August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  Body armor. Otherwise the rifle I had would have shredded a man into hamburger at close quarters. But the blast had only knocked him off balance. He was hurt. But hurt wasn’t good enough.

  He struggled to bring his Street Sweeper up at me.

  A blast from my rifle and his head blossomed crimson.

  “Splash one,” I heard Frank’s voice say over the walkie-talkie.

  “Splash two,” I replied, moving quickly to the sunroom.

  The party had begun.

  Thirty-three

  Shock and awe.

  The rifles I’d borrowed from Tomás had done their jobs, temporarily throwing off the intruders with big booms and splatter damage. But for hard men like this, shock-and-awe was a very temporary thing. It just compressed their timeframe and gave their mission imperative more deadly immediacy.

  We were in close quarters now and a rifle was no good.

  Glass shattering.

  I brought up my Smith & Wesson .38 and ran into the sunroom. The third man had been careful not to get hung up in the razor wire concealed in the low shrubbery. By the time I entered the sunroom, he had clambered in. Seeing me, he leveled his gun. He was quick enough to pop off a round that found the flesh of my upper right shoulder.

  I fired two shots in quick succession and dropped him.

  “Splash three,” I said into the walkie-talkie. Outside, the engine of the Ford pickup revved and the house trembled.

  “Splash four.”

  Colleen’s voice. She had been in the shed to the back southern end of the house. Her mission had been to jam her foot down on the accelerator of the truck and drive the snow plow hot and heavy into any intruders making entry on that side of the house.

  A scream.

  It wasn’t Colleen or Vivian.

  I ran to the office on the opposite side of the house and saw one of the men thrashing about, engulfed in flame. Frank had lit him up with two sticky bombs. I leveled my S&W.

  “He’s mine!”

  I turned.

  Colleen.

  I nodded to her and ran upstairs. Behind me I heard Colleen shout at the man on fire, “This is my house, motherfucker!” Then three loud pops.

  Upstairs, automatic rifle fire chewed against wood.

  I mounted the steps two at a time.

  I wasn’t quick enough. The man put a black boot to what remained of the door that led to Vivian. He disappeared quickly into the room. Two, three, four loud pops. Automatic rifle fire. Another single pop.

  The man backed out of the room, his rifle at his side. He slumped against the hallway wall, then slid to the floor in a sitting position.

  Dead.

  Vivian came out, my Glock leveled rock-steady in her right hand. She held it over the dead man.

  “Wet burrito!” I yelled.

  She didn’t hear me. Or chose not to hear me. Instead she knelt by the dead man, whispered into his ear, then fired one more shot into the man’s left temple, his body quivering as it took the shot and toppling over on the floor.

  “Goddammit—wet burrito!” I yelled again.

  Colleen edged past me at the top of the staircase.

  “Viv?” she called out. “Baby?”

  Vivian stood from the side of the dead man and looked at Colleen. Her eyes were not her own. They were the eyes of a killer. Vacant. Cold. It was the look of someone suddenly absent from their own life, untethered and floating between a moment in an unspeakable past and its present echo.

  Vivian leveled the gun at Colleen. Rock steady, finger curled around the trigger. I brought my gun up and put Vivian Paget’s chest in my site.

  “It’s me, baby,” Colleen said, walking slowly toward Vivian. “It’s Colleen.”

  “You cool?” I said.

  “I’m cool,” she quickly replied. “We’re cool—right, Viv?”

  “Colleen?” Vivian finally said.

  The gun in Vivian’s hand began to quiver. She blinked slowly. Soon the weight of it brought her arm down quickly to her side.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Colleen said, cautiously moving forward. “Everything’s all right.”

  Vivian let the gun slip out of her hand. It landed with a thud to the hallway floor. The two women embraced tightly, Vivian weeping on Colleen’s shoulder.

  “What’s happening?” Vivian asked as she sobbed into Colleen’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  I lowered my gun and began breathing again. “So much for goddamn safe words,” I muttered to myself. I called out to Colleen, “One more. Get her in another room. Now.”

  Colleen looked back at me and nodded.

  I ran downstairs just in time to see the last man. He was standing in the foyer and had a forearm tightly clamped around Frank’s neck, his black Glock pressed hard against Frank’s temple.

  The man saw me and calmly said, “We get to my car and I leave.”

  “Sorry, August,” Frank managed to say through the man’s tight grip. “Now stop fuckin’ around and put a bullet in this asshole’s eye, Marine.”

  “Hoo-raa,” I said before firing a single round from my S&W. The bullet found the man’s left eye, spinning him backwards, away from Frank. He fell hard to the floor, dead.

  Frank rubbed his neck, then gave the dead man a kick in the ribs.

  “We get ’em all?” Frank said.

  I nodded. “We got ’em all.”

  Frank and I put out the fire that was consuming the body of the fifth man. Then we checked each of them for identification, knowing we wouldn’t find any. The man Colleen had driven the truck into was mounted on the truck’s snow plow, pinned against the side of the house, nearly cut in half. Nothing on him either.

  Frank and I found two rental cars parked beneath an old oak near the end of Vivian and Colleen’s tree-lined road.

  “Jesus,” Frank said.

  Inside the first car’s trunk were eight gallons of hydrochloric acid in plastic containers. Apparently the men had gone in heavy, the objective being to quickly kill them, dissolve them down to sludge then let what had been their bodies flow away in the sluice of the sewer system. Taking souvenirs, of course. Proof of a job well done.

  Collected around the kitchen table, I told Vivian and Colleen that Frank and I had to bug out fast. I was reasonably sure the immediate threat to them was over. They would have to explain to the local and state cops what had gone down at the house. Save for the fact that Frank and I had been there.

  “You’re bleeding,” Vivian said to me, a vacuous look in her eyes. “There’s so much—blood.”

  “They’re not gonna believe we took these guys out all by our lonesome,” Colleen said.

  I nodded. “I know, but you’ll need to buy time until the FBI gets here. Ask for Special Agent Megan O’Donnell out of the Detroit field office. Tell her everything.” Then I drew in a deep breath, slowly exhaled and said to Colleen, “I need to talk to you. In private.”

  In the hallway outside of the kitchen, I told Colleen what I suspected.

  She didn’t flinch.

  Instead Colleen led me to the attic and turned the lights on. Past the boxes covered in dust and cobwebs, past the furniture huddled in a forgotten corner were paintings covered with sheets and leaning against attic beams. Tentatively, Colleen lifted the sheets.

  The first was the most revealing; a watercolor portrait of Vivian’s father, his lifeless eyes staring out, blood trailing down from a large bullet hole above his left eye near the temple. His mouth was agape and his canine teeth elongated like those of a vampire.

  There were others, always with her father lying naked and dead in the riverfront condo bed in which he was found. And there was one of the young girl who had been found with him, lying in quiet angelic repose, her chest soaked in blood.

  “They’re maybe five years old,” Colleen said, her voice choked and halting. “I—thought they were—just dark fantasies.”

  “It’s the way we found them, her father and the girl.” Then I asked, “Any of her
mother like that?”

  Colleen searched my eyes for a few seconds before shaking her head. “No. I—I don’t think so.” After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “What should I—”

  “Burn ’em,” I said. “Burn ’em all.”

  Anger seared across my chest.

  Anger at myself for not having put everything together nine years ago. Anger for having gotten caught up in the momentary adulation of peers and superiors—my father—for having closed out my first high-profile case quickly and neatly.

  Vivian, then eighteen, had murdered her father. As the lead detective, I watched hours of black-and-white surveillance video from the lobby of the riverfront condo high-rise. I’d cross-referenced everyone who entered and exited with residents and visitors. Everyone save for the elegant woman—long legs, black dress, long black hair, briefcase. The one who charmed the elderly black concierge into using his keycard for the elevator. The woman who had exited the condo thirty minutes later.

  “You knew,” Colleen said, her voice a trembling whisper.

  “I had a feeling,” I said, staring at the paintings. “I was the lead investigator. Took my suspicions to my captain. Ray Danbury. He told me I was being reassigned from her father’s murder to lead investigator following the money Vivian’s father had embezzled. A reassignment that had the stink of politics on it. But I sucked it up. Pretty soon I had media lights in my face and stars in my eyes. I—liked it. Liked the recognition. Danbury told me the woman in the black dress was just a resident who’d mislaid her access card. And you know what? I didn’t care about that any more ’cause I gave my dad what I thought would make him proud: his son’s face in the newspaper and on TV as the cop who recovered millions of stolen dollars. I’d made my bones.” After laying bare the ignominious truth, I looked at Colleen and said, “I’m guessing her father was a sick, miserable bastard. I’d guess Vivian was abused as a young girl.”

  “God,” Colleen said.

  “The bullet for Viv’s father was deserved,” I said. I thought about the sixteen-year-old girl who died at Vivian’s father’s side. “The bullet for the girl—maybe Vivian shot her to kill what she saw in herself. Two bullets for stolen innocence.” I held Colleen’s eyes steadily in mine. “Listen, this doesn’t change anything between you and Viv—if you don’t want it to. But you’ve got to get her help. Serious help.”

  Colleen, her eyes watery, nodded.

  Sirens were approaching in the distance. We rushed back downstairs.

  “Helluva time to take a tour of the house,” Frank said with some irritation.

  “Helluva house,” I said. I turned to Colleen. “How much time?”

  “Five minutes,” she said. “Six, tops.”

  Colleen quickly patched up my shoulder. A couple splashes of hydrogen peroxide and a fast gauze wrap. No bullet to dig out, no broken bone. Frank and I threw our gear in our separate cars and said hasty goodbyes.

  Frank called me ten minutes after we hit the road, racing south through the cold darkness.

  “What was that all about back there?” Frank said, his voice coming through the car’s speakers. When I was done explaining what I could, he said, “Holy shit. His own goddamn daughter?”

  “There are devils that walk amongst us,” I said.

  “No shit,” Frank said. “So what’s that make us?”

  “The sword in God’s left hand,” I said.

  Thirty-four

  Around Saginaw midway between Traverse City and Detroit, I pulled off of I-75 South and found a Dunkin’ Donuts, its sign lit up like a beacon of high-caloric salvation. Frank followed. The goofy-looking, freckle-faced kid behind the counter saw two big guys, sweaty, slightly bloody and mostly wearing tactical black standing at his register.

  “Whoa,” he said inadvertently.

  “Xbox,” Frank said. “Call of Duty.”

  “Sweet,” the kid said.

  Frank and I carried a dozen mixed donuts and two large coffees to a table by the window. Killing people had never been easy for me, even when I was a marine and on the job. But two things made the killing easier: Knowing that I’d killed bad people intent on doing harm to others. And knowing there would be donuts afterwards.

  “How’s the shoulder?” Frank finally said.

  I told him it hurt, but the bleeding had stopped.

  Halfway through the donuts, Frank said, “You think she’ll be all right? Vivian?”

  “I think she’s had years to compress rape, emotional neglect and psychological abuse into a small, dark corner of her mind,” I said. “If Colleen’s smart—and I’m pretty sure she is—she’ll get Vivian some help.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m good,” I said, taking a sizable bite out of an apple fritter.

  Frank nodded, slurped at his coffee and resumed looking out the window at the red taillights and white headlights of cars blacked out by the night. Ten minutes later, we got coffee refills from the goofy-looking kid at the cash register.

  “I’m NutSack357,” the kid said with a disturbingly big, toothy grin. “Maybe we can team up sometime for a little online Call of Duty action.”

  Frank and I hit the road.

  About forty-five minutes from Mexicantown, I got a call.

  “I got two women up here—one of them fairly coherent—calling you a hero,” O’Donnell said. “You and some generic white guy.” She had taken a chopper to Traverse City with two other FBI agents, cutting a four-hour drive by car to a fast forty minutes.

  “I am heroic by nature,” I replied.

  “I’ve also got seven bodies, some very confused local cops and some very pissed off Staties,” O’Donnell said. I asked her if she’d gone over the cars Brewster’s team had driven to Vivian Paget’s estate. She had. “I’m glad you put these guys down, August, but the mess? Jesus. What do I look like? Your personal janitorial service?”

  “What about the IDs I pinched from Dax Randolph and the other guy?”

  “Let’s get one thing straight, August,” O’Donnell said. “I do not now, nor have I ever—nor will I ever—work for you. So show a little goddamn gratitude to me for letting you walk around free for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

  “Just tie this off, O’Donnell,” I said.

  She asked me about the “generic white guy.” I glanced in my rearview mirror at the car Frank was driving. “He’s a good guy with the power of righteousness on his side. And that’s all you get.”

  O’Donnell started to say something, but I disconnected.

  I slipped a CD into the car’s player and turned the volume up. Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island.”

  At around two in the morning, we were in Mexicantown. I called Frank and told him we needed to go in my house fast, locked and loaded. Just in case.

  “Is your life always this exciting?” Frank laughed.

  “Most of the time it’s SportsCenter, nachos and beer. Sometimes I buy a lottery ticket.”

  We went in hard and swept the house from top to bottom. No evildoers. No undead looking for fresh brains. I told Frank he could rack in the spare upstairs bedroom for the night and he didn’t argue. We were both exhausted and the smell of spent gunpowder and hot brass shells was still in our noses.

  “Nice place,” Frank said, looking around my living room. “Not much in it, but nice.”

  “Glad you approve,” I said. “I grew up here.”

  “You were a kid once?” Frank said. “Hard to believe.”

  I got Frank some sheets, a new comforter, a pillow and a couple of towels. Then, after taping a plastic bag over my shoulder wound, I took a long, hot shower. After the shower I disinfected my wound, redressed it and put on a pair of well-worn Wayne State Warriors sweats.

  Both of us were tapped, but there were still vestiges of caffeine and adrenaline coursing through us. I fired up the TV. “How come you don’t got an Xbox?” Frank asked.

  “’Cause I’m not twelve.”

  Frank pulled a face.


  My doorbell rang and instantly Frank and I took defensive positions.

  I moved to the door and peeked out.

  Jimmy Radmon.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” I said, opening the door and quickly ushering him in. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I thought you might want somebody to keep an eye on the place. Saw the lights on and figured I’d check it out,” Radmon said. He spotted Frank and looked back at me. “He with the cable company, too?”

  I introduced the two, then told Jimmy he could go home—wherever that was.

  “I’m up the street at Carmela and Sylvia’s,” Radmon said, his eyes darting between me and Frank. “Case you need anything.”

  “You’re staying at Carmela and Sylvia’s?”

  “Yeah,” Radmon said. “They got carryout from El Zocalo’s and we just, you know, talked and shit. And don’t let them old girls fool you, man. They cheat at poker.”

  Jimmy left and Frank and I flopped on my new sofa. We found a movie on Netflix—Prometheus—and watched it while doing a few shots of honey vodka. Colleen had given Frank two liters of their home-distilled liquor. Even warm it was comforting and transcendent.

  “I don’t get it,” Frank said as the movie’s end titles rolled at four in the morning.

  “It’s a brilliant but flawed study of faith and how far a person will go to discover the weight and validity of their belief,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Frank said. “I still don’t fuckin’ get it.”

  At about four-thirty, we both knocked off. Before going to bed, I loaded a fresh clip in my gun, racked one in the chamber and made sure the safety was off. I’m pretty sure Frank did the same.

  Just in case.

  After a light but fulfilling sleep, Frank and I were up at around nine-thirty. I fixed huevos rancheros, chorizo sausages, several toasted bagels and a pot of Gevalia Columbian Roast coffee made in my mom’s old percolator. Frank buried his face in two plates of the eggs, devouring six sausages and two Asiago cheese bagels. I would have been amused by the sight had I not done the same.

  I got a call fifteen minutes after we’d finished breakfast.