The TANNER Series - Books 4-6 (Tanner Box Set Book 2)

by Remington Kane

  “We’ll find her and we’ll kill her, but I want that bastard in the hoodie so I can cut his heart out.”

  Down in the hole, Tanner relaxed his grip on Sara just a bit, to relieve the strain. She was on her back beneath him, while he was on his knees between her spread legs with his forearms pinning her down.

  He was going to kill her without mercy, for he had warned her to back off and yet she just kept coming.

  Yes, he planned to kill her, but it did not escape his notice that the bosom rising and falling beneath his chest was of ample proportion, the neck his hands gripped, soft, and the face, beautiful, despite the fire of hate burning within the eyes.

  Sara Blake was an enemy, yes, but a woman just the same, and he was not a man who failed to appreciate such obvious charms.

  He would kill her, in self-defense, plain and simple, but he knew that the act would not bring him pleasure. Despite her animosity towards him and the hatred she held for him, the emotion he experienced when he thought of her tended more towards a mixture of annoyance and pity.

  After long minutes passed without hearing voices or seeing movement, Tanner tightened his grip once more, saw fear enter Sara’s eyes, and whispered to her.

  “What did you think this was, a chess match? I warned you to stay away from me, told you that I would kill you if you kept coming, and now, I’ll keep that promise.”

  Sara spit in his face.

  Tanner grunted his displeasure and was about to strangle her when he felt the tip of the knife pierce the fabric of his jeans, nick his inner thigh, and come to rest along the side of his testicles.

  It was the knife he had thrown at her, the knife that had still been stuck in her arm when he dragged her into the hole. It was his knife, and if Sara so much as flicked her wrist, Tanner would be a eunuch.

  Tanner’s eyes widened as he released his hold on her throat and after leaning back carefully, he held up his hands in a sign of surrender.

  Sara smiled.

  “Checkmate!”

  CHAPTER 10 - Straightjacket

  Tyler pounded the side of his fist against a tree in frustration.

  They had searched out to the road and back and come up empty. The man who had killed his brother was gone and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Sherry placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

  “We did what we could. Now we have to get back to that farmhouse before someone else sees us.”

  “I know. I just hate going back empty-handed, and what are we going to do with Randall, bury him here?”

  “I think we’ll have to, and at least the ground is soft with all this rain.”

  Tyler struck the tree again, but then an idea came to him.

  “I’ll call for help.”

  “We can’t do that, remember? No contact until after the Feds have called off the manhunt.”

  “There won’t be any contact, not one on one, and besides, isn’t this what we bought the throwaway phones for?”

  Sherry reached into an inner pocket on her jacket and took out a phone.

  “The number is built in.”

  Tyler dialed, and when nothing happened, he checked and saw that he had no bars. He kept checking as they jogged back towards the farmhouse and when they reached the area where the incomplete office building sat, he saw two bars, but still couldn’t place a call.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?”

  “It’s not the phone; they said on the radio that the storm was screwing with the system.”

  The third try was successful and Tyler heard the voice of his other partner.

  “You wouldn’t be calling unless there was a problem, so tell me what’s wrong?”

  “We need help... Randall’s dead.”

  There was a pause and then the voice continued.

  “Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

  ***

  Sara gave one last look around before calling down into the hole.

  “It’s finally clear, come out now.”

  “I can’t,” Tanner said. “Not without my hands being free. The angle is too steep.”

  “Nice try, Tanner, but unless you want to stay down there with a bullet in your brain, I suggest you figure it out.”

  After gaining the advantage with the knife, Sara had instructed Tanner to slide his hands inside the sleeves of his hoodie and place them behind his back. Afterwards, she reached around and tied the ends together with her free hand.

  The procedure took a while to perform one-handed, but it essentially left Tanner wearing a makeshift straightjacket.

  After two failed attempts, he emerged from the hole, stumbled, and fell at Sara’s feet.

  She had recovered her gun after leaving the root cellar and had it pointed at Tanner’s face.

  He rose to his knees, then, to his feet.

  “Why are you keeping me alive? Are you planning to hand me over to that ex-partner of yours, or maybe The Conglomerate?”

  “You’re all mine, Tanner, and by the time I get through with you, you’ll be begging for mercy.”

  “But you have none to give, do you, Blake?”

  “Not where you’re concerned. Now, enough talking, start moving,”

  Sara pulled her phone from a pocket in her jeans, and as Tyler had done, she searched for a cell signal, once she found one, she reached her party on the second try.

  “Duke, it’s Sara Blake and I need—”

  Tanner took off as fast as he was able, given that his arms were tied behind his back.

  Sara fired off a shot that missed, as Tanner weaved among the trees.

  “I’ll call you back,” Sara said into the phone, before shoving it into her pocket and giving chase.

  ***

  At the farm, Tyler and Sherry were discovering that they weren’t the only thieves in the world, as they realized that the bank bags were gone.

  They were in the kitchen, where the odor of Randall’s corpse wasn’t as prevalent. In their absence, the body’s bowels had vacated and the stench was great.

  Sherry pulled at her hair as she spoke.

  “Could one of the people we chased have doubled back and taken it?”

  “No, this was kids, a redheaded snot and his girlfriend, I saw them out at that building and I’d bet you it was them.”

  Sherry thought that over and nodded in agreement.

  “Yeah, that would explain why there’s no cops or Feds here waiting for us, but how do we find those kids?”

  Tyler took out the phone again.

  “We find them the same way we find that man and woman.”

  He dialed, but there was no answer.

  “I’ll try again later, in the meantime.... I’ll take care of my brother.”

  “We’ll wrap him in a sheet and place him on the porch for now, later, when we have the time, we’ll bury him.”

  Tyler agreed, and they walked back into the living room to begin the grim task.

  ***

  Tanner had taken off while Sara was distracted with her call, knowing that one of her shots could find his back at any moment.

  He considered the risk one worth taking, since she had all but stated her intention to torture him.

  Better a bullet in the back than days or weeks of agony.

  His first priority had been to get away, to gain distance from her, and after running as fast as he could for several minutes, he had accomplished that, but knew that a hundred yards or less separated them.

  The next step was to free his arms. This, he accomplished by leaning forward and slipping the knot that Sara had tied downward, until it was below his buttocks. Afterwards, he sat, lay on his back and pulled his legs flat against his chest, so that he could bring his arms around to the front.

  He gave a grunt of satisfaction once he had his arms in front of him again. All that remained was to shimmy out of the hoodie, but as he began to free his arms of the knotted sleeves that bound him, he saw a faster way.

  Tanner ran f
orward, raised his arms above his head, and leapt into the air.

  ***

  Sara was running fast, gun raised up and ready, while her head swiveled in an attempt to spot Tanner.

  She saw it when she was still twenty yards away, and by the time she reached the tree, she had figured out how he had done it.

  Tanner’s hoodie was hanging by its sleeves from the stub of a broken branch that was situated ten feet off the ground.

  Sara knew that Tanner must have maneuvered his arms in front of him, and then leapt up to let the jagged remains of the tree branch catch the knotted sleeves.

  Gravity would do the rest, and once he slipped free, he could fall to the ground and be on his way.

  She sighed, but then realized that it meant that she was going in the right direction. Until she found the hoodie, she wasn’t certain of that, and had been thinking that Tanner may have doubled back.

  She left the tree in a mad dash, and soon spotted the tops of buildings ahead.

  That meant that Tanner had made it to town and was looking for a car to steal, and once he had transportation, he would definitely be lost to her.

  That thought had just left her mind when she saw Tanner. He was up ahead, leaning on an SUV with his legs spread wide and his arms atop the vehicle’s hood.

  At first, she thought that Tanner had injured himself and was resting, but the position of his body was a familiar one, and through the driving rain, she made out the details of the vehicle, and saw the official decal with the badge and name of the town.

  As Sara stepped from the woods, she spotted the big man in the Chief of Police uniform with his gun pointed at Tanner.

  “Oh thank God, I thought he had—”

  The wet metal of the gun barrel pressed against the side of her head stopped her voice in mid-sentence. Not daring to turn her head, Sara moved her eyes to the left and viewed the female deputy at the other end of the gun.

  “Drop that weapon or I will blow your head off.”

  Sara released her gun and it clattered to the ground. She followed it a second later, as Deputy Lydia Bradshire knocked her legs out from under her and cuffed her, as she lay atop the wet street.

  “No! Wait, you don’t understand, that man is—”

  This time the gun was pressed into her ear.

  “You shut the hell up or I will remove my baton and shut you up. We know who you are, know that you robbed that bank in Ciderville and you will pay for killing the man you murdered.”

  Sara began to protest and Lydia lifted her to her feet by the cuffs shackled behind her back. The pain caused by that action stilled Sara’s voice, while Lydia’s whispered words replaced the gun in Sara’s ear.

  “Keep talking bitch and I’ll cripple you.”

  Sara looked into Lydia’s eyes and saw that she was serious. Sara blinked against the rain, and when she looked over at Tanner, she saw him smile.

  He shrugged.

  “They got us, partner.”

  CHAPTER 11 - Nosy, Nosy

  Dean and Amy moved about Ridge Creek on a spending spree, as they enjoyed their new wealth.

  Amy bought clothes and perfume, while Dean went wild in the comic shop and bought an expensive game system.

  Dean’s purchases would be kept at Amy’s house, because his foster parents would become suspicious. They would also likely confiscate anything of value and sell it at the church flea market.

  The people who had taken him in after his only parent, his father, died, were good people overall. However, Dean was certain that they looked after him and the other three foster kids they had, more for the money the state paid them, rather than out of the goodness of their hearts.

  Still, they kept him fed and treated him with respect, but Dean felt more like a pet than a member of a family, and when he turned eighteen, a date that was just weeks away, he was going to move out.

  Where he was going to move to and how he was going to pay for it were questions he hadn’t yet answered, but with the money they’d taken from the bank robbers, his and Amy’s future was secure.

  Amy had turned eighteen a month earlier. So they would soon both be adults and able to do and go where they pleased.

  Their spending spree did not go unnoticed.

  Mrs. Doris James, a lifelong resident of Ridge Creek, and the town’s main gossip, happened to be in line behind the kids at the local Mega drugstore. When Dean bought the costly game system, she wondered where a boy like Dean had acquired the funds.

  When the young couple left the store, Mrs. James followed them, and her eyebrows went up when the kids entered the jewelry store.

  Mrs. James went inside the coffee shop across the way and settled in at a table by the window. She had braved the rainstorm because her husband had a bad case of diarrhea and she went out to the drugstore to get something for him.

  But Mr. James would just have to stay perched atop the toilet for a while longer, because Mrs. James knew mischief when she saw it, and Amy and Dean were up to something, she just knew it.

  She sipped her coffee, took a bite of her glazed donut, and waited to see where Dean and Amy went to next.

  ***

  Cameron Ryder was only a few miles from Ridge Creek, when she got the call from Bobby telling her that the chief there was holding two suspects in the bank robbery, a man and a woman.

  She pointed her pickup truck in that direction and wondered if she would soon see the face of the woman who had murdered her brother.

  As she drove along, she thought about her younger brother and realized that she was now all alone.

  Her mother had passed away when Michael was only six. While her father spent long hours trying to keep the family hardware store afloat, fourteen-year-old Cameron had practically raised Michael.

  Six years later, when her father died in a hit and run accident, Cameron became more of a parent than a sister to the boy.

  Luckily for her, Michael had been a good kid, and Cameron had felt pride as she watched him excel academically, and later go on to have success as a financial advisor.

  It seemed inconceivable to her that he was gone, just wiped off the planet by the whim of a madwoman.

  When the first tremor came, Cameron barely noticed it, as she was lost amid grief, but then came the second jolt, followed by a lurching sensation, and she realized that the front end of her truck was sitting higher, as if she were climbing a hill.

  “What the...?”

  She had been driving over the flat surface of a one-lane bridge, the North Street Bridge, whose other side was the border of Ridge Creek. Cameron looked in her rear view mirror and saw that the car behind her was slamming on its brakes. The hard stop made the vehicle go sideways and it slammed into the metal guardrail.

  Cameron looked away from the mirror, saw the jagged edge of crumbling roadway rising up in front of her and realized that the bridge was coming apart.

  She instinctively touched the brake pedal, and yet, in the second it took to perform that action, she realized that she’d never stop in time to keep from driving off the edge.

  She moved her foot onto the gas and pressed down hard. There was a gap in the road ahead; the broken roadway in front of her proclaimed that, but what she didn’t know was how wide the gap was.

  In any event, the more speed the better, and when the truck’s front wheels left the roadway and spun in empty space, Cameron screamed.

  CHAPTER 12 - Caged

  Chief McCoy placed Sara and Tanner in side-by-side cells that were only separated by shared metal bars.

  The cells sat twenty feet away from the chief’s scarred wooden desk, and their back wall was the rear brick wall of the small building. The chief was near the front door and Lydia’s desk was over on the right, by a rack of shelves that held forms, along with several miscellaneous items.

  There were only three cells, each with a sink and a toilet, and Sara had been placed in the center one, while Tanner was on the right.

  Tanner lay back atop the cell’s
thin mattress and rested, gathering his strength, while Sara spent her time trying to convince the chief and his deputy of her innocence.

  “I’m no damn bank robber. I’m a former FBI agent.”

  McCoy leaned back in his chair.

  “If that’s true, you’ll soon have a reunion with your fellow agents. They’re on their way here to talk to you.”

  “This man, his name is Tanner and he’s a paid killer, but earlier, the two of us were being chased by a man and woman, and I believe that they’re the people you’re searching for.”

  Lydia laughed.

  “Let me get this straight. You say you’re an FBI agent, he’s a hit man, and you just happened to of been chased by two bank robbers? And here I thought this was a quiet little town.”

  “Check the farm, the one over at the other end of the road you found us on. That’s where you’ll find the people you want... along with a dead body.”

  McCoy sat up straight behind his desk.

  “You killed someone else?”

  “No... well... you’ll find one of my rounds in him, but he was already dead. Tanner killed him.”

  Chief McCoy looked over at Lydia, while not really knowing what to make of Sara’s tale.

  In truth, McCoy didn’t care much about what she was saying.

  His mind was preoccupied by thoughts of the empty flask he carried. He needed more whiskey, and as soon as the FBI took this mess off his hands, he was going to go out and get some.

  Lydia spoke to Tanner.

  “What’s your story, handsome?”

  Tanner sat up.

  “How about something to eat?”

  Lydia chuckled.

  “You’re only worried about your stomach, are you?”

  “For now,”

  McCoy picked up the landline.

  “The man might be a murdering thief, but food sounds like a good idea. God only knows how long it will be before the Feds get here. I’ll call Bonnie over at Grover’s and have her bring us some lunch.”

  “I’ll take the usual,” Lydia said. “But first I’m gonna go check out that farm.”

  Sara sighed with relief.

  “Thank you, but please be careful, Deputy, those people might still be there.”