He saw no look of recognition in her eyes, and so he pushed the feeling aside and asked her how he could help.
After hesitating and looking around the office, the woman released a sigh and then spoke.
“I had an affair, and now I’m being blackmailed.”
“All right, that’s nothing I can’t handle, but before we move ahead with the details, why don’t you tell me your real name Mrs. Smith.”
More hesitation, followed by another look around the room, and then she spoke again.
“Mr. Drake, I’m Professor Amy Lowe.”
Jimmy felt a shock of surprise but didn’t display it, as he took out his iPad to take notes.
Professor Amy Lowe was the former love and obsession of his friend, Rick Pierce.
“Tell me more,” Jimmy said, and he hoped like hell that Pierce wasn’t somehow involved.
***
Jake and Stacey were back to checking motels when they caught a break.
Not only was the desk clerk certain that Bo Raines was staying at their motel, but the motel had hidden cameras that recorded the guests entering and leaving their rooms. When the clerk played video of the guest in Room 14, both Jake and Stacey were sure that they were looking at Bo Raines.
“He’s out right now,” said the clerk, a thin man with a reddish goatee and a receding hairline. “But the room is paid for until tomorrow.”
“Do you know what sort of vehicle he’s driving?” Jake asked.
The clerk thought for a second and then answered.
“Yeah, it’s a motorcycle. A big black one.”
Stacey thanked him, and then she asked the clerk to inform the maid not to clean the room.
Jake took a spare keycard from the clerk and headed towards the room, but Stacey halted his progress.
“Whoa! We should call it in right away. We can’t be absolutely certain that he’s not in there, and what if he were to return right now?”
Jake sighed, knowing she was right. They called the lieutenant and put the conversation on speakerphone. After listening, the lieutenant, Coke Dyer, told them to hang back and wait for SWAT to show.
“Is that the right call, Coke?” Jake asked. “Shouldn’t we watch the room instead? Because of the camera, we’re almost certain that he’s not in there.”
Stacey’s eyes widened. Jake Collins was a rookie detective and he was questioning the decision of a man who was a cop before he was born. To her surprise, Coke agreed with Jake.
“Yeah, Collins, you’re right. If you’re certain that the video shows Raines is out of the room, then you and Hightower set up a surveillance until I can get a team out there.”
“Great Coke, anything else?”
“Yeah, good work, kid, you and Hightower both.”
“Thanks Lieutenant, we’ll check in again in an hour.”
When Jake ended the call he saw that Stacey was smiling at him.
“Why the smile?”
“I’m impressed. You weren’t intimidated by the lieutenant and you actually changed his mind.”
“The lieutenant is cool, and he’s not afraid to admit that he’s wrong.”
“I like him too,” Stacey said.
Jake hit a speed dial button on his phone to call Pierce. When Pierce didn’t answer, he left a message on his voicemail.
“No answer?” Stacey said.
Jake shrugged.
“I guess Rick is busy.”
***
Pierce ducked low and peered around the corner of the barn.
When he saw the eight armed Bay Street Demons headed towards the house, he hoped that Bart Raines had something decent to defend himself with, or else the fight would be a quick one and both he and Bart Raines would be dead.
That was when the rooster appeared. The bird charged at one of the Demons while ignoring the others, most of whom had continued towards the house.
The back door of the farmhouse opened up and Pierce watched as Bart Raines walked out with an AR-15 pressed against his shoulder.
The former Marine was outnumbered but undaunted, and he opened fire on the Bay Street Demons.
CHAPTER 12
If not for the damn psycho rooster, Gorgon knew he’d be dead.
He had been leading the assault on the farmhouse, taking point, and getting closer. That was when the biggest damn chicken he had ever seen attacked him. It was a rooster. The thing had to be two feet tall and was aggressive as hell.
It charged at Gorgon from the front and made him come to a stop. Then, he had to dance around to avoid its thrusting beak. When it pecked at his boot, Gorgon kicked it and made it squawk and head off in a different direction.
While that was going on, Dagon, a young Bay Street Demon, had led the charge with a few of the other Demons around him. Moloch, as usual, missed no chance to give Gorgon grief and had stopped to point and laugh at him while he dealt with the rooster.
That was why the two of them were behind the others when Bart Raines stepped out onto his back porch and opened up with the AR-15.
Dagon died first, as two rounds blew his head apart. Another Demon died when he took one in the throat, while three others ducked behind an old pickup truck and returned fire.
One of the other Demons had headed towards the front of the house and Gorgon and Moloch went with him. Once there, they kicked in the front door.
If they could get their hands on the farmer’s wife, they would have leverage against the farmer. And later on, they could use the woman as bait to trap her soldier boy son.
Gorgon and Moloch were heading up the stairs, certain that the woman would be cowering in her bedroom. While they did that, the other Demon sprinted towards the kitchen to ambush the farmer from behind.
When the double blast of a shotgun came from the kitchen followed by the sound of a body falling, Gorgon and Moloch figured that they had been wrong.
The farmer’s wife was in the kitchen, and armed as well.
They rushed her while she was reloading. Moloch punched her hard on the chin and rendered her unconscious. Afterwards, he hefted her onto a shoulder.
Gorgon smiled as he looked at Karen Raines and ran a hand across her ass.
“She ain’t bad looking at all.”
“We’ll fuck her later. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Moloch said.
Gorgon led the way, as the firefight at the rear of the house intensified.
***
Pierce got into effective firing range of the gun battle just as Bart Raines took a round in the arm. The wound caused the former Marine to lose control of his weapon and it left his hands and tumbled onto the back steps.
There were two Demons left standing, and they sprinted from behind the pickup truck. They were both bringing their weapons to bear on Bart when the two of them let out screams and fell to the ground. Pierce had placed three rounds in each of them while firing a barrage of bullets that mostly missed their moving targets.
Still, he had struck them in the legs and back, and he didn’t feel bad at all about shooting them from behind without issuing a warning.
Pierce was about to move in on them when he saw movement on his right. It was Gorgon and Moloch. When Pierce saw that they had Karen Raines, he felt torn between rescuing her or helping her husband.
But then, he saw that Bart had slid on his stomach atop the porch steps and regained control of his weapon. Meanwhile, the two Demons Pierce had shot were both badly wounded and out of the fight.
Pierce went after Gorgon and Moloch, and as he did so, he wished he had more ammo to reload with. He had fired all but two of the fifteen shots that his magazine held in taking down the two Demons. The round he kept chambered had been fired as a signal to warn the Raines of danger.
Then, he heard it, the sound of a police siren growing near.
Low ammo or not, he had to stop the abduction of Karen Raines. Once he did that, he could hold on until backup arrived.
Rounding the opposite side of the barn, Pierce watched as Moloch dum
ped a stunned Karen Raines into the sidecar of the motorcycle. While that was going on, Gorgon kicked the young biker that Pierce had rendered unconscious. The kick sent the young man tumbling down a small hill and out of his way.
“Police!” Pierce said. “Show me your hands!”
Gorgon and Moloch were both empty-handed. Moloch because he had been carrying Karen Raines, while Gorgon had just holstered his weapon to grab onto the bike’s handlebars.
Neither man showed Pierce their hands, rather, he saw their asses, as Gorgon and Moloch took off running in opposite directions.
Pierce was about to fire but changed his mind. He wasn’t a horrible shot, but he doubted he’d hit either of the running men, and with only two rounds left, he didn’t want to empty his weapon.
Karen Raines was just regaining her senses when Pierce came up to her. She became more aware and widened her eyes as the screaming began back at the house.
***
Of the two men Pierce had wounded, only one of them was in any condition to talk, and talk he would, if Bart Raines had a say in it.
“Where did you bastards take my daughter?” Bart asked the man, and as he asked, he drove a thumb into a bullet wound in the man’s back.
The Demon howled in agony and Bart repeated his question.
The man cursed at him defiantly, and Bart flipped him over, unsheathed a knife, and stabbed him in the left eye.
By the time the man recovered enough to speak, Pierce was coming around the barn with Karen, while a patrol car was rocketing along the farm’s gravel driveway.
Bart leaned in and whispered into the Demon’s ear.
“Tell me where you took my daughter or I’ll cut out your other eye and then start on your nuts.”
The man told him all he knew, and when Bart was certain he wasn’t lying and was of no further use, he slit the Demon’s throat and stood back to watch him bleed to death.
Pierce had seen the slaying, and he locked eyes with Bart as Karen Raines went to her husband and checked out his arm wound.
“What did the man tell you, Raines? Did he know where I can find your daughter?”
Bart didn’t answer Pierce, and when the first cop left his car, he shouted a command for them to drop their weapons.
Pierce and Bart Raines complied, and before long, identities were confirmed and Pierce was giving a statement to a police officer.
She was a young woman. For her final question, she pointed over at the body bag containing the Demon with the gashed throat and gouged out eye.
“Detective, who killed that man?”
Pierce nodded towards Bart Raines.
“Mr. Raines killed that man after a struggle... in self-defense.”
Bart Raines had been near enough to hear, and he sent Pierce a nod of thanks, as an EMT worked on his arm wound.
Pierce didn’t respond. He was looking at the spent cartridges that Raines’ AR-15 had spat out. There were over a hundred casings littering the ground along with four empty magazines.
Bart Raines had killed four Demons, his wife had slain another with a shotgun, while Pierce had wounded one Demon and captured another. That meant that there were only seven Bay Street Demons left if the FBI had their facts straight about the motorcycle gang.
Seven, from an original sixteen, and the Raines Family had only begun their battle against the gang the night before.
If the Demon that Bart had tortured had given up the location of the remaining members, Pierce felt certain that the younger, better trained, and well-armed Bo Raines would make short work of them.
If the Demons did know where Jenna Raines was and could get their hands on her, they sure as hell better do it, or they would become extinct.
Pierce took out his phone to report in, and wondered if his lieutenant would even believe the story he had to tell.
CHAPTER 13
FBI agents Rodgers and Abrams were using Pierce’s and Collins’ desks during the detectives absence from the station.
They had spent the morning going over Al Finder’s recent reports along with his personal notebook. The blood-stained notebook, like the daily reports, was meticulous in its detail, and the agents were impressed by Detective Finder’s work.
“It’s no wonder this guy had such a great record at finding runaways,” Rodgers said. “I don’t know when he slept. You usually see this kind of obsession with the job from the undercover narks.”
Abrams nodded in agreement, as he was busy looking through the scraps of notepaper he’d found in Finder’s car. Unlike the rest of the late detective’s paperwork, the scraps of paper just seemed like random thoughts written down on whatever was handy at the time.
Most of it was scribbled on napkins from fast food restaurants and Abrams assumed that Finder had written them while driving. Abrams became convinced of his assumption when he found that the scribbles were later transferred to the notebook.
When he came across one note written on a napkin that had no corresponding notation in the notebook, he assumed it had been written last. The note had two addresses written on it, along with the words. CHECK THEM OUT! JENNA?
One of the addresses was in Atlantic City, but the other one was the massage parlor where Al Finder was killed.
Abrams passed over the napkin. Rodgers read it and understood the significance.
“We know he checked out the massage parlor, unfortunately, but did he ever get a chance to give Atlantic City P.D. a ring?”
“It looks like he thought the girl might be there,” Abrams said.
“Yeah, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be there alone.”
Rodgers brought out his iPad, as Abrams did the same. Within minutes, both agents were looking at the location in Atlantic City. The image on their screens was a year old, but thanks to the mapping service they could see what lay around it, which wasn’t much. Although, several casinos were visible in the distance, as well as the Barnegat Bay.
“This place is an ass-ugly warehouse of some sort,” Rodgers said. “The paint on the building is so old that I can’t read the company’s name.”
“Maybe someone is warehousing girls there,” Abrams said.
“Yeah, but if so, it’s not the Demons, they might grab the girls off the street and sell them, but it would be the buyers controlling the warehouse.”
“Salvadorans?” Abrams said.
“Probably, and they’re likely armed to the teeth. I hope that you didn’t have any plans partner. It looks like we’ll be raiding that warehouse tonight.”
Abrams nodded. The warehouse was probably nothing, but it was better to go in heavy with the Atlantic City P.D. at their backs rather than stumble into something serious.
They spoke to Coke Dyer and told him what they’d found, and then they were off to speak with the Atlantic City P.D.
***
The Uhlerstown–Frenchtown Bridge is a narrow two lane roadway positioned over the Delaware River. Gorgon and Moloch rode their motorcycles over the bridge and entered Pennsylvania. Moloch was leading the way, as he had told Gorgon that he knew a place where they could hide out.
They’d been lucky and hadn’t passed any cops, but that luck wouldn’t last forever.
They knew that the police in New Jersey would be searching for them, but it was less likely that the cops in Pennsylvania would do the same.
Moloch had grown up near the Delaware River until he was in his teens. He had a faint memory of how the rural back roads were set-up, although he had only returned to the area once since leaving it at the age of fourteen.
A short time after crossing the bridge into Pennsylvania, Gorgon followed Moloch around a curve and they rode over another bridge. It was narrow, made of thick wood planks, and seemed ancient. Once they were over the second bridge, the road curved left and Gorgon found himself at a T intersection.
They went right, then left, then another left, and soon they were at a small farm that was overgrown and long abandoned. On the locked gate was a sign that said, NO TRESP
ASSING!
While the farm was neglected, on either side of the property were well-tended fields that belonged to others.
Gorgon and Moloch had to get off their bikes and help each other. They found a spot where there was a gap in the wooden fence, but there was a ditch between it and the road. They had to move the motorcycles down into the ditch one at a time and then up the other side.
Moloch then insisted that they pushed their bikes along, otherwise the sound of the engines might travel to the nearby farms.
“If the cops came around asking questions, someone might remember hearing two motorcycles riding around over here.”
“What is this place, Moloch?”
“It’s where I grew up before I moved to New Jersey. I think it still belongs to my older brother, but he’s doing time in Frackville.”
“Doing time? What for?”
“He killed our mother, but the bitch had it coming.”
Moloch led Gorgon through a strip of land that had trees growing on it. The trees weren’t big and didn’t look very old, but they were enough to shield them from the eyes of any passersby on the quiet country road.
As they reached the end of the trees, Gorgon saw a structure looming up ahead. It was an old house. The home was in need of repair, but far from dilapidated, despite the peeling paint.
“We can hide out here?”
“Yeah, my sister lived in it for a while, until she sold most of the damn furniture to buy drugs. She’s dead now; she died of a drug overdose three years ago.”
“Sister? First a brother and now a sister, how come I never met them when we were growin’ up?”
“They were both older than me, and my brother was in prison. Anyway, there’s no electricity, but there’s well water. Maybe I can get the hand pump primed and running.”
“Who else knows about this place?”
“Just me, and now you, but shit, we had to hide somewhere.”
“Yeah, your great plan didn’t exactly go the way we thought it would.”
“No shit, and that fuckin’ cop almost got us too.”
“Let’s get inside and think things over. I also better call Andrea or she’ll think I’m dead.”
Demons (A Detective Pierce Novel Book 2) Page 5