Anger still simmered just beneath the surface, the muscles and tendons pulled tight in her chest and collarbones, visible each time she glanced at the rearview mirror.
Just as clear was the tempest of hostility roiling behind her eyes, concentrated fury ready to be aimed at whoever was foolish enough to come her way.
Each moment since storming out of the office, she had expected her phone to ring or the radio on the dash to spring to life. She had planned on picking it up, hearing Charbonneau scream and yell, a big man when hiding behind a desk across town.
In the course of his outburst, he would cite her insubordination, use it as grounds for dismissal, tell her to collect her things, drop off the truck keys, and never return.
Not that she could really blame him if such a thing were to come to pass. She had probably crossed a few lines, had acted in a way that no low-ranking employee ever should.
But she would be damned if she ever apologized for it, every last word she said complete truth.
Having heard nothing from the office, Davis pointed her vehicle in the only place she could, doing the sole logical thing that occurred to her.
She would continue working the case that had been given to her, seeing it as far as she could for as long as she could.
She would just be damn smart in how she approached things, knowing that whatever scintilla of help she might have garnered from the office was now gone.
Either way, it wasn’t like there was a chance in hell she could walk away from this.
Twenty minutes after leaving the office, she pulled back up to the same spot she’d been in earlier that morning, making a k-turn so the nose of her Bronco was pointed toward the exit in case she needed to leave in a hurry. Climbing out, she removed her weapon from its holster, bending her elbow and tucking it tight against her shoulder.
With her head cocked to the side, she stood, her eyes searching, waiting for any sign of something that shouldn’t be there.
Aside from the ticking of her engine a few feet away, there was nothing. A few birds chirped overhead, stray spots of sun managed to filter down through the trees, but as far as she could tell, nothing was out of the ordinary.
Moving in a diagonal path, she went toward the front door, putting one foot across the other, going in a slow and easy pace.
“Don’t.”
Just a single word, it sent a charge the length of Davis’s spine. Stuck halfway between her Bronco and the front door, she whirled toward the sound of it, dropping to a knee, her weapon extended before her.
Sweat dripping down her face, her breath came in short gasps as she stared to the southern corner of the house, seeing nothing.
“I am with the Sheriff’s Department!” she yelled. “Come out with your hands up where I can see you!”
Continuing to move her gaze from side to side, she saw nothing, not even a shadow out of place.
“Lou, it’s me,” the same voice called.
Taking a moment to register, Davis exhaled slowly, the front end of her gun dipping a few inches.
Tim.
“Dammit, Tim,” she said, using the toe of her boot to push herself upright. As she did, she released her left hand from the grip of the weapon, lowering it to her side.
A moment later, Tim emerged from the far edge of the cabin, his hands held wide, a near copy of their first encounter on the back deck hours before.
“We really need to stop meeting like this,” he said.
Not in the mood for sarcasm – or much of anything for that matter – Davis merely glared his direction.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” she spat.
Taking a few steps further, Tim measured her, taking in her words, the look on her face.
“I see the shock has passed.”
Thinking back on her explosion earlier at the office, she ventured that it would be quite a while before anybody could claim that the full shock of the morning was behind her.
Even if that wasn’t exactly what he’d been getting at.
“Tim, why are you here? Again?”
Dropping his hands to his side, he nodded, “Same reason you are.”
Motioning with the top of his head to the side, he added, “Come on, you need to see this.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Without waiting for a response, Tim disappeared back in the same direction he had come from, the sound of his footsteps falling away.
Not caring for his second sudden appearance, or his seeming to think he was in control of their interaction, Davis gritted her teeth, shaking her head as she took one last look at their surroundings. Seeing nothing more than on her previous glances, she circled wide around the side of the house, Tim waiting halfway down, his body turned to look in her direction.
Opening her mouth, a litany of comments and questions lined up, Davis was cut short.
“So, I was thinking the same thing you must have been after everything went down earlier,” Tim said.
Pulling up alongside him, Davis made no attempt to bite back the acid on her tongue.
“You mean, where the hell did you get a gun? How did you learn to shoot it? Did you really think you could just walk away from what happened out there?”
A faint half-smile was the first response, Tim keeping his upper body turned in her direction. Regarding her for a moment, he nodded, before replying, “Okay, so maybe we weren’t thinking the same thing.”
Taking a step forward, he added, “You’re welcome, by the way.”
The same feeling that had washed over her in Charbonneau’s office welled again, threatening to overtake her, to rise up and come spilling out, laying waste to anyone that stood before her.
In this case, that being Tim Scarberry.
“No,” he continued, either not noticing or not caring about the stance she was taking, the clear agitation on her face. “What I was thinking was, how the heck did Baxter’s guys know the second we showed up? I mean, we had barely left and they were on us.”
With everything already lined up in her mind, ready to be unleashed, it took a moment for the words to sink in, for their meaning to resonate with Davis.
In the time since the yellow truck had arrived, she’d jumped from one extreme emotional state to another. For not a moment had she been able to stop and truly ruminate on things.
A move that, if she had done it, would have surely led her to the same conclusion Tim was now putting before her.
“Damn,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“Right?” he replied, taking a few more steps forward. Walking just to the rear corner of the house, he turned his body sideways. Bending at the waist, he pressed his palms into the front of his thighs, extending a single finger forward.
Remaining back a few feet, Davis followed the lead.
“What?” she asked. “Something on the deck?”
“Come here,” Tim said, using the same hand to motion her over.
Flicking her gaze from the deck to him and his ridiculous pose, she exhaled slowly, willing herself not to make a comment, not to unload some more of the animosity she was feeling within. Taking two steps forward, she assumed the same stance as him, their arms pressed tight together.
“Up under the top railing,” Tim said, “on the far side.”
Squinting her eyes tight, Davis ran her gaze the length of the rail, spotting what he was directing her to halfway down. “What is that, a wasp’s nest?”
“A camera. That’s how they were able to show up right after we did.”
Nudging forward a few extra inches, Davis peered tight. Being told what it was, it was easy to pick out the hard line of the device, a small black electronic no more than a couple inches across.
“How did you...”
“I figured they would be looking through the glass,” Tim said. “So I skirted the rear, spotted it tucked up under there.”
Nodding, Davis coupled the information with what she already knew, a few pieces beginning to slowly fit into place.
<
br /> “Which is why we’re now standing over here.”
“Out of the line of sight.”
“And the reflection of the glass,” Davis said. Shoving herself upright, she took a few steps back, using the corner as a shield. “Smart.”
Remaining in place another moment, Tim eventually rose to full height before turning to regard her. “You don’t have to sound quite so surprised. And to answer your questions: I got the gun from my Uncle Jep, learned to shoot it from him first, later by the army, and I wasn’t running away.
“I was just avoiding the hour-long shit show that would have been going back to the Sheriff’s Department with you.”
Giving one last look over to the deck, he too took refuge beyond the edge of the house. Folding his arms across his torso, Davis could see the front bulge of his gun in his pants pocket, him making no effort to hide it.
“Speaking of which, how the hell did you get out of there so fast?”
Looking his way for only a moment, Davis shifted her focus to the trees, pretending to be making another sweep of their surroundings.
“Long story.”
A smirk pulled her attention back, though there was no mirth on Tim’s face when she looked. “How ugly?”
“Enough,” she said, not wanting to get into the details with him, hating the fact that he had even seemed to sniff out what had taken place.
“Enough that you aren’t still employed?” he asked.
This time, Davis felt her annoyance spike in a way she didn’t feign to want to control. The time of others around her having control of the conversation, of the events directly affecting her, was over.
“No, I am,” she snapped, “which, might I remind you, makes me the only law enforcement officer present. I told you earlier you were trespassing at a crime scene.”
“That was right before I saved your life,” Tim inserted.
Blood flushing her cheeks, Davis said, “I’m sorry, were you the one that saw them coming and took off before they could run us over?”
Beginning to respond, Tim paused, his mouth half open. Closing it, he unfolded his arms, patting the air between them, a gesture of placation.
“Easy. I just said that because I was hoping it would buy me a little latitude.”
“Very little,” Davis snapped, “which I like to think I’ve already extended.”
“And I asked if you were still employed because right now there is a ticking clock and two distinct things that need to be looked into. I can get on one of them, but the other you are infinitely better suited for.”
Again, the thought of pointing out she was the sole one among them licensed to do anything came to mind, ultimately outweighed by wanting to know what he was thinking.
In the aftermath of her earlier explosion, she had come back to the cabin because it seemed the most logical.
That didn’t mean she had a clear plan in mind.
“Yeah?” she asked. “And what’s that?”
Pausing, Tim studied her a moment, as if trying to get a feel for how serious she was, before stating, “I hit one of the shooters atop the truck. Assuming he didn’t die, they had to take him somewhere for treatment.”
Seeing where he was going, Davis nodded.
He was right. She was better suited than he was for such a thing. Her search on the license plate earlier had been a dead end, but that didn’t mean their attackers couldn’t still provide them with a lot of information.
“And the other?”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The weapon was in Radney Creel’s hand the instant the sound first penetrated the house. Even over the persistent belching of the air conditioning unit in the front room, the low rumble of a large vehicle was plainly audible.
Jerking Creel out of the rear bedroom, he padded forward through the house, gun raised to his shoulder, adrenaline pumping. Making his way down the front hallway, he poked his head inside the kitchen to see Elijah Pyle rising from his post behind the table, cigar clamped between his teeth, a plume of smoke engulfing his face.
In his hands were a pair of the guns he’d spent the last two days oiling, finally having some use for the extensive care they’d been shown.
“You tell anybody where we were?” Creel asked.
“I haven’t said a word to anybody but you all week,” Pyle replied. Taking a step to the side, he spit the cigar into the sink, shoving the remaining smoke out through his nostrils, both weapons raised to either side of his head. “Anybody here now, means they must have followed your ass home.”
Letting the scowl on his face be the only response, Creel pushed back from the kitchen.
There was no way anybody had followed, no chance they would even be able to tail him if they wanted to. Not under the best of conditions, and certainly not in the wide-open roads of East Tennessee.
Going straight across the carpet of the front room, he pressed a shoulder to the far wall, using one finger to pull back the lace curtain hanging across it, forming an opening no more than a couple of inches across.
“You have got to be shitting me.”
At once, the trepidation he’d felt a moment before was gone, replaced by a renewed hostility unlike anything he could remember. Pushing himself away from the wall, he walked across the room to the front door, Pyle appearing in the opening to the kitchen, guns still in hand.
“What?”
“Gawdamn rookies,” Creel spat. Beginning to tuck his own weapon into the small of his back, he thought better of it, instead snatching the door open and stepping outside, pistol held at shoulder level before him.
On the other end of it was two of the three young men he’d met with earlier in the day. One of the two was striped liberally with blood, his jeans and cutoff t-shirt bearing enormous splotches of it.
Marching straight out, Creel kept the gun trained on them, watching as both froze in the middle of the sidewalk, their faces pale, one even going as far as to raise his hands before him.
As if that would make a damn bit of difference.
“What the hell are you two doing here?”
Between them, not a single word was uttered, both standing rigid, grasping for the right thing to say.
Wanting nothing more than to point the gun at the sky, or at the ground by their feet, or even into their kneecaps, and fire, to get their damn attention, Creel instead took another step forward.
Pressed the front barrel of the weapon into the chest of the cleaner of the two.
Behind him, he could hear floorboards groaning, Pyle no doubt coming out to observe, his presence just one more thing that had Creel’s blood boiling.
“What. The hell. Are you doing here?” Creel said, spitting the sentence out in fragments, spittle flying as he asked the question.
The young man with the gun in his chest looked down at the weapon before staring up at Creel. All previous thoughts of self-assuredness, of male machismo, even of his overinflated muscles, peeled away, revealing nothing more than the scared kid Creel had tabbed them all for the moment they arrived.
“Uh, boss told us where you were.”
Pressing his lips tighter together, Creel could feel his face twitching, vitriol aching to come spewing out.
“You called Vic?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Why?”
Again glancing down to the gun, the young man said, “We didn’t know what else to do.”
Taking a half-step forward, Creel closed the gap between them to just a few inches. Raising the front tip of the weapon away from the kid’s chest, he jabbed it forward a handful of times, the metal beating against his flesh.
“So why the hell didn’t you call me?”
“I,” the young man stammered, looking to the side for aid. “I...”
Moving forward another couple of inches, Creel jerked the gun from the young man’s chest, repositioning it under his chin.
“You..” he said, mocking the young man’s cadence, “you called Baxter?”
Every
part of him wanted to pull the trigger. To send the guy’s teeth up through the top of his skull, a geyser of blood and brain matter.
Turn the weapon to the side and do the same to his cohort.
They might have been sent by the boss, but nobody would know if they met their end standing right on the front sidewalk.
Nobody but Pyle, and Creel was long past giving a damn what he thought.
Shoving the gun upward, using it to lift the young man’s chin toward the sky, he pushed until the kid staggered back, unable to maintain his balance, before twisting and taking a few steps out across the brittle front lawn.
Running a free hand back over his head, Creel looked to Pyle in the doorway, still holding the guns, his wrists resting on his hips, looking like he was supremely enjoying the entire affair.
“Damn donkey show, ain’t it?” Pyle said, letting some of his amusement show in his tone, on his face.
A donkey show didn’t begin to describe it, but Creel was not about to openly agree with the man.
He had enough on his mind at the moment.
“Holy shit,” he said, scratching at the back of his scalp. “What the hell did you boys do?”
Glancing over, he could see the two of them share a glance, neither looking like they were prepared to say a word.
Things like this were why he worked alone. Why he never, ever consorted with young kids like these.
They didn’t know what they were doing, were too young and pompous not to broadcast every move to the world, couldn’t think about more than the six inches in front of their face.
Which was usually dictated by the six inches between their legs.
“There were three of you earlier.”
Thinking that would be enough, he waited for a response, watching as they continued their show of fidgeting.
“Where the hell is the other one now?”
“County,” the one with the blood stains said.
Having no idea what County was, Creel could only infer it was a nearby hospital, meaning that whoever might be looking into things would now have a pretty tight geographic window to pin them into.
Great.
“What happened to him?” Creel asked, each word burning as it passed over his tongue, every part of the day one unending exercise in bullshit.
The Subway Page 20