Time to Run

by Marliss Melton

  The men shared another quick look. Apparently it took two of them to come up with a single decision. “Fine,” agreed the taller one, knocking Sara aside and grabbing Kendal by the scruff. “If you call the cops,” he warned, giving him a shake, “or if Chase calls the cops, we’re gonna kill yer mama, you got that, kid?”

  Kendal nodded, too terrified to speak. He cast his mother a wild-eyed look. I don’t want you to die.

  “Everything’s going to be fine, honey,” Sara managed to reassure him. “Tell Chase that these men want their guns back. He’s to bring them to . . . Where are you taking me?” Heavens, who was in charge of this abduction?

  “The ol’ Reeves place,” said the skinhead apparently in charge. He spat on the ground to assert his authority and waved the gun at her again. “We want all eight guns within five hours, boy, or your mama’s gonna be sproutin’ up daisies come springtime. Come on, lady.” He grabbed Sara’s elbow and slung her in the direction of his car.

  Sara kept eye contact with Kendal. “Just give Chase the message when he gets back,” she called. The phone lines in the house weren’t working, so Kendal would have to wait. There wasn’t any way to call Chase. “It’s going to be okay, honey,” she added, just before the skinhead shoved her around the corner, taking her out of Kendal’s sight.

  “What’d you do with the dog?” she demanded as the shorter man opened the passenger door of the banged-up vehicle.

  “Shot him,” he said, giving her a push before he climbed in after her.

  With numbness creeping over her, Sara settled into the middle of the bench seat, only vaguely aware of the springs poking out from under the filthy seat cover.

  Surely the skinhead was joking.

  Because if Jesse was dead, and Kendal found him that way, it wasn’t going to be okay. Not even if Chase brought the rifles to the Reeves place and got Sara back, unscathed.

  Chase saw Linc’s truck, with its doors left open the minute he broke through the tree line. What the . . . ? He accelerated abruptly, curious to see what had brought Sara back to the ranch.

  But then the stillness of the scene penetrated his consciousness, summoning his sixth sense. As he braked to a halt behind the truck, his trained eye caught sight of tire tracks in the grass, marking the flight of a third vehicle.

  Concern jostled to the forefront of his emotions. He reached for the gun he’d stowed under the seat while filing for a deed at the city courthouse. He stepped out of the car and scented the air, hearing at the same time a terrible silence.

  Jesse should be barking.

  Concern congealed into dread. Oh, fuck, no. If those skinhead bastards hurt my dog or—God forbid—Sara and her son—I’m going to wreak holy havoc on them.

  He tamped down his spiraling fears, channeling them into focused energy.

  Releasing the safety on his gun, he mounted the porch steps without eliciting so much as a creak. A breeze blew over the back of his neck as he opened the screen door and nudged the inner door open. His gaze fell on Kendal, who lay on top of Jesse in the entryway, both of them unmoving.

  The scent of death was unmistakable. Blood had oozed out from under the dog to stain the carpet.

  “Ken,” Chase called, bending down to put a tentative hand on Kendal’s shoulder, relieved to find it warm.

  The boy jumped with a strangled scream. He looked at Chase through expanded pupils, his face the color of glue.

  Chase clicked the safety of his gun back on and jammed it into the back of his cargo pants. “Ken,” he said again, glancing at Jesse, who’d been shot in the head. “Hey,” he said, giving him a little shake. “Where’s your mama?”

  “They took her,” Kendal said, in a voice that was raw from weeping.

  “Who’s they?” Chase asked, though he already knew. He had to keep himself from crushing Kendal’s slender bones.

  Linc’s son of a bitch cohorts.

  “Th-they told me to tell you”—the boy broke off to drag air into his convulsing lungs—“to bring the guns to the Reeves place or they’ll kill my mom, too.”

  “The Reeves place,” Chase repeated, hearing the second half of the threat but refusing to dwell on it. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the farmhouse where the skinheads wanted to do the exchange. It stood in the middle of a field without any trees around to offer cover—crap.

  “And we can’t call the police,” Kendal added. His face crumpled as he bowed with renewed anguish over the dog.

  “Listen, Ken. I won’t let anything happen to your mama, you hear me?” He pried him off the dog again.

  “We’re going to take Jesse outside in the grass where he’d like to be. And then I’m going to get the rifles and we’ll take ’em to get Sara back. Help me roll the carpet up.”

  Sniffling and staggering with shock, Kendal nonetheless gave a hand in rolling Jesse’s body in the ruined carpet.

  With a heavy heart and knowing Jesse’s death was going to hit him later, Chase carried Jesse outside, heading automatically toward the pecan tree where he’d buried everyone else he’d ever loved.

  He lowered the carpet in the grass with Kendal fussing over it. Stalking toward the little door that gave access to the crawl space, Chase reached inside and retrieved the rifles.

  Kneeling right there in the grass, he jammed as many of the components as he felt he had time to, disabling five of the eight weapons. Then he gathered them in his arms and stood up, wondering what he should do with Kendal. “Come on, son,” he called, striding toward his car.

  Kendal hurried after him, sniffling but responsive.

  Five minutes later, Chase pulled up in front of Ray and Linda Mae Goodner’s sprawling ranch house. “You’re going to stay here with a friend of mine,” he said.

  “No,” Kendal protested, gripping the car door with the tenacity of a cat up a tree. “I have to get my mother.”

  “I know how you feel, Ken,” said Chase, in the lulling tone he reserved for dealing with victims of violence. “But this is somethin’ that I have to do alone. I can’t bring you with me.”

  Kendal grabbed Chase’s arm and gripped it fiercely. “You’d better bring her back!” he shouted, anger spitting from his green-gray eyes.

  Chase took heart from Kendal’s rage. “You bet I will,” he swore. After I rearrange their body parts.

  He pushed out of the car to escort the boy up to the Goodner’s front door, but Linda Mae was already bustling toward them. She took one look at Chase’s set features, and her smile fled.

  “This is Ken,” Chase said, shutting the passenger door with the heel of his boot. “I need you to watch him for me. Linc’s friends are keeping his mother till I give them their guns,” he added tersely.

  “Oh, Lord!” cried the woman, stepping up to Kendal with motherly concern.

  With a reassuring pat, Chase relinquished Kendal to Linda Mae’s care. He headed back to the driver’s seat.

  “Should I call the police?” the woman inquired.

  “I will,” Chase said, glancing at Kendal’s worried face. “Afterward,” he added, dropping into his car.

  As he peeled away, he glanced into his rearview mirror to see Linda Mae ushering Kendal inside. She’d do and say all the right things to keep Kendal sane in the next hour or so. Chase’s job, meanwhile, was to ensure that he kept his promise to Kendal and brought his mama home alive.

  The Reeves place was an abandoned farmhouse back when Chase was just a kid. Teenagers used it as a place to escape their parents, to smoke and drink. It had fallen into serious disrepair since then, listing to one side as a result of the constant, southerly winds.

  The sagging roof stood at the verge of collapse. The clapboard siding, which had once been white, had peeled away, exposing old, dried wood underneath. With many of the windows broken or boarded shut, the house looked to Chase like a skeleton as he surveyed it from a distance of two hundred yards, beyond the scope of peering eyes.

  Welcome to the headquarters of the FOR Americans, he scoffed in
wardly. They used to be holed up in Linc’s office. Now this was all that was left to them.

  He eyed the stormy, purple sky, wondering if he should wait for nightfall or just drive up to the front door, hand them their weapons, and get Sara the hell out of there—assuming they would even let her go. But they were racists, he reassured himself, not murderers. Chances were they’d let her walk in exchange for the weapons. Only Chase wasn’t satisfied with just compromising their rifles. He wanted to rip their fucking hearts out.

  Dammit, I should never have brought her here!

  This was the last thing she deserved after dealing with the likes of Garret. She deserved peace and quiet, not fear and threats.

  He’d never forgive himself if Linc’s buddies hurt her.

  With no choice but to play it by ear, Chase ducked back into his car. He donned his holster and slid the SIG into place. The blade that he carried in his left boot was his backup weapon. He could peg a man in the heart with a flick of his wrist.

  The MP5, which he’d taken out of the back of his car, was propped on the floor of the seat beside him, in case he was driven into retreat. Two extra magazines were stowed in the pockets of his cargo pants. It was time to draw the line.

  As he eased the car out of a copse of trees and onto a rutted road, he could feel the warrior within him coalesce. He could feel the rocks on the road through the steering column. The skylarks diving for insects over the fields seemed to fall in slow motion. And a cicada buzzed over the hood of his car, moving like a CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter.

  By the time he pulled up before the clapboard farmhouse, the sky had taken on a bruised hue, with rain clouds sweeping closer. Chase got out, leaving the MP5 right inside the open window. He reached into the backseat, scooping up the eight rifles, five of which would never work again.

  Feeling eyes on him, he marched toward the rickety front stoop and rapped loudly on the crooked front door.

  Sara’s heart pounded with the dread of impending violence. Like a true-blue hero, Chase had come for her, knocking on the door with purpose that had her holding her breath.

  If he thought he could storm inside and teach these men a lesson, though, they might all wind up dead.

  The morons who’d abducted her weren’t the problem. Les and Timmy, as she’d heard them call each other, didn’t have the brainpower to overcome a trained Navy SEAL, not even with the nine-millimeter gun that Les toted.

  It was their leader, Will, who worried her.

  For the last hour or so, she’d made his acquaintance. And she’d discovered that her amateur skills in psychology couldn’t begin to sound the depths of the man’s complexity. He’d been an Army Ranger during the Vietnam War, the equivalent of a Navy SEAL. Obviously, at sixty, he wasn’t in his prime, but what he lacked in speed in agility, he made up for in experience. She’d heard enough stories to know.

  In old Will’s mind, the war was ongoing. He’d insisted on showing her his arsenal of weapons. He owned a boxful of hand grenades purchased from a crooked cop. He had mortar rounds for a machine gun that was being shipped UPS. He even had a shoulder-mounted missile launcher made by the Russians, which he admitted to her didn’t work.

  Will had a passion for history, too, only it wasn’t the version Sara was familiar with. It was Will’s version: a litany of how the White Man had been wronged.

  He’d sat on an upended crate across from her folding chair trying to recruit her to his cause. The Sterno burner, which he’d lit to combat the encroaching gloom, threw light onto the undersides of his cheekbones, leaving his eye sockets in shadow.

  By nature, Sara abhorred anger and violence. For a decade she’d gone to great lengths to keep from agitating Garret. She played the same passive game with Will, lulling him into thinking that she agreed with his twisted point of view.

  When he shot off his seat at the brisk knocking, she gasped in terror, wishing there were some way to forewarn Chase of the danger he was facing.

  She forced herself to speak up, smoothing the wobble from her voice. “Perhaps I should meet him at the door. He could leave the rifles on the porch,” she suggested.

  “And then what?” Will countered. “Let you go? So you run to the police?”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she told him, truthfully. “I told you, I’m leaving for Texas.”

  Eyeing Chase through a knothole in the boarded-up window, Will cracked his knuckles and thought.

  The brisk knock came again.

  “I’ll get it,” Les volunteered, materializing out of the shadows of the back room, gun in hand.

  Will stopped him with a single word. “No.” He turned his head and looked at Sara. “She’s going to answer the door.”

  Sara’s relief evaporated in the next instant when he added, “And if she doesn’t persuade him to leave the guns on the porch, we’ll shoot ’em both. Go on.” He jerked his head.

  Chapter Nine

  Sara rose on legs that jittered. As the skinheads retreated into the shadows, she crossed to the door and opened it, coming face-to-face with Chase, who carried more than half a dozen rifles over one shoulder. He managed to look at her and past her all at the same time, his eyes translucent in the gloom.

  “Hi,” she said, getting his full attention with her overly bright tone. “Just put the guns down here, and we can go.”

  She could feel the adrenaline radiating out of him. He was more than braced for a confrontation; he was itching to thrash the enemy soundly, only she stood squarely between the opposing forces. “Put them down,” she repeated, imbuing her words with deeper meaning, “and we walk away.” Alive, she added mentally.

  To her vast relief, he leaned over. The rifles clattered onto the wooden stoop. He straightened, grabbed her hand, and pulled her with him toward the car, keeping his body between hers and the house as he opened the passenger door to let her in. Rounding the car, he lifted his submachine gun off his seat and dove inside.

  He was backing down the driveway before his door was even shut.

  Over her galloping heart, Sara listened to the whine of his engine as they picked up speed. He found a place to spin them around, and they shot away from the farmhouse with efficiency that left her breathless.

  Chase didn’t slow down until they’d driven several miles. He pulled off the road, suddenly, yanked up the hand brake and reached for her, his hands hot on her upper arms. “Tell me the fuckers didn’t hurt you,” he demanded roughly.

  “I’m fine,” she reassured him, though every muscle in her body ached from all the tension. “Where’s Kendal?”

  “Staying with Mrs. Goodner, my neighbor. I’m going to take you there now.”

  She could feel the rage still shimmering in him. “You’re not going back, Chase,” she said, sensing that was exactly what he intended to do. “I met the leader of the group—Will. He’s a former Army Ranger and a Vietnam vet,” she told him quickly. “He’s convinced that he’s fighting a war. You can’t go back. There are three of them and only one of you. Someone’s going to get killed.”

  There was just enough daylight left for her to see Chase’s jaw muscles jump as he released her and sat back.

  “Call the police,” she urged. “Forget about me; you have to call the authorities. Will has plans. Something about a . . . a lesson to teach the liberal duffers to look after their own kind.” She shook her head in bafflement. “Whatever that means.”

  Chase tugged off the elastic that kept his hair in a ponytail. It fell to his shoulders in wavy locks, giving him a savage look. He went perfectly still, as if meditating on the hunt to come.

  “Please, Chase,” Sara begged. “I don’t like violence. And I don’t want you to get hurt.” Tears sprang to her eyes.

  He glanced at her and cursed. “You just want me to walk away?” he asked on a disbelieving note. “They killed my dog,” he growled. “They broke into my house; they fucking terrorized you and Kendal, and you just want me to turn my back on that?”

  The confirmation t
hat Jesse was dead made her waver. “Don’t tell me Kendal was the first to find him,” she begged.

  “Yes, he was,” Chase bit back. “Does that change things for you?”

  Sara wrestled with conflicting impulses. On one hand, imagining what her son had suffered today, she wanted nothing more, as a mother, than to teach the skinheads a lesson they would never forget. She was tempted to unleash Chase on them.

  On the other hand, if he were hurt in the process, how much more awful would that be?

  “Just call the police, Chase,” Sara begged. “Please. Let them handle it.”

  A fierce frown settled on his forehead. Sara held her breath. It was a defining moment. She would see for herself what he was made of. He reached abruptly over her knees and snatched the cell phone out of the glove compartment. Watching him press the illuminated numbers, Sara released a silent sigh of relief.

  “Nine-one-one, do you have an emergency?”

  In a concise message, Chase relayed the whereabouts of the FOR Americans, with the added warning that they were armed. He refused to give his name, saying only that he preferred to remain anonymous. That, of course, was for her benefit. He didn’t want the police swarming the ranch, asking questions.

  “Let’s go get Kendal,” Chase said, when the call was done. His tone was calm, his scowl was gone. By all appearances, he was ready to put the experience behind him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, collapsing weakly against her seat.

  Sweat poured from Chase’s body. His thighs burned from pumping underneath him as he tore up and down the half mile driveway in the dark, hoping to relieve his pent-up energy.

  Jesse was dead. They’d buried him under the pecan tree just before the rain came pouring down.

  Rainwater trickled down Chase’s cheeks in lieu of the tears he was unable to cry. He wished he could, if only to relieve the pressure in his chest.

  Kicking off his squishy running shoes, he pushed through the front door, moving quietly to keep from disturbing Sara and Kendal. But there was Sara, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, waiting up for him. He shut the door against the gentle murmur of the rain.