Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  I made a path parallel to the drive, close enough that I could see it. I had decent night vision—though nothing like that of Charley or Stacey, who could move like bobcats through the darkness. Nevertheless, I tripped and nearly slipped on the wet leaves and moss-slick rocks.

  All the while the horn continued to blare. That this unknown person had entered my own vehicle to summon me was somehow more galling than the obnoxiousness of the sound itself.

  Who can it be?

  Not Ronette or her husband, checking in on me. They would have done the neighborly thing and walked up the trail.

  I hadn’t told Zane Wilson where I was staying. Nor did he have a working vehicle of his own.

  Gary Pulsifer knew where I’d chosen to pitch camp. In his drinking days he might have laid on the horn to summon me. But the new man he’d become seemed above those kinds of adolescent antics.

  Billy, if he had managed to find his way here, would have been circumspect to say the least. As a former combat soldier, he would have approached the cabin with caution and under the cover of darkness to assess whether someone other than his family and me was waiting for him.

  I had a thought that I might have disclosed the information to others, but my memory had a hole in it.

  Eventually I drew near enough to the gate to see the looming shape of Aimee’s Tahoe. My Scout would be parked behind it. Presumably the vehicle driven by our visitor would be blocking me from backing out. I decided to make a semicircle through a stand of poplars and beeches to approach the interloper from behind.

  Just as darkness makes blood appear black, so did the night rob this familiar truck of its redness. Crew cab. Extended bed. Off-road tires. It belonged to Gorman Peaslee: out of jail and out for revenge.

  From experience, I knew he possessed an arsenal that extended from slingshots to shotguns to, in all likelihood, modern sporting rifles equipped with bump stocks to make them nearly fully automatic weapons. I supposed I should have considered myself grateful he hadn’t brought along his pack of man-eating Rottermans.

  As I snuck up on him from the rear, I could make out that the big man was standing with the driver’s door open and his right hand planted on the horn. His left hand gripped the top of the door. So whatever weapon he might be carrying, I would have the drop on him at least.

  He seemed to be in shirtsleeves, which struck me as odd considering the chill and dampness.

  I pressed the thumb lock on my holster and quietly drew my service-issued SIG P239. I had no qualms about leveling the night sights at his center mass.

  “Knock it off with the horn, Gorman.”

  He tensed immediately and drew himself up to his full height, but while he removed his hand from the horn, he didn’t remove it from the inside of my vehicle.

  “Bowditch?”

  “Don’t make a move. I’ve got a gun aimed at your back.”

  “Warden Bowditch?” His voice sounded unexpectedly shaky. And a bit too loud.

  “I don’t appreciate your letting yourself into my vehicle. Let alone putting your greasy hands on it. What are you doing here?”

  He just about shouted the next two words. “It’s him!”

  I didn’t feel the bullet where it grazed the side of my head. The sensation was of my hair being lifted as if someone, leaning close to me, had blown breath upon it. Then I heard the gunshot.

  The sound triggered my reflexes. I threw myself facedown in the mud.

  Gorman was shouting, “He’s there! Behind my truck!”

  I had no clue where the shooter had stationed himself for the ambush. But my instincts had me crawling on elbows and knees along the passenger side of the Ram. Despite what you might have seen in movies, bullets can easily punch holes through the metal frames of cars and trucks. They might bounce off the engine block or the axle, but you’re about as safe hiding behind a motor vehicle as you would be taking shelter behind a sheet of plywood.

  For that reason, I scrambled into the woods, where, at least, the trees would provide some camouflage. I had dropped my Maglite, I realized. But the pistol might as well have been super-glued to my hand.

  Now I felt a sharp stinging along my scalp. I pressed a muddy palm against my hair, an inch above my left ear, and it came away warm and black with blood. So the shooter wasn’t a marksman, at least; he had missed what should have been an easy head shot.

  As Gorman continued to shout directions—he had lost sight of me but guessed where I was headed—it dawned on me that he hadn’t moved at all. He continued to stand beside the open door of my Scout where I’d first discovered him. It was as if he had been chained there.

  Now a bullet shattered against a tree trunk five feet above my head.

  So the assassin had night-vision sights on whatever rifle he was using. But at least I had a better sense of his position now. He was firing from the cabin side of the gate and across the parked vehicles. He had expected me to come straight down the road toward the sound of the horn.

  My wariness had saved my life—for the moment.

  The night scope provided him with an advantage, but he would be cautious about giving himself away because he knew that I was armed as well.

  What happened next caught me off guard. Gorman began to run. He took off down the road in the direction of the highway. I followed him with my eyes until I heard the supersonic explosion of a bullet slicing through the air. Gorman stumbled, threw out his arms, then sprawled to the ground. The first round had caught him in the lower abdomen: a poor shot. It required a second round to the back of his shaved head to put him down.

  I took the opportunity to make my move. I used a spruce bough to pull myself to my feet and ducked behind the nearest big tree. A moment later I vaulted over a spiky deadfall and came within inches of impaling myself on another, hidden behind the first.

  The rifle exploded again.

  Like all head wounds, mine hurt like a son of a bitch, and although it wasn’t deep, it was gushing blood. I needed to apply pressure to slow the bleeding, but I didn’t have a spare hand.

  It seemed I was being targeted by a single individual. But Billy had suspected that a larger conspiracy was at work inside the prison. I had to proceed on the assumption that other armed men who wanted to kill me were in the woods.

  Predators that hunt in packs behave in predictable ways. They might work together to separate the weakest individual from the herd so they can run it to ground. Or they might drive a prey animal toward a waiting attacker. When they have to overcome a guardian, say a bull moose defending his harem, they keep him occupied while other members of the pack cooperate to separate a vulnerable female from the circle of the male’s protection.

  These thoughts didn’t run through my head in a systematic manner. I was too shaken, too pumped full of adrenaline. Instead I found myself guided by flashes of insight and physical reactions that only made sense in retrospect.

  The attackers were here for Aimee and the Cronklets. I was nothing but an obstacle in their way. A dangerous obstacle.

  I had to get back to the cabin. They knew I was coming. Why waste time and manpower hunting the woods for me when they would understand I had no choice but to place myself inside their killing zone?

  The coldly logical thing to do would be to take Gorman Peaslee’s truck and, horn blaring, let them know I was leaving to fetch help. But chances were, they had a truck of their own blockading the road and would know my stratagem couldn’t succeed. Nor would they believe I would leave a woman and children to their possible deaths—whether it was the coldly logical move or not.

  My SIG had seven rounds in the magazine with another already chambered.

  I had two other loaded magazines in my pocket. Twenty-two bullets in all.

  Plus an automatic Gerber 06 knife Billy had carried with him across Iraq and Afghanistan, which he had given me as a memento before he went to prison.

  Against an unknown number of attackers equipped with rifles outfitted with night-vision technology, those
were my armaments.

  The forest had grown still again. I listened for footfalls. Leaves rustling. Twigs snapping. My executioner approaching.

  Just then, multiple gunshots went off from the direction of the cabin. They sounded almost like firecrackers in the way they exploded one after the other. From a distance I couldn’t differentiate them from the rounds that had been fired at Gorman Peaslee and me. But they sounded different somehow.

  I heard a crash off to my left and realized it was my attacker bulling his way out of the forest. He was daring to leave me unguarded. Maybe he thought he’d wounded me worse than he had.

  I took a chance and started after him. Like the cornerback I had been in high school, I took a pursuit angle on the runner.

  He was distracted, his attention focused on what was happening ahead of him. For the first time I heard a radio receiver, which he must have had in his ear. As I moved to intercept him, I saw his silhouette. His rifle barrel was hanging down and across his legs so that he kept knocking it with his knees.

  When I broke through the cover, I was nearly parallel with him. The sniper was smaller than me, dressed in black tactical clothes and a black knit cap. I hit him with a brutal blindside tackle. I pinned his arms to his body with my own and slammed him hard to the ground. His forehead must have struck against a rock because he went limp when I landed on top of him.

  I rose to my knees. He was wearing the rifle—a Bushmaster carbine with a collapsible stock and an Armasight scope—hung around his neck on a bungee sling. None of it was military or law-enforcement issue. Nor was the Taurus revolver he had holstered against his thigh.

  I turned him over but didn’t recognize his face. He was young with a buzz cut and a neck tattoo I associated with turnkeys. He had lips the color of a night crawler. I doubted he had a military background given his atrocious aim and his clumsiness carrying a loaded rifle.

  He was breathing, but I figured his skull was pretty well cracked. If he awoke from his concussion in the next hour, he’d be too busy puking to pose a problem to me. I doubted he would remember his own name.

  I relieved the unconscious man of his weapons. I re-holstered my SIG and stuck the Taurus in the back of my pants. Then I pulled the bungee sling over my head and checked to see if a round was in the chamber.

  I unclipped the radio from the unconscious man’s belt and screwed the earpiece into my own ear. The sound of static was like freezing rain against a windowpane.

  My last action was to yank the cap from the killer’s head and pull it down over my ears. It wasn’t the best disguise, but maybe it would create some confusion if I was spotted and provide me an extra few seconds. The merino helped soak up blood from my wound at least.

  When I stared through the scope, the world turned an unreal greenish color, as if I were looking at it through an uncleaned aquarium. With the barrel raised, I began to creep slowly up the drive in the direction of the cabin. I hadn’t heard a thing since those popcorn gunshots.

  When I crested the rise, I noticed that the door of the cabin was standing open and the windows had gone dark. From the outside it was impossible to tell if the building was occupied or vacant. What did I say about people always underestimating Aimee Cronk?

  41

  I stepped into the forest on the side of the trail opposite the pond. Not wanting to show a defined profile, I kept to the trees as I would have hunting deer. The Armasight scope was not a thermal imaging model: it didn’t show heat signatures. But the other assailants might be better equipped.

  The man I’d taken down had the bulked-up physique and lack of training I associated, right or wrongly, with correctional officers. Which made sense. I had to believe that Rancic was here. He seemed to have had tactical training, and after what I’d seen him do to Darius Chapman, he struck me as the kind of stone-cold killer who lived for this sort of stealth operation.

  But who is he working with?

  At the moment, the question didn’t matter.

  What I needed to figure out—and fast—was their mission.

  It started with neutralizing me. Only once I was off the board would they proceed to the next step. If their goal was to lure Billy out of hiding, they would seek to take Aimee and the kids hostage. I wanted to reassure myself that the Cronklets were needed alive as potential bargaining chips, but knowing the collateral damage they’d been willing to inflict to kill Pegg, I couldn’t take the risk.

  Those popcorn gunshots I’d heard earlier, the ones that had distracted my pursuer, puzzled me. Aimee had told me she was unarmed. Then I remembered the musty box of birdshot shells Peter Landry had found behind one of the walls.

  As a distraction, she’d thrown them into the woodstove, where the gunpowder had combusted and the tiny ball bearings had careened harmlessly around the inside of the cast-iron furnace.

  Smart woman, Aimee Cronk.

  I heard a rustle to my left and froze. Slowly, I swung the rifle barrel around. I caught a split-second glimpse of an armed man moving into a mass of head-high evergreens. Something about seeing the world through the hazy green of the scope ratcheted up my heartbeat even more.

  He was heading toward the outhouse, I realized.

  I remembered Emma having asked Aimee if she could use the toilet before we heard the car horn. Had she and her brother returned to the cabin? Or might they be sheltering in place there now?

  The evergreens were short, dense balsams that would make perfect Christmas trees in eight months. I could hear boughs being bent and twigs being snapped underfoot. The thicket was too dense. I would have to find a way around it.

  Suddenly a man’s voice spoke through my earpiece: “Gamma, come in.”

  The person in the trees ahead of me froze.

  I carefully set my foot down, heel first, on the sodden fir needles.

  “Gamma, this is Alpha. Report.”

  The voice sounded familiar, but between the whispered tone and the radio distortion I couldn’t be sure.

  “Beta, this is Alpha. Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Alpha.” It was another male voice. Again familiar.

  “I think Gamma is down.”

  So now I knew that there had been, at least, three of them to start: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Probably only three.

  The tree boughs ahead of me swooshed again, then went quiet as if someone was turning around to listen.

  “Alpha, this is Beta. I think I’m hearing a radio behind me.”

  I had turned off the transmitter but must have been close enough to Beta that he’d heard his own transmission come through my earpiece.

  “Fuck yeah,” said Beta, “we’re compromised. Bowditch has got Gamma’s radio. What do you want to do here?”

  Alpha came back, “I want you to run a drag route. Got it? Then move to radio silence until my say-so.”

  “Copy that.”

  My earpiece went dead as the two men simultaneously turned off their radios.

  A drag route in football is when a receiver runs straight over the line of scrimmage, then cuts parallel across the field. What the hell did that mean in this context?

  It didn’t take me long to find out.

  Beta broke from the evergreens on the opposite side of the thicket. Instead of continuing toward the outhouse, he made a ninety-degree change in direction. I couldn’t see him through the cover, but my gut told me he was making a run for the backside of the cabin.

  So where was Alpha?

  Waiting to ambush me, I wagered. He was hoping I would pursue Beta and step out into the open where he would have a clean shot.

  As quietly as I could, keeping to the trees, I took three steps in the direction of the dooryard. When I had a bead on the front steps, I knelt down and steadied my rifle barrel by bracing my left elbow against my knee.

  From the sounds of things, Alpha and Beta hadn’t discovered where the Cronks were. Aimee might have led the kids on a flight into the forest. Or she might have left the door open as misdirection while the family remai
ned hidden inside the building. Sooner or later, someone was going to need to go up those steps—the only way inside the building—and have a look.

  These men thought of themselves as the aggressors in this scenario. I needed to flip the script.

  How do you defeat an ambush predator? By waiting him out.

  Patience, alas, has never been one of my virtues. It was why I preferred stalking deer to sitting in a tree stand. It was why Charley Stevens chided me for giving up too quickly on riffles that held trout.

  What I would have given to have Charley with me now.

  But no one was likely to come to my rescue tonight. Tantrattle Pond was so far from anything that the shots that killed Peaslee would have been heard only by owls, raccoons, and fishers. The she-wolf. My fellow nocturnal hunters.

  Water from the branches above me dripped onto my head and shoulders.

  The wood frogs had been joined in their singing by a few spring peepers.

  My right quadriceps began to burn.

  Then to my left I heard an expulsion of breath. “Fuck it.”

  Alpha was leaving his place of hiding. If I held still a few seconds more, I might have a shot at him as he approached the cabin door.

  One of the hardest lessons you learn in law enforcement is this: sometimes the bad guys get lucky.

  “Motherfucker! Son of a bitch!”

  The voice had come from behind the cabin where Beta had disappeared.

  Alpha drew back into the cover. “What’s happening?” he called.

  “They’re under the fucking cabin! The bitch slashed me with a knife when I squatted down for a look.”

  I could almost hear the well-oiled wheels turning inside Alpha’s head.

  “Drag one of them out!”

  “Which one?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Alpha wasn’t going to show himself. Now that he had the advantage, he was willing to wait as long as needed.

  There was a thump that sounded like steel hitting bone.

  Aimee began to scream. “No! Stop! Let her go!”

  Beta emerged around the side of the cabin, clutching little Emma to his chest with one arm while he leveled the carbine at her mother with the other one. Aimee gripped a butcher’s knife with both hands. From Beta’s hopping limp, it was clear she had slashed him badly across the shin and the forearm he was using to hold his sobbing prisoner.