“Look, lady,” he began, fixing her with an unblinking gaze, keeping his voice low but with an edge of barely contained menace, “I’m three steps away from you, which means you might just get the chance to pull that trigger once. But you won’t get to pull it twice. Now I don’t know how much they’ve told you about me, but if you know anything at all, then you’ll know how much you’re going to regret not getting a chance to put that second bullet through your brain.”
He paused, letting his words hang in the air awhile. Nobody, not even the dog, drew breath for several moments. He didn’t take his eyes off Mrs. Hathaway. She blinked, and there was a barely perceptible tremor at the corner of her mouth. That was good. She was scared and unable to hide it. He pressed home his advantage.
“Let the boy go, now.”
Mrs. Hathaway felt a cold shiver of fear run down her spine. She hoped Charlie hadn’t noticed, but felt sure he must have. There was something about his eyes that saw everything, as though his gaze penetrated to the back of her skull and scooped out her thoughts. She blinked involuntarily, trying to wipe away the ugly feeling that her mind was being somehow violated, but the gesture didn’t help. She became aware, too, of a change in the way he held himself. He hadn’t visibly moved since entering the room, but now she could see that every fiber in his body was ready to close the distance between them in a flash and carry out the hideous threat he’d made.
It was too much for her. Too much for anyone. Slowly she lowered the gun and dropped it to the floor. Charlie stepped over, picked it up, and slipped it into his pocket.
Christopher was already clinging to his mother, sobbing and trying to understand why Auntie May had wanted to kill him. The dog ran whimpering around their feet.
Charlie looked around. Mrs. Hathaway followed his every move, fearful of what was yet to come. She knew he was deciding what to do with her. She saw him start to usher Susan and Christopher out of the room, and felt suddenly afraid that he was going to come back and do something to her. But she heard Susan say, “Don’t hurt her, Charlie. She’s been good to Christopher till now. Let’s just get out of here.”
He came back, but only for a second. There was a key on the inside of the wine cellar door. He took it, gave her one last warning glance, then locked her in.
Christopher was still drying his eyes as they climbed the cellar steps. Susan put the dog in his arms, which seemed to comfort him. “Hold on to him,” she said, “we don’t want him disappearing now.”
Charlie went first, making sure there was no trap, no sign of Rod or anyone else. But the house seemed deserted. He led the way to where he’d left the station wagon.
“My father…?” Susan asked as they walked.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. He was about to try to explain when she touched his arm and said, “No, tell me later.”
Christopher was with them, and, whatever the details were, she didn’t want him to hear them just now. The child had been through more than enough for one day.
Chapter 55
THEY REACHED THE station wagon, got in, and drove off without incident. Only as the house was shrinking in the rearview mirror did Charlie notice a movement that made him frown. It was the young man, Rod, sprinting from his hiding place in some outbuilding and heading for the main house. Charlie thought he would have been a mile away by now, running for his life.
Susan saw Charlie’s expression. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“Looks like muscle boy’s going to free the woman,” he said.
She looked back just in time to see Rod go in the door they’d just come out of.
“Can they do anything?” she asked.
“Come after us, I guess,” he said, though he didn’t seem concerned at the prospect—at least not until they’d traveled another mile or so. Then Susan saw his face darken again as he spotted something else in the rearview mirror. “Damn,” he said, barely audibly.
“What?”
Her question didn’t need an answer. When she turned to look back, she saw the helicopter at once. It had risen just a few yards in the air, but was already tilting to come after them.
“I should have made sure,” he said grimly.
Susan wondered what he meant by making sure. Killing Mrs.Hathaway, or the young man, or both? Or simply crippling the helicopter? Whichever, this wasn’t the time to ask him.
“Christopher,” Charlie said, “are you strapped in back there?”
“Sure.”
“Hold on to Buzz.”
He swung the wheel, taking the vehicle off the smooth surface and onto bumpy, dry ground. Susan found herself grabbing the dash to keep from being uncomfortably shaken about. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Those trees,” he said.
She looked ahead. The nearest trees were about two hundred yards away. When she looked back at the helicopter, she saw it was gaining on them fast. “Do you suppose it’s armed?” she asked.
The answer came in a burst of automatic gunfire that sent up little puffs of earth only a yard to the right of where she sat in the speeding vehicle.
They were still far from the trees when the chopper overtook them, swinging to the right and preparing to turn. As it passed, they saw the muscle-bound figure of young Rod hanging out of one side, gun blazing, living his fantasy of movie heroism.
Again the shots almost but didn’t quite connect. They would have to get closer. Charlie watched the chopper arc around to do just that. He could see the woman at the controls. She flew well. He was impressed, and he cursed himself again for having let this happen.
“It’s Auntie May!” Christopher shouted, not from excitement but alarm. He had trusted this woman, which made the fact that she was now trying to kill him all the more terrifying. He screamed as the helicopter’s clatter became deafening overhead, as though it was going to crush them physically. Another spray of automatic fire exploded around them. This time at least one bullet hit the vehicle; they heard a dull thud somewhere in the bodywork, though it was impossible to say exactlywhere.Charlieheldhisbreath,buttherewere no immediate consequences, not even a warning light on the dash.
He spun the wheel again, fishtailing this way and that, making the vehicle as tough a target as possible. The woman flying that thing was good, but muscle boy was undisciplined and poorly trained. He missed totally on the next pass. Charlie had a glimpse of them as they came in low, then banked away, screaming accusations at each other. Not exactly a dream team. All the same, he knew they’d get lucky in time. She was a good enough flyer to lock onto their vehicle just long enough for muscle boy to pump lead through the roof and get them all. Even he couldn’t miss if all he had to do was shoot straight down and look out for his foot.
The chopper made another pass, there was another burst of gunfire, but no damage. Charlie was relieved to reach the trees before they could attack again. The trees were pretty sparse at first, but the important thing was they kept the helicopter high. Muscle boy kept shooting, but his shots went wide. After that, the chopper pulled up higher and raced ahead. Charlie wondered what this meant, and decided there must be another open space coming up ahead, and the woman was planning to ambush them.
He slalomed left and right between the trees, but he could tell from the movements of the chopper that the gap ahead was big and probably unavoidable. He tried to remember what he’d seen when he flew in, but couldn’t recall enough detail.
Suddenly, as he’d feared, they were out in the open again. The chopper was ready for them, hovering low and to one side. It came at them at an angle, muscle boy giving it all the firepower he had. Several bullets hit the vehicle. A couple of times the dull thuds were sickeningly heavy and sounded more serious than before. A red warning light started blinking on the dash, then another. Charlie didn’t have time to read what they were telling him before the window behind him shattered.
Susan spun around to check that Christopher was unhurt. He was all right, but wide-eyed with a shock that went beyond fear
and probably insulated him from the worst of what was ppening. The dog, still clasped in his arms, was emitting a series of long, mournful howls, as though calling to its ancestors for help.
“Look out, Charlie—!”
Susan had turned forward just in time to see the perimeter fence of the ranch looming up at them. It looked like it was made of wood, horizontal slats with steel wire between, maybe electrified or just to reinforce. Every few yards there was a concrete upright. Charlie was aiming for the middle point between two of them.
“Get down!” he shouted.
“Oh, my God! Chris, get down—!”
She didn’t think this was going to work. She knew it wasn’t. These things couldn’t happen like they did in movies, where people casually smashed their cars through gates and barriers of all kinds, splintering them like the matchwood they were in fact made of. It couldn’t be the same in real life. They were going to die in a mangled pile of blazing wreckage any second.
Time froze as the front fender of the vehicle made contact with the fence. Froze, but didn’t slow down. The next thing that happened was something smashed her in the face, and the world disappeared.
But the sound of the impact didn’t disappear. Or the roar of the engine. Or the clatter of the chopper overhead. Or the sense that they were still moving. It took her a moment to realize that her air bag had inflated. She looked over and saw that Charlie’s had, too, but he was already tearing his out of the way.
“You okay?”
“Yes,” she managed to say, trying to wriggle free of the thing in front of her. “Chris?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. That was neat!”
She turned to look at him. A transformation had come over the child. Instead of being catatonic with fear, he was now smiling as though they were at the amusement park. The dog seemed to have taken comfort from this change of mood and had become silent.
Susan figured that the same thought had gone through Christopher’s head as hers when they hit the fence—that it was just like the movies. But in his case the idea had reassured him. He knew where he was now—in a movie, it was all beginning to make sense. Susan said nothing. Whatever worked.
“Better cover here,” Charlie said. “They can hardly see us now. I think I know where we’ll come out if we carry straight on—there’s a track down the mountain to the highway. The trouble is we’ll be out in the open again.” He paused a moment, thinking, then said, “Can you drive this thing?”
“Sure.”
He found the densest cover he could, then stopped the vehicle but didn’t cut the engine. He tore the remains of Susan’s air bag out of the way, then got out while she slid across behind the wheel. He, meanwhile, went around to the back, opened it up, and climbed in. He picked up one of the machine guns he’d stashed there, checked that its magazine was full, and told Susan to drive on. “Keep straight ahead. When we’re close to coming out of the trees, slow down while I figure out our next move.”
“Okay.”
She drove less fast than Charlie, but the passage was just as bumpy. Christopher swiveled in his seat belt to see what was happening behind him. Charlie was trying to arrange himself in the back, constantly ducking to the window and looking up to where he could see the chopper intermittently visible in patches of sky between the treetops, weaving this way and that, searching for them.
“We’re coming out from cover,” Susan called over her shoulder.
“Okay, slow down,” Charlie said. He was lying on his back now, feet wedged behind the rear seat and the interior sides of the vehicle, the upper part of his body extending out the back with his gun ready to fire into the sky. “Slow right down,” he said, “but be ready to go when I say.”
“I’m ready.”
He could see the helicopter still circling above the trees, and waited until it was as far away as it was likely to get from the point where they would emerge.
“Now—go!” he said. “Fast!”
Susan floored the accelerator. They shot out into the sunlight and onto a dry, rocky track. The wheels threw up clouds of dust, blinding Charlie, which was something he hadn’t bargained for. He could hear the helicopter, the note of its motor changing as it spotted them and turned, but he couldn’t see it. Furiously he wiped his eyes with one hand. He could see something now. The plume of dust was thinning out a little and the chopper was gaining on them fast, coming in low. Muscle boy started shooting.
“Charlie? Are you all right?” Susan shouted.
“Yes. Keep going, don’t slow down.”
Charlie fired back as best he could, still half blinded, lying horizontal and firing both up and backward. His first shots went wild, but then a long burst connected with the bulbous Perspex nose of the chopper. It was bulletproof, of course, but nothing would resist that kind of attack indefinitely. The woman at the controls pulled sharply back and up to get out of his range. He fired off a couple more rounds. He knew hed hit the chopper more than once, but he didn’t seem to have done any damage. He watched as it swung out to one side, keeping pace with them, deciding on its next move.
The track they were going down was growing steeper. On one side was a wall of rock, on the other a sheer drop that seemed paradoxically to be getting deeper the farther down they traveled. Charlie knew he didn’t have much time. If Susan made one mistake, or if the vehicle lost a tire, they would all be killed. They still had miles to go before they could reach help. If they died now the only witnesses to their fate would be their murderers.
There was something in the way the helicopter shifted and adjusted its position in the sky that made him think of a cat bunching up in readiness to attack. In truth, this was a cat and mouse game they were playing now. The chopper came in from an angle that was hard for him to hit, muscle boy blazing away. Charlie sensed as much as heard the slam of more bullets hitting the vehicle. He lifted his head to check that Susan and Christopher were unhurt. They seemed to be all right. Then he waited for what he knew would be his one chance to get the chopper as it pulled up and back to avoid the rock face behind them. At precisely the right moment he got a long burst at the chopper’s tail. He knew he’d hit it, but again there was no sign of real damage.
Susan was screaming something but he couldn’t make out the words. “Keep going,” he yelled back. “Just keep going!”
The chopper was preparing to attack again, head-on this time. That was bad. From that angle he had even less chance of hitting it. He cursed the fact that he hadn’t anticipated being blinded by dust in those vital first few seconds. That was when he’d lost the only real advantage he was going to get. Now it was almost too late.
But it wasn’t over yet, and he wasn’t about to quit. He shifted and stretched his lower back, which was being painfully jolted by the bouncing vehicle, and braced himself for the next attack.
He saw the chopper start to move in. Muscle boy was hanging out ready to start shooting, and even at this distance Charlie could see his lips part and his white teeth flash in a grin of triumph, sure that he’d get them this time. But the next thing that happened wiped that grin off his face faster than Charlie could have done if they’d been in the same room.
Without warning, and for no apparent reason, the helicopter began yawing wildly from side to side. Charlie saw muscle boy nearly lose his grip and fall, then he started screaming furiously at the woman, who was screaming back.
The yawing got wilder, then turned into a spin. Charlie knew what had happened. He’d got the tail, as he’d thought—maybe hit the rotor, or one of its controls. At any rate, it was out of control now. There was a strange and morbid fascination in watching the machine waltz slowly in the air, then faster, spinning with a fatal elegance, until suddenly it ceased to be a flying machine and fell like a stone.
From somewhere below and behind them now came the sound of an explosion, followed by a billowing fireball of smoke and flame. Charlie exhaled a sigh of relief and levered himself upright. “Okay, you can slow down, it’s over,” he ca
lled forward to Susan.
They were traveling faster than ever, and he could see her hunched forward, gripping the wheel, wrestling it this way and that.
“I can’t!” she screamed back. “They’ve shot the brakes! That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
Somehow she was holding the vehicle on the road, but any moment an unexpected bump or a sharper than anticipated corner would fling them out by sheer centrifugal force into the abyss.
“Hold on, I’m coming!”
Charlie scrambled over the backseat, over Christopher and the dog, grasped Susan’s shoulder and pushed her to one side. His hand was on the wheel before hers left it, and almost before she was out of the way he was in the driver’s seat with his feet on the pedals. It was as she’d said: There was no pressure in the brakes, and the emergency brake was equally useless. They were in free fall and still gathering speed. At least the steering worked. It was all he had.
“All right,” he kept shouting over the screaming motor and the crash of the suspension as the vehicle leaped into the air and hit the stony track again, “it’s all right… I’ve got it… I’ve got it…”
Epilogue
Charlie felt a pleasant drowsiness. It was what they had told him to expect. He had been reassured more times than he could remember that there was nothing to worry about. He did not understand the details, but the doctors had explained, with the help of X rays and a lot of impenetrable jargon, that although it was a simple surgical procedure, a general anesthetic would be necessary because of where the tiny implant was located in his chest.
“It doesn’t have to be removed,” he’d been told. “You can live with it. It won’t do you any harm. It’s completely inactive now.”
All the same, he preferred to be rid of it—just in case. He didn’t want any repetition of those sudden blackouts ever again, and as long as that thing was in him he felt there must still be a risk, however slight. And anyway, as Susan had reminded him, the congressional committee looking into the whole affair needed to have the implant as evidence.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 27