KILLER IN BLACK a gripping action-packed thriller (Johnny Silver Thriller Book 2)

by PAUL BENNETT

  Mr Blenkenstein thought about this for a second or two, then nodded his head.

  ‘I’ll bring it over later,’ he said. ‘Seeing as how I’m used to driving the thing – sometimes it seems to have a mind of its own.’

  ‘How’s the well going?’ Red asked.

  ‘It’s a slow business. Like I said, the ground’s hard – full of rock from the mountains once you get through the top layer; even the digger struggles to break it. I get the feeling it’s either that rock or me, and that the damned rock is winning.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. I got the feeling that the damned rock didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ I said.

  ‘We go back thirty years, this place and us. Thirty years of scratching a living.’

  ‘It’s hard work being a farmer,’ I said, noticing his calloused hands for the first time. ‘I’m not sure I could do it. Not got the patience.’

  ‘Farming teaches you that you don’t get nothing without hard work,’ he said. ‘Except for Red, that is. He’s a lucky son of a gun.’

  ‘Almost my words exactly,’ I said.

  ‘There was a time,’ he said with eyes that grew dark, ‘when it weren’t so hard. When we had Ray, our son, doing all the heavy work. But when he died it was all up to me and Ma. Can’t afford no help, so it’s up to the two of us.’

  Ma Blenkenstein nodded and looked away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Red said. ‘I could have offered you some help if I had known.’

  ‘I hear you need all the hands you’ve got – and then some.’

  ‘What else do you hear?’ I asked.

  ‘That someone’s going to run you out of town, one way or another.’

  ‘That someone doesn’t know me, or my friends,’ Red said.

  ‘Ray thought he was immortal, too. Then the big C got him. We ain’t got no church around here for our faith – we’re Evangelicals, or Lutherans as you folks insist on calling us – so we buried him out back six foot under. Some day we’ll join him. One way or another, we’re not going to leave this place.’

  Ma Blenkenstein got up and went across to the window over the kitchen sink. She stared out as if something fascinating was happening outside. She took a handkerchief out of her apron pocket and blew her nose loudly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It must be hard to bury your own son. When did this happen?’

  ‘He got sick about a year ago and then gradually got worse and worse. After six months he was bedridden and then he lingered for a while. That was the hardest part, seeing him get thinner and weaker each day till he was just a shadow of himself. He died a month ago. It was a blessing. Since then me and Ma have been picking up the pieces as best we can.’

  I felt for the both of them – outliving your children is something no parent wants to do. I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut and hadn’t asked questions that made them rake over the past. I looked at Red and he read my mind.

  ‘You call on us whenever you need help,’ he said, ‘harvest time or whatever. It won’t matter if we’ve got problems. We’ll be there for you. That’s what neighbours are for.’

  ‘Well, thanks, Red,’ Pa Blenkenstein said. He had a tear in his eye and quickly brushed it away with the frayed cuff of his sleeve. ‘Now, about this digger. I’ll bring it over this evening and show you how it works. Keep it as long as you like – my well can wait.’

  We shook hands. There was nothing left to say.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We had finished for the day and were seated around the table awaiting Jesse with his third load of materials and Pa Blenkenstein with his digger. There was a bucket of ice stocked with cans of beer on the porch ready for us to watch the sun go down. We were feeling like we were progressing pretty well with our plan. Tomorrow would be the day that would tell us how long our traps would take to assemble.

  A silver Mercedes came along the drive and parked at the side of the bunkhouse. I gestured to the others and we took our places on the porch. I gestured Red to take up the position furthest on the right. We were armed and ready for anything that might ensue.

  A man, in his thirties I guessed from the athletic way he walked, got out of the car. He was wearing Ray-Ban Aviators with mirror lenses, a lightweight black suit, white shirt with a button-down collar, black tie and black loafers. Our presence didn’t seem to intimidate him. I noticed his jacket was unbuttoned and bulged slightly under his left arm. He was packing. Still, he must have had guts to face odds of five to one.

  ‘Who’s the boss man?’ he said, looking along the line of us.

  ‘I guess that would be me,’ I said. ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Name’s not important,’ he said. ‘Message is.’

  I kind of liked his style. I wondered what we could do to throw him off balance.

  ‘And the message is?’ I said.

  ‘There are people who think you don’t belong here. What will it take to buy you out?’

  ‘Which people?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not at liberty to disclose that,’ he said.

  ‘Not even if I give you a Chinese burn?’ I said.

  His mouth started to turn up into a smile, but he fought it.

  ‘I’m authorized to make you an offer of two million dollars,’ he said.

  ‘Hardly generous,’ I said. ‘What’s the place worth to you, Red?’

  ‘This place is my home. Hard to put a value on your home. A lot more than two million, though.’

  ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘The place only has value as long as you can farm it. Hard to do with no labour. Things could get hot around here.’

  ‘Things are always hot around here,’ I said.

  ‘This offer will only be made once. After that the price goes down. Think about it.’

  ‘Not much to think about,’ I said

  ‘Pass me a beer,’ he said.

  I took a beer from the bucket and threw the can towards him. He caught it deftly and, in one movement, tossed the can in the air. He pulled out his gun and put three bullets in the can before it hit the ground. He looked me in the eye. Better that, his look said.

  ‘See that tree,’ I said, pointing to an apple tree around thirty yards away. It had seen better days, several of the branches being dead and bare.

  He looked at the tree and then back at me. He nodded.

  I took out the Browning from the back of my waistband. Took aim and clipped two inches off the end of a branch.

  He made like he wasn’t impressed. After all, I could have been aiming anywhere on the tree.

  ‘Bull,’ I said.

  Bull drew his gun and fired. Clipped an inch off the end of the same branch.

  ‘Stan,’ I said. ‘You next.’

  Stan repeated the process. Then Pieter. Finally, it was Red’s turn. He reached down by his side and drew the shotgun. Boom! The left-hand side of the apple tree turned to shreds.

  ‘I think you’ve got your answer,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

  ‘Let us know and we’ll bake you a cake.’

  The digger arrived just before the sun went down. There was enough light to cast an eye over it and mark out the key controls. It didn’t seem too difficult provided you had good coordination. Clutch, accelerator, forward and reverse gears, a lever to raise and lower the bucket, one to tip and one to move sideways left and right. I was itching to use it and hoped it would make fast work of digging our pit. We could only hope, since we couldn’t know how much time we had. I looked up and saw a flashing blue light in the distance: it seemed to be heading our way.

  The sheriff pulled up in front of the house and got out of his car, its light still flashing.

  ‘We found Jesse,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t know he was lost,’ I said.

  ‘Now’s not the time to be pedantic,’ Tucker said. ‘He’s in a bad way. Someone beat him up pretty good. We’re waiting for an ambulance to take him to hospital. You better follow me into to
wn.’

  I asked Stan and Pieter to stay behind on guard and Bull and I jumped into the back of the four-wheel-drive and let Red drive – time was of the essence and Red would get us there faster than the sheriff, given an overtaking opportunity.

  A little way outside the town we saw the truck. It had pulled up half on the road and half on the scrub verge. The deputy was bending down beside it. Jesse was on the floor, covered with a coat. Red slewed the vehicle to a halt; the three of us jumped out and joined the deputy.

  Jesse’s face was a mess. The sheriff was right – someone had done a thorough job on him. Both eyes were reduced to slits and there was blood trickling from his mouth and from a gash on his head. I lifted the coat gently and cast an eye over his body. His arm was lying in an impossible position, a fragment of bone sticking out. There was blood soaking through his shirt: I guessed broken ribs – if he was lucky. I prayed there was no internal bleeding. He looked up at me.

  ‘Who did this?’ I asked.

  ‘Man in black,’ he mumbled through his swollen lips. He seemed to be missing at least a couple of teeth, too. ‘Forced me off the road. Had a gun, but he didn’t need it. Hit me with a tyre iron.’

  ‘We’ll get our own back,’ I said, not caring if the sheriff overheard. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jesse said. ‘He made me talk. Asked about you and your plans. I had to tell him or he would have killed me. I could tell that from his eyes. That look we were talking about. He was a mean son of a bitch.’

  Sirens sounded in the distance.

  ‘You just rest up,’ I said. ‘I know he gave you no choice.’

  The ambulance pulled up behind us and two paramedics rushed over. They took one look at Jesse and one of them went back for a stretcher. The other checked his pulse and seemed satisfied. One of the paramedics gave him a shot of some sort of painkiller, morphine maybe, immobilized his arm and then the two of them lifted him as gently as they could on to the stretcher, bringing a cry of pain from Jesse. They whisked him away and left us standing there, not knowing what to do next.

  ‘They’ll take him to the hospital in Reno, if you want to visit him.’

  ‘What are you going to do about this man in black?’ I asked.

  ‘Keep an eye out for him,’ Tucker answered.

  ‘Keep both eyes out for him,’ I said, ‘and keep your gun handy. This guy is very dangerous. He may be out of your league.’

  ‘But not out of yours,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘If you find him before me, that might be good. For all of us.’

  I nodded. It was as near as he could go to give me carte blanche as to how I handled him. Tucker wasn’t all bad after all. He could have the pieces after I’d dealt with the man in black.

  The man in black’s assault on Jesse altered things. By how much we couldn’t know. I hadn’t told Jesse much that would be useful to the man in black: what he knew was more about me rather than how we planned to fight the bikers, but we’d have to plan for the worst. We sat around the table drinking coffee and generally feeling depressed by the latest turn of events. There was no banter. The mood was solemn. Someone needed to break the silence.

  ‘How much did Jesse know?’ Bull asked.

  ‘He didn’t know the details of what we intended – the pit, the stinger and so on,’ I said, ‘but all the equipment he had on the truck would have told the man in black that something was going on. All we can do is stick to the plan and hope for the best. He doesn’t know we’ve got a digger, so he might think we were just going to erect some sort of barricade with barbed wire.’

  ‘Maybe I should just take his offer,’ Red said, letting out a long sigh.

  ‘Sell the ranch and move on?’ I said, astounded.

  ‘Might be best for all of us.’

  ‘Start running and it becomes a habit,’ I said. ‘What will it take to make you back down next time? A little less? A lot less? What pride can you have in yourself? How can you stand tall?’

  ‘We didn’t bargain for this man in black. You said yourself that he was dangerous. Got the sheriff running scared, too.’

  ‘We have to face him and beat him,’ I said. ‘He’ll haunt all of us otherwise. Remember the Russians? We spent all those years looking over our shoulders, scared of any shadow. Tackle your enemy head on – that’s the only way.’

  Bull nodded. ‘I agree with Johnny. Running’s not the answer. Not for us. No one frightens me off by shooting a beer can and beating up a friend of mine.’

  Pieter got up and went to the dresser, picked up a bottle of bourbon and five shot glasses. He poured out the bourbon and passed the glasses around. ‘By rights, it should be gin,’ he said. ‘Dutch courage. I’m not looking forward to our next meeting with the man in black, but I’m not for running either. I can handle it. I vote we stay and face him.’

  ‘There is an old saying in Poland,’ Stan said. ‘The sausage of the boar is sweeter than that of the pig.’

  ‘And what the hell does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It means I agree with Pieter,’ Stan said. ‘What’s life without some danger? We stay and fight. I’m not wasting all that planning. We face the man in black if we have to. Maybe if we put up a good show against the bikers, he’ll back off.’

  ‘Then we stay,’ I said to Red.

  They all nodded. The bottle of bourbon got passed around. The decision was made. I hoped it was the right one. I probably could have talked them out of staying if I’d wanted to. The responsibility was now mine.

  ‘And so there’s no doubt,’ I said, ‘the man in black is mine. No one touches him but me. There are scores to be settled.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Pa Blenkenstein was right. Even though we were digging on the track, away from the foothills, it was hard work. You could almost hear the digger groan as you plunged the spikes of the bucket into the ground. The mound of earth by the side of the hole was increasing frustratingly slowly. This was going to take longer than we’d thought. It wasn’t just digging the hole in the ground, it was getting rid of the material that we had dug out. We couldn’t leave it by the trap or it would have been obvious that something wasn’t right, so we had to use the digger to transfer the earth to a hiding-place behind the ranch house. At least we could use the earth to construct another firing position.

  ‘This is going to take too long,’ I said to Bull. ‘Too much time ferrying earth around and too little digging.’

  ‘It’s gonna have to be manual labour,’ he said. ‘Spades and wheelbarrows. The digger digs and we transport.’

  ‘Sounds like another trip to town. They’re going to think we’re building a whole new city at this rate.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea, judging by the one they’ve got at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t deserve our custom.’

  ‘Somehow I think that doesn’t bother them.’

  I nodded and went off to get the truck. I needed to talk to Jerome, so might as well kill two birds with one stone – neat trick if you can pull it off. Still doesn’t beat shooting bits of twig.

  I parked the truck outside the hardware store, told the bespectacled boy what I wanted and tipped him ten bucks to load everything for me. I crossed the street to where Jerome was in his usual place, rocking away with the dog by his side.

  ‘Still here then,’ he said.

  ‘Looks like it,’ I replied.

  ‘Sure do,’ he said.

  ‘Beer?’

  He nodded. ‘And don’t forget the peanuts.’

  I obliged. Passed a beer to him and tested the dog’s reflexes by flicking a peanut in the air for him to catch. He passed the test, although I didn’t think he’d do that for much longer. He had that worn-out look that comes when your time approaches. He was going to leave a big hole in Jerome’s life. Wouldn’t seem the same, him rocking away on the porch without the dog.

  I sipped my beer. ‘What news from Jackson? Anything interesting on the senator?’

  ‘Jackson reckons something
’s going down. Senator’s more cagey than usual. All conversation stops whenever he comes in the room. Senator never used to bother – always treated Jackson as if he was deaf, dumb and blind, a non-person is what Jackson called it.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Senator spends a lot of time with Slim – more so than usual, like they’re cooking up something.’

  ‘Did Jackson say anything about a man in black, drives a silver Mercedes?’

  Jerome shook his head. ‘If he’d come to the ranch house, then Jackson would have had to let him in. Would have mentioned it to me.’ He looked up at me. ‘What’s with the man in black?’

  ‘He don’t seem to like us.’

  ‘Lot of that going around.’

  ‘If you see him, get out of his way. He’s mean. Tried to buy Red’s land and when that didn’t work thought he could scare us off.’

  ‘Gonna be a showdown coming?’

  ‘Reckon so. He won’t back off and neither will we.’

  ‘Man in black ain’t your only problem.’

  I flicked another peanut in the air for the dog in a show of nonchalance. I raised an eyebrow at Jerome.

  ‘Bikers are coming.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘My sister works at a diner ’bout twenty miles from town. The bikers are camping out there. Numbers grow each day. They blab a lot, too. Gonna teach you a lesson, they say. Soon they’ll be ready to take you on.’

  ‘Anyone else who wants to join our enemies?’

  ‘Not that I hear, but knowing you I wouldn’t bank on it. Reckon trouble kinda follows you around.’

  ‘Sometimes gets ahead of me, too.’

  He nodded sagely.

  ‘How about,’ I said, ‘visiting your sister for us? Take a look and report back to me. I’ll give you fifty bucks and cover the costs of a meal.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘Deadly serious.’

  ‘There speaks a man who’s never had my sister’s cooking. You only have to smell it for your arteries to clog. I’d stand more chance of surviving if I took on the bikers.’