by Bobby Cole
Hoss made the last turn on the road to the mound, right behind the FBI agents. They both had their flashing lights on and were driving fast, but he soon realized they were driving much faster than he was and floored his accelerator to keep up. His car only had the tribal police channels and was not encrypted like theirs to hear all the local law enforcement. He could tell by the way they were driving they were worried about something, presumably Agent Haden.
The FBI guys crossed the bridge next to the mound, and when Hoss made the turn, he could see brake lights. Then they quickly turned to the left on a gravel road he was familiar with. It didn’t go anywhere, since the bridge was out.
Hoss grabbed his microphone and radioed that he was 10–23 at the Nanih Waiya Mound area. If the base responded, he didn’t hear. After he turned, his headlights illuminated Agent Haden’s car parked on the side of the gravel road. Two agents were searching it, while two others were running to the bridge. He slammed on his brakes and slid to a sideways stop behind her car.
With an urgency that was rare for him, he bailed out of the car. The agents at the car looked up at him, and he identified himself to them as he ran toward them. In another couple of minutes, Hoss and all the agents were gathered at the edge of the bridge. Hoss explained what he knew of the area. Garner explained what he knew from Agent Haden’s call and texts.
“I’m going to try and call her,” Agent Garner said as he pulled his phone out and dialed. “Maybe we can get the phone company to triangulate her location if the phone is still on.”
Standing in the drizzling rain, each man was horrified to see a phone light up on the bridge. When one of the agents carefully balanced his way out to the phone, he also retrieved a Benelli shotgun he’d found lying along a rotting board in the middle of the bridge and handed it over to Agent Garner.
“Hasn’t been fired, but she had one in the barrel!” Garner announced. They all knew that meant she’d felt threatened. The fact she’d left the gun behind was even more worrisome.
The men flooded the surrounding area with flashlights but couldn’t see anything helpful.
Looking down, then back up the creek, Agent Garner had two obvious options. Maybe three, if he gave any credence to the thought that they’d left via a vehicle.
“She was going to the camp that’s on the next road up,” Hoss said.
“That’s where she started, but she ended up here for sure,” Agent Garner said. “After that I don’t know.”
Suddenly they could see blue flashing lights turning onto the gravel road behind them, but Hoss’s car and Agent Haden’s had the road blocked.
As the senior agent in the bunch, Agent Garner knew decisions needed to be made, so he began making them.
“Hoss, take the deputies and go check out the camp. They may have gone back up there. We’ll go down to that next bridge, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll tell one of the sheriff’s units to seal off this road and stay here with their eyes peeled.”
Everybody took off running, knowing seconds could count. Agent Garner screamed as he ran, “Stay in radio contact!”
Hoss stopped running, and everyone stopped with him.
“What?” Agent Garner asked.
“I don’t have a radio!”
Garner pointed at an agent and said, “Go with him. Let’s move!”
The extra weight in the front of the boat made it a bit more difficult to steer with the bow pushing water, but it wasn’t anything Runt couldn’t handle. The boat was built for three people. They had traversed at least a mile away from the old bridge when they slowed as the motor began sputtering. He picked up the gas tank, and it had plenty of fuel. After he quickly unrolled a kink in the black-rubber fuel line, the motor roared back to life.
“You were right,” John Allen said to Emma. “Winston murdered Jim Hudson just like you thought. Runt told me. And they killed the guy whose job I took. Said he was threatening to destroy their livelihood.”
Emma took this in, then a thought hit her. “Where the hell is Winston?”
“I don’t know for sure. The night they kidnapped me, I kicked his knee in a way a knee doesn’t bend. Runt says he can’t walk.”
“Good for you. I sure wanted to arrest that son of a bitch. My guys couldn’t find him at his house tonight, but they have a bulletin out on him. We’ll find him.”
“Do you have your phone?”
“It’s on the bridge. I thought I was going swimming.”
John Allen and Emma stared at each other while the boat navigated the black water. Neither could see the other’s eyes, but they each felt an unspoken concern for the other.
The rain had turned to a steady drizzle, and Emma’s cap gave her eyes relief from the moisture. She formulated her plan and knew that if she waited for the right moment when Runt was distracted, it would work. She just had to wait. She considered telling John Allen but decided against it.
Runt was watching her like a hawk. He was leaning on one knee so he could see both her and the creek. His right hand held her favorite pistol, and the laser revealed everywhere it pointed. It was the first time she’d been so close to the other end of a pistol.
After a few more minutes that seemed like hours, she saw Runt peering at something as they rounded a bend. Whatever he saw was up high. She strained to turn her head but couldn’t turn it far enough.
Seeing her trying to look ahead, John Allen said, “There’s another bridge. This one is more modern.”
At that moment everyone heard a car engine, the sound of it rapidly building. It was obvious the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed. As they pulled to within about fifty yards of the bridge, blue lights suddenly reflected off the green leaves of the trees, then a police cruiser sped across the bridge.
Shaken, Runt stood to observe the vehicle.
Seeing him distracted, Emma pulled her left pants leg up and drew a small 0.380 Walther semiautomatic from her ankle holster. In one motion she worked the action and pointed the pistol at Runt’s chest. Realizing she would have to shoot right over John Allen’s head, she said, “Keep your head down,” just loud enough for him to hear, and observed his head lower by an inch or two.
When Runt had watched the blue lights and vehicle pass over the bridge and pick up speed, he’d smiled, knowing they hadn’t seen him. But when he looked back down, the smile vanished in his shock at finding the FBI agent aiming something at him.
Emma tightened her grip. “It’s over. Drop the pistol!”
For a split second Runt tried to assess the threat. He couldn’t see clearly what was in her hands. It could be a stick. He made his decision and started raising the pistol in his hand, and before it was halfway up, the agent placed two bullets in his chest, center of mass, just like she’d been taught.
Runt reflex-fired once into the bottom of the boat, punching a neat hole next to John Allen’s thigh, and fell back into the motor.
John Allen was momentarily deaf from the pistol report near his ears, as well as blinded by the flash.
Runt had fallen against the motor and managed to twist the handle to full throttle in his death spasm. Emma had just started to get up as the boat responded to the motor’s thrust and pushed her into John Allen. She managed to turn her head in time to see a huge metal bridge piling shooting toward them, and before she could react, the boat crashed into it at full speed. She and John Allen were tossed like projectiles into the water. Runt crashed headfirst into the front of the boat.
Caved in like a beer can, the aluminum boat immediately started taking on water. The motor quit from the jolt of the impact, and silence fell on the creek.
When Emma surfaced twenty-five feet away, she realized she’d lost her pistol. She treaded water in the darkness.
“John Allen!” she cried, spitting water between breaths. Her body ached from the recent fall, and her muscles burned with the exertion it took to keep her head above water. “John Allen!”
Feeling herself begin to panic, she called his name ov
er and over. Spreading her arms wide, she tried swimming in an arc, hoping her searching hands happened upon him.
“John Allen!” she screamed.
Chapter 37
The FBI agents were standing outside their vehicles, giving last-minute instructions to a pair of Winston County deputies, when they heard the pistol shots. The reports were more than a half mile away but could be heard plainly in the still, damp night.
Their vehicles’ blue lights illuminated everyone’s faces, and they all had the same surprised reactions. Every man pointed in the same direction, but there were various ideas as to where the shots had come from. Hoss estimated the shots to be near the Nanih Waiya Mound, while another deputy screamed and pointed to the bridge on the paved road.
With the courage that propels law-enforcement officers into the teeth of trouble, they all jumped into their vehicles and threw gravel as they tore off toward the gunfire.
The FBI agents were the first to arrive at the bridge. There were two deputy vehicles right on their tails, and Hoss brought up the rear. Agent Garner didn’t let the vehicle stop before he was out and crouched at the bridge’s concrete edge. He didn’t see anything at first, but as he grabbed his flashlight, he heard Agent Haden screaming for help.
“Get some lights down there!” Agent Garner yelled.
Within seconds every officer had his flashlight pointed toward the water, illuminating the immediate area as bright as daylight. Thirty-five feet beneath them, the black water of the creek was lazily flowing. On the far bank, Agent Garner saw a set of eyes glow fire-red, then disappear underwater. Alligator eyes.
Wrapped tightly against the bridge piling was an aluminum boat with its front half crushed. A body floated faceup at the rear of the motor.
“Help! I need help!”
Directing his beam straight down toward these cries, Agent Garner found Agent Haden treading water under the bridge. In an exhausted voice, she went back to hollering for John Allen.
“Emma, we’re here!” Agent Garner yelled back. He gave serious consideration to jumping over the bridge but thought better of it. There were lots of logs, and he didn’t know the depth. Two deputies had already started wading through the kudzu at the end of the bridge, and he turned to follow their lead.
Garner knew he had to make sense of who was whom. Shots had been fired, and the agents needed to know who, what, and where as fast as they could.
As he approached the bridge’s concrete edge, he and Hoss watched the scene unfold beneath them. The drizzle was soaking them both. Garner could clearly hear the female agent’s desperate cries for John Allen, and if he leaned out over the edge, he could see her thrashing about in the creek. As he stepped off the bridge to climb down, he saw Hoss run to the other side of the bridge and probe the dark water along that bank with his flashlight.
As he climbed down the bank, Agent Garner pointed to the dead guy behind the boat and instructed an agent to concentrate on that body.
As he hit the creek bank, he called to Emma. “Tell us what to do!”
“John Allen’s in the water, and his hands are tied!”
Everybody’s lights were already searching the water’s surface, each man claiming a piece of territory without having to be told to do so. They saw nothing, not even a string of telltale bubbles.
Agent Garner tried to get Emma to swim to the bank, but she wasn’t having it. She kept diving and swimming underwater with her arms spread wide, hoping to touch him. Two other agents shed their firearms and shoes and dove in to assist.
The force of the crash had tossed John Allen well clear of the crumpled boat. His eyes were still blinded from the flash of the pistol, and his ears rang from the gunshot as he flew through the air and hit his head on an old cypress log. His body flowed into a giant snag of driftwood, and he was suspended in it for a few minutes, fortunately with his head above water. Unfortunately, he was in no condition to make sense of Emma’s cries as she called out his name.
As the law-enforcement officers arrived, his body gently sank and drifted in the current created around the bridge pilings. His senses weren’t functioning, and his arms were, of course, still securely tied behind his body, so it would’ve been useless even if he’d tried to use them.
Under the water his mind slowly woke from its dream state; then all at once John Allen was fully conscious and sucking in water as he tried to breathe. Panic flooded his brain as he tried to swim but couldn’t. Not knowing which direction was up or down, his mind raced with thoughts of Sadie and the unborn child he’d never know, and of his parents hearing about his death and being devastated. Emma flashed through his mind, and he could see her strength and determination to find him. He could hear her screaming his name. A flash of green light bathed the water above him, and in what he thought were the final seconds of his life, John Allen was certain he saw an eagle flying above him against that backdrop—an eagle in the water.
As he wondered at this image of the eagle, his feet hit something soft. It was mud. He was touching the bottom of the creek. With all the strength he possessed, he used his legs to push himself straight up toward the light.
When John Allen surfaced, he was only a few feet from Emma. She’d been treading water almost directly over him, fanning her arms out as widely she could with every stroke, longing for contact with any part of him. Hearing the gasping sound he made trying to catch his breath, she wheeled and lunged for him.
High above, Hoss could see it all and started screaming at the two officers in the water, pointing beneath him at the pair. When they reached Emma and John Allen, she was holding his head above water and trying to pull him to the bank. Each of the agents grabbed one of them and pulled them twenty feet to the creek’s edge, where other deputies had waded out waist-deep to help.
“Unit thirty-three to base,” one deputy said into his shoulder-mounted microphone just before John Allen was close enough to be able to grab on to him. “Request an ambulance at the bridge before the Nanih Waiya Indian mounds immediately.”
The officers pulled John Allen up onto a bare spot on the bank where fishermen had worn the vegetation to bare dirt. The zip ties were carefully cut, and he was laid out on his back. He coughed twice, rolled onto his side, and expelled creek water.
Agent Haden, in her soaked T-shirt and sweatpants and without her FBI cap, looked like a civilian to the deputies. She was on her knees trying to catch her breath, but her eyes were glued on John Allen in the glow of the flashlights.
Emma watched him struggle to breathe and saw the crimp marks around his wrists. His hands were almost black from lack of blood, and his feet weren’t much better. What has this man been through?
Exhausted, she looked up at Agent Garner, and her eyes said thank you. She didn’t have the strength to speak yet. Agent Garner identified her to everyone around them as a distinguished agent for the FBI.
The officers excitedly fired off appropriate questions: Who fired the shots? Who else was in the boat? Who was the body in the creek? Was the area now secure?
When Agent Haden had caught her breath, she said, “Let’s get him to a hospital. This area’s secure.”
Chapter 38
Three hours later, at Neshoba County General Hospital, John Allen was being observed by a nurse and by Hoss, who sat in a chair beside his bed.
The young doctor on call in the ER hadn’t looked old enough to be practicing medicine, but John Allen hadn’t cared. Anyone was better than Runt, and anywhere was better than the skinning shed.
IV fluids drained into his left arm at a slow, steady drip. The events of the night were still very clear to him, but the sedative combined with the quiet, warm hospital bed left him wanting to close his eyes and forget.
A soft knock on the door brought Hoss to his feet as Agent Garner helped Agent Haden into his room. She had a slight limp and was obviously sore from her fall into the boat. The hospital had given her a set of pink scrubs to wear. John Allen blinked his eyes and was suddenly self-conscious abo
ut his appearance, especially the nappy hospital gown. Stepping back near Agent Garner at the door, Hoss observed John Allen’s behavior and shook his head, smiling.
“Hey there,” John Allen said as he tried to sit up. “Are you okay?”
She slowly completed her walk to the edge of the bed and placed her hand on his arm. “I’m sore, but I’ll be okay. They gave me some really good painkillers.”
Agent Garner looked relaxed and content, but he was still very businesslike as he told John Allen, “Tomorrow, when you’re up to it, we’ll need to get a statement from you.”
John Allen nodded at him. “No problem. I have a lot to tell.”
Emma’s eyes opened wide, and she slammed her hand on the bed. “Oh, we picked up Winston Walker. He was eating wings at a Hooters in Alabama, and a trooper recognized his car tag. Long story short, he tased him, and Walker is being extradited back to Jackson.”
John Allen smiled as much at Emma’s happiness as anything else. “That’s good. I wish I could have been the one who tased him.”
“Me, too,” she said and patted his arm. “But we got him. Thanks to you.”
Hoss said, “It sounds like you’ve got more to charge him with than he can defend.”
Emma beamed. “He’s going to need two lawyers!”
“Yeah, you did good, John Allen. That was a tough situation,” Agent Garner said. Then he waved and added, “I’ll be outside, and I’m going to make sure they get your car back, Emma.”
Emma thanked him, although she didn’t plan on leaving the hospital anytime soon. She had so much to tell John Allen, but it could all wait. She was happy just to stay here with him, and John Allen didn’t want her going anywhere.
Hoss started for the door, too, but John Allen asked him to wait.
“They killed Wyatt Hub. I think I know where his body is, but you’re not gonna like it.”