by Matt Hilton
'Anyone moves and I kill Bradley,' shouted the shooter.
'Put down the gun and move away slowly,' Kaufman shouted in return. He was again propped over the wall. No way could he take a shot, though.
The shooter twisted Bradley towards him. Fired once from the Glock. The bullet missed Kaufman but was enough motivation for him to drop down out of sight.
I watched, waiting for my opportunity.
'There are only two choices here,' the shooter yelled again. 'Drop your weapons or Bradley dies.'
There were actually three choices. I could shoot straight through Bradley and kill the fucker as well. Yesterday, before I knew the truth, I might have done. And, heaven forbid, if he did shoot Bradley, that was exactly what I was going to do.
'What's it going to be, FBI man? Do you want me to kill this innocent boy?'
Kaufman didn't reply. That put the ball back in my court.
'You aren't going to do that, Dantalion,' I said. I stood up. It meant putting myself at risk, but also gave me a clear shot through Bradley and into the shooter's central mass.
'So, you know my name?' Dantalion swung a fraction back my way. Still no clear shot though. 'Touche, Mr Hunter.'
'I know the pussy name you hide behind,' I told him. 'What is it with all you deadbeats, huh? Why the stupid name? All you sick-in-the-head motherfuckers do that.'
Instead of riling him like I'd intended, Dantalion seemed pleased with my words. He chuckled to himself, even as he pressed Bradley to take a slow step forwards. I matched his step, moving away from the Audi.
'You're looking for an opportunity to shoot,' Dantalion pointed out. 'Go on. Shoot, then.' he dropped the barrel of his Glock so he could pull aside Bradley's jacket. Under it was a bullet-proof vest. Something Seagram had demanded his mark wear after it was too late. I wondered where the bodyguard had got to. Hell, probably. Dantalion went on. 'See the only problem now is you will have to shoot through Bradley's head. Are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes,' I said.
For effect I allowed my knees to bend slightly, exaggerating my shooter's stance. It was a gamble, a big one. But Dantalion didn't shove Bradley to one side and come out shooting as I'd hoped. If anything he took a tighter hold on the younger man. His face was barely visible beyond Bradley's lolling head.
'This is what's going to happen.' His Glock was steady as it pointed my way, but I got the impression that he'd turned his head to one side. As he did, I took a step back towards the Audi. His gun was now pointing a yard to the right of my shoulder. He didn't note the subtle shift of my body, calling instead to Kaufman. 'FBI man, throw your gun over the wall. You have three seconds to comply or Bradley here will be as dead as your buddy inside.'
'Not giving up my gun,' Kaufman shouted in denial.
'Your choice. One. Two?…'
Kaufman's service revolver clattered on the ground next to Dantalion's feet. I swore under my breath. We'd lost a major advantage and Dantalion knew it. But he didn't see me shift my weight to the side, putting an extra foot from the trajectory of his first shot.
'Same goes for you, Hunter.'
'No.'
'Three seconds.'
'When you reach three you will be dead.'
'One. Two?…'
'Three!'
Neither of us fired.
'So how do things go now, asshole?' I asked him. 'You sound like you're a fair man. You like choices, don't you? How about you choose to put down your weapons? Let Bradley go, and maybe you'll get a comfortable prison cell instead of a hole in your head.'
'Don't care too much for prison,' Dantalion continued to edge forwards, Bradley a compliant partner in their slow dance.
'You look like you've spent a long time out of the sunlight already, but I guess that's because you've crawled out from under a rock.'
'You can goad me all you want, Hunter, but I'm not biting.'
'So you choose the bullet in the head?' I continued. 'Not that I blame you. Pretty white ass like yours would have them queuing up down at the State Penitentiary.'
Dantalion didn't reply; I'd come a little too close to the truth for his liking.
'Where'd you do your time? You've obviously done a stretch before? Don't care too much for prison,' I mimicked in an effeminate voice.
He didn't answer, just kept moving. What the hell was Kaufman up to? Where was his back-up weapon? We had Dantalion nicely triangulated now, and Kaufman could have put a bullet in his spine at any time. Only he wasn't making his play. He had been off the streets too long.
Dantalion was that much closer to Kaufman. He heard something that I didn't. 'The fucking cell phone, FBI. Throw it to me now!'
Kaufman's cell came sailing over the wall and Dantalion caught it under the sole of his foot and stamped it into fragments.
Dantalion was angry now. But it wasn't the senseless anger that I wanted to force him into. His rage was controlled. More dangerous. He jammed the revolver hard into Bradley's armpit.
'I'm done playing games. Hunter, get your ass out of my way or — so help me, God! — I'm going to shoot this punk and then you.'
'I don't think God is on your side,' I didn't move an inch. 'You're forgetting that He chose to elevate man above His angels. Whose side do you think He's gonna pick today?'
'Think I believe all that stupidity?' Dantalion snapped.
'Yeah,' I said slowly. 'I think you do.'
'Think again!'
Dantalion fired at me.
I didn't have a shot, so I had to leap away.
His first shot missed by a mile, but he was turning, following me, vectoring in on my running form.
Now I fired. Not at him. Despite my threat, there was no way I could shoot Bradley through the head. I fired so that my bullet passed over their heads. But it was enough to make him flinch and his second shot missed its mark too.
Then I was back behind the station wagon and twisting round for a shot. Point. Shoot. That was what had been ingrained into my psyche during the hundreds of hours training at Arrowsake. My bullet went true, hit dead centre. Only it wasn't Dantalion I'd hit, but Bradley. The Kevlar vest absorbed the killing power, but it was still like he'd been kicked by a mule. His body collided with Dantalion's, knocking his third shot astray.
It was one of those do or die moments when everything can play out on the basis of a snap decision. He was off kilter now, and if I charged him he wouldn't waste time shooting Bradley, he'd turn all his attention on me. I would blast the fucker's face off the second he lifted it above Bradley's shoulder.
But before I could move, Seagram stumbled out of the house looking like the victim from a slasher movie. His shirt front was dark with blood; a mass of it had pooled round his waistband and was even now seeping into the front of his trousers. He had taken a serious wound to his abdomen. He had one hand cupped around his throat, and there was blood there too. Not as much as was coming from his guts, but I knew that this was going to prove fatal. In his other hand he held a Heckler amp; Koch semi-automatic pistol. His face was ashen and fixed into a mask-like rictus. There was no recognition when he looked first at Bradley and Dantalion, then at me.
He lifted the H amp;K.
Pointed at me.
He fired but I was already on the move. The problem was I had to dodge away, so could no longer rush at Dantalion.
Seagram didn't see me. Not as Joe Hunter. He was looking into a gulf into which he was about to fall on a one-way trip. The human body is miraculous. It can take horrendous wounds and survive and learn to function in new ways. Pity our minds aren't as resilient. Seagram was gone from inside his own head, and whether it was terror or hatred or sheer instinct to come out shooting, that was all he was capable of. He pulled the trigger again and again.
I was loath to shoot the man, but I wasn't about to take a blind shot. I lifted my SIG and squared it on his forehead. I paused for a fraction of a second, then watched as a tiny rosebud blossomed in the centre of his face while the back of his head explode
d in a welter of blood, skull and brain matter.
Dantalion had his arm extended over Bradley's shoulder, and there was smoke coming from the barrel of the Glock.
Then he was swinging it towards me, and I had no option but to look for cover. I got to the front of the station wagon and hoped that the engine block would be enough to save me.
In the few seconds I'd kept my head down, Dantalion had moved backwards and I saw then what he was aiming for. The silver Lincoln was the only car in a driveable condition. He opened the driver's door and shoved Bradley inside, encouraging him to move faster with slaps to the face. Bradley scooted over into the passenger seat and then Dantalion was starting the car. He must have taken the car keys from Seagram.
I rose up from my crouch.
I could fire, but I was afraid that I'd hit Bradley.
So I had no recourse but to watch the Lincoln screeching away up the road.
'Knowles? Knowles!' Kaufman came over the wall like an Olympic hurdler. He lunged forwards to pick up his service revolver and raced towards the house. I took a last look at the Lincoln powering towards the exit drive, then at my Audi and the station wagon. Both had deflated tyres. No way was I going to catch Dantalion now.
I followed Kaufman inside. The trail of blood led us into the kitchen and what I saw broke my heart. A man was on his back, eyes fixed in a cataract stare. The agent — Knowles — that Kaufman had been concerned about. Bad enough that this man had died, but he was a professional and death was sometimes a downside of the job. What made my heart shrivel was the elderly lady lying across her table. Her mouth was crooked in an eternal bow. She had been no threat to anyone. Dantalion had done it from a thirst for blood.
Earlier, I'd told Walter that it wasn't personal. Well, I was wrong. When Dantalion killed that old lady he'd ensured that I wouldn't give up until I tore the last breath from his throat.
Kaufman was gingerly probing through the dead agent's clothing. Looking for his cell phone to call for back-up, no doubt. I took out my own phone and called all the back-up I required.
'Rink.'
'I'm here, Hunter.'
'Change of plan, buddy.'
I told him what had gone down and he swore. I stood by the window, staring out across the lawn towards the bright sea. A dark silhouette hunkered on the lawn.
When I was done giving my instructions to Rink, I looked back at Kaufman. He was still yelling animatedly into Knowles's phone.
'Kaufman,' I said loudly.
It was as if he'd forgotten I was there.
My finger pointed out the window.
'Can you fly that thing?'
37
Jean-Paul St Pierre — despite what everyone said — wasn't a sickly child. His vitiligo condition was purely external, and though it earned him cruel taunts from other children, even the occasional beating, it had never affected his physical boundaries. So long as he was careful under the Louisiana sun and took his medication at the dosage prescribed he could live a normal life. His mother loved him dearly, cherished him. Her little angel boy. She gave him all the kindness and support he needed. And he loved his mother in return.
He never knew his father. In a drunken stupor he'd been flattened under the wheels of an express train when his alcohol-addled brain told him he had right of way at a rail crossing. It wasn't much of a loss. He'd got on fine without him.
He blamed his father for his condition. It was his father's seed that had cursed him. But his father's curse was also responsible for making him the man that he would become.
He wasn't a sickly child. No.
He was strong and resilient and he looked after his mother as a good son should. When it came time to grant his mother her greatest wish he'd had the fortitude to do so, willingly and without an ounce of selfishness or self-pity. She had longed for it, asked for it, begged her uncaring god for it. So he couldn't understand why he'd been taken away and placed under guard at Juvenile Hall. They called him a monster. They did not understand him. He'd only been doing what his mother had begged for whenever he'd found her crying. His mother had been sad since the day of his father's death, and Jean-Paul had only wished to make her happy. He was even mindful to cause her as little pain as possible when he shot her in the back of her head with his grandpapa's old 'coon rifle.
Sociopathic, his doctors had called him. Psychopathic. Others called him worse names. More personal and hurtful. But he wasn't any of those things. He wasn't sick. Physically or mentally. Couldn't understand why they'd kept him locked away for eight years.
' I know the pussy name you hide behind,' Joe Hunter had said to him. ' What is it with all you deadbeats, huh? Why the stupid name? All you sick-in-the-head motherfuckers do that.'
He had smiled at the inanity of it. He'd been hearing similar accusations all his life. They had been his bread and butter. They sustained him, nourished him, made him even more determined to show his doubters just how much further up the evolutionary ladder he was than they. They could not understand his singular take on reality, because they were blind. No one seemed to see it but him.
He had shown Hunter.
He was better than Hunter.
Primarily because he did not share Hunter's base weaknesses.
Where he would not have faltered in shooting through another person's head to kill his enemy, Hunter had paused. That was the difference between them, what made him better at killing than Hunter would ever be. Hunter was trained. His military masters had ingrained in him the technicalities of killing, but they had never fully eradicated that human foible: the reluctance to murder in cold blood another human being. Empathy and guilt are stronger than the finger that pulls the trigger.
That was why his doctors had proclaimed Jean-Paul a sociopath. No empathy. No guilt, they said. Just like his father, he supposed.
Hunter on the other hand did have empathy. He had it in bucket-loads.
Dantalion could use Hunter's weakness to bring all his targets to him. And he would kill them all. He would leave Hunter until last, so that his guilt was magnified tenfold. And, he thought, looking sideways at his hostage, he would start with Bradley Jorgenson.
His escape from the island was easier than he'd thought possible. When Hunter and the FBI agent had turned up, things had looked like they were stacking against him. Only the fortuitous arrival of Seagram stumbling around like something from a zombie movie had allowed him to get away. The bullet he'd fired through Seagram's head had diverted Hunter long enough for him to make it to the Lincoln. Then the Lincoln had given him the speed and power to ram his way out of the metal gates. They were designed to keep intruders out, not in. The cop who'd tried to halt him by standing in the way and pointing his gun should actually have fired the thing, although his skull had starred the windscreen as his body was catapulted over the hood and on to the roof of the sedan.
Now he was ten miles north, travelling at high speed, slaloming in and out of traffic heading up the coast towards Jupiter. He was enjoying the freedom that the huge town car demanded from the other road users. A Dixie Highway turnpike was somewhere ahead, he recalled. He had to get off the coast on to the main route, then find a way across country. The FBI agent would set all available manpower on his trail. Roadblocks would be in place somewhere ahead of him, and a convoy of blue lights and sirens rushing in his wake. There was no sign of it yet, but the pursuit would definitely come.
Within half a minute he found the turnpike. Cars were backed up on the off ramp. He just went round them, forcing the car along the shoulder and leaving several vehicles minus their wing mirrors behind him. He swung into cross traffic and cars swerved and braked, and a refrigerated truck jack-knifed into oncoming traffic, effectively closing the road behind him. Dantalion watched the carnage in his mirrors, wondering what tally he should add to his book from the pile-up that ensued.
He sped up the highway, found a second exit on his left and blasted his way through the meridian across the path of more traffic at over sixty miles a
n hour. He almost lost control of the vehicle, but steered into the slide of the rear tyres, righted the sedan and took off at speed. The road went under another highway, swung north and then west, then he was rocketing along a single-lane blacktop, headed out into the swampy lands of the Floridian interior.
The road hadn't been designed for speed. It was ridged at its centre and there were more bumps and potholes than there were smooth patches. He could afford to slow down now that he'd lost any possible pursuers. He looked over at Bradley Jorgenson. The young man was oblivious of all that had occurred since Dantalion had jabbed him with the needle.
Dantalion backhanded him across the face.
'Wake up, Brad, you aren't going to be any help with your head in the clouds.'
Bradley's eyes opened but there was no recognition in their depths. He was mindless of the blood trickling from his nose and into the corner of his mouth.
Sodium amatol is sometimes inaccurately referred to as a truth serum. Movies show those who are drugged answering probing questions in a dull monotone, unable to deny their interrogators. Dantalion knew that was ridiculous. The drug did reduce a person's resistance to suggestion and had the effect of lowering their inhibitions, but it would never cause someone to give up their most closely guarded secrets. At a higher dosage it was no different than any other anaesthetic: it put you to sleep. Dantalion wanted answers, but he had other ways of forcing them from the man. He wanted Bradley awake and able to recognise the dilemma he was in.
He slapped him again.
Bradley muttered, turned his face away and promptly fell back to sleep.
Bradley would have to be woken by pain. Maybe the amputation of his extremities followed by a meal to remember.
On either side of the road scrubland was interspersed between the occasional irrigated fields. Tributaries of a swamp lying to the north were like the twisted fingers of an arthritic crone. Mangrove grew in dense clumps on hillocks standing above the streams. Birds broke from cover, startled by the passage of the Lincoln. Not the most densely populated area, but less wild than the swamps along the flooded banks of the Mississippi.