Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost

by Allen, William

  Pat responded with mock frustration, and I painted on my grin before saying three little words.

  “Sheriff’s treasure map.”

  Pat hissed.

  “Shoot. You actually did figure it out. And after your own brother said your head was only good for a hat rack.”

  “Well, you know Mike. Consider the source.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When Pat and I rolled into the yard, the house was abuzz with activity. Well, in a country sort of way.

  I saw Tommy and Tammy sitting on the front porch in the rocking chairs with their laptops fired up, while Lisa went from one to the other with a legal pad in her hand, making notes. Mike was sitting on the rehung porch swing with a metal ammunition can resting on a folding table, methodically reloading magazines. He looked up when he heard Pat’s truck and gave us a wave, but I could tell from his grim expression that he was not happy about something. Probably because I got his truck shot up, I figured.

  As soon as I got out of the Pat’s truck, I strolled over to the porch to take my medicine.

  “Sorry about your baby.” I said, hanging my head in supplication.

  “Forget about it,” he replied with a touch of a growl. “I can’t believe somebody had to gall to set up right on the road like that. I’m just glad you guys are okay. We can fix my damned truck.”

  Setting the half-filled magazine aside, Mike grabbed me in a bear hug that made my ribs creak. “Thank you for watching out for Cissy.”

  That was what Mike and I called our little sister. She, of course, hated it.

  “Glad we had her there, sad as it sounds. She got us out of the fire sack slick as snot on glass. Where is she? And Rachel and Hunter?”

  I wanted to ask about Nancy, but just then I heard the screen door open, and she stepped out to join us on the porch. Moving around Mike, I met Nancy at the door with a hug of my own. Our lips met, and I could taste her tears.

  “God, I was so worried about you,” I whispered in her hair, and I thought I heard Lisa making a gagging sound at our Public Display of Affection, but we both ignored the dig. This wasn’t junior high, after all.

  Nancy disengaged from our embrace, taking a step back, and I saw that look of fire in her eyes and noted her weapons were already slung.

  “When you go, I’m going with you.”

  It was an announcement, not a request.

  “Are your sure you’re ready for this?” I asked softly, and when I saw emotion begin to swell in her eyes, I cut a glance at little listeners sitting nearby, antenna already quivering. With a subtle motion, I gestured for her to follow me off the porch, down the steps, and around the side of the house. Nancy frowned but held her tongue as she trailed after me.

  Out of earshot, I said what was on my mind before Nancy could make her pitch.

  “Nancy, I’m not questioning your courage, okay? Let’s get that out of the way first.”

  “But I froze up in the truck,” she protested. “That’s not me. I’m not some delicate damsel who needs rescuing, and…”

  “I said, that’s not why I asked the question,” I replied patiently. “In fact, I thought you kept it together surprisingly well given the circumstances. That’s not what I’m worried about.”

  “Then what is it?”

  I paused, trying to think how to say what needed saying without damaging our relationship. Thinking about it, I decided she deserved to hear the unvarnished truth.

  “I’m afraid, Nancy. I’m afraid if you see some of the things that we have to do, then it will affect how you look at me.”

  “What are you talking about? Cecelia told me how you guys saved her, and how you let her…” here she paused, and I think some of what I was trying to say dawned on her. “You let her take care of her rapist. She told me about the one bullet you gave her, too.”

  That part I hadn’t expected Cecelia to talk about, but I went on.

  “This isn’t going to be like the fight in Fred, or even like what Mike and I did in town with Marky and his thugs.” I paused. “This is going to probably be more like what happened at Landshire’s house.”

  “What do you mean? Different how?”

  “Pat thinks wherever they’re taking the trucks is only a waystation for a bigger gang. That’s why we have to hit them quick, before they can move again. But, if we take any prisoners, we plan on questioning them. And they probably won’t survive the process.”

  Nancy held up her hand in a stop motion, and I did just that.

  “These people, these men, how many innocent people did they kill at that roadblock today?” She asked, and her tone was cold and clinical.

  “I counted six dead, dumped in that ditch.”

  Nancy didn’t blink before she replied.

  “If you can’t find a blowtorch, I’m sure I’ve got one in my toolbox. You do what you have to do to keep us safe.”

  I stammered out a response of some sort, and then Nancy kissed me again. This time, it was tender and sweet.

  “I love that you’re trying to protect me, but I’m a big girl, Bryan. Let’s just find those locations and check them out. It might turn out to be a bust anyway.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”

  When we emerged back from beside the house and our quick chat, the work was already almost done. What Tommy, Tamara and Lisa were working on turned out to be PDF scans of Sheriff Landshire’s loot maps, and Rachel had been absent since she was grabbing pages off the printer in my office. When I called in to give Mike an idea of what we were looking for, he’d put the kids to work. Pat and I were secretly pleased that we had thought of the map before it occurred to Mike.

  With the requirement of a ‘really big building’ with pass-through capacity in an isolated area but with access for an eighteen-wheeler, the choices were clear. After thirty minutes of examining scans, comparing them to the original laminated map pages that corresponded to where we thought the highwaymen could have gone, Mike gave a satisfied grunt of approval to Lisa while his son and daughter fought to keep from rolling their eyes. They knew their dad was sulking, but like me, they thought it had to do with the damage sustained by his truck.

  Now we had a list of half a dozen potential locations identified. Lisa had been busy writing down the addresses just as fast as Tommy and Tamara could generate the leads.

  I also found out why Mike was acting pissy.

  “Wil and Ethan are waiting for you guys at Wade’s. I’m headed back to the hospital to pick up Marta and Dorothy tonight,” Mike announced from his seat on the porch. “Everybody from Bonner house is spending the night here so we can concentrate ourselves in one place. Just in case this is an effort to get us uncovered. After I get back with the hospital run, I’m taking a tarp and setting up at the end of the road.”

  Ah, and the penny dropped. This plan had Pat fingerprints all over it, but I wasn’t going to pry.

  “I’m taking Bryan and Nancy,” Pat replied, emerging from the house and joining us on the suddenly overcrowded porch. “We’ll split up the list and scout each one from the road, then figure out which one is the likely stash house.”

  “Or barn,” Nikki added without missing a beat, walking around the house from where she’d tooled up with weapons, webgear and body armor from the mudroom. Other than a large butterfly bandage on her forehead and wound cream the scratches across her face and neck, my sister looked ready to go. In fact, the orange-tinted Betadine patches on her face made her look like a pissed-off Valkyrie in warpaint. If anybody was going to stop her, that would be up to Pat. I wasn’t sticking my hand in the wood chipper.

  “You guys think to read Sally in on what we’re doing?”

  Nancy actually rolled her eyes at my question, which I took to be a good sign, all things considered.

  “Yes, Bryan. Mike, Cece and Beatrice went and got her this afternoon right about the time Pat went tear-assing out of here. She’s set up in the control room downstairs, and she’s drafted Billy and Hunter to act as her runner
s.”

  And that explained the whereabouts of my last nephew. With Tammy, Tommy and Rachel all clustered around the same age, I always tried to pay a little extra attention to Hunter so he didn’t feel left out. Not as much of a sacrifice as one might think, since Pat and Nikki’s youngest might be the smallest physically, but as my friends from Boston would say, the kid was wicked smart. Not ‘take over the world as an evil overlord’ smart, but close. He did mention thinking about recruiting his older sister and cousins to be his minions when he mounted his campaign of global subjugation, and I could only hope he was joking.

  We took the list and split it three ways, so each of us would have two targets to inspect. The plan was, we would simply drive by and look for signs of recent use. That’s it. Pat was taking his truck, with Nikki driving, and when we grabbed Wil and Ethan, they would get the second list. I was taking Nancy in my trusty Datsun, and we had the last two sites to eyeball. All of us had our cellphones charged, and if we found a likely location, then the other two teams would converge on that location at an offsite rally point picked by the duo onsite. Pat admitted it was a piss poor plan, but we said what we were all thinking: we were racing against the clock. Chances were likely the target of our hunt would bolt as soon as it got dark.

  After we broke up, I headed inside and grabbed the rest of my gear, happy for the moment to feel the weight of the heavy body armor on my shoulders as I adjusted the straps. Then I attached the Sig in the center of my chest, angled for quick access, and I was ready to go.

  “I still can’t believe this is your preferred ride,” Nancy commented as I opened the truck’s passenger side door for her.

  “What? This thing is small, responsive, and gets great gas mileage. Plus, I actually know how to fix anything that goes wrong with it.”

  “Just doesn’t fit the image of a successful attorney,” Nancy teased, her Mona Lisa smile giving her away.

  “Who said I was any good? I’m certainly not rolling in the big bucks,” I retorted as I started my little truck and shifted into gear, pulling out of the garage.

  “I asked around. You have a reputation for being a very competent lawyer, and ethical in a field that ranks slightly behind used car salesmen in that particular quality. Lord knows, you could have made more money if you’d taken any of the personal injury or criminal cases that came through your door instead of sending them down the street. A little birdy even told me you were offered a chance to go to work with Butch Kaminsky as a partner, but you turned him down.”

  Wow, she really had done her homework. My reaction said something about my age and maturity, I think, as I took her words as the compliment she intended, rather than bristling as her for digging into my background. That was the reaction of a young hothead, and those days were behind me.

  No, I took her inquiries as an excellent sign. She cared enough about our chances to check under the hood, which meant she had plans to possibly stick around for the long haul.

  “Got our first address programmed?”

  “Yep,” Nancy replied.

  “Got a round chambered, safety on, finger off the trigger?”

  She showed me a finger then, one of her long, slender middle ones, and I laughed.

  “Okay, we have a little bit of a drive, so if you’ll help me keep an eye out, I’ll tell you a story about a young lawyer and one of his criminal cases. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Now, a long time ago, in a county not so far away, a young lawyer graduated from law school deeply in debt and burning with a dedication to serve the public as a prosecutor. But as time went on, that young lawyer realized that the scales of justice didn’t always weigh true, and after a few years, he left the District Attorney’s office and went to work for himself. And one of his first cases was representing a older gentleman, a pillar of the community, who had been accused of a terrible crime. He was arrested for fondling his own five-year old granddaughter.”

  “Oh, my, god,” Nancy whispered, drawn into the story.

  “Now, you need to know a few things first. She wasn’t his granddaughter by blood. Not that it matters, except he didn’t know that much about the little girl’s mother before his son married her just a year before. This man, let’s call him Paul, didn’t know at the time he agreed to babysit the little girl that her mother had previously made sexual abuse allegations against two men she had dated before marrying Paul’s son. These allegations were handled discretely, and the mother received a pair of sizeable settlement checks to be held in trust for the little girl’s future treatment. Of course, her mother had deposited both of those checks in her own checking account and proceeded to blow through that cash like a fat kid at a Krispy Kreme.”

  “That’s terrible,” Nancy hissed. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Oh, believe it. After the little girl stayed over for a weekend, the accusations started. The mother confronted him that Monday at his office, and she demanded $20,000 to make the whole thing go away. Now, Paul didn’t want to cause his son any problems with his new marriage and he told himself he must have misunderstood what the woman was accusing him of, because it just went beyond what he could imagine. So he refused, and suggested that she and her new husband should go with the little girl for family counseling.”

  “Paul was shocked when the cops showed up the next day and arrested him in the middle of his insurance agency office, cuffed him and read him his rights. Only then did Paul have any idea of the trouble he was facing. That’s when he called the young lawyer and asked him to handle his defense.”

  “You don’t think he did it, do you? What did the little girl say?”

  “Oh, she had almost definitely been abused. When the CPS worker met with her, you could tell from the video. And the little girl identified Paul as her attacker. Of course, the video was three hours long, and the judge refused to allow the jury to see the caseworker spend two hours and forty-five of those minutes convincing this little girl that she was assaulted by Mr. Paul, and not by her own biological father. She was five, and the woman clearly seemed to have an agenda, but the judge did as well. See, it was an election year, and he had to be seen as being tough on crime.”

  “The young lawyer mounted a spirited defense. He filed several evidentiary motions to either suppress the video or force the prosecutor to play it in its entirety, to the jury. He lost his motions at the pre-trial level, filed a writ of mandamus, appealed to the intermediate court of appeals, and lost again. At least he was able to preserve his objections, and he made sure he preserved his grounds for appeal.

  “At trial, the young lawyer used everything in his arsenal. But he was prohibited from bringing up the mother’s blackmail scheme, and the judge threatened him with contempt when he tried to press for more details about the alleged abuse in the other claims. So despite feeling like the fix was in, he put Paul’s wife got on the stand and she swore under oath that he had never been alone with the little girl for more than five minutes that whole weekend. The jury just decided she was standing by her man and dismissed what she said. And when Paul testified for over an hour, and despite vicious attacks from the prosecutor, his story never wavered. Paul swore he’d never touched the little girl and he had no idea why she was making such wild allegations. Of course, the jury didn’t believe him. Who would believe a pedophile, after all?

  “The video did the trick, you see. When the prosecutor showed the ninety second clip where the five year old girl, visibly exhausted, finally agreed with the grown woman that Paul must have touched her in an inappropriate place, that was all they needed to convict Paul. He was sixty years old, and after the jury came back with a guilty verdict, the judge sentenced him to sixty years in prison.”

  “That’s not the end, is it? You fought for him on appeal, didn’t you?” Nancy asked, now fully invested in the story. I shook my head as we pulled out on the county road.

  “Nancy, I never said this story was about me. I said I would tell you a story about a young lawyer, and I hinted
it would explain why I don’t handle criminal cases. The young lawyer was actually a very successful criminal defense lawyer I went to law school with. One of the best people I’ve ever known.”

  “But why? Why did you tell me his story?”

  Nancy waited for me to negotiate the turn, then a few seconds longer as the gate rumbled closed behind us. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see the first glimmering tendrils of ice forming on the roof of the entry cover for the gate box. Yep, definitely getting colder.

  “He called me drunk off his ass the night he lost the trial, and he did it again six weeks later when his appeal was rendered moot. Seems one of the other inmates in Huntsville stabbed Paul to death in the showers. And that’s why I never handle criminal cases, because sometimes the accused is actually innocent, and the system isn’t set up to deal with it.”

  Nancy grew quiet for a bit, and she never said a word as we crept through the section of road where this morning’s abortive ambush took place. She kept her window down, though, despite the cold and the wind, and her fingers stayed tightly wrapped around the grip of her rifle as I bumped us up onto and then across the bridge.

  I saw no sign of the line of bodies from this morning, but I still felt the weight of their presence on my soul as the bridge disappeared in my rearview mirror. I didn’t believe in ghosts, even though I carried around more than my share.

  Mentally shaking myself, I resolved to get on with this search and go about our business of finding their killers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I went on my hunt feeling lucky, but both the addresses we checked turned out to be, as Nancy predicted, busts. The first was an old egg barn and it had apparently succumbed to damage from one of the recent storms. Like the ones Doyle’s family used, this was a long building but built taller than the ones I had previously seen. That height may have contributed to the structural failure, because the rafters supporting the ridge line, the highest point on the sloped roof, had clearly collapsed and the upper portion of the barn had fallen inside. This in turn pulled down the exterior walls nearly to a 45-degree angle. I was thinking it would have been a great place to hide, but Nancy burst my bubble.