Rattler Road: A Danny Devlin Thriller
RATTLER ROAD
A DANNY DEVLIN THRILLER
PATRICK MCNULTY
MINISTRY OF MONSTERS PRESS
For my family and friends who are my beta readers, my cheerleaders and my 24 hour support staff - I love you all!
A special thanks goes out to Jeff Bootsma, for helping get the word out about Danny Devlin and his adventures, and who was brave enough to allow me to use his name in this book.
CONTENTS
ENEMY WITHIN
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
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ENEMY WITHIN
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CHAPTER 1
When the three dots began to finally rumble across the screen Emily Collins held her breath.
It was just a few hours with friends at the mall. It would probably be boring, but she still didn’t want to miss out. She still didn’t want to be the one who couldn’t go.
The bubbles disappeared and a message from her mother appeared: COME STRAIGHT HOME. PASTA NIGHT.
Fuck.
Emily’s thumbs twitched with a burning hate, needing to transcribe what she was feeling at that precise moment.
Fucking pasta night? Was she serious?
With her dad’s groan worthy jokes and his terrible Italian accent every time he told her about his mother’s secret old country recipe.
Seriously?
Emily wrote a perfectly cutting message.
Deleted it.
Wrote another, even more spiteful one. And then deleted that one too. She took a slow even breath…in and out…in and out…
In the end she ended up settling on everyone’s favorite passive aggressive letter when responding to a text: k
Immediately her phone buzzed in her hand with another incoming text from her mom:
eta?
Emily dragged her backpack onto one shoulder, felt her physics textbook dig into the small of her back and the bright rage flared again.
She felt like running away. She had enough babysitting money to last a couple weeks, maybe she could make it. Head down the coast…
Emily glared at the screen and felt like whipping the phone into the ground and smashing it. One mistake, one missed call and all of a sudden she was tagged like a seal. Every second of her day accounted for.
At the end of Hudson Street another text rolled in from her mother, the warden, this time in all caps.
ETA?
Emily tapped a 5 as a reply and sent it away with a whoosh.
She crossed State Street and headed up to Elm.
Every day she took the same route, cutting across the parking lot of the abandoned shoe factory and through the gap in the fence at the rear of the lot which brought her within twenty yards of her house.
She slipped through the open gate still staring at her phone as messages from her best friend Jasmine rolled in:
We in the food court.
WRU?
Emily tapped a quick reply blaming her mother and then a gif from the movie Misery where Kathy Bates uses a sledgehammer on James Caan’s ankles.
Jasmine sent a crying emoji and then a heart in reply.
Then Jasmine sent a picture of Luke, a senior that she had been crushing on since forever. It looked like he was sitting with her friends at the food court.
Jasmine: Luke asked about you.
Oh my God!
Emily’s thumbs froze up trying to decide what to say, what to ask.
What do you mean?
What did he say?
“Excuse me.”
Emily’s head snapped up and stared stupidly at the woman standing in front of her.
“Shit!” Emily spat and stumbled backward, dropping her phone.
“Are you all right?” The woman asked, taking a cautious step closer.
Emily scanned the ground for her phone and scooped it up from the asphalt, quickly searching the screen for any scratches or cracks. The warden had already warned her that if she broke another phone Emily would be on the hook for the replacement.
“Are you okay?” the woman wanted to know.
For a second Emily didn’t know if she was all right.
Shoe factory.
Walking home.
Pasta night.
She was fine.
She blinked and forced a weak smile making eye contact with the woman for the first time.
She looked a little younger than her mother, but she had the hard lines around her mouth and eyes of a heavy drinker or a heavy smoker, or both. Her hair was dyed a deep black so dark it could have been navy and she wore peach lipstick on her thin lips that only accentuated how pale the woman was. She wore a jean jacket over a concert t-shirt for a band Emily had never heard of and ripped jeans. She held nothing in her hands except a thin red dog leash.
A pale blue Ford Windstar sat a few yards away. Rust had taken hold around the wheel wells and a stick person family was plastered to a back window. Dad, Mom, two little stick children and a skeleton dog.
Emily thought it was pretty creepy.
“Have you seen my dog?” She asked.
“What? No. Sorry.”
The woman’s strained smile faded and she turned back toward the empty parking lot and the crumbling buildings behind her.
“Biscuit! Biscuit! Come on!”
Emily joined her in looking for the animal but only a white plastic bag tumbled across the weed choked field that bordered the parking lot.
“Sorry.” Emily said, “I didn’t see him.”
“Could you help me find him?”
“Sorry no.” Emily told her. “I have to get home. My mother…”
“Oh, I’m sorry to bother you but she’s so little and its getting dark…Biscuit! Come on girl!”
Emily knew from her countless explorations inside the sprawling factory that it housed a million places where the tiny dog could be hiding. Open pits, broken glass, rusty nails sticking out of the ground. Thinking of this woman’s dog alone and scared out here in the cold made her miss her own dog, Oscar.
Emily gave one last look toward the break in the fence and then turned to the pitiful looking woman.
“What kind of dog is it?”
“Oh,” the woman said, striding closer, and pulling her phone from a pocket. “it’s the cutest little thing.”
She tapped a long peach nail on the screen of her smartphone a few times to call up a photo. The woman stood close enough for Emily to smell the stale cigarettes on her breath.
A moment later a small blonde Terrier was staring happily out of the screen.
“He’s just a puppy.” The woman cooed. “Poor little guy.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Emily asked.
The woman slid the phone back into her pocket and cocked her head to the side.
“What did I say?”
“You said both actually.”
The woman eyed Emily, and the way the woman smiled made the hairs stand up on Emily’s neck.
“Smart girl.” The woman said finally. “Biscuit is a boy. A naughty little boy. We were driving around for hours trying to get home and poor Biscuit had to use the bathroom and –“
“We?”
CHAPTER 2
The woman’s eyes flashed to something over Emily’s shoulder.
“Any luck?” The woman asked.
Emily turned her head straight into the punch.
The man’s fist festooned with garish silver rings connected with her temple like a cruise missle. The young girl’s head snapped back with a crack of breaking kindling and Emily was out cold before her thin body hit the asphalt.
The woman, whose name was Katie Delray, did a quick check for any nearby nosy lookie-loos and then turned her fierce green eyes on Dale Trager, her idiot boyfriend, who at the moment was massaging his right hand and painfully flexing his fingers.
“Kid’s head must been made a concrete.” He said, shaking out his hand.
“What the hell, Dale? We agreed on the chloroform. What if she’s broken?”
Dale got down on his haunches and touched two fingers to the girl’s slender throat.
“She’s all right.” He reported. “Got her right on the button though. Gonna have a hell of a shiner but she’ll live. No harm no foul.”
Katie tossed Dale the dog leash and knelt down beside the kid. She was indeed still breathing, and alive as far as Katie could tell. But there was some bleeding on her forehead from when she hit the deck.
She cursed and thought, not for the first time, that she should have come up here herself.
“She’s bleeding, Dale.”
/> “Well…okay…” was his only response.
And then the kid’s phone buzzed.
Katie scooped it up from the cracked tarmac and read the screen. A call was coming in from MOM. Katie declined the call and then after wiping it for fingerprints, whipped the shiny new device into the weeds.
When she stood next to Dale she saw that he had forgotten about his sore hand and was standing over the sleeping girl, eying the line of her bare stomach where her white school shirt had come apart when she fell.
Katie shook her head. Men were all the same. Simple. But useful. Sometimes.
“Dale.”
Dale’s head snapped toward her voice and she marvelled at how young he looked for that split second, like he was five years old again and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He was almost handsome again, like he was when she first met him.
And then he spoke.
“What? I wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”
“You gonna put her in the van, Dale? Or you want to wait until she starts screaming?”
Dale bent down and scooped the young girl from the ground as if she were weightless, and carried her to the waiting van. Katie grabbed the kid’s backpack and jogged ahead to open the sliding passenger door.
Inside the rear seats had been removed and replaced with a custom built wooden crate that had the same dimensions as a coffin. Katie opened the coffin lid and Dale deposited the girl inside. Immediately the passenger door slid closed and Katie went to work securing the young girl to the interior of the box. Padded ankle and wrist restraints kept her from thrashing around making a racket and possibly hurting herself. And finally, a hockey helmet retrofitted with extra padding and a built in gag that secured her mouth closed was placed over Emily’s head.
As the last buckle was secure Emily began to blink awake, her features crunching in confusion and pain and then absolute panic.
Tears were already popping out of her eyes and rolling down her cheeks when she screamed into the gag. She twisted and writhed as best she could within the confines of her restraints but she was all but immobile.
The last thing she saw before the lid was closed on her makeshift coffin and the darkness came, was the face of the woman from the parking lot. And she was smiling.
“Sleep tight, kiddo.” She whispered. “Got a long drive ahead of us.”
The woman pulled a syringe from a pocket of her jean jacket and uncapped the end. Emily roared against the leather gag in her mouth that tasted of salt and sweat and did her best to pull away.
But it was no use.
The woman slammed the syringe into Emily’s left thigh and depressed the plunger.
A warmth spread outward from the injection site. A rising wave rushing over her stomach, around her frantically beating heart and into her brain until there was no fight left in her.
No panic.
Nothing, except the warmth and the darkness.
CHAPTER 3
“I’d stay on the main highway if I was you. Rattler road ain’t safe this time of year. Just saying.”
I stared at the short, chubby old timer behind the rental car counter as he smirked, loving that being local to this part of the world finally paid off in some way. He knew something that the city mouse didn’t. I read the plastic nameplate clipped to his chest and asked, “Why’s that, Chet?”
The old man’s dust broom moustache twitched into a smile as he said, “Well, you mentioned you were heading south and most people that ain’t from around here see the Rattler as a kind of a short cut. Lookie here…”
His sausage fingers danced across the map that was pressed flat under the glass top of the counter, and traced a wavy line down the mountain.
“See? And it is, in the summer months, that stretch of road, even with all the switchbacks will damn near cut off three hours. But we in March now, and its the rainy season for these parts. And during that time when rain comes down in sheets and the trees get to bending, nine times out of ten a section of that damn road gets washed out, or a tree comes down blocking the damn thing. I can’t tell you how many of our customers get caught up there, having to walk all the way down, cause there’s sure no cell service for most of it. Screaming and hollering at us cause they went that way and didn’t know. So, now you know.”
“Now I know.” I told him.
He smiled and shook my hand and he walked me through the last of the documents and in the end handed me the keys to a dark blue Ford Fusion.
I found the car in its assigned space as thunder rolled somewhere far to the north. The sky above was a sweet cornflower blue and I didn’t see a cloud anywhere. So much for the rainy season.
I slipped into the Ford and fired up the GPS. I typed in my destination and sure enough the computer chose the quickest route to get me from A to B.
Rattler Road.
And true to his word the Rattler route shaved off two hours and forty three minutes from the next fastest route. It was an easy call. I tapped GO on the little display and I was off.
Sometimes, I’m just too stubborn for my own good.
Two hours later hooked claws of lightning ripped at the cast iron sky and thunder rolled so close it shook my little car. My speed had dropped down to twenty-five miles per hour and I had the wiper blades on full blast, but still I could barely see the road.
A constant torrent of water flowed down the mountainside to my left and I could feel the tires losing their grip on the asphalt. I was constantly turning into the skid, but I was still gradually sliding to my right, following the path of the water where it ran downhill.
A bolt of lightning struck the ground nearby with a ear splitting crack. For a second brilliant white light flashed and turned the dreary gray day into high noon.
Somewhere close I heard a rumble that wasn’t thunder. It was a primordial groan as branches broke and snapped and fell into the road.
As I crept through the next switchback I saw a monstrous tree fall through the screen of leaves that still clung to the branches.
I had half a second to jerk the wheel to the right before the massive oak was going to flatten my car, with me inside.
The Ford followed the torrent of water straight to the edge of the highway, and then beyond. I stomped on the brakes, but it was no use. The front passenger tires slipped off the road and the car followed. Suddenly I was heading down the mountainside at a forty-five degree angle.
I did my best to steer around the boulders and trees but I might have been just dreaming that I had any control at all as the car picked up speed heading downhill.
I did my best to play along, but the Ford finally rolled snake eyes and slammed dead center into a tree trunk about three feet wide. The hood crumpled in like it was made of tin foil and the airbag fired out of the steering wheel and punched me right in the face.
I guess I deserved that.
I sat there in the aftermath listening to the rain hammer the roof as the engine ticked and shook as it cooled. After a while the airbag deflated and I checked my bloody face in the mirror.
So that’s what stupid looks like.
I wiped the blood from my nose and took inventory. Other than a bloody beak, the only thing hurt was my pride.
Luckily my phone was still plugged into the car. I found it dangling over the passenger side footwell. I checked the screen and just as Chet predicted there was no cell service where I found myself in God’s country.
Immediately I saw Chet’s smiling face as I grabbed the keys and thanked him for his advice about my travel plans. He was still smiling, knowing I was gonna totally ignore it and travel on the Rattler.
He and the rest of the rental car employees probably had a pool going to see which out of towner would wreck on the infamous road.
Just plain stupid…
I couldn’t open the door, so I rolled down the driver’s side window and climbed out of the car and into the storm.