Keeping Watch

  “Went out the window. I called for reinforcements—he won’t get far.” Jerry seemed less interested in the failure of their trap than he was in Allen’s injuries. The only blood appeared to be from where Allen’s forehead had smacked into the edge of the sink, but his face was screwed up in pain. Jerry brushed his brother’s fumbling fingers aside and ripped open the buttons on the plaid shirt to peer at the Kevlar vest beneath. It had trapped two rounds: One would have gone through Allen’s stomach, the other his heart. Thank God for good aim, Allen thought, and had to firmly stifle the impulse to laugh. He reached for the vest straps, allowing Jerry to help him.

  “Everyone okay?” Allen asked. He could smell the sweat and the gunpowder on his brother, and it seemed to him that Jerry’s hands were almost as uncertain as his own.

  “Annie was nicked in the leg, she’ll be fine. Marty took one in the side, but it doesn’t look too bad. I don’t think O’Connell was hit, but the other guy, shit, he just wouldn’t stop shooting. I don’t know which one of us got him in the end. Christ,” he said, trying to make light of it. “My hands are shaking. I never had to shoot at anyone before.”

  “Must be Howard. If you hadn’t got him, we’d all be dead meat. He blew through here and shot me almost casually, like you’d kick a chair out of the way. Ow!”

  “Here, let me get that.”

  Gently, Jerry lifted the vest away from his brother’s body. He tossed it on the counter and eased up the army-green T-shirt Allen wore underneath it. The skin was angry, and it wouldn’t have surprised Jerry if he was right about the ribs. Jerry handed Allen an ice tray from the freezer.

  “Get some cold onto that,” he suggested. “You going to be okay for a while?”

  “Sure,” Allen assured him. Jerry left, to go upstairs and see to the injured. Allen put down the ice, retrieved the Glock from the sink, and took his waterproof jacket from its hook next to the door. Silently, he let himself out into the rain.

  Ten paces, and the rain forest took over. Another ten, and the sounds of voices and equipment became distant, muted. In less than a minute, Allen was all by himself in the green. Just him and a man with blue eyes.

  At first, the rain was an irritant. He kept feeling that if only someone would shut the damn hiss off for a minute, he could hear his quarry moving through the undergrowth. But then the instincts crept back in, and reminded him that acuteness of hearing was only necessary for the prey. Deer and rabbits had big ears; their hunters did not. And in this jungle, Allen would be the hunter.

  O’Connell had gone out the upstairs window and sprinted straight across the cleared space for the trees, shoving in among them at full speed, wanting only to put distance between himself and the guns that had so suddenly erupted from the corners of an apparently empty house. He’d spent time in the woods, hunting deer (and mock-hunting his son, Allen reminded himself grimly), but he’d never been a target himself, as far as Allen knew. That was about to change.

  Allen, following the man’s northbound trail, saw the point at which O’Connell’s mind clicked out of panic mode—far too soon for Allen’s taste, since it was easier to follow a man who wasn’t thinking clearly. Allen paused to shrug off his rustling jacket, and moved on through the wet, his eyes picking out the disturbed moss and the places where the fern fronds had shed their drops, his ears alert for any sound that wasn’t a steady pat and hiss, his nose—or was he imagining this?—following the expensive cologne that he’d smelled in the marble bathroom and on the silken bed covering. Glock against his thigh, Allen slipped through the gloom between the ferns and the moss-thick trees, a shadow in the green.

  Sudden motion at three o’clock: big, fast-moving—but two of them, and not men: elk. What startled them? Allen crouched a little more, setting aside the pain in his chest, trying to ignore the once-familiar chafe and bind of soaked clothing. The elk had been trotting off to the right, which meant O’Connell was dead ahead, maybe half a mile north.

  But going where? The man had paused briefly, a quarter of a mile back, his footprints pressing into the moss with the delay. When he’d resumed, his path had angled slightly to the east. But he hadn’t scuffed the ground with indecision, merely stood for a moment, then started up again.

  Shit, Allen thought abruptly; the bastard stopped to look at a compass. He’s making for his car.

  No time to waste. Allen started up again, but hadn’t gone a dozen paces before he halted; predator or not, he was making too much noise. He laid the gun on a log thick with moss, whipped his folding knife from his pocket, sliced through the sodden laces on his boots, and dropped the knife into his T-shirt pocket. He stepped out of the boots, did the same with his sodden jeans and socks, and went on, dressed in nothing but olive-green shorts and T-shirt.

  The freedom was extraordinary. His skin seemed to drink in the forest. Why hadn’t the Snakeman gone naked in the jungle? he wondered. Maybe he had.

  Allen could trot now on the soft forest floor, and he set a path curving out around to the left. He figured he had at least a mile or two before O’Connell reached his car, since the next road was that far away. Of course, if O’Connell was traveling on foot, he could set off due east, and Allen would be screwed. But he believed the man would have a car.

  Allen moved faster, dodging the trees, barely touching the thick growth, slipping through the green like a wild thing as his hair and clothing plastered against his body and his feet patted the mossy earth. Suddenly he stopped, his head coming up as if to taste the breeze. Somewhere, deep inside, a switch had been thrown, and its current began to wake an entire set of long-buried instincts. He knew where O’Connell was, he could feel him like the blip on an internal radar. The man was moving swiftly, though not as fast as Allen was, and his path would intersect the trajectory of Allen’s curve in less than ten minutes.

  Two minutes later, Allen became aware of O’Connell’s growing assurance, knew when the man paused to sweep his gaze over the woods behind him, felt the man’s glee that he had escaped and fury that Howard had not. The man’s thoughts touched on his son then, and the flare of his anger came across the forest like the heat from a fire.

  At five minutes the forest stopped abruptly and Allen was stumbling into an unnatural clear place, a confusing bare strip, harsh gravel digging into his bare feet: the access road. It ran arrow-straight to the west, disappearing around a corner a few hundred yards to Allen’s right. He stood in the center of the foreign thing, listening in his mind for O’Connell’s progress. He could run down this road and hope to reach the car before its owner did, or he could set up an ambush.

  The green was ready for him. Sometime earlier that year, the forest had given up a tree. Not a terribly large tree, and not so long ago that it had become a sodden and immovable mass along the edge of the road. Sparsely branched, with no root ball to speak of, it seemed set there for his purpose: perfect. He laid the Glock on the ground, and braced himself under the curve of its trunk.

  The weight of it was almost too much, particularly the first wrenching motions needed to loose it from the soil’s embrace. His ribs shrieked at him, his shoulder groaned, but the tree came, an inch and then a foot, and he staggered across the bruising rock surface with the dead branches wrapping his face, letting go only when his feet hit the softness again on the other side of the road.

  He retrieved the gun and sat against a tree trunk, hugging his ribs and whining with pain, trying not to pant any more than he had to. The dead tree now lying across the road was not big enough to block a determined driver, particularly in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but it would force him to slow to a crawl, and that was all Allen needed. After a minute he checked the gun, then sat with it sheltering under his bent-up legs. His thumb began to play with the safety: on and off, on and off.

  He felt (imagined? Did it matter which?) when O’Connell reached the car, knew the man’s surge of satisfaction when he found it undiscovered. Allen’s ears picked out the whine of its starter from the rain noises, and then
the thing was coming down the track. He got to his feet, taking up a position clear of the trees so he would have an open line of fire, and so O’Connell would see him. He dashed the hair and dead leaves from his face, and he waited.

  Had Mark O’Connell spent less time as hunter and more as prey, he might not have made the mistakes he did. Had he remained cautious once he gained the car, been capable of thinking of its two tons as a liability instead of weight to throw around, he would not have gone down the road at such a speed. He might have listened to the voice of the hunted, telling him that there was no safety in steel, that a man with a handgun could be equal to a heavily armed killer in a tank of an SUV, given the right circumstances. But he did not listen to any voice but the gloating tones of the habitual victor, and he came around the curve moving too fast to stop.

  The dead tree and its mud-covered guardian froze him for one crucial half second, allowing his arm to make a brief automatic jerk away from the standing wild man before he caught himself and yanked his juggernaut back toward Allen. But the moment of indecision cost the heavy car its momentum, and the wet soil under the gravel gave beneath its skidding tires.

  The big black vehicle with the smoked-glass windows crunched one wheel up onto the tree while its back passenger side slammed into one of the tree’s standing brothers, stunning the forest and sending buckets of collected raindrops splashing to the ground. The driver, however self-assured, had prudently fastened his belt and did not go through the windshield. Instead, he kicked open the front passenger-side door and dropped to the earth, protected now by all that steel. He edged his head over the hood; in his hand he carried a small automatic machine gun.

  But the naked maniac was no longer in front of his tree. O’Connell lifted the gun and sent a brief spray into its trunk, hoping to drive the man out from behind it, but there was no response. He went around the back of the car, his shoes slipping on the wet moss at the side of the road, but he could see nothing from there either.

  Allen was not behind the tree. When he’d seen the big car waver and come at him, he’d flung himself behind the moss-green trunk, but he had continued on, plunging deeper into the woods. He could no longer see the vehicle or its driver, but the shots told him all he needed to know: O’Connell was sticking with the car.

  Allen worked his way up the road until he reached the curve. Checking to be sure the roadway was clear, he trotted across, then turned back. O’Connell might expect him to try an approach from behind, but he couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t look in all directions at once. Gun down but ready, Allen let his feet choose their path between the trees. The hanging mosses brushed his shoulders, the ferns parted for his knees, and green surrounded him, the multiplicity of green that cloaked all his dreams.

  Thirty yards from the car, he stopped. The shift and murmur of the rain forest were unbroken, no sound of bird or beast. There had been no shots after that one brief burst, and although Allen was certain that O’Connell was still there, he couldn’t tell what the man was doing.

  Setting up an ambush of his own, Allen’s mind whispered. The man was after all a hunter. But he was the kind of hunter who valued results over challenge, who put out grain to lead the deer in. The car was the bait; O’Connell would wait within view of it.

  Of course, the only deadline in a deer hunt was the man’s wish to regain the comfort of his hearth before darkness fell. Here, both sides knew it wouldn’t be long before that houseful of guns followed the would-be assassin’s track. Both men knew that time was on Allen’s side. He moved with infinite caution across the forest floor, tasting the air, his instincts probing to find the other.

  O’Connell was, he finally decided, back inside the car, hiding behind the dark reflective windows of the SUV. He trusted his urban protection more than the wilds, and valued his comfort. The naked man with the gun was sure to come; he would be met by death. Except that Allen had no intention of sticking his head into that vehicle. He was happy to wait in the rain. O’Connell wouldn’t be able to stand it, not knowing. In a few minutes he’d begin to think he had imagined that mud-smeared, leaf-clotted creature pointing a shiny gun at him, think that maybe the tree’d just fallen there. Think that all he had to do was put the vehicle into low and set it to crawling over the trunk.

  Give the bastard ten minutes, Allen thought.

  It took seven. The black sides of the car shifted slightly. A dark shape ventured up close to the windows, disappeared again. Another shift, and Allen slid the Glock’s safety off. The shape of a body slithering over the seatbacks, keeping well down from the clearer glass of the front windows, settling into the driver’s seat. Allen prepared to sprint up to the side of the car.

  Then abruptly the silence was broken by a well-known voice, shouting, “Hold it right there!” and a lot happened fast. The ignition caught, the car jerked and died again as O’Connell snatched up the gun with one hand and held down the electric window control with the other, jamming the gun’s barrel into the gap and pulling the trigger. He’ll be completely deaf, Allen’s brain registered in passing, and then he was ripping open the front passenger door and pointing the Glock at the back of Jamie O’Connell’s father.

  “Put it down,” Allen told him. The man turned his head just enough to catch a glimpse of Allen’s weapon; O’Connell’s hold on the machine pistol loosed, its barrel tipped to the sky before it fell to the gravel. “Now, reach out the window and put both hands on top of the car.”

  Jerry’s head reappeared around the tree he’d dived behind, and he squinted, trying to make sense of the sight. He came out, moving cautiously and with his gun ready, approaching the car.

  “It’s me, Jer,” Allen called.

  Jerry’s pace picked up and he reached for the door handle. It took some wrenching to get it open, and then O’Connell was stepping out, two guns on him.

  He was a smaller man than he appeared in photographs or on Allen’s television screen, and his eyes were more intensely blue. The eyes glittered with fury, and with something else. Amusement, perhaps? Certainly with a strong conviction of his own superiority to these two hicks who had somehow managed to turn the tables on him. The man’s meandering gaze rested briefly on the badge clipped to Jerry’s shirt, then he dismissed both it and the man wearing it and turned to Allen, clad only in T-shirt, shorts, and mud. The corner of his mouth twitched in disdain, and he tipped his head to look into Allen’s face, holding his gaze. Now the smirk was unmistakable.

  “You must be the pervert who kidnapped my son,” he said to Allen. His voice was conversational. “I hope you got your pleasure out of the boy, because by the time I finish with you, you’re going to wish you’d been castrated at birth.”

  And then Jerry hit him; Jerry the staunch upholder of order, Jerry the paragon of self-control, Sheriff Carmichael, who had never once in all his career treated a prisoner with anything but firm good manners, succumbing to a rush of brutality at the brief phrase of a man he’d never met, never seen except on tape; he reached out with the flat of his gun and smacked O’Connell in the head.

  Then he looked down at his hand in surprise, as if it had nothing to do with the man on the ground. Even Jerry, Allen thought, and reached to tug the handcuffs from his brother’s belt.

  When the first wrist snapped on, O’Connell began to laugh through the blood on his face. Jerry gave a shudder. The murder died from his eyes, and only then did he holster his gun and reach for the radio.

  Chapter 35

  Jamie O’Connell sat on the hard bench and tried not to think. It would be so much easier if he could just go empty, turn into a brainless moron, become a smiling vegetable. Then maybe they’d all leave him alone. Let him go back to the Johnson farm and sit on the porch swing with Terry on his lap, talk to the chickens. Montana had been a dream, even though he’d seen Rachel and talked to Pete on the phone since then; it had been something he’d made up, like his arms had made up their memory of a wriggling Jack Russell terrier, like his feet had invented the feel
of a warm weight during the night.

  It was all so confusing. They all wanted something from him, and he didn’t know how to give it to them. The men in the suits wanted him to tell about his father, and Rachel wanted him to come back with her, and Allen . . . He didn’t know how to put what Allen wanted, he just knew it was the hardest thing of all. Because Allen wouldn’t say what it was, just, “Do what you think is right.”

  What you think is right. Shit—how could he know what was right? If even the grown-ups couldn’t agree what to do, how could he be expected to? Sometimes he just hated Allen. Just purely hated the big man with the hole in his arm that he didn’t even blame Jamie for, like he didn’t blame Jamie for fucking up his life, even though Jamie could see it there in his face, that kind of haunted look that Allen wore sometimes when the FBI was threatening to lock him up or something. Not that he’d ever tell Jamie just what it was that made him look haunted, but Jamie figured that was it. And it was Jamie’s fault, for dragging him into all this in the first place with that stupid deadboy email, instead of figuring out how to deal with his problems on his own. Jamie’s fault Allen got shot and Alice was in trouble and Howard was dead and that strange woman Rae looked so nervous and everything, but Allen just sat there and told him to do what was right. And he hated Allen when that happened, wanted to gouge his eyes out and take his old deer rifle and aim it right at the man’s chest and pull the trigger so he’d be gone and leave Jamie alone with Father like he belonged, just him and Father.

  But the strange thing was, even when he was most pissed off with Allen and just wanted Allen to LEAVE HIM ALONE, for some reason the endless conversations with the men in suits went more easily when Allen was there. Not that Allen stopped them from pushing at him, or that he helped Jamie figure out what to say. It was less definite than that. More like, when Allen was there, it was easier to breathe. It wasn’t that he’d tell Jamie when to breathe, or what to say with the air that came out; he was just there, and it was easier.