A new panic bloomed.
“I’m here to help,” Scorpion said, as if reading his thoughts. “I’m not here to hurt anyone. Well, not you, anyway. Not your family.”
Thomas stopped moving.
“I’m going to take my hand away now, okay?”
He nodded.
True to his promise, the hand lifted. Scorpion smiled. “So, how’ve you been?” he asked, his tone filled with irony.
Thomas’s head whirled. “What the hell,” he said. It was the best he could do.
“Turns out we’ve got more work to do,” Scorpion said. “I had-”
“GUN!” The voice boomed from nowhere-from everywhere. Scorpion prostrated himself on the ground and covered Thomas with his body.
In a horrible flash of realization, Thomas knew exactly what was happening. “No!” he yelled.
But his voice was drowned out by the gunshot.
Chapter Sixteen
A rifle discharged from the area of the cabin, launching a bullet that skimmed the grass within inches of Jonathan’s back. A millide to the wounded man. He let his M4 fall against its sling and he ripped open a large pocket on his combat vest. He pulled out two large white paper packets and put them on the step.
“Leave him alone!” Julie commanded.
Boxers ignored her.
“He’s going to dress the wound,” Jonathan explained. He recognized the packets as HemCon, a chemical-coated gauze that Jonathan believed was responsible for saving more lives in modern combat than any other technical advancement. You stuff the HemCon into a wound, and the bleeding stops. Just like that.
When Boxers unsheathed his K-Bar knife, Thomas jumped as if to intervene, but then he seemed to remember the last time he saw one of those blades. “They’re okay,” he reassured his mom. “They know what they’re doing.”
Julie shot a withering look to Jonathan. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Call me Scorpion,” Jonathan said. “My friend is Big Guy.”
“Those aren’t names,” she growled.
Jonathan shrugged. What could he say?
Boxers slipped the blade of his K-Bar into the bloused leg of Stephenson’s trousers and sliced upward, ankle to crotch. The fabric fell away, exposing a perfectly round puncture in the flesh on the inner side of the man’s left leg.
“You could have killed him!” Julie accused.
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Boxers growled. “But didn’t. He’ll be fine.” With the wound exposed, he poked around the rest of the leg and gave a satisfied nod. “Damn, I’m good,” he said. “Bone’s fine. No arterial bleeding.” He winked at Jonathan. “Bullet went just where I put it.”
Thomas’s jaw dropped. “Nobody’s that good a shot.”
Jonathan smirked.
Julie slapped the back of Thomas’s head. “Don’t admire them,” she snapped. “They tried to kill us.”
Boxers laughed.
Julie’s eyes grew hotter.
“All respect, ma’am,” Jonathan said. “When we try to kill, people die. You’re not dead.”
Boxers ripped open a HemCon package. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you,” he said to Stephenson. “This is gonna hurt like hell.” He didn’t wait for a response, moving with skill and purpose to stuff the gauze into the hole made by the bullet.
Stephenson howled in agony. He squirmed and kicked, but there was no refusing Boxers, who held his patient down with his hips and his left arm while he used his right pinkie to cram the HemCon into the wound.
“Stop!” Julie commanded. “You’re hurting him!” She took a step to intervene, but again Thomas was able to stop her.
“Let them do their thing, Mom,” he urged. “They’re the good guys. Really.”
“They’re hurting him!”
“We’re helping him, ma’am,” Jonathan said. “It’ll be over in a few seconds.”
“There,” Boxers said, sitting upright. “We’re done. Only took one pack. Still with us, Steve?”
“It hurts,” Stephenson said.
“Of course it hurts,” Boxers said. “You’ve been shot, for God’s sake. It’s supposed to hurt.” Mister Bedside Manner. “Now try not to move. I need to s other hand. “You can. You should. And take Thomas with you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Thomas objected.
Stephenson faced his son. “This isn’t your fight, Tommy.”
“The hell it’s not.”
Julie’s voice took on a pitiful, pleading tone. “We’ve had enough of this nightmare, Steve. I can’t take anymore.”
Stephenson eyed Jonathan. “We can off-load the truck and the two of them can drive away together.”
Jonathan shrugged.
“I can’t go without you,” Julie whined.
“You have to.”
“ I can’t.”
Jonathan interjected, “Where will you go?”
Julie shot him a glare. “This is none of your concern,” she snapped.
“Yet the question remains. Where will you go? You’re a murderer, remember? Sooner or later, you’re going to be recognized. Then what? With your bank accounts frozen, you won’t be able to hire a lawyer. That is, if you even get the chance. You have exactly zero friends and fewer resources past the threshold of that door.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but seemed to have lost the words. “Steve?”
He shrugged. “Think of the evil these people represent. I have to stay.”
Julie’s face showed raw betrayal. “Do you hear yourself? You’re buying into this insanity. You’re going to get yourself killed. I’m going to be a widow. For what?”
“For everything,” Stephenson said.
“We’ll go to the police,” Julie begged. Her voice rose, and her words came faster. “We’ll tell the whole story. Every detail. They’ll have to believe us.”
Jonathan stepped in. “They won’t. They can’t. They’ve got to keep you quiet. There’s plenty of evidence against you for the Caldwell murders, and what they don’t have already, they can manufacture. I’m telling you, Mr. Hughes-”
“Steve.”
“You have no option.”
“What about the video?” Stephenson reasoned. “Won’t that exonerate us?”
Jonathan shrugged. “If I were the prosecutor, I might just use it as evidence of your desperation to get Thomas back. I’d argue that a desperate man wouldn’t hesitate to kill the Caldwells and their nanny as a means to learn the whereabouts of your son.”
“You see?” Julie said, her voice full of hope. “At worst, they’d see a case of justifiable homicide.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Thomas said. His face and his tone showed anger. “They’d see premeditation.” He glanced to Jonathan. “Right?” You don’t watch as much Law amp; Order as he did without learning something.
“That’s the way they designed this thing,” Boxers chimed in. “These guys we’re after, they’re very damn good at what they do. We either stop them, or they keep going. They keep going, your family never gets to rest.”
“You don’t know that,” Julie objected. “You just want your vigilante justice. You want to avenge your wife.”
“That doesn’t make me wrong about the re“ These are bad people. There’s going to be shooting, and the bullets are going to be real. There’s no video game do-overs.”
“I don’t want those bastards chasing me for the rest of my life.”
Julie shouted, “Stop it! All of you stop it! This is crazy!” She started to cry, but Jonathan sensed more anger than sadness. After a few seconds, the tears dissolved to sobs. She buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with the force of her emotions.
Stephenson moved to her, kneeling at her side as he tried to comfort her. “Honey, there’s no choice,” he cooed, but she shook him off.
“Don’t talk to me!” she shrieked.
Jonathan and Boxers stood together. “Let’s unload the equipment,” Jonathan said, striding toward the front door. Boxers fell
in step three feet behind him.
“Wait!” Thomas said, also rising. “I’ll give you a hand.”
Boxers started to object, but this time backed away from Jonathan’s admonishing glare. Clearly, the kid wanted to get out of there. Probably needed to. What was the harm?
“Don’t you think you should be staying with your folks?” Jonathan asked as they walked. “They probably don’t need any more worry than they’ve already had.”
“Shit,” Thomas scoffed. “Worry is all they’ve got. And they’ve earned every bit of it.”
“Watch the attitude, kid,” Boxers scolded. “Those people went through a lot for you.”
Thomas glared. “They didn’t do anything for me. They didn’t even think of hiring you.”
Jonathan gave a disapproving scowl. “They tried their best.”
“And that worked well, didn’t it?”
“It’s not their fault.”
“Their way would have gotten me killed.”
“They were trying, Tom. Sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.”
Thomas stopped short in the middle of the tall grass. “Are you really that blind?”
Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. “I guess I am.”
“Dad knew what his company was making. He knew about this germ crap. He had to.”
“He says he didn’t.”
“It doesn’t matter whether he knew about the GV whatever. They were making bombs or missiles or some such bullshit murder machine, and he never once stopped to ask himself what the fuck was going to happen with what they rolled out. It’s all about killing. Good guys, bad guys, Arabs, Americans, what difference does it make? It’s still about killing people.”
Boxers seemed to grow taller as his defenses kicked in. “Makes a hell of a lot of difference when you’re the one being shot at.”
“As I’m going to find out, apparently,” Thomas conceded. “I got kidnapped because my dad worked for a company that manufactures shit that kills people. If he was working at a drug company, or at a lawn chair manufacturer-”
“Then there might have been some nutcase who objected to animal testing, or an idiot with a jones for lawn chairs. These people are crazy. opped and turned on Jonathan. For the first time in all their hours together, the kid seemed on the edge of losing control. “You don’t get it!” he shouted, punctuating each word by driving his forefinger into Jonathan’s chest. “I’m a musician! I’m a poet! I write songs! I don’t want any of this shit! I never did! When I left my house to head off for school last summer, I told myself I was never going back. I told the world that I was never going back.”
He made a wide, sweeping gesture back toward the lodge. “Don’t you see them in there? Don’t you see how they are? They don’t give a shit about me. They never did.”
“Coulda fooled me,” Boxers said.
“They fool everybody! Hell, they fool themselves. How twisted is that? Now I’m stuck in their fucking nightmare, and I’ve got no choices left.”
They finally reached the wood line. The Hummer was still at least three hundred yards deeper into the woods. Jonathan said, “You do have choices, Tom. Nobody expects you to stay here. You don’t have to be a part of what’s coming.”
“Bullshit.”
“You don’t!”
“I do!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Why, for Christ’s sake?”
Thomas held Jonathan’s gaze. “Because you saved my life.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Scorpion, Scorpion, this is Mother Hen.”
As often was the case when radio traffic had died but the bud remained in his ear, the sound of a voice in his head startled him. Boxers, too. Thomas sensed the urgency, but had no way of knowing what it might be.
Jonathan pressed the transmit button on his vest. “Go ahead, Mother.” He suppressed a smile as he spoke to Venice. He was the one who assigned radio designations, and she hated hers.
“Scorpion, you are not alone. I repeat, you are not alone.”
Jonathan motioned for the others to get off the road, such as it was, and they all dove for the foliage on the left side of the overgrown path. Jonathan took a knee and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”
“There’s another vehicle near yours at the bridge. Looks like a light truck. Maybe an SUV, but a small one. Details are hard to see through the trees.”
“Just the one?” Jonathan whispered.
“I think so. It’s definitely not the Green Brigade. They’re still hours out.”
Then who the hell was it? He looked to Boxers and got a shrug. “How long ago did they arrive?” he asked.
“I can’t say exactly,” Venice advised. He could hear the embarrassment in her voice. “Once you got to the cabin safely, I stepped away for a while. No more than ten minutes.”
Jonathan did the math in his head. Whoever the visitors were, if they’d only had ten minutes, they couldn’t have accomplished very much. “Any sign of people?” he asked.
“Negative. Again, the trees are pretty thick, and it’s too warm for the infrared imaging to do much good.”
Jonathan sighed. Translation: she had no friggin’ clue. “Okay, Mother, thanks for the info. Advise if you see any more detail.” Jonathan motioned for Thomas not to
He rocketed to his full height, his rifle leveled at Sheriff Gail Bonneville and the guy he assumed must be her deputy. “Freeze, Sheriff!” he commanded.
The guy to her right reacted by swinging his shotgun around, and Jonathan stitched the dirt in front of his feet with a three-round burst that made them both jump back.
“Freeze means freeze, goddammit!” he yelled.
And they froze.
“Weapons down!” he commanded.
Gail lowered her Mossberg shotgun by its barrel to rest its butt plate on the ground and let it fall like a tree. The deputy didn’t move.
“I do not want to shoot you,” Jonathan said. He saw in the deputy’s eyes that daring should-I-or-shouldn’t-I look that had gotten so many people killed over the years.
“I don’t want to shoot you either,” Boxers said, emerging from the woods behind them.
The daring look went away. The deputy knew that he’d been beaten. He let his Mossberg fall.
“Sidearms next,” Jonathan said. “Two fingers and slowly, please.”
Using exaggerated movements, they unfastened the straps that secured their weapons in their holsters, and then stooped to ease them onto the overgrown path. Handguns cost too much these days to go throwing them around the way they did in the movies.
“Well done,” Jonathan said. “Now put your hands behind your backs, please, while my big friend zips you guys up.”
It all went as if they’d rehearsed it. Boxers approached from behind and produced two set of zip ties from his vest. They were much more convenient than handcuffs, and more secure. Given the right conditions, ballpoint pen fillers could be used to pick handcuff locks. Without a knife or a good pair of snips, zip tied prisoners stayed zip tied until someone decided to let them go free. Besides, there were no keys to lose.
When they were both secure, Jonathan let his weapon fall against its sling and stepped closer. He gave his most charming smile. “Well, hello, Sheriff Bonneville. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“Taking you down,” said the deputy.
Jonathan allowed his smile to fade as he shifted his gaze. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The man just glared.
“This is Jesse Collier,” Gail said. “My right hand.”
Jonathan took his time evaluating what he saw. Middle aged and a little thick of middle, the guy had a life-hardened look about him. Jonathan assessed him as zero bullshit and dangerous. “He looks like a loyal deputy,” he said. “A smart one, who knows when he’s no longer in control and needs to do what he’s told.”
Jesse spat a wad of phlegm that nailed th
e shoulder of Jonathan’s vest. Boxers dropped him with a savage punch to the kidney. The entire transaction went down with such speed that they all jumped.
“Enough!” Jonathan commanded.
“The fuck do you think you are?” Boxers yelled at the contorting deputy. “That’s my friend you just spit on.”
“Big Guy!” Jonathan said, more soothingly this time. “It’s okay.”
“No
“Gail Bonneville and Jesse Collier,” Jonathan said, “allow me to present the rest of the Hughes family-Steve and Julie.”
“What’s going on?” Julie demanded.
Jonathan explained the confrontation on the road as he helped the newcomers into dining table chairs.
“Why are they here?” Stephenson asked.
“If you want the short version,” Jonathan began, “Sheriff Bonneville is better at her job than I had anticipated. When I rescued Thomas, it was from a farmhouse in her jurisdiction.”
“So you admit it now,” Jesse said.
“Not much sense denying at this point,” Jonathan conceded. “Anyway, she’s been hunting for me ever since.” He turned one of the remaining dining chairs around and sat with his chest resting on the cane back, facing Gail. “I do hope, however, that you’ll tell how you connected the final dots. I know it didn’t come from fingerprints-we’ve already established that.”
Gail smiled as she shook her head. “When you unstrap my hands, I’ll fill you in.”
Jonathan smiled. He liked this woman. He even liked her deputy, although of the two of them, he was the one to be feared.
“What was your plan?” Jonathan asked. “Were you going to arrest us single-handedly?”
She shrugged. “If the opportunity arose, I suppose we might have. But really, it was more about recon. Once I got the lay of the land, maybe I would have taken my pictures to the state police and put together a plan to take you out.”
“In spite of your directive from the FBI.”
“ Because of my directive from the FBI.”
She had guts, he had to give her that.
Stephenson looked confused. “So, your only interest here is to arrest Scorpion for shooting up your town?”
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