The Hunted

by James Phelan

  “He’s just a guy.” Squeaker looked up at them. Two of Barb’s guys. She’d seen them around before but didn’t know their names. One was young but already bald. The other had hair down to his butt. Barb was in the house with the Sheriff. They’d be back soon. Squeaker knew that her chance of escape was now or never. She was handcuffed to a block-and-tackle that was built to lift engines out of cars. It was on wheels, castors, which meant she could move around, push it, but not far, and not fast.

  Baldy came over and slapped her. “Who is Walker?” he demanded. “Who’s he work for?”

  Squeaker was quiet.

  “Is he DEA?”

  No answer.

  “He’s definitely government, we know that much.” Baldy moved away.

  Squeaker said, “He was Air Force.”

  “Air Force?” Hairy said.

  “Was?” Baldy added.

  Squeaker nodded. Spat out blood. “Then CIA.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Aw, look at you two,” Squeaker said. “Looking at each other like that. Mr. Bald Man, does your hairy friend here complete you?”

  Baldy said, “Huh?”

  Hairy said, “CIA? Like, spies and shit?”

  “Yep,” Squeaker said. “And he’s got all kinds of gadgets.”

  Baldy said, “Gadgets?”

  Hairy said, “All kinds?”

  Squeaker nodded, said, “Yep. You should see them. His watch—with his watch he can track me.”

  Baldy said, “Track me?”

  “Me,” Squeaker said. “Maybe you too, though, you never know.”

  “How?” Hairy said, skeptical but still intrigued.

  Squeaker hung her head and shook it. “Flu shot.”

  Hairy said, “What?”

  “I got a flu shot, you know?” Squeaker said. “A needle, an injection, at the doctor’s, two years back.”

  “What?” They looked at each other.

  “This guy, Walker? He’s bigger than you, stronger than you. Hell, he might be part government robot. I saw him wipe out Barb’s guys unarmed. How’s one guy do that? They had guns and knives. That’s Gus’s truck he’s driving around in.” Squeaker leaned forward in her binds, spoke in a low voice. “And soon he’s gonna be here, smashing down your door, because he can track me, find my location, with his gadgets.”

  Hairy said, also in a quiet voice, “Because of a flu shot?”

  “They track the nanomites in it. With satellites. Some kind of Cold War invention, when they were spending billions of dollars on things you’d never know about. It’s science.” Squeaker stared them down.

  One guy talked to the other, then Baldy said, “Shit. I went and got a flu shot once.”

  “What? Idiot! He’s gonna track us!”

  “What do we do?” They looked to each other and then to Squeaker as though she might have the answer.

  “If I were you guys?” she said. “I’d just cut me loose and run. Fast as you can. Get away. At least five hundred miles. That’s the range, see?”

  The guys nodded. One drew a knife, took a step to cut her free—

  Then the door opened. Gus came in. He looked at his guys, at the knife, and gave them a look that turned them to stone. And Squeaker knew that her chance of escape was gone.

  •

  Deputy Jones was unconscious and stripped of his utility belt, cuffed to Chester in the cell. Walker headed outside. It was dark. The stars and moon were nowhere to be seen. It was close to freezing and the damp made it colder. Every now and then a fat wet snowflake fluttered to earth.

  Walker took a patrol car and turned onto the main road, following it northwest toward the Sheriff’s house; the address had come courtesy of Jones, who’d proved, with nothing more than a tap on the nose, that he was talkative after all. Then, as Walker drove by the biker bar they’d seen coming in, a low concrete-block building with no windows and a neon beer sign buzzing on the roof, he knew he should make a detour first.

  43

  There were fourteen of them, in colors and embroidery and patches on their leather jackets. A few others lingered nearby, but they didn’t concern or interest him.

  Walker headed for the group at the end of the bar. A guy was holding court, but he wasn’t their leader. Too insignificant. The leader had a graying beard and bulging eyes, was short and stocky and fat, like he was under pressure inside and could burst at any point.

  Walker stood close by them. Close enough to be noticed, close enough to irritate, close enough to elicit an immediate reaction. The group fell silent, their drinks left on the tables as they sat and waited.

  “There’s another crew here,” Walker said. He watched for reactions, for an indication of who would speak first.

  “Crew?” asked a man with a trimmed goatee and a smooth shaved head. “What the fuck does that mean, crew?”

  “A crystal crew, meth runners,” Walker said. A bar stool slid back on the floor and a regular punter made to leave the bar but goatee made eye contact with him and he stopped by the door, head down, then returned to his seat. “From Arkansas.”

  Silence from the men, but the music played on. A 1990s track, Pearl Jam. Walker thought he would’ve been about Squeaker’s age when he first heard it.

  “I’m on the clock here, boys,” Walker said. “You want what I know or not?”

  Eventually goatee said, “Maybe go tell the law your little story.”

  “Yeah,” the guy closest to Walker said. He was the biggest, easily six foot eight and 350 pounds, sitting across two chairs. Next to him was a lanky guy with long greasy blond hair and a scar across his cheek and mouth that gave him crooked lips. “Go get your bitch ass outta here.”

  Walker tossed two sets of handcuff keys into the big guy’s lap. “The deputies are preoccupied,” he said. “And the Sheriff is going to be dead soon. And you’ve got a crew from down south on your turf.”

  Silence. The big guy looked to goatee, either seeking permission or questioning whether they were to keep listening to Walker at all.

  “Surely you boys are the muscle here in town? Making sure things are kept running just so? Well, I’m telling you, right now, and it’s the only warning you’re gonna get—you’re getting fucked in your own home and you don’t even know it.”

  Goatee’s bug-eyes glanced to the big guy, who gave the slightest nod.

  “You get up off of those chairs,” Walker said to the 350-pounder, “and I’ll break your legs. Then I’ll push your girlfriend here head-first up your ass so you can use her legs to walk you around.”

  The guy didn’t move as he watched Walker. He took the comment in a way that showed he hadn’t been spoken to in an offensive manner since he was ten years old and knocking out grown men. He looked to goatee, who was flushed red in the face.

  “They’re the muscle,” a voice said behind Walker.

  Walker turned around and zeroed in on the speaker, who sat at the far corner of the bar.

  “My muscle.” The man stood and walked over. It was the guy Walker had seen in the Sheriff’s office, the bear-like one he’d thought was a trucker trying to get through town. “This is my town, and the Sheriff’s my guy. These here, they are my guys. So, if you or anyone else is fucking with them, with me, with my business, you’d best tell me, right now, all of it you know. You’ve got two minutes to impress me.”

  Walker raked his eyes over the crew. “I hope they put up more of a fight than the deputies did,” he said.

  The leader was silent but he checked his watch.

  “I don’t need two minutes,” Walker said. “I’ve told you all you need. So, are you in or out? If you’re in, this is over, fast. We help each other get rid of these Arkansas guys. If you’re out, then I’ll deal with it on my own, which will take me longer, but I’ll get it done. The thing is, if I do it that way, there might just be no town left for you and your girl scouts here to play in anymore.”

  The music had stopped. Walker could almost hear the light-as-a
ir snowflakes landing on the roof.

  “Take him outside, dump him in the woodchipper,” the bear said to his guys. “Then go get the Sheriff and bring him here and get me some straight answers. If anyone from down south is here, I want them strung up fast and sent home in a meat truck.”

  44

  Menzil looked out his window.

  The team had been late, having done some op that his boss had sent them on, something in Little Rock. He didn’t like that. He’d brought these guys in, and he wanted to be their only level of command. But as soon as this all started, he’d been removed from several decisions. The SEAL hits, months in the planning, had been executed with exacting precision. All had gone well. But they hadn’t found Murphy, yet they’d had to act then, on those they had located. Menzil wondered why—Why that day? Why not wait until they’d got Murphy too? He’d asked his boss and the answer had been because the opportunity to hit the other eight was there and needed to be taken. But Menzil wondered about that. They’d outsourced the overseas hits, which could have been coordinated with the home ones on almost any given day—so why not wait another week or so, until they’d located Murphy?

  But it was not for him to wonder, for the wondering and the waiting were almost completely over. He’d be on the other side of this and get out of it exactly what he desired for his brother, and himself. Revenge for past wrongs, and restitution to secure a comfortable future. He could live with all that.

  •

  Walker knew that the 350-pounder would be the first to get up, that he’d make a good show of punishing Walker to reinstate his dominance. And Walker also knew that the guy’s buddies would no doubt sit and watch the show, drinking their beers and moonshine while enjoying the entertainment.

  The thing was, this wasn’t about a bigger guy fighting someone he saw as smaller and less capable. Far from it. Walker had spent his entire adult life at the pointy ends of the military and intelligence worlds. His life had been one long period of high operational tempo, where every movement and action was so honed that it was second nature to destroy an enemy at every given chance.

  These guys—even the 350-pounder—spent their days sitting around drinking and eating and looking tough, using their numbers to intimidate, occasionally employing a knife or gun or bat or fist to do some stand-over work. But they would always have that safety in numbers, knowing that regardless of who they were threatening or running out of town, there were more than a dozen comrades at arms standing next to them, a wall of beef not to be messed with.

  Walker didn’t want to destroy this guy, because he might well prove useful. But he needed to send a strong message to all in the room.

  The guy took off his jacket. His arms were heavily tattooed skin over the kind of bulk that only came with steroids and protein. He cracked his knuckles, grinned, and lunged forward.

  Walker parried the blow and grabbed a wrist, using the 350 pounds of momentum to turn the man back to his table, where he twisted the arm around, forcing him to counteract and turn his back to Walker to move away from the bone-shearing pain. Walker then grabbed the other wrist, put his knees into the guy’s back, and pulled the arms out and then back, fast.

  A double pop rang out as each shoulder dislocated. The guy let out a whimper as Walker rested him face down on the table, bent at the waist.

  “Ready to play your part?” Walker said to the biker with the long greasy hair, pointing at the 350-pounder’s butt. The guy was wide-eyed and silent. “Hope you can hold your breath.”

  “Enough,” the leader said.

  Walker turned to him.

  “Who are you?” the bear asked.

  “I’m the guy trying to save a friend who’s here, in town, from that Arkansas crew,” Walker said. “If we do this together, it works out well for all of us.”

  The bear looked at his enforcer, who hadn’t moved from the table.

  “Can you fix him first?” the leader asked.

  “As quick as I broke him,” Walker said. “And it ain’t gonna tickle.”

  45

  The leader’s name, the bear Walker had seen in the Sheriff’s office, was Hogan, Hogan Copper. And among his business interests he did indeed have a logging-truck operation. He was losing money while he thought the Sheriff wasn’t doing all he could to clear the roads.

  “You sure they’re in town?”

  “I heard the Sheriff say so,” Walker said. “Said he was meeting him at his place, to talk business.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Copper said. “He’s a dead man.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “This friend of yours?”

  “A girl. Susan. From south of here.”

  “She’s your girl?”

  “She’s a friend.”

  “What do the Arkansas crew want with her?”

  “They want me,” Walker said. “I started this. That’s why they’re meeting with the Sheriff in the first place, to discuss what to do with me. He’s no doubt talking to them now, figuring out what’s the best deal for him to hand me over.”

  “What’d you do to these guys?”

  “Killed a couple of them. Stole a truck.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  Hogan nodded. “Okay,” he said. “This is how we’re going to do this.”

  •

  “What does Walker want with Murphy?” Barb said.

  Squeaker was silent.

  “Girl, I’m giving you a chance to talk,” Sheriff Lincoln said. “Tell it all, to me, or I just leave you with your kin here.”

  Squeaker didn’t look at Barb. But she did stare at the Sheriff. Kept him in her gaze, her little world. He was maybe her best hope in it. She knew that she could buy time with this guy, by talking to him, spin a story, draw him in.

  “She ain’t talkin’,” Barb said. “Give her over to us now. We’ll get her hummin’. Then we’ll get this Walker guy. We’ll get him out of your town, for good.”

  Barb looked at the Sheriff, waiting for a reply.

  “The way I see it,” Lincoln said, “she’s my prisoner here. So, until we work out what’s in all of our interests, she’s mine and mine alone. Walker too.”

  Barb was silent. Then, she gave a slim smile, the web of creases around her lifetime-smoker’s mouth forming into a grimace.

  “Keep your eyes on her,” she said to one of her guys. “Me and the Sheriff here are going to work out what’s what.”

  •

  Walker rode in the back seat of Copper’s twin-cab truck. The rest of the crew took to their bikes. They wound out of town in a convoy, headed for the Sheriff’s house. Copper drove; the big guy was next to him, still massaging where his shoulders had gone back in. Walker was behind on the passenger side, and beside him was a guy with a sawed-off pump-action shotgun across his lap.

  “Point that the other way,” Walker told him.

  The guy stared into Walker’s eyes, unflinching, but after about a minute he gave in and placed the gun the other way, so that if it went off it’d blast the door instead of turning Walker into a sausage creature.

  It was a five-minute drive out of town, where the land was cleared and formed a small valley of fields surrounded by treed hills. Copper pulled to a stop at the corner of the turn-off from the road, an intersection populated with a tall pine and several mailboxes, a mile-long lane that fed off to long driveways. Behind, the crew aligned their bikes into a row, all pointed back to town, then killed engines and headlights.

  “His house is at the end of the third dirt track,” Copper said over his shoulder. “To the right. See?”

  Walker saw the dotted lights of a squat house in a small clearing closely surrounded by a ring of birch, their leaves red-orange and fluttering from the branches in the breeze, the scene lit by a couple of floodlights on the barn. It had cleared acreages to the front and sides, forest to the rear. Light caught the windshield of the Sheriff’s patrol car parked by the steps that led up to the porch, and there were three pic
k-ups parked in a row.

  The Arkansas crew.

  Now that Walker could see the terrain and layout, he saw the sense in what Hogan had proposed. This guy wasn’t dumb. He might have done service once; he’d certainly done time, judging by the prison tatts that showed at his cuffs.

  Walker had the two police-issue Berettas tucked into the back of his belt, two spare clips in each pocket.

  The 350-pounder sat still in the front passenger seat. He looked somewhere between sheepish and furious, his only movements during the drive the occasional rolling and rubbing of his shoulders, the joints no doubt inflamed where they’d been popped back in. In the truck’s tray two men were lying down, out of sight, each armed with an AR-15, the civilian equivalent of the military’s M4 assault rifle. Each had a high-capacity barrel-shaped mag that held 120 rounds.

  “Like I said, Walker,” Copper said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “I’m gonna drive up there and see what’s what. This Sheriff understands that he serves at my pleasure. If things are as you say, then you’ll hear my signal and move with my men. Not before. Got me?”

  “Yep,” Walker said, getting out of the cab and joining the guys from the bikes. Each sported a firearm of some sort, sawed-off shotguns a favorite, and a couple of pistols, nickel-plated showy things.

  “If he tries anything before or after,” Copper said to his crew, nodding toward Walker, “cap him.”

  •

  Walker set off on foot with twelve of Copper’s men. They walked through the field, approaching the house from the east. It was dark, the moon a thin sliver in a night sky filled with low clouds. They moved in single file. Walker was second, behind the long-haired guy, who carried a sawed-off shotgun. It would take them ten minutes to make it across the grassy terrain to the tree line, at which time Hogan would start up his truck and drive up the track to the house.

  With every step, Walker thought of Squeaker.

  The twelve men split into four groups, each trio headed for a different corner of the house. They stopped out beyond the ring of birch trees, just twenty yards short of their objective. They moved heavily in their boots and leathers, some wheezing from whatever they smoked. But there were no sentries outside, so the infiltration went unnoticed. In his three-man team was the guy with the sawed-off, watching him. Walker had eyes for the situation before him.