by Jack Slater
“There’s no way, Colonel,” Chino said with some bite, vociferously shaking his head for emphasis. “No fucking way I’m touching a penny of that. That’s just a fact.”
“Well, a few pennies,” Caldwell winked. “A fair salary for a fair job. But you’re the right man, Alex, I can tell that just by looking at you. So like I said before – are you with me?”
Chino nodded slowly. “All the way, sir. All the freaking way. And I appreciate it, I –”
“I don’t need your thanks, son. After what you gave your country, it’s the least I can do.”
The foursome fell silent, the quiet only broken by Conrad almost ashamedly clearing his throat. Chino was almost quivering with emotion, though only the white-knuckled grip on his cane indicated that it was anything more than tiredness.
“What about Odysseus?” Trapp asked after a short while had passed, relaxing his posture some from the taut ball of anxious energy he’d brought with him. A tic throbbed slowly on his jaw.
Caldwell’s eyebrows nearly disappeared upward. “You brought the prisoner?”
Trapp nodded. “He’s in the trunk.”
“Good,” Caldwell remarked. “I wondered if you might just kill him.”
“That’s not the way I do things,” Trapp replied before quickly adding, “but that doesn’t mean I want him to get off either.”
“Not the way I do things either, Jason,” Caldwell said agreeably, though Trapp’s attention was drawn to the look of stony stillness on Conrad’s face. He shivered, despite the heat beating down from above.
“Glad to hear it, sir,” Trapp said, fishing for detail.
“I’ll offer him a choice,” Caldwell said. “The kind of choice that really has only one plausible outcome. If he helps us take down Odysseus, he’ll spend a few years behind bars, but when it’s all over, he’ll walk away a free man. Hopefully he’ll even learn a lesson or two.”
“And if he says no?” Chino asked, his throat scratchy from the dry desert air.
Conrad grunted, his voice equally gravelly. “He won’t.”
“Well, all right then.” Trapp grinned, clapping his hands together with a snap that made Chino flinch.
He spun and walked toward the Corolla. The trunk popped open under his touch, and when it was upright, he leaned over and grabbed a bound, blindfolded Marcel Hawkins by the shoulders, levering him out and setting him down on his feet. The prisoner stumbled, but Trapp held him firm before frog-marching him back over to the waiting posse. He deposited the man in Conrad’s capable hands.
“Put him in the truck,” Caldwell said quietly.
Chino waited until the two men were gone before he spoke again, though when he did the strain in his voice indicated it must have been a battle. “And Dawes?”
Caldwell winced.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Trapp growled, surprising even himself with the force of the statement. Ryan looked up, clearly startled.
“Charles Dawes is a Lt. Col.,” Caldwell said, sounding like he didn’t much like it either. “Which means he isn’t the kind of problem you can just sweep under a rug.”
“If you won’t deal with him, maybe I’ll –”
“You will do no such thing,” Caldwell said coldly, instantly silencing him. “Jason, what you have done so far is impressive. I’m not afraid to admit that. But it’s also wildly illegal. If this ever got out, you would spend the rest of your life behind bars. And so would your friend Chino here. Sometimes you have to accept a compromise and realize that’s the best you can get. This is one of those times.”
Trapp clenched his jaw shut. He heard Caldwell’s words, but the anger bubbling just under the surface of his mind made them difficult to process. The idea of Dawes walking free after all the hell that he had put into motion was abominable. He was about to explode when he felt a touch on his arm.
Surprisingly, it was Chino.
The vet, standing straighter than he’d ever seen before, simply made eye contact with him and shook his head once. Trapp deflated.
“You’re sure Odysseus won’t survive this?” he said at last, his voice much softer now.
Caldwell nodded. “I’ll make sure of it. It’ll take some time, but I promise you both, I’ll get the job done.”
Trapp inclined his head curtly. “I’ll hold you to that, sir.”
“No, Sergeant, I don’t think that you will,” Caldwell replied, his lips graced with a guarded smile.
“I’m sorry?” Trapp said, his brow furrowed. He had a creeping feeling of where this might be headed, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. He turned toward Ryan, whose face was now deliberately impassive, and straining to look anywhere other than his friend’s eyes.
Caldwell jerked his head to the side and indicated an empty section of the warehouse’s parking lot. Trapp followed silently, his feet heavy as lead.
“Jason,” Caldwell said when they were both alone. “Unfortunately for both of us – but mainly you – you have become a liability. If what you’ve done ever got out –”
“It won’t, sir,” Trapp insisted forcefully. “My lips are sealed.”
Caldwell reached out – and up – and squeezed his shoulder. “I know they are, son. But if anyone ever came looking, we’ve left enough loose threads behind that maybe they’d lead somewhere interesting, and I can’t have that.”
“Then what?” Trapp croaked, his throat constricted.
“I need you to come back in.”
Before Trapp had a chance to protest, Caldwell held up his hand. “You know the unit I command. I won’t lie to you; I think you could be a useful operator. No, I expect you will be. But that’s not why I need you to do this. Inside, I can protect you. If people come looking, they’ll have to go through me first. On the outside, though, you’re exposed. And I can’t risk that. Believe me, Jason, if there was any other way, I would choose it. But there isn’t.”
He fell silent, allowing Trapp to process the handbrake turn his life had just whipped him around. He blinked slowly, stunned by the proposal.
But it wasn’t a proposal, was it? Not really. Caldwell was right. There was no other way.
“When?” he whispered.
“Immediately. If someone’s coming for you, they’ll do it soon. I’ll have you on a plane to Georgia this evening. You’ll need to go through selection, of course, and we don’t have a group lined up until next month. But we can hide you in Bragg. No one will ask questions. I’ve done it before.”
Trapp’s chin sank to his chest. He thought briefly about protesting, but even then he knew there was no point. And besides, where else was his life heading? He had no family, no-one waiting for him at home.
Except Shea.
“I need to ask a favor, sir.”
Caldwell raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. “Shoot.”
“I need a week. That’s nonnegotiable. After that, I’ll come in. I’ll do everything you ask of me. But I need a week.”
The Delta commander paused, his lips shaped tight as though he was poised to reject the request. Then his expression softened, and he held out his hand. “Fine. But only a week.”
Trapp shook it, feeling strangely at ease. “You have my word, sir.”
“Good. And Jason?”
“Sir?”
“Take my car. I’ll get rid of”—he glanced at the Corolla—“that.”
They walked back to the group. Ryan and Chino were doing their best to look anything other than interested, but Conrad’s face was – as usual – shrouded in stony indifference. Caldwell silently called his man off, leaving just the three of them. Ryan hung back.
Trapp extended his hand toward Chino, but the Latino batted it aside.
“No way, ese,” he grunted. “I’m not letting you leave like that.”
They embraced, and Chino held him tighter than Trapp would have believed possible.
Ryan was next. He seemed nervous but was first to speak. “So I guess we’ll be seeing some more of each other, huh
?”
Trapp just punched him in the arm. “I’m not angry, jackass. I get why you did what you did. And I would’ve done the same in your place, okay?”
His friend nodded, clearly relieved. “Okay.”
“But—” Trapp grinned. “Never play me like that again.”
Trapp drove past the lane opening that led to the Grayson residence for the third time in 20 minutes, unable to bring himself to turn his head to the right and even glance at it. But this time, he realized, he had company.
The lights started flashing on a sheriff’s patrol car, which emerged from a driveway about a hundred yards up the street, though the siren didn’t blare. Immediately upon noticing the vehicle in his rearview mirror, Trapp indicated right and slowly brought the SUV in to park. He killed the engine and left his hands on the wheel.
The cruiser pulled in behind and left its lights flashing in order to warn oncoming traffic. Trapp half-expected the sheriff to step out, though instead it was a younger man. Trapp recognized the deputy: it was the same man who had given him a lift back from the hospital a few weeks earlier. He wound down his window but kept silent as the officer strolled up, the handcuff chain clinking on his belt.
“Wondered if you’d show your face,” the deputy said from behind a pair of mirrored Ray Bans and a curled upper lip.
“Am I in any trouble, sir?” Trapp asked hesitantly.
The deputy leaned forward and grasped the edge of the door window. “Now you listen here,” he hissed, barely able to contain his anger. “The sheriff’s a good man, and his family, well they’re good people. I don’t know who the hell you are, but I know one thing: I can’t say the same of you.”
Trapp gritted his teeth. His own anger boiled up inside him as he thought of everything he’d been through over the past few weeks. And then he squashed it. The man was right, at least from his perspective. And he would pay his penance for it. Just not here.
He sighed. “I hear you, Deputy. I’m not here to cause trouble, you have my word. I’m here to apologize, and then I’m gone, okay?”
The officer’s fingernails scratched against the Chevrolet’s plastic interior as he raked Trapp up and down with his gaze. He didn’t say anything for a long time, long enough for Trapp to start counting and make it to 20. Then he spun on the sole of his boot, grumbling, “Stay here.”
Trapp watched in the side mirror as the deputy strode back to his own vehicle in a clipped, fast stride. He climbed in and reached for something below the dashboard. It was a radio, he realized a second later.
He tore his eyes away from the mirror and made the decision to accept whatever fate was coming his way. If he ended up in county jail, then so be it. Col. Caldwell would just have to wait.
The crunching of the deputy’s boots preannounced his return. He leaned down, surprise battling with disappointment on his face. “The sheriff’s waiting for you. Park out front.”
That was it.
Trapp did as he was bidden and drove the short distance down the lane to the house with his palms tight and sweaty against the faux leather steering wheel. By the time he arrived a couple of minutes later, the sheriff was already waiting, his arms folded across his barrel chest. He looked the same, and yet half a decade older, all at once: his hair uncut and unkempt, and his frame a little lighter than when they’d last met.
He stepped out of the vehicle, opened his mouth to speak, and found that the words wouldn’t come out.
The sheriff spoke first. “She’s in the yard out back,” he said.
“Listen, sir, I –”
He was cut off by a raised hand and the slight shake of the man’s head. “It’s not me who needs to hear from you, son. Like I said, she’s out back.”
Trapp fell silent and attempted to divine what fate lay in store for him through reading the sheriff’s face. But it was impossible. The man was impassive, an Easter Island statue weathered by the waves – or in his case at least, the desert heat. So he just nodded instead. “Yes sir.”
He closed the Chevrolet’s door with a heavy clunk and walked around the side of the Graysons’ wooden-slatted prairie house, a sense of melancholy constricting his throat.
Shea was exactly where Ron had said she would be: sitting underneath a flowering desert willow tree and facing away from him, staring up at the canopy of light violet flowers among the leaves above her. Trapp stopped dead, his heart in his mouth.
She was in a wheelchair.
“I wondered if you’d be back,” she called out, her voice a little strained. “But you took your time.”
Trapp stayed silent as he padded toward her and around to the front of the chair. Shea’s once-tanned skin was now a pallid white, and she appeared thin and frail. Her knees rested against each other, leaning against the side wall of the chair.
“My God, Shea,” he croaked when he was finally able. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” she asked, mustering a frail smile. “This? Don’t you worry your pretty little head. Doc says I’ll be all better in a couple of months.”
“Can you…?”
Shea raised her eyebrows. “Walk?” She slapped her palm against her left thigh and squeezed – hard. “Those days are long gone, I’m afraid.”
Trapp sank onto his haunches, horrified.
“I’m kidding!” she said, her laughter tinkling throughout the well-kept, though now somewhat overgrown, garden. “I’m just not supposed to walk much until the stitches come out. You should have seen your face…”
It wasn’t just his face. Trapp’s heart was thudding faster than he could recall. “You’re – you’re serious?”
She nodded, a smile eating at the corners of her mouth, though now a little more serious. “I’ll be fine. I just lost some blood, that’s all. They fixed the lung up just fine. And there’ll be a hell of a scar. But I’m fine.”
Trapp stayed silent as a wave of relief crashed against the growing realization that he needed to rip this Band-Aid off now, while he still could. “Listen, Shea. I have to go away for a while.”
She frowned. “How long?”
“I don’t think I’m coming back.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, reaching down and grasping the handles around the wheels. She rolled forward a couple of feet, coming to a halt just in front of him. “You just got here.”
“I know,” he said, his voice croaky with something that wasn’t far away from grief. “The people who hurt you, they are never coming back – okay? I made a deal with some people. This is how I have to honor it.”
Shea looked up at him, her face ashen. “There has to be another way.”
Trapp leaned down until his face was only a few inches away from hers and shook his head. His eyes glistened, mirroring Shea’s. “There isn’t. I promise. I wish there was, but there isn’t.”
His lips grazed hers, and he buried his fingers in the hair at the back of her neck, clenching tight as he kissed her for the last time. As he pulled away, he whispered, “Will you do something for me?”
She nodded silently, as a single tear streaked down her cheek.
“Just live your life, okay? Find a guy, and settle down, and never think of me again. That’s all I ask.”
Author’s Note
Dear reader,
Last time I wrote to you, just as I was putting the finishing touches on Depth Charge, the fourth novel in the main Jason Trapp series, COVID-19 was little more than a twinkle in the eye of some Wuhan seafood market. I wish it had stayed that way. For me, as I’m sure for many of you, the last six months has been an anxious and concerning time, during which we’ve watched a world get turned on its head.
Last year I wrote a novel about a pandemic, False Flag. I don’t think in my wildest dreams that I could have imagined that the risks I read about during my research might actually happen. Even though every expert wrote that it wasn’t just a possibility, but an inevitability, that a novel virus would be able to take advantage of a human race that is more glob
ally inter-connected than at any time in human history. It’s hard for any of us to imagine that the worst can actually happen – even though all I do all day is dream up scenarios in which it could!
I promise I won’t write any books about asteroids colliding with the earth, or Yellowstone finally erupting, just in case…
I’m not ashamed to say that an addiction to following the latest headlines on the spread of the virus around the world had a major impact on my productivity. Hangman will be released seven months to the day after Depth Charge. That’s over twice as long as any previous novel has ever taken me.
However, the past is the past. And I’m pleased to say that work on The Apparatus, the fifth novel in the main series, is well underway.
If you are new to Jason Trapp – welcome. I hope you enjoyed the last few hundred pages. If you did so, I would be much obliged if you could leave a glowing review on the Amazon sales page. It really is the number one way that I get to keep on doing what I do.
The good news, new reader, is that there are four – and soon to be five – further books in the Jason Trapp series for you to sink your teeth into. Hopefully that sounds like a tantalizing prospect as the world turns slowly toward winter.
If you’ve been here since the beginning, thanks for sticking with me. I love doing what I do, and to know that at every hour of every day someone, somewhere in the world is reading one of my books is truly an amazing feeling.
The sun never sets on the Jason Trapp Empire…
Okay, it’s more of a fiefdom. But it’s mine!
As usual at the end of my books, I like to write a little about the real-life science, technology and geopolitical basis and ramifications of my books. That’s obviously a little more difficult with Hangman, since the book is more introspective than the world-saving antics that Jason usually gets up to.