Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  “Doing what?” I said. “What the hell could I do?”

  The officer didn’t say another word. He waited for me to assume the position, and then he gave me a thorough pat-down. He nodded to the van driver, and I was allowed the courtesy of climbing up into the van.

  When I sat down across from Livermore, he looked at me and smiled. He was in the same jailhouse orange, with the same cuffs, chains, and shackles.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said.

  “Just shut up,” one of the guards said. They were both unarmed. Standard protocol. You didn’t want any weapon inside the van that could be taken away and used against you.

  The van started moving again. I could hear the voice of the van driver through the metal partition as he communicated with the rest of the convoy. Livermore kept watching me, that same smile on his face. I stared right back at him. I wasn’t about to look away.

  “We’ll take a right turn soon,” Livermore said without taking his eyes away from mine.

  The van driver relayed this to the other vehicles. A few minutes later, we came to a brief stop, then we made a slow turn and started going downward. There were no windows to see out of, but I could tell from the rough ride that we were on a dirt road.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I heard the van driver say into his radio.

  Halliday’s voice came back. “Keep going. Nice and slow.”

  Livermore kept watching me. “The Japanese have a saying,” he said. “Ame futte chi katamaru. Literally, it means, ‘After the rain, the earth hardens.’”

  “I told you to shut up,” the guard said.

  “What it really means,” Livermore said, “is that you and I are both going to find out just how hardened you really are.”

  “We’re in the goddamned desert,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to rain today.”

  “Alex . . .” he said, and then he paused before saying the five words that would become burned into my mind. “You think this ends today?”

  The guard to Livermore’s left leaned forward and looked at both of us. “Everybody,” he said, “shut the fuck up right now.”

  Livermore stopped talking, but he kept smiling at me, and the vague feeling I’d had all morning started to take on its own color and shape. This man is running the whole show, I said to myself. Even though he’s locked up tight, guarded by seven men . . .

  Livermore is calling every shot.

  The van came to a stop. A few seconds later, the back door opened. I was told to get out first. As I did, I saw that all three vehicles were parked where the road ended in a cul-de-sac, and a few yards beyond that there was an old mining shed that looked like it had been left for decades and forgotten about. More red rock was piled high all around us. The sun was almost directly overhead now. It beat down on us in that dead-end bowl, as the dust from the vehicles’ braking hung in the air.

  When the guards finally led out Livermore, he stood there blinking in the sunlight. The whole thing should have looked ridiculous to me—the two state guys with their tactical vests and their shotguns, the three guards from the jail and the two agents from the FBI. All to watch over this one man in orange with his hands cuffed to his belt.

  But no matter how chained-up Livermore looked . . . no matter how many men were surrounding him . . . no matter how many guns . . .

  “Where is the air support?” Livermore said as if reading my mind. “You only have eight men here. Surely you need a helicopter . . .”

  “Where’s the woman?” Halliday said. “In that shed?”

  “Down this trail,” Livermore said. “She’s not far.”

  “This is not believable,” Halliday said to him. “You drove her all the way down this dead-end road and then what, you made her walk down the trail with you?”

  “She was tied up, Agent Halliday. I carried her.”

  “How far can you carry an adult woman, Livermore?”

  Livermore looked at him with that little half smile. I’m sure Halliday hated it by now, maybe even as much as I did.

  “I’m stronger than you think,” he said.

  Agent Cook came up close to him. “Just show us where you took her, you sick fuck.”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  He led us toward the shed. As we got closer, a narrow trail appeared, leading through a break in the red rock.

  I took Halliday aside. It was time to say something to the one man who I knew would listen to me.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said. “I think you do, too.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking down the narrow path. “But you’re doing everything according to his playbook. He got you to fly me all the way across the country. Now he’s got all of us stumbling around out here in the middle of the desert . . .”

  “So what do you want us to do? Just leave her out here?”

  “There’s nobody here to find,” I said. “Think about it. What’s he getting out of this? Did you take the death penalty off the table? Promise him he wouldn’t go into general population?”

  “I don’t know what’s driving him. Maybe he’s just that fucking crazy, Alex. But if there’s any chance she’s out here . . .”

  He looked over at Livermore. This one man in orange, his legs so hobbled he could barely walk.

  “What if this was your daughter?” Halliday said. “Or your wife?”

  I knew there was no answer that would satisfy him. That was the ultimate trump card. Then Halliday took out his semiautomatic, as if that alone would be enough to convince me I had nothing to worry about.

  “Let’s go find out,” he said.

  I shook my head and followed him. The path squeezed through the break in the rocks, then opened up just enough to give us all a little more room to breathe. But the ground still rose on either side of the trail, more naked rock with that same scrubby green and gray vegetation, the great saguaro cactuses all lined up on the very tops of the ridges, like they were spectators looking down at us.

  Or waving their arms to warn us.

  We walked in silence for several minutes, making our way over the rough ground. Besides the shackles, Livermore was wearing his standard jailhouse shoes with no laces and struggling even harder than the rest of us to find his footing on the trail.

  The sun was beating down on us, and I was already getting thirsty. One of the state men had a backpack, and he stopped to pass out bottles of water. I drained half of mine at once.

  “Are you going to let me die of thirst?” Livermore said.

  It made me remember everything he had said about what the thirst was doing to that woman’s body.

  “You’ll get water after she does,” the officer said. Then he closed up his pack and we were on our way again. The sun got hotter, and my head started to hurt again. But we kept moving forward, as the trail started rising and winding its way between taller hills with more cactuses looking down on us.

  “You did not come this far,” Halliday said. “Not in the dark.”

  “She’s here,” Livermore said, raising his head into the air as if he could smell her. “A hundred yards away.”

  Halliday hesitated. I could tell he was thinking hard about it. Finally, he nodded, and the line of men continued around a bend in the trail, until we found ourselves at the entrance to a small side canyon, the walls rising straight up on both sides, thirty feet high.

  “She’s in this canyon,” Livermore said. “There’s a small shelter at the end. Go ahead and look.”

  “You first,” the van driver said, pushing Livermore ahead of him. “Move.”

  We followed them, each man looking up at the walls that seemed to close in on top of us. The two FBI agents were at the end of the line with me between them.

  I didn’t have a g
un. That was the difference. I didn’t have that simple, deadly arrogance I’d seen so many times before, the belief that a gun in your hand is enough to control everything around you.

  The van driver took the radio from his belt and looked at it. When he turned up the volume, the white noise reverberated through the canyon. “What the fuck,” the man said. “The radios are . . .”

  He didn’t finish the thought. Every man in the canyon stopped, and as Livermore turned, he caught my eye and smiled.

  The next three seconds filled an eternity. With that one simple act, Livermore had shifted all of the attention to me. Every other man was watching me now, waiting for whatever came next.

  “It’s time, Alex!”

  Livermore’s words hung in the still air of the canyon as seven different brains raced to process their meaning. I reached my own conclusion just as quickly, but it was too late.

  “Wait . . .” I said, already feeling two hands grabbing my shoulders from behind. I had no chance to react as everything tilted, and I felt myself being brought down to the ground. A man’s knee grinding into my back, a classic cop takedown, driving the air from my lungs as everything else in the world came apart at once.

  The first explosion shook the walls around us, a sound so loud it was a piercing physical impact against my ears. As I looked up I saw the men going down in front of me, saw blood sprayed against both sides of the canyon. If there were screams, I did not hear them. The second explosion was a wave of heat and concussion. The weight shifted on my back, moving backward, as I started to push myself up, just in time for one more blinding, noiseless flash and a sudden sting in my left knee and across my left biceps. The man who had been standing in front of me seemed to turn in the air in an oddly graceful pirouette, so that I could see how his upper body had been turned into a tangled mass of blood and fabric. He hung there for a moment, a marionette held up by invisible strings. Then he fell to the ground, his lifeless face inches from mine.

  Everything was still. Another eternal three seconds until I saw a figure slowly raising himself to a standing position, twenty feet ahead of me.

  Livermore.

  He shuffled toward me, his ankles still shackled together, until he came to an officer who was still moving on the ground. I saw the shotgun barrel being raised and pointed at Livermore, then Livermore calmly taking the gun away. He had just enough play in the handcuffs attached to his waist to get the index finger of his right hand onto the trigger. He pointed the gun back down at the man, and then there was a flash from the barrel and a dull sound like the dial tone on an old phone as the man’s head was blown apart against the ground.

  Livermore came to the next man, looked down at him and, seemingly satisfied with the body’s condition, kept moving until he came to the next man.

  You need to get up, I told myself. You need to get out of here.

  But I couldn’t move yet. I stayed there, feeling everything spin around me, until another dial tone hit my ears a fraction of a second before I felt the spray of blood on my face.

  I’m next. He’s going to do the same thing to me.

  When I looked up, he was close to me. His eyes were locked on mine as he stopped three feet in front of me.

  This is it. His will be the last face I see.

  I looked him in the eye and wondered if I’d even be able to hear the gun go off. There was another flash from the barrel, another dull sound that barely registered in my ears. I let out a breath, waiting for my body to react to the gunshot. For the pain to reach my brain.

  It never came.

  He stood there looking down at me. Then his lips moved like he was saying something to me, but there was no sound left in the world. Then with a sudden painful pop, my ears cleared, just enough to hear what he was saying.

  “I told you,” he said. “This does not end today. Not for us.”

  I clawed my way up to my hands and knees and reached for him, but he took one step backward and my head was spinning again. I tried to breathe. When I looked back up, he had already gone down the line of dead men, taking a weapon from each. A shotgun from the other trooper. A sidearm from the van driver. I felt around for something to hit him with. A rock, a stick, anything. It was the only thought I could form in my head.

  Stop him. Don’t let him get away.

  I reached behind me and felt something warm.

  Blood. A body.

  I turned and looked. It was Agent Cook. He was lying against the rock wall. His chest was soaked. I saw the blood coming in a steady stream from the hole in his neck.

  When Livermore had raised that shotgun . . . When I was waiting to die . . .

  He had shot Cook instead.

  The agent’s windbreaker was still tied around his waist. I took that off, wadded it up, and pressed it against his wound. But it was already too late. He kept looking at me, and then the light went out behind his eyes.

  When I finally gave up, I turned around and saw Livermore at the far end of the canyon. He lingered there for a moment, a dark figure against the bright sunlight that gleamed from the other side.

  He nodded to me, one more time.

  Then he turned and disappeared.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I WAS SURROUNDED by death. Surrounded by blood. The sun had moved to a new angle, making the red streaks on the rocks all around me glow in the light. I tried to stand up, felt everything spinning around me, and I went down hard on my knees. I stayed there for a long time, taking one breath at a time, waiting for everything to stop turning.

  The explosions were still pounding in my ears as I stared down at the dirt on the canyon floor.

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  When the spinning walls finally slowed down, then settled back into place, I looked up at the far end of the canyon, the last spot Livermore had stood before turning to leave. I put one foot on the ground to push myself up, feeling a sudden pain rip through my left knee. Blood had soaked through my pants, and I saw a half dozen small round holes in the fabric. There were three more holes in my left shirtsleeve, more blood soaking through. Whatever had been in those explosives, I’d been grazed on the left side, and somehow nowhere else.

  I tried to stand up again, starting with the right leg this time. When I was finally upright, I leaned against the canyon wall for a while, testing out my left leg, slowly putting weight on it until I was sure I could walk without going back down again.

  I knew Cook was dead. I checked on the other men in front of me, one by one. Livermore had destroyed them, every single man, ripped apart their bodies with the shotgun.

  Right here, I thought as I came to a hole in the canyon wall. There was a metal pipe set into the rock, four inches in diameter. About five feet above the ground, the perfect height for a head-and-neck shot. The metal was blackened now and still smoking. If you set the right kind of charge in here, it would blow horizontally. And if you knew to hit the ground in time, and cover your ears . . .

  How much time did he spend setting all of this up? How many days did it take for him to put this all together, before he was captured?

  The ultimate escape plan.

  I picked up the radio the van driver had dropped. It still had power, but I heard nothing but static. I went back to the trooper who had taken my cell phone, pulled it out of his pocket and checked the signal. It was just as useless.

  He planned this so carefully, I thought, not only does he tripwire enough explosives to kill seven men, he also triggers some sort of battery-operated radio jammer.

  I stood against the wall for another minute, looking up and down the canyon, trying to see it from his point of view, trying to imagine how any man could see this place and come up with such a plan. And then pull it off so flawlessly.

  Until he got to you, I said to myself. He had that shotgun pointed right at you. All he had to do was pull the trigger.r />
  That was when it hit me.

  Wait a minute . . .

  I did a quick count of the dead bodies I had checked.

  Where’s Halliday?

  I remembered him being at the back end of the line. I backtracked through the canyon to the point where it broke into a slight curve.

  Halliday.

  He was sitting with his back against the wall, looking at me. There was a great streak of blood across his face, more blood on his chest from injuries I could only guess at. As he raised one hand, I could see that he was missing the last two fingers.

  I went down on my right knee beside him, tried the radio again. Tried my cell phone. Still nothing. The road was half an hour away.

  “We have to get you out of here,” I said.

  He shook his head, but I wasn’t going to leave him there. I went back and found another man’s jacket, or what was left of it, came back and wrapped it around his hand, tying it as tight as I could. Then I went back and opened the state man’s pack and looked inside. The explosives had ripped right through the bottles. I found one that had an inch of water left, came back and made Halliday drink it. I put one arm around him, holding myself steady with my other hand against the wall.

  “Come on,” I said. “You have to get up.”

  He cried out in pain as I half pulled, half pushed his body into a standing position. He slumped forward against me and took what sounded like a man’s last breath. Then he seemed to gather some kind of strength from God-knows-where, and he looked in my eyes as he leaned his head back against the wall.

  “Can you walk?”

  He didn’t respond. But it was time to try. I guided him away from the wall, watching him take one slow step, then another. It took us a full minute to get out of the canyon, back into the sunlight. I felt it burning on the back of my neck.

  We took another step. Then another. The blood dripped from his ruined hand. I lifted up his shirt for one moment, saw a hundred small holes spread across his chest and abdomen. Like mine, each hole was bleeding. But he had a hell of a lot more of them. There was no way I could stop them all.