Weapons Read online

  Weapons

  The King & Slater Series Book One

  Matt Rogers

  Copyright © 2019 by Matt Rogers

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Onur Aksoy.

  www.onegraphica.com

  Contents

  Reader’s Group

  Books by Matt Rogers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Announcement

  Books by Matt Rogers

  Reader’s Group

  About the Author

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  Books by Matt Rogers

  THE JASON KING SERIES

  Isolated (Book 1)

  Imprisoned (Book 2)

  Reloaded (Book 3)

  Betrayed (Book 4)

  Corrupted (Book 5)

  Hunted (Book 6)

  THE JASON KING FILES

  Cartel (Book 1)

  Warrior (Book 2)

  Savages (Book 3)

  THE WILL SLATER SERIES

  Wolf (Book 1)

  Lion (Book 2)

  Bear (Book 3)

  Lynx (Book 4)

  Bull (Book 5)

  Hawk (Book 6)

  THE KING & SLATER SERIES

  Weapons (Book 1)

  BLACK FORCE SHORTS

  The Victor (Book 1)

  The Chimera (Book 2)

  The Tribe (Book 3)

  The Hidden (Book 4)

  The Coast (Book 5)

  The Storm (Book 6)

  The Wicked (Book 7)

  The King (Book 8)

  The Joker (Book 9)

  The Ruins (Book 10)

  1

  Manhattan

  New York City

  Gianni wasn’t comfortable.

  Granted, he hadn’t been comfortable since childhood — that was the nature of his profession — but certain levels of discomfort were cause for alarm.

  This was one of them.

  He was in the Meatpacking District late at night, and he was a man who ordinarily had little reason to be in the Meatpacking District late at night. He wasn’t accustomed to opulence. His world was not the world of trendy chic establishments and indoor marketplaces and overpriced designer clothing and cocktails and laughter and fun.

  No, his world was a little more straightforward than that.

  He dealt in fear, and intimidation, and he considered himself a master in the art of the prolonged silence that followed a threat. He was a low-level Italian street thug, and despite his reputation he didn’t resort to violence often. Those who relied on physical force too often were desperate to set an example. Those types were the poker players that went all-in with regularity.

  Eventually the violence became the same, and people figured you out.

  No-one would ever figure Gianni out, because he was almost never aggressive.

  He kept the anger locked deep inside, and he rarely ever tapped into it. He let people imagine what he could do to them. He was six foot five and built like a truck, with slabs of muscle hanging off his frame in all the right places. He had a barrel chest and burly forearms and thick meaty fingers. He looked like he could crush a saucepan with his grip strength alone, and he probably could. He’d never tried it.

  He was the guy who showed up at your establishment to demand a protection fee. If you asked what he’d be protecting you from, he’d walk away silently, and that night a car would drive by and throw rocks through all your shopfront windows. The next day, he’d return and ask for a slightly higher protection fee for the inconvenience.

  Rinse and repeat.

  The oldest trick in the book, but he’d succeeded at it for nearly a decade.

  Time flies when you’re having fun.

  He and his ragtag group of miscreant buddies pulled the same scam on half the small businesses in Hell’s Kitchen. If a cop came sniffing around, Gianni paid them off or slipped photos of their wife and kids under the front doorstep. Whichever made them cave first. And they always caved. Gianni had become something of an expert at manipulation, but he’d never evolved from petty extortion. He knew his limits. He wasn’t a mob boss. He didn’t have the book smarts. He wasn’t good with numbers. He knew if he tried, he’d get ripped off a thousand different ways without even realising.

  No, Gianni liked control over his life. He stuck to the same highly profitable actions that had consistently put a few bucks in his bank account ever since he was big enough to scare people. Which, in his case, had been from the age of fifteen.

  Now he was twenty-five, with his hair buzzed short and thin stubble dotting his jawline. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a rented box truck on Washington Street, only a few hundred feet from the Hudson River. There were bars and restaurants ahead, and bars and restaurants behind, but this little stretch of
the sidewalk was dark, and all the shops were closed for the night.

  He’d picked this space strategically.

  To intimidate.

  If any drunk patrons stumbled out of the upmarket establishments and sauntered toward the truck, he’d get out and stare daggers into their soul until they turned right around and went back the way they came. He’d been hired for the job for those tactics alone. He wasn’t the type to get involved in gang warfare. If that was the case — given his brashness and refusal to back down from anything — he would have ended up riddled with lead a long time ago.

  He picked his fights.

  And he picked his jobs.

  ‘Why’d you fuckin’ do it?’ he muttered in the freezing cabin. ‘Why’d you say yes this time?’

  He’d been offered jobs before.

  He’d turned them all down.

  Not this time.

  Because the offer had come from the Whelans.

  And you don’t say no to the Whelans.

  Gianni rubbed his cold hands together and exhaled a cloud. He glanced around with nervous anticipation and waited for the payload to show up.

  2

  The payload in question arrived on the dark, deserted bank of the Hudson River.

  The crates were brought in by boat and dumped overboard a hundred feet from shore, along with a cluster of five small men in wetsuits wearing fins on their feet. The divers pushed the crates — all of them equipped with a flotation lining — to shore.

  Gianni’s men were dotted along the riverbank to watch for onlookers.

  The crates arrived amidst trash and gravel and muddy silt in a shadowy corner at the base of Pier 54. The divers stripped off their wetsuits and buried them under the loose gravel. Underneath they wore civilian garments — faded jeans and simple long-sleeved shirts. They were all the same build and ethnicity — short, slim Asian men with cold beady eyes and pale skin.

  Gianni’s men studied them. The divers were professionals — probably from the triad, probably recruited by the Whelans to ensure the job went off without a hitch, but Gianni and his posse were strangers to this world, so they didn’t assume anything.

  The men on shore ranged from early twenties to late forties. There were eight of them in total. They were all big and well-built and intimidating like Gianni — he only recruited a certain type. Together they ran nearly every protection racket in Hell’s Kitchen, and they’d started expanding into new territories with their ever-growing bankroll.

  Maybe that was why their boss had been willing to give this new job a go.

  It was the era of trying new things.

  But although they collectively outweighed the five divers by close to a thousand pounds, they weren’t exactly bristling with confidence.

  There were four crates in total, each the size of a large refrigerator. They were sealed tight in some sort of waterproof material — like cling wrap, only stronger. The eight men fanned out on the shoreline, and two took each crate by the thick metal handles on either side. They each heaved, and with pumping muscles and glistening veins, managed to inch the crates off the ground.

  It was laborious, back-breaking work.

  Under cover of darkness they carried the crates into the mouth of an alleyway. The shadows swallowed them whole. On the other side they found a box truck.

  On cue, Gianni climbed down out of the cabin and greeted them with a silent nod. He opened the rear doors and helped each pair heave their respective crate over the lip, adding his size and strength to each movement.

  In seconds, the truck was loaded.

  Gianni wordlessly jerked a thumb into the dark hollow space in the back of the truck. It beckoned like a gaping maw. All eight of his men leapt up into the hold. The last man to enter reached out with both hands and snatched hold of the rear doors. He was about to pull them closed when he took a final glance at the alleyway, wondering if the five divers had followed them out of sheer curiosity.

  But, as he suspected, they were true professionals.

  There was no sign of them.

  They’d melted into the night as if they’d never existed at all.

  The two parties hadn’t even exchanged a word with each other.

  The eighth man swung the doors shut.

  Gianni pulled at the exterior handles one by one, checking the truck was sealed. Then he turned on his heel to get back in the driver’s seat.

  There was a young couple staring at him from the other side of the street.

  Staring at the truck.

  They were stereotypes of the Meatpacking District — in their twenties, affluent, loaded with alcohol. The guy was dressed expensively to hide his soft body, and the woman was wearing a dress so tight that Gianni could picture her naked from across the road. He liked what he saw. She was curvaceous in all the right places.

  He banged a fist hard on the back of the truck. The doors sprang open.

  Gianni said, ‘Two witnesses.’

  His men let out a collective sigh.

  Two of them got out of the truck to lend a helping hand, and the other six stayed put.

  Trailing Gianni, the pair crossed the street to where the young couple stood frozen.

  3

  Should have kept walking, Gianni thought. You could have avoided this.

  He snatched two handfuls of the guy’s shirt before either of the rich yuppies knew what hit them. He shoved the guy into the alley, hard. The kid tripped over his own feet and went down in a heap, landing in a puddle of ankle-deep water.

  Gianni followed him into the shadows.

  The girl opened her mouth to scream — Gianni had spent so much time in the business of intimidation that he could almost time their reactions to the millisecond. So he turned on his heel before she could make a sound and grabbed her by the throat, cutting her off mid-outcry.

  Gianni flashed a dark look at his men, who were standing there like fish out of water.

  He said, ‘Never hit a woman before?’

  They shrugged.

  ‘Thought you’d take care of that,’ one of them said.

  ‘You think that matters right now?’ Gianni said. ‘You know what’s in those crates. You think we can afford to have either of them make a fuckin’ sound?’

  The woman sobbed. He was digging his fat fingers into her throat hard enough to bruise the skin. Tears turned her mascara to black treacle. It ran down her face as she gasped for air.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ the second guy said.

  Gianni noted the dull yellow streetlights nearby. They were still in the lip of the alleyway. If anyone saw him squeezing a young woman by the throat, they’d start a riot.

  So he said, ‘Watch and learn,’ to his hired help.

  Then he threw her into the shadows after her boyfriend.

  The young guy was getting to his feet when she hurtled into him. They both went back down to the ground.

  The girl tried to scream again.

  Don’t you learn? Gianni thought.

  He kicked her in the stomach, putting all his weight into it, sapping every ounce of breath from her lungs. He figured it didn’t matter if he broke a couple of her ribs.

  The end result would be the same.

  ‘What’d you see?’ Gianni muttered, bearing down on them in the darkness.

  ‘Please,’ the guy gasped. He had a Jersey accent. ‘We didn’t see nuthin’.’

  ‘Ohh—’ the girl said.

  But she said it softly.

  Quietly.

  Music to Gianni’s ears.

  He kicked her again, then kicked the guy in the face.

  It was hard to see in the dark, but he heard the blood spray.

  ‘Did I say you could speak?’ Gianni said. ‘You saw the truck.’

  ‘Please,’ the guy said.

  It was only a single syllable, but it came out jumbled and garbled. The young guy’s mouth was filled with blood, and he was probably missing a few teeth.

  Gianni felt good. There was liquid power surging thro
ugh his veins. His penchant for avoiding violence had finally bubbled up inside him, and now it was all coming out.

  He shied away from it during standard business hours.

  But this was a special job, and it had special rules.

  He lived for this shit, but any more of a beating and it would become extraneous. He wasn’t here to fuck around. They’d seen the truck, and the stakes were high. He’d never taken a job for a crime family before. He couldn’t risk it going belly up.