The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Broken Fixers, Part 3 of 4

Mickey Malloy finds himself in an uncomfortable position: playing politics. He can deal with monsters and brawls and gunfights, but forging alliances is not in his wheelhouse. For better or worse, the motley crew of criminals, revolutionaries, and oligarchs he’s assembled are about to get the fast track to friendship: a common enemy.

This is Part 3 of The Case the Broken Fixers. If you’d like to avoided spoilers, read Parts 1 and 2 first.

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Content warnings: Mild swearing, violence, gun violence, death, gore, alcohol use, tobacco use, Nazis.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 28, 1943
LEVEL II DECRYPTION
HYDRA INTERCEPT SITE, CAMP X, ONTARIO

“One-hundred-eighty-five, inspector,” Analyst First Class Doriane Tremblay reported, loud enough for the whole room to hear. She was getting used to making reports in front of groups, finally. She’d even managed to break her old habit of twirling a blonde lock around her finger while she spoke. Still, it was hard not to be nervous with two of the highest-ranking officials to ever serve hanging on her every word, and Mickey Malloy, one of the Office’s founders, using her findings to push for something that was frankly nuts.

“A buck-eighty-five,” Mickey Malloy repeated, his voice rumbling like a distant freight train. He wanted the assembled officials to hear it aloud. “A hundred-eighty-five reports referencing a ‘Mister Schmidt’ on American soil.”

The reports Doriane had pulled were spread out on Arachnae Bellegarde’s impressive oak desk, covering every other document the Printmaster General had been studying. Mick spied the dog-earred corner of a Bastion Americana Freedom Journal, scrawled with red, peeking out from underneath the jumble.

“These reports only constitute those catalogued this year,” Doriane clarified.

“Mon dieu,” Gaétan Chiron muttered. He pushed the long silvering curls out of his face and sifted through the documents the analyst had pulled. The Preceptor General sighed: “So much hate, spread so fast.”

“‘Hate is a seed that sprouts quickly when sowed with fear,’” Bellegarde replied in a way that they could all tell that she was quoting someone else.

“Your father?” Chiron asked.

“My uncle,” she answered. She stood up straight, her posture as perfect as the braid holding her iron-gray hair atop her head. She had a severe look, and the findings Mick had brought to her weren’t helping.

“Ah, a good man,” Chiron replied. Mick snorted. The three of them smiled knowingly. They’d all known her uncle years before, while he was still around and kicking. The late Brigadier General Alistair Halistone, Junior rewarded success and met injustice with violence. At the same time he was an ornery, braggadocious, pompous ass who’d damn-near disowned his own son before he got himself revenge-killed for grave-robbing. ‘Good’ was a stretch, but he’d stopped a lot of bad things in his day.

“He was good with words, at the very least,” Bellegarde answered.

“And at killing krauts. So how many of those reports are direct from friendlies?” Mick asked, eager to cut short their trip down memory lane.

“Twenty,” Doriane said.

“Just twenty,” Mick repeated. “And the rest?”

“Mail, telephone, and radio intercepts,” she replied.

“So that makes, what? Eighty percent of the folks that we know a Mister Schmidt contacted kept it to themselves,” Mick concluded. “If they’re not Nazi lapdogs now, then they’re willing to keep Nazi secrets.”

“That is indeed disturbing,” Chiron agreed.

“Any correlation for those reports? Geographic or anything?” Mick wondered.

Doriane flipped through the pages, but she already knew the answer and what it meant. There wasn’t any use sugar-coating it or delaying:

“No correlation. The reports originate from all over.”

“We’re surrounded by God damned Nazis,” Mick growled.

“It is hard to believe,” Chiron said. “How could so many people be so dedicated to hate? Do they not know what the Nazis stand for?”

“We have got to mobilize,” Mick grunted. Chiron acted like he hadn’t heard him.

“Are these findings confirmed?” he asked. Doriane’s eyes fluttered. She swallowed hard, then shoved her doubt aside.

“To the best of my ability, sir.” she answered.

“That means ‘yes,’” Bellegarde clarified.

“They’re everywhere,” Mick grumbled. Something cold compressed the inside of his chest. He leaned forward and tapped the rumpled Freedom Journal on Bellegarde’s desk. “More and more of ‘em, every day.”

“The people who read that trash are not Nazis: they are afraid,” Bellegarde answered, placing her hand on Chiron’s arm. “In times like these, anger gives more comfort than understanding.”

“So what do we do?” Mick asked.

“We talk to them, we explain who we are and what we do,” she replied. “If we cannot shield people from what we fight against, we tell our stories. What we’ve sacrificed, what we’ve accomplished.”

“Truth pierces the armor of lies,” Chiron said, quoting a ghost once more.

“Their truth is more exciting than ours,” Mick said. “They have a bogeyman: us.”

“Our bogeyman is Adolf Hitler,” Bellegarde replied.

“Adolf never hid,” Mick pointed out. “We did. Americans side with the Devil they know.”

“Then they will get to know me,” Bellegarde snapped back.

“So you’re going to stick your neck even further out?” Mick wondered.

“That is a mistake, ma petite araignée,” Chiron said.

“Every official has a price on their head,” Doriane whispered.

“These monsters can only hurt us if we stay hidden,” Bellegarde replied. “Besides, I am the Printmaster General: how much higher can my bounty go?”

They all stayed quiet for a moment until Mickey cleared his throat, saying:

“I agree.”

Chiron nodded, but he worried at his gray beard. Trouble was inevitable in their line of work.

“Fais gaffe,” Chiron said.

“So you got a battle plan for dealing with future fascists,” Mick said, tapping the Journal. He moved his hand to Doriane’s pile of Schmidt reports: “How do I handle the ones we already got?”

“Have you submitted these findings to Inspector General Klavin yet?” Bellegarde asked.

“Well, I’m not the most orthodox guy, and the boss like to keep his ducks rowed up,” Mick said. He slumped into the chair Bellegarde kept across from her desk, eliciting a squeak and groan from its old leather cushion. “The way I see it is that we’re in an arms race with the krauts, and they’re trying to scoop up as many Americans to their cause as they can. The Freedom Journal gets the civilians and Schmidt gets the militants.”

“So you want to be the anti-Schmidt,” Chiron concluded.

“The Nazis are appealing to folks through fear, hate, and greed,” Mick replied. “I think I can do the same. Be afraid of the Nazis, hate with they do, and get rewarded for opposing it. I just need the leeway to reach out to people that Klavin might not want to rub elbows with. People that might make the Journal’s readership think they were right about the Office from the jump.”

“Who is that?” Doriane asked. The three elder officials looked at her like they’d forgotten she was there. Doubt caught her breath in her throat but she held their gaze and recovered quickly. She was good at what she did; she wouldn’t have been there if she wasn’t.

“Anybody who’s against genocidal racists having their way. There’s a whole fleet of pirates roaming the Caribbean, a couple Chinese gangs in California I’d like to talk to, some Communist militias out west, and those assholes down in Texas to name a few.”

“You sound like you already have your plan, Michael,” Chiron said. The two of them had fought through some of the worst shit either of them could’ve ever imagined. That helped build trust, if nothing else. “You wish to be an ambassador to the underworld.”

“That is most certainly not what I want, but it’s seeming like what I got to do,” Mick replied. “We got to go where no one else has or will, and that’s the scumholes. I know scum, and scum’s got untapped, ignored connections and resources that could help push the needle in either direction. The krauts figured it out first, so right now the only person reaching out to these people, these devious, deadly, unpredictable people, is Schmidt. A whole legion of Schmidts.”

“I can collect the names of friendly contacts,” Doriane offered.

“Thanks, we’re going to have a lot of calls to make,” Mick replied.

Bellegarde and Chiron locked eyes for silent moment.

“What?” Mick demanded.

“This is dangerous,” Bellegarde said. “The people you wish to recruit are all the things you described and worse.”

“Any port in a storm,” Mick said.

“And what about legitimate organizations?” Chiron asked.

“That’s her job,” Mick replied, pointing at the Printmaster General. “We get her in the spotlight, you keep me in the shadows. Give me the green light.”

“You want to conduct clandestine recruiting of American criminals on American soil into the Office,” Bellegarde replied. “That is not an operation I can authorize.”

“Yea, I figured you’d say that,” Mick grumbled.

“You walked in here with your little plan,” Chiron rumbled. “You simply need our backing before you bring it to Klavin.”

“It ain’t a secret that Chip has a couple lumps of Commie lead in his back. Between that and his time with Hoover, he ain’t likely to get behind this unless I got support,” Mick figured with a shrug.

“No, he isn’t,” Bellegarde agreed. She settled into her own chair, across the desk from Mick. “Analyst Tremblay, generate those contacts. Inspector Malloy, settle in. We will make this airtight before we call the Inspector General.”

“How can I help?” Chiron asked.

“Get back to your trainees, love,” she said, already distracted by the task laid out before her.

“Of course, my dear,” he replied. “Don’t mind the noise, it’s live-drop DIVERT day for this recruit cycle.”

Doriane gathered her reports and rushed out, mumbling her to-do list. Chiron ambled out

Mick and Bellegarde worked long into the night, guzzling coffee, burning cigarettes to nubs, and planning their recruitment operation. They didn’t notice the rocket capsules’ sonic booms just a couple miles away.

The plan was to do a classic pincer, with Bellegarde building trust through interviews and articles while Mick worked with the folks everyone else chose to ignore. It was later than any of them realized when Doriane came back with an optimistically tall stack of potential contacts. The trio went through them all, one-by-one.

If even half of them cooperated, Mick would build an underground network that spanned the continental U.S. with connections to every inhabited continent. Sure, that would mean a bunch of killers and pushers would get the same network, too, but that was a problem for Tomorrow Mickey, and Tomorrow Mickey was great at dealing with problems.

The people Doriane had found were maniacs, with ideologies that could generously be considered antithetical. Militias, union muscle crews, bootleggers, cults, buccaneers, gangs, loansharks, commies, fixers, and worse. If Mick put them in a room together with anything but a Nazi to point them at they’d tear each other apart.

Hell, most of them would’ve ended up on the business end of the Bastard’s club had the other evil not be so far greater.

There were a lot of strange groups on their list, but a few familiar as well. Mick had run up on agents of Agrarian Mutual Bank before, when he was dealing with that Head Hunter business in Charleston. He’d hoped the Diamond Plated mercenary group would make an appearance, but he wasn’t holding out too much hope for that; their founder was violently dedicated to staying neutral as cornmeal. Mick might even see Batty Masterson and he might not even take a shot at him. The Black Wings had fought their way off the Office’s shit list by running a mission in Germany, but it was a little soon for an absolved traitor to show his face.

He’d call Lobo Losa first: his crew had been infiltrated but he’d managed to cut out the cancer before it spread. The Selvaggios would be Mick’s keystone: they had sway and name-recognition, and Mick knew they weren’t afraid to get in the fight: they’d already risked it all to help out the Office in Italy.

Doriane looked like she was about to lay her forehead on Bellgarde’s desk and pass out right there. The Printmaster General herself slumped back in her chair. She realized what was at stake, but she also knew all the names she’d be signing off on. She knew what it meant to advocate for them.

She sighed and nodded at Mick. He had her support, which meant he had Chiron’s as well. Earp always had Mick’s back, and hopefully that would be enough to get the wheels in motion. The krauts had a head start, and the avalanche they wanted might have already been rolling.

Klavin would hate the names they settled on, and Hoover would shoot steam out of his ears if he ever caught wind. The Journal would name them criminals and traitors just for associating with half the people on the list. For the other half, they’d rile up a lynch mob.

Still, in the end, Mick knew he was doing what was needed, and any compromise short of fascism was necessary. It’s what he had to tell himself.

It would work, it had to.

Mick didn’t look at the clock. He still had more to do. It wouldn’t be making phone calls, he had to set up a meet. The kind of people he needed didn’t take somebody’s word for it, especially not a fed with a mask and a bad temper. He’d need to get all his pieces on one board; they’d need to see their future comrades all in one spot, all focussed on their common enemy.

It was just a couple hours until Klavin would be at his desk. Mick snuck a sip out of his flask.

“Why don’t you grab a couple hours of rack time?” he grunted. Doriane lurched to her feet like she was a marionette and stumbled out without any objections. Bellegarde remained seated, staring numbly at the list.

“What about you?” Mick asked.

“We’re on the edge of something here,” she said. “We must be certain that when we jump, we jump in the right direction.”

“That’s sleepy talk. Get some sleep,” Mick grunted. Bellegarde swatted at him absently but got up and stumbled over to an emerald velvet chaise and threw a quilt over herself. She was snoring in minutes.

Mick smiled. His list was good. His plan was good. The people he had around him were good. No matter what the folks he was about to recruit had been yesterday, in the morning they’d be patriots and humanitarians. They’d know what they were fighting against, and they’d give it their all.

They had to, there was no other option.

For a second Mickey Malloy was hopeful. Just for a second.

WEDNESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 4, 1943
GATES RUBBER FACTORY
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

“Everyone down!” Earp shouted. He pulled Uncle Gio to the floor. He was getting used to that move. Across the circle, the woman in blue was already below her table. Mick and Capano dove next to Earp as a machine gun roared to life outside, hammering through the factory's old brick walls. Red dust and the familiar crack of bullets whipping inches overhead filled the air. Anyone who wasn't on the ground was getting stitched up.

Guns appeared in a dozen different hands, more than Mickey could keep track of. Pistols cracked, and one Bar fell, clutching his chest. Ingalls' legs dropped out from under him and blood welled from a puncture just above his knee. A Ghost Eye matron slumped back in her seat: the machine gun had found her three times. Men and women were shouting in eight different languages.

The machine gun went silent.

The Young King rushed past Mick, hunched down behind one of the massive women entrusted to guard him. His long dreadlocks dragged through the dirt as the women pushed him past. A revolver roared, and one woman was knocked to the floor, bleeding from her chest. The Young King snatched a pistol out of her limp hand and scuttled away. Mick couldn't see the shooter, but the King's surviving bodyguards opened up on someone with concealed derringers. Their shots were rewarded with a scream.

Mickey pushed himself up to his knees only for Capano to yank him back down. The machine gun roared again, and two DiCarlo men caught lead. Hoover's plant, the consigliere, grasped the ragged stump where his ankle had once been and howled.

An engine roared and the factory's accordion door burst inward, folding under the rear bumper of a massive armored truck. Its tires thumped over the officials' sniped corpses before skidding to a stop.

Its steel-plated tailgate dropped and gunfire erupted from within, splattering Texans and communists alike. The gunners covered a disembarking squad of masked men in all-black uniforms who advanced while firing German-made MP-40 machine pistols in short bursts. Criminals, revolutionaries, and officials alike were cut down one after the other. A score of attackers stormed out of the massive truck, advancing under the raking cover of deadly salvos.

Mickey risked a peek over the tire press. Every inch of them was wrapped in back fabric, save the red L's adorning each chest. The crimson patches glowed against the black. They were Silver Legion. Mick spat.

Those jokers had never directly attacked anything before. Sure there were brawls and riots and drunken instigators, but never open paramilitary action.

Mick’s perfect little plan had gotten the Germans’ goat.

The Legionnaires moved with military precision, and worked their MP 40's carefully, picking each target before loosing rounds. None fired from the hip, none fired on full-auto. They weren't dissidents, they were combat-ready soldiers. The criminals around Mickey stood no chance.

“Pull back,” Earp ordered. He hauled Gio to his feet and shoved him behind a bank of heavy machinery. Mick and Capano scampered alongside them.

“We got to hold them for eight more minutes,” Earp said. He held up an Office radio transponder. Its little bulb glowed green. He'd already called in the cavalry.

Blood misted before them. Arthur Bell took a round in the hip before his men could get him away. One of his people opened up with a set of snubnose revolvers, but only one Legionnaire dropped before the intruders mowed down the shooter and two more Bankers. The Bank’s head of security flicked his arm and a golden shield unfolded from his wristwatch before Mick’s eyes.

That was a neat trick.

The man scooped up Bell with one arm, soaking his silk jacket with blood. Bullets plinked off the shield as he dragged his wounded boss behind cover.

The reedy Ghost Eye translator managed to play dead long enough to stab one attacker in the armpit, but he himself was cut down seconds later.

“Officials, open fire!” Earp shouted, not realizing that he and Mick were the only officials left standing in the building. Earp had his chrome .45 in his hands, and Mick retrieved the .38 from his own ankle holster.

Daniel Earp was a trained marksman, and he fired twice, adjusted, fired twice more, repeating until his magazine was empty and four Legionnaires were dead on the floor. Mick's revolver roared furiously. His shaky hand sent all but one of his shots far wide. An attacker caught that round in his shoulder and crumpled, and the rest of the crew fell back, pinging lead off the tire-press Mickey was ducking behind.

“Eyes on primary target?” one Legionnaire shouted over the chaos, a leader.

“Target secure!” another responded. Mickey hadn't noticed with his head down, but a group of the Legionnaires had splintered off and restrained a single prisoner. His head was hooded, but Mick recognized the black silk shirt and white linen pants; they had Losa. The Cuban struggled, but his captors wrenched back on his arm, forcing his elbow into an angle it was never meant to reach. Losa cried out and fell to his knees. His own men, dead, bloody, or driven back, could not help him.

“Secondary target?” the leader called out.

“Here, sir!” another Legionnaire replied. A trio of them had formed a triangle around Ingalls' woman in blue. She was untouched, save for the brick dust staining her hair and face. The first Legionnaire lent her a hand and she climbed onto the tailgate without a struggle. The other pair loosed a barrage from their MP 40's, encouraging anyone with ideas of rescue to reconsider.

“Covering fire, pull back!” the masked leader shouted. He dropped his sub-machine gun onto its sling around his neck and drew a Luger. A half-dozen men encircled him, MP 40's leveled outward, like a full-auto sea urchin. They opened fire.

“Hell,” Mick grunted, then ducked lower behind the industrial press. Bullets hammered the rolled steel, deafening him. Earp leaned over, yelling right into Mickey's ear to be heard.

“They're taking Losa!” he shouted.

“I know!” Mick yelled back. “Plug him?”

“Plug them!” Earp said. He slammed a fresh magazine into his Colt 1911 and popped back over the press, only to drop back under an instant barrage. Splintered metal and shattered bullets had peppered his face, shearing into his forehead and cheeks. Blood was already pouring out of a dozen cuts, getting into his eyes.

“Look at me, look at me,” Mick said. He took his boss's head into his hands and gave him a quick once-over. He wiped the thick crimson off his eyelids and examined the inspector's baby blues. They were both in one piece, but the flow of fresh blood immediately blinded him again. “You ain't going to be so pretty anymore, but you'll keep both eyes.”

Earp took a deep breath, going icy calm.

“Mister Capano, are you still there?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah,” Capano grunted. The Chicago Slugger had caught a graze in his upper arm, but he wasn't one to complain.

“I need you to bandage my head, stop the blood,” Earp ordered. Even wounded, he was still in charge. Capano went to work on Earp, and Mick left him to it.

The MP 40’s slacked off and Mick peered around his cover. The enemy leader stood on the bumper of the idling truck, Luger in hand. Losa was laid out on the floorboards behind him, trussed up like a prize hog. The woman in blue sat on the tailgate, dangling her feet.

“Is that you, Herr Malloy?” the Legionnaire on the bumper called out with a familiar German accent. One of his men groaned loudly and reached out to him from the floor. The masked man rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. “One moment, I apologize.”

The man peeled off his balaclava to reveal a smooth, pale, noseless face. Frostbitten scars were all that remained of his nose, lips, and chin, drawing his mouth into a freakish grin.

“Eizhürst!” Mickey shouted. He was shaking with rage.

The Nazi put a finger to his bare teeth to shush him, then fired his Luger once into his wounded man's forehead. The Legionnaire died instantly.

Mickey snatched Earp's Colt out of his bloody hand and stood, firing. His hand shook, and all seven shots went wild. Eizhürst stared him down, grinning, not even troubling himself to duck. The kraut's eyes glittered blue, and he holstered his black pistol on his hip.

“You cannot win every time, Herr Malloy,” Eizhürst said. “The game would get boring, your defenses would drop.”

“I may lose to you, but not today,” Mick said. He pointed upward, through the corrugated tin roof. “You hear that?”

The rumble of roto-copter engines shook the old factory, rattling the bullet-shattered glass out of window frames. The Lanes had arrived.

“Ah, your Chickenhawks,” Eizhürst said. He'd seen them in action in New Orleans. The Smiling Man barked an order to his masked henchmen. “Luftfäuste!”

Three Legionnaires emerged from the back of the truck carrying long weapons, like bazookas except each was series of nine smaller launch tubes rather than a single wide one. They were like rocket launcher shotguns. Eizhürst watched his men take their positions at the broken windows.

The dead Black Bank man was sprawled two yards in front of Mickey's cover. His matching set of revolvers had clattered to the ground not much further away.

“Stay where you are, Herr Malloy,” Eizhürst advised. Two of the kraut's men had a bead on him, ready to riddle him with bullets. “All of you: do not move.”

The wounded and hiding members of the criminal council heeded his warning. Spotlights from the approaching Chickenhawks raked the building, spilling through shattered windows and ragged bullet holes. The roto-copters were overhead, their propellors loud as summer thunder.

“Attention, Nazi scumbags,” a loudspeaker crackled outside. Mick recognized Alex McFife's voice. “You have about two seconds to - !”

“Los!” Eizhürst barked. The three luftfausts roared as one. Nine miniature rockets howled from each launcher, lancing upward. A cloud of hot white exhaust boiled onto the factory floor, and the blast of a rocket's impact high above shook the building.

“Holy hell!” McFife shouted through his megaphone, “Evade, evade! Hawk Two is hit!”

An orange flare of fireballing aviation fuel bloomed outside the factory.

“Feuer frei,” Eizhürst told his men. They slammed fresh loaders filled with twenty-millimeter shells into the weapons' breaches, lined up their sights, and fired again. The heavy machine gun that had torn through the factory walls opened up again, this time sending its tracers into the air.

The smaller, side-mounted Brownings on the surviving Chickenhawks stuttered to life, but another rocket salvo roared skyward and silenced them. A second Chickenhawk crashed to the ground outside. Mick could hear the screams of burning soldiers over the rest of the firefight.

The remaining Chickenhawk's thunderous engine had taken on a pained whine. Its machine guns chattered furiously, and the Nazi gunner outside went quiet.

The whine grew louder, tearing into Mick's eardrums, and suddenly one of its twin rotors smashed through the factory wall.

The craft’s whirling blades sheared free, spinning into the work floor, flinging brick and wood and glass with it. A shard whipped inches past Mick's face, so close that he felt its very passage like a rabbit punch to the side of his head.

The Chickenhawk's fuselage followed, slamming the rest of the way through the wall, crumpling with the impact and crushing wounded gangsters as it skidded across the ground. Eizhürst cowered away, giving Mickey his chance.

He ignored the churning craft, still skidding across the floor, and dove, landing bodily on the bodyguard's warm corpse. Sparks and twisted metal rained down around him. He scooped up the revolvers with a deftness his arthritic mitts had not possessed in years and brought them to bear. The pistol in his right clicked empty so he chucked it aside and transferred the loaded pistol to his good hand.

Mickey let his breath out slow and slowly squeezed the trigger. The revolver barked, sending a fat lead slug inches to the left of the Smiling Man's face. One of the Legionnaires caught it in the chest and curled around the wound, falling off the idling truck's tailgate.

Eizhürst shouted orders in German, too fast and angry for Mickey to catch. The remaining Legionnaires opened up with their SMG's, forcing Mick to scuttle back behind his cover. Metal splinters peppered him, but he ignored their vicious stings. He stretched around the corner of the tire press and fired blind, expending his last two bullets.

Eizhürst's barrage ended on his order. Mick popped up to peek over the top of the press. The Legion rocketmen tossed their weapons aside and boarded the truck. The Smiling Man sat on the last seat on the bench, the woman in blue across from him.

The Texan succubus smiled, then peeled her blonde hair away and threw the wig into the dirt. Underneath she was as bald as a baby. She dug her fingernails beneath her jaw bone on both sides, pinched something, and pulled evenly. She grimaced and eased two long silver strands out of her face. As the thick metal threads grew longer, her face contorted. The threads snapped free from from her skin with a twang, and the woman was wholly transformed. Her high cheekbones had melted to mush, her sharp chin sunk into her neck. Her eyebrows seemed higher and her eyes closer together.

Hers was a face Mick knew, if only through description. He was looking at one of the Abwehr's most infamous spies and assassins, possibly even surpassing the grinning killer next to her.

Eizhürst interrupted Mick's dark thoughts. He had pulled something from his pocket and dangled it before him on a long strap.

“Herr Malloy, a parting gift,” he called. He held it up to show off a swinging softball-sized glass globe. He took the strap in his left hand and ripped it free, igniting a pale blue glow deep within the sphere.

Mick knew the weapon. It had the power to drop a mountain.

The armored truck roared and rumbled over shattered brick and bodies. Eizhürst tossed the glass ball into the chaos then took a seat. The truck belched black exhaust and rumbled back out into the Florida night.

Eizhürst, the woman, Losa, and the Legion were gone, leaving blood, flame, and a live Ionen-Aktivierung grenade in their wake.

The strange bomb bounced twice and rolled to a spot next to the wounded Governor Ingalls, still clutching the weeping bullet hole in his thigh. Its blue glow had grown as bright as a desk lamp.

“What?” he stammered, squinting.

Earp wiped the blood out of his eyes and saw the blue light.

“I-A grenade!” he shouted. Even bloody and half-blind, his voice was one of command. “Everyone out!”

The wounded that could stand scrambled to their feet, each dragging themselves to the nearest exit. The I-A device was bright as a spotlight, painful to even look at. Ingalls moaned and tried to drag himself away from it.

Capano tried to sling Earp over his shoulder, but the inspector shoved him away.

“I can walk,” he insisted. “Take someone who’s hurt, I'll stick right behind you.”

Capano complied and hauled Uncle Gio to his feet. The massive mafioso led the blinded Earp out of the building with Capano close behind, a bleeding moonshiner's arm over his shoulder. Mick picked his way through the wounded. Most were dead, but a few still whimpered.

Jimmy DiCarlo and one of his bruisers were carrying their maimed consigliere between them. The Young King's hulking bodyguards returned to retrieve the surviving Ghost Triad matrons, carrying the shrunken crones in their arms like gray-haired children. The Hatchet leaned on a bloody Italian's shoulder and they struggled toward the exit together, Suero in tow.

A bang sounded from with in the crashed Chickenhawk, and the sliding door shuddered. Two more hits and it flew free. The I-A grenade flashed once, then flared brighter than the July sun. Alexander Lane pulled himself out of the wreck, then dragged his brother Christopher out behind him. He saw Mick watching.

“I got three alive in there, Malloy,” Alex said. Mick nodded and rushed over, climbing into the broken fuselage. He hauled one man out, careful not to touch the raw edge of splintered bone that poked through his uniform sleeve. The man was already bleeding from split stitches in his chin. Fernandez, Mickey remembered, one of Diedre Daniels' hypnosis victims. A balding man clawed his way past next, his face sprayed with another man's blood, his neck black and crinkled with burns. He stumbled over a corpse, but Alex Lane caught him and helped him through the door.

The I-A grenade flashed twice more, so bright that Mickey could feel his skin pinking just standing in the same building as it.

“Last one,” Mick grunted. He shoved another dead commando aside and grabbed the last survivor, a short, leathery white man, by his collar. The official yelped. Blood was pumping in spurts from a ruined hand, but his training took over and he followed the big man to drag himself out of the hatch.

Mick looked back inside the Chickenhawk. The rest of them were dead.

He and the wounded commando caught up to the other officials at the closest fire door. The survivors of the attack had huddled in the brown grass a hundred yards away from the building. Mick set the wounded man down and flopped onto his rear, watching. He hoped they were far enough away; he didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The I-A grenade strobed with celestial intensity. With one final flare, the air shattered, then rushed away in a wall of heat.

The remaining glass in the rubber factory melted like rock candy while Mickey watched. Metal twisted, rusted, scaled, reformed a hundred times in a second. The old bricks that held the factory's tin roof aloft glowed bright red and cooled to freezing over and over, shattering the mortar between and warping the foundations of the building. Five thousand tires reverted to crude black liquid in an instant, then hardened into asphalt, and fifty corpses had every ounce of water drawn from every cell. Their blood rose as electrically agitated steam that burned in wisps of flickering white flame.

As fast as the reaction had happened, it ended. blinding light disappeared, drawing the stars back into the sky. The factory groaned under its own weight, slumping into its foundations but somehow holding itself aloft. The wrecks of two Chickenhawks burned on the ground on its far side.

Mick could hear someone whispering over the ringing in his ears. Sigal Bat recited a desperate prayer for her fallen brethren. Survivors began milling around. Shock drained away, allowing pain and anguish to flow into its abscess.

Uncle Gio asked quietly amongst the survivors for a spare cigarette. The Young King held Arthur Bell's hand as his bodyguard applied a compress to his shattered hip. The two remaining Ghost Eye matrons sat silently over their fallen sister. Suero was on a radio phone, rattling off orders to someone.

Mick settled onto the grass and watched it all burn. The flames were flickering golden and cheerful. The air was thick with familiar humidity, and Mickey's head felt lighter than it had in years. Something warm trickled onto his neck. His hand came away bright red. He reached his thick fingers up and felt the raised edges of a gash above his left ear. When had that happened?

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.