Harvey Bennett Mysteries Box Set 3

by Nick Thacker

  “I don’t think so, Eliza,” Ben said. “We would’ve heard a gunshot last night or this morning. Clive is out here somewhere, but I don’t think this guy got to him.”

  Ben realized as he said the words that they would do little to comfort her. It's not that he didn't believe them, he did. It was just that they both knew there was something out there besides a man with a gun. Something they both knew was actively willing to kill and had in the past.

  It had killed three times already, at least in that they had discovered. It was leaving a trail of death and blood behind it, a trail that —

  Ben caught himself. He was onto something; he just wasn't quite sure what it was yet. He let the thought percolate in his mind, bouncing around as long as it took to find a home. He had never been someone known for intellectual endeavors, but he was far from stupid. Ben had an uncanny sense of street smarts, an ability to process and analyze a situation from multiple angles at once until they suddenly clicked into place and made sense. He likened it to a puzzle, all of the pieces being jumbled around inside a cement mixer until miraculously being spit out, complete and perfect.

  It wasn’t an infallible system, but it worked for him. He would add different puzzle pieces and variables and elements to the mix and let them all interact and bounce around together, sometimes for days on end. But at some point, after some number of additional variables or luck or wit or whatever it was that made it all happen, his mind would spit out an answer.

  He sensed that he was close to that kind of answer now. He was close to figuring out what it was this place was trying to tell him.

  “You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you?” Eliza asked.

  He was sitting on his butt, next to her, and he looked to his left to see her working her right leg back and forth, bending her knee. “What you mean?” He asked. “What am I thinking about?”

  She answered. “There’s something about all of this that doesn’t make sense yet, right? Something that should make sense but doesn’t, because we either don’t know enough or we aren’t thinking of it the right way. I can see you processing it, just like my husband used to do.”

  “Processing things is what every single living person does,” Ben said. He didn’t appreciate being psychoanalyzed, and he certainly didn’t like the connotations of being constantly compared to her late husband.

  “No, it’s different from just normal human processing,” she said. “It’s deeper, something more emotional. You — and him, when he was alive — are able to see things from multiple points of view, driven not just by logic and instinct but also by your emotion. You allow that to help solve problems.”

  Ben was no psychologist, so he couldn't comment on the veracity of her claims, but it certainly struck him as true. He shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. Julie always told me that I am actually a really emotional guy; it's all just bundled up inside, underneath all these unemotional layers."

  “That’s pretty much what I told my husband, as well,” Eliza said. “He always seemed so… tough. Nothing could get to him, you know? Nothing seemed to bother him, until it did.”

  Eliza was looking straight ahead.

  “He would just keep it all bottled up inside, like some sort of human cliché, but if you knew what questions to ask, or rather, how to ask them, he would let it all out into this beautiful mess of chaotic truth. Like, he could be chewing on a problem for weeks or months and then all of a sudden burst out with some multifaceted, complex solution to whatever problem it was he had been working on.”

  Ben nodded slowly. So it seems we did have a lot in common, after all, he thought. It’s a shame this guy is no longer with us.

  “That does sound like me,” he said.

  They sat there for a few more minutes, both watching the woods for any movement, anything that might alert them to the hunter trying to sneak up on them. Ben didn’t like being motionless, but he knew Eliza needed to rest, to let her knee’s swelling go down. Besides that, he didn’t mind a bit of a rest himself.

  “I read about you, you know,” Eliza said. “Before I reached out to the CSO. I did my homework, like I always do.”

  37

  Ben

  "Oh?" Ben asked. "What did you find? You know, all that journalistic bullshit is just that — BS with a handful of truth in it. The CSO isn't some mercenary-for-hire organization or some group of superheroes that runs around shooting bad guys."

  “No, not that,” she said. “I went back further, back to before you guys were CSO.”

  Ben knew what she was getting at. He knew there was nothing in any newspaper articles or journalist reportings about him prior to his involvement and semi-celebrity status with the CSO.

  Except for one thing…

  “It’s heroic what you did,” Eliza said. “But it didn’t feel heroic, did it? At the time, you probably weren’t even thinking or feeling much at all. You just wanted to save your family.”

  Ben looked at her again, seeing her in a new light. This was the first time anyone had said anything to him like that. "Yeah," he said. "That's exactly what happened. I'm no hero or anything like what all those articles said. I just didn't want my dad or my brother to die. I didn’t want to die.”

  "So, you did what you had to do."

  “Yeah, I did. I don’t know if it was right or wrong or somewhere in between, but I definitely didn’t care at the time. I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time. I knew where the rifle was, and I heard screams. So I ran there and I did what I had to do.”

  He paused for a second, taking another sip of water. “People got to say what they thought it was, what they thought I was. But they never asked me, you know? They just put their spin on it and just sent it out, like they were some sort of expert on me and what I did.”

  "People love to tell me what I'm thinking," Eliza said. "Maybe it's because I'm a woman, because I have breasts, because I'm attractive and somehow intimidating, I don't know. I don't care. People always like to tell me what I 'meant' when I give a speech or publish a paper. There's always commentary on it, but at the end of the day, there is absolutely no question in my mind what I’m all about.”

  Ben nodded along, enjoying listening to this woman talk. She was intensely smart, and he got the sense that she was wise beyond her years as well.

  “The thing is, if enough time goes by when you don’t recommit to yourself, recommit to what you know, you start to believe these people. You start to think they might be onto something, that they keep bringing up the same things about you over and over and over again, and eventually you wonder if they might be right.”

  “How do you ‘recommit’ to yourself?” Ben asked. “What do you mean by that?”

  She shrugged. "I'm not really sure, not yet. That's just my working theory, anyway. But I think it has something to do with this —" she waived an outstretched arm over the land around them. "I think it starts with committing to what you know is right; what you know is true, and then just… Doing it. Forget what they all say about you or what they want you to do or to be. You just have to commit and then do it."

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and Ben could see some moisture around the edges. He knew she was thinking of her husband, missing him. Wishing he were here right now in place of Ben.

  Then he understood.

  She wasn’t flirting with him; she didn't like him in that way. It wasn't about that; it had never been about that.

  Eliza was dealing with the loss of her husband, dealing with a death she thought had been murder. The man had been taken from this world while at the prime of his life, doing something he believed in and something he wanted to accomplish. It was supremely unfair, and Ben had known all too many people who had found similar fates.

  He didn’t fault Eliza for being reminded of all of this; how could he? She had hired him because she knew his qualifications, because she knew what he stood for and what the CSO had done in the past. But she had also brought him on because she knew something deeper about him that he
himself was only just beginning to understand. She knew who he was inside, in his core, and it was that man she had wanted to partner with. He shared those qualities, those characteristics, with her late husband, and neither of them could do anything about that.

  Of course he would remind her of her husband. Of course he would act in a similar way.

  He reached over and took Eliza’s hand in his. He placed his other hand on top, for a moment forgetting about their predicament and setting the rifle by his side. “I’m going to help you figure this out,” Ben said. “I don’t fault you for getting me involved in this; this is exactly the sort of thing we are trying to fight against. I know you know that, but I want you to hear me say it. I’m going to do everything in my power to end this, to make things right. It won’t bring him back, but I sure as hell want to make them pay for it.”

  When he finished, she began sobbing, the tears falling freely over her cheeks and down her face. They splashed onto her jeans, forming tiny dark spots on her legs.

  Ben took a deep, long breath, held it for ten seconds, then let it out.

  It was time to act, time to press on and overcome and solve the mystery. It was time to reach down for that reserve of inner strength he knew he had, to tap into that resilient core he had summoned on occasion. He released Eliza’s hand and reached down for his assault rifle once again.

  They needed to find Clive, and they needed to find whoever it was that was out here with them.

  38

  Ben

  They found Clive in a small gulch, about three-hundred yards north of the cave and downhill a bit. After deciding that they were safe from the shooter, Ben had helped Eliza to her feet, and together they slowly began marching downhill and to the north, pushing toward EKG headquarters.

  They had been walking for about twenty minutes, looking for any sign of their third teammate, when they had heard the voice yelling in the distance.

  By that time, Eliza had felt comfortable putting some weight on her knee, and Ben had found a blunt, smooth stick for her to use as a sort of makeshift crutch, and they picked up their pace and worked downhill in the direction of Clive's calling.

  His backpack was on the ground near a tree, but when they got closer, they saw that Clive himself had fallen into a steep, shallow valley. It was an old, dry riverbed that had long ago cut through the side of the ridge toward lower elevation, about six feet across and between four and eight feet deep.

  Ben carefully climbed down the side and knelt by Clive, whose face was a bloody mess. Ben quickly checked the younger man's vitals, finding nothing out of place and nothing terribly urgent. He had a bloody nose, a bunch of smaller cuts and scrapes on his face and neck, and a huge welting bruise on his right shoulder. It was this bruise, hiding a dislocated shoulder that had made it impossible for Clive to crawl out of the ravine. His body, after falling, had been twisted around so that his top half was downhill a bit, making it impossible to move without seriously hurting his arm.

  “I’m glad to see you’re alive,” Ben said.

  "Me too, though this thing hurts so bad, I might as well be dead."

  “I think I can pop it back into place,” Ben said. “But — and I can’t stress this enough — I’m definitely not a doctor.” Ben smiled, trying to lighten the mood a bit.

  Clive smiled back. “Yeah, I know. And I get it. This is not the first time one of my limbs has gone awry. Do your best, Doc.” He winked at Ben.

  Ben pressed on his shoulder, just above the joint, while tightly grabbing the man’s upper arm and bicep with his other hand. He waited until Clive relaxed and looked the other direction, then he pulled forward on the arm while slightly twisting at the same time. Clive wailed in pain, but then sucked in a quick breath and went silent.

  Ben waited, watching the younger man.

  Clive gritted his teeth, then slowly, carefully, put a bit of pressure on his elbow. “Well, looks like you may have a career in the medical field before you know it,” he said. “Good as new, I presume.”

  “Definitely not as good as new,” Ben said, helping the man to his feet. “But it’s certainly not as bad as it was before.”

  Together, they climbed out of the gulch and reunited with Eliza. Eliza shared her own injury story with Clive before asking, “What happened to you? Why did you leave the cave this morning?”

  “I heard it,” he said. “Or, I thought I did. It was like a scratching sound, like something out of a movie. Big, intense. It was just outside the cave, I swear.”

  “And you didn’t just decide to shoot it?”

  He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t see it. It was already beginning to be morning, so there was a bit of daylight. I thought I saw a shadow, but I couldn’t actually see it. I didn’t want to wake either of you up, so I snuck out with my rifle and sidearm and a few of the magazines. I followed it, or, at least I thought I did, down to the edge of the woods.”

  “You followed the shadow? Or you found tracks?”

  “I did, I saw this shadowy thing moving, like it could go completely silent for long periods of time without moving or making any noise, and then suddenly I would see a small flicker of a shadow. No tracks, though. Almost like…”

  “Almost like what?” Ben asked.

  “Well, almost like it was… in the trees. But it wasn’t. I mean, not when I saw it.”

  Ben and Eliza were shocked, and it registered on their faces. Ben looked at her, then back at Clive.

  Is he messing with us? “What do you mean, you saw it?”

  Is he not in his right mind?

  “No, I swear,” Clive continued. “It was… it was right in front of me.” He shuddered. “I swear to you guys, I followed it — or at least its shadow — until I was right here. I stopped, waiting for a minute because I thought I lost it, and then I…”

  “What?”

  “And then I turned around. And then it was right in front of me. There was nothing, and then it was there. Standing over me. Had to be… It had to be twenty feet tall.”

  Twenty feet tall?

  Ben knew something had gotten into this guy's mind, and it was now playing tricks on him and the rest of them. But still, this was a professional, trained hunter—someone who traveled all over the world to hunt big game. Clive might be going insane, but Ben knew there had to be at least a kernel of truth to his story.

  “What was it?” Eliza asked. “The creature that did all of this — the one that killed all these people. What was it?”

  Clive nodded slowly, contemplating his answer before speaking. “I — I want to say… I mean, it was a gorilla. But, it also wasn’t.”

  “A gorilla?" Ben asked. "Like, a jungle gorilla? Black, beating on its chest, King Kong-sort of a gorilla?"

  “A silverback, just like what you would see in a zoo. But this one, it was, different…”

  "Like, twenty-feet-tall different?" Ben asked. He didn't intend to sound diminishing, but he didn't believe for a moment that an actual twenty foot-tall silverback gorilla was running around the hillsides of Switzerland.

  He flashed a glance at Eliza, only to find her giving him the same look.

  We’re going to have to rein him in a bit, Ben thought. Whatever got to him, whatever this creature is, it sounds like it does more psychological damage than physical.

  Then he remembered the men they had stumbled upon, back at the campsite and in the cave, and the one Clive had seen yesterday. No, he thought, changing his initial assessment. This thing definitely causes more physical harm.

  “I don’t really know yet,” Clive said. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since, well, ever since I was pushed into the hole. What it could be and all that. I mean, it was absolutely a gorilla. Older male, I would guess — but the way it looked at me. It was like it was actually seeing me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ben said. “Hold on, go back. It pushed you into that hole? Is that how you got injured?”

  Clive shook his head rapidly as if trying to push away the cobwebs i
nside his brain. "No, sorry. That's not — that's not what happened. This thing was there, just like I said, but then… It wasn't. I mean, I'm sure it ran away or climbed a tree or something, but I didn't see it. Or at least, I don't remember seeing it."

  “Maybe you should sit down, Clive,” Eliza said. “Maybe take a drink of water and —“

  “I know what I saw!” Clive snapped, his eyes suddenly flaring open and firing toward Eliza.

  39

  Ben

  "Whoa, Buddy," Ben said. "We're just trying to help. We found you; now we need to figure out what this thing was. You have to help us figure it out. You say it was a gorilla, twenty feet tall, that can appear at will anywhere in the forest, and it got away from you: a trained hunter and experienced tracker. So you have to understand, it sounds a bit far-fetched."

  "I know what I saw," Clive said again. His voice had calmed, however, and he looked at Ben and Eliza with a pained expression on his face. "I swear to you both, again, I'm telling the truth. But no, it wasn't that thing that did this. He — or it — disappeared, like I said when the gunshot —"

  “There was a gunshot?”

  Clive nodded. “Yeah, at least one, maybe more. We both heard the gunshot, me and that… thing, and then it just disappeared when I looked away. I wasn’t sure where the gunshot had come from at first. I grabbed my own and got it ready, and then… And then some guy rushed me.”

  “He rushed you?” Ben asked.

  Clive nodded vigorously. “Yes, he came from my left side, from behind a tree. It was probably too close for him to get a shot lined up before I saw him, so he just charged me, knowing that I also couldn’t get a shot off. He tackled me, and we fought for a minute before he punched me and cut my face and then kicked me into the gulch.”

  Ben was absolutely shocked to hear this. Not only had Clive snuck out and tracked their mysterious apelike apparition, but he had come into contact with the man who was after him and Eliza earlier, and even fought him off.