Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  A sedan and a couple of SUVs were in the parking lot. Jake didn’t recognize any of them, but every instinct in his body told him that they were a bad sign.

  “You see anybody?” he whispered to Barry.

  “No, but they’re around. Not any doubt of that.”

  “Cartel? Terrorists?” Jake paused. “Or federal agents?”

  “Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “It does,” Jake said tautly. “I still don’t like killing anybody who’s supposed to be working for the same government I am.”

  “They’re not. You work for the government that was elected legally, by the people. Cavanaugh and his ilk, they’re part of a different government, a shadow government of bureaucrats who’ve been appointed . . . in some cases, self-appointed . . . and they believe the rules don’t apply to them. They’re above the law, in their eyes, and when the average citizens stand up and say, hey, we don’t like what you’re doing, the elites try to shout them down at first, and if that doesn’t work, they don’t have a problem putting down any dissent with force. The ones who accidentally tell the truth admitted a long time ago that they don’t see anything wrong with locking up their political enemies . . . or killing them, if that’s what it takes.”

  “I know, I know, blast it. You’re preaching to the choir, Barry.” Jake sighed. “I just hate that things ever got to that point in this country.”

  “You and me both, son. You and me both. Blame the people who bought into blatant lies for decades.” Barry peered intently though the gap in the branches and went on, “There, in that shadowy area between the house and the clinic. Two of them.”

  Jake looked where Barry indicated, and after a moment his keen eyes made out the shapes there. They were nothing more than man-sized patches of deeper darkness, but Jake knew his uncle was right.

  “If we take them, we can get around to the back.”

  “Yeah. We’ll have to try. But crossing that open ground, we’re liable to be spotted if there are more of them.” Barry shrugged. “Chance we’ll have to take. But let’s circle around to the other side of the clinic. Better angle of approach that way.”

  They moved off to the left, staying well back in the brush so there was less likelihood of them being spotted. As they made their way into position, Jake listened intently for any noises coming from inside McIntire’s house. He knew that if he heard screams or gunshots, he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back but would have to charge in there and do whatever he could to help Gretchen.

  He was surprised by the depth of feeling he had developed for her in just a few short days, but he realized there was no point in questioning or analyzing it. He felt what he felt, and that was all there was to it.

  He didn’t hear anything that signified trouble as he and Barry crossed the open ground, but as they pressed their backs against the brick wall at the far end of the clinic from the house, however, he was able to hear barking inside the building. One of the dogs staying there overnight because of some ailment was announcing his presence to the world.

  Jake took a little comfort from that. A dog barking was a normal sound . . . a sign that the whole world hadn’t gone crazy.

  They eased along the wall to the back corner, then around it and closer to the gap between clinic and house. They could have made a run for the back door from there, but the watchers in the shadows were almost certain to see them if they attempted that. Better, instead, to go ahead and deal with that threat first.

  Barry had brought along a piece of a broken branch, about a foot long, that he had picked up in the woods. When he and Jake reached the other corner and stopped there, Barry took the piece of wood from behind his belt and threw it toward the brush. It made a little racket when it landed—not much, but enough to attract the attention of the guards.

  “What’s that?” one of the men quietly asked the other.

  “Don’t know, but we’d better check it out.”

  Barry whispered to Jake, “You take the first one who sticks his head out.”

  Jake nodded, even though it was probably too dark back there for Barry to see him. He was the nearest to the corner, so he set his feet and waited for the guy to get close. He heard stealthy footsteps approaching. The guard was being careful—but not careful enough.

  As soon as the man took one step past the corner, Jake struck with blinding speed. His hands shot out and grabbed the guard’s shoulders, jerking him closer. Jake’s right arm went around the man’s neck and clamped down like an iron bar. He hung on until the guard slumped into unconsciousness—or death.

  Right now, Jake didn’t particularly care which one it was.

  While that was going on, the other man realized something was wrong and exclaimed, “Hey!” as he lunged forward. Barry swung around Jake and was ready to meet that charge. With a lithe agility much belying his age, he bent sideways at the waist and snapped a kick into the second guard’s midsection. Breath gusted out of the man’s lungs as he doubled over.

  Barry chopped a side hand blow down onto the back of his neck. The guard collapsed on his face, out cold.

  Barry stepped back from the fallen sentry and said quietly, “Now let’s see if we can get in through the back door.”

  They moved toward it, but before they could get there, the door swung open and a man stepped out with an automatic rifle in his hands. There was nowhere for Jake and Barry to hide. This guard, who wore tactical gear like the others, saw them immediately, let out a yell of alarm, and jerked his rifle up.

  Barry was too fast for him, bringing up the 1911 he carried in a two-handed grip and firing a pair of swift shots to the man’s chest. The guard’s vest stopped the slugs, but at that range the .45 caliber rounds packed enough punch that they knocked him back off his feet and made him drop the rifle. Barry rushed forward and kicked him in the jaw to finish knocking him out.

  Another man had been following the first one along the hallway toward the back door. When he saw what was happening, he fell back, also shouting an alarm.

  He tried to bring his rifle into play, too, but Jake had already stepped up with the Browning outthrust. There was no time now to be less than lethal. Flame spat from the pistol’s muzzle. The guard went down hard with a third eye in his forehead.

  Someone shouted, and more heavily armed men charged into the hallway from the room where Gretchen was supposed to be recuperating from her injury. Clearly, Jake and Barry would have to go through them to reach her.

  Well, if that was the way it had to be . . .

  Jake dropped to one knee and resumed firing. Barry crouched behind him, shooting over his head.

  Outnumbered and outgunned as they were, they had to get their shots in first and make them count. That meant more head shots because of the body armor the enemies wore. The rogue enemy agents had visors on their helmets, but that protection wasn’t lowered in place. They hadn’t been expecting trouble, and they hadn’t reacted as well as they should have.

  That carelessness cost two of them their lives right away. They tumbled off their feet, drilled through the head. The remaining man was able to get his rifle working. Its ferocious hammering filled the corridor. Jake flung himself one way, Barry the other, as the slugs stitched the air between them.

  They ended up on opposite sides of the hall, both of them triggering their pistols as they lay on their bellies. Firing from this angle meant that when one of their slugs—they never did know which one of them fired it—caught the man under the chin, it angled on up through his brain and rattled around inside his skull, turning the man’s brain to mush.

  He hit the floor hard and fast.

  Jake scrambled to his feet first and pounded toward the door of the room where they’d left Gretchen.

  The first thing he saw as he loomed in the doorway was the back of a man bending over the hospital bed, apparently struggling with someone. A fraction of a second later, Jake realized the man had his hands wrapped around Gretchen’s throat and was trying to choke her. Barry
was about to go after the guy when another figure rose up from the floor.

  Dr. Caleb McIntire had a loose IV stand in his hands. He swung it like a baseball bat and slammed the metal pole against the back of the man’s head.

  That jolted loose the man’s grip on Gretchen’s neck but didn’t knock him out. With an angry roar, the man swung around toward McIntire. Jake recognized Mitchell Cavanaugh, who was high up in the conspiracy—whatever it was—that threatened the United States.

  Jake wanted to put a slug in the middle of Cavanaugh’s face, but he realized in time that the man might have valuable information. So he blasted Cavanaugh’s right kneecap into a million pieces instead. Cavanaugh screamed as that leg buckled underneath him and dropped him toward the floor.

  McIntire hit him again with the IV stand on the way down. Cavanaugh was out cold when he hit the floor.

  McIntire was reeling. A line of dried blood ran down one side of his face from the wound on his head where somebody had clouted him, probably with a rifle butt.

  Barry came into the room behind Jake. He grasped McIntire’s arm to steady him and said, “Sit down over here, Doc. Jake, I’ll keep Cavanaugh covered. You check on Gretchen.”

  That was exactly what Jake was doing already. Gretchen lay there, pale, gasping, and coughing as she gulped down air through her tortured windpipe. Jake stuck his gun behind his belt and took hold of her shoulders.

  “Gretchen, are you okay?” he asked, knowing it was kind of a dumb question even as the words came out of his mouth.

  “Yeah . . . other than . . . being shot and then choked half to death!”

  There was fresh blood on the hospital gown McIntire had put on her, which meant the gunshot wound had probably broken open again, but the crimson stain wasn’t very big and didn’t appear to be spreading fast. Jake figured that the bleeding likely wasn’t bad.

  “Where did Cavanaugh come from?” he asked.

  “They’ve been spying on you . . . with satellites.”

  Barry said, “They must’ve lost sight of us part of the time. If they’d known where we were for any length of time, I wouldn’t put it past Cavanaugh to call in a drone strike on us!”

  “An . . . American citizen? On . . . U.S. soil?”

  “You’re still clinging to the idea that all those Deep Staters aren’t the bad guys,” Barry told her. “After what happened here tonight, though, I’ll bet you’re starting to think differently about that.”

  “Jake . . .”

  He leaned closer over her and asked, “What is it? Do you need something?”

  “Yeah . . . Give Cavanaugh . . . a good swift kick for me!”

  “We can do better than that,” Barry said. “We’re gonna make him tell us at last what this is all about.”

  CHAPTER 59

  The first order of business was to check on the men Cavanaugh had brought with him and make sure the ones who were still alive were secured properly so they couldn’t cause any more trouble or send for help.

  Jake went to do that—reluctantly, since he didn’t want to leave Gretchen’s side—while Barry talked to McIntire in the hallway just outside the room where Gretchen was resting again with her IVs hooked back up.

  “I’m sorry to get you mixed up in this trouble, Doc,” he said. “It may cost you your practice. Once the bureaucrats in the state capital find out that you gave Jake and me a hand, they’ll probably pull your license to practice veterinary medicine.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” McIntire said as he taped a bandage over the gash on his head. He had already cleaned it with disinfectant. “Could be the government will be giving you boys medals before this is all over.”

  Barry let out a cynical laugh.

  “Not hardly. Even if we find out what’s going on and put a stop to it, they’ll never acknowledge what happened. The powers that be will move heaven and earth to cover it up.” Barry shrugged. “That’s what governments do.”

  “Well, however it plays out, I’ll never regret giving you a hand. Not after all the things you’ve done for me.”

  “I appreciate the heads-up you gave me about trouble waiting for us here. Otherwise, Jake and I might have waltzed right into it with our eyes wide open.”

  McIntire let out a snort and said, “I doubt it. That instinct of yours would have warned you, Barry. I’ve never known it to fail yet. But when I came to on the floor, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to send you a message in case you were nearby. I was able to get my hand into my pocket and reach my phone without Cavanaugh or his men noticing. They were too busy paying attention to Cavanaugh questioning Ms. Rogers. I’d programmed the number of that burner phone of yours into mine before you left, and I can send a text message just working by feel.”

  “I guess that makes you as talented as a millennial,” Barry commented wryly.

  McIntire just snorted again, then looked down at the still-unconscious Cavanaugh.

  “I suppose I’d better tend to that piece of scum before he bleeds to death.”

  Barry had been standing where he could keep an eye on Cavanaugh. The man hadn’t regained consciousness. Gretchen had dozed off, so Barry went into the room, got hold of Cavanaugh’s collar, and dragged him out, leaving a trail of blood smeared on the floor. Luckily, the tile was the sort that would clean up easily.

  “You may be doing more damage to his knee by hauling him around like that,” McIntire said with a slight frown.

  “You swore an oath to do no harm,” Barry replied, “but I never did.”

  “We’ve both done plenty of harm in our lives . . . most of it justified.”

  McIntire and Barry lifted Cavanaugh onto the metal table in McIntire’s bare-bones operating room for human patients. McIntire cut away the man’s trouser leg, revealing the bloody mess that Jake’s bullet had made of Cavanaugh’s knee. White bone fragments were visible through the gore.

  “Shooting a man like this strikes me as a little cruel,” McIntire commented to Barry. “I don’t know Jake well, of course, but it seems a little out of character for him.” He smiled bleakly and added, “More like something you would do.”

  “Are you saying I’m cruel?”

  “No . . . but you are practical.”

  “And Jake saw Cavanaugh trying to strangle Gretchen.”

  “That does help to explain it. Well, I’m no orthopedic surgeon, so there’s not much I can do here except clean up the blood and stabilize the knee.”

  “Oh, I think there’s something else you can do,” Barry said. “You still have any of that special serum of yours?”

  McIntire frowned and said, “I’ve told you, Barry, there’s no such thing as truth serum.”

  “No such thing as a foolproof one, you mean. But we both know there are drugs that can help get information out of somebody who doesn’t want to part with it.” Barry nodded toward Cavanaugh. “He certainly falls into that category.”

  McIntire thought about it for a moment, then said, “Let me see what I can do for his knee first. Or do you plan on using that injury to help extract what you want to know? Am I just wasting my time because you’ll damage it even more?”

  “I’ll do whatever’s necessary,” Barry said. “But I can’t question him if he bleeds to death, so go ahead and work on his knee.”

  He stood in the doorway, leaning a shoulder against the jamb, while McIntire cleaned the blood away from Cavanaugh’s bullet-shattered knee and bound it up. Cavanaugh started to stir and moan a little while McIntire was working. The doctor went over to a cabinet, opened it, and took out three bottles and an equal number of hypodermic syringes.

  “Two of these are drugs to help with the pain and ward off infection,” he said as he filled those syringes. “The other one . . .” He drew the third syringe full of liquid from the last bottle. “It’s what you asked for.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I have to admit, I’m a little curious why you have it on hand.”

  “The old days are just old,” McIntire said. “That doesn’t mean they’re
completely gone. I have other friends who need favors now and then, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear it. I figured you’d keep a hand in if you could. If this wasn’t so important—”

  “Save any apology you were about to make,” McIntire said. “After what this man tried to do, I’m not exactly overcome with sympathy for him.”

  Jake came back into the house while McIntire was giving Cavanaugh the injections. He saw Barry in the hallway and joined him.

  “The two who are still alive are secured and gagged. I dragged them out to the barn. They won’t give us any more trouble.” Jake nodded toward the metal table where Cavanaugh was stretched out. “What’s going on there?”

  “Doc’s patching up Cavanaugh’s leg where you shot him.”

  “I figured he had it coming,” Jake said.

  “Nobody around here is going to argue with you.” Barry paused, then added, “The doc’s going to help us find out what we need to know, too.”

  McIntire stepped back and said, “He’s starting to come around now, but with everything I’ve given him, he won’t be awake for long. So you’d be well-advised to ask your questions fairly quickly. As for me . . . I’m going to go check on Ms. Rogers.”

  Barry nodded. He knew exactly what his old friend meant. McIntire didn’t want to be in here while the questioning was going on. It wasn’t that he had gone squeamish over the years since Barry had last seen him. Caleb McIntire had always operated by a strict moral code of his own.

  Barry understood that. He was the same way. And his code meant saving lives was more important than handling evil men such as Mitchell Cavanaugh with kid gloves.

  When McIntire had left the room, Barry stepped up next to the table and lightly slapped Cavanaugh’s cheeks until the man’s eyes opened. He stared up at Barry uncomprehendingly for a moment.

  Then pain and memory hit Cavanaugh at the same time, and he snarled in rage.

  “You . . . you’ll never get away with this, you . . .”

  He sputtered out curses and obscenities for several seconds before Barry rested his hand on the man’s right knee and put just a little pressure on it. That was enough to make Cavanaugh choke off his tirade and gasp in agony instead. Tears began to well from his eyes.