Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  He kept dissecting Isaac’s explanation, trying to make it all add up, but it was just too much—the witness protection, the double cross on the government, the squealing mobsters. All of it made sense at its face, so why couldn’t he just relax?

  It was the lies. Not just about the phone—though that was a big one—but about his sick father, too. Why would somebody follow him all the way out here when they could have shot him on the spot in the father’s house?

  Then there was the sheer number of weapons, the night scope, the silencer, the vault. The tunnel. This place out in the middle of nowhere. All of that took money. So, there’s the big question: where does an allegedly retired professional killer get that kind of money?

  There was no coherence to the thoughts. They flashed as images through Scott’s mind: shelves stacked with weapons, the vault door, the weird foam rubber vest. He saw the phone—

  The vest was a fat suit. The thought came to him out of nowhere. He’d seen something like it on a television show that took him behind the scenes of a movie shoot, where skinny actors were donning fat suits in the makeup department. The vest was a disguise of some sort!

  Okay, so what? That was consistent with his story, wasn’t it? A man hunted by the Mob and chased by cops probably would want a disguise, wouldn’t he? That’d go with the business of visiting his sick dad. Maybe disguises were as common to men on the run as cell phones were to salesmen.

  So, what about the telephone? Why lie about that—twice? Just an excuse, maybe, to keep from calling the police? What was it that Isaac had said? The secret to everything was to look at the situation from the position of the other guy. So, here’s this reclusive ex-killer who suddenly finds himself with a houseguest. Is he going to tell the truth? No, of course not. Certainly not under these circumstances.

  It all checked out. No matter how many times Scott ran Isaac’s explanations through his head, it always checked out. Why, then, was he so convinced that the man had something big and important to hide? Why did Scott continue to feel that he was in jeopardy?

  If Isaac wanted to kill him, he’d have done it by now. Nobody knew Scott was even there, so they’d certainly never come looking for him. And if they did, they’d just find his body at the bottom of the dry well with the others. What difference would one more body make?

  Thomas Powell is a very dangerous man.

  The warning from the FBI agent/hired killer reverberated through Scott’s brain. And then he thought of the look in Isaac’s eyes when Scott told him that the man hadn’t said anything to him in the tunnel. Why had he lied like that? And why had the lie come so instinctively? At the time, it seemed like dangerous information to pass along, but now it seemed more like a stupid thing to hold back.

  Don’t ever cross me. I play for keeps.

  Isaac had said to consider that a warning. A warning from a killer. Suddenly, Scott had the urge to come clean, to correct the record for Isaac. Maybe if he cleared his conscience, he’d be able to relax. If Isaac was telling him the truth about his plans, then all he had to do was hang out for a few days, and it would all end. Isaac would disappear, and sooner or later, Scott would be rescued.

  So, why hadn’t Isaac left already? It was a gorgeous day today. Yesterday, his excuse had been the storm. So, why was he still here tonight? Scott knew he was close to unraveling the mystery and his stomach tightened. If Isaac truly was a hunted man, why wasn’t he off on the run?

  Answer: He had something left to do—a solid, affirmative reason to stay. There was no way for Scott to know what that reason might be, but it certainly tickled his imagination. What would a hired gun need to stick around for?

  Scott bolted upright in his bed, his heart hammering, his eyes wide in the shadowy darkness. Suddenly, he understood. All the guns, all the paranoia. Isaac DeHaven—or maybe Thomas Powell, a very dangerous man—wasn’t retired after all. He was here to do another job.

  It was the answer that made sense. Isaac had another person to kill, and for whatever reason, the timing mattered. Maybe he had to meet somebody first, or maybe the victim had to be in a specific place. Who could say?

  The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Isaac wasn’t in the business of killing just anybody—the fact that Scott still breathed was testament to that. No, his customers hired him to kill specific people, maybe at specific times.

  Who might the next poor bastard be? Scott wondered. Whoever it was, he surely didn’t know it was coming. Scott thought of the phone in the drawer. He needed to get the hell out of here—to get help, not only for himself, but for that next victim. Maybe some of those Secret Service guys he’d been tripping over all last week could—

  Just like that, Scott knew who the next target was. He remembered the posters all over SkyTop announcing the big Founder’s Day celebration in Eagle Feather. Holy shit, it was the Super Bowl and World Series of murder all wrapped together: the president of the United States.

  STAYING THERE WAS NO LONGER AN OPTION. Scott needed to leave, right by-God now. Jesus, this was huge. He didn’t understand the game that Isaac was playing by keeping him alive, but suddenly, he knew as certainly as he’d ever known anything that his hours were numbered.

  You’ve got to look at it from the other guy’s point of view. Scott knew what Isaac looked like, he knew where he lived, and maybe he even knew his real name. There was no rational reason for Isaac to keep him alive.

  Scott dressed quickly and silently, the coldness of the floor reminding him of his first problem: no shoes, no socks. Such a brilliant move when you thought about it. No shoes, no escape: a prison as secure as anything ever built with bars. But there had to be a solution. There had to be. He’d come this far on his wits, beating the odds; he’d be damned if he was going to let it end with a bullet through his own eye.

  In all of this house, with its hidden panels and all the toys, there had to be something that could double for shoes.

  Moving to his bedroom door, Scott pushed against the door with one hand while he turned the knob with the other, a trick that he’d learned from home experience would keep the latch from making noise as it opened.

  Walking on tiptoe, he glided to the mezzanine railing and peered over the side. Light from one lamp in the living room cast a yellow glow over everything, the only glimmer that separated the house from total darkness. Under different circumstances, Scott might have been amused by the fact that a hired killer needed a night light. He stood there for a long moment, watching for signs of movement from below. If Isaac saw him, he was dead for sure.

  ISAAC KNEW THAT IT WAS all out of his hands. As he sat in the darkness of his room, he reassembled his pistol as he considered his options—more accurately, as he considered the lack of them. It was a useful skill, disassembling and reassembling his weapon in the dark. Of no practical use in the real world—if he needed to clean his gun, he’d turn the light on—he nonetheless liked the notion of being at one with his firearm. There was something intimate about the connection between man and machine, nearly as intimate as the act for which the machine was employed.

  Sometimes, the mixture of truth and deception that defined Isaac’s life was a disturbing, confusing thing. Truly, he was not in the business of killing children. Most of his targets had been old men who likely would have been dead soon anyway. He couldn’t remember a single one much under the age of forty. It wasn’t in his nature to judge the justice of his victims’ deaths. A customer had deemed their deaths to be worthy of his fee, and that was all the rationalization he needed. The rest was just mechanics and logistics. He planned, he acquired his target and he pulled the trigger. A simpler world would be hard to find.

  Problem was, his heart actually went out to this kid. He had a lot of balls to set out on his own from a plane crash and wander through the woods to this tiny spot on his map. Isaac wasn’t sure that he could have done that himself. Took a lot of courage to pull it off, and if there was one quality in a person—especially a young person—that Isaac
admired above all others, it was courage. So, when he hobbled Scott by taking away his shoes, he’d done it with his heart in the right place. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable solution to both of their problems. He only needed one more day. One lousy day. Then it would all be taken care of.

  He never would have made the phone call, of course, but at least the kid would have had shelter and enough food to keep him alive for a while. Sooner or later, Scott would have had to make some choices that might have gotten him into trouble, but hey, that truly wasn’t Isaac’s problem.

  He’d convinced himself at the time that it made sense to keep Scott alive, but now that he thought about it, he knew that it could never work. The kid was too smart. And he’d lied to him. Isaac had heard the dickhead in the tunnel ask about Thomas Powell (and just how the hell did he come up with that? He hadn’t heard that name in years!), and the fact that Scott didn’t answer about it truthfully told Isaac something that he frankly didn’t want to know. It all came down to the fact that the kid was too goddamn smart for his own good. Certainly too smart for Isaac’s good.

  His was a business of details. Every job carried its risks, and on every job, something went wrong. Call it Murphy’s Law or just plain bad luck, but that’s the way it was. One or two things always went wrong. Since Isaac was a professional, though, his plans allowed for a certain number of mistakes. That’s why he always carried an extra weapon and extra ammunition, an extra driver’s license and passport—all of them packaged for easy disposal if it came to that. It was the nature of his business to be extremely careful, and to capitalize on the mistakes of those who were not.

  But it was unconscionable to allow so huge a complication as a witness to go uncorrected. It’s why he had to kill the truck driver. And it was why the boy had to die.

  In the darkness, his fingers found the ammunition clip, and with his thumb, he verified that he’d loaded hollow points. With luck, Scott would be sound asleep when it happened, and he wouldn’t know a thing. Isaac would blast him three times in half that many seconds, and the hollow points would do the rest, expanding to twice their size as they shredded the boy’s vitals. Guaranteed death, no suffering.

  Scott was a nice kid. Isaac owed him that much.

  NOTHING MOVED BUT THE WIND OUTSIDE. With the fire and the wood stoves banked down for the night, the place was downright cold; cold enough to see your breath, Scott thought, even though he in fact could not.

  He made it down the stairs to the main level without a sound, and walked quickly to the front door, where he plucked his coat from its peg and put it on. There he paused. He was being foolish. No hat, no gloves, no shoes, he wouldn’t make it two miles. More than that, he didn’t even know where he was going.

  He needed to find something for his feet. That was nonnegotiable. But what? The place was as clean as a model home—not a piece of paper out of place, let alone a pair of shoes. So, what was he going to do? For a second, he thought about cutting up the cotton cloth on the kitchen table and wrapping the strips around his feet like the pictures he’d seen of George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, but he dismissed that as senseless. He needed something to insulate against the wet and the cold.

  His eyes moved to the hidden door that led to the secret room and its secret tunnel. No doubt, that’s where Isaac put his stuff. Probably in the safe. On the off chance that Isaac had left it unlocked, he pulled on the handle, but of course nothing moved.

  Dammit. The phone was in there, too—his backup plan. If he could somehow get inside the little room, he could duck outside long enough to make a call on the satellite phone and then return to bed to await his rescue. He could be in and out in just a few minutes and Isaac would never be the wiser until a SWAT team swooped down on him.

  The hinges.

  He heard himself gasp. Could it really be that simple? He knew for a fact that the door opened outward, so didn’t that mean, by definition, that the hinges were on the outside? The living room light was only moderately helpful this far away, so he had to feel his way with his hands.

  “Yes!” he whispered. Not only were the hinges on the outside of the door, but the pins had already worked themselves partially out. If he could pull them the rest of the way, he wouldn’t even need the latch to open the door. It was a trick he’d learned at camp one summer after he and his roommate found themselves locked into their room by pennies crammed into the doorjamb.

  Scott pulled on the pins with his fingers, but they wouldn’t budge. He needed a screwdriver or a chisel, something to slide under the head of the hinge pin that he could then whack to get it to slide.

  A butter knife would do just fine, thank you very much, and here in the kitchen, there was a whole drawerful.

  The real trick was to be quiet. With the handle of the knife clutched in his left fist, he tucked the blade under the top ridge of the pin and used the heel of his right hand as his hammer. He didn’t hit so much as he tapped, gentle yet firm strokes that he hoped would break the pins loose. The first one turned out to be easier than he’d expected. He felt it budge on the third or fourth stroke, and on the very next, he felt it sliding free.

  Yes!

  Only one more to go. He stuffed the first pin into his pocket, for lack of a better place to put it, and stooped for a better angle on the second. He’d just settled the blade into place when he heard a door open somewhere behind him. Crouched in the shadow of the kitchen’s center island, Scott craned his neck to see Isaac, dressed in his nightclothes, walking out of his bedroom and across the living room toward the stairs.

  Scott felt the panic boil in his belly. If he was coming for a midnight snack, Scott was totally screwed.

  His heart hammered as he watched Isaac scan the room as if sensing that something was amiss. Scott would have sworn that he looked directly at him, and he was ready to bolt, but then the man looked away and up the stairs. Isaac was disturbed by whatever was on his mind, and Scott didn’t like it one bit.

  Then, Isaac started to climb to the second floor. Oh, shit! Scott’s mind screamed. He’s going to find my bed empty!

  When he saw the gun in Isaac’s hand, his fear turned to horror.

  28

  BRANDON SAT IN THE DARKENED LIVING ROOM, staring out the towering windows at the ghostly outline of the trees below. In his right hand, he swirled ice cubes in his scotch, waiting for the temperature to get just right inside the glass. It was his fourth, so his lips and tongue were well calibrated by now. He heard a door open, and as he shifted his eyes upward, he caught the reflection of a door opening on the second floor, beyond the railing to the loft. A shapely silhouette in a quilted bathrobe filled the lighted space, and he watched as she glided toward the steps, and on down to the first floor.

  “I thought you were sleeping in Scotty’s room,” Sherry said softly, her voice barely a whisper. “Scott’s room, I meant.”

  “That was my plan,” Brandon said. “But between the trophies on the wall and the monsters in my head, I thought I’d sit here and get drunk instead.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nice scotch, by the way. The Macallan, twenty years old.”

  “It’s not mine. Mark Olshaker’s a great fan of the single malt.”

  Brandon’s eyebrows arched. “The publisher? This is his house? I never thought to ask.” This afternoon’s confrontation had led to an uneasy truce between the two of them.

  Sherry nodded. “Uh-huh. He opens it up to his more profitable authors.”

  “Nice perk. And what’s with all the dead animals on the wall? Are those the disguised heads of the less profitable authors?”

  Sherry laughed. “Hunting’s his other passion. Behind skiing.” In the awkward silence that followed, Sherry helped herself to a spot on the sofa next to him, close but not touching, and wrapped herself in the blanket that had been tossed on the back. “I just got off the phone with Audrey,” she said. “She twisted enough arms to pull a press conference together tomorrow afternoon aro
und three. After the president is done with his dog and pony show.”

  Brandon checked his watch. “It’s after midnight.”

  Sherry gave a little shrug. “She’s her most persuasive when people are too tired to fight back.” Another awkward pause. “Did I hear you on the phone with Chief Whitestone?”

  In the dark, she could see his shadow nod. He said, “I want to hate that son of a bitch, but I can’t. He’s a good man in a bad spot. I look at things from his perspective and I realize I’d probably make the same decisions as his.” He paused for a long sip on his drink. “I just wish I could make somebody understand that he’s still alive out there.”

  Sherry let the comment hang there, unsure whether to pursue it. “Tell me why,” she said finally. “Tell me about this feeling you have.”

  Brandon shook his head. He knew that no one but he could possibly understand. “It’s a certainty, not a feeling. That’s the best I can do. I just know, beyond all doubt, that Scott isn’t dead. Yet.”

  Sherry heard the frustration in his voice, took a deep breath as she considered it. “It’s not beyond the realm of reason, you know.” What little light there was glinted off Brandon’s eyes as he turned toward her. “Psychologists know that there are levels of communication between people that defy rational analysis. I can’t count the number of studies I’ve read over the years where siblings or parents and children are separated by half a world, yet when one is in trouble, the others somehow know it. Usually, it’s more of a feeling than a certainty, but it’s all part of a continuum.”

  Brandon looked at her for a long moment. “So, you’re saying you believe me?”

  “I’ve always believed that you believed,” she hedged. “I’m skeptical about a lot of things, Brandon, but too often, the evidence bears out exactly what you’re saying. I think it’s what the power of prayer is all about.”