Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  He was an eminence grise at last.

  On the other side of the desk were the two brown leather suitcases. They hadn’t yet been opened. Faroe had been so eager to get Parillaud over to the concrete hangar that he’d said the cases could wait until later. Herrera and most of his boys were with Faroe. Atwater had Arcadia more or less to himself. He was aching to see inside the cases—he had high hopes that he’d find something especially damaging on his boss, the D.A., like maybe a snapshot of him being fucked in the ass by a donkey—but he hadn’t dared sneak a look. He didn’t trust Jefferson not to have planted some kind of booby trap in them and didn’t want to be blamed if anything went wrong.

  As to what the hell Faroe was doing to Parillaud in the Stone House, Atwater wasn’t interested. He was too cool to get involved in emotional disputes; that was why Faroe had fucked himself up in the first place; that was why Atwater had succeeded so spectacularly. He was the ice man. Others could fuck up their judgment with emotions, but not him. Filmore Faroe was half-crazy with amphetamine shots and rage. Atwater was concerned for him, but what the hell, the guy had been caged up for a decade and it was early days. He had a right to blow off some steam. He would calm down soon enough. Then Atwater would ease “Colonel” Herrera out of the frame. Herrera had had his uses, true, but the gunplay was over now and guys like him were a liability. Atwater was the number-one shithammer now: there was a new marshal in town and the sooner people got used to the idea the happier their lives would be.

  A plane buzzed overhead and Atwater frowned. They weren’t on any flight paths here. He listened more closely. It wasn’t a jet engine. Some weekend flier. Hey, maybe he would get a pilot’s license for himself. He would have to spend the money he was going to make on something. He emptied his glass and put it down and walked around the table and squatted down by the two bulging suitcases. They looked ordinary enough, but then they would. He was sorely tempted. Maybe there was a little something in there he could take for himself without telling Faroe, for personal insurance. He had a sudden image of himself with his arm blown off, or drenched with wash-proof dye. No. He’d played his hand to perfection so far. Let Faroe open the cases; later there would be an opportunity to sneak something away.

  The airplane came over again. This time it was so low the windows shook in their frames.

  “What the fuck?” muttered Atwater.

  He stood up and walked over to the window and looked out across the great lawns of the esplanade. He felt the color drain from his face.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Rufus Atwater ran over to the desk and grabbed for the phone.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ELLA wanted to take a blast on Titus Oates’s joint but she feared that if she did she wouldn’t be able to do what was required of her. A madman like Oates could probably conduct a gun batde while stoned but she doubted that she could. Even so, the grass would have been soothing. She was confident that she looked cool enough on the outside—she was used to brassing it out onstage—but inside she was mush. It felt like all her bones had dissolved.

  Yet somewhere inside the mush there was something hard, hard and strong and yet warm. All her life there’d been an unasked question in her heart, not something that had troubled her, just a vapor of uncertainty. It seemed like it shouldn’t make any difference where she came from or how or why. She was who she was, wasn’t she? But in the course of a single conversation with Grimes she had changed; she was different; she was still her and yet at the same time someone else. And the someone else was filled with an aching sadness and a violent love for Lenna. Could love be violent? Yes. Its energy was so great that it had to be so—an elemental violence like a powerful wind or a crashing sea. It was a violence without malice or hate and she hoped that Grimes was right and George had been wrong. She didn’t want to have to hate anyone in order to do what was right. And no matter how frightened she was, she knew it was right to go to Lenna. If she didn’t at least try then the identity that had given her the strong warmth inside would never truly be hers. The wind and the sea didn’t make deals; and neither would she. In the cockpit she heard Titus Oates call out to her. “Ella?”

  She turned and looked at the smoke-wreathed beard and the pulled-down cap. Beneath the cap were a pair of big, crazy eyes that she could not read. She sensed that Oates could kill you on a Monday if he wasn’t on your side, and die for you on a Tuesday if he was. What determined whether he was or not was probably unknown even to Oates himself, and perhaps to him most of all.

  “Ella, you’re a smart chick,” said Oates. He jutted his beard toward Grimes. “But you’ve thrown in with this asshole, right?”

  Grimes prodded at a graze on his face.

  “To the end of the line,” replied Ella.

  Oates looked at Grimes as if her answer implied some deep mystery.

  “So, in a nutshell,” said Oates, “you’re asking me to get myself killed and destroy my livelihood—and a whole fuckload of the finest sipping whiskey I ever even seen—for no gain whatsoever.”

  “What should it profit a man,” said Grimes, “if he should gain the whole world but lose his immortal soul?”

  Oates laughed like a psychopathic Santa Claus.

  “I told you, Doc, I’m having serious doubts about Christianity.”

  Ella said, “I can pay you.”

  Oates stopped laughing. He and Grimes turned toward her together. Ella reached in her bag and pulled out the envelope Jefferson had given her. For some reason, since Grimes had told her Lenna’s story—and hers—it was no longer difficult to think of Charlie as Jefferson. From the envelope she pulled out two thin plastic wallets and some papers. She’d opened the packet earlier but with so much else going on they hadn’t seemed worth mentioning. She handed the wallets over to Grimes. They were bankbooks.

  “Jefferson gave them to me,” said Ella.

  Grimes flicked through them impassively, then handed them to Oates. Oates’s eyes bulged.

  The wallets contained two bank deposit books, one of them in the Bahamas, the other in the Cayman Islands. They were in her name and contained a total of two and three-quarter million dollars, a figure so unimaginable to her as to be meaningless. Grimes took the wallets from Oates and handed them back to Ella. She put them away.

  “Do we have a deal?” asked Ella.

  Oates said, “The Koran instructs us that ‘persecution is more grievous than slaying.’ Seems to me this big-shot scumbag Faroe is guilty of both.”

  He pulled on his beard.

  “The book goes on to say: ‘but fight them not by the holy mosque until they fight you there, then, if they fight you, slay them.’ ”

  He looked at Grimes from under the brim of his cap.

  “ “Such is the recompense of unbelievers.’ ”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Ella.

  Grimes glanced at her as if he thought she was losing it.

  Oates nodded. He fumbled in his pocket.

  “I figure those backwoodsmen musta given me this little souvenir for something.”

  Oates opened his palm to reveal a huge cartridge with a bullet as thick as the end of his thumb.

  “Deer slug,” he said. “Under that seat I got a Remington 870 cut down to seventeen inches. Security.” He put the slug back in his pocket. “Anyhow, I never could resist a God-given opportunity to kick ass. How’re we going to get in?”

  Grimes peered out of the cockpit and put his hand on Oates’s arm.

  “There,” said Grimes. “That’s Arcadia.”

  Oates looked. “You telling me that’s our landing zone, Doc?”

  Ella stuck her head into the cockpit and followed their gaze. Below them was a vast flat blackness. Standing bright in the middle of it was a pool of yellow light. As she looked harder and they got closer she saw a building, a mansion that looked like a courthouse or a bank, with its front facade illuminated. In front of the mansion stretched a thin ribbon of illuminated road.

  “You’ve got light,
and the driveway’s three or four hundred yards long,” Grimes said. “It’s the closest we’ll get. And there’s a fair chance Filmore Faroe’s in there right now.”

  Titus Oates wrinkled his nose. Without speaking he took out a pair of Aviator shades and put them on.

  Grimes said, “Where the road looks like it ends, I mean going away from the house, it runs into a bunch of trees.”

  “Better get in back and batten down, then,” said Titus Oates. “And open the cargo door.”

  “Why?” asked Grimes.

  “If it gets jammed we don’t wanna be trapped inside.”

  Grimes climbed into the hold and wrestled open the cargo door and slid it back. The wind was intense. Grimes locked the door in place then buckled himself in next to Ella. His face was pale. Ella almost asked him if he was okay, then decided that it might make him feel worse and he would only say yes anyway.

  “Are you okay?” asked Grimes.

  “Right as rain,” said Ella.

  “We can still call this off if you want to,” he said.

  “Do you want to?” she replied.

  “Better not ask,” said Grimes. He turned. “Gul!”

  Gul trotted from the rear of the hold, where he’d been sniffing around. At the open door he paused and looked out. Ella’s heart stopped.

  “Gul!” she yelled.

  Gul turned, wondering what the fuss was about, and came to Grimes. Grimes pulled him between his thighs and locked his arms around the dog’s chest.

  The plane took a stomach-churning dip.

  “We’re going in!” growled Oates.

  Ella looked at Grimes. Grimes winked at her. Ella winked back, then bent forward and clasped her elbows to her knees. As she did so she heard Grimes murmur into Gul’s ear.

  “Hang in with me, pal, and you’ll be okay.”

  Ella closed her eyes.

  Titus Oates bellowed, “For Allah is Lord! And mighty is his sword!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THROUGH the open cargo doorway Cicero Grimes could see the tops of the trees skimming by, inches below the belly of the De Havilland. Over the roar of the propeller and the sucking of the wind he heard Titus Oates hollering oaths to himself in the cockpit. There was a sudden, violent dip and Grimes thought he was going to throw up, then his spine jolted with a massive impact and he knew his seat belt was going to tear away from the wall. He closed his eyes and clung to Gul. Gul, his head over Grimes’s shoulder, uttered not a murmur. The seat belt held.

  Grimes’s head filled with rumbling. His bones registered a different quality of movement. Wheels. The big rubber wheels were grinding along the driveway. They were on the ground. Grimes opened his eyes. Through the open door he saw the lawns of Arcadia speeding past. The whole fuselage trembled with the strain of braking. He saw a gray blur and an instant later a deafening bang stunned his eardrums. The plane bucked and juddered. Screaming metal. The speeding ground loomed toward the door as the plane tipped then righted itself. Slower now. Grimes glanced at Ella: she was huddled beside him, her eyes clenched shut. Grimes twisted forward and looked over Oates’s shoulder: through the shell of the cockpit loomed the Doric columns and wide steps of Arcadia.

  They were heading straight for the portico.

  Grimes pulled back and braced himself. A moment later he left his seat and the belt almost cut him in half as the plane mounted the steps and barreled on. There was a vast, grinding crash of metal and stone. The cabin lights cut out. Grimes felt the breeze of something huge brush past him and splinter against the forward bulkhead. A dense mist of alcohol fumes swept into his nostrils.

  Then everything stopped.

  Grimes’s vision was blurred and it was dark. In his arms Gul was panting.

  “Good man,” said Grimes. He couldn’t hear his own voice.

  Grimes let Gul go. He unsnapped his belt and turned to Ella. She was moving but he couldn’t make out her features. Her voice reached out faintly to his concussed ears.

  “You okay?” she said.

  She was fine, then.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  He stood up unsteadily. Ella’s face came into focus. From the direction of the cockpit he sensed a bulky rummaging, then heavy feet crunching on broken glass. Titus Oates emerged. His cheeks and brow were speckled with grazes. In one hand was the cut-down Remington. One lens of his Aviators was cracked.

  Grimes squatted down by his father’s body.

  “Leave him,” said Oates.

  Grimes looked up. Oates took his shades off and threw them away.

  “We got a lot of inflammables and a red-hot engine,” said Oates. “Sorry, man.”

  Oates racked a shell into the cut-down and went to the door. Grimes pulled the tarp back from his father’s face. The cheeks were sunken and gray.

  “Ella,” said Oates.

  Grimes found Ella looking over his shoulder at George.

  “Goodbye,” said Ella to George.

  She followed Oates. Grimes hung on for a moment. He didn’t know why.

  “Doc! Goddamnit!””

  Grimes pulled the tarp back over George’s face and stood up. In the cargo doorway Gul stood waiting for him, flapping his tail. Between the door and the inner portico wall there was a two-foot gap filled with floating dust.

  Grimes said, “Let’s go, pal.”

  Gul jumped down and Grimes followed him. To his left, the entrance to Arcadia was blocked by rubble and the twisted blades of the propeller. Along the outer metal skin of the plane was a great gash where the wing had been torn off. Grimes clambered down the steps toward the pillars and lights. Out on the lawns to either side of the drive, both wings of the plane lay amid the rubble of the two marble statues that had shorn them off.

  “Over here!”

  Twenty yards to his left Titus Oates, with Ella next to him, beckoned Grimes toward one of the elegant floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted the house. Grimes started toward them, after Gul. As he cleared the plane’s tail section there was a dull whoosh behind him. He looked back and saw a billow of flame flare out from the cargo door. Grimes ran.

  He found Oates and Ella stomping the glass and wooden crosspieces from the tall window frame. Oates finished the job with the butt of the Remington, ducked and stepped inside. Gul picked his way through the glass. Grimes and Ella followed. The room was similar to the parlor where he’d first met Lenna. Oates strode over, opened the door and glanced professionally back and forth down the corridor.

  “Anyone know where we’re going?” said Oates.

  As Grimes walked across the room he oriented himself The study seemed like the best place to start. He led out into the corridor and found his way toward the main hallway. As they approached it smoke drifted toward them. Oates put a hand on Grimes’s shoulder and pulled him back.

  “There’s still a fuckload of aviation fuel in that thing that hasn’t blown yet.”

  Grimes looked. In the main hall the big carved front door lay flat on the tiles where it had been rammed from its hinges by the twisted nose of the plane. The nose itself was wreathed in flames.

  “I don’t know any other route,” said Grimes.

  “Then make it fast.”

  They ran with Grimes through the smoking hall and past the walls of paintings toward the study. Beside him jogged Ella, gun in hand. Grimes’s Colt was still in his belt. Gul trotted a yard in front, Oates brought up the rear. They reached the study. The double doors were closed. Gul put his nostrils to the crack and started his soft death growl. From inside came a muffled but audibly panic-stricken voice. Grimes looked at the door handles. He took hold of Gul’s collar and pulled him back. Gul strained toward the doors.

  Grimes said, “Open it, Titus.”

  Oates leveled the cut-down at the handles and blew the doors apart.

  Grimes let go and Gul went, roaring savagely toward a bleating vibrato of terror. Oates darted after him, shotgun to shoulder. Grimes followed and saw Rufus Atwater make it onto the leather-topped desk i
n one fear-fueled leap. As he teetered for balance Gul lunged up and snapped his jaws around Atwater’s ankle. Atwater’s scream drowned out the sound of crunching bone. Gul dragged him from the table with a contemptuous heave. As Atwater smashed, squealing, into the floor, Gul let go and made as if to go in for seconds.

  “Gul!” ordered Grimes. “No more.”

  Gul stopped and hovered over the blubbering prosecutor. Grimes walked over and saw the automatic under Atwater’s arm. Grimes un-holstered the gun and tossed it to Oates. He grabbed Atwater by the lapels and hauled him to his feet. Atwater was gagging with terror. His eyes when they locked onto Grimes’s contained a desperate plea for mercy. Grimes thought of his father. He remembered to keep his neck loose, for maximum whiplash velocity, then head-butted Atwater in the bridge of the nose. Atwater sagged and groaned pitifully through the blood pouring from his nostrils. Grimes held him up. For a moment he was blind with rage. Haifa dozen ways to kill the prosecutor rippled through his mind. He didn’t; but he had to do something or his brain would burst. He hawked a mouthful of phlegm and spat in Atwater’s face. Atwater cringed. Grimes grabbed Atwater’s scrawny throat and pulled him close.

  “Do you remember, Mr. Prosecutor, what happened to Jack Seed’s balls?”

  Atwater nodded. He had stopped breathing. Grimes squeezed some more.

  “Answer me.”

  Atwater croaked, “Yes.”

  “Good. Where’s Lenna?”