THE BUTLER

by Bill WENHAM

  I knelt down for a moment and pretended to be checking something in my shoe. A moment later I straightened up and then we walked over to the other side. There we peered over the parapet at the tumbling waters of the Colorado River being released from the slipways far down below us. Mist from them billowed half way up the dam face.

  After a few minutes of admiring this gigantic concrete marvel, we got back into the Jeep, turned around and headed back to Boulder City. There was no traffic. It was exactly 2.30 a.m. We’d wait in an all night diner in Boulder and return sharp at 4 a.m. for our appointment with the Butler.

  I knew that he’d be on time. If nothing else, the man was punctual. Hopefully there’d still be little or no other traffic crossing the dam at that time in the morning.

  They’d both be there. I was sure of it. The Butler desperately needed to take back control of the game. Perhaps it was even showdown time. Either way, Ellie and I were ready for them.

  At least, we prayed we were. We had either done enough or we hadn’t. It was too late to change anything now. We’d been very lucky to find what we wanted in an electronics store in Vegas. The other item I’d brought with me from back home.

  At exactly 4 a.m. we both entered the dam, but from opposite ends. We came back in from Boulder City again and the Butler, also on Hwy 93, had come in from the Arizona side as we’d done two days ago. The dam crosses the Colorado River at the State line between Arizona and Nevada.

  As we rolled to a stop in our Jeep, slewing our vehicle diagonally across the centre of the two lanes, I saw the Butler stop as well and do the same. We were about 150 feet apart beside each of the two center towers. He was driving a black Range Rover. We could see each other quite clearly in the illumination from the dam itself, even though it was 4 a.m.

  I switched off the Jeep’s headlights and a moment later I saw the Range Rover’s lights go off as well. Obviously neither of us wanted to be looking into the other’s headlights, if this was to be a shooting match. I no longer doubted this was to be the showdown.

  Neither of us made a move for several minutes, each of us waiting for the other to start the action.

  Ellie took my hand and gripped it hard. “Scared, Babe?” she asked me softly.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I’m absolutely bloody petrified. We know how good these guys are, El, and it’s us or them in a goddamned shootout now.

  “Don’t worry, toy boy,” she said, trying hard to smile. “Whoever wins, wins, right?”

  “Whatever idiot it was who said that has never been in a situation like this,” I told her.

  I saw her bottom lip quiver but I was glad she didn’t remind me I was the damned fool that had said it.

  I knew I badly needed to try to relax. If I didn’t, I knew the madmen in the car ahead of me would kill the woman I loved first, and then they would take their own sweet time in killing me.

  That is what the Butler had sworn to do and I felt this was now the moment he’d chosen to do it. I’d originally thought that somehow he’d get us set up in some kind of wedding scenario. But I guessed now my constantly goading of him had escalated it all into this early morning showdown. Somebody was going to kill somebody in the next few minutes and it was a flip of a coin now as to who it would be.

  I’d thought my plan would work, but now looking out directly at the Butler and his brother, both weapons experts, I had this awful sinking feeling in my stomach.

  Who was it that had said this was like a couple of Old Wild West outlaws? Surely I hadn’t said that as well, had I? It all seemed so long ago now. God, I was scared, I thought. Ellie must have read my mind because she gripped my hand hard again. I squeezed hers back hard in return. Then I turned her to me and kissed her as passionately as I knew how.

  I didn’t know right at that moment if or when I’d ever get another opportunity.

  Then we reluctantly broke apart and checked our weapons again. Each of us had our service piece with four clips of ammunition. In addition, we each had a .38, with a single load as back up. I also had a small remote control device.

  I desperately hoped the Butler or his brother wouldn’t be using a rifle, scoped or not. If they were, at this distance, they could pick us both off very easily. Somehow though, I’d convinced myself his final face to face with me would have to be something a lot more confrontational than hiding behind a rifle.

  He believed himself to be the ultimate killing machine, therefore, at the very least, I expected handguns. Knives would be even more likely, I thought, with a sense of dread.

  He’d want to want to see our faces up close, to see the terrified look in our eyes when he finally brought these lives of ours to an end. I also couldn’t help but think of the brothers’ Delta Force training.

  Ellie and I must be stark, raving mad to try to take them on, one on one like this, I thought.

  Ellie gripped my hand once again, nodding her head towards the Jeep’s windshield. I followed her glance and saw the doors of the Range Rover opening.

  This was it, I thought, as we each opened the doors of the Jeep as well and got out. I didn’t want us to be caught like sitting ducks inside the Jeep. If I had to dodge bullets fired by experts, I wanted to at least be out in the open with some room to maneuver.

  As the driver of the Range Rover got out as well, I could see he was holding what looked like an Uzi. From this distance, it could be an Uzi, but I couldn’t be sure. I just knew whatever came out of the end of it would hurt like hell if it hit you. The man getting out of the other side appeared to be carrying something similar.

  I realized, for the first time, although we now had the two of them standing right in front of us, we still didn’t know which one of them was actually the Butler, Emilio Cervantes, a.k.a Milo Van Creste.

  At least they weren’t holding rifles, I thought. And since there was a far greater degree of inaccuracy with an Uzi than with a rifle, it may give us a slightly better chance of survival. To counteract the inaccuracy, there would just be a hell of a lot more bullets coming out of them, that’s all. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of winning right now, merely surviving for the next few minutes.

  Surprisingly, the driver of the Range Rover suddenly made a dash for the dam’s parapet, taking the classic high ground position. He climbed nimbly up on to it, spraying our Jeep with bullets as he went. The Jeep’s windows and windshield dissolved into a shower of glass as the rounds from the Uzi hit them.

  His action had taken me completely by surprise but I had one for him too, if only it worked. Please God, I prayed fervently, keep Murphy’s Law away from me for just this once.

  As he reached the top of the parapet and dodged behind one of the center two of the four tall towers on the south side of the dam, I pressed the button on the tiny remote in my hand.

  The remotely fired ‘Whizz-bang’, which I’d placed on the other side of the dam when Ellie and I had been on the dam earlier, went off with a sharp crack and a flash, causing the man on the parapet to glance quickly over there, a very natural reaction.

  That was when I shot him!

  I snapped off a shot that hit the man in the right arm, spinning him around and causing him to drop his weapon over the wall of the dam. Before he could recover his balance, which had been precarious at best, with only one foot on the narrow ledge running around the tower, I shot him again. Even knowing him to be unarmed now and without any compassion at all, I shot him in the right leg just above the knee, as well.

  As he started to sag, the other man, the Range Rover’s passenger, dashed around the front of their car and clambered up onto to the parapet to get to his brother.

  He made a desperate grab for him just as I squeezed off another shot. I’d intended it to hit the man who’d just arrived but by trying to pull his brother to safety, he’d actually pulled him into the line of my shot instead.

  It hit the first man somewhere in the head, I thought. I couldn’t see if it had been a glancing shot or a fatal one. Whichever it had been, the impa
ct of it caused the injured man to start to slide off the top of the parapet towards the roof of the power station and the Colorado River far below.

  His brother grabbed at him with one hand as he fired frantically and wildly at me with the other. Suddenly he dropped his weapon as well as he felt his brother slip slowly away from him over the edge. As he laid flat on top of the parapet, with his hand gripping his brother’s arm, his own body started to slip over the edge as well.

  With a scream of anguish, he was forced to release his hold on his brother’s arm in order to save himself, as his own legs and lower torso went completely over the edge. I rushed up to the parapet just in time to see the first body, the man I’d shot, plunge down the curved face of the dam.

  His body hit the dam face once on the way down, bouncing out into space just like a rag doll trying to learn how to fly. Its arms and legs were all akimbo as it tumbled head over heels until it finally disappeared beyond the power station roof and into the raging misty torrent hundreds of feet below.

  The other man was screaming in fear, as I looked over at him, with only his fingers frantically trying to maintain a hold on the edge of the parapet. His whole body was suspended below him.

  His eyes were pleading with me as he begged me to save him.

  I looked back towards the Jeep and was shocked to see Ellie lying beside it. One of the Range Rover’s passenger’s rounds must have hit Ellie as she’d gotten out of the Jeep. During my shooting of the brother on the parapet, I hadn’t been aware of the other shots going on at the same time. And now the murderous slime bag wanted me to save his sorry ass? I don’t think so!

  My beautiful lady, the light and love of my life had been shot. I ignored the man hanging from the parapet and ran over to where Ellie was now trying to sit up. Relief flooded through me. At least she wasn’t dead. Everything else I could handle.

  I saw she’d been very lucky. It looked to me, although blood was oozing down the side of her face, that it was only a scalp wound. Bad enough but not life threatening. At least I hoped not. She would have a hell of a headache for some time but hopefully that was all.

  “I gotta go, El, just for a minute,” I said. “Be right back.”

  I dashed back over to the parapet where I could still see fingers clinging to it.

  I looked over the edge and into the eyes of the desperate man hanging there below me.

  “Help me,” he pleaded, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Please, for God’s sake!”

  “You want some help? Then you’d better look to the Devil, pal, not to God, for it,” I said. “But hey, since I’m here, I’ll be glad to help you, you murderous bastard. I’m going to help you straight down into your own private hell.”

  With no compassion whatsoever, and holding my weapon in my right hand by the barrel, I said, “This little piggy is for Sullivan,” as I smashed the first of his fingers on his left hand with it. He screamed as I said, “This little piggy is for Newt Winders,” and smashed his second finger. “This one is for Petrocelli” I said, hitting the next.

  “And this one is for Jan and Wayne,” I said, slamming the gun down on his index finger.

  He was now only able to hang on with one hand and I looked into his eyes as the Butler would have done with me if the situation had been reversed. His screams reverberated off the dam and the walls of the canyon as he hung there in agony.

  I holstered my weapon and bent down to pick up his Uzi from where he’d dropped it beside the parapet.

  I heard shouts and turned to see some men running towards me. Maintenance guys from the dam, I thought. I put my back to them and looked once more at the monster hanging on for his life below me.

  “And this one is for Ellie and all those other poor bastards you two have killed,” I said grimly as I smashed his own Uzi down across the knuckles of his remaining hand.

  His broken fingers failed to hold him any longer and his body fell away beneath me, hitting the dam wall halfway down, just as his brother’s had done. It too bounced, with its arms and legs flailing, sending it far out into the air above the river. I pitched the bloodied Uzi over the dam wall after him.

  Unlike his brother, who had probably already been dead when he went over the edge, I could hear this one’s screams all the way down.

  The curtain had just been rung down on the murderous brothers’ final act. There may be some folks in the world that would miss them, but Ellie and I wouldn’t be amongst them. There are plenty of other good actors around.

  I was just thinking about an ambulance for Ellie when the first of the dam’s staff came up behind me. I’d thought that what I’d done had been a long drawn out process. I wish I could have made those two bastards suffer forever. But then I realized it had all been over in a matter of seconds.

  The dam guy said, “Don’t know what’s going on here, fella, but the police are on their way and a helicopter has been dispatched.”

  I walked back with him over to where Ellie was sitting with her back to the door of the Jeep and I thanked him as I cradled her in my arms.

  “It’s all over, Babe,” I whispered to her, “The good guys have won.”

  “They’re gone? Both of them?” she asked, but her voice was barely above a croak.

  “Both of them. Right off the top of the dam,” I said as I started to tear my shirt off.

  “This is really no time to wrestle, Hon,” she said, trying to turn on her grin but only managing a painful grimace, “Save it for later, okay?”

  I tore the tee shirt into strips, balled a chunk of it up, and tried to gently wrap up her head with it. It looked a mess but it was obvious, even to me that the bleeding was already easing.

  “You’ll be fine, Babe,” I said, as I held her tightly.

  “You guarantee it, do you?” she said, with a slight trace of her cheekiness back in her voice.

  “I do and you’d better be,” I said, “Otherwise I’ll have to find someone else to marry.

  “Is that a proposal, Lover,” she said, smiling a little now.

  “No, of course not, you silly woman. You’re just hallucinating right now,” I said, “But if you are a good girl, maybe I’ll repeat my offer soon.”

  “And what if I’m not a good girl?” she said, with her cheekiness right back on form, bandaged head, headache and all.

  “Then I’ll have to repeat it that much sooner won’t I, that’s all” I said.

  “Does this mean we’re engaged then?” she asked.

  “Don’t push your luck, lady,” I said, “I need to find out what kind of a girl you are first.”

  “And I can’t wait to show you, Buster,” she said, hugging me closely to her and smiling happily.

  Looking at her now though, with her damaged and bandaged head, I wish I’d been able to pump a few more bullets into whichever one of them it was that had gone over the edge first.

  I knew I’d murdered the other one just as surely as the two of them had murdered all of their victims, but I didn’t care. Is the deliberate and premeditated murder of a serial killer considered to be justifiable homicide, I wondered.

  It was certainly premeditated because I’d thought about almost nothing else except killing those two bastards ever since this whole thing started. I realized I didn’t know which one was which and what’s more, I didn’t really care. The important thing, and the only thing that mattered, was that they were both gone now.

  The means of how they were actually dispatched was totally irrelevant, I thought. They were gone and that was the end of it.

  I knew I could have easily saved my final victim. I could have very easily hauled him back over the edge if I’d wanted to, but for what reason? As far as I was concerned, I’d just saved our City’s taxpayers a hell of a lot of money and time in legal wrangling.

  The brother I’d just helped on his way to hell had probably watched the whole of his evil life flash before his eyes on the way down. If that was the case, I wished the dam had been a hundred times, or better yet, a
thousand times higher, to give him more time to enjoy it all before he hit bottom.

  But it was all over now. Ellie would go to hospital for a day or two in Las Vegas maybe, and when she was well enough we’d spend a few more days there for her to recuperate. Then we’d take a leisurely drive back to our own home town.

  I looked back over to where the brothers had staged their final and most spectacular performances and I had to convince myself again it was really and finally all over now.

  “Them two has bin a right nasty pair o’ bastards, ain’t they?” as old Tom Ward would have said, but talented as both of them were, neither of them had ever bothered to learn how to fly! Especially off the top of one of the highest dams in the world.

  I was still kneeling there beside Ellie, cuddling her, as two helicopters landed on the roadway in front of us. One was the police and the other was the ambulance. The paramedics immediately took charge of Ellie and put her in their helicopter. After a few minutes spent stabilizing her for shock or whatever, it took off and roared away in the direction of Vegas.

  I’d said I wanted to go with her but the police said they wanted to question me first. They’d take me back in their whirlybird when they were finished at the dam, they told me. And the two vehicles would also be taken back to Vegas, where I could pick up the Jeep later if it was still drivable.

  I told them Ellie and I were cops from up north and we’d been trailing these two serial killers through several states. I gave them a brief outline of both of their criminal, military and acting careers which raised their eyebrows somewhat. I don’t think they were too happy about having two northern hotshots blazing away in their territory and I understood the feeling. I would’ve felt the same if the situation had been reversed.

  Had I shot them, one of the cops asked. One of them, I said. And the other? He fell, I told them, with a bland look on my face. They gave me the “Yeah, right” look, but didn’t pursue it any further.

  They said the bodies may, or may not, turn up again somewhere down river sometime. They said this as though it was a regular occurrence here.