Nate followed his friend into the basement. It was nicely finished with a dark wood floor and a drop ceiling, but that didn’t change how cold it was on their feet. Removing his phone, Nate shined the way with the flashlight app. They stopped before a work bench strewn with tools. Above it was a rack with three long rifles. The one in the middle caught his eye: H&K G36 with x3 optical sights and tac light on the front rail. It was a civilian version of the famous German assault rifle. Gas-operated, normally with a thirty-round mag (5.56×45mm NATO), Sanchez had outfitted this baby with a hundred-round drum magazine.
“You okay parting with the H&K?” Nate asked.
“She’s my pride and joy,” Sanchez admitted, “which is precisely why I think you should take her. I’ve always got the Colt AR and the SR-25.” The latter was a semi-automatic sniper rifle that used the larger 7.62×51mm NATO round.
Nate removed the G36 from the wall mount, then stared through the scope at the light bleeding in through the basement’s single window. The duplex crosshairs would do just fine.
“I got something else for you,” Sanchez said, reaching beneath the work bench and coming out with a package wrapped in opaque plastic. “Might stop you from getting your head blown off in the first five minutes.” He handed it to Nate, who tore it open. Inside was a set of MARPAT overwhites, essentially winter-themed camo he could put on over his existing clothes. A roll of white tape on the table could also be used on the rifle to keep it from sticking out.
Sanchez was staring at his old work buddy for what felt like a long time when he finally said, “She reminds you of your sister Marie, doesn’t she?”
Nate set the camo gear down and said nothing. He knew his friend was talking about Dakota.
“She’s about the age Marie was when she vanished. We’ve known each other for a long time, Nate. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure. Ten years at least.”
“That’s right, and in all that time you never told me what happened. Given we might never see each other again, I’d say you at least owe me that.”
The corner of Nate’s mouth rose into a pained expression. He started to swallow and found what had always been a simple act had suddenly become far more difficult. “Marie was three years younger than me and a freshman in high school. I was in my first year of college. I guess you could say we got along as well as a brother and sister could be expected to, despite the gap in our ages. But we also didn’t have a whole lot in common, save for our love of shooting. I’d bought a shotgun a few months earlier and had decided to introduce her to the joys of target shooting. Some people fire off a few rounds and find it’s not their thing. Marie was different. She got a real thrill from feeling that wooden stock buried into her shoulder, from watching those watermelons disintegrate before our eyes as she pulled the trigger. It’s a powerful experience for a young person. I’d gone through it myself a few years earlier and wanted her to also know that same sense of exhilaration.
“I was away at college back in those days, but whenever I’d come home she and I would head out to an empty field and blow away stupid stuff like shaken Coke cans and oversized watermelons. I kept the shotgun in my room back then, tucked under my bed, and told her never to touch it. One day, when I wasn’t home, Marie broke those rules and took the gun out. She wanted to show her friend Bobby Hayes. Bobby was a year younger than she was and didn’t have much in the way of friends. Looking back, I think Marie was trying to take him under her wing the way I had done for her. Wanted to give him that same exhilarating experience she had felt that very first time. Ironically, she was in the middle of running Bobby through the safety procedures when the shotgun accidentally went off and blew away his right leg just above the knee. My sister panicked and ran for help, leaving poor Bobby in that clearing, screaming in agony. She didn’t know much about tourniquets or how to deal with gunshot wounds. Hell, neither did I back then. Needless to say, the paramedics found Bobby not long after, lying right where he’d been shot. Said the kid had probably bled out in less than three minutes.
“She’d tried to do something good. Show the kid he was important and worth loving. But sometimes even the best of intentions come back to bite you where the sun don’t shine. About a week after the kid was buried, Marie herself went out to the spot the kid died and never returned home. We spent the next few days searching high and low for any sign of her. Was she lost? Had she gone somewhere and taken her own life out of guilt? Or worse, had some sicko pulled up beside her on a desolate stretch of road and kidnapped her? We conducted more searches than you can imagine. Days stretched into months and then years. By then, we were no longer expecting her to come running through that door. And the reality we begrudgingly came to accept was that she was no longer alive. To this very day, I’d be just as happy to find my sister’s body as I would to see her alive. It sounds like a strange thing to wish for, I know, but the human psyche craves closure. Living with that sort of mystery every single day has a funny way of gnawing at your soul, one bite at a time.”
Sanchez’s face was a mask of grief. “Oh, man, that’s terrible. I couldn’t imagine.” He must have recognized something in Nate’s face. “So when you dropped out of university after your injury, it was really you setting out to find her.”
“Not consciously,” Nate admitted. “But it was a big part of why, when I finally came home, I decided to become a cop.”
Sanchez was quiet, thoughtful for a moment. Then: “You blame yourself, don’t you? For her disappearance… for her death.”
After she’d been missing for ten years, their family had pushed to have her legally declared dead. If time healed all wounds, then signing the paperwork to ratify your sister’s demise had a nasty habit of tearing them open again.
“And why would I not shoulder at least some of the responsibility? I was the one who introduced her to it. Maybe if I’d had a gun safe, locked up tight, Bobby might never have gotten hurt and she might never have gone off―”
“You can’t think like that. You’ll drive yourself crazy. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, right? You told her not to and she broke the rules. I mean, you weren’t even there.”
“That’s the problem, Sanchez. I wasn’t there to protect her and I should have been.”
Sanchez grabbed Nate by the shoulders. “So you think saving this girl will wash away your sins, is that it?”
“Something like that,” Nate replied, his voice low and filled with resignation. “But before any salvation, I just need one more thing.” His eyes rose to meet Sanchez’s.
“Anything,” his friend said.
“I need to know where to find Jakes.”
Chapter 37
Armed with an answer to his question, Nate left Sanchez’s place. He did so on foot, the sun having just set. Sanchez would keep an eye on his horse until he returned. There was no sense dragging the poor beast along only to leave him on the street to fend for himself.
Jakes was holding Dakota at the City Hall building on the corner of State and 2nd Street, which explained why Nate was positioned a hundred yards to the north, surveying the area through the scope of his rifle. The structure in his crosshairs wasn’t so much one building, but two. The original section was eight stories tall, gleaming white and built in the 30s. The newer half had been added a decade ago in order to accommodate for Rockford’s impressive growth.
But apart from leaving Wayne behind, Nate hadn’t left empty-handed. Sanchez had hooked him up with one drum mag and six additional thirty-round magazines for the H&K. Along with that came a few extra mags of .45 ACP for the Sig and Colt Defender he carried. Finally, in case he managed to work his way through all that firepower, he’d brought his hatchet. Everything currently on him was housed in a white chest rig worn over his camo suit.