The Hunters Series: Volumes 1-3

by Glenn Trust

  The cigarette glowed brightly as Darren inhaled again, his dark eyes calmly defiant. “I knew what I had to do. You brought this shit to me. I had to clean it up best way I knew how. That’s all there was to it.”

  “They’re dead, Darren!”

  He inhaled the cigarette’s gray smoke holding it, letting it calm things before exhaling. “Yeah, they are.”

  “You knew they was gonna be killed, Darren! What’s that make you? A fucking murderer, that’s what!”

  You forgettin’ that you started this whole thing by killing that boy and stealing the girl?”

  “That was different. He moved, tried to stop things. I had to do something.”

  “Yeah well you did something all right,” Darren said his annoyance rising to the surface.

  “You planned it. You set them up. That makes it worse.”

  Laughing softly, Darren shook his head, took one final drag from the butt and flicked it to the ground. “What I did was save your ass…our asses. Them Atlanta murder cops would have been on you, on us, in a week. You’d be in jail, or we both would, out of business for a long time, maybe forever. That’s all fixed, now. Them fat ass white boys and their van gonna be found and put down as the killers of the boy. They’s dead, so no witnesses. Girl’s gone, and she ain’t gonna be heard from no more. You’re in the clear…we’re in the clear, brother.” He looked into Dale’s eyes, speaking softly and firmly. “Only other way would be for you to be back there with a bullet in your head. That what you want?”

  “No.” Dale’s voice was a whisper, his brain trying to wrap itself around his brother’s logic.

  “Me either.” Darren stepped away from the building and started walking briskly. “So shut the fuck up and let’s move. You still gotta get rid of that Mustang.”

  It took some effort, but Dale’s conscience slowly cleared. Thirty minutes later his only thoughts of Sam and Stevie were that them dumb, fat ass white boys should have been more smart, like Darren.

  27. People to See

  Walking from the bright interior of the garage to the alley behind, Ricky Sanchez waited for the steel door to close, drowning out the sound of air wrenches. The big grease-covered man in overalls who followed him out stood quietly, breathing the humid night air, smelling of oil and gasoline, waiting for Ricky to speak.

  “It’s a Mustang, black with red stripes on the hood. They’ll be lookin’ for a place to chop it.”

  “So?” The grease-covered man stood hands in his pockets, waiting.

  “It was my brother’s, Bobby’s.”

  “Oh.” The man thought about that. “It’s business, Ricky. You know that.”

  “Bobby’s dead. They killed him.”

  “Oh.” A nod this time, sympathetic and understanding followed by a slight shrug and bob of the man’s big head. “Sorry.” He paused out of respect before continuing. “It’s still business, Ricky.”

  “I know, Tank.” The name suited him. Tank Johnson had worked on cars all his life, like his daddy before. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about them, or how to fix. But his true expertise was in taking them apart. He and his crew could take apart a car, separating the parts and pieces for resale in less time than you could get a tune up. “All I ask is you let me know if they bring it here. Give me a call. You keep the car, let me have whoever brings it in.”

  Tank thought it over. Turning one of his suppliers over to Ricky Sanchez might not be too good for business. He nodded without speaking, not committing either way.

  “They killed my brother, Tank. Remember, Bobby? You knew Bobby. He was gonna play for Georgia Southern next year.”

  A few seconds passed before the big man spoke. “Okay. I’ll call you. Car stays here, but when I call, you get here quick and you can have whoever brings it in.” It was Ricky’s brother after all, and Ricky was one of his best suppliers. As an afterthought, he added, “But nothing happens here, Ricky. I don’t want no trouble here. Take him, do what you want but away from here.”

  “Fair enough.” Ricky turned towards his Camaro. “Thanks, Tank,” he called over his shoulder.

  The engine rumbled to life, and Ricky spun the steering wheel turning the car quickly out of the alley behind the shop. He had other people to see.

  28. You’re Gonna Love It

  The phone only buzzed once before he punched the green button to answer and stepped out of bed and into the hall, not wanting to disturb Deirdre. Andy Barnes was accustomed to calls in the middle of the night. So was Deirdre for that matter.

  “Barnes,” he said quietly.

  “Mornin’, Sergeant. How’s it goin’? Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.” Always the comedian, Detective Gary Poncinelli added with a chuckle. “Actually, I hope I did.”

  “What’s up, Ponce?” Andy was tired and not in the mood.

  “Got a double homicide. You should come.”

  Andy took a deep breath. Poncinelli was a good murder investigator, one of the best, but his penchant for cracking jokes and messing with people’s heads could be annoying. “Get to the point, Gary.”

  “You’re working a homicide and missing girl, right?”

  “Yeah,” Andy said, perking up a bit and adjusting the phone against his ear so that he could hear clearly.

  “Well, put your pants on and get over here.”

  “What?” He was losing patience. “You have the girl? The killer? What?”

  “Don’t have the girl, but I think we have the one’s that snatched her.”

  Padding softly into the bedroom, Andy gathered his clothes up from the chair. “Who is it?”

  “We’re working on that.”

  “What’s that mean? I thought you had them.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Shit.” Phone crooked between his ear and shoulder, Andy pulled his pants on. “Then how do you know they snatched her?”

  “There’s a van near the bodies. The girl’s purse and I.D. are in it.”

  “I’m on the way.” Andy disconnected and walked to the bed, giving Deirdre a kiss on the forehead.

  “Gotta go babe.”

  “I know. I heard.” She turned under the covers, yawning. “Be careful.”

  Thirty minutes later, Andy pulled behind the warehouse that was now brightly lit by a light truck. Two uniform patrol cars and Gary Poncinelli’s unmarked Ford were parked at the corner of the building far enough away not to disturb the crime scene. An evidence technician SUV also sat unattended outside the yellow tape that was strung around the area, the rear lift door up.

  At the center of activity was a rusted old van, white and well dented. Two techs and Ponce were going through the van. Nearby, another crime scene tech knelt beside a dumpster. Andy could make out the two bodies lying side by side.

  Andy looked over Poncinelli’s shoulder at the side of the rusted furniture van, close to his ear. “What you got, Gary?”

  “Jesus.” Poncinelli jumped at the words spoken in close proximity to his ear. “Damn, Andy. You tryin’ to make me shit my pants.”

  “Little jumpy aren’t you?” Andy smiled, happy finally to get one over on the squad’s practical joker. He leaned in the van, watching a crime scene tech dust the interior for fingerprints. “So, you have her I.D.?”

  Pointing, Ponce indicated a plastic bag on the ground nearby containing the belongings of Juanita Maria Lopez. “That’s what we got from the van. Here’s her I.D.” he said, handing a driver’s license to Andy.

  Looking closely at the picture in the garish floodlights, Andy nodded. “It’s her. Matches the picture her folks gave us. Anything else?”

  “We found a few strands of long brown hair. Probably hers…Juanita’s. Looks like they dragged her out of the van. The hairs were positioned cross ways on the floor as if someone had pulled her across the floor to the side door.”

  “Maybe drugged? She couldn’t move, so they dragged her out.”

  “Maybe.” Ponce shrugged. “Drugged or not, she’s gone.”

 
; “And them?” Andy nodded towards the two bodies by the dumpster.

  “Well, that’s interesting, now that you ask.” Poncinelli pulled his notepad out of a pocket and began reciting the information they had. “The van is registered to a Samuel Crane, bought it used about six months ago.”

  “Used, huh. No shit.” Andy’s eyes wandered over the rusted van wondering when it would have been new.

  “Yep used,” Ponce continued unperturbed. “We were able to pull up a 10-27, driver’s license information on Samuel along with the photo on the license.” He pointed to one of the bodies by the dumpster. “That would be young Samuel on the right.”

  “The other?”

  “Did a random check of other possible relations and found a Steven Crane.”

  “Stephen Crane, like the author?”

  “Who?”

  “Wrote the Civil War book, ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ bunch of short stories, died of tuberculosis” Poncinelli’s face was a blank. “Never mind.” Andy nodded at the second body. “That him?”

  “Hard to tell. His face hit the dumpster on the way to the asphalt. Lot of swelling, but the physical matches. Big boy like his brother.” Ponce handed over a page with a blow up of Steven Crane’s driver’s license photo. Not the same spelling as the author, Andy noted.

  Andy knelt beside the body of Steven Crane, adjusted the fedora back on his head and looked up at Poncinelli. “I’d say it’s him. Pretty battered, but I’d put money on it.” He stood up and handed the blow up photo back to Ponce. “That’s crackerjack investigative work, Detective Poncinelli.”

  “Whatever. Cut the shit, Andy. Where you want to go with this?”

  “Where do I want to go?”

  “Well, yeah. Started as your case. Murder and missing girl. Now these two, deader’n three-week-old dog turds. Seems like it’s still part of your case.”

  “Well, I have some good news for you, Detective Gary Poncinelli.”

  Ponce cringed slightly and waited. Anytime Andy used his full title and name, what followed was likely to be unpleasant.

  “We’re going to team up.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know…partners.” Sergeant Andrew Barnes smiled. “Don’t worry, Detective. You’re gonna love it.”

  29. Reality

  Head slumped on her chest, Juanita Lopez slowly regained consciousness and became aware of the traffic noises that seemed to be right behind her back. Squinting, she opened her eyes. It felt as if her irises were rusted and cranking open mechanically like a louvered window to let light in. It was a painful process. She never had headaches, but she had one now. Gradually, she became aware of her surroundings.

  Seated on hard steel with her back against thin sheet metal, she realized that she was in the back of a cargo truck. The bump and rumble of the tires on the pavement and the sound of other vehicles on the highway were clearly audible in the truck. A large semi-truck could be heard as the vehicle she was in swerved to the left, and passed the big rig and then swerved back into the right lane. The tractor-trailer noise faded in the distance as the box truck accelerated and put distance between them.

  A small battery lantern sat on the floor in the middle of the cargo space. Juanita could see three girls seated across from her, their heads slumped on their chests, all of them apparently unconscious. Their feet were shackled together one to another by what looked to be big handcuffs; like the police use, she thought, and chains between the cuffs on each girl’s leg.

  She realized for the first time looking at her feet that she was shackled to girls on either side. Turning her head slowly, she saw two girls to her right and one to her left. That made seven girls in the truck.

  After a minute, she dared to lift her head a bit more. Two men occupied the cargo space with the girls. One sat by the back door to the truck and the other at the opposite end. The driver’s cab would have been on the other side of the truck’s wall.

  “Duérmete niña.” Juanita’s head turned to the man sitting by the truck’s cargo door. English was her first language, but the words could have been those of her grandma, her abuelita. Go to sleep little girl.

  “Baja la cabeza. Cierra los ojos.” Put your head down. Close your eyes. The man emphasized his words by pointing the pistol in his hand at her and motioning the barrel downwards.

  Juanita Lopez lowered her head to her chest and spent the next several hours in tortured agony. She was conscious. The other captives had been more heavily drugged and slept through the journey.

  Bobby falling dead at her feet, followed by the fear and pain of the day, overwhelmed her nervous system and caused her to tremble uncontrollably. She had a vague memory of the two big boys dragging her from the back of the van and then they were being walked away by two men, the men who were in the truck with her now.

  Two loud explosions had shattered the night and brought her to semi-consciousness. She remembered being tossed like a sack of potatoes into the back of the truck, before drifting off again into blissful unconsciousness, dark empty and peaceful with no terrible thoughts of blood pooling red around Bobby’s body lying in the alley.

  She prayed for that relief now, to be unconscious and out of this reality, to wake up and find that this was all a dream. A jarring bump in the road caused her head to strike the sheet metal wall of the truck. Peering through slitted lids, she saw that the men with the guns were still there. The girls, chained to each other were still there. She was still there, in the back of the truck. As the hours passed, Juanita knew that somehow she had to accept it. This was her reality.

  30. The Size of Peas

  Wheeling off the dirt road in a cloud of dust, the big, white Chevy Tahoe slid in the sandy yard of the shack. Watching from the shade of the ramshackle porch, Roy Budroe laid the vintage Colt Python .357 on the old tomato crate beside the splintered bench where he sat waiting for his visitors. He looked at his watch.

  “You’re five minutes late,” he called as they walked through the sand, kicking up little puffs of dust with each step.

  “Had a hell of a time finding the place.” The big man who handled Budroe’s dirty work looked squinting around the small space surrounding the shack. The south Georgia morning sun was bright and hot. He stepped into the shade of the porch, his head almost hitting the rafters overhead. “He didn’t want me to drive his car. Told him there was no choice if he wanted to meet.”

  Budroe’s gaze shifted to the man who had asked for the meeting. “Sheriff, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. Come out of the sun, you look peaked.”

  Sheriff Richard Klineman looked around the clearing, brushed the dust from his sleeve and stepped under the narrow overhang of the porch. Actually, Klineman was the former sheriff of Pickham County, having lost his office to Sandy Davies in an election that gave Davies a lopsided win characterized by the Everett Gazette as the “greatest margin of victory in any state election since the days of Reconstruction following the Civil War”. It was not a statistic that Klineman liked to dwell on.

  “Have a seat.” Budroe motioned to an old barrel, bottom side up and a rickety wooden chair on the porch.

  Klineman was left with the barrel when Budroe’s lieutenant picked the chair up one handed and put it down to one side, straddling the chair and seating himself with his elbows leaning on the backrest. He cocked his head to one side and smiled at the sheriff, curious as to what he would do next.

  “Donut?” Budroe asked, head nodding to an open box of store-bought powdered donuts on the crate. Several large flies flitted around the box, landing occasionally in the powdery sugar, rubbing their feet together and doing whatever it is that flies do. Eat, lay eggs, shit. Who knew?

  Klineman did not reach for a donut, although the big man who had been his escort, brushed the flies away and snagged one from the box. Saying nothing, Klineman seated himself on the barrel, looking from Budroe to his assistant and back. His downturned mouth made him look as if he had just bitten into a very sour apple, finding a couple of
worms inside. Budroe smiled.

  “Okay, Sheriff.” The word came out of Budroe’s mouth in a tone that let Klineman know that he was anything but the sheriff, especially here and now. He was on Budroe’s turf. “Let’s get to it. You wanted this meeting. Talk.”

  Unaccustomed to such blunt and blatantly disrespectful treatment, Klineman swallowed hard and took a breath. He was going to have to eat his share of shit pie if he wanted to regain his former position and prestige. Might as well open wide and take a bite now. “I understand you have problems back in Pickham County.”

  “Everyone knows that. It’s not news.”

  “What would it be worth to you to have these problems go away?”

  Budroe’s eyes narrowed. “Go away? How?”

  “I mean, what if those that are causing you the problems were no longer able to do so?”

  “And why would they stop? Sudden change of heart?”

  “No, that’s not likely to happen.” Klineman smiled slightly for the first time. “Let’s say they were taken out of the picture so that they could no longer pose a problem for you.”

  “You mean eliminated? Eliminated like made to go away permanently, disappeared?” Leaning back, Budroe crossed his beefy arms and eyed Klineman for several seconds, assessing the man. “You don’t strike me as the sort of man that could handle that sort of work.”

  “You might be surprised,” Klineman replied, looking Budroe in the eye, knowing he had to assert himself now or have no respect from the man, and no opportunity for his proposal to be heard.

  “Hmm. Maybe.” Uncrossing his arms and relaxing his posture slightly, Budroe indicated his interest. “Go on.”

  “You’re right, though. Eliminating those persons in the way you think would create more problems for you, not fewer. The full force of the GBI and every law enforcement officer in the state would be out to solve the murders of a popular sheriff and the hero of the GBI taskforce.”