Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Read online

  Dead Eye Hunt: Into the Rad Lands

  Book 2

  Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2020

  Peter Meredith

  Blah, blah, blah, lawyer speak, lawyer speak, blah blah, blah.

  Do we really need to go into this? Here’s the deal. Looky-no touchy.

  It’s as simple as that.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

  Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

  Dead Eye Hunt

  Generation Z

  Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

  Generation Z: The Queen of War

  Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

  Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

  Generation Z: The Queen Unchained

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Jillybean’s First Adventure: An Undead World Expansion

  Tales from the Butcher’s Block

  Chapter 1

  The car that pulled up outside Cole’s favorite diner was black and shining, but it was no vamp car. Vamps never drove city-made cars. They wouldn’t be caught dead above ground in anything domestic. The current fad, which changed every couple of years, allowed the discerning vamp only a narrow choice of foreign cars. Vamps were either driven about in a twelve-cylinder Jaguar or a Dallas Stretch. Anything less and the knives of gossip would come out.

  The car outside the diner was a Riker’s Rambler, nineteen feet of low, sleek curves, tinted windows, shining hubs, and rumbling chrome pipes. It was the automobile du jour for the city mob bosses.

  “Fuuuck,” Cole muttered, his right hand slipping below the table to where his 44-Forino was holstered beneath the coat of his dark suit. It was no Crown, but it was the best gun two-grand could buy. “You paid up on your insurance, Mick?”

  “I wouldn’t be breathing if I hadn’t,” Mick Dolan said, ducking down to peer through the cutout in the wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the diner, his hooked nose preceding him by a good three inches. “Shit! That’s Eddie the Axe.” Mick paid Eddie the Axe a hundred dollars a month to keep Eddie from burning his place to the ground—this was the mob version of insurance.

  Left-handed, Cole sopped up yolk with the last of his biscuit and as he did, he watched a man slide out of the front passenger seat of the Rambler. Trying to appear casual, he leaned on the car and lit a cigarette. In the flare of light, Cole caught sight of a heavy chin made dark by the shadow of a beard. A gold chain winked at his throat. The rest of his features were hidden by the brim of his pork pie, which he had pulled low on his head against the night mists.

  “Is Eddie a slick?” Cole asked.

  “He’s Italian,” Mick answered, pronouncing the word eye-talian. “So, don’t go throwing around that ‘slick’ business. They’re awful touchy.”

  As far as Cole knew, it didn’t matter if they were slicks or Mandarins, all gangsters were perpetually touchy. Cole relaxed. If this was Eddie the Axe, he was here for Mick, probably to jack up his insurance fees; once you went down that road there was no end in sight. The gangsters would keep coming back for more money until you were working for them and not yourself. But that was Mick’s business.

  Mick was letting someone’s fried spam burn as he hissed instructions to his wife to “Put the kitty down the hole!” A second later he was back at his station, flipping spam and checking the fries, dipping his long, angular body to glance through the cutout every few seconds.

  “Gawd! It is him. Janice! Put fresh coffee on. Albert, take over here.” Mick emerged from the kitchen, wiping his greasy hands on the front of his apron. Nervously, he stood waiting in the middle of his diner as though he were about to meet the King of England. Cole felt a touch of sympathy and then went back to eating, still with only his left hand. Just because Eddie was here for Mick didn’t mean things weren’t going to spill over.

  Eddie the Axe did everything in his power to make sure people knew he was a slick. His blonde hair was greased back. His gold chains sat proudly on his chest. His suit was dark blue, his tie was white silk, his shoes were silver. Eddie had a paunch pushing out the front of his vest, causing the tin buttons to strain in their eyeholes. Beneath the ensemble, Cole guessed that he had on a spaghetti-stained wife beater. If he could get away with wearing a sign that said: I Ain’t No Irishman! he probably would have.

  With his dead-white skin tone, his little nose and thick lips, he looked Irish to Cole, just one in a costume. Cole hid his sneer; he hated the tribal aspect of New York gangs.

  “Dolan! Paison!” Eddie the Axe called out as if there was a gulf between the two instead of twelve feet of black and white checkered linoleum. The diner was dead quiet as the two hugged; Mick did so nervously, Eddie with the haughty indifference of a petty monarch. Eddie eyed Cole as Mick broke away.

  “Two glasses of your best vino, Dolan.” He sauntered Cole’s way, the little smile on his face, making him look more Irish than ever. “You’re Cole Younger.”

  “I am.”

  Eddie waited for Cole to go on, but Cole had no intention of doing so. “Mind if I sit?” Without waiting for a reply, Eddie sat down across from him. His two bodyguards came to flank him on either side. They also wore matching suits, black on black. They thought they looked fearsome. Cole thought they looked like backup singers.

  “Whatchu want, Eddie? I’m trying to eat dinner.”

  Tapping his pinky ring on the table, Eddie said, “Direct, I like that. What I want is a favor. I heard you know how to locate people and I need someone located.”

  “Oh yeah?” Cole picked up his coffee. The board above the counter declared the coffee to be a pure Colombian strain. How that was even possible, Cole had no idea. South America was a black hole. Bogata had been overrun fifty years before and since then, no human had been heard from south of the Panama Canal. Either way, the coffee tasted a little like dirt. Still, it was better than synthetic.

  Eddie’s smile slipped away. He began tapping the pinky ring slowly. “Yeah? All you gotta say is, yeah? You gotta problem with me? Cuz that’s what I’m starting to think. Trust me on this pal, you don’t want a problem wit
h me.”

  “You’re right. I don’t want a problem with you. What I want is to finish my dinner, alone. Go back to whoever gave you my name and tell them they screwed up. I don’t do favors, and I especially don’t do them for gangsters.”

  “So, this is about money,” Eddie said, his smile returning. “That’s fine. Money is what makes the world go round and round. What’s your daily fee?”

  Cole had no set fee because he didn’t have what anyone would call a normal job. He was still a bounty hunter but as he hadn’t heard even a rumor about any Dead-eyes since dealing with Krupp six-months before, he was now scraping by doing odd-jobs. He was a guy who could find people who didn’t want to be found. He could warn off an unwanted suitor or suggest that a dead-beat dad might end up a dead dad if he didn’t support his family. He could get stolen items returned; perhaps they’d have a little blood on them, but that couldn’t be helped.

  He charged whatever the market would bear for his catch-all services, which usually amounted to a dollar or two a day.

  “Twenty,” Cole answered Eddie. “Not including expenses.”

  Eddie leaned back, eyeing Cole, his wormy lips squished thin, his body stiff. Twenty dollars a day was an obscene amount. It’s what doctors and mid-level politicians made. Schlubs like Cole Younger weren’t worth twenty a day.

  “That seems a bit high,” Eddie said, ignoring the glass of wine Mick set in front of him.

  Cole did the same. “That’s my usual fee. I charge extra when I deal with gangsters. I call it a sin tax. For you it would amount to forty—a day.”

  “You expect me to pay you forty dollars a day?”

  “I guess slicks ain’t so good at math. The tax is on top of my usual fee. It’ll be sixty with a ten-day retainer paid up front. That’s six-hundred dollars. And of course, that’s non-refundable whether I find your guy or not.”

  Eddie glanced at one of his bodyguards. “Can you believe this guy? He thinks he can talk to Eddie the Axe like this.” He shook his head in disgust as he picked up his glass of wine and set it aside so there was a clear run of table between him and Cole. “You’re disrespecting me. That’s not smart, pal.”

  Cole shrugged. “I’m rarely accused of being smart. Something we probably both have in common.” This made Eddie grin like a shark. He started to reach a hand into his coat. “I wouldn’t,” Cole said, thumping the Forino against the underside of the table.

  The hand froze with the fingers just beneath the poly-blend. “So, that’s it? That’s why you think you can talk to me this way. You really are dumb. I run six of the biggest gangs on the east side, pal. I can have a hundred men here in ten minutes.”

  “I’m sure you can. But to what end? You offered me a job, I turned you down. The thing is, I don’t work for gangsters. When they want me to find someone, that person always ends up dead. Find ‘em yourself. Kill him, whatever, just leave me out of it. Or, go get your so-called ‘men.’ I’ve seen some of the gangsters you got running around here. They’re nothing but a bunch of pimply-faced boys. Now, remove that hand from your coat or I will kill you and your little friends.” For emphasis, Cole tapped the Forino a second time.

  Eddie’s hands came to rest on the edge of the table. He stared into Cole’s hazel eyes for half a minute before he snorted a laugh. “Damn, Cole. I gotta hand it to you, you are one cool customer. Ya ain’t smart, that’s for damn sure, but you are cool. I like that. Boys, go wait with the car.” The two bodyguards backed away from the table before slipping out of the diner. As Eddie waited for them to leave, he took a sip of the wine and made a face. “What the fuck? This tastes like piss. I suppose that’s what I get for ordering wine in a fuckin’ diner.”

  Cole said nothing to this. Eddie wasn’t done making his pitch. The gangster set aside the glass. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot here. I’m used to dealin’ with riffraff like our friend Dolan. They only respond to a strong hand and a boot in the ass, but you’re different. I was told that the White Knight of the 7th Precinct wouldn’t play nice and they weren’t kidding.”

  “You should’ve listened to them,” Cole said, resisting the urge to ask who “they” were. “It would’ve saved you some time.”

  “It’s not my time, pal. I’m here because I’m doing a favor for my boss, Julius Fantucci.” Cole had never heard of him and shrugged his ignorance. This shocked Eddie. “You never heard of the Fantuccis? They run everything from 23rd on south.” This only elicited another shrug. Eddie rolled his eyes like a teenage girl and, out of reflex, took another sip of the wine and made the same face as before. “Dolan! This stuff is crap. It’s probably why you have only slags for customers. No offense,” he added with a nod to Cole. “Either way, the orders came down from on high, so if it means twenty a day then so be it. When the boss wants something, he gets it. It’s a little job. There’s a guy named Davidson something. Scott Davidson, that’s it. And he’s…”

  Cole was shaking his head. “I should warn you that you and your boss are being set up. The only person who would call me the White Knight of the 7th Precinct knows that I would never work for gangsters, and he just happens to want me dead. You see what’s going on? You’re being used to do someone else’s dirty work. And what’s worse, you’ll be doing it free of charge.”

  The mobster’s eyes narrowed to squints. “Is that so?”

  “Seeing as I have no plans to work for your boss, yeah it is. It’s one of the things I dislike about you gangsters; you have no sense of proportion. You offer me a job, I say no and you threaten to kill me. I look at you wrong and you threaten to kill me. You steal from poor Mick and if he doesn’t thank you for not burning down his place, you threaten to kill him. You’re boring and predictable, and now it’s coming to bite you in the ass. Go tell your boss that he’s jumping through hoops like a trained poodle.”

  Eddie’s clenched teeth held back a string of curses. He almost reached for the wine glass, but stopped his hand an inch away. He sneered at the glass. “I don’t like this. And I don’t like you. Who turns down six hundred dollars? And who says no to Eddie the Axe? Dead men, that’s who. But if I’m being set up…”

  “Let me guess, you’ll kill someone?” Cole asked. “There are other options available to you.”

  A derisive grunt escaped Eddie’s sneering lips. “You wouldn’t kill this guy who’s setting you up? I find that hard to believe.”

  “I wish, but he’s a taxman and no one needs that sort of headache.” At least on this the two could agree. The police were the worst of the city’s gangs. They were violent, uncompromising and untouchable. They not only enforced the law, they frequently made it up as well.

  “It was those fucks?” Eddie slid from the table. “I’ll be back once I check this out. In the meantime, Dolan, get some better wine than this. And you, don’t think about going anywhere.”

  “I’ll be right here, waiting for you,” Cole answered. He kept his gun aimed under the table until Eddie and his little crew packed back into the Rambler. The driver gunned the engine so that it let out a testosterone-filled roar.

  Mick poked his head out from the kitchen. “Don’t touch that wine unless you plan on paying for it!” He hurried from the back with a funnel. The contents of both glasses went back into the bottle. “Still good,” he said, popping the cork back in place and thumbing it down.

  Cole pushed one of the empty glasses further from him. It had a pickle smell to it. “It was never good, Mick. This isn’t Carolina wine. The label is a fake. Bottled in Winstom? There is no Winstom, Carolina. It’s Winston. And look at this: ‘Fine bery wine? Come on. First, they misspelled berry and secondly, proper wine is made from grapes, not berries.”

  “Yeah well, no one’s gonna see the bottle no how.” He lowered his voice with a glance around. “And none of these slags can read, so it’s their too bad.” He laughed softly before giving Cole something of a sympathetic grimace. “I don’t wanna be a dick or nothin’ but you aren’t thinking about coming back, righ
t? I got plenty of trouble enough already and Eddie will kill you. He doesn’t need much of a reason to break out that axe of his.”

  “I’m not scared of Eddie. I have you to back me up.” He clapped Mick on his thin shoulder and couldn’t help grin as Mick went pale and began to shake his head. “No? Where’s the loyalty, Mick? I’ve eaten dinner here every night for three months and you won’t take my side?” Cole hadn’t expected him to, but he hadn’t liked the slag talk. It was rude, especially since only two or three of the diners were actual slags. The rest were normals.

  “I think I lost my appetite.” He stood, considered dropping a couple of quarters on the table, then decided against it.

  “Hey.” Mick almost grabbed Cole by the shoulder. At the last moment, his greasy fingers curled inward. “That’ll be forty cents. You know that.”

  Cole made a show of holstering the Forino. “I’ll get you when I come in next. Oh, that’s right, you don’t want my business. Have Eddie pay my tab. He ruined my dinner; it’s the least he can do. See ya, pal.”

  Chapter 2

  As it normally was in New York, the night was more a dark grey than a black. Even though the streetlights hadn’t worked in half a century, the falling mists mixed softly with the steam and the smoke and the pollution rising up from the earth to give the world a slate hue.

  It was thought that more than two million slags “lived” beneath the surface of the city. Though it was hard to call their existence actual living. They were the city’s untouchables. Once the lesions began to crawl across their face and the sores leaked green puss, there was no coming back and they were treated like the living dead. Relatives became scarce and friends disappeared altogether. It was rare for a slag to hold onto a job that wasn’t simple manual labor.

  Although the lesions that erupted up through their flesh were obvious, the tumors that lurked below the surface were far worse. They turned the slags into mental deficients. Some could barely tie their own shoes.

  All the same, they needed fire to cook with and to stay warm. With wood being in short supply, they burned anything that would hold a flame: old carpet, tires, human dung, and insulation stolen from apartment buildings that they tunneled into. Frequently the toxic fumes from these little fires sifted upward into the city. From long experience, Cole walked a crooked path to avoid the worst of these grey vapors. There was little he could do when the Cat storms drifted in from Jersey or the “Brown Mound” as Staten Island was called. When the radiation storms came there was little anyone could do except get indoors and hide.