Firepower, John Cutter [best summer reads .txt] 📗

“Whoa, Rendell? Good! Rendell is scum!”

“Well Rendell up and left town, and took his boys with him! This guy scared them into leaving!”

“One guy did that? Who is he?”

“Name’s Vincent Bellator. Used to be in the Army Rangers. He’s here, on the base, right now.”

“Vince Bellator? The Rangers? Dude — that guy was my brother’s best friend!”

Shaun stared. “Chris knew him?”

“Yeah! They were close! He was there when Chris died, man! Kind of a coincidence, him being… I mean, Chris would never have joined the Brethren and from what I heard, Vince didn’t seem like…” He shook his head.

“Um…” Shaun’s brow furrowed. “Listen, that’s kinda weird. Maybe you shouldn’t mention that to anyone. Maybe I…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It is a big fucking coincidence…”

“I wonder if…”

“What?”

Bobby opened his mouth to say If he’s here to get me out. If my mom sent him… But some instinct told him to keep quiet. “I don’t know, man. Can you put in a good word for me, with the General?”

“Like he listens to me? But…” There was the noise of a door opening. “Someone’s coming. I’ll try to… shit, I gotta go…”

“Shaun!”

Shaun rushed off, down the corridor.

Bobby walked slowly back to his cot and sat down. Chris’s best friend. Here? At the base?

He felt a sudden, secret hope kindle inside him…

*

After being silently escorted from Gustafson’s property, Vince rode the Harley to Stonewall and bought some ammo for the Desert Eagle.

He returned to his bike, shoved the ammo in the bike’s bags, got into the saddle, and decided to call Chris’s mother while he had a good cell signal.

She didn’t answer, so Vince left a message on her voicemail. “It’s Vince. I’m looking into that thing for you. Getting closer. It may take a while to get another message from me, but I’ll let you know eventually.”

He hung up — and turned to see a short, stocky, scowling, fortyish man in a sheriff’s uniform walking down the sidewalk toward him. The sheriff stopped across from the motorcycle, tilted his wide-brimmed Smoky Bear hat back, and said, “Would you be the guy who got into a fight with Rendell Saggett at Tina’s place?”

Vince considered denying it but he knew the sheriff probably had a pretty good description of him. “We got into it some, officer. I understand the man was a drug dealer. I heard him making threats to a friend of mine and it kind of blew up.”

“Saggett seems to have vanished. You know where he went to?”

“Seems to be gone, the way I hear it. Left town. You miss him?”

“Don’t get smart.”

Vince had almost said You miss the extra income? But that wouldn’t have been wise.

The cop stepped off the curb and put one hand out, the other on the butt of his gun. “Let’s see some ID.”

Vince shrugged and slowly took his wallet out. He handed over his driver’s license as he read the name on the sheriff’s shirt tag. M. Woodbridge.

The sheriff looked at the license, looked at Vince, then took out his cell phone. Vince waited patiently as Woodbridge called in his DL number.

A minute passed, with Vince glancing up the street to see if deputies were coming as back-up. But the only people on the street were a couple of guys coming out of a tavern and a gaggle of teenagers gossiping in front of a Dairy Queen.

Woodbridge handed Vince’s license back. “Alright. Nothing on you. But that could change, you get in any more fights. You’re lucky Tina didn’t want you arrested. That your motorcycle?”

“It a loaner from Mrs. Destry. Chris Destry was a friend of mine.”

“Oh? Army buddies?”

“That’s right.”

“Where you staying?”

“The Destry cabin, off Road Thirty-two.”

“I know it. Don’t cause a speck of trouble in Stonewall or I’ll run you in. No more — you understand?”

“I do understand, Officer,” Vince said, putting his license in his wallet.

Woodbridge stepped back onto the sidewalk as Vince started the bike. He backed it onto the street and rode away. Glancing in the small bike mirror, he caught a glimpse of the sheriff watching him go.

Vince rode out to the cabin. There, he sat on the porch and read as much as he could stand of the books that Gustafson had given him so that he could be reasonably conversant in Brethren rhetoric.

Two hours of soaking up lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, falsehoods about history, and near-psychotic rhetoric was all he could bear. Then he went about the wooded areas around the cabin, setting up old-fashioned warning lines: fishing lines attached to cans and sticks, whatever he could find that would make noise. It wasn’t impossible that Gustafson would decide he was a liability…

He went fishing for a few hours, and that night he cleaned Rendell’s Desert Eagle, read twenty pages of a volume of Abraham Lincoln’s letters, which he’d brought in his pack, and went to bed.

He lay in his bed for a while, hands laced behind his head, thinking about the encounter with Sheriff Woodbridge. It had to happen. He gets in a very public fight with Rendell Saggett, said drug dealer suddenly departs town, leaving everything in his house. Isn’t answering calls. Someone could have killed him. But then, the sheriff probably finds it hard to believe that one person killed all Rendell’s men, too.

After the fight in Tina’s, Vince’s gut had told him that Rendell Saggett could be coming after him. So he’d set it up on his own terms. Then he waited to be sure the gang was there to kill him.

Now to Vince Bellator, that next step, outmaneuvering and killing the drug gang, was not only just and sensible. It was plain self-defense. But the law wouldn’t see it