Dead Men's Harvest

by Matt Hilton

  Baron merely smiled. Charters was more animated, his eyes flicking between his bosses like he was watching a tennis match. Suddenly his gaze fell on me, and stuck there. He lifted his bandaged arm. ‘Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough? I’ve got nothing to do with this! I’m just some poor sap who took a fucking protection job! I didn’t know I was gonna get involved in anything like this!’

  Hendrickson laughed. ‘Kill him if you want, Hunter. He’s a fucking coward.’

  The man, so tough when he had me at his mercy, wasn’t so tough now. Tears rolled from his eyes and he shook like a wet puppy. Under the circumstances perhaps he didn’t deserve to die. Maybe I would have spared him, but his fate was taken out of my hands. Baron moved, lightning fast, but not for his gun. He grabbed Charters by the back of his neck and propelled him towards me.

  Charters wasn’t a major threat. Terrified, he didn’t even try to get me. But he was blocking my view of both Hendrickson and Baron and there was no way that they were standing still. If I attempted to manoeuvre around Charters, he would definitely grab at me, halt me long enough for Baron or Hendrickson to finish me. That made up my mind. I shot him in the throat. The force of the bullet took him off his feet and I now had a clear view of the others.

  Hendrickson had swung away from me, but Baron’s hand was going for his gun. At the same time he went into a crouch, making him a smaller target. I fired and knew immediately that I’d missed. Baron’s hand was coming up again. I dipped on one hip, swerving my upper torso to one side, and I felt the air buffet my cheek as Baron’s return fire cut through the space I’d just vacated. Motherfucker was fast.

  Trying to keep an eye on both of them, I deemed Baron the most immediate threat. Hendrickson still had his back to me and seemed to be leaning on a counter. Baron had taken two steps further to my right, his arm swinging towards me. I shot at him. My bullet struck his side and threw him against a wall. But he wasn’t dead, and I saw his finger pull on the trigger of his gun. There was no way to avoid his shot but go down. His bullet cracked the wall above my head. I’d saved my life, but given up my stability. Down on one knee, off balance, I tried to track Baron but he had already danced a few steps and was parallel to my position. To kill him I’d have to bring my arm fully around. He was as quick on his feet as he was with a gun: he leaped past me and was now almost at the door. I turned, trying to get a bead on him, but it was hopeless.

  Baron fired a final round, but he was too busy fleeing to care where it struck. It missed me and hit the inert form of Charters where he lay on the floor. I started to rise. But Hendrickson was also moving, swinging round, and in his hand was a large Colt revolver that glinted silver in the overhead lights. The old-fashioned gun must have been the source of the clunk I’d heard earlier. It had been behind Hendrickson all the time, concealed from my view by his sturdy body.

  Shit. I’d wanted to force Tubal Cain’s whereabouts from him before he died. But given the choice of letting him get the drop on me and shooting him there was only ever going to be one outcome. Even a disabling round through his body wouldn’t be enough, because while I dealt with him, Baron might return. As I told Harvey I would, I shot Hendrickson in the face.

  The Colt slipped from his fingers and clattered on the floor between his feet. For a second or two Hendrickson defied gravity, then his knees gave out and he toppled forward. The splash of blood reached all the way over Charters to my boots. For all that he was the source of my woes, I gained no satisfaction from his death. Possibly because the way he went was too easy on the bastard. Justice would have been better served if I’d hobbled him as I’d threatened and left him to rot in jail.

  Hendrickson couldn’t help me find Cain now, and I barely glanced at him as I moved to the edge of the door. Baron was still up there and the last thing I desired was to start up the stairs and have him fill me full of holes while confined between the two stone walls. Yet I couldn’t stay there. The brief gunfight was bringing Hendrickson’s men running from all corners of the house.

  Chapter 29

  Deadened by the walls of the basement, the racket caused by our shoot-out wouldn’t have carried beyond the house, so there was no fear that the police would come with blue lights blazing. However, Baron must have found where I’d dropped the Galil because suddenly the house rattled to the clamour of machine gun rounds. I was trapped in the cellar, and even if Baron or the others didn’t have the bottle to come down and finish me off, the cops would be here soon. That’d be me done for: without the backing of Walter I’d be seen as the aggressor and dealt with accordingly. Either I’d be put down or carted off to prison for the remainder of my life.

  The cops would have to be a concern for later, I decided.

  Some of Baron’s rounds made it all the way down the stairwell and into the basement. They cut chunks out of the floor, throwing shards of concrete and red-hot metal everywhere. Something scored my left shin, and I jumped, slapping down on an oozing wound. I hobbled a few steps away, shoving bodily into a corner nearest the door. The rebounding bullets were still a concern but less likely to hit me now. The last time I’d been in a similar situation my enemy had lobbed a hand grenade at me: this time there was no steel hospital bed and mattress to save me. However, I did still hold an ace card.

  ‘Harvey, I need your help now!’

  ‘Wondered what all that hullaballoo was about,’ Harvey said in my ear.

  From above there came the retort of a rifle. Someone screamed and I hoped it was Baron. It wasn’t very likely, but at least the machine gun fire stopped as the flow of battle surged to a new front. I didn’t wait to make sure, just bolted up the stairs and into the kitchen. A man was dead on the floor but he was too big to be Baron. The window was smashed. From outside I heard the repeated crack of Harvey’s rifle as he tracked fleeing men through the windows of the house. Someone fired back, but their bullets came nowhere near to him. He continued laying down cover and I went through the kitchen. Didn’t bother with the door, just hurdled out through the broken window and on to the gravel path.

  ‘I’m out,’ I said.

  ‘See you, brother.’

  I looked for targets but saw none.

  ‘OK, start falling back.’

  We pepper-potted out of there, taking turns to cover and run as we retreated through the garden. The lawn mower had fallen silent, but a new sound carried through the air: sirens from responding police cruisers. From further back in the grounds there was the roar of an engine, and the squeal of a vehicle making a harsh turn. I assumed that, like us, Baron wanted no part of the police investigation that would follow. I would have liked to take him out there and then, but at least this way Rink might get his wish.

  We went over the wall with little finesse, just ran at it and leaped, caught the upper edge and swung over. Our rental had gone undiscovered and we clambered inside. Harvey drove, I sat in the front passenger seat, and we talked calmly. We kept to the speed limit; just two guys on a drive. Cop cars screamed past us heading for the front gates of the Hendrickson estate. By the time they arrived, gained entry and discovered what had happened we were well out of range of the cordon they set up around the crime scene.

  Apart from Baron, nobody had any idea who was responsible for the slaughter, and it was reasonable to expect that he’d keep his mouth shut. That he’d made his escape was a given, so the chances of the police searching for Harvey and me were very slim. We headed out of town and pulled in at a hotel that was more upper-class than anything normally favoured by those fleeing justice. Cops tended to target the seedier flophouses first; they didn’t expect felons to lie low in five-star comfort. Forward planning meant that Harvey had pre-booked – under false details – so we weren’t like a couple of desperadoes when we turned up and locked ourselves in our room. Harvey even set up a charge account on a credit card, further enhancing our hide-in-plain-sight ethos. He requested a wake-up call and newspaper for the morning.

  Our room was on the ground floor and we cou
ld come and go without having to bypass the checking-in counter. From the window we could see where we’d parked our rental. There was also a second vehicle that Harvey had ordered via a different rental company: just in case our first car had been noticed near to the shooting we’d planned to leave here in the second.

  When the investigation got underway, it was probable that any mobile phone usage in the area would be scrutinised, so the mobiles we had would have to be dumped. Nevertheless I knew how the gears of bureaucracy could grind an investigation to a snail’s crawl so thought my phone was good for a while yet. Phoning Walter directly from it was foolish, because the numbers would show on the call log, but not when I went through the relay stations that filtered and encrypted the route. Ensconced in our rooms, I rang the CIA man.

  ‘You can strike Kurt Hendrickson off the list,’ I said when Walter picked up.

  ‘He’s dead? Hell, son! The Justice Department isn’t going to be happy when they find his trial won’t be going ahead. They were looking at a real media coup with this one.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Right now a higher power is judging his crimes. Where he’s heading, it’ll be worse than any hell-hole that the courts could send him to.’

  ‘I never took you for the religious type,’ Walter said.

  ‘You know what they say: there’s no atheists in trenches, Walt.’ Though I didn’t pray that regularly, I’d often taken the Lord’s name in vain. Maybe I should’ve got down on my knees and begged for forgiveness otherwise, when it was my time, I might be heading to the same hell-hole as Hendrickson and all the other evil men I’d killed. I told Walter what had gone down at Hendrickson’s house.

  ‘So you’ve no idea where Cain is,’ he summed up.

  ‘Drawn a blank,’ I said. ‘So it’s even more important that both John and Imogen are out of harm’s way.’

  Anticipating my next question, Walter confirmed, ‘Imogen was collected by Hartlaub and Brigham. She’s out of Cain’s reach. There’s no one left who he can use to get to John, so you needn’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. Walt, I need to speak to my brother.’

  Walter’s silence gave me a sense of foreboding.

  ‘Walt?’

  ‘Uh, I’m just figuring on how best to arrange that, son.’

  ‘What’s the problem, Walt, and please . . . none of your usual bullshit.’

  Walter coughed into the handset, then must have twisted away because I didn’t catch his next mumbled words.

  ‘Walter.’

  ‘I’m here, OK. Look, this won’t be easy to set up. We have him in deep hiding. It’s going to be a bitch getting you to see him without your involvement throwing problems our way.’

  ‘Seeing as I’m just a fucking crazy vigilante and all?’

  ‘There is that.’ He tried to temper his words so they sounded like a joke, but he meant them. ‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime I suggest you get some rest, recharge your batteries, you’ve been on the go for . . . what? Two days now?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. The truth was, now that the thrill of battle had subsided, I could have slept for a month. ‘Just arrange things for me, Walt. I want to speak to John.’

  ‘Get some sleep. Give me a call back in a few hours, OK.’

  Walter hung up and I must have looked at the phone strangely. Harvey, currently sprawled on one of the beds, was watching me. His usually bright eyes were rheumy, like I wasn’t the only one in need of a nap. ‘There a problem, Hunter?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  Placing the phone on the floor, I crushed it under my heel. Then I disassembled it further, separating the battery, the guts and the SIM card and tossing them into a waste basket.

  ‘Destroy your phone,’ I told Harvey. ‘Then we’re getting out of here.’

  ‘I need to sleep, man.’

  ‘Trust me, Harve, we need to get going.’

  While he dismantled his handset, I went to the window that overlooked where our cars were parked. There was nothing unusual out there. So maybe the nasty feeling I’d just felt was wrong; but the niggling thought persisted that Walt was up to something. I crossed the room and opened the door. A narrow corridor led back into the hotel one way and to the car park the other. Going to a window, I peered out across the hotel lot on to the main road. Traffic regulations meant that stopping on the highway wasn’t allowed, but there were plenty of places where they could pull off the road and into one of the hotel courtyards across the way. A hundred yards up, its front end peeking out from behind a stand of trees, I spotted a navy-blue sedan with tinted windows.

  Returning to the room, I said, ‘Harvey, we have to go now!’

  We fast-walked out of the room, along the corridor and out through a revolving door into the car park. The rifle was still inside the first rental car but we had no time to fetch it. We hurried over to the second car and Harvey bleeped it open. He drove again, with me riding shotgun. We only made it as far as the exit ramp when the first police cruiser screeched up the ramp towards us, its lights flashing balefully.

  Chapter 30

  Tubal Cain watched a young girl leading a smaller boy by the hand. The boy couldn’t have been much more than five years old, the girl a little older. She had the reddish hair and slightly upturned nose inherited from her mother, but the boy was definitely his father’s son. Cain could even detect a little of his Uncle Joe in the boy. Those bluish-green eyes with a hint of brown at the outer edge of the irises must have been a trait from his grandmother’s side of the family, as Tubal Cain knew that John Telfer and Joe Hunter had different fathers. The boy even had that same straight-backed shoulders-held-high walk as the brothers; maybe that was inherited as well and not a stick-up-the-ass attitude they carried with them.

  They were too young to be walking these streets alone, so it was no surprise to find that Jennifer was a few paces behind them, deep in conversation with another young mother whose brats trailed in their wake. Jennifer puffed on a cigarette between sentences. Every so often she glanced up, checking the progress of her offspring. She must have gone out to collect the kids while he was sampling the delights of the tea shop.

  Cain watched Jennifer say her goodbyes to her friend, then she hurried the few steps to catch up to her children and ushered them through the entrance to their building. She wasn’t laden down by grocery bags this time, and Cain noticed that she used the stairs, sending the kids off at a gallop ahead of her. In no major hurry to follow, Cain hung back in the alley that had become his surveillance point. While he waited for the Telfer family to settle in he studied the graffiti. Why do all ignorant people have a fascination with genitalia? he wondered. Someone had daubed the legend manu for the cup in bright red paint. A different artist, but equally industrious, had scored through the final word and written the word chop. Under it in even larger letters they’d added city rules! Cain was unfamiliar with soccer, but even he knew that there was a rivalry in this city where wearing the wrong-coloured jersey could get you a whupping.

  The floor of the alley was littered with a filthy collection of debris, including broken glass, crushed drinks cans, cardboard and other things he didn’t care to imagine. The carcass of a rat had rotted down to the skeletal bones, but they held no interest for him. Cain looked up to the window of Jennifer’s flat. He could detect movement there. Good. Hands in his coat pockets, he walked out of the alley and on to the road. From his left three figures emerged. They were dressed like the bicycle-riding kids he’d seen this morning, their hoods pulled up, and their sneakers whitened to a gleam. It didn’t matter what colour jersey you wore, these were the kind of youths who were going to kick your ass just for being different. Already he’d noted their posture had changed. There was a lot of hand-flicking going on, gruff expletives exchanged that he couldn’t understand. Cain didn’t have the inclination to waste time with these punks.

  They moved close, enclosing him in a three-sided box.

  Ordinarily it would have been a fa
tal error to allow them to shut down his options like that, but Cain didn’t fear them. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that it might draw unwanted attention he would quite happily butcher them.

  ‘Hey, mate, you got the time?’ The elected leader postured in front of Cain, bouncing loosely on the balls of his feet. Another of the boys fiddled with a cellphone, as though engrossed, but really readying himself to sucker punch Cain from the side. All he was waiting for was the nod from the leader. The third youth was standing at the leader’s shoulder, ready to leap on board as soon as Cain was hurt.

  ‘No, but I’ve got some of these.’ Cain drew the Recon Tanto from one pocket, then the box-cutter from the other. The youths took a step back, but they were used to dealing with sharp-edged weapons. Nevertheless some of the cockiness had gone. Now they were trying to decide if this was such a good idea. Cain gave them even more to think about. He slipped the box-cutter away, snaked his hand under the tail of his coat and pulled out his Bowie. ‘Then there’s this motherfucking brute!’

  Subtly the distance between them had widened again.

  ‘And if that’s not enough . . .’ Cain put away the Tanto and pulled out the Walther P99. ‘There’s always this.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ the leader said.

  ‘I haven’t the time.’ Cain lifted the barrel of the gun so it was aiming directly at the youth’s groin. ‘So I suggest you just get the fuck out of here. All of you.’

  ‘Fuckin’ psycho!’

  ‘Yes.’ Cain gave them a death’s-head grin. ‘I am.’

  The three spun away and headed off the same way that they’d come. There was little swagger in their mincing steps now. He glanced around himself, checking that the small drama hadn’t earned him any unnecessary attention. The incident had gone unobserved. He slipped the gun away. The trio had made it to the far corner of the street. Feeling brave they offered him the finger, plus the two-fingered salute particular to the UK. Cain mimed an oral sex act, then mouthed, ‘Blow me.’ The youths decided there were less dangerous victims to be had elsewhere and headed off out of sight.