John Miller - The Last Family

The grandfather clock chimed three times. Paul could hear either Thorne or Joe snoring. It was a bizarre feeling having people in his cabin, but he didn’t dislike it. Aaron visited on rare occasions, usually on his way to fish Paul’s stream, but had never spent the night. The men had stayed because Joe was too drunk to navigate the trail back to Aaron’s.

Paul got out of bed and made his way quietly to the bathroom. He looked into the mirror above the sink, studying the hair and the beard. The familiar mountain man stared back at him. The hair didn’t really hide the damage but certainly cut down on the number of people who engaged him in idle conversation when he was in town. He readied the scissors but hesitated before attacking the beard. It was like losing an old friend. A warm friend.

He had to go out there and help them. He hoped there hadn’t ever been any real question of its being otherwise. Even if his own family had not been endangered, he hoped that he would have gone to help his friends find their tormentor. Martin would be all but impossible to find and even more impossible to take alive. That was just as well. Martin was the mad dog people spoke of when they used the term. Martin Fletcher had been taken alive once… and it hadn’t panned out.

The fact that his family was threatened required his attention. How could he live knowing that he had turned his back on them and allowed harm to befall them? Maybe they were safe, maybe not. He couldn’t gamble on it. He could protect them here, but they would not come to Clark’s Reward. This way he could do what needed to be done from a distance and get back up on the mountain, and they wouldn’t even have to know he had been down. He would insist that they not be told he had been out in their world. He loved them with everything he was, but he couldn’t face them again. The very idea caused his chest to tighten.

He looked at the man in the mirror and tried to remember what that face had looked like before it had been altered. He had looked at this other face so long that it was Paul Masterson’s smooth, unmarked face that was all wrong. His old face reminded him of another time, another life, and of Martin Fletcher. He realized that Fletcher had never been completely out of his mind.

He had met Fletcher because the expert on terrorism was training the DEA’s elite force when Paul came into the organization from Justice. Fletcher was a corn-fed, military-trained CIA asset who enjoyed inflicting pain. He had remarked once to Paul that interrogation was rarely about gaining information. He had explained that it isn’t what you learn that matters but what the person you’re working on lives to tell others. Torture one, and let his contemporaries see what you’re capable of.

Paul had never liked Martin Fletcher. Not that he wasn’t charming when he chose to be. But there had been something missing from the man’s personality that had bothered Paul from the get go. He lacked compassion, for one thing. He also lacked the ability to shoulder responsibility. But the main thing he lacked was real emotion. It was as if he mimicked emotions-acted them instead of felt them. And then there were the man’s eyes. His eyes were flat, lifeless.

Fletcher had joined Paul’s group as an adviser and had pulled strings to do that. Paul hadn’t felt comfortable with it, but the argument was that the group needed an objective observer, someone who knew the ropes and had experience dealing with Latin American drug cartels. He had pulled his weight, certainly hadn’t done anything overtly suspicious. But things started to happen. Deep-cover agents started disappearing. Most of them were working close to the two main cartels based in Colombia. Two had been in Mexico, working to uncover corrupt government officials.

Martin Fletcher had been getting sensitive intelligence somehow. Paul was certain he had purchased it, or possibly used blackmail to get it. Paul committed his theory to a report and passed the word upstairs. They knew that the cartels had a man on the inside of the DEA but couldn’t seem to get hard evidence. Paul knew it was Martin. Knew it in his heart. But proof was never forthcoming. So word had come down that the leak had to be plugged. Paul had plugged it by having evidence planted. Martin had been arrested, tried, and convicted. Paul had somehow believed that would be the end of it. With most men it would have been.

So Martin Fletcher hated Paul because Paul had been personally responsible for his arrest, his fall from grace. Death was unimportant to Fletcher, because in the world Martin inhabited, death was always a choice, a slipup or a few seconds away. Martin was an animal who operated near the top of a complex feeding chain-eat or be eaten. It was a life that depended on knowledge, sharp reflexes, planning, lack of conscience, and flawless intuition. Paul had defeated him and humiliated him. Killing him, the alternative, would have been understandable, even forgivable, in Martin’s mind.

Paul had known that Martin would come for him one day unless he was, as rumor had it, dead. He thought it was possible that the others had been killed first and the confession made so Paul would be forced to come out to play. Because the fact was Martin could have killed Paul at any time over the past years. Maybe he planned to kill the Masterson family while Paul watched from the sidelines, helplessly. He would enjoy that. If it was Martin, Paul was no match for him. A team might beat him, if it was the right group.

Paul closed his eyes and imagined Martin as he had known him. In Paul’s mind Martin had grown to mythical proportions. He was ten feet tall, had the instincts of a cougar, and was as strong as something hydraulic. Has a day ever passed that Marty didn’t cross my mind, soil some pleasant thought? Paul was afraid of him-deeply afraid. Maybe that, more than the other reasons, was why he had really hidden himself here. Paul felt as if Martin Fletcher were working the strings and they were leading from his hands to Paul’s life.

Paul looked at the wild beard one last time. He pressed the scissors against the jawline and squeezed. The first cut is the deepest, he thought as a bird’s-nest-sized clump of beard floated down to the basin.

Sunlight was-just beginning to sear the bottom of the sky with a light crimson band. Aaron was dressed and standing in the kitchen brewing coffee in an electric aluminum percolator. Something moved in the window, and as the back door opened he turned and was face-to-face with a beardless Paul Masterson. His nephew’s hair was combed back against his head, and the beard had been replaced with a large handlebar mustache. He opened the kitchen door and Paul stepped inside.

“Paul. Hell, son, I’ve seen happier faces in a proctology ward.”

“Coffee smells good,” Paul offered.

“I reckon you want some of it?” The old man frowned. “Never see you unless you want something. Bet you want the top of the brew?”

“Give me some of that burned syrupy stuff off the bottom, like you usually do.”

“Where’s your pals? Shit-faced I bet. Look like serious whiskey drinkers to me. Looks like you had a few yourself.” The old man poured two cups of coffee, replaced the pot on the stove, and sat. “Now, that’s hot.”

“Good, the heat’ll take the top layer off my tongue, cover some of the taste,” Paul said, taking a tentative sip. “Joe McLean does a right good jig with the bottle. Thorne’s a teetotaler. Alcohol doesn’t agree with his personality.”

They were silent for a long time as they sipped, steam rolling up over their cheeks.

“Never fails to amaze me what you can do to perfectly good coffee beans.”

“It’s free, ain’t it? You can get a twenty-five-cent cup of muddy water down the street anytime.”