The Attitude Adjuster: Three Cavanaugh/Protector Stories Read online

  Barry nodded. The man had sent him an email about a car accident in which his drunken driving had caused his Mercedes to veer toward a van full of high-school kids on their way to a party after their prom. Swerving to avoid him, the kids hit a concrete wall, the impact killing all of them. The man who caused it managed to drive home. Nobody witnessed the incident. Thus he avoided punishment, except that when he got out of his Mercedes at home, he was so drunk that he fell and broke his leg. That’s not enough punishment. I don’t want to go to prison, but I can’t bear feeling this guilty, his email said.

  You’ve come to the right person, Barry had replied. I will make you feel better.

  Now Barry tried the door. As promised, it wasn’t locked. He pushed it open, stepped into a dark hallway, and walked toward light seeping under a farther door. As promised, it wasn’t locked, either. Barry swung it open, revealing the grief-stricken man hunched over his desk.

  “You’ve been bad,” Barry said.

  “You have no idea,” the man murmured, his face down.

  “I’m here to adjust your attitude. You’ll be sore afterward, but I swear I’ll ease your conscience.”

  “Actually,” the man said, “I planned on doing some adjustments of my own.”

  “What?”

  The man looked up. His intense hazel eyes reflected some of the brown from the desk. His strong chin and forehead radiated the wrath of hell.

  “I think I’m in the wrong place.” Turning, Barry faltered at the sight of a gorgeous woman with searing green eyes and a pit bull on a leash.

  “No, you’re definitely in the right place,” the woman said.

  A noise made Barry pivot toward the man. The noise came from the chair scraping as the man stood and grabbed one of the crutches from the wall.

  “Wait,” Barry said.

  “Why?” The man held the crutch as if it were a baseball bat.

  “There’s a mistake,” Barry said.

  “You think so? Roll up your right sleeve.”

  “My . . . ?”

  “Right sleeve. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

  Barry rolled up the sleeve, revealing a rose tattoo.

  “Call me the auctioneer,” the man said.

  “Uh,” Barry murmured.

  The man swung the crutch with all his might. It slammed across the desk. With an ear-torturing crack, it split apart, one end flying across the roof, crashing against a cabinet.

  “Uh,” Barry said. Feeling something wet on his legs, he realized that his bladder had let go.

  Growling, the dog bared its teeth as the woman urged it forward. Barry stumbled back and tripped over a chair, crashing into a corner. The man whacked the broken crutch against the wall above Barry’s head. The impact sent plaster flying. It was so loud it made Barry’s ears ring. The dog growled nearer. The man picked up the other crutch, towered over Barry, and swung it toward—

  * * *

  A road-repair crew. A man holds a pole with a sign at the top. SLOW, it says on one side. STOP, it says on the other. The man holds it listlessly. Tall and scarecrow lanky, he looks even more weary than his dawn-to-dusk workday would explain. His cheeks are sunken. His shoulders sag. A chill November wind blows dust across his face. His coat and yellow vest hang on him. Cars speed past, ignoring the SLOW sign, almost hitting him.

  You’ve seen countless versions of him without ever paying attention. As snow starts to fall, he looks so pathetic that you actually give him a sorrowful look. What kind of dismal life does he have? What on Earth is be thinking?

  Is that them in that van? The light was so dim, I never got a good look at their faces. The bit bull. Jesus. Snapping at me. Foam spraying over my face.

  No matter how much Barry had begged, the guy wouldn’t stop hitting him with the crutch. “We’ll keep track of you, Barry,” the guy had said after taking all of Barry’s money and the airline ticket folded in his pocket so that Barry didn’t even have a way to get back to Illinois after he got out of the hospital. “We’ll make sure you learned the error of your ways. If we find out you’ve been doing more adjusting, we’ll put the fear of God into you, Barry.”

  The fear of God? They’re the ones I’m afraid of. I was never so shit-scared in my life. That van’s gotta be doing sixty. Slow down! You almost hit me! But I don’t dare shout. If that’s them and I shake my sign at them, they’ll wait for me after work. They’ll—

  “Barry! What the hell’s wrong with you?” a voice shouted.

  “Huh?” As the snowflakes got larger, Barry turned toward his big-chested foreman stomping toward him. The man had angry red cheeks.

  “Don’t you listen to your walkie-talkie!” the foreman yelled. “I’ve been giving you orders for the last five minutes!”

  “Orders?”

  “To stop traffic from coming through! Turn the frigging sign! Make everybody stop!” As passing traffic almost hit them, the foreman raised his beefy hands. “This has been going on too damned long. How many times do I have to tell you to do your job?”

  “I’m sorry. I . . .”

  “Look, I hate to do this. You’re just not fit for the job anymore. Don’t show up tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “Can’t risk it, Barry. Somebody’ll get hurt. Get your head straight, man. You need a better attitude.”

  If you enjoyed these stories about Cavanaugh and Jamie, check out their other adventures.

  THE PROTECTOR

  He calls himself Cavanaugh. No first name, and even “Cavanaugh” isn’t his actual last name. His hatred of bullies compelled him to enlist in Special Forces, where he was accepted into Delta Force. Now as a civilian, he runs Global Protective Services, the world’s best security company. His mission? To defend the helpless, to keep predators from their prey.

  In The Protector, the high-tech weapon developed by the man Cavanaugh is assigned to defend multiplies the effects of fear, incapacitating its victims. Many people want Daniel Prescott’s secret. When he disappears after causing the death of the team charged with keeping him alive, Cavanaugh and his wife, Jamie, go after him in a desperate chase that traps them between government agents and foreign operatives. But Cavanaugh ultimately learns that his biggest enemy is fear.

  In this propulsive thriller, New York Times bestselling author David Morrell provides so many intriguing twists that readers addicted to action, suspense, and authentic tradecraft will find themselves hurriedly turning pages until the final surprising chapter.

  You can buy THE PROTECTOR here!

  THE NAKED EDGE

  From ITW’s 2009 Thriller Master . . . Cavanaugh and Jamie return.

  Once Cavanaugh had a boyhood best friend. They played in the woods near their homes, pretending to be soldiers surviving behind enemy lines. Grownup, they belonged to Delta Force and later worked as protectors for the world’s best security company. Now their lives have taken drastically different paths, pitting them against each other, forcing them to play their boyhood game again, this time to learn who dies.

  The survival of a great city hangs in the balance as two friends-turned-enemies hunt each other and discover that there’s a line between predators and prey, a line that’s called The Naked Edge. From Rambo-creator David Morrell, the father of the modern action novel, comes a gripping global thriller that explores the meaning of friendship and the naked edge between love and hate.

  You can buy THE NAKED EDGE here!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Morrell can be contacted at his website, www.davidmorrell.net. He is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

  In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted
Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

  That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries that premiered after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.

  Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as The Protector, The Naked Edge, Creepers, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.

  Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and car fighting, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.

  Morrell is an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious career-achievement ThrillerMaster Award. His short stories have appeared in numerous Year’s Best collections. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Blue Murder

  The Controller

  The Attitude Adjuster

  About the Author