Power (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 8) Read online

  A scream, “Get the Killer,” echoed over the noisy chairs, while the thousands of fans hollered other cries.

  Tinker fell into the audience.

  Those around Doctor Mike tried to surge forward, tumbling over the seat backs in front of them, crushing each other on the floor. Voices raised accusations of murder.

  “He’s killed Cole!”

  “It’s a knife in the back!”

  The lights in the theater flickered and went out. The room became totally black, raising more cries from all sides of Doctor Mike. Some lights went on from cell phones held in the air, the little blinks not casting much light. “Loggerman” and then “Oil baron killer” were epithets thrown in the blackness.

  She felt a hand from behind her, touching her shoulder. She turned quickly, her hands in fists to defend herself.

  The stranger opened the light on his cell phone. He was a large black man dressed on a blue maritime uniform with a captain’s cap on his head.

  “Loggerman told me you wear little dog necklace. I’m a friend. I’ll take you out of here.” He raised his hand and signaled for her to follow.

  He persisted, louder, “I’m Captain James Abada, the master of your friend, Loggerman’s, ship.”

  She paused, searching his face, then, finally assured, climbed over the seat and walked behind him.

  He said, “We must hurry.”

  Doctor Mike was beset on all sides by antagonistic people snarling and grabbing at anyone they could blame for the disaster. She was pushed to the side and worried she might be hurt or trapped under a mass of Tinker fans. She decided quickly. If this man was who he said he was and he knew Loggerman, he was worth her trust.

  They clambered through the current of people also trying to get out of the great hall. They came to the main doors which were bottlenecked with terror. The captain led her along the theater wall to a side door where several police men and women were standing. Ordering the police to stand back, he shouted he had a pregnant woman to get to the hospital. Pulling her along, he managed to get outside the center and into the bright light of the sidewalk.

  The blinking red neon sign above them advertising Tinker’s speech flickered off the faces of the crowd in the street. His phone rang. When he hung up, he said to Doctor Mike, “It’s a report from my crew. They followed Tinker’s men. Loggerman is being taken to a boat tied at the street pier near this hotel. We’ll go there.”

  They rushed along the avenue, seeing the crowd after a block or two change to one of tourists who seemed to know nothing of the murder. They passed restaurants and stores filled with Baltimore citizens enjoying the evening. They were flanked by the huge side of the old frigate Constellation, a venerable Navy ship the city of Baltimore had constructed centuries ago after the American Revolution. Lifted wooden shutters along the hull revealed the powerful snouts of antique iron cannon still pursuing ghostly enemies of the fledgling United States.

  By the stern of the old ship, a small cruiser was quickly pulling away into the harbor. One man in green was standing at the wheel while another was climbing from the cabin below. The wake showed silver flecks from the dark harbor water as it sped into the channel.

  “There they go,” said the Captain. He spoke into his phone again. “Come on,” he said to Doctor Mike. “We’ll go to our own boat and follow them. Then we’ll figure out how to free my friend.”

  Far across the harbor, flames from a petroleum storage tank climbed skyward. People had slowed on the avenue and watched the cataclysm, frozen in fear. The flames seemed to burn the sky, and shoots of flame reflected across the dark water in front of the city skyscrapers. “The city is burning,” a little girl said to her mother.

  The captain held Doctor Mike tightly by her waist and led her toward the Bertram where his sailors were starting the engines. As it sped from the harbor mooring, the flames seemed to spurt towards it, leaping, but failing.

  * * *

  Loggerman rolled on his side, watching the reflections of the truck headlights on the branches of roadside trees rushing overhead. From the bouncing steel bed of the pickup he knew they were on an unimproved country road, not much different than what he was used to in up-country Nigeria. Two of the green uniformed guards from the speedboat were in the front cab. Another sat against the side of the truck bed watching him, an automatic pistol in hand.

  He spotted the top of a large green farm harvesting machine whisk by. The steering cabin on top of the machine had windows which sparkled in the quick truck light.

  A few minutes later, the truck skidded to a stop. The driver quickly turned off the engine and the headlights.

  The hot night was quiet. Loggerman heard an owl far away. Above a few stars twinkled. A large passenger plane was circling not far above, coming in for a landing. He thought she might be headed for Baltimore or Washington. His kidnappers had not taken him far from the boat. He closed his eyes from exhaustion, and then opened them. A lightning bug flew over, its glimmer cheering him. His side and back hurt from the past pounding by the truck. His head felt again the blow of a street protestor’s fist hitting him back in Baltimore.

  The guards dragged him from the truck and let him fall to the ground, his face in tall grass. One of them was a woman, smaller than the others but loud. She ordered him, “Stand up, bastard.” As he tried to straighten, leaning over from pain, he noticed the dim structure of a two-story barn a few yards in front of the truck.

  Loggerman could smell the old straw and dust of the building. Horses had been here too, maybe several years ago, but not now. He would have heard them stamping around in the dark inside the building.

  The men talked, then called back to the woman near him. “Let’s get him into the barn.”

  A large door creaked opened. The three pushed and pulled him stumbling into the dark interior. They moved him ahead about twenty feet, propping him in a side room or horse stall. He felt the rough plank wall tearing into his back. As he slid down to a sitting position, they closed a dusty wooden door at the front of the room, clicked a lock, and left him without saying a word.

  He kept still. His eyes tried to get used to the dark. In time, he examined the stall he inhabited. Breaking into the blackness, thin slivers of light entered from a front room where the guards sat. They trickled through the cracks in the wood door.

  The guards had so far not tied his hands. They must have figured he was easier to handle if untied. Either that, or they were watching for his attempt to escape so they had a good reason to kill him. They did not appear very stalwart. Loggerman suspected they were looking for a quick way to get rid of him, something they could explain to their leaders.

  He fought back the irritation in his nose and throat as he breathed in the heavy dust of the old barn. He had already tested the strength of the side boards. They were big and wide and secure with no rotten sections. To break them down he’d need more strength than he had, even as an ex-Marine.

  Loggerman could see more in the dimness now. He could make out the door with its cross-piece bars of thick wood and the shadow of a large padlock hasp on the outside. He moved slowly across the floor. The cell measured about fifteen by fifteen feet, a little more than two body lengths each way.

  He heard a car arrive outside. Its tires spat gravel into the brush along the road. The headlights leaked light into his cell before they were turned off.

  “Hey there, lady,” one of the guards called out.

  The driver stepped out. Loggerman heard the car door slam.

  “Is there any news from the Institute on the radio?” the woman guard called.

  “I’ll turn it on,” the new woman replied. The car door opened again and the radio boomed.

  “Ferrars’ giving his speech,” she said. “You got Loggerman tight back there? Let’s piss him off, the bastard. We’ll let him hear what Ferrars is going to do to him.”

  He pushed his head close to the door and tried to see the guard room, but it was too far away. Little light was in the co
rridor. The radio crackled in the distance. A curse exploded from the woman and he heard her fumbling with the radio volume. The signal faded as she tried to readjust the set.

  The woman guard called out, “I’d like to kill him right now. I don’t know why they are waiting.” The radio volume increased. A gravelly voice stated, “This broadcast is coming from Tinker Institute, the home of free energy for the people.”

  Ferrars was then introduced by the announcer. Loggerman, imagined Ferrars’s face, smiling, pleased to have the audience all to himself, asserting himself as the new Tinker.

  Ferrars’ voice was consoling to the fans, composed and thoughtful. “Cole Tinker has been killed, assassinated, by an agent of the international oil conspiracy. This murderer came to us professing to visit his daughter, couching his treachery. Fortunately our loyal volunteer has helped us to convict him. Everything humanly possible is being done to determine the full size and membership of this evil group.”

  Sitting there in the horse stable, Loggerman was immobile for the first time in days. He had to stop and understand what had happened to him. It suddenly became clear. When they found out he was looking for his daughter they suddenly knew they had a patsy. Ferrars and his henchmen or women used him as a foil, as an innocent, to kill Cole Tinker and take over the Institute. If they had wanted a suspect for the murder, someone to blame for the killing, what better than an engineer from a major oil company?

  Elizabeth and Spire had to be in on this plan, from the moment they saw him begging to see her daughter. Elizabeth, with her evil nature, and Spire, as a natural murderer, must have been delighted to see him at the compound. Spire was quick enough to spot him even at the gate. They must have been planning this and then Loggerman dropped in as the final part of the plan. Likely the Tinker fandom would believe all of it.

  Cole Tinker was now a martyr.

  Ferrars would be immediately accepted as the new leader, while he or someone else in that crowd at the podium had actually done the deed, easily blaming Loggerman.

  Which one of them had killed Cole Tinker?

  Elizabeth, Ferrars, or one of the guards must have pushed that knife.

  Why had they conspired?

  Probably money, but he’d have to stay alive to figure out that one.

  Ferrars continued, “Cole told me this day would come. He knew he would be killed by an enemy. He knew the forces of evil would cut him down.

  “I remember a day when the two of us were walking on a country road near the farm where he grew up. His old house stood in the distance and he pointed to its roof off among the pines at the edge of a newly plowed field. His famous family gas station was nearby.

  “ ‘You see there, Ferrars,’ he said to me in the voice we all know so well, ‘Here is where I got my religion.’ ”

  “I turned to him, thinking he was going to share with me a calling of Jesus.”

  Loggerman could hear the background applause on the radio, the hoots and cheers, almost like the wailing prayers and saved sinners of a tent meeting.

  “Cole said, ‘I heard the earthly truth I needed to hear, the message for my life. Listen to me about energy, about my fire. I grew up in this house and we had no heat except the fireplaces, two of them on the first floor, none on the second. I cut the wood. Momma had a stove with the small wood. The other one warmed the beds in the real cold days. It used a bigger fire going all day with the large wood. The house had no electricity. Momma would light up the kerosene lamp and put it in the middle of the kitchen table. She had to do most of her cooking during the day because we had no money for candles during the night. Of course Daddy was out working odd jobs and selling our cut wood down by the road. Later on my father started the gas station which you all know about.’

  “ ‘You remember how President Lincoln learned his letters by the light of the fireplace after he done his chores? He read his law books there at the fire.’

  “I said I remembered the story.

  “He said, ‘Well, the day will come when you want to tell a story about how I learned what my work was for the people. I learned the same way Old Abe learned. Every bit of my life was made hard by not having light and heat placed me behind the more fortunate children, President Lincoln was smiled upon by the Lord but the other boys and girls of his time were not. Same with me. I was smiled upon but the others around me grew up in those poor houses would stay there and die. You remember something else for me, too, Ferrars.’

  “ ‘What?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘When folks say how character building it was to grow up in poverty, you look to see who’s doing the saying. Chances are it’ll be somebody who never had to live so poor.’

  “We came along down the road a little farther and we could see the old house now. It was all fallen in. Out in the front yard were four tombstones. “

  “Cole led me up to the stones and pointed out the names on each one.

  “ ‘When I got some money, I had these stones made in Baltimore and set up here. This one is my father and this one my mother. The other two are my brothers. All died younger than they had to. All died in this old house. When the house inherited to me, I let it rot. I farmed the fields but let the house destroy itself. I just did not want anyone to have to live in it again.’

  “We went up to the old door, hanging off its hinges. Inside on a table, covered with dust and webs of insects, was a coal oil lantern.”

  “Cole pointed to the lantern. ‘I just leave it there to remind me how it was; remind me if I don’t do what has to be done, it ain’t going to get done.’ ”

  Ferrars changed his voice to one of an angry man. “Now we come to a crossroads of our epic; our fight against the forces of evil. The prize is yours, my friends. Our fight is to bring you the freedom you and your ancestors have sought for hundreds of years of struggle.

  “Out across this great land of America we who loved Cole Tinker are kneeling in our homes, sorrowful for his tragedy.

  “Cole Tinker has shown you the way to success. He has given his life for you. Your power is great, made greater with Cole’s martyrdom.

  “The secret is the control of energy. No longer will you let energy be monopolized by the rich and doled out to you for high prices. Cole Tinker said you could be truly free. He also said you had to take back your freedom.

  “Beginning today we will take what is ours. Across the land the cities will give way to our forces. All energy producers will be captured by our people. The production of energy will be taken over.

  “As long as the energy to heat your houses, light your nights, and power your cars is owned by others, you are not free. So tonight, help each other to take it back.

  “I can assure you,” Ferrars’ voice was gravelly now from talking, “There is a limited supply of energy. It is managed for the benefit of the rich by the poor who receive only small wages in return and no chance at riches. The stability of the society we live in rests on the shoulders of a few men. They keep us in bondage.

  “We know about the grid blackout last week in the west. The accused man ran great grids of electric power. He could with almost no effort slow down or turn off electric power to massive numbers of people causing great hardship. Yet, when he was taken in by the law, he said simply, and I quote, ‘Too many having the power took too much from the other people. It weren’t fair no more.’

  “This man was a Tinker. His methods were wrong. He should have joined us parading in the street to convince the leaders to change the laws. Yet he had been convinced himself to do more, to take the struggle into his own hands. He had been reached by the work of all of you, as we strive like a religion to outreach to all. We develop our volunteers. These people are like weapons in our fight. Reach out to the man or woman next to you. Use their sorrow to our advantage, to the advantage of our movement. Gain another soldier in our fight on the streets.

  “Cole leaves us this legacy as he is martyred to our cause. Now, let us go to the streets!”

  The applause reve
rberated in the radio.

  “It’s time, men,” the woman said as she turned down the radio. “We must go to our assembly place. We are to set a fire,” she said. “The smoke and flames will kill him. I’m going to watch him burn.”

  He heard some wood being snapped and broken in two for kindling. A stack of wood would be put against a dusty wall and lighted. He would be burned to death.

  The guards were laughing. “Ferrars will give you a rifle for this work,” a soft voice, probably the female guard, said.

  “Yes, and you too,” the woman from the car agreed.

  It took a few minutes, but Loggerman began to smell wood smoke and to hear the crackling noise of bright fire.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Loggerman spotted the curls of smoke penetrating the cracks of his stable door. The fog of fire filled the corridor outside. The guards pried down more dry timbers from the walls. Flames from the fire flickered, sending waves of light. He pulled on the door by the lock hasp, trying to break it loose from the old wood. His hands were burned by the flames licking at wood a few feet away. He put his face as close as he could against the hot wood and tried to see the guard room. Fire put shadows on the far wall showing the guards moving their gear outside. His hands scratched at the lock but it was still tight. He was having trouble breathing.

  He heard a thundering noise. It moved closer. The guards were yelling, “Out of the way!”

  He heard an engine peak its revolutions. The barn vibrated from the noise of a powerful machine screaming at maximum pitch. The wall of his wooden cell trembled and the thick wooden boards began to split with a rending sound. The machine pressed the barn and the front wall of the stable lifted from its bottom, planks shifting and cracking as if a huge hammer had pounded them. Light from the flames outside aggressively streaked across his cell floor.

  The door burst inward, the lock and hinges spinning violently across the room. Boards on the side walls cracked and sent splinters into the air, the ancient dust adding to the fog of the fire’s smoke.