Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  Jake knew he had to keep a clear mind, buying as much time to strategize as he possibly could.

  “Why did you kill Doc and Finney?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Sutter paused. “We didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I feel almost guilty, closest thing to a confession I’ve made in years. Charlie doesn’t frequent church very much himself, do you Charlie? We do seem to end up at a lot of funerals, though. See, we really didn’t know who killed your friends, or we’d never have set this thing up with you in the first place. Unlike you and the police, we suspected foul play immediately. I guess we’ve got an eye for it. It could have been an accident, but the timing was lousy. Really lousy. It smelled like somebody took him out and wanted everybody, especially us, to think accident. We’re in the business of making accidents’ happen. The odds in the betting pool were two to one against an accident. In any case, we had to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Your friend was a key man. He had lots of power, lots of potential. A man of influence, confident, secure, a real leader. We got him to get his hands dirty, then we knew he was ours. We were watching him, of course, and we knew we’d have to take him out if he went soft on us. But the boys at the top were thrilled with the doctor. No way they’d ordered a hit. It’s like, you spend a few years training a guy on the job, and he finally starts to really pay off, and then you lose your investment. And the people we work for don’t like to lose investments. We had to know who did it. In our line of work, you can’t afford not to know who. Or next week you’re history, with them laying flowers on your grave and saying what a great guy you were.”

  Jake was genuinely interested and tried hard to look it. Sutter clearly enjoyed playing to an audience. That meant more time to stay alive.

  “At first the big guys thought it might have been someone in our own circle taking things into his own hands. Like I said, we were watching your friend. He gave us a few scares. Talking a little too seriously with that other friend of yours, though we weren’t sure exactly what he was saying. We were afraid he was having a conscience attack, but it looked like he was getting over it, and we figured things would settle in for a nice long-term relationship in the heart, lung, and kidney markets—sort of the pork bellies and soybeans of the medical exchange.”

  Sutter lost it again and was acting more and more like a drunk. Can only four wine coolers do this to a guy?

  “Of course, if we found it was one of our boys acting on his own, we’d have to discipline him. Severely. But within a few days we’d shaken everybody down and knew it wasn’t an inside job. We were clean as a whistle. Then we figured it could be another group moving in on our operation. You never know about that. See, organized crime isn’t the tight little knitting circle you might imagine. We’ve got all kinds of people, lots of them successful business people, established professionals, trying to break into this medical thing. It’s a real bonanza. People will pay big bucks to go on living.

  “So maybe a competitor was trying to get in on the act. Maybe they knew Dr. Lowell was our foothold and decided to terminate him. Set us back so they could get a jump with someone else. If so, we had to know. But we’d run out of leads, hit a dead end within a few days of the wreck. We needed hard facts. Oh, we could have eventually found where the car was towed, checked it out, but then what? We don’t have a crime lab, fingerprints on computer, all that stuff. That’s where you came in.”

  “Why me?”

  “After a lot of discussion—and it still wasn’t unanimous—the brass decided to make contact with you. If you helped us, great. If we helped you, the police could nail them, get ’em out of the way for us. Or if they got off easy, we’d take care of them. In fact, even if they went to prison, we might take ’em out there. Send a message, you know. Piece o’ cake.

  “I asked you about organized crime to see if your detective friend suspected anything. It was a great opportunity to find out if they were on to our operation, even slightly. If they were, we would’ve been on the suspect list. I mean, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell us one way or another, so we had to come up with somebody who was. Who better than a reporter?”

  Jake avoided eye contact with Charlie but sensed he was getting eager to do what he did best.

  “Of course, we were relieved when you told us nobody even suspected organized crime—that told us our operation was still undercover. But if another group made the hit, the cops didn’t suspect them either. Your friend’s computer files came a little too close to home. I don’t mind telling you it made me nervous, and now the cops know more than we wish they did. But it was a risk we had to take.”

  “So who did do it?”

  It was just about pitch dark now, and Jake didn’t want the conversation winding down.

  “We still don’t know. Your buddy will keep working on it after you’re gone. If he solves it, he nails the guys who set back our operation. If not, we lose nothing. Well, maybe not nothing. We knew all along we were telling you too much. But that was the beauty of it. You took the vow of silence. Our own little Omerta. But now you’ve outlived your usefulness. Remember the saying. ’If you’re no longer an asset, you’re a liability’? Well, you’re no longer an asset, Woods, and we have only one game plan for liabilities. ’You talk, you die.’ Only this is the preventative version. ’You die, so you don’t talk!”’

  Jake had never felt like such a fool for keeping a promise. He’d broken plenty of others he should have kept. Why had he kept one he should have broken?

  “Come on, Woods, lighten up. Don’t look so shocked. It’s just our own little euthanasia plan—when people’s lives become too expensive for us, we put them out of their misery. Kevorkian style, but no consent required. Just think of us as your doctor, or your family member who’s tired of paying the medical bills. You understand, don’t you Jake? We don’t want any hard feelings. We’ve become … sort of attached to you. You know, male bonding and all that.”

  Sutter laughed again, this time more deliberately, relishing the moment in his perverse way, squeezing out its juices and savoring them.

  The dim overhead light caught Sutter’s eyes, which seemed to Jake to have undergone a transformation. The eyes were coal black, lifeless, ruthless, deadly. Shark eyes. Why didn’t I notice them before? The eyes seemed subhuman, animal eyes, vicious and uncaring, without conscience, without moral reference points. The eyes of a predator, alive but mechanical. His giddiness was no sign of softness, but an idiosyncrasy of an utterly ruthless man.

  “Besides, Jake”—he said Jake’s name with pronounced sarcasm, rubbing in the facade of a personal relationship—“we don’t want you to have to live with that thing Vietnam vets have. What do you call it? Survivor guilt syndrome? You know, how come you lived when your friends died? You should have died too. Well … now you will.”

  “But …”

  “This is now what we professionals call the pleading, bargaining stage, sometimes known as the procrastination stage. What would you like to say? What can you offer me in exchange for your life? You’re not rich, I know that. Perhaps a favorable column? The promise to quote me fairly and accurately? A year’s subscription to the Tribune? Ah, I have it. You could write my biography. Now that’s a tempting offer. Well, what is it, Woods?”

  “You can’t expect to get away with this. If I’m murdered—”

  “Oh, but we do expect to get away with it. We have before. Why shouldn’t we this time? Besides, this isn’t going to be known as a murder, just a permanent disappearance. Sure, your detective friend will be suspicious, but you didn’t tell him or anybody else you were coming here, did you? Good boy, we knew we could trust you. Even if they knew there was foul play, who will they suspect? Somebody who hates your column? Some group you’ve insulted? Nobody’s going to suspect us—they don’t even know we exist! We’ve got a perfect place to bury you, don’t we Charlie? They won’t find your body for another fifty years when they turn these woo
ds into a housing development. Nobody will remember Jake Woods then. Nobody will care!”

  Sutter reached into his briefcase again, its raised lid shielding Jake from its contents. His hand wrapped in a white handkerchief, he lifted something out, something with a familiar scent, and said, “By the way. Have I thanked you for the Walther? A Nazi gun, you said. I’m impressed. I’m handling it carefully, ’cause we’re thinking of possible uses for it. What’s wrong, Jake? You look surprised. We didn’t want you armed, just in case we had to face off with you prematurely. Tell him about it, Charlie.”

  Mayhew shook his head.

  “Okay, I’m not shy. Charlie’s good with a slim-jim. Took him all of twenty seconds to get in your car. Said he didn’t think you’d leave the game early. Would have done the job earlier, but if you can believe this, he sat in his car listening to the game on the radio, waiting for the rain to stop. Never did, so he finally got out and went to work. That dopey kid freaked him out so much that when he started running away, he squeezed the trigger and almost shot off his own foot. He could break in the car any time, and he waits till you’re coming back—’cause he didn’t want to get wet!”

  Sutter rolled his eyes with an exasperated good-help-is-hard-to-find expression. Charlie did not appreciate the ribbing, and no doubt wished he’d never told Sutter what happened that night.

  “But how’d you know I had the gun in my car?”

  “We didn’t. But you’re a vet and you hunt. Obviously you’ve got a hand gun. And after being attacked behind the supermarket, it was a good bet you’d start packing it. Besides, staging the break-in the day before you and I had a meeting was a timely reminder you should talk with your friends before your enemies took you out.”

  Sutter glanced across the room.

  “What do you say, Charlie? Should we flip to see who does the honors?”

  Charlie didn’t look happy with this arrangement. Apparently he assumed the job would be his. Sutter reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a quarter.

  “Call it.” The quarter flipped over and over in the air, as if in slow motion. “Heads” Charlie called anxiously, clearly concerned he might lose. The quarter landed on the old, beat up, oil-cloth covered table, bouncing twice and awkwardly tripping over a big crease.

  Sutter swept up the coin before Charlie could even see it. “Heads it is.” Sutter shook his head. “Charlie always wins the toss.”

  Jake had the impression Sutter always made Charlie the winner—maybe because Charlie enjoyed this part of his work, or maybe so in case of a conviction, Sutter would only be an accomplice. That way Sutter might spend even less time away from his work or his retirement home.

  Charlie drew his .44 Magnum, the barrel looking to Jake as wide as a cannon. He wondered why no gun had been drawn earlier, then realized they didn’t consider him a serious threat. The gun fit comfortably in Charlie’s right hand, as if it had spent a great deal of time there. He waved it toward the door. For the first time Jake could remember, Charlie smiled so broadly he could see his teeth.

  “Time to take a walk, Woods.”

  Jake knew he was probably going to die, and in a strange way felt he was ready to die for the first time in his life, yet not ready, because he now had a stronger reason for living than he’d ever known. If he did die, he was determined it wouldn’t be without a fight.

  “See ya, boys. Don’t be gone too long now,” Sutter chuckled, walking toward the table and loosening his tie like he deserved to kick back after pulling off a major coup.

  Jake knew there was no reason for a shooter to take him any further from the cabin than to avoid a mess some visitor was likely to see. And no doubt about it, the .44 would make a real mess. Jake had to make his move soon, somewhere between stepping out of Sutter’s range of sight and getting maybe thirty feet from the house. Charlie might toy with him first, and he might not. He couldn’t count on it, and even if he did, the first blow or shot would likely cripple him. He decided the moment he stepped out the door would be the moment of greatest surprise.

  As Jake stepped out under the threshold, he looked back suddenly toward Sutter, successfully shifting Charlie’s eyes back also. Sutter was taking his first big suck on a fresh wine cooler. At the moment Charlie’s eyes left him, Jake swung his left arm up at the porch light, knocking it loose and shattering the bulb. The explosion of light was followed by intense blackness. Jake knew his only hope was that Charlie would be unable to see in the sudden dark long enough for him to get a lead into the trees.

  Charlie didn’t wait more than a second to start shooting. He shot blindly into the black, seeing nothing but the image of the light bulb burned into his retinas. The sound of the .44 was deafening, especially the first two shots, fired while Jake was within ten feet. Charlie swore and yelled, and if he’d been able to see Jake, could easily have killed him. Had he been quiet he could have heard Jake running close alongside the house. But quiet Charlie was too angry to be still the one time he most needed to be.

  The path most natural for an escapee to run—straight from the house toward the cars or the close edge of the woods—was riddled with gunshots and flying dirt clods. The getaway path’s logic was exactly what kept Jake from choosing it. Instead he ran laterally, pressed up against the side of the cabin.

  By now Jake was beyond the edge of the house and running into increasingly thick trees. He slowed down enough not to hurt himself as he brushed off one tree and then the next, his hands and face breaking off the dead, brittle, quarter-inch branches of the trees, most of them Douglas firs.

  He heard Sutter yell “Shut up,” and stopped in his tracks, just a moment too late. A few twigs broke under his feet. Two shots glanced by him, one to his right, the other making a dull thud two feet to his left. Quickly he stepped behind the nearest fir tree, closing his eyes tight to accelerate their adjustment to the dark.

  His opponents had two distinct advantages over him. There were two of them; and they had guns. On the other hand, there were lots of trees for cover; and they would have to find him. There were eleven hours of darkness ahead, and the ones who best used the darkness would win this battle. The next minute, Jake surmised, was critical, a minute in which they were still by the front of the house with the lights from the inside retarding their night eyes. He was closing his or squinting and looking away from the house to cultivate his advantage.

  He could hear Sutter and Charlie arguing and knew they weren’t listening for noise to shoot at. He moved slowly back from the tree and kept it squarely between him and the cabin. He backed into the next tree and stepped behind it, then repeated his backward motion. He tested the ground as he walked, seeking out the spongy, moss-covered soil, trying to avoid the crack of brittle branches and leaves. He looked into the darkness, willing his eyes to see more. He saw dimly, then stooped low and felt two pieces of dead wood, each about twelve inches long and an inch thick. The more he looked at them the more they took on shapes. It came back to him from Vietnam. You can see much better in the dark than you think, but you have to orient yourself to the subtle hues of the night. It’s an art more than a science, an art he once knew well, and now tried to regain.

  He was now ninety feet from the house, seventy feet into the woods. He supposed his enemies to be on the edge of that circle of soft light emanating from the cabin. He figured his eyes were adjusted at least a minute ahead of theirs. Straining to make sure he didn’t hit overhanging limbs, he threw one of the pieces of wood about twenty feet, poising the other in ready position. As he’d hoped, the moment it hit the ground, a gun fired at it, and at that very moment, trusting the sound of the Magnum had desensitized their ears, Jake quickly moved back several feet the opposite direction. Even as he did so he threw the other piece, this time higher and farther along the same plane, so it would sound like he was moving the opposite way. Again the wood hit, this time both men fired at the sound, and again he moved backward several feet more.

  The window of opportunity for such a bold ef
fort was largely gone now. If they kept moving away from the house, soon they’d be seeing almost as well as he could. They might catch sight of his arm throwing the wood, or see the trajectory of the wood and fire not at its landing but at its launching. He could hear them rushing toward where they’d fired. He heard them talking and swearing. They supposed they had wounded him. They knew he was unarmed and that they should get him while he was close, while they still had their advantage.

  He kicked himself for not buying another gun to keep in the car and for going into the cabin unarmed. But he’d never repaired the Browning, his other handgun, and you didn’t just haul your hunting rifle around in the trunk. Not that he could get to it now anyway. Besides, who would have thought it? These were supposed to be the good guys. How easily they’d deceived him. He had less confidence than ever in his ability to discern what was true.

  What was his next move? From hunting and fishing he knew this area better than his pursuers, and the darkness favored the hunted more than the hunters. He’d almost certainly get away from them. But no. By the time he emerged some place miles away where he could call the police, Sutter and Mayhew would be long gone, never to reappear. He felt certain of it. One might show up in Miami, the other in Chicago. Or they’d stay around town and finish him off. More likely, someone else would be hired to take him out, and they’d get a nice telegram in Miami telling them he’d bit it. It might just look like another accident. And as Doc’s accident took Finney’s life, Jake’s could take Carly’s or Little Finn’s or anybody’s. He wasn’t going to let that happen. As they chased after him now, they’d think his only goal would be escape. They wouldn’t expect him to choose to face them rather than run. That might provide the element of surprise he needed.