Behold the Stars (25 page)

But the seven were townspeople, and they did not look defeated. They looked angry, resolute. And they were waiting for him to lead them.

Ten people in Diane’s shop who would fight, including Isaac and Show. Nine people in the ice cream shop, including Dan and Ceej. Where were Len, Bart, and Havoc?

Addressing the whole room, Isaac asked, “Anybody seen Len? And how many are out there?”

Martin Fosse, the mayor, stood up. “Those SUVs were full. Six of them, rolling into town like some kind of military caravan. I’d say thirty in all. And I think those trucks are armored or something. Not taking damage like the other cars out there. I saw three other Horde riding in—didn’t see who, but they went around the other side. I think they must be across the street somewhere.”

Thirty? The Northsiders were big, but not that big. They had help. Of course they did. Ellis’s resources were apparently limitless, and he’d taken his time planning this attack.

Show, who’d gone up to the blown-out front window and surveyed the situation, came back now and said, “Quiet out there now, but I see maybe two dozen men at cover. What about outside town? Any word of trouble?”

Fosse shook his head. “This looks like their stand right here.” The mayor looked at Isaac. “This is bad, Ike.”

No shit. Isaac’s head was pounding. It was more than he had any idea how to deal with. He pulled his phone and dialed Len. It took three tries to get the call through.

When it finally did, his SAA picked up immediately and answered in a whisper, “Boss! You whole?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Bart took fire, clipped his shoulder and took his bike out. We got him in cover. Hav and me are in the alley, south side of Main.”

“We’re right across the street, in the Treasure House. Dan and Ceej are up at the ice cream shop. Can you get to them?”

Len was quiet, and Isaac knew he was planning the move. “Think so. Gotta get Bart movin’ with us, but it’s quiet now, so we’ll go.”

“Careful, brother. We got maybe thirty bad guys walking around with big fucking guns. Call me when you’re there.”

“Yep.”

Isaac ended that call and dialed Dan. That call went through on the first try. When he answered, Isaac first asked, “Vic with you?”

“No. Ain’t been able to raise him for half an hour. He was going down the row, sending people up here. Went alone. He’s down, gotta be.”

Fuck. Two brothers down, at least wounded, maybe worse. Jesus fucking Christ. “Dammit. Okay. I hear you’ve got nine people over there, seven ready to fight?”

“Yeah. Nine fighters, including me and Ceej.”

“Look out for Len and Havoc, coming in from the back. They’re in the alley. They got Bart—he’s hit.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Then Isaac said, “Put Ceej on.” C.J. and Victor had military training. He needed their insight.

“Yeah,” C.J.’s voice was gruff and strained.

“Ceej. Brother, we need military-grade ideas here. What’s the play?”

And he had one. Isaac listened as C.J. detailed a decent plan. When he ended the call, he pulled Show aside and explained it to him. Then they brought it to the people arrayed on the floor, their hunting rifles and shotguns in hand. Except for the poor customers tucked into a corner, to a one, with grim determination, they agreed.

The plan required more patience than the Northsiders outside had, and automatic gunfire again began spraying the buildings, coming into the broken windows and destroying stock. Bits of china and glass rained down and flew around, catching glints of sunlight before landing on the roughhewn floor.

Hopefully, though, people were safe enough for now. Isaac pushed Diane, Martin, and the rest back into a far corner, and then he and Show crabbed their way to the front of the store. Isaac saw Dan and C.J. up front across the street, too. Rather than use his AK, Isaac pulled his Remington rifle around and sighted it. He wanted accuracy. Patience and accuracy. Better to think of this as a hunt than a war.

He got his crosshairs on the top of one head, just showing over the hood of a Land Rover. He took a breath and fired. Through the sight, he saw the bullet shear the top of that guy’s head clean off and caught a glimpse of pink brain before the body dropped.

Show saw what he was doing and did the same. Sitting at the front window, using the sill as cover and support, they began sighting on bad guys. They got three kills and a wounding before they had to bail, as several AKs were aimed directly at Diane’s destroyed storefront. But that was four bad guys they didn’t need to fight again.

Dan and Ceej were shooting, too, until they took a hail of AK fire as well.

After that shower of bullets ended, Isaac heard what they were waiting for. The earthshaking rumble of heavy farm equipment on a paved road. The reinforcements had arrived. Massive tractors rolled down Main Street, a man with a gun standing on every one. Don Keyes led the pack, driving his biggest dozer, his brother Dave braced behind him with a rifle in each hand.

His phone in his hand, the line to Dan open, Isaac called out, “Now!” and armed townspeople came through doors, or stepped over the broken glass of display windows, and entered Main Street, shooting all the way. The Northsiders were surrounded, and the heavy machinery, especially Keyes’ dozer, was turning their own vehicles into weapons against them. Their AKs were flashy, and scary, but hard to control. Finding cover where they could, a town full of lifelong hunters took the Northsiders down with Remington rifles and Mossberg shotguns.

When the air was quiet again, twenty-six men showing Northsider colors were dead or wounded on the street. Six of Signal Bend’s population were wounded, including Bart, with his shoulder wound, and Vic, shot in the chest and in bad shape. And the town had lost five, including Diane Lindel. She was a widow, with a teenage son, Evan.

And Dan, who got caught early, in the first barrage of bullets as the tractor cavalry had arrived. He’d never made it out of the ice cream shop.

There was no such thing as being remote enough to keep what had happened off law’s radar, and there was no way to cover it up, either. Too much bloodshed and destruction. But there were five civilian witnesses to Signal Bend’s self-defense, so Isaac wasn’t unduly worried. He had no control over that fallout, and he had more important things to worry about. He wanted Dan’s body out of its pool of blood. And he needed to talk to Lilli. He sat down in the ice cream shop next to his brother’s body and pulled out his phone to call his old lady. He noticed that he had a voice mail and a text—they must have come through while he was on the line with Dan.

He checked the text first. From Dom.
No answer from Badger
.

He checked the voice mail, also from Dom. “Isaac, call coming in over the police band. Shooting in the Walmart parking lot, young male injured. They’re describing your truck, boss.”

His heartbeat shrieking in his ears, he called Lilli. The line picked up on the second ring.

A smooth male voice answered Lilli’s phone. “Isaac Lunden?”

Isaac knew who’d spoken, and his blood turned to painful ice. He’d never heard the voice before, and there were times he’d felt nearly sure that there was no actual man behind it, times he’d wondered if his nemesis was nothing more than a legend. But he was real. Isaac was going to rip this son of a bitch into tiny pieces with his bare hands. He swallowed and forced his voice to be steady. “Ellis.”

“Indeed. Well deduced.”

“If you hurt her, you will die hard and bloody.”

“Yes, well. I think you ought to be careful about the kind of threats you make, considering what I have of yours.”

Isaac closed his eyes. Bile rose in his throat, and his hand shook, but he kept his voice even. “What do you want?”

“Oh, nothing from you. I’m done with you. What I want, I want from her.”

The line went dead.

Isaac redialed, but it went straight to voice mail. Ellis had turned Lilli’s phone off.

Ellis had Lilli. Ellis had Lilli.

Ellis had Lilli
.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When consciousness found Lilli, before she’d made sense of what had happened or where she was, she rolled to her knees and vomited. When she was done she sat back, feeling shaky, sore and confused, and made her brain work.

She ran her hand through her hair and learned that she had apparently puked before; it was caked in her hair. Leaning against a wall, she looked around, taking stock of her surroundings and herself.

The room was bright and bare. Concrete floor covered in peeling green paint. Grey cinderblock walls. High ceiling—fifteen, maybe twenty feet—with three long, fluorescent light fixtures suspended from it. A steel, windowless door in one corner, the same green as the floor.

The room was completely empty except for a plain metal desk against one wall.

Her own physical state was less than top-notch. A jackhammering pain filled her head, and her right shoulder felt about three sizes too big. The pain had all but immobilized her right side—her dominant side. And she was violently nauseated. Bringing that point forcefully home, her gorge rose again and she rolled back to her knees. This time, though, she only dry heaved.

She was dressed but barefoot. Her jacket was missing as well as her boots. Her bag, too—no, she hadn’t had that; she’d left it in the truck. The truck—with that thought, the rest of the memory clarified. This was Ellis. She’d been tranq’d. Badger had been shot—tranq’d, too? Was he here, too? She didn’t know. She had no idea how long she’d been out, or where she was, or who was with her.

Her head was clearing despite the intense pain, and she was beginning to think well again. She examined her surroundings more closely, looking for vulnerabilities. There was a camera high in one corner, a red light glowing. Somebody was watching her. In another corner, an old grey speaker, like the intercom speakers she remembered in her grade school classrooms.

The room was utterly bare, not even a bucket to piss—or puke—in. But there was the metal desk. Lilli struggled to her feet, leaning against the cool cinderblock wall until the world stopped swinging, and walked to the desk.

There was a document placed neatly, squarely in the center, a cheap plastic ballpoint pen lying on the paper. Lilli moved the pen and picked up the document. A sales contract, for the Keller place. The purchase price was listed as $520,000. Ellis had actually listed himself—not a dummy or proxy, but himself—as buyer. There was his signature, big and bold, signed with a fountain pen.

Lilli palmed the flimsy plastic pen, sliding it into the sleeve of her sweater, then turned to the camera and ripped the contract into pieces.

~oOo~

She’d been sitting against the wall again for at least an hour, and no one had come in to deal with the neat stack of paper shreds she’d left on the desk, or to torment her, interrogate her, offer her water—which she could really use—nothing. She sat and waited and thought.

Ellis wanted the Keller property. Well, that was hardly news. But why didn’t he just kill her, then? All he’d have had to do was shoot her dead in the Walmart parking lot, and within a matter of a few weeks, the property could be his, probably with no more fight from anyone. She had no heirs, no family. She and Isaac were not married. She had no will. Once she was dead, there would be nothing to stop Ellis from buying the property, for a good deal less money than he was offering on that contract she’d torn up.

He was a smart man, so he had to know. So why was she still alive?

Because it was personal now. That had to be it. Ellis was pissed off that Signal Bend, the Horde, she herself had caused him so much trouble over the past few months. Success was no longer enough. He’d fallen into the trap of the powerful man. He could not tolerate the idea that anyone, particularly someone whom he thought worthy of nothing more than neglectful contempt, might get in his way. He no longer simply wanted to win. Now he wanted to beat his foes. Break them. He wanted to force her to sign, make her give up.

That was a vulnerability. Maybe she could use it.

The door burst open, and three armed men came into the room, dressed in black paramilitary gear and carrying M16s—an awful lot of firepower for one unarmed woman. The one in the lead, tall and broad, with a blond ponytail, charged toward her and leveled his weapon at her head. “Stand up!,” he barked.

She did. Behind him, one of the other men cleared the torn paper off the desk and put a new contract down.

Blond ponytail waved his 16 at her. “Strip. Now.”

Fuck. Fuck. It came as no surprise, but it still sucked. This was how it worked. Humiliation and sexual abuse were Chapter One of the handbook on torturing female subjects. She didn’t humiliate easily, however. The worst part was that it would take the pen from her. Her only weapon. She’d hoped they wouldn’t notice; clearly the effects of the tranquilizer had been muddying her thinking.

The question now was whether to do as he said or make them strip her. Doing as he said might suggest that her will was weaker than it was. Refusing would show fight, which would probably get her hurt more. She took off her clothes.

When she was clad in only her bra and underwear, she stopped and made a show of folding her jeans, sweater, and camisole, testing to see how far they’d take it. The pen was still in the sleeve of her sweater. She felt a pang to lose it.

Ponytail waved the 16 at her again. “Not done, sweetcheeks. All the way.”

When she was naked, without taking his eyes or weapon off her, Ponytail kicked the pile of her clothes toward one of the other guys, who was shorter and shaved, with copper skin and matching eyes. “Check for the pen,” said Ponytail. Yep. Hadn’t pulled anything over on these assholes.

Copper found the pen and walked over to set it on top of the new contract. Then the three men backed out and left her alone in the room.

She stood where she was, waiting to see if they were really done with her for now. After a few minutes, she went over to the desk. The new contract offered $400,000. Ellis’s elegant signature still had a touch of the shiny sharpness of fresh ink.