“Orders, boss?”
“Whoever it is, they’re still a minute or two away. They stopped when they realized they couldn’t stealth us in a vehicle. They can’t see in at night through the windows Bum installed. We could turn on the lights and have a party—they are specially polarized, like sunglasses.
“Melissa and I will go to the front of the cabin. You take the rear. There is at least one large window and two turret-sized, shoulder-level windows on every wall. The turrets slide open—flip the latch if you need to. The view of the road and anything or anybody is outstanding. There is nothing but fifty feet of open ground from the tree line to the fence, three hundred and sixty degrees and as soon as the motion-detectors are tripped, it’ll be daylight out there. The panel here will show us the area of any motion and bring up the video surveillance for that part of the compound.
“Alternatively we’ve also got the video surveillance room where every inch of the grounds are covered at all times. I think our best move is to identify our visitors and decide the next course of action once the threat is identified.”
“Agreed,” said Manny.
Melissa nodded, her face a sheet of blankness.
“Em,” I said. “Me and you, baby. I go, you go. Hip to hip, okay?”
She nodded again, this time more confidently.
We took our places and waited impatiently for the show.
After about twenty minutes we could hear the sound of the vehicle crunching the gravel, the driver clearly having given up the clandestine approach. I assumed the twenty minutes equaled the formulation of a new plan. That plan was Bum Garvey’s Forerunner pulling fully up to the front gate. All the lights came on, but Bum’s windows were heavily tinted. I could not make out the driver but he was not as large as Bum, who went a solid six foot-four.
The driver reached out and pressed the intercom. There was a pause before anyone said anything and then:
“Hello, brother.”
For the second time in my life the world dropped away from my feet, leaving me suspended in weightless disbelief.
RECKONING
What will you do
on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?
Isaiah 3:10, The NIV Bible
13
THERE ARE times in most people’s lives where they must face a truth that for whatever reason does not compute as logical or possible inside their own minds. Trauma that has been buried away in a victim’s mind many times presents itself (when it finally does) in this way. For example, rape victims that deny they have actually been assaulted sexually too often put the truly savage moments in a place so far inside themselves even they know not where to find it even did they desire to.
When, say, a year later, the memories kick down the door behind which they’ve been denied as truth—as factual reality—and demand their rightful place amongst all memories, good and bad, the return of the images is not unlike an out-of-body experience where the victim is watching a third person entirely. It can be that difficult to accept, much less comprehend.
Such return of the forgotten begins as unbelievable, unreasonable, a complete shock to the system, and more than anything, a life-altering revelation.
But what people find, eventually, is that it is none of these things.
It is a reckoning.
A bill come due.
A loss never accepted fully, but rather dismissed by the nervous system.
But whatever form in which it comes or what time of life it chooses, a reckoning is nothing less than a demand for the balancing of the scales of truth.
For some reason, some period of time, perhaps from a completely different lifetime, the unavoidable has finally come calling. Five, ten, or a hundred years, it really doesn’t matter. It has come, it has always been coming because the debt has always been owed and when the person on whom the weight of the universe has dropped finally regains clarity, the realization becomes clear.
I owe this.
It is mine to pay or the creditor’s to forgive, but the most terrifying realization (and comfort, strangely enough) is that there is no more running.
It is time.
“Hard to wrap your head around,” Jax spoke into the intercom. “I get that, I honestly do. And I’m sorry—I wish it could be under more intimate circumstances but, well brother, it’s not. I’m here for my possession and you’re soon going to understand that—all shock and family dismay aside—you do not have a choice in this matter.”
I reached over and pressed the green button. “My own surprise notwithstanding, you’ve gone delusional in your absence if you think you’re taking anyone away from this cabin.”
“Do you remember the last time you told me I was your best friend in the world?”
“Labor Day weekend, on the houseboat you rented at Lake Havasu. A long time ago—a long time before you died.”
“Well, setting aside your clearly mistaken assumption that I somehow perished, that’s exactly right. But you’ll be pleased as a peach pit to know I have your true best friend—the one you didn’t ignore for years on end—right here in the car with me.”
“Jax, don’t.” It was cliché; it would prove ineffectual; it bordered on silliness, but it was all I could say. Half my brain was terrified for my friend, Bum, but the other half—the ruthless one—was sending “all hands on deck” orders to the once dormant platoons of guilt bunked down inside my heart.
“Inspiring, Bobby. Truly so. But if you don’t open the gate and allow us entry, I am going to soak Agent Garvey here in water and use a rubber baton to press him against his own electrified fence. And if you turn off the juice, I’m going to douse the man in gasoline and have a little bonfire outside the gate. He’s unconscious, by the way. Drugs and a good old-fashioned police beat-down with a baton will do that to a fella.”
Manny was by then at my side. “We can’t let him in,” he said.
“But we can’t watch Bum fry. I have no compunction at all that he’ll do it and he’ll do it as he dances a Scottish jig.”
“Bum would want you to save the girl,” Manny said.
Melissa looked at me with that doe-eyed “you swore” look.
“Bum is the reason I’m taking the risk. I think we can still get out of here. And let me make something clear to you, too, partner: Em is never going back to the bad guys. Never. Not if it means sacrificing you, Manolo. You satisfied?”
“Sorry, boss.”
I punched in the code and the gate slowly slid open. Jax drove the Forerunner through the opening and toward my parked squad car. Halfway there, Jax’s window still down, he drove through an infrared beam and five holes in the driveway spewed Xenon gas from the ground beneath the truck.
Jax didn’t even get the window halfway back up before the Forerunner rolled left, down the sloped embankment, and crashed nearly harmlessly into a boulder.
“We’ve got about half-an hour. And since I had no idea if the gas would work on whatever Jax has become, I can’t even count on that. Em, you gather our things and grab every piece of armory I laid out on the kitchen in bags. Manny you and I will secure Jax ASAP. Then we load him in my car.”
We didn’t have to wait long to leave the front of the cabin as the Xenon dissipates quickly and naturally into the atmosphere after discharge. Melissa loaded the guns, ammo, and other sundries into the back of the Pathfinder while Manny and I handcuffed and bound Jax’s chest, legs, and ankles where he sat, in the driver’s seat, and then struggled to move him into the rear of the Crown Vic.
“Melissa and I will drive Jax to the FBI. I’ll call Amanda on the way and have her meet us there. I’m going to gamble on trusting her team. They can secure him and Melissa.”
“But you said you weren’t letting me leave your side,” Melissa said.
“Amanda is twice the cop I am,” I told her. “I’d trust her with my life. I am going
to trust her with yours. Where I’m going, I can’t take you. I might as well take the fly to the spider, Em. You have to trust me. You’ll be safe with Special Agent Macaulay and her team.”
I hoped using Amanda’s name might help. From the look on Melissa’s face, it didn’t.
“You trust me, don’t you? That I’d never do anything I didn’t think was best for your safety?” I said.
Melissa nodded.
“This is what I believe will keep you safe.”
“Okay, Mac,” she said, a bit more confident than before. It would have to do.
“Manny. You get Bum to a hospital and then meet me at the parking garage we identified. You’re sure your friends will be there?”
“They’re not my friends,” he said, “but they’ll be there. Best back up in the city next to our brothers in blue.”
“Bum’s not going to be happy, staying behind. He’s going to wake up wanting to do things by the book.”
“I’ll tell them he needs a twenty-four hour psych eval,” Manny said.
“Nice. Time to jet.”
Manny nodded and jumped in the Forerunner. Melissa and I walked over to my unmarked, Jax still unconscious in the rear, doors locked, fortified steel between him and us.
“It scares me, riding with him,” Melissa said.
“Think of it this way: cops in the front seat, bad guys in the back.”
“Can I get a badge?”
I handed her mine. “You keep it safe for me, okay? Now it’s me trusting you.”
That got me a smile.
14
MEYER HAD slept through Jax’s visit to the Macaulay residence and the sleeping interrogation upstairs in the master bedroom. He’d arrived the day before and Amanda had picked him up at Denver International. She hadn’t been happy to see him but he forgave her. His presence never meant good things, he understood that. He was hoping someday that might change.
It was close to noon and he was just getting dressed after finishing the first truly hot shower he’d had in three months. There was a soft knock at the door.
“You decent in there?” Amanda said.
“One second,” Meyer said, and put on a polo shirt that was quickly tucked into his jeans. No official business today. “Sure, come in.”
Amanda opened the door and handed him a steaming cup of coffee with cream. “I just heard from Bobby finally.”
“Thank God,” Meyer said. “Where is he?”
“He’s on his way to my office.”
“The FBI?”
“Yep. Said he needs my help and he wants you to come, too.”
Meyer was jetlagged beyond reason and would much rather have crawled right back into the comfy downstairs guest room that doubled as his cousin’s home office. He swigged the hot coffee. “I’m ready when you are.”
“There are scones on the table downstairs. I just need to grab my cell, badge, etcetera, and then we’ll take off.”
Meyer turned to leave and Amanda followed. On her way out she noticed Meyer’s used towel lying in a crumpled mess on the wood floor. When she leaned over to pick it up, she glanced at the tattered sticker on his luggage.
Missoula International Airport.
Melissa was quiet driving back to the city, probably wondering the same thing I was: when would my brother wake up? We were a few miles from the city limits on top of Lookout Mountain cruising fast with lights on down Interstate 70 when our curiosity was ended.
“Brother. You never told me about the countermeasures. Smart man,” Jax said, still sounding groggy from the KO gas.
“Can’t take credit,” I said. “Bum made the upgrade after our fishing trip.”
“And it wasn’t like we were Facebook friends or anything deep like that.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your brother,” he said, laughing. “Who else would I be?”
“You don’t sound like Jax. You look like him, but not quite. What are you, some kind of duplicate?”
“People aren’t their bodies or their voices,” he said. “Listen to you, always the thinker. You should have read more of the Romantics. Less Asimov and Nietzsche.”
“If you were my brother, I wouldn’t have to cuff and hogtie you like a common dirtbag.”
“You need to because you’re finally coming around, not because I’m a criminal.”
“Coming around?”
“Stop talking to him,” Melissa whispered. “I don’t like him. He sounds like my dad did.”
“Daddy’s dead,” Jax said.
Melissa spun around in shock and anger. “Fuck you, you—dirtbag.”
“Nice mouth,” he said. “Maybe Rule was right to tear old Dad’s heart out and show it to him.”
I hit the brakes, skidding to a stop along the shoulder of the Interstate. I turned around and drilled my own eyes into his.
“You say another word to her and I will come back there and KO you myself. Talk to me or no one at all.”
“So I can tell you how her father went out like a sniveling coward?”
I got out of the car, opened the back door, clutched the fabric of his shirt, and began pummeling him with my fists. Over, and over again until he was bloodied and broken and barely conscious. “Say it again. Come on, do it. I’ll fucking kill you and leave you in the trees for the scavengers, you demon cocksucker.”
Jax lay on the backseat, silent but for the spitting of blood from his tattered mouth. I waited. I wasn’t kidding.
Nothing.
I got back in the car and drove back onto the roadway.
Melissa looked horrified and I knew at that particular moment there wasn’t anything I could do to wipe away the terror because she was likely as scared of me as of anyone else.
We reached the office of the Denver FBI just after Amanda. She didn’t need to explain the Melissa Grant situation, even to a team of accountants with weapons. I shouldn’t have been so hard on them or glib, but I couldn’t shake the inexplicable surety that whatever happened in the next twenty-four hours was either the end or the beginning of everything. I needed law enforcement I could trust and I needed them in force.
That was the next stop. I could not risk climbing any further up the FBI chain; I had already asked too much of Amanda, essentially harboring a kidnap victim (although I had not told her what I knew—or at least suspected on good authority—about Spencer Grant, most-wanted).
“Meyer,” I said, and embraced my priest cousin. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I you, Bobby.”
“I need you to come with us,” I told him.
“Bobby, only you can wield the weapon of our ancestry.”
“You know that’s not true. You can’t have forgotten Tilson Wayne. Any member of our clan—”
“You and I both know that a cousin is weak blood at best, and that I am too much of a weakling and, I admited, a coward, to do what must be done.”
“Meyer, that’s just not true.”
“It should be you, Bobby. Under the circumstances,” he slid his gaze up and back, toward Jax, or whatever he was.
“Then you, old friend, are charged with keeping my girl here safe.” I pulled Melissa to me. “You’ll find no more trustworthy a man, even if he is a priest,” I told her.
“Count on me for that. I’ve got the best cop in the city with me,” he said, smiling at Amanda.
I turned to her. “We can still rearrange this. We haven’t gone too far, not yet.”
“Don’t even think of pulling me out of this,” she said. In addition to loving me, she’d watched her comrades die mercilessly at the hands of our bad guys.
“Just thinking of you and your career,” I said.
“I know.”
I kissed her and grabbed Jax by the cuffs and led him out into the descending night.
“You want what?” said Len Brighton, sitting behind the desk at the S.W.A.T. and Violent Fugitive Unit headquarters.
“You and a dozen men and women you’d trust with you
r family’s lives.”
“Bobby. You know I respect you, but—”
“Len, you’ve now seen some of what I have. I know you trust me, though you might have a hard time admitting it. These creeps hurt Bum Garvey. They’ve killed children. But I need this off the clock.”
Len was old–school. He was too much like me and I was counting on that cop factor, way down in his soul. The law enforcement officers, or LEOs, who cared about justice above protocol.
“I have a dozen, maybe a few more,” he said. “But my guys are worth three of yours any day of the week.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second,” I said.
I gave him the coordinates of the abandoned parking garage. “I just need an external perimeter. Containment. But it may not be easy.”
“Walk in the park,” he said, but I heard the tremolo of unease in his voice.
I had one more call to make.
As I drove Jax, my brother, the thing—I didn’t know what to call him—across the city, he was silent for a while and I was grateful. Too bad it didn’t last.
“I’m not myself,” he said, and I took it as a poor attempt at humor.
“Fuck you.”
“Nah, not this time, brother. I mean it. It’s me and you. I’m sorry for all this. I don’t understand it much more than you.”
“I doubt that. Tell it to the dead women.”
“Spencer Grant killed all those women, and he would have killed his own daughter if—”
“If?”
“Never mind. I never was any good at convincing you, was I?”
“We’re light years beyond those days, Jax.”
“We’re never beyond those days, Bobby.”
15
R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning Page 14