I drank what was left in my glass, and I told her exactly how it happened. I even added the part about the black bear dragging him further into the woods after he’d bled out. How the sheriff shot the bear with his pistol. I told her I couldn’t make this stuff up even if I were writing a novel.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said. “I’m not sure even a man as bad as Sonny deserved to die like that.”
“The point is, he’s dead, and now we have each other. It’s what we wanted, right?”
She drank her drink, slapped the empty glass on the bar.
“Then why does it feel so fucking bad?” she said.
For a minute we didn’t say a word. But the silence was quickly broken with the sound of another vehicle pulling up outside. We both came back around the bar and went to the window. It was Sheriff Woods. He wasn’t here for a social call or to offer up his condolences to Cora, that much was for sure. He got out of the prowler and approached the tavern, his scruffy face tight as a tick. I’d already opened the door for him before he reached it.
“Cora,” he said, touching the brim of his cowboy hat.
“Sheriff,” she said.
He turned to me. “The state police been to see you?” he asked.
“Just left,” I said. “I’m surprised you didn’t run into him on your way in here. Black guy by the name of Spencer.”
“He spoke with me earlier. Maybe he didn’t say anything about it, but I get the feeling he’s got his doubts about Sonny’s situation being an accident.”
Despite the calming effects of the whiskey, my stomach cramped up and my temples started to pound like two tympani inside my brain.
I said, “Spenser said he’s sending out a forensics team to examine the site where the accident happened. He also wants the chainsaw.”
Cora took a step forward.
“We all know that Sonny’s death was no accident,” she said. “If Spencer is a good trooper surrounded by bad troopers, he’ll want to get to the bottom of what happened.”
Her words were like a blow to the gut. Because what she was saying was this: it was only a matter of time until Spencer found out the truth.
“I was thinking about going back into the woods to retrieve the chainsaw,” I said.
“Don’t,” Woods said. “It’s too late for that, and the staties will know you tampered with it and they’ll use it against you.”
“That’s what I said,” Cora added. “It would only make matters worse.”
“Besides,” the sheriff went on, “we’ve got bigger problems to deal with.” He focused on Cora. “Cora, I assume you notified Sonny’s family about what happened this morning?”
“I told his mother,” she said.
“Listen,” Woods went on. “Big Billy has already been ’round to see me. He’s convinced Sonny was assassinated. If he’s convinced of that, then the entire Torchi family will be convinced of that, never mind the state cops.”
“So, what are you saying?” Cora said.
“What I’m saying is the Torchi crime family wants war, not later but now.”
I swallowed something bitter while the timpani inside my head got louder.
“They’re on their way?” I said. “You’re sure about that?”
“That meeting we called for later on at Bunny’s?” the sheriff said. “It’s been moved up to now.”
“What about the state troopers coming here with their forensics team?”
“Forget about them,” Woods said. “Right now, we need a plan to protect this town from the inevitable.”
“What’s the inevitable?” I said.
“War, Kingsley,” he said. “Our all-out war against the mob.”
Cora and I followed Woods back into town. We parked beside him in Bunny’s parking lot. I had to be honest. As much as I loved Cora…as much as I had been willing to do anything for her…I was beginning to feel something welling up inside of me. And it wasn’t good. It was the need to get the hell out of town. I had a state trooper on my ass, and now I found myself having to help a powerless sheriff defend his own town from a bunch of very pissed off gangsters who were sure to show up with some heavy weaponry.
Was it worth the one-hundred grand I’d been promised? What if, in the end, I helped Woods hold back the Torchi crime syndicate and I was arrested for Sonny’s murder anyway? I would be kicking myself for not having taken advantage of a head start to the Canadian border while I had the chance.
But then again, maybe I was just panicking. I wasn’t one for panicking. Panic was another one of those things that would get you killed on the battlefield and in the joint. What was the old saying the Brits liked so much? Keep calm and carry on. I was a part of this thing now. There was no getting away from that. When I personally killed Sonny Torchi, I had done this crummy little nowhere town a service. But at the same time, I’d placed a curse on them. If what Sheriff Woods said was true, in only a matter of hours they were gonna get hit, and they were gonna get hit hard, and only a handful of us could stop them.
It was suddenly dawning on me that we’d be lucky to escape with our lives.
We followed the sheriff into the bar. Maybe a couple dozen people were present. Men mostly, but a few women mixed in. Some of them were seated at the bar, drinking beers from mugs or from out of the bottles. Sheriff Woods took up a position over at the pool table, only he wasn’t about to play pool. He pulled a document from out of his chest pocket, unfolded it, and laid it out on the table. It was a map of the town.
Bunny stood behind the bar along with Kate. Something that surprised me. This morning, I’d assumed Kate was innocent of all this mob and gangster business. But it turned out she was not only interested in saving lives, she was just as interested in saving her town. She wouldn’t be here otherwise.
“Kingsley,” Sheriff Woods said, “I’ll ask you to lock the door and put the closed for business sign out.”
Nodding, I turned and flipped the sign that hung from a small nail on the front door from open to closed. Then I closed the door and locked it.
The sheriff asked for quiet. The steady banter immediately stopped. It told me these townspeople still respected Sheriff Woods regardless of how powerless he’d become since the Torchis moved in.
“First off, everyone,” he said, “this man to my right is Johnathan Kingsley. Some of you might know of him as JA Kingsley, the author. He’s recently come to our community to stay at Loon Lake Inn to write a new book. In the process, he went to work for Sonny Torchi. Upon learning what Torchi and his men were doing to our community, he did something that took a lot of guts. More guts than any of us in this room possess, me included. He neutralized Mr. Torchi and did so with absolute prejudice, and for that we thank him.”
The whole room erupted in applause, sending a cold chill up and down my backbone. Here I was standing beside Cora, Sonny’s wife, and they were cheering me on for killing her husband. It was perhaps the strangest display I’d ever encountered in my life. Stranger than anything I’d ever written, stranger than anything I’d ever read or watched on the TV, stranger than anything I’d seen or been a part of in prison, stranger than anything on the battlefields of Iraq.
“Naturally,” Woods went on, “our discussion in this bar stays in this bar, which is why only a chosen few have been invited to hear what I’m about to say. I trust you all, and I feel quite certain you trust me in return. As we all know, the Torchi family is intent on taking over our small town and turning it into one big casino and illicit drug den. And for this, they have attempted to buy us out for pennies on the dollar. Pathetic offers almost all of us have refused. But in the face of that refusal has come harassment, the demand of illegal cash kickbacks, and even the murder of an entire family—the Kennedys, who died in a tragic house fire not long ago. While that fire was determined to be an accident, witnesses said that Sonny Torchi and his men were witnessed as having been on the scene the night the fire started. A fact that the state police cho
se to conveniently ignore, especially considering four unidentified troopers also witnessed the quadruple homicide. Two children and two adults died in that fire, and it proved the lengths Torchi was willing to go to, to get what he wanted. And we also know that he has the manpower behind him to cause a lot of hurt to our surviving residents if we don’t eventually give his family what they want.
“But all that has changed with the arrival of Mr. Kingsley, who personally managed to enact the ultimate revenge on Torchi. However, in doing so, I’m certain what we are about to face, in a matter of hours I might add, is a gangland assault on our town by the Torchi crime family. What this means is we are not only going to have to defend ourselves, we are going to be expected to fight for every square inch of precious soil under our feet so that once and for all, the Torchi family will leave us alone, leave us in peace. Mr. Kingsley is not only a man of letters, he is a man who knows how to fight and how to survive. He was decorated for bravery in Iraq when his outfit almost singlehandedly took Fallujah in what was arguably the bloodiest battle of the war. He also spent nearly two full years inside a maximum security prison for a crime he was perfectly justified in committing, and he survived. Like I said, he’s not only taken care of Sonny Torchi, he’s agreed to assist us in our dangerous mission.”
They were all looking at me stone-faced, except for Bunny, who raised her fist in the air and shouted, “You go, Mr. Kingsley! You’ve got some steel balls.”
Some of the bar cracked up at that, but the atmosphere quickly turned serious again. One man at the bar raised his hand and said he had a question.
“Why don’t we try to approach the state police, Sheriff?” he said. “It’s the right and legal thing to do.”
Sheriff Woods shook his head.
“Now, Ben,” he said, “with all due respect, we’ve tried that approach in the past when the Kennedys were killed and the state police, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, called it an accident. Remember the four unidentified troopers I just spoke about? Their presence at the murder scene told me that the Torchis had gotten to them. That they were being paid off in order to tip the scales of justice in their favor.” He set his right hand on his gun, almost like he was getting ready to draw it. “And even if we did go to the police, they would insist we stand down and do things according to the letter of the law. In other words, they would disarm us and leave us vulnerable to the attack that is sure to come.”
Ben bit down on his lip, nodded, and drank some beer. In my gut, I knew that Woods was absolutely right. If the police were in cahoots with the Torchi family, then the town was on its own. It also meant that I could very well find myself on the losing end of the Sonny Torchi accident investigation. But that would have to wait for a while.
“Now,” Woods went on, “I’m going to officially deputize Mr. Kingsley here and a few more of you. When that’s done, we’re going to get down to making a plan to defend our town against the invaders. Sound good, everyone? Are we all on the same page?”
“Damn straight, Sheriff,” Bunny said. “I’ll be the first to volunteer to be deputized.”
Woods smiled, said, “Well then, come on over here, Bunny, and grab your star.”
Bunny came around the bar and went to the pool table. Woods reached into his work shirt pocket, pulled out a gold star, and pinned it to Bunny’s black, sleeveless CBGB t-shirt. The look on her face told me this was indeed a proud moment for her.
“Mr. Kingsley,” he said, “you’re next.”
I got my badge, so did Cora and Kate, and so did three other men. We then gathered around the map. Woods pointed at the one road that led into the town from the south. Loon Lake Road.
“They’re sure to come via this route, Kingsley,” he said. “What do you suggest we do when they arrive?”
I stared at the map and the different properties that flanked it. Single and two-storied structures mostly. It didn’t take a lot of thought on how to handle what would essentially constitute an ambush. We’d set up plenty of them in Iraq and especially Fallujah when we allowed the bandits to enter a roadway while we quietly waited for the right moment to spring our trap on them. It was a classic flanking counter-attack measure, and when enacted with some skill and surprise, it almost always worked.
I glanced at Cora. She looked into my eyes and smiled. It had been a rough day, to say the least, and things were only going to get rougher over the next twenty-four hours. I cleared my throat.
“First, let me say this,” I said. “I’m not here to save your town. Fact is, just a few days ago, I was still sleeping behind iron bars inside Sing Sing. If someone told me then that I’d be defending a town that was about to be attacked by a crime syndicate, I would have told them to take another sip. But here I am. What I do, and what I have done, I don’t do for Loon Lake. I do it for Cora. And that’s all.”
It’s not one of my favorite clichés, but I’m going to say it anyway. You could have heard a pin drop inside the bar. They were all looking at me like I was their heaven-sent savior, and I was nothing of the sort. I was just a guy who had fallen in love with a mobster’s wife—the caretaker’s wife. But then, I was also a guy who knew how to kill.
“We allow them to enter the town, Sheriff,” I said after a time. “In fact, when they get here, there will appear to be no one on the street. Loon Lake will seem to be deserted. Like a ghost town. The men and women they send will be the toughest of the tough. They will be highly trained cold-blooded killers. But when they ride into this town and discover that it’s been emptied, it won’t sit right with them. It will send cold chills up and down their backbones. And…” I trailed off.
“And what?” Sheriff Woods said.
“And then we kill them,” I said. “Every last one of them. One by one. Methodically. Without hesitation. Without humanity. Without remorse. Without God. We do everything in our power to make the hunters know they are now the hunted.” Inhaling and exhaling a deep breath, I then said, “What I’m trying to tell you is that they must be convinced they’ve just stepped through the gates of hell.”
21
It was far too late in the day for the Torchi family to enact their revenge. But my gut told me they would be here prior to the dawn. They would use the sleepy time just minutes before the sunrise to launch their attack—what they no doubt considered a surprise attack.
But we’d be ready for them.
For the next three or four hours we gathered as many hunting rifles as we could. 30.30s, AR15s, shotguns, pistols, and even a bow and arrow that Kate preferred to hunt with. I positioned several men on top of the jail/sheriff’s office and several more directly across the street on top of Bunny’s Place. I was careful to warn them not to get caught up on one another’s crossfire, but instead to fire at the invaders from a thirty-five-degree angle as the bastards made their way towards them. When the surviving gangsters passed by, they were to shift themselves and shoot them from behind. That is, shoot them in the back.
Kate and Bunny would be positioned at the entrance to the town. They, too, would shoot the bandits in the back as they went by. I told them to take every opportunity to shoot them in the back since the bandits wouldn’t hesitate to do the same.
The sheriff and I would be the last line of defense on top of the insurance building across from the sheriff’s office. Or, that’s the way I planned it anyway. But when Cora insisted she join the sheriff and me at what she described as The Alamo, I couldn’t possibly refuse her.
While we stood inside the sheriff’s office, she took hold of one of the 9mm semiautomatics, released the magazine, checked the load, then slapped the mag back home while engaging the safety. Stuffing the barrel of the pistol into her leather belt, she helped herself to two additional magazines which she stored in her back pocket. I was a little shocked that Cora knew her way around a gun. But then, she was a former New York City cop, so why should it have surprised me in the least? Making her way to the wall-mounted rifle rack,
she grabbed hold of one of the AR15s.
“Magazines, Sheriff?” she asked.
Woods went to his desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a key ring. Making his way to the gun safe set beside the gun rack, he slipped a special key into the safe’s slot, and then entered a set of four numbers into the safe’s electronic locking system. The heavy metal door opened automatically. He reached inside and came back out with several thirty-round magazines.
Handing two to Cora he said, “These are illegal in New York State since our governor reduced the magazine capacity to just seven rounds. But these little babies hold thirty rounds a piece, two-two-three subsonic ammo, so look for big wounds. I’ve got plenty of them, and they are all loaded.”
“Looks like you’re ready for the zombie apocalypse, Sheriff,” I said.
“No,” he said, reaching back into the safe and pulling out more mags. “I’ve been preparing for the inevitable showdown with the Torchis for nearly two years now. I upped my preparations after he burned the Kennedys in their own home and the state police refused to do anything about it.” He set at least two dozen magazines onto his desk. “The weapons you see here are just a part of my little personal arsenal.”
Stepping into the center of the office, he took a knee and pulled back the throw rug, revealing a trap door in the floor. Pulling open the door, he reached down inside and flicked on a light switch.
“Anyone care to follow me down into my secret bunker of tough love?”
Without waiting for an answer, he began descending a metal ladder. Cora didn’t hesitate to follow. Neither did I. Standing at the foot of the ladder, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a small concrete room, not much bigger than a small bedroom. But this place was a far cry from a peaceful night’s sleep. Every inch of wall space was covered in weaponry of one kind or another. And I’m not talking garden variety pistols and rifles. Being an ex-Army Ranger, I recognized three grenade launchers which could be mounted to the AR15s. There was one SAM, along with six or so landmines. There was even a .30 caliber tripod mounted machine gun. But what surprised me the most was the flamethrower. If I had to guess, it dated back to the Vietnam War.
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