Fortunate Son

by J. D. Rhoades

  Mick and Keith loaded the locker in the van. Savannah got behind the wheel, shoved the key they’d taken off of Cully into the ignition, and flipped on the headlights. “Keith. Get the door open. Then get in quick. We’re going to have to—” She was interrupted by Keith’s cry of pain as he crumpled to the ground. He’d only gotten the door halfway open before he fell, but it swung wide open as he collapsed. Savannah looked out over the steering wheel, through the van’s pitted and scratched windshield. What she saw made her slump over the wheel, her forehead resting on the hard plastic.

  A pair of big pickup trucks sat across their path. A half-dozen men stood in a line in front of the trucks. They held a variety of guns, all pointed at the van. In the middle of the line stood Mr. Luther. In the headlights, his smile made him look even more ghoulish than usual.

  “Savannah!” he called out. “Come on out, gal. And bring those two boys with you. We need to have a talk.” His grin widened. “A long talk.”

  “WHERE EXACTLY are we going?” Wyatt asked.

  “I’m not completely sure,” Chance replied. She was staring down into the screen of her phone. “It looks like the middle of nowhere. Out in the country somewhere.” She looked up and through the front windshield as if it would tell her something. “It’s not anywhere Savannah ever told us about.”

  “But she’s there. And she’s in trouble.”

  Chance grimaced. “Maybe she’s there. I don’t know.”

  Wyatt didn’t slow down. “Only lead we’ve got, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So we’re going anyway.” He didn’t look over at her.

  “Right,” she said.

  “Okay, then.”

  “COME ON, gal,” Luther called again. “It’s just gonna get harder on you if you make me wait.”

  Savannah looked through the windshield, craning her neck to try and see what had happened to Keith. She couldn’t see him.

  “That one of your boys tryin’ to open the door?” Luther said. “Looks like he’s still breathin’. Right now. ’Course, you keep makin’ me wait…” He nodded to the gunman immediately to his left, a short, rail-thin man in a Confederate flag T-shirt. The little man was wielding a rifle so long it made him look like a boy playing soldier. He grinned, showing a mouthful of missing teeth, and raised the gun. Luther said something to him that Savannah couldn’t catch, then raised his voice so she could hear. “I can let Lester here shoot him to pieces, bit by bit, till you come out. If that’s what you want.”

  “Mama,” Mick’s agonized voice came from the back of the van, “let me—”

  “No,” she said, marveling at how steady her voice was. “Put the gun down.” She turned in the seat to look at him, fixing his eyes with hers. “I can talk to him. I’m the one he wants. I can get him to let you go.” She looked back to where Lana was huddled next to Mick. “You, too. He doesn’t care about you.” Before there was any response, she leaned out of the van window. “Okay. I’m coming out.” Her hands were shaking so badly, she could barely open the door, and when she stepped out, her knees almost buckled beneath her.

  “Good girl,” Luther said. It was the voice of one speaking to a pet, and Savannah saw in a flash the life that he had planned for her. That would be all right, she thought, if she could only get her sons out of this. And Lana. She was surprised at the sudden impulse she had to protect the girl. But why not? She was family, or would be soon. If they survived.

  “Please,” she said to Luther. “Let me look at my son.”

  The smile on his face never slipped. “Sure,” he said. “Go to your boy.”

  She ran over to where Keith lay, next to the open carriage house door. He was breathing shallowly, each exhalation ending in a pitiful moan. There was a red stain on his shirt, just above the belt line.

  “He’s gut-shot,” Luther said. “He’ll be a long time dying if he don’t get some help.”

  She looked up, the tears she couldn’t hold back any more streaming hotly down her face. “Please. I’ll do anything. Anything you want. Take me. Punish me. But let my boys go.”

  “But that’s the thing, gal,” Luther said. “Best way to punish you is to hurt your boys.”

  “Please!” she screamed.

  “Tell you what,” Luther said. “Just to show you I’m not an unreasonable man.” He turned to the gunmen who flanked him on either side. “I’m not an unreasonable man, am I boys?” The men around him shook their heads, grinning, and murmured that no, sir, bossman, you’re a real reasonable man. Luther nodded his satisfaction. “Plus, I got a war to fight. This ain’t the only stash house of mine that Gutierrez has tried to hit. I’m kinda busy, is what I’m sayin’. So I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll only kill one of your boys. I was gonna give one of ’em to my dogs, but like I say, I got a lot on my plate right now. So we do it right here, and right now. You get to pick.” He nodded at Keith, cradled in Savannah’s arms. “I’d suggest that one. He looks like he’s about played out anyway. I’ll make it quick, I promise. Better than dyin’ from a belly wound. But it’s up to you.”

  “Just kill me,” Savannah begged. “Let them go.”

  “Oh, no, gal,” Luther said, and the false smile fell from his face. “You gonna live. You gonna live, and you gonna suffer. You gonna suffer as long and as hard as I want. Losin’ a son, well, that’s just the beginnin’. Now choose. Or I’ll kill ’em both.”

  “No,” a voice said. Savannah looked up. Mick had stepped out of the truck. “Take me. Shoot me.”

  THEY SAW THE first body as they pulled up to the iron gate. It was a man in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt. He was lying across the entrance.

  “Jesus,” Chance whispered. Wyatt could see other bodies lying in the drive. “What the hell happened here?”

  “Winslow said Gutierrez was going to war with Luther. This is what that war would look like, I think.”

  “That guy’s blocking the road,” Chance said.

  Wyatt sighed. “I know.”

  “And Savannah’s call came from in there.”

  “I know.” Wyatt got out, his pistol drawn and ready. He advanced on the body, noticing the SKS semi-automatic rifle lying a few feet away. He saw that someone else, possibly several someones, hadn’t been so squeamish about driving over the body in the way. There were the marks of tires across the small of the back and the body seemed oddly compressed there. Wyatt considered for a moment whether to drag the body by the arms or the legs. He had a brief sickening image of the body separating and coming apart at the tread marks. He gritted his teeth and grabbed the legs. The body didn’t come apart. Thanks for small favors, God, he thought. He picked up the rifle and stuck it behind the seat as he got back in the car.

  “Bad?” Chance asked.

  “Bad enough.” He started up the driveway again.

  “Wait,” Chance said. “Stop here. Kill the lights.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer, just opened the door and got out.

  “Where…” Wyatt started, but she was gone.

  In a moment, she was back, carrying an AR-15. “Guy I took this from was Latino. Judging from the face and neck tattoos, some kind of gangbanger.”

  “Gutierrez’s people,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah. My guess is, Gutierrez tried to raid this place and ran into an ambush. Or they were in mid-raid when Luther’s guys showed up.”

  “So why was Savannah in the middle of—” He was interrupted by the rattle and pop of gunfire, then the dull thud of an explosion. It sounded very close.

  “Shit,” Chance said.

  Wyatt was already out of the car, pulling the SKS from behind the seat. Chance followed with the AR-15.

  “MICK, NO,” Savannah moaned. “Please. No. Let me—”

  Mick looked at her and smiled. “I love you, Mama. I always will.” He bent and kissed Keith on the top of the head before he straightened up. “I’ve come too far. Done too much. It’s not the way I thought it would be. We’re not
goin’ out like this. Not this family.” As he spoke, he was unbuttoning his top two shirt buttons. Still smiling, he looked Luther in the eye. “Let my mama and my brother go.” He started walking forward, hands up.

  “Ain’t gonna work that way, boy,” Luther said. “You just stop right there.”

  Mick kept walking. “Why? So you can shoot me down like a dog? I don’t fucking think so.”

  Luther scowled. “I’m tellin’ you, boy—”

  “Or what? Tell me what?” His voice was rising, almost cracking with strain. The line of men on either side of Luther raised their weapons. When Mick reached into his shirt, they began firing. The first bullet struck Mick in the side and made him stagger. His right hand came from inside the shirt. Another bullet went through the palm of that hand, blood spraying in a crimson arc behind him. The impact dislodged the three grenade pins wrapped around his fingers. They landed in the dirt just as Mick, grinning, lunged forward and wrapped his arms around the frantically backpedaling Luther.

  “Who’s your daddy, motherfuck—” he screamed before the grenades blew them both apart.

  “Mick!” Savannah screamed. The ragged bits of the two men collapsed to the ground, Luther and Mick falling apart like a single body divided in two. Their flesh had absorbed the force of the explosion and contained the shrapnel, but everything above the waists and below the necks of both men was shredded meat. The line of gunmen looked on, stunned into immobility for a moment. As the shock wore off, they raised their guns again, but the volley that would have killed Savannah and finished off Keith was interrupted by Lana, who came out of the van carrying the machine pistols, screaming and firing blindly with both hands. The sudden fusillade broke the line. They fled in a disorganized rout, two of them falling to Lana’s guns and the rest bolting away around the sheltering hedge.

  Directly into the guns of Chance Cahill and Wyatt McGee.

  CHANCE AND Wyatt were coming up the drive, rifles at the ready, when the remaining four gunmen of Luther’s contingent came pelting around the corner. Later, they’d agree, in both their own private talks and in seemingly endless official inquiries, that had the men thrown down their guns, they might have lived. As it was, they startled two armed and nervous law enforcement officers. That meant they were cut down in seconds, the sound of the volley that killed them leaving a huge silence behind it. Into that sudden, stunned quiet came a raw, anguished wailing. Wyatt thought of a passage he’d heard in church, back in the days when he still went: In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. The sound sent a shiver up his spine and he broke into a run, Chance a step behind him.

  They came around the concealing hedge to a scene from a horror movie. Two ripped and bloody bodies lay a few feet apart in the dirt courtyard. A young girl knelt beside one of them, rocking back and forth, her face streaked with tears. Two more bodies lay a few feet away. Behind the girl and the ruined bodies, Wyatt could see the form of Savannah Jakes, holding yet another body in her arms.

  She gave another heartbroken cry just as Chance barked out, “Gun!” Wyatt looked back and recognized the girl from the back of the car in Arabi, the one who’d shot at him. She held a black MAC-10 machine pistol in each hand. He raised his rifle.

  Beside him, he heard Chance shout, “Police! Drop the weapon!”

  Wyatt joined in, bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Drop it! Now! Put it down!”

  Their combined shouts seemed to hit the girl like a physical blow. She flinched backward, nearly falling over, but she dropped the guns.

  “Sheriff McGee,” Chance said, her voice steady, “would you secure those weapons, please?”

  Still holding his rifle in one hand, he walked over and picked up one of the ugly little machine pistols and shoved the other one out of the girl’s reach with his foot. “Stand up,” he ordered her.

  She looked up at him uncomprehendingly. “He saved us,” she said. “Mick saved us. He killed Luther.”

  Wyatt glanced over at the body she’d been kneeling beside. The bottom half of the face was mostly gone, but he could see the eyes. He could believe it was the face from the robbery video, the face of Kevin DeWalt. That would, he supposed, make the other body Wallace Luther. He turned back to the girl on the ground. “Stand up,” he repeated. Slowly, she complied. “I don’t suppose you brought cuffs with you?” Wyatt called back.

  “Sorry.”

  Wyatt nodded. “Stand over there,” he told the girl, motioning with his rifle to where Savannah was still weeping, her wails turned to convulsive sobbing. He recognized the body held in her arms as Tyler Welch. She was sitting down in the wide-open door of what looked like a carriage house, the boy’s head in her lap. A white van loomed behind her in the garage. Another car sat off to the side. He reached them in a few long steps and crouched down. The boy was still breathing, but his eyes were closed, his face so pale it was like seeing the skull beneath. “Savannah,” he said as gently as he could, “let me look at him.”

  She shook her head no, still sobbing, but didn’t resist when he moved the arm she’d thrown across his chest. He sucked in his breath. The front of his shirt below the breastbone was soaked with blood. It looked like an abdominal wound, and it was bleeding badly. “He’s shot, Cahill. Belly wound, and it looks bad. We need…” He realized she was already speaking into her phone.

  “On it,” she said to him before returning to her call.

  “No!” Savannah screamed. “No! Don’t take my Keith from me!” She tried to stand up, pulling Tyler with her.

  His eyes opened and he let out an agonized whimper. “Mama. It hurts, Mama.”

  Wyatt held on tight. “Savannah. Listen to me. He’s going to die if we don’t get him to a hospital. And I mean right goddamn now.”

  She shook her head. “No. We need to get away. Mick sacrificed himself so we could get away. Give him to me. Give me my Keith.”

  Tyler grasped her arm, his grip as weak as a baby’s. “Mama,” he whispered. “That’s…not…my name.”

  She let him slip from her arms. “Don’t say that.” She got to her feet, leaving Wyatt the only one holding him. “Don’t you ever say that again!”

  “I want…I want to go home, Mama. Please let me…go home…”

  “You’re my son!” she yelled. “Your home is with your family!”

  Tyler didn’t respond. He’d slipped back into unconsciousness.

  “Savannah,” Wyatt said. “You once said in court you’d do anything for your sons.”

  “I did. And I will. I will.”

  “Then let him go to the hospital. And then just let him go. If he comes with you, he’s going to die.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head violently, as if she was trying to make everything go away. Wyatt tried again. “Look, Savannah, we both have made some really shitty choices. And because of that, we hurt the people we love. This is your one shot—only shot—to save Keith. This is your one chance to be the mom you wanted to be. And the only way to do that is to get in the van and go. Get out of his life. Forever. It’s the best thing for your son. You know it is.”

  “Um, McGee?” Chance said. “She’s still—”

  He interrupted her. “That’s the deal, Savannah. Your freedom. His life. It’s a good deal. Take it.”

  She opened her eyes and looked down at Tyler. “I love you, son. And I never brought you nothing but pain. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” She looked back at McGee. Her weeping had stopped. “Okay. I’ll go. But one condition.” She pointed at the girl who’d had the machine pistols. “She comes with me.”

  Chance spoke up. “Oh, now, wait just a damn minute.”

  Savannah didn’t look at Chance. She kept her eyes on Wyatt’s. “She’s Micks’ fiancée. She’s the closest thing to family I got left.”

  “Okay,” McGee said.

  Chance was outraged. “McGee, she shot you!”

  “Yeah
, well, I’m real sorry about that,” the girl said.

  “No doubt,” Wyatt said. “I can let it go, just this once. But don’t let me see you again.” He turned to Savannah. “Or you.”

  “Don’t worry, hon,” the girl said. “You won’t.”

  “I’m really not okay with this,” Chance said.

  He turned to her. “Hey, I’m the one she shot. And this is what’s best for him.” He nodded at the bleeding boy on the ground, then pointed at the dead man across the courtyard. “And the guy who shot your deputy is there.”

  She gritted her teeth. Finally, however, she shook her head angrily. “Fine. Go.”

  “Come on,” the girl said. She got in the driver’s seat of the van. Savannah took one last look at Tyler on the ground. She didn’t speak again or look at Wyatt or Chance as they pulled away.

  Wyatt knelt beside Tyler. “Come on, buddy,” he whispered. “Hang in there.” He raised Tyler’s shirt and exposed the wound in his belly.

  Chance ran up and knelt next to him. She held out a blanket. “This was in the car over there. Can’t really say how clean it is.”

  He nodded and took it. Once it was folded over, he put it under Tyler’s head. He held his own hands against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding.

  “Ambulance ETA is three minutes.”

  He nodded and looked at her. “It was the only way to get her out of his life for good. She won’t come back if it could get her arrested.”

  She grimaced. “Yeah. I know. But you didn’t tell her about Mick. Or how that wasn’t Mick.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “The real Mick Jakes died a stupid, sordid death in a Tennessee jail.” He nodded towards the bodies. “That version of Mick Jakes died saving her life. Why not let her believe he was a hero?”

  She shook her head. “You’re a strange one, McGee.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  The sound of the sirens drew closer.

  CHANCE HANDED A Styrofoam cup to McGee. “It’s pretty bad, even for hospital cafeteria coffee.”