by Logan Ryles
Reed turned back to Kelly and raised both eyebrows. She nodded once but didn’t say anything.
“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.” He wasn’t sure if he meant those words or not. They were just what he needed to say. The best way to stay numb was to suppress his feelings.
“I asked you not to come around anymore, Reed. I was very clear about that.” An edge crept into Kelly’s tone.
“I know. It’s not about the medical. I—”
A skinny man with blonde hair stepped off the staircase and into the hallway. Water dripped from his hair, and there was a towel wrapped around his waist. Steam still rose from his flushed skin, and a big smile hung on his lips. “Kelly, I was thinking—” His smile faded when he saw Reed, but there was no defensiveness in his posture—just surprise.
“John, this is Reed.” Kelly poured another cup of coffee, and John stepped forward and took the coffee before extending his hand toward Reed. The grip was firm and confident, but not all that strong.
Reed shook once, then released.
“Reed is my realtor. He sold me the house.” Kelly stared into her cup.
“Oh, cool.” The smile returned, and John took a deep sip of the coffee. “Sorry to come down dressed like this, man. Didn’t know we had company.”
Reed forced a tight smile. “It’s early. My intrusion.”
John shifted on his feet, then flashed another nervous smile. “Well, I better get dressed. Good meeting you, Reed.” He disappeared back up the steps, coffee in hand.
Reed turned back to Kelly and raised one eyebrow. She flicked her hand at him and turned away, wiping down the counter with a dry cloth.
“He seems nice,” Reed said. He hoped the insincerity in his voice wasn’t as obvious as John’s awkwardness.
“He is.”
“Is he . . . umm . . . ?”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “A Christian?”
“Well, yeah. I guess.”
“Yes. I met him at church.”
“I’m happy for you.”
Kelly flung the cloth into the sink and shot him a glare. “You don’t have to lie, Reed. I know what you think. He’s not like you. He’s not big and blunt and brutal. Not everyone has to be.”
The room fell silent with that awkward, tense mood like invisible fog.
Kelly leaned against the counter and wiped hair from her face. “I’m sorry.”
Reed rubbed his finger over the mosaic pattern of the mug, tracing each spiral and shard of colored glass. “I never hated you for what you believe. I always supported it. I just don’t feel the same.”
“I know.” She stared at the floor, and once again, the silence felt thick.
Reed imagined he could feel each second slipping by as though it were water falling from a leaky faucet. He looked into the backyard again and studied the swing. Bright yellow. Gender neutral. The kind of thing only an overzealous future parent would buy before they even knew the sex of their child. That was Kelly, always jumping ahead.
“Why are you here, Reed?”
The sudden question jarred Reed out of his muse. He dumped the coffee into the sink and leaned on the counter. “I need you to keep Baxter for a couple days. He’s in the truck.” He shoved his hands back into his pockets and rested against the kitchen island.
“I told you I was done. I’m not getting mixed up in your chaos anymore. I put that life behind me. I’m an honest woman now.”
“You were always an honest woman, Kelly. That’s what made you such a shitty thief.”
She blushed and rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t half bad in my better days.”
“Does John know about your better days?”
She looked away. “What do you think?”
“I doubt he’ll ever ask. Doesn’t impress me as an inquisitive person.”
“What about when I tell him my realtor’s dog is staying the week?”
Reed grinned. “Hey, you set yourself up for that one.”
Kelly’s dark eyes were rimmed with red.
Reed stepped across the room and placed one hand on her arm, squeezing softly. “This is the last time. I swear to you. There’s something I have to clean up, but when I’m finished, I’ll come back for Baxter and then I’ll be gone. You’ll never see or hear from me again.”
A single tear spilled out of her eye. She looked away, glaring at the back patio through the sliding glass door. “You think that’s what I want?”
“I think it’s what you need.”
Reed brushed the fallen bangs out of her eyes then leaned down and kissed the top of her head. He gave her arm another squeeze and then walked toward the door. “Three days, Kel. Maybe four.”
“I charge for pet sitting!”
Reed paused and shot her a wink and a grin. “Maybe I’ll pay off the house.”
As the door closed behind him, Reed faced north toward the mountains. The breeze that stung his cheeks unleashed fresh resolve in his veins. He pushed back the thoughts of Kelly and her quiet life, and he remembered Atlanta—the wrecked train, the bloody bodies, and the ultimate backstabbing. He was only one kill away from a quiet life like this—one of retirement and solitude—or at least he thought he was. But that had all been a farce. Oliver’s promise of thirty kills in exchange for his freedom was a lie from the start, and it was a lie Reed would never swallow. He worked as a professional killer under the condition that he killed people who deserved to be killed. It was a cheap, clichéd excuse for his bloody profession, but it was how he justified the relentless slaughter.
Oliver made a terrible miscalculation when he turned on Reed, failing to realize that a man they called Prosecutor—a man who made his living gunning down injustice—should be the last man he tried to backstab.
I’m coming for you, Oliver.
Ten
“…It’s twenty-eight degrees here in beautiful Cherokee County and not showing any signs of warming up. This is truly radical weather for early November. We’ve got a cold front sweeping down from the Midwest, with temperatures expected to fall into the single digits overnight. I just can’t overstate how atypical this is. You’re going to want to get home early tonight, and make sure you bundle up. It’s gonna be a cold one. From channel—”
Reed cut the radio off and settled back into the cloth seat of the pickup. The heater hummed on low, pumping hot air over the windshield to keep it from fogging. Even though the cab of the truck was warm, Reed could feel the chill from the other side of the glass. It hung in the trees as a semi-frozen mist, frosting over the tips of the limbs and collecting on the grass. Chunks of ice cascaded down the gurgling brooks that crisscrossed beneath the county road, and what leaves remained in the trees were stiff with the sub-freezing temperatures. The brunt of impending winter was hitting North Carolina early, and even the animals had taken shelter. The mountains felt still and silent, almost as though a brooding force lay in the shadows between the trees, waiting and watching, haunting every passerby who defied the claws of the cold.
The two-lane mountain road wound back on itself, weaving its way farther into the mountains. Every ten or fifteen minutes, another vehicle passed him, slipping by on the narrow space between the yellow lines and a hundred-yard cliff, dropping down into the depths of an empty ravine.
Reed left the town of Murphy over an hour before, skirting Hiwassee Lake before working his way through the back roads and into the wilderness. Oliver’s cabin headquarters lay deep in the heart of the North Carolina Appalachians, far off the beaten path, where no hunter or hiker would ever stumble across it. Reed discovered the location by accident while reviewing kill contracts almost two years before. It was a secret, and at the time, he didn’t mention it to Oliver to avoid his employer’s possible wrath. Now the secret carried an entirely new value. With any luck, Oliver would be holed up in his safe house, half-drunk and sitting by the fire when Reed closed in. It was equally possible that Oliver was on the other side of the world, negotiating contracts with Indonesian warlords, but Ree
d was willing to take the chance that his former employer wouldn’t leave the States until The Prosecutor had been put to bed. They had to know he was coming.
Reed turned off the blacktop and onto a back road. Using the GPS, he rechecked his position relative to the cabin: six miles out, separated by two ravines and one river. The river would be the greatest challenge. There was a bridge, sure, but it was an obvious point of weakness for Oliver’s defenses. At two miles from the cabin, it was almost certain that the old killer had some surveillance at the bridge.
Reed would have to figure something else out when the time came. He would leave the pickup in the woods, three miles out, wait for the cover of darkness, then approach the cabin from the west. Oliver might not be alone and could have dogs or trip wires crisscrossing between the trees around the cabin. It would be a painfully slow process to make his approach, and Reed was ready to take his time.
The digital thermometer on the dash read twenty-two degrees when Reed cut off the truck fifty yards from the road, buried in the trees. He settled into the seat and waited while the heat slowly vacated the cabin, replaced by an icy temperature that seeped straight through his thick black jacket and into his bones. He rested his head back against the headrest, crossing his arms, and embraced the discomfort. It burned, then it ached. Soon his mind would numb it out, just like it had a thousand times before, and then he’d be ready to conquer the wilderness and beat it into submission.
“You are God. Everything is subjected to your will. The day you stop believing that is the day you die.”
Oliver’s admonition rang in Reed’s mind—a distant echo of three years before during his intense training. Fresh out of prison, with nothing to lose and everything to win, Reed followed Oliver into these very mountains. It was winter, snow lay on the ground, and for a Marine fresh out of Iraq, this new ice demon was an unprecedented threat. Here in these mountains, miles away from civilization, Oliver and his goons took Reed to the edge of death, forcing him through a four-month pressure-cooker course designed to remove the humanity from his soul and make him the ultimate killer.
“I’m going to destroy you. And if by some miracle you prove to be indestructible, I’m going to hire you.”
Reed guessed that the challenge was meant to be horrific, but it wasn’t. He’d already been on death row, so the thought of losing his life here in this frozen wilderness was less than terrifying. It was more annoying than anything because when he accepted Oliver’s thirty-kill deal that night in that dark room, he was under the impression that he was hired. The sudden change of events in North Carolina felt like backtracking, but these mountains hadn’t killed him then, and they wouldn’t kill him now.
The sun slowly faded over the western horizon, vanishing amid the trees and leaving the forest in a ghostly glow of moonlight and shadow. Reed would have preferred perfect darkness, pierced by the illumination of his night vision goggles, but there was no time to waste defying the clear sky and full moon. He would have to make do with the shadows.
Reed’s wristwatch read nine-thirty before he slipped out of the truck, shutting the door softly behind him. The ground was frozen, and brittle mud crunched with each footfall. Thin fog drifted down from the tree limbs, further distorting the darkness, and making every shadow morph under the shine of the moon. In the distance, an owl hooted. Amid the leaves to the north, a chipmunk scampered through the forest. Or maybe it was a squirrel. The cold that cut through his jacket no longer bothered him; it felt natural to feel this numb, even with the added discomfort of a glacial breeze drifting out of the west.
I dominate this. This cold is mine.
Reed opened the back door of the truck and dug through the bags. His handgun was already strapped beneath the jacket, accompanied by two spare magazines and a Ka-Bar knife. He withdrew his custom-built AR-10 sniper rifle, chambered in .308. It was the same weapon he had welded from the top of the Equitable Building in Atlanta a few days before. He slipped a twenty-round magazine into the receiver, then dumped two more magazines into the oversized pockets of his jacket. Last, he pulled an oversized backpack on a metal frame from the back seat and secured it to his shoulders. A black baseball cap pulled low over his ears completed his ensemble. There was too much moonlight for his night goggles to be truly effective, and they would respond poorly to muzzle flash. He’d rather just let his eyes adjust and trust his instincts.
Reed looked up at the night sky, searching amid the glistening pinholes until he located the North Star, then he shouldered the rifle and stepped into the trees. The owl began to hoot again, and another nocturnal mammal bounded through the leaves. The terrain, littered with rocks and fallen logs, rose and fell beneath him. His body began to warm as he fought his way up the mountainside, hiking toward the ridgeline. The strain and pressure felt good.
“Fight through. Kill or die. Dominate or be a slave. There is no middle ground, Reed.”
The top of the ridge burst into view as the trees parted, and Reed knelt behind a boulder, lifting a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The forest that clung to the next ridge was thick, allowing for very little view of what could be hiding amongst it. The cabin sat on the end of the ridge, right at the top of a fifty-yard cliff, while the river cut through the valley in between. It would be impossible to slip down to the water, find a way across, then scale his way to the cabin without being detected. Certainly, there was a method to Oliver’s design.
Reed lowered the binoculars and bit his lip. He could position himself on the top of the next ridge and establish a decent overwatch over the cabin, but at seven hundred yards in the dark with all the trees, it was doubtful he would obtain a clear shot. If he approached the cabin from the south along the long and winding driveway that ran along the ridgetop, he would be discovered before he was within half a mile of the mountain-top hideout.
There was really only one option. He would have to run Oliver out of his hole, and there was no subtle way to do it. It was time to launch the fireworks.
Eleven
The top of the next ridge was covered in a dense thicket of evergreens and scrub brush, providing ideal cover as Reed slipped up to the edge and returned the binoculars to his eyes. Two hundred yards below, down a steep hillside covered in rocks and brush, the river wound its way through the ravine. It was about twenty yards wide and surged through the valley floor in a black tide speckled with ice. The far wall of the ravine shot upward in a slope so steep it was almost a cliff. At the top, nestled on the very end of the ridge right before another drop-off, Reed focused the binoculars on the cabin. It sat under the shade of towering pines, built low to the ground out of thick spruce logs. An awning hung off the back, sheltering a green pickup truck and a large stack of firewood. Smoke rose from the chimney, barely visible against the black sky as it drifted into oblivion.
Reed lowered the binoculars and tapped his index finger against them. He’d never seen the cabin before, but he knew the pickup. There were no bumper stickers, scratches, dents, or identifying marks of any kind. It was just a plain Chevy pickup, but he would’ve recognized it at five hundred yards anywhere in the world. The vehicle was wider than a regular Chevy of that year and sat one inch closer to the ground. That was because of the thick bulletproof plates built into the body beneath the paneling—the daily driver of a kingpin killer.
The cold faded out of Reed’s mind as he unslung the backpack and dug into it. He retrieved his Bushnell rangefinder, clicked it on, set the crosshairs over the cabin, and hit the trigger. Oliver’s front door sat 367 yards away, at a comparable elevation to Reed’s current position. The next item from the backpack was long and dark, consisting of three metal tubes held together by bungee cords. Reed unstrapped them and clicked each one together, then unfolded a metal tripod and locked the tube into it. The weapon was an M224 60mm mortar, and he was well acquainted with its capabilities. Back in Iraq, he’d spent many long hours using identical mortars to shell ISIL entrenchments, and more than a few times he’d been forced to tak
e cover himself as captured M224s were redirected back at the Marines.
The mortar was heavy, and the metal felt so cold to the touch it almost burned. His fingers stuck to the controls as he adjusted the tripod, squinting through the iron sights as he aimed the weapon toward the cabin. His breath came in short bursts, and his heart rate accelerated with that familiar rush of excitement. Anticipation.
Reed never remembered regretting a kill. From the moment he pressed the trigger on that first contractor in Iraq, to the execution of Oliver’s East European thugs at the garbage dump outside of Atlanta. To him, it was all the same. These men deserved to die, for one reason or another, and he was here to prosecute that justice. But tonight, sitting behind the mortar, staring at Oliver’s cabin, things felt different. The excitement was a little stronger than the usual rush of anticipation and nervousness. Reed felt eager. Hungry. This was more than an execution—this was a statement. Oliver had broken his own rules, and Reed was going to prosecute him for it.
He checked the elevation of the tripod once more, then reached into the backpack again, more gingerly this time. In the bottom of the pack, carefully wrapped in thick foam padding, were three 60mm mortars. Two were marked with red paint, and the third in a bright green. All three were smooth and clean and glowed in the soft light of the moon with the promise of imminent death just seconds away.
Wind rippled over the top of the ridge, sending leaves cascading over one another in the stillness. The owl started in again, hooting long and slow, as though he knew what was about to happen and he were mourning the disturbance of his forest retreat. Reed checked the AR10 and removed the lens caps off the scope before lifting the weapon. He slipped fifty yards down the ridge, ducking under limbs and between the dense shrubbery before stopping in a tiny clearing between two evergreens. He laid the rifle down between the trees, propped up on a stubby tripod, then checked his view of the cabin.