Half Past Midnight (16 page)

Trying not to move any more than absolutely necessary, I quietly scanned the area for the others. I knew there were still at least four more in the band, but where were they? A hint of movement to my right revealed that two more had just passed beneath Megan’s hiding place.

That left two. I looked back down the trail and saw them trudging along, completely ignorant of the slight movement in the pile of pine needles between two trees. A moment after they passed it, I tugged on the kite string and the needles rose and dispersed, leaving Ken’s dark form in their place as he stood and began to sneak up behind the pair, a knife in each hand, eyes hard. From my vantage, I could see their deaths in Ken’s eyes and felt a moment of compassion. Then I remembered Pat Robinson. I turned to my group, machete in my right hand, Bowie in my left.

Careful to keep a tree between myself and Ken’s quarry, I stood slowly, catching Megan’s eye. I nodded, and she rose to her knees in the crook of those two enormous branches, raised the Kalashnikov, sighted in on the two below her, and opened fire.

As soon as she did, the four in front of me spun to face her. I waded in from behind with the machete, and things moved in a blur from there. I decapitated the first of them before the others even knew I was on them. At almost the same time, I drove the Bowie knife high into the back of another and felt it lodge in his spine. With no time to work it loose, I left it, spinning to confront the other two. Both of them tried to bring their rifles to bear, but the quarters were too close. I slashed one across his left shoulder as he turned, then reversed direction and jabbed the point upward through his throat. He died instantly, wrenching the machete from my grip as he fell.

The last man succeeded in getting his barrel up, but I was practically on top of him. I slid right, parried the rifle barrel, and slipped up alongside him. A head butt and a hard uppercut broke his nose and cracked ribs, loosening his grip on the rifle. I yanked it out of his grasp and slammed the butt into his diaphragm as hard as I could. He went to his knees with a wheezing exhalation, gagging until I silenced him with the rifle stock on the base of his skull.

I whirled to see how Ken was doing just in time to see the last of his two drop to the ground, bleeding profusely from the neck. Looking back toward the oak tree, I saw Megan jumping down from the lowest branch.

It was over.

Less than ten seconds had passed since Megan’s first shot. Megan’s two were unequivocally dead, as were both of Ken’s. Of my group, two were dead, and one was dying with a knife in his back. The last one was unconscious with a bloody nose, broken ribs, and a nasty bump on the back of his skull.

With no minor trepidation, I yanked the knife from the spine of the dying freebooter, knowing as I did so that it would likely kill him. It did, leaving us with a lone survivor and an ethical question that none of us wanted to deal with.

Should we kill him, finishing what we had started, or rather, what
they
had started? Or should we let him live? To be, or not to be? This perverted version of Hamlet’s dilemma now faced us squarely in the guise of this helpless young man.

“Kill him,” Ken said bluntly. He looked at me with the pained expression of a person caught between two equally distasteful choices. “You’re the one who said we would have to kill them all.”

He pointed to the unconscious form on the ground. “Kill him, and it’s over.”

He was right but, still, I hesitated, my emotions clashing with my logic. “How will you feel about it when we do kill him?”

I intentionally used the plural pronoun so that he couldn’t distance himself from the event. “He’s beaten and helpless. Hell, Ken, he may die anyway! But do you really want to live with the idea that we killed him in cold blood?”

“Don’t try that judge, jury, and executioner philosophical crap on me! This guy is a murderer and a rapist! He and his buddies killed John and Pat. How many others have they killed? For that matter, how many more would they have killed if we hadn’t gotten them today?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head wearily. I was exhausted, tired of the whole situation, both mentally and physically. Still shaking my head, I handed Ken the crimson coated knife that I had just pulled from the other man. “If you’re that determined, if you are that sure you’re right, then go ahead. Because I honestly don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong at this point. All I know is, I don’t want anything to do with it.” I took the coward’s way out and headed for the house.

Megan followed behind me, and we left Ken staring at the bloody knife in his hand.

A couple of minutes after Megan and I walked into the house, I heard the back door slam behind us. Turning, I saw Ken standing in the kitchen with the would-be bandit slung over his shoulders. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

Chapter 9
* * July 4 / Evening * *

Le ciel (de Plencus la cité) nous presage,
Par clers insignes & par estoilles fixes,
Que de son change subit s’approche l’aage,
Ne pour son bien, ne pour ses malefices.

The sky (of Plancus’ city) forebodes to us
Through clear signs and fixed stars,
That the time of its sudden change is approaching,
Neither for its good, nor for its evils.

Nostradamus –
Century 3, Quatrain 46

The next few hours were difficult for all of us. At first the police, led by the intrepid Chief James Kelland, confiscated our weapons and threw Ken and me in jail. Of course, the weapons we had when we walked into the hospital were not the same weapons we had used against the freebooters. We had dropped them and Megan off at the house with instructions for the women to hide them, as well as all of our other firearms. Then Ken and I told Kelland a story wherein we had disarmed a few of the bandits and turned their own weapons against them.

He wasn’t having any of it. It was a stupid idea on our part anyway. We hadn’t taken into consideration a major flaw in our reasoning. It was soon brought to our attention when the kid we had lugged into the hospital recovered enough to talk almost immediately. He told a story about a group of men who had attacked him and his innocent friends as they partied. He claimed several men and a young girl had attacked his friends for no apparent reason. He stated that the young girl had killed two men with a rifle, two with a crossbow, and one with her bare hands.

The questioning began in earnest, and I began to have second thoughts on the wisdom of having spared the kid’s life.

In light of his story, I figured it was time for us to tell the truth, starting with the gunshots we’d heard earlier that afternoon. The only thing we held back was the existence of our supply stash. I was still unwilling to give that up, and I guessed by Ken’s silence on the subject that he agreed.

Our only problem was that since we had already lied once, Kelland was trying very hard to try to rip our story to shreds. And he loved every minute of it. The first thing he did was separate us so they could question us individually and hopefully get conflicting stories. We each went into interrogation rooms just like in the movies, only they always appeared larger in the movies. I didn’t think this was terribly smart of him. After all, he’d already allowed us to stay together earlier while I told him what had happened.

After we were separated, Kelland sent an officer to question Ken. He evidently wanted the pleasure of making me squirm all to himself. Most of the questioning was pretty predictable.

“Y’all heard gunshots?”

“Yeah, we already told you that.”

“How far away were they?”

“We couldn’t tell.”

“So you decided to find out?”

“Yes.”

“Y’all dressed up like GI Joe, went trompin’ off through the woods huntin’ for a few gunshots?”

“It wasn’t just a few gunshots; it sounded more like a war.”

“And y’all went lookin’ for a war? Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

“We had to find out what was going on. With the phones out, we couldn’t very well call the police.”

“You gettin’ smart with me? I don’t like it when folks smart off to me.”

“I’m not smarting off. Just stating facts. We couldn’t call the police. Amber had the van, so we couldn’t send someone to get the police. The only option we had left was to investigate for ourselves.”

“So you ran through the forest, found your war, jumped into the middle of it, and whooped up on twenty to twenty-five men? That’s seven to one odds, boy! You expect us to believe that you, your nigger friend, and a scrawny little girl could each take on six grown men?”

I held my anger in check. “We took them by surprise, in small groups. That way we only had to take a few at a time.”

“So you admit you jumped them without provocation!”

“They killed John Robinson!”

“You saw ‘em do it?”

“No. But we saw them raping Pat Robinson!”

“Was she protestin’?”

“She was tied to a table!”

“Maybe she liked it that way.”

“With her husband’s dead body lying in the yard a few yards away?”

“How did you know he was dead? Could be havin’ her husband play dead while she got it on with a bunch of men was just some kinky sex thing with them.”

It went on like that for nearly an hour. It seemed his main goal was to try to implicate me, or rather us, in the murder of several innocent individuals. I knew he didn’t like me, but I hadn’t thought it was anywhere near that bad.

Or maybe he just wanted to see me squirm.

At any rate, he had questioned me for nearly an hour when another officer stuck his head in and called him outside. Kelland returned a few minutes later with a manila folder and a rather strange expression when he looked up at me.

He kept doing that, glancing up at me with that look, then reading some more. What the hell was he reading, anyway? It was as if he didn’t quite know what to make of me. He stood inside the door reading through the folder for a minute more before he spoke again.

“When I heard that kid’s story in the hospital, I guessed the ’young girl’ he talked about must either be your wife or your daughter. Especially since, according to your ’killer hijackers’ report,” he waved a sheet of paper from the folder at me, “both of them have already killed people.”

A chill ran up my spine at the way he said that. As if I wasn’t already worried enough, now he was after my wife and daughter.

“So I sent a couple of officers over to pick them up.”

Oh, Lord.

“By the way, they’re here now, along with Mrs. Simms and your boy.”

He smiled a little at the anguish in my expression before he went on. “I also sent some men over to the Kindley’s and the Robinson’s.”

Finally!
Concern for my family was somewhat alleviated by the thought that we were finally getting somewhere. “And they confirmed exactly what I told you, didn’t they?”

“They confirmed that there were a lot of bodies layin’ around. That don’t mean nothin’ ’cept somebody killed a bunch of people out there.” And again, that look.

But I thought that I possibly understood it now. Kelland was the kind of man who respected strength, or what he understood of strength anyway. He still didn’t like me, but to his way of thinking, anyone who could take on odds like the ones he had mentioned earlier must be a strong individual. It didn’t matter that we had at no time faced anywhere near that many opponents at once. The way he saw it was simply that we had faced impossible odds and won.

He respected that; ergo, he respected me, maybe even feared me a little.

He moved to the table and sat down across from me again. Scooting his chair back, he propped his feet on the table and began a new tactic. “You know, when Chief Davis died, and I took over, one of the first things I did was to read the statement you filed on your run-in with those hijackers.” He waved the report at me again. “Then I sent two men out to the site.”

I wondered where this was heading.

“They pretty much confirmed what you said about the ambushed convoy. All the wreckage and the bodies matched your report. And they found the hidden little road where you said it was and the cabin in the clearing.” He peered intently into my eyes. “And they found three bodies in that clearing.”

“Three?” We had killed two, Edgar and Michael. Who was the third?

“One was a man whose throat had been punctured,”
Edgar
, I counted. “Another man had been shot in the back.”
Michael
. “And the third man had a hole in his shoulder and a broken knee.”
Larry
.

He must not have recovered. I remembered leaving him tied up, but we’d left his left hand untied, his wounded arm. It would have been painful, but I felt sure he would be able to get his right hand untied from his ankles with a little work, unless he had reopened the wound in his shoulder and bled to death in the process. Why hadn’t I thought of that at the time?

“He must have bled to death,” I said lamely.

Kelland nodded. “That’s what the officers guessed.”

“So what does this mean?”

“It means that you killed three men on the way out here, and then reported it to the authorities as soon as you could.” He sat back in his chair having found something in my reaction that satisfied him that I wasn’t hiding anything. “That tells me you’re either honest, or sneaky. When I mentioned three bodies, it surprised you. You didn’t expect three of them to be dead. That leads me to believe you’re honest. And it tells me you didn’t intend to kill the third guy, even though according to your report, he was gonna kill you.”

He remained silent for a moment, tapping his pencil on the table between us before he continued, “I took over when Davis died because my men and the mayor thought I was the best man for the job. So do I. I’m good at it. It may not seem like much to you, bein’ from a big city and all, but right now, right here, I’m the best there is. And I learned a long time ago that in this job, you’ve got to learn to trust your gut.

“The facts that we have, Mr. Dawcett, say that you are either a magnet for bad luck, or you’re a homicidal maniac. Either way, I’m not wild about having you in my jurisdiction.” He surprised me then by smiling. “But I think we had that conversation yesterday.