John Gilstrap - No mercy

It took every bit of a half hour to tell the story again-thirty minutes that they could ill afford. By the time they were done, the Hummer and Gail’s Kia Sorrento had both arrived in the front yard, and Thomas and Boxers had joined the confab in the main room.

“So, Sheriff and Deputy, you’ve stepped into the middle of a war that’s about to happen,” Jonathan concluded. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. You’ve proved yourself to be just crazy enough not to be trusted if I let you go, but it doesn’t seem right to keep you trussed up like a couple of sculptures once the shooting starts. The third option-giving you a gun and asking you to help-doesn’t do much for me, either.”

“Well you sure as hell can’t give Deputy Dawg there a weapon,” Boxers said, pointing at Jesse.

Jonathan stood. “Enough chatting,” he said. “Let’s get to work. Once it gets dark, we’ll be on borrowed time. We’ve got to get that grass cut down out front, and we’ve got to get an ambush set.” He looked at Stephenson. “How about we start with a tour? Are you up for a little hobbling?” He held out his hand and helped the

“What about them?” Boxers asked, indicating the captives. “We gotta do something.”

He had a point. “Zip them to the chairs.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Gail said.

Boxers froze. He shot a panicked look to Jonathan. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. For Boxers, the Achilles’ heel was excretory functions. He could wallow to his elbows in blood and brains and not even wince. Pee and poop were entirely different matters.

Trying not to laugh at the look of horror from the big guy, Jonathan’s eyes narrowed as he assessed Gail’s angle. “Okay,” he said at length. “Tom, escort the sheriff to the outhouse.”

“No way!”

“You just have to walk with her,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to wipe her.”

Gail was blushing. “You know I’m right here, right? And, not to get too graphic, there is the matter of my pants.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Who’s gonna do that?”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Julie?”

She stood. “Sure,” she said, and she helped lift Gail to her feet with a hand on her biceps. “Come on, Sheriff, I’ll help you.”

Before they’d had a chance to move, Jonathan said, “Tom, you go, too, to help your mom.”

Thomas made a slashing motion with his hand-a definitive denial. “No. I am not-”

“Tom, I want you to stay with your mom.” This time, his tone conveyed his real message, and everyone in the room caught the subtext. Jonathan didn’t trust either woman.

Thomas conceded, even as Julie’s back stiffened.

“Let’s not argue, okay?” Thomas said, getting ahead of his mother’s inevitable complaint. “Let’s just do this and get it over with.”

Jonathan’s tour of the DuBois property started by heading up the stairs. The steps led directly to the master bedroom, where the ceiling was barely high enough to allow him to stand upright in the parallel troughs between the rough-hewn oak beams. A sagging double bed and a small table filled the space.

“Cozy,” Jonathan said.

Stephenson chuckled. “As a kid, I used to think this place was huge.”

“I guess it helps to be four feet tall.” He knocked on the nearest beam with his fist. “Solid.”

“Family lore has it that my grandfather built the place with his own hands. Not sure how he got the three-hundred-pound beams up.”

“Not a man to be trifled with,” Jonathan said. “I need to know if your wife is going to be a liability.” He launched that last part like a torpedo.

“Excuse me?”

“Do I need to watch my back when she’s around?”

Stephenson waved off the notion as foolish. “She’s not a violent woman. That’s part of why she’s being so…difficult. You have nothing to worry about.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m better than sure. She’s just terrified. Hell, so am I.”

Fair enough, Jonathan thought. “Next I need see the GVX.”

Boxers came along. As barns go, the one on the DuBois property was small, but built to the same standards as the house. The heavy timber pillars looked brand new even if the fifteen-foot of they supported needed considerable repair. An ancient John Deere tractor stood in the far corner, still hooked up to the enormous cutting deck that clearly hadn’t been used in a while. “There you go, Big Guy,” Jonathan said, pointing. “Fill that baby with fuel from the spares on the Hummer and mow down all that free cover out front.”

“On it,” Boxers said, and he headed out the door to get things moving.

The barn in general smelled of mud and old gasoline, and light leaking through spaces in the walls cut pinstripes through the dust that stirred as they entered. Stephenson explained, “It’s a place to store stuff we never use. As a kid, it was my retreat. My fort. I used to hide out in the loft.”

Next to the tractor sat a relatively new three-quarter-ton truck. “Is that the vehicle you helped yourself to?” Jonathan asked, pointing.

“That’s the one.”

“And how much germ juice is in there?” Jonathan slipped a mini-Maglite out of a loop on his belt and twisted it on, launching a piercing white beam across the floor. “Show me,” he said.

Stephenson hobbled to the back of the truck and pulled open the back door. All they could see were five wooden crates, each of them three feet square. The one closest to the rear of the vehicle had clearly been opened, and its lid hastily replaced. “That’s the one I took the cylinders out of on the night we were trying to free Thomas,” he explained, pointing.

Jonathan hoisted himself into the truck for a closer look.

Stephenson continued, “Tibor met me at a truck stop outside of Shepherdstown that night. I left the truck there and took the three canisters that Conger wanted and we went the rest of the way by car.”

The canisters themselves were about the size and shape of a salami, and constructed of what appeared to be stainless steel. Jonathan hefted one and guessed the weight to be maybe six pounds.

“Not much to them, is there?’ Stephenson said.

“A couple of pounds is a lot of germs. Why do you think Tibor Rothman agreed to come along with you?”

Stephenson pursed his lips and shrugged. “I really don’t know. My begging helped, I think.” He meant it as a joke, but it fell flat. “I talked myself into believing that the only way to have a chance long-term, if everything went right, was to have an eyewitness from the press to report what had happened.”

Jonathan put the canister back in the crate and closed the top. “That wouldn’t make them all the more anxious to kill you?”

“Maybe, but for a different reason. In that case, they’d be killing me because they were pissed. Everybody would know who did it, and for what reason, and because of that, I figured they’d be less inclined to go to the trouble.”

Jonathan smiled. “Good old-fashioned reverse logic. Why did you and Tibor split up after you bolted from the drop-off site?”

“Harder to catch two moving targets than one. I ended up taking a bus back to the truck stop where I left this beast.” He patted the side of the truck. “By the time I got back to it, I figured the story would have broken and it would have been over. But the story never broke. I guessed that meant Tibor was missing and I decided to go into hiding.”

“Let me get down outta this,” Jonathan said. “Shit gives braced himself, his left leg ahead of his right. He settled himself with a deep breath and tightened his whole hand around the pistol-grip stock as he tucked his shoulder in. When the weapon barked, the kid seemed ready for it. Even without binoculars, Jonathan could see the white gouge that the bullet carved into the bark of the tree.