“Copy that, Mr. Chalk. See to it personally. Peace out.”
Chalk hung up. That’s the last thing he needed: a spavined warhorse padding his disability payments by writing a tell-all bestseller about his glory days with Right Way Moving & Storage.
He turned back to Slagget, Clynch and Gavin. “Great news, boys. Seems that a pilot who flew the shit for Blackshaw has been located. We’ll have some intel out of him soon.”
“The clients?” Clynch, seasick as he was, understood the stakes.
Chalk confided, “They are very, very busy.”
Dar Gavin kvetched, “More than I can say for us.” Though he was not a rookie, Gavin was always virulently eager to wag his pecker in a firefight.
Chalk counseled, “Dar, there’s an old saying. ‘Sit patiently by the river, and the body of your enemy will float by.’ Be the river, Dar Gavin. Be the motherfucking river. Now, if Dickie Blackshaw told that pilot anything, and the clients compromised the pilot, we can expect things to hot-up around Smith Island in the very near future. Before we head out, let’s step downstairs and check on our little lady. See if she’s awake. See what she’s got to say for herself.”
CHAPTER 24
Ben placed Charlene on the double bed in a downstairs guestroom and draped her head to toe beneath a counterpane. It was all he could do for her.
After fastening Tug’s hands behind his back with a clothesline, Ben hogtied his wrists and his ankles together. He cinched hard on the bad leg with no remorse. Ben suspected the agony he was inflicting crossed from binding into the darker realm of torture. He also knew this thrust him down into the moral crevasse right next to Chalk and the rest of that crew.
To Ben, trussing Tug like an animal, even with a crepitus fracture, felt like coddling him. Given the invaders’ treatment of Hiram and Charlene, Ben could just as easily jump on Tug’s neck with both feet. He found a bloodstained roll of duct tape, and quickly encased Tug’s head in a sticky silver hood leaving only his nostrils exposed.
Before Ben left the charnel house, he looked for anyone on the path. The house was isolated from all three Smith Island hamlets. No one was lying in wait for him.
Ben exfiltrated straight for his saltbox. The entire way, there was no one abroad to remark on a local man double-timing down the path in a wetsuit, and toting a rolled up ghillie rig under his arm. It seemed the neighbors were staying indoors, out of the wind and rain, or out of trouble. Just another day in paradise. Ben’s eyes scanned right and left, looking for further sign of murderers. Now, all of Smith Island was no longer his home. It was a battlefield. He assessed its vantages and weaknesses like a general. He saw nothing of the enemy.
Ben’s saltbox was another story. The door was wide open. The Kid was gone. The shattered kindling that had recently been the stout oak chair lay festooned in the ligatures that Ben had used to bind his captive. Ben examined the chair. Nothing other than feral brute force could have destroyed it. The Kid was powerful. And savage.
Ginger, Ben’s dog of seven years, and raised from a pup, lay dead. Her skull split, caved with a leg of the chair. Fresh blood on the floor, and more blood staining Ginger’s jowls showed she had given noble account of herself before being struck down.
Ben shrouded his second body in fifteen minutes with a throw blanket from the back of the couch. Charlene Harris had crocheted it for him as a Christmas gift years ago.
He tried LuAnna’s home line, and her cellular phone. No answer at either number. He left quick messages. Maybe Chalk had seen LuAnna outside his place that morning. He remembered she had copped a feel and kissed him. LuAnna’s affection for him made her a target. And their child as well. Because he had lied about where the gold came from, she had no idea of the menace looming to pounce her. For the moment, he reminded himself her patrol boat could outrun anything Chalk had stolen from Hiram Harris.
He tore through the house looking for The Kid, praying to find him. He had not hung out for a rematch. Perhaps he was making new friends among Ben’s neighbors. Ben hoped they were better prepared than the Harrises.
Ben ransacked his crab shanty for what he needed, and jumped aboard Miss Dotsy. He did not go forward to open the cuddy cabin.
With no visible enemy on whom to vent his fury, and no way to find LuAnna, Ben had to deal with the bomb before it killed everything and everyone that mattered to him. He had to defuse or destroy it. There was less than half a day left until it exploded. He thought he knew how to handle the thing, but he was not sure. On the run back from the Harris home, his father’s letter suddenly became clear. Perhaps those stupid empty sentiments concealed a vital clue. On the other hand, if he were reading too much between his father’s lines, Smith Island would soon become the first chapter in the history of the Apocalypse.
Miss Dotsy’s gearbox rattled and thumped, but she moved. As he pointed her down the stream, Ben got a new take on the old conservationist’s anti-erosion sign posted on the shore: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR WAKE.
Yes, it was suicide going into eight-foot waves with Miss Dotsy's damaged drivetrain, but he had no choice. Macabre as it was, that sign on shore gave him the seed of an idea.
The ride back to Deep Banks Island was rough. Unburdened by the gold, Miss Dotsy rode over the waves well enough, but she surfed fast down their backs to auger her bow deep into the troughs. He kept trying to raise LuAnna on the radio, but got no reply. The hurricane had played hell with cellular towers, but the wireless companies had gotten most of them back in service as soon as the storm blew through. That did not explain why LuAnna was not answering her radio. Scanning the police and emergency channels, Ben heard no indication that her dispatcher had missed her. That was a good sign. Then he remembered LuAnna’s eleven-to-seven tour ended that morning. No one but Ben wondered where she was.
He continued to listen for distress calls on the radio, but heard none. Ben felt like a monster. He did not know where LuAnna was, so he could not help her if she needed it. Since he could not help her, his cold soldier’s heart tried to set the matter of her well-being aside, to compartmentalize. He confirmed within himself that for now, he had picked the next right objective out of a grab-bag packed full of shitty options. Maybe LuAnna was safe and sleeping at home.
Ben steered into the maze of guts leading to the planks and the hollow below the heron rookery. The water calmed. Pushing farther inland, now the wind carried reeds and branches whipping past him.
He stopped Miss Dotsy next to the sapling marker. He set the CQR anchor on shore in case the baby gale backed to the east and blew straight down the gut. He took a shovel with him through the plank-lined channel in the reeds. He glanced up as he approached the hollow. The herons were hunkered low in their nests.
The wind obliterated nearly all sound but itself, yet for a man of Ben’s checkered and bloody past, there was no mistaking the hornet buzzing past his ear. A high-velocity bullet.
Ben ducked low and turned just in time to see a man stalking up behind him, almost invisible in the reeds. The man collapsed backward. Ben was strangely aware of nearby cattails that seemed airbrushed to a Dallas-in-Autumn shade of Zapruder pink.
Ben crept to the body. A gunshot wound in the face made recognition difficult. The cranium was completely evacuated leaving the usual canoe of a front to back headshot. There were adhesive tape marks at the elbows and wrists. Deep canine bites on the right leg confirmed his suspicion. Ginger went down fighting. Here lay the psychopath once known as The Kid.