Moving Target

by R. A. McGee

  “I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”

  “Not a chance,” Porter said.

  There was silence for a couple of seconds. Porter looked out the windshield at the sun, still hanging strong in the sky before starting its nightly dip behind the mountains.

  “So I changed my mind. I guess you can ask Amanda out. You wouldn’t be so bad to have around.”

  Porter laughed. “Well, right now my dance card is a little full, but I’ll keep her in mind if I get an opening.”

  “Fair enough. Call me when you have the girl?” Joe said.

  “Will do.”

  “And Porter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What did I tell you the first day I met you? What did I tell you every day we ever worked together?” Joe said.

  “Do whatever it takes to go home.”

  “Whatever it takes.” Joe hung up the phone.

  Porter took a deep breath and punched the address Spaulding had given him into his GPS. It would take almost an hour to get to the location, and he couldn’t afford to be the last person to show up.

  It would be like walking into the middle of a firefight.

  Porter did a quick Google search, then put the address into his GPS and followed the robotic voice until it spat him into the parking lot of just what he was looking for.

  A gun shop.

  The place was in a strip mall and was fairly nondescript, if you didn’t count the Confederate and Gadsden flags in the windows, the flashing red light on the windowsill, and the thick bars that covered the entry door.

  Porter pulled the heavy door open, stepping into a place that smelled of rubber and gunpowder. Two men were speaking to each other across the store counter; the man behind it had a bald head and a full Gandalf-style beard.

  Porter smiled at the Tolkien reference that popped into his head. Claudette’s favorite. He hated having to stand her up, but didn’t see any other choice. Depending on how the night went, he hoped he would get a chance to apologize to her.

  “Anything I can find for you?” Gandalf said to Porter. The other man, wearing a black Vietnam veteran hat, turned toward Porter as well.

  “No, I think I have a good idea what I need,” Porter said.

  “A man on a mission,” Gandalf said. “Do your thing. If you need me, I’m gonna be holding this counter up.”

  Porter nodded and let his eyes wander. In truth, he didn’t need a gun. He had everything he needed in the trunk of his Yukon. He was looking for something more specific, something that was the right tool for the job.

  He found it on an end cap, a clear plastic jug with a label on it that read “Quickee-Boom.”

  The basic product went by many names, and was easy enough to purchase. Some intrepid souls even ventured to the internet to order ammonium nitrate and aluminum shavings in bulk, to mix it themselves. As much as Porter loved the stuff, he wasn’t keen to get on a DHS watch list for importing mass quantities of it.

  People would think he was planning the next Oklahoma City.

  It was billed as an exploding target. The basic components were inert and shipped together in a clean, plastic canister for use. In this state, they were impossible to detonate. The product was a binary explosive. The components of the target, when mixed properly, became volatile and could be set off with an influx of kinetic energy. In short, when shot with the right-sized projectile, moving at the right velocity, the mixture would explode.

  It was this bomb-like quality that Porter was interested in. This particular model of Quickee-Boom could be detonated with a round from his AR-15. He picked up the three remaining canisters and carried them to the counter, interrupting the two jaw-jacking men.

  “You got a good range day planned,” Gandalf said.

  “I hope so. I cleaned your shelf out, got any more in the back?” Porter said.

  “I damn sure might.” Gandalf stepped around the counter and disappeared into the back of the store.

  “I just love that stuff,” Vietnam Hat said.

  “Big fan,” Porter agreed.

  “Tell you what, I saw on the interwebs the other day where some farmer was having trouble with the feral pigs on his land.”

  “Like big rats,” Porter said.

  “They sure are. So this crazy son of a bitch mixes up a bunch of that stuff you got there, then hides the canister in a bunch of food. Corn scraps and the like. Them damn pigs come out at dusk to eat, farmer’s about fifty yards away with his rifle. He shoots the canister and boom. Pig parts everywhere.” Vietnam Hat started laughing hysterically.

  “Good way to take care of pests,” Porter said.

  “Hell yeah. Damn expensive, though. Wish I could find it cheaper.”

  The shop employee stepped back through the door with four additional canisters in his arms. “All we got left, friend, but it’s yours if you want it.”

  “Lucky for me, that’s exactly how much I wanted,” Porter said, and slid the cash across the counter.

  Gandalf made change, while resuming his conversation about foreign policy.

  Vietnam Hat reached behind the counter and started bagging the Quickee-Boom for Porter.

  “I mean, we was just for asking ISIS to take over, you know?” Gandalf said.

  “Hey, I’ve been in war,” Vietnam Hat said. “I don’t want them boys over there any longer than they need to be.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gandalf said.

  Porter didn’t join in the conversation, waiting instead until all the canisters were bagged up and then accepting the bags from the men. “Thanks, guys.”

  “If you do some cool shit with all that, put it online. Maybe I can find your video someday.”

  Porter shook his head. “I think there are enough videos of people taking care of pests already,” he said as he backed against the front door and stepped out to the parking lot.

  Forty-Seven

  The next stop was the big box store. Porter checked the time on his phone and resolved to be in and out as fast as he could.

  He kept his word. A quick trip to menswear for a pack of socks, a stop in the spray paint section, and then to electronics for the last item. He surveyed the choice in prepaid cell phones and grabbed two of them, paying at the in-department register and jogging out of the store with all his items in one bag.

  His phone showed he’d only been inside for eight minutes.

  Porter reconnected the GPS and let its robot voice guide him to the main highway, which he followed for nearly an hour. During the drive, he went past the Peaks MC clubhouse.

  The lynch mob he’d imagined forming wasn’t there. The bar’s parking lot was light on people and only a couple of the vehicles from Porter’s visit remained.

  He could see the still-flat tires.

  The blue line on his phone’s screen pointed him off the interstate, followed closely by the voice telling him to turn right. He obeyed and turned onto a much smaller surface street, choked on both sides with thick kudzu vines and the power lines and poles they were enveloping.

  Porter followed along the two-lane road for ten minutes without seeing another soul. Eventually, as Jimi was wailing about a watchtower, Porter came to a T intersection.

  The GPS seemed stuck, pausing for a long moment, before recalculating and telling Porter to take another right.

  The thick vegetation continued on the left, but on the right the forest opened up and was replaced by a wide but shallow river. Porter tried to sneak a closer look, but the embankment leading to the river was steep and there was no guardrail, so he pulled his eyes back to the front.

  Almost twenty minutes later, he saw a structure peeking out of the overgrown trees and vines. Porter slowed his truck as he passed.

  It was an abandoned motel. He couldn’t make out any of the signage, and the windows were all busted out. He feathered the gas again, chasing the blue line on his navigation.

  Minutes later, there was another structure—not as decrepit as the last, but Mother Nature was still doi
ng her best to take her land back.

  Once upon a time, these motels had been part of a great number that littered the area. They had been on the main road cutting through western North Carolina. Largely rendered obsolete by the advent of Interstate 40, they had now fallen into disrepair.

  As he went along, the motels grew in frequency. Sometimes they were to Porter’s left, fighting their way out of the forest, struggling for recognition. Other times, they were on the right, in a spot where the river took a bend outward and allowed for just enough space to put a building.

  Many of the signs were still intact, if dingy and overrun by shrubbery. The signs evoked a strange nostalgia in Porter, making him wistful for a time period before he had even been alive.

  Porter passed the Ramblers Inn, the Hide Away Stay-Place and the Starlight Motel. The Starlight had a façade that screamed “space race,” with a very Sputnik-esque geometrical pattern on the road-front sign.

  The next motel on the left had the sign Porter had been looking for: the Teddy Bear Motel. It actually read “Teddy  ear M t l,” as much of the signage had been lost to time.

  The Teddy Bear had a wide front and a big parking lot that wasn’t nearly as overrun with vines as some of its contemporaries. It was two stories, with a white façade and a smattering of staircases.

  Just like Porter’s motel back in town, every door on the Teddy Bear was front-facing and opened out to the sidewalk or the balcony of the second floor.

  He pulled into the parking lot, confident he was the first party to arrive.

  A hill rose up behind the big old building, connecting the motel to the mountain above it. Through one of the stairwells, Porter saw a rusted old playset, sitting on an overgrown plateau.

  He drove closer, looking at the destroyed rooms, their windows open and doors smashed in. He blared the horn, checking for squatters. There were clothes and trash and barbeque grills littered all over the place. There was even a stack of mattresses against the door to the check-in area.

  Porter laid on the horn again and rolled this window down. “Police. If you’re in there, you gotta go.”

  Nothing moved. Satisfied there were no homeless people trying to escape the cold afternoon, he put the truck in park and reached into his back seat, grabbing the bag of Quickee-Boom.

  The Teddy Bear was unique among the motels he’d driven past in that there was a small overflow parking lot opposite the motel. There was a bend in the road, not quite big enough for another motel to have been planted there, but there was plenty of space for a parking pad.

  He eyeballed the distance, happy with what he saw.

  Porter ripped into the bag from the gun store and mixed four individual canisters of the Quickee-Boom. Then, using duct tape from his trunk, he taped them all together by their sides, ending up with one big square of ready and mixed explosive.

  He took the big improvised bomb and double-wrapped it in the bags from the big box store. He left it on his lap while he fumbled with the prepaid cell phone, ensuring it was activated properly, that the phone got enough reception to ring out there in the sticks, and that the volume was up. Porter used the rest of the duct tape to secure the bag closed, with multiple lashings of tape for good measure.

  He pulled back to the road. There was no other traffic, so he went across the street. Porter grabbed the spray paint and his bundle of Quickee-Boom, and hopped out of the truck.

  Placing the big package on the ground in the middle of the parking lot, he shook the can of spray paint and put a softball-sized dot of yellow paint on each side of the bundle. He set it down and looked back across the road at the Teddy Bear and the parking lot. Porter moved the bundle a foot to the right, looked back and the motel, and nodded.

  He pulled out of the overflow parking, driving slowly away, opposite the way he’d come in. A few hundred feet around the next bend he found another motel, next in line of the forgotten. This one was in much worse shape than the Teddy Bear; Porter couldn’t read the sign any longer, but could just make out the remnants of a graphic Cherokee Indian brave, more cartoon than realistic.

  There were willow trees in front of the Cherokee, and they’d long since overrun the parking lot. Porter circled in and out, then backed into a spot, willow branches almost completely covering the Yukon, rendering it virtually invisible from the road.

  He ripped into the bag of wool socks from the store and put a double pair on each of his feet, tying his Chucks tight. Then he dug through the pile of clothing in his trunk, pulling on his thickest long-sleeve shirt and pulling his dark hoodie on last.

  His gloves were sticky with the blood of the Los Primos hitman from the trailer. Porter paused for a moment, but pulled them on anyway, sighing in disgust. Then he opened his lockbox, sliding on his magazine carrier with two extra mags for his pistol, and pulling his AR from its resting place.

  It was simple and no-frills: sixteen inches with a light attached to the end and a sling to hold the entire thing to his body. He slid an extra thirty-round magazine into his back pocket and slammed the trunk. He got back into the running truck, thankful for the warmth of the heater. It was getting colder as the sun dropped, and now there were places its rays weren’t reaching, blocked out by the surrounding mountains.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, wondering if there was anything else he could do to give himself a chance. There was no doubt that this was the worst-case scenario—himself against an unknown number of people, all of whom had murderous intent. He hoped Pima was alive. He hoped he could help her. He hoped he’d get a chance to eat another burger sometime.

  That last thought made Porter laugh and he slid out of the truck, turning the engine off but leaving the keys on the seat.

  The plan wasn’t ideal, but nothing ever was. There was an old saying, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Too many times in his life these words had been right. His only hope was that this particular enemy had no clue they were even in a battle until it was too late.

  Porter cupped his hands and blew into them. He adjusted the sling to cinch the rifle tight to his chest and pushed his way behind the Cherokee brave hotel, into the woods and up the hill, back toward the Teddy Bear Motel.

  Forty-Eight

  “We could, you know…” Pima said. “Just go. Leave.”

  Laura Bell was sitting on the edge of the chair, gauze stuffed into the nostrils of her badly broken nose. “You want a little tip?”

  Pima nodded. “Sure.”

  Laura Bell touched her nose and felt a jolt of pain across her face. “If you have a broken nose, you aren’t supposed to blow it.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s a membrane in your head. If your nose is broken, it could be punctured. You blow your nose, then air leaks into your eye socket and other weird places. It hurts like a bitch until it goes away,” Laura Bell said.

  “Did you learn that in school? When you wanted to be a nurse, I mean?” Pima asked.

  Laura Bell laughed. “No. That’s from experience.”

  Pima reached out and touched Laura Bell on the shoulder. “You know we can make it. Let’s just go, right now. Don’t wait for those guys to get back here. All they’re gonna do is hurt us. Let’s run.”

  “You can, but I can’t,” Laura Bell said. “I can drop you off anywhere and you’ll go back to your family. I run, all I’m going to do is get arrested somewhere. I’m broke; I need money to get away.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, baby girl. I’m going to go with Seth and Dusty. Once I get mine, I’m gone, you understand? Gone. Nobody will ever see me again.”

  Pima was quiet for a few minutes. “My family can help you.”

  Laura Bell laughed. “Them nice folks don’t want any part of a murderer. Trust me. Once I get through this, I’ll find my way. But until then, I promise I’ll stay with you, got it?”

  Pima nodded. “Thanks for—”

  The door of the trailer swung open, slamming into the siding with a bang. Seth
walked in, unsteady on his feet. “The hell is this, nap time? We gotta go, come on. Teddy Bear’s waiting.”

  Laura Bell stood, eyeing her brother. “How much you had to drink?”

  “Not as much as I wished I did. Why?”

  “You need to sober up.”

  “Like hell I do. I’m fine, come on,” Seth said.

  Laura Bell took a step backward. “You sure you even need me? You and Dusty should be able to handle it. I could stay here and watch the girl, wait for you guys to get back.”

  “Of course I need you. Only three of us and we need to watch each other’s back. You still got that wheel gun you shot the cop with?”

  Laura Bell nodded.

  “Good. Tell you what, I’ll set you up in your own room. Me and Dusty will do the talking. Any kind of double-cross, you waste anyone that comes into that room that ain’t one of us.”

  “What about the girl? Let’s just leave her here. We don’t need her in the way,” Laura Bell said.

  “I’m sick of hearing about this girl. She’s coming too, the hell with it. You wanted her around, now she stays,” Seth said.

  “It’s just—”

  Seth reached out and grabbed Laura Bell by her dirty blonde hair and yanked her close. He swayed back and forth in front of her face.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Now you need to listen here.”

  Laura Bell pulled her pistol out and stuck it to his chin. “I. Said. Let. Go.”

  Seth smiled and let go of his sister’s hair, taking a couple of steps backward. “What, you gonna shoot me, Sis? You don’t have the balls.”

  Laura Bell pointed the revolver at Seth. “You don’t know what I have. Out. Now.”

  Seth rocked back and forth, then stumbled out of the trailer without another word.

  “Laura Bell, let’s just go. We can sneak out the back. They’ll never find us.”

  “No,” Laura Bell said, stuffing her pistol back into her pants.