Without Measure: A Jack Widow Thriller

by Scott Blade

  I imagined that to most people these were the every night sounds of what was normal. They were the sounds of safety and comfort. They were the things that made them feel normal, like getting up every morning and heading to jobs that they hated. It was all a part of the daily ritual of taxpaying citizens. This wasn’t for me. For me, the word citizen meant the freedom to travel and go where I pleased, how I pleased. No one told me what to do or where to go. Not anymore.

  All the windows on the back of the house were pitch black, except for the light coming from a slider upstairs off a wooden deck that looked like it was added on later.

  I walked up the wooden stairs, cautiously. The wood creaked a little more quietly than the gate had, but still worried me because the house was silent enough to allow anyone to get the warning that there was an intruder on the back deck.

  I kept the gun down by my leg, out of sight. I didn’t want to get shot because someone saw the weapon. If Warren was actually home and just pretending not to be, then he could legally shoot me for entering his house. I wasn’t sure about entering his yard. I didn’t know California’s laws on property and trespassing.

  It didn’t make any difference because no one seemed to be home.

  I looked in the back through the slider. There were loose hanging, vertical blinds, but they were pulled open.

  I saw no one. The light was a dim lamp on a table back near the far wall.

  The house had an open design. I looked left and saw an empty kitchen. I looked right and saw Colonel Warren’s living room furniture. The rooms were empty.

  A flat-screen TV hung from a wall to the right, in front of the sofas. It was switched on, but there was nothing on the screen. It was just some generic wallpaper, like the thing had a display setting that switched on after no activity had been sensed for a long time. I’d seen PCs do the same thing with a screensaver.

  I scanned the room again to be sure and then I tried the slider. It was locked, which is what I expected.

  I looked around the back deck. There were more planters, some cheap patio furniture, and an outside barbeque on wheels.

  Hollywood movies are always so fake. You see a guy bust a window on a slider, reach in and unlock it. Simple, right? Wrong.

  Sliders have countermeasures for that sort of thing. They come with a good old-fashioned Charlie bar, which is a long bar, dropped in behind the door that slides. It keeps the door from opening.

  The best way to break through a locked slider? Shatter the window completely and walk through.

  I reached down and grabbed one of the smaller planters and dumped out the plants. They slid out and fell on the back deck. Then I chucked the pot through the glass window.

  The slider window shattered. The sound was loud. It echoed into the darkness of the backyard.

  I crouched down, weapon ready. I waited.

  First, I waited for someone to come running out of the dark hallway, but no one did. Then I turned and looked left and looked right. I studied the neighbors on both sides. I saw nothing.

  I could hear a dog bark down the street. Then another one joined in, but still no one came out to see what the noise was.

  I stepped over the broken glass, entered the threshold into the house, which also meant that if Warren was innocent in all this, then I’d just entered the legal territory of getting shot as an intruder.

  I aimed the G2 out in front of me. This time, I pulled my finger out of the housing, just in case someone innocent was home. While I didn’t want to get shot, I also didn’t want to shoot the wrong person.

  Still, no one came out of the darkness.

  I checked the kitchen again, quickly. Nothing there. I studied the east wall of the house. The kitchen was the farthest point. I walked to the hallway. I stayed crouched.

  My eyes adjusted as best as they were going to and I started to head down the hallway. I came to another hall that branched off. One direction led to the front door and the second led to two doors. I walked toward the two doors. The first was a bedroom. It was unoccupied. There was a crisply made, cold bed inside and an empty closet and an on-suite bathroom. Which was small. The door was open. I saw three pieces: a standup shower, a toilet, and a sink.

  I turned back to the second door. I walked closer and started to smell something. It was faint.

  The door had a deadbolt and a lock on it, which made me assume that it led to the garage. None of the locks was locked.

  I opened the door and darted through it. I was prepared to shoot, if I needed to.

  That preparation was overturned fast because I came face-to-face with a powerful stench.

  I knew that smell. I searched around for the light switch and flipped the light on.

  Above the garage were a couple of panel lights. They slowly came to life.

  The building was a basic suburban garage. A long tabletop lined the back wall. Tools were hung in neat fashion along a wall rack. A set of metal lockers that looked like they were recycled from a military base stood in the corner. And two plain cars were parked inside. They were obvious his and hers—one Ford and one Mazda.

  The Mazda was a red thing that looked like I wouldn’t even fit in it. The Ford was a newer Taurus, white. I assumed it was Warren’s.

  They both had military stickers, but the Taurus had the proper identification to signal to the guards at the gate that it was Warren’s car.

  I stepped down a single drop over a two-stair step and stood in the cold garage.

  I ignored the Mazda altogether and walked around the long hood of the Taurus and back to the trunk. I walked to the trunk because that was the source of the stench. No doubt in my mind. First, it was obvious because there were flies fighting to get in. Hordes of them were on the trunk lid.

  I looked up at the ceiling and saw a hole leading to the attic. A low wind noise blew through it. It wasn’t big enough for anything other than a small rodent to come through. It was the point of entry for the flies, I guessed.

  The second thing about the trunk that told me it was the source of the smell was that there was a pool of blood underneath it. Some of it was dried and some looked more recent.

  I didn’t touch anything.

  I scrambled back to the driver’s side door. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

  I reversed the G2 and a swung it at the window, like a hammer. For the second time in one night, I heard the echo of shattering glass.

  I reached through the broken window and popped the trunk. It clicked open.

  I walked back around to the trunk and opened it in one fast motion like I was removing a Band-Aid.

  The smell intensified and wafted over me like a bioweapon. It felt like I was being gassed. I was reminded of sixteen years ago when my old SEAL trainers shut each of us into a room and gassed us with tear gas as a part of SEAL training. This wasn’t a new tactic of training soldiers, but what was new about it was that they filled the room with the rotting carcasses of pigs, which made it feel terrifying to say the least.

  I looked down at the contents of the trunk.

  Suddenly, I was staring at two very dead bodies.

  CHAPTER 31

  TWO DEAD BODIES were half-covered in shadow from the trunk lid of Warren’s Taurus.

  They were folded over and piled neatly in the trunk like luggage. The top body was a male and the bottom was a female. Both were older, probably in their sixties. And both were covered in blood.

  I kept the G2 in my hand because I hadn’t checked the upstairs yet. But I was sure that whoever had killed and piled the bodies into the Warren’s car was long gone.

  I reached down and pulled the faces apart and turned the male’s toward me. It was Warren. I recognized him from the photographs on his desk. He was a lot older, but it was him.

  He’d been shot in the head. The bullet had been fired straight to his forehead and at pointblank range. That was evident because there were huge powder burns all over his face, caked in with blood.

  I reached down past him and g
rabbed the head of the female. I twisted it and faced it up.

  It was Warren’s wife, no doubt about that either because the face was exactly the same as the one from his photograph of her.

  She’d been shot in the forehead as well. It was the same execution style, the same pointblank range, only her death had been much earlier than Warren’s. The blood on her had dried up and the powder burns dried up in it. She had been dead for more than twenty-four hours. I was sure of that.

  I laid her head back down gently. I leaned down and studied their bodies. They were killed with the same gun, muzzle to the forehead. The wife had bruises on her forehead, like a gun had been pushed hard into it.

  She had two black eyes. Her face was a mess of dried blood and mascara. I imagined that Romey’s forensic teams would find the gunpowder and probably evidence of tears as well.

  Suddenly, I heard a pounding sound behind me, like a loud knocking.

  I stood up straight and spun around, pointed the gun in the direction of the sound.

  It was Romey knocking on the outside of the garage door.

  She said, “Widow? Are you in there?”

  I called back to her. I said, “Yeah. Go back to the front door. I’ll open it.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  I walked back through the garage door to the hall and checked the spare bedroom again. I didn’t hear anyone else in the house and I was pretty sure that no one was there, but I’d also known a few cops who were shot by not being thorough enough.

  I went down the other hallway to the foyer and stopped at the bottom of a staircase. I checked up it with the G2. No one was there. No sounds or lights were there. I flipped on all the light switches that I saw. All the lights above me fired on, even the staircase light.

  I looked back up the stairs. Still no sign of life.

  Romey banged on the other side of the front door.

  “Hang on,” I said. I held the G2 down by my side. No reason to hide it from her anymore.

  I unlocked the door and she pushed it open. She had her gun out.

  Romey stepped into the foyer and glanced up the stairs. She stood up on her tiptoes like she was trying to see as much as she could. She asked, “Anybody here?”

  “The garage.”

  She looked at me and then at the G2. She asked, “Where did you get the gun?”

  “Technically, I stole it.”

  “From where?”

  “Warren’s office.”

  Romey waited a second and then she asked, “It was his backup?”

  “Found it in the desk. When you were out in the hall. On the phone. I figured that I might need one.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that, Widow. It’s a senior officer’s personal weapon.”

  “Don’t worry. He won’t be filing a formal complaint or anything. He’s dead.”

  She paused a beat and then she asked, “Garage?”

  “Yes. Shot in the head. Wife too. They’re in the trunk of his car.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Shot by the same shooter who killed five Marines on your base.”

  “Did you check the whole house?”

  “Not yet. But we won’t find anything else. Not the shooter, anyway. He’s long gone.”

  She said, “We’d better have a look anyway.”

  I nodded and said, “The only part left is the upstairs.”

  “You seem to know what you’re doing. You lead the way.”

  I led Romey up the stairs, gun out, but pointed at the floor.

  Upstairs, we found two bedrooms, a bathroom, two walk-in closets and an upstairs laundry room. All the beds were neatly made. All the closets were well organized. Shoes were arranged in a neat order along the back wall in one of the closets. The other room was more of a master bedroom. It was a little bigger and a lot more feminine.

  Romey stared at the feminine room.

  I said, “Looks like the Warrens were sleeping in different bedrooms.”

  She nodded and said, “Doesn’t necessarily mean that they had marital problems. Could just be an old-fashioned thing. My grandparents slept in different rooms.”

  “I don’t think it had any bearing on what happened to them.”

  We left the upstairs and moved to the garage. Romey went straight to the Taurus’s trunk. She gasped at the way they were packed in there.

  She said, “They look terrified.”

  “I’m sure they were. They saw it coming. The killer executed them right to their faces.”

  “I didn’t like Warren that much. No one did. But he was a Marine. He didn’t deserve this. And Mrs. Warren. Her only sin was staying married to an old creep like him.”

  I said, “What about Turik?”

  “I didn’t know him, but I feel bad for blaming him.”

  “If the shooter used Warren’s wife as leverage to make him cooperate then it’s safe to say that Turik was in the same boat.”

  She nodded, said, “We never found her.”

  I said, “Judging by the difference in decomposition, gun powder burns, and dried blood, I’d say that Mrs. Warren died long before the Colonel. Therefore, we can presume that the shooter never had any intention of leaving them alive.”

  She nodded.

  “We can also presume that this is more than one guy.”

  “Of course, at least one guy babysat the hostage.”

  I said, “It’s four. At least.”

  “Four?”

  “One with Mrs. Warren, one with the Colonel, and two more. One with Turik’s wife and the one with Turik.”

  “Four,” she said in the sound of doomed realization. She added three more words. She said, “That’s a conspiracy.”

  “We need to find Mrs. Turik.”

  “We already went to Turik’s house.”

  I asked, “You searched his entire property?”

  “We looked everywhere. There’s no sign of her.”

  Romey paused a beat and said, “We didn’t look for a grave.”

  “There wouldn’t be one. These guys left the Warrens in the trunk of their own car. They knew it would get searched, eventually. They’re not concerned with exerting the effort it takes to dig a grave. Besides, they could’ve easily just shot her and left her in Turik’s living room. Your guys would’ve chalked it up to Turik killing her before he left for work this morning. They could’ve framed it any number of ways. They could’ve made it appear like she found out about his plans and tried to stop him. They would’ve assumed that once he’d killed her, there was no turning back. Your guys would’ve assumed he killed her, went to work, and murdered five Marines in a bout of insanity, then killed himself. It all plays out the same.”

  Romey asked, “But what about the Warrens?”

  I said, “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Not at first. Why go through the trouble of setting Turik up and then leaving the Warrens practically out in the open?”

  She said, “They wanted Turik to look like a terrorist. They wanted Turik to be seen as an ISIS terrorist.” Then Romey paused and said, “The media. Oh God!”

  “What?”

  “There’s a press conference.”

  She looked at her watch and said, “It’s too late. They gave it an hour ago.”

  I asked, “If you’re here and the general and colonel are dead, then who gave the conference?”

  Romey paused a long, long beat. I watched her face turn flush. She said, “It wasn’t from the base.”

  “Where was it?”

  “The White House.”

  CHAPTER 32

  “WHY WAS IT THERE?”

  Romey said, “The White House wants to look tough on terror.”

  My whole career and life, politicians have always done what politicians do. Politics is not a game of governing as much as it is a game of theater. It’s more like watching a play where everyone wants to be the top dog.

  I said, “George R. R. Martin had the right title.”

  “What?”

 
“He’s a writer.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He wrote a series of epic fantasy books. The first one’s called A Game of Thrones. It’s a great title. Makes sense here. I was just thinking about politicians.”

  “I didn’t know there was a book. I love the show.”

  I said, “I didn’t know there was a show.”

  “You really do live under a rock.”

  I stayed quiet.

  Romey said, “What do we do now?”

  “We can’t help Turik’s reputation now. If the White House has made a statement, then the cat’s out of the bag.”

  “We can’t just walk away?”

  “We’re not.”

  “So what then, Widow?”

  I said, “What’s Turik’s wife’s name?”

  “Fatima.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She said, “Strange name for an Arab girl, I thought. It means happiness. I think.”

  I shook my head and said, “Sara means happiness. Fatima is the name of one of Muhammad’s daughters.”

  We headed out of the house, back to the car. I slipped the G2 back into my jacket pocket and Romey holstered her Glock. I said, “We need a photograph of her. Can you get me one from Turik’s house?”

  “We can go there now.”

  “No. Call Kelly. Have him pick one up. He can scan it and send it to your phone. We need some fast answers.”

  “So where to?”

  “I want to know who’s here.”

  “Who’s here? Widow, what are you talking about?”

  “The guys from secret service that you were talking about earlier. They’re foreigners. That means they came with someone important from another country. I want to know who. And what’s he got to do with this?”

  “How would he have anything to do with this?”

  I didn’t answer that. Instead, I said, “Take me back to the base. I want to chat with him.”

  Romey said, “We can’t leave yet. I’ll have to wait for Kelly and the team to get here. Also, I’ll have to call in the locals. This is a crime off base and technically, Mrs. Warren falls under their jurisdiction.”