Before He Preys

by Blake Pierce

  A ladder, Mackenzie thought. She remembered Tate saying that it was next to impossible to reach the top of the silos so she assumed a ladder would be a solution. Of course, the silos were too tall for the ladder to reach the top.

  Never one to settle for speculation, Mackenzie raced a bit faster, closing in quickly. After another thirty seconds or so, the grain came to a stop. It was replaced by an overgrown area of grass, mostly populated with weeds. She had her flashlight with her but did not see the point in making herself known just yet. She ignored the first silo he came to and went directly to the second one, where the ladder was perched.

  She gazed up and saw two people on the side of the silo. It was impossible to see clearly what was happening in the darkness, but it looked like the ladder had led them to the iron rungs along the side of the silo. Mackenzie saw these same rungs directly in front of her but also saw that many of these were fractured or hanging loosely from one end.

  He’s been out here to check it out before tonight, she thought.

  Quickly, she took her phone out. She pulled up Tate’s number and sent him a text. She figured he’d be more likely to habitually read an incoming text than force himself to speak with her on the phone.

  Second silo. Two people going up right now. Send help.

  And with the text sent, Mackenzie readied herself and started up the ladder.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Mackenzie climbed the ladder as quietly as she could but the sides still made that groaning metallic sound she had heard minutes ago while she had passed through the grain field. The first time the ladder made the complaint, it was soft and barely there at all. But the second time she made it, when she was just shy of having reached the halfway point, it was louder and quite grating.

  A nervous voice called out from somewhere overhead. “Who the fuck is down there?”

  Mackenzie decided to stay quiet. Without any true understanding of Jimmy Gibbons, she didn’t know what the thought of an FBI agent tailing him might do to him. She did stop for a moment, though, looking up to see exactly where Gibbons and his apparent next victim were located. They were very close to the top, the iron rungs coming to a stop beneath what appeared to be a very thin lip that circled the edge of the silo before the dome capped off the top.

  She was pretty sure Gibbons was bringing up the rear, forcing his victim to go ahead first. He was climbing awkwardly because he seemed to be holding something in his hand. A gun, maybe. But if that was the case, she couldn’t help but assume that it was just for show—that it wasn’t loaded. Otherwise, he would likely have started shooting at her the moment he saw her coming.

  Unless he’s now dreaming of throwing two people off, she thought.

  She knew that one well-placed shot would take him out. But she also knew that shooting from a ladder high up in the sky on a starless night where vision was murky at best would be very dangerous. She could hit the hostage. Or she might be able to hit Gibbons and on his way down, he could easily collide into her and send them both crashing to their deaths.

  So until she could see a clear and present danger to the soon-to-be victim, she would take no such shot. Bringing a killer in alive and relatively unharmed was always preferable over hauling his corpse away from the scene in a body bag. Even thinking this, though, Mackenzie knew that she was going to have to move quickly. She could not rely on her assumption that Gibbons would want to relish the moment before throwing his victim off. For all she knew, he’d do it the moment he reached that little walkway overhead.

  She came to the end of the ladder and found that she had been right; the ladder ended just beneath where a series of sturdier iron rungs clung to the side of the silo. When her hand fell on the first one, her heart lurched. These rails were much thinner than the ones on the ladder. As she pulled herself up by them, she felt gravity trying to claim her and, for the first time, became aware of the opens space behind her.

  She fought against it and continued to climb the ladder. She looked up again and saw that Gibbons and the person in front of him were nearing the lip at the top of the silo. She was going to have to speed up and hope that she could use the brief interruption when Gibbons and his victim reached the top.

  But her hands seemed to be drenched in sweat and as she pushed herself faster, the rungs started to feel thinner, the open space behind her feeling as if it were physically pulling at her.

  Overhead, she heard a woman’s slight cry of despair, followed by what sounded like a metallic clinking. Mackenzie looked up while still scaling the side of the silo. From what she could tell, the person in front of Gibbons—a female from the sound of it—had reached the thin walkway at the top.

  Mackenzie took a second to reach into the interior pocket of her coat. She pulled out the little flashlight that she had stored there before leaving DC and clicked it on. She pointed it upward to get a better view. All she could see was the bottoms of a pair of shoes roughly twenty feet overhead. As she watched, Gibbons was also coming to a stop on the rungs, reaching up and out for the thin walkway.

  Mackenzie sped up, climbing with reckless abandon now. She knew that if she did not reach Gibbons by the time he got onto the walkway, she could be in trouble. All he had to do was block her entrance onto the walkway. Of course, she could shoot him—and would if she had to—but even then, firing a gun while clinging desperately to an iron rung while about eighty feet in the air did not appeal to her.

  She placed the flashlight into her mouth, clamping down on it and using both hands to scale up. She neared the top and saw Gibbons throw one leg over onto the walkway. As he began to lift his other leg, Mackenzie stretched herself out, skipping the next rung in line, and made a swipe for his leg.

  She managed to slap him along the calf but not quite hard enough. He stumbled a bit between the final rung and the walkway and cried out in surprise.

  What he did next caught Mackenzie off guard. Rather than scramble up onto the walkway in fear, he held to the edge and stomped down. His left foot caught the side of her head. Reflexively, her left hand released the rung and her knees buckled at the impact. The flashlight fell from her mouth and went pinwheeling down toward the ground in a frenzy of light.

  She screamed as her legs went slipping off of the rung they had been on. Her left hand dangled uselessly out into open air as her sweat-slicked right hand clung on for dear life.

  Gibbons repositioned himself at the base of the walkway and drew his leg back once more. If he managed to slam it down on her right hand, she was dead.

  Mackenzie swung her left hand across her chest and clumsily unholstered the Glock. She freed it and drew it, doing her best to forget the fact that she was right-handed. She didn’t have time to aim but fired anyway.

  The shot was loud, the recoil slight but feeling like an earthquake in her left arm as her right hand held the entire weight and life of her body.

  She heard the round strike the underside of the walkway just as Gibbons yelled out in surprise and scrambled up to the top. Mackenzie swung her legs back onto the rungs and gripped the final one with her left hand, pulling herself up as well. Even before she had a good hold on the edge, she could see that it was no more than two feet wide, just wide enough for someone to walk across it.

  She saw Gibbons rushing toward her, drawing his foot back to kick her. He was screaming in frustration, apparently so mad with his bloodlust that he didn’t even consider the consequences. Mackenzie, still unable to switch to her firing hand, pulled off another shot. She aimed high, hoping to take out his knee, but the shot went low. It tore through his sneaker and came out the top of his foot.

  He howled in pain and stumbled backward against the edge of the silo. Behind him, the woman that he had forced up the silo was slowly backing away, making a shaky retreat around to the other end of the silo.

  As Gibbons bounced around on his good foot trying to reclaim his balance, Mackenzie hauled herself up onto the walkway. She was finally able to get the Glock into her right han
d and when she did, she got to her feet slowly. When she took two steps away from the small opening that led back to the rungs and the nearly one-hundred-foot drop below, she finally breathed a slight sight of relief.

  A very slight one.

  It also helped that she heard sirens in the distance. Apparently, her text to Tate had worked.

  Meanwhile, Gibbons took one shaky step forward, hobbling toward her. Mackenzie took another step forward to meet him, the Glock aimed straight out.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He was crying, whether from the sheer absurdity of the situation itself or from the pain (or both) she wasn’t certain.

  “I’m Agent Mackenzie White with the FBI. Who’s up here with you?”

  “An old friend,” he said. “A doctor. But even she couldn’t help. She couldn’t make the monster go away.”

  “Whoever is back there,” Mackenzie called out to the other side of the silo, “stay where you are. You’re safer back there.”

  “Okay,” replied a vaguely familiar voice.

  Gibbons looked from Mackenzie to the edge of the walkway. Mackenzie followed his gaze and saw headlights quickly approaching, highlighted by the swirling blues and reds of Kingsville PD patrol cars.

  A thin safety rail stood about three feet from the platform and, honestly, didn’t provide much in the way of safety at all. Seeing it at this height was almost laughable.

  “You ready to shoot me?” Gibbons asked.

  “If I have to.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because someone is going off this silo.”

  With that, he came surging forward. He gave no warning at all. He simply ran forward, arms outstretched as if he intended to wrap her up in a bear hug. Mackenzie fired twice and sidestepped to the left, nearly colliding with the side of the silo.

  The shots both took Gibbons high in the right shoulder—not fatal but painful as hell from such a close range. Shocked and dazed, he went leaning hard to the right as his legs buckled. He slapped out at her and seized the collar of her jacket. He gave a wide grin and in his eyes, there in the darkness at such a height, she thought she could see some form of the monster he had been talking about.

  And then he forced himself over the safety railing.

  When his free-falling weight hit the open air, his hand still held her jacket. He had it in a death grip, pulling her forward. Her hip struck the safety rail and although she managed to grab it with her left hand, she still went sailing over it in an identical fashion to the near-fall she had taken at the water tower.

  There was a moment of pause as her neck snapped hard to the right. Gibbons still had his hand on her jacket and she could hear the fabric tearing, but she could also feel his weight dangling from her, all transferred to her left arm. Again, her left hand was the only thing saving her from falling.

  The threads popped and tore in her jacket collar but she didn’t know how much longer she could hold both of their bodies’ weight. She had only one option and the thought of it made her feel almost heartless.

  She steeled her nerves for a fraction of a second, steadied her right arm in midair, and fired.

  The shot took Jimmy Gibbons directly between the eyes. Everything in him went blank and slack, including the muscle reflexes in his hands. He released her jacket and went falling backward into all of that open space.

  As he fell, the first of the patrol cars came tearing through the grain, bouncing along the rough ground. But Mackenzie was barely aware of that. She could not tear her eyes away from Gibbons as he fell. When he hit the ground about one hundred feet below, she could still feel his eyes on her.

  Sobbing, she tossed her Glock up onto the walkway. She grabbed the safety rail with her right hand and the relief to her left arm was immense. As she pulled herself up, she felt a dull sensation in her left arm; she wondered if she had pulled a muscle in her desperate attempt not to fall.

  But then she felt a set of hands on her right wrist. She looked up and saw Jan Haggerty there. She looked all out of sorts but managed to find enough of her wits to help Mackenzie back up onto the walkway. When her feet were resting back on that thin little lip around the silo, she sat down. She leaned against the silo wall, unable to get the haunted look she had seen in Gibbons’s eyes out of her mind.

  “You okay?” Mackenzie asked Haggerty.

  “Yeah. For the most part. You?”

  Mackenzie nodded and gave a shaky chuckle that nearly came out in a very brief bout of weeping. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m just trying not to think of getting back down.”

  ***

  Within another half an hour, Mackenzie and Dr. Haggerty were back on solid ground. Dr. Haggerty handled herself well, not letting her trauma overrule her. She was able to tell Mackenzie and Sheriff Tate about her day without exaggerating or melting down. She told them how she had met with Jimmy Gibbons a few times in the past, mainly to talk about overcoming nightmares about his parents. She then told them about how he had essentially held her hostage for the afternoon until he had forced her to drive out to the silos.

  The gun that Gibbons had been carrying had been empty. Apparently he had no qualms about pitching people from great heights but wasn’t much in the way of shooting people.

  After Tate had a look at the body lying in front of the silo, he looked to the ground like a scolded child and walked back over to Mackenzie.

  “I should have taken your call,” he said. “That’s on me, and I’m incredibly sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I understand why you did it. I still need to find a way to explain this without having my supervisor bite my head off.”

  “You need anything from us?” Tate asked. Behind him, a few other officers including Andrews and Roberts were looking around the edge of the clearing. One was running a flashlight beam up and down the ladder that was still propped up against the silo.

  “Not right now. I may call you for your description of this scene for my final reports. I have a feeling I’m going to have to get pretty detailed if I want to keep my job.”

  “Any chance a good word from a small-town sheriff would help?” Tate asked.

  “It couldn’t hurt,” she said.

  She thanked him and shook his hand as she headed back to her car. She knew she could not go back home just yet. There was protocol to be followed. She’d need to stay until the coroner arrived, until the scene was cleared. She thought about just calling the motel and booking a room but decided not to.

  She had a fiancé waiting for her back at home.

  Home. It was a word that seemed to have a new meaning now that she knew what her future had for her.

  In the passenger seat of her car, she grabbed her phone and called Ellington. He answered right away.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I am. The case is closed. I got him.”

  “What? Damn…that was quick.”

  He was right, but the thought of not once but twice dangling just a few fingers away from certain death made it seem like it had lasted an eternity.

  “I’m going to be late getting home. Probably tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay. Try to make it around lunch time if you can. That will give me time to go out and get you a ring.”

  It was a happy thought, one that made her feel like a winsome teenager for a moment. But then she looked back out at the silos and thought about her near falls. She looked to the crumpled body of Jimmy Gibbons and sighed. In contrast, an engagement ring seemed trivial.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. “I love you.”

  “Back at you,” Ellington said, and ended the call.

  Mackenzie got out of the car and approached Haggerty, who was propped against a patrol car. She saw Mackenzie coming and gave her a tired smile.

  “Have I properly thanked you yet? For saving my life?”

  “I don’t know,” Mackenzie said. She then started talking right away, not giving Haggerty the chance to thank her. “He referred to himself as a monster,” she said. “He
said you couldn’t make the monster go away. What did he mean?”

  “Earlier today he said that killing people was the only thing that could make him better. He said he needed to become the monster in order to make the nightmares and the depression go away.”

  “And do you think that’s possible?” Mackenzie asked. “Do you think it’s possible that men can sometimes just be evil for no reason? Just because they enjoy monstrous things?”

  “I don’t,” Haggerty said right away. “At his heart, there was nothing evil or monstrous about Jimmy Gibbons. He’d suffered trauma at the deaths of his parents and a rough few years in his childhood. He never processed it in a healthy way and for whatever reason, this is how he chose to deal with it.” She paused here and asked, “How about you?”

  Slowly, Mackenzie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen just about every type of so-called evil man you can imagine. And like you said—at the heart of it all, there’s some trauma or pain or circumstance that they were never able to deal with.”

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?” Haggerty said.

  “I suppose it is,” Mackenzie said. Actually, she knew it was. She had experienced it herself. She had never properly processed the death of her father and she had coped with it by chasing down every manner of murderer she could get her hands on.

  For some people, becoming a monster didn’t involve murderous thoughts and bloodlust. Sometimes it meant closing yourself off to everything except the ways you had to try to fix the past.

  But now with her past behind her, Mackenzie had only the future to face.

  And in the grain field of a starless night in a backwoods Virginia town, oddly enough, the future had never looked brighter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  Setting a date for the wedding was easy. Neither of them wanted a big wedding, nor did they have family that would care to attend. However, they also did not want to just go to the courthouse and get a license. In the end, they settled on a simple ceremony in a public garden near the National Arboretum. And while the ceremony was still two months away, there was plenty to be encouraged about in the meantime.