“And the geek?”
“Less than five miles away. He inherited a house from his parents in Happy Valley, but my contact says he’s pretty messed up. If he hadn’t been kicked out with the others, he likely would have been eased out on a medical discharge.”
Wallace bristled. “I need to fill in the gaps and find out where Alicia and my boys are. This geek’s involved and he may be an easier nut to crack than the guard.”
“Not necessarily,” said Laurel. “He was being held by al Qaeda. My contact says both he and Gallagher were tortured — quite brutally.”
“Then he’ll be softened up,” snapped Wallace.
He pushed back from the table, his features sharpened by an angry scowl. He scanned the table and picked up the hammer and chisel that Laurel had used to open the metal box.
“This time,” Wallace said angrily, “I’ll do more than bruise bones. And if he still doesn’t talk, I’ll carve out his fucking heart.”
CHAPTER 52
Mr. Black excused himself from the table and headed to the lone bathroom off a narrow corridor at the rear of the house. He passed through the living room with its large picture windows positioned to take advantage of the view.
A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace dominated one corner of the open area and gave prominence to a polished redwood mantle where a silver-framed photograph showed a smiling woman and a beautiful baby girl. The photo was black and white, but both females shared the same large, baby-seal eyes.
Before the hallway, a wide open-riser staircase traveled nowhere, its climb blocked by an oversized trapdoor in the ceiling above. The hinged door was made of rough, unpainted plywood and secured with a padlock.
Mr. Black walked around the stairs to reach the bathroom. He knocked on the door.
A sharp intake of breath from inside was followed by the sounds of frantic shuffling.
Mr. Black leaned against the jamb. Calm. Relaxed. A visiting shadow. Player of games. Nothing more.
“That phone won’t work,” he said through the door. “The keypad is secured by a password. Pain, really. I prefer biometrics, myself.”
The woman didn’t answer.
Mr. Black thought about the phone, about what the woman could do with it. Without the password, she couldn’t dial out, send email or texts. She could access some of the applications, but a GPS module or police scanner wouldn’t do her much good trapped in a bathroom.
He hesitated.
The phone had a browser for the Internet. It used a touchscreen keyboard, which was separate from the keypad. The virtual keyboard wasn’t secured.
Mr. Black stepped back and kicked open the door. It didn’t take much.
The woman sat on the toilet with the phone in her hand.
No pretense. No apology.
Mr. Black snatched the phone away from her and glanced at the screen. It showed the keypad, locked and useless.
The disappointment was etched on her face despite a defiant attempt at concealment.
“Worth a try,” said Mr. Black. “But Gallagher is the paranoid sort.”
The woman flicked her hair to one side and glared at him. Her long neck was mottled in bruises the shape of fat fingers. Two heavy thumbs formed a V directly over her windpipe. The bruising was deep.
She nervously flicked her hair back to cover the marks, but as she did so, Mr. Black noticed her arms. Dark purple and yellow bruises ran the length of them, made more prominent by her fair, lightly freckled skin.
She had struggled, but her enemy had superior strength and a depth of cruelty non-combatants could never fully understand — until it was too late.
“Why are you alive?” asked Mr. Black.
The woman’s eyes widened in horror as if the thought of her demise hadn’t entered her mind. Or if it had, she buried it, pretending it wasn’t the only outcome one could possibly come to.
Curious.
Gallagher called from the kitchen. “What you doing, Bone? It’s turning dark out there. We have to go.”
Mr. Black cocked an ear. There was a slipperiness to Gallagher’s words as though he had taken Mr. Black’s short absence as an excuse to quickly lubricate his tonsils.
In the sand, Gallagher would have crippled a soldier for less. This wasn’t the same leader who could stare deep into a troubled man’s heart and see the misaligned cogs within the feral machine.
Mr. Black slipped the extra cellphone into his pocket and turned his back. As he walked away, the woman’s bravado crumbled and she wept into her hands. She tried to be quiet, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of her defeat.
She didn’t.
There was no satisfaction simply because he didn’t care. In his mind, she was just another ghost.
AT THE rear door, Gallagher was breathing heavy as he bent over to pull on a tall pair of rubber boots. When he looked up again, his eyes were noticeably bloodshot.
“You got boots?” he snarled.
“I’m fine,” said Mr. Black.
“This shit is worse than the sand. It sticks to everything and hardens like cement. Fucking rains all the time, too.”
“We should go to Africa,” said Mr. Black. “Money to be made with our skills.”
Gallagher scowled and held up his mutilated hand. “You think anyone would hire this?”
“You can still shoot,” said Mr. Black. “They missed the most important finger, remember?”
Gallagher grinned and lifted a metal flask from his back pocket. He unscrewed the top and held it up.
“Ffucking ffuckers,” he toasted before taking a deep swallow.
Mr. Black bristled as his former sergeant returned the flask to his pocket. He understood the need for any soldier to unleash the dark shadow within. And although he found his release in other ways, he had spent many a dark night watching over the sergeant and his flock as they lost their minds to alcohol and opium.
On duty, however, he would rather slit their throats than serve beside them. That was a line drawn in the sand, and served up one night in graphic detail, by Sgt. Douglas Gallagher.
How could such a lesson be forgotten by its own teacher?
“You comin’?”
Without a backward glance, Gallagher tugged on a battered oilskin hat and threw open the kitchen door. He staggered down the wooden stairs and squelched noisily into the mud.
Reluctantly, Mr. Black followed.
Dark, rain-filled clouds drooped low enough to make both men subconsciously hunch their shoulders as they walked deeper into the clearing behind the house. Beyond the mud, on a small grassy knoll, they came to a circular stone well.
Hand-built with thick mortar and rough-hewn stone, the well looked like the kind of postcard-friendly attraction that tourists dropped coins into in exchange for false hope and imagined blessings.
“It’s fed by a mountain stream,” said Gallagher. “Runs clear most of the year, but it can get blocked and full of silt sometimes. When I first bought the land, we drank straight out of the bucket. Then, one spring we got sick with fucking Giardiasis.”
Gallagher laughed. Throaty. Coarse. “Beaver Fever they call it here. You should have seen us. This was before Katie was born, mind you, which was a blessing. One bathroom and there’s the two of us with stuff pouring out either end. I thought we were going to die and one of you lot, or a bloody MP, would eventually find our dehydrated husks curled up together on the bathroom floor.”
He shook his head with exaggerated force. “It wasn’t fun at the time, but when you go through something like that, it can bring you closer together as a couple, you know? Kinda like the Corps. Sometimes you have to fall into hell to discover how quickly your friends are willing to rush in and pull you back out.”
Gallagher tried to laugh away the darkness that had entered his voice. He covered it with a quip. “I’d rather take on a whole platoon of ragheads than endure it again.”
Bending down, Gallagher grabbed hold of a rusted iron handle bolted in the middle of a large circ
ular stone lid.
“I sealed it off after that,” he said. “Give me a hand.”
Together, the two men pulled the lid aside.
Gallagher switched on a flashlight and pointed it straight down into the deep, dark hole.
Mr. Black leaned forward and stared into the abyss. The water level was high and for a spine-tingling moment he wondered if he had carelessly allowed himself to be delivered to the edge of his own grave.
Wallace had slipped through his grasp. Desmond had already paid a price. What more fitting reprimand could there be than a bullet to the back of the head?
Mr. Black turned slowly to peer over his shoulder. Not willing to go peacefully, his hand was already reaching for the knife on his belt.
But Gallagher wasn’t staring back from behind the cocked hammer of his Desert Eagle.
Instead, his gaze was completely focused on the depths of the well, and from his disappointed expression, whatever he had expected to find down there was missing.
CHAPTER 53
Lance Corporal James Ronson had inherited an ugly house in a simple neighborhood that showed its age with liver spots and varicose veins. An architect’s designed-by-committee nightmare, the early 1970s split-level had been built of sawdust and chewing gum before getting marooned upon a high concrete basement with undersized windows.
Its cracked stucco siding and overgrown front lawn reminded Wallace of homes in his own North Shore neighborhood that — on a double-dog-dare to prove adolescent bravery — he used to egg or cover in toilet paper when he could sneak enough rolls out of the house.
Neglect often invited youthful imaginations to assume such homes must be either haunted or lair to an evil cannibalistic witch. The truth usually wasn’t much better than the fiction: an alcoholic bachelor or lonely widow whose children were now too busy with their own lives to ever stop around.
Or in this case, a soldier. Kidnapped, tortured and dismissed. If he had kept to himself, Wallace could have mustered some pity. But he hadn’t. He left his cave and attacked innocents, which made him nothing short of a monster.
Wallace glanced over at the empty seat beside him. Laurel had told him she couldn’t take part, but she had made him change into one of her dad’s clean shirts and said he was welcome to borrow her car.
“If you get caught,” she added. “I’ll tell the police you stole it.”
It was a fair trade. And for what he had to do, he was glad she wasn’t along.
Wallace picked up his shotgun. The Defender felt warm in his hand, even comforting. Reloaded and only a little worse for wear, it gave him strength. And even if it was false, even if all he held was an inanimate tool, he took whatever he could get.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
Gun in hand, Wallace slipped out of the truck and moved up the weed-infested garden path at a brisk pace. Four concrete steps to the front door. He tried the handle, but this wasn’t Canada. It was locked.
No time to waste.
Wallace knocked and pressed his ear to the door.
When he heard footsteps approach from the other side, he took two steps back.
When the handle began to turn, his foot lashed out.
The door smashed open, knocking whoever stood behind it flat on his ass.
Wallace rushed inside.
The man on the floor was barefoot, wearing baby blue boxers and a thin white T-shirt. Blood spotted the front of the shirt from a dripping, freshly-flattened nose.
Wallace pumped the shotgun, letting the man hear the anus-puckering Click Clack, while he kicked the door closed behind them for privacy.
The man lifted his hands to cover his face. He was already trembling. A good start.
“I ain’t got nothing worth stealing, man. A few old computers maybe, some small tools. You’d break your back moving the TV. It’s a bloody dinosaur.”
“James Ronson?” asked Wallace.
The man peered out from beneath splayed fingers. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“My name is Wallace Carver. That mean anything to you?”
“No.” His forehead crinkled into deep furrows. “Should it?”
“My wife and sons have been abducted. I think you’re involved.”
Ronson lowered his hands and looked up at Wallace through intelligent but muddied chocolate-brown eyes.
“You’re the bus driver,” he said.
A surge of anger made the shotgun tremble against Wallace’s shoulder. “That’s me.” His voice cracked. “What have you done with my family?”
“Hold on, hold on,” Ronson blurted. “I wasn’t involved, OK? I mean, yeah, I know about it, but, man, I just handle the comms, do a little computer work, you know? I set up the phones, it’s what I do, but I didn’t want nothing else to do with it.”
Wallace snarled and kicked at Ronson’s legs. “Get up.” He waved his gun in the direction of the living room. “You’re going to tell me everything you know or I’m going to make al Qaeda look like a fucking babysitter.”
Ronson blanched and rolled over to push himself to his feet. He was skin and bone with a two-day growth of beard. Clusters of scabbed-over needle marks and tiny symmetrical cuts that could have come from a razor blade ran along the inside of his arms and the backs of his legs. But there was also enough muscle definition to let Wallace know he hadn’t completely given up on himself. Not yet.
As he walked, Ronson tilted his head back and lifted his T-shirt to press it against his bloody nose. His exposed back was etched in raised scar tissue.
Wallace looked closer. The scars formed a familiar grid pattern; a game he played with his sons; a game they loved because Wallace concentrated hard on losing nearly every turn. Someone had carved a game of X & Os on the man’s flesh. A large C cut deeply across the grid, showing the game had ended in a tie.
Ronson turned and dropped onto an ugly couch in the middle of an even uglier room. Asparagus green shag carpet covered the floor and continued inexplicably halfway up the walls. The walls, in turn, were painted a lighter shade of mint as though the designer had thought a slight contrast would make all the difference.
The shag was beaten down from years of shuffling feet and featured several prominent burn marks. The ceiling was yellow from cigarette smoke and streaked with ghostly fingers of soot from a gas fireplace in the corner that had likely passed its last inspection more than three decades earlier.
“I know,” said Ronson. “Hideous, ain’t it.”
“Suits you,” said Wallace.
Ronson sighed resignedly. “Yeah, you could be right.”
He lowered his T-shirt as the blood in his nostrils began to clot. More scars, in a similar pattern to the ones on his back, vanished beneath the thin fabric.
Wallace resettled the shotgun in the crook of his shoulder. “Who’s got my family?”
Ronson glanced nervously at a small table beside the couch. A blown-glass pipe and several tiny nuggets of crystallized cocaine sat on a ceramic pie plate celebrating America’s bicentennial.
“You mind if I smoke?” he asked.
Ronson’s hand was already reaching for the pipe when Wallace smashed it to bits with the blunt end of his shotgun.
“Fuuuck!” Ronson yanked his hand back and stared at his fingers to make sure they hadn’t been mangled.
Wallace snarled again. “Answer the fucking question.”
“I was gonna. I was gonna,” protested Ronson. “I just . . . just needed a little.” He ran his fingers through his hair, digging the nails into his scalp with a horrible scraping noise. “Fffuuuck. Fuuuckers. You have no fffucking idea who—”
Wallace slammed his shotgun down on the side table again, splintering the wood and sending any remaining shards of pottery, glass and crack spilling into the deep-pile carpet.
He glared at Ronson. “Next time, it’s your fucking hands. Both of them. Then your feet. I’m sure you know exactly how many bones are in your feet? Al Qaeda may have used you for sport, soldier, but you have no fuckin
g idea how serious I am!”
Ronson held up his hands in surrender. “OK, OK, but they’ll fucking kill me, man.”
“Fast or slow?” asked Wallace.
Ronson looked up at him, confused. “What?”
“Will they kill you fast or slow?” Wallace repeated. “’Cause I’ll damn well make it slow. So fucking slow, you’ll wish you were in hell for days before you actually get there.”
Ronson began to chew the nails of his right hand. “You’re fucking scary, man.”
Wallace scowled and pressed his face closer to Ronson’s. “Who’s got my family?”
Ronson sighed heavily and spat out a few shards of fingernail. “That would be Sergeant Douglas Gallagher. He was my unit commander. Hell of a Marine.”
Wallace ground his teeth. “Why?”
Ronson’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why did he take them?”
“Yes,” Wallace snapped.
“To punish you, naturally.”
“Why?” Wallace repeated.
The surprise left Ronson’s face to be replaced with genuine puzzlement.
“Because of what you did.”
“And what was that?” asked Wallace.
“Come on.” Ronson smirked nervously. “How could you not know?”
Wallace rushed forward and jammed the barrel of the shotgun against the man’s temple. The cold steel cut into flesh as Ronson strained his neck muscles to stay upright.
“OK, OK. FUCK!” Ronson fixed a fierce glare on Wallace. “You killed his wife and daughter. They were all he had left after he was kicked out of the Corps. You took them away. He’s not the kind of man who could ever let that go.”
Ronson was unable to disguise a look of unbridled disgust as he added, “And who could blame him?”
CHAPTER 54
Gallagher dragged his disbelieving gaze away from the dark, empty hole.
“Where the fuck are they?”
He turned to glare at the house where the red-haired woman was silhouetted in the kitchen window. From this distance, her expression was unreadable.
No Cry For Help Page 17
