by Chuck Logan
Now a dark-haired man runs out to help him. Jump drops the rifle and throws his arm over the man’s shoulder as together they do a stumble, skip, quick-step toward the helicopter that’s still running, out of sight.
“They’re helping him back to the bird. It landed behind the house. I don’t know where the other ones are.” Jesse’s voice is a fever of adrenaline as she scans the woods behind them. Davis has managed to sit up and experimentally feels at his head. He tries to get to his feet and collapses back to the ground.
“Aid kit, by the car,” he mumbles, taking the AR15 from her and squinting with his good eye. While she fetches the medical bag, he attempts a sight picture on Jump and his rescuer, who are now getting closer to the house. Never happen. Too much blood in his eye. Shaking too much.
Jesse returns and drops the bag at his feet. When she doesn’t open it, he follows the direction of her bright eyes that fix on the silver helicopter parked next to the hangar, the one that they used to scatter the ashes along the beach. And Jump is getting away, and it’s all there in her fierce blue glare. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Stay to the edge of trees ’til you’re even with the hangar. There’s some terrain relief. I’ll cover you.”
On impulse she leans over and kisses his mouth, and his blood on her lips tastes like warm, wet copper.
Then she’s up and off, sprinting through the brush at the edge of the trees. Davis read the ground right, and there’s just enough downside to the roll of the ground to mask her run. All she can see is the roof of the mansion against the overcast sky. Ignoring the pain in her right knee, she tosses the Beretta aside because it slows her down. Just like worrying about catching a bullet slows her down, so she lets that go too. Then she makes her break into the open, toward the hangar and the Bell Long Ranger, which is the first bird she ever flew at Rucker. It’s gassed up and ready to go and waiting for her, and she’s less than a hundred yards away now, and her lungs burst with the effort.
Davis watches Jesse dash in a low crouch, using the ground to conceal her approach. Good girl. He swings the AR15 in an arc, but the woods behind him are silent, so he sets the AR15 aside and, wiping away blood, quickly ties a compress over his temple. Jesse is now just yards away from the silver-blue helicopter. Then she’s in. Okay, he sees the chopper blades slowly start to rotate. She made it.
Gingerly he probes the bulky dressing and decides that Morgon Jump has damn near shot off his left eyebrow and maybe carved a new wrinkle along the left side of his skull. But, aside from all the glistening, needle-pointed pain in the goddamn world and his left eye plugged and swollen shut, he can still function.
Sort of.
So he retrieves the Remington, checks the action, and hopes the scope isn’t cattywampus. Reflexes. Even head shot, he hugged the rifle protectively into his side as he went down. With his good eye he watches Jump being hauled behind the house by the dark-haired man and hears the chopper revving.
Okay, Marine, back to basics. Square away. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. After taking a few experimental steps, he bears down and sets off toward the gabled, turreted house feeling like a crippled caddy on a fucking golf course.
Brian Cawker sees it all unfold from behind the sturdy trunk of an oak tree and takes a quick inventory of his options. He has an empty pistol, no ammo, a few hundred cash in his pocket as well as a thousand in traveler’s checks, his credit cards, and his passport. What the hell was Morgon thinking? Showing himself like that before they located the girl? And now he’s hit and Roger will be running scared and the Kraig woman has apparently managed to ding Roger’s helicopter with an assault rifle nobody knew she had. Davis is back from the dead and looking very much alive and now is on his feet with a scoped rifle. Any minute Cawker expects the cavalry to arrive, probably in blue windbreakers decorated with big yellow letters: FBI.
And it’s pretty clear from the last twenty minutes that, in this crunch, Morgon Jump is not up to being another John Rivard. So fuck it. Just have to disappear from the grid for a while and get some new ID. He can always find a berth someplace where they run a tighter ship, like maybe Singapore.
So he decides it might be more sensible to see how this plays out from a discreet distance. Say, from Sydney. He turns and jogs off into the woods.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Vaulting into the cockpit, Jesse’s hands and feet touch the pedals, the cyclic, and the collective and the helicopter’s latent avionics pour into her. For the first time in months she knows exactly where she is. Can’t fly, huh? Okay, Janet. Watch this!
Cranking on the double quick, she cracks the throttle, engages the starter, and wraps it up fast through flight idle to 100 percent and pulls pitch before she even fastens the seatbelt.
Like riding a freakin’ bike.
It’s maybe four hundred yards to the house where the red Bell is still on the lawn by the beach. Squinting, she sees the pilot is out of the aircraft, checking the tail boom. C’mon, c’mon. She wills the blades to turn faster and grab air. Then okay. Skids up. She’s off the ground, and a deep chill crackles inside her as she inhales the sweet bloom of Av gas and it’s like she’s firing up neural systems that have been too long dormant. She zooms past Davis, who is hobbling across the lawn. Comes even with, then passes, the house. Okay, so what’s the play; which way’s the pilot gonna go? Glancing to her right through the windshield, she makes out the red blur of the other helicopter in the trees. He’s taking off, hovering, turning toward the beach. Same direction as me.
She ignores the gauges, instinctively figuring time, distance, angles, and wind speed. Okay, you can’t do this by the book. Then she smiles ruefully and thinks, Well, one book maybe.
Hugging the contour of the ground, she skims forward, picking up airspeed, feeding in power, swiveling her head to track the fleeting red image trailing at her five o’clock. Through the hundred yards of woods that separates them, she sees that he’s still headed in the same direction, along the beach. Back maybe five hundred yards. Stay close to the deck so he can’t see you. Got a little wobble to him, so I musta hit the boom after all. Okay.
So howabout Chickenhawk Rules!
Here goes.
She hauls in on the controls and puts the Bell to starboard in a steep turn. So take a chance. So aim for a meager clearing in the trees. Like a daredevil from another generation, she’s hell-bent on testing the Bell’s potential as a chainsaw.
Ohhh Shit! Bit of pucker as the airframe shudders and the props growl in protest. A whirligig of severed branches and shredded foliage slap the windshield. But it gets her through the trees. Shaky but still airborne, she pops out over the beach ahead of the red helicopter and keeps the turn going, and there’s only one option now. White-knuckled on the controls, she heads straight at the red Bell that fills her windscreen until she can see the pilot’s startled face.
He tries to evade to the left, but she swings out, and there’s no room or time, and he takes the only other choice, which is to flare right, into the tree canopy. Jesse braces herself, passing the other helicopter so tight she knows their fans overlap, and then, as the red Bell commences to eat itself to pieces in the trees, she executes a rivet-twisting but adequate emergency landing and brings it down with a tremendous jolt in the surf.
Now billows of black oily smoke obscure the overcast sky, and Jesse is out and drops to her knees in the cold surf. She scoops a double handful of lake water to her face to douse the red-hot adrenaline shakes and clear her eyes. Not done yet. She gets up and wades through the water. Then she’s walking on cobbles, then sand, as she watches two men, the pilot presumably, and the dark-haired man crawl from the smashed helicopter and scramble, limping and tripping, headlong down the beach.
Morgon Jump, abandoned, makes slow progress away from the wreck on all fours. Blood mixed with dirt soaks the right side of his jeans, and his shirt is fouled with oil.
Without breaking stride, Jesse leans over and plucks up a sturdy length of driftwood. Jump sees her now from the
corner of his eye and rolls on his side and then uses his elbows and then his palms to push himself up in a sitting position and fumbles, yanking at the Colt .45 jammed in his waistband.
At a distance of ten yards they glare at each other, and it’s déjà vu on steroids. The crippled helicopter. Seeing him up close, with the gun in his hand and the livid scar throbbing on his neck. “Didn’t get away this time, you bastard,” she says in an even voice, gripping the driftwood.
Morgon’s face is lacerated and his lips have been split in the crash, so he coughs blood as he shakes his head. In the distance he can just make out a corner of the porch where he was sitting just minutes ago, sipping iced lemonade. A sound—part cough, part cold mirth—escapes his bloody lips as he waves the Colt toward his feet. “Shit, I started out barefoot in Mississippi, and now here I am again.”
Jesse, all in, grits her teeth and brandishes the stick, determined to try a rush.
Then Morgon’s face turns grim and he raises the Colt and extends his arm. “That what they taught you in the North Dakota National Guard? Bring a club to a gunfight?”
Davis sees Jesse thread the silver helicopter into the trees and then hears the crash on the other side of the woods and sees the black plume of smoke and tries to run, but his body won’t do it. Gasping, he makes it to a clearing past the house where it’s open down to the shore and sees a shimmer of red in the smoke and spots Jesse leap from the other helicopter that has landed, tilted, in a foot of water. Helplessly, he watches her walk toward a man who is crawling on all fours across the beach.
He swings up the rifle and lenses them herky-jerky in the scope. Jesse with her stick. Morgon Jump sitting up and pulling out the pistol, and it’s no good because it’s more than two hundred yards and a futile chill clamps his chest to ice. He can’t keep the trembling rifle anywhere near steady—offhand—in the condition he’s in, standing, one eye swollen shut and his head coming apart and still shaking like hell.
Then his good eye fixes on the limestone wall about a dozen feet away, around a gazebo, and the ground behind the wall is still excavated, not filled in. So he scrambles to the wall in three fast strides, rolls across its broad flat surface, lays the rifle on the warm, solid stone, and snaps in.
Nothing fancy. Center mass. He drops the crosshairs between Morgon Jump’s shoulders, squeezes the trigger, and sends the shot like a prayer.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Davis swoons and smells fresh-turned earth and imagines sunlight. The sound of surf. Sirens. He squints through his one good eye and locates Jesse jogging up from the beach, and he marvels at how she’s come through all this batter looking so clean, like she’s finishing a long cross-country race. Or maybe it’s him who’s finally feeling clean, but more likely he’s just slipping into shock. So he sprawls behind the wall and waits for Jesse, but Amanda Rivard appears first like a gliding vision with a geisha fright mask of clenched ivory and ebony for a face. She bends over him and opens a first-aid bag.
“Cops?” Davis wonders, thick-tongued, the words furry. “You call 911?”
Amanda stares toward the beach and hugs herself to contain a full-body tremor. When she stops shaking, she nods as she pries the clumsy compress away from his head and assesses the wound. “I called the sheriff direct. He’s prompt, because I reminded him who bought his new fleet of Crown Vics.”
The sun has come out, and Jesse now casts a shadow over them. Amanda looks past Jesse, down toward the beach, with a question in her spooked eyes. “Is he gone?” she asks in a dry whisper, gnawing her lower lip.
“He’s dead,”
“You’re sure?”
“Trust me; now see to the living.” Jesse kneels and puts her hand on Davis’ shoulder.
“So you got him,” Davis sighs, going in and out.
“We got him.”
Davis tries to sit up. “Need a phone, gotta call . . .”
“Shush there, cowboy; take a break.” Jesse eases him back down. Then she eyes Amanda coldly and nods at the wound on the side of Davis’ head.
Amanda stares at them for several beats with her facial expression misfiring. Then she turns back to Davis. At first her voice fails, but then she swallows and composes herself. “I’m reluctant to touch this. You need a trauma center. I think it furrowed the temporal but only X-ray and MRI can confirm whether something broke off and penetrated.” The medical opinion exhausts her, and her fingers spasm and her cheeks jerk and she collapses to a seated position on her backside. “You’ll tell the FBI I tried to help,” she mutters. The color drains from her face as she watches the police cruisers and ambulance race toward them across the lawn along with a fire truck that veers toward the smoking crash site on the beach.
“Hey,” Davis mumbles, “I don’t mean to presume on a first date, but could you maybe undo my belt and, ah, remove my shoes and elevate my feet . . .”
“Got it,” Jesse says, brushing some dirt from his cheek. “Clear the airway, stop the bleeding, treat for shock.” Then she waves to the ambulance that swerves to a halt ten feet away. While the EMTs unload a gurney, she turns back to Davis and smoothes her fingers through his fouled hair.
“So you ever thought of going to Alaska?” she asks.
Davis blinks because the sun blinds him or maybe it’s the last fierce blaze of determination leaving her face. “Ah, remind me what’s happening in Alaska?”
“DeHavilland Beavers. Bush pilots. Me.”
“Sounds like a hell of a deal.” Davis attempts a crooked smile as two paramedics rush up and bend over him.
