‘He’s in a real bad way,’ Hogan whispered anxiously.
‘He’s not the only one,’ Ben replied.
He watched from the shadows of the bushes as the Garretts’ men converged on the battlefield, sauntering casually among the devastation. The five from the Rhino were joined by half a dozen more.
Jayce Garrett clambered out of the Humvee’s roofless cockpit and appeared to spend a few moments fiddling with the cannon. Maybe he’d run out of ammunition, Ben wondered, or perhaps something was wrong with it. As though he hadn’t done enough damage, in any case.
After a few seconds Jayce seemed to give up on the weapon, and jumped down to the ground. As Ben went on watching, Seth Garrett appeared and came running over to join his brother, hooting with maniacal laughter. The pair were gazing around them as though even they couldn’t believe how wonderfully destructive their little toy had proved to be. They slapped hands in a high-five.
Then both Seth and Jayce Garrett drew pistols from their belts and walked out among the shattered trees with their men.
Ben realised what was about to happen. They were searching for survivors. They were going to execute them.
The pistol shots sounded like tiny pops after the devastating noise of the cannon. But a tiny pop can be all it takes to end a human life. One by one, the Garretts stood over the bodies of the dying and shot them in the head.
And it was at that harrowing, gut-twisting moment that Ben became certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Keisha, Caleb, Noah and Trinity were already dead. They’d probably died that morning or early afternoon, soon after Mason Redbone had delivered them to his patrons.
This had been the Garretts’ plan all along. They’d been a step ahead of him from the start. It had never been about a prisoner exchange. Their intention had been nothing more or less than cold bloody murder. The cops, the hostages, him, everyone.
Ben closed his eyes. His mind numbly replayed the image of himself sitting at the Hebert family dining table, what seemed like a thousand years ago. He remembered the little girl’s sweet prayer of Grace. He remembered the look of loving pride on her parents’ faces, and Keisha saying, ‘That was beautiful, Trinity.’
Then his mind filled with the nightmare of the child’s screams as he involuntarily pictured the Garretts butchering her under the eyes of her mother. Then Noah, then Caleb. Then Keisha too. The horror of it was too much for him to bear.
And it was he, Ben Hope, who had brought these good, kind, innocent people into this by turning up at their house. They wouldn’t have been involved, except for him.
He might as well have murdered them himself.
When he reopened his eyes, they were wet with tears. He wiped them dry and felt the white, cold fury of resolve flooding his mind and body.
He jumped to his feet and snatched up Roque’s Winchester. One round gone, four left in the tube, one up the spout. The sheriff wasn’t going to be in a fit state to pull the trigger himself anytime soon.
‘Where are you goin’?’ Roque croaked.
Ben said, ‘To finish what we came here to do.’
Chapter 60
In the shadows of the bushes Ben said to Hogan, ‘What’s your name, Officer?’
She looked at him. ‘Officer Hogan.’
‘I mean your real name.’
‘Jessie.’ She sounded coy, as though it made her blush to say it. Underneath that thorny exterior she was still just Jessie Hogan who’d grown up in Clovis Parish, Louisiana, attended the local school and would one day marry some local guy named Bo or Billy Ray whom she’d known since she was nine.
‘Jessie, I need you to stay here and look after him. If I don’t come back, do what you can to get yourselves out of here.’
Jessie Hogan pulled a big steel Kimber from her duty holster and nodded. As he began to turn away she said, ‘Hope?’
He looked back at her. ‘Call me Ben, Jessie.’ It might be the last time anyone spoke his name to him again.
She said, ‘Ben, you kick those fuckers’ butts four ways to Sunday, okay?’
‘Just watch me.’
‘And Ben?’
‘What?’
‘Try to stay alive, okay?’
Ben left them and began working his way back towards the Humvee. He could hear the thump and rumble of the diesel motor still ticking over. With sickness in his heart he knew this wasn’t a rescue mission any more. He’d never find Keisha and the kids now, anyway. His sole reason for being here was now revenge. And he wouldn’t stop until he had it.
The Garretts’ men were still going around searching for injured cops and shooting them, but they were running out of execution victims and the flat pistol reports were becoming fewer. While they were still distracted, Ben reached the Humvee and quickly, quietly, jumped aboard. His plan wasn’t a complicated one. He just wanted to get behind the wheel of the monster truck and go charging in among them and run as many of the bastards down before they got him.
But plans were made to be changed.
As he clambered aboard the Humvee he noticed the coiled-up belt of unfired ammo still draped from the receiver of the rotary cannon. It hadn’t run out, it had just stopped working.
Ben’s soldier’s mind was conditioned to instantly want to know why. A gun was just a machine. When they broke down, there was always a reason. Dud rounds happened, as could feed jams, and either could bring an automatic weapon to a grinding halt like a stalled engine. Except the M61 Vulcan rotary cannon had been designed to keep firing even if rounds misfired, thanks to its external electric power drive.
With that thought, Ben’s mind flashed on the solution and he saw that one of the electrical leads connecting the big electric motor to a high-capacity marine battery in the rear of the Humvee had come loose, probably rattled free with the vibration. Jayce Garrett’s home-made system was pretty crude. It was just a matter of reconnecting a crocodile clip, and the Gatling gun was back in business.
The pistol shots had stopped. The men were gathering in a bunch among the shattered trees, talking. There was more laughter. Someone lit a cigarette. Ben could see them clearly outlined in the glare of the spotlamps. He counted eleven figures. With a shock he realised that the Garrett brothers were no longer among them. Jayce and Seth had gone.
It couldn’t be helped. Ben would have to deal with them later.
He scrambled into the rear of the Humvee, grabbed the loose end of the wire, opened the jaws of the crocodile clip and jammed them onto the naked battery terminal. It sparked. He had power.
With murder in his heart he jumped into the open cockpit. The big red fire button on the dashboard looked like an emergency stop button taken from some industrial appliance and rewired as a straight on-off switch. Jayce was a handy sort of guy. It was a shame he hadn’t turned his practical skills to better use. Now his eleven cronies were about to pay the price.
Ben angled the gun and slammed the red button with his fist. And the world around him disintegrated into a cacophony of incredible noise as the weapon started up again, a whirling, howling tornado of destruction.
‘Shoe’s on the other foot now, boys,’ he muttered, but even the loudest yell would have been drowned out by the noise. The eleven men were right in his sights. They scattered like flies as they heard the Gatling gun start up again. Too slow for seven of them, who were swiftly diced up in a pink mist under the blazing lights of the Humvee. A direct hit. Like throwing them into a liquidiser. With nowhere else to hide, the remaining four more dived behind the cover of the Rhino, obviously thinking a 20mm cannon couldn’t touch them behind there. They were about to learn otherwise. Ben swivelled the gun.
The destruction of the vehicle was spectacular and brief. The cannon shells chewed up its bodywork and rugged chassis like papier mâché. It caught fire, then exploded. Ben kept pummelling it until there was nothing left but a heap of burning scrap metal spread out all over the ground. All that remained of the four men who’d taken cover behind it was something resembling
chopped watermelon.
Now the Gatling gun really was out of ammo. The six barrels continued whirring, inaudible over the high-pitched tinnitus whine in Ben’s ears. He grabbed Roque’s Winchester and jumped down from the Humvee. Before he went looking for Jayce and Seth he wanted to make sure no more of their cronies were lurking among what was left of the woods.
As he scouted through the shadows his foot nudged a body that the Garrett thugs hadn’t needed to finish off with a shot to the head. It was the sectioned remains of Wyatt Earp. His Glock pistol was lying half buried in the mud where the Gatling gun had chewed up wet furrows in the ground. Ben picked it up and started wiping off some of the caked dirt.
Then stopped. A movement had caught his eye. A figure among the trees, skirting the edge of the light in the direction of the bushes where Roque and Hogan were hiding.
Ben quickly slipped the Glock into his pocket and raised the shotgun to take aim at the figure.
Chapter 61
It was a cop, wearing the same kind of bulky jacket as the rest of his colleagues, now mostly dead, with POLICE emblazoned across his back. Ben lowered the gun and watched him. There was no mistaking the large, brawny shape of the ginger-haired officer named Charlie Fruge, last seen hurling himself into the undergrowth.
Ben hesitated, thought for a moment, then ran over to the bushes to rejoin them.
He found Charlie Fruge standing next to where Hogan crouched over the prone Sheriff Roque. Hogan looked up at Ben in bewilderment. ‘What the hell just happened? Did you get them?’
‘Not all of them,’ Ben replied. Turning to Fruge he asked, ‘Where did you pop up from?’
The big man appeared completely unscathed. Apart from a smear of dirt on one cheek and plastered on his knees and elbows from where he’d gone crawling in the wet undergrowth, he might have been on a weekend jaunt in the national park. But he was all keyed up and agitated, and seemed all the more so for Ben’s sudden and unexpected appearance. He signalled towards the far side of the newly-formed clearing. ‘I was hidin’ over there. They never saw me. Shit, man, are we all that’s left?’
‘I need help to get Seth and Jayce Garrett,’ Ben said. ‘You with me?’
Fruge hesitated. ‘I, er, I lost my gun.’
‘Take this one,’ Ben said, handing him the Glock from his pocket.
‘I thought you were goin’ alone,’ Hogan said.
‘Change of plan,’ Ben replied. ‘Now that Charlie’s here.’
Hogan’s eyes burned hotly. Ben could see she resented being left behind and overstepped by a male colleague. A female cop’s lot in life.
Roque stirred and raised his head off the ground. His eyes were ringed with agony and the sweat gleamed on his face. ‘You go with ’em, Jessie. I’ll be okay.’
‘You sure?’
‘Go,’ Roque repeated. ‘That’s an order, dammit.’
‘Quickly,’ Ben said.
They left the sheriff hidden among the bushes. Then the three of them made their way towards the compound. The lights were still on in the old stone house. It was the first building Ben wanted to check and clear. He waved Charlie Fruge in ahead of him. The big guy seemed jumpier than ever, and kept glancing at Ben.
The Garrett brothers’ home was the kind of redneck bachelor pad that gave redneck bachelor pads a bad name. As he checked the living room, Ben noticed the portrait over the fireplace. An old oil painting was an incongruous sight in a home that was essentially a shrine to hunting trophies, guns, girls and TV. Knowing what he knew about Jayce Garrett’s leanings, he wouldn’t have been too surprised if the painting had been a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Instead, he found himself looking at a likeness of a gaunt, severe, grey-bearded man he had little doubt was the famous Leonidas Garrett, the mastermind of the failed biological warfare plot against the Union army. Great-grandfather of the brothers.
Minutes later, it was clear that the brothers themselves were nowhere in the house. Ben hadn’t truly expected them to be.
‘We’re clear,’ Hogan said tersely.
Ben said, ‘Move on.’
They slipped back outside, spread out and headed towards the dark buildings behind the house. The gathering storm was crackling like static electricity in the air. It was going to be a big one.
All was silent, but somewhere behind the silence Ben was sure he could feel the presence of his quarry. The sick feeling had left him now. It would return later for sure, with a vengeance. But for the moment he felt nothing but predatory calm. His senses were focused to needlepoints. His heart rate settled, his breathing deep and slow. The Winchester shotgun felt solid in his hands.
A little way from the empty house Ben noticed a row of quad bikes parked under a lean-to. He moved on down an alley between the tin sheds, with Hogan’s edgy, nervy presence to his left and the big, blocky shape of Charlie Fruge to his right. The dim moonlight picked out the ridges of corrugated sheets and threw black shadows in recesses and doorways on both sides.
Jayce and Seth Garrett, or any of their remaining men, could be lurking anywhere, ready to jump out or start shooting from within. Ben’s finger was on the trigger.
He smelled them before he heard them, and heard them before he saw them. A whiff of sour body odour; the scraping shuffle of boot soles on hard-packed earth; then two dark figures appeared from the shadowy doorway of a building on the left, and became visible in the moonlight.
They weren’t Jayce or Seth.
One of them wore an ugly scar that distorted his face from temple to chin, an obvious knife slash from long ago. His eyes went wide at the sight of Ben, Hogan and Charlie Fruge. He clawed for the .357 in his belt but Ben blew him down hard with the ten-gauge before he could get to it. The kick of the shotgun was ferocious, its impact on target even more so. They really knew how to kill folks in the old west.
As the other one simultaneously reached for his pistol, Charlie Fruge pointed Wyatt Earp’s Glock at him in a two-handed combat stance and yelled, ‘Drop it, Bubba! You’re under arrest!’
The Garretts’ guy ignored the warning and fired, but his bullet went wide. Hogan nailed him twice in the chest with her Kimber and he went down with an arc of blood sailing from his open mouth.
Ben said, ‘Nice work.’
Hogan shrugged. ‘They had it comin’.’
Fruge wiped his perspiring brow with the back of his hand and puffed his cheeks. ‘That was a close one, huh? You reckon Jayce and Seth are still hangin’ around?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said, truthfully.
‘Then what do we do now?’ Fruge asked.
Ben said, ‘Now you’re going to take us to where they were keeping the hostages. If they’re dead I need to see it for myself.’
The big cop glowered at Ben. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight. ‘How the hell would I know where they wuz keepin’ them?’ he rasped. Defensive.
‘Same reason you seem to know a lot of things,’ Ben replied. ‘Like you knew that guy’s name was Bubba just now.’ He pointed at Bubba’s corpse.
‘I already arrested him once before,’ Fruge protested, but not very convincingly. ‘Bubba Beane. That other one you just shot, he’s Floyd Babbitt.’
Ben shook his head. ‘You’ll have to try harder than that to persuade me, Charlie. Because earlier on, I saw you hit the deck before the shooting began. Just as if you knew what was about to happen. And I think you did.’
Fruge glanced at the silent Hogan, then back at Ben. ‘What? You’re freakin’ crazy.’
‘And you’re a moron, Charlie. Only a complete idiot would get himself involved with the Garretts. They had more than one inside man in the local police department, didn’t they? There was Mason Redbone, and then there was you. You were the one who tipped them off that we were coming here tonight. And you knew what we were walking into. The death of your fellow cops is on you. And a lot more besides.’
‘This is nuts. Hogan, you gonna stand there and listen to this wacko bullshit?’
Hogan said no
thing. She was watching her colleague carefully with her head cocked to one side. Now she was beginning to understand why Ben had wanted Fruge out here with him.
Ben continued, ‘Then when you popped up out of hiding, I think you were planning on killing Jessie and Sheriff Roque, too. Got a knife tucked away somewhere, or were you going to use those brawny hands of yours? Nobody would ever have known it was you. Did you think Jayce would give you a nice big hug for helping him out? Or maybe a juicy cash bonus?’
Fruge backed away a step. A shaft of moonlight fell across his face. It had turned the same colour as Mason Redbone’s in the Sheriff’s Office.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Nobody will ever know.’
And he levelled the Glock at Ben’s head and fired.
The pistol flashed and boomed. Then came the cry of shock and pain. Fruge dropped the weapon and clutched at his mutilated right hand. The gun had burst and blown away half his fingers. He fell to his knees, whimpering as the blood began to pump.
‘Dirt in the barrel,’ Ben said. ‘Plugged up solid when it got dropped in the mud. You should always inspect your weapon before use, Officer. That’s lesson number one.’
Lesson number two was a hard and brutal blow to Fruge’s face. Ben used the forend of the shotgun. Solid wood and steel. He liked the way it felt, so he hit him again. Fruge toppled sideways to the ground. His lips and nose were split wide open. He jammed his ruined hand between his legs and gibbered, ‘Don’t kill me dear Lord don’t kill me please.’
Ben stood over him with the gun clenched in his fists. ‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just beat you to death, right here, right now.’
‘I know where they put the woman and kids. I can lead you there.’
‘Then do it,’ Ben said.
Chapter 62
Fruge led the way, bent over in pain and clutching his mangled hand. The blood spots he left in his wake looked black in the moonlight as Ben and Hogan followed him.
The Rebel's Revenge Page 31
