One Way Out: Scout Ledger Thriller

by Elleby Harper

  Despair crawled into bed with her frustration. She paced up and down the length of the shed, dodging the piles of fishing line that were stacked against one side in front of a row of basins. Her eyes tracked from the ground, moving upwards a foot at a time, climbing the walls until she reached the line of broken skylights in the ceiling.

  Her time in parkour meant she was used to judging distances, heights and scales. Where the wall met the ceiling was around ten feet from the ground, and the ceiling rose on a low angle another two feet to its maximum height, and then sloped back down to the other wall. There were two skylights on each side of the wooden supporting beam that ran through the middle. Each was a rectangle about four feet long and half as wide. They were installed to run lengthwise down the slope of the roof, rising from the wall up from a narrow aluminum lip. They were the source of the incoming moonlight and the evening breeze, and a much newer addition to a structure that had been built around the 1900s.

  She stopped pacing. The skylights were an available exit. All she needed was to reach them. Ten feet from floor to ceiling. At five feet nine inches, Ledger had a standing vertical reach of nearly seven feet. She had easily run up walls of eight and nine feet during her parkour days, even swinging herself up on top of ten-foot heights. She had a strong climb up technique. But the last time she had scaled anything approaching that height had been years ago.

  She shifted her glance back to the tablet in her hand. Pedro was back in the pick up and Ledger recognized landmarks through the windshield. Rico and his men were on their way back to Kendrew’s. She guessed she had between twelve and fifteen minutes before their truck bounced back down the driveway.

  She took another sweeping view of the shed’s interior. No other escape routes presented.

  The skylights ran above the two longest walls. Each of these held a row of metal basins ending in a bench that presumably had at one time been used to stack sacks and nets of oysters. She considered using one of the sinks to climb upwards, but the metal was old and rusted. It would be dangerous to test her weight on them. That left the metal bench.

  It stood on rusting legs, clamped to the wall with corroded bolts. Using the screwdriver she easily levered it from the wall. She started to drag the bench away, to give herself a clear run at the wall, then changed her mind. She upended the short sheet of metal onto one narrow side, jamming it against the wall on an angle to make a slope. The legs stopped the flat surface meeting the wall, but they were rusted through. Two short, sharp stomps later they were detached. She was pleased. It meant she could use it as a ramp in her upward climb. Rather than starting vertically from the ground, she would have a two-foot head start because that was roughly how high up the wall the table leant into. She was going to need the help because she had a surprise planned for Rico.

  This time instead of skipping over the spools of line, her glance lingered. She took one of the spools and unrolled the tubed fishing wire, so like a garotte. With some tugging, it turned out to be quite easy to strip the wire from the tubing. When she judged she had sufficient length, she used the wire cutters from the toolbox to snip off the end. She circled the wire along the floor, from the doorway to her makeshift ramp.

  Then she took both ends and threaded them through the belt loops in her denim skirt and tied a knot to secure the wire around her waist.

  She didn’t need to look at the screen to know the men were heading back. She could hear the gravel crunching and scattering under their returning tires. Thirty yards away and getting closer. It was now or never.

  She tucked the tablet into the back of her skirt. In a last minute decision she consigned the utility knife to a pocket, ensuring the blade had been fully retracted. Then she strode out from the slanted table, pacing backwards. She would have liked to have a test run, warm up her muscles, but there was no time. She stretched up onto her toes in her thin-soled shoes, flexing her ankles and calves. She focused her mind, shutting out the distracting sounds from outside. And ran.

  She took off in a burst of speed, running up the table in three paced steps and then pushing off the wall into a leap. She used her leg almost as a pole vault to thrust herself upwards. With the drag from the wiring around her waist, this was the most difficult part and the reason she needed the extra help from the ramp.

  She managed to get high enough to grip the ledge of the skylight. She hung on by eight fingertips, her body dangling in the air. Scrambling her feet against the wall, she inched her body higher, taking pressure off her burning fingers. Firing up her back muscles she used her strength to pull her chest up over the ledge, resting on her straightened arms. Now her head and torso poked above the roof line. With a surge of sinewy strength she swung her legs around and then she was lying on top of the shingled roof.

  13

  The roof of the old oyster processing plant was low pitched, slanting downwards at around 18 degrees. Ledger lay full length beside the skylight, digging her toes in against the shingles, fighting not to slip. She was also anchored by the steel cable to the inside of the shed. She peered back through the skylight. She could just notice the suspended wiring but she hoped the thin steel cables wouldn’t immediately be spotted by the incoming men.

  The roof slope faced the beach so she couldn’t be seen from the driveway. She could hear the men exiting the vehicle. Doors slamming. Voices raised and talking in excited Spanish.

  She hooked the tablet out of the back of her skirt to watch the footage from Pedro’s body cam. His brother was in front of him as both men approached the sliding door to gain access to the shed. The images jiggled with each footstep, veered to the side, then back to the man in front who was fiddling with the door. Disarming and disconnecting the booby trap bomb. She saw him draw his gun. She saw the tip of Pedro’s gun move into view as he waved it in a signal to his brother to open up while Pedro covered him.

  She had hoped all three men would enter the shed together, but it looked like Rico was waiting by the truck. She was sorry about that, but that was the luck of the draw. She would work with the hand she was dealt. It was time for her to make her move.

  On her hands and knees, she climbed to the peak of the roof. Twisting her body around to face outward, she eased herself to her feet. This was risky. If Rico looked up he would see her silhouette rising like a human-shaped chimney against the light from the moon. She looked down at him. He was leaning against the vehicle, smoking a cigarette. A drift of smoke hung over his head.

  From under the roof’s overhang she heard Pedro and his brother slide the door open so violently it slammed back on the rails with a screech. She dropped the tablet onto the shingles. She had no more use for it. She untied the wire at her waist, leaving it within the belt loops and gripped the ends in both fists. She didn’t want to miscalculate and cut herself in half from the thin steel when it was jerked back.

  She balanced for a second and then launched herself towards the edge. Using her momentum she threw her body forward, almost flying into the night air. The drop straight down from the roof was ten feet to the ground. She planned to hit the soft beach sand at an ever-decreasing angle, so the impact would be from half that height.

  She had a split second to imagine what was happening inside from the sounds of chaos and screaming echoing through the open skylight.

  She was using her weight as ballast to tighten the cable wire she had laid out on the floor. It would pull up, looping around the men and sweeping them off their feet as she dragged the wire with her. If her rough calculations were correct it would snag them, whipping them across the room to smack up against the wall under the skylight. Their bodies were an obstacle to the smooth movement of the cables streaming out the opening. The tug from the cables was too strong for Ledger to keep hold and the ends ripped from her grasp, freeing her from the last of the drag.

  Then her attention was fully focused on landing as far away as she could from the building to make the distance of her fall as short as possible. She knew she was lucky to be heading
for the beach side of the shed. Sand was a forgiving surface that offered the softest impact for her body. Using her free-running skills, she landed on the balls of her feet, her knees bent to absorb the landing as she continued her forward motion into a neat roll. Ahead of her a white mist crept in from the sea’s edge. Above her, incoming clouds covered the glow from the moon. She could smell a fresh rainfall approaching.

  But she didn’t have time to contemplate the change in weather.

  She clambered to her feet, turned and ran back to the building. The sand slowed her down, grabbing at her feet, absorbing her footfalls. That was a good thing because Rico wouldn’t hear her approach. She flattened herself against the back of the building, then edged her way around.

  Entwined in ragged, twisted oyster wire, fishing line and tattered tarpaulins, were stacks of recycled lumber, sea worn driftwood and broken fishing traps burgeoning from the side, forcing her to step away from the wall. Skirting the abandoned materials, she edged her head around the corner.

  She could see Rico’s pick up truck, but Rico was no longer in sight. The smoking stub of his cigarette lay beside a tire. He had moved in a hurry. Given the sounds from inside the building, it was obvious Rico had disappeared inside to investigate the commotion. He would be exiting very shortly and that’s when she needed to make her move before he got away. He would be on high alert because he would have seen that she had escaped, so she needed to take him by surprise.

  Ledger backed up and quickly sorted a hefty piece of timber from the stack of recycled boards. She moved into position beside the open doorway, being careful to avoid the dismantled booby trap that Pedro and his brother had left on the ground. She waited, pressed hard against the siding. She pictured CC’s van exploding, his body flailed by gunshot as he tried to escape the burning inferno. She took a firmer grip on the board.

  As soon as Rico’s leg strode out the door, she swung the plank like a baseball bat, aiming for the soft target of his belly. She gave it everything she had. She was aiming for a home run off this strike. Rico doubled over, his mouth a big O as he struggled for breath.

  Ledger scanned the doorway in case he was being followed by his men, but there was no movement there. She swiveled back to Rico.

  Her second blow struck the hand holding her Sig Sauer. It clattered to the ground and she kicked it out of his reach. He staggered another step forward. She raised the plank and smashed it down on the back of his skull. The sound of bone cracking was loud. She pictured his brain shaking like a jelly inside its casing, the injured organ swelling until it cut off access to its blood supply. Without that, Rico was a dead man within the next five minutes.

  Still, he remained on his feet for a few more seconds, swaying as though to music only he could hear. Then he sagged, first to his knees with a crash, then straight down flat on his face with a force sufficient to break his nose.

  She discarded the wood, slipping the utility knife from her pocket, and bent over him. A quick check of his carotid confirmed he hadn’t needed the full five minutes. Blood trickled from skin broken by bone and was joined by heavy drops of rain. The storm was coming in.

  Ledger waited a moment to steady her breath, listening hard for other sounds. All was quiet save the soft pounding of waves on the beach and the steady rattle of raindrops on the shingled roof and the metal surfaces of the pick up truck.

  She found her phone in the back pocket of Rico’s pants and returned it to her own. She wasn’t ready to make the call to Bogel or Dallenbach just yet.

  She retrieved her gun from the ground, tucking it into the back of her skirt. Then she approached Rico’s Ford. Throwing open the doors to the front and back of the dual cab she used the light from her phone to shine inside because the cab’s interior light had been disconnected.

  Two gray and black gym bags were lodged underneath the front seats. She tugged them out and unzipped them. One was filled with plastic bags of white powder. She had interrupted Rico’s meetings with his dealers at Northern Shore. The other was three quarters full of neatly bundled hundreds. She riffled through a few stacks, swiftly calculating the bag’s total at around five hundred thousand dollars. She rezipped the bags and left them in the back of the cab.

  She crossed back to the processing shed, entered the building and waited for her eyes to readjust to the darkness. She could hear crashes of thunder and streaks of lightning lit up the night sky through the open skylights, sufficient for her to see the devastation she had caused. It looked like a mini cyclone had sped through the room upending the tidy stacks of spooled cable and tearing free a section of the metal trough from the center of the room. She knew the authorities would have difficulty deciphering what had happened.

  The force with which the cable had tightened around Pedro and his brother as she leapt off the roof had whipped the men off their feet, across the room and smashed them into the wall. When the cable had been jerked from her grip, it had slacked and their bodies had dropped back to the floor, along with the cable. There were dark patches splashed across the wall, up near the skylight. Blood stains.

  She picked her way through the debris to cross to the men.

  Pedro’s neck was at an odd angle, his body a jumble of loose limbs. His head was arched so far backward the skin of his neck had split, the cause of some of the blood on the wall. It was obvious he had hit the wall with his chin pointed up. The force of the impact had driven his head backwards, snapping his spine. Death had been quick.

  Pedro’s brother was still breathing. She could hear his whimpers and see the blood burbling through his shirt from his crushed chest. The rest of his body was a jellied mess of broken bones and skin mottled by dark bruising. He wasn’t going to survive. She bent close to him, the Sig in her hand. One shot would put him out of his misery. It would also leave evidence behind that couldn’t be covered up.

  She didn’t shoot him for the same reason she hadn’t used her gun on Rico.

  She had a job that was bound up in laws, people’s constitutional rights and probable cause before she pulled her weapon and fired. Her duty of care was to arrest Rico and his men, not kill them for no other reason than they were bad people.

  By rights her duty now was to call Bogel or Dallenbach and offer her statement of events, confess to what she had done. Alerting the authorities to her actions meant she would be facing a long trial. Her lawyers would fight for her, putting forward the argument of self-defense. She was a woman in fear of her life from men she had seen kill her colleagues. There was no doubt she would win the battle. But it would tie her life in knots for the next two or even three years. She would be put on desk duty or, even worse, stood down to twiddle her thumbs until the verdict was in. She had known all this when she made her decision to avenge CC and Wyche.

  She rose to her feet. The hammering of rain on the roof was fading to a patter. The storm was blowing itself out as quickly as it had arrived. Above the sounds of the dying storm she heard the growl of a vehicle approaching down the driveway.

  14

  Ledger recognized the powerful rumble of the Dodge Viper instantly. It was the car that Mayor Sherman Telsey had driven around town in with Washington Witness reporter Valentina Galliano. She doubted there would be two such cars in a town the size of Oyster Bay.

  Telsey wasn’t on a sight seeing tour tonight. The only conclusion was that he had come to the abandoned processing plant well after operating hours to meet with Rico. What reason did the Mayor have to meet with Rico, aka Dean Woodle? The question flashed through her mind and forced her to do some quick thinking.

  Rico hadn’t anticipated Ledger’s kidnapping interrupting his run to Northern Shore to disperse the bagged drugs to his dealers finishing work at sunset. Hence the gym bag stuffed with cocaine. So he wasn’t meeting the mayor to give him a share of the drugs, because he hadn’t expected to have any left. No, the mayor was here for a different reason. The most likely being he had come to collect the bag of money. That was more reasonable than Rico handi
ng cash over to his dealers. No, definitely if Rico was the Mr Big he would be expecting his dealers to hand their profits back to him.

  That left the question of why Rico would be giving money to Mayor Sherman Telsey.

  She ran through a few quick scenarios, but settled on the most likely being Rico was paying the mayor off so he could operate in the district. If that was true it put Dallenbach at odds with his boss. It left unanswered the question of why Telsey would put his town at such a risk. But she didn’t have time to probe that puzzle.

  Grabbing an old tarp from behind the shed, Ledger hurriedly draped it over Rico’s body. There was only one way to find out why Telsey was here and that required her to bluff him into talking to her. Telsey had only seen her briefly from a distance when she discussed Woodle with Dallenbach. She was betting he had been so focused on impressing Galliano that he hadn’t paid her much attention.

  Telsey rolled the GTS coupé to a stop behind Rico’s pick up, his big engine rumbling to silence. The Viper’s original headlights had been replaced by modern LED lamps that burned bright arcs over the area. Ledger held back and waited. A minute later, the driver’s door was thrown open. Light spilled out of the interior showing mud splashes and gravel clinging to the car’s sides from the trip down the rain-rutted driveway. Ledger’s attention was riveted to the driver. The light shined through to illuminate him well enough for her to get a good look.

  Judging by the way he eased out of the car, he was in his mid-sixties. His skin had a baked-dry look, stretched tight over bones with crevasses across his forehead and down the sides of his mouth. Grey hair swept to one side from a sharp line buzzed into his skull. A silvery goatee decorated his chin. He was dressed in light denim jeans with a sharp crease and a dark shirt. He had burnished leather boat shoes on his feet with neatly tied laces and no socks. He was trim, but soft around the edges. Like cheese melting on toast. Ledger didn’t pick him as the type to stand up to pressure.