Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  The canyon. Devil’s Gulch. A deep crevasse carved out of sandstone. I remembered it now from a comment made by one of the train crews. The tracks crossed over the gorge on a fifty-foot-high trestle, and the crew had to make sure to slow down before they hit the curve.

  Ten to one, the ravine was where Jazmine’s body lay. A lonely, broken thing at the bottom of the world.

  “After that,” Jimmy was saying, “we’re clearing out. Whip says we’re done with this place. He’s found somewhere better.”

  “When are you putting my son on the tracks?” Nik asked.

  Jimmy’s knees jittered like machine-gun fire. “Tonight.”

  Nik looked like a bull tapped with an electric prod.

  The kid glanced at him. “He won’t know anything. They’re getting him drunk. On account that, you know, he used to be one of us.”

  “We’ll find him, Nik,” I said. “We’ll get him out.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “What was your plan when you walked into The Pint and Pecker?”

  “I was winging it.”

  “You want to call the sheriff?”

  “What can they do?” His eyes met mine in the mirror. “Leave them for cleanup. Makes more sense to try and stop the train.”

  I pulled out my phone. One bar. I tried it anyway, hoping to reach the train dispatch in Fort Worth. Nothing but dead air. I didn’t bother yet with trying to raise the crew on my railroad portable. The train wasn’t in range.

  When we were five miles east of Wiggins, the kid said, “The place is coming up. There’ll be some trees and a fence with a gate.”

  Nik’s finger went into the trigger guard. “Better get us there soon.”

  “There it is!” the kid yelled at the same time I spotted a clump of naked cottonwoods and a barbed wire fence.

  I braked, skidded, then eased off the road.

  Someone had propped the gate open; a heavy-duty combination padlock dangled uselessly off the latch. Beyond the fence, a narrow road curved south, away from the highway, winding upward into a series of low hills. Snow was starting to fill a set of tire tracks on the other side of the fence.

  “You guys usually leave the gate open?” I asked Jimmy.

  “Sometimes. When we know we got guys coming.”

  I put the truck in gear. “How far to the camp?”

  “Three miles or so,” Jimmy said. “Camp is right next to the tracks. There’s a couple of old houses there from when that pioneer, Boedeker, used to ranch out here. But we sleep in the trailers.”

  On the other side of the fence, the snow was soft. The Explorer fishtailed a moment before finding traction. “How many trailers?”

  “Seven. No, eight. Three for us, the rest for our stuff.”

  “And how many skinheads?”

  The kid looked up and to his left, a sure sign he was preparing to lie.

  “The truth,” I said, “or Nik will hurt you.”

  He flushed. “Twelve. Thirteen with me.”

  “There a lookout nearby?”

  “In weather like this? Anyway, that’s what the gate’s for.” The kid snorted at the idea. Dumbest thing he’d heard all day, posting a lookout.

  One point lost by the white-supremacist team.

  I squinted through the windshield. The windows kept fogging and the wipers flailed against the snow. It felt just like the war days, rolling in for the bodies after the bombers had done their work, struggling to see through a sandstorm and praying the insurgents had all gone home. Hoping that what you found wouldn’t be so god-awful that you’d lose what little breakfast you’d managed to eat.

  With that memory, sweat beaded under my hat. I white-knuckled the wheel as my gut became a mess of sick energy. In the seat beside me, Clyde sat tense as an electric wire, humming with nerves.

  I met Jimmy’s eyes. “Where are they holding Gentry?”

  “Trailer closest to the tracks.”

  “Is he tied up?”

  “They got a manacle on his leg.”

  “Where’s the key?”

  “I dunno. The head guys like Whip carry a whole ring of keys. Must be one of those.”

  After two miles, the road narrowed to a track. Another half mile and it telescoped into a bumpy rut. The Explorer bounced and skittered.

  I looked at my cell phone. No bars.

  Nik pulled out his railroad portable.

  “Senior agent DPC to westbound at Fort Morgan. Over.”

  Static.

  He looked at me. “You got the train symbol?”

  I’d checked earlier. “It’s the Z train, Nik.”

  “Fuck me,” he said.

  A Z train is a high-priority run. This one was coming out of Chicago. It would be running fast, the proverbial bat out of hell, indifferent to the storm and caring only about velocity.

  Nik hit push-to-talk. “Senior special agent DPC to Z-CHODEN5 22B.”

  All that came back was a burst of static.

  Nik hit the PTT switch again, repeated his request. Nothing.

  We got another quarter of a mile before the Explorer hit a pocket of deeper snow and skewed sideways. The passenger-side tires dropped off the road and the hood nosed into a snowdrift. I put the four-wheel in low and rocked the truck back and forth, trying to get the spinning tires to bite. I turned the wheel and tried again. The engine whined and the truck lurched, but I couldn’t make it climb out of the hole.

  “I have a shovel,” I said. “There’s cardboard in the back.”

  Nik got out, walked around back then came to my window.

  “You’re locked in good,” he said. “And we’re sitting ducks here. How far have we come?”

  “Almost three miles. Quarter of a mile left, maybe.”

  “We’ll walk.”

  I turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. I found my hat and gloves, then I cuffed the kid’s wrist to the door handle to keep him from trying to steal the truck. Or walking into the storm. I dropped an army blanket over his shoulders.

  “You can’t leave me here,” he said. “I’ll freeze to death.”

  “Sheriff’s men’ll be along one of these days. After the snow thaws, maybe.”

  “I’ll be dead by then!”

  “Won’t break my heart,” I said.

  He gave me the bird. Just like old times.

  When I stepped out, I sank into snow halfway up my shins. I opened the door for Clyde. He’d picked up on my worry, and now he leapt from the truck like a cannonball before plunging through snow to his stomach. He gave me a look like I could’ve warned him.

  “Let’s check things out, boy.”

  We scrambled away from the truck and back onto the access road where the wind had swept the snow into hard drifts. Nik joined us, and we did a three-sixty scope of the area.

  Not much to see. The snow had swallowed the horizon and rendered the hills into two-dimensional cutouts. A nearby clump of trees rattled like bones. The tire tracks we’d been following when we came in had disappeared. Our own tracks were filling fast.

  “Thirteen with the kid,” I said, thinking out loud.

  Nik and I exchanged glances.

  “Nothing for it,” he said.

  We returned to the truck and loaded up what we needed and could carry—weapons, radios, extra ammo, a flashlight and binoculars, and a compass. My phone in case we hit a sweet spot. I checked everything on my duty belt to make sure nothing had rattled loose, and we started walking south along the road.

  Behind us, the kid shouted through the glass, his voice hollow with helpless fury.

  I gave him the finger. Seemed only right.

  CHAPTER 25

  On my third day in Iraq, a lieutenant said to me: “If there’s no light to be had, immerse yourself in darkness.”

  “What does that mean exactly, sir?” I asked him.

  “It means to hell with being a hero. To hell with worrying about who’s innocent and who isn’t. Worrying whether the guy’s got a bomb or a bag of plums. It�
�s your job, Marine, to stay alive. If that means getting comfortable with your inner darkness, then that’s what you do.”

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  We’d gone only a short way through softening light when Clyde dropped back beside me and pushed my leg. He must have alerted, and I hadn’t seen him in the snow.

  I dropped into a crouch and Nik followed suit. Snow whipped into my eyes, pelted the back of my neck. I tugged up the collar of my coat and tried to see and hear anything more than ten feet away.

  Then the wind shifted, and I caught it. The thrum of an engine idling. Accompanying that, a faint ping like a door alarm.

  I crab-walked to Nik and told him what I’d heard. He slung his rifle to the front, and we eased around the bend between the hills.

  Perpendicular across the road so that it blocked both entrance and escape, a Wiggins police SUV idled, its headlights drilling twin holes through the fog of snowfall. Exhaust streamed from the tailpipe, a gray cloud chuffing into the air. A dome light glowed feebly in the cab. On the far side, the driver’s door was open, the alarm chiming.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  I pulled my Glock and told Nik to keep us covered while Clyde and I approached. Clyde let me know with lowered ears and tail that he didn’t much care for whatever waited on the far side. He wasn’t alarmed. Just unhappy.

  A bad feeling wormed into my gut.

  We circled around the rear of the cruiser and approached the open door.

  The driver, a thirty-something man in a blue Wiggins Police Department parka, lay on his back, his spine arched over the console, his booted feet still tucked in the well beneath the steering column. The fingers of his right hand were curled around the radio mic. His death-white face was turned toward the dash, sightless eyes staring at nothing. A single bullet hole oozed blood from his temple.

  Snow flurried in and settled along the man’s feet and thighs. The wind tugged at his hair and coat. He hadn’t been dead long.

  I could just make out his badge through a gap in his coat. Patrol Officer Markusson. Maybe he’d seen the skinheads in town acting suspicious and followed them. Maybe the domestic call had been a ploy to lure him out. Either way, whoever was waiting for him at home—a girlfriend or wife, kids or parents—would wait forever.

  I pressed my hands against his cruiser and closed my eyes. Mentally, I closed the wound in Markusson’s temple. Returned life to his eyes. Breathed air into his lungs as he sat up.

  Nik shouted over the wind. “They shot out the radio, too. No calling the posse. Let’s go, Sydney Rose.”

  I touched my heart. “I’ll hold you here,” I whispered to Markusson. Then I opened my eyes and pushed away from the truck. “I’m coming.”

  Fifty yards past Markusson’s patrol unit, Clyde’s ears pricked and once more we slowed our pace.

  Soon I heard what Clyde had—a rhythmic, metallic clanging. We came upon a Confederate flag whipping atop a pole. Just beyond, a barbed wire fence ran along the ground where the hills channeled into a narrow vale. We slogged up the nearest hill and dropped to our stomachs at the top. I pulled out the binoculars and propped myself on one elbow, using my other arm to shield the lenses.

  The snow was too thick for me to see much. Eight broken-down trailers made a sprawling U-shape around a cluster of tumbledown buildings. Three pickups and an SUV sat parked near the gate; the beds of the trucks were covered with blue tarps. One of the trucks had an empty flatbed hitched to it. A snow-covered picnic table and a thrown-together outhouse completed the living quarters.

  The only other signs of life were a pair of dogs roped up and howling forlornly and the rattle of a generator.

  Nice advertisement for world domination.

  “See anything?” Nik asked.

  I kept scanning and was rewarded when a man appeared from behind one of the trailers.

  “They’ve got a sentry. He’s circling away from us, moving toward the south end of the camp.” I used my sleeve to wipe moisture off the lenses and looked again. “He’s taken a post on the southeast side of camp facing the train tracks.”

  I angled the binoculars beyond the trailers.

  At the top of a rise on the other side of the camp, a wooden trestle hung against the snow-gray sky like the masts of a ghost ship. The bridge spanned a quarter mile and rode fifty feet over the abyss. The far side of Devil’s Gulch winked in and out, a dark slash of rock in the swirling snow.

  Off to the left, on the steep rise leading to the trestle, a cluster of lights moved up the hillside, weaving in and out among the rocks. I tightened the focus.

  “A group of men heading up the hill toward the bridge,” I said. “I count eight. Carrying rifles, I think. Hard to tell. They’re wearing headlamps.”

  “Gentry?”

  I squinted through the snow and the failing light until my head hurt. “I can’t tell.”

  I passed the binoculars to Nik.

  “Looks like they’ve got someone,” he said after a moment. “But I can’t be sure it’s Gentry. Snow’s too thick, and those rocks are giving them cover.”

  When he lowered the glasses, the look on his face made me glad he was on my side.

  “I’ll take out the sentry and head up the hill after the others,” he said. “You clear those trailers. Make sure Gentry’s not there. If the kid wasn’t lying, should be three men down there.”

  Along with a murderess. And a child.

  “Figure he was lying,” Nik added.

  I nodded, but it must not have looked convincing. The image of the dead patrolman kept floating in front of my eyes.

  “What if I find Gentry?” I asked.

  “Stay with him. I’ll be back when I finish with the others.” Nik gripped my arm, put his face close to mine. “You have to kill whoever’s in camp, Sydney Rose. And fast, before they can get word to the group on the hill. Anyone left alive will come after us or notify the others. If we die, Gentry dies, too.”

  “The guys you’re following will hear the gunshots.”

  “They won’t know for sure what’s happening. Assholes probably shoot off guns every time they take a shit. If they send someone to investigate, I’ll be ready.”

  I nodded. Tried to ignore the fist clenching my stomach. It had been like this every time I went outside the wire. A shit-my-pants moment when I was sure I’d curl up in a ball on the ground and refuse to move.

  In a shimmer of sudden light, Elise appeared behind Nik. Her face was worried, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts. As if she didn’t like Nik’s plan any better than I did.

  Nik’s voice pulled me back, his fingers digging into my arm. “You can’t hesitate. You can’t be soft. These guys are child killers. Cop killers. You understand?”

  The world rushed in with a pop. My heart rate soared and my lungs expanded with an overdose of oxygen.

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  He released my arm.

  “Shoot to kill,” he said, and disappeared with a long loping run down the southern slope of the hill. Clyde and I followed in the failing light, hurrying after Elise’s ghost.

  At the edge of the camp, she vanished.

  CHAPTER 26

  Bottom line, morality is different in war. And war doesn’t always take place on a battlefield.

  —Sydney Parnell, ENGL 0208, Psychology of Combat

  We moved fast.

  The first trailer Clyde and I hit was padlocked shut. A smell like paint thinner oozed from the cracks. A quick shine of my flashlight through the window revealed tables laden with beakers, CorningWare, rubber tubing, large plastic tubs, and bottles of ammonia.

  The next two trailers, also padlocked shut, held weapons, forty-pound bags of fertilizer, and gasoline cans. Empty boxes cluttered the floor and two loaded dollies stood near the door. Preparations for moving out.

  We slogged through the snow toward the southernmost trailers and almost tripped over the body of the sentry I’d spotted through the binoculars
. Nik had taken his rifle and left him on his back, throat cut.

  I slowed as I approached the fourth trailer where a muffled diesel generator hummed. Light shone through partially drawn blinds, and men’s voices rose and fell from within. Because of the dogs at the north end, I downed Clyde while I completed a circuit of the camp. The dogs went silent as I approached, then started up again. No one responded. Maybe none of them had read about the boy who cried wolf.

  My reconnaissance yielded four more trailers, dark and empty, and two additional generators, both silent. Either the kid had been lying about Melody and Liz, or they were in the fourth trailer with the men. If Gentry was still here, he’d be in that trailer as well. The one closest to the tracks, Jimmy had said.

  Back with Clyde, I stood in the snowfall and listened. With the howling of the wind, I couldn’t make out the men’s words. Couldn’t tell if there were two men inside or five or seven.

  I cocked my head at a sudden silence behind me. The dogs had stopped barking. I pulled the Colt free of its holster and wrapped both hands around the grip as two shapes hurtled out of the darkness trailing leads of rope.

  The dogs separated when they hit the light spilling from the trailer windows; one launched itself toward Clyde, who leapt silently to meet it.

  The second came for me.

  I shot it through the chest and spun for the other dog. It had pulled away from Clyde, its black lips slicked back from long teeth, its haunches coiled for a second attack.

  “Steht noch!” I yelled at Clyde. Stand still!

  My second shot hit the dog in its hip. It yelped and pitched onto its side.

  A man’s voice cut through the ringing echo of gunfire. “What the hell you doing?”

  I whirled to find the trailer door open and a man standing outside in the snow. He held an AR-15, the butt of the rifle tight against his shoulder as he stared down the barrel at me. A second man stood on the stairs, also holding an assault rifle.

  “Hold off, Petes,” said the man on the stairs. “Look. It’s a woman.”