“Put her on the phone.”
“Who? The detective? I know you have a thing for her.”
“You’re pretty confident. Aren’t you?”
“Here’s how it’s going to play out, Savage. Leave town. Forget Tulsa. I’ll give you what you want.”
“What do I want?”
“Don’t play games. You don’t want anything to happen to her.”
“Her department wants to put me in jail for murder.”
He kept avoiding details. I’d get it out of him. I always did. It would just require a little psychology. You poke the dumbest bear with a stick and it’s going to charge at you and make mistakes. If McCurdy fell for it, it’d confirm he wasn’t running the show. No way would the person who orchestrated this ordeal react to childish insults.
“You really going to blow the place up because some kids stole your bike?”
He laughed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know, I’m wasting my time. Let me talk to the adult who’s running the show.”
“That would be me.”
Admission he’s the leader. Not something an intelligent man would do, even if it were true.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, McCurdy. There’s money behind this. You couldn’t run a profitable lemonade stand. He sent you out to the pastures and tosses you a bone once in a while.”
His jaw was grinding so hard I could hear it in the phone. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
“An unimportant, sniveling dead man. That’s exactly who I’m dealing with.”
“You’re a little—”
“Yeah, yeah. Put the boss on the phone before I get upset. You have to the count of three.”
“I’m going to gut—”
“One.” I hung up the phone. He didn’t get three seconds.
I let him stew for a minute and then called him right back. He answered on the first ring.
“You’d better be getting me someone who actually makes decisions.”
There was a shriek. It was Shirley. “You hear that, Savage? Bear is about to have some fun with your ol’ lady. You think you’re so damn tough. Think you’re so smart. Like you’ve got me figured out. You don’t know a damn thing, pal. You aren’t shit. You’ll never be shit. So, I suggest you get out of town before I turn my guys loose on her.”
I held my hand over the receiver and tried to keep from punching the glass out of the windshield. Shirley’s screams muffled like they’d just gagged her. If she was screaming, she was still alive. I couldn’t make decisions based on emotions. It might cost Shirley her life. Analytical thoughts trumped emotion every time. McCurdy had already proved that. I was better than him.
I forced myself to laugh. “Been there, done that. Ask your boys if they like my leftovers.”
“You’re a sick twisted freak, you know that?”
“I’ll tell you what I am, McCurdy. I’m a dangerous man who knows where you are. And I’m coming for you. I don’t forget things. And if I don’t get you today—yeah, I’ll disappear. Nobody will find me. I’ll live off the land for a while. It’s what I do. But you know what? You’ll wish you were dead already. Because it’ll be even worse if you live. You’ll look over your shoulder the rest of your life, knowing I’m out there somewhere. I’ve been to damn near every square inch of this earth. I know it all. Your heart will race at every shadow that jumps in front of you. You’ll feel my breath on the back of your neck the rest of your life. There’s nothing worse than a trained killer on the loose that wants your head mounted on a stake. I’ll take my time too. I’ll let you get nice and comfortable. Good luck.”
I hung up the phone and stepped out of the truck. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, I dropped the phone on the ground and smashed it under my heel.
45
I WENT TO THE NEXT most well-lit place I could find in Claremore which happened to be a WalMart parking lot. I’d started to head straight for Maple Grove Lodge, but I knew they wouldn’t be there yet. They were back at his farm, it was the only thing that made sense. McCurdy wasn’t running the show. Someone else was and they weren’t stupid.
I needed more time to think.
I had to ask myself some questions. Would he take the hostages somewhere else? If so, where? How would he get the truck into Maple Grove? When would he try to detonate the bomb? Should I be focused on the bomb or trying to save Shirley and Morgan? I needed to answer these the best I could, with the latest information, then plan accordingly.
I had some time before they’d put everything in action. The truck bomb had to still be at the farm. The Maple Grove event was at eight. If they took the bomb out there now it’d look odd. And the longer it sat there, the greater the chance of discovery. One of the numerous executive security teams would notice it was out there for hours, and they might start asking questions.
They would want to deliver it at a normal time. Maybe an hour beforehand. They’d have made plans for some way to get it past security—paid someone off. I sat in the WalMart parking lot for about five minutes and thought it all through.
Once I’d calmed, and played everything a few times through my mind, I knew where I was heading soon; right back to the farm. That’s where they had to be keeping Shirley and Morgan, and that’s where the bomb was. I told myself not to think of them as Shirley or Morgan. This was an extraction mission. I had to think of them as hostages and keep it from being personal.
I couldn’t go in tense, wanting to kill everything in sight. Emotion had no place in a mission. I might fire a bullet through someone and hit one of the hostages through a wall. It wasn’t too difficult getting my mind in the right place. Delta Force turned you into a machine built for these situations. We sat in as dummies during training sessions with live ammunition. That’s how accurate we were and how much trust we had in our abilities and our team.
I had to think like McCurdy and his boss. If it were me with the bomb, I’d drive it in through my security checkpoint at the same time other deliveries were being made. All planned out for whoever to turn a blind eye, maybe a guard who was paid off. And I’d blow the place up as soon as I knew all my targets were there. If something didn’t go as planned, I would blow the bomb early and take whatever casualties I could get.
I took in a deep breath. It felt good to stop and think through contingencies. It’d also stagger the time they were expecting me. McCurdy would be sweating it out. There was no way he’d be there at the farm, but he had to know that’s where I’d go. He liked to quarterback from afar. He’d expected me to go straight there, told his men to be ready, then he’d slipped off somewhere when I’d hung up. By now, his men were watching the shadows. Noises were making them jump.
In less than a few hours, there’d be royal princes, billionaires, prime ministers and presidents all landing private jets at an airfield somewhere and making the trip out to the lodge, if they weren’t already there. The sniper was probably already set up and in place. He’d be calibrating his equipment and dialing in, waiting for orders.
I pulled out of the WalMart parking lot. The farm was a couple minutes away. I just needed to pass through the town and drive a little way on Route 66. I wouldn’t have time to go through Peabody’s land and back through the cornfields. I didn’t want to haul the equipment a couple of miles either. How many guys could he have out there? I wished I’d have taken a peek inside the building. Surely it was ten, maximum, plus Bear. I counted him as two. So twelve guys. They’d already lost two, so ten left. One or two of them would be scientists, not a real physical threat. That meant maybe eight guys with guns. He wouldn’t want more than that. It’d be hard enough to get ten guys to keep their mouths shut.
He’d have at least two sentries out front by the entrance keeping watch. I could kill them with the Barrett from down the road, then drive up in the truck. If he was smart, he’d have one guy somewhere in between, near the administration building. A decent guy, maybe former soldier.
They would try and surprise me on the way back to the building. If I made it through him, the rest of the heavy firepower would be in the back protecting the bomb and the hostages. There’d be guys with machine pistols to replace the ones I’d already killed. Bear would be back there too.
Everything I thought turned out to be wrong.
46
I PULLED UP ON ROUTE 66 and decided to take another quick detour to throw them off. I needed to stop by Peabody’s. They’d obviously found Morgan and Shirley sitting off the entry to his house. A warning was the least I could do.
I wound through his rocky driveway in his pickup truck, then stepped out and whisper-screamed as I ran up the porch. “Peabody!”
Nothing.
Maybe he was asleep, but I doubted it. He knew the pot was stirring a few miles away. His front door was locked. I beat on it for a few minutes. Nothing.
My heart dropped into my stomach, and my chest coiled up like a spring. I kicked the door in. Peabody dangled from the ceiling fan, stripped naked, with a noose tight around his neck. Words caught in my throat. I glanced to the corner. Remington had a knife sticking out of his chest. I prayed they did it afterward, but I knew they hadn’t. They’d made Peabody watch them kill his dog. I was sure of it.
My fingers trembled and my whole body started to shake.
I’d just left—just talked to him and had one of the most meaningful conversations of my life.
It hadn’t been a pleasant death for Peabody. There was a pistol sitting on the coffee table. It looked loaded and ready to go—unfired.
I knew what they’d done. They’d given him an option to shoot himself. He hadn’t taken it. From a distance he looked like an old crazy man with crooked teeth who’d hung himself. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t have his glasses on.
His stomach and feet were starting to bloat. Livor Mortis setting in. It’d turn purple in a few hours. Gravity had worked on his blood once his heart stopped pumping. The coloration on his stomach suggested he’d bled internally. There were basketball-sized bruises on his abdomen and chest. Bear-sized fists had hammered his frail body over and over. Blood crusted on his mouth where he’d spit it out. It landed on his chin and in the silver curls of hair on his chest and dried there.
They had to have watched me leave and drove in right after. Maybe they’d been watching his house the whole time, tracking everything we did.
I wrapped my arms around him at the waist, hoisting him up to get some slack in the rope. I slipped the noose from his neck and he collapsed onto me. His body was cooling but rigor hadn’t set in. He was a limp, lifeless noodle. I sat him down longways on the couch and did my best to squash the rage building deep in my chest. I imagined what Peabody would’ve said. “When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. We all die someday, boy.”
I found a blanket, but it only reached up to about his mid-section. I covered up the lower half of him, then walked over and took his medal out of the box. I used extra caution and tilted his head up and slid it around his neck.
“It’s still something to be proud of.” My face was as hot as an iron. I sat a pillow under his head and let him rest on it.
Then I went and took out his manila folder. I lifted his arm and slid the file underneath it so that he was clutching it to his chest. I moved his free arm down to his side, and walked over to Remington. I eased the blade out of his heart and slipped it from his ribcage, then picked him up around the waist and carried him to the old man. I sat him down on Peabody’s other side and wrapped his arm around the dog.
I took a step back. Remington looked like a dog that loved his master. Peabody looked at peace, like he’d been totally content with the life he’d lived. I kneeled and put my hand on his forearm. “I’ll be back for you two when the job is done. You have my word.”
It was time to go kill some people.
47
I SHRUGGED ON PEABODY’S BLACK shirt and threaded two paper clips inside, one in the cuff of each sleeve.
The sun had yet to show itself on the horizon and the air was still cool, maybe mid-70s. McCurdy Farms was only a few miles away. I was short on time.
I set off down the road in the truck. The moon was still full in the inky black night.
I drove ahead on Route 66 with the headlights off and used the moon and the street lights as my guide. If I was ambushed, I could fight my way out and head into the forest, then come up from behind them the way I’d snuck onto the farm the other two times. It’d be a pain in the ass, but I liked contingency plans.
Lightning bugs sparked the air along the drainage ditches. I rolled the windows down on the truck and tuned into the sounds surrounding me. Peabody’s long-sleeved black shirt was already heating up. I was going to need to take it off until it was time to head up there. Moss and the occasional rot from roadkill seeped into my nostrils.
It was humid out and mosquitoes flew in through the windows and bit at my face.
I came up over a slight rise and the farm revealed itself far out in the distance. I noticed the chain-link fence first, then the gap for the trail, a long stretch of the cornfields, and the lights and buildings. I whipped the truck over on the side of the highway. This would need to happen fast, before any innocent employees came in to work on Sunday.
I climbed out of the truck and peeled off the long-sleeved shirt. The Barrett weighed heavy on my shoulder. It had a bipod on the front: scope, after-market tactical stock. I opted for just the 1911 and the knife. I didn’t want to be loaded down with too many weapons. I left the Beretta in the truck.
The location was perfect. The hill wasn’t super tall, but it sat above the farm by ten or twenty feet. A quick and dirty naked-eye estimate put me at nine-hundred yards out. Twenty-seven hundred feet—a little more than half a mile. A lot of being a sniper was geometry and trig. I could’ve used the Pythagorean theorem to get closer to a true estimate of the distance. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. But from this far away with such a short height, the altitude difference was negligible, coupled with the curvature of the landscape. I crouched down in the shadows and got set up, facing the opposite direction of my targets.
I needed to make sure the sights were zeroed in. There was nothing worse than missing with the first shot and sending everyone running. Running targets were harder to hit than still ones. I glanced back. There was a street light on the highway, thirty feet tall and about the same nine-hundred yards distance. It was perfect. If I hit the target I knew my scope was dialed in. If not, I’d adjust accordingly and select a new target. Peabody’s house was in the background. The round would come to rest somewhere out on his property and avoid any collateral damage.
I got set up, chambering one of the .338 rounds, lining up the sights, slow and steady from the prone position, flat on my stomach, legs balanced, just like I’d been trained. I exhaled, trying to keep my body completely still. The fact there was no wind gave me an advantage. I slowed down my internal clock. Even your heartbeat at that distance could send a bullet astray—tiny vibrations, long distances. A millimeter difference could end up way off target. I heard my heart beat in my ears—slow, barely audible thumps, spread further apart than usual. I squeezed the trigger in between two of them.
The muzzle velocity on the Barrett M98B is thirty-one hundred feet per second. I was twenty-seven hundred feet away. That meant it took approximately eighty-seven one hundredths of a second for the round to hit the target. Things move so fast over short distances on earth that people think of things as instant; light, bullets, sound. Our brain is hard-wired to accept it as fact. It always feels a little off to pull the trigger and wait, even nine-tenths of a second, for a result. It’s like that moment when you lean too far back in a chair and start to fall.
The light ceased to exist after a long point-eight-seven seconds. Relativity; that Einstein guy knew what he was talking about. Thanks for taking good care of your weapons, Peabody.
I shifted around and set up the Barrett in the opposite direction
and aimed toward the front of the farm, back down in prone position. The lights were all on at the front of the farm. Two street lamps towered over the entrance emanating additional light, along with some residual from the ambience lighting on the big billboard with the corn logo, plenty enough to get the job done. It looked like business as usual as I peered through the scope. The moonlight added some extra into the mix. Two sentries were posted at the front as I’d expected. I hoped McCurdy was watching so he’d know what he had to look forward to the rest of his life, if he somehow made it out of this mess.
The guys had H&K machine pistols like the guys I’d killed earlier. They both leaned against the fence. It needed to be quick. Take the first shot, the second guy would go into shock for a second. They always froze up. I’d take him out before he took off running. He’d figure it all out just as the second bullet took his head off.
One of the two was slim and athletic, and the other was as wide as he was tall. I lined up on the smaller man. He looked faster. Always take out the fastest and smallest target first. Always.
The first target leaned up against the fence, stiff like a statue. He may have been taking a nap standing up, or just dozing off. They’d probably been awake all night.
Them or everyone.
I exhaled. Listened to my heart. Fired.
It went in through his jaw and blew out the side of his ear. The bottom half of his head exploded, showering the other sentry with brain fragments. By the time his legs gave out and the top half of his head rolled off onto the rocks, I’d lined up on the fat guy. Then, something remarkable happened. The first guy suspended in mid-air for a moment, then collapsed. When his H&K hit the ground, there was a muzzle flash, and his gun riddled the second guard with a three-shot burst.
The second guard’s body toppled over and landed in a crumpled pile.
Well, I don’t mind that at all.
Savage Beast (Max Savage Book 1) Page 18