by Matt Hilton
The drapes were drawn in our room. A faint amber light glowed at the edges of the windows. Snow began to flutter past the halogen lights in the parking lot and gather on the sloping eaves of the motel. It looked like a scene from a Frank Capra movie. I paused outside the door, my bag of groceries clutched to my chest as I sucked in a deep breath.
My hesitation was because I knew Kate would be repulsed by my actions. She was a cop. How would she react to what I'd done to Trent Bolan? In a lot of respects, that made me a cop's worst nightmare. Would she despise me? That was the last thing I wanted. I'd told Rink earlier that I couldn't allow myself to be distracted by a pretty face, and I'd meant it. But for all my best intentions, I'd failed.
Kate was very beautiful and feisty and I was strongly attracted to her. When she kissed me it had taken all my will not to kiss her back.
It took a lot to open that door.
It was best not to mention the episode yet. The fact that my throat was twice its normal size, I had a lump on my head like a duck egg, and my ribs felt like Rocky Balboa had used me for a punch bag, might give the game away. I'd admit to a run-in with the twins, but not to the outcome. She didn't need to know exactly what I'd done to Trent.
I stepped into the damp warmth of the room. 'Kate. It's only me, Joe.'
Kate wasn't in the living room. The bed was mussed from where she'd been lying on top of the comforter and the TV was switched to a local news channel with the volume down low. The bathroom door was closed, and I could hear a trickle of water from the shower.
Putting down the bag of groceries, I pulled out the chocolate and placed it strategically on the bed like a peace offering. I shrugged out of my jacket. There was a mirror over a chest of drawers. My face wasn't as bruised as I'd thought – Trent had punched me above the hairline – and my neck only felt like it was swollen. I lifted the hem of my shirt and studied my ribs. They were red and tender to the touch but I couldn't detect any abnormality. Thankfully, Larry had been kicking me with his instep and not the toe of his boots, so I'd escaped any broken bones. I dropped my shirt, covering the incriminating evidence.
'Kate?' I didn't want to embarrass her if she happened to come out the bathroom in a state of undress. I rapped on the door. 'Kate. I'm back.'
There was no answer, and I experienced a cold spurt of dread in my gut.
'Kate?'
I tried the door handle and the door swung silently inwards.
The bathroom was empty. Steam hung in the air, and water still trickled from the showerhead. Kate hadn't been absent long.
I wondered where she could be. She was a free spirit and not exactly helpless, so I shouldn't have been as concerned as I was. Maybe she'd gone out to a nearby store to purchase some food – neither of us had eaten since leaving Florida that morning. Even so, something about the emptiness of the room told me I was fooling myself. It was warm and clammy from Kate's shower, but there was something else.
Where was she? What had happened here? For the briefest of moments I wondered if she'd left out of embarrassment because I'd brushed her off. But I discarded that idea. A feeling lingered in the atmosphere, almost like some residual fear had been left over following sudden violence. It pervaded the air like a static charge.
Lifting the mattress with one hand, I found the Magnum where I'd left it. I shoved it down my waistband next to my SIG Sauer. The inclination that I might need the heavy firepower was strong in my mind.
My shoe scuffed against something lying partly hidden by the bed.
Kate's mobile phone.
It was one of those with a flip front and I opened it up.
The screen saver showed Kate standing with her arm round the shoulder of another woman. The second woman was a few years older, fairer of hair and slightly heavier in build. But there was no denying the family resemblance. Kate and her sister, Imogen, were mugging for the camera. They both looked very happy, caught in a snapshot of simpler times.
Ordinarily I'd have closed the phone then. A person's mobile phone is the equivalent of a personal diary these days. It is where people store all their memories. I would have felt like an interloper invading her precious space if not for one thing: Kate had left the phone for me to find it. There was a clue on the phone to who had taken her, and where I would find her.
Wondering if she'd discreetly snapped her abductor, I first scrolled through the photograph files. There were dozens of pictures, many of them of Imogen, some of Kate dressed in her NYPD uniform, smiling proudly at the camera. There were a few of friends and landscapes, one of Imogen's mountaintop home, but none of anyone who'd come uninvited to this room.
Next I went to her call register and to her dialled numbers.
I recognised Rink's number immediately. She'd called him six times over the last four days. But his wasn't the most recent number in the list. There were two above it. The first I quickly ascertained was likely to be Imogen's cell; it was no Sherlock Holmes power-of-deduction moment, the number was logged as SIS. There were a dozen or so calls made to the same number prior to Kate calling Rink and four occasions during the time they'd been in contact. She'd called Rink a little over an hour ago and then tried Imogen's number again immediately after. Twenty minutes after that she'd called the final number on the list. I selected the number and hit the 'view' button. Kate had barely been on the phone for two minutes. It didn't tell me who the call was to or what it had been about, so I hit the green call button.
'Little Fork Sheriff's Department,' announced a woman. 'How may I help you?'
It was all I needed and I hit the red button to end the connection.
'Damn it, Kate,' I sighed. 'Why didn't you do as I asked?'
But the answer was obvious. She was a cop. Duty had prevailed.
I couldn't really blame her.
It was her career at stake, after all. She was evidently concerned about what had happened up on the mountain. It would be the death of her career as a police officer if she didn't call it in. Problem was, she'd just traded her career for her life.
Larry Bolan hadn't told me everything. But he'd told me enough.
Robert Huffman was in charge, but one of his confederates came in the shape of Sheriff Jim Aitken. Aitken had watched while Larry and Trent had battered his predecessor to death with their fists. He hadn't even intervened when Trent had torn an ear from Sheriff Devaney's head to show him the error of not doing as he was told.
I could imagine how it had played out. Kate's call had been put through to the sheriff and he'd promised to deal with things personally. Aitken had come here and Kate had opened the door to him. Aitken had then drawn his gun and taken her away. Kate had had the presence of mind to drop her phone, warning me that I'd very likely walked into a trap.
'Shit,' I said. But that was about as effusive as I felt.
Reaching behind me, I came out with a gun in each hand.
Just as something crashed through the window trailing smoke.
No such a thing as a warning shout for me. The Little Fork Sheriff's Department meant business. The tear-gas canister was only the start of worse things to come.
Chapter 14
There were only two options open to me: surrender or resist.
Surrendering isn't normally in my vocabulary.
But how could I resist officers of the law?
Sheriff Aitken was one of the murderous group headed by Robert Huffman, but I couldn't be sure how far his influence extended to the men and women under his command. In all likelihood, the junior officers were simply good people following orders. To them I'd be a gun-toting fugitive who'd brought violence to their town. They'd be determined to bring me to justice, and if I came out with my guns blazing, I could expect them to return fire.
I didn't want any good people to die.
To surrender meant coming out empty-handed. In approximately five seconds, I'd be face down on the sidewalk with my hands cuffed behind me. Then straight to a cell. At Aitken's mercy, I didn't doubt that some tragic ac
cident would come my way while pent up in a cage. Maybe Larry Bolan would be my first visitor. That's if Aitken's trigger finger didn't slip the second I poked my head out of the motel-room door.
There were only seconds to decide.
The tear gas was launched with the intention of forcing me into their arms. If I didn't show quickly, they'd be following the gas into the room to take me down while I was coughing and choking on its effects. Shouted commands from outside drifted to me, but I wasn't listening. They were irrelevant to what would happen next.
The front door was covered, so too would be the bathroom window. No apparent way out. The cops had me cornered and debilitated by their gas.
Unless they'd wrung it out of Kate, they wouldn't know that I was ex-Special Forces. They couldn't know that I'd been trained to continue fighting even under extreme duress. Being exposed to tear gas, CS, PAVA, and all manner of non-lethal chemicals and irritants is standard practice for someone with my background.
The gas had filled the room.
Grabbing up my discarded jacket, I tied it round my face as an improvised mask. It didn't help my eyes, but it took away the acridness tearing at my respiratory system. Then I moved to the cupboard upon which the TV played away to itself and shoved the TV to the floor. The newscaster on the screen didn't seem aware of the tumble he'd just taken.
Using the TV as a step, I clambered up on to the cupboard. From outside I heard the scuff of feet as the assault began. I thrust upwards, throwing back the service hatch into the loft just as feet pounded towards the building. Men were shouting, identifying themselves, telling me to lay down my weapons. Then I hauled myself into the roof space, rolling sideways so that I could kick the hatch back into place. The sound of it slamming shut was covered by the crash of the room door being smashed off its hinges.
Immediately the shouts of the first officers inside filled the room below, then banging and clattering as they moved through the room bumping into furniture. They'd be wearing gas masks, but they'd still be confused by the smoke. When the living area was cleared they'd move to the bathroom. I came to my feet in the narrow attic space, moving hurriedly to my right. When the motel was built, the expense of fitting out the rooms wasn't extended to the attic area. No walls had been erected, so I had a free run to the far end of the building. Unsure of what I'd find in the room below, I hauled open the hatch and dropped through the hole into darkness.
The room was vacant. The drapes were open, and I could see the gumball lights from the Sheriff's Department's vehicles dancing on the snowflakes drifting by the window. Pulling free my jacket and shucking into it, I moved quickly to the door and opened it an inch. I could see movement at the far end of the block. It wasn't the kind of take-down you'd see conducted by big city SWAT teams. Three squad cars. A maximum of ten or twelve officers, I calculated. Most of them were in the room or covering the back. There were only two men outside, and only one I was interested in: a short, stocky man in a cop's uniform standing at the front of a liveried car.
I'd never seen Sheriff Aitken before, or even had a description of him from Larry Bolan, but I knew who the barrel-chested punk was. Like all murdering cowards, he wasn't about to put himself in the line of fire; not when he had innocents under his command who could be ordered to do so.
It'd be a matter of seconds before they realised how I'd escaped them. Give them another half-minute and they'd be conducting a thorough search of every room in the block.
Never let it be said that Joe Hunter is too rash for his own good. I could run, yes. But running, like surrender, doesn't sit too well with me. I'm more your go-for-broke kind of guy. Which was the driving force for me throwing open the door and running directly at Sheriff Aitken.
The punk didn't see me coming. He was too intent on watching the assault on the motel room. His face was a long oval, mouth open in anticipation. He was holding a revolver down by his thigh. Probably the gun he intended using to assassinate me.
Aitken was blind to my approach, but not so the deputy who was standing aiming a shotgun over the open door of his squad car. He caught my rush in his peripheral vision and his face swung my way. Surprised, he couldn't make immediate sense of the man running towards him, but his eyes blinked in astonishment at the guns I held in my hands. It took his brain a second or so to recognise the danger, to fire commands to the hands holding the shotgun. In that time I'd crossed most of the distance between us and brought up my SIG.
I fired before he did.
I aimed directly for his central mass and hit him dead centre.
The man dropped behind the car door and he stayed down.
That pleased me. It meant that I wouldn't have to kill the poor sap. I'd purposefully fired into his bullet-proof vest. The Kevlar would have stopped the bullet, but not the impact which had knocked the wind and the senses out of him.
I didn't stop my forward rush, only angled it towards Sheriff Aitken.
Now he was aware of me.
He turned, bringing up his revolver.
He was wearing a vest as well, but he deserved something a little more lethal. The only thing stopping me unloading a full clip into his head was that I needed him alive. He couldn't tell me where Kate was if I left him steaming in the frigid parking lot.
Aitken didn't have such qualms. All he was interested in was having me dead at his feet. My mad charge was all the justification he required to put me down. Who would challenge the killing when it was so obviously self-defence? With me dead, Kate would follow. Then they could get back to finding Imogen Ballard and put an end to this hiccup in Huffman's plans.
Aitken fired.
Only I was dropping under his line of fire, skidding like I was headed for first base. The snow helped my crazy attack, allowed me to slide the ten feet that separated us. Instead of stepping aside, Aitken was too intent on shooting at me. He tried to track me with his gun, but my movement was faster than his ability to follow it. Then my feet slammed into his shins and Sheriff Aitken sprawled over the top of me, his revolver sliding away into darkness. His body was on top of mine but only for as long as it took me to swing him over and on to his back. I came up from the floor with one knee on his chest and the Magnum under his chin. My SIG was squared on the door to my motel room.
The shots fired had alerted those within the room. I saw a man in a gas mask and vest come out of the cloud of tear gas pouring out the open door. He had a pump-action shotgun and it was aimed at me.
Good guy or bad, I wasn't going to let him take off my head. I shot him in his left leg and he collapsed in agony.
'The next man out of that room dies!' I roared at the top of my lungs. To add validity to my threat, I fired a couple of rounds into the room – careful to keep the bullets above their heads.
'Get up,' I said to Aitken. 'Now!'
Aitken scrambled up, showing me his empty hands. 'Easy now, son. I'm unarmed.'
'I'm not your son,' I snarled at him. 'Now get in the car. You drive.'
'You're making a big mistake…'
I cracked him round the side of his face with the barrel of the Magnum. 'The only mistake is that you're still alive, asshole. Now get the hell in the car before I decide to put things right.'
Aitken didn't need telling twice. He bustled into his squad car even as I clambered in the back. There was mesh between us, but it didn't mean a thing when I was armed.
'Drive,' I shouted.
'Where?' he asked as he reversed away from the other parked cars. I saw the man I'd shot in the chest rolling on to his knees and was gratified to see that he appeared unharmed.
'Away from here. And don't try to lead me into a trap. I'm not an idiot, Aitken. Try to set me up and I'll do to you what the Bolans did to the real sheriff.'
At my words, I saw his head shrink into his thick shoulders.
'Yeah, I know all about that. And everything else you've got going with Huffman.' Behind us the deputies were racing for their vehicles, planning on giving pursuit. 'Get on the radio, A
itken. Tell them to back off or I swear to God I'll kill you.'
Aitken was quick to comply. He also drove like he intended outrunning the storm that was growing stronger around us.
'Take us out of town,' I ordered.
'Where?'
'I'll know it when we get there.'
'What happens then?'
'That depends on whether you've harmed Kate or not.'
'I haven't. I swear to you she's fine.'
'So maybe I'll let you live, Aitken,' I said, 'if you tell me where she is.'
'I'll tell you! She's with Huffman.'
'Where?'
'I don't know.'
I drew back the hammer on the Magnum. The double click was ominous.
Aitken cringed. 'I swear to you… Jesus… I don't know where he took her.'
'Think.' Tapping the Magnum on the wire mesh, I warned him, 'You've got until I tell you to stop. You don't come up with where she's at, well, Aitken, that'll mean you've outlived your usefulness.'
Chapter 15
'You will tell me who he is, bitch, or I swear I'm going to hurt you in more ways than you can imagine!'
Stripped to the waist, an impromptu bandage wound round his gun-shot shoulder, Larry Bolan menaced Kate Piers like an ogre out of a dark fairy tale.
Kate was sitting in a semi-dark room, propped on a folding metal chair with her arms cuffed to the back legs. Her linen jacket had been pulled off, her cream blouse torn open at the front exposing her bra and even her boots had been taken away so that she sat with her bare toes curling with each of Larry's words.
'Who is he?' Larry demanded again.
Kate just stared at him in defiance.
Larry slashed his hand across her face, his callused palm almost tearing the skin from her right cheek. Her head rocked from the blow, and her eyes momentarily lost lucidity.