Beau (In the Company of Snipers Book 18)

by Irish Winters

  It was too bad some things couldn’t wait, but finding that maniacal woman before she got her hooks into anyone else was definitely one of them. Beau endured his misery because his gut kept talking. It wasn’t telling him it needed food, though a hot dinner would’ve been nice. No, this annoying pain registered deep, low, and annoying. It wasn’t so much heartburn and nausea, as the same hollow feeling that hounded him since he’d hit the streets as a kid. The gnawing sensation that something was drastically wrong with the universe.

  It hadn’t taken long for a kid gone feral to develop the basest survival instincts. Honed razor-sharp after a few years in the Army, those instincts were all that kept a guy in the line of fire alive. And Beau had been in the line of fire since he could walk.

  “Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he grumbled to himself. “Get over it, asshole.”

  But those finely tuned, keep-me-alive instincts were screaming now. Telling him to be more careful than he’d ever been on any night patrol. By the time he arrived at the home with the desert landscape job gone horribly wrong, he was edgy. The police tape strung along and over the fence meant nothing to a guy who’d lived outside the law for most of his first fifteen years. Lifting the long, yellow tape between him and the front walk, he ducked into the yard he’d narrowly escaped from days earlier.

  Icy fingers tiptoed up the back of his bare neck as he approached the front door. No motion detecting lights flashed to life. No alarm sounded. Not like that meant anything. Silent alarms could be just as deadly. He glanced over his shoulder, sure someone was watching. But nothing in the shadows moved, so he continued as planned.

  More tape blocked the massive double entryway with a great big X, as if flimsy plastic could keep anyone out. He twisted the knob, but the way was locked. No big surprise there. Looking over his shoulder one last time, Beau still detected nothing behind him but the middle of a long dark night and plenty of dead air.

  Let’s do this then but be smart. Break and enter through the side door.

  Rounding the front corner of the home on his way to said smart entry, he came upon a bizarre sight. One tall and butt-ugly saguaro cactus stood in his way. He hadn’t noticed it on his run for freedom. The poor prickly thing looked out of place, and it was dying, its limbs emaciated and twisted from too much moisture. Yet there it stood, holding a pair of shears hooked over one arm some maniacal gardener had left behind like an unwilling but valiant helper. What the fuck?

  Intent on following correct protocol while breaking the law, Beau pulled one of the surgical gloves he’d lifted from his hospital room out of his jacket pocket. All evidence from the front doorknob had already been compromised, but not this. After he pulled the cuff of the glove over his wrist with his teeth, he reached one-handed up into the saguaro and tugged the tool free of its lofty perch. Carefully, he avoided the cactus spines that would stick to him like burrs on a dog’s ass if he were dumb enough to bump them.

  Interesting. The shears were a hefty, scissor-type implement, its blades sharp and clean, with a divot machined into one of them. Intended for heavy pruning, the divot provided a tight stop where branches—or fingers—could be trapped before being lopped off. Just looking at the finely-honed blade made his reattached pinkie hurt even more. So why were the shears left behind, and who’d left them? Were the police blind that they’d missed them?

  Beau glanced over his shoulder to the front entry where most of the police action would’ve taken place. He could see how this lack of discovery might’ve gone down. The way the shears had been stuck open, its blades extended in an X, and its handles over the arm of the saguaro, it could’ve looked like a branch to a detective in a hurry. Possibly. The cactus was butt-ugly. Its arms were more like sticks. Who would’ve given it a second glance? Not anyone in this neighborhood, where each home truly was built as an island unto itself.

  So yeah. A harried detective or officer on the run, possibly one who’d been shaken at the gruesomeness of what he’d seen inside Ringer’s, could’ve missed the shears. But wasn’t Montego clever to have hidden a piece of evidence in plain sight? She’d made them look normal. Damn, she was good.

  Unlike tract housing built in sprawling moderate-income suburbs, each of these lavish homes had been designed by different architects for pretentious millionaires. Each was unique, and all were mansions. Some stone. Some cedar. Some impressive brick sculptures to their owners’ wealth and success. All the yards were wide and deep, some wider than others.

  Stewarts’ home two doors east of Congressman Ringer’s sat dead center, just like a bulls-eye, in an extra-wide double lot. No doubt Alex planned the house and the yard himself. While the two-foot thick granite wall fenced the immediate yard and protected the house, an impenetrable forest Beau knew for a fact held enough security cameras, traps, and triggers to rival Fort Knox, stretched beyond and behind the house just outside that fence. Which was why Beau had been able to vault over the side fence when he’d escaped Montego. Alex hadn’t planted any trees there. They would’ve ruined a clear shot.

  His backyard was something different. On a bad day, Whisper and Smoke made it an intruder’s worst nightmare. On a good day or when the dogs were inside, the wide expanse held a butt-load more cameras. And every last one of those lenses, when activated, pinged an alarm to the app on Alex’s phone, as well as to the matching apps at Mother’s desk and at local police dispatch. Alex didn’t mess with security companies to contact the police for him, not since his business put most of them to shame.

  Beau had heard the scuttlebutt how Gabe killed a man inside Stewarts’ former home in Alexandria. Gabe had nearly died that night. Kelsey hadn’t been there at the time, but Alex wasn’t a man who took chances, which was why they’d moved out here. Like any husband who adored his wife, he’d forbidden her to set foot back in their first home ever again. Then he’d built this stone monument to her, and he made sure no one could get close to his family without him knowing it. If Beau recalled correctly, another agent, Jake Weylin and his wife had recently purchased Stewarts’ old place when it hit the market as a fixer-upper. Talk about one freaky coincidence.

  Not that the rest of these homes hadn’t also been built for maximum privacy. No two entries or driveways faced each other. Between each dwelling, either a berm or some type of natural privacy shield blocked most owners’ views of each other.

  These people never had to look at each other at the butt crack of dawn on their way out the door like common residential dwellers. Beau doubted these folks even knew their neighbors. Hell, most of them probably didn’t work as much as they managed their wealth. Their stock portfolios. Investments. Assets. Things Beau was just learning about since he’d started working for Alex.

  “Where are you, you evil bitch?” Beau hissed as he scanned Ringer’s side yard, the lopping shears still in his hand. Equally sized maples lined this portion of the lawn, starting at the front fence line. Wasn’t that an odd landscape design, a badly managed desert scene in the front yard, but hardwood trees all in a row on the side? Dumb. Who was the senator trying to impress?

  Sticking to the shadows, Beau located Ringer’s side door between two expansive bay windows. Approaching cautiously, he licked his lips, edgier than when he’d searched Syrian homes for insurgents. This time was different. He’d left something behind and he wanted it back. His nerve.

  Tucking the shears under his bad arm, he released the holster’s snap over the pistol stored there. Disgust quirked the corner of his mouth. Out of habit, he’d strapped on his twin holster before leaving home, and because he was a dumbass, he carried two loaded pistols, one under each arm. Like he needed two weapons? This one-handed business was going to take some getting used to. He just hoped his rash decision to throw caution to the wind today hadn’t made it permanent.

  Ringer’s place was now dark and quiet. Once inside, Beau flipped the wall light switch that brightened the dining room. Carefully, he set the shears on the counter between that
room and the adjoining kitchen. It was obvious the police had come and gone. Placards and tags where forensic photos had been taken were scattered everywhere. Discarded booties and gloves lay on the floor and counters. Drawers, closets, and cupboards had been left open. Crap like that.

  Beau froze at sight of the wooden table where he’d been restrained like meat to be sliced and diced. It was a surprising piece of furniture for a house as fine as this one. Whereas most wealthy people would’ve had a pricy, pretty carved wooden piece of art on display, this was nothing but a coarse workbench, a rough construct of recently purchased lumber, not even sanded.

  Grabbing the nearest corner, he gave it a shake. Hell, the legs weren’t balanced. Dried blood where his left wrist had been cuffed told a gruesome story. So did the bloody smears he’d left behind in his panic to get away.

  It wasn’t a chopping block, yet it might have become one. Stapled price tags still adorned the ends of the four-by-fours. Why would Montego have gone to the trouble of building her own table? What was she—? Erase that thought. He knew precisely what she was—one crazy bitch.

  His skin crawled to see this instrument of torture up close again. To remember. He’d come damned close to not escaping that psychotic she-devil. If not for the sheer terror at what she would’ve done had she caught him...

  Panic raced through him as he recalled the moment she’d opened the side door and caught him in the act of escaping. Gut-wrenching terror had pretty much scrambled his instincts then. He’d been so close. Seconds. His being alive today had come down to the mere seconds it had taken him to jerk his ankle out of that last cuff. He’d damned near taken his foot off in the process. Honestly. He had no idea how he’d gotten away. Jesus must’ve been looking out for him. That was the only explanation Beau could come up with. He surely hadn’t saved himself.

  But damn her to Hell. She’d emasculated him, first by taking his finger, then by taking his courage. Making him run when he should’ve manned up and knocked her on her ass. When he should’ve ended her. That troubled him most. He’d damned near shit his pants like a scared little kid on that table. Freakin’ bitch!

  Beau took a deliberate step back from Montego’s wretched workbench. Things didn’t add up. How had she, a mere woman, abducted a grown man from a bar in the District? How had she then driven him to this particular neighborhood, only to wrangle him out of a car, drag him in through Ringer’s house, and cuff him to that table? Then she returned to Crystal City to leave Alex a threat? Seemed like a helluva a lot for one woman to manage alone and in one night.

  For that matter, where were the Ringers? He’d lost part of a finger. What had they lost? Their lives? During recovery, he’d overheard Maverick and Gabe chatting about the multiple plastic containers of bloody DNA evidence the police recovered from Ringer’s freezer. Was that where they’d ended up?

  Everywhere he looked, he now saw instruments of torture. The meat grinder was gone but the black puddles on the floor remained. Shit, what a nightmare.

  He knew how the date-rape drug worked. That crap was easy to drop into an unsuspecting guy’s glass in the middle of a busy bar, but it was what had happened after he’d been drugged that made no sense. He was no tiny, little thing. For certain, Catalina Montego hadn’t acted alone, but if she’d truly intended to torment Alex, the prevailing theory between Gabe and Maverick, why hadn’t she waited until Beau came to, and then filmed him being brutalized for Alex’s viewing pleasure? That seemed a more sensational way for a sadist to get a former Marine’s attention. Film it. Broadcast it. Put it on YouTube for the rest of the world to watch, while Alex sweated bullets because he couldn’t make it stop.

  It turned Beau’s stomach to think how close he’d come to dying. Taking another step back, he swallowed the bile pooling at the back of his throat. If he hadn’t been drugged, he would’ve screamed his guts out when she’d lopped his pinkie off. But if she’d really wanted to send Alex a disturbing message, filming the diabolical stunt would’ve done so much more psychological damage. Torture. Slice off body part after body part. Laugh while her victim screamed. You know, the grisly crap ISIS is so good at filming and exploiting.

  Alex would’ve come unglued. Surely listening to his agent scream for mercy would’ve wrecked him more than just finding that agent passed out and bleeding in his kitchen. But Beau hadn’t been gagged, and he would’ve made plenty—PLENTY—of noise. Was that why the evil bitch hadn’t taken more extreme tactics? Was she afraid of that noise? Or was she afraid of Alex?

  Weary of the puzzle and the threatening migraine, Beau slanted his weary eyes, needing to see what he was missing. After standing there for another few minutes, he wasn’t any wiser. There was no more evidence. He would call local dispatch and tell them what he had found stuck in the cactus the first chance he got. He’d tell them who he was and admit to the B and E. After that, he’d hunt Montego down and make her pay.

  His left arm had grown oddly numb, a disconcerting development for which he didn’t want to imagine the ramifications, permanent nerve damage or worse—being a one-handed guy for the rest of his life. Time to go.

  Unnerved, Beau backed to the side door and turned the light off. The place looked downright creepy in the dark, as if Montego’s evil spirit lingered. As if she could reach out and touch him. Cut him. Make him bleed. Hurt him again. Like his old man had.

  The Montego siblings were renowned in the law enforcement community for their level of extreme brutality. Sadists got off on torturing their victims. How well Beau knew. So where was Catalina now? Who was she torturing? Who wasn’t safely stowed behind the stone walls that Alex built?

  Only one face sprang to mind. Doc Fitzgerald. McKenna. That’s who.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Why are you doing this to me?” McKenna whimpered, not her usual style. But this bitch was crazy with a capital K. Dressed in a slinky, black, short-sleeved shirt over an equally black broomstick skirt, Catalina was a vision of unholy terror. A truly evil witch. Since she’d possessed the only weapon in the place, she’d had no problem forcing McKenna into her bedroom, then to undress down to her underwear and onto her back on the bed.

  But what Catalina did now was just plain sick. She’d stretched McKenna’s arms between the top posts of her four-poster bed, then snapped a spring-loaded clamp onto each of her palms, effectively pinning McKenna like a frog about to be dissected in junior high biology class. The clamps themselves were connected to chains nailed to the top posts of the four-poster bed. There was no way to escape.

  Which frightened the hell out of McKenna. Someone had been inside her apartment, possibly since she’d come home, setting this in motion. Maybe while she’d been dallying in her tub, playing like a spoiled, privileged brat who thought she knew better than her trained bodyguards. Her stomach pitched acid up her throat at the terrifying thought.

  With every tug, the clamps dug into the thin bones and tender flesh of McKenna’s hands. To make matters worse, metal teeth lined the clamps. With every tiny move, those teeth chewed deeper, inciting the nerve-endings throughout the rest of her body.

  But when Catalina stretched wires across McKenna’s hips, then under her breasts, McKenna could no longer control herself. She bucked and screamed, certain that death was minutes away. Only when Catalina jerked the wires until they were tight and cutting, then attached the ends, somehow, to the sides of the bed frame for maximum agony, did McKenna cease thrashing.

  Finally, Catalina looped another wire around McKenna’s neck, which only frightened her more. When Montego tugged at what resembled a fishing reel now clamped to the foot of the bed, the wire beneath McKenna’s jaw jerked her chin up. Her heart faltered. This can’t be happening to me!

  But it was. With every small move McKenna made, the wires rubbed across her skin. Eventually, they’d saw through the tougher epidermis and dermis layers and into the blood-rich subcutaneous tissue where nerves ran like electrical networks. Where veins pulsed with oxygen-
rich, red blood. Slicing deeper, the wires finally rendered her helpless at Montego’s mercy. Her throat was bleeding. McKenna could smell it. A warm pool gathered in the hollow of her neck. Get me out of here!

  But help would not be coming. She’d made sure of that, when she’d thought she was clever and eluded Maverick and Gabe. Here she would die, dressed only in her underwear, erotically and disgustingly displayed for the investigating officers—when they showed—in all her gruesome, but dead, glory. God, please don’t let Beau be with them.

  Why her brain sought him out of her short list of would-be rescuers, McKenna didn’t know, other than he seemed like her. Lost. Wondering where he fit in. If he belonged...

  As Catalina went around the bed tightening the screws that reduced the slack in those wires, McKenna fought her panic and tears. No one would know what happened here tonight until it was too late. Quivering from pain and the shock of being tortured, she had no choice but to bear it. This was her fault, every last bit of it. Maverick, Gabe, and Alex had tried to warn her.

  Grinding her teeth at her stiff-necked stupidity, she focused on the ceiling overhead. Her father’s perpetually cheerful smile came to mind. She’d been so lucky to have him in her life. He’d never let her down, and this would hurt him terribly once her body was discovered. The fear that he might be the one to find her, that he’d come looking for her when she didn’t call tomorrow, pained McKenna to her soul.

  I love you, Dad. I’m sorry. If I don’t live through this, please stay strong. This isn’t your fault, it’s mine. I’m the truly stupid one, not you. Never give up, okay? And oh yeah, tell Stu he plays a lousy game of chess. The unexpected optimism that thought brought to her heart, nearly made her smile. Any other time, insulting Stu would’ve been funny. Not tonight.