The Virgil Jones Mystery Thriller Boxed Set

by Thomas Scott

  “What’s that noise?”

  Virgil ignored her question and shouted into the phone. “Where’s Sandy?”

  Huma answered, but he couldn’t make out what she said, the noise from the chopper drowning out her words. “Say that again.”

  “I said she took Jonas and they drove down to the Co-op to sign the papers for Mr. Lipkins.”

  Virgil shouted to Franklin and Parr. “Keep Said locked up.” He made a twirling motion with his arm and ran toward the helicopter. Cool had the engine back up to full operating speed when Virgil yanked open the door. “Shelby County, Cool. Right now. Go, go, go…” Cool pulled on the collective and they were airborne before Virgil had the door closed.

  42

  Virgil got his phone back out and used an app that let him check Sandy’s location. It showed her at the Shelby County Co-op. He put a headset on, gave Cool the coordinates and watched as he plugged them into the helicopter’s nav unit. “How long?”

  “Half hour,” Cool said. When he saw the look on Virgil’s face he increased his speed. “Maybe a little less.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “Always. Talk to me, Jonesy.”

  “I think Cal Lipkins has Sandy and Jonas.”

  “Who is Cal Lipkins?”

  “A farmer,” Virgil said.

  Cool made a few minor adjustments to the controls. The airspeed indicator was pegged solidly in the red. Virgil could feel the aircraft buffeting against the strain. He tightened his belt. When he looked at Cool, Virgil could see the cartilage in his jaw as it flexed with tension. Cool had saved Sandy once before. His own blood still ran through her veins.

  They were eighty miles away.

  Sandy heard a door open and the rattle of a Diesel engine. So…not a container after all. She was in the back of a truck. She should have known, she thought. But the panic and fear had kept her mind occupied with other thoughts. She was going to call out, but thought better of it. If her captor knew she was conscious, it could be trouble. She ached with the knowledge that Jonas was scared and alone, but she had to put that aside for now. She couldn’t help him if she couldn’t get to him. And that’s what she intended to do.

  The truck began to move and the smell of the chemicals and fuel became much stronger as they sloshed around inside their containers. She had to find a way to free herself from the back of the truck, or be ready to fight when her captor opened the door, whichever came first. She knew she couldn’t do either of those things with her hands bound tightly behind her back.

  One thing at a time, and right now, it was time to get her hands free.

  Reif called the old man. “I told you the first time we met that no one has ever been able to get on top of me. I had the feeling you weren’t listening then. Maybe you’ll listen to me now.”

  Ralph Wheeler put the truck in low gear and turned down a dirt path. It was slow going. He didn’t want to bounce the load around too much. “You know what the trouble with people like you is? You think you always know what the other person is thinking. That means you’ve already had the entire conversation in your head before you ever open your mouth.” Then, as if they were still on the same page, “You set up at the yard?”

  Reif laughed at him. “Hardly. That part of the operation is a bust. Why do I think you already know that?”

  “Probably because we work for the same people. Except the way I hear it, they don’t seem to have much faith in you anymore.”

  “That’s not necessarily true. You see, I’m a good soldier, and when they tell me to do something, I do it. You and I need to meet.”

  “I don’t see why,” Wheeler said.

  “I’ve got the detonator and the bomb.”

  This time Ralph Wheeler laughed. “Your bomb’s a dud, you idiot. It was never going to be the bomb. You got played like a fiddle, boy. I’ve got tons of fertilizer and fuel oil packed into a truck. I’ve got the nuclear material too.”

  “I’ve still got the detonator…and maybe something else you might want.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “I’ve got your boy.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Check your rear view mirror, smart guy.”

  Ralph Wheeler looked in the mirror and saw the SUV about one hundred yards back. “How’d you know to find me?”

  Is this guy for real? Reif thought. “We’re working for the same people. They’re not going to let anything get in the way this time. They’ve kept me informed every time they told you to do something. Been watching your every move all along.”

  Wheeler had the truck in position…or close enough anyway. He hit the brakes. “Get up here then. And remember what I said…I ain’t afraid to die.”

  “Quit being so dramatic. We’re on the same side.”

  Sandy searched around the cramped quarters of the truck trying to find something she could use to cut her hands free. The containers that held the fuel and fertilizer were big plastic barrels. The walls and the floor were constructed of plywood with tightly fitted seams. The roll-up door was made from pressed boards and used rounded carriage bolts. She looked for any type of sharp edge and found none. There was nothing.

  Then she looked at the pallets where the chemical barrels were secured. One of the pallet’s cross members had cracked near the edge and a single nail stuck out at the corner, very near the spot where the floor met the sidewall. Sandy crawled over and backed up next to the pallet. She laid down on her side and got her wrists up against the nail.

  She began to saw back and forth, slowly and carefully. Tiny little nicks. If the nail broke free, it’d be useless to her. The angle was difficult and she had trouble keeping her wrists steady. She felt the nail scratch and puncture her skin, the blood streaming across her palms and fingers.

  She thought about Jonas and kept picking away at the bindings.

  Reif pulled up behind the box truck and met Wheeler between the two vehicles. He looked around at the vastness of the area. “Seems like a waste of a good bomb, you ask me.”

  “That’s because you don’t know what’s going on. You and your boys thought that bomb was going to take out a city block or something, didn’t you?”

  “We weren’t told,” Reif said. “Although there was some hope that might be the eventual outcome.”

  Ralph Wheeler laughed at him. “That was never the plan. The bomb is going to ruin this land. Where’s the detonator?”

  Reif tipped his head back toward the SUV.

  “Get it up here, then. Everything is wired up through the cab.”

  Reif got the detonator Murton had built and together the two men hooked it to the explosives. The detonator was nothing more than a simple battery pack with an electronic timer. The countdown would begin once they powered up the device.

  Ralph Wheeler thought of his son. It’d be just like him to set the timer at zero so when they pressed the button the bomb would go off instantly, killing them both.

  “What is it?” Reif asked.

  “I’m wondering how long the timer is set for.”

  “The last one was only a few minutes.”

  “The last one?”

  “I had your boy build a test bomb to make sure he knew what he was doing. Why are you looking at me like that? I thought you weren’t afraid to die.”

  “I’m not,” Wheeler said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to.” He looked at the SUV. “Where’s my idiot kid?”

  “Wrapped up in the back,” Reif said.

  “Let’s get him up here. He can press the button. If he hesitates, we’ll know he tried to fuck us.”

  Sandy heard two men speaking at the rear of the truck. When she heard their voices she froze. She had to stop working on the bindings. They were right on the other side of the door and she was afraid they might hear her. Then she heard the front doors of the truck open and she could hear the men speaking in the cab. They were worried about the timer.

  So was she.

  She continued to pick at h
er bindings as quietly as possible.

  They pulled Murton out of the SUV and dragged him up to the front of the box truck. Ralph Wheeler and Reif each held a gun pointed at Murton. They dropped him on the ground and Reif cut the ties from his hands. “Get up.”

  Murton was still hooded and couldn’t see his surroundings. He rose slowly, the task complicated because his legs were bound together. Once he was upright, Reif yanked the hood from his head. “Surprise. Time for a little family gathering.”

  Murton stared at his father and didn’t say a word.

  “Here’s what we’re thinking,” Reif said. “Your old man and I had a conversation and we don’t trust you. We think you might have built the detonator to blow the minute it’s activated. How long of a delay did you set?”

  Murton grinned at them. “Press the button and find out,” he said.

  “Good idea, Son.”

  “Don’t call me that. You don’t ever get to call me that.”

  “Boy, the two of you sure do have mutual hard-ons for each other, don’t you?” Reif said. “No matter, it’s still a good idea.” He pushed Murton forward and slammed him into the side of the truck. Then he yanked the door open, grabbed the timer and put it in Murton’s hands. He pointed his gun at him and said, “Press the button.”

  Murton looked at his father. “I always knew it would come down to something like this between you and me. So sayonara, hasta luego, or whatever.” He winked at his father. “See you in hell, old man.”

  Then he pressed the button.

  Ralph Wheeler knew the look in his son’s eyes. It was the same one he’d seen over forty years ago when he’d tried to attack him with the hammer. When he saw him wink, Ralph Wheeler shouted, “Wait!”

  But he was too late. The timer made an audible click, then showed 29:29. Murton had set the timer for thirty minutes when he built it, but more importantly he’d scored a victory in much the same way Patty Doyle had. He’d tricked his father into showing fear in front of someone else, making him an unwilling participant of his own humiliation.

  He tossed the timer on the seat, looked at both men, opened his eyes wide and said, “Boom.”

  Reif spun him around and secured his wrists with a pair of plastic cuffs. Then he looked at the old man and said, “It’s your call. You want to take him out now, pull the trigger. Otherwise, let’s get him in the back. When this thing blows it’ll scatter his ashes across half the county.”

  Ralph Wheeler looked at the gun in his hand, then at his son. “Put him in the back.”

  Murton laughed without humor and spat at his father’s feet. “Jonesy will square this. I’ve known him my whole life. I know what he’s capable of, even if you don’t. You won’t even see it coming.”

  Ralph Wheeler kicked Murton’s feet out from under him, then looked at Reif. “Got any more of those plastic ties?”

  Sandy heard someone say ‘put him in the back.’ A few moments later she heard the lock mechanism on the door ratchet out of place. She had just enough time to let her body go limp. If they knew she was conscious, it wouldn’t go well for her.

  The door rolled up and Reif and the old man tossed Murton inside next to Sandy. Five seconds later the door was back down, the lock clicked back in place. Sandy opened her eyes and saw that Murton was bound with his hands behind his back and his feet pulled up behind him, his wrists and ankles held tight against each other by the plastic cuffs. His back was arched so severely she thought his spine might snap. They were face to face. “Oh, Murton,” she said, leaning forward and pressing her forehead against his.

  Murton pulled back and looked her right in the eye. “Shh. Wait till they’re gone,” he whispered. He said it so quietly Sandy had to practically read his lips to understand. A few moments later they heard two doors slam as the other vehicle backed up and drove away.

  “Can you roll over?” he asked Sandy.

  It took some doing in the cramped quarters but Sandy managed to wiggle herself around until she was facing away from Murton. “Now what?”

  “Inside my right boot.”

  Sandy arched her back until she thought her own spine might snap. She couldn’t see what she was doing and every time she turned her head it pulled her hands further away.

  “Don’t try to look,” Murton said. “Close your eyes and do it by touch. My right leg.”

  She closed her eyes and reached his leg. She worked his pants out of the way then slid her fingers down inside his boot. When she had the knife free she said, “Got it.”

  “Are you taped or cuffed?”

  “Taped. I’ve been picking at it with a nail.”

  “Put the knife in my hands.”

  Sandy rolled and Murton grabbed the knife. He pressed a button and the blade clicked open. Sandy wiggled up against him. “Okay, carefully now,” he said. “This thing’s like a razor. I want you to slide your wrists right up to the blade and then—”

  Sandy pulled her hands apart and ripped the remaining tape from her wrists. “We gonna talk about it or we gonna do it?”

  “I guess we’re doing it.” She took the knife from Murton’s hands and cut the bindings from his wrists. Then she handed him the blade. A minute later he had himself free as well.

  Sandy stood slowly, still sore from the beating she’d taken in the crash. “Murton we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Can you kill the timer?”

  Murton stood next to her. The look on his face was hollow, as if someone had vacuumed his expression away. “No. The detonator has a fail safe built into it. I can’t shut it down. We’ve got a little less than thirty minutes.”

  Sandy grabbed him by the arms. “It’s not us I’m worried about, Murt. It’s Jonas. They’ve got Jonas.”

  43

  Virgil leaned forward in his seat, his shoulders rounded, his neck extended, as if the act of doing so would help the helicopter go faster. He looked at Cool. “How long?”

  Cool glanced at the nav unit. “Fifteen minutes.”

  Virgil shook his head and Cool caught it. He inched the speed up a fraction. Any more and they’d come apart in the air. They were already well past the design limits.

  Virgil watched the countryside slide by. It felt like they were crawling.

  Murton climbed on top of the containers, laid down on his back and punched his knife through the roof of the truck. The material wasn’t very thick, but it was tough. He began sawing through the plastic with as much speed and efficiency as he could manage. Every time he made a cut, little bits of the material shredded away and fell onto his face and into his mouth. He spit the pieces out and said, “Tell me.”

  Sandy watched Murton work on the roof and realized this was a side of him she’d never seen, one she’d only heard of, fragments that had been pieced together over the years. Gone was the smiling face, the carefree attitude, the facade that told everyone he couldn’t be touched. Murton was working with a single-minded objectiveness, one that had no equal. He was calm, driven, quietly optimistic, determined, and curious all at once. “Small?”

  Sandy told him all of it. How she and Jonas had gone to the Co-op to sign the paperwork, the odd and mercurial way Cal Lipkins had behaved, the antithetical nature of his remarks, the duality of his actions, and ultimately how he died trying to save them. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Murton. He was up to something, I’m sure of it. I think he was trying to separate me and Jonas. Then at the last minute it was like he had a change of heart.”

  “Guys like that don’t have hearts, Small.” He made another cut in the roof. Then he added, “I should know.”

  “Murt?”

  He looked down at her, still sawing frantically through the roof. “What?”

  “That other man? That was your father, right?”

  “What of it?”

  Sandy thought of her own father and how he’d died saving Virgil, how she’d never had the chance to know him as a person or a man. She thought of second chances a
nd how she almost had the opportunity to regain what she’d lost through Mason and how that had been taken from her as well. It was as if the universe never intended for her to have a father. “Promise me you won’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  He punched a giant section of the roof away and stuck his head through. They were alone. He crawled out and laid down on top of the roof and stuck his hand through the hole. “C’mon. Let’s go get your boy.”

  Murton had his hand wrapped around Sandy’s bloodied wrist. He pulled her up on top of the crates and through the hole as if she weighed no more than a child. What he said next shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. “Is Becky okay?”

  Surprised or not, it didn’t get past Sandy that Murton had refused to address her request regarding his own father. “You tell me,” she said.

  They climbed down from the top of the truck and looked around. They were in the middle of an empty field. The soil had recently been turned and the dirt smelled fresh and alive.

  “Where are we?” Sandy asked. “Do you have any idea?”

  Murton held his hand up to his forehead and shielded the sun from his eyes. He saw the moon off in the distance, a faint thin arc of a thumbnail, perched upright and low on the horizon, hung across the underbelly of a thin layer of Cirrus clouds. Below the moon was the squat rounded structure of the Co-op building. “Standing on your land, I’d say. Look behind you. The Co-op is about a half-mile that way,” he said pointing across her shoulder. “That’s the direction the tire tracks lead too. We’re unarmed, probably outnumbered, and we don’t know when or if any backup will arrive. Are you up for this?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” Sandy said. “I’d go alone if I had to.” She started running toward the Co-op.