What could he—DKI’s newest, least-trained, and perhaps most unstable employee—accomplish?
Well, for one thing, he was the only person on site. He was the only one in a position to actually watch the clinic and gather intelligence. If he was back in the military and this was one of his operations, that was exactly what he’d be doing right now, gathering the kind of information that only he was in a position to gather. He'd put eyes-on, observing patterns, taking notes, taking photographs, and identifying the local players.
He put the truck in gear, pulled out of the parking lot, and drove the couple of miles to the local Wal-Mart. He mopped his face with a fast food napkin before heading across the parking lot. He still looked like a man in the midst of a meltdown, the kind you'd step away from and not make eye contact with.
He grabbed a cart and headed for the hunting aisle at a rapid clip. There he studied the trail cameras before picking up two that offered cellular connectivity. That feature would allow him to view the images on the camera remotely. From there he went to the clothing aisle, knowing Wal-Mart stocked the basic work clothes most people in construction, labor, or utility work wore. He picked out a high-visibility orange t-shirt and a fluorescent green safety vest that would drop over his head, then checked out and carried his purchases to the truck.
He drove across the street and visited a Lowes home improvement store. In the safety aisle, he picked up a hardhat, safety glasses, and two large orange cones, like the ones utility workers used to route traffic around a hazard. He also picked up an oversized aluminum clipboard with a compartment for storing papers. It looked like the kind of thing a utility worker or contractor might carry around, which was exactly the look he was going for.
Ty headed home with his purchases and pulled into the spot in front of his townhouse. He sat there for a moment staring at the door. For now, he didn’t feel a sense of dread at going inside, though he was cautious. He always felt vulnerable after an attack, like his weakened state made him an easier target were the demons to return.
He didn’t think that was going to happen now. He was on-task again. He had a mission before him and he was fully engaged. Sanctioned or not, Ty Stone was operational.
21
A Farmhouse
Washington County, Virginia
When Tonya Terry couldn’t find any other place to crash there was always a bed at the farmhouse. The couple who owned the place, Mike and Sherry, had kind of a hippie attitude about life. People were always welcome to come by and party as long as they brought a little something with them. It was like pot-luck with real pot. They even had a hand-painted sign hanging over their hearth that read A Friend With Weed Is A Friend Indeed. It was the hippie version of the Love, Joy, or Faith signs that suburban housewives decorated with.
Just as they were not discriminatory in who they allowed to stay at their home, Mike and Sherry were not particular about the drugs they used. While marijuana was always welcome, consumed with the frequency of water, so was cocaine, crystal meth, and any variety of buzz-producing pill. They were equal opportunity, enjoying benzos, opiates, diet pills, and antipsychotics with the relish and sense of adventure common to mountain climbers. Every day you survived was an adventure.
Tonya hadn’t known Mike and Sherry very long, but even she could see that they’d once had larger aspirations for their farm. There were signs for a corn maze they’d opened to the public exactly one time until they decided it was too much of a hassle. Other signs told the story of similar failed ventures like “pick your own beans” or “pick your own strawberries”. People would stop by on the honor system and fill their own buckets with produce, leaving money in a jar. Neither beans nor strawberries grew there now, the fields overtaken with Johnson grass, pokeberries, and stickseed.
They’d even had a petting zoo at one time. Some of the animals remained but were nothing anyone would want to pet any longer. The alpacas were dirty and neglected, turned mean from lack of attention. The goats too had gone ornery and distrustful, side-eyeing visitors with their odd vertical pupils. The rabbits had been cleaned out by coyotes, the chickens by a persistent and murderous raccoon.
Apparently hippies could smoke pot and hold onto their dreams, but the introduction of harder drugs pushed those dreams into dark drawers where they became easier to ignore. While this may have once been a house of guitar-strumming potheads singing Grateful Dead songs, it was now more often the residence of paranoid bottom-feeders trying their best to lay low beneath the surface of the world.
They locked themselves into dark rooms with towels for curtains and jabbed needles into their arms, something they’d once been completely averse to. They no longer even noticed the drops of blood that stained the oriental rugs proudly discovered at yard sales and thrift stores. They crushed pills and snorted them off every hard surface, from countertops to record albums to the woodstove. They drank daily, alcohol becoming the constant that kept their ship righted from day to day. The only thing that didn’t change was the nonstop party and the open door policy.
Tonya had met Mike and Sherry a year ago when they had a pig roast. At the time, Tonya had been hanging out with a guy named Cricket, a real estate agent with lots of money and a taste for pills. He was a regular at the farmhouse. Cricket was an odd name for a guy, almost implying he was delicate, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. He was tall, heavily-built, and burly, looking more like a logger than a real estate professional.
Tonya had been impressed with the carnival atmosphere they’d found at the farm. There were people in costumes and playing music. There was alcohol and drugs everywhere. She’d been in the drug scene for her entire life and never seen anything like it. In most places she hung out you couldn’t even bum a beer without someone wanting money for it. Here everyone shared what they had and smiled while doing it.
She visited the house with Cricket several times after that pig roast, but the two of them eventually broke up. She’d been stealing drugs and money from him and he eventually figured it out. She'd figured he had plenty of both and wouldn’t notice it, but she’d been wrong. By that time she felt comfortable enough to stop at the farmhouse on her own and crash for the night when she had no other place to go. They were always welcoming, making her comfortable on the couch or in a spare bedroom.
She loved the attention they gave her because she couldn’t remember a time in her life when anyone had ever cared whether she was comfortable or not. Despite their faults, Mike and Sherry treated her like she was somebody—a real person. She couldn’t get enough of it. Then there was the added benefit that someone was always dropping by the house with drugs. It was a place where a girl with no money could stay high with minimal effort.
Tonya had a few other places where she could crash at night when she didn’t have anything lined up. Her regular territory ranged over five counties and she rarely left that familiar turf. On this particular night, she needed to stay at a place with a phone because she needed to call the counselor at the suboxone clinic tomorrow. The farmhouse would welcome her and they had a phone.
Tonya had a couple of cell phones over the years but rarely kept one for very long. Paying for minutes was an expense she couldn’t afford with no job and no income. That would change if she could sell this child growing inside her. She’d have money for whatever she wanted. She could get one of those smartphones, maybe rent some little place of her own for a while, and get some new clothes.
That night when she showed up at the farmhouse they welcomed her just like they always did, but she ended up going to bed early. She smoked some weed and snorted a line of fentanyl, but there was some new girl she didn’t know who’d been giving her a judgy look for doing drugs while she was pregnant. Tonya had considered slapping the girl’s soul right out of her body but was afraid Mike and Sherry would ask her to leave if she started a fight. The hippies loved drugs but hated conflict. In the end, Tonya had let it go, opting to turn in early in one of the spare rooms upstairs.
While the spare room wasn’t anything to brag about she’d slept in much worse conditions. Just this summer she’d slept in an abandoned chicken house, a wrecked car, under a bridge, and in the crawlspace beneath a house on a piece of damp carpet. Anything indoors was an improvement over that. The walls in the spare room were cheap 1970s paneling with a few holes punched in them. There were posters from various bands but the only one Tonya recognized was Lynyrd Skynyrd. There was a king-size mattress with no sheets shoved into the corner. The thing was nasty. Tonya knew good and well what happened on that mattress because she’d often been party to it. Sometimes being willing to do almost anything was what it took to get the best drugs going around.
She slumped on the mattress and pulled a stained comforter over her. She cradled her belly but it wasn’t out of any protective, maternal instinct as much as from a drive toward self-preservation. It was selfish rather than selfless. There weren’t a lot of folks in the house that night but the door didn’t lock and there had been numerous occasions where she woke up with someone snuggling into her. It wasn’t like she was picky about the men or the situation, but she generally preferred to know who it was.
Once she fell asleep, the weed and fentanyl combination had her sleeping like a baby through most of the night. When she was awakened just before dawn it was not by one man but by nearly a dozen coming through the front door. She was jarred awake as the impact of their battering ram shook the entire house. Their cries of “Police! Police! Get those hands up!” traveled up the stairs and sent her into a panic.
She couldn’t afford to get arrested. Even if she didn’t have any drugs on her, she’d be tested because of the pregnancy. Becoming ensnared in the system while she was pregnant would mean an end to her plan. She’d be chained to social services and court-ordered into treatment. Her baby would be documented and suddenly worth a lot less money. All of her plans would be crushed and she couldn’t let that happen.
She threw off the comforter and slipped on her flip-flops. She’d slept in her clothes and had nothing else with her. Without a car, she’d hitchhiked to the house. If the police couldn’t physically catch her, there would be nothing left behind to tie her to this place and these people. She heard boots stomping through the house as she rushed toward the window. The house had no air conditioning so the window stood open to the night air. There was no screen, insects allowed to come and go with the same casual attitude as the human guests.
The window was in a second-story dormer, looking out onto the dull silver surface of the old metal roof. From this height, there was no way she could climb down to the ground, and to jump meant certain death. For a moment she experienced a sensation that she was utterly unfamiliar with—an inner voice warning her that something she was about to do was a really bad idea. Maybe it was best to go into the hallway and see if there was another way out.
She didn’t make it a single step in that direction before at least two men came up the steps, shouting between themselves as they advanced.
“Dammit!” she hissed, climbing out the window before that little warning voice could start on her again.
Tonya knew nothing about construction or roofs, but she knew this was a steep one. She also recognized immediately that it was slick from the overnight dew. If she lost traction there would be no catching herself. In seconds, she’d be sailing over the edge and dropping to the ground. If she didn’t die, she’d probably be paralyzed. She’d certainly lose the baby.
With nowhere to go, she’d have to climb, to go higher. She had a hard time prying her death-grip loose from the windowsill. Once she released that handhold, she was uncertain where she’d find another. Her slowly sliding foot found tentative purchase on the domed leaden head of an old roofing nail. With her slide temporarily arrested, she moved her other hand up to claw at a rotting piece of window trim. With her free hand she gently slid the window closed behind her.
Finding that there were other raised nail-heads where she could get purchase, Tonya began sidestepping. She’d barely taken two steps when the door to her room was kicked from the hinges. The noise startled her so badly that she nearly lost her footing, her free hand pinwheeling to help her regain her balance.
Afraid that someone might come look out the window, Tonya started climbing, the toes of her flip-flops seeking the nail-heads while her fingers tugged at the exposed roofing overhanging the sides of the dormer. Once, she slipped, a foot sliding off a wet nail-head. She grabbed for the roofing with both hands, feeling the sharp edge slice the web between two fingers. She bit her lip and issued a silent curse.
Her heart pounding and gasping for breath, she reached the top of the dormer in near silence and straddled it like she was riding a horse. The window was thrown open below her and she threw a hand across her mouth, pressing hard to silence her labored breathing. The sound of her own heart filled her ears, surely so loud that the man in the window could hear it too.
They must have decided that the window was an unlikely escape route because, in a moment, the window slid shut. Only then did she breathe again, sucking in air. Her legs and fingers were cramped from the exertion of her climb and she worked to rub them out, afraid to move too much for fear of drawing attention. When the sun began to rise in the distance she flattened herself against the roof, hoping that the sharp angles of the dormers hid her.
She laid like that for hours before the last police car left the property. The roof was dry by then, as Tonya had hoped it would be, but it was beginning to get painfully hot. Every time she moved, the bare flesh of her legs, arms, or hands felt like it was being seared by the hot metal. She waited a half-hour after seeing that last car pull out, then decided she could wait no longer. She began making her way down the roof.
She slid in a seated position, inch by inch, bracing her heels against the raised heads of the lead-capped nails. With her hands, she clawed at the same nail-heads or clutched at the edges of the dormer’s rusty roofing panels. Getting closer to the window, to her portal back inside the house, meant getting closer to the edge. She could see the drop-off now, as she hadn’t been able to in the darkness. If she lost traction here and started to slide there would be a lot less time to catch herself. She saw a rusty gutter she could attempt to dig her heels into but had no faith that the nails would hold the gutter to the rotting fascia behind it.
As she finally closed in on the window she wondered if the officer might have locked it after looking outside. Did it even have a lock? If it did, she was screwed. The idea of having to crawl back up this roof and look for another path down was almost more than she could handle. If it was locked, she'd have to break it.
Thankfully, it wasn’t locked. With a few sharp blows from her palm, she freed the sticky window, swollen in its frame from the morning sun, and was able to crawl inside. When she hit the floor, Tonya relaxed for the first time in hours. As she lay there, her eyes roved around the room and she saw that it had been tossed. The cops had emptied the drawers and closets, searching for drugs. She assumed the rest of the house would look the same way.
She noticed the bedroom door hanging from a single bent hinge. “It wasn’t locked,” she whispered. “You should have tried the handle.”
She got to her feet and listened for a moment before creeping out into the hallway. She heard no human sounds, only the creaks and pops of the century-old farmhouse adjusting to the change in temperature. She crept across the dark oak floors to the staircase. The ornate railing was tiger maple, something someone had once been proud of. Floral Victorian wallpaper lined the stairwell, covering thick plaster walls. Descending, Tonya cringed at the noises the stairs made beneath her feet, but it was unavoidable.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs she stopped again and listened carefully. Dead silence. She went through the entire first floor, making sure there was no one there. All the cops were gone and they’d apparently taken everyone else into custody. Tonya was glad they hadn’t arrested her too, but she was used to such cl
ose calls. It came with the territory.
Every room she poked her head in had been thoroughly searched. Mattresses had been flipped so the officers could search beneath the beds. Closets had been emptied and drawers dumped onto the floor. Every little knick-knack and cubbyhole had been probed.
Comfortable now that she was the only one in the house, Tonya went to the kitchen and made herself a bowl of cereal. She was starving. As she ate at the kitchen table she could see a yellow stripe of police crime-scene tape stretched across the kitchen door. She assumed she’d find the same on the front door.
When she’d eaten the entire box, she left her cereal bowl on the table and returned to the refrigerator. The only other drink besides milk was beer so she opened one and took a long swig. As far as she was concerned, milk was a food, not a drink. Beer was a drink. She didn’t want to spend any more time in this house than she had to, but she needed to make a call first.
She extracted the crinkled business card from her pocket and stared at it for a second before taking the phone receiver off the wall, pleased to hear a dial tone. Sometimes people in the drug life forgot to pay their bills and their phones got cut off. She punched in the number from the card and stood in the window, watching the driveway in case anyone showed up.
“Counseling Services, this is Karen. How can I help you?”
Tonya noticed that the woman didn’t use the actual business name or her own last name when she answered the phone. She was intentionally keeping it generic, making Tonya wonder if Karen was even her real name.
“Karen, this is Tonya. I was by the clinic yesterday. You gave me a card and told me to call you today.”
“Yes, Tonya, I remember.”
“You find a place for me to hole up until this baby comes out?”
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