Mark for Blood (Mason Dixon Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  Mark for Blood

  Nick Thacker

  Mark for Blood

  Turtleshell Press

  Copyright © 2017 by Nick Thacker, Turtleshell Press

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  Nick Thacker

  Colorado Springs, CO

  www.NickThacker.com

  Contents

  A favor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Afterword

  Also by Nick Thacker

  About the Author

  A favor

  Don’t click, swipe, or poke that Kindle page!

  Thanks for taking a chance on me. I’m a new author, and I really hope you enjoy this book!

  To thank you for reading, I want to give you three FREE books.

  That’s right, FREE. Three of them — my first three standalone thrillers. Full-length, action/adventure, fast-paced fiction. For free.

  How?

  Just head over to my website — www.nickthacker.com/free-books. You can click that link directly on a Kindle device, or you can type it into a web browser.

  Again, the link is www.nickthacker.com/free-books. Hope to see you on the other side!

  1

  I KNEW I WOULD KILL him as soon as he walked in.

  Not quite sure how, but I knew. That feeling was there. In all of my fifteen years behind the bar I don’t remember a time when it was wrong — off slightly perhaps, but never flat-out wrong. There was that time it told me it was the guy, instead of the girl, but we got that straightened out (or rather, it didn’t really matter much after I’d killed them both, as I found out later he was just as much a dirty schmuck as she was dirty all around).

  There was also that night I went around a few times with a younger kid, a guy ten years my inferior, and I thought the whole time he was screwing with me. Took me until he had a knife at my throat, his huge bicep turning his faded Semper Fi tat into a bloated pig of a prior life’s memory. I used that kid’s own knife on him. ‘Once a marine, always a marine’ doesn’t hold a lot of weight when your side gig starts paying more than the US government, I guess.

  But after a few times testing that feeling I started trusting that feeling. In my mind it’s more of a feeling anyway. It’s a knowledge — an instinct, really. I just know.

  So he walked in, and I knew he was the mark.

  He looked like he was in college — that shitty outfit, wearing pants that sagged to his asscrack, those shoes that said ‘I don’t give a shit but I care that you think I give a shit,’ and that hair.

  My God, that hair.

  His hair would’ve made me kill him even if I didn’t have another reason to. In some ways I think I even made his hair the main reason. It was poofed up, the pressed-down-to-his-ears, then teased in a not-accidental kind of way the way they do it up in a salon that’s meant for men the same way a tampon’s meant for men. The kind of hair that says, ‘yeah, my dad’s got the money to bail me out.’

  I didn’t have a plan for this kid — I never do. One of the reasons I’m the best at what I do is that I hate planning. Plans never go the way they’re supposed to, and by the time you’ve planned through all the possible outcomes of a situation, the plan’s useless because the situation’s changed.

  Another one of the of the reasons I’m the best is that while I hate plans, I’m the best with details. I know what people are thinking even before they do sometimes. It’s not a superpower, but I guess it’s a gift. Haven’t met anyone else who’s able to do it quite like I can yet. That’s how I knew it about him. He was already shouting when he walked in, but of course he wasn’t walking in alone. These types always travel in groups — a posse. His was right behind him, stumbling in like they’d already been drinking for a few hours with those huge dumb smiles on their faces but waiting until their leader approved of some invisible thing before they spoke or walked toward the bar. Four of them, altogether, but the main one came right up toward me at the bar.

  He did approve, I guess, because he started toward me and the others dispersed. I had the towel in my hand and I was moving it like I was supposed to, the universal sign of ‘I’m cleaning,’ even though we all know it takes more than a whitish towel and a Karate Kid motion to clean a bar top, when he gave me the nod.

  ‘The nod,’ meaning that half-assed head throwback that couldn’t possibly get any lazier. I’m a classier type, so I returned with a full, deep, frowned-faced forward nod.

  “‘Sup,” he half-assed.

  “How are you tonight?” I asked, raising my voice just a bit to carry to him over the low roar of the other patrons and the clinking of glassware. There weren’t many — the way I liked it — but there were enough engaged in a card game on one side and a few in a deep conversation on the other to create a steady din.

  “Good, man. Scotch, on the rocks.”

  “You got it. Weapon of choice?”

  His micro expression clued me in, but to his credit he recovered quickly. “Uh, yeah, sorry. How about Macallan?”

  “The Macallan?”

  He looked at me for a moment. I knew what he was thinking, too: It’s that important to you that you gotta give the weight of a ‘the?’

  I shook my head. “No, it’s part of the name. It’s called ‘The —‘ never mind.”

  He laughed. “Good stuff, man. Yeah, I’ll take one of those, or whatever. On the rocks.”

  “12? 18? 25?”

  He frowned.

  “Years…”

  “Ah, right. Uh, 12? What’s the price on those?”

  I shook my head. Imperceptibly to him, but it was for me. Bartenders — real ones — hate that. If you know what you want, it shouldn’t much matter how
much it costs, right? This isn’t a ‘$2-you-call-it’ bar, anyway.

  I raised my chin just a bit. “12 year is eight a glass. 18 year, thirteen. And the 25… not sure you can afford it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t think I have the money for it, champ?” he asked.

  Champ? Okay, now I really was going to kill him.

  “No, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who does.”

  “How much it gonna set me back?”

  “Well it’s been sitting on sherry-infused oak for twenty-five years, so, let’s make it an even $700.”

  “A bottle?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Holy sh—“

  “Yo, Dawson, this the place that dude was telling us about? Seems a little run down.”

  2

  ONE OF ‘DAWSON’S’ — THE MARK’S — lovely friends had decided that shouting from across the room was an ideal way to have a conversation. And ‘the room,’ in this case, was my bar. A single, small, one-facility building set back from the street a ways but still lit enough to see the front door. I had renovated it myself with the help of a contractor friend, splitting the empty building in half so I’d have a nice front chamber for the drinking and sitting, and a back half split in two again — one half for the office and kitchen and the other for the restrooms.

  I fell in love with the place from the minute I saw the listing. A buddy dabbling in real estate set up the meeting, and I was his one and only client before he moved on to his true passion — marrying a rich lady from the bay area and moving in with her and her kids. Anyway, the contractor friend and I spent a few weeks gutting the old restaurant and cleaning out the fried food smell, then framing out and drywalling the separating wall, then I hired a team for the grunt work. Restroom, electrical, plumbing — no one wants to do those jobs.

  It was a hit with the locals right from the start. Part of the appeal, I heard later, was that when it opened I had refused to talk to the town’s paper and the three idiot ‘food bloggers’ who’d come down from Charleston repeatedly that week. I didn’t like press, what they thought they stood for, and I certainly didn’t like the tight-jeaned hipsters who came in with their phone cameras clicking away, expecting me to give a shit about some-odd ‘thousands of followers.’

  The older locals thought I was a hero, and the younger ones thought I was a legend. It was weird — I was certainly neither — but I accepted the attention in the form of greenbacks. They liked drinking in a place that was relaxed. A bit old-fashioned, but relaxed about it. I didn’t smack the youngsters upside the head when they would ask for an old fashioned and then frown at me when I wouldn’t squish a bright-red maraschino cherry into a red Solo cup before I poured the drink.

  Likewise, I didn’t argue with any of the older ones. Twenty-five years ago I was twenty-five years younger, and there were plenty of folks twenty-five years my senior coming in. They all have their ways about them, like I do now. Some of them thought the only way to make a daiquiri was with daiquiri mix, and some of them thought ‘Scotch’ meant anything distilled last century.

  Whatever. As long as they paid their tab and left a decent tip, I was happy. Doing what you love is only surpassed by doing two things you love at the same time.

  And tonight I was going to do two things I loved.

  I poured the kid’s Scotch, the cheapest of the options I’d given him, and thought about how I’d do it. Guns and knives were always traceable, and even though I wasn’t worried about local authorities much I had a business to run. Any questions I got meant downtime, and not-working time.

  Poison, chemicals, and other exotic treatments were just that — exotic. That meant they were more difficult to exhume from the corpse, but once they were it was almost a sure thing that the higher-ups would get involved. Ditto about the downtime in that case.

  Thankfully its left up to me to decide how it’s done. That was the deal, and that will always be the deal or I’m out.

  I repeat methods, but not often. Usually there’s some story-building involved, as it makes for a more natural climax and a much smoother transition to normal life… and I like stories.

  Dawson’s unenthused buddy walked over, hovering over the bar like I owed him something.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “What you make my friend here?” he asked.

  “Scotch. On the rocks.”

  “I’ll take one too.”

  I poured it and then listened. They always start talking, when there are two guys at the bar next to each other. Even if they don’t know each other, they always talk. Always. If it’s just one, they’re either silent or they try to bring me into whatever it is they’re dealing with. Women, it’s the opposite. They want you to draw it out of them, or if there’s more than one they’ll sit there and wait for the other one to talk. If they’re drunk — man or woman — all bets are off.

  This time I couldn’t tell if they were drunk or not. They started yapping about ‘some chick’ one of them had seen and/or done some stuff with, but I wasn’t interested enough to know the details. I hadn’t thought they were drunk when they’d come in, but listening to their conversation really made me wonder.

  Kids these days.

  Wait. Did I really just think to myself the words, ‘kids these days?’

  I felt immediately disgusted and simultaneously amused. I felt like I was turning into my old man, the curmudgeon of curmudgeons. Here I was pouring drinks for kids half my age, silently judging them behind a half-wall I’d built with my bare hands.

  Probably while I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get home at night.

  I decided to take a bit more interest in their conversation.

  “…Because they smoke the whiskey when it’s done,” Kid B — not the mark — said.

  “How do you smoke liquid?” Kid A — the mark, or Dawson — asked.

  “I, uh, I think it’s… they just add like that liquid smoke stuff I guess.”

  I shook my head. Enough to give them a clue but not enough to give me a headache.

  “What’s that?” the mark asked, turning his coiffure my direction.

  I smiled. “Sorry — no, it’s — hate to interrupt, but it’s before the distillation process. They smoke peat and then add that to the fermentation. Then it’s distilled out, but that smokiness is still in there.”

  Kid B had the look of ‘who the hell asked you?’ on his face, but the mark, to his credit, seemed enthused. So I kept going.

  “They age it in charred oak barrels after that. That’s the number you see on these bottles — how many years it’s been resting on oak.”

  “And the oak gets in there, and, like, flavors it?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” I explained. “It enhances the flavors by —“ I stopped.

  What am I doing? Am I really this bored?

  One of the oldies came to the bar and asked for a couple margaritas. I recognized her, but didn’t know her name. I held up an index finger at the boys and busied myself with the lady’s drinks while I looked over to her table to make sure that she was actually sitting with someone. She’d entered with a younger gal, perhaps my age, maybe a little younger, and they’d started talking deeply about some issue or another before they’d even started drinking.

  I always like to make sure someone’s not drinking alone, and especially not ordering more than one drink at a time. I don’t really have a rule against it, necessarily, it just seems like anyone so excited to get going that they need to have two drinks for themselves on the table at once is a little too excited for me to not pay attention.

  The lady who’d ordered asked if we kept tabs open. I made the universal sign of ‘yeah, sure,’ by tucking my open palm out to her and shaking side to side and she seemed to get it, leaving her credit card there on the counter for me.

  I finished making the margaritas — old, traditional style with no mix — and came back to the boys.

  “What brings you i
n here tonight?” I asked.

  The first guy — the mark with the amazing hair — thought for a moment. Maybe hesitating just a bit. “Uh, yeah, we wanted to go out, you know? Hadn’t tried this place yet, but I got a tip from someone that it’s worth checking out.”

  I nodded. “Seems like your buddy knows where the hot spots are.”

  I waited to analyze his reaction. Both of them seemed to think I was joking, that drinking here was a bit of a step down from their typical haunts. I went with it, smiling.

  “I know, kind of a dump, huh?”

  “It’s — it’s not the worst I’ve —“

  “Tell the owner it smells like catfish in here,” the mark said.

  I sniffed, good and long and hard, just to show him I cared, then responded. “Yeah, we have a tiny grill back there. Catfish is our main dish, believe it or not, and Joey cooks the hell out of it.”

  “Really? Way out here?” Kid B said.

  “Really.” ‘Way out here’ in this case referred to the fact that we were nowhere near the big city as long as you didn’t zoom out too far in Google Maps. The town was on the coast, the main road actually backing up against the beach in most places. My bar was only a few blocks from the beach, but since there wasn’t a direct road to the coastline and the town sort of wound around a bit before meandering its way to the sand, it seemed like this was the last stop on the way to the inland areas, rather than the way I liked to think about it: a first stop on the way to the beach, if you were from out of town.