Once Quiet (Jack Widow Book 5) Read online

  Now all four of them were living in an old, gas-guzzling RV that ran slower than an old nag and was freezing cold at night because they couldn’t afford to run the engine to use the heater.

  Luckily, the IRS was kind enough to give them first right to buy their property back, and they could do it in payments. They just had to come up with ten thousand dollars down. At first, they didn’t know what they were going to do. No way were the disability checks that the older two got from the government or the unemployment scam that they had been running or their welfare subsidies going to pay that much in sixty days. Together these things wouldn’t even pay a substantial amount of that. They would only pay a fraction of it, a simplified fraction at best.

  They thought about running a new job, a new scam, but ever since the older brother, the father of the youngest of them, had gotten out of jail, he wasn’t that eager to go back. Which was the only thing keeping them all on the straight and narrow, or at least the more straight and narrow.

  In the older brother’s opinion, the only good thing to come out of his time in the joint was making friends and connections that he could use later. So, when he reached out to one of his prison friends for help, the guy had put him in touch with a guy, who knew a guy, and he got his brothers and his son the opportunity that they were currently in.

  They were lucky that this opportunity was given to them. All four were grateful. Their employer was a connected person and she was certainly going to throw more jobs their way. She acted as if this particular job, even though it was monotonous, was an important assignment.

  The older brother figured that it must’ve been very important, because it didn’t seem like anything was going to interrupt the natural order of what was expected. And what was expected was that the husband was going to die of natural causes. His prognosis didn’t look good, after all.

  Their biggest concern and the most interesting to watch was the mother. She was quite interesting to watch for multiple reasons—physical reasons, mostly. That was something that all four of them agreed upon. Especially, the youngest one and the youngest brother.

  The two of them were continuously commenting on her. The older two brothers didn’t need to comment on her. They were trying to retain a sense of half-assed professionalism that stemmed from some kind of older brother mentality, mixed with one brother’s long-ago Marine training.

  From an abandoned lot, hidden in the thick forest across the river, they had the perfect vantage point of the back of the ranch. They weren’t privy to the driveway, which was their big disadvantage. But what were they supposed to do? The driveway was long and ran from their targets’ front doorstep all the way to the main road, which must have been close to a mile. The target family had over one hundred acres of pristine land, which made the watchers hate them all that much more.

  The main watcher knew that their employer had suggested that they sit on the lot across from the driveway entrance, but that wasn’t as effective. They wanted to see the goings-on in the house. After the first day of recon, they discovered that the family didn’t close their blinds in the back of the main house and the main house was all windows and timber.

  It wasn’t a secure habit to be in, but then again why would they close the blinds? There was nothing behind the house but acres and acres of trees and empty land. There were no neighbors, no other houses, no public parks to worry about. The only people who might pass through there were people fishing or kayaking down the river, but that wasn’t too often. There was plenty of river to use in more public areas.

  The youngest brother said, “They should be waking up soon.”

  His nephew said, “Good. I’m ready to see her take her morning bath.”

  Without eye contact, they both grinned, and they both knew it.

  The youngest brother looked through the scope of the M40. He searched the house, going from window to window. Everything was quiet. The Montana sun hadn’t risen yet. Which they were glad for in a way, because they were to the east, backs to the morning sun. It was the right position to be in, but it still was problematic because most of the early morning sunlight reflected at them from the giant windows. The sunlight mirrored back in their faces. Not that that ever bothered them, because the show every morning came from the wife’s bathroom window, which was slanted in a more southerly direction and didn’t ricochet the light.

  She had a full wall of windows that were supposed to be tinted from the outside world, but the tint didn’t work because she liked to use a lot of outside lights. While the night sky blanketed the ranch with darkness, the lights negated the tints’ use. This let the watchers get the complete show of her bath every morning. And what a show it was.

  Even if no one had ever told them that she was a foreigner, they still would’ve known that she wasn’t from Montana. They had never seen a girl from Montana who looked like her. At least, not from their small town.

  Her name was Crispin Sossaman and she was from Poland, from a little village north of the border with Slovakia, called Izby. She had lived there her whole life until Liam had met her on a UN convoy passing through fifteen years ago.

  The watchers didn’t know any of that.

  The nephew pulled the field glasses up to his face. He said, “Oh boy! I see something moving!”

  “Where?”

  “I see it. Here she comes.”

  The youngest brother said, “Where? I’m starin’ right at her windows and I don’t see nothin’.”

  The nephew looked closer and then he moved away from the field glasses and looked at the house with his eyeballs. Then he frowned and looked back in the field glasses.

  He said, “Something’s moving.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed at the first floor, though several big windows, and then moved his finger to the double sliders on the back porch.

  The youngest brother stopped using the M40 and retreated from the scope and eyeballed it. He saw it. He moved his head back to where it had been and pressed his right eye to the M40 scope and said, “I see it.”

  “Should we wake Dad?”

  “Nah, boy. Let dem sleep. Dis our watch.”

  “It is, but…”

  “But nothin’. Let’s see who it is movin’ around.”

  The nephew said, “Maybe it’s the maid?”

  “Nah way. Dat old hen gets up with the sun. Only Mrs. Sossaman gets up this early.”

  “Why would she be downstairs this early? She never leaves her room before anyone else is up.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she wants to start breakfast.”

  The nephew said, “That’s what they got the maid for. You know that.”

  The youngest brother nodded, said nothing else.

  They continued to watch.

  On the bottom floor in the living room there was movement. It was a figure, not tall, but not child size either. Which was what they were both thinking. They were both thinking that the figure walking around on the bottom floor this early in the morning was one of the children.

  The family had two sons. One was a teenager who seemed rebellious against his mother and probably would’ve been the same against his father, only he was in that coma.

  The younger son had just started elementary school this last year. But this was his second semester in school. He had to get up five days a week to ride the bus, which stopped at the end of their mile-long drive and drove a half hour to reach the town called Eureka, not to be confused with Eureka, California, not even close. Eureka, California, had something like forty-five thousand people, whereas Eureka, Montana, was closer to a thousand.

  The nephew said, “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know. They’re leaving all the lights off. How you expect me to see them?”

  “We got the night vision?”

  “Those are goggles. They don’t work on the scope. Besides dat distance is too far for you to see anything from here. You’ll just see the same thing you see now—nothin’.”

  The two wa
tchers waited.

  They watched the figure move through the bottom of the house to the garage.

  The ambient noises in the forest made it easy for them to decipher the next sound that they heard because their ears had grown used to the forest noises. Therefore, any sound that was different stuck out like a sore thumb.

  They looked at each other and immediately their eyes and facial expressions registered the noise that they were hearing.

  It was the roar of a truck engine coming to life, followed by the winding of an ancient drive belt that might’ve dated back several years. Then they heard the unmistakable sound of gears grinding hard, the blast of a heavy foot on an accelerator, and then thick tires on the pavement, which immediately tracked over the gravel because the pavement part of the driveway only went a couple of hundred feet from the garage.

  The nephew followed the truck with his field glasses. His jaw dropped. The youngest brother watched through the scope of the M40. They watched an old Ford pickup twist and turn down the part of the drive that they could see until it was lost to sight.

  They picked it up about ten seconds later because the driver switched on the headlights, which gave away its position in the dark.

  They watched it until it vanished completely from their view because of the natural obstructions across the river.

  A little after that, the sound died away and they were left with nothing to listen to but the ambient sounds of the forest around them and the rapid flow of the Kootenai River below.

  Both men pulled back from their farseeing devices and stared at each other. Both men wore the same questions on their faces. Was that the husband’s truck? Who was in it? Should we wake up the others?

  CHAPTER 10

  JACK WIDOW’S BIGGEST PROBLEM, at that moment, was the number that he was staring at on the polished screen of an ATM machine outside a gas station in Eureka, Montana, twenty miles to the east of the Sossaman Ranch, and hundreds of miles north of where he had started.

  The main issue with the number that displayed back at him on the screen from his bank account was more accurately described as the lack of numbers showing because technically zero isn’t a number, like black isn’t a color. Zero equals nothing. And nothing isn’t a number.

  It’s nothing.

  Nothing was the balance in his bank account.

  He thought there was more, almost sure of it. Then again, he hadn’t checked the exact balance of his account in a long, long time. He hadn’t had to. He didn’t think he was burning through cash that fast.

  It felt wrong.

  Normally, he paid with a swipe of a bank card, which these days was becoming more and more of an insert technique for use of a microchip and not a swipe anymore. Every couple of days, he’d simply withdraw cash and pass on getting a receipt which usually carried the total amount left in the account. That was one possible reason why he was surprised to see zero as a balance. But it shouldn’t have been, because no way was his balance zero.

  He had had money in there from his last direct deposit from the NCIS, which was the last professional job that he had.

  He remembered having a lot more than zero in his account. He remembered having at least five digits left. He knew the well was depleting—all wells run dry eventually—but not that fast. He had been sure that wasn’t a problem for him to face for some time still. Sure, he had lived a nomadic lifestyle, like a tourist, but he wasn’t living extravagantly. He wasn’t even living anything close to lavish. In some cases, not even a homeless person would’ve thought that he was living well off.

  He stared at the ATM machine, puzzled, like staring at it would make a difference. Suddenly, the machine angrily droned at him, a mean, gruff sound like a buzzer on a game show when the wrong answer was called.

  It was the ATM machine telling him that he needed to grab his card before it was sucked into the black hole of the ATM company’s bureaucrats.

  He jerked the card out and tried to refrain from taking it personal. Then he breathed in and breathed out, a sign that his normal, peaceful self was bordering on coming unhinged.

  Widow, gently, reinserted the bank card again and rekeyed in his passcode, which was easy to remember, hard to crack, unless the cracker knew him. And he wasn’t known by anyone, not anymore and not really ever, which was the way he liked it.

  The only people who knew him were from a past, long ago and long buried. Most of his past life was locked up in the top-secret corners of Fort Bragg, filed under “classified beyond classified.”

  The only place that his past still could be found was embedded in his memories, which he wasn’t planning to share with anyone, not anytime soon. Maybe if Widow ever met the right woman, the kind who has the master key to all of a man’s locks, then he might spill a secret or two. But that kind of future for Widow seemed like a null possibility, a nonfactor, or as his mother used to say, “a nothing burger.”

  Widow waited. The ATM machine cranked out the same bad news that it had before. And he cursed to himself. He didn’t bang the machine this time. It’s a felony to harm one of these things. At least, that’s what his brain told him in a kind of last-minute warning. Oddly enough, his brain’s last-minute warning sounded more like one of the hard-asses from his SEAL training, way back at Hell Week.

  He could hear their hardened, unsympathetic voices all muddled together.

  Widow decided that it was best to walk away before he broke the don’t tamper with an ATM law.

  He stood outside a twenty-four-hour gas station that served coffee, which is what he wanted. They also had a great stock of bottled water, which is what he needed. He hadn’t had a drink of water in around five hours because the last driver didn’t stop that whole time. He was parched.

  Widow had been in town for about thirty minutes. He rode into Eureka with a young United States Navy sailor, who was on a mission that Widow completely sympathized with.

  The fact that the driver had been a sailor was a big coincidence that wasn’t lost on Widow.

  The young sailor was on his way to Canada for a girl.

  He told Widow about how he and his Canadian girlfriend had exchanged words, had some doubt about their relationship, and she decided to return home, without him.

  After only being apart for a week, the young sailor had a change of heart. He realized that he loved her, that he couldn’t live without her. He left his post, not an AWOL situation, not really because the kid had leave built up. Widow imagined that he must’ve begged and pleaded with his CO to take it for a few days.

  The sailor decided to drive straight to her family’s home and convince her to marry him.

  He claimed to have grown up in the Midwest, which Widow confirmed by his accent.

  They continued to chitchat most of the way, which was fine by Widow. He enjoyed good conversation as much as silence.

  Widow asked about where he was stationed, which turned out to be Coronado, a base that Widow knew a lot about.

  Then Widow wondered if the guy was a SEAL. He was young, but it was possible. He wasn’t that young. Maybe he was in his late twenties. Widow had started out in his early twenties. The guy didn’t say what rank he was or which platoon. He said nothing specific, which just made Widow more suspicious.

  The only detail about his service that the young sailor had revealed was that he was stationed in Coronado. That didn’t mean much.

  The Naval base in Coronado was public knowledge and the fact that the SEALs worked out of there was also public knowledge.

  Then again, the fact that he was stationed in Coronado and then went out of his way to travel three hundred eighty-five miles and take Highway 93 straight up to Canada was weird.

  Widow had asked him about it, not point blank, but in a casual way. Turned out that they had had the same idea.

  The young sailor planned to take the scenic route. He said it was something he had done as a kid with his father. He said the old man didn’t live to see him make it into the Navy, but he knew that his fath
er would’ve been proud. For him the Navy was a family thing, passed down from father to son.

  It was an idea that Widow was familiar with. His mother had been a Marine and his father, who was a drifter who left his mom before he was born, had supposedly been in the Army.

  The young sailor reiterated the same notions about Highway 93 as the college stoners had. He told Widow about it covering a diverse terrain that made it great for road-tripping.

  Widow would’ve thought that it was more important to get to the Canadian girl as fast as he could. Seemed to him that it would’ve been smart to fly to her and ask her to marry him on the spot and then take her on a nice long road trip afterward.

  Widow said nothing about this because he also figured that maybe the young sailor wanted some extra time to think the whole romantic crusade over. Not a bad idea, in Widow’s opinion, but if he had been consulted about it, Widow would’ve told him to just drive to an airport and fly straight there, at once. Sometimes thinking things over isn’t good. Sometimes, it was best to shake things up, to be spontaneous, to jump off the cliff.

  His mother would’ve called it a leap of faith.

  Still, Widow didn’t offer much advice to the kid because what did he really know about love and marriage?

  He had never been close to marriage, not once, but he had known love. A couple of times. He tried not to think about it. Like many guys stationed and deployed from one place to the next, it was a sore subject. Hard enough to maintain a real relationship for a normal SEAL. Even harder for an undercover one.

  Nevertheless, the whole endeavor wasn’t lost on him.

  Widow ended up spending a lot of time with the young sailor, hours and hours. Widow knew that the guy spoke from the heart. He really loved this girl.

  Finally, the kid asked Widow for advice. He ended up telling him that he was doing the right thing. Better to make a mistake marrying the wrong girl than letting the right one go, was Widow’s conclusion.

  Widow had liked the guy so much that he even asked him for his phone number. Even though Widow had no cellphone, he figured that he could just call him in a few days and find out the second half of the story.