Chapter 16 #3
She was almost on him, prepared, weapon drawn …
But she burst out on him in a clearing. He had stopped. He had stopped and was waiting for her with a smile on his face.
Because he’d found a way to stop her.
He had a sobbing kid drawn in front of him, with his weapon pointed at the little boy’s head. The child appeared to be about ten or eleven, with big brown eyes and soft brown hair that fell around his face. Big enough to be trusted for a bit of a walk through the woods on his own.
Except that he had apparently walked right into Brendan Cosby as he had attempted to escape.
And now, of course, he was terrified. The length of him trembled with fear.
Shelly stopped. She stared at Cosby; Cosby stared at her.
“You want the kid to die?” he asked.
“I don’t even want you to die,” Shelly said.
“I mean, you are brilliant. You created all these websites, the first innocuous enough to sucker in those who needed something to believe in. And then you lured them all to your dark websites; you found those who wanted others to die. And then you found the ones who were willing to kill to be set up on the clouds, beloved of the gods and goddesses you created and they thought were real.”
He shrugged. “The restaurant just wasn’t doing so well,” he told her.
She knew she needed to keep him talking. Help was out there—out there somewhere.
And if she could just keep him talking long enough …
“I know what you’re doing,” he said.
“What am I doing?” she asked him.
He laughed. “You know, you’re not from here.
You don’t know just how far these woods can go, where they let out, how deep and dense they can be.
I mean, everyone thinks of Florida as a lot of beaches, right?
But I’m walking out of here. Can I go back to the restaurant?
Well, hell, no. I’m not stupid. But I don’t need the restaurant anymore.
And here’s the most amazing thing. I don’t promise that the curse tablets will kill.
People get to think that they were right!
That the person was a horrible monster, and it was the gods themselves who decided that they had to die.
And after that stupid politician died and the other stupid Italian confessed …
well, my value shot up to the moon! Now doing George Maynard, that was a pure pleasure.
But I was afraid he knew what I was doing, and he was pretending he hadn’t been on any of the sites.
But he knew all about them. I mean, Belinda, she’s got money.
But she’s not that brilliant. She talked to him now and then, and I never knew for sure what she said to the man.
That one was all me. But … here’s the thing.
Only two people knew that I knew anything about the sites at all—if you want to keep a secret, you keep it a secret.
I had to have Grigsby in on it—he brought that idiot woman in to pretend to be Natalie Greenway.
Money. He needed the money that came in for her.
And the real Natalie … ah, hell. She was too old to live anyway.
And I need to stop now. You’re playing for time.
But then again, hmm. Who will find us first? My people or yours?”
“Just let the kid go,” Shelly said.
“And then we can have a good old western shootout?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I’d take my chances. And you don’t think that a girl could possibly take you down, so …”
“I’m not into chances. If you don’t drop your gun this minute, I’m going to shoot to kill this kid.”
“Then I’ll shoot to kill you,” Shelly said.
“No, you won’t. You won’t get the chance,” he said, grinning.
It was then that she felt it; the presence at her back. She dared to turn slightly. Belinda Jenkins was behind her, now brandishing an impressive carving knife.
But Belinda wasn’t alone, though she didn’t know it. The spirit of Henry Beacon was by her side, waving his spiritual mist around her, trying uselessly to strike the knife from her arms.
“Thank you!” Shelly said.
“Thank me?” Belinda asked, frowning.
“They’re coming; they’re on the way,” Henry’s ghost said. “You’ve got to keep the two of them talking. I’m trying, but …”
“You do know there’s a ghost at your side, right?” Shelly asked the woman.
“What?”
Belinda had felt something. Maybe a bit of a chill, maybe a sense of the mist at her side.
But she was thrown long enough for Shelly to turn back to Brendan Cosby.
“You think I can’t shoot you if she stabs me?” she asked.
“And you think I won’t kill the kid?”
“Where will you go?” Shelly asked him. “You must know that my fellow agents have informed our headquarters that you’ve been the head of this bizarre operation.
And they know now where to go, where to round up others who might have been involved in any way, and there won’t be a place anywhere in the entire world where you could go where law enforcement wouldn’t be after you. ”
“I am going to kill this kid!” he said furiously.
But he wasn’t.
Because Henry Beacon hadn’t lied. Help had come. Quietly, so quietly that Brendan Cosby hadn’t realized Grant was right behind him, ready to set the nose of his Glock against the back of the man’s head.
Then Shelly saw Zach walking into the clearing from the side.
And three men walking in from the other side.
And she knew.
She’d never met them, but she knew that all three of the McFadden brothers had arrived at an extremely fortunate moment.
“I’m going to kill the kid!” Brendan Cosby raged.
But at that second, he was startled by the touch of Grant’s gun.
He lifted his own to aim straight at Shelly.
“Drop it!” Grant ordered.
But Cosby was going to shoot.
There was the sudden sound of gunfire.
The kid Brendan Cosby had been threatening let out a terrified sob, escaping Cosby’s loosened hold and running in panic, straight into Zach’s arms.
As Cosby went down and the kid screamed, Belinda let out a cry of rage and lunged for Shelly. But Shelly swung around, slamming her weight against the woman’s arm, using everything she knew about weight and counterweight.
Belinda Jenkins went down on the ground, sobbing. As Shelly bent down to wrest the knife away from the woman’s grasp, the last of Cosby’s strange foursome, the Natalie Greenway imposter, tried to burst in with a gun waving. “No! No! No! You must die, you have to die!”
She had a gun, too, and was trying to reach a position to take aim at Shelly.
Not a chance.
They didn’t even need to expend too much effort. One of the McFaddens stepped forward, slamming against her.
She tripped and went down.
And he was over her quickly, wrestling her gun away, flipping her over, and dragging her back to her feet.
Another McFadden went over to cuff the impersonator, whose true identity they still needed to discover.
“EMTs already have the Grigsby guy,” the McFadden holding the cuffed woman said.
“There’s a paddy wagon at the end of that trail; we’ll deal with the two women.
That kid is going to need some help. And as for this guy, we’ll get the ME out here as quickly as possible.
Jackson is on his way down, too, and you know the drill, Grant … ”
“Yes, fired my weapon, killed a suspect,” Grant said. “But let’s go get all this over with and turned over to cybercrime and our office hunters as soon as possible.” He turned to move when Shelly remembered something else.
“The clearing where they were before … the real Natalie is buried there somewhere. We need to … she deserves a decent burial!” she said.
She realized the ghost who had done his best to warn them all was right by her side.
And that was all right, she thought, smiling. Because no one here would think that she was crazy; the ghost had assuredly helped them all.
And the little boy, sobbing away despite Zach’s attempts to calm him, to ask him about his family, wasn’t going to notice.
She turned to the spirit of the man who had been killed to allow Brendan Cosby and his deluded crew the time to torture George Maynard.
“Henry, thank you. Thank you so much.”