Chapter 7
Z
The air in the Sheriff's office turned to ice.
Logan backed up so hard against the mahogany desk that a glass paperweight rolled off the edge and shattered on the floor, the sound sharp as a gunshot. He stared at me with wide, terrified eyes, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't keep them still.
"Jake... bro, please..." Logan stammered, his voice cracking like a terrified child's. "They... they told us you were gone! They showed us the military reports! Dad said—"
"Dad sold me for a down payment on a casino debt, Logan," I said, my tone flat, stripped of all emotion. "And you helped him sign the bill of sale."
"I didn't have a choice!" Logan cried out, tears of sheer panic streaming down his face. "I owed people! Terrible people! They were going to break my legs, Jake! Webb came to us... he said you were already dead in a black-budget operation that didn't exist on paper! He said the government was going to take the land anyway!"
"So you decided to ruin Hannah's life instead?" I stepped closer, my tall frame towering over my younger brother. "You let our mother isolate my wife? You tried to declare my son illegitimate so you could steal his trust?"
"It was Patricia!" Logan pointed a trembling finger at our mother, completely abandoning any loyalty to save his own skin. "She was the one who worked with Webb! She took Hannah's money! She locked her out of the bank accounts!"
"You pathetic little worm!" Patricia hissed, her shock instantly dissolving into pure, venomous fury as she glared at her younger son. She turned back to me, drawing herself up, her face a mask of bitter, unrepentant arrogance. "And what if I did, Jake? Look at you! A broken soldier coming home to demand a farm? That land was wasted on your grandfather, and it would have been wasted on you! Eighty million dollars! Do you have any idea what that kind of money does for a family?"
"It destroyed this family," I said softly.
"You were always so self-righteous!" Patricia spat, stepping right into my face, completely blind to the danger she was in. "Just like your grandfather! Honor, duty, country—useless words that don't pay taxes! We gave you a funeral! We gave your wife a pension! You should have stayed in the ground where you belonged!"
Before I could answer, a loud, sharp metallic click echoed from the doorway behind us.
"Nobody move," a heavy, gravelly voice ordered.
I turned slowly. Standing in the doorway was Sheriff Oakley himself—a massive, thick-necked man in a tan winter parka, holding a heavy 12-gauge tactical shotgun leveled directly at Daniel’s head. Flanking him were two more armed deputies with their handguns drawn.
Oakley looked down at Senator Sterling, who was squirming on the floor, gagged and bloody. A cold, ruthless smile crept onto the Sheriff's weathered face.
"Well, well," Oakley drawled, adjusting his grip on the shotgun. "The ghost of Jake Mercer finally decided to show up. Senator, you look like hell."
Sterling made muffled, panicked noises through his gag, shaking his head frantically, trying to warn Oakley, but the Sheriff was too focused on his own greed to understand.
"Put the gun down, Vance," Oakley said to Daniel, gesturing with the barrel of his shotgun. "You're an FBI agent out of your jurisdiction, escorting an escaped fugitive who just assaulted a United States Senator. I can execute all of you right here in this office and call it self-defense. The coroner is my brother-in-law. The report will say whatever I want it to say."
"Oakley," Daniel warned, his voice remarkably steady despite the shotgun pointed at his face. "You have no idea how deep this black hole goes. The entire operation is burnt. Webb is dead."
Oakley’s smile flickered for a fraction of a second, but he quickly recovered his composure. "Webb was careless. I'm not. Once you two are dead, Patricia and Logan sign those papers, the Senator wire-transfers my offshore cut, and we clean up this whole messy night before the sun comes up."
"You're forgetting one thing, Sheriff," I said, taking a half-step sideways, placing my body directly between Oakley's shotgun and Daniel.
"Oh yeah?" Oakley sneered, raising the sights to my chest. "What's that, Sergeant?"
"You left your dispatcher alone downstairs," I said smoothly.
Out in the main hallway, the building's emergency fire alarm suddenly detonated in a deafening, rhythmic roar of shrieking horns and flashing red strobe lights.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
At the exact same time, the heavy glass window behind the Sheriff’s desk shattered inward as a steel tear-gas canister slammed through the frame, tumbling across the floor and instantly erupting into a thick, choking cloud of white chemical smoke.
"WHAT THE—" Oakley yelled, coughing violently as the stinging gas filled his eyes and lungs.
It was Rebecca. She had used the flare gun from the ambulance to blow open the lower basement access window, triggering the building's central fire suppression system and flooding the ventilation shafts.
"COVER!" I roared.
In the blinding haze of tear gas and red strobes, I lunged forward. I grabbed the barrel of Oakley's shotgun, forcing it upward just as he pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The heavy 12-gauge slug tore through the ceiling tiles, showering us in white plaster dust. I twisted the shotgun violently out of Oakley’s grip, drove the butt of the stock into his jaw, and slammed him against the wall.
Daniel moved with lightning speed, tackling the first deputy through the open doorway into the hallway, while the second deputy, blinded by the gas, fired two wild shots into the ceiling before I swept his legs out from under him with the heavy steel shotgun.
Patricia screamed in terror, scrambling under the mahogany desk alongside Logan, both of them choking on the dense, blinding smoke.
I dragged Sheriff Oakley up by his vest, slamming him back down onto his desk, pinning his throat beneath the heavy steel barrel of his own weapon.
"It's over, Oakley!" I yelled over the deafening roar of the fire alarm. "Give me the master safe key!"
Oakley gagged, his eyes streaming with tears from the tear gas, clutching at my hands. "In... in my belt pouch... keycard..."
I ripped the black keycard from his tactical belt, dragged him across the floor, and shoved him into the heavy walk-in evidence locker at the back of the office, slamming the reinforced steel door shut and locking him inside.
I turned back to the room. Daniel had already cuffed the two deputies in the hallway.
Through the clearing smoke, I saw my mother and brother crawling out from under the desk, coughing, covered in plaster dust, looking like two terrified rats caught in a corner.
I picked up the signed affidavits from the desk—the documents meant to strip my son of his future—and held them in front of Patricia’s face.
"Jake... please..." Patricia wept, holding her hands up, her arrogance completely shattered. "I'm your mother! You wouldn't leave your own mother to go to prison!"
I stared at her for a long, quiet second, feeling the final lingering threads of my past fall away forever.
May you like
"My mother died fourteen months ago," I said softly.
I ripped the legal documents in half, then tore them again, letting the white scraps of paper fall like fake snow over her head.
