Shadowfires

by Dean R. Koontz

“Not much farther,” Sharp said, leaning forward in his seat, peering intently through the windshield. “Slow it to a crawl.”

  — no solution at all, because if he shot Sharp, no one would ever believe that Sharp had intended to kill Shadway and Mrs. Leben — after all, what was the bastard's motive? — and Peake would wind up on trial for blowing away his superior. The courts were never ever easy on cop killers, even if the cop killer was another cop, so sure as hell he'd go to prison, where all those seven-foot-tall, no-neck criminal types would just delight in raping a former government agent. Which left — what? — one horrible choice and only one, which was to join in the killing, descend to Sharp's level, forget about being a legend and settle for being a goddamn Gestapo thug. This was crazy, being trapped in a situation with no right answers, only wrong answers, crazy and unfair, damn it, and Peake felt as if the top of his head were going to blow off from the strain of seeking a better answer.

  “That's the gate she described,” Sharp said. “And it's open! Park this side of it.”

  Jerry Peake stopped the car, switched off the engine.

  Instead of the expected quietude of the forest, another sound came through the open windows the moment the sedan fell silent: a racing engine, another car, echoing through the trees.

  “Someone's coming,” Sharp said, grabbing his silencer-equipped pistol and throwing open his door just as a blue Ford roared into view on the road above them, bearing down at high speed.

  * * *

  While the service-station attendant filled the Mercedes with Arco unleaded, Rachael got candy and a can of Coke from the vending machines. She leaned against the trunk, alternately sipping Coke and munching on a Mr. Goodbar, hoping that a big dose of refined sugar would lift her spirits and make the long drive ahead seem less lonely.

  “Going to Vegas?” the attendant asked.

  “That's right.”

  “I 'spected so. I'm good at guessing where folks is headed. You got that Vegas look. Now listen, first thing you play when you get there is roulette. Number twenty-four, 'cause I have this hunch about it, just looking at you. Okay?”

  “Okay. Twenty-four.”

  He held her Coke while she got the cash from her wallet to pay him. “You win a fortune, I'll expect half, of course. But if you lose, it'll be the devil's work, not mine.”

  He bent down and looked in her window just as she was about to drive away. “You be careful out there on the desert. It can be mean.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She drove onto I-15 and headed north-northeast toward distant Barstow, feeling very much alone.

  26

  A MAN GONE BAD

  Ben swung the Ford around the bend and started to accelerate but saw the dark green sedan just beyond the open gate. He braked, and the Ford fishtailed on the dirt lane. The steering wheel jerked in his hands. But he did not lose control of the car, kept it out of the ditches on both sides, and slid to a halt in a roiling cloud of dust about fifty yards above the gate.

  Below, two men in dark suits had already gotten out of the sedan. One of them was hanging back, although the other — and bigger — man was rushing straight up the hill, closing fast, like a too-eager marathon runner who had forgotten to change into his running shorts and shoes. The yellowish dust gave the illusion of marbled solidity as it whirled through veined patterns of shade and sunshine. But in spite of the dust and in spite of the thirty yards that separated Ben from the oncoming man, he could see the gun in the guy's hand. He could also see the silencer, which startled him.

  No police or federal agents used silencers. And Eric's business partners had opened up with a submachine gun in the heart of Palm Springs, so it was unlikely they would suddenly turn discreet.

  Then, only a fraction of a second after Ben saw the silencer, he got a good look at the grinning face of the oncoming man, and he was simultaneously astonished, confused, and afraid. Anson Sharp. It had been sixteen years since he had seen Anson Sharp in Nam, back in '72. Yet he had no doubt about the man's identity. Time had changed Sharp, but not much. During the spring and summer of '72, Ben had expected the big bastard to shoot him in the back or hire some Saigon hoodlum to do it — Sharp had been capable of anything — but Ben had been very careful, had not given Sharp the slightest opportunity. Now here was Sharp again, as if he'd stepped through a time warp.

  What the hell had brought him here now, more than a decade and a half later? Ben had the crazy notion that Sharp had been looking for him all this time, anxious to settle the score, and just happened to track him down now, in the midst of all these other troubles. But of course that was unlikely — impossible — so somehow Sharp must be involved with the Wildcard mess.

  Less than twenty yards away, Sharp took a shooter's spreadlegged stance on the road below and opened fire with the pistol. With a whap and a wet crackle of gummy safety glass, a slug punched through the windshield one foot to the right of Ben's face.

  Throwing the car into reverse, he twisted around in his seat to see the road behind. Steering with one hand, he drove backward up the dirt lane as fast as he dared. He heard another bullet ricochet off the car, and it sounded very close. Then he was around the turn and out of Sharp's sight.

  He reversed all the way to the cabin before he stopped. There he shifted the Ford into neutral, left the engine running, and engaged the handbrake, which was the only thing holding the car on the slope. He got out and quickly put the shotgun and the Combat Magnum on the dirt to one side. Leaning back in through the open door, he gripped the release lever for the handbrake and looked down the hill.

  Two hundred yards below, the Chevy sedan came around the bend, moving fast, and started up toward him. They slowed when they saw him, but they did not stop, and he dared to wait a couple of seconds longer before he popped the handbrake and stepped back.

  Succumbing to gravity, the Ford rolled down the lane, which was so narrow that the Chevy could not pull entirely out of the way. The Ford encountered a small bump, jolted over it, and veered toward one drainage ditch. For a moment Ben thought the car was going to run harmlessly off to the side, but it stuttered over other ruts that turned it back on course.

  The driver of the Chevy stopped, began to reverse, but the Ford was picking up a lot of speed and was bearing down too fast to be avoided. The Ford hit another bump and angled somewhat toward the left again, so at the last second the Chevy swung hard to the right in an evasive maneuver, almost dropping into the ditch. Nevertheless, the two vehicles collided with a clang and crunch of metal, though the impact wasn't as direct or as devastating as Ben had hoped. The right front fender of the Ford hit the right front fender of the Chevy, then the Ford slid sideways to the left, as if it might come around a hundred and eighty degrees until it was sitting alongside the Chevy, both of them facing uphill. But when it had made only a quarter turn, the Ford's rear wheels slammed into the ditch, and it halted with a shudder, perpendicular to the road, effectively blocking it.

  The stricken Chevy rolled erratically backward for maybe thirty feet, narrowly missing the other ditch, then came to a halt. Both front doors were flung open. Anson Sharp got out of one, and the driver got out of the other, and neither of them appeared to have been hurt, which was pretty much what Ben had expected when the Ford had not hit them head-on.

  Ben grabbed the shotgun and the Combat Magnum, turned, and ran around the side of the cabin. He sprinted across the sun-browned backyard to the toothlike granite formations from which he and Rachael had observed the place earlier. He paused for a moment to scan the woods ahead, looking for the quickest cover, then moved off into the trees, toward the same brush-flanked dry wash that he and Rachael had used before.

  Behind him, in the distance, Sharp was calling his name.

  * * *

  Still caught in the spiderweb of his moral dilemma, Jerry Peake hung back a little from Sharp and watched his boss warily.

  The deputy director had lost his head the moment he had seen Shadway in the blue Ford.
He had gone charging up the road, shooting from a disadvantageous position, when he had little or no chance of hitting his target. Besides, he could see that the woman was not in the car with Shadway, and if they did kill the man before asking questions, they might not be able to find out where she had gone. It was shockingly sloppy procedure, and Peake was appalled.

  Now Sharp stalked the perimeter of the rear yard, breathing like an angry bull, in such a peculiar state of excitement and rage that he seemed oblivious of the danger of presenting such a high profile. At several places along the edge of the woods, he took a step or two into the knee-high weeds, peering down through the serried ranks of trees.

  From three sides of the yard, the forested land fell away in a jumble of rocky slopes and narrow defiles that offered countless shadowed hiding places. They had lost Shadway for the moment. That much was obvious to Peake. They should call for backup now, because otherwise their man was going to slip entirely away from them through the wilderness.

  But Sharp was determined to kill Shadway. He was not going to listen to reason.

  Peake just watched and waited and said nothing.

  Looking down into the woods, Sharp shouted: “United States government, Shadway. Defense Security Agency. You hear me? DSA. We want to talk to you, Shadway.”

  An invocation of authority was not going to work, not now, not after Sharp had started shooting the moment he had seen Ben Shadway.

  Peake wondered if the deputy director was undergoing a breakdown, which would explain his behavior with Sarah Kiel and his determination to kill Shadway and his ill-advised, irresponsible, blazing-gun charge up the road a couple of minutes ago.

  Stomping along the edge of the woods, wading a few steps into the underbrush again, Sharp called out: “Shadway! Hey, it's me, Shadway. Anson Sharp. Do you remember me, Shadway? Do you remember?”

  Jerry Peake took one step back and blinked as if someone had just slapped him in the face: Sharp and Shadway knew each other, for God's sake; knew each other, not merely in the abstract as the hunter and the hunted know each other, but personally. And it was clear — from Sharp's taunting manner, crimson face, bulging eyes, and stentorian breathing — that they were bitter adversaries. This was a grudge match of some kind, which eliminated any small doubt Peake might have had about the possibility that anyone above Sharp in the DSA had ordered Shadway and Mrs. Leben killed. Sharp had decided to terminate these fugitives, Sharp and no one else. Peake's instincts had been on the money. But it did not solve anything to know he had been right when he'd smelled deception in Sharp's story. Right or not, he was still left with the choice of either cooperating with the deputy director or pulling a gun on him, and neither course would leave him with both his career and his self-respect intact.

  Sharp plunged deeper into the woods, started down a slope into the gloom beneath interlacing boughs of pine and spruce. He looked back, shouted at Peake to join in the chase, took several more steps into the brush, glanced back again and called out more insistently when he saw that Peake had not moved.

  Reluctantly Peake followed. Some of the tall grass was so dry and brittle that it prickled through his socks. Burrs and bits of milkweed fluff adhered to his trousers. When he leaned against the trunk of a tree, his hand came away sticky with resin. Vines tried to trip him up. Brambles snagged his suit. His leather-soled shoes slipped treacherously on the stones, on patches of dry pine needles, on moss, on everything. Climbing over a fallen tree, he put his foot down in a teeming nest of ants; although he hurriedly moved out of their way and wiped them off his shoe, a few scaled his leg, and finally he had to pause, roll up his trousers, and brush the damn things off his badly bitten calf.

  “We're not dressed for this,” he told Sharp when he caught up with him.

  “Quiet,” Sharp said, easing under a low-hanging pine branch heavy with thorn-tipped cones.

  Peake's feet almost skidded out from under him, and he grabbed desperately at a branch. Barely managing to stay on his feet, he said, “We're going to break our necks.”

  “Quiet!” Sharp whispered furiously. Over his shoulder, he looked back angrily at Peake. His face was unnerving: eyes wide and wild, skin flushed, nostrils flared, teeth bared, jaw muscles taut, the arteries throbbing in his temples. That savage expression confirmed Peake's suspicion that since spotting Shadway the deputy director had been out of control, driven by an almost maniacal hatred and by sheer blood lust.

  They pushed through a narrow gap in a wall of dense and bristly brush decorated with poisonous-looking orange berries. They stumbled into a shallow dry wash — and saw Shadway. The fugitive was fifteen yards farther along the channel, following it down through the forest. He was moving low and fast, carrying a shotgun.

  Peake crouched and sidled against the wall of the channel to make as difficult a target of himself as possible.

  But Sharp stood in full view, as if he thought he was Superman, bellowed Shadway's name, pulled off several shots with the silencer-equipped pistol. With a silencer, you traded range and accuracy for the quiet you gained, so considering the distance between Sharp and Shadway, virtually every shot was wasted. Either Sharp did not know the effective range of his weapon — which seemed unlikely — or he was so completely a captive of his hatred that he was no longer capable of rational action. The first shot tore bark off a tree at the edge of the dry wash, two yards to Shadway's left, and with a high thin whine, the second slug ricocheted off a boulder. Then Shadway disappeared where the runoff channel curved to the right, but Sharp fired three more shots, in spite of being unable to see his target.

  Even the finest silencer quickly deteriorates with use, and the soft whump of Sharp's pistol grew noticeably louder with each round he expended. The fifth and final shot sounded like a wooden mallet striking a hard but rubbery surface, not thunderous by any means but loud enough to echo for a moment through the woods.

  When the echo faded, Sharp listened intently for a few seconds, then bounded back across the dry wash toward the same gap in the brush through which they had entered the channel. “Come on, Peake. We'll get the bastard now.”

  Following, Peake said, “But we can't chase him down in these woods. He's better dressed for it than we are.”

  “We're getting out of the woods, damn it,” Sharp said, and indeed they were headed back the way they had come, up toward the yard behind the cabin. “All I wanted to do was make sure we got him moving, so he wouldn't just lie in here and wait us out. He's moving now, by God, and what he'll do is head straight down the mountain toward the lake road. He'll try to steal some transportation down there, and with any luck at all we'll nail the son of a bitch as he's trying to hot-wire some fisherman's car. Now come on.”

  Sharp still had that savage, frenetic, half-sane look, but Peake realized that the deputy director was not, after all, as overwhelmed and as totally controlled by hatred as he had at first appeared. He was in a rage, yes, and not entirely rational, but he had not lost all of his cunning. He was still a dangerous man.

  * * *

  Ben was running for his own life, but he was in a panic about Rachael as well. She was heading to Nevada in the Mercedes, unaware that Eric was curled up in the trunk. Somehow Ben had to catch up with her, though minute by minute she was getting a greater lead on him, rapidly decreasing his hope of closing the gap. At the very least he had to find a telephone and get hold of Whitney Gavis, his man in Vegas, so when Rachael got there and called Whitney for the motel keys, he would be able to alert her to Eric's presence. Of course, Eric might break out of that trunk or be released from it long before Rachael arrived in Vegas, but that hideous possibility did not even bear contemplation.

  Rachael alone on the darkening desert highway… a strange noise in the trunk… her cold dead husband suddenly kicking his way out of confinement, knocking the back seat off its hinge pins… clambering into the passenger compartment…

  That monstrous picture shook Ben so badly that he dared not dwell on it. If he gave it too much
thought, it would start to seem like an inevitable scenario, and he would be unable to go on.

  So he resolutely refused to think the unthinkable, and he left the dry wash for a deer trail that offered a relatively easy descent for thirty yards before turning between two fir trees in a direction he did not wish to pursue. Thereafter, progress became considerably more difficult, the ground more treacherous: a wild blackberry patch, wickedly thorned, forced him to detour fifty yards out of his way; a long slope of rotten shale crumbled under his feet, obliging him to descend at an angle to avoid pitching headfirst to the bottom as the surface shifted beneath him; deadfalls of old trees and brush forced him either to go around or to climb over at the risk of a sprained ankle or broken leg. More than once, he wished that he were wearing a pair of woodsman's boots instead of Adidas running shoes, though his jeans and long-sleeve shirt provided some protection from burrs and scratchy branches. Regardless of the difficulty, he forged ahead because he knew that eventually he would reach the lower slopes where the houses below Eric Leben's cabin stood on less wild property; there he would find the going easier. Besides, he had no choice but to go on because he did not know if Anson Sharp was still on his tail.

  Anson Sharp.

  It was hard to believe.

  During his second year in Nam, Ben had been a lieutenant in command of his own recon squad — serving under his platoon captain, Olin Ashborn — planning and executing a series of highly successful forays into enemy-held territory. His sergeant, George Mendoza, had been killed by machine-gun fire during a mission to free four U.S. prisoners of war being held at a temporary camp before transfer to Hanoi. Anson Sharp was the sergeant assigned to replace Mendoza.

  From the moment he had met Sharp, Ben had not cared for him. It was just one of those instinctive reactions, for initially he had not seen anything seriously wrong with Sharp. The man was not a great sergeant, not Mendoza's equal, but he was competent, and he did not do either drugs or alcohol, which put him a notch above a lot of other soldiers in that miserable war. Perhaps he relished his authority a bit too much and came down too hard on the men under him. Perhaps his talk about women was colored by a disquieting disrespect for them, but at first it had seemed like the usual boring and only half-serious misogyny that you sometimes heard from a certain number of men in any large group; Ben had seen nothing evil about it — until later. And perhaps Sharp had been too quick to advise against contact when the enemy was sighted and too quick to encourage withdrawal once the enemy was engaged, but at first he could not have been accurately labeled a coward. Yet Ben had been wary of him and had felt somewhat guilty about it because he had no substantial reasons for distrusting his new sergeant.