Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  Before I could say anything, I heard Cyrus’s voice in my other ear. “I got the four. They’re on the river side. They’re flanked out. Wait. Hold it. One’s dropped behind a bush. You’ve got three visible. One hiding, plus the other three.”

  I covered the mouthpiece on the cell phone with my thumb and acknowledged his information. A thin, watery dawn filtered through the trees as I threaded my way to the other side. Cigarette butts, beer cans, and other garbage, now visible, littered the ground. I stepped around a pile of old tires and scared two rats the size of poodles. At the edge of the tree line someone had left two ancient television sets stacked one on top of the each other. I used them as cover and eased myself around to look out.

  Three figures stood about seventy-five yards away, toward the Continental Street Viaduct. I brought the phone back up and said, “I only see three men. Where’s Nolan?”

  The group moved toward my hiding place. No communication.

  At thirty yards away, Jack Washington came back on the line. “Out. Where I can see you.”

  “First you tell me where the girl is.”

  Jack chuckled and hung up the phone. Before I could ponder what that meant, I heard movement behind me. All the amphetamines in the world couldn’t help. I reacted in time, but the suppressor hung on a tree branch. I turned to see the muzzle of a bolt-action rifle pointed about five feet from my head.

  “Please. Gun down. Hands up.” The accent was Slavic and matched the pale face that peered at me from underneath a hooded cape of burlap. A forest of artfully arranged plastic foliage covered the cloth. The outfit was called a ghillie suit by those who knew of such things, and was used mostly by snipers. It perfectly matched the surrounding terrain. The man’s belly was covered in mud, indicating a long crawl. I figured him to be ex–Soviet military, probably special forces.

  “Valk. Out.” He waved his weapon.

  “Yeah, I’ll valk,” I said, speaking for the benefit of my crew. “Quit pointing that rifle at me. Where the hell did you come from?” The throat mike was hidden by the collar of my shirt. The earpiece was clear and on the opposite side and would hopefully remain unnoticed.

  “Gun on the ground.” He pointed the muzzle of the rifle downward.

  I complied. He indicated the pistol on my belt and I dropped that too.

  “Valk.” He scooped up the MP-5 with one hand, leaving the sidearm on the ground.

  I “valked” out of the trees and into Jack Washington and his posse of thugs. He stood between the two others, no gun visible. His companions had AKs pointed my way. The Russian slung his sniper rifle over his shoulder and waited.

  “You don’t look like you’re carrying my shit,” Washington said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s within reach, but hidden. Where’s Nolan?”

  “She’s not exactly where you can help her.” He laughed.

  “She better be in one piece, Washington.”

  He smiled and said something, but it was difficult to process two conversations at once. I couldn’t understand his reply because of the noise in my ear. “Cyrus says he’s got a shot at River Boy.” Washington took a step toward me, talking; Delmar said something else. Olson’s voice was louder than everyone: “Go on my signal. I’ve got the Levee Guy. GO DOWN NOW, HANK.”

  Pay no mind when someone talks about the glory of battle and the thrill of combat. It’s a dirty, nasty business that no sane man would search out. It’s a series of disjointed sights, sounds, and smells, magnified a thousand times by adrenaline. Your skin alternates between clammy and sweaty. Your head spins and your stomach flutters with anticipation of the next shot. Everything jumbles in your brain and comes out surreal. It makes no sense. It’s horrible.

  I headed down as directed by Olson, right as River Boy squealed and dropped. At the same time, a reddish mist sprayed off to my right as the torso of the Russian sniper disappeared. A half second later there was a sonic boom in the distance followed by the faint sound of a car alarm. A pile of something red and livery landed a few feet in front of me.

  Miss Clarita had spoken.

  I crawled toward the remains of the Russian, through the mess that had been his chest cavity, and grabbed the MP-5. Small arms chattered all around me. The stench of blood and the contents of the Russian’s bowels filled my nose. I could feel my own life force dripping from the wound in my side, reinjured during the movement.

  Shouting.

  Swearing.

  More gunfire.

  A cloud of dirt erupted from the ground, ten feet in front of me, followed by the sound of the .50-caliber. Noises in my ear, my team talking to one another. Olson broke through the fog. “Hank, sweep it at twelve o’clock.”

  I pushed the safety off and sprayed an ankle-high swath of bullets in front of me, the working of the bolt the only noise until a scream pierced the air.

  Olson’s voice again. “Hank, you need to get out of there. They’ve got reinforcements coming. Make for the tree line.”

  Mama Oswald’s boy doesn’t need to be told twice. I jumped up and ran for cover, ignoring the pain in my side. Another Slavic-looking guy emerged out of the grass, thirty yards in front of me, shooting my way with a semiautomatic pistol held sideways, gangster-style. I dumped half a mag at him, as did someone behind me. The figure convulsed and fell, spasmodically firing into the ground on the way down.

  I entered the grove at the same place I’d left and managed to scoop up my Browning on the way. I paused for a moment and wiped sweat out of my eyes. Even early in the day, the heat was suffocating in the trees, compounded by the lack of breeze and the heavy fatigues I wore. More gunfire erupted, a lot more, coming from the direction of the Continental Viaduct. A couple of stray bullets slammed into trees nearby. From a long way off I heard sirens.

  I made my way back toward my team, running as quietly as possible, one hand holding the wound on my side, the other leading with the subgun. I pressed through a group of saplings toward where we’d placed the dummy. There was a gunshot close by and then Jack Washington’s voice swearing.

  I stopped cold, willing myself to be as quiet as possible.

  He howled, a banshee screaming in the light of dawn. He’d found the fake stash. I peered through the brush and could see a blur of movement as he ran through the woods. I lost sight of him, but then his voice exploded again in the stillness of the grove. “Hey, Oswald. You out there? Well, guess what? Your bitch is dead and so are you.”

  The trees deflected and twisted his words. I quashed any feelings I had and tried to get a bead on his location but couldn’t. There was another boom from the .50-caliber followed by a prolonged rattle of fully automatic fire.

  “You hear me, Oswald? You are one dead motherfucker.” The words came from one direction, then another. “I will hunt you down if it’s the last thing I do.”

  My foot brushed against a rock. I picked it up and threw it as far as I could manage in the undergrowth, heading in the opposite direction before it landed.

  Washington fired at the sound and ran toward the clearing. I caught a glimpse of him moving and let loose with the silenced machine gun. The nine-millimeter chewed a path through the brush, toward the target. Then he was gone.

  I heard crashing off to my left. Then, “She screamed a lot. Didn’t break easy.” He fired at something and the bullet hit a tree ten yards behind me. I moved to the right as quietly as possible, and resisted the urge to let him bait me and draw fire before I was ready. He continued to shoot randomly. Olson started talking in my ear. I switched the comm unit off and wiped sweat from my palms, breathing shallowly through my mouth.

  Then Jack “the Crack” Washington made a mistake.

  Another barrage of small-arms fire crackled in the distance. He took the noise as an opportunity to dart across the edge of the clearing where I had a clean view. I dumped half a clip at him and he went down, landing hard in the dirt. Shaking, I jammed a fresh magazine in the gun and approached the still figure carefully. Blood mixed with
earth as it trickled out of his wounds. I kept the muzzle trained on him. When I was about six feet away, he opened his eyes and coughed. Blood flecked his lips.

  “F-f-fuck you.” His voice was weak.

  “Eloquent.”

  He spat at me, a mixture of blood and saliva that barely made it past his chin.

  “Where’s Nolan?” I said.

  “Too late.”

  I felt nothing but coldness and amphetamine-induced jitteriness. “Where’s Coleman Dupree?”

  Washington’s eyes rolled upward in his head, then came back down. He coughed again, a gurgling noise like someone blowing bubbles in a soft drink. “He’ll find you when he’s ready.” He made a sound like a laugh, and smiled. Then he died. Something deep inside him rattled and a bloody bubble blew out of his mouth. It was time for me to move. Sporadic gunfire competed with sirens in the distance.

  I switched on the tiny radio unit.

  “—come in. Hank, come in, please.” Delmar’s voice.

  “Yeah, I’m back with you.”

  “You gotta problem with maintaining radio communication like we agreed on?”

  I headed away from the shooting and sirens, toward where Olson had dropped us off. “Sorry. Been a little busy. Fill me in.”

  “Smokey the Bear has inun-fucking-dated the viaduct.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Head back the way we came. Cyrus and I are in a stand of willows at the edge of the river, right under the Sylvan Street Bridge. There’re no cops at this end. Yet. You better belly-crawl it anyway.”

  “Yeah.” I stood at the edge of the trees and got my bearings. “I’m gonna pass on the belly crawl.”

  Daggers shot through my side and I felt blood dribble. I ran low and headed for the willows by the underpass. I gave wide clearance to the tree where Cyrus had left the package. After what seemed like an eternity, I slogged my way into the meager shelter of brush on the river’s edge. My two compatriots huddled there. Cyrus kept guard, scanning for trouble. Delmar had the backpack we’d left in the truck, now lying open on the ground.

  He held a drill bit in his teeth, while he worked the chuck on a cordless Makita. “Olson dropped this off for cleanup.” He stuck the bit where it belonged and tightened down. “He’s at the base of the bridge. We’re gonna dump the guns and then head that way.” He handed me the drill. “It’s set up for a nine-millimeter.”

  I nodded and pushed the magazine release button on the MP-5, then cleared the chamber of the live round. After checking to make sure the hardened drill bit was secure, I jammed it into the muzzle of the subgun. Four or five passes with the extra-hard cutting tool obliterated the rifled grooves of the barrel. No ballistic test would ever be able to match a specific bullet to this gun. Expensive, yes, it was, but better than getting caught with a gun linked to a bunch of dead people.

  Cyrus and Delmar repeated the operation with their firearms. Not counting my Browning, which had not been fired, we were down to one now, a short-barreled M-16 that had been stuck in the backpack and was clean. Delmar radioed Olson that we were almost ready. I gathered up the weapons and tossed them into the muddy water one at a time.

  I dropped the last one and turned to my companions. “Welcome to Gun River.”

  Delmar chuckled without humor. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Ten minutes later, we were in Olson’s Suburban, sweaty and dirty but in one piece. I mopped up blood from my side as best I could and put a fresh field dressing on the wound. Olson handed me a pint of Dewar’s and I washed down a codeine. Upon short reflection I decided to have another.

  I gave Cyrus twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. He told us the address of a girl in Carrollton where he wanted to be dropped off. Olson pulled the truck off Canada Drive, looping around to get on the Sylvan Street Bridge.

  The traffic on the overpass was slow as everybody tried to make out the scene at the Continental Viaduct. When we reached the middle, the traffic stopped again. From a long way off came a thudding sound. Somebody had hit the perimeter trip wire Cyrus had set up in a circle thirty yards in all directions of the package. I rolled down the window and could just make out a white cloud drifting with the wind through the rain.

  Delmar said, “Two ounces was just right.” I nodded but didn’t reply. We’d put on quite a show for the assembled police and spectators.

  Two ounces for thirty pounds. Gone in a cloud of smoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The day after the battle at the river, I attended a memorial service for Charles Michael Wesson. The intermittent thunderstorms promised by the TV weatherman in the purple shirt never materialized, replaced instead by an extra-thick band of humid air layering the city like marijuana smoke at a Grateful Dead concert as the low pressure trough held its place over the Gulf. A record broke for that day when the temperature hit 102 about the time the funeral started. I wanted to wear shorts and a T-shirt but instead put on a lightweight suit.

  The event took place at a Baptist church on Marsh Lane, not far from where Vera Drinkwater lived with her husband, Duane. The church was small, befitting the number of mourners. A couple more people and we could have fielded a football team.

  Afterward, I told Vera what I could, which wasn’t much. I promised I would learn more and fill her in later. She started to cry and talk at the same time, but I couldn’t understand her through the sobbing. Duane stalked up at that moment, resplendent in a light green double-breasted suit and white loafers. The jacket had been cut to accentuate his shoulders. A guy stood behind him who looked like a hairless gorilla in sweatpants and a wife-beater T-shirt. The gorilla had on so much cologne he left a puddle when he stood still.

  Duane said something derogatory about my mother and then suggested that I do an anatomical impossibility. A surge of anger spiked through me. The next thing I knew, a black guy in a suit had ahold of me, and was shoving me into an unmarked police car. They said later that Duane’s collarbone did not break, but the Paco Rabanne–wearing simian would be walking funny for the next few weeks.

  When I snapped back to the land of sanity and reasonableness, we were pulling into the parking lot of a Denny’s on Forest Lane. The black guy in question was Sergeant Jessup, the investigating officer in Charlie Wesson’s death. His partner, Sonny Conroy, rode in the passenger seat.

  We took a booth in the back and ordered coffee. Jessup pulled a pack of Merit Ultra Lights out of his pocket and sparked one up, defying the No Smoking signs. He spoke through a cloud of nicotine. “Next time you assault somebody, make sure the police aren’t standing around watching.”

  “I’ll make a note of that.”

  Conroy grunted and dumped a couple of pounds of sugar in his coffee.

  Jessup spoke again. “You read the papers, Oswald? Follow your local current events much?”

  “Yeah, sort of.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  “You read the newspaper this morning?”

  “Uh-huh. You mean about the new Cowboy running back and that prostitute?”

  Jessup chuckled and rolled the cigarette in his mouth. “No. I’m talking about the firefight at the Continental Viaduct.”

  “Oh, that story.” I drank some coffee. “What about it?”

  Jessup stubbed out his smoke. “Seven people killed. Two police officers wounded. One critically.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything, figuring that he didn’t want me to point out the obvious, how six of the seven people killed had forty-three arrests, seven convictions, and nine outstanding warrants among them.

  Jessup pulled out another cigarette but didn’t light it. “Then of course there was the explosion. A shitload of white stuff blown every which way.”

  “Does this conversation have a point?”

  He didn’t say anything, just fiddled with his lighter. Sonny Conroy grunted again, and shifted his weight to scratch his left buttock. The waitress came around and poured everybody another cup of coffee. She was young and pretty, not coarsened by
the years of bad food, bad booze, and bad love that were yet to come. As she left I watched her move down the aisle, back toward the cash register. Nice legs. Why was I thinking about legs now?

  When she sat down at the counter, Jessup said, “The point is, maybe you could help us clarify the who and the what of the activities on the river.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy, Officer Jessup. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything.”

  Conroy spoke for the first time. “We were late getting the choppers up but one of our people on the ground thought he saw some men, dressed in black, towards the Sylvan Street Bridge. So yesterday, we got a crime scene team to the site. Somebody had been there. Found a bunch of nine-millimeter casings and fresh footprints. The officer in charge got the bright idea of dragging the river, seeing what comes up.”

  He paused for a drink of coffee. “They pulled out a pile of guns. Military-type stuff with serial numbers that go nowhere. And here’s the funny part: the barrels, they’ve all been blown out, the rifling gone. That’s not a gangbanger trick. That’s a professional move.”

  “Really.” I drained the last of my coffee, wishing I could get another cup and Irish it up. “Think that has anything to do with the dead bodies that keep showing up all over town?”

  Jessup sighed and leaned back in the booth. “That kept us hopping for a while. That’s over for the time being. The longhairs in narcotics tell us there’s been a shift in the power structure of the dope trade.” His tone was casual and he affected a relaxed demeanor.

  Neither man spoke for a moment. Sonny Conroy fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers, moving them around on the tabletop like some peculiar chess game only he understood. Finally Jessup spoke. “Coleman Dupree has disappeared. After the shit storm at the river, he had a small manpower shortage. Packed up and gone. It’s too bad, we’d like to have a talk with him.”

  “Have you asked his brother where he is?” Score one for my side. By the looks on their faces they didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “His brother,” Jessup said. “Who’s that?”