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From a distance, Maddock and Bones saw several windows in Ruth Harshbinner’s farmhouse lit by internal lights. Bones raced up the driveway, toward a late model Dodge Ram. Its diesel engine was running, and its driver’s side door was open. The headlights shined on an older man crouched on the ground. He was talking into his cell phone while stroking a trembling Doberman Pinscher. Maddock thought he recognized it as the same dog that had been with Brenda earlier.
Bones skidded to a stop, allowing Maddock to jump out a half second before him.
“I don’t know where she is,” the man nearly shouted into his cell phone. “Her flashlight’s on the front lawn, and they took a shot at our dog.” The man stood and turned to see who was approaching him. “Just get here as quick as you can.”
Maddock slowed, holding his hands in plain sight. “Are you Brenda’s father?”
“I am,” he said, his gaze shifting from Maddock to Bones. “Who exactly are you?”
“Mrs. Harshbinner hired us to do some work around her house,” Maddock said.
“You’re that Indian fella that beat up Don Murphy’s boys. Brenda told me you two were working out here.”
Maddock asked, “What happened?”
“Why are you here?” Brenda’s father slowly approached. He was on the lean side, wearing stained coveralls and a John Deere baseball cap. His eyes squinted in suspicion. At his side, Dolph gazed dully up at them. “What made you show up just now?”
Maddock said, “Brenda texted me about twenty minutes ago that she thought she saw someone around Mrs. Harshbinner’s house. I texted back, telling her to stay where she was. When she didn’t answer, I tried to call and got voicemail.”
“That doesn’t say why you’re here.”
“Ruth Harshbinner’s son, Johnny, was caught trespassing, and his mother changed the locks. We thought he might’ve been trying to break in, and we told Mrs. Harshbinner we’d watch out for that.”
“Well, if it was Johnny, he shot Dolph, and Brenda either ran off or he took her.”
Maddock’s breath caught in his throat. That explained why the man was treating them with such suspicion.
“Grazed Dolph’s leg.” The man looked down at his dog, seemingly trying not to think about the possibility that Brenda had been abducted. He gestured to the hind leg with a bandana tied around it. “Just a graze, thankfully.” He swiped his thumb across his cell phone’s screen. “Sheriff’s on the way. I better call the vet.”
When the man began talking into his cell, Bones whispered to Maddock, “Let’s go. We’ll get tied up with the sheriff if we stay.”
“We’re going to go see if we can find Brenda,” Maddock said.
“What?” the man asked. “You know where she is—where Johnny took her?”
Maddock and Bones backed toward their SUV. “We don’t know if it was Johnny,” Bones said. “We’re just going to cruise the roads and hope we get lucky.”
They climbed into their vehicle and Bones sped down the driveway. They were a quarter mile away when they passed a crossroad. Down it they saw the flashing red and blue lights of a deputy’s car.
“Where to?” Bones asked.
“Well,” Maddock said, “if it’s Trident that took Brenda, they probably don’t have much familiarity with the town. Only place they would know—”
Bones finished the sentence with his partner, “—is Johnny’s print shop.”
“You remember where his shop is?”
Bones nodded and stepped further down on the gas pedal.
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Johnathan Harshbinner’s print shop stood just off of Main Street. It took up half of the first story of a brick building that was well over a century old. Above it were two stories of old apartments. The streetlights showed the apartment windows to be dirty with no curtains and several having pigeon droppings scattered around. That suggested they were unoccupied.
The print shop had a large display window to either side of the street entrance. A gray Lincoln Town Car from the late 70s sat with its engine running across the street. It was in near pristine condition, and that probably said something, but Maddock wasn’t sure what. The driver sat smoking a cigarette and observing the minimal street traffic. Lights were on somewhere in the back of the print shop, but nobody was in the front area that Bones or Maddock could spot as they drove past. Lights didn’t necessarily mean anything as the antique shop next door, as well as several other businesses on the street, maintained internal lighting, probably to deter burglars. But those businesses that did have lights on, had them in the display windows or front areas.
“Park around the corner so we can go around back,” Maddock said. “If there aren’t stairs to the apartments, there might be old fire escapes.”
Maddock was right. A rusting metal framework of fire escapes lined the back of the building. The alleyway running between the backs of the buildings was relatively clean. It held a few old tires and some broken pallets and several green dumpsters. Maddock had definitely seen worse.
Avoiding line of sight from the print shop’s back door window, they climbed atop a dumpster to jump and reach the fire escape’s bottom platform. Using his knife in the dry-rotted wood, Bones had little trouble prying one of the old apartment’s back windows open.
Their flashlights revealed that Johnny used the apartment above his shop for storage. Boxes of paper, old folding and cutting machines and dusty file cabinets filled several of the rooms. The trick was trying to make their way across the room without causing the floorboards to squeak.
Maddock discovered a door, apparently barred or padlocked from the outside. The lock was meant to keep people out, not in. With little effort, he removed the pins from the hinges. Then Bones easily pulled the door back from its frame, bending the cheap hasp in the process.
The stairs led down to a narrow hallway. One door opened onto the street. One on the left wall probably went to the antique store. The one on the right, to Johnny’s print shop.
The old door had a modern deadbolt, but also narrow frosted windows built into it. Both men listened, and heard muffled voices. They sounded deep, deeper than Brenda’s, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in the print shop.
Bones took his knife and began prying at the wood holding the glass in place. “Not very security conscious,” he whispered back over his shoulder.
Maddock replied, “Small town.”
Two minutes later Bones handed the antique pane of glass to his partner and reached in, turning the dead bolt’s latch to unlock it. Definitely not security conscious.
They stepped into the dark work area. Light from an office, ahead and to the right cast long shadows as it played over various types of equipment: offset printers, cutting and folding machines, a silk screening machine and dryer and a table filled with folded stacks of t-shirts. To the left, leaning next to the doorway that led to the front of the shop, with its counter and display area, stood a burly man in a dark suit. White shirt and no tie, like he’d left a wedding reception. A bulge under the jacket suggested a handgun.
The man smoked a cigarette while observing passing traffic through the shop’s front windows.
To the right, where fluorescent light emerged from an open door and window with Venetian blinds only partially closed, sounds of conversation emerged.
“Those two guys,” a distressed feminine voice said. It was Brenda’s. She spoke with a bit of a lisp. Maddock recognized it as someone speaking with a swollen, probably tender lip. “I don’t know their names. They just told me they were hired by Mrs. Harshbinner to do some video recording and watch the house.”
“Watch for what?” asked a deep voice. The man sounded like he gargled gravel in his spare time.
“They didn’t tell me.”
A thud, preceded a brief scrape of metal on tile. It was joined by a sudden gasp of expelled air, followed by a groan.
Only half glancing back, white teeth revealed the man watching the shop’s front was grinning.
Wordlessly, Bones nodded his head toward the grinner. The pair split up, with Maddock moving behind the cutter, toward the table laden with shirts.
“Well, do you want to rethink that last answer?”
Maddock figured they hadn’t been here long. Brenda looked like a tough farm girl. She probably had loyalty toward Ruth Harshbinner, but probably not so much for he and Bones. And she certainly hadn’t had training to resist harsh interrogation. If these were Trident men, they were just getting started.
Maddock used Brenda’s voice to mask the little noise he made approaching the back office.
“They didn’t say,” Brenda said, quickly adding, “but I can guess...if you want me to.”
“Let me hear your supposition,” the gravelly-voiced man said. “And then I’ll decide.” He paused. “If your supposition lacks insight, Arnie will break several of your ribs. Then we’ll return to your attractive face. Arnie loves to break teeth.”
Several heartbeats passed before the dairy farmer started talking, hesitancy in her voice. While she spoke, Maddock crouched low and peered a half second into the office through the open door.
“Mmm—Mrs. Harshbinner doesn’t want her son—Johnny—on the property. He’s got a lawyer from out of town and wants to take her farm.”
Maddock spotted three men in the large office. A tall man with frizzy gray hair and narrow mustache stood between Brenda and the doorway, blocking most of Maddock’s view of the woman. She was blindfolded and duct taped to an office chair. Behind her was a desk filled with papers, a tower computer, several flat screen monitors and a landline phone. Beyond the desk, along the back wall, were shelves filled with papers, manuals and several bowling trophies. A heavyset man with thick sideburns leaned close to Brenda, wearing close-fitting leather gloves. Arnie. He was doing the punching.
Blood covered Brenda’s chin as it seeped down from her swollen lower lip. Another man, in his thirties, Latin American from his hair and skin tone, leaned against one of the shelves in back, observing.
All were dressed like the man watching the street, in black suits with white dress shirts. And all carried firearms in shoulder rigs under their jackets.
“Where did Ruth Harshbinner get the money to hire the two men—what were their names?” the frizzy, gray-haired man asked. Maddock guessed his rough voice was due to years of smoking.
“She still owns the farm,” Brenda said, “so she’s got money—and I told you, I don’t know their names.”
The Latin American man nodded and checked his cell phone. “Chloroform her.”
Arnie, the heavyset man that had been punching Brenda, reached into a pocket.
“What?” Brenda asked. “No.”
Arnie opened a dark bottle and poured some clear liquid onto a handkerchief.
Maddock knew it was his chance. His Walther already drawn, he knew Bones was waiting for him to make his move. At least two of the three men would be focused on Brenda, maybe all three, while they were putting her under. That was his best chance for surprise.
As soon as the handkerchief went to her nose, Maddock stood in the doorway, pistol aimed at the Latin American man—the apparent leader, and shouted. “Hands up, and freeze.”
Without hesitation, the Latin American man dropped his cell and went for his pistol. The gray-haired man went for his gun too, albeit a fraction of a second slower. Arnie grabbed Brenda and spun the chair between him and Maddock in the doorway. He dropped the bottle and went for his gun while keeping the chloroform-soaked handkerchief clamped over Brenda’s nose.
Maddock fired. The Latin American man staggered back into the shelves with a bullet buried in his chest just to the left of his sternum. The gray-haired man had his gun drawn before taking a bullet to the belly. He staggered back, dropping his pistol and collapsed to his knees, clutching his stomach. By the time Maddock shifted his aim to the last man in the office, the heavyset opponent had hunkered down behind Brenda, with his gun drawn.
“Now what’re ya going to do?” Arnie taunted. “Drop it or—”
With no safe shot to take at Arnie as he had the others, Maddock adjusted his aim and pulled the trigger. His bullet slammed into the squatting man’s knee as it protruded from behind the cover of Brenda and the chair.
The big man hobbled and toppled onto his side, but didn’t give up his gun. Before the Trident operative could take aim at Brenda, or Maddock himself, Maddock pulled the trigger again, taking the Trident man in the forehead.
Maddock rushed into the room and kicked the pistol away from the kneeling gray-haired man. He looked up at Maddock while sagging to a prone position on the floor, blood seeping from between the fingers of both his hands. “Call an ambulance,” the man gasped.
“I aim to do that in a moment,” Maddock said, looking over his shoulder, back into the print shop’s work area. The guard was on the floor and Bones was taking on the man from the Lincoln. From somewhere the Trident man had gotten a ball peen hammer. He, however, wasn’t trained in hand-to-hand combat. Bones ducked under his roundhouse swing and took the man in the ribs with his knife. A quick head-butt by Bones ended the fight.
Their eyes met and Maddock hurried to check Brenda. She was still blindfolded and taped to the chair, and she was unconscious, but breathing steadily. He examined the brown glass bottle on the floor. The acrid odor of its spilled contents confirmed what the label read: Chloroform. She’d be out for a short while, but okay.
The old man on the floor was already going into shock. Maddock had witnessed more than his fair share of mortal wounds. The expanding pool of blood suggested that no matter what Maddock did or how fast the EMTs arrived, the gray-haired man would be joining his two dead cohorts.
“Your guys?” Maddock asked.
“Out for the count. Both should survive,” Bones said. “Brenda?”
“Knocked out. Chloroform,” Maddock said, striding over to the desk. “Get their cell phones.” Taking a clean shop rag from the nearby shelf, he lifted the desk phone and dialed 911.
While there might be ballistic evidence, nothing else would tie Maddock and Bones to the scene. Brenda had been blindfolded and unconscious. Neither of Bones’ foes had gotten a good look at him in the dark work area. What would be obvious was that Brenda had been kidnapped, likely by these folks. And if the bullet that struck Dolph could be recovered, that would link one of these men to the abduction scene. Who took the kidnappers down would hopefully remain a mystery.
The 911 dispatcher’s voice calmly asked, “911. What is the nature of your emergency?” The landline provided an automatic location.
Even if the gunshots hadn’t been heard and reported, law enforcement would be dispatched to the print shop to investigate the call.
Maddock checked on Brenda again, and then, without a word they headed out the back way, using the shop rag to remove any fingerprints on the side and upper door along the way.