F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (46 page)

“I’m scared,”
Katie said, clinging to Poppy as the thunder shook the ground and the wind
rattled the walls.

“It’s okay, honey
bunch,” Poppy said, sitting on the bedroll and rocking Katie back and
forth. “The storm’ll be over soon.”

“Scared o‘ storms, is
she?” Lester Appleton said, licking his lips as he positioned a tin can
under a leak. That made twelve containers scattered around his floor.
“So’s most of the wimmins and kids. All probably hiding under their
beds right now. Do it every time the thunder starts. That little girl’ll
do well to get used to’em if she’s a-gonna stay. We get some real
doozies out here.”

She ain’t staying. Poppy
wanted to say, but didn’t want to be rude. All the Appletons had been
kind to them today. Some of them said they remembered her stopping by with her
daddy when she was a kid, but maybe they were just imagining it. The main thing
was the way they’d welcomed her and Katie, sharing their home and their
food… even their dolls, so to speak. The Appleton ideas of what was clean
and what was cooked, of what was edible and what tasted good were light-years
from Poppy’s, but they meant well. What they had was hers.

After all, she was kin…

Lester had said they could sleep in
his place for now. His place: a ten-by-fourteen space lit by two kerosene
lamps—one on a crate that served as his dresser and the other hanging
from the six-foot ceiling. The walls creaked and shuddered under the
wind’s attack, which set the hanging lamp to swaying. And the moving
light did funny tricks with Lester Appleton’s nose-gazing eye.

Another crash of thunder and Katie
tightened her grip on Poppy.

“Hope them stills is all
right,” he said, swigging from a ceramic jug. “Wish my back was
better—I should be out there helpin‘.” He shook his head.
“First that heeliocopter, now the storm. Bad omens. I feel it in my
bones— somethin’ bad’s gonna happen.”

The sight of the
“heeliocopter” earlier had spurred her to run down to the clearing
and pull the panel truck under some trees. That might have been like closing
the barn door after the proverbial horse was gone, but she did it anyway.

And then the storm had hit and all
the able-bodied men—the overly attentive Levon among them, thank you very
much—and some of the women had run off to make sure the stills
didn’t get damaged and the fires didn’t get too wet. Applejack was
their major asset. They sold it for cash and bartered it for goods.

Poppy wondered how her Uncle Luke
was faring with the feds. He’d said he was going to try and make a deal
for her. What was taking him so long?

Carlos Salinas took the photo of
Nixon from the wall and tossed it into his valise, then looked around the room.
Nothing remained that he couldn’t part with, nothing that couldn’t
be replaced with a simple telephone call.

As for records, Alien Gold kept all
sensitive information on the office computer—verbally coded and digitally
encrypted. He’d copied the pertinent data onto a Zip Drive disk and
erased the hard drive. That done, Carlos had Llosa fire a few 9mm rounds into
the drive—just to be sure.

“All set?” Gold asked,
popping into the room for the third time in as many minutes.

Carlos nodded. Too bad, he thought.
Leaving the United States and this wonderful setup. But if decriminalization
went through, he’d be out of business soon, anyway. He regretted leaving
Maria behind, but that was only temporary. He’d send for her later.

Llosa was waiting by the back door.
Carlos nodded to him as he approached. Llosa stepped outside, then jumped back
in.

Carlos skidded to a halt.
“What is it?”

“A car! In the alley!”

“Oh, no!” Gold
whimpered. “Oh, God! Oh, please, no!”

“Silence!” Carlos
hissed as his heart began to thump. He turned back to Llosa. “Is anyone
there?”

“I did not see anyone.”

“Look again.” Llosa
opened the door a crack and peeked through.

He shook his head. “I see no
one.”

“It could be nothing,”
Carlos said.

“But it’s blocking our
way.” Carlos thought of his waiting Gulfstream, fully fueled and ready to
go. If he could just get into the air…

He turned to Gold. “Call a
tow truck. Have someone come and move it. Pronto!” Gold nodded. His smile
was sickly. “Right. No way I’m going near that car.”

In the single heartbeat it took
Gold to reach for the phone, Carlos heard a roar, felt the floor tremble, saw
the door shatter as an onrushing ball of orange flame swallowed Llosa and
engulfed Carlos, but not before a million wooden daggers from the door ripped
the silk suit and most of the flesh from his body.

When Snake reached the clearing, he
saw four or five pickups but no panel truck. He began to curse and pound on his
steering wheel in red-hazed fury.

The nearer he’d gotten to
this place, to this blinking star on his GPS map, the greater his anticipation
of finding Poppy, getting his hands on her, hurting her like she’d hurt
him. He needed that as much as he needed the tape, and the need had grown until
he felt ready to burst.

But she wasn’t here! She must
have run off after seeing the copter overhead. Still cursing, he began angling
the Jeep to turn around, and that was when he spotted it, hidden behind one of
the pickups at the very edge of the clearing.

Snake leapt from the Jeep and ran
through the deluge to the truck. Yes! This was it. This was Poppy’s. But
where was she? He moved along the perimeter of the clearing… had to be a
way out of here.

And then he found it. A break in
the underbrush. Using lightning flashes to guide him. Snake pulled the Cobra
from his belt and started up the path, a path to the “strange-looking
house” the copter pilot had mentioned.

He headed for one of the few lit
windows.

John had tuned the car radio to an
all-news station, hoping for word of when the storm would break. Instead, he
found himself listening to Heather Brent.

“Let me bore you with some
more statistics. Federal, state, and local police made well over a million drug
related arrests last year. Seventy percent of those were for
possession—not sale or manufacture, simple possession. But they’re
not even scratching the surface. Six and a half million people used cocaine
last year. Twelve percent of Americans admit—admit—to illegal drug
use. How many do not admit to it? If we pursue the stated goals of the war on
drugs, we should be trying to jail all those tens of millions of Americans. Do
we really want to do that? Wouldn’t the resources and countless man- and
womanhours that went into last year’s million-plus drug arrests be better
directed toward muggers, rapists, murderers, wife beaters, and child abusers?”

“I wish we had some of those
resources and man-hours at our disposal right now,” Decker muttered.

John switched the station.
He’d wanted weather, not Heather Brent.

“I’ll be damned,”
Decker said, looking in the rearview mirror. “Someone’s
coming.”

John Vanduyne twisted in his seat
and looked through the fogged up rear window. Sure enough, two smeary blobs of
light were bobbing their way through the downpour.

“Dear God, we haven’t
seen anybody for hours, and now—It’s a miracle.” A big pickup
with fat tires eased to a stop on their right. John rolled down the window and
saw a weathered face grinning at him from the truck’s cab. A similar and
equally weathered face, this one bearded, peered over the driver’s shoulder.

“Looks like you found
yourself some sugar sand,” the driver said.

“Can you help us out of
it?” John said.

The driver shook his head.
“That stuff’s like soup now. Maybe after the water settles out a
bit.”

Desperate, John was about to ask
him for a lift when he heard a door slam and saw another set of lights behind
the truck. Someone holding a newspaper over his head was sloshing their way.

Good Lord—Gerry Canney, the
FBI agent.

“Come on!” Canney
yelled to him as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get in our
car!” He turned to the driver of the pickup. “They’re with
us.” The driver nodded and rolled up his window.

John didn’t even bother
checking with Decker. He jumped out and followed Canney. Seconds later a
dripping Decker joined him in the back seat of the FBI man’s sedan.

As the pickup pulled away, Canney
introduced the driver as Special Agent Geary. He waved over his shoulder and
began following the pickup. “How come you’re not stuck?”
Decker asked, wiping the rain from his face.

Canney shrugged. “Front-wheel
drive, I guess. Look. Those guys in the pickup are two of Poppy
Mulliner’s uncles. They’re taking us to her.” John levered
forward and gripped Canney’s shoulder.

“They’ve seen her? Is
Katie—?”

“Katie’s fine. She and
Poppy are hiding out with some deep-woods relatives of the Mulliners.”

“And that’s where
they’re taking us?”

When Canney nodded, John wanted to
hug him. “Thank God!” Almost over, he thought. A few more minutes
and Katie will be safe.

“They wanted to make a
deal,” Canney said. “If Poppy gave herself up, could we do anything
for her? I said, Hell, yes. I even offered witness protection if she turned
state’s evidence. How’s that sit with you, Bob?”

“I’ve no problem with
that,” Decker said. “She’s an angel compared to some of the
other people who’ve been offered that deal.”

John felt a nudge from Decker.
“How about you, Doc? Will you squawk if we make a deal with Ms.
Mulliner?”

“Absolutely not,” John
said, meaning it. “I have a feeling she’s the only reason my little
girl is still alive. Give me back my Katie and Poppy can walk, as far as
I’m concerned.”

“Good,” Canney said,
then turned to Decker again. “And you know that leak we were
discussing?”

Now Decker was leaning forward.
“What about him?”

“Plugged. With four 9mm
hollow points.”

Decker grimaced and lowered his
head. “Where?”

“On the sidewalk near his
office—making another telephone call. And another thing: I don’t
know if there’s a direct connection, but an explosion on M Street this
afternoon reduced a restaurant to dust. The owner, a very well-connected
Colombian named Carlos Salinas, was inside.”

Decker nodded. “They’re
covering their tracks, erasing all the links. We’re not going to be able
to pin this conspiracy on anyone.”

A few hours ago, John would have
been intensely interested in the identity of the “leak” and the
names of the people behind Katie’s abduction. Now he didn’t care.
Just get me to Katie, he thought, wishing the car could fly.

Just when Poppy thought the storm
couldn’t get any worse, it did. The thunder was so loud, she was sure the
house would get knocked flat by the sound waves.

So when the door smashed open,
letting the wind and rain howl into the tiny room, she thought it was just the
storm. But then the lightning flashed and she saw somebody standing in the
doorway. At first she thought it was the Frankenstein monster—with an eye
patch. But then he smiled and she recognized him.

She screamed as Mac stepped into
the room.

“Hello, Pop—” But
he never finished. Lester was suddenly in his face.

“Here! Who the hell do you
think—?” Mac’s hand darted up and Poppy saw the pistol
clutched in his fist. Lester grabbed at it and the gun went off, sounding like
an explosion. A stream of water gushed through a new hole in the ceiling.

Poppy huddled with Katie, who
wailed in terror as they watched the two men struggle for the gun. Lester was
holding his own but Poppy wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. She
looked around for something to hit Mac with and spotted Lester’s
applejack jug against the wall.

As she began to crawl toward it,
another shot blasted through the room. She felt this one whiz past—right
between her head and Katie’s. Katie huddled on the floor, eyes closed,
hands over her ears, screaming.

Without hesitation, she picked her
up and ran for the open door. She had to get Katie outside—the next shot
could hit either of them—then she’d come back to help out Lester.

She’d carried Katie maybe
twenty feet through the almost night of the rain when she heard a third shot
behind her, followed by a cry of pain.

Poppy rounded the corner of the
house, then stopped and peeked back, hoping, praying that Lester would appear
in the lit doorway. It took a long time, but finally someone stepped through and
looked around.

Mac.

With a small cry, she spun and
dashed for the brush at the rear of the house. He hadn’t seen
her—or had he? Maybe he’d go the other way.

Still carrying Katie, she crashed
through the bushes for a good dozen or so feet, then turned and crouched behind
a tree, panting. She and Katie were soaked through to the skin. No shelter from
this rain—the wind seemed to be driving it at them from all directions.
Katie shivered against Poppy and began to cry.

“I want to go home! I want my
Daddy!”

“Hush, honey bunch,”
she whispered frantically, placing her hand gently over Katie’s mouth.
“If that man hears you, he’ll find us.” She rocked Katie,
trying to soothe her. With the dark and the rain and the thunder, maybe they
could survive here until the rest of the Appletons returned from their
stills—if they kept quiet.

Katie seemed to be calming down
until a bolt of lightning sizzled into a tree not a dozen feet to their left,
and the simultaneous thunder clap knocked them flat. Katie wailed in terror then,
long and loud, lasting well after the thunder had faded, and Poppy knew Mac had
heard it. How could he not have?