Chase Baker and the God Boy: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 3) (16 page)

Tony turns the gun once more on
Tavis.

“Wail you son of a whore,” he says.

“What?” Tavis says, his face ashen,
dripping sweat.

“Cry like a gut-shot elephant,” he insists
while thumbing back the hammer.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to know how an
elephant feels just before you shoot it in the gut before cutting off its tusks
and leaving it there to die and rot.”

Tony triggers a round that takes
half the poachers left ear clean off in an explosion of flesh and dark blood.

Tavis screams, blood running down
the left side of his face and neck.

“Wail!” Tony insists, thumbing back
the trigger once more.

The now pale-faced Tavis inhales a
deep breath, begins making a sound not like an elephant, but more like a
wounded dog. High pitched, desperate, and ugly. Tony shifts the revolver barrel
just a couple of inches to the left, fires again, taking most of the poacher’s
right ear off.

Tavis screams again, the right side
of his face now covered in blood and little bits of jagged, dangling flesh.

“Please….stop!!!”

He’s screaming so loudly it’s a
wonder the Thuggees can’t hear it all those miles away. But then, not even
noise from the shots we’ve fired can penetrate this thick jungle.

“I’ll gladly stop,” Tony says. “But
not until every elephant in this forest gets their money’s worth.”

Lowering the revolver, he takes aim
at Tavis’s left leg, fires. The poacher’s knee explodes. He drops onto his
side, his wailing now having de-evolved into outright sobbing.

“Please,” the poacher pleads, “for
the love of God.”

“This one’s for God,” Tony says. “For
the love of his most magnificent of creations…the mighty elephants.”

Tony plants a bead, blows Tavis’s
other knee away.

Then, shoving the pistol barrel
into his pant waist, “Give me a hand will you, Chase?”

He makes his way over to Tavis,
grabs hold of his left forearm. Following Tony’s lead, I grab onto the right
forearm and together we begin to drag the poacher back into the thick forest.
Then, opening the cylinder on the pistol, Tony makes a check on how many fresh rounds
the poacher’s got left.

“Looks like I was counting
correctly,” he says as he hands the pistol back to Tavis, who’s lying there on
his back, bleeding out, writhing in pain. At the same time, Tony retrieves my
.45, hands it back to me.

“You’re just…gonna…leave me…here?”
Tavis poses.

“That’s exactly what we’re gonna
do, Mate,” Tony says. “Just like you leave them gut-shot elephants to die a
slow, agonizing death just so you can make a few bucks on the ivory black
market.”

Then, his angry eyes focused on me.
“Come on.”

We head back in the direction of
the camp.

We don’t cover more than thirty
feet of ground before we hear the shot that tells us Tavis, the Poacher, is fast
on a one-way trip to hell.

“Christ, Tone,” I say, “where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

I also want to ask him how he went
from being a simple tough-guy-earth-mover to Dirty Harry in a just half a
decade. But one thing at a time.

“You don’t know everything about
me, Son,” he says, popping another bit of tobacco in his mouth. “I used to
shoot with your dad now and again. I just got better at it while living out
here. You know the right people, you can buy a gun on the street here. Don’t
need a license.” He spits tobacco juice on the jungle floor, smiles proudly.
“And I know the right people.”

When we get to the camp, Rudy is stealing
small sips of whiskey while applying an antibiotic ointment to the red and swollen,
rope-shaped irritation banded around his neck.

“A mere few hours ago, I was a
simple barkeep at an establishment I’d just sold off for pennies in the heart
of Kathmandu,” he says, his gruff voice sounding like his tonsils were just
removed. “Since then, the bar’s been burned down, I’ve been held at gunpoint
for cheating at cards, and I’ve been hanged by the neck. What’s next, the earth
opening beneath my feet to reveal the devil?”

I wonder if Rudy realizes just how
accurate his prediction might turn out.

Anjali is seated by the fire. She’s
staring into it, her eyes glowing and distant. Not a few feet away from her
lies the bled out body of Aussie Bruce.

“Rudy and Tony,” I say, “untie the
Sherpas and have them bury the bodies.”

Tony pulls out his knife, cuts the
Sherpas loose. Then, having instructed them on what do to about the poachers,
they begin hauling Bruce into the same section of forest where his partner
breathed his last. Tony and Rudy accompany the paid help, but before
disappearing into the dark woods, the former Baker Excavating employee turns to
me.

“These Sherpas hate the poachers as
much as I do. They’d rather the bodies are left behind for the vultures.”

“Far be it from me to break with
the will of the masses,” I say.

The men disappear into the bush
with Bruce. Making my way to Anjali, I take a knee beside her.

“You okay?”

She nods as a single tear falls
from her eye, runs down her smooth cheek.

“I was convinced I was about to be
killed,” she says. Then, wiping the tear from her eye with the back of her
hand. “Allow me to correct myself, Chase. I was convinced I was about to be
raped, tortured, then killed. In that precise order.” She sniffles, wipes her
eyes. “But I’m not crying for me. I’m crying for Rajesh, his screams, the
sweet, gentle soul that’s being robbed from his body. I’m also crying for
Elizabeth…for what Kashmiri did to her.” She looks up at me. “But yes, I was
also afraid for my own life and I’m not certain I deserve to be afraid for me.”

Exhaling. “Fear. Kind of goes with
the job.”

She shoots me a look like I’ve just
tried to cop an unwelcome feel.

“Goes with the job?” she says. “But
you seem to
like
the job.”

I cock my head over my shoulder. “I’m
good at it. That’s why people like your ex, Dr. Singh, hire me.”

She refocuses her gaze into the
fire. “I suppose you’re right. Singh wouldn’t trust you with finding Rajesh if
he weren’t convinced you were the right man for the job.”

Reaching out my hand, I gently set
it on her shoulder.

“And true to my word,” I say, “I’ve
found him.”

Her eyes light up. What had been
tears of sadness are now replaced with at least a small measure of joy, or
relief anyway. Relief that can only come from someone who’s experienced the
loss of a loved one, only to find out he or she is alive.

She looks me in the eye.

“You have to believe me, Chase. I
only want one thing. And that’s to see my boy returned to me. He doesn’t have
long to live. His unusual physical condition assures that. There’s only so much
time left for him to love me and me to love him.”

“If Kashmiri has his way, your God
Boy will be leading a great army that will be invincible. Listen carefully…”

She places her hand on my arm. “You
need to know how sorry I am about the loss of Elizabeth.”

“Thanks. But she wasn’t mine
anyway. She made that perfectly clear a long time ago.”

“But the way Singh promised her to
you…promised her alive. Your heart must be broken for a second time, regardless
of what happened between you and me back at the hotel.”

I try to feel my heart. Sure it’s
pumping the blood I need to survive, to live and breathe, but I can’t feel it.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I don’t
want
to feel it. Maybe it’s
been broken too many times before, and now it sits there inside my ribcage cobbled
back together with scar tissue, bruises, and regrets. My heart aches not only
for the woman I’ve loved and lost but also for a daughter who will experience
most of her fourth-grade year in New York City without my being around for it.

My heart tells me I should stick
around more and be there for her whenever she needs me. But my body needs to
get up and go, like a man who just can’t sit still. My ex-wife was convinced my
problem was deeply psychological. Pathological even. Maybe she was right. Maybe
I have a sickness and don’t even know it. Don’t want to know it.

I stare into Anjali’s dark eyes and
I feel for her because she is so worried about her boy. But, then I’m reminded
that she and Singh split up over the boy and that somehow Kashmiri abducted him
even if she hasn’t yet revealed to me the precise manner in which the abduction
came to be. But then, maybe she doesn’t want me to know. Maybe the
circumstances of the abduction are something she and Singh would rather forget
since it happened on their watch.

Tony and Rudy break through the
woods, the Sherpas a few steps behind them. Rudy’s neck still looks sore, but
at least it’s not snapped in half. Tony has a look in his eyes I recall all too
well from my days as a soldier in Desert Storm. It’s what we old grunts call
“the million-mile” stare. I know he’s sensing not only imminent danger but also
pure evil to go along with it. The worst is yet to come.

“We should all get some sleep,” I
say. “We’ll start out at first light for Kashmiri’s encampment and diamond mine.”

Rudy takes a drink from his bottle,
drags the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Do we get to eat anything?” he
says. “I’m starving. Hanging by the neck takes a lot out of you.”

Anjali’s eyes go wide. “How the
hell can you talk about food at a time like this? Rajesh is being held captive
by a devil and we’re just sitting here.”

I turn to her. “We’re going to get
him out of there. I promise you that, Anjali.” Then to Tony. “It’s important
that everyone tries to eat. Our energy reserves will begin to run low in this
jungle heat.”

“You know me, Chase,” he says. “I’m
always up for food.” But I know he’s lying.

Approaching the Sherpas, I instruct
them to cook up something simple and quick using the freeze-dried food supplies.
In the meantime, Tony and I come up with a plan for extracting Rajesh from that
diamond mine. It’s the least I can do to divert my thoughts from the now dead
Elizabeth. A woman I loved with all my heart, but not for long.

The Sherpas cook us a simple lentil curry which we eat with small
slabs of naan, their traditional flatbread. Rather, I
attempt
to eat,
but visions of Elizabeth being murdered atop the diamond deposit is too much to
take for my heart and stomach. When the plates are cleared, Rudy and Anjali
retire to their tents. I need to keep myself busy or I’ll think too much.
Remember too much. Which means Tony and I look over a topo map of the jungle
and work on our plan for stealing the kid away from Kashmiri.

With the topo map laid out before us,
I match up the GPS coordinates retrieved from the drone to the precise area on
the map where both the diamond mine and the Thuggee encampment and tunnel are
located. Turns out, we’re talking an area the size of several football fields,
which is how I describe it to Tony.

“But we need to concentrate only on
one place,” he says. “The tunnel.”

“Who knows how long, how wide, how
deep that tunnel is. If it were built into the side of a hill or a mountain, we
might be able to make reasonable sense of it. But underground like that, who
knows. It could zigzag for miles like an ant farm. No telling what kind of
surprises wait for us inside, we even manage to get inside. What kind of
security?”

“My guess is that it’s several
layers deep, with stairs and elevators. A real working mine, which means…” He
looks up at me like he’s just experienced his Eureka moment.

“Which means what, Tone?”

“You and I have worked on enough
underground tunnel and cave projects through the years to know that every single
one of them, no matter how big or how small, no matter how sophisticated or simplistic,
have one very important thing in common.”