Steven James - The Knight

The Infiniti belonged to Thomas Bennett.

The owner of Bearcroft Mine.

I sent my chair toppling backward as I stood. “Let’s go.”

As I sprinted for the hall I yanked out my cell and called dispatch to get some cars and an ambulance to Elwin Daniels’s house.

Colonel Cliff Freeman fired up the helicopter as Cheyenne and I slipped on our headphones and headset mics so we could communicate en route.

As we took off, I used my cell to pull the DMV photos for Thomas Bennett and Elwin Daniels so that we could visually identify the two men if either of them were at the ranch.

By the time I looked up, we were already soaring over the foothills toward the Rockies.

Giovanni dragged Thomas Bennett’s unconscious body into the barn and laid him on the hay-strewn ground.

He took a moment to close and latch the twelve-foot-tall sliding doors so that they could only be opened from the inside. The only other way into the barn was through the tack room.

With the doors shut, the barn was lit only by the sparse lightbulbs dangling from the beams high overhead and the four tiny windows on the east side.

The familiar odor of dried manure and dusty hay surrounded him, but now it was mixed with the stench of the stale urine on the floor of the greyhound’s cage.

The cage hung in the middle of the barn, about twenty-five feet away, suspended three feet above the ground by four chains cinched around the beams high overhead.

Giovanni had named the sleek, jet-black greyhound Nadine, after his grandmother whom he’d pushed the knife into when he was eleven. And now that he hadn’t fed the dog in four days, he knew she’d be motivated to eat whatever type of meat he offered her.

Even if it were still moving.

A wheelchair sat beside the cage, but the floor of the barn was too rutted and had too many loose boards to wheel Thomas around, so Giovanni picked up the man’s legs and pulled him across the hay.

As he passed the horse stalls, the Appaloosa and the black mare-the only two horses currently in the barn-watched him from behind their gates. The Appaloosa neighed and stomped at the hay as he passed, but he ignored her.

He arrived at Nadine’s custom-designed cage: four feet wide, eight feet long, and just tall enough for her to stand. Because of its weight, it barely swayed as she paced impatiently back and forth. He hoisted Bennett into the wheelchair.

From inside her cage, Nadine let out a burst of vicious barks that betrayed the fact that she’d grown up domesticated.

She stopped and locked her eyes on Giovanni. Snarled.

He’d expected her to be in a nasty mood, but the low feral sound coming from her throat surprised him. The amphetamines he’d injected into her throughout the week must have been making her even more aggressive than he’d anticipated. “Easy, girl,” he said. “Supper’s on the way.”

Bennett’s limp body slumped in the wheelchair, and Giovanni took a moment to prop him upright.

Then he retrieved a roll of duct tape from a shelf near the tack room and returned to the wheelchair to begin the preparations.

I spent the flight reviewing what I knew about the case, trying to discern whether Thomas Bennett was more likely the victim or the killer, but I didn’t have enough data to confirm or disprove either possibility.

We made it to the ranch in less than nine minutes.

“There!” Cheyenne pointed to the gray Infiniti FX50 parked beside the barn. A field stretched between the house and the barn, but had so many scattered pine trees and so much uneven terrain that I couldn’t see any good landing spots.

I asked Cliff, “What do you think?”

He shook his head. “Closest I can get is that field to the southeast.” He pointed to a meadow that lay about six or seven hundred meters from the ranch house.

I wasn’t sure how fast Cheyenne could run, but she sure appeared fit. And although I hadn’t been jogging much since last winter when I’d been shot in the leg, I’d recovered pretty well and I figured I could make it to the ranch in less than three minutes.

“Up for a run?” I asked her.

A gleam in her eye. “Only if it’s a race.”

I liked this woman. Liked her a lot. I patted Cliff’s shoulder. “

Take us down.”

He nodded and aimed the helicopter toward an opening in the trees.

Giovanni finished duct taping Thomas’s left wrist to the wheelchair. Tugged the tape tight. Ripped it off. Set down the roll.

There. Both wrists and both ankles were secure. Thomas wouldn’t be leaving that chair.

The spaces between the bars of Nadine’s cage were only wide enough for her muzzle, but that didn’t stop her from viciously attacking the air less than two feet from Giovanni’s arm as he stood nearby.

He felt a spray of her hot saliva on his forearm.

“Almost time,” he said, being careful not to get too close to her. “You’ve been more than patient. Just a few more minutes.”

Confident that Thomas couldn’t wriggle free, he walked past the cage to retrieve the duffel bag and the bucket of rose petals from the shelves near the maze of round hay bales on the barn’s west side.

He carried the duffel bag and the roses back to the wheelchair, set them down, and glanced at Nadine.

The top of the cage could be unlatched and had an opening through which Giovanni had lowered the tranquilized dog a week and a half ago. The cage’s only other door lay on the end a few feet from Thomas Bennett’s unconscious body. When unlatched, this second opening wasn’t large enough for the dog’s body, but it was large enough for her head.

That was the feeding door.

Greyhounds are smart, so it hadn’t taken Giovanni long to condition Nadine to eat whatever he placed in front of the feeding door.

He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out a silk sheet, then smoothed it across the ground.

He would be needing that for the body.

Cheyenne beat me to the ranch house, but not by much.

The barn lay a hundred meters past the house on the other side of the field.

We drew our weapons. “You take the house.” I tried to hide how out of breath I was. “I’ll get the barn.”

A quick nod and then she was on her way to the porch.

I rolled under a length of barbed wire fence and ran toward the barn.

Giovanni dipped his hand into the bucket, caressed the rose petals. Smooth. Velvety.

Fragrant.

He cupped a handful and tossed them onto the silk sheet, and they fell in gentle curling patterns that made him think of great, crimson snowflakes. Red on white. Petals the color of blood landing on a silken field of snow.

Jacked on adrenaline, I arrived at the barn built of wooden boards, baked dry in the Colorado sun.

Assess the situation.

Assess and respond.

I checked the Infiniti.

Empty.

Then turned to the barn.

The best way to get killed is to rush into a situation like Rambo. I’ve known too many agents and police officers who’ve died in the line of duty because they reacted instead of anticipated.

Be careful. Be smart.

I ran around the southeast corner and tried to picture what lay inside. I’d grown up on a farm in Wisconsin, so I knew barns, and this one probably had a tack room, the seed room, horse stalls, hay bales, dead farm equipment. This barn was nearly twenty-five meters long and twenty wide-larger than I’d thought at first.

Looking for a way in, I circled around the south side, saw that the four-meter high metal sliding doors were closed off. Tried sliding them open.

Locked.

Inside the barn a dog was barking. Wild. Ferocious. I’m not an expert on dogs, so I didn’t know what a greyhound sounded like, but this one sounded more like an attack dog than a racer.