The Storm Giants (7 page)

“You know what this is?” He
asked Rick. Rick shook his head and waggled his hunting rifle at the girl, who walked ahead of them with her hands still atop her head.

When they left the trees and reached the ridgeline
, Norm lay on his side with his knees up, pressing both hands to the wide stain on the side of his stomach, still alive but in obvious pain.

“Thanks for penciling me in,
assholes,” Norm said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m gut shot here.”

Everett
dropped to one knee next to Norm.

“Show the wound
,” Everett said, and Norm fanned his hands out as if shrugging.

Everett
studied the hole in Norm’s shirt without touching it. “Blood’s red, stain’s spreading slowly. If it had nicked an artery the blood would be black, and coming a gusher.”

Everett
looked at Norm’s back and examined the exit wound. “Through and through, nice and clean. Round didn’t hit bone and mushroom, looks like full metal jacket. You’re not slurring or rolling your eyes so it’s unlikely any major internal stuff was involved. You got lucky.”

Norm sweated and gasped
as he clutched his gunshot wound, and looked at Everett even more strangely than his condition warranted. Rick looked at Everett oddly as well. They were dismayed by the current situation even if he wasn’t, but that was their problem.

Everett
asked, “Where’s that hip flask?”

Rick handed
over the flask. Everett squatted next to Norm and proffered it. Norm shook his head.

Everett
gestured with the flask again, insisting. “It’ll thin your blood and won’t help if you’ve got intestinal lacerations, but you and Rick are a couple of idiots who had themselves a bona fide drunken hunting accident. Your wound’s through and through. They can doubt all they want but they won’t be able to disprove your story by forensics. You’ll take this drink Norm.”

Everett
tipped the flask for him, and Norm took a few unenthusiastic swallows.

“For
Kerri and Raymond,” Norm said when he was done.

Everett
sniffed Norm’s breath and was satisfied. Everett stood and handed the flask to Rick, who started swilling at it like he didn’t need to be asked twice.

“F
ire off a few rounds so your piece is dirty,” Everett said, and Rick looked at the frightened driver girl.

Everett
shook his head. “I have use for her.”

Rick
worked the bolt and chambered and fired one round after another, the butt planted against his hip as he fired the Weatherby 30.06 straight into the air. With each round he fired, Rick stared hard at the Widow’s driver. With each round Rick fired, the girl flinched. She was living proof there was a downside to having too much imagination.

When Rick was done shooting
he slung both his and Norm’s rifles over his shoulder and squatted. Norm howled as Rick tossed him over his shoulder in an unceremonious fireman’s carry and stood with a grunt.

“Remember
,” Everett said as Rick started laboriously picking his way down the ridge. “You’re a couple of drunken fools; you really screwed the pooch. You’re oh so embarrassed you shot Rick. Keep the story simple – it’ll fly.”

Norm’s head reared up from against his
brother’s back to goggle moon faced until they hit a curve in the trail and were gone.

“What was the use for you?”
Everett asked the Widow’s driver. “What was it?”

He
fumbled for the line glimpsed during the earlier excitement. “You’ve got a cellie to call the Widow. Give it.”

She flashed
her eyes at her friend’s corpse. Everett waved her ahead with the sawed off and shouldered the DeLisle as he followed. He fished the cell phone from the shooter’s blood stained buck shot shredded breast pocket. There was only one entry on speed dial.

S
omeone picked up on the first ring, but there was silence at the other end. “The Widow,” he said.

H
er voice came from the digital void: “Everett.”

“Your shooter is dead
. No choice. He threw down. You going to ask about your other asset?” Everett asked, staring at the Widow’s driver, who avoided his gaze.

“I assume there is a purpose to this call
, but if so I do not see it,” the Widow said. “The situation is the same. I have the goods on you, and I know where your precious family is at. You are mine.”

“No
, it’s not the same,” Everett said. “I can kill this one, take the family and drop off the map all the way.”

“In that case
I would submit your mother’s DNA samples to the authorities as a concerned citizen, and you will have an APB that you cannot outrun without hiding forever.”

“Makes for a stalemate
,” said Everett, “My freedom of action is curtailed, and yet you don’t get use of me to recover your gold. Unless . . .” He stopped and waited.

“What did you have in mind?” the Widow
finally asked, in a tone like he was pulling teeth.

“As a gesture of good faith
, your surviving operative goes free,” Everett said. “She proves we’re on the same page and that you’re being obeyed. On your end, you don’t plant anyone on this house again. You trust me to play ball.”

“Trust
,” she said.

Everett
continued. “Don’t work for free no matter what kind of threat you make. One million dollars, small bills cash, used and non-sequential, payable in full upon delivery of the bullion to you or your designated agents.”

“What would prevent you taking
it elsewhere to sell?” she asked.

“Don’t be stupid
,” he said, voice raised and cold. “This is a specialty item. Big ticket number like this needs a big player in place to unload it fast. You’re convenient and available. Path of least resistance. Smartest move for me.”

“You bend a bit
, makes for a win-win situation,” he said, soft and reasonable like she was a trusted old associate. “This is biz, nothing personal – no beef between us if you back up a skosh.”

“Very
well,” the Widow said, and hung up.

Everett
’s hostage still had her hands pressed to the top of her head. He said, “Your boss seems unconcerned for your welfare. Maybe you and her aren’t as close as you thought?”

She
stood with her hands still atop her head. She thought he was toying with her before the kill.

Everett
said, “Take your hands down.”

She
lowered her hands slowly, still suspecting a trick. The Widow’s driver said. “She’s a great woman and she serves a great cause,” she said. “Great causes require great sacrifices. I’m prepared to do whatever I have to for my race. How can you stand by and let the mud people overwhelm your fellow Nords?”

Everett
had met enough Aryan types that he could preach a racist sermon right back at her if it had been useful. The supremacists always thought Everett a good recruiting candidate for their drivel.

What was her story?
How had she gotten mixed up with the Widow or Quiverfull? She’d probably tell him if he asked forcefully enough. But so what? Even if the player was different, the story was always the same.

He shooed her ahead of him
and they headed toward the tree line where his victim’s corpse awaited. As he walked, he pulled the entrenching tool from his belt, folded it open, and started tightening the shovel blade’s retaining ring.

Chapter 15
: Fate’s Cruelty

The Widow’s driver
stood waist deep in the grave, flinging shovel fulls of dirt over her shoulder. The miniature military shovel wasn’t the most convenient digging implement in the world, and she quickly tired of moving earth with it. Already warm from the hump through the woods and the gunplay, making a hole to hide the leavings was making her sweat.

Everett
couldn’t shit this close to where he lived and just walk away from the mess. The damage control and cleanup afterwards were the hardest parts of a killing.

Maybe it was good
the aftermath of murder was so inconvenient. Otherwise more people would do it, most of them unqualified amateurs. Things would get messier than they already were.

Somebody cleared their throat
in the tree line, and Everett and the Driver’s girl both froze. Everett’s shotgun only had one shell left, but the grave would make a good breastwork firing position if he jumped in, and he could strip the entrenching tool from the Widow’s driver if it came up hand to hand.

Like in one of those opti
cal illusion pictures where if you stare at the jumble just right the hidden image comes clear, Everett became aware of the redneck Frankenstein girl. She stood unobtrusive amongst the trees about twenty feet away. She had a big sack of something or other draped over her shoulder and a full length shovel in her hand. The AK was slung on her other shoulder.

“Heard t
he gun fire,” she said, in a surprisingly melodious voice. “Thought I’d be neighborly.”

The r
edneck girl still scowled, but that was just the way her face was put together. She looked pugnacious no matter what was going on behind the front of her skull.

She approached and dropped the shovel and the sack in front of him.
The sack was labeled as containing quicklime, perfect for hastening the Shooter’s decomposition.

Everett
quipped, “If you are feeling neighborly, could take a turn at deepening the hole.”

The r
edneck girl snorted as she squatted at the grave’s edge. “Don’t push hospitality, friend.”

She inspect
ed the driver’s progress at digging the grave: “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

The Widow’s d
river stared up at her. “I’ve dug a hole or two,” she said.

The redneck girl lau
ghed and handed her the shovel, which really made a difference. It only took a few minutes more until the Widow’s driver flung the last clump of dirt from the hole.

The
driver made to climb out of the armpit deep grave, looking owlishly at Everett. The redneck girl looked at Everett as well, and he shrugged. She extended a work calloused hand and pulled the driver from the earth, easily as she would have plucked a long root from her vegetable garden.

“
Cheese it while you can,” Everett ordered the driver, waggling the shotgun. She didn’t have to be told twice.

“How’d yo
u happen to have quicklime around the house?” Everett asked the redneck girl.

“Oh
, some of us go through a lot of quicklime,” she said.

Everett
grabbed the shooter’s body by the shoulders and started dragging it over to the grave, but the corpse’s legs snagged on a cluster of roots. Everett bent to free the body from the obstruction.

“Men
,” the redneck girl said, but grabbed the legs to help.

Together they dragged it sideways across the roots and tumbled it into the hole.
The shooter’s corpse landed face down at the bottom, with one arm behind its back like a ghost had it in a hammerlock.

Everett
ripped open one end of the quicklime and upended it into the grave. The corpse being face down, no one had to watch the quicklime getting on its face. When the bag was empty, Everett tossed it into the grave and it spread across the shooter’s head and shoulders like an impromptu shroud.

He
began shoveling dirt into the grave. The redneck girl grabbed the e-tool and helped. Between the two they finished filling the grave quickly.

Everett
patted the top with the flat of the shovel. He started scattering the left over dirt around.

The r
edneck girl cocked her head and walked around the grave, examining it from different angles. “You’re different from the men around here,” she said as she swept the grave’s surface with a branch and scattered leaves and twigs across it. “You strike me as the kind of man that’s never pointed a gun at anything with more than two legs in his life.”

She faced
Everett with only a couple of feet between them. A wind sighed through the trees, and Everett was very conscious that no one else was around but the Widow’s driver.

“I know I’m ugly in the face
,” the redneck girl said.

“Wouldn’t go that far
,” Everett replied.

“You’re sure a romantical
kind of guy,” she said with a snort.

S
he unbuttoned her baggy work shirt and took it off. She wore nothing underneath but faded jeans and down at the heel work boots. Everett was washed over by a ripple of lust, it poured right through him by surprise. Her tanned body was that of a goddess.

She wasn’t built like one of those anorexic ‘heroin chic’ mo
dels that supposedly represent the modern ideal of the American female gender. She had muscles without being masculine, with wide yet feminine shoulders sweeping down to tawny, firm breasts perched above a flat, tanned, six pack of a stomach. A peach fuzz of tiny sun bleached hairs started just below her navel and disappeared into the top of her low slung jeans, jeans filled by a heart shaped ass and perfect swelling hips attached to muscular legs. The hips and legs of a woman who tramped up and down the hills of Mendocino all day tending her crop.

Everett
’s pulse throbbed at the sight of her. Then he thought of Kerri waiting at home and wrenched his gaze away from that beautiful body. He snuck a sidelong look at the redneck girl’s work roughened hands and baboon face, reminded once again of fate’s cruelty.

The r
edneck girl nodded at his absence of pity, and put her shirt back on. “I take good care of my man, when I can find a real one that is. If you get tired of that skinny little one you’re shacking up with, you look me up.”

She
reclaimed her shovel and grinned at Everett as much as her scowling face allowed. “Hell, you don’t even have to leave her. Come on by my place when she ain’t enough for you on her own.”