by Jayne, Chris
Minute Zero
Stronghold, Book 1
Chris Jayne
Published by Inferis Press
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©2020
All rights reserved.
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No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Chris Jayne
Minute Zero
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EBook ISBN: 978-1-64563-507-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-64563-508-6
Audio ISBN: 978-1-64563-509-3
v4
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Cover Art by Inferis Press
Contents
I. Minute Zero
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
II. One Week Earlier
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Sneak Peek
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
About the Author
Part I
Minute Zero
Chapter 1
Lori
Monday
11:00 AM Mountain Time
Graystone Rest Area, I90, Montana
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Lori Dovner dried her hands on a paper towel, then froze as she caught her own reflection in the grimy restroom mirror. A punk rock college student after a rough night out stared back, pale, utterly disheveled. She looked nineteen, short spikes of black hair everywhere.
What happened to the most sought-after private chef in Miami? What happened to the thirty-four-year-old mother of two? Her friends and clients back home would certainly be shocked to see her now. People invited her into their homes and opened their kitchens to her, expecting her to make an excellent impression on their guests, and she never met the public without carefully tasteful makeup, an expensive handbag, good shoes. Now, she wore no cosmetics, her careless appearance exacerbated by the tacky plastic sunglasses she’d taken to wearing in public, so stupidly large that they approached Elton John proportions. Nevertheless, they had the desired effect. Her five-year-old had cried the first time he’d seen her, and she didn’t even recognize herself when she looked in the mirror. No stranger could possibly associate this grubby black-haired teenager in holey jeans and coffee-stained sweatshirt with the poised, immaculate professional the news channels and tabloids were showing to the public.
She paused a final second, realizing something else. Her face was noticeably thinner, even to her own eyes. It was no wonder: she’d hardly done more than pick at food for the last week. Previously there was never enough time to go to the gym, and she’d despaired for years about the last ten pounds she’d put on when she was pregnant with Brandon. Maybe she could get a new celebrity diet book out of this: “Lose Weight While Running For Your Life.” Yeah, there was a plan.
Swallowing hard, Lori pulled the glasses off, reached for a paper towel to wipe away the hot tears that had suddenly welled in her eyes as she asked the question for the millionth time: What the hell was she doing here? Then, stop, she told herself ruthlessly. Just stop. The questions had no answers. Bad things happened to good people.
Lori finished blotting her eyes, then rinsed the scratchy towel in the warm water, and wiped the parking lot grit off of her skin, telling herself that this was almost over, that she could do this. They had 130 miles to go, just a little more than two hours travel, though she spared just a second for a cynical thought. For a week, all she had wanted to do was get “to Montana,” and when they crossed the state line this morning, the cruel joke hit her: Montana was a very big place. They still had almost 250 miles to go.
A toilet flushed. Out of the stall further down the long row, a young woman, perhaps thirty, emerged. She walked to the sink, next to where Lori stood, and washed her hands. Lori gave her a brief smile as their gazes met in the mirror. Lori’s eyes widened just a bit; the woman had quite the nasty bruise on one of her cheeks. Not wanting to stare, Lori looked away quickly, but even as she did, she saw the woman return her smile.
The woman moved away, and as she did Lori watched her idly in the mirror as she walked towards the door. This sharp-looking professional didn’t seem like the type who would put up with getting popped around by a man, but, Lori reflected, you never knew. Hell, maybe she did kickboxing. In her tailored gray suit, carrying a simple, but obviously expensive black leather bag, she definitely looked out of place in the interstate rest stop which was populated mostly by folks who looked like Lori now did: jeans, sweats, tee shirts and a lot of hair that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in days. Women who looked like this generally flew to where they were going, just as, Lori reflected, she had, at least up until now.
As she moved away, Lori was distracted by the woman’s hair. Very long, it was tied back in a neat ponytail that bounced when she walked, and Lori couldn’t stop herself from thinking, for just a second, about her own long hair that she’d cut, about how Brandon had burst into tears when she’d come out of the seedy motel bathroom with short black spikes. She took a final glance into the mirror. Yup, the only thing missing were neon blue highlights.
Enough, Lori sighed. Focus on the next task. Focus on getting your kids to Roger and Lou’s, because one thing was certain: your hair’s not going to grow if you’re dead.
Even as she looked at herself, though, she acknowledged that there was another reason she was hesitating this morning: her brother-in-law, Roger Hale. For most of the trip, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about the reason she had had a falling out with her sister six years ago, but she could avoid it no longer. There were a couple reasons, but high on the list was the fact that Lori thought her sister’s husband was an arrogant misogynistic asshole who had forced his wife - her sister - to move to some Love-Honor-Obey commune. Good looking, really good looking to be sure, (if you were allowed to have thoughts like that about your sister’s husband) but a jerk as far as Lori was concerned. No point in being polite about it, and that wasn’t going to change when she walked through the door.
Of course, there also was another reason she’d been avoiding Roger as well.
Stop it, Lori again told herself ruthlessly. She couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The reality was that it was his door she was going to be walking through in about three hours. A niggling voice that sounded suspiciously like her father’s rang in her ears: “My house, my rules.” When she’d called Lou, without hesitation her sister had said to come to Montana. In spite of Lori’s falling out with her sister, Lou and Roger were there for her, and personal considerations took a back seat when your children’s lives were on the line.
She stuffed the cheap plastic sunglasses
back on her face; she took one final second to ruffle the punk cut back up into spikes. They’d have their lunch, and then drive straight through and be to Lou’s by 3:00. And maybe tonight, in a house with her gun-toting brother-in-law, she would be able to sleep more than a couple of hours without waking in terror. She paused a final moment, wiped a stray hair back from her forehead.
As she exited the restroom she started running a mental inventory of what was left in the cooler. The kids were hoping she’d light up the camp stove and make grilled cheese or hot dogs…
A man was walking away from the men’s restroom, not five feet in front of her. For one instant, she barely noticed him, just another stranger. And then it hit her. She froze, gasped as if she had been punched, a frisson of fear slamming through her body, painful down to her fingertips.
It was Raoul Saldata.
This was the corpulent body that had haunted her dreams for the last week; she’d recognize him anywhere. The last time she’d seen him, he was wearing a bloodstained button down dress shirt and chasing her with a knife. That shirt, of course, was gone, but it had been replaced with another that looked exactly the same, except for the blood.
Even though she could only see him from behind, there was no doubt. It was him.
Involuntarily, she shrank back towards the door of the woman’s restroom. Had he heard her gasp? Should she run? But where to?
Frozen with indecision, all she could do was watch, not breathing, but within an instant she saw he’d made no movement to alter his gait. Nothing indicated that he’d heard the small, terrified sound behind him. If she hadn’t taken the additional second to check out her hair one last time, they would have walked from the respective restrooms simultaneously. Would he have recognized her with the short hair and sunglasses? It wouldn’t have mattered, because she would have recognized him. She would not have been able to hide an instant and terrified reaction, and he certainly would have noticed that.
Snack and drink machines hummed in the foyer between the restrooms. A middle-aged woman standing at a soda machine had heard her sharp draw of breath and turned to look at her curiously. “You okay?” she asked. Just as the woman asked the question, Saldata pushed opened the glass door and left the building.
Lori watched him walk, astounded. He had left. He was not going to turn around. He really had not seen her.
“Honey?” the woman persisted. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Her mind spinning, she glanced over at the woman who was regarding her with a look of concern. “My… uh… ex-husband,” she babbled, saying the first thing that came into her head. “What a coincidence! Out here in the middle of nowhere.” Lori gave a nervous laugh and quickly tried to minimize the situation. “Crazy!”
The woman gave her a skeptical look, then, shaking her head, went back to the candy bar choices. Lori slowly floated just a bit closer to the glass doors and watched intently as Saldata walked across a small courtyard, towards the parking lot fronting the restroom building. The cars were parked in two long rows, one facing the building and the other facing away, looking out towards the interstate.
For a moment Lori knew more blind panic. Where were Brandon and Grace? When they’d pulled into the rest area, Simone, her au pair, had brought them to the restroom while Lori had taken her German Shepherd Sasha on a quick initial trip to the fenced dog run. They had no reason to come back up to the restroom building, but they could have begged Simone for sodas or candy. Would Saldata know her children if he saw them? She had to assume he would; all of their pictures had been on the news, and even if Brandon was nothing more than a typical five-year-old boy, Grace, with her long black hair and lovely quarter-Korean features was very distinctive.
What did this mean? Lori’s head spun sickly with frantic questions. Somehow, Saldata had figured out they were on their way to her sister’s. How? Did that mean he knew she was in her Aunt Sylvia’s car? Luckily, in a state where every other vehicle was either a pickup truck or an SUV, Sylvia’s black Escalade was nondescript. Plus, it was parked behind the building, not in the front, towards the opposite end of the truck parking lot, right by the dog run area. Lori held her breath. Unless someone actually saw the Florida plates, it wouldn’t stick out.
The monster that was trying to kill her walked across the parking lot to one of the cars in the row facing away, and got into a small SUV. Even at this distance Lori could see the vehicle had Montana plates. A rental? It must be. Parked nearly directly opposite the building’s doors, the car’s reverse lights flashed on, and Lori realized with horror that, as it backed up, the driver would be looking in the rearview mirror. Shaking, she ducked back towards the restroom door and slid between two snack machines. She had no idea if he could see through the glass doors into the foyer area, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
As the car pulled away, her heart stopped all over again. He wasn’t alone. As soon as she saw the car in profile, she saw that there were two other occupants of the vehicle. In the driver’s seat sat a man Lori recognized all too well. He’d been in Saldata’s house both times she’d been there, first for the original visit when she’d met the housekeeper and checked out the kitchen and then, the second time on the night of the party.
Actually, he’d been there all three times she’d been to Saldata’s house. The last time she’d seen him, he had tried to kill her.
The other occupant, the one in the back seat? Her vision spun and she staggered. Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.
It was the woman she’d just seen in the restroom.
The woman at the snack machine was watching her again with a look of concern. “Honey,” she repeated, “you sure you’re okay?” She reached out and caught Lori’s arm, obviously noticing that Lori was not steady on her feet.
The SUV moved out of her field of vision and Lori shook her head, pulled out of the woman’s gentle grasp, and cautiously approached the glass doors. She held her breath in terror, imagining the worst, imaging that somehow her kids would be on the sidewalk, standing right there, in plain sight, but no. The car never slowed, and within a couple seconds, zoomed down the on-ramp towards the interstate.
Lori exhaled, a loud frantic sound that was almost a whimper.
Behind her the woman spoke. “That bad, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lori said, and walked out the door.
A path divided the front area of the rest stop, containing the restroom and snack building, from the back area, where the tractor-trailers parked next to the dog run. The tractor-trailer parking, she saw now, completely shielded the area where she’d parked the Escalade. Relief slammed through her as she saw that neither her car nor the children were even visible from this vantage point.
They had passed through Billings about an hour and half earlier; she’d even seen signs on the interstate directing traffic to the airport. Given the fact that he was in a car with Montana plates, he’d obviously flown in and rented a car.
So how was he here? Had she been spotted somewhere along the road and it was just a good guess? No, if she’d been seen somewhere, Denver for example, it would take a huge leap of faith to randomly fly three people to Montana, and, for heaven’s sake, for Saldata to come himself. Lori had no idea who Raoul Saldata was, but he wasn’t someone who put himself out in public. Raoul Saldata had others do his dirty work for him. As she sped along the path, she knew it must be more than that. This was no fishing expedition. For Saldata to fly here - with “buddies” - he had to be positive. He had to know she was here.
There was only one way he could have known. Saldata had almost certainly found Michelle and Salvadore and they had been forced to reveal her plans and destination. For the last week, she’d been trying not to think about grim images of the tortured man, but now they exploded in her head. She knew what lengths this man would go to.
Lori forced herself to focus on the here and now. Whatever had happened to her employees, it was done. The only way forward for Lori was to get protection
, and make absolutely sure that Saldata never found her or her children.
Then, a startling awareness dawned, so staggering she stopped moving for a moment. Saldata was looking for her, obviously, but he wasn’t looking for her here. He’d never even glanced around, never scanned his surroundings as he’d walked out towards the rented vehicle. What did that mean?
Somehow Saldata had figured out that she was on the way to her sister’s. How no longer mattered, but once he’d known that, he probably guessed she’d left Miami almost immediately, last Monday, Tuesday at the latest, and he could read a map. He wasn’t looking for her here because he assumed she was ahead of him, already at Louise and Roger’s house, which she would have been if Grace hadn’t gotten so sick. When they’d left Florida last Monday, a week ago, she’d hoped they could make the trip to her sister’s home in Montana by Friday night. They should have been to Louise’s two days ago already.
And that’s where Saldata was headed. Panicked, she knew she had to warn her sister, and she started to run so fast on the path she almost stumbled, but then she forced herself to calm down. It was 130 miles from where they were to west of Lewiston, near Hobson, where Lou and Roger’s farm was. He might be a monster, but he wasn’t a magician.