Lovely Night to Die Read online

  Table of Contents

  Lovely Night To Die

  Dedication:

  Lovely Night 1

  Lovely Night 2

  Lovely Night 3

  Lovely Night 4

  Lovely Night 5

  Lovely Night 6

  Lovely Night 7

  Lovely Night 8

  Lovely Night 9

  Lovely Night 10

  Lovely Night 11

  Lovely Night 12

  Lovely Night 13

  Lovely Night 14

  Lovely Night 15

  Lovely Night 16

  Lovely Night 17

  Lovely Night 18

  Lovely Night 19

  Lovely Night 20

  Lovely Night 21

  Lovely Night 22

  Epilogue

  Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Stoker Aces Production, LLC. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Special Forces: Operation Alpha remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Stoker Aces Production, LLC, or their affiliates or licensors.

  For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds

  Lovely Night

  To Die

  Caleb Pirtle III

  Venture Galleries

  Dedication:

  To the members of my critique group who have diligently and painstakingly gone through the manuscript for Lovely Night to Die and kept me on the right path even when I tried to take the story elsewhere.

  My thanks to Linda Pirtle, my love and my editor, and to Richard Hollingsworth, Dr. William Burgdorf, Beverly Sable, and Ryann Martin.

  Even our poodle, Piper, got in on the act. She ate the pages I threw away. They didn’t make her sick so I probably should have kept them.

  Lovely Night 1

  HE LAY ALONE in the dark and waited to hear footsteps outside the front door. It was nothing new for Roland Sand. He had been waiting for an invitation from the grim reaper for the past three months, sixteen days, eight hours, and six minutes, provided the digital clock on his motel nightstand was correct. Hotel clocks hardly ever were. A few minutes of lost time here and there made little difference to a man on the run, and he had been running most of his life. Sand doubted if the running would last much longer.

  One day, probably sooner than later, or maybe sometime in the middle of the night, it would all be over. The door would be torn from its hinges, and he would hear the sound of a single gunshot. Then again, he might not hear anything at all. And the cool darkness that wrapped itself around him like the arms of an unfaithful woman would remain dark for a long time. Lying with his back against the wall in the early morning hours, dying didn’t seem like such a bad way to make his final exit. So why was he determined to fight so hard for a chance to catch another breath – and who was trying to rip it from his throat?

  Sand crawled out from beneath the damp, wrinkled sheets and walked to the window. He opened the drapes just wide enough for him to look out across the parking lot and toward the lights of Durango, Colorado, lodged against the backdrop of the San Juan Mountains. The timbered ridges were dark bruises against the sky, and the stars had been wiped away by a thunderhead that promised bad weather.

  Sand smiled faintly. He must have come to the right place. It was far easier to hide away in bad weather. Sand knew how to become one with the rain and the fog. He would be another faint shadow without a face, a ghost in the mist, a name without a voice, and names were the easiest things he had to throw away. Thunder rumbled in the west like a slow-moving train, and lightning reached down to touch the top of the mountains. The winds crackled with electricity.

  His gaze swept from one end of the street to the other. Two Atlas trucks and an aging Chevrolet van were the only vehicles on the road. Sand ignored, then forgot them. He was searching only for black SUVs that would bring men wearing black suits and armed with enough firepower to leave the little Colorado town in ruins. They were somewhere behind him. He didn’t know how far.

  Roland Sand knew the kind of man he worked for. He realized he had been reduced to a vague number on some out-of-date death certificate. Sand’s name would not be released. He would be just another John Doe in an unmarked folder at the back of some clerk’s filing cabinet. A pauper’s grave might be too good for him.

  Who was Roland Sand?

  Don’t know.

  When did he work here?

  Don’t recall.

  Whatever happened to him?

  Maybe he retired.

  Everyone would know he didn’t quit.

  No one quit the Association.

  A man worked until the day he died. For some, the day always came earlier than they expected.

  Common sense, at least the strategic reasoning that lay buried deep inside the Intelligence Community, said Sand would escape to some metropolitan area, maybe Los Angeles, probably Denver, and lose himself among the great unwashed, the multitudes that crowded city streets most hours of the day and night.

  His last assignment had gone awry in Dallas, and now his handler wandered the shadows, unknown and mostly unseen, waiting for him beneath the steel and glass skyline of Denver. Sand would go where the phone call told him to go, and the call said Denver, and the prepaid American Airlines ticket placed him on a late-night flight to Denver.

  No need to run. Hide in plain sight. That’s what he had been taught. His would become just another stray and ugly face among a thousand stray and ugly faces that few saw but hardly ever remembered. That was their logic. It had been written on page sixteen, paragraph four, of the Association’s strategic handbook marked Escape and Survival. It might as well have been chiseled in stone.

  The one-eyed Bohemian who wrote those words believed desperate men faced with desperate circumstances always relied on their safety nets when the tightrope broke and their world began crumbling around them. It was instinct, and instinct kept them alive. Don’t think. No time to think. A man’s next thought was never as quick as someone else’s last bullet. Find home. Home was a good place to hide. Home might even be a good place to die.

  The one-eyed man who ran the Association only thought he knew Roland Sand. He trained the agent. He molded the agent. He broke down Sand and built him back again in the image of the Association. Do what you are assigned to do. Do it quick. Do it efficiently. Ask no questions. Get the hell out. Don’t leave any tracks. Sand had been issued a new credit card from a bank that did not exist, ushered out the door, and given a Sig P320 military handgun. He had two jobs.

  Find the target,

  Pull the trigger.

  On the outskirts of Dallas, Sand broke protocol. In Dallas, Sand violated his oath. A low-ranking bureaucrat hired as a real estate broker lived another day because Sand decided the little man should not be the one to die.

  Behind the Nocturne Jazz bar, in an alley amidst the stench of stale whiskey bottles and rotting cucumbers, he learned there was little difference between the white hats and the black hats who played a deadly game of chess for wealth and power, for God and country.

  It was a game where pawns were expendable and sometimes buried in unmarked graves. Sand realized his own hat was as black as the dying hours after midnight. His hands were dirty and sometimes stained with the wrong man’s blood.

  The Bureaucrat’s name was Archie Conway. Sand had found him sipping tequila and licking salt from the rim of the glass in a bar where harried executives stopped for various drinks of hard liquor on their way home from work. He was on the north side of forty with a fleshy face and frightened eyes. His dark gray suit was wrin
kled. So was his white shirt. His fingers were stained with nicotine. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. It was no longer lit.

  Conway possessed a secret. The secret had been his death warrant.

  The secret must be silenced. That was the job Sand had been given.

  Conway had stood and headed toward the back door as soon as Sand dropped a silver dollar on the table. He glanced at the date. Only the Association used silver dollars minted in 1940. Sand led him into the alley and stood him against a crumbling brick wall as the distant sounds of John Scofield’s guitar blues mingled with the night air.

  “So, this is how it ends,” he said softly as he walked.

  “It always ends sometime.”

  “We never know do we?”

  “Nobody ever does.”

  Conway had left the Nocturne without asking any questions. A Sig P320 pressed against the base of his spine needed no further explanation.

  Die now or die later.

  A man will do whatever it takes to prolong the inevitable.

  “I know why you’re here,” Conway said, grasping for each word.

  Sand only nodded.

  “You’ve been assigned to terminate me.”

  “It’s not personal.”

  “It never is.”

  The glass of tequila slipped from Conway’s grip. It fell to the pavement and shattered at his feet. “You know why they want me dead?”

  “I never ask.”

  “You have a right to know why my blood is on your hands.”

  “It’s not important.”

  Conway loosened his red and white striped tie and unfastened the top button on his white shirt. “I know what they don’t want anyone else to know.”

  “That’s your business. Not mine,” Sand said.

  In a harsh whispered tone, Conway told him his secret.

  Sand’s face did not lose its solemn expression, but his eyes flinched. He lowered the P320 and let it dangle at his side. He stood for several minutes and fought with his conscience.

  He fought with his sanity.

  He fought with his guilt.

  He fought duty.

  He fought the words in the oath he had taken.

  He came to one final conclusion.

  To hell with them all.

  Sand turned without a word and walked out of the alley, fading into the darkness of a hot night in Denver. He knew someone would kill Archie Conway.

  But it would not be Roland Sand who pulled the trigger.

  Now he knew the secret. He had committed the unpardonable sin. He was condemned as well, but only if the one-eyed man could find him. By morning, when the Bohemian did not see a report of Archie Conway’s untimely demise written in the Dallas newspaper, an executioner would have Sand’s name and an enhanced photo from the Association stuffed in his pocket.

  How long did he have to live?

  It depended on whether the executioner traveled first to Los Angeles or to Denver. Sand might have a handful of days or maybe a week or two. But now he knew what Conway knew, what the Association didn’t want anyone else to know.

  The Bohemian’s logic would no doubt work for some within the Association, but not Sand. Sand was different. He could not hide in plain sight. Someone would see and remember his face.

  Strangers always stared at the scar that ran crookedly down the left side of his face. Long and ragged. A slash of white against his tanned skin. The top of his left ear had been torn away. Part of his skin had melted. Most of his hair had been snuffed by the flames. He shaved off the rest. He hid as many of the scars as possible beneath a dark mustache and goatee. Sand looked as if he had been run through the burning fires of Hades, and, perhaps he had if Hades resided within the shadows of Iraq. His friends all swore that hell did. They were the only ones who looked at Sand and never thought he might be a freak in a traveling sideshow.

  Of course, they had all died.

  One last mission.

  One last covert operation.

  One last roadside bomb on the outskirts of Mosul.

  One last day on earth. Only he had crawled through the smoke to freedom. Could he have saved them? Roland Sand didn’t know. He led them in. He could not lead them out.

  The wounds had healed.

  The guilt suffocated him still.

  He stood in the window of Durango’s downtown Aurora hotel and waited in the darkness for the men in black suits. They would find him, if not today, then no doubt tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then next week.

  His assignment had been aborted, but Sand knew he must find a way to pass the secret on to someone on his side, someone who could prevent another man from dying.

  But who was on his side?

  And who could he trust?

  And who would even believe him?

  He still heard Archie Conway’s words. They frightened him now as they frightened him then. The words, only six of them, echoed in Sand’s mind.

  Conway had spoken clearly and concisely.

  There had been no hesitation and no doubt in his voice.

  “They’re going to kill the President,” he said.

  Lovely Night 2

  ELEANOR TRENT GLANCED toward the tall, swarthy man seated beside her. He was slightly taller than six feet, and his store-bought gray suit was plain and much too small for his broad shoulders. His black hair was full of curls and grease. It glistened in the harsh glare of the courtroom lights.

  His eyes were dark and lethal. His face was as hard as chiseled granite, and he watched the empty jury box with the distant calmness of a man who could shoot a store clerk point blank in the face with a Saturday Night Special while eating a ham sandwich on rye.

  That’s what the prosecution claimed, and no one had yet disputed the fact that Charles Harrison Denton was, as the press reported in front page headlines, a cold-blooded killer.

  Eleanor Trent had been appointed to prove his innocence, which she knew was about as practical as proving the earth was flat and the moon was made of green cheese.

  She pushed back her long, dark hair, adjusted her black-rimmed glasses, and felt sweat rolling down the small of her back. She quickly glanced down at her handwritten notes to keep from looking at a man who distributed death as easily as Fed Ex delivered packages.

  Charles Harrison Denton was wanted in three states for armed robbery, had been indicted twice for sexual assault, and, if he was entirely honest, the only occupation he could list on his driver’s license was Fugitive.

  He knew the system. He learned it the hard way. He had served a total of eight years before being released on a minor technicality. He walked back into a world that would never be safe from the likes of a man who possessed no conscience and genuinely liked to hurt people who got in his way. In his warped mind, almost everyone did.

  The detective in charge of the store clerk incident swore Denton would be indicted as a serial killer if anyone ever found the bodies. Only God knew for sure, and God, by now, might have lost count.

  Eleanor was thirty-seven years old and still working in the Public Defender’s Office of Durango. During the past year, she had turned down three lucrative offers to go into private practice in Denver because she genuinely liked helping those who had no one else to assist them during the worst days of their lives.

  She rarely had regrets.

  Today she did.

  Eleanor looked at Charles Denton with curious eyes and decided she had made a grave mistake by not leaving for a sixth-floor office with the Whittington Law Firm where she could have had mahogany walls and glass paneling overlooking Larimer Square. Handling wills and probates might not be so bad a job after all.

  The room grew suddenly hot, and she felt dirty. Charles Denton had raised an eyebrow and was smiling at her. He winked.

  Eleanor turned quickly away and began straightening the wrinkles in her blue linen suit. She was tall and slender and had always believed she looked too angular and gangly when she walked into a room. She was all legs and elbows. Her fac
e was narrow, her black eyes big and seductive, an old boyfriend told her, but she would have never dared use those words to describe them.

  Eleanor knew there was bound to be days like this, court cases like this one, a defendant like Charles Harrison Denton. The morning she read his rap sheet, she felt nauseous. The day she met him, Eleanor Trent threw up as soon as Denton returned to his cell, and she went to sleep that night in a tangled web of nightmares.

  She was only a few years older than the last girl he had strangled, raped again and again from midnight until morning, and left to die beneath a pile of trash in a landfill outside of Albuquerque. The girl lived, but she would live the rest of her days in an asylum for the insane.

  It was her duty, Eleanor knew, to represent him. It was her job to defend him with all the legal skill and knowledge she possessed. But if he walked out a free man, she would feel guilty every time she glanced at her face in the mirror.

  A store clerk had died for nothing.

  And chances were, she would never know how many others lay in creek bottoms, barrow ditches, alligator swamps, and shallow graves known only to the vultures and coyotes that roamed the hollows of the mountains.

  She would do her best. Eleanor always did. But she prayed the jury would find him guilty so she wouldn’t be burdened with the condemnation of turning an animal back among the innocents who might die even if Charles Denton had no reason to kill them.

  He sat back in his chair, his hands folded on the table. His white shirt was stretched tightly across his chest. His green and yellow striped tie was too short to reach his belt.

  Eleanor wondered why he wasn’t sweating.

  Denton kept smiling as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “You certainly seem sure of yourself,” she said to break the stony silence as they waited for the judge to walk into the courtroom.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said.

  “Only your life.”

  Denton sadly shook his head. “See the clock on the wall?”

  Eleanor nodded.