by Logan Ryles
“How were you paid?”
“Cash. American dollars.”
“Who paid you?”
“Nobody. We get job through Swiss broker. They call him Cedric. We were told to pick up the cash in locker at train station. This was all!”
“You’re lying.” Reed lifted the pliers.
“No! Okay. Okay. We work for him before. The man in Georgia. I do not know his name.”
“Salvador? Is he called Salvador?”
“Salvador? No. He is English.”
“English?” Reed cocked his head. “You mean he’s white?”
“I don’t know!” He looked away and slammed his head into the van again.
Reed grabbed him by the collar and jerked him forward, forcing him to meet his gaze.
“What did you do?”
Breath whistled between his bloody teeth. His eyes reminded Reed of the way pupils looked after being dilated at the optometrist—wide, vacant, and unnatural.
“There was girl. I do not know who. He wanted her taken.”
“Describe her.”
Again, he tried to look away, but Reed dropped the pliers and sent his fist crashing directly below his victim’s left eye. Knuckles met flesh with all the vengeance and power of the practiced blows back at the cabin. Once, then twice, then came a third stroke, driving the man’s head into the rear of the van.
Reed leaned closer to his bloodied face and screamed into this ear. “What did she look like?”
The man sobbed. “Blonde. Pretty. Young twenties.”
“Where did you take her?”
“Train! Train place. I do not know name! No trains come. Only empty.”
Reed shook him by the collar then raised his fist again. “Abandoned? It’s abandoned?”
“Yes! Is abandoned.”
“In the city?”
“Yes . . . yes. In the city.”
Reed knew the location. It was the last place anyone would look—empty and isolated, with plenty of places to hide a kidnapped woman. He tossed the pliers into his left hand and drew the pistol.
The prisoner stared down the muzzle.
“No! You said if I talk, I live!”
“I did, and you would have, but you touched Banks. Go to Hell.”
The pistol cracked, and the man fell to the ground. Reed’s arms trembled, his vision fogged, and the world tipped under his feet as he stepped away from the bodies and leaned against the van. Nausea and vertigo overwhelmed him, washing down his body like a tidal wave of illness. Vomit hurtled through his throat and splashed over his boots.
God forgive me. It’s too late to turn back.
The bodies crumpled over each other in the back of the van. Reed tossed the pliers inside, then shut the door and kicked dirt over the pools of blood under his feet. He drove back to the four-lane highway and turned east. The pavement drummed under the cheap tires, and occasional cars flashed past in the oncoming lanes. Reed’s head spun, but he forced back the feelings of confused remorse. There was no time to feel sorry for the guilty.
He pulled the van into a dark, abandoned shopping mall southeast of town. Broken and abandoned shopping carts sat at random throughout the lot, while paper bags and bits of trash skipped over the pavement. Reed parked behind the main building and grabbed his gear. After digging through one of the dead man’s pockets, he located a cell phone. It was locked but still allowed him to dial 911.
“What is your emergency?”
The sleeve of his jacket tasted bitter as he pressed it against his lips and spoke in a dull monotone. “You will find Senator Holiday in a trailer off of Grimley Road. Bring medical.”
Reed hung up before the operator could respond, and he threw the cell into the back of the van. He drew the Glock and bent over under the rear bumper. One shot to the bottom of the plastic gas tank resulted in a stream of fuel gushing over the pavement. The gasoline gurgled and splashed over the asphalt and tires, and filled the air with the thick aroma of petrol. He stepped back a few feet, holstered the gun, and lit a cigarette. The nicotine brought relief to his strained nerves. His joints loosened, and he relished the fog that consumed his brain—not really a distraction, and barely a shield. It was a filter that blocked out the worst of the last hour, clearing his thoughts of the screams and carnage.
What have I become?
Reed flipped the smoke beneath the van. The gas exploded into a red-hot ball of fire, lifting the rear tires an inch off the ground before consuming the vehicle in flames. They were hot on his face, singing his skin like a summer sun. Reed turned away.
The Camaro sat in the shadows, melting into the darkness like a ghost. He opened the trunk and deposited the rifle and gear, then slid into the driver’s seat. Pain ripped through his legs and torso, reminding him that his adrenaline high was receding. There was nothing he could do about that. There would be time for painkillers and whiskey later.
Reed slammed the car into gear and took the on-ramp onto I-24 East. He planted his foot into the accelerator and listened to the roar of the wind and motor meld together in a bellow of hellish defiance that matched the rage building in the back of his mind.
It was time to finish this.
Twenty-Four
The miles passed under the belly of the Camaro in a dark blur. Reed circumvented the heart of the city, knowing it would still be hot with police activity. There was almost certainly an APB on the Camaro, which left only a few hours before the investigative net of the Atlanta PD tightened too much for him to enter the city at all. By sunrise, both the car and its driver would need to be far away.
After taking the bypass around the southern side of the city, Reed turned north along State Highway 23 through Thomasville. His heart rate quickened as he closed in on East Atlanta. A lot of railroads cut between the streets and houses, and there were plenty of rail yards, also. Several of those were abandoned, the skeletons of an industrial age now passed. But when the tortured goon mentioned an empty rail yard where Salvador held Banks, only one place came to mind.
Pratt-Pullman Yard.
The streets around the Camaro grew darker and more desolate. Old houses with faded and peeling paint lined the sidewalks, many of them abandoned with shattered windows and boarded-up doors. Giant oak trees leaned over the streets with wiry branches hovering over rotting rooftops. Many of these trees remembered the Civil War; they were the survivors of the flames that consumed Atlanta, and they felt unwelcoming to Reed’s violent intrusion, as though this place had seen enough of conflict and only wanted to sleep.
Reed stopped the car where he could see the rusty rooftops of the train yard a few hundred yards ahead. Just beyond it, MARTA’s Blue Line ripped through the neighborhood and toward the east, lit by soft streetlights and red track lamps. Everything was unmoving and reserved, as though the trees and the darkness housed a terrible secret. There was an unnatural calm that promised awful things to anyone who broke it. Could that secret be Banks?
The body armor was heavy and restrictive as Reed pulled it on. He didn’t tighten the straps as much this time, but he tucked an extra magazine into the elastic straps of the chest plate. The KRISS, fully loaded, hung from a single-point sling around his neck. Half-dry blood stuck to his hands and forearms, and it was splattered over his pants and covered his shoes.
Reed slammed the trunk closed and stepped around to the side door of the Camaro. For the first time since hanging up on the unknown caller three hours before, he looked down at his phone. There were four missed calls, all from the same number. Reed hit redial.
The voice that answered was the furthest thing from the calm and controlled speaker of the last twenty-four hours. Salvador was consumed by anger, and his South American snarl muddled the clarity of his words, converting them into a stream of verbal vomit.
“It’s too late, Montgomery. We’ve killed her!”
Reed forced himself to remain calm. He wanted to curse and scream. He wanted to crush the phone under his boot and charge into the train yard,
guns blazing. But he wouldn’t let Salvador break him so easily.
“If that were true, you wouldn’t have answered.”
A crashing sound erupted from over the phone. “I’m going to rip her limb from limb!”
“Shut up!” Reed’s patience snapped like a strained rubber band. “I’m giving you one chance to walk away. Leave Banks, and get out while you’re still alive.”
“I’m not scared of you, Reed! You want her? Come get her!”
Reed hung up and pulled the charging handle of the submachine gun. The heavy bolt cycled back and rammed a fresh round into the chamber. His body was tense and charged, his mind sharpened, and he focused on the metal building rising over the shingle roofs three hundred yards away. The battered tin was painted with graffiti and full of holes, and moonlight illuminated Pratt-Pullman as though it were a stage. Reed thought about the way Banks laughed and the overwhelming obsession he felt the second her lips touched his. The sound of her fingers strumming the ukulele, looking out over Atlanta. A city she loved. A place she called home.
I don’t have a home, but I’ll be damned if they take this from me.
Reed broke into a run toward the train yard.
Banks couldn’t see. Her head was numb, and her eyes stung like they were filled with pepper juice. She knew there was some type of sedative in her veins, and it caused her mind to work in slow motion, as though each thought was its own private marathon. She blinked and tried to focus on tangible concepts, things she could work with, information that was relevant.
Her hands were tied behind her back and around the chair. She could work with that. What kind of bonds were they? Hard and narrow. Cable ties, maybe? Her feet were also bound, locked to the chair’s legs with more cables. A dirty cloth that tasted like gasoline filled her mouth.
Her heart pounded like a war drum. Even through the drugs, the fear was palpable, building into a driving force that urged her to embrace the panic and descend into mental anarchy. She tried to identify her last clear memory, but everything was fuzzy. Was she in the Beetle or just near it? No, she wasn’t in it. She was walking toward it. Looking at it. In a parking lot? Yes, it was a parking lot. There was a shopping bag in her hand. New socks and a bag of potato chips. That detail rang ironically clear in her crowded mind.
She remembered a split second of fear before the world erupted into chaos. There were men . . . two of them. Maybe more. They jumped from the side of a van and ran toward her. She fumbled with her purse, reaching for the Smith and Wesson 637 buried inside, and she struggled with the holster. The hammer spur caught on the inside of the bag, and panic overwhelmed her mind.
And then there was blackness. Had they hit her? Her head didn’t hurt, but her neck throbbed.
Banks sank her teeth into the towel and pulled at the bonds. She jerked at the back of the chair, but nothing loosened. She tried to scream past the wadded cloth in her mouth, but the muted moan sounded more like a grunt than a cry for help.
Light flooded the room, and she blinked and tried to focus through her blurred vision and numb mind. She could see a door on the far side of the room, and two men stepped in. They moved in a blur of black clothes and stomping boots, lifted the chair off the floor, and carried her across the room.
A third man, short with dark skin, appeared and snapped angry commands at the others. “Hurry! Put her on the train. If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes, go through with it.”
Banks kicked against the chair, and a gloved fist slammed into her cheekbone. She tried to scream, but everything hurt. Panic surged through her mind, but this time it was accompanied by rage.
Another fist to her temple, and she choked and slumped forward. The world spun.
Reed held the submachine gun to his chest and leaned low as he ran northward along Rogers Street. Everything was deathly silent. He checked the rifle for the third time as Toomer Elementary School loomed to his right. The school was dark, and the parking lot empty. On the far side of the schoolyard, a row of trees blocked the south edge of Pullman Yard. Reed jogged across the lot and slipped into the trees, and his boots fell in soft thumps on the leaf-covered ground.
He ducked under a limb and paused at the edge of the tree line. The bulk of Pratt-Pullman stood directly ahead in a cluster of large warehouse buildings. The space between consisted of a mostly empty field with a few abandoned structures and shallow ditches. To his right, the trees became thicker and looped their way along the east side of the field and toward the warehouses. The foliage was dense and tangled, ensuring a difficult and time-consuming approach. The alternative, however, would be to make a direct dash across an exposed three-hundred-yard stretch.
He opted for the trees and turned right, working his way through the brush for fifty yards before turning north and moving along the east edge of the field. The forest floor was littered with dry sticks and shallow holes, making it difficult to walk without sounding like an army of squirrels bouncing through the leaves. Reed bent under the low-hanging limbs and held the gun just under his line of sight, his finger extended over the trigger guard. Each breath was shallow. Every movement charged with nervous excitement.
As he approached the warehouses, the trees began to thin, and standing just twenty yards from the tree line was the first of the metal structures. They consisted of four narrow buildings, with sloping tin roofs, built directly next to each other, and the walls were rusted and full of wide holes, exposing nothing but darkness on the other side. Reed slipped up next to the first structure and swept the muzzle of the rifle over the landscape around it. There were no signs of life. Moonlight played hide-and-seek with the shadows as the trees swayed in the wind. In the distance, an owl hooted, and some kind of nocturnal rodent bounced through the leaves. Reed’s arm trembled with tension.
Thirty yards across a small field littered with trailer parts and manufacturing paraphernalia stood the train yard’s primary structure. Over a hundred yards long, it dominated the field in rusty red—a relic of another era. The eastern end of the building was buried in the trees, with foliage and kudzu vines growing over the side and onto the roof, and threatening to consume the building back into the belly of Mother Nature. The southern wall faced Reed with a series of twelve garage-style doors. Half of them hung open, gaping like the hungry mouths of a sleeping beast. Windows ran along the sloping rooftop, and most of them were busted out, leaving shards of dirty glass glistening in the moonlight. Graffiti covered every exposed inch of the building, blasted in gaudy shades of spray paint over the metal and brick. Nothing about the shadowy structure was hospitable. Reed realized there would be no chance of breaching it without exposing himself. Once inside, it would be dark. The floor could be concrete, strewn with machinery and sections of railroad iron. Worse still, the floor might be constructed of rotting wood ready to give way under the slightest provocation. He understood why Salvador chose this spot. It wasn’t isolated or hidden or even defensible, but it was utterly impossible to approach without complete exposure.
Reed disengaged the safety and laid his finger over the trigger. He cast a wary look around the open field, checking for any new signs of surveillance or defense. Then he launched himself out of the trees and toward the building.
Twenty-Five
Three strides into the field and one leap over a ditch. That was as far as Reed made it before the first gunshots shattered the stillness. They were small-caliber, fully automatic, and blazing from one of the windows near the roofline. The ground exploded around his feet, sending rocks blasting into the air as though a land mine had detonated. Reed ducked and dashed to the left, and the gunfire continued, spraying the field with a deluge of lead.
It must be some kind of com-block submachine gun, inaccurate beyond fifty or sixty yards, clapping and thundering like some kind of deranged DJ hooked on a bass loop. Reed raised the KRISS and flipped the thumb switch to fully automatic, then pressed the trigger. The gun rattled like a firecracker, dumping twenty-five rounds of .45 ACP slugs into th
e building at random. The gunshots from the warehouse ceased, and Reed accelerated toward the building. He dropped the empty magazine and slammed a new one into the mag well, then smacked the bolt release with the heel of his left hand. Every sound rang in his head, pounding and echoing as though individually amplified. Reed skidded to a halt next to one of the gaping garage doors, pulled the gun into his shoulder, and ducked through the door. The inside of the warehouse stretched out before him, lit by the moon shining through the holes in the roof. As soon as his foot crossed the threshold, the gunfire resumed. He pivoted toward the sound and raised the KRISS. Muzzle flash blazed from a catwalk a few dozen yards away, suspended high above the concrete floor. Reed aligned the red dot over the spot and pressed the trigger twice. Something blunt struck his left calf, tearing through his pants like a red-hot spike. Reed grunted and fell sideways to the floor, still firing at the catwalk. The warehouse thundered with the sound of gunfire, reverberating off the tin walls. Somebody screamed, and a body hit the floor with a meaty crash. More gunfire erupted from the far end of the warehouse, ripping through the open space toward Reed.
He rolled to the left and forced himself to his feet. Sticky hot blood streamed down his left leg and over his boot as he pivoted toward the gunfire and pressed the trigger. Before he could fire again, something struck his right shoulder, and he collapsed to the ground. A tall man wielding a nightstick loomed over his head, and Reed rolled to his right just in time to dodge a sweeping blow from the baton. A boot landed on his knee and pressed down with over two hundred pounds of force. Reed jerked his leg free, then jammed his left boot into his attacker’s shin. The submachine gun lay tangled in the sling under his arm. Reed grabbed the Glock instead and fired twice at the man’s face. He clattered to the ground. Reed fought his way to his feet, and the world turned as though he were on a carnival ride and being slung in and out while being forced to listen to a drumbeat of hell the whole time.