Here's the next installment of William Brandt and his Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Weekend. He's a bit of a mess, and I hope you enjoy!


With fingers gone ice-cold, Will delved into the hole torn through his pant leg. They slid in heavy wetness, and a shock of stunning pain exploded down his leg. Reeling, he yanked his hand back and slumped on the tree, breathing hard. "Shit."

His luck had officially run out. Yeah, he was past the fence, had two fewer hunters to worry about, but his hike out was now compromised by a damned bullet through his leg.

Darkness was creeping into the edges of his vision. Will lifted his bloodied hand, placed it on the tree, and squeezed. The mossy bark crunched and dug into his palm, giving him a focal point.

Breathe, Brandt. In and hold. Out, slowly. Again.

He was this close to hyperventilating. Pain was raging through him and blood was welling in a steady flow down his leg, but he couldn't deal with either if he passed out.

In, hold. Out, slowly.

This time when he moved, the darkness didn't narrow his vision. He took his hand off the tree, chips of bark glued to the blood, and felt down his side until he found the pack. His fingers felt thick and dulled, but he managed to get the zipper tab between them and to pull it back. Its rasp sounded harshly loud even over the pulse thudding in his ears and he wondered briefly where Blonde Ponytail was.

On the far side of the fence. Focus, Brandt.

The sheet was flimsy enough for him to tear with his bare hands, without needing to nick the hem with his knife. He kept tearing until he'd removed a strip the length of the sheet; then he turned it and ripped another strip off the short end that he folded into a pad of cloth.

He was starting to pant shallowly again; he made himself hold his breath for a few beats- Do. Not. Pass out.- until he'd slowed down his respirations again. Then he fumbled at his waist until he'd gotten his belt unbuckled and pants undone. The pants were dark to the knee now with blood, so soaked that droplets were seeping down onto the thick covering of fallen hemlock needles he sprawled on. Will shoved the pants down until they were below his hip and clapped the pad onto the bullet wound.

Starbursts exploded behind his eyelids. Like being in a cartoon, Will thought vaguely, pain rocketing up beneath the pressure of his hand. Elmer Fudd in full hunting regalia, gunning for Bugs Bunny. Or was it Daffy Duck? Wabbit Season. Duck Season. Nope, it's Will Season, and I got bagged.

The pain finally ebbed a notch. He lifted his face off the tree trunk, gritted his teeth, and made himself lift the pad enough for a wary look.

Not quite as bad as he'd feared, but bad enough. The bullet had skimmed his hip, not a through-and-through but carving a deep welt through his skin from back to front. Maybe a bit of luck remained- a fraction to the left and it would have plowed into his hipbone, shattering it and leaving him crippled, bleeding out on the mountainside while Blonde Ponytail made her sprightly way to where he'd fallen.

Which could still happen, Will thought as blood welled up again while he examined the damage. He pressed the pad back down to stanch the flow. Got to get the bleeding stopped. Can't do anything until I do.

His ears were buzzing a little. Will let his head droop and breathed, hand jammed hard to his hip. The cheap cotton was rough against his torn flesh, and that plus the pressure were firing off a few more of those cartoon starbursts on the back of his eyelids. Daffy Duck was the one who got popped and saw stars, Will remembered hazily. Bugs was the wascally one, who outsmarted Elmer Fudd without a scratch. Duck Season. Will Season.

Do. Not. Pass out.

Will jerked his head up, fighting off the drifting feeling that was trying to drag him under. His fingers were wet again- the pad was soaked through with bright red. Clumsily he pushed up, managed to rip another piece off the sheet and wad it over the first. It was a really awkward place to take a bullet- to tie the bandaging in place, he'd have to wrap it all the way around both hips, not just his leg.

He'd deal with that in a bit. Right now, priority one was to just get the bleeding stopped.

Somewhere up the hill behind him came a sharp 'pop'. Will startled, far too violently with his shocky nerves, and wrenched around, snatching up the Glock in a sticky hand while he scanned the crest of the hill. There was a rushing 'fwooosh' and then another 'pop', higher above him and fainter.

Between the soft branches of the hemlock, red smoke drifted across the blue sky.

Blonde Ponytail had sent up a flare.

She must have climbed down from the cliff and reached the fence, where she realized it was live again and was standing between her and her prey.

She was summoning assistance from the Coordinator and his guards.

They had ATVs, Will knew, remembering the tracks in the grass along the fenceline. They'd have radios and could use them to request the fence be shut off so they could reach him. Fear swept the haze from his mind. He knew with cold clarity what he needed to do- get moving, and fast. Carefully he placed the Glock on the needle-carpeted ground beside him. There was only a bit of sheet left; he folded it up into a thick pad and laid it along his hip. The long strip he wrapped tight around himself, as low on his hips as he could without impeding the movement of his legs. The last safety pins from the first aid kit held it in place; he peeled open another packet of painkillers while he was at it and tossed down both pills, tinted rust-colored by his fingertips.

Breathing hard, Will dragged his pants back up into place, easing them over the bulk of the bandaging and buttoning them. Part of the largest padding reached to his waist and he smoothed that flat and cinched his belt tightly to help hold it in place. He could feel the bullet wound pounding in time with his pulse and he wasn't even standing yet. He took a drink and then, wincing, shrugged the pack onto his back. It hung a little loosely now that he didn't have the bulk of the vest covering his upper body, and it was probably going to bounce unpleasantly against the bruise on his back, but fiddling with the straps to adjust it higher was beyond his capabilities right now.

He had to tuck the gun into his left pocket where it wouldn't bang his bad leg with every step. He hitched around until his back was flat against the hemlock, and once positioned, took a breath and blew it out, trying to steady himself. His heart was racing too fast and too shallowly. His hands and feet were cold and tingling.

Will was teetering right on the edge of full-blown shock and what he needed was to lie down with something warm covering him, or at least in a sunny spot with the sun baking into him.

What he was going to get was a hike through the backcountry in search of a town or a house or at least a road, with pain jarring every step of the way and vital fluids leaking away.

Will braced his shoulders on the tree and pushed back with his left leg, levering himself slowly upright against the trunk. A rush of dizziness made his head swim and cold sweat broke out along his hairline and down his back. He bent forward with his forearms braced on the trunk and waited for it to pass.

Falling down would be a bad thing- he'd rip open the bullet wound anew and jolt his pain level from Barely Tolerable to Off The Charts. So Will stood with his right knee flexed, his foot barely resting on the ground, waiting for the waves of pain to recede and the trees to stop swirling.

And then, long before he was ready, he put the sun and the fenceline and Blonde Ponytail to his left, clenched his jaw, and took the first halting step of many.


"Any progress?" Ethan asked in a clipped tone as he swung back into the sitting area from the bedroom where he'd been making phone calls.

"No," Benji answered, just as shortly. He pointed to the portable printer beneath the coffee table where it was periodically printing off an attempted and eliminated code. He had his cell clamped to his ear with his hunched shoulder and he said into it, "No, not you, Chloe, I mean, Yes, do that and get back to me." Jane took the phone from him, hung up, and laid it on the table with one hand while texting into her own phone with the other.

"Paris has a couple of unique Cold War-era encrypts on file. Told them to send them to your computer."

"'Kay." Benji caught sight of the blinking 'Incoming Message' icon at the bottom of his screen and tapped it active. He shook his head. "Looks like just variants on Corvus Three and I tried that an hour ago."

"Run them anyway," Ethan demanded.

"Yup," Benji bit out. He linked the coded file, started the decrypt, and minimized the window, going back to what he was doing.

Ethan leaned over his shoulder. "Are those musical notes?"

"Yup," Benji snapped again. The rapid clicking of his fingers paused, and he sat motionless, jaw clenched.

"Benji." Jane reached over and slid the keyboard out from under his fingers. "We're frustrated because we can't help, not because you're not doing your job." Her hand darted out and caught his when he reached to drag the laptop back and she squeezed his fingers. "Five minutes. Take five minutes. Please?"

"If I stop, I don't know if I can start again." He threw himself back against the loveseat cushions and dug his knuckles into his temples. "I don't know what this thing is! I've run everything in IMF's database six ways to Sunday. I've got people at Headquarters running combos of ten different encrypts that there should be no way a layperson could construct without the kind of mainframe IMF has. I've run it forward, backward, sideways, and in every alphabet known to history. I've tried the Bad Translator, for fuck's sake!"

"Okay." Ethan dropped into one of the wingback chairs. "Then it's time to go at this from another angle. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's not a code to a location at all."

"What else could it be?" Benji took the cold can of soda Jane handed him and pressed it to his forehead. "A message from Unknown A to Unknown B says when A receives payment, B will receive a location. B sends payment, and in return gets a file. It has to be the location."

"It's so huge, though," Jane said. She rose and crossed to the decorative mirror on one wall, which had sheets of paper taped across it with the rows of numbers printed on them, three sheets by three sheets in a large square. "It's far too large to be GPS coordinates or a street address or postal code or even directions unless they're the most convoluted scavenger hunt type directions ever given."

"So many of the numbers are repeats," Benji said wearily without opening his eyes. "I tried eliminating all the dups and just running the unique ones, and with the Hallis decrypt, I got the word "glow". Can you do anything with that? 'Cause I sure can't."

"Maybe page numbers in a book?" Ethan stood up again and came to stand with Jane, looking over the printout for the hundredth time.

"It would have to be a readily available book with over 900 pages."

There was a quiet tap at the door, and Jane, recognizing her mother's knock, turned to open it. "Hi, Mom."

"Sweetheart." Celeste set down her purse and a large canvas tote bag at the doorway and embraced her daughter. "Everyone else has taken off. Unless there's anything I can do, I was going to head home as well."

"I can't think of anything." Jane looked back at Ethan, who shook his head slowly. "I'll walk down with you." She briefly laid her head on her mother's shoulder and gave a shuddering sigh.

"The Bible?" Ethan asked from behind the two women, still musing on the columns of numbers. "That's one of the most-distributed books in the world. Might be common enough that all the recipients would know to use it."

"I did try that one," Benji said. He pushed off the loveseat, rolling the soda can around to hold it to the back of his neck. "Just got back gibberish. Like I said, there are too many duplicate numbers." He joined Ethan. "I mean, look at the first row- 934. 934. 934. 934. 934., all the way across. Second row, same thing except for a few 935s, 936s and 937s sprinkled in. Some clusters of 469s and 730s, and then diagonal lines of 869, then rows of 986.987.989, some 319s and 320s... all of it over and over, with no pattern to them. They aren't alpha-numeric, they aren't page numbers, they aren't web addresses, atomic numbers, geographic elevations, they aren't, well, hell, anything."

"They are DMC color numbers," Celeste said offhandedly, bending to retrieve her purse.

"Mom, I know you mean well..." Jane's voice trailed off. "But this is really important. Life or death important."

"Sorry." Jane's mother waved her hand, brushing away her words as she turned to go. "Forget I said anything."

"No, wait." Benji's eyes were bulging. "What do you mean, 'DMC color numbers'?"

"Embroidery floss." Celeste stepped around Jane, who threw up her hands and gave a small groan. "DMC is a company that makes needlework threads. Their colors are coded by number. 934, 935, 936... those are all shades of green. So are 469 and 730, and... what else did you say?"

"869," Benji said numbly.

"That's brown. Here, look." Celeste dropped her purse and opened the canvas tote bag, pulling out a clear plastic zip-top bag. It was filled with a square of linen and an embroidery hoop and several dozen colorful skeins of thread, each bound with a small black-and-gold label. She opened the plastic bag, dug through it, and pulled out two skeins and held them out to Benji. "730 and 869. Each different color has a unique number so that stitchers can pick the exact color called for in a pattern."

Benji looked between the thread in his hand and the printouts on the mirror. "And each number is a spool of thread...?"

"Well, they're skeins, not spools, but yes. Designers create patterns on a grid, and each grid square is assigned a color number so that the stitcher can reproduce the pattern on cloth." She reached into her bag and took out a paper pattern. "See? Each square on the pattern has a symbol; each symbol corresponds to a thread color; and each thread color has a number. Every time you see this symbol, you know you need to do a stitch of 730, and every time you see that symbol, you know to do a stitch of 869 and so on. And when all the squares in the grid have been stitched, you have a picture." She turned over the pattern and showed Benji a color picture, of an autumnal mandala formed by leaves and acorns and stylized flowers, all in greens and golds and browns.

He took the pattern from her and stared at it, flipping between the finished color picture on the front and the grid of symbols and the color key on the back. He looked up at the printouts on the mirror. "They're colors. Each number is a color."

"Maybe they're colors," Ethan said cautiously. "Let's not jump to conclusions..."

"They're colors! It's a picture!" Benji cried. The pattern fluttered to the floor as he grabbed at his short hair with both hands, rocking his head back and forth. "I'm going to need a metric fuckton of thread!"

Celeste tsked. "You don't need thread, you need a color conversion chart. There are computer programs..."

"That convert photographs and pictures into patterns," Jane said, darting around the back of the loveseat and reaching for her laptop. "Mom, do you know the name of one?"

"There are freebies on the web, but the best program by far is X's and PhotO's. It's very pricey, though."

Jane reached behind her without looking, snapping her fingers; Ethan was already handing an IMF credit card over her shoulder. "Benji, the software converts pictures to patterns- once I buy it and install it, can you reverse-engineer it to convert a pattern back to a picture?"

"Sure, no problem." Benji was staring at the printouts with red-rimmed eyes. "Those fuckers. They've probably got a second mail-drop where they send the software so the customers can convert the file. I just hadn't found it yet."

"Here, go." Jane stood up and Benji took her place, still muttering, "Colors. Those fuckers, it was colors."

Fifteen minutes of furious clicking later and Benji paused, licking his dry lips. "Okay, that should do it. The program in its original configuration scans photos, pixelates them, matches pixel shade to thread color number, and produces a chart. I told it to match color number to pixel shade and produce a photo. Loading text file... now."

Unconsciously, Ethan, Jane, and Celeste leaned forward over Benji's shoulders to watch. For a moment nothing happened; and then, across the blank white screen tiny squares of color scattered like confetti. More appeared, filling in small blocks of mostly mottled greens. Finally color swept the entire screen, top to bottom and side to side, running off the edges. Benji clicked a key and the image resized to fit the screen.

It was a topographical view of a hilly, heavily forested area, crossed by two narrow dark lines of roads or trails that intersected near the center. "Where is that?" Ethan asked hoarsely.

"Sending it to IMF servers for mapping now," Benji replied. "Searching." Jane pressed her fist to her mouth as they waited; Ethan's hands were white-knuckled on the back of the loveseat. After several tense moments, Jane's laptop 'pinged'. "It's got a match," Benji rasped unnecessarily.

"Onscreen," Ethan ordered, and a map opened before them, an uninhabited area where the only thing labeled was two roads. "Sky Manor and Bernards Roads in... Pennsylvania?" he said in disbelief.

"North and west of where we are right now," Benji confirmed.

"Get me a current satellite view."

Benji brought up a satellite overview of the map area. "Not much is out there, it's in the middle of state parkland, preserved wilderness areas. The rendezvous point was probably this intersection since I don't see anything else around."

"Can we get a closer look?" Jane asked, and Benji zoomed in. The crossroad of the two-lane rural roads came into focus, detailed enough to show stop signs at the intersection and a gravel area at one of the four corners.

No buildings. No enclosures. No indication of human activity.

"Someone met the customers here, then took them to the actual location," Ethan guessed.

"And where's that?" Jane whispered, stomach sinking. "They could have driven off anywhere."

"Give me a wider view," Ethan said, and when Benji complied, tapped a section of the map. "Maybe right here after all- the state land. It looks pretty empty."

"Be a good place for a hunt," Benji said. He opened a new window and did a search. "It's undeveloped parkland. Restricted activity, meaning no hiking, camping, hunting- Ha!- or fishing. There are no recreational facilities or campsites."

"What's this then?" Ethan pointed to a rectangle of pale reddish-brown, surrounded by a lighter green area, just visible at the edge of the map. "A ranger station?"

"That's too big to be a ranger station." Benji dragged the map to center the structure, then zoomed in. "It's a house- a big one."

"In the middle of a designated wilderness area?" Jane said, skepticism sharpening her voice.

"A lot of parkland was acquired piecemeal, with privately-owned tracts still interspersed where the owners wouldn't sell to the government," Ethan said. He stared at the property. A single, narrow lane led to it through miles of dense forest from the road labeled Sky Manor, and the zoomed-in sat-view showed a band of cleared land completely surrounding it. "There's a perimeter. Find out who owns this."

"It's a corporation," Benji said after a moment. "Il Loggia, Incorporated."

"And who owns that?"

"Hang on, I'm going to have to dig through tax records." Benji rattled at the keyboard and Ethan spun away to pace. Celeste laid a hand between Jane's shoulderblades and rubbed lightly, but Jane barely felt the comforting touch. Benji kept clicking, muttering beneath his breath. "It's down a few layers, pretty buried."

"That's suspicious, right?" Jane asked him. "Someone trying to hide ownership?"

"Maybe. Or maybe just someone trying to dodge taxes, or tangle up the property rights so the government can't unravel it easily and force a sale with eminent domain..."

"Do you need someone at IMF Headquarters to trace it?" Ethan asked impatiently.

"No. Got it." Benji blew out a breath and leaned back. "Partnership of Salvatore DiSabatino and Elizabeth White. I'm starting background checks now."

"Nothing much on her," Benji said minutes later, as data began streaming in. "White is her married name- she's Salvatore's daughter. Widowed, apparently. College graduate, gets some negligible income from something called E&D Designs4U. Him, though... he's interesting. Veteran, Vietnam. Started a construction company on Long Island, New York when he got out of the service, married, wife now deceased. Elizabeth is his only child. Business was small time for ten years or so until he moved to New Jersey and got into the building boom in the 1980s. Acquired a lot of money, fast. He bought the Pennsylvania property in '85, from a guy named Jacobs. Owned a couple of boats for a while, one in Pennsylvania, another moored in Ocean Gate, New Jersey. And then there's this." He looked up at the others. "He's got an AKA- Salvatore "Sam the Hammer" DiSabatino."

"Mob connections?" Jane asked.

"Never convicted, but word was he worked enforcement for the Mannino family." The computer pinged, and Benji opened the new bit of info. "His cousin's kid Joey went away for extortion and racketeering in 1990. DiSabatino "retired" to the Pennsylvania wilderness right around the same time."

"Let's go." Ethan began gathering up scattered papers and dumping them in his briefcase and he made a winding motion at Benji to 'wrap it up'. He snatched up his suit jacket and slung it over his arm. "We'll need to make a stop on the way for hardware."

"Mom." Jane spun and flung her arms around her mother, hugging tightly. "Thank you so much. You broke this open for us. I love you."

"I love you, too, sweetheart. Please be careful. And call me when you get your friend back."

"Promise." Jane swiftly kissed Celeste's cheek and then bent to pack up her computer. Ethan came around the loveseat, hands outstretched.

"Ms. Carter," he said, taking her hands in his. "You saved someone's life today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."

"He's not safe yet," she replied. "Go get him and good luck."


Every step sent a jolt up Will's leg where it blossomed into hot agony at the top. His vision had narrowed to the forest directly in front of him and more than once a pine branch loomed out of nowhere to swipe the side of his head. He had to concentrate hard on the simple mechanics of walking just to keep putting one foot in front of another.

The ground was sloping steadily uphill, and climbing was actually a little easier than flat ground because he could sort of pull himself along- left leg forward, knee bent, pushing upward on his good leg while grabbing a pine branch in his right hand and pulling, right leg trailing a bit behind and then planting against the ground to brace himself for another forward step with his left. His thigh muscles burned and his breathing was making so much noise he probably wouldn't hear the ATVs coming until after they ran him over, but he was upright (mostly), and still moving (slowly), and so far staying ahead of Blonde Ponytail.

Going down fighting wasn't easy, but that's what he'd set himself to do, and by god he would do it.

A small clearing opened ahead of him; Will stumbled into it, his boots catching and tearing the broomsedge and foxtail grasses that had sprung up without tree cover to block their growth. A pine tree had fallen some time in the past and it lay across the far edge of the clearing, the mass of its rootball blocking the direction he was heading. For a moment he simply stood, confounded, unable to process what he should do next- there was simply a large, immovable object in his path and he could do nothing more than stare dumbly at it. Then he realized his chest was heaving like a bellows with short, rapid breaths and there was a fluttery feeling in his chest.

Sit down before you fall down, he'd told Benji after the tech had gotten himself thrown over a railing in Marseille and was weaving woozily on his feet, and Benji had sat and put his head on his knees and said bad words in three languages until they could bundle him off to a hospital. Good advice, but if Will sat down he'd never get standing again and he couldn't find the road sitting under a dead pine tree in the woods. He draped himself over the trunk instead; the bark was dry and flaking and felt sharp against his lacerated stomach, but it was also warm in the afternoon sunshine and he leaned his cheek on it between his outstretched arms and rested.

There was some kind of bass percussion going on in his leg, a low, deep-set 'boom, boom, boom' that was kind of mesmerizing. After a minute he realized he was probably dehydrating- he'd been dripping cold sweat and hot blood for an hour or more now and he'd better wrestle the pack off his back and take a drink before he passed out.

He got tangled in the straps and had to close his eyes and breathe past a surge of panic and then shrug/shake one arm until the pack unkinked itself and slid down to where he could grab it. The water in the bottle was warm and tasted metallic, but that might have been from the scent of the blood that coated him from belly to knee. The blood did seem to be drying, though- his shirts were stiff across his stomach, and his pant leg, saturated as it had been, also seemed to be stiffening up. He took another drink and then made himself cap the bottle and put it back. The terrain here was much drier than down lower, and he needed to conserve water for the moment. He took out a square of dried fruit, and then, back protesting, hitched the pack back onto his shoulders.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. The pounding of the pulse in his leg was getting more intrusive. To distract himself, Will tried to bite off a chunk of dry fruit so chewing on it would counteract the throbbing rhythm. Even the small effort of biting through the dense square made him dizzy. All his reactions seemed hyper-exaggerated- the confusion over the fallen tree, the claustrophobia of getting hung up in his pack, the annoyance at the thumping pulse. Signs of shock, he noted vaguely, and closed his eyes, tilting his face up to the warm sunshine.

He couldn't rest for long. He had to keep moving, because he had a goal. An objective. Somewhere north of his position was a road. There had to be- a car had driven on it to reach The Lodge... yesterday? No, the night before... wasn't it? Okay, he might not be exactly clear on time passed, but he did know a car had driven up. He'd heard it, had heard tires on gravel.

An objective, yeah. To find that road the car had driven on and to walk along it. All roads led somewhere, and when he found it, it would eventually lead him somewhere, anywhere, other than this godforsaken wilderness.

He could do that much. Even with a bullet through him, a contusion the size of a hubcap on his back and a stomach that had been run across a giant grater, he could hike out of backcountry. It was just walking, after all.

Chewing was proving to be too much of an effort; Will tucked the chunk of dry fruit into his cheek where he could simply suck at it and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. There was dirt and blood engrained in the creases of his skin and the rims of his nails, and his palm was sticky with pine tar from hauling himself uphill by grabbing branches.

Well, he'd let Ethan lure him back to the field again, hadn't he? And being in the field meant getting dirty.

Focus, Brandt. Stop drifting.

He straightened his bowed back and looked at the base of the fallen tree, its old, dead roots reaching like clawed hands from the mass of the rootball. Water, food, a brief rest- break-time was over. Will took one unsteady step and it set off a catalog of hurts but he forced his right leg to follow and then he was walking- okay, shuffling- through the tangles of dry summer grasses choking the fallen tree, skirting the leaf-drifted hole torn in the ground when it had fallen. And then he was clear of it and half-crawling up a hill slippery with years of shed pine needles, copper-colored in the shafts of sunlight slanting between the trees.

Keep moving. Stay ahead of Blonde Ponytail. Find the road.

He reached for a branch on the next tree up the hill and pulled himself onward.


The man who called himself the Coordinator sat at his desk, hands resting on the arms of his old-fashioned wooden rolling chair. He made no pretense of working- he wasn't reviewing applications, or reading surveillance reports; he wasn't tracing the maze of his off-shore accounts, watching his money shuttle covertly from virtual bank to virtual bank; he wasn't even playing solitaire on the computer resting on the scuffed leather top of his desk. He simply sat, eyes fixed on the digital picture frame that rested front and center on the desk.

Elizabeth had given it to him for Christmas one year when she was feeling maudlin. She'd dug out all the old photographs he had packed away after her mother passed and had selected a hundred or so to scan- or, more likely, had someone else scan them for her- and loaded them into the frame. She had been so pleased with herself for coming up with the idea- now he could pore over them without effort, without sifting through dusty old shoeboxes of deckle-edged black and whites, without lugging heavy albums out of storage and leafing through pages that crumbled with a touch.

He should have thrown the whole mess of them away when he sold the Montvale house.

Now whenever he sat at his desk, a parade of disappointments scrolled slowly, endlessly past him. There, his parents- side by side on the front lawn of their house in Farmingville, his father with that old-fashioned hat he wore everywhere, his mother with her stockings rolled down around her thick, hairy ankles. They had never lost their accents, their penchant for loud, gesticulating arguments in public, or their ability to embarrass him utterly. There, his wife on their wedding day- a demure veil on her hair and a pearl at her throat. Little did he know that June day as they posed for the stiff, formal portraits that she would never be more than arms' reach from a cigarette and a wager again, that gossip and coffee klatches would take precedence over scrubbing and cooking. There, his only grandson, Daniel, on his christening day- now currently occupying a locked ward at a residential center after setting one too many fires and gutting one too many neighborhood dogs. And there, the fruit of his loins, his darling daughter Elizabeth in her own wedding finery- and look how that fiasco had turned out. Although ridding Ellie of the candy-ass had laid the groundwork for the hunts.

At least Ellie had turned out to be truly gifted in acquiring assets for his little recreational games.

The rough roar of an ATV approaching The Lodge at top speed caused the Coordinator to frown and swivel his chair to face the office door. There should be no reason for Grecco to be tearing across the property like that; that he was doing so meant someone had fouled up, and when someone fouled up, it usually meant he personally had to clean up a mess before it metastasized. Frowning harder, he listened as the ATV skidded to a halt outside the piazza door in a spray of pea gravel- someone was going to have to rake that smooth again- and then heavy footsteps pounded down the hall to his office.

Grecco gave one hard bang on the door and burst in without waiting for permission. The Coordinator rose behind his desk, glaring menacingly. "You better have a damn good reason for this, Christophe," he barked.

His sentry didn't look cowed by the sharp greeting. "We have a problem."

"I saw the flare. I don't want a payoff cutting in to my profit- am I going to have to eliminate a client?"

"Not that kind of problem." Grecco pulled the blue fatigue cap off his head and swiped a sleeve across his sweating face. "The prey got out."

The Coordinator's head snapped back. "Got out where?"

"Out of the fence. Davison saw him go over. She's at the south border where he took off."

"How the hell did he get out?"

"She thinks he did something to interrupt the power flow in the fence. She's the only one left- she said he took down the others. She said he climbed over, but by the time she got there, the fence was hot again. Says she can't go after him until we pull the plug."

A hectic flush had risen up the Coordinator's neck and across his cheekbones. For a second he stood, eyes blazing at his man, his teeth bared slightly. Then he sucked in a sharp breath; his face smoothed and he no longer looked on the verge of ripping out someone's throat with his teeth.

"I'll kill the power," he said with icy calm. "You get Belardo and the other quad and get out there and run him to ground. Take radios and firearms and coordinate the search with Davison. I don't need to tell you what'll happen if I'm forced to liquidate The Lodge, do I?"

"No, sir."

The Coordinator reached back and centered his chair precisely beneath the desk. "And Christophe?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Shoot to kill."


To be continued.

I'm hoping there won't be a delay with the next chapter, but I have to go out of town for two days without internet access, so sorry in advance if I don't get the next one out as quickly. Thank you for understanding, and thank you all for reading!