Safe and Sound (Jack Keller Series) by J. D. Rhoades

From the Publisher

Bounty hunter Jack Keller faces his most dangerous and sadistic enemy yet in J.D. Rhoades’s  explosive Southern thriller.

“[A] full-throttle narrative.”—Booklist

Jack Keller works in fugitive apprehension, and never feels more alive than when he’s hunting down a skip. But when a young girl goes missing, and Keller finds out that the father is an AWOL member of the army’s elite Delta Force, he knows immediately that this case will be anything but fun and games.

“A fine example of redneck noir.”—Washington Post

Keller is a Gulf War vet who knows his way around the Army’s red tape, but the psychological scars from his experiences in the gulf have only just started to recede enough for him to live and love again. No one is sure how taking on the kidnapping case will affect him, least of all his girlfriend Marie, who’s counting on Jack’s recovery if they are going to have any future together. But what choice does he have? A young girl’s life hangs in the balance—and in order for Keller to save himself, he’ll have to save her first…

 “Jack Keller is a sure-fire star of the new generation of hard-boiled heroes.”—Stephen Booth, bestselling author of Dying to Sin

Publishers Weekly

Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Rhoades's solid third mystery to feature rugged bounty hunter Jack Keller (after 2006's Good Day in Hell) wastes no words. Keller loves his work: it keeps him from dwelling on the past. When a young girl goes missing, his suspicion first falls upon the child's father, David Lundgren, a member of Delta Force. Keller wades through military bureaucracy-dealing as best he can with his own ineradicable memories of what he saw during the first Gulf War and the way the army treated him afterward-to learn that Lundgren has also disappeared; Keller quickly begins to suspect that the actual story is more complicated than it first seemed. Soon he's proven horribly right. Crisp dialogue and the author's deft use of local color support a narrative driven as effectively by characters as by events. (July)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Bounty hunter Jack Keller (Good Day in Hell, 2006, etc.) returns to hunt a murderer who's also hunting him. DeGroot is a stone killer with certain collateral expertise: He extracts information from recalcitrant sources. It's a skill that has kept him gainfully employed in war theaters around the world. But now, occupational fatigue has set in, a sort of midlife crisis, and he's been thinking of retirement. Suddenly, a multimillion-dollar opportunity presents itself. Afire to cash in, DeGroot makes an uncharacteristic mistake, and a battered, bloodied, mutilated subject expires with key information undisclosed. It's at this point that Keller inadvertently crosses DeGroot's path. Without knowing how or why, Keller, his girlfriend Marie and her son Ben have become pawns in an unusually high-stakes chess game. Five-year-old Ben, in particular, is the focus of DeGroot's attack, since experience has taught him a useful lesson in gamesmanship: The sight of a son or daughter's severed finger turns hard cases whimperingly soft. Soon enough, Keller learns what DeGroot wants from him, and DeGroot learns that in Keller he confronts his own mirror image, a man who exudes violence "like steam." They're a matched pair, but in Ultimate Chess there are no draws. Nothing new, but the slam-bang action is unrelenting, and that sound you hear is the rustle of pages turning.

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

“You’re lucky one way, you know,” the man said. The accent was clipped, the vowels oddly pronounced, so that the words came out You’re luggy one wuh, you nuh. People tended to mistake the accent for Australian. But he was an Afrikaner, a descendant of the Dutch pioneers who had struck out into the South African wilderness in the 1800s to escape British rule. He was originally from the harsh, arid plateau known as the Karoo, although he hadn’t been there in a long time. His name was DeGroot, and he was worried.

“Some people actually enjoy this type of thing,” the man went on. The naked man tied to the heavy wooden chair in the middle of the room said nothing. He tried to stare straight ahead, but his eyes kept darting to the table where DeGroot had laid out his tools. The room was empty except for the table, the chair, and the plastic sheeting covering the floor. The man in the chair could hear the harsh crinkling sounds of the Afrikaner’s boots on the plastic as he walked around.

“I don’t enjoy it,” DeGroot said. “But you do what you have to.”

The man in the chair hated the way he was sweating. He hated how he desperately wanted to know what it was that DeGroot was doing behind him. There was the snap of a switch and a high pitched whine. A sharp, electric smell filled the air. He felt the Afrikaner step up behind him, felt the man’s breath on his ear.

“I scheme your training’s like mine,” DeGroot said. “Everyone’s got his limits. Everyone talks eventually.” He stepped around to face his captive. He was holding a pair ofwires in his hands. The wires ended in a pair of large alligator clips. The other ends were somewhere behind him.

“You tell yourself you’ll be different. You’ll be the one who holds out.” The man smiled, almost sadly. “It’s who we are. We’re the best.” He was opening and closing the clips absentmindedly as he spoke. The man in the chair stared with horrified fascination at the jaws opening, closing, opening, closing . . .

“But in the end, we’re human,” the Afrikaner said. “Flesh and blood. We’re all the same underneath. We hurt, we bleed, we scream, and”—he looked directly at his prisoner—“we talk. It takes longer for some than others, but we do. So save yourself some pain, eh? Tell me. Where’ve you been? And who’ve you been talking to? And most important, where’s your key?”

“I haven’t told anyone,” the man in the chair said. “I swear it.”

The Afrikaner shook his head. “I wish I could believe you, boet. We’ve been through a lot together already. But I can’t take chances.” I kint take inny chanzes. He stood up and approached the man in the chair, the electrodes clenched open in his hands. “Don’t feel bad about screaming,” he said. “It’s not like anyone can hear you, way out here.”

•••

There are few places hotter than a tarpaper roof in the late summer in North Carolina. The small group of men working around the tar kettle were stripped to the waist, the skin of their backs and chests cured to the color of old leather by the twin blasts of the sun from above and the waves of heat shimmering up from the sticky black goo they spread around the chimney that stuck up from the gabled roof. They were mostly silent, moving with an economy of motion. It was too hot to move fast, and they didn’t know one another well enough for small talk to come easily. Mostly they kept their heads down, concentrating on the job of spreading the tar evenly. They looked up, however, as the ladder that leaned against the side of the building shook and rattled. Someone was coming up. They looked at each other curiously. The whole crew was already at the top; they were expecting no one else. All work and motion stopped as they turned to see who was invading their space.

As they watched, a head came into view, followed by a pair of broad shoulders. The man who clambered off the top of the ladder was tall and lanky, with shoulder-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He straightened up and looked at the men standing silently by the edge of the roof. His gaze took them in, one by one. Finally, he stopped, his eyes fixed on a wiry dark-haired man who had moved to the middle of the group as if trying to lose himself in the tiny crowd.

“Afternoon, Edward,” the blond man said in a soft drawl. “We missed you in court the other day.”

The other men looked at Edward, then moved slightly aside. He was the newest member of the group, and no one felt inclined to try their luck against the dangerous-looking interloper. They were especially disinclined to stick up for him since he had previously introduced himself as Gary.

Edward looked from one of his coworkers to the other and saw no help there. He looked back at the blond man and squared his shoulders.

“I ain’t goin’ back,” he said.

“Yeah,” the blond man said. “Actually, you are.” He advanced on the smaller man calmly, moving as easily as if he were on level ground. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a set of handcuffs. Edward looked desperately one way, then another, then over the edge of the roof. He turned back to the blond man.

“Fuck you,” he said, and ran off the edge.

It wasn’t meant as a suicidal move; in lunchtime small talk, the other men had regaled Edward/Gary with the story of how one of them had lost his footing, slid off the edge of a roof, and landed on his feet without any ill effect other than a sore ankle for a few days. Edward didn’t have that kind of luck; he never had. He screamed as he landed, his ankle breaking with a sickening crack. He rolled over onto his back, howling like a wounded animal, pulling his knee up to his chest in a futile and belated attempt at protecting the shattered joint. He looked up to see a short Latino man standing over him. The man was in his midforties with deep brown eyes and a thin mustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. He was holding a shotgun pointed at Edward.

“Hold still,” the man said in a soft Spanish accent. “We will get you a doctor.”

Edward screamed again, the tears of pain and frustration rolling down his face. Dimly, through the haze of his own agony, he heard the metallic rattling of someone coming down the ladder. He looked up to see the blond man standing over him. The blond man turned to the Latino and held out his hand silently. The Latino man sighed and handed over the shotgun. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He riffled through the contents for a moment, then pulled out a bill and handed it to the blond man.

“You were right,” he said. He shook his head.

“I usually am, Oscar,” the blond man said, not unkindly.

“What?” Edward snarled. “Right about what?”

The Latino man shrugged. “I did not think anyone would be stupid enough to try to escape by running off a roof. Mr. Keller here bet me five dollars I was wrong.”

“Fuck you,” Edward said again.

Keller pulled out a cell phone. “Look, you want me to call an ambulance before we run you in or what?”

The man with the rifle tracked the progress of the red Jeep Grand Cherokee as it wound its way up the mountain. Even at this altitude, it was beginning to heat up, but he paid no attention to the sweat that ran down his face. The huge rifle was heavy and awkward, but the rifleman moved easily with it. He kept the crosshairs of the telescopic scope locked on the tinted windshield, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. As the Jeep reached the bend in the road, the man’s finger tensed ever so slightly. The Jeep stopped. The headlights flashed once, twice. The rifleman relaxed the pressure. If the Jeep had not stopped and signaled, he would have put a .50-caliber bullet into the driver’s side window, then another into the engine block. Each of the rounds was the length of a man’s hand and traveled at three thousand feet per second. The rifle was originally designed to disable vehicles at extended ranges; against flesh and bone it wreaked terrible damage. The rifleman had seen the weapon cut a man in half at fourteen hundred yards.

As the Jeep approached the cabin below him, the rifleman saw a flash of movement at the edge of his field of vision. He swung the rifle to bear, his finger taking up the slack on the trigger again. The crosshairs centered on the back of a blond head. He tracked the figure of the small child running across the tiny yard in front of the cabin. She was about five years old, dressed in a light-blue flowered dress. The rifleman held the sight on the girl for a long second. He blew out the breath he had been holding and let off the trigger. He kept his eye to the sight and focused again on the red Jeep. It pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man got out. The rifleman swung the scope to bear on the passenger side. No one got out. The driver was alone. The rifleman took his eye away from the scope. Only then did he wipe the sweat from his brow.

“Shit,” he said under his breath. A slight breeze blew up and he closed his eyes, savoring the coolness on his flesh. He opened them again and looked out over the vista before him.

He was standing in a rusting steel hut at the top of an abandoned fire watchtower. The tower itself was situated atop the highest of the local mountains. His vantage commanded a view of hundreds of square miles of forest that covered this part of the Blue Ridge. The ever-present haze that gave the mountains their name was light today. It obscured his view only slightly. The tower and the cabin at its base were far enough from the main road that even the muted whisper of traffic that most people tune out at the edge of hearing was gone. The silence of the ancient hills seemed to be a noise in itself, an emptiness that roared at him from the valleys below. In that enormous sound that was not a sound, the Jeep door’s opening and closing seemed muffled, as did the voices that followed. One was high and childish, the other one deeper. It was a voice the rifleman knew as well as his own. But it was only one voice and he had hoped to be hearing two. He sat down on the wooden floor of the tower and leaned against the steel side. The massive rifle lay across his lap.

The tower vibrated slightly as the man below mounted the steps that spiraled up from the bottom of the tower. The vibration grew stronger as the second man drew nearer, until his head poked up through the hole in the middle of the floor.

“Anything?” the rifleman said.

The second man shook his head. He climbed the rest of the way into the observation deck. He walked over to the side and looked out.

The second man was tall and broad-shouldered, in contrast to the rifleman’s wiry compactness. The second man was light-haired and fair-skinned, where the rifleman was dark-haired and Mediterranean-looking. Yet there was an indefinable similarity between them that occasionally led people to ask if they were related or even if they were brothers. In some senses, they were.

“We’re going to have to call DeGroot,” the rifleman said.

“He’s not going to like this,” the second man replied.

The rifleman lifted up slightly and fumbled in his pocket for a coin. He pulled one out. “Call it,” he said as he flicked the coin into the air with his thumb.

The second man smiled slightly. “Tails.”

The rifleman caught the rapidly spinning coin out of the air with one hand and slapped it down on his other wrist. He took his hand away. “Heads.”

The second man grimaced. “I’ll make the call. You get to feed the kid. I got groceries.”

The rifleman sighed. “Spaghettios again.”

“It’s all she eats.” The second man smiled tightly. “And we’ve eaten worse.”

The bells hanging on the doorknob jingled. Angela Hager looked up from the counter as Keller and Oscar entered the front door. Keller gave her a thumbs-up as he placed a sheaf of paperwork on the counter. She picked it up. Her hands were covered by soft black leather gloves.

“Did he give you any trouble?” she asked him.

“Nah,” Keller said. “But he didn’t do himself any good.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“He ran off a roof,” Oscar Sanchez said. “Trying to get away.”

She arched an eyebrow at them. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a dumb-ass,” Keller said. “If he wasn’t a dumb-ass, he wouldn’t have run in the first place.”

“If you can spare me,” Oscar said, “I am going upstairs for a bit.”

Angela looked concerned. “Is the leg acting up?”

Oscar shrugged. “It hurts a bit, yes. But it is better than it was.”

“There’s some ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet,” she said. “Take some of that.” Oscar only nodded. He went up the stairs to the small apartment that he shared with Angela. She winced slightly at the sound of his halting tread on the stairs. She turned to Keller. “So how’s he doing?” she asked.

“Not bad,” Keller said. “He still underestimates how crazy or stupid some of these jumpers can get.” He fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out the five that Oscar had handed him earlier. “By the way,” he said, “slip this back into his wallet sometime.”

She took the bill, looking at it quizzically. “What’s this for?” she asked.

“Oscar didn’t think Edward would be stupid enough to try and run off a roof to get away. I bet five bucks that he would. But I was just doing it to make a point.”

Angela tried to hand the bill back to him. “It won’t work,” she said. “He’ll know. He knows exactly how much money he has. To the penny.”

Keller shrugged. “He needs it more than I do,” he said. “What with trying to get his immigration problems straightened out. He’s got a good lawyer, and good lawyers cost money.”

She grimaced. “You got that right,” she said. She sat down in the chair behind the counter and massaged her temples as if her head hurt. “And he’s gotten back to the idea of bringing his sons here from Colombia. And that’s going to cost another fortune.” She shook her head. “But you know how he is. He made a bet. He lost. If you try to give it back, he’ll think you’re patronizing him. And he’ll be impossible to live with for days.”

Keller came around the counter and sat down. “So how do you feel about having his kids here?” he said.

She gave a short, sharp laugh. “Boy, there’s a can of worms.”

“Sorry,” Keller said. “If you don’t want to . . .”

“No, no,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.” She looked down at her hands. “You mind if I take these off?” she said. “I’m roasting.”

“You know you don’t have to ask me,” Keller said softly.

She looked up and smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “Well, I’m still working out exactly where we stand, now that . . .”

“Now that you’re with someone else,” he said. “Well, we’re still friends,” Keller said. “I hope.”

“Yeah,” she said. “We still are.” She began pulling the gloves off as she spoke, exposing the web of burn scars that covered the backs of her hands. “Anyway. He’s been talking about it off and on. He misses his boys and he worries about them. But a couple of weeks ago there was a news story on that Spanish-language station he listens to. A young boy got kidnapped in Bogotá.”

“It’s not like that’s anything new in Colombia,” Keller observed.

“Yeah, but this one really got to him. See, he’d always sort of assumed that it was just the kids of rich people who got snatched and held for ransom. But these kidnappers made a mistake. They got the wrong target. Instead of the rich kid they thought they were getting they got the maid’s son.” She shuddered. “When they discovered their mistake, they slit the boy’s throat.”

Keller’s face darkened. “So it hit him. Anyone’s vulnerable.”

She nodded. “It’s making him crazy. So . . .” She fell silent.

“So you can’t say anything about the way you feel,” Keller said. “If you put up any resistance at all . . .”

She finished the sentence for him. “If I put up any resistance at all, I feel like a complete selfish bitch.”

“Well, you’re not,” Keller said.

“Aren’t I?” she said, her voice bitter. “They’re his sons, Jack. He’s got every right to want to see them grow up. To see them grow up safe. And I’m supposed to stand in the way of that because I’m worried that I won’t be able to hack it? That I’ll be a lousy stepmother to them? Or that I just won’t be able to stand having teenage boys around my apartment?” There was another silence before she spoke again. “You know the last thing my husband said to me before he shot himself?” She paused, took a deep breath. “I was lying there on the rug, both legs broken, the house beginning to burn down around me. He dropped that fucking baseball bat he’d just beaten me bloody with and pulled out his gun. I thought he was going to shoot me. I was praying he’d shoot me so I wouldn’t have to burn to death. Instead, he looked at me and said, ‘None of this would have happened if you’d just agreed to have kids.’” She slammed her hand down on the counter. It made a sound like a gunshot in the silence. “Like I was going to bring a child into a house with that psychopath. I couldn’t protect myself. How was I going to protect—” She stopped, drew a deep shuddering breath as she got herself under control.

Keller got out of his chair. He knelt by hers and took her scarred hand in his. “You need to tell him this, Angela,” he said softly. “He needs to know how you feel. Because it’ll come out. Somehow. No one knows that better than me.”

She smiled down at him, ran her free hand through Keller’s hair before putting it on top of his hand. “Ahhh, Keller,” she said. “Why did I let you get away?” She let go and waved off the response. “Don’t answer that. I know why.” She smiled sadly. “And now it’s too late. We’ve got other people in our lives.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “And speaking of late,” she said, “you’d better get a move on if you’re going to make it to Fayetteville in time to see Marie.”

He stood up slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “But remember what I said.”

“I will,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.” She stood up. “Things easier between you two now?”

“A little,” Keller said. He didn’t elaborate.

“How’s her new business going?” she said.

“Picking up,” Keller replied. “She said she needed my help on something. I’ll call if I’m going to be gone long.”

“No worries,” Angela said. “Most of our clients have been pretty well behaved lately. Maybe it’s your reputation, since you’ve been on TV and all.”

He made a face. “Great. Thanks to TV, I have a reputation as a total wacko.”

She laughed. “Yeah, but damn few people want a total wacko like you coming after them. Hey, you use what you’ve got.” She gave Keller a kiss on the cheek. “Say hey to Marie for me.”

Copyright © 2007 by J. D. Rhoades. A