Francis left the one with the shaggy mustache unconscious in the bathtub. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder by the strap before backing out of the bathroom. The shotgun had been a poor choice for inside the house. Even with the stock folded, it was cumbersome in doorways and narrow halls. In any case, he wanted to keep one hand free for the stun gun. He didn’t want to shoot anyone. He wasn’t a killer.
Still, he pulled the revolver before heading down the hall.
He paused at the bedroom door, cocked his head to listen. He definitely heard movement coming from within, then a man’s voice pitched low. Francis twisted the doorknob, not making a sound.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
Francis shoved the door open, rushing into the room in the same motion.
Emma lay on the bed. Cavanaugh leaned over her, shaking her by the shoulders, but his head came up when Francis entered. Cavanaugh’s expression shifted from annoyed to suddenly worried when he saw the revolver in Francis’s fist.
“Take it easy, kid,” Cavanaugh said.
Francis lifted the revolver, pointed it at Cavanaugh’s face. “Get away from her.” He thumbed back the revolver’s hammer. He kept his hand with the stun gun low and behind his leg.
Cavanaugh stood straight and took a step back from the bed. “Take. It. Easy.”
“Go over there.” Francis waved the revolver to a spot across the room. In order to get there, Cavanaugh would have to walk right past him, and then Francis would put him down with the stun gun.
Cavanaugh moved slowly. “You’re in way over your head, kid. If I were you, I’d want to talk this over so everyone can get out of this in one piece. I got a bunch of guys outside. Shoot me in the head, yeah, sucks for me, but it doesn’t help you. They’ll hear the shot and swarm in here, and then you’re done. The girl too.”
“Just keep moving.”
When Cavanaugh passed in front of him, Francis brought the stun gun up fast. Cavanaugh had been ready, grabbed Francis’s wrist. With his other hand, he grabbed the pistol, pushed it away.
Francis tried to pull away, but Cavanaugh stepped in, brought a knee up hard into Francis’s groin. Pain flared in his testicles, and it took every bit of Francis’s willpower to resist the need to drop and curl into the fetal position. His face went hot, nausea rising up.
They bounced around the room, holding on to each other, each trying to get the upper hand. They banged into the desk and the dresser, knocking over baseball trophies. Their legs tangled, and both went down, Cavanaugh ending up on top.
Francis tried to bring the stun gun up, but Cavanaugh had the angle and put all his weight into holding Francis’s arm down. But this meant the hand holding the revolver at bay was in a weaker position. Francis began to twist his hand, and slowly the barrel swung even with Cavanaugh’s left eye.
“Shit!” Cavanaugh let go of Francis’s other arm so he could push the barrel of the revolver away.
Francis jammed the stun gun under Cavanaugh’s chin and thumbed the trigger.
Zap.
Cavanaugh went rigid a split second, then fell limp across Francis’s body. He groaned but didn’t move. Francis pushed him off, then zapped him again.
“Fucker!”
He zapped him a third time. Cavanaugh lay still.
“Sh-shoot … him,” came a weak voice. “Shoot…”
Emma lay still on the bed, one eye open but glassy. “Kill … kill him.”
Francis ignored her and lurched to his feet. The ache in his balls was going to slow him down, but it was already beginning to ebb.
He unbuckled the belt around Emma’s ankles, then untied the cord around her wrists. “Can you stand? Can you walk?”
She muttered something unintelligible.
The urge to simply wait and rest nearly seduced him. He hurt, and Emma was obviously in no shape to go anywhere. Maybe he could just lie down next to her, just for a few seconds.
But there were still men out there with guns, and soon they’d lose the fog.
“Emma, please. Come on.”
He put one of her arms around his neck, lifted her off the bed. Part of her must have been listening, because she tried to stand for him but nearly collapsed when her feet hit the floor. She groaned and flopped back on the bed.
“Can’t … can’t feel my feet.”
She fought hard to stay conscious, eyes trying to focus on him.
Francis retrieved the shotgun, slung it over his shoulder, stuck the stun gun into his back pocket. “Easy, Emma. I’ve got you.”
He bent and gathered her up, shifted her weight, then heaved her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
Thank God she’s thin. I need to start working out.
He wrapped one arm around her bare legs to hold her steady, revolver up in the other hand, and headed down the hall. By the time he made it to the kitchen, his legs already felt weak, partially because of the knee to the balls, partially because of Emma’s weight.
If I put her down, I’ll never get her up again.
He opened the kitchen door and stuck his head out. The fog was still thick. The others were out there somewhere, looking for him. They would search the barn as a matter of course, but that’s just where Francis had to go. Luck. He just needed a little luck.
He nudged the door open the rest of the way and headed out through the fog, ears straining to hear a voice or a footfall or any warning at all the thugs were nearby. He circled the barn to the smaller side door, paused to listen.
A sharp pain spread from his shoulder blades, and he shifted Emma’s weight slightly. He’d need to set her down soon, but he forced himself to move slowly. He opened the door a couple of inches, stopped again to listen, then eased the door open the rest of the way and entered, pulling it closed softly behind him.
The lights were on, and he froze. He tried to remember if he’d shut them off or not. He had. He started backing toward the door but stopped himself. No, the lights being on was a good thing. It meant they’d been here and searched and left.
His eyes darted around the interior of the barn. He hoped they’d left.
Francis took the narrow path between the GTO and the tractor, circling around to the other side of the Pontiac. He opened the door. He bent, grunting, and gently lay Emma in the back seat. It was a relief to put her down. He rubbed his shoulder and neck.
Emma muttered something. She tried to lift her head, fighting to stay conscious, eyes blinking and trying to focus.
“It’s okay now,” Francis whispered. “We’ll be out of here soon. Just sleep.”
Wait, what did they say to do if somebody had a concussion? Maybe he was supposed to keep her awake. How did one even diagnose a concussion anyway? Something with eye dilating, Francis thought. He couldn’t quite remember.
Because he was fucking useless.
Stop panicking, Francis told himself. And keep moving.
He reached in and buckled the seat belts around her as best he could. There wouldn’t be time to do it later.
He circled back to the other side of the car and turned his attention to the tractor. Yet another thing he didn’t know a thing about—starting a tractor. He hoped it wasn’t complicated. He’d mowed his grandmother’s lawn with a riding mower when he was in high school. It couldn’t be more difficult than that, could it?
While he pondered the tractor, something else nagged at him. Something was … missing?
He looked down at the floor. The tarp was there. The bald thug wasn’t.
Francis turned quickly to run back to—
The fist hit him square between the eyes. His vision filled with stars exploding like fireworks. He staggered back into the tractor, bruising his back on some jutting piece of machinery, then rolled away, trying to blink his vision clear.
He sensed the bald thug coming forward. Francis reached into his back pocket and came out with the stun gun. He waved it wildly in front of him, thumbing the trigger, the blue light spitting and popping. His ears rang. He blinked and cleared his vision just in time to see the bald one rushing him.
The thug slapped the stun gun away, and it spun off into the distant, dark reaches of the barn. The thug kept coming, barreled into Francis, and both of them went down. The thug ended up on top. Francis punched upward. The thug’s chest absorbed it as if it were nothing.
One of the thug’s hands took Francis by the throat. The other hand squeezed tight into a hammy fist. He raised it high. “You little fucking shit. Zap me with my own stun gun.”
Francis tried to talk, to plead, but the thug’s fist tightened on his throat.
The fist came down hard, and a whole new world of pain exploded in Francis’s jaw. His eyes filled with tears. The man sitting on his chest was a blur.
“Little fucking cocksucker,” the bald thug said. “Fucking kill you.”
The thug squeezed harder, and Francis tried to suck for air and failed. His vision grew cottony around the edges, and he felt himself fading, slowly being drawn down into a cold blackness. He tried to pry at the fingers at his throat, but there was no strength remaining in him. As darkness closed in, his ears filled with a roaring like the blood in his body rushing to a single spot.
Francis shoved his hand down between his body and the thug’s, fingers clawing, searching.
“You’re going to die now, little man,” the thug said. “And then we do whatever we like to your freaky little bitch girlfriend. That’s what I want you to know. You’ll be dead, hero, and nobody will save her. Is that what you think you’re doing? You’re not saving nobody.”
Francis’s hand closed around the butt of the revolver stuck in his waistband. He twisted it, and the thug felt the cold metal in his gut. The recognition of what he was feeling dawned in his eyes.
The gun went off, the report muffled by the two bodies sandwiched around it. Francis felt a burning force against his stomach as the revolver bucked.
I’m shot. Oh my God, I’m dead.
Francis realized the thug had gone limp on top of him. He pushed the body off and scooted away. The thug rolled back up against the tractor, and at first Francis thought he was dead. The thug blinked once slowly, an expression of disbelief on his ashen face. One of his trembling hands went up to the hole in the center of his chest, blood seeping between each finger.
Francis inched away from him, looking on in horror.
The thug worked his mouth to say something, but suddenly coughed once so violently it made Francis flinch. Blood erupted from the thug’s mouth, dripping down his bottom lip and chin. His eyes met Francis’s, pleading.
In the second Francis’s brain spun, wondering what to do, it was over. He watched the light fade from the thug’s eyes. Francis imagined he could almost see the life lift out of the man and drift away like a puff of smoke. The dead man’s eyes looked like glass. And in that moment, it didn’t matter if he was a good guy or a bad guy. In the single pull of a trigger, Francis had ended the man, something so final it was hard to believe. Of course it was self-defense, but Francis stood, weak and sweating, the feeling that something inside of him had shifted and could never shift back into place again.
He took three deep breaths and steeled himself. There wasn’t time for this. Francis couldn’t afford the luxury of self-reflection. Not now.
He looked down at the revolver dangling loose in his hand. He didn’t want it anymore but knew he might need it. He picked up the shotgun where it had fallen and took both to the back seat of the Pontiac. He dumped them in the floor behind the driver’s seat and paused to look at Emma.
She breathed easily, eyes closed, legs pulled up slightly. If it hadn’t been for her face, she might simply have been napping peacefully. Her bottom lip was split, and the left side of her face swelled badly.
Francis went back to the tractor, climbed up into the seat. At first, he had no idea what he was looking at, but then it turned out to be as simple as he’d hoped. He thumbed the starter button and was relieved when the tractor cranked immediately. It made a thunderous rattling sound much louder than Francis had expected. He needed to hurry and get the thing out of there. He wanted to attract attention, but not to the barn.
He hopped down from the tractor and turned out the lights before throwing the barn doors wide. Back atop the tractor, he shifted into gear and headed out, the tractor’s headlights impotently trying to penetrate the fog. He tried to remember what his environs looked like without the fog and pointed the tractor toward what he was fairly sure was the widest part of the pasture.
Francis leaped from the seat, hit the ground, and rolled. He sprang back up, looked to see the tractor still on course, its shape slowly being swallowed by the fog, only the fuzzy glow of the headlights still visible.
Francis cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “There he goes! He’s getting away!”
For a long, tense moment, Francis thought he had accomplished approximately dick.
Then suddenly shouts back and forth through the fog. Francis glimpsed dark shapes running after the tractor. More shouting.
Francis stood frozen, listening. Had it really been that easy?
The sound of gunshots sent Francis running back to the barn.
He climbed in behind the wheel of the Pontiac and cranked the ignition. The engine rumbled, and the vibrations felt like raw power. He shifted into gear, and the car erupted from the barn like it had been shot from a Howitzer.
As he sped past the house, he saw the one with the shaggy mustache stumble out the front door, gun in hand. Francis mashed the gas pedal and shot down the narrow dirt road. If he could just remember the zigs and zags between here and the highway, he should be home free. He glanced back to check on Emma, saw she was still sleeping.
When he faced forward again, a large SUV loomed large in the fog directly ahead of him.
“Shit!”
Francis jerked the wheel and hit the brakes. The Pontiac fishtailed and missed the SUV by an inch. There were two more vehicles parked behind the SUV. He realized this was where Cavanaugh and his goons had parked before slipping up on him through the fog.
The sun was up now, and soon the fog would burn off. Until then, Francis decided to drive on a little more slowly. He was desperate to put miles between him and the gunmen, but escaping only to wrap the car around a tree wasn’t something he wanted to explain to Emma.
* * *
When his men had found the tractor spinning its wheels in a ditch on the other side of the pasture, Cavanaugh cursed and knew they’d been suckered. “These little shits are making us look like clowns.”
Ernie sat behind the wheel. There was still a little fog, so he leaned forward, squinting as he drove. The other two vehicles with the rest of the boys followed behind. They were trying to hurry. If Berringer and the girl made it to the highway, then they could head off anywhere, and Cavanaugh would be back at square one.
“What year?” Cavanaugh asked.
“I don’t know,” Ernie said. “Sixties.”
“Sixty-one? Sixty-two? Sixty-three?”
“Give me a fucking break, okay? I’m not a car guy. Late sixties. Sixty-eight or sixty-nine.”
“You didn’t see a logo? Ford or Chevy?”
Ernie shook his head. “I’d know it if I saw it again.”
Cavanaugh pulled up a photo of a 1969 Camaro on his smartphone and showed it to Ernie. “That?”
“No. The front end looked more pointy.”
“Pointy?”
“Yeah, I dunno. Pointy.”
Cavanaugh showed him a picture of a 1969 Corvette.
“Jesus, I know a Vette when I see one,” Ernie said. “Not that pointy. A muscle car.”
Cavanaugh showed him a half dozen more photos, but Ernie kept shaking his head.
Then Cavanaugh showed him a picture of a 1968 Pontiac GTO.
“That’s it,” Ernie said. “I’m positive.”
“What color?”
“Red.”
“What kind of red?”
Ernie frowned at him. “Red red.”
Cavanaugh sighed. “There’s a whole spectrum, you know. A bright primary sort of red but also a red with some purple in it like a burgundy or something.”
Ernie glanced at Cavanaugh like maybe he wondered if he were being put on. Then his brow wrinkled as he thought about it a moment. “A little darker. Like red with some cherry in it, maybe.”
“Okay.” Cavanaugh dialed the number into his smartphone. “We’re going to find this Berringer son of a bitch and get him for what he did to Ike. We’re going to feed him his own balls.”
* * *
Bryant was eager to see how this would work. Middleton had ordered the new software to be completely uninstalled from Bryant’s setup and relocated to the facility built into the new Sonoma house. So Cavanaugh’s request might be one of the few chances remaining for Bryant to see the software in action.
He plugged 1968 or 1969 Pontiac GTO, cherry red or candy-apple red into the search string for Berringer and the girl, then sat back and waited. He didn’t need to add any other search parameters. The software knew what to do, and it was a pleasure to see the thing in motion. He’d had it put up on the big monitor so he could see everything unfold as the program went step-by-step through the process.
The software accessed multiple websites to get the average gas mileage for that year and make of automobile. Speed limits for the surrounding roads and highways. Numbers flashed across the screen as the software used the information to calculate a search radius.
Then a blur of photographs across the screen, vehicles with rest stops or highways in the background. Bryant could tell they were digital image captures from various surveillance cameras.
One of the images suddenly blinked, an accompanying bell, alerting him the computer had a hit. A picture-in-picture image of the Pontiac at a gas pump moved up to the corner of the screen. The man filling the car with gas had his back to the camera but could have been Berringer. They didn’t get a credit card hit, so he must have paid cash. The image was from a truck stop on Highway 50 near Vermillion. The surveillance system saved its footage to the cloud, and the software accessed it with ease.
Another picture-in-picture image flickered into existence directly below the surveillance cam photo of the Pontiac. It was a Google Maps image pinpointing the exact location. A second later, another image appeared in the other corner of the screen. The Pontiac again, but this time a photo from a Nebraska State Patrol dash cam. To Bryant, it seemed the trooper was just parked on the side of the road, and the Pontiac had happened by.
The next image was again from Google Maps, showing the trooper’s location as just over the state line on Highway 15.
They’d located Berringer and the girl, and had the direction in which they were traveling.
The entire process had taken ninety-seven seconds.
* * *
“Highway 15.” Cavanaugh jotted it into his notebook. “Got it. Listen, if the computer gets another hit, let me know right away. Maybe you can work up some kind of intercept course for us. Right. Okay, thanks.”
Cavanaugh hung up and then grinned at Ernie. “I think we got the little bastard.”