Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (26 page)

The more I thought about it, the more my blood boiled.

Roy Massengill drove one of our equipment buses. Roy Massengill was a Chain of Light member. He had access to the charter jet, and along with his other talents he was a decent aircraft mechanic. He was the invisible hand that came along and fucked things up. If my suspicions were correct, Roy Massengill, acting under the sanction of Reverend Lucius Strychar, lit what turned out to be the most tragic burning cross in history.

Now, more than ever, I needed to get my hands on The Holy Record. I had seen one other act of terrorism written in the book, the exploding Datsun pickup truck; I figured if Chain of Light was behind the plane crash, that would be recorded there as well.

As I stood and witnessed what promised to be yet another gruesome scene of misguided religious fervor based on ignorance and hatred, a fierce rage boiled up inside of me. I wasn’t concerned with justice. I didn’t want any of these assholes to go to jail. I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to mercilessly mow them down with the AK-47, and then rush in and rescue Brittney and take her home with me and live happily ever after.

But that’s not what happened. Not exactly.

The wooden swastika stood on a platform in the center of the clearing, and Brittney’s arms and legs were tied to it with heavy ropes. She was awake and alert and terrified. The swastika was flanked by burning crosses, one about twenty feet to the left of it and one about twenty feet to the right. The crosses appeared to be metal, the flames fed by propane cylinders. Again I was reminded of my wife and baby burning with that airplane. Reverend Strychar stood at a pulpit in front of the platform, with what I assumed was The Holy Record on a stand in front of him.

Reverend Strychar was speaking to his flock: “—and as we proceed in the most solemn of sacrifices, dear brethren, let us remember what our savior said as he hung suffering on the cross—”

“What did he say, Lucius?” I shouted from my position on the hill. I walked toward the pulpit, my rifle pointed at Strychar’s chest. “Did he tell you to kill innocent people? Did he tell you to hate folks because of the color of their skin, or because they don’t think the same way you do? I’m not a religious man, but I’m pretty sure Jesus Christ taught tolerance and love. Not too much of that ‘round here, now is there?”

“Who goes there? How dare you interrupt this holy meeting?”

“Holy? The only thing holey here is going to be your heart if you don’t untie that girl in about five seconds.”

I advanced, and Strychar finally recognized my face in the firelight.

“You,” he said. He looked astonished. He’d already killed me—twice, actually—but there I stood.

In my peripheral vision, I saw someone rise from one of the tables. I kept my eyes on Strychar.

“Brother Matthew. What are you doing?”

I recognized the voice. It was Perry, the music director.

“I’m not Brother Matthew,” I said. “My name is Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator. He knows who I am. I don’t know how he found out, but he knows. If you want to live to see the sunrise, you better sit your ass back down.”

“But—”

“Sit the fuck down,” I shouted.

He sat. Everyone else kept quiet. I’ll never know for sure, but I felt a sense of relief among them, relief that they weren’t going to have to watch an innocent young woman burn. Maybe what limited optimism I still possessed emerged, a limited hope that some smidgeon of humanity still existed, even in those cold and listless hearts gathered to witness one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

“Get your hands up where I can see them,” I said to Strychar.

He ducked behind the pulpit, and a ring of fire suddenly surrounded him and the platform where Brittney stood tied to the swastika. The ring was composed of smaller rings, overlapping like links in a chain. The Chain of Light.

I’m sure the fiery ring had originally been set up as a dog and pony show, for drama’s sake. Now it acted as a barricade between Strychar and me, and between Brittney and me. I needed to save this young girl’s life, but I also needed The Holy Record. As it was, I couldn’t get to either of them.

Brittney was positioned behind Strychar, so if I fired my weapon in that direction I risked hitting her. If I tried walking through the flames, I would become a human torch. In short, I was screwed. All Strychar had to do was make one call on his cell phone and a hundred Harvest Angels would swoop down and cut me to ribbons. But Strychar didn’t make that call. Strychar panicked. He rose from behind the pulpit, holding his nickel-plated revolver, and fired five shots in my direction. Handguns, even expensive ones like the Colt Python, aren’t very accurate. It was hardly a miracle that all five shots missed me. He stuffed the gun into his waistband, grabbed The Holy Record, and heaved it toward the flames, intending to burn it, but he tossed a little too hard and it landed outside the ring.

He then turned one hundred eighty degrees, pulled the Python and pointed it at Brittney. He was only ten feet away from her.

She screamed just before the next shot was fired.

But the next shot fired was not from the gun in Reverend
Strychar’s hand. The next shot fired was from a forty-caliber semiautomatic pistol identical to the one I’d taken from Brother John back at the dorm. My head instinctively turned left, toward the muzzle flash, and I caught a glimpse of a man with an eye patch before he grabbed the massive book, The Holy Record, and darted into the woods. I fired a few rounds in his direction, but he kept running.

Massengill.

I wanted to chase him. I wanted him, and I wanted that book. I looked toward the woods, and then I looked toward Brittney. If I chased Massengill, Strychar might finish her off with his last bullet. He might even set her on fire. If I let Massengill go, I might never learn the truth about the plane crash.

Sometimes you have to let go of the past and cling to the love you have now.

I didn’t move an inch.

Strychar staggered, faced the crowd, and fell to his knees. A dark stain bloomed from his chest. “Help me,” he pleaded.

“Turn the flames off,” I shouted.

Grimacing in pain, he reached behind the pulpit and flipped a switch. The ring of fire disappeared.

I ran to Strychar, thinking I might be able to put some pressure on his wound and stop the bleeding. If I could keep him alive, maybe there was still a chance I could learn the truth about the plane crash.

Unfortunately, Reverend Lucius Strychar had other plans.

He still had the revolver. When I got close enough, he pointed it directly at my heart. I pointed the AK-47 directly at his.

Stalemate.

I kept my eye on his trigger finger. When his twitched, mine twitched.

A crushing tide hammered through my neck and jaw. Some sort of alarm wailed in the distance. Strychar only had one more bullet, but that was all he needed. At close range, the .357 mag would tear me in half.

“Drop the weapon,” I said.

“You drop it. Nothing can happen to me. I’m a prophet, sent to usher in the return of Christ. Jesus won’t allow anyone or anything to hurt me. Surrender now and I might let you live.”

“You have one cartridge. I have an entire magazine. Give it up, Strychar. It’s over.”

“You’re right. It is over. For you.”

He squeezed that trigger hard and fast and a nanosecond after I heard the
click,
I instinctively and involuntarily opened up and riddled a dozen holes in his chest.

His last bullet never fired. It turned out to be the dummy round I had loaded into the revolver the night before.

Strychar lay dead at my feet. I turned and ran to Brittney and loosened her bonds. She fell into my arms crying.

I held her for a few seconds, raked the sweaty hair away from her face.

“We’re going to be all right,” I said. “But we have to get out of here. Fast.”

“The guy with the eye patch!” she screamed. “He killed my sister. Get him!”

“I’m not leaving you, Brittney. I’m never going to leave you again, you understand that?”

The Chain of Light members who had been sitting peacefully at the picnic tables were now stampeding up the hill toward Strychar’s house like a herd of cattle. Distant shouts of
Fire!
echoed through the valley, and I remembered I had left Strychar’s desk lamp shrouded with my black Harvest Angels shirt. It seemed I had inadvertently created the perfect diversion.

I pulled out Brother John’s cell phone and called 9-1-1. I told the dispatcher there was a house fire and gave her the address. When she asked my name, I hung up.

I turned back to Brittney. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I can do it. I can walk.”

“Have you ever used a handgun?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to lead her into the woods on a dangerous manhunt,
but she wanted Massengill as much as I did. Maybe more. And I couldn’t leave her alone.

I took the forty-caliber pistol out of its holster and handed it to her. “It’s ready to go. Just aim and pull the trigger.”

She looked at the gun, and then at me. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. Are you sure you want to do this?”

She hesitated a beat, but her tone was emphatic. “Fuck yeah,” she said.

We entered the woods, me leading the way with the AK-47. Moonlight trickled through the canopy, dancing on what appeared to be drops of fresh blood on the ground. I crouched down, pinched a droplet, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, sniffed it. It was blood, all right. I must have at least grazed Massengill when I fired earlier. The trail led west, toward the highway.

We stalked deeper into the woods. The drops of blood on the ground got farther apart, and then stopped altogether. Massengill’s wound must have clotted. Now there was no way to track him.

“Now what?” Brittney said.

“State Road Twenty-One’s over there. Come on.”

“We’re giving up?”

“No. He was headed toward the highway, so—”

“Look!”

On the ground, a few feet to our left, lay The Holy Record. Dots of fresh blood on its leather binding shimmered in the diffuse moonlight. I tackled Brittney at the waist and we fell together to the forest floor. My right ear collided hard with a pinecone.

“Stay down,” I said.

I remained on top of Brittney, covering her body the best I could, expecting gunfire to erupt any second. It had to be a trap. The book had to have been left there as bait. No way Massengill would have just abandoned it.

I waited, expecting the worst, but nothing happened. Smoke alarms from Strychar’s house warbled faintly from half a mile away. No fire truck sirens yet.

“Why are we on the ground?” Brittney whispered.

“Be quiet. I’m trying to save your life.”

Something warm and viscous dripped on the back of my neck. A voice from above—way above, in the treetops somewhere—said, “Pocket forty-seven. That’s how you figured all this out, isn’t it? When Tony Beeler said ‘Pocket forty-seven’? That’s how you
think
you figured all this out, anyway. Let me tell you something, Nicholas Colt. You’ve done more damage tonight than you can possibly imagine.”

I whispered into Brittney’s ear. “I’m going to roll off of you, to the right. At the same time, I want you to roll left. Understand?”

“I’m scared.”

“It’s all right. Just trust me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll count to three. You ready? One—two—
three
.”

I rolled right, stopped on my back, opened up with a staccato burst from the AK-47. I fired the entire clip in the direction of Massengill’s voice, arcing the barrel in a variety of directions for maximum coverage. I squeezed the trigger like a madman until there was nothing left.

Gunsmoke hovered above me like a ghostly serpent. I was out of ammo now and partially deaf in both ears. I stood, looked upward, saw nothing but a purple haze.

“Brittney, I want you to stay down. Do you hear me?”

No response.

Then a refrigerator fell from the sky and landed right on top of me.

I rolled onto my side into the pad of twigs and pine needles with Massengill straddling my shoulders. He had my head in a scissors lock with his legs, so tight I thought my brain might leak out through my nose.

“How does that feel, Colt? I’m going to crush your fucking skull.”

I reached between his legs and grabbed a handful of testicles, squeezing as hard as I could. Massengill roared in pain, and I felt the vice on my head go slack. He immediately slugged me in the
forehead with his fist in retaliation. He got to his knees and pulled out the forty-caliber automatic, the same one he’d used to shoot Strychar back at the clearing. He aimed the barrel directly at my face.

The punch had left me dazed. It felt as though my mind and body weren’t quite connected, as though I’d been drugged. I couldn’t move my legs. I was completely at his mercy, and mercy didn’t seem to be one of his strong suits.

He held the gun on me, rock steady, and with his free hand removed the eye patch. He pulled a butane cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it, and held the orange flame to his face. There was a gruesome cavern where his eyeball had once been, lined with skin grafts that looked like pink modeling clay. It was the result of what I’d done to him on the Shands Bridge several months ago, and that’s why he was showing it to me before he blew my brains out.

“This is your handiwork, Colt. Aren’t you proud?”

“I did what I had to do.”

“And now, I’m going to do what I have to do.”

“Why did you save my life?” I asked. “The night you killed Marcus Sharp?”

“I was aiming for you, dumb fuck. I missed, but I’m pretty sure I won’t this time.”

There was a palpable moment of silence, and then Brittney galloped in from stage right with a screeching yawp and stabbed Massengill in the face with a pine branch. For an instant I caught what looked like a ghastly wink as his expression changed from fierce to stunned. The pistol discharged, and two hundred grains of lead whistled supersonically past my left ear. Before Massengill had time to react, Brittney went at him again, jamming her weapon into his only eye this time. He fell back and she stabbed him again, twisting the stick in his socket as though she were scouring a bottle with a brush. A thick string of bloody goop followed when she finally pulled it out.