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“Sure must be.”
“It makes sense,” Lonnie said. “His phone and his tracker died at the same time. So, the water killed them. Smart, but he captured more without going to this trouble.”
Travis had come over and added his two cents. “Maybe he was just getting started. Seems he likes to kidnap them and keep them a while before he kills them. This could be just the start for him.”
“Crazy. He’s crazy. It’s like he wanted to keep them as…company. Companionship, and once they served their purpose, kills them.”
“Could be,” Travis agreed. “Killing people slow is worse by far. He might be looking for companionship, but also he’s prolonging their deaths.”
“In some ways, like your father, he might be trying to make it seem like they died of natural causes. Starvation, whatever.”
Dante asked, “Like his father? In what way?”
Quickly, Lonnie explained, “I’m an alcoholic. When Travis and I first were together, his father was furious that his son was gay. He kidnapped me and poured liquor down me, great amounts of it, so once I died and he could drop me somewhere, the coroner would conclude it was my drinking that killed me.”
Dante spat, “What a bastard!”
Lonnie heard him, but his mind’s switches were all flipping, and his hair was lying flat at last. “Jesus, Travis. Your father.”
“What about him?”
“Where did we find him?”
“A bunker, but…but they already found Harrison’s bunker.”
Dante grabbed Lonnie’s arm. “That was a small panic room. If he was truly a survivalist, he’d have made another one!”
Lonnie ran over to Tango, who was about to scream from lack of other clues. “Tango, he might have another bunker, and if it’s near here…”
Tango’s face lit up, even as the sun from the east was lighting up the world. “The ranch has a ground-penetrating radar drone. They use it to find water for new wells. I’ll call Jace and have him get it now.”
Lonnie, Travis, and Dante had people look over the area for entrances or anything that could show them where the bunker could be.
It all happened quickly. The drone was in the air by seven that morning, Jace, Tango, and Lonnie watching the screen of Jace’s phone. Almost immediately, a huge obstacle under the earth could be seen, dark, solid…metal.
“It’s there all right, but how do we know how to get to it?”
Suddenly, Tango’s phone rang and he saw it was Dallas. He and Ruben had come out to help look for their partner, Marius. On speaker, Dallas told them, “Ruben and I found some kind of hatch. It’s dug down into the ground, grass and shit over it like it’s a little hill. It looked like a cave until we moved some brush away and saw the door.”
“We’ll be right there,” Tango told him. To Jace, Tango said, “Take the drone flying over where we are. If we can figure out how far in it goes from the hatch, we can figure out if we can blast in somehow.”
“Taking an awful risk blasting.”
“Hopefully we won’t have to.”
Lonnie ran with them the two hundred yards it took to get there, and once inside the cave Dallas was talking about, they all stared at the solid metal door and the keypad next to it. He told Dante, “It’s a fucking code. Who knows what it could be?”
Hollering back to Dallas, “Prince is still at the farmhouse?”
“Yeah!”
“Get him here and tell him to bring his computer and whatever else he could need to break this code.”
“I’ll go get him myself!”
Ruben came down the steps and banged on the door. “Marius! Marius, we’re here! We’re gonna get you out! Marius!”
*****
