The Subway

by Dustin Stevens

  A stab of hostility passed through Davis, her features contorting as Tim pressed the door open, shoving his way on inside.

  With the opening of the door came a host of new smells, ones markedly different from those in the garage, bringing with them an entirely new set of physiological responses.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Walking into the ME’s office in Sevierville had been a new experience for Talula Davis. She’d been around bodies before – it was sort of a job requirement, even for somewhere as far-flung as Monroe County – but never something like what she had encountered in the chilled basement lab.

  The chest splayed open.

  The organs in various states of removal.

  The tattered skin flaps that had been Jessup Lynch’s chest.

  Even at that, she would gladly take a morning conversation with Dr. Asay every day for the next week if it meant she didn’t have to walk into something like the back room of the farmhouse.

  The bodies looked to be the other two from the yellow truck that had tried to run them down that morning. Both young and muscled up, they looked like the kind that someone would send in to try and make a point.

  Definitely like the sort that would drive an oversized monstrosity of a pickup truck and paint it bright yellow, looking to put a sign up, drawing attention to themselves.

  Lying side by side on the carpet, their arms hung by their sides, almost as if they were positioned, ready to be placed into coffins. Shot at short range, twin blood circles were stretched across their chests like misshapen red nipples. A few inches each across, they only hinted at the damage that must have been left by the exit wounds, thick puddles of dark blood seeping out from each serving as the proof.

  Though more than enough to be fatal by themselves, a third round had also been placed into each, perfect circles cleaved into their smooth foreheads.

  As for those exit wounds, Davis didn’t need to speculate, assorted organic detritus sprayed across the wall behind them. Time of death seemingly just minutes before, some of the heavier spots were still visibly wet, streaking south.

  Adding one final touch to the hellish scene was the air conditioner blowing at full capacity, shoving the assorted smells into the rest of the house.

  Even now, twenty minutes later, the sight, the smell, was enough to make Davis’s eyes water as she stood in the front doorway. With the door open, she leaned against it, willing to take the outside heat in exchange for a reprieve from everything behind her.

  With her right hand resting on the butt of her weapon, she stood and stared out, trying to make sense of the day she’d had, of what it could possibly entail moving forward.

  Thus far, she’d been shot at, had her ride wrecked beyond repair, stood witness over a trio of bodies. She’d cursed out her boss, condemned her coworkers, became impromptu partners with someone she barely knew.

  In her back pocket was his cell phone, his instructions before slipping away quite odd, even if they were clear, and a bit unequivocal.

  Puzzling over what they meant, Davis’s brows were drawn in tight as a cruiser appeared at the end of the driveway. Moving slow, without sirens or lights, she could see the enormous girth of Charbonneau behind the wheel, a thinner silhouette she guessed to be Adams riding shotgun.

  Lingering by the end of the drive, they seemed to check over the wreckage of her Bronco for several moments, Davis feeling her core draw tight as she tried to imagine the comments that were being lobbed her way from inside the cruiser.

  Just envisioning them, she felt the same animosity she had unleashed earlier rising within her.

  This was going to be ugly. She could see it already.

  Calling it in was not something she was really keen on doing, but she hadn’t had a choice in the matter. As precarious as her employment status might be, not requesting backup in the wake of the exit by two armed assailants and the discovery of a double homicide would be certain termination.

  Maybe even charges of misconduct, or as an accomplice.

  Drawing herself up tall, she placed her hands on her hips, framed in the doorway as the cruiser eventually slid past the wreckage in the front ditch. Idling forward, it stopped well back from the garage, both men climbing out, looking over everything before them.

  “What the...?” Adams opened, his voice trailing away as he bent at the waist, picking up a few shards of the garage door and examining them.

  On the opposite side, Charbonneau stood and folded his arms over his torso, shaking his head as he looked at the last remnants of the garage door hanging free from the corner. His mustache twitched as he sniffed the smell of charred rubber in the air.

  “Got to admit,” he said, raising his voice, “didn’t think I’d be getting a call from you so soon after that little outburst of yours back at the station.”

  Not caring for his choice of words or the connotation they carried, Davis remained silent, venturing no closer.

  Knowing nothing good could come from it.

  “But now I guess I understand why,” he said. Slowly, he shifted his focus over to her, his face red and sweating, trying its best to hold a glare. “What the hell did you do this time?”

  Just as it had a few hours before, that familiar jolt of anger rose up through Davis. Starting low, it spiked fast and hard, threatening to come rolling out, to tell both of the men before her exactly what she thought of them.

  In case that hadn’t been made abundantly clear already.

  Instead, she raised a finger, motioning for them to follow her inside. Taking a step that direction, she disappeared through the doorway, peering out the lace curtains, watching as the two seemed to debate things for a moment.

  Not until they begrudgingly started to come forward, each waving their hands about, the sound of their voices just barely drifting in, did she walk on through the house.

  With each step, the smells of death became more pronounced, so much so that she stopped on the edge of the rear living room. Hooking her thumbs into the front of her belt, she put her back to the room, waiting for them to enter.

  It took longer than it should have, was accompanied by a host of unnecessary grunts and noises done simply for her to hear, but eventually they showed, Charbonneau filling the width of the doorway, Adams taking the top vertical portion behind him.

  “On patrol this afternoon, I spotted the yellow truck that had attempted to run me down,” Davis said. “When I approached the front door, two men fled, destroying the garage door on their way out.”

  The story wasn’t quite how things had played out, but at this point, she had determined that leaving Tim out of it as much as possible was for the best.

  They already knew he had been with her earlier. There was no need to make it look like she had brought on a partner without consulting them, especially one that had first arrived by illegally entering an active crime scene.

  “So that’s what happened to your department issue vehicle out there?” Charbonneau said, his tone and his question both making the hatred Davis felt for him become that much more pronounced.

  Of course, that was what he was most concerned with at the moment.

  “After taking fire, I breached the house, attempting to secure the scene,” Davis continued, doing her best to ignore his statement and the insinuation it carried. Jerking her chin back over her shoulder, she added, “That’s when I found this.”

  Each staring at her a moment longer in silence, Charbonneau was the first to react. Stepping forward, he kept his gaze on her, a sneer in place, before walking to the threshold of the rear living room and peering in.

  There he stood for the better part of a minute, saying nothing, his body less than two feet from Davis, before slowly turning his head to regard her.

  “You’re fired.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  The drive south from Knoxville had been short and relatively painless for Deputy Marshal Abby Lipski. After a few initial stabs at conversation – all of which were met with little to
no enthusiasm from anybody in the car – Marshal Colvin had fallen largely silent, relegating his comments to nothing more than clarifications about directions rendered or the destination they were headed to.

  In the rear, Marshals Burrows and Marlucci had been silent as well, both pounding away at various electronic devices, keeping in close contact with the team back on the plane, all of them scurrying to try and get a handle on Tim Scarberry.

  As best any of them could tell, the calls had been had with Jessup Lynch, the adoptive father that took Scarberry in after the demise of his parents in his teen years. A reclusive sort that lived well below the radar, initial sweeps for property or utility holdings in his name had turned up nothing.

  Not until someone had noticed that he had once been married, the woman deceased, did the notion of trying to track him under her name occur to them.

  From there, things had fallen fairly easily into order. The man might have preferred to stay out of sight, but that didn’t mean he could be a ghost, not in the modern world.

  Of the various items in his name, one was a bank account that paid for the cell phone listed under the name of someone he had served in Vietnam with decades before.

  For most of the drive down, she couldn’t help but wonder how much of this could have been avoided, how unnecessary the entire ordeal felt.

  Witness protection wasn’t a life in exile. If he needed something, wanted someone to look into his uncle for him, they could have done that.

  Would have been much better suited for it than him, at that.

  But he hadn’t. He had exhibited the same prideful arrogance that annoyed Lipski every time she had to be in the same place as him, storming ahead with total disregard for the mess he was making in his wake.

  Such as potentially destroying her career.

  That notion, that thorn that continued to prod deep into her psyche, was the foremost thought on Lipski’s mind as they pulled down the wooded lane. With pine and poplar trees lining it tight on either side, very little of the late afternoon sun was visible, the air noticeably cooler as Colvin inched them forward.

  Abandoning the previous line of thinking, Lipski sat up higher in her seat. Reaching to her hip, she felt for her weapon, her adrenaline peaking as a structure emerged before them.

  Two stories in height, it was constructed of dark wood, the roof a glossy metallic green.

  Out front sat not a single vehicle, not the slightest sign of life anywhere on the premises.

  “Marshal Burrows, with me,” Lipski said, the SUV not yet even to a stop. “Marshals Colvin, Marlucci, stay with the car, prepare for a quick evac if necessary.”

  Having no idea what they might find, if there would be any call for a fast extraction, Lipski issued the order more to keep the crowd inside thin. Not wanting to have a marshal that was trained in electronic surveillance and another she had just met riding along, she stepped from the car before either could object, Burrows doing the same behind her.

  Bringing both hands under her weapon before her, she jogged across the short expanse of dirt and pine needles that comprised the front yard, stepping up onto the front porch. The roughhewn boards echoed beneath her feet with every step as she crossed them, going directly to the door and pounding on it.

  “Mr. Lynch! U.S. Marshals, open up!”

  In the quiet of the forest, her voice seemed to carry, birds falling silent above them.

  A few feet away, Burrows stood with his own gun angled toward the ground, alternating glances between her and the front of the property.

  “Anything?” he whispered.

  Listening close, Lipski shook her head, hearing none of the usual telltale signs of movement within a home.

  No footfalls on the floor, no creaking boards, not even a groan from the structure under uneven weight.

  “I’m going in,” she said.

  A grunt was the only response from Burrows as she tried the door, finding the knob solid in her hand. Taking a step back, she positioned her body in a staggered stance, her shoulders square to the door.

  “On three.”

  Shifting himself into position, Burrows put a shoulder against the outer wall, prepared to breach the moment she crossed the threshold.

  “One...two...”

  Lipski never got the third word out, a deep and guttural sound replacing it. Hurtling herself forward off her left foot, she drove the heel of her right at the door. Connecting just millimeters from the knob, the door flew inward, the aging boards of the casing splintering beneath her weight.

  Shearing away with a loud cracking sound, Lipski’s momentum carried her across the threshold, the smell of sawdust hitting her nostrils as she stepped to the side, Burrows rushing in behind her, weapon poised.

  Shifting in front of her, he checked over the living room they stood in before taking a few steps forward, peering into the neighboring room. “Clear.”

  Waiting until he was in position, Lipski moved past him into the kitchen, every item cleaned and put away, the place looking like it hadn’t been used in quite some time.

  Going past him, she positioned herself at the foot of a narrow staircase, the wooden steps ascending before her at a sharp angle.

  “Clear,” she echoed, Burrows moving past her. Squeezing his thick frame into the stairwell, he moved in short, choppy steps, his girth filling the space, each step echoing through the house as he pounded his way upward.

  Reaching the top, he stopped and glanced her way before disappearing from view, venturing forward. Following the sound of his footfalls, Lipski maintained her pose by the door.

  Since they’d first arrived, she knew what they were going to find – or rather, wouldn’t find – an assumption that was made final a moment later.

  “Clear,” Burrows called down, Lipski relaxing her shoulders, letting her weapon dip toward the floor. Exhaling slowly, she felt the tension release from her shoulders, the disdain she had for Scarberry still present.

  Just like the trip to Maine, this was already starting to look like another false lead.

  “Deputy Marshal Lipski?”

  A spasm roiled through Lipski as she snapped her weapon up a second time, adrenaline seeping into her system. Pressing her body tight against the wall, she stood poised to act before recognition set in.

  Standing just a few feet away, her mouth open, her shoulders turned to make her body as small as possible, stood Marshal Marlucci.

  “Dammit, Jessica,” Lipski said. Pushing up from the wall, she lowered her weapon, drawing in a deep breath. “I thought I told you to stay with the car?”

  Her face void of any color, Marlucci peered at the gun in front of Lipski, her focus on it for several moments before she raised her attention back to eye level.

  “I’m sorry. You did, but I thought you’d want to know, we just got a hit. Tim Scarberry’s phone just came back online.”

  Part V

  Chapter Seventy

  It wasn’t hard to find the truck. Exactly zero effort had been put into hiding it, the guy behind the wheel going just a couple miles down the road, far enough to ensure he was completely out of sight in both directions, before turning onto a dirt lane.

  Much like the one leading back to Uncle Jep’s place, or even the one I’d used for the Charger a couple of times, or a thousand others just like it in the area surrounding the lake, it passed through a narrow cut in the tree line.

  Had I not been looking for it – on foot no less – I might not have seen the brief flash of yellow paint.

  May not have even noticed the swirls in the dirt alongside the road where the second car had pulled up and collected his cohort before spinning out, back on their way again.

  Careful to go around the tracks, I stepped down the two track to find the truck angled between a random assortment of trees, low-hanging branches scratching at the windshield and body of it, obscuring the smokestack and most of the glass from view.

  The rest was shrouded in shadow, as good a job at tucking it out of
sight as could be done in ten seconds or less.

  Which I’m guessing was about all the guy had put into it, his sole focus on getting out of the shiny lightning rod and into something more inconspicuous.

  Sliding the Beretta from the waistband of my pants, I approached wide around it anyway, eschewing the driver’s side door and coming up on it from the right. Flicking my gaze to the world around me, I heard little, saw less, everything seeming to be holding a collective breath as I approached the door.

  Inching close to the side of the machine, I peeked into the bed, seeing thin red stripes of blood splashed across the bed of it, remnants from our earlier encounter.

  Sidestepping past it, I kept the gun in my right hand, reaching across it with my left. Grasping the handle to the truck, I jerked it back in one quick movement, the metal moving smoothly, barely making a sound.

  And revealing nothing at all, save a plume of ammonia, the scent so strong it brought a sheen of moisture to my eyes.

  Stepping back, I returned the weapon to the small of my back, raising a fist to my mouth. Coughing twice into it, I lifted the front edge of my tank top up over my nose, the saturated fabric providing nominally more comfort as I ventured a second pass into the truck.

  The source of the smell was obvious at a glance, a spray bottle cast into the footwell showing exactly where it had originated.

  Venturing a hand out, I dabbed at the top of the cloth bench seat before me, seeing beads of moisture collected across the steering column and front dash.

  Leaning backward, I drew in a deep breath, clenching it tightly as I came back inside. Lifting my knee up onto the seat, I stretched my body the length of it, searching for anything that might be of use.

  Fast food receipt. Credit card gas purchase. Anything that might have a time or location stamp on it.

  Best I could tell, there was nothing visible, the interior cab having been worked over by someone that knew what they were doing.

  Which, I’d venture to guess, hadn’t been any of the three young men that had first shown up in the rig.