Relentless (Elisabeth Reinhardt Book 1) (17 page)

Huge snowflakes fell softly to earth, transforming the dense forest into a pure white tapestry. Snow had been falling for over eight hours, inch by inch it rendered their world unrecognizable. The air was bitter cold, pure, muted and silent. Jake slouched on the couch staring out the window. He had always loved snow. Loved looking at it! Smelling it!
Feeling it! It calmed him down. ‘Must be three feet of snow out there,’ he thought, ‘and it’s going to snow all night!’ His fingers moved automatically up and down the piece of wood he held in his hands. He’d been wheedling for hours now. Carving the surface of the wood, he watched features and details emerge under his knife. Wood chips were flung off the edge of the knife littering his clothes, the sofa and forming uneven layers on the floor. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to clean it up! He looked down at his creation. Almost done, he thought….nearly perfect! He ran his fingers along the statue’s surface feeling for bumps or grooves smoothing them with his knife’s edge. ‘I could have been an artist,’ he thought, ‘like that Michel Angel guy from Italy.’ He admired the delicate wooden face in his hands; studied it with interest. Without warning he jerked his knife up and stabbed it in its little face, dragging the blade along the cheek toward the mouth. His lip curled into his characteristic snarl. “Now,” he said with satisfaction, “now I’m done!” He tossed the statue over his shoulder onto the growing pile of carved female statues lying in disarray in the corner. “Yep,” he thought, “my Reggie collection is growing and I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.” He chuckled as he picked up another chunk of wood and slouched further down on the couch.

In a Chicago
Dojang, Gina had worked up a sweat in her TaeKwonDo class. Her arms and legs flew as she spun across the mats completing series of roundhouse kicks. She moved and kicked with the determination of a black belt. During this hour long class she had a complete workout; she sharpened her stances, blocks and strikes with speed and balance. She felt pleased with herself as she dried off and pulled her coat over her shoulders.

Gil grinned at her as she opened the
car door and said, “Hey, I’d hate to meet you in a dark alley, girl! You’re hard core!”

Gina laughed and asked “Where to Boss?”

“Let’s grab something to eat and go over some ‘home invasion’ videos I want you to review. You need to take your self-defense techniques to the next level and be prepared for anything these freaks may throw at you.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Gina said, “How about Ruby Tuesday’s they’re close and pretty fast.”

Custer stood at the stove, cooking rice and beans. A honey glazed ham had been baking all morning. He’d been keeping himself busy in the small kitchen trying to avoid Jake and Slim. He looked out at the deep snow and thought about how completely isolated they were. On the one hand, he was glad about that. The cops would never find them in this snow.  But on the other hand, he was trapped in this cabin with those two maniacs he used to call his friends. ‘They really hate each other,’ he thought. He didn’t know who would kill who, and he told himself he didn’t care as long as it wasn’t him! So he stayed out of the way. He cooked whatever he could find, thinking they’d be less irritable if their stomachs were full. When he wasn’t cooking he would clean up the place. He tried to anticipate them. Figure out what would piss them off or what they would want next. Before the big snow came, he had gone back down the mountain and bought enough food to last about a month. He loved that trip. Alone in the car! Shopping without pressure, it was so nice. ‘What a life it would be if only I could be alone,’ he thought. He decided he would cook one big meal every day. Since the cabin had a freezer, he bought lots of meats to roast. They were in better spirits when they ate home-cooked food and lots of it. Plus it kept him busy and out of their way. He was grateful that his Mom had taught him these homey skills. Without them, he’d be screwed. He missed his Mom and wished he could see her. Although he had not seen her for years, he decided the next chance he had he’d go visit, or at least call her. She must be worried about him. He was often out alone without Jake and Slim since he was the one who did the shopping and such. Those were the best times. They trusted him to do that alone. ‘The next chance I get, I’m going to call my Mom,’ Custer thought, ‘maybe even my brothers.’ All the times Jake dragged them back to Hurricane looking for Reggie and stopped in to see the Raines family, he could have gone to see his Mom. ‘Why didn’t I go see her,’ he wondered, ‘why did I stay with Slim and Jake? That’s just stupid. What kind of jerk am I? I should be able to see my own mother without getting permission from these two guys.’ As he thought about it now, life at home hadn’t been so bad really. Those beatings his brothers gave him weren’t really all that bad and his Mom had been a really good cook. He glanced over at Jake carving another wooden statue. ‘That guy is completely bonkers’ he thought for the thousandth time watching him grin and chop away on that wood. ‘Why am I still following him around? I could stop anytime, go home and get a job somewhere. Maybe I could get a job as a cook in a little restaurant somewhere? Jake says I’m a really good cook. Maybe Gus would hire me. Gus’s Diner is a pretty good restaurant,’ Custer thought. It was right there in the heart of Hurricane and they had really good meatloaf on Tuesday. It was their special. Custer liked all their specials, but the roast chicken was his favorite. ‘Next time I go to Gus’s,’ he thought, ‘I’ll get two orders of that chicken.’

‘Yep,’ Custer decided, ‘I think I’ll go back to Hurricane. It’s time to get away from Jake. He
was always been a little ‘nuts’ when it came to Reggie and those other girls he killed, but he used to think about other things.’ Jake had been a pretty good gang leader, keeping them flush and on the move, planning their ‘jobs’ and keeping them out of jail. But not anymore, now he’s just dangerous. His Mom used to say ‘all good things come to an end,’ and he supposed this was one of those things. He wondered what kind of ‘good things’ his mother was thinking about when she said that. He never saw any good things come to her. Never saw anything good that he could remember. And this mess, well Custer couldn’t imagine how all of this was going to play out. He worried they’d run out of food up here and he’d have nothing to cook and they’d kill him ‘cause he hadn’t gotten enough food.’ He guessed he could go out and shoot something for them to eat, but he really didn’t want to do that. He didn’t like killing stuff and besides it was really cold out there.

It was Gina’
s turn at the punching bag and she was getting a good rhythm going, a steady hit, hit, pause, hit, hit, pause as the bag banged back and forth. Sweating in her razorback tank and shorts she had sped through her self-defense routine, tumbling, turning and evading, practicing her moves on the large blue mat. Gil flattened her a few times but she was holding her own. Using her small size to advantage, she moved quickly ducking out of range then turning to trip or kick. She had a natural instinct, moving with speed and agility. She had laughed as Gil tackled her from behind and she flipped him onto the mat.

“I gave you that,” he mocked.

“Liar,” she teased. “I flipped you fair and square.”

She had helped him up and handed him a towel. As they
had dried off and drank from their water bottles, they reviewed the workout session. Gil, ever the instructor, pointed out her growing strengths and areas of vulnerability he had noticed.

“You need to watch your left side,” he
told her “you let your left down and aren’t fast enough to pick up movement when it comes from the left. Lots of right-handed people are like that, they favor their dominant side. You can’t afford to do that. I want you to use a right-eye patch at home maybe an hour every evening, just to make you use your left eye more and to get you to be more aware of this issue. You need to have eyes in all directions; you can’t miss anything ‘cause you can never tell when or where they’ll attack and you’ve got to be ready when they come.”             

Jake sat carving in front of the window. He knew the gang was changing and he didn’t like it. He had big plans and he needed three people to carry them out.  And now with the cops on their trail, they needed to stick together. They needed to play it cool and wait for the cops to lose interest or for their trail to cool off. They would lay low and stay put. They would only leave this hideaway when they needed food or beer. For now they had enough stuff and no one knew they were here and no one would be coming up that mountain for months. By then the cops would be off doing something else and they could continue their hunt. For some odd reason, Jake felt that he was getting close to his big goal. Reggie was out there, he could feel it. The sing-song refrain filled his mind again, “Come out come out wherever you are……” he sang to himself.

He lay back on his sofa and considered his options. When they left this place he was going to get some help. He’d need his gang and he’d need someone else. Smiling he thought about that. There were still some people out there he could count on, but for now he’d keep that to himself. No reason to get the troops all up in arms about it. Back in his twenties, he’d spent three years in the Pennsylvania State Correctional Facility in Greensburg for assault and battery. He had gotten into a bar fight and nearly killed a guy who was protecting his little blonde sweetheart. As he was being stuffed into the back of a police car, he yelled “Hope she’s worth it!” to the half-conscious guy on a stretcher being wheeled toward an ambulance.

His time in Green
sburg had been the only time Jake and his ‘gang’ had been separated. His cellmate for two of those years was a guy named Teddy Ruff. Teddy was a big guy of Irish descent. He had a freckled complexion and a shock of curly red hair that had earned him the nickname of ‘Ruff n Red-y’.  The nickname gave Jake a lot of opportunities for teasing. Teddy was in for some blue collar stuff like hacking and theft. Teddy had a lot of status on the cellblock. He had connections and clout. He was a ‘hacker’ and that was big time stuff. Everyone knew and respected Teddy and through him Jake. Jake would follow Teddy around and do his bidding. If someone needed to be ‘taught a lesson’ Jake would be ‘the teacher.’ He and Teddy would joke about them being a team, ‘the teacher and the hacker.’ They would call each other ‘TT or TH.’ They had gotten pretty tight in prison.

Through the years, they got together every so often, when Jake could get away from the gang.  Jake thought of Teddy as his secret weapon and Jake knew how to keep a secret. He never wanted his gang to know about Teddy. Teddy Ruff was a smart and talented guy and Jake wanted to keep him all to himself. Just outside of Ligonier, PA there was a Tavern called ‘THE SIT IN’. A small cork bulletin board hung
just inside the door. Town-folk posted notes there, ‘lost dogs,’ ‘wood for sale’, ‘carpenter wanted’ that kind of thing. ‘Let’s get a burger and beer,’ was their code and they signed using the initials ‘TT or TH.’ Their notes were always hand printed on old newspaper with the date of publication at the top of the page. They tacked their notes in the lower left hand side of the corkboard with the agreement that they would meet one month from the day on the paper and if no one showed, they bumped the meet to the following month. This wasn’t the most convenient arrangement for Jake, but he managed to swing by the Tavern every month or so to see if there was a note from Teddy Ruff. Teddy lived in the area, so stopping by to check for a note was no big deal for him. They decided this was the safest way to stay in touch. They would only use their cell phones when absolutely necessary. When word of the killings hit the news, Teddy knew immediately that Jake was the killer. Jake was a hothead with blood-lust. While Teddy didn’t approve of the killings, they had been cellmates and loyalty was loyalty. That is until it wasn’t.

Jake had done Teddy a favor about 6 months back. Some guy had been hassling him to do a certain job Teddy didn’t want to do. He told Jake, “These are just not the type of people I want to get involved with, understand?”

”Sure,” said Jake, “they the mob?”

“Sort of,” Teddy said vaguely.  Jake raised his scarred eyebrow and Teddy continued,
“He’s a ‘made’ guy with a Philly connection, trying to set something up around this area.”

“What’s he want with you?” Jake asked.

“Wants some computer stuff done, you know the kind of stuff I do,” Teddy replied.

“Want me to whack him for you?” Jake grinned pleased with
his ‘mob-speak’.

“Nah, just rough him up a little, that should do it,” Teddy
replied grinning at Jake’s little joke. “I don’t want nothing too serious or the whole family will be after me.”

“You got it, Teddy. What are friends for?” Jake nodded and took the paper Teddy passed across the table.
Remembering that conversation, he grinned and poked the small wooden statue in the stomach with his knife.

Glares hot as laser beams shot at him from the dirty mattress across the room. Slim lay still as death curled under a heap of blankets plotting his revenge. He was expressionless. He laid completely still save for his eyes, fixed and hateful, a coiled cobra waiting to strike. As
wood chips flicked, his plans unfolded. Although he was nearly recovered from the beating, in his mind those blows were still coming. He kept reliving the shock, pain and betrayal he felt in that Asheville Days Inn. Technicolor replays of the attack cycled through his mind; blood spewing from his lip, pain surging through his body, Jake screaming and kicking him, Custer helping him into the bathroom. He never thought about what he had done to make Jake so mad; how many mistakes he had made bringing the cops to their doorway. In his mind the attack was unprovoked; he was an innocent victim just like all of Jake’s other victims. In that instant, Jake morphed into his
nemesis
and he morphed into an
innocent victim
.  He had justice on his side, like Batman. ‘It’s just a matter of time,’ he thought, ‘til I take him down.’ Slim played out dozens and dozens of scenarios as he lay there, but each time he thought about getting close enough to kill Jake, his fear kicked in. He could feel himself start to shake and the ‘film’ from the hotel room scene would start playing in his mind. Slim had never felt like this before. Sure he’d been in fights before, even with Jake, but this was different. This time he’d nearly died. Jake hated him enough to kill him. ‘My best bud,’ he thought sarcastically, ‘friends since we met up in Juvie.’ He remembered all the fun they had together, breaking street lights, shop lifting, drinking, robbing stores. They sure had a good time together. Even the ‘girl stuff’ had been fun for a while, til Jake started killing them. Jake was a problem.