“Price for what?”
“I said you wouldn’t understand. The greater purpose is more important than me, or you. It’s bigger than any or all of us. You said don’t make myself a murderer. This isn’t the first time for me. Chesty says it gets easier, but I don’t think so.”
“Who?”
“I told you – sort of. The President’s first campaign manager, Clyde. They weren’t so sure of him and asked me to get close. He was old. As old as you even, but I didn’t mind. I was used to it from before. We were secretly living together and I found out Mrs. Tufts was right. He was a traitor. He told me Mr. Tufts wasn’t moral enough to be President, as if morality has any place in politics. He was getting ready to talk to some reporter in New York.”
“You killed him?”
Alta’s eyes were no longer the color of rye grass. They had become brittle, the shade of a cheap emerald. “I liked him, but it was necessary. He was always gentle with me, like you. I think it’s because you’re both older. Young men tend to be rough, even when you’re not in the mood. I was upset at the time but Mrs. Tufts was right to make me do it. If something is important enough, it requires a price. If the price is high, that’s only a sign of how important the greater purpose is.”
“Like now? Killing her and me is difficult for you so that confirms how significant this all really is?”
Marei began to sob into her hands.
Alta looked at the woman contemptuously. “Not her. I should have slit her throat like a hog Saturday night just to be certain. Don’t think I haven’t thought about that a thousand times since,” she said to Marei. “I’m the cause of it all, you know, so this is only right. It was stupid of me. I know how vulnerable Mrs. Tufts is, the blind spot she has for her husband and his women. She has to stay with him. What choice has she got if she’s to accomplish great things? But the compromise makes her a little crazy about his lovers and she reacts irrationally sometimes. I should have remembered that. I’m more than her assistant, Danny. I’m the only friend she really has, the only one in whom she can confide. It carries with it a heavy burden. Last Saturday I was careless, stupid, like I said. Mrs. Tufts came to me in tears. Her husband had bragged about what a great time he’d had with... with this person here... and how a real woman could make a man feel great. He said as long as she... he put it crudely but meant that no woman who ever desired the comfort of another woman could ever really please a man. It was all so dumb.”
“What did you do?”
“I just told her wouldn’t it be something if she liked women too? You know the French, and Marty told me a story about her and that other woman putting on a sex show for the President. ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’ I said. I never should have opened my mouth.”
“You aren’t responsible, Alta. You can still put a stop to this madness.”
“There are prices to be paid. This is just more unpleasantness. There are always victims, Danny. Surely you know that, even if you never saw yourself as one. You didn’t have to get involved, did you? No one forced you into this. It was always your choice. What do you expect of me?”
“Not this.”
“I have to clean up the mess I left and should have taken care of Saturday night. That’s what I must do. And for it to mean anything, it has to hurt, you see?”
“They aren’t saints, Alta. They’re just two pretty shabby and unscrupulous opportunists.”
“You don’t understand, Danny, so don’t talk that way. You disappoint me.”
“Your orders were to get close to me, is that it?”
She nodded. “It wasn’t so hard. I just didn’t plan... I mean, I never thought I’d like you so much. Oh damn it!” She wiped at her glasses half-heartedly, then pointed the little revolver at Marei who drew a breath to scream. Powers shouted, “No-o-o!!”, as Alta fired three shots.
The bullets struck Marei in the chest. Her mouth froze into an oval. Her eyes showing amazement and incomprehension.
Alta swung the gun towards Powers, her wet pink tongue fixed between her lips in concentration, but his finger was already on the trigger of the Walther in his pocket. He squeezed once striking her low in the abdomen, some part of him not wanting to kill her, thinking as she doubled over that if he hurried and the roads were clear he could get her to a doctor and keep her from dying.
Alta moved backwards a short step and folded down on herself as if she had a terrible stomach ache. The gun looked heavy in her little hand as she dropped her arm nearly perpendicular to the floor. She looked up at Powers in utter confusion.
“Drop it, Alta,” he said, “Please. Just let it drop from your hand.”
She opened her mouth as if to speak then slowly raised the arm with the gun pointing it towards him. Powers squeezed the trigger again, this time putting the bullet through the lens of her glasses into her left eye.
TWENTY-THREE
Seven Fountains, 6:29 a.m.
Julie Marei was dead, her chest a crimson pattern on smooth skin, the blood rapidly dimming in luster, her face frozen in that final looked of incomprehension.
Alta Fort was an even uglier sight. The hollow point bullet had passed through the soft tissue of her eye and brain, expanding as it did, then blasted a large hole out the back of her skull. Her face was distorted as was always the case with such head shots. Her pink tongue somehow remained in place and now lay exactly in the middle of her bow-shaped lips.
Powers sat heavily on the straight back chair. A moment later he pulled the cell phone Alta had given him and stared at it. Not once had it occurred to him there was a tracking device in it, not even when he’d feared they’d plant one in any car he requested. He’d been too quick to dismiss his inability to shake Shanken and Lily to his own rustiness. He threw the telephone across the room, smashing it in the fireplace.
Powers head suddenly jerked up. “Shit!” he muttered. Alta wouldn’t be alone. She had just been the stalking horse. “Shit!” he said more loudly as he bolted out the front door to the Taurus.
“Hold it right there!” Shanken’s voice called out. Powers placed the car between them but the rear door was locked. He pulled the Walther out and fired twice into the window, shattering it, and yanked the weapons bag out as Shanken opened up with an M16 on full automatic. Powers dove to the front of the car and rolled as bullets tore into the glass and metal of the vehicle. When the clip was spent he scrambled to his feet and ran around the cabin, but Shanken was very fast or had someone with him because an M16 fired again, spraying bullets very close to him and this time one tore into the flesh of the calf of Powers’ left leg.
He went down, but was out of the field of fire behind the cabin. He scrambled to his feet, clutching the bag, and made it mostly on one leg into the tree line. He crawled on his hands and good leg until he was satisfied then examined the wound. No bone was shattered and the bullet had passed straight through soft flesh. It hurt like a son of a bitch. He pulled a handkerchief out and wrapped it tight around his calf to slow the bleeding. Then he crawled more cautiously, deeper into cover.
First things first. Was Shanken alone? Powers found that hard to believe. Lily would almost certainly be with him. The ghoul had always struck Powers as a city man, someone good in dark alleys. Sometimes men like that were natural hunters and performed just as well out in the open but not often.
Shanken was another story. Everything about him said “country,” and the synopsis Carmine had given told him not to underrate the man as an opponent, no matter how out of shape he looked. He’d know what he was doing.
The rain was gone now though the wood was saturated. Dirty white clouds rolled low overhead, swept quickly northward. The wind was a steady 30 miles an hour. Powers moved to his left, working his way in a lazy circle around the back of the cabin, passing at one spot, he realized, not 10 feet from the bodies of the two Frenchmen, then around until he was more in front of the cabin than beside it. At that point he crawled very slowly forward until he could see the BMW, the Cadillac,
the Taurus and the Explorer.
He quietly removed an AK47 and silently chambered a shell then lay waiting, using the pain in his leg to help with his concentration, as he listened for any sound behind or beside him in the brush and trees and watched for movement within his field of vision. Patience, patience, he reminded himself repeatedly.
“Powers!” Shanken called from his left, somewhere down the road, not all that far away. “I know you can hear me! Let’s work somethin’ out!” Pause, then in a more disgruntled tone, “Have it your way! I checked the cabin while you were playin’ Injun and the broad’s dead. I got the tapes and letters from the truck. That’s what this was all about. No one gives a rat’s ass about you. I can just drive away and let someone else worry about the rest. But we gotta know are you gonna make trouble, or can we count on you keeping your trap shut? That means we gotta talk, come to a meeting of the minds so to speak.”
Shanken was working his way up the road, moving closer as he talked. “Too bad about Alta. I really liked her. A great fuck, wouldn’t you say? Maybe not in the frog’s league from what I saw, but she had good natural talent for it. With the right handling early on she’d have been a real money machine for someone. A little crazy though, did you notice? I useda wonder when she’d flip out. Still, a great fuck and it’s always a shame to waste one of ‘em. You got guts, I’ll give you that. My guess was you’d hesitate before putting any bullets into the body that made you feel so good, and that’s when she’d nail yah, but was I wrong. Two shots, one to the gut for a slow death – I guess you still had some questions to ask – the other through the eye. Fuckin’ A, I say! So come on. Let’s be friends. We start muckin’ around the woods with guns and stuff someone’s gonna get hurt and frankly I’m too old for this shit. My cold’s killing me, honest to God. I got a sick wife who doesn’t deserve to be a widow lady. You got a life to get back to. You’re a man of your word. I know we can cut a deal here.”
The wind blew, clouds rushed overhead and heavy drops of water dripped from the leaves but otherwise it was silent.
“You saw the money, right?” Shanken was almost to the clearing now, not more than 10 feet behind the BMW, but out of sight. “It’s a cool half million. You want another half I can swing that. If you’re greedy and want more you’ll have to talk to the boss man about that. I mean Karp, he’s running the show now, not the other guy. Come on, Powers! Ally, ally, auction, free, free free!”
There was nothing after that. Then a full five minutes later Shanken resumed. Now he was even closer, having entered the woods and moved to Powers’ left, advancing through the tree line towards his position. “I know I got yah. I saw you go down and I spotted the blood. Maybe I got yah better than I thought and we should talk about gettin’ you to a doc. Just let one round off. Just one so I can find you and get you to help. Come on fella, give yourself a break.”
No sign of anyone else. Either Lily, or whoever Shanken had with him, was exceptionally good at concealment and sitting still, or the man was alone. He was getting disconcertingly close. By chance, Powers thought, but close nonetheless.
“You know I got a weak ticker, Powers. Honest to God. Come on! Give me a break! I’m soaked already. Enough’s enough!”
Taking a full minute to make the move, Powers turned cautiously just slightly onto his right side to give him a better angle towards his left. Shanken opened up with his M16. Bullets flew around Powers, just above him, in front and behind him. He counted three clips, the second two placed in the weapon in record time. Shanken was running to his own right as he fired. Probably seeking something solid to put between him and me, Powers thought, before I start shooting back.
The M16 was a great gun in Powers’ estimation, not quite the gun the AK47 he had was, but a great gun, though with one profound drawback. The small high-velocity bullets it fired were designed to be unstable on impact so as they tumbled through flesh they caused the greatest damage. But if they struck anything first – a branch, a twig, a leave – the tumbling started prematurely while the bullets were still mid-air causing them to scattered like shotgun pellets in an unpredictable pattern. Powers was unscathed but doubted his luck was going to last. Shanken was too good.
Powers crawled out of the woods to the clearing using his elbows like they taught at OCS then turned a sharp right and wiggled 15 feet before reentering the woods headfirst where he stopped and listened. Nothing but wind and falling water drops. A half hour passed by his watch, dragging as if a half day had passed. Finally he spotted something to his left, much farther away then he’d thought Shanken could possibly get unobserved. It was so little motion he waited some more then there it was again, five feet away from where he’d first seen it.
Powers fired three long bursts, one left, one right, one dead center. He rolled four times as experience and training taught, changing clips as he did.
“Fuckin’ A!!” Shanken shouted. “Where the hell you learn that?” Then he opened up with his M16, firing five rounds, working the area heavily, but coming close to Powers just once. Then he heard a sound Powers thought he’d forgotten a lifetime ago and in his mind screamed, Grenade!!, and threw his hands across the vulnerable back of his neck, trying to disappear into the spongy earth.
The explosion rocked him, followed by a second, a third, then a fourth. Shanken would be advancing now, Powers knew, taking advantage of the disorientation that immediately followed the concussions, but he’d be smart enough not to rush straight from where he’d last seen him. Powers guessed left for no reason other than there were only two choices and lay down a withering field of fire. Then he scrambled backwards and to his right.
Three hours later it was mid-morning and Powers was beginning to suspect he’d been lucky and killed Shanken. The sky was nearly clear, the wind was down to a brisk 15-mile clip and the woods were much drier. The throbbing in his leg had become nearly unbearable.
At last and without warning Shanken broke from the trees and ran heavily towards the far side of the cabin, limping badly, his M16 flopping up and down on its strap, his hat pulled tightly on his scalp. Shanken was into cover before Powers could fire. He drug himself deeper into the woods, rose, nearly screaming out loud at the pain then ran, mostly on one leg, cutting a direct line towards the location from which Shanken had first called out. It was noisy going but he reasoned the man was cutting and running. He’d get out with his car then telephone for help from the main road.
Branches snapped at Powers’ face, he caught his forehead on a low branch and nearly fell but he made it before Shanken. It was a dust colored mid-size Chevrolet, government issue. Powers waited and there he was, running, if that was the word for it, very slowly, his face a bright red, his pale green raincoat wet and torn. The crushed fedora was missing and Shanken’s long fringe of hair was matted against him. He was sweating all out of proportion to the temperature and effort. He didn’t look frightened or even agitated, just like someone in a great hurry whose body was failing him.
Shanken lumbered awkwardly up to the car, too preoccupied to look around him, blood running from his hip or thigh down his leg. He struggled with the keys, dropped them, and stared for a moment as if the effort of retrieval would be Herculean. He braced himself on the car with his left hand, then leaned down, holding himself with one hand in the mud, the other on the car. Ever so slowly he keeled over, landing at last face first.
Powers watched for five minutes as the man lay virtually unmoving on the road before cautiously moving to check him.
Shanken was still breathing though not without some effort. Powers pulled the M16 away, then a Colt revolver, a .38 Police Positive of all things, standard issue to police officers 40 years before. No more hand grenades, Powers was pleased to discover. He rolled him onto his back.
Shanken’s face was a ghastly white, the dry skin mottled like worn parchment. His mouth worked in a peculiar twist and Powers leaned down, smelling cigarettes and peppermint. “Almost got you, fella,” he breathed. “For a guy who was al
ways the walking dead you’re one tough mother fucker to kill off.” The effort to speak seemed to exhaust him.
“Where’s Lily?”
“That’s a good one.” Shanken tried to laugh. “You’d be dead if he was where I wanted him.” He grimaced in pain, then grunted, “Pills, in here.” He gestured with his eyes towards the pocket of his jacket. Shanken looked near death. Powers fumbled in the pocket for the pills and with dismay felt the man’s hand move towards him. In it was a white handled Buffalo Horn switchblade knife, the sharp point pressed against his jacket. One thrust and Powers was dead, but the knife was frozen in place. Shanken grunted again with effort but life was rapidly leaving him. His eyes grew round and large, saliva foamed in the right corner of his mouth, then the air eased out of his body in a protracted rattling sigh.
Powers drew his fingers from the pocket and stared at the nitroglycerine tablets.
TWENTY-FOUR
Seven Fountains, 10:53 a.m.
From Shanken’s car Powers recovered the athletic bag with the tapes and letters. He located a Casio digital camera and added it to the cache. There was a Magellan locator but he left it. Leaving Shanken where he was Powers limped back up the road. He searched the BMW but found nothing of use, just a wrapper paper from MacDonald’s, an empty Styrofoam coffee cup and a new box of .38 Special cartridges with six missing. In the cabin he took his time dressing his wound with Marei’s bandages. The two unmoving women were his company.
He returned to Shanken and methodically searched his clothing, taking a black address book from his right coat pocket. Then he snapped a series of photographs with the camera, walking and snapping his way back to the cabin, past the BMW, the Taurus, the Cadillac, the Explorer to the porch and into the house where he continued taking pictures. Put together they would be a series of movie-like stills that documented the scene.
When he was finished he checked Alta carefully and found nothing of use. Then he wrapped the tapes, letters and disc from the camera into a tight package which he addressed and placed in his coat pocket.
Shadows and Lies Page 21
