by George Wier
He was free. Free as a bird with money in his pocket and tens of thousands more coming his way—more money than he knew how to spend.
“Yeah,” he said to himself as he took a particularly nasty turn a little faster than he probably should have, and still kept his tires between the stripes. “I got it made now.”
But what Skillet didn’t know—and couldn’t have known, because that kind of thinking was as alien to him as the concept of time travel or the possibility of life on other planets—was that there are checks and balances inherent to existence, any existence. The pendulum swings one way, describes an arc full of power and inertia until entropy is achieved at the peak of the upward arc, then it comes back the opposite way once more. Possibly if he had spent a healthier portion of his life watching the tide come in and go back out, or the seasons changing, or observing the older folks dying and the new babies being born, he would have known what was coming. And heeding it, could have saved himself an ocean of misery. But then again, if he had, he wouldn’t have been Skillet.
His name was no longer Shelby Knight, it was Danel Artola, and he wasn’t killing a young man. He was, instead, on a quest: a quest to mete out justice, and do something that was good and right. His skin was steel and the blood pumping through his veins to feed his muscles, his organs and his bones were crimson droplets of purpose. He rode along with his friend, the Indian, in silence, and breathed in the warm sunlight.
Beside the White Knight, Billy Strongbow was thinking about the last time he had fired a weapon, apart from his infrequent trips to the basement gun range at the Bureau Office. The nine millimeter in his shoulder holster under his left arm felt heavy to him, but it couldn’t possibly be as heavy as the armor worn by his friend. The chances were more than good that he would have to draw the weapon, and if so, he might have to fire it. He had never taken a life. He had, in fact, exercised almost textbook caution up until this point, but the last several days had been like a sea change for him. No agent worth his salt would remotely consider bringing a civilian along on an investigation, would not have circumvented a local police detective, and decidedly would never have handed a civilian one of his own firearms. Each step along the way had been a gradual bump in the heat on the stove, and the frog in the water in the pan on the grate was starting to boil. Billy knew, instinctively, that something was about to happen. He knew that events had accelerated past him; had, in fact, left him standing in the dirt. And now he was no longer the captain of the ship, the conductor of the orchestra, but instead he was no more and no less than a deckhand, a member of the audience. He shrugged inwardly, and began to breathe as he followed Quinn Thompson up the road.
In the seat directly behind him, Sullivan Kross was tranquil, but for the stitch in his left knee and the pain in his right foot. The aspirin he’d taken that morning had long ago worn off, and the foot was throbbing. But he had felt worse pains in his life. The .357 magnum in his left pants pocket dug into the tender flesh of his leg. It wasn’t so bad; it was, instead, a comforting sort of pain, if pain could be possibly be considered so. He wore a pair of dark sunglasses and he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror up front. Sully smiled. He had known it all along. He looked cool.
Sheppard Payne had his own internal dialogue going, but unlike the other men in the car, this was an actual dialogue. He was reviewing Rudyard Kipling’s poem If, and couldn’t decided whether the proper wording for one of the lines in the last stanza was ‘If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you’ or if it was, instead, ‘If neither loving friends nor foes can hurt you.’ He had committed the thing to memory twenty years ago when he was going through severe heroin withdrawls. In the end he had kicked it, and had attributed an old and possibly racist white man with saving his life. He’d never told Shelby about the heroin. The alcohol, yes. The women, absolutely. But not the heroin addiction. That one he would take to his grave.
The road ahead of them straightened out and began the downward climb toward the river, somewhere far ahead and out of sight. They had entered a tunnel of sorts, where the trees had grown thick and higher than normal for the country among the hills west of Austin. As they rode quietly along, the four men may as well have been on a wide bobsled with no real control other than that of fate. A bobsled, perhaps, headed straight down the long slope leading to hell.
All four hundred pounds of the frame that made up the fleshy mountain known as Paul Roberts was prone on the front walkway of his father’s home. He was wet and he was dirty. The mud had somehow gotten into his left eye and he had used the last vestige of water pressure in the line he had broken to wash the grit out of his eye. The tools were scattered around him on the walkway and in the grass. Paul cursed to himself.
He looked up when he heard the sound of squealing brakes and saw the black Ford Expedition come to a stop on the street past the driveway. The SUV backed up nearly into the little ditch and onto the edge of the grass. A black man got out, came around the car, then stopped and looked at him.
“What?” Paul called out. He wasn’t about to get up and give the man so much as the time of day. What he wanted was for him to disappear.
“Lookin’ for a fellah,” the black man said.
“So?”
“Maybe it’s your dad. Maybe not,” Skillet said.
Paul gestured behind him with the piece of broken PVC pipe in his hand. “You see that? That’s called a door. Next to the door is a doorbell. You walk up to it and you push it.”
Skillet nodded. “Smartass punk,” he said to himself. He started up the walkway.
“Excuse me?” Paul said.
“Smell a skunk,” Skillet said.
As the man walked past, he kicked Paul’s ankle. At first Paul wasn’t sure if this was purposeful or whether the man was simply clumsy. Regardless, Paul’s face flushed crimson.
“Hey! Watch it.”
“Sorry,” Skillet said.
The front door opened and Paul heard his uncle’s voice.
“Are you Skillet?” Terry Roberts asked.
“The one and only.”
“Look, we can’t do business inside. Let’s take a walk.”
“Where we going?” Skillet asked.
“You’ll see.”
Terry and Skillet cut across the grass to the driveway and in the direction of the roadway beyond. When they got to the driveway, Terry Roberts’s older brother, Cleve, walked out of the garage. He had the fully assembled AR-15 in his hands and carried it as if it were a fragile infant. The smile on his face was beatific. His head turned to see his vastly overweight son laying prone on a diagonal across the damp front walkway, his fat and stubby arms in a long, narrow trench he had dug. Cleve stopped in his tracks.
“What the hell are you doing?” Cleve shouted.
“I’m fixing the lawn like you told me to!” Paul shouted back.
“You’re screwing it up! That’s why we have a warranty. All I wanted you to do was replace the sprinkler head, not tear the damned thing up!”
Terry and Skillet stopped to watch this exchange. Cleve looked back at the two men.
“Who the fuck is this?” Cleve asked, meaning Skillet.
“He’s with me. We’re going for a walk to talk business.”
“I wanted to show you the AR-15.” Cleve’s face changed from the agitated frown back to a smile.
Terry sighed. His older brother was little more than a overgrown kid, all things being equal.
Three vehicles pulled up in front of the house and jerked to a stop. All four men in the front yard turned to look—Cleve, Terry and Skillet in the driveway, and Paul on the sidewalk.
“Shit,” Terry said.
Cleve reached in his pocket, removed a drum and fed it into the gun. He chambered the first round.
“Calm down,” Terry said.
Skillet reached into the back of his belt and wrapped his hand around the butt of his pistol.
Quinn Thompson was the first out of his car. He appeared to be the sole oc
cupant. The vehicle immediately behind him, however, discharged four men. One of those men was the White Knight. Terry had seen the news broadcast from the steps of the Capitol and had chuckled his way through it. Standing there in his brother’s driveway, a fit of nervous laughter erupted from him and just as abruptly died.
The White Knight put his helmet on his head, walked to the trunk and swung the compartment open. Three other men got out of the car.
The third vehicle discharged two Austin Police officers.
“Put the weapon on the ground!” Quinn shouted.
Cleve Roberts looked down at his gun then back at the seven men. The two officers had their weapons out and had taken positions behind their vehicle.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Cleve shouted. “Why don’t you go fuck yourselves.”
“We’re here to bring Terry in for questioning, that’s all” Quinn said. Thus far Quinn didn’t have a weapon in his hand.
“What do we do?” Skillet whispered to Terry.
“I don’t know. Take it easy, okay?”
Sully Kross and Sheppard Payne took up positions on the opposite side of Billy Strongbow’s car, in imitation of the policemen.
“Okay,” Billy Strongbow called out. “Everybody just chill.” He held up his badge with his left hand, but it was of course impossible to read it a distance of forty feet. “FBI. This is a federal investigation. Put your gun on the ground. Now!”
“Here’s my response to that,” Cleve Roberts said, and raised the AR-15. Quinn Thompson quickly pulled his pistol from his shoulder holster.
Shots rang out from the two policemen at the back of the column of cars. This was joined by Sully Kross, firing over the roof of Billy’s vehicle.
Terry Roberts felt as though a baseball bat had struck him on the left side of his head, midway between his ear and his eye. His feet folded under him and the back of his head thumped onto the concrete. All he could see was blue sky with fingers of red and purple streaking across it.
Cleve Roberts’s gun barked a cacophony of automatic fire. His first burst was aimed at Billy Strongbow, Sully and Sheppard, who ducked behind the car.
Before Quinn Thompson could get off a shot, Cleve raked the weapon his direction and sent a burst of bullets into his stomach and chest, throwing Quinn backward onto the hood of his car.
Skillet whipped his gun out and began firing at the two policemen, who likewise ducked.
The White Knight shouted, “No!” and ran across the law directly at the man firing the automatic weapon, his shield before him and his sword held high. This drew Cleve Roberts’s full attention and instantly Shelby’s armor rang with multiple impacts.
Paul Roberts felt as though someone had taken a glowing hot branding iron and ran the tip of it from his left shoulder diagonally across his back and down to his right buttock, where the iron was shoved mercilessly into his flesh. He let out a wail and began rolling on the grass.
The AR-15 ceased firing.
Cleve Roberts looked at the weapon in his hand and realized he was out of ammunition. He had a spare weighting down his right pants pocket and began digging for it, but something stung his left shoulder, and quickly it felt like he was on fire.
He ejected the spent clip on the driveway and tried to remove the spare, but his arm wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. Instead it began to grow numb. Five feet away from him his brother was on the driveway, staring up at the sky. Cleve let go of the AR-15, dropped to the ground and crawled to Terry. Feeling underneath him, he found his nine millimeter in the rear of his belt, pulled it out, thumbed the safety off, and began firing at the man in medieval armor coming toward him.
The only man standing in the driveway was Skillet.
Paul Roberts stopped rolling and lay with his back on the wet grass. He looked up to see his old friend, Aiden Holloway, coming toward him across the law. He was sure Aiden was going to separate his head from his shoulders with the sword, so he cried, “No, Aiden! Don’t do it!” But Aiden passed on by him without so much as a nod his direction.
Behind Billy Strongbow’s car, Sully Kross looked down at Sheppard Payne and said, “What the hell good are you?”
“I’m acting as a target. Remember, I’m the token black guy.”
“Right.”
Sully looked over at Billy, who had just finished snapping a fresh clip into his pistol. “Ready?” Sully asked.
Billy nodded.
The two stood up together and started snapping off shots at Skillet.
Skillet took five bullets, his body jerking as if he were doing some kind of weird dance, then fell backwards next to Terry Roberts.
Lying on his side on the driveway, Cleve Roberts brought Terry’s gun to bear on the man in the armor.
It was point blank range.
The armored man raised his sword to strike and hesitated at the top of his swing.
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” Cleve said, “but you’re a dead man.”
He fired and Shelby’s armor rang. The center of the big man’s head blossomed crimson, and he fell backwards on the driveway, dead.
Shelby looked down at his breastplate and saw the small ding there. The man had been aiming for Shelby’s heart, but hadn’t accounted for the ricochet.
Blood ran from the corners of Quinn Thompson’s mouth. His eyes focused on the blue sky, then unfocused again. Finally his vision resolved on the altered face of Shelby Knight. Other faces swam around him, but he couldn’t make out any of them.
“God, Quinn,” Shelby said. “What were you doing?”
“My...job.”
“Well,” Shelby said. “Your work may be done now.”
Quinn nodded. He tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t come up with anything particularly biting. That had been his habit for a long time: stay quiet until he could throw out a zinger. Maybe it was time to let the habit go.
“You’re a hero, Quinn,” Shelby said.
“It’s all...I ever wanted...to be.”
Suddenly there was far more he wanted to say. He wanted to tell Shelby that he was his best friend. That he loved him, even when he thought he was guilty. That possibly Shelby might, in time, come to forgive him. But before he could begin to form the words, a fundamental pain, deep down, latched onto him and pulled him down into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
His name was Hubert Alan James, and he swam in an ocean of pain.
He had no visitors except for the policeman outside who glanced inside and checked on him very fifteen minutes or so. He had been awake for over an hour, and was trying to take stock of his body, which wasn’t easy to do since he could feel nothing below his neck. What was especially disconcerting was that he couldn’t feel his arms, legs or feet. There was pain, however, but this was in his head, where, in the final analysis, all pain resided. Hubert Alan James bore the pain—there was nothing else to do, except bear it—and waited.
After what seemed hours, but was actually no more than another fifteen minutes, a woman entered his room, looked down at his face and saw that he was awake.
“Mr. James,” she said, “my name is Dr. Kincaid. You have been seriously injured. Your spinal cord has been severed and you are now a quadraplegic. In addition to your spine, bullets were removed from your right shoulder, your left lung, and from next to your heart. You will probably develop pneumonia. You may die. Do you understand me?”
Skillet nodded and tried to speak. The female doctor removed his mask. “You can talk now, but try to do no more than whisper. Did you understand what I told you?”
“My name,” he whispered, “is Skillet.”
Following the interment of Quinn Thompson in the Texas State Cemetery in East Austin, complete with full police honor and a twenty-one gun salute, the man who had become known as Danel Artola—and who was now famous across the airwaves as The White Knight—met with a man underneath the spreading branches of an oak tree that was perhaps two hundred years old.
“Mr. Knight,” the man offered his hand.
“Mr. Holloway,” Shelby shook the man’s hand.
“I wanted to tell you that Aiden would be proud of you. He would be proud of who you have become.”
Shelby nodded. “I am eternally sorry, sir.”
“I know. I knew it the first time I met you. It’s why I couldn’t do it.”
“I know.”
“I have a proposition for you, if you wouldn’t mind hearing it.”
“I’m listening,” Shelby said.
“My home is not far from downtown, as you know. The White Knight might need a place to rest before he goes out on his nightly rounds of the city. There is a spare bedroom. In fact, it’s Aiden’s room. I would be happy if you came to stay there.”
“I don’t know,” Shelby said, then he looked at the man’s face and eyes and could tell that it was important to him. “My home was just foreclosed on, and I don’t have a place to stay other than Sheppard’s dojo. I’ll have to talk it over with Sheppard. He’s my sensei you know. I don’t want to tick him off.”
Jonathan Holloway nodded.
“Does the room have a bed?”
“It’s got a very nice bed,” Holloway said.
“Then I’m inclined...to take your offer.”
The man nodded and a tear rolled down his cheek. He grasped Shelby’s arm and pulled him into an embrace. And there was nothing for it for Shelby but to hold the man and pat his back.
“You look fine, Shel,” Rachel said when he rejoined her at her car next to the cemetery. He was wearing the rented suit that Rachel had sprung for.
“It’s just the suit,” he said, but he smiled.
“I was thinking you and I might have dinner sometime.”
“I would really like that.”
“That is, when you’re not walking the beat as the White Knight.”
“There is always that.”
“So, you’re going to keep doing it?”
“I have to,” he replied. “You know that.”
