She took the money out from under her bed. It was still in the black bag Mickey had given to Terrill. Maggie set it on the bed. Then she opened the top drawer of the chest and took out a Beretta 9-millimeter semiautomatic. She racked the slide and put one in the chamber. She looked at the bedroom door. It was still closed. She stuck the gun in the front of her pants and then lifted the black bag up in front of her. It was big and heavy and it hid the butt of the gun above her belt.
She was a cool cat, she thought. A very cool cat. Cool and calm as she thought it out. She would be holding the bag with two hands when she went down the stairs. They would be waiting there and when they saw the bag, that’s where they would focus their attention. Ray would say something like “ah” or “now that’s better” or something else stupid and Maggie would toss it down the stairs, let it land at their feet. Ray would keep his eyes on it and that would be when she shot him. Pull the Berretta out of her pants and plug him in the chest. Maybe see his eyes go wide in that moment when he realizes what’s going to happen and that it’s too late to stop it … the moment between life and death when he realizes he’s been played.
Shoot him and then shoot Jan for siding with him. She would probably cry out some sort of plea before getting hers. Maggie, no! Sorry, Jan. You play, you pay, bitch.
Maggie stepped out into the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
Maggie turned and looked down the hall. It was Lee. Christ.
“I’m going downstairs,” Maggie said. Using the tone she generally used with Lee. “Something wrong?”
Lee stood there in the hallway, her expression blank. She took in the bag.
Lee said, “You’re going to run away with him, aren’t you?”
“Who?” And after Maggie asked that, she saw the revolver Lee was holding down at her side. Using one hand, Maggie began to reach for her Beretta.
“Lee…?”
Lee raised her arm and fired three shots. Two of them took Maggie in the chest and knocked her down. Lee walked to her and fired two more shots into her torso, twitching it, though Maggie’s face registered the same initial shock. Lee pulled the trigger three more times on empty chambers. Click, click, click.
Lee stood over the body. Early dawn now, the Kiowa moon gone.
She looked over to see Ray standing nearby. He had come up the stairs.
Ray Muller looked at the dead body and then over at Lee, still holding the pistol.
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said.
Lee vaguely pointed the spent pistol at Ray. Ray put his hands up. “Lee,” he said.
“She was going to take him away from me.” Lee looked at the gun and tossed it on the floor.
Ray picked it up. Then he took the Beretta that was near Maggie’s hand. He pointed it at Lee. Debated it for a moment, then said, “It’s okay, Lee. No one’s mad at you. Go back to your room. Okay?”
Lee looked at him, her eyes something feral. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said.
She stayed there for a couple of moments, then walked back down the hall to the bathroom. Ray heard the door slam shut.
“Jesus Christ,” he said again.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Protocol was such that they had to alert the U.S. Marshals, the Illinois State Police, and Alton PD. The Springfield PD would have liked to have a piece too, but they were far enough away that they could be left out of it. It was necessary to alert these people so that they wouldn’t show up because of reports of shots being fired and local deputies wouldn’t mistakenly shoot at federal agents. Still, it was the FBI’s show and every law enforcement officer there understood that. The secondary law enforcement was positioned in the rear. Agent Kubiak had left express instructions that he didn’t want police cars in the immediate vicinity. If they saw police cars, they might shoot the girl right away.
The Hostage Rescue Team was stuffed into a white Ford van that said HUDSON ELECTRICAL AND MECHANICAL on the sides. The slogan on the back read, QUALITY DOESN’T COST, IT PAYS! Eight federal agents inside wearing Kevlar jackets and carrying automatic rifles. They had VHF handsets and when they got to the house they would surround it and then commence an explosive entry and move in with stun grenades and tear gas. The hope was that it would go so quickly that there wouldn’t be time for the suspects to reach Cordelia Penmark. They didn’t want the suspects inside while the HRT were outside and the negotiator tried to talk them out of killing someone they had probably already killed.
About a mile down the road was a line of three cars, two Ford Crown Victorias and a 1987 Jaguar XJ6. Klosterman and Hastings sat in the Jaguar.
They watched as Curtis Gabler walked down to them and opened the back door to the Jag. The door shut and Gabler said, “Cold out this morning.”
“Yeah,” Klosterman said.
There were two shotguns up front. One of them in the stand against the dashboard, vertically positioned. The other one lay across Klosterman’s lap, the muzzle pointing to the door.
Gabler said, “Okay. We just got word from the team commander. They’ve got the house surrounded. But we’re not sure Muller is at home.”
Hastings said, “Why’s that?”
Gabler said, “Department of Motor Vehicles says that Ray Muller’s got a 1991 Volvo 240. But we don’t see it there. So we don’t know.”
Hastings looked in the rearview mirror. He caught Gabler’s eye. “You thinking we should wait till he comes back?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“If we think the girl’s in there…”
“Yeah,” Gabler said, “that’s what I thought.” He drew a cold breath. “Okay.” He got out of the car and walked back to the first Crown Vic.
* * *
Jan said, “Maybe we should wait until Terrill and Mickey come back.”
Ray said, “I don’t know who’s crazier, you or Lee. Terrill finds out Maggie’s dead, he’s likely to kill us for it.”
“But we didn’t—”
“I don’t know if he’ll believe that. I don’t know if he’ll believe what actually happened.” Ray sighed. “I’m not sure I do.”
“She’s been fucking tweaking for days. If anyone should’ve seen it, he should have.”
“Well, he didn’t. Look, I’m leaving and I’m taking this money with me. You can come with me or you can stay here.”
“But the movement—”
“There is no movement. There is no cause.” Ray held the bag. “This is what it’s about. Terrill and Maggie knew it all along. Don’t you see?”
Jan looked around the house. She looked to the stairs, Maggie’s corpse at the top. Lee still up there somewhere …
Jan said, “Let me get my coat.”
* * *
They walked out the front door, Ray holding the keys to the Toyota. They got about twenty yards from it when they heard a voice calling out to them.
“Hold it!”
And Ray knew it was a cop.
He turned to his left and saw an FBI agent in a blue military uniform. He was holding an M-16.
Ray still had the Beretta in his jacket pocket. He made his face passive and normal and said, “What’s going on?”
The agent had his rifle raised, the barrel pointing at him.
Ray kept it up, saying, “What is this?”
The agent’s voice was a shout. “Drop that bag and put your hands on your head. Do it now. You too, lady.”
Ray saw just the one agent. He had the money and the car was near and he figured his odds were good. He took the Beretta out of his pocket and had it halfway raised when the first shot took him in the back. And Jan was screaming when the agent in front of them pulled the trigger and shot Ray in the forehead. A third agent, positioned in front of the house, also took a shot, which caught Ray in the right shoulder. Ray dropped to the ground, dead before he hit.
* * *
Within five minutes, the unmarked Crown Vics were racing down the dirt road, trailed by Hastings’s Jag. They scrunch
ed to a halt in front of the farmhouse and were out with guns drawn, fearful and anxious even though all the shooting was done. The team commander of the Hostage Rescue Team, a tall man who had been a Marine, kept saying, “Chill, chill,” before some overexcited cop shot another. Two suspects were handcuffed, both female. One of them was crying hysterically, saying they had taken the kidnapped girl someplace she didn’t know. The second suspect seemed to be in an almost catatonic state.
Gabler was standing in front of the team commander, saying, “The girl, where is the girl?” Still saying it when Hasting came up nearby.
The team commander said, “She’s not here.”
“She’s dead?”
“I don’t know. She’s not here.”
Hastings said, “What about Mickey Seften? Is he here?”
“No,” the team commander said. “Neither is the leader, Terrill Colely. There’s a dead body in the house, but we can’t find Colely or Seften or the girl.”
Gabler turned to Hastings. “They’ve taken her out to kill her. Or bury her.”
Hastings said, “A ninety-one Volvo, is that what you said?”
“Yeah.”
Hastings took a breath. He said, “The roads around here, if you stay off the highways, the roads are more or less on a grid. Like a checkerboard. We run back and forth and … see what we can find.”
“Yeah,” Gabler said, “if they didn’t go far.”
Hastings pointed to the black bag. “They’d want to come back for that.”
“Okay,” Gabler said. “I’ll tell Craig to give the order.”
Hastings said, “I’ll get started.” He ran to his car, leaving the corpses and the feds behind.
* * *
Terrill gave up about forty yards into the wheat. He couldn’t see the girl anywhere. He couldn’t even hear her rustling about because the sound of his own crashing was too loud. He stopped a couple of times to see if she would cry out because she’d stepped on a short stalk and hopefully punctured a hole in her foot, but it didn’t happen. He had Mickey’s little semiautomatic, but it wasn’t the sort of gun you could use for long-distance shooting and he couldn’t see anything. If they had a combine, they could cut it all down, wait for her to try to scurry out of its path, and then shoot her when she presented herself. But they didn’t have a combine and Terrill wouldn’t have known how to operate it anyway.
After spending precious minutes doing this horseshit, Terrill thought, She’s running and she’s going to come out the other end. Use your head, man, and wait for her on the other side.
Terrill went back to the Volvo. He got in and backed out onto the road. He took a look at the wheat field, now on his right. It spread up a couple of hundred yards where it would stop at the next road on the grid. Terrill told himself that she was not going to stay in that wheat. It would be too cold for her to do that and she would be too scared, thinking that he was coming through the wheat after her. She would be scared and she would try to make a run for the road and flag down a driver. Help me, please. Help me. Yes … yes. Better to be there when she came out. A welcoming party.
He got the Volvo up to about fifty, but slowed when he came to the next intersection. He told himself that it was not easy to run through a wheat field. The terrain was not flat and was difficult to cross. She would have to push her way through it, and it would not be easy for a girl who was exhausted and weak with hunger. He would get to the other side before her.
Terrill made a left at the intersection. There was about a twenty-yard stretch between the wheat field and the road, long prairie grass and scrub filling the gap. Terrill stopped the car. He got out and took the Browning bolt-action rifle out of the backseat. He put a 7.62-millimeter slug in the breech and bolted it into place. It clicked home and was ready.
And then he saw it. There. A black shadow among the yellow and gray. She was coming out of the wheat, about fifty yards ahead and up to his right. She came out of the wheat and into the tall grass and scrub. Looking toward the road like it was a beacon of hope. Then she turned and saw him in the distance.
Terrill raised the rifle. He put the front sight on her, saw her begin to move, and he pulled the trigger. He saw her go down.
* * *
Hastings drove fast enough to eat up the roads that lay flat and long. He made loops, going four intersections down before turning down one, then coming back down the other. Looking for a 1991 Volvo, looking for two white males, looking for a girl who he hoped was still alive. Looking and hoping.
They had two more cars out there: Klosterman with a federal agent in one, other federal agents in the other. The U.S. Marshals would send men out too, in time. They had split up the area into boxes.
But it was a big goddamn area. They needed a helicopter to sweep over these things. Looking for the same thing he was looking for and doing it much better and quicker than he could. He had not spoken to Gabler about a helicopter, but Gabler would figure that out on his own. For now, all they could do was drive up and down the lines separating this checkerboard of fields until they found something. They had to do something because the alternative was to give up.
One dead girl at the house, one male killed by FBI agents. Radicals, revolutionaries, fighters of the establishment, whatever you want to call it, but finding out soon enough what Bogart had had to deal with in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: that money does things to people, makes them paranoid and watchful and sometimes murderous.
But the money was still at the house. They would have to come back to the house to get the money. At least try. But they had the girl and they weren’t going to come back until they took care of her.
Hastings would slow enough at the intersections to take a quick look left and right. See if the lines between the checkerboard would give him something to go after, something to pursue, something to stop him from going nuts from driving and seeing nothing worth seeing.
And then he saw it.
He had lost track of how many intersections he had counted. But it didn’t matter. He saw a flash of darkness. A car. A boxy car. A Volvo.
Then he was past the intersection.
Hastings stomped on the brakes, the wheels trying to grip the gravel before coming to a stop. Hastings put the gear in reverse and backed up to the intersection.
And there it was. A 1991 Volvo pulled off to the side of the road. A man with dark hair holding a fucking rifle. And in the distance he could see the girl on her knees.
* * *
Did I get her? Terrill wondered.
He had seen her fall. Had seen her fall after he fired.
Terrill squinted into the distance. There was no scope on the rifle, only the front sight. The front sight was sufficient for aiming, but it wouldn’t work as a telescope. At first, he thought he had hit her with the bullet. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe she had just tripped or fainted.
Terrill pulled the bolt back and then shoved it forward again, putting another slug in the breech. He could still see her. She had not gone back into the field. She was on her knees now, maybe preparing for another dash back into the wheat for cover. Terrill raised the rifle to fire.
He heard tires on gravel then and then the sound of a car’s engine. Not steady, but accelerating and getting closer. Terrill turned. A brown Jaguar—
“Christ,” Terrill said.
—Bearing down on him.
Terrill raised the rifle again, as Hastings pressed the accelerator to the floor. The engine roaring as the Jaguar veered off the road and slammed into the back of the Volvo. The impact punched the Volvo off its wheels and into Terrill Colely. The force of it swatted Terrill about twenty-five feet through the air, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Hastings ran to him after he got his seat belt off. He was holding the shotgun on Colely. He checked for a pulse and found one. Colely would later die of internal injuries, but he was alive then. Hastings knew that the man was in bad shape and wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Hastings checked him for other weapon
s, and when he left Colely he took the rifle with him.
Hastings walked toward the field. His heart was racing.
“Cordelia,” he called out. “Cordelia!”
Hastings turned and looked back at his Jag, the front all smashed in. In front of the damage, a man on his back, crushed and bloody. She wouldn’t know it was a policeman’s car, Hastings thought.
Hastings dropped the shotgun and the rifle on the ground. He took out his police badge and held it up.
“Cordelia,” he said. “I’m a police officer. My name’s Lieutenant George Hastings. I’m a police officer. It’s okay.”
That’s when he saw the girl stand up. She was coming toward him.
Hastings said, “Are you shot?”
She was about thirty yards from him, stumbling a little but coming to him, saying something.
“What?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I’m not shot. Is he dead?”
Hastings said, “I don’t think so. But he’s unconscious. It’s okay now.”
There was an awkward moment, the two of them complete strangers, but she knew what he was and her face was crumpled with fright, on the verge of collapse. She rushed to him quickly, a stranger, but needing human contact then. She wrapped her arms around him, crying and shaking. And Hastings was aware that if he let her go she would drop to the ground.
“It’s okay now,” Hastings said.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Within a half hour, they were back at Muller’s house and all the emergency vehicles had converged onto the grounds. Ambulances, police cars, federal vehicles, and then a police helicopter. Hastings looked up and shook his head at it, wondering where it had been earlier. The helicopter landed and Hastings saw Jim Shellow step out with a couple of other federal agents.
Cordelia Penmark said she would get in the ambulance even though she felt she was not hurt. But before she did she asked Hastings who he was again, and when he told her she said, “I saw it. I saw that man in the field shoot Tom. It was him.”
They were standing in front of the house. The ambulance was nearby. Cordelia had told them that she didn’t need a stretcher.
Goodbye Sister Disco Page 23