Nightwalker 3 by Frank Roderus & Craig Martelle

Author:Frank Roderus & Craig Martelle [Roderus, Frank & Martelle, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642022124
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

They held Wolfe in what had been a storage room at the back of the gas station. He was not tied up, but he’d had to deposit the rucksack in the front room beside a useless cash register. And one of the men—there were three of them—asked him very politely for the bowie. Wolfe looked at the shotgun first, then meekly handed over the big knife.

They hadn’t searched him and he still had a folding lock blade knife in his pocket, but had no illusions about overcoming all odds with just that for a weapon. The dog really did not count in the weapon category, he decided, leaning down to ruffle its fur and scratch behind its ears.

Becca had been taken elsewhere by the Regulators; at least, he assumed these were some of the dreaded Regulators. Dreaded, that is, by the people of Paradise. So far, Wolfe could not see that there was all that much difference between them, except that the Regulators seemed to be older and not so well-dressed. Everyone in Paradise wore the uniform grey sweatshirts and blue jeans. The men in Delaney dressed like any country folk might. He hoped they behaved better than the ones in Paradise, though. He would hate to take Becca out of one sort of ill treatment just to deposit her into another.

Time passed slowly inside the windowless storage room, and there was no place to sit. Eventually, he sat cross-legged in a corner. The dog curled up at his side with its head in his lap; Wolfe closed his eyes.

He roused to the sound of a padlock rattling at the door, and a moment later, the room was flooded with light. The sun must have come up while he was imprisoned—detained would be a nicer way to put it—and the sudden light made him wince in pain. He quickly slipped the welding goggles in place and felt immediately and immensely better.

“You can come out now. Sorry, but we had to make sure of you, Mr. Wolfe.”

Obviously, these people had been talking with Rebecca.

“My name is Adams,” the man said, extending his hand. “Bill Adams, or the Reverend William F. Adams, if you want to get formal about it.”

Adams was probably fifty or so, with bushy eyebrows and a very bad haircut. He wore shorts, a t-shirt, and Mexican peasant-style sandals that had been cut from a used tire. The sandals were not elegant, but they would do the job, and God knew there were more than enough truck and car tires lying about. Adams did not look like a pre-war preacher, but then, these were odd times and civilization had not yet adjusted to the world’s many changes.

“You used to be a preacher?” Wolfe asked.

“Not ‘used to be’.” Adams corrected. “I still am. If anything, these external circumstances have only served to strengthen my calling.”

“Are you the leader of the Regulators?” Wolfe asked.

Adams laughed. “There are no Regulators, Mr. Wolfe. Not to our minds, anyway. That is a name applied by our ‘neighbors’ so they can lump us together and view us as an enemy, or so I assume.

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