Oh, I get it. The lieutenant holds the drugs and makes the exchange, but he gives the money to his boss. The boss holds the earnings, but he also has a gun to make sure nothing goes wrong. They’re not as dumb as I thought they were.”
“They’re smart enough.”
Kelly nodded and made a mental note, chastising himself for having made at least two wrong assumptions. But that’s why you did reconnaissance, after all.
Let’s not get too comfortable, Kelly, he told himself. Now you know that there’s two bad guys up there, one armed and well concealed in that doorway. He settled in his seat and locked his eyes on the potential threat, watching for patterns of activity. The one in the doorway would be the real target. The misnamed “lieutenant” was just a hireling, maybe an apprentice, undoubtedly expendable, living on crumbs or commission. The one he could just barely see was the real enemy. And that fit the time-honored pattern, didn’t it? He smiled, remembering a regional political officer for the NVA. That job had even carried a code name. ERMINE COAT. Four days they’d stalked that bastard, after they’d positively identified him, just to make sure he was the one, then to learn his habits, and determine the best possible way to punch his ticket. Kelly would never forget the look on the man’s face when the bullet entered his chest. Then their three-mile run to the LZ, while the NVA’s reaction team headed in the wrong direction because of the misleading pyro-charge he’d set up.
What if that man in the shadows was his target? How would he do it? It was an interesting mental game. The feeling was surprisingly godlike. He felt like an eagle, watching, cataloging, but above it all, a predator at the top of the food chain, not hungry now, riding the thermals over them.
He smiled, ignoring the warnings that the combat-experienced part of his brain was beginning to generate.
Hmm. He hadn’t seen that car before. It was a muscle car, a Plymouth Roadrunner, red as a candy apple, half a block away. There was something odd about the way it—
“Kelly . . .” Pam suddenly tensed in her seat.
“What is it?” His hand found the .45 and loosened it in the holster just a millimeter or so, taking comfort from the worn wooden grips. But the fact that he’d reached for it, and the fact that he’d felt a sudden need for that comfort, were a message that his mind could not ignore. The cautious part of his brain began to assert itself, his combat instincts began to speak more loudly. Even that brought a surge of reflective pride. It’s so nice, he reflected in the blink of an eye, that I still have it when I need it.
“I know that car—it’s—”
Kelly’s voice was calm. “Okay, I’ll get us out of here. You’re right, it’s time to leave.” He increased speed, maneuvering left to get past the Roadrunner. He thought to tell Pam to get down, but that really wasn’t necessary. In less than a minute he’d be gone, and—damn!
It was one of the gentry customers, someone in a black Karmann-Ghia convertible who’d just made his transaction, and, eager to have this area behind him, shot left from beyond the Roadrunner only to stop suddenly for yet another car doing much the same thing. Kelly stood on his brakes to avoid a collision, didn’t want that to happen right now, did he? But the timing worked out badly, and he stopped almost right next to the Roadrunner, whose driver picked that moment to get out. Instead of going forward, he opted to walk around the back of the car, and in the course of turning, his eyes ended up not three feet from Pam’s cringing face. Kelly was looking that way also, knowing that the man was a potential danger, and he saw the look in the man’s eyes. He recognized Pam.
“Okay, I see it,” his voice announced with an eerie calm, his combat voice. He turned the wheel farther to the left and stepped on the gas, bypassing the little sports car and its invisible driver. Kelly reached the corner a few seconds later, and after the briefest pause to check traffic, executed a hard left turn to evacuate the area.
“He saw me!” Her voice hovered on the edge of a scream.
“It’s okay, Pam,” Kelly replied, watching the road and his mirror. “We are leaving the area. You’re with me and you’re safe.”
Idiot, his instincts swore at the rest of his consciousness. You’d better hope they don’t follow. That car has triple your horsepower and—
“Okay.” Bright, low-slung headlights made the same turn Kelly’d executed twenty seconds earlier. He saw them wiggle left and right. The car was accelerating hard and fishtailing on the wet asphalt. Double headlights. It wasn’t the Karmann-Ghia.
You are now in danger, his instincts told him calmly. We don’t know how much yet, but it’s time to wake up.
Roger that.
Kelly put both hands on the wheel. The gun could wait. He started evaluating the situation, and not much of it was good. His Scout was not made for this sort of thing. It wasn’t a sports car, wasn’t a muscle car. He had four puny cylinders under the hood. The Plymouth Roadrunner had eight, each one of them bigger than what Kelly was now calling on. Even worse, the Roadrunner was made for low-end acceleration and cornering, while the Scout had been designed for plodding across unpaved ground at a hot fifteen miles per hour. This was not good.
Kelly’s eyes divided their time equally between the windshield and the rearview mirror. There wasn’t much of a gap, and the Roadrunner was closing it rapidly.
Assets, his brain started cataloging. The car isn’t completely useless, she’s a rugged little bitch. You have big, mean bumpers, and that high ground-clearance means you can ram effectively. So what about the coachwork? That Plymouth might be a status symbol for jerks, but this little baby can be—is—a weapon, and you know how to use weapons. The cobwebs fell completely from his mind.
“Pam,” Kelly said as quietly as he could manage, “you want to get down on the floor, honey?”
“Are they—” She started to turn, the fear still manifest in her voice, but Kelly’s right hand pushed her down towards the floor.
“Looks like they’re following us, yes. Now, you let me handle this, okay?” The last unengaged part of his consciousness was proud of Kelly’s calm and confidence. Yes, there was danger, but Kelly knew about danger, knew a hell of a lot more than the people in the Roadrunner. If they wanted a lesson in what danger really was, they’d come to the right fucking place.
Kelly’s hands tingled on the wheel as he eased left, then braked and turned hard right. He couldn’t corner as well as the Roadrunner, but these streets were wide—and being in front gave him the choice of path and timing. Losing them would be hard, but he knew where the police station was. It was just a matter of leading them there. They’d break contact at that point.
They might shoot, might find a way to disable the car, but if that happened, he had the .45, and a spare clip, and a box of ammo in the glove compartment. They might be armed, but they sure as hell weren’t trained. He’d let them get close ... how many? Two? Maybe three? He ought to have checked, Kelly told himself, remembering that there hadn’t been time.
Kelly looked in the mirror. A moment later he was rewarded. The headlights of another, uninvolved car a block away shone straight through the Roadrunner. Three of them. He wondered what they might be armed with. Worst-case was a shotgun. The real worst-case was a rapid-fire rifle, but street hoods weren’t soldiers, and that was unlikely.
Probably not, but let’s not make any assumptions, his brain replied.
His .45 Colt, at close range, was as lethal as a rifle. He quietly blessed his weekly practice as he turned left. If it comes to that, let them get close and go for a quick ambush. Kelly knew all there was to know about ambushes. Suck ‘em in and blow ’em away.
The Roadrunner was ten yards behind now, and its driver was wondering what to do next.
That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Kelly thought for his pursuer. You can get close as you want, but the other guy is still surrounded by a ton of metal. What are you going to do now? Ram me, maybe?
No, the other driver wasn’t a total fool. Sitting on the rear bumper was the trailer hitch, an
d ramming would have driven it right through the Roadrunner’s radiator. Too bad.
The Roadrunner made a move to the right. Kelly saw its headlights rock backwards as the driver floored his big V-8, but being in front helped. Kelly snapped the wheel to the right to block. He immediately learned that the other driver didn’t have the stomach to hurt his car. He heard tires squeal as the Roadrunner braked down to avoid a collision. Don’t want to scratch that red paint, do we? Good news for a change! Then the Roadrunner snapped left, but Kelly covered that move also. It was like sailboats in a tacking duel, he realized.
“Kelly, what’s happening?” Pam asked, her voice cracking on every word.
His reply was in the same calm voice he’d used for the past few minutes. “What’s happening is that they’re not very smart.”
“That’s Billy’s car—he loves to race.”
“Billy, eh? Well, Billy likes his car a little too much. If you want to hurt somebody, you ought to be willing to—” Just to surprise them, Kelly stomped on his brakes. The Scout nose-dived, giving Billy a really good look at the chromed trailer hitch. Then Kelly accelerated again, watching the Roadrunner’s reaction. Yeah, he wants to follow close, but I can intimidate him real easy, and he won’t like that. He’s probably a proud little fuck.
There, that’s how I do it.
Kelly decided to go for a soft kill. No sense getting things complicated. Still, he knew that he had to play this one very carefully and very smart. His brain started measuring angles and distances.
Kelly hit his accelerator too hard taking a corner. It almost made him spin out, but he’d planned for that and only botched the recovery enough to make his driving look sloppy to Billy, who was doubtless impressed with his own abilities. The Roadrunner used its cornering and wide tires to close the distance and hold formation on Kelly’s starboard-quarter. A deliberate collision now could throw the Scout completely out of control. The Roadrunner held the better hand now, or so its driver thought.
Okay . . .
Kelly couldn’t turn right now. Billy had blocked that. So he turned hard left, taking a street through a wide strip of vacant lots. Some highway would be built here. The houses had been cleared off, and the basements filled in with dirt, and the night’s rain had turned that to mud.
Kelly turned to look at the Roadrunner. Uh-oh. The right-side passenger window was coming down. That meant a gun, sure as hell. Cutting this a little close, Kelly . . . But that, he realized instantly, could be made to help. He let them see his face, staring at the Roadrunner, mouth open now, fear clearly visible. He stood on the brakes and turned hard right. The Scout bounded over the half-destroyed curb, obviously a maneuver of panic. Pam screamed with the sudden jolt.
The Roadrunner had better power, its driver knew, better tires, and better brakes, and the driver had excellent reflexes, all of which Kelly had noted and was now counting on. His braking maneuver was covered and nearly matched by the Roadrunner, which then mimicked his turn, also bouncing over the crumbling cement of an eradicated neighborhood, following the Scout across what had recently been a block of homes, falling right into the trap Kelly had sprung. The Roadrunner made it about seventy feet.
Kelly had already downshifted. The mud was a good eight inches deep, and there was the off-chance that the Scout might get stuck momentarily, but the odds were heavily against that. He felt his car slow, felt the tires sink a few inches into the gooey surface, but then the big, coarsely treaded tires bit and started pulling again. Yeah. Only then did he turn around.
The headlights told the story. The Roadrunner, already low-slung for cornering paved city streets, yawed wildly to the left as its tires spun on the gelatinous surface, and when the vehicle slowed, their spinning merely dug wet holes. The headlights sank rapidly as the car’s powerful engine merely excavated its own grave. Steam rose instantly when the hot engine block boiled off some standing water.
The race was over.
Three men got out of the car and just stood there, uncomfortable to have mud on their shiny punk shoes, looking at the way their once-clean car sat in the mud like a weary sow hog. Whatever nasty plans they’d had, had been done in by a little rain and dirt. Nice to know I haven’t lost it yet, Kelly thought.
Then they looked up to where he was, thirty yards away.
“You dummies!” he called through the light rain. “See ya ’round, assholes!” He started moving again, careful, of course, to keep his eyes on them. That’s what had won him the race, Kelly told himself. Caution, brains, experience. Guts, too, but Kelly dismissed that thought after allowing himself just the tiniest peek at it. Just a little one. He nursed the Scout back onto a strip of pavement, upshifted, and drove off, listening to the little clods of mud thrown by his tires into the wheel wells.
“You can get up now, Pam. We won’t be seeing them for a while.”
Pam did that, looking back to see Billy and his Roadrunner. The sight of him so close made her face go pale again. “What did you do?”
“I just let them chase me into a place that I selected,” Kelly explained. “That’s a nice car for running the street, but not so good for dirt.”
Pam smiled for him, showing bravery she didn’t feel at the moment, but completing the story just as Kelly would have told it to a friend. He checked his watch. Another hour or so until shift change at the police station. Billy and his friends would be stuck there for a long time. The smart move was to find a quiet place to wait. Besides, Pam looked like she needed a little calming down. He drove for a little while, then, finding an area with no major street activity, he parked.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“That was scary,” she replied, looking down and shaking badly.
“Look, we can go right back to the boat and—”
“No! Billy raped me ... and killed Helen. If I don’t stop him, he’ll just keep doing it to people I know.” The words were as much to persuade herself as him, Kelly knew. He’d seen it before. It was courage, and it went part and parcel with fear. It was the thing that drove people to accomplish missions, and also the thing that selected those missions for them. She’d seen the darkness, and finding the light, she had to extend its glow to others.
“Okay, but after we tell Frank about it, we get you the hell out of Dodge City.”
“I’m okay,” Pam said, lying, knowing he saw the lie, and ashamed of it because she didn’t grasp his intimate understanding for her feelings of the moment.
You really are, he wanted to tell her, but she hadn’t learned about those things yet. And so he asked a question: “How many other girls?”
“Doris, Xantha, Paula, Maria, and Roberta ... they’re all like me, John. And Helen ... when they killed her, they made us watch.”
“Well, with a little luck you can do something about that, honey.” He put his arm around her, and after a time the shaking stopped.
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
“There’s a cooler on the backseat.”
Pam smiled. “That’s right.” She turned in the seat to reach for a Coke—and her body suddenly went rigid. She gasped, and Kelly’s skin got that all-too-familiar unwelcome feeling, like an electric charge running along its surface. The danger feeling.
“Kelly!” Pam screamed. She was looking towards the car’s left rear. Kelly was already reaching for his gun, turning his body as he did so, but it was too late, and part of him already knew it. The outraged thought went through his mind that he’d erred badly, fatally, but he didn’t know how, and there was no time to figure it out because before he could reach his gun, there was a flash of light and an impact on his head, followed by darkness.
7
Recovery
It was a routine police patrol that spotted the Scout. Officer Chuck Monroe, sixteen months on the force, just old enough to have his own solo radio car, made it a habit to patrol his part of the District after taking to the street. There wasn’t much he could do about the dealers—that was the job of the Narcotic
s Division—but he could show the flag, a phrase he’d learned in the Marine Corps. Twenty-five, newly married, young enough to be dedicated and angry at what was happening in his city and his old neighborhood, the officer noted that the Scout was an unusual vehicle for this area. He decided to check it out, record its tag number, and then came the heart-stopping realization that the car’s left side had taken at least two shotgun blasts. Officer Monroe stopped his car, flipped on his rotating lights, and made the first, preliminary call of possible trouble, please stand by. He stepped out of the car, switching his police baton into his left hand, leaving his right at the grip of his service revolver. Only then did he approach the car. A well-trained officer, Chuck Monroe moved in slowly and carefully, his eyes scanning everything in sight.
“Oh, shit!” The return to his radio car was rapid. First Monroe called for backup and then for an ambulance, and then he notified his District desk of the license number of the subject automobile. Then, grabbing his first-aid kit, he returned to the Scout. The door was locked, but the window was blown out, and he reached inside to unlock it. What he saw then froze him in his tracks.
The head rested on the steering wheel, along with the left hand, while the right rested in his lap. Blood had sprayed all over the inside. The man was still breathing, which surprised the officer. Clearly a shotgun blast, it had obliterated the metal and fiberglass of the Scout’s body and hit the victim’s head, neck, and upper back. There were several small holes in the exposed skin, and these were oozing blood. The wound looked as horrible as any he had seen on the street or in the Marine Corps, and yet the man was alive. That was sufficiently amazing that Monroe decided to leave his first-aid kit closed. There would be an ambulance here in minutes, and he decided that any action he took was as likely to make things worse as better. Monroe held the kit under his right hand like a book, looking at the victim with the frustration of a man of action to whom action was denied. At least the poor bastard was unconscious.