by KJ Dahlen
When he finished the room was silent enough to hear a pin drop. Everyone was stunned.
Swede fell down into a chair, as did several of the others.
Pappy marched over to where the information was still on Trudy’s screen and saw it for himself. After he read the words, he looked up and glared at Swede. “When you went through the second compartment, did you see any blue water containers?”
Swede ran his hands through his hair and shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, I don’t remember. They could have been there but I was more worried about not getting caught than what the hell I was looking at.”
“We could just ask Lacey,” Slammer responded.
Pappy shrugged. “I’m not sure she would know anything about what her brother hid in the next compartment. I don’t imagine her brother told her much about his business.”
“That may be true but she still might know more than we do at this point,” Slammer added.
“I guess we’ll have to wait until she wakes up then. I’m not going to be the one to knock on Bear’s door though.” Pappy grimaced.
“No that might not be a very good idea,” Swede agreed. “For some reason, he’s protecting this girl and this just might set him off.”
When Bear and Lacey walked down the hall into the main room, the whole room went quiet. Lacey looked around and moved closer to Bear’s big frame.
Bear looked from man to man finally settling on Slammer. “What’s going on?”
Slammer got to his feet and faced the other man. “We got some questions for Lacey and we need some answers only she can give.”
Bear paused and wrapped his arm around Lacey’s shoulder pulling her close to him. “I won’t let you bully her but you can ask her what you need to know.”
Slammer shook his head. “We’re not going to bully her,” he assured Bear then turned his attention to the girl at his side. “Honey, we need to know what you know about Leroy’s business.”
Lacey wrapped her arm around Bear’s back and leaned into his embrace. “I never knew much about what he was doing. I listened to him rant and rave but it was never anything I thought he was serious about. When he found us in Montana, he told my mother he’d taken care of his father and now it was her turn. When he brought me away with him he talked about how everyone always told him he wasn’t ever going to be anybody, how no one would ever remember his name. He used to brag he was going to show the whole world just what he could do and how he was going to go down in history as a great man. He would tell me everyone would know his name.”
“Do you know what he meant when he said that?” Pappy asked.
“No, I never asked. Leroy got mean when I asked him about his business,” Lacey admitted.
“Did you ever see the second compartment?” Slammer asked.
Lacey nodded. “When he brought in the shipments, I would help him unload the stuff.”
“Did you know what it was?” Pappy asked.
Lacey felt her face flush but all she could do was shake her head.
Swede frowned and stated, “But the boxes and crates were clearly marked. Didn’t you read any of the warnings?”
Lacey felt Bear stiffen next to her and she tried to hide her red face in his shirt. Bear tightened his arms around her and glared at the group of people facing them. “No she didn’t read the labels on the crates. She doesn’t read very well. Leroy never sent her to school. Her mother was trying to teach her but Leroy took her when she was seven.” He glared a bit more then added, “He took her to the silo when she was seven and he never let her out of there in the past fifteen years.”
No one said a word as the new information sunk in. They all looked shocked and some looked angry as well.
Finally, Pappy asked, “IS there anything you can tell us about his various shipments that you do remember?”
Lacey peeked out at them and nodded. “There was one shipment he had me unload by myself. It was a shipment of twenty soft sided containers of red liquid. The containers were blue but he opened one and showed me the red liquid inside. He told me not to get too close. When I asked him what it was he screamed at me that I shouldn’t ask him about his business. When I was done, he hit me and told me to go to my room. When I did, he locked me in for three days. I never asked him about his business again.”
“Were any of those twenty containers still there when you guys left the silo?” Slammer asked her.
“Some of them were still there but not all of them.”
“Shit, then we have a real problem.” Slammer swore.
Lacey peeked up at Bear then told the group, “Leroy has been making a lot of trips lately.”
“What kind of trips?” Pappy asked.
“He locked us in our rooms and loaded some boxes and crates on his boat and he leaves sometimes for days at a time. Sometimes, it’s only a few hours but just last week, he left for six days. When he got back from that trip, he was in a good mood for once.”
“Was there anything different about his trip last week, the one he was gone for six days?” Slammer asked.
Lacey nodded. “He locked us in our rooms again, and loaded some barrels on his boat. I could hear him using the forklift to get the barrels on the boat. When he was done, he came and unlocked my door. He told me to wait until morning to unlock the others. Then he told me not to speak to anyone while he was gone.”
“Do you know how many trips he’s made in the last while?” Pappy asked.
“Maybe six trips in all.”
“Where was his boat?” Swede frowned as he glanced at Bear. “We didn’t see any boat while we were at the silo.”
“There is a hidden cave you can get to when you use the secret tunnel.” She shrugged. “That’s where the barrels were stored.”
“How many barrels were there?” Slammer wanted to know.
“Maybe a hundred? I don’t really know for sure.” She seemed to guess. “The whole cave was pretty well filled.”
“Could he get to that boat if he used his escape tunnel?” Swede asked.
Lacey nodded but didn’t say anymore.
Swede ran his hands over his head. He paced for a moment then thought of something else. Turning to Lacey he asked, “Does Leroy have another place he goes to sometimes? Another house?”
Lacey looked down at the floor then raised tear filled eyes to the group. “Yes, he does. When he first brought me away from Montana, he took me to a house on the river. He bragged the house once belonged to his father but his father had left it to him when he died. Leroy admitted to me that his father’s death wasn’t from natural causes unless you count a knife in the ribs as natural causes.”
“How long did you stay there?” Bear asked.
“Not long. He would lock me in the pantry during the day while he was gone and then he’d let me out to fix him supper.”
“Did he lock you up again at night, when he was sleeping?” Swede asked.
Lacey nodded. “He chained me to the end of his bed. I slept on the floor.”
Bear growled but didn’t say anything. His arms tightened around her.
Dewey glanced over at Pappy. “You know what we have to do don’t you? We have to call Shay in on this. We have to get everything he has in that silo under guard, so he can’t use what’s left in there against us.”
Pappy ran his fingers through his hair and nodded. “I know but we don’t know how much of his inventory is already out there. I’m afraid he might be waiting and watching the silo to find out who we are. If he sees ATF and Homeland in the area, I’m not sure what he’ll do.”
“But we can’t let him find another way back inside,” Slammer argued.
“I know.” Pappy looked frustrated. “If we had a list of his inventory, we could counter balance it with what’s left. But we don’t have that list. This is a big fucking mess.”
Bear watched the back and forth for a moment then felt a tug on his arm. He looked down at Lacey and leaned down when she whispered in his ear. Bear backed up and stared
down at her. “Are you sure?” he asked.
Lacey nodded.
Bear turned to look at Pappy and the others. “There is a list of what munitions he had.”
Everyone turned to stare at them. “What are you talking about?” Pappy asked.
“Leroy kept a master list,” Lacey whispered out loud, as she buried her face in Bear’s chest.
Bear leaned back and cupped her jaw as he raised her face to his. “Honey, what’s wrong? Why are you afraid to talk to them?”
Lacey tried not to shake but the fear inside was too much. She closed her eyes and waited for the slap to come. “I’m not supposed to talk about Leroy’s business. He’s gonna be so mad at me.”
“Sweetheart, Leroy is never going to hurt you again,” Bear vowed. He glanced around and found everyone watching them. He grasped her wrist and took her over to a corner of the room. The tears rolling down her cheeks broke his heart but he had to make her understand what was going on. “Lacey, I need you to listen to me and understand what I’m saying. Can you do that?”
Lacey nodded. “I’ll try.”
“Your brother has been planning something very evil. He wants to kill a lot of people for absolutely no reason. He’s been stockpiling the items he needs to carry out this plan. We don’t know for how long or what he’s been able to get his hands on. All of us are going to stop him. We don’t want anyone else to die by his hands. What he wants to do is create chaos and bring death. Basically, he wants to terrorize this country and that we cannot allow. That’s what these men do, they stop acts of terror on our home soil.”
She stared up at him her soulful eyes wide.
“When we found the silo, we didn’t expect to find you in there. We knew about the other women but we didn’t know about you.” Bear paused then added, “When Leroy left the silo he left you behind to whatever fate we decided. He doesn’t care about you or the other women.”
“I know that Leroy hates me.” Lacey dropped her head and Bear saw her tear drops hit the floor. “He never stops telling me that. He blames me for the way his life turned out.” She raised her face and he could see the fear in her eyes. “I know he’s crazy as sin. He rants and raves for days at a time and has terrible headaches and screams for hours until he passes out. He scares me more than anything and not a day goes by when he doesn’t let me know that he holds the power of my life or death at his hands.”
“He is never going to hurt you again,” Bear repeated firmly. “But we have to know what he’s planning to do. We have some idea what his plans are but until we know for sure, we can’t stop him. We need your help to stop him.”
Lacey took a deep breath and exhaled shakenly. “If I help you, do you promise he won’t hurt me again?”
“I give you my word and a promise from everyone else here that Leroy will never get his hands on you again.”
Lacey nodded her head. “Then I’ll help you.”
Bear took her hand and led her back to the group waiting. “She’ll help us for the promise that Leroy is never going to hurt her again.”
“That goes without saying,” Pappy assured her. “Every man jack of us will keep you safe.”
Lacey walked over to the small wooden box on the table. Picking it up in her hands, she turned the box over and found a hidden panel. Flipping it open, she took out a flash drive. She handed it over to Pappy and went back to where Bear was waiting.
Bear wrapped his arms around her and held her while she shook. After a few minutes, she stopped shaking so badly. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
“If Leroy knew I knew about that flash drive, he would have killed me,” she murmured.
“How did you know about it?” Bear asked.
“I watched him. Mostly, to know when his mood changed but after a while, I couldn’t stop. I needed to know where he was and if he was coming after me for something I did that he didn’t like. He thought I was hiding but I wasn’t. I was watching him. I would listen and watch. After each shipment came in, he would plug that thing in his computer and he’d enter what he got and then he would hide it again.”
Pappy walked over to where they were standing and he smiled at Lacey. “Thank you.” He glanced at Bear. “The flash is more than just a list of the shipments he got, it’s also a list of every person he did business with. All his contacts are there and we found his detailed manifesto.”
Bear nodded. “So what happens now?”
“Now, we give Shay a call and while he’s gathering what’s left at the silo, we are going to get started running down his movements and neutralizing his plans. We’re running out of time. We have twenty one days left.” He shrugged. “It goes without saying, we’ll be looking for him wherever we go.”
Lacey shook her head. “You may not find him. If he knows you’re looking for him, he’ll keep hidden.”
“We’ll find him. One way or another, we’ll find him,” Pappy vowed. “Right now, Leroy Nash is a dead man walking.”
Swede, Slammer, Dewy and Bastian joined them. “What do we need to do first?” Slammer asked.
“I’ve already got a call in for Shay,” Pappy told them. “We need to get the network alerted and the word out, so we have everyone looking for Leroy. We need to find enough people with boats to cruise the rivers to find where he’s hiding.”
“If you need more boats let me know.” Bastian shrugged. “I’m transferring money over to buy what we need for this mission. Use it anyway you like.”
Pappy nodded. “That will come in handy. This way, we don’t have to waste time haggling. Time isn’t on our side at the moment. Trudy has the banking information. I’ll make sure you get it back.”
Bastian shook his head. “I don’t need or want it back. This mission is more important to me than the money. It might as well be used for a higher purpose. Believe me. I have more. It won’t break me.”
“Well, it will certainly help,” Pappy agreed.
“I’ll get it set up right away,” Bastian said as he walked away reaching for his phone.
All the men in the room stared at him and some nodded their heads as they whispered to each other.
“Do you know of any other place he might use to hide?” Pappy asked.
Lacey shook her head. “The house and the silo are the only two places I know. I have no idea where he would go if those two places weren’t available to him.”
“Could he live on his boat?” Slammer asked.
Lacey shrugged. “I suppose the boat would be big enough to stay on but his other boat would be bigger and better for that.”
“What other boat?” Dewey asked.
“He has another boat he keeps in St Louis,” Lacey told them. “It’s older and he doesn’t use it much but I know he keeps it for his meetings and stuff like that.”
“You said it’s in St. Louis?”
Lacey nodded. “He named the boat after our mother. Lila. I don’t know what kind of boat it is but I know that it isn’t as fast as his other boat. That’s why he doesn’t use it much.”
Slammer looked over at Pappy. “We need to find that boat and see if Leroy is on board.”
Chapter Seven
Day twenty three…
The tug boat moved into the harbor near St Louis. Up in the control room, Slammer and Pappy observed the area keenly. Slammer swept the camera over the area slowly as he snapped pictures of the boats docked there. It was almost dawn but the sun hadn’t made it up over the horizon yet. The shadows still held the secrets of the nighttime hours.
Pappy maneuvered the tug closer to the rows of boats tied to the wide wooden walkway leading to the shoreline. They were looking for an older boat but they didn’t know what type of boat it was just yet. They had arrived during the night and as soon as the sun rose, they got up close to the other boats.
It had been a full three days since they called Shay in. Shay had gotten into the silo and what they found was astounding. According to the master list, they found on the flash drive they found Leroy had only bee
n able to place one fourth of his inventory.
What had everyone still worried was the fact that there over half of the twenty containers of the Red Tide algae missing. That discovery was what freaked out Trudy so bad that morning a couple of days ago. They also discovered the algae had been concentrated, so it was even more deadly than it should have been to begin with.
If any of the fourteen containers broke open in any of the major rivers, it had the chance of infecting the entire waterway system in the nation. Not only would the fish and plants in the river be affected but the algae was strong enough to kill people too. One river would led to another river and another river. There wouldn’t be clean water anywhere.
They had found out that was part of his plan. People depended on the water in the rivers in order to live. The main river channel was the Mississippi. If that poison got into the Mississippi, it would eventually get into the other river systems and down into the Gulf.
“Third boat toward the end of the causeway,” Came a voice in his ear. Pappy turned to search and found the boat they had been looking for. It was a small trawler boat. Small enough to get up and down the river but big enough to provide a place to live on if the need was there.
Pappy double checked the name on the back of the boat. It was the one they were looking for. Picking up the microphone on the panel on the control board, he called in the other team. Five men scrambled down the wooden dock quickly and silently, five men boarded the boat.
A few minutes later, they heard another voice say, “No one’s on board but there are signs someone’s been here.”
“Do you think he’s coming back?” Pappy asked.
“Yeah, he’s coming back. There’s food and drinks in the fridge and we’ve located four of the missing blue containers.”
“Only four?” Pappy growled. “There are fourteen missing containers.”
“Well, there are only four here.”
“Damn,” Pappy swore.
“What do you want us to do?”
“At least get those containers off his boat. We may have to watch the boat until he gets back.”