The bullets through the back window of the truck decided the matter. Nice of the cop not to make it an ambiguous question. As far as Jonathon was aware, cops weren’t supposed to shoot first at traffic stops and ask questions later. But hell, this was Wyoming—he thought it was still Wyoming, anyway, though he was heading toward Nebraska—and maybe here mega-watt lights and a preliminary round of gunfire was routine police procedure. Another spray of bullets, which must have been aimed lower since they didn’t make it in toward them, suggested the cop had shot out their back tires for good measure.
Veronica stiffened beneath him, but she stayed still. Jonathon listened for the sound of someone approaching the truck and heard nothing after the gunfire stopped. The cop was keeping his distance. Good. Jonathon reached up to the seat for his gun and, without looking, fired a volley through the already shattered back window. Just to give the cop a little incentive to back off.
“Hey there,” their unknown shooter called through a bullhorn when he was done. “This here is Sheriff Ron Metzlan.”
By the sound of it, the sheriff had backed up all the way to the protection of behind his car. Good.
“Now, you folks should just give yourself up. I wasn’t trying to shoot you there right now. I seen you ducked down before I shot. No, I was just trying to make sure you understood the seriousness of the situation. And of course, I shot your tires out so you don’t get no crazy ideas about driving away.”
Why the fuck were all the killers he was running into on this job so talkative?
“Now, how abouts you two come out from in there, hands up, and we’ll talk about what’s got you in so much trouble? How about it?”
Jonathon let off another round in answer.
“What are we going to do?” Veronica whispered, but it was a measure of how wrong everything had gone since he’d first shown up at her house that she didn’t even sound surprised. As if she expected every encounter at this point to involve shooting. And at this point, so did he. Shit, he was surprised the old man reading smut in the gas station that time—was that yesterday—hadn’t pulled out a gun.
Jonathon had always scoffed at the Agency involving non-agents in search and destroy missions, but he was coming to realize it could be pretty effective in slowing the prey down. Especially now that he and Veronica were the prey. And he didn’t even stop to question his assumption that it was the Agency, the mole at the Agency, anyway, behind this urgency to kill him and Veronica. Or at least him, though, Sheriff whoever had been somewhat indiscriminate in his shooting.
He reached into the glove compartment and got the gun he’d lifted off their last assassin and handed it to her. She took it without hesitation.
The bullhorn spoke up again, preceded by a chuckle. “Well, now, I see you’re not in a talking mood. Fair enough. And I already saw from how you left it back in my town that you ain’t afraid to shoot back. I can respect that.”
“Fuck, this guy is going to talk us to death,” Jonathon muttered.
“But this here is sort of a stalemate and I got a lot more ammunition than I bet you do. That truck you stole was old Jeb Hunter’s and contrary to the name, he ain’t got no rifles or anything in it. So, you just got what you shot that junkie back there with. And that junkie’s gun, I’m guessing.”
“He knows the guy we took out back at the bar had a gun,” Jonathon said, using we deliberately, hoping she would not be reminded that she had pulled the trigger. “Nobody would know that unless they had something to do with sending him.”
“Maybe,” she whispered. “Although someone could have seen him come in with a gun.”
The sheriff kept up his bullhorn. “By the way, you left quite a mess back there. By time I got on the scene, weren’t nobody could tell me where you got up to. But luckily, it was Jeb’s truck you done stole and he got that Lojack-whatchumacallit. So, here we are. You with not much firepower. And me? I got handguns, rifles…you name it. And I can bring backup, too, if I need it.”
“Doubtful,” Jonathon said to Veronica. “We’re miles out of his jurisdiction and I’m sure he doesn’t want any witnesses to this.”
“He’s right about the guns, though, isn’t he?” She added quickly, “And don’t quote your mother to me.”
He smiled. “Okay, I won’t. Yeah, he’s right.” He glanced out to the darkness just out of sight of the sheriff’s beam of light. “But he’s, for all purposes, an amateur. He might do fine with a sitting duck, or a sitting truck as it were, but he probably can’t shoot a running target in the dark too well.”
“Probably,” she said, deadpan.
“Let’s put it this way, I’d stake my life on it.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
He felt an unreasonable amount of pride in her calm. It was about fifty feet to the pitch-black brush, though they’d have to hop over the guard rail. “I know you were pretty good at track back in the day. How were you at high jumps?”
She glanced to the side of the road, seeming to understand right away.
“You run towards that stand of trees, as far deep into it as you can get. There’s a little bit of a moon, so you should be able to see just enough to make it. I’ll dash out first and as soon as I start shooting to give you cover, you take off.”
She bit her lip.
“I’ll be right behind you,” he answered her unasked question. Unless her unasked question was whether this would work. He didn’t have an answer to that yet. “Ready?”
She nodded.
He opened the passenger side door, just a bit. “As soon as I start shooting, got it?”
“Yes.”
He kicked the door all the way open, climbed over her and yelled out, “Hold your fire. I’m coming out. I surrender.”
And if the sheriff believed that one, Jonathon had a bridge in Brooklyn to sell him.
“Now that’s a smart boy,” the bullhorn responded. “Just put your hands up.”
“Do you want me to throw my gun out first?” he called. Couldn’t hurt to have the sheriff thinking logistics.
And right as the bullhorn started to answer, Jonathon leaped out, aiming toward the voice in the distance, the bright light. He sensed rather than saw Veronica jump out of the truck behind him and take off at a run towards the woods.
He backed away himself toward the trees, firing, and only risked a glance behind him to see she had made it over the guard rail before he turned to run himself in earnest. He was just clearing the rail, almost in the black patch beyond the sheriff’s light when one of the volleys caught up to him. He barely hesitated, just registering with the nip of pain that it had caught him in his shoulder. He would deal with that later.
There was no path in the brush that he could discern, but he managed to weave in and out of the trees, maybe a hundred yards, when an arm snaked out and caught him. “You made it.” She was breathing hard.
“Yeah. Now comes the hard part.”
“What? Don’t we just run? Lose ourselves in the woods?”
He shook his head. “No. There’s nothing out there. Not that we can count on, anyway. We have to lure sheriff whoever to follow us in here so I can catch him unawares.”
As if his ears were burning, Bullhorn called out from the edge of the trees, close to the guardrail, “That weren’t too smart. There’s bears out there. You city folk wouldn’t know about that, but there are.”
Jonathon gestured for Veronica to crouch behind the nearest tree. He could only hope the cop would follow them into the dark expanse.
A clatter of what sounded like someone much less agile than Veronica hefting themselves over the guard rail indicated that their assailant was coming closer. A round of swearing followed.
“Now you listen, you, I got some Indian blood in me, I do, and I’m a hell of a tracker. I’ve called for backup, too. There’ll be a hundred cops combing the woods for you. If you come in with me now, maybe we can make a deal. I’m a reasonable man.”
Bullhorn was remaining just out of
the circle of light to keep Jonathon from having a good place to aim. He shouldn’t have worried about that, though. Jonathon wasn’t going to waste a bullet on this guy. He’d take him out with his bare hands. Shooting for cover had cost him a lot of ammunition. Maybe a wiry junkie hyped up on artificial bravado was a little tricky, but if he couldn’t handle a plain vanilla country cop, he’d hang up his secret agent badge.
Which wasn’t such a bad idea, in fact. Too bad it was impossible.
He doubted the cop had called for backup on his contract hit, either. So, he wasn’t worried about a bunch of cops descending on them. But still Jonathon wanted to get this over with. He walked softly over to where Veronica was crouched. “Just stay here,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”
“If I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that to me since we’ve met…”
Then he turned back to Bullhorn who, lucky for Jonathon, was even chattier than Mr. Smooth Talker back at the motel.
“Now come on, I can hear y’all ain’t still running.” He was coming a little closer, feeling his way as he edged farther from the guard rail.
Jonathon chose trees at random, to disorient his adversary, running from one to another noisily.
Bullhorn took a few potshots that fell far from the mark. “You out of bullets now, ain’t you, boy? That it?”
The configuration Jonathon was following, tree to tree, was getting him closer to the guard rail, but farther down from the sheriff. When he was far enough, he hopped to the other side and crouched along, the steel rail acting as cover while Bullhorn continued to mutter and call out.
“I’m telling you, I’m getting tired of this! There’s a lot of folks after you two. And they’re going to be mighty motivated. Me? I’m just in it for the money. You give yourself up and, long as you got something to offer me, I won’t, er…” He hesitated, then gave up the game. “Kill you. ’Cause you know, don’t ya, that that’s what this is about? I don’t know what you did to get a price on your heads, but—”
Jonathon sprang up behind the sheriff, who had edged back toward the guard rail. Leaning over the rail, Jonathon circled the sheriff’s neck with one arm, jerking back until the man made a gurgling sound.
Then he snapped his neck and let the corpse fall to the ground. He looked down to see if he recognized him—he didn’t—and was surprised to see blood at the man’s throat. But he realized it was his own blood, seeping from his shoulder down his arm and making its way on to the sheriff’s neck as he had choked him.
He’d have to get the wound patched up. But now he had other things on his mind.
Before he would call out to Veronica, he needed to make sure the sheriff really was on his own. Since no one had jumped out of the cop car to assist, he figured that must be the case. But the other guy might just have been chicken-shit. Better to check.
He leaned down and picked up the rifle that had been dropped in the struggle and was laying at the dead man’s feet.
Aiming the gun, he walked toward the still-running cop car, driver door wide open. A quick glance inside showed there was no one with the sheriff. And his radio was turned off, confirming to Jonathon, even if he hadn’t made that last admission, that the sheriff was moonlighting and not on official business.
“It’s all right, Veronica,” he called out. “You can come out. It’s safe.”
She ran out of the woods and all but tripped over the sheriff’s body. Letting out a loud scream, she stumbled around the corpse.
“He’s dead,” Jonathon added unnecessarily, heading back to the body himself. He fumbled through the sheriff’s pockets, extracted his wallet and examined it in the squad car’s headlights.
Veronica looked down at the man.
Dead men, no matter how vicious they were in life, often looked vulnerable and helpless in their final state, before the undertaker got to them, anyway, and turned them into department store mannequins, only more lifeless. They’d lost the ultimate fight everyone struggled with, the fight to stay on this side of that black line, whatever might be on the other side. Most people couldn’t help being affected by that, feeling a solidarity with the recently deceased.
He could see Veronica was suffering from the phenomenon. She stared down at the sheriff.
The corpse’s eyes were wide open, as if surprised it had all come to this, and as befitting his death, his tongue stuck out.
“He could have had a family,” she said in a shaky voice.
“If he does, he doesn’t carry pictures of them. And even if he did, if he wanted to stay alive for them, he shouldn’t go around shooting first at traffic stops.” He fingered the cash in the dead sheriff’s wallet. At a glance, it was several thousand in hundred-dollar bills. “Or taking bribes to carry out a contract. This was a dirty cop, Veronica.”
“But he was a human being.”
God, he was tired.
He couldn’t think. But if the side of the road to sleep wasn’t a good idea in normal circumstances, it certainly wasn’t feasible at the scene of a killing.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Veronica. But I can’t worry about the bad ones who get killed. I have to worry about the good ones not getting killed.”
“It’s not so black and white,” she said in a small voice.
“It is at this very second.”
He glanced at the sheriff’s car. He would rather have had a plane, but for now it would have to do, given the tracking device the sheriff had mentioned on the truck and the fact that he didn’t have time to change the shot-out tires.
“We’re going to take his car. Go ahead and get in. I’ll be there in a minute. I need to move our friend here to a less conspicuous place.”
“Do you…” She shivered, and he knew it must be hard for her to ask it. “Do you need help?”
“No, that’s okay. Just get in the car.”
She noticed the blood running down his arm. “You’re hurt! We have to at least bind that.” She looked around as if there might be a first aid kit nearby.
“It’s fine for now. Get in the car.” He knew he was being short with her, but he didn’t have time for anything else.
He was glad the body was on the woods-side of the guard rail. The sheriff was a big boy and the fire-hold Jonathon used to carry him was harder than he’d expected with the blood loss from his shoulder. He was glad he didn’t have to hop over the rail carrying the dead weight, as well. And he would have to bind his wound—Veronica was right about that—before they took off again. Fainting from blood loss over the wheel wouldn’t be much help.
He dumped the corpse underneath some leaves a little deeper into the woods than he and Veronica had ventured.
By the time he retrieved his leather jacket and the satchel with Veronica’s computer from the truck and got back to the car, he was facing the fact that he didn’t have much of a plan. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous in a cop car, though he should turn on the radio to see if there was any chatter concerning them, or the sheriff.
Veronica was scrolling through something on the screen of an iPhone, which must have been the sheriff’s.
“We can’t use that,” he warned, although she hadn’t brought up calling her friend since their first night. “No calling Patty.”
“Mattie.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t worry. I’m long off that idea.”
He tore a strip from the bottom of a plaid shirt lying on the back seat—at least it smelled clean—and after slipping his arm out of his own shirt began to wind the plaid strip around his upper biceps where the bullet wound was leaking blood.
“Wait, let me help with that.”
She put down the phone and, when they had the makeshift bandage tied tight enough to stop the blood flow, he slipped his arm back into his shirt and she picked the phone up again.
“Let me have that. I’ll stomp on it and throw it in the woods. That’ll interfere with them tracing it through that ‘find my iPhone’ crap.”
She didn’t hand
it over.
“What are you doing?” He hoped it wasn’t getting to know their dead cop.
“I’m looking at his texts. And as I suspected, we’re in luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that I would have been surprised if a man like this didn’t have a hunting cabin somewhere that he might have invited a pal or two to at some point. Maybe even had to give him directions. And I was right.” She held out the screen for him to read.
Hi you old fucker! Yeah, I can join you. I aint got an antelope yet this year. But you going to have to walk me through how to get there, pal. I don’t remember nothing about our last drive out ’cause I was drunk as shit.
A few more pleasantries and the directions were there. They could get to it right off this very highway if they headed east toward the border with Nebraska.
Quite a coincidence. Although maybe the sheriff had meant to kill two birds with one stone. Do the hit then mosey along for a little relaxation at his hunting cabin.
“The text is from six months ago, and it’s not hunting season now. From the conversation back and forth, the cabin sounds like it’s quite remote. We could go there.”
Jonathon thought about it. It would be safer than trying to stop in a town again. And it wasn’t like he had anything better in mind, until he could find a plane. He had to sleep. “That’s a good idea. An empty place. We’ll check it out at least. And if it looks okay, park there for a bit, anyway. Get some rest. Eventually they’ll figure out the guy is missing and look there, but it might take a while.”
“It might. Especially since from his emails, I gather he just tells his secretary to screw off if she tries to micromanage where he is. We could even send an email to her from him saying he had to go out of town for a few days. Something like that. It could buy us some time.”
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