Chapter 10
Ian hearsthe sound of gravel popping takes a quick look out the front window. The black Mercedes he's seen earlier this morning was parking in the driveway. As he watched, Matt MacKenzie got out. He looked out of place in his business suit in this setting. Ian was grateful for the lack of traffic on the dead-end road out here. Not only did the man look out of place; the shiny high end car did, too.
He met the mayor at the door, motioning him inside. At that point he realized the seating situation was less than optimal. One couch. Two of them. Nothing he could do about it at this point though.
"Mr. MacKenzie. Have a seat. Sorry about the arrangements."
Matt MacKenzie didn't even hesitate to sit on the old couch. Ian had to give him credit for that.
He seated himself and gave the other man a direct look.
"I need to you to tell me exactly what's been going on here. How did you discover there's a hit on you? My boss, Hank Patterson, told me you've already had two attempts on your life. What were they and how did you avoid them?"
Matt leaned back against the sofa as though he didn't have the strength to sit upright any more.
"I'm glad you’re here." He said, surprising Ian.
"I know I've been acting like a jackass to you," he laughed at Ian's astonished look. "But I have to act the way I would if you'd just shown up to visit like you're telling everyone. It won't do either one of us a lick of good if it gets out that you're here protecting me."
Ian would never have given the older man the credit for thinking it out that way. But he was right.
"Tell me how you know there's a hit on you." Ian asked again.
Matt cleared his throat. "I guess your boss told you I've been passing along criminal information about my colleagues to the FBI?"
Ian nodded, still amazed that Matt had been doing this for years without anyone being wise to it. At least until recently.
"Jim Powers, the mayor in another town up the road that I won't name, has been a friend for a lot of years." Matt frowned. "As a matter of fact, he got into trouble with the state a long time ago. It was me that turned him in. Jim knows it was me, but him going to jail for a couple of years turned his life around and he got straight when he came out of jail. Saved his marriage and everything."
Ian wondered about the truth of that. Some people simmered for years before they broke. Maybe Jim Powers had been waiting all this time to strike. Being Matt MacKenzie's friend in order to get his revenge without being under suspicion. Stranger things had been known to happen.
"Jim came to see me about three months ago and told me he'd heard from one of the officials I turned in years that he was hiring a hit on me. Jim went along to get information, then came here to let me know what was going in."
Matt picked some lint off his black slacks. "I didn't believe it at first. That kind of thing only happens in the movies. But my car was run off the road not two weeks later. I was out on Highway 59 near the old bridge." He looked at Ian. "You remember where I’m talking about."
Ian did. It was the one place in the county where if you ran off the road right next to the bridge, your car would plummet sixty feet into a ravine. The odds of surviving the fall were small. As evidenced by several accidents just like that that had happened over the years. The hit man must have been trying to make it look like one of those accidents.
"I managed to run into the trees before the ravine, so that's why I'm sitting here today. Banged me up some and totaled my car."
"What was the second attack?" Ian asked.
"It might not have been related to the hit." Matt said. "I was pretty spooked by getting run off the road. As you can imagine. So I was being extra alert after that. One night when I was coming back from a mayor's weekend in Jackson, I thought someone was following me. I got off the interstate onto some secondary roads and the car stayed behind me. Even when I got on some old roads that only someone familiar with this area would know." Matt shrugged. "Maybe it was someone local coming home from Jackson, too. Nothing happened other than the same car being behind me all that way and on all the same roads."
Ian thought it was probably the hit man scaring Matt. Keeping him in a state of anxiety so that his thought process was not the best.
