by Ty Patterson
‘Left me for whom? Can you see any competition around?’ Kelly growled, looking around the café, and then cracked a grin and high-fived Beth.
‘The Wise One is not used to small talk,’ Meghan reminded them. ‘What’s the plan, Wise One? We’ve reached a dead end with the stuff you asked us to follow up on. The guys in Dad’s team have no clue why gangs are after us. They’re sure it’s got nothing to do with what happened.’
Beth looked at him excitedly. ‘Foley invited us to Washington, D.C. He said we could stay in his house, and he’d take us to the White House. He says we'll be safer there, with his security detail; his guys are all ex-Secret Service.’
Zeb frowned. ‘How does he rate a security detail?’
Kelly rumbled, ‘He doesn’t. He has his own protection. I guess when you’re rolling in as much dough as that family is, you can afford the odd bodyguard or two.’
‘Nah, we’re not going to stay with him.’ Meghan scoffed at her. ‘He’s got a trophy wife, all Botox and boobs, no kids. We wouldn’t get along with Mrs. Bimbo. And in any case, we were never really close to Jack, to none of them actually, other than Joe. Joe and this big lug.’ She punched Kelly on his forearm and winced and rubbed her knuckles.
‘We’re going to visit Joe’s wife?’ Beth asked him.
‘Today. Now, if possible,’ Zeb replied. They’ve stayed too long in one place. That’s a risk.
Kelly frowned as he stood. ‘Nope. You’re joining us for dinner. Liz has been cooking all day, enough to feed the rest of the town. You can go tomorrow.’ He turned to the twins. ‘Maggie knows you’re coming?’
‘Yeah. She said we just had to give her an hour’s notice. I’ll call her later,’ Beth said distractedly as she searched for Maggie’s number on her phone.
‘You’ve told her the situation? That she might not be safe if we all head there?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ She waved him away impatiently. ‘I’ve told her death and destruction follows Zeb. She looks forward to it. She said she could do with some excitement.’
Two thousand miles away, a short man flipped shut his phone and stood staring at the pond in his garden. Technically it was a garden, but it was as large as a soccer field. The pond in its center was large and deep and had a special feature. It had tropical salt water that the short man shipped in regularly, and had inhabitants that were found in deep water – turtles, fish, stingrays – all replenished regularly since the pond’s chief inhabitant had a habit of consuming them.
The chief inhabitant was a tiger shark.
The far end of the garden had a twenty-foot concrete wall that ran around his home. The wall had electrified barbed wire on top of it. Home was the wrong word for the twenty-bedroom mansion the man lived in.
The man smoothed his black hair, fingered his neatly-trimmed moustache, patted his belly, which was just pushing out, and considered the phone call he’d received from the Voice. He had invested a lot in the person on the phone. He walked to the pond and returned the dead-eyed stare of the shark that looked in his direction. The pond had seen live humans thrown in it.
Decision made, the man turned back to his home.
‘Pacho,’ he called out softly.
A tall man glided soundlessly through the open doors. The man had black eyes under bushy eyebrows, was clean shaven and had short black hair. His skin was leathery, dark brown, and shined as if it had been polished.
He stood a couple of feet away and waited in silence.
‘Take the jet. Take six people. Take care of the problem.’ The short man gave some more instructions, and when he’d finished, Pacho turned and left without uttering a word.
He couldn’t.
He had cut his tongue out when he was a teenager as a show of loyalty to the short man. They communicated using sign language.
The short man dismissed the problem from his mind once Pacho left. Pacho would take care of it. He would bring back the girls. The man had wanted the girls the first time he saw them. Coincidentally his desires and the Voice’s interests matched.
It didn’t matter to him that they were in the U.S., or that they were daughters of a highly decorated cop. He wanted them. They could be rich, they could be poor. He didn’t care. He would have them. It wasn’t the first time Pacho had brought women from across the border. He would succeed this time too. Once he was done with them, he would get a good price for them. The women business was growing very fast. Twins always commanded a premium.
He looked back at the pond and idly wondered if he should feed the prisoner he had, the informer, to the shark. It looked hungry.
He sighed and headed into the house. So many problems. Being a drug lord in Mexico was tough. Being boss of one of the fastest growing new drug gangs in that country was tougher.
Zeb had declined the offer of dinner despite strenuous urging from Kelly and the twins.
‘Got to watch my weight,’ he said finally, to put an end to the entreaties.
Kelly shook his head at the lame joke and turned to leave, signaling with his eyes for Zeb to join him outside the café.
‘We picked up a thug a couple of nights back. Charged him with DUI and possession – he had reefers with him – and he was still high when we caught him. He was babbling about driving around and keeping a lookout for a pair of women. He said there was word on the street that there was a reward for finding them. We squeezed him, but didn’t get anything from him. He was strictly low level. Then Connor called me and told me they have an additional interest in this case. They’re hunting for some guys who’re connected to incidents in Cheyenne and Chicago. He didn’t elaborate. Typical FBI. One-way traffic.’
He paused and stirred uneasily, looking out at the town he protected. ‘What’s happening, man? What’s all this?’
The twins joined them, and Meghan punched Zeb in the shoulder. ‘Hey, we agreed, no secrets. Not if it involves us.’
‘You know whoever is behind this has spread the word about hunting you?’
‘Yeah, what about it? That’s not news anymore.’
‘They’re now offering a reward.’
Kelly’s home was a condo four blocks away from Town Square, a two-bedroom, two-bath cozy home in which he and his wife had raised two daughters. ‘It became crowded, so we had to kick the girls out.’ He laughed when he drove them home.
The walls were painted white and glowed yellow from the lamps within. The home exuded warmth and laughter, a place where Kelly lost his cop troubles and became dad and husband.
Zeb wasn’t feeling warm.
He was lying under a neighbor’s pickup truck, a dark shape indistinct in the shadow of the night. He had earlier circled the block; the nearest structure was another block of condos about four hundred yards away, and the entrance was dotted with vehicles of all shapes. Two of Kelly’s neighbors had dogs that growled when Zeb circled around.
Dogs are good. They’re an early warning system.
Satisfied that the Kellys' home couldn’t be approached in stealth, he had looked up and down the street before choosing the pickup to hide under. It was high enough from the ground to give him space, yet low enough to provide him cover.
Krone hadn’t made a mistake yet, but the trail had grown warmer.
Broker had tracked down private aircraft landing in Chicago and had homed in on ten that were private charters. Only one had flown in from Cheyenne, and the same wings had returned in twenty-four hours.
Using that timeline, he had entered the systems of the large car rental agencies – they used the same systems in all their branches, which his hackers had cracked a long time back – and zeroed in on SUV hires.
SUVs were popular with all those who carried a lot of kit. The kind of kit mercenaries, special ops guys or gang badasses used.
He had fed the information to the FBI, who had enlisted the help of the local cops, who had sent their men to the agencies with photographs of Krone and his buddies.
‘Black Durango. We traced it to Laramie using
its tracking system, all rental agencies have one installed, but then we lost it. Krone must have disabled it.’ Broker was cheerful. This was progress, even if they’d lost ‘eyes’ on the three men.
Zeb knew the men were near, maybe in Jackson even now. He felt it deep within him. He had always been able to sense when his quarry was in the neighborhood.
He was also confident Krone and his guys wouldn’t try anything at Kelly’s home; there was too much traffic around and too many cops in the vicinity. But it was always good to back up confidence with caution.
They set out for Idaho Falls at midday the next day, in a black Escalade with the twins singing up a storm in the rear.
The plan was to meet Maggie McBride and return late at night or the next day to hunt Krone, who would be checking out hotels in Jackson for the twins.
Or Zeb would return alone while the twins stayed with Maggie. That would depend on the kind of home Maggie McBride had.
‘I can’t dig up plans for homes that are in the middle of nowhere,’ Broker complained when Zeb had asked him to get off his ass. ‘All I can see is a large plot, in splendid isolation, outside Idaho Falls. I’ve no idea about the interior.’
If the home was defendable, Zeb would leave the twins with Maggie and return alone to Jackson. A calculated risk, but one worth taking since Krone would be seeking them in Jackson. In any case, Krone wanted the women alive, and the twins had their Kevlar vests and their guns. The vests had GPS trackers that Broker kept tabs on. Broker would have ‘eyes’ on the twins at all times and would let Zeb know if they had been grabbed.
He met their eyes in the mirror, and Beth winked at him.
‘Wise One, it’s good to be on the move again. We’ve had enough of Jackson.’
Zeb looked past her in the mirror, but didn’t spot anything that bothered him. Zeb had been changing vehicles every couple of days and, unlike Krone, had been renting from small agencies that did not have systems that could be hacked.
He joined WY-22 out of Jackson, stopping every now and then to allow the women to use their cameras and to also check the vehicles going past. The women went quiet as they drove through Teton Pass. Most people did, as they let the surrounding Tetons speak for themselves.
They passed Victor, a town named after a postman who walked between Jackson Hole and the south side of Teton Valley to deliver mail.
They stopped at a rest area, a cloned version of thousands of such stops across the country.
Four long-haul trucks took up the far side, dwarfing a scattering of family vehicles next to them. The truckers strolled around stretching their legs, some of them grabbing beer cans in their hands. There was no sign of any of the cars’ occupants.
Beth hesitated, her hand on the handle.
‘We can go to a better place. Right on to the McBride home,’ Zeb told her.
She shook her head, glanced at Meghan, and opened the door. ‘This is fine. We’ll be back in a second.’
A giant with red hair and beard eyed the two women as they headed to the facilities, made a comment to his companion, and laughed uproariously as he slapped his companion on the back. The two men hung around and watched the women walk back, making no effort to conceal their stares.
Zeb leaned against the hood, crossed his arms and waited.
I wonder if they’ll act out the B-movie scenes.
They did.
Chapter 14
Beth glanced in Zeb’s direction and nudged Meghan as they returned. He was wearing a dark blue shirt over khaki slacks, his arms crossed, his shades unmoving as he watched them approach.
‘If he were ten years younger.’ She sighed.
‘And spoke a bit more and smiled and joked,’ Meghan retorted.
She dug in her handbag for her phone just as Red and his companion crowded them from behind.
‘Hey, Jube, check that ass out. That must be the best ass in the state, what say?’
Jube spat on the ground. ‘I reckon. Both of them. How about–?’
Beth whirled around. ‘Listen, limp dick. You say one more word and I’ll squeeze your balls so hard they’ll shrivel up and shrink inside your not-so-pretty butt.’
The two men stopped, and a dull flush spread over Jube’s face as a pair of truckers laughed at them.
Red raised his hands slowly. ‘Ma’am, we were just joshing.’ His rising right hand brushed Meghan’s breast.
The next moment he was doubled over gasping as Meghan’s knee found his groin. She grasped his collar with her left hand, hauled him upright and swung with her open right hand, a blow that knocked him to the side.
She whirled to face Jube, but he stumbled back and raised his hands high. ‘We meant no harm, ma’am. We were just having fun.’
‘You say one word more and I’ll rip your intestines out,’ she growled at him.
‘Ma’am,’ one of the watching truckers called out, ‘you want us to call the cops? These guys have been harassing women for some time now at this rest area. We’ve warned them several times.’
Meghan shook her head. ‘All they needed was some humiliation.’ She smiled brilliantly at the other truckers. ‘I’m sure you wouldn't have let us come to any harm.’
The trucker shuffled his feet. ‘We didn’t realize what was happening. We would have piled right in if things had gone any further. You go on your way without any care, ma’am. We’ll read the book to these assh– I mean, these dumbasses.’
Meghan felt warmth stab through her as they headed back to Zeb. He hadn’t moved a muscle, still leaning languidly against the SUV. Those guys are lucky he didn’t take a hand.
‘You could do better?’ she asked him when they neared.
‘Nope. You did just fine, ma’am.’
Maggie McBride was in her late forties, very fit, and came up to Zeb’s chest. She flung the door open for them, and her blue eyes peered intently at Zeb. ‘Oh my,’ she said and moved to the twins and hugged them tight.
Her home was big for a single person, a six-bedroom house on a half-acre plot that was at the end of a mile-long dirt track. The track led to the road that skirted the town of Idaho Falls. The house was painted white on the outside with a three-foot-high black strip skirting the bottom. A double garage and an RV pad gave width to the house; the rear of it overlooked green undulating land that ran for as far as the eye could see. The plot was marked by a thin line of trees and shrubs all around the house, except at the front, where the tree line tapered out and gave way to the dirt track.
‘We had a home in town, but Joe wanted to get away, when this plot came up for sale several years back, we bought it and built on it. It’s about ten miles from town. Our neighbors came a few years later,’ Maggie said proudly as she showed them through her house.
The entrance foyer led to the living room on the right and the dining room and kitchen on the left. The living room had picture windows that overlooked the front and the rear, and led to bedrooms at its far end. The rear of the house had a utility room that had a door opening into the garage. Zeb inspected the basement carefully; it could be secured from inside and used to be a wine cellar but was now empty except for a neatly lined shelf of groceries.
He circled the house from the outside. Its white exterior gave no cover to anyone in dark clothing, unless one was bent double to blend with the dark skirting. The flat landscape around it meant any approach would be visible from within the house. The dirt track was the only way in; the fields behind were rough and uneven, not suitable for any vehicle.
Basement. That’s where they should shelter if there’s an attack here. But there won’t be one here.
Four hours later, Zeb realized Maggie McBride did not know anything relevant. He could sense the disappointment in the twins, though they hid it well. He jerked his head once at Meghan and headed out.
‘We’ll leave after dinner.’
They didn’t leave that night.
Zeb spent the evening outside keeping watch; he lay prone against the side of the house an
d blended in the darkness of the black strip.
The utter stillness was broken by the occasional chug of a tractor in the far distance or the laughter of the women inside. A fly hovered around Zeb, found him uninteresting, and sped off.
Darkness came, and with it the canopy above lit with tiny pinpricks. Zeb turned down the offer of dinner, his attention focused on the landscape; his inner sense was uneasy.
Then he saw it.
A dark shape that didn’t fit the landscape, that wasn’t there a few moments earlier in his memory. The shape was in front of the neighbor’s house on the right.
Zeb looked at it, looked around the edges of it, and it resolved into a large vehicle, maybe an Escalade. Or a Durango. The neighbor had a Ford sedan.
Broker checked the neighbors out, down to the pets they have. That neighbor’s been away for a month.
This could be a friend visiting the neighbor.
Or an enemy visiting McBride.
A shadow broke the nightline briefly and then disappeared. A shadow moving in their direction.
An enemy, then.
He thumbed his sat phone and called Meghan. He had prepped them on defensive positions before he had stepped out.
‘Draw the curtains over the windows. The basement. Now! Wear your vests. There’s a spare vest in the carryall I’ve placed in the living room. Give that to Maggie. Drop the shelf in the basement across the door. Don’t bunch together. If anyone comes down the basement, anyone, shoot to kill. I will call out before I come in. Turn on the player now.’
He had recorded their conversation on one of his recording devices; playing it back would give the illusion they were in the living room.
How did Krone know?
He erased the thought, the how wasn’t important at this stage, and focused on the problem at hand.
Three of them. One will break in from the front, a diversionary tactic, while the other two will come in hard from the rear. They’ll hear conversation in the living room. At a signal, the one at the front will break in, and then the men at the rear will follow. They’ll all come in through the windows; they’re easier and large enough for a man to come through. Doors might take more time. Palisano, the most inexperienced of the three according to Broker, at the front; Krone and Romero at the rear.
