Free Girl of Vengeance by Charles Sheehan-Miles

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    Three years later he’d gotten out. He couldn’t go back in the military, not with a felony conviction, but that didn’t stop a career with a private military contractor, which paid better anyway. Lately he’d been taking on jobs for the mysterious Oz, an Irish gentleman (possibly) who had been keeping Marky busy for more than a year with jobs big and small, some interesting and some not so much.
    The latest job was a problem. He’d been ordered to track down a woman and her daughter. It should have been simple. The woman’s house in San Francisco was bombed (he didn’t know by who) and it turned out she was pretty smart, disappearing off the face of the earth. Lovecchio had drifted south out of San Francisco, showing pictures everywhere he could, until this morning, when he saw the woman’s picture on the front page of the paper. She’d gotten away, making it across the border into Canada.
    That was a problem, but not as big as the next problem. When they ran across the border, Nick Larsden had been in pursuit, and fired shots across the border after them, which was a big no-no as far as cops on both sides of the international border were concerned. Then Nick had the bad grace to get caught.
    He and Nick had gone through basic training together, way back in 1994, and when Nick had told Marky he was looking for work, Marky hooked him up with Oz.
    Big mistake. Now Marky was waiting for a phone call, and he had a pretty good idea what that call was going to involve.
    For now, he sat in his car along an overlook, watching the ocean far below. He loved the Pacific Ocean. But not as much as he loved getting into the shit. Somewhere along the way in Iraq, he’d gotten the taste for it. He felt invincible—he’d been through five combat tours in three theaters of war. Lesser men all around him had fallen to bombs and bullets, disease and suicide. Marky just kept going.
    Sometimes he thought he was immune. He had to be. In October 1993 he and his squad had been separated from the main body of Bravo Company, 75 th Rangers in Mogadishu and fought their way through half a dozen city blocks surrounded by literally thousands of pissed off Somalis. 18 Americans dead, 80 wounded, somewhere upward of 3,000 Somali casualties, and Marky had walked through it without a scratch. Twelve years later, as a senior sergeant in Special Operations, he’d been briefly captured in Fallujah in the Sunni triangle, only to have a squad of Marines come in fast and dumb into the building he was being tortured in. The result, fortuitously, was four dead Hajjis and one free Marky.
    Lately though, he’d been starting to wonder. Like, maybe there was something more to life than all this bullshit. He didn’t like running around shooting at people, and that’s what the jobs for Oz had consisted of, at least in the last couple of weeks. That was bullshit.
    But he also knew that once you were on the hook, Oz didn’t take no for an answer. Which was why he was sitting here in the car, waiting for the phone to ring.
    Waiting. Waiting.
    The volume on the music was so loud that he jumped when the music suddenly cut off, replaced by the ringing of his phone through the car speakers. He quickly turned the volume down then answered.
    “Lovecchio.”
    “Mister Lovecchio, this is Oz.” Oz—or whatever his name was—did not sound happy. As always, his voice was gravelly, the Irish accent a quarry full of age and aggravation.
    “Hello, sir.”
    “We have a problem, Lovecchio.”
    “Yes, sir. Nick Larsden?”
    “That’s right. First, he had the woman in his sights and let her cross the border. Second, he let himself get captured. If he’s in custody, then he can talk.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You’re going to correct that situation. Do I make myself clear?”
    Marky nodded slowly, even though he knew Oz couldn’t see him. He’d had the feeling it would come to this. Marky owed some level of loyalty to Larsden—after all, they’d both served