The Breaker

Book 6: A Peter Ash Novel

by Nick Petrie

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

In the sixth white-knuckle thriller from bestselling author Nick Petrie, Peter Ash hunts an assassin – if he suceeds in catching him, Peter's own record will be wiped clean...
With two governments out to get him, ex-soldier Peter Ash has been keeping a low profile. His quiet existence in Milwaukee is far from the action-packed life he's been used to, but perhaps that's no bad thing...
But when he spots a suspicious armed man walking into a busy market, Peter can't stand by and do nothing. He manages to prevent a tragedy, but the gunman escapes and his intended victim vanishes into the crowd. Then a powerful associate from Peter's past appears and makes him an irresistible offer: get to the bottom of what happened that day, and his record will be scrubbed clean.
This is Peter's only path to a life free from the threat of prison. Now, he'll have to fight harder than ever before to ensure that freedom doesn't come at too high a cost...

Release date: January 12, 2021

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

Peter

The flatbed Toyota was too big for tight city parking, so Peter and Lewis left it behind a gas station and walked up St. Paul and across the river toward the Milwaukee Public Market, four blocks away. It was lunchtime on a blue-sky October day, and they were dirty and cheerful from a morning of demolition on a property Lewis owned in the city.

Peter Ash was tall and bony in a faded gray T-shirt and double-front work pants torn at the knees, a blue hooded sweatshirt slung over one shoulder. He hadn't cut his hair since a large-animal veterinarian had shaved his head the year before and it now hung in a dark surfer's shag streaked with premature gray.

He didn't like dealing with all that hair, but it changed the shape of his face, which was helpful. Most of the pictures they had of him were from his old Marine Corps ID, with the classic jarhead cut that revealed the shape of the skull beneath.

June Cassidy liked to tease him by saying he'd be cute with a man bun.

He found her seated on the far side of a table outside Colectivo Coffee, across the street from the Public Market. She sat sideways in her chair, looking in the opposite direction. He tossed the blue sweatshirt onto the table. "Hey, toots," he said. "You order yet?"

June held up her hand, still staring up the street. "Hang on." She wore a black Pussy Riot shirt under a running pullover and crisp mountain pants. Her bike was chained to a meter twenty feet away. She did not seem relaxed.

Lewis eased onto a stool like a lion into a crouch, following her gaze. He had coffee-brown skin and tight-cropped hair, black Levi's and an NWA sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. "Lemme guess," he said. "Weird-looking dude with the beard, coming our way?"

June nodded. "Red hat and jacket. Something's wrong with him, but I can't figure it out."

Searching the sidewalk, Peter walked around the table and took the seat next to June, his back against the building's brick. Old habits weren't always bad habits.

The weird-looking dude was a quarter-block away. His baseball cap was pulled down tight over mirrored sunglasses and a heavy beard. The black strap of some kind of bag, probably a backpack, showed over his right shoulder.

Peter couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, either. But June was right, there was definitely something strange. Maybe it was the way he walked? Fast, but without swinging his arms, his elbows tight at his sides.

The guy wasn't clocking them at all. He stared across St. Paul toward the glass-walled Public Market with its rows of sidewalk benches and umbrella tables packed with office workers soaking up the autumn sun on their lunch break.

As the guy got closer, Peter could see the Cardinals logo on his cap and across the chest of his jacket, two birds on a baseball bat. The day was sunny and warm, so the hat and sunglasses made sense. But the baggy jacket didn't, especially zipped to the neck. It was hard to tell the size of him underneath it, but Peter could see some bulk in the torso. Maybe he was a gym rat, trying to sweat off some weight.

The ball cap and razor shades told Peter something else. Some of his Marines had worn that look overseas, and many more after they mustered out. It was a way to project toughness, to make yourself unreadable, and also a way to hide the rawness of your emotions, even from yourself.

As traffic slowed for the light, the guy left the sidewalk to angle across the street. He jogged a few steps, as if eager for an appointment. The backpack bounced on his shoulder and his jacket rode up on his left side. Forty feet away, Peter saw something slim and dark poke out beneath it.

The black barrel of a rifle. The jacket hem had snagged on the front sight. Nothing else it could be. Peter had seen enough of them to know.

"Shit," he said.

"Uh-huh." Lewis had seen it, too. He was on his feet now, ready. Lewis was always ready.

"What," June said. She was an investigative journalist, a good one, but she'd honed her instincts in a newsroom. Lewis had done a single tour in the army, deployed twice for a total of thirty months of combat. Peter had spent eight years as a Recon Marine, the tip of the spear, deployed more times than he cared to remember.

Now he was standing, too. He put his fingertips on June's back and stepped beside her. "Our guy's got some kind of rifle under his jacket. See the barrel showing at his hip?"

Which explained why he walked with his elbows locked, to keep the rifle from swinging on its sling. Although the jacket was baggy, the fabric was thin enough that the motion would betray the weapon's angular shape.

Then June saw it. She blinked twice. "Goddamn it."

It was too short to be a hunting rifle. It would be something with a shorter barrel and a collapsing stock, an M4 or AR-15 or any of two dozen guns like it. An assault rifle designed for war, with a magazine that held twenty to thirty rounds. He probably had more magazines in his pockets or his pack.

Lewis turned and scanned up and down the street, fingers tapping a drumbeat on his thigh. "Never a cop when you need one." He turned to Peter with a tilted smile bright on his dark face. "So much for lunch."

June put a warm hand on Peter's bare arm. She didn't say anything, but she didn't have to. She knew who he was, the man the war had made. Wound up and restless and hardwired to make himself useful. She'd seen what that could mean, in moments like this. She still didn't like it.

She tightened her grip on his arm and picked up her phone. "I'm calling 911. The police will handle it."

"Great idea," Peter said. "Lewis and I will just go into the market and wait for them to show up."

June looked at him like she could see the marrow of his bones, down to each individual molecule. Down to the werewolf that lived inside of him. Softly, she said, "Can't it be someone else's turn? Just this once?"

Peter knew she didn't mean it, not really. He leaned in, pressed his lips to her freckled cheek, and breathed in her summery smell, the clean athletic tang of fresh sweat combined with some complex, exotic scent he'd never been able to resist and could no longer live without.

"Is that who you want me to be?" he asked. "Someone who doesn't step up when something bad is about to happen?"

Muscles flexed in her jaw. "Goddamn it, you know it isn't," she said. "I just wish you'd wait for the fucking police."

Lewis had his eyes on the red jacket. "If we doin' this, Jarhead, it's time to move."

Peter straightened and looked over his shoulder. The guy with the gun had passed the streetcar stop and was almost at the market's corner entrance. As he reached one hand toward the door, his other hand reached for his jacket's zipper pull.

Peter put his hand on June's. He kept his voice soft. "You know how much damage he can do before the police get here. I'm sorry, but right now there is nobody else. Right now, we're it."

Lewis stepped into the street. "Time to go, Jarhead."

Peter walked backward after Lewis, eyes still locked on hers. "I'll see you in a few minutes. As soon as the cops show up, we're gone."

Then he turned and caught up to Lewis. Side by side, they loped across the street toward the busy market. At lunchtime, the place would be packed.

Lewis said, "The cops won't get here in time." There was no trace of strain in his voice. As if he were standing in a field watching butterflies, instead of chasing down a guy with a gun.

"I know," Peter said. His chest rose easily, pulling in oxygen, and his legs felt strong and sure. He tasted copper on his tongue and felt the familiar lift of adrenaline in his blood.

Alive, alive, I am alive.

Neither man carried any kind of weapon.

2

The Public Market was a pleasing block-long arrangement of concrete and glass and steel trusses at the edge of Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward, a former manufacturing and warehouse district that now held mostly restaurants, condos, and art galleries, with just a few of the old industrial businesses remaining.

Peter and June went to the market at least once a week. The crowded, noisy environment was a good place for Peter to push the limits of his post-traumatic stress, an acute claustrophobia that was the only souvenir of his many combat deployments overseas. It came from kicking in doors in Fallujah, he figured. All those weeks of fighting house to house, room to room, clearing insurgents one doorway at a time.

He called it the white static, and it didn't like crowds or enclosed spaces. It began with jangling nerves that sparked up his brainstem like naked electrodes under the skin, calculating firing angles, searching for exits, his fight-or-flight reflex gone into overdrive. When he first mustered out, he could only handle twenty minutes indoors before the static turned into a full-blown panic attack, bad enough to make living outside seem like a good idea. For more than a year, he'd slept alone under the stars or under a rain fly, high above the tree line of one mountain range or another, barely able to manage resupply in small-town grocery stores.

The static had gotten better, until it got much worse, bad enough to make him think seriously about dying. Then it had changed again, and now it lived in his head like a low-grade fever, a heavy hum just below the level of his conscious mind. Until his old combat instincts woke up and the hum revealed itself for what it really was, the deep rumble of a high-performance engine just waiting for someone to step on the gas.

He could feel it now, wide awake and focused. Ready to go.

The corner entrance was a natural choke point. Flanked by concrete pillars, two single doors opened to a small glass vestibule, where a double door allowed entry to the market proper. Five people were stacked up in the vestibule, their arms loaded with lunch.

Peter stood on his toes and spotted the red Cardinals cap inside the market, moving away. The guy with the gun was shorter than average, which made it harder to see him.

Lewis held the door for the shoppers, calm and cool, waiting for an opening. Peter stepped sideways to peek around the corner, hoping to see a police car parked on Water Street. No luck.

"They got cameras all over this place," Lewis said. "No matter what happens, somebody gonna be watching that footage. You prepared for that?"

"No," Peter said. "But I don't want to live with the consequences of doing nothing, either."

Peter's name and picture were in multiple federal databases and posted on police bulletin boards all over the U.S., with several warrants issued for his arrest. Because of his background and training, he was assumed to be armed and dangerous. It was a reasonable enough assumption.

Interpol and the FBI believed that he'd murdered a government employee in Iceland the previous December, which was not true. He had killed several other people, however, to save his own life and the lives of others, although that fact wouldn't help his case with the feds. At least those bodies were buried where nobody would find them.

The FBI had no clue where Peter was now, although scrutiny of video footage might change that. He'd been living under the radar and minding his own business for nine months. The outstanding warrants helped him keep his promise to June Cassidy, too. Peter didn't blame her for being pissed. He'd lied to her about going to Iceland. He'd taken unnecessary risks. He hadn't asked for help when he needed it most. He'd almost died because of it. She'd let him know in no uncertain terms that this behavior was unacceptable.

Peter's deal with June wasn't complicated. She wanted him to stop diving headfirst into trouble, and he agreed. She wanted him to put himself into something more constructive, and he agreed. She felt-and Peter's therapist felt-that the best way to put his war in the past was to work toward the future. He agreed. They were right.

But sometimes the world had other plans.

A man came out of the entrance vestibule and pushed past them, glaring. He wore a plaid western-style shirt and a straw cowboy hat. Peter smiled at him. "Can I borrow your hat?" Without waiting for an answer, he plucked it off the man's head, then settled it on his own. Not a perfect fit, but good enough. He looked at Lewis. "Let's go."

The hat's owner turned back, sputtering, and cocked a fist. He was younger than Peter, and thick through the neck and shoulders. Peter gave him a flat stare and the other man took a step back, probably without even realizing he'd done it.

"Call 911," Peter said. "I mean it. Right now. Tell them you saw a guy with a gun walking into the market." A second call would help the cops take the threat more seriously.

Lewis floated into the vestibule, with Peter right behind him.

The white static flared, that internal engine revving up high.

The market ran the length of the block along St. Paul. Behind it, a loading dock and large crowded parking lot filled the space under the low ceiling of the freeway overpass. The interior floorplan was a figure eight of aisles, with another wider aisle extending off the end like the tail of a tadpole. Vendors and food stalls with refrigerated glass display cases were crammed into both sides of every walkway.

Peter and Lewis entered at the top left of the figure eight. There was another entrance at the top right, two more near the bottom of the eight leading to the street and the parking lot, and one entrance at the bottom of the tail. The aisles were packed with people. The white static crackled like Frankenstein's machinery, and Peter felt something ancient inside him coming back to life. Hello, old friend. It's been too long.

He was on the left, facing a narrow path between a Mexican food counter and a kitchen supply and spice shop. Lewis was on the right, where a wider path ran between the spice shop and the hissing espresso machines of Anodyne Coffee.