Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (27 page)

Brittney stepped away as he lay writhing. I thought he was finished, but a few seconds later he sprung to a sitting position like
some sort of sightless jack-in-the-box. He fired a round in her direction, missing by several feet. He fired again, closer this time. The bastard must have had radar. Somehow he was honing in on her. She was only a few feet away, so maybe he was catching her scent. Or the sound of her breathing. Or some other voodoo shit he’d learned as a Navy SEAL.

Brittney stood frozen. The slightest sound would be a beacon and a death sentence, and she knew it. I was starting to get some feeling back in my legs, but they still weren’t strong enough to stand on. I felt dizzy and nauseated and useless.

“Shoot him,” I shouted. I’d given her the pistol before we entered the woods, and I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t used it. She’d chosen a stick instead, which didn’t make any sense.

I hoped the sound of my voice would cause Massengill to train his weapon on me. If he shot at me, it might give Brittney time to run away. But he never wavered. He kept the gun pointed in her direction. He fired again, his third shot even closer than the second. Each time, the muzzle flash gave me a momentary glimpse of the horror on Brittney’s face.

The pistol was stuffed down the front of her jeans, the grip sticking out and easily accessible. The only thing I could imagine was that she’d tried to shoot him and the gun hadn’t fired. Maybe it had jammed. She’d probably pointed and pulled the trigger like I told her to, and when nothing happened she’d bravely come to my rescue with the only weapon she could find.

Then I thought of another possibility.

“There’s a little slide by the handle,” I said. “Pull it toward you.”

Massengill fired again. He missed, but his barrel was aimed directly at her now. I figured the next shot would take the left side of her head off.

I was wrong.

The next shot was from Brittney, and it blasted a chunk of flesh the size of a rib-eye from Massengill’s right shoulder. His arm convulsed spastically, and his gun fell from his hand.

“I’m hit,” he said, seemingly amazed by the turn of events.

He was blind and severely wounded and helpless. Brittney stepped forward and, with absolutely no emotion I could discern, pumped an entire clip of forty-caliber rounds into his brain.

She stood there for a few seconds staring at his lifeless body, then threw the gun down and ran to me. She collapsed at my side, gasping for breath.

“You did good,” I said. “You saved me.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.” She got up, staggered away, leaned on a tree, and puked her guts out.

I managed to rise to a sitting position. I was still dizzy, but I felt like I might be able to walk with some help.

Fire engine and police sirens howled in the distance now, growing louder as they approached the ranch. I figured together Brittney and I could make it to the highway. From there, we would need a ride. I called Juliet on Brother John’s cell phone. She answered on the second ring.

“Nicholas? Is it really you? You sound drunk.”

“I think I have a concussion. I’ll tell you all about it in a little while. Can you pick us up at the intersection of twenty-one and sixteen?”

“Us?”

“Brittney Ryan is with me,” I said. “Brittney is alive.”

I sat at Juliet’s kitchen table with The Holy Record and read the following entry from October 21, 1989:

A grand mission was accomplished today, the downing of a chartered jet with an interracial celebrity couple and their mongrel child aboard. “Fuel gauge malfunction,” I believe the official investigation will show. I have my faithful servants Brother Roy and Brother John to thank for this service to humanity. Pocket-47, as they say. It has been reported that the man actually survived, but that is of no consequence. The lesson remains.

Brother Roy was Roy Massengill, of course. I wondered if Brother John was the same idiot who had nearly drowned me.

And there was that phrase again. Pocket-47. It had come to mean something more than sabotage to me. There was something downright evil about it.

Eight people died on that airplane because of a religious zealot’s hatred. I allowed myself to weep openly for one hour, and then decided to put it behind me. Not that I would ever forget Susan and Harmony, but it was time to move forward with my life. They would have wanted it that way.

It worried me some, what Brother John said about the Harvest Angels, that they were two million strong and had cells all over the country. Groups like Al-Qaeda get a lot of news coverage, but it’s probably the homegrown terrorists that pose the greatest threat to
national security. I had a feeling we’d be hearing about the Harvest Angels again some day.

The Clay County Sheriff’s Department shut the Chain of Light Ranch down immediately. From me they got The Holy Record, along with the VHS-C tape. The original videocassette from the ER examining room was found at Massengill’s house, as I’d suspected. The State Attorney’s Office and the FBI filed boatloads of charges against several members in the upper echelon—charges ranging from false imprisonment of minors to seditious conspiracy against the United States—promising to keep the court system busy for years. The FBI confiscated a considerable cache of weaponry and a ton of terrorist propaganda, and Florida added forty-nine children to its foster home registry.

But one child, who had endured the system for most of her life, was not put back on the list. I made sure of that.

A little over a year after the occurrences at the Chain of Light ranch, Juliet and Brittney and I drove away from the Clay County courthouse with signed, sealed, and delivered adoption papers in hand. Juliet and I had gotten married a few months before, and Brittney was our daughter now.

Brittney had been receiving counseling for the loss of her sister, and for posttraumatic stress disorder. She was back in school, struggling a bit, but that was okay. I was extremely proud of her.

On days she felt like it, we would sit and talk. By and by I learned the horror story that had been her life for eight months. She never went back to Duck the pimp. It was another girl who died in Duck’s apartment, a girl named Jennifer. Roy Massengill kidnapped Brittney from my camper the day I chased the old Chevy station wagon, and then brought her to the Chain of Light ranch. They could have killed her right away. Instead, they kept her prisoner and fattened her up, intending to use her as an offering for their Nazi god.

“Did they abuse you?” I asked.

“Not at all. They treated me like a princess. I didn’t know about that sacrifice crap until the night they came and got me. I was
under the impression they were going to make me have babies, like some of the other girls. I thought they were just waiting until I got a little older.”

“What a nightmare,” I said. “You know, I took her to Point Conception.”

“Who?”

“Jennifer. I took her ashes there. I’ll have to try to get in touch with her family somehow.”

The first few times I asked Brittney about the videotape I’d found in her bedroom, she acted too upset to talk about it. I didn’t push it, but then one day she walked in from school and opened up on her own.

“I needed a tape for my tennis lesson, so I grabbed one from Doctor Spivey’s study. I thought it was blank, but when I played my lesson back later I saw something horrible. A little girl who’d gotten burned. Not just any little girl—see, when I first went to live with the Spiveys, I was digging around in a box of junk one day and found a picture of an infant. She was pretty, except she had this weird birthmark on her face. I asked Doctor Spivey who she was, and he said she was his niece and that she’d died of pneumonia soon after that picture was taken. I didn’t think anything about it, really, until two years later when I saw her on the tape. I recognized her because of the birthmark. I said, ‘Hey, isn’t this your niece? I thought she died when she was a baby.’ Doctor Spivey freaked out. His whole expression changed, like Jekyll and Hyde or something. He grabbed me by the arm and forced me into one of his spare bedrooms. He slapped me, hard enough to knock me down. He called me a stupid little bitch and said I needed to be more respectful of other people’s property. He told me not to leave the bedroom. A little while later, I heard him talking to his wife about their yacht. He said he was going to take me for a sunset cruise. I got really scared. I thought he was going to sail way out and throw me overboard. I had to get out of there. I snuck back into the study and stole the tape, climbed out a window, and hitched a ride home. I knew Doctor Spivey would eventually be coming after me,
so I left the note on Leitha’s windshield making it look like I was running away. I didn’t want her to get hurt—”

She hugged me and cried on my shoulder.

We would never know exactly how it went down, but my guess was that Massengill stole the original tape from the emergency room and sent a copy to Spivey to set up the blackmailing scheme. Brittney then inadvertently taped her tennis lesson over most of the incriminating footage on that copy. When she watched it and saw the scalded two-year-old, Spivey suddenly considered her a threat. He panicked. He was guilty of performing a third-trimester abortion, among other things, and his wife Corina was guilty of manslaughter when the child died.

Brittney had caught Dr. Spivey in a lie. He couldn’t risk exposure.

Neither could Massengill. That’s why he went to Leitha’s house in search of Spivey’s copy of the tape. Unfortunately, I had already taken it before he got there. When he couldn’t find it, he tried to torture Leitha into giving up Brittney’s location.

Leitha died protecting her sister.

Brittney suffered night terrors for a while, but those episodes gradually became less severe and less frequent. Slowly but surely, she was beginning to heal.

I was determined to give her the best life I could. I asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate the big day, the day Juliet and I officially became her parents. Anything she wanted, I told her. I would have taken her to Paris for a month. I would have gone back to Point Conception, if that’s what she had wanted.

She wanted to go fishing.

We packed a big lunch and the three of us went to Lake Barkley. The old Airstream was still there, and it made a fine weekend getaway for my family. My family. There was a time when I thought I’d never say those words again.

It was a sunny afternoon in May. We fished for hours and ate fried chicken and rested on blankets and fished some more and ate some more and rested some more. It was the kind of day you
wished would last forever. Warm and kind and happy, and quite conducive to somnolence.

In other words, perfect.

As the day faded, I lay in the grass with my guitar while Juliet and Brittney fished from the shore. I gazed past their silhouettes, past the concentric circles of their lures plopping into the still water, past the sailboats anchored in the distance. I gazed beyond the gold and turquoise sky, and prayed no harm would ever come to either of them.