The Hunters Series Box Set

by Glenn Trust

  “Girl talk.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Pamela Towers doesn’t engage in girl talk. If she came to Everett to see you, she had a purpose. I’d be interested to know what it was.”

  Sharon took a deep breath. “She’s worried.”

  “Is that a fact? What about?” George’s voice had taken on a hard tone. Intruding into their personal life was not acceptable. It crossed a line. There had better be a good reason.

  “It’s more than that.” She closed her eyes seeing his face, his eyes looking into hers waiting.

  “What?”

  “I’m worried. Hell, I’m scared Mackey, like a little girl. I don’t get scared, but I am...more frightened than I’ve ever been.”

  He sighed. “You know, if I could change everything, I would.” Pamela Towers forgotten, his voice became softer. “Then I think about it all, what happened that day. I don’t think I would do anything different, even if I could go back and replay the whole thing. If it matters, I’m worried too…scared.” He closed his eyes and leaned back on the pillow, thinking of her face, imagining it next to him, talking in bed. “I’m not like you. I get scared all the time.”

  “You, scared Mackey? I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.” He tried to explain. “Being afraid doesn’t mean you don’t face things. Just means you push the fear down and do what you have to do.”

  “So what are you afraid of, right now?”

  “Losing you. It’s the biggest fear I’ve ever known.”

  There, he said it. It was the question Towers had asked. Do you want to lose each other? Sharon spoke quietly. “It’s what I’m afraid of too.” She took a deep breath. “Do something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t let them do this to you…to us. Don’t let Klineman and Swain steamroller you, crush you for their own political purposes. Whatever happened in the woods with that murdering freak, letting them use you up, destroy you would be worse. Don’t let them.”

  “I can’t pretend…say things that aren’t true about it. Whatever happens, it has to be because everything is out…finished, clean, no loose ends hanging over us the rest of our lives.” He paused, thinking what else he could say. There was nothing. “I can’t explain.”

  “You don’t have to explain. I know you Mackey. Just think about something for me.”

  “What?”

  “We are both caught up in this. We never wanted it, but we are. I’m a fighter too, and I can’t stand by and just let them plow you under. I’ll do what I have to, to stop them.”

  “There’s nothing to do. The trial has to run its course.”

  “There is something. You can stop playing dead with the lawyers…let them help you...cooperate.”

  “I am cooperating. I just can’t let them paint it into something it wasn’t.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about Swain or Klineman or the governor. I care about you…us.”

  The sudden burst of profanity made him smile. “That’s my girl,” he said laughing.

  “Oh shut up and listen. Whether you think it or not, George Mackey is not some super hero, above it all. You are a man. The same things that affect other people, affect you. You saw the bodies; you chased the killer across the state. He fired at you, tried to kill you, and me for that matter, and you confronted him alone in the woods. Those are things that might make reasonable people believe you are not the desperate killer cop that Swain is trying to paint you.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Shut up!” She lowered her voice, fighting back the frustration and the tears. “You don’t have the right to do this to us. I love you…I need you.” Her sobs were audible over the phone. “Be you, Mackey. Face things on your own terms. Tell the truth; don’t leave anything out, but let them save you…save us.”

  For a long while, they lay on their beds separated by distance, connected by the thread that held them together, the love that had grown between them. George felt the thread being pulled thinner, taught, almost to the point of snapping. What then? The world would be dark, empty and alone.

  “I’ll try.”

  It wasn’t much, but for George Mackey it was a great deal. Sharon knew it and knew that if he said it, he would…try. It was the best she could hope for.

  79. Mostly None

  The door to the back office opened and closed and Big Luke and Henry Schulls stepped through into the bar. For an instant, Marco caught a glimpse of the big man, Roy Budroe, huddled over the desk looking at a map, surrounded by the military looking men who spoke Spanish. The scene had the look of a general drawing up battle plans with his staff.

  Budroe was back at Pete’s Place. Now was the chance to take him if they could get some backup there. Marco began easing his way to the door.

  “All right. Gather round.” Henry Schulls called out to the dozen or so bikers in the bar. “You too Bono. Get your ass over here.”

  Ponce looked up curiously from the table with his redneck friends at the other end of the bar. He exchanged glances with Marco. Something was up.

  “Everybody stays close. No one leaves.” Schulls looked at the bikers gathered around him. “This is what we been payin’ you for. Now it’s time to earn it. We are goin’ to war.”

  “What the fuck’s that mean?” One of the bikers who had been on the collection detail at the dealer’s farmhouse in Florida spoke up. The other bikers called him ‘Dud’, short for Dudley, his name and because they said he shot blanks when he went with one of the girls. Dud had been the one so hot to kill the drug dealer and his wife to set an example. “I didn’t sign up for no war. I signed up to run drugs, make some money.”

  “You signed up for whatever the fuck we tell you to do.” Schulls looked at him matter-of-factly, waiting for any discussion on the point.

  Dud looked around. None of the other bikers had any comments or objections, and Big Luke was staring a hole through Dud’s chest. There was no further discussion.

  “Like I was sayin’, we’re goin’ to war. There’s some heavy shit gonna go down and we are gonna hunker down here. Liable to be lot of local law comin’ here soon. They’ll be sorry they showed up in Roydon. Here. When it’s over, we own the county.”

  “Own the county? What’s that mean?” Marco looked at Schulls calmly.

  “Means we’ll control the law here, Bono. Them we don’t control will be gone…or dead. That simple. This little piss hole of a county is gonna be ours.” He looked around the group and smiled, something Henry Schulls did only rarely. “You boys are getting’ in on the ground floor. From here on, the sky’s the limit. This operation is going nationwide, global even, and you’re sittin’ right at the heart of it all. Just one thing…” He paused, the lieutenant looking his troops in the eye before battle. “First we got to fight our little war.

  From across the bar, Gary Poncinelli tried to pick up on what was happening with the bikers. Marco took the bandanna from around his neck and wrapped it around his wrist, knotting it in place. It was a warning, Marco’s way of telling him something was going down…something big. He didn’t know what, but he could at least, give the team a heads up.

  Ponce rose unsteadily from his chair. “Well, boys, think I’ll call it a night.”

  There were drunken, half-asleep murmurs from his drinking buddies as he stumbled to the door. Outside, the night air was humid and heavy. The neon beer signs in the window buzzed electrically.

  He turned to his pickup parked at the end of the building, away from the motorcycles.

  “No one leaves.”

  “Huh?” Ponce looked around.

  “No one leaves. Back inside.” The man was young, clean cut and spoke with a Spanish accent. He was one of the military types that had been hanging around Pete’s Place.

  The four men had been standing in the shadows at both ends of the building. All were armed, semiautomatic pistols in their hands. One had a high-powered rifle sl
ung over his shoulder. The others had AK-47s. It was a fire team, there to take out threats and give warning if necessary. He would have loved to get a look at the serial numbers on the AKs.

  “Get moving.” The leader of the fire team motioned with his pistol back to the door.

  “Right, right…geez take it the fuck easy with that thing.”

  Ponce stumbled back through the door, and staggered into a chair, deliberately making noise. The bikers, still meeting with Schulls and Luke turned at the noise. Marco exchanged a brief questioning look with him.

  “Well, I reckon we’re staying the fuck here tonight.” Ponce pushed the chair aside with his leg and stumbled towards the table with his redneck friends. “Got some badass boys outside don’t want to let us leave.” He called to the bar. “Beer. Give me another beer.”

  Lonna pulled one from the cooler well and slapped it down on the bar. “Get your ass over here and get it.”

  Marco watched Ponce’s drunken act while his mind whirled away at the possibilities of getting word out. Guards outside, bikers inside, Schulls and Big Luke running things here, Budroe and the military types in the back office. The possibilities, he realized, were slim to none…mostly none.

  80. Don’t He Ever Sweat?

  It was after midnight when the caravan left Pete’s Place. Roy Budroe’s Cadillac Escalade was the third of the five cars in the procession. If it was meant as a subterfuge for security purposes, it would not have not fooled anyone watching. The Escalade was always Budroe’s choice in vehicles. Everyone knew it. Peña had even suggested that they use a different vehicle, but Budroe would not hear of it. His need to assert himself, to take the fight to those who had made him run, and to let them know that he was bringing the battle, overrode all other concerns.

  It didn’t matter this night. No one was watching. There were two undercover officers at Pete’s, and that’s where they stayed, both playing their roles and both unable to follow or warn anyone that something big was about to happen. The room full of bikers made sure of that.

  After a few miles on the back roads, when it was certain that no one was following, the other vehicles, two vans and two pickups, both loaded with Peña’s men, peeled out of the caravan leaving the Escalade to conduct Budroe safely back to the doublewide, his hidden temporary headquarters in the woods of northern Florida.

  There were two guards in the Escalade with them. Peña drove. Budroe sat silent for most of the trip, smoking and staring out into the night.

  When they were nearing the turn off onto the dirt road that led to the doublewide, Budroe cracked the window down to let the cigar smoke escape. “I’m almost there.”

  Peña nodded, eyes on the road. “Yes, we should be there in half an hour.”

  “Not that.” He lowered the window all the way and leaned to the side, letting the air rushing by blow into his face. “Me. I’m almost there.”

  Peña turned his head briefly to look at the man. Budroe had hired him, paid him exceedingly well and included him in much of the decision-making these last months. In some ways, he admired the crime boss. He was course, harsh and deadly, but in his own way he could lead men. That was a quality that Peña respected wherever he found it. Seeing him lean to the window, the night air rustling the thin hair on his head, he discerned Budroe’s meaning. “Yes. I suppose it has been a long journey for you, to get to this point

  “You ain’t got no idea.” He pulled the lighter from his shirt pocket and rekindled the cigar. “I was fourteen when I finally had it out with my pap. He was big. I was too, but not as big as him. We fought; he nearly beat me to death, but I bloodied his nose. My mama and sisters cried and tried to stop the fight. Wasn’t any use. Neither one of us would stop. Finally, he sat down in the dirt to catch his breath. I picked up a two by four lying in the yard and brained him with it. He just watched me pick it up, sitting there panting out of breath. I guess he didn’t think I’d use it. There was surprise in his eyes when I swung it like a baseball bat, going for a home run. I remember the thud of wood against his head, the crack of his skull.”

  “You killed your father?” Peña looked at Budroe, assessing and knowing that what he said was true.

  “Can’t see how I didn’t, though I didn’t stay around to find out. I hit the road that night.”

  “And your mother, your sisters?”

  “Never saw them again. Went back once, years later. The old shack we lived in was there, run down and leaning to one side, but still there. Everyone was gone. Never did find out what became of them.”

  “How did you…” Peña wondered if he should pry any further into this dark man’s past.

  A soldier, Peña had killed men, in battle or as a requirement of a contract that he was bound to fulfill. But his father still lived in the same shack where he had raised Marques and his brothers and sisters. It was at the edge of a state-run tobacco farm in Cuba. He still wrote to his father, went to visit when he could. He could not imagine harming him, or being harmed by him.

  “How did I, what?” Budroe looked at him. “Get into this business?” He shrugged. “Not hard to figure out. Fourteen years old with nothing but the clothes on my back, I had to find a way to get by. Went to work cutting timber in the swamps for a while. Some of the boys liked to ease the pain of the long days by drinking, some used drugs, others needed women or gambling to make them forget what a shit hole they were stuck in. I saw that the ones making the real money were the ones that gave them the booze, or drugs or women or a backroom card game. Decided that was the life for me.

  “So I saved my pay, scraped together every cent I could. Didn’t do what the others did. No drugs, booze, women. None of that. I put together a little stake and started buying and selling drugs. After a while, I was giving them boys whatever they wanted…for a profit.

  “Then I started looking for some place to set up, permanent like. Found Pete’s Place there in Roydon. I had the money to buy it. Didn’t take much, I got it cheap. Built it into something.”

  He looked at Peña. “After tonight there won’t be no stopping. I’m gonna run everything from Georgia to California, and when that’s done I’ll move north, take it all.”

  “An empire.” Peña nodded. “Very ambitious.”

  “That’s right, a fucking empire. And anyone who tries to get in my way is going to pay. Starting tonight.”

  The lights of the doublewide were visible through the trees up ahead. When they rolled into the clearing, Ramón Guzman stepped onto the front porch. The night was hot and humid. Guzman looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of the Caribbean edition of GQ.

  “Look at that son of a bitch.” Budroe pushed the door open and stood beside the Escalade stretching. “Don’t he ever sweat?”

  81. Peaceful Nights

  “Damn needle in a haystack.”

  “What’s that?” Rince turned his head toward Mike Darlington, who was leaning as far as he could to see what could be seen on the ground in the dark.

  Mike pulled his eyes away from the terrain below. “Needle in a haystack. Three hundred and fifty miles of state line between Florida and Georgia. All we know is Budroe went somewhere just over the line to some doublewide in the woods. Not a hell of a lot to go on.”

  Rince nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty much a longshot.” He shrugged with a smile. “It’s something to do. All said and done, I guess I’m okay with it. And who knows, we might get lucky and find the son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, we might.” Mike looked at the pilot. “You been doing this a while with them, the OSI?”

  “Few years now I guess. Started when we were just a task force working on the ‘Term Limits’ case.” He nodded. “We’ve been through some shit.”

  “George told me about the first time you flew him.”

  “Yep, over to Savannah.”

  “Said he was ready to beat you to death when you landed. Was sure you were banking and turning just to see if you could make him sick.” Mike laughed.

  Ri
nce grinned. “Wasn’t that bad. Bought him some beer for the return flight. He calmed down quite a bit.”

  “So let me ask you a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are we wasting our time up here?”

  Rince shook his head. “I’ve burned up a lot of fuel, but none of it’s been wasted since I’ve been with the OSI. Sometimes what I do up here helps out, sometimes not so much. Never really think of it as wasted, just part of the process.”

  “Guess I’m just an old ground pounder. Don’t’ have the patience for this.”

  “Yeah.” Rince nodded. “It’s a different world up here. Kind of pure. Just you, the plane, the sky. Not so complicated as down there. That’s why I like it.” He looked at Darlington. “That’s why I couldn’t do what you, and George and the others do.”

  The lights of the traffic on I-95 became visible below. Rince banked the plane over Roydon and Pete’s Place. Everything was dark and quiet. If you didn’t know better, it could have been a peaceful little village nestled away in the country instead of the snake-pit center of an expanding criminal network.

  “Time to head in.” Rince pointed at a gauge. “Getting low on fuel. We’ll land, gas up and get up in the air again tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Mike watched Roydon and Pete’s Place disappear behind them as Rince lined the Cessna up for the approach into Everett. He felt himself relaxing for the first time since strapping in next to Rince that day. Like a day hunting without seeing a buck, the tension and anticipation dissipated, replaced by a resolution to do better the next day. At least their little war in Pickham County was peaceful tonight.

  82. No Time For Tears

  They were careful men, methodical. They had done this before.

  The two vehicles, a pickup and a minivan, slowly cruised the last quarter mile with their lights off. Pulling onto a dirt road on the right side, they proceeded another hundred yards around a bend and then turned around on the narrow trail so that they were facing in the direction they had come. Maneuvering in the soft sand, they made almost no sound. Their movements would have been inaudible to anyone standing more than a few feet into the surrounding woods.