Bloodstained Kings

  Atwater vaguely waved his hand toward the window. Grimes drove his knee into Atwater’s crotch and shoved him onto his knees.

  “Gul,” said Grimes.

  Gul bared his teeth and gargled horribly an inch from Atwater’s wobbling eyes.

  “She’s not here!” screamed Atwater. “The hillbillies. The hillbillies. The Stone House.”

  “And Clarence Jefferson?”

  “Him too. Faroe too.”

  “We need a vehicle,” said Grimes.

  Atwater nodded, drooling and sobbing. Grimes dragged him to his feet and shoved him toward the door. Atwater stumbled, blood pouring over his shoe from his savaged ankle. Gul herded him against the wall. Grimes noticed the two big suitcases on the floor.

  Oates nodded toward them and said, “These the ones we’re hot for?”

  Grimes nodded. Oates stuck Atwater’s pistol into his belt and tossed the Remington toward Grimes. As Grimes caught it he sensed a movement in the corridor. Without having to decide he pulled the butt into his hip and pointed the shotgun at the doorway. When a man in combat fatigues sprang into view, Grimes squeezed the trigger and blew him backward into the corridor wall.

  As the man crumpled forward into the gush of his own innard workings, footsteps clattered down the corridor, running away. Oates pulled his automatic, checked the corridor, then bent down over the disemboweled figure. He came up with a second automatic.

  Grimes realized he’d just killed another man. He realized too that if it was supposed to trouble him, it didn’t. He racked another round into the shotgun. It felt good. He looked at Atwater.

  “The car,” said Grimes.

  Atwater limped toward the door and past the dead man. With Gul and Ella, Grimes followed him down the corridor, away from the entrance hall. At the end Atwater peered around the corner.

  “It’s clear,” he said.

  Grimes rammed him forward with the shotgun butt. There were no gunshots.

  “The others, how many?” said Grimes.

  “I don’t know,” wheezed Atwater. “Nobody tells me a goddamn thing.”

  Ella said, “Where’s Titus?”

  Grimes looked back toward the study. Oates emerged, carrying the two suitcases as if they were plastic bags crammed with Twinkies.

  “Then, if they fight you, slay them,” said Oates, and laughed.

  Hastily, Rufus Atwater took them through a huge kitchen and a laundry room to a side exit toward the rear of the building. Grimes opened the door quietly. Outside stood a dark blue panel van, a Dodge Tradesman. To the rear of the driver’s seat was a sliding door, closed. Grimes hauled Atwater to the threshold and took him by the throat.

  “Open the van,” said Grimes. “If you yell, you’re dog food.”

  Atwater nodded.

  “Gul,” said Grimes. “Go look.”

  As Gul slid outside, Grimes shoved the prosecutor after him. Atwater hobbled forward in agony and fell against the van for support, biting his lips. Grimes watched Gul rove back and forth. It seemed safe. Atwater slid the side of the van open. It was empty. Grimes turned to Ella. She looked like she was holding up at least as well as he was, maybe better.

  Ella said, “Let me drive.”

  Grimes nodded and crossed to the van. There were no seats in the back and no windows except for one in the single rear door, which looked like it opened upward. Grimes pushed Atwater inside and Oates loaded the suitcases. Ella got behind the wheel. Grimes returned the shotgun to Oates and got in beside Ella. Oates setded himself on one knee to the side of the open door.

  “Gul,” said Oates.

  Gul jumped in the back and sat staring at Rufus Atwater from close range. Atwater stared down at his own belt buckle and sucked on his lips. Ella switched on the engine. They pulled away.

  As they drove around the edge of the mansion and onto the gravel esplanade the van’s right-hand wheels were lifted from the ground by the concussion wave of an explosion. Grimes ducked his head as the window next to his face cracked with a loud bang but didn’t shatter. More debris pelted the windshield, dented the body work, ricocheted through the open side door. Ella swerved left, bounced over a curb onto the lawn, got control. Grimes wound down the cracked window and looked back.

  The grand Palladian facade of Arcadia was a mass of oily fire. Black and orange flames scoured and defaced the perfect white stonework and flared away into the darkness above. Heaped around the burning rage of the cargo plane’s shell were the shattered remnants of the splendid portico: its slender columns and proud entablature were now a mass of broken masonry and smoking timbers.

  Oates said, “Reckon this is as close as I’ll ever come to a broken heart.”

  Grimes turned. Titus Oates knelt in the door watching the self-immolation of his plane. He looked at Grimes.

  “At least your pa got the send-off he deserved.”

  “Yeah,” said Grimes. “I guess he wouldn’t complain.”

  Watching the inferno consume Arcadia, Grimes remembered what George had said about the Faroes: a line that deserved to end. But they weren’t finished yet.

  Ella skirted one shorn wing of the plane where it lay on the lawn and pulled the van back onto the driveway. She picked up speed toward the tunnel of trees.

  “Here they come,” said Oates.

  Grimes swiveled his head. From the opposite side of the burning mansion a four-door sedan came skidding through the gravel and straight toward them across the west lawn. Its windows were down and Grimes could see arms holding pistols, and a pair of rifle barrels, sticking out. There was a muzzle flash and a futile crackle of automatic fire. Then Ella plunged the Dodge beneath the trees and the pursuit car disappeared from view. Grimes turned back to face the windshield. The road hurded beneath them in the headlights. Wide black trunks, hanging ghosts of Spanish moss. Grimes thought: the gate. The wrought-iron gate.

  “Ella,” said Grimes. “When these trees end you’ll find about a hundred yards of clear road and then a gate.”

  “What kind of gate?”

  “Double wrought-iron gates, twelve feet high, set into a wall. They’ll probably be locked.”

  Ella reached for her seat belt. Grimes followed suit.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “Titus?” said Grimes.

  “Ram them. Not too slow, not too fast. Thirty miles an hour,” said Oates. “Aim just off-center.”

  “Okay,” said Ella.

  “Gul,” called Grimes.

  Gul clambered forward and Grimes held him tight on his lap. He heard the zing of bullets. The van was untouched.

  “Amateurs,” sneered Oates. He looked at Rufus Atwater, pushed his beard into his face, and roared at him: “Amateurs!”

  Atwater covered his bleeding face with both hands. Oates rummaged through Atwater’s pockets and produced two spare bullet clips, then grabbed him by the hair and threw him flat on the floor behind the backs of the front seats. Oates sandwiched the prosecutor against the seats with the two suitcases, then sat against them and wedged himself cross ways between the van walls.

  In the side mirror Grimes saw, in the distant pitch-dark, the lights of the pursuit car. He looked at Ella’s face. The tendons of her neck were strung tight and her lips were a clenched line. Her eyes were fixed ahead and totally focused. There was nothing Grimes could say: she was in control. The live oaks lining the road suddenly thinned and disappeared. The road cleared. He looked at the speedometer: the needle was dropping toward thirty. Through the windshield the road curved and at the limit of their beams the headlights swept across a section of red-brick wall. In what seemed like an instant the tall gates loomed ahead. Grimes clamped Gul with his thighs and grabbed two handfuls of his fur.

  “Hold on!” shouted Ella.

  Grimes’s vision turned black and he felt himself kicked in the chest. A shower of glass lashed his face. His head cleared. They had stopped dead. Gul squirmed in his arms. Grimes opened his eyes. Inches from his face the wrought-iron bars of the gate
slanted down from above the cabin roof and down across the hood of the van. They were jammed: the lower hinge of the right-hand gate had been smashed free but the upper had held firm. He looked at Ella: she was already gunning the engine back to life. She slammed into reverse. The van creaked and squealed backward.

  “No. Everybody out!” bellowed Oates. “Out. Clear the wagon.”

  Grimes threw his door open and Gul leapt away. The van stopped. As Grimes ripped off his belt he saw Ella slipping out of the driver’s side. Grimes tumbled clear. His knee gave way; he fell. Gunshots were singing from the bricks behind him. He was dazzled by lights. He dived off the road and into the grass, out of the dazzle. He rolled, stopped on his back, dragged the gun from his belt, flipped onto his belly and lay prone.

  Twenty yards away the pursuit car slowed amid the wild flashes of its own gunfire. Bullets started slamming into the van. Grimes couldn’t see anyone to shoot at. Where was Titus? Through the van’s open side Grimes saw Oates’s boots, toes splayed down to the floor, soles pointing toward the driver’s seat. His body was obscured. Grimes thought: He’s dead. An urge to charge the pursuit car seized him. No. He aimed his Colt and waited. Close range.

  As the pursuit car came to a halt the single rear door of the van sprang upward and emitted a rapid fusillade of shotgun blasts punctuated by the meaty clack of the racking slide.

  Before Grimes’s eyes the pursuit car turned into a writhing slaughter chamber of exploding glass, punctured limbs and screaming faces. The shotgun fell silent. A voice boomed from the van.

  “Hold your positions”

  The van rocked and Titus Oates jumped from the back, an automatic clamped in either fist. He held the guns out at strange angles, like a huge, drum-chested praying mantis, stepped clear of the headlight beams and walked briskly up to the buckshot-sieved sedan. He poked one of his arms into the reeking interior. There were four irregularly spaced shots. Grimes stood up. He found Gul standing beside him.

  “Ella!” called Grimes.

  A door slammed.

  “Here.”

  Ella was already back in the driver’s seat of the Dodge. She reversed further back from the tangled gates.

  Oates called, “Wait.”

  Grimes walked over and joined him at the rear of the van. Oates reached in and picked up the shotgun. From his pocket he pulled the deer slug. As he shoved it into the magazine Grimes glanced back at the riddled pursuit car. Wisps of gunsmoke drifted from the open windows and curled through the lights. Oates caught the glance.

  “Nothing you can do for ‘em, Doc.”

  Oates smiled and racked the deer slug into the chamber. He jerked his head toward the gates and Grimes followed him. From a few inches’ distance Oates aimed the muzzle at the upper hinge of the gate where it was mortared into the bricks. He fired and blew the hinge from its moorings. The gates, still fastened together in the center, sagged and wavered uncertainly. Grimes and Oates dragged them aside. They piled back into the Tradesman. Behind the suitcases Grimes heard Rufus At-water snuffling quietly. Ella drove out through the gates and onto the road.

  Titus Oates’s head appeared over Grimes’s shoulder.

  “I just thought I’d tell you that this is one of the few world-class women of her generation, or any goddamn other. The last time I saw driving that cold was Colorado Springs back in ‘eighty-six.”

  “What happened in Colorado Springs?” asked Ella.

  “For an objective account you’d have to dig out the newspapers.”

  Ella looked at Grimes.

  She said, “Where’s the Stone House?”

  “Go straight, I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  They all fell silent for a while and Grimes stared through his window. They drove across the flat and moonlit plantation, through acres of silver marsh grass that waltzed and whispered in the wind. And the whispering dance was eerily serene, as if the tall blades of grass were moving to a melody chanted by the land that said, “All this too will pass.” Then Grimes heard something else.

  “Listen,” he said.

  Across the great flatness he could hear the thump of an approaching helicopter.

  Oates said, “Hey, man. No one mentioned a Sikorsky to me.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  DESPITE HIMSELF. At all costs. Beating, beating. The blows fell softly now.

  A fluttering—no more than that—at the outer perimeter of knowing.

  If the blows carried with them some charge of pain he had slipped beyond its appreciation. At this, the final extremity of continuum, he felt the ecstasy of supreme definition. Here—amidst the deliriac celebration of the death of God, the death of death, the dissolution of in-teriority—the psychobiological torment of ages was metamorphosed into a gaping breach between the one which was one and the other which was all sensate things. And in that breach he danced, with neither witnesses nor partner to share his heady wine, his light and wheeling steps, his dissolute grace. He was sanded to a shadow’s ghost, denuded to an impersonal resonation, but a fingernail’s scraping from zero.

  Despite himself.

  At all costs.

  Oh yes.

  He had brushed his cheek against that greater-than-himself; that greater-than-he-was despite himself; that whatever-it-might-be which at all costs must not be; that moment toward which he had striven with all his might, and which at the same time he had fought with all his power to repel.

  Miracle.

  Dissolution.

  Extremity.

  Joy.

  The homes we never write to and the oaths we never keep.

  Beating, beating, beating.

  He stirred amid the shit of pigs. He could no longer smell his own rotting. He missed it. The beating was against his head; no, against the tiny bones and stretched-taut drumskins of his ears. It was sound that bounced on his sensorium, not rifle butts and feet.

  He thought: The machine that hovers goes aloft.

  The Captain opened his eyes. Swollen slits peered into obscurity. The slithering tiles of a pigpen. The mooch and grunt of fine fat hogs with bristles smooth and dappled hides. The Captain smiled. Was this the best they could do? This faint dribbling of concern too anemic to qualify as fear? Did they think that hogs might erase him from the uncharted wilderness of time? No. The Captain’s ripening meat was too tainted by far for the delicate palates of these good beasts. Beauty, laughter and filth claimed no liens on trembling reason, try as it might to throw its net over them. It was in surrender that the supremacy of evil lay. He would not bow before this servile cosmos, still less its scuttling slaves. He would slake himself on their rending. Let the plenti-tude of horror and that of bliss be one. Let the irreducible collision be commenced. An uncontainable force of eruption cracked wide the fissures of his stasis.

  The Captain, clanking, lumbered to his feet.

  Constriction.

  Through slits he saw a silvery chain, slim-linked but strongly mettled. A fence of wood. A stretched steel triangle: ankle, cross-spar, wrist. He raised his stump and sundered the cross-spar in one. He shuffled forward. The slithering tiles gave way to gravel, softly shifting, then concrete, then plank. He opened a door onto brightness and a fast-turned face, lips gaping in surprise. The lips embraced his resined stump and shed their small white bones. His left hand filled with hair. His blunted right rammed home once more, between the mewling gums, and down. And down. Feeble claws at his chest. And down. The shunting clack of a dislocating jaw. Another inch, one more. The stump-clogged throat gave up its spasmic heaving and was done. He probed among the rags. A key. A key then dropped, then found and housed and twisted and clicked. The slim-linked shackle trailed upon the floor. He took a knife, its butcher’s blade half-whetstone-scraped away. He touched it to his tongue; the tasty sting of well-keened edge. Into my pocket, beauty. A gun? He scorned it. They think him mad?

  Then let them.

  For the Captain knows them all.

  And despite himself ana at all costs, the midnight campo cal
ls him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ELLA switched off the van’s lights and squinted through the frame of the shattered windshield. A bunch of drifting clouds were cutting across the moon. To either side of the blacktop were the darker gashes of deep flood ditches and she was afraid of running into one. The sound of the helicopter was closing in. She briefly dropped her hand to her belly: the Smith & Wesson was there, loaded, tucked into the waist of her leggings. She looked at Grimes.

  “We’ve got to bring the chopper down,” said Grimes.

  “Can’t be done, Doc,” replied Oates. “Not with the ordnance we got.”

  Grimes told her, “At the next crossroads hang a left.”

  Ella nodded. Grimes climbed over the back of his seat and into the rear. He spoke to Rufus Atwater. Ella half turned her head so she could hear.

  “Listen, Rufus,” said Grimes, with surprising kindness. “I’ve got my reasons for being here and so have you. Right?”

  A pause.

  “Answer the doctor,” snarled Titus Oates.

  “Right,” stuttered Atwater. “Right.”

  “But do you know why Mr. Oates is here?” asked Grimes.

  “No, sir,” said Atwater.

  Ella decided she didn’t know either.

  “Tell him, Titus.”

  “Because,” said Oates, “in this country we have the right to keep and bear arms. And that means that to prove that point we can kill any assistant fucking prosecutor we fucking want. And you know something else? That’s why the rest of the world is afraid of North America. Are you afraid, Mr. Prosecutor?”

  Oates paused and Ella glanced over her shoulder. Atwater was actually crying, silently, with bewilderment and fear.

  “Okay, Rufus,” said Grimes. “Now, I want you to do exactly what Mr. Oates tells you to. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ella jumped as the first burst of gunfire came from above. The bullets kicked into the road ahead, then battered and ratded into the hood of the van and the roof above her head. She ducked. The battering stopped. Grimes was still talking in back but she couldn’t concentrate on his words. The crossroads were on her. She jabbed at the brake pedal and spun the wheel. The road in front of her tilted. She dialed the wheel back. The van righted itself and she stamped on the gas. For a moment the sound of rotor blades diminished as the chopper overshot the turn. She glanced sideways: out above the fields the chopper swooped and wheeled into a wide turn. Grimes’s head appeared at her shoulder.