The Standoff

by Scott Blade

  “General, those’re helluva shots.”

  Abel said nothing.

  One of the others asked, “They close together?”

  “Pretty close.”

  The guy on the dirt track turned back to the patrolman and then whipped back around again.

  “Hey, guys.”

  They all looked out.

  “This pig ain’t dead.”

  “What?” Dobson asked.

  One of the other guys stepped farther out from the van and joined the one standing over the patrolman. He looked down.

  “He’s twitching.”

  “Could be after-death. That happens.”

  “He’s blinking, though.”

  Abel did not get out of the van. He leaned over Dobson and barked an order out the window.

  “Leave him. Come on. Let’s get going.”

  Abel’s men returned to the van, returned to the back, and returned to their original seats.

  Dobson rolled up his window after the last of the others returned to the back, and the van door slid home. The sound was loud in the stillness.

  Dobson took his foot off the brake and rolled forward, skewing the van’s trajectory in order to drive around the patrolman and the abandoned police cruiser.

  Chapter 12

  W ATCHING the black panel van roll away in the cold, blue lights from his police cruiser, the patrolman barely turned his head to see it all.

  He could hardly move. He could hardly think. His brain pounded in his skull. His ears rang louder than he had ever heard before. He felt nothing but cold and heat at the same time.

  His body temperature heated up intensely, at first, but quickly it reduced its degrees to a cold, minimal level, swapping out its intensity for extreme cold. The cold came on fast, and before he knew it, he was freezing. He felt it on his face and cheeks. He could taste smoke and sulfur in his mouth, both at the same time. The smoke wasn’t there as if he was inhaling it. It was more like he was exhaling it, like the smoke was produced from his own body. Instead of breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, he breathed oxygen and exhaled smoke.

  It didn’t take long before the cold consumed the rest of his extremities and then swallowed the rest of him. His core temperature dropped. Everything dropped. Everywhere.

  The patrolman’s right hand moved, involuntarily. He saw it. He couldn’t think clearly. His thoughts came out in broken phrases. He felt himself slipping away.

  His hand continued to move. It crawled up over his body armor and his chest like the severed hand in that old TV show, The Addams Family , only, his hand wasn’t detached. It was still attached to his arm. It just moved on its own, without him trying to move it, like falling down and having a hand whip out in front of you to break the fall.

  The hand clawed itself up his body armor and up his chest to a radio mounted on his top left shoulder. The hand pulled the radio down and rested it just under his chin.

  The whole act took a long minute.

  His thumb clicked the talk button like it was trying to call for help. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. All that his mouth did was gurgle blood.

  He released the button.

  No one answered.

  He clicked it again and tried to speak.

  All that happened was more bloodcurdling with some added wheezing from the holes in his cheeks. There was no speech, no sound of any known letters or parts of speech, of any known language.

  He released the button again.

  He was getting colder and colder. The end was near. He knew it. His body knew it. But his hand wouldn’t give up. His right hand automatically took action. It defaulted to its third nature.

  He clicked the talk button on and off for another solid minute or two; he wasn’t sure. He repeated this until a voice finally picked up.

  “Who’s clicking their talk button?”

  He clicked it again and tried to speak. He tried to call for help, but nothing came out.

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  The patrolman clicked one last time.

  That was the last thing he did before his right hand stopped moving. He stared up at the night sky and watched the stars for the last time and took his final breath.

  Chapter 13

  W IDOW had driven the Lexus through the day and into the night, stopping three times for gas, stopping once for lunch, and eating dinner in the car. He drove beyond nightfall into the early morning hours.

  He passed through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, part of North Carolina, putting Chicago behind him, enjoying the journey. Widow stopped about twenty miles before the border of the two Carolinas because of a roadblock that could’ve been for him, for throwing a bad guy off a roof back in Chicago. Although, he figured that was unlikely, it was better to err on the side of caution.

  Widow wasn’t much worried up until that point, but he was technically in a stolen vehicle, stolen from three dead criminals that he killed, not in Chicago, but back in Deadwood, South Dakota.

  Nothing much special to say about them, not over any of the other people he had killed in the past. They were bad guys doing bad things to innocent people. In Widow’s opinion, you do bad things to good people, and you cross his path, then justice has sentenced you already.

  Widow wasn’t a vigilante, not in the Charles Bronson-Batman kind of way. It was just that he was a guy who couldn’t let injustice go free. That and he had enough bad luck that it seemed injustice crossed his path a lot, more than the average person. Or it could’ve been he just noticed more?

  Widow preferred things to be done by the book, by law enforcement. Someone breaks the law, let the cops sort it out. That’s what they are there for. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always enough. Justice was about balance, about setting things right. Sometimes the law isn’t enough. If Widow was around, then he would do what needed doing to reset the balance.

  Like in South Dakota, innocent people got hurt. Cops weren’t doing anything about it. So, Widow did something about it. He was retribution walking. He was justice incarnate.

  He killed the guys who needed killing and didn’t give it a second thought. What would be the point? Only a Buddhist monk would go around thinking about a cockroach he stepped on. Widow was no Buddhist monk. He did believe in karma. What goes around comes around. He was karma. He was what came back around.

  The three bad guys he stole the car from weren’t model citizens either. They had just shot up a hospital, killed an FBI agent, his friend. He didn’t figure the Feds would be in a real big hurry to track him down. He figured they probably wouldn’t be looking for him at all. Not over three dead cockroaches, but he had thrown a Saudi prince off a building back in Chicago.

  The prince was the top of the food chain for a certain nefarious criminal enterprise that crossed Widow’s path, leading him to be the karma, coming back around, once again.

  That was one that they might be looking for him over. Saudi princes tended to be well connected. It was definitely the kind of murder that grabbed headlines.

  So, maybe they were searching for him. If the FBI would ever be hunting for him; it would be for some like that.

  Not hunting him, per se, but the Lexus he was cruising around in. They had no clue who he was. No evidence of his identity.

  Still, the roadblock he came to did make him uneasy.

  There were any number of ways that could be what the roadblock was all about.

  The Saudi prince’s servant girl, who saw his face, might’ve ratted him out. Maybe they pulled the vehicle description from the camera back in the alley leading to the prince’s building or maybe they pulled it off a CCTV camera on the street, or a streetlight camera, one of those that takes photos of cars running red lights.

  There were about a million ways that the police might’ve gotten a description of a black Lexus leaving the crime scene after a prominent, wealthy citizen took a nosedive off his own penthouse balcony.

  Up ahead, Widow saw brake lights and cars bottlenecking up into
a single lane to pass through a row of highway patrolmen.

  Widow wasn’t interested in the idea of spending a month in jail while the authorities tried to figure out if he was their guy or not. And what if they figured he was their guy. Potentially, he could be facing life in prison. Does Illinois have the death penalty? He didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

  The other side of the coin, the X-factor, was the Saudi royal family, which was a bigger problem for the FBI. The prince might’ve been exiled by the royal family, but that didn’t mean they condoned his being tossed off a roof, just like Hans Gruber at the end of Die Hard , Widow suddenly realized.

  He smiled again and saw a turnoff that led to a gas station and a hotel.

  Widow took it. His tank was running low again anyway.

  He pulled down the ramp, a bumpy, neglected patch of interstate. He pulled into the gas station.

  A single highway patrolman’s cruiser was parked at the station. After Widow pulled in, he realized his mistake. The car was parked there as a precaution in case someone tried to do what he had just done, avoiding the roadblock.

  Widow pulled the Lexus in and slowed. He looked over the gas pumps and the station for security cameras. He counted two, one in front of the door to the station and one over the pumps. Plus, there were certainly going to be some in the store, at least one over the register.

  Widow avoided the outside cameras and drove past the pumps, past the corner of the station, and past the highway patrolman’s car, which was a souped-up Dodge Charger, painted gray, with a black stripe down the side. It had the police interceptor package: battering ram mounted on the grille and an extra layer of armor skin over the metal exterior.

  Widow saw a highway patrolman step out of the store and into the cold as if he had been staying inside in the warmth waiting for cars to pull in. He stared at Widow as he passed.

  Widow gave a friendly nod to the guy. He doubted they had a physical description of him or a photograph of his face—if they were looking for him at all.

  He leaned forward and smiled and waved at the patrolman as the Lexus glided past. He went to the far reaches of the lot, as far as he could, out of the cameras’ views, and stopped at a set of self-serve air and water pumps for tires and radiators.

  He parked the car, killed the engine and stepped out.

  He glanced over the roof of the car at the patrolman who stood on the corner, staring at him.

  Trying to look like he was there for the air pump, he looked at the nozzle, at the coin insert slot. To engage the operation, it cost one dollar, coins only, which meant quarters only.

  Widow checked his pockets quickly with a self-pat down and found no coins. He turned back to the Lexus and ducked down into the car and searched the cup holders for loose change.

  He lucked out and found two dollars in quarters, three coins in a cup holder, but a fourth stuffed down in the passenger seat and another dollar’s worth in an unused ashtray that ejected out from the bottom of the stereo when pressed with a finger. He took them all and backed out of the car. That’s when he saw the patrolman coming straight toward him.

  “Shit,” he said under his breath.

  The patrolman walked slowly, like he would if he were approaching a suspect. He didn’t go for his radio, which was a good sign. He wasn’t reporting a suspicious suspect or requesting backup, but suspicion flashed across his face.

  Widow knew this look well. He seemed always to be the prime suspect every time there was a crime in whatever town he was passing through. He had that look, he guessed, which was probably one of the reasons the NCIS recruited him to be an undercover agent in the first place, a lifetime ago.

  In the civilian world, none of that mattered. Only the guys in the uniforms got the glory, the respect, and the public gratitude for their service.

  Widow had been a double agent, working for the NCIS in an elite unit, but stationed with the SEALs as one of them.

  He had worked black on black ops.

  No one knew who he was. And no one cared.

  In the civilian world, he was the ultimate book cover—judged and labeled and sorted away as the prime suspect.

  He looked the part.

  If the cops searched for a mad dog killer based on looks alone, he fit the bill, and in more ways than one.

  Usually, Widow wasn’t the guy the cops were looking for, but this time it was right. If the roadblock up ahead was for the murder of a member of the Saudi royal family, then he was the guilty party.

  Widow unscrewed the rubber cap on the air nozzle to the front driver side tire. He returned to the machine and whipped the quarters in and fired it up. He turned to kneel to begin the fake air-pumping process and stopped. He stared at the patrolman and pretended that he was only seeing him for the first time.

  He jumped back a little, pretending to be startled.

  “Oh. Hello, Officer.”

  The patrolman picked up his pace and stepped into a cone of light that shone down from a light high up on a pole above them both.

  He stopped ten feet from the rear of the Lexus and paused, scanning his eyes over the vehicle. He was checking the interior as best he could in case there were others inside.

  The windows were tinted.

  Without skipping a beat, the patrolman whipped up a Mag flashlight seemingly out of nowhere and clicked on the beam. He shone the light into the tint, saw no one was there.

  He clicked off the light and stepped up to the rear of the car.

  “This your car, sir?”

  Widow thought about the plates. He had no idea where they were registered. He had taken the car from South Dakota, but he presumed that it was a rental. It could’ve been from anywhere. Rental cars are moved cross-country all the time, every day.

  So, he just told the truth.

  “It’s a rental.”

  The patrolman nodded.

  “Nice car.”

  “It is. But out of my price range. I’m just an employee. My company paid for it.”

  “You having tire trouble?”

  “Yeah. The damn tire pressure light keeps coming on. It’s annoying.”

  “Did you turn off when you saw the roadblock?”

  Widow paused a beat.

  “Yes. But not because of the roadblock. That warning light came on again, and I saw the gas station. Figured now was a good a time as any to fill up the tire. Don’t want to be stuck in that line and have the tire go flat. You know how long those things can last?”

  Widow chuckled.

  The patrolman stayed behind the Lexus; his lower half was out of Widow’s sight, which told Widow as much about where his hand was as if it was right there in plain view.

  The patrolman had one hand on his gun—no question.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jack Widow.”

  “Mr. Widow, you got identification?”

  “Sure. What’s this all about?”

  Widow asked the question like an involuntary reaction, like exhaling. It surprised him, but what was more surprising was the look that the patrolman gave him. The patrolman’s face shot a look of disbelief at Widow as if he was shocked that Widow didn’t know what the roadblock was about.

  “Where’re you driving in from?”

  Widow didn’t want to say Chicago in case they were searching for a guy from Chicago who fit his description. Plus, he figured the Lexus’s plates were from South Dakota. He didn’t know for sure, as he’d never checked the plates, which was a rookie mistake, he realized. He should’ve taken a gander at them much earlier. The Lexus had originated with some bad guys before he stole it from them, which was in South Dakota. He figured the odds were good that they’d rented the car there. Of course, the odds decreased when he started thinking about how often rental cars are transported from one state to the next with no return to their home.

  He took a chance and pulled the trigger on the lie. He answered.

  “Rapid City.”

  “South Dakota?”
>
  Widow nodded.

  It must’ve been a good guess because the patrolman didn’t take a second look at the plate. South Dakota, it was.

  “ID, please?”

  “I’ve got the pump running.”

  “Sir, ID, please?”

  Widow nodded, furrowed his brow like he was annoyed, dug into his back pocket and took out his passport. He let the hose for the air pump fall to the concrete and walked back around the Lexus to meet the patrolman. The timer on the air pump ticked away, using up his quarters.

  He handed over the passport, hoping the patrolman didn’t ask about his driver’s license because that caused a problem. He didn’t have a driver’s license. He would have to think of a way to distract the man, so that he wouldn’t even think to ask for it. It would have to be something really distracting to work.

  The patrolman took the passport and flicked it open.

  “Jack Widow. As you told me.”

  The patrolman shook the passport, one-handed. The pages flicked from page to page. He studied them all the way to the last page, fast.

  “You got a lot of stamps here.”

  “I travel for work. Always on the road. You know how it goes.”

  The patrolman nodded.

  “Where do you work?”

  This posed a problem for Widow. He didn’t want to give the guy the name of the company that the stolen car was probably rented under, the bad guy’s company. At the same time, the fewer lies he told, the better it was for him not to get caught in one. That was undercover cop 101, but sometimes lies were necessary, for the greater good and all.

  “I work for a major conglomerate.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t want to give my company a bad name. But we’re into everything.”

  “Like what?”

  The patrolman closed the passport and leaned into Widow as if he was about to learn a deep, dark secret, something juicy.

  Widow thought of his distraction tactic. He thought of two.

  “Ever heard of Starbucks?”

  The first distraction.

  The patrolman leaned back, nearly leaping back.