AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I was still alive. Why? Why not just blow me away and bury me in the woods? Where the hell were they taking me?
They didn’t know what to do with me, I realized; or I would already be dead. They needed to find out what I knew. Another blast of fear rocked through me. They were going to torture me to find out.
As I lay there with the horror of this new realization rattling through me, I suddenly found it. I figured out my one advantage, how they had screwed up. I had one window. It was tiny, almost microscopic, but I needed to take it. I had no other choice.
“Ahhhhh!” I suddenly screamed as we went over the next pothole. “My back! Ahhh! I have a bad back! The pain! I need to sit up!” I said, getting up on my knees.
“You do and I’ll shoot you,” Shortie said, putting the gun to my head.
“Do it, then, you son of a bitch! Shoot me!” I yelled as I continued to rise.
I heard him rack my gun.
“Fine, do it. Put me out of my fucking misery!” I screamed as I got up and sat on the seat.
And proceeded to go absolutely berserk.
I began by rearing back into the backseat and kicking Shortie right in his chin with the heel of my right shoe. Damn, that felt good. As he screamed in pain, I reared back again and kicked the big bastard of the driver hard in the back of his head with the heel of my other shoe.
Then I double-kicked out with my feet toward the windshield between the front bucket seats, jammed both of my feet into the steering wheel, and started thrashing around like the trapped animal that I was.
The big guy yelled as he hit the brakes, and the little guy was hitting me in the side of the head with the pistol butt, but then we were off the road in the woods, the truck went to the left sideways, and we were toppling over.
I’d never been in a rollover before. In the spinning cab, I bashed off the ceiling and the seats again and again like a sock in a dryer. The driver-side window smashed in and then the windshield. We kept rolling.
When we came to a stop, what felt like a million years later, we were right side up. Shortie’s door was missing and so was Shortie. The roof on the right side had crumpled and come down about three feet. I looked to the left at the big dude, moaning, still belted in the driver’s seat behind th
e deployed air bag.
I noticed his left arm had an open fracture, the bone protruding below his sleeve. As I stared at it, something warm flowed down the right side of my head and began dripping off my chin. I couldn’t wipe at the blood because of the handcuffs.
I didn’t know how I was still alive, and I didn’t care. I wriggled away out the missing passenger-side door, dropped out of the crushed truck, and began to run into the woods.
Chapter 21
Devine waited in the outer office of the comm trailer at Black Hills compound, listening to the boss, Paul Haber, scream bloody murder into his phone on the other side of the closed door.
He had reason to be pissed. They’d been only half an hour away, coming back from New York, when they got the call from Therkelson that the cop, Bennett, had arrived at the base alone.
Toporski and Therkelson, going ahead of the rest of the team, were supposed to neutralize the cop.
But that hadn’t happened. As they came up the hill, they saw the wreckage in the ravine—Toporski squashed dead like a bug and his buddy Therkelson busted up and in critical condition. The cop was gone.
The only good news was that the cop seemed to have headed off in the direction of the state forest, hundreds of thousands of acres of uninhabited woods. He had a good forty-minute head start on them, but there was no one on this side of the mountain. They might be able to catch him still.
Haber had already gotten the hunting party started. Before making the necessary calls, he told Monroe to get the MH-6 Little Bird ready, then took down and doled out what he called his M&M packs—M4A1s with attached M203 grenade launchers—to all the men.
Haber, who had been a platoon sergeant in the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry, before joining Delta, wasn’t stingy with the ammo. He’d given everyone five full clips apiece, as well as grenade packs with star clusters and smoke and high-explosive rounds. He wanted this cop good and dead.
Devine sat on a plastic lawn chair staring up at the trailer’s dull metal ceiling as Haber screamed some more.
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved guns and hunting and the woods. His father was an avid deer hunter, as his father had been before him. Devine loved the cold, empty wilderness and the smell of gun oil and cordite, sweat, and leather.
But for the first time, he felt something was wrong about all this, something off.
There were only seven of them now. Haber, Irvine, Leighton, Willard, Monroe, and De Souza. And himself.
One little, two little, three little Indians, Devine thought as the boss’s door flew open.
