The Rebel's Revenge

by Scott Mariani

  Some thirty miles the other side of Pointe Blanche, they finally reached the Big Q Motel unscathed. It was the generic type of grubby fleapit Ben had passed a hundred of on his travels through the state, set off the highway with room doors on two floors, a weed-strewn parking area in front and a reception office with dirty glass doors and signs for No Smoking and No Concealed Handguns. What on earth was happening to America?

  Dwayne swung the Firebird into the forecourt. The eyes darted in the mirror. ‘Now what?’

  Ben pulled the arrow away from Dwayne’s neck and pointed with it. A tiny drop of blood oozed from the little hole the steel tip had bored in his prisoner’s flesh.

  ‘Pull up over there, where we can see the doorways. Then we wait, and watch, and you keep your mouth shut and pray that I don’t start getting all impatient and irritable.’

  In his time Ben had spent many hundreds, if not thousands, of patient hours on stakeouts, OPs and sniper duty. Even before the SAS had sharpened his skills to razor edge he’d had the ability to remain utterly still and absolutely focused on his target for extended periods of time, in anything from frigid mountain cold to melting jungle heat and humidity. A talent that his hostage lacked, but Dwayne was showing good sense in neither complaining nor trying to bolt for freedom. If anyone inside the office wondered what a flame-painted muscle car with black windows was doing just sitting outside their place of business, they didn’t care enough to come and check it out.

  It soon became apparent why the management paid little attention to the activities that took place at the Big Q Motel. Every so often, with metronomic regularity, a car pulled in off the highway and parked in a bay outside the room doors. Then the driver, invariably a solitary male, would get out, glance a little nervously around him as though checking that he wasn’t being followed, then climb the steps and make his way to any one of three adjacent rooms on the upper floor, numbered twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. It was the same routine, every time. The guy would knock, the door would open, and a scantily-clad female would appear and welcome him in with a smile. The women in rooms twelve and fourteen each had the kind of teased blond hair Ben had thought had gone out after the eighties. Lucky number thirteen’s occupant was dark, a little plump, and the least smiling of the three.

  ‘That’s Layla,’ Dwayne said when she first appeared.

  Ben said nothing.

  At intervals of around twenty minutes, the routine would run in reverse: the door would open again, the punter would return to his car looking a little more relaxed, and drive off, soon to be replaced by another. All the coming and going added up to quite a busy little enterprise going on up there.

  An hour went by. Then another. The Firebird was turning into an oven. After two and a half hours Ben was losing patience and ready to escort Dwayne up to pay an unscheduled visit to room thirteen. He definitely didn’t want to walk in there while she was still occupied with her current client, and so waited for the guy to leave.

  Just as Ben was about to make his move, a boxy black SUV the size of a small cottage with a Cadillac badge on its grille came tearing onto the motel forecourt and screeched to a halt in a parking bay. Once again, the solitary male driver jumped out and began marching towards the stairs. He was lean, about thirty years of age, and walked with the cocky swagger of a man suffering from overconfidence issues. Spiky reddish hair, mirror-tinted dark glasses, blue jeans, fancy boots. He could have been just another client rolling up, but Ben instantly knew there was something different about this one.

  And Dwayne instantly knew it, too. He said, ‘Christ. That’s Logan Garrett.’

  Chapter 32

  It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason for Logan Garrett’s visit to this motel room cottage industry. Ben thought it improbable that he was here to collect on the same kinds of services as the punters. More likely, if Layla and the two blondes were his girls, and if he was their pimp, he was here to pick up the nice little wads of cash they’d been busily earning for him.

  Ben watched Logan trot up the stairway, stride up to the door of room thirteen and knock. Layla took a moment to answer the door. She didn’t look especially happy to see him. He pushed past her into the room, and the door closed behind them.

  It was going to take Logan a couple of minutes to pick up his money. Ben told Dwayne to drive around the side of the building. Dwayne shrugged, fired up the engine and did as he was told. At the rear was a scrubby area of parched grass and a row of dumpsters filled with broken chairs, old mattresses and carpet offcuts. Once the Firebird was out of sight of room thirteen’s windows, Ben said, ‘That’s far enough. Now get out of the car. Leave it running.’

  Dwayne halted the car, put the transmission in park and got out. Ben rocked the driver’s seat forward and stepped out after him. ‘Now open the boot.’

  Dwayne frowned down at his feet. ‘The what?’

  ‘The trunk,’ Ben corrected himself. ‘Open it up.’

  Again, Dwayne did what he was told. Then Ben glanced upwards and said, ‘Is that a police chopper?’ Dwayne craned his neck to scan the perfectly empty sky. And Ben hit him with a right uppercut to the side of the chin that spun his head around and knocked him out cold.

  He caught Dwayne as he fell, propped his limp form against the back of the car and quickly went through his pockets. Dwayne was carrying about two hundred dollars in cash, a BlackBerry, some guitar picks and a Leatherman multi-tool. Ben didn’t play the guitar but the rest of the stuff was useful spoils of war. He tipped Dwayne into the open boot. He’d briefly considered putting him in one of the dumpsters, but hostages were always a useful accessory to fugitives from justice.

  ‘You’re an idiot, Dwayne,’ Ben said to the slumped shape in the boot, and then closed the lid. As an afterthought he took out the Leatherman, folded out some blades until he found a stubby Phillips screwdriver among them, and used it to punch a few holes in the boot lid. Dwayne might cook in there, but at least he wouldn’t run out of air.

  Ben quickly got behind the wheel, threw the transmission back into drive and pulled a tight turn back around the front of the motel, just in time to see Logan Garrett returning to his Cadillac. There was a bulge in each of Logan’s trouser pockets the size of a roll of banknotes. Ben wondered what percentage of his ill-gotten gains the girls got to keep. Probably not much. What a life; but things were set to improve for them, because they soon wouldn’t have a pimp any more.

  Logan fired up the Cadillac and burned rubber out of the motel forecourt. Ben waited until he’d rejoined the highway and then followed. Logan was tearing along at over eighty miles an hour, which displeased Ben as the last thing he needed was to get pulled over for speeding. He kept pace with the Cadillac but hung well back for the sake of discretion, since a flame-painted muscle car with a huge fiery phoenix emblazoned across the bonnet perhaps wasn’t the most anonymous surveillance vehicle. Then again, discretion might well be wasted on Logan Garrett, who didn’t strike Ben as the most perceptive sort.

  Logan headed north. Eighteen miles later he turned off the highway and struck eastwards along a country road that was almost devoid of traffic but twisty enough to enable Ben to stay back out of sight. It was just after five in the afternoon when Logan finally left the metalled road for a dirt one that snaked and wound upward into densely wooded hill country.

  With no other vehicles to space between him and his quarry it was becoming harder for Ben to remain unnoticed. Forced to hang back two hundred yards and more, he got only the occasional fleeting glimpse of the Cadillac’s tail ahead.

  He wondered where Logan was leading him. Perhaps to the mysterious Garrett Island that Sheriff Roque had mentioned, but of which neither of the Heberts seemed to have ever heard?

  One thing was for sure. Life was about to get more interesting.

  For another forty minutes Ben carefully tailed Logan Garrett deeper and higher into the hills. As Ben reached a ridge the tree cover thinned out and the ground sloped away on his right to offer a broad
view over a valley.

  Two hundred yards further on, the dirt track had veered sharply around to the right and he could see the distant Cadillac making its way down the slope towards a small cluster of rustic-looking buildings that stood alone in the middle of the vast empty wilderness. At this range it was hard to make out what the buildings were. A farm, maybe. Definitely not any kind of island. There was no water in sight. But whatever the place was, Logan appeared to be making right for it.

  Ben rolled the Firebird to a halt, turned off the engine and got out, bringing his bag out with him. Inside was the compact but powerful pair of binoculars that he carried everywhere, just for times like these.

  The edge of the slope was just a few yards from the track, strewn with rubble and wild grass. Ben made his way over to it, keeping low, then lay on his stomach with his elbows planted in the dirt and the binoculars to his eyes. He focused and panned and picked up the moving Cadillac as it progressed the rest of the way down the winding dirt road towards Logan Garrett’s mysterious destination, trailing a dust plume in its wake.

  Panning further to the right, Ben saw that the buildings were enclosed all around by a high security fence topped with concertina razor wire. The enclosed area consisted of maybe a quarter of an acre, nowhere near large enough for even the most diminutive rural smallholding.

  Ben scanned the buildings to examine them in as much detail as he could, at this range. The whole place was crudely constructed out of planking and corrugated-iron sheets, most of which were weathered various shades of rusty brown. There was a larger structure in the centre, surrounded by a number of what were clearly storage sheds. Two of the sheds were of open-fronted lean-to design, and inside them Ben could make out rows and stacks of blue cylindrical objects that he at first thought were large propane bottles but then realised were container drums. There must be scores, even hundreds of them, arranged four or five high on wooden pallets. More loose drums lay untidily around the beaten-earth yard.

  Another open-fronted barn was heaped ten feet high with sacks of something like grain or corn, some of which had split open and spilled their contents all over the ground. Yet another shed was stacked to the roof with firewood logs. A dismembered tree trunk lay on a saw horse in front of it, waiting to be chainsawed into segments and then split by axe on a chopping block. A lone worker in cap and dungarees was busily engaged in adding to the wood pile. He was a huge man, and from the way he moved it was clear there was something not quite right about him.

  As Ben watched, the giant grabbed a sawed section of log the size of an armchair, placed it on the block and swung a large axe at it, splitting it apart with ease. He lumbered lopsidedly over to the scattered pieces, gathered them up in his monstrous arms and hurled them on the pile, then went lumbering back for more. Genetics.

  The building in the middle was about the size of a hay barn, with side walls made out of warped planks and a rusty metal roof that sloped in four directions from a tall, jutting iron chimney with a ragged top that made it resemble the stack on Stephenson’s Rocket. It was belching out a thin cloud of smoke that dissipated on the wind. The gentle hill breeze was blowing Ben’s way, and even at this distance he could detect a whiff of a malty brewery smell coming from the building.

  Ben smiled. Logan had just led him to the Garrett brothers’ illegal moonshine distilling plant. Maybe one of several. If there were others, they would undoubtedly be in similarly remote locations to lessen the chances of discovery by local law officers or federal officers of the ATF. Judging by the messy state of the place, it had clearly been in operation for years. And the number of drums stacked up in the lean-to sheds made it easy to see that the Garretts’ annual output of tax-free liquor was enough to intoxicate half of the Southern states. Business acumen obviously ran in the family.

  Logan’s Cadillac had reached the gateway into the enclosure, which was as tall as the fence and chained shut. As Ben watched, a bearded man in a cap and a red check shirt emerged from a tin guard hut and loped casually up to the gate to undo the padlock. He had a short-barrelled shotgun hanging off his shoulder. Maybe a product of the Garretts’ other little line, supplying firearms to crooks. The chain fell loose and the bearded guy opened the gate for Logan to drive though. They exchanged a few brief words, then the bearded guy closed the gate behind him and redid the chain and lock before disappearing back into the tin hut.

  Ben tracked the Cadillac as it drove across the yard, passed the main building and turned into an area between two large sheds where a row of other vehicles was parked. It made sense to keep the vehicles a good distance from the hub of the plant. Illegal stills were known to go up spectacularly in flames when things went wrong, usually when some drunken operator spilled a pot of pure methanol onto an open fire or lit a cigarette in the presence of highly explosive vapours. In pre-SAS days his army unit had once been deployed to the site of a suspected terrorist bomb factory in Northern Ireland that had exploded, only to find the smoking remnants of an illicit poteen distillery and a pile of charred body parts, all that remained of the culprits.

  He watched now as Logan slotted himself into a parking space between a flatbed truck, so ancient that it could have dated back to the original prohibition days, and a couple of pickups. But those weren’t the vehicles that drew Ben’s eye and made his blood race in his veins as he twiddled the focusing ring for a sharper view through his binoculars. It was the sight of the dirt-streaked vehicle parked at the far end of the row.

  A black Mustang. One that Ben recognised instantly as the same car that Lottie’s killers had been driving that night.

  They were here.

  Chapter 33

  Ben put away the binocs and returned to the car to get his jacket and Caleb’s bow, arrows and quiver. Dwayne must have regained consciousness a while ago. Now very much awake, he was thumping on the inside of the boot lid and demanding in a muffled voice to be let out. He’d just have to resign himself to his fate and get comfortable in there. He had plenty of space. It wasn’t a Fiat 500.

  Ben grabbed his things and slipped over the edge of the slope. He zigzagged his way down the incline, moving from tree to bush to tree to conceal his approach. The Garretts believed they were safe up here, deep in the middle of nowhere. They were about to discover that nowhere was safe for them any longer.

  Even so, Ben knew what he was coming up against. If there was one armed guard inside the fenced compound there were sure to be more. Not counting the monster with the axe and the Garrett brothers themselves. From what Tyler had told him, Ben could be certain that Jayce Garrett, the eldest, posed the biggest threat of the three.

  At the bottom of the slope the ground rose up again in a steep bank of verdant ferns that grew thick and wild all the way to the base of the perimeter fence. Ben moved as slowly and cautiously as a hunting leopard. It took him a full ten minutes to stalk through the foliage towards the wire. Lying flat among the ferns he had a view of the compound yard, the vehicles and the main building. The only movement he could see was the slow plume of smoke drifting from the chimney stack. The axe-wielding giant was nowhere to be seen. The bearded guy with the shotgun hadn’t re-emerged from his hut.

  Ben took the multi-tool from his pocket and folded out the handles to reveal the combined pliers and wire cutters, then went to work snipping out a hole in the mesh large enough to crawl through. A passing guard might notice his entry route and raise the alarm – but odds were they’d know he was here before that happened.

  Ben pushed his kit through the hole and then slipped inside the compound. He moved quickly towards the nearest shed and took cover against its rusty side, listening intently and hearing nothing but the rasp of a diesel generator coming from somewhere. He stalked across to the row of parked vehicles. Squatted on his haunches next to the black Mustang. Found the sharp little knife blade of the multi-tool, pressed its tip against the sidewall of the Mustang’s right rear wheel, and gave the hilt a sharp blow with the flat of his other hand to punch the bl
ade through the steel belting of the tyre.

  The sudden escape of air hissed like a wounded snake. The tyre began to deflate and flatten and the rear corner of the car sank slowly towards the ground. He did the same thing to the other three tyres and then moved on, working his way along the line until he could be certain that none of the Garretts or their associates would be leaving here in a hurry.

  Ben slipped away from the immobilised vehicles and headed towards the guard hut.

  The hut was a crude wooden shed that doubled as a workshop, littered with tools and junk. The grimy window pane overlooked the compound’s gates. The bearded guy was sitting slumped in a raggedy armchair in the corner. His shotgun hung by its sling from a nail in the wall. On the workbench next to him lay a walkie-talkie. But he made no attempt to reach for either as Ben stepped inside the hut, because he was asleep. Little wonder, judging by the reek of moonshine on his breath and the half-empty bottle at his elbow.

  Ben needed to make sure the guy wouldn’t wake up again too soon. He did that with the heavy rubber-headed mallet that was among the mess of tools on the workbench. One solid blow to the side of the head, and the guy was off to dreamland for a good long while. Ben proned him on his fat belly and crouched over him to hogtie his wrists and ankles together with some electrical wire. Then he stood and looked around him. Most of the workbench’s surface was taken up with a large section of copper cylinder the size of a hot water tank. Various lengths of copper piping lay on the worktop next to it.

  If Ben needed any final evidence of what the Garretts were up to, the dismantled still was it. Sometime before the bearded guy had drunk himself into a stupor he’d been working on repairing the thing – binding up sections of the piping with gaffer tape, and using drops of molten metal solder to fill little pinholes in the thin copper cylinder where potentially flammable liquids or explosive fumes could leak out. The soldering iron lay cold on the bench, next to a big roll of steel wool that the guy had been using to keep the tip of the iron clean and buff up the copper. Very industrious, Ben thought.