Hogan was having a hard time believing that her fellow police officer could have betrayed them like that. ‘Our own guys,’ she kept muttering. ‘You sack of shit, Charlie.’ She kept her Kimber trained on Fruge’s wide back. Ben sensed she was having a hard time resisting pulling the trigger, too.
They didn’t have far to walk. The compound was a rambling lacework of little paths leading here and there, added to over the years as the Garretts had gradually extended their home base. Fruge seemed to know the layout pretty well. A regular visitor, obviously. Maybe he and Mason Redbone had often hung out here drinking with their buddies on the other side of the law. Cosy.
Fruge led them past the long, low building nearest the house, then turned left down another path. After a couple dozen paces, he stopped.
‘This is it, right here. This is where they put ’em. It’s kind of like a prison, a buried container. It’s where they always put people before …’ His voice trailed off miserably.
‘Before they kill them,’ Ben said.
‘And other things,’ Fruge said. ‘See, they—’
Ben said, ‘Shut up.’
Fruge shut up.
Ben looked and saw the circular manhole in the ground, black against the darkness. It had a short section of metal drum extending a few inches, to stop dirt and ground water trickling in. He could picture the kind of dank, squalid hellhole that lay below ground. The Garretts’ answer to a medieval dungeon.
He walked over to it, and saw that the lid of the dungeon, a heavy iron drain cover, had been lifted away and dumped on the ground nearby. He peered into the black hole. The stink of dampness and human waste made his nose twitch. He’d seen kidnap victims kept in worse places, but he really couldn’t remember when.
Ben needed more light to see by. He reached in his bag, found his mini-Maglite and shone it down the hole. The calmness of combat had deserted him now. His heart was thumping so powerfully that he was sure the others could hear it.
The rungs of an aluminium ladder glinted from inside the mouth of the hole. Ben rolled the light beam around. He saw no signs of recent violence. No blood. No bodies. Nothing at all. The dungeon was empty.
‘They’re not here,’ he said. His throat was almost too tight to speak. ‘If Jayce and Seth were going to kill them, where else would they have done it?’
Hogan said, ‘Ben, maybe you don’t want to know what happened to them. If they’re dead, they’re dead.’
That was when Charlie Fruge said, ‘They ain’t dead.’
Ben and Hogan both stared at the big man. Ben shone the Maglite in his face. His broken nose was a swollen mass of blood. His pupils shrank down to hard black pinpoints in the bright light.
Ben said, ‘What did you just say?’
‘They ain’t dead,’ Fruge repeated. ‘I thought they might still be here. Looks like we wuz too late.’
Then Fruge was on the ground again, flattened on his back and pressing his good hand to his freshly-rebroken nose as Ben stood astride him with the shotgun muzzle jabbing hard under his chin.
‘Talk to me. Three seconds, or I’ll blow your brains all over this island.’
‘I-I tried to tell you,’ Fruge stammered through the blood and tears. His voice was choked and nasal-sounding. ‘They don’t always kill’m. They sell’m.’
Alarm pulsed through Ben’s whole body. ‘Who do they sell?’
‘Women and girls, mostly. Black ones.’
‘To who?’
‘Klan,’ Fruge said. ‘Hammerskins. White Aryan Resistance. Over in Texas, up in Tennessee, Mississippi. I don’t know ’em all. Jayce used to hang out with them boys. They pay money for slaves.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Hogan said. ‘Step out of the way, Ben. Let me shoot this sick sonofabitch.’
Fruge held up his bloody palms in supplication. The three missing fingers on his mangled, scorched right hand suddenly didn’t seem to be bothering him as much. The prospect of imminent death could have that effect.
‘No! I ain’t got nothin’ to do with that. But they’re alive, see? The woman and the lil’ girl, anyhow. They might’ve shot the half-breed boy and the older kid, unless Jayce kept’m alive for somethin’. I can’t say. I’m bein’ straight with you. Please! You can’t kill me like this! It’s murder!’
‘We ain’t gonna murder you, Charlie,’ Hogan said through clenched teeth, clutching her Kimber with a shaking hand. ‘There’s no word for what we’ll do to you.’
‘Where are they?’ Ben said.
Fruge replied, ‘I truly don’t know. I swear, that’s the truth!’
Ben said, ‘You know what, Charlie? This time I actually believe you.’
And pulled the trigger.
Charlie Fruge’s brains didn’t splatter all over the island. But it was close. The loud BOOM rattled off the buildings and echoed above the roofs.
Ben stepped away from Fruge’s body. He saw the look on Hogan’s face.
She said, ‘You asshole.’
‘Why, because I shot an unarmed man in cold blood?’
‘No, because you made it too quick and easy for the motherfucker.’ Hogan was all about mushy sentimentality.
She shook her head. ‘Oh man, this whole thing is FUBAR. Everybody’s dead, we don’t have the Garrett brothers and we don’t know where the Hebert family are.’
A hard voice from the shadows said, ‘Right here, bitch.’
Ben whirled around and instinctively raised the shotgun butt to his shoulder. Hogan dropped into a combat stance with her pistol sights lined up on the darkness where the voice had come from. But before either of them could get off a shot, there was a loud detonation and a tongue of white-orange flame and Hogan staggered, dropped her gun, and fell on her back.
Ben racked the Winchester. He was on the brink of delivering a lethal blast of buckshot straight back at the shooter when he suddenly froze.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I was you, buddy,’ Jayce Garrett said as he stepped out of the shadows.
Jayce wasn’t alone.
Chapter 63
Ben had been intent on finding the Garrett brothers, and now he had his wish. But he hadn’t reckoned on catching up with them quite this way.
Jayce and Seth had the Heberts with them. The big stainless steel revolver Jayce had used to shoot Hogan was now jammed against the side of Keisha’s head. Tears of terror were flooding down her cheeks. She was clutching little Trinity in her arms. Noah was clasping at his mother’s legs, making a keening sound. Caleb was tightly in the grip of Seth Garrett. The knife held across the front of the boy’s throat glittered in the moonlight.
Ben could see the swellings and mottled bruises all over Caleb’s face. He guessed that the teenager had been pluckily trying to resist their captors and learned the hard way that they were a lot tougher than he was.
Jayce Garrett said, ‘I figured you’d come lookin’ for them, Hope. Been waitin’ for you.’
‘Take it real easy with that scattergun, now, fella,’ Seth said with a mocking grin. ‘This here merchandise is as valuable to you as it is to us, I reckon.’
On the ground at Ben’s feet, Hogan wasn’t moving.
Ben relaxed his finger on the shotgun’s trigger, but he didn’t lower the muzzle. The calculations churning through his mind were all about ballistics, speed, reaction time and odds. He was only fifteen paces away from the Garretts and their hostages. At such short range, the shot pattern of the ten-gauge wouldn’t spread out much. All twelve heavy lead pellets would hit their mark more or less as one, striking the target with the equivalent brute force of a dozen 9mm handguns firing simultaneously. He was confident he could take Seth out without hurting Caleb. That part was easy enough. But the next part wouldn’t be, because there was no way he could rack the Winchester, eject the fired shell and chamber another and turn the weapon on Jayce faster than Jayce could pull the trigger of his revolver and blow Keisha’s brains out. No human being alive could make that shot.
And the converse was just
as true. If Ben opted to save Keisha by shooting Jayce, Caleb would die with Seth’s knife buried in his neck.
Only a miracle could save them both. Miracles were in short supply, as a rule. And at this moment, with Jessie Hogan lying inert at his feet, Ben felt very alone.
But he wasn’t about to let the enemy see that.
‘This is over,’ he said to Jayce Garrett. ‘Whichever way it goes down, you’re done. Make it easy on yourself and let them go, right now. I’ll see to it that you spend the rest of your lives in a nice, cosy cell. Who knows, it might be years before they give you the needle.’
Jayce smiled. ‘That’s rich, comin’ from a cop killer.’
Seth nodded down towards the body of Charlie Fruge on the ground, and tutted. ‘Shootin’ officers of the law, now that’s a death penalty rap, right there.’
‘Looks like we’re all in a spot of trouble, doesn’t it,’ Ben said.
‘Looks that way,’ Jayce said. ‘Except some of us are gonna come out of it, and some aren’t.’
Ben called out to Keisha, ‘Are you okay? Have they hurt you?’
Keisha looked frail and ghostlike in the moonlight. In a hollow voice she called back, ‘They beat Caleb.’ She winced and went quiet as Jayce’s gun muzzle pressed harder against her head.
‘Kid’s gotta serious attitude problem,’ Seth said. ‘Had to teach him a lesson or two.’
‘I’m a businessman,’ Jayce said. ‘First rule, never damage the stock. They’re in pristine condition. Just like you see.’
Seth giggled. ‘In better shape than your cop buddies, that’s for sure.’
His elder brother had no time for amusement. He kept his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Ben.
‘Now, speakin’ of business, you and we had kind of a deal. Looks to me like you went and broke it. But I’m a reasonable man. The offer’s still on the table.’
‘I give myself up to you, you let them go,’ Ben said. ‘Is that what you had in mind?’
‘Not exactly. You got the first part right. You give yourself up to us. Then you face the punishment for what you done to Logan. The second part is, we let the Hebert boys go instead of skinnin’ the little shits alive and feedin’ ’em to the gators. They ain’t no use to us. The bitch and the lil’ girl, that’s a different story. They’re already spoken for.’
Keisha squeezed her wet eyes shut and hugged Trinity for all she was worth. Noah was howling in fear. Caleb struggled to get away from Seth, but was powerless against his iron grip and the knife against his throat. A thin dark trickle of blood ran down his neck.
‘You wouldn’t want to let down your business partners in Texas and Tennessee,’ Ben said.
Jayce gave a pretend-nonchalant shrug, still keeping the big revolver hard up against Keisha’s head. ‘You see how it is. I got the orders already lined up. Gotta look after commerce.’
‘Then we have an impasse,’ Ben said. ‘Because I don’t much like your terms.’
‘Like they say,’ Jayce replied. ‘Non-negotiable.’
‘In other words, that’s tough shit,’ Seth spat out.
‘You should know me by now,’ Ben said. ‘But you’re still not getting it, are you?’
Jayce’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means that if you knew me, you’d know that I’d rather kill these people myself than let them end up the way you’ve got planned for them. I still have three rounds left in this gun. One is all I need to destroy your precious merchandise. Guess where the other two will go.’
Jayce smiled. ‘You’re one hardcore mofo. I hate to say it, Hope, but I like the way you think.’
‘You won’t like it so much when your innards are spread out all over that wall behind you,’ Ben said. ‘This isn’t going to end well for anyone. Especially you.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Jayce said. ‘Seth, cut the kid’s throat.’
Things happened very quickly after that.
Grinning like a man possessed, Seth gripped the teenage boy in a lock and jerked his head back to expose his throat. The knife’s edge began to slide across the milky flesh of his neck. The blood began to trickle faster. Caleb screamed. Keisha screamed. Trinity and Noah were wild with horror as they watched their half-brother about to be murdered by the bad man.
And Ben blew the side of Seth Garrett’s skull out with a blast of buckshot.
As he pulled the trigger and the explosion filled the night, he knew that he was killing Keisha, too, because in the next instant Jayce would shoot her in the head.
But then a miracle happened.
Chapter 64
The last thing that went through Seth Garrett’s mind was an ounce and a quarter of cold swaged lead alloy buckshot. His legs were already cut off from his brain as they crumpled under him. His lifeless fingers released the knife and his other hand let go of Caleb, who scrambled away from him as he fell to the ground.
The average reaction time for a healthy, alert human to a visual stimulus is around 0.25 seconds, and 0.17 seconds for an audio stimulus. The sight and sound of his brother’s brains getting blown out was a combination of both for Jayce Garrett, whose reactions were somewhat quicker than most people’s. Factor in a few extra milliseconds for the order to flash down from his brain to his trigger finger and let off the revolver he had to Keisha Hebert’s temple, and she would be dead pretty fast.
But somewhere in the middle of that extremely short time interval, before the neurotransmitter cells in Jayce’s brain were able to relay their instruction message to his body, another loud shot boomed out from the darkness somewhere behind Ben. A bullet slammed into the shed wall right next to where Jayce was standing, close enough to make him flinch and let go of Keisha. She stumbled to the ground, crying out in confusion, thinking the gunshot had been Jayce’s.
And in the next few milliseconds Ben cracked open the lever of the Winchester, slammed out the smoking spent shell that had emptied its contents into Seth’s head, and closed the lever to chamber the next one that was intended for his brother. But before the eject/recock cycle was complete, Jayce’s trigger finger received its delayed FIRE command and the revolver, now pointing straight at Ben’s chest, went off.
The impact of a heavy slug travelling somewhere north of the speed of sound knocked Ben backwards off his feet as though he’d been kicked by a horse, still clutching the shotgun which fired harmlessly straight up into the air. In the midst of the turmoil of confusion that comes with being shot in the chest with a large-calibre weapon, he registered the fact that he wasn’t dead, because the ballistic vest he was wearing under his jacket had stopped the bullet.
Then came the sensation of pain and the knowledge that he’d cracked an upper rib, around his heart area. Kevlar could prevent a high-powered projectile from penetrating your vital organs, but the energy still had to go somewhere.
Next, the hidden shooter in the darkness let off another round. This time, the bullet struck Jayce Garrett in the right hip. The impact made him spin and drop his gun, but he stayed upright. As he went to scoop up his fallen weapon, a third shot kicked up dust at his feet and forced him to stagger back. There was little question who the unseen gunman was shooting at. Jayce stood there swaying on his feet for maybe half a second, then his face twisted into a leer and he bolted away into the shadows, limping badly.
Ben stood up. He was dizzy and hurting, and had to blink a few times to shake off the shock and confusion still buzzing through his mind. He pointed the shotgun towards where Jayce Garrett had been standing a moment earlier, but Jayce was gone. His blood glistened on the ground. A thick trail of it, leading off.
Hogan still hadn’t stirred. Ben wanted to reach out to her, but he had to attend to Keisha and the kids first. They were gathered around their mother and clamped tightly to her as she clutched them and sobbed loudly. She turned to Ben. ‘Oh God, I thought you were dead. I thought we all were.’
‘You’re safe now,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s over.’
‘Wh
ere’s Tyler?’
‘He’s fine. He’s waiting for you.’
‘Oh, Ben.’ Keisha burst into a flood of tears and hugged him. Caleb hugged him too. There was blood on the kid’s neck, but the knife had barely cut him. Another half a second, and it would have been a very different story.
Ben let go of them and crouched next to Hogan. At the same moment that he realised she still had a pulse, her eyes fluttered open. He put a hand under her and helped her to sit up. ‘You had me worried there for a moment.’
‘I feel like I got hit by a baseball bat,’ she groaned, rubbing her torso where the bulletproof vest had taken the hit. ‘Knocked the crap outta me.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Ben said.
‘What happened?’
‘A miracle,’ Ben said.
He looked around as the mystery shooter came staggering out of the shadows towards them.
‘Or maybe not,’ Ben said.
Sheriff Roque looked as though he might collapse at any moment. His face was pale and cadaverous in the moonlight, his jacket was shiny with blood and his right arm was hanging limp.
‘Thanks for the help,’ Ben said.
‘It’s a damned good thing for you I can still point this thing with my south paw,’ Roque muttered, holding up the Colt in his left hand. He glanced down at Seth Garrett’s body, and at his brother’s blood trail leading away into the darkness. ‘Jayce?’
‘Still out there, but he’s hurt. I think your second shot broke his hip.’
‘Good. The sumbitch deserves to suffer.’
Roque’s own pain must have been tremendous but he was bearing it with amazing fortitude. He eyed the remains of Charlie Fruge, then looked at Ben, then looked at the ten-gauge in Ben’s hand, and Ben could tell that the sheriff knew exactly what had happened to Fruge.
Roque pulled a pained but knowing smile and said, ‘The Garretts sure made a mess of him, didn’t they?’
‘He was one of theirs, just like Mason.’
‘Guess we’ll never know now, will we?’
‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I don’t suppose we will.’
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