by Chad Zunker
“Do you know anything about Joe Landon?”
David shook his head. “Only what I just told you.”
Jen was already on her phone again, searching Google. She found quick results. “Well, by this time next year, Joe Landon could be a household name.”
“Why?”
“He’s running for Congress in Texas’s Thirty-Second Congressional District.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, he’s one of the guys battling it out for the chance to oust the incumbent next fall. Landon’s got a good pedigree, too.” Jen was searching and reporting her findings. “He served in Iraq as an army Ranger, where it’s been widely reported that he saved the lives of two men from his battalion during a hostile operation. The Upella Group is now worth over four hundred million dollars. One report claims Landon has already spent ten million dollars of his own money on the campaign, and insiders say he’s willing to spend three times that, if necessary, to win. The spending is working. Early polls are showing Landon already running neck and neck when matched up with the incumbent and gaining momentum. Most from his party view him as a future superstar who could make a run at the White House one day.”
David was trying to piece things together. “Maybe this wasn’t about a litigation matter. Maybe this was about a man.”
“You think Benny had something on Jerry and chose to use it against Joe Landon?”
“I think I might have gotten pulled into the middle of two desperate men. One desperate to help his friends. Another desperate to protect his power.”
“We have to find that video, David.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Frank Hodges knocked on the hotel suite door, which seemed to be his client’s preferred meeting place. Although it was only late afternoon, his client’s eyes were already completely bloodshot. He also reeked of alcohol. This should be fun, Frank thought. He followed his client into the suite. His client went straight to the bar, refilled his glass, and then dropped heavily into a chair in the living room. There was an air of desperation to him. Frank knew desperate people did really stupid things. He took a position across the coffee table from the man.
Reaching down, his client slid him a folder.
Frank opened it, found a list of names on top. “What is this?”
“More possible loose ends. I need to know what these people know ASAP.”
“There are twelve names on this list.”
“Correct.”
“And how do you figure we go about doing that?” Frank asked.
“Hell if I know!” his client blurted out. “You’re the expert. Tap all of their phones, hack their emails, follow them, interrogate them, waterboard them. Figure it the hell out.”
“What exactly would we be looking for?”
“It’s summarized in the file.”
Frank sighed, put the file down. “If we find out someone on this list does know something that you don’t want shared, then what?”
“You let me worry about that.”
“When does it stop?”
“When my clients say to stop! We have a serious problem here, Hodges! A problem we both need to deal with right now before this blows up in all of our faces.”
Frank was not at all happy with the way his client kept saying we in his paranoid references. Frank was not one of them. He’d done what he was hired to do, and had gone above and beyond to help track down Benjamin Dugan. Something he was now seriously regretting. Out of his own curiosity, Frank had gone back to the surveillance video of the original money drop and had found Dugan sitting in the sixth row of the church, hunched down while dressed in a trench coat and a knit cap. The old man had somehow lifted the X envelope himself. Dugan had been so smooth with the velvet bag that Frank still couldn’t see it, even while enhancing the video.
“I’m afraid my job here is done,” Frank explained. “We’re pulling out today.”
His client glared at Frank. “What? You can’t leave now.”
Frank remained calm. “I assure you, I can. And I will.”
The man bolted out of his chair, cursing loudly. “This isn’t finished, Hodges! We need your help. What should’ve been a simple job has turned into a total disaster. There are too many loose ends on this thing and too many people for us to track by ourselves. We need your team in place right now to finish this damn job, or we’re all going to prison.”
Frank knew exactly what finishing the job meant to his client. How many people were they willing to kill? While Frank was okay living in the murky gray area that it took to operate in the dark world of private security, he also had his limits.
He stood. “This is your mess, not mine.”
“Please!” his client begged. “Just name your price, Hodges. I can get you whatever you need. My client will spend whatever it takes to promptly resolve this matter. He’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But you can’t walk out on us right now. He’ll never allow it.”
Frank cocked his head. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s the truth. I promise you, if he goes down, we all go down.”
“Best of luck to you.”
As Frank walked to the door, he heard his client yell another string of expletives, make more drunken threats, and then toss his glass of bourbon across the room. Frank never flinched. He’d once stood in front of a terrorist leader in Egypt who put a sword to his neck. He’d escaped a Russian execution squad while on assignment in Saint Petersburg. He’d sidestepped a sniper attack in Tel Aviv. Men like this didn’t scare him in the least.
But his client was correct about one thing.
There were loose ends.
THIRTY-SIX
They huddled back inside Jen’s office. Night was upon the city. There was a new energy to their pursuit—David knew they were really close to finally finding the truth. Benny had clearly put an intricate plan in action against a powerful and sinister player, and that had ultimately cost him his life. Benny had something big—David felt sure of that. But what, exactly? What was at the center of the old man’s plan? What could Benny have had that would scare someone into killing him? Jerry, the old man at the facility, probably knew but wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk to them. Outside of finding the video, their only other hope was that another member from the navy photo knew the same thing as Jerry and would talk to them.
Jen had again reached out to her military source on the drive back from San Antonio in an effort to identify each man in the photo. As they waited, Jen continued to research everything she could possibly find on Joe Landon, trying to find any angle that might help lead them to the truth. Behind her, David paced in a tight circle around the small office, racking his brain, and making himself dizzy. Marty Lyons had started incessantly calling him again—and David kept hitting “Ignore.” He knew the fuse had again been lit.
In one way or another, this was all about to blow up on him.
Jen read from her computer screen. “Landon received the Silver Star for his lifesaving actions back in Iraq. Several years ago, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News wrote up a detailed account of the event. It reads like an action-movie script. Landon’s got American hero written all over him. Apparently, he risked his own life to pull two men out of a burning Jeep that was under heavy enemy fire and dragged them more than fifty yards to safety.”
David considered that. “We all have a dark side. Power can make a man crazy.”
Jen suddenly gasped, startling him. “Look at this!”
He quickly leaned over her shoulder. Jen was pointing at a photograph from the Dallas Morning News article of a young Landon wearing his military fatigues, leaning up against a Jeep in Iraq, with several other soldiers hanging around him. Two of the soldiers in the photo were highlighted as the men he’d saved. Jen placed her finger an inch from the screen, aimed directly at the face of one of the young soldiers.
“Is that him?” Jen asked. “Is that the white-haired man from Benny’s photos?”
David’s eyes widened. “Yes
, that’s definitely him. That’s the same guy I saw outside Nick’s house, in his office two days later, and meeting with my boss outside the airplane. That’s probably the same guy who killed Benny.”
“His name is Mark Appleton. From Claremore, Oklahoma.”
David cursed. “So Landon saves this guy’s neck back in Iraq, and now he calls him in to return the favor?”
“Maybe Larue can identify this guy?”
“I had planned to show him the surveillance photos tomorrow.”
Jen noticed an email arrive in her in-box. It was from her military source, who had done quick work in identifying the other navy men in the photo with Benny and Jerry. Jen now had a full list of names, two of which were already marked as deceased. Family members had filed official paperwork with the military a long time ago. They focused on the three remaining guys on the list. Jen began a quick Google search of their full names. David returned to his pacing behind her. Everything Larue had told him about that fateful night in the alley with Benny was legit. Mark Appleton was a highly trained soldier, and he owed Joe Landon his life. It was no longer far-fetched that he might use a gun with a silencer to take down Benny. Appleton also had been at Benny’s burial service. Why? Who was he watching?
Looking down at Jen, David felt uneasy. He’d pulled her right into this dangerous deal.
“Take a look at this,” Jen said, eyes on her screen.
David looked in from behind again. “What is it?”
“The obituaries from the Casper Star-Tribune a month ago. Sammy Diermont, the third guy from the right in the photo, just died in a hiking accident.”
“Check the others, Jen.”
Jen typed in another name from the group, immediately found an easy hit. “What the hell, David?”
David read the computer screen—a blurb from the Journal-Spectator, a small newspaper out of Wharton, Texas. Charles Hicks died of an apparent suicide, gunshot to the head. No foul play suspected.
Jen typed in the last name on the list. Another immediate hit—and yet another reported death. Marvin Shobert had died in an apparent mugging at a horse track near Dallas.
“All from the same week,” David said, feeling the air knocked out of him.
“Every one of them is dead.”
“Except for Jerry Landon.”
“We have to go to the police, David. Right now. People are dying all over the place because of this. I know one of the detectives. He’s done a lot of volunteer work with us. We can go straight to him and give him everything. I trust him.”
“Okay, but let’s at least go back out to the Camp one last time and search for the video, just to see if Benny might have found a spot to hide it out there. Without the video, it still feels like a lot of speculation on our part.”
“Okay, I’ll go with you.”
Exiting the building, David and Jen hurried into the small parking lot and climbed into David’s SUV. Jen realized she’d forgotten her phone and rushed back inside the building. David glanced across the street while waiting and suddenly noticed someone standing beside a car near a streetlight, staring directly over at him. It sent a shiver of fear straight up his back.
Mark Appleton.
Cursing, David jumped out of his car to go grab Jen. A sudden explosion behind him shattered the pawnshop’s front windows and knocked David forward, where he slammed his face up against the brick of the building. For a second, he couldn’t hear a thing, just a ringing in his ears. His vision was also blurry. And it felt like his lungs were on fire. Lying facedown on the pavement, he turned over, trying to figure out what had just happened. There was a ball of fire in the parking lot behind him, billows of smoke filling the air. Then he suddenly recognized that his Range Rover was in the middle of the fire, being completely swallowed in flames.
David’s head pounded. He could barely focus. He looked down, noticed that his pants were on fire. He quickly patted them down with his bare hands, putting out the small flames. His palms were completely covered in black. His skin was stinging. What the hell had just happened?
He suddenly felt hands under his arms, pulling on him. He looked up, found Jen trying to drag him away from the scorching fire. Two other cars in the small parking lot were also engulfed in flames. In his first moment of clarity, David remembered Appleton standing across the street. Pushing himself up onto wobbly feet, David spun around to look in that direction, but he couldn’t see anything through all the smoke and flames.
David grabbed Jen by the hand and ran like hell.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Sitting behind the wheel of Jen’s Ford Escape, which had been parked on the opposite side of the pawnshop, David drove like a madman through the streets of East Austin, the tires squealing at every sharp turn. Although his ears still had a faint ringing, his hearing had gradually returned, and his vision had cleared. But he still felt a stinging in his fingers.
Jen sat next to him, holding on tightly to the handle by the passenger door, looking freaked out of her mind. She had taken a white T-shirt from her back seat and was trying her best to clean David’s charred face while he tossed her all about with his reckless driving. The white T-shirt was now completely covered in black.
“You’re bleeding badly,” she said, shaking her head. “We need to take you to the hospital. You could have internal injuries.”
“I will, but not yet.”
She sat back, still holding on tight. “Are you sure you saw the guy?”
“Yes. And I’m sure that was a car bomb intended to kill us.”
“This is crazy! What kind of person would do all of this?”
David thought of Lyons. Did his boss know about this? Nick’s death clearly had not been a suicide. Could his boss have had Nick killed? Could Lyons have even given the okay to have his star protégé blown into a million pieces just now in order to protect his own client?
Speeding down the neighborhood street that led to the edge of the woods, David immediately noticed something different up ahead. He cursed, pulled the car to the curb. A huge orange ball of fire was licking the night sky in front of them. Three fire trucks and several police cars were already stationed at the very edge of the street, where David had parked his Range Rover to take the path into the woods. A crowd had gathered to watch, as it looked like the entire forest was engulfed in flames.
“David!” Jen said, eyes locked on the fire trucks. “The Camp?”
David felt a thick ball of fear develop in his stomach. The boys! They both jumped out of the car and sprinted forward toward the big crowd.
“Shep!” someone called out in the chaos.
David turned, spotted Doc and then Curly, Elvis, and Shifty, all standing at the edge of the crowd. He immediately felt a rush of relief. They were okay. But what about the other guys? The boys hurried over to him. He could see the shock in the men’s faces.
“What happened, Doc?” David asked.
Doc just shook his head. “A man showed up about an hour ago, waving a gun around, scaring the hell out of all of us. He had a big gas container with him. He started shooting in the air, running us all off, and then he began pouring gas over everything. He set it all on fire. He burned down the Camp, Shep!”
David cursed. “White-haired guy?”
“Yeah,” Doc replied, forehead bunched. “How’d you know that?”
David cursed again. The panic button had been pressed. They’d probably burned down the camp just in case there was evidence out there—like the video. No one was safe anymore.
“I’ll explain later,” David said. “Did everyone get out okay?”
“I don’t know,” Doc said. “I think so. We tried our best to scramble, to make sure everyone got out, but I can’t be sure yet. The fire grew so quickly. We all had to just run for it.”
“What do we do?” Shifty asked, looking dazed, confused. “He burned down our homes. We have nothing and nowhere to go.”
“Don’t worry,” David said. “I’ll take care of you. All of you.”<
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THIRTY-EIGHT
On the way to the police station, David felt his cell phone buzz. He pulled it out of his pocket and recognized the number from the phone call he’d placed to Memphis earlier that afternoon.
“Who is it?” Jen asked.
“Jessica Bowman. Benny’s daughter.”
“You should take it. She needs to know.”
David pulled over to a curb two blocks from police headquarters, answered on speakerphone. He tried to sound calm, although his voice felt shaky. “Jessica, this is David Adams. Thank you for returning my phone call.”
“You said this was about Benjamin Dugan.”
“Benjamin was your father?”
“Yes.” A long pause. “Is he dead?”
David was surprised by such a straightforward question. Jessica had also asked it without much emotion behind it. There was no way for him to sugarcoat his answer. He just had to tell her the truth.
“Yes, I’m afraid your father passed away two days ago. We were only able to find you today. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Jessica sighed. “I’ve been expecting this call for many years now, to be honest. My father chose his way of life a long time ago. I knew it would eventually lead to this one day. You’re actually saving me a phone call, Mr. Adams.”
David and Jen shared a curious look. “How’s that?”
“I received a letter from my father out of the blue a few days ago. He made many apologies about his decade-long absence, especially because he’s never even met his only grandchild. My father’s letter was brief. He was never much for words. He didn’t ask me for anything. But he told me, should I ever find out that something had happened to him, I should call a lawyer named David Adams. He gave me your phone number. He also wrote down an address at the bottom of the letter, along with some kind of number combination, and he said I should give you the info when I called you.”
David and Jen shared a look. He felt his adrenaline spike again. He asked Jessica to read him the address, which she did, while Jen scribbled it all down on a piece of paper. Jen then immediately began typing the address into her phone.