by Scott Blade
Even though the weapon was fully loaded, Major’s man liked the sight of the back of the Magnum rounds in the cylinder, so he popped it out and checked it and spun it, and he flicked the cylinder back into the weapon. The next bullet was loaded and ready to fire .
None of it had been necessary, but the act of doing it put a smile on his face. It was up there with pumping a shotgun or pulling a trigger. It got his adrenaline up. It got his blood pumping. It got his engine revved.
Like the other eight guys in Major’s crew, he was formerly a part of a dangerous military unit in the United States Armed Forces. None of them was from the same unit. None of them was exclusive to one branch or the other. Each of them had once served the country they loved.
Each of them had proven himself in battle.
In the Old West, a gunfighter had notches on his belt from his kills. Similarly, they all had their fair share of notches.
Major’s guy watched the truck drive cautiously up the track. He saw faraway plumes of dust kick up behind it.
He put the Smith and Wesson back into his saddlebag.
He knew what he had to do. He had messed up. He couldn’t beat them back to the cabin. No way. There was one way in and one way out. He couldn’t get past them without being seen.
He’d have to kill them. Which wasn’t on Major’s parameters for them, but it was better them than him.
The only chance he had of avoiding murdering two cops was if they drove right past the cabin without stopping. But what were the chances of that?
They were probably out here searching for the fire from the night before .
Major’s guy reared his feet back and turned the motorcycle and drove off, back down the breach of the gully, back to the main road, and then back to the cabin to take care of loose ends.
Chapter 10
T HE TOMBSTONE was gothic and hard and cracked and very, old. Widow walked up to the edge of the wrought iron, which stopped short at waist height. Not his waist, but the waist height of a normal human being. He stepped over it and moved as close to the grave as he could, without stepping on it. He knelt, resting on his back foot. He studied the headstone. It was etched with wicked-looking demons or spirits. He wasn’t sure what they were. In the corners, they stood guard like gargoyles. They looked to be out of a different time and a different place, like hieroglyphics from a forgotten part of American history.
The scene made little sense to him. Widow had never been much of an art critic.
The center of the tombstone had nothing but a date. It was 1801.
There was no name. No age. No family link. No indication of cause of death. No indication of who was buried there. Whoever it was, he or she was important enough to get a grave that was geographically in the center of town .
Widow stood up, slowly and took another look at it in case he was missing something. There was no sign posted anywhere. No plaque posted on a pole to tell the story. No sign of it being a memorial. No personal effects set up on the gravesite. No sign of visitors. Nothing indicating that the grave was a historical thing or anything to explain its significance.
He looked up and scanned the neighborhood. He saw no one.
He shrugged to himself and stepped back over the wrought iron fence and walked back to the street. He continued following the barber’s general instructions till he was back on the main road and found the diner.
The sign outside called the place Mable’s Diner.
The inside was like hundreds of roadside diners that Widow had frequented over the years. Cheap cloth booths. Square tables with four seats. Two waitresses on duty. One young one, one older.
There was a long countertop with stools, all metal legs, all with red vinyl cushions.
Widow skipped the booths and tables and sat down right at a countertop on a stool, among a group of lumberjacks, he figured, because they had that look. They were all scarred with rough hands and sandpaper skin on their faces and necks. They were all big guys with tree trunk-sized torsos. They could’ve all been from the same clan, the same family, like a clan of Nordic Vikings, stopping into the local tavern to recon the place before they marched in with hordes of giants, wielding medieval weapons.
Truckers could have the same look, but these were not truckers. There were no trucks parked out on the street. No big rigs. No trailers. Just regular pickups and cars.
Plus, these guys wouldn’t know the first thing about assimilating into any other culture. They looked like they had lived there all their lives.
It would’ve shocked Widow to learn that any one of them had ever gone anywhere past the New Hampshire state border.
Then he thought maybe they worked at a local sawmill. Surely there were sawmills out here. Were sawmill workers considered lumberjacks? He didn’t know the answer.
There were three of them at the counter and four more spread out over two square-top tables. They were all older than him. The closest one was maybe fifteen years older. Maybe ten if you factored in the fact that lumberjacks worked heavy labor jobs that required them to expose their skin to the elements and the sun more than other jobs. Perhaps this aged them faster than most occupations, like ranch hands or commercial fishers. They were guys who spent their daily lives being eroded by nature. This might’ve been the factor that aged them so much.
Judging by the several missing fingers between them, they worked around dangerous equipment .
The scars on their faces showed they had learned how to handle themselves over the years. They had been in more than one scrap.
The biggest one had a wicked scar across his nose and cheeks. It looked like someone had swiped at his face with a machete and didn’t entirely miss the mark.
Widow hated to think about what had happened to the other guy.
An old cliché about books and covers was something that applied to Widow in his everyday life. So, he didn’t judge these books by their covers. He smiled and said hello.
He didn’t ask if someone was taking up the stool next to him. There was no one there. No plates, silverware, or coffee mugs in front of it, so he sat down.
The waitress who worked the counter was the younger one of the two, but both spoke to him. Both were friendly.
The younger one was polite, but something was there right under the surface. She had a cold look in her eyes like a woman sentenced to a life of servitude.
She had thick brown hair, rolled up tight in a bun. She had arm tattoos, not sleeves but one was a half sleeve, upper arm.
She wore threaded, handmade rope bracelets with little hearts hanging on them. Neither waitress wore any official uniform. Not like the traditional waitress garb. Their clothing was their own, all except for the same white print aprons and plastic nameplates .
Widow took a peek at her nameplate. He read it out loud.
“Mable?”
“Yeah, that’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”
Widow smiled, said, “You’re Mable?”
“Yeah.”
“You?”
“Yes. Is there something odd about that?”
“No, ma’am. Just…”
“Just what?”
“I never met a Mable who wasn’t old. Is all.”
“Well, my name is Mable, and I’m not even thirty yet.”
Widow nodded, a little apologetically, a little regretfully.
“You’ll forgive me. I’m on the road a lot. Just myself. It can be taxing on the brain.”
She looked at him crooked and placed a clean, white coffee mug in front of him.
“Coffee?”
He nodded, and a big grin came across his face, like a trained dog running to the sound of a twenty-five-pound bag of food being shaken.
She twisted and went to a counter behind her and returned with a fresh pot of coffee. She poured it, leaving two fingers in the top for Widow to put cream and sugar.
He noticed it but didn’t tell her that he wouldn’t need the space.
He took a drink from the mug and said, �
�This is good coffee. ”
Which it was. Not the best in the world, but as far as roadside diners owned by young entrepreneurs went, it was great.
“This is your place?”
“It was my mother’s. She left it to me after she passed on.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What you don’t think a young woman can run a business?”
“I meant about your mother.”
“I know. I’m just picking on you.”
Widow smiled, took another pull of the coffee.
“Actually, my mom died five years ago. I’ve been running this place ever since.”
“You’re doing a damn fine job of it too.”
“Thanks.”
“Ready to order?”
“What’s good?”
“The Traditional.”
She handed him a menu, which was a two-sided plastic affair with breakfast on one side and lunch and dinner on the other, coffee written on both. He took it and placed it down on the countertop. She pointed at a breakfast called the Traditional.
“Okay. Sounds good.”
He said nothing about the grave. Widow stayed there for less than thirty minutes, finished his breakfast and drank two more cups of coffee for a grand total of three before he asked about the grave.
Mable took his empty plate and asked if there’d be anything else .
Widow said, “What’s the story with the grave?”
She stopped and stared at him. Cold eyes turned flush as if someone had just woken her out of her coma.
Suddenly, Widow felt as though he had bridged a gap that was meant to stay a gap, as though he had opened a sealed room in someone else’s house. He had crossed a line that he had no idea existed.
At first, Mable was quiet. After a long moment, she swallowed, and then she slowly spoke.
“What grave?”
“The one on Willow Street?”
The tree-trunked lumberjacks at the countertop stopped drinking their coffees and twisted in their seats and stared at him too. The four at the tables all did the same. They stopped and looked up. Widow felt it. He didn’t have to have sixteen years of Navy SEAL experience to feel it. A mannequin could have felt it. It was obvious.
Everything that the lumberjacks did seemed rehearsed and perfectly timed. It could have been part of some dinosaur instinct, some kind of synced, single-minded organism. Three tree-trunked dinosaurs all part of the same tribe, all turning to the stranger among them.
At first, Widow stayed staring forward. He looked at Mable; then he returned the stares. He turned in his seat, looked first at the one lumberjack to his left and then twisted around and stared at the other two, ignoring the four at the table. They weren’t the immediate threat. But he didn’t forget them.
The other waitress stepped back to the kitchen door, not going in, but lingering there as if she wanted to be near a back exit in case things went the wrong way.
Mable said, “Sorry, Hon. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
As she turned, he could’ve sworn there was a look of hurt in her eyes, as if the grave was a sore subject. He sensed he should’ve known better than to bring it up.
She took his plate and left a handwritten ticket and walked away.
The lumberjacks stayed where they were, but the big one, with the scar across his face, said, “Maybe it’s time for you to be moving on, friend.”
“What for?”
They said nothing.
“You asking me to leave town?”
“We’re simply pointing out that you have finished your meal and there’s nothing left for you here.”
“There’s nothing left for me anywhere.”
Two of them scratched their heads to that remark.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t expect that you’d get it.”
The big one started to stand up.
Widow stood first. He was off the stool and standing straight up. He said, “No need to get aggressive here, fellas. I’m leaving now. ”
Widow waited to see what they would do. And they did nothing. The big one nodded and faced forward. The other two followed suit, like dinosaurs sharing a collective brain.
Widow held the check and stared down at it, checked the math, an old habit, and dug the amount out of his pocket in cash. He left a two-dollar tip. Not the percentage that he usually left. The end of his experience wasn’t top-notch. Now, he was even more interested in the unmarked grave.
Who was in it?
The waitress was lying to him about the grave. That was obvious. But why were the three lumberjacks getting all bent out of shape about it?
He knew when someone was lying to him.
Maybe the topic of the unmarked grave was a sore subject for some people in town.
He finished his coffee and moved on.
Outside, Widow thought about catching a ride out of town. He knew from firsthand experience that the bus didn’t run through Hellbent, but the thought hit him anyway. He looked up one side of the street, saw plenty of vehicles and people walking, then he gazed down the other side of the street and saw more of the same.
He decided to go left.
Chapter 11
A NOTHER FIVE HOURS of blazing fire and no one would’ve known that a cabin had ever been in the spot that Bridges and Wagner were now standing. But the rain had put out the fire, not soon enough to leave any forensics behind. They were staring at the only evidence they had.
Wagner stood, staring at the black and gray ash that used to be something. His mouth hung wide open.
“What a terrible way to die.”
Bridges said, “It is.”
“You think they were cooking meth?”
“Not sure.”
Bridges knelt on her haunches. She pulled a stainless-steel ballpoint pen out of a shirt breast pocket, kept the tip retracted, and used the end to gently brush away flakes of ash around a human hand. There was no skin. No fingernails. Nothing but the almost buried bones of something that was once alive, surrounded by ash and muddy residue from the rain.
“What is it?” Wagner asked.
“Look. ”
He stepped closer and stopped a foot behind her. He stayed standing and leaned forward, peering over her shoulder.
“What are we looking at?”
“Check it out.”
Wagner pulled his Raybans off his face and held them down by his side.
He saw nothing, at first, but he kept staring, thinking whatever she was looking at would sink in. And it did. He saw it.
“What is that?”
She moved the pen and budged it with the tip.
“It’s a nail.”
Wagner said, “Oh my God!”
“Someone nailed this guy to the wall.”
“He was murdered.”
Bridges set the tip of the nail back down into the human soot and slowly rose back to her feet.
“We’ve got to call this in.”
“Let’s look some more first.”
He agreed, and they walked the perimeter. Bridges went out to the tree line and walked north and west around the pile of ash that used to be a hunting cabin.
She heard Wagner call out from the front yard.
“Who did this place belong to, anyway?”
“It belonged to Neelan.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s an old guy who runs a hunting company in town. He sells hunting gear, weapons, stuff like that. ”
“So what? He gets hunters coming into his shop for supplies and then he talks them into renting a cabin out here?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he does.”
“Smart.”
“He calls it Sporting Synergy.”
“Cool term.”
“No, I mean that’s the name of his store. Sporting Synergy Hunting.”
Wagner walked farther away from the pile of ash to the very last sign of it and started from there, walking back.
Bridges gazed from as
h back out to the forest like she was comparing something.
Wagner moved slowly, staring at the black dust until he saw something.
He called out, “Bridges.”
“Yeah? Got something?”
“Take a look.”
Bridges left the tree line and walked over to where Wagner stood. She stopped and stared in horror.
“Shit,” she muttered.
They were staring at two more human-shaped piles of ash.
“What the hell happened here?” Wagner said, a rhetorical question.
But Bridges answered it anyway.
“Looks like they were tortured.”
They stood there for a long minute until Wagner rocked back on his feet from a gust of wind and said again, “We’d better call this in.”
“Who you going to call? ”
“My CO for one thing.”
“He’ll call the FBI.”
“Well, we can’t do anything.”
“True.”
Wagner took a cell phone out of his left pocket and stared at the screen.
“You’re not going to get a signal. Not out here.”
“What about yours?”
“Are you kidding? No phone will work out here.”
Discouragement came over his face.
“We’d better get back then. Whoever did this is probably still in town.”
Bridges turned and led him back to the truck.
At the truck, Wagner hopped into the passenger side and stared at a CB police radio.
“That thing work?”
She was already picking it up, preparing to use it.
“It works.”
“Good you can call it in.”
“There’s one problem.”
“What?”
“There’s no one to call it in to.”
“Right. But what about one of your deputies?”
She shrugged.
“You mean my volunteer deputy? Singular. He’s not going to be there. Right now, he’s on call. But I’m going to try.”
She clicked the button and said, “Colin. You there?”
No answer .
She paused and tried again, waited. There was nothing but static.
She tossed the receiver down and tried her phone again. This time it worked.
She redialed her deputy and got the answer machine at the office.
