He wished her good hunting and doubled his well-wishing for those she fought against.
With any luck, they would all kill each other.
160
Finders Keepers
Dean and Amy entered the farmhouse after calling inside through the open front door and getting no answer.
Dean went in first. As he did so, he pushed back the hood on the yellow slicker he wore. Amy wore only a denim jacket to ward off the rain, and as a result, she was drenched to the skin.
Her stylish black sneakers made a high-pitched squeak with every step, so Dean motioned for her to stay put, while he ventured deeper inside. Within a few steps, he came upon the body of Tyler’s brother, Randall.
“Oh man, this is not good.”
“What is it?”
Dean opened his mouth to answer when he spotted something else. He stood like that, with his mouth agape, until Amy joined him, and when she followed his gaze, she saw the bundles of cash that had spilled from the canvas bag.
“Holy crap!”
A moment later, she spotted Randall’s corpse, and a choked cry escaped her lips.
Dean gripped her hand to comfort her, even as he swiveled his head around. “I don’t see a landline, but there’s a cell phone lying over there on the floor.”
Amy saw something else by the phone and the wonder of it eclipsed her fear at seeing the body. “Another bag, Dean, there’s another bag over there.”
After taking a moment to gather their courage, the teens moved past the body and deeper into the room, where Dean pulled open the canvas sack and found it full of bundled cash.
“There’s a fortune here. They must have robbed a bank and then had a falling out.”
Amy walked back into the hallway and shoved the spilled cash back into the first bag.
“C’mon, we have to leave before they come back.”
Dean tore his gaze away from the contents of the bag. “What? We can’t take this, it’s stolen.”
“And we’re stealing it again. Dean, baby, don’t you see how lucky we are? We’ll never have to work a day in our lives now.”
Dean gazed back at her for six seconds before he gathered up the second bag.
As he walked by it on his way out of the room, on impulse, he grabbed the phone from the floor and stuck it in his pocket. When he looked up, he found Amy lifting the shotgun by its barrel.
“This thing is heavier than it looks.”
“Leave it.”
“No, you grab it… just in case.”
Dean took it, but he picked it up by its stock and set the safety switch with his thumb.
“What was that you just did?”
“I engaged the safety.”
“Shotguns have safety switches?”
“This one does.”
“How did you know to do that?”
“My dad, we used to hunt some… you know… before he got sick.”
“I wish I had known him better, but c’mon, we have to go.”
Dean tucked the shotgun beneath his rain slicker, then he and Amy crept from the house, where they walked past Tanner’s pickup, Sara’s car, and the stolen vehicle that Tyler and Sherry were using.
Once on the road, they stayed to the shoulder and headed away from the farm.
Every once in a while, they would giggle with glee at their good fortune, little knowing what lied ahead.
161
Hunted
A groundhog skittered in front of Sara’s position. When the movement caught Sherry’s eye, Sara knew that the woman had spotted her.
Three shots slammed into the tree Sara leapt behind, followed by two more, then Tyler could be heard shouting for Sherry to stop firing.
Sara sent two shots their way but saw that they had already headed back up the hill. She let loose a vehement curse over the fact that the couple was now behind her, and after taking a deep breath, she went in pursuit of Tanner.
Sherry followed Tyler back up the first of the short hills he’d earlier rolled down while struggling with Tanner and questioned him about why they were leaving.
“We’re not leaving. Do you think I’d let that bastard go after he killed my brother? But I can’t do shit without my gun. I have to find it.”
“I have a gun; we’ll just use mine.”
“How many rounds you got left?”
Sherry’s shoulders sagged. “Just two.”
“That’s what I thought; now help me find my gun and keep an eye out for that bitch too.”
Tanner made it to the other side of the field just as Sara called out his name. He had entered a second wooded area, but then remembered that there was a clearing up ahead. The clearing was in an area where another farmhouse once stood, but that building had burned down in a fire that occurred back in the 1960s.
He would have to stay clear of that open area or risk becoming easy prey.
Tanner looked over his shoulder and saw Sara coming fast across the field. He was certain that she could no longer see him now that he was among the trees, and the sound of the thunder and the constant patter of rain would mask any sounds his footfalls made.
Still, she was armed, he wasn’t, and if she caught even a glimpse of him, he was a dead man.
Deeper into the trees, the branches overhead grew so thick that the rain making its way through became more like a steady drizzle, and not the unending barrage of water that had been pouring upon him. While the decades of fallen leaves had created a soft ground covering that gave each of Tanner’s steps a springy sensation.
Having only visited the site of the old farmhouse once, Tanner was unsure of exactly where the broad clearing began. He traveled east to give it a wide berth, and afterwards, he would move northward again toward the town.
He had just made the move toward the north when he saw movement up ahead, just a flicker of something, or someone, moving low between the trees. He wondered if Sara had somehow circled in front of him, but no, she couldn’t have moved that fast. It was the man and the woman whose friend he’d killed.
They must have traveled back to their vehicle and driven around, to come at him from the town side of the forest.
Tanner stopped moving and gazed about, while looking for a place to hide. The trees offered shelter, but the movement up ahead had grown close enough to make sounds, and he knew that he would be facing someone before he could ever make it behind one of the wide trees.
He unfolded his only weapon, a knife with a six-inch long blade, and readied himself for what was coming. Whoever it was, Sara Blake, Tyler, or the scowling woman, whichever, they were about to die, or he was.
No middle ground existed when the stakes were life and death.
Tanner moved toward the approaching figure, but when he saw who it was, he dropped the hand holding the knife to his side.
“Oh, it’s you.”
Sara made it to the clearing where a home had once stood.
The area wasn’t a true clearing since there were a few trees, but they were so scattered and small compared to their ancient cousins that it was easy to see past them, while the thick covering of the overhead branches had ended, making the rain inside the clearing as unrelenting as ever.
Sara moved toward the center, with the mud sucking at her ankle-high boots and threatening to dislodge the left one from her foot and swallow it.
Apparently, she hadn’t laced it as tightly as its counterpart, and with every step she could feel it slide down her ankle as the muck gripped it.
Her eyes darted left and right, while she looked back often to see if the tall man and the woman had followed her.
When she spotted movement to her right, she smiled, for although she couldn’t see the man’s face from where she was, she could see the wet dark hair and the hood hanging down his back.
Tanner!
Sara raised her gun, took careful aim, but hesitated.
What is he doing? Is he talking to someone?
Her hesitation ended when his head turned, and
she could see his face in profile. It was Tanner, and although the shot was far from an easy one, she knew she could make it. Sara took careful aim at the center of Tanner’s back, and after releasing a breath, she fired.
Tyler had found his gun without difficulty, but had trouble collecting his bullets.
Despite both he and Sherry scouring the area, he was only able to find four of the six that had dropped. The rest of his ammo was back at the house, inside the stolen minivan.
Tyler knew if they delayed any longer that the man and woman who killed his brother might get away.
They traveled across the field, entered the forest and moved in a straight line while keeping watch, but after trudging some distance with no sign of either Sara or Tanner, Sherry believed they had lost them.
“We should go back to that farmhouse. The bastard probably got away, plus we left the money back there.”
Tyler glared at her. “Do you remember what else we left back there, Sherry? We left my damn brother, my dead brother that this bastard killed. You go back if you want, but I’m not doing anything else in this world until I find this son of a bitch and make him suffer.”
Sherry stared at him, then shrugged. “The guy’s gone. He could be anywhere by now.”
A shot rang out, the sound coming from up ahead and to the right.
Tyler pushed past Sherry and headed toward the sound. “I got the bastard now.”
Sherry sighed, turned, and followed Tyler, as the frown lines on her face deepened and her patience grew thin.
162
Ryder On The Storm
Amy and Dean entered her house and found her mother either passed out or sleeping on the living room sofa.
There was an old movie on the TV and liquor bottles scattered on the coffee table.
Amy’s mom, Carol Patton, was an alcoholic and a pain pill addict. Her habits were sustained by a substantial quarterly check she received in compensation for losing her right leg below the knee, and the use of one eye, in a work-related accident.
After legal wrangling, Carol Patton’s attorney agreed that his client would accept a structured settlement with periodic payments rather than go to trial, where she undoubtedly would have been awarded a huge lump sum by a jury. The payments Amy’s mom received for her suffering added up to six figures a year.
When she wasn’t drunk or high, Amy’s mom would take the bus trip to the casino with her friends and lose hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
Before the accident, she was a hardworking single mom, but after becoming hooked on pain pills and caught in the downward spiral of alcoholism, Carol Patton rarely saw her daughter. She had no interest in Amy’s life and didn’t even know Dean’s name, even though he and Amy had been dating for two years and had been classmates even longer.
Amy locked her bedroom door and she and Dean poured the money onto her mattress. Once the bags were empty and the cash heaped in a pile, the two teens just stared at it in awe.
Amy gave a little laugh. “Oh my God, there might be a million there.”
“They must have robbed a bank,” Dean said. “Who else would have this kind of money?”
Amy went to her closet and came back to the bed holding a backpack.
“After we count it, we’ll put it in here, then we’ll get rid of these bags.”
“And the phone too.”
“Why did you take the phone?”
“I figured it belonged to one of them and if the cops find it with the bags, they’ll know who to arrest for the robbery.”
“Smart, yeah, they shouldn’t get away with it.”
“What about us? I guess we’re thieves now too.”
“No, what we did is more like finders keepers.”
Dean laughed, then he picked up the bags the money had been in. They were made of a sturdy canvas material and had a drawstring at the top.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?”
“These bags, they’re coin bags, you know, for rolled coins, dimes, quarters, but look how big they are. If these were filled even halfway with rolls of quarters they’d be too heavy to carry, plus the weight would probably split the bag.”
Amy took one of the bags from him. “Yeah, so I guess they used this as sort of a prop or something when they stole the money.”
Dean nodded in agreement, as forty miles away, the police and the FBI were coming to the same conclusion.
FBI agent Mel Cooper stared down at the body of Michael Ryder and wondered why the young blond man had been killed, when it was obvious that he had been no threat to the robbers.
As if he were reading his mind, his fellow agent, Ben Simms, answered the question.
Simms was in his forties, same as Cooper, but his thick wavy hair and boyish face made him appear to be years younger.
“Witnesses say the woman didn’t like the way he was looking at her. The bitch shot him as they were leaving. Just plain mean.”
“And stupid,” Cooper said, while scratching the center of his bald head. “This murder makes them job one, and what about the other site, the one where they dumped the vehicle?”
“We have a witness and a description of the vehicle they drove away in after dumping the phony armored car, plus there’s little doubt that there was a driver too.”
Cooper stared down at the body of Michael Ryder. “We have to get these bastards, Ben, and I mean today.”
Not far away, Cameron Ryder left her blue pickup truck, an old Chevy C/K 1500. She had spotted a cop she knew named Bobby; he was manning the perimeter of the scene and she went over to talk to him.
Cameron was a tall woman in her late thirties, long-limbed and shapely, with a no-nonsense look about her. She had once been a cop but was now a bounty hunter. She wanted to find the people who had robbed the bank more than she wanted to breathe.
Past the yellow crime scene tape that cordoned off the area was a panel truck that resembled an armored car, but a close look revealed that it was only made to appear as such. Someone had set the interior of the truck on fire, but the fire never spread to the exterior because of the rain.
The cop was about to tell her to step back when he recognized her.
“Cameron, hi, how do you like this weather, huh?”
Cameron pointed at the panel truck. “They used that, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but do you know something about the robbers? Are they people you were tracking down?”
Cameron pushed a strand of her blonde hair back behind her ear and began crying, but her tears were hardly noticeable due to the rain. Still, the cop saw something in her eyes and felt the sorrow emanating off her, as well as the anger.
“Cameron, hey honey what’s wrong?”
“The bastards killed Michael, Bobby. They murdered my brother.”
“The civilian that got killed? That was Mike?”
The cop, Bobby, had been both a friend and a classmate to Cameron’s younger brother, Michael Ryder, and had gone through high school with him. After the shock of the news hit him, he too grew angry.
“Cameron, this is all I know and it’s not much. A man and a woman robbed the bank by pretending to be guards delivering coins. The man was normal looking, maybe on the tall side, while the woman was shapely, and they both had dark hair. They used this truck to help make them look legit and there’s a possibility of a third person, maybe a driver, but they can’t be sure. A witness here says he saw a silver Toyota minivan leaving the scene and headed north and… that’s all I know.”
Cameron reached across the tape and laid a hand atop the cop’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Bobby.”
Cameron had taken three steps, but she turned back to ask a question.
“Which one shot my brother?”
“It was the woman. Witnesses say she did it because she didn’t like the way he was staring at her.”
“Knowing Michael, he was probably trying to memorize their faces.”
“You’
re going after them, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful. I know you can handle yourself, honey, and I know your record at tracking down dirtbags. When you find them, please be careful. And one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
The cop looked around before speaking.
“Kill them. And if you find you can’t do it, call me.”
Cameron stared into her friend’s eyes. “You won’t be getting that call.”
A minute later, she was back in her pickup truck and headed north.
163
… But You Can’t Hide
Tanner put away his knife and looked at his new companion.
It was the dog, Madison’s dog, as he had come to think of her. She was a mutt with a lot of German shepherd mixed in, but Tanner noticed something else about her.
“You’re almost dry. How have you been staying dry?”
The dog took off back the way it had come and Tanner moved to follow her, just in time to avoid Sara’s shot.
The blast from the gun frightened the hound and she doubled her pace. Tanner followed, his speed no match for the dog’s, but he stayed with her long enough to see her dart left and move beneath the branches of a bush.
Beyond the foliage, the north end of the clearing was visible. Past the center of it and moving his way was Sara Blake.
Tanner turned, sprinted six steps, then dropped to the ground.
Once he was out of Sara’s line of sight, he pivoted and crawled over to the bush that the dog had disappeared beneath.
As soon as he moved under the bush, he felt himself sliding downward into darkness atop something that felt like a ladder but was actually an old set of steep wooden stairs.
The ground at the base of the steps was covered in dirt and debris blown in from outside. As Tanner hit bottom, the pile of leaves and broken branches made for a soft landing. When he rolled over, his hand touched a shelf and he heard the tinkle of glass jars.
The Tanner Series - Books 1-11: Tanner - The hit man with a heart Page 50