DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (27 page)

The garden behind the great camp sloped up towards the line of trees edging the property. It was enclosed by a split rail fence.

Staryles pointed at the latched gate. “Open it. Go in.”

Brendan swung it open and stepped through. Staryles followed him.

Brendan said nothing. He walked further into the garden. He noted the vegetables. It brought back memories, from three years before, of Olivia Jane’s garden, where Kevin Heilshorn lay fatally wounded in the dirt, taking his last breaths, staring up at the sky.

Brendan stopped and turned around, facing Staryles who was just a few yards away.

“Is this where she wants you to do it?” Brendan asked. “Right here?”

His heart rate had steadied. He remembered how he’d strived for a calm spirit before taking the Rebecca Heilshorn case, how his peace became disturbed during the course of that investigation, how it had taken three years to get it back.

Overhead, the sun was behind a thick smudge of clouds, temporarily withholding the rain, but ready to deluge again any moment.

“Thing is, Greta is no longer in with the right people,” Brendan said. “You think she’s calling this, you think she’s in charge. But you’re wrong. You’re off the winning team.”

Staryles lifted the gun higher, aiming at Brendan’s head.

“What are you talking about?”

“Everyone has enemies, Staryles. And my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

He lifted up his hands to either side of him, without thinking, turning his palms up, waiting for the rain.

Staryles’ usually handsome face had become contorted, a thing from nightmares. He stepped close to Brendan, exuding evil.

Brendan thought of the book
The Great Divorce
and remembered the final line in the passage:

And that is why the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’

And both will speak truly.

Brendan looked past Staryles, to the house, where Greta Heilshorn stood watching through the windows.

“Oh well,” Staryles said. And his finger moved against the trigger.

Jennifer’s father kept some old guns in the house. Turkey guns for the spring hunt on the Cape Cod National Seashore. One was an antique “long fowler” .75 caliber flintlock. The gun was a preposterous six feet long, used in colonial times. It hung above a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe in the back den.

The rest of the guns were locked in a gun cabinet in the den, and Jennifer didn’t have the combination.

A shadow darkened the door behind the curtained glass. The knock came again. Jennifer froze. Not knowing whether to call out and ask who was there. The vehicle she’d borrowed — stolen, really — was in the driveway. Whoever was out there knew someone was inside.

The curtains were drawn around the rest of the living room except for the windows behind the couch. She snapped out of her paralysis and moved quietly to the couch, leaned on her knee and pulled the curtains closed. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt her throat closing up. The blood sang in her ears. She felt hunted by her own side.

But could she be sure who was out there? It could be a neighbor, checking on the house or wanting to discuss the crisis. Her first thoughts had been to arm herself, when the visitor could be totally harmless. It was a pattern of thought previously unfamiliar to her. Now she was wondering if the gun cabinet was something she could bust her way into. She needed to stop, get a grip. People needed to band together in times like this, not fall prey to paranoia.

More knocking. The way the doorframe rattled, it was not Eleanor Beech from two houses down Old Post Road. The dark shape loomed, the door shook; this was a man. And as she stood near the couch where she had drawn the blinds, she saw a figure pass. Another man, moving around to the back of the house. The shadow of the second figure slipped along above the couch.

She halted again. Her breath became fast and shallow. She was panicking. The shape at the front door suddenly dropped out of sight. She watched as a hand pushed through the black rubber cat door. The hand was closed in a loose fist. Then it opened, and something fell out. Her breathing stopped altogether. The hand withdrew, leaving sunflower seed casings in a small pile on the floor. The shape — Delaney’s shape — stood back up on the other side of the glass. And then the glass shattered.

Jennifer broke into a run. She bounded down the short hallway which fed into the rear den. She grabbed the flintlock from the wall. It was a huge heavy beast of a gun, and she wielded it like a battering ram. She charged the pine gun cabinet with it. The first impact made a splintery crack. She drew back, gathered herself, and rammed again. The butt of the long gun burst through the wood. Yet she realized from the size of the hole she’d made it would do her little good like that. She needed the whole door open to get the shotgun out — her father kept an H&R Single Shot 10 in there, and that was the weapon she needed — and she had to get the ammunition and load it. But there was no time.

“Ms. Aiken?” The voice floated from the living room. A sing-song voice, a man enjoying himself. “Ms. Aiken.”

She stood motionless with the flintlock in her hand. Nowhere else to go. This was a bungalow. There was only one door, and Delaney was there now. The person who’d gone around the back could come in a window, but that was it. She was trapped.

She turned the giant gun around in her hands so that she could point the barrel. Her heart pounded. She placed her feet shoulder-width apart and raised the barrel to point at the door to the den. She heard the creaking of footsteps of Delaney as he moved further into the house.

“Ms. Aiken? We need to talk.”

What was he doing here? Delaney was an investigator from Oneida County. She was sure Bostrom had lost them during the chase two days ago, but it was certainly possible he had gone into the system and found her father and the address. Why ride all the way out here to Cotuit Bay? He had no jurisdiction here. There was only one answer. He meant to kill her.

“Ms. Aiken . . . Come on out from back there.”

She couldn’t take it anymore. Her entire body trembled. She stepped forward into the hallway and swung the big gun towards the living room. Delaney was there, his own weapon in his grip, a semi-automatic rifle. He looked at her for a moment, expressionless. He took in the sight of her, the flintlock she was holding, and then he broke out in a maniac grin.

“Holy shit,” he said.

He stepped forward, smile faltering, and aimed the rifle at her. At the same time, she heard a noise from outside. The sound of engines approaching, the crunch of tires over gravel. Then, shouting. The other man out there was yelling something, trying to get Delaney’s attention. He cocked his head to the side, listening. Then he locked on her with his dull, torpid eyes, and started to back away, returning to the living room.

Jennifer stepped back into the den. She rushed to the window and looked out at the driveway. Two black SUVs were pulling in behind what must have been Delaney’s dark sedan. The doors of the first SUV opened. John Rascher stepped out.

“John!” It just burst out of her. He heard her, he must’ve heard her, because she saw his face tighten, alarm light up in his eyes. Then Delaney, probably back at the front door now, opened fire.

Staryles was standing a few paces from Brendan when his head whipped to the side. There was a burst of blood, and then Staryles toppled over. The sound followed a second later, a cracking gunshot from the treeline beyond the garden that rolled off the distant mountains.

Brendan moved quickly to where Staryles lay. He kicked the gun from the fallen man’s hand. Half of Staryles’ face was gone, leaving a twisted gristle of tissue and bone. Yet he was still alive — one eye ruptured, the other looking around in bewildered fashion.

Brendan turned his gaze to the trees surrounding the property, as they started coming out of the woods. He stood, just watching, expecting this, grateful for this, but momentarily paralyzed with a sense of complete unreality.

They were Argon’s men. Ex-cops, firemen, highwaymen, carpenters, contractors, even a Best Buy manager — Russell Gide emerged among them, no longer wearing his striped tracksuit, but decked in cargo pants and a camouflage vest over a stained white t-shirt. Gide was also brandishing an automatic rifle. One man wore a bandolier of ammunition and was holding a video camera.

Above them, the storm approached over the mountains, ready to heave.

At Brendan’s feet, Staryles gagged and sputtered. A blood bubble formed at his lips and burst. With his one eye, he looked up at Brendan and moaned as he strained to move. Staryles, with half his face in ruins, was trying to get up. The blood spurted from his neck, his carotid artery shredded, as he tried to stand.

Brendan stepped back from the gory spray of blood.

He realized he felt sorry for the crumpled man at his feet. Staryles was pure psychopath and a murderer. Yet Brendan found himself thinking about what could have led him to this, what turned his neural pathways to the electric pulses of a killer. It had to be more than loyalty, or a code. Staryles’ drive was to be on the winning side. Maybe he thought the Heilshorn legacy was that side, and that Titan, and all of the multinational overlords like it, was the future. Or, maybe there was more. Brendan wondered if Alexander Heilshorn had been some kind of a surrogate father for Staryles, Greta a perverted mother figure.

She was being pulled away from the window now — Argon’s friend, Santos, held her in his massive arms, dragging her back into the house. At the last second, she kicked against the glass. The reflection of the outside world shuddered from the blow as Santos hauled her away.

There were other men in there, too; hopefully one of them had Leah and was looking after her, keeping her safe.

Argon’s men came down the hill, some of them stepping over the fence and into the garden, others walking towards the house. Eight of them, by Brendan’s count — and he had only called Russell Gide. Gide had been his third of three phone calls following his release from Rikers. He’d called Sloane, Jennifer, and the man in the tracksuit. Not only had Gide been willing to help Brendan, he’d acted as if he’d been patiently awaiting the opportunity. Brendan’s plan had only involved the need for a couple of men, to stop Jeremy Staryles and subdue Greta, but even Leonard Dutko had shown up, the tall guy with his thick mustache, who’d been reluctant to go any further the previous year, citing the vulnerability of his wife and kids. They’d all turned out to help Brendan and kill the man who had haunted their lives.

Staryles was still trying to get up. He got one foot beneath him and then fell forward over the knee of the other leg, his obliterated face mashing into the mud.

“Where are you going to go?” Brendan’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

A moment later and the rain came down, tap-tapping the pea plants, the beans, pattering against the large fronds of the zucchini, until it fell harder, filling the air with a riot of noise, like static turned up on an old TV.

Hopelessly, Staryles tried to crawl away through the mud. The men gathered around and Brendan turned his attention to them.

“Shovels are in the basement,” Brendan said. He turned and swept his hand over the garden.

The men glanced at the plants, then down at Staryles.

“We calling in EMS for him?” It was a gray-haired man who spoke. Brendan didn’t know his name. They all watched Staryles, who was now hardly moving. He had managed to get over onto his stomach, one arm outstretched in front of him, as if reaching for the house.

His body went limp.

“Alright,” said Brendan.

He squatted down and looked into Staryles’ face. Staryles was dead.

Brendan rose to his feet. The rain was soaking his clothes — the jeans and sweatshirt get-up. Brendan blinked away the moisture, but the rain beat at his scalp and ran down his face in rivulets; he felt one runnel coursing down his nose. The rain washed the bit of cover-up from his face, revealing his scar.

“This is crazy,” said Russell Gide. His lanky body was like a livewire. “I just fucking shot that guy.”

Gide bent forward and threw up on his shoes.

She saw Rascher get hit. The impact of the bullet threw him back against the SUV. The men with him were soldiers from Edwards. They spread out and returned fire on Delaney and his associate. The rounds exploded like fireworks.
Pop. Pop-pop-pop.
Jennifer dropped away from the window and rolled her body against the wall. It was like being in the middle of a war. Amid the cacophony, she worked her way back to the gun cabinet. Lying on her back, she was able to reach up with her feet and start kicking at the door, working the ragged hole she’d made with the turkey gun into a larger opening. She kicked and thrashed at it with her feet, gunshots popping all around the outside of her house, the rattle of automatic fire issuing from the living room. Her ears were ringing. In the middle of it all she realized she was screaming.

One last sharp kick and the piece of wood bearing the latch gave way. She spun herself around on the floor and, on her belly now, reached up and jimmied the door all the way open. The bottom of the cabinet was a row of cubby bins. She sifted through the boxes of ammo until she came up with the 10 gauge shells. She shook a few out of the box. She could only use one at a time in the H&R.

Shotgun shell in hand, she hoisted herself to her knees, reached up and released the heavy weapon from its bracket. The thing weighed a ton, more than the flintlock. She laid the gun over her thighs. The H&R was a break action. She thumbed the release to drop open the barrel. There was no safety. No half cock. You pulled back the hammer, aimed, and destroyed. Her father would go on and on about it. Referring to it as the “kitchen door gun.” She shoved the shell into the barrel and snapped it closed. The gun was loaded.

The firefight continued. Delaney was still in the living room. His partner must have fled into the woods between the houses, because the shots seemed to concentrate in that direction. There was a path in those woods that led to a small creek. She remembered crossing the creek as a little girl. Just a few feet wide, it had seemed like the Mississippi.

Jennifer got to her feet. She stepped out into the hallway. Not wasting any time. She walked to the end and into the living room. Delaney was right where she’d pinpointed him in her mind, just inside the door, squeezing off rounds into the driveway, lips pulled back and teeth bared in a death mask. He didn’t even see her as she came into the room. She didn’t announce herself, didn’t make a sound. She only breathed, once in, once out, and took aim. She saw the face of the little girl in the back of Stemp’s car, saw Delaney turn the gun on that little girl’s mother. She squeezed the trigger.

The one thing her father had always pointed out about the old single-barrel shotguns was that while they were simpler, and cheaper, than the double-barrel, the kickback was much more severe. The second the shot exploded out of the barrel, the massive 10 gauge recoil threw her back against the wall. She almost dropped the gun but managed to keep her grip on it as she hit. She kept her eyes open, too, watching as the shot buried into Delaney’s shoulder, his neck, his jaw. The automatic rifle fell out of his grip. Blood immediately started running from his busted arteries. He fell against the recliner just inside the doorway, his eyes wide, his mouth gasping like the last catch of the day.