The dawn widened just as the insect-buzz arrived at the rear of the boat. Searching for the source, he looked up, and toward the east into the blazing morning light, which caught his eyes dead center, blinding him. The sound had the persistent, low-key mechanical buzz of a dragon fly, or a humming bird, or a…
Phfft!
His chest felt a momentary sting. One second later, his face felt nothing when it slammed the boat’s deck.
Chapter Ninety-Five
It wasn’t a dream, yet he wasn’t awake. He was in some netherworld, some odd, in-between place.
The number three was where the number six should be on the boat’s brass wall clock. That was strange enough. But the floor was where the wall should be, and the door to the stern was cockeyed. You had to be unnaturally bent to walk through it. To egress, you had to walk at a forty-five-degree angle.
He strained to remember a cartoon lodged deep in his memory, buried in the sand at the bottom of the ocean. It was a cartoon where all the characters wore nightgowns, had unnaturally dangling arms that dragged the ground, and walked at angles in a run-on puzzle of optical illusions.
Returning to consciousness was nothing like waking from sleep or emerging from anesthesia after knee surgery. It was more like rising from the dead.
“You back yet, Teagarden?”
The voice was so close it was startling. But it was too soon. He wasn’t ready.
“Did you hear me?”
His eyes focused.
He was on the boat’s narrow bed. He was in the small living quarters of The Tomcat. It was beached. That’s why the number three was where the number six should be on the clock, why the floor was where the wall should be, why the door leading from the small living compartment could be used only by bent-over-sideways people. It was because the entire boat was leaning. It was beached on Wisteria Island and he was inside the cabin.
“Yes,” Teagarden said to the voice. “I hear you.”
“That’s good,” the voice said.
“Am I dead?”
“No, not yet.”
“Not yet?” When the voice did not respond, Teagarden said, “Why not yet?” His eyes were unsteady, still not seeing clearly. His ears, however, could do their job.
“Because the K-32 drone was set to stun,” said the voice. “One more click of the dial, from stun to fatal, and it would have spit epipoxilene. Very lethal stuff. One drop to the skin of that serum with one one-hundredth of the toxin triggers instant heart failure. Totally untraceable. We call it the ‘mother’s milk’ of black ops.”
Teagarden was certain now. Coconut’s death was no accident. His sweet dog sensed the danger. He smelled the poison. That big, lumbering, wonderful, old, best boy knew what was going down. He intentionally leapt to take the venom so as to sacrifice his final hours and save his human.
“Why set only to stun? You want me dead, don’t you?”
“Instant death would be too easy for us both. And a disgrace for someone as accomplished as you. You’ve come too far for that.” Teagarden wondered what to say, but could think of nothing. “I’m going for a walk. You will follow me outside. We’ll have our final encounter out there. In the bushes of that abandoned island. Do you hear me, Teagarden?”
“Yes, I hear you.”
He could barely make out the shadowy image of a large man, bent to the side as he exited the door. He heard him scramble over the side of the boat to the narrow beach of Wisteria Island. He realized Harry McCanliss had found him.
Chapter Ninety-Six
Teagarden sat up and shook his head from side to side. He tried to force all lagging brain cells to catch up. That seemed to help. His eyes focused. He stood on his creaking knees, rubbed his eyes and rolled his head around. His body felt the lingering effects of a powerful fever, as though he’d risen from a two-week bout of the Asian flu.
Try not to throw up.
He leaned across the kitchen counter. The tiny sink was under him in case he needed to heave. He looked from The Tomcat’s port window. McCanliss stood beyond the narrow beach, at the edge of the tall shrubbery. The demon was waiting, his long arms dangling at his side, looking back at the sailboat.
Waiting for what?
He checked the starboard window. Nothing, except coarse sand and a thick layer of surf-strewn pebbles where the boat had beached to the starboard. At the stern, the sun was still rising above the other live-aboard vessels anchored peacefully at respectful distances. The nearest boat was a wooden hulk, an antiquated pleasure craft bobbing unanchored in the shoal about twenty-five yards off. He could read the name: Beyond Bayonne. He hadn’t seen it before, but sensed it played a role in McCanliss’s arrival on The Tomcat.
Guns. Oh my God. There are guns onboard.
As his consciousness powered up, he remembered. There were two firearms on the boat, a twelve-gauge shotgun and a military issue .45 Colt.
He stumbled to the safety cabinet and began rotating the combination dial on the padlock. It was silver and black, like the cheap lock on his locker in high school: spin twice; right to the first number, left past the first number, and so on.
1-2-4-5. No good. 5-4-2-1. No good. 4-5-1-2. That did it.
Knowing next to nothing about handguns, he withdrew the twelve-gauge. It was a standard pump action, not what he preferred as a former competitive skeet shooter. Skeet shooters use an automatic or a double barrel. They’re quicker and help maintain focus. The necessary strength involved in pumping the next shell into the chamber compromises focus and aim, which is never good for competitive shooting.
The movies are to blame.
Audiences like pumps because of Hollywood. Very silly. It’s sexy to pump-and-fire, pump-and-fire—especially when the hero (or sweaty heroine) holds the pump and jerks the stock, instead of holding the stock and jerking the pump. He put four shells into the magazine, then chambered one and inserted a fifth.
Five shells.
He looked again from the small portside window. McCanliss was still there, still standing at the edge of the waist-high shrubbery. Still waiting. Waiting. But, waiting for what?
The cellphone.
That’s it. He needed to call the police. Where was Pangolin’s phone? He felt for it, but it was not in any pocket. He glanced about. Nothing.
The next chaotic instant was more than nothing. It was a volley of popping noises from the beach. They were gunshots, and each bullet struck the sailboat: bow, stern, bow, stern, bow, stern.
Teagarden instinctively dropped to the uneven floor as chips of fiberglass and teak molding flew about inside the cabin. The shots continued: bow, stern, bow, stern.
Duck and cover. It’s what his parents did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It better work now for me.
He ducked and covered.
The next volley was aimed more mid-hull and seemed to go on for an eternity. The brass clock was slammed, the coffee pot shattered, a hole opened in the kitchen cabinet, a ricochet echoed in the hatchway. Shots hit the port light, grab rail, lower hull, upper hull, keel.
God damn it!
Return fire, dummy!
Without exposing himself, Teagarden extended the twelve-gauge from the angled doorway, pointed the barrel in the general direction of McCanliss and fired. He gave a quick glance from the port window.
McCanliss was still standing. He was walking backward, nearly to the point of disappearing inside the shrubbery and reloading what appeared to be a Glock with a full clip. Just before slipping into the greenery, his arm extended, his fingers curved several times in quick succession over the top of his palm. It was yet another taunting gesture telling Teagarden to come out, to follow him. Immediately afterward, he took one additional step backward and disappeared into the heavy foliage like a specter on a haunted island.
That’s what the gunshots were about.
He’d intentionally aimed high and away from the position where he knew Teagarden was cowering on the floor. It w
as a message. McCanliss wanted to be pursued. After a week of fox-and-hound, he wanted the final stage of the hunt to be between the two of them, alone on the small uninhabited island.
Teagarden remembered thinking that macho bravado might be the Achilles heel of this psycho. Now he knew it was true. Yet the challenge still lay in capitalizing on it. He had no idea how to make it work to his benefit.
Teagarden slowly eased through the lopsided door, stepping on Pangolin’s cellphone that lay on the other side. He didn’t bother picking it up; it had already been smashed. Beside it lay his laptop, also crushed.
Staying low, he slid over the starboard bow to the beach where he had the cover of the entire boat to protect him. He lumbered around the front of the hull, racing as best as his knees could carry him across the narrow beach, which wasn’t very fast.
He entered the thick growth of prickly pines twenty-five yards to the east of the spot where McCanliss disappeared. Once inside the cover of greenery, he realized he’d made a stupid mistake. He’d failed to bring the box of shotgun shells. He had four shots remaining.
Four shots, compared with McCanliss’s arsenal of a full clip. How many bullets did a Glock hold—seventeen? Nineteen?
Those numbers are not good!
Chapter Ninety-Seven
Ten feet into the rough, Teagarden squatted as low as he could manage.
The sand beneath his toes was thickly dotted with a residue of broken rock and fragmented shell. The shrubbery was mostly weather-beaten evergreens. They were droopy, furry variations of Christmas trees that naturally grew on the tiny island, stubbornly surviving the odds against everything nature tossed: sun, wind, salt, sea.
He too intended to stubbornly survive, though he knew he needed more of the remarkable luck that had been so generous to him over the past days.
He checked the twelve-gauge. He’d failed to pump another shell into the chamber after firing that first shot. He racked the next shell from the magazine into the chamber, then crouched lower, alert and listening in case McCanliss heard the kah-chuck.
Behind him, he could make out the narrow beach beyond the shrubbery, the outline of the foundered Tomcat, the emerald green waters, and the speckled, shadowy images of other boats bobbing at anchor. One boat in particular seemed to be advancing, drifting toward the beach. It was the old wooden pleasure craft, a houseboat named Beyond Bayonne. He contemplated running back to The Tomcat, gesturing frantically for help, yelling at other boaters like a desperate Robinson Crusoe, doing anything to sound the alarm that might convince them to summon the police or Coast Guard.
It didn’t happen. As if he knew what Teagarden was thinking, McCanliss made the first move.
Pop!
The shot cut through the evergreen trees at ground level, missing Teagarden.
“I just want to say congratulations,” McCanliss shouted. He was about fifty yards to the left and his voice carried on a misty early morning breeze. Teagarden instinctively dropped flat and wormed into the sand like a flounder.
“Congratulations for what?”
“You know for what,” McCanliss said. “For outsmarting me. For outsmarting the DFC, the NYPD, the D.C. police. Very good. It’s like you stepped out of an old movie or a comic book. I’ve enjoyed it.”
“What’s DFC?”
“C’mon, Teagarden, don’t mess with me on the day of my death. It’s Deep Field Command. You figured it out. Domestic black ops. Been around since the sixties. Because of you, Capitol Hill and the media are figuring it out right now. You even managed to get my face on CNN. That was damn good.”
“I can’t be that good. You found me on the boat. How’d you know I was there?”
“Followed you and that hippie pilot with Chispa’s taxi. Then I watched you take the dinghy to Pangolin’s boat. You see, Teagarden, it’s not all listening devices, drones and satellites. Sometimes old fashioned shoe leather is still the best way. The newcomers don’t know that.”
Teagarden had no idea who Chispa was, but had no intention of asking. The voice didn’t seem to be shifting. Unless the wind was doing tricky things with acoustics, McCanliss was staying put.
“Why do you say this is the day of your death?” Teagarden shouted. “You’re still trying to kill me just like you did in Bethel. If you succeed, you win—you get to live.”
“Oh, I will succeed,” McCanliss said. “It’s just you and me now. I will kill you. But I will not live. After you’re dead, I’ll do myself.”
“Why?”
“Why? You! That’s why. Because of you, the bureau tried to kill me, and the DFC will disband. That means you win. You’ll be dead, too. But you win.”
“I don’t call being dead winning.”
“Yeah, that’s strange, I’ll grant you. But that’s the way of black ops. You’re a part of it now, so you just have to accept it. Black ops is the only game where you can die and still win.”
“Is that how you justify killing Billy Carney, Svetlana, Danford Shackton and the Shelbourns? You just call it the black ops game?”
“Yup. And don’t forget Chispa, here in Key West.”
There was that name again. Weird.
“While you’re at it, don’t forget Coconut. Apparently you’ve never heard the expression ‘kill a man’s dog, break a man’s rules.’”
“Would you like an apology?”
“No, thanks.”
He sensed the social hour had concluded and that McCanliss was on the move, stalking through the bushy pines. With the 9mm Glock, he wouldn’t have to get close. The shrubbery wouldn’t present much of an obstacle for his weapon. But for Teagarden’s twelve-gauge, the shrubbery was a problem. The hardiness of the evergreens would deflect a portion of the pellets housed in each shotgun shell. That meant he suffered yet another handicap. Unlike McCanliss, he needed a relatively close and clear line-of-sight to make his shot work.
Because it was easier on his knees, Teagarden army-crawled from the direction of McCanliss’s voice, toward the center of the island. Along the way, he disturbed a nest of seagulls that took noisy flight. Fearing it would bring McCanliss down on him, he rose to a cave-man squat and scrambled off, stepping over the nest holding three mottled brown eggs.
After a few seconds, he stopped to listen.
Nothing.
He ducked through the shrubbery toward the north side, where he stopped just short of the beach to peer from a wall of green. What he saw was astonishing.
He and McCanliss were not alone on the tiny island.
Chapter Ninety-Eight
There were two boys. Young men, really.
Tanned to a fine bronze, each had broad shoulders, narrow waists and wore only boxer style swim shorts. One struggled with a spaghetti jumble of nylon rope as he tried to hoist the brightly colored red and black sail. The other strained like a mule behind the twin hulls, pulling at a Y-shaped configuration of nylon to tug the vessel from its hiding place inside the wall of evergreen. It had been pushed three-quarters into the shrubbery. Like a car too long for the garage, only its rear end poked out, which was concealed with chopped-off pine branches for camouflage.
Teagarden understood immediately.
They were illegally camping and had been awakened by gunfire and loud conversation about death, dying, and murder. Their natural response: get the hell off of Wisteria Island.
Teagarden’s instinct was to rush toward them.
When he stumbled from the cover of evergreen, his eyes wild with panic and shotgun in hand, the young men were paralyzed. They stared in disbelief and raised their arms in surrender.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
Teagarden realized he’d made a potentially costly mistake. Now there were three people in mortal danger. He thought of turning and ducking back into the thick shrubbery, but doubted that would save them. Instead, he hobbled forward, making desperate hand gestures for them to hush, quiet down, stop shouting. But they didn’t understa
nd. They saw only a wild-eyed man, twelve-gauge pump in hand, limping toward them.
“Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”
When he got within ten feet he spoke as loudly as he dared.
“Guys—hush. I’m not going to hurt you. Please, I need to get off this island. A man is trying to kill me.” He gestured to their catamaran. “Take me with you.” He looked over his shoulder for any sign that McCanliss was coming up from behind. There was none. “C’mon, guys, let’s go—fast!”
It worked.
Their paralysis unlocked. The two scrambled to push the catamaran off the beach. Teagarden helped as best he could. Now that he was closer, he saw how young they were, maybe eighteen, certainly no more than twenty. He guessed they were fraternity brothers, college friends working summer jobs in Key West.
“Jimmy, get the anchor lanyard,” one said. “It’s staked into the sand over there.”
“Okay, got it.”
Jimmy ran fifteen yards to the right and yanked a two-foot metal stake from the beach, freeing a nylon lanyard serving as a safety mooring. He tossed the stake to his companion.
“Scotty, tie it off or it’ll drag.”
They got as far as ankle deep water when the first shot rang out, hitting nothing in particular. McCanliss emerged from the green wall crouching low, pivoting like a panicky groundhog. He fired another shot in their general direction, again hitting nothing in particular before lunging back inside the greenery.
Teagarden cursed. As the others watched, he stepped away from the catamaran and lumbered toward the point where McCanliss had reentered the thick evergreens. He aimed and fired.
Blam…kah-chuck…blam…kah-chuck…blam…kah-chuck…blam…kah-chuck…CLICK…kah-chuck…CLICK…kah-chuck…CLICK.
That was it—he’d used his four shells. The shotgun was empty. He could walk into the evergreens to see if McCanliss was dead or he could help with the catamaran. He chose the latter.
Flight of the Fox Page 29