At this point, I really didn’t care. These cockroaches were part of a criminal gang from before Rockfall, and I imagined they weren’t getting better behaved as times got tighter. My guess about their bathtub chemist struck a chord with Kyle, and he was eager to fill me in on the details of their hideaway.
“You got to give me your word, man, your word,” he stressed, then started coughing. “Your word that you’ll do right by our people. We was here because of that idjit Sherwood. No other reason.”
“My word,” I replied solemnly. “If you tell me how to talk your people out, we won’t harm a hair on their heads. Like I said, Padraig is wound really tight on security, but he doesn’t kill women and children, or non-combatants.”
At that last part, Kyle cast me a bleary, non-comprehending look.
“If you don’t point a gun at his people, Padraig is cool. But…”
“I got it,” Kyle mumbled, then proceeded to give me not only directions to the gang’s current hideout, but also passed on the names of some of the people inside. It wasn’t much, but I made sure the recorder on my phone got all the details. I also got him to tell me some about their previous operations, or at least, what he could recall.
As he spoke, Kyle visibly began to sag again, leaning over on his side like a junkie on the nod. Meth to keep you up and functioning, if not thinking clearly, but then eventually you need a touch of heroin or some other type of opiate, to unwind after being up for three day straight. This reminded me of users I’d seen, but I knew what ailed Kyle was something else entirely.
“Alright, Kyle, why don’t you take this for the pain,” I finally said, handing the dying man the tablet of Oxy I’d palmed earlier. In the dying light of the day, the criminal glanced at the pill, popped it in his mouth and dry-swallowed.
As the man drifted off, I reached down and unfastened the crude bandage wrapped around his thigh, breaking through the crust of coagulating blood and triggering a fresh stream of his life’s fluid out onto the soggy mud. I looked down and saw empty beer cans and assorted plastic trash littered the ground around us.
How long I stood there, staring down at the unconscious figure, I couldn’t rightly say, but when I heard Mike’s steps approaching me from behind, I noticed the last light was gone, and we were standing under the unsure illumination of a moon wreathed in cottony clouds. I started gathering up my gear and replacing my knives and most importantly, my cell phone. I figured I would need to ditch the thing after what I had recorded on it, but the information might prove useful to Sheriff Bastrop, if nothing else. Dying declaration, and all that.
“We need to do anything with him?” Mike gestured, but I pretended not to notice.
“Who? Kyle? No, let him lay there and catch up on his rest. He told me some of what we needed to know.”
“Uh, Bryan, I don’t think he’s breathing,” Mike observed, and I could tell he wasn’t sure how to react. He’d seen me interrogate Sheriff Landshire, of course, but for some reason, my brother seemed more disturbed this time.
“Sssh,” I admonished. “That just means he’s really tired. Best not to wake the dead.”
Mike took a step back, carefully studying me once again.
“Don’t go getting scary on me now, big brother. I don’t need you collecting ears or building a suit out of the skinned bodies of your victims.”
“Dude, that’s just gross, and offensive. I’m just keeping myself detached from the horror, that’s all,” I retorted, keeping my voice down as I saw other shapes moving around in the gloom. “Besides, you’re probably the one who fired the shot. I was just asking questions.” Seeing shapes I thought I recognized, I gestured. “Who’s that? Wade and Wil?”
“Yeah, Pat rode back with Margie, taking Sally to Wade’s house. It’s closer, and Marta’s already on her way over with Nikki in the shotgun seat. We’re just policing up the weapons and pulling what ID we can for the sheriff. He’ll either be here in the morning or send somebody.”
“He’s not getting the weapons. No offense, but I’m still waiting for my hog gun.”
“Nancy made that clear when she spoke to him earlier,” Mike confirmed. In this new world, weapons might have more value than dollars or gold. Passing them up would look suspicious. “We’ll search the trucks, too. See if Wade wants them. Get the fuel either way.”
“How’s Sally?” I asked, closing my eyes as I said the words. Asking the questions when I was afraid of the answer.
I felt the tight rein I held on my emotions begin to crack as I thought about the woman who had become a friend, a family member, over the last few trying months. I also felt a flash of guilt that picked away at my heart, as I realized that if I had just gotten to that one shooter even a quarter second faster…
Mike, it seemed, could still read my mind.
“That wasn’t your fault, Bryan. You did the best you could.”
I opened my eyes, catching Mike’s steady gaze.
“I wish I could believe that, brother. But I muffed that shot. If I’d just taken another quarter second for the headshot, Sally would be fine and cracking wise.”
“I call bullshit, Bryan,” Mike nearly barked his frustration at me. “Did you know he was wearing body armor? Could you see it?”
“Well, no. But I should have…”
“What’s to say the next guy, the one you took out before he could get a shot off, wouldn’t have blasted Sally to hell if you’d taken that extra quarter second to finish off a target you registered as finished. You know better. You can’t play that game.”
I knew the game he meant without naming it. The What-If game. I’d nearly killed myself with that one after losing Collette and Charlie.
“We knew the odds were against us, and we still managed to take out the other side without losing anyone. We’re not going to lose Sally,” Mike emphasized. “She’s stable and in good hands, and while she’s going to be limited in what she can do for the next little bit, I think it would be good for us to have a dedicated defensive coordinator overseeing our set-up. What do you think?”
“Well, you think Sally wants to run the 3-4 defense, or are we going to switch over to a 4-3? You know I like the four-man front line. And what’s she going to do on blitzing downs?” I wise-cracked, trying to project a sense of levity I didn’t feel. Trying to lighten the mood when all I wanted to do was go back to Kyle’s gas station bolthole and burn the place down, women and children be damned.
Mike clapped my shoulder, then gripped it as he turned me back towards the scatter of bodies littering the trampled-down stretch of grass where we’d done our killing.
“She did good, too, you know. You were right about her being tough and up to the job. Took that bullet and kept in the fight. I swear, I heard her muttering, ‘get some’ when she first lit up her guys.”
“Well, that’s good, but now we’ve got more problems.”
“The Fitts place?”
“Yeah, that’s part of it, anyway. Sometimes, I hate being right. Kyle said it was where they were heading. Only screw up was using a Sherwood to guide them in the back way.”
“Man, this keeps up, we’re going to have to exterminate that whole blood line just to be safe. Who was it? I didn’t recognize any of them.”
“We’ll have to ask Wade,” I observed. “All I know is Kyle said he was wearing overalls.”
“You really didn’t kill him?” Mike asked delicately, glancing back at the still shape, now consumed by shadow.
“I may have hastened things a bit,” I admitted, holding my thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, “but more from omission than anything else. I even gave him a happy pill to ease the transition.”
“Yeah, Bryan, you’re a peach. A prince among men, and not at all the Buffalo Bill I accused you of being,” Mike bantered back, and I decided we were good again. Crisis averted, but this time it was me who was getting all sensitive and shit. Better nip that in the bud, I warned myself. I was supposed to be the Iceman, after all.
> “Let’s go see Wade and talk about houses.”
CHAPTER SIX
Wade was obviously pleased by our actions, but he was currently venting his fury on the corpse of what I took to be the late, unlamented Eugene Sherwood. Turned out, he was a nephew of George. Neither Wade nor Wil knew much about him other than he worked at a greasy spoon diner down in Martelle as cover for whatever his real job was in the family criminal enterprise.
When I told Wade of our plans to find someone to occupy the Fitts place, he was supportive but as he said, even though his family was large, they were tied up between the two locations. Maintaining guard watches on a rotating basis ate up a lot more time and effort than he’d expected.
Wade knew about our use of cameras and sensors, and though he had a good electrical background, he admitted he lacked the more advanced computer skills to use them to best effect. Mike was listening in and he volunteered before I even had a chance to make the suggestion.
“Hell, Wade, you might find what you need for this at Walmart or Tractor Supply,” Mike explained. “Let me get back to the house and I’ll make up a list of compatible systems and power requirements, then I’ll e-mail it to you. When you get the hardware, I’ll help you set up the network.”
“That simple?” Wade asked, surprised by Mike’s suggestion. “I thought that kind of equipment was a bit out of my price range. I looked at some surveillance systems, but the sticker shock turned me off from going that route.”
As Wade and Mike started discussing the intricacies of setting up a mini-server and networking the feeds, I walked over to check on Wil, who was still collecting wallets, pocket contents and assorted gear from the dead.
“Finding anything interesting?” I asked, noting how carefully the former Marine separated the loot into various piles.
Rather than answering, Wil went about his chore on the next dead man. Beginning with the boots, Wil removed all the useful items, from spare magazines to belts and stacked them on top of the boots, using them to keep everything else off the damp muddy ground. From his back pocket, Wil took out a plastic bread bag, the kind stores packaged their pre-sliced loaves, and inserted all wallets and scraps of paper he found into the bag, then tied off the end and dropped it on the chest of the corpse. I noticed this one, unlike some of the others, lacked web gear and body armor.
“What’s that for?” I asked, this time gesturing to the discarded plastic bag.
“For the sheriff’s boys,” Wil finally replied. “When I was a young Marine in Iraq, we had all these foreign fighters in the country, eager to throw off the shackles of the Great Satan. Our captain wanted to know where they were coming from, and he had us collect all the identification papers off the dead. This reminds me of those days.”
“What was the craziest thing you found? I mean, I know from Mike that you had hajis from all over, I was just wondering which one surprised you the most?”
“Latvian passport,” Wil replied after a second of thought. “I had to look it up. I thought that was where Dr. Doom was from, but turns out it is a real country.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing at that point. Great big old belly laughs as Wil glared at me. I didn’t know the man that well, not nearly as well as I knew Wade, but there was a bond between us since we’d gone after Sheriff Landshire together. All it took was one secret murder mission and you were suddenly blood brothers. Mike had said something like that once, about sharing a foxhole with somebody when the hajis were overrunning your base, and now, Wil was like part of the family.
“Dude, here I am sharing military secrets and you gotta laugh at me that way,” Wil complained, and I held up my hands in supplication before explaining.
“Sorry, it was just Mike and I had that very argument before, back when we were kids. I mean, I think I was eight or nine, and he was about seven. Ask him. He thought the same thing, and when I showed him on the globe and proved it was a real place, he just shrugged his shoulders and said those comic book writers must really do their research.”
Wil then chuckled as well, and I saw Mike and Wade look over at us like we were crazy. I just waved them back to their conversation as I shifted gears a little bit.
“You doing okay, about what we did?” I asked vaguely, but he knew what I was talking about. The Sheriff’s place.
“Dude, I can’t believe you talked Ethan into cutting that guy’s finger off!” Wil exclaimed, then looked around, as if worried about eavesdroppers.
“I can’t believe he did it,” I confessed. “I was just trying to scare him, but there goes Ethan, crunch, and then his finger was on the floor. You think he’s okay with it?”
Wil nodded before replying.
“I think so. I’ve known him and Wade just about all my life, and Ethan’s not soft. Just, more thoughtful about stuff, you know?”
“Yes, I know. I knew plenty of guys like that, back before.”
“But when he saw those dead truckers in the pit, guys he’d known and worked with, it was like something clicked inside his head. If that makes any sense?”
“It does. Some people are glass half full, no matter what kind of shitty hand life deals them,” I said, digesting what Wil was saying. “That was my read on Ethan. You’re saying he’s changed?”
“He has, and that’s why Wade and I trusted him to guard the front gate tonight,” Wil agreed. “He’s still a little skittish, but it’s like he’s finally opened his eyes to the world we are stuck in now. No more rose-colored glasses for that one.”
“Bryan might not look it, but he can play the role with the best of them. He burned Landshire’s stump like it was nothing. Like he was planning on doing it all along,” Mike pointed out, joining the conversation, and I could hear a thread of dark humor in his words. Clearly, what he’d done here wasn’t going to be keeping him up at nights. Then Mike gave me a hard stare, as if he was probing my intentions, or my thoughts, and reminding me of what he’d said earlier.
“We never did anything like that when I was in the Corps,” Wil explained. “Thought about it a few times, but never went to that place. Probably a good thing, for most of us. Are you okay with what we did?”
I caught the Marine watching me carefully, like Mike had done, and I returned his gaze with a steady one of my own as I answered.
“I did what needed doing. No reason for you or Mike to have those nightmares. Same reason I capped Sherwood and those jokers in the barn. I have my own nightmares, but I haven’t missed a minute’s sleep over what we did that night.”
No, my nightmares all centered around the things I failed to do, and those I couldn’t save.
“And you were okay with doing it again?” Wil gestured to the slumped for of my latest interrogation, and I could make out the quirked eyebrow as he asked the question.
“Like I told Mike, other than a little persuasion, that guy died of his wounds. Wounds he got while trying to attack your house. Your family,” I stressed. “I doubt any of my methods would show up on an autopsy, except for the painkiller I gave him. He was just talkative is all. That’s what my report to the sheriff is going to say, anyway.”
“Uh-huh. But what motivated them to make the move on us?”
“They were aiming for the Fitts place. Got lost, or bad directions from Eugene there. Their current squat was just overcrowded, especially after they started cooking meth in the walk-in cooler.”
Wil whistled under his breath.
“Well, that’s not good, but word is probably all over the county about Wally being killed. He’s going to be missed. Town just don’t realize it yet. What’s your plan, Bryan?”
“Why does everybody think I have a plan?” I complained, but from his scowl, Wil wasn’t buying it.
“Okay,” I continued. “We need to recruit somebody in to occupy that house. It represents a danger to not only you guys and the Lovetts, but us as well. Those guys knew the farm was vacant, and their gang was looking for a new place to hide out,” I explained. “Wade said you gu
ys are out of family to put in there, but I took it to mean he was out of people we trusted with that location. You got any suggestions?”
“You planning on just squatting there?” Wade asked carefully, but without disapproval.
“No. And have you been passing notes to Nikki in class? She accused me of the same thing,” I grumped, but then grew serious. “Mike, Pat and I talked about maybe trying to buy the property. Depends on the cost, and who inherited. But we’re spread thin, and I don’t know anybody we could trust to watch our backs there. I know you guys are in the same boat, even if Mike’s plan for game cameras work. I was thinking we need to bring in other people. People we can trust, maybe have to trust, with our lives. You got anybody like that?”
“What about your wife’s family? I understand she grew up close to here,” Wil asked, then visibly flinched at my reaction. My face must have turned that awful shade of red that Mike always warned me about.
“We don’t talk. Not since Colette’s funeral. They blamed me for what happened even more than I blamed myself. They are not an option I’m willing to entertain.”
There was more, lots more, but I still couldn’t bear to get into it at the moment. The silence stretched uncomfortably between us, but I finally gestured to Wil to get on with it and answer my question.
Wil seemed to be thinking hard before he answered.
“Yeah, I got a guy I went to school with, and we later ended up working for the same company for awhile before I went over to driving the tow truck full-time. Ethan knows him, too. Good, solid family man. Did four years in the Army after he got married, and I know he’s stayed proficient. I mean, for an Army puke. We go deer hunting every year, and he doesn’t use a stand. Stalks on the ground, like God intended.”
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost Page 6
