by Gary Parker
“Inside!” Mabel yelled.
Rick grabbed Shannon’s hand and pulled her into the living room. “I figured I lost them,” Shannon panted as they peered out the window. “Watched all the way from Atlanta.”
“Out the back!” Mabel whispered. “Move it!”
A muffled shot fired, shattering the window above their heads, and a smoky cloud spread through the room. Mabel grabbed Rick and Shannon and led them crouching to the kitchen, then onto a screened back porch behind it. Rick’s eyes burned and he jerked off his shirt and handed it to Shannon.
“Over your eyes, nose!” he whispered loudly.
Somebody’s fist pounded on the front door as Mabel pulled Rick and Shannon down the steps off the back porch. Rick glanced over his shoulder, but nobody rushed them so he followed Mabel and Shannon, his shoes slipping on wet grass from summer dew. Seconds later, they reached the shore of the lagoon and darted behind the largest of three willow trees that bordered the water. The trees’ branches drooped to the ground, a drapery of soft green that obscured a small boat tied off on the trunk of the center tree.
“Here,” Mabel whispered, pointing to the boat.
Rick glanced back, then heard a crash as someone forced their way into the house. Blue light bathed the front yard and swished out and back across the sky.
Mabel untied the boat and pointed Rick to the front. “Only room for two,” Mabel whispered. “You and Shannon. I’ll go back, stall, misdirect.”
“We shouldn’t leave you,” Rick offered quickly.
“All they can do is arrest me, at worst I’ll stay in custody a few hours, then tell them where you went. That’s all the time you’ll need. Cops will show up at the cabin but you’ll be gone by then.”
Lights flicked on in Mabel’s house, one room at a time blinking bright as the cops searched them. Rick clambered into the boat, then held Shannon’s hand as she followed. “Keep this,” he whispered, handing Mabel Tony’s phone. “I already overused it.”
Mabel took the phone, leaned to Shannon, and gave her a quick hug. “I’ll be fine,” Mabel whispered. “You know where to take him but don’t stay no longer than necessary—they’ll come there pretty quick.”
“I’m aware,” Shannon answered as Mabel moved away. “You take care.”
They pushed off, the oar in Rick’s hands sliding quietly in and out of the still water. Mabel hustled to her house and Rick glanced back in time to see a policeman bound down the steps toward her. He and Shannon ducked lower; Rick holding his breath, the oar stilled. The policeman left Mabel behind, ran to the shore, and drew a pistol. A shot rang out, then Rick felt a sting in the upper half of his left shoulder and he doubled over in pain. Mabel rushed the cop and grabbed his arm as Shannon snatched the oar from Rick and began to row, her arms furious in and out of the water. Mabel’s voice carried across the water as she wrestled with the cop, but Rick couldn’t understand her muffled words. Pressing his hand over his wound, he felt blood between his fingers but kept the pressure on anyway as the boat skipped ahead, Shannon’s steady stroke putting distance between them and the officer on shore.
Still sitting in his jeep, Charbeau watched calmly as the police stormed Mabel Bridge’s house. Give them a chance, he concluded, let them handle the situation if they could. He heard a couple of shots and wondered if the cops had hit anyone but still didn’t move. Five minutes passed, then ten, and Charbeau’s patience grew a little thinner but still he waited. No reason to show himself just yet.
He checked his Glock in the moonlight—all in order. Then he climbed out of his jeep and leaned against the fender, his jaw clenched. A few minutes later the police started leaving the house, two, four, six. None of them spoke to him and he returned the gesture.
As the last cop pulled away—with no Carson in tow— Charbeau’s frustrations finally boiled over. Idiots, he fumed, incompetents. He’d called them after Shannon left the Atlanta station; given them her final destination; told them they’d probably find Carson there too. But they’d botched the pickup and now he had to clean up their shoddy work.
Leaving the jeep, he slid through the shadows to the backyard, the only direction from which Bridge and Shannon could have escaped. Quickly surveying the area, he spotted the willow trees and lagoon beyond them. Pulling a small pen light from his pocket, he hurried to the water’s edge and inspected the shore but saw nothing out of place. He ran the light up the side of the willow trees and spotted a metal ring screwed into the trunk of the center tree—obviously a place for a rope to tie off.
A boat, he concluded, Carson and Bridge had escaped across the lagoon. His eyes searched the water but all remained quiet. He bent to the water, ran a hand through it, then stood, wiped his hand on his pants, and headed back to his vehicle.
“The police screwed up the snatch,” he reported to Augustine by phone as he climbed back in. “Nobody in custody.”
“You’re certain they were there.”
“I followed Ms. Bridge to the front yard.”
“So we know Mr. Carson went there, at least temporarily.”
“Yes.”
“Any chance he left before she arrived?”
“Why come here in the first place if that was the plan? Makes more sense that he’d wait on her.”
“I’m sure you’re correct. So what’s the next step?”
“I ask somebody where our slippery couple went.”
“Mabel?”
“Who else?”
“Proceed as you think best.”
Charbeau put away the phone, started the jeep, and pulled it a few blocks down the street so Mabel couldn’t see it. Then he snuggled into his seat to wait. An hour or so, he figured, let her settle into bed. Then he’d kidnap her in the dark, force her to tell him where to find her meddlesome daughter and the surprisingly resourceful Rick Carson.
A smile crossed Charbeau’s thick face. Bridge and Carson intrigued him; people with a combination of talents— intelligence, adaptability, courage—a couple perhaps worthy of his best efforts. The idea of handling the two of them promised intense satisfaction, something he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
It will happen, Charbeau assured himself. All signs pointed to it. One day, and one day soon, he and the happy couple would meet again, and when they did, he expected to be the only one to leave the encounter alive.
23
The boat skidded against the bottom of the lake, then slid to a stop close to five miles from Mabel’s house and Shannon hopped out, tied it off on a pier, and turned to help Rick climb ashore. Holding his shirt tight to his wound, Rick gritted his teeth and grabbed her hand.
“You okay to move?” she whispered.
“Yeah, bleeding seems to have slowed, we need to keep going.”
“This way then,” Shannon whispered, dropping his hand and shouldering her backpack. “There’s a cabin about a mile away through these woods. Tell me when you need to rest.”
“Go.”
Rick followed Shannon as she led the way through a stand of thick pines, the moon her only light, her slender form moving confidently in spite of the dark. He found it tough to keep up and wondered again about her identity. No normal park ranger—man or woman—acted like her, took the chances she’d taken, demonstrated the skills she’d shown, all for a man she barely knew.
The woods offered no clear trail, and brambles and thorns pulled at Rick’s pants and nicked his hands, arms, and face. His shoulder throbbed and he grunted every time he moved too fast, and blood and sweat soaked his shirt. Mosquitoes buzzed in and out around his face and throat, and he wanted to scream. A sense of impending doom pounded through his veins. He thought of his dad, his mom, his own isolation. For the first time since his nightmare started, he really felt afraid.
A mysterious man tracked him; an equally mysterious woman protected him. Nothing made sense; everything felt unreal, like a scene out of a bad movie. His former life seemed distant, separate, as if he had never lived it and would never return t
o it. But if not, what life would he lead? He knew nothing else, had no other experience on which to draw, to depend. He felt lost; literally like a child dropped into the middle of a dark wood and told to find his way home. Right now, he didn’t know that he could, largely because he no longer knew what the word home meant.
He wondered if he’d die this way, in the middle of the night, his blood soaking the ground beneath his feet. He felt like stopping, sitting down on the brambles at his ankles, and letting it all end. But Shannon wouldn’t let him. She turned to him every few minutes, asked how he felt, stopped to check his wound. After awhile she grabbed his belt and pulled him when the terrain allowed, her grip stronger than he expected from such a slender woman.
It took close to an hour to reach the cabin, and sweat poured off Rick’s body when Shannon finally stopped in a small yard to let him catch his breath. He squatted, pulled his shirt off the wound, and touched the bare skin with his fingers.
“Bleeding seems to have stopped,” he panted.
“Need to get you inside,” Shannon whispered.
“Let me rest a moment.”
The moon’s glow showed a rusty truck sitting under a shed to his left and an old well by the truck. Shannon slipped to a bucket sitting by the well and pulled a key from beneath it. She stepped onto the cabin porch, opened the door, then moved back to Rick and helped him up. Seconds later, they were inside, the door shut behind them.
“It belongs to my uncle,” Shannon said, flipping on a single lamp and lowering her backpack as Rick stumbled to a sofa and lay facedown. “He lives in Maine in the summer, here in the winter. Hang on a second, I’ll get you some water.”
Rick watched her go, his shoulder burning with pain. When she returned, she handed him a glass of water, then left him again while he took the glass with his good hand and sucked down most of the refreshing liquid. A minute later, she entered the room once more, a wet washcloth and a small plastic bag in her hands.
“Let’s check this out,” she said, kneeling by the sofa. “See what we need to do.” She squeezed water onto the wound from the washcloth and swabbed the dried blood away. Rick tried to watch but couldn’t bend around far enough to see, so he gritted his teeth and held as still as he could.
“Top of the shoulder blade,” she said. “Looks like it missed the bone though. That’s fortunate.”
Rick winced but didn’t cry out as she swabbed the wound. After she’d removed all the blood, Shannon opened the plastic bag, pulled out a bottle of pills, took off the top, and told Rick to stick out his tongue.
“What are those?” he asked, indicating the pills.
“The bottle said Percocet. My uncle had some kidney stones not too long ago. You’re fortunate he left some here.”
Rick stuck out his tongue and she laid a pill on it, then gave him the last of his water and he swallowed.
“Good boy,” she said, opening a tube of ointment from the bag and applying a hefty glob to the wound. “This should help with infection for a while, but you’re going to need a doctor to dig that bullet out.”
Finished with the ointment, she lifted gauze and tape from the bag and dressed the wound. “There,” she said. “That’s the best we can do for now.”
She moved away and Rick closed his eyes and rested. When she came back, he looked up to see another washcloth in her hand. She knelt by the sofa again and started to wash his face, his neck, his chest. Rick relaxed and felt a little better, like he might actually live.
“Thank you,” he whispered as she finished.
“No problem. You stay still while I freshen up a little, then I’ll see what I can find to eat.”
Rick glanced around as she left—saw a sitting area with a brick fireplace, a sofa, three chairs, and a deer head over the mantle; nothing fancy. A couple minutes later, Shannon stepped back in and handed him a bottle of water and a stack of saltine crackers covered with peanut butter.
“You need to rest for a couple of hours before we move again,” she said. “Let that blood coagulate, then we’ll set our course.”
Rick swallowed a huge gulp of water and turned slightly so he could see Shannon better. “We have a course to set?” he asked, biting from a cracker.
“You have no idea.” She took a chair across from him.
“You think Mabel is okay?” he asked as his pain eased a touch.
Shannon nodded. “She’s a tough lady. She’ll call a lawyer, stall a while, then tell them what they want. Like she said, we’ll be long gone by the time anyone shows up here.”
Charbeau knew from the outset that Mabel Bridge offered him a most unusual challenge. Women like her knew a lot about hard knocks, and that made them largely immune to his normal tactics. Although beating her up would eventually break her, he suspected she wouldn’t crack fast enough for him to find Carson in the time frame he needed to find him. He also knew that offering cold hard cash would just insult her. Women, not even the weakest of them, didn’t generally put their kids in danger to beef up their bank account.
“You know who I am?” he asked Mabel, his face close to hers as she sat shackled in a straight chair beside her bed.
“I don’t know your name, but I know of your work,” she said calmly.
“I take it you’re not impressed by what I do.”
“Enemies of the Lord never impress me.”
He laid a hand on her cheek and patted it gently, but she tried to bite him, so he jerked his hand away before her teeth landed. “I see you’re not totally against violence.” He chuckled.
“Destroying evil by any means seems fine by my moral compass.”
“So you think I’m evil?”
“You don’t need me to answer that.”
“Where’s Rick Carson?” he asked, careful to avoid her teeth.
“Who’s he?”
“My momma always said I shouldn’t hit girls,” he said. “And I generally like to do what my momma said. But you’re pushing me hard.”
She snapped at him again and he smacked her lightly on the back of the head, then dodged left. “Games,” he said, “you want to play games.”
“It’s no game to me.”
“Where’s your daughter? You do know who she is, right?”
“She’s where you won’t find her.”
“Oh, I always find my prey, maybe not right off but soon enough.”
“You won’t find her by wasting your time trying to scare me.”
Charbeau chuckled and surveyed the room. Multiple photos decorated the walls. Shutters but no drapes covered the windows. A hand-carved cross hung on the wall over the center of the canopied bed. “You believe in Jesus, I see,” he said.
“With all my heart.”
“Where’s your Jesus now? Why ain’t he protecting you, your daughter?”
“She got away, didn’t she?”
“But you didn’t.” He faced her again. “Why is that? Why did the Lord let her escape but not you?”
“The Lord’s ways are mysterious. Not my place to understand all of them.”
He squatted to her but kept his distance from her teeth. “Look,” he offered gently. “I seen your type down in Louisiana all my life—Bible babes. My granny was just like you, tougher than dried shoe leather. Ladies like you got character, I get that. So I ain’t gone insult you with any more physical harm. I trust you’ll appreciate my generosity in that regard.”
“You’re a real sweetheart.”
“I need to find Carson,” he continued. “That’s all I want out of this. Not you, not your daughter. Just Carson.”
“Like I said, I don’t know anybody named Carson,” she lied again.
He shook his head. “I’m trying to be reasonable here, professional-like. But you ain’t cooperating.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
He paused, trying to figure a way out of his dilemma. Mabel perplexed him. “What do you care about Carson?” he asked. “And don’t give me that tripe that you don’t know the name of the
man you just helped escape. What’s he to you? To your daughter?”
“So that’s his name.” She almost smiled. “Shannon likes him, I think, nothing to it but that.”
He sighed, suddenly weary of the banter. “I’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “Who you are, who your daughter is. When I do . . .”
“When you do, what?”
He paused and she filled the silence. “You’ve asked me who I am, who Shannon is. So let me ask you something—why do you want Carson? What’s he to you?”
Charbeau grunted. “I’m the one asking the questions here.”
“Suit yourself.”
Charbeau rubbed his head, a migraine threatening. He had to find a way to pry what he needed from Mabel. But how? Nothing threatened her, so that meant he had to offer her something she wanted. “Okay,” he finally said as an idea occurred to him. “I’ll offer you a trade.”
“You don’t have anything I want.”
“Not money, my dear, nothing as mundane as that.”
“Nothing else either.”
He stared into her eyes. “Clues,” he said. “The one thing that interests you—clues to who I am, who I work for, what we plan to do.”
“I won’t give anybody up, not even for that.”
He slapped her, harder this time, then jerked away to avoid her snapping teeth. “I don’t expect you to give me anybody,” he agreed. “We trade, one tidbit for another—fair for fair, tit for tat. You see how it’ll work?”
Mabel’s eyes searched his and he saw interest in her face. “We call it Operation Domino,” he offered. “It’s a big deal, believe me on that. Now it’s your turn. How far away is your daughter?”
Mabel hesitated; bit her lip as he waited.
“I won’t know the direction,” he parried. “You give me the mileage, that’s all.”
“Within five,” Mabel said. “That won’t help you much.”
“Most likely within two weeks,” Charbeau said.
“The timetable for your operation?” Mabel asked.