“Okay. James Blackstone. Homeland Security. Springfield, Missouri.”
“Thank you, sir. One moment.” After about a hundred moments he came back. “Sir, the operator says that party is deceased.”
A sign said one mile to the ferry.
“Call them back and ask them if they want to know how he died.”
“Sir, I am not allowed to elicit or transmit information to or from a third party. And it is not yet eight o’clock in the morning in the state of Missouri.”
“I’m calling from the state of Maine. Listen to me. It’s a murder. James Blackstone was killed.”
“Yes, sir.” The phone went dead. Perhaps life is cheap in New Delhi.
No, it was probably the battery. The light on the top of the phone had stopped blinking yellow; it turned red and dimmed.
I went over a hill and there was the sea, or at least the bay. I parked the boy’s car by the ferry office and put the key under the mat. Kept the cell phone. Maybe if I didn’t use it, the battery would come back for one bleat.
The ferry was approaching. I bought a twenty-dollar ticket and watched the heavy craft ease into its berth, escorted by a cloud of seagulls. Did they think it was a fishing boat? Maybe there was nothing else for a bird to do.
The weather was about to change, and not for the better. A band of golden light to the east was fading as charcoal clouds boiled in from the west. I went back into the ticket office and bought a two-dollar plastic slicker from a box by the cash register.
The first drops began to fall as I walked down the ramp to the Captain Henry Lee, which smelled of new paint and old fish.
There was an enclosed waiting room that added the smell of diesel exhaust and a whiff from the head. I stood outside after a couple of minutes and enjoyed the rain after I struggled into the slicker.
That would make a fast draw even more problematical. Would you mind putting that gun away while I untangle mine?
This would be one time in my life, however much of it was left, when I could justify smoking a cigarette. Looking for a machine gave me something to do for a few minutes. But the boat was disgustingly healthy in that regard. I was sure that I could bum one off some old Mainer standing in the rain puffing away, but he must have had an oncology appointment.
Would the Enemy be waiting for me? Could be. They had shown me the picture of Kit, but would they suspect that I could deduce from that where they were?
It was placid and pretty, the light rain sprinkling down on the green islands that bulked out of the mist. Then a sudden stab of lightning and thunder blast, just to keep me from getting too relaxed.
The ferry backed and filled into its place at the dock, and I followed the one car out onto the road that sloped up into the woods. No passengers waiting, which I supposed was good.
I checked the map. Go to the left and walk about a mile and a half down Ring Road. The cabin was at the end of the fourth dirt driveway.
The rain made a constant rattle on the plastic as I walked along. Feeling conspicuous as a bug on a plate.
But none of the cabins were visible from the road. And the bad guys wouldn’t be looking for me yet, I hoped.
They might be. Presumably they knew I’d made it to Washington, but wasn’t in the hotel room. Maybe they’d figured out that I could turn the signal generator in my hand on and off. They probably had seen the sling by now, and might deduce that it was hiding something.
They knew I was armed, assuming the guy with the camera in the cowfield had been one of them. That might not be an advantage; not if it made them nervous.
With the revolver in its holster, there was nothing I really needed in the Amtrak bag. Two candy bars that I transferred to jacket pockets. The Heinlein book and a litter of receipts. All tax-deductible if I wrote it into a book.
A lot of good books had been written in prison; I could become the Camus of my generation. If I could learn to like cheap red wine and boys.
I decided Heinlein could wait, and stuffed the bag with his book into an RFD box, which surely broke another federal law. Perhaps they would put me in a cell with other hardened postal offenders.
The house before the turn-off looked deserted, storm shutters over the windows and no cars. So I walked down the dirt road as if I belonged, and passed behind the house to the rocky beach. The rain started coming down in buckets, for which I should have been grateful. Surely they couldn’t expect anyone to come sneaking up through this weather.
Unless they actually were experienced criminals, with criminal minds. I’ve had two bikes stolen in my life, both of them in weather like this. Criminals assuming that nice people would not go out into the driving rain.
I struggled to keep my footing on the slippery rocks. Slick seaweed brought me down twice, hard enough the second time to cut my knee.
The leg stiffened up. I studied the terrain and picked my way carefully but clumsily from rock to rock. Clattering.
I had almost made it to the grass when a yellow light gleamed. The cabin’s back door.
A man came out with a rifle or shotgun. I stumbled the last few yards with my hands up.
He waited for me, the weapon pointed in my general direction. It was a large double-barreled shotgun. So if I untangled myself and drew on him, he would only have two tries to blow me in half. And then reload.
He yelled over his shoulder, “It’s the guy!” A woman came running out, pulling on a raincoat. She and the man approached me together.
“Watch out,” she said. “He’s got to have a gun.” So much for surprise.
“It is him, ain’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. To me: “Out for a walk?”
I shrugged, an odd gesture with your hands up. She frisked me and took the pistol. “Nice holster,” she said, and wagged the pistol in the direction of the cottage.
I recognized her voice from the phone. The man had been the driver of the car in the cowfield, I thought.
They walked me up a gravel path to the back door, and then through a rustic kitchen. “Company coming,” she called out.
It was the living room in the photograph. Kit was bound in the same chair, but was wearing different clothes, jeans and a man’s work shirt. She didn’t seem harmed, but had a bandana tight over her mouth. I tried to smile and she tried to smile back.
Seated next to her on a couch, similarly bound, was Ron Duquest, wearing a white silk suit, all California. It had probably looked pretty sharp a couple of days ago. He was pale and shaken.
Standing by the fireplace, the man who’d had the camera in the car. Whom I had last seen over the sights of the snub-nosed revolver. He had a broad grin and a Glock in an army-issue shoulder holster. He looked drunk.
“The writer,” he said. “Marksman.” I couldn’t think of anything to say that might improve the situation, so just nodded.
I catalogued the weapons. Shotgun and pistol, mine, behind me, and who knew what else. Another handgun in front of me and, leaning up against the fireplace, a pump shotgun. On the coffee table, the sniper rifle with the fancy grain, with the futuristic Leupold flip-out scope.
Perhaps with a bullet still jamming the barrel.
They had more weapons than people. Pretty grim. The woman nudged me in the small of the back with my own snub-nose.
“There are too many variables in this equation,” she said. “You know what I say.”
“Kill ’em and dump the bodies,” said the man next to her, and looked at his shotgun. “That may be good for you, but I personally have never killed anybody. I don’t want to hang for your scheme.”
“There’s no death penalty in Maine, chickenshit,” said the man by the fireplace. “Remember?” He picked up the sniper rifle.
“Careful,” the woman said.
“You be careful,” he said. “This asshole never shot at you.” He cocked the bolt u
p and down and took aim. “Just nick the ear.”
My only chance. “Big man,” I said. “You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”
“No!” she said, and then a wave of concussion smacked me.
The man’s face became a splash of crimson as the jammed receiver exploded just below his eye.
I half turned and kicked out at the woman. If the snub-nose went off, I didn’t hear it. My kick caught her between the legs and she folded—and then my bad leg gave out and dropped me on top of her. The pistol skittered away and I snatched it up. The double-barreled shotgun went off like a sledgehammer, searing the side of my face, as I fired the snub-nose into its owner over and over.
I levered myself up, pulling on the arm of the couch, and aimed wildly left and right, not sure whether the revolver had any shots left. The air was grey with gun smoke and there was a lot of blood.
Some of it was mine. It dripped off my chin when I looked down.
The woman was very dead. The double blast that had singed me had excavated her chest.
The man who’d done it was bent double on the floor, twitching, clutching his abdomen, the emptied shotgun under him. I put the muzzle of the revolver behind his ear and happened to look up.
Kit was shaking her head frantically, weeping, no.
A strange calmness came over me.
She would never understand.
The dead people, this dying one, and me. All of us were Hunter. And all of us were prey.
I set the pistol down and watched him die.
Epilogue
I had gone into the kitchen to find a knife to cut Kit’s ropes when I heard a helicopter laboring through the storm outside. I had her hands free and was working on the tight-knotted bandana gag when someone kicked open the front door and four men charged in, wearing black body armor with “FBI” in white letters, front and back.
I put my hands up. “What took you?” I think I said.
In fact, it was amazing that they had gotten there so fast, or at all. Reconstructing, I found out it started with fast action on the part of that annoying operator in New Delhi. He was on the line long enough to hear me say I was in Maine and “It’s a murder. James Blackstone was killed.” That operator queried a stateside operator, playing back the recording, and within a minute or two an FBI analyst was listening to it. Agent Blackstone’s name was still hot enough to trigger a response.
A helicopter with a SWAT squad took off from Boston while FBI computers chased my credit card trail down to the Swan’s Island ferry. The black helicopter was already over Cape May, speeding north by northeast, when the FBI verified the location of the cabin and sent them a satellite photo and a map.
I have to wonder, as fast as they responded, what might have happened if they’d showed up a few minutes earlier. What would the bad guys have done if they’d heard a helicopter coming? It might have prevented a bloodbath. Or precipitated a different one.
The whole bizarre story came out in Ron Duquest’s trial. I had just missed my big chance at fame and fortune.
Duquest had concocted a scheme for a kind of cross between an action feature and reality TV. He hired a couple of lowlifes in Los Angeles and had them drive out to the Midwest, then Louisiana, then Mississippi, to put Kit and me through what he conceived as a fantastic paranoiac chase scene: Who is after us? Why does the sniper weapon from my past keep cropping up? Who’s on first? It would be a post-postmodern version of classic old television serials like The Fugitive and Lost, with the delicious variation that the star didn’t know he was on camera.
He testified that he knew me well enough to trust that I wouldn’t commit any serious crime, and the men he hired were under orders to just harass us; not break any laws themselves. But that all went out the window when I actually shot at them.
They had guns, too, it turned out, and an attitude problem that escalated into a runaway kidnapping scheme. Duquest lost control of them and was afraid to call in the police.
I’ve told the rest of the story here. Except for the happy ending.
The slight scar on my cheek from the shotgun just makes me look “interesting,” Kit says, and together with the missing finger they mark the beginning and end of my decade of violence.
This decade will be parenting, we just found out last week. Starting lives rather than ending them.
We’re even getting married, continuing a family tradition that started with old Grand-dude, back in the sixties: pregnancy, then marriage.
When the other hippies asked why they bothered, he said that one thing the world didn’t need was yet another bastard.
Oh, and the cube in my finger? Nothing to do with anything. The army won’t even tell me what it was. That probably means it never worked. Typical. All that aluminum foil wasted—and I’d been so proud of myself. Our tax dollars at work.
Joe Haldeman, Work Done for Hire
(Series: # )
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