The Daisy Ducks (39 page)

* * *

"Hi, Mare. I love you."

"Oh Jesus! Where the hell have you been? You
jerk! Don't you know that we've been —"

"Do you love me?"

"Sure, Charlie. Now where —"

"Well I love you, Mary. And guess what? It's
only the third day. You won't have to move to Vegas after all."

"Wanna bet?"

I told her we still had some loose ends to straighten
up, but we'd be back in Asheville as soon as we could. She wanted to
know all about it, but I wasn't telling. I simply told her we'd
retrieved Daisy and none of us was hurt. We left the café and drove
back out to the boonies. Twice, choppers whined and popped overhead.

"Think Freddie got through?" I asked.

"Yeah. We'll have a reception committee. What
should we do with the loot?" asked Roantis.

"I told you to stop using that word," I
said.

"Well, what happens now?" asked Daisy.

"Hmph! We better get our story straight,"
growled Summers.

He was right. What to do about the money? How to
explain Jusuelo's demise? What about the dead man at Royce's
mountaintop hideaway? What about the lads there who took off into the
wilderness? Roger Penland, James Hunnicutt, and Company would want
answers. If they weren't forthcoming, or satisfactory, we could be
doing time in the slammer or on a road gang.

When the phrase "road gang" came up,
Summers informed all of us that he was not—repeat not—doing time
on some jiveass, motherfuckin', nastyass, honky road gang. Period.

We parked the camper rig in our hidden spot, stashed
the money in a plastic garbage bag in a rocky crevice twenty yards
away, and hightailed it back to the mountaintop. We didn't arrive
till midafternoon, and I was finally, totally, fagged out. So, I
noticed, was everybody else. Daisy felt no discomfort or urgency from
that phantom kidney punch I'd dealt her, but she did tire easily.
Even Mike admitted he was pooped. We crossed back over the trestle
and saw Tommy waving his arms over his head like a flagman, smiling
at us. Just wait till they heard about the loot. Uh, I mean find . .
.

Then we saw Kaunitz and Royce below us, sitting on
the riverbank. Royce was still talking, throwing pebbles into the
water. The law got there shortly afterward. They had to land their
chopper on a wide stretch of gravel riverbank half a mile down-stream
and walk up. Hunnicutt and Penland were leading the way. First order
of business was the dead guy at the base of the cliff. Kaunitz
stepped forward and explained accurately what had happened. Daisy
backed him up and told of her ordeal. The lawmen made the guy right
away: a notorious thief and troublemaker who had been charged a year
previous with killing a deputy sheriff. Couldn't make it stick. After
all this went down, none of us was very worried about what might
happen to Freddie.

Where were the others? One man, we said, attempted to
escape on a homemade flatcar and was apparently blown up by a faulty
bomb. I told Hunnicutt he was the same man who'd killed the pilot in
the hospital, but positive identification of the body would prove
difficult, to say the least.

The officers were still skeptical until two things
happened. The first was Royce's voluntary private session with them,
in which—we found out later—he told them in detail about his
founding of the survivalist community. The drug operation was
Jusuelo's thing, although Royce knew he was an accomplice. The second
thing was the inspection of the mountaintop fortress.

There we all saw big stockpiles of small arms, most
illegally converted to full automatic fire. We found explosives,
rations, two mortars, stockpiles of seeds, huge piles of ammunition,
several medium-weight machine guns, reloading equipment, and a
generator-powered workshop with a lathe and metalworking equipment
used in the firearms conversions. Who knew how many state and federal
violations were laid open in that little walking tour?

Then the officers took Royce aside again and pumped
him for names, dates, locations, home addresses, and so on. Finally,
they found a partial list of Jusuelo's contacts. That put the lid on
it. They took Bill Royce away in the chopper with them, leaving two
men to watch over the state's evidence. The officers were pleasant,
but made it clear we were not to leave the scene. That was when Fred
Kaunitz approached me and held out his hand.

"You were great, Doc."

"Thanks, Freddie. And thanks for saving my skin.
Hope you get off okay. I don't see a problem, do you?"

"No. There shouldn't be any hassle. Listen,
seeing you in action, I'm sorry I didn't take you with me that night
in Texas."

"What?"

"The night you stayed at Flying K with us, I
woke up in the dead of night and couldn't get back to sleep. I kept
thinking of those dry-gulchers on my land. So I got dressed and
decided to hike down to that arroyo in the dark to see what I could
see. I stopped by your room to see if you wanted to come along, but
your door was locked. When I peeked in the window, I saw you were
asleep. You'd had a tough day, so I went alone."

"Ah! And did you see anything?"

"Not the men, but their dry camp. A week later,
I took three of my men out there and set up an ambush. We grabbed two
of them and turned them in."

"That'll teach 'em," I said.

"Now, Doc, I got to do something I don't want to
do. I've been talking with Bill for two hours, and he's filled me in
on a lot. Let's go get Roantis. I want both of you to follow me to
the top of the mountain for a few minutes," he said quietly.
"The others can wait here."

So, with weary feet, we went to the summit. There, we
left the rock face and entered scrubby woods. We walked for twenty or
thirty yards through bushy tangles and creeper vines, then descended
into a little hollow of bigger trees. There were ferns on the floor
of it and softly sighing pine boughs overhead. We all stopped.
Roantis and I looked at Kaunitz. What pronouncement was he going to
make?

"How's Bill?" asked Roantis.

"So-so, but better than I thought he'd be. We
had a long talk while you were gone. He told me everything. Actually,
he hasn't been as bad a boy as we all think. Lieutenant, I asked you
up here for an important reason. Straight ahead, about ten paces, is
the man who tried to kill you."

We both stared at him for a second, waiting for the
grin, the punch line, the wry gag. None came. We went forward and saw
an upright stone set in a small clearing. There were two little
American flags, one on each side of the stone. And carved on its face
was a single word:

VILARDE.
 

28

ROANTIS WALKED up to the stone and touched it, placed
both hands on it, perhaps to see if it was real.

"It's a lie," he said in a whisper. "The
one man I trusted and liked above all others was Ken."

He dropped to one knee and stared at the name on the
granite. It was a professionally carved gravestone. Somebody had
trucked it all the way out there and set it on the grave. He grabbed
at the ground, then let the pine needles and sand dribble from his
hand slowly.

"Where did you hear this? It's a lie."

Kaunitz sat down cross-legged next to him.

"Royce told me."

"Royce is nuts. This proves it. Either he shot
me or Jusuelo. Not Ken."

"Maybe. Maybe not. You remember 1978? Ken was
just back from a tour in Syria. He had a month's leave before he went
back. This time to Afghanistan. Remember?"

Roantis nodded, wrinkling his brow. But beneath the
frown of disbelief a vague realization was coming to him. He nodded
again. `

"Ken wanted to fly to Kowloon then, but you said
wait. Wait till the tour in Afghanistan is over, then you'll be out
for good."

Roantis flung down the handful of dirt.

"Yeah I remember. But Ken agreed. Listen: I'd
had that scrape with the law then. I couldn't even leave the state."
Fred said nothing. Roantis stared at the stone. "I mean, at
least he dint fight it. He went along with it."

"Uh-huh. Because since you got the Siva in the
first place, and you were his CO, he figured it was your place to
call the shots. He told Royce about your probation, too. But I guess
he figured if you really wanted to go, you could have. So no, the two
of you didn't fly to Kowloon. Ken went to the heartland of Asia for a
boonie stint and special ops. On one of them he caught shrapnel. Damn
near died before they could get him out."

Roantis kept picking up the dirt, grinding it in his
palm, and flinging it down. He stared at the carved name inches from
his face. Kaunitz continued.

"So, as he recovered he began to think. He
thought how close he'd come to dying, how close you'd come to getting
it all for yourself And that maybe you'd half planned it that way.
Meanwhile his wife, Rosie, who's sick and tired of living in trailers
and government billets, meets this rich real estate developer out in
California . . ."

I squatted down on my heels and stared at the ground.
The rest of the picture was easy to fill in.

". . . so, when Ken finally comes stateside, he
finds his wife and daughter gone. Gone with the rich guy. The rich
guy that he could have been."

"So he blamed me!" Roantis blurted out.

Kaunitz drew lines in the dirt with a stick, played
with it, the way people do when they're saying something difficult.

"Something like that. He figured maybe it was
your long-range plan to take it all. Not that Royce, or any of us,
believe it. But something had happened to Ken. The defeat in Nam, the
near-miss in the Afghan mountains, and Rosie's desertion . . . These
things can change a guy."

A long silence followed. Kaunitz played with his
digging stick. I squatted, looking at the dirt. I watched a black ant
struggling headlong over twigs and pebbles, as if on a great mission.
Did he know where he was going? Did any of us?

"So by last fall, Ken had it in his mind—had
convinced himself, you know—that all his troubles could be placed
on you. He needed somewhere to put all his misery and —"

"I know, I know!" shouted Roantis, getting
to his feet. He paced back and forth in front of his comrade's grave.
"I get the picture, Freddie. When he called me about getting the
Siva in October, he was setting me up. Tracking me. For weeks I knew
something was up. I been doing this stuff long enough to tell when
somebody's on my backtrail. But I never thought it would be him."

"Royce told me that when he first saw Vilarde a
few months ago, Ken felt betrayed all around. He hated the army. He
hated America. He hated Rosie. He hated you. All he wanted was enough
loot to take off and forget it."

There was that word again. And I thought back to my
little visit to Moe's trailer, when he'd warned me of the Siva,
saying it would taint everything it touched. As usual, he was right.
"Just about then, he ran into Jusuelo. The two fit together like
meshed gears. Both Hispanics felt used and betrayed by the Anglos.
They thought it was time they worked for themselves. Jusuelo was
making some big drug hauls out of the Caribbean, where he grew up.
Now he needed a big chunk of cash to make the biggest buy ever. And,
of course, Vilarde knew just where to get it . . . and get even with
you at the same time, lieutenant."

Roantis began walking back. We stood up and followed
him through the brush, talking as we went.

"Ken followed me to Doc's house and ambushed me
there, out in the country. Makes sense. He wouldn't do it in the
city. He takes the key, and then he and Jusuelo fly to Kowloon with
both keys, retrieve the Siva, and peddle it."

"Yeah. Royce thinks it was somewhere in the
islands, like maybe Grand Cayman, where they sold it. They took the
cash from that, made the big buy south of the border somewhere, and
arranged for a series of drops by air. The first two drops went okay.
The third one, Doc, is the one you jinxed."

"I didn't mean to—it was an accident."

"Yeah, like everything else you managed to do,"
growled Roantis.

"How did Royce and his little rascals get
involved in it?" I asked. "Was he in from the beginning?"

"Naw. Jusuelo was looking for an FOB—that's
forward operations base to you, Doc—and South Florida was getting
hot as hell. Jusuelo tracked Royce down out here when he heard he was
back in country. It didn't take him long to realize that Royce, with
his survivalist thing, had the perfect hideout and cover for his
operations, including a farm in the wilderness that could be used for
the drops. Royce resisted at first, but Jusuelo offered him money,
arms, supplies, and help. Finally—and this shows what a bad egg
he'd become—he found a way to take advantage of Royce's instability
and enslave him."

"Yeah. He got him doing the hard stuff," I
said. "I could tell that when I first met him."

"Yep. What he did to Bill, all right. So enter
Vilarde, and there you have it."

"And then Jusuelo killed Ken for his cut,"
said Roantis.