She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,110

himself. A slew of pleading words flowed from his pale face.

Preacher pulled the trigger.

With the barrel pressed tight against the man’s chest, his body acted like a makeshift silencer. He bounced as the explosion entered his chest cavity and expanded, no doubt turning his organs into mush. The blast escaped from the man’s back with enough force to spray water and the remnants of a few petals out in all directions.

In a single, fluid motion, Preacher raised the shotgun, jerked his arm hard enough to eject the spent shell and load a new one, and sighted the weapon on a second man in a white trench coat stepping out of the guardhouse next to the gate. This man also had a Sig Sauer P220. He managed to get it about halfway out of his holster before Preacher’s shotgun erupted in a second blast. A bright red bloom opened up in the man’s chest and ruined his nice white coat. The man looked down at the spot. Confusion filled his eyes as it grew. Then he collapsed in a puddle, partially obscured by the Pontiac’s left front fender.

Because that shot didn’t utilize a human silencer, or any silencer for that matter, it was much louder than the first. No doubt loud enough for at least one or two neighbors to hear. Whether or not they called the police was a different matter. In a storm like this, most would probably attribute such a sound to the weather. Shotgun blasts in this part of town were not common, and while most people would like to believe they could identify the sound of gunfire, very few actually could, and even fewer were willing to act on that sound when they did hear it. Easier to tell themselves they didn’t hear it, easier to pretend they heard something else.

Three steps to the guardhouse. Preacher was inside in an instant, the shotgun reloaded and ready. As he expected, it was empty.

The guardhouse had four windows, one facing in each direction. Beneath the window, facing the house, was a small desk. The desk housed three small television monitors tied to the closed-circuit video system. The first monitor displayed a nice close-up of his Pontiac GTO, and he couldn’t help but admire the car. It was a beautiful piece of Detroit’s finest workmanship. The rain brought out the best of the car’s lines, glimmering under the floodlight pointed at the hood. The second monitor showed a wide view—the tail end of the GTO was visible as was a substantial length of the driveway, nearly to the main road. The third monitor cycled through all the other cameras positioned around the large property.

Immediately following the Gargery funeral, Preacher trailed the small motorcade of white vehicles back to this place. No easy task. There had been three of them, and each took a different route in an effort to thwart a tail, one of them taking more than an hour to get back even though the house wasn’t more than a couple miles from the cemetery. Preacher knew which car contained the Oliver woman, and that was the one he focused on, carefully tailing at a respectable distance with several cars between whenever possible. Not his first rodeo. Oliver’s car had also taken a longer route back to the house, one that took nearly thirty minutes rather than the five or so a direct route would take. That didn’t matter. What did matter was Preacher knew where the house was after that, knew where they were.

He knew where to find the girl.

That afternoon, he obtained copies of the building plans from the county courthouse. He obtained plat maps of the terrain. He pulled all the tax records for the property. It was an old estate, built back in 1893. Records from Building and Zoning gave him details on all the improvements and additions made over the years—upgrades to the electrical and plumbing, reinforcements to the rooms and walls. Building permits listed vendors on-site whenever an inspector came by. Using the vendor names, Preacher located the company that installed the security system and the custom dead bolts securing all outer doors. Obtaining their records only took a few days.

Within a week, he knew every inch of the place. He could rattle off the type of nail the contractor used in each room down to the copper manufacturer of the original pipes and the PVC that replaced them about a decade ago.

He began surveillance shortly after that.

Most installations—and that was exactly