by Gregory Kay
“That’s pretty obvious to anybody with eyes,” Alison broke in, “The question is, do you like him?”
“Yeah...I mean he’s a nice guy...”
“That’s not exactly what we mean,” Kathy told her, but she was saved from having to answer by Joe Parks’ voice from the front door.
“Allie, come in here.”
Alison promptly went, and Luke winked and smiled at her as she passed him on the steps to let her know everything was going to be okay.
“Well?” Kathy asked as soon as he approached. Fiona was standing close to the woman; she couldn’t ask – it wasn’t really any of her business, although turnabout would definitely be fair play in this case – but she was damned if she was going to miss the results just the same.
Luke briefly explained, received another grateful hug from Kathy who promptly excused herself and went inside to hear things firsthand. He saw Fiona staring at him, and asked, “What?”
“Lean down here.”
He did, and she grabbed his face in both hands and gave him a quick, hard kiss.
“That was beautiful!” she informed him, “totally, abso-freaking-lutely beautiful!”
“Well, I try.”
And he did try, for another kiss anyway, and had just slipped his hands around her tiny waist when the door flew open and Alison came out with a skip in her step, happy tears in her eyes, and a grin from ear to ear. A surprised look crossed her face when she saw what they were about to do, but it quickly passed and her smile grew even bigger, her expression a silent but at the same time loud and clear shout of 'and now I know!'
“I didn’t mean to interrupt!”
“It’s alright,” Fiona told her, letting go quickly, her cheeks turning dark pink, and Luke remarked, “You seem awfully happy for someone who’s still grounded.”
“You know good and well what I’m happy about!” She tried her best to crush him in a tight hug before turning to Fiona and saying, “He is simply the most wonderful man on Earth!”
Looking at Fiona over Alison’s head, Luke said, “You could agree with her, you know.”
Fiona tried to smile, tried to pass it off as a joke, but that wasn’t going to happen. She did agree, and that was the problem.
CHAPTER 20
“What the hell!”
Fiona had been deep into her interview with Alison for the entirety of the short trip, half-turned in the seat and conversing through the opened sliding Plexiglass partition with the girl who sat in the back in the space usually reserved for prisoners. She had intended to sit back there herself to make the process easier, but Alison had firmly insisted that the reporter “sit up front with Luke,” and had worn the perfect shit-eating grin of a successful matchmaker the whole way. Now they were coming down Potter’s Creek Road, and were nearing the turnoff where they had found the bones and the makeshift satanic temple when they spotted a brown Jeep Cherokee on the south side of the road, with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources seal on the door and a green state vehicle tag on the rear. It was a standard game warden vehicle, but what was completely non-standard is that the two brown uniformed occupants were outside it, had a third, un-uniformed person down in the gravel, and were kicking the hell out of him. Another car was sitting on the north side of the road with its driver’s door hanging open, and all three of them instantly recognized Johnny’s battered Camaro, and knew who was on the receiving end of that beating.
Alison screamed and Luke loudly said, “Shit!” Instantly sliding to a stop and slamming the shift into park, he was out the door before the cruiser stopped rocking.
“That’s enough!” he shouted, and, sparing him little more than a glance, one of the pair in the warden’s uniform growled, “We don’t need your help, officer! We’ve got this!” before kicking Johnny squarely in the face, bouncing his head off the road.
Both the wardens were extremely physically fit, but they were smaller than Luke, and they quickly discovered that two-hundred-twenty-five pounds charging at full speed, backed not only by muscle but by anger and adrenaline, made one hell of an impact.
Alison was still shouting and struggling with the door handle that, like those on the interior of the rear seat of all police cruisers, was designed not to open from the inside. Fiona didn’t have that problem; she was already on her way out when Luke stiff-armed the pair, one with each arm, sending a man staggering halfway across the road and knocking the other flat on his back in the gravel.
“I said that’s enough, damn it!” Luke was yelling, and the one who had been knocked down rolled backward in a continuous motion and back to his feet, even while the other reached for his pistol.
Thinking it was simply overzealous law enforcement officers he was dealing with, Luke hadn’t expected that, and hesitated an instant too long, and the game warden’s weapon was already coming out of its holster.
He is going to kill Luke! Shoot him!
The voice literally screamed through Fiona’s head in a psychic blast, and her body reacted before her mind realized what was happening. Her hand shot into her jacket pocket and came out with the .38 and a sound of ripping cloth when the front sight hooked on the lining.
Even without the earplugs, the revolver’s roar seemed strangely quiet, at least to her. Fiona had no idea how the gun had gotten into her hand; she had no conscious memory of drawing it, let along firing it, but had simply done it. The Cherokee’s driver’s side window exploded into spiderweb fragments right behind the one drawing his weapon, and she definitely got the attention of everyone involved. All three froze in place, unsure of what had just happened at first.
“Put that down!” she yelled, or rather squeaked due to her nerve-tightened vocal cords, then followed that with an equally tense and high-pitched, “Drop it or I’ll shoot!”
Oh shit, I feel like I’m going to piss my pants!
Luke stood absolutely still with his hand on his pistol butt; he hoped and prayed Fiona wouldn’t shoot again, wouldn’t have to shoot, but if she did, he sure as hell didn’t want to step into her line of fire. He knew he should say something to somebody to try to diffuse the situation, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what it would be. Dimly he was aware that someone – presumably Alison – was yelling inside the car, but he didn’t have time to worry about it just now.
“All right,” he said, as calmly as he could, motioning with his left hand while his right one remained firmly wrapped around his Glock, “Everybody needs to just settle down for a minute...”
His voice trailed off when he saw the two men exchange knowing looks with hard, cold eyes that didn’t belong to any game warden he’d ever meant, and suddenly a strange voice almost shouted inside his head.
Do something, Luke! They will kill you all!
He’d analyze the voice later; for now, he started to draw, and his two adversaries did the same
There was a loud clack-clack of a racking slide that instantly got everyone's undivided attention, followed by a “Don’t even think about it!”
Alison popped up over the opposite side of the cruiser, and she had the car’s 12 gauge Mossberg out of the rack and leveled across the roof. Her blue eyes were wide and wild and crazy, and she was blubbering, the tears and snot running down her face, but there was no doubt she was ready to blast somebody, and the two wardens carefully eased their hands away from their weapons. It didn’t matter if it was a seventeen year-old schoolgirl holding the gun or not, or how fit and experienced the men might be; a charge of double-ought buckshot from twenty feet away would almost certainly be fatal.
“You bastards!” she shouted at them, spraying slobbers, then she called out, “Johnny! Are you alright?”
“I think so,” a dazed, garbled voice mumbled, and he started to move, but Luke motioned him back with his free hand, as the other was involved in aiming a pistol.
“Stay down for a minute,” the deputy ordered quietly, never taking his eyes off the others or letting his muzzle waver.
&
nbsp; “I-I got on the radio and called for help; someone will be here in just a minute,” Alison informed them, and Luke nodded without looking at her.
“Good idea; I reckon they’ll get this sorted out, and we’ll figure out just what the hell is going on here.”
The one who had gotten knocked down looked at the other, something passed between them, and they nodded as one. Keeping their hands well clear of their holstered weapons, they turned headed for their Cherokee.
“Hold it right there!” Luke commanded, and one of them laughed.
“Why?” he asked sarcastically over his shoulder, “Are you going to shoot a law enforcement officer in the back for getting in his car?”
“You’re no law enforcement officers!”
The taller one opened the door and grinned tightly back at him.
“But you don’t know that for sure, do you?”
The man was right, and they could do no more than watch as the pair drove away, but not before one of the men tossed a piece of advice out the shattered window.
“Just a friendly warning: you’d do well to stay clear of this end of the TNT. All of you.”
“What kind of a damned mess have you gotten into this time?”
That had been Harry’s first words when he heard their story, and Luke wasn’t at all surprised; he’d been wondering the same thing himself for the past hour.
The first thing he had done was to call the local game warden, then the Department of Natural Resources in Charleston – using his cell phones because a lot of people in the area had scanners, and they didn’t want to try to describe what had happened over open air until they figured out just exactly what had happened – and both contacts confirmed they not only had no people in the area, but that particular year’s model of Jeep Cherokee had been retired from the Department two years before.
Then, while Luke called the Sheriff, Harry contacted the State Police headquarters to make sure nobody was running an undercover operation in the area; they weren’t.
“In other words, they were impersonating officers, and I let them go!” Luke growled at the sheriff in a voice full of self-disgust, but Pete, who had arrived only ten minutes after he got the call, at the same time as the ambulance for Johnny, put a reassuring hand on his deputy’s shoulder.
“Don’t be hard on yourself; you did the right thing, or at least the only thing you could have done under the circumstances. I would have done the same.”
“What, let them just drive away?”
“Better than shooting them when they were walking away, especially when you didn’t know for sure they weren’t law enforcement officers, isn’t it?” Jerking his head in the direction of Fiona and Alison, he added, “And it was a hell of a lot better decision than getting in a shootout with a woman and two kids in the line of fire where they could get hurt or maybe even killed, wasn’t it?”
That particular revelation hit Luke like a punch in the gut, so hard it was slightly nauseating.
“Yeah,” he admitted, “it was a hell of a lot better than that.”
“Good. Now, why were they beating up Johnny?”
Luke looked over at the boy, sitting on the hood of his Camaro while the paramedics dabbed at his cuts and bruises and Alison sobbed with relief that he wasn’t hurt too badly. That last part just didn’t make sense.
Any police officer on the job for any length of time, even in a quiet place like Mason County, sees the results of violence many times throughout his career. Luke knew from experience what condition someone who'd been beaten and stomped by two more someones should be in, and yet Johnny had little more than cosmetic damage.
“They pulled him over with a blue dashboard flasher and told him they were going to impound his car for being in an illegal area: over there, on the other side of the road by the signs. Johnny says he told them he wasn’t over there, so they had no right to take his car, and they dragged him out and beat the shit out of him.
“Thing is, that beating was meant to hurt, but that’s all. By all rights, he should be in ICU, but all he got was a little banged up. They hit him and kicked him in various pressure points, almost every blow landing where it would cause the most pain and the least chance of fatal damage. It was controlled, like they didn’t want to send him to the hospital, only make him comply and give them the car. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Why do you think they’d do that?”
Luke shook his head, baffled.
“I don’t know. The only possible reason I can think of is that they wanted to minimize the impact of the incident. He’s the star quarterback; if they had put him in the hospital – for that matter, they both had guns and could've shot him – it would have made a big stink in the papers. On the other hand, if he'd complied and given them the car, or even if we hadn’t shown up and they’d just beaten him up and taken it like they were trying to do, it wouldn’t have been more than a blip on the radar screen. Things didn’t escalate until I showed up; then, well...” He paused. “Then they were ready to kill if necessary to accomplish whatever it was they had in mind.”
Pete took off his hat and fiercely rubbed his bald head in frustration.
“But why were they so interested in keeping a low profile?”
“Damned if I know.”
“Sheriff!” Harry called out from the lowered window of his cruiser while raising a cell phone in his hand, “Come over here for a minute; they want to talk to you.”
Pete excused himself and got in the car with the Trooper, then closed the door behind him, and Luke went back to stand with the other three while the paramedics packed up and put away their gear.
Looking at Johnny, he asked, “How are you doing?”
The boy shrugged and he grinned through puffy lips to show blood-stained teeth.
“Been worse, I reckon. At least they didn’t hit as hard as Allie’s dad.”
“That’s because they didn’t want to.” Turning to Fiona and Alison, he told them, “As for you two, pulling guns on what you believed to be armed law enforcement officers was a damned stupid thing to do. It was also a brave, gutsy thing, and you saved not just my life, but all our lives by doing it. Thank you both.”
Both of them smiled, even though they both still looked a little pale from the trauma of the experience. Then Fiona’s brows abruptly drew together when she picked up on part of what he had said.
“We believed to be law enforcement officers? Are you saying those weren’t game wardens?”
“No, they weren’t; they weren’t cops of any kind.”
“Then who were they?”
“Carjackers,” Pete said as he walked up, Harry at his side, “They were impersonating police officers in order to steal vehicles. Johnny was apparently their first victim.”
“Carjackers, my ass!” Luke hissed, “I know what I saw, and those weren’t any run-of-the-mill carjackers. Those guys were professionals...actually, they seemed almost military!”
“They probably were; a handful of veterans coming back from over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or any war, for that matter, will turn to crime. That’s given; a few people just miss the excitement. They were just more organized than most.”
Luke opened his mouth to ask what kind of organized criminals would want to carjack an old, beat-up, piece of shit Camaro, but the Sheriff quickly cut him off.
“Whatever they were no longer matters to you, however; since you’re personally involved, you now have a conflict of interest. The case officially belongs to the State Police now, and you’re to leave it strictly alone.”
“But – “
“Come here, Luke.” Pete punctuated his actions by putting an apparently-friendly arm around his deputy’s shoulders, turning him, and leading him away from the others just far enough that his urgent whispers would not be overheard.
“I said that’s it! Leave it be!”
Luke was livid; his cop’s instinct for a lie had kicked into overdrive, and he knew that was exactly what he was bein
g told right now.
“Tell me one thing; who the hell are these people and why are you covering up for them?”
“I don’t know who they are!” the Sheriff hissed back in return, “But I know we’ve been ordered to turn it over to the State Police and leave it the hell alone!”
“Ordered by who? The County Commissioner? The Governor?”
“I can’t tell you that; I really don’t know who it is, but I know it’s a lot higher than the Governor.”
“Feds?”
“Yes.”
Luke looked at him levelly with a cold yet somehow savage gleam in his eye, and his voice was calm, hard and clipped.
“Funny thing about that, Pete; the Feds didn’t vote you into office, and they don’t sign our paychecks. The people of Mason County are responsible for that, people like that boy’s parents, and they’re the ones we’re sworn to protect. If that duty interferes with that bunch in Washington, then so be it; they can kiss my ass. If I find these assholes, the FBI or Homeland Security or whoever the hell they are, can come down here and pick them up out of your jail cell...and that’s if they’re lucky!”
“You’re forgetting I’m the one who signs your paycheck, and after that little outburst – “
Luke cut him off with an upraised finger pointed right at the end of the sheriff's nose; he was about to play a card he had been holding back for a long time.
“Before you say anything else, you’d better listen to this! I’ve put up with a lot of shit over the years over who I could arrest and who I couldn’t, who got special favors and who got no slack at all, all because of local politics. Grandaddy taught me that and I understand it; it goes with the job, and if I have to let some councilman’s dad off for DUI or smooth things over the next time the prosecutor’s son tries to shoplift yet another six-pack, I can live with that, because nobody got hurt. What I can’t live with – what I won’t live with – is anybody hurting the people here, and I’ll do anything it takes to put a stop to it, and that includes spilling everything I’ve learned over the years about every last career politician in this county, including you: all the special treatment, all the bribes, all the affairs with each other’s wives, all those pounds of weed that seem to mysteriously shrink between arrest and trial. I’m not stupid; I knew I might find myself in a situation like this with you or the powers that be at some point in time, so I’ve filed all that information away – names, dates, the works – in a safe place. Granddaddy did the same thing, and I’ve got every potential scandal he collected over the decades too, filed away right along with them.”