Dead Men's Harvest

by Matt Hilton

  The sound of a rifle snapped from behind us. I didn’t glance back because if the bullet had been aimed at me or Rink then already one of us would be dead. I saw Drummond go down, and there was a bloody hole in his chest. Baron dropped to a crouch, his gaze seeking out the shooter. The others had the sense to throw themselves flat.

  There was another crack of the rifle and a man on the balustrade dropped out of sight. Permanently.

  Harvey, it appeared had come through for us.

  ‘The chopper,’ I called to Rink. ‘Quickly.’

  ‘Let me go,’ Petoskey squawked. ‘You don’t need me any more.’

  ‘No. You’re coming with us.’ If I’d let him go then, we’d have been riddled with bullets. Even if we made it into the air, without Petoskey as a hostage, I’d the feeling that Baron wouldn’t hesitate in ordering the chopper brought down. There were plenty of assault rifles to get the job done. And who knew what other weapons were in their arsenal? There could be surface-to-air missiles hidden under the topiary for all I could tell.

  The pilot who’d flown the helicopter here was conspicuous by his absence. Harvey was prone beneath the chopper, a sniper rifle on a tripod trained towards the front of the house. He was dressed in a drab green jumpsuit, his skin streaked with camouflage grease. The skills he’d possessed from back when he was a Ranger hadn’t failed him when entering the compound undetected. He winked up at me, said, ‘If I was a betting man, I wouldn’t have wagered a cent on us pulling this off.’

  ‘So long as you’re not a sore loser.’ I winked back. Then I covered for him as he rolled out from under the chopper and climbed inside. Rink clambered into the cockpit next to him while I dragged Petoskey into the rear compartment. I left the door open so that his henchmen were reminded of where blind shooting could get them.

  My Special Forces training didn’t extend to flying helicopters. I was more used to rappelling from them, or parachuting into bandit country from a high-altitude airplane. The flying was left to those who knew what the hell they were doing, so the routine Harvey went through to get us off the ground was lost on me. All I know is that the blades cut the air, there was a lot of high-pitched engine noise, and we were up and away, drifting on the night breeze like a fleck of lint.

  We banked right, then soared up into the sky. Below us in the grounds of the mansion, gunmen aimed useless weapons at us.

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Petoskey asked.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Just tell me what you want. I swear to God, Hunter, I’ll give you it.’

  I considered his offer for a split second.

  ‘Call Tubal Cain off my brother.’

  Petoskey made big eyes at me. ‘I would, but . . .’

  ‘But nothing,’ I told him. ‘Do that and I’ll let you go. Call off the contract.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Petoskey yelped. ‘Cain isn’t doing this for me. He’s working for Kurt Hendrickson. Your argument is with Hendrickson, not me!’

  Shaking my head slowly, I stared into his eyes. I pictured Petoskey lifting his gun to the back of Louise Blake’s head. That innocent girl had suffered enough because of Hendrickson. Then, on the bastard’s behalf, Petoskey had put a bullet in her head.

  ‘You’re right. There’s no argument for what you did to Louise,’ I said.

  Petoskey’s face fell. There was resignation there, but it was far outweighed by fear.

  My fist connected with his throat. He gagged, bending over, and I grabbed and spun him round. I stamp-kicked his buttocks and Petoskey was propelled out of the open door. He screamed as he fell.

  There’s this urban legend about a man falling for thousands of feet, landing on his feet and walking away uninjured. We were only five hundred feet up; so maybe Petoskey would get lucky.

  Chapter 20

  As emotionless as driftwood, Baron watched Petoskey plummet from the sky.

  The Arkansas mobster screamed all the way down then went deathly silent as he struck the roof of the house. He smashed through tiles, made it through the support beams and ended up in the attic space. The blood pouring down the steepled roof was an indication of what would be found when Petoskey was retrieved from the wreckage.

  Setting his mouth in a tight line, Baron reached into his pocket and took out his cellphone. He pressed a speed dial number. The phone rang three times before it was picked up.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid, sir,’ he said into the phone. ‘Hunter and Rington have escaped.’

  He tolerated the shouting in his ear, knowing that this was nothing compared to what was coming.

  Then he said, ‘It’s worse than that, Mr Hendrickson. During their escape, your business partner was killed.’

  Hundreds of miles away, Kurt Hendrickson screamed blasphemous threats down the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ Baron acknowledged. ‘I will do everything in my power to stop them.’

  He quickly disconnected to avoid a further berating, slipped the phone back in his pocket then turned to the men standing next to him. He indicated the shattered roof. ‘Come on. We’d best go and see what’s up there.’

  ‘It’s not going be pretty,’ one man said.

  No, Baron thought, and neither is our future if we don’t stop Hunter.

  The phone chimed again. Sighing at the intrusion, Baron pulled his cellphone out. The screen was blank. He heard the tone once more and slapped at his other pocket in confusion. He dug out a second phone. This one’s screen glowed with a cold blue colour. As it rang it vibrated softly in his hand. Baron nodded to himself. It was the phone taken from Hunter when they’d snatched him off the street in Little Rock. On the screen the caller’s name was displayed.

  imogen ballard

  Baron pressed the green button. ‘Hello?’ he asked, deliberately muffling his voice with his free hand.

  ‘Is that you, Joe? I . . . uh . . . I’ve been thinking. Things shouldn’t end like this between us. We need to talk, Joe . . . I was just wondering if you’d come back to Maine when you’re finished there.’

  Baron breathed into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Joe? Are you there? Can you hear me?’

  Baron switched off the phone and dropped it back into his pocket. Maybe his future wouldn’t be so grim after all, not now he’d found a new way to control Hunter.

  Chapter 21

  Some might say that my treatment of Sigmund Petoskey was excessive.

  That would be a valid point of view, but I didn’t look at it that way. Cold-bloodedly shooting an innocent woman in the back of the head is murder. The way I saw things, I was totally justified in executing him for his crimes. Pro-lifers would undoubtedly argue otherwise, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over Petoskey’s violent death.

  My friends didn’t know about Louise’s murder, so their reaction to me throwing Petoskey out the helicopter was stunned silence until I told them what he had done. Then both lamented that I hadn’t saved a piece of his ass for them. With no time for ethical debate, I put the miserable bastard out of my mind and turned to something far more important to me. ‘How are you holding up, Rink?’

  ‘Still ticking, brother,’ he said.

  Rink has the type of mentality that should he lose all his limbs he’d still try to rip an enemy’s throat out with his teeth. But he was only human, and despite his desire to go down fighting, he barely had the strength to keep his eyes open.

  Leaning into the cockpit, I peeled back the dressing on his shoulder, concerned by what I might find. Luckily it wasn’t a bullet wound as I’d first feared but a rip in his flesh. It was raw and angry looking. Someone had slapped on the rudimentary dressing, but it didn’t look like the tear had been cleaned or treated. I could feel the heat radiating from Rink’s body and knew that he was feverish.

  ‘It’s nothing, Hunter,’ Rink said, pressing down the bandage to cover the wound. ‘I ran into a goddamn tree branch, is all. Goddamn fool’s trick, you ask me.’

  ‘How’d they manage to get you?’

 
‘That slimy little punk, Baron. There was a group of ’em that ambushed me, forced my Porsche off the road and into the swamp. Managed to take out some of them, but then Baron came from nowhere, hit me with a goddamn Taser. Before I could recover from that, a couple of others had me down and had my weapons stripped from me. I fought back, got free and ran full tilt into a freakin’ tree. Almost impaled myself . . . was hung up there while Baron gave me another blast or two of his Taser. Then I must’ve been given a shot of somethin’ ’cause the next I knew I was in that cellar having my ass kicked all over again.’ The heat radiating from him now came from a different source.

  ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Rink.’

  ‘You reckon? Time was they wouldn’t have taken me.’ He swiped the cold sweat from his forehead.

  Careful not to touch him anywhere it would hurt, I placed a comforting palm on his good shoulder. ‘Not alive anyway. It’s better that things turned out the way they did. At least this way you get a chance at payback.’

  ‘He’s a sneaky one, that Baron. We gotta keep an eye out for him in future, Hunter.’

  Recalling the speed with which he’d shot at me – luckily with a blank cartridge – I knew that Baron could prove to be a deadly foe. But he wasn’t my main concern at that moment. Another more potent killer was out there, someone more dangerous than ten of the likes of Baron. Tubal Cain was seeking my brother, but he was also standing between me and a reckoning with Kurt Hendrickson. I’d decided that Petoskey, for all his faults, had been correct about one thing: my argument now was with Hendrickson. He was the current force behind all our other enemies. Stopping him would fracture their alliance, weaken them, and then we could take them all out.

  To Harvey, I said, ‘Can this thing take us where we need to go?’

  Harvey shook his head, indicating a dial on the controls. ‘The chopper wasn’t refuelled after travelling here. We’re only good for a few more minutes, then we’ll have to set down. But don’t worry guys. I’ve got things under control.’

  He piloted the helicopter towards a distant copse of trees, swooped over it and then set down in a clearing on the far side. At my estimation we were barely ten miles from the house where Rink had been held. Harvey indicated another, smaller helicopter resting in the moonlight. Harvey must have made his way here via this route, so the appearance of his personal craft was no real surprise.

  ‘There could be a tracking device on this bird, so I suggest we don’t hang around, guys.’ Harvey clambered from the chopper, then went to help Rink out the other side. Grabbing the sniper rifle Harvey had brought with him, I decamped by way of the side door through which Petoskey had exited a few minutes earlier. When my friends were safely out of the way, I shouldered the stock and fired a few rounds into the engine housing. Apart from the clatter of shredding metal and the occasional spark there was nothing as dramatic as an explosion, but this helicopter wouldn’t be capable of following us. A waste of a good machine, but anything to slow down Baron and the rest of his gang was a help.

  Hendrickson’s chopper was a Bell UH-1N Twin Huey, whereas Harvey’s was nowhere near as flashy. His was the more familiar Bell Jetranger that was the mainstay of many commercial helicopter companies. It wasn’t as big or as intimidating as the modified military aircraft we’d ditched, but it would get us where we were going. Harvey once told me all about his little pleasure craft, stating it could go for three hours and still have fuel in the reserve tank. At over one hundred miles per hour, it would get us to our destination with no need for a refill. Again Harvey took the pilot’s seat, but unlike on the first trip I moved Rink into the back with me. As we lifted into the sky, Rink reached across and took my hand. ‘Thanks for coming for me, brother.’

  ‘Did you expect anything different?’

  ‘You shoulda told the frog-gigging muthas to go fuck themselves . . . just like I said. You shoulda went after Cain. It’s more important that you kill him. He won’t stop until he’s stripped the rest of John’s hide from his back.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that without you beside me, Rink. Cain’s unfinished business for the two of us, remember?’

  He ran a palm down his face, lingering a moment just below his bottom lip. On Rink’s chin was a livid white scar, a token of the last time we’d fought Tubal Cain. I had a similar scar but mine was only an inch or so from my heart. Cain had almost finished the two of us before we’d managed to stop him. So I wasn’t kidding when I told him I wanted him there when next I faced the killer: it might very well take the two of us to stop him again.

  ‘John’s safely out of harm’s way,’ I said. ‘Walter has him surrounded by armed guards. I think we should be proactive, take the fight to Hendrickson.’

  From the front, Harvey called back. ‘We should get Rink to a hospital is what we should do.’

  ‘Told you,’ Rink said. ‘I’m fine. Let’s just go get the fuckers and have done with it.’

  ‘You need medical help and you need rest.’

  ‘Need a stiff drink is what I need,’ Rink grunted.

  ‘Best I can do is this.’ Harvey slung a drinking canteen back towards us and I snatched it out of the air. Carefully I dribbled tepid water into Rink’s mouth. My big friend didn’t have the strength to steady the canteen, didn’t even attempt to lift his hands. Harvey was right. First stop was a doctor.

  ‘Where’s the nearest hospital?’ I asked. It only then occurred to me that I’d no idea where on the Eastern Seaboard we were, let alone the location of a medical facility.

  ‘South-west of here, we have a choice between Raleigh and Greensboro. We go north into Virginia, nearest city I can think of is Richmond.’

  We were somewhere in North Carolina? That surprised me as my initial thought on waking earlier was that we were further north: Maryland perhaps.

  Rink stirred, leaning forward in his seat so that Harvey could hear him. ‘You think you can find Selwin, Gates County?’

  ‘There’s a hospital there?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘No. But there’s a cute veterinarian that can patch me up.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’ I smiled. ‘I always said you were a bloody hound dog.’

  ‘Nah, Hunter. What you’re thinking of is, I’ve got animal magnetism. That’s why that pretty little vet will be over the moon to see me.’

  ‘Where the fuck is Selwin?’ Harvey’s grumbling was followed by tapping on instruments and I guessed he was accessing a sat-nav system. A moment later the helicopter shifted and we began streaking due east.

  ‘You gotta find somewhere just north of town. Moulder has her practice about a mile out.’ Rink smiled at the memory of when he’d last been out at the veterinary centre. He closed his eyes, perhaps savouring the moment, and I waited and waited for them to open again. His soft snores told me I might have a long wait. I studied his fatigue-loosened features and a pang of melancholy went through me. Rink was now in his early forties, but never before had it looked like age was beginning to creep up on him. There were deep lines around his hooded eyes that I’d not noticed before, and even a few errant grey hairs peppered throughout his raven hair. Jesus, I’d always seen Rink as being invincible, so this was a real lesson. There were more than a few grey strands in my own hair now . . . a reason why I kept the damn stuff cut so short these days.

  Using a lap-belt I strapped Rink into his seat, before clambering over and into the co-pilot position. Harvey nodded back towards our friend. ‘He’s OK, just sleeping,’ I said.

  ‘He needs more than a shot from a goddamn veterinarian. I think we should head for a hospital while he’s out of it, get him some real help.’

  ‘Ordinarily I’d agree, but do you think the big guy would be happy if we did that? Probably he’d kick both our arses.’

  ‘He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.’ There was only fondness in Harvey’s words.

  Normally it’s me who’s accused of being too stubborn, usually by Rink, but Harvey was right. Rink would see it as a personal failure if he was
holding up our mission and I wasn’t going to be the one to cause him any further shame than he’d already endured these past couple of days. ‘Let’s just go see Vet Moulder and get her opinion first.’

  ‘That Rink, he seems to have a lady in every town.’

  Yeah, but just like me he had never been lucky enough to find someone he could spend his impending old age with. Maybe it was my sigh of regret that swung Harvey’s gaze upon me. He said, ‘You should call her, you know.’

  He wasn’t talking about Vet Moulder.

  When I didn’t immediately respond, Harvey went on, ‘She deserves more than a goodbye in the middle of the night, Hunter. That woman, she’s been around for you this past year, like you’ve been for her. Just my opinion, but I don’t think you should sever all ties.’

  I thought that the best way to let Imogen get on with her life would be to do exactly that. Being around her was always going to be a reminder of how we’d both failed her sister. Phoning her wouldn’t help.

  Harvey’s a handsome man. He has that very black skin that’s as smooth as silk, spread evenly over a finely shaped bone structure and a slightly aquiline nose. Yet, right now, his features were set, his lips stretched taut over his teeth. His face was almost skull-like in its intensity. It wasn’t my failure to acquiesce in his opinion that made him angry. We shared a moment that was statically charged before Harvey looked at me. His eyes were twinkling with unshed tears. ‘I should’ve looked out for Louise more than I did. I called her, told her to lay low for a while, but it wasn’t enough, Hunter.’

  ‘You couldn’t know what was going to happen to her.’

  ‘No. We both guessed what the consequences were. That’s exactly my point, man. We should’ve done more, just like we should to keep Imogen out of this. No one around us is safe any more . . . everyone we care about is a target to these bastards.’