by Scott Blade
"Trust me. They get old fast."
Abby shoved her husband from the back, a quick hard shove, but not strong enough to budge him much.
"You're no spring chicken yourself, sir!"
"I wasn't talking about you, babe."
"Yeah, right."
Abby said nothing else, but she stepped over to her son and took his arm like the father of the bride escorting his daughter down the aisle. Then they walked off back up the steps to the porch and into the house.
White turned back once before entering.
"Dad?"
Abe looked at his son.
White reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the Tundra and tossed them to his father.
Abe caught them.
They said nothing about it.
White turned to Widow.
"My dad will take care of you. See you at breakfast."
Widow said, "No problem. Thanks for the hospitality."
White nodded, and he and Abby vanished completely into the large farmhouse.
Widow heard birds and let his eyes gaze up over the porch, where he watched a lone blackbird fly and land on the corner of the roof.
He saw smoke puff out of the chimney about ten yards to the right of the bird.
"Okay, Jack. Let's get to work."
Abe looked at his watch.
He said, "We're late already."
"Are we going somewhere else?"
"Farm work starts early."
Widow nodded.
They both climbed into the Tundra. Widow took a look in the back as he went around to the passenger side. He hadn't peeked in so far to see what was in the back.
He had expected farm equipment, or machines, or bales of hay for horses or whatever a Christmas tree farm would be hauling in a work truck.
But there was none of that.
The back of the truck had stacks of lumber packed in tight with a thick stack of roof shingles wrapped in white plastic that was torn and falling off. They were held down by cables and bungies, which might’ve been overkill because they were heavy enough to stay in place unless Walter’s truck had been rear-ended.
Widow hopped in next to Abe and shut the door.
Abe fired the engine back up and jerked the gear into reverse like he was angry at the truck. He backed up and switched the gear to drive and drove around the circle driveway and over to the barn.
They passed the vehicle with the tarp over it and the older Tundra.
Abe stopped in front of the barn's huge double doors.
"Jack, hop out and open those doors for me?"
"No problem."
Widow did as he was asked. He stepped out and closed the passenger door behind him. He traced around to the nose of the Tundra and pulled the doors open, one by one.
The inside of the barn was dark, but not pitch black. A large cone of light was coming from way in the back.
A cold draft swept over Widow like he was standing in a wind tunnel. He heard the wind blowing from inside.
It whistled.
Widow had expected to see horses, maybe chickens, and maybe goats lodged inside the barn. This was a farm, after all, but there were no animals.
In the darkness, he could make out stalls where horses would go, but they were empty.
In the corners of the barn, he saw various farming tools. The thing that stuck out to him was a pitchfork that looked old, almost medieval, like something from the devil's weapon rack. It had wicked prongs on the end. They looked strangely sharp. He wondered if they were supposed to be that sharp.
Abe opened the Tundra's driver’s door a crack.
"You gotta step aside so I can pull in."
Widow turned and nodded. He stepped out of the way.
Abe flipped the Tundra's headlamps on.
The inside of the barn lit up, and Widow saw exactly why there were no animals inside. He saw why he had felt the wind. He saw why he had heard it.
The barn was long and narrow, but with plenty of room inside.
On the far back corner, there was a huge hole in the wall and the roof. The wall wasn't missing from never having been put up. There was a hole that looked like a giant had come along and ripped it out of the barn, like a small bomb had gone off, blowing out that section of wall and roof.
Abe pulled the Tundra into the barn, slowly.
He slipped the truck into park and left it running and hopped out.
Widow pointed at the hole.
"Is that why the lumber?"
"Yeah. Damn barn is old as dirt. We had a twister blow through here last summer. We just got the insurance check for it two months ago. Bastards took their sweet time. But it was fine. We had other priorities anyway. So, we never got around to fixing it. You know how it goes. We used the money for other things.
“We ain’t got no animals anyway. Fixing the barn wasn’t a priority. Things pile up ten times faster on a farm when you don't stay on top of them. Anyway, Walter had the time and opportunity to pick up some lumber last night since he was down in Atlanta anyway."
Widow nodded.
Abe said, "Don't worry. I'm not going to make you repair it or anything. We got guys for that."
Widow smiled.
Abe closed his door and joined Widow at the rear of the truck.
Widow let the tailgate down.
Abe asked, "You don't mind doing this?"
Widow shrugged.
"You guys invited me to stay for dinner. It's the least I can do."
"It'll be slow going. I'm old. Can't lift a lot at a time."
Widow took another look over the lumber and the shingles.
"I can do it all myself."
"No. I can't allow that. If you can do it, then I can do it too. I'm old, not dead."
Widow shrugged and said, "The boards are easy. We can take them one at a time. The shingles are too heavy in this bundle. Got a knife? We can cut them loose."
Abe smiled and reached into his inside coat pocket.
Most men carried wallets in their inside pockets, but not Abe. He pulled out a large folding knife.
"That's a big blade."
"Biggest in the county on a folding knife."
"That so?"
"Oh, I don't know. I just like staking that claim."
Abe smiled.
It wasn't the biggest blade that Widow had ever seen, not even close, but it looked five inches, which was probably illegal to conceal and carry in the state of South Carolina. He wasn't sure. He knew that lots of states made it illegal to conceal and carry a blade longer than three inches.
Abe opened the blade and reversed it and offered it to Widow.
"You can do the honors."
Widow nodded and took the blade by the handle and climbed up onto the tailgate.
“Don’t cut the cables and bungies. You can just remove those. They clip to the bed,” Abe told Widow.
Widow unclipped them and tossed them aside to the side of the truck bed. After that he saw the next layer of security from the lumber yard that loaded the truck. The lumber and the shingles were all secured with plastic ties. He cut them all free; then he double-checked to make sure he got them all.
He closed the knife and returned it to Abe.
"Where do you want them?"
Abe said, "We'll pile everything over by the hole."
Widow nodded and began taking as much as he could carry. He started with the shingles.
He picked up a huge stack and lifted it and got down off the tailgate. He walked them over to the back corner near the hole and began a neat pile.
When he turned back, he saw Abe still at the truck, desperately trying to pick up a stack of shingles the same size as Widow's stack.
"Let me get that," Widow said, and he scooped up the stack with ease, piled it up on top of the stack he’d already started.
Abe said, "You're a strong guy."
Widow stayed quiet.
Abe asked, "You a bodybuilder or something?"
"No. I could
never do that stuff. I just move a lot. It keeps me in shape. I'm always walking."
"You like that kind of life?"
"I do."
"Must be lonely, not having a place to go on Christmas?"
Widow shrugged.
"It's not so bad. It's only one day a year. Not a big deal."
"I couldn't do it. I love Christmas time."
"Did you start this farm yourself?"
"No. My daddy bought it after the war."
Widow didn't ask which war because of how Abe had said it. He said the war , which Widow took to mean World War II.
Widow continued to unload the back of the truck until the work was finished.
Chapter 23
T HE ATF HELICOPTER BUZZED over the Athenian compound, over the trees, over several wide-open fields, missing Agent Dorsch’s dead body, which lay partially buried in snow, over a pool of cold blood.
The helicopter flew onward without a second look back.
They lost enough agents for one night. Seeing Dorsch, they would’ve stopped and landed and recovered the body, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. He was dead. Their colleagues were dead.
Abel was out there.
The two new, de facto agents inside the helicopter stared at Adonis. Ramirez flew the helicopter, staying steady on course toward the dead patrolman.
They all wore headsets to hear and communicate.
Adonis explained a brief rundown of what they were doing and who they were after. She explained the explosion, which they already knew about, then she explained about Abel, whom they’d had a briefing on before the raid. The new part was that he had escaped with six of his operatives. The other new part that she added were the words: clear and present danger and then, shoot to kill .
The agents and Ramirez all nodded in agreement.
Now, they felt reenergized because their guy wasn’t dead in the explosion. It had been a fake out that cost them more than was acceptable. It was personal.
Abel was still out there—free. And that could not stand. They owed it to the agency, to the dead, and to the injured. Adonis owed it to Dorsch.
During her briefing, perhaps unnecessarily, perhaps she was overcompensating, she made the point to them that no one had seen Abel during the raid. And terrorists tended to want the credit for their suicide bombings. Abel should’ve been the first one to step out of the compound. He should have made it a point to step forward so everyone could see him and then watch him blow himself up. He would want to be on TV blowing himself to bits. That was the typical terrorist martyr standard operating procedure, not to unexpectedly blow up women and children while staying behind in a burning building.
After she caught them up to speed, she said one more thing.
“This guy is a psychopath and so are the guys with him. You can bet that they’re still alive. You can bet that this whole thing was a diversion. He wanted to escape. Rigging the compound to explode like that means the put in months of planning for a scenario like this. We can bet that he knew we were coming. Maybe not us specifically, but he had planned on someone coming for him. Convincing those people to blow themselves up takes months and maybe years of brainwashing.
“And you can bet that if he planned that part, then he planned the rest of his escape. Probably. So, be ready for anything.”
The two agents nodded. They took up their weapons and locked and loaded right there in front of her, both primary assault rifles and their sidearms. They made the gesture big and huge like they were telling her: hey lady, we got this . She outranked them, a woman. They were making a statement without saying anything. And she knew it, but it didn’t matter. She was beyond proving herself. Now, she wanted them to be deadly.
She saw the hunger in their eyes. She saw the desire to kill in their faces. And she was okay with it.
Adonis got up off her bench, shaken a little from the helicopter ride. She squatted and steadied herself and then scrambled past them on her way up to the cockpit. She climbed up a narrow space and around the center console and dumped herself down in the copilot’s seat.
“Everything good?” Ramirez called out to her.
She reached up and grabbed a headset that was locked above her. She slipped it over her head. A coiled, curly wire connected the headset to the console above her.
Once she got it situated right on her head, she spoke into it.
“Everything’s good. You know where we’re going exactly?”
“Not the exact road, but we can’t miss it.”
Adonis looked out the windshield and saw nothing but confusing backroads that stretched on for miles in every direction, crisscrossing multiple times.
She saw trees and snow and shadows. The morning light didn’t help illuminate the shadows much.
“Why can’t we miss it?” she asked.
Before he answered back, she saw why.
Up ahead, about two klicks, she saw blue lights wash over the trees, bouncing and strobing and climbing out of a gap between trees.
Ramirez pointed.
“There.”
“I see it.
The helicopter yawed and circled out over the treetops like a heavy car trying to make a sharp turn. Then it came back and swooped down at an angle.
Ramirez called back over the headsets to the guys in the cabin.
“We’re going to land.”
They each gave a thumbs-up. They were ready.
The helicopter zoomed like it was going to pick up speed, then Ramirez pulled back on the stick and pressed his foot on the rudder pedal.
The machine jerked back.
“Sorry,” he called back to the guys in the cabin.
The hole between the trees wasn’t wide enough to make a comfortable, slow landing. The helicopter hovered downward, slowly, and appeared above blue lights.
Below, Adonis saw four state patrol cruisers.
Three of them had blue light bars rotating out of sync. The lights combined and swashed up into the trees and the forest around them. It made everything look blue.
Ramirez said, “They knew we were coming, but they didn’t even clear us an LZ.”
He said it as a statement, which Adonis picked up on. She didn’t respond.
They came in as slowly as Ramirez could and hovered over the patrolmen and their cars, which was on purpose. He buzzed them, like flashing a frown at a driver cutting him off in traffic.
Two of them wore uniform hats, which they clamped their hands down on to keep them from blowing off.
Adonis saw them fighting to hold them down.
“That’s enough,” she said. “You’re messing with the crime scene.”
Ramirez nodded and swooped the helicopter up and over the cruisers. They ended up landing about twenty-five yards south of the cluster of cars.
Ramirez left the engine running, and the rotor blades slowed to a light rotation.
“Stay here,” Adonis told him.
She took off the headset and hopped out of the flight deck.
Swan and James followed behind, weapons ready, which wasn’t necessary, but they liked to put the patrolmen on notice that the ATF was the big guns.
Adonis stopped halfway to the patrolmen.
“You guys stay back. Let me do the talking here.”
Swan looked at James and they nodded.
“Okay.”
“You’re the man here,” James said.
Adonis said nothing to that. She turned and approached the patrolmen.
One of them said, “Your boy’s tryin’ to ruin our crime scene?”
Adonis said, “You didn’t clear us a landing space.”
“Not my job, lady.”
“It’s your job to assist us in our investigation.”
The other patrolman said, “Your investigation? That’s rich.”
The first one said, “Wasn’t it you guys that botched the Athenian Raid in the first place?”
He walked up into what she considered to be her personal space.
&nb
sp; Adonis stared him down with a hard, terrifying look that she had practiced in the mirror forever. It was her cop look.
He backed off a few feet.
Another man, without a hat on, stepped forward from behind the trunk of one of the cruisers. He had a half-smoked cigarette in his hand. He took a last drag off it and tossed it. It went spiraling into the snowy shoulder of the road.
The hatless patrolman was probably over fifty, but in great shape, like a guy who gets up at four a.m. every day to run ten miles while most of the world sleeps.
He stepped up to her. He was dead-on six feet tall, towering over Adonis’s five-foot frame. Plus, the patrolman was two hundred fifteen pounds, not built like a rugby player, but he could pass for a baseball player. Either way, he had a hundred fifteen pounds on her easy. Adonis was a hundred pounds soaking wet.
The other thing she noticed immediately about the guy was his cop stare. He wore it right then, same as her. But it was much better than hers. It demanded obedience. He commanded respect with it. She already respected him and didn’t have a single reason to, other than professional courtesy.
It was his stare, his presence. He walked and carried himself like a commander.
He looked down at her. His stare lightened up a bit and he stuck his hand out for her to shake.
“You Adonis?”
“Agent Adonis.”
She took his hand and squeezed hard and shook it.
The hard squeeze was something she’d learned long ago. Ninety-nine percent of the men in her field had a thing about handshakes. The stronger the handshake, the more dominant the man, they believed, which was a dumb fraternity thing to her, schoolboy even, but whatever. She played the game as well as any man. Therefore, she gave him a hard, strong handshake as she did every man she met.
To the fraternity of professional men, a soft, gentle handshake indicated a soft gentleman, which equaled weakness, helplessness almost.
The whole handshake thing was just another tool in Adonis’s arsenal. Only part of her job was shaking down bad guys, but a bigger part was navigating the world of modern-day, corporate and bureaucratic law enforcement.
If Adonis were ever interviewed on a “Life in the ATF for a Woman” documentary, she would say that navigating the bureaucracy scene was “one big pissing contest.”
Adonis thought about writing a book about her experience as a high-ranking female in the agency. Nobody writes tell-all books about the ATF, and especially not women. She figured it might be an interesting book and unique. She’d never heard of a female agent of the ATF revealing all her experiences in the male-dominated world of policing Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.