American Lease (A Dylan Cold Novel Book 1) (10 page)

It was a long night and Dylan did his best to walk a path into the carpet of his small apartment.

Montana had dutifully positioned himself between the kitchen counter, where Dylan had tossed the paper and the drugs, and the living room, where his master paced anxiously. At the slightest hint of Dylan moving into the kitchen, Montana lifted his head and started getting to his feet to block Dylan’s path.

Why was it so cheap and easy to get something that could ruin his life, again? How had he learned the language and culture of drugs so well?
He had been an athlete and a leader, the opposite of a loner hiding in a basement in the woods getting high.

Around one in the morning, he grabbed a can of seltzer and drank the whole thing. He flattened a side and pulled out his multi-tool. After a moment, he placed the crude pipe on the mantle next to a box of matches.

Maybe if he tried smoking and hated it he wouldn’t want to keep getting high.

By two o’clock, a match was out and lying across the box.

What was he struggling with? Most of his issues were in the process of being resolved, and he hadn’t really had to do anything. Four anonymous phone calls to the press had set the wheels in motion. His luck was turning around, why get high now?

Why not?

Each time he turned to face the kitchen, his eyes locked onto the newspaper on the counter. When he walked in that direction, he tried to see how much closer he could get before disturbing the sentry dog. As a means of measuring, he kept track of how many words he could read from the lead story.

By four-thirty he had read the first paragraph over one hundred times without Montana so much as raising an eyebrow.

An historic document, that few believe exists, has rocked one small New Hampshire town. The mythical “American Lease,” proving legal ownership over much of the United States’ Eastern seaboard, has been cited by anonymous sources as the cause behind a string of recent crimes and even the death of one dedicated police officer.

His focus fully shifted from the rocks inside the folds to the information inside the article. Dylan wanted to know more, but would Montana trust that he was getting the paper to read?
Could he trust himself?

He was tired of being a victim. Running and hiding made him feel gross. Giving in to the vile substance that would ruin his body and fuck up his mind was not what he wanted.

Dylan was ready to get back on the offense; escaping, evading and hiding behind trick plays didn’t win games. Winning happened when you attacked, took charge, and pushed forward.

Stepping over the hulking golden shape on the floor, Dylan entered the kitchen. He flipped the paper open with his right hand and pulled out a drawer with his left. The small baggie with two cloudy crystal rocks inside dropped onto the counter and he swept it into the drawer. He slammed it shut and took the paper to the couch, where he sat for the first time in almost twelve hours.

He read both articles about the American Lease several times. Dylan was disappointed by the lack of facts. His freshman-year journalism professor had made it sound like newspaper articles had to be second only to medical research in their citation of facts and sources. These articles mainly recited legend and folklore.

The legend said that both sides of the American Revolution had seen it coming and worked to come up with a solution other than war. King George III did not want to pay for another war and the industrialists in the colonies did not want to disrupt their very successful businesses. Those facts fit what Dylan had learned about the American Revolution in school.

The departure from the history books came when the article suggested that in 1770 or thereabout the King had agreed to lease the known area of the North American continent to the Continental Congress for a period of two hundred and fifty years.

King George was willing to take this approach because he had felt that eventually the colonists would come around to seeing the benefits of being a part of Great Britain. Plus, he had liked the idea of getting a regular check and having first refusal on the vast natural resources. It was the opposite of fighting a war there.

This approach supposedly made sense to the Continental Congress, because they didn’t really think they could win a war against Great Britain. In fact, they had hoped that by avoiding war, France or Spain would defeat Great Britain and the Colonies could win their freedom by default or at the very least negotiate a better deal with someone other than the British monarch.

None of it sounded as outrageous as aliens or the fountain of youth, but it still seemed unlikely. Dylan’s father had made sure that his studies were not completely forgotten. He had often said that he didn’t expect a Rhodes Scholar, but he never wanted to hear anyone call his son a dumb jock. Unfortunately, high school was a long time ago and he wasn’t sure he could do the research needed to understand the legends, let alone prove if they were real.

People were looking for the document because the leaseholder at the time of expiration had legal ownership of North America east of the Mississippi. Not just the lands either; all the leasehold improvements that had been made would revert to whoever held the document. On the surface, the claim was outrageous. But when the article cited the 99-year British lease of Hong Kong from China, it quickly came into perspective. It was a possibility, and the document would be valid in international law.

To make matters worse, at least one of the sources had a false-flag reference thrown into his comments about the lease. One talking head even declared “The document does exist, but and American already has it. If they lose the next election they’re going to bring out the document and try to form a new country.” 

Locker rooms and construction sites always seemed to have at least one guy who believed that America never went to the moon, Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and Bush had ordered the attacks on September 11. It was funny to hear them rant, but they were not the guys you based your worldviews on.

There was also a reference to scholarly research done on the topic. It was a Harvard University Ph.D. thesis, but the work was incomplete. The author was Brookford’s own Abbey Holt, the young woman from the farm stand.

It made sense that someone who grew up in town might have information about, or at least a justified interest in, a local legend.

Did she know something that wasn’t recorded in the history books?

Why did she stop her research?

Abbey Holt had not responded to the reporters’ request for comment. It wouldn’t have surprised Dylan to find out she was out on the tractor all day and simply couldn’t be reached. Still, he thought it was poor judgment to print her name in an article relating her area of expertise to recent events that included a murder and violent assault.

It was possible that the men who had performed these acts of violence already knew about Abbey. After all, they had been able to determine that Eliza and Ryan had gone to New York.

Maybe she had willingly provided everything she knew. If her work had hit a dead end, she may have determined that the document didn’t exist and there was no use in pursuing it or keeping the information private.

Dylan didn’t believe that the young woman from the farm stand would be a partner with men like the men he had dealt with. There was something about her that made him think that no matter how driven she was, her friends and the people in town were more important to her than money or fame. If she knew who these guys were, she would have come forward the instant Officer Farley was killed.

The most likely scenario was that whoever was searching had just missed the information about the farmer. Experts missed things all the time, and it wasn’t like any of the thugs he had dealt with seemed like scholars.

If they had missed it, the information was out there now. The reporter had put Abbey’s life in jeopardy, but it was Dylan who had given the reporter the tip.

If the cop he had spoken with after the historic society break-in had followed his advice, they would be keeping a close eye on Abbey. Surely her friends in town knew that she was an expert on the American Lease. Just because they were her friends didn’t mean they would put two and two together—or that she would accept their help if they offered it.

He felt responsible for her name coming into the public eye. There was no way he could have known, but still, he hadn’t thought through the whole plan of getting the press involved. Maybe on his way out of town he could stop at the farm stand and giver her a head’s up. That and a quick message to the police station outlining his concerns would probably be enough to keep her safe.

All of it would have to wait. There was no way he could get far with the sleep that was heavy in his eyes. Montana came and sat on his feet, and Dylan closed his eyes and slept soundly.

Dylan woke with a shiver. Montana rose to his feet, stretching his rear legs to their full length. His master did the same with his arms,  cracking his stiff neck to the side. The sleep had been bad and not nearly long enough.

Dylan looked to his bags of things by the door and decided that he was rested enough to get six or eight hours away. A few days spent just driving would get him far enough away to forget and give him a chance to start over new.

Suddenly Dylan remembered the rocks he had slid into the drawer. He didn’t want Eliza, or worse, Ryan, to find them.

The makeshift tin can pipe on the mantle reminded him how close he had been to using last night. One hit of that stuff and he would probably have been awake for days. Maybe that
was
the best way to get far, fast.

Dylan stared at the drawer. His keys were inside, and he would have to open it in order to leave. Opening the drawer would make it almost impossible to hold off on the drugs.

What was it about running away and using that went so well together? Every time he thought about leaving town and moving on from his problems, he thought about getting high. They were both forms of the same thing; one was physically leaving, the other was mental.
Why couldn’t the physical escape be enough?

The only time in the last twenty-four hours that he hadn’t thought about using was when he was trying to figure out the lease. That and when he was worried that he had gotten the girl from the farm stand in trouble.

He knew that idle time was bad for his sobriety, but it is hard to keep busy when you are running to some place you hadn’t discovered yet.

The sound of a tractor on the road startled him out of his thought. He came up with a simple plan that should be good enough to get him out of the house and occupied enough to stay clean: Find and warn Abbey, stop at the bank, and then start driving.
Just get through the next hour
, he told himself as he stood from the sofa.

His keys were always in the same place in the drawer. In this case, he was grateful for his habits. He opened the drawer and grabbed his keys without looking. “
See no evil,”
repeated over and over in his mind.

At the door, he paused before picking up his bags. Something inside told him that he was not leaving yet, but he wasn’t sure why. He looked back at the drawer and called to his dog.

Dylan and everything important in his life were in the truck. As he pulled to the end of the driveway, Montana looked back at the house. Dylan stopped the truck and looked in the rearview mirror. Every fiber of his being told him that running away was the wrong thing to do.

He looked up the empty road to the right. In that direction lay suspicion, anger, and hatred. The center of town was what he wanted to run away from, the reason he wanted to drift off into a drug-induced haze.

Looking to the left, in the direction of the highway and his escape, he noticed a nondescript sedan turning into the orchard. Usually it was only pickup trucks or tractors in the orchard. Occasionally there was a car, depending on who was working and what the job was. But it was never a late-model sedan though; this was wrong.

Knowing that Abbey Holt owned the closest orchard, it was possibly her who had driven the tractor past when he woke up. If the cop killer had just read the paper or just found out where Abbey would be, they could be going after her right now. There were no cops in sight, so even if they had determined that the farmer might be at risk, they hadn’t done anything about it—or she hadn’t let them.

Sticking his nose in wasn’t without risk. The number of times a gun had been pointed at him in the last week was concerning. If it continued, the chance one of them would go off increased. Getting shot wasn’t high on his list of to-try experiences and he knew that if he survived it would be almost impossible to manage the pain without drugs.

Right or not, he felt some level of responsibility for the woman’s name and her knowledge of the lease becoming public. Besides, thinking about helping didn’t bring with it any of the thoughts of getting high that accompanied thoughts of running.

If he was going to die, his preference was for it to happen while he was trying to do the right thing, not in some narcotic-veiled act of idiocy.

“Stay here, Montana,” Dylan ordered his dog.

He hopped out of his truck and crossed the street. Carefully jogging down the street, Dylan tried to get a fix on where in the orchard the tractor was located. It seemed like the tractor had made its way in the direction of Dylan’s apartment. That was good news; it was between him and the guys who had just driven into the orchard.

As soon as the rows of apple trees came into view, Dylan veered off the road and up over the stone wall that lined the edge of the orchard. He crouched to look under the trees and caught a glimpse of the black tire on a green rim rolling from his left to right. He looked to the left to see if he could spot the car that had driven in, but it wasn’t visible.

Before he set off to stop the tractor, he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed 9-1-1. The central dispatch struggled to understand his message, but he didn’t want to stay on the line and wait to be transferred to the local station. Hopefully they would have a handle on the big picture and get the right idea.

Dylan ran to the end of the row and turned left, toward the tractor. He hoped he would get there first, but he wasn’t sure what to do once he was there.

Seconds later, the big green farm machine turned around the last tree in a row and came directly toward him. Abbey Holt was driving and he could see the surprise and anger in her face.

The tractor came to a complete stop and the engine began to slow.

Dylan shook his head and rolled his hand over and over frantically. He wanted her to keep it running; if someone were looking for her, he didn’t want them to think that anything unusual was going on.

She didn’t get the message. The tractor slowed to an idle and Abbey climbed out of the cab.

“What the hell are you doing? Get out of my orchard or I swear to God I’ll run you over,” she said.

“Your name was in a newspaper article about the American Lease,” Dylan said.

“I know. They tried to interview me. Not interested in talking to you about it either, so again, get the fuck out of my orchard.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, but there are two men here right now who aren’t going to give you a choice. I think they’re the ones that killed your friend and beat up the women at the historic society.”

“Bullshit. You’re an idiot and no one is going to attack me over that stupid fucking legend.”

“If you come with me and I’m wrong, you lose ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll leave town immediately and you will never have to see me again. If I’m right and you get in that tractor, you may never leave this orchard alive,” Dylan explained.

“Excuse me, Miss Holt?” a man’s voice with a thick British accent called over the idling tractor. “We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions about the American Lease?”

Abbey gave Dylan a surprised look.

“If they were respectable, they wouldn’t hunt you down in an orchard; they could have just waited at your farm stand.” Dylan raised his eyebrows and sensed that she was getting ready to trust him.

“So what do we do?”

“That way.” Dylan mouthed and pointed toward the rear of the orchard, away from the street.

They both dropped into a crouched walk and headed past the rear of the tractor. After turning down the last row, Dylan started to look off into the woods on the other side of the rock wall.

Abbey stopped and knelt to the ground. She looked back toward her tractor and scanned the area under the trees.

“I think we should keep moving,” Dylan whispered.

“That tractor is worth more than—” she paused and looked at him. “More than everything you own.”

“And I bet it’s insured—” Dylan started before her hand grabbed his arm and cut him off.

He leaned to see around the closest tree. The two men in the black suits were standing behind the tractor, guns in their hands.

“Where the hell did she go?” one of them asked.

“I told you not to call to her, you wanker,” the other answered.

“Let’s go,” Dylan said as he pushed Abbey to turn away from the men and her tractor.

“AHHHH!” Abbey screamed in shock.

FBI Agent Smith smiled and trained his gun on Dylan.

“Looks like I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk with you, Ms. Holt,” the agent said. His British accent was thicker than Dylan had remembered.