Chapter 19
The closer they approached Tanner’s farm, the more anxious Maggie became. Dillon had no idea her daughter worked at the farm, and she prayed to keep it that way.
But it was clear to Dillon that something was bothering her. He continued to glance over at her just before they arrived at the farm.
“Look,” Dillon said, and he sighed. “I’m sorry about earlier. But you have to understand that I will follow through on my threats.”
Maggie relaxed slightly, realizing that Dillon simply thought she was nervous because of the people he killed at the diner.
“You’re a murderer,” Maggie said. “It doesn’t exactly make me feel great about the prospect of my future.”
“People worry about the future too much,” Dillon said. “They forget to live in the moment. Every second a person uses to worry about something is wasted. Because we’re all heading toward the same eventual end.”
“And is that how you justify your evil?” Maggie asked.
“For the record, I did not want to hurt anybody,” Dillon answered. “But you forced my hand. When people think you don’t follow through on what you say, they won’t take you seriously. But I know you will take me seriously now.”
They drove past the sign’s farm at the entrance, and Maggie braced herself for what she would find.
It took all of Maggie’s concentration not to dissolve into a puddle of anxiety.
She wasn’t sure how she was going to react if she saw her daughter.
But she knew the moment Dillon understood her relationship with Sydney, then he would immediately use that as leverage against her.
A group of armed men greeted them as Dillon drove into the parking lot. Maggie searched through the faces, looking for Sydney, but she didn’t see anyone she recognized. That was until she came across the face of a young boy.
It was Teddy. Maggie had met him a few times before. He was in the same grade as Sydney, and Maggie had always believed the boy had a crush on her daughter. Teddy had welts and bruises all over his face from a beating. Maggie prayed her daughter was in better health.
After Dillon received his hero’s welcome, Maggie was pulled from the truck. The men who removed her from the passenger seat handled her roughly and tightened the handcuffs around her wrists, keeping her restrained.
“What do you want us to do with her?” the man standing next to Maggie asked.
“Ah, this one is special,” Dillon answered. “She will have a place of honor amongst the rest of the group. She stays with us.”
“We still have a house full of the workers,” another man said, stepping forward. “One of them escaped and killed Frankie.”
Maggie studied Dillon very closely. She saw that mask he wore so well crack under the announcement. For a moment, Maggie saw the sociopath who was capable of murder.
“Frankie is dead?” Dillon asked.
“We think this kid is the one who did it,” another said, and he gestured for Teddy to be brought forward.
Teddy was presented to Dillon and then shoved to his knees. The kid was bloodied from his encounter with Dillon’s men, but to his credit, he didn’t keep his head down. He looked up at Dillon and refused to look away.
“He’s tougher than he looks, huh?” Dillon asked. “Did you kill my guy?”
Teddy remained silent.
“There’s also a woman we can’t find,” the man said. “Frankie tried to have some alone time, and that’s when he died.”
“Ah, I see,” Dillon said. “So, Frankie tried to squeeze some of his love juice out onto some poor woman.” He laughed, and then the other men chuckled, but the moment they started laughing, Dillon dropped his playful act. “What did I tell everybody here about making mistakes?”
Everyone was silent. All of them were afraid of Dillon. Even with so many against him, he still managed to keep them in check through fear. But Maggie supposed there wasn’t much else to control evil men like this in their line of work.
“Dillon, it was Frankie,” one of them said. “You know how he gets. It’s like trying to cage a wild animal.”
“That may be,” Dillon said. “But you know the rules.”
“Oh, fuck the rul?—”
The man never got a chance to finish a sentence before Dillon shot him in the head. The man crumpled to the ground, and his body lay next to Teddy, who was still kneeling in front of Dillon.
Some blood splatter covered Dillon’s cheeks, and he smeared it across his face in an attempt to wipe it away but only spread it around. Dillon studied the rest of the group, daring anyone else to speak up, but they all remained silent.
“No more mistakes,” Dillon said, then glanced down at Teddy. “As for you. Well, you killed one of my guys. So, you have to die.”
Dillon aimed the gun at Teddy, and Maggie couldn’t keep quiet anymore.
“Stop!” Maggie shouted.
Dillon looked at Maggie, keeping the weapon aimed at Teddy. He studied her, wondering why she had stuck her neck out to save him, and Maggie tried to give him an answer before he came up with one on his own.
“He’s just a kid,” Maggie said. “And you’re not even sure if he was the one who killed your guy. What if it was the woman Frankie attacked? Doesn’t that make more sense?”
Teddy was breathing heavily now, on the verge of tears, but he didn’t let them fall. He was barely holding on to what courage he had left.
Maggie held Dillon’s gaze, wondering why she had been so desperate to save Teddy’s life.
“You’re right,” Dillon said quickly, and then he holstered his pistol. “Unless this kid is going to confess, we don’t know for sure whether he killed Frankie. He lives for now.”
Teddy heaved a sob of relief, and he was picked up and dragged away by the other men. Dillon, on the other hand, walked over to Maggie, keeping his eyes on her as he approached. He got so close that Maggie had to turn her head away lest she would have been pressed up against his chest.
“Maggie, are you not telling me something?” Dillon asked. “Because I’m getting the sense that you’re keeping secrets, and I don’t appreciate that.”
“I’m not keeping anything from you,” Maggie said.
“You remember what I told you about breaking the rules?” Dillon said. “And just so we’re clear, lying to me is breaking the rules.”
Maggie turned her head up so she saw Dillon’s face, and all of her fear was decidedly overpowered by her anger toward this man.
“And just so we are clear,” Maggie said. “I will be the one who kills you when all of this is said and done.”
Dillon smiled. “I knew I liked you.” He stepped back and then addressed the rest of the men. “Who wants to get paid?”
The men raised their rifles and arms high into the air as they cheered. The only thing they cared about was getting their money, and Dillon had tapped into that greed to convince them to follow him.
Dillon ordered everybody in the house to be brought outside. Maggie was afraid that one of the farmworkers who knew her daughter worked here would rat her out, but everybody was so afraid of Dillon’s men that nobody even looked up to notice her.
Everyone was marched out into the field, and Maggie and Teddy were paired up with each other in front of the rest of the group.
Teddy limped along, struggling to keep up with the frenzied pace set by Dillon’s men.
Maggie was desperate to know what had happened to Sydney because she didn’t find her daughter among the group that Dillon’s men had escorted outside.
But she didn’t want to start talking to Teddy and look suspicious, so she had to wait until they had a little bit of privacy.
“Are you okay?” Maggie asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Teddy nodded, picking up on the sign they should be very quiet as they spoke.
“Where is Sydney?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know,” Teddy answered. “That guy the others were talking about, Frankie, he attacked Laura, and Sydney went to intervene. I think it was Sydney who killed him.”
Maggie shuddered. But she found solace in the fact that Sydney was still alive. Maybe she was hiding somewhere on the farm.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Carver,” Teddy said, keeping his voice low. “I should have done more to protect her.”
“She’s alive,” Maggie said. “That’s enough for now. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”
But it was clear that Teddy was still distraught. And it was obvious to Maggie that he cared about her daughter. Maggie wanted to provide more words of comfort, but she didn’t want to risk anybody else overhearing the conversation. It was risky enough to talk as much as they did.
Maggie had only visited the farm a couple of times, so she didn’t know the area very well. She had no idea where Dillon was leading everybody as they marched deep into the fields. Maggie glanced behind her and couldn’t see the main house or barn anymore over the hills.
But she heard the distinct sound of water, and they eventually reached the river that cut through the property. Maggie didn’t know what Dillon had planned or if he expected everybody to swim across, but she noticed something coming down the river.
Dillon forced everybody to line up along the riverbank. They stood there for a moment, unable to see what was coming toward them, but as it drew closer, Maggie realized it was a barge.
“Everybody asked how the hell do you make one hundred million dollars disappear?” Dillon asked as the barge came closer.
“And my answer was to put it in plain sight. The authorities were so used to us moving our goods via freight; that’s what they assumed we would use this time, but that’s exactly what I wanted them to think.
” He held up his hand, reveling in the attention everyone was giving him.
“The Ohio River moves more product through this state than all the highways combined. And it’s also the least monitored by state authorities, which is good news for us. ”
The rest of the men chuckled as the barge neared the shoreline but never approached it. The vessel was probably too big to get close to the shore without a dock, lest they run around.
“While the authorities are sifting through the rubble created by the EMP, we will be on our boats to the Caribbean with all of our money,” Dillon said.
“And then we get to fucking party!” one of them shouted, and that caused a bigger uproar than all the other cheers combined.
The men danced around as if they had just won the lottery, and in some respects, Maggie figured they had. But their celebration went beyond enjoyment. There was a madness to it, along with an unbridled sense of desire, the kind that could never be slaked.
The only thing these men cared about was the money they had stolen. But while everybody was jumping around and celebrating, Maggie noticed that Dillon was the only one who didn’t have a smile on his face. If anything, he looked like he was disappointed, but Maggie wasn’t sure why.
Slowly and deliberately, Dillon made everybody settle down. Once the craze had ended, he raised his voice.
“Now, obviously, we can’t leave any survivors,” Dillon said.
Maggie glanced around at the farmhands, who were all trembling. Then she saw Tanner, the owner of the farm, step forward.
“Let these people go,” Tanner said. “You have what you came for, and you don’t need to hurt anyone else.”
“Need,” Dillon said. “Now that’s a funny word, isn’t it? I don’t need the money I stole. But I want it. And perhaps I want to shed more blood.”
The rest of the group once again cheered, and it was clear to Maggie that Dillon had no intentions of letting any of them go. It had all been a ploy to give them false hope, and now that hope had run out.
“Everybody step forward into the river,” Dillon said.
At first, nobody moved, but then Dillon fired a warning shot, and everyone walked until they were ankle-deep in the river.
But Maggie and Teddy were forced to stay back, held by two guards, the four of them behind everyone else as the rest of Dillon’s men approached the water and aimed their weapons at the farm hands.
“The world doesn’t work the way you want it to, so you have to bend it to your will,” Dillon said. “I wish all of you would have realized that sooner, but alas, I’m afraid there is nothing more we can do about that.”
“Don’t do this!” Maggie shouted, looking at Dillon. “Please, these are good people!”
But Dillon no longer wore his charismatic mask. He was the sociopath right now, with nothing stopping him from killing. Maggie looked away as Dillon raised his arm. She couldn’t watch another massacre, not like she had witnessed in the diner. She didn’t have the stomach, so she turned away.
It wasn’t until Maggie heard the screams of everyone through the ringing in her ears that she looked up again and opened her eyes.
All the gunmen who had stepped forward to kill the farm hands now lay dead. The two men who had kept Maggie and Teddy back had shot and killed their own people.
“Well,” Dillon said. “Now, that’s done.”
Dillon whistled and then waved his hands, and a boat departed from the barge and made its way over to the shore. Maggie suddenly realized that Dillon had planned on killing his men all along.
Dillon walked over to Maggie, smiling. “I told you once before that I am a man of my word,” Dillon said. “And you and I have more than just a brighter future ahead of us.”
“I told you that I’m not going with you,” Maggie said.
“I think you’ll change your mind,” Dillon replied.
“Because if you don’t come with me, then I’m going to kill all of your friends here.
So, you have to decide what you want? A future with me, one where your friends here live.
Or a future without me, in which you’re responsible for all of these people’s deaths. ”
It was an impossible choice. But Maggie already had her answer. She wasn’t going to allow anyone else to die because of her. Even if that meant surviving in a living nightmare with Dillon Elliot.