Gateway to Chaos (Book 2): Seeking Refuge

by Payne, T. L.

  After patting the large black mare on her nose, JJ trotted back toward the Jeep feeling good that she’d saved a life, even if it had only been horses. The image of the boy she’d shot replayed in her mind as she climbed back into the vehicle. She wasn’t sure she’d ever stop seeing it—or if she should. She still couldn’t make sense of all that had happened since the lights had gone out.

  When she’d left Kansas City heading to her folks just a few days ago, she never could’ve imagined she’d be drawn into such violence or forced to kill someone. She’d had to make life and death choices. She’d chosen her life over theirs. As a human being, she still struggled with that decision, but at the end of the day, she believed she had the right to live and the right to defend herself.

  The snow didn’t appear as deep on Highway 67. Scott seemed to be less cautious away from the narrow, winding road they’d just come from and was moving up to a decent speed. JJ wanted to lean over and look at the speedometer, but after the cold shoulder Scott had given her after she’d stopped to help the horses, she refrained. She too was anxious to get the task of delivering Mrs. Ward to her sister’s over and get home, but taking five minutes to do a charitable act didn’t hurt anything—at least in her opinion. Obviously, Scott hadn’t felt that way.

  Just past the St. Francois River, JJ saw a truck off in the ditch.

  “You see that?” she asked.

  “I see it,” Scott said.

  JJ’s heart rate sped up as they got closer to the stranded vehicle. As they approached it, two men stepped onto the shoulder of the highway. Her breaths quickened. A knot formed in the center of her chest. The taller of the two raised a hand. Scott slowed.

  Time stood still as JJ saw the flicker of recognition on the taller man’s face. His hand dropped to his side.

  “Scott. Don’t stop. Floor it. Get us out of here!” JJ yelled as she wrestled to put the rifle to her shoulder in the confined space, her thick coat slowing her movement.

  “Mrs. Ward, get down,” Scott said as he stomped on the gas. The Jeep lurched and the traction control system made a grinding noise as it kicked in.

  JJ locked eyes with the taller man. He now gripped his pistol in both hands. The second man had turned to face the Jeep. JJ heard the report of the weapon as it fired, but it must’ve missed them. She struggled to twist herself to bring the rifle up and return fire. It was impossible at that angle. JJ struggled with her seatbelt. She needed to be able to turn in her seat. She reached down with her left hand and unbuckled it without taking her eyes off the men. Another shot rang out, then another. The Jeep lurched again, and JJ was knocked off balance. Her shoulder hit the dash as she attempted to roll down the window.

  By the time she got the window down enough to hang out of it and get a shot off, the Jeep was far enough down the road that the men’s pistols were ineffective. The last JJ saw of them, the men were standing in the middle of the highway still shooting at the Jeep. As far as she could tell, not a single shot had connected with the vehicle.

  Pure luck. Good thing they were poor marksmen. How long will our luck hold?

  She was really getting nervous about entering the city now.

  “What the hell was that?” Scott said, staring at the men in the rearview mirror.

  JJ’s mind raced. She fought with herself about whether to tell him the truth or not. The men appeared stranded. If their vehicle still ran, how long would it take for them to get it out of the ditch, if they even could. She’d be miles down the road by then, right? Could they catch up with them? She doubted it. Trucks weren’t always that great in the snow. It was likely that they were no longer a threat, but there could be others.

  She cursed under her breath. If they’d found her, others might as well. She had to tell Scott. He deserved to know.

  JJ glanced over her shoulder. Mrs. Ward was still hunched over in the back seat.

  “I think we’re safe now, Mrs. Ward. You can sit up,” JJ said.

  “Easier said than done at my age, dear,” Mrs. Ward said as she straightened.

  “How’d you know they had guns?” Scott asked. “I couldn’t see them as we approached.”

  “I…” She hesitated, the words catching in her throat.

  Would he stop the Jeep and force her to get out? Should she just have him drop her off in the next town and take her chances? She was still at least fifty miles from her parents’ home. What was the right thing to do? Fear was clouding her judgment.

  “I think…” she stammered. “I think they may have been after me.”

  “What? Why?” Scott said, his voice raised. When the Jeep slowed, JJ was sure that this was it. She was going to be walking from here.

  JJ was afraid to look at him. She didn’t want to get into it. She didn’t want to involve him any more than he already was, but what choice did she have? She couldn’t walk fifty miles in the snow, especially not with those men and others like them out there looking for her. She’d have to be honest with Scott and take her chances.

  Chapter 5

  After gathering her thoughts, JJ told Scott and Mrs. Ward her story from the beginning, starting with how she’d met her ex-husband and how she’d gone to work at her father-in-law’s accounting firm right after the wedding. She left out the emotional abuse and David’s excessive jealousy and went straight to describing his family's connection to the Sinaloa drug cartel and their money laundering schemes.

  She paused as she recalled the moment the lightbulb went off in her mind.

  “Go on,” Scott said.

  “I’d suspected that David and his father might be involved in some not-so-legal business practices practically from the first week I worked there. It became clear that their income was coming from somewhere besides the firm's clients. When I’d asked David if they had some big client that I didn’t know about, he’d said yes, but to never ask his father about them.”

  “That didn’t strike you as strange?” Scott asked.

  JJ’s gaze dropped to her hands in her lap.

  “Three months ago, as I was trying to locate a computer file on the server, I discovered an encrypted file. I clicked on it, attempting to open it, but couldn’t crack the code. By the time that my father-in-law confronted me about it, I’d completely forgotten that I’d seen an encrypted file. That answer didn’t satisfy him. His level of paranoia about it and his insistence that I knew more than I did only fueled my suspicion that it likely contained something illegal.”

  “How’d he know that you’d seen it if you hadn’t opened the file?” Scott asked.

  “I assume that they have some type of notification set up if employees went places they shouldn’t be on the server. The IT guy that maintains their computer system is weird. I’d often suspected that there was spyware on my computer, but I didn’t have anything to hide, so I wasn’t overly concerned.

  “I knew something was wrong when my father-in-law wouldn’t let it go. He had some guy he said was from human resources come in and ask me a bunch of questions about what accounts I’d accessed and how I’d gotten into an encrypted file. He wouldn’t take my word for it that I hadn’t.”

  Mrs. Ward leaned forward in her seat. “What was in the file, you reckon?”

  JJ looked over her shoulder. She expected the older woman to be frightened or upset, but she only looked curious.

  “At the time, I had no idea. In hindsight, I suspected that they might have some shady clientele, but after that, I started digging. If they were going to accuse me, I was going to find out what they were hiding. I was concerned that I’d somehow be implicated if it turned out to be illegal. I felt I needed a way to extricate myself from them if it turned out they were dirty.”

  “And they were?” Mrs. Ward asked.

  JJ nodded and looked down at the black duffle at her feet. "After that, I contacted a friend from college for help. He’s a computer genius. I was able to copy the files onto a flash drive and he was able to crack the encryption fairly easily.”

  “
What was in the files? Secret bank accounts?” Mrs. Ward asked with just a bit too much enthusiasm.

  “It did. Twelve accounts, in fact. What was troubling was that they all traced back to my father-in-law. It turns out that my father-in-law’s accounting firm ran a money laundering operation for the cartel. There were two sets of books. He’d been cooking the books and skimming a little off the top for himself.”

  Scott whipped her direction. “Really? Wow.”

  “It seems the IT guy was in on it, but something I did tripped alarms set up by his supervisor. It was the cartel that had been spying on the computer network. He’d had to cover their tracks when the cartel demanded an audit to see what I’d been doing. But my father-in-law had somehow convinced them that I had done so with his permission and that he’d forgotten. He assured them that their scheme was still safe, and everything would remain in the family.”

  “You went along with that?” Scott asked.

  JJ looked out her window. Sometime during her speech, they’d passed the town of Farmington without her realizing. They were approaching Park Hills. Her stomach lurched. They’d tracked her vehicle to this town. Were more bounty hunters waiting for them at the next interchange or the one after that?

  “I played dumb. I didn’t confront my father-in-law with my suspicions. Not until I overheard his one-sided conversation with a Mexican national named Emilio Orozco ordering him to find out what I’d done with his money.”

  She paused.

  “The day of the EMP, I pulled into the parking lot at work and saw three men shove my father-in-law into the back of a vehicle and drive off. I knew it was only a matter of time before they found me. I went home, threw a few things into a bag, and left.”

  “They followed you? You said that your father was tracking you? What’s up with that?”

  JJ didn’t want to get into her father’s paranoia or why as a thirty-five-year-old woman, her father would still be tracking her phone. Having a daughter himself, he might actually understand overprotective parents, but she was frankly embarrassed by it.

  “I think that the cartel learned that I’d filed for divorce and took a new job out west. In the weeks after I found all this stuff out, I had been slowly making plans to leave. I was pretty much ready by the time they came for my father-in-law. I didn’t think they knew about my new Jeep. I had it registered in my dad’s name and kept it in a storage facility. I guess I wasn’t as clever as I thought.”

  “So what now?” Scott asked. “With all that is going on, why are they still here?”

  “Those guys know not to return until they find me or are told to stop looking. Obviously, with the phones not working, they can’t call in, and the cartel would want them to keep looking until they found me, I’m sure. Even if they couldn’t retrieve the money they think I stole, they’d want to set an example by killing me.”

  JJ didn’t tell them that she’d moved the money into a secret account. That was her insurance policy. If anything happened to her, they’d never find their money. They had to take her alive.

  No one spoke.

  JJ let Scott process all that she’d revealed to them. She half-expected him to stop the car and physically drag her out. Every time he slowed the vehicle, she tensed in anticipation. She had been surprised each time he’d accelerated without stopping. She wouldn’t have wanted to get involved if the tables were turned.

  They rode in silence for over an hour before reaching the interchange of Highway 67 and Interstate 55 at Festus, Missouri. A stalled car blocked the lane of the exit ramp to Interstate 55 North. JJ wasn’t sure they could make it around it.

  “You think we should get out and push it out of the way?” she asked.

  “That’s probably the best thing to do. I wouldn’t want to get stuck in the deeper snow on the shoulder,” Scott said as he slowed and put the Jeep into park.

  Luckily, the car was unlocked. The keys still hung in the ignition. Just in case it might start and make their job easier, JJ turned the key. Nothing happened.

  “Put it into neutral and we’ll push it onto the shoulder there,” Scott said.

  With the sedan in neutral, JJ joined Scott at the rear of the vehicle and the two of them pushed it onto the shoulder. As JJ turned back toward the Jeep, Scott held out his arm and blocked her. Her heart sank. She was sure this was where he intended to ditch her.

  “I under—”

  “Hurry!” Scott said as he sprinted back to the Jeep.

  JJ looked around to see what had him so concerned. It seemed their activity or the sound of a running vehicle had attracted unwanted attention. Two men and a teenaged boy were headed straight toward them. The crowbars in their hands told JJ that they might not be coming to offer to help them with the sedan.

  JJ jumped into the SUV and slammed her door as Scott stomped the gas pedal and the Jeep sped past the men. The older of the men started to step into the path of the vehicle. JJ drew in a long breath and started to lift her rifle. After seeing that Scott wasn’t slowing, the man quickly stepped back out of the way.

  JJ puffed out her cheeks and blew out the breath she held. She looked back at Mrs. Ward. All the color had drained from her face. JJ was concerned the poor woman might have a heart attack or stroke from all the excitement. Then the corners of her mouth curled upward.

  “You all right?” JJ asked her.

  “I haven’t had this much excitement since my days in the war,” she said.

  JJ raised her eyebrows.

  “I was in the U. S. Women’s Army Corps. I worked in Saigon helping train women for the Vietnamese Women’s Army Corps.”

  “That sounds exciting,” JJ said, trying to picture a young Mrs. Ward in uniform.

  Mrs. Ward paused, looking out of the car window before answering.

  “It was,” she finally said.

  As they drove under the Highway A overpass, something smashed into the windshield and temporarily blocked JJ’s view of the road. She shot a glance at Scott as the Jeep’s wiper blades swished the block of snow back and forth against the glass.

  “Can you see?”

  He sat up straighter in his seat and leaned in close to the steering wheel.

  “Yeah. I can see well enough,” Scott said. “Good thing that was mostly snow. A chunk of ice that large might have broken the windshield.”

  JJ looked back. As they continued north, she scanned the overpass for people on the bridge over the highway but saw none.

  “The snow on the overpass must have got too heavy,” JJ said as she turned to face the front.

  At the bridge over Joachim Creek, JJ thought she saw movement in one of the cars stalled in the passing lane. As Scott weaved the Jeep between the immobile cars, JJ leaned forward and studied the vehicle. If anyone was inside, they stayed hidden. JJ was glad. They’d had enough trouble for one day.

  As they approached the city of Arnold, the number of stalled cars increased and made it more difficult for Scott to navigate the offramp. At one point, Scott had to drive into the grass, reminding JJ of off-roading as the vehicle tipped to the right. Back on the roadway, Scott took the turn to Highway 141 North a little too fast and nearly hit one of the stalled cars.

  It took over an hour to drive the next nine miles from Arnold to Fenton. As they approached the last intersection before reaching Interstate 44, Scott asked Mrs. Ward to confirm that the city of Manchester was north of the interstate.

  “It’s about three or four miles past Interstate 44, I’d say,” she replied.

  JJ leaned forward as the interstate came into view. She pointed in that direction. “Is that…”

  “Soldiers?” Scott said. “Why are their soldiers in the road?”

  Chapter 6

  Red Cross Disaster Shelter

  Chesterfield Mall

  St. Louis, Missouri

  February 18th

  As the last of the lunch shift lined up outside the food court, Raine stood in front of the missing persons wall waiting for Sheena, Tom, or G
age to show up. She’d just about given up when she heard DeAndre’s cheery voice. Her mood instantly lifted. Raine stood on her tiptoes looking for them in the crowd of people heading to lunch.

  “Sheena,” Raine called over the noise.

  “Raine,” DeAndre yelled as he ran toward her.

  She hugged him and asked, “Where’s your mom?”

  “DeAndre Devon Brown! What have I told you about running off like that,” Sheena scolded.

  “Momma. I wanted to say hi to Raine.”

  “Don’t you backtalk me. You can’t run off from me, no matter what,” Sheena said, grabbing DeAndre by the shoulders.

  “Your mom is right, Dee. It’s not safe,” Raine said.

  “Hey, Raine. How are you, girl?” Sheena asked, reaching out for her. The two women hugged and moved to the side to allow others to pass.

  “I saw Antonio,” Raine said.

  “He made it. That’s great. How’d he do that?”

  Raine filled her in on what had happened to Antonio, including his injuries.

  “A manhole?” DeAndre said, wrinkling his little nose. “That’s stinky.”

  “I know. Good thing they let him take a shower, huh?”

  DeAndre nodded.