by AR Shaw
By this time, Bishop was blocked in on both sides of the narrow street. Not one to be intimidated, Bishop took the weakest route and shot down the man directly aiming at him. There were only two thugs left, and Bishop saw no need to let them live another day.
After pulling up behind the empty snow tractor, Bishop used it as coverage while he gunned down the other two men in a firefight that lasted all of five seconds. When both men dropped to the ground, again silence reigned.
The eerie quiet returned for more than a minute, and then a flicker caught his attention. Someone in the adjacent house had opened the door. The slender figure looked like it belonged to a young woman. She saw him standing there behind the truck and pointed to the food in the back of the sled trailer. He said nothing but watched as she ran into the street and grabbed a large bag lying there half-spilled. She picked it up and ran back into her house. Before he left, three more people, like ghosts, ran out as well and took what they could manage to recover and then fled again back into the darkness of their homes.
Bishop left then. He had to find a place to strike again. Taking them down one by one was the only way a single man could beat an army.
34
“Who the hell is killing my men?” Frank demanded. He strangled the handheld radio, his blood pressure rising. “We already took care of the officers who didn’t see things our way. Was there someone you missed?”
The police officer on the other end stuttered. “Frank, every…everyone here is on board. It’s not one of us. Must be a resident. Over.”
“Well, get down here and deal with him. There was only one witness that we found. Her tracks in the snow led us to her house. One man on a black snowmobile, full helmet—could be anyone. That’s all she could tell us, anyway.”
“All right. We’ll go through town and see if anyone fits that description. There aren’t that many people who are coming out of their houses let alone riding at night with their snowmobiles. I can’t imagine who this could be. We’ve already taken possession of all working snow vehicles.”
“Could this—I’m just saying—could this be one of your men?”
Frank was pissed at even the insinuation. His men were loyal: he’d made sure of that over the past few years. “Hell no! He gunned down four of my men. None of them would do that. Not unless they had a death wish or something. Get moving, Reuben.”
“Yes, sir. Out.”
“Cannot believe he would even suggest a thing like that. Cops…” Frank shook his head and smashed his cigarette butt out on a plate that Roman had handed him.
“We’ve got other problems,” Roman said as he unbuttoned his suit jacket and sat at the head of the conference room table. With only him and Frank at the table, his voice seemed to boom off the walls of the spacious room. He turned his chair to the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the frozen lake. “See those marks coming from across the bay?”
Frank stood and walked over to the window. The scene was unmistakable. A winter wonderland is what he saw, but as Roman warned him, the wonder was deceptive; these conditions were a kind of hell, and that was what he was looking at. Coming from the side of the lake were two unmistakable marks in the snow made by a sled tractor. “Yeah, I see them. Those are different than the ones we found by the massacre last night.”
Roman nodded his head; his finger propped up his chin in thought. “Those are from the sheriff in Rockford Bay. He left us a note of his own last night. He says the people on the south side of the lake are starving. He wants food deliveries.”
Frank chuckled. “Or what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“I see two sets of tracks out there. You let him go?”
Roman nodded. “I did. Let’s see what he’s got first. If we take him out now, he won’t show his hand. His people are desperate. Desperate people do stupid things. There’s no way they’ll survive out there for long. I told him to bring his people in and we’d take care of them. He refused, of course.”
“Are they armed?”
This time Roman chuckled. “Frank, everyone in Idaho is armed.”
Frank put his hands on his hips and seemed transfixed by the scene beyond the window. “Still, I don’t know. I’ve known the sheriff for a long time. He’s a good man. He knows we killed off some of his officers because they wouldn’t go along with things. We know he took some of his people with him when he left. He’s not corruptible. He knew what he was doing. He knew he was beaten when all of this went down.”
Roman nodded. “He did. He anticipated our move. The sheriff’s a good leader. In time, he’ll have to go. For now, let’s see what he’s got planned.”
Frank stepped away from the window, breaking his trance on the winter scene. “Great, we’ve got a vigilante and a sheriff to deal with.”
As Frank was leaving the office, Roman said, “Frank, they’re both very dangerous. Don’t underestimate either.”
Frank paused at the heavy door and nodded with a grim but menacing expression.
35
After returning to the storage unit, Bishop spent an additional hour covering his snow tracks in the early morning hours. The children were still asleep, and Maeve was relieved to see him. After she fell asleep, he bedded down near Jake and slept for a few hours until Jake began nibbling on his hair and tonguing his ear.
“Knock it off, you weirdo,” he’d said and shoved his muzzle away. When he sat up, Maeve smiled at him and tried to suppress a laugh. Her hair was a fiery, wild, tangled mess. He’d never seen a lovelier sight.
He’d made it up to Jake later by rubbing him down and giving him feed and melted snow. His horse was like a good dog companion in many ways. He’d come when he whistled and demanded he pet him if he was nearby. Jake was like a big dumb Lab; he always seemed to sport a goofy grin and lolled around when he wasn’t working.
“OK, you big goofball, that’s all you’re getting today. Stay out of trouble,” he said. Again Bishop said goodbye to Maeve and the children before slipping out just before dawn.
Even dressed warmly, the temperature still seeped between the layers the instant Bishop went outside. Since it was near freezing inside the shelter, the temperature outside had to be closer to the single digits if not well below zero by now. This limited his activities, and if it limited his, it would also limit those of his enemies. Bishop would try to use that to his advantage, but unfortunately it meant that his adversaries would not come out to play where he could get to them without injuring innocent people. He’d have to go to them.
Starting where he’d last seen them, he intended to follow their tracks. Bishop raced over the snow to where he’d taken out the last of the looters. When he drove down that street with his night vision helmet activated, there was now only one body lying in the street, and it wasn’t one of the guys he’d killed just a few hours before. The closer he came to the body, the worse the feeling in the pit of his stomach became.
When he was only three feet away, his pulse raged with hate. The one shadowy young woman who dared to run out for the fallen food lay dead. Her blond hair stained red, her white skin frozen in time—she’d been shot not once, but three times. Both of her thighs had gunshots through them, and the last one was through her temple. They’d tortured her. He guessed why. She’d seen him.
Bishop shook his head. “Condemn them to hell…” he said under his breath. Such a senseless killing. She probably had children in the home, he guessed. This had to stop. This had to stop now.
Bishop followed what looked like the tractor sled’s distinguishing tracks. They were choppy on the outer sides and smooth on the inner, made by the larger tractor wheels in the front of the sled and the sleek blades of the vehicle carrying these sick bastards.
It didn’t take long for Bishop to follow them far enough to see where they led. In fact, most of the tracks in the town were the same. Hardly anyone else traveled from their homes, even though occasional curtains flickered. He knew they were in there—just too afraid to come out.
An entire town was terrified because of the tyrant in the big hotel controlling everything.
Under cover of darkness, Bishop edged closer to the hotel, where the tracks had led him. They swung up into the parking garage multiple times. They were fresh, and Bishop wondered why they didn’t try to hide them. Then he remembered the dead police officer on the lake and knew they didn’t feel the need to cover their tracks. They owned the town now.
Hidden behind a corner building on East Front Avenue and Fourth Street, Bishop watched as guards walked back and forth in the opening of the parking garage attached to the hotel. Then something else caught his attention. A noise, and it sounded like its source was traveling closer, from across the south side of the lake. In his helmet, he used the magnify app and zeroed in on the source of the noise. There was a man on an older snowmobile. The louder gas two-stroke engine was from before everything became battery operated. Where the man got the gasoline mixture was a mystery to Bishop. With his night vision goggles, Bishop could only see that the traveler was alone and pulled a small trailer on skis behind his snowmobile. He wasn’t certain if the guy was with the hotel bullies or not, but as the guards from the hotel scrambled to intercept him, he assumed the latter.
Afraid the guy was driving into his own death like the last guy he’d watched die on the ice, Bishop anticipated gunshots any minute. But that’s not what happened. As the guards scrambled to intercept the guy, another man walked outside. This guy stood taller than rest. A few of the guards went to him for instruction, and he made hand gestures toward the guy on the ice. What surprised him was that it wasn’t Frank. Nor were the men guarding the hotel Frank’s men. These guys wore black uniforms, and Frank’s men wore street clothes.
“Odd. This guy’s got his own army.”
Several of the uniformed hotel guards intercepted the guy on the ice. Or rather, they met him on the ice as he slowed down. Their rifles raised on his approach. The man, who held his hands up, didn’t appear to be armed from Bishop’s view and only talked to the men. One of the three guards stepped away and used his radio on his shoulder to relay what was probably a message. Bishop looked back at the parking garage and saw that two other guards were standing next to the leader, discussing something. Obviously they’d received the message and were contemplating what their next move would be. By this time, the sun was beginning to rise, and soon Bishop had to switch off the night vision to watch the scene unfold in front of him. Near dawn, some decision was made, and the three guards holding the traveler searched through his belongings and patted him down while another one held him at gunpoint. Whatever they were saying to the man, he seemed to object to it. He waved his arms angrily and made pleading gestures.
The three men then turned and began walking away from him as the traveler shouted at them. One of the guards turned back abruptly and yelled. This Bishop could hear from his position. “Do you want to die?” The guard aimed his rifle at the man’s head. The traveler shook his head in defeat and turned on his engine, arching a circle with his vehicle and racing away the way he’d come.
Bishop didn’t know the man, but he was obviously desperate. And from the previous scene here, he was surprised they let him live, let alone leave on his own.
Switching his view to the men standing in the opened parking garage, the taller man watched the traveler speed away. His breath clouded out behind him. He had to be freezing standing out there in only a coat, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The guards left his side after saying something more, and the tall man stood there for a while longer, watching the ice. Then he turned and went back inside.
At that moment, Bishop knew who the enemy was. Frank was a henchman, but this guy was the head of the snake. The one Bishop needed to take down.
Bishop began to leave, but when he turned, he spotted someone coming around the back of the building where he was hiding. Immediately he knew he’d been too involved with what was going on in front of him so that he’d forgotten to check behind his position. The man was dressed in the black uniform associated with the guards of the hotel and was speaking rapidly into a mic on his shoulder while drawing a pistol from a holster on his side.
Bishop was already on his snowmobile, had started it, and was racing toward the guy, who aimed, fired, and missed as Bishop leaned to the side when he reached close proximity. Bishop kicked the guard square in the chest, flinging him into a snow berm. Too late, he thought. They’re on to me now.
He took off up Fourth Street and jetted right onto East Indiana Avenue. Most of this was residential, and he couldn’t leave tracks leading back to the storage unit, nor did he want to get anyone killed. When he hit Seventh Street, snow vehicles were coming from the south, so he made several shots in their direction.
He was desperately trying to get out of the residential streets when shots rang out behind him. He began zig-zagging in the street to evade the bullets and continued to gain distance. Nearing Phippeny Park on the right, Bishop swerved through the two-block-wide park, cutting between the trees until he sped east and then doubled back south on Eighth Street. If he could get them in between the streets, he could end this.
But by the time he hit Pennsylvania Avenue, sparks flew from a bullet hitting his engine cover. Someone was shooting at him from the west side. Continuing on in hopes of losing them, Bishop hit Foster Avenue but turned too late to see a roadblock pull into place, and not only that, but a young boy had emerged from his home between him and the roadblock and was walking out toward the road through the snow in his driveway.
Shots flew through the air, and all Bishop could think of in that split second was the child’s life ending from a stray bullet. He was about three years old, dressed in head-to-foot pajamas. Beyond the boy, there were the men shooting at Bishop, heedless of the child making his way between them into the street. Bishop did the only thing he could think of, and that was intercepting the child. Bishop sped toward the enemy. Halfway there, he skidded down to the right, his kneecap grazing the ice as the boy entered the kill zone. He grabbed the child with his right arm as his snowmobile landed on its side between them and the enemy.
In seconds, the armed men were on them, shouting and pointing their weapons at him and the child. Bishop held his hands in the air in hopes they wouldn’t kill the boy. The little boy cried out in fear. One of them grabbed the boy by the back of his pajamas and flung him away hard toward the path he came through in the snow.
Behind Bishop’s helmet, he glared at the man. The child still screamed. Five armed men dressed in black quickly removed Bishop’s helmet, knife and firearms and had fitted him with plasticuffs.
They roughly picked him up out of the snow and began leading him toward their vehicle. The child still screamed from where he’d landed. “Put the kid inside his house at least,” Bishop shouted. They made no effort to do so.
Bishop struggled as they took him away, and one of the officers laughed and then took his rifle and butted Bishop in the side of the face. Blood spewed from Bishop’s nose, and yet he yelled again, “You’re going to kill him. Get the kid inside!” Again, the same officer this time raised his pistol and, before Bishop could duck, the handle end came crashing down against his skull. Bishop’s vision faltered as his peripheral vision went black and what he could see was quickly zeroing out into darkness.
They didn’t listen, and as they held Bishop down, the last thing he heard as he was losing consciousness was the sound of the boy’s cries as he screamed from the snow berm beside the street.
In his last seconds of consciousness, his thoughts turned to another boy, Ben, and his mother and Louna, who were hiding still, hiding in a place they would not be safe in for long. Not from the men in his way, but from the greater danger, the cold.
Damn, I’ve killed us all.
36
A child’s cry was his last memory and was also what woke him as he lay on cold concrete floor. Groggily, Bishop realized the sound wasn’t the cry of a child at all, but a thrumming in
his head reminded him of what had happened.
He tried to rise, but as he lifted his cheek from the rough, cold floor, he found his hands were still tied behind his back.
He’d realized then, too, that he wasn’t alone in the dark room. Someone else was in there with him and had made a noise like the brushing of fabric across the flooring, fibers catching on tiny concrete thorns.
“Who’s there?”
Though no one answered, Bishop could hear him breathing in the dark. His breath was coming in and out in at a faster rate of speed, which meant he was scared. In Bishop’s experience, scared men did dumb things. Things that got you killed despite the desire to save yourself. Like he did earlier, trying to save the child from the crossfire only for the little boy to freeze to death in the snowbank where the thugs had left him.
Attempting to sit up, Bishop rolled over first onto his side and then scooted backward a few feet until he hit a wall. He leaned against the solid structure and felt grooves in the wall with his fingers. A painted cinderblock wall was easy to detect. Must be in the building’s basement.
“Hey,” he called out to the unseen occupant. His voice bounced off the walls. The ceiling must be high in here. Maybe a stairwell?
He tried again. “Hey, I know you’re there. I can hear you.” He didn’t hear anything for a second, only another shift of fabric on the floor. “Hey, what’s your name?”
Silence for a time and then, “I’m…Austin. Austin Sanchez.”
Young man, Bishop thought at the sound of his voice. Not more than twenty-five.
“Why are you here, Austin?”
“I…I won’t do what Roman wants me to do. I’m Mr. Geller’s personal assistant. I’m not a…a gangster.”
“Who’s Mr. Geller?
He laughed, incredulous. “Mr. Geller owns this hotel and half the town.”
“Where is he now?”
