Authors: Grant McKenzie
CHAPTER
50
The red-haired woman didn’t acknowledge Mr. Black. With her head held low, chin tilted to bosom, she glanced at the table, walked to the sink and rinsed a cloth under the tap.
When she returned, she wiped the spilled coffee and lifted the brown paper package.
“Don’t open that,” said Gallagher. “It’s private.”
“I’ll put it by the sink,” she said. “Does your friend want coffee?”
Mr. Black tilted his head, trying to see the woman’s face beneath her long, curly bangs. She wasn’t young, but time had been kind to her. The wrinkles around her eyes appeared to be mostly from laughter and her delicate pale skin had been jealously protected from the sun. Her lips were a cupid’s bow of pink rosebud and yet something about them appeared unyielding.
Mr. Black glanced up, suddenly aware that the woman was studying him with the same intensity.
He smiled. Not to be friendly. And he could tell from the narrowing of her eyes, and the slight tremor in the soft square of skin between, that she understood.
Her eyes were as green and untrusting as a cat’s.
“If you don’t want coffee
—”
“I do,” said Mr. Black. “Black.”
The woman retrieved a fresh cup from the cupboard and filled it to within a hairline of the brim. Despite its fullness, none of the coffee spilled over the lip when she placed the cup in front of him.
A challenge?
Mr. Black lifted the cup to his lips and took a long sip. He didn’t spill a drop either.
The woman filled Gallagher’s cup before returning the pot to its burner.
“Leave us,” said Gallagher.
The woman hesitated.
“I was hoping to—”
“Later!”
Gallagher’s lips curled and he made a noise in the back of his throat that reminded Mr. Black of a feral dog that had attacked them during a mission in the sand. The dog had sprang from nowhere and savagely ripped out Corporal Penner’s throat before Mr. Black had done the same to it.
The woman left the room with her head hung low once more.
Mr. Black raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I don’t know,” said Gallagher irritably. “She keeps moaning on. The sooner I get rid, the better.”
Mr. Black sipped his coffee, his gaze drifting across the table.
Something was missing
.
He glanced over to the sink. The brown package was there. He had watched the woman move it and sensed her concern over the uncomfortable feel of what lay within.
He hadn’t noticed her pocket Desmond’s phone.
Her hands had been steady.
She wasn’t scared.
She was cunning.
CHAPTER 51
Laurel rushed into the room, her eyes wide with alarm. Wallace sat on the edge of the couch, his back hunched, wiping a sheen of cold sweat off his brow.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I heard a scream.”
Wallace looked up. “Yeah, sorry. Bad dream.”
“Your wife and sons?”
Wallace shrugged. “That was part of it.”
“It’ll be the stress,” said Laurel. “It digs up our darkest stuff.”
“And it does a damn skilled job, too.” Wallace sighed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “You find out anything?”
“Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I got what I could.”
ON THE
kitchen table, Laurel spread out five sheets of paper fresh from the printer. Each one showed a grainy black and white mugshot of a former Marine, along with discharge dates and other relevant details.
She slid one of the print-outs to the side. It showed the border guard they had left tied up in his condo.
“That’s Desmond Morris,” she said. “We already know his story. He was part of the three-man unit that went rogue.”
She slid a second sheet to the same side. It showed a young man with a head so round it could have been a soccer ball. “Michael Shepherd, explosives expert. He also went rogue, but my contact says he died on a construction site in New Jersey six months ago. The official investigation ruled it an accidental detonation during a demolition, but my contact says he wouldn’t be surprised if Shepherd triggered it on purpose. He took the discharge hard.”
Laurel slid a third sheet over to join the other two. The man’s face was so densely black, and the quality of the print-out so poor, it was difficult to make out anything but the whites of his eyes.
“Tennyson Bone was the third member of the rogue unit and, from all accounts, its instigator. His list of confirmed kills is impressive, although I’m told that’s not the whole story. My source tells me they shouldn’t have cut this one loose. He even scares the generals.”
Wallace pulled the sheet closer to him and took a hard look. “This could be the man who showed up at the guard’s house. Does he live around here?”
“His address is listed as Chicago, but mail has been bouncing back to the Corps. They have no idea where he is.”
Laurel pointed to the two remaining print-outs.
“These are the Marines who were rescued. On the left is Lance Corporal James Ronson. He was the communications specialist. More geek than killer, but incredibly essential. Without him, your unit is deaf, dumb and blind. He would have made a prize catch for al Qaeda.” She paused. “On the right is the unit’s leader, Sergeant Douglas Gallagher. He would have taken his capture as a personal insult. From what I could gather, he sounds like the type of man who would save the last bullet for himself rather than be taken alive.”
“Why were those two kicked out of the Corps?” asked Wallace. “They couldn’t have disobeyed orders if they were being held prisoner.”
“It’s what happened after,” said Laurel. “The part that didn’t make the newspaper.”
“Which was?”
“My contact says everything is sealed away, but he skimmed the reports before they were buried.” She grinned. “The generals treat him like a butler, but there’s not much he doesn’t see or hear. During and following the rescue, unofficial estimates put the number of dead in the encampment at close to fifty. Unfortunately, not all of them were combatants.”
“What does that mean?” asked Wallace.
“They went on a killing spree and it didn’t matter who crossed their path. If you weren’t a Marine, you were dead. Men, women, children, even livestock was slaughtered. My source estimated that less than a dozen of those killed were al Qaeda. There is no official estimate since some of the bodies were rigged with explosives to take out anybody who tried to move them later.”
“Christ,” said Wallace. “They pissed off the wrong Marines.”
“Nobody would weep for the insurgents,” said Laurel, “but the villagers don’t have a choice. Most of them aren’t protecting al Qaeda because they want to. It’s purely a matter of survival.”
“And none of this made the papers,” said Wallace.
“Not a peep. If it did, those five men would never have been discharged. The Corps buried it fast and deep and as quietly as possible.”
Wallace moved the five sheets of paper around. He placed the dead man and the guard to one side. They didn’t have a current address for the black man, but Wallace was now sure he had to have been the one with the gun at the foot of the stairs.
He tapped the print-out of Lance Corporal James Ronson.
“J. Ronson,” he said. “He created the fake photo.”
“Looks like it,” said Laurel.
“But Gallagher’s the unit leader? The one they’re all loyal to?”
Laurel nodded. “Does
his
name mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
“Nothing,” said Wallace. “I wish to hell it did.” He sighed wearily. “Do we have an address for either of these two?”
“Sergeant Gallagher has a post-office box. It’s in Washington state, so we know he’s nearby. I’m still trying to track down a residential address. It must be rural.”
“And the geek?”
“Less than five miles away. He inherited a house from his parents in Happy Valley, but my contact says he’s pretty messed up. If he hadn’t been kicked out with the others, he likely would have been eased out on a medical discharge.”
Wallace bristled. “I need to fill in the gaps and find out where Alicia and my boys are. This geek’s involved and he may be an easier nut to crack than the guard.”
“Not necessarily,” said Laurel. “He was being held by al Qaeda. My contact says both he and Gallagher were tortured — quite brutally.”
“Then he’ll be softened up,” snapped Wallace.
He pushed back from the table, his features sharpened by an angry scowl. He scanned the table and picked up the hammer and chisel that Laurel had used to open the metal box.
“This time,” Wallace said angrily, “I’ll do more than bruise bones. And if he still doesn’t talk, I’ll carve out his fucking heart.”
CHAPTER 52
Mr. Black excused himself from the table and headed to the lone bathroom off a narrow corridor at the rear of the house. He passed through the living room with its large picture windows positioned to take advantage of the view.
A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace dominated one corner of the open area and gave prominence to a polished redwood mantle where a silver-framed photograph showed a smiling woman and a beautiful baby girl. The photo was black and white, but both females shared the same large, baby-seal eyes.
Before the hallway, a wide open-riser staircase traveled nowhere, its climb blocked by an oversized trapdoor in the ceiling above. The hinged door was made of rough, unpainted plywood and secured with a padlock.
Mr. Black walked around the stairs to reach the bathroom. He knocked on the door.
A sharp intake of breath from inside was followed by the sounds of frantic shuffling.
Mr. Black leaned against the jamb. Calm. Relaxed. A visiting shadow. Player of games. Nothing more.
“That phone won’t work,” he said through the door. “The keypad is secured by a password. Pain, really. I prefer biometrics, myself.”
The woman didn’t answer.
Mr. Black thought about the phone, about what the woman could do with it. Without the password, she couldn’t dial out, send email or texts. She could access some of the applications, but a GPS module or police scanner wouldn’t do her much good trapped in a bathroom.
He hesitated.
The phone had a browser for the Internet. It used a touchscreen keyboard, which was separate from the keypad. The virtual keyboard wasn’t secured.
Mr. Black stepped back and kicked open the door. It didn’t take much.
The woman sat on the toilet with the phone in her hand.
No pretense. No apology.
Mr. Black snatched the phone away from her and glanced at the screen. It showed the keypad, locked and useless.
The disappointment was etched on her face despite a defiant attempt at concealment.
“Worth a try,” said Mr. Black. “But Gallagher is the paranoid sort.”
The woman flicked her hair to one side and glared at him. Her long neck was mottled in bruises the shape of fat fingers. Two heavy thumbs formed a V directly over her windpipe. The bruising was deep.
She nervously flicked her hair back to cover the marks, but as she did so, Mr. Black noticed her arms. Dark purple and yellow bruises ran the length of them, made more prominent by her fair, lightly freckled skin.
She had struggled, but her enemy had superior strength and a depth of cruelty non-combatants could never fully understand — until it was too late.
“Why are you alive?” asked Mr. Black.
The woman’s eyes widened in horror as if the thought of her demise hadn’t entered her mind. Or if it had, she buried it, pretending it wasn’t the only outcome one could possibly come to.
Curious
.
Gallagher called from the kitchen. “What you doing, Bone? It’s turning dark out there. We have to go.”
Mr. Black cocked an ear. There was a slipperiness to Gallagher’s words as though he had taken Mr. Black’s short absence as an excuse to quickly lubricate his tonsils.
In the sand, Gallagher would have crippled a soldier for less. This wasn’t the same leader who could stare deep into a troubled man’s heart and see the misaligned cogs within the feral machine.
Mr. Black slipped the extra cellphone into his pocket and turned his back. As he walked away, the woman’s bravado crumbled and she wept into her hands. She tried to be quiet, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of her defeat.
She didn’t.
There was no satisfaction simply because he didn’t care. In his mind, she was just another ghost.
AT THE
rear door, Gallagher was breathing heavy as he bent over to pull on a tall pair of rubber boots. When he looked up again, his eyes were noticeably bloodshot.
“You got boots?” he snarled.
“I’m fine,” said Mr. Black.
“This shit is worse than the sand. It sticks to everything and hardens like cement. Fucking rains all the time, too.”
“We should go to Africa,” said Mr. Black. “Money to be made with our skills.”
Gallagher scowled and held up his mutilated hand. “You think anyone would hire this?”
“You can still shoot,” said Mr. Black. “They missed the most important finger, remember?”
Gallagher grinned and lifted a metal flask from his back pocket. He unscrewed the top and held it up.
“Ffucking ffuckers,” he toasted before taking a deep swallow.
Mr. Black bristled as his former sergeant returned the flask to his pocket. He understood the need for any soldier to unleash the dark shadow within. And although he found his release in other ways, he had spent many a dark night watching over the sergeant and his flock as they lost their minds to alcohol and opium.
On duty, however, he would rather slit their throats than serve beside them. That was a line drawn in the sand, and served up one night in graphic detail, by Sgt. Douglas Gallagher.
How could such a lesson be forgotten by its own teacher?
“You comin’?”
Without a backward glance, Gallagher tugged on a battered oilskin hat and threw open the kitchen door. He staggered down the wooden stairs and squelched noisily into the mud.
Reluctantly, Mr. Black followed.
Dark, rain-filled clouds drooped low enough to make both men subconsciously hunch their shoulders as they walked deeper into the clearing behind the house. Beyond the mud, on a small grassy knoll, they came to a circular stone well.
Hand-built with thick mortar and rough-hewn stone, the well looked like the kind of postcard-friendly attraction that tourists dropped coins into in exchange for false hope and imagined blessings.
“It’s fed by a mountain stream,” said Gallagher. “Runs clear most of the year, but it can get blocked and full of silt sometimes. When I first bought the land, we drank straight out of the bucket. Then, one spring we got sick with fucking Giardiasis.”
Gallagher laughed. Throaty. Coarse. “Beaver Fever they call it here. You should have seen us. This was before Katie was born, mind you, which was a blessing. One bathroom and there’s the two of us with stuff pouring out either end. I thought we were going to die and one of you lot, or a bloody MP, would eventually find our dehydrated husks curled up together on the bathroom floor.”
He shook his head with exaggerated force. “It wasn’t fun at the time, but when you go through something like that, it can bring you closer together as a couple, you know? Kinda like the Corps. Sometimes you have to fall into hell to discover how quickly your friends are willing to rush in and pull you back out.”
Gallagher tried to laugh away the darkness that had entered his voice. He covered it with a quip. “I’d rather take on a whole platoon of ragheads than endure it again.”
Bending down, Gallagher grabbed hold of a rusted iron handle bolted in the middle of a large circular stone lid.
“I sealed it off after that,” he said. “Give me a hand.”
Together, the two men pulled the lid aside.
Gallagher switched on a flashlight and pointed it straight down into the deep, dark hole.
Mr. Black leaned forward and stared into the abyss. The water level was high and for a spine-tingling moment he wondered if he had carelessly allowed himself to be delivered to the edge of his own grave.
Wallace had slipped through his grasp. Desmond had already paid a price. What more fitting reprimand could there be than a bullet to the back of the head?
Mr. Black turned slowly to peer over his shoulder. Not willing to go peacefully, his hand was already reaching for the knife on his belt.
But Gallagher wasn’t staring back from behind the cocked hammer of his Desert Eagle.
Instead, his gaze was completely focused on the depths of the well, and from his disappointed expression, whatever he had expected to find down there was missing.