Won't Back Down

by J. D. Rhoades

  Cameron shrugs. “Last I heard, he’d gotten some land in the Uwharries and was living off the grid. And out of our jurisdiction.”

  Fletcher says nothing, just taps on the roof of the car while looking off into space, thinking.

  “We’ve got a lot on our plate already, Fletch,” Cameron says. “Let’s put out a statewide BOLO and wait for some other agency to bring them in while we work the local angle on the murders we picked up this week. Keller’s firearms problem can wait.”

  Fletcher runs a hand over his face, trying not to snarl in frustration. He knows his partner is right. They’re overloaded and it’s time to focus on what they can do. But it gripes his ass that Keller’s the one on the hunt and not him. He sighs. “Okay. Let’s get back and see what we got.”

  As they pull out of the clay and gravel drive of the trailer, they turn toward home. But Fletcher can’t help but glance over his shoulder to the road going the other way.

  ONE HUNDRED-

  SEVEN

  “This is it,” Meadow says. “Turn off here.”

  Ben has to stand on the brakes to stop the big truck in time. His three passengers are thrown forward by the sudden stop and the tires squeal on the pavement of the hard road. Alia cries out, and Meadow instinctively puts out her hands to keep from crashing into the dashboard before her seatbelt stops her. Ben glares at her. “You could have told me sooner.”

  She’s close to tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see it. I haven’t been here in a while.”

  “Okay.” Ben takes a deep breath. “Sorry I snapped at you.”

  As he puts the truck in gear and backs up to make the tight turn, she murmurs, “It’s okay. We’re all on edge.”

  They’ve turned onto a gravel road that’s so narrow Ben grits his teeth and leans forward to keep from running off the side. Twilight is falling, and he has to grope to find the switch to turn on the headlights. As he does, the road widens out to a tiny gravel parking lot. Ben pulls the truck to a stop. “Is this it?”

  Meadow shakes her head. “This is the trailhead. The beginning to one of the hiking trails in the forest. We walk from here.”

  “Oh boy,” Bassim says. “Hiking. So looking forward to this.”

  Ben pulls the truck to one side, puts it in park, and kills the engine. The only sounds are the ticking of the cooling motor and the growing rasp of crickets.

  “Grab your packs and come on.” Meadow does just that as she exits the vehicle. Ben follows, sticking the pistol they’d retrieved from his mother’s lockbox during the drive into his waistband.

  Alia and Bassim look at each other. Bassim shrugs. “Unless you want to live in this truck, I guess we’re hiking.”

  Alia nods and picks up her own backpack.

  Meadow’s already started up the trail. They have to jog to catch up. She snaps on a flashlight to guide their way through the gathering darkness. The trees loom overhead, shutting out what little light there is left. The trail is hard-packed clay, but jutting roots and patches of loose gravel cause all of them to stumble from time to time. The terrain dips into shadowed valleys, then climbs abruptly to tall ridges. Before long, they’re all panting with the strain. After a while, they start to notice bright yellow signs on either side of the trail, warning POSTED. NO TRESPASSING. PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  “I thought this was a national park,” Ben gasps, barely able to catch his breath from the exertion.

  “It is,” Meadow calls back. “At least the trail is.” She draws up short at the top of a steep climb, where a group of granite boulders, some of them as tall as a man, just from the clay soil. “We can rest here.”

  “Thank you,” Alia breathes, collapsing onto a chair-sized rock.

  Meadow leans against a tree. “The parkland widens out about a quarter mile down the trail. But right here, on either side, is property of people who refused to sell when the government created the park. And the government decided it wasn’t worth the effort to go to court to take it.” She shrugs. “Or someone paid someone off. Daddy’s not sure which.”

  “Speaking of Daddy,” Ben says. “Does he know we’re coming?”

  Meadow shakes her head. “No. He doesn’t have a phone or anything like that. So let me do the talking, okay? And try not to get upset if he says anything, you know…”

  “Racist?” Alia’s voice bears just a trace of bitterness. “Don’t worry, Meadow. Bassim and I have become experts at keeping quiet in the face of bigots.”

  Meadow sighs. “Daddy’s not a bigot. Not exactly. He’s not really all that crazy about anyone, to tell you the truth.”

  “Except you,” Ben says. “We hope.”

  She smiles. “Except me. I hope.”

  “Except my baby girl,” a gravelly voice comes from the darkness. As they leap up to face the voice, a man steps from behind a standing rock a few feet away. He’s a little over six feet tall. His hair is gray and thinning on top, but his gray beard is thick and full and reaches to the middle of his chest. He’s dressed in tattered jeans and a ragged black T-shirt and holding a black AR-15, the barrel of which tracks from Ben, to Alia, to Bassim, then back to Ben again. “If you’re thinkin’ of drawin’ that piece in your waistband, sonny,” he says, “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  The biggest dog Ben has even seen, a fawn-colored animal with a short muzzle and muscles rippling beneath his fur, steps from behind the man and regards the intruders with baleful pale gold eyes that finally come to rest on Ben. A low growl emanates from the animal’s throat.

  “You may get one of us,” the man says in a growl even more terrifying than the dog’s, “but the other one’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, hush, Daddy,” Meadow says as Ben raises his hands above his head. “No one’s killing anyone.” She goes down on one knee and gestures to the dog. “Hey, Zeus. Hey, sweet boy. C’mere. Come see me.”

  The dog looks from his master to the girl calling to him. Then he breaks and trots over to Meadow, wagging his stubby tail madly and licking her face. She throws her arms around the animal’s thick neck and scratches his ears, crooning to him all the while. “That’s my sweet boy. That’s my good boy.”

  “God damn it,” the man mutters. He looks at Ben and raises the rifle. “Keep your hands up, boy.”

  “I am, sir.” Ben raises his hands even higher as the man steps nearer.

  “Meadow!” the man snaps. “Stop playin’ with the dog and fetch me that gun.”

  Meadow gives the dog a final hug and stands up. “It’ll be okay, Ben,” she whispers as she walks over and takes the gun. As she hands it to her father, butt first, she asks, “Where’s Hera?”

  The man nods over Ben’s shoulder. They all turn to see another dog, with the same massive build as the first, but a streaky dark brindle coat, watching from a dozen feet away. She’d come up behind them without a sound. “She’s been a lot more skittish since the pups were born.”

  “Puppies?” Meadow’s voice goes so high it’s almost a squeal. “Hera had puppies, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “Well…” the man begins.

  Meadow walks up to him and links her arm in his. This has the effect of impeding, if not completely disabling, his ability to shoot. He clearly realizes and is unhappy about it, but she leans over and kisses his weathered cheek. “Take us to see the puppies.”

  ONE HUNDRED-

  EIGHT

  “That didn’t take long,” Natalya observes.

  “It never does,” her sister Liza kisses the young deputy tenderly on the forehead and tells him in a gentle voice what a good boy he’s been. Then she stands up and wipes the blood off her face with a towel.

  They have it down to a science now: Marina wields the knife, inflicting pain with the deft cruelty that comes from long practice; Liza kneels by the subject, cradling their head tenderly in the crook of her elbow, whispering the questions they want answered, commiserating with the subject’s suffering, and telling them with a motherly solicit
ousness that all this foolishness can end if they would just stop being so stubborn and tell the sisters what they want to know. For someone far gone in the wilderness of agony that Marina creates, that soft, soothing maternal voice is a lifeline to a world that may not be better, but at least doesn’t hurt as badly. Given that lifeline, most subjects will take it, only some of them knowing that the cessation of pain often comes at the price of permanent darkness.

  This time had been no different. It hadn’t taken the young policeman long to give up all of the details of the investigation. They’re disappointed to find that he’s a minor figure, not much more than a report writer, but there’s still enough there to proceed.

  Natalya looks through the open door of the van and frowns. “And now, what do we do with him?”

  A soft whimper from the man tied to the floor of the van indicates an attempt to register an opinion. They ignore it.

  “He still has one testicle left,” Liza says as Marina tosses the one she’s taken into the woods, shaking the blood from her fingers when she’s done. “He can still have a life.”

  Natalya shakes her head. “He can identify us.”

  “A shame,” Liza says with sincere regret. “He was a beautiful young man.” She looks to Marina, who nods her agreement. Then she cuts the policeman’s throat.

  “So,” Liza says as she drags the beautiful young man’s still-twitching body out of the van and onto the dirt path in the woods where they’ve pulled it, “where to now, sister?”

  “We don’t know where the Khoury children are,” Natalya says. “But we know this Keller is after them. And we know Keller’s center of gravity, do we not?”

  Liza nods. “The Jones woman.”

  “So,” Natalya says, “we talk to this girlfriend of Jack Keller. If she doesn’t know where he is, I’ll wager she knows where to contact him.” She smiles thinly. “And hearing the person you love screaming can be a powerful way to motivate someone, right, sisters?”

  They all nod. They all have very good, very personal reasons to know.

  ONE HUNDRED-

  NINE

  Keller savors the feel of the tires rumbling on the highway, the big police engine rumbling beneath the hood. It feels good to be back on the hunt. Then he takes a deep breath. This is different, he reminds himself, from chasing down some lowlife who’s jumped bail. Before the next dawn, he knows, he might have to kill again. He thinks back on the men he’s killed in his life, and suddenly they’re all in the car with him, looking at him with accusing eyes. John Lee Oxendine. Willem DeGroot, who’d died on his knees, unarmed, but smiling contemptuously with the knowledge that he’d be back to torment Keller and the people he loved. A nameless team of foot soldiers in an empty place a few miles north of the Mexican border. Jerico Zavalo and the men he’d brought to kill Keller. A pair of gunmen he’d set a trap for and burned to death.

  He looks back down the path of his life and sees that it’s a path that grows redder and redder with the blood of others. It’s true that all of them had been engaged at one point or another in trying to kill him and the people he cared for, but he worries about when exactly it was that killing became so easy for him. He wonders if he hasn’t gone completely crazy. You can justify anything, any killing, any atrocity, if you’re crazy.

  He shakes his head to clear those thoughts. It’s time to focus on what’s happening now. He made a promise to look after Bassim and Alia. He promised Marie he’d bring her son back. There are people out there who’d hurt them. That means there’s work to do. It may be violent and bloody work, but it’s work he can do well. He pushes the accelerator to the floorboard and the car leaps forward.

  The turn marked on the map comes up so quickly that Keller nearly misses it, and the tires wail in complaint as he takes the corner. He glances in the rearview, hoping that he hasn’t pulled the maneuver in front of a lurking highway patrolman. All he sees are the headlights of a U-Haul bound for somewhere else passing the crossroads. He slows a bit, searching for the turnoff identified in smeared ink on Meadow’s topo map. He passes by the abandoned country store she’s marked STORE, with a large X beside it. Something makes him glance back at the place after he passes. Why would she mark that place? He slows and attempts a three-point turn that the narrow country road makes into a five-point turn. It’s gotten dark, and the headlights pick out the worn boards and rusted signs of the old place. Keller stops the car, leaving the motor idling, and looks around. A sudden thought makes him reach into the glove box and fumble around until his fingers close on the long, thin metal cylinder of a flashlight. He smiles. Frank Jones, former veteran cop, wasn’t one to go anywhere without being prepared for emergencies.

  He gets out, snapping the flashlight on, and walks around the parking lot, not completely sure what he’s looking for, but strangely confident that he’ll find it. His toe catches in a slight depression and he stumbles slightly, then looks down. A pair of deep tracks scar the clay soil. Keller bends down for a closer look, shining the flashlight beam over the tracks. The dirt to either side is dry and cracked, but the bottom of the track still glistens with the moistness of recently dug clay.

  Keller straightens up. So, a large vehicle—say, a pickup—has been here recently. It doesn’t have to be his truck, he knows, but this isn’t exactly a high traffic area, and this was a place specifically designated on Meadow’s map. Tracking, Keller knows, is often a matter of staring at the scattered pieces of a puzzle until patterns begin to emerge. Except sometimes, what he’s staring at are pieces of several different puzzles, and the real trick is sorting out which pieces are the ones to his puzzle and which ones are irrelevant. Problem is, Keller doesn’t have a lot of time to stare. He plays the flashlight around the parking lot some more until he notices the grassy area to the right of the store, at the edge of the lot. The grass hasn’t been cut in ages, but as Keller draws near, he sees it’s been trampled down. He moves in for a closer look and almost stumbles down the steep slope behind the store. The bent and broken grass forms a trail down the slope. Keller picks his way along that path until he arrives at the area where mortared stone columns hold up the back half of the building. Someday, he thinks, one of those posts is going to go, and the whole damn thing is going to slide into the ravine. But as he looks closer at the handiwork, he decides that day’s probably a long time away. This stonework may be crude, but it was meant to last. He turns and sees the padlocked door set into a dark wooden wall. The light on the hard-packed dirt in front of the door shows the scuffled marks of multiple footprints. Someone’s been here. Keller walks over and rattles the padlock. It holds firm in its hasp. The surface of the lock feels rough and gritty in his hands from the rust that covers it, but when Keller examines it closely with the flashlight, he can see the scratches and the bright metal around the keyhole. Keller lets the padlock drop with a rattle that sounds like a gunshot in the closeness of the hidden storage area.

  More puzzle pieces, Keller thinks. A big truck, a secret locked space where someone—actually several someones, from the look of the beaten path—has recently been walking, and an X mark on a map, like something from a pirate story. X marks the spot, the place where the treasure is buried. Maybe. Maybe these are pieces from some other puzzle. But he has the feeling he knows where the stolen money is hidden. But he won’t know for sure until he finds the final pieces. The children. He gets in his car and pulls away, headlights cutting a swath through the night.

  The turnoff marked by Meadow isn’t far, and it leads to a gravel parking lot with a wooden sign stating that it’s the EBENEZER TRAILHEAD. Keller sees his battered and dented truck parked to one side of the lot. He also sees another vehicle.

  The rental car he last saw driven by Gray and her two gunmen.

  They’ve arrived before him.

  ONE HUNDRED-

  TEN

  Iris Gray moves through the woods as silently as she can behind Waller and Tench, glad that she brought along a pair of sneakers to
replace her flats. Her cane digs into the ground with every step, but she’s finding it as much a hindrance as a help. They’re only a couple of feet ahead of her, but the woods are so dark she follows them as much by sound as sight, and there’s not much sound. The two move slowly, in single file, rifles at the ready, scanning from side to side through their night-vision goggles. “Sorry, ma’am,” they’d said as they pulled the contraptions over their heads, “we don’t have a pair for you. We weren’t expecting company.”

  They’d arrived at the place where Gray’s tracker said Keller’s truck would be, only to find the vehicle empty of both people and money. The only way out is the trail that begins beside a large wooden sign standing on a slight rise. The narrow track starts up a steep hill with tall trees and bushes on either side. The thick leaves arching overhead effectively shut out both moon and starlight, making the path ahead of them as dark as a cavern.

  Gradually, as her eyes become accustomed to the gloom and the land continues to rise, the overhead vegetation becomes a little less thick and she can see a little better in the ambient light. Still, when Tench stops dead, she almost walks into his back. They stand still and silent for a second, then a bright red dot appears ahead of them. It’s the laser sight on Waller’s rifle, and it comes to rest on a figure about fifty feet ahead of them on the trail. Gray catches a glimpse of brown hair in the reflected glow before the light snaps off.

  “Deer,” Tench whispers. “Quit fuckin’ around, Waller.”

  Waller says something she can’t catch, and the three of them move on.

  ONE HUNDRED-

  ELEVEN

  The house in the clearing is the first actual log cabin Alia’s ever seen, the rough-hewn structure like something from a history book. “Did you build this yourself, sir?” she asks the bearded man.