Chapter Forty-Nine
Forty-Nine
Court leaned back in his chair. “Can’t wait to hear it.”
“From some camera footage near the incident, Jim Pace learned that the man who killed Lewis Shaw was at least six-foot-three; it was definitely a Gauntlet employee, not Whetstone. For some reason, though, the killer wore a hat and a coat similar to the images we have of Whetstone.”
“That can’t be good.”
“There’s more. A Gauntlet aircraft flew from D.C.
to Jacksonville early this morning. Arrived at seven thirty a.m.” Court rose from the table, his phone to his ear.
He looked out the kitchen window towards the street.
“Lacy checked cameras at the fixed-base operator there at the airport. Six men left at seven forty-five a.m., driving a pair of—”
Court interrupted. “Let me guess. Gray Chevy Suburbans?”
Hanley groaned, then said, “How did you know that?”
In a voice low and slow, Court said, “Because they just rolled past the house. There’s a farm road a hundred yards up the street, figure they’re going to access the empty property across the road here, park behind some trees. Then fan out, hit the house.”
Thunder rumbled outside.
“Shit!” Hanley said. “I’ll call the local sheriffs and—”
Court said, “No. Don’t call them. There’s a storm about to hit; it’s going to be chaos around here. The deputies who show up will get slaughtered by a half dozen trained hitters.”
“What do you need, then?”
Court shook his head before replying. “Whatever I need, it won’t get here in time. I’ll work with what I’ve got.”
He hung up on Hanley, put his phone in his pocket, and turned to his father, still sitting at the table with his coffee in his hand, looking up at his son.
“Dad. When you said we had an hour before the storm hit. That was a lie, right?”
The older man nodded. “Yep.”
“I could tell.”
“Just wanted to enjoy a few minutes at the kitchen table with my oldest boy. Is that such a crime?”
“No crime. What do you think? Another ten minutes before it hits?”
Jim looked outside. “Five.”
Court turned back to the window. “Okay. Here’s the deal. You and I are about to get into a gunfight.”
“With each other?” Jim said, and Court swiveled his head back to him. There was a glint in the old man’s eye that showed he was joking. It also looked a little like excitement. “Quantity and quality of the enemy?” Jim then asked.
“I think there’s six in all. Five of them…they’re probably adequate. The other guy, well, I’m told he’s one of the best in the world.”
“And he’s the one whose son you killed?”
“Afraid so.”
Jim rose. Stood next to Court. Trash blew by on the street. Beyond it, past the tall grass on the barren property, he could see a pair of SUVs disappear behind some trees.
The elder Gentry said, “I’ve got an MP5, but it’s disassembled. Needs a new bolt. A 700 in .308, but I took the scope off to repair it. Bought an old PPK off a guy, but the ejector’s broke and I need to—”
Court said, “We don’t have time to assemble your old junk guns, Dad. We’re armed. We’re gonna make do with what we’ve got.”
Jim kept looking out the window, but he said, “And your plan is to just stand here and shoot it out with six jokers in a two-bedroom ranch-style, or is it to make a run for one of the vehicles and then get chased down by them on the road in a violent thunderstorm?”
Exasperated at his father, Court said, “I’m totally open to other ideas if you’ve got ’em.”
“Well, son, seems to me that you and I have one hell of an advantage that you aren’t considering.”
“What’s that?”
Jim tipped his head towards the back of the little home.
“We get our asses out back, next door, past the pines, and into that damn shoot house. You, me, and your brother spent thousands of hours back there; we know every inch of every room. Every hall, every doorway, every step on every stair, every single angle and sightline.”
Court put his hand on his dad’s arm. “How fast can you move?”
“Had no reason to find out till right now. Let me grab a flashlight first, then let’s get our asses back there.”
—
Jim and Court Gentry moved through the scrubby property, past chicken coops that hadn’t had chickens in them in a few years.
The older man couldn’t run; he seemed to have an impairment in his back and legs, but he shuffled along quickly, and Court stayed just behind him, looking over his shoulder every few seconds to see if Coyle and his goons had figured out that Court was making a run for it across the acreage behind the house.
There was standing water here and there. Jim wore roper boots and cargo pants, a plain gray sweatshirt. The temperature was in the low fifties, but the wind made it feel considerably cooler.
Lightning pounded the sky, and the winds whipped all around them; the rain began to fall, and their clothes were already soaked when they still had one hundred yards to go to the tree line.
As they moved across the rough ground, Jim said, “We get lucky, those Micks are gonna get bit by snakes before they make it to us.”
“I’ve never been that lucky,” Court said.
“Me, either.”
They had just made it to the pines when Court looked back over his shoulder and saw the two gray SUVs passing up the driveway, past his Range Rover, continuing off-road, into the backyard.
He said, “They’ve seen us. They’re being careful, staying back, but they’ll catch up.”
Jim took his glasses off, wiped rain from them, and put them back on hurriedly. He said, “We had rain yesterday afternoon too, so there’s going to be some puddles and some mud back here, so watch your step.”
—
Three minutes later Court came out on the far side of the trees and stood next to his father as he looked at the massive shoot house, now almost surrounded by overgrown woods.
The storm had kicked in full force, and rain poured from the tin roof, so the two men immediately stepped inside a dark sloppy hallway with overgrown vines on the wall and the smell of rotting lumber and mold prevalent in the humid air.
The last time Court had set foot in this building, he’d been eighteen years old.
He’d spent thousands of days of his life working in here, mostly playing the role of opposition force, fighting the SWAT teams training under his father and his father’s training cadre.
Both Court and the law enforcement teams used real but modified rifles and pistols that fired marking cartridges, non-lethal rounds that blistered and tore skin when they hit.
By sixteen Court was doing the training himself, walking the catwalks above, shouting orders to SWAT teams facing other OPFOR role players.
Jim said, “Listen up, son. I wouldn’t trust that catwalk. I damn near fell through it ten years ago, back when it didn’t look so bad, so I’m guessing anybody going up there is gonna come down on their ass, or worse.”
Court pulled out his flashlight, and Jim pulled his own; the lighting inside the area was spooky, even for Court. The dark gray sky barely filtered in through holes in the tin roof, water poured in with it, and many corners and smaller rooms were pitch black.
Jim said, “This is mixed lighting, especially with the storm. We get them in here, get them confused, get them lost.”
Behind them they heard the sound of a vehicle struggling, and they turned to see a gray Suburban caught in mud along the tree line.
Quickly three men bailed out of it and ran behind a rusted-out CONNEX shipping container outside the shoot house surrounded by dense foliage, a stack of rotten railroad ties, and a high pile of sand with vines all over it.
A long, low earthen berm ran along that, parallel with the shoot house.
All three men had been carrying pistols.
Both Gentrys knew those three men could have gone anywhere after they’d disappeared, including right up to the entrances of the shoot house.
They turned and saw the other SUV at the edge of the pine trees, but it immediately pulled past a berm that separated the shoot house from a nearby handgun range.
The berm was so overgrown that, again, the three men in this vehicle could enter the other side of the shoot house without Court or his dad seeing them.
Court said, “They can come over both those berms, enter this space from any one of the twelve entrances.”
Jim spoke softly, even though the roar of the rain on the roof drowned out their voices at distance.
“There were twelve entrances when you used to work here. There’s over twenty now with all the broken-down plywood walls where the railroad ties rotted out.
We need to go deep into the structure, son.
Let them come to us. They won’t stand a chance. ”
Court liked the idea. There were thirty-two different rooms or hallways here, and Court could still walk this entire building with a blindfold on.
He looked to his dad and said, “King Tut’s Tomb.”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. Center of the shoot house. We go there, defend. Our fallback is the Speakeasy.”
Every room and every hallway had a name; Jim’s two sons came up with most of the names when they were just children.
King Tut’s Tomb was a closet-sized space off a center-fed room in the middle of the building, but there was a low crawl space out of it that led to a room they called the Speakeasy because of a makeshift wooden bar built there to resemble an actual pub.
The Speakeasy had four exits to it, plus the crawl space entrance behind the bar, so if the two Gentrys were overrun, they could possibly escape out of there.
Together they began hustling through the nearly dark hallways, making lefts and rights without needing to employ their flashlights, except when they encountered plant life, large puddles, or fallen wooden beams from the catwalk above.