by Chuck Logan
Davis holds up his phone. “Call the number.”
“How soon can they be here?”
Davis wings it in his best game-face voice and says, “Be best if we relocate, meet them.”
“And then what?” Amanda swats at the bugs swarming around her face.
“They take your statement, get a warrant, and arrest Jump and shut them down.”
Amanda gives a sardonic smile. “Shut them down? Really? How do you know some oversight committee won’t dither for six months and decide John was just a bad apple running a rogue operation. In the meantime, if Morgon can’t make bail, there’s no guarantee they won’t send another Morgon at you—or me, if I talk—just for spite. God knows they’ve been training a limitless supply of them the last ten years. And I suspect, Mr. Davis, you’re one of them.”
Davis shrugs. “We’re burning time here, Miss Rivard.”
“Flip on Morgon?” Her sweaty fingers tug at the widow’s peak in the center of her forehead. “Jesus, the lawyers will cost a ton, and I’ll have to call in most of my chits.”
Davis senses she’s reaching the tipping point and moves in closer. He draws a look from Jesse as his voice changes up, positive. “But in the end you’ll get immunity and keep this place and what you do here.”
“I want that in writing, with my lawyer present.”
“You got it,” Davis assures her, taking her by the arm, nodding to Jesse to start moving toward the car.
Amanda balks as she remembers a lecture from medical school about the difficult transition from student to practicing doctor. How you have to respond rapidly and correctly to acute situations. She feels the pressure of Davis’ fingers on her bare arm. She has to make a decision.
“You coming?” he asks.
“You’re asking me to snitch.”
“I’m showing you a way to survive.”
She tosses one last look back through the trees toward the house and Morgon and the world that was. Lady, tiger? Live lady trumps dead tiger. Do it. “Okay. I’m in. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Hunched, furtive, she hurries through the itchy waist-deep weeds, swatting at mosquitoes, but then she dares to hope, and every step starts to feel like freedom. No Morgon. And it starts to come out in a rush. “For openers I can give him how they funded the operation through anonymous donations to the foundation. And I can show you how the money was disbursed to pay subcontractors, like the men who came into the hospital. They look hard enough, they should be able to trace it back to somebody’s budget.” Then Amanda turns toward Jesse with a tense smile. “Sorry, honey. Taxpayer dollars killed your crew.”
But Jesse isn’t listening. Bringing up the rear, she’s lensing the house one last time with the binoculars. She lowers the glasses. “He’s gone off the porch. And you hear that?” Past the house, at the far end of the grounds, a helicopter turbine coughs and begins to crank.
Davis, phone out, about to punch in Appert’s number, jerks his head around. “Move,” he shouts. “Run.” They dash to the car, and Davis yanks open the driver’s-side door to shove Amanda across the seats. Jesse has her hand on the backdoor handle when a single gunshot cracks and the Ford’s rear hatch window blows out in a bright shower of shattered glass.
Chapter Seventy
Ah, shit! So go to plan B.
Davis hurls Amanda to the ground, then dives, rolls through the tall grass and ferns and thistles, and comes up pulling open the Ford’s rear door. Fast look around. Where’d Jesse go? As he heaves in and reaches over the backseat for the rifle cases in the boot compartment, another shot smashes through the rear windows and pellets of glass sting along his arms, his face, and in his hair. But he grabs the cases and the first-aid kit. As he rolls back into the grass, he pats his empty right trouser pocket.
Somewhere in the confusion he lost his cell phone. So much for backup. Amanda crouches, shivering, six feet away, with her pupils dilated and her face striped by the dense bottlebrush grass, and she’s jumpy as a bead of grease on a hot skillet. Any minute she’s gonna run.
“Stay down,” he commands, looking around for Jesse as he unzips the longer case and slides out the rifle and a plastic strip that contains ammunition. Quickly, expertly, he feeds four rounds into the Remington, pushes the bolt forward, and sticks the remaining ammo in his back pocket.
“Oh shit, oh shit,” Amanda mutters and Davis swings his head in the direction of her fixed stare and sees Jesse crawl around the back of the car with a fringe of golden hair pasted in a wet, red pageboy against her forehead. More blood makes a gory nimbus on the top of her head.
“Not bad,” Jesse grunts. “Glass just cut the scalp. Superficial head wounds . . .”
“ . . . bleed a lot,” Davis finishes the thought as he tosses the shorter case toward Jesse, who now crouches, trying to rub the blood from her eyes and making a mess of her face.
Then he turns to Amanda, who’s halfway to her feet because the blood smeared on Jesse’s face is starting to look like a deal breaker. “Lay flat on your stomach, do it,” he orders. Shaky, hyperventilating, Amanda complies.
He turns back to Jesse. Eyes wide, she’s holding her breath but looks steady as she inserts a magazine into the AR15 and pulls the operating rod to load the chamber. They both exhale. Davis tears open the aid kit, tosses Jesse a compress, then scans the silent, shadowed trees. “That was a pistol,” he mutters. His side is throbbing like hell to the backbeat of buzzing insects, the drip of sweat, and his pounding heart. So here he is again in one of those deadly, frozen moments.
“We’re blind,” Jesse whispers. “Can’t see shit hiding down here in this freakin’ stuff.”
Davis raises his finger to his lips. Moment like this, up against pros, you only get one move. World Series of your life, bottom of the ninth, two out, two strikes, three balls, and Mariano Rivera is winding up. One throw, one swing. So who’s going to blink first?
They do.
“Amanda,” a voice yells, deep in the trees. “Run for the house; I’ll cover you.”
Three rapid shots rattle through the overhead, whipping up a tiny storm of bark and bits of green. As the debris filters down, Amanda tenses up on her palms and the balls of her feet and the fear spins in her eyes like gray icons on a slot machine. Another flurry of shots cracks high and wide, and her eyes swell and she jumps to her feet and crashes, wild, through the brush toward the open ground beyond the trees. Jesse squats in the weeds with the Beretta stuck in her waistband. Squinting from under the hasty bandage around her head, she swivels the black assault rifle, looking for the shooter. “We blew it. There goes Bobby Appert’s perfect material witness,” she hisses through clamped teeth.
With a grimace, Davis rises like a sprinter on starting blocks. “Shit. Don’t fire unless you have a clear target.” Then he’s in motion, and it’s like he’s running through this banner with big block letters on it: DUMB. More shots make a racket through the trees, but he forces himself to ignore them because it’s a pistol and the voice that called to Amanda was out of pistol range. But they managed to hit the car twice.
Gaining on Amanda, he breaks from the cover of the trees and instinctively crouches and shifts the rifle across the open space. Some primal alarm in Amanda’s stoned cortex also seems to get the message because she stops running and shifts nervously from foot to foot as her face turns waxy with apprehension. The imposing house is almost two hundred yards away. They’re in plain view and the red helicopter’s engine revs and its blades beat an ominous tattoo in the air.
“Get down,” Davis yells, inching toward her. “Make yourself small. We’ll crawl back to the trees.” He eyes the roll of the ground. “There’s some defilade . . .”
“Some what?”
Chapter Seventy-One
Oh, this is perfect.It’s gonna work. Not so much a thought as an imbedded process of orienting and reflex and ranging as Morgon raises the barrel of his rifle at the corner of the house and shifts his bare feet in the thatch of dry Juniper
needles that sting among the wood chips because, after he alerted Roger, he came through the house and opened the gun safe and grabbed the Remington and a box of shells and his .45 so goddamned fast he didn’t take time to put on his shoes or say anything to Martha, who watched him pass through the kitchen in open-mouthed shock.
Absolutely perfect. Cawker’s shots stir the pot, and Amanda bursts from the trees and then stops running as if suddenly intimidated by all the open space. Then Joe Davis—an apparition from a Memphis photograph who now becomes available in flesh and blood, in the optics of the ten-power scope—slows to a tense crouch and approaches her with one hand outstretched like he’s trying to calm down a spooked colt.
Soft click. Safety off. Greedy for the shot, he decides to forego the supported position. Just do it. Swat these interlopers who have ruined your day. In the slightly wavering scope he can clearly see the sweat pop on Davis’ determined expression. Musta forgot everything they taught you—showing your ass like this. Must be a fuckin’ Boy Scout. Then it all plays out in the tight, intimate world of the sniper scope, which, depending on your stomach for seeing the pores on your target’s face, is a curse or a secret delight. The precise black crosshairs caress the ripple of scars on Davis’ cheeks. A little tricky, he’s still moving in a crouch, using the rolling ground for cover, and just now Amanda is in the way. C’mon, c’mon. Just have to time it right. The first stage of the sensitive Camjar trigger releases, and Morgon takes up the slack, and the rifle stock recoils against his shoulder. Shit. Rushed the shot. He moved again. But then—yes—he sees Davis twirl and fall.
Amanda screams, but Davis doesn’t hear it or the shot, because the shock tears into his left temple and the smackdown, pinwheel of gray sky becomes green spinning grass, and then it all goes black.
Morgon has his phone out and hits a preset. “Roger. It’s cool. One down. Bring up the bird and work the tree line. I’ll call Cawker and see if he can get a fix on the girl.”
He racks the bolt and loads another round and watches Amanda, who now is walking, head down, arms folded tightly across her chest, across the lawn toward the house. Cautiously, he leaves concealment and carefully steps forward, steadying the rifle across his left forearm, covering Davis’ crumpled body. He jerks the rifle barrel to wave Amanda out of the way and puts it back on line as he thumbs his cell phone in his left hand. Now he holds the rifle in one hand to free the other to talk. “Cawker. Yeah. Davis is down. So far so good. We’re going to push the trees with the bird, see if we can flush the girl. Keep your eyes open. We gotta assume she’s armed.” Then he slips the phone into his pocket and starts to circle because Davis sprawls behind a slight rise in the ground and Morgon can only see his head and shoulders. Amanda continues walking, eyes downcast.
Across the twenty yards that now separate them, Amanda raises her chin and stares at him with her eyes hard and shiny as ball bearings. “I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” she says.
“I know what I’m doing,” Morgon answers. “Where’s the girl?”
She ignores his question and goes on in a cryptic tone, saying, “Because if you don’t know what you’re doing, I still have to look out for myself.”
Morgon winces at her. “Calm down. You did good. Now where’s the girl, goddammit?”
“Her head’s . . . all bloody.” Amanda clamps her eyes shut for a second then looks away.
Morgon nods. “Now go to the house, take Martha down in the basement, and wait until I get back. This ain’t over yet.”
Amanda’s icy stare goes right through him, and she repeats, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” Then Morgon, who’s had enough of her spacey bullshit, waves her away, and she continues on toward the house.
Morgon is on the phone again, to Cawker. “Amanda says you hit the girl. I’m going to sweep the tree line. Stay put.” Then he calls and updates Roger. “Buzz the tree line and see if you can spook her out. Just clean up, now.” More confident, he stands up straighter as he puts the phone away and turns his full attention back to Davis’ body that lays in a slight depression a hundred yards away. Circling, he’s looking for the rifle he was carrying. Must be under his body. From the corner of his eye he sees the red helicopter levitate off the ground and start forward, tail lifted, nose down. He takes a firm grip on the rifle and places the crosshairs on Davis’ bloody head as he slowly steps forward.
Crouched just inside the foliage behind a fallen tree, Jesse hears the shot and sees Davis spin and fall and lay motionless, and she doesn’t look away. She takes in every detail to include the way that cold bitch, Amanda, doesn’t even look twice when Davis goes down and keeps walking across the lawn. Then Jesse bares her teeth when she sees Morgon Jump come out of hiding and start his stalk across the grass. So there he is, the motherfucker who’s still killing her buddies.
Quickly she faces about and probes the barrel of the AR15 at the surrounding thick brush. Deep breath. Sweat and blood blur her vision. She uses the bandage to wipe away the sticky haze then tosses it aside. Just a maze of trees out there. Nothing. Jump’s in front, and she doesn’t know how many others are to her rear. And they got a chopper in the air. She has one magazine in the rifle, another one stuck in her waistband, and the Beretta.
She takes a few beats to study the red helicopter that’s starting her way.
Then her heart catches in her throat because—Oh, you skinny bastard—she sees Davis’ right hand twitch, low, next to his side, and the fingers flutter, feeling their way along the rifle tucked in under his right arm and walking down the stock toward the trigger guard. He turns his hand, curls his fingers into a fist, and gives a thumbs-up sign.
Okaaay. Jesse carefully leans the AR15 against the tree trunk and takes out the Beretta. Then she’s up and moving, stepping from the trees into plain sight because their relationship is founded on her drawing fire, right, and she waves her arms and screams with everything she’s got:
“Hey you! Yeah, you, fucker!”
A hundred yards away, Jump turns away from Davis and instantly fixes on the slender figure with a red-smeared face that steps from the trees. And it’s, no shit, not a phantom in a dream, but there you are out in the open where I can see you. I should have wrung your neck in Balad, but this will do just fine. He grins when he sees her raise the puny handgun, and it’s back to how it all started. Amateur hour.
Now the red helicopter is swerving directly toward her, getting close enough to clearly see the yellow pyramid logo on the side. Jesse squats and grips the pistol two-handed, holds two feet high, and fires four rapid shots at Jump, which at this range is like flipping rocks with a catapult. And she notes that Jump, the smug bastard, doesn’t even duck, obviously contemptuous of a female banging away at extreme range with a pistol.
Just you wait.
Then, before he gets the rifle up, she drops, rolls, and scrambles back into the safety of the tree line, snatches up the black assault rifle, and yells, “Davis, if you can move, crawl toward the trees because all hell’s gonna bust loose!”
Davis’ left eye is plugged and sightless and his whole body is a shivering tuning fork of screaming nerves. Impossibly, he hears the crack of four shots and Jesse’s voice somewhere behind him. So the game is still on and the pitch is still on the way and there’s a roar of approaching engines, and he takes a chance and twists his head and feels his left eyebrow hang and flop against his face like a wet forelock.
“Crawl!” she shouts.
Okay. I think I can crawl.
He flings one painful look behind him. Morgon Jump stands, barefoot, maybe ninety yards away. He swings his rifle, looking for a target in the trees.
Trying not to think about the mess on the left side of his head, Davis turns in an agonizing, crablike belly crawl toward the sanctuary of the cool, shadowed trees. Any moment he expects to be hammered into the ground by someone in the looming chopper. Then the leaves in the tree line stutter in a green frenzy as a rapid-fire volley of shots rips the air.
/> A hundred yards over Davis’ head, Nigel, the Rhodesian pilot, yells in alarm as the tick-tick-tick of impacting bullets tears into his tail boom. “Fuck this,” he says and turns the helicopter sharply away from the trees.
Roger Torres, who is having a real bad day, shouts, “But Morgon’s in trouble down there.”
“Your girl knows what she’s doing,” Nigel shouts back. “She’s trying to take out the tail rotor. My pedals are jumping. I’m putting down behind the house.”
As the helicopter veers off, Jesse swiftly swaps out the empty magazine, slaps in a fresh one, hits the charging handle release, and finds the now backpeddling Morgon Jump in the peep sight. She takes a supported position on the tree trunk and puts the blade on his chest. Then she squeezes the trigger as fast as she can. Ten, twelve, fourteen rounds chew up the turf around his feet, and he goes down like a string-cut marionette. Gotcha. No time to celebrate because Davis is out there. She bites her lip as she tosses a wary glance to her rear. How come they’re not shooting? Screw it.
She drops the rifle and bolts from cover and grabs Davis by the waistband of his jeans and one arm and drags him into the protection of the trees. Gasping with the effort, she turns him over and forces herself not to recoil from the swollen left eye. The dangling eyebrow. Red exposed bone gleams in the ragged flesh.
“How bad?” he croaks.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a simple question. You see bone or you see brains?”
“Bone. I think.”
Then he growls, “Grab your piece, goddammit; they’re still out there in the woods! ”
Jesse snatches up the rifle and scans the silent trees around the Escape. Then she turns to the scene on the lawn. Jump is on his butt clutching his right thigh, and the helicopter is doing a wobbly retreat. As the Bell flares and lands behind the house, she sees Jump struggle to his feet and, using his rifle now as a crutch, start to hobble toward the house.
“Jump’s hit,” she yells.
