Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain

by William Allen

  By the time Lem Brewster returned from his errand, Scott was taking a break from interrogations and the day was halfway gone. At Yalonda’s insistence, Scott also grabbed a shower at the communal facilities and changed into another set of loose fitting carpenter pants and a dingy tan tee shirt hauled from his pack. He had to admit he felt better and certainly smelled less offensive after he’d had a chance to scrub off the funk of body odor, dried blood, and decomp.

  As for the interrogations, Aaron’s idea of giving the other three prisoners a chance to see Bennie’s current condition went a long way towards loosening lips. One of the men fainted and the woman threw up and couldn’t stop gagging for nearly half an hour. Max complained of getting writer’s cramp from trying to keep up. None of them wanted to join in on what Aaron called “the Bennie Experience”.

  Scott was tired, and the delay made him even more irritable, but he couldn’t complain about the results from the last twenty-four hours. He had what he’d originally come for, a set of motorcycle ‘colors’ or a jacket worn by some other motorcycle club member, and not one but two plans for dealing with the scum camped out in Lowell. Good Lord, who would have thought arsenic was not only still available, but he was getting his poison delivered?

  But, Scott missed his daughter, and though he loathed to admit it, he worried about the four men he’d had out on observation duty. Perkins wasn’t even trained for that kind of work, he groused to himself, but he was willing, and that meant a lot.

  “You want any of that haul?” Max asked, interrupting Scott as he sat by himself at a picnic table under an old pecan tree and slowly cleaned his weapons. The knife and sheath required a full decontamination washdown before he’d even touched the edge. Now he was finishing up the task of stripping, lubricating, and reassembling the Springfield XD.

  “What do you mean?” Scott asked, replacing the slide and working the action, testing the spring. “What haul?”

  “From that farmhouse. Where else?” Max replied with glee. “I got Aaron headed back over in a few minutes with six of the boys and a trailer for the truck. There’s two rooms on the front side of the house filled with food, and the utility shed out back is stacked with guns and ammo those bastards stole when they were hitting houses in the area.”

  Scott thought about the question for a moment. He didn’t really need anything, and he had darned few wants anymore.

  “Figure whatever is my share, and split it between the five ladies we liberated. I imagine some of the loot belongs to them and their families anyway.”

  With that comment, the smile fell off Max’s face.

  “You sure know how to kill an old man’s mood, partner,” he said softly. Scott realized the biker might have taken the response as a back-handed rebuke, which was not his intent.

  “Max, I’m sorry,” he declared earnestly, “that wasn’t what I meant. Just, I don’t need anything in particular unless you can lay hands on the latest Monster High book for my little girl. But you heard what Sarah and Yalonda said about those women, they’ve lost everything. No food, no homes, and no family. So, I would feel better if they had something to make their lives less terrible. That’s all. You and yours have done right by me, and I don’t begrudge you anything you can use or want. Hell, I saw the supplies there, but didn’t even register them what they were at the time. I was looking for anything that was planning on shooting me.”

  “We sure owe you something, Scott, and I’m not talking about that load of chemicals Lem is hauling in here for you, so you can forget that real quick.”

  Scott closed his eyes and sighed. What he most wanted, Max couldn’t give him. He wanted the world to go back to the way it used to be, and he wanted to be able to sleep and get a full night’s rest.

  “Alright, here’s what I need, if you are willing to help. First, I need someone to run over to Kellerville and drop off a report to Lieutenant Conners. He needs what we know about War Eagle, Max. Everything. You know that’s the real threat against our survival. Those ghouls at Lowell, they are a real horror show, and I mean to deal with them, but that camp is meant to distract us from the hidden danger to our east.”

  “I know,” Max grumbled, “and we need to deal with that threat. I’ll send Scooter. He was one of our snipers last night, and he’s real good. Just promise me, we get to kill whoever came up with this idea. If it was Chambers, then he’s gotta die knowing why it happened. Using a bunch of meth head freaks as zombie shock troops just to demoralize the survivors, that is just beyond what I’m willing to stomach.”

  “We made a pact, Max. Those of us that had to bear witness. They all die. Everybody we can prove had a hand in this. And if Dandridge has to make some kind of deal with the Devil to get this country back on track, then they still die. Just a little later.”

  Max chuckled darkly at Scott’s pragmatic and brutal assessment. Then he grew more serious.

  “You know the official story about where the name of our club came from, right?”

  “Wait, you have more than one story? I didn’t even know the official one, much less the secret one,” Scott explained. “You guys weren’t poachers, so my bosses didn’t spend a whole lot of time briefing us.”

  “The truth. Got nothing to do with snakes. Nathan Gardtner, the founder of the club, was an old cannon cocker in the Army before he got out. He came up with the name, borrowing it from the first smart anti-tank round ever developed. The tankers like to refer to themselves, their M1A3s, as the Kings of the Battlefield, but a Copperhead can take out the most sophisticated armor in the world, Scott.”

  “So your club might be small, but it has the bite capable of taking out the biggest and strongest? That’s the message in your name?”

  “That’s it, in a nutshell. Now, here’s another thing most folks don’t know. Hell, nobody except for Chapter Presidents knew, and Nathan kept this very close to the vest. The only reason you are hearing this now is so I can explain the other half of what you need to know.”

  Scott caught Max’s eye, giving the older man his undivided attention.

  “Give it to me straight, Max.”

  “We might be outlaws and troublemakers, but most of us, we still believe in this country. Or believed in what it used to be, I should say. We might smuggle a little weed or set up some underground gaming events, but nothing too far out there. But we heard stuff, you know, about other operations going on at the same time. And as President of the Fayetteville Chapter, I had a specific person to talk to about these little tidbits the boys picked up.”

  “Holy shit,” Scott whispered, “you guys were some kind of sleeper cell.”

  Max shook his head, but a slight grin split his face as he did so.

  “Nothing so James Bond, or Jason Bourne, man. Think of it more like we were doing our patriotic duty. Nothing too big, but enough that the G kept the heat off our club and let us run. Once word got out the Paradise Lodge was ‘protected’ territory, then we really started picking up some scary information. Some of it was just talk, you know, bad guys sitting around bragging about the shit they’ve done. Other things, though, definitely set off our radar.”

  “Now, you have to understand, none of club’s booths were bugged. We didn’t try to pull any phone intercept stuff. That wasn’t what we were doing. We were just willing to pass along things we heard that might have bigger implications.”

  “CIA?” Scott asked, clearly sucked in by Max’s story.

  “Nothing like that. Plain old FBI, brother. Well, maybe a little more than that. Compartmentalized. One thing we figured out within weeks of the club opening was just how corrupt some law enforcement agencies were, and how high the rot went. Hell, there was one Mexican cartel guy who stopped in every Thursday to hand out bundles of cash to the local cops like it was a regular payday. Miguel Aguilera. Worked at the Mexican Consulate in Little Rock, in case you were curious.”

  “But you aren’t telling me this for fun, are you, Max?”

  “No, not at all. Even with eve
rything that’s happened, we would have kept our silence. Except, I needed you to understand that there’s a level of trust developed here, okay? Most of the boys never even knew about this. They were aware we were sort of straddling the line between a legit motorcycle club and the outlaws, but I was the only one in Fayetteville who knew the bigger picture. Well, me and Aaron, or should I say, Special Agent Aaron Courtland.”

  Scott sat for a moment, his jaw clenched. He’d just committed gross acts of human rights violations in front of a federal agent. Tortured a man nearly to death. If he was still a game warden, or in any capacity in law enforcement, Scott would expect to be thrown under the jail before spending the rest of his days in a very small, very ugly prison cell. But this was worse.

  Smoothly, he slid the magazine into the XD, chambered a round and raised the pistol to eye level, so the man across the table was forced to stare into the dark eye of the pistol. Had he been looking in a mirror, Scott would see he had the same expression on his face as when he’d taken the blowtorch to Bennie just hours earlier.

  “The FBI is not under Homeland Security, last I checked,” Scott said softly, “but Homeland has been pulling their strings, even before the lights went out. And we are currently at war with Homeland. They just killed some good friends of mine, in fact. And now you are telling me my plan to stop their thugs’ raping, murdering rampage has been disclosed to a member of that same agency? How exactly is this going to work out, Max?”

  Max, for his part, paled but didn’t try to evade either the barrel, or Scott’s question.

  “Because, Scott, I think we have someone on the inside, maybe at War Eagle. Someone who can give us a lot of answers, answers to questions we haven’t even thought about yet. There’s an FBI agent I trust who is trapped inside, and I think he could help all of us.”

  Weighing Max’s words, Scott thought about the upcoming operation he’d set for himself. Lem, protected under a layer of protective gear that looked more suited for the CDC than safety apparatus found in a wood processing plant, was even now setting up the canister Scott would sneak into the Lowell camp for deployment shortly. That part of the plan still needed work, but he was committed to making that delivery. Sitting back in his chair, Scott kept the pistol trained on Max, but held lower so others would not see.

  “What makes you think you can trust this person?”

  “Because he’s Aaron’s partner in this deal, and he is reaching out to us. Understand, when I say the deal was compartmentalized, I mean that nobody higher up or lower down the food chain knew about our little arrangement. If one of my boys got busted in town for something, we didn’t have the juice to spring them, except of course, going through the cops I knew were bent. This was strictly out of the local offices, here and in Little Rock where Nathan had his headquarters. The chapters in Jonesboro and West Memphis had to go through just these two agents.”

  “Why them? Why Aaron and this other agent?” Scott asked, his voice still neutral but he had to admit, Max could spin a good story.

  “Because they served together in the Army, and this other, older agent talked Aaron into going to Quantico when he got out. And because the other Agent, the one in Little Rock, the one who just reached out to us, is my brother. Special Agent in Charge Alex Scofield.”

  Didn’t see that one coming, Scott admitted to himself.

  “So, if he wants out, what’s stopping him?”

  “Homeland, who else?” Max replied with a pained sigh. “They have his wife and kids locked up there, along with the families of a bunch of others they’ve got doing their dirty work. If the Arkansas National Guard hits that base, then a whole lot of people, a whole lot of innocent victims, are going to get killed, Scott. Including my niece and nephew, along with their mother.”

  Scott finally lowered the pistol.

  “Will he meet with my people? Can he get loose long enough to sit down with Lieutenant Conners, and maybe the Colonel?”

  Max shrugged. “Maybe. The only way I found out he was alive was a message left at our dead drop location. And yes, I know it was from Alex. We have codes, including a duress code. He’s working with a six-man team of other dragooned agents, most of whom are in the same boat, but they have a supervisory agent overseeing their actions. He was just lucky to be in the area late last week and had a chance to drop the note. Must have said he needed to take a leak. Restroom of a truck stop over on I-49.”

  “The date was two weeks old,” Max continued in a voice that finally allowed emotion to surface, “so he’d been carrying that letter around for a while. Aaron found it two days ago. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to broach the subject with you, but I’m afraid we are running out of time.”

  “Like you said, Max, you sure know how to kill an old man’s mood,” Scott nearly growled, running his fingers through his short-cropped hair.

  “So, nobody knows about this but you and Aaron? Not Nancy, not the Porters?”

  “Just us. After things went to shit, I managed to bring in Aaron, passing him off as a brother from the West Memphis chapter. He’s got solid skills, was in the 10th Mountain when he was in the Army, and his training was more recent than some we got. I think Thad’s got some suspicion Aaron was part of our alleged gun-running side of the business, but he hasn’t made a stink even though Aaron has risen up pretty quick here.”

  “Alright, going with the spook angle, we’ll treat this as need-to-know intel, but you have to agree that at least the LT is in the loop. I trust the man completely, Max. He’s smart, but a no bullshit kind of guy, and he rose up through the ranks.”

  “Agreed. Are we still friends? Want to kiss and make up?”

  “Fuck you, Max,” Scott replied, but for the first time, there was something other than ice in his voice. He didn’t like Max withholding this information, but he could appreciate the concern for family as well.

  “Let’s go see about setting up this next operation.”

  “You want to try to make a go tonight?” Max asked, back on the subject at hand. And clearly, despite his concerns for his brother and his family, he considered the Porter farm his responsibility as well. Couldn’t let cannibals continue to roam the countryside, after all.

  “I need to get with my people in the field and find out what’s stirring. Hey, I still got that Los Lobos jacket, so I guess we can go ahead with the original plan for that.”

  “What was that?”

  “Blow some shit up and blame it on Los Lobos.”

  “See, there you go stereotyping an innocent group of peace-loving motorcycle enthusiasts,” Max groused, his earlier color returning at their banter. He’d been worried Scott might react badly when he came over to talk, but fortunately the former game warden was able to see reason.

  “Really?”

  “Noooo. I’m just surprised there weren’t more of them at the house. According to Wanda, Bennie was a recent recruit to their little band of murderers and slavers. Apparently, Los Lobos ended up on the losing end of a gun battle with the town militia down in Chester. Or so he claimed.”

  “Wanda?”

  “Yeah, the female prisoner we captured. Aaron took her statement, once your…once Sarah got her cleaned up. She was willing to admit to snatching the Lindbergh baby, so he had a hard time getting the facts from her.”

  “What’s her story, anyway?”

  “Tweaker scum,” Max pronounced, “she tried to claim she was forced to be there, but the other women said she was one of the worst when it came to abusing them.”

  “She know anything about the camp at War Eagle?”

  “Not really. That was Justin’s deal. The one with the dreadlocks? He knew all about how to set up the meet with the soldiers there, and what kinds of trade goods they were willing to part with for more ‘party girls’ for the camp.”

  “Aaron get everything he wanted from him? I noticed he gave it all up without any of us having to lay a hand on him.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was Billy Badass when he had the
upper hand, but the thought of seeing his own blood brought him around pretty quick.”

  “What about the other one? He got any value to you guys?”

  “Roger? Nope. Just another asshole, but not a very bright one. The ladies did say he was meaner than a broke dick badger, though.”

  “Good. If he’s not too marked up, I think I might have a use for him.”

  “He’s not going to enjoy this, is he?”

  “If all goes according to plan, not even a little bit.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  By dark, Scott had rendezvoused with both his teams, and was pleased to note no further activities for the day. At least, no large-scale efforts to leave the compound by the wretched scum squatting there. Joined by Sarah and Yalonda, he relieved the four men from their watch duties and pulled the team back two miles to an abandoned Taco Bell for a sit-down meeting. Scott hated leaving the roads clear, but they needed to touch base and the two teams of watchers needed some downtime.

  While Sarah stood watch and Yalonda heated up some stew, Scott debriefed the men on their activities and filled them in on his own adventures.

  “Damn,” Perkins interjected, “You go off and save the damsels in distress, while I get to listen to Mike here try to work on his turkey call while we stare at an empty road.”

  “Well, don’t feel bad. Things are about to heat up. In case you missed it, I’ve got a plan.”

  “Does that plan involve the guy wrapped up like a mummy in the bed of your truck? Cause that fella didn’t sound happy,” Ben drawled.

  “Yep,” Scott replied, “one of those slavers we captured. Roger there, was a very bad boy, and now he is going to pay his debt to society, while providing our people with more cover.”

  “Well, lay it on us, boss,” Keith requested. “We need to stomp on these monsters, and the sooner the better.”

  So, Scott explained what he had in mind.

  “That just might work,” Perkins conceded. “And if nothing else, it reinforces the idea we are just another group of raiders. Rivals, not defenders.”