The Devil's Gunman Read online

  The Devil’s Gunman

  Book One of The Devil’s Gunman

  By

  Philip S. Bolger

  PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press

  Copyright © 2019 Philip S. Bolger

  All Rights Reserved

  * * * * *

  Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

  and discover other Blood Moon Press titles at:

  http://chriskennedypublishing.com/

  * * * * *

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Dedication

  To Victoria:

  I couldn’t have written this without you

  * * * * *

  Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko

  Original Art by Ricky Ryan

  * * * * *

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue: Reintegration

  Chapter One: For the Man Who Has Everything

  Chapter Two: About Last Night

  Chapter Three: Friends in High Places

  Chapter Four: A Helpful Miscommunication

  Chapter Five: Well-Laid Plans

  Chapter Six: Supernatural Sleepovers and the Art of Collectible Card Games

  Chapter Seven: Night Raids by Daylight

  Chapter Eight: Hounds on the Trail

  Chapter Nine: Nick’s Date

  Chapter Ten: Flames

  Chapter Eleven: Drive to Survive

  Chapter Twelve: The Early Bird Gets the Devil

  Chapter Thirteen: Final Approach

  Chapter Fourteen: Sic Semper Hipsterus

  Chapter Fifteen: Revelations

  Chapter Sixteen: The Summoning

  Chapter Seventeen: Showdown at Acheron Ranch

  Epilogue: Feelings and Poutine

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Book One of The Fallen World:

  Excerpt from Book One of The Darkness War:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Turning Point:

  * * * * *

  Prologue: Reintegration

  Rain slicked down the edge of my Vikings cap and dropped haphazardly onto the concrete in front of me, on my rifle, and on my gloved hands. It was pouring all across the city, which made my task all the more difficult. And rain, in Minneapolis, tends to bring fog. Today was no exception.

  The sounds of downtown accompanied the falling rain—engines of passing cars, the squeaking brakes on a city bus in need of maintenance. I was listening for the sounds of emergency services, but at that moment, there weren’t any, at least not any that could be heard over the rain.

  Dressed in maintenance clothes, along with my ball cap, I was staked out on top of the Hotel Ivy. Nobody had bothered to ask me whether I worked there, assuming I was dispatched to some menial task everyone from the guests to the management thought was beneath them.

  That was to be expected. Hotel security wasn’t equipped to deal with someone like me. If they had recognized me, they would’ve called the police.

  My orders from my Patron were incomplete, as they always were. He liked playing games with me. It’s the nature of devils, I suppose. So I sat in the rain, soaking, watching my rifle get wet and dreading the amount of cleaning I’d have to do if my target didn’t show.

  The rifle in question was a derivative of the AR-15, a Knights Armament Company SR-25, used by the military for designated marksmen.

  I wasn’t a marksman, not by nature.

  I’d never even touched a gun two years ago when this all began.

  Since then, though, through the interference of my Patron and the assistance of a few tutors that unnerved me, I’d become quite proficient. The magazine slapped into the weapon was an unusual dark red, the color of congealing blood. The orange runes on its side glowed gently.

  The runes on my right hand glowed softly in time with the magazine as I grabbed the rifle’s pistol grip and put my eye up to the scope.

  It was tough to see through the fog. My Patron had foreseen that and given me a thermal scope. The problem with thermals is that they make target identification more or less impossible. I had assumed it would be like in the movies; I’d see everything in rainbows, a kind of Pride Month visual explosion. Turns out, thermals don’t work that way. You get a choice of whether you want to see White Hot or Black Hot, and whatever isn’t hot is the opposite color. You can’t see faces. You can barely tell the size of the person in question. Makes sense; it was built for military applications, where you assume the guys across the battlefield are just plain enemies.

  While the thermal scope may not be useful for determining which blob is which person, it can paint a clear picture through the rain, particularly because the ground gets just a little bit colder while the people walking around keep that lovely body temperature of 98.6 degrees.

  I had a photograph of the guy I was after, a Somali community organizer named Mahmood Khalif. He was supposed to be walking around in the rain, handing out pamphlets about equal rights or something similar. For all I knew, he was running for city council, and he was a good guy. I had learned not to focus on that. It just complicated things.

  The first time I’d done this, I’d felt pretty badly about it. Taking a life kind of sucks. By now, though, I was used to it. I stopped asking “why” and stopped looking into my targets beyond the bare necessities. I knew that every life I took made mine last just a little longer, kept me one step ahead of the reaper, and in turn, one step ahead of damnation.

  * * *

  I put down the thermal scope and picked up my binoculars. The rain and fog interfered, but through a lucky gap, I got a view of my target. Khalif was standing outside a Caribou Coffee franchise, darting out into the rain to talk to people walking by, then back under shelter. He was with three other people.

  I picked the rifle back up, and sighted in. I was pretty sure the guy second from the right was Khalif.

  Pretty sure would have to do.

  I breathed out and caught myself before I breathed in, putting Khalif right in the crosshairs, as I gently squeezed the trigger. The suppressor barked, about as loud as a jackhammer, and I saw Khalif slump over. I was too far away to hear any screams, so I shot his form on the ground two or three more times. The echoes of the weapon’s report were masked by the traffic, rain, and sounds of the city. I think one of my bullets got one of his friends.

  A shame.

  I didn’t like killing innocents. It wasn’t out of a sense of personal morality—my soul was so rusted and tarnished I don’t think any devil would make me an offer—so much as just plain sympathy.

  Sucks to be you, buddy, I thought as I ejected the magazine, which was now glowing that unearthly red. I tried not to look at the bullets. Loading them was a chore. I knew what was in them. I had no idea how my Patron made them, but I knew. Every time I put one in the magazine, I saw a flash of a life. A Roman peasant. An Aztec priest. A Mandarin bureaucrat.

  They were all conducting similar rituals.

  Rituals that summoned my Patron.

  I recognized them easily.

  They were the kind I’d personally witnessed two years ago.

  I heard their words in langu
ages I didn’t speak as I loaded the bullets into the magazine. I was confident they were crying for help.

  I wondered, absent-mindedly, if I’d become a bullet one day.

  It would be a fitting end for me, I suppose.

  I broke the weapon down and put it back in my maintenance bag. I’d toss the bag into Lake Minnetonka before the end of the day, though the fury of Hell would hit me if I didn’t bring the magazine back to my Patron.

  Said Patron had an interesting sense of humor. He wanted me to meet him nearby, at a place we’d met twice before. I stopped off at the 14th floor, ducking into my room to discard my maintenance clothes and switch into the business casual/standard white guy garb I usually wore. I put the magazine, no longer glowing, into my pocket and headed downstairs, stopping only to toss the maintenance bag, now inside a suitcase, in my rental car.

  As I pushed out onto the street, I could see police and first responders a few blocks down, already on the scene, but I avoided rubbernecking. That kind of dumb shit could get you caught.

  My Patron had been clear about the resources I could expect if I got caught by law enforcement: exactly fuck-all beyond painful death on the inside. Maybe a shiv, maybe a broken neck, maybe a guard getting a little overzealous restraining me…but it would be death nonetheless. He controlled many of the courts and police precincts within the mortal world, but he made it clear that he would not save me if I got caught in the act. He, after all, had an institution to protect. I had gotten quite adept, quite quickly, at avoiding law enforcement.

  * * *

  I headed up to Marquette and turned right, then left on 10th Street. There I stepped into a building and shook off the rain as I entered a hallway. The hallway fed into several local businesses and a few restaurants, but I knew which one the Patron would be waiting in. The name, alone, should’ve given it away. I walked over to the restaurant’s entryway and stepped downstairs.

  As was always the case after events like this, the restaurant was abandoned, save for four people—a hostess, a waitress, me, and my Patron. The décor was a lot of black—black ceilings, black chairs, black barstools, and a black grand piano. The walls were yellow brick, interspersed by black supports, though the entryway’s walls were splashed with crimson. The music that was playing was the Patron’s favorite—the Rolling Stones.

  The hostess and waitress looked identical—a pair of 30-something women with a striking resemblance to a cross between Morticia Addams and Bettie Paige. They wore identically pressed white shirts and black skirts which complemented their makeup. Neither looked pleased to see me. I knew them as my Patron’s bodyguards, Patricia and Natasha, or Trish and Tash, for short. I could never tell the difference between them. They might have human guises, but they were no more human than your average armored personnel carrier or thermobaric rocket.

  “Welcome to Hell’s Kitchen,” the hostess purred, softly caressing my arm as she did, her fingers branding iron hot. “I assume your party is already seated?”

  As she said it, her lips curled up, revealing immaculate white teeth, and ended in something that was more smirk than smile. Her eyes glinted with predatory glee. Both she and her pack mate radiated malice.

  “You know why I’m here,” I said. “So, let’s skip the pleasantries.”

  Her smile disappeared, the only veil of civility dropping. “Watch your tongue, mortal, or I’ll—”

  “Continue to be a subservient construct bound to Hell? Yes, you will. Take me to my fucking seat.”

  She looked at me, and I could swear I heard the hint of a dog’s growl as she took me over to my Patron. We walked by the empty booths and passed the bar. The music played softly, some big band-era tune I didn’t recognize. The Patron could be funny about his tastes.

  He was sitting in the same booth he always did, a booth toward the kitchen, right under a Ralph Stedman painting of what he thought Hunter S. Thompson looked like after his suicide, and he was digging in, voraciously, to a Juicy Lucy. My Patron had chosen the same guise he usually did, that of an overweight Caucasian man in his early 40s with a bald head, a red goatee, and a Brooks Brothers suit he was unintentionally dousing in second-hand cheese. A set of round glasses perched upon his nose, and he wore a bib with the restaurant’s logo.

  “Please, be seated, Nicholas.” He motioned before digging back in to the Juicy Lucy. He enjoyed his burger for a bit, and I sat in silence, waiting for the waitress to return.

  “That is why…” he said between mouthfuls of food, his accent carrying just a hint of Scandinavian influence. “That is why I love this place. The people, they are so nice, so kind, and the food is delicious. I could have had a lot of assignments. I had Rome, you know, when Rome mattered, before the Vatican got so damn paranoid.”

  He burped, loudly, and the smell of sulfur wafted across the table as I adjusted my seat.

  The waitress walked up and put a menu in front of me, scowling a little bit, but saying nothing.

  “But I chose the Twin Cities!” he said, grinning broadly as I tried to decide whether I wanted Walleye or a basket of curds. He resumed munching on his burger, and more cheese dripped onto his suit. He put the burger down and dabbed at his mouth, getting some of the cheese that had been stuck in his goatee.

  “You see,” he said, pausing to slurp loudly on his beer. “This is a perfect place for someone like me. I get to meet people like you.”

  “It’s done,” I said, putting the magazine on the table and trying to pretend I wasn’t hearing screams in my head. I slid it across to him.

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “Trish told me. Apparently you nicked his brother, too. Poor fellow will surely not survive the ambulance ride, given what you hit him with.”

  He chuckled and tapped the magazine, before picking it up and putting it in his suit pocket.

  “This is, though, exceptional good news for you!” he said, his smile stained with meat and cheese. “You have just cleared another debt off your ledger!”

  He snapped his fingers, and the waitress, ignoring my request for some cheese curds, put a book in his hands.

  I was intimately familiar with this particular book. It was a thick, heavy tome, bound in leather of something uncomfortably pink and stitched. When he opened it, it had a creak that sound disconcertingly like a distorted human moan. As he leafed to a green lace that served as a bookmark, the waitress passed him a pen, and he scribbled some notes.

  “The death of Mr. Khalif will put my plans in play a bit sooner than I thought, which is good news for me but a momentous event for you, Mr. Soren! It means you are free.”

  * * *

  My heart fluttered. I was sure I had misheard him.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked, just a hint of my Minnesota Nice creeping back in.

  “Yes,” he said, grinning, “you are free. Completely done with your obligation. What a loyal servant you were! It has been an absolute pleasure working with you, and I would like to give you a small gift, on behalf of all the forces of Hell and our local affiliates here in the Twin Cities.”

  He reached down and pulled out a black briefcase. It was marked, in small letters, with “H&K.” He slid it across the table to me.

  “It is,” he continued, “a parting gift. No tricks on this one, Mr. Soren. No blood prick that binds you to me forever or curse that makes you unable to shoot. No, this is a handgun enchanted to interact nicely with the mark on your hand and keep the tutelage you enjoyed from General Forrest and Mr. Nelson in the forefront of your mind.”

  He grinned that same stained smile again.

  “I am very proud of you, Mr. Soren. When I first received your summons, I had some concerns. You remember, I am sure. You were so polite then, so unsure about what must be done. My, how you’ve grown. So please, enjoy this gift in good health.”

  He raised his beer to me and motioned for me to take the case.

  I was dumbstruck.

  I had thought the list would never end.

  I had thought the ledger woul
d never run out.

  I had thought I was in debt interminably, doomed to hear my Patron read out in that not-quite Norwegian accent how I had violated some clause and blah de blah, and therefore, I now owed him another two lives taken, which would be followed by another two, and another two, until I died painfully attempting to execute his will. I had thought the 3:00 AM texts, the obtuse, riddle-filled dossiers, and the military-grade weapons that always had something written in runes or Sanskrit or kanji on them would keep coming.

  “I know what you are thinking,” he said. “Readjustment can be hard. Of the many who have entered my service, you are one of only three who fulfilled, honorably, all the requirements. You have been well-compensated for your troubles, despite being in debt. I am nothing if not generous.”

  He wasn’t lying. I had been paid in gold ingots stamped with swastikas, in silver denarii with the aquiline features of Augustus Caesar, and in blood-spattered kilos of cocaine. I was paid in houses, cars, and suits. I had an arsenal of weaponry and a modest collection of artwork. My material wealth brought me no joy.

  “But there is the existential matter,” he continued. “The idea of what else one could possibly do after such a, let us say, dramatic tenure. I leave you to that challenge, as it is decidedly human in nature. I would suggest you find your passion. Enjoy the rest of your time on the mortal coil, and I shall meet you on the River Styx to ensure you have a place in my household when you depart this world.”

  He motioned for the waitress. “Tash, take Mr. Soren outside. He shall not be dining today, at least not here. Enjoy your emancipation, Mr. Soren, and I’ll see you in Hell!”