Mackie's Men (2 page)

She looked at the width of the man’s shoulders and knew she would never get him through that window. So she crawled through the back to the hatch and was grateful that after only a few kicks it popped open. Her foot was in the way when it tried to bounce back shut so at least she felt lucky for that. Pulling and yanking his dead weight over the backseat was impossible, until she found the latch that lowered the seat, to make the entire rear end of the vehicle cargo friendly. By the time she had him out of the vehicle and on the gravel road she was exhausted. The muscles in her arms were burning and trembling from the effort it took just to move him a few inches. Now the question was what to do with him?

The baby was crying again and Jenny was trying to soothe him. Mackie made up her mind and left Eric laying on the side of the road with her flashlight while she took Jenny and the baby back up to her house and let them inside. Once they were in the house, she hurried back to retrieve the unconscious young man. The rain had washed most of the powder coated blood from his face by the time she got to him and she could see that he was a very handsome young man. Even pale as death the man was good looking and she hoped he would be all right. She was pulling him up into the golf cart when he groaned and she started talking to him. “Eric, I am Mackie and you have been in an accident, I need you to help me get you into the house, okay?”

He continued to groan, but unable to move on his own, and she was losing the battle to get him on the seat. “Come on, Eric, I have Jenny and the baby in the house and Jenny needs you, you need to help me here. Just try to move your legs please? I’m a big girl but you are a lot bigger than me, and I can’t help you by myself, Jenny needs you at the house.” Mackie gave thanks when the man moved his legs trying to help her get his body on the cart. Finally, he was half sitting and half lying on the seat and she propped him up the best she could and slid into the driver’s side and drove them to the house.

By the time she got the small family situated in her second bedroom and had gotten them cleaned up, warmed up and now asleep, she was ready to collapse herself. There was definitely something strange about the wreck and the people involved. She slipped out the backdoor to put away the golf cart, but decided to go back down to the wreck and see if she could find the baby’s diaper bag and maybe Jenny’s purse. She climbed into the vehicle through the back hatch and found the diaper bag and the purse, and as she trained the flashlight around the interior of the vehicle she spied a pistol and a wallet. She checked the glove box and found the registration to the vehicle and insurance papers. When she unfolded a long paper, she was a little surprised to see it was a marriage certificate dated a few days ago. Mackie stuffed the vehicle papers and everything else she gathered into the purse and diaper bag, then shut the door as she exited the wreck. Lightning and thunder were crashing and lighting up the landscape while she drove back to the house and parked in the lean-to. She took everything into the house and locked the door behind her.

She went into her bedroom and found the grey cat curled up on her bed asleep. The little creature made her smile. She wasn’t a guard dog but she kept the house free of mice and other vermin and she was good company most of the time with her acrobatics. Mackie stripped her soaking wet clothes from her cold body and tossed on a pair of sweats. The fleece felt warm on her skin. She took her wet clothing into the laundry alcove and tossed it in the washer with the young couple’s clothes and turned it on. She had loaned Jenny a nightgown, which the young woman had to hold up the hemline to walk without tripping, but at least it was warm. And the man, Eric, had been lying in bed in a pair of her cartoon pajama bottoms that came about six inches too short for his long legs but at least he was covered.

When Mackie went into the kitchen she saw Eric sitting at the table, he must have woke up and came to check out the place. She saw him rummaging through his wife’s purse, and assumed he was looking for a cell phone. “I don’t have a landline, all I have is a cell phone and it doesn’t have a strong enough signal to call 911 in this storm, I tried.” The item that he held in his hand was not a phone like she thought, it was just a little black box with a small green light and when he pressed the button the light turned red. He put it back into the purse and asked.

“Could I bother you for a cup of coffee or something hot? I am so damn cold I need to warm up inside and out.”

“Sure, why don’t you go into the living room and I’ll get the pot started.” She made the coffee, and grabbed the cream and sugar setting it next to the waiting mugs. She went to her room and dug out a t-shirt that might stretch across his wide shoulders and brought it to him on her way back to the kitchen to pour their coffee.

She put a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee and stirred it in the hot liquid, doctored her cup, and took both into the living room where Eric sat waiting. The t-shirt was a little tight but it covered his chest so it should make him feel a bit warmer. She took a lap rug and laid it over his shoulders much to his embarrassment. “Don’t be a sissy, young man, you are cold, and I made the blankets for the sole purpose of keeping warm.” She smiled at him and sat in her favorite overstuffed chair. They sipped the hot coffee and watched the lightning through her front windows. “You know, Eric, I am thirty years old and have seen some pretty messed up things in my life, so why don’t you tell me why someone would shoot at you, and especially with a baby in the vehicle?” When he shook his head she didn’t pressure him for the information. Not that she didn’t want to know what was going on, but whatever it was, Eric wasn’t inclined to share. Mackie sat quietly and watched him as if he was having an inner debate with himself.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, “Have you heard of a company by the name of Klinger, as in Klinger Corporation?” When she shook her head no he sighed. “Klinger Corporation has its fingers in a lot of different pies, I am in the Communications and Development Department. I just finished a new video gaming system that will blow the competition out of the water. One of our competitors tried to bribe a co-worker to steal the software for the system. Since I am a paranoid bastard I never left the software at the office. I think that’s what this is all about.” He sat back, sipped on his cooling coffee, and closed his eyes. “It never occurred to me that my wife and child meant so little that someone would rather kill me than allow the game to come online for the Christmas rush on sales.”

“Klinger as in Eric and Jennifer Klinger?” At his look, Mackie had to tell him what she found. “Look, I was not really snooping, I went to get the diaper bag and Jenny’s purse, and I found a pistol and took the papers from the glove box in case the gasoline I smelled caught on fire. The Marriage Certificate was there too.” She got up and went to refresh her coffee taking his mug with her too and when she came back, “I haven’t heard of the Klinger name before but I assume that it is a family business?” At his nod she said, “You can try to use my cell to call someone if you like. Maybe it will work now.”

Eric was smiling and shook his head, “They will find me, I’m not worried. By the way, how did you get us out of the SUV?” Mackie knew he was changing the subject to get her off track. So she humored him and explained that she really had no idea how she did it. He watched her hands as she spoke, probably looking at the cuts that she had gotten from the broken windows in the vehicle.

She knew why his eyebrow kept arching as she related her part in rescuing his wife and baby, and going back for him. He saw a woman who was five foot ten in her bare feet and not a delicate little flower to look at. Mackie was built on the muscular side. Well, if she was honest, she was actually a bit chubby. She wore a size fourteen and had for most of her adult life. Men still introduced themselves to her considerable sized boobs instead of her eyes and although she learned to bring a finger up her middle for their eyes to follow so she could talk to them and not have to “say it through her breasts” during a conversation, she wasn’t what you could call fat.

She tossed the clothes into the dryer and they talked, about anything but Eric’s life. She told him about her plan to raise pheasants and quail for the markets. “I almost have enough saved for the barns to raise them in. I have been banking my money from my second job so by this time next year I hope to be raising birds full time.” She laughed a little, “We have several butchers in the area that slaughter and package for farmers. I figure I can advertise the birds for sale and provide a list of the butchers for anyone wishing to have the birds dressed and shipped overnight.”

The dryer buzzed and Mackie went to get the clothes and brought them back to fold and talk with the weary Eric. “I thought about raising all kinds of domestic exotic birds but when I heard the racket that peacocks made I decided against it.” When she had all the clothing folded she looked toward Eric and saw that he had fallen asleep while she talked.
I must have talked him to sleep
. His driver’s license said he was twenty-five years old but right now he looked like a battered homeless teenager in her loaner clothes and the afghan around his shoulders. That train of thought brought up too many buried memories so she turned off all the lights except the one over the kitchen sink, and went to bed.

Mackie woke up to the sound of thunder overhead, No,
wait, that’s not thunder, what the hell?
She noticed the time and seen she had slept for four hours. It was eight a.m. She ran into the living room and saw that Eric must have woken up sometime during the night and taken the clothing into the bedroom with him. She knocked on the bedroom door with a quiet tap, “Hey, guys, I think we have company.” The murmured “be right out” was answer enough for her as she made her way into the kitchen and the coffee pot. She could still hear the steady whap whap of the helicopter blades over the house and knew it was a matter of time before someone would be knocking on her door. Until Eric emerged from the bedroom she wouldn’t know if the visitors were friendly or not so she reached into the top cupboard and pulled down the solid plastic box. She knew Eric was at the kitchen door as she loaded the Smith and Wesson with a full clip and jacked a shell into the chamber.

“I think it’s my family, Mackie, you won’t need that.” Eric was dressed and sat down to put his shoes on. “I hit my panic button last night and they would have tracked me here.” When he went to the door she handed him the pistol. He took the gun from her, mostly to calm her fears for his safety. He knew his grandfather would have sent the chopper for him as soon as the emergency alarm had reached the family security offices. This entire week had been fucked up so why would he expect their rescue to be anything less than a circus. He watched as the chopper sat down in the only spot that was clear enough for it to land. Five men piled out of the side the minute it sat level. One man followed them and he knew Granddad had sent Uncle Liam to retrieve him. He put the gun in the back of his waistband and walked toward the advancing men.

When the men surrounded Eric, he told them, “I’m fine, the SUV is toast, and I do mean toast. The truck is across the driveway in those woods. I got lucky, just a knock on the head and some scrapes.” Everyone but Liam took off to see the wrecked vehicle, and he dreaded the coming discussion with his uncle. No one knew he was in the area and he had neglected to leave his destination with the family when he left the house on Tuesday. His father was in Europe dealing with some company emergency there, so he knew Liam would be on the rescue mission to retrieve him. When the family found out about Jenny and EJ he was really going to catch hell.

By the look on his uncle’s face, Liam was pissed off at his carelessness. He knew then he was in deep shit. When he got close enough to talk he started to hold out his hand to shake Liam’s, but the man was already grabbing his shirt and drawing back to punch him. The sound of a gunshot and the dirt kicking up the mud near the big man’s left foot stopped the fist as both men turned toward the woman who had followed Eric outside.

“Let him go or I take out your arm at the shoulder Mr.” When the big man didn’t release his grip on Eric’s shirt, she said, “This is a Colt .45 with hollow point bullets, do you really think you can hit him before my next bullet takes your shoulder out? I said let him go.”

Eric started to turn to tell her that it was okay when another shot rang out, dropping the woman where she stood. The two men watched the surprise on her face as her eyes closed and she melted to the ground. Eric started screaming at the shooter as he ran to Mackie.

“
You stupid sonofabitch
. She was protecting me you dumbfuck.” He knelt in the mud next to her and saw the hole in her upper chest. The bullet had gone through her chest and looked to be lodged in her right arm. The arm she was using to point the gun at Liam. As shots went it was a good one, though unfortunately for Mackie. He pulled the shirt away from the wound and saw the bloody mess of ragged flesh and blood. “Dammit, somebody help me here, she is losing too damn much blood.” He pulled his shirt off and pressed the material to the open wound and kept telling her it would be okay, they would get her to the hospital and find a doctor to patch her up. “Hang in there, Mackie, I’ll get you some help.” He looked around and saw three men and not one of them had moved since Mackie dropped to the ground so he tried to pick her up himself but couldn’t budge her deadweight. “We need to load her in the chopper and get her to a hospital, Uncle, because if we don’t get her some help you might as well get ready to go to prison for murder.”

Mackie could hear men’s voices and she felt herself being carried. There was pain in her shoulder and she started to fight the strong arms that were holding her so tightly, but the man’s strength kept her in his embrace and she could hear another man telling her she would be okay. She felt a needle go into her arm and knew she was being drugged into sleep.