by Jon A. Hunt
Rafferty and Smally instinctively brought their side arms up and aimed.
“Who’re you going to shoot?” I shouted.
“Shit!” snarled Rafferty. He didn’t lower his weapon but he couldn’t argue my point.
The only clear target was a horse. The woman and the man were too close to the flames; their silhouettes shifted and shimmied in the heat. Over the open sights of a pistol, neither of them were where they appeared to be, a great way for a would-be shooter to blind himself.
The man had to be Rico. Everyone else who’d come to Hillbriar to hunt was dead.
“What are they doing?” Rafferty’s frustration turned his deep voice to forty-grit.
“Hoping they can get into the tunnels,” I said. But I’d been down there.
“The feds sealed them off!”
“All of them?”
“Christ, I don’t know!” Rafferty’s cinderblock face turned ruddy in the firelight.
The men from the trees took up positions behind the cars in the driveway. With their rifles and high-powered telescopic sights, they had the same problem the regular cops had: nothing better than a blind guess of a shot.
“Let me talk to them,” I said and started walking. Hell, if I could persuade that son-of-a-bitch Whiskey to listen, how hard could a couple humans be?
The gelding bounded as close as his steel nerves allowed and reared in place. He was glorious against a swirling backdrop of flames. But this was no tobacco smoking fire. He pawed the wavering air and slammed his front hooves to earth in outrage. I was as invisible to him now as the rain or the cop he’d left writhing in the gravel.
I yelled Sandra’s name. Whiskey screamed for her at the same time. Neither of us got our message across.
Rico’s gun flashed in the firelight, the one with the fancy electronic sights. Not pointing at me or anyone. Limply down at his side. His other hand joined Sandra’s, and for a painful second they hesitated in the doorway, partially distinguishable from the inferno behind them. Her hair danced wildly in the heat.
“Sandra!”
Maybe she heard me. Maybe she saw me, beyond the murderous rearing horse she’d so loved. But she turned anyway with Rico. Hand in hand, they passed through the doorway into the blazing guest house. They finished their journey as they’d started, together.
Twenty seconds later, the timber framework finally gave way. The building collapsed in an explosion of light, heat and finality.
Epilogue
“Do you have any damn idea what you’re doing?”
I planted both elbows on the fence rail, even though it still hurt to move my shoulder that far, and squinted across the field from under my new hat like a movie cowboy. A pleasanter June day couldn’t be expected. The horses loved it, too, bright, warm, clear, perfect for running, and that’s what they did. The herd eventually disappeared over a shallow hill and the breeze did away with the dust.
“I’m babysitting, Jerry.”
The arrangement was temporary. Hillbriar’s surviving horses needed to go somewhere until the investigation—this time, a proper, thorough one—was finished. The estate grounds were littered with tracks, spent brass, blood and other debris associated with violence. All of the tunnels needed to be charted. When the feds were done, the prevailing opinion was the shafts should be filled with rubble and concrete. The ruins of the stables and guest house would be leveled. That would take months. So I’d found a couple hundred fenced acres with a barn, ten miles outside the Franklin city limits, and had the horses moved there.
Rafferty appreciated the gesture. He struggled with the fact that I’d paid for the land outright. But he liked the place more than he let on. His last four weeks had passed inside court rooms and forensics labs. He’d driven out to remind me to come downtown for my deposition when a phone call would have gotten the message across just as well.
“The girl’s getting the hang of having her own place,” he said. “She gives the feds hell every time somebody breaks out a shovel.”
I grinned. Jetta had returned the morning after the fires. She’d driven that turbocharged hatchback right up to the fountain and surrendered for questioning. When Rafferty and the FBI were satisfied with her answers and could stomach her silence, they let her come home. Hillbriar belonged to her now. JD might not have planned on his daughter outliving him, but he’d included her name in the will. Nothing was left to chance because nothing would’ve been overlooked if everyone except JD managed to die. If she stayed sober, Jetta was set for life.
Every game has losers, though. If the dead were disqualified, Special Agent in Charge Pennington lost largest. He’d missed the grand finale because Rafferty and several specialists, flown in last minute from DC, collected him at the Airport Marriott and locked him away.
Rico had sent one last letter. To Rafferty. It came in a box full of transcripts, wiretap logs, copied requisitions, and memory cards with recorded conversations. From the time of his assumed death in a western desert, Rico had been collecting proof of what really had gone on.
All the years he supposedly pursued Rico, Pennington had in fact been manipulating the killer for his own ends. The woman’s finger “found” at the Nevada car-bombing site and presumed to be Harley Jansen’s had been cut from a corpse from an unrelated Bureau case. Pennington had arranged Rico and Harley’s disappearance for a price: Rico became Pennington’s private executioner. When the legal system didn’t fulfill Pennington’s expectations, Rico did, and those lowlifes the law couldn’t convict died anyway. Like they deserved.
Harley—Sandra—never hid as well as she hoped. Pennington kept her secret as insurance against the day Rico reconsidered their arrangement. Dumb luck and another person hiding from the same past, Clarence DeBreaux, started the unravelling. Sandra must have contacted her former lover in desperation, and the decision was made to hire a private detective. Lucky me.
Nobody would confirm my guess that Pennington himself had revealed Rico and Harley’s whereabouts to Buck Dover’s vengeful son.
I had a strong hunch Pennington had known JD was a killer all along, as well. Another gilded puppet. I never asked a soul about that.
Hal Dover had chickened out and flown home to Vegas. But one honest member of Pennington’s team contacted the Vegas office from her hospital bed, and Dover went into the legal spin cycle for a long time. If karma paid attention, he and Pennington might be cellmates. Andy Honeywell had a fat promotion waiting in DC when she recovered enough to travel.
Rafferty got some due credit, too. Not a larger office.
“Found him, by the way,” he said. His voice might be casual. Might not.
“Rico?”
“Yep. Mostly bones, badly burned, and that exotic gun of his. So far they’ve found three different tunnels under that old house.”
I didn’t ask about her. He carried the topic without me.
“No one else down there.”
A horse bounded over the hill. Just one, not the herd, because they knew better than to crowd him. Whiskey flowed through the billowing chest-high grass, a leaping component of the wind. His mane had grown in again and his tail chased after him like smoke.
He wouldn’t trot over to say hello. He was busy enjoying his next last chance.
Not everyone gets those.
