The Impaler

Chapter 61

Andy Schaap parked his TrailBlazer alongside the white truck at the end of the driveway. He got out and peeked through the driver’s side window. He didn’t know what he expected to find—Blood spatters on the dashboard?—and felt foolish when he saw the truck was clean.

Nonetheless, Schaap couldn’t deny the feeling he got when he pulled onto Sergeant Lambert’s property. The old tobacco farm was the most secluded of the homes he’d visited so far. And had he not been taken so off guard by the little spark of hope clicking away deep inside his stomach, perhaps Andy Schaap might have been more careful.

Indeed, he wanted first to go looking in the old horse barn, perhaps even check out the crumbling tobacco sheds he passed on his way in. And if he had, things might have turned out differently that afternoon. Instead, however, Andy Schaap followed protocol—took out his cred case and headed up onto the front porch.

The old, weather-beaten planks creaked painfully beneath his feet as he came upon a little handwritten sign over the doorbell that read, Please ring. Schaap pressed the button. The sound that came from inside was loud—like a buzzer on a game show, he thought—but afterwards there was only silence, no sign of life within.

Schaap rang the bell again and called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

Nothing.

Schaap opened the screen door and peered through the inside door’s small, beveled-glass porthole. The house was dark inside, but he could make out an empty hallway with a large staircase at the far end. Something about this place gave him the creeps, but he certainly would need more that that to justify his entering without a warrant. He rang the doorbell again—listening, watching for movement inside—when suddenly he heard a creak on the porch behind him.

Schaap turned just in time to see the man coming up the stairs—a tall, muscular man in a tight black T-shirt. In one moment, Schaap felt a smile form at the corner of his lips; in the next, he saw the man’s gun.

“Freeze!” he shouted, dropping his cred case as he went for the gun beneath his jacket. “FBI!”

But the man coming for him did not freeze.

“Your body is the doorway,” he said, raising his gun.

Time seemed to slow down for Andy Schaap; and amid his terror, he felt the clicking in his stomach travel up his spine and into the back of his head.

That’s a Beretta M9, he said to himself.

A split second later the bullet struck him between the eyes.