Dead Watch (42 page)

Moving slowly, he slipped the weapon off his shoulder, cocked it, clicked it onto full-auto. There was a downed branch a few feet away. He edged over to it, pulled off his camo hood, snagged it over the tip of the branch, and slowly pushed the branch out in front of him. Before moving again, he dug into the damp earth around him, rubbed it over his face to kill the face-shine. Then he moved along for ten feet, the branch out in front, pushing the camo mask, another ten, another ten, climbing higher and higher. He might possibly be able to make a phone call from where he was, but couldn’t risk turning the cell phone back on. If it rang, he was dead.

He pushed the stick ahead a fourth time. A sudden
crack,
a slug plucked at the hood, the gunshot from the trees no more than thirty or forty yards to his right. He snapped his gun over, pulled the trigger, and hosed the trees with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter, shredding leaves and vines and bark and twigs and dirt.

He flipped the mag out and slammed in another as he rolled away from his shooting position; another shot plucked at the ground behind him. Damnit, he’d missed. He fired three quick bursts and this time let himself roll back down the hill, scrambling, falling, turning, trying to control it as he let himself go, his gun pointed up the hill. He saw a flash of movement and fired another squirt, and then was scrambling right back to where he started.

He was fucked, he thought. They had him.

One last chance . . . He fired the last few rounds in a single burst into the trees where he’d seen the stalker, slammed his last magazine into the weapon, and burst out of the trees. He was weak, his eyes were going dark, but he only had to make it thirty yards to the shelter of the porch.

If he kicked in the door he’d be face-on with the guy inside, maybe, maybe the guy would be surprised enough, after the fight up the hill, that he wouldn’t be ready. If he could get inside the cabin, if he could just get a break from the hunter, if he could barricade himself, if he could do something about his leg, if there was a hardwired phone inside that hadn’t been disabled.

If . . .

He ran.

The burst of full-auto didn’t hit Jake, but it knocked him down. The slugs were shredding the landscape six feet away from him, uphill, then swung toward him, tearing up the tree branches overhead, and he was on his face, jacking a round into the rifle.

Another burst behind him, not loud, more of a chattering sound: the weapon was silenced, it had looked like one of the Israeli commando jobs, meant for killing terrorists in a quiet way . . .

Two more bursts, and then he registered the guy moving, snapped a shot at the movement, got another burst in reply, jacked another round, lay flat listening, realized that the movement was fast now, and farther away. He lifted his head just in time for another burst, thought,
He’s heading for the cabin,
pulled out the walkie-talkie and shouted, “He’s coming right at you, I think. He’s coming right at you . . .”

Jake was on his feet now, listened for one second, heard the continuing thrashing below, and started running. Blood on the ground: the other man had been hit. He must be desperate, he was going for the cabin. Jake had to get clear of enough brush to take the shot, he’d have just one, if the man could still run, but getting clear would be a struggle . . .

With the woods all around him, it would be possible to see the other man, but impossible to get a decent shot. He’d see him as flashes between trees, but as he swung the rifle barrel to track the target, he’d be as likely to hit a tree as anything else. He needed a shooting lane.

But when Goodman broke out of the trees, running for the cabin, Jake was too far up the hill. He saw him, saw the movement, had no shot . . .

Goodman was fifteen feet from the cabin when he saw the movement, then registered the face.

Madison Bowe, wearing a flannel shirt. And in her hand . . .

Madison dropped the walkie-talkie, picked up the twenty-gauge, and stepped out on the porch. She heard, rather than saw, Goodman break from the trees. She leveled the shotgun and let him come.

Saw him then.

And from fifteen feet, fired a single shot into his face, and he went down like a rag doll.

Was stunned by the act. Stood, motionless for a moment, then said, “Oh, God,” to nobody.

Jake got there a minute later, flailing along on his bad leg. He stopped next to Goodman, his rifle pointed at Goodman’s heart, probed him with a foot, but there was no point in probing: most of Goodman’s head was gone.

Jake came up on the porch, his face almost as hard as hers.

“What’d I tell you?” he asked.

“What?”

“I told you to pull the trigger and to keep pulling it until the gun was empty. I don’t need any of that single-shot bullshit.” He glanced back at Goodman’s body, then stepped close to her, touched her forehead with his. “You did good.” He started to laugh, high on the rush: “You did so fuckin’ good.”

They saw it differently, but to the cops, it probably would have been murder—hard to explain that first shot in the man’s back. Jake checked the body where it was still lying on the porch. He’d died instantly, hit in the spine and the heart. The slug had passed through his body, digging into a four-by-four upright next to a window. The bullet hole was smaller than his smallest fingernail, and looked like a routine defect in the wood.

“What do I do?” Madison asked.

“Pick up all the brass you can find—the shells thrown off by Goodman’s gun. I’ll point you at the spots, and there’s a blood trail going up the hill. You’ll need gloves to pick it up. Don’t touch it with your bare fingers.”

He showed her where Goodman had climbed the hill. “I don’t think I can get it all,” she said. “It’s all scattered around, in the trees.”

“Get what you can.”

While she did that, he searched the two dead men, got car keys, put the bodies in two of the contractor cleanup bags, dragged them to his car, fitted them in the trunk. When they were out of sight, he got a bucket and soap and washed the blood off the porch. That done, he hosed down the places where Goodman had been hit and then had died, eliminating as much of the blood trail as he could find.

Now would be a time for a good solid rain, he thought, looking up at the sky: and it was possible that he’d get it.

Madison came back down the hill with a bag of brass and two magazines. Jake counted them: eighty-eight out of ninety shells accounted for, assuming that all three mags had been full.

“Now what?”

“Now’s the dangerous part,” he said. They had to move the bodies and the other car.

“You’re not still going to Norfolk?” she cried. “You said we might be able to do something else. I mean, it’s crazy, Jake, if anything goes wrong . . .”

“But it’ll work for us, it’s the only thing that’ll really work for us.”

Madison was adamant, and so was Jake; they snarled at each other as they drove out to the car park. Goodman had been driving an SUV: they found it in the park, just where Jake had thought it would be. When they clicked the remote control at it, the taillights blinked.

There were no other cars in the parking space, and Jake moved the bodies from his own car trunk, and threw the guns, the empty mags, and some of the clean empty shells in the back with them, then pulled one of the contractor’s bags over the driver’s seat.

Madison was pleading with him. “Jake: don’t do this. It’s not necessary.”

“It is,” he insisted. “Just stay on the other route. You’ll get there quicker than I will, because it’s shorter. I doubt that I’ll see a cop all day . . .”

He did see cops, two of them. Neither one gave him a glance. He saw one near Farmville, and another near Franklin, both on back highways. He stopped only once on his way, to empty the bag of 9mm brass into a creek on a back road. The bag he threw out the window when he was sure there were no cops around.

Norfolk is a complicated place, and not easy to get around. He took it slowly, ultracautious through traffic, and finally found a spot to dump the truck. He left it on a grimy industrial back street, in a collection of other trucks from a nearby light assembly plant.