Street Justice Read Online Free PDF

threw his thumb over his shoulder.
    “Yeah, that too. I guess we’d better call this in.”
    “Let’s do that, then we can head back in for a beer and a shot,” Steve started walking back toward the door leading to the kitchen.
    “You know, this is now a crime scene, we aren’t supposed to touch anything, let alone drink the beer,” Adrian offered.
    “I’ll piss it back out for them later, they can dust for prints then.”

Chapter 1
     
                  Russ wiped his brow. It felt warm and slimy. The hot sun baked him in his full combat fatigues causing him to sweat. Then the swirling dust particles stuck to the sweat, creating a thin layer of mud on any exposed skin, and often on unexposed skin. The tiny particles found their way everywhere. The mud layer created a layer of slick film that didn’t seem natural, especially to a boy from Seattle. It was something he’d never get used to.
                  Russ, and his squad of three Hummers and twelve men, were in the deserts of Afghanistan surrounded by a sea of nothing. When most folks thought of Afghanistan, they thought of the rocky outcroppings originally made famous by news photos of Russian tanks being ambushed from above. But Afghanistan also had a desert region, to the south west, near the Iranian border called the Sistan Basin. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees and would be for many more weeks.
                  Russ was a large man who barely fit through the opening in the roof of the Hummer he commanded. It wasn’t that he was fat, but at six foot five he was also solid muscle. Combined with the combat gear he wore, he would have completely filled a standard phone booth. For most men, the combing on the side of the roof-mounted turret came to nearly chest high. Russ could bend at the waist without obstruction.
                  As the commander of the Hummer, Russ had the chain of command authority for the four men in it. But they would have followed him anyway, no matter his rank or title. Russ’ father had been lifelong military. His mother was a local politician. The combined skills of discipline and building consensus were ingrained in Russ and he wielded them without even thinking about it. Add to that his size and athletic ability, he’d been popular and a leader through high school, whether he’d wanted to be or not.
                  Once through high school he had tried college but decided it was just not for him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart enough, it was that college wasn’t hands-on enough for him. He liked building things, doing things, working with others, not sitting alone all night studying what others had done in books. With his parents’ blessing, he’d left college and joined the Army. Six months into his first tour, four years ago, his parents had been killed by a gas leak in their own home. The pilot light had gone out of the water heater, which was located in a closet right next to the door of his parents room. They’d died in their sleep; he’d been in Afghanistan since.
                  He squinted in the bright sun as he took off his polarized Rudy Project sunglasses. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and felt relief as the dark eye cups sealed around his eyes. He scanned the horizon, looking for some break in the vast desert. After a few minutes he took the binoculars down and turned to yell down into his hummer, “I don’t see crap, isn’t the village supposed to be just over there to the north?”
                  “Yeah,” Mario yelled from inside. The stout Jamaican-born-turned-US-Citizen sitting behind the steering wheel was not quite as tall as Russ and carried a slight layer of fat over his muscle. But in a bar fight, Mario was the better bet. He had grown up on the rough streets of Panama, far from the commercialized areas most tourists ever saw. At age nine, his family had immigrated to Atlanta. Life did not