Chapter 4 - The Cabin in the Pines
The Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey were a vast, suffocating void of pitch pines, sandy soil, and cedar swamps that stretched across more than a million acres. At midnight, under a heavy downpour, the forest was a wall of blackness that swallowed headlight beams whole.
The three-car convoy turned off the paved state route onto a rutted sand road that hadn't been maintained since the 1980s.
Tree branches scraped along the sides of the SUVs like metallic nails scratching on glass.
Inside the lead vehicle, Damian sat in complete silence. He held his service pistol—a custom SIG Sauer P226—on his lap, methodically removing the magazine, checking the brass rounds, and snapping it back into the well with a sharp, heavy clack.
“Explain to me again,” Leo said from the front passenger seat, his head turned back toward Damian. “Why the cabin? The cabin was burned to the ground during the police investigation five years ago.”
“The main house burned,” Damian corrected. “The old pumping station by the cedar creek was underground. It was built during Prohibition by the liquor runners. It’s reinforced concrete, submerged six feet beneath the swamp line, and completely invisible from the air.”
“You knew it was there?”
“I knew Caleb used it to store stolen weapons when he was working for the syndicate,” Damian said. His voice was unnaturally calm—the dangerous stillness that always preceded his most violent actions. “I searched it after the shooting. It was empty then. But Caleb spent three years before the ambush preparing a fallback position. If he survived the fall into the ravine, that’s where he crawled to bleed.”
The convoy stopped at a clearing two hundred yards from the creek.
Damian opened his door and stepped out into the freezing pine air. The smell of wet pine needles and ozone was sharp in his nostrils.
He gestured with his hand. “No lights. No flashlights. Infrared goggles only.”
Six men stepped out of the secondary vehicles, equipping low-profile night-vision optics over their dark tactical caps. They moved through the thick pine brush like shadows, their boots making almost no sound on the wet carpet of pine needles.
Damian walked at the front.
His heart wasn't pounding. His hands weren't shaking. A cold, absolute clarity had taken over his nervous system.
He remembered every second of the night he had shot Caleb five years ago.
He remembered the smell of the gunpowder, the deafening roar of the shotguns in the tight ravine, and the sight of Caleb’s body pitching backward over the wooden rail, falling forty feet into the roaring, swollen creek below.
He had thought it was over. He had thought he had scrubbed that filth from the earth.
I should have stayed, Damian thought, his thumb resting on the safety switch of his pistol. I should have climbed down into the mud, found his head, and put two more through his eye sockets.
They reached the crest of a small sandy ridge overlooking the creek.
Down below, hidden beneath a dense canopy of overgrown wild cedar trees, sat the rusted tin roof of the old pumping station.
A faint, flickering yellow light was visible through a narrow, barred air vent near the base of the concrete foundation.
And parked thirty feet away, obscured by camo netting and fallen branches, was a dark blue Ford van with mud-caked license plates.
Leo touched Damian’s shoulder, pointing down toward the vehicle.
Damian nodded once.
He raised his hand, gesturing for Miles and three men to loop around to the rear water exit, while he and Leo approached the steel reinforced entry hatch at the front.
Damian stepped down the sandy bank, his eyes locked on the barred vent.
From inside the concrete bunker, carried on the damp night breeze, came the sound of a voice.
A voice he hadn't heard in five years.
May you like
High, thin, smooth, and full of terrible, familiar confidence.
“You always did like the green dress, Nora,” the voice said. “Though I have to say… you’ve gotten much too thin since you left me.”
