by Alice Sharpe
“Chelsea!” Adam yelled.
Eyes now watering, she grabbed a throw rug and beat out the flames, then ran back down the hall to the bedroom.
“There was a fire—” she began.
“Are you all right?” he interrupted with a concerned glance.
“I put it out, but it looks as though they’re trying to burn the trailer down with us inside it.” Her announcement was followed by more cracking glass and another explosion.
“We have to break a window and take our chances outside,” Adam told Bill. “Maybe I can pick off one or two—”
“Hang on, one more shove,” Bill said. “Those goons took all my weapons, but maybe they missed the knife in the false back of the top drawer. Check for it, Chelsea.”
She wedged herself between the bed and the chest and pulled out the drawer. Socks flew everywhere as she emptied the drawer to find the fake back still in place. Sheathed knife in hand, she turned into the room. Bill was now on his hands and knees where the bed had once stood. Adam had crossed to the window, which had shattered thanks to the reverberations of the other explosions. He fired into the yard, taking a second to look over his shoulder as Bill yelled.
“Give me the knife—hurry,” Bill said as yet another breaking window somewhere near the kitchen signaled another bomb. By now, the trailer was filled with acrid smoke and the sound of crackling flames. They were all coughing and gasping as noxious fumes polluted the air.
Bill sliced the carpet in four quick strokes, revealing a wooden hatch built into the floor. He pulled on the attached ring and lifted a hinged lid. “If they haven’t found the exit, we’ll be safe,” Bill said.
Adam suddenly backpedaled across the room and out into the hall as a projectile sailed through the window. It landed by his feet and he kicked it down toward the living room.
“That was a hand grenade,” he said.
Bill dropped into the underground passage, pulling Chelsea after him. Adam’s shoe hit her head as he followed. He pulled the trap door closed right as the grenade exploded down the hall. The cramped space became pitch-black.
A light caught Chelsea in the eyes. When she could see again, she found Bill had donned a miner’s cap with a bulb attached to the crown. “There’s no headroom, you’ll have to crawl. Follow me,” he said. “Don’t stop for anything unless you hear a rattler.”
Did he mean there could be a rattlesnake in this tunnel? Chelsea swore under her breath. Apparently, she was afraid of snakes, and for a second she froze.
An explosion in the room they’d just left loosened dirt in the tunnel and suddenly, snakes seemed like the least of their worries. With gentle prodding from Adam, she scrambled to crawl after Bill.
No one spoke as they concentrated on getting as far away from the trailer as possible. Eventually Bill stopped. There was enough space above his head for him to get to his knees and push up on another hatch. Dim light flooded inside, along with straw and the smell and squawk of chickens. Bill heaved himself out, then reached down to help the other two.
They’d arrived in the enclosed portion of a large chicken coop. Chelsea saw the wire cage part through the open door, as well as smoke and flames coming from the trailer they’d just escaped, and wondered how in the world they could walk out into the open and not get blown off their feet.
Her brother was several steps ahead of her. He pulled on what at first glance appeared to be a solid piece of the nesting structure, but turned out to be a lever that opened a gap in the stone wall located at the back of the coop. Lights immediately turned on in the adjoining space. “Come with me,” Bill said.
This time the door closed behind them, leaving them in jarring silence, and they were standing in what appeared to be a communication center. There was a steel door built into the far wall. Bill grabbed the controls for a radio. “I’m calling for help,” he said. “And then I’m going to find Jan and then I’m going to take care of those damn Feds.”
“These guys aren’t with the government,” Adam said. “You misunderstood me. They’re hired guns. The fact they aren’t very good at what they do is just plain dumb luck.”
“They’re still going to be dead,” Bill said.
Chelsea moved to the door. “Where does this lead?”
“The back of the horse barn.”
“Do you have any idea where they’d take Jan?”
He almost threw up his hands. “She could be anywhere. There are a million places to hide...somebody.”
He busied himself on the radio, his words when he connected hushed and urgent. As soon as he put down the radio, he unlocked a cabinet and started selecting guns and ammo.
“The police are coming?” Chelsea asked hopefully as Bill shoved a loaded rifle in her hands.
“No cops,” Bill said.
“But we need help—”
“Not the cops. I called friends.”
“I hope they know what they’re doing,” she said.
“They know. We’ve prepared for this kind of situation.”
Adam handed her the revolver. “Tuck this away,” he said and kissed her forehead before crossing to the steel door. “How do we open this? We have to know what’s going on outside.”
Bill unlocked and opened the heavy door. Leaving the soundproofed communications room for the barn, they were once again bombarded by explosions. The animals in the corral bleated and whinnied as the crackling roar continued. Bill and Chelsea ran toward the front of the barn.
Out in the yard, two of the men hovered over a box of hand grenades. As Chelsea watched, one of them plucked a bomb from the box and pulled the pin. He threw it at the trailer. Seconds later another explosion sent the terrified animals racing around the corral.
“They’ve got to be dead by now,” one of the men said. He wore a bandage around the bulging muscle in his left arm. He must be the guy Chelsea shot in the alley.
“We’ve got to be sure,” the first one grumbled. “We’ll catch hell if Parish escapes again.”
“How many grenades does it take to kill two guys?” the injured one protested. “I say we go look for bodies and get out of here.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” the first one replied. “We do what we we’re told.”
“If we could just shoot them—”
“No bullets, you know that. Now, clam up.”
As the two men continued to argue, Bill motioned for her to stay where she was as he crept out of the barn and took up a position behind a steel water tank. She couldn’t imagine his new location gave him a clear shot of anyone, but it would provide protection against an explosion. There was no sign of Bill’s wife or of the blond guy, either, for that matter, and in her mind, that made shooting anyone risky.
On the other hand, the killers had talked about there being only two men in the trailer. Was it possible they didn’t know she was there, too? Could she use that to their advantage?
“Look what we got here,” a deep voice said as an arm the circumference of a well-fed boa constrictor circled Chelsea’s neck. Every cell in her body jumped to attention as his free hand grabbed the rifle from her hands. She immediately tugged at his stranglehold but he shook her off like a gnat.
His arm still clamped in place, he propelled her ahead of him toward the other two men. Where had he come from? Had she been so busy assessing what was going on in the yard that she hadn’t heard someone roughly the size of a refrigerator approach her from behind?
She tried frantically to turn her head to scan the interior of the barn, desperate to find out what had happened to Adam.
Was he still alive? What else had she missed?
Chapter Nine
Adam threaded his way through the dark barn, searching for an alternate exit and knowing Chelsea and Bill would need back up.
He heard a creaking noise to his left and stepped behind several bales of be
dding straw. He crouched down, all but holding his breath. From that position, he saw dusty loafers descend a ladder, followed by a tank of a guy wearing a white shirt and crowned with white-blond hair. The man was whistling a jaunty tune under his breath. Adam would have shot him right that moment just because he dared to whistle while attempting to obliterate innocent people if a shot wouldn’t have made things worse.
The guy moved off to the front of barn. Was it possible he’d stashed Jan up in the loft? What better place? But Chelsea and her brother might be in trouble—he debated what he should do for twenty seconds, then scampered up the ladder, emerging in a small closed space filled with lockers and boxes.
He tore open the door to spaces big enough to cram a human being inside, but there was no sign of Jan having ever been up here. All he found were more munitions.
When Bill and Jan had built their homestead, they’d obviously thought in terms of defending their turf. That meant that from the vantage point of this open loft, the road leading toward the mesquite trees and the back entrance, as well as the one leading away from the yard and the front of the trailer, were highly visible so that any incoming vehicles could be dealt with. But it also meant that Bill’s soon-to-arrive friends would be vulnerable.
The killers had to realize this—that must have been why the blond guy was up here. Ignoring a burning desire to check on Chelsea, Adam sidled up to the platform’s bulwark and chanced a peek down to the yard. His attention was immediately drawn to the two men standing over a box of hand grenades. He was just in time to see one of the men pull a pin, wait until the count of three to lob a grenade into the trailer. Adam recalled the earlier delay that happened in Bill’s bedroom, when the gap between deployment and explosion had given Adam time to kick the threat away. Apparently the man had learned to wait a few seconds before throwing.
The trailer was understandably crumbling under the onslaught and several fires had started. Black smoke circled skyward but was there anyone within miles to see and report it? Adam wasn’t sure why they were still lobbing hand grenades unless it was to be certain nothing remained intact...and that the survivor rate was zero.
The man who had stood by while the grenade had been thrown now waved his arms and shouted as a heated argument erupted. The combined noise of crackling fire, panicking animals and small explosions made hearing every word impossible.
Where were Chelsea and Bill?
Adam scanned the yard and almost decided they were both still inside the barn, when he spied movement off to his left and watched as Bill slithered from behind the water tank to the cover of a small building. He was inching, it appeared, his way closer to the center of the yard and a clear shot.
Adam lifted his rifle. He was ready.
Another movement caught his attention as the blond he’d seen minutes before came from inside the barn. He pushed a raven-haired woman in front of him—Chelsea. Adam swore under his breath and lowered the rifle. A bullet through the guy’s back would go right through Chelsea, too.
The guy shoved her toward his cohorts, one of whom was glued to his cell phone, then stopped several feet away and yelled at them to shut up. He trained Chelsea’s rifle on her heart and bellowed toward the trailer. “Parish? Is this little gal with you? Get out here, tough guy. The party’s over.”
Adam’s gaze darted to Bill, who now held his rifle on the blond guy. The yard seemed to attain a moment of pure silence as though a vacuum had sucked up every sound, from fire to exhaled breath. Everyone appeared caught in a moment of inertia. Even the guy with the phone fell silent.
And then Bill shattered it all with gunfire. The blond guy fell to his knees. As he shifted his rifle to return fire, Chelsea pulled the revolver from under the hem of her shirt and got off a shot. The blond’s bullet went wild as he toppled over onto the sandy earth.
The other two men each grabbed a grenade and spun around, aware now that the threat came from the barn and the yard itself, not the trailer. As one of them pulled the pin, Adam saw Chelsea race for the cover of the water tank. Once she’d attained cover, he pinpointed the grenade in his sights and pulled the trigger.
The resulting explosion blew both men to smithereens. Bill staggered from his position, looking dazed but unhurt. Chelsea got to her feet, revolver still drawn. Even from that distance he could see her hand shake as she perused the devastation in front of her.
Bill ran to the blond guy, demanding to know where Jan was, but the man was motionless, staring up at the clear sky, taking Jan’s whereabouts and the identity of the man behind this mayhem with him into death.
Adam made his way down the stairs and out into the yard, where Chelsea flew into his arms.
“It’s over,” he said, holding her as tight as he dared.
But, of course, it wasn’t. Where was Jan?
* * *
BILL’S BUDDIES SHOWED up soon after. For a few minutes, everyone just stood, kind of dumbstruck, their gazes darting between one disaster to the next as though uncertain how to clean up the nastiest mess of human flesh and twisted metal any of them had ever seen.
Bill left it to Adam to explain what had happened. He decided to tell them everything he knew. The memory of one of the killers on his phone plagued Adam. Who had the man called and how much had he said? Certainly whoever was behind this knew for sure about Chelsea now, and also about this standoff. These people had to understand that they must remain vigilant.
The time for explanation was short, however, as everyone’s overriding concern was what had happened to Jan. Bill quickly divided people into teams because of the number of buildings scattered across the property that would all need to be searched. He hadn’t seen his wife since she’d been taken out of the trailer the previous night, and though he wouldn’t say it, Adam could see as the minutes went by and people reported finding nothing, that Bill was beginning to believe they’d killed her and buried her body in a sandy grave.
It was Adam who stumbled across an old abandoned well located out beyond the pasture. He shined his flashlight down the shaft for a cursory check and couldn’t believe it when he saw a mop of red curls atop a small crumpled body at the dry bottom. He yelled Jan’s name, which caught the attention of everyone nearby, and they all came running. She didn’t respond—from that distance, there was no way to tell if she was dead or alive.
The rescue went surprisingly smoothly. Bill insisted on being the one lowered to his wife. A few tense moments were followed by a shout that brought tears to those waiting at the top. “She’s alive,” he yelled.
He was hauled up and a man Bill introduced as Tang, an aging Vietnam vet and former medic, went down with some rudimentary first-aid equipment.
“A broken ankle, dislocated shoulder and a bunch of scrapes from the fall,” Tang announced once they’d rigged a harness and brought Jan to safety. “Plus she’s been down there awhile so she’s dehydrated.”
Bill couldn’t take his eyes off his wife’s battered face or release his grip of her hand.
“I thought I was a dead duck,” she whispered as Bill held a cup of water to her lips. She looked around at everyone, her gaze sliding past Adam and resting on Chelsea. “Some welcome we offered, huh?”
“I’m just so sorry about your home and your leg and—”
“All that can be rebuilt and fixed,” Jan whispered.
“You should go to a hospital,” Chelsea added.
Jan smiled. “No, honey, no institutions for me. There’s work to be done here and Tang can patch me up just fine, can’t you, Tang?”
“I can set the break, no problem,” the former medic said as he scratched his salt-and-pepper beard. He gestured back at the gutted trailer and bombed-out yard. “But wow, your house! Bill, what are you going to tell the authorities?”
“Nothing,” Bill said.
“But—”
“But nothing. You know as well as I do that once t
he law gets involved, I might as well hand over my land. Those three murdering scumbags never did one ounce of good in their lives. Now they’ll fertilize a few tumbleweeds.”
Chelsea stood closer to Adam. “Do you think he can get away with it?”
“He might,” Adam said. “Technically, I killed two of the guys.”
“And I killed the other one,” Chelsea said.
“I’m not anxious to try to explain any of this to anyone, are you?”
“No. But you have to wonder what the people who hired those men are going to think happened to them. Will they look for them? Don’t killers have families who ask questions? I don’t know, it just seems impossible that three lives can be erased without someone somewhere caring.”
“Let’s help clean up this mess and get out of here,” Adam said.
She sighed. “So much has been destroyed. They have a lot to rebuild.”
Adam nodded. He didn’t add what Chelsea obviously knew. Any pictures or mementos of her that her brother once possessed were now gone. Bill might provide a story or two, but any concrete proof she had of who she was no longer existed, at least not here.
“Sorry I called the folks,” Bill said while the medic worked on Jan and a contingent of others went to fire up the backhoe to dig a mass grave.
“It’s not your fault,” Adam said.
“Sure it is. I told them to keep it between the two of them, but Mom probably confided in Lindy.”
“Who is Lindy?” Chelsea asked.
“I keep forgetting you don’t remember things,” Bill said. “Lindy is our gossipy twenty-one-year-old sister. Put a beer in front of her, set her on a pub stool and off she goes. If anyone wanted to know anything about you, all they’d have to do is stick close to Lindy.”
Adam shook his head. “My friends knew I was coming here, too, Bill. I told both Doc and Whip.”
“Would they be behind something like this?” Bill asked.