Open Carry Read online

  OPEN CARRY

  MARC CAMERON

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Marc Cameron

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number:

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2172-3

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: March 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2173-0 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-2173-X (e-book)

  For Annie

  PROLOGUE

  Prince of Wales Island, Alaska

  THE MAZE OF DEADFALL WAS HIGHER THAN HER HEAD, AS IF GOD had walked away from a massive game of pickup sticks.

  In the darkness behind her, were the sounds of a predator.

  Boots shuffled on dusty ground, stopped abruptly, and then moved closer. Millie pictured the cloud of vapor around a nose, sniffing the chilly air. Her rubber boots made little noise on the carpet of decaying spruce needles. It didn’t matter. The scent of fear was enough to give her away.

  A branch snapped, somewhere in the shadows, flushing the girl from her hide like a panicked grouse.

  Floundering over snot-slick moss and through thorny stalks of devil’s club, she fell more than she ran. She thrust herself forward somewhere between a frantic scramble and a scuttling crawl. Blood oozed from gashes on her streaked face, dripping off her chin and onto her T-shirt. Her knees and palms were raw and ravaged. Few of the logs made passable bridges over the rubble, pathways to gain precious ground toward her skiff. Most crumbled at her touch, rotten and soggy, sending her clamoring for a foothold before she impaled herself.

  Millie Burkett was Tlingit, people of the tides and forest, and these giant trees had been her friends for all of her sixteen years. Their groans and snaps were normal, and their mottled shadows a perfect place to hide. Her earliest memories were of playing at the mossy feet of the great trees as they watched over her like a kindly grandmother. But now, the Sitka spruce, Western hemlock, and yellow cedar loomed like hateful villains from a movie. An eerie silence pervaded the forest. Rain clouds pressed through the dense canopy, adding a sinister air that chased away the light.

  Wheezing and winded, Millie ducked around a massive spruce, at least eight feet across. She yanked a curtain of black hair away from her face and pressed her back against the rough bark. Straining to hear over the thump of her runaway heart, she listened to the sounds of the forest, like her mother had taught her. A branch cracked in the cathedral-like stillness.

  Doubling her efforts, Millie crashed through a wicked tangle of leaves and ropy stalks twice her height, oblivious to the scourging. Her camera swung back and forth from a strap around her neck, snagging on the vegetation and threatening to hang her. A spruce hen exploded with a drumbeat of wings to her right. She cut left, into a jagged, half-rotten limb as big as her wrist, that slashed at her belly. Startled, she tried to jump again, but the gnarled branch seemed to reach out and grab her, clawing at the loose tail of her wool shirt, tearing away a strip of plaid cloth and nearly upending her.

  She knew these forests. Her people had called them home for thousands of years. The stony silence of Bear, the chiding of Squirrel, or the drumming whoosh of Raven’s wings—they were to her as the patter of falling rain or the lapping of ocean tides.

  But today was different.

  She should have known better than to come alone. Tucker had warned her. He ventured out alone all the time with his camera, but he was at least ten years older, probably more—and he knew the risks. She choked back a sob. If only she’d listened.

  Head spinning with fear and fatigue, she ducked under, over, and around the towering, tilted trees, many of them two or three meters wide. It was still light enough to pick her way through, but dark enough that there were no shadows.

  Millie’s lungs felt ready to explode by the time the giant spruces began to give way to thicker undergrowth. There was more light here, and a spit of rain. The odor of rotting bull kelp and low tide swirled on the breeze, filling her with a sudden rush of hope. Her skiff came into view as she ran, at the edge of the water less than two hundred yards below. If she could just make it to the boat, she might have a chance.

  Long legs in freewheel down the steep incline, the Tlingit girl was sure she was beating her best cross-country record. Her heart sank when she saw the tide was out. It left the bow of her aluminum skiff on the gravel slope, but the stern still bobbed in the shallows, and the shore fell away quickly into deep water. She prayed her little outboard would be able to pull her off the rocks.

  Air chambers in the carpet of bladder kelp popped and snapped beneath the soles of her boots as she hit the tide line. She fell twice between the line of driftwood flotsam and the edge of the water. Broken shells and barnacle-covered rocks tore her shredded knees and hands, but she didn’t care.

  Sliding to a stop on the slick rocks, she pulled the anchor line off the large stone where she’d looped it and clamored over the side of the little aluminum boat. Her back to the shore, she sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket that made up her seat, and worked to coax the reluctant outboard to life. She pumped the bulb on the gas line, opened the choke, then put her back into the starter rope. The thirty-horse Tohatsu coughed on the first two pulls, as it always did, and she didn’t hear the crunch of gravel behind her until it was almost on top of her.

  Millie Burkett turned to see a face she knew well, smiling at her.

  One hand still on the starter rope, her eyes shot to the dark woods above the beach. “What are you doing here?” Unwilling to take the time to explain the gravity of their situation, she turned back to the motor to give it another pull. “Never mind,” she said. “Just get in, we have to—”

  Something heavy struck the back of her skull, knocking her off the bucket. Reeling,
she flailed out with both hands, trying to catch herself, grasping nothing but air. A second blow, more powerful than the first, drove her to her knees. A shower of lights exploded behind her eyes. Molten blades inside her brain spun with sickening regularity, pulsing with each beat of her heart.

  She pitched forward, against the cold deck, vaguely aware of splintered wood and the copper taste of blood. The fleeting image of a rubber boot passed inches from her face, and the heavy ache in her skull dragged her into blackness.

  * * *

  The terrifying realization that she’d been stuffed in some kind of sack hit her all at once. Panicking, she jerked from side to side, finally realizing that only by moving her face away from the rough cloth could she get any air. Her hands were bound in front of her, low, at her waist. The rough cloth was there as well, against her hips. The thump of lapping water on an aluminum hull told her she was on the floor of a boat. Nauseated, she pulled her knees to her chest, trying to keep the world around her from spinning out of control. She wanted to scream but managed little more than a pathetic whimper. The effort was just too painful. The back of her head felt as if it had been opened with an axe. She remembered that there was someone else at the boat when she’d been attacked—a person she knew—but the face escaped her.

  The boat rocked heavily to one side and someone grabbed her feet, hauling them up on the metal gunnel. Good. They were getting out. A disembodied voice muttered something she couldn’t understand. The boat rocked again as her body was hauled roughly upward. She strained to recall the face.

  “Where are you taking me?” Her father had told her stories about what happened to young girls who were kidnapped. “Please . . .” Her chest was racked with sobs. “I don’t . . . I don’t know anything. Please, just let me go.”

  Now sitting on the edge of the boat, Millie heard a splash behind her. A line zipped over the aluminum gunnel filling her with deadly dread.

  An anchor.

  An instant later the rope went taut, yanking hard at her ankles and dragging her off the edge of the boat. She sucked in a final, desperate breath before she went under, but shock from entering the frigid water drove much of the wind from her lungs. Intense pressure pushed at her eardrums as the anchor pulled her down.

  Millie Burkett screamed away her last breath as the anchor slammed into the muddy bottom. She remembered, and the name of her killer rose toward the surface on a stream of silver-green bubbles.

  VIAM INVENIAM AUT FACIAM.

  I shall find a way—or make one.

  CHAPTER 1

  SUPERVISORY DEPUTY US MARSHAL ARLISS CUTTER KNEW HOW TO smile—but it took effort and, often, came at great expense. More than once, the flash of his killer dimples had sent him crashing headlong into an ill-advised and short-lived marriage. The dimples were a genetic gift from his mother, but he’d also inherited the resting “mean mug” of his paternal grandfather—whom everyone called Grumpy. The mean mug turned out to be perfectly suited to a man who hunted other men for a living.

  Cutter stood beside his government issue Ford Escape—the irony of the name not eluding him as a manhunter. The hood of the small, white SUV was surrounded by the seven other members of his ad hoc arrest team, each of them dressed in the full battle rattle of law enforcement on a mission. The three Anchorage PD officers looked bedraggled, having spent the last six hours of a ten-hour shift shagging back-to-back calls for service. One had a mud stain on the thigh of his dark blue uniform, like he’d slid into home plate. Anchorage could get rough after midnight. The two special agents from the DEA, along with the two deputy US marshals assigned to the Alaska Fugitive Task Force, had the damp hair and scrubbed-pink look of people who’d showered and rushed out the door in order to make it to the 5:00 a.m. briefing. One of the DEA guys still had a bit of tissue paper stuck to a shaving cut on his neck. These two sported neatly trimmed, matching goatees, though one had more salt and pepper than the other.

  Counting his time in the army, Cutter had almost twenty years of experience tracking evil men, but this position with the Fugitive Task Force was new. He was a hands-on leader, and would be hands-on during this first op in Alaska.

  The chilly breeze teased at his sandy hair, pushing a Superman curl across his forehead. He took a deep breath, drawing in the spring smells of flowing birch sap and new spruce growth. He was a long way from his home state of Florida and its comforting familiarity.

  There was a real upside to working fugitive cases in the Last Frontier—at least during the spring and summer. The hours of darkness were few and far between now, so the bandits spent most of their time running around like cockroaches trying to find a place to hide. In Cutter’s experience, stomping roaches was easy when they ventured into the light. There had been plenty of cockroaches in Florida and it turned out there were a few in Alaska that needed a boot heel as well.

  The roach of the moment, Frederick “Donut” Woodfield, had a criminal history that said he’d gone peacefully during each of his seventeen previous arrests. There was no reason to believe that today would be any different. Cutter checked the BUG—or backup gun—in any case. It was a small Glock he wore in a holster over his right kidney. On his hip, he carried a stainless steel Colt Python revolver with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement badge engraved over the action.

  Arliss Cutter was fresh to the District of Alaska—and as such, the two deputies assigned to his task force were fresh to him. All three were still in what Grumpy Cutter had called the “butt-sniffin’ stage.” They were untested, getting to know each other’s ways, the good, the bad, and the stuff that might get somebody killed. The deputies had yet to see Cutter lead, and he’d not seen either of them in a fight. That too was apt to change. The pursuit of violent fugitives virtually guaranteed it.

  Deputy US Marshal Sean Blodgett stood to Cutter’s immediate right. Bull strong but thirty pounds on the heavy side, Blodgett’s thick forearms rested T. Rex–like on the magazine pouches and personal trauma kit on the front of an OD-green armored plate carrier he wore over a tight navy blue T-shirt. A subdued green and black circle-star badge was affixed over his left breast. A short-barreled Colt M4 carbine hung vertically from a single-point sling around the deputy’s neck. Bold letters on the back of the vest said “POLICE: US MARSHAL.”

  At twenty-six, Deputy Lola Fontaine was what Cutter’s grandfather would have called a “healthy” girl. Naturally thick across her hips and shoulders from her Polynesian roots, she took her fitness to the extreme. Decked out in the early morning light, she reminded Cutter of something from an advertisement for tactical gear. Similar to Deputy Blodgett’s, her vest identified her as a “US MARSHAL,” but her intense countenance and chiseled arms screamed “badass.” She kept her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun that highlighted her wide cheekbones and made her look more mature than she actually was. Chestnut eyes issued a challenge to anyone who met them for too long. She was around five and a half feet tall, but Cutter didn’t have to guess her weight because she kept a record of it on a piece of printer paper taped to her computer. Yesterday, she’d scrawled, “134 pounds of blue twisted steel.” She had proclaimed this her “fighting weight” and no one in the task force offices argued with her. Cutter had heard her tell war stories in the squad room about the fights she’d been involved in, and considering the swagger with which she walked through life, he was inclined to believe her.

  Boiled down to its core, manhunting was a straightforward science. Deputy US marshals cared little for the what, when, or why of a crime—but focused with a laser-like intensity on who and where. In theory, now that they had a location on Donut Woodfield, it was a simple matter of closing in and scooping him up. But in practice, few theories survived first contact with a fugitive.

  Cutter glanced at the two seasoned agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration: Simms and Bradley. Each was dressed in a thin blue raid jacket pulled over an olive-drab tactical vest. Each topped off their extra ammo, personal trauma kits, and
other tactical gear with two flash-bang grenades. A little over the top for someone not in a SWAT unit, but it was hard to argue against taking extra gear as long as it didn’t weigh you down.

  The DEA guys appeared to be capable enough, though Simms, the younger of the two agents, made a lame joke that Lola Fontaine was a stripper’s name. Cutter did what any good supervisor would do. He quietly led the man away from the group and threatened to kick his ass if he heard that kind of talk about one of his people again. Although it took a few minutes away from the gathering, it was time well spent. With a six-foot-three, two-hundred-forty-pound supervisory deputy making sure he watched his p’s and q’s, Special Agent Simms became a picture of decorum. Deputy Blodgett had also made fun of Lola Fontaine’s stripper-esque name—but in private and as part of the USMS family, so Cutter had let it slide with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Even that had the same effect.

  As per their standard operating procedure on a raid, both DEA agents wore black balaclavas, ready to roll down over their goateed faces just prior to booting the door. The other five members of the team—the three uniformed APD officers and the two deputy marshals—were young, pitifully so in Cutter’s mind, young enough to make his forty-two-year-old bones ache. He was at least a decade older than anyone else there. But young didn’t necessarily mean inexperienced, especially for the coppers. Serving a population of three hundred thousand, these APD officers witnessed enough human conflict and unmitigated stupidity every night to mature them at near lightning speed.

  Out of habit, Cutter touched the small leather bag tucked into his belt, and then leaned over his Ford to get one last good look at the floor plan drawn there in erasable marker—a mobile whiteboard. It was just before five-thirty in the morning but the other members of the team cast stark shadows across the hood.