Perilous

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Use my shoulder to pull yourself up a bit,” I said.

  He did.

  I put my hand inside his shirt and slipped it around to the back of the vest. I didn’t feel an exit wound.

  “The bullet is still inside. Here.” I pulled my winter cap from my head, balled it up and jammed it between the entry wound and his vest. “Keep your hand on it. Keep applying pressure.”

  He pulled in a breath through clenched teeth. “Is it bad?”

  I didn’t answer. I took a position next to him, facing the front door.

  The sound of yelling came from outside. I tried to make out the words. It sounded like someone yelled, “Spray it!”

  In an instant, the front windows of the cabin erupted in shattered glass.

  “Get down!” I yelled. I grabbed Kinnear and pulled him to the floor behind the oak table.

  I kept my head low. Left to right, I heard bullets rip through the house. The sound of window glass shattering could be heard in the moments between shots. I looked to my right. The couch threw bits of foam into the air. I looked up. The antler chandelier swung and splintered. From the corner of my eye, I saw the television on the wall just before it shattered to the floor in sparks. The recliner to my right bucked toward us. Five loud thumps hit our coffee-table shield before I heard the bullets continue toward the kitchen.

  The gunfire stopped. I slid out from the side of the table and crawled toward one of the front windows. I lay on the floor and reached the barrel of the gun up into the window void. I fired blindly at where I guessed they were standing outside then pulled the gun back down. Return fire whizzed past my head as I crawled back for cover next to Kinnear.

  “Get one?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just stay low. Where is that backup?”

  “Any minute.”

  “They better get their asses here.”

  Kinnear tried his radio again, he didn’t get a response.

  I yanked my Heckler & Koch up onto the edge of the table and held it on the door.

  We waited.

  The sounds of more gunshots echoed outside—semiautomatic gunfire, at least twenty shots. Nothing hit the cabin. A second later, another group of shots rang out. I could hear faint shouting then more gunfire. Everything went quiet. I kept the barrel of my gun on the door. Kinnear struggled to do the same.

  “Slide down,” I said. “I have the door. Just keep pressure on that wound.”

  Kinnear squinted and nodded. We waited.

  Through the void of the broken windows, I heard feet crunching on snow.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” a voice called. “If there’s someone inside, come on out, hands in the air.”

  My gun remained aimed at the door. I wasn’t ruling out a ruse by whoever was shooting at us. I said nothing.

  Kinnear looked at me and nodded. “That’s Deputy Sommer, the shift commander. I recognize his voice.”

  I wasn’t ready to rely on Kinnear’s voice recognition after he’d been losing blood for ten minutes. My gun stayed on the door, and I heard footsteps climbing the front steps of the patio.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” the voice called again.

  “Stay down,” I whispered to Kinnear. I slipped from the back of the coffee table and took two quick strides to the side of the front door. I positioned myself just inside the kitchen, at the wall. I held the barrel of my gun on the front door and used the wall for cover. The front door sat open an inch, facing into the house. I wouldn’t be able to see whoever it was until they were three feet into the room. However, they also wouldn’t be able to see me.

  “There’s two inside,” I said.

  No one kicked the door open and started shooting.

  “Deputy Kinnear?” the voice asked.

  “Yeah,” Kinnear answered. “Is that you, Sommer?”

  “And Esler. We’re coming in.”

  I looked over at Kinnear. He nodded.

  The front door pushed open, and I saw a flash through the crack—two men walking in. I saw two hands, each holding a gun, then blue jacket sleeves, then the two sheriffs in plain view. I lowered my weapon.

  Chapter 25 - Kane

  Sommer holstered his weapon and went to Kinnear. He slid the coffee table away. “Where are you hit?”

  Kinnear lifted his hand from the area. “A bullet went through my vest.”

  “Shit.” Sommer grabbed his shoulder radio and called for paramedics. The call went through. “Keep your hand on that. They are on the way.” Sommer looked at the other deputy. “Esler, where’s that backup?”

  “Any second,” Esler said.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Sommer asked. He stood and waited for my response.

  I told him who I was and laid it out for him—we’d found evidence that my parents were taken, and we found blood and signs of a struggle. We were waiting on the rest of the deputies to arrive when we started taking gunfire.

  “Do you know who is behind this?” he asked.

  “Not directly. Indirectly, I have a pretty damn good idea.”

  “Give me a name,” Sommer said.

  “Viktor Azarov. He’s Russian organized crime. It won’t do you any good, though.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He’s incarcerated at USP Coleman.”

  The deputy flashed me a confused look.

  “It’s in Florida,” I said.

  “Do you think he hired this out?”

  I nodded. “We heard a barrage of gunfire outside. What happened?” I asked.

  “We took fire, pulling up. A guy was standing at the end of the driveway and unloaded on us. By the time we got out and were able to return fire, they were already up the street. They jumped into a dark sedan and took off.”

  “Why didn’t you pursue?”

  “Go look at our car, and you’ll see. Both front tires are out, and the guy put at least five shots directly into the engine.”

  “How many guys?” I asked.

  “Two. They went north,” Sommer said. “I tried getting word out on the radio, but it wouldn’t go through. Our radios just came back on right before we came in. I put the call out on the car and what direction they headed. They have to be at least a few miles up the road or more by now.”

  “They have some kind of cell-and-radio jammer,” I said. “We couldn’t get a call through for backup. When they were at my sister’s house this morning, our cell phones showed no signal. Can one of you take Kinnear’s car and start looking?” I asked.

  Esler spoke up, sitting at Kinnear’s side. “We’re stuck here. You haven’t been outside. Kinnear’s cruiser has four flats. The same as the truck out there,” he said.

  I ran my hand over the top of my head. “Shit.”

  Two more deputies walked in. Deputy Sommer immediately sent them in search of the shooters.

  I took a chair at the kitchen table. “You said just two guys?” I asked Sommer.

  “Two.”

  “I think there was at least one more,” I said.

  “How’s that?

  “I think I may have put one of them down out back.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Sommer said. “Esler, you okay waiting with Kinnear here?”

  “Yeah, EMTs should be here any second.”

  I grabbed a flashlight from under my father’s sink. Sommer followed me from the front of the house. We walked around back and started through the snow. With each step, we sank to our knees.

  “We took shots from the back and front of the house at roughly the same time,” I said. “I put half of a magazine into where the gunfire from the rear was coming. Within a minute, I heard two people talking at the front.”

  “That still could just be two people,” Sommer said.

  “The shots were at distance. You wouldn’t be able to get from back here, to up there, that fast. The snow is too deep.”

  “Unless he was wearing snowshoes.”

  Sommer had made a good point, but I was betting that we’d be finding a b
ody within the next fifty feet. We started up the hill that he fired from. I used the trees to pull me along. My flashlight shone across red mixed into the white snow at the crest of the hill.

  “There,” I said.

  Sommer drew his sidearm and took the lead. We reached the blood at the top of the hill. A rifle lay in the snow. I knelt and looked at it—a Knight SR-25.

  “Hmm,” I said, standing.

  “What?” Sommer asked.

  “There’s a body around here somewhere.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s an expensive weapon. No one would leave that laying in the snow.”

  I followed the blood with my light, down the other side of the hill. Forty feet away, a man lay pinned against a tree, facing away from us. Black pants covered his legs, and he wore a camouflage jacket and a black ski mask. He was, no doubt, either one of the guys from the house or an associate of theirs.

  “Hands where I can see them!” Sommer yelled.

  The guy didn’t move. With my light, I followed the trail of blood from the body back to us at the top of the hill. Blood covered everything around our feet. I looked at the snow between us and the body. It was all disturbed, but not from walking. The man’s footprints to get to his shooting position came from the east. The guy had rolled to his final resting position after being shot. I examined the amount of blood again. He’d been dead before he left the top of the hill.

  Sommer walked sideways down the snow-covered hill to the body. I followed in his footsteps.

  Sommer reached out and took the man’s wrist. He held it in his left hand while keeping his gun pointed at the man with his right. “Deceased.”

  He rolled the man onto his back, and I saw the cause of death. Below his ski mask were two bullet wounds in his neck. Another two holes could be seen in his jacket around the collarbone area. I took the bottom of the ski mask and began to pull it up off his head. As soon as I started, I became confused. The light from our flashlights was shining off brown skin. After I removed the mask, the dead eyes of a Hispanic man stared back at me. His nose and lips were swollen, and he had two busted-up eyes.

  “This guy got the hell beat out of him. Does he look familiar to you?” Sommer asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought you said something about these guys being Russian?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, this guy sure as hell isn’t Russian.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Sommer knelt and started checking the guy’s pockets.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “I have a phone, um, I think I have a wallet here, too.” He slipped out the wallet and phone and then finished patting down the guy’s jacket. “Feels like he’s got a pistol. We’ll leave that for the crime-lab guys.”

  Sommer stood and thumbed open the wallet. “Got an ID here. Florida. Daniel Juares. Oh, look at that, we have another ID, Florida as well. Jose Gomez. No credit cards. Looks like about a hundred bucks in cash.”

  “So which one is he? Or neither?” I asked.

  “Both IDs have the same photo.”

  I stared down at the body. “Do you have a pen?” I asked.

  “Pen? Yeah. For what?”

  I held out my hand. “I need to check something.”

  Sommer unzipped his jacket and reached into the breast pocket of his shirt. He pulled out a pen and handed it over to me.

  I pressed it against the guy’s lip.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to check his teeth.” I lifted his top lip—three busted teeth across the top row.

  “Broken teeth. What’s that telling us?” Sommer asked.

  “More than likely, my father was the one who delivered the beating on this guy. I found broken teeth in the master bedroom.”

  “So this was one of the guys who took your parents? I’m not sure how that helps, though,” Sommer said.

  “They have to still be in the area.”

  Sommer blew on his hands. “See that?” he asked. “The guy has a radio earbud.”

  I knelt and looked. “He must have been communicating with the others.”

  Sommer started back up the hill. “Come on. We’ll leave him for the crime-lab guys. They can figure out how to get him out of the woods. We’ll be able to get him printed and have a positive identity by morning.”

  My mind went back to the bodies removed from my sister’s house. Getting a confirmed identification on this guy was our single lead. “I’m carrying the body back,” I said.

  “You’re what?”

  “The bodies were removed from the last scene. I don’t want to chance it.”

  “What about forensics? Shouldn’t we leave the scene as is?”

  “Not this time. I’m not leaving this body unattended, and I’m sure as hell not staying out here to freeze to death. The rifle and scene can stay as is, but the body comes with.”

  “Fine. Let me get his legs,” Sommer said.

  We lifted the body and trudged back through the snow, again sinking up to our knees with each step. The process was grueling. By the time we were halfway back, I took it upon myself to just carry the body. We rounded the cabin to more squad cars in front. Two sheriffs stood next to a car and watched me lay the man’s corpse on the frozen driveway. An ambulance idled close to the front deck. Four squad cars that hadn’t been there when we left sat parked next to my father’s garage. We walked indoors. Kinnear was gone.

  Esler was sitting at the kitchen table with two other deputies.

  “Kinnear?” Sommer asked.

  “The paramedics just got him loaded up,” Esler said.

  “Outlook?” I asked.

  “He lost a lot of blood.”

  I heard the ambulance pull from the front. I stared out the broken front window and watched them flip on the lights as soon as they hit the street.

  “What are we doing here?” Esler asked.

  “We’re going to fan out.” Sommer looked at his watch. “It’s eight fifteen now. I want groups of two knocking on every door in the area before ten p.m. There’s a chance these guys are holing up locally. Where’s Purwin?”

  “Back bedroom,” Esler said.

  “Purwin!” Sommer yelled.

  A thin man in his thirties walked from the hallway. He wore a white jacket with the word Forensics across his right breast pocket.

  “There’s a body out front,” Sommer said. “I want him printed before you do anything else. We need an identity on that guy as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Okay,” Purwin said.

  “I have a friend that’s helping me at the FBI,” I said. “If you can get the prints to him, he’ll have something for us tonight yet.”

  Sommer dipped his head in confirmation. “Get the FBI guy’s information from him and share the prints.”

  “Okay. Let me just grab my kit from the bedroom.” Purwin grabbed his kit and came back to me.

  I gave him a contact number for Faust then looked at Sommer. “I need the two names on those IDs, and we need to go through that cell phone. Do you guys have a system in place to get a current GPS location on the numbers?”

  He shook his head.

  “All right, we’ll use my guys. Phone and wallet?” I asked.

  Sommer pulled them from his jacket pockets and handed them to me.

  “Do you have something to write this stuff down?” I asked.

  Sommer pulled a small notepad and his pen from inside his jacket. “Copy down the names and addresses from those.” I handed him the two ID cards and started pulling up the cell phone’s call log. I found just one number dialed in the history and three numbers programmed in. I rattled off the numbers to Sommer.

  “Got them,” he said.

  I held out my hand for the notepad. “I’m going to go make the call.”

  “Sure,” Sommer said.

  “Let’s get one of the other deputies listening in on that earbud the guy wore. If these guys are communicati
ng, maybe we can get their location,” I said.

  “I’ll get someone on it,” Sommer said.

  I headed outside to the 4Runner to get my phone from the passenger seat. Shell casings littered the snow around it—they must have been using the vehicles for cover. The squad car and 4Runner had fresh bullet holes in the grilles and windshields—mine from when I’d returned fire blindly, I assumed. I walked to the driver’s door. Blood colored the snow at the rear of the truck. I’d hit one of them. I popped the door and grabbed my cell phone from inside. The screen showed four missed calls from Callie’s prepaid number. I dialed her back and placed the phone to my ear.

  “Carl?” she answered.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “We’re fine. I was just worried. I hadn’t heard from you in a while. Is everything okay? Did you find your parents?”

  I dug my palm into my eye. “No.”

  “No everything isn’t okay, or no you didn’t find them?”

  “No to both. Whoever is doing this is up here. They have my parents.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Positive.” I didn’t tell her I’d just been in a gunfight.

  “Are we still safe here?” she asked.

  “As far as I know. I’m going to see what I can do about getting a sheriff from that area out to you guys, just to be sure.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know, Cal. As soon as I can.”

  “I know you’re not telling me something, Carl. What’s going on? What happened?”

  “Babe, let me just tell you later. I’m fine.”

  “You tell me right now.” Her tone wasn’t one I’d heard before. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  I let out a breath and went over what had happened. She was silent for a moment after I finished.

  “Carl, I know you have to find your parents. Just, please, be safe. I don’t want this baby to not have a father. Promise me that’s not going to happen.”

  “I promise.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  I hung up and shook my head. I imagined the situation had to be killing her—it was killing me. I was torn between finding my parents and protecting my future. I walked back into the house. The deputies were gathered at the kitchen table. They were marking points on a map—houses or cabins to check, more than likely.