The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6)

  The Castle Doctrine

  Daniel Faust, Book Six

  by Craig Schaefer

  Copyright © 2016 by Craig Schaefer.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design LLC.

  Author Photo ©2014 by Karen Forsythe Photography

  Craig Schaefer / The Castle Doctrine

  ISBN 978-1-944806-04-0

  Contents

  The Daniel Faust Series

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The Daniel Faust Series

  1. The Long Way Down

  2. Redemption Song

  3. The Living End

  4. A Plain-Dealing Villain

  5. The Killing Floor Blues

  6. The Castle Doctrine

  Side Stories

  1. The White Gold Score

  Prologue

  Jace Brubaker didn’t believe that a man’s home was his castle. His home was a squalid roach trap back in Tucson, littered with cigarette butts and photographs of the kid he hadn’t seen in five years. His castle, though, that was the open road. He ruled his kingdom from the leather bucket seat of a copper-painted Freightliner Coronado, six hundred horsepower of thundering steel with bright chrome stacks and a raised sleeper cab. Jace was one of a dying breed: a genuine owner-operator who held the slip to his rig, free and clear. After twenty years of long-hauling for a company that never spelled his name right on the paychecks, saving and scrimping every last penny to buy the Coronado, he had more or less resolved to blow his brains out behind the wheel before he’d ever call another man boss.

  The work took him from New York City to the San Francisco Bay, snow to sunshine as the contracts shifted with the seasons, and that was just the way he liked it. You could be anyone you wanted out on the road, with nobody to question you. Sometimes he could even get a truck-stop waitress to call him “Jace the Ace,” a nickname nobody had ever called him back home, but he steadfastly swore they all did. Tonight he was rolling up I-80 west just outside of Des Moines, hauling a forty-foot refrigerated trailer with a chugging, leaky compressor that occasionally drooled wisps of silver smoke into the tangerine sky. The trees along the highway stretched out skeletal fingers, nestling in blankets of rusty red and orange. Halloween weather.

  Halloween was still three weeks away, but the big dusty sign for the Long Sun Truck Stop had a line of gaudy plastic pumpkins dangling along one side, strung like a tacky earring. A cardboard skeleton waved from the diner window as Jace eased his semi into the parking lot. His wheels rumbled on loose gravel, brand-new air brakes bringing him to a stop with barely a whisper. Jace gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat and checked himself in the rearview. Two days of stubble, could do with a shave and a splash of cologne, but he figured he wasn’t unfit for human company just yet. He adjusted his white baseball cap—emblazoned with a black ace of spades, just like the driver’s-side door—and hopped down from the cab.

  Jace gave the semitrailer a once-over as he strolled on by, checking the tires, smiling at the cartoon pig on the side. This week’s cargo was frozen sides of beef. The pig, dressed in an apron and chef’s hat, beamed down at him and offered up a plate of steaming steaks. “Lombardi Meats,” read the script beneath, “Come Meet our Meat!”

  A steak sounded good right about then. After ten hours on the road with nothing but a weigh station to break his stride, he would have settled for burnt hamburger. Might not have a choice, he thought, navigating the lot and making his way toward the diner. Eating at a strange truck stop was like playing culinary Russian roulette. You might get a five-star meal, served up by some short-order cook who should be working in a big-league restaurant but never found his way. Or you might get heartburn and a bad case of the runs. Jace kept a bottle of Pepto in his glove box and took his chances.

  Wiping his boots on a crusty welcome mat, he could have been anywhere in America. Dirty linoleum, yellow vinyl booths, the rattle of aluminum pans, and the smell of eggs and black coffee. A diner was pretty much a diner anywhere you went. Jace sidled up to the counter and sat back on a stool, picking up a laminated menu that might have been printed sometime back in the seventies. He didn’t know why he bothered; in a place like this, there was only one way to guarantee a decent meal.

  “What’s good today?” he asked the waitress, who had probably been working there since around the time the menus were printed.

  “If you don’t mind breakfast for supper, can’t go wrong with the corned beef hash.”

  “Sounds good. Set me up with the hash and a couple of eggs, sunny side up. And a coffee, thanks.”

  As she scribbled his order down, hooking the scrap of paper up behind the counter on a clothespin for the cook, the man sitting two stools down glanced his way. “A wise choice,” he said with a genteel smile, gesturing at the same order on his own plate.

  The guy was a weird sight for a truck stop. Older than the usual crowd, with dusky skin that almost looked dusty under the cheap fluorescent lights. Dust on his suit, too, a twill number with leather patches on the elbows like an old-time college professor, and a yellow bow tie with tiny brown dots.

  “Good to hear,” Jace said, returning the smile. “You traveling far?”

  “Oh, yes. All the way to the West Coast. Going to visit an old friend.” His smile grew, baring yellowed teeth. “Ecko’s the name. Damien Ecko, at your service. Formerly the proprietor of D. Ecko and Company Jewelers. Alas, my fortunes took an unexpected turn. Had to close up shop.”

  “I hear ya. This damn economy, man, it’s killing everybody. I’m Jace. Jace the Ace, that’s what my friends call me.”

  Ecko ran the tip of his tongue over his teeth, as if tasting the name.

  “Jace the Ace. Ah, like your cap. A fine appellation.” He nodded to the window. “Saw you pull in. Is that a refrigerated truck?”

  “The trailer is, yeah. She’s a beauty. Keeps the meat so fresh you’d swear it was from right next door. You know, most people don’t realize how far away their food gets trucked in from. Your average city is about three days from starvation if the trucks ever stop running.”

  Jace had picked up that fact from a Reader’s Digest article, and he was very proud of it. Damien’s eyes opened wider, acknowledging his expertise.

  “You perform an invaluable service, good sir. Ah, to ride the open road on eighteen wheels. It must be majestic.”

  Jace shrugged, almost bashful. “Well, it’s a living. Wh
at are you driving?”

  Ecko sipped his coffee and sighed. “Sadly, nothing at all. My car broke down two miles up the road. An acquaintance of mine in Nevada owes me a good deal of money, but I have to collect it in person. So, for the moment, I find myself reliant on the kindness of strangers.”

  As the waitress brought over his plate, eggs steaming and the hash glittering with salt, Jace gave his dining companion a long, measuring look. He wasn’t in the habit of taking on passengers; he liked making small talk here and there, but out on the highway he preferred his radio for company. Still, he didn’t like the idea of leaving the old guy stranded in the middle of nowhere, not with night settling in and bringing the midwestern autumn cold with it. He just knew if he left, he’d pick up the paper tomorrow and read something about the cops finding the guy frozen and stiff at the side of the road. No, he couldn’t have that on his conscience.

  “Tell you what,” Jace said, “I’m driving as far as Omaha tonight. If you want to ride with me, that’ll get you a little closer to where you’re going.”

  “You,” Ecko told him, “are a hero and a gentleman. A most unexpected lifesaver.”

  They finished their meals and set out side by side. Night had fallen now, turning the parking lot into a corral of slumbering mammoths. Big steel, silent in the dark.

  At the edge of the lot, the cab’s nose facing a vacant and weed-choked field next to the truck stop, Jace hopped up into the throne of his rolling castle. He leaned over and pushed open the passenger-side door. The old guy was spry for his age, clambering up and inside, pulling on the seatbelt and adjusting his bow tie.

  “Y’okay with country music?” Jace asked him.

  “I’m partial to the opera,” Ecko replied, “but country’s fine. I believe the rules of the road state that a driver’s authority over his own radio should never be questioned.”

  “We’re gonna get along just fine,” Jace said and slid the key into the ignition.

  “Indeed. There is just…one thing, though.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  The semi’s engine rumbled to life, like the deep-throated purr of a lion. The headlights clicked on, washing the field in blinding halogen, turning night to day.

  There were people in the field.

  Twenty, maybe thirty of them, standing motionless in the headlights’ glare. All of them turned toward the truck. All of them stared up at Jace. His short-lived surprise changed to confusion—and then to a cold, creeping fear that knotted his guts.

  Some of the people wore paper hospital gowns, standing barefoot in the weeds. Others were stark naked, untouched by the autumn chill, and their chests bore the Y-shaped stitches of an autopsy. A woman looked up at Jace with wide, hungry eyes, as if she wanted to say something. But she couldn’t, not without a lower jaw, her mouth a wet red ruin. A man beside her was missing the top of his skull, the bone sliced away with surgical precision to bare the rotted gray meat of his brain.

  “We need to bring my friends along, too,” Ecko said. “It’s all right. They can ride in the back.”

  1.

  My life wasn’t exactly a riches-to-rags story. I never did manage the “riches” part. Still, I’d been somebody once. I had a home, cash in my pocket, and just enough security and comfort to take it all for granted.

  Now I didn’t even have a name.

  As far as the government was concerned, Daniel Faust died in a prison riot. I’d burned my last lifeline, my final get-out-of-jail-free card, and killed my old identity just like I’d killed the warden of Eisenberg Correctional: at close range and without mercy. Now I was free and clear. Free to answer one burning question.

  What do you do when you lose it all?

  I guess if you’re me, you find yourself in an alley in East Las Vegas, on a stretch of bad road you don’t see in the tourist brochures. The Delaney brothers were in town, straight out of Belfast, flush with cash from a bank job. One wild night at the Medici had separated these two fools from their money, and now they had a quick, fat score in mind. They needed a hired wand. I needed operating capital. Needed it badly enough to consider working with the Delaney brothers, anyway.

  “Y’gonna light him on fire?” Scottie asked, looming over me like a wall made of blubber with his face stuffed into an olive ski mask.

  “I am not,” I said for the fourth time, “lighting anybody on fire.”

  “Stop pesterin’ the man,” growled Sean—older, a grizzled scarecrow with a body and teeth straight out of a “don’t do meth” poster—“and take that bloody mask off. It ain’t time yet.”

  “So when’s it gonna be time?”

  “It’s time,” I answered for Sean, “when you let me concentrate for five seconds.”

  “Mikki just lit people on fire,” Scottie said. No idea who he was talking about. Didn’t care. He caught Sean’s glare and finally shut up.

  I crouched on an oil-stained patch of asphalt, holding my open palms over a cracked clay bowl stained the color of rust, where the remnants of a half-smoked cigar nestled in a puddle of white ashes. Symbols painted in ash ringed the bowl at north, west, south, and east, winding glyphs in a forgotten language. The sorcerers who invented this spell had to reckon directions by the sun and the moon. I used a digital compass. I lit a second cigar—a Dominican Carrillo, with gold leaf writing on ink-black bands—and puffed it to life. A woody, hickory taste filled my mouth, painting over the bitter aftertaste of smoke.

  Or maybe the bitterness came from realizing I was pushing forty, homeless, broke, and about to rob a liquor store. Yeah. I was going places.

  I exhaled my resentment and it billowed past my lips, transformed into smoke. It emerged as whispered words, a slow and soft chant in a language only dead men remembered. Ashes rained down to feed the bowl. Silky smoke twisted up to feed the night sky. Words fed the world, soothing it, seducing it into bending to my will. Just a little, here and there. A tiny quiver at the edges of reality, a narrow stage where I could stand and issue my decree. Sometimes, with the shadows lit like neon in my second sight and the winds of magic churning around me, I had a sudden sense of history. As if I could see all the sorcerers who had come before me, standing in a long and unbroken chain stretching out across time.

  Conjurers and philosopher kings. Victorian showmen and hermetic artists, builders and keepers of the Promethean fire. All the way back to the oldest shamans in the oldest caves, the first humans to interrogate the universe and come away with secrets earned through pain and blood.

  And then there was me. I wondered if they could see me, too.

  The smoke and the words struck a bargain with the universe. The ashes gave that bargain a place to rest. My penknife, whipping across my arm, stinging like a rattlesnake bite, offered the payment. Droplets of my blood tumbled from the shallow cut like a scattered handful of garnets, splashing over the glyphs one by one. North, west, south, east. I’d snuffed the cigar, but the smoke still streamed from my parted lips like a gossamer rope. Then I spoke the last word of the chant and the smoke faded, leaving me with the taste of dirty hickory on the roof of my mouth.

  “Wait for my signal,” I said, ripping open a Band-Aid and slapping it over my cut. I pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves. Then I dug my fingers into the bowl, scooping out a handful of ash.

  I took a walk, right across the barren street, to the only place on the block that wasn’t closed for the night or boarded up: Larry’s World of Liquor. The name shouted down from a strobing marquee, ringed by bulbs that flashed like the gate to a carnival. It smelled a little like a carnival, too, the odor of stale beer and salty peanuts hanging in the stagnant air. Keeping my fingers curled and the ashes tucked away, I pretended to go shopping, scouting the aisles for civilians. We’d picked a good time: the balding cashier and I had the place all to ourselves. He sat on a stool, idly reading a gossip magazine, one hand never far from the shotgun we knew he had stashed behind the counter. I grabbed a bottle of gin and walked on up, just another custome
r, just another night.

  He stood and reached for the bottle, leaning closer to my side of the counter. I brought up my hand, palm open, and blew. The ashes hit his face like buckshot. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed, hitting the grimy tiled floor, a puppet with its strings cut. I gave a big wave to the plate-glass windows and hopped the counter.

  Scottie and Sean burst in, Scottie playing pack mule with a rucksack full of tools jangling on his shoulder. Sean flipped the Open sign, locked the front door, and hustled over to take a look at the fallen clerk.

  “He dead?” he asked me.

  I was bent over the console behind the counter, the controls for the security cameras. “No. Sleeping. He’ll be out cold until sunrise, and when he wakes up he won’t remember anything from the last twelve hours or so.”

  I yanked the tape from the console—an old VHS-style clunker—and ran a magnet over the cassette. We killed the lights, shutting the store down, and then Sean and I dragged the clerk into the back room while Scottie set up his tools. Larry’s World of Liquor wasn’t a random hit. The proprietor—I never found out if his name really was Larry—had a bad habit of storing the shop’s cash in a safe all week long, letting it pile up, then bringing it to the bank with an armed guard every Saturday morning.

  Today was Friday.

  For his lack of smarts elsewhere, Scottie was a virtuoso boxman. I watched the street, keeping an eye out, while he pulled on a welder’s mask and went to work on the safe with a thermal lance. Even on the far side of the store I could feel the heat, simmering against my cheek like the noonday sun. The fading screech of the lance and Scottie’s whoop of joy told me the box had cracked. I turned from the empty street and joined them behind the counter to see what was waiting beyond the half-melted steel door. Stacks and stacks of rubber-banded bills nestled in the safe, alongside pyramids of rolled coins. We bagged the bills, left the coins, and cleaned out the cash register for good measure. No idea how much the take was, not yet—you never count until the job is done. On our way to the door, Sean snatched a bottle of Hennessy, holding it up like a trophy.