Ebb Tide Ch. 03

The black woman turned her back on us as she bent over; pulling up a shotgun. Jo decided to pick off the other smartass, the black guy. He was presenting a side-view. She obliged his stupidity by putting a bullet between his fourth and fifth ribs so that it traversed his chest cavity and went sailing over the pool, then Lake Las Vegas and, if it missed a random golfer, off into the desert.

The black woman had enough sense to try and flip over a table to use as cover. Our third shooter's next bullet (he'd killed the duffel-carrying hillbilly that had been to our right) passed through her nasal cavity, out the back of her skull and went chasing after the Jo's round. The eighth and last man, white - in his early twenties, had already turned away and was running for his life.

The police frowned on shooting fleeing people in the back, so we reined in our instincts and let him go. I changed magazines in one smooth, rapid process. I would collect the spent mag when / if things were finally over. The situation was that three men and one woman, none of which truly knew one another let our eyes flicker about.

The fourth guy went first; holstering his S&W as he knelt by his date. She was muttering something in a language I didn't know. That was when normal reality kicked in. People began screaming, crying and running for exits. Idiots. They had no clue that the shootout ~ as much as it was ~ had concluded.

There was one person moaning. That was the guy whose arm Jo had blown off. Jo spared me a moment.

"Are you okay?" she asked, her voice calm and emotionless. I nodded. We both looked to the older guy.

"Do you have any idea who they were?" I asked him as I holstered my piece.

"No idea," he shook his head. His gun went back home as well. That made Jo comfortable enough to put her hand cannons away. In real combat, you make sure the people you shot are dead. In this case, it had been a slaughter.

Whomever sent these people our way had been moronic and incredibly tactically inept.

"Dabney, G, Reagan - call out," I was in my own state of combat-calm. Panic wasn't something a man like me could afford.

"I'm okay," G sung out.

"V, are you okay?" Dabney was starting to tear up. She'd been pressed down on the seat. G crawled out from under the table on all fours. Reagan slithered up on the far side of our table.

"Benji, Leigh Mark; time to go," Jo's voice was more insistent. I could understand that. Hotel cameras had record the events and I was way too recognizable. Jo and company were in a different situation. She was likely unknown. Successful assassins prized their anonymity. It made little things, like moving through airport security, less of a hassle.

"Reagan, can you get the ladies out of here?" It wasn't really a request.

"Sure thing," she responded nervously. "This way, I know we'll talk later."

Reagan saw more than her fair share of misery and death, but that didn't make her a killer, or a combatant. People had been trying to kill her ~ maybe.

Bullets had been flying, Jo and I had dealt with the threat and it was time for her to not be a witness to multiple murder.

"Vance, I don't want to leave you," Dabney came up and hugged me. G wrapped her up and began pulling her away.

"Dabney, you don't want to be here when the cops arrive. We'll talk later. Now go!" I insisted forcefully.

Jo was already rounding up her mini-squad and herding them out. She spared me a quick glance, then was hurrying for the exit. It was time for me to do some damage control. The second ally was calming down his 'date'. Her voice had an odd, heavy accent.

"Is this what America is like?" she asked her companion in halting English.

"Only on Saturday nights and the occasional, random Thursday," he joked. "Let's go to the lobby," he coaxed her loud enough so that rest of us knew he wasn't running away - like Jo. I noticed G and Dabney shooting me worried looks out of the corner of my eye. That left me and the old guy.

"Brigand, are you somehow involved with this?" the man, 'Gunrunner', asked me. Brigand had been my SEAL call sign. I hadn't trained with this man. He was from before my time, but he'd trained several of my instructors and they thought he walked on water. Worse, he was a sniper.

Snipers are their own breed and it didn't take long for me to decide I didn't have what it took to be one. I had cross-trained as a spotter though ... which only reinforced my desire to not be a sniper. In a way it was career affirming that he'd remembered my name.

"If I say 'no', will you believe me," I replied, "Gunrunner?"

"You are a Naval Corpsman," he chuckled in a completely relaxed manner; as if killing three stooges before lunch was a perfectly normal thing to do. "You are expected to lie upon occasion."

"In that case, 'I've never seen any of these people before and I don't care to speculate on their intentions," I grinned.

It was the classic 'what you tell the civilians' response. If they kept up the delusional thinking that one of us would tell them the truth, it was JAG time. He was about to say something else, except the carnage of human frailty was all around. It was time for me to play paramedic. I was already heading for task #1 on my damage control plan.

"Ma'am?" I went to the mature woman poolside who had thrown herself on the ground.

"Ah ..." she squinted up at me fearfully. I crouched down and handed her the sunglasses that had flipped away when she made her roll. The noontime Sun was beating down on us. The few wispy clouds provided no shade.

The woman's fear became confusion then blossomed into recognition.

"Mom?" the young man from the pool called out.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" She was collecting herself. A white band on her ring finger suggested a recent divorce.

"Yes ... yes I am," she smiled as I helped her up. "Are you the ..."

"Yes, I am. I need to go check on the others now," I calmed her. "Why don't you move over there?" I pointed away from the carnage close by. "Wait for the Police to arrive." I returned inside. Public relations exposure was the proper ploy for me at the moment.

I needed eyewitnesses telling the cops good things about me. Outside was easy. I didn't have to walk over the dead to help the woman. It was an easy twenty seconds for maximum reward. Inside would be tougher. There were staff and patrons surrounded by the slain. The armless man had quieted down.

He'd been too shocky to do anything useful with his stump and I was willing to let him bleed to death. I went to a screaming waitress who was doused in fountaining blood from the Mohawk woman I'd shot. I snatched up an unused cloth napkin, dipped it in water and then gently began cleaning the blood off her face.

"Miss, you are not wounded," I soothed her. Dealing with physical and emotional trauma was my chosen profession. Even Marines got freaked out from time to time. A tap on the nose brought eye-to-eye contact. She became lost in my gaze, her breathing grew steady and her pulse stopped imitating that of a race horse down the final stretch.

"I ... dead people," she mumbled. "Is it over?"

"The shooting - yes. The police will have questions," her name tag read, "Jennifer, you need to start asking the patrons what they want to drink, keep them here and help me keep things calm. "Can you do that?" I continued. Jennifer nodded.

"Alcohol is okay. Nothing to eat because post-stress nerves might cause vomiting. Let's get started," I spoke with quiet authority. In a crisis, people responded best to quiet, decisive voices. Give a person sensible directions and a job to take their minds off the horrors they just witnessed. I pulled her up by the arm. She could take it from there.

I did the same while moving through the rest of the room until the first member of the LVMPD - the Hilton was outside of the city, but the LVMPD had inherited most of Clark County's unincorporated areas as well as many of the smaller municipalities ~ like Paradise, which was the 'municipality' of the Las Vegas Strip. It was of no surprise that they both had their standard issue Smith & Wesson Model 659 9mm's out.

I stood up, raising my hands over my head.

"I'm Vance Vardanyan. I have a pistol and a Concealed Carry Permit. It is on my left hip," I announced clearly. I'd hate to have them try to shoot me and have to kill them as well. They started a careful approach, one pointing his sidearm at me while the other scanned for other threats. The armless guy had thankfully shed this mortal coil.

I would rely on Reagan to figure out why this crazy shit happened.

"Hey, you are that guy from yesterday," he relaxed slightly. His accent was Bostonian. "The paramedic MedicWest canned."

"That'd be me," I confessed. They identified themselves as Officers L. Galloway and A. Sanchez.

That turned out to be Liam and Alonzo. Liam didn't care. Alonzo had a stick up his ass so I ended up letting Liam do all the talking.

"That was fucked up," Galloway continued. "I hear you saved Sgt. Dunston's life. Thanks."

"At this point obsessing on the past seems irrelevant," I shrugged. I still had my hands up.

"Oh," Galloway noticed. "You can put your hands down. What happened here?" I went over the fire-fight without hinting that I knew who any of the other gun-wielders on my side, or the name of any of Jo's children. I did identify Dabney and Georgianna, though I didn't know their current location. Witnesses were not required to stick around, or make statements to the police.

'Reagan' was an unknown and unnamed acquaintance of Dabney, which was okay since Dabney had a criminal record. Why had they left? They weren't accustomed to all the blood and death. Sane people ran from such things. Standard hotel surveillance was visual only - no audio - which meant no evidence what we talked about at the table and the bathroom cove was a visual dead zone.

I walked the two officers through the fight as seen from my vantage point. When asked if I could have saved the guy missing part of his arm, I said 'Yes. I decided to check for possible victims first.' By the time I'd finished, six more officers had arrived. Two had the presence of mind to bring their Model 870 shotguns.

When the homicide detectives showed up, I was sipping on a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, courtesy of Jennifer, and chatting it up with Officer Galloway. One of the Sgt.'s directed him to make sure I didn't vanish along with half of the survivors involved.

"Mr. Vardanyan," the lead Detective greeted me with a smirk. "Are you on a one-man crusade to rid Las Vegas of our criminal element?"

"If I was, you wouldn't be finding the bodies so easily," I bantered back. "ID's."

"Still hate cops, Vardanyan?" the second officer said as they both brandished their ID. For a man who wanted to live below the radar, casual law enforcement comradery was the opposite of what I wanted. Today I had Det. Sgt.'s M. Griffin and L. Sabatini.

"With a passion," I grinned. "Liam here is trying to convince me that you guys are actual terrestrial entities, but I'm still looking for the zipper on his 'human' suit."

"Do you really hate cops?" Galloway thought the two were joking with him.

"Yes he does," Sabatini answered.

"Yeah, Liam," I sighed, "because they act like assholes and answer questions aimed at other people without fear of being taken to task by Ms. Manners." Galloway still thought a joke was being played on him.

"I am going to see if the other two shooters are more cooperative," Griffin spoke up.

He headed Gunrunner's way. I would have wished him luck with the 'Old Man', except that would have been disingenuous. Gunrunner had killed three people in under eight seconds. Like ... well, the other three of us hit what we were shooting at and killed everyone we hit ~ just like me.

"So, Vardanyan ..." Sabatini began.

"Call me Vance," I huffed. "I have a feeling we are going to be seeing a lot more of each other."

"Fine Vince ... Officer Galloway, you can leave now," Griffin continued. Reluctantly the patrolman left.

"Vince ..."

"It is Vance, Dick-tic-tac Suppository," I corrected him. "You can be 'like that', or you can accept that I've been interrogated by people who had the power of life and death over me. Your primitive annoyance tactics merely make me want to be as helpful as you are polite."

"Vance, let's start with how many people did you kill today? By the ambulance people hanging around the front entrance I figure no one lived," Sabatini inquired.

"Today, or only today - here?" I snorted in derision.

"How about we start on the past hour and work our way back?" he answered.

"Seven. Those two," I pointed to two of the corpses by the bar, "those three," the three corpses I'd killed initially, "and two of the seven outside. One ran away. His face is on the cameras and he should be easy enough to hunt down. He's the guy in his early twenties who has pissed on himself and dumped a serious load in his shorts (underwear)."

"Who killed the other fourteen?"

"Good Samaritans," I said. "Apparently Good Samaritans who practice with firearms regularly."

"What did that one hit them with?" Griffin looked over one of Jo's kills.

"Bullets," I answered completely deadpan. "I'm sure if she'd thrown table wear, I would have noticed."

The rest of the Q&A processes was as productive ~ which is to say I was as little of help as possible. They took my current pistol, making it a grand total of two now in the Police Evidence Locker. I only had twenty-two registered ones left, which was barely acceptable in my cautionary opinion. That was twenty-two pistols, not total number of firearms.

After the official on-sight interrogation and collection of all the supporting testimony, plus the physical and video evidence, they let the three of us go. I finally got to talk to the second guy who'd stepped up and helped. His name was Brent Black. He was a private security specialist, neither military nor mercenary. That meant he was a professional bodyguard.

This was his first date with the woman he was with. Her name was Tamari Bolkvadze, from Georgia (the country) who currently worked at a software design firm in Hong Kong. Gunrunner and I wished him luck. Her waiting in the front lobby and not being in her room, packing up and heading back to the airport, was a good sign.

Gunrunner and I were kind enough to wait with the lady while Brent went to his car for his 'back-up' main firearm. He had once possessed a back-up .32, but the cops had taken that too. After the couple went off to her room ~ he'd driven up from Arizona ~ me and the 'Old Man' went out to the parking lot. By unspoken consensus we went to his car first, so he could rearm.

Since the bad guys were definitely not after him, that was the safer move.

"The police appear to know you well," Gunrunner commented. If there was any doubt, that was not a positive accusation.

"I retired two months ago and I'm trying to keep a low profile," I replied. Gunrunner snorted.

"If this is your best effort, Brigand, you might want to re-enlist. The US will be safer that way."

"I retired from the 'Teams' three years ago. I was otherwise employed," I said. That meant the SOG (aka CIA) 90% of the time.

"I thought you were smarter than that," he taunted me.

I was busy retrieving my next .45 Compact Tactical from the gun safe in my trunk.

"Apparently not." Pause. "I ran across CAM a few days back, here in Vegas. He's working private security now (a bodyguard). He's looking good - better."

"Tell him to call me sometime," Gunrunner allowed.

Ex-SEAL, or not; hanging around an out-of-control junkie who happened to be a trained killer was never a safe thing. If I thought CAM was in control of himself, there wouldn't be a problem. I was a corpsman so my opinion mattered a smidge more. The LVMPD had cordoned off all the entrances to the Hilton, keeping the press at bay as the coroners came and went.

One of the two remaining ambulances retained a lone vigil. The first one had taken away a female patron complaining of chest pains. The newshounds were using their cameras to sweep the parking lot. I was in a spot covered by two service vans, so 'Old Man' and I weren't visible. He didn't need the scrutiny.

"Take care," Gunrunner grinned as he turned to leave. "You seem to have attracted the wrong kind of friends."

"I'll keep that in mind," I joked back. There was no 'thank you - you're welcome' passing between us. Not helping one another would have been the oddity.

Had the attackers identified themselves as law enforcement, or had I not engaged them, Gunrunner would have let events unfold without intervening. Once those stupid sons of bitches brought their guns out (which they had done in the lobby), Gunrunner was going to get involved. I would have done the same thing.

Mr. Black was undoubtedly upstairs right now, getting some victory pussy. I wished him luck making the second date better than the first one. For me, the next hurdle was exiting the parking lot. The reporters didn't stampede, so I slowed down and answered a few non-specific questions.

#1 "Why was I there?"

"The Lagoon Bar & Grill had great food."

I didn't tell the reporters the truth. I hadn't been rating the LB&G cuisine. My mind had been pre-occupied the entire time and I hadn't had a chance to order dessert. Throwing the place a bone (they would need a week remodeling) felt like the community-conscious thing to do since Las Vegas was my home town once again.

#2 "Did I know the people involved?"

"The ones trying to kill me? No."

#3 "What about the people that weren't trying to kill me? "

"I was concentrating on the ones who were trying to kill me. It seemed the prudent thing to do at the time."

#4 "Was this the Playboy Bloods, "Florencia 13"s, or another group of the Sureños?"

"No comment."

#5 "Were there any survivors?"

"No comment."

#6 "Would I consent for an interview?"

"Not yet. I'll let the police make their announcements." I knew my attitude was fucking with the LVMPD's mind. Yeah, I vocally hated them, but I also was being an excellent witness by not yammering critical details to the media. I'd let their 'unnamed source' do that.

#7 "Didn't I hate cops?"

"Yes. That doesn't mean I think the whole department is incompetent. This is their job and I plan to let them do it."

#8 "Did I hate the free press?"

"Journalists were people ~ both good, hard-working, honest souls and utter scumbags who gave bottom-feeders a bad name. As for 'free'. If I found a member of the 'free press', I wouldn't expose them out of common courtesy from one endanger species to another." I would let them figure out which group I didn't like.

#9 "I was an ex-SEAL. Had I killed people before?"

"Did they mean full-formed human beings, pets with rights, or sperm cells?" That went over well. A few female reporters blushed. Yeah - right.

#10 "Did I think something like this would happen again?"

"Since I don't know what has just happened today at the Hilton, I don't believe I have enough data to make a proper prognostication." I didn't use big words to stump less intelligent people. I used them because that was what language skills were for - to adequately define what you meant. I had little doubt more than one of the reports thought I followed the zodiac, or something else equally inane.

#11 "It was reported that I was meeting someone and/or on a date?"

"Are you suggesting I'm seeing someone, or insinuating I might be lonely and you are asking me out?"

#12 "If they took me to dinner, would I grant them an interview?"

"No. That would make one of us a prostitute."

#13 "Did this..."

"Nope. Sorry. No more questions. I'm way past my limit for socialization for the moment. Thank you and good-bye - and if one of you think that jumping in front of my car in order to keep me from leaving is prudent, you might want to consider that I accidently sent some people to the Medical Examiner yesterday and odds were I've done something similar today ... and today isn't over yet."