A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  There were hunting rifles and handguns, desert boots, denims, thick shirts, knives. Lock controlled his breathing. The place had the excitement of an Aladdin’s cave. ‘You want a hunting licence, feller?’

  ‘I might as well.’

  ‘You shoot good enough not to harm yourself nor anybody else out there?’ Lock nodded. The storekeeper produced the hire forms, the insurance docket, the hunting licence. Lock produced his passport. At once, the storekeeper looked up, surprised. ‘You planning on leaving the country with my stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought it might help,’ Lock offered, a new bout of tension seizing his head like a migraine.

  ‘You city boys,’ the storekeeper sniffed. ‘OK — you go pick out some clothes and a rifle, I’ll use this here passport for the details.

  Like you say, it saves time.’ He donned wire spectacles and studied the passport which, to Lock at least, looked suspiciously unused. James Laurence was the name on it, a resident of Baltimore.

  He was in advertising. ‘You here on vacation?’ he heard from the storekeeper.

  ‘My wife’s folks live in Phoenix — retired out here.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Lock selected two shirts and a pair of denims from the shelves, tried on a pair of boots. Then he inspected a glass case of handguns. There was a Smith & Wesson 459, a gun he had handled in the field. The rifles were racked on the wall beside the window.

  ‘You got an address in Baltimore — make that Phoenix?’

  Lock supplied a fictitious number on Camelback Road. The storekeeper scribbled. Lock would have liked the M-16, but as a civilian he knew he ought to choose something that approximated to a hunting weapon. He reached out, tentatively touching each of the rifles in turn. It was as if he were making some bargain, signing something irrevocable, were he to buy one of them.

  There was a Ruger single-shot carbine, looking as if it belonged in Bumbte Bee and not the world beyond it. It was accurate, though. At too close a range. He chose another Ruger, the Mini-14, on which a telescopic sight could be mounted and its magazine could hold up to thirty rounds. A ten-round magazine would make it lighter. He ignored the shotguns.

  ‘You done shopping, feller?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lock indicated the Ruger, and a scope from the glass case.

  Then the Smith & Wesson pistol. Then a knife. He dumped the shirts and denims and the boots beside the weapons.

  ‘You’re sure aiming to do some serious hunting,’ the man observed mockingly, a greedy glint in his eye. He had difficulty preventing his hands from rubbing themselves together in congratulation.

  A truck pulled up outside and Lock flinched. An arm, throwing. Newspapers landed on the stoop near the old man in the hard chair. ‘You want a paper?’

  ‘No.’

  The storekeeper shrugged. ‘I’ll bring ‘em in later. Food, feller —‘cross the street. Not old Colonel Sanders but the cafe next to it. Sell you anything you want — say, you’ll need camping equipment, right?’ His grin broadened into what might have been carnivorous appetite.

  It was another fifteen minutes before Lock was shown out to the jeep he had contracted to hire. His face was on the front page of the Phoenix newspaper lying on the sidewalk near the dozing old man’s boots. He shivered again. His suit was in the sports bag. The storekeeper had allowed him to change his clothing behind a rudimentary curtain at one dim end of the store.

  His photograph, supplied by the Washington PD, was there for the man to recognize, in all probability, only moments after he cut the rough string holding the bundle of newspapers together.

  Then he would phone the cops in Phoenix … He felt his whole body become sacklike, all his determination slumped in him like a great weight dragging him down. He barely heard the storekeeper’s words of advice and warning as he took a map from the man’s hand with a vague, numb grip. The storekeeper studied him, then shrugged. The jeep was insured, you’ve paid for the equipment, I don’t have any problem if you get lost and die out there, his look said.

  Lock started the jeep and pulled away from the store along the town’s one street. He sensed the storekeeper watching his departure. He would buy food later. All that was important now was to get out of Bumble Bee before an alarm was raised. He was hungry and his throat was dry. He headed north, accelerating involuntarily towards the 1-17.

  The weight in his stomach increased and his shoulders slumped. His knuckles were white, gripping the wheel.

  Serious hunting. It had been said mockingly. It might easily come to that.

  Serious hunting …?

  The pistol and the rifle were a joke, part of an elaborate charade. Lock pulled the jeep off the highway just north of Cordes Junction, onto a dirt road that wound drily towards tree sloped mountains. He parked beneath a paloverde, startling a mourning dove from its branches. He watched the bird circle, then flutter back to rest; returning as surely as his thoughts to the same perch. It was no good, there was no point in running.

  He couldn’t fly away from it … He switched off the engine and at once the desert silence encroached, pressing against his ears like a depth of water.

  The song of a cactus wren pierced the quiet, slitting it like a blade, relieving the pressure of the desert; though not the weight of his thoughts. Nowhere to run … the one inescapable fact being the girl’s body on the sofa of his apartment. There was evidence, eye-witness accounts, a continental manhunt … He raised his head, eyes closed tightly, to the sky. Opened them and saw chollas, barrel cactus, buckthorn — felt dust on the faint breeze. It settled on his hands. He let his head drop forward onto the steering wheel.

  He was hungry. He had bought food at one of the service stations at Cordes Junction — where they would remember him, have his description for anyone who asked — but a pervading sense of nausea prevented him from reaching for the food. It was akin to despair, the sense of failure that enveloped him.

  Pete Turgenev was seven thousand miles away and more, safe in Siberia, while he was on the run from his people, Tran, and the police. Those brute facts had pursued him along the highway like a desert wind, however fast he drove, however hard he gripped the wheel and tried to retain a hold on his imagination.

  But they had overtaken him the moment he stopped to buy food, spare cans of petrol, water. Pete Turgenev was safe while he was surely, inexorably, being run to earth. Impotence, fruitless, pointless rage, were all he had left. His picture was in maybe fifty newspapers in a dozen states already. There was no way out of it.

  The wren poured out its strange, rasping song, largely unnoticed, punctuating the passage of a blank, dead time. The faces of Beth, Kauffman, Billy, Vaughn, the dead girl, all circled in his mind, Turgenev’s most of all. They were moving as slowly as distant comets, too distant to have any significance …

  The wren’s song, the faces, the hard rustle of the cactus and the Lock looked up. The dust that surrounded the jeep was made as murky as a sandstorm by the hovering helicopter, its down draught ploughing at the red desert. It was becoming more difficult for the marksman to aim accurately. He had to keep moving, had to help create the dust-screen. The jeep stumbled and tore its way through the thickly scattered sagebrush and cactus, crushing low hedgehog cactuses, swinging to avoid the chollas and the scattered, isolated paloverdes. The mountains appeared more distant. The windscreen shattered near his hand, showering it with needles of glass. Flecks of blood mingled with the thick red dust on the backs of his hands. The dust storm behind seemed to be closing.

  He swung the wheel again, then again, as he drove into a blind alley of tree chollas that had gathered like senile spectators to stare at an arroyo where there must once have been water.

  The jeep tumbled into the dry watercourse, wheels spinning, driveshaft screaming before the tyres bit again. Narrow gully, the tree chollas leering over him, the dusty cloud over his head spinning wildly as if caught by a small tornado … Only then, as the helicopter tilted crazily across his vision, did he re
alise that the jeep was mounting the other bank of the arroyo before he could turn the wheel. The vehicle was failing to make it, was falling back slowly, turning onto its side as slowly as a large animal that had been anaesthetised.

  The scream of the driveshaft again, then the tear of the offside wheels, the mad spinning of the other two. He switched off the ignition as the jeep subsided with great, slow dignity, coming to rest at the bottom of the arroyo. So slowly that he was aware of no impact, no jolt. The sky seemed to spin across his vision for a second or so — that was the only disorientation. The tree chollas appeared cool, their needled flesh like thick bunches of strange fruit. He scrabbled from the driver’s seat, grabbing at the Ruger Mini-14 which had been flung loose from the rear of the vehicle. The Smith & Wesson pistol was thrust into his belt. He seemed to swim through dust into the shadow of one of the chollas. Bullets plucked up dust around the jeep. Within the noise of the rotors he heard the gunshots and the approaching vehicle. Through the distressed shadows of the cholla’s branches. he could see the occupants of the Jetranger. There were three of them.

  He recognized Tran. Peering between the pilot and the marksman.

  Then their faces vanished behind the updrawn red dust.

  Lock crouched against the low wall of the arroyo, hunching into himself, feeling the vehicle’s approach through the earth like an echo of a distant tremor. He could hear its engine. Jeep, some other 4WD. Two men, three — ? He clutched the rifle against his cheek as if the metal would cool its burning. It would be finished here.

  The vehicle stopped. He listened to its engine idling, to a masked and incomprehensible exchange by radio or R/T. Now he was still, the desert’s afternoon temperature seemed choking, unbearable, as close around him as a straitjacket. He was pinioned there by the heat of the place until they came for him.

  He heard the door of the vehicle slam shut. The helicopter, as if to gain a better vantage or to distance itself imperiously from the necessary, unpleasant violence, slipped higher in the sky, maneuvering gently on the other side of the stricken jeep so that it could locate him; then just watch.

  Inevitable -

  he turned onto his stomach quickly, wrenching his muscles, and fired the Ruger as a figure leapt into the arroyo, dropping the six or seven feet to — become a deadweight, even as it fell, so that it sprawled, grey-suited, on the red dust. An M-16 held in one unmoving hand. A voice called out as Lock rose into a crouch and began running, away from the man’s body. He sensed rather than heard the Jetranger shuffle closer, as if angry at having lost sight of him. There was shouting behind him, but caution, too. They’d climb nervously down into the arroyo, now.

  The Jetranger loomed above him. Shots plucked at the ground around him. The helicopter leaned like a drunk, like someone peering down into a well, so that the marksman, suspended in webbing, could lean further out, take more certain aim. Lock watched the slow, careful increase of the helicopter’s angle. He could see the marksman’s mouth, stretched into a rictuslike grin.

  He was Caucasian, like the pilot. Tran’s face was that of a child between two adults maneuvering to kill him. He raised the rifle without thinking and fired once, twice — four, six, seven …

  The marksman hung in the webbing like a doll, the perspex of the helicopter’s windows was starred like a spider’s web. He could see neither face; only that of the marksman, who still seemed to be grinning at him, his hands moving with the tilt of the machine …

  … which was slowly sagging, as if the helicopter had lost its tight grip on the air. The Bell turned, nose drooping, leaning tiredly on the desert “air, tilting towards the dust it was throwing up around Lock.

  Lock was blindly thrusting a new magazine into the Ruger as he continued to stare with utter, rapt fascination at the slow death of the machine. It fell lowards him, but it no longer possessed the slightest suggestion of danger. It was harmless, a dead man hung from its open doorway, arms jigging senselessly in imitation of a scarecrow. The Jetranger toppled towards the arroyo, its rotor blades whirling like a dazzling, sun-catching dish as it drove towards him — broken spell. He moved leaden legs very slowly, clumping as through deep water, away from the last plunge of the helicopter.

  Then he flung himself flat, the Ruger stretched out at the end of his arm.

  The helicopter ploughed into the bank of the arroyo, churning dust, rock, gouts of dry, dead soil over him. The noise ground in his teeth and bones, the earth shook under his body in a frenzy … The screaming of metal, the breaking of the machine.

  The slow fall of the level of noise into eventual silence; perhaps minutes later, he could not tell. He kept his hands pressed over his ears for a long time after the noises seemed to have stopped.

  Then he fumbled for the Ruger and turned onto his back before sitting upright amid the rubble of soil and dust and broken tree chollas.

  The sword of a broken rotor blade thrust up from the dry bed of the arroyo. Another was plunged into the bank. The helicopter was smeared with dust, cactus, darker soil. The windows were entirely obscured. There was no one else there, it seemed, except for himself, no other spectator. Cautiously, he rose to his feet and walked unsteadily towards the machine.

  The marksman had been caught in the rotor blades. The smearing on the fuselage and shattered windows was not entirely cactus juice and damper soil. The corpse was headless, almost shredded; what remained of it was still suspended in the soiled webbing from which it had been hanging in order to kill Lock.

  Lock vomited. Retched until his throat ached. Then shivered with a sudden chill, as if the still-high sun had set. The pilot’s door was hanging open. The pilot was strapped stiffly into his seat, staring sightlessly at the spider’s web Lock’s shots had created over his window. Lock leaned over the body — a hole in the chest, another in the left temple — and saw Tran’s small form, broken-necked, lying against the bulkhead. One arm lay underneath him, the other was stretched out as if to ward something off. There was no doubt the Vietnamese was dead.

  Startled, Lock straightened at the noise of a door slamming in the desert silence. Then an engine fired, wheels spun, and the 4WD careered away. Its dust rose like the smoke of a fire beyond the rim of the arroyo.

  One of them had already died. They hadn’t been paid enough to hang around after Tran’s death, or without back-up from the Jetranger. The surviving foot-soldiers had fled.

  Lock walked away from the wreckage, towards the shade of the remaining tree chollas. He sat down in the inviting shadows, cradling the rifle on his knees, his head hanging forward with new, drained weariness. He closed his eyes, trying not to imagine the first flies humming around the bodies in the helicopter.

  It was a long time later, by the sun’s declination, that he was awoken by the noise of a light aircraft passing low to the west of the arroyo. He stood up, adrift on sudden nerves, and located the plane, descending towards some hidden desert airstrip three or four miles away from his position. It was obviously not engaged in any search for him. It dropped to cactus height as he scrambled clear of the arroyo. The airstrip was due west. His head ached and he felt dizzy. The dirt road he had been on must lead to it.

  He looked at the overturned jeep and shook his head. To right it alone was probably beyond him. He would have to walk. He heard a mourning dove, then a cactus wren. The flies around the wreckage were a constant, distant murmur, like that of a small, muffled motor.

  He thought of calling Faulkner in Washington. But he had seen a newspaper at the service station. The girl had been a hooker and an addict and he had picked her up. His hire car had been seen cruising the district. Turgenev had him in a box, and the lid had been nailed down tight.

  Despite what he had done here …

  … he had done nothing but alleviate the immediate pursuit.

  Given himself a breathing space, maybe a few hours, some of which time he had already wasted by falling into exhausted sleep.

  There was nothing else he could do. Turgenev had burned a
ll the bridges behind him. There was nothing left for him here —

  Water, he must take water. Eat something. He should make the airstrip before nightfall.

  Igor Trechikov, chief of pcilice for Novyy Urengoy, stared down at Vorontsyev, who was propped against plump pillows in the hospital bed. A sense of sadness assailed him. His chief of detectives’ arm was in heavy plaster, his forehead was bandaged and, beneath the sheet, his broken ribs were strapped. There was bruising on his jaw, scorch marks on his cheeks.

  Trechikov shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Vorontsyev’s people — Dmitri Gorov, the female detective Marfa, just herself released from the hospital, and Goludin — were arranged around the bed like a ceremonial bodyguard.

  Vorontsyev’s eyes glared blearily at him, and he fumbled to find the sense of outrage that he had fell on receiving his instructions from Bakunin. That anger would now serve to maintain his dignity and authority during his reprimand of Vorontsyev.

  Looking at the younger man now, he seemed accused of dereliction.

  ‘I

  — I’ve been kept informed of your condition, Alexei,’ was all he could immediately find to say. The girl scowled contemptuously.

  Vorontsyev blinked once, a remote, detached gesture. There was not, it was claimed by the medical staff, any brain damage. Concussion, yes, but that was supposed to have passed. ‘Terrorists, of course-‘ He quailed. Until Bakunin’s phone call, he had been able to believe that embracing fiction, even act upon it. House-to-house searches, arrests, interrogations all designed to unearth the terrorist cell.

  Bakunin, without the slightest explanation, had ordered him to suspend Vorontsyev and his team. Thereby dynamiting the fiction, as surely as those far too powerful even to suspect had dynamited Vorontsyev’s flat.

  Vorontsyev’s lips opened like an oyster shell.

  ‘Vera Silkova’s dead — together with her baby,’ he announced in a faint, dull voice.

  Trechikov was bemused, then he recalled the two fatalities of the explosion. A young woman, someone’s mistress, and a baby.