DEAD LOAD (A Nick Stello Action Thriller) Chapter One: The Plumb Line

The granite didn’t care about the cold.

Neither did Nick Stello.

The hardened stone mason adjusted his grip on the three-pound steel club hammer, his thumb resting just beneath the head for maximum control, and delivered a short, rhythmic strike to the tungsten carbide chisel.

Clink!

The sound rolled across the valley and disappeared into the trees.

No sirens.

No radios.

No shouted orders.

Just wind.

Most people would have called the valley isolated.

Nick preferred the word…

…peaceful.

Clink!

A crisp flake of gray Vermont stone sheared away, exposing a clean, raw face.

He turned the stone in his palm, feeling the new edge with his thumb. Square. True. He set it back into the wall and reached for the next piece. Habit, though, made him pause. He looked back at the new stone. Made sure it belonged.

Build it right, and it would stand for two hundred years without a drop of mortar. Build it wrong, and the first hard frost would walk it apart, stone by stone, until it was just a pile at the bottom of the hill.

To a casual observer, he was just a quiet, middle-aged stone mason building a dry-stone retaining wall behind a farmhouse in rural Vermont.

They didn’t see the mathematics.

They didn’t see the elegance.

They didn’t see that he was matching the lateral thrust of the earth with stone laid perpendicular to the slope, ensuring the wall would stand for centuries.

And they certainly didn’t see the scars beneath his canvas work shirt. The jagged exit wound from a 7.62 round near his left shoulder blade. The faint, silver line across his throat. A wire garrote. Prague.

His inner monologue didn’t use the old terms anymore. It used the language of the craft instead. A wall, like a man, can’t fight the plumb line, Nick thought, his eyes tracking the vertical line of the stone. Gravity always wins the argument. You are either upright, or you are falling.

Then there was the cold.

It came up through the soles of his boots from the half-frozen ground.

His breath hung in front of him in the early light. He liked working in this kind of cold. It kept his hands honest. Numb fingers couldn’t fake a grip. They couldn’t compensate for a bad angle. Either the swing was right, or it wasn’t. And the stone told you the truth either way.

A sudden vibration in the pocket of his heavy canvas trousers broke the rhythm.

He set the hammer and chisel down on the rough stone. Not dropped. Set. The way he set down everything. Because a tool thrown carelessly was a tool that would be in the wrong place when you needed it.

Stello pulled out a rugged, generic flip phone, the plastic casing scuffed gray from three months in a tool belt.

A burner.

He replaced it every ninety days. On a schedule. The way some men changed the oil in a truck. A habit from a life he’d told himself — more times than he could count — that he’d left behind in a different state under a different name.

It was an incoming text from Kate Andrews. Kate was a single mom in her mid-thirties. She picked up part-time hours at Stello’s workshop whenever she could get them. She needed the extra cash.

Kate cataloged deliveries and kept his invoices straight. She was supposed to be at his cabin three miles down the road, logging a shipment of hydraulic lime that had come in the day before.

The message was a single line of nine scrambled characters: 9]9]9]000

Nick read it once. He didn’t read it again. There was nothing to learn from reading it twice. He knew exactly what it meant. The way you know the weight of a hammer the instant your hand closes around the haft. Not a thought. Just a fact your body already had.

999 was their emergency duress signal. The 000 meant intruder alert.

There was nothing soft about the message. No “call when you get a chance.” No “just checking in.” It was urgent. As in no room to wait. Hard breach. Right now.

His posture changed before he’d finished the thought.

The slouch fell away.

Shoulders back. Spine set. Weight balanced even over both feet. Knees soft. Ready to move any direction without a wasted half-second.

His breathing slowed. The long, even draw he’d trained into himself years back. The kind that brought a heart rate down a beat at a time until it had dropped twenty beats per minute.

He wanted it calm. He didn’t want it to spike only to come crashing back down later.

He didn’t panic.

Panic was an unsquared stone. It looked fine sitting in the wall. Right up until the weight came onto it. Then it found every weakness in the structure around it.

The phone slipped back into his trouser pocket. The worn fabric settled against the weight of it.

Stello picked the hammer back up off the stone. Not into the tool belt. He held it. The haft was warm now. From his grip. The head was a solid three pounds of drop-forged steel. And he was aware of it. Suddenly. Completely. In a way he hadn’t been ten seconds ago.

The steel pitching tool went into the loop on his belt. Two inches of hexagonal stock with a chisel point. Heavy enough to feel like something in his hand. It usually rode loose there, half-forgotten.

Not today.

His truck sat at the end of the gravel track, thirty yards off. A white, one-ton pickup. Plain. Unremarkable. Powerful enough to do the job. Common enough to be invisible. Which was exactly why he’d chosen it.

He knew, from old habit, how far that naturally aspirated V8 note carried through hardwood forest on a still autumn morning. Nearly a mile. Further if the wind was running with it.

A mile of warning. If anyone was listening for an engine.

He didn’t take it.

He stepped off the gravel. Onto the old logging trail. Packed dirt. Exposed roots. Narrow enough that branches brushed both shoulders if he didn’t angle through carefully.

He moved at a steady jog. Low. Knees soaking up the uneven ground. His footfalls stayed quiet. Weaving instinctively, he kept the thicker stands of pine between himself and the sightlines toward his cabin.

The cold air burned going down.

The hammer swung loosely in his right hand with each stride. A small, steady pendulum. Weight he’d long since stopped noticing.

Except this morning, he noticed it.

Six minutes later, he dropped into a crouch in the underbrush at the treeline, thirty-five yards from his workshop, and went still. He didn’t check the time. He didn’t need to.

The cabin looked the same as it always did. Same weathered cedar shakes. Same crooked stovepipe. Smoke curling thin and gray against the white sky.

But one of the workshop’s side access doors stood open.

He’d hung that door himself. Two summers ago. A heavy oak slab on three-inch steel pins he’d forged at a friend’s shop. The hardware store hinges wouldn’t have carried the weight.

It wasn’t propped open for ventilation, the way Kate sometimes left it. It was open at a precise forty-five-degree angle. Swung hard enough that it had rebounded slightly off whatever had stopped it.

Morning light fell across the threshold. It picked out a series of deep, narrow scuffs in the damp dirt just inside the doorframe.

Tread marks. The kind of compressed, overlapping marks that came from someone planting their feet hard and pivoting, more than once, in roughly the same spot.

Tactical boots. Vibram soles.

Nick’s eyes moved past the door. Without lingering. They’d been trained that way. Never fix on the first thing you see. The first thing is often what they want you to see.

Near the woodpile, twelve feet to the left of the workshop entrance, a shape didn’t belong. A man. Motionless. His back to a stack of split oak. Cover. And a clear line on the workshop entrance and arch.

Whatever he was holding, he held low and close to his body. The posture of someone who’d done this enough times that stillness came easy.

Ex-military. High-tier contractors.

Near the workshop arch, a second man stood with one hand pressed to his ear. Head tilted slightly. The universal posture of someone listening to something only they could hear.

He shifted his weight, just slightly, and turned toward the door. Even that small movement had a clinical precision to it. Nothing wasted.

From inside the workshop, a sound. Faint. Muffled. Almost lost under the wind in the pines.

Nick’s body reacted before his mind had finished identifying it.

A voice. Kate’s. Pitched in a register he’d never heard from her before.

“Primary site’s cold,” the second man said.

His voice carried farther than he probably realized. The cold, still air did that. This hillside had a way of carrying sound. Nick had used it himself. Just minutes ago. When he left his truck behind.

“Asset secure. Room’s clean.” The man paused to listen.

“Copy.” Another pause.

“Five minutes. Terminate the asset.” His words came colder than the Vermont air.

Nick didn’t move.

He didn’t breathe. Not in any way that would show.

His eyes weren’t on either man. They weren’t on the dark doorway where Kate’s voice had come from.

They were on the stonework above the second man’s head. A semicircular archway. Nick had spent the better part of three weeks rebuilding it. Stone by stone. The granite blocks fitted so tight you could barely find the joints with a fingernail.

The temporary scaffolding still clung to the front of the workshop, stacked with stone waiting to be set once the arch was locked in place.

The arch wasn’t finished yet. For now, it still rested on a temporary wooden centering frame.

The keystone. At the top. Dead center.

The wedge-shaped block that locked the whole arch together. Three hundred pounds of dressed granite.

For now, its full weight rested on the temporary centering beneath it. The timber frame carried that weight through a single diagonal brace.

There was more behind it than the man beneath the arch could see.

Held in place by nothing yet but a steel support pin and the leveling winch bolted just inside the door.

The mortar hadn’t been poured. Nick had been planning to pour it that afternoon.

He thought about the winch. He thought about the pin. He thought about the three hundred pounds of stone sitting directly over the spot where the second man was standing. He thought about how little force it would actually take to change that arrangement.

But one unimportant piece of wood kept drawing his focus.

The throw didn’t have to work. It only had to start things moving.

A wall never depended on a single stone. A good plan never depended on a single outcome.

If the brace failed, gravity would do the rest. If it didn’t, he was already moving.

Time to test the Law of Gravity.

His fingers tightened on the hammer.

The haft was solid and familiar against his palm. The cold steel of the head, a small, certain weight. Years of stonework had taught him precision. Years spent playing scout-team quarterback had taught him how to put an object exactly where it needed to go. The brace looked enormous by comparison.

Nick stepped out of the shadow.

And threw.

Now It’s Your Turn To Play!

AGENT DECISION:

Question: Which hostile does Nick intend to take out first? (Select one)

1. The hostile behind the woodpile.
2. The hostile beneath the arch.
3. I’d rather find out in Chapter Two.

If choice is 3, ask “Why did you choose that?”

• I enjoy being surprised.
• I don’t want to stop reading.

[Continued in Chapter Two.]

Would you like to learn more about this Action Thriller Visual Novel Game? Click here to go to NickStello.com