Cemeteries, for example. Until a couple of years ago, he’d thought of these vast gardens of the dead as grisly, awful places. Now, he took a certain solace in visiting them.
He’d purposely parked a good distance away from the row he was looking for. He’d discovered that the walk gave him time to prepare himself for the meeting, and to decompress afterward. As always, he dressed as if the funeral were today.
On this April day, Carter marveled at the paradox of so much life teeming in a place set aside for the dead. Birds had rediscovered their voices after the long, bleak winter, and the flowers seemed somehow more vibrant here. The beauty of the place made it all the more comforting.
It was a beautiful gravesite, nestled into the shadow of a stout oak, and just a few feet away from a thicket of honeysuckle that filled the air with the perfume that for Carter defined the arrival of spring. He was pleased to see that the scar of the new grave had largely grown over, and delighted that someone had recently filled the little flower pot with freshly cut tulips, Nicki’s favorite flower.
As he stooped to brush grass clippings away from the nameplate, a wave of emotion sneaked up on him and he had to clench his jaw to fight it away.
“Don’t you miss headstones?” a lady’s voice asked.
Carter jerked his head up to see Gisela Hines sitting on a concrete bench, watching. She wore a flower-print dress that screamed springtime. “Mrs. Hines,” Carter said, rising to his feet. “I didn’t see you there.”
Her expression betrayed neither cheer nor sadness. “A graveyard looks too much like a golf course without the stones,” she said.
Carter had never thought of that. “I don’t know. Without the headstones, it’s a more peaceful place to visit. Less intimidating.”
“I just wish we could have written a final message to him,” Gisela said. She looked and sounded like a woman who had wept until there were no tears left. “I could have told him one more time that we loved him.”
Carter resisted the urge to offer up a platitude. Instead, he went back to the task of sweeping the grass clippings off Jeremy Hines’s marker. Silence was probably best now anyway. Words did not exist that could console her loss.
As Carter dug a blade of grass out of the carved dates on the plaque, he prayed that Jeremy’s young soul had found the peace he’d sought in taking his own life. The deputies swore that they’d left him alone for only a couple of minutes, but it was all he’d needed to hang himself in his cell.
“How are you holding up?” Carter asked. He eyed the spot on the bench next to Gisela, and she moved to make room for him.
“I’m lonely,” she said. “It’s sweet of you to visit.”
Carter blushed. He didn’t know how to respond. “Do you ever wonder how you could have made things different?” Gisela asked. “I lay awake some nights—every night, really—wondering if things would have been different if I’d left Frank before Jeremy became so angry. I wonder if there weren’t signs that I could have read, or if maybe there were signs I did read but chose to ignore. Do you do that?”
“I try not to,” he said. “I think that’s a road to insanity. The clock only spins forward, you know? If you don’t move on when a chapter closes, I think you’re doomed.”
Gisela weighed that. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought of on her own. “It’s hard to do.”
“There’s nothing harder in the world.”
Gisela said softly, “How is Nicolette?”
Carter’s expression softened. “She’s doing okay,” he said. “The antirejection drugs seem to be working well, and there’s no sign that the disease has returned.” He turned to look at Gisela and waited for their gazes to meet. “Jeremy’s heart and lungs are strong.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “I can’t tell you how grateful—”
Gisela placed her hand on Carter’s leg and squeezed. “You already have,” she said. “Many, many times over. He simply didn’t need them anymore, and under the circumstances, well . . .” She drilled a look straight through Carter. “They’re not Jeremy’s anymore. They belong to Nicolette, and please don’t ever refer to them that way again.”
Carter’s eyes reddened as the wave of emotion sucker punched him again. He dared not attempt to speak.
* * *
A quarter mile away as the crow flies, Nicki stood in the shade of a dogwood looking at the marker her father had bought as a peace offering. At her request, it read,
BRAD WARD DOUGHERTY
His Smile Lit My World
“You hate it, don’t you?” she said. “It’s way too corny and it would have pissed you off.” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “Well, tough. I’m making the decisions now.”
In another month, it would be a year since their trip together into hell, yet this was the first chance she’d had to visit and see his grave. It was as pretty as a place like this could be, peaceful and spooky all at the same time. Having spoken to Brad daily in her head, she felt silly speaking aloud to a patch of grass.
He knew all about her long stay in the hospital after the fire, and he knew that she’d sold him out by signing papers laying all of the blame for the carjacking and kidnapping at his feet. By doing so, and with the help of testimony from Scotty and his grandmother, all the charges against her had been dropped. That would have made Brad happy.
Then came the transplants, out of the blue. She’d just recovered from her fire-related injuries when word came that she was being leapfrogged up the recipient list. She didn’t understand all the details, but she got the sense that her dad knew who the donor was. He wouldn’t tell, of course, and even if he would, she didn’t think she wanted to hear. The procedure went flawlessly. The difference to her health was immeasurable. She felt young again. She still had drugs to take—they would be a part of her life forever—but the frequency of visits to the hospital was decreasing, and for the first time since she could remember, the doctors were smiling and delivering good news.
Secretly, Nicki suspected that Brad had pulled some strings in Heaven to make it all happen. If anyone in the world could charm the likes of Saint Peter, it would be him.
“I brought you a present,” she said to Brad. Stooping low and balancing herself to keep from kneeling in the wet grass, she pulled the little vase from the marker and set it upright. “No, they’re not flowers. Sorry about that, but you never were much of a flower type. I brought you something to read instead.”
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a carefully folded page from the Michigan City News.
“I can’t take any credit for this,” she explained. “This one is all Daddy. The journal you told Mrs. Parker about was still there. He won’t let me read it, but he said that he had you pegged wrong. Those were his words: pegged wrong. That’s the equivalent of God admitting that gnats were a mistake.
“Whatever you wrote pissed off the right people. Daddy leaned on the prosecutor out there to file charges for what happened to you. They didn’t want to at first because you weren’t there to testify, and they were worried that prisoners would be too scared to testify against each other. Then Daddy suggested that they forget about the inmates, and go after that one guard, Lucas somebody.” She looked at the article, trying to find the name.
“Lucas Georgen,” said her father’s voice from behind.
She jumped and put her hand on her heart, a gesture that first startled him and then made him smile. “What are you doing, Daddy?”
“Sorry. I haven’t been listening, I promise. Just that last part. Lucas Georgen, rapist scumbag. We had no trouble at all getting people to spill their guts about him.”
Nicki was shocked to see that he was talking to the grave, too. “Anyway,” she said, “he got twenty years.”
Carter paid silent respects to Brad, then he turned his gaze to Nicki. “How are you holding up?”
Nicki took a deep breath and blew it out with a dramatic flair. “Everything’s working fine.”
“That’s n
ot really what I meant,” he said. He nodded toward the grave. “How are you holding up?”
That answer took some thought. “Okay, I think. I only cried once.” Nicki spindled the newspaper article and tapped it into the vase. “I try to tell myself that this is the only time he’s ever really been happy.”
“I tell myself that about you, sometimes,” Carter mused.
Nicki didn’t reply. What was there to say?
“Well, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Carter said, stepping back. “Take your time. I’ll be—”
“It was the sweetest thing,” Nicki said, interrupting. She saw his look of confusion. “What you did. The marker, the stuff with the prosecution in Michigan, all of it. It was sweet.”
Her words disarmed him. He looked at the ground. “I thought I’d try being a good father for a change,” he mumbled.
“It’s hard to do when you’ve got a crappy kid to deal with,” she said.
Overhead, a cloud passed in front of the sun, blurring the edges of shadows. Carter cleared his throat again. “Well, I’ll give you some time alone with Brad.”
“I don’t need it,” she said, standing and brushing her pants legs straight. “He’s not here. Not really.” She tapped her chest with her finger. “He’s here.”
Carter cocked his head. “You sure? It’s likely to be a long time before we come back this way.”
“This is all the past,” Nicki said. “I’m tired of the past. Now that I’ve got a future, I thought I’d try living for it.”
As Nicki reached out to hold her father’s hand, the sun emerged in a breathtaking starburst of light. The entire universe seemed to be smiling.
Don’t miss John Gilstrap’s next compelling Jonathan Grave thriller
Final Target
Coming from Kensington in Summer 2017
Keep reading to enjoy a sample excerpt . . .
Chapter One
Jonathan Grave heard the sounds of ongoing torture a full minute before he arrived on the scene. An approach like this in the middle of the night through the tangled mass of the Mexican jungle was an exercise in patience. He was outnumbered and outgunned, so his only advantage was surprise. Well, that and marksmanship. And night vision.
Ahead of him, and too far away to be seen through the undergrowth, his teammate and dear friend Brian Van De Muelebroecke (aka Boxers) was likewise closing in on the source of the atrocity.
The last few yards, the last few minutes, were always the most difficult. Until now, the hostage’s suffering had been an academic exercise, something talked about in briefings. But hearing the agonized cries above the cacophony of the moving foliage and screeching critters of this humidity factory made it all very real. The sense of urgency tempted Jonathan to move faster than that which was prudent. And prudence made the difference between life and death.
The slow pace of his approach was killing Jonathan. It was 02:15, the night was blacker than black, and that victim who no doubt was praying for death had no idea that he was mere minutes away from relief. All that had to happen was for Jonathan and Boxers to get into position, read the situation for what it was, and then execute the rescue plan. There was nothing terribly elegant about it. They would move in, kill the bad guys who didn’t run away, and they’d pluck their precious cargo—their PC, a DEA agent named Harry Dawkins—to safety. There was a bit of yada yada built into the details, but those were the basics. If past was precedent, the torturers were cartel henchmen.
But first, Jonathan had to get to the PC, and get eyes on the situation, and he had thousands of years of human evolution working against him. As a species, humans don’t face many natural predators, and as a result, we don’t pay close attention to the danger signs that surround us. Until darkness falls.
When vision becomes limited, other senses pick up the slack, particularly hearing. As he moved through the tangle of undergrowth and overgrowth, Jonathan was hyperaware of the noises he made. A breaking twig, or the rattle of battle gear, would rise above the natural noises of the environment and alert his prey that something was out of the ordinary. They wouldn’t know necessarily what the sound was, but they would be aware of something.
Alerted prey was dangerous prey, and Jonathan’s two-man team did not have the manpower necessary to cope with too many departures from the plan.
Another scream split the night, this time with a slurred plea to stop. “I already told you everything I know,” Dawkins said in heavily accented Spanish. The words sounded slurred. “I don’t know anything more.”
In time, the magnified light of his night vision goggles, NVGs, began to flare with the light of electric lanterns. “I have eyes on the clearing,” Boxers’ voice said in his right ear. He was barely whispering, but he was audible. “They’re yanking the PC’s teeth. We need to go hot soon.”
Jonathan responded by pressing the transmit button on his ballistic vest to break squelch a single time. There was no need for an audible answer. By their own SOPs, one click meant yes, two meant no.
As if to emphasize the horror, another scream rattled the night.
Jonathan pressed a second transmit button on his vest, activating the radio transceiver in his left ear, the one dedicated to the channel that linked him to his DEA masters. The transceiver in his right ear was reserved for the team he actually trusted. “Air One,” he said over the radio. “Are you set for exfil?”
“I’m at a high orbit,” a voice replied. “Awaiting instructions.” The voice belonged to a guy named Potter, whom Jonathan didn’t know, and that bothered the hell out of him. The Airedale was cruising the heavens in a Little Bird helicopter that would pluck them from one of three predetermined exfiltration points. He was a gift from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as an off-the-record contribution to their own employee’s rescue. For reasons that apparently made sense to the folks who plied their trade from offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, this op was too sensitive to assign an FBI or even a US military rescue team, yet somehow it could support a government-paid pilot, and that inconsistency bothered Jonathan. A lot. It was possible, of course, that Potter was every bit as freelance as Jonathan, but that thought wasn’t exactly comforting. All too often, freelancers’ loyalty was as susceptible to high bidders as their skills were.
“Be advised that we will be going hot soon,” Jonathan whispered.
“Affirm. Copy that you’re going hot soon. Tell me what you want and I’ll be there.”
Jonathan keyed the other mike. “Big Guy, are you already in position?”
Boxers broke squelch once. Yes.
Jonathan replayed Dawkins’s plea in his head. I already told you everything I know. The fact that the PC had revealed information—even if it wasn’t everything he knew—meant that Jonathan and Boxers were too late to prevent all the damage they had hoped to. Maybe if DEA hadn’t been so slow on the draw, or if the US government in general had reacted faster with resources already owned by Uncle Sam, the bad guys wouldn’t know anything.
The bud in Jonathan’s left ear popped. “Team Alpha, this is Overwatch. Over.”
“Go ahead, Overwatch,” Jonathan replied. He thought the “over” suffix was stupid, a throwback to outdated radio protocols.
“We have thermal signatures on Alpha One and Alpha Two, and we show you approaching a cluster of uniform sierras from roughly the northwest and southeast.”
Somewhere in the United States, Overwatch—no doubt a teenager judging from his voice—was watching a computer screen with a live view from a satellite a couple hundred miles overhead. As Jonathan wiped a dribble of sweat from his eyes, he wondered if the teenager was wearing a wrap of some kind to keep warm in the air conditioning. “Uniform sierra” was what big boys wrapped in Snoopy blankets called unknown subjects.
“That would be us, Overwatch,” Jonathan whispered. He and Boxers had attached transponders to their kit to make them discernible to eyes in the sky. Even in a crowd, they’d be the only two guys flashing here-I-am signals to the
satellite.
“Be advised that we count a total of eight uniform sierras in the immediate area. One of them will be your PC. Consider all the others to be hostile.”
In his right ear, Boxers whispered, “Sentries and torturers are hostile. Check. Moron.”
Jonathan suppressed a chuckle as he switched his NVGs from light enhancement to thermal mode and scanned his surroundings. It wasn’t his preferred setting for a firefight because of the loss of visual acuity, but in a jungle environment, even with the advantage of infrared illumination gear, the thick vegetation provided too many shadows to hide in. “How far are the nearest unfriendlies from our locations?” he asked on the government net.
A few seconds passed in silence. “They appear to have set up sentries on the perimeter,” Overwatch said. “Alpha One, you should have one on your left about twenty yards out, call it your eleven o’clock, and then another at your one, one-thirty, about the same distance. Alpha Two, you are right between two of them at your nine and three. Call it fifteen yards to nine and thirty to three. The others are clustered around a light source in the middle. I believe it’s an electric lantern.”
Jonathan, Alpha One, found each of the targets nearest to him via their heat signature, and then switched back to light enhancement. Now that he knew where they were, they were easy to see. The concern, always, were the ones you didn’t see.
As if reading his mind, Venice (Ven-EE-chay) Alexander, aka Mother Hen, spoke through the transceiver in his right ear. “I concur with Overwatch,” she said. The government masters didn’t know that Venice could independently tap into the same signal that they were using for imagery. She was that good at the business of taming electrons. He liked having that second set of eyes. While he knew no reason why Uncle Sam would try to jam him up, there was some history of that, and he knew that Venice always had his best interests at heart.
Nick of Time Page 38
