The TANNER Series - Books 13-15 (Tanner Box Set) Read online

  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.html

  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.”