Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover

by Mike Cooper

  On the other side of an open field was another, smaller school, playground structures on woodchips alongside. The acres of empty parking felt like the old P1 lot at Shea on an off day.

  “You okay now?” I said after a while.

  “Sure.” His breathing was normal.

  Sunshine and faint birdsong. Life in the country.

  “We’re alive, we’re in one piece, let’s keep it that way.” The veteran soldier’s philosophy.

  Dave looked around. “I went to school here,” he said.

  I blinked. “High school?”

  “All the way through.” He gestured at the elementary building. “Kindergarten on up.”

  “Like it?”

  He shrugged. “My foster dad taught me to drive right here. Round and round the parking lot.”

  “Seems like a good place—nothing to run into.”

  “Nope, just stalled out like a hundred times.”

  “And look at you now.”

  Cars passed on the road. A few hundred yards down two orange trucks were parked at the side, along with an excavator—all locked up and empty, in the middle of some infrastructure project that would no doubt resume on Monday.

  “I think we can rule you out as the target,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m the one they were shooting at. You just happened to be there.”

  “Well, I . . . sure.” He seemed flummoxed. “No one’s got any reason to be gunning for me.”

  Since the attack on the garage we’d been riding momentum, but the forward velocity had burned out. Energy drained away, leaving me slumped in the roll cage.

  The interior of Dave’s car, I should mention, was barren. Not even a sound system. Just exposed metal—cleanly painted, to be sure, even around the welds and joints—two bucket seats in the front and a plain bench in the rear, and some serious safety equipment. Not only the bars, which bolstered the entire frame, but five-point harnesses and a fire extinguisher, clamped sideways under the dash.

  Also, no speedometer. Just a big tachometer, and smaller dials I didn’t recognize.

  “Is this what you expected?” I asked. “When you wrote that letter?”

  “Naw.” Dave didn’t say anything else for a moment, then laughed. “I mean, not exactly. It ain’t like I had so much to lose, back there. I had the shop five years now. No—six? Six in November. But the mortgage is so far underwater, I wasn’t looking at ever paying off. Fuck it.”

  Mortgage? For a convicted felon coming off real prison time? The timing put it right before the bubble burst, which was just believable. Banks were lending to anybody, right up until the whole thing exploded. Pulse and a scrawled X—good enough!

  “You need to call the police,” I said. “Right now.”

  “But Brendt’s car –”

  “You’re not a detective.” I glanced over, then back out the windshield. “Neither am I. This isn’t a fistfight behind the pool hall—those guys were using military full auto. Like it or not, law enforcement is going to be all over Clabbton.”

  “So what?”

  “So you need to talk to them.”

  “What about you?”

  “Ah.” We’d come to the hard part of the conversation. “Well, I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Talk to them.” I turned toward him again, and didn’t take my gaze away this time. “I have a complicated life.”

  Dave half frowned, half rolled his eyes. “I knew it.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “No? You’re gonna take off, leave me standing here scratching my ass?”

  “Um.” That was about right, in fact.

  “Like I said.”

  “I need to do three things,” I said. “Number one is find out who’s trying to kill me, and why. No way I can do that from inside a jail cell.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s number two?”

  “Then I’ll . . . discourage them.”

  “Kill them.” He said it without particular emphasis.

  “No. Not unless I absolutely have to. That just attracts even more attention, which interferes with goal number three.”

  “Yes?”

  “When it’s over, I disappear.”

  A siren in the distance, but it faded away. I rolled my window all the way down—with a crank, no power assists in the Charger—and leaned one arm out.

  “We’ve barely got to know each other,” Dave said.

  “I’ll stay in touch.”

  “You’re kinda missing the point.”

  I sighed. “Drop me off and call the cops, okay?”

  “No.” He smiled. “I’m going with you. We’ll solve this together.”

  “That’s a really bad idea.”

  “Nope.”

  A pause. Eventually I said, “Okay, tell me.”

  “First, like I told you, I got some history with the law. If I talk to Gator, he’s gonna be thinking one thing—somehow, some way, it’s my fault. Or at least I’m involved.”

  “Gator?”

  “Police chief in Clabbton. He went to school here too, matter of fact. That history I mentioned—he’s in it.”

  “Is that his real name?”

  “Course it is.” Dave hesitated. “I mean, it’s what we always called him. I ain’t never seen a birth certificate.”

  “Never mind.”

  “But more important is you.” He reached over and kind of lightly slapped my head. “My brother.”

  What could I say?

  “All right.” I shook my head. “Okay. Let’s do this—we’ll try to chase down Brendt’s car.” Truth was, I needed Dave’s help anyway. He was the local, and I didn’t know anything. “But you’re not going underground. First opportunity, you have a sit-down with, uh, Gator. And if the bad guys show up with tanks and missiles again, you go straight to safety. I can take care of myself.”

  “Sure, that’s fine. But meanwhile, if anyone asks . . . ?”

  “Don’t mention the shop. You weren’t there, you don’t know anything about it.”

  “Great!” His mood had swung back to cheerful, like some inconsequential spot of bother was now behind us.

  I should work on being so resilient.

  “So this little setback—?”

  “I got the car.” Dave slapped the dash. “I got a few hundred bucks in my pocket. They’ll repossess everything else. So what?” He grinned. “I got you, Silas. It’s all good.”

  “Uh . . .”

  What we had, actually, was at least a dozen stone killers chasing us, a trail of destruction, and nowhere to run. That I could think of. “Yeah. All good.” Christ.

  Dave started the car and we drove out of the lot—slowly, this time. Only ten or twenty miles over the speed limit. The town was quiet. Everything seemed normal again.

  We stopped at a light, the crossroads empty. A stone church at the corner was boarded up, even the clerestory windows nailed over. As we waited, another siren rose, then a blue light, and a big, red, shiny, double-cab pickup flashed past, whip antenna streaming behind it.

  I didn’t like that. “Unmarked police?”

  “Naw, the volunteer firefighters. I think that was Dink—I heard he got a new truck. Someone must have seen the smoke and called it in.”

  The welding shop was not only a fire hazard, it was also a crime scene. The local PD wouldn’t know what to do with it, so state detectives would jump in. Once they ran the ballistics and discovered that military-grade armament had been involved, they’d probably call the FBI. I groaned.

  “You all right?”

  “Great.” Looking Dave up was starting to seem like the worst decision I’d made since punching out a first lieutenant one night in a Kabul bar. “Really great.”

  —

  We stopped in front of a small, sagging bungalow. Dave parked directly on its gravel drive, blocking access onto the road. Clabbton didn’t seem to go in for zoning: next door was another house only slightly less ramshackle, then a car w
ash and a feed store. Down the road the other way an empty, weedy lot surrounded a charred foundation.

  “Maybe you should stay here.” Dave studied the house. “Brendt, well, he don’t always take well to strangers.”

  “I met him yesterday!”

  “Not at his house. He gets kinda territorial.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Just saying.”

  I looked hard at him. “Maybe I should come in.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  The staredown went on a few seconds too long.

  “Fine.” What was I going to do, shoot my own brother? “Keep it simple. Don’t use my name.”

  “Course not.”

  “Five minutes, then I’m coming in.”

  “Why? I told you—”

  “I need to hear the story myself.”

  “Whatever.” He slammed the door on the way out.

  Cars swooshed past. None slowed, but I felt every eye. The Charger was about as anonymous as a parade float. It even looked a little like one, covered in white smears of turtle wax.

  Dave walked across the ill-kempt lawn, going opposite the drive, around the side of the house. Paper shades were pulled down two of the windows I could see, and the third was dark and crusted with dirt.

  I checked my phone—still working. It might have cost twenty dollars but it seemed to be as reliable as any of that military-grade hardware the army loaded us down with. I called Zeke.

  No answer.

  Johnny—no answer.

  Ryan—you get the picture.

  I checked the Sig Sauer. It still smelled from the firefight. I didn’t feel like disassembling it—who knows what Brendt was up to? I might need a weapon again real soon. The cleaning would have to wait. Instead, I took my one spare magazine, removed all the rounds and pushed them back in again, nice and careful. The used magazine still had three left, so I put it in an outside pocket.

  The pistol itself I held down at seat level.

  Two minutes went by. The sun reflected sharply off one of the windows in Brendt’s shack, and I shifted my head away from the glare.

  A door slammed, and Dave came running out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He opened the door, slid in and pulled it shut—not loudly—in about two seconds.

  “His girlfriend took it.” Dave rumbled the Charger’s engine into life and stamped the accelerator. We squealed through a U-turn and roared back toward town center.

  “The Saturn?”

  “She works at the Super Duper, went in this morning at seven. He says.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I think so.” Dave looked over at me, checked all three mirrors automatically and thought for a moment. “He was just waking up. Brendt is kind of slow, like I said. He looked way too hung over to be making up stories. Elsie’s moved in, and he’s sharing the car with her.”

  “Elsie?”

  “She’s from Fairville,” he said. “Next county over. No one I know.”

  A setup seemed impossible. “How long’s she been with him?”

  “Brendt said a few months.”

  “You didn’t know about her?”

  “He never mentioned.”

  “Hard to believe you never even saw her before.”

  “I ain’t seen much of Brendt either lately—now I know why.”

  “Okay.” The social mores seemed odd, but it wasn’t my town.

  Dave slowed behind an RV—some retiree out to see America, his home on his metaphorical back. The thing must have been forty feet long and fifteen wide.

  “Maybe . . .” Dave hesitated. “Brendt and I have some history. You know, with women.”

  Ah. “Let me guess.”

  “Yeah.” He grimaced. “I don’t know how, he always seems to find the good ones first.”

  “And you’re like, what, share and share alike? All’s fair in love and war?”

  “I can’t help it.” He shrugged without taking his hands from the wheel. “Some of them, they decide they’d rather step out with me.”

  “Jesus. And he’s still friends with you?”

  “Mostly.” Dave abruptly accelerated. The Charger bounded forward, barely missing the corner of the RV. The oncoming lane was empty for a few hundred yards, but a trailer truck was approaching fast. We roared past the RV, engine screaming in high gear. Dave yanked the wheel, and we slipped back across the solid line—about ten feet in front of certain death on the truck’s bumper.

  “Oh. My. God.” I tried to breathe again.

  “Anyway, Brendt was real worried, thought this might fuck up the relationship or something.”

  Worried about Dave, or worried about his girlfriend handing his car over to a squad of terrorists? Maybe it didn’t matter. “I could see that.”

  A mile down we slowed, entering a turn lane at a blinker. At the intersection Dave turned into the jammed parking lot, the Charger rumbling as he nosed slowly among the rows, looking for a space. Women pushed loaded shopping carts to their SUVs; men ambled along carrying 24-packs and sacks of charcoal. Sunday was Clabbton’s big shopping day, apparently.

  The Super Duper occupied one end of the strip mall. A Chinese restaurant, a gun shop and dollar store filled out the rest. Dave parked around the side, on top of the yellow zebra stripes. He pointed at the NO PARKING YOU WILL BE TOWED! sign.

  “Better stay here,” he said. “In case they’re serious.”

  Again? “Now, wait a min–”

  He raised his hands. “No, no, don’t worry, I’ll find Elsie and bring her out. You’re right, we should both talk to her.”

  “All right.” I gave in. “Fine.”

  He disappeared into the supermarket. I took a minute to study the lot, including the service drive that continued behind the car and around the back. The cab of an eighteen-wheeler was just visible in the rear, probably where it had backed up to the loading dock. Out front, the parking lot was a hive of cars coming and going.

  The sun came out again, stronger this time.

  Nothing looked out of place.

  The attack had to be connected to Clayco. The other work I’d had lately was nothing—some collection work, sorting out a low-level abstraction of funds, and even a few tax returns, mostly as favors to friends. Glamorous, huh? Nothing that would draw a Call of Duty strike force.

  Anyway, the timing made it certain: run my little audit one day, assault forces are parachuting in forty hours later.

  The problem was, they knew me.

  Or they knew Ryan, and they got my name from him. Actually, that was more likely. But either way, it was an inside job. Only someone in the loop would be able to run the pingback so quickly.

  So the job had either been a setup from the start—or there were some very big, very fast sharks swimming in the same pool.

  Dave came back around the corner, a woman gesturing beside him, and I stopped worrying about Soap MacTavish.

  Stunning. Drop-dead. Heartstopping. She should have been on a Brazilian runway, not schlumping frozen pizzas across a scanner. Willowy tall—too tall for the baggy yellow employee smock—hair flowing with streaks of gold and silver, eyes green and knowing. She was knocking a cigarette out of a box, Dave hastily checking his pockets.

  I’ll bet her checkout line was twenty deep. Guys buying one or two items—“Honey, can I do the grocery shopping today?”

  I got out, closed the door, and met them in front of the hood.

  “Silas? Elsie.” Dave made the introduction, kind of grudging, getting his lighter into play.

  “Hi, Silas.” Her voice husky and low and tuned to that frequency that switches off men’s cortexes. She got the cigarette going and looked me in the face. “Damn! What’re you, twins?”

  “Brothers.”

  “I guess.”

  “I known Brendt since grade school,” Dave said. “He must be doing all right in the world.”

  “He’s really nice to me.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Lend
s you his car and all.”

  “Yeah, I had a little fender bumper last week.” She exhaled smoke to the side like a forties movie queen. “I think Brendt mentioned your name, Dave. Thought you could fix it up for me.”

  “Sure, no problem!” He paused, his brain catching up. “Or, well, actually. Maybe I should swing by instead. Sometimes you can just knock the dents out with a mallet.”

  The attack, the destruction of his garage, our screaming high-speed drive through the county—Elsie seemed to have driven everything out of Dave’s head.

  Some teenagers walking from their car passed us, the boys’ mouths hanging open as they stared. One of the girls elbowed her boyfriend, sharp, and he yelped. Aggrieved complaints and laughter from the others took them into the store.

  Elsie didn’t take any more notice than she would have a bumblebee.

  “You parked here?” I tried to keep the conversation on point.

  “Out at the edge.” She lifted one finger, gracefully indicating the far side of the lot. “They don’t like us to take spaces closer than that.”

  “Uh-huh. Is it still there?”

  We all peered across the pavement.

  “Sure.” And indeed, I thought I recognized the same dull-colored car the gunmen had driven off in, not forty minutes earlier.

  “Is it where you left it? In the same parking place, I mean?”

  Elsie’s gaze turned to me. “That’s a funny question.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe we should take a look.”

  We walked across the lot, zigzagging around parked cars. Shoppers watched us openly, sideways, subtle, blatant. I realized that Elsie was perhaps the most effective camouflage I’d ever used. No one had a microsecond glance for me.

  Good thing I hate the smell of cigarettes—one thing about the city, the air’s lousy but hardly anyone smokes in public anymore. Elsie might have distracted me utterly, otherwise.

  Like Dave, who walked straight into the bed of a pickup, his head turned around to talk to her instead of watching where he was going.