by Jude Hardin
A snake with red and black and yellow stripes slithered across the trail. There was a little rhyme based on the order of the stripes that told you whether or not this kind of snake was poisonous, but Colt never could remember what it was. Black against red makes a fellow dead. Something like that. Or black against yellow kills a fellow. Colt never could remember. He knew every word from the theme song of Gilligan’s Island, but he couldn’t remember something that might actually save his life. So he just assumed that all snakes with red and black and yellow stripes were deadly, and he avoided them whenever possible.
Today it wasn’t possible.
He pulled the gun from its holster and drew a bead on the snake’s head. Colt was a good shot, and he could have taken the potentially deadly reptile out at this distance with no problem. But he didn’t. It probably wasn’t poisonous, and it wasn’t an immediate threat. It was just crossing the path to the other side of the woods.
He slid the revolver back into its holster.
“Peace,” he said to the snake.
As if on cue, it disappeared under a rotting tree branch.
Colt climbed out of the brush and walked back toward the house to meet his new partner, noticing as he made his way that his watch had stopped. Probably just the battery, he thought. The sun was getting low, and he guessed it to be around eight o’clock. According to the files, Jack Reacher had the ability to tell time without any mechanical or digital help. He did it naturally, somehow, all in his brain. Like down to the minute or something. Colt could see where a talent like that might come in handy sometimes, but right now he didn’t really care if it was 8:05 or 8:20. He knew it was going to be night soon, and he knew that he would have another drink or two and discuss the assignment with his partner and eat something and go to bed and sleep as long as he wanted to. He didn’t have to be anywhere until day after tomorrow, which gave him plenty of time to study the books on Reacher.
He took a deep breath, mounted the stairs to the deck, peered down the hill and saw that the helicopter was still parked on the boat ramp. N1488BZ. Same bird that brought him earlier. It’s rotors were circling slowly, indicating that the engine was still running, idling in neutral or whatever they called it. Odd that it hadn’t launched yet. It had been at least fifteen minutes since he’d heard it making its approach. It should have flown off in the other direction by now, over the lake, as it had previously when it delivered Colt to the cabin. Maybe the pilot was checking the flight plan or something. Maybe he needed to go in a different direction this time.
Colt walked back inside the house, where a man wearing black pants and a black jacket sat on the sofa sipping on a bottle of spring water.
And pointing a gun directly at Colt’s chest.
6
Felisa pressed the little button mounted to the wall beside her bed. It looked like a doorbell. It alerted her captors when she needed to use the bathroom, or when she had some other problem that demanded immediate attention. The bruises on her face reminded her never to use it unless absolutely necessary.
Benny came and opened the door. He’d never hit her. It was the other one. The mean one. She didn’t know his name, but she heard his voice in her dreams sometimes.
“You need something?” Benny said.
“I need to use the restroom.”
“All right. You know the drill.”
Felisa slid the case off her pillow and put it over her head. Benny took her by the hand and led her out the door and away from the room and up a set of stairs. A quick right, and then another right, and then another right. Felisa felt her way along the vanity and then to the toilet.
“Do you think you could close the door this time?” she said.
“No.”
“It’s not like I’m going anywhere. I just want some privacy.”
“No. Hurry up.”
Felisa did as instructed. She hurried. So humiliating.
“All right,” she said. “I’m ready to go back.”
Benny took her by the hand.
“Bring her in here,” the mean one shouted from another room.
“What for?”
“Don’t worry about what for. Just do what I tell you to do.”
Benny gripped Felisa’s hand a little tighter and followed the sound of the voice.
7
Colt froze in his tracks and stared at the barrel. You never got used to being on the wrong end of one of those things. It was fat and black and ugly and deadly, and Colt could feel his blood pressure in his fingertips.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“I’m taking you back to headquarters. The assignment has been cancelled.”
“Why the gun?”
“Put your hands behind your head, turn around and open the door and start walking back down the hill. I’ll be right behind you.”
The man stood.
He was big.
Six-two, two-twenty, Colt guessed. He had the kind of body you see in commercials about exercise equipment. Mid-to-late twenties, dark mussed-up hair, fashionable stubble. He looked familiar.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about,” Colt said.
“I think you know what it’s about.”
“The coffee cup? I’ll pay for it. Really. You can just take it out of my check.”
“Kurt Valinger died in his sleep last night,” the dashing young operative said, unfazed by Colt’s attempt to lighten the mood. “One of our pathologists will be performing the autopsy later tonight, but it’ll take a few weeks to get the toxicology reports back. Until then—”
“What are you telling me? I’m under arrest?”
“That’s what it amounts to. Everyone on the set saw your inexcusable little fit of rage last night, Mr. Colt. If Valinger was murdered, then you’re the obvious suspect.”
Colt knew that he had seen this guy before. Now he remembered where. He was one of the customers in the miserable little play about Felisa Cayenne being kidnapped. He had the looks to be a movie star, but not the skills.
“So you think I killed Kurt Valinger?” Colt said. “Are you nuts?”
“He went to your room after he left the set, and he stayed for quite a long time. Then he went to his own room and fell asleep with his clothes on. He didn’t wake up.”
“He had a couple of drinks, and we discussed the assignment. That was it. He gave me a flash drive with some video footage on it. We parted friends last night. I’m not a murderer.”
“I’m just following orders, Mr. Colt. I have to take you back to the HQ.”
Back to be executed, Colt thought. He’d heard about it happening before. When you signed up for The Circle, you signed up for life. And you gave up a lot of your rights as a United States citizen. Any sort of betrayal was punishable by death. No trial, no judge, no jury. You just disappeared.
Colt wondered why The Director had only sent one operative to bring him back. Then he remembered what the helicopter pilot had said about the weight restrictions on that particular aircraft. It was a small bird, meant for one passenger and some luggage. That meant Colt couldn’t even bring his things back with him. He knew he couldn’t, so he didn’t even ask.
He laced his fingers together and put his hands behind his head. “I’m going to turn around now and walk outside,” he said. “You won’t shoot me in the back when I reach down to open the door, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Colt stepped to the door, turned the knob and pulled.
It was stuck again.
He yanked and lifted and jiggled, but he couldn’t get it open this time.
The other operative stepped forward, pressed the barrel of the pistol against Colt’s ribcage, reached around and started jerking on the knob. At that instant, Colt decided that he didn’t want to play anymore. He knew that he would probably die trying to escape. And even if he was successful, he knew that The Circle would probably catch up to him eventually and take care of business. But it didn’t matter. If he l
et this guy put him back on that helicopter, there was a good chance that he was going to die anyway.
It would have been one thing if The Circle had sent him some sort of reasonable message about returning to HQ. But they hadn’t. They’d sent a guy with a gun. Colt figured he might not even make it back to headquarters. He wondered how many operatives—deemed traitorous for one reason or another—were at the bottom of the lake. No telling. More than one, probably, and Colt had no intention of joining them. If he was going to check out today, he was going to do it under his own terms.
He made an abrupt turn to the right, swinging his arm down like a pendulum and knocking the pistol away from his back. All in one swift motion. The gun discharged harmlessly into the wood floor, and a split second later Colt clouted Glamour Boy in the jaw with a left hook. GB staggered backward and fell to one knee, his eyes rolling back in his head as he tried to maintain consciousness. He still had the gun, and he aimed and fired, but he must have been seeing double. The bullet whistled past Colt’s left ear. Before GB could get another shot off, Colt kicked his hand and sent the pistol flipping to the other side of the room where it skittered to a stop against a small bookcase.
Colt drew his revolver and aimed it at GB’s head.
“Facedown on the floor. Do it now while you still have a face.”
“You’ll never get away, Colt.”
“Don’t make me tell you again.”
GB got down on the floor. Colt stepped over to the kitchen area and started opening drawers. He found a roll of duct tape stored with some basic hand tools, walked back to the living room and secured GB’s wrists and ankles. He didn’t bother gagging him, because there was nobody around to hear him shout for help.
Colt finally got the door open, looked down the hill and saw that the helicopter was still on simmer. With the engine running, the pilot wouldn’t have been able to hear the gunshots. That was good. It meant that Colt still had some time. He hurried to the bedroom and jammed his clothes and his shaving gear and his spare shoes back into his duffel bag, and then he snapped the Jack Reacher books back into the briefcase. He went to the kitchen and grabbed the whiskey and a few random things from the pantry and a hammer and a screwdriver and a pair of pliers from the drawer where he’d found the duct tape.
“I think that’s everything,” he said.
“You’re a dead man, Colt. You know that, right?”
“You’re not the first person to tell me that, junior. I might just surprise you.”
Colt slung the duffel up onto his shoulder, grabbed the briefcase, walked out to the deck and down the steps and around the house to the strip of gravel where the pickup truck was parked. He threw his bag in the back. It was nice that the truck had a topper. His things wouldn’t get wet if it rained, and he could even sleep back there if he needed to. He opened the driver’s side door, tossed the briefcase over to the passenger’s seat, climbed in and slid the key into the ignition.
Cranked it clockwise and pumped on the gas pedal.
Nothing.
The truck wouldn’t start.
8
Colt pulled the release under the dash, climbed out and opened the hood and looked at the engine. He was no mechanic, but he pinpointed the problem right away.
No battery.
The truck probably sat unused most of the time, and whoever was responsible for its maintenance had probably removed the battery to keep it from draining. Valinger hadn’t mentioned anything about it, but that was Colt’s guess. There was a steel storage shed about halfway between the house and the lake, and the battery was probably in there. The shed was secured with a padlock. Colt had noticed it when he first arrived, when he walked up to the house from the improvised helipad. He figured one of the keys on his ring would open the lock, but he was hesitant to walk down the hill that far, fearful that the pilot would see him and know something was wrong.
He was afraid to walk down there right now, but he needed the truck. At least for a few hours, enough time to put some distance between him and The Circle’s little safe house.
The sun had set, and Colt figured it would be completely dark in fifteen minutes or so, but he didn’t want to wait that long. The pilot was probably already getting concerned. He wouldn’t just sit there and wait forever. He was a pilot, but he was also an operative, and if he thought the situation warranted it, he would shut the copter down and walk up the hill to investigate. Colt couldn’t afford for that to happen.
He didn’t know what to do. He spent another thirty seconds deliberating, and then decided to take a chance on being seen rather than waiting for night to fall. Time was his worst enemy, and the pilot might have already contacted someone about the delay. Colt needed to make tracks, and he needed to do it as soon as possible.
He crouched and started making his way toward the storage building, trying to keep low, trying to keep the structure between himself and the pilot’s line of sight. The door of the shed was on the lake side, so when he got down there he had no choice but to expose himself, if only briefly. He opened the lock as fast as he could and crept inside. There was a riding lawnmower and a weed trimmer and some gardening tools and a can of gasoline.
Some hubcaps and extension cords and some other junk lying around.
No truck battery.
Colt stood there for a minute in disbelief. Where else could it be? He’d seen every inch of the house when he first arrived, so he knew it wasn’t in there. Why leave a truck parked on a strip of gravel with no way to get it started? It didn’t make sense.
Nothing made sense, but it was dark in the shed and the gasoline fumes were starting to make him lightheaded and it was quickly becoming apparent that transportation away from the property was going to be a major challenge.
Colt stepped outside and locked the door, glanced down the hill and saw the pilot climbing out of the helicopter. Now he had two choices: he could run, or he could stay where he was and fight it out.
Unfortunately, option one quickly disappeared.
There was a muzzle flash and the sharp crackle of a pistol report, and a bullet thudded into the maple tree six inches from Colt’s right shoulder. Colt rolled to the ground, pulled his .38 and returned fire. His first two shots missed, but the third hit home. The pilot fell to the ground and started shouting out in agony.
Colt approached him slowly, kept the revolver trained on his torso.
“Drop the weapon,” Colt said.
The pilot tossed the pistol off to the side.
“I need help,” he said. “I need a doctor.”
There was a hole and an expanding red blossom on the pilot’s left pants leg, about eight inches above his knee.
“Can you fly?” Colt said.
“No. I need both legs, and I can’t move this one now.”
Colt tore the man’s shirt off and tied a pressure dressing around his thigh.
“This should keep you from bleeding to death until someone gets here.”
“You’ll never get away, Colt.”
“That’s what the other guy said.”
Colt looked down the hill, wishing he’d taken some flying lessons at some point in his life. He’d always wanted to. In fact, he had recurring dreams where he somehow knew how to jockey a helicopter. He was a first-rate flyboy in his dreams.
But that’s all they were.
Dreams.
In his waking life, he didn’t have a clue.
But he had an idea.
Helicopters had batteries. Great big batteries that started the great big engines that turned the great big rotors that made them fly. Helicopters had batteries, and Colt remembered seeing a set of jumper cables in the shed.
He trotted up there and opened the door and grabbed the cables and continued on up to the truck. He opened the driver’s side door, put the transmission in neutral, pushed the vehicle forward a few feet and climbed in as it started rolling down the hill. Without the engine on, turning the steering wheel was like wrestling a bear, but he mana
ged to coast to the edge of the boat ramp and maneuver in beside the copter.
Like the steering, the power brakes didn’t work very well without power. The truck kept rolling, and for a minute Colt thought he was going to end up in the lake. He instinctively yanked on the emergency brake and the truck finally came to a full stop inches from a stand of cattails. He got out and popped the hood and connected one end of the jumper cables to the truck’s terminal wires and the other end to the posts on the helicopter’s battery. He climbed back into the pickup and switched on the ignition and there was a big boom and a bright orange flash. Before Colt knew what was happening, the front of the truck was engulfed in flames. He snatched the briefcase and opened the door and took off running as fast as he could. He was almost to the shed when the gas tank blew. He rolled to the ground and curled up in a ball under the same maple tree that had taken a bullet for him, hoping not to be sliced open by flying glass or seared by a red hot piece of sheet metal. Debris rained all around, but the leaves and branches kept any of it from hitting him.
“Are you insane?” the helicopter pilot shouted.
It was almost dark now, and Colt couldn’t see him, but he sounded okay, which was what Colt wanted. The pilot had shot to kill earlier, but like the other guy, he was just following orders.
As Colt rose to his feet and started climbing back up the hill, he knew that the area would soon be crawling with as many operatives as The Circle could spare, and he knew that they would all be doing the exact same thing.
Just following orders.
9
Felisa couldn’t see anything. She was totally dependent on Benny to guide her where she was going. The stench of tobacco and marijuana smoke became more and more pronounced as they proceeded, along with another smell Felisa couldn’t identify. It was sweet and foul and pungent, like sugared popcorn burnt in a microwave.
“We’re in the living room now,” Benny said. “I’m going to put you on a chair.”