Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  But that didn’t mean he didn’t take out his aggression on Tessi Slovnik, the tough, beautiful Serbian mechanic. Actually, as his boots had crunched on the gravel and he’d watched the Crown Victoria speed away, he had thought he might need to visit Tessi.

  He had seen an unrecognizable face in the splintered windshield of the car. His vision wasn’t perfect, but there had been something familiar in the way the man’s eyes connected with his. The intent stare, eyes locked, had seemed to suggest something from long past, at least for Gunther. The stranger who had boldly penetrated their defensive perimeter, using Griffyn’s car, must have a history. He didn’t know what it was, but it was something. There was more to this little gunfight than a man who had made a wrong turn. It was a deliberate psych job. It was an “I’m coming to get you.”

  Those thoughts didn’t unnerve Gunther. He had been dealing with rednecks and ruffians all his life. This was just one more something he had to handle. Throckmorton was too focused on the girls and the money. Somebody had to do the dirty work. His cut of $250 million was a solid cut. He could retire and move somewhere in Down East North Carolina. They could embezzle the money they had, but he was worried about the Chinese guys, Ting and Chun. Something about them didn’t sit right with him. They were too . . . in control. They had an answer for everything and were one step ahead of him most of the time. They knew how to drill, and they had all the numbers down pat.

  Gunther considered himself a simple man. Before that crazy kid had come in and changed his life forever, he had needed some strangeness about once every other day, and he really hadn’t cared where it came from. As long as he could take it forcibly, that was all that had mattered to him. Now he got to do the forcible part without any of the sex. While the freckled blond mother had been a nice piece of ass, she definitely wasn’t worth a lifetime loss of sexual ability. And for that, he blamed the kid. The giant Indian kid who had come into the house and had fought four of them like there was only one of them.

  Gunther had been in many fights, but never one like that. The kid was a rarity, and he wondered why he was thinking now about a young boy whose name he couldn’t even remember. The woman had been a startling blonde, alone in a clapboard home near the right-of-way they had been paving for a new road in Robeson County. They had asked for some lemonade or tea, and she had actually responded by turning her back, smiling, and saying, “Sure, boys.” Hell, if that hadn’t been an invite, Gunther didn’t know what was.

  But that day crystallized for him at this very moment, as he walked up to a bound and gagged Griffyn, who had been tossed from his very own car like a sack of seed. One of the commando teams had mounted up in a truck and had sped after the Crown Vic. Good luck, Gunther thought. No way they were catching that guy, if it was who he thought it was.

  He nudged Griffyn with his boot and said, “Thought they trained you better than that, Detective.”

  The commandos had performed the outer perimeter circle led by Petrov, who had orchestrated their movements. He was the Russian Special Forces guy. No wonder they got their butts kicked in Afghanistan, Gunther thought.

  He reached down and removed the gag from Griffyn’s mouth. “Tell me how the hell you got yourself in this position.”

  Griffyn coughed. “Snuck up on me. Both of them. Dead. I’m arresting them tomorrow. Cassidy’s husband is dead. We think the big guy did it.”

  “The big guy?”

  “Yeah. The Indian. Hawthorne. Army special agent.”

  Gunther rolled this around in his mind. Hawthorne?

  “What’s he look like?”

  “A giant. Six and a half feet tall. Massive. Powerful. Blond hair, blue eyes. Probably one of those eastern bands from the Outer Banks or maybe Robeson.”

  Gunther felt a stir, everywhere except the one place where he couldn’t. A buzz coursed through his veins.

  “You ain’t going nowhere right now, Griffyn. You’re a damn liability. That guy figured out you were in with us without even thinking about it. We’ll send you down to the nurses and let you rehab, but we can’t risk you being out there for about the next twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ve got a major murder investigation on my hands, Gunther.”

  “No. You’ve got a missing person case. Cary has the murder. Get your facts straight. And technically, the Army has the missing person case. Just another reason to keep your ass locked up tight here, instead of stepping all over other police jurisdictions. Let it cool for twenty-four hours, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

  Griffyn, who was still bound like a tied hog, nodded.

  “Untie his ass and take him into the Underground,” Gunther said.

  The men carried out his direction. He felt Throckmorton come up on his side. Smelled him, too. Some kind of musky aftershave. The man got on Gunther’s nerves, but he was willing to violate a sack full of principles to make a quarter billion.

  “What’s your deal, Throck? This thing falling apart?”

  “Not at all. Miss Cassidy just made it to the first spot, and we’re ready to send down some perforating charges to get the natural gas flowing. Thought I’d come up and give you the good news.”

  Gunther nodded, still staring at the gate a quarter mile away in the darkness, as if he expected the Crown Vic to come barreling back through the opening. If the fourteen-year-old kid was driving it, he was certain that he would already be back, ready to finish what he thought he’d already done: kill him.

  But if fifteen years had passed and the kid was now a man and the man was a soldier or a cop, that was a different story. The man would be wiser, more cunning.

  Gunther had seen Throckmorton’s anxiety when he learned that Petrov was nervous about going to see the big guy who was with the Mexicans. This kid from his memory would be enough to scare Petrov.

  “We’ve got to plan for defending against a full attack on this compound, Throck. If my instincts are correct—and I hope I am flat-ass wrong—we’ve got someone coming at us for two reasons.”

  “The first?”

  “To get Cassidy and her kid back.”

  “The second?”

  “To kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “That ain’t important. What’s important is that his daddy found me and died, and now the son has found me, and he will die.”

  “The Indian? That guy who was chasing you?”

  Gunther had hired private detectives to find out what had happened to his friend Tommy Boyd. He had suspected it was more than a meth lab accident, and he had been right. Boyd’s throat had been cut from ear to ear with a large knife.

  “Remember that Indian? We got a picture of him?”

  He watched Throckmorton’s Adam’s apple bob up and down. He knew the refined gentleman was not thrilled with the dark underbelly of how Gunther survived with his business or life, but they were from different worlds. He had made Throckmorton join him that morning several months ago when he had seen Mahegan’s father. Throckmorton had taken a photo. Gunther was sure it was for blackmail or insurance, but he didn’t care. He’d kill Throckmorton before it ever came to that.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “That’s his son. I’d bet a paycheck on it. The one who threw me through a sliding glass door.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “A SPOILING ATTACK? WHAT DID WE SPOIL OTHER THAN MY BREAK-FAST?” Grace asked Mahegan. They were lying in bed, the Holiday Inn sign casting a shaded green light through the pale curtains that covered the window. She had stripped down to her T-shirt, and Mahegan was naked except for his boxers. After the adrenaline dump, Mahegan knew that they had both experienced a level of physical and mental exhaustion usually associated with the completion of athletic events or combat. The endorphins were rushing.

  “Probe. Spoiling attack. Like I told you. I’m just wired that way. Can’t explain it and haven’t really thought too much about it. I get information, and I go. I process and analyze as I’m moving. You’re a forensic scientist. Your job is
to study the evidence in a somewhat static environment. I’m a soldier. My job is to kill the bad guys and help the good guys. So I get information, process it, and move before anyone either thinks I have the information or believes they are vulnerable.”

  “Is it really that simple? Good guys and bad guys?”

  “Well, sometimes there are bad women,” Mahegan said. He looked at Grace, her head resting on his chest again. She turned her gorgeous eyes up at him and smiled.

  “I can be bad,” she said.

  Mahegan ignored her teasing and said, “You know what I mean. Evil. Poisonous. Men and women. Sociopaths. Harmful.”

  “And it’s your job to stop all that?”

  “What I can. Not saying I can stop it all, but I do what I can where I can.”

  “So you’re a vigilante?”

  Despite his exhaustion, Mahegan was in an introspective mood, but he let Grace’s question hang in the air, unanswered. His mind was replaying the risk he had taken tonight. He had acted on impulse by taking Griffyn hostage and stealing his car. Then he had driven directly through the guarded gate and dumped Griffyn’s body on the driveway while they were under fire. He had gathered needed information, but it was a huge risk, maybe even a gamble. He could recover from a risky endeavor if he made a mistake, but if you lost a gamble, you lost it all, Mahegan remembered from his training. Tonight, he decided, he had edged more toward the gamble side of the spectrum. But every time he felt that he had perhaps done something too risky, he was presented with new opportunities that were potentially too rewarding to ignore. Was the slope becoming too slippery to prevent sliding into some catastrophic error?

  “We should sleep,” Grace said, yawning. Mahegan felt her warm breath on his chest. Her small hand was resting on his sternum, and his left arm was holding her close. She was molded to his body, and he could feel her heart beating on his abdomen. After a few minutes of silence, he felt her body go slack and fall into a steady sleep rhythm.

  Continuing to think the next steps through, Mahegan decided to close his eyes, also. He immediately cycled through all the data, wondering what he was missing. Maeve’s henna tattoo, which provided a mysterious warning, perhaps, about North Carolina’s three nuclear plants; the EB-5 commandos; the fracking; the murder of Pete Cassidy; the kidnapping of Maeve and Piper Cassidy; and the apparent complicity of Detective Griffyn all made for an incomplete puzzle.

  But most overwhelming for Mahegan was the sense that Gunther had been there, looking at him through the window. Mahegan found himself at the intersection of professional duty and personal agenda, a street corner with two equally satisfying destinations, but if you chose one direction, you might as well forget about the other. Wait, he thought. There might be a way to do both.

  Could he? Should he focus on Gunther and his personal feelings, he could make mistakes in safely securing Maeve Cassidy, which might also be connected to some large plan with the nuclear facilities.

  But he had promised himself that all four of his mother’s attackers would die a painful death. He had personally delivered on two of those promises at the scene of the crime, and Gunther was all that remained after his partner’s meth lab explosion.

  Lying there, with Grace sleeping on his chest, her body curled around him like a cat, he was struck by how her presence made him feel more grounded. Maybe because she needed protection, he felt useful to her. Certainly, his mother’s death had been a scarring event for Mahegan, and so his self-satisfaction in protecting and defending, especially women, was most likely connected to the day that Gunther took her fifteen years ago.

  Reviewing his early days as a rapidly growing boy in Frisco, North Carolina, Mahegan remembered his mother taking him to the beach every day, completing the short walk from their trailer park to the turbulent waters of the barrier islands of the Outer Banks. There the beaches were wide, and the currents were wicked. Riptides sucked the water through forever shifting sandbars at velocities so high, some swimmers were pulled out to sea so quickly that they were never found again. Samantha Mahegan, though, was a champion swimmer and believed in the waterman’s way of life. She surfed, dove, swam, and kayaked in the ocean and in Pamlico Sound, just steps away on the north side of the island.

  Mahegan remembered watching his mother surf the hollow tubes off Frisco Pier. Since he’d been a five-year-old, gangly kid, his mother would shred the open face of waves with the best of the men, who respected her abilities and deferred to her when she outmaneuvered them for position on the finest swells. There came a day when Sam took young Jake out on the board, walking him through the minor swells as he lay there, balancing himself, and pushed him into his first wave. He stood and rode the white water all the way to the beach, enjoying the sensation of connecting with nature, being pushed by nature.

  After that day, Mahegan went on to become a respectable surfer, but by the time he was fourteen, he had outgrown most surfboards’ ability to hold his weight, and the previous year his father had made them move to Maxton, in Robeson County. Maxton wasn’t anywhere near the beach, but there were jobs there for Native Americans with construction skills. Neither Sam nor Jake had wanted to move, but in Frisco they had barely been able to put food on the table. So his parents had loaded the family Roadmaster station wagon with everything worth taking from their rented trailer a few hundred yards from the beach. After his military discharge, while he was drifting along the Outer Banks last year, Mahegan had learned that the site of that trailer park was now filled with multimillion-dollar homes.

  Maxton had been bad news from the beginning, and it had ended in the worst possible way. While the trailer park in Frisco had not been anything for a kid to brag about, it was all Mahegan had known, and it had been home. So when they moved to another trailer park in Maxton, it was no big deal to Mahegan. Trailer parks were what you made them, he figured. And his mother made theirs a home. His father was working a steady job in Lumberton, which was thirty miles away, and the work had him gone more often than not.

  On his first day walking back from middle school, thirteen-year-old Mahegan chose a route along the Lumber River that appeared to be a shortcut to his home. Curious, he left the road soon after passing a bridge. When he was level with the river, he noticed a water moccasin basking in the sun on an exposed cedar tree root. The snake was spread across the vertical root like a man might lounge with his leg draped across a sofa.

  True to his native heritage and his mother’s Outer Banks pioneer lineage, Mahegan had learned to love the land and all her animals, whether they were the red wolves of Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge or a resting snake on a cedar root. Kneeling several feet from the snake, he admired its tan and black scales. Mahegan studied the elliptical eyes and the flickering tongue. The snake turned its head toward him, sensing his presence. They locked eyes, and Mahegan smiled as he continued to study the pit viper.

  The shotgun blast startled him, but he didn’t flinch. It was as if he was watching the scene in slow motion. He heard the noise, and a split second later he had snake guts exploding on him, along with the shattered cedar root. Then he heard the yelling and hollering of three or four boys, all maybe his age, maybe a little older.

  They came running down from the bridge, laughing and proud.

  “Damn good shot, Lanny,” the tall kid said.

  Mahegan studied the kids who were running directly toward him. He had been less than five feet from the snake when “Lanny” pulled the trigger. Mahegan sized up the three boys. One was almost as tall as him, but thin as a reed. Lanny, the shooter, was pudgy and wore camouflage pants and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. The third kid had a distant, hard look about him. The tall one and Lanny were laughing and joking, while the third stayed a step behind and locked eyes with Mahegan.

  As they stumbled upon Mahegan’s perch on the trail, he stood, towering over even the taller boy. His crimson tan was as deep as ever, since he had just moved from Frisco, where he had had daily bouts of summer sun. With Maxton an
d Robeson County filled with Lumbee Indians, Mahegan was not surprised when the tall kid said, “What are you looking at, cherry nigger?”

  “That’s one BFI there, Jimmy,” Lanny said, looking at the tall kid.

  Mahegan said nothing. He knew that BFI stood for “big fucking Indian.” He had heard people call his father that before. He kept watching the intense third kid. He noticed the kid’s hands were moving, and as he shifted a little to his right, he saw a switchblade in his hand. Mahegan assessed his situation: Three to one. Shotgun and a knife.

  The tall kid, Jimmy, stepped forward as Lanny leveled the shotgun at Mahegan. He was thirteen. They were probably fifteen. He was new, and they had been around long enough to form a small gang.

  “Three to one. We’ve got a shotgun. What’s your problem?” Jimmy asked.

  Mahegan continued staring at the kid with the switchblade. Without moving his gaze, he said, “You killed my snake.”

  Lanny and Jimmy laughed.

  “That ain’t your snake, Shitting Bull. That’s a nasty cottonmouth that deserved to die,” Jimmy said. He seemed to be the leader.

  “How is it you get to decide that?” Mahegan asked Jimmy. The switchblade kid had moved a step to the side. Mahegan assessed him as a fighter, whereas the other two probably were less skilled.

  “Maxton’s my town, asshole. You ain’t full blooded, so you’re just a half-breed buffalo jockey. You don’t belong nowhere. We’ll give you five seconds to get the hell out of here, or we’ll let you visit your friend in snake hell,” Jimmy said.