Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  “Brother Matthew. What are you doing?”

  I recognized the voice. It was Perry, the music director.

  “I’m not Brother Matthew,” I said. “My name is Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator. He knows who I am. I don’t know how he found out, but he knows. If you want to live to see the sunrise, you better sit your ass back down.”

  “But—”

  “Sit the fuck down,” I shouted.

  He sat. Everyone else kept quiet. I’ll never know for sure, but I felt a sense of relief among them, relief that they weren’t going to have to watch an innocent young woman burn. Maybe what limited optimism I still possessed emerged, a limited hope that some smidgeon of humanity still existed, even in those cold and listless hearts gathered to witness one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

  “Get your hands up where I can see them,” I said to Strychar.

  He ducked behind the pulpit, and a ring of fire suddenly surrounded him and the platform where Brittney stood tied to the swastika. The ring was composed of smaller rings, overlapping like links in a chain. The Chain of Light.

  I’m sure the fiery ring had originally been set up as a dog and pony show, for drama’s sake. Now it acted as a barricade between Strychar and me, and between Brittney and me. I needed to save this young girl’s life, but I also needed The Holy Record. As it was, I couldn’t get to either of them.

  Brittney was positioned behind Strychar, so if I fired my weapon in that direction I risked hitting her. If I tried walking through the flames, I would become a human torch. In short, I was screwed. All Strychar had to do was make one call on his cell phone and a hundred Harvest Angels would swoop down and cut me to ribbons. But Strychar didn’t make that call. Strychar panicked. He rose from behind the pulpit, holding his nickel-plated revolver, and fired five shots in my direction. Handguns, even expensive ones like the Colt Python, aren’t very accurate. It was hardly a miracle that all five shots missed me. He stuffed the gun into his waistband, grabbed The Holy Record, and heaved it toward the flames, intending to burn it, but he tossed a little too hard and it landed outside the ring.

  He then turned one hundred eighty degrees, pulled the Python and pointed it at Brittney. He was only ten feet away from her.

  She screamed just before the next shot was fired.

  But the next shot fired was not from the gun in Reverend Strychar’s hand. The next shot fired was from a forty-caliber semiautomatic pistol identical to the one I’d taken from Brother John back at the dorm. My head instinctively turned left, toward the muzzle flash, and I caught a glimpse of a man with an eye patch before he grabbed the massive book, The Holy Record, and darted into the woods. I fired a few rounds in his direction, but he kept running.

  Massengill.

  I wanted to chase him. I wanted him, and I wanted that book. I looked toward the woods, and then I looked toward Brittney. If I chased Massengill, Strychar might finish her off with his last bullet. He might even set her on fire. If I let Massengill go, I might never learn the truth about the plane crash.

  Sometimes you have to let go of the past and cling to the love you have now.

  I didn’t move an inch.

  Strychar staggered, faced the crowd, and fell to his knees. A dark stain bloomed from his chest. “Help me,” he pleaded.

  “Turn the flames off,” I shouted.

  Grimacing in pain, he reached behind the pulpit and flipped a switch. The ring of fire disappeared.

  I ran to Strychar, thinking I might be able to put some pressure on his wound and stop the bleeding. If I could keep him alive, maybe there was still a chance I could learn the truth about the plane crash.

  Unfortunately, Reverend Lucius Strychar had other plans.

  He still had the revolver. When I got close enough, he pointed it directly at my heart. I pointed the AK-47 directly at his.

  Stalemate.

  I kept my eye on his trigger finger. When his twitched, mine twitched.

  A crushing tide hammered through my neck and jaw. Some sort of alarm wailed in the distance. Strychar only had one more bullet, but that was all he needed. At close range, the .357 mag would tear me in half.

  “Drop the weapon,” I said.

  “You drop it. Nothing can happen to me. I’m a prophet, sent to usher in the return of Christ. Jesus won’t allow anyone or anything to hurt me. Surrender now and I might let you live.”

  “You have one cartridge. I have an entire magazine. Give it up, Strychar. It’s over.”

  “You’re right. It is over. For you.”

  He squeezed that trigger hard and fast and a nanosecond after I heard the click, I instinctively and involuntarily opened up and riddled a dozen holes in his chest.

  His last bullet never fired. It turned out to be the dummy round I had loaded into the revolver the night before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Strychar lay dead at my feet. I turned and ran to Brittney and loosened her bonds. She fell into my arms crying.

  I held her for a few seconds, raked the sweaty hair away from her face.

  “We’re going to be all right,” I said. “But we have to get out of here. Fast.”

  “The guy with the eye patch!” she screamed. “He killed my sister. Get him!”

  “I’m not leaving you, Brittney. I’m never going to leave you again, you understand that?”

  The Chain of Light members who had been sitting peacefully at the picnic tables were now stampeding up the hill toward Strychar’s house like a herd of cattle. Distant shouts of Fire! echoed through the valley, and I remembered I had left Strychar’s desk lamp shrouded with my black Harvest Angels shirt. It seemed I had inadvertently created the perfect diversion.

  I pulled out Brother John’s cell phone and called 9-1-1. I told the dispatcher there was a house fire and gave her the address. When she asked my name, I hung up.

  I turned back to Brittney. “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “I can do it. I can walk.”

  “Have you ever used a handgun?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t want to lead her into the woods on a dangerous manhunt, but she wanted Massengill as much as I did. Maybe more. And I couldn’t leave her alone.

  I took the forty-caliber pistol out of its holster and handed it to her. “It’s ready to go. Just aim and pull the trigger.”

  She looked at the gun, and then at me. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She hesitated a beat, but her tone was emphatic. “Fuck yeah,” she said.

  We entered the woods, me leading the way with the AK-47. Moonlight trickled through the canopy, dancing on what appeared to be drops of fresh blood on the ground. I crouched down, pinched a droplet, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, sniffed it. It was blood, all right. I must have at least grazed Massengill when I fired earlier. The trail led west, toward the highway.

  We stalked deeper into the woods. The drops of blood on the ground got farther apart, and then stopped altogether. Massengill’s wound must have clotted. Now there was no way to track him.

  “Now what?” Brittney said.

  “State Road Twenty-One’s over there. Come on.”

  “We’re giving up?”

  “No. He was headed toward the highway, so—”

  “Look!”

  On the ground, a few feet to our left, lay The Holy Record. Dots of fresh blood on its leather binding shimmered in the diffuse moonlight. I tackled Brittney at the waist and we fell together to the forest floor. My right ear collided hard with a pinecone.

  “Stay down,” I said.

  I remained on top of Brittney, covering her body the best I could, expecting gunfire to erupt any second. It had to be a trap. The book had to have been left there as bait. No way Massengill would have just abandoned it.

  I waited, expecting the worst, but nothing happened. Smoke alarms from Stryc
har’s house warbled faintly from half a mile away. No fire truck sirens yet.

  “Why are we on the ground?” Brittney whispered.

  “Be quiet. I’m trying to save your life.”

  Something warm and viscous dripped on the back of my neck. A voice from above—way above, in the treetops somewhere—said, “Pocket forty-seven. That’s how you figured all this out, isn’t it? When Tony Beeler said ‘Pocket forty-seven’? That’s how you think you figured all this out, anyway. Let me tell you something, Nicholas Colt. You’ve done more damage tonight than you can possibly imagine.”

  I whispered into Brittney’s ear. “I’m going to roll off of you, to the right. At the same time, I want you to roll left. Understand?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “It’s all right. Just trust me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll count to three. You ready? One—two—three.”

  I rolled right, stopped on my back, opened up with a staccato burst from the AK-47. I fired the entire clip in the direction of Massengill’s voice, arcing the barrel in a variety of directions for maximum coverage. I squeezed the trigger like a madman until there was nothing left.

  Gunsmoke hovered above me like a ghostly serpent. I was out of ammo now and partially deaf in both ears. I stood, looked upward, saw nothing but a purple haze.

  “Brittney, I want you to stay down. Do you hear me?”

  No response.

  Then a refrigerator fell from the sky and landed right on top of me.

  I rolled onto my side into the pad of twigs and pine needles with Massengill straddling my shoulders. He had my head in a scissors lock with his legs, so tight I thought my brain might leak out through my nose.

  “How does that feel, Colt? I’m going to crush your fucking skull.”

  I reached between his legs and grabbed a handful of testicles, squeezing as hard as I could. Massengill roared in pain, and I felt the vice on my head go slack. He immediately slugged me in the forehead with his fist in retaliation. He got to his knees and pulled out the forty-caliber automatic, the same one he’d used to shoot Strychar back at the clearing. He aimed the barrel directly at my face.

  The punch had left me dazed. It felt as though my mind and body weren’t quite connected, as though I’d been drugged. I couldn’t move my legs. I was completely at his mercy, and mercy didn’t seem to be one of his strong suits.

  He held the gun on me, rock steady, and with his free hand removed the eye patch. He pulled a butane cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it, and held the orange flame to his face. There was a gruesome cavern where his eyeball had once been, lined with skin grafts that looked like pink modeling clay. It was the result of what I’d done to him on the Shands Bridge several months ago, and that’s why he was showing it to me before he blew my brains out.

  “This is your handiwork, Colt. Aren’t you proud?”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “And now, I’m going to do what I have to do.”

  “Why did you save my life?” I asked. “The night you killed Marcus Sharp?”

  “I was aiming for you, dumb fuck. I missed, but I’m pretty sure I won’t this time.”

  There was a palpable moment of silence, and then Brittney galloped in from stage right with a screeching yawp and stabbed Massengill in the face with a pine branch. For an instant I caught what looked like a ghastly wink as his expression changed from fierce to stunned. The pistol discharged, and two hundred grains of lead whistled supersonically past my left ear. Before Massengill had time to react, Brittney went at him again, jamming her weapon into his only eye this time. He fell back and she stabbed him again, twisting the stick in his socket as though she were scouring a bottle with a brush. A thick string of bloody goop followed when she finally pulled it out.

  Brittney stepped away as he lay writhing. I thought he was finished, but a few seconds later he sprung to a sitting position like some sort of sightless jack-in-the-box. He fired a round in her direction, missing by several feet. He fired again, closer this time. The bastard must have had radar. Somehow he was honing in on her. She was only a few feet away, so maybe he was catching her scent. Or the sound of her breathing. Or some other voodoo shit he’d learned as a Navy SEAL.

  Brittney stood frozen. The slightest sound would be a beacon and a death sentence, and she knew it. I was starting to get some feeling back in my legs, but they still weren’t strong enough to stand on. I felt dizzy and nauseated and useless.

  “Shoot him,” I shouted. I’d given her the pistol before we entered the woods, and I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t used it. She’d chosen a stick instead, which didn’t make any sense.

  I hoped the sound of my voice would cause Massengill to train his weapon on me. If he shot at me, it might give Brittney time to run away. But he never wavered. He kept the gun pointed in her direction. He fired again, his third shot even closer than the second. Each time, the muzzle flash gave me a momentary glimpse of the horror on Brittney’s face.

  The pistol was stuffed down the front of her jeans, the grip sticking out and easily accessible. The only thing I could imagine was that she’d tried to shoot him and the gun hadn’t fired. Maybe it had jammed. She’d probably pointed and pulled the trigger like I told her to, and when nothing happened she’d bravely come to my rescue with the only weapon she could find.

  Then I thought of another possibility.

  “There’s a little slide by the handle,” I said. “Pull it toward you.”

  Massengill fired again. He missed, but his barrel was aimed directly at her now. I figured the next shot would take the left side of her head off.

  I was wrong.

  The next shot was from Brittney, and it blasted a chunk of flesh the size of a rib-eye from Massengill’s right shoulder. His arm convulsed spastically, and his gun fell from his hand.

  “I’m hit,” he said, seemingly amazed by the turn of events.

  He was blind and severely wounded and helpless. Brittney stepped forward and, with absolutely no emotion I could discern, pumped an entire clip of forty-caliber rounds into his brain.

  She stood there for a few seconds staring at his lifeless body, then threw the gun down and ran to me. She collapsed at my side, gasping for breath.

  “You did good,” I said. “You saved me.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.” She got up, staggered away, leaned on a tree, and puked her guts out.

  I managed to rise to a sitting position. I was still dizzy, but I felt like I might be able to walk with some help.

  Fire engine and police sirens howled in the distance now, growing louder as they approached the ranch. I figured together Brittney and I could make it to the highway. From there, we would need a ride. I called Juliet on Brother John’s cell phone. She answered on the second ring.

  “Nicholas? Is it really you? You sound drunk.”

  “I think I have a concussion. I’ll tell you all about it in a little while. Can you pick us up at the intersection of twenty-one and sixteen?”

  “Us?”

  “Brittney Ryan is with me,” I said. “Brittney is alive.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I sat at Juliet’s kitchen table with The Holy Record and read the following entry from October 21, 1989:

  A grand mission was accomplished today, the downing of a chartered jet with an interracial celebrity couple and their mongrel child aboard. “Fuel gauge malfunction,” I believe the official investigation will show. I have my faithful servants Brother Roy and Brother John to thank for this service to humanity. Pocket-47, as they say. It has been reported that the man actually survived, but that is of no consequence. The lesson remains.

  Brother Roy was Roy Massengill, of course. I wondered if Brother John was the same idiot who had nearly drowned me.

  And there was that phrase again. Pocket-47. It had come to mean something more than sabotage to me. There was something downright evil about it.

  Eight people died on
that airplane because of a religious zealot’s hatred. I allowed myself to weep openly for one hour, and then decided to put it behind me. Not that I would ever forget Susan and Harmony, but it was time to move forward with my life. They would have wanted it that way.

  It worried me some, what Brother John said about the Harvest Angels, that they were two million strong and had cells all over the country. Groups like Al-Qaeda get a lot of news coverage, but it’s probably the homegrown terrorists that pose the greatest threat to national security. I had a feeling we’d be hearing about the Harvest Angels again some day.

  The Clay County Sheriff’s Department shut the Chain of Light Ranch down immediately. From me they got The Holy Record, along with the VHS-C tape. The original videocassette from the ER examining room was found at Massengill’s house, as I’d suspected. The State Attorney’s Office and the FBI filed boatloads of charges against several members in the upper echelon—charges ranging from false imprisonment of minors to seditious conspiracy against the United States—promising to keep the court system busy for years. The FBI confiscated a considerable cache of weaponry and a ton of terrorist propaganda, and Florida added forty-nine children to its foster home registry.

  But one child, who had endured the system for most of her life, was not put back on the list. I made sure of that.

  A little over a year after the occurrences at the Chain of Light ranch, Juliet and Brittney and I drove away from the Clay County courthouse with signed, sealed, and delivered adoption papers in hand. Juliet and I had gotten married a few months before, and Brittney was our daughter now.

  Brittney had been receiving counseling for the loss of her sister, and for posttraumatic stress disorder. She was back in school, struggling a bit, but that was okay. I was extremely proud of her.

  On days she felt like it, we would sit and talk. By and by I learned the horror story that had been her life for eight months. She never went back to Duck the pimp. It was another girl who died in Duck’s apartment, a girl named Jennifer. Roy Massengill kidnapped Brittney from my camper the day I chased the old Chevy station wagon, and then brought her to the Chain of Light ranch. They could have killed her right away. Instead, they kept her prisoner and fattened her up, intending to use her as an offering for their Nazi god.