Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  High-pitched and nerve-edged, the words shattered the glassine air.

  Andrea Shaeffer, crouched over into a shooter’s stance, arms extended, nine-millimeter pistol cocked and ready, was ten feet behind Ferguson’s grandmother, down the hallway leading toward the rear kitchen door, which she’d slipped past without being seen or heard.

  “Drop that shotgun!” she yelled, trying to cover anxiety with noise.

  But the old woman did not. Instead, turning as if in some sepia-toned, herky-jerky antique film, she spun toward the sound of the detective’s voice, swinging the shotgun barrel in front of her as if readying to fire.

  “Stop!” screamed Shaeffer. She could see the twin barrels like predator’s eyes pointing directly at her chest. She knew only that death often walked with hesitation and this time she could not let it slip through her grasp.

  Cowart’s mouth opened in a single, incomprehensible shout. Brown called, “No!” but the word was swallowed by the deep burst of the detective’s pistol as Shaeffer fired.

  The huge handgun bucked violently in her hands and she fought to control it, suddenly alive with evil intent. Three shots burst through the morning still, exploding in the small, dark house, deafening, echoing through the rooms.

  The first shot picked up the elderly woman and threw her back as if she weighed no more than a breath of wind. The second shot crashed into the wall, sending wood and plaster fragments into the air. The third bullet shattered a window and disappeared into the morning. Ferguson’s grandmother’s arms flung out, and the shotgun clattered from her grasp. She tumbled backward, smashing into the wall, and then slumping down, arms outstretched, as if in supplication.

  “Jesus, no!” Tanny Brown cried again.

  The policeman stepped toward the woman, then hesitated.

  He tore his eyes away from the fast-growing splotch of crimson blood that stained Ferguson’s grandmother’s nightgown. He fixed first on Cowart, who was standing, frozen, in spot, mouth slightly agape. The reporter blinked, as if awakening from a bad dream, said, “Jesus Christ,” himself, then suddenly turned toward the front door.

  Ferguson had disappeared.

  Cowart pointed and shouted, not words but simply surprise and anger. Tanny Brown jumped toward the empty space.

  Andrea Shaeffer entered the room, her hands shaking, her eyes locked onto the dying woman.

  Brown tore through the front door, out onto the porch. Sudden quiet shocked him; the world seemed a wavy, infirm sight of mists and shafts of dawn light. There was no sound. No sign of life. His eyes swept the yard, then he turned toward the side, instantly seeing Ferguson moving rapidly for the car parked by the side of the shack.

  “Stop!” he shouted.

  Ferguson paused, but not in response to the command. Instead he squared himself to the policeman and raised his right hand. There was a short-barreled revolver in it. He fired twice, wildly, the shots slashing the air around the detective. Brown was pierced with a sudden familiar memory: The deep booming sounds were like those of his partner’s gun. Fury, like a storm, burst within him. He shouted out “Stop!” again, and ran insanely forward on the porch, rapidly returning fire.

  His shots missed the killer but struck the car. A window exploded glass. The demon sound of metal scoring metal and ricocheting off into the morning filled the air.

  Ferguson fired again, then turned away from the car and ran toward the line of trees on the far side of the clearing. Tanny Brown anchored himself on the edge of the porch and screamed to himself to take careful aim. He took a deep breath, his eyesight glowing red with fury and anger, and saw the killer’s back dancing onto the small pistol sight. He thought, Now!

  And pulled the trigger.

  The gun jumped in his hand and he saw his shot fly astray, splintering into the trunk of a tree.

  Ferguson spun once, facing Tanny Brown, fired another wild shot and disappeared into the darkness of the forest, running hard.

  As Brown went through the front door, Shaeffer walked quickly over to Ferguson’s grandmother. She knelt down, her pistol still in her hand, reached out with her free hand and gently touched the woman’s chest, like a child touching something to see if it is real. She drew back fingertips smeared with blood. The old woman tried to breathe in one final time; it made a sucking, rattling sound. Then she wheezed out in death. Shaeffer stared at the figure in front of her and then turned toward Cowart.

  “I didn’t have a choice. . . .” she said.

  The words seemed to force action back into the reporter’s limbs. He stepped across the room and seized the shotgun from the floor. He swiftly cracked it open and stared at the two empty chambers, one for each barrel.

  “Empty,” he said.

  “No,” Shaeffer replied.

  He held the weapon up to her.

  “No,” she said again, quietly. “Damn.”

  She looked toward the reporter, as if seeking reassurance. She seemed suddenly terribly young.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she repeated.

  From outside, they heard the crash of shots.

  Matthew Cowart ducked involuntarily. It seemed to him that the silence between the gun reports was somehow deeper, thicker, and he felt like a swimmer treading water in the ocean. He took a shallow breath and jumped toward the front door. Andrea Shaeffer moved in swiftly behind him.

  He saw Tanny Brown’s back at the edge of the porch and realized the policeman was feverishly emptying spent casings from his revolver. The shells clattered against the wooden boards at his feet, and he started to jam fresh bullets into the gun’s cylinders.

  “Where is he?” Cowart asked.

  Brown spun toward him. “The old woman?”

  “She’s dead,” Shaeffer replied. “I didn’t know . . .”

  He interrupted, “You couldn’t help it.”

  “The shotgun was empty,” Cowart said.

  Tanny Brown stared at him but had no response, save a single, sad shrug of his shoulders. Then, in the same instant, he straightened up and pointed toward the forest.

  “I’m going after him.”

  Shaeffer nodded, feeling that she was being tugged along by some current she could not see, only feel. Matthew Cowart nodded as well.

  Tanny Brown pushed past the two of them, leaped off the porch, and moved rapidly across the clearing toward the edge of shadows some thirty yards distant. He picked up his pace as he crossed the open space so that by the time he reached the small cut in the darkness that had swallowed up Ferguson, he was loping in an easy run, not pushed into a sprint, but making up for each moment that the killer had stolen.

  He was aware of the harsh breathing of the two others a few feet behind him, but he paid them no mind. Instead, he leaned forward into the cool green half-light of the forest, eyes dead ahead on a small trail, searching for Robert Earl Ferguson, knowing that it would not be long before the chased creature turned in ambush to fight. He told himself, This is my country, too. I grew up here, too. lt’s as familiar to me as it is to him.

  He reassured himself with lies and pushed on.

  Heat fractured the morning, rising about them with sticky insistence, sucking at their strength as they penetrated the tangled branches and vines in pursuit. They clung to the small path, Shaeffer and Cowart following the swath cut by Tanny Brown’s single-minded search. He forced himself ahead steadily, trying to anticipate what Ferguson would do.

  There were occasional signs that Ferguson, too, was following the path. Tanny Brown spotted a footprint in the wet earth. Cowart noticed a small swatch of gray material stuck on the end of a thorn, pulled from the killer’s sweatshirt.

  Sweat and fear clogged their eyes.

  Brown remembered the war, thought, I’ve been here before, felt a joint apprehension and excitement within him and continued. Sha
effer plodded on, seeing only the old woman’s body tossed by death into a corner of the shack. The vision blended with a distant memory of the sight of Bruce Wilcox disappearing into the gloom of the inner-city night. She thought death seemed to be mocking her; whenever she tried to do what was right it tripped her, sent her sprawling into wrong. She had so much to correct and had no idea how to do it.

  Cowart thought each step was pushing him further into a nightmare. He’d lost his notebook and pen. A ridge of brambles had stolen them from his hand and sliced open a line of blood that pulsated and stung infuriatingly. For an instant he wondered what he was doing there. Then he told himself, Writing the last paragraph.

  He jogged to keep up.

  The ground beneath their feet began to ooze and grasp at their shoes. A thick, damp heat surrounded them. The forest seemed to grow more snarled and knotted together as it gave way to swamp, almost as if the two elements of nature were struggling over possession of the earth beneath their feet. They were streaked with grime and dirt, their clothes ripped. Cowart thought that somewhere there was morning, with clarity and warmth, but not there, not beneath the mat of overhanging tree branches that shut out the sky. He was no longer aware how long they had been pursuing Ferguson. Five minutes. An hour. It seemed to him that they’d all been pursuing Ferguson all their lives.

  Tanny Brown stopped abruptly, kneeling down and signaling the two others to crouch. They huddled up close to him and followed his gaze.

  “Do you know where we are?” whispered Shaeffer.

  The police lieutenant nodded. “He knows,” Brown replied softly, gesturing toward Cowart.

  The reporter breathed in hard. “Not far from where the little girl’s body was found,” he said.

  Brown nodded.

  “Can you see anything?” Shaeffer asked.

  “Not yet.”

  They stopped and listened. Cowart heard a bird rise through the branches of a nearby bush. There was a small noise from adjacent underbrush. A snake, he thought, taking cover. He shivered despite the warmth. A breeze moved across the treetops, seeming very distant.

  “He’s out there,” Brown said.

  He gestured toward a break in the thick mire of swamp and forest. Shafts of sunlight measured a small open space in the path before them. The clearing couldn’t have been more than ten yards across, surrounded by the maze of greenery. They could see where the path they were following sidled between two trees on the far side, like a slice of darkness.

  “We have to cross that open space,” he said quietly. “Then it’s not too far down to the water. The water runs back, miles. Goes all the way to the next county. He’s got a couple of options: Keep going, but that’s tough country to cross, and when he gets out on the other side, assuming he can without getting lost or bit by a snake or chewed on by an alligator or whatever, he’ll be cold and wet and knows maybe I’ll be waiting. What he’ll really want to do is double back, get past us and back out the easy way. Get back to his car, get over the Alabama border and start to make things happen for himself that way.”

  “How’s he going to do that?” Cowart asked.

  “Lead us on. String us out. Then make a move.” Brown paused before adding, “Precisely what he has been doing.”

  “And the clearing?” Cowart asked. His voice was slow with fatigue.

  “A good place to do it.”

  Shaeffer stared directly ahead. She spoke with a sullen, awful finality. “He means to kill us.”

  None of them wanted to debate that observation.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Brown shrugged. “Not let him.”

  Cowart stared at the opening in the forest and said quietly, “That’s what it always comes down to, right? Eventually you always have to step out into the open.”

  Tanny Brown, half rising, nodded. He glanced back toward the small space and thought it a good spot to turn and fight. It would be the spot he would select. There’s no way around it. No way to avoid it. We have to cross through it. He thought it suddenly unfair that the edge of the swamp seemed to be conspiring with Ferguson to help him escape. Every tree branch, every obstacle, hindered them, hid him. He scanned the tree line, searching for any sign of color or shape that didn’t fit. Make a move, he said to himself. Just a single little twitch that I can see. He cursed to himself when he saw none.

  He saw no option, except going ahead. “Watch carefully,” he whispered.

  He stepped out into the clearing, pistol in his hand, muscles tense, listening. Shaeffer was only two feet behind him. She kept both hands on her pistol, thinking, This is where it will end. She was overcome by the desire to do a single thing right before she died. Cowart picked himself up and followed behind her another couple of feet. He wondered whether the others were as frightened as he was, then wondered why that made any difference.

  The silence shrouded them.

  Tanny Brown wanted to scream out. The sensation that he was walking into a gunsight was like pressure on his chest. He thought he could not breathe.

  Cowart could feel only the heat and an awful vulnerability. He thought himself blinded.

  But it was he that saw the small movement before anyone else. A quiver of leaves and shake of bushes, and a gray-black gun barrel that pointed toward them. So he shouted, “Watch out!” as he dove down, oddly surprised in the wave of dread that swept over him that he was able to process anything at all.

  Tanny Brown, too, had thrown himself forward at the first syllable of panic that came from Cowart. He rolled, trying to bring his weapon up into a firing position, not really having any idea where to shoot.

  Shaeffer, however, did not duck. Screaming harshly, she had turned toward the movement, firing her weapon once without taking aim at anything. Her shot spun crazily into the sky. But the deep roar of the nine-millimeter was bracketed by three resonant blasts from Ferguson’s pistol.

  Brown gasped as a bullet exploded in the dirt by his head. Cowart tried to force himself into the wet earth.

  Shaeffer screamed again, this time in sudden pain.

  She spun down to the ground like a bird with a broken wing, clutching at her mangled elbow. She writhed about, her voice pitched high with hurt. Cowart reached out and dragged her toward him as Brown rose, taking aim but seeing nothing. His finger tightened but he did not fire. As he paused, he heard an explosion of trees and bushes as Ferguson ran.

  Cowart saw the detective’s pistol hanging limply from her hand, blood pulsing down her wrist and staining the polished steel of the weapon. He seized the gun and raised himself up, tracking the sounds of the escaping man.

  He was not aware that he’d stepped over some line.

  He fired.

  Wildly, letting the racket from the gun obliterate any thoughts of what he was doing, he tugged on the trigger, sending the remaining eight shots in the clip whining into the thick trees and underbrush.

  He kept pulling after the magazine was emptied, standing in the center of the clearing listening to the echoes from the weapon.

  He let the pistol drop to his side, as if exhausted.

  All three seemed frozen for a moment, before Shaeffer moaned in pain at the reporter’s feet and he bent down toward her. The sound picked up Tanny Brown, switching him back into action. He scrambled across the wet earth and hastily inspected the wound to the detective’s arm. He could see smashed white bone protruding through the skin. Deep arterial blood pulsed through the ripped flesh. He glanced up at the forest as if searching for some guidance, then back down. Working as rapidly as he could, he tore a strip of cloth from his own jacket, then twisted it into a makeshift tourniquet. He broke a green branch from an adjacent tree limb and used that to tighten the bandage. His hands worked skillfully, old lessons never forgotten. As he twisted the wrapping tight, he could see the blood flow diminish. He looked u
p at Cowart, who had risen and gone to the edge of the clearing, eyes staring into the dark forest.

  The reporter still gripped the pistol in his hand.

  Brown saw Cowart lean forward into the black hole in the clearing, then step back, looking down at his hand.

  “I think I got him,” the reporter said. He turned toward Brown and held out his palm.

  It was smeared with blood.

  Brown rose, nodding. “Stay with her,” he said.

  Cowart shook his head. “No, I’m coming with you.”

  Shaeffer groaned.

  “Stay with her,” Brown repeated.

  Cowart opened his mouth, but the policeman cut him off. “Now it’s mine,” he said.

  The reporter breathed out hard and harsh. Emotions smashed into him. He thought of everything he’d set in motion and thought, It can’t stop for me here.

  Shaeffer moaned again.

  And he realized he had no choice.

  He nodded.

  Matthew Cowart waited with the wounded detective, but felt more alone than ever before.

  The police lieutenant turned and plunged ahead, angling through the net of brambles and branches that reached out and grabbed at his clothes, scratching like wildcats at his skin and eyes. He moved hard and fast, thinking, If he’s wounded, he will run straight. He thought he had to make up lost seconds spent fixing the detective’s arm.

  He saw the blood splotch that Cowart had found as he passed out of the clearing, then another some fifteen yards into the swamp. A third marked the trail a dozen feet after that. They were small, a few crimson droplets of blood standing out against the green shadows.

  He raced on, sensing the black water that lay ahead.

  The forest crashed around him. He thrust apart all the tendrils and ferns that blocked his path. His pursuit now was all speed and power, a tidal force of fury. He smashed aside anything that hindered his way.

  He did not see Ferguson until he was almost on top of him.

  The killer had turned, leaning up against a gnarled mangrove tree at the edge of the expanse of swamp water that ran inkily behind him. A line of dark blood had raced down from his thigh to his ankle, standing out against the faded blue of his jeans. He was pointing his weapon directly at Tanny Brown as the policeman burst ahead, running directly into the line of fire.