The Storm Giants (6 page)

Chapter 13
: The Line Points the Way

Just after dawn came
a knock at the front door and Everett stood up, buck naked and awake. Kerri thrashed around in bed behind him, and her gaze made his back tingle as he rewound the mental tape recorder that ran even during his sleeping state.

N
o memory of untoward noises. There’d been none of the psychic radar traces that would have made the danger sense clang. Whoever this visitor was, they were stealthy motherfuckers. Unwelcome news, it implied capability.

Everett
wrestled on his pants and strolled to the front door.

The low ra
ys of the dawn sun silhouetted the familiar shadow darkening the other side of the curtained window. But as Everett had the kind of somatic memory allowing recognition of someone by the shape of their earlobe from behind in a crowd years after meeting, that familiarity didn’t narrow it down.

When
Everett opened the door he was unsurprised to see the Widow, her visage bland and her dark sunglasses reflecting Everett’s own expressionless face. She had a fat valise under her arm, stuffed with god knows what.

Everett
focused on her glossed lips as her mouth opened and spoke: “Good morning, Everett. What a quaint home you inhabit with your dear ones, suckling at the tit of familial bliss.” She tilted her head past Everett’s shoulder to see inside and Everett chanelled her murder.

Everett
looked beyond her, at the various places on the property where he’d set up a firing position if he were responsible for her backup. The assumption had to be made that his family was in a killing bottle.

Even asleep he would’ve heard t
he Beamers if they’d come down the access road. She must have managed the hike from the highway on foot. Quite a feat in those fuck me pumps she wore. She must have really wanted this meeting. Everett knew her feet were killing her, and she’d be dealing with major blisters by the time she got back to the antiseptic luxury of her BMW.

The Widow
continued peering past Everett into the depths of the house, as if she could see Kerri and Raymond ensconced in their beds, both undoubtedly wide awake and still as prey, both straining to hear what was going on at the door..

T
he Widow mused: “She thinks she cares for you. That’s a natural response for any higher mammal suckling at the tit of familialy  bliss, just the heat of propinquity. If you were to disappear today, she’d find someone new.”

But th
e Widow leaned in and purred, “It’s the way of things, for love to fade with time. How can she ever forget what you are? There can be no peace, no fairy tale ending for one of your temperament, Everett.”

She straightened up and a
puzzled look crossed her face. “Do you think you love her? Love that common, ordinary woman? Does she think you can unfreeze enough to care? You are merely stunned by the novelty of someone caring whether you live or die, so flattered that you mistake your own response for love.”

Everett
imagined a bull’s eye illuminating the Widow’s center mass. The lightning bolt of the line arced right through her heart to the clean sky beyond.

He
decided that he’d kill her if she called Kerri common again. Then he decided with equal suddenness that it would be too dangerous to show he cared, and muffled that impulse. He didn’t know where she had her backup. The line would get too messy for words if he killed the Widow. Things would get too hectic to ensure his family’s continued health.

“You didn’t come
to talk about that,” Everett said so gently, so soft.

But this foolish woman
covered her lips with her fingertips and looked away, pantomiming a bad little girl: ‘M’I bad?’

“As you say
, that is not why I have come.” She extended the valise like a child presenting a bouquet of flowers. Everett took it.

“I have documentation of the
DNA samples your mother freely gave me,” she said. “The genetic similarities between you and her will red flag you on many cold cases. I also have a full dossier on the organization you are to infiltrate, the leader you must outwit, and the gold you will return to me.”

The Widow
smiled. “And I have your house, Everett. I have access to everything you hold most dear. But you are safe with me.”

Everett
made a vague circular gesture encompassing the valley surrounding Kerri’s property, to indicate the Widow’s hidden watchers. “You have a crew. Use them.”

“You will understand why I cannot when you
get there,” she said.

“Why
did you and Doctor D get together?” Everett asked, still trying to give the needle and crack that façade of hers.

It was
surprising when she answered. “I will admit it was a May December romance.”

She looked off into the middle distance with a sterile pout adorning her scarlet lips.
“When I was a little girl I had a dream. In the dream I was just awakening, I was sitting up on a rough military cot in a concrete bunker.

“There were huge muffled explosions happeni
ng somewhere, and the bunker was shaking. Dust and grit showered from the ceiling with each explosion, and I realized I was in some kind of underground tunnel complex, and that someone was bombarding the surface above us with artillery.

“
A man ran by in the hallway and stopped at the bunker entrance, clutching the door jamb to stop himself. He was in German uniform, black with red armband, and the death’s head of the SS proudly displayed. He was holding an MP40, what you Americans called a Schmeisser.

‘’They are
coming,’ he shouted, and continued running out of sight. He spoke High German.

“I looked d
own at myself as I stood, and I was dressed the same as he. The beautiful polished jack boots, elegant midnight black uniform, the death’s heads showing the world how lethal we were. There was an MP40 leaning against my cot. I grabbed it as I ran from the bunker to join my kameraden in the final defense of the Reich.

“Do you believe
in reincarnation?” she asked.

He shrugged
, and she shrugged in turn. She believed there was some kind of rapport between them. She behaved as if this were no more than a casual conversation between friends.

The Widow continued.
“From the time of that dream, I knew I had fought for the Fatherland, and that I was destined to fight for it again. I sought out like minded people, of whom there are many, and in the course of that I met Doctor Dauffenbach.

“He had actually served the Reich
decades before my own birth. I was awed by his tales of meeting the Fuhrer, doing the hard deeds our country needed to prevail and purify itself of the mud people. And when he showed me his cache of bullion, gleaned from the useless and ready for future front fighters to use in the struggle, I had to love him. I had to.”

Any love she’d felt had to have been
more directed toward the dragon’s hoard of gold Doctor D brought to the wedding bed. How could lust be generated in any woman by moving together in the dark with the withered Prussian sadist, unless she had all that wealth to focus on as Doctor D inflicted his short, brutish thrusts into her?

After a few seconds
, the Widow realized he wasn’t going to contribute anything more to their dialog. Sunglasses or no, the wheels turned in her head as she considered whether it was necessary to add anything more to emphasize her perceived psychic dominance over Everett.

She came
to the conclusion that nothing more need be said – Everett agreed – and turned on her heel. As she started walking up the access road toward the highway she was limping a little, and Everett found that pleased him.

Kerri
was in the kitchen, brewing coffee. She watched the kettle as if will power could make the water boil quicker.

“Do you think she’s attractive?” Kerri asked, her back turned to him. “There was something between you two. You cared, somehow. It was weird.”

Kerri
snorted when he didn’t answer. She took a cigarette from Everett’s pack and applied the flame from his Zippo, then held the smoke out in his direction without looking at him. He absentmindedly took the cigarette and put it in his mouth without hitting on it.

Everett’s mind was spinning. The Widow shouldn’t have been able to creep up on him like that. His game had gotten sloppy, to let her slide in under the radar as if she were a part of him or something. Inexcusable.

“God!” Kerri
cried. “That toxic cunt knocked on my door? God!”

Everett
stepped outside onto the porch and took a deep drag off the smoke, forcing his mind to relative calmness as thoughts flowed.

The Widow had followed him
home, but he hadn’t spotted a tail. Highway 101 was two lane blacktop for most of its insertion into northern Mendocino. No way could she have followed without him knowing it.

Everett
looked at the Escort, and found himself strolling toward the car, flopping onto his back and wriggling underneath the chassis, ignoring the bite of the driveway’s curing cement. It was just in front of the rear axle, held in place by a magnet: an electronic Lo Jac GPS homing device, with a stubby antenna poking from it and a red LED light blinking away.

Everett
crawled out and stood, realized the cigarette had snapped in two without him noticing when he’d crawled under the car. He spat the broken burning rags of the smoke onto the ground with a distracted air. He turned in a full 360 circle, rotating in place to take in the panorama of forested hills surrounding Kerri’s domicile.

Raymond stood on the porch in his pajamas
, watching his daddy work. Raymond was always watching him.

Last night home had felt
safe and secure. Now the bowl of hills was the world’s biggest mouse trap and Everett was the world’s biggest boob. There was no safe place. His family was in mortal danger due to Everett’s sloppiness.

I
f he didn’t care, the Widow wouldn’t have a thing to hold over his head. Back in the day, he would have just chopped the bitch and faded. But there was nowhere to run to with Kerri and Raymond part of the tactical equation.

T
he sky pressed down like a black weight, trying to crush a man into the dirt before his time. A man was born to die, and so were Kerri and Raymond. Nothing a man did mattered, couldn’t save himself or anyone else. Everything would pass no matter how hard he tried and in the end cold darkness would reign over a graveyard universe.

Everett
grabbed that negativity with two mental hands and shoved those loser thoughts out of the brain. Deep breaths, eyes shut tight. Kerri and Raymond. Let them be all that existed. Let them push this darkness out. Let me stay useful to them.

Everett
opened his eyes. His stare was aimed south at a stand of trees in a saddle atop a ridgeline, away from the highway, about a quarter of the way around the circumference of Kerri’s pocket valley.

T
he bright line toward it smelled more and more of ozone as he looked. Good fields of fire and observation, well concealed, no cover for a frontal assault, but lots of ways to creep in or out unobserved by a target standing . . . Oh, right about where
he
was.

Everett
turned away from that fascinating stand of trees, as if no longer interested in it. There, he told himself as he walked inside to wheedle a cup of coffee from Kerri, soothe her and Raymond down a bit if possible.

The Widow has her watchers right up there.

Chapter 14: The Storm Giants in the Piney Woods

Norm and Rick walked
tandem point through a dandelion infested meadow, matching Weatherby Mark Vs with Leupold scopes in the crooks of their arms. Dressed in identical camouflage outfits, they’d even covered their faces with cammo crayon war paint. They’d brought their steadiest three dogs to use for scouting, but Everett persuaded them the yodeling canines would be too loud for the work and the disappointed canines were left to guard Rick’s Ram truck.

The
brothers had endless advice on what Everett should wear, how Everett should act, taking it for granted as hunters that this was their ballpark and their lead should be followed. But for this little adventure Everett followed his own counsel. He was pulling drag as tail guard; all he’d brought along was a folding surplus entrenching tool clipped to his belt, and Kerri’s sawed off shotgun.

The sawed
off had been a baby shower gift from Rolly. When Rolly handed the stubby little weapon to Kerri, he gave her sound advice. ‘If you have to use it, don’t point it at baby’s room. The double-ought has a lot of penetration, it’ll go right through most interior walls.’

The
brothers had listened to his abbreviated version of the Widow situation without argument. When Everett laid the homing device on their coffee table for their admiring inspection, it made a convincing piece of confirmatory evidence. The brothers seemed disappointed when he’d smashed it to bits with a hammer after showing it to them, but they hadn’t offered protest.

The brothers made a few phone calls
, then the three drove a couple of miles up river. They made their approach from the rear of the tree line where the Widow had her observation team parked. Although the brothers were doubtful about Everett’s certainty regarding where the Widow’s people lurked, they were eager to make enough of a sweep around Kerri’s property to confront any potential trespassers.

Ahead on the trail
, the brothers stopped and squatted on their hams. Norm held up a fist in hand signal, both brothers looking over their shoulder to make sure Everett saw.

Everett
slunk up to the two older men and squatted next to them in a cluster that felt a little tight. They were still quite a ways from where Everett figured the Widow’s people were.

“We’re coming up on o
ne of your neighbor’s grows,” Norm said. “We’ve already arranged safe passage, but stay close and don’t touch nothing.”

Everett
shook his head at the swig Rick offered from his silver hip flask. Everett resumed position on the ass end of their little patrol as it recommenced its progress.

They entered a stand of old growth
, the redwood trunks looming around them like cathedral pillars. Occasional shafts of light shone down through breaks in the canopy, providing illumination in the fetid murk. As they wended their way deeper into the cluster of tall trees, Everett started seeing big clumps of sensemilla sprouting under the separate shafts of sunlight that managed to reach the forest floor.

While
Everett would have assumed the meadow behind them was a better cultivation area, the growers also had to contend with the Man’s CAMP helicopters, doing their endless over flights to protect American society from the scourge of marijuana.

S
omeone was paralleling their passage along a trail to their left. Their tagalong angled closer. It was a tall scowling redneck female, carrying an AK 47 at port. She was pretty rough, an inbred daughter of Frankenstein tom-girl, built like she could outwrestle most men. She didn’t appear happy that Everett and the brothers were intruding on her farming territory.

The r
edneck girl and the brothers exchanged nods. The girl fell back to walk next to Everett on the trail, her scowl deepening as she looked him up and down. Everett assayed a nod of his own which she returned. He faced forward to walk the path, although he could still see her scowling at him out the corner of his vision.

When the path took them
next to one of her patches Everett sensed her mounting tension, as if he might attempt to reach out and steal some of her crop right in front of her. The brothers vouching for Everett didn’t seem to count for much in her book.

Then they were out of the redwoods and the trail wou
nd its way through a thick grove of sycamores, the clustering lodge pole thin trunks like arrow shafts aimed at the underbelly of the sky. Up ahead, Everett saw the back of the ridgeline overlooking Kerri’s house.

T
he redneck girl scowled after them from the patch of redwoods, even though Everett was technically off her territory and her product no longer in jeopardy. Everett favored her with a polite wave.

Now that they were close to the rid
ge Norm and Rick faced each other, arguing about their next move with their rifles still in the crooks of their arms.

How much experience d
id the brothers have with prey that shot back? Was this a party to them? They didn’t seem convinced that life and death was on the line.

Everett
floated past the squabbling brothers to where the base of the ridge began its slope upward. Everett snapped his fingers once, and they stopped their spat to goggle as he made a horizontal fanning motion with his hand toward his left. They fell in next to him, and they commenced to stalk up the slope side by side in a line.

The climb
was steep and Everett felt it in his calves. Even with the entrenching tool dangling from this belt, when the going got tough Everett could reach out with his free left hand and grab a bush or a branch and still have Kerri’s one handed weapon ready.

The
brothers didn’t have that luxury. They gasped and cursed whenever they had to set their rifles down or sling them to continue their labored progress uphill.

While the sawed
off was made for the close quarters of this kind of combat environment, the brothers’ rifles snagged on every branch, entangling them. But then, their hunting rifles would serve well enough if the Widow’s gunmen popped their heads up like three point bucks and posed for a picture.

Everett
grew warm from the exertion of the climb and the rays of the morning sun that baked his struggling body. He let himself enjoy the sky and sunshine a little, the shrubbery and ruler straight sycamores surrounding and enclosing him from the rest of the world almost engendering a relaxed feeling. The death dealing weight of the sawed off remained heavy in his hand.

Everett
heard the muted swish of Norm to his left, out of sight as he made his parallel climb towards whatever awaited them uphill. Old buddy adrenaline was trying to boil up, and Everett’s lips rippled into a grimace.

He stopped just below t
he top of the ridge and pressed prone against the ground as if to dry hump Mother Earth. The eyes were all that moved in Everett’s face as he studied tree line about 15 yards ahead. To the left, about ten and 20 yards away respectively, Norm and Rick came into view. They exited the shrubbery, standing upright as they advanced across the open toward the tree line without pausing.

Even though
their pieces were aimed forward ready to fire from the hip, Everett was confused they hadn’t stopped to scope things out. Whatever knowledge of tactics the brothers possessed came from watching one too many late night war movies on TV.

Everett
opened his mouth to hiss a warning. Norm turned his head in Everett’s direction, surprised not to see his brother in law standing upright like him and Rick.

There was
a slapping thump as a dime-sized red spot appeared on Norm’s abdomen. Dust flew off his cammies from the force of the impact. No other sound, except for Norm’s grunt of pain and bewilderment as he flailed his arms and toppled backward downhill out of Everett’s field of vision.

Crack!
Everett heard from over about where Rick had been, then another wet sounding
Crack!
and Rick’s frantic cursing as he thrashed away through the shrubbery.

Everett
risked lifting his head for a second and looked that way, peeking cat quick before pressing prone again. There were a couple of shattered branches on the tree Rick had been next to, the sap wet and gleaming. They were facing some kind of silenced weapon.

E
verett followed the arc of the line glowing in his head. Rising to hands and knees and dog scrambling across the open ground between the crest of the ridge and the tree line, angling to his right on a path that was hopefully out of the shooter’s field of vision. He felt naked making his hunched-over rush, expecting to feel a silent round slap into him at any second.

He dropped prone and froze
when he entered the trees. There was an acrid, tangy cordite smell. The shooter’s firing position was close.

Norm was silent
, either dead or smart enough not to draw further attention to himself. With any luck Rick hadn’t been hit, and had the sense to swing around the shooter’s left flank, catching him from the side as Everett was trying to do on the right. But Everett couldn’t count on that, and had to assume he was the sole asset left to remove these fuckers from the catbird seat overlooking his family.

He made a scan of the surrounding underbrush
, rose to hands and knees, planting the ball of one foot preparatory to stand. He was ready to rise and commence the stalk when he saw motion to his left through the obscuring undergrowth.

A guy in a brand new hunting
jacket was walking backwards toward Everett. The shooter carried a rifle in his hands with a fat barrel, several inches in diameter. As he stepped back the guy faced the area of the tree line from which Norm had been shot. Everett aimed his gaze in the direction the shooter was leaving, and then at where he was going towards.

Was the s
hooter alone, or did he have a partner? Was the partner pulling rear guard at the tree line to Everett’s left? Or had the partner displaced first, and now waited on Everett’s right for the Shooter to catch up?

The sawed
off only had two barrels, even if the double-ought loads made each shot a guaranteed heart stopper. This whole right/left decision was too much of a 50/50 ‘Lady or the Tiger’ crapshoot to be comfortable about making a commitment on.

In the event
, the decision was made for him. Whether from intuition or because he caught a glimpse of Everett out the corner of his eye, the shooter stiffened and whirled toward Everett, trying to bring the silenced rifle’s cumbersome barrel to bear.

The guy was quick
but it didn’t matter. Everett didn’t even have to rise from his knees as he fired the sawed off one-handed and gave the guy a taste of 12-gauge double-ought at pointblank range.

The s
hooter flew back to land on the forest floor, not losing his grasp on the rifle even as he fell. Everett studied his white empty staring face. The shooter was either dead, or a real good actor.

M
ovement to the right, and Everett’s sphincter clenched as he surged up from his kneel, whirled behind a sycamore trunk and extended the sawed off at the Widow’s driver running toward him with a Glock in her hand. She saw Everett lurking behind the tree trunk with but half his face exposed, one cold blue eye piercing her as he aimed unflinching with the shotgun. She almost tripped over her own feet as she slid to a halt about ten feet away.

The tendons on the hand holding the pistol stood rigid beneath her
skin. The Widow’s driver commenced trembling. Everett got a good look at her. She was a lanky, athletic twenty something with chestnut brown bangs and a wide, mobile mouth, also wearing a new hunting jacket identical to her dead friend’s.

The lightning odor of ozone impinged o
n Everett. The storm giants were close; they’d stirred from slumber at the shooter’s demise. The bastards looked out through his eyes, wanting her dead and having myriad opinions about how it should be done.

F
ull knowledge shone from her eyes as well. Things went through her mind as she examined the shit she found herself in.

“You’re going to ki
ll me anyway,” she said in a creaky voice.

“Not right now
,” Everett said, the shotgun’s barrel unwavering. “Not unless you force it.”

Her face was blank and s
weaty, and for a moment it seemed instability was about to happen. This brave girl disbelieved him, but finally realized the futility of any grand desperate gesture in her current dismal tactical situation. She let the Glock slide from her dangling hand and fall to earth.

S
he clasped her hands atop her head and stepped back, trying not to threaten or distress Everett in any way. He gave her a nod of approval and stood away from the tree trunk.

Someone
came lumbering through the underbrush behind her. It was Rick, gun pointed and at the ready, his eyes wild as he came to offer what belated assistance he could.

When Rick
saw the shooter’s body, he spat in its face. But he calmed down a bit as he searched the girl with rough, humiliating thoroughness.

Everett
’s eyes shone as he confiscated the long arm from the corpse’s hands.