“I’m on the way. It’ll take me a minute to get back to the car.” With that, he turned the phone off and resumed his stalk, fixing his eyes on the direction he needed to go. He wanted to be sure they hadn’t detected him during their conversation, but after a few steps and no crashing sounds coming from that direction, he was comfortable his ruse had worked.
Finally, he got a glimpse of yellow light between the trees. Looking at the luminescent dial of his watch, he figured the phone call had bought him about 10 minutes before they realized something was up. He had about eight of those minutes remaining. He drew his pistol, double-checking that it was ready to fire. He wanted to take the first one out before he even knew something was wrong. The second one would probably drop down, head swiveling from left to right in a near-panicked attempt to locate the threat, but wouldn’t do so before he was engulfed in the eternal darkness as well. Carson felt bad for about a tenth of a second before remembering who these bastards were and the jeopardy in which they had put him and Katie.
Fatigue crept into his muscles. It had been quite a while since he’d been covert like this, and the half-crouch ensuring his invisibility was killing his thighs. He wasn’t quite so young anymore, and this was a young man’s game. Fatigue was his enemy. It could cause him to stumble, or to hurry, and even heavy breathing could give away his position. It forced him to slow down, which he didn’t like. In his invincible 20s, he would have remained stealthy at twice his current speed. He paused for a minute to recover, using the opportunity to do another sweep of his surroundings.
Something was to his left. He thought he might have seen a movement, something more than a branch swaying in the breeze, but when he turned his head that way, he saw nothing. He opened his eyes as wide as possible and looked aside just a little – the human eye can see dim objects better when one doesn’t look directly at them – and strained to hear any sounds of humans but, if there ever had been anything there, it was gone now. He waited a little longer to be sure before resuming his stalk.
A couple of minutes later, he could clearly see the outline of the target vehicle. To his surprise, there were three silhouettes standing around it. That presented a more complicated scenario. The third guy could run and get off a warning via phone or discharge his weapon while Carson was dealing with the first two. At night, in the rain, and at a distance, it would be a challenge to make his third shot count. It never goes according to plan, he reminded himself.
He saw one of the men turn. “Whea tha fuck is he?” he whined in a hideous New England accent, his voice way too loud for the situation.
“Quiet the hell down, Money!” answered a second voice. It was the voice of the man he’d just insulted over the phone.
“Whatevah,” came the response, albeit in a softer voice. “How long does it take for a guy to get a coupla miles, for Christ’s sake?”
“He’s gotta point.” This from a third voice, one that was new to Carson. “What if he was bluffin? Maybe he never left the cabin.”
“Sarge said he saw the car leave. The guy’s just lost,” Phone Voice responded. Carson thought his answer seemed to be lacking confidence.
“You sure? This motherfucker done a lotta killin’ in the service. He knows what he’s about. You wanna risk it that he’s not sittin’ out there right now with a sniper rifle on us?”
“Look, I don’t wanna hear about how tough this fucka is! I thought you guys were the shit down in this place! He’s doin’ my wife, and if I can’t have her, no one gets her, especially not some dumb-ass military guy. I want him freakin’ dead, you got me?”
Doing his wife? What the hell is he talking about?
“Look, Brendan,” Voice Three said in a mocking tone to the guy he’d called “Money” a minute ago, “don’t start going all tough-guy on us. We’ll take care of him, but we give the orders now. I don’t even know why you came along tonight.”
“I came along ‘cause I want to see this fucka die, and then I’m gonna take my wife back!” Carson saw him slam his fist or palm down on the hood of the car. “I can’t believe she’s doin’ someone else!”
There was a momentary pause in their conversation, giving Carson time to process the disjointed snippets of thought racing through his brain:
- Katie said she wasn’t quite divorced and that her husband was fighting her
- This guy called him Brendan
- Brendan sounds like fucking JFK
- Katie said Brendan had a horrendous New England accent
Son of a bitch.
“Settle down, Brendan” Phone Voice said like a parent to a petulant child. “We told you – there’s no place for this shit out here. This is business. Keep it together.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Carson didn’t have enough time to properly assess the situation, but he was able to deduce that this new development, troubling though it might be to Katie, didn’t make much difference right now. What mattered was Brendan would be a soft kill. He’d just have to handle the other two first. He was about to move towards his initial point when the trill of a cell phone sounded.
Voice Three picked it up. “Yeah? Oh, hang on.” He pulled it away. “Oh, Money… it’s Daddy.”
Brendan grabbed the phone. “It’s my fatha-in-law, ya dickhead.”
Father-in-law? As impossible as it was that this guy was Katie’s ex-husband, the possibility that the man on the other end of the line was Katie’s actual father was beyond the pale. What in the fuck is wrong with these people? It’s like Days
