THE TANNER SERIES
BOOKS 13-15
BY
REMINGTON KANE
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE TANNER SERIES - BOOKS 13 -15
First edition. April 18, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Remington Kane.
Written by Remington Kane.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The TANNER Series - Books 13 -15 (Tanner Box Sets, #5)
HELL FOR HIRE | BY | REMINGTON KANE
CHAPTER 1 – Distraction kills
CHAPTER 2 – Nothing at all
CHAPTER 3 – The man
CHAPTER 4 – Grave references
CHAPTER 5 – Scout sniper
CHAPTER 6 – Trust, but verify
CHAPTER 7 – Bully, bully
CHAPTER 8 – Friends... kinda
CHAPTER 9 – Henry the eighth
CHAPTER 10 – Agent X
CHAPTER 11 – Run-in
CHAPTER 12 – The follower, followed
CHAPTER 13 – Ambushed!
CHAPTER 14 – The hunter
CHAPTER 15 – The hunted
CHAPTER 16 – A change of plans
CHAPTER 17 – Only grapes should bunch together
CHAPTER 18 – Our little secret
CHAPTER 19 – Armed and armored
CHAPTER 20 – A pain in the neck
CHAPTER 21 – Attract and repel
CHAPTER 22 – A little makeup can work wonders
CHAPTER 23 – Dude looks like a lady
CHAPTER 24 – A hell of a good kid
CHAPTER 25 – Ping!
CHAPTER 26 – For life
A HOME TO DIE FOR | By | REMINGTON KANE
CHAPTER 1 – Adrenalin withdrawal
CHAPTER 2 – Stop, thief!
CHAPTER 3 – L.A. woman
CHAPTER 4 – Mexico or bust
CHAPTER 5 – Tangled heart strings
CHAPTER 6 – Walk like an assassin
CHAPTER 7 – Darkness visible
CHAPTER 8 – Hankey-pankey?
CHAPTER 9 – The pause that refreshes
CHAPTER 10 – Rendezvous
CHAPTER 11 – Unexpected company
CHAPTER 12 – A woman scorned
CHAPTER 13 – A dangerous idea
CHAPTER 14 – Shell game
CHAPTER 15 – The Brotherhood
CHAPTER 16 – No honor
CHAPTER 17 – Give my kid a break
CHAPTER 18 – Indecent proposals
CHAPTER 19 – Analogous
CHAPTER 20 – Skeletons in the closet tend to rattle
CHAPTER 21 – Just plain silly
CHAPTER 22 – Amateur hour
CHAPTER 23 – Maxed out
CHAPTER 24 – The cell tower of Babel
CHAPTER 25 – You can’t hit what you can’t see
CHAPTER 26 – Runner’s high
CHAPTER 27 – Not the most PC of individuals
CHAPTER 28 – Very cleaver
CHAPTER 29 – Nooo!
CHAPTER 30 – Sara
FIRE WITH FIRE | By | REMINGTON KANE
CHAPTER 1 – There goes the neighborhood
CHAPTER 2 – Uncle Mike
CHAPTER 3 – The monster in the closet
CHAPTER 4 – Nice try!
CHAPTER 5 – Called on the carpet
CHAPTER 6 – Hold on
CHAPTER 7 – Gift giving, the billionaire way
CHAPTER 8 – The deal
CHAPTER 9 – Blood trumps everything
CHAPTER 10 – It’s just business
CHAPTER 11 – The answer
CHAPTER 12 – A bad feeling
CHAPTER 13 – Man and dog
CHAPTER 14 – A thorny situation
CHAPTER 15 – Yesterday never ends
CHAPTER 16 – Burned!
CHAPTER 17 – You can take the boy out of the prison...
CHAPTER 18 – Cheeky
CHAPTER 19 – Divergent desires
CHAPTER 20 – He don’t play
CHAPTER 21 – Toothless and blind
CHAPTER 22 – Whoosh!
CHAPTER 23 – Obscene fire and obscene rain
CHAPTER 24 – No comment
CHAPTER 25 – Guardian angel
CHAPTER 26 – Anything is impossible
A BONUS SHORT STORY
THE FIVE STAGES OF TANNER | By | REMINGTON KANE
STAGE 1 – DENIAL
STAGE 2 – ANGER
STAGE 3 – BARGAINING
STAGE 4 – DEPRESSION
STAGE 5 – ACCEPTANCE
A PLEA
ALSO BY REMINGTON KANE
Further Reading: Taken! - Love Conquers All
About the Author
Join my Mailing List and Learn about New Releases. Also, get access to FREE Books and Short Stories, including The TAKEN! ALPHABET SERIES, THE FIVE STAGES OF TANNER, QUICK – A TANNER Short Story, and A LITTLE OFF THE TOP – A TANNER Short Story. REMINGTON KANE http://www.remingtonkane.com/contact
HELL FOR HIRE
BY
REMINGTON KANE
CHAPTER 1 – Distraction kills
Three weeks had passed since Tanner had killed Julien Adams, and in that time he had rested, healed, and trained.
When the offer for the next contract arrived, it came suddenly and had Tanner on the move and headed to Florida.
Tanner’s target was a terrorist named Ayman Mostafa.
***
Several months earlier, Mostafa had been in Detroit, Michigan, where he managed a terror cell which consisted of five men.
The young men in the cell were all American born and bred. However, for one reason or another, they had become disenchanted with their country and its leadership. They were willing to go to extremes to change things, and were also ripe to be manipulated.
Ayman Mostafa, a Syrian, fed that discontent and gave it focus. It was his role inside the terror organization he belonged to. Mostafa had been given the task of finding those native-born citizens of Western countries who felt disenfranchised and thought of themselves as outsiders. It was Mostafa’s job to help unite them into a single group, one that could be used to spread terror and mistrust.
It was one thing to learn that the men who shot up your local mall were Arab terrorists, quite another to discover that the bastards behind the slaughter and chaos grew up in your town, and possibly your very own neighborhood.
Mostafa had been successful with this tactic in Europe, and had begun working in the United States.
Days before the launch of a major attack on a sports stadium, one of the men in the cell used a hidden phone to call his older brother. He didn’t come right out and say what he and his group were planning to do, but had said enough to cause his brother to read between the lines.
The brother, a former army paratrooper and unemployed construction worker, began keeping watch on his brother, by following him.
The older brother knew that his kid brother held extreme political beliefs and had a chip on his shoulder. When he saw his younger brother and Ayman Mostafa enter an apartment building with two other young men, he filmed Mostafa by using his phone.
That night, over beers, he showed the video to a friend that was a low-level FBI agent. The FBI man did a search through the database and found that a man named Ayman Mostafa matched the man in the video, and that he was a wanted terrorist.
The older brother pleaded with his friend to cut a deal for his brother, even as the FBI man was making a call to his superiors.
In the end, Mostafa evaded capture, while the younger brother was given the credit for reporting his whereabouts.
The younger brother was found dead in his apartment a month later. His throat had been slashed open, but only after he’d been tortured. The knife left behind bore the prints of Ayman Mostafa.
***
Mostafa resurfaced in Florida and was thought to be building a new terror cell out of local youth who were hungry for a purpose, any purpose.
The FBI were tracking the incoming and outgoing calls made on the cell phone of a terrorist sympathizer. The man was a college professor who came from a wealthy family in the north, and in several conversations, he was overheard using Mostafa’s name and speaking about him as if he had recently been in Mostafa’s presence. This gave Mostafa’s probable location as being in the Tallahassee area.
Mostafa had changed his looks by shaving his beard and cutting his hair shorter, while also wearing glasses and donning a more professorial air. On the dashboard camera belonging to the State Trooper that stopped him, Mostafa was actually wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe.
Mostafa was returning home after a meeting with one of the young men in his latest cell group when the trooper clocked him going too fast on a back road.
The hour was late, well past midnight, and traffic was sparse.
Mostafa had an Uzi, and he used it to kill the trooper and escape. That trooper was the grandson of a United States Senator.
Mostafa had just sealed his fate.
***
In Connecticut, Sara met with Tanner at the airport, where they sat inside a jet on the runway, and she told him what she herself had just been told less than an hour earlier.
There was a manhunt underway in Florida for a cop killer who was also a terrorist. Tanner watched the dash cam video from the trooper’s cruiser, reviewed a file on Mostafa, and made a point of memorizing the faces of Mostafa’s associates, including the college professor.
“This doesn’t seem very challenging,” Tanner said. “Not considering how much I’m paid.”
“Maybe, but there’s a catch. If he’s captured before you can find him, you’ll have to kill him while he’s in police custody and make it seem as if he killed himself. You’ll also be given no assistance by the authorities.”
“Ah, now that would be challenging.”
“If we move quickly, perhaps you’ll get to Mostafa before the authorities do and won’t need to stage a suicide,” Sara said. “Which is why I’m giving this briefing at the airport. Of course, you can still turn the contract down.”
Tanner reached down and buckled his seat belt.
“We’re wasting time, Blake. Let’s get in the air.”
***
Tanner and Sara landed in Florida, even as the manhunt for Mostafa was still underway. While Sara set about getting them rooms in a Tallahassee hotel and gathering the latest intel, Tanner immediately went to work locating Mostafa.
The domestic terrorist sympathizer who had mentioned Mostafa over the phone taps had successfully evaded questioning by the police, by stalling with tactics employed by his high-priced lawyer.
Sara had supplied Tanner with the professor’s address, and after slipping unseen past the two FBI agents watching the home from a black sedan parked across the street, Tanner picked the lock on the rear door and entered.
The man’s lawyer was there, while his client was in a bathroom down the hallway from the living room. The lawyer was shouting instructions to his client, advising him on how best to phrase his answers to the police, when they inevitably questioned him.
The lawyer had just finished telling the man to fake a limp once the detectives had ended their questioning, particularly if he found himself being interviewed on camera. That way, they could blame the phony injury on rough handling by the police.
When the lawyer sensed Tanner coming up behind him, it was already too late to react.
Tanner placed a sleeper hold on the lawyer and left him lying unconscious atop his client’s Persian rug, with his wrists and ankles zip tied together and his mouth taped shut.
He then marched into the bathroom and dragged the terrorist sympathizer off the toilet bowl. The man was sitting there reading the newspaper after having taken a dump, when Tanner grabbed him by the tie, yanked up until the man was on his feet, and then shoved him backwards into the bathtub.
After pressing a booted foot down against the man’s chest, Tanner turned the hot water on high.
Before long, the professor confessed that he had given Mostafa money and a place to hide. Mostafa was using the summer home of the professor’s ex-lover, without the ex-lover’s knowledge. The professor stated that he still knew the alarm codes and where the woman hid her spare key. She lived and worked in Maryland and wouldn’t be visiting Florida for another few weeks.
The summer home would have been an ideal place for Mostafa to hide had the professor not talked, but Tanner was... persuasive in his questioning, and after he learned all he could about the area where Mostafa was hiding, Tanner drowned the man in the bathtub.
***
An hour later, Tanner was approaching the summer home, which had the look of a cottage, and was considering the best way to gain entry.
The small home had probably once been surrounded by empty land, but over the years, the area had been built up. There were homes near enough that the neighbors would hear gunshots and the local police were a short drive away.
Mostafa was a former soldier and would be on edge. Sneaking up on the man quietly wasn’t likely to happen. Tanner needed a distraction, and he mentioned it to Sara when he contacted her and told her he had located Mostafa’s likely hideout.
“What sort of distraction?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I’ll think of something.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead,” Tanner said, and after hearing her plan, he agreed that it should work.
“I can be there in thirty minutes,” Sara said.
“Just one thing, Blake. If you see Mostafa leave the house, get back in the car and floor it. The man is carrying an Uzi and he’s got nothing to lose.”
“I’ll be careful, but you be careful too. My plan may not work.”
“It will work, unless the man is gay.”
“That may be the nicest thing you’ve said to me.”
“Get a move on, Blake,” Tanner said, and ended the call.
***
Sara coasted to a stop on the two-lane road outside the cottage twenty-eight minutes later. The car she was driving had a flat tire at the rear of the passenger side. The tire was flat, because she had let the air out of it while still out of sight of the cottage.
When Sara emerged from the driver’s seat, she was wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts that were the skimpiest Tanner had ever seen. The shorts were matched with a halter top so small that it appeared to have been made to fit a toddler.
Sara moved around to the rear of the car and pouted as she looked down at the flat tire, then, she bent over to inspect the flat, exposing a good portion of her breasts.
Inside the darkened cottage, Mostafa was atop a sofa on his knees. He had leaned forward and peeked out at Sara through a gap he had made in the window blinds, and his eyes explored her body with great interest.
As practiced, Sara let out a loud curse, and followed it with a scream of frustration as she gave the flat tire a kick.
The shouted curse was a signal, while her scream was loud enough to cover the sound of Tanner’s knife slicing through a window screen. Those sounds were followed by Sara talking loudly on a cell phone, as she pretended to be giving directions to a road service.
***
Mostafa watched Sara with lust in his eyes, but then stiffened in fear, as paranoia gripped him. His attention had been focused on Sara to the point of having tunnel vision, and he feared that someone had slipped inside the home while he’d been distracted.
Mostafa left the window with the Uz
i gripped in his hands and went to check out the rear door. It was secure, and the empty beer bottles he had stacked in front of it were undisturbed. He relaxed and was beginning to smile when he heard a faint sound coming from the bathroom.
Mostafa crept towards the bathroom and looked in to see that the cold water was running at a steady trickle. He had washed his hands earlier, and had sworn he’d cut off the water, but that trickle made him nervous.
Mostafa ripped aside the shower curtain and found no one, then checked the closets and other rooms in the house, while even looking beneath the bed. With that done, he felt secure and rushed to the window to watch Sara again. As he had done earlier, Mostafa sat up on his knees upon the sofa and leaned forward to look out the window. Only then did he notice that the sofa was sitting out farther from the wall than it had been.
The realization came too late, and a knife thrust upward and entered the soft flesh beneath Mostafa’s chin. He attempted to cry out, but with his tongue skewered by Tanner’s knife, his shout of agony made little sound.
Tanner shoved the knife up higher, through the roof of Mostafa’s mouth, and buried the tip of the blade into the man’s brain. He then gave the knife a twist.
Tanner emerged from behind the sofa to find Mostafa writhing in agony atop the floor. He crushed the man’s throat with his foot and watched him die.
Contract completed.
Tanner’s face and right hand were bloody from the stabbing of Mostafa, so Tanner took the time to wash up in the bathroom. He left the home the way he entered, cut across a small field and a neighbor’s yard, and emerged on the road a quarter mile ahead from where Sara sat in her car.
Upon spotting him, Sara got out of the car and inflated her flat tire with a can of foam. With the tire useable again, she threw a dress on over her shorts and halter top, then she started the car and drove down to meet Tanner.
“I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but I’ll make an exception in your case,” Sara told him.
Tanner climbed in and looked her over, noting that she had covered up the skimpy clothing.
“No need to be modest on my account, Blake.”
“I was tired of looking like a hooker, and I take it that the contract is fulfilled?”
“Yes, thanks to your help.”