Nightwalkers cr-4

by P. T. Deutermann

  "What's that mean?"

  "If he sets the client up on a trophy buck, and the client gets buck fever and blows it? He nails the buck, and then it becomes the client's trophy. His MOS in the army was sniper. Just like you. You wouldn't stand a chance."

  "Nor does Carol," I reminded him.

  He finished his Scotch, eyed the bottle, but then put the glass down on the table.

  "I can try to cover you with a SWAT crew," he said.

  "They're urban, not field guys, right?"

  He nodded. We both knew they'd be mostly useless out there in the weeds at night. The Bureau's hostage rescue team could do it, but Callendar probably wasn't going to wait.

  "Lemme show you something," I said, and we went down into the kitchen. He looked at the inscription on the mantel stone.

  "Any ideas?" I asked.

  "One," he said. "That looks pretty old. This might be what Hester Lee is afraid of."

  "How so?"

  "The train robbery. Maybe the original Callendar had something to do with that."

  "Like what?"

  "Beats me. Maybe he was the inside man."

  My cell phone began to vibrate audibly. The sheriff looked at me.

  "Showtime?" he asked.

  The listing in the window said CAROL POLLARD. He was letting me know he did in fact have her. Then the screen shifted to a text message.

  YOU FOR HER, it read.

  "Showtime," I said. I texted back: WHERE amp; WHEN?

  LOSE COPS, he answered.

  I showed his answer to the sheriff, who wondered aloud how he could see us and then remembered the cruisers. There was another rumble of thunder across the river, although it didn't seem to be getting any closer. The rain outside had settled into a drizzle.

  WHERE AND WHEN, I texted.

  No answer.

  "I've gotta do this," I said.

  He nodded. "We'll leave here, go upriver to the highway bridge, cross the Dan, and come down on the q.t. to that burned-out house. I've got a boat out there. We'll muster some assets up at that carriage house and wait for your call."

  That sounded like as good a plan as any. I thanked him for letting me take a shot.

  "You like that lady?"

  "I do, actually," I said. "We got comfortable with each other."

  He finished his Scotch and then fished in his pocket for some spearmint gum. "You get this business done tonight, you better watch yourself," he said. "She'll git ya."

  "I can think of worse things," I said.

  "Me, too," he said.

  I waited an hour while the storm across the river passed on to the east. It was still drizzling, and the occasional grumble of thunder could be heard across the entire countryside. I had everything I needed except some raingear. Wouldn't you know. Finally I turned off all the lights, called the dogs together, told Frack to assume the watch in the house, and took the other two out to the front porch with me. I was dressed in field gear and carried the shotgun and my SIG. I put my cell phone in a sock and stuffed it into my shirt pocket.

  I thought I knew where he might he holed up, because I'd finally remembered what Valeria had said after getting her hide ventilated. Him? He's in the bridge. It had made no sense at the time, but then I also remembered the crumbling fortifications around my side of the bridge. I thought it was possible he could see the big house from that vantage, hence the order to lose the cops. It was as good an objective as any, so out we went.

  The sky was black as ink, and there was tangible energy in that warm, muggy air. I thought about taking the utility vehicle, but there was no direct route up there to the abandoned rail line suitable for wheels. Conscious of long guns, I took the indirect route, however, going down the drive to the two-lane, west along the road until I was up on the major's favorite ridge, and then north through the pines toward the burial ground and the ruins of the bridge. The dogs ranged ahead for the most part, but Frick seemed to want to hang back. I suspected the stormy night was affecting her, and I was glad that other thunderstorm had passed on by.

  The grass was wet and I was wetter by the time we made it into the deep piney woods. I kept pulling the cell phone out of its protective sock to see if there'd been any calls, but the screen remained blank. All the woods creatures were probably bedded down, so we moved unchallenged, but probably not unseen, over the carpet of soggy pine needles. At last we came out onto the hillside overlooking the cemetery and the darkened bridge abutments. I stepped behind a tree, went into text mode, and then placed a call to the sheriff's cell phone.

  APPROACHING THE BRIDGE, I texted.

  COPY, he answered. NO HEAT.

  I sent him an R for roger and replaced the phone in its now slightly damp sock, making sure it was still on vibrate.

  "No heat" meant that they had IR gear on the river and had detected no signs of life on or around the bridge. It was comforting to know they were out there, but I knew better than to assume that there was no one around.

  I started down the hill, my muscles tensed for a gunshot. If he was on or in the bridge emplacements, it would be child's play for a sniper-trained shooter to hit me in the open like that. I was betting that he wanted to crow a little before we got it on. If I was wrong about that, I'd be dead.

  A warm and then suddenly cool breeze lifted off the ridge as I started down the hill toward all those leaning gravestones in the tall grass. My night vision was just about perfect by then, so when I glanced left and up the hill, I could almost make out the approaching thunderstorm. All the brand-new tree leaves were making that weird something's-coming noise, and I hurried to get down off that exposed hillside, mindful of the lightning patch up above me.

  I tripped over one of the stones and almost went sprawling as the wind strengthened, definitely cooler now as the thunderhead seven miles above my head began to collapse. Both dogs closed in on me, and Frick went into her leg wrap mode. I moved as quickly as I could through the gravestones, aiming for the railroad embankment while trying hard to avoid cracking a shin. Then the world turned bright white, followed by a terrific clap of thunder that sent me to my knees. I could barely hear the residual rumble as the sound spread out over the county, and for the moment I was blinded. In that flash of light, though, I had seen two figures standing astride the empty track bed, halfway between me and the bridge. One was Carol, and the other was a large black figure with a bright white face and what looked like some kind of weapon that he was holding at port arms.

  Callendar Lee, at long last.

  I held position for another minute while trying desperately to get some night vision back, but my eyes were staring into an orange glow no matter how much I blinked, and my ears were still ringing. That had been close enough for me to smell the ozone. I could feel the dogs nearby, but they were certainly as blind as I was by then, too.

  Of course, Callendar was probably also blind. Had he seen me? The first drops of rain patted onto the gravel. I called Carol's name, my voice sounding tinny after that thunderclap.

  I thought I heard her yell and reflexively rolled to one side of the track bed, just as something cut the air by my cheek. I never did hear the gun, but by then I was rolling down the embankment on the downhill side, trying not to lose the shotgun. I ended up about twenty feet into the weeds and quickly pointed the gun up at the track bed in their general direction.

  I still couldn't see.

  Neither can he, I told myself, but I was wrong about that. The ground exploded next to my left cheek, and I frantically rolled again. I thought I heard the dogs scattering into the weeds nearby. Smart dogs.

  The next round blew dirt against my right cheek, which is when I realized he had me spotted and bracketed, and he'd keep shooting until I got the message.

  I stopped rolling. I put down the shotgun and raised my hands, then stood up, slowly, still blind as a bat. The rain was getting a little bit heavier, and there was some grumbling from the direction of that big black cloud.

  I blinked frantically and finally
could make out a few objects inside that orange corona. Two of them were moving toward me. I kept my hands out in front of me, wondering if I'd snapped the SIG into its holster. I usually did.

  A second flare of lightning, but this one was cloud to cloud. It lit everything up like a welding arc. He had Carol in front of him, and he had that damned white mask on his face. No wonder he could see and I couldn't.

  Carol, probably as blind as I was, stumbled as she came across the gravel embankment and then went sprawling. I heard her grunt painfully, and then she was still. Callendar ignored her and kept coming until he was standing ten feet from me. I could only guess that it was him, since I could see his silhouette and the white blur where his face should have been. I couldn't see the rifle, and then understood that that was because it was pointed right at me. The dogs. Where the hell were the dogs? C'mon, mutts, now's the time to take his ass out. Don't be shy.

  Another lightning flash, not close but bright enough for me to see that the shepherds were occupied. Two large Dobies were confronting them, and the shepherds were very slowly backing up.

  "It's been fun," he said, raising his voice to reach over the sound of the rain and a new breeze sweeping down from the cemetery hill.

  "Wait," I said. "I've got to know: who's the woman I'm supposed to have killed?"

  "She doesn't exist," he called. "That was all bullshit. A distraction, to make you think I was serious."

  "After Summerfield, I always thought you were serious," I called back.

  "You kept coming anyway," he said.

  "So this is all about the will?"

  More thunder from that cloud, but no lightning. The breeze had turned into a steady wind, though, and it was definitely cold air now. In a minute we would be drowning. The sounds of a big dogfight erupted to my right, but that white face never flinched.

  A new flash of lightning, behind me this time, lit the area up before he could answer, followed by a bang of close-by thunder. When I realized I could still see, I half hoped that it would blind him for a second and tensed to take a dive. Except what I'd seen in the lightning flash instead made me freeze in total amazement.

  In the air, rising over the railroad embankment in a fluid black arc, came the major on his horse, which crashed down behind Callendar in an explosion of gravel and dirt just as another lightning flash erupted. I caught one terrifying glimpse of that huge cavalry saber flashing down, and then the horse and rider were thundering away to my right, coming so close to me that I sat down without even realizing it.

  Then the real rain came down like a waterfall, together with more lightning and thunder and wind, to the point where I could do absolutely nothing until it slackened off for a moment.

  I crawled forward, keeping low because of all the lightning. I couldn't see much. The blinding rain was sheeting down so hard now that it stung my hands and face. I was looking for Carol, but instead I put a hand into a warm, sticky mess. I recoiled, even as the rain quickly rinsed my hand. The major, abroad in the night and enveloped in his madness, had decapitated his own son.

  "Cam?"

  "Keep calling," I shouted over all the racket. "I can't see you."

  "Here," she said, and I finally found her in the maelstrom, lying flat on the ground as I had been, trying to become one with the earth. We clung to each other for a moment, and then she asked what had happened. I told her, and she shuddered.

  I realized I could no longer hear the sounds of dogs fighting, although the rain was getting heavier again. They could be ten feet away and I might not hear them. I started to call for them but then thought better of it. If the Dobes had driven them off, my calls would bring the worst kind of trouble right to us.

  I asked Carol if she was hurt. I had to shout into her ear over the storm's incredible racket. I thought I heard her say the word "okay," so I gathered her up and we started to climb back up. I headed on a diagonal across the embankment, aiming for the ruins of the bridge fortifications. It was the only shelter around, and we needed to get off this damned lightning patch. Carol probably had no idea of what I was trying to do, but she wasn't going to leave me just then.

  We were only about thirty feet away from the bridge abutment when all of a sudden I felt rather than heard a deep humming in the ground and sensed all the hair on my body start to stand up. That's when I realized we were crawling over steel. They'd apparently left the last thirty feet of track buried in the ground, and we were straddling it on our hands and knees.

  "'Bye," I said to Carol, or tried to, anyway, and then the world turned bright white again and all the noise finally stopped.

  I awoke with my face in water. Not my whole face, just one side. I smelled wet dog, opened the one nonsubmerged eye, and stared into Kitty's teeth. Then I realized she was tugging me along the ground while another dog, who I assumed was Frick and not one of the killer Dobes, was pulling on my sleeve in the same general direction. It felt like I was being dragged through a big puddle until I realized, mostly from the smell, that I was on the edge of the Dan River. My vision was back to its orange glow phase again, but the storm had gone silent. In fact, the whole world had gone silent.

  I tried to stop the dogs and get loose, but none of my muscles would do anything other than quiver. And hurt. I felt like I'd been slammed onto the ground by the entire front line of the Green Bay Packers. My mouth hurt. My teeth hurt. The fillings in my teeth hurt. My joints felt like they had been detached and then reattached with barbed wire. There was a terrible taste in my mouth, and my tongue was swollen into the size of a balled-up sock. The sock hurt.

  Then there were lots of lights, which I finally realized were flashlights. A man's face appeared in my cone of orange vision. He was talking. I couldn't hear a thing, and I still couldn't move. The dogs backed off, and then people took over the dragging.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Carol, of how nice it had been during our time together, and how nice it would be if we could just climb into a big warm bed and sleep off this terrible, brain-ringing hangover.

  Which is pretty much where I woke up. It was a nice warm bed, unfortunately sans Carol Pollard, but it would do. The first thing I noticed was that my vision was no longer tinted orange. I thought I could hear a low, murmuring noise, but it was overwhelmed with a ringing sound. My left wrist hurt where there had been something stuck in my arm, probably an IV. Or maybe that's where the lightning had gone in. I focused this time and saw that it was, in fact, a handydandy IV. I felt wonderful, actually. Warm. Lucid. Content.

  "Goo-o-o-d morning," an unreasonably happy voice warbled next to the bed. "And how are we feeling this morning?"

  I turned my head to focus on what turned out to be a nurse. Turning the head may have been a mistake, based on the audible crackle of my neck vertebrae. Nurse Tweety Bird saw me frown, made an adjustment on the pretty plastic bag above my head, smiled at me like the angel she was, and then I was away again to Never-Never Land. Wonderful.

  The next time I woke up, Nurse Tweety had been replaced by Sheriff Walker. Lousy trade. I thought he might have a twin, but then they solidified into my good buddy, the High Shareef of Rockwell County in all his uniformed glory.

  "You warble and I'll scream," I said.

  "Okay," he said. "We hereby declare this a warble-free zone."

  The "we" part bothered me for a moment, but then my head cleared.

  I remembered. Where was Never-Never Land when I needed it? He saw me break through.

  "Ah," he said, "there you are."

  "Where's Carol?" I asked.

  "Resting comfortably, not far away. You remember what happened?"

  I looked over his shoulder at the bright blue day outside.

  "Rain. Thunder. Lightning. I remember the lightning."

  "I'll bet you do," he said with a grin.

  "Am I in trouble?" I asked.

  "Physically? No. At least the guys in the white coats don't think so. You laid hands and glands on God's halo and were treated accordingly."

&nb
sp; "I remember that," I said. "Jesus H. Christ."

  "Yes, the believers think he's a full partner."

  "God'll git you for that," I said. "How's Carol, really?"

  "Sedated. Burns on her hands and knees, just like you."

  I looked at my hands. I hadn't noticed them before. That's because the palms were swathed in white bandages. Now that I was finally paying them attention, they jointly rewarded me with a lance of serious pain in full stereo. I think I whimpered.

  "There were rails there," I said. "They were supposed to have picked up all that shit after the war."

  "Apparently it was a union job," he said with a straight face.

  I closed my eyes for just a minute. An hour later he was back, with two paper cups of coffee. I praised him for being a gentleman and a scholar and gratefully sipped some truly obnoxious yet wonderful black coffee. It was hard, with the bandages.

  "We're trying to figure out the headless m-f up there on the tracks."

  It took me a moment, but then I remembered that huge horse and the rider with that equally huge cavalry saber. "The major arrived," I said. "Saw the overseer being menaced by a masked Yankee agent. Jumped his horse over that embankment and took said m-f's head right off."

  "You're kidding."

  "I'm not, and it's worse than you think." I reminded him about Callendar's true relationship to the family at Laurel Grove. That rocked him back a little.

  "He killed his own son?"

  "No," I said. "Technically, yes, of course, but actually? He saw the overseer being menaced by a stranger with a gun, doubtless an enemy agent, and he acted to defend the Honor of the Glorious Cause."

  "Holy shit."

  "Exactly," I said. "You need to go sweat those Auntie Bellums. Find out what the fuck this was really all about. It couldn't have anything to do with some bogus will from the dusty past."

  He sat back in his chair. My head was clearing fast, and I realized he was well and truly shocked by what I'd told him.