cigarettes, 2/3
Part 1.
He looks back at Ray’s face.
“Ray. I need to speak to you.”
Lilley backs off a step, puts his hands up at chest level, one palm open, his stupid fucking liability of a phone in the other. He doesn’t try and cover the gesture of surrender with a hand through his hair like earlier, and Brad feels a vicious sort of pleasure run sharply through him.
He makes sure he meets Lilley’s eyes until Lilley looks away.
“I’ll be back riiiight back,” Ray says, over his shoulder to Lilley. Brad breathes sharply through his nose and adjusts his grip on Ray’s arm.
Brad twists them around and Ray lets him put Ray’s back to the wall, but starts talking before Brad can even draw breath around the stone that’s taken up residence in his chest.
“Ray, you might want to watch the fucking camera.”
“What, you worried I’m going to turn up as the next internet porn star, Brad? The next Paris Hilton? I like to think I’m could pull off coked-out whore better than she ever did. Maybe I could make some serious cash, you don’t want to stifle my flourishing creativity -"
“No, Ray,” Brad is angry, fuming, feels like he’s all creaking control and teeth, jaw aching. His hand around Ray’s arm is simultaneously calming and making him feel out of control on an entirely different level he can’t think about right now. His fingers tighten and neither of them acknowledge that it must ache. “I’m worried you’re going to get fucking arrested because you’re out of your fucking dumb hick head on whatever Meesh ripped you off for and running your mouth in front of Lilley’s goddamn camera.”
“Really, Brad? You sure it’s not the Paris Hilton thing?”
“I don’t give a shit if you suck Lilley’s cock in front of everyone here and his retarded fucking liability of a toy.”
“Sorry it’s not your dick I’m sucking?”
Brad momentarily loses the ability to speak.
Ray snorts, rubs his eyes hard and fast with the back of his free hand, the arm Brad’s not holding. When he stops and looks at Brad, his foot is jiggling against the toes of Brad’s shoe, but otherwise he’s mostly still. He doesn’t tug his arm away.
“What do you want, Brad?” he asks.
Brad shifts his fingers on Ray’s arm, looks away from Ray’s pitch-dark eyes, sweat shining on his upper lip. He looks at the faint red marks striped across Ray’s arm, where his fingers were, and forces his thumb still in an aborted slide across one of the red smudges that disappears under the black ink of Ray’s tattoo.
“I want you to be careful,” Brad says.
“Let me go, Brad,” Ray says, shaking his head. He tugs his arm and Brad lets it slip out of his grip.
“Ray.”
"Brad,” Ray says, then takes a breath and makes sure he’s heard, makes sure he’s heard by not just Brad, but the entire room, which Brad belatedly thinks about and feels his face flush hot. “Can I just mention that YOU DON'T FUCKING OWN ME!"
And the vague hush that runs over the room like a breaking wave, leaving only the bassline from the stereo like a heart beating too fast. It draws back and the volume of conversation gradually returns to normal.
Ray flashes him a grin that doesn’t touch his eyes.
Brad feels dead calm. He spins on his heel without speaking to Ray, head up and returning a nod to Pappy, waving as Poke raises a drink to him, as he makes his way towards the front door.
Walt calls something after him just before he ducks out the front door into the hall, but he doesn’t turn back. He’ll have to call Walt tomorrow morning anyway, so they can get directly onto this warehouse mission for Nate.
He doesn’t have a contact for Trombley, but Walt may, or he can go via Pappy or Nate for it.
He’s better off at home, starting an inventory of what they’ll need to do this job, and how exactly they’re going to run it. If Ray insists on continuing to rohypnol and possibly incriminate himself for a cheap fuck with a kid who shouldn’t be breathing the same air as him, that’s fine. It’s none of Brad’s business.
By two in the morning, Brad’s methodically worked through cleaning and polishing every weapon he owns. He’s also got the outline of a plan, pending Nate’s input, and sets his alarm for seven the next morning.
He strips for bed, and lies under the sheets, not thinking of his fingers around Ray’s arm.
He watches the ceiling, the faint line of orange light from the streetlight outside his window, sliding between his blackout curtains where they’re not quite flush. Light slips in like a card between a doorjamb and a lock. He’s half-hard from not thinking about his fingers on Ray’s skin, and he turns over so his dick isn’t pressed against the mattress.
He fails to keep his mind away from Ray, though.
There are safer things to think about than his fingers on Ray's skin, and since he cannot actively force himself not to think of Ray, he substitutes recent memory for one of the first times he'd taken Ray out into the field.
Standing in daylight, bright sun reflecting off the light grey concrete of the rooftop doubling the glare so Brad squinted. Ray was wearing sunglasses, big and ugly, and, Brad was fairly sure, intended to be women's wear, and when he took them off to put his eyes to the scope of the M40. Both his eyes are bloodshot, one bruised.
Skinny little tweaker with a black eye and an attitude, a smile on his face and a cigarette in his mouth, looking like the minimal kickback from the M40 would knock him over.
Brad is lecturing: “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use, because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn."
In hindsight, Ray had been uncharacteristically quiet. Brad hadn’t known what he would be in for when Ray regained his voice with the slow balancing of his brain chemistry. This was Ray coming down hard.
Ray had looked at him with his wide brown eyes and asked him if he had a family.
He'd told him he did. Brad normally would have ignored the question, but he answered Ray. Brad speaks to his family, still, there are just years between one meeting and the next. He tells them he works security for a private firm in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever he'd been needed were that the truth.
Ray tells him he can't go home. "I don't even know why I'm telling you this," he'd said, rolling over onto his back, his head resting against the low ledge of the building's edge like a painful pillow, and looked up at Brad with a smile that didn't reach his bruised eyes. The butt of the rifle cast a short shadow over his bare arm. Brad'd looked at him for a long moment, unable to think of something appropriate to say.
And he’d told Ray where he lived.
Looking back, Brad thinks that should have been the first sign he might keep Ray. He thinks how he'd already had trouble lying down next to Ray on the hot concrete, pressed together shoulder-to-knees, putting his hands over Ray's and adjusting his grip on the M40 and feeling nothing at all.
If he hadn’t still been raw from the fucking-over Sarah had given him, maybe he would have seen that, that first sign he should have run a mile, leaving Ray with Pappy or Poke.
But he’d still been walking wounded when he met Ray.
Sarah.
("Brad you go away for weeks at a time, come back and beat the shit out of my friends. I can't handle it anymore.")
It was a little while before he realised she'd already been sleeping with Michael - Brad's friend. First guy Brad had fucked. Sarah and Michael are happy (married, Brad’s checked), swapping stories about his jealousy, how he was such a mistake.
He’s not fucking half-hard anymore.
Nate calls him at nine, almost on the dot. Brad’s sweating out a set of sit-ups on his bedroom floor. He’s lain beside the bed because there’s not enough room anywhere else but his cold-floored kitchen otherwise.
He scrambles off the floor and grabs his phone from the bench.
"Nate," Brad says, unhooking the phone from its charger.
"Good morning," Nate says.
"When are we doing this?" Brad asks. He's been ready to move since his alarm woke him at seven.
"You've got three days before anything's moved. I've texted you the address."
"What's the security like?"
"Godfather's word is it's solid guys, but very minimal."
Brad doesn't like the tone in Nate's choice of words. Minimal means at least four or five guys, all of whom may be armed, none of whom will be complete retards off the street dealing with this amount of goods. That’s agreeing with Godfather’s assessment, that isn’t, apparently, Nate’s.
"Nate, what's your word on the security?"
"My word is there's no harm in getting eyes on the place first."
"Noted, sir."
"You say that as if you hadn't already decided to, Brad."
"I appreciate your input," Brad says. He had already decided, yes, but you can never have too much intel.
"Godfather wants the trucks. There's three of them and they'll be full. You'll have Walt, Trombley, and obviously Ray, so there's a driver for each and one spare. I’ll text you the address you can park them at momentarily. Anything else you need from me?"
"A car and a contact for Trombley," Brad says.
"Car's out front," Nate says. Obviously Nate’s been on the go since as early as Brad has. Brad appreciates this about Nate, that he gets his men what they need.
Brad pads barefoot to the window pushes the heavy curtain aside to look down. There's a dark blue SUV parked directly in front of his building, nudged up behind his bike in his space. Brad hmmms into the phone. It's a soccer mom car, middle-class and non-descript.
"I've been informed Trombley is staying with Walt.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll get it organized.” Brad’s has to bring the phone back to his ear as he hears Nate say his name.
"I just want to let you know that, dependant on the outcome of this particular operation, this almost certainly won't be the last time Godfather employs this strategy against Patton."
"You're saying there's more bullshit smash-and-grab jobs I'm woefully overqualified for heading my way?"
"Very possibly," Nate breathes into the phone, almost a sigh. "Are you aware of Patton's main business, Brad?"
"I was under the impression it was guns." Brad’s M40A3 was somewhat deviously acquired from Patton’s people, in fact. One of his best guns.
"That's exactly it."
"Obviously I can't commit to anything further right now, Nate."
"Of course," Nate says quickly, "I'm just thinking out loud, Brad. Bad habit. I haven't got as many people I trust to bounce ideas off, anymore."
Bad habit from being a cop, Brad thinks. Wonders briefly how many others Nate still has from that. It has to be frustrating for someone as smart as Nate to be surrounded by the general ignorance of the assholes in Godfather's higher echelons.
Trust, though. Trust is a big word, and this isn't the first time Nate's said it to him. Brad appreciates Nate's regard, but he can't entirely turn off the part of him that's worried by the word. It's up there with some other words Brad feels he could live his life without speaking entirely.
"It's fine, sir. My ear is always open to you."
"Thank you, Brad," Nate says, and hangs up.
Brad paces the room once, feeling tense. He's left his M9 taped behind his mattress and goes to retrieve it, tugging it loose from the tape and settling it into the open top of his duffle.
He has to call Ray.
The anticipation of the awkwardness that will undoubtedly be almost entirely on Brad's own end is unpleasant. Not that there will be awkward silence, he is fairly certain he hasn't fucked up that badly (no worse than he has before). Ray's proven himself tolerant of almost all Brad's quirks and silences, and will generally, outside of a heated moment, let Brad alone with the things he clearly does not want to talk about, all the while filling in spaces with thousands of words and managing to give away as little as Brad does.
It’s fine. It’s how they work.
Brad contemplates picking up Walt first, but it's twenty minutes out of the way and so obvious he can't.
He grabs his duffle full of gear and calls Ray.
They’ve got to get eyes on the place by midday.
Brad stops at the McDonalds down the block from his building, on his way to collect Ray. He buys hotcakes and asks for two packets of syrup. Briefly despairs at the fact he actually knows Ray’s syrup preferences.
Brad pulls up to the curb in front of Ray’s building.
Ray’s leaning in the shade against the F of a six foot high obscenity in baby blue spray paint. Someone’s scrawled da police next to it less competently, in black marker. If they’ve got that much time on their hands they’ve got enough time to think of something original, Brad thinks. Not that he can’t appreciate the sentiment.
Ray climbs into the passenger side of the SUV and slams the door shut. He’s wearing an overly large t-shirt, high-necked and with sleeves nearly to his elbows. He hadn’t rolled them up like Brad’s seen him do almost every time Ray’s even worn a t-shirt, he’s not comfortable in anything more covering than a wifebeater unless it’s below freezing.
Brad is fairly sure Ray doesn’t actually own a shirt with sleeves, and concludes uncomfortably that it’s someone’s (Lilley’s) shirt and that Ray’s hiding something. Brad is torn between relief that at least Ray’s covered up and… frustration that there is apparently something to hide.
Ray greets him mercifully with a mouth full of words, none of which being “about last night”.
Brad’s shoulders relax.
“Do not tell me you had Micky D’s without me, Brad,” Ray says, nostrils flaring. “I swear to your Hebrew god unless I’m still tripping some fucking serious balls I can smell breakfast.”
Brad leans back and grabs the paper bag off the back seat and throws it in Ray’s lap without a word.
Ray grins and opens it.
“Hotcakes, praise Jesus!”
“'Brad' will suffice,” Brad says. He can’t help smiling, as they pull away from the curb. Walt and Trombley are waiting.
“Fuck, I feel like I haven’t eaten for a week,” Ray says, through a wetly audible mouthful. Brad glances over, right as a drop of syrup falls from Ray’s chin. He refrains from mentioning this is the only thing he’s actually seen Ray eat for the last week, other than a piece of toast.
They pull up in front of Walt’s apartment and Brad looks over at Ray, who’s tapping the last few drops of syrup out of the container held over his open mouth, and getting more on his shirt than his tongue.
“What?” Ray says, glancing at him sidelong with his tongue still stuck out for the last drop, before throwing the empty packet into the bag, before licking his lips lewd and ineffective. “Not gonna tell me I’m a dumb hick who needs to learn how to eat?” Ray raises his eyebrows.
He picks up another hotcake and tears half off.
Brad shakes his head and sees Walt and Trombley making their way towards the car.
“No. I’m going to let Walt do that.”
Walt climbs in behind Ray, and Trombley jumps in the other side.
Ray turns around in his seat.
“Walt!”
“Jesus, Ray, you fucking hick, you just spat food on me! You look like you should be riding the short bus, not shot-gun.”
Ray turns around and catches Brad’s eye, they exchange a smile, Ray’s rueful and sticky, Brad knows he’s smirking just a little smugly. He has taught Walt well.
“You’re turning Walt against me, you bastard. WALT, baby, Sunshine, tell me you still love me most -"
Brad glances in the mirror. Walt’s got his fists up, violently warding off Ray’s dirty, grasping fingers (there’s no point in bitch-slapping Ray away, Walt has already learned that Ray is persistent and takes most hits like they’re lovetaps unless they involve knuckles and intent). Trombley’s looking confused and faintly disgusted, hunched in the opposite corner. He’ll learn.
They drive ten minutes outside the city, into the terrible sameness of suburbia, right up to where the same three identikit brick houses stop repeating, manicured lawns turn scraggle-edged, and the older cottages that are waiting to be torn down border the river and its docks.
They leave the SUV parked in one of the last streets that’s still leafy-green and lived-in, and walk on the next block to where there's as many empty lots as houses, broken down like a hillbilly smile.
At the border of the last stretch of trash strewn grass that separates the edge of suburbia from the docks, there's one last house. Its front windows are boarded up like two black eyes and caution tape streams off the three pickets left of its formerly white fence.
Brad had cruised these streets on his bike in the cold just post-dawn and been almost suspicious of the perfection of the broken down old house as a hide for watching the docks and their warehouse. If there's a window on the side of the house that the docks are on, Brad will almost be tempted to check the place for bugs.
No one's that paranoid though, the docks are still nearly eight hundred yards away by his estimate (which is always fairly accurate).
"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," Ray says and kicks the front door with the flat of his boot.
Brad is gratified to see the door's lock was already broken, which he could have told Ray had Ray been able to wait thirty seconds before charging in making unnecessary noise and fuss. The door slams against the wall and bounces back, and nothing but Ray's quick reflexes save him from a bloody nose.
"Check it out, I've got fuckin' Incredible Hulk strength," Ray says, smiling lopsided over his shoulder and holding the door with one hand.
"You've got incredible retard strength," Brad says, and looks away when Ray gives him a pout, so he doesn’t let the grin that’s quivering on the corners of his lips slip free.
Walt laughs and Trombley grins, tentatively.
Inside it's dark and stinks like human filth.
"Smells like piss and fortified wine in here," Ray says. "Is that a tautology?" he turns and asks Trombley who looks, rightly, confused.
Ray rolls his eyes at him.
"You should be right at home, then," Brad says. "Trombley, go check if there's a window in that room."
He points to what might have once been a lounge room, but is now a space empty but for a few broken chairs and damp looking couch cushions, covered in unwholesome stains. No harm is separating Ray and Trombley pre-emptively. Not that Ray is being seriously antagonistic, because there would have been more than a confused expression from Trombley.
Ray picking a real fight is as subtle as spit in the eye.
Harmony in the team is important, however, and Brad is a believer in prevention being better than cure. He's unsure about what a pissed-off Trombley might look like, which is unsettling.
"Might as well put your bags down, gents. We're going to be here a few hours yet. Don't kick off your shoes though; Godfather does not cover tetanus shots."
"Hey!" Trombley yells from the other room. "There's a window in here that faces the docks."
Perfect.
"Oooh," Ray says, and Brad stops on his way into the next room. He turns around and watches Ray prod at a nest of blankets with his foot, then bend down and retrieve something. "Chef Boyardee! Someone left us a welcome gift. Awesome."
"You're not gonna actually eat that are you, Ray?" Walt asks, looking disgusted and amused.
"Of course I am, Walt. What kind of sick individual would leave perfectly good Chef Boyardee," he squints at the torn label, "... 123s and... balls on the floor?"
"Ray, an actual drunken vagrant has apparently rejected that very can," Brad says. “Does that not seem like a sign to you?”
"Their loss," Ray says, and fishes Brad's knife out of his duffle without asking.
Brad knows from long experience there is almost nothing Ray won't eat when he decides he's actually eating regular meals, and he cannot abide by wasted food. This, at least, is in a can. Dubious origins disregarded, it doesn't even appear to be rusty, and it isn’t the worst thing Brad’s seen Ray eat.
Brad shrugs when Walt raises his eyebrows at him. Ray can answer that himself. He hefts his duffle of weapons into the dirty lounge room and sees the window Trombley had yelled about.
It’s boarded up with ply, lazily tacked up on an angle. There’s a fist sized hole in it that was likely made by an actual fist, probably of the previous occupants who’d left their bedding, their Chef Boyardee, and the smell of urine.
Brad leans close to the hole in the plywood and looks out. There’s a six and a half foot chainlink fence that runs around the docks a few meters from the window, but it’s got holes cut into it that Brad would barely have to duck to walk through. Beyond it there’s an open field for a good eight hundred meters, covered in long, half-dead grass and trash, industrial squalor, and then the warehouses. Their target, dead ahead.
The hole in the plywood will accommodate a scope nicely, and that eight hundred meters will disappear under the glass.
Brad straightens up again. The setback is it’s at an uncomfortable height for him to lean into.
"Where'd you get that?" Trombley asks.
"Magic," Ray says and shakes his hands, which sends red sauce spattering onto the floor and his shoes. He tips the can up and slurps the last mouthful of spaghetti letters and numbers and sputters a cough. “Ugh, imagine if I died choking on Chef Boyardee, like Paris Hilton on a mouthful of jizz.” He makes gurgling noise and flaps his hands at his throat before stopping abruptly. “Scratch that, there's no way she's not used to swallowing buckets of that shit.”
Brad does not pause to wonder what it means that he’s not disgusted by Ray’s red sauce covered face. Instead he refocuses away from Ray, unzips the side flap of the duffle and inspects his disassembled M40A3.
The rifle lies placid and bloodless inside the dark green canvas, and Brad runs a finger over the trigger guard. It’s one of the most reliable guns he has ever owned, and he imagines this is something like what pet owners feel, except he never has to clean up the mess this little animal makes.
He pulls the unattached scope out, tosses it to Ray.
"Shut up, Ray."
Ray picks at the edge of the hole in the plywood before he leans the scope out and watches.
By late afternoon they’ve seen seven smoke breaks from the men in the warehouse, and nothing else. Ray’s started singing.
Waiting is no small part of this job. You learn to wait and watch on the job. You learn to wait for the next job to come along. You might wait weeks, even months for an offer worth taking.
Brad has always been fairly at home within his own head, and when there was downtime he always found something to do: surf, swim, ride, train - there are no excuses not to train during downtime - drink good coffee when Ray brought it to him, watch Ray play darts in some dive bar.
Some men dealt badly with downtime: Rudy and Pappy disappeared abroad like they couldn’t be still for more than a few weeks, looking for what, Brad wasn’t sure. It could just be they kept working, or it could be an extension of Rudy’s quest for enlightenment.
Ray had long, chemically-fuelled weekends before turning up at Brad’s apartment on a Monday morning, coffee in hand, if Brad hadn’t followed him, as he did sometimes. Not because he enjoyed the dives Ray hung around in, but because sometimes the need to know was overwhelming. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Ray could look after himself. He just liked to be there, sometimes, and sitting quietly at a bar with Ray always in his peripheral vision was, despite what Ray said, not boring or weird.
It’d just be sad to take up Ray on his offer to play darts - Brad was always the better shot.
Other people dealt very badly with extensive downtime. There had been the occasional person who ended up doing a six month stretch for something petty: assault, DUI; meanwhile Brad and everyone knew they were sitting on enough homicides to keep them in for three hundred years. Brad had bailed Q-Tip and Christeson out once after they had systematically taken out every street light in a ten block radius without a weapon.
Brad had never gotten the full story.
Proper downtime is, though, Cinderella to the ugly step-sister that is surveillance.
Ray, unsurprisingly, breaks the first sustained silence.
“And in another shocking development over at warehouse nineteen, the fat motherfucker in the trucker cap is having another smoke break. What the fuck they’re doing in there that’s so strenuous I’d really like to know. On second thoughts, maybe I wouldn’t, because they are some ugly motherfuckers and all I can think now is orgy.” Ray says without looking away from the scope. “Orgy, orgy, orgy,” Ray repeats, pensively. Then he shakes his head like a wet dog.
“There will be no orgies, Ray.”
“Aw, not even one? I’d let you come on my face,” Ray’s still staring into the scope and shifting from where he’s been kneeling on one knee to the other, his shirt pulled up over the back of his jeans, a slice of skin visible between hem and waistband. Brad looks down at the chipped floorboards.
He takes a deep breath.
“They’re taking a lot of smoke breaks,” Walt says in the ensuing silence.
“Well, they are a bunch of unscrupulous criminals left alone to guard a large shipment of stolen cigarettes. I mean hell, it’s not like that shit’s gonna be perfectly inventoried down to the last stick,” Ray says. “This is a totally WWJD moment. Jesus would smoke up like a motherfucker.”
Twenty minutes later, Brad’s M9 has never been cleaner. He suspects it wasn’t this clean when it was new. He resists re-cleaning any other weapon he cleaned last night, resenting his inability to put things off. Surveillance tests even his patience, occasionally.
“Status update, Ray. Then hand the scope over to Trombley.”
Trombley’s maybe been on watch a little longer than anyone else, but Brad doesn’t think of this as unfairness. You have to earn your way out of being bottom dog, and Trombley is new. That is how things work in Brad’s team.
“This hot news just in: another one is having a fucking smoke break. Jesus. Chuck me my pack, Walt?” Ray says, standing up and stretching, hands behind his head like he’s under arrest. “What the fuck is IN this shipment? It can’t just be fucking cigarettes, there’s got to be some blood diamond, black ops shit going on here.”
“Ray, please no conspiracy theories,” Brad says.
“Come on Brad! You can’t tell me you’re not thinking it!” Ray still has Chef Boyardee on his face, it’s illuminated by the glow of his cigarette as he lights it. Brad makes a swipe at his own face and Ray wipes his cheek in response.
Speculation, at this point, is useless. They’ve committed, and unless they observe an army setting up shop in the warehouse before morning, the job’s got to be done. It isn’t that there isn’t money in cigarettes, it’s only boredom gives you too much time to think and, if you’re Ray, breeds bullshit on top.
“Ha, you are,” Ray accuses.
It has occurred to Brad, along with far too many useless ideas, that perhaps Godfather had employed them because there was something of value in the trucks beside the cigarettes and they were of a higher calibre than the regular smash-and-grab monkeys. It’s unlikely, though.
“Why does he want cigarettes anyway?” Trombley asks. “Not like you can’t buy cigarettes already, you know?”
Walt snorts. Ray gives Brad a stare, eyebrow curved like a question. Brad waves his hand for Ray to go ahead.
“Trombley, a truckload of cigarettes smuggled into our fine U S of A will garner a rough profit of two million sexy green dollars. That is enough to stuff the g-strings of every strippers in the city more than once, my friend. That is enough to pay for the removal of the sixth finger from the hands of all your undoubtedly freakish people -"
“Money, Trombley,” Brad interjects when he feels Ray’s made enough of a point for everyone. He smiles, but doesn’t laugh at Trombley despite the fact Ray’s lifted that last phrase directly from Brad’s insults to him and his hillbilly kin.
“Let's have a toast for the douchebags, let's have a toast for the assholes…” Ray hums quietly for a minute. “Every one of them that I knooow,”
“Ray, please. No more Kanye West.”
Walt and Trombley have both nodded off. It’s past four in the morning. Trombley had gone down first, curling himself into a relatively clean corner and falling asleep faster than Brad would have thought possible with a balled up sweatshirt and a cold wall for bedding. He’s snoring faintly. Walt had laid himself out across the floor with his head on his bag and hadn’t moved for the past twenty minutes.
"No country and no Kanye? You're breaking my balls, Brad. You're right though, there's only room for one ego that size in this shack."
"It's not ego if it's true, and your Cartman is abysmal."
"Okay, okay Brad, this one's just for you," Ray shuffles around on his knees and points at Brad and smiles fake and cheesy. "And feel free to sing along."
"YOU'RE AS COLD AS ICEEEEEE -"
Despite the fact Ray continues to murder melody as efficiently as he kills for cash, and the terrible pun that Ray has made before, the song choice is still an improvement.
Walt starts singing along with his eyes shut and Brad stands and stretches, takes care not to look at Ray reaching up towards him full of mock emotion and bad singing.
It's still Ray on his knees.
Brad takes up position at the scope and listens to Walt, who is evidently not quite as asleep as Trombley, "harmonising" with Ray.
There's light starting to show faintly yellow in the windows high up the sides of the warehouse. Their view is side on to their target, and the only entrances Brad can see are the long line of windows that run too high up to be practical, and the door that's dwarfed by the length and height of the blank side of the warehouse, covered by a small awning. Men have been coming out of it every now and then to smoke, pick their noses, and throw cigarette butts out into the dirty grassland, accompanied by the commentary of whoever's on the scope.
Colour commentary if it's Ray.
Brad moves the scope a little and looks over the other identical warehouse buildings that are spaced evenly along the river. The front doors of the next building along are visible, huge steel roller doors high enough to let a semi-trailer in with room to spare, and wide enough for two trucks side by side. Further along the road the runs beside them ends in locked gates, the chainlink fence still standing strong at that point.
The small side door makes sense, even with the unpredictability of their untimed smoke breaks. The men tend to come out singly or in pairs, there appear to be only five individuals, and Brad has seen nothing but a sidearm on two of. Not a problem.
After a few minutes, Brad realises there's a general silence, and when he glances around Ray’s looking over at Walt and grinning.
“Little tykes just couldn’t keep their eyes open.”
Walt’s got his head leaning on his pack and his mouth open just slightly, he looks relaxed now. He snorts faintly in his sleep. Trombley’s still curled into the corner and looks peacefully dead to the world.
Ray gets up and drags one of the stained couch cushions over to the window, and lets it falls with a puff of dust and dirt beside Brad, before he sits down elbows on his knees. The toes of one of his boots up nudges up against Brad’s leg. Brad doesn’t shift away. Ray kicks him lightly.
“Brad,” Ray says impatiently.
Brad turns to look at him properly, and he’s holding a granola bar out.
“Thanks,” Brad says. He hasn’t eaten since some time around midday, he realises.
Ray smiles, and kicks him in the calf again. It feels like an apology, and Brad smiles back.
Brad thinks momentarily about telling him to get an eye on the scope, but finds he doesn’t really want to. No point waking Walt or Trombley, either. Brad eats and he and Ray sit in comfortable silence. Brad’s knees start protesting and he has to shift, Ray pulls his foot away.
“You look tired,” Brad sits back and rests an arm over one knee. Watches Ray. Ray’s eyes are dark and smiling. His face is clean of red sauce but he’s managed to get some spattered in the middle of his shirt (of Lilley’s shirt). Brad hopes it stains, briefly, then wants to shoot himself with his fucking M9 for being a retard.
“Thanks, asshole. So do you. Evidently it’s harder to stay up all night when you’re sober. Who knew?”
“Nice shirt,” Brad says, and feels like a fool. He doesn’t want to talk about Lilley, or the previous night.
“Yeah? You should like it, it was yours,” Ray says, pulling the front of the shirt out to glance down at it. “Shit, I got sauce on it.”
“What?” Brad says.
“I got sauce on my shirt,” he says.
“My shirt?”
“Sorry, I got sauce on your shirt,” Ray says with a smirk, not sounding at all sorry.
Brad’s shirt. Covering whatever Ray’s covering.
Brad must be silent a little too long, because Ray’s smile fades and he looks ominously like he’s about to say something serious.
“Brad -" Ray starts and Brad feels himself flush, and can’t let Ray finish, or start. No one’s on the scope.
“Get up on the scope, Ray.”
Ray rolls his eyes and Brad says nothing, thankful Ray’s actually stopped talking when Brad wants him to, for once.
“Hey, Brad,” Ray says a beat later, tone all business now, “get up here.” Ray waves him closer without taking his eye off whatever he’s seen. “I don’t remember seeing him before, do you?”
Brad takes the scope, and glances around for a second before he sees what Ray’s seen: there’s a man on the roof, standing on the edge of the building closes to them, but facing right and watching, Brad turns the scope to look in the direction he’s facing. There’s nothing particularly interesting happening, except for a ship docking.
“Good eyes, Ray. We’ll bring the M40 back tomorrow night, and get rid of our friend on the roof before we go in.”
At dawn, Brad feels they’ve seen all they need to. Godfather’s word was bare minimum security, and six men isn’t quite that, but it isn’t far enough off it for Brad to feel more than the same level of trepidation he’d felt for the entire job. He feels as close to satisfied as he thinks he’s going to get with this bullshit. He texts Nate: good to go sir
Ray wanders over to wake Walt and Trombley, Trombley gets water flicked in his face from his open canteen and Walt gets the dubious pleasure of Ray humping his face like a dog.
Nate replies ten minutes later: Godfather says tomorrow night.
They’re back in their little condemned cottage, preparing to rid themselves of the first obstacle on the path to Godfather’s gains. It's eleven o’clock at night and around seventy degrees. It’s starting to rain in light spit warm drips. Brad feels it as he presses a hand through the hole in the plywood, hears it dripping down gentle through holes in the roof in the hallway and the kitchen.
It's dry in the dirty little lounge room though, and he pushes his duffle into the corner with one foot after he's set up his M40, attached the night vision to the scope. He holds her out, unloaded, and presses the butt of the gun to his shoulder for a moment, feeling how comfortable she still is before he tosses the gun to Ray. He slips a single bullet out of the small box in his pocket and presses it into Ray’s palm. He should only need one.
Brad ignores Trombley's stare, the kid looks like a hungry dog that's been tossed outside into this sticky summer storm while he watches someone else eat a nice juicy steak.
As much as Brad trusts Pappy's word on Trombley, and on most everything else, he's not letting Trombley take the shot at the man who's showed up again on the warehouse's rooftop. He hasn't seen Trombley perform with his own eyes, but he has seen Ray, and this is not a training exercise.
"That rifle’s got to be older than me," Walt comments. It is older than him, in fact.
"Yeah, looks like a real shitstick," Trombley says. "You really use that one? Rudy and Pappy have got a sweet M200, that shit can destroy a dude like two clicks away. Just, pow,” Trombley moves his arms out in a wide arc above his head that looks curiously like ballet, but Brad understands he’s talking about the bloody fallout from someone taking a fifty calibre round to the head.
"Do not insult Brad's M40, Trombley," Ray says, holding the gun against his chest like it's an infant to be protected from Trombley's hurtful words.
"Ray's right, man," Walt says, "I once saw Brad literally hammer in a nail with the butt of that thing." He reaches over and strokes a finger over a gouge in the rifle's butt. Brad had actually hammered nails with the beat up old girl, and the dent is only one of many dings and scratches, the paint job has become less visible than the dull grey metal underneath.
It’s not that Brad doesn’t get kind of hard for some of the serious guns Rudy and Pappy tote, some of the new mind-blowing tech that’s coming out now. It’s just he’s also got a strong appreciation for the tried and tested, and his M40 is an excellent gun.
The rain's slowing to a trickle already, the little cloud burst just enough to push the humidity higher and do nothing about the heat. The heat is better than the rain for Ray's line of sight, though. Especially given there is no room in the fist-sized hole in the plywood for a spotter to put binoculars, or any other scope. Especially not anything bigger and higher powered than the little scope attached to the gun.
It should be adequate, Ray is an excellent shot. Brad knows this. Everyone he's trained has become at least competent, regardless of innate talent, but Ray is genuinely good.
Of course, he could take the shot himself, but there are perks to being a leader and one of them is he is allowed to be selfish and watch Ray work, without owing an explanation to anyone.
He loads the rifle, before rolling his shoulders a few times and shifting his footing. Ray settles the rifle in the window, stooping a little so the butt can rest comfortably against his shoulder. Knees bent, braced and steady. Brad watches him look through the scope and readjust himself twice before he can no longer resist the urge to correct him.
"Ray," he says, stepping forward and placing his hand flat on Ray's back, over his ribs. Ray's skin is warm and Brad can feel the dampness of sweat through his shirt (Brad's shirt, again).
"Yeah, Brad. I'm breathing," Ray says, before Brad can open his mouth again. Ray takes a deep breath that Brad feels pushing out his ribs, a proper deep breath to regain his stillness. Brad pushes gently against Ray's back, a soft pressure to show Ray he's there, but not enough to jolt or move him. He feels Ray's breathing even out against his palm.
"Good boy," Brad mutters, quiet.
Watches Ray brush a hand over the bolt again, then stare silently through the scope for a minute. Brad breathing has synched in with Ray’s.
"He's pacing," Ray says.
"I'm going out onto the porch to watch," Trombley says.
"Get going then, and don’t be obvious about it," Brad says, and sees Trombley leg it outside with the spare scope and it's night vision component clipped on. It's the first time he's seen Trombley move like he has to, rather than he’s grudgingly obliging the world. Brad is unsurprised it's the prospect of blood, albeit in glorious greened out, basically two-d vision.
"He's stopped," Ray says, without a glance towards Trombley. He's focused, steady under Brad's hand. Brad watches a drop of sweat slide from a curl of black hair down the back of his neck, under the t-shirt's collar.
"You got the shot, Ray?"
It's not an easy shot in the dark, especially at this range, eight hundred meters is edging up on maximum for the M40.
"Yeah."
"Take it," Brad says.
Ray doesn't need his reassurance, and Brad doesn't have eyes on the target, so all's he's doing is confirming Ray's own decision, but old habits die hard. He always kept a steadying hand or two on learners, easier to correct, or slow them down, or remind them to breath. It was a habit he'd never actually gotten out of with Ray, though.
Ray readjusts his fingers on the gun and there's a ten second lag that feels like slow motion, a moment Brad's intimately familiar with, before Ray squeezes the trigger.
Brad feels the muscles in his shoulders tense as he pull the trigger - it's not a heavy trigger but five pounds isn't nothing either. He takes the shot. The recoil jolts him mildly, shoving back into Brad's hand.
Ray gets his eye back on the scope quick as he can, but he's nodding his head and withdraws the barrel from the hold in the plywood as Trombley comes back inside the house with a happy cry of "Did you see his fucking head explode! Right in his fucking face, man. Good shot."
“Yeah man, well done,” Walt adds and grins at Ray.
Ray actually gives both Walt and Trombley a smile. Good.
Brad realises, after Ray turns that smile on him and it gets bigger and toothier, that he's still go his hand on Ray's back.
He drops his hand.
"Head shot, Ray?"
Ray shrugs.
"Asshole sat down, I had nothing but a face to work with. Too bad he doesn't anymore."
"Good shot, Ray.” And from the shoulder too, Brad feels something like pride. “Right, gentlemen. Get your Kevlar on, we need to be across that field before anyone notices the corpse on the roof."
Brad checks everyone's vests; better safe than dead. He tugs the front of Trombley's vest then pulls the velcro across the ribs undone, it's too loose.
"Re-do that, tighter."
He checks Walt's and they exchange a smile. Walt's squared away. Walt's always been a solid worker, and quick to pick up anything Brad had thrown at him. Brad never felt like he had to worry about Walt.
He turns to Ray who's rolling up the sleeves on his t-shirt so they’re nothing but bunches around his shoulders, apparently he’s hit his limit for tolerating sleeves. His Kevlar vest is still hanging half open, the front swung wide like a door, and Brad forgets entirely whatever it was he was going to say to Ray.
Ray's been hiding something alright, there's a bruised bitemark on his right bicep. There's no obvious indentations of teeth at this point, just a shape Brad is familiar with. They can bruise - exactly like that - in an oval rainbow of broken capillaries. Ray's is monochrome in the low light, but Brad knows there'd be colours there in daylight, dark blue, purple, fading brown-black.
He breathes in sharply through his nose.
"Stop playing with your shirt and strap your fucking vest on Ray.”
Ray looks away from where he's fiddling with his sleeve and meets Brad's eyes, raising an eyebrow.
Brad looks away and presses his vest closed with a slap on his hand, holstering his handgun in the front.
“What? I’m not gonna be any less shot if I leave a thin layer of cotton between my arm and a speeding bullet.”
Brad is thankful for Ray’s apparent assumption that the cause of Brad’s abrupt snap, as if the sharp intake of breath through is nose and tightening of his jaw are symptoms of something nobler than Brad is capable of right now.
Except when Brad’s taken a breath, Ray catches his eye with a look like a dare or a fuck you, reminiscent of Nate’s place where Brad’s fingers had been around his arm. Right about where that bruise is. The bruise Ray’s fingers skim over.
What’s he going to say, here? Well shit Ray, you’re right, I wasn't looking pissed about how fucked you might be if a bullet hits you anywhere but your vest, I was more thinking of how the only way to get rid of that bruise on your arm would be to obliterate it with a larger one of my own making while trying not to break something or get a fucking hard-on.
“I can roll them down if you want,” Ray says, tap-tapping his foot on the ground and smirking.
“Let’s go,” Brad says and turns away. Yeah. He's about ready to kill something.
Brad draws his M9, a comfortable, cool weight in his hand. The thing Brad enjoys about working this kind of job is you know the General is just as excited as Godfather by the prospect of involving police. The General will clean up their mess for them, which is an amusing thought. Brad strokes a finger over the outside of the trigger guard.
They duck through the chainlink fence where it's been torn open and pick a damp path through the overgrown grass, hunched and slow.
It's past midnight and though the rain hasn't returned the stars are still invisible behind the blackout curtains the clouds have drawn. The clouds are rumbling like they're complaining about the humidity as they work themselves up to soaking it out.
It's dark. This is good.
They can easily orient themselves by the warehouse’s high windows flashing orange light across the field - theirs is the only warehouse with the lights on. Legitimate workers all clocked off hours ago.
Without the man on the roof who could easily have had thermals or NVGs (unseen does not mean nonexistent, and Brad is completely comfortable with assessing the threat based solely on the man's position), there's less chance they’ll be spotted. If someone comes out for a smoke break within the next minute (not unlikely) they'll be blind enough within the little puddle of yellow light that spills from the door that Brad has no doubt they’d be able to wait them out or take the out.
They set foot on the concrete. Brad glances back and grits his teeth momentarily as he watches Trombley catch his foot on one of the various pieces of trash half buried in the damp grass, only to be saved from faceplanting and further unnecessary noise by Ray grabbing his arm. Brad can't see the look exchanged silently in the dark, but assumes Ray is conveying Brad's displeasure adequately for both of them.
The doorway is surrounded by a semi-circle of cigarette butts, all falling just outside the weak circle of light from the bulb under its awning.
Brad turns to his team and waves them up against the wall, backs flat to the building. If someone comes outside now, it would not be ideal to be caught looking like a bunch idiots having a circle jerk in the dark.
Brad can hear laughter and indistinct speech inside, a few voices.
Time to go.
"Brad," Ray says, quiet and waving the hand not holding his M9 in case Brad misses the near inaudible whisper. Brad shakes his head at Ray. Ray gestures to the door with his gun, and Brad shakes his head again.
He got Ray the first time, and there is absolutely no way anyone but Brad himself is going in point.
This is the dangerous part - he can still hear comfortable talk and laughter, and a few banging noises like something thrown down onto a table - but that isn't a one hundred percent guarantee he's not about to stick his head right into the sights of some asshole's gun.
"Handle," Ray whispers. Brad runs a hand over his throat and hoping Ray takes the subtle hint and attempts no more communication.
He just grins at Brad and flips him the bird, like Brad hadn't also watched each of the men inside take the smoke break and walk inside through the apparently open door (okay, so Ray was probably remembering what Brad was - there'd been that time with the unlocked door and the unnecessary forceful entry, which did not actually need to be reminisced about, ever).
Brad opens the door.
The light is momentarily overwhelming, like a flash going off in his face, Brad keeps his eyes open through it.
There are four men at the table.
Brad breathes in.
Seconds spin out into small eternities.
Brad feels everything settle inside him like sediment at the bottom of deep water.
There are four men, seated at a flimsy table, turning to face him.
Four men. Three exits: a staircase that must lead to the roof top, Brad's right, far wall of the building, past the trucks, the door behind them and the huge roller door to Brad's left. Three trucks. Two hands reaching for weapons. One M249 SAW laying across the small table with a deck of cards stacked on top. A SAW. A fucking SAW.
The fucking SAW says very clearly they had been expecting someone, Brad notes impassively, however the matching fuck doll expressions on the men’s faces say something different. Curiouser and curiouser. He’ll deal with the implications of that later.
"Gentlemen," Brad states loud and clear, and chooses the most likely looking asshole of the bunch to aim his M9 at, "you'll all want to stay very very still. Keep your cards in your hands."
Ray is beside him now, arm straight and gun aimed at the man next to Brad’s. Walt and Trombley are somewhere behind him, then.
"Okay, okay," the man whose forehead Brad has a perfect shot on says. His surprise melts into a placating smile slowly. His teeth are very white underneath a thick dark three day stubble, and there’s a clamped matchstick between his teeth.
"Is that a fucking SAW," Trombley says, quiet and lustful, and if Brad thought tact were in Trombley in any form, he’d say he hadn’t intended that to be overheard.
They're not going to do this nice and easy. Brad has asked men for cooperation under similar circumstances enough times that he knows, as he meets the steady gaze of the man who he's singled out that there is no way they are going to cooperate.
There’s not a lot of difference between bravery and stupidity in this situation, particularly with that kind of firepower sitting right next to the man. He doesn’t look away.
Brad doesn't know who moves first, but he does know something more important: he knows who shoots first. The man with his stupid-cocky grin takes a bullet to the back of the head and several more on his way down to the ground.
The near silence of the stand-off lingers even after he's hit bottom, bloody and pale, until the air fills with a hail of bullets as the next man moves and everyone follows Brad's fire. The suppressed rounds are more echo than sound, pained groans bouncing back from the gentle click of triggers.
Shell casings clink and bounce off the concrete floor.
Brad feels a spatter across his cheek like the warm rain from earlier. The table is flung over between them and the two men closest to Brad take the SAW down to the ground with them as they slump and slip into a tangled heap, one a deadweight stringless marionette pinning the other down.
The pinned man takes a shot between the eyes while his fingers are scrabbling at the gun in his dead friend’s hands, and Brad is sure, for some reason, that it was Ray's shot.
He can see Ray in the corner of his eye, concentration written in the compressed line of his lips but restless joy by his eyes. Brad doesn't want to look at him dead on right now, can't afford that distraction.
Time drags, like every bullet fired is a neon green second ticking down on a microwave face, a watched pot.
The table obscures the fourth man from view. The SAW is safely situated on their side of the obstacle, however. Brad holds up a hand. The air is full of gun smoke and copper, cigarettes burnt and unburnt, and moaning.
"Nice shot," Walt says, without any particular tone, from behind Brad. Brad glances at Ray, by his side, and the over his shoulder to where Ray's looking at Trombley and nodding. Trombley looks as if he's just blown a load with the girl of his dreams, a gentle smile on his lips.
He looks young.
"Oh fuck," a voice comes from the other side of the table, high pitched as a prepubescent ladyboy. "My fucking hand, oh.”
Brad gestures for Ray to move left as he moves right, and as he rounds the table he sees the man holding his right hand, bleeding in pulses across his shirt, coming up with a gun in his left -
"Down!" Brad orders sharply.
The air is shattered by the crack of unsuppressed fire and Brad hits the deck before glancing over his shoulder and taking in an unharmed Ray grinning, Trombley still smiling faintly, head up, and Walt holding up a thumbs-up: fine.
On the other side of the table Brad can hear the man breathing heavily.
Brad feels the graze a second later, a hot itch on his shoulder, before the intense sting starts up in earnest with the trickling flow of blood. He glances down at his right shoulder. It's shallow and won't impede movement.
"Brad," Ray says.
"Superficial," he replies. It’s not worth wasting breath on.
"Drop the fucking gun, fucknuts, before I come around that table and beat you to death with it!" Ray calls.
"Shut up, Ray."
"He fucking shot you," Ray says indignantly.
"Fuck you! DAVE," the man behind the table calls. It's the plaintive bleat of a wounded animal. "Daaa-ve! Where the fuck are you you fucking…" he trails off, groaning. Dave must be their man on the roof.
Brad and Ray exchange a look.
"Dave can't come to the phone right now," Ray shouts over the top of him, "he's currently lacking a face."
They need to silence this guy before someone who isn't dead hears him, though the possibility is extremely remote it’s not worth the chance. There's the definitely possibility that if they keep on their bellies with the table between them and wait he'll loose enough blood he won't even be able to get the weight of the gun up in front of him.
Brad inches his way closer to Ray.
He can barely hear the sound of laboured breathing, but the man doesn't call out anymore.
"Talk to him," Brad says, shoulder pressed to Ray's.
"Hey asshole!" Ray yells.
There is no reply.
Brad is about to get up into a crouch and take a chance peering around the table, but Ray puts a hand flat on his shoulder blade and pushes him down. Brad shakes his hand off.
"Ray."
Ray is already up. Brad frowns, settles into a crouch and watches him.
Walt gets up with him. They both inch tentatively and bent double to different sides of the table, guns up. They peer around at the same time.
"He's out," Walt says. Brad’s not surprised.
Walt and Ray make their way around the table.
Brad jumps up off the floor. Walt’s standing with a foot on the side of the guy's neck, looking over his shoulder questioningly.
"He's down for the count," Walt says.
Walt, for a cold blooded killer, is sometimes kinder than Brad would like.
The man is breathing shallow and fast. He’s not quite down. Brad knows he's awake. His bleeding hand is stretched in front of him, reaching faintly towards the gun that's been kicked out his hand by either Ray or Walt. He can't yell under the pressure of Walt's boot, but he's going to the second the pressure comes off.
He's going to try to, anyway.
Brad shakes his head, and raises his gun.
The man's head smacks audibly on the concrete, body jerking, as a bullet passes through his temple before Brad shoots.
“He fucking shot you,” Ray repeats, and shrugs at Brad like whaddayagonnado.
Brad immediately buries any feelings he might have under the miles of ocean deep calm flowing through him. They have cigarettes to deliver.
Walt shakes his foot faintly and dislodges a spatter red. It gets swallowed up by the growing puddle as the man's head and hand wounds seep together slowly to form one sticky puddle.
“Man,” Trombley says and sits down on the sole chair that's still standing. With the bodies, bullet casings and the overturned table around Trombley, he looks like he’s been caught in the eye of a particularly focused tornado. Trombley puts his boot against the back of the nearest corpse and shoves so it rolls over. There’s a playing card stuck to the side of the corpse’s face, a bloody two of hearts. “That kicked ass.”
"The job isn't over yet, Trombley," Brad says. “We need keys,” Brad points to the trucks, lined up in a neat little row their backdoors to them.
"Yeah, Trombley, I bet you're one of those rude motherfuckers that blows his load and doesn't even give -" Ray's cut off by gunfire, three shots slam into the trucks, thankfully having gone massively wide.
Brad glances over at the sound of the massive roller door screeching up just enough to let three men in underneath it, ducked down and nearly crawling. The shots had gone wide because someone was stupid enough to start shooting without actually being able to see exactly where he was aiming yet, still half-ducked under the door.
Part 3
He looks back at Ray’s face.
“Ray. I need to speak to you.”
Lilley backs off a step, puts his hands up at chest level, one palm open, his stupid fucking liability of a phone in the other. He doesn’t try and cover the gesture of surrender with a hand through his hair like earlier, and Brad feels a vicious sort of pleasure run sharply through him.
He makes sure he meets Lilley’s eyes until Lilley looks away.
“I’ll be back riiiight back,” Ray says, over his shoulder to Lilley. Brad breathes sharply through his nose and adjusts his grip on Ray’s arm.
Brad twists them around and Ray lets him put Ray’s back to the wall, but starts talking before Brad can even draw breath around the stone that’s taken up residence in his chest.
“Ray, you might want to watch the fucking camera.”
“What, you worried I’m going to turn up as the next internet porn star, Brad? The next Paris Hilton? I like to think I’m could pull off coked-out whore better than she ever did. Maybe I could make some serious cash, you don’t want to stifle my flourishing creativity -"
“No, Ray,” Brad is angry, fuming, feels like he’s all creaking control and teeth, jaw aching. His hand around Ray’s arm is simultaneously calming and making him feel out of control on an entirely different level he can’t think about right now. His fingers tighten and neither of them acknowledge that it must ache. “I’m worried you’re going to get fucking arrested because you’re out of your fucking dumb hick head on whatever Meesh ripped you off for and running your mouth in front of Lilley’s goddamn camera.”
“Really, Brad? You sure it’s not the Paris Hilton thing?”
“I don’t give a shit if you suck Lilley’s cock in front of everyone here and his retarded fucking liability of a toy.”
“Sorry it’s not your dick I’m sucking?”
Brad momentarily loses the ability to speak.
Ray snorts, rubs his eyes hard and fast with the back of his free hand, the arm Brad’s not holding. When he stops and looks at Brad, his foot is jiggling against the toes of Brad’s shoe, but otherwise he’s mostly still. He doesn’t tug his arm away.
“What do you want, Brad?” he asks.
Brad shifts his fingers on Ray’s arm, looks away from Ray’s pitch-dark eyes, sweat shining on his upper lip. He looks at the faint red marks striped across Ray’s arm, where his fingers were, and forces his thumb still in an aborted slide across one of the red smudges that disappears under the black ink of Ray’s tattoo.
“I want you to be careful,” Brad says.
“Let me go, Brad,” Ray says, shaking his head. He tugs his arm and Brad lets it slip out of his grip.
“Ray.”
"Brad,” Ray says, then takes a breath and makes sure he’s heard, makes sure he’s heard by not just Brad, but the entire room, which Brad belatedly thinks about and feels his face flush hot. “Can I just mention that YOU DON'T FUCKING OWN ME!"
And the vague hush that runs over the room like a breaking wave, leaving only the bassline from the stereo like a heart beating too fast. It draws back and the volume of conversation gradually returns to normal.
Ray flashes him a grin that doesn’t touch his eyes.
Brad feels dead calm. He spins on his heel without speaking to Ray, head up and returning a nod to Pappy, waving as Poke raises a drink to him, as he makes his way towards the front door.
Walt calls something after him just before he ducks out the front door into the hall, but he doesn’t turn back. He’ll have to call Walt tomorrow morning anyway, so they can get directly onto this warehouse mission for Nate.
He doesn’t have a contact for Trombley, but Walt may, or he can go via Pappy or Nate for it.
He’s better off at home, starting an inventory of what they’ll need to do this job, and how exactly they’re going to run it. If Ray insists on continuing to rohypnol and possibly incriminate himself for a cheap fuck with a kid who shouldn’t be breathing the same air as him, that’s fine. It’s none of Brad’s business.
By two in the morning, Brad’s methodically worked through cleaning and polishing every weapon he owns. He’s also got the outline of a plan, pending Nate’s input, and sets his alarm for seven the next morning.
He strips for bed, and lies under the sheets, not thinking of his fingers around Ray’s arm.
He watches the ceiling, the faint line of orange light from the streetlight outside his window, sliding between his blackout curtains where they’re not quite flush. Light slips in like a card between a doorjamb and a lock. He’s half-hard from not thinking about his fingers on Ray’s skin, and he turns over so his dick isn’t pressed against the mattress.
He fails to keep his mind away from Ray, though.
There are safer things to think about than his fingers on Ray's skin, and since he cannot actively force himself not to think of Ray, he substitutes recent memory for one of the first times he'd taken Ray out into the field.
Standing in daylight, bright sun reflecting off the light grey concrete of the rooftop doubling the glare so Brad squinted. Ray was wearing sunglasses, big and ugly, and, Brad was fairly sure, intended to be women's wear, and when he took them off to put his eyes to the scope of the M40. Both his eyes are bloodshot, one bruised.
Skinny little tweaker with a black eye and an attitude, a smile on his face and a cigarette in his mouth, looking like the minimal kickback from the M40 would knock him over.
Brad is lecturing: “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use, because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn."
In hindsight, Ray had been uncharacteristically quiet. Brad hadn’t known what he would be in for when Ray regained his voice with the slow balancing of his brain chemistry. This was Ray coming down hard.
Ray had looked at him with his wide brown eyes and asked him if he had a family.
He'd told him he did. Brad normally would have ignored the question, but he answered Ray. Brad speaks to his family, still, there are just years between one meeting and the next. He tells them he works security for a private firm in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever he'd been needed were that the truth.
Ray tells him he can't go home. "I don't even know why I'm telling you this," he'd said, rolling over onto his back, his head resting against the low ledge of the building's edge like a painful pillow, and looked up at Brad with a smile that didn't reach his bruised eyes. The butt of the rifle cast a short shadow over his bare arm. Brad'd looked at him for a long moment, unable to think of something appropriate to say.
And he’d told Ray where he lived.
Looking back, Brad thinks that should have been the first sign he might keep Ray. He thinks how he'd already had trouble lying down next to Ray on the hot concrete, pressed together shoulder-to-knees, putting his hands over Ray's and adjusting his grip on the M40 and feeling nothing at all.
If he hadn’t still been raw from the fucking-over Sarah had given him, maybe he would have seen that, that first sign he should have run a mile, leaving Ray with Pappy or Poke.
But he’d still been walking wounded when he met Ray.
Sarah.
("Brad you go away for weeks at a time, come back and beat the shit out of my friends. I can't handle it anymore.")
It was a little while before he realised she'd already been sleeping with Michael - Brad's friend. First guy Brad had fucked. Sarah and Michael are happy (married, Brad’s checked), swapping stories about his jealousy, how he was such a mistake.
He’s not fucking half-hard anymore.
Nate calls him at nine, almost on the dot. Brad’s sweating out a set of sit-ups on his bedroom floor. He’s lain beside the bed because there’s not enough room anywhere else but his cold-floored kitchen otherwise.
He scrambles off the floor and grabs his phone from the bench.
"Nate," Brad says, unhooking the phone from its charger.
"Good morning," Nate says.
"When are we doing this?" Brad asks. He's been ready to move since his alarm woke him at seven.
"You've got three days before anything's moved. I've texted you the address."
"What's the security like?"
"Godfather's word is it's solid guys, but very minimal."
Brad doesn't like the tone in Nate's choice of words. Minimal means at least four or five guys, all of whom may be armed, none of whom will be complete retards off the street dealing with this amount of goods. That’s agreeing with Godfather’s assessment, that isn’t, apparently, Nate’s.
"Nate, what's your word on the security?"
"My word is there's no harm in getting eyes on the place first."
"Noted, sir."
"You say that as if you hadn't already decided to, Brad."
"I appreciate your input," Brad says. He had already decided, yes, but you can never have too much intel.
"Godfather wants the trucks. There's three of them and they'll be full. You'll have Walt, Trombley, and obviously Ray, so there's a driver for each and one spare. I’ll text you the address you can park them at momentarily. Anything else you need from me?"
"A car and a contact for Trombley," Brad says.
"Car's out front," Nate says. Obviously Nate’s been on the go since as early as Brad has. Brad appreciates this about Nate, that he gets his men what they need.
Brad pads barefoot to the window pushes the heavy curtain aside to look down. There's a dark blue SUV parked directly in front of his building, nudged up behind his bike in his space. Brad hmmms into the phone. It's a soccer mom car, middle-class and non-descript.
"I've been informed Trombley is staying with Walt.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll get it organized.” Brad’s has to bring the phone back to his ear as he hears Nate say his name.
"I just want to let you know that, dependant on the outcome of this particular operation, this almost certainly won't be the last time Godfather employs this strategy against Patton."
"You're saying there's more bullshit smash-and-grab jobs I'm woefully overqualified for heading my way?"
"Very possibly," Nate breathes into the phone, almost a sigh. "Are you aware of Patton's main business, Brad?"
"I was under the impression it was guns." Brad’s M40A3 was somewhat deviously acquired from Patton’s people, in fact. One of his best guns.
"That's exactly it."
"Obviously I can't commit to anything further right now, Nate."
"Of course," Nate says quickly, "I'm just thinking out loud, Brad. Bad habit. I haven't got as many people I trust to bounce ideas off, anymore."
Bad habit from being a cop, Brad thinks. Wonders briefly how many others Nate still has from that. It has to be frustrating for someone as smart as Nate to be surrounded by the general ignorance of the assholes in Godfather's higher echelons.
Trust, though. Trust is a big word, and this isn't the first time Nate's said it to him. Brad appreciates Nate's regard, but he can't entirely turn off the part of him that's worried by the word. It's up there with some other words Brad feels he could live his life without speaking entirely.
"It's fine, sir. My ear is always open to you."
"Thank you, Brad," Nate says, and hangs up.
Brad paces the room once, feeling tense. He's left his M9 taped behind his mattress and goes to retrieve it, tugging it loose from the tape and settling it into the open top of his duffle.
He has to call Ray.
The anticipation of the awkwardness that will undoubtedly be almost entirely on Brad's own end is unpleasant. Not that there will be awkward silence, he is fairly certain he hasn't fucked up that badly (no worse than he has before). Ray's proven himself tolerant of almost all Brad's quirks and silences, and will generally, outside of a heated moment, let Brad alone with the things he clearly does not want to talk about, all the while filling in spaces with thousands of words and managing to give away as little as Brad does.
It’s fine. It’s how they work.
Brad contemplates picking up Walt first, but it's twenty minutes out of the way and so obvious he can't.
He grabs his duffle full of gear and calls Ray.
They’ve got to get eyes on the place by midday.
Brad stops at the McDonalds down the block from his building, on his way to collect Ray. He buys hotcakes and asks for two packets of syrup. Briefly despairs at the fact he actually knows Ray’s syrup preferences.
Brad pulls up to the curb in front of Ray’s building.
Ray’s leaning in the shade against the F of a six foot high obscenity in baby blue spray paint. Someone’s scrawled da police next to it less competently, in black marker. If they’ve got that much time on their hands they’ve got enough time to think of something original, Brad thinks. Not that he can’t appreciate the sentiment.
Ray climbs into the passenger side of the SUV and slams the door shut. He’s wearing an overly large t-shirt, high-necked and with sleeves nearly to his elbows. He hadn’t rolled them up like Brad’s seen him do almost every time Ray’s even worn a t-shirt, he’s not comfortable in anything more covering than a wifebeater unless it’s below freezing.
Brad is fairly sure Ray doesn’t actually own a shirt with sleeves, and concludes uncomfortably that it’s someone’s (Lilley’s) shirt and that Ray’s hiding something. Brad is torn between relief that at least Ray’s covered up and… frustration that there is apparently something to hide.
Ray greets him mercifully with a mouth full of words, none of which being “about last night”.
Brad’s shoulders relax.
“Do not tell me you had Micky D’s without me, Brad,” Ray says, nostrils flaring. “I swear to your Hebrew god unless I’m still tripping some fucking serious balls I can smell breakfast.”
Brad leans back and grabs the paper bag off the back seat and throws it in Ray’s lap without a word.
Ray grins and opens it.
“Hotcakes, praise Jesus!”
“'Brad' will suffice,” Brad says. He can’t help smiling, as they pull away from the curb. Walt and Trombley are waiting.
“Fuck, I feel like I haven’t eaten for a week,” Ray says, through a wetly audible mouthful. Brad glances over, right as a drop of syrup falls from Ray’s chin. He refrains from mentioning this is the only thing he’s actually seen Ray eat for the last week, other than a piece of toast.
They pull up in front of Walt’s apartment and Brad looks over at Ray, who’s tapping the last few drops of syrup out of the container held over his open mouth, and getting more on his shirt than his tongue.
“What?” Ray says, glancing at him sidelong with his tongue still stuck out for the last drop, before throwing the empty packet into the bag, before licking his lips lewd and ineffective. “Not gonna tell me I’m a dumb hick who needs to learn how to eat?” Ray raises his eyebrows.
He picks up another hotcake and tears half off.
Brad shakes his head and sees Walt and Trombley making their way towards the car.
“No. I’m going to let Walt do that.”
Walt climbs in behind Ray, and Trombley jumps in the other side.
Ray turns around in his seat.
“Walt!”
“Jesus, Ray, you fucking hick, you just spat food on me! You look like you should be riding the short bus, not shot-gun.”
Ray turns around and catches Brad’s eye, they exchange a smile, Ray’s rueful and sticky, Brad knows he’s smirking just a little smugly. He has taught Walt well.
“You’re turning Walt against me, you bastard. WALT, baby, Sunshine, tell me you still love me most -"
Brad glances in the mirror. Walt’s got his fists up, violently warding off Ray’s dirty, grasping fingers (there’s no point in bitch-slapping Ray away, Walt has already learned that Ray is persistent and takes most hits like they’re lovetaps unless they involve knuckles and intent). Trombley’s looking confused and faintly disgusted, hunched in the opposite corner. He’ll learn.
They drive ten minutes outside the city, into the terrible sameness of suburbia, right up to where the same three identikit brick houses stop repeating, manicured lawns turn scraggle-edged, and the older cottages that are waiting to be torn down border the river and its docks.
They leave the SUV parked in one of the last streets that’s still leafy-green and lived-in, and walk on the next block to where there's as many empty lots as houses, broken down like a hillbilly smile.
At the border of the last stretch of trash strewn grass that separates the edge of suburbia from the docks, there's one last house. Its front windows are boarded up like two black eyes and caution tape streams off the three pickets left of its formerly white fence.
Brad had cruised these streets on his bike in the cold just post-dawn and been almost suspicious of the perfection of the broken down old house as a hide for watching the docks and their warehouse. If there's a window on the side of the house that the docks are on, Brad will almost be tempted to check the place for bugs.
No one's that paranoid though, the docks are still nearly eight hundred yards away by his estimate (which is always fairly accurate).
"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," Ray says and kicks the front door with the flat of his boot.
Brad is gratified to see the door's lock was already broken, which he could have told Ray had Ray been able to wait thirty seconds before charging in making unnecessary noise and fuss. The door slams against the wall and bounces back, and nothing but Ray's quick reflexes save him from a bloody nose.
"Check it out, I've got fuckin' Incredible Hulk strength," Ray says, smiling lopsided over his shoulder and holding the door with one hand.
"You've got incredible retard strength," Brad says, and looks away when Ray gives him a pout, so he doesn’t let the grin that’s quivering on the corners of his lips slip free.
Walt laughs and Trombley grins, tentatively.
Inside it's dark and stinks like human filth.
"Smells like piss and fortified wine in here," Ray says. "Is that a tautology?" he turns and asks Trombley who looks, rightly, confused.
Ray rolls his eyes at him.
"You should be right at home, then," Brad says. "Trombley, go check if there's a window in that room."
He points to what might have once been a lounge room, but is now a space empty but for a few broken chairs and damp looking couch cushions, covered in unwholesome stains. No harm is separating Ray and Trombley pre-emptively. Not that Ray is being seriously antagonistic, because there would have been more than a confused expression from Trombley.
Ray picking a real fight is as subtle as spit in the eye.
Harmony in the team is important, however, and Brad is a believer in prevention being better than cure. He's unsure about what a pissed-off Trombley might look like, which is unsettling.
"Might as well put your bags down, gents. We're going to be here a few hours yet. Don't kick off your shoes though; Godfather does not cover tetanus shots."
"Hey!" Trombley yells from the other room. "There's a window in here that faces the docks."
Perfect.
"Oooh," Ray says, and Brad stops on his way into the next room. He turns around and watches Ray prod at a nest of blankets with his foot, then bend down and retrieve something. "Chef Boyardee! Someone left us a welcome gift. Awesome."
"You're not gonna actually eat that are you, Ray?" Walt asks, looking disgusted and amused.
"Of course I am, Walt. What kind of sick individual would leave perfectly good Chef Boyardee," he squints at the torn label, "... 123s and... balls on the floor?"
"Ray, an actual drunken vagrant has apparently rejected that very can," Brad says. “Does that not seem like a sign to you?”
"Their loss," Ray says, and fishes Brad's knife out of his duffle without asking.
Brad knows from long experience there is almost nothing Ray won't eat when he decides he's actually eating regular meals, and he cannot abide by wasted food. This, at least, is in a can. Dubious origins disregarded, it doesn't even appear to be rusty, and it isn’t the worst thing Brad’s seen Ray eat.
Brad shrugs when Walt raises his eyebrows at him. Ray can answer that himself. He hefts his duffle of weapons into the dirty lounge room and sees the window Trombley had yelled about.
It’s boarded up with ply, lazily tacked up on an angle. There’s a fist sized hole in it that was likely made by an actual fist, probably of the previous occupants who’d left their bedding, their Chef Boyardee, and the smell of urine.
Brad leans close to the hole in the plywood and looks out. There’s a six and a half foot chainlink fence that runs around the docks a few meters from the window, but it’s got holes cut into it that Brad would barely have to duck to walk through. Beyond it there’s an open field for a good eight hundred meters, covered in long, half-dead grass and trash, industrial squalor, and then the warehouses. Their target, dead ahead.
The hole in the plywood will accommodate a scope nicely, and that eight hundred meters will disappear under the glass.
Brad straightens up again. The setback is it’s at an uncomfortable height for him to lean into.
"Where'd you get that?" Trombley asks.
"Magic," Ray says and shakes his hands, which sends red sauce spattering onto the floor and his shoes. He tips the can up and slurps the last mouthful of spaghetti letters and numbers and sputters a cough. “Ugh, imagine if I died choking on Chef Boyardee, like Paris Hilton on a mouthful of jizz.” He makes gurgling noise and flaps his hands at his throat before stopping abruptly. “Scratch that, there's no way she's not used to swallowing buckets of that shit.”
Brad does not pause to wonder what it means that he’s not disgusted by Ray’s red sauce covered face. Instead he refocuses away from Ray, unzips the side flap of the duffle and inspects his disassembled M40A3.
The rifle lies placid and bloodless inside the dark green canvas, and Brad runs a finger over the trigger guard. It’s one of the most reliable guns he has ever owned, and he imagines this is something like what pet owners feel, except he never has to clean up the mess this little animal makes.
He pulls the unattached scope out, tosses it to Ray.
"Shut up, Ray."
Ray picks at the edge of the hole in the plywood before he leans the scope out and watches.
By late afternoon they’ve seen seven smoke breaks from the men in the warehouse, and nothing else. Ray’s started singing.
Waiting is no small part of this job. You learn to wait and watch on the job. You learn to wait for the next job to come along. You might wait weeks, even months for an offer worth taking.
Brad has always been fairly at home within his own head, and when there was downtime he always found something to do: surf, swim, ride, train - there are no excuses not to train during downtime - drink good coffee when Ray brought it to him, watch Ray play darts in some dive bar.
Some men dealt badly with downtime: Rudy and Pappy disappeared abroad like they couldn’t be still for more than a few weeks, looking for what, Brad wasn’t sure. It could just be they kept working, or it could be an extension of Rudy’s quest for enlightenment.
Ray had long, chemically-fuelled weekends before turning up at Brad’s apartment on a Monday morning, coffee in hand, if Brad hadn’t followed him, as he did sometimes. Not because he enjoyed the dives Ray hung around in, but because sometimes the need to know was overwhelming. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Ray could look after himself. He just liked to be there, sometimes, and sitting quietly at a bar with Ray always in his peripheral vision was, despite what Ray said, not boring or weird.
It’d just be sad to take up Ray on his offer to play darts - Brad was always the better shot.
Other people dealt very badly with extensive downtime. There had been the occasional person who ended up doing a six month stretch for something petty: assault, DUI; meanwhile Brad and everyone knew they were sitting on enough homicides to keep them in for three hundred years. Brad had bailed Q-Tip and Christeson out once after they had systematically taken out every street light in a ten block radius without a weapon.
Brad had never gotten the full story.
Proper downtime is, though, Cinderella to the ugly step-sister that is surveillance.
Ray, unsurprisingly, breaks the first sustained silence.
“And in another shocking development over at warehouse nineteen, the fat motherfucker in the trucker cap is having another smoke break. What the fuck they’re doing in there that’s so strenuous I’d really like to know. On second thoughts, maybe I wouldn’t, because they are some ugly motherfuckers and all I can think now is orgy.” Ray says without looking away from the scope. “Orgy, orgy, orgy,” Ray repeats, pensively. Then he shakes his head like a wet dog.
“There will be no orgies, Ray.”
“Aw, not even one? I’d let you come on my face,” Ray’s still staring into the scope and shifting from where he’s been kneeling on one knee to the other, his shirt pulled up over the back of his jeans, a slice of skin visible between hem and waistband. Brad looks down at the chipped floorboards.
He takes a deep breath.
“They’re taking a lot of smoke breaks,” Walt says in the ensuing silence.
“Well, they are a bunch of unscrupulous criminals left alone to guard a large shipment of stolen cigarettes. I mean hell, it’s not like that shit’s gonna be perfectly inventoried down to the last stick,” Ray says. “This is a totally WWJD moment. Jesus would smoke up like a motherfucker.”
Twenty minutes later, Brad’s M9 has never been cleaner. He suspects it wasn’t this clean when it was new. He resists re-cleaning any other weapon he cleaned last night, resenting his inability to put things off. Surveillance tests even his patience, occasionally.
“Status update, Ray. Then hand the scope over to Trombley.”
Trombley’s maybe been on watch a little longer than anyone else, but Brad doesn’t think of this as unfairness. You have to earn your way out of being bottom dog, and Trombley is new. That is how things work in Brad’s team.
“This hot news just in: another one is having a fucking smoke break. Jesus. Chuck me my pack, Walt?” Ray says, standing up and stretching, hands behind his head like he’s under arrest. “What the fuck is IN this shipment? It can’t just be fucking cigarettes, there’s got to be some blood diamond, black ops shit going on here.”
“Ray, please no conspiracy theories,” Brad says.
“Come on Brad! You can’t tell me you’re not thinking it!” Ray still has Chef Boyardee on his face, it’s illuminated by the glow of his cigarette as he lights it. Brad makes a swipe at his own face and Ray wipes his cheek in response.
Speculation, at this point, is useless. They’ve committed, and unless they observe an army setting up shop in the warehouse before morning, the job’s got to be done. It isn’t that there isn’t money in cigarettes, it’s only boredom gives you too much time to think and, if you’re Ray, breeds bullshit on top.
“Ha, you are,” Ray accuses.
It has occurred to Brad, along with far too many useless ideas, that perhaps Godfather had employed them because there was something of value in the trucks beside the cigarettes and they were of a higher calibre than the regular smash-and-grab monkeys. It’s unlikely, though.
“Why does he want cigarettes anyway?” Trombley asks. “Not like you can’t buy cigarettes already, you know?”
Walt snorts. Ray gives Brad a stare, eyebrow curved like a question. Brad waves his hand for Ray to go ahead.
“Trombley, a truckload of cigarettes smuggled into our fine U S of A will garner a rough profit of two million sexy green dollars. That is enough to stuff the g-strings of every strippers in the city more than once, my friend. That is enough to pay for the removal of the sixth finger from the hands of all your undoubtedly freakish people -"
“Money, Trombley,” Brad interjects when he feels Ray’s made enough of a point for everyone. He smiles, but doesn’t laugh at Trombley despite the fact Ray’s lifted that last phrase directly from Brad’s insults to him and his hillbilly kin.
“Let's have a toast for the douchebags, let's have a toast for the assholes…” Ray hums quietly for a minute. “Every one of them that I knooow,”
“Ray, please. No more Kanye West.”
Walt and Trombley have both nodded off. It’s past four in the morning. Trombley had gone down first, curling himself into a relatively clean corner and falling asleep faster than Brad would have thought possible with a balled up sweatshirt and a cold wall for bedding. He’s snoring faintly. Walt had laid himself out across the floor with his head on his bag and hadn’t moved for the past twenty minutes.
"No country and no Kanye? You're breaking my balls, Brad. You're right though, there's only room for one ego that size in this shack."
"It's not ego if it's true, and your Cartman is abysmal."
"Okay, okay Brad, this one's just for you," Ray shuffles around on his knees and points at Brad and smiles fake and cheesy. "And feel free to sing along."
"YOU'RE AS COLD AS ICEEEEEE -"
Despite the fact Ray continues to murder melody as efficiently as he kills for cash, and the terrible pun that Ray has made before, the song choice is still an improvement.
Walt starts singing along with his eyes shut and Brad stands and stretches, takes care not to look at Ray reaching up towards him full of mock emotion and bad singing.
It's still Ray on his knees.
Brad takes up position at the scope and listens to Walt, who is evidently not quite as asleep as Trombley, "harmonising" with Ray.
There's light starting to show faintly yellow in the windows high up the sides of the warehouse. Their view is side on to their target, and the only entrances Brad can see are the long line of windows that run too high up to be practical, and the door that's dwarfed by the length and height of the blank side of the warehouse, covered by a small awning. Men have been coming out of it every now and then to smoke, pick their noses, and throw cigarette butts out into the dirty grassland, accompanied by the commentary of whoever's on the scope.
Colour commentary if it's Ray.
Brad moves the scope a little and looks over the other identical warehouse buildings that are spaced evenly along the river. The front doors of the next building along are visible, huge steel roller doors high enough to let a semi-trailer in with room to spare, and wide enough for two trucks side by side. Further along the road the runs beside them ends in locked gates, the chainlink fence still standing strong at that point.
The small side door makes sense, even with the unpredictability of their untimed smoke breaks. The men tend to come out singly or in pairs, there appear to be only five individuals, and Brad has seen nothing but a sidearm on two of. Not a problem.
After a few minutes, Brad realises there's a general silence, and when he glances around Ray’s looking over at Walt and grinning.
“Little tykes just couldn’t keep their eyes open.”
Walt’s got his head leaning on his pack and his mouth open just slightly, he looks relaxed now. He snorts faintly in his sleep. Trombley’s still curled into the corner and looks peacefully dead to the world.
Ray gets up and drags one of the stained couch cushions over to the window, and lets it falls with a puff of dust and dirt beside Brad, before he sits down elbows on his knees. The toes of one of his boots up nudges up against Brad’s leg. Brad doesn’t shift away. Ray kicks him lightly.
“Brad,” Ray says impatiently.
Brad turns to look at him properly, and he’s holding a granola bar out.
“Thanks,” Brad says. He hasn’t eaten since some time around midday, he realises.
Ray smiles, and kicks him in the calf again. It feels like an apology, and Brad smiles back.
Brad thinks momentarily about telling him to get an eye on the scope, but finds he doesn’t really want to. No point waking Walt or Trombley, either. Brad eats and he and Ray sit in comfortable silence. Brad’s knees start protesting and he has to shift, Ray pulls his foot away.
“You look tired,” Brad sits back and rests an arm over one knee. Watches Ray. Ray’s eyes are dark and smiling. His face is clean of red sauce but he’s managed to get some spattered in the middle of his shirt (of Lilley’s shirt). Brad hopes it stains, briefly, then wants to shoot himself with his fucking M9 for being a retard.
“Thanks, asshole. So do you. Evidently it’s harder to stay up all night when you’re sober. Who knew?”
“Nice shirt,” Brad says, and feels like a fool. He doesn’t want to talk about Lilley, or the previous night.
“Yeah? You should like it, it was yours,” Ray says, pulling the front of the shirt out to glance down at it. “Shit, I got sauce on it.”
“What?” Brad says.
“I got sauce on my shirt,” he says.
“My shirt?”
“Sorry, I got sauce on your shirt,” Ray says with a smirk, not sounding at all sorry.
Brad’s shirt. Covering whatever Ray’s covering.
Brad must be silent a little too long, because Ray’s smile fades and he looks ominously like he’s about to say something serious.
“Brad -" Ray starts and Brad feels himself flush, and can’t let Ray finish, or start. No one’s on the scope.
“Get up on the scope, Ray.”
Ray rolls his eyes and Brad says nothing, thankful Ray’s actually stopped talking when Brad wants him to, for once.
“Hey, Brad,” Ray says a beat later, tone all business now, “get up here.” Ray waves him closer without taking his eye off whatever he’s seen. “I don’t remember seeing him before, do you?”
Brad takes the scope, and glances around for a second before he sees what Ray’s seen: there’s a man on the roof, standing on the edge of the building closes to them, but facing right and watching, Brad turns the scope to look in the direction he’s facing. There’s nothing particularly interesting happening, except for a ship docking.
“Good eyes, Ray. We’ll bring the M40 back tomorrow night, and get rid of our friend on the roof before we go in.”
At dawn, Brad feels they’ve seen all they need to. Godfather’s word was bare minimum security, and six men isn’t quite that, but it isn’t far enough off it for Brad to feel more than the same level of trepidation he’d felt for the entire job. He feels as close to satisfied as he thinks he’s going to get with this bullshit. He texts Nate: good to go sir
Ray wanders over to wake Walt and Trombley, Trombley gets water flicked in his face from his open canteen and Walt gets the dubious pleasure of Ray humping his face like a dog.
Nate replies ten minutes later: Godfather says tomorrow night.
They’re back in their little condemned cottage, preparing to rid themselves of the first obstacle on the path to Godfather’s gains. It's eleven o’clock at night and around seventy degrees. It’s starting to rain in light spit warm drips. Brad feels it as he presses a hand through the hole in the plywood, hears it dripping down gentle through holes in the roof in the hallway and the kitchen.
It's dry in the dirty little lounge room though, and he pushes his duffle into the corner with one foot after he's set up his M40, attached the night vision to the scope. He holds her out, unloaded, and presses the butt of the gun to his shoulder for a moment, feeling how comfortable she still is before he tosses the gun to Ray. He slips a single bullet out of the small box in his pocket and presses it into Ray’s palm. He should only need one.
Brad ignores Trombley's stare, the kid looks like a hungry dog that's been tossed outside into this sticky summer storm while he watches someone else eat a nice juicy steak.
As much as Brad trusts Pappy's word on Trombley, and on most everything else, he's not letting Trombley take the shot at the man who's showed up again on the warehouse's rooftop. He hasn't seen Trombley perform with his own eyes, but he has seen Ray, and this is not a training exercise.
"That rifle’s got to be older than me," Walt comments. It is older than him, in fact.
"Yeah, looks like a real shitstick," Trombley says. "You really use that one? Rudy and Pappy have got a sweet M200, that shit can destroy a dude like two clicks away. Just, pow,” Trombley moves his arms out in a wide arc above his head that looks curiously like ballet, but Brad understands he’s talking about the bloody fallout from someone taking a fifty calibre round to the head.
"Do not insult Brad's M40, Trombley," Ray says, holding the gun against his chest like it's an infant to be protected from Trombley's hurtful words.
"Ray's right, man," Walt says, "I once saw Brad literally hammer in a nail with the butt of that thing." He reaches over and strokes a finger over a gouge in the rifle's butt. Brad had actually hammered nails with the beat up old girl, and the dent is only one of many dings and scratches, the paint job has become less visible than the dull grey metal underneath.
It’s not that Brad doesn’t get kind of hard for some of the serious guns Rudy and Pappy tote, some of the new mind-blowing tech that’s coming out now. It’s just he’s also got a strong appreciation for the tried and tested, and his M40 is an excellent gun.
The rain's slowing to a trickle already, the little cloud burst just enough to push the humidity higher and do nothing about the heat. The heat is better than the rain for Ray's line of sight, though. Especially given there is no room in the fist-sized hole in the plywood for a spotter to put binoculars, or any other scope. Especially not anything bigger and higher powered than the little scope attached to the gun.
It should be adequate, Ray is an excellent shot. Brad knows this. Everyone he's trained has become at least competent, regardless of innate talent, but Ray is genuinely good.
Of course, he could take the shot himself, but there are perks to being a leader and one of them is he is allowed to be selfish and watch Ray work, without owing an explanation to anyone.
He loads the rifle, before rolling his shoulders a few times and shifting his footing. Ray settles the rifle in the window, stooping a little so the butt can rest comfortably against his shoulder. Knees bent, braced and steady. Brad watches him look through the scope and readjust himself twice before he can no longer resist the urge to correct him.
"Ray," he says, stepping forward and placing his hand flat on Ray's back, over his ribs. Ray's skin is warm and Brad can feel the dampness of sweat through his shirt (Brad's shirt, again).
"Yeah, Brad. I'm breathing," Ray says, before Brad can open his mouth again. Ray takes a deep breath that Brad feels pushing out his ribs, a proper deep breath to regain his stillness. Brad pushes gently against Ray's back, a soft pressure to show Ray he's there, but not enough to jolt or move him. He feels Ray's breathing even out against his palm.
"Good boy," Brad mutters, quiet.
Watches Ray brush a hand over the bolt again, then stare silently through the scope for a minute. Brad breathing has synched in with Ray’s.
"He's pacing," Ray says.
"I'm going out onto the porch to watch," Trombley says.
"Get going then, and don’t be obvious about it," Brad says, and sees Trombley leg it outside with the spare scope and it's night vision component clipped on. It's the first time he's seen Trombley move like he has to, rather than he’s grudgingly obliging the world. Brad is unsurprised it's the prospect of blood, albeit in glorious greened out, basically two-d vision.
"He's stopped," Ray says, without a glance towards Trombley. He's focused, steady under Brad's hand. Brad watches a drop of sweat slide from a curl of black hair down the back of his neck, under the t-shirt's collar.
"You got the shot, Ray?"
It's not an easy shot in the dark, especially at this range, eight hundred meters is edging up on maximum for the M40.
"Yeah."
"Take it," Brad says.
Ray doesn't need his reassurance, and Brad doesn't have eyes on the target, so all's he's doing is confirming Ray's own decision, but old habits die hard. He always kept a steadying hand or two on learners, easier to correct, or slow them down, or remind them to breath. It was a habit he'd never actually gotten out of with Ray, though.
Ray readjusts his fingers on the gun and there's a ten second lag that feels like slow motion, a moment Brad's intimately familiar with, before Ray squeezes the trigger.
Brad feels the muscles in his shoulders tense as he pull the trigger - it's not a heavy trigger but five pounds isn't nothing either. He takes the shot. The recoil jolts him mildly, shoving back into Brad's hand.
Ray gets his eye back on the scope quick as he can, but he's nodding his head and withdraws the barrel from the hold in the plywood as Trombley comes back inside the house with a happy cry of "Did you see his fucking head explode! Right in his fucking face, man. Good shot."
“Yeah man, well done,” Walt adds and grins at Ray.
Ray actually gives both Walt and Trombley a smile. Good.
Brad realises, after Ray turns that smile on him and it gets bigger and toothier, that he's still go his hand on Ray's back.
He drops his hand.
"Head shot, Ray?"
Ray shrugs.
"Asshole sat down, I had nothing but a face to work with. Too bad he doesn't anymore."
"Good shot, Ray.” And from the shoulder too, Brad feels something like pride. “Right, gentlemen. Get your Kevlar on, we need to be across that field before anyone notices the corpse on the roof."
Brad checks everyone's vests; better safe than dead. He tugs the front of Trombley's vest then pulls the velcro across the ribs undone, it's too loose.
"Re-do that, tighter."
He checks Walt's and they exchange a smile. Walt's squared away. Walt's always been a solid worker, and quick to pick up anything Brad had thrown at him. Brad never felt like he had to worry about Walt.
He turns to Ray who's rolling up the sleeves on his t-shirt so they’re nothing but bunches around his shoulders, apparently he’s hit his limit for tolerating sleeves. His Kevlar vest is still hanging half open, the front swung wide like a door, and Brad forgets entirely whatever it was he was going to say to Ray.
Ray's been hiding something alright, there's a bruised bitemark on his right bicep. There's no obvious indentations of teeth at this point, just a shape Brad is familiar with. They can bruise - exactly like that - in an oval rainbow of broken capillaries. Ray's is monochrome in the low light, but Brad knows there'd be colours there in daylight, dark blue, purple, fading brown-black.
He breathes in sharply through his nose.
"Stop playing with your shirt and strap your fucking vest on Ray.”
Ray looks away from where he's fiddling with his sleeve and meets Brad's eyes, raising an eyebrow.
Brad looks away and presses his vest closed with a slap on his hand, holstering his handgun in the front.
“What? I’m not gonna be any less shot if I leave a thin layer of cotton between my arm and a speeding bullet.”
Brad is thankful for Ray’s apparent assumption that the cause of Brad’s abrupt snap, as if the sharp intake of breath through is nose and tightening of his jaw are symptoms of something nobler than Brad is capable of right now.
Except when Brad’s taken a breath, Ray catches his eye with a look like a dare or a fuck you, reminiscent of Nate’s place where Brad’s fingers had been around his arm. Right about where that bruise is. The bruise Ray’s fingers skim over.
What’s he going to say, here? Well shit Ray, you’re right, I wasn't looking pissed about how fucked you might be if a bullet hits you anywhere but your vest, I was more thinking of how the only way to get rid of that bruise on your arm would be to obliterate it with a larger one of my own making while trying not to break something or get a fucking hard-on.
“I can roll them down if you want,” Ray says, tap-tapping his foot on the ground and smirking.
“Let’s go,” Brad says and turns away. Yeah. He's about ready to kill something.
Brad draws his M9, a comfortable, cool weight in his hand. The thing Brad enjoys about working this kind of job is you know the General is just as excited as Godfather by the prospect of involving police. The General will clean up their mess for them, which is an amusing thought. Brad strokes a finger over the outside of the trigger guard.
They duck through the chainlink fence where it's been torn open and pick a damp path through the overgrown grass, hunched and slow.
It's past midnight and though the rain hasn't returned the stars are still invisible behind the blackout curtains the clouds have drawn. The clouds are rumbling like they're complaining about the humidity as they work themselves up to soaking it out.
It's dark. This is good.
They can easily orient themselves by the warehouse’s high windows flashing orange light across the field - theirs is the only warehouse with the lights on. Legitimate workers all clocked off hours ago.
Without the man on the roof who could easily have had thermals or NVGs (unseen does not mean nonexistent, and Brad is completely comfortable with assessing the threat based solely on the man's position), there's less chance they’ll be spotted. If someone comes out for a smoke break within the next minute (not unlikely) they'll be blind enough within the little puddle of yellow light that spills from the door that Brad has no doubt they’d be able to wait them out or take the out.
They set foot on the concrete. Brad glances back and grits his teeth momentarily as he watches Trombley catch his foot on one of the various pieces of trash half buried in the damp grass, only to be saved from faceplanting and further unnecessary noise by Ray grabbing his arm. Brad can't see the look exchanged silently in the dark, but assumes Ray is conveying Brad's displeasure adequately for both of them.
The doorway is surrounded by a semi-circle of cigarette butts, all falling just outside the weak circle of light from the bulb under its awning.
Brad turns to his team and waves them up against the wall, backs flat to the building. If someone comes outside now, it would not be ideal to be caught looking like a bunch idiots having a circle jerk in the dark.
Brad can hear laughter and indistinct speech inside, a few voices.
Time to go.
"Brad," Ray says, quiet and waving the hand not holding his M9 in case Brad misses the near inaudible whisper. Brad shakes his head at Ray. Ray gestures to the door with his gun, and Brad shakes his head again.
He got Ray the first time, and there is absolutely no way anyone but Brad himself is going in point.
This is the dangerous part - he can still hear comfortable talk and laughter, and a few banging noises like something thrown down onto a table - but that isn't a one hundred percent guarantee he's not about to stick his head right into the sights of some asshole's gun.
"Handle," Ray whispers. Brad runs a hand over his throat and hoping Ray takes the subtle hint and attempts no more communication.
He just grins at Brad and flips him the bird, like Brad hadn't also watched each of the men inside take the smoke break and walk inside through the apparently open door (okay, so Ray was probably remembering what Brad was - there'd been that time with the unlocked door and the unnecessary forceful entry, which did not actually need to be reminisced about, ever).
Brad opens the door.
The light is momentarily overwhelming, like a flash going off in his face, Brad keeps his eyes open through it.
There are four men at the table.
Brad breathes in.
Seconds spin out into small eternities.
Brad feels everything settle inside him like sediment at the bottom of deep water.
There are four men, seated at a flimsy table, turning to face him.
Four men. Three exits: a staircase that must lead to the roof top, Brad's right, far wall of the building, past the trucks, the door behind them and the huge roller door to Brad's left. Three trucks. Two hands reaching for weapons. One M249 SAW laying across the small table with a deck of cards stacked on top. A SAW. A fucking SAW.
The fucking SAW says very clearly they had been expecting someone, Brad notes impassively, however the matching fuck doll expressions on the men’s faces say something different. Curiouser and curiouser. He’ll deal with the implications of that later.
"Gentlemen," Brad states loud and clear, and chooses the most likely looking asshole of the bunch to aim his M9 at, "you'll all want to stay very very still. Keep your cards in your hands."
Ray is beside him now, arm straight and gun aimed at the man next to Brad’s. Walt and Trombley are somewhere behind him, then.
"Okay, okay," the man whose forehead Brad has a perfect shot on says. His surprise melts into a placating smile slowly. His teeth are very white underneath a thick dark three day stubble, and there’s a clamped matchstick between his teeth.
"Is that a fucking SAW," Trombley says, quiet and lustful, and if Brad thought tact were in Trombley in any form, he’d say he hadn’t intended that to be overheard.
They're not going to do this nice and easy. Brad has asked men for cooperation under similar circumstances enough times that he knows, as he meets the steady gaze of the man who he's singled out that there is no way they are going to cooperate.
There’s not a lot of difference between bravery and stupidity in this situation, particularly with that kind of firepower sitting right next to the man. He doesn’t look away.
Brad doesn't know who moves first, but he does know something more important: he knows who shoots first. The man with his stupid-cocky grin takes a bullet to the back of the head and several more on his way down to the ground.
The near silence of the stand-off lingers even after he's hit bottom, bloody and pale, until the air fills with a hail of bullets as the next man moves and everyone follows Brad's fire. The suppressed rounds are more echo than sound, pained groans bouncing back from the gentle click of triggers.
Shell casings clink and bounce off the concrete floor.
Brad feels a spatter across his cheek like the warm rain from earlier. The table is flung over between them and the two men closest to Brad take the SAW down to the ground with them as they slump and slip into a tangled heap, one a deadweight stringless marionette pinning the other down.
The pinned man takes a shot between the eyes while his fingers are scrabbling at the gun in his dead friend’s hands, and Brad is sure, for some reason, that it was Ray's shot.
He can see Ray in the corner of his eye, concentration written in the compressed line of his lips but restless joy by his eyes. Brad doesn't want to look at him dead on right now, can't afford that distraction.
Time drags, like every bullet fired is a neon green second ticking down on a microwave face, a watched pot.
The table obscures the fourth man from view. The SAW is safely situated on their side of the obstacle, however. Brad holds up a hand. The air is full of gun smoke and copper, cigarettes burnt and unburnt, and moaning.
"Nice shot," Walt says, without any particular tone, from behind Brad. Brad glances at Ray, by his side, and the over his shoulder to where Ray's looking at Trombley and nodding. Trombley looks as if he's just blown a load with the girl of his dreams, a gentle smile on his lips.
He looks young.
"Oh fuck," a voice comes from the other side of the table, high pitched as a prepubescent ladyboy. "My fucking hand, oh.”
Brad gestures for Ray to move left as he moves right, and as he rounds the table he sees the man holding his right hand, bleeding in pulses across his shirt, coming up with a gun in his left -
"Down!" Brad orders sharply.
The air is shattered by the crack of unsuppressed fire and Brad hits the deck before glancing over his shoulder and taking in an unharmed Ray grinning, Trombley still smiling faintly, head up, and Walt holding up a thumbs-up: fine.
On the other side of the table Brad can hear the man breathing heavily.
Brad feels the graze a second later, a hot itch on his shoulder, before the intense sting starts up in earnest with the trickling flow of blood. He glances down at his right shoulder. It's shallow and won't impede movement.
"Brad," Ray says.
"Superficial," he replies. It’s not worth wasting breath on.
"Drop the fucking gun, fucknuts, before I come around that table and beat you to death with it!" Ray calls.
"Shut up, Ray."
"He fucking shot you," Ray says indignantly.
"Fuck you! DAVE," the man behind the table calls. It's the plaintive bleat of a wounded animal. "Daaa-ve! Where the fuck are you you fucking…" he trails off, groaning. Dave must be their man on the roof.
Brad and Ray exchange a look.
"Dave can't come to the phone right now," Ray shouts over the top of him, "he's currently lacking a face."
They need to silence this guy before someone who isn't dead hears him, though the possibility is extremely remote it’s not worth the chance. There's the definitely possibility that if they keep on their bellies with the table between them and wait he'll loose enough blood he won't even be able to get the weight of the gun up in front of him.
Brad inches his way closer to Ray.
He can barely hear the sound of laboured breathing, but the man doesn't call out anymore.
"Talk to him," Brad says, shoulder pressed to Ray's.
"Hey asshole!" Ray yells.
There is no reply.
Brad is about to get up into a crouch and take a chance peering around the table, but Ray puts a hand flat on his shoulder blade and pushes him down. Brad shakes his hand off.
"Ray."
Ray is already up. Brad frowns, settles into a crouch and watches him.
Walt gets up with him. They both inch tentatively and bent double to different sides of the table, guns up. They peer around at the same time.
"He's out," Walt says. Brad’s not surprised.
Walt and Ray make their way around the table.
Brad jumps up off the floor. Walt’s standing with a foot on the side of the guy's neck, looking over his shoulder questioningly.
"He's down for the count," Walt says.
Walt, for a cold blooded killer, is sometimes kinder than Brad would like.
The man is breathing shallow and fast. He’s not quite down. Brad knows he's awake. His bleeding hand is stretched in front of him, reaching faintly towards the gun that's been kicked out his hand by either Ray or Walt. He can't yell under the pressure of Walt's boot, but he's going to the second the pressure comes off.
He's going to try to, anyway.
Brad shakes his head, and raises his gun.
The man's head smacks audibly on the concrete, body jerking, as a bullet passes through his temple before Brad shoots.
“He fucking shot you,” Ray repeats, and shrugs at Brad like whaddayagonnado.
Brad immediately buries any feelings he might have under the miles of ocean deep calm flowing through him. They have cigarettes to deliver.
Walt shakes his foot faintly and dislodges a spatter red. It gets swallowed up by the growing puddle as the man's head and hand wounds seep together slowly to form one sticky puddle.
“Man,” Trombley says and sits down on the sole chair that's still standing. With the bodies, bullet casings and the overturned table around Trombley, he looks like he’s been caught in the eye of a particularly focused tornado. Trombley puts his boot against the back of the nearest corpse and shoves so it rolls over. There’s a playing card stuck to the side of the corpse’s face, a bloody two of hearts. “That kicked ass.”
"The job isn't over yet, Trombley," Brad says. “We need keys,” Brad points to the trucks, lined up in a neat little row their backdoors to them.
"Yeah, Trombley, I bet you're one of those rude motherfuckers that blows his load and doesn't even give -" Ray's cut off by gunfire, three shots slam into the trucks, thankfully having gone massively wide.
Brad glances over at the sound of the massive roller door screeching up just enough to let three men in underneath it, ducked down and nearly crawling. The shots had gone wide because someone was stupid enough to start shooting without actually being able to see exactly where he was aiming yet, still half-ducked under the door.
Part 3