that it would make his story more believable to the local police. He’d hated to have to take that head shot as they were considered as an intent to kill, rather than shooting to stop, but didn’t have much of a choice with the way the guy was moving. It would have been better to have one of them alive to question by the police—another disadvantage in killing all three of them.

What the fuck had happened? It wasn’t a robbery, as it didn’t make sense—it was obvious that there was a lot of valuable merchandise at the store, but not much of it was out at any given time. And, he’d made it clear to any local hoodlums that any robbery attempts would be met with overwhelming, lethal force. And if Leo didn’t get them all, he knew that his partner in the coin store had enough semi-corrupt cop friends to finish the job.

Their guns were only of passing interest except that they spoke of being well equipped amateurs. Normal gang bangers didn’t have access to automatic weapons nor any want to use them. Hell, they couldn’t shoot for shit with AK-47’s and Glocks anyway, much less bullet hose MAC-10’s and Tec-9’s. Short barrels, rapid cyclic rate, crummy sights, and firing a pathetic, weak cartridge, the 9mm—lots to love if you were a crappy shot wanting to kill a lot of innocent people in a short time. If you really wanted to get the job done, stand back at six-hundred yards and put a large hole in their chest with a decent sized caliber bullet—that way, you only needed one, like a professional would have done. Leo knew this quite well as he had been one—a hired assassin specializing in long distance killing.

Leo had returned fire with a Smith and Wesson Model 57 in .41 Magnum. Loaded with the hottest factory ammo that he felt that he could stuff in the cylinder without blowing the thing up—it had done the job. He was going to miss that gun when the cops took it away for evidence. He’d spend whatever it took to get it back, but it would be in horrid condition but a good tool was worth keeping. The expense to get it back would be much more than it was worth monetarily, but not in Leo's heart.

One of the officers approached and said, Leo?  Max Jennings was the name he was born with, but Leo was what he was known as around here. And, Jackie did know his real name—everyone else who did was now dead.

He nodded and twisted his head so he could get a better look at the guy. Damn, how lucky could you get, the officer was a customer of the store. Not as high-end as his customer who had been dragged out of the store and was now sitting on the other side of the squad car, handcuffed and loudly complaining that he wanted his lawyer.

Hey Sam, good to see you, stop by later in the week.

He had a bag of silver dimes that Sam wanted, and he'd honor the original deal at—five-percent over spot. Leo had always made it a practice to treat any public servants as best he could be it police officers, deputies, medics, firefighters and even the guys who fixed the sewers as they would hopefully look kindly on anyone who had helped them.

Leo could have shipped it for ten-percent over the current trading price of silver—spot, so he was losing money on the deal, but this guy paid cash so the IRS wouldn't know anything about it.

What happened?

Leo knew the drill, don't answer any questions except when his lawyer was present and the legal shark he kept on retainer wouldn't be happy, but fuck the slimy pinstriped twerp.

I was trying to sell a high-end coin when the three dirt-bags opened up with automatic weapons. I returned fire to protect myself, my girlfriend and my customer. You'll find the gun I used on the counter by the door.

You know who they are?

He glanced at the bodies which were now cooking on the hot pavement—hopefully someone would come pick them up soon otherwise the smell of death would soak into the pavement driving away future customers.

Nope. Never seen them before.

Anybody you piss off recently?

No one. Me and my partner try to run an above-board business. Never mind the safes stuffed full of cash and bullion that he and his partner had carefully scraped off the top and hidden from the IRS.

Okay, the ambulance, detectives and coroner are on their way. Can we do anything for you?

Take off these cuffs. Please.

Chapter 2

In the Pacific Northwest, a program code-named Tyrannicide, running on an anonymous server farm continued to spread it’s far reaching tentacles into the Internet, gathering, and analyzing data and collecting money from round off errors in credit card machines. The program had been named Tyrannicide for the killing of tyrants or those who have committed tyrannical acts.

Jackie Winn unknowingly started its murderous path, shortly after her ex-lover and business partner's death. Nathan White had developed Tyrannicide with the specific objective of tracking down all government officials and workers who violated their oath to the Constitution by meddling in the lives of private citizens. Through the tendrils of the electronic online transactions its parameters then allowed the program to pay members of a private assassination team to have the government workers killed.

Tyrannicide's previous test plan had been moderately successful—almost completely disrupting the entire city of Denver.

It had already started to implement the second part of the plan. But, first it had to deal with a problem that hadn't been resolved—having Leo Marston and Jackie Winn killed. 

###

Reginald Lynch, 'Raging' to his friends, checked his mail, hoping that there wasn't anything except bills. His part-time job at the corner 7-11 didn't pay squat and it was barely enough to pay the rent much less afford food, beer and cigarettes. Yes, he was a convicted felon, but had only gotten convicted on a technicality, but it still meant that no one would hire him that afford to pay decently, so he was forced to work shitty jobs. It at least kept his probationary officer happy.

He hadn't squealed during his five years in prison, but none of his old friends and associates would have anything to do with him much less throw him some work. Violence was his stock and trade and given his six-foot frame sporting two-hundred twenty pounds of muscle along with hair-trigger anger, he usually got what he wanted. If only that damned rag head that ran the 7-11 would realize the robberies and shoplifting had stopped since he'd been working there. If he did, Reginald fantasized, maybe he'd be given a raise and more hours, and then he would have a better living situation. The last person who had even tried to shoplift while he was working earned an ICU bed and all his boss could do was yell and threaten to fire him.

Reginald had tried to look for other work, but the economy sucked and was even worse for people with his background—no father, a mother in prison for drugs, ward of the state, and having dropped out of high school when he was sixteen.

He'd only been able to stay in his crappy apartment this month because he'd been lucky enough to stumble on a drug dealer, who was more than happy to give up his wad of cash to save his life.

Flipping through the mail, he saw bills and more bills. Then he came across a thick envelope. No return address. It felt like there was a debit card in it. Who the hell would give him a debit card? Probably just a scam of some sort. He almost tossed it into the trash, but instead opened it.

There was a debit card, along with a PIN number and a picture of a guy, along with his address, where he worked, and enough other information that this dude, whoever he was, could be easily found.

Then he found a computer generated letter that said:

Sir:

Your particular skill set has come to our attention.  

Enclosed, please find a prepaid debit card with a positive balance of $500. Consider this payment for your time and consideration of this matter.

We would like you to kill the man whose picture and information is enclosed. If you accomplish this, with no other deaths or injuries to innocent parties, your account will be credited another $2,500.

This is a test of sorts, but if you accomplish this task within 72 hours of receiving this, we will have more work for you and it may pay a great deal better.

Do not contact the authorities about this letter or a similar letter will be sent to another person with your name and particulars and you will be eliminated.

Good Hunting!

Was this some sort of sick and twisted joke? He looked at the debit card. He didn't recognize the bank name, but it sure looked legit with a logo in the corner that changed color depending on the way you held it in the light. Then he read the information about the guy he was to kill. Some sort of clerk in a government agency. He worked out of the Federal Building, but liked to hang out in seedy bars after work. If this was for real, this guy was going to be easy to kill.

Raging thought about the neighborhood where the victim liked to hang out. Bad. Lots of prostitutes, pimps, muggers, drug dealers and druggies and there seemed to be at least one body a week found there of some unfortunate fool or another who wanted to try life on the dangerous side and paid for it. 

He noted down the PIN, and grabbed his coat. There was an ATM at the corner and he needed to get some working cash to buy a gun. He knew just who he needed to reach out and touch to find one.

###

Ten people received similar letters. Tyrannicide had determined that an optimal outcome would be if even one accomplished their mission and got away without being caught. Others would take the $500 on the card and try and disappear which would have to be dealt with—but later.

###

Minutes after the shooting, Jackie still shook. How did Leo seem so calm despite the violent event? It was uncanny and unusual and she knew that there were other things about his past that he hadn't revealed to her. She knew he had been a sniper-assassin and had more than several confirmed 'hits' all at very long-range but had no idea about the exact number.

Leo also seemed most happy when he had his target rifle up against his shoulder with a paper bulls-eye hundreds and hundreds of yards away—not even visible with the naked eye.

He was quiet almost to a maddening point—preferring to read books about assassination, history and politics than talk with her, watch TV or go on fun dates. He didn't even own a TV and the only radio he owned was the clock radio in his bedroom. His computer skills bordered on primitive as was the only computer he had access to—at the store. Every time she turned the thing on, it seemed like she had to wait for the tubes to warm up before she could use it.

Yes, he had saved her life, and had a body to kill for—muscular, trim and without an ounce of fat and could effortlessly jog for hours while she was lucky to make a mile. They had been dating or hanging out; she didn't really know which, for three months and she still hadn't even begun to crack his shell. The disheartening thing was that she wasn't sure that she would ever be able to.

On the positive side, he treated her like a perfect gentleman, cooked delicious vegetarian meals and was as neat as Marine—everything in its place, no loose clutter, dirty clothes, no drinking or nights out with the boys. His only interests were his coin shop, shooting and a little of his life was set aside for her.

She got the impression that his childhood had been very difficult as he didn't seem to know how to relate to people except for fellow shooters and coin customers. Despite their time together, there was still awkwardness about the relationship like he didn't know how to reach out to her, or even to act appropriately while with her.

Jackie was startled when she heard him call her his ‘girlfriend’ as he talked with the first officer