Patriot Lies (Jack Widow Book 14) Page 36

  Together, they stayed in the smoke and darkness and took off half-running, half-stumbling for the structures beyond.

  Fifty-Five

  They stayed hidden in a small structure that had once been a cabin fifty meters from the house that was on fire with Widow still inside it.

  Once Gray managed to haul Tyler all the way there, she hid him inside. Then she did what Widow had told her not to do. She went back for him.

  She ran back, staying low, staying hidden in the darkness and behind the other structures. She saw two of the meth heads were now in the backyard. They looked like they were staring at something on the ground. As she closed the distance, she realized they’d found the smoke grenade canister. They were walking in and out of the smoke, which was starting to dissipate.

  She kept going. She would kill as many as she could to get Widow’s back. But as she got closer, she saw her worst fear come true.

  The house exploded!

  Gray stayed where she was watching the fire, seeing the house’s outer walls crumble and fall over. Tears streamed down her face.

  Widow was dead. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t!

  He can’t be dead! she thought.

  After five long minutes, she tried to move forward to get closer; maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe he was still alive. It looked impossible. Everything was on fire. The more time that passed, the more parts of the house started to collapse in on itself.

  She got closer, but then she saw more of the meth heads coming back from the front of the house. Then, more came, until she counted seven. Then she saw Daniels. He was pointing in her direction like he could see her. He barked orders at the meth heads to search everything. Five of them turned and started to head her way, started to head toward where she left Tyler.

  She had to go back. She had no choice.

  Gray backed up into the darkness and turned and took off, running back to Tyler.

  She got to where he was hidden and burst in. She looked down at him. He was huddled against a back corner. The shotgun was at his side, lying across the floor. His hand spanned out over the butt.

  She said, “I think Widow’s dead.”

  Tyler stayed quiet.

  She moved in closer. She wiped the tears off her face, and she stopped at Tyler’s feet.

  She said, “Tyler? Widow’s dead.”

  He stayed quiet.

  “Tyler?”

  Nothing.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She turned on the flashlight and shone it across Tyler’s face.

  His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t blinking. His mouth was wide open, but he wasn’t speaking. His chest was completely still. He wasn’t breathing. The hand that plugged up his gutshot was now laid out, palm open, across his lap.

  He stared back at her with lifeless eyes. He was dead.

  Fifty-Six

  Daniels stowed the bullhorn and took out his phone. It wasn’t a regular smartphone. It was a satellite phone. He had minor cuts all over his face and one major gash on his forehead that would need stitches. He had dodged Widow’s bullets, but he couldn’t dodge the exploding windshield glass from his car.

  He dialed the last call he’d received, which was from Nick Gaden.

  Gaden answered the phone.

  “Yes? Is it done?”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “So, you’ve recovered their bodies?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I want their bodies! Especially Widow’s!”

  “Understood. He’s burning right now. But once this fire goes out, we’ll find him.”

  Gaden said, “Don’t leave until you’ve recovered the bodies! I want a photo!”

  “Okay.”

  Before Daniels finished saying okay, Gaden had clicked off the call.

  Daniels slipped the satellite phone back into his pocket and started barking orders at the meth heads again to let the fire burn out and locate the bodies.

  Gray left the shotgun behind. It was used up and heavy, and she wasn’t as proficient as she was with her own Sig. She tried her phone again and got no signal. She texted Cameron in all caps, but the text message wouldn’t send until she had a signal or Wi-Fi. She returned the phone to her pocket and snuck around the outer edges of the backyard, staying low, trying to keep within the trees. She was nearly spotted once by one of the meth heads, but she ducked behind a tree, and he passed her by.

  She made it to the north side of the house, near where she and Tyler had jumped off the roof. The whole house burned like nothing she had ever seen before. It was bright red like blood.

  She got as close as she could and searched for Widow’s body. She saw that some of the meth heads were doing the same while others searched for her and Tyler as if they suspected they’d escaped the fire because of the smoke grenade.

  Gray waited and looked for a good ten minutes from the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Widow’s corpse. She couldn’t stand that he had died this way. And after sitting there for ten minutes, her worry turned to anger, which quickly escalated to rage.

  She had known his plan was stupid. She’d tried to protest. She’d even asked him how he was going to get out if the fire got worse. And he’d only smiled at her.

  Gray decided it was enough. She was ready to take on Daniels. She moved on, creeping through the trees until she was at the front of the house. She stayed low, passing between two of the meth heads that were five meters apart. They didn’t notice her because they were searching the ground for dead, charred bodies.

  Then she saw Daniels. He was leaning against the hood of his cruiser, wiping blood off his face with a handkerchief.

  She went along the passenger side of the cruiser and snuck right up behind him and stopped.

  She said, “Hey.”

  Daniels heard a woman’s voice and turned around to see Gray standing there holding a gun, only she wasn’t pointing it at him. Instead, she wrenched it back fast and pistol-whipped him right in the face.

  She heard an audible CRACK! as his nose broke in two pieces. Blood sprayed out and dabbed across her face.

  She wrenched the weapon back a second time and aimed to pistol-whip him right in the jaw. She hoped she would break that too.

  She never made it to his jaw. At the same moment, she was spun around, nearly coming off her feet. A meth head stood behind her with a hunting rifle. He smiled at her with a mouthful of part rotten teeth and craters, where teeth used to be.

  He punched her with a vicious right hook, and she went down. Her lights were out before she hit the ground.

  Fifty-Seven

  Daniels said, “Watch it, dumbass!”

  The meth head was pointing his rifle down at Gray, who looked unconscious.

  “Lemme shoot her, boss?”

  “No. Just hold on. I’m thinking this is better than dead.”

  Daniels gripped his nose with one hand. Then he shoved the meth head out of the way with the other. He bled all over the place, but he had broken his nose before, twice. He was a fat guy. He knew that. And he knew that people looked at him like he was a backwoods, fat sheriff, but that was a deception. He was fat and he was backwoods, but he wasn’t a weakling. He knew how to get down and dirty.

  That low-bar opinion of him was how he surprised people all the time.

  He slumped down over Gray and kicked her gun out of her reach. She wasn’t moving. He reached down and turned her over. He felt her pulse. She was alive and breathing. He inspected her face. She was going to have a shiner, that was for damn sure, but otherwise, she was intact.

  “She alive, boss?” the meth head asked. “I clocked her pretty good.”

  Daniels looked at him.

  “Clevis, you’re a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet. You couldn’t kill a house cat with that punch. Now, help me get her up.”

  The two of them struggled to lift her up because she was out cold, which made her dead weight. They brought her to the hood of the car and bent her over it. Dan
iels stepped back.

  Clevis sidestepped and leaned his rifle up against the car. He grabbed the drawstring that held his pants up and started to undo it.

  He said, “Oh boy, boss. Can I go first?”

  Daniels looked at him.

  “Clevis, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Clevis’ pants fell to his ankles.

  Daniels shouted, “Clevis! Put that away! Nobody is doing nothing to this little starlet. Not yet, anyway.”

  Clevis nodded and pulled his pants back up, retied the drawstring.

  Daniels slid Gray’s jacket off and tossed it into the cruiser. Then he unsnapped the bulletproof vest and added it next to her jacket. He took out his handcuffs and cuffed Gray from behind, tight.

  He laid her back across the hood, whipped the hair out of her face, and turned her face, so it was clearly visible. He took out his satellite phone and aimed it at her and snapped a picture. He texted it to Gaden with the message: One lived. What do you want to do with her?

  Just three seconds later, he got: Keep her alive. She can tell us things we need to know.

  He texted Gaden back: You got it.

  After that, he lifted her up and shoved her into the trunk of his cruiser and closed it.

  Fifty-Eight

  At the same time that Gray was getting stuffed into the trunk of Daniels’ cruiser, Chris Fallow and the two other guys who had helped him kill Eggers, minus Sathers, stepped off a private plane at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

  Fallow breathed a heavy batch of Alaskan air and stared off to the west-northwest and saw the Tordrillo Mountains, which were seventy-five miles away, but huge and white and grand under the night stars.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were grabbing their bags from baggage claim. Five minutes after that, they were firing up a black Chevy Tahoe left for them in short-term parking earlier in the night by one of Gaden’s assistants.

  They drove out of the airport and merged with traffic and drove to Route Three to pick up Sonya Gray before heading to Gaden’s estate.

  Fifty-Nine

  From the Gaden family estate, one of them anyway, Nick Gaden called Sheriff Daniels one last time.

  Daniels answered.

  "Yes, sir."

  "How's it going? Find any more of them?"

  "We've recovered the FBI agent. And the woman is in my trunk."

  "I know that. What about Widow?"

  "Nothing. But, sir, both the FBI and the NCIS are going to investigate the disappearance of their agents."

  "Let them. It's not a problem. Money can buy anything."

  Daniels said, "I wouldn't know."

  "Of course, you wouldn't. You're a peon. Listen. Just get rid of his body. Make sure no one ever finds it. And you'll have nothing to worry about."

  "Okay."

  "What about Widow?"

  "Nothing so far. But there's a lot of burned ash here. Hard to tell what's what."

  "You find any bones?"

  "Don't think so. There's a lot of debris. We burned a whole building down with Widow inside it."

  "Get your boys to stay there till you find his bones. Tell them to save his skull for me. I want you to take the girl and meet with Fallow. Hand her over to him. He'll take her and bring her to me."

  "Where?"

  Gaden gave him the address.

  Sixty

  Before he got into his police cruiser, Daniels told the meth heads what to do, instructing them to stay and sift through the ashes until they found Widow’s dead body.

  Daniels got into his car, brushed as much of the broken glass as he could out onto the gravel. A lot of it fell into the cracks of the front seat and down into the footwell.

  He fired up the engine and revved it up. Then he backed out and K-turned so that he faced the way they had come in. He drove around Gray’s charger and headed back down the winding dirt roads to the main highway.

  He could hear Gray thumping around in the trunk, kicking and slamming her fists into the backseat. She wasn’t screaming because he had duct-taped her mouth closed. And she wasn’t going to escape. He had his trunk reinforced so that nothing could get out. He did it a long time ago with a mechanic buddy. It only cost him a six-pack and a one-time look-the-other-way kind of deal, which the mechanic had already called in. He got busted one night with a bag of marijuana, and Daniels had to get him out of it by making a trade with the arresting state trooper. This was all long ago, way before legal weed ever became a reality.

  Eventually, Daniels bumped off the dirt trek and back onto Route Three. He turned right and headed south to meet with Fallow and hand off the woman in the trunk. On the way, he smiled, thinking of what they were going to do to her.

  Before the house exploded, Widow was on the second floor, in the master bedroom, which had been a grand thing, once upon a decade. Now, it was nothing but ruined furniture, derelict floors, and exposed cracked brick.

  Widow waited by a rear window and looked out over the backyard to try to get a glimpse of Gray and Tyler. He saw the smoke grenade canister on the ground and the dissipating smoke and several meth heads back there combing over the area searching for Gray.

  He would have shot them with the Remington sniper rifle, but he was out of bullets. It turned out the opened box of Remington Ultra Magnum bullets had been used before and a lot were missing. There were only a dozen bullets in it. He’d already shot them all.

  Widow saw the smoke from the grenade and the canister on the ground, which told him that Gray had gotten away.

  The meth heads started throwing more Molotov cocktails at the house, which was like throwing dynamite on the sun. It was already burning. There was no real point to the extra fire.

  The house all around him was coming down. He heard parts of the outer walls crumbling and collapsing. He knew it was only a matter of time before the whole house came down around him.

  The smoke was getting worse. The fire was getting worse. The second floor was filling with smoke and fast.

  Widow got down on his hands and knees and crawled below the smoke, back the way he’d come to the room he saw with the giant hole in the floor. Once he got there, he monkey-climbed down to the garage. He hung from the crumbling boards from the floor above and stretched out a foot and planted it on the metal tool table in the garage below. He felt heat through the bottom of his boot. He shimmied down carefully and balanced himself on the tool table. It held him. He slid his feet to the edge of the table. Flames ignited and erupted all around the garage walls and floor and ceiling.

  Sweat drenched out of his pores from the immense heat.

  Widow looked at the wall filled with tools. He eyeballed the sledgehammer and reached his hand out as far as he could. He could almost reach it, and then he almost slipped off the table and fell into the fire.

  Widow stepped back abruptly to regain his balance. Then he edged back to the end of the table. Somewhere behind him in the house, he heard another section of wall crumble and collapse.

  Widow came up on one foot and then one tiptoe and leaned forward like he was doing a yoga pose. He reached out as far as he could and got his fingers on the sledgehammer. He edged forward all the way to the end of the table; half his toes hung off the side.

  He managed to grab the sledgehammer’s handle and scooped it up off its hooks and leaped back to the table. He grabbed a long, dark cloth off another rack and set the hammer down. He wrapped his face with the cloth to help him from passing out from the smoke. Then he snatched a pair of work goggles and put them on to help him see.

  Widow climbed back to the second floor and made his way back to the master bedroom.

  He went over to the rock fireplace and picked up the sledgehammer. He wielded it like a lumberjack with a heavy ax. Widow bashed the rock with it. He slammed the rock over and over, as hard as he could.

  He slammed and hammered and crushed the stones. Bits and pieces came flying off the stone fireplace. He bashed until there was a big hole left behind. Smoke
billowed around him and went up the chimney and out the top.

  None of the meth heads noticed the smoke pluming above the chimney outside.

  Widow dropped the hammer and went back into the room. He gathered together all the old, dirty bed covers that he could and went back to the hole and squeezed himself up above the fireplace in the lower part of the chimney. He dragged the covers in behind him and plugged up the hole as best he could, preventing smoke from filling up the chimney and killing him.

  The inside of the stack was a lot roomier than he had thought. He shimmed himself up as high as he could and waited.

  The whole experience was grueling. There were several times he feared suffocating to death, but he didn’t.

  Sixty-One

  The cold night went on, and the meth heads searched through smoke and flames for Widow's body. They never found it. They did find Tyler's body back in one of the structures behind the main house, which led them on a wild goose chase through the dark and the woods.

  Eventually, they determined that Widow never escaped the fire and they returned to the main house and waited.

  They waited nearly all night for the flames to die down. In the early morning fog, they saw nothing was left of the old house except for the large stone fireplace and chimney, the concrete slab, the metal tool table in the garage, and the stone steps that led up to the house. The rest of the structure had bowed and crumbled to ash and broken wood and rubble.

  There were still large sections on fire, but for the most part, it all was over. The time was very early in the morning, but the sun didn't fully rise until around eight-thirty, so the sky was still dark.

  There were seven meth heads left. The gutshot one in the front was dead. The others searched through the fog and remaining smoke for Widow's body. They were all still armed with AR-15s and hunting rifles and shotguns. They were exhausted, and each of them was on some level of meth withdrawal from not shooting up all night.