Ghost Target

by Nicholas Irving

  Lodge. Five minutes. Harwood calculated that his odds were one on one, right now, especially with Lanny’s hands on the steering wheel. Might be two on one in five minutes. Infinity on one any time after five minutes. And there was a woman—a girl—involved somehow.

  Keep working her.

  He carefully slid the knife into his waistband, freeing his hand to go for his pistol, which he kept in the inner flap of his rucksack. It was a harder grab than the knife, but seemed like the better choice, given his predicament.

  Lanny quickly had a pistol aimed at Harwood’s face. It was a Sig Sauer Tribal nine millimeter, the same kind that a highly trained former Special Mission Unit operator named Jake Mahegan carried when he and Harwood worked together in Afghanistan. The main difference was that Mahegan was a patriot and a friend and would never turn his pistol on him or any right-living American.

  “See your mind working there, Reaper. Don’t you know you’re the most popular person on television right now?” The word came out tel-ee-vision. “All over that Twitter thang and the Facebook. And here you are in the front seat of my car with my pistol in your face! Yeah, buddy!” The emphasis on the last few words—“in your face”—told Harwood that Lanny might be on some type of amphetamine. He’d seen it before with Afghan, Iraq, and Syrian fighters chewing qat or spaced out on morphine, one to make them more aggressive, the other to deaden the pain of what they were about to do. Combined, the two were a potent mix that led to polarized swings in personalities.

  The car fishtailed, spit gravel, and gunned up a ruddy washboard of a dirt road. In the distance was a cabin with a single light burning inside. If it weren’t for the mention of the girl, Harwood would take his chances at bailing from the vehicle, rolling, grabbing his pistol, and coming up shooting, betting that he was a better shot than Lanny.

  But the girl. What about her? And what were they doing to her that made Lanny ask Stoner to “save some for me”?

  He rode it out to the very end of the driveway with Lanny’s pistol pointed at his face across the short expanse from the driver’s seat to the passenger’s seat. In fact, it was a challenge for Lanny to drive and aim properly at Harwood’s face. The pistol was jumping around and Harwood presumed that Lanny would have more than a fifty-fifty chance of missing him even at such a short distance. He braked hard in the driveway, causing Harwood to press into his rucksack that was in his lap. Lanny flung his door wide open and was up and out of the car, saying, “Okay, Reaper man. Get your black ass out of my car.”

  Harwood left his rucksack in the front seat, because he fully intended to return to it shortly. He removed his hand from his waistband, having just placed a tool of his trade in the tight, stretch material. His physical-training running shirt hung loose over his shorts.

  “Leave that pack in the car and follow me,” Lanny said, gun pointed with one hand, turned sideways gangster style. A single light shone in the cabin through a window with sheer drapes. One dark shadow was moving back and forth, walking, as if the person was doing something on one side of an object and then doing the same thing on the other side of the object.

  “I’m following you,” Harwood said. He kept his voice calm and steady, avoiding any provocation before he was ready to act. He needed to see who was inside and then determine the best way to resolve the issue. He had noticed that the Mustang had three-quarters of a tank of fuel, enough to get to Atlanta and find Jackie. His mind was kicking into high gear, combat mode. He liked it. The rush of having a loaded pistol in his face catalyzed something deep inside of him, perhaps even began to dominate whatever was causing his memory loss.

  Because at this moment, he remembered his hand-to-hand combat skills, stalking techniques, and close-quarters combat as if he had trained on them yesterday. Adrenaline surged through his veins. Coursing through him were the catalysts that empowered him to think, act, and remember. Previously, he had been stumbling along trying to keep pace with rapidly moving events, figure them out, and react.

  React.

  That word had never been in his vocabulary. He was proactive. Stalk. Position. Hide. Shoot. Escape. Evade.

  The look in Harwood’s eyes must have taken on a new measure, one that spoke of his inner strength and training. A countenance that communicated: Danger. Lanny’s eyes narrowed as Harwood walked toward him, around the front end of the automobile and toward the house.

  “That’s right, keep walking, boy. Up the steps and remember I’ve got this gun aimed at the back of that big, nappy head of yours.”

  Harwood felt Lanny’s rhythm behind him. With every step Harwood took, Lanny made a similar step, keeping a safe distance. Harwood could have attacked at any moment, but he had decided he wasn’t doing anything until he knew who was inside.

  The gun barrel pressed against the back of his skull as he stepped through the threshold of the doorway, pushing the wide pine board door inward. As if he were clearing a room not with a stack of four Rangers, but by himself alone, Harwood checked the hard-left corner: two sofas and a fireplace, but no threat; the diagonal left corner: a kitchen and breakfast nook, but no threat; the diagonal right corner: two twin beds, but no threat.

  To his hard-right was the leading edge of the door and the same shadow dancing back and forth around something.

  Threat.

  “Keep moving,” Lanny said, pressing the pistol into the back of his head.

  “Lanny, I’ve just about got her rigged for us,” Stoner said. The voice was the same one from the phone call in the car.

  Lanny and Stoner.

  To Harwood’s right was a third person.

  She was tied to a four-poster bed naked. A black cloth gag ran through her mouth. She was a light-skinned African American woman, maybe even a girl. Discerning her age was nearly impossible because Stoner had tied her facedown and slid a pillow under her stomach, making her ass lift off the bed, receptive. Her head was facing Harwood, eyes wide with fear and perhaps hope. A new person had entered the cabin, and like her, was perhaps not there of his own volition. He gave an imperceptible nod to her before he lifted his head and fixed his gaze on Stoner.

  “What you looking at, boy?” Stoner said. “This fine piece of meat right here?” Stoner was holding a squeeze bottle of K-Y jelly. “You ain’t getting none of this. Telling you that much.”

  Stoner was wearing jeans that hung low around his waist, a T-shirt that said EAT LOCALS, and some type of basic work boots, which most likely had steel toes in them.

  “Here’s my plan, Stoner. This here is the Reaper. Every TV station in the country has his picture on it. He’s wanted for four maybe five murders. I’ve got his equipment in the car. We use condoms, bust our nut, then kill the bitch, and then act like we almost rescued her and captured the fugitive.”

  “That’s a hell of a plan, Lanny, if you hadn’t just spelled it out for him right here and now. Plus, I don’t feel like using no condom. Drill this bitch and dump her ass in the swamp with the gators. Fuck it.”

  “I say we do it my way,” Lanny said, trying to assert some authority over the steadfast Stoner. Lanny was a bigger man than Stoner and could certainly hold his own in a fight. Harwood was going to have to kill both men, or at the very least, incapacitate them. He could still feel the fire flowing through his veins, knew it was adrenaline, but an extra dose that hyperfocused him like a laser on his task at hand. This zone was like stalking prey as a sniper. He stood there, almost feeling invisible because he was seeing the action unfold before him. Something in the back of his mind reminded him that this was the old Vick Harwood, the combat-hardened killer.

  The Reaper.

  Sensing the pistol barrel in the center of his skull, Harwood listened to Lanny and Stoner argue about who was going to rape the young girl first, not realizing neither of them were going to live long enough to accomplish their bucket-list item. He played the rhythm of their conversation back and forth, like music. Stoner would riff for a few seconds about the brilliance of his plan, then Lanny would s
ay what a genius he was. The more they focused on each other, the closer Harwood came to executing.

  But he didn’t flinch, because the timing wasn’t right just yet. The pistol was beginning to jump with the increased inflection in Lanny’s voice, wearing a spot in the back of his hair. He could feel it sliding. Left then right, then left again.

  Stoner said, “Fuck this. You do what you want with him. I’m busting my nut.”

  “You get your DNA in there and you’re in prison for the rest of your life!”

  When Lanny said “life!” the pistol barrel slid hard to the right, clearing Harwood’s skull but maybe not his ear. Lanny was talking with his hands. In a swift hand-to-hand combat move, Harwood dipped his right shoulder, turned his head left, reached up with both hands and controlled Lanny’s shooting hand while he shifted his hips sufficiently to give him leverage to flip Lanny over his back onto the floor. During this quick action, he snapped Lanny’s wrist with his powerful forearms and swept the pistol into his palm. While his running shoes were not the preferred close-quarters-combat footwear, they did afford him traction as he lowered his right heel into Lanny’s windpipe and aimed the Tribal pistol at Stoner.

  Unfortunately for Stoner, he had already lowered his jeans around his ankles, so as he tried to rush Harwood, the Reaper had time to lower the pistol, secure his knife, flip the blade open, and slash it across the stumbling Stoner’s throat. Stoner fell on top of Lanny as Harwood stepped back to avoid the blood. Some of the spray from Stoner’s carotid artery spotted his running shoes. Also, the sharp edge of the knife had nicked the small finger of his right hand, which was bleeding.

  He knelt and checked for a pulse on Lanny, who was still wheezing through his collapsed windpipe. With Stoner draped across Lanny’s legs, Harwood lifted Lanny’s torso enough to brace his back with his knee and then use one hand on the back of the head and one on the chin to snap his neck cleanly. A quick, violent twist, and Lanny was gone.

  With both men dead, Harwood moved quickly to the sink, washed his hands, wrapped the cut finger in a paper towel, scrounged and found some black electrical tape to secure it tight. Washing the knife in the sink, he cleaned the blade before he walked over to the twin beds, removed a sheet from the unoccupied bed, and covered the young woman. She was no more than sixteen years old, if that. He quickly cut her ropes and then leaned over as he gently pulled on her shoulders.

  “I am on your side. I just killed two men to keep you from being raped. You need to come with me to get away from here and then we can figure out how we get you back to where you belong.”

  The girl looked him in the eyes.

  “I don’t belong nowhere, mister. I hook on the internet. This was a job gone bad, that’s all. I can take care of myself.”

  “The internet?”

  “Ha. Like you don’t know how to find girls like me.”

  She must have seen the blank look on Harwood’s face.

  “Gawd. You have no idea, do you? There’s websites for men who want to have sex. I was supposed to get four hundred dollars to have sex with both of them. They didn’t mention anything about tying me up, though.”

  She sat up, wrapped the sheet around her tighter.

  A simple thank-you would have been sufficient. He said, “They were going to kill you. You understand that, right?”

  She turned large brown irises up at him, batting eyelashes, making him wonder if she was even fifteen years old. “Yeah, I heard that. I guess I owe you something.” Her hand reached out for him.

  He stopped her progress and said, “You owe me nothing. Get dressed and we’re leaving in two minutes.”

  While she pulled on some jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt, and high-top black PRO-Keds, Harwood hurried into the kitchen area and looked at the windows. Wire-mesh screens covered each window. Not the normal bug screens, these were steel gauge to keep animals out of the fishing or hunting cabin, whatever it was. Maybe it was just a place these two men brought women, who knew? But the metal screens gave him an idea.

  He did what he needed to do in the kitchen. When he returned, the girl had rifled both dead men’s wallets and pulled about six hundred dollars in twenties; she stuffed the bills in her pockets and looked at him.

  “Just bidness, that’s all,” she said.

  “Okay, I don’t have a problem with you taking their money, but you have to help me here. Lift the fat guy first. There,” he said pointing at the man’s arm.

  “No fucking way!” she said, backing up. “Not touching me no dead man.”

  “Hey. Watch your mouth. Okay, then go get the ropes from the bed,” Harwood said. She seemed to have no problem with that as Harwood dragged Stoner to the kitchen table and hefted him into the chair. He looked at the window then back at the chair and figured that was good enough. He did the same with Lanny, putting him opposite Stoner, as if they were eating dinner or having a conversation. The blood issue became more complicated, but his plan had evolved.

  “Here,” she said. Harwood grabbed the ropes and looped them around the chest of each man, securing them upright to the backs of the wooden chairs. He even pulled one of the ropes under Lanny’s chin so that his dead eyes were staring directly at Stoner’s slumped head. Nothing he could do about Stoner with his neck cut to the bone, but he had placed Stoner so that his back was to the window.

  “Smell something,” the girl said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s move,” Harwood said. He ushered her to Lanny’s Mustang, removed his rucksack, and placed it in the backseat. He kept Lanny’s Sig Sauer Tribal and stowed his Beretta in the rucksack. He kept the knife in the pocket of his running shorts, vowing that his next stop would be to get some suitable clothing for the mission ahead.

  He was thinking about the bag Lanny had asked him to place in the trunk of the car. Was it a bomb? A rifle? He didn’t know. But as he transitioned from hunted to hunter, he knew he would need resources. Whatever was in the bag might be helpful. Sirens wailed in the distance. No time to check out the bag. Backing out, he peeled north, away from the sirens and the site of the political rally. The Mustang had muscle.

  “Where we going, pardner?” the young girl asked.

  “First of all, you’re not my partner,” Harwood said, steering the car through a series of washboard cuts in the road. “What’s your name?”

  “Monisha. Who are you?”

  “I’m Vick. Where do you live?” Harwood asked.

  “I stay in Atlanta mostly, but spend a week in Macon every month doing jobs down here.”

  “You don’t go to school?”

  Monisha cackled. “That’s a good one. I ain’t got no momma or nothing and so I have to fend for myself. This money right here? That’s a pretty good take. That’ll get me through the next week or so.”

  Harwood shook his head. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” she huffed.

  Harwood gave her a stern look, one he often used on his Ranger subordinates. Monisha’s icy confidence melted immediately.

  “Fourteen,” she admitted.

  “Fourteen? And you’re selling your body for sex?”

  “Hey! You just killed two dudes. Who are you to talk?” The brash confidence reemerged.

  Harwood was driving north on the gravel road. The car had a map function and it appeared that he would hit a secondary road in about a mile, which would lead to Interstate 75 north.

  “Put your seat belt on,” Harwood ordered. Laden now with a fourteen-year-old prostitute, he began churning through his options. His last-known location for Jackie was a Barnes & Noble in Buckhead, Atlanta, so that was where he was headed.

  But then he thought, no, that was wrong. His last-known location for Jackie was in Savannah.

  “Go with what you know, Vick,” he whispered to himself.

  “Oh great. A murderer who talks to himself,” Monisha said, rolling her eyes.

  “First of all, I’m not a murderer. I killed those men in self-defense. You heard them talking
about killing me and you,” Harwood said. He maneuvered the car onto the secondary road and was quickly heading south on Interstate 75.

  “Yeah, better get our story straight,” Monisha said. Then, “Hey! This ain’t no way to Atlanta.”

  “I know. We’re going to Savannah. I’ll turn you over to child services once we get there.”

  “Like hell you will. You ain’t the only one who can kill somebody.” Monisha brandished a small pocketknife.

  Harwood laughed and said, “Go for it. We’re doing seventy miles an hour on the interstate. How do you think you’re going wind up if we wreck? You’ve got to start using your head, young lady.”

  Monisha put away the pocketknife and paused, pensive, Harwood thought. “What’s in Savannah? Your woman?”

  “Yeah, my woman,” Harwood said.

  “Figures. Good-looking guy like you had to be taken.”

  “Listen, Monisha. You’re fourteen. You may be all tough on the outside, but you’re just a fourteen-year-old girl, so act like one, will you?”

  Monisha stared straight ahead and remained silent. She pulled out her smartphone and started playing with it.

  For the first time in a long time, Harwood felt okay, as if he was moving closer to his normal self, away from the trauma and nightmares and toward the Vick Harwood action figure he knew himself to be. He felt his adrenaline spiking even higher. His instincts were coming back. He’d just performed two close kills. That felt good, perhaps better than it ought to, but they were in danger and he had solved the problem efficiently. His training was right there where he’d left it.

  “Don’t be texting anyone,” he said to Monisha.

  She turned her head and smiled, teeth bared, lips pulled back.

  “Ain’t texting,” she said. “Just reading about you on Twitter. Hot damn. They was right. You’re the Reaper! This is going to be fun!”

  He shook his head and aimed the car toward Savannah, while trying to maintain the speed limit.

  CHAPTER 18