Last Shot (2006) (16 page)

"He'll find you. What are you gonna do?"

"What do you think I'm gonna do? I need a safe house."

"I got a complex going off Sepulveda, by the dump. Half built, tied up in litigation."

"What for?"

"The shit you care? We had to shut down construction. You can go live in there. Water and electricity to the model unit should work. Hell, there's a security truck and everything. Your very own gated community. Never let it be said I don't take care of my own." Pierce waited for Walker to challenge the claim, but he said nothing. "You good for gear?"

"Always."

"Good, 'cause I can't help you there. Not no more."

"Lend me a shirt, though?"

"Got some shit going to Salvation Army. Trash bags by the curb. Go on and dig through them." Pierce pulled a rubber-banded roll of hundreds from the front pocket of his apron and tossed it across the table. It bounced off Walker's shoulder and rolled on the deck. "You owe her."

"We all owe her." Walker dipped a shoulder and swept the roll of bills from the fine-stained wood. He studied it before shoving it into a pocket. "I can't sit at your table, but I can do your dirty work."

"That's right. Our dirty work."

"Why? You never cared about Tess."

"I cared about you both until you turned into the total fuckups your mother raised while I was away. Still, it's a point of principle. Tess was my blood. You don't let your blood get fucked with. Something you could stand to learn."

The cash bulged uncomfortably in Walker's pocket. "Three grand. Tess needed just three grand to move states with the kid. Why didn't you help?"

"What do you think? I'm still in the game?" He ran his tongue across his teeth, bulging his upper lip. "Tess never was an ace with a checkbook. You start a family, you gotta have your priorities. Save your money in case maybe a kid gets sick. Instead she blows it on her hair-trigger brother in the clink."

"What do you mean?"

"Your appeals, the attorney. You didn't think it was free?" A smile cracked his face. "Oh, you didn't know. You didn't want to know."

Finally Walker said, "She said you paid."

Pierce was grinning, his face vibrant from the realization. "She put every cent she had and a few she didn't into your defense lawyer's pocket. That's why she couldn't afford a new liver for Spanky. So don't come bitchin' to me like I'm the March of Dimes."

Walker studied the red and blue plastic toys littering the sandbox by the steps, the Wacky Wiggle hose laying limp on the rich green strips of rolled sod.

Pierce kept carrying on the argument alone. "Yeah, well, guess what you win when you complain?" He held up his hand, thumb and fingers forming a zero. "It wasn't my job to do a damn thing. Not with where I was with my career then. Your mother and I worked it out. That woman never kept her word. Not a day in her life. The queen martyr. Only woman I've ever known who'd rather open a vein than fry a fuckin' egg." He stood, tapped a fist on the table like a judge dismissing a case. "I'll get you the keys."

Walker waited for his face to stop burning, but on it went. He kept an impassive expression in place, heavy like a welder's mask. And then, slowly, gradually, he started to believe the mask.

"Who are you?" The boy stood in the threshold, tugging the sliding door so it knocked against him at intervals. Fair hair, light blue eyes, pug nose--the kid looked like a JCPenney model.

Walker studied him, then cleared his throat. "I'm--"

"An old friend," Pierce said, appearing behind Bronson and ushering him inside, large hands encompassing the narrow shoulders. Walker stood and caught the airborne keys. The circle tag of the key ring had an address scrawled in black ink. Walker memorized it and left the incriminating tag on the picnic table. Pierce had already vanished into the house, and somewhere one of the kids started banging "Frere Jacques" on a piano.

At Walker's approach, the scruffy dog retreated across the driveway, where it crouched at the neighbor's mailbox, longingly regarding the plunder he'd been forced to abandon. Walker rustled in the curbside bags and dug out a few shirts and one of his father's outmoded court-appearance suits. Even as he drove off, the mutt remained at bay, skinny and trembling.

Chapter
22

The stumps of Marcel Deron's arms waved in circles as he laughed. The left, which flapped like a vestigial wing, terminated midbiceps, the right two inches below the elbow, so its narrow tip squirmed above the joint like a sightless head. The medical ward at the VA Hospital, sectioned by vinyl sheets to accord each bed a four-foot buffer, housed about twenty patients, most of them grizzled survivors of wars well past. Marcel and his buddy, currently being changed by a burly orderly behind a drawn curtain, were the youngest vets Tim and Bear had encountered on the VA grounds by a good two decades. Judging from the black orbs of Marcel's eyes and the drawl of the friend's complaints one bed over, both soldiers had been easing their pain with a steady stream of morphine. The sheets, strung on overhead tracks like massive shower curtains, offered an illusion of privacy, but the various patients' smells and sounds pervaded the ward.

"You think that was a war?" Marcel answered Bear with a snicker. "That was a corporate action. Look at me." Wearing a mock kung fu expression, he arranged his stumps into a martial arts pose, then chuckled. "Half of me's still MIA. And what for? Liberating Fallujah. Is it even liberated? Hey, Mikey? Is Fallujah liberated yet?"

"Fuck if I know," a voice returned from the far side of the partition sheet, picking up the well-worn routine. "But Nafar ain't."

"Nafar? Why you talkin' 'bout Nafar?"

"That's where I left my fucking leg."

Marcel joined Mike's braying laughter, writhing on his sheets. Dirty fingernails, sweat-glazed skin, grown-out hair like an Afro that couldn't get up momentum--it wasn't a stretch for Tim to envision Marcel pushing a shopping cart and mumbling to himself like one of the Vietnam vets camped out on the surrounding blocks.

Tim rephrased the question. "You served with Walker Jameson."

"Yessir. I was enlisted. SAW-gunner Deron." Marcel raised his arm in a salute, though there was no forearm and hand to finish the job. No matter how many times Tim had seen it, the abbreviated movement of a stump was always shocking, always grotesque. Marcel continued, "Saw the world with Walkman." With pride he added, "The Corps's been there longer than anyone else. We were the first boots on the sand, you know. Year and a half I served in Iraq, till I caught a rocket-propelled grenade. Something comes at you like that, it's instinct." The blunt ends of his arms tapped together once, twice, Bill Buckner reliving the passed grounder. Marcel caught himself, mounting a carefree grin and a mouthy follow-up. "Oh, yeah, I stuck around Iraqtown. You got your duty extensions, your stop-loss programs. Six months, 'nuther six months, 'nuther six months. Shit, Rummy keep pluggin' quarters into this motherfucker. Game continued. Game continued. Game continued."

"The phrase 'the left side' mean anything to you? About Walker or anything else?"

Marcel shook his head. "What's a sniper like you doin' Dragnet for anyhow?" Raised voice: "How 'bout that, Mikey? The cops here are Rangers, but we got leathernecks playin' po-lice in Baghdad. Upside-down world. Go fuckin' figure."

"Can you tell me anything about Walker that we might not learn from his SRB?"

"Walkman? Uu-ee. Like they say in the NFL, he had good motor. You could cut off both legs and the boy'd keep on giving. Or one." He flung back the sheet and wormed a bandage-capped knee around, clearly enjoying Bear's discomfort. "He's a dangerous mofo, Walkman. Goju-Ryu karate or some shit. Knew every pressure point on the body, and that's a fact." His right arm shot out, catching Bear above the wrist, the nub jackknifing. Bear dropped his weight quickly, sitting on the floor before twisting his arm free of Marcel's elbow joint. Quickly finding his feet, Bear rubbed the meat of his forearm and scowled, clearly displeased at the prospect of retaliating against a triple amputee.

"Who says you can't teach a crippled-ass dog new tricks?" Marcel said.

"You pull that shit again," Bear said, "I'll nail you to the wall."

"I wish I had my old form back to make it a fair fight," Marcel said, without a hint of animosity. He warmed again to his story. "Walkman would sneak off when we'd put into port, come back bruised with wads of cash stuffed in his pockets. Finally I cornered him. Turns out he was tracking down underground street-fighting circuits. 'Keeping up skills,' he called it. Homeboy kicked ass in Phuket, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi...."

A coldness overtook Tim's stomach. His adversary's credentials--already more impressive than those of anyone Tim had tracked--continued to mount. Seven years younger than Tim, Walker was more fit physically and tactically, and practiced in the next generation of war toys and techniques. Tim pictured himself coming off Afghanistan--cocksure, skills honed from day-in, day-out soldiering--and figured he wouldn't want to meet his former self now in a mano a mano. For the first time in recent memory, he wondered how he'd fare against a fugitive, and he could tell from Bear's restless shifting that his partner felt the same way.

"And that was just extracurricular," Marcel continued. "Walkman killed hajjis by the bagful. Right up until he got the shaft. Dishonorable. Ouch ouch ouch. No pension, no health care, no fine VA benefits. Walkman got nu-thin'. He ain't here to enjoy the gour-met cooking. Orange roughy Sundays. None of it."

"Why'd he get court-martialed?"

"Well, as you may have read in your USA Today, they didn't send us over so well equipped."

A surprisingly smooth baritone issued through the curtain: "Dubya sent in 'Merica's trooops. Said he'd armor us head to booots. Family back home, ain't they the best? Mama done pass the hat for a bulletproof vess."

Mikey's chanting provided accompaniment as Marcel continued. "We rolled out in unarmored Humvees--thinskins. Patrolled in flimsy-ass flak jackets couldn't stop an AK round if someone threw it at you. We didn't like it, but we did it. Like most of us dumb-asses, Walkman thought the war was...What's that term, Mikey?"

The song abruptly stopped. "Boo-shit."

"That's right. And this one LT, Lieutenant Lefferts--I ever tell you about Lieutenant Lefferts, Mikey?"

"'I'm beset by the undisciplined and the foolish,'" quoth Mikey from the privacy of his bed.

"I had the privilege of speaking to Lefferts this afternoon," Tim said.

Marcel's grin widened. "So you know. Silver-spoon Academy family. Well, us enlisted swine, we'd do what we do for a few days, then LT would get it in his head to put his own special touch on our mission plans. He'd read up on base intel, mix in a bit of that classroom magic they taught him at Annapolis, and retrace our patrols, routing us through dead spots or hot spots, wherever the pencil drew. And when you're light on armor, you get tired playing bullet sponge for a legacy ring-knocker. Walkman let him know. Not directly, but he, you know, body-languaged his displeasure. One night Lefferts personalizes our patrol right through an urban ambush, we near get our asses shot off. We scatter, regroup, and limp in some twelve hours later, minus one. We pass LT just inside the base checkpoint, wearing his pressed garrison fatigues. Walkman don't salute. And LT's like, 'Didn't they teach you to salute in boot camp, Marine?' Still Walkman don't salute. LT get up in his face, saliva and shit flying, says, 'I'm talking to you, Marine.' Walkman still don't move. Not an inch. Starts to walk away. So LT grabs him by the equipment harness, spins him around so hard his helmet falls off, starts finger-pokin' him in the chest."

A dramatic pause. Mikey swept the curtain aside so he could take in Marcel's face.

"With just a single thumb, Walkman strikes him. Once. Like this." The stub of an arm corkscrewed up from the sheets. "Right up under the rib cage. LT went down, was sucking dirt for ten minutes. Shit hisself, even. Paramedics and all."

The SRB's tailored vagueness and Lefferts's defensiveness on the phone were all the clearer now, though Tim doubted that Walker had broken out of prison now to go after a shithead lieutenant. Tim considered the conviction that had landed Walker in TI--stockpiling frag grenades after being fired from a job. Maybe he'd been looking for a cause, and finally, in the prison chow hall, he'd found one. But what?

When Tim refocused, Mikey had again drawn his privacy curtain and Bear had just put another question to Marcel.

"What did we do?" Marcel repeated. "What didn't we do? We were an Advance Force Recon Team. When I was with Walkman, we spent a lot of time in the Anbar province and Sadr City, working in support of infantry operations. A lot of scouting, mountainous navigation, sure. But more night ops." His eyes took on a soulless gleam that Tim recognized immediately as the detachment required for routinized killing, so ingrained it emerged even in recollection. Marcel's voice had gone cold and humorless, and it was clear he wasn't going to stop talking anytime soon. "We broke off into hunter-killer teams. Sometimes we'd parachute in under cover of night to clear a landing zone. Pick off unfriendlies, secure the area for helicopters to unload the main body in the A.M. Sometimes it was urban settings--reconning enemy positions, sniping targets of opportunity. That was a different game. We'd take fixed positions at elevated sites so the rags couldn't determine the base of fire. We could knock 'em down from eighteen hundred yards. Symbolic shots, too, oh, yeah."