A Pair of Second Chances (Ben Jensen Series Book 1) (32 page)

Ben held him from falling over and making any sound, beyond the slight rattle of death, with his left hand. Slowly, silently, he tipped him over and lowered him to the ground. The blank, emotionless mask that had been drawn across his face remained.

Standing just inside the doorway for several long minutes, Ben waited, listening and watching. He waited to see if the nearly silent violence had been observed or heard by anyone. No new lights came on in the house. No sound came from it.

The cowboy, still in the light shoes he'd donned that morning, moved like a shadow to the wall of the house. He ducked under each window he came to as he floated silently toward the front door, a little more than half way down the length of the building.

Once he reached the front door, he could just see the glow of a single light through the narrow pane beside the door, coming from somewhere deeper inside the house. It made sense, he'd heard the guard coming on duty saying someone, Janik? was watching Karen in the front room. So, he'd have some light; good.

He reached for the knob, as he drew his pistol from its holster and released the safety. Tightly gripped, he slowly tested the knob. It turned. Slowly, ever so slowly he turned that knob, and moved the door, like the hand of a clock; doing everything he could to avoid any sound, any warning squeak of its hinges.

With the door half open he soundlessly slid sideways through the opening and up against the wall of the entry hall.

Two or three steps in, he cleared the corner of the entry and could see Karen, bound and gagged with duct tape, her blouse torn, lying on a couch. The hand and arm of a man extended from behind the left side of a high back chair, that sat opposite and facing the couch. That hand held a book under the low light of a lamp on an end table beside the chair.

It held a book the guard was reading.

Ben feared to even breathe as he moved toward that chair. There was a single step down from the stone floor of the entry to the carpet of the sunken living room.

He reached the chair without having alerted the guard, but as he looked around the back of that chair, Karen's eyes were open, watching him!

He struggled against the urge to shake his head no. He dared make no movement that could produce an unexpected sound. Instead he firmly, with exaggeration, closed his eyes.

He feared his pounding heart and the sound of the blood roaring in his ears would betray his presence. When he opened his eyes Karen's were closed. "Good girl" he thought.

He closed his own again, momentarily, to offer a silent "Thank You" to the Boss.

Followed by a silent, quick sidestep around the side of the chair as his pistol was extended to slam its muzzle into the side of the guards head.

"Get on the floor, there!" Ben pointed in the dim light at a spot in front of the couch. "You make a sound, I'll make a bigger one, only you won't hear it. Now move!" Ben hissed again. "Put your nose in the carpet you... fuck!" He ordered.

The man, eyes wide, silently obeyed. He'd seen crazy men before. This one struck him as maybe the craziest he'd seen. "Maybe this white bwoy crazier than Tyrone!" he thought. The taste of bile filled his throat as he stretched out on the floor, close beside the couch.

Karen lay on her stomach. Ben stepped over to the couch. While keeping the muzzle to the back of the man's head he took the bloody K-bar and sliced through the duct tape that bound Karen's hands behind her back. As he looked down at her, her eyes, filled with a mix of terror, surprise, and... something he wasn't sure of, opened.

Ben slid the K-bar back into its sheath and put a finger to his lips. Karen nodded slightly, acknowledging the warning.

As quietly as she could she sat up and reached for the tape binding her ankles and finally, the strip wound around her head and over her mouth. She pulled that away from her mouth, leaving it stuck in her hair.

She started to reach for her father with both arms, when Ben shook his head violently. "No! Not now!" he whispered, as he reached and touched her cheek.

"The door!" he hissed, pointing at the sliding door on the back of the house. It was on the other side of the dining room. The side of the house that faced the unknown watchers.

As Karen moved across the room toward the door, Ben leaned down and whispered in the man's ear; "Get up asshole. Do as you're told. Don't... FUCK... with me!"

Slowly, not wanting any movement to be misunderstood, Janik pushed himself up from the floor. Ben pointed toward the dining room, where Karen was just getting to the door.

The soft hiss of the door, as she pushed it and its screen open, were the only sounds. Together, Karen leading where Ben pointed, Janik following and Ben in the rear, pistol pressed to the man's neck, the three moved out into the moonlight of the back patio. It only took seconds to cross the landscaped yard. The trio stopped at the edge of the lawn, where the rail fence of another large paddock bordered the yard.

Ben motioned Karen to slide under the rails. He himself, moved in front of his captive, and grinning, pistol pressed to his forehead, carefully climbed the rails.

As he lowered down on the far side the captive Janik started to relax. He'd made it. When he looked at his captor in the moonlight, the crazy rage he'd seen inside was gone. All he could see was the emotionless face of Ben Jensen.

Ben pulled Karen close, pistol, reaching across the fence, still pressed to Janik's forehead. "When I say Darlin'... You RUN." He hissed in her ear. "You run as fast as you can. That way!" he told her, pointing the direction to the coulee that held their only hope of escape.

He looked back at Janik. The man expected to be told to be quiet or he'd die. What he saw, was the blank mask on the man's face and too late, the finger tightening against the trigger.

Karen screamed at the sound of the shots as Ben pushed her and hollered "Run! Run now! Run GOD DAMN IT!"

The loud crack of gunfire outside his window brought Tyrone instantly awake and upright in his bed. He grabbed his pistol off the nightstand as he tore back the sheet and sprinted to the door.

The sounds of commotion and confused hollering came from the three other bedrooms in the house as all doors were jerked open and the remaining seven Jamaicans crowded into the hallway.

Tyrone was already to the end of the hall, eyes and pistol scanning the room, as he raged; "Where the fuck is Janik?"

Sawon called out; "The back door be open Mahn!"

All seven men surged through the door weapons extended. Tyrone held up at the edge of the patio. He pointed to the body of Janik lying by the fence, and hollered to no one in particular, "Check Him!"

One man ran to the body and knelt down, while the other five spread out across the yard moving to the fence. One man shouted, "There!" pointing out into the darkness, and fired three shots.

Four shots came screaming back. One shattered the glass of the sliding door, a second wanged off the bricks of the wall. Tyrone heard one snap as it passed his ear, making him flinch involuntarily.

"Get them!" he hollered as he ducked.

"Sawon! What is out there? Over there?" Tyrone called, gesturing toward the fleeing shadows with his pistol.

"Nothing Tyrone. Nothing. Just grass!" Sawon called back, as he fired two more shots. With two more shots fired in return from the runners fleeing across the grass.

Deval called out from the fence. "There is a track. Just a small track. I saw it yesterday when we were coming back from the mine. It just goes from the road, out into the grass!"

"The cars! Everyone get to the cars. Get to that track. Deval you get in the Escalade. You show me that track!"

The seven men sprinted back through the house and out the front door to the vehicles sitting in front of the garage. In seconds, the Escalade leading, all three vehicles were speeding up the driveway, headed for the road.

Chapter
32

After sitting for hours in tedious silence, the muzzle flashes and the rattle of the pistol shots that shattered the stillness of the night jumped the men sitting in the grove of the pullout, a few hundred yards away, to full alertness.

They could see a pair of shadows running across the paddock that ran down the south side of the property. Through their binoculars they saw the men come streaming out of the back of the house. They witnessed them run to the fence line and start firing...

They counted four shots returned, toward the house from one of the running shadows.... followed shortly later, by two more.

With the initial shots, Mirza, sitting on the passenger side of the car, grabbed his cell phone and pressed a speed dial number. After a few seconds, and an answering; "Yes?" He made his report. " Gunfire. Two, running away from the house. Those at the house are firing at the runners. One of the runners is firing back!" He went quiet for a moment, listening to the phone, then, "I don't have any idea! We saw no one approach, it's a bright moon, we'd not have missed them! They had to have approached the house from the north side. But they're moving away now, to the south east." with a final; "Roger. We stay on the primary." Mirza clicked off the phone and spoke to Jadranko.

"We stick to the Jamaicans. If they move we do. Otherwise, we sit right here. But watch for lights. Those shots are likely to bring the police. We need to take care to not get entangled with them!"

But a few seconds later, after they watched the men run back into the house, they saw the lights of the SUVs and van moving up the driveway. Jadranko started their own car in preparation, but left the lights off. They'd taken care to disable the "daytime running lights" so their position would not be revealed, unwanted, at night.

When the van had passed, following the Escalade, Jadranko put the car in gear and pulled slowly out onto the pavement, still not turning on their headlights. He kept one eye on the road behind them. Getting tail ended, moving slowly in the dark on the highway, was not a way to win any glory.

They moved south slowly, just keeping the cars in sight. Having no idea what was going on, they wanted to stay out of it for the time being. Their expectation that the likely direction those cars would be going was out where the runners had disappeared into the darkness was rewarded when all three turned out into the grass, nearly a mile to the south.

Mirza and Jadranko watched headlights come on and a car come up out of the darkness, out on the grass, and hurtle toward the oncoming trio of vehicles. They watched as it went headon with the lead SUV and then get spun to the side when they collided. Jadaranko called out; "They hit, they hit! Shots, four!"

The sound of Ben's shots as he spun the Saturn behind the Escalade were muffled with distance, the camouflage of the roaring engines, and having been fired inside the car. But the muzzle flashes inside the car were unmistakable to these men of Bosnia.

As it passed the second vehicle, several flashes and the delayed sound of gunfire came from the van. No shots came from the third vehicle, the black Yukon.

Whoever they were, the runners seemed to be putting up a fight.

They watched as the car threaded its way through the blocking actions of the Jamaican drivers and continue back to the pavement. It seemed odd to them that it stopped and sat motionless for several seconds, once it had navigated its way, bouncing and weaving, to the asphalt. They thought maybe the motor had quit. Maybe it had taken damage from gunfire. Mirza heard a shout come from the car, but couldn't make out the words, over the sound of their own car.

But, after just a few seconds, it took off south with the vehicles they'd followed from Chicago, and the third that had joined here in Montana, in hard pursuit behind it.

Chapter
33

"UH!... Shit!" Ben fell hard, tumbling across the grass.

"Daddy?!" Karen screamed, "What's wrong?"

"Hit! Keep, running! Damn!" Ben scrambled to his feet to keep running. He continued toward the car, limping badly on his left leg.

"Oh My God! You're shot?" she screamed as she reached for him.

"Not Now!... Just... Keep... Running!" Ben pushed her on, "Go! Go! RUN!"

Ben ran on pure adrenaline and will power, a searing pain in his foot. He hollered at Karen; "You run girl! Run!... Red car... The keys are in the ignition... I don't get there, you go. You GO Damn it!... Don't wait... just go!" He pointed across the grass in the moonlight. Up ahead he could just make out the dark shadow of the coulee that concealed the Saturn.

The pain in his foot was murder, but he kept running. His daughter ahead of him he kept going, one foot in front of the other. As he ran he thought, "Damn it. Damn it! I'm spurting a bloody trail, all over this prairie, and the damn cops are gonna follow it, right, straight, to me! God Damn it!"

Behind them the shooting ceased. He heard some hollering but couldn't make out the words. He thumbed the magazine release and grabbed the empty magazine before it could fall to the ground as he ran. His second magazine he jerked from his back pocket and slammed it into the magazine well, thumbing the slide release, allowing it to slam home.

As he ran he couldn't keep the idea out of his thoughts; "Just one mistake. Just one miscalculation... Damn it! Getting shot was damn sure a mistake! He couldn't face or accept the consequences of that, and so, limping, and grunting in pain with each step, he ran!"

Karen made it to the car and was waiting when he slid over the lip and down into the coulee.

"I told you don't wait! Get in!" he snapped as he limped past her to the drivers door. "Come on! Move girl!"