The Standoff Read online

  “Owe him?”

  “Yes. How much do we pay new hires?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty dollars an hour?”

  “He’s earned forty dollars then. Probably more. I’d say ten for the ride is fair. Now, we owe him a breakfast.”

  Abe stared at his wife. He couldn’t argue with that. His lips didn’t move, and no sound came out of his mouth, but Widow could see that they were still communicating, a side effect of decades of marriage.

  Widow decided to make it easy for them.

  “Forty dollars is an expensive breakfast. What are we having for breakfast, ma’am?”

  Abby turned and stepped away from them so they could get up and follow her. She spun back on one foot near the top of the porch steps and smiled at Widow.

  “We’re having scrambled eggs, bacon,” she paused. She put one finger on her chin, and her eyes rolled up a bit to the sky like she was recalling something to add.

  Widow started to speak, but Abby wasn’t finished.

  She said, “Pancakes with Vermont maple syrup, which I get delivered here special. You’ll love it.”

  Abe said, “You’re serving the Vermont maple?”

  He scratched his bald head and smirked with a genuine disappointment to offer such a fine condiment to an outsider.

  “Widow, we’re done here. Thanks for all your work. We appreciate it.”

  Widow smiled and stood up from the chair, followed by Abe.

  Abby said, “Good. Take off your boots when you come in. Abe, show him the bathroom so he can wash his hands. And hurry up; we’re waiting.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Abe said.

  Abby spun around like a ballerina and walked back into the house.

  “Sorry, if I put you to work. Guess I got carried away.”

  Widow said, “Don’t worry about it. I enjoy doing things. And I appreciate your letting me stay, also for the family home cooking. I never get that anymore. The negative part of being out on my own.”

  Abe smiled and went into the house behind Abby. Widow followed.

  The front door opened to a grand country estate on a small scale. The place was awesome. It could’ve been featured in a magazine. It looked like a new build on the inside. It was probably a recent renovation, either that or Abby slaved away all day making it look so new. It even smelled new, but only in the front foyer.

  The foyer had country wood everywhere, all painted white. He smelled freshly polished wood, which could’ve been the large oak table near the entrance with a potted plant on it. It could’ve been the walls or the baseboards or the floor tiles or it could’ve been all of it.

  Beyond the foyer was a big, open floor plan with a construct of wooden stairs zigzagging right at the front. One landing was presented to visitors like a stage. Widow imagined having a lone guy with a guitar and a stool up there, playing for parties.

  The stairs disappeared into a floor above, which had to be the bedrooms because the first floor was so open that Widow could decipher what every room was right from the front door. Every square foot was easily reconned.

  In his head, he calculated the size and layout of the space.

  Off to the left, the first room’s door was wide open. Inside Widow saw a mudroom.

  Abe stomped his feet on a large welcome mat inside the front door and then went straight through the foyer, careful not to track any dirt or snow through. He went to the mudroom like his life depended on getting the house procedures right.

  Widow stomped the snow off his feet onto the mat and followed suit behind Abe.

  The mudroom had two sets of cubby stations—one to the left, one to the right. In the center, on a back wall, was a bench with welcoming pillows on the back.

  The bench, the pillows, and the cushions were all painted white and clean. There was no sign posted warding off people from using the bench, but Abe stood over it for a second seeming to be calculating whether it was worth his life even to risk dirtying it up.

  In the end, Abe decided he had no choice and plopped down on the bench, leaving room for Widow to his right, but Widow waited for him to be done first.

  Abe slipped off his boots and stuffed them in a cubby to the left. Then, he leaned to the other side and pulled out a pair of comfortable, well-worn slippers from the right cubby. This assembly line process was refined by strict instructions from Abby, no doubt.

  Widow stayed in the doorway to the mudroom with his boots on because he had no slippers to complete the process and he didn’t think Abe wanted him to walk around in only his smelly socks.

  Abe realized the dilemma.

  “You can borrow Junior’s slippers.”

  Widow thought he was referring to Walter.

  Abe got up off the bench, standing in his slippers, relishing the comfort of it for a split second. Then he stepped over to the right cubby and reached to the top shelf and pulled out a pair of men’s slip-on shoes.

  He held them to his face, looked down at Widow’s boots, and stopped.

  Widow turned fast and glanced back at the left cubby. He looked at the cubby from that side and saw a pair of recently shined black combat boots. Like the slip-on shoes, they belonged to a big man, this Junior, he figured.

  He remembered on the drive up the track to the house, Walter mentioned playing in the field of Christmas trees with his brother. That must have been Junior. These must’ve been Junior’s combat boots and his slip-ons.

  Abe asked, “What size do you wear?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Abe stared at the shoes but didn’t check the label. He looked at them and knew the size almost as well as anyone knows their own size.

  “Oh. Well. That won’t work then. Junior was a twelve.”

  Without much brainpower behind it, Widow let out a question before he put two and two together. Instantly he felt stupid.

  “Was?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Junior was a size twelve?’”

  Widow stared past the slip-ons in Abe’s hand and looked at the cubby. He confirmed what he had already seen and felt even dumber because he knew the answer before he uttered the first dumb question.

  Both cubbies were divided into sections for each family member. It appeared to be divided by height so if a teenager grew taller, then everyone else in the family was downgraded to a lower cubby. The next section of shoes to the right was smaller than size twelve. Maybe they were tens or elevens. They were probably Walter’s shoes, Walter’s cubby. Next down were women’s shoes, and then another set of women’s shoes, and then Abe’s, and then what looked like shoes for a teenage girl, and next Abby’s—he figured by the style—and finally, there were shoes that had to belong to a boy. Judging by the style and size, the boy was somewhere in middle school, a growing boy. He would be the x-factor, the decider in who would move down the ranks in the White family shoe cubby hierarchy.

  The thing that made Widow feel like an idiot was that now he realized the first section of shoes belonged to a dead son.

  Abe stayed quiet.

  No tears came from his eyes, but they glazed over so fast it was like his brain flipped a switch to make them do that.

  Widow asked, “What branch was your son?”

  Abe smiled and reached up, unzipped his coat all the way down. He unbuttoned the top button on a collared shirt and reached into the top. He grabbed onto a metal-beaded chain around his neck and reeled it out. He let it dangle out in front of his chin.

  It was a set of dog tags.

  Abe said, “His name was Lance Corporal Abraham Michael White, Jr. of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.”

  Widow stared at the dog tags, read them, and confirmed the name and rank. He stayed quiet.

  Abe added, “Marine Expeditionary Force.”

  “The Professionals. Their nickname. Marines love nicknames.”

  Abe nodded.

  “You know them?”

  “I served. Navy. Sixteen years. But can’t say I ever met a Marine
from The Professionals.”

  He didn’t say his rank or that he was a SEAL, or NCIS, for that matter. No need to tell a grieving father his rank if it was higher than his dead son’s. It wasn’t a pissing contest. Widow felt that just saying Navy was good enough to illustrate that he understood.

  “Did you go to Iraq?”

  “More times than I can count.”

  “Did you see combat?”

  “More times than I can count.”

  Abe nodded.

  “My son was a good Marine. He died in what the official US Marine Corps after-action report described as ‘enemy action’ in a place I never heard of before called Al Anbar Province. It’s in Iraq.”

  “I’ve been there. Tough place. All of Iraq is tough. He must’ve been a great Marine to get that assignment.”

  Widow put one hand on Abe’s left shoulder.

  Abe smiled at him.

  “Thank you for your service.”

  “Thank you for your sacrifice. It’s not in vain. Don’t you ever think that it was.”

  Abe nodded. He returned the dog tags to their place under his shirt.

  He stepped back. Widow removed his hand and let it fall back down to his side.

  Abe stepped away over to the only other wall in the room, which had a plethora of different sizes and styles of winter coats all hanging on hooks along the wall. The largest percentage of coats looked like they belonged to a single owner, a teenage girl. It was probably thirty percent of them.

  Widow recognized styles and colors as something he had seen traveling across America. He had seen more teenage girls, traveling alone on buses than he would’ve expected before he started his nomadic lifestyle. And the thing all teenage girls had in common was that they were stylish and trendy. So were the coats. The process seemed to go like this: The coats were selected according to the latest trends and then neglected a week later. It reminded him of the stock market. Investors bought something that thought was hot or trendy; then they dumped it a week later.

  Trends in fashion and stocks were like the moods of a schizophrenic, depressed mental patient with multiple personality disorder; everything changed fast.

  Widow thought they should change the saying from death and taxes to fashion and psychosis .

  Widow had never been fashionable, not ever. He was lucky to fit in with the cool kids at all.

  Widow shook off his overthinking and snapped back to reality where Abe was waiting so they could join the others at the breakfast table.

  Widow slipped off his coat and hung it on a hook. That part was easy, but then he looked at Abe. Now they had to face a serious problem together. No way was Abby going to let him inside with his boots on. But there was no size slip-on for him to borrow.

  “You gotta leave your boots here. Sorry, I don’t have shoes for you.”

  “It’s no big deal. I can keep my socks on. Is that okay?”

  “It’ll have to be.”

  Widow didn’t sit on the bench. He put one hand on a cubby and leaned and kicked one boot off, trying not to shake any snow and dirt off onto the tile. Then he repeated the process with the next boot.

  Afterward, he picked them both up by the neck with one hand and set them down on the top, back corner of one of the cubby structures.

  Widow cracked his knuckles before they went to join the others. He didn’t want to do it at the table.

  After that he said, “Ready.”

  Abe turned and led the way back through the door. Widow followed in his socks.

  Chapter 25

  A DONIS AND SHEP turned the wrong way down a one-way street, but they never knew it because there was no visible sign posted. The sign wasn’t visible because it wasn’t there. A year earlier a thunderstorm had stomped right through Spartan County on its way north. The thunderstorm took down the sign, along with other things. The next day, a pair of local farm boys stole it. They set it up in the back of one of their dad’s property and used it for target practice.

  By now, it was no good as a street sign—too many bullet holes.

  Adonis and Shep continued the wrong way down the street because they were following a pair of tracks they thought belonged to Abel, and that’s where the tracks led so far.

  They followed the tracks on the ground until the snow thinned out over the road. The helicopter flew over the backroad system for a bird’s-eye view, hoping to spot the van, but so far, Ramirez had seen no sign of it. The treetops were too dense, and the roads wound around so much it was hard to maintain a steady look without yawing and turning the helicopter’s flight pattern.

  Ramirez was sure that from the ground they must’ve looked like they were flying mock dogfights.

  Shep didn’t notice the tracks thinning. He concentrated on driving. Adonis focused on the tracks.

  As soon as she noticed the tracks were missing, she stuck her head out the window and stared down at the road and then up ahead to see if they came back into view, but they didn’t.

  “Stop!” she said.

  Shep slowed and stopped.

  “What’s up?”

  He looked over at her.

  She hung out the window and stared at the road ahead.

  He asked, “You see them?”

  “No. I see nothing. The tracks vanished.”

  “They’re gone?”

  He looked out ahead, scanned the road, saw the thinning snow, and nothing else—same as her.

  Adonis said, “The snow’s too thin here. I can’t make out their tracks anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s because we’re on a hill? The snow might get better up ahead.”

  Adonis looked ahead, saw the slope of the hill heading back down.

  “Maybe.”

  “We should be able to pick them up again if we keep going.”

  “Let me get out and look first.”

  “Okay.”

  Adonis hopped out of the cruiser and stood still. She checked out the road ahead to confirm no sign of tracks. And then she flipped around and looked back the way they’d come. She saw where the tracks vanished.

  She took her phone out of her pocket and pulled up the screen and went to her maps app. She opened it and investigated her surroundings. What did not change was that she was still in the middle of a fifteen-mile network of backroad country. No amount of staring at her maps app was going to change that.

  She stared at the perimeter of the map. She made mental pinpoints where she thought the roadblocks should’ve already been set up. Between her and the roadblocks was nothing on the map, just nameless roads.

  She looked straight, looked left, looked right, and turned back to the car. She walked back and stuck her head near Shep’s window so they could talk.

  “Call the roadblocks. Check with them.”

  Shep stayed where he was. He had one hand on the wheel, and one draped out across the door’s windowsill. He felt the cold on his knuckles.

  “They’ve got nothing so far.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They would’ve called.”

  “Check anyway. They should’ve tried to pass through by now.”

  Shep got on the radio and called one of his guys.

  “Watts, come in.”

  “Go for, Watts.”

  “Anything at the roadblocks yet?”

  Watts came on over the radio.

  “Nothing. No vans anyway. Bunch of trucks coming and going, and that’s it.”

  “Heard. What about these trucks? Anyone fit our guys’ description?”

  “Nope. Only two trucks had more than two passengers so far. They were both old guys. Looked too old to be the guys you’re looking for. They checked out, anyway.”

  Shep clicked the talk button.

  “Okay. Keep a lookout for them. Be careful; we’re dealing with low-down salty dogs, here. Over.”

  “You got it. Over,” Watts said and clicked off.

  Shep shrugged at Adonis.

  Adonis got on her phone and called Ramirez. She lo
oked up at the helicopter circling overhead. She saw it fly in and out of view above.

  The call wasn’t a direct call. Ramirez couldn’t hear his cell phone up there, not over the rotor blades. She had to call her switchboard and have the call wired to the helicopter’s radio.

  It was fast, faster than usual. Within seconds, Ramirez answered from his headset.

  “Adonis?”

  “Yeah.”

  She stepped back from the police cruiser and jammed a finger in her free ear. There was a lot of background noise coming from his end, a combination of the rotors and wind and engine noise.

  “What’s up? Why we stopped?”

  “I lost the tracks down here. You see anything from up there?”

  She stared up at Ramirez, who had the helicopter hovering two hundred feet above. All she saw was the outline of the helicopter. It was too high and too dark to see Ramirez’s face.

  From the helicopter, Ramirez looked out his windshield at the terrain. He looked clockwise in all three compass directions and then he completed the rotation to see behind him.

  He took his time, double-checked, and answered her after thirty seconds.

  “All I see is miles of nothing and snow and trees and more nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I see the fire to the west.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Lots of empty roads.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Looks like a bunch of farmland.”

  “Where?”

  “North. South. East and West. Everywhere.”

  “Any of them look alive?”

  “Not that I can tell from up here. I’ve got nothing. No sign of them. I see no disturbances anywhere.”

  “So, you don’t see anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where are the closest farms?”

  “Oh. Hold on.”

  Ramirez looked out the windshield again.

  He said, “Keep going straight. The road veers to the north. Those are the closest farms I can see. We’ll meet you there.”

  Adonis hung up the phone, pocketed it and got back in the cruiser. She looked at Shep.

  “Know anything about the farms up ahead?”