Nick answered on the second ring. “Nick, it’s Troy.”
There was a long pause and Troy knew he was probably the last man on earth Nick wanted to hear from right now. “Hey,” Nick finally replied, his voice obviously strained.
“I want to meet with you,” Troy said.
Again a long pause followed. “Do you think it’s really necessary?”
“I think it is,” Troy replied. “Please, Nick.”
A deep sigh filled the line. “When?”
“Now, if possible.”
“I’ll meet you in thirty minutes at the usual place,” Nick said, and then hung up.
Five minutes later Troy was in his work truck and headed to the old abandoned baseball field where the six men had plotted a murder scheme that would assure each of them both vengeance and the justice that had been denied.
As he approached his destination, tension bunched his shoulders and he gripped the steering wheel more tightly. He couldn’t come here without thinking of Annie, and thoughts of her always brought forth a deep grief, a hollow emptiness and also a rage tempered only a little bit by the passing of time.
Knee-high weeds greeted him as he stepped out of the truck. Nature was in the process of taking back the land that had once been filled with a ball field and little baseball players.
The wooden bleachers in the distance leaned to one side, broken and bleached almost white from the summer sun. A snack shed was spray-painted with a variety of words in different colors. Even that paint had faded, attesting to the forgotten nature of the property.
He walked toward the thick stand of trees in the distance. It was there next to a fallen tree that a plot for murder had been hatched among six grieving, angry men.
They had met two years ago at a group meeting for survivors. All six of them had a couple of things in common. The first was that the perpetrators who had committed horrendous crimes against their loved ones had walked away free men due to glitches in their cases. The second thing they all had in common was a killing rage and a desperate and hungry need for justice.
They had set up a plan for each of them to kill another man’s perpetrator. They each would be killing a man who had absolutely nothing to do with them, hopefully assuring that they all stayed under law enforcement’s scrutiny.
Troy now headed into the woods. Even in the shade it was hot, and insects buzzed angrily as if to protest Troy’s presence in their domain. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to think about the crime that had brought him here. But it concerned him that one of the six was apparently acting alone, and that hadn’t been the plan.
He sat on the fallen log to wait for Nick and tried to keep his mind empty, but it was impossible. Surprisingly it wasn’t thoughts of murder, but rather thoughts of his neighbor Eliza Burke that intruded in his head.
It had been a long time since Troy had really noticed any woman. After his wife had walked out on him three years before, he’d had no interest in any kind of a relationship.
However, Eliza Burke had stirred him on a level he’d thought was long dead. She’d sparked something inside him he hadn’t felt for a very long time. Not that anything would come of it. He wouldn’t allow anything to come of it even if she was interested in him.
He just wanted to know who in her house might have seen him last night. He’d join her for dinner and see if he got the answer. Once that question was answered, he would be done with her.
Before he had time to really process anything more, Nick appeared. The tall, dark-haired man wore a deep frown. “What’s up?” He leaned against a nearby tree as if not wanting to get too close to Troy.
“I was supposed to kill Winthrop last night, but somebody got to him before me.”
Nick grimaced. “Just like what happened to me.”
“Somebody has gone rogue and it’s got me worried.”
“Look, I don’t want anything to do with this,” Nick protested. “I’ve moved on. I’m in love with a wonderful woman and we’re planning a wedding.”
“I know you don’t want to be involved in this, but you are,” Troy replied evenly. “Doesn’t it bother you that one of us is acting alone? Do you have any idea who it might be?”
Nick frowned again. “Adam is the one who planned all this. Maybe he just decided to take things into his own hands.”
Adam Kincaid was one of the six men who had taken the lead and was in charge of the logistics of the plan. His wife had been murdered at a drive-through ATM where she had just withdrawn two hundred dollars. A drug-addicted man had yanked her out of the car and had stabbed her to death to get the cash. The case had ended in a hung jury and the prosecutor had decided not to retry the case.
“If that’s true, then you know what that makes all of the rest of us? Liabilities,” Troy said.
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think he’d come after one of us?”
Troy released a deep sigh. “I don’t know what to think. I just wanted you to know that somebody isn’t playing by the rules we all set up, although I have to admit I was kind of relieved to wake up yesterday morning and realize I didn’t have to kill a man.”
“Yeah, I felt the same way when my target was already dead when I went to his house to kill him.” Nick’s frown appeared once again and his eyes darkened. “I’ve got to tell you, man, that was a bad scene. Whoever killed Brian McDowell enjoyed it. His throat was slit, and that takes a special kind of killer. There was also a carving in his forehead. It looked like a V.”
Tension once again tugged at Troy’s shoulders. “V for vengeance? For vigilante?”
“Could be either, or maybe it was just a coincidence that it looked like a V. But who does that? Who carves up a man’s forehead after slitting his throat?”
“Hell if I know. So, what do we do about it?”
“Nothing. I told all of you before that I’m out of it. I feel like I made a pact with the devil when I got involved in this crazy scheme,” Nick replied.
Troy studied him for a long moment. “How did you feel this morning when you woke up and read that the man who raped and killed your wife was dead?”
“Nothing,” Nick replied. “I felt nothing. My wife was still dead and Winthrop’s murder didn’t change that. I’m building a new life for myself and that’s all that matters to me now.” He straightened from the tree trunk. “I hope nothing more comes of this, Troy, but in any case, please lose my number forever.”
Nick turned and left the small clearing. Troy remained on the log, trying to figure out what in the hell he had hoped to accomplish by meeting with Nick. Maybe he’d just needed somebody else to know.
Troy didn’t want to think about the pact anymore. He knew somebody was going to kill Dwight Weatherby. Troy definitely wanted that man dead, and he wasn’t about to do a damned thing to stop that from happening.
And
