by K. T. Tomb
She blacked out once more, and woke up with blood staining the front of her shirt, soaking it. Perhaps Cavanaugh had come back and cut her throat, she thought, then realized that if he had done that, she would most likely be already dead. Someone was fumbling with what sounded like a chain somewhere close. She looked toward the noise, but remembered that she was still blindfolded. She tried to call for help, but found her throat so parched and mouth too caked with her own blood that only a rasping gurgle came out. She heard voices outside, but she must have been hallucinating. They couldn’t have found her; it was impossible.
“We could use a crowbar; twist it until the lock breaks?” one voice said.
“No, haven’t got one in the truck. Hold on, stand back. I’m going to try blasting it,” said the other.
Ricki tried shouting again, but her feeble speech was drowned out by what sounded like a colossal explosion. The door of the shack she was held in blew off its hinges—or at least, it sounded like it had. The noise was so loud, Ricki’s ears rang and her head spun, and they were still useless. All of a sudden she was no longer blind, and was staring into her own deep brown eyes. No, not her own, her little sister’s eyes. Riley was crouched in front of her, untying her hands from the arms of the wooden chair. She was speaking to her but Ricki couldn’t hear. She tried telling her so, but was unable to do so. A water bottle pressed to her lips, bringing back hellish memories of Joe doing the same thing. Ricki went into a brief spasm at the thought, but was calmed by the soothing hands of her sister, she couldn’t tell which one, on her cheek, stroking it gently, fussing at her, checking her wounds. Ricki cried tears of relief, happiness, emotions too complex for her to grasp all at once. She had to warn her sisters, and spat out the fourth mouthful of water she had been delicately fed onto the floor. She could see her surroundings now; she was in a tool shed of some kind. Where it was, she didn’t know.
“Roberta, Riley, it’s Joe Cavanaugh! It’s him, It’s Cavanaugh’s son! He wants you to get the Rock for him!”
When Riley replied, Ricki could hear her voice, although the tinnitus was still present, an annoying whine above the frequency of a mosquito’s wing.
“We know, Ricki, hold on. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Turns out Joe Cavanaugh has been busy, we managed to follow the trail of death back here. You’re in the shed round the back of old Joseph’s house,” Roberta said.
“How?” Ricki said.
Despite the danger of Joe coming back, she had to know.
“Hold still Ricki, I’m trying to get your legs free, but these knots are tight, and it’s heavy rope.” Riley’s voice came from beneath her. “Bobby, pass me a knife or a saw or something.” There was a rummaging and clanging of metal on metal, and in a moment Ricki felt Riley begin sawing through the rope. Roberta took up the story.
“Turns out that Madeline Frome wanted to defraud the insurance company to keep up with the neighbors, and hid the Rock of Rhodesia in her yard, but someone found it. Anyway, way before that happened, we think Joe Cavanaugh was forcing his father to try and marry into Mrs. Frome’s wealth, but she never had any—not in the last ten years at least. Why, we don’t know yet. We found the box the Rock had been in while sort of following the instructions on the note we received telling us you had been captured. The box was empty, and Frome thought it might have been her gardener, but when he turned up dead, we figured there was only one lead left. We knew Cavanaugh was dead, and we guessed that if he didn’t die of natural causes…”
“That I killed him for being a useless old bastard.”
It was the soft voice of Joe Cavanaugh, the younger. Ricki stood up, and Riley fell backward onto her butt, having sliced through the last threads restraining her elder sister. Roberta whirled, eyes wide. Ricki could see that Roberta had placed her shotgun on a work bench while she had looked for something for Riley to cut her bonds. It was halfway between Joe at the door and the Vaughan sisters, deep in the shed, crowded together where they would be easy pickings for a couple of blasts from their father’s old weapon. Ricki’s eyes were still adjusting to the light, but it didn’t look like Joe had seen the weapon either. He was however hefting a large and sharp looking pitchfork.
“You murderer!” shouted Riley. “You killed Marcos Rubera too!”
“Yes, that was unfortunate,” said Joe. “You see, I got a tip off from a friend that you had involved the police, against your instructions. That forced me to tie up some loose ends. Rubera had been fired by Madeline, so he was easy to convince to go and steal from her for a cut of the profits—a tiny cut, of course. He knew the grounds of her house better than anyone, so he immediately saw that something had been disturbed. I thought at first he had stolen the necklace for himself, but I believed his story that the box was empty. In the end.”
Joe eyed the Vaughan sisters meaningfully. Ricki wondered if there was any way to distract Joe long enough for Roberta to grab her gun, but Roberta was directly in front of her, closest to the wicked prongs of his pitchfork, more than a foot of steel on a long wooden handle.
“Well, you still don’t have the Rock of Rhodesia. We don’t have it either. Looks like your plan failed, Joe.”
Ricki tried to sound more confident than she was, but the pain of her cracked tooth and empty socket made her wince and chew her words.
“Oh, I’m sure that Madeline still has it,” Joe said. “You’d be amazed by how easy killing becomes, once you get the first one out of the way. I was a lawyer, once. Defense made me good money, and I defended a lot of really bad men. Reading over the things that they did, well, when I—quite unfairly, I think—was disbarred, I always remembered how these men did it, and how they got caught. Coming home in shame to live in this poor town, I knew I had to get out. Had to get back where I should have been. I saw Madeline. Saw the Rock, and I knew what I had to do. After I get rid of you three, I suppose I can just go and pay her another visit. See where she really has the Rock. She’s smarter than she appears, clearly.”
Joe smiled at Ricki, and it was only now, despite all that he had done, that she really saw how far into madness he had fallen.
There was nothing that would compel any of the Vaughan sisters to allow their sisters to die easily for this man’s twisted pursuit for wealth. Joe seemingly was set himself to run Roberta through, and then herself and Riley would be next. There seemed to be no escape. Then, several things happened at once.
Joe stepped forward, and Roberta yelled, “Riley, now!” instead of doing what Ricki thought she would do; which was to meet Joe head on she lept backward, colliding with Ricki and taking her by complete surprise. Both women fell over the chair in which Ricki had been tied for so long.
Simultaneously, there was the crack of a gun going off, and a grunt of pain from Joe Cavanaugh. There was another report from the gun, whoever had it, and as Ricki landed she saw Riley, still on the floor in front of the chair where she had sat when Joe had appeared in the shed. A small pistol was in her hands. Her form for firing was pretty poor, elbows tucked in to her body and torso twisted almost ninety degrees to take aim, but the cramped confines of the shed meant that Joe was only six feet away at most, barely out of the range of his fork. Ricki turned to see a second red hole appear in Joe Cavanaugh’s white shirt, in his shoulder.
He was still standing, and realized the danger he was in from the smallest, weakest-looking woman. With a desperate cry, he raised his fork high and made to drive it down into Riley’s head. Ricki screamed and threw out her hand in a vain attempt to defend to her sister with pure force of will. Riley needed no other protection than her own aim, and her third shot caught Joe Cavanaugh in the throat. His charge was stopped in its tracks, and the fork fell from his grip. A sickening gurgling sound came from his lips as his blood spurted, painting the shed and the Vaughan sisters with his blood. He died with a surprised look on his soft, lawyer’s features. There was a sudden quiet, the smell of blood and gunpowder, and fear filled the air. Ricki looked at
Riley, hands still gripping the pistol. Her eyes were wide, terrified herself.
Roberta moved first, climbing up from where she was laid over Ricki, and accidentally pressed an elbow into Ricki’s broken ribs. Ricki whimpered, and the noise of her pain seemed to break Riley out of her funk. She stood up, checked her weapon and put it back in her jacket pocket as Roberta helped Ricki get gingerly to her feet.
“I did it right, Roberta. I didn’t shoot until you said, right?” Riley said.
“You did great,” Roberta said. “Let’s get out of here. We need to call Terry and the local cops. We’re in for a long talk with them, and Ricki needs an ambulance.”
“I’m fine, really,” Ricki lied; and it was clear that she was far from convincing.
“I wonder what really happened to the Rock of Rhodesia?” Riley pondered. “It must still be somewhere.”
Ricki felt despondent. The reward for finding the Rock would now never be forthcoming, not that it ever would have been. They might have defeated Joe Cavanaugh, but R3 Recovery was surely going to go under. Their little company was finished.
Epilogue
Sergeant Dobbs had been first on the scene to the Cavanaugh place, along with his damn fool partner who was banging one of these Vaughan bitches.
Damn it, they had stumbled their way like a bull in a china shop, wrecked everything.
He knew that with Cavanaugh dead, the chances of getting his hands on a cut from the Rock of Rhodesia would be somewhere in the region of slim and none. Six months he’d been working on a way to get that diamond, risked his career on the chance Cavanaugh said he could deliver. He should have known better than to trust a lawyer. He thought he’d grind his teeth to powder when they pulled the door to that shed open to reveal Joe’s body. The further revelation that Joe had gone so far off the deep end to murder Marcos Rubera and, according to the statement from the Vaughan sisters, his own father merely cemented in Dobbs’ mind that he had made a critical error of judgment.
A month had passed, the Rock had not surfaced. To trump it all, the business run by Terry’s girlfriend and her sisters was by all accounts booming to the point of people turning to them instead of the local police for help with minor crimes. This in itself didn’t bother Dobbs; after all, the less work he had to put in running around after the morons of Savannah, the more time he had to plot revenge against the girls who had wrecked his plan for escape. He should be in Bora Bora or Aruba by now. It was a small reward, knowing that at least he would get to make the Vaughan sisters’ lives a living hell if he couldn’t be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Besides, you never could tell, maybe the Rock would turn up, and Dobbs would be poised to scoop it up.
Dobbs sat reading the newspaper in the patrol car, occasionally glancing over the top of the paper to check on the progress Terry was making toward purchasing the Tuesday morning coffees and donuts. He was still three customers back in the line; the idiot refused to use cop privilege to cut in line like a normal police officer. Dobbs sighed heavily, his heavy gut lifting and sagging back down. The paper had a picture of the Vaughan sisters on the front page, with the headline; “Savannah Investigators Bust Alligator Poaching Ring.” Ridiculous. It was fluff pieces, barely even crimes to Dobbs’ experienced mind. But the press lapped it up, partly due to those mulatto girls being good looking women, he was sure. Dobbs was tempted to crumple the paper up and throw it out the window, but instead he folded it neatly, and placed it on the back seat.
Terry soon returned and passed Dobbs his coffee. Dobbs took it in silence, brooding on the future.
***
The squirrels in Madeline Frome’s garden were busy, especially since Madeline had left for a retirement village and put the property up for sale.
The removal of the annoying elderly human was forgotten by the squirrels within a week as they explored and rampaged through the attic of the old house, getting into a short and brutal turf war with a few rats. The squirrels were ultimately victorious and went back to collecting nuts from the end of summer bounty.
One of the family of gray-furred, bushy-tailed rodents had collected a tidy pile of nuts that he had stored at the base of the large tree he lived in at the center of the rapidly overgrowing lawns. He had arranged them there as part of a relay from the trees in the garden next door. He had already fought a skirmish with his sister over the pile, despite the nuts all going into the communal stores. Just because they were family, didn’t mean this squirrel did not know that these nuts were his alone.
In his small forepaws, he gripped a nut, transferred it to his jaws and prepared to climb the sturdy tree. In seconds he was twenty feet in the air (not that he would have referred to it as feet, being a rodent and not aware of human measurements) and there was the hole to the pantry. The pantry was a naturally formed crevasse in the wood that sank into the very core of the plant, completely hidden from view by all who were not a squirrel in just the right place.
He pushed the nut into the hole, and followed it with his head, pushing it into the narrow hole. He liked watching the nuts fall, bouncing onto the growing pile that was being created from their labor. Long ago in the lifetime of a squirrel, he had found a strange nut at the base of the tree, inside a strange, useless human enclosure. He had watched the elderly human that used to live inside the house totter out one day and bury it, right beneath his paws, and it had been an easy task to dig up the hole. It had taken him some time to figure it out, but eventually the squirrel had managed to open the hinged box, and get to the nut inside. It was evidently resistant to his teeth, but perhaps the old human had buried it so that the shell might weaken over time. In any case, it glittered in the afternoon sun, and the squirrel decided it was far too fine for one of those noisy, aggressive primates to have. He took it to the pantry, and stored it with the other nuts.
He liked seeing the faint glint of it as he loaded nuts on top, one by one, day after day. Today was the last time he would see it, until the stores were emptied over winter. The last nut fell into the pantry, bounced once, twice, and came to rest neatly over the last gap in the food store through which the last glint of the Rock of Rhodesia could be seen. The squirrel looked a little disappointingly at the place where the glittering had once been, and then left to resume gathering. Soon, he had forgotten all about it.
The End
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THE TARGET
A thriller by
K.T. TOMB
The Target
Published by Quests Unlimited
Copyright © 2018 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
(Previously published)
The Target
Prologue
CNN Wire Staff
May 22, 2010
HEADLINE: US Issues Travel Alert For Jamaica
The US State Department issued a travel alert for Jamaica on Friday, citing unconfirmed reports of criminal gang members amassing in Kingston and the mobilization of Jamaican defense forces.
“The possibility exists for violence and/or civil unrest in the greater Kingston metropolitan area. If the situation ignites, there is a possibility of severe disruptions of movement within Kingston, including blocking of access roads to the Norman Manley International Airport,” according to the alert.
“The possibility also exists that unrest could spread beyond the general Kingston area,” the alert said.
The US Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, is taking extra security precautions, according to the alert, which expires June 21.
“American citizens should consider the risks associated with travel to and within the greater Kingston metropolitan area,” the alert said. “US citizens in Jamaica are advised to monitor local news reports and consider the level of security present when venturing outside their residence or hotel.”
The United Kingdom on Thursday updated its travel advisory for British citizens in Jamaica.
The British Foreign Office urged UK citizens to take extra care when
traveling away from their homes or hotels due to the “increased risk of civil disorder and street violence in Kingston” and potentially other urban areas.
***
“What the hell do they mean by that, Michael?” Carla asked, as she wrinkled her brow and looked from the grave face of the CNN newsroom anchor to her husband.
“I don’t know, hon,” her husband answered immediately. “I guess they think this thing in the Inner City could get hostile. You know how they love to over exaggerate things.”
“Well, just to be safe, I think you’d better take the kids to school this morning. I’ll keep the baby home from kindergarten. Instead of heading down the hill in the traffic, I think that I’ll go up to the square a little later to fill up my gas tank and order some diesel for the generator from Mr. Harris.”
“That’s a great idea, Babe,” he replied. “Are the kids ready to go? I don’t want it to get any later if I can avoid it. The traffic is going to be murder.”
“Girls!” she bellowed up the stairs, “Your dad is ready to go. Get a move on.”
The rumbling of two sets of footsteps pummeling the stairs came immediately. When Madison and McKinley reached the door, their mother was waiting for them with their backpacks and their lunch boxes. A kiss for her husband and Carla sent her family along their way. As she waved at the car and watched the electronic gate slide shut behind them, she prayed silently that this was just another one of those times when the embassies were overreacting.
