Blowout (28 page)

A tremendous gust of wind shook the mangled fuselage, and already snow was beginning to drift up against the side of the chopper. Egan ducked under the tail section, and made a three-sixty visual scan, but nothing was out there that he could see, though a herd of buffalo could be standing right there ten yards out and they'd be invisible.

He turned and looked back the way he had come, but from here he couldn't see the Caddy, and could barely make out his own footprints in the snow. He began to panic a little. Sure as hell he wasn't going to get his ass lost out here in the Badlands and freeze to death. He'd made his contract, he had money coming, and this time he figured he might just go someplace warm.

But first he had to make tracks. No more screwing around.

Lowering his PDW, he walked around the front of the wreck and headed as fast as he could back to the Caddy. She was a damned big machine, four-wheel drive, chains on all four tires; it was enough he figured to get him at least to Belfield, and from there he would blend; evade and escape, change appearances, be one with his environment, let 'em see what they expected to see, and just where they expected it.

 

43

BLOOD OOZED FROM
a gash in the side of Osborne's head, a couple of his ribs were broken, and he wanted to fade out, just lie back in the snowdrift five yards from the downed chopper where he'd scrambled in case of an explosion or fire. But the worst part was the titanium prosthesis on his left leg. It had jammed under the control panel when they'd crashed, and it was bent and his stump was damaged. He could feel blood running down the side of his leg.

The man in the dark jacket had ducked under the chopper's tail, and stopped for a moment to look directly at him, but by the time Osborne had managed to pull out his pistol the man had disappeared in the blowing snow.

Osborne raised his gun anyway and started to pull off a shot, but stopped. Ashley was out there somewhere. Or at least he hoped she was, and he didn't want to shoot blind and take the risk of hitting her.

For a full minute, what seemed like an hour while at the same time just an eyeblink, Osborne lay propped up on one elbow, his pistol cocked, his aim wavering in the general direction the man had gone.

Finally he safetied it, stuffed it in the holster on his right hip, and reached for his cell phone in his jacket pocket. But it was gone. Somewhere in the wreck, or in the snow. He tried to make his head work. If he laid here he would freeze to death, and unless the son of a bitch who'd shot them down still had Ashley in the Caddy she was out here, too. He didn't want to think that the man had already killed her, although that would have been the logical thing to do.

He got up on his good knee, and trailing his bad leg, pushed himself upright with every ounce of strength he had left. His head spun and he stood, hunched into the stiff wind, his stomach heaving, his ribs on fire each time he took even a shallow breath.

Afghanistan wasn't so far away, and he remembered just then the pain mostly blocked out by adrenaline, and he stumbled the few yards to the helicopter and looked in at Tommy's mangled body. He was going to have to face Eunice at some point. Tell her why it had been necessary to call Tommy out on a night like this. Writing letters to the families of his soldiers had been the most difficult job he'd ever had, and facing Tommy's wife was going to be worse.

He worked his way to the chopper's nose, and hesitated for just a moment before he headed out in the direction he thought they'd seen the Caddy. Each time he put weight on his left leg the pain of metal grating on bare bone was nearly impossible to bear, but he put it out of his mind. Nobody died because of a hurt stump.

The wind and fiercely blowing snow was pushing him to the left, he knew this intellectually, yet it was easier to simply go with the flow, and in about fifteen minutes he topped a small sharp rise and was on the flat surface of the gravel road.

Maybe fifty yards or more, he figured, from where the Caddy had been parked. He started to draw his pistol again as he turned to the east, the wind at his back when he heard something. A woman, shouting or crying, and he turned back, his heart soaring, his ear cocked.

But there was only the wind. Numbing, shrieking, a presence impossible to ignore as was his fading strength.

He took a step back and he heard the cry again. Impossible to pinpoint exactly where, except that it was into the wind and not very far.

About fifteen or twenty yards he stumbled across a body, its legs on the road, its head and much of its torso already half buried in the blowing snow. It wasn't the guy who'd come down to the chopper, but in any case it didn't matter now.

A woman shouted his name, off to the right, and it was Ashley, he knew it for certain, and he hobbled down the road and then off into the higher drifts until he saw her spread-eagled up against the fence, her parka open in front, her chest and face and hair covered in snow.

“Nate,” she cried weakly when he got to her.

The ties that held her wrists and ankles to the fence were frozen solid. Osborne holstered his pistol and sawed through them with a pocketknife.

“I'm so cold,” she cried softly, and he held her close, trying to give her some of his body warmth.

After a couple of minutes he managed to zip up her parka, scoop the snow out of the inside of the hood, and from her hair and face, and pull the hood over her head.

“What took you so long?” she asked, managing a little smile.

“A little detour,” he said. “Can you walk? We have to make it to the gate, maybe two miles.”

“I'll try,” she said, but she was nearly out of it, and after only one stumbling step her legs collapsed from under her. “Oops,” she said. “Must have been the last wine.”

Carrying her that far was going to be next to impossible, but he sure as hell wasn't going to leave her. She'd never survive.

Something nudged Osborne in the back, and he shoved Ashley to the ground to shield her as he spun around and pulled out his pistol. The bastard had come back after all.

For a long beat, he had a hard time accepting what he was seeing. But it was a horse, saddled, its reins dangling from the bit. Maybe whoever was lying dead beside the road had ridden here on the horse, but the only place he could think of was the Roundup Lodge, which was fifteen miles to the south.

Didn't matter. Osborne took up the reins, gentling the horse with a few soft words, and he picked Ashley's nearly inert form from the ground and awkwardly put her up in the saddle, his bad leg nearly giving way.

The horse was shivering, and it looked as if it were nearly on the point of collapse. The animal might carry Ashley, but not both of them. The situation was what it was. Osborne shrugged and leading the horse by the reins he limped back to the road's surface, and started to the west toward the main gate, not at all sure it was possible for him to make it that far.

Ashley said something, and he turned back to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She raised her head from the horse's neck and looked at him. “You're here,” she said.

“I'll always be here,” Osborne told her. “Now shut up, we're going for a little ride.”

“Okay, Nate,” she said, and she lay forward again on the horse's mane, in and out of consciousness.

One step at a time, Osborne told himself. If he could make one step, he could make the second. Just a matter of will, and he was back in Afghanistan waiting for the attack to come.

 

A Ranch House
Belfield, North Dakota

BARRY EGAN SLEPT
until three in the afternoon, the fierce winds that had buffeted the farmhouse through the morning hours not letting up until early afternoon. And it was the relative silence that finally roused him from a dream in which he was a worker in a meatpacking plant. Except that the gutted carcasses hanging from their ankles on the processing line were not cattle or pigs. They were humans, and working all alone in the vast abattoir he sang and hummed some tune he couldn't recognize. He was a man happy in his job.

And waking, completely refreshed, he knew that his work was far from over; in fact he'd just begun.

The ranch was a couple of miles west of U.S. 85, and he'd stumbled on the dirt track just off Thirty-seventh Street SW, recognizing it as just the sort of a place he was looking for, the nearest neighbor a mile or so away.

Pure blind luck that came only to the righteous of heart and purpose.

He padded nude into the bathroom to relieve himself, glancing with only mild interest at the old man and woman whose throats he'd slit after he'd roused them out of bed and herded them into the shower.

This morning after he'd killed them, he'd made his way through the snowstorm twenty-five yards to the bunkhouse where two hands were asleep in their beds and shot them both in the head at point-blank range. Then he'd parked the Caddy in the barn that was empty of livestock—he figured they'd either sold off any animals they might have had, or they were old and had retired from the business—before he went back to the house and cooked himself a big breakfast: a couple slices of ham, half a pound of bacon, four eggs, four pieces of toast, and the better part of a quart of milk. Hard, satisfying work always made him hungry.

Back in the corridor to the family room and kitchen Egan realized that his hands and arms were covered in dried blood, and in the kitchen the counters, the front of the fridge and stove, and the frying pans and dishes in the sink were also bloody.

Marks of a good job well done. It's a tough old world, his daddy had drummed into his head. But the old bastard would have been proud of him last night.

“No loose ends here, by Christ,” Egan told himself.

He went into the guest bathroom where he took a long, hot shower, after which he found a pair of scissors and cut his hair very short, not quite a flattop, leaving a five o'clock shadow on his chin just like the old man in the shower.

“An honest haircut for an honest man,” Egan told himself.

Back in the couple's bedroom he dressed in clean underwear, white socks, a dress shirt, and a blue serge suit that was a little short in the legs and a little tight in the chest, but not impossibly so. He found a red tie, and worked out a reasonable Windsor knot. The shoes were too small, so he used the kitchen sink to clean the blood off his own boots, and when he had them on he went back to the family room where he turned on the television to KDIX, out of Dickinson.

As the set warmed up he found a beer in the fridge, and sat down at the counter to watch
Days of our Lives,
and wait for the weathercast. He figured that he had a number of options. First of course was getting out of the immediate vicinity—depending on the weather either east to the airport at Bismarck or north across the border back to Regina—he thought that he'd seen something on TV at the Rough Riders before they'd snatched the broad that the storm would be concentrated more to the south—or even west all the way to Billings.

That was the easy part, because he would either make it out of here using the old man's clothes and ID, plus the Ford 4x4 F-450 pickup truck he'd spotted in a shed next to the barn, which would go through more serious shit than even the Caddy could, or he would get himself cornered and die in a shoot-out. Sure as hell he wasn't going to give himself up and spend the rest of his life behind bars. He looked fine in drag, and he just knew what would happen once he was in the can because of his dark good looks.

During a commercial break a good-looking girl in short dark hair and an earnest small-town breathlessness came on to explain the back-to-back fronts coming down from western Canada that mixed with a rapidly rising warm, moist air mass that had moved up from the Gulf and had caused the first storm, and in another eight hours would cause the second, even larger blizzard.

“If you have to drive anywhere—which we recommend you don't—better get it done before midnight, let's make it ten this evening, because if you're caught out on the highways after that you could be in some serious trouble.”

Egan had the notion that the weather girl had no clue what serious trouble was all about, because when it came it almost always bit you in the ass and left marks. And he was in some serious shit, yet he'd known all his life that it would come to this point sooner or later. But at least the weather was cooperating, and he figured that if he could make it to Minneapolis ahead of the second storm front, he'd have a chance of renting a car—if the dead rancher had a credit card—and could make it down to Louisville where the Posse had some friends who could help out.

Because listening to the weather girl talk, her words flowing around him like wind chimes up in a tree, little snatches of music now and then, he'd come up with the inkling of a plan. The last big thing.

Clyde Thompson, the dead rancher, had an American Express credit card, was a member of AARP, though he was only fifty-two, AAA, the National Cattleman's Beef Association, and the North Dakota Farmers Union. He had a pair of twenties and four ones in his wallet, and a photograph of a young man, probably himself, in an army uniform, an M-16 slung barrel down over his shoulder in what looked like a jungle. On the back he'd written:
Grenada 12/12/83.

Too bad, Egan thought, glancing toward the bathroom door. The bastard fought for his country and had come out of it in one piece. Until now. It was indeed a tough old world.

He found the keys to the Ford along with a parka in the mudroom just off the kitchen, and went out to the shed where he started the truck and checked the gas. The tank was full and with luck he figured he'd make it all the way without filling up.

Back in the house the soap opera was on, and Egan opened another beer and sat down to wait until it got dark, and think about just how he was going to tackle his next job—his last job—never once considering the probable outcome of something so radical and especially not the why of it. Because he knew that last part; he had it down cold, had it that way for as long as he could remember.