John Miller - Inside Out

The paved road ended at a cul-de-sac surrounded by what appeared to be a good start on a mountain range constructed entirely of rubbish.

Tomeo sat in the backseat next to Apache. He was Chinese-American and wore his thick black hair combed straight back. He was almost six feet tall and had been a Navy SEAL. His easy smile and sense of humor gave people the impression that he was the opposite of what he actually was.

Mickey, the team's fourth member was in the front passenger seat. “We've got company,” he said.

“I see him,” Lewis said evenly.

A battered Ford pickup truck of indeterminable color was backed into a tall horseshoe of garbage. A short, bandy-legged man wearing a yellow plastic rain poncho stood beside the open tailgate trying to look innocent of violating warning signs against dumping refuse. Lewis parked the big Suburban broadside to the truck, blocking it in, and lowered his window. Trapped, the man took tentative steps toward the invading vehicle, peering out from under the poncho's plastic hood.

Lewis lowered the window and studied the man. He could have been in his fifties or seventies-the lack of teeth made guessing his age difficult. Beneath a crop of wild white hair, his face was crisscrossed with crevasses and he peered at Lewis through eyes whose muddy irises appeared to have been laid in ancient ivory.

“How y'all do nah?” he inquired, grinning uncertainly.

“You taking that trash out for me,” Lewis said, “or dumping?”

“I was taking,” the dumper replied, nodding suddenly as though the motion was necessary to power his next breath. “Lots a good stuff in here people trow away, you know.” He opened his arms like a welcoming store owner.

“No signs threatening anyone for taking the shit away,” Tomeo said.

“This heah you place?” the man asked, his voice cracking. “I don't mean no trespass atall.”

“You out here alone in this nasty weather?” Lewis asked him.

“Yeah, was jus' bout to leave out wit' my little load here.”

A broad-faced pit bull with chewed-up pyramid-shaped ears leaped down from the truck's open window and approached the strangers in the Chevrolet. He stopped beside his master and measured the Suburban's occupants by sniffing the air with his upraised nose. Not liking what he discerned, he growled and the hair on his neck rose.

“He don't bite, though,” the man said. “Get on back in the truck, Badger,” he said. “We be going now, if you let us pass on by.”

“I never cared for dogs,” Lewis told the man.

“He all right, though, this one,” the man said defensively.

“They're plain stupid. Don't know when to growl and when not to.”

“Don't we have work to do?” Apache sounded annoyed.

Lewis looked in the rearview at Apache in the seat directly behind him. His hand rose to the window's ledge. He squeezed the trigger before the man standing in the rain saw the pistol. The SOCOM's silenced bark was not much louder than the sound of the dog falling over on its side. Its stiff legs quivered. The dumper was speechless, his now-open mouth a hole ringed in pink gums.

“What you wan' do dat for?” the old man asked.

“I like your clothes,” Lewis said. “Take 'em off.”

The dumper slowly removed his coat and handed it to Lewis through the window. He pulled off the flannel shirt, his boots, and his overalls, and Lewis took each with his free hand while maintaining his aim.

The old man stood bent and shivering in the rain beside his dog. He looked down at the animal and crossed himself. Before he looked back up, Lewis squeezed the trigger twice again, making holes in the old man's throat and in the silver triangle of hair between his breasts. The dumper took two steps back and collapsed.

“Aw, Lewis, that was fucking cold, man,” Tomeo said. “You should have done the old guy first.”

“Why?” Lewis asked.

Apache shifted in her seat. “Because, Lewis, that old man just watched you clip his best friend. He died knowing that his dog was dead,” Apache said. “For Christ's sake, it's like shooting a child in front of its mother.”

“I did it to spare the dog's feelings,” Lewis said. “That noble beast died thinking he was protecting his master.”

“What's wrong with shooting a kid in front of its mother?” Mickey said jokingly. “I mean, if shooting a kid was necessary.”

Lewis said, “Guys, go give our dearly departed the burial they so richly deserve.”

The men opened their doors, jumped out and carried the man's body off into the garbage, where they covered him over with a wet piece of carpet and piled that over with a tire and black trash bags. Tomeo grabbed the dog by its back legs and, like an Olympic hammer thrower, swung him in a circle before releasing the thick carcass to sail off into the refuse.

Mickey and Tomeo returned to the Suburban, which drove across the field to the tree line some one hundred yards north of the dump site. They parked deep enough inside the woods so there was little chance of the vehicle being spotted.

Lewis killed his headlights and, with the rear doors open, the four changed into their assault suits, impervious to the cold rain and the thick smell of rotting vegetation drifting in from the open marsh.

“Time to sell some death,” Lewis said.

Hank drove the Jeep as fast as it could go and still remain on the wet asphalt. Winter trusted Hank's skills, which allowed him to concentrate on the purloined satellite photo. Chet had stayed on the telephone so he and they could plan the best way to accomplish the rescue of Sean Devlin with a minimum of casualties.

What Winter had seen in the satellite picture was five flat rectangles of uniform size out in the flooded marshland behind the tank farm. He instantly recognized them as duck-hunting blinds. He then spotted the roofs of two buildings set in a one-hundred-yard-wide strip of trees running alongside a drainage canal. The canal was open to the marsh through a series of channels. The smaller roof looked like a boathouse with a dock extended out from it near the mouth of a channel, which would allow the hunters to take boats directly from there out to the blinds. The larger roof had a chimney on the end facing the marsh and was farther back from the water. Winter's only hope was that the lodge and boat shed he had seen in the pictures of hunters posing with dead ducks on Sam's den wall were the same buildings represented by the flat roofs in the satellite photo.

Winter had been talking to Chet about needing to find the tank farm where the letters ILS were painted on the top of one of the larger storage tanks. Chet said, “Sure I know exactly where ILS is. It's out River Road about fifteen miles.” That was when Winter realized that the driver had already told him where Manelli was heading. When Winter had asked Manelli's driver what the make of the green van carrying Sam was, the man had said, “Ford,” and he had then said what Winter thought was “eyeless.” Eyeless was how the locals pronounced the initials ILS. The lodge was just behind the tank farm.

Chet procured a helicopter. The assault force was waiting for it to come in from Callender Field naval air station to pick them up and deliver them to Manelli's duck lodge. The sky was overcast and it was raining, but Chet had been assured that the ceiling was ample for the helicopter to stay below the cloud cover and above obstructions. After the assault was under way, more of Chet's deputies would come in by way of the tank farm's front gate.

The tank farm was a several-hundred-acre rectangle of land that had been cleared so nothing obstructed the views of the giant white containers from the company's offices. A line of oak trees stretching along the highway was probably there to make the facility look less threatening-less like a collection of circular bombs waiting for a spark. The fence, an unbroken silver line in the picture, backed up to a wooded area where the lodge and boathouse were located.