R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (20 page)

Garvey had installed under-lighting strategically throughout the house. It provided a low-key, ambient light to make your way around at night and see shapes just fine, but did not emanate at all through the one-way glass windows.

“Orders, boss?”

“Whoever it is, they’re still a minute or two away. They stopped when they realized they couldn’t stealth us in a vehicle. They can’t see in at night through the windows Bum installed. We could turn on the lights and have a party—they are specially polarized, like sunglasses.

“Melissa and I will go to the front of the cabin. You take the rear. There is at least one large window and two turret-sized, shoulder-level windows on every wall. The turrets slide open—flip the latch if you need to. The view of the road and anything or anybody is outstanding. There is nothing but fifty feet of open ground from the tree line to the fence, three hundred and sixty degrees and as soon as the motion-detectors are tripped, it’ll be daylight out there. The panel here will show us the area of any motion and bring up the video surveillance for that part of the compound.

“Alternatively we’ve also got the video surveillance room where every inch of the grounds are covered at all times. I think our best move is to identify our visitors and decide the next course of action once the threat is identified.”

“Agreed,” said Manny.

Melissa nodded, her face a sheet of blankness.

“Em,” I said. “Me and you, baby. I go, you go. Hip to hip, okay?”

She nodded again, this time more confidently.

We took our places and waited impatiently for the show.

After about twenty minutes we could hear the sound of the vehicle crunching the gravel, the driver clearly having given up the clandestine approach. I assumed the twenty minutes equaled the formulation of a new plan. That plan was Bum Garvey’s Forerunner pulling fully up to the front gate. All the lights came on, but Bum’s windows were heavily tinted. I could not make out the driver but he was not as large as Bum, who went a solid six foot-four.

The driver reached out and pressed the intercom. There was a pause before anyone said anything and then:

“Hello, brother.”

For the second time in my life the world dropped away from my feet, leaving me suspended in weightless disbelief.

RECKONING

What will you do

on the day of reckoning,

when disaster comes from afar?

To whom will you run for help?

Where will you leave your riches?

THERE ARE times in most people’s lives where they must face a truth that for whatever reason does not compute as logical or possible inside their own minds. Trauma that has been buried away in a victim’s mind many times presents itself (when it finally does) in this way. For example, rape victims that deny they have actually been assaulted sexually too often put the truly savage moments in a place so far inside themselves even
they
know not where to find it even did they desire to.

When, say, a year later, the memories kick down the door behind which they’ve been denied as truth—as factual reality—and demand their rightful place amongst all memories, good and bad, the return of the images is not unlike an out-of-body experience where the victim is watching a third person entirely. It can be that difficult to accept, much less comprehend.

Such return of the forgotten begins as unbelievable, unreasonable, a complete shock to the system, and more than anything, a life-altering revelation.

But what people find, eventually, is that it is none of these things.

It is a
reckoning
.

A bill come due.

A loss never accepted fully, but rather dismissed by the nervous system.

But whatever form in which it comes or what time of life it chooses, a reckoning is nothing less than a demand for the balancing of the scales of truth.

For some reason, some period of time, perhaps from a completely different lifetime, the unavoidable has finally come calling. Five, ten, or a hundred years, it really doesn’t matter. It has come, it has always
been
coming because the debt has always been owed and when the person on whom the weight of the universe has dropped finally regains clarity, the realization becomes clear.

I owe this.

It is mine to pay or the creditor’s to forgive, but the most terrifying realization (and comfort, strangely enough) is that there is
no more running
.

It is time.

“Hard to wrap your head around,” Jax spoke into the intercom. “I get that, I honestly do. And I’m sorry—I wish it could be under more intimate circumstances but, well brother, it’s not. I’m here for my possession and you’re soon going to understand that—all shock and family dismay aside—you do not have a choice in this matter.”

I reached over and pressed the green button. “My own surprise notwithstanding, you’ve gone delusional in your absence if you think you’re taking
anyone
away from this cabin.”

“Do you remember the last time you told me I was your best friend in the world?”

“Labor Day weekend, on the houseboat you rented at Lake Havasu. A long time ago—a long time before you died.”

“Well, setting aside your clearly mistaken assumption that I somehow perished, that’s exactly right. But you’ll be pleased as a peach pit to know I have your
true
best friend—the one you didn’t ignore for years on end—right here in the car with me.”

“Jax, don’t.” It was cliché; it would prove ineffectual; it bordered on silliness, but it was all I could say. Half my brain was terrified for my friend, Bum, but the other half—the ruthless one—was sending “all hands on deck” orders to the once dormant platoons of guilt bunked down inside my heart.

“Inspiring, Bobby. Truly so. But if you don’t open the gate and allow us entry, I am going to soak Agent Garvey here in water and use a rubber baton to press him against his own electrified fence. And if you turn off the juice, I’m going to douse the man in gasoline and have a little bonfire outside the gate. He’s unconscious, by the way. Drugs and a good old-fashioned police beat-down with a baton will do that to a fella.”

Manny was by then at my side. “We can’t let him in,” he said.

“But we can’t watch Bum fry. I have no compunction at all that he’ll do it and he’ll do it as he dances a Scottish jig.”

“Bum would want you to save the girl,” Manny said.

Melissa looked at me with that doe-eyed “you swore” look.

“Bum is the reason I’m taking the risk. I think we can still get out of here. And let me make something clear to
you, too
, partner: Em is never going back to the bad guys.
Never
. Not if it means sacrificing you, Manolo. You satisfied?”

“Sorry, boss.”

I punched in the code and the gate slowly slid open. Jax drove the Forerunner through the opening and toward my parked squad car. Halfway there, Jax’s window still down, he drove through an infrared beam and five holes in the driveway spewed Xenon gas from the ground beneath the truck.

Jax didn’t even get the window halfway back up before the Forerunner rolled left, down the sloped embankment, and crashed nearly harmlessly into a boulder.

“We’ve got about half-an hour. And since I had no idea if the gas would work on whatever Jax has become, I can’t even count on that. Em, you gather our things and grab every piece of armory I laid out on the kitchen in bags. Manny you and I will secure Jax ASAP. Then we load him in my car.”

We didn’t have to wait long to leave the front of the cabin as the Xenon dissipates quickly and naturally into the atmosphere after discharge. Melissa loaded the guns, ammo, and other sundries into the back of the Pathfinder while Manny and I handcuffed and bound Jax’s chest, legs, and ankles where he sat, in the driver’s seat, and then struggled to move him into the rear of the Crown Vic.

“Melissa and I will drive Jax to the FBI. I’ll call Amanda on the way and have her meet us there. I’m going to gamble on trusting her team. They can secure him and Melissa.”

“But you said you weren’t letting me leave your side,” Melissa said.

“Amanda is twice the cop I am,” I told her. “I’d trust her with my life. I
am
going to trust her with yours. Where I’m going, I can’t take you. I might as well take the fly to the spider, Em. You have to trust me. You’ll be safe with Special Agent Macaulay and her team.”

I hoped using Amanda’s name might help. From the look on Melissa’s face, it didn’t.

“You trust me, don’t you? That I’d never do anything I didn’t think was best for your safety?” I said.

Melissa nodded.

“This is what I believe will keep you safe.”

“Okay, Mac,” she said, a bit more confident than before. It would have to do.

“Manny. You get Bum to a hospital and then meet me at the parking garage we identified. You’re sure your friends will be there?”

“They’re not my friends,” he said, “but they’ll be there. Best back up in the city next to our brothers in blue.”

“Bum’s not going to be happy, staying behind. He’s going to wake up wanting to do things by the book.”

“I’ll tell them he needs a twenty-four hour psych eval,” Manny said.

“Nice. Time to jet.”

Manny nodded and jumped in the Forerunner. Melissa and I walked over to my unmarked, Jax still unconscious in the rear, doors locked, fortified steel between him and us.

“It scares me, riding with him,” Melissa said.

“Think of it this way: cops in the front seat, bad guys in the back.”

“Can I get a badge?”

I handed her mine. “You keep it safe for me, okay? Now it’s me trusting you.”

That
got me a smile.