Authors: Grant McKenzie
CHAPTER
61
The white Yukon pulled off to one side of the road and stopped below the crest of the hill.
With the engine idling, Wallace turned around in his chair to face Crow. “You ready for this?”
Crow’s eyes remained hard, but his lips twitched as he answered. “Nope.”
Wallace returned the frail smile, knowing his friend was trying to ease the tension, but still . . .
“If you want to turn around and go home, I won’t stand in your way. You know that right? You’ve already done more than I could ever ask.”
Crow’s smile vanished and a spark of anger flashed in his eyes. “Don’t even go there. Those boys have always known that if they get into trouble and can’t go to you, they come to me. What kind of godfather would I be if I didn’t live up to that promise now? I’ve seen up close exactly what you’re up against. You need me and I’m in it ’til the end, you hear?”
Wallace choked back a wave of emotion and simply nodded his appreciation. Now wasn’t the time.
“OK,” he said. “We have to make sure my family is here. If they are, maybe we can arrange an exchange.” He indicated Ronson. “Him for Alicia and the boys.”
Crow raised an eyebrow. “You think he has value?”
Wallace shrugged. “His friends threw their careers away to rescue him once before.”
“Not just me, though,” Ronson piped up nervously. “If Sergeant Gallagher hadn’t been with me, I don’t know if they would’ve bothered.”
“What about Semper Fi?” said Wallace.
Ronson smirked. “Some people think that kind of loyalty comes sewn onto the uniform. It doesn’t. It’s earned. In the sand, Bone was Gallagher’s pet, but I knew he always looked at me as just another morsel waiting to be chewed up and buried.”
“Let’s hope you’re wrong,” said Wallace.
Ronson shrugged. “Do what you gotta do, man, but just remember, they’re killers. And from what you’ve told me, you’re not.”
THE LONE
white SUV rolled over the crest of the hill and bounced along a rutted path to enter the clearing.
Staring at the unfinished house in the center of the muddy yard, Wallace wondered how the scariest/stupidest/bravest thing he had ever done in his life had ended up saving the lives of two strangers while placing his own family in such peril.
It didn’t make sense.
He had risked everything to climb out that bus window, and this was his reward?
He swallowed and felt guilty. There he went again, thinking life owed him. This wasn’t about reward, or punishment, or even about him. This was about Alicia and the boys.
After the accident, he should have embraced life more, embraced his family. If he had paid more attention, been a better husband, a better father, perhaps . . .
Light blinded him as a bank of security lights snapped to life on every wall of the house. The powerful high-intensity beams created a perimeter of at least sixty to seventy feet around the entire house, illuminating every rock and weed in its path. Anyone attempting to sneak across the clearing would have been exposed instantly.
Crow tensed in the back seat beside Ronson. The only sound was the sucking squelch of fresh mud under the tires, a patter of rain on the windshield and roof, and the hard, steady breathing of three nervous men.
Wallace kept the wheels rolling through the encroaching dusk toward the light.
Slowly.
Steadily.
With sweat beading his upper lip, Wallace glanced in the rearview mirror at Ronson.
“You’re sure there isn’t any way to contact them? Let Gallagher know that I want to talk?”
“Landlines and cellphones can be monitored and tracked,” said Ronson. “Gallagher had me build three secure phones. Real beauties, custom software, the works. They can call out to anywhere, but only receive calls and texts from each other.”
“You sure there’s only three?” said Crow.
Ronson shrugged. “If I did build a fourth, I don’t have it with me. Same difference, right?”
The vehicle’s broad monochromatic nose breached the outermost shell of artificial light as though passing through a clear, insubstantial curtain—
The ground erupted and the SUV bucked as the night air was torn asunder around them.
Automatic gunfire sprayed from the house, sending a Kamikaze horde of steel-jacketed slugs to cripple the vehicle.
Metal puckered and buckled, rubber and plastic blew apart, headlights exploded and the radiator hissed and screamed as if in agony.
Wallace threw himself flat across the front seats as the windshield shattered, spraying his back with blunt pebbles of glass.
The noise was deafening as the vehicle seemed to disintegrate before his eyes and death whizzed past his head.
Wallace reached up and yanked on the wheel in an attempt to turn away, but the front tires shredded into useless strips and the metal rims sunk into the mud. When the engine stalled, the steering wheel went stiff and unresponsive in his hands before locking up completely.
Wallace kicked on the parking brake to prevent the vehicle from rolling closer to the house. If it wasn’t for the solid density of the Yukon’s massive V8 engine, Wallace knew everyone in the cab would already be dead.
Alive, he couldn’t get over the noise. Every bullet made him flinch and there seemed to be an unending stream. He knew the expression “nerves shot to hell”, but had never fully understood it until now. How soldiers kept their wits together conflict after conflict, he didn’t know.
When the shooting finally stopped, Wallace lifted his head and peered over the lip of the riddled dash.
Steam billowed from uncountable holes stitched across the dying vehicle’s long hood. The hot mist momentarily blocked his view, but it also blinded the shooter.
“Told you he was paranoid,” said Ronson.
Wallace tried to hold it inside, but couldn’t. He slammed a fist into what remained of the dashboard and released an agonized wail. He had needed to hear his own voice, to reassure himself he was still alive. His ears rang, but he wasn’t yet deaf.
“I know how you feel.” Crow’s voice was hoarse and crumbling at the edge. He sat up and shook pieces of glass and plastic from his hair. “What the fuck was that?”
“A warning,” said Ronson dryly. “If they wanted you dead, you would be. Wouldn’t surprise me if Gallagher had an RPG in there. Take out this vehicle in a heartbeat.”
“It didn’t feel like a fucking warning,” Wallace snarled.
With a vicious kick, he forced open his door.
He waited, expecting more gunfire, but none came.
Despite the reprieve, Wallace didn’t exit.
“Get him ready,” he said to Crow.
As Crow worked on Ronson, Wallace scrambled between the seats to join them. He pushed open the passenger door directly behind the driver’s to create a buffer of two doors between him and the house.
After taking a deep breath to control the panic that filled his chest like a mass of expanding foam, Wallace turned to Ronson. Despite his seasoned bravado, Wallace knew the former Marine had to be just as scared as they were.
“You ready for introductions?” he asked.
Ronson couldn’t nod or shake since Crow held his head rock solid, one of the shotguns attached to his right temple with thick bands of duct tape. Before he could voice his answer, Crow sealed a fresh band of industrial gray tape across his mouth.
“He talks too much,” said Crow.
Wallace took another deep, calming breath and nodded. “OK, let’s do this.”
Wallace took a tentative step outside, keeping his head low to stay out of sight behind the door.
Inside the vehicle, Crow pushed on the gun’s barrel, forcing Ronson to scuttle over in the seat and join Wallace outside.
Crow handed off the gun to Wallace.
“Be careful,” he said. Then to Ronson, “Don’t even think about it. Putting you down is the easiest and smartest thing we could do.”
Crow picked up the second shotgun and chambered a round. Wallace flinched reflexively; Ronson didn’t. His eyes had already taken on a hundred-yard stare.
Slowly, Wallace pushed Ronson out into the open beyond the doors.
After another deep breath, he shouted toward the house. “My name is Wallace Carver. I’ve come for my family and I’m willing to make an exchange.”
CHAPTER
62
Inside the house, Alicia lifted her head at the sound of her husband’s voice and released an astonished cry of joy. The unrelenting gunfire in the confines of the tiny kitchen had sounded like the end of the world, but she never imagined for a moment it was Wallace being shot at.
Despite everything she had said, those goading words of defiance, she never actually believed that Wallace would find her.
How could he? She didn’t even know where she was. The creep had used a woman’s profile to befriend her on the Internet and she had unknowingly given him everything, every detail that he needed to snatch her and her boys from the Bellingham mall.
Wallace didn’t even use the computer, had no interest in it, but she had hoped beyond hope that someone — a
real
friend — would read her urgent S.O.S. and get a message to the authorities.
Alex and Fred, however, never shared her doubts. Even in the cloying darkness of the well, when the man had come to separate her from her children with false promises and rough hands, when Alicia thought her screams would led to madness, the boys never stopped believing. To them, their father
— the man who could wrestle them both at once; snap his fingers and whistle; and drive an enormous transit bus — had always been a hero.
Upon hearing his voice, they instantly began screaming in unison. “Dad! Daddy! Dad!”
“Shut them up,” shouted Gallagher.
He turned from the window and snapped a fresh magazine into a lethal-looking automatic weapon, black steel designed by a madman for one reason and one reason only: massive carnage.
He pointed the weapon at the boys, but Alicia immediately rose to her feet and stepped in front of them.
“It’s over,” she said. “Why don’t you just let us go?”
“I can’t do that,” said Gallagher.
Alicia firmed her jaw. “We won’t tell the cops. We won’t tell anyone. We just want to go home.”
Gallagher tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work.
“Your husband is a piece of work. He’s got a shotgun fastened to the side of my soldier’s head. How the fuck does a bus driver get the balls to do that?”
“He loves his sons,” said Alicia proudly. “What father would do any less?”
Gallagher’s upper lip curled into a sneer.
“I’ve killed lots of fathers and lots of sons. Your man is nothing special.”
Alicia swallowed and her eyes softened as she squeezed the shoulders of her sons. “Maybe not to you, but he means the world to us.”
Gallagher glared at her and turned to his companion. “Lock them in the bathroom ’til this is sorted.”
Alicia considered defying him, but there was something fiercely unsettling about the black man’s demeanor that stifled any rebellion. She grabbed her boys and hustled them out of the room.
MR. BLACK
closed the bathroom door behind the woman and her two children. The door hung loose on its hinges from when he had kicked it in earlier and he didn’t see a way to lock it from the outside.
Instead, he removed a spare cartridge from his pocket and pressed his forehead to the hollow door.
With careful aim, he dropped the shell onto the fringe of hard tile that peeked out from under the door. The brass pinged beautifully.
“That was the pin to a fragmentation grenade,” he said through the door. “If you try to open this door, it will explode. Neither you nor your children will survive. Do you understand?”
He heard a frightened whimper from inside.
He repeated, “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
“Good.”
MR. BLACK
returned to the kitchen where a canvas bag filled with weapons and ammunition had been dragged out of a cupboard and unceremoniously dumped on the table.
Gallagher knelt by the open window, still cradling his favored M4 assault rifle. A crude but effective weapon capable of firing 950 rounds per minute, the M4 was a solid choice for close-range work. And although it suffered from an annoyingly inferior ballistic performance beyond three hundred yards, Mr. Black had found it rarely let him down when a high body count was the main objective.
Mr. Black studied the remaining weapons cache and selected a M39 Enhanced Marksman Rifle with an attached Leupold Mark 4 scope. He flashed Gallagher a look of annoyance. The M39 was not the sort of weapon one normally dumped in a canvas bag and hid in a kitchen cupboard.
Gallagher didn’t notice Mr. Black’s scorn. He was too busy peering out the window at the puzzling scene beyond as the bus driver continued to plead for contact while threatening the broken shell of what was left of Ronson.
Not that Ronson had ever been much of a Marine. He was the kind of bleating modern soldier who preferred to kill anonymously from the safety of a monitor and joystick than to meet his enemy face to face.
And if that was the military’s future, Mr. Black was glad to be out.
With reverence, he carried the rifle to an adjacent window beside Gallagher and peered through the scope.
The range was ridiculously short for such a weapon. He quickly dialed down the scope to 8X magnification, but even then he could still select which sweat-glistening pore or blackhead he wanted to plug.
The bus driver was attempting to shield himself behind the vehicle’s open doors, but tempered glass and lightweight aluminum wasn’t much of an obstacle for a 170-grain bullet moving at 2,837 feet per second.
He moved the scope to the left and caught sight of the second man huddled behind the front seats. He frowned. This man shouldn’t be here and there was no possible way that he had been the one who knocked him out at Desmond’s condo.
Were there others?
Mr. Black quickly surveyed the surrounding area through the scope. He didn’t see anyone else, but suddenly he no longer felt as comfortable with his situation. His instinct for self-preservation was tingling.
“The second man is Crow,” he told Gallagher. “Wallace’s bus driver friend.”
“How the fuck did they find us?” Gallagher glared at Mr. Black. “You said Desmond didn’t talk.”
Mr. Black shrugged. “I believed him. That was a mistake.”
Gallagher’s face paled. “You talked to Desmond? He was alive when you got there?”
Mr. Black smiled thinly. “For a short while.”
“Christ, did you even try to call an ambulance?”
“He died in my arms,” said Mr. Black. “He couldn’t be saved. Besides,” he nodded out the window at the white SUV, “he obviously couldn’t be trusted either.”
Gallagher snarled. “He saved my life.”
Mr. Black flared his nostrils in anger. “I saved your goddamn life. Desmond was little more than a pack mule.” Before Gallagher could respond, Mr. Black stabbed his chin out the window again. “Are you going to talk to Wallace?”
Gallagher licked his lips and looked away. “Don’t know yet,” he said. “Hate to give the fucker false hope.”
“Fine.”
Mr. Black returned to the scope, selected his target and
—
Squeezed the trigger
.
At the edge of light and shadow, a fountain of blood blossomed like an exploding poppy.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Gallagher. “What did you do that for?”
“Time to end his misery,” said Mr. Black calmly. “As you pointed out, why give him false hope?”