Hard country rogue warri.., p.1
Hard Country (Rogue Warrior Thrillers Book 5), page 1
HARD COUNTRY
A ROGUE WARRIOR THRILLER
IAN LOOME
Published by Inkubator Books
www.inkubatorbooks.com
Copyright © 2024 by Ian Loome
Ian Loome has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83756-419-4
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-83756-420-0
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83756-421-7
HARD COUNTRY is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS
Inkubator Books
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
Epilogue
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About the Author
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1
PAHRUMP, NEVADA
Bob Singleton scratched at his beard as he leaned against the outfield rail and the stock car roared past, tires kicking up dust as it skirted the high dirt bank of Valley Speedway’s northeast corner.
The car’s back end slid out, the driver taking the right ‘line’ around the corner but going in too fast.
“HEEL AND TOE, SON! HEEL AND TOE!”
He looked to his right. The man yelling looked thirtyish, in an “AC Delco” ball cap, with shaggy light brown hair and sunglasses. He was watching the ride intently. “Dang! Pushing the line again,” he muttered.
He pulled off his cap and slapped it against the rail.
Bob nodded toward the vehicle. “Friend of yours?”
Annoyed, the man put his cap back on and nodded. “My younger brother. His ride, his team. But I taught him to drive. Or I thought I did, anyhow.”
“Big racing town?” Bob asked. A pink, heavily sponsored Nitro Funny Car sat in the infield, next to its trailer. Between various corporate logos, the word “JENKINS” was spray-painted on the hood in futuristic, boxy italicized capitals.
The other man followed Bob’s line of vision. “Yeah… not at the Valley. No, sir. They just race stocks here, modifieds. Too rough for Nitro, too short on the straightaways. That’s just a promo the Jenkins team does.” Then the man frowned, puzzled. “Mind, they do fuel it up here sometimes. Have that big ol’ tanker in the lot on Fridays. That’s kind of weird, ‘cos it don’t run here, just down at Ron Fellows…”
Bob let his ignorance show. “Ron Fellows…?”
“Spring Mountain, the operation down the road,” the man said. “Long story short, Ron Fellows is a driver, ran in NASCAR, endurance races like Le Mans. He’s got a school based out of it. Anyhow… real nice place, real good layout, lots of different track setups, clean concrete surfaces to handle the heat. So all the high-level stuff, when it comes into town, goes there. Team Jenkins runs Nitro there, does testing and driver training.”
It couldn’t be a coincidence, Bob supposed. “Jenkins… is that related to Jenkins Mechanical, in Bakersfield?”
“One and the same. Dick Jenkins is old school.”
“I have a friend working there.”
“Uh huh.” The man directed his attention back to the track. “OH, HEY NOW! COME ON, LES! FOOT DOWN!” He glanced back at Bob. “Takes the perfect line out of the second turn, barely steps on it coming into the straightaway. I swear, he’s got talent, if he could ever learn to concentrate.”
Bob nodded, but had half-tuned him out.
If his friend Dawn had had her way, he’d have gone to Bakersfield instead of heading to Seattle by bus via Pahrump. She wanted him to see Marcus, her adopted stepson, give him some encouragement from another male voice. He was apprenticing at Jenkins, a daunting first trip for the nineteen-year-old.
“He’s a sensitive kid, and he looks up to you,” she’d said. Then she’d gone quiet for a moment, the way she did, and said gently, “He talks about you all the time. I think he sees you as family now, and he needs one. We all do.”
Dawn and Marcus had seen him at his worst, when he was living on the street, and then when they’d been on the run, fleeing the killers of Marcus’s parents and Bob’s CIA past. But she didn’t believe there was a risk anymore; he could sense it.
Even though he’d been on the road for nearly a year, she fixated during their calls on the fact that no one hired by his former bosses had tried to kill him since Memphis, six months earlier.
“If I didn’t care about both of you,” he’d reminded her, “this wouldn’t even be a discussion. There’s a reason we use burners and don’t see each other.”
And so it had gone, Dawn trying to erode his will to keep moving, urging him instead to settle and build a life for himself; Bob trying to get her to understand that he didn’t want to keep running but he had no choice.
Thus, Seattle.
He watched the stock car complete another lap, the older brother clapping and cheering an improved performance. Seattle was for a second opinion. The specialist in Las Vegas, Dr. Michael Strong, had diagnosed him as having ADHD and complex PTSD.
The first part he could handle. That was all fine, such as it was.
He watched the stock car break too late, almost skidding out. The chatty brother was wringing his hair out.
But then he kept on with the PTSD nonsense.
The stock car was pulling up to the pits. The bearded man hopped the rail and headed in its direction, leaving Bob on his own. He looked around, realizing he hadn’t checked his perimeter in ten minutes.
He scolded himself for being so lax.
He headed towards the parking lot and exit. The speedway had been a distraction, but he still had two hours before his bus was due to leave.
Pahrump made sense. There were more direct routes from Las Vegas, but anyone hunting him would check larger destinations as a matter of course. Most people hide out in crowds.
Being counterintuitive—using buses, avoiding traffic and airport cameras—had served him well for close to a year. But eventually, someone would cotton on.
The town was an hour northwest of Las Vegas, perched on the edge of Death Valley, where the daily temperatures bleached bones until they cracked. A pastiche of small homes with zero-scaped front yards and red-grey dirt, the only greenery easily visible was the odd cactus.
It didn’t exactly scream “friendly.” There wasn’t much there, that he could tell: some housing developments, a Walmart, a few casinos, a couple of brothels. If the town had thirty thousand residents, it was hard to see where.
Or, maybe, why, Bob figured. It was the kind of frontier town that usually died out with the closure of a local mine or rerouting of a rail line, long before the Great Depression. It was dusty, scorched daily by temperatures above 110 F.
People didn’t go to Pahrump to draw attention, Bob figured. They went there to disappear. Maybe that’s the real reason you chose this route; maybe you were looking for another Tucson.
Somewhere to just disappear.
The speedway was a twenty-minute walk from the bus stop. Bob had always been curious about stock cars. He’d figured they’d have burgers, at least.
But he’d found on arriving it just wasn’t that busy, the track often rented during the day by individual outfits like the chatty brothers.
The dirt-and-gravel parking lot was almost empty, a half-dozen cars set back a few dozen yards from the back of the bleacher seating. A couple of pickups, a sedan and…
Bob whistled under his breath. The Dodge Challenger had arrived while he was watching the run, its throaty engine drowned out by the stock car. It was near the entrance, a ’73 in bright yellow, with black rally stripes.
Serious muscle. He approached it and crou
The voice came from behind him, slightly nasal and nervous. “Now, you all are going to want to put your hands up, real slow, and clasp your fingers behind your head.”
2
Bob glanced over his shoulder. A police officer in a tan tunic and brown slacks was approaching him slowly, slightly crouched, his service weapon braced, his badge gleaming in the desert sun.
He did as he was ordered. Rural cops were, in his limited experience, the height of unpredictability.
The officer crept a few steps forward. “Nye County Sheriffs!” he announced. “Okay now, you’re going to want to drop the bag, then kneel down and put your hands right there on the rail in front of you. Lay ‘em flat, so’s I can see ‘em, and spread your fingers.”
Bob complied. “Like that?”
“Yep.” The officer kept his pistol trained on Bob. He reached down and snapped half a set of handcuffs around Bob’s left wrist, then used the same hand to cuff the other bracelet to the right wrist.
Bob glanced over at the parking lot, then back to the handful of people trackside. Nobody was paying them any attention.
“Now I’m going to go on and search you, there, big fella, and you just stay real still, like,” the deputy said. “You carrying?”
Bob nodded. “FN five-seven in my bag.”
The deputy frowned, puzzled. “Nothing on ya?”
“Nope.”
“Huh. Weird.” He began to frisk Bob’s coat. “Figured you’d just up and get yourself some spending money while out on the road, huh, mister?” the officer suggested.
He took Bob’s wallet out of the coat as he moved into Bob’s line of sight again. His tag read ‘Deputy D. Buckwalter’.
The officer withdrew his license and studied it, then put it back into the wallet.
“Robert MacMillan of Las Vegas, huh? You been keeping busy, ain’t ya, Mr. Robert MacMillan of Las Vegas.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bob said. “I can account…”
“WHY… why don’t you just go on and shut it,” Buckwalter said. “Unless maybe you want to go and confess…”
“Confess to what?” Bob said. “I literally got off a bus, walked around town for a while, then came here to check out the track.”
“And in the meantime, you just went ahead and robbed Mike’s Gas Bar, didn’tcha? Didn’tcha!?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Uh huh, sure. Seems awful convenient, though; you know… you coming into town right on the day he gets robbed by some dude he didn’t recognize—a guy he said was dark-haired, carrying a soft-sided bag. You’ve got a soft-sided bag right there. You want to explain that one?”
He can’t be serious. “You can’t be…” Bob caught himself. The dude was a power-mad yokel nervous about outsiders, clearly. Irritating him wasn’t going to end well. “I get to call a lawyer at some point, right?”
The deputy grinned. Bob’s reflection warped in the man’s mirrored Aviator shades. Buckwalter’s teeth were gapped, a fleshy lump on his lip suggesting he liked dip tobacco. “Well now, sure… at SOME point.”
He crouched and picked up Bob’s bag, opening it and throwing the wallet inside. Then he began to rifle through it.
He withdrew the FN in its speed holster and dropped the bag casually at his feet. “What the fuck?” he grumbled, standing and holding the gun’s grip daintily by one thumb and forefinger. “I seen this piece before online. It’s used by NATO globalist types. Super-small bullets but real accurate.”
“Whatever you say, man.”
“Yeah… you’re darn right. It’s light, too… like a lady gun.” He dropped it back into the bag and it clunked off the cement.
Bob winced slightly.
Behind them, Bob heard brakes squeal, the desert dust creating friction. Buckwalter glanced that way. “HEY THERE, BOSS MAN!” he called out.
Bob turned his head to look northeast, towards the Lockspur Avenue entrance. A police cruiser had pulled up twenty feet behind them, an older man in uniform leaning out the window. “You need a hand there, Dobie?” he asked.
“No, siree, Sheriff! I’m just going to be Mirandizing this here miscreant shortly, then taking him over to the office. Mr. MacMillan up and robbed Mike’s.”
“I heard that.” The older cop squinted at him curiously. “That was just about an hour ago, I reckon. Found him awful quick.”
“Learned from the best,” Buckwalter said. He leaned Bob’s way slightly. “Deputy Sheriff Parnell has twenty years in law enforcement.”
“Uh huh.”
Buckwalter turned back to his boss. “Sure can tell he’s a bad’un just by looking at him.” The officer sniffed.
Bob tilted his head and peered up at him incredulously. He looked over at Parnell. “Is he for real?”
“Aw… don’t mind Deputy Buckwalter. He’s got what you call a flair for the dramatic, I guess. Now… you got something you want to tell us, Mr. MacMillan?”
“Yeah: I’d suggest you check the gas bar’s security camera. If you charge me, I imagine it’s going to come up at some point.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Buckwalter sneered.
“YES!”
The officer ignored his vehemence. “You’d like us to waste our time tilting with Mike about warrants for cameras and what not.”
Bob sighed loudly. “My phone call.”
Parnell’s attention shifted from his officer to Bob. “Impatient sort of fella, ain’t ya?”
Bob winced again. Everything about Pahrump was beginning to irritate him. “What is that? What is that accent? Why does everyone here sound like they stepped out of a documentary about an Ozarks blood feud?”
Parnell frowned. He looked slightly taken aback, leaning back and straightening up slightly in his car seat. “Well now, that’s just kind of hurtful, sir. Like many folk in this community, I’m from inland Cali-for-nye-aye, born and raised. Bakersfield in my case, and I believe Deputy Buckwalter…”
“Barstow,” Buckwalter said.
“But, like lots of folks from the area, our families come west from Oklahoma.”
“And Texas,’ Buckwalter added.
“And Texas. You’ll find we tend to cling to that independence and southern hospitality,” Parnell said. “When warranted.”
“Don’t take kindly to rudeness, though,” Buckwalter sniffed.
“My phone call,” Bob repeated.
Buckwalter wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Law says we can hold you for forty-eight hours before we even get a whiff of trouble for it. Ain’t that right, Sam?”
“I believe so, Officer Buckwalter.” His officer’s informality clearly bugged him, Bob figured. “Though I imagine it won’t have to come to that, assuming Mr. MacMillan behaves himself.” He nodded Buckwalter’s way once more. “You sure you’re good?”
“Right as rain, boss.”
“Well, I’ll see you back there, then.” Parnell’s cruiser pulled ahead a few yards, before executing a U-turn and leaving the parking lot.
Bob looked up at Buckwalter. He was avidly following the deputy sheriff’s car as it disappeared. Then he looked down at his captive.
“Well now, you just got quite the big mouth on you, don’tcha? That ain’t no local accent, neither. Where you from originally, Big Slim?”
“Michigan.”
“Uh huh. Well… you a long dang way from home.”
The gravel nearby crunched, catching both men’s attention. Two other men were approaching, both in civvies, blue jeans and work shirts.
“Ricky, Zeke,” Buckwalter said.
Ricky stopped five yards short. He had ginger hair and a neat, short beard. He looked like he’d been working hard, his face smudged with dirt, his cheeks burnished by the sun. He took a pack of Marlboros from his chest pocket and lit one. “Who’s the little bitch?” he asked.
“Some vagrant thief out of Vegas.” Buckwalter looked both ways suddenly, as if checking for eavesdroppers. He nodded towards his friends. “You fellers up for a little fun?”
3
They walked Bob towards the two pickups at the back of the lot, a man under each arm, both escorts checking their surrounds for any potential problems, Buckwalter carrying his bag.
