B00CCYP714 EBOK (36 page)

“That’s all doable with the right surveillance equipment,” Rainey countered. She was still unwilling to believe she let someone inside her security net who would do her harm.

“The guard’s dog’s name is Buddy, if he asks. You cannot enter your home without defeating four levels of security. There are no weapons allowed past the foyer or garage door. The panic room is in the master suite closet, behind a hidden panel, accessible only by biometric lock.”

Rainey dropped her hands to her sides. “Enough.” She took a step toward Martin and he ducked, anticipating a blow. “I’m not going to hit you. Give me your business card.”

Astonished at the request, Martin asked, “What?”

Rainey held out her hand. “Give me your card. I have things to do today, but I will sit down and talk with you. I will call you as soon as things settle down around here.”

Martin dug around in his coat pocket, producing a card emblazoned with, “Cross Examinations: The real story.”

“Catchy, Martin,” Rainey said, slipping it in her pocket. “Now, out you go. I don’t advise trying this approach again. They’re giving me my firearms back today.”

She escorted the still trembling writer out the back gate.

“Thank you for not kicking my ass,” Martin said.

Rainey smiled and looked down at his crotch. “Sorry about the pants, Martin. I’ll call you.”

She closed the gate and turned to Gunny. “You know she’s going to rake us both over the coals for the firearm violation, a second offense, I might add.”

“No, I don’t think so. She shouted at me to go get it and go after you. I think she’s glad I broke the rules, and I may have actually won a point in my argument.”

Rainey laughed, patting Gunny on the back. “Oorah, Gunny.”

“Oorah,” came the reply.

On the outside, Rainey was calm, almost serene, laughing and joking with Gunny on the way back to the house. On the inside, her mind was racing through the list of construction workers, architects, employees, friends, and acquaintances, even family members who had access to her home. Her cellphone rang, as she chuckled at the argument Gunny was preparing in favor of allowing weapons in locked vehicles in the garage. She pulled it out of her pocket, seeing Junior’s number on the screen. As hard as she tried not to allow it, doubt crept into mind. That’s what Martin had just set in motion, Rainey’s inability to trust anyone, even a man she considered a little brother.

“Hang on, Gunny. I need to take this. It might be about Mackie.” Rainey stopped walking and answered the phone. “Hey, Junior. Is Mackie all right?”

Junior proudly announced, “He came through with flying colors. That’s what Dr. Herndon said. He should make a complete recovery, and be healthier than he was two days ago. He’s in recovery now. We should be able to see him in a few hours.”

“Great. Katie and I were planning on coming after we get the kids down for their afternoon nap.”

“Okay, I’ll tell Thelma and Ernie. They haven’t left the waiting room all day.”

“Gunny is going to stay here at the house. We’ll drive separate cars, so I can stay for the night if I need to. Thelma would probably like to go home for a bit. I’m sure you could use a break, too. You haven’t left him either, have you?”

“Why does Gunny need to stay at your house? I thought you caught the stalker guy. Who are you afraid of?” Junior asked.

“Someone tried to frame me for murder. Until I figure out who that is, I’m not standing down. It may take days or years, but I’m going to figure out who this is.”

“I hear that,” Junior said. “I contacted Brooks.” He paused to chuckle. “She likes me.”

“You’re pretty, Junior. Just her type,” Rainey said, laughing with him.

“I asked her to run deeper background check on everybody associated with the bail business. Brooks can dig a little deeper than the rest of us, as you know. She said she was coming over to your house to stay a few days and would work on it for me.”

“And what did she wrangle out of you in return?” Rainey teased.

“She said I had to come serve her drinks at your house with my shirt off, just so she could look at me. I don’t think she was serious.”

Rainey cackled into the phone. “Oh, Junior. She was so serious. You better work on those abs.” The phone vibrated in her hand. She tipped it down to see Brooks’s number on call-waiting. “Speak of the devil, she’s calling me now. I’ll see you soon.”

“My girlfriend would kill me. Tell her that.”

“A deal’s a deal,” Rainey said into the receiver, and then hung up with Junior to answer the other call. “Hello, Brooks. Are you calling with your ETA?”

“Rainey, Danny is on his way to you. Be calm,” Brooks said, with uncharacteristic seriousness.

“I thought he had to go back to Quantico,” Rainey said, worried but not sure what she should be worried about.

“He was about to leave for the airport when I showed him what I found. He told me to call you and ran away with his head pressed to his phone.” She paused. “Where are the children, Rainey?”

“Why, what’s wrong?” Rainey said, beginning to sprint for the backdoor.

“It’s Gunny. She was raped at age eighteen, her first year in the service. She’s Michael Paul Perry’s birthmother.”

Rainey stopped running. Gunny, who had been running beside her, skidded to a halt, too. Her eyes darted around the yard and to the house, looking for the enemy. When she made eye contact with Rainey, it only took a split second for the recognition to hit her. They locked eyes long enough for Rainey to see the transformation. Like the nictitating membrane retracting on a shark’s eye, Gunny blinked the psychopath into view.

At that moment, Katie opened the backdoor. It distracted Gunny, but not Rainey. She threw her cellphone down and leapt for Gunny’s weapon, yelling, “Panic room, now Katie!”

Rainey heard the door slam, but could not look up to confirm Katie was gone. She knew she was. One thing Katie recognized was Rainey’s “get to safety” voice, never hesitating to do what that voice said. Rainey got her confirmation, when seconds later the panic alarm exploded from the house. The guards would ignore it for the fifteen seconds allowed for resetting, after false alarms and appearances by the likes of Martin Douglas Cross. Katie was following procedure. By now, she would be rushing everyone into the panic room, where they would be safe. She would call the proper authorities from the emergency phone and wait for help. Rainey on the other hand had a major problem, surviving until that help arrived.

Gunny Pierce was fully capable of killing with her bare hands, so it made no difference that Rainey had managed to knock the pistol from her grasp. She grabbed two fists full of Rainey’s hair, and began banging her knee repeatedly into Rainey’s face.

She was not so much speaking as snarling. “You killed my son, bitch. You told him he would never get out of prison and he hung himself because of it.”

Rainey took a second to recover from the first couple of blows, thankful for the training Gunny put her through. They had worked on fighting while dazed by a punch. She had Rainey run in circles with her forehead on a bat, then kicked the bat away, and ordered her to flail away at the heavy bag.

 “Just swing. Keep moving. You’re bound to land something and a moving target is harder to hit,” Gunny would shout at her.

Rainey took that advice and began to pummel any part of Gunny she could reach, gaining the upper hand by the sheer force of running her into the patio furniture. Rainey’s advantage was size and strength, and she used it to launch them both on top of the wooden table, snapping the umbrella pole, causing the open canopy to close on the wrestling women beneath it. Rainey’s range of motion became limited immediately. When she drew back to land a punch on Gunny’s face, her shirt snagged long enough to lose control of her opponent.

Gunny kneed Rainey in the ribs with sufficient force to knock the breath out of her. She stumbled back, tangling in the canopy further. Gunny sat up and kicked out with both feet, sending the umbrella incased Rainey tumbling backward. She landed hard on the blue slate patio, a piece of the splintered umbrella framing piercing her arm. Rainey fought to catch her breath, and ripped her arm free of the wooden spike. She’d rather bleed to death than lie there and get pummeled.

Gunny was no longer talking. She growled like an animal, leapt off the table and landed on Rainey. The women exchanged blows, but Rainey was taking the brunt of the fight. Gunny grabbed a handful of hair on either side of Rainey’s head and tried smashing her skull against the slate. Her head hit the umbrella frame instead—a painful blow, but far less damaging than having her brains bashed out on the patio deck. Rainey could hear sirens now. She only needed to hold on for a few minutes more. While Gunny gripped her hair, she left Rainey’s hands free. She had one shot to knock this crazed, but highly trained combatant off her chest, before the umbrella frame gave way, and her brains were turned to mush.

Gunny taught Rainey how to deliver a strike to an opponent’s open jaw that was almost guaranteed to knock them out. Rainey clasped both hands together, fingers interlaced. She pulled her elbows close to her chest, rocked to one side, and then flung her weight back in the other direction. All of Rainey’s strength went into the swing of her double fist, up through Gunny’s outstretched arms, connecting the hammer blow to her open jaw with a snap of bone.

The effect was instantaneous. Gunny fell on top of Rainey, who scrambled out from beneath her as fast as she could. She stood over Gunny’s unconscious body for a moment, making sure she was out cold. Rainey looked down at the blood spreading on her shirt. It was not too bad. She had worse. Locating Gunny’s pistol became her priority. Rainey was not going to bleed to death from her wounds, but if Gunny woke up and found her pistol, things could get bad very quickly.

Rainey thought she saw the weapon fly over by Katie’s prized rose bush, the only survivor of last summer’s blight. The sirens were in front of the house now. Katie would be controlling the gate from inside the panic room, letting them in. Then she would have to disarm the alarm for them to enter the house. The alarm continued to wail, so finding the wayward firearm was still Rainey’s biggest concern. She was digging around under the rose bush, thinking she really needed to weed-eat some of the taller grass, when she heard a shell being racked into the chamber of a nine-millimeter Glock, an all too familiar sound.

 “Convenient that you’re already down on your knees,” Gunny snarled, her words a little warbled by her swelling jaw. “Turn around, stay on your knees, hands on your head.”

Rainey turned slowly, searching hate-filled eyes for the woman she had once thought of as a friend, but not finding her there.

“I didn’t kill your son, Gunny. You’re going to kill me anyway, but you should know the truth. He was a very sick boy, much like the man that raped you. It’s true that I recommended he be moved from the juvenile facility straight to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. He died committing autoerotic asphyxiation, masturbating while he cut off his airflow. The powerful family that adopted him would rather people think he killed himself, than let the truth be known. That’s what happened, Gunny.”

“Still toeing the bureau line, are you? Staring down the barrel of a gun and you still lie for those people. Who were you to decide Michael wasn’t rehabilitated? You took his hope away. Do you know what they did to him in that cesspool they called juvenile facility.”

“How would you know, Gunny? I know all the people who visited him in there. You were not one of them.”

“Michael contacted me after he turned eighteen. I got one letter, before he was taken from me. That’s all I have. He reached out to me for help. They were torturing him in there.”

“Did he tell you about the eleven-year-old boy he raped at the facility, so violently he had to be hospitalized?”

That was the wrong tactic to use. Rainey discovered that very quickly. Gunny took a step forward, raised the pistol in the air, and brought the butt of it down on Rainey’s cheek. The blow sent blood running from a jagged gash and stars danced into Rainey’s vision. The alarm began to sound funny, taking on a wah-wah echo. The black tunnel of unconsciousness wavered around her.

Gunny grabbed her by the hair again, preventing her from toppling over. She let out a wicked laugh, the self-satisfied cackle of a psychopath. It was the epitome of duping delight, the ultimate “I’ve got you now.” It was the sound of pure evil, often requiring the tossing back of the head for emphasis. In Gunny’s case, the head toss was unnecessary. The Glock was there to make her point.

She lowered her crazed eyes again on Rainey. “Oh no, you don’t. You’re not passing out. You’re going to see this coming.”

She jerked hard on Rainey’s hair, pulling her up, lifting her knees from the ground. She pointed the barrel of the gun at Rainey’s face. Rainey squeezed her eyes shut, just as the alarm was silenced. She fully expected the next sound to be a gun blast that she would never hear.

“Hey!”

Startled, Rainey opened her eyes. She and Gunny both turned to see Constance Herndon pull the trigger of a snub-nosed .38. It was the last thing Marine Gunnery Sergeant Naomi Pierce, retired, saw before she hit the ground.

Constance was at her side in seconds, prying Gunny’s hand from her hair, while Rainey wrenched the firearm from Gunny’s other hand. Constance shoved Gunny over into the rose bushes with her foot, and then took the weapon from Rainey. She put both pistols on the ground, as the police poured into the yard.

“That woman was attempting to shoot my daughter. I shot her. We need an ambulance,” Constance announced to the police and then sat beside Rainey, cradling her against her chest. “Are you all right, Rainey?” she asked calmly.

“I’m okay,” Rainey said, still dizzy and stunned by what just happened. “How did you know about the revolver?”

Constance smiled at her daughter. “My father gave that book-safe and gun to Billy before we ran away to get married. He said Billy should use it on my mother if she came after us. Thankfully, he did not.”

“Things might have been different if he had,” Rainey said, a little sad at the moment that her family had been torn apart before it really got started.