Stronghold | Book 1 | Minute Zero

by Jayne, Chris

  “I had no idea.” Deacon let out a low whistle. “That’s a good sized town.”

  “Yeah, in addition to the grocery store, we had a pharmacy, a combination barber shop and beauty salon, a small furniture store, a five and dime, a library, two diners and a pizza joint. A family doctor, even a dentist. A nice fitness center with a pool. We had a little airport where ten or twelve guys had their own planes. And the elementary school? Almost 400 kids.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  Roger continued. “Well, yeah, but the schools were where the problems started. The elementary school was a community school, but the teenagers were still being bused to high school every day, about 20 miles each way into Lewiston, and people wanted to change that. So, a couple of years ago, the community opened a high school. That’s when the problems really started, because some of the parents didn’t want it. They still wanted their kids to go the public high school in Lewiston, where there were more classes and sports, and probably a better chance of getting into college.” Roger shrugged. “My kids were still not even grade school age, so I wasn’t paying much attention to this, but when the high school opened, there was some serious backlash. The families who were sending their kids to the private high school, started saying that the kids who were going to public high school were bringing in drugs and electronics, and were a bad influence on the good kids who went to high school in Bowenville. People even began to argue that people shouldn’t be allowed to send their kids to school off site.”

  “Shouldn’t be allowed?” Deacon asked incredulously. “So much for individual liberty.”

  “Exactly,” Roger agreed. “Got pretty ugly, but Bill Bowen was still alive, and he stepped in and put a stop to it. Said that those kinds of individual family choices were exactly the kinds of things that people needed to make on their own. So it cooled down for a while; but then, the old man died. About two years ago.”

  “And I think I know how this story goes,” Deacon stated flatly. “As soon as he died, things got worse.”

  “Yup. Because Bill had a son, William Junior, who everyone calls Willie. A lot of people didn’t like Willie very much, but because Willie was Bill’s heir, he now legally owned the ranch. We all owned our own houses, but he owned all the stores, and anyone who’d started a business was just renting from him. Plus, he owned the land where the schools and the community center were. Because of all that, a lot of people felt they couldn’t stand up to him.”

  “So, what happened?” Deacon paused. “More trouble with the schools?”

  “Not really. Worse. Religion.”

  “Typical,” commented Deacon.

  “Yup. Bill Bowen had welcomed all faiths. In fact, there were no physical churches in Bowenville at all. People who wanted to go to church just drove into Lewiston because there were a lot of churches there, Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, whatever. And for people like me and Lou, who chose not to have much to do with religion, no one said a word. But right after the Old Man died, Willie started a church - right in the community. And nobody could say anything because after all it’s his money and his land. All of a sudden, Willie Bowen is a preacher and in less than a year nearly 100 families at least are going to his church. Right from the start, it seemed a lot more, I don’t know, fringe, for lack of a better word. Speaking in tongues, rolling around on the floor. Then the women who went to that church started dressing different.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, they claimed it was because they wanted to be more modest, but before you knew it, it seemed like half the women in town were wearing longer skirts, always plain colors, and starting to say it was wrong to cut their hair. Then the women who went to that church started wearing little black hats whenever they went out, so you could always see which ones went to that church.”

  “Hats? Like cowboy hats?” Deacon was having a hard time picturing that.

  “No, not cowboy hats.” Roger let out a small chuckle. “That would have been a lot better. No, more like what the Amish women wear. Bonnets, I guess you’d call them. Then the next thing was that girls shouldn’t be allowed to wear pants to school, even girls who didn’t go to that church. Then the pharmacy, which is run by someone who goes to Willie’s church, all of a sudden announced that it won’t be selling birth control pills anymore.”

  “What?” Deacon couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice.

  Roger nodded as he drove. “And even though this whole thing was not supposed to be about the money, there was a hierarchy in the jobs. Always had been. Obviously, I got paid more as one of the Chief Financial Officers in the community than the guy who unpacked the produce at the grocery store.”

  Deacon didn’t need to be a fortuneteller to see where this was going. “And all of a sudden the better jobs start going to the people who go to Willie’s church.”

  “Exactly.” Roger shrugged. “So now, people see the writing on the wall and more and more start going to Willie’s church. Then about a year ago, well, Willie’s got six kids. He has a young woman living with him who helped his wife. A nanny, he called her. Big surprise. She turns up pregnant.”

  “Oh shit,” Deacon said softly.

  “Oh shit is right. At first, people just assumed she had a boyfriend somewhere, but then Willie started preaching that the old testament men had more than one wife and there was nothing in the Bible that said it was wrong, so it was obvious what happened. The woman living with Willie was twenty or twenty-one, but then another guy in Willie’s church gets a nanny for his kids, and now she’s pregnant too. Problem is that she’s only fifteen. You can guess the rest.”

  “People stand up to Willie,” Deacon said slowly, “and all of a sudden, bad things start happening to the ones who are complaining.”

  “Yup. And because Lou is one of the midwives in the community she was in the thick of who was having babies and hearing all the gossip. So, she says we have to call the state police about the fifteen-year-old who is pregnant.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Remember the guy I mentioned, the stockbroker who went to Chicago one week a month? His name was Tom Kaplan, and he and I were pretty close. He came to me quietly and said that he and his wife were going to leave. He’d apparently had some big blow out confrontation with Willie Bowen, and he was planning to sue, and wanted to know if I wanted to join him.”

  “When was this?”

  “In June. ‘Bout four months ago. Anyway, Tom had to go to Chicago that week, but he said he was going to talk to someone in Chicago, and then we’d talk more when he got back that Friday night.” Roger drew in a deep breath.

  “And?” Deacon asked.

  “He never came back. Shot in a robbery on the street in Chicago.” Roger paused, then went on softly. “Such a dangerous city, don’t you know.”

  “Holy Christ,” Deacon swore, feeling as if he’d been punched in the gut. This was worse - a lot worse - than he thought it was going to be when Roger had started talking. “You think Willie sent someone to Chicago?”

  “I don’t know what I think. But if it was a coincidence, it was a pretty big one. So now Lou and I are trying to decide what to do. She’s scared.”

  Deacon snorted. “I’ll say.”

  Roger went on, “We’d put all of our savings into moving to Bowenville, and with more than a hundred or so home sites still available, no one is interested in buying an already existing house. If we leave, we’re doing it without enough money to start over. And then, out of the blue, the fifteen-year-old pregnant babysitter isn’t pregnant anymore.”

  Deacon was lost. “Maybe she had one of those miscarriage things.”

  “Could be. But Lou is one of the midwives in the community, and for something like that, most of the women would just call the midwife. Or the community doctor. And according to Lou, she was at least five months along.”

  “What does Lou think happened?”

  Roger’s voice was quiet. “It was suggested to her by one of the other women, tha
t there had started to be enough of a backlash, that to quiet things down for a while, someone forced her to have an abortion.”

  “At five months? Isn’t that pretty late?”

  “It is,” allowed Roger. “It’s very late. Lou starts asking questions, poking around. Then the last week of June, Willie Bowen shows up at my office. The ranch had gotten to be a big business, grass fed beef, a very large egg operation, orchids, a subsidiary that processed and sold organic tofu. A big operation,” he repeated. “Willie tells me that there have been some financial irregularities in my work, and until an audit is performed, my services are no longer required.”

  Deacon froze, resting his hands on the dash. “Shit,” he whispered. “Roger, why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “With what? The cops in Chicago say it’s a robbery. The pregnant girl who is now the not-pregnant girl? Well, she’s a minor, she’s back with her parents, who say she was never pregnant. At least three of the cops in Fergus County actually live at Bowenville. And I look like a criminal who got nervous when I got accused of stealing money.” Roger took a deep breath. “On top of everything, Lou is pregnant again.” He paused. “And if you ask me how that happened, I swear to God I’m going to stop the car and beat the shit out of you.”

  Since that was exactly what Deacon was going to say, he turned away and looked out the window. After a tense few moments, he muttered, “Must be the beard.”

  Roger let out a genuinely amused snort of laughter, breaking the stress. “Yeah, it was the beard.”

  “Go on, I’m not going to ask you how it happened.”

  “We left. One night we packed as much of our stuff as we could in the car and the truck, took the kids and the dog, and hit the highway. We left most of our clothes, all the furniture, pretty much everything.”

  Deacon felt even sicker. That his brother had been going through something like this, and he hadn’t known a thing made him furious. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “And tell you what? We didn’t have any proof, Deacon. There were no witnesses to whatever went down between Willie and Tom. I guess I could have flown to Chicago, but if the Chicago police are saying it’s a robbery, where do I even start? I can’t play detective when I don’t have the first idea of who to talk to, and even if I did, I’m not going to leave Lou and the kids home alone. And staring me in the face was Tom Kaplan’s wife, or should I say widow, who was now stuck in Bowenville in a house she couldn’t sell with three kids. I couldn’t let Lou end up like that.”

  “You should have called me,” Deacon repeated.

  “Deke, could you even have gotten leave for something like this?”

  Deacon didn’t answer, knowing his brother was right. Special operators like Deacon had to have a very good reason to ask for leave, when the whole concept of operational readiness depended on them being available at a moment’s notice. This two week leave he was on now was his first in eighteen months, and had been scheduled six months ago.

  Roger went on. “So, what would you have done? Gone AWOL? Come here in the middle of the night with your Navy Seal ninja moves and killed Willie? That might work in the movies, but my bet is in real life, that shit don’t work.”

  “Well, it works,” Deacon muttered cynically. “Dead is dead. But I get your point.” He took a deep breath. “You still should have called me.”

  “This just went down about three months ago. And anyway, right after we left in July you called and said you were coming to visit on your leave. I just figured that would be soon enough to tell you.”

  Deacon looked out his passenger window at the stark Montana landscape flowing by. “Are you making it?” There was a very long moment of silence in the truck. Finally, Deacon spoke again. “Roger?”

  “Barely,” Roger answered. He took a long, deep breath. “Actually, no. I put every penny I had left in savings into buying us another place to live, and managed to borrow some from the bank to buy some stock, but everyone knows you don’t make anything in cattle until the third year. Things have been tight for us. Really tight. So, yeah, there actually is something you can do for me.” Deacon heard his brother take a deep breath, before he continued, “You can lend me some money.”

  Chapter 11

  Lori

  Monday

  2:00 PM Eastern Time

  Miami, Florida

  * * *

  Lori stepped outside a branch of her bank, nearly shaking with relief. She’d chosen to go to one that was not the usual branch she used, but was also not the closest to Sylvia’s house. So far, her choices seemed good. Whatever strings Saldata had pulled to get the police to her children’s school within one hour of her leaving his house, it had not extended to his being able to shut down access to her money. She had, just by showing her driver’s license and ATM cards, been able to withdraw $3,000 from her corporate account and another $1,000 from her personal account.

  As she walked, she clutched her purse just a bit more tightly than usual. $4,000 in cash bought a lot of security. There was no way gas, food, and lodging would cost more than $600 per day. Even if they were on the road five days, that still left a cushion of a $1,000 dollars.

  She moved purposefully towards Simone’s Toyota, which she had parked a bit down a side street, not hurrying but not delaying either, now wondering if the good fortune had been an illusion. Perhaps access to her finances had not been cut off in the hopes that she would try to go into a bank and could be intercepted there. Without really thinking about it, she’d parked down the side street in order to avoid the parking lot cams at the bank. Not that it mattered that much anyway, because the car Simone used, the Toyota, was registered to Lori just like the Range Rover and they’d already used it at the school to pick up the kids, so no way was it a secret. She’d chosen to take it to the bank because it was a lot less conspicuous than the Range Rover, but once she got back to Sylvia’s and parked it in the garage, it would be completely hidden.

  Of course, using the Toyota at all had been a risk, but the alternative - taking Sylvia’s Escalade was worse. Lori suspected that as soon as it was discovered she’d withdrawn money from the bank, every security camera for miles around would be scrutinized in the hopes of figuring out what she was driving. She’d already made a mistake, she knew, driving the Escalade to get the kids, even though they’d left it at the McDonald’s. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. If the authorities saw the Toyota, it didn’t matter. If they saw the Escalade and could read the plates, all of her plans might come to a crashing and horrible end.

  When Lori walked back into Sylvia’s, Simone rushed off the sofa and embraced Lori desperately. “I was so afraid you would not come back.”

  Before she’d gone out she’d given Simone Louise’s phone number, telling her only that if she did not come back in three hours, to call Louise. She hadn’t wanted to say more, not wanting to terrify Simone, but she also couldn’t leave the girl with no resources at all. Lori thought she had played it fairly cool, but from the desperation of the au pair’s hug, she obviously had been a lot more frightened than she had let on.

  Lori pushed Simone away firmly. “I’m sorry you were scared, Simi, but I’m here now. And, I’m not going to lie to you. We’ve got a long, long way to go.” Lori suddenly felt guilty. Was she endangering Simone for her own convenience? She pulled Simone away from the family room, sat down with her at Sylvia’s kitchen table, then looked earnestly into her face. “If you want to stay here, you can. Just hide here until Sylvia comes back.”

  “How long would it be?” Simone asked slowly.

  “Two weeks. She comes home on Sunday, two weeks from yesterday.” Lori exhaled. “I can leave you with $300. That would be enough to have food delivered every other night, and there’s canned goods and oatmeal and other things here. You might get bored, but you wouldn’t starve.”

  “What would happen then?”

  “Simone, I don’t know. I can’t promise you that someone might not come here looking for us. B
ut I also can’t promise that we’re safe on the road either.”

  “These are bad people?”

  “These are very bad people.”

  “No.” Simone shook her head. “I will come with you.”

  “Okay,” Lori said. “Then let’s get going. I want to get out of the city as soon as possible.”

  Once she said the words, Lori made things happen. She raided Sylvia’s bathroom for a few basic supplies; a tube of toothpaste, some new toothbrushes still in their packages, shampoo, conditioner. She took a couple of towels from the linen closet, and noticed that the widow still had a few men’s jackets in her front hall closet, which, Lori assumed, had belonged to Rob, Sylvia’s husband. Since he’d been dead for years, Lori assumed he would not miss them. Sylvia didn’t have a terribly well supplied pantry, but Lori was able to grab a couple boxes of granola bars and a twelve pack of diet drinks.

  With the kids still watching TV, she walked out into the attached garage. There were a few things in the Range Rover she should get: a first aid kit, flashlight, an extra jacket for her, a blanket. She prepared to walk back into the house to get the kids when her eyes rested on some items on a shelf in Sylvia’s garage.

  There were - Lori moved closer - camping supplies? When in the world had Rob and Sylvia ever camped? They certainly didn’t seem the type, but Lori was not about to argue with good fortune. There were two sleeping bags, both good quality, a camp stove, an old-fashioned metal percolator and camp cook set, and a full-sized plastic cooler. Finding those items gave Lori pause, and she spent a few more minutes looking around the garage. She located a small well-equipped toolbox, several bungee cords, and to complete the package, a roll of duct tape. Lori scooped everything up and quickly loaded the items into the back of the Escalade, glad for the car’s large size. Even with the third seat up, there was a huge amount of cargo space in the back.