Chapter 8 I Want It All #2
He headed back to his truck, peeled off his wet fleece, got in, pulled out of Mabel’s and drove onward three quarters of a mile until the dirt lane that led up to his house came into view on the opposite side of the road to Mabel’s.
He had two logs planted vertically on either side of his lane. Both had signs that said Private Property in orange neon on black.
Pretty much everyone on this patch had the same.
Poachers poached.
Tourists were invariably idiots.
But most people could read.
When he got home, he parked his truck, took his gear inside, stowed it, then changed his jeans, pulled on a clean, dry fleece, got his dog and went back out to the dual line of chain link, sectioned fencing that served as his large dog pens.
Plenty of room in each for a dog to roam, but in the back, right corner was a small, insulated shed that had plenty of old blankets inside for warmth.
They’d been fed in the morning, it wasn’t time for their second feeding, but he checked water bowls, took a few out for exercise and drills, gave them some love, put them back and headed to the house.
He sat at his kitchen table and pulled out his phone.
He’d thought about it on his hike, made his decision, and as such, called Rus.
“How’s it going, Hutch?” Rus answered.
“Took a hike with some long range binos. Shit is hinky at The Lion and The Lamb.”
Rus said nothing.
“The Feds aware of these fucks?” Hutch asked.
“Do you know Mabel Adams?” Rus asked in return.
“Yes.” Hutch didn’t hesitate to answer.
“As a neighbor and someone you wave to on CR 10, or something else?”
“I’ve fucked her.”
“I’m right now getting your intensity,” Rus muttered.
“That note was fucked up, Rus.”
“Agreed.”
“She’s alone, and the women who go into that compound never seem to come out.”
“Something we know. But as far as we know otherwise, they aren’t doing anything illegal.”
“How would you know if no woman was let out to tell you?”
“As much as it fucks me to say this, I know I don’t have to explain the concept of probable cause to you.”
Goddamnit.
“I thought you said you were giving her Hannibal?” Rus inquired.
“She and I had a chat. She doesn’t want Hannibal. She wants Tonks.”
“Tonks?”
“A red husky at the rescue who’s named after a fictional witch in a kids’ book.”
He heard Rus sigh.
“Okay, this is the situation, Hutch. You’re trained to solve problems. You get intel, command makes a decision, you get your orders, you act, no questions.
That isn’t how it goes in law enforcement.
Now, as much as it fucks me to say this, which, I’ll admit, it fucks me a whole lot more, we come in after shit goes down. ”
He was giving a good man a hard time about something where that good man’s hands were tied.
And Rus might not be as tweaked about this as Hutch was, even so, that note had tweaked not only Rus, but Harry, Polly, Karen, Sean, Raul, and the entire Fret County Sheriff’s Department.
“This dog…Tonks, is it not gonna serve our purposes?” Rus asked.
“Huskies are pack animals. They form strong bonds. That dog has sat, unwanted and unloved, in a cage for three weeks. She’s freeing her. Anyone fucks with her, training or no, Tonks will lose her shit.”
“That’s good, yeah?”
Hutch didn’t answer Rus’s question.
He stated, “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Join the club, Hutch. Keep an eye on her. But for fuck’s sake, don’t get caught on that bluff.”
Hutch tried not to be insulted.
He felt better about it when Rus mumbled, “Who am I talking to?”
“You know anything about that legal tangle the Flannery family got into with Lars Enstrom?”
“I know it’s an issue for a civil court.”
“Can you tell me how a guy provides for maybe fifteen other guys, perhaps the same number of women, kids, having trucks, ATVs, a house for each, a church, and I could go on, by selling jam?”
Another sigh from Rus. This one heavier.
“All right, man. I wasn’t going to tell you this because the only thing Harry gets free and breezy with is deputizing the Bohannan twins whenever he has a problem only those two geniuses can solve.
But as far as I know, he hasn’t deputized you.
But just to say, after that note, we’re poking around.
We don’t know a lot about these people. We don’t need to trip any triggers that will end in tragedy.
So we’re going real quiet, which means real slow.
We’re looking into the Flannery suit. We’re looking into a lot of things.
And if the Feds need to be called, we got a good rapport with them. We’ll call them. No hesitation. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Feel better?”
He did not.
While they were going real slow and quiet, Mabel was a short hike from those nutcase’s north gate.
And they’d been watching her.
“Three things I got for you,” he said. “One, they got a lot of lumber. Upright, tarred log fence around that entire property, big piles of firewood. They’ve cleared a massive space, and you know we got trees, but my guess is, they got wood burning stoves in their units, so they use a lot of wood, and unless they’re hell on wheels with that fuckin’ jam, they’re poaching lumber from somewhere. ”
“Gotcha.”
Rus’s tone was serious because in those parts, it didn’t matter which side you were on in the political spectrum, they took lumber seriously.
The environmentalists would tie themselves to a tree before they’d let it come down.
On the flipside, trees equaled money.
“Second thing, they got a fortified shed, southeast end of the property,” Hutch told him. “Heavy duty lock.”
“Fucking hell,” Rus murmured.
“Position of that shed, number of men on that compound, it’d be iffy to get to it without getting caught.”
“Then don’t do something stupid.”
“I didn’t intend to. But you find probable cause to get on that land, you make sure that shed is in the warrant.”
“You’re heard.”
“Last thing, I did a walk through the perimeter of Mabel’s place. No cameras, but there’s been foot traffic back and forth. Not a lot, but it’s there. Even if we knew it was, now we know it is. That note is from them.”
“Noted.”
Good.
“I’ll let you go,” Hutch said.
“If this makes you feel better, they sneeze in the wrong direction, slow and quiet is a memory. Harry is getting a warrant.”
That didn’t make him feel a lot better.
But at least this time it made him feel a bit better.
“Thanks, man. Now letting you go.”
“Come to the club for a meal. The food’s the best in the county, and Lucinda always foots the bill.”
Lucinda Bonner was the owner of the Bon Amie Club.
She was also Rus’s woman.
They were not married. What they were, were committed for life.
“You’re on.”
They hung up and Hutch, with Hannibal loping at his side, went to get his laptop.
He took it back to the kitchen table, and after a few scratches behind his ears, Hannibal slid with a groan to lie at Hutch’s feet.
Hutch opened the laptop, the search engine, and he began.
The thing was, fifteen minutes later, he had nothing.
Not that first thing.
There was an actress named Mabel Adams. There was a teacher and principal from Horace Mann in Boston who wrote books on educating kids with special needs named Mabel Ellery Adams. There was an artist who died in 1957 named Mabel Adams. There were obituaries for a variety of other dead women named Mabel Adams. And a variety of live ones who were not the Mabel Adams he picked up at The Link and followed home to fuck.
No pictures. No social media accounts. No blue ribbon awarded at some junior high school track meet.
He dove deep and…
Nothing.
He had no social media, but he had a business, he had a website, he had a past, and unfortunately, that shit either had to be on the Internet or just was.
“The fuck?” he whispered, fifteen pages deep on the search engine results.
On page seventeen, Hutch made another decision.
He nabbed his phone, thumbed through the contacts and hit go.
Lee Nightingale answered on the third ring.
“Hutch, brother, it’s been a while.”
Lee Nightingale was the best private investigator west of the Mississippi, maybe east of it too. He and his crew had three branches in three cities in three states: Denver, LA and Phoenix.
He could find anybody, no matter how good they were at hiding.
And he could find out everything about you, no matter how hard you worked to keep it buried.
“You know that marker you owe me?” Hutch asked.
No hesitation. “Yeah.”
“Name’s Mabel Adams. Address on her rental, four four five oh County Road Ten, Misted Pines. My guess, late twenties, early thirties. Five eight. Lean but stacked. Brunette. Hazel eyes.”
And she gives phenomenal head. And I swear to fuck, when she watched me play, I wasn’t sure anymore if it was me or her who wrote my songs.
She went toe to toe with me, maybe not knowing I was a former SEAL, but she couldn’t miss I could handle myself, and she had the balls to do it all the same.
Oh yeah, and I pulled some seriously stupid shit with a Post-it note when I left her beautiful naked body, thick, soft hair and knockout face in her bed.
“How much you want?” Lee asked.
“I want it all.”
“Give me a few days.”
“You got it.”
“Later, brother.”
“Later, Lee.”
They disconnected, Hutch put down his phone, then he headed out to put more dogs through drills.
And pen them up after giving more love.