Kane- Tooth & Nail Read online

  “Let’s do it,” Alvarez finally said. “But with one change of rules.” He jerked his chin toward the table full of torture instruments. “We use chainsaws.”

  Chainsaws? Are you kidding me? He just shrugged and said, “Whatever. I’ll kill you with a paperclip if that’s what it takes.”

  “What I’m going to do to you, bastardo, will hurt way more than a paperclip.” Alvarez sneered. “Guns down on three?”

  Kane nodded.

  The Mexican rattled off a three-count, and both men dropped their weapons at the same time. Alvarez shoved Krissy away so roughly that she fell on her face. She quickly scrambled to put her back against the wall.

  “Stay,” he snapped as if she were some kind of dog. “Don’t you dare move.” He then stepped over to the table and picked up a chainsaw. Through the blood and grime caked on the machine, Kane saw the word “Stihl” emblazoned on the side. He recognized that as a top-tier brand. Nothing but the best for butchering kids.

  Alvarez moved aside and Kane approached the table, keeping a wary eye on his enemy to make sure he didn’t try any funny shit. Not that he expected him to; Alvarez seemed eager for the battle, ready to clash steel against steel in mortal combat. A dangerous, lunatic fire blazed in his eyes.

  Kane hefted the remaining chainsaw, a PowerKing, which was lighter than he expected. That meant it would be easier to maneuver in the upcoming deathmatch. The eighteen-inch bar jutted from the small but powerful machine, bristling with jagged teeth ready to rend and tear. Kane mentally reminded himself that if he fell victim to those unforgiving flesh-rippers, Krissy would be next. He could not afford to lose this fight.

  Alvarez grinned, a blood-crazed madman clearly enjoying the moment. “Amigo!” he shouted. “Start your engine!” He cranked the starter cord, and the chainsaw rumbled to life in a billow of noxious smoke.

  Kane glanced at Krissy. The little girl was stricken with terror. No surprise there. “Don’t watch,” he said. “You don’t need to see this.”

  She nodded tearfully and turned her face against the wall.

  Kane fixed his ice-cold gaze on Alvarez. “Time for you to die.” He fired up his chainsaw and hit the throttle, making the steel teeth spin around the bar in a metallic blur.

  The Mexican appeared convinced of his own immortality, not a shred of worry showing on his face. “Let’s dance!” he roared, lunging forward and thrusting the Stihl toward Kane’s face like a lance in a joust.

  Kane dodged to the side, and the screaming teeth missed his head by inches. The thunder of the engine brutalized his eardrum. The Mexican tried dropping the blade in a vertical cut to catch Kane’s shoulder, but he sidestepped out of harm’s way.

  Seizing the offensive, Kane swung the PowerKing toward Alvarez’s flank, hoping to carve a gash through his ribcage and into the vital organs beyond. The sex trafficker jumped back, and Kane’s saw cut through nothing but thin air.

  He gritted his teeth and pressed the attack, slicing toward the Mexican’s belly, going for a disemboweling strike. But Alvarez again hopped back, and the blow missed. Not by much, but that didn’t matter. A mile or an inch, a miss is still a miss.

  Sensing an opening, Alvarez raised his chainsaw overhead for a downward, chopping stroke that would split Kane’s head from crown to chin.

  Kane brought his own chainsaw up and blocked the blow. The metal bars clashed together, steel teeth mangling each other in a harsh spray of sparks. Violent vibrations shuddered up his arms. Alvarez’s brute strength pushed the screaming blades closer to Kane’s face, muscles heaving with his herculean effort to kill his foe. His lips were peeled back from his clenched teeth in an animalistic snarl.

  Rather than expend his energy repelling Alvarez’s power, Kane rolled out from underneath the crisscrossed chainsaws. Robbed of a resisting counterforce, Alvarez lurched forward, stumbling as his Stihl slashed through suddenly-empty space. Moving with the lethal grace of a jungle cat, Kane spun behind the off-balance Mexican and prepared to drive the PowerKing’s blade into the man’s spine.

  But Alvarez, holding his chainsaw in just one hand, flailed backward with wild desperation. Kane dropped to his knees and felt the Stihl’s blade whip over his head with only millimeters to spare. But a miss was a miss, and the warrior seized the advantage.

  Like a scene from a horror movie, Kane thrust the chainsaw up between Alvarez’s legs. Shredded flesh and hot blood sprayed everywhere in a thick, wet slurry. The Mexican screamed like the little girls he had savaged as metal teeth ripped his groin into a ragged red ruin, and he fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

  Kane rose to his feet, letting the bloodied chainsaw drop to the floor as he retrieved his Sig. Alvarez had deserved what had happened to him, no doubt about it. However, Kane was a soldier, not a sadist who took pleasure in his enemy’s pain.

  He fired a mercy bullet into Alvarez’s skull and ended his misery.

  Hot smoke curled from the muzzle of the gun as he shut off both chainsaws, then walked over to where Krissy huddled against the wall. He could hear her frightened whimpers. “Come on, Krissy, let’s get you home.”

  “Hijo de puta!”

  Kane dropped into a crouch and spun toward the door as an angry voice filled the warehouse. The Sig snapped up, seeking target acquisition on this unexpected threat. His finger had the trigger halfway home, ready to pump out a whole lot of hollow-points.

  The young Mexican kid standing in the doorway couldn’t be any older than fourteen. The nickel-plated Browning Hi-Power .40 caliber pistol in his fist looked even newer.

  Kid must have been waiting in the van, Kane thought.

  The teen’s face twisted with rage and grief. “You killed my brother!” he shouted.

  Kane moved to put himself between the gunman and the girl. He kept the M17 locked on target but kept his voice low and calm. “Easy there, kid. I’ve got no fight with you.” Even from here, he could see the boy’s resemblance to Alvarez. Talk about a messed-up situation. He was standing over the body of the kid’s brother, and the only way out, the only way to save Krissy, might be to kill the kid too.

  The rage on the boy’s face transferred to his gun hand, which shook badly. His whole body trembled, vibrating with shock, horror, sadness, and fury. “I’ve got a fight with you!” the teenager shouted, and even his voice quivered.

  “I get it,” Kane said. “Really, I do. I’ve had people taken from me, so I get why you’re feeling raw right now. But believe me, your brother was doing some bad shit that couldn’t be allowed to stand.”

  “I don’t care!” the kid shouted. “He was mi hermano. I must avenge his death!”

  Just like that, his hand stopped shaking.

  Kane mouthed a curse. He didn’t want to kill a kid. There had to be a way out of this standoff.

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. The knuckle of his trigger finger tightened.

  Kane saw the signs. He was out of time.

  Dammit!

  The teen started to pull the trigger.

  Kane beat him to the punch.

  The bullet ripped into the kid’s chest. He still managed to get off a shot, but he missed badly, staggering from the lethal impact. He stared at Kane, eyes wide in their sockets, full of shock and hurt and the horrified realization that his young life was over. Blood poured from the hole drilled in his heart. He grabbed at the wall to keep from falling but failed, sliding to the ground in a twitching heap.

  “Stay here,” Kane said to Krissy, then ran over to the fallen teen.

  By the time he got there, death had glazed the boy’s eyes as he stared into whatever waited beyond the business end of a bullet. Guilt tore a jagged wound across Kane’s conscience. He could have sworn he saw accusation in the kid’s dead eyes.

  With a soul-weary sigh, Kane turned back to Krissy. She looked at him like she wasn’t sure if he was a good guy or a bad guy. Right now, he wasn’t sure himself. Yeah, he had killed some deserving scumbags tonight, but he had also killed a kid. He wasn’t s
ure how that would balance out on the scales of justice.

  He shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this anymore.

  He gave the frightened little girl a reassuring smile. “Come on, Krissy. Let’s get you home.”

  As he guided her out into the night, the shadows closed around them, the darkness outside mirroring his internal darkness. Shielding Krissy’s eyes as they stepped over the boy’s corpse, Kane felt a cold hollow carved into his guts. He wondered if the feeling would ever go away.

  Someone had to ride the blood and thunder. Someone had to cross swords with the savages and cannibals who preyed on the innocent. Someone had to carry the fight into the gaping, tooth-filled maw of the beast. But what price did the warrior pay? How many scars could a soul stand?

  Kane had once vowed to be that warrior.

  Now, he wasn’t sure he could do it anymore.

  Chapter One

  Adirondack Mountains, upstate New York

  Five days later…

  Even with the GPS guiding him, Kane drove past the sign for Wolf Pond Road. He glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure there was nobody behind him—there wasn’t, just like there hadn’t been for the last thirty miles—then hit the brakes on his Jeep Wrangler. He backed up until he could turn onto the unpaved, poorly-marked, dead-end dirt road.

  Gravel crunched under the Jeep’s tires as the road curved around the small body of water for which it was named. He saw a man and a boy down on the bank, wetting their fishing lines. They stared at him as he drove past. Kane raised his hand in a polite wave, but they didn’t wave back.

  “Friendly folks,” Kane muttered. Maybe he should have checked the back of the Welcome to Black Bog sign he had passed a half-mile back to see if it said, Now go the hell away.

  A mile farther on, he pulled up in front of the house at the end of Wolf Pond Road and parked the Jeep next to a rusting metal mailbox marked with the name E. Foxx.

  As he climbed out of the Wrangler, the fresh mountain air hit him, laced with the scents of pines and cedars. Before he could really savor the crisp smells, the biggest Maine Coon cat he had ever laid eyes on raced around the corner of the house and charged at him. The loud meows coming out of the cat’s mouth could have drowned out a dragon’s roar. Thankfully, the Maine Coon’s ears weren’t pinned back.

  Kane offered a non-threatening hand for the cat to sniff. Almost instantly, the meows changed to purrs. As he scratched the cat under the chin, a man came out of the house and stood on the porch. “Don’t worry about ol’ Doofus; his meow is far worse than his bite. He might break your foot if he happens to step on it, but that’s about as dangerous as he gets.”

  “You named your cat ‘Doofus?’” Kane asked.

  “Trust me,” the man said, “if you’d lived with that fleabag as a kitten, you would’ve named him ‘Doofus,’ too. Personally, I wanted to call him ‘Dumbass,’ but the wife took exception.” Despite the insult, the affectionate gleam in the man’s eyes when he looked at the Maine Coon made betrayed his true feelings.

  The men sized each other up. Kane knew he cut an imposing figure at 6’4” with his broad shoulders and hard muscle. He judged the other man to be somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties. Hard to tell behind the full, bushy, mountain-man beard he sported. His blue jeans and red-black checkered flannel gave him the look of a logger, but the significant belly betrayed him as a man who enjoyed his beer. The guy sported a battered camouflage baseball cap perched slightly crooked on his head, strands of salt-and-pepper hair, heavy on the salt, poking out from underneath.

  The man came down the stairs and walked over. “You John?” he asked.

  “That depends,” Kane said. “You Ernest?”

  “Ernest Foxx, that’s right,” the man replied. “But only my ex-wife called me Ernest, and you’ll note she’s an ex. Folks who don’t want to get on my bad side call me Ernie.”

  “Fair enough. I’m John, but most people call me Kane.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it’s my last name.”

  Ernie shook his head. “Round these parts, everyone calls each other by their first name. Except for the correctional officers over at the Black Bog Federal Prison.” He waved a hand toward the west, apparently indicating the direction of the prison. “They always use last names. Must be a prison thing.” He shrugged to indicate it didn’t mean much.

  Over Foxx’s shoulder, Kane saw a large field of wild grass, at least ten acres, edged by pine and cedar trees. A soft autumn breeze rippled the grass like ocean waves. Nearby mountains loomed over the tranquil scene, some with peaks so high it looked like you could touch the clouds if you reached the summit.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” he remarked.

  “It suits me,” Foxx said. “Peaceful and quiet, ‘cept for when wife number two starts yapping at me.” He shook his head in exaggerated regret. “Can’t believe I was dumb enough to get hitched again after I threw the first one out.”

  Kane grinned. “The things we do for love, right?”

  “Love?” Ernie snorted derisively. “More like good old-fashioned lust. Wife number two had a great ass at one point, before the Dorito- and doughnut-addictions set in.”

  “Well, peace and quiet are what I’m looking for.” Kane hoped Foxx would take the hint and get down to business.

  The old man nodded. “Of course, son, of course. Here I am, prattling on about my love life, and you probably just want to get up to the cabin, kick off your boots, and do…well, whatever it is you came all the way up to God’s country to do.”

  “Just looking for a little R&R, that’s all.”

  “You’re not some kind of hooligan, are you? Running from the law?”

  “Far from it,” Kane said. “Just need to sort some shit out in my head, and looking to get away from the world while I do it.”

  Foxx nodded. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. The cabin’s two miles back in the middle of nowhere, completely off-grid, and not a speck of cell service to be found.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Like I told you when we spoke on the phone a few days ago, I get payment in full up front.” As Kane forked over the money, Foxx said, “I didn’t use to be so rigid about that, but a few years back, a young Canadian couple rented the place, and I said they could pay on their way out. They ended up getting killed, and I didn’t get a single red penny.”

  Kane asked, “What killed them?”

  “Bear got ‘em.”

  “A bear? A man-killing bear is kind of rare, isn’t it?”

  “Not as rare around here as you might think,” Foxx replied. “You bring protection?”

  “You mean, a gun?”

  “I’m not talking about a rubber, son.”

  “Then yeah, I’ve got protection.”

  “Hope it’s not some nine-millimeter peashooter,” Ernie said. “When it comes to dealing with bears, bigger is definitely better.”

  Kane saw no reason to tell him about the Sig M17 tucked in the small of his back beneath his jacket. Knowing he would be hiking in some wild country, he had also brought along heavier firepower. No harm in telling Foxx about that. “I’ve got a forty-four mag with me.”

  “Rifle or handgun?”

  “Handgun.”

  “With proper shot placement, a good-quality six-shooter will definitely get the job done.”

  “It’s a semi-auto.”

  Ernie’s eyebrows shot up. “Desert Eagle?”

  Kane nodded. “Looks like you know a little something about guns.”

  “Hobby of mine. I do some collecting, plinking, that sort of thing. Got a whole reloading setup down in my basement.” He waved a hand. “But enough about all that. You’ve got yourself a heavy-caliber bear deterrent, and that’s all that matters.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, attached to a spent brass .223 cartridge.

  Kane grinned. “What, no rabbit’s foot?”

  “A bullet will bring you more luck.” Foxx
handed him the key and pointed to a trail, not much more than twin ruts in the dirt along the edge of the field. “Follow that all the way out back, and you’ll see a metal gate. Key opens the gate as well as the cabin. Once you’re through the gate, just follow the path until you come to the cabin. It sits up on a hillock about two miles back. Once you cross Dribble Creek, you’ll know you’re almost there.”

  “I’ll need to pick up some supplies,” Kane said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Back to the main road and head north to get to town?”

  “Vesper Lake is about three miles up the road,” Foxx replied. “Closest thing we’ve got to a real town around here. If you’re looking for Walmart, you came to the wrong place.”

  “Just somewhere to pick up the basics. Town must have some kind of grocery store, right?”

  Foxx nodded. “Baldy’s. It’ll be on your right once you cross the old railroad tracks and roll into town.”

  “Baldy’s?”

  “Stupid name, I know. Double-stupid because the owner’s got a head of hair that would make a lion proud.”

  “Strange little town you got here.”

  “Now there’s an understatement,” Foxx said. “Because, mister, you don’t know the half of it. If you belly up to the bar down at Saws ‘n’ Suds, old Fred will fill you in on everything you need to know and a whole lotta shit you don’t, if you let him keep yakking at ya.”

  “Good to know,” Kane said. “Because my first impression is that the town doesn’t care much for outsiders.”

  Foxx snorted. “Most don’t, but you don’t strike me as a man who cares much about what people think of you.” He headed back to the house, saying over his shoulder. “Enjoy your stay, Kane, and I hope you get that shit in your head sorted out. You need anything, you know where to find me.”

  Kane gave Doofus a quick scratch between the ears, then climbed back into the Jeep.