Lost in Shadows (2 page)

She was never there, a cruel whisper from the recesses of his mind taunted him as he struggled to sit up. Just a mirage conjured from the Art Survey course he took to impress that sophomore—what was her name?

Juliet—no that was what Lucky had called her. Julie, that was it, plain old Julie. He remembered sitting in the dark auditorium, holding her hand while larger than life Raphael and Botticelli paintings floated on the screen before them. Man, those guys had it right—women should be life-sized, warm flesh you could get a hand on, not waifs too fragile for a man to touch.

He spit out a mouthful of blood. Bit his tongue during that last session—was it the third, or the fourth? No matter. He hadn’t said anything, had kept his attention focused on trying to find any distinguishing characteristic he could use to identify The Preacher in the future. 

He ran his tongue over parched lips. His entire left side was tingling with sharp jolts that ran from his heart down to his fingertips. He tried to wiggle his left hand, but it flapped useless in his right.

Lucky blew his breath out, fully awake now. He might have had a seizure after the last electric shock session—or maybe a heart attack. 

His chest felt like an elephant was sitting on it. Ugly purple marks where the prongs of the stun gun had burnt his skin were grouped over his heart.

Hey, he was still breathing, time to worry about the rest later. In between each session, he’d been busy prying the metal trim free from the base of the desk. The painstaking process had loosened a two inch by one inch strip of metal that he had managed to bend out before the last session. Thank God, they hadn’t noticed it.

Now or never, Lucky told himself as he inched over across the floor, his arms and legs screaming in agony from their position behind him. Finally he reached his destination. He hauled himself upright and began the painful process of sawing through the duct tape that bound him.

When Fergus returned, Lucky played possum, lying on the dirt floor, hands clutching his homemade shiv beneath him. The bowlegged caricature of a man squatted down, reached to roll Lucky over onto his stomach.

Lucky kept his body a dead weight until Fergus had him halfway rolled over, exposing the side of Fergus’ neck. Then he aimed a knee into Fergus’s abdomen and shoved his weight on top of him, the jagged edge of the shiv at the other man’s jugular.

Fergus went white, and he shouted a curse. “You were dead!”

       “Think again,” Lucky whispered, leveraging his arm against the man’s windpipe to shut him up before any of his partners heard his cries. “Where’s The Preacher? Who else is here?”

The little man just kept shaking his head, muttering gibberish. Typical bully. Give them any show of resistance and they crumble. Of course, seeming to return from the dead hadn’t hurt Lucky’s street cred.

“Tell me, Fergus!” He lifted the shiv and held it in front of the man’s face.

“Go to hell!” Fergus crashed his beefy fist into Lucky’s windpipe. 

Lucky’s vision darkened with pain as he gasped for breath. He swiped his blade down, felt it dig into the flesh of Fergus’ neck, but Fergus deflected it before it could do any serious damage. Fergus pushed Lucky off him and scrambled to grab a length of thick chain piled by the door. 

Lucky caught his breath and rolled to his feet. Fergus was swinging the chain before him, aiming to snag Lucky’s knife hand with it. Lucky feinted with his shiv, then stepped forward, extending his left arm to take the blow from the chain.

The heavy chain wrapped around Lucky’s forearm like a python strangling its prey. Fergus howled with victory as he wrenched the chain tighter, pulling Lucky forward onto his knees.

“You’re gonna stay dead this time!” he roared as he lifted a length of chain around Lucky’s neck and used both hands to tighten it.

Lucky leaned his weight back, forcing Fergus to step closer. Just a little bit more, he thought as his vision darkened. Fergus obliged, leaning forward to watch Lucky’s suffering.

Giving Lucky the opening he had been hoping for. Lucky rammed the homemade blade up, burying it into Fergus’s groin. 

Fergus jerked back in astonishment and Lucky yanked the knife out. A spray of blood spurted from Fergus’s femoral artery. Fergus dropped the chain, clasped both hands over the wound and staggered backward. 

Lucky uncoiled the chain from his neck and stumbled to his feet, aimed another blow under Fergus’ ribcage.

This time Fergus dropped to the ground, one hand flailing for the shiv stuck in his chest, the other slipping in the blood streaming from his thigh. Lucky dropped the chain onto the floor and crouched beside the dying man.

“Last chance, Fergus,” he said. “Where’s The Preacher? Who is he? What does he have planned?”

The little man’s color grew ashen. He twisted his lips into a grimace, and his hand tightened on the blade in his chest.

“The death of all of you.” Fergus’s words were slurred by hatred and effort. “He’s going to kill you, Cavanaugh. I’ll see you in hell.”

Before Lucky could stop him, Fergus wrenched the shiv out of his chest. A fresh blossom of blood streamed over his shirt and his eyes closed. Lucky put pressure on the wound, but knew that without the blade slowing the blood loss, it was a useless gesture. He felt for a pulse. There was none.

Lucky sat back on his heels, his body covered in blood, shivering with cold and adrenalin. He took a breath in, let it out, his eyes never leaving the body of the man he had killed. 

He needed to move fast, warn Chase, start searching for The Preacher—the realization hit that Lucky was probably the only law enforcement officer alive who knew exactly what The Preacher looked like. 

He closed his eyes, blocked out the stench of blood and fear and urine, blocked out the pain lancing through his body, the thick, heavy feeling of his left side, the arctic cold that threatened to devour him. Blocked out what had happened and what The Preacher would do to him if he ever caught Lucky again and the fact that Lucky had just killed a man with his own hands.

Blocked out everything until the only thing that remained was the fleeting glimpse of his Lady. Then she too was gone, vanished in the darkness. Her words sang through his mind, a haunting whisper in the darkness.

Life is hope.

“Agent Cavanaugh? Open your eyes. There you go, that’s good. You’re in the cardiac care unit, everything went fine. You’re going to be fine. You understand, Agent Cavanaugh? You’re going to be just fine.”

Lucky focused on the smiling face of his doctor and knew the man lied. No matter what the verdict from his heart biopsy was, everything was not going to be fine. 

Never again.

CHAPTER 1

Lost River Mountain, January 18

Helluva place for a city boy
. Lucky wished he were back home in DC, familiar streets and buildings framing every view instead of these West Virginia mountains with their wide-open spaces alternating with claustrophobic stands of tall trees looming over the narrow road.

“You’re sure you know where you’re going?” Lucky asked his fellow ATF agent as Tillburn drove them deeper into the shadows of the Appalachians. 

“Of course I do,” Tillburn said. “These rednecks always want to meet on their own turf. Makes ‘em feel superior to the gangbangers from the projects. Don’t know why. They all want the same stuff. Bigger, badder, faster. I figure these Liberty guys will be wanting some MAC-10’s modified to full auto, maybe a few AK’s, nothing too fancy.” 

Lucky reached over to turn up the Redskins game on the radio. He should’ve known better when Tillburn burst into the lab this morning, asking, “Hey, Lucky, still got all your fingers and toes?” by way of greeting. 

Tillburn was a cowboy, one of the agents who worked undercover for the ATF. The cowboys always figured Lucky got his nickname because he had yet to lose any major body parts in the six years he’d been a demo man. 

Lucky and his fellow demolitions experts were looked upon as “kooks” by their undercover counterparts who preferred the adrenalin rush of the streets to the more tedious but no less dangerous work of defusing and analyzing bombs.

After trying it once and barely escaping with his life, Lucky didn’t understand the allure of street work. Give him the well-ordered life of demolitions any day: he got to blow things up, then dissect and rebuild them, all in a setting where chemistry and electricity followed the predictable laws of physics. 

If he wanted adrenalin, he could go out on a call with the Metro Bomb Squad guys. They liked having him along, there hadn’t been a bomb yet that Lucky couldn’t either disarm or safely contain.

“I told you I had to be in Fairfax by seven tonight,” he reminded Tillburn. If the Redskins hadn’t been hosting the NFC championship for the first time since ‘91, this would have never happened. The only person left in the office when Tillburn came looking for backup was Lucky. He wasn’t even supposed to be there. He had the weekend off, was going to be best man in a wedding this evening.

“Don’t worry, this will be quick. It’s only a meet and greet. All you have to do is stand there and look intimidating.” Tillburn cut his eyes over at Lucky’s scrawny frame and shrugged. “Well, just stand there anyway. I don’t expect any trouble.”

Lucky shook his head at the undercover agent’s cavalier attitude. His last partner, Chase Westin, had spent the better part of a year undercover with The Preacher’s renegade militia. 

When Lucky joined him for a few short months that had seemed to stretch into eternity and which had nearly got both of them killed, Chase taught him never to take anything for granted when you were undercover. “Murphy’s Law rules,” Chase would say whenever a monkey wrench got thrown into the works.

Like a pretty FBI agent showing up with her own agenda and covert operation, Lucky thought with a smile. KC had ended up saving both his and Chase’s lives. If Chase hadn’t beaten him to the punch, Lucky would have proposed to her himself. 

“Stonewall Jackson invented guerrilla warfare and tactics in these mountains,” Lucky said, trying to ease the knot of apprehension that constricted his stomach with each mile they drove. 

 Tillburn turned off the highway, and they headed further into the mountains. “That so? I’ll bet Whitney and his crew think they’re still fighting his battles.” 

The radio faded to static. Tillburn cursed as he tried in vain to recapture the Redskins. Layers of gunmetal-grey clouds pressed down overhead, and even though it was three in the afternoon, the sun had vanished into an early twilight. 

Snow banked against the edge of the twisty road, a good two feet or more that gusts of wind had scoured and etched into a bizarre menagerie of beasts guarding their forbidden wilderness.

Lucky watched the trees bend in the wind, as if trying to block their progress into the forest. He shivered and reached to turn the heater up high. Definitely no place for a city boy.

“I told you not to touch anything, right?” Lucky asked.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s how The Preacher blew your cover last month, he has a back door into our undercover agent database. Thought the computer geeks were beefing up security.” Tillburn didn’t act as if he were too concerned. 

“The Preacher broke through security the last time we upgraded,” he reminded Tillburn. “Don’t underestimate him, he might be crazy, but he’s one smart bastard.”

Tillburn glanced at Lucky. “Right, you’ve actually met him, haven’t you? About the only person to live to tell the tale.”

“Watch the road,” Lucky groused, his fingers stroking the rabbit’s foot on his leather jacket. He wasn’t superstitious. The rabbit’s foot was a gift from his older sister. It reminded him of home, family, of why he did what he did. 

Growing up the youngest of five kids with a father on the Metro force and his three older brothers following in Dad’s footsteps, the importance of “protect and serve” had been drilled into him at a young age. Lucky and his sister, Alice, were the rebels of the Cavanaugh clan. Alice had joined the Secret Service while he’d parlayed his master’s in chemical engineering into a career with the ATF.

Going undercover for a few hours was no big deal, but he was getting a bad feeling about this. Why couldn’t the Liberty Hunt Club have come into DC to go shopping for their munitions instead of forcing them to traipse all over creation?

“Almost there,” Tillburn said. They passed a sign announcing that they were entering the Lost River National Forest and Wilderness Area. “Yeah, that road on the right.” 

The BMW, the product of a DEA curtailment, fish-tailed as they turned onto a gravel drive. Another few miles and they pulled up to a small, white-framed house with two pickup trucks and a Ford Expedition parked in front.

“Remember, let me do all the talking,” Tillburn said as they left the car. 

Lucky slid his hand inside his jacket, touched the grip of his forty caliber Glock and nodded. He eyed the gathering clouds warily. Chase was going to kill him if he was late for the wedding. “Let’s go.”

They entered the Liberty Hunt Club. The door opened directly into a large room with fireplaces at either end and a long bar along the back wall. A balding man with glasses sat at a desk immediately inside the door, a laptop before him. Behind the bar, a beefy, red-faced man poured a glass of Bookers for one of the other two men waiting.