SYCAMORE BLUFF (Prequel to THE JACK REACHER FILES: ANNEX 1) (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 8)

by Jude Hardin

  Colt noticed a small puddle of blood that had oozed from one corner of the fallen bay door. It was almost black, and it had already started to dry.

  “Can’t we just leave the dead guy here?” he said. “I think it’s cold enough to keep him fresh for a while.”

  “What if a nosy neighbor wanders in while we’re gone? It’s not like that curtain is going to keep anyone out. No, I think we better move him to the shed. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “All right. Let’s do it.”

  Together, they lifted the hinged sections of the bay door and awkwardly slid them forward in one piece away from the corpse.

  “Get your gun,” Diana said.

  Colt reached down and pried his pistol out of the dead man’s hand. He checked to make sure there wasn’t any blood on it, and then he slid it into his ankle holster.

  “Is yours still in the car?” he said.

  “No, I have it.”

  She patted her ankle, and Colt saw the Ruger’s impression under her black sweat pants.

  “Good,” he said. “If someone else attacks us, I’m not sure how good my aim is going to be.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to The Hospital?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The dead man had been slammed face-first into the pavement, and the back of his skull had cracked open like a hardboiled egg. He’d died instantly, so there wasn’t a lot of blood, but the sight of his exposed brain made Colt’s stomach lurch. He thought he was going to lose it for sure this time, but he didn’t. He managed to fight it off.

  “We’ll cover him with plastic first,” Diana said. “Then we’ll drag him through the house and out the back door to the shed.”

  “Have you looked in the shed?” Colt said.

  “I did. This morning when you were still asleep. It’s empty, but there’s a bunch of paint splatters on the floor, all different colors. Apparently the people who lived here before were using it for an art studio.”

  “That would explain why the lawn mower and the garden tools are here in the garage.”

  “Yeah.”

  Colt and Diana pieced some plastic trash bags together with duct tape and wrapped the corpse. When they were finished, the dead man looked like a shiny black and silver mummy. They put their coats on and rolled him onto an area rug from the living room, and then they pulled him out of the garage and down the hallway to the bedroom and out the sliding glass door to the back yard. There was a privacy fence, and it was dark back there, so Colt didn’t think anyone would be able to see them.

  They stopped for a breather when they got to the shed.

  Colt rubbed his hands together. “I’ll be glad to get back to Florida,” he said.

  “You and me both. Come on, let’s finish up.”

  Diana unlatched the double set of doors and swung them open. The plywood floor of the shed was about eight inches above grade, so it took a bit of effort to get the two-hundred pound corpse over the hump. Colt had to bend down at the man’s feet and heave forward while Diana pulled from the other end.

  “This is obviously where the phrase dead weight came from,” Colt said. “No wonder they always have six pall bearers at funerals.”

  Diana nodded, her breath coming out in white puffs. “Another good reason to be cremated,” she said.

  They exited the shed, and Diana closed the doors and secured the latch. She stood there with her arms crossed and stared at it.

  “What?” Colt said.

  “I just wish I had a padlock.”

  “I saw some cable ties somewhere. In the garage, I think.”

  “Better than nothing, I guess. Go on in and grab a few. I’ll wait here.”

  “Aren’t you freezing?” Colt said.

  “Yeah, but I feel funny about leaving these doors so easily accessible, even for a few minutes.”

  “All right.”

  Colt walked back to the house. The furnace had kicked on, and it was toasty inside now. Colt’s head hurt, and he felt an overwhelming sense of tiredness. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but he knew his and Diana’s night was far from over. They still needed to go to Town Hall and contact The Director, and then they would have to wait for the helicopter to come. Assuming The Director would want to get them out of there. Surely he would. Colt hoped they wouldn’t have to hike all the way out to the bluff to catch a ride, but if they did they did. At least this crazy assignment was almost over.

  He walked out to the garage and found the canister full of cable ties he’d seen earlier. There were several different sizes. He grabbed a few of the largest ones and turned to exit the garage, planning to walk back through the house and out the sliding glass door again. It would have been quicker to go out through the opening where the bay door had been, but he didn’t feel like crawling under the curtain. Also, he didn’t want to risk inadvertently pulling it down. Better to go back the way he came, only there was one problem.

  Bill Lott, the guy from across the street, stood just inside the door to the house, blocking Colt’s way.

  Bill Lott was holding a machete.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Colt’s first instinct was to go for his pistol, but he never got the chance. Bill Lott lunged forward with an overhand motion and came down hard, intending to bury the massive blade in the middle of Colt’s forehead. Colt jumped backwards and landed on the bay door with a crunch. Boiling hot rivulets of fizzy white pain shot from the base of his spine to the top of his skull. At first he wasn’t sure what had split apart, the piece of wood he’d fallen onto or his tail bone. He could still move his legs, which was a good thing. Otherwise, Lott’s second strike with the machete would have chopped his left foot off. Colt rolled away from the bay door, stood and snatched the first thing he could find to defend himself, a garden hoe that had been hanging from one of the exposed studs.

  Something about Bill Lott had changed since earlier. Something about his facial expression. Almost as though a switch had been thrown. His eyes had gone from intelligent and kind to dull and glazed and stupefied. Colt wondered if the man had suffered a stroke or something.

  Lott grunted something incomprehensible. A thread of drool dangled from the right side of his mouth. Something had happened to his mind, but he still seemed very capable physically. He came at Colt again with the heavy knife, slicing the air sideways with rapid arcing motions, left and right, left and right, as though he were cutting through a tangle of vines in the jungle. Colt tried to block him with the hoe, but the wooden handle on the garden tool was no match for the big brutal blade of the machete. In a matter of seconds Colt, was against the wall, holding the short end of a very splintered stick.

  “What do you want?” Colt said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  Lott made some grunting sounds again. He sounded frustrated, as though he were trying to communicate but could not. He swung, and Colt dodged. His eyes bulged wild, and a line of foamy red blood trailed from his left nostril to the bottom of his chin. He seemed to be losing steam. He was slowing down, but Colt didn’t dare take the time to reach for his ankle holster. Not yet. One misstep could mean the loss of a limb or a head.

  “My wife has a gun,” Colt said. “She’s going to come out here and blow your brains out any second now.”

  Lott just stood there grinning and shaking his head. There are no guns in Sycamore Bluff, he seemed to be saying. Which was true before Colt and Diana came to town. At least that was the word they’d gotten from The Director. Colt hoped it was still true. It was hard enough trying to defend himself against blunt objects and cutting tools around here.

  Lott lunged forward like a swordfighter, trying to skewer Colt, but Colt turned sideways and the pointy end of the blade got stuck in the lap siding on the other side of the framing studs. Finally, an opening, and it turned out to be all Colt needed. In the brief moment that it took Lott to dislodge the machete, Colt rammed the sharp splintered end of the hoe handle about four inches into the right side of his belly
, just under the rib cage. Colt muscled the stake in deeper, twisting it clockwise through Lott’s internal organs as though he were tightening a screw.

  Lott made some sounds that weren’t quite human. He belched and growled and grunted and staggered backward. He dropped the machete and yanked the broken handle out of his gut. Blood oozed from the wound, along with some bright red chunks of something, probably a mixture of liver tissue and—from the smell—intestinal contents. He wobbled, swaying back and forth like a willow tree in a whirlwind. He fell to his knees, and then toppled face-first onto the fallen bay door.

  Colt pulled his pistol and stood over Lott’s head, thinking he would put him out of his misery, but by the time he clicked the safety off Lott had stopped breathing. Colt put the gun back in the holster, then pulled it out again, thinking there might be even more assassins lurking about. He ran through the house and out the back door, worried that one of them had gotten to Diana.

  She was still standing by the shed.

  “What took you so long?” she said.

  Colt just shook his head incredulously. “Weren’t you just a wee bit concerned when I didn’t come back right away?”

  “Yeah, I was about to come looking for you. Another couple of minutes and—”

  “Another couple of minutes and I could have been a shish kabob,” Colt said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We have another one for the morgue.”

  “What?”

  “Another dead guy in the garage.”

  “Another—”

  “It’s too cold out here,” Colt said. “Let’s go inside.”

  They walked back to the house, through the sliding glass door and into the bedroom. Colt sat on the bed while Diana walked to the garage to check out the latest carnage. When she returned, her face was a shade paler than it had been before.

  “What a mess,” she said. “What did you stab that guy with, anyway?”

  “The broken handle of a garden hoe. Crude, but obviously effective.”

  “Obviously.”

  Diana grabbed some thermal underwear and pair of black fatigue pants from her suitcase and a pair of boots. She started changing her clothes while Colt explained, in detail, everything that had happened.

  “What was really freaky about it, though, was how he kind of changed all of a sudden,” Colt said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “One minute he looked like your normal run-of-the-mill machete wielding murderer, but then his expression went blank and his eyes glazed over and he couldn’t speak anymore. Like he’d died already, although he was still very much animated.”

  “An animated corpse,” Diana said. “Like a—”

  “Don’t even say it.”

  Colt had a deep-seated fear of zombies. He could trace the origin of his phobia to one specific night when he was twelve years old, the night when Joe Crawford’s parents took him and Joe to a drive-in showing of a low-budget horror film called Time Traveling Zombie Bikers from Darkest Hell. Forty years of recurring nightmares later—not to mention a run-in with a serial killer known as The Zombie down in Key West—and Colt didn’t even like to hear the word spoken.

  Diana knew it, and she enjoyed teasing him about it.

  “Zombie,” she said. “Zombie, zombie, zombie. Bill Lott turned into a zombie right in front of your eyes.”

  “Shut up. He did not. There’s no such thing. I know there’s no such thing. It was just weird, that’s all. Like someone snapped a finger and made his personality go away. Anyway, you want me to go get the rug so we can pull him out to the shed?”

  “Forget about it. Someone obviously wants us dead, and there’s no telling how many attackers they have lined up. In the past hour, this assignment has gone from a Level One hostility threat to a Level Five. We need to get to the radio ASAP and let The Director know what’s going on. At the very least, we’re going to need some backup and some more fire power until they can send the Guard in.”

  “All right,” Colt said. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “Before we go, I wanted to talk to you about what happened earlier.”

  “Earlier?”

  “You know, when we were about to jump in the sack together.”

  “Nothing happened,” Colt said.

  “But something would have. As much as I like you, and as much as I’m attracted to you—”

  “We can never let anything like that happen again,” Colt said, finishing her thought. “Don’t worry. We’re on the same page as far as that’s concerned.”

  “Good.”

  “Good. Okay, now that we’ve established that we’re not allowed to jump each other’s bones, let’s get out of here.”

  Colt’s backpack was on the living room floor where he’d left it. He wasn’t hungry, but he felt like he needed something in his stomach, so he grabbed a box of granola bars from the pantry. He looked at the jug of bourbon, decided to stuff that into his backpack as well. It would help keep them warm if they had to hike out to the bluff.

  Diana handed him the keys. “You drive,” she said.

  They walked out the front door to the driveway. Full moon, lots of stars. Colt saw right away that both of the front tires on the Kia were flat.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I have Triple-A.”

  “Very funny. Looks like we’re hoofing it. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Sure. It’s only three miles, and the temperature out here is only in the single digits. No problem.”

  “Got any better ideas?”

  Colt looked across the street. “I say we take Bill Lott’s pickup truck. He won’t be needing it anymore.”

  “His wife might have a problem with that,” Diana said. “You want to be the one to wake her up and tell her about Bill’s untimely and gruesome demise?”

  “We could kill her too,” Colt said. “What’s one more?”

  “Come on, goofball.”

  Diana headed toward the street, and Colt reluctantly followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  After ending his call with Victor DeLorenza, Colonel David A. Davidson had switched on the two-way shortwave radio in his study and had dialed in the prearranged frequency. Two hours later, he was still listening, and he was starting to get worried. Wes Roper should have radioed in with the code word by now. Aurora. That’s all Davidson needed to hear. Aurora meant that John and Karen Millington, the operatives from The Circle, were dead. Aurora meant that everything was going to be all right.

  So far, all Davidson had heard was static. Not good. Not good at all. Maybe there was a radio problem in Sycamore Bluff. That was possible. Or maybe Wes was having trouble getting to Town Hall. All sorts of possibilities ran through Colonel Davidson’s mind, although none of them seemed very probable.

  Wes Roper was a bad man, but he was a good bad man. Davidson had a lot of faith in him. He’d handpicked Roper from a group of former combat vets who had, for one reason or another, separated from the military under less-than-honorable conditions, and who, for that reason, were having trouble finding work in the civilian world.

  Wes Roper loved his country. He loved it so much, he’d tracked seven enemy soldiers to a mountain cave in Afghanistan and had blown them to smithereens with a series of grenade strikes. Seven enemy soldiers, along with their seven wives and sixteen children. Oh, well. Sometimes collateral damage was unavoidable. One minute, the families were sharing an evening meal together, and the next minute, blammo!

  Seven enemy soldiers were eliminated because of Wes Roper’s bravery. At least the men hiding in that cave were alleged to be soldiers, although the final report generated from the Army’s internal affairs investigation was less than conclusive on that small matter.

  Sergeant Roper should have gotten a medal, as far as Davidson was concerned. Instead, he got booted out of the Army with a shameful piece of paper, a document that the enlisted guys who talked the talk and walked the walk commonly referred to as the Big Chicken Dinner
.

  The BCD.

  The Bad Conduct Discharge.

  It was a huge red F on a military career, and it was the kiss of death when it came to future employment. Many of its recipients, those who could find a job at all, ended up settling for unskilled labor positions, busting their balls sixty hours or more a week and earning just enough to get by. Dishwashers, fry cooks, drywall installers, landscapers, whatever. Not that that there was anything inherently wrong with those kinds of jobs, but they didn’t offer much hope for advancement, and they weren’t conducive to any sort of meaningful or lucrative future. It was a depressing life for a veteran who had once proudly served his or her country. The ones who chose it often worked among the drunks and druggies and other dregs of society, and often ended up sinking to that level themselves.

  Others simply refused to scrape the paint off of boxcars or toil in steamy hot hospital laundry rooms that reeked of human waste. In their minds, those jobs were for losers. No way were they going to lower themselves to do anything like that. Not for a million dollars, and certainly not for minimum wage. They were highly trained heartbreakers and life takers, and they deserved better. Some of them dropped out of society altogether. They moved back in with mom and dad and played video games all day, or they sponged off of other relatives, or friends, or they panhandled and lived on the streets. They were happy to do nothing and have nothing as long as they didn’t have to answer to The Man.

  Still others, some of the more ambitious Dishonorable Discharge or BCD recipients, became mercenaries, performing nasty little jobs in foreign countries for cash under the table. They used torture to interrogate prisoners, they poisoned water supplies, they performed indiscriminate bombing missions, and they torched villages. In short, they did whatever they were asked to do, and they did it well. They eagerly accepted an infinite number of illegal or unethical wartime ventures that would have been political nightmares for regular United States military personnel. The paychecks weren’t consistent, and life expectancy wasn’t that great, but the jobs were never boring and the men who performed them felt a sense of purpose. They could knock back a few at the end of the day and take pride in the fact that a goodly amount of pain had been inflicted and umpteen lives had been erased because of their actions.