Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  The sound of the slug was unmistakable as it hit George Brenner, a snap-whack so fast as to be inseparable, but distinct from the sound of the shot, which followed a few milliseconds later. Darrell Goodman didn’t think about it; he was too thoroughly trained to think, he simply moved, vaulting the porch railing, scrambling for the cover of the cabin. He felt an ankle go when he hit the ground, and he rolled toward the inviting darkness under the porch, felt the bite of a slug cutting into the same leg with the damaged ankle, never heard the second shot.

  The shooter was quick.

  He threw his weapon over his back on its sling and scrambled toward the right side of the cabin. The support beams were only eighteen inches over the ground, and in a few uneven places, even closer than that. Animals had been under the porch; he could smell them on his hands, in his face, and still he scrambled and dragged himself, ignoring his leg, out the other side, and then he was running toward the trees, staggering, his left leg weakening, the cabin between him and the assassin.

  In the course of the scramble, his brain had processed the cabin as a trap. It provided immediate cover, but that wouldn’t last. He had to get out. If he could make it to the trees . . .

  He didn’t think about being hit again. There was a bright flash to his right, and he dodged, thinking it might be a muzzle flash, but then he registered it as too bright, and a second later plunged into the tree line. As he did, there was another snap-whack four inches from his face, as a slug tore into a tree trunk.

  Jesus!

  He went down, on his belly, slithered into a depression, damp with dew on moldering leaves, and then he stopped.

  Listened, trying to suppress his heavy breathing, his heart pounding. He could hear the other man—had to be Winter. Jesus Christ, he’d set them up, he must’ve known about the bug, how long had he known, what had he fed them? He groped into the leg pocket on his injured leg, took out a cell phone, looked at the connection bar. No connection. He was too deep in the valley. He’d had a solid link at the top of the ridge, three hundred yards away. He had to get to a spot where he could link up, had to move quickly.

  Winter wasn’t alone. There was at least one more guy in the cabin, then there’d been the flash on the hillside when he was running, so there might be two more. The fag group? Was Winter working with Barber’s guys? No time to think: had to move. Couldn’t let them pin him down.

  He slid one hand down his injured leg, probing for the wound, came away with a wet red-stained hand. No first-aid kit. Still, he had to do something about the bleeding, soon.

  If he could get to the top of the ridge, he could make a call, hunker down, wait. If they came for him, he could make them pay.

  He pushed off from the depression, nearly groaned with the pain, and using his arms as much as his legs, began moving as quietly as he could toward the west side of the bluffs south of the cabin.

  Jake heard him, but at first couldn’t see him. The second man was probably no more than a hundred yards away, but the woods were so thick that he simply couldn’t see more than a few yards into it. A good thing: the other man couldn’t move quietly.

  So Jake tracked him by the sound of his movement, and after two or three minutes, realized that the other man didn’t seem to be getting closer. He seemed, instead, to be working toward a neighboring bean field, though that was five or six hundred yards away to the southwest, not far from where Jake had set up during the turkey season. Away from the car park, from the direction he’d come in from.

  Why would he go there?

  The walkie-talkie vibrated in his pocket, and he slipped it out, gave her a single beep of acknowledgment. “The first one is gone. There’s blood on the ground where the second one jumped.”

  Jake muttered, “Okay,” then, as quietly as he could, “You’re out? Go back in.”

  “I’m okay here, I just came out to check. The runner was hurt.”

  “Get back in. I’m tracking him, he’s well south of you.”

  And getting farther south, Jake decided a minute later. Then: high ground. The other man was looking for a place to make a cell-phone call.

  He had to move. He slipped out of the makeshift blind, risked walking on the grass on the edge of the food plot, exposed, but too far from the second man to be seen, he thought. Still, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and some danger gland in his brain was shouting at him to get out of sight.

  He paused inside the tree line. Listened, heard just a bit of movement, still heading up. Found a game trail, worn leaves and slightly thinner brush where deer had cut across the slope. Passed an old buck-rub, made a mental note. Moved slowly, slowly, still-hunting.

  Stopped every six feet. Listened. When he heard nothing, he froze. When he heard movement, he moved. Five minutes into the stalk, he saw a tree limb shake; a little jiggle of new bright-green leaves, like a squirrel might make, but too low. Sixty yards out, two-thirds of the way to the top of the bluff.

  From experience, he knew that the other man would have to get nearly to the top before the cell phone would work. Jake watched until he saw another leaf-jiggle, and then moved, sideways, across the hill, until he found a seam in the trees. Not a trail, not a gully, but simply a seam, the result of random seeding . . .

  But it gave him a shooting lane.

  He eased down, put the scope on the last spot he’d seen movement, and glassed the area.

  He saw the first hard movement a minute later. Watched, watched . . . green, brown, black: camo.

  He fixed the scope on it, pulled the trigger.

  Goodman heard him coming. Couldn’t see him, but thought the footfalls were a man’s—the sky was too bright, and the sound wasn’t explosive enough to be a large animal. He was being stalked. He couldn’t pick out an exact direction; but there was only one. Had he been wrong about another man in the woods, in addition to whoever was in the cabin?

  He could feel that he was still losing blood, he was weakening. He had to do something.

  Moving slowly, he slipped the weapon off his shoulder, cocked it, clicked it onto full-auto. There was a downed branch a few feet away. He edged over to it, pulled off his camo hood, snagged it over the tip of the branch, and slowly pushed the branch out in front of him. Before moving again, he dug into the damp earth around him, rubbed it over his face to kill the face-shine. Then he moved along for ten feet, the branch out in front, pushing the camo mask, another ten, another ten, climbing higher and higher. He might possibly be able to make a phone call from where he was, but couldn’t risk turning the cell phone back on. If it rang, he was dead.

  He pushed the stick ahead a fourth time. A sudden crack, a slug plucked at the hood, the gunshot from the trees no more than thirty or forty yards to his right. He snapped his gun over, pulled the trigger, and hosed the trees with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter, shredding leaves and vines and bark and twigs and dirt.

  He flipped the mag out and slammed in another as he rolled away from his shooting position; another shot plucked at the ground behind him. Damnit, he’d missed. He fired three quick bursts and this time let himself roll back down the hill, scrambling, falling, turning, trying to control it as he let himself go, his gun pointed up the hill. He saw a flash of movement and fired another squirt, and then was scrambling right back to where he started.

  He was fucked, he thought. They had him.

  One last chance . . . He fired the last few rounds in a single burst into the trees where he’d seen the stalker, slammed his last magazine into the weapon, and burst out of the trees. He was weak, his eyes were going dark, but he only had to make it thirty yards to the shelter of the porch.

  If he kicked in the door he’d be face-on with the guy inside, maybe, maybe the guy would be surprised enough, after the fight up the hill, that he wouldn’t be ready. If he could get inside the cabin, if he could just get a break from the hunter, if he could barricade himself, if he could do something about his leg, if there was a hardwired phone inside that hadn’t been disabled.
r />   If . . .

  He ran.

  The burst of full-auto didn’t hit Jake, but it knocked him down. The slugs were shredding the landscape six feet away from him, uphill, then swung toward him, tearing up the tree branches overhead, and he was on his face, jacking a round into the rifle.

  Another burst behind him, not loud, more of a chattering sound: the weapon was silenced, it had looked like one of the Israeli commando jobs, meant for killing terrorists in a quiet way . . .

  Two more bursts, and then he registered the guy moving, snapped a shot at the movement, got another burst in reply, jacked another round, lay flat listening, realized that the movement was fast now, and farther away. He lifted his head just in time for another burst, thought, He’s heading for the cabin, pulled out the walkie-talkie and shouted, “He’s coming right at you, I think. He’s coming right at you . . .”

  Jake was on his feet now, listened for one second, heard the continuing thrashing below, and started running. Blood on the ground: the other man had been hit. He must be desperate, he was going for the cabin. Jake had to get clear of enough brush to take the shot, he’d have just one, if the man could still run, but getting clear would be a struggle . . .

  With the woods all around him, it would be possible to see the other man, but impossible to get a decent shot. He’d see him as flashes between trees, but as he swung the rifle barrel to track the target, he’d be as likely to hit a tree as anything else. He needed a shooting lane.

  But when Goodman broke out of the trees, running for the cabin, Jake was too far up the hill. He saw him, saw the movement, had no shot . . .

  Goodman was fifteen feet from the cabin when he saw the movement, then registered the face.

  Madison Bowe, wearing a flannel shirt. And in her hand . . .

  Madison dropped the walkie-talkie, picked up the twenty-gauge, and stepped out on the porch. She heard, rather than saw, Goodman break from the trees. She leveled the shotgun and let him come.

  Saw him then.

  And from fifteen feet, fired a single shot into his face, and he went down like a rag doll.

  Was stunned by the act. Stood, motionless for a moment, then said, “Oh, God,” to nobody.

  Jake got there a minute later, flailing along on his bad leg. He stopped next to Goodman, his rifle pointed at Goodman’s heart, probed him with a foot, but there was no point in probing: most of Goodman’s head was gone.

  Jake came up on the porch, his face almost as hard as hers.

  “What’d I tell you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “I told you to pull the trigger and to keep pulling it until the gun was empty. I don’t need any of that single-shot bullshit.” He glanced back at Goodman’s body, then stepped close to her, touched her forehead with his. “You did good.” He started to laugh, high on the rush: “You did so fuckin’ good.”

  They saw it differently, but to the cops, it probably would have been murder—hard to explain that first shot in the man’s back. Jake checked the body where it was still lying on the porch. He’d died instantly, hit in the spine and the heart. The slug had passed through his body, digging into a four-by-four upright next to a window. The bullet hole was smaller than his smallest fingernail, and looked like a routine defect in the wood.

  “What do I do?” Madison asked.

  “Pick up all the brass you can find—the shells thrown off by Goodman’s gun. I’ll point you at the spots, and there’s a blood trail going up the hill. You’ll need gloves to pick it up. Don’t touch it with your bare fingers.”

  He showed her where Goodman had climbed the hill. “I don’t think I can get it all,” she said. “It’s all scattered around, in the trees.”

  “Get what you can.”

  While she did that, he searched the two dead men, got car keys, put the bodies in two of the contractor cleanup bags, dragged them to his car, fitted them in the trunk. When they were out of sight, he got a bucket and soap and washed the blood off the porch. That done, he hosed down the places where Goodman had been hit and then had died, eliminating as much of the blood trail as he could find.

  Now would be a time for a good solid rain, he thought, looking up at the sky: and it was possible that he’d get it.

  Madison came back down the hill with a bag of brass and two magazines. Jake counted them: eighty-eight out of ninety shells accounted for, assuming that all three mags had been full.

  “Now what?”

  “Now’s the dangerous part,” he said. They had to move the bodies and the other car.

  “You’re not still going to Norfolk?” she cried. “You said we might be able to do something else. I mean, it’s crazy, Jake, if anything goes wrong . . .”

  “But it’ll work for us, it’s the only thing that’ll really work for us.”

  Madison was adamant, and so was Jake; they snarled at each other as they drove out to the car park. Goodman had been driving an SUV: they found it in the park, just where Jake had thought it would be. When they clicked the remote control at it, the taillights blinked.

  There were no other cars in the parking space, and Jake moved the bodies from his own car trunk, and threw the guns, the empty mags, and some of the clean empty shells in the back with them, then pulled one of the contractor’s bags over the driver’s seat.

  Madison was pleading with him. “Jake: don’t do this. It’s not necessary.”

  “It is,” he insisted. “Just stay on the other route. You’ll get there quicker than I will, because it’s shorter. I doubt that I’ll see a cop all day . . .”

  He did see cops, two of them. Neither one gave him a glance. He saw one near Farmville, and another near Franklin, both on back highways. He stopped only once on his way, to empty the bag of 9mm brass into a creek on a back road. The bag he threw out the window when he was sure there were no cops around.

  Norfolk is a complicated place, and not easy to get around. He took it slowly, ultracautious through traffic, and finally found a spot to dump the truck. He left it on a grimy industrial back street, in a collection of other trucks from a nearby light assembly plant.

  Before he left it, he took the plastic bag off the driver’s seat, stuffed it in his pocket, closed the truck’s doors, and locked them. Madison picked him up at a gas station six blocks away.

  “Still think it was foolish,” she said.

  “It’s not. We’ve given them a story. We’ve given them something they can work with. Darrell was involved in cleaning up the gangs down here, and there are stories about his interrogation techniques. Stories about bodies that went in the Atlantic. We gave them the payback story.”

  “What about the slug in the cabin?”

  Jake shrugged: “Means nothing. First of all, it’d be almost impossible to find. The hole is tiny and I rubbed it over. Neither guy has a slug in him, so there’s nothing to match. Goodman’s full of shotgun shot, but that’s not diagnostic. We’ll get rid of the rest of the shotgun shells, buy new ones of a different brand, clean the guns.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “I didn’t mean to get on you for driving to Norfolk, but I was pretty scared. I haven’t done this before.”

  “Neither have I. Not like this,” Jake said. “Are you pretty freaked out about the dead guys?”

  She shook her head. “No. They were killers and they were coming to kill us. As for the blood . . . I’ve got two hundred head of angus. They get butchered and sold for meat. Blood’s not a new thing if you raise farm animals.”

  They left Norfolk, headed back to Washington. Jake drove, fast now, seven miles over the speed limit, and after a while, she said, “Actually, we’re pretty good at this.”

  “It ain’t fuckin’ rocket science,” Jake said. “The only problem is the stakes. You make a mistake, you go to prison. Or worse.”

  “Even if Arlo Goodman knows what happened, what can he say about it?” Madison asked, building her confidence. “That he knows we did it, because he sent his brother to kill us?”

>   “And if they investigated, what could they prove? Nothing. On top of all that, there’s the credible alternate story: hoodlums did it, in Norfolk. I think we’re good.”

  She straightened herself in the passenger seat, pulled down the vanity mirror, and checked her face. They’d heard the stories about Howard Barber; television was waiting for her in Washington. “You’re gonna be hard to train,” she said.

  “My first wife said the same thing.”

  “She was right.” She pointed out the windshield. “Now shut up and drive for a while. I’ve got to think about what we might have missed.”

  Arlo Goodman sat at home and waited for his brother to call. He expected a call around seven o’clock in the morning, or maybe eight, depending on how long it took to get through the forest above Winter’s hideout. But Darrell had warned him that it might take longer, and it would be unwise to use cell phones from the site of a murder . . .

  Especially with the murder victim in bed with Madison Bowe, and Bowe so willing to make accusations.

  Darrell had also suggested that after they did Winter, and got him in a suitable hole, he might put George in with him. That’d take some extra work.

  At eight, with no call, Goodman still wasn’t too worried. He sat in his office and watched television, the breaking story on Howard Barber—the FBI was investigating the possibility that Barber had killed Lincoln Bowe, with Bowe’s own connivance, the anchors said, with convincing excitement. The media was camped outside Madison Bowe’s house, waiting for a statement.

  At ten o’clock, he was apprehensive.

  At a little after ten, he learned that Madison Bowe was not in her town house, although she’d been there at midnight the night before, and the first newsies had arrived by 5 A.M. Had she slipped out? they asked. Had she gone into seclusion? Where was Madison Bowe? The last person to be seen at her house was a man with a cane.