Chapter 16 #3
“How far?” I asked when we’d all settled in.
Oscar glanced at his phone, tapped it several times, and waited while it conducted its search.
“Seventy miles southwest,” he said. “The Wechselmann brothers have been off grid for more than a decade, but they’ve caused enough trouble to make it onto the FBI’s domestic-terrorist watchlist, which means we know that they live in a cabin with no running water or electricity,
but the coordinates have been in their file for the past couple of years. Pete says the file was updated a year ago by a drone flyby, and the brothers still seemed to be living there.”
“Let’s go get these fuckers,” Candice growled.
“We should alert local law enforcement,” Oscar replied.
“No,” I said, reaching into the glovebox where I’d stored my gun.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Candice asked. “We can’t go in there alone, Dutch. There’s no telling what kind of an arsenal these guys have.”
“You want to stay in the car, Candice, you do that, but law enforcement out this way is infested with these racist, Three Percenter fucks, and I’m not gonna risk having one of them tip off the brothers, who’ll murder Abby and make a run for it.”
“You want to go in with just the three of us?” she asked, her expression incredulous.
“No. I definitely don’t want to go in with just the three of us, but it’s gonna take us an hour to get there, and backup from any other Bureau is at least three to five hours away. I’m not letting my wife suffer one minute longer than she has to. Like I said, you two want to stay in the vehicle,
fine. But I’m going in, and I’m not coming out without Abby.”
Oscar glanced over his shoulder at Candice. “I’ll cover him. It’s okay, Fusco. We can take these assholes.”
She crossed her arms and seemed to think about that for a second. At last, she said, “How much firepower have you got between you? I only brought along my Glock.”
“Fantastic,” I said with a grateful smile. “That means that between all three of us, we’ll have three Glocks and a whole lot of rage.”
“Ah,” she said. “Then those motherfuckers don’t stand a chance.”
Oscar drove like a bat out of hell, and the sun had already begun to set by the time we inched up the dirt road toward a structure at the top of a hill that was definitely a log cabin.
There was no light coming from it, which made it look creepy as hell.
Oscar had mentioned that the cabin had no running water or electricity, and I wondered if that meant that Abby had no ability to clean herself or keep warm at night while the cabin’s fire burned low.
Oscar parked, and I once again bundled up Eggy in his blankets, then we got out of the truck, closing the doors softly, then crept low up the hill toward the entrance of the cabin.
There was an old pickup parked nearby, as well as a grungy camper with a stripe along its side.
We were definitely in the right spot.
My heart pounded in my chest as we inched closer. If the truck and the camper were here, odds were that the brothers were too.
The light was dim, and it bothered me that the cabin was dark.
Did the brothers know we were here? We hadn’t had the truck’s headlights on as we approached, and we’d parked a half mile down the road.
If there was no electricity to this cabin, then they wouldn’t be running satellite surveillance, either.
I motioned to Oscar to take the rear of the cabin, and when I turned to Candice, she indicated that she’d be covering my back. Oscar peeled off, and I approached the front door.
We stayed low and moved to the side of the door. There was a window to our right, and I kept well to the side of it while I inched up to take a look inside.
A bit of light was coming in from another window at the side, and I could see a pair of legs poking out from behind a Barcalounger in such a way to indicate that someone was lying on the ground.
I ducked low again and signaled to Candice that there was someone inside.
She nodded, and we eased over to the door. I tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I turned it very, very slowly and tapped the door open with my foot.
The smell hit us like a punch. The scent of rotting flesh seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the space around us. I tightened the muscles around my rib cage to prevent myself from gagging and parted my lips to breathe only through my mouth.
I looked behind me, and Candice had an arm across her nose and was squinting at me with watery eyes.
The implications of that smell weren’t quite hitting me yet, but there was something dark at the back of my mind. Something that threatened to end me.
I used every ounce of willpower and training to focus on the task at hand. I moved through the doorway and came upon a scene that was as gruesome as it was nonsensical.
There were two bodies on the floor. One was at the far right of the cabin by the chair and the fireplace, the other at the far left near a makeshift kitchen.
Digging my flashlight out of my pocket, I turned it on, my eyes desperately searching the blackened corpses for signs that one of them might be Abby.
But the bodies were too big, and they were both wearing men’s clothing. Their shoes were men’s boots, several sizes too big to belong to my wife.
Candice slid in beside me, her own head swiveling back and forth between the bodies. “What the fuck?” she whispered before pointing to a ring secured to one wall and a pair of shackles dangling from them.
I mentally took note but didn’t allow my mind to linger. I then walked over to the body on the left. There was a hatchet sticking out of the chest cavity. If he hadn’t died quickly, then he’d suffered.
Next, I moved over to the other body, and this time Candice followed me. Although he was in the midst of decay, it was pretty obvious by looking at the skull that he’d been shot in the face.
I moved back over to the other body. I found the gun near him. It appeared that one brother had shot the other after being attacked with the hatchet.
“Abby?” I called, not expecting an answer, given the condition of these two. They’d been dead several weeks. Maybe even several months. “Abby, you here?”
“Sir!” I heard from outside. “Come quick!”
Candice and I looked sharply at each other and bolted out the door, running around to the rear where Oscar stood some ten feet from the cabin.
His stance looked off. He wasn’t holding his gun so much as barely hanging onto it and the flashlight in his other hand.
His shoulders were slumped, and as my flashlight’s beam found him, I realized he was crying.
He seemed unable to speak, and he simply shook his head, then pointed the beam of his flashlight toward a mound of dirt behind him.
There was a shovel next to the mound.
“No,” I whispered.
Candice grabbed onto my arm before she sank to her knees.
I left her and ran forward. Oscar tried to block me, but I had to see. I had to see her.
He’d removed a little of the dirt to expose a skeletal arm up to the shoulder, clad in a red sweater.
Abby’s sweater.
I turned away, stumbling several feet before I dropped to my own knees and threw up. After that, I simply buried my face in my hands and wept.