Blood & Tacos #3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

around,” barked the sheriff. “Gimme your hands.”
    Dax turned around, holding his hands behind him. The sheriff clamped a pair of handcuffs on him and shoved him into the car. Dax smiled grimly, looking at his reflection in the police car window. What he saw was a man who had been in far worse fixes than this. Those experiences came rushing back to him, just as surely as the photons of his image bounced off the window glass and struck his retinas.
    After being drafted by the army, Dax worked for Colonel Randers, the head of Special Chemical Division, on a variety of top secret projects—from formulating truth serum that could make a VC spy spill the beans on his own mother to devising nerve gas that only worked on Communists. Yet he was troubled by reports that Agent Burnt Umber was making American troops sick, and he insisted on being deployed on combat duty in the jungle to prove that the defoliant was safe. He saw a lot of men die in country, but not from poisoning—unless it was lead poisoning, from being riddled with bullets. Dax became a formidable soldier on top of being a genius with chemicals, and his squad mates called him “The Chemistrator” because of his jury-rigged explosives, smoke screens, and other chemical innovations, often concocted entirely from raw materials Dax had happened upon in the jungle. Once, he had exploded an underground VC stronghold using only bat guano and mango juice.
    But that was a long time ago.
    Dax stared out the window of the cop car. The pleasant boulevards making up the public façade of Averyville gave way to seedy neighborhoods populated by drug-addled crazies wearing dirty, mismatched clothing and shouting confused obscenities at invisible tormenters. In the distance, a series of factories belched black smoke into the air. Whatever household goods these factories had once produced, Dax knew that they had been retrofitted into drug factories for producing drugs.
    Dax winced, knowing that these nefarious facilities were operating according to his own blueprint: the chemical recipe for synthetic synapse-incinerators that he had devised. Lost in a world of his own thoughts, he closed his eyes and reflected on how that had come about.
    After the war, there was no place for men like Dax. His country wanted to forget they had ever needed a man who could kill a hundred men with only his hands and naturally occurring substances on the jungle floor. Unable to find work, Dax used his knowledge of chemistry to create a synthetic form of cocaine that was eighteen times as powerful as the real thing. And the kicker was that it was completely legal: because Dax’s drug was a chemical compound that was unknown to science, there were no laws against it. The drug had many street names: Bolivian blizzard, Nicaraguan nostril nuke, Colombian corn flour.
    Dax became a rich man. He got married to a model named Stephanee and they had a daughter together. They named their daughter Argonia, after Dax’s favorite noble gas. The plan was to live happily ever after.
    But Chico Juarez, a local drug lord, had other plans. Angry with Dax for stealing his business, Chico Juarez sent his thugs to shoot up Dax’s house, killing his wife and his daughter. Dax only escaped with the help of a noxious smoke screen he concocted from Clorox and leftover packets of Arby’s Sauce. That night, huddled alone on a park bench in the cold, Dax swore that he would never again use his knowledge of chemistry for evil. He found a job in another city as a high school janitor, determined to make an honest living for himself.
    “Here’s your cell,” growled the sheriff, shaking Dax out of his reverie and shoving him into a cold concrete room that smelled like urine and hopelessness and more urine. In place of a bed was a pile of old newspapers. They reminded Dax of the time he found an old newspaper on the floor at the school, where he worked as a janitor, months earlier. The headline had read:
    S ynthetic “Snow”