Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  Dex was on his feet and putting on a pair of jeans. “Then I’m going with you,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, which he obviously took as my acceptance. A part of me wanted to be strong and independent, and tell him to stay home, but another part admitted that I would feel better with him along. We were both dressed within ten minutes, and went out the door without even thinking about Critter.

  From my house, it took only twenty-five minutes to get to Kellyville, and we found Slick Road just a short distance beyond it. I turned left and watched my odometer, but Dex spotted the sign for 181st Street before we’d gone the full two miles. A minute later, we turned onto the unmarked county road.

  It was gravel, and it was rough. My new Mustang sat low enough to drag in a few spots, but I didn’t care. I drove slowly and kept to the high spots when I could, and we had gone about a mile by the time the house came into view.

  I stopped the car, and then backed up a bit. I had seen an entrance into a wooded area, and I pulled the car in far enough that it would be out of sight from the house.

  We got out of the car and started walking back toward the road, but Dex spotted a path in the woods. “Maybe we should try this,” he said. It seemed to parallel the road, so I agreed.

  We were still about a half mile from the house, and it sat in the middle of a large clearing. We wouldn’t be able to get all the way up to it and stay in the cover of the trees, but I wanted to avoid being seen as long as possible. When we came to the edge of the woods nearest to the house, we stopped and squatted down.

  “I wish I grabbed the binoculars,” Dex said. I looked at him for a moment, then took out my phone and turned on its video camera. I zoomed in as tight as it would go on the house, and panned it around to try to see any signs of occupancy.

  We were facing the front of the house, which was across the gravel road from where we were in the woods. The windows appeared to be dark, and I couldn’t see anything that indicated somebody was living in the house. I turned the phone toward the barn, which happened to be sitting on the side closest to us and had a big open doorway.

  It was hard to make out, but I was sure I saw the front end of a van in the dark interior. I held my phone out for Dex to see, and he nodded.

  “That looks like a van,” he said. “Any word yet from Pennington or the sheriff?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing yet.”

  No sooner had I spoken than we heard vehicles approaching. We stayed back out of sight and watched as two Creek County Sheriff’s cars pulled up and turned in the driveway of the house. Two deputies got out of each one, and the four of them walked together toward the front door.

  “What are they doing?” I asked. “Shouldn’t a couple of them hang back?”

  “I would think so,” Dex said. “Maybe they know whoever owns this place. It’s possible whoever is there is supposed to be there.”

  The deputies stepped onto the front porch and one of them knocked on the door. They stood there for a moment, but there was no answer so he knocked again, louder.

  I still had the video app on my phone, and I raised it up and pointed at the house again. I could see the deputies clearly, as they talked to one another, but then they started down the steps off the porch. I was still watching the front of the house, and I saw the curtain at the front window move.

  There was a muffled sound, like a gunshot but not as loud as I would expect, and the window shattered. One of the deputies pitched forward and landed on his face, and all three of the others were down only a second later.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, “oh, my God! Dex, he just shot them!”

  “I know, I saw,” Dex said. “Come on!”

  He grabbed my hand and we took off running back down the path. “Where are we going? We can’t just leave them…”

  “He was a Navy SEAL,” Dex said. “They’re almost certainly dead, but there’s nothing we can do for them. Call 911, now, and tell them what you saw. What we’re doing is getting back to the car, and I’m getting you out of here.”

  The path was fairly clear, so I let Dex lead me by the hand while I tried to punch 911, but my phone rang at that moment. It was Pennington, and I answered instantly.

  “Jim! They sent deputies to check the house, and he killed them all!”

  “What? Cassie, are you out there?”

  “Yes, we came out because I wanted to be close, but the deputies just knocked on the door and he shot them all dead. I was about to call 911 when you rang through!”

  “Get out of there,” Pennington said. “I’ll handle it.” The line went dead, and I kept running.

  We got to the car a moment later, and were just about to get in when we heard a vehicle. It was coming from the direction of the house, and Dex yanked me back into the tree line. He had his gun in his hand, and I drew my own.

  It was the van, of course, and it sailed past our little hiding spot without slowing down. I jumped up and ran for the car, with Dex on my heels. I got behind the wheel and started it as he was climbing in, then threw it into reverse and backed out of the wooded driveway. When I hit the gravel road, I spun the car around, threw it into drive, and floored it.

  That was a mistake, on gravel. The car slid sideways, and it took me a second to get it back under control. When I did, I gave it gas carefully and we bounced and bumped all the way down the road.

  We caught up with the van just as it turned onto Slick Road, turning south instead of north. I didn’t even bother to stop, but cut the wheels and let the car fishtail onto the blacktop. Danny had his foot in the carburetor as far as it would go, and the van was accelerating rapidly. I was up to eighty miles per hour and he was still pulling away from me.

  I tossed my phone to Dex. “Call Pennington back, tell him where we are and what’s happening.”

  Dex didn’t argue, or bat an eye. He hit the call back button and put the phone to his ear, but took it down a moment later and hit redial again. “Went to voicemail,” he said. “I’m trying again.”

  An intersection loomed ahead, and Danny hit the brakes hard and fishtailed through a right turn onto Highway 16. I stayed on him, the Mustang taking the turn easily at forty miles an hour, and handling the curves a lot better than the big van could.

  Beside me, Dex finally got through. “Pennington? This is Dex Tate. The guy took off in his van, and we’re following him. Right now, we’re on Highway 16, going west. It’s a blue Chevy van, late nineties, license number 755-ADA.” He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, got it.” He ended the call and turned to me, speaking loudly over the sound of my engine.

  “This road leads into Bristow,” he said. “Pennington is trying to get a roadblock set up there.”

  “If he gets into town,” I said, “that puts more people at risk. We need to stop him, if we can.”

  Dex nodded and rolled down his window. I glanced over to see what he was doing, and saw that he had his gun out and was trying to aim ahead.

  “I’m gonna try to get his tires,” he said. He unbuckled his seatbelt and raised up on the seat, getting his head and shoulders out the window. He held the pistol in both hands, but it was almost impossible to hold it steady in the wind.

  The back door of the van suddenly flew open, and there was Danny, kneeling on the floor and aiming a rifle. My heart leapt into my throat as I realized that Dex was presenting a perfect target, and I instinctively grabbed at him and pulled, trying to drag him back into the car before Danny could fire. It made me swerve to the right, and I felt the wheels on that side drop off the pavement for a second.

  Everything went into slow motion. I saw the flash as the rifle went off, but I didn’t hear the shot. I screamed as I felt Dex jerk, but then my windshield turned into an almost opaque sheet of cracks. Dex dropped into the seat beside me as I hit the brake pedal, and I turned to look at him, expecting to see blood everywhere.

  He was looking at me, his eyes wide. “Watch the road!” he shouted, and I turned my eye forward again. It did
n’t help much, because I could barely make out the van ahead of us, let alone the road. I kept my foot on the brake and watched the van dwindle into the distance until I couldn’t even make it out anymore through the shattered glass.

  I got the car onto the side of the road and stopped, then slammed it into park and turned to Dex. I grabbed him and ran my hands over his body, looking for the bloody wound I knew had to be there, but there was nothing.

  “Oh, God, I thought he shot you,” I said. “Are you okay, were you hit?”

  “I’m fine, Cassie,” Dex said. “I thought he shot you!”

  We both looked at the bullet hole through the windshield, and realized that it was almost dead center. We turned and looked behind us, and saw that the back window was also a spider web of cracks.

  I looked at Dex again, and felt my heart trying its best to slow down and sink back into its proper position. That moment of terror when I thought he had to have been shot was replaying itself over and over in my mind, and I couldn’t help thinking that my stubbornness had almost gotten him killed.

  “Well,” Dex said, “now we know for sure that he’s not alone. Somebody else was driving.”

  THIRTY

  It took me a moment to register what he’d said, but then I nodded. Obviously, someone else had to be driving while Danny was at the back of the vehicle aiming at us. I reached over and picked up my phone from where Dex had laid it on the console and dialed Pennington again.

  “We’re working on the roadblock,” he said, but I cut him off.

  “We lost him,” I said. “He shot out the windshield of my car. He’s definitely got somebody else with him, because someone else was driving.”

  “Do what? Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “The last we saw of him, he was going straight ahead on 16, doing about eighty-five miles an hour.”

  “Geez,” he said. “Let me see what’s happening on the roadblock, and I’ll get back to you.”

  I put the phone down and looked at Dex. “So,” I said, “how much is the new glass going to cost?”

  He looked at me for a second, and he burst out laughing. “Probably quite a bit,” he said. “And somehow, I don’t think you want to turn this in to your insurance company.”

  “Yeah, probably not. They’re still upset about the Kia getting blown to smithereens. I had to explain what happened, and then they found out I’m a private eye, and my rates doubled. I can imagine what this would do.”

  A couple of sheriff’s deputies showed up a few minutes later. Pennington had told them about us, but they actually seemed a little nervous when they approached the car. Dex and I were sitting on the hood at that point, and it turned out all they wanted to do was take our statement.

  It was one of the most unfriendly interviews I’ve ever been involved in. They were justifiably upset and angry over the loss of their friends and coworkers, but I got the impression that, if it weren’t for Pennington, they might have decided to take us in as accessories. The Creek County Sheriff’s Office, I was informed, did not approve of private investigators being involved in police work.

  “And if I hadn’t been there,” I said, “how long would it have been before you knew they got shot? At least now, you have a description and license number on the vehicle that was involved.”

  A burst of static came through the radio one of the deputies was holding, and he adjusted some control on it.

  “Say again, dispatch,” he said. There was an earpiece in his ear, and he listened for a moment. Suddenly, his face lit up, and he turned to his partner. “Jenkins, Palmer, and Story are all still alive,” he said. “They’re in the ambulances, on the way to the hospital.”

  “What about Ramirez?” his partner asked.

  “He didn’t make it,” the first deputy said. “The other three still have a chance, though.” He stopped, then turned and looked at me. “I guess we can thank you for that,” he said. “By the way, we found the woman who called you. She lives right down the road, so it wasn’t hard. Just a concerned citizen, I guess, but she should’ve called us.” He sighed. “Is there anything we can do for you, Ms. McGraw?”

  I reined Freda in a bit. “I think we’ll be okay,” I said. “We can call somebody to come get us.”

  He nodded, and his partner looked at me as if he was going to say something, then turned and walked away. They got back into their car and drove off, and I looked over at Dex.

  “Well,” I said. “Who do we call?”

  He grinned and took out his phone, then called a towing service out of Bristow. All he told them was that our windshield was shattered so that we couldn’t drive the car, and that we needed it taken all the way to Tulsa. The guy said he could be there in ten minutes, and he showed up just as Pennington found us.

  They got the car loaded up—it was a rollback truck, like the one we had bought—and Dex climbed up in the truck with the driver while Pennington offered me a ride. I slid into the front seat of his unmarked car, noticing again how crowded it was.

  “I’m gonna start calling you Lucky,” he said. “It’s a miracle Danny didn’t aim directly at you, but that bullet hole is just to the right of dead center on your windshield.”

  I was quiet for a few seconds, but then the tears started to roll. Pennington looked over at me, concerned. “Cassie? What’s the matter?”

  “Dex was going to try to shoot out his tire,” I said. “He climbed out the window, and he was trying to aim at the tire, but we were moving so fast the wind was blowing him all over. That’s when the back door of the van opened up, and I saw Danny aiming a rifle. Jim, I swear he was aiming at Dex. I reached over to try to pull him back into the car, and I guess I swerved to the right, my wheels went off on the grass for a moment, and that’s when the bullet hit the windshield.”

  He drove for a couple seconds while it sank in. “Sounds like your luck is rubbing off on Dex,” he said. “If the gun was aimed at him, swerving off the road is what saved his life.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I figured that out.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence, and Dex had the driver take the truck to our shop. He opened the overhead door as the car was unloaded, then climbed into it and drove it inside. Pennington followed me in and looked at the shattered glass once more.

  “You’re just going to change the glass yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Dex said. “I can do it a lot cheaper than a glass shop. We’re not turning it in to the insurance, anyway.”

  We gave the detective a quick tour of the shop, and he drooled over the Cuda. Jim was probably in his early fifties, and talked about how he’d always wanted one of those cars when he was a teenager. The two of them were talking about something called a “crate engine” when my phone rang.

  I didn’t even think to look at the display, I just put it to my ear. “Cassie McGraw,” I said.

  “That was pretty crazy,” Danny Kendall said. “I couldn’t tell, did I hit your boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said. “But you owe me for a new front and back glass.” Dex and Pennington heard me, and turned to stare at me.

  “Well, good,” Danny said. “I don’t need you distracted right now. We’re coming up on the last couple of rounds, are you starting to catch on yet?”

  I thought for a second, and a grin came to my face. “You tell me,” I said. “I came pretty close to catching your ass today, didn’t I?”

  He laughed. “Do you really think so? I don’t. I don’t know how you found me out there, but that was just one of several places I’ve had prepared. Don’t worry, I’m not homeless. Unfortunately, that tells me you still haven’t figured out the game. I guarantee you, I’ll know when you do.”

  “And what happens then? You said when I figure it out, I’ll know how to stop you. Is that still the plan?”

  “Close enough,” he said. “When you finally figure out the clues I’ve been giving you, it’ll take you to your chance at the grand prize, but I hope you learned something
today. Did you see what happened when you sent those cops to my door?”

  “Yeah,” I said bitterly. “I saw.”

  “That’s what’ll happen to any cops I see coming after me. Their deaths, Cassie, are on you. You should’ve come after me alone, and we could’ve jumped past everything else and gone straight to the end of the game.”

  “And what’s the end of the game, Danny?” I demanded. “What happens then?”

  “Oh, do you really want me to spoil the suspense? I know you have to be wondering, right? You wonder why I want this to end with you coming face-to-face with me?”

  “Oh, hell, Danny,” I said, exasperated. “I wonder what any of this is about. You blew up the place where I worked, killed two people but took two others hostage. You are nice to them for the first day, then you beat them both and left them for dead. You put a bomb on my car and blew it up, even though you say you don’t want me dead. You blew up the shelter and killed a little kid, you rigged up suicide vests and made two of my clients wear them, just so you could make me figure out the password to disarm them. You put another bomb on my new car, and if you weren’t trying to kill me, then that just makes no sense at all. I don’t understand any of this, Danny. I don’t have a clue what these clues are you’re talking about, or what I’m supposed to figure out, or anything.”

  “Well, damn,” he said. “I guess that’s what I get for believing all your press. The newspapers make you out to be pretty damn smart, but maybe I’m going to have to make things a little more obvious. I’ll tell you what, Cassie, here’s a hint. Just look up. Okay? Just look up. And you might want to get ready. The next round begins in a little over an hour.”

  The line went dead. I took the phone down and looked at Dex and Pennington, and then I told them everything he had said.

  “Look up?” Dex asked. “That could mean anything. Does it make any sense to you?”

  I shook my head. “Absolutely nothing about this makes any sense,” I said. “But I get the feeling it’s all perfectly logical to him.”