by James Phelan
“The Sheriff took her to his place,” Jones said.
“We can take you there,” Chester said.
Levine stood and tossed them keys to a cruiser. “We’ll follow you.”
49
Walker filled the gas tank at Willow Springs. Squeaker was steadier on her feet and made her way to the bathroom. He wondered what they’d given her. A hit of meth? Just a small taste? By the time she came back, Walker had bought them strong coffees and a bag of doughnuts, as well as a packet of jerky and bottles of water for the road ahead. He’d also purchased two woolen hats and two pairs of lined gloves made of some kind of animal hide. The coffee was hot, and the doughnuts gave him a sugar rush, waking him up against the night. He stashed their supplies into the cargo panniers on top of the twin Berettas.
Walker asked, “Feeling better?”
“Yes,” Squeaker said, pleased with her new hat and gloves. “And thanks.”
“For the coffee?”
“For saving me, dumb-ass.”
“Oh, that, it was nothing.”
“Seriously. You didn’t have to come get me. You could have left me there, gone on without me.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
Squeaker smiled. “You don’t need me to help you in any way. You have to see Dylan on Old Pelts, right? That’s it, that’s all we’ve got.”
“We’ve got each other.”
“I’m being serious.” She punched him playfully on the arm.
“Okay, well, first up, you’re welcome,” Walker said, eating another doughnut in one bite. “Second up, no, I couldn’t leave you there.”
“Why not? There was nothing in it for you but danger—you could have been killed.”
“It’d take more than some greasy-haired middle-aged men to kill me.”
“Stop being a jerk about it,” Squeaker said, punching his arm.
“I’m not,” Walker said. “And at any rate, you punch harder than any of those guys ever could.”
“Grrr!” Squeaker said, walking around the bike, stomping the stiffness and frustration out of her legs. “I was being serious and nice and all.”
Walker gave her a second to cool, then said, his tone softer, “I know. And I’m saying I had to. I brought you into this. And I let you tag along. And sooner or later I might need to leave you behind, but I promise you that it’s not going to be in the custody of a group of depraved men, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good.”
“I could have got away on my own, though.”
“I’m sure you could have.”
“I’m being serious!”
“Me, too. You’re a strong young woman, Susan.”
“I’m not that young,” she said. “And don’t call me that.”
“You’re stronger than you think you are, Squeaker. A spirit like yours—you could do anything you set your mind to. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“And here I was being serious.”
Squeaker cut off her laugh and said, “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”
“Come on, then,” Walker said, getting on board the Harley.
“Onward we go?” Squeaker said.
“Yep,” Walker replied. He paused as a police cruiser went past the truck stop. It rode slowly, observing the cars and trucks parked in the car park, but then continued on its ride through town. “The quicker we get there the better, for a whole bunch of reasons.”
•
“Sorry to wake you,” Levine said into her cell phone. She looked over to where Woods was walking a line with the deputies, their flashlights sweeping the grounds around the Sheriff’s house. “We’ve got a mess here.”
A moment passed before Grant responded. “Is it Murphy—is he dead?”
“What? No,” Levine said. “We’re not quite there yet.”
“Not quite there?”
She could hear him shuffling out of bed, and then came the sound of coffee pouring into a cup. It was now 4:30am local time, which meant 2:30am back in San Diego. He’d be wearing his shorts. The house would be dark.
“As of yesterday we learned that there’s another party looking for our man.”
There was a long pause, but Levine could hear Grant’s breathing and could almost perceive an elevated heartbeat.
“Who?” Levine said. “Who is it?”
“That guy. The lone wolf. Jed Walker. He’s working with a UN investigative team.”
“Damn.”
“I went through his file. Ex-Air Force Spec Ops, and later a decade at Langley. Something strange happened after that—seems he recently dropped off the face of the earth for more than a year. I think he’s going to be trouble.”
“Okay. I’ll organize local law enforcement from my end, see that they hold Walker up.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what’s the mess?”
“Walker is leaving a hell of a carnage in his wake. I think we need more boots on the ground here. And he may have a hostage, a young local woman.”
“Why would he have a hostage?”
“She’s Murphy’s cousin. We think he’s using her to find Murphy, to flush him out.”
“Jesus.”
“More hands would help, boss. Walker is at least four hours on the road ahead of us.”
“And you think he can get to Murphy?”
“Yes.” Levine looked at the cut and snapped cable ties in the barn, and the scuff marks and half-pint of congealed blood on the ground. “From what I’ve heard and seen, Walker’s as capable as any man our armed forces has fielded. We’ve got reports and evidence of at least two dead local criminal types, along with the body of the local Sheriff.”
“Jesus,” Grant said again. “Do you know where he’s headed?”
“A place called Old Pelts Road, out in the boonies somewhere.”
“All right. This is what we’re going to do. Start with putting out an APB on Walker. Have every cop in Missouri looking out for him. Our team of heavy hitters is in the state and will be en route. We’ve got to stop him, fast.”
50
They were pulled over on a side road in southern Missouri, for a pit stop and awaiting a call about directions. Menzil watched the sat-nav system in their rented Suburban, the blinking dot on Old Pelts Road. Estimated travel time was four hours.
“Okay, let’s move,” Menzil said from the driver’s seat.
He watched the four of them prep and repack their weapons. They were efficient. Well drilled. Hard men who’d never go soft. Killers.
•
Walker stopped the bike at the junction. The sign was pocked with bullet holes.
Old Pelts Road.
The middle of nowhere and none, Old Pelts was a single-lane gravel track winding up into forest that had a deep ravine at its center, a river running through it. The sun was aglow beyond the mountains. The motorbike had just under half a tank of gas.
Walker put it into neutral and said, “Quick pit stop.”
Squeaker climbed off, and then he did. His legs and arms were stiff, but the gloves and hat helped keep the warmth of his body heat in. It was coldest in the early mornings here, and it was that same cold that seemed to cut with a damp knife into his joints. He patted his face to get the blood flowing.
“So, this is the road,” Squeaker said. “Now how are we going to find a guy called Dylan?”
“We stop at the first house we see and ask.”
“Okay,” Squeaker said. “Jerky?”
“Sure.” He took a strap and chewed at it. The taste took him back to USO care packages they’d received in Afghanistan. And that reminded his senses of so much. The smell of sweat and fear and gunpowder and the funk of his unwashed buddies as they trekked through the mountains on long-range patrols. Of the deep, deep dark of cave systems and the crystal-clear cold nights with impossibly big skies. Of designating targets and calling in air strikes and the feel of percussion of the high explosives as they went off. Of mountains being reduced to little
more than mounds of gravel. He’d heard a MOAB go off once. The Mother of All Bombs, the biggest thing that went boom in any nation’s arsenal short of a nuclear device. He’d been a little over twelve miles away, and felt the force of the blast vibrate through him and ring in his ears for an hour after. He and his team watched and cheered as the B52 had flown in over the drop site. They’d sat around in silence after, as though they’d nearly witnessed the end of the world in the mushroom cloud that stayed in the air all day. Three miles closer to ground zero and they’d have all been permanently deaf. Three miles closer than that and the shockwave would have blasted off limbs and ruptured internal organs and membranes. Any closer and they would have simply ceased to be, just a grease spot on the ground.
“You okay?” Squeaker asked, passing him an open bottle of water.
“Yeah,” Walker said, drinking. The water was warm from where it had been stowed in the panniers near the bike’s exhaust. “Just thinking of another time and place.”
“The war?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
“They’re all the same.”
“Which place?”
“Hell.”
Squeaker paused, then asked, “You think we did good over there?”
“Afghanistan? Sure. The Taliban were bad news, but the world should have acted a lot sooner. Iraq—well, that’s a work in progress.”
“But we lost in Afghanistan, right?”
“It wasn’t a win-or-lose scenario; it was never about that,” Walker said. “We went in to change the system, and we achieved that. We got the worst of the despots and women-haters out; killed a lot of them in the process.”
“You killed over there?”
Walker nodded.
“How do you feel about that?”
“Just fine.”
“Fine?”
“Every Taliban I dispatched wanted to meet his maker, so I obliged.”
“How about Iraq?”
“I was there, for a while,” Walker said, pacing around and stretching his legs, then taking a Beretta from the stowage and checking it over. “That was different.”
“About how we went in—all the WMD lies?”
“Yeah, that, and the rush to get in and do it. It just felt wrong. Sure, Saddam was a war criminal who got what was coming, and it was long overdue, but here at home the country got all whipped up thinking that we were there because they had some kind of hand in 9/11.”
“Not because we suspected he had WMDs?” Squeaker started in on a doughnut she’d saved, eating the pink icing off the top.
“He had WMDs. He used them, many times, against his own people. And the world didn’t act then. We went in for oil and money and all that bullshit.”
“If he used the WMDs in the past, why didn’t we find any—did he use them all?”
“Used them, sold them, destroyed them, who knows? A lot of them were moved out of the country when our government here was building a case for the world to go in there.”
Squeaker finished her doughnut and licked her fingers. “Do you think Murphy thinks like you?”
“About what?”
“About how they were different wars and all that?”
Walker nodded, said, “Yeah. All soldiers who served in both theaters think about the same. They were different wars, very different, in lots of ways. The only similarity was that there were guys wanting to kill you every day you woke up.”
Squeaker watched him for a moment before she spoke. “Why’d you choose that kind of life?”
“Because . . .” Walker said, stowing the water bottle and tucking the Beretta into the back waistband of his jeans as he climbed onto the bike. He thought about his father. And his grandfather. And the stories they’d told him growing up. How that imprinted on him. “My whole life I’ve had this thing where I can’t just stand by idly and watch shit go down. It’s in my blood.”
51
It turned out that it wasn’t hard to find Dylan on Old Pelts Road, because the first and only house they came to, ten winding and climbing miles up the corrugated gravel track, was Dylan’s. Walker pulled the bike to a stop and kicked out the stand. It was dead quiet but for a dog barking. He came round from the backyard. Doberman. Male. Bukowski-sized balls. He stood halfway between the arrivals and the house, barking and dribbling.
“What can I do for you?” Dylan asked, eyeing Walker and Squeaker and their hog of a ride parked out front of her timber house.
Dylan was a strong-looking woman, easily Walker’s size, with square shoulders and thick forearms, and calloused hands showing beneath her rolled-up flannel shirt sleeves. She had a two-ton truck parked under a lean-to cover, dozens of four-foot gas bottles lined up and a huge industrial-sized gas tank next to the garage. Alongside that were smaller tanks labeled “Gasoline” and “Diesel.” Beyond the garage hundreds of rectangular hay bales, some wrapped as silage, were squared away under a long metal roof two stories high and covering a half-acre. Stacked at the end of the clearing next to the tree line out back were enough foot-and-a-half lengths of firewood to burn until the end of days.
“My name’s Walker. This here is Squeaker,” he said. “We’re looking for a guy, Squeaker’s cousin, lives up hereabouts. Charles Murphy.”
Dylan looked at them, the legs of their jeans soiled and wet from the road leading up here.
“You said Charles Murphy?”
Walker nodded. “Yep.”
Dylan looked to Squeaker. “Your cousin?”
“That’s right.”
Dylan was quiet a second, then asked Squeaker, “What happened to your face?”
“It’s nothing I couldn’t handle,” Squeaker said, licking at the swollen and cut lip, the whole left side expanding in a welt.
“Can you be more specific about that?” Dylan asked, looking from her to Walker as though she might have to straighten out some kind of domestic-violence situation this morning before breakfast, and it’d make her day.
“Some bikers back in Mountain View,” Squeaker said. “But we licked them good. But what’s comin’ for my cousin, if we don’t get word to him fast? It’s going to be a lot worse.”
“Right. Why don’t you come in?” Dylan said, standing aside at her open door. “Get warm, have a coffee, and we can talk some more.”
“Thanks,” Walker said, standing still. “We’re actually in a hurry.”
Dylan looked at him and her face didn’t flinch at all when she said, “You may be, Walker, but up here there’s no hurrying. Especially no hurrying where you want to be going. Ain’t no fast way to it, and ain’t no quick way back. So, the least you can be is warm and fed before all that trekkin’.”
Walker asked, “How far from here?”
“It’s not the miles, it’s the time,” Dylan said. “Crow flies? Maybe twelve miles, though it could be fifteen or so. Call it half a day on the road, but.”
“This road?”
“Yep. I run supplies up for him and his clan, four times a year,” Dylan said. “Takes the best part of a day there and back. I can only drive half the way, then I take the four-wheeler off the truck for as far as I can, then I dump it where I can’t drive no more and he somehow hauls his supplies the rest of the way. I don’t really know how, to be honest.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Walker said. “We should get most of that way on our bike. We might buy some gasoline off you first, if we can.”
Dylan nodded and came down onto the porch. She was nearly eye level with Walker, maybe six foot two. She looked from Walker to Squeaker. “Where you from, girl?”
Squeaker answered with her arms folded across her chest. “Calico Rock.”
Dylan nodded. “Murphy’s from there. He’s a good man. Good family. Wants to be left alone. No other reason for him to be out there like that. His choice, you see.”
There was silence on the porch for a moment.
“We need to warn him,” Walker said. “There’s trouble headed his way, and it�
�s the kind that will keep coming until they’re sure there’s not a breath left inside the man.”
Dylan asked, “Who’s his trouble?”
“It’s a long story,” Walker said.
Squeaker added, “The short answer, Dylan, is that we don’t know.”
“Well, like I said,” Dylan said, standing to the side of her doorway, “why don’t you come inside and tell me. At least what you know.”
Walker smiled. “I’m guessing that Murphy told you, if the day ever came that someone came to your door looking for him, that you had to screen whoever it was—and what? Send them off in the wrong direction?”
Dylan smiled. “If I don’t like what I hear.”
“You ever had anyone look for him?”
“No.”
Walker nodded. Silence again. He looked around at the forest. Wondered when they’d be coming. How many. How capable.
Squeaker moved closer to Dylan. She was at least a full foot shorter than the mountain woman and half her weight. She looked up and brushed the hair from her face, tucking it under her woolen cap.
“You see my face?” Squeaker said. Then she held out her wrists. “And see here? The marks? This man here, Walker, he saved me from a group of men who thought nothing of tying me up, roughing me up—and worse. They were talkin’ about what they’d do to me. And he came and got me and saved me—and he didn’t have to do that. And he’s going to do the same for Murphy, because there’s a group out there, far, far worse than the ones who took me, who are going to get to him. And this mister doesn’t have to do that, either.”
“Murphy’s tough.”
“But as tough as he is?” Squeaker said. “It’s gonna be bad, real bad, because they’ll sneak up on him and wait and maybe who knows? Like you said and like I know, he’s got a good family up there in the forest. Murphy can protect himself but not all of them, not from what’s comin’. This is my cousin, my blood, you get that? I’ve got to warn him.”
Dylan looked from her to Walker.
“Walker is as tough and crazy as Murphy ever was,” Squeaker said. “He’ll warn him and protect his family, I promise you that.”