by Neil Mcmahon
“It could have been better. Worse, too.”
“He’s okay?”
“Physically,” Monks said.
She stood and came to him. He put his hands on her waist and kissed her. She started crying. Monks held her, feeling helpless. Now she was the one waiting to find out whether her child was alive. Acting on Glenn’s information, police had raided the place where Marguerite had called from, an isolated backwoods shack near the tiny town of Annapolis. But it was deserted by the time they got there, and she hadn’t been heard from again.
“He’s not going to hurt her, she’s carrying his bloodline,” Monks said, although the fear that he was wrong was another bitter gnawing in his heart.
“I just want it over,” Sara said shakily. “Lia back home again, everything like it used to be.”
“Soon,” Monks said, stroking her hair. “The net’s closing on Freeboot.”
“I want him dead,” she whispered.
41
Six days later, late in the afternoon, Monks was driving back to his house from Sara’s and stopped for gas in Santa Rosa, at one of those big plazas with a dozen pumps and a convenience store. The price of gasoline had gone up ten or fifteen cents per gallon since he’d last filled up, a couple of weeks earlier. He put thirty-four dollars’ worth into the Bronco and went inside to pay.
The clerk at the cash register was a woman who had to be at least seventy years old. She was carefully made up and groomed, and her dignified bearing was very much a lady’s, in spite of the store employees’ clownlike uniform of a pink polka-dotted shirt and a bow tie. It seemed odd that she’d be working at all, let alone in a place like this, probably for minimum wage. Skyrocketing living expenses on a fixed income, Monks thought, or maybe a gutted 401K, and this was the only kind of job she could get.
Feeling vaguely guilty, he walked back outside. His path was intersected by a man coming toward him-skinny, with lank shoulder-length hair, jeans and T-shirt that had been worn for days, and several highly visible tattoos.
“Hey, pardner,” he called to Monks. “Me and my friends got a little car trouble. We need a couple bucks for some oil. Could you help us out?” He jerked his head toward a big old sedan pulled up outside the store. Two other men of roughly the same description were leaning against it.
Monks hesitated, then said, “Sure.” He was used to being tapped by street people in San Francisco -it could cost several bucks to get across Union Square at night, paying tolls at every street corner-and when he was there, he carried folded one-dollar bills in his pocket. But here he was unprepared. He pulled out his wallet, extracted two singles, and handed them over.
“How about making it twenty?” the skinny man said, eyeing the other bills inside.
Monks blinked, taken aback. “Sorry. That’s going to have to do it.”
“Come on, man. You got plenty.”
“I’m glad to help within reason,” Monks said. “But I need money, too.” He started to put the wallet back in his pocket.
The man took hold of his wrist with a clawlike grip of surprising strength. He might have been thirty and was certainly not yet forty, but his thin, sallow face was ageless, his eyes burning with dead black fire from another world.
“Are you threatening me?” Monks said in amazement.
“Threat? Don’t insult me, man. I’m asking very politely.” The hand stayed on Monks’s wrist. His buddies who had been leaning against the car were walking closer now.
Monks almost laughed at the sheer outrageousness of this.
“You realize I can go back into that store and have police here in two minutes?” he said.
The skinny man’s mouth tightened, and his eyes drilled into Monks’s for a few more seconds. Then he let go his grip and went back to his car. The other men gave Monks measuring looks before they turned around, too.
He got into the Bronco and drove away, checking his mirror in case they followed. But they were back to leaning against their vehicle-probably waiting for the next mark, who might be more cooperative.
He realized that he was shaken, more so than he should have been. Partly, it was the brazenness of what had almost amounted to robbery, in a public place, in broad daylight. But something else disturbed him more deeply. He had to think for a minute to grasp it, but then it came-the way the skinny man’s mouth had tightened, and that final searing gaze. That was not just anger. It was a look that said, Okay, asshole, if you want to play hardball, that’s how it’s going to be.
The Bronco’s radio was tuned to a Golden Oldies station. Monks usually preferred quiet while he drove, but these past days he’d been keeping up with the news constantly, hoping for the welcome word that Freeboot had been captured.
After a few minutes, he caught an update.
“One of the largest manhunts in California history continues, for a charismatic ex-convict named James Reese, known to his followers as Freeboot,” the news announcer said. “Law-enforcement officials believe that Reese is the mastermind behind the Calamity Jane killings, as well as last week’s riot at Bodega Bay, which left twenty-one dead, including six police officers, with many more injured, and a damage toll in the millions of dollars.
“A San Francisco police car was attacked with gunfire earlier today, while making a drug-related arrest. The shots apparently came from a nearby building, but police were unable to locate a suspect. No one was injured.”
Monks turned the radio off. What the announcer hadn’t mentioned was that there had been two similar incidents during the past days, one in Philadelphia and one in Miami, where police cars had been fired on. The one in Miami had had the aspect of an ambush, with cops lured in on a phony call. An officer was killed and another wounded. There had also been a spate of random shootings in several cities-cars driving around at night, firing into parked vehicles, store windows, even private homes. No one yet had been hurt during those, but if they continued, it was only a matter of time.
In general, there was a sense that whatever mysterious societal force held chaos in check-not just law enforcement, but the awareness that there were lines that couldn’t be crossed-was eroding, fast.
He had been keeping in touch with Pietowski, and so he knew that FBI informants in the fringe world were aware of a sort of verbal underground newspaper that was developing, a word-of-mouth communication that spread through the country with amazing speed. It was urging the stockpiling of weapons and ammunition, attacks on law-enforcement officers, and random violence, especially against the affluent. It also threatened more incidents like Bodega Bay. Authorities admitted that they’d been caught napping, and vowed that nothing like it would happen again. But if thousands of people just started showing up someplace, what could be done? Call out the National Guard? Haul them all off to jail?
What if they started shooting?
Pietowski had hinted that behind the scenes in the political world the alarm was even more acute. The president himself had made a veiled allusion to Bodega Bay at a press conference, repeating his insistence that the United States government would not tolerate terrorism.
But these weren’t terrorists. These were citizens.
Monks turned off Highway 101 at Petaluma, relieved as always to get off the freeway onto two-lane country roads. Traffic thinned as he drove farther west, with the thick canopy of oaks, laurels, redwoods, and eucalyptus groves bringing an early dusk. It started to sink into him how exhausted he was. With all the troubles that still hammered at him, he felt a kind of numb joy at getting back to his own home. The world might be going crazy-crazier-but here, all was serene.
When he stepped inside his house, he was immediately hit by an ugly, fetid smell. It wasn’t one he encountered often, but he never forgot it.
Rotting flesh.
“Just like old times, huh?” Freeboot said from the darkened living room.
Monks had been cautious about his own security at first, but as the days passed, he had decided that the risk of Freeboot’s coming after him were nil, and the FBI h
ad a lot more important people to protect. His gaze swung toward the telephone. It was dead, its lights out.
Taxman stepped into sight, holding a submachine gun at the ready.
Monks felt a dizzying lurch inside his head, and feared that he was having a stroke, that he was going to seize up like a burnt-out engine and collapse to the floor.
Then, just as swiftly, the same euphoria that had come to him after his showdown with Freeboot touched him again-the sudden certainty that nothing more could happen that was worse than what already had.
“If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and get it over with,” he said. He walked across the kitchen and got a bottle of Finlandia out of the liquor cabinet.
Freeboot made a hoarse hacking sound that seemed to contain amusement.
“Let’s get down to it,” he said. “I ran out of junk. You keep Demerol here, your kid told me.”
“The kid you tried to have killed?” Monks said, dropping ice cubes into a glass. He felt detached, disembodied, almost like he was floating. He noticed that his hands were remarkably steady.
“That was nothing personal, just business.”
“Whose ear was it?”
“Nobody you know. I need a shot-now. So quit fucking around and get it.”
Monks set the ice tray on the counter and said, “All right. Where’s the wound, by the way?”
“How’d you know about that?” Freeboot said suspiciously.
“Are you kidding? I smelled it as soon as I walked in the door.”
“Get the shot.”
Monks walked down the hall to his office, with Taxman following. The phone in there was dead, too. He knelt on the floor and opened the safe where he kept an emergency supply of narcotics, his.357 Magnum, and several thousand dollars in cash.
“All the drugs, and the money,” Taxman said. He pulled the plastic liner bag out of a wastebasket, emptied it on the floor, and tossed it to Monks.
Monks stuffed the bundles of bills inside it, along with an unopened twenty-milliliter vial of hundred-milligram-strength Demerol, a packet of syringes, and a bottle each of Percocets and Vicodin. He waited, expecting Taxman to demand the pistol, too, but he said, “Okay,” and jerked his head back toward the living room. Apparently they had plenty of guns.
When they got there, a light had been turned on. Freeboot was sprawled on the couch, with one leg extended over the coffee table.
At the couch’s other end, huddled into herself, was Marguerite. She looked bewildered, dully frightened, but unhurt.
Another wave of relief washed over Monks.
“Say your little bitch ratted you off,” Freeboot said, pointing a thumb at her. “What would you do with her?”
“She’s carrying your child,” Monk said quickly. “Genetically pure this time.”
“Ain’t that a fucker?” Freeboot said, annoyed. “Confuses the whole issue.”
He took the plastic bag from Taxman. His left arm was already tied up with his belt, popping blood vessels thick as nightcrawlers in his forearm. He held the bottle to the light, examining the label, then unwrapped a syringe and inserted the needle through the vial’s seal. Monks watched him draw out just over one milliliter.
“For a guy who distrusts medicine, you know your dosage,” Monks said.
“This ain’t medicine, man. This is dope.”
Freeboot slid the needle into a vein, and a few seconds later, relaxed and laid his head back with a grunt. The lines of pain eased visibly out of his surgically thickened face.
Now Monks could see the wound-a hand-sized patch of crusted, blackened blood and scab toward the right side of his groin. The bullet must have missed the femoral artery, and the entry point was beneath most of the abdominal organs. But it almost certainly had penetrated the intestines-besides the gangrene, there would be infection, maybe peritonitis-and it might have ricocheted off bone, causing more organ damage.
“If that gets treated immediately,” Monks said, “you might make it. I’m talking hours.”
Freeboot smiled faintly. “The same argument we started with. Kind of like our song. It makes me go all gooey, thinking about it.”
“Let’s try another old song,” Monks said. “‘I hate to say it, but I told you so.’ Remember that one? It was one of those sixties Brit groups.”
He walked back into the kitchen and filled his glass with vodka.
“How about ‘Revolution No. 9’?” Freeboot said.
“A theme song for murder and havoc?”
“The motherfuckers are paying attention, you got to admit.”
Monks took a long sip, savoring what he figured was going to be his last drink.
“It looks to me like a giant step back toward barbarianism,” he said.
“You kick a dog long enough, that dog’s finally gonna bite you. This isn’t over, Rasp. It’s just getting started.”
Freeboot grimaced suddenly, his face contorting in a spasm. The Demerol would provide a little relief, but the agony had to be nearly unendurable. Only unconsciousness was going to keep it at bay now.
Freeboot reached for the bottle again and inserted the needle through the seal. Monks watched with surprise, then alarm, as he drew three milliliters, then five.
“That’s getting up toward lethal,” Monks said.
Freeboot ignored him and filled the syringe to the tenmilliliter mark.
Monks glanced quickly at Taxman and his weapon. Both looked ready.
“Remember one thing, Freeboot,” Monks said. “I had you in my sights and I let you walk away.”
Freeboot looked up at him-not with the stare that Monks was used to, but with weariness, and maybe pity.
“There’s no fucking truth,” Freeboot said. “Everybody’s full of shit, including me. I done what I could, man.”
This time, Monks got the sense that man was intended to include all of humankind.
Freeboot slid the needle into his arm. His thumb pushed the plunger all the way home. Almost immediately, he sagged, forward this time-chin falling onto his chest, right hand dropping to the couch, palm up, fingers slightly curled. The syringe still hung from his left forearm. Marguerite made a whimpering sound, turning her face away and curling more tightly into herself.
Taxman moved without hesitation, stepping forward to pick up the plastic bag of money and drugs.
Monks edged in front of Marguerite. “There’s no reason to hurt her,” he said.
Taxman looked at him curiously, as if Monks was a puzzle he couldn’t get a handle on.
“I watched you playing with the kid that night, making him laugh,” Taxman said. “I never could have done that.”
He flipped the weapon into the air, catching it by the breech in a quick, practiced motion. Then he strode across the room and out into the dusk, breaking into a lope, footsteps crunching lightly on the gravel drive until the sound faded.
Monks leaned down to Marguerite and carefully unclenched her hands with his own, then helped her to her feet.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to a phone and call your mom.”
Arm around her shoulders, he guided her out the door where he had first seen her standing on that night when all this had started, a million years ago.
Acknowledgments
As always, this book owes a great debt to many people who helped in its making. To name a few:
Chuck and Lois Anderson, Frank and LaRue Bender, Dan Conaway, Lisa Grubka, Mike Koepf, Drs. Dan and Barbara McMahon, Kim McMahon, Jill Schwartzman, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.
About the Author
NEIL McMAHON studied premed at Stanford and was later a Stegner Fellow there. He is the author of three previous Carroll Monks thrillers and a new stand-alone novel set in Montana-where he lives with his wife-to be published in 2006. You can visit his website at www.neilmcmahon.com.
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