Chapter 4 - Midnight Visitors
My house sat on five acres of dense pine woods off Route 17, three miles outside town limits. It was an old two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, built in the late 1940s. To anyone driving by, it looked like a peaceful, aging family homestead.
To a trained combat instructor, it was a fortified defensive perimeter with interlocking fields of fire.
I arrived home at eleven-thirty. The rain had picked up, drumming against the tin roof with a dull, steady rhythm. I didn't turn on the front porch lights. Instead, I walked into my detached workshop behind the main house.
I unlocked the heavy steel gun safe hidden behind a false panel of pegboards. Inside rested tools I hadn’t touched since leaving active service: an unmodified Benelli M4 tactical 12-gauge shotgun, three boxes of double-ought buckshot, night-vision monoculars, and two sets of tactical flex-cuffs.
I wasn’t looking to kill anyone. I wasn’t going to give Frank Cole’s corrupt judges an excuse to put me behind bars for murder while my daughter remained unprotected. But I was going to secure my home, and I was going to extract the truth.
At twelve-fifteen, the headlights appeared down the gravel driveway.
A black Dodge Ram pickup and a dark Chevy sedan rolled silently past the mailbox, their engines idling low, headlights turned off to run solely on amber parking lights. They stopped thirty yards short of the porch.
Through my night-vision optic from the darkened second-floor window, I watched four men get out.
Dustin was in the lead. He wore a dark hoodie pulled low over his cap, his posture tense and aggressive. Beside him were two men I didn't recognize—heavier, older, moving with the careless confidence of seasoned street enforcers. The fourth man stayed by the truck bed, carrying a five-gallon plastic gas canister.
They hadn't come to talk. They had come to burn the house to the ground to ensure no witnesses survived.
“Check the workshop first,” I heard Dustin whisper, his voice cutting through the damp night air. “If the old man is inside, put him down. Uncle Frank said nobody leaves this property on their own two feet.”
They moved in pairs. Dustin and one enforcer headed toward the front porch with crowbars, while the other two moved toward the workshop.
I was already behind them.
I had slipped out the back storm cellar minutes before their tires hit the gravel. I moved silently through the shadow of the weeping willows, my combat boots making no sound against the wet grass.
The man carrying the gas can never heard me approach.
I stepped out from behind the cedar trunk, driving the butt of the Benelli shotgun squarely into the nerve cluster behind his right knee. His leg buckled instantly. Before he could cry out, my left hand clamped over his mouth while my right thumb dug deep into the pressure point beneath his earlobe. He went limp, his nervous system overwhelmed, sliding into the mud without a sound. I dragged him beneath the porch lattice and secured his wrists and ankles with zip-ties in less than eight seconds.
His partner, reaching for the workshop doorknob, turned around when he heard the faint click of the plastic tie.
“Mickey?” he called out in a low rasp.
He reached into his leather jacket, pulling a snub-nosed revolver from his waistband.
He was too slow.
I closed the ten-foot gap before his gun cleared his holster. My left hand trapped his wrist, forcing the muzzle downward toward the dirt, while my right palm drove upward into the hinge of his jaw. The crack echoed like a snapped branch. His teeth slammed together, his eyes rolled back, and he dropped like a sack of wet flour. I kicked the revolver into the bushes, cuffed him to the water pipe beside the workshop, and turned toward the front porch.
Dustin was standing at the front door, jimmying the lock with a pry bar, swearing under his breath.
“Hurry up!” his crony hissed from the bottom step, looking nervously at the empty driveway. “Where the hell are Mickey and Joe?”
“Shut up,” Dustin snapped, shoving the door open with a splintering crunch. “They’re probably already stealing the tools from the shed. Let’s get inside and find Marcy’s laptop before we light the place up.”
“Looking for this?” I spoke from the bottom of the porch stairs.
Dustin spun around so fast he nearly lost his footing on the wet wood.
The porch light suddenly flicked on. Vance had wired a remote relay before I left the hospital, and three high-intensity security floodlights bathed the entire porch in blinding, surgical white light.
Dustin blinked, raising an arm against the glare. The enforcer beside him drew a heavy automatic pistol, leveling it straight at my chest.
“Drop it, old man!” the enforcer yelled.
*Click-clack.*
The distinct, unmistakable sound of a Benelli cycling a 12-gauge shell broke the night. But it didn't come from me.
From the tree line, four state tactical officers emerged with patrol rifles raised, their weapon lights pinning the enforcer in an inescapable crossfire. Vance stepped onto the porch from the side yard, his Glock 17 held at low ready.
“Drop the weapon!” Vance shouted. “Drop it or you die on this porch!”
The enforcer’s nerve shattered instantly. The heavy steel pistol clattered onto the wooden deck, and he threw his hands into the air, dropping to his knees.
Dustin stood alone at the front door, his face pale, his jaw twitching with impotent rage. He looked at the floodlights, looked at the rifles pointed at his chest, and then looked down at me.
“You’re finished, Dustin,” I said, walking slowly up the porch steps until I stood three feet from him. “Your men are cuffed. The state troopers have the house surrounded. You violated your bail conditions within two hours of walking out of the county jail.”
Dustin’s eyes darted frantically around the yard, looking for an escape that didn't exist. Then, an ugly, vicious laugh tore from his throat.
“You think this is over?” Dustin snarled, pointing a shaking finger in my face. “You think you won something, Robert? You don’t have the drive! Frank already copied the files. Frank already moved the money!”
I stepped closer, until Dustin could see his own terrified reflection in my eyes.
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“I don’t need the drive to finish this, Dustin,” I said quietly. “Because your uncle didn't send you here to clean up the mess. He sent you here as bait. And you were stupid enough to swallow the hook.”
***
