The Unseen Enemy Series

Chapter 226

Mark watched as Michael Ferguson drove towards him. Luckily, there was only one road away from the Halloway farm, so guessing this asshole’s choice of direction hadn’t been a big challenge. No, the challenge was yet to come. Mark’s large body tensed up as he prepared to make contact with a man that, until now, he’d only encountered on paper; God knows, that man had been bad enough.

Ferguson was the Sheriff of Foxburg Falls, Oregon, a former Marine, a high school football hero. He was also a sick, twisted f**k who raped and beat up women in his hometown, and then used his badge to intimidate them into silence.

He’d come up on the Solid Security team’s radar through Katherine Lawrence – who had now reclaimed her real name of Beth Harper in light of Ferguson’s arrest. Beth was Jim Alden’s girlfriend, and Jim was one of Dallas’ closest friends and a fellow survivor of three tours in Afghanistan. The two men and their friends had stepped up to protect Beth from Ferguson when she’d finally told them the truth about her life.

The truth was that Beth had been on the run from Foxburg Falls and from Michael Ferguson for more than four years. He’d raped, beaten and terrorized her for a year before she’d fallen pregnant with his baby – a baby that she’d then lost after an especially brutal beating at Ferguson’s hands. When he’d found out about the miscarriage, he’d sworn to kill Beth for ‘killing his baby’… and she ran. She ran, she assumed new names, she worked as a hair stylist for cash, she changed her hair color every two weeks, and she moved every few months. She’d maintained that exhausting, terrified, lonely existence until she got to Denver, where she’d found a life that she'd wanted to fight to keep.

Dallas had sent Sully and Cordelia Patton – the Solid Security receptionist with uncanny people-reading skills – to Foxburg Falls undercover to observe Ferguson. Their assignment had been to simply watch the man, and to try to get some dirt on him. Dallas’ original plan was to maybe find something to bribe Ferguson with, a bargaining chip to throw down and demand Beth’s safety in return.

What Sully and Cordelia had turned up was even better: they’d uncovered Ferguson’s drug trafficking ring, and they’d convinced two of his accomplices to turn on him. The evidence was overwhelming and Ferguson had been arrested. Unfortunately, the man still had friends in the small town police department and court system, and he’d been quietly granted bail two days earlier.

The first thing he’d done was to drive like hell through the night to Salt Lake City, Utah and take Clyde and Emily Halloway hostage in their own living room. Then he’d called their son Aaron Halloway – one of Ferguson’s own cops back in Oregon – and threatened to kill his parents unless Halloway could come up with a good hiding place for him. Aaron had suggested the family farm in Meadow, and so the nightmare for the senior Halloways had really begun: Ferguson had taken them with him, and done God-only-knows-what to them in the meantime.

When Dallas had heard that Ferguson had received bail and disappeared into thin air, he’d immediately sent Mark and Sully to Foxburg Falls to try to figure out where Ferguson may have gone. Within seconds of meeting Halloway, Sully had just known that the man was more involved than he was trying to let on, and Sully had gotten him to talk. And now here they were. In the middle of a goddamn field in Utah, facing down a brutal, professionally-trained ex-military man with his back against the wall.

Trapped animals with nothing to lose are always the most dangerous.