Enemy Combatant

by Ed Gaffney

  “Are you okay?” I asked, holding both phones up to my mouth so that Beta could hear me.

  “Tom? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I just needed to check on you before I, uh, left the state.”

  “We’re fine, but we have a flat tire, so I had to call triple A to fix it before we leave. They’ll be here in a couple of hours. And you need to tell me what’s the matter. I thought you couldn’t call me. Tom—you’re scaring me.”

  I was in a perfectly impossible situation, acting like a perfect idiot. In an attempt to assure myself that Amy was okay, I managed to frighten her into believing that she was not okay.

  “I can’t talk now,” I said. “But I’ll call you later. I’m okay. I promise.”

  And I hung up.

  “Good job, Tom. See? I got no reason to hurt anybody. Just don’t push me. Meet me at Cactus Curt’s Steakhouse at six-thirty. Sit alone. I’ll find you. And I swear—nothing’s going to happen to Amy or Erica. Or Dad. Just finish this trial, and I’ll be out of your lives forever.”

  “How do I know—” was all I managed to say, before the connection went dead.

  I didn’t believe him, but I was trapped. There was nothing for me to do but go back, and hope that if I died trying to finish the Gomez case, Beta would let my family live.

  It was one of the low points of a very low week.

  In hindsight, I should have been able to figure out an awful lot from that conversation, but my mind was spinning. It was all I could do to keep functioning, much less puzzle out what was happening to me, and who was behind it all.

  I went into the rest area to go to the bathroom, and as I was washing up, I saw my reflection in the mirror, and flinched. The two gashes from the fire were nothing compared to the cut on my forehead from Landry, which was still oozing blood. The area around it was very red, and very tender. I was going to have a gigantic bruise there, very soon.

  The blood that had run down my face had dried in black streaks, and I was able to wash that off. But there was nothing I could do about the blood that had dripped onto my shirt and pants, and the huge stains that darkened my shirt where I’d pulled it up to hold against the wound when it was bleeding freely.

  I returned to the road. There was a barrier dividing the eastbound and westbound sides of the interstate, so I had to drive farther east until I reached an exit where I could turn around. As I rolled down the ramp, I realized that I was going to have to stop for gas. The only question was which was the least risky way to pay—by credit card at the pump, which could easily be traced, or by paying in cash, and potentially arousing suspicion in the clerk.

  Then, suddenly, it became clear that it was in my best interest to use a credit card. And to go into the store and have the clerk see my face. Because I wanted Landry, and whoever else was trying to keep me away from the trial, to know I was way out here. This gas station was over a hundred miles from my confrontation with Landry. As far as they were concerned, I was going to keep going east on the interstate.

  When they found out I was well on my way to New Mexico, there was no way they’d expect that what I was really doing was returning to the Phoenix area, because I was going to Cactus Curt’s Steakhouse. Because tonight was a Humongously Big Occasion.

  THIRTY

  IT WAS SIX twenty-five when I reached the restaurant at Cactus Curt’s.

  I had stopped at one more rest area to clean up before I arrived, hoping that my appearance wouldn’t be so distracting that management would call the authorities. I knew the crowd of people at the restaurant would be so big that if I didn’t attract a lot of attention to myself, there was no way I’d be noticed.

  But the cuts on my face and the outsized bloodstains on my shirt made that a pretty big if.

  Even though my head wound had finally stopped bleeding, it still looked very ugly—a jagged black line in the center of a large dark red area above my right eyebrow. And my shirt couldn’t have been more of a mess. If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought I’d been shot several times in the stomach.

  I decided to do what I could to minimize the chance that my appearance would attract attention. I parked, and headed right for the gift shop, which was squeezed between the restaurant itself and the Wild West storefront that was to host the shoot-out in a few minutes.

  Amidst the forest of racks of shot glasses, coffee mugs, and refrigerator magnets, I found a large T-shirt with “Cactus Curt’s” stenciled on the front. I also bought a Cactus Curt’s baseball cap, and some large sunglasses. The woman at the cash register winced when she saw the cut, and asked me what had happened. I believe the words I uttered were “Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks. I fell on a rock trying to save my dog from running across the road. He’ll be okay.”

  I told you I was a bad liar.

  I made it out of the shop without further mortification, and went right back to my car, where I switched T-shirts, and donned the cap and the glasses. I had to adjust the band of the cap to make it too large for my head, because it hurt just to wear it. But with the bill tilted down slightly, and the glasses, I looked less like a horror movie victim, and more like a tourist who didn’t know that he looked like an idiot.

  It was now after six-thirty, so I hurried out of the car, and started toward the restaurant entrance. I had to walk across the street where the six forty-five shoot-out was being set up. Employees had set up barricades on the side of the road opposite the wooden facade on which were painted the signs identifying the sheriff’s office, the saloon, the hotel, and the general store. Doorways were cut into the facade to make the illusion that much more real. Additional atmosphere was achieved by the hitching posts, watering troughs, the stretch of wooden sidewalk, and the wagon stationed outside the hotel for Mad Bill’s dramatic death plunge.

  The right end of the facade abutted the gift shop, which was the first real building on the street. To the right of the shop was the restaurant, and that’s where I went.

  The entrance was a large archway, with a hostess positioned at the right side. She didn’t give me a second glance as she led me to my table, which spared me the effort of coming up with another explanation for the welt on my head.

  But I hadn’t taken four steps into the restaurant when I recognized someone across the entrance. He didn’t see me—he was in profile, and speaking on a cell phone. At first glance, I was unable to put a name to the face. But curiously, I was not concerned. Even though I couldn’t immediately place the man, I knew that I knew him, and I knew that he wasn’t a threat.

  And then it came to me—it was Joe Hextall! My buddy from the gym. I hadn’t recognized him because I’d never seen him except in workout shorts and a sweaty T-shirt. For a moment, I was oddly comforted by the knowledge that my old world still existed. That there were still pickup basketball games on Monday nights, and meaningless insults to pass back and forth. That there just might be somewhere to return to if I could ever find my way out of this nightmare that had grabbed hold of my life.

  I almost called out to him, but then he turned, and reality slapped me down. It wasn’t Joe Hextall. It was just somebody who looked like him. First Dale, and now Joe. My mind was obviously reacting to the stress of the past few days.

  But even if the man in the restaurant had been Joe, I couldn’t very well have brought him into the mess I was dealing with. There was no way to know whether I was even going to survive the night, much less through tomorrow. If Beta kept the pressure on, I was going to have to stay involved in the trial. And if I did that, it was only a matter of time before Landry and his homicidal gang killed me. For all I knew, they were here, waiting in ambush.

  I followed the hostess to my table. The waitress came over quickly, and I placed an order that I knew wouldn’t create any special attention.

  The restaurant had several dining rooms. This was one of the larger ones, rectangular in shape. One of the long walls featured oversized windows, which looked out on the Western street scene. Beh
ind the opposite wall was the kitchen. Patrons entered at either end, through doors on the shorter walls.

  Outside, I heard the beginnings of the Wild West show. Each one of the explosions from the blanks the cowboys were firing made me jump. With today’s attempted murder by Landry, the subsequent pistol-whipping, the grand theft auto, the six-plus-hour drive through the desert, and the latest in a series of death threats to the people I loved most in the world, not to mention the insane notion that my dead brother might somehow be involved in all of this, my nerves were pretty frayed.

  I was expecting Beta, but I still didn’t know what he looked like, unless, of course, he really was Dale, which I still refused to believe. All I knew was that I had reached such a desperate point that if I believed he’d been acting alone, I might have tried to kill him right there, and suffer the consequences. But if Beta had any brains at all—and clearly he did—he’d have someone keeping an eye on Amy, Erica, and Henley. If Beta didn’t check in, the people I loved most would die.

  But while I watched for Beta, I caught sight of someone else who looked familiar. Like Joe, he was an African American man in his thirties, but unlike Joe, he had a goatee. He was sitting beyond me, near the far exit.

  And then he stood up, and looked past me, toward the nearer exit, the one on my left. I glanced over at what had captured his attention, and suddenly I remembered who he was.

  Because what the African American man was looking at was his partner, the white man with the shaved head. These were the two men who had appeared in the courthouse lobby on the day Beta had first contacted me, in the men’s room. They were Kappa and Gamma.

  And they were coming toward me. One from each side. With guns in their hands.

  I got up from the table immediately, with absolutely no idea what to do. The exit to my left was blocked by the bald guy. The one to the right was blocked by the black guy. I chose straight ahead, toward the wall opposite the windows. Toward the kitchen.

  Either they hadn’t expected that I’d try to escape that way, or they’d overlooked it, but they were caught off guard. I ran for the swinging double doors through which the cowboy-hat-wearing waitstaff passed regularly. I pushed open the door, and took a hard left. I didn’t know if there was an exit to the right, but if there was, I figured Kappa and Gamma would expect me to go that way. And I’d seen a door to the kitchen from the entryway when I first spotted the man who wasn’t Joe.

  My hasty turn, however, almost resulted in a bad collision with a waitress carrying a tray full of plates and glasses. “Easy there, hon,” the woman said, before she realized I didn’t belong there. “Hey!” she called after me, as I bolted past stainless steel shelves filled with salads and salad dressing, and turned right to avoid a bank of ovens.

  I have to admit that I didn’t even consider making a stand in the kitchen despite the fact that it was literally full of weapons. If I had been a Hollywood hero, no doubt I would have thought to grab a pot of boiling water, climb up to the top of some shelves, and dump it on my unsuspecting pursuers. Or I would have found a closet full of cleavers and hacked my way to freedom through a fusillade of bullets. But my mind was on escape only. I was so convinced that I was going to be shot if I didn’t get out of there immediately, that I just raced through the kitchen without even the briefest notion to stop and confront the two guys with guns who were chasing me.

  The room was bigger than I expected, extending behind both the entryway and what had to be the gift shop. About ten seconds after I reached the kitchen I heard a crash from behind me, and I assumed that Kappa or Gamma had slammed into a waitress carrying a tray as they entered. I didn’t turn around to check. I just hoped it gave me enough time to reach my car and drive off before I got killed.

  I had to dodge shelves and carts positioned at various places, but I was moving generally in the direction of the end of the building that abutted the Wild West show facade. Finally I saw an exit sign in the back corner of the room, and after slaloming around two startled busboys I burst through the door into a small, square entryway.

  There were two other doors leaving the six-foot-by-six-foot space. One was directly in front of me, straight across from the kitchen. I wasn’t sure where that one led. But the other was on my right. I chose that one, because it had to lead outside—to the back of the restaurant building.

  I burst through, and was immediately hit with the smell of garbage and the sound of weapons firing. I recognized the gunplay from the Wild West show taking place on the other side of the wooden facade that was immediately to my left. The smell was coming from two huge Dumpsters, extending dozens of feet from the building, which were stationed about twenty feet to the right of the doorway, blocking an escape in that direction.

  But as I turned to the left to run behind the length of the facade, I heard a bang that was louder than the others. In fact, it sounded like it came from right behind my head. I turned around and looked up, and saw a smoking hole in the door behind me. When I turned back around, I saw two men in cowboy hats running back and forth through the facade—obviously two of the stuntmen, pretending to come in and out of the saloon during the big gunfight.

  But another smaller figure, one without a cowboy hat, between one and two hundred feet away, was running directly toward me. I didn’t recognize the man without the hat, but I could see the gun he held in his outstretched arm.

  And then he fired.

  THIRTY-ONE

  IN LESS THAN a second, my brain processed the situation.

  If I ran to the left, I’d head straight for the short man without the cowboy hat, who was shooting at me.

  The Dumpsters were blocking an immediate move to the right. I’d have to go forward several feet to pass the Dumpsters before I could veer right, and move away from him. Even if he didn’t cut me off, by the time I reached the end of the Dumpsters, he’d have a great shot at me.

  I pulled open the door and tore back into the building.

  To my left was the door to the kitchen. In about five seconds, it would burst open, and Kappa and Gamma would pour through. I yanked open the door to the right, and ran.

  I should have known where it went, but I was still surprised when I found myself on the wooden staircase that the stuntmen used to reach the third-story balcony outside the faux Golden Palace Hotel.

  There was nothing to do but race up the stairs.

  I had about a five-second head start, and the design of the staircase was in my favor. Rather than one long, straight flight up two stories, the carpenters had built a landing on the second floor. That way, my assailants wouldn’t have a straight shot up a long flight of stairs at me. The flight from the second story to the third was directly over the flight from the first floor to the second. They could try to shoot me from below, through the treads, but they wouldn’t be able to see me.

  The problem with all of this, however, was that the staircase was outside the building. So my peripheral vision was able to pick up the fact that as I fled up the steps, I was rapidly getting higher and higher above the earth.

  For those of you who are curious, you can literally be running for your life with a system full of adrenaline, and still get nauseated from vertigo.

  At the first hint of sickness, I shut my eyes.

  It sounds stupid, but it works. The dizziness and motion sickness come from the brain’s inability to appropriately process the data it is receiving from your peripheral vision. And a flight of stairs offers extremely consistent footing. If you are climbing a staircase using a handrail, even without sight, you can be pretty confident you aren’t going to trip on a tree root or stumble off a curb.

  The difficulty of such an effort is increased, of course, when you are being chased by homicidal lunatics firing loaded weapons at you.

  The sounds of the stunt gunfight were all around me as I climbed the steps, but the real bullets didn’t start flying until I had turned the corner and headed up the second flight to the third story.

  Of course I was slo
wed down by the fact that I had to open my eyes to see where I was going, which meant that I had to shield myself from the view of the terrifying drop over the banister to the ground below.

  Once on the steps to the third floor, though, a succession of thoughts raced through my brain, as the sounds of the real and blank cartridges exploded all around me.

  First, I guessed that I had an advantage, since I had been to Cactus Curt’s so often. I was hoping that the three others chasing me weren’t familiar with what was to come, and that I could use my knowledge against them.

  But right on the heels of that comforting thought was the realization that what I knew wasn’t going to help me at all. Because what I knew was that I was being chased right into a dead end. The terrace on the third floor of the fake hotel on the fake street next to Cactus Curt’s Steakhouse had one way in, and one way out.

  And then, just before I burst through the door to the end of my pathetic escape attempt, the final, shining piece of information that kept me from losing all hope presented itself.

  The ax.

  I had forgotten the positively joyful news that Mad Bill Barton was an ax murderer! And waiting up on the veranda for the stuntman who played the murderous outlaw was my weapon of choice. Right under the rocking chair. I was so excited about the prospect of confronting and defeating my enemies that I distinctly remember thinking that things couldn’t have worked out any better.

  That, of course, was a ridiculous thought. Any number of things could have been better, including the substitution of a machine gun for the ax, or a sudden stairway collapse plunging Kappa, Gamma, and the short guy to their deaths.

  I mention it only to illustrate just how overtaxed my brain was at the moment that I hit the door to the balcony and emerged onto it with my beautiful, if terribly violent and risky, and ultimately farcical, plan.

  My strategy was the following. I was still about five to ten seconds ahead of my adversaries. That would give me enough time to reach the other end of the balcony, and get hold of the ax. I would attempt to cross back to the doorway before the first one emerged, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have the time. So I was prepared to throw the ax—the distance was laughably short. I would strike whoever came through the door first with a fatal blow to the chest.