Green File Crime Thrillers Box Set

by James Kipling

  “I get it,” Alvin nearly snapped Mandy’s head off. “I know the stories—”

  “Historical facts,” Mandy fired at Alvin.

  “Yeah, sure,” Alvin caved in. He wasn’t in the mood to fight with Mandy. Besides, deep down, he knew in his heart and spirit that each man Mandy mentioned had indeed been protected and loved by God. Alvin’s only problem was, he didn’t feel worthy to be loved.

  The conversation turned back to Jessica. “Pastor, I didn’t mean to kill that man,” she finally spoke, allowing the heavy snow to cover her hair. “I’m very sorry.”

  Tom walked over to the stain glassed window in his office, paused, and took a few seconds to gather his thoughts.

  “Mrs. Mayes, I do not believe you are guilty,” he confessed in a deeply troubled voice. “I presided over your husband’s funeral, and our meeting was very brief. Yet, even though we spoke only briefly, I felt that someday, Mrs. Mayes, you would be in need of my help. I must admit that I’m shocked that you have reached out to me.” Tom stared at the beauty of the stain glassed window, struggling to secure peace and calmness. “I’m not entirely certain how I can help you?”

  “I’m not entirely certain why I called you,” Jessica confessed, feeling her tears finally drying up. The woman was emotionally exhausted and unable to cry anymore. “Pastor Braston, I put your phone number into my cell phone. Why? I don’t know. I’m not using my cell phone to talk to you. I’m using a cell phone, as it was explained to me, that is continually scrambling the call signals blocking any attempt to track the call.”

  Tom wondered how Jessica had come into possession of such a phone. Such phones were assigned to the government and military.

  “Mrs. Mayes, who are the people with you?” he calmly asked.

  Jessica turned her head, studied Alvin and Mandy, and then returned her focus to the falling snow.

  “My sister, Mandy Andrews, a brave man named Alvin Monroe, and a man named Jacob. I don’t know his last name or anything about him, really.”

  “Yes, the news has identified the woman as Mandy Andrews and one of the men as Alvin Monroe. The second man remains a mystery,” Tom informed Jessica, relieved that the woman had reveled accurate information to him. “Mrs. Mayes, will you please tell me how this all began?”

  “In person, please,” Jessica requested, smelling smoke coming from Alvin’s cigarette. The smell of cigarette smoke bothered her nose. “Alvin...please,” she whispered, and motioned for Alvin to move farther away. Alvin shrugged his shoulders and stepped behind the van. “Pastor Braston, I killed a man. I must live with that, and I’m guilty.” Jessica closed her eyes, saw herself standing next to a deep, dark, open grave, and shivered all over. “I must fight the lies,” she continued in a weak, desperate voice. “Not for my sake, but for the sake of my husband. I don’t care what happens to me, but I can’t allow the name of Jack Mayes to be turned into some kind of...some kind of bad word. My husband was a good man, Pastor. He’s not guilty of the crimes being attached to his name. The CIA...it’s the CIA...”

  Tom continued to stare at the stained-glass window. “Mrs. Mayes, I...” he began, but then paused, as the image of a young shepherd boy battling a giant slipped into his troubled mind. Tom saw the young shepherd boy slay the giant with faith even though a stone was used. The scene suddenly changed. Now Tom was seeing a beautiful queen named Esther, daring to save her people. “But in the book of Esther, the Lord’s Name isn’t mentioned once. The Lord was working behind the scenes,” Tom whispered.

  Out of nowhere, he felt a warm hand touch his shoulder; not a physical hand, but a spiritual hand. A hand full of power and glory. Shocked at feeling such a hand, Tom’s eyes snapped closed. He dropped down to his knees to pray. He was trapped in a world full of untold evils that were flooding the hearts of mankind. Evils filled with murder, lies, deceit, hate, sexual immorality, drugs, drunkenness, occult, thievery, false religions that tore souls away from the one True God of Israel. Yes, evil was flooding the hearts of mankind, and Tom wasn’t sure how to stop the rampage. Only God could bring victory against the Goliath’s standing on the battlefield taunting the faithful, filling the lands with one abomination after another.

  “Show me what to do,” Tom prayed, as tears burst from his weary eyes. “I can’t win this battle alone.”

  “Pastor Braston?” Jessica asked. “Pastor Braston, are you there? Hello?” Jessica cast a worried eye at Mandy. Mandy shrugged her shoulder.

  “Pastor Braston?” Jessica called out again. “Pastor Braston. Hello. Are you there?”

  Tom didn’t answer Jessica. He remained in prayer until an answer was revealed. By that time, Jessica had ended the call and was trying to call back.

  “I’m here, Mrs. Mayes,” Tom promised Jessica, answering her third call. “I needed to pray.” Tom turned back to the stain-glassed window on steady legs and advised in a careful but urgent voice, “Mrs. Mayes, if you can, travel to Hope Springs Baptist Church. You know the town.”

  Jessica closed her eyes, saw a snowy little church appear in her mind, and nodded her head. “Yes, I know the church,” she promised. “If I can. Please, pray for me, Pastor, because I can’t pray for myself anymore.”

  Tom heard a defeated woman speaking. “Mrs. Mayes, in time, we will discuss your faith. Now isn’t the time. You must try to travel to my location immediately. I can’t explain what has occurred within the last few minutes, but suddenly I feel a great sense of urgency. Whatever location you are at, leave now. Please.”

  Jessica didn’t know that Deputy Dwayne Notting, a twenty-eight-year-old man who carried a big chip on his shoulder, was traveling directly toward her to check the warehouse for bums. Dwayne took delight in tasing a few bums while scaring others off into the night by firing his side arm into the air. Bums, to Dwayne, were less than rats. They were a disease that needed to be destroyed. “Yes, okay, we’ll leave right this minute.”

  “Go,” Tom begged. “Mrs. Mayes, go!”

  “I...yes, okay.” Jessica ended the call, looked at Mandy, and yelled: “We have to leave now!”

  Alvin threw down his cigarette, raced around the van, and locked eyes with Jessica. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Jessica confessed, as her legs began to tremble with fear and anxiety. “Pastor Braston ordered us to leave this location.” Jessica snatched open the passenger side door of the van, spotted Jacob talking to General Garcia, and yelled, “We need to leave!”

  “Call you back, General,” Jacob told General Garcia. He threw the cell phone he was using down onto his lap and ordered everyone into the van. Alvin didn’t waste any time moving. Bypassing the wheelchair lift, he grabbed Mandy’s wheelchair and loaded the woman into the van using the back doors. Then he jumped in. Jacob nodded his head and kicked the gas, peeling out of the snow-covered lot he had parked the van in.

  Jessica crawled back to the spare tire, sat down, and grabbed Mandy’s hand. “We have to get to Pastor Braston. He’s our only chance.”

  Alvin bent down on one knee, struggling to keep his balance as Jacob raced the van around the warehouse and found a cruddy two-lane back road that was barely passable.

  Alvin studied Jessica’s face. “Who is this man?”

  Jessica stared into Alvin’s eyes; eyes filled with misery and defeat.

  “He’s the man who buried my husband,” she whispered, and said no more as Jacob turned right and fired the van north. No more than ten minutes later, the headlights on Dwayne’s patrol car appeared. Fortunately, the heavily falling snow and winds had erased the tracks Mandy’s van had left behind. Unfortunately, a bum who had been hiding in the warehouse decided to talk to Dwayne, hoping to get on the monster’s good side. Dwayne didn’t believe the bum and opted to have a little fun with his taser gun. That was when the bum, who was in no mood to be tormented, managed to strike Dwayne in the head with a board and kill the man. Frantic and terrified, the bum made a hasty plan to blame the death on the
four people he had seen parked in the back of the warehouse. Little did he know that his lies would set off a media frenzy.

  Chapter 6

  Snowy Woods

  Jacob felt the back, right tire of the van blow out with a loud pop.

  “Oh great,” he grumbled under his breath, and managed to pull the van into an abandoned gas station sitting on the side of a narrow back road soaked with snow and loneliness. “Alvin, help me change the tire,” he called out in a quick voice. “We have to keep moving.”

  Alvin glanced down at his hands. “Why?” he asked. “This hunk of junk is nearly on empty. It’s not like we can just pull up to a gas station and fill up.”

  Despair grabbed Jacob’s heart. It was growing dark, and the snow was falling heavier and heavier. The narrow back road passing by the abandoned gas station was nearly impassable, forcing Jacob to drive at a slow crawl. “Look, I’ve downloaded a map of the United States onto my cell phone. I know where every state and federal roadblock is, thanks to General Garcia. All we have to do is keep moving.”

  “How?” Alvin barked at Jacob as he crawled to the front of the van to lock eyes with his friend. “Man, we’re coasting on fumes as it is. How much farther do you think we can get?”

  “Twenty miles,” Jacob explained. “General Garcia is sending a team to pick us up in a town called Grayfield.”

  “What?” Mandy gasped, sitting in her wheelchair. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

  Jacob tapped the steering wheel. “General Garcia and I agreed that we want to leave this van in a small town…in a remote location. We want the van found but not immediately. The CIA must believe we ditched the van and continued moving west.” Jacob paused for a minute, and then shook his head. “Look, everyone, our people are being heavily watched, okay. What it comes down to is that General Garcia and I agreed that it’s worth the danger to send out an extraction team. The safe house in Wyoming is being watched, and there’s no way we can make it to Pennsylvania in this van. As it stands, we’re trapped in the state of Missouri right now. Every state and federal agency has thrown up roadblocks everywhere. There are only a handful of roads that aren’t being watched, and we can forget about traveling over the state border. An extraction, although dangerous, is our only choice.”

  “But Pastor Braston told us to travel to his location,” Jessica told Jacob in a desperate tone. “Jacob, we have to reach Pastor Braston.”

  Jacob turned in his seat and looked into the shadowy interior of the van, Gazing at the woman’s beautiful face, he nodded his head. “Mrs. Mayes, I can appreciate your concern. As it stands right now, we are in a very dangerous situation. General Garcia and I have agreed, along with other high-ranking officials, that an extraction is the only choice.”

  “Oh, man,” Alvin moaned, “if the safe house is being watched you better know—”

  “I know,” Jacob told Alvin in a sharp tone. “The CIA has people crawling around all over the place. The Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol Building...like roaches.”

  “Then how?” Alvin demanded. “And why?” he added,” Why should I endanger my life by trusting the government?”

  Jacob gave Alvin time to vent before speaking. “Alvin, even if the extraction team if followed, at least we’ll be picked up,” he explained. “The extraction team General Garcia is sending is a four-man team made up of retired Navy Seals and—”

  “Man, I don’t care about a bunch of retired Navy Seals,” Alvin promised Jacob. “Right now, all of our faces are being broadcast across the entire planet. I know the system, man. I know how the people in the shadows play.”

  “What do you mean?” Mandy asked in a scared voice.

  Alvin turned to face Mandy. “Yeah, we might get extracted, but you better know that’s only because we have information that both sides of the aisle want. If our brains were drained, this man sitting here,” Alvin nodded at Jacob, “wouldn’t be wasting his time with us. No sir, this man is here because of that woman,” Alvin pointed directly at Jessica. “You and me,” he told Mandy, “are just along for the ride. So, don’t believe for one single second this General Garcia fellow cares one grain of dust about any of us.”

  “He’s right,” Jacob confessed. “Mrs. Mayes, you have information that we need. Ms. Anderson, Alvin, you two are of little importance but still need to be questioned; at least that’s how General Garcia views the situation. General Garcia is a good man, but right now, he doesn’t have time to become emotionally involved. The very existence of our country is at stake, and that man has to remain extremely focused on numerous operations. So, what Alvin just said is true. You have to view it from the other side.” Jacob reached out and patted Alvin’s shoulder. “We’re all nobody’s until we have a piece of candy someone wants. Right, my friend?”

  “You got that right,” Alvin told Jacob in a miserable voice and then looked deeply into his friend’s eyes. “We talked, remember? You spilled all the goodies to me, remember?”

  “What are you talking about?” Mandy demanded.

  “I already suggested the big dogs come and save us,” Alvin explained, “when we were at that dirt motel. Jacob here wasn’t keen on the idea. Remember?” Alvin asked Jacob. “Jacob insisted that the CIA has too many eyes about, watching the movement of every good little soldier. But,” Alvin added, “not only the CIA. We’re talking about every person who opposes President Green; people in the State Department, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, you name it. That agency has eyes.” Alvin shook his head. “A simple text or e-mail...that’s all it takes to wake up the wolf pack.”

  “Alvin, at this point, there’s no other option,” Jacob insisted.

  “Man, back at the motel you assured me that there was no chance of an extraction team being sent out without being followed. And now that our little shoot out at high noon has been shown to the world, forget it,” Alvin told Jacob. He knew Alvin was speaking the truth, but what choice did he have?

  “We have to reach Pastor Braston,” Jessica insisted. “Jacob, please. Pastor Braston will help us.”

  “Mrs. Mayes, General Garcia—not a small-town pastor—can help us,” Jacob objected. “As I mentioned, at this point we don’t have a choice.”

  “I have a choice,” Alvin informed Jacob. “I ain’t putting myself in the sight of a sniper. No sir. I’ll walk off in this snow and freeze to death before I willingly eat a bullet.”

  “Same here,” Mandy added. “I trust what Alvin is saying.”

  “You do?” Alvin asked Mandy in a shocked voice. Why in the world would a crippled white lady trust a black man who was a nobody?

  “Yes, Alvin, I do,” Mandy promised, seeing an intelligent man instead of a black man who considered himself dead. Alvin was a fighter, at least in Mandy’s eyes, as well as a man who understood the rules of the game.

  “I trust you, too,” Jessica told Alvin. “You have been very brave and very kind to me and my sister. Back at the motel, you could have run. Instead, you protected Mandy. I’m very grateful to you Alvin, and I do trust you with my life.” Jessica looked at Jacob. “I’m sorry, but I believe the majority has spoken.”

  “We have just enough gas to get to Grayfield,” Jacob pointed out. “This van I’m driving is in the crosshairs of every cop in the nation. We have no other—”

  “Pastor Braston can come and extract us,” Jessica informed Jacob, surprised at the sternness in her voice.

  “Mrs. Mayes, I’m not going to trust a small-town Pastor. We have urgent business to—”

  “I’m not going to trust the government,” Jessica told Jacob in a sharp tone. “Yes, it may be true that there are people you trust, but you said it yourself—traitors are everywhere. Even IF we are safely extracted, then what? How can you assure our safety? How can you assure me that someone pretending to be on your side will not try and harm us?”

  “Mrs. Mayes, I—”

  “You can’t,” Jessica informed Jacob. S
he stood up from the tire she was sitting on and rubbed her neck. “I am far too tired to argue this point any further. My mission is to clear my husband’s name. If I’m taken into protective custody, I may never be able to do that.”

  “Mrs. Mayes, as much as I respect your desire to stand up—”

  “There is a way,” she whispered and stopped rubbing her neck.

  Jacob stared at Jessica. Was the woman holding back a vital piece of information?

  “Mrs. Mayes?” he asked.

  “No, not here,” Jessica insisted. “My mind is far too exhausted to think clearly right now. I need rest, food and time to put my thoughts in order.” Jessica reached down and took Mandy’s left hand. “Jacob, I will do everything within my power to reach Pastor Braston. I can’t put into words right now what I’m feeling, but I can promise you that Pastor Braston is a true safe house.”

  “Hey, if the lady is insisting, we better listen,” Alvin nudged Jacob. “Besides, you’re the one who let her contact the Pastor.”

  “Against my better judgment,” Jacob sighed, feeling a terrible headache approaching. “I allowed Mrs. Hayes to contact the Pastor because she was very upset. She assured me the man was someone she could trust.” In all truth, Jacob had allowed Jessica to contact Pastor Braston with the hope that the man would reveal vital information. Jessica didn’t know the phone call had been recorded...or did she? Jacob was still waiting for General Garcia’s team to examine the phone call and decipher each word spoken. “Look, everyone,” he stated in a tone he hoped sounder authoritative, “we are in position—”

  “To die,” Alvin cut Jacob off, cast his eyes at Jessica, and nodded his head. “Jessica, call your Pastor friend and tell him to travel to Missouri.” Alvin rubbed his chin. “Does this Pastor friend of yours have a church van?”

  “I don’t know.” Jessica answered Alvin, studying the man’s thoughtful eyes.