by Scott Blade
He spun the wheel all the way and backed up away from the farmhouse. He ended up spun all the way around one hundred and eighty degrees, facing the right way back down the driveway and back to the road.
Widow punched the gas. The van peeled out, back tires kicking up snow and gravel. He drove back to the road.
Chapter 46
A T THE WHITES’ FARM, Abel smoked one of Abe’s cigars and drank coffee out of a family mug. The mug rested on an end table next to his armchair.
Abe moved off the sofa arm and was, now, at the chair across from Abel, which wasn’t his favorite chair, but it might be going forward, because Abel sat in his favorite chair.
Right then, he was thinking of burning that one as soon as this was all over. If this was ever over.
The White family members were all clustered together on the other furniture. Walter was with them. He sat on the sofa with his wife on one side and his two children on the other. He hugged all of them together. They grabbed onto him like a family riding out a hurricane in the dark, hoping to survive the night.
Foster sat on the other side of Maggie. She stayed strong, at least trying to put on the façade that she wasn’t scared. Abby was in the kitchen, preparing a big meal for everyone. It was a big lunch, as Abel had called it. Flack was in there with her, watching everything she did, every step she took, from taking out a frozen pack of T-bone steaks to peeling potatoes, and every step in between.
Every time she pulled a sharp kitchen knife out of the knife block, he planted a heavy, gloved hand on her shoulder and stood behind her, breathing heavily. It forced her to shiver.
Sheriff Rourke was in the downstairs bathroom, handcuffed to the pipe behind the toilet. He didn’t beg to be freed or left in the family room because he knew the less he spoke, the better they would treat him. The one who punched him repeatedly at Pine Farms had made that clear.
Abe watched Abel’s men put all his guns back in the shed outside. They took the key from him and locked it.
Abel finally spoke.
“Guess we didn’t need to cut the power after all. We can all do stupid things. People aren’t perfect, you know?”
No one spoke. Abel smoked the cigar and sipped his coffee.
“Got anything stronger?”
Abe said, “We don’t drink.”
“Really? Nothing? Your wife doesn’t have a stash somewhere? Something you don’t know about?”
Abe’s face turned red, like he was going to explode.
Abel puffed out smoke rings and stared at the end of his cigar.
“Something you wanna say, Abe?”
Foster interrupted.
“Leave him alone. He’s just an old man. He told you we don’t have any liquor.”
Abel glanced at her.
“Oh, good. Some balls in this family. I like that.”
Tanis, who had been standing-by at the bottom of the stairs, walked up, slowly. He stopped behind Foster and looked at Abel, waiting for a sign to do something.
Foster felt him standing there behind her. She could see the wheels in Abel’s twisted mind turning.
Maggie spoke up first.
“I’ve got bourbon.”
Everyone turned to her.
Abel asked, “You do?”
“Yes. It’s in my purse. Over there. On that table.”
Abel nodded to Tanis, who stepped away from Foster and went to the purse and picked it up. It was a big, white bag.
Tanis unzipped the main compartment and fished through it.
“Try the bottom,” Maggie said.
He pushed down farther and finally pulled out a small bottle of Kentucky bourbon.
He tossed the purse back onto the table and brought the bottle over to Abel.
Abel said, “Jargo would like this. What’s keeping him?”
Just then, Brooks came walking down the stairs from the upper floor. When he got to the bottom, the front door opened and Cucci walked in.
Abel twisted the cap off the bourbon bottle and dumped half into his coffee. The rest he didn’t offer to anyone. He just set it aside for a second round in the future.
He turned to Brooks at the stairs and asked a question, followed by a long pull of his bourbon coffee.
“How’s Agent Adonis?”
“In the master bedroom. Handcuffed to the bed.”
Abel smiled wide.
Cucci interrupted.
“I can’t get Jargo to answer.”
Abel’s smile shrank to nothing.
“Why not?”
Cucci shrugged but didn’t answer.
Abel asked, “The weather?”
Brooks said, “Could be. It’s getting bad out there.”
Abel stayed quiet.
Brooks asked, “Want me to go back?”
“No. Cucci, you go. Take the police car.”
Brooks asked, “By himself? Sure, you don’t want me to go with him?”
“No. What for? Cucci can handle Jargo. Right?”
Cucci thought about watching Abel strangle Dobson to death with the garrote earlier.
He swallowed and answered.
“Yeah. I got it.”
Abel said, “He’s probably taking a piss break. But if he’s napping, you make sure to tell me. Don’t cover for him. Got it?”
The same image of Dobson dying stayed in his mind. This time Cucci remembered seeing the guy’s eyes bulging out of his head.
He swallowed again.
“Got it. Be back.”
Cucci spun back around and started to head out the front door.
Brooks called out behind him.
“Wait.”
Cucci stopped.
Brooks dug in his pocket and fished out the keys to the cruiser. He realized they were on the same keyring as the handcuffs he’d used on Adonis, but he didn’t care. He handed them over to Cucci. No reason to hold onto the handcuff keys. She wasn’t coming out of those cuffs. Not alive.
Cucci took the keys and headed out the front door. He fired up the cruiser, backed it up to face the road, and drove the long, bumpy drive back to the road, back to Pine Farms.
Chapter 47
S NOWFALL PICKED UP, falling fast in what could only be called snow bombs. It was coming down hard by the time Cucci drove Shep’s cruiser down to the main road, just outside the Whites’ large mailbox. Cucci had to stop dead right there because he couldn’t drive onto the main road because there something was blocking the driveway entrance.
He saw it through the windshield. He switched the wipers up to full blast. They sped up and scraped across the windshield, kicking off snow as fast as they could. He heard the snow thrashing on the roof of the cruiser.
The wind gusted and thunder rolled and rolled above and all around.
Cucci slowed and approached the obstruction carefully. He leaned forward in the driver seat, his chest pressed against the steering wheel so hard that he honked the horn. He went back upright. He continued to stare. He knew it was a vehicle. He could see the lights. The headlamps were switched on bright, but the vehicle was facing north on the road and parked sideways right at the mouth of the driveway, acting as a roadblock.
He stopped the cruiser and put it in park. He kicked down the emergency brake and clicked on the high beams. He stayed ten yards back.
He picked up his radio and clicked the talk button, but stopped because he recognized the vehicle. It was the black panel van they escaped the Athenian compound with hours earlier. What the hell was it doing there? It should’ve been stowed away in the barn at the abandoned farm.
It was parked, engine running, and the driver’s side door had been left wide open, like someone had just hopped out and took off running.
He craned his head and stared at the ground around the van. There were no footprints in the snow, but there should’ve been.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
He started to click the radio, but someone else did first. He listened, thinking it was Brooks or Abel, but no one sp
oke. Whoever was pressing the talk button held it down because the radio continued a long hiss and crackle. And nothing else. It didn’t stop.
Cucci waited, but there was no one. No one spoke. No voice. Nothing.
He held it up to his ear, wondering if this weather could disrupt their radios. He wasn’t sure. Dobson had been their mechanic and their equipment guy. Cucci knew nothing of radios. He was more apt at fixing two tin cans connected by a string than he was electronics.
He thought of Dobson again. That look on his face being strangled to death would haunt him forever, and he knew it.
He held the radio close to his ear, pushing it right up against his head. Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t hearing static. He was hearing rain—no, not rain. He heard the hard snow. It pounded on the other end of the radio like it was falling on the roof of the cruiser.
He realized he wasn’t hearing static. He was hearing the same falling snow, hammering on a car roof that he heard from inside the cruiser. The radio was in open air, near a vehicle.
Cucci grabbed the M4 and opened the driver’s door, setting the radio down in a cup holder. He left the door open and threaded around it. He pointed his weapon at the van and approached it slowly, staying loose, keeping his head on a swivel.
The snow hammered all around him. It pummeled his shoulders. One ball of snow hit him dead on the top of the head. It was hard and ruggedly packed, but not as hard as hail. He looked left and scanned all the way to the right as he approached the abandoned van.
The van’s headlights started to flicker. The interior lights flickered. The sound from the open-door alert hissed and dinged. Then, as he got five yards away, the van coughed up once and died. The power went off as it had when they were driving it several hours ago. And the engine died. He stopped and stared at it. Now, it was just dead weight, blocking the road.
He called out.
“Jargo? You idiot! This isn’t funny!”
No answer.
“Jargo? How the hell are we gonna move this piece of shit now? Dobson can’t fix it. He’s dead,” Cucci said. He stepped forward, slowly.
A big step forward later, he called out.
“Jargo?”
Cucci got three yards from the front tire and stopped and scanned the area in front of him, around him, and behind him. He saw no one.
“Jargo? Where the hell are you?”
Cucci walked around the van to the back. He sidestepped far enough out to give him room to scan and shoot. He was also consciously fighting his shoot-first instincts because he didn’t want to shoot Jargo if the guy jumped out at him.
But Jargo didn’t jump out at him.
He circled around the van to the open driver’s door and looked flabbergasted. He lowered the M4 and stared at the seat, which he had expected to be empty, but it wasn’t.
On the seat, he saw Jargo’s radio. A long strand of duct tape was wrapped all around it, holding the talk button down.
Suddenly, he heard footsteps on the snowy road and tree branches shuffling around behind him. He spun around, M4 still pointed down, a mistake, because right then a large man with a gun faced him from the tree line next to the Whites’ mailbox.
The man was Widow.
Widow stomped across the road and the snow. He pointed the Winchester right in Cucci’s face and barked at him.
“DROP IT!”
Cucci was embarrassingly stunned. He should’ve reacted and raised the M4 and shot at the stranger, but he didn’t.
Widow stopped charging toward him and stayed about ten feet away.
He shouted, “DROP IT!”
Cucci dropped the M4 and raised his hands. He stared at Widow as if he was some kind of monster rising out of the gray and the gloom.
Widow asked, “How many?”
“What?”
“HOW MANY MORE OF YOU ARE THERE?”
“There’s six. Six of us.”
“Including Jargo?”
“How do you know his name?”
“Take a guess, genius.”
“You. You’re the reason we can’t get him to answer the radio.”
“No shit! You must be the brains of the outfit.”
“General Abel is our leader.”
Widow stood there, frozen for a moment out of disbelief.
How dumb was this guy? he thought.
He asked, “General? You just told me his rank.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“Whatever happened to only giving your own name and rank?”
Cucci said, “I’m not in the Army anymore.”
“Surprise. I wonder why you got kicked out.”
“I didn’t get kicked out. I mustered out.”
Widow shook his head and said, “You’re not up there with the IQ score, are you?”
Cucci said nothing to that.
Widow asked, “The dead ATF agents in the barn; how much of that is you?”
“Are you a cop?”
Widow took a big step closer, putting the barrel of the Winchester inches below Cucci’s chin.
He half-shouted, “DON’T change the subject!”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it. That was the others. Not me. I like cops,” Cucci lied.
He followed his lie with a grin that seemed involuntary, as if he’d just thought of the look on the face of whichever of Adonis’s men he’d shot and killed.
Widow stayed put. He nodded at Cucci and made another demand.
“That a Glock on your hip?”
Cucci kept his hands above his head and nodded.
Widow said, “Take it out. Slow. Pinch the butt. If I see three fingers touch the weapon, I’ll put a bullet under your chin. Got it?”
Cucci nodded and did as he was told. He used his right hand and slowly reached down to the Glock. There was no safety strap on his holster. He pinched the weapon with his thumb and index finger, nearly fumbling with it, at first. In the end, he managed to pull it out. He didn’t throw it away because Widow hadn’t given him any instructions yet. And he didn’t try to flip it around and fire it at Widow, which Widow knew he wouldn’t. He knew it because this guy was no kind of risk taker. He wasn’t the kind of guy to think for himself. He was a follower.
Widow shoved the barrel forward, all the way into Cucci’s neck. Then he stepped left and, one-handed, he swiped the Glock out of Cucci’s hand, sending it flying into the gloom. Before Cucci knew it, Widow was back in his original position, the Winchester gripped two-handed, ready to fire.
“Now, what’s your name?”
“Thomas Cucci.”
“Cucci?”
“Cucci.”
“Where do you boys get these dumbass names?”
Cucci said, “It’s Italian.”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
Cucci said nothing.
Widow removed the barrel from under his chin and backed away three feet. He trained his aim on Cucci’s center mass.
He asked, “You got any other weapons on you?”
“A knife.”
“Where?”
Cucci moved his right hand again, down, dropping it from the surrender position. He pointed at his foot.
“It’s in my boot.”
Widow glanced quickly in case it was a trick. He saw nothing, which meant it was a folding blade, probably tucked into the boot and not on an ankle sheath.
Widow said, “Kick the boots off! That way!”
“They’re boots. I’ll need to use my hands.”
“No. Figure it out.”
After he said it, he regretted it because of the thought that this guy was so dumb that it might take him all night to take off the large boots without his hands. But he figured it out and it only took him about a minute.
Cucci turned to the side and kicked off the right boot, using the left to pinch down the heel. He repeated the process by holding down the left boot’s heel with his right foot. After he kicked off both boots, he turned back, hands still raised.
He asked, “You going to kill me?”
“Kill you? What makes you think that?”
“You don’t look like a prisoner-taking kind of guy.”
“How you know that? Because that’s who you are? That’s how you and your boys do it? You shoot unarmed prisoners?”
Cucci paused a beat, and then he said, “You should join us.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You took out Jargo. You’re basically one of us.”
Widow stayed quiet, but his trigger finger started to itch.
Cucci said, “What were you? Ranger? Green Beret?”
“Empty your pockets. Slow! Use your left hand first. Dump the contents on the road right there!”
Cucci nodded and moved his hand down, emptied his front pockets, coat, and pants. He turned around so Widow could see the back and he dug in there. He repeated the process with the right pockets.
“Take the coat off and drop it.”
Cucci removed it and dropped it.
He shivered and complained.
“It’s cold.”
“Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
Cucci stared at him.
“SEAL? You’re a SEAL?”
Widow stayed quiet.
Cucci said, “I knew a guy who used to say that. He was a frogman.”
Widow asked, “That a pair of handcuffs on your belt? Well, on one of the dead ATF agents’ belts?”
“Yes.”
“Where’re the keys?”
“Right there.”
He didn’t point down, but he was talking about a small ring with two keys on it. It was on the ground in the snow. They had fallen out with the pocket lint when he turned out his pockets.
For no explainable reason, just another sign that Cucci wasn’t very smart, he said, “There’s another set of handcuff keys on the ring. In the ignition.”
“What about them? Where do they go?”
“They’re not for these cuffs. They’re for the ones on the woman, I guess.”
“The woman?” Widow asked. He raised an eyebrow.
