Safe and Sound

by J. D. Rhoades

  DeGroot’s glance fell on the Jeep that Powell and Riggio had brought. Perfect. And there might be some useful information to be had. He walked toward it. As he did, he stumbled over an object lying in the gravel. He looked down. A child’s toy frog. He kicked it out of his way and climbed into the Jeep. He took one last glance around the peaceful overlook he had so effectively turned into a killing zone and smiled as he started the engine.

  ***

  “Sonofabitch,” Riggio said. “He got past us. Slipped right through the line.”

  “You shouldn’t use bad words,” Ben said severely.

  “Hush, baby,” Marie said, scooping him up in her arms. Ben wrapped his arms around her, clinging to her like an infant.

  “So he’s down there, and we’re up here,” Powell said.

  “He won’t stick around,” Riggio predicted. “Somebody down there hollered for help when the fireworks started. Guaranteed. He won’t wait around to get caught again.”

  “Who the f—” Keller choked the curse back. “Who is that guy?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Powell said. “We’ve gotta move.”

  “Move where?” Keller insisted. “I’m not going anywhere with anyone until you tell me what’s going on. One minute I’m looking for a missing kid, and the next, some psycho has wired a five-year-old with explosives.”

  “Jack,” Marie said, “He’s right. We need to get out of here. I want to go home.”

  “Me, too,” Ben said.

  “Can we at least get off the top of this mountain?” Powell suggested. “I feel like I’ve got a set of crosshairs painted on my forehead standing out here.”

  “Okay,” Keller relented. He walked over and picked up the shotgun.

  “I got point this time,” Riggio said. “Bobby, you trail. Keller, you stay in the middle and look after the woman and the boy.” As they fell into line, Keller noticed Marie staggering slightly under Ben’s weight. “Hey, big boy,” she grunted with the effort, “You’re getting too big for Mommy to carry. Can you walk?” Ben’s answer was to draw his arms and legs tighter around Marie’s torso and whimper.

  “Here,” Keller said, “Take the shotgun. I’ll carry him.”

  Marie looked at him for a moment. Ben turned his head to look at Keller as well. Then Ben slowly relaxed his grip on his mother and slid to the ground. He and Marie walked over together. Keller handed the shotgun to Marie over Ben’s head, then bent down to scoop the boy up in his arms.

  “You won’t drop me, will you?” Ben said softly.

  Marie answered before Keller could respond. “No,” she said. “No, he won’t drop you.” She looked back at Keller. “I was wrong to doubt you, Jack,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Uh…folks?” Powell spoke up. “We need to be going.”

  “Lead on,” Marie said.

  “You know how to use that shotgun, ma’am?” Riggio said pointedly.

  Keller and Marie looked at one another for a moment before both of them started chuckling. This time it was Keller who answered. “Yeah,” he said, “you could say that.”

  “I mean,” Riggio insisted, “you ever shot anybody?”

  The chuckling stopped. “Yeah,” Marie said, her face expressionless. “I have.”

  “Marie used to be a cop,” Keller said.

  “Ah,” Riggio said, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t…”

  “We can debate unconscious sexism later,” Marie said. “Let’s move.”

  They worked their way back down the trail. As they reached the stream where the bodies of the FBI men still lay, Keller pulled Ben’s head against his shoulder. “Don’t look, Ben,” he urged. The small fires were dying down, sputtering fitfully. The horrible miasma of burned flesh still hung in the air.

  Burning oh God they’re burning I’ve got to help them the whole goddamn world’s on fire…

  “Hey,” Ben said, “you’re shaking.”

  Keller’s mind snapped back to the present. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just some bad memories.”

  “Are you scared?” Ben said.

  Scared shitless, Keller thought, but he didn’t say it.

  “You can’t be scared.” Ben sounded alarmed.

  “Shh,” Keller said. “It’s okay to be scared. Only really stupid or really crazy people don’t get scared. But I’m not going to drop you. And I’m not going to let anybody hurt you, okay?”

  Ben was silent for a moment. “That mean guy shot my dad,” he said in a small voice. “I think he…I think he might have killed my dad.” The boy’s small body began to shake with sobs. Keller held him tighter, not knowing what to say. After a few minutes, Ben spoke again, into Keller’s ear. “You get bad guys, right? It’s what you do, right?”

  Keller could see it coming. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s my job.”

  “I want you to get the bad guy that shot my dad, okay?”.

  “We’ll talk about it later, Ben,” Keller said.

  “You’ll get him,” Ben said, his voice suddenly drowsy. “You’ll get him.” By the time they reached the bottom of the trail, he was asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DeGroot drove with one hand and flipped the Jeep’s glove box open with the other. He rummaged through the papers inside, his eyes flicking back and forth between the road and the dimly lighted glove box. The sudden turns and switchbacks in the road quickly made that idea unworkable. He had run into the opposite lane several times and almost crashed the guardrails at least twice before he gave up, fuming. He was going to need a place to go over the inside of the Jeep and gather what information there was to be gained. Then, he supposed, he needed to get rid of the Jeep. The FBI had probably sent in a description of the vehicle and a license plate number. He needed a quiet place, then a vehicle. In the cone of his headlights, he saw one of the wooden roadside signs that pointed the tourists toward the Parkway’s facilities. This one had a simple carved relief of a tent and the legend “1 mi.” A campsite, then. This had possibilities.

  He took the indicated exit off the paved road and immediately found himself crunching over a narrow gravel path. A few more turns and he began to see more wooden signs, directing campers to various spaces. The Jeep’s headlights flashed off the chrome of vehicles in some of the spaces. A few dying campfires glowed dull orange in the dark. In the dim shadows at the edge of the light, he could barely make out the humped shapes of tents. There was no one up, no one stirring.

  After passing a few of the tents, DeGroot found what he was looking for: an occupied site away from the others, with a Toyota 4 × 4 bakkie in the parking space. Perfect.

  He killed the lights, then the engine. He waited a few moments, letting his eyes get used to the darkness. He watched the tent closely, waiting for signs that someone had noticed his arrival and was coming out of the tent to investigate. Nothing. He picked up the pistol he had taken off the FBI man and looked around the inside of the Jeep.

  His eyes lighted on a bright yellow pillow in the back, where the little girl must have sat. He picked it up and noted with bemusement that the pillow was painted like a giant yellow sponge. A sponge with a very imbecilic-looking face. DeGroot looked at it for a moment and shook his head. Then slowly, gently, he opened the Jeep door. It creaked slightly as he slid out of the vehicle.

  When he was completely out, he stopped and waited.

  Nothing.

  Somewhere, far off, he heard the call of a whippoorwill. He took the pistol in one hand and tucked the yellow pillow under his arm. As silently as he had moved through the forest before, he advanced on the tent.

  It was a small tent, made for no more than two people. A couple of fishing rods were propped up on the picnic table by the fire pit. He’d be sure to take those with him. Tomorrow morning, he doubted that anyone would notice that the vehicle by the campsite wasn’t the one that had been there before. And no one would notice that the campers weren’t coming out of the tent. If anyone bothered to notice, they’d assume the campers had gone fi
shing, at least until the bodies started to get ripe. And by then, he’d be far away. He’d change vehicles again in a day or so, just to be safe.

  He crouched down and fumbled for the zippered door on the tent. As his fingers located it, a horrible sound split the air. It sounded like the coughing roar of a chainsaw starting up, but there was a living quality to it, like the grunting respiration of some awful beast. It came from no more than two feet in front of DeGroot and he whipped the gun up to focus on the source of the awful din. Then he realized that it was and he almost laughed out loud with relief. DeGroot had spent enough nights in enough barracks and encampments to recognize the sound of snoring. This, he had to admit, was one of the more impressive examples he’d heard. He used the next great ripping inhalation to cover the sound of opening the zippered tent flap the rest of the way. There was a stirring on the right side of the tent and a vague mumble of complaint in the dark. DeGroot put the yellow pillow over the barrel of the pistol. He made out the shapes of two figures in sleeping bags. Another huge snore split the night, coming from the left-hand bag.

  DeGroot leaned over the figure in the other bag. It was a pretty dark-haired girl, about twenty. She stirred restlessly as her tent mate gave out with the biggest snore yet. Her eyes popped open just as DeGroot pulled the trigger and put a bullet through the pillow and between her eyes. The snorer stirred restlessly at the sound. He didn’t wake up, though, and after DeGroot put a bullet in his temple, using the girl’s blood-soaked pillow to muffle the shot, he never would.

  Afterward, he carefully zipped the tent flap back up. He took a flashlight that he had found in the tent and walked back to the Jeep. He checked his watch and glanced up through the trees. Daylight was coming on and he had a feeling that campers woke early. Some of them, at least.

  Back in the Jeep, he leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He suddenly realized how tired he was. He wanted this mess done. But in this condition, he’d be prone to stupid mistakes. He didn’t know where his former partners would go. And he was still outnumbered. He couldn’t forget that. DeGroot was not a man to play long odds. Powell and Riggio knew he was coming after them now.

  And there was the woman. DeGroot remembered the look in her eyes as she had demanded to know what he had done with her boy. A fighter. She’d be a handful. Like the lawyer. DeGroot had enjoyed the challenge of breaking that one. He found himself drifting, indulging himself in thoughts of how he’d go about breaking the woman, the sorts of pressure that could be brought to bear on a strong young body like that. Women were much stronger in many ways. They had to be able to bear the rigors of childbirth. They were naturally built to take more pain…

  He sat up with a start. He realized, with a vague sense of unease, that he had become aroused. This was ridiculous. He was a professional. He didn’t take plea sure in what he did, beyond the satisfaction of a job well done. He did it because he knew how. It was a usable skill and profitable. He thought back to his session with the lawyer. A shiver of disgust ran through him as he remembered. He had felt the same thing then. He had even had an erection.

  “Gaah,” he said out loud in disgust. “I’ve gone bossies, for sure. I need to get out of this fucking business.” But to do that was going to require capital. And while he had saved prudently from his previous employments, he knew it wasn’t enough to last him the rest of what he intended to be a long and peaceful and boring life. He might even go home and take up farming.

  He reached inside his shirt and found the cord of a lanyard around his neck. He pulled on the cord and pulled out the object hanging on the lanyard. It was a slim plastic cylinder, about half the length of a ballpoint pen. It was colored a dull silver. DeGroot held it up before his face and looked at it. There’s the key, he thought. Or half of it, at least. He studied it for a moment, then sighed and slid it inside his shirt. He returned to his contemplation of the odds. Powell. Riggio. The woman. He had heard the blond man call her Marie. The blond man was Keller. The one who had threatened to gouge his eye out. He felt a flash of anger at that. I’ll see you again, boet, he promised. And when I do, you’ll learn that when you threaten to put a man’s eye out, you do it, and worse after. Unless you want him to come back and do worse to you. Oh yes, you’ll learn that, and I’ll take my time teaching you. It was a different feeling than he had had thinking about the women, and it didn’t raise in him any feeling of unease or disgust. In his profession, revenge was just good business. It kept other potential enemies respectful.

  “Kak,” he said softly. These odds were impossible. There were too many of them, and they’d be ready. Slowly an idea came to him. He didn’t like it at first. It would involve sharing some of the take. But he didn’t see any other way around it. He needed information. He needed more people. More professionals, like him. He took out his cell phone. No service. No surprises there. He’d have to get down, out of these mountains, and make some calls.

  ***

  Shit,” Riggio whispered. They stood in the parking lot, looking stupidly at the place where the Jeep had been.

  “Dude,” Powell cracked, “where’s my car?”

  “Funny,” Riggio said. “Real funny.”

  “My car looks okay,” Keller said. “We can take it.”

  “Check it, Dave,” Riggio said. “We don’t want any more surprises.” Powell nodded and trotted over to the car. As he bent down to examine the undercarriage, Ben began to stir against Keller’s shoulder. “Let me take him now,” Marie said. She put the shotgun on the ground. Keller gently untangled Ben and handed him to Marie. The boy squirmed for a moment, then settled down as she stroked his hair and spoke soothingly to him.

  Keller picked up the shotgun and dangled it by his side. “While your friend checks and makes sure that maniac hasn’t booby-trapped my car, suppose you tell me what the fuck this is all about.” Riggio hesitated for a moment, then held up his hands placatingly as he saw the look on Keller’s face. “Easy, now,” he said, “we’re all on the same side here.”

  “I’ll decide that,” Keller snapped.

  “I should talk this over with my partner…”

  “Come on,” Keller told Marie. “Let’s go.” He started walking toward the car. “You’d better get going,” he said. “It’s a long walk home.”

  “We need that car,” Riggio said. His voice held a dangerous edge.

  Keller raised the shotgun and pointed it at him one-handed. “You think you can take it?” Riggio started to raise the assault rifle. Keller’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Whoa, whoa, let’s chill out a minute here.” It was Powell, walking over from Keller’s Crown Victoria. “Let’s all get in the car and talk this over while we drive.”

  “You two aren’t going anywhere until I find out what you’ve brought down on us.”

  “Jack,” Marie began.

  “I did just save the kid’s life,” Powell said. “That ought to earn us something.”

  “Thanks,” Keller said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

  “Jesus,” Riggio said, his voice tight with frustration.

  “I want to know who’s after us,” Keller insisted.

  “Fine,” Powell said. “But while we stand here and argue, he could be in that tree line, laying a pair of crosshairs on your head. Or the kid’s.”

  Keller was silent for a moment. Then he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. He jerked his chin at Powell. “You drive.”

  He turned to Riggio. “Your rifle,” he said. “It goes in the trunk.”

  “Now wait just a damn minute,” Riggio sputtered.

  “If I don’t like your story,” Keller said, “you’re getting out. And I don’t want any arguments. Either the gun goes in the trunk or you do.”

  “It’s not all that uncomfortable,” Marie said. “I’ve been there.”

  “Tell you what,” Powell said to her, “Mikey’ll put the weapon in the trunk if you promise to tell us that story.”

  Riggio glared for another b
rief moment, then his face split in a grin. “That’s a deal I can live with.”

  “Done,” Marie said. “But you go first.”

  “Deal,” Powell said. He looked at Keller. “Deal?”

  Keller hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. “Deal.”

  They walked over to the car, Keller bringing up the rear. Riggio turned to Marie and said in a whisper deliberately loud enough for Keller to hear, “He always this big of a hard-ass?”

  “Yeah,” Marie said. “Pretty much.”

  They loaded Riggio’s rifle into the trunk. “Jesus,” Powell said as he surveyed the trunk’s contents. “At least it won’t be lonely. You always drive around ready for a war?”

  “Yeah,” Keller said. “Pretty much. Your pistol, too.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right,” Powell said. He laid his gun in the trunk. He climbed into the driver’s seat. Keller got into the front passenger seat, the shotgun held on Powell.

  “What happens if we hit a bump?” Powell said.

  “Drive carefully,” Keller said. Marie got into the back, holding Ben on her lap. Riggio was last. He was holding something in his hands.

  “This was lying in the parking lot,” he said. “It must have been Alyssa’s. You think your kid might like it?”

  “Yeah,” Marie said. “Thanks.”

  Riggio put the stuffed frog on the flat deck beneath the back window. “For when he wakes up.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The valleys were still in shadow, but the sunlight was creeping slowly but perceptibly down the mountainsides as DeGroot steered the stolen Toyota truck down one of the steep off-ramps and exited the Parkway. He retraced the path he had taken to the meeting place, searching for one of the tiny villages he had passed through.

  Like most of the towns in the area, it made its living from providing the comforts of home and civilization to the tourists who told everyone they’d come to the mountains to get away from all that. After a short time, he located a place he had noticed and marked. The building had apparently started as a diner, but some subsequent owner had decided to try to dress the place up in a Swiss chalet motif with carved gingerbread trim around the edges of the roofline. A neon sign in the window advertised ESPRESSO, LATTE. SMOOTHIES in curlicued red letters, while another hand-lettered sign in the other side of the window promised INTERNET CAFÉ.