Rest in Peace Page 5

  “Oh, just thinking out loud, that’s all.”

  He climbed down off the ladder, unable to shake the thought he was about to feel incredibly foolish.

  Might as well get it over with.

  “Okay, baby. Go ahead and finish thinking out loud.”

  She smiled.

  She hated to hurt his feelings, but she hated even more to watch him go through a lot of unnecessary effort.

  “Well, the trailers aren’t lighted, so even if the bay has lights we’re still gonna have to have flashlights to search for the rifles.

  “So I’m thinking you could spend an hour or two screwing in light bulbs before we start looking.

  “And then you can spend another hour or two after we’re done unscrewing them again.

  “Or…?”

  “Or we can just use the flashlights we’re gonna use anyway to find our way to and from the trailers.”

  He paused for just a moment, and then said, “I really hate it when you get all logical on me.”

  “I know you do, honey, and I’m sorry. I know logic and order are two of the things you hate most. That’s just one of the things that make you the most amazing man in the world.”

  Mark wasn’t sure whether he was being insulted or complimented.

  But he’d take it.

  “Thank you, baby. You’re not so bad yourself.”

  He left the ladder on the side of the bay and turned on his flashlight.

  “After you, my dear.”

  “Why do I have to go first?”

  “Because you, my love, are a lady. And as the old saying goes, ladies go first.”

  Hannah said, “Well, in this particular case I’ll let you lead the way.

  “But it’s dark back there.”

  “That’s why I suggested we do it with flashlights.”

  “But there might be lions and tigers and bears.”

  “Oh my…”

  “Why don’t you go first?”

  “I don’t wanna.”

  “But you swore to love and honor me and protect me from all lions and bears.”

  “You forgot the tigers.”

  “Oh yeah. And tigers.”

  “Says who?”

  “It was in the ownership papers. I mean our wedding vows.”

  “Hannah, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in our wedding vows.”

  “Well, it should have been. Are you saying you’re really gonna make me go first, you big sissy?”

  “Look. If a bear jumps out in front of us I’ll tackle him and beat him up. Bears don’t bother me.

  “Spiders do.”

  “Sissy.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Marriage is nothing but a series of compromises between two people who love each other.

  They ended up walking into the darkness side by side, he on the lookout for spiders and she for bigger threats.

  They reached the first trailer, rolled up the door, and climbed aboard.

  Things were very chaotic in the early days of stocking the mine.

  Sarah and Hannah were splitting up in those days, figuring they could cover more ground and obtain more goods that way.

  They were being threatened with prison if they went public with the news of Saris 7, and trying desperately to keep a low profile.

  At the same time, though, they were faced with the daunting task of having to secretly gather enough provisions to keep forty people alive for up to ten years.

  They learned as they went, and got better as each week went by.

  These trailers, though, represented those early days when they were more or less stumbling along, trying hard but making a lot of blunders.

  In those early days each of them was going to a different Walmart and was filling up cart after cart of non-perishable items.

  They didn’t stop buying until their oversized SUVs were filled to the brim.

  It wasn’t until those SUVs looked like ticks ready to burst that they finally drove to the mine to off-load.

  It was actually Sarah who said, “You know, we’re wasting a lot of time driving a hundred and twenty miles each way to and from the mine to off-load.”

  Hannah already knew that. She was a rocket scientist, after all.

  But she didn’t have a solution.

  Mark did.

  “Let me buy a used box trailer. I’ll park it in a vacant lot near the house and y’all can go there to unload all your stuff. Once it’s full I’ll take it and park it in the mine and buy another trailer.”

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Now, not so much.

  When they rolled up the first trailer’s door they finally realized how daunting the task ahead of them would be.

  The trailer was stacked full of cargo tubs, floor to ceiling, from one side to another.

  “I hope you’re ready for this. This is going to be a royal pain.”

  Hannah didn’t even comment. She just dug in.

  -14-

  Richard Sears was the first one to spot Lenny’s body, crumpled in a heap in the snow.

  The snow was coming down hard now, and he was well on his way to being covered with the stuff.

  Richard rolled him over, saying a silent prayer to himself it was just a heart attack.

  The gaping wound said otherwise.

  The gaping wound told him they were under attack.

  He quickly looked around, and saw nothing but white in all directions.

  “Fan out,” he told his men. “Shoot any son-of-a-bitch with a gun.”

  It was a stupid order to give.

  But Lenny was a friend of his.

  And Lenny was a man who didn’t have a hurtful bone in his body.

  Lenny didn’t deserve this.

  As his men looked around he examined the blood beneath the body. It was still soft but crystalline. Soft frozen.

  The warmth of the body kept it from freezing hard, but now that the body was barely above air temperature it would hard-freeze within minutes.

  “Lenny,” Richard swore to his dead friend, “I swear upon all that is holy we will find the men who did this and make them pay.”

  One by one his men returned to report they’d found nothing.

  Except for the last man in.

  His name was Red.

  And he had bad news.

  “About fifty yards up the fence line are a bunch of footprints. They’re half covered with snow, so I couldn’t see the treads. I don’t know if it’s one man who moved around a lot or several men who didn’t move much at all.”

  He stopped and caught his breath.

  “They’re up against the fence. There’s a ladder leaning against the fence and a blanket thrown over the concertina wire.”

  Richard had a single word to say in response:

  “Shit!”

  He wasted no time getting on the radio.

  “Control Center, this is Richard. We’ve been breached. There are marauders in the yard. Secure the doors!”

  At first there was no answer.

  That was chilling in itself.

  Since the day they first started stocking the prison several months before someone had manned the security station.

  It was the brains of the whole operation.

  It was from the Control Center instructions were given to open or close the gate.

  It was from there decisions were made who to let in and who to let out.

  It was the Control Center which kept track of everything: Who was on duty at any given time, who was scheduled to replace them, which drivers were out and what times they were due back.

  It was just inconceivable to Richard that the controllers would leave their station unattended.

  Richard felt an ominous chill run up his back that had nothing to do with the driving wind.

  He left Lenny’s side and ran full-bore, slipping and sliding every step of the way, back to the gate shack.

  One man was left in the gate shack; Tony Garcia.

  Tony had a puzzle
d look on his face.

  “Let us in,” Richard yelled at him through the glass. “Open the damn gate!”

  Tony pushed the button and the Sally port’s outer gate slowly started to move.

  As soon as it was wide enough to squeeze through Richard was through it, his men close behind him.

  They ran to the gatehouse almost in a panic.

  Tony closed the gate behind them and asked, “What’s going on? Did you find Lenny?”

  Richard ignored him and grabbed the gatekeeper’s radio microphone from its cradle.

  It was his last desperate hope: the possibility that perhaps there was nothing wrong other than a radio malfunction.

  Perhaps Lenny had seen someone climbing over the fence and had shot him.

  Perhaps the roaring northerly wind prevented the gatekeeper from hearing Lenny’s shot.

  Perhaps the man Lenny shot fell into the darkened yard of the prison.

  Maybe he was lying there, dead as a doornail, behind the waist-high wall which kept Richard and his team outside the fence line from seeing his crumpled body.

  Perhaps he returned fire before he fell, hitting Lenny and killing him and preventing Lenny from calling in to report the intruder.

  And maybe… just maybe… the Control Center didn’t respond to Richard’s calls simply because Richard’s battery was dead.

  Maybe.

  But almost certainly not.

  When a man is truly desperate he’ll grasp at anything.

  He almost yelled into the microphone, “Control Center, this is Security One. Come in!”

  At the same time, on the opposite side of the tiny gate shack, Red whispered to Tony, “Lenny is dead. Somebody shot him.”

  Tony and Lenny were good friends. They had a standing date to play poker with a couple other friends every morning after breakfast, and just before they went on duty.

  Tony’s look changed from puzzlement to shock.

  But there was more bad news to come.

  A strange voice came over the radio. A voice no one recognized.

  “Security One, this is your control center. My name is John Sennett. My men and I are now in control of your prison.

  -15-

  The takeover took place in a flash.

  Sennett and four heavily armed men went over the wall with almost military precision.

  That in itself was no small feat, for none of them had ever been in the service.

  They’d all been criminals. They were the worst of the worst. Between the five of them they possessed not a single iota of decency.

  Sennett was a very bad man.

  He’d served time at the Eden Prison.

  Seven years for armed robbery.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing in his past.

  He was a double murderer, shooting his ex-girlfriend and her new man a year before he was popped for the robbery.

  The murders had been a crime of passion.

  Not the good kind of passion, for Sennett had never felt love in his life.

  No, there’s another kind of passion. One which drives a man to do things he wouldn’t ordinarily do. Commit crimes he wouldn’t ordinarily commit.

  A type of passion which expresses itself with rage.

  Sennett had followed the pair home from a club that night. Her new boyfriend was rich. He was a rancher who lived south of Brady.

  He’d seen them at the club and thought they made an odd pair. Selena was beautiful. A raven haired girl of twenty three, she turned every head in the room.

  He, the new man, was a gringo like Sennett: a white man.

  That was Selena’s preference.

  It was her belief that being with a white man furthered her stature in Texas. When she was with a gringo she was accepted in the gringo community. She wasn’t looked down upon like the other illegals from Honduras and Guatemala.

  So it didn’t surprise Sennett she’d chosen another white man to replace him.

  What did surprise him was the man’s age.

  Oh, he danced like a younger man. Rocked to the beat of modern music like a younger man. But the gray of his temples gave away his true age.

  Sennett, like Selena, was in his twenties back then.

  He didn’t understand why she’d be spending time with a man who had to be in his fifties at least.

  He watched them dance from a booth at the back of the bar, where he was sharing a beer with an old friend.

  And he voiced his concerns to his friend.

  “They call that a May-December romance,” his friend explained. “A much older man with a much younger woman.”

  “I understand what December sees in May, but what does May see in December?”

  “Man, she sees Christmas. That’s what she sees in December.”

  The man laughed uproariously at the old joke, but Sennett didn’t find it funny.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so slighted if she’d fallen for someone more handsome, more virile.

  This clown, for all he could tell, had nothing to offer her except money.

  When they left the bar that night they didn’t see him sitting in his pickup half a block away.

  He tailed them out of the city and to the man’s ranch several miles outside of town.

  When he pulled into the driveway behind him the man thought Sennett was lost and looking for directions.

  But he wasn’t. He was looking instead for a fight.

  He yelled for Selena to get out of the man’s car.

  “Why are you with this jerk?” he drunkenly asked her.

  Selena, passionate even when sober, had had several drinks herself.

  She was nothing to be trifled with.

  “He treats me nice,” she said. “He’s a gentleman. That’s more than you ever were.”

  If she’d left it at that she might have lived to see another day.

  But her tongue was loosened and she was upset this former boyfriend had the gall to spy on her and follow her home.

  She went too far when she questioned his manhood and his ability as a lover.

  “He’s way better than you ever were, cabron. He treats me with tenderness and patience. He makes love to me all night long and makes me feel far better than you ever did.”

  Rage is indeed a passion.

  A passion which does no one any good, and which no one wants. For it leaves turmoil and misery in its wake.

  She barely got the words out when Sennett pulled a pistol from the belt behind his back and fired.

  Three rounds first at the new lover, for even in his drunken mind Sennett recognized him as the biggest threat.

  Selena tried to run and he fired after her.

  The first shot hit her leg and made her tumble to the ground.

  The second went into her shoulder as she rolled around on the driveway, begging for her life.

  He could have shot her in the head with the second shot.

  But his rage at being emasculated made him want her to suffer.

  It wasn’t until the last shot, the one centered on her forehead, that he put her out of her misery once and for all.

  Sennett got away with the double murder simply because luck was on his side.

  The bar had no surveillance cameras to capture his face. No one reported seeing him there, or reported him leaving just a few minutes before the victims.

  His buddy at the bar was a man he’d known since childhood. He’d never breathe a word of what he knew about the case.

  He used a gun he’d purchased new just weeks before. It had never come under police scrutiny, and in fact had never been fired since it left the factory.

  So there were no ballistics samples of its bullets on file anywhere.

  Since it was a revolver he didn’t leave any shell casings behind which might have had his fingerprints.

  There was no DNA evidence to be found, and he never came into physical contact with either victim.

  Because the ranch was so isolated, and because the boyfriend lived alone, no on
e heard the shots; no one came running.

  There were no witnesses.

  And because the driveway was paved there were no tire tracks.

  Sennett laid low for weeks, worried the sheriff would find something which tied him to the crime.

  Nobody ever came knocking.

  The newspaper reported less than two weeks after the murders the sheriff had no clues whatsoever and was placing the case on ice until a witness came forward.

  Which, of course, wasn’t gonna happen.

  Sennett felt like the luckiest man on earth.

  He started going out again, partly to celebrate what he’d gotten away with and partly because he felt somewhat invincible.

  As much as he drank though, he was smart enough never to brag about what he’d done or what he’d gotten away with.

  He knew the only way they’d ever pin the murders on him was if he opened his own big mouth.

  His luck finally ran out six months later when he pulled a knife on a man at an ATM machine.

  The man had a black belt in karate and was able to overpower Sennett and pin him to the ground.

  And here was something else too.

  The man was an off-duty policeman.

  -16-

  Sennett actually received ten years for that particular stunt but only served seven.

  In Texas, inmates earn “good time” for essentially behaving themselves.

  Good time can be used to knock time off their sentences.

  In essence, all one has to do is stay out of trouble, which they should be doing anyway.

  It’s kind of like giving a kid an allowance for keeping his room clean when he should keep it clean anyway.

  In his last two years at Eden Correctional Facility Sennett was a “trusty”: a man who helped around the prison because he wasn’t considered a flight risk and because he convinced the guards he could be relied on.

  Now, Sennett wasn’t a saint. He used his trusty position to smuggle drugs and cell phones into the prison.

  He just never got caught.

  Being a trusty, he was periodically granted access to parts of the prison most inmates never saw.

  He knew where the mechanical rooms were, where the armory was, where all the industrial equipment and supply stores were.

  When he walked out of Eden Correctional the hacks gave him the traditional farewell greeting.