Enemy Combatant

by Ed Gaffney

  But he was the person who put me into the danger in the first place. He was the man who had pretended to be Dale, to try to manipulate me. If he hadn’t threatened Amy and Erica and Henley, I never would have been near Cactus Curt’s—I’d have been into New Mexico now, well on my way to Texas. In fact, if he hadn’t grabbed me that day in the men’s room, none of this would have happened.

  But just before I was about to unload on him, Beta opened his eyes and turned to me. He looked awful. “Listen,” he said, pushing himself up and opening the door. “I must have been hit worse than I thought, so I gotta get in there.” And with that, he opened his door, stepped out of the car, and fell to the ground in a heap.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I JUMPED OUT of my door and ran around to the other side of the car. Beta was lying on his stomach, one arm trapped beneath him, the other stretched forward.

  As soon as I bent down to turn him over, I saw the problem. The wound to his upper back was bad enough—but there was another injury, lower on his left side, beneath his rib cage, where the real trouble was. The bloodstain from that one was huge, and growing.

  I checked the rest area quickly. The three cars that had been parked when we pulled in had left already. Two new ones had come in, and the drivers were still in the bathroom. But it was only a matter of time—no more than seconds—before they emerged. I had no idea how I was going to deal with the kindness of strangers. I had to get Beta up and into the car again.

  I touched him on the right shoulder, and he flinched. “What?”

  “You passed out,” I told him. “You’ve got to get back into the car or somebody’s going to see you.” I have to admit that my concern was not solely for the fallen man. I had to keep myself hidden, or I was finished, too.

  My one, very fresh, personal experience with bullet wounds led me to believe that what Beta did at that moment was rather extraordinary. As if by sheer dint of will, he forced himself into consciousness, pushed himself up onto his knees and right hand, and then, slowly, stood.

  The driver’s door was still open, and he reached for it, using it to steady himself as he lowered himself back onto the blood-soaked seat.

  I closed the door, and spoke to him through the window. “I’m going in to get some paper towels and water. Are you going to be okay?”

  He smiled grimly, gave me a thumbs-up, and said, “Never better.”

  I turned and hurried inside.

  The throbbing in my hand reminded me that I had taken a bullet, too. Once in the bathroom, I ran it under cold water in hopes that I might slow the bleeding, and possibly dull the pain.

  But all that the water did was to increase the flow of blood, and intensify the pain. Upon further inspection, the bullet had torn a considerable amount of flesh off the side of my hand, but as far as I could tell, it had missed the bone. I grabbed a bunch of paper towels, soaked some of them with the cold water, and raced back out to the car to help Beta.

  My feelings toward the man were conflicted. He had threatened the lives of my loved ones, and then, hours later, he had saved my life. I think that as cynical and hardened as I’d become in those few days, I simply hadn’t yet reached the point where I could just turn my back on a man suffering from gunshot wounds received in helping me escape my own death.

  When I got there, Beta was sagging back against the headrest, his eyes closed. His face was ashen, and I had no idea if he was even conscious. But as soon as I opened the door, he turned to me and asked, “Got those towels?” Then he leaned forward, resting his forearms on the steering wheel.

  I pulled up the base of his T-shirt to reveal the ugly wound under the left side of his rib cage. Red-black blood was pulsing from it at an alarming rate, despite the fact that there was already some clotting at the site of the injury.

  “Press some wet cloths against it,” Beta said, in a soft voice. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

  I took four or five of the wet paper towels and gently pushed them up against the angry hole in his back. Beta gasped at the contact, but when I pulled away, he said, “No. Leave it. I’ll hold it there. Get your hand to stop bleeding.” And then he reached around with his left hand and took the already blood-soaked towels from me.

  While he attended to his back, I returned my attention to my hand. I made a crude bandage out of a folded pair of the wet towels, and then wrapped several of the dry ones around it. I lowered the mess down to the car seat, and pressed down as hard as I could.

  Beta cleared his throat and began to speak softly. “Your brother was a hell of a soldier.”

  “You knew Dale? You were in Afghanistan?”

  “I only met him once. We wanted him. We only recruited from men in the field. Only the best soldiers. Intensely dedicated. Fearless. Driven. But he saw the danger in what we were doing. Way before I did. He turned us down cold.”

  I thought it was possible that Beta was delirious, but whatever he could tell me about Dale I wanted to hear. “What do you mean, he saw the danger? What danger?”

  Ignoring me, Beta went on. “I think he even talked about you. Yeah. Told me if I ever got in trouble with the law, I should call you because you were a hell of a lawyer.” Then he laughed, as if there were something very funny about that. “Want to take my case?”

  Beta let out a ragged breath, then continued. He spoke hesitantly, like someone barely awake, recalling a dream. “We were recruiting for something called the Foundation. When the man signs on, the Foundation arranges his so-called death. The family is notified that their fallen loved one was a hero, and that very little of his body was recovered. Usually, the Foundation cuts off a piece of your body and sends it home.” He pointed to his right ear. “See?”

  I peered down and saw that there was no lobe. God almighty.

  “They ship the fragment back in case somebody wants to do a DNA test. That way, there’s never any inquiry. The family deals with the funeral. That’s just as well, because to sign up with the Foundation, the soldier has to accept that he is dead to his family. And vice versa.”

  “Why would anybody do that?”

  Beta sighed. “You think you’re making a sacrifice that needs to be made. To protect the country. And then, you’re in the middle of Phoenix…” His voice trailed off.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you talking about?”

  Beta didn’t answer for a while. Then, out of the blue, he opened his car door and announced, “We have to leave here.” He staggered out of the car.

  “Wait a minute.” I jumped out after him, and reached him at the vehicle’s trunk. “We can’t go anywhere. You’re still bleeding.”

  He was, and badly. The paper towel compress had done next to nothing. Blood had dripped down into his pants, and had begun to seep through.

  “If we stay here, they’ll find us,” he told me. “You drive, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  It made sense. The three goons had followed us from the restaurant for long enough to get a description of our car, complete with license plate. Sitting at a rest stop within fifteen to twenty miles of our shoot-out was just plain stupid.

  I went around to the driver’s side, and sat down on the blood-drenched seat. I waited for Beta to join me, then I started up the engine and left the rest area.

  The sun had set, and darkness was falling quickly, so I got off at the first exit. I wasn’t familiar with this particular part of the state, but I figured I could drive around until I found a safe place to stash the car where we wouldn’t be seen.

  As I worked my way along the small county roads, I asked, “Who runs the Foundation?”

  Beta took a deep breath. “Yeah. Well. They manage to keep that pretty buttoned down, but I can tell you this much. It runs at least as high up as Undersecretary of Defense Newton. I know he’s in it, because that’s where my latest orders originated.”

  “And what exactly is the Foundation? What do you do?”

  “We’re a secret subgroup of the military, d
edicated to keeping America safe from terrorism, at any cost.”

  My limited understanding of the armed forces came from Dale’s experience. I had never heard of such a thing. “I thought the military was already dedicated to keeping America safe from terrorism.”

  “At any cost,” Beta repeated. “Any cost.”

  The man’s voice was soft. It was getting a little hard for me to hear him. He was obviously badly weakened by his injuries. “Are you sure we shouldn’t get you to a hospital or something?” I asked.

  “By now, they’ll have people covering every emergency room within thirty miles of Cactus Curt’s. As soon as they get the call, one of the Foundation will be in our ER within five minutes. If you bring me to a hospital, they’ll kill both of us.”

  “But if you bleed to death, what difference is it going to make?”

  Beta ignored me. “The Foundation plays by its own rules. You know how the Constitution restricts military action? That doesn’t apply to us. We go wherever we need to go, and do whatever we need to do. You’d be surprised how many people will obey authority. There aren’t that many of us. We’re just in the right places, and we know how to give orders.”

  That was an awful lot of ominous information. “So the Foundation operates outside the Constitution?”

  “I told you our mission—to protect the country from terrorism, at any cost. Including the Constitution.”

  I knew he wasn’t inviting a debate, so I refrained from the obvious inquiry about exactly what country would be protected if the Constitution was destroyed in the process. “And you’re in the Foundation?”

  “How do you think I know all this stuff?” Beta asked.

  So Beta was part of a secret arm of the military that ignored the Constitution in order to secure the country from terrorism.

  “What does all this have to do with me?” I asked. “Why am I so important? And why did you have to drag my family into it?”

  When Beta didn’t answer, I looked over and saw that he had passed out again. He was slumped over to the right, exposing the wounds to his back. The one on the bottom was still bleeding.

  I was torn. Beta obviously needed help, but if what he said was true, I’d be risking his life, as well as my own, if I brought him to a hospital. And even if I weren’t driving, I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to help, other than to try to stop the bleeding, which clearly hadn’t worked so far.

  As I drove farther down the road, Beta drifted in and out of consciousness, occasionally repeating something like, “Watch out, Tom—don’t let them white you,” or “They’ll white you if they can.” Either I wasn’t hearing him clearly, or he was speaking nonsense.

  After about ten minutes, I drove past a billboard that was lit well enough to illuminate Beta’s face for a moment. His face was the color of chalk, and he had broken out in a sweat. Right then, I made a decision. I realized it was risky, but I couldn’t ignore the man’s deteriorating situation anymore. I pulled over onto the shoulder, well out of the range of the billboard’s light, and killed the engine. The sky was overcast, and the road was dark. I hadn’t seen a car in fifteen minutes.

  I pulled out my old cell phone, but it had run out of power. I took Beta’s cell phone off of the clip on his belt, and I dialed 911.

  “Why are we stopping?” Beta asked, weakly. Then he opened his eyes, and saw me holding his cell phone. “Don’t use that,” he said, reaching up and pulling the phone away from my ear, and thumbing the off button. He checked the display, and laughed quietly, without a hint of humor. “Oh, well. It was over anyway.”

  He looked out of his window, then opened the door. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  He bent down, and slid a small gun from an ankle holster. Then he opened the door, and stepped out of the car. Through the open door he pointed it vaguely in my direction, and said, “Stay away from me. They’ve been monitoring my phone. They’ll be coming, now. You’ve got to get out of here.” He reached into the area behind his belt buckle, and brought his fingers to his lips. “I just put a cyanide capsule into my mouth,” he told me. “That second shot to the back did it. I’m finished.”

  “I can take you to—”

  “There’s papers in the trunk that explain everything. I wrote it all down. Read it. Whatever you do. Read it. Make sure you get to the trial tomorrow and tell everyone what you know. But stay hidden until the trial. The Foundation will be after you. If they get to you before the trial, you’re dead.”

  I wasn’t willing to leave him there, though. He so clearly needed help. But he kept pointing the gun at me, and threatening me, every time I made a move to get out of the car.

  During that two or three minutes he spoke, occasionally rapidly, sometimes haltingly. He apologized for trying to trick me into thinking that he was Dale. He admitted bugging my cell phone that first day in the bathroom with a listening device and a GPS chip, which was how he kept such close tabs on me. He seemed to be wobbling in and out of consciousness as he spoke, and occasionally what he said sounded more like the ravings of a fevered mind than the lucid thoughts of a coherent one.

  At the conclusion of a particularly long rant, he seemed to gather himself, and focus clearly on me. “Everything I’ve told you is true, Tom. Believe me when I tell you that they will kill you without thinking twice. The minute you stood up in the courtroom and that idiot Judge Klay put you on this case, your life was over.”

  Then he bit down, swallowed hard, and said, “Get out of here. They’ll be all over this place in minutes.” Seconds later, he collapsed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I LEAPT FROM the car and hurried to the downed man’s side. The light from the open car door lit him poorly, but well enough to confirm what I feared. Beta’s eyes and mouth were open, and he wasn’t breathing.

  They’ll be all over this place in minutes. The harsh reality of my predicament forced me back to the car. I closed Beta’s door, then jumped into the driver’s seat, and sped away.

  Although unable to leave the injured man despite what he had done to me, I had no problem leaving his dead body. The help he needed now was way out of my hands.

  If Beta was right, and they were on the way, I was betting they would be coming from the Cactus Curt’s area, from the north. So I continued south, on the county road.

  I knew they had a description of the car, and the license plate number, so I also knew that one unlucky, random glance from a cop in a passing cruiser, and I was screwed.

  I began to look for a place to ditch the car. But I was in such desolate country that I decided to get closer to Scottsdale. If I left the car here, it would be the only car parked in a ten-mile radius, and I’d have to walk for hours before I came across a living soul.

  I was afraid of checking into a motel, no matter how remote. All I needed was for somebody to have put my picture on the news, and suddenly a Days Inn night clerk is getting interviewed on cable news by a shrill woman with hair like a blond helmet while a police helicopter broadcasts an aerial shot of me desperately running across the arroyos of central Arizona.

  I needed to stop being so paranoid. I turned on the radio in an effort to return to reality. Even if the Foundation was as dangerous and powerful as Beta described, it had limits. It was a covert commando group—not a major law enforcement arm with direct ties to statewide media. Even if the plan was to get a manhunt started, it was going to take time to publicize. They couldn’t just snap their fingers and put me on CNN.

  It was a few minutes before eleven o’clock—less than five hours after we’d escaped back at the restaurant. And the driver of the SUV must have been seriously hurt, or else that car never would have spun out of control as it did. Dealing with that had to have taken some time.

  The advertisements for KNWS, AM 740, called it a twenty-four-hour news station. In reality, though, from about eight P.M. to six A.M. it ran call-in shows for people who liked to telephone radio stations and gripe. The shows were hosted by people who liked to gripe more th
an the callers. But at the top of the hour, even at night, the station actually did broadcast news. I tuned it in, just to be sure that I was in the clear. In the few minutes left before eleven o’clock, the host of the show gave what I thought was a foolishly simplistic argument to vote for Governor Hamilton in the special election for senator—something about how we in Arizona more than anyone else in the nation needed a strong leader who would protect us in Washington, like Hamilton was personally protecting us from terrorists like Juan Gomez.

  When that claptrap finally ended, at exactly eleven o’clock, I heard something else that I wasn’t expecting.

  “This is Neville Jordan, with news on the hour. Our top story: Local criminal defense attorney Thomas Carpenter, whose unconventional tactics in the Juan Gomez trial have garnered him national media attention this past week, is now wanted himself by authorities on charges of arson and murder. Mr. Carpenter, who is described by police as armed and dangerous, is a suspect in the shooting deaths of two men earlier today, and in the fire that claimed the life of his father, former Assistant District Attorney Henley Carpenter.

  “Tom Carpenter was last seen north of Scottsdale, and the fugitive is believed to be traveling south in a white four-door Chevrolet Impala, with an Arizona license plate number ending in 347. Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of Carpenter may call this toll-free special hotline set up by the state police—”

  I shut it off. While undoubtedly better than Beta’s, my situation was growing considerably darker with every passing moment. Although I had a pocket full of cash and a loaded weapon in my possession, I was soaked in blood, had a headache from an earlier pistol-whipping, and a relatively fresh gunshot wound to the hand. I was wanted for three murders and an act of arson that I didn’t commit, and my status as a fugitive was being broadcast all over the state. The car I was driving, besides having no rear window, was literally dripping with the blood of two victims of a gunfight. And its description, along with mine, was in the hands of every law enforcement agency in the Southwest.