Hammers and Nails Read online

  HAMMERS

  AND

  NAILS

  The Fixer: Book 3

  Also by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Hegemony

  Sullivan's Run

  The Fixer

  Ordnance

  Hell Follows

  Hammers and Nails

  Aphrodite's Tears

  Dead Man Dreaming

  Head Space

  Escalante

  The Fixer Omnibus

  Watch for more at Andrew Vaillencourt’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also By Andrew Vaillencourt

  Hammers and Nails (The Fixer, #3)

  Other books in “The Fixer” series by Andrew Vaillencourt

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

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  About the Author

  Andrew Vaillencourt

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  Other books in “The Fixer” series by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Escalante

  Ordnance

  Hell Follows

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  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Vaillencourt

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first of the bounty hunters to show up was woefully inadequate.

  The unfamiliar male stomped into the dim yellow haze of the Smoking Wreck with the self-assured braggadocio of a man who was very accustomed to being the toughest guy in the room. He did not walk, or amble, or saunter. This one swaggered. Every footfall clumped the dusty floor like the kick bass in a thrash-metal song, and his long brown coat swung with casual elegance with each step.

  He was tall, lean, and had a jaw square enough to lay bricks on. His tan face was layered with the perfect, old-west stubble young men lusted after and old men seemed to grow naturally. He wore a wide hat that threw his face into deep shadow, and a stubby cheroot vibrated between his teeth. From within the artful blackness shrouding his face burned two pinprick embers of orange light. His eyes were glowing bionic orbs that flicked and darted as they took in the whole room.

  It was a comical and clichéd look, a cultivated appearance betraying the deep childish insecurities of a small man with small man sensibilities. Naturally, the crowded bar went silent as he entered. Of course it did. It went silent because he wanted it to. His whole entrance was a bit of practiced theater carefully designed to produce this one effect. Dockside was a simple place, and so the trick worked.

  The newcomer raised his head, letting the weak light from the dim bar touch his face and reveal the perfectly symmetrical features of a man unafraid of plastic surgery. There was a dramatic, practiced pause as the man blew gray smoke from his nose and let the crowd get an eyeful of his affected menace. Then, mercifully, he spoke.

  “I’m looking for Roland Tankowicz,” he drawled. His voice was a laconic, grumbling growl that said more about his smoking habit than anything else. “I know he comes here and I know y’all can tell me where to find him. Just tell me what I want to know and there won’t be no trouble.”

  If the man was expecting the crowd to recoil in fear or perhaps show defiance, he was disappointed.

  The crowd was not afraid, and they showed their intractability with the same Bostonian irreverence that had tweaked Mad King George’s nose seven centuries prior.

  The crowd laughed at him.

  It started as a couple of nervous smirks, then a barely suppressed chortle. Soon, a guffaw erupted from the back and that broke the spell for all of them. Every scruffy patron of the dingy bar began to laugh at the man in the hat and this vexed him greatly. As quick as lightning, his hands whipped his jacket back with a flourish and his palms slapped the ivory butts of his custom Colt Dragoon pistols. The guns leapt from their holsters with a twirl, and the right-hand weapon unleashed a gout of fire and a deafening crack as it put a projectile into the bar's already chipped ceiling. The laughing stopped.

  “Listen up you rubes! My name is Wild Bill McClintok, and you are going to tell me what I want to know or I am going to punch holes through all of yer goddamn faces!” The nickel-plated pistols sent flashes of reflected light dancing across the sea of faces as he spun them in his hands and sent them home to their holsters with a satisfying slap of steel on leather.

  A voice from behind the bar spoke. It sounded gruff, gravelly, and not particularly impressed with the gunslinger. “Well my name is Marty Mudd, and nobody here gives a flying fuck whether you are looking for Tank or your mama's lost virtue.”

  The crowd parted, still chuckling, and Bill McClintock got his first look at Marty Mudd. Specifically, he got a look at Marty’s shotgun. The large one. The one that was pointed at his face. It was the same one that was being held with rock-solid stillness by a four-year veteran of the Planetary Expeditionary Force with two tours in the Venusian secession.

  Wild Bill instantly regretted returning his pistols to their holsters. If they had been in his hands still, he could have dropped the grizzled bartender with a hip shot. His Press Point implant made his aim nearly infallible, but something about the perfectly unwavering silence of the enormous weapon pointed at him made him pause. McClintok was a very fast draw, but the look in the bartender’s eye was sending a clear signal, and the message was: “Go for it, buddy. Make my day.”

  Bill chose discretion over valor and touched a hand to the brim of his hat. “Have it your way, rubes. Just make sure you let that big bald bastard know I’m looking for him.”

  The goddamn crowd laughed at him. Again. The bartender winked at the bounty hunter and shook his head. “I think he knows, buddy.”

  Wild Bill scowled and looked over the crowd again. Some
thing was wrong. Their smug faces contorted with restrained mirth as if they all knew something obvious that he did not. The shotgun dipped and the ugly man behind the bar shook his head at McClintok like he was a simple child who did not understand how the world worked.

  Joke’s on you, asshole.

  This was the lapse Bill had been waiting for. His hands returned to the butts of his pistols faster than a man could blink and his bionic eyes were marking targets for each one before they cleared the holsters. An example was about to be made. That much was clear. But then something went wrong.

  Somebody must have gotten behind him and hit him with a club, because an explosion of pain erupted from the base of his skull and pitched him forward, spoiling his draw. Wild Bill spun, trying to paint the target with his eyes to direct the pistols and dispatch the sneaky bastard, but the bionic orbs found no assailant. Just a field of black writhing shadow closing in on him from behind, obscuring his vision and confusing the sophisticated scanners that served for his eyes. He fired twice into whatever it was, but this achieved nothing. Another flash of pain lit up his forehead and snapped him backward. His legs got tangled in a chair and Wild Bill McClintok fell to his ass in a writhing heap. His long coat, so elegant and artfully badass, wrapped around his legs and he kicked spastically to clear his boots from the tangle of sturdy leather so he could rise to face the threat.

  A massive foot thundered onto the tails of the coat and pinned the bounty hunter to the floor. Bill didn’t waste time worrying about it and simply emptied his pistols upward and into the owner of that boot at point-blank range. The pistols were not the sort of things normal hoods might carry. Dragoons were novelty weapons, conspicuously large and powerful. Most people needed augmented strength simply to handle the heat and the recoil from the big guns. But if you could take it, the 8mm slug-throwers were about as nasty a sidearm as one could find for putting the punishment down. The explosions of light and showers of sparks as each ceramic projectile struck and shattered against whoever was attacking him blinded Bill and obscured the features of his target. Bill didn’t care. Fifteen direct hits later, both guns clicked home on empty chambers. Wild Bill noted with no small quantity of dismay that the boot trapping his coat had not moved.

  The haze of gun smoke parted like a billowing gray curtain and a large bald head pushed through the fog. The head wore a pug nose and an oppressive slab of a jaw. Small black eyes sat in deep hollows under a heavy brow that scrunched and furrowed in obvious irritation.

  The face stopped mere inches from Bill’s. Beady black eyes met glowing orange bionic eyes. A pregnant pause followed, and then a voice like thunder growled a single syllable.

  “Ow.”

  Wild Bill did not know what to say to that. What could he say? That was enough firepower to bring down a herd of elephants. It would have dropped a man in light power armor. He toted the ridiculous hand cannons for exactly those reasons, and ‘Ow’ did not seem like the appropriate response from anyone on the receiving end of such a barrage.

  “Sting a little?” The bartender still found it all funny, it seemed.

  “He’s packing goddamn Dragoons, Marty. Dragoons!” The big man sounded irritated.

  “No shit?” The bartender sounded impressed. “I bet that smarts, then!”

  Bill recovered his senses at this point and fumbled at his belt for a reload.

  “Really?” The big head asked, incredulous. A black hand the size of a dinner plate rose and McClintok got a clear view of a single finger poised to flick him between the eyes.

  What the fuck...?

  Then a familiar explosion of pain sent flashes across his vision and he dropped the speed-loaders from numb fingers. The force of the hit rocked him backward, and the back of his head bounced off the floor with an awful thunk.

  When I find that motherfucker with the club I’m gonna...

  He never finished the thought, because the giggles from the audience made it clear that he had not, in fact, been hit with a club. It was far worse than that. The big bald sonofabitch had been flicking him with a finger the whole time. Wild Bill was proud to the point of narcissism. The humiliation of the moment was just about as much as he could take.

  “Get the hell off of me!” Wild Bill spat and yanked furiously on his trapped coat. “I will have your goddamn ass in a sling you big stupid...”

  The big hand dropped to the floor and grabbed a handful of leather coat, and then yanked hard. Bill barely had time for his jaw to click shut before he was dragged ass-over-teakettle across the floor. The giant lifted the coat by its tails and the humiliated bounty hunter rose from the floor until his feet flopped over his head. He spilled out of his duster to crash like a drunkard face-first in the dust. As he rose, his own coat was tossed over his head, and he swatted it away to clear his line of sight.

  The laughter of the crowd roared in his reddening ears, but the bounty hunter’s hands went back to his belt with speed fueled by pure rage. Wild Bill McClintok was just about done with this place and this humiliation. His right-hand Dragoon was reloaded faster than an eye-blink, and he spun it in his palm to bring the muzzle to bear on his enemy.

  In the interminable instant that followed, Wild Bill’s accelerated reflexes gave him the time to ponder a few key aspects of his position with sudden and depressing clarity. Subtle truths that should have already been obvious to him chose this moment to coalesce into cognition, and Wild Bill had just enough time to consider his folly before its consequences manifested as painful reality. It was all those little things that, when taken as a whole, became big, important truths.

  Things like: “I’ve already shot him fifteen times to no effect, why do I believe a few more will make a difference?”

  And: “Gee, that looks like an enormous fist coming straight for my face.”

  It was this last one that hurt the most. Quite literally. A black fist the size of a Christmas ham collided with Bill’s face before he could squeeze off a shot. If getting flicked by the big man’s finger had caused an explosion of pain before, then his fist was a supernova. Wild Bill was certain he felt his brain bounce off the inside of his skull before consciousness fled him like startled birds after a gunshot. Orange eyes blinked and fizzled as the tall man lost his feet and crashed backward into the bar with a sickening slap. Those burning bionic eyes faded to darkness then, and he flopped over sideways. His head struck the floor undefended by any attempt to break his own fall and the bounty hunter lay still, drooling and bleeding on the dusty floor of the Smoking Wreck.

  Marty Mudd laid the shotgun on the bar and looked up at the giant. His voice twisted with paternal disapproval, “Jesus, Roland. Tell me he ain’t dead? I can’t have the cops here again. And if he’s registered? Dammit. I am going to end up blacklisted by the Lodge. Again.”

  The giant clumped over and checked the body on the floor for signs of life. Roland had minimal medical training, so his technique was to poke the bounty hunter rudely with the toe of an enormous black boot. Wild Bill responded with a soft gurgle, then gasped.

  “Not dead,” Roland grunted. Then, louder, “You registered, Bill?”

  Wild Bill followed the thread of the booming voice and used its guidance to drag himself to consciousness. His hands, floppy and flaccid, pushed gamely against the floor but his elbows refused to lock and he could not force himself upright.

  “Blughgghhhh...” He burbled helpfully, “Guhwahhhh...” followed and his useless arms scratched at the floorboards, desperate for purchase.

  “Roland!” Marty sounded annoyed. “Pick him up, please.”

  Some sort of industrial vice clamped onto Bill’s neck and he was soaring. This seemed an unlikely development, but that is how it felt to his failing cognitive faculties all the same. When his stomach had caught up with his body and his vision stopped swimming in and out of focus, Wild Bill realized the big bald man had picked him up, and he was now standing. Swaying, actually, and suddenly feeling very sick.

  “Bucket, Marty,” Bill
heard the rumbling voice caution. He wondered if it was some kind of code word. Then he felt an overwhelming urge to throw up. So he did, violently and with much volume into a waiting bucket.

  “Bucket,” it appeared, was in fact a code word. It meant, “Get this guy a bucket because he has a concussion and he’s gonna puke.” Wild Bill approved. These guys thought of everything.

  “Chair,” the big man boomed. Bill wondered if that was another code word. It was. It was code for, “Get this guy something to sit on before he pukes on my shoes.” Wild Bill found himself seated on a plastic chair in short order. It helped his stomach to not be standing, and he was relieved to have it.

  “Water,” the giant growled, and Wild Bill was certain he had cracked the code at this point. Sure enough, a glass of ice-cold water found its way into his hand and he gulped it thankfully.

  In just a few moments, Wild Bill was starting to feel like himself again. He would have the world’s worst headache for a while, but his eyes were rebooting so his vision was getting back to normal. As a bonus, his stomach did not seem like it was going to heave its contents all over the table anytime soon. Things were looking up.

  At least they were until he actually looked up and realized who he was sitting across from. His cognitive abilities had been scrambled rather thoroughly, but as they returned Wild Bill found himself in a strategic landscape he did not know how to navigate. He was a bounty hunter. In his business, you either got your man, or he got you. When Bill finally put it together that he was sitting across from Roland Tankowicz, he could not figure out what the hell he was supposed to do with the information. Roland helped him.

  “First things first,” the enormous man growled. Both juggernaut’s hands came up, each clutching one of Bill’s prized Dragoons. The hands closed over the nickel-plated hand cannons and then squeezed. Wild Bill nearly cried when his beloved pistols crumpled like beer cans in the giant black mitts of his quarry. Roland placed the wrecked guns on the table between them.