The Bitch is Back By Tyson Blue
Written by Tyson BlueI had dropped in at my favorite eatery, the Water Horse Irish Pub in Franklin, New Hampshire, my mouth watering for a nice Friday Night Fish Fry, a staple of restaurants throughout the Northeast. It usually consisted of a fillet of beer-battered haddock, fried to a golden brown, with coleslaw and fries. A server came up to my table.
“Evening, Sir,” she said. “I have to tell you that, because of a problem with our deliveries today, we don’t have our fish fry. We didn’t get the fish in, so —“ she smiled and shrugged.
“You have the fry, but no fish?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Ayuh,” she said. “That’s about the size of it.”
I scanned the menu quickly.
“I’ll have the steak, then.”
Her brow wrinkled. With mock horror, she said, “Eat meat on a Friday?”
I smiled back.
“That’s all right,” I said.
She nodded and headed off to put in my order. She came back for my drink order, and soon came back with my Guinness, complete with a shamrock drawn in the foamy top.
While I waited for my meal, I took a minute to look around the room. I was looking for anyone I had seen before, or anyone who seemed particularly interested in me. Although I enjoyed coming here, I tried not to do it too often or with any regular time or day — it wasn’t a good idea to establish any habits that might make it easy to set up an ambush for me, which is, in my line of work, an all-to-likely scenario.
There were only a half-dozen couples seated in various parts of the room, none of whom were familiar, and all of them were talking quietly with each other, enjoying drinks or meals. No one seemed to be paying attention to me.
My meal arrived, and I dug in. It was up to the pub’s usual high standards, and I finished it, leaving nothing but a skim of grease and a few florets of broccoli on the platter. I paid for it in cash, including a hefty tip for the server, and headed out to my car, stopping to hold the door open for a young woman who was coming in. Night had fallen while I was inside. The street was deserted, no one appeared to be waiting for me, so I put the car in gear and headed up the street, taking my first right to head down to Central Street, and turned left to head toward my residence, an old hunting cabin set back in the woods along a barely-there one lane dirt road in Grafton, a little over a half-hour away.
After spending a lot of time operating out of central Georgia, I had decided that things had gotten a little hot for me down there, and had relocated to New Hampshire for a new base of operations. I had chosen Grafton because it could best be described as “sparsely populated”. Just over 1,300 people lived there. Back in 2006, a group of libertarians had moved into the area and tried to set up a “Free Town”, where laws were minimal and local services, such as garbage pickup and snowplowing, were all but defunded. The local history of resistance to pay taxes went back to its founding in 1778. Zoning regulations were nonexistent, and at its height, many of the Free Towners had lived in a series of campsites in the woods, made up of campers, trailers, yurts and tents. Although most of them had long since left, I suspected that some of them were still, there, although I had never actually seen any of them.
Most of my neighbors had fur, claws and/or antlers. Deer were frequent visitors, as were raccoons and porcupines. Black bears were plentiful in the area, drawn to garbage and other food items, but for the most part, they kept to themselves around my place.
The cabin consisted of a single large room with a wood stove for heat and cooking, and a built-in bunk for sleeping. I read by window light during the day, and by a kerosene lantern at night. The facilities were the great outdoors. I carted in water from a convenience store out on the highway, where I could charge my laptop and check my Dark Web connection for potential jobs.
My name is Ray Vincent. I kill people for a living.
I drove the winding two-lane road, passing Newfound Lake on my right, and a few miles later drove by Proctor Academy, a staid old New England prep school in the small town of Andover. There wasn’t much in the town except for the school, just a gas station and a few other places that mainly served the needs of the school and its students. There was only one vehicle behind me, and it was quite a ways behind.
When I turned off the main road, dense pine woods closed in on both sides of the road. The headlights illuminated the road ahead, but not much else. The single-lane dirt trail that led back to my cabin was about five miles ahead. I’d be home soon.
Suddenly, a blaze of white light filled my back window and reflected blindingly from my rearview and side mirrors. An engine roared behind me and and I was hit from behind by a much larger vehicle, my head flying back against the headrest. The vehicle behind me pushed me toward the side of the road, then dropped back and swerved around me, cutting me off. I popped my seatbelt and reached for the glove compartment, which contained my Colt Python .357 Magnum. I opened the driver’s side door, which I had modified with an inner panel of heavy steel, and stepped out to see what this was all about.
In front of me was a heavy-duty pickup truck. It stood much higher off the road than my sedan, which explained why its headlights had shone directly through my back window, effectively blinding me. A light-bar across the top of the cab blared on, spotlighting me. I heard the driver’s door open, but couldn’t see it because of the severe angle at which the truck had pulled in to cut me off.
The driver walked around the back of the truck and stepped into the pool of light between the two vehicles. It was a woman, her dark hair cut shoulder length. It was the woman for whom I’d held the door at the pub as I was leaving.
So much for being polite.
She held a gun in her left hand. In the place of her right hand was a prosthetic. She walked toward me with an awkward, rolling gait. Her right leg was a prosthetic, too.
“Remember me?” she asked. “Because I sure as shit remember you.”
It didn’t come back to me right away, but her face was familiar. Then it came back to me.
A few months ago, I had been hired to take out a man named Henry Shaheen. He was a human trafficker who provided girls ranging from toddlers to teenagers for the Arabian sex-slave market. The father of one of his victims wanted him taken out, and hired me to do it. I had intercepted him at a container port in Boston as he was preparing to transfer a truckload of girls onto a freighter bound for the Middle East. I had taken out Shaheen at the scene, but the men with him had gotten away with the truck.
I followed them up into southern New Hampshire, where they had driven down a wood road to eliminate the girls. In the back of the truck with the girls was a young woman who had acted as Shaheen’s groomer, luring the girls in and pretending to be one of them in order to keep them calm until the ship left port.
When I killed the men who had been driving the truck, she acted like she was grateful to me for saving her, and had almost convinced me that she would get them to safety. I was almost back on the road when I realized that she had known too much about the truck to not be in on the job, so I had gone back and found her about to kill the girls in the back of the truck. I had shot her in the wrist of her gun hand with a high-explosive round and then run her over with the truck to leave it for the police I had called. I didn’t want to explain all that to them when they arrived.
At any rate, that woman was now standing in front of me with a gun in her remaining hand and a burning mad-on for me in her eyes.
“I thought you were dead,” I said.
“Not quite,” she said, with a tight smile. “You didn’t run over my body, just my legs. You broke them, and I ended up losing my right one below the knee. I made a tourniquet from a phone-charger cable to keep from bleeding out from your shooting off my hand, and I called some of Shaheen’s people to come and get me. They got me patched up, and I began working on trying to get you.”
“So you tracked me down, did you?”
I had visions of her having somehow tracked me down on the Dark Web, and tracked me here, which — assuming I lived through the next few minutes — would mean that I would have to relocate and set myself up in business somewhere else. I really liked the setup I had here; for someone in my line of work, it was nearly perfect. But if I had been compromised, I’d have no choice.
“I didn’t track you down,” she said. “I tried, but I don’t know that much about finding hitmen online. No, I just recognized you tonight when you held the door for me as you were leaving the Water Horse. You didn’t even recognize me, did you? “
“To tell the truth, I didn’t even look at you. I was just being nice on my way out the door.,” I told her.
“Throw your gun into the woods”, she said.
“Ain’t gonna happen, kiddo,” I said, squatting down behind the armored door as I did so.
“I can still see your feet under the door,” she said.
“Good luck hitting a moving target that small shooting one-handed,” I said, then turned and ran quickly around the back of my car and into the dense brush beside the road. I crashed through the litter of sticks, dead leaves and pine straw that littered the forest, trying to get as deep into the woods as I could before she came in after me.
She fired two shots after me, and one came close enough that I heard it whiz by me as it passed harmlessly into the woods, clipping off branches as it went. The sound of the shots rolled around in the night. If there had been anyone around to hear, they would most likely not have given it much thought. Gunshots in the woods in Grafton were not uncommon at any hour of the day or night. Most residents respected their neighbors’ privacy, not to mention their right to bear — and use — firearms as they saw fit.
The lights from the pickup lit up the woods some, but I was dressed in dark clothes, and the farther I got into the trees, the harder I’d be to see. If she moved the truck to aim directly into the woods, it would light things up much better, but that’s not what she did. She was coming after me. It was going to be hard going with one leg and one hand, and that hand holding a gun. But that’s what she was doing.
As I moved deeper into the woods, I ran strategies through my head to give me the best advantage I could get. I thought about trying to climb a tree and get the drop on her as she went by. But many of the trees around me were fairly young pines, and were not sturdy enough to support me. There were some hardwood trees that were older, but their lost branches were too high for me to get a grip and get up into them.
My best bet was to keep moving deeper into the woods, away from the light, and to find a good position to ambush her. The hardest part was trying to avoid making any noise, given all the litter on the ground, leaves that would crackle or rustle, and sticks that would snap loudly when stepped on.
Pausing for a moment, I looked back toward the road. I could see her silhouetted against the light from the truck. She was about fifty or sixty feet back, making her way slowly through the trees, trying to avoid limbs or potential obstacles on the ground. I was confident that she couldn’t see me against the black backdrop of the woods, and kept going, trying to be as quiet as possible.
As she stood there, I saw her put the gun under her arm and reach up with her hand toward the baseball cap on her head. A beam of light came on above her eyes. She was wearing a headlamp. It wouldn’t be strong enough to pick me out, but it might help her to avoid anything that might trip her up. Taking the gun back in her hand, she began tramping deeper into the woods.
I moved into an area that was mostly pine, which was good. The ground was coated with pine straw, which muffled my footsteps and offered fewer sticks or leaves. I was able to move faster through here, deeper into the woods.
A few hundred feet further, I came to a small open space, like a meadow. I went across it as quickly and quietly as I could, moving cross ways to my left to take a different path in hopes of throwing the woman off. There was a light breeze, moving the grass, a soft, rustling sussurus that helped to cover any sound I might have made.
Behind me, the sharp crack of a gunshot rang out. I didn’t hear the sound of a bullet coming near me, so she must have fired at something else; or she may have just been guessing, or trying to make me nervous. But all I was doing was keeping track of the shots. I counted three. I was also trying to remember whether she was carrying a pistol or a revolver, whether she had three shots left, or however many were left in the clip. I wished I had made sure of that before I ran off, but it was too late now.
As I reached the far edge of the meadow and prepared to go back into the woods, I heard a rustling of branches and the crackle of crushed leaves coming from the brush ahead of me. Thinking that she might have somehow circled around me, I made my way to the trunk of a tall maple and did my best to blend into the shape of its trunk. I breathed as quietly as I could, my mouth wide open.
As I stood there, a few yards away, with a great cacophony of breaking twigs and snapping branches, I made out a huge shape emerging from the woods. A huge head, topped by an enormous rack of antlers, came first, atop a body whose shoulders were higher than my head, supported on improbably spindly legs. It was a bull moose.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
As I stood there, the moose rocked its great head, shaking loose branches that had tangled in its antlers as it made its way through the forest. Then it bent down and began to eat the vegetation growing in the meadow. I stood frozen by the tree, not wanting to startle the moose. I didn’t know if they were aggressive or not — this one seemed to be fairly sedate, but I didn’t want to find out I was wrong.
Finally, the moose raised its head and began slowly walking across the meadow, headed for the woods on the other side. The woman had had plenty of time to close the distance with me, and I had to make up for lost time. I eased around the tree as quietly as I could, then moved as slowly into the woods.
The ground sloped down into a small gully. A tiny stream made its way through the lowest point, and I stepped across it easily, not wanting to get my feet wet and have fallen leaves stick to the soles and create a risk of noise as I walked.
On the other side of the stream, the ground began sloping upward. I had just reached the beginning of the slope up when a voice spoke behind me.
“Hold it right there,” the woman said. A light blazed out from the other side of the stream. It seemed blinding, since my eyes had gotten used to the darkness, and my pupils were probably fully dilated.
I was caught in the light from her cap, almost as if I had been hit with a Super Trooper spotlight in the middle of a stage.
“I’ve got you now”, she said, taking a step toward me. A stick cracked loudly under her foot. I backed up a step. She came forward quickly, and stumbled over something on the ground. The something moved, emitting a mewling, almost childlike sound. I saw a small, furry black shape on the ground. At the same time, she went to her knees, keeping her hold on the gun. I squinted at the shape on the ground, and I felt a watery quiver of fear in my groin as I realized what it was.
It was a black bear cub.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered, and before I could move, a terrible roar shredded the night behind me, and I was hit below the knees by a great shape that sent me sprawling onto my back as the bear’s mother brushed past me and headed for the woman who had frightened her cub. She knelt on the ground, looking up at the beast, who had reared up onto her hind legs to loom over her. The gun in her hand was forgotten as she stared wide-eyed at the force of nature that had appeared before her, her mouth hanging open. As the bear raised one of its huge paws, I scrambled to my feet and began to run past her, headed back toward the road as fast as I could. As I ran, I heard a scream, abruptly cut off in mid-shriek, a snapping, ripping sound, and an object came flying past me, a beam of light trailing from it like the tail of a comet. It was the woman’s head, knocked from her shoulders by a single swipe of the bear’s paw.
She was dead now, I thought, that was for damn sure.
There were other sounds as the bear continued to maul her victim, which gave me time to put more distance between us. My Python could split an engine block, but I wasn’t interested in seeing how much stopping power it had against a mama bear in a full protective frenzy.
I came out onto the road and made my way to my car, the driver’s side door still hanging open. I looked at the back. The damage was mostly cosmetic; both taillights were still working. I walked over to the front of the truck. It was outfitted with a push-bar, one of those cowcatcher things you see on the front of police cars, so they can push disabled vehicles without damaging the grill. That was why most of the damage to the car was in the center.
I went back to my car and got a pair of nitrile gloves out of the center console and pulled them on. Closing the door, I climbed into the pickup and put it in gear and drove it back the way we had come, taking it farther away from the road leading to my place, and lessening the chance that anyone would make any connection between the truck and me, or between the truck and the location of its missing driver. I drove it down an old abandoned logging road that didn’t have any homes built up along it (although who knows who might have been living off the grid back in the woods) and left it there. I locked the keys inside, and walked back to the main road, peeling off the gloves and stuffing them into my back pocket as I went.
Then, I began trotting back to my car, hoping I wouldn’t run into the bear along the way, or any other bears. Or a moose. Or anything or anyone, else, for that matter. I reached my car without any further incident and drove on down the highway, turning off down the road that led to my cabin. It looked as though the whole thing had been a coincidence; the two of us had just seen each other in passing, which meant that I hadn’t been found out, and that I could stay where I was for now. Which suited me fine.
I liked my little cabin.
