Fatal Justice (Jack Lamburt #1)(5)
They sounded far enough away that I wasn’t concerned they’d see me when I poked my head around the corner and peered into the parking lot. Before I spotted them, I heard Ostrich Boy talking about Mary Sue. Other than the cursing, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his tone was bad.
His maniacal laugh was even worse.
4
I located my quarry and watched them stumble and slide over to a black Cadillac SUV. On the third try, Ostrich Boy found the correct pocket that held his key fob and chirped his door unlocked. He climbed in, started the engine, and backed out of his spot without unlocking the other doors. He didn’t look both ways, either. What a douchebag. He probably even texted while driving.
I memorized his New York plates, which read “KING REX.” King Rex? Rex was the Latin word for King, so in effect his license plate read “KING KING.” Idiot.
He slammed the oversized SUV into drive and accelerated across the parking lot. His two partners in crime scampered through the snow to keep up with him, banging on the windows and smacking the roof while they cursed at him. “Open the door, you fuck.”
I had a good view of him behind the wheel and saw him laughing hysterically like an overtired kid who drank too much caffeinated soda. He’d pull away, stop, wait for the two buffoons to come sliding through the snow and catch up to him, and pull away again once they got their meaty hands on the door handles.
The fatter of the two took a hard spill on his ass, his fat jiggling like a cartoon character. An “Ooh, shit” wheezed from his mouth when he landed, and he sat there breathing heavy in the snow for a second, dazed from the sudden stop. In his struggle to catch his breath, he sounded like he’d just sprinted a mile. In reality it couldn’t have been more than fifty feet, but I had to cut him some slack because he probably hadn’t run that far since he was in grammar school. If ever.
I had to work hard not to laugh out loud at the comic stupidity I was witnessing, and despite them bringing up highlight reels of the Three Stooges in my head, I knew these three dumb bastards were armed and dangerous. Especially Ostrich Boy.
According to HFS, a little known government spy agency, he was a stone cold killer who took special delight in torturing his victims until they pleaded with him to kill them. Then he’d torture them some more.
After another minute or so of proving his superiority, Ostrich Boy seemed to have grown bored of playing his high school game and he let the two cold and out of shape middle aged adolescents into the big Cadillac. I could hear him laughing when they opened their doors.
I walked over to my pickup, started her up, and left my headlights off. The snow was light enough on my windshield that my wipers cleared it away in no time.
The big SUV made a quick left turn onto Route 10, and I followed them from a safe distance. They traveled less than a half mile before making a right onto Sawyer Hill Road. After a couple of hundred feet, they made a left turn into the parking lot of the Lakeview House, a small B&B that overlooked Summit Lake. Hopefully this was their last stop of the night. I drove past them and pulled over to the side of the gravel road.
During the day, Sawyer Hill Road didn’t have much traffic on it. This time of night it was downright desolate. I got out and walked over to the Lakeview House, arriving just in time to see the three stooges stumble up the front steps.
Once they were inside, I watched them through a window on the front porch. They bypassed the small bar that greeted you as soon as you entered and headed up a flight of stairs to the second floor, which housed the guest rooms of the old house. They moved out of sight, and a couple of lights came on within seconds of each other. The three clowns had entered their rooms. Hopefully for the night.
I went back to my truck and sat for a while, watching in my side-view mirror to make sure that nobody left the Lakeview House. The last thing I wanted to see was any of them returning to the Red Barn.
Thirty minutes went by with no sign of them and I figured that they’d had enough booze for the night and would spend the remainder of it sleeping it off, so I decided to leave. I started my truck and hung a U-turn. In two minutes I was back at the Red Barn.
The place had emptied out and I grabbed one of the many open stools at the bar. Good to be home.
“Where’d you go?” Debbie asked, taking a break from hand-washing the pile of glasses that had accumulated while she was busy fielding compliments and popping beers. She poured a Molson Triple XXX into a frosted mug and set it in front of me. Yum.
“I had to check on something.”
“Sure,” she teased. “I turn my back for a second, and the next thing I know you and Frances disappear for an hour. Care to explain yourself?”
“No way. I’d never admit to that.” I raised my mug and made a toast. “Here’s to hot sex with a nonagenarian.” I took a swig of beer, and another. Icy-cold beer was God’s gift to man. Ranked right up there with warm pizza and hot women.
Debbie scoffed at me. “Stop trying to impress me with big words.”
“Nonagenarian means someone between the ages of ninety and ninety-nine.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “I know what it means. You pronounced it wrong.”
“Oh.”
I looked at my watch and it was already after midnight. “Wow, getting late. I’m going to head back to the Hill in a few minutes and let London out.” The Hill was slang for Eminence, a small hamlet with a winter population of eight, if you counted household pets. It was surrounded by about a million acres of state-owned forest land and if you ever wanted to live the quiet life or disappear, Eminence was the place for you.