by L. J. Martin
“Great, I’m headed to the casino.”
“Another few miles south on I 15.”
“I’m a little embarrassed,” Pax says. “I’m low on gas. You couldn’t sell a guy a couple of gallons, could you?”
I can hear the guy chuckle. “Gas comes pretty dear way out here in the sand hills.”
“Five bucks a gallon,” Pax says.
“Bullshit. Costs damn near that much at the pump. Ten bucks…two gallons for a nice crisp twenty?”
Pax chuckles. “Guess I don’t have much choice.”
“I’ll fetch a couple,” the voice says. Then I hear the voice raised a little. “I don’t need no help. I gotta go to the barn. You perch it up there on the porch in the shade.” Then he yells even louder. “Silly, bring this fella a glass of water, she’s a’warming up out here.”
“Stay on that asshole at the barn door,” I say to Skip.
“Ten-four,” he replies. He’s prone on the ground, the Lapua’s bipod rest extended to the exact length he requires. I can see him consciously calm his breathing, with a couple of long exhales. He wets an index finger and raises it, trying to judge the breeze velocity and direction, then makes a couple of adjustments to the scope. “I wish I had some range time with this one. Hope she’s on.”
“She was on a couple of weeks ago,” I reassure him.
“Well, hi there, sweetie,” a female voice over the Motorola, and I swing the spotting scope away from Rudowski and back to Pax, as she continues after a giggle.
“Yes, ma’am. I run out of gas in your front yard.”
“You take a seat on that lawn chair and I’ll get you something else. You want a beer?”
“You bet,” Pax says, and I can almost see his wide grin and wink.
A moment passes and he double clicks the mike again. “I think it’s okay.” He digs out the FinSpy unit and goes to work. He whispers, “It’s uploading now to the nearest cell phone. I got a number but who the hell knows whose it is, hopefully someone in the barn. Call Vanessa and have it relayed to your phone.”
I double click my transmitter and break away to tell Seri to dial Vanessa.
“What’s up?” she answers.
“Relay the FinSpy video and audio to my phone.”
“Will do.”
In moments I’m getting a signal, but the damn phone must be in someone’s pocket as the video is black, then I get some audio. “…is that?” Just the end of a question, I surmise.
“Just some fuck head about out of gas. I’m gonna pick up a few bucks.”
“I don’t like it, he looks familiar.”
“Wander back with me and see for yourself.”
I quickly double click the mike and Pax comes back. “Make it quick.”
“They’re coming back your way. The Paiute and another guy. Careful.”
I can hear what sounds like a hand pump being operated, then another voice. “What’s going on?”
“Some butt fuck on a motorcycle. Says he’s about out of gas.”
“Get your ass out there with chief here,” the second voice snaps.
“I was going, Flannigan. You take care of your business and I’ll take care of mine.”
“When we’re out of here, I’m going to stomp your fat ass.”
“Just get what you can out of that fat prick before he buys the farm, then we can get to Florida. Roth is sending our dough there. You can get your butt whipped when we get there.”
It’s an interesting conversation, even without the video. It seems the phone we’re onto is Thunder-Growing’s, as I can hear the door open and see that Rudowski is following him out.
I go back to Pax and see that the woman hasn’t returned, so I radio him. “He’s coming back, and Rudowski is with him. Stay the hell out of the line of fire.”
Knowing I’m watching him, he merely nods. But I can see him pull the Glock from the back of his belt and with it held at his side, out of sight of the approaching Thunder-Growing and Rudowski, thumb the safety off.
41
“Stay on that big prick,” I say to Skip. “Avoid the Indian if you can. We don’t know his culpability yet.”
“The big fuck is mine,” he replies.
Pax stands, purposely with his back to the approaching pair, and the woman opens the door and hands him a beer.
“Here you are, sweetie. I don’t fetch Corona for just anybody.”
Pax has to reach with his left, as he’s trying to keep the Glock pressed tight enough to the side of his thigh that it won’t be noticed by the woman or seen by the approaching pair.
Then the pair stops short, and I can hear the yell over the radio. “I know that motherfucker!” As he’s bringing the shotgun up, Rudowski, at the same time, turns his head back to the barn and yells at the top of his lungs, “Vinny! Vinny!” It’s a mistake.
“Take him out!” I snap at Skip.
But Skip’s a second too late as Pax has leveled on the threat, feet spread, crouched, with a two-hand grip…and two shots ring out in quick succession, and Rudowski is stumbling back, double tapped. The shotgun fires, but into the ground as he’s dropping it, blowing a cloud of dust up.
Thunder-Growing ducks, covers up with hands over his head, and runs for the barn. His wife turns and scampers, as quickly as a woman with a fifty-gallon butt can scamper, back into the house.
Rudowski is still on his feet as the Lapua bucks. It’s a long six seconds, but then the big man does a complete back flip and lays splayed, cold, in the dirt.
“You’re a downrange motherfucker,” I say to Skip, and he’s knows it’s a compliment.
Thunder-Growing reaches the barn and collides with a man coming out the pass-through door. And shoves him back inside.
In a second I know, because of the link, that Thunder-Growing’s phone is ringing, and suddenly the video comes up on my phone as he pulls his from his pocket. It’s his wife calling, and I could kiss her as now I get a visual inside the barn.
“Should I call the rez cops?” she’s yelling into the phone.
“Fuck no,” Thunder-Growing says. “Go hide in a closet. These fucking white-eye cocksuckers better take care of this.”
I get a quick glance of a guy hanging from what appears to be a chain hoist, a heavyset guy, both his wrists bound, his toes barely able to reach the ground.
“Sol’s in that barn,” I say over the radio, loud enough that Skip can hear me also. Then turn to him, “Let’s go for it.”
I yell into the radio at Pax, “Cavalry is coming. Stay low.”
“Ten-four,” he says, but runs for the side of the barn, clearly out of sight of the front doors, but not safe enough from my standpoint.
As we gun the van toward the barn, I yell again into the radio. “I’m going in the front without knocking…van and all. Cover the back.”
I know that Sol is hanging about halfway into the big barn and I can take the front out without running over him. Hanging from the chains he’d swing like a bell clapper were I to hit him. I only hope flying debris doesn’t kill him.
Glancing at the phone I see my video is gone. Thunder-Growing has obviously re-pocketed the phone.
I’m up to seventy miles per hour by the time I’m a hundred yards from the double doors of the barn, large enough to drive a semi through, but begin to brake it as I slide into a turn to line up.
“Duck, Skipper,” I yell. And Skip, as large as he is, does his best to get below the windshield level.
Fifty, twenty-five, and we’ve slowed to about twenty as we smash into the wooden doors. Splinters and shards of timber fly in front of us. As we slide to a stop, Sol hangs only ten feet ahead. And his eyes are open, in fact so wide open you see whites all around his bulging pupils. And he’s a bloody mess…but alive.
Skip hits in a roll out the passenger side and I do the same from the driver’s.
Both of us now carry our M4s.
To my great surprise there are not two bad guys, Flannigan and Frack—Vinny—but four scrambl
ing for hiding places behind a stack of hay bales, a John Deere green tractor, and a pile of full feed sacks.
We exchange a couple of magazines with them, and at least two of them have automatic weapons as do we. I switch to a three-shot configuration. If you can’t down them with three….
The place is echoing with gunfire and gunsmoke and dust motes filtering from above fill the air. There are only four skylights in the barn, which must be at least sixty feet long and nearly that wide, so the light is bad.
Things are silent for a moment, then I recognize Flannigan’s voice, “Your fat little buddy is still alive, but won’t be if you don’t drop your weapons. I’m going to use him for a nine-millimeter piñata.”
Sol hangs there like a beaten and bruised side of beef, as helpless as Jesus on the crucifix.
“What’s it going to be?” Flannigan repeats.
“I don’t know that fat fuck,” I yell back, but Sol doesn’t get my ploy.
“Mike, Mike it’s me! Sol. Don’t let them shoot me!”
“Sol who?” I say, but he still doesn’t get it.
“Sol, for Christ sake. Sol. Don’t let them shoot me.”
I’d laugh if we didn’t have four bad guys thirty or forty feet away, intent on sending Skip and I to hell.
So I yell, “Thunder-Growing, we’ve got no beef with you. Walk out now. Silly has a cold beer waiting for you.”
It’s silent for a minute, then he stands up from behind the feed sacks. “I got no dog in this fight,” he says, and turns and heads for a back door. A door I’m sure he’ll open to find Pax.
“You ain’t going nowhere, you dumb Ute fuck,” Flannigan snaps. Just as Thunder-Growing is opening the back door, he turns back and his eyes flare. A shot rings out from behind the green tractor and he pitches forward and slams into the door jamb, spins, and hits the ground outside, moaning like a two-dollar whore in a Tijuana brothel.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Skip lay his M4 down on something and empty a magazine, then the sing of chain rattles through the air. Sol crashes to the ground. Skip has chowdered the chain where it was tied around a cleat on a post near the far wall, and it’s released.
Sol, his ankles bound with rope, his wrists chained and still attached to the heavy hook and pulleys of the bottom of the chain hoist, is doing a gopher snake imitation as he wiggles for cover. Not that I’ve ever seen a gopher snake with a forty-inch waist.
One of the guys I think I recognize from Roth’s casino, a security guy who followed Pax and I out after I rattled Roth’s chain, raises up from behind the pile of feed bags and levels his hand gun on the wiggling fat kid. I stitch him with a three-shot burst and he flies out of sight, and I’m sure out of the fight.
Skip has jumped into the open and, on his knees to stay low, is dragging Sol to cover, when Flannigan yells to the other guy I don’t know, “Frank, get that fucker.” Frank follows the bad example set by the guy who rose up from behind the feed bags, and steps away from the big wheel of the tractor. With one hand over his eyes to shade them from a sliver of bright sun streaming down from a skylight, he tries to zero an automatic pistol on Sol and Skip…and he, too, takes three in the chest from my M4.
It quiets in the barn, a deadly silence, then Flannigan again yells out, “There’s six more of us outside. Why don’t you dumb fucks just stand up and walk away? Take the fat kid with you.”
“Flannigan,” I reply, “you’re the fat fuck here and you’re alone. I suggest you throw out whatever peashooter you’re carrying, put your hands on that volleyball head of yours, and step out where I can see you before we put your lights out as well. We’ve got what we came for, our buddy, but we’re not walking out of here—” and I’m interrupted by Pax’s voice.
He’s obviously snuck up behind Flannigan.
42
Pax, sounding very satisfied with himself, calls out, “I got the barrel of my Glock in this asshole’s Dumbo ear. His pistol is on the ground. This is over unless he wants to buy the farm.”
“Move him out where we can see y’all,” I command. And Flannigan, with Pax shoving his Glock up under his jaw bone, steps out.
“The other two?” I ask.
“One of you guys triple-tapped them. Not a twitch….”
“And Thunder-Growing?”
“He’s gut shot, through and through, from the back.”
“Skip, get Sol free, then you guys tie Flannigan up and get them both in the back of the van. I’m going to yell at Silly to get an ambulance here.”
“Move it,” Pax yells. “We need to beat a trail.”
I hustle out the back door. Thunder-Growing has stopped singing and now has his teeth gritted. Blood oozes through his fingers where he’s clasping his stomach.
“Hold on, chief,” I say. “We’ll get some help here…but you forget you ever saw us or we’ll be back for your wife and daughter, and we’ll have your son in prison shanked. You got it?” He nods his head and I run for the house.
Only to be met by Silly, on the porch with a double-barrel shotgun leveled at me. I slide to a stop, fifty feet from her. “Silly…Mrs. Thunder-Growing…you know me. The chocolate milkshake, remember? One of those assholes from Maxmillian’s shot your husband. Get in the house and get an ambulance here. John might live, if you move quick.”
She looks hesitant, then spins and heads for the front door. I yell after her. “Forget you ever saw me…saw us…or we’ll be back. And it won’t be for a Corona.”
I turn back to the barn, and see Pax backing the van out of the pile of rubble that were the double doors. He guns it up beside me and I head for the back and climb in, almost losing it as he guns away.
“Everybody good,” I yell to the front. I’m having to step over Sol who’s lying on the van floor on one side of my Harley and takes up almost as much space as Flannigan, who’s tied up on the other.
Pax wastes no time getting back to the secondary highway and as we near Moapa, an ambulance with full siren and lights flies by us.
“You gonna live?” I ask Sol.
“Oy vey…damned if I don’t think I will,” he says.
“You hurt bad?”
“Maybe a broken rib. Mike, I didn’t tell them anything, no matter what they did to me, and they did some...some terrible things...made me do some terrible things.”
His eyes tear up as he speaks, and he backhands them away then keeps speaking. “I kept thinking what you and Pax would do. They caught me following them, with my lights off. I told them I was a herpetologist, out in the night hunting snakes and lizards and turtles on the highway.”
“Good story, Sol. You’re a good man. When you feel better, it’s that Argentine steakhouse and all you can eat.”
He smiles, and closes his eyes. The instant we can get him there, he’s headed for a hospital. He’s beat all to hell…but looking very satisfied with himself.
I yell up to Pax. “Take the off ramp away from the Casino. I’m not through with Flannigan yet.”
“It’ll be my pleasure,” Pax yells back, and I hear Flannigan mumble through his duct-taped mouth.
“A couple of miles into the desert will do. Even as fat as this ugly fuck is, the coyotes will make a quick meal of him.”
More tape occluded mumbles come from Flannigan’s side of the van.
Pax takes the off ramp and turns west, out into the desert on a two track. He bounces along for a short while then slides to a stop. I open the back doors and jump out and by the time I arrive at the back, Skip is there. He grabs Flannigan by the feet and drags him out. Hitting hard, his head bounces on the hardpan. I first reach into my pocket and retrieve a small recorder the size of half a pack of cigarettes and hit the red record button, then rip the tape off of Flannigan’s mouth.
I growl, “The whole story, asshole. Or you’ll soon be coyote food.”
“What fucking story?” he snaps. “Get this tape off me and I’ll give you a fucking story.”
“I’m going to ask nice one more time. The
whole story? Who bombed the bus? Who do you really work for? Where’s Det?”
“Who the fuck is Det? Them ragheads bombed the bus. I work for Pointer, as you fucking well know.”
I free my Glock from the holster at the small of my back and look up to where Skip stands on the far side of Flannigan. I’d don’t use Skip's name as there’s no use letting Flannigan or anyone who hears the recording know more than they already do.
“Partner, move away as I don’t want you killed by the ricochet.”
And Skip walks around to my side.
I carefully aim the Glock so the first shot will graze the big man’s side, switch to fully automatic, and let loose the dozen shots left in the magazine.
It’s very loud in the quiet afternoon.
But Flannigan is not quiet, he's blubbering and screaming. “You fucker, you shot me! You shot me!”
“If you think that’s getting shot,” I snap, “then you’re going to think this next one is getting blown up.”
I pop the magazine and insert another, and this time lay it down on the middle of his chest.
“Wait, wait,” he says, trying to turn over. Skip kicks him in the side, turning him again to his back.
“What am I waiting for?” I ask, in an ominously low tone.
“Det is buried out in the desert, in that old Ford of his. I don't know where. That Thunder guy, the Indian, he buried him.” He shrugs, seeing that I’m listening and not shooting. So he continues. “The fucking ragheads bombed the bus. And I work for Pointer most the time and for Roth some of the time.”
“You’re a lying scumbag,” I say, and motion up and down his chest with the Glock.
“I ain’t lying—”
So I drop the muzzle a few feet and blow a hole through a nice brown wingtip, holding, I presume, his foot—rapidly confirmed by his scream.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” he yells. “You fucking shot me again!”
“That’s only the second time, Flannigan, there’s more to come.”
“Okay, okay,” he sighs deeply, then continues, “Roth paid me to pay some asshole…Pemberton, Duane Pemberton, to hire another asshole…Baddovic, Nobby Baddovic, to carry a...a package onto the bus. I didn’t know what was in the package, and neither did Pemberton, and sure as hell Baddovic didn’t—”