“Fine,” she said. “After school she talked about going for a run and then we were supposed to hook up.”
“Where?”
“At my house and then we were going to our spot.”
“Where’s your spot?” Jake asked, stepping away from the kid, but holding the sharp end of the antenna at his head as a warning.
“An old house off Poor Boy Road. We found it in the woods one day. We go there once in a while to hang out. It’s not far from yours. A quarter mile past Skinny Hart’s place. You know, the house with those silly deer statues and gazing balls in front of it.”
“Who lives there?” Maggie asked.
“Nobody,” Alicia said, squinting like it was the stupidest question she’d ever asked. “Looks like nobody’s lived there in a long time. There’s a picture of a skinny guy next to a fat woman in the dining room, but that’s the only personal thing there.”
“So what happened?”
“She never showed at my house,” Alicia said. “I called her, but she didn’t answer. I figured you and her were doing something.” She finally caught the frantic look in Maggie’s eyes and softened. “You really can’t find her?”
“No, I can’t. Who else knows about this place?”
“Nobody, Ms. Holden. I wanted to tell some people and Halle said no. It was our little hideout.”
“If you hear anything about her, you call me. Now, go home.” Maggie grabbed Jake by the elbow. They climbed into Jake’s truck which he threw in reverse.
“You were going to cut him, weren’t you?” she asked.
He shook her earlier with his tale of his violent past and was afraid to say any more. No way perched on his lips, but he couldn’t lie to her. “Thought about it. A few months ago, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. Seeing their own blood tends to be a big motivator to get people to talk.”
“What changed your mind?”
He glanced at her. “You. I don’t want to be that guy anymore.” He let the confession sit. “You know the place the girl was talking about?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “Sounds like old Royce Weather’s place. Hell, he’s been dead for years. I kind of know where the turn off is, but I’ll never find it in the dark.”
“Call Bear,” Jake said. “Have him meet us at your place. We’ll swing past to make sure your girl hasn’t gone back home. If she’s not there, I bet Bear can find the house.”
He spun the truck around and started back out The Fill Road; the Swinging Bridge crossing the Osage River couldn’t support traffic any longer. He glanced in the rearview mirror. The teens resumed their drinking, and the shithead flipped him off with a full arm extension.
They rolled to Highway 7, stopped, and waited for a few cars to pass.
“Tell me she’s okay, Jake.”
“She’s okay,” he said. As she dialed, Jake hoped he wasn’t telling her a lie.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A quarter before midnight, Willie pulled into the driveway of his uncle’s farm a few miles northwest of Hastain. He killed the lights and rolled along the dusty road, guiding the truck by the moonlight which danced in and out of the patchy clouds overhead. Though his uncle slept like the dead, Willie wasn’t taking any chances on waking him. He wheeled away from the house behind a decrepit barn, slouching like an ancient relic in the darkness.
Willie opened the door. “Stay here and keep an eye on her.”
“With pleasure,” Bub said, drawing his tongue across his chapped lips. Willie started toward the barn, paused, and leaned back inside.
“You touch her, Bub, and I’ll cut your dick off. Got it?”
Bub’s nostrils flared like a bull, his mouth working on a reply but came up empty.
“Give me two minutes.” Willie grabbed his portion of meth from the back and hauled the hefty bags around to a coffin-shaped box his uncle used to store miscellaneous tools. Willie set the bags on the ground and opened the box. He moved some blankets and tools out of the way and yanked on a ring hidden in the base. A three-foot by three-foot trap door opened, leading to a hidden cellar beneath the barn. He could hide Halle down here and say she got away. But then he’d have to contend with Bub and Shane. He grabbed the meth and carefully descended the creaky stairs into darkness. When he reached the dirt floor, he dropped the bags on the ground and groped around for cord of the overhead light.
The dull light from the dirty single bulb swung, pushing back the shadows. Fifteen feet square, the room held racks of rifles, machine guns and other weapons his uncle swore the government didn’t want him to have. Enough weaponry to shoot Shane’s house to hell and back, but Willie couldn’t shoot worth a damn and Bub embodied one of the biggest targets you could find in Benton County.
He moved past plastic-covered shelves of dry goods and water jugs lining the far wall. Willie would burn the roads to get here when the zombie apocalypse hit. He picked up the meth bags and placed them in an old army footlocker in the far corner.
Back at the entrance, Willie killed the light and hopped into his truck. Minutes later they rolled back down the road to the highway, toward the blue house and Shane. Willie’s grip tightened on the wheel with each turn of the wheels. The window to get Halle out of this mess shrank with each passing second.
* * *
Jake and Maggie waited in Maggie’s living room for Bear. They’d swept through like a tornado looking for Halle. It killed Jake to see the fire in her eyes extinguish like a blown-out match when they found the house empty. To make matters worse, he got a text from an unknown number. The simple message read “Tick tock.” Jake had less than a day to put Langston in a body bag or Keats would find one for Jake.
Maggie fidgeted on the beige, corduroy couch, rubbing her hands together like they were worry stones, waiting for her baby girl to come bounding through the front door. Jake sat in a brown, leather recliner next to the couch twiddling his thumbs, feeling helpless and hating it.
“It’s going to be okay, Mags.” Did the words sound as hollow as they felt? Would she see through his reassurance knowing things might be far from okay?
“Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” she whispered.
“Who says that?”
“You used to,” she said, head tilting in surprise.
Jake scrunched his eyes. “When?”
“All the time. We’d sit on the hill talking about what you were going through with Stony and football and school and Nick and Janey. Your head went in a million different directions back then. You hoped for the best because that’s what would get you out of here. You planned on the worst because you knew life is full of curveballs.”
“I don’t remember saying it. Sounds pretty optimistic considering that as long as Stony was around, things were guaranteed to turn to shit,” he said.
“I always loved that about you.”
“What?”
“You could always see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, a sad smile crossing her lips.
“Well, I was an idiot teenager.”
She shook her head. “I think you’re selling yourself short.”
He rose and stood by the fireplace, examining the pictures on the mantel. He lifted the first one; one of her parents with their arms draped around an eight-year-old Maggie.
“That’s my favorite picture of my folks,” she said. “We took it at Silver Dollar City. Daddy was so happy he could spring for a vacation. He did just about anything to make me happy.”
“Don’t think he liked me much.”
“He liked you about as much as any father could for the man who deflowered his baby girl.”
“You told him?” Jake set the picture back on the mantel as if the frame was on fire.
Maggie laughed. “No, but I think he had a pretty good idea. I think he had bigger worries that you were going to turn out like your father.”
“Then he was a smart man.”
He stared at another picture of a beautiful, blonde girl with the same button nos
e and high cheekbones as Maggie.
“This Halle? Bet you’re beating the boys back with a stick.” He stole a glance at Maggie. “She’s gorgeous, just like her mother.”
“She is beautiful, inside and out. She’s stubborn as mule, like her father.”
“Who is…” Jake asked when headlights flooded the living room and Bear’s horn blared. Maggie jumped from the couch. Jake set Halle’s picture back on the mantel and followed her outside, clasped Bear’s hand, then laid out what they learned from Alicia.
“I know exactly where it is,” Bear said. “Not far from here at all. Got some flashlights we can use to scout the place out. Come on.”
The three of them climbed into Bear’s truck and they rolled out of Maggie’s driveway and on to Poor Boy Road. Instead of moving right toward town, Bear spun the wheel to the left. They rode in silence through the blackness, the clock on the dashboard reading twelve thirty. A mile later, he slowed, leaning his bulky frame forward, squinting his eyes as he probed the passing landscape lit up by the headlights.
“There you are,” he said at last, cutting on to a dirt path Jake didn’t even see. He hopped out and opened a long, green gate then returned. They bounced along deep, rain-carved ruts for a hundred yards before rolling into a clearing. The truck’s bright beams blasted the side of the old house in front of them, shadows jumping away into the deep woods. The three of them got out and Bear scanned the area. He popped open the strap of his holster and rested his hand on the butt of his gun. Jake stood beside him, taking in the house and surrounding grounds.
“Abandoned, huh?” Jake said.
“That’s the word.”
“Awful lot of fresh tire tracks for an abandoned place.”
“Any chance Halle would drive down here, Mags?” Bear asked.
“No chance,” she said. “We just have the one car and it’s in Sedalia.”
“Jake, stay here with Maggie.” Bear eased his gun from his holster. “I’m going to check the house out.”
“I’m coming with you,” Maggie said, starting forward. Bear held his hand out.
“No, you’re going to stay here with Jake,” he said. “Something doesn’t smell right.”
Jake took Maggie’s hand and pulled her to him. He leaned against the truck, feeling naked without a weapon of his own. Bear crept with his pistol resting on the outstretched flashlight. At the front of the house, he shined it through the window, then walked around the side and out of sight.
Despite the warmth, Maggie trembled as a late summer wind gusted through the trees. Jake agreed with Bear, something didn’t smell right. The normal rustic, woodsy smell of the Ozarks had been replaced with an acrid stench.
Bear’s flashlight appeared on the opposite side of the house and danced along the ground as it approached them. As he drew closer, he holstered his pistol and examined something in a white handkerchief in his hand.
“What’s that?” Jake asked.
Bear held out a red shard into the lights of his truck. “A link. Meth”.
“Red meth?”
“Devil Ice. I got a shithead in custody who knows exactly what it is.”
“You go inside the house?” Jake asked.
“Hell, no. You smell it?”
“Yeah, like weird sweet-smelling cat piss,” Jake said. “If that makes any sense.”
“Makes perfect sense if you combine it with the trash I saw inside the house through the windows and this chunk of meth. That’s why we’re not going in there. This is a meth lab and somebody cooked here recently.”
“But…but…Halle could be in there,” Maggie said, jumping forward. Bear grabbed her by the arm.
“You can’t go in there, Mags, the house is full of poison. But don’t worry, I checked the rooms through the windows and it’s empty. I’ll get my team here with the proper gear and we’ll sweep through it. Once light breaks, we’ll sweep through the woods as well, but I’m guessing Halle was here recently.”
“Why do you say that?” Maggie asked, a slight smile raising her cheekbones.
Bear held out the white handkerchief and rolled his palm over revealing a silver iPod. Its illuminated face showed two things, Pink’s song “Try” playing and the ominous sliver of red from the battery bar. Bear turned the iPod case over, the light from the truck revealed the name “Halle” crudely etched in the silver casing. Maggie stifled a cry. Jake pulled her in tight, holding her until her stiffness gave in.
“Come on, Mags.” He led her to the truck and helped her in. He shut the door and returned to Bear.
“What are you thinking?” Jake asked.
“I got a cook house, a rock of new meth they’re calling Devil Ice, which I also found in the trailer of a guy I have in custody who happens to work for my local dealer who happens to work for Shane Langston. Combine that with Halle’s iPod and I’d say we’ve got ourselves a good lead.”
Shane Langston again. Should he bust out the reason for his return besides taking care of his dying father? How would Bear react? He couldn’t do it in front of Maggie. Soon.
At least they now had something to go on. Jake had the same iPod. His got a good six to eight hours of playing time before the battery ran out which put Halle here not long ago. Where the hell was she now?
Chapter Thirty
At midnight, moving south on Highway M, Willie turned down a roughly paved unmarked road heading toward the water. He flipped the headlights to bright and slammed the brakes hard when a couple of deer flew across the road, missing his front end by scant inches. Willie instinctively threw his arm across Halle’s chest to keep her from flying into the windshield. Bub grunted as his sausage hands crushed into the dashboard. As if Willie’s nerves weren’t frayed enough, he had to worry about a family of deer flying through the windshield and skewering him.
Bub yelled and reached for the shotgun in the rack behind their heads. Halle screamed at Bub’s lunge and pressed her palms into the dashboard.
“Bub, what the hell?” Willie said.
Bub kept his hand on the gun, breathing heavy. “Little bastards coulda killed us.”
“It’s just a bunch of goddamn deer.”
“I gotta do something…shoot something. I’m about to lose my fucking mind. We shouldn’t be doing this, Willie. We need to bail.”
“Relax, man. Smoke a blunt.”
“I would if I had one.”
Bub sat back in the seat and they drove on for another mile. Willie leaned forward, squinting through the midnight fog wafting off the road, searching for the turn off. He slowed to a crawl by a blue ribbon tied on a fence post off the road. At a gate blocking the road, he flashed his brights three times.
A bearded behemoth with a shaved head and a neck as thick as Willie’s waist emerged from the darkness with a rife slung across his back and a pistol in his hand. Was that Rick? Hard to tell. Shane liked to rotate through his crew, and they all looked alike, big and mean. Rick eyed the truck for a moment, called in something on a radio and opened the gate. Willie gave him a quick wave, getting nothing but a cold stare in return.
A quarter of a mile later, Willie stopped in front of the blue house, a sprawling two story nestled in a grove of thick Ozark trees off the water. The house was dark except for a patch of lights on the far end and a single bulb burning over the front door. A pair of boots stuck out of the shadows at the far reaches of the porch light. A heaviness settled in his gut. His chances to save Halle were all but gone. He smoothed his hair back and took a deep breath.
“Stay here with the girl,” he said to Bub. “Let me make sure everything’s cool with Shane.”
“What if you don’t come back out?” Bub asked.
“Then I guess you’re fucked.”
He climbed out, the rusty door screeching through the night like a banshee. He slammed it shut and walked the few feet to the front door.
“Go on in,” the voice said from the darkened porch. “He’s waitin’ for you in the den.”
Willie opened
the door and took a few tentative steps inside to the smell of fried bacon and cigarette smoke. A light shined from the kitchen to his left and a figure flashed by the doorway. A bearded face he didn’t recognize. He went right down the dark hallway, his heart hammering.
He emerged into a brightly lit den. A large head of a ten-point buck hung above a stone fireplace, regarding Willie with glassy eyes. Bookending the fireplace were two comfortable leather highbacks. Shane lounged in one of them in blue jeans and a tight, gray T-shirt talking on his cell phone, his polished, black cowboy boots resting on a wagon wheel coffee table. Shane raised his eyebrows at Willie and waved him forward to sit on the brown leather couch.
“Yeah, he just got here,” Shane said. “Uh huh. It won’t be a problem, sir. I’ll take care of it.”
Willie’s skin prickled, his nerves firing on all cylinders. He didn’t know why Shane wanted him here, didn’t know what he planned on doing with Halle, and had certainly never heard Shane call anyone “sir.” He pulled out his cigarettes, hoping the nicotine would ease the nervous tremble in his hands.
“Willie.” Shane hung up the phone and settled back in the chair. “Glad you could make it. Any trouble finding the place again?”
“Little tougher in the dark, but we managed.”
“Where’s the girl?”
“In the truck with Bub.”
“You didn’t invite them in?” Shane asked. “Where’s your manners?”
“Thought we should talk first.” Willie took a deep pull on his smoke. “I never heard you call nobody sir before.”
“It’s called respect.”
“I suppose.”
Shane plopped his boots to the floor and leaned forward, resting his steely arms on his knees. His jaw tensed as he picked up a large Bowie knife off the table and cleaned his fingernails with it.
“You know what I hate, Willie?” he asked after a minute of silence, holding his nails out for examination like he just got a manicure at a salon.
Jake Caldwell Thrillers Page 15