The Standoff (Jack Widow Book 12), page 25
“Good choice, my boy.”
Brooks approached and came up to Rourke. He stopped his boots inches from Rourke’s head. He pointed his silenced gun at Rourke.
“Kill him?”
White shouted, “No! You promised!”
Abel looked at Rourke. He stuffed the Glock 22 into one of the pockets of his winter coat and fluttered the tailback off his butt. He squatted down, balancing on the soles of his boots.
He looked Rourke up and down.
Rourke was pressing at his chest hard with both hands. He was in pain from the bullet impact.
Abel reached his bony hand down and opened the sheriff’s coat. He grabbed both Rourke’s hands and forced them to separate from his chest. Rourke didn’t fight back.
Abel looked at Rourke's brown shirt, which was pooling with blood. He reached out a long finger and tapped on the chest, getting blood on his finger.
“Bulletproof vest, huh?”
Rourke nodded.
Abel said, “An old, shit one too. You’re lucky it worked at all.”
Abel cocked his head like a doctor examining a wound. He grabbed both Rourke’s hands once again and returned them to the wound.
“Looks like the vest saved your life,” Abel said and glanced at a name patch sewed into the breast pocket of Rourke’s shirt and said, “Sheriff Rourke. But your vest is old and shitty. Looks like the bullet penetrated and got you, but it’s mostly superficial. The round is jammed into the vest.”
Rourke said nothing.
Abel repeated, “You’re lucky.”
Brooks kept his weapon ready to kill the sheriff right there on the ground.
Abel stood back up and backed away. He stepped over to White and wiped the blood off his fingers onto White’s coat shoulder.
“You want him to live?”
“Yes.”
“You do what we say, and no one will die. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“You disobey me, or one of my guys, just once, and he dies.”
White swallowed hard out of relief because he thought by the way Abel talked he had abandoned the idea of taking his family hostage. That was shattered when Abel said one more thing.
Abel looked at Cucci.
“Pick him up. Take him into the barn and find out if the police know anything.”
Abel saw the look of betrayal on White’s face, and he added one more thing.
“Check his wounds and fix him up first. Then talk to him. That’s all.”
Cucci asked, “Want me to hurt him?”
“Give him some time. If he’s not cooperative, then we can use other methods.”
White interrupted.
“You said you would let him live.”
“I didn’t tell him to kill him. He’s just going to have a conversation. And I wouldn’t worry about what happens to him, Mr. White.”
Just then, Jargo came over the radio.
“Boss?”
Abel snapped a nod at Brooks, jerked a radio out of somewhere in his white robes that White hadn’t noticed, and tossed it to Brooks.
“See what he wants.”
Brooks caught the radio and clicked the button. He looked up at Jargo in the barn and pulled the receiver end of the radio in front of his lips.
“What’s up?”
“Helicopter! Same one from before, I think.”
Abel, White, Brooks, and Tanis were all in earshot and heard it. Flack heard it off his own radio. Cucci heard it but didn’t react. He had been given a direct order, and he was carrying it out. He lifted Rourke like Frankenstein’s monster, carrying a victim away into the night.
Rourke didn’t resist. Cucci scooped him up and carried him off into the barn.
The rest of them first looked up at Jargo, who pointed out to the northeast. Abel and White both had to spin on one foot to face that direction. Brooks and Tanis stayed where they were and looked up over the trees. Flack stepped farther out to the drive, away from the barn door and past Cucci on his way. He stopped behind Abel and looked up.
Several of the men raised their hands over their eyes. The sunlight that was there shining through the clouds beamed into their lines of sight like lasers.
They waited and searched the sky. Abel glanced at Brooks. Brooks got on the radio.
“Jargo, how far?”
“It’s three klicks away, but coming on fast like they know where they’re going.”
Brooks looked at Abel.
“We should take it out.”
A look of horror came over White’s face.
Take it out, he thought.
Abel thought for a second. They didn’t have the luxury of firepower heavy enough to take out a flying helicopter, not from the ground. The only possibility would be if Jargo took out the pilot. Could he do it? Sure, but not from three klicks away. But once it was a closer range, he could.
Abel made a decision.
“No. We could use the helicopter.”
“How? We can’t get the pipe bombs out of here by helicopter. Someone will notice a helicopter flying around.”
Abel glanced at White, whose facial expression changed to an emotion that was a combination of confusion and utter terror. He heard the words. He heard the right sequence—pipe bombs.
The confusion was the same, normal, expected expression that anyone would have. The terror part came on because White realized they didn’t intend to leave him alive. Before he heard those words, he thought he stood a chance of surviving. Not now.
Now, he was a dead man walking. Knowing there were pipe bombs meant he had heard too much. It may have been a slip by the one called Brooks. Whatever. It happened. He couldn’t unhear it.
Abel smiled a sinister grin at him that was supposed to be reassuring, but White doubted Abel knew how to be reassuring or comforting.
Abel turned back to Brooks.
“We can find many uses for it. It’ll get them off our back. For another, we can use it to get as far as possible. Just do it. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Jargo came over the radio.
“Boss, what do we do?”
Brooks answered.
“Nothing. Observe only.”
Brooks got off the radio and said, “We should take cover again. If they’re coming for us, they’ll do a sweep first.”
Abel said, “Of course.”
“What about the vehicles?”
“Leave them. They’ll see them and stop to look.”
32
Shep parked the patrol cruiser past the circle drive in the spot where Walter’s Tundra had been parked only twenty minutes earlier before Brooks tricked him into driving out to the road.
Shep unbuckled his seatbelt but left the car running. He looked at Adonis in the passenger seat. She undid her seatbelt and slipped her fingers into the handle to pop the door open and get out. She stopped there because Shep was looking at her, his left hand on the steering wheel. He didn’t get out.
Shep was about to brief her. She knew it. Over her career, many guys like Shep, lifetime cops, had looked at her the same way before giving instructions or a warning or briefing.
He pointed the index finger on his right hand across his chest at the farmhouse in front of them.
“Listen, this is my state. These are my people. I can tell you about the people who live here. They’re not gonna cooperate. Not likely. People out here don’t volunteer cooperation with cops. It’s just a way of life for them. If they have trouble, they take care of it themselves.”
Adonis waved her free hand up in the air like she was waving off tiny, invisible rockets. Like an old west quick-draw, Adonis ripped her sidearm out of a shoulder holster padded down on her left ribcage under her breast. She pulled it faster than Shep had ever seen someone do in real life, outside of shooting competitions.
The weapon was a standard ATF Glock 22 with fourteen rounds in the magazine, and one chambered. She ejected the magazine and showed Shep the bullets.
The Glock 22 has a 7.32-inch slide length, eight inches overall from the corner of the butt to the tip of the barrel, and it looked huge in her small hands. But she held it like she had fired it a thousand times a month at the shooting range, which was true except during months when she had too much caseload to make it into the shooting range.
“You were being a really good guy before. Don’t give me this you're a little lady bullshit! I’m a Resident Agent-in-Charge in the ATF and I’ve seen shit too. I’m not some fragile little woman who got this badge and this gun from affirmative action. I earned it. I earned this badge, and I earned every bullet in this gun. Got it?”
Shep raised both hands in the international sign of giving up like she was pointing a gun at him.
Adonis reinserted the magazine into the Glock and smacked it home. A little melodramatic, but she had learned long ago that men responded to visual aids and drama.
“Okay. Okay. I get it. I just wanted to warn you they may not cooperate with us.”
Adonis re-holstered her weapon—fast, almost as fast as she had drawn it.
“Let’s go.”
She pulled the door handle, opened it, and got out. She closed the door behind her. Shep followed suit, and they both approached the front door. They stepped up onto the porch. Adonis took the front and center position. She rang the doorbell. They both heard the standard doorbell chime through the house. They heard scurrying footsteps, like a child’s, and slow, regular footsteps, like an adult.
The door opened after the doorbell chimed and echoed through the structure and died to silence.
Standing in the doorway was a man wearing a worn, gray knit skullcap. Adonis would’ve guessed that underneath, he was bald, judging by the way his red hair seemed to end above the temples, where most people’s continued.
Standing directly behind him was a woman who was shorter than him, shorter than Widow by nearly two feet. She had curly hair and big eyes. She glowed angelically. Standing behind both of them was an entire clan, squeezed into a foyer that opened up to a huge floor plan.
Adonis quickly counted six people in all. Everyone looked related, like members of a family tree hanging out for a family day. One woman looked different. Adonis figured she was married into the family. But everyone else looked like the same genetics, even the two children. One was a boy who pushed his way to the front to see what was happening. Adonis could see his eyes weren’t on her, but were locked onto Shep’s holstered sidearm. The other child was a teenage girl. She came with the rest of them to see who was at the door, but once she saw Adonis, she lost interest and turned and walked back to whatever piece of furniture she had probably been glued to before Adonis rang the doorbell.
The old man was the first to speak.
“Hello. Can I help you?”
Adonis pulled out a black leather wallet with her badge pinned into one side. The wallet was shaped the same as the badge. It was only a badge holder. There was one empty pouch on the rear for her to stuff money in. It was empty. She showed the badge to the whole family. The boy’s eyes flicked from inspecting Shep’s holstered gun to Adonis’s badge.
“My name is Toni Adonis. I’m with the ATF.”
She left off the Agent part because she wanted to seem friendly and accessible, at Shep’s implied suggestion that country folk around Spartan County didn’t take kindly to law enforcement.
Abe White leaned into the badge. He squinted his eyes and stared at the gold badge’s blue center. He mouthed the words he read on it.
“Department of Justice. A-T-F. Special Agent.”
Then he retreated to his stance and asked, “How do I know that’s real?”
Adonis dropped her hand and pocketed the badge into her coat pocket.
She nodded and said, “It’s real.”
“Okay. What can I do you for?”
“This is Officer Pittman with the Highway Patrol.”
Abe put his three fingers on his chest and introduced himself like he was teaching someone how to pronounce his name. Adonis didn’t know if he was mocking, or it had been a stupid impulse. Either way, he did it.
“Abe White. And this is my family behind me. Now, why are you here?”
“Sir, how many people do you have in the house right now?”
Adonis’s eyes wandered behind him; only it wasn’t to recount the family. Her eyes darted behind Abe to see if there was any evidence of anyone else in the house.
Abe said, “Why do you want to know? You got a warrant?”
“Sir, we’re looking for very dangerous men. We’re not here because of you or your family.”
The wife grabbed at Abe’s arm and jerked him back.
She said, “Dangerous men? What men?”
Shep interrupted.
“Ma’am, it’s urgent that we find these men.”
Adonis stepped back in and raised a hand for Shep to stay quiet.
She asked, “Mrs…?”
“My name’s Abby White.”
“Mrs. White, we’re searching for any sign of a group of very dangerous men. Did you all hear about the explosion at the Athenian Compound?”
The whole family nodded, like real-life bobbleheads.
Abe said, “We heard about it.”
“Several of the men responsible for it have escaped. We believe they’re in this area.”
Terror overtook Abby’s face. Everyone else looked at each other like they were all keeping a secret.
Adonis looked at Shep and nodded. He took out his cell phone and swiped and clicked like he was searching for something. He stopped at his Notes app and read off it.
“Do you guys have a son named Walter?”
Abby nodded so hard it looked like her bobblehead might fall off. She dug her fingers into Abe’s forearm.
Abe said, “Yes. He’s not here right now, though. Why?”
Shep continued to half-glance at his phone.
“Did he call Sheriff Rourke about something to do with squatters at one of the farms nearby?”
“Yes. He saw some lights on or something when he drove in late last night.”
Adonis said, “Maybe the squatters are the men we’re looking for.”
Shep said, “They might’ve found one of the farms and are hiding out there.”
Abby said, “Oh, my.”
Adonis repeated, “How many people are on the premises? Here I mean?”
Abby said, “Six. Plus, our son. But he’s out.”
“Where’s he?”
Abe said, “He drove off to help a gentleman who came to the door. He said he broke down, up the road.”
“A man? What, man?”
Abe said, “Oh, an African fellow? He was tall. Maybe late forties.”
Adonis asked, “African?”
Foster stepped forward and gently shoved her mother aside.
“He means a black guy. He wasn’t from Africa. Least, he sounded American. There was no African accent or anything.”
Adonis nodded and asked, “Who are you, ma’am?”
“I’m Doctor White. Just call me Foster. The one who left with the black guy is my brother, Walter.”
“Okay. Where did they go?”
Abe said, “Walt took him back to his car. He said it was broken down out there on the road somewhere.”
Maggie, who had been holding her son by the forearm to keep him close to her and to keep him quiet, moved Dylan back behind her, and she stepped forward. Now, four members of the White family were huddled close to the front door. Abby stepped a little to the right and hugged the wall, but the chain of White family members stepping forward forced Abe to take a step out onto the front porch. He was still in his house slippers. He felt the cold between his toes.
Maggie spoke.
“You mentioned something about dangerous men?”
Adonis said, “Yes, ma’am. Very dangerous.”
“Could one of them be the tall black man?”
Adonis stayed quiet for a moment, but Maggie and the rest of the White family could see her brain searching through the dossier of bad men that she was looking for.
It only took a second for Adonis’s face to register that she located one name who fit the description from her memories of Abel’s files. There was a guy in his circle named Brooks. She couldn’t remember his exact designation or rank or military function. There were seven primary names in his circle.
Still, recognizing the description was enough for her face to send the wrong output to the White family. Maggie reacted first. She grasped a hand to her chest, and worry overtook her face. Abby followed next. They both started speaking over each other in near hysterics.
Shep said, “Now, we said nothing, ladies. Walt is probably fine.”
Abe looked at Adonis.
“We have to go get him.”
Adonis reached out and grabbed both of Abe’s shoulders.
“We will, sir. I promise.”
Shep interrupted.
“We need to ask you a few questions first. Just quick questions.”
“But my son. I told you he’s out on the road with that guy.”
Adonis said, “Step out here with me, sir.”
Abe shivered in the cold but didn’t go back to the mudroom for a coat. He folded his arms into his chest and stepped out onto the porch, and followed Adonis down to the bottom step. She led him just out of earshot of his wife and family.
“Mr. White.”
“Abe. Please.”
“Okay, Abe. We just came in from the road. We’ve already been up this way once, and we saw no broken-down car or any sign of anyone being out there on the road.”
It took Abe a second to figure out what she was saying. And when he did, his face went blank, like his mind checked out right there.
“Abe, earlier, there was a call from this house to the sheriff’s office.”
Abe snapped out of it and looked at her.
“Yeah. My son called. He thought there might be squatters at the place down the road. As you’ve already mentioned.”
“Right now, the sheriff isn’t answering his phone. We think that may be where they are now.”
“Pine Farms. That’s where he called about the squatters. But all he saw were some lights on at night.”
“Where’s Pine Farms?”
“It’s right across the main road, sort of diagonal. It’s our closest neighbor. Pine Farms’ driveway is probably fifty, maybe a hundred yards, mostly south of our mailbox. You can’t see it from here. But it’s that way.”
