The Standoff Read online

  As much as seemed that Abel couldn’t widen his grin any more, he did. But he also did something else. He nodded his head up and to the right a couple of times like he was signaling for Shep to look over Abel’s shoulder.

  Shep glanced up over Abel’s shoulder and saw nothing there to see, just the front of the barn, and the open doors. He saw the black panel van inside it and White and Rourke zip tied to the grille and old hay and animal stalls and nothing else.

  Abel saw him look.

  He said, “No, Shep. Not there. Look higher.”

  Shep feared it was a trick, but what kind of trick?

  He couldn’t help but look. He glanced up again, but this time, he let his eyes linger on the barn’s front side.

  Abel said, “Up. Higher. Look higher.”

  Shep looked past him and up over his shoulder and up the barn’s front side. He looked up to the open shutters, exposing the loft. Then he saw the sniper rifle they had seen earlier, only this time it wasn’t down on the floor of the loft as if it had been placed there as a trap. This time it was higher in someone’s grip, and it was pointed straight down at him.

  He saw a sniper behind it, smiling back at him. The sniper’s eye was behind the scope.

  Shep knew this was the end. He didn’t hesitate any longer—no more running up the clock. Time seemed to slow down. The muscles in his neck and jaw fired on all cylinders to traverse his head back down to look at Abel. At the same time, the muscles from his arms down to his waist fired up and torqued, all of it working in unison so that he could raise the shotgun up and lower his vision to aim. The butt of the shotgun slammed into his shoulder, and his eye lined up as fast as he could down the sights. He nearly had Abel in his line of fire when his upper chest and collarbone exploded—partially under the bulletproof vest and partially above the plate. The pain was immediate, but the muzzle flash seemed like it came after he had already been nailed by a bullet.

  The force of the impact jerked him off his feet, but he got in one pull of the trigger. The shotgun fired up as he went back off his feet.

  Abel ducked, as did the rest of his guys, minus Brooks, who stayed behind James and Swan like human shields. Jargo didn’t have to duck. He was out of range.

  Shep landed on his back and dropped the shotgun. He felt the bullet’s pain amplified through his chest and bones as if it was still moving.

  Adonis stayed standing, hands up. She was completely frozen. Ramirez went for his gun, but Cucci fired a warning shot into the ground in front of him and he froze.

  The others returned to standing and just stared at Adonis and Ramirez.

  Adonis turned and looked down at Shep. She moved to run to him, but Flack fired a warning shot at her. The gun was silenced, but the bullet shot up snow and dirt right at her feet. She froze in place. She didn’t look away from Shep.

  He stared back up at her. Blood spurted out of his mouth from pooling in his lungs and throat. He tried to speak, tried to say something, but nothing came out but the blood. He tried to mouth something, but she couldn’t make it out before he was dead.

  Chapter 37

  W IDOW FOLLOWED Abe into the Whites’ house, closing the front door behind them and dead bolting it. They walked back through the family room past his daughter, his daughter-in-law, his grandchildren, and his wife.

  He made eye contact with Abby. She knew not to ask where they were going. She knew where they were headed.

  They threaded through the furniture, over to the fireplace and to the sliding doors at the back of the house. Abe slid one side open and they stepped out onto the back porch.

  Abe waited for Widow to walk through. Then he leaned in, looked at his wife, and said, “Lock this, hon.”

  Abby did as he asked and walked over and locked the slider behind them.

  Abe turned and walked around the outside of the fireplace to a door that Widow hadn’t known was there. It was a part of the house’s structure but wasn’t built in brick. It was all wood, painted white, including the door. The door had a padlock on the outside of it.

  Widow figured it was a shed. He was mostly right.

  Abe took a set of keys out of his pocket, not from his truck keychain. This was just a simple key ring with five keys on it. The others must’ve been related to the barn and wherever they stored Christmas tree farming equipment. He sifted through the keys until he found the right one. He unlocked the padlock, replacing the lock on the metal hasp.

  He opened the door and stepped into the darkness, and Widow followed.

  Abe clicked on a string, and a low-hanging light switched on. It was dull and yellow but lit the room enough to see everything but eighty percent of the ceiling above it. The bulb dangled from a cord and started to sway back and forth from the wind whooshing through the open door.

  The exterior room with the lock on it was mostly a shed. All kinds of different regular, everyday tools littered built-in wooden shelves along three of the walls. There was a long, wooden table in the center of the room. It looked heavy and hulking as if there was no way the builders managed to squeeze it in through the door. Widow thought the shed must’ve been built around the thing. That was not true, obviously, but that was his first thought.

  The table had a bottom shelf underneath it with boxes and boxes of hand tools crammed into them. The boxes were labeled in black marker, but that didn’t make much difference in regard to organization. The whole shed was disorganized, but in an organized, chaotic way, like only Abe knew where everything was located. It made sense to him.

  The one exception to this was the twenty percent that wasn’t related to a typical tool shed. That was the far wall.

  On it, there were five layers of mounted hooks from top to bottom with a built-in mantle underneath, placed just below Abe’s waist level and far below Widow’s waist level.

  On the hooks were three classic rifles, placed with care, and below that were two scoped hunting rifles. Below that, on the mantle, were boxes of ammunition.

  Abe stepped past the light and rounded the table and stopped dead in front of the rifles. He paused, looking over them like they were his pride and joy. Then he sidestepped to the right and turned back to Widow. He put his hand out like a stage presenter revealing a new car for a gameshow contestant to win.

  Abe said, “I’ve got these guns.”

  Widow walked full into the shed and rounded the same table on the opposite side and stopped in front of the weapons. He looked them over and reached his hands up to the top one. Then he stopped.

  “May I?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Widow smiled and lifted the top rifle, one of the classic ones. He pulled it off the hooks and twisted it and studied it from top to bottom.

  “A Winchester. 1894.”

  “You know guns? Well, I guess, of course you do.”

  “It’s the most popular lever-action rifle ever made.”

  “Some would argue that. Me included.”

  “This is a classic. You’ve kept the original steel butt.”

  Widow dropped the lever. The weapon was obviously unloaded, but he liked to be sure—an old habit.

  Abe said, “Yeah. I found that one antiquing through west Texas.”

  “You’ve got three of them?”

  “Yeah, the other two came from the internet. And the others are for hunting. Although, we used to use the 1894s.”

  Widow repeated the lever-action fast, and dry-fired the rifle, testing the firing speed just for the kick of it. He repeated the process several times, rapid firing it. A big smile flickered across his face.

  He said, “Works great.”

  “They all do. My sons take good care of their rifles. I taught them that.”

  A cloud seemed to shade across Abe’s face when he realized one of his sons was dead. Widow saw on the stock, of the rifle he held, a set of carved letters—A.M.W. for Abe’s dead son: Abraham Michael White, Jr.

  Abe said nothing about it, and Widow didn’t offer to return the weapon to
its rightful place. Instead, he tried to reroute Abe’s attention to the situation at hand.

  He said, “What kind of load-out you got?”

  Abe washed a single hand over the boxes of ammunition stacked neatly on the mantle—the only thing in the shed that looked organized. He stopped over a stack of three boxes and pulled one off the top, handed it to Widow.

  “That depends. If you want that gun, it’s chambered to thirty-thirties. So are the other two, but the hunting rifles are long range.”

  “Thirty-thirty is fine.”

  Widow took the box of thirty-thirty bullets from Abe’s hand. Then he took the box and the Winchester rifle and rotated all the way around on one foot, a hundred eighty degrees. He stopped in front of the huge worktable and placed the rifle down. He popped open the box. It was full. He took out nine bullets and lined them up under the gun, one in front of the other, on their sides, nose to tail. He left no space between them. He compared them to the length of the gun barrel. Exactly nine bullets appeared to fit perfectly.

  Abe paused a beat and asked, “Sure, you don’t want one of the hunting rifles? The repeater’s a good gun. Don’t get me wrong. And I ain’t got no problem with you using my son’s rifle. But the range on those old guns is two hundred yards. Sure you won’t want something with longer range?”

  “No. This is perfect. If there’s trouble here, you’ll need the scoped guns.”

  “Trouble here? You’re not sticking around?”

  Fast—faster than Abe had ever seen anyone in his life—Widow’s fingers moved like a magician’s sleight of hand in performing card tricks. Within seconds, he had slid each bullet into the side-loading gate, using the right amount of pressure not to jam the bullet or force each one in.

  Once the rifle was loaded, he scooped it up and racked the lever, loading the first bullet into the chamber from the magazine. The rifle was ready to fire. Widow moved his hand up past the trigger and lever and held it down safely from firing.

  Abe stared at him. The look on his face was like he was staring at both a skilled rifleman and a circus performer at the same time.

  He asked, “You ever been in the Marines?”

  “I told you. I was in the Navy.”

  “Yeah. You did, but that was like watching the boys in the Marine Honor Guard. I mean you’re fast with that.”

  Widow shrugged.

  Abe said, “What part of the Navy?”

  “I polished hulls.”

  “What?”

  “Boats. I was the underwater hull-polisher. You know? A diver.”

  Widow smiled.

  Abe asked, “A diver?”

  Widow nodded.

  “I know what that means. You were a SEAL?”

  Widow stayed quiet, continued to smile. And Abe took that to be an unofficial confirmation to the question.

  Question asked. Question answered.

  Widow said, “We better scoop up the rest of these rifles. Take them inside. If something goes down and Adonis’s plan spills over to this house, then we’ll need all the firepower inside. They’ll be useless to you out here.”

  Abe nodded and walked over to the rifles. He started picking them off the hooks one by one and placing them on the worktable.

  Widow asked, “Got a sidearm?”

  Abe stopped on the first hunting rifle and said, “Walter used to carry one in his truck, but he got rid of it. He’s not a gun person. Not since he’s had kids. I’m not a crazy gun nut. I don’t collect them or anything — just these rifles. But when Dylan came along, Walt insisted on getting rid of our handguns. He wouldn’t even let me keep them in here. I think it was Maggie and not him. But they’re parents, and that’s the way it goes.”

  “That sucks. We could use a few handguns.”

  “You’re planning to get close to these guys?”

  “It may come to that. Better prepared than dead.”

  “Okay. I do have one handgun. I couldn’t let him sell it. It’s upstairs.”

  Widow took bullets out of the box of thirty-thirties. He shoved as many of them into his pockets as he could carry without being bulky and uncomfortable. If he needed to sneak around outside, he didn’t want bullets slapping together in his pockets, making all kinds of racket.

  Next, Widow grabbed the remaining rifles off the hooks for Abe and carried three out the door, his initialed A.M.W. rifle included, along with as many boxes of bullets for the three rifles that he could palm in his hands or wedge between the rifles and his ribcage. Abe followed suit as best he could. Together they left the shed, leaving it unlocked in case Abe had to run back in for more bullets.

  They came to the back porch sliders. Abby stood on the other side, waiting as if she hadn’t moved. As hard as it might’ve been for some people to believe, Widow had had a mother once. He knew motherly expressions. They were universal among the world’s mothers. And one such expression was worry.

  Worry was stretched across Abby’s face like a face mask. It couldn’t possibly get worse or more obvious. At least, that’s what Widow thought.

  Abby saw them coming and waited till Abe was at the door. She unlocked the latch and slid the door open. She stepped out to help take some of the ammunition and one rifle from her husband. Foster came out from behind her and took as many of the spare boxes of ammo that she could from Widow.

  Right then was when they heard a sound that solidified their growing anxiety.

  In the distance, off toward the direction of the Pines Farm, they heard a loud gunshot. It echoed over the trees and across the sky.

  They all froze and stared at each other.

  Widow said, “Shotgun.”

  Chapter 38

  A BEL WATCHED Shep die right there. His guys stood around him in a semicircle like some sort of ritual. All of them except the one in the sniper’s nest. He remained on guard and vigilant. Adonis was on her knees, zip tied, next to Ramirez, who was the same, next to Swan and James. All their hands were restrained behind them. Their hats were gone, thrown off in the distance. James and Swan showed no emotion. They had stayed tough to this point. James’s nose continued to bleed, not a steady flow as before. Now, it was a slow trickle—a faucet that needed tightening.

  Adonis felt Ramirez shivering. His teeth chattered. His eyes darted from side to side, watching the skyline like a pilot waiting for rescue, knowing that backup was coming.

  His knees shook in the snow. His body shivered and bumped into hers.

  She whispered, “Keep it together.”

  Ramirez shook. He said, “We’re gonna die.”

  “We’re not going to die. Keep calm.”

  “You got us into this. We’re going to die. It’s your fault.”

  “Shut up!” Adonis ordered.

  Ramirez didn’t listen, not really. He lowered his volume and muttered under his breath, incoherently like he was praying to himself.

  He was afraid. She couldn’t blame him. For her, it was slowly coming on. She felt her heart pounding, her knees slowly chattering like his. She might’ve been distracted by her need for revenge more than him, more than the others. That was what kept her from feeling afraid. But that wasn’t going to last.

  After Shep was dead, Abel knelt beside him and hovered one bony hand over the body. He spoke over the corpse like a priest giving a benediction.

  “The Bible says, ‘Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written.’”

  Abel reached out and swiped his long fingers over Shep’s eyes and closed them.

  He said, “God’s wraith. That’s what I am. That’s what we are.”

  The others stirred like true believers. They whooped and hollered and stabbed their rifles into the air. They chanted. It was a mishmash of Army, Marine, and Navy cheers.

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  Abel said, “Vengeance belongs to God!”

  The men said, “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  Abel said, “Revenge belongs to God!”
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  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  Abel said, “Justice belongs to God!”

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  Abel said, “But I am God’s wraith!”

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  “I am God’s revenge!”

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  “I am God’s justice!”

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  Right then, the four men on the ground raised their rifles as Abel rose slowly. He lifted his hands and looked up to the sky.

  He said, “Revenge is mine. Soon, those who deserve it will feel it.”

  “HOORAH! OORAH! HOORA! HOOYAH!”

  The men lowered their rifles. Abel lowered his hands and adjusted his head to look forward. The four men saluted him.

  That was when it hit Adonis. That was when she felt fear. That’s when the truth hit home, and she uttered it to herself.

  “You’re insane.”

  Brooks was the first of the men to speak after their strange behavior.

  “What do we do with them?”

  Abel walked over to his prisoners, away from Shep’s corpse. He stopped at arm’s length away, hovering over them like a vulture.

  His four guys stood around behind them, weapons lowered by their sides.

  Abel paced out in front of them from left to right, slowly, and then back again. He stopped in the middle between Ramirez and James.

  “Which one of you is the pilot for the bird?”

  No one answered.

  Abel wasn’t the ask-for-something-twice kind of leader. So, he reached into his white garbs, under his coat and pulled out his Glock, big and obvious. He wanted them to notice it.

  Ramirez whispered to himself faster and faster. He squeezed his eyes shut and swayed back and forth like he was about to go into a spasm.

  No one spoke. No one answered Abel’s question.

  Abel sidestepped and pointed the Glock at Adonis. She stared up and back at him over the barrel.

  He looked in her eyes.

  “You. You’re their leader. Who is the pilot?”