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

But Bobby was working on it a couple months ago and he can fix anything. I’ll bet it starts.” She stood up. “Now, I’ll tell you where you might find some of the Germanic Brethren. There’s a place called Tina’s Bar and Grill…”

*

It took Vince about fifteen minutes to get enough boards off the porch, without doing too much damage. He got the folding army surplus camp shovel from his backpack, along with the jar in bubble wrap, and brought them out to the porch. He set the jar carefully aside, lowered the porch lantern into the hole, stepped in after it, and got to work. “Maybe just a couple feet down, Chris,” he said, as he dug. “I figure you want to be up high enough to protect the cabin.” He dug for a while more and then said, “This cabin must’ve meant a lot to you. I guess you and Bobby and your folks were out here for fishing. Maybe felt more like home than the house in town.”

Vince knew that a lot of people would think he sounded crazy, talking to the dead like this. They’d think his errand under the porch was crazy too. But they weren’t professional soldiers. A lot of guys he knew talked to their dead buddies now and then. It seemed to help. And if there was anything you could do to honor a buddy who’d died, you did it.

He got two feet down, and then he tossed the shovel onto the porch, unwrapped the jar, and took one last look at Chris’s hand, with its ragged bit of wrist, floating in medical preservation fluids. The fingers were formed into a fist; the skin now pale blue but otherwise well preserved. There was an Army Rangers ring on it.

“Chris, I’m doing this crazy shit you asked me to do, and I hope you’re satisfied.” He sighed. “I met your mom. Liked her a lot. I’m gonna do what I can to help her. Hey — she gave me the keys to that Harley you rebuilt. I’ll try not to wreck it. And I’m going to make a promise. The guy who killed you… the head of the outfit that killed you… that guy Lopez? I heard a rumor he’s working in Arizona now. I promise, my brother — I’m going to take him out.”

Vince put the jar into the hole, covered it over, then patted down the little hump in the dirt. He said, “Sua sponte, man.” The Army Rangers motto. Of their own accord. “We took the trail of our own accord, brother. I was proud to walk it with you.”

Then he climbed out and set to work replacing the boards.

*

Vince was up at dawn, prepping coffee on the camp stove, doing push-ups and sit-ups on the ground out front of the cabin while the coffee was perking, watching the sun turn the horizon from gray to rose-blue over the top of the forest.

He drank his coffee while he was getting the tackle organized, finding some fishing flies in a tackle box.

He carried the tackle box and headed west, stepping over Dead Springs Creek. It was so narrow it barely deserved to be called a creek; it was little more than a crooked moss-lined ditch streaming with shallow water. He kept going another half mile. When he reached Chickasaw Creek, he set off upstream till he found a wide, deeper place; a possible fishing hole. It was already jumping with trout.

Vince caught four of them over two hours, then carried them on a line back to the cabin. He cleaned them and fried them for breakfast in a dusting of cornmeal and pepper.

When he’d finished a third cup of coffee, Vince got the detailed area maps from his backpack and sat on the sofa to study them.

He found the place, east of the Talladega National Forest, where the gunfire had likely come from.

The headquarters of the Germanic Brethren.

He remembered the picture Chris had shown him of Bobby Destry. A slim young man with a brave smile and sad gray eyes. Was Bobby there, maybe held a prisoner?

Or — was he dead, and buried somewhere out in the woods?

CHAPTER THREE

A little past nine that evening, Vince showered, shaved, went to the back of the cabin, and started up the old Harley. It sputtered, then rumbled steadily. He smiled at the sound. His old man taught him to ride on a Harley, and he’d given Vince a ’66 Bobcat for his seventeenth birthday. They’d gone for long rides out in the hills. Two men connecting deeply, just riding side by side on the road, never having to say a word.

Vince rode the Harley around the cabin to the road and to the little mountain town of Stonewall. Tina’s Bar and Grill was right where Rose said it would be, set close to a trailer park and half hidden by a screen of pine trees.

He swung the trail bike into the bar’s parking lot. A dozen pickups and SUVs, all of them with huge tires, were parked around the bar, nosed in as if they were feeding. It was dark, the trees and clouds cutting out most of the starlight. A single light-pole shed a sickly yellow glow over the parking lot and one small window with a Jack Daniels sign added a splash of neon blue and rusty red. He could barely make out the flaking old sign for the bar atop the square, flat little building.

Vince parked the Harley behind the bar. He noted a gravel road that passed from the lot to the trailer park. Someone was riding a dirt bike back thereon dirt tracks behind the trailers. He could hear its engine growling and whining, and he could see the single headlight strobing through the brush. Good to know there was a back way out of here