Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1)

by Jack Slater

  “You know, I think I’ve had enough excitement to last me a lifetime—” he began before trailing off as he started to really consider his answer.

  Shea’s nostrils flared as she wound up to float some joke or other, and Trapp noted with amusement the almost imperceptible—but highly effective—look of disapproval she received from her mother which strangled the witticism in its crib.

  “Don’t let Shea interrupt you, Jason,” Sarah said, practically hissing her daughter’s name once she realized that he’d picked up on the look. “Honestly, sometimes I question whether she’s really my daughter.”

  “Mrs. Grayson—” Trapp started, catching himself in enough time to spare a tongue lashing of his own. “Sarah, I mean. You know, I guess something you said earlier on stuck with me. I have been running. Not just since I got discharged, but before that, too. Maybe I’ve been running my whole life…”

  He stopped, struggling to articulate the thoughts coursing through his mind. He’d lived through—survived—the kind of misery that no child should ever have to endure, he knew that. Rationally, anyway. And after, the Army had saved him from a spiral and created the man he was today. But maybe he wasn’t the best he could be. Perhaps there was always something missing, and he’d only now worked that out.

  Trapp wanted to say all that, but in the moment it was as though an iron band had fixed itself onto his throat, constricting tighter and tighter the further he delved into his past.

  “Look,” he said at last, “I guess I kinda like working with my hands. I like seeing what I’ve built at the end of the day. And I’m good at it, too. That’s something. And it seems like I would be an idiot to just throw it all away, after you’ve been so good to me. I’ll say that, okay?”

  The conversation moved on to safer ground after that, as if by mutual consent. Trapp couldn’t help but notice that a few lines seemed to have fallen away from Sarah’s face, but figured he was probably imagining things.

  Or projecting, maybe.

  They cleared the table, returned, and whiled away an hour or two sharing stories and jokes as the sky above turned from a wicked orange sunset into an empty blackness. Their faces were lit only by a few tea lights scattered across the trestle table whose flames flickered in the breeze before they too began to burn out.

  “I think it’s time I turned in for the night,” the sheriff announced, pushing his chair backward and standing up from the table. “Early shift in the morning.”

  “I’ll join you,” Sarah said, pointedly glancing at Trapp and rolling her eyes. “Lord knows you make enough of a clatter getting up that I’ll be awake at five a.m. sharp, just like you.”

  “Well, you’re stuck with me now, lady,” her husband agreed. “You’re stuck with me now.”

  Sarah grimaced and threw her hands upward, but only halfheartedly. “And don’t I know it! What about you two kids? Are you staying up?”

  “A little while longer,” Shea replied quickly. “I’ll lock up when we’re done.”

  “I know you will.” Sarah ruffled her daughter’s hair fondly and turned toward the French doors. “Night, Jason.”

  “Good night, Sarah.”

  The two of them fell silent for a few seconds as a warm breeze briefly willed itself into existence and set the trees and hedges around the perimeter of the yard murmuring to themselves. It was, Trapp reflected, as calming a scene as he had ever encountered. The house he’d been raised in, little more than a decaying shack by the time he’d ventured into manhood, was equally isolated. But it was harder to relax when a single stray word could earn a beating, and when your belly was never full.

  Within the house, an interior door banged, and the sound brought Trapp back to the present.

  “I’m not tired,” Shea announced, turning toward him and grinning impishly. “How about you?”

  “What do you have—”

  Before he could finish, she was gone, knocking the chair underneath her backward in her haste. For several seconds it wobbled on its rear legs, as though in a cartoon, before touching back down to earth on all four.

  “—in mind?” Trapp finished wryly. He shook his head, figuring he was about to find out.

  Shea reappeared a few seconds later, her arrival pre-announced by the thundering of her footsteps. She called out, “Catch!”

  It turned out to be a good thing that he was paying attention, because the next thing he knew a bottle of dark caramel bourbon was sailing through air that wasn’t much different in shade, and miraculously landed in his grasp.

  Trapp’s eyes widened as he saw what he was holding. “Hey, you know, your old man’s been real good to me. I don’t want to disrespect him in his own house.”

  “Relax, eagle scout.” Shea laughed lightly as she walked toward him through the night’s gloom. “My dad gave it to me, it’s cool.”

  As she emerged through the evening’s murkiness, Trapp was forced to squint to make her out. Her top half seemed to have acquired considerably more bulk than when he’d last seen her just a couple of minutes before. “What’s that?” he asked.

  She set the items down on the table one by one with a flourish.

  “Flashlight.”

  Thud.

  “Lighter.”

  Thud.

  The last item fell from her arms with a whisper, not a bang. “And the hoodie’s for me.”

  Trapp’s gaze passed from the items on the table to the bottle of bourbon in his hands, and then back again as he wondered precisely what mess he had landed himself in.

  Shea didn’t give him a moment to think. She bounded a few steps into the darkness, heading toward the back of the yard before turning and sticking out her tongue. “Well… you coming?”

  16

  Mike Lee hung a ways back from the Graysons’ yard, his large frame more than three-quarters sheltered in a sun-baked irrigation ditch, wary of the twin threats posed by both the presence of the current sheriff and a retired Army Ranger, and the fact that he was operating alone. He was wearing dark-hued civilian clothes with a 9 mm pistol tucked into a concealed shoulder holster, for which he had a permit made out in his alias’ name.

  The cover would hold up to moderate scrutiny, but the Graysons’ kid had seen his face a few days earlier, so being questioned by the sheriff would create a headache he would prefer not to deal with.

  Lee’s eyes were accustomed now to the darkness that had settled over the Texas skyline some thirty minutes earlier. He had purchased a night vision scope from a military surplus store a couple of towns over, but it was a cheap Russian piece of crap, and he didn’t trust the battery, so he left it by his side. Besides, he wasn’t planning on assaulting the house.

  Not tonight, anyway.

  As the late evening marched onward into night, the cicadas took a brief timeout, or at least some of them did, leaving only a few of them repeating their metronomic, scratching mating cry. The combination of the gloom all around him, and the meditative rasp of the insects was a potent concoction which quickly prompted his mind to drift.

  Perhaps he could clean up this problem tonight, by himself. His boss wanted it done quietly, after all—and the quicker, the better. That would look good on his performance report, wouldn’t it? Not that that particular document would ever see the light of day. It would incriminate all of them ten times over, and nobody wanted that.

  Still, the people that mattered would know.

  Lost in a reverie of ambition, Lee missed the first sign of movement down at the Grayson residence, the sound of the French doors that let out onto the yard being thrown open, and a woman’s muffled, embarrassed giggle.

  The second sign was impossible to ignore. The powerful beam of a large flashlight blinked into existence and played out jerkily into the darkness of the yard, for a fraction of a second passing across Lee’s eye line and blinding him.

  For the second time in a few hours, he froze, wondering if his target knew he was being watched. He held his breath and pressed his chest to the di
rt, stilling his body as his mind raced, applying a career’s worth of experience to an equation familiar to all of nature: hide, fight, or flight.

  Lee knew that while those three options were immutable, context mattered.

  And tonight’s context was that Trapp was an Army Ranger, or at least he had been until all of five months earlier. He might be rusty, but he was unlikely to have already forgotten the skills he had learned. Most of those were drilled into you for life.

  So the question was twofold: first, was his target armed? And second, did Trapp know that someone was out there?

  It wasn’t impossible that he was packing heat. Unlikely, but not impossible. And the uncertainty meant there was only one rational move: attack first, using whatever element of surprise remained.

  The problem was that that option conflicted with the second question: did Trapp know he was being watched?

  It had certainly felt that way earlier that day when Trapp was on the pay phone. It had seemed to Lee that the former soldier had looked right through him, as though some instinct inside him had alerted him to the impossible.

  But then, he’d given no other sign that he was aware he was being watched. For that matter, he’d given no sign that he even suspected it was a possibility.

  And Lee knew that if he opened fire on Trapp now, in the darkness, from a 60-yard range, there was no way he’d hit his target with the first shot. Especially with only a pistol.

  The report of a single bullet being fired might be dismissed by an observer—like Sheriff Grayson in the darkened house above—as a car backfiring, or the crack of a desiccated tree toppling in the wind.

  But not a whole flurry of gunfire.

  Lee understood that to take Trapp out, he’d have to fire off the entire magazine, half a second between each shot, saving the last few for the girl. If that happened, there was no way the sleeping sheriff would mistake what had happened.

  And then what? A phone call to police dispatch, no doubt. An attack on one cop was an attack on them all, which meant cruisers from half a dozen neighboring jurisdictions would join the chase. Hell, the Texas Rangers would probably send up a helicopter or two to join in the party.

  No, it was out of the question.

  Running would be no better if his cover was blown. Trapp might give chase, the girl would inform her father, and then all bets were off.

  So that left hiding, face down in the dirt, and hoping the predator wouldn’t catch his scent.

  And as all that flooded through Lee’s mind, the beam of Trapp’s flashlight skipped again, moving out of his sight line and landing on a patch of brown grass at the very end of the Graysons’ yard, not that he could make out much with the stars now dazzling his eyes. He blinked hard and swore under his breath, momentarily forgetting the predicament he was in.

  There goes my night vision.

  There was always the scope, which would provide some advantage over his foe, and there was some consolation in the fact that from his position behind the flashlight, Trapp’s would be equally useless. But in the jumpiness of the dark, the former Ranger’s skill set was beginning to take on supernatural, omnipotent qualities in Lee’s mind.

  The girl laughed again, and the sound floated on the night air with incredible lightness, instantly deflating the burden of fear and anxiety that had been mounting on the mercenary’s shoulders. He cursed himself for getting into his own head, turning the chance skip of the flashlight’s beam into a terrifying, irrational certainty that his cover was blown and it was his time to die.

  Lee dropped his forehead against the ground in the ditch and breathed in the smell of sun-baked earth, trusting his ears to update him on Trapp’s position. Perhaps it was time to leave. It would be better to wait for backup to arrive.

  Cleaner.

  And safer, he didn’t have to say.

  But even as the thought crossed Lee’s mind, he knew he could not allow himself to shrink from the bogeyman he had created in his mind. He would have to confront Trapp sometime, if not tonight then probably tomorrow. And when the time came, he couldn’t allow himself to be crippled by an imagined, overblown fear.

  No, he had to get closer. For the sake of repairing his jangled nerves, if nothing else.

  17

  “Get the fire going, will ya?” Shea asked just as Trapp began to feel the earth the ground beneath his feet slope downward. A couple of stones broke free and skidded down the bank, clattering as they impacted something hard below.

  “What fire?”

  Shea picked up the beam of the flashlight from a couple of yards in front of her feet and illuminated a blackened circle of flat, oval stones that had clearly been sourced from the bottom of the dried-out riverbed that lay just next to it.

  In fact, Trapp thought, calling it a riverbed was ambitious. He could scarcely believe that it qualified even as a stream during whatever passed for the rainy season in this part of the country, and as if to prove his point, the thin tendril of water currently flowing through it barely even gurgled.

  He took a deep breath in through his nostrils, savoring the cool air. Shorn of the heat of the day, there was a complexity to the scent that he hadn’t detected before. Hesitant as the flow of water was, it carried with it an aroma that was difficult to define. A freshness, Trapp thought. When the wind blew, it bore the faintest hint of animal manure, diluted sufficiently through distance and time that it was almost pleasurable, rather than overpowering—like sipping a fine whiskey.

  Shea turned and held the flashlight upward, so the beam was parallel to her face, as though she was telling a ghost story to a small circle of terrified kids. “Ew, did you just sniff me?”

  “No need.” He grinned back broadly. “I can smell you a mile away, kid.”

  The comeback merited him a raised brow and an outstretched tongue, though both were delivered with a smile. “Get burning, kid.”

  “We’re not going to start a wildfire, are we?” Trapp queried. He was a country boy, but one raised in a place a whole lot wetter than this one. Fire, not least in a place as dry as this, filled him with a primal dread.

  He heard more than saw Shea rolling her eyes as she danced the flashlight out up either bank of the stream. The beam hit a single, huge fallen tree trunk, but mostly smooth oval stones for about 10 yards before it hit the hard-packed baked streambank. “You see any forest?”

  “Point taken.”

  Shea tossed over the lighter, which solved that mystery, and Trapp crouched down, sticking it in the back pocket of his jeans for safekeeping. The weather hadn’t turned since the last time the fire burned, so there were still a few pieces of half-charred driftwood laying blackened in a windswept pile of ash.

  “Hey, toss me that,” he said, pointing at the flashlight. A second later, it was in his hands.

  He illuminated the streambed, sweeping the beam of light left and right as he took a few paces forward, crashing down occasionally to gather twigs and pluck handfuls of dried grass from the rising banks. When he judged he had enough to start a blaze going, he returned to the circle and began arranging a small pyramid.

  When he was done, he turned, brandished the lighter, and said, “You want to do the honors or shall I?”

  Shea wrinkled her nose. “You’d better. I’ll probably douse the darn thing.”

  Trapp shrugged. “You should have more faith in yourself.”

  He flicked the lid of the zippo open and dragged his thumb down on the flint. It sparked without catching, but on the second go around burst into flame. He held it down low, so the heat bit into the small tripod of kindling that he had constructed. Once the embers began racing into the dried grass, he tilted his head and began to blow, the whole scene illuminated by Shea’s spotlight as though he was on Broadway.

  A thin pencil of light gray smoke built into a tornado, and Trapp sensed the heat building on his face half a second before the pyramid burst into flame.

  His congratulations came in the form of the scratch of a liquor bottle
opening. Trapp stood as Shea took a sip. Without meaning to, he studied her expression in the dancing light of the building campfire. She manfully resisted scrunching her face up in reaction to the heat of the alcohol, and almost succeeded.

  Almost.

  “You’re a contradiction, you know that, Jason?” she said, her voice momentarily hoarse from the liquor. She swallowed and handed over the bottle.

  He studied the label before replying. It was rye, not something he’d tried before. “How do you figure?”

  “You don’t look cautious, but you are. You don’t look gentle, but you are. And…”

  Trapp’s voice came out a little coarser than he intended. “And what?”

  “You don’t look sad, but you are.”

  He didn’t react, not verbally anyway. In truth, he didn’t know how to. Instead, he played for time, not caring how obvious he made it. He glanced over his shoulder, stepped a couple of paces back, and slumped down against the fallen tree trunk, a wooden carcass massive enough to accommodate his lanky frame.

  Now seated on the ground, his legs stretched out, Trapp lifted the bottle to his lips for the first time, taking a larger swig than he might have before. The liquid burned all the way down his throat, fizzing in his belly to leave him just short of indigestion. It helped, some, to bring clarity to his thoughts.

  “I’ve never had this,” he stated simply.

  “What?”

  Trapp set the bottle down on the ground, wedging it between his thigh and Shea’s, just a couple of inches away. “This,” he said, spreading his arms and gesturing around him. “Any of this. All of this.”

  One of the small logs he’d placed on the campfire collapsed, toppling the entire burning structure in on itself. He stared into the flame, wondering if he should bare his soul to this girl he barely knew.

  Wondering if he even could.

  Somehow, Shea knew to stay quiet.