Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  “Smith.” The man hesitated for a fraction of second, but it was long enough for Gabriel to notice.

  “This could still end well for you, Agent,” pause, “Smith. So, next question. You and your friends were sent to beat me up. Not to kill me, though. I saw you go for your gun, but you stopped yourself. Why?”

  The man calling himself Smith drew in a hissed breath and let it out again in a groan.

  “You’re asking questions about Vincent Calder. That’s a really bad idea. Take it from me. You need to back off.”

  “Boss?”

  “What?”

  “Your boss, man! Who’s in charge?”

  Smith shook his head.

  “I can’t. Please. You have to get me to a hospital. I’m getting cold, OK? It’s shock. Feel my pulse.”

  “Fuck your pulse!” Gabriel shouted, making Smith flinch. He took hold of the free end of the belt. “I don’t, at this point, give a flying fuck whether you live or die. I’ll take this off and leave you for the coyotes and the mountain lions. So give me a name or shock will feel like a holiday compared to what’s out there waiting for you.”

  The man’s eyes fluttered and he mumbled something.

  Gabriel slapped him hard.

  “Again!”

  “Cruikshank. Cruikshank! Now get me to a hospital. I’m dying.”

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “Inside jacket pocket.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Smith raised a bloodied hand, reached inside his jacket and produced a phone.

  Gabriel took it.

  Then he dropped it to the ground and stamped on it with the heel of his boot, grinding and twisting it underfoot until it was smashed and splintered.

  Smith’s eyes were wide.

  Gabriel looked down.

  “You’re corrupt. I know the type. You and your friend hired a couple of losers to fuck me up. To warn me off. There’s a veteran of the US Marine Corps and Delta Force lying underground because of you or the people you work for. Now is the moment of truth. Your redemption, if you like. You answer one more question, truthfully, and you live. Lie, or get clever, and I’ll know. Then I climb in to the car, drive back to San Antonio, and leave you here for the wildlife. Ready?”

  “Quickly, please.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why did the CIA kill Vinnie?”

  “Talk to Clark Orton. He’s—” Smith managed, before slumping back, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in spasms.

  In the distance, Gabriel heard the plaintive howls of coyotes. The moon was bright against a cloudless sky, and the stars were out. Billions of points of light in the black. With his hands under Smith’s armpits again, he dragged his unconscious form to the rear of the Town Car. He left him there and opened the driver’s door, reached in and popped the trunk. The space was huge, easily big enough for Smith and even a couple of buddies from behind Catfish Charlie’s. Gabriel heaved him over the metal lip and rolled him onto the carpeted floor. The gunshot wound was a mess, but the blood was only trickling out. Plenty left in the tank. He slammed the trunk lid.

  The coyotes sounded as though they were singing to the moon. Pleading for food, maybe, or just celebrating their existence out here, far from humans and their guns. Gabriel should have climbed straight into the Town Car and begun the long drive back to San Antonio. But he needed a plan. He wanted to know more about Orton’s work for the CIA. He knew he’d just crossed a line. A bloody big line. You didn’t go up against the world’s premier crowd of spooks without backup. He had none. And how was he going to deliver Smith to an emergency room without attracting attention? He walked away from the car for a hundred yards or so, then stood, completely still.

  He lay on his back, closed his eyes and let the cool breeze blowing from the north whisper to him. He concentrated, focusing on the layers of sound combined into that soughing whisper until they resolved into separate streams. A tumbleweed’s bouncing progress across hard-packed earth. Sand grains skittering along in wind-driven races. The rustle of his windcheater. Sagebrush plants bowing and bending, shedding dry leaves and dead twigs. And something else. A voice. Quiet at first, then growing louder until he could make out individual words.

  Don’t back down, man.

  It was Vinnie. Gabriel breathed slowly, stared up at the infinite blackness overhead and let him speak from beyond the grave.

  You swore to find my killers. So the CIA are involved. So what?

  Yes. So what? Gabriel thought. Shooting honourably discharged veterans through the chest and then chucking them out of helicopters couldn’t be official Agency business. Smith, if that was his real name, had to be working off the books. Maybe this Cruikshank was, too.

  He got to his feet and trotted back to the Town Car. He popped the trunk again. Smith was still out. Breathing steadily, though; Gabriel could see the smooth rise and fall of his chest. He climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine.

  After an hour of traffic-free highway, Gabriel had sunk into a reverie. The headlights threw a sickly yellow cast over the onrushing road for seventy feet or so, but further ahead, and to the sides and rear, everything was as black as the inside of a cave. He wasn’t sleepy, but his conscious mind had wandered off to consult past missions and discuss aspects of the unfolding case with former colleagues, both alive and dead. The road ahead was a monotonous, fine-grained pattern, leavened by a scuffed white line and occasional road number markings.

  A sudden banging from the rear of the car brought him to full alertness. He turned round in his seat, but the back seat was empty. Must be Smith kicking at the side of the trunk. Good. That means he’s conscious again.

  Gabriel turned to face forward. And yelled in terror.

  Standing in the middle of the road was Vinnie Calder. The front of his shirt was discoloured by a spreading bloom of blood, black in the moonlight. His left arm was gone. He raised his right out to the side, palm uppermost. His eyes were glowing green marbles in the headlamps’ watery glare.

  Instinctively, Gabriel wrenched the wheel over to the right in an attempt to avoid the apparition. The car slewed off the blacktop onto the loose grit at the side of the road. The rear wheels lost traction, and the car began to spin. Then they bit down into the earth again, jerking the car into a new trajectory. Gabriel fought the bucking wheel, trying to steer into the skid. He saw a boulder out of the side window. The rear wheel rode up and over it. With a bang, the rear of the car lifted clear of the ground then thumped down again. Miraculously, the impact hadn’t triggered the air bag, and Gabriel drifted the car back onto the road. He was facing back the way he’d come. Of Vinnie’s shade, there was no sign. But twin trails of black rubber curved off the blacktop as if to avoid some imaginary object blocking the road.

  Heart racing, Gabriel swung the car through a hundred and eighty degrees, and, slower than before while he let his nerves settle, drove on, back towards San Antonio. When he reached the city limits, he planned to find a deserted lot and ask Smith a few more questions. Then leave him in the car to find his own way to an emergency room. Was he worried about having taken on the CIA? Not really. His immediate plans involved a trip somewhere far, far away from Texas.

  29

  A Time to Stay and a Time to Leave

  “PERFECT!” Gabriel said. The strip mall had clearly failed some years before, to judge from the rundown look of the units, all with ‘For Lease’ signs plastered over the windows. He swung the wheel over and without slowing, drove straight into the long row of diagonal parking spaces across from the retail units. He was heading for the last unit. As he expected, the roadway curved round the shop front and led to a large rectangular concrete apron designed for delivery vehicles, utilities and rubbish bins.

  He killed the engine, pulled a switch to open the trunk and climbed out. At two in the morning, the temperature was still seventy degrees or so. The moon’s white light was just as bright here as it had been in the desert, though
it bounced off steel, glass and asphalt instead of the loose surface and plant life of the Chihuahuan wilderness.

  At the rear of the car, Gabriel lifted the trunk lid with his fingertips. He looked down at Smith. What he saw made him frown deeply.

  “Shit!” he muttered.

  The floor of the trunk was black in the moonlight, but the smell was familiar enough for Gabriel to be sure the man had bled out. Smith was lying in a lake of blood that stretched from left to right and from front to back of the trunk. The makeshift tourniquet had popped off his thigh, presumably under the force of the impact with the boulder, and Smith had been either unconscious or too weak or disorientated to retie it. Maybe the round had clipped an artery after all, or passed close enough to weaken it.

  Scratching at his scalp, Gabriel walked out from behind the car and stared at the perimeter of the lot. The back corner disappeared into a screen of thick vegetation and trees beyond that. He walked over to investigate, looking around him as he neared the shrubs bordering the concrete apron. No fence, that’s good. He pushed through the lower-growing plants and squeezed between a couple of thorny shrubs, hissing in pain as he scratched his arm on the vicious, two-inch spines. No, and none needed. Once through the improvised security fence, he emerged into a stand of silver birch and oak trees. He walked between them for a couple of hundred yards without breaking cover. The noise from the road was a distant hiss now, and in front of him there just seemed to be more trees, many of them clad in dark swags of glossy ivy. He saw what he was looking for and picked his way between the thorn bushes and out to the safety of the parking lot.

  Lights off, he nosed the Town Car into the bushes, wincing involuntarily as the thorns drew their spiny fingernails down the blackboard of the car’s flanks with a high-pitched metallic screeching. He had to blip the throttle a couple of times to juice the car through a particularly sturdy trio of bushes and then, with a whistle of spines on paint, he was through and into the trees. Spinning the wheel left and right in a crazy dance of sharp turns, he ploughed deeper and deeper into the woodland until he found the small clearing he’d spotted on his recce.

  He got out for the last time, locked the car and then flung the keys away into the darkness. Barely any moonlight penetrated this tangled patch of trees and undergrowth, and he had to move around cautiously, not wanting another encounter with the thorns. He gathered up armfuls of fallen branches and dead bracken and lay them across the trunk lid, roof and hood of the car. Next, he lay more against the fenders and the doors. Finally, he threw handfuls of leaves and the rich, deep humus of the forest floor over the whole thing. He knew it wouldn’t escape a detailed search, but he was relying on that not happening. Or not here. He backed away from the shrouded car, using a fallen branch with a wide fan of leaves to sweep over his tracks. Emerging from the trees, he pulled the branches he’d disturbed back into place, then repeated the process with the thorn bushes.

  Back on the road, he began walking towards downtown. He wasn’t holding his thumb out. He guessed the kinds of people he’d accept a lift from would be at home in bed at 3.00 a.m., and the kinds of people who might offer him one now were more likely to cause trouble than relieve it.

  He’d covered two miles when the choked-off whoop of a police siren brought him to a halt. Pasting his ‘harmless civilian’ smile onto his face he turned slowly and waited. The cruiser eased forwards until the driver’s window was level with his hip. He squatted down as the window descended with a whirr.

  “You OK, sir? It’s kind of late to be out,” the officer said, shining a torch in Gabriel’s face. He was thirtyish, white and wearing gold-rimmed glasses.

  Gabriel shielded his eyes from the torch beam and adopted an upper-class accent he’d last heard from the lips of a Coldstream Guards major whose family owned half of Bedfordshire.

  “That’s awfully bright. I don’t suppose you could lower it a little, could you?”

  The officer aimed the beam at the centre of Gabriel’s chest.

  “What are you doing out here, sir?”

  “I was just out for a walk, officer.”

  “A walk?” He stressed the word as if Gabriel had told him he was looking for his home planet.

  “Yes. You know, a constitutional. A stroll. I usually go for a potter about when I can’t sleep. Insomnia, I’m afraid. Always had it. Got worse after Afghanistan. Now I spend half the blithering night tramping about like I’m on a route march.”

  It was a masterstroke. At the mention of Afghanistan, the police officer’s face relaxed and he broke into a smile. He turned to his colleague, whose own face was in shadow.

  “Hey, Janine. This crazy Brit served in Afghanistan.”

  “Is that right?” she said. She leaned across her colleague to get a look at Gabriel. “You serve, sir? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He read her name off her badge. “Yes, Officer Figueras. Messy old business, eh?”

  “Damn straight,” she said before straightening in her seat again. Her colleague spoke.

  “Listen, it’s not a bad neighbourhood, but it’s probably best for you to take your little stroll closer to your hotel, OK? We’ll take you. Where are you staying?”

  “Oh, well, there’s really no need, but if you’re sure, it’s the La Quinta Riverwalk. It’s on—”

  “Blum Street, yeah, I know it.”

  After fifteen minutes of polite conversation, the cruiser pulled up outside the La Quinta. Gabriel thanked the officers profusely. He waited for the driver, an Officer Roman, who’d served two tours in Afghanistan with the Twenty-Second Infantry Regiment, to let him out. Then he shook hands, waved and smiled some more before entering the brightly lit reception through a set of revolving doors.

  He walked towards the reception desk, staffed at this ungodly hour by a tired-looking blonde with bright pink fingernails. She looked up as he arrived and smiled, showing perfectly even white teeth. He looked over his shoulder. The cruiser had gone.

  “May I help you, sir?” she asked.

  He thought about declining and asking for her to call him a cab back to Helotes but then fatigue overtook him like a black wave.

  “I’d like a room please. One night. No luggage.”

  He placed a credit card on the counter and smiled.

  While she found him a room and printed off a form for him to sign, he texted Terri-Ann.

  Staying in town tonight. Will explain in the morning.

  He peeled off his clothes and collapsed back onto the bed. To the whisper of the air conditioning unit, he fell asleep.

  He woke early, ate a quick breakfast, then took a cab to Terri-Ann’s place. He stepped out of the car’s pine-scented interior at 10.00 a.m., and headed inside. On the way up the flagstone path to the front door, a car horn made him turn round. Pulling up at the curb in a silver Ford F150 pickup was JJ Highsmith.

  Gabriel waved, then waited halfway up the path for JJ to join him.

  “Hey, man,” JJ said with a smile as they shook hands. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” Gabriel said. “Major discovery yesterday, but possibly major trouble, too. I’ll tell you inside. How about your end of things?”

  “About the same.”

  The two men sat at the kitchen table, their unofficial HQ. A laptop sat unopened at one end of the table. Terri-Ann had made coffee and they drank gratefully. She’d stood a whiteboard in a corner of the kitchen. Across the top she’d written in a neat, blue heading:

  Who killed Vinnie Calder?

  The stark question was underlined in red. From her vantage point to the side of the whiteboard, black dry wipe pen held ready in her right hand. Gabriel thought he detected a defiant jut to her chin and something behind those eyes that spoke of newfound resolve.

  “You won’t be getting any more of the sobbing widow from me, boys,” she said. “I’ll be doing my grieving in private. From now on, I’m in charge of this investigation. The SAPD is a busted flush so it’s us against the world. OK with you?”r />
  “Fine by me,” JJ said with a grim smile.

  “No complaints here, ma’am,” Gabriel added.

  She smiled back.

  “OK, then. Well, as they say round these parts, y’all have a hard row to hoe, but God willing, we’ll get to the end of it in one piece. So, who wants to go first?”

  “I’ll start,” Gabriel said. “It’s the old good news/bad news routine, I’m afraid.”

  “Give us the good news.”

  “I got a definite steer last night from a reliable source that we need to talk to Clark Orton again.”

  “And the bad?”

  “The source was a CIA agent sent to put me in hospital. He told me his boss was called Cruikshank.”

  “Well, you’re here, so I’m not sure that counts as bad news.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Terri-Ann froze in the act of turning to write on the whiteboard. JJ was leaning forwards, looking at Gabriel with an unreadable expression. It could have been anger. It could have been puzzlement.

  “Please tell me you didn’t kill him,” he said.

  Gabriel winced.

  “I shot him, but I didn’t kill him.”

  He explained the circumstances that led to Agent Smith’s death. The others listened in silence. When he’d finished, Terri-Ann spoke first.

  “You know what? If the CIA is sending gangs of thugs to beat up British visitors to Texas, I’m pretty sure that’s outside their scope. Read the news! They’re under scrutiny right now. The President himself has ordered an investigation into the way they operate. So maybe this Smith character was acting on his own. Maybe there won’t be any repercussions. But I’m a hundred percent certain there will if you go after this Cruikshank guy.”

  JJ unfolded his massive arms, which he’d crossed in front of his chest at some point during Gabriel’s narrative.

  “Forgive me, but Gabriel just admitted to killing—” He glanced up at Terri-Ann’s pursed mouth. “OK, causing the bleeding to death of a CIA agent. I think it’s fair to say there’ll be a reaction of one sort or another. Even if it isn’t the official kind.”