by Jon Mills
“Leave that to me.”
A TV was playing in the background with the volume down. Jack turned and saw it flip to the news channel. A jolt of panic flooded his being when he saw Billy’s and his mug shot along with a photo of Ruby come up on the screen. It probably didn’t help that one of the old-timers at the bar glanced up then swiveled in his chair. Jack gave Billy a slight kick under the table.
“What?”
He jerked his head towards the TV. Billy’s eyes flitted up and then he looked at the guy who was now speaking with his pal beside him. For a few brief seconds both of them looked at each other until they heard the sound of a gun being cocked. The bartender had reached under the counter and brought out a large double-barrel shotgun.
Billy was already half out of his seat when Henry spoke.
“Stay right where you are.”
“No, Henry, you know me.”
“I know you are a crook.”
Jack remained calm and collected. These kind of things didn’t usually go south if no one made any hasty moves.
“We don’t have any kid. This is a mistake.”
“Then you won’t mind sticking around and telling the cops that. Wiley, get on the phone.”
One of the guys on the stools hopped down and was heading over to a phone when Billy rose to his feet.
“Billy. I’m warning you. I don’t want to do it but I will.”
Jack was slightly out of view in the booth. He could see all of this playing out in the mirrors on the walls. His hand reached behind his back and pulled his Glock. He squeezed the grip tightly. This was the worst kind of situation he could find himself in. He didn’t want to kill anyone in here. They were good people. Hard-working. Just folk trying to do what was right.
“Now, Henry, how long have I been coming in here?”
Billy’s gun was hanging down in his hand beside his leg. For all his attempts to negotiate it was doing little to alleviate this guy’s fears. In the mirror Jack could see the other guy reach the phone behind the counter. He couldn’t let him make that call. This wasn’t going to end well for anyone. Billy was edging his way forward hoping to get closer to Henry when the shotgun went off and blew a hole in the wall.
Billy ducked down instinctively.
“The next one goes in you.”
“Fuck, Henry. My old man knew you, so did my brothers. Look, the kid on the screen is my daughter.” He paused. Jack hadn’t taken his eyes off the man who was by the phone. He hadn’t placed the call. The noise from the gun had startled him. His hand was hovering over it.
“Go ahead and make that call, Wiley,” Henry repeated.
Wiley looked as if he had pissed himself with fright. He had to have been at least eighty years of age.
“Henry, c’mon now. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
That only riled him up more. “You come into my bar and threaten me?”
“Whoa, whoa, I didn’t say that. I just meant you’re holding a gun and…”
Negotiating wasn’t getting them anywhere. Jack watched as Wiley picked up the phone. Henry’s full attention was on Billy. In his mind all he was thinking was, put the gun down. Just put it down. But he wasn’t going to do it.
Jack wheeled his Glock up in one smooth motion around the edge of the booth. Before Henry could aim at him, a bullet hit him in the shoulder sending him crashing back into his bar. His finger must have been on the trigger as the shotgun fired in the air. Billy didn’t waste a second racing over to the old guy by the phone. He didn’t need to tell him what to do, he’d already dropped the phone in fear.
Jack got up and went around the counter to check on Henry. He was still alive. He’d been hit in the right shoulder. “Billy, get me some cloth and bring the phone here.”
He turned toward the old guy and added, “Sorry, old-timer. But he’s telling you the truth. We don’t have her.”
The very words cut him to the core. If they didn’t have her, who did?
He patched up Henry as best as he could, called an ambulance and then both of them got the hell out of there.
Chapter 26
She stared down at the bloody hole in the man’s forehead. Isabel was exhausted. By now she should have been tucked away in bed, but this didn’t look like it was going to be one of those nights.
She’d been on site at the Sunrise Motel for the past twenty minutes talking to a witness who said she had seen a man leave the motel with a girl that matched the description from the Amber Alert. By now she already had a grainy photo of the guy from the hospital incident. It was pathetic. She pulled it up on her phone and showed it to the woman who was as thin as a rake.
“Hard to tell, it was kind of dark. I just remember seeing them come in. The girl didn’t look happy.”
Now, as police examined the body inside the registration office, she wondered why anyone would want to take Jack’s daughter. Better still, why keep her alive and hole up in a motel? Perhaps he wasn’t anything to do with Jack. She was fifty minutes away from the hospital in New Orleans. She wanted to talk to Theresa again. She was certain that she was holding back key information that might help but it was late and her last conversation with Theresa hadn’t exactly gone well. She was still conflicted about whether to have her charged for assisting Jack.
“Any luck?” she asked another officer who came into the room.
“We are stopping traffic but nothing so far.”
They had set up a small perimeter around the city on the main roads and were stopping vehicles. It was the best they could do right now. Isabel rubbed her eyes feeling a wave of tiredness. For what she got paid, she often wondered why she continued doing the job. But it was in her blood. She couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else. Besides, just remembering her father’s death at the hands of a home invader gave her more than enough fuel to keep going.
About ten minutes later an officer approached her to let her know that they had received a call about a shooting down at a local bar on the west side.
“Bartender says Jack Winchester and Billy were in there.”
“Let’s go.” Isabel didn’t waste another second, she hopped into her car and followed a cruiser across town. The fact that he was still in town, and in a bar of all places, meant he couldn’t have been worried about getting caught.
Police lights lit up the dark streets that were practically empty. Covington was vastly different to New Orleans. A small town with a population of just under ten thousand, it was just far enough north that it missed Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall. Many of the people who had lost their homes had moved to Covington and since 2005 it had become one of the many cities in the area that had seen a lot of growth.
Rain beat against her windshield. The wipers couldn’t move fast enough. It was the beginning of Hurricane Danielle. Trees swayed and bent in the harsh ninety-mile-an-hour winds. By the time she reached the bar, the roads were being turned into a shallow flowing stream. Water gushed from the drains and gutters overflowed.
Isabel pulled her coat up around her ears as the rain plastered her hair to her face. She double-timed it across the sidewalk and ducked under the yellow police tape. Inside, the witnesses were still on scene.
“What have we got here?”
“Bartender is at the hospital for a gunshot wound to the shoulder. These guys saw it all.”
Isabel went over and introduced herself. They looked old, pale and shaken up by what had taken place.
“You want to take me through what happened?”
“I just told him twice.”
“Humor me.”
The old man’s hands were shaking. He took a sip of a double scotch that was on the counter.
“We come here all the time. We’d seen Billy Dixon before but not the other fella. Henry had his gun on them and asked me to call you guys. Which reminds me. That damn ambulance took forever. I thought we were going to lose a friend.”
“Who shot him? The other guy, Jack Winchester?”
He shrugged. “If th
at’s his name.”
She held up a photo of him.
“That’s the man.”
“Did he say anything before he left?”
“Yeah, he said they didn’t have the girl and that the police had it all wrong.”
Isabel thought back to the man in the hospital. To what Theresa had said about her attackers. Had they taken the girl as retribution? If they had and Jack knew about it, this was about to turn ugly real fast.
Under the direction of the witnesses she went over to the booth to see if there was anything they had left behind. She shook her head. No luck. She was still waiting to hear back from the police on whether or not they had found out what hotel he was staying at in New Orleans. She’d asked the sergeant on duty to contact motels in the area in the hope that they could find him or the other assailant, but that was going to take a while.
Time was against her. Whatever reasons he might have had for leaving would be tossed to the wind now that he knew about his daughter being taken. Her mind went back to the bloodbath at the club in L.A. She sure as hell didn’t want that to happen again.
She was about to leave when her phone rang. It was Theresa.
“Agent Baker, is it true?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Then it dawned on her. Might have Jack thought that this was just a ploy to get him to turn himself in? A setup by the police to lure him out?
She heard Theresa sobbing hard on the other end of the line. “Who’s taken her?” she managed to say between sobs.
“We’re not sure yet.”
“Carla?”
Isabel went quiet. Thankfully she didn’t need to explain. Her silence was an answer in itself. “Where’s Billy? Jack?”
“We’re trying to find them but with the storm coming in, the visibility out there is pretty bad. Hopefully by morning we’ll have a lead and I will let you know immediately.”
“Morning?” she stammered. “She’ll be dead by morning. If it’s the same men that…”
“Theresa, we don’t know that yet. The sighting we’ve had places her here in Covington with one male suspect.”
“Perhaps it’s Jack?”
She didn’t want to lie to her but at the same time it wasn’t going to do her any good to fret over this. There was very little they could do. Everything that could be done was being done.
“It’s very possible,” she replied knowing full well that it wasn’t Jack or Billy.
In between the loud cries, Isabel tried to get her to calm down. “Theresa, do you know anywhere Billy might go? Anyone he knows?”
“I… I don’t.”
“Think. Right now we have very little to go on.”
“Um, there was a guy by the name of Mike. That he used to have around from time to time. I’m just trying to think of where he said he lived.”
An officer across the room motioned for Isabel.
“Call me back, okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
She hung up and went over to the officer in charge. “Seems the bar has some surveillance footage.”
He led her out back to a screen. On a small flat-screen TV, black-and-white images came up that showed the outside and the inside of the bar.
“Go back.”
One camera was angled down across the booths, and one towards the door. Another was out the front and another focused on the rear door. An officer went back until the images of Jack and Billy came up.
“That’s it. Play it from there.”
In a second-by-second playback she watched what happened. She saw Jack pull his gun and wait. What are you waiting for? Why didn’t you kill them? Her eyes scanned the different people including the old witness who was standing by the phone. Then she watched him take the shot.
“He could have killed him but he didn’t.”
“Bad shot?”
“No. Not this guy.”
Then she saw the smartphone on the table. “Go back a bit further.”
She watched Billy talk on the phone then lay it down. The phone screen lit up again about five minutes later.
“Pause it. You think you can zoom in on that?”
“Agent, this is Radio Shack crap that we are dealing with. Maybe if we took this down to the station, we might be able to.”
She could feel frustration building. Give me a break, she thought.
“Alright, see what you can do.”
The officer showed her a few streams from the outside but it was useless. They disappeared into the shadows.
There was very little else that could be done. It was getting close to midnight by the time Isabel booked into a local Holiday Inn. It was the first one she saw. She didn’t care what the bed was like. She knew the moment her head hit that pillow she’d be gone.
As she closed the door behind her, she leaned up against it and slipped down to the floor. Isabel wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her head on her knees. It was hard to turn off the mind. It kept replaying the events in the hospital. She could still hear the sound of gunfire and screams.
After taking a quick shower she was about to slip into bed when her phone vibrated on the side table. It was Cooper. She hit accept and slumped back onto the bed.
“I hear things are heating up. Amber Alert. Multiple shootings.”
“Yeah, it’s…” she trailed off not really knowing what to say about it all. To be honest it was all getting away from her and she felt like a donkey trying to bite a carrot that was hanging from a stick in front of her.
“That’s why I should have been there.”
Here we go, she thought. She smirked. Regardless of what a bonehead he was at times, she kind of missed having him with her.
“Yeah, you would have this case wrapped up by now.”
“In the bag,” he replied and they both chuckled a little. Outside the storm was getting worse. No doubt the police would have ceased stopping vehicles in this weather. She heard what sounded like a stick hit the window. A flash of lighting and she saw that it was tree branches. They looked like gnarled fingers as they raked at her window.
Chapter 27
Neither of them slept much that night. It wasn’t the fact that Ruby was on both of their minds. It was the storm. Within a matter of hours of leaving the bar it had gone from mild to extreme. By morning the storm had still not let up. Jack stood by the window in a motel, two towns over. Billy was paranoid the police were going to show up.
“I can’t go back. I won’t,” he’d said multiple times that night. He was beginning to sound a lot like Jack. There was something to be said about doing time. Once out, you didn’t want to feel trapped again. And right now both of them were beginning to feel like hedged-in animals on a safari hunt. They had taken turns that night to keep an eye out for police. None showed up but then no one would have been stupid enough to go out in that weather. The entire room shook as violent winds whipped against the door and windows, threatening to break them wide open.
It was a little after eight in the morning. Outside Jack could see store signs that had been torn from the ground and scattered across the parking lot. The wooden fence that wrapped around the pool had been ripped apart and scattered. Small trees had been uprooted and garbage tumbled across the ground.
“You know he’s probably not even got the meth.”
“Yeah, I know. But it doesn’t matter. Just stay cool.”
Billy fired up a cigarette and peeked out the side of the curtain. “What I wouldn’t do for a fix.”
Jack studied him. His hands were shaking as he took a deep pull.
“Theresa knows.”
“What?”
“That you’re using again.”
“How the f—” His eyes dropped and then met Jack’s. “Fuck’s sake.”
“What, did you think you could hide it from her?”
“No. I wasn’t going to keep doing it. It was a reaction to what happened to her. I just needed a little something to take the edge off, you know.”
“N
o. I don’t. You can’t do that shit around Ruby.”
“Yeah, well, I might not have to worry about that.”
Jack grabbed a hold of him.
“I swear. If anything happens to her. I’m going to…”
“Get off, man. That might work where you come from. But around here everyone threatens.”
“I don’t threaten.”
Billy studied him for a second then walked away in a huff. He picked up his phone and glanced at it for the ninth time that morning.
Jack frowned. “You expecting to hear from someone?”
“Theresa. She’s bound to find out about Ruby from the news. She hasn’t called.”
“That’s because she has learned already. She won’t call.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Trust me on this one.”
Jack glanced at the clock, went over to the coffee machine and tore the corner off a bag of coffee. He poured the grinds into the filter and put it on.
“You said you were from New York. What did you do there?”
Jack didn’t reply. “Just get your shit together, we are going to head out soon.”
“I’m just trying to be friendly.”
Jack snorted. Maybe if you hadn’t fucked up we wouldn’t be here now, Jack thought.
The fact was, no matter where he went, trouble might be found. But this was a whole new level of trouble. Seeing his mug shot on an Amber Alert meant they were not only under the watchful eye of the police and FBI but now the general public would be looking out for them. At this rate the only way he’d be able to escape his past would be to leave the country. But with no passport that was out of the question.
After downing an awful-tasting cup of coffee, they slipped out and drove north. As they were expecting Billy to show up alone, Jack laid in the trunk. Being two towns over they were a good forty minutes away from their destination. The wind whipped against the car making it difficult to drive. The sun was hidden behind dark clouds. The grey skies only made him feel worse. Everything in him wanted to go searching for Ruby but he had no idea where she was or even where to begin.
Had they taken her early in the event that Billy didn’t pay? It was possible. People were prone to get cold feet at the last minute and try to duck out from debts they owed. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d seen criminals swoop in before payment was made. It was like insurance to them.