JD04 - Reasonable Fear

by Scott Pratt

  I took the pre-paid cell out of my pocket and dialed Mack McCoy’s phone number.

  “I figured you for an early riser,” I said when he answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the woods outside my house. Any chance you and Bernie Cole can come out?”

  “Be there in an hour.”

  As the gray light of dawn began to emerge, I started scouring the area around the house, looking for signs that someone had been there: cigarette butts, wrappers, cans, bottles, any type of trash that might indicate surveillance. I looked for depressions in the grass and weeds, especially on the higher ground, but found nothing that alarmed me. It appeared that the sicarios hadn’t arrived yet. I wondered about what Bates had said to me on the phone. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Pinzon was the killer and had hatched an extravagant plot to extricate himself from the murders. Maybe there weren’t any sicarios. Maybe no one was coming. Maybe Pinzon had tried to force me into hiding to buy himself some time.

  I heard vehicles approaching on the road and looked down the hill. Mack McCoy’s car was in the lead, followed by the van Bernie Cole had driven the other day. I took the web gear off, set it down next to a tree stump, and laid the M16 beside it. I came out of the woods just as Mack and Leah were getting out of the car at the top of the driveway. Both of them reached for their weapons. I held my hands up.

  “It’s me! It’s Dillard!”

  “Damn, son, have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?” Mack said as I approached. “You look rough.”

  I hadn’t bathed or shaved in two days.

  “Did you get everybody squared away?” Mack said.

  “Yeah, they’re safe. They’re with an old friend on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Michigan.”

  “What are you doing dressed up like GI Joe?” he said.

  “I spent the last few hours out here watching the house. I was afraid someone might be in there, but nothing’s moved so far. I’ve been walking the property since dawn looking to see if anybody’s been around, but I didn’t find a thing.” I looked at Bernie Cole, who had gotten out of the van and walked up next to Mack. “I need to know exactly what’s in the house, and I need to know if there’s a way to disable it.”

  “Disable it?” Bernie said.

  “Shut it off completely.”

  “That’s easy. They’re using your power supply. All you have to do is flip the main circuit breaker and cut the power to the house. Everything but the phone tap goes dead.”

  “You’ve missed quite a circus around here the past couple of days,” Mack said. “The media’s on a feeding frenzy. You should see the story in the paper this morning, what the sheriff is saying. He’s telling everybody you’ve come unhinged.”

  “I know. I talked to him yesterday. What do you think? You think I’m a nut case?”

  “I might if it wasn’t for Leah. She’s said a lot of good things about you. If I wasn’t so secure in my masculinity, I might be jealous.”

  I looked at Leah, who was still standing on the passenger side of the car. She winked at me and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I was with Pinzon for more than an hour at the hospital,” I said to Mack. “I saw how he acted. I’ve misread people before, but I don’t think he was lying. Lipscomb is responsible for the murders of the girls, he’s behind the murders of Zack Woods and Hector Mejia. I think he had his brother killed too.”

  “You’re probably right,” Mack said. “I’ve checked into some of the things you told me before you left. The girl in Boston, Mallory Vines, checks out. She was reported missing and was never seen again. And the other guy, Tex. His name was probably William Rogan, reported missing from Grand Prairie, Texas. His parents had been killed in an automobile accident, he was a student at SMU, and he went by the nickname of Tex. Never a sign of him after he got on a flight to Boston.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. I guess that’s good.”

  “There’s more,” he said. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “Guess I could use a little good news about now.”

  “We got a hit on the El Maligno nickname you gave me. He’s worked for Eduardo Pinzon for twenty years. Eduardo Pinzon just happens to be Andres Pinzon’s uncle.”

  “Right. That’s what he said. ‘Uncle Eduardo.’”

  “First name is Santiago. Last name is Guzman. Has a nasty scar on his left cheek just like you said.”

  “So you can track him?”

  “That’s the bad news. I called an old buddy in Colombia and asked him if they could get eyes on this guy. They know him well. They know where he lives, where he hangs out. They should have been able to find him, but they couldn’t.”

  “Which means?”

  “It could mean he took a vacation to Guadalajara or Rio de Janeiro or someplace.”

  “Or it could mean—”

  “Right. He’s on his way up here, but that isn’t the worst of it. My Colombian buddy told me that El Maligno is responsible, directly or indirectly, for at least a hundred and fifty murders. He and his boys blew up a plane in Colombia with over a hundred people on it back in ninety-eight. They were trying to kill a Colombian presidential candidate, but the guy got cold feet and didn’t take the flight. This El Maligno tracked him down and shot him in his car two days later. Killed his wife and daughter, too. He’s a bad, bad hombre.”

  We stood outside the house for more than an hour. Bernie showed me a rough diagram he’d drawn of the devices that were in the house and explained what areas they covered while Leah and Mack milled around impatiently. The video cameras were everywhere, even in the garage, and the microphones, at least theoretically, would pick up every word uttered – even whispers – from anywhere inside.

  “There’s nothing outside?” I asked Bernie. “Did you check the workshop out back?”

  “I checked everywhere,” he said. “Didn’t find a thing.”

  “Just what are you planning?” Mack said. He’d walked up behind Bernie and was hovering over his shoulder. Leah stayed a good distance away. She was looking out over the lake, acting like she was interested in what she was seeing. I remembered Leah as a strong, independent, sometimes domineering woman, but she’d obviously met her match in Mack.

  “I have something in mind,” I said.

  “What can we do to help?”

  “I don’t think you should be here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t have a lot of choices.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Look, I’ve only known you for a few of days. You weren’t in on the beginning of this, and I don’t think you want to be around for the end. If this El Maligno comes, someone is going to die here. If the media and the government and Bates and everybody else think I’m crazy now, what’s it going to look like if there’s a gun battle on my property? Even if I make it out alive, there are going to be some serious repercussions.”

  “Yeah, well, chances are you won’t make it out alive if you try to do this alone,” Mack said.

  “This case – this situation – has been like a hurricane. It started small and now it’s grown into something uncontrollable, something deadly. You and Leah just transferred here. You need to think about your own careers, about your reputations. If they come, I’ll be lucky to live, and if I do live, I’ll be lucky to stay out of jail. There are people on both sides of this that would like to see me dangling from the end of a rope. So you guys need to distance yourself from me. What do the politicians call it? Plausible deniability?”

  Mack put his hands on his hips and took a couple of steps in my direction. I’m not a small man, but he dwarfed me. Being in his presence was like standing in front of Zeus.

  “I think maybe I like you, Dillard,” he said. “You know why? Because I’m not some run-of-the-mill, dipstick FBI agent, and you’re not some run-of-the-mill, dipstick prosecutor. I wish you were in the U.S. Attorney’s office. You and I could get some things done.”

  I smil
ed for the first time in days.

  “Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll make a deal with you. You have other work to do, right? Go do it. My plan, if you can call it that, is to go inside and let them see me on the video equipment so they know I’m here. After that, I’m planning to sit out in the woods, watching, until they come, if they come. So here’s the deal. If you’ll agree not to tell anyone I’m here, if you’ll just let me handle this my way, I’ll agree to call you the second I see something that looks like it might be bad. And if I call you, I’ll expect you to come running.”

  He regarded me intently with those brilliant blue eyes for a few seconds. He was trying to read my mind, to decide whether or not I was lying.

  “Deal,” he said, “but I want to know what kind of weapons you have.”

  “A shotgun and a pistol. They’re both in the house. I think I have three double-ought buckshot shells for the shotgun and some bird shot. I have maybe fifteen rounds for the pistol. I’m not prepared to fight a war with anyone.”

  “Is that it? A shotgun and a pistol? I don’t know exactly what kind of firepower these guys will bring if they come, but it’ll damn sure be more than a shotgun and a pistol.”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed, Dillard.”

  “You were a SEAL,” I said, “a professional soldier. Which enemy is the most dangerous, the enemy you least wanted to fight?”

  He thought for a minute before he started nodding his head.

  “The man who’s defending his own home.”

  “And that’s what you’re looking at. This ground we’re standing on, that house, those buildings, this is my home. My wife and I built a life here, we raised our children here, and now John Lipscomb has taken it from us. He’s taken our lives, and I don’t intend to let it stay that way. If he sends soldiers, sicarios, hit men, assassins – whatever you want to call them – if he sends them here, I’m going to kill them.”

  “And when Lipscomb hires more? You going to kill them, too?”

  I thought of the conversation I’d had with Erlene. She’d gotten the message. I had no doubt she had her own people working on doing the same thing to Lipscomb that he’d been doing to others.

  “I don’t think Lipscomb will hire any more,” I said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Just call it a hunch. I think Lipscomb’s train is about to run off the tracks.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  After Mack and Leah left, I walked back through the woods to the van and curled up underneath a poncho. I slept restlessly for few hours, terrified by a nightmare, one in which Caroline, Lilly and Sarah were being gang-raped by men wearing black hoods. I’d been gagged and tied to a chair, my eyelids taped open, and was being forced to watch helplessly. Jack was in another chair across the room, his throat cut and his tongue pulled out through the wound. The sound of John Lipscomb’s laughter boomed through the scene while the men sweated and grunted and brutalized the women in my life. I woke up just as the man who was raping Caroline raised a knife to her throat.

  I changed back into the clothes I’d been wearing the day before, started the van, drove it around to my workshop, and unloaded the crate Bo had given me. I cut several two-by-fours that were lying in a pile into four-foot lengths and used a cordless drill to bore two holes into each end. As soon as I was finished, I drove the van back to the hiding place and for the third time walked through the woods to the house. I opened the front door with my key and stepped inside.

  I don’t think it had ever been so quiet inside the house. I walked through each room, looking around, trying to act like I didn’t know I was being watched. I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a sandwich, sat down at the kitchen table, and ate it slowly.

  I spent the better part of the next two hours convincing myself that setting an ambush with the intention of killing men wasn’t wrong. I thought about Osama bin Laden and the terror he’d inflicted on an entire nation, a nation in which I’d been raised, a nation of laws. How did we react? We went hunting for blood, just as we should have. It took ten years, but we finally killed that miserable coward.

  John Lipscomb was no different in my mind. He was a criminal and a terrorist, a murderer of defenseless young women as well as a coward who hired others to do his killing. The difference was that I knew his men were coming, and I knew where they were most likely to strike.

  A thought popped into my head as I recalled the conversation I’d had with Bo Hallgren in his barn. I walked over to a drawer in the kitchen and took out a pen and a small notebook. I set the notebook on the table in front of me, opened it, and wrote down the words, “reasonable fear.”

  Was I in reasonable fear of seriously bodily harm?

  Damned right I was.

  Would the law allow me to use deadly force?

  If they came to my house, the answer was yes. A man’s home is still his castle in the eyes of the law.

  I finished nibbling on the sandwich and started gathering things: photographs, an old wedding album, a cedar chest full of memories, and I carried it all to the outbuilding. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew with what I was planning there was a possibility that a fire might start. If it did and I couldn’t put it out, I didn’t want to some of the things Caroline and I cherished to burn.

  On my last trip to the workshop it started sprinkling. A clap of thunder startled me and I looked to the southwest, the direction from which most of our weather came. A huge, black thunderhead was rolling across the mountains, moving steadily in my direction. I picked up Bo’s crate and carried it to the corner of the house, just outside the garage, as the sky grew steadily darker. I went back to the workshop one last time, gathered up the two-by-fours, the drill, and some four-inch wood screws, and carried it all to the crate.

  I walked inside the house again. Bernie Cole had made me a diagram, so I knew where the cameras were. I was so geared for a fight that I wanted to walk up directly in front of a camera and say, “Here I am. Come and get me,” but I resisted the impulse. I could hear the wind whistling outside. I walked down the steps to the basement and flipped the main circuit breaker.

  The house went black.

  I hurried back upstairs and out through the garage. I made two trips carrying the crate, the lumber and the screws and the drill into the house. I changed quickly back into the fatigues, boots, and web gear, smeared some camo paint on my face, and went to work.

  There were five doors into the house: one in the kitchen that led to the deck, one in the den that led to the deck, one in Jack’s old room downstairs that led to the patio, one in the kitchen that led to the garage, and the front door. I barricaded the two doors that came off the deck and the door to Jack’s room by screwing three two-by-fours into the door frames on the inside. I left the other two doors – the front door and the door from the garage to the kitchen – unlocked.

  I opened the crate and started pulling out the real toys Bo had given me: Claymore mines. Claymores are roughly the size of a thick, hardback book, and they only weigh about three-and-a-half pounds. The outer shell is green and made of plastic. They’re convex in shape, about eight inches long, five inches high and a little less than two inches wide with the words “Front Toward Enemy” stamped into the front panel. They’re filled with seven hundred steel balls, each about an eighth of an inch in diameter. The balls are held together by an epoxy resin and propelled by a C-4 explosive charge.

  I’d used Claymores when I was a Ranger. They’re deadly, but the best thing about them is that they can be aimed in a particular direction. They don’t send shrapnel flying three hundred and sixty degrees like other conventional land mines. They have a sight on the top so a soldier can aim them. They’ll spread the steel balls about sixty degrees at fifty yards away. I didn’t need a sixty-degree spread, though. My prey was going to be in a much more confined area.

  I placed one Claymore about fifteen feet from the front door and anothe
r about fifteen feet from the door that went from the garage to the kitchen. I camouflaged both of them by covering them with dark towels. There are several ways to detonate Claymores, but Bo had given me four laser triggers, the latest improvement in the technology, and I set the beams so that anyone who walked four feet inside the doors would be met by a hail of ball bearings traveling at four thousand feet per second. I set one in the den and one at the top of the stairs that led to Lilly’s room – places where an intruder who entered through a window was most likely to walk. As soon as I was finished, I pulled the M16, the ammo, the knife, the flashlight and a poncho out of the crate, pushed it into the garage, and went outside into the storm.

  When I got to the place where I planned to spend the night watching, I took the cell phone out of my pocket and texted a message to Caroline: “All is well. Talk in morning. I love you.” I turned the phone off, and sat back to wait.

  I certainly didn’t plan it when the house was being built, but building on the bluff above the lake gave me at least a bit of a tactical advantage. If someone wanted to sneak up and try to get inside, they couldn’t do it from the lake side because of the sheer rock cliffs. That meant they would have to come through the woods or walk across an open field on the opposite side of the house. They could come directly down from the road, but I didn’t think they’d be that lazy.

  I’d been over it dozens of times in my mind in the past twenty-four hours. From which direction were they most likely to come? I didn’t know how sophisticated their weapons or their equipment would be. Would they have night-vision devices like the scope I had? Would they have grenades or rockets? Were they planning on destroying the house and anyone in it? From what Pinzon had told me, I thought they most likely wanted to take me alive, if at all possible, so they could torture me or force me to watch my family die. They might even want to take me to Lipscomb so he could derive some pleasure at my expense.

  The weather was both a blessing and a curse. It would help me move silently, but it would do the same for them. I’d walked up to the same rise where I was standing when Leah and Mack arrived that morning. It gave me a clear view of three sides of the house. I couldn’t see what was going on in back, but I didn’t believe they’d come from there. I spent the next four hours lying on my belly, peering through the thermal sight and listening. Five vehicles passed on the road below me at different times during my wait, and each one set my heart racing.