The Last Infidel Read Online Free Page B

realist, Cody,” Lisa said.  “What do you think?”
    Cody looked at Marcus and said, “Thanks for telling me.”  He stuck his finger into Marcus’ ribs and rubbed the top of the boy’s head.  Then he hugged him.  He made his way towards the rubble heap on the other end of the basement, turned and smiled at Lisa, and slipped out into the darkness. 
    Five in the morning.  Dawn was only minutes away.
    Cody Marshall, the six-foot-one, twenty-nine-year-old ex-sheriff of Rutherford County, the manager overseeing the construction crew building Bashar’s new mosque, looked across the piles of trash towards the road to Woodbury.  In the darkness, standing near piles of debris and multi-colored pieces of garbage, everything from metal roofing to soda cans and tall weeds, a single man like him, dressed in blue jeans and a red shirt, was just another piece of wreckage.  Out here, Cody could probably walk up to one of Bashar’s patrols, slap the officer in the face, and never be seen. 
    He climbed into his blue, custom, Ford F-150 pickup and started the engine.  He made his way slowly up Hall’s Hill Pike, heading towards the university; but he kept his headlights off.  When he crossed the old intersection where Halls Hill Pike crossed MTSU Boulevard and became Greenland Drive, he turned the lights on.  Five minutes later, he drove onto the town square, parked his truck, and got out.
    Cody Marshall looked across the street from the courthouse parking lot.  He carefully studied the goings on behind the glass window of the dimly lit See You Latte Café .  Just a Hispanic and a white guy.  Doable, especially since the Hispanic guy was Jose Lozano, the local black marketeer with customers on both sides of the war, and who happened to be Cody’s foreman for the mosque job.  Cody had had to arrest him a few times in the past, before the war, even though they’d grown up together.  But that was all in the past, forgiven, if not forgotten.
    Cody hurried across the street and stepped up onto the old cobblestone walk.  He peaked inside the door, called for cup of coffee, and took a seat at a small, wooden table outside, just in front of the cafe.  The weather felt cooler this morning, less humid; and that meant easier breathing at the work site.  A couple of Bashar’s men, older, tired-looking guys, were arguing in front of the courthouse.  To Cody’s right, two guards leaned against the doors of the old Rutherford County Health Clinic building, which had now become a police station.  To the left, on the east side of the square, a half dozen of his construction workers gathered around a Muslim street vendor bartering for their breakfast.  He put his elbows on the table, put his face in his hands, and closed his eyes.  He listened for the six o’clock bell, but it never came.  Time didn’t count in hell, he thought.  Why would it count here?
    Cody quickly raised his head and looked towards East Main Street.  The door to the See You Latte Café swung open and Jose, with a mug of coffee in his hands, stepped out. 
    Cody and Jose heard the squealing of tires a block or two away.  Then the crash of something metal.  Cody got up and walked to the edge of the sidewalk in time to see an old Fed Ex van being driven through the stop sign at East Main.  The van turned sharply to the right and drove up onto the curb where it took out an old, blue mailbox.  The driver got the van back on the road, turned left, and skidded to a stop. 
    Four Muslims jumped out of the vehicle. They brandished new rifles, rifles not normally used by Bashar’s men, and they hurried towards the tall oak doors of the Greenspan Realty and Auction building, the business next door to the café.  A fifth man jumped out of the back with a small battering ram.
    “You’ve gotta hand it to Bashar’s men,” Cody said to Jose.  “They really know how to drive.”
    The four armed men, all of them dark-skinned middle easterners, stepped