The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (27 page)

Twenty minutes later I was checking on Manetti. Her pulse and pressure were still off, and Deanna had cracked another bag.

I watched her chest rise and fall. Those few inches of shuddering movement made life feel so fragile. Riehl came in and stood beside her. His hands were so big he could have been a stand-in for the Hulk. With both mitts he held Manetti’s hand for a second. When he looked up at me, I was expecting to see some kind of emotion. They’d been partners for a few years and even if the ordeal in Oregon was the only thing they’d been through together, it was enough to bond them for life. And I happened to know for a fact they’d been through other things also. Maybe not as awful but in their own ways just as bad. Riehl and Manetti shared a bond deeper than friendship, maybe deeper than love.

So I was expecting Riehl to emote. What I saw instead was even more powerful and terrifying. His face went cold. His eyes laser-focused. All he did was nod at me once. Just once.

It was all he needed to do. It meant:
game on.

He was asking me to go with them. So I responded in kind. Just one nod, meaning:
I’m in.

“Hang in there, Agnes.” I squeezed Manetti’s hand.

Outside the wind had died down. The air was damp, the kind of cold that burrowed deep inside and took days to get out. Still pitch black.

The light from the facility lit up the exterior, exposing the utter destruction left by the storm. One maple had cracked and fallen on top of two cars in the parking lot. The long drive was covered in heavy branches. Upstairs, a couple windows were shattered on the fourth floor.

I followed Riehl down the drive and into the neighboring field. The helicopter’s lights were on. The pilot fiddled with his controls. The tack unit was already packed inside. Megan was seated beside the pilot.

“You ready for this?” Riehl asked. “It’s the real deal.”

The correct answer was no. I had no business going out with them to catch this asshole. But I kept thinking about Manetti. I pictured her in that tiny hospital bed, clinging desperately to life. Shot in the back by a sadistic asshole who had either forgotten about her already or was still laughing about it.

“I’m ready.”

***

Beneath us, the helicopter’s high-powered fog light illuminated the long grey ribbon of road. Every other block, I spotted another obstruction blocking the street. A split tree or a downed power line. Many roads were flooded and impassable. Most of the street lights were dark, the power was out almost everywhere, leaving the ground in shadow as we zoomed by overhead. It was five-thirty now. Sunrise in a little over an hour. We flew over an eerie landscape ravaged by the storm.

And we were getting close. My nerves had kicked in and I couldn’t sit still.

Megan’s voice came on over the headset.

“It’s a two story house on the bay, about fifty years old and falling apart. It faces the road and backs up to the bay with a long dock. We can’t get a satellite image right now because of the storm cover, but let’s assume there’s a boat at the end of that dock,” Megan said.

Megan’s voice was matter of fact and she spoke with an authority beyond her years. “Good news is the road is only two lanes with no turnoffs for at least half a mile in either direction. We know they have a car, so let’s count on them having two, maybe three vehicles. We have state troopers moving into position now in either direction. So the roads are covered. What’s not covered right now is the hypothetical boat. We’re trying to get local LE to loan us something but there’s no guarantee. They’re still recovering from the storm. If our guys flee on foot, there’s a half mile of swamp and heather on the other side of the road that only takes them to a separate inlet. They can flee but they don’t have easy access to another road. Nearest public transportation is twenty minutes away by car, and they can forget the airport anyway. We’ve flagged them all in the system and I doubt any planes are going to fly this morning.”

“How are we hitting them?” one of the tack guys said.

“The first floor of the house is mostly open space,” Megan said.

“Dynamic entry,” Riehl said.

The tack unit did a little macho cheer, getting the answer they wanted.

Megan continued. “We set down half a click from the house behind the roadblock. If they hear the chopper they’ll get spooked. From the roadblock we’ll take cars in as close as we can and then fan out. Eddie has studied the house and can provide more color.”

I wasn’t expecting her to hand me the mike.

“It’s a pretty basic layout. We’ve got a living room, dining room, kitchen and half bathroom on the first floor. Stairs up to the second floor are in the middle of the house, right by the front door and lead to two bedrooms and a shared bathroom. There’s a basement in there too. It’s a tiny little shithole from what we can tell, not too much furniture so you should have pretty good line of sight inside the structure.”

“Got any intel on what’s going on inside?”

I thought back to the dream I had watched probably fifty times. “Best we can tell there are four or five men and maybe three women in the house right now.”

“And they won’t be expecting us.”

I shook my head. “Cons are always expecting the police to walk through the door. You can expect them to be armed and have their weapons close by.”

***

We came in low, impossibly low. Looking down it seemed like our skiffs would get caught in some of the trees, like a swimmer's feet getting tangled in seaweed. But somehow the pilot kept us flying fast and just above the treetops.

We set down two hundreds yard from the southern roadblock. Four cruisers were parked diagonally to create a barrier on the two-lane road. Another police transport was behind them. I counted a dozen troopers in uniform and a six-man team in riot gear, ready to do the dance. I fully expected Riehl or Megan to turn to me at any point and say,
okay, see you later, Eddie, it'd be safer if you didn't come in with us
. But they didn't. And as scared as I was, I was grateful. I wanted to go in. I wanted to shoot this guy myself if I got the chance.

The head trooper called us in for a huddle by one of the cruisers. He flattened an aerial map on the hood of the car. Riehl and Megan stood next to him while I circled with the rest of the tack unit. Riehl and Megan were preternaturally calm, while the tactical unit was antsy, ready to go scrambling.

The trooper circled the house in question with his pointer.

"We got visual confirmation five minutes ago. Infrared scans tell us there are eight people in that house, five we think are men. One of the men matching the description of Lettes stepped out onto the back porch this morning."

"How many cars do they have?" Riehl asked.

"We see two. One of them is parked behind the house in an unusual spot with a tarp over it. Obvious conclusion to draw there."

The getaway vehicle. They'd covered it up out of fear I'd gotten a decent look at it.

"Do they have a boat?" Megan asked.

The trooper nodded. "It's a bay boat. Not really big enough for all of them but in a pinch they could use it."

"How do we disable that?" I asked.

Riehl gave me a smile. "Thanks for volunteering."

I smiled right back at him. "Just doing my part."

But it was a self-serving question. I figured these guys might make a run for the boat. I wanted to be there when that happened.

***

The sky brightened in the east. The edge of the bay shimmered like it was on fire. We piled in to unmarked cars, kept the lights off, and drove fifteen miles-per-hour up the road and rolled to a stop three houses away. The troopers stayed put in the cars with the engines humming.

Then everybody was running. There were nine of us plus another ten members of local SWAT. The tack unit carried some sleek-looking automatic weapons with laser sights and flash beams attached to them, while Riehl and Megan had the handguns. I was packing too. The tack unit wasn't too happy about that, but Riehl and Megan shut them up quickly. Megan had seen firsthand how I'd handled a weapon in Oregon. I obviously didn't have their training but at the same time I wasn't going to shoot myself in the foot or accidentally blow somebody's head off. We were going in hard, we were going in fast. The plan was for everything to be over inside of a minute.

They called it a dynamic entry. It was a shock and awe approach. We’d breach through the two ground entrances at the same time. SWAT would toss some flash-bangs to momentarily stun everybody in the house. While they were dazed we’d breach and neutralize any threats. The goal was to get to White quickly and safely, minimum of fuss, with hopefully no shots fired and then drag his ass out of there.

It was a good plan and I was surrounded by competent people who’d been through the shit before.

We split into two groups. I followed Megan’s group around the side of a newer-looking bay house, into its backyard, and then we were running along the grass that edged the beach. Riehl had taken a group up the street.

***

White had never gone to sleep.

They'd had two choices: make a long run into Virginia or take a short run to Lettes's house along the bay. The storm, which had aided his escape, had made that choice for them. Major highways were impassable and once the storm began to abate, more cops would be out looking. So they'd settled on the bay.

It was a good spot. They could get to public transportation if they had to and with a few minutes up the road could travel west if needed. There was an old bay boat he could take for a run up or down inlet in either direction. He had people he could use in New Jersey and some all the way down in Maryland and Virginia. 

But now White was regretting the decision to remain local. Storm be damned, they should have stayed on the fucking road and found a way.

The booze and the broads had been a welcome release, but White hadn't truly been able to relax. He'd been fleeing now for ten hours and he'd felt every minute of it. When the others had dozed off, courtesy of the alcohol, he'd stayed up. He wasn't going to shut his eyes until he was somewhere else with the new identity. For reasons he couldn't even understand, part of him demanded he stay in the States even though it would have been safer to go to Mexico or South America. A man of his talents could make money anywhere. It was the safer play. But the pull of "home" was too strong. White couldn't see himself anywhere else.

White had spent his life outside of the law and from an early age had developed a sixth sense of knowing when he was in danger of being caught. Now that the storm had passed and the police were out looking, that feeling was working its traveling north, from his lower back to his neck. Many years ago he'd ignored the creepy-crawlies and suffered for it—some pig had caught him boosting a car. Since then he'd learned to follow his intuition. It kept him safe, or as safe as a criminal could be on a day to day basis.

With two fingers he opened the blinds a few inches. He was looking out the front of the house so the street was still covered in darkness except where the streetlights were on. All looked normal, at first glance. Across the road all he could see was marsh and swamp that led to another inlet farther out. The bend in the road gave him eyeballs on the neighbor's houses to the north. They were all still dark, everybody asleep, and using his freakishly photographic memory, White was able to confirm the same cars were still parked in the driveways and on the street.

The woman stirred in the bed, the sheet falling off to expose her soft thigh. The slope of her hip stirred the urge in him, but he ignored it. He had to get a look to the south.

White slipped on his clothes quietly and laced his sneakers. Another old lesson learned the hard way: if you were on the run, first thing you did was tie your shoes and get your keys when you woke up. White hadn't broken that rule in a long time.

The other bedroom door was open. He peered inside and saw the other broad curled up with Lettes. He smirked. At least he'd had first dibs on her. It was a long-running gag that nobody wanted Lettes's sloppy seconds. It was only a matter of time before that shithead contracted some STD. He was reckless when it came to his dick.

The stairs creaked as White descended. Nobody else was awake. Trip and Chance, asleep on couch and floor, didn't even stir as he walked right by them. Shovel, the little guy White had only met for the first time last night, was dozing in a recliner. White stepped into the bathroom on the south side of the house, kept the light off, and gently—very gently—nudged the curtains aside a sliver.

Several shadows passed just through the cone of amber light coming from one of the streetlights in front of the neighbor's house. 

White didn't panic.

He also didn’t hesitate. Matter of fact, he didn't even think about what to do. He already knew what to do. He had decided a long time ago. There was no need to weigh his options because there was only one option.

He stepped out of the bathroom. "THEY'RE HERE!"

***

Riehl was moving with local SWAT down the street. They were close now. His adrenaline supercharged him as they hustled in the predawn darkness toward the house that a girl he’d never met before had dreamed of. The same girl that had aided White in his escape. The same girl that had tried to trick Eddie into shooting Manetti.