1

My name is Richard Talbot and I am what some would call a bodyguard.  Others would say a mercenary, and even others would call me a criminal.  All of them would be right in some form or another, but what I like to call myself is a survivor.  Four years ago, I was a member of the United States Army as a Ranger.  I was caught up in some bad shit and captured by drug runners who planned on skinning me alive and then leaving me on an ant hill as pay back for ruining a number of their caches of drugs near an ‘abandoned’ airport in Colombia.  A private team of men, hired by folks I’ve never bothered to ask about, hit the place the night before I was to be skinned and broke me free.

I quit the service after that, realizing that nothing I could do was going to break the cartels down that way.  Besides, what a squad of highly-trained military men couldn’t do in a year of work, a trio of private mercenaries had completed in (I was told by one of my saviors after it was over) less than a day.  They didn’t have the issues with authorization we had.  They didn’t have concerns with international incidents that we had.  They came in, shot the place up, blew up half of the drug supply and sank the other half in the river we had approached by and then disappeared into the night, taking two surviving Rangers with them.

And they weren’t doing it for their country.  They were being PAID.

On the flight back to the States, I talked to one of my rescuers.  Turned out he was a solo operative who had a network of military contacts around the world he could rely on to do work like this when the jobs came along.  I laughed.  It was straight out of an action hero movie.

He didn’t.  He said it was bloody, dangerous and highly lucrative, and that was why he was still doing it.

“Why, I just likely made in a couple days’ preparation and a single night of operations more than you will make this YEAR.  And I’m not living on some base in military housing, putting up with the bullshit of not knowing what I’ll be doing next week or next year.  I go where I want, buy what I want, live HOW I want…”  He nodded at me, his blue cybernetic eye gleaming in the hold of the AC-10 he had hired for his mission.  “You get the interest, you call.”

When I got off the plane, I had his card, his street name, and a serious need to be risking my neck for my own personal goals, rather than some suit in Washington who didn’t care whether I lived or died.  In three months, I was declared ‘mentally unfit’ for continued duty thanks to my change of attitude.  I was offered either a crap job on some base in Minnesota until my time was up, or I could be bought out and let go.

I chose the latter option.  I was in Seattle within days, packing what few belongings I’d left in a storage unit there, and was on my way to Los Angeles.  That was where “Pitbull” told me he lived when I called him and told him I was in.

“If you want in on the big and the small, this is the place to be,” he said in his heavy Cockney accent.  “I’ve got people will set you up in your own place, get you the right equipment, and see you working for your own betterment.  Jes’ ask fer me when you get here.  Take a taxi to a club called PF’s in West Los Angeles.  If I’m not there, ask for Lynx.”

Little did I know what I was getting into.