by Bobby Adair
He laid out a grid of Spring Creek in his mind. Tried to imagine how much of the town they could search at night—not that they’d be going door to door, but he couldn’t depend on the lucky happenstance that everyone he needed to find would be conveniently located. He thought about the bloody 704 jackets he and Summer wore. Would they be a hindrance or a help? Should they make a point to find fresh jackets or did the blood on the jackets they wore match the condition of their faces?
At halfway into town, they rounded a curve on a heavily wooded incline and Summer caught Tommy’s arm. “Stop.”
Panting from the run, Tommy did. They were far from any house and invisible from the road. They were alone.
“You need to answer some questions.”
Tommy nodded. He knew he’d have to at some point. He led her off the bike path and down a narrow footpath between the lodgepole pines.
“You know where this comes out?” asked Summer.
“The trailhead at Granite near Fifth,” answered Tommy. “By those gray apartments. You know the place?”
“Yeah.”
“Before we get to the apartments, there’s a clearing by the creek. It’s pretty isolated. We can talk there.”
***
After stopping in the clearing, Tommy scanned the forest, peering down the banks of the creek, looking for human shapes in the darkness, listening for any spoken sound. Summer did the same, searching for anyone who might have seen or followed.
When Tommy was satisfied they were alone, he turned his attention to Summer. Her eyes looked fierce in the silver moonlight shining down through the tall trees. At the same time, she seemed vulnerable. It was easy to see every subtle emotion cross her face. “What do you need to ask me?”
Careful to keep her voice down, Summer said, “You’re not a computer guy, or whatever.”
“I am.”
“Not the way you murdered those people back at the ranch.”
“I told you what I was going to do before we went down there.”
“And,” Summer added, “the way you attacked those men in the parking lot.”
“Attacked?” Tommy asked. “Curious choice of words considering all that’s happened.”
“You killed three armed men. You didn’t even have a knife. They are dead, aren’t they?”
“One for sure,” Tommy confirmed. “One wasn’t done dying. The last guy, he’ll need surgery to fix his face and a few weeks in the hospital. I threatened him before I left.”
“Threatened?” The thought of it was ridiculous to Summer. “Why, you nearly beat him to death.”
“For the same reason we left the ranch without stealing anything. I’m trying to create a rift between Battalion 704 and CTS. I told a guy in the hospital my squad was ambushed by Colorado Truth Society. I told the guy I beat up in the parking lot that I was CTS and I was retaliating for something 704 did down in Fairplay.”
“Why did I even ask?” Summer threw her hands in the air and seemed ready to have a fit. “Forget all that for now. What’s all wrong about you, what gives your charade away is that you don’t seem the least bit bothered by what you just did to those men. How is that you, a—” Summer raised her hands and made a pair of gaudy air quotes, “—normal computer consultant nerd guy kills people like you’re a CIA assassin? You’re a liar, Tommy Joss, that’s what you are. You’ve lied to Faith about who you are. You lied to your daughter, and you’re lying to me.”
“I never lied to them.”
“Maybe not,” argued Summer, “but not lying isn’t the same as being honest.”
Tommy couldn’t argue with that. “I guess we’re both just a pair of liars then, aren’t we?”
“I confessed the real purpose of our mission to the ranch,” Summer spat. “What are you, a hitman? A psycho?”
“If I were a hitman, I’d have killed my boss a long time ago.” Tommy threw up a weak smile to let her know he was joking.
“Tell me what you meant when you said you’d killed people before?”
“I know this seems urgent that you need to know all this right now,” Tommy explained, “but we’re going to run out of time to do what we need to do. If I promise to do it later, can I wait until tomorrow or next week sometime to answer all your questions?”
“Not if you want me to come with you now.”
No matter how much Tommy wanted to turn and leave Summer there in the clearing, he knew his odds of success went up by having her along. “You’re right, I never told Faith or Emma. And I never will tell my daughter what I’m about to tell you. You keep that in mind.”
“Don’t bully me, Tommy.”
“My daughter is the most important thing to me in the whole world.”
“Tommy,” Summer stopped him, “I don’t need to be threatened. I’ll keep your big secret if that’s what you want, but whatever it is, you need to tell Faith if you don’t want to lose her.”
“Faith’s father knows,” admitted Tommy, “some of it. That’s why he despises me. He doesn’t know everything. If he did, he’d have had me locked up years ago.”
“What’s everything?” Summer prodded.
“I’ll give you the highlights now, and later, if we’re not killed doing this, I’ll tell you all you want to know, okay?”
Summer crossed her arms and conceded. “Give me your summary.”
“I killed my father when I was fourteen.”
Summer’s mouth gaped open. She started to say something, but stopped. “My God.”
“Yeah.” Tommy confirmed.
“Like—” Summer shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Not what you expected?”
“Was it—” Summer didn’t want to say the word.
“It was murder,” Tommy told her. “Premeditated. I tried to sell it to the DA as self-defense but I was convicted of manslaughter.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“We agreed. We don’t have time for all that now. Let’s just say he was evil. He got what he deserved.”
“Evil like the devil?” asked Summer.
“The world has its share of cruel people,” explained Tommy. “Some of them revel in it. They hurt others for the joy of it. Call it Satan’s work. Call it what you want.”
“Faith said you hardly ever talked about your childhood.”
Tommy was growing impatient, but he told her, “The Fred effect ruined my mother. What he did to my sister—” Tommy shook his head, not wanting to say it out loud.
“What did he do to you?”
“It’s a long story and we don’t have time for it all. We need to get into town.” Tommy cast a long stare down the trail, looking for any hint that he and Summer might have attracted anyone’s notice.
“You implied that you’ve killed more than one person,” Summer pushed. “It didn’t stop with your dad did it?”
“In juvie,” answered Tommy, “and after.”
“You killed someone when you were in juvenile detention?”
“Rehabilitation isn’t the goal in some of those places. Maybe most of them. I don’t know. Where they threw me?” Tommy really didn’t want to dredge all of that up. “It was a prep school for the prison system.”
“You killed another boy, didn’t you?”
“Not all ‘boys’, as you seem to want to think of us, are cuddly pubescent kids. Some kids are just men, waiting to finish filling out. They’re hard and they’ll kill you for a pack of cigarettes. Like I said, the world has some evil people in it.” Tommy looked in the direction he thought the ranch lay. “We saw some of that today.”
“How many did you kill in juvie?” Summer asked like she was afraid of the answer.
“Two.”
“You’re not just some kid who offed his abusive father, you’re a murderer?”
“I am,” Tommy admitted.
“And nobody knows it except Faith’s father.”
“There was some kind of law that at age eighteen, they had to kick you back to the st
reet. I got out with an expunged record for keeping my nose clean.”
“You went to college and learned how to write software then, right?”
“No,” Tommy answered. “I didn’t start taking college classes until I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight.”
“What did you do in the meantime, or do I want to know?”
“We’ve come this far,” Tommy told her. “I fell in with the only people I knew. I went into the business that helped turn my father into the worse version of himself he could be, the same business that killed my sister.”
“And that was?”
“Meth.”
“You were a drug dealer?”
Tommy shook his head.
“An addict?”
“I was an enforcer for an outfit whose territory covered most of east Texas and half of Louisiana.”
“Is enforcer another word for hitman?”
“Kind of. Among other things.”
“How many people have you killed, altogether?”
“The people I killed were animals.”
“That doesn’t tell me how many,” she replied.
“Enough that I’m still good at it.”
Summer shivered and stepped away. “And you thought your father was the evil one.”
Tommy didn’t have a response for that, so they stood there in the moonlight, listening to the water run over the rocks as Summer tried to assimilate the ugly revelations, and tried to figure out what to do about it.
“You see why I’d keep my past to myself?”
“You don’t do that kind of work anymore?” asked Summer. “Enforcer stuff?”
“I’ve been on the straight and narrow for nearly twenty years. I’ve tried to live like normal people are supposed to.”
“How does that even work?” asked Summer. “I mean, really. You go from criminal to computer consultant? That seems a little far-fetched—nobody does that.”
“You decide to change.”
Summer laughed meanly. “What, you listened to an Anthony Robbins seminar and you were cured?”
“Belittle me if you want. Believe me or don’t. I’ll tell you this, nothing is easy in life. Trying to make yourself something better is hard, really hard. It starts with a choice. It took time, but I succeeded.”
Summer mulled that for a moment before asking, “So no killing. None at all?”
“Not until today.”
“And Faith doesn’t know any of this?”
Tommy shook his head.
“I won’t tell her,” Summer blurted. “So—”
“I’m not going to kill you, so please don’t think that. What would be the point? You and me, we’re murderers together, now.”
“I like the word ‘patriot’.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Summer ran out of questions, then, so Tommy said. “I don’t know what we are, you and me. All of us, now. I only know—well, maybe I don’t know anything. I never saw this 704 coup coming. Didn’t have a clue. What I know now, though, is we’re going to destroy this country, one family, one house, one city at a time. I don’t know what kind of hate could drive a person to lock all those people in that barn up there and burn them alive, but if this truly is just a Blue versus Red thing, this is going to be a very nasty war. And when it’s over, there won’t be any America left anymore.”
***
“I don’t believe that.” The fear that had been growing in Summer’s eyes disappeared and was replaced with her usual fire. “I’m not giving up on my country. It’s not too late for the good people to save it. But we need to act quick.”
Tommy was getting antsy. It was time to get moving. “I just want to save my family.”
“That’s admirable, Tommy, but don’t you think you have a duty? Or do enforcers for meth kings not have any loyalty to their country?”
“I liked you better when you weren’t criticizing me.”
“I’m sorry.” She seemed like she meant it. “That just comes out sometimes.”
“We all have our flaws.” Tommy raised a finger to hush her before she could respond.
Summer got back on track with her argument. “We both saw what these 704s did to the people in the barn. If all that stuff you told me about killing evil people was true, then you have to help me fight them.”
“There’s no good versus evil here, Summer.”
She was mortified. “How can you say that?”
Tommy heaved a tired sigh. “Up there at the hospital just now, I killed two men and maimed another. You watched me do it, and it frightened you. You thought I was a monster.”
Summer didn’t deny it, yet she didn’t admit it, either.
“Do you know why I killed them?”
Summer shook her head. “Because you had to?”
“I could have found a way to make it to the bike trail without doing it. You did.”
Again, Summer didn’t have an answer.
“I did it because I wanted to.”
Summer was disgusted, yet couldn’t help herself from asking. “Are you addicted to it, like a serial killer?”
Tommy almost chuckled, but it was even too twisted for his sense of humor. “No. I killed them precisely for what their 704 buddies did up at that barn. I didn’t have to. I chose to punish them because what they did was repugnant, cowardly, and wicked. To those men’s families, though, to their friends, I’m the evil one, because I killed them when I didn’t have to. I killed them for revenge. Summer, by the end of this, we’ll all be doing the same. There won’t be any difference between us and them, the good guys or the bad guys, we’ll all be monsters. We’ll have to be if we want to survive.”
“If you believe all that, then why are we going down to Spring Creek to try and save Faith and Emma? For what? They’ll either be killed eventually or turn into killers just like you. And what then, Tommy, will Emma still be your precious little girl when she’s murdering 704s in a hospital parking lot?”
“This is your war, Summer, not mine. I’m not staying for it. I’m going to take my family and make my way as far away from this mess as I can. And whether you believe it or not, I will spend the rest of my life in peace and never pick up another gun, and hope I never have to look at another human being with enough hate in my heart to kill them.”
“And where is this rainbow rest-stop supposed to be? Canada? Mexico? Australia?”
Tommy shook his head. He hadn’t thought that far down the road. All of his problems so far had been too urgent to give him any room to consider the details of his future. “I don’t know.”
“I think you’re wrong,” said Summer. “I think you’re living in a fantasy future that won’t ever come to pass. The only way any of us are making it out of here is by fighting and winning. That’s what I believe with all my heart. I’m going to do my part to save the country I love.”
“Thank you for taking time out from your war to help me,” said Tommy.
“Now that the plan to kidnap Lugenbuhl’s son has failed, you and I are on parallel paths. I need to get into Spring Creek and gather the intel Barry needs to defeat 704. You need to find the people who have information on Faith and Emma. We need to go to the same places and find the same people. You and I can work together.”
Tommy didn’t completely buy that. He suspected he was being pulled into another of Summer’s lies. “When I find out where Faith and Emma are, I won’t stay in Spring Creek to help you. I’m going straight to them, do you understand?”
“You can save your family and your country, Tommy. Don’t give up, please?”
Tommy didn’t see any point in arguing it further.
“Then make me one promise at least,” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“If we come across Frank Lugenbuhl, and if I can’t do it myself, I want you to kill him.”
“Assassination, is that what the good people do?”
“Think of it as punishment if it helps you sleep at night.”
“Do you
think killing one minor warlord will help you stop all this?”
“No,” admitted Summer, “but if the resistance in every town stands up to these thugs, then we can win. We have to do our part here. Will you do it?”
“He’s already on the list of people who I plan to kill if I come across him.”
“Quit being difficult then, and let’s get moving.”
“I think this Crosby guy is who we need to start with. Do you know who he is?”
They were already walking toward the trailhead as Summer nodded. “Malcolm Crosby. Yeah, I know him.”
“The SPAM guy?”
Chapter 14
“Malcolm Crosby,” Summer confirmed. “He owns those Hawaiian sandwich shops down in Denver.”
Tommy had tried one once while waiting on a delayed flight at the airport. He shuddered. SPAM was still SPAM no matter how you dressed it up.
“Up in Breck,” said Summer, “those big places way up the mountain—”
“Near the lodge?” asked Tommy.
“Kind of. The log cabin mansions, you know which ones I’m talking about?”
Tommy did. They were huge places. Five and six bedroom ski villas with four-car garages built around the lift pick-ups at the bottom of the runs. Tommy had shopped them online back before his concept of house prices had inflated enough to realistically reflect mountain home square footage.
“He splits his time between there and Denver,” said Summer. “They say he has a big house in Cherry Creek, too.”
“The sandwich biz must pay well.”
"He stood for City Council four years ago. He didn't win. So I know he's politically active, and he's an associate of Frank Lugenbuhl. More, actually—they're good friends."
“He sounds like our guy. Any chance it could be someone else?”
“Every chance in the world,” answered Summer. “But he’s the only one I know of who fits the bill. We don’t have any other Crosbys in Summit County. None I know who are politically active, anyway.”
Tommy patted his pocket. “You wanna pull out your stolen sat-phone and call your buddy Barry, check with his people? Maybe they’ve learned enough to confirm.”
