Wild Ocean Read online

  Wild Ocean

  Tyson Wild Book One

  Tripp Ellis

  Tripp Ellis

  Copyright © 2019 by Tripp Ellis

  All rights reserved. Worldwide.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental, and not intended to refer to any living person or to disparage any company’s products or services. All characters engaging in sexual activity are above the age of consent.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, uploaded, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter devised, without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Author’s Note

  Max Mars

  Connect With Me

  1

  The names and locations have been fictionalized to protect the innocent, and the guilty.

  The first time I died was nothing like I expected. There was no warm soothing light. No chorus of angels. Nothing remotely comforting. There was only darkness. And the terrible sensation of falling.

  With my stomach in my throat, I plummeted into the inky blackness. I had no illusions about where I was headed. With every inch I fell, the temperature grew hotter. The burning heat seared my skin, causing it to blister. The putrid stench of burnt flesh filled my nostrils. Pain engulfed my body. Throbbing and raw.

  No, this wasn’t a nightmare.

  It was much, much worse.

  Look, I was no saint. But I didn’t think I was that bad. In the back of my mind, I always knew I would have some explaining to do. But, up until this point, I had always been able to talk my way out of just about anything. I figured with a little creative persuasion, the Arbiter of Righteousness would say, “Hey, everybody makes mistakes. Come on in.”

  The pearly gates would open and it would be all clouds and angels. Angels that looked like they stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret ad. At least, that would be my version of heaven.

  That wasn’t the case.

  I wasn’t even granted an audience with the Big Guy.

  Nope.

  It was straight to hell.

  Every inch of my skin sent pain impulses to my brain. Not that I had a physical form anymore, I was just a spirit at this point. A lost soul. But it felt like I had a physical body, nonetheless. And it was being tortured.

  If the fall was this bad, I couldn’t imagine how horrible it was going to be once I reached my final destination?

  Or maybe this was it?

  Maybe I was doomed to fall through the darkness as my flesh melted from my bones for all eternity, repeating the process over and over again?

  To be honest, I never much believed in heaven or hell. I figured maybe there’s something out there beyond the plane of mortal existence. But mostly I figured I’d be taking a long dirt nap after my final breath.

  If this was my fate, it sucked. And sucked hard.

  I started to panic. And I really wasn’t prone to such a thing. I had always remained calm, cool, and collected. It was a requirement in my line of work.

  A million thoughts raced through my mind. I wondered what the specific event was that sealed my fate?

  It could have been any number of things.

  Perhaps, it was an accumulation of multiple transgressions over my lifetime? Who knows? I wasn’t sure I would ever find out. And maybe that was part of the torture—to spend an eternity in hell not knowing what you had done to deserve your fate?

  I lost all sense of time. I could have been falling for seconds, minutes, hours, or days.

  Then I felt a jolt to my chest. An electrical charge raced through my body. I felt my heart pump, and I saw a brilliant white light.

  My chest sucked in a breath of air, and my eyes adjusted to the blinding light. I was flat on my back in the ER staring at the light on the ceiling. The blip of my heartbeat pulsed on a nearby monitor. Doctors and nurses in teal green scrubs hovered over me, wearing face masks and wielding surgical implements.

  “We’ve got him back,” a nurse said in Spanish. “He’s stabilizing.”

  The clear mask over my nose and mouth pumped in oxygen. I watched the medical team frantically try to save me. I felt detached, like it was happening to someone else. My eyes flicked to the bedside monitor, and I watched the craggy peaks and valleys of my heart climb up and down. My blood pressure and my oxygen saturation were low. I heard one of them say something to effect that, “It was a miracle I was alive.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Judging by my near-death experience, I was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone doing any miracles for me.

  I couldn’t tell if I was really conscious, or if I was watching this from outside myself, still somewhere in between here and there.

  It was touch and go for a while. I wasn’t sure if I had been only granted a temporary reprieve, or if I was actually going to get a second chance? I probably didn’t deserve one, but I would take it.

  I didn’t know what happened, or how I got into this mess in the first place. But I knew one thing for certain—I never wanted to go back to hell. And I would do damn near anything to change my fate.

  2

  I wanted to believe it was just a crazy dream. I woke up in an intermediate care unit. The first thing I noticed was the cold steel of a handcuff around my left wrist, chained to the bed rail.

  What the hell?

  Things had gone seriously wrong.

  My hands were covered in black ink. They had fingerprinted me while I was out. I was wearing one of those sea-foam green gowns with little snowflake patterns repeating across the fabric. The kind of gown that you could never really tie properly and always left your ass half exposed.

  They had pumped me full of the good drugs, but it didn’t touch the pain in my chest. This wasn’t the first time I had been shot.

  The walls were painted in a pale institutional green, and the overhead florescent lights bathed the room in a sickly glow that made even the healthy nurses look ill.

  The room was clean, but well-worn. Paint was chipped from the walls in places, and high-traffic areas had a coat of grime over them. The monitoring equipment looked like it had been there since the early ‘90s. This wasn’t a state-of-the-art facility, and I began to wonder how clean those surgical instruments were in the ER? I didn’t want to surviv
e a gunshot wound to the chest only to die of sepsis a week later.

  The nurse noticed my eyes were open. She looked fuzzy to me as she set a glass of water on the tray next to the bed. Everything was still a bit hazy. She held her thumb and index finger about an inch apart, “This much farther and you’d be dead, the doctor said.”

  I was fluent in Spanish and replied in kind, “Just lucky, I guess.”

  I flashed the best smile I could muster, but even that hurt. Just pushing enough air through my lungs to speak brought on stabbing pain.

  The only thing that saved me was the carbon nanotube soft armor that I wore under my suit. It was lightweight IIIa armor effective up to .45 caliber rounds. Getting shot in real life is nothing like the movies. Even with soft armor, taking a bullet to the chest is like getting hit full swing with a baseball bat. The impact causes a substantial deformation in the skin. You’ve seen the welts people suffer from paintball hits? Imagine that times 1000. The impact is enough to spin you around, knock you off your feet, empty the air from your lungs, and sometimes stop your heart. To make matters worse, the bullet had pierced the back of the soft-armor.

  That’s where I got lucky. Sort of.

  The armor had absorbed the brunt of the impact, so the velocity of the bullet was greatly reduced. It entered my upper chest, narrowly missing my subclavian artery and my brachial plexus. If the artery would have been nicked, I’d have bled out on the spot. The brachial plexus is a nerve bundle in your shoulder that controls motor function to your arm. Getting shot in the shoulder isn’t as benign as it seems on TV.

  The bullet was lodged in the muscle tissue of my pectoralis minor. The thoracic cavity wasn’t penetrated. My brush with death was more a result of a drop in BP and my heart stopping while in surgery. I wasn’t in a Level I trauma center, though I’m sure this place had no shortage of experience with gunshot wounds. The standard procedure was to remove the projectile and any other debris, debride the damaged tissue and remove surface contaminants, evaluate and repair neurovascular structures, and start IV antibiotics.

  My chest and shoulder were multiple shades of purple, blue, green and red.

  The nurse held the glass of water in front of my mouth and angled the straw toward my lips. It was one of those cocktail straws that you needed an industrial vacuum just to suck a few drops through. Needless to say, I didn’t have any sucking power in my lungs.

  She leaned in and whispered in broken English, “You in big trouble. Policia aqui para ti. What did you do?”

  I shrugged, which again caused me to wince. I was going to have to stop doing that.

  She pulled the cup away and set it down on the tray again.

  I had no recollection of the last few days. Maybe the last few weeks. My brain was gummed up and I couldn’t think clearly. There was a big hole in my memory.

  I was hoping the man that stepped into my room would be able to fill some of the gaps. Though, he was probably looking for the same thing from me.

  Answers.

  He looked to be in his mid-50s, thinning hair on top with salt-and-pepper gray on the sides. His face was tanned and lined, and he had a large bulbous nose and a thin, trimmed mustache. He introduced himself as an investigative agent with the Policía Federal Ministerial. It was the Mexican version of the FBI. Their main focus was fighting corruption and organized crime.

  Agent Gutierrez was his name. He wore a suit that was rumpled and worn and certainly didn’t come from Brooks Brothers. He asked if I spoke Spanish and I nodded. With a smug grin he said the same thing the nurse had said. “You’re in big trouble.”

  He towered above me, hovering over the railing. As he leaned in, his coat open slightly, revealing a patent leather shoulder holster. The once shiny surface was scuffed and worn. My eyes fell upon his Glock 9mm.

  It was within reach.

  A quick man could snatch it. But I was no longer a quick man. I was a fuzzy, groggy man that couldn’t take a deep breath without eliciting pain.

  The agent’s eyes burned with anger, but he restrained himself, for the moment.

  “What am I accused of?” I asked.

  His lip curled up and quivered. If there weren’t medical personnel in the room, he likely would have beaten me. “As if you don’t know.”

  “I’m a little foggy on the details.”

  I could tell he thought I was playing a game with him, and he didn’t like it one bit. Trying to contain his anger was a losing battle, and his pleasant facade was beginning to crack. “Three of my agents, along with a federal witness, are dead. Good men. Men with families. You killed them.”

  I said nothing.

  His statement didn’t jog my memory. It was still a big dark hole, like it had been redacted with a sharpie.

  I couldn’t absolutely say that I hadn’t done it.

  I had killed plenty of people before. Assassinations were my bag. And this sounded like a professional hit. But I couldn’t put the why of it together. What was I doing in Mexico, taking out a witness? It just didn’t make sense.

  In my business, not everything is black and white. Most of it is varying shades of gray. Sometimes you have to do things of questionable moral value for the greater good. At least that’s what you tell yourself.

  That’s what they tell you.

  They are always trying to justify seemingly unjustifiable actions, but none of that is ever supposed to be your business. You are hired to do a job and not ask questions. Trust in the people above you. But the longer you are in this business, the harder that trust becomes. And you never really know who they actually are.

  You do what you're told, like a good little soldier. Then you wake up one day, near death, realizing your life has gone horribly wrong, and you decide you don’t want to be a good little soldier anymore.

  3

  “Who was the witness that I allegedly murdered?” I asked.

  “Who are you working for?” Gutierrez replied. He pondered this for a moment. “The CIA, perhaps?”

  “Not me. I’m just a civilian.”

  “Then tell me, civilian. What are you doing here?”

  “Enjoying the sun and fun.”

  “Let me spell this out for you, and I will speak in English so I know you will understand. I don’t think you are fully aware of the magnitude of the situation.”

  He was about to explain further when I heard the sound of suppressed fire in the hallway. The muffled bullets zipped down the corner and slammed into the two agents standing guard outside the room. Blood erupted from their chests and they flopped to the ground.

  Gutierrez turned his head toward the door and reached for his gun. Before he could grasp it, an assassin put two bullets into his chest. Crimson blood spewed from the wounds, staining my lovely green gown.

  My heart pounded and adrenaline coursed through my veins. I didn’t feel any pain as I reached for Gutierrez’s weapon. My hand wrapped around the grip and yanked it from the holster as the agent's body fell across my bed.

  It was the only thing that saved me.

  His body absorbed several bullets that were meant for me. It gave me enough time to return fire.

  Muzzle flash flickered from the barrel, and the sharp smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils. I squeezed off several rounds. Brass shell casings pinged against the floor. Smoke and haze filled the air, and the deafening bang filled my ears. The assassin hit the floor, and his gun clattered against the tile. Another man followed behind him and met the same fate.

  Panicked screams of the hospital staff filtered down the corridor. A high-pitched whine filled my ears, but my hearing was slowly coming back to me. The blip of my heartbeat on the monitor raced. I dug into Gutierrez’s pocket and fished out his keys. They clinked and chimed as I fumbled for the keys to the handcuffs. Within moments, my wrist was free. It was more difficult to get the guardrail down on the bed than it was to get out of the handcuffs.

  I snatched Gutierrez’s wallet from his back pocket. It had a few thousand pesos, and more im
portantly, his federal identification. We looked nothing alike, but a quick flash might fool someone. I figured it might come in handy.

  Gutierrez’s body fell to the ground as I dropped the bed railing. I pulled the IV from my arm and climbed out of bed. The rush of adrenaline was wearing off, and the pain in my chest was excruciating. It felt like someone had stuck a red hot poker into my thoracic cavity.

  I stumbled into the hallway. Staff hid in patient rooms and behind the counter at the nurses’ station. They didn’t care what I had done, and no one was getting paid enough to stop me. I ambled down the hallway, my ass hanging out the back of the gown. I must have looked ridiculous. Or crazed. Or both.

  I found a pair of scrubs and a lab coat in the storage closet and pulled them on as quickly as possible. Talk about pain. The mere act of getting dressed hurt like hell. Fortunately I hadn’t opened my stitches. But there was always the possibility of internal bleeding.

  I slipped the 9mm into the pocket of the lab coat and took the elevator to the lobby and walked out of the building as if nothing happened. At the sidewalk, I flagged down a cab and slipped into the back seat, wearing non-skid hospital socks. Without hesitation, I gave the driver an address. It was like muscle memory. Words rolled off my tongue without a second thought. I didn’t know what city I was in, but I knew where I was staying.