Killer Pursuit: An Allison McNeil Thriller Read online

  Killer Pursuit

  An Allison McNeil Thriller

  Jeff Gunhus

  Seven Guns Press

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also By Jeff Gunhus

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Afterword

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2016 by Jeff Gunhus.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Seven Guns Press. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Extended Imagery

  Edited by Mandy Schoen

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gunhus, Jeff

  The Torment of Rachel Ames / Jeff Gunhus

  Created with Vellum

  Also By Jeff Gunhus

  ADULT FICTION

  Night Chill

  Night Terror

  Killer Within

  Killer Pursuit

  The Torment of Rachel Ames: a novella

  YA FICTION

  Jack Templar Monster Hunter

  Jack Templar and the Monster Hunter Academy

  Jack Templar and the Lord of the Vampires

  Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves

  Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons

  Acknowledgments

  Every journey begins with a single step. The journey of writing a novel begins with the important task of surrounding oneself with great people who support, nourish and nurture the process. First and foremost, I rely on the good counsel and unconditional love of my wife, Nicole. Without you, nothing around here works. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  Heaps of gratitude also goes to my five kids who are so good about letting Dad write his crazy books in the mornings and trying out plots on them during long drives. All five of you continue to amaze me as you grow into full-fledged human beings. Our house is always loud and it’s the music of my life. I love every minute of it.

  Thank you to my parents for a childhood filled with books, travel, adventure and encouragement. And to my older brother, Eric, who consistently amazes me with his creativity.

  We’re told to never judge a book by its cover, but in this case I’m all right if people do so. Carl Graves of Extended Imagery did an incredible job capturing the tone I wanted to express with this cover. I couldn’t be happier with it.

  Mandy Shoen once again edited the book. Your developmental edits made substantive improvements while keeping my voice and intention intact. Thank you.

  Thank you to my assistant, Kate Tilton, who makes my life easier and gives me more time to write.

  A special thank you to FBI Assistant Director in Charge Diego Rodriguez and the men and women of the New York FBI Field Office. The incredible access granted through the International Thriller Writer’s Association answered all my questions and improved this book immeasurably. More than that, thank all of you for your tireless and dedicated service in defense of our country.

  Thank you Steve Berry for your full-day Masterclass on writing thrillers. You may not realize it, but your fingerprints are all over this manuscript due to the lessons you taught that day.

  Finally, thank you to my readers. I’ve been writing in some capacity since I was a kid, but I didn’t put my fiction out into the world until I wrote Jack Templar Monster Hunter for my reluctant reader son in 2012. The response to those books and then to my books written for adults has been unexpected, overwhelming and humbling. I don’t mind admitting that sometimes your reviews and letters cause me to choke up. Your support means more to me than you can ever know.

  As always, thank you for the decision to trust me with your most valuable commodity––your time. I worked hard on this book because I take our bargain seriously. You give me your time (and a little money) and in exchange I deliver a good story. I did my level best to deliver on my side of the deal. I hope you find your trust was well placed.

  With my sincerest gratitude,

  Jeff Gunhus

  Annapolis, Maryland

  For Nicole

  …because they’re always for you

  1

  Allison McNeil tensed when she spotted the first shadow dart through the mist and take cover behind a tree. In the early-morning light it took her a while to pick out all six members of the Hostage Rescue Team approaching the cabin, but within a minute she could clearly see the tactical team converging on their target.

  The small building stood on a rise, up from the swampy, flood-prone land around it. Wood-slated walls tilted precariously inward, twisting the windows into deformed rectangles. Moss and dead leaves covered the roof. The place smelled and looked like decay, well on its way to inevitable reclamation by the weeds and vines choking the cabin to a miserable death.

  And, if Allison was right, the place deserved what it got. Hell, if she was right, she had half a mind to take a match to the place after everything was done.

  She hunkered down behind a fallen tree, her head barely clearing the top to see the building and the team closing in. A trickle of sweat started at the base of her neck and went the length of her spine. She adjusted the Kevlar vest, under her light windbreaker emblazoned with large yellow letters. FBI. It felt ridiculous to wear the windbreaker when it was in the ’80s before daybreak with the Louisiana humidity hovering at about a thousand percent, but if it meant that the hotheads with assault rifles could more easily identify her as a friendly, then she was happy to have it.

  Garret Morrison shifted his weight next to her, stretching out a leg and rubbing his knee. She gave him a sideways look.

  “You all right?” she whispered.

  He scowled at her. They both knew she didn’t give a damn about him. The comment was intended as a dig at the fifty-three-year-old Garret who prided him
self on being in better shape than the agents beneath him. Even though he ran the Behavioral Analysis Unit, home of the FBI’s fabled profilers who spent more time in the heads of the criminals they chased than in the field, he required an aggressive physical program for his people. Everything about Morrison is a throwback to the old male-dominated Bureau. A slicked-back head of hair with just the right amount of grey to lend him gravitas without making him look old, a square jaw out of a mountaineering magazine, cold steel-blue eyes that seemed to look through people instead of at them. Unless they were trained on an attractive female, in which case his eyes gave their full attention to the area below the chin and above the waistline.

  “Worry about yourself,” Garret grumbled. He turned to Doug Browning, a junior agent who followed Garret around like a little puppy. “Jesus, Doug. Not so close.”

  Allison turned back to the cabin and raised her binoculars, not bothering to hide the smile on her lips. Garret was a legend in the Bureau for his work hunting America’s worst criminals, but Allison’s own legend had grown since her work on the Arnie Milhouse case a year earlier. While that case had given her credibility, she knew she was just as likely to be referred to as the woman who’d broken Garret Morrison’s nose when he’d made one too many unwanted advances while she was a trainee. And, while she wanted to be known for her work, she didn’t mind that piece of fame following her around.

  “Alpha team in position,” said a voice through the small speaker in her ear. She noticed Garret put a finger to the side of his head and nod. He looked over at her.

  “You better be right about this,” he whispered.

  Allison shook her head. For all his brilliance—and, regardless of how she felt personally about him, she recognized that he was brilliant—Garret’s transparency could border on the inane. What he was really saying was that if the lunatic Allison’s research had tracked to this location wasn’t holed up in this backwoods cabin, if the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had been activated and deployed for no reason, then the blame would drop on her like a bag of bricks. If Sam Kraw was in there, Allison knew it would be Garret standing in front of the cameras taking credit for the HRT mission and the capture of America’s most wanted fugitive.

  She pushed the thought away. As long as they caught the bastard and ended his multi-year killing spree in the Southeast, she didn’t give a damn who got the credit.

  Allison moved her binoculars. The tactical team was in place around the cabin, peering through scopes with infrared capabilities. If there was someone hiding in the shadows of a window or doorway, they wouldn’t be hiding for long.

  On some signal unseen by Allison, the men began a steady, crouched advance to the building. She realized she was holding her breath so she blew out her air slowly between pinched lips.

  “Relax, McNeil,” Garret muttered. “You’re making me nervous.”

  The two members of the tactical squad approaching from the front reached the deck that wrapped around the front of the building. As they strode across it, the old wood floorboards groaned. The men froze. The seconds stretched out. Allison became suddenly aware of the hum of insects in the air around her. The dampness of her own skin. The sound of a bird calling in the distance. All of her senses were wired tight. An entire year of her life was wrapped up in the next few seconds. And if she’d got it wrong, Garret would have the ammo he’d been looking for to get her out of his unit once and for all. But she wasn’t worried about herself. What really bothered her was the chance that she had it right, that this was Kraw’s hideout, but that somehow they’d spooked him and he’d already slipped away. If that had happened, he’d be hundreds of miles away by tomorrow, scouting for his next victim as he traveled.

  Movement in the cabin. Just a flutter. Like a bird trapped in a cage. Only her intuition told her it was more than a bird. It had been an arm. A human arm. Sam Kraw.

  Based on the lack of movement from the tactical team, she realized no one else had seen it.

  “I’ve got movement,” she whispered into her mic. “Window to the right of the front door. An arm.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Garret whispered.

  Allison ignored him. The men around the cabin responded immediately, reorienting to the front door. Guns pointed at the window.

  One of the men produced a miniram, a high impact, brute force breaching tool. Coordinating with his partner, he crouched next to the door while the other man readied a flash-bang grenade.

  There was a pause, as if someone had pressed a button on a TV remote. Everyone was in place. The air seemed to still as if the world knew something was about to happen. Allison had her binoculars trained on the window where she’d seen the movement. If Kraw was inside, then the nightmare was almost over. She’d know in a few seconds whether that was the case or not.

  But in that second, she saw the movement again.

  Only this time, she knew something was wrong.

  It was a man’s arm, she saw it clearly this time. But it was too stiff. The color was off. And, attached at the shoulder, she saw a coil of wire.

  A mannequin arm on a spring.

  Meant to make them think someone was inside.

  It was a trap.

  2

  Allison shouted into her mic. “No, wait!”

  As the words came out, one man threw the flash-bang grenade through the window and the other reared back with the ram.

  The grenade went off inside, lighting up all the windows on the lower floor, the percussive force loud even from where Allison watched. The other man swung the ram forward with enough force to smash through the decrepit door.

  But the second it hit the old wood…

  BOOM

  A bomb detonated inside the cabin. All four walls blew out, pulverized by the blast, sending a deadly wave of splintered wood and fire roaring outward.

  On reflex, Allison ducked behind the log. Even so, she felt the heat and the pressure from the explosion pour over her. Debris slammed against the log. Bits of shrapnel zinged by her head.

  She looked up and saw Garret prone on the ground. She reached out for him, thinking he was hit. He flinched at her touch and glanced up at her. Something had torn a nasty gash through his left cheek, but it wasn’t serious. Behind him, his assistant Doug held his shoulder, moaning. As Garret saw to him, Allison stood and surveyed the carnage.

  The building had disintegrated from the force of the blast. Burning debris littered the field. Sharp boards stuck into the soil like arrows. With the smoke hanging in the air she couldn’t see what had happened to the tactical team.

  But she heard them. Screaming. Groaning in pain.

  The smoke shifted and she saw them, laid out on the ground twenty or thirty feet from the house.

  Their black tactical gear smoking.

  The screamers writhing on the ground.

  Others lying there. Not moving. Bodies twisted into unnatural positions.

  “Agents down. Agents down,” she cried out, climbing over the log. As she ran toward the nearest man, she realized she hadn’t toggled her mic. “Agents down,” she yelled. “Need all available medical teams.”

  “Roger that,” came the voice in her ear, maddeningly calm and professional. “Two minutes out.”

  Allison slid to her knees as she reached the first man lying face down. She rolled him over and he screamed. When he did, Allison nearly vomited. One side of the man’s face was gone, no more than a smoking, red smear. Smoke rose from his vest. Allison tore at the buckles and straps, peeling off the layers. The man’s flak jacket was embedded with chunks of hot metal. Several had made it to the man’s skin and were burning him. Her first thought was that they were nails from the cabin. But she noticed a variety of metal shards: bolts, wingnuts, screws. The bomb had been packed with them, designed to cause the most damage possible to soft flesh.

  “You’re gonna be OK,” she lied to the man. Even if he survived, he’d never again be the person he was when he left home that morning. Left home to come
on an operation put together based on her intel, she reminded herself. “Medical team is coming up from the staging area,” she managed to say. “Hang in there.”

  The man didn’t respond. He gritted his teeth and screamed with his jaw clenched shut. Allison moved to the next man, but Garret was already there. He looked up at her and shook his head. Dead.

  Garret ran to the next man, but Allison hesitated. Something pulled at the back of her consciousness. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something important.

  Then it came to her. After months of living in Samuel Kraw’s head she felt like she knew him as well as he knew himself. Better, actually, because she had the clinical detachment to understand why he was as fucked up as he was. There was one thing she knew about him more than anything else.

  Sam Kraw would never pass up a chance to watch someone die.

  Allison jerked back at the thought. She scanned the tree line all around the cabin, struggling to see through the dense smoke from the burning wreckage of the building.

  Movement. In the trees to the north. A person moving.

  No, that was the backup team rushing up from the secondary staging area. To confirm this, a dozen other people appeared behind the first, running in her direction.

  Allison turned in place. Looking into every shadow. She knew Samuel Kraw. She knew the son of a bitch. “Where are you,” she said, turning in a circle. “I know you’re here.”

  “Allison,” Garret called out. “I need you.”

  She turned and saw him giving CPR to one of the tactical agents. She was just about to run to help him when her eye caught on something to her left. She scanned the area, her eyes coming to a stop at the base of a large sycamore tree. There, in the tree’s shadow, was a hulking figure, hands up to his face with a pair of binoculars.