At my insistence, Eddie Nolan had donned a pair of sweatpants. We were sitting opposite each other on matching couches. I still had my Beretta drawn, but I held it loosely, safety on and pointed at the ground. I didn’t really need it. We’d already established who was going to come out second in a fight. I’d left the Remington where it had fallen in the kitchen.
“You won’t find him,” Nolan told me. “He’s too good for you.”
I didn’t see the point in debating the issue. “He’s coming to kill you, you know.”
The corners of Nolan’s mouth curled up. I had seen that smirk before: in one of the news shots of Wardell being escorted into court. It said
I know something you don’t know
. Somehow, it was less convincing on the father.
I feigned surprise. “You don’t believe me?”
The smirk stayed in place.
“Here’s the thing,” I continued. “You’re operating under a classic narcissistic delusion: You’re assuming that, just because you feel a certain way about somebody, they feel the same way about you. I bet it’s pretty common in difficult parent–child relationships. But, of course, you’re not really a parent, are you?”
The smirk disappeared. “That boy is my flesh and blood,” Nolan said sharply, responding to the barb just as I had known he would.
“Sure,” I said, letting the word hang in the air for a moment. “Anyway, it must have been something when you found out who your son was. What he’d done. Would have been too much for most parents, even ones who’d been around to raise their kid. But you were okay with it. No, you were
proud
of it.”
The knowing smirk was back. Nolan was shaking his head from side to side, not denying what I was saying, just dismissing it as anything worthy of his interest.
“So you keep news clippings. You give interviews. You write fan letters to your son.” This last was a guess. Wardell had undoubtedly received letters while in jail—notorious killers always did—but there had been no specific examples in the files. The twitch of irritation provoked by “fan letters” told me I was on the money. “Yeah, that’s what they were, Eddie. Fan letters. You’re like one of those guys who takes an interest in one of the unwanted pregnancies he was responsible for only when it ends up starting for the Lakers.”
“Caleb is my
son
.”
“Did your son ever reply to any of those letters?”
Nolan got up from the chair and took a step forward. I left the gun pointed at the ground and stayed exactly where I was, not acknowledging the attempted intimidation.
“I want you out of here, you little prick,” Nolan said, sounding like he was struggling to control his fury.
“No.”
“No?”
“You’re going to help me find your son. And then I’m going to stop him.”
Nolan let out a bark of strained laughter. I didn’t know which part he found so amusing: that I expected to catch his son, or that I expected him to help. Nolan moved his head from side to side again and this time I saw something in those eyes that told me that maybe I didn’t quite know everything, that there was an angle I hadn’t considered.
Anything you don’t know, Blake?
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said softly. “Caleb got the brains from his mother. I guess he got the crazy from you.”
Nolan grinned at the slight. “You were right about one thing, punk,” he said. “My boy’s coming, and when he gets here, we’re gonna start with you.”
I shook my head. “You think he wants company? You think the two of you are just going to bond over a little spree killing? You’re even more deranged than he is. When did he call you? Yesterday?”
Nolan shook his head. “Day before. He’s a good boy. I told him to look me up if he ever got out, and that’s exactly what he did. Got things all ready for him coming home.”
Something about that worried me. The Remington and the survivalist literature indicated a personality that interpreted “getting ready” in a very specific sort of way. Nonetheless, I doubted the homecoming would be what Nolan expected. He had started to back away from me slowly, moving in the direction of the cabin’s front door. I jerked the Beretta up, flicked the safety off with my thumb.
“Sit down.”
“You ain’t gonna shoot me,” Nolan said, and I could see that he knew it. “I ain’t done nothing wrong. You’d be killing an innocent man. You said it yourself; you’re here to protect me.” He put his hand on the door handle and pulled.
I stood up. “Close that door and sit the hell down, Nolan. You’re delusional.”
Nolan swung the door open wide, letting in the freezing morning air. He turned his head to the doorway and closed his eyes, inhaling a lungful of cold through his nostrils. “Shoot me.” He chuckled. “You don’t know what a killer is, son.”
I got out of the chair and pointed the Beretta at Nolan’s head, cocking it. “Try me.”
“You don’t know how . . . how goddamn
glorious
it is, killin’ a man. A pansy like you couldn’t appreciate it.” He opened his eyes again and turned his head back to look at me. “I’m gonna go and wait outside for my son to come home. He won’t be long. And when he gets here, I’ll show you a killer.”
I let the muzzle of the gun drop and walked over to Nolan, then put a hand on his shoulder, gripping hard. “I don’t need to shoot you to make you do as you’re told, old man.”
Nolan opened his mouth, but he never got the chance to say his piece.
The right side of his head, the side facing away from the door, exploded like a water balloon in a microwave. I caught an absurdly detailed freeze frame of it: a flap of hair and scalp swinging up, skull fragments and chunks of brain and a gray-blue eyeball and a torrent of blood all expanding out from the epicenter in a multicolored starburst of gore. And then the world was red and I barely registered the crack of the gunshot as it caught up with its work.
9:28 a.m.
For a moment, I was senseless. Nolan’s blood was in my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nostrils. The coppery, viscous taste of it brought a series of involuntary gags from my throat. I resisted the overwhelming urge to lose it completely and dropped to the floorboards, praying that I wasn’t too close to the open door or to the window. If I was, I was a sitting duck.
I clawed at my face, wiping blood and unidentifiable chunks of Nolan’s head away until my vision returned. I managed to hold off until I’d crawled over to the safe side of the cast-iron stove in the corner before I vomited. After a momentary spell of dizziness, my head cleared.
Unbidden, my brain started trying to compute how Wardell was here at this moment when he’d dumped the van seven hundred miles away only a few hours before. Either that wasn’t Wardell out there, or Wardell hadn’t dumped the van. Explanations could come later, if there was a later. Right now, all that mattered was that someone had me pinned down. I felt my gut sinking as I became aware that my hands were empty. I’d dropped my gun at some point after Nolan’s head had exploded, probably while clearing the stupid bastard’s blood off of my face. I looked around.
It lay on the floorboards about a yard from Nolan’s virtually decapitated body, just outside the still-spreading pool of dark red blood. And, unfortunately, in full view of the open doorway.
I considered my options. The grisly manner of Nolan’s death told me that Wardell—it had to be him, didn’t it?—was probably still using the rifle. I had to assume that he knew I was there. He’d probably have seen me through the front window, and besides, it would have been obvious that Nolan had been talking to someone. The old stove would afford some protection, but I wasn’t sure it could stop one of those rounds. The biggest thing in my favor was that I was out of the line of sight. The other thing in my favor was Wardell’s frugality. He wouldn’t want to waste limited ammunition on blind shots. If I moved quickly, I could probably grab the Beretta before he could get a lock on me. Depending on how far away he was, of course.
My only other option was to stay put and hope he got bored of waiting. Somehow, I didn’t think that would happen. In a way, the situations where only one realistic course of action presents itself are the easiest. You just take a breath and do it.
I pushed off my right foot, took two steps, and dived for the Beretta. As my fingers closed around the grip, the doorway slid into my field of view and I saw a figure approaching the cabin, a hundred yards away, carrying some kind of assault rifle, another rifle strapped to his back. I tucked my right arm under me and turned the dive into a roll as my shoulders hit the bloodstained wood.
An assault rifle? I rolled past the doorway and up onto my feet in a crouched position as two things happened: A maelstrom of bullets tore into the space on the floor I’d occupied a second ago, and Eddie Nolan’s words repeated in my head.
Got things all ready for him
. So much for frugality with ammunition.
As the firing ceased, I gripped the Beretta two-handed and launched myself back the way I’d come, not wanting to give Wardell breathing space. I fired four quick shots at the
figure outside, but he was already diving to the ground. Was that Wardell? It was hard to tell at the distance. The height and build looked right for him.
My lunge carried me past the doorway and back behind the shelter of the stove. It looked like he was toting an AK-47—assuming he wasn’t tooled up with armor-piercing rounds, the combination of the walls and the stove might be enough to protect me.
Another rattle of gunfire and the beautiful sound of polymer-coated steel jackets ricocheting off cast-iron proved me right.
They kept coming, though. When the hail finally abated, I guessed he’d emptied an entire magazine from that AK, which told me two things: one, that he wasn’t short of ammo, and two, that while Wardell was a purist when it came to long-range killing, he could be pragmatic when he found himself in a fight. If I’d nursed a hope that “one shot, one kill” was an absolutism that Wardell applied across the board, and therefore an exploitable weakness, the last thirty seconds had hammered a couple of hundred nails into the coffin of that hope.
I took advantage of the brief lull to dive across the room and slam through what was left of the kitchen door. It wasn’t hard to do; the door now had all the structural integrity of a slice of Leerdammer. I kept low as I made the kitchen, a renewed burst of fire punching big holes in the drywall separating the two rooms.
The Remington was still there on the floor. Was it loaded? Going by the ten minutes I’d just spent with Nolan at the end of his life, I thought it was a safe bet. I grabbed it left-handed and glanced at the wide-open back door, praying that Wardell, or whoever the shooter was, didn’t have com
pany. It didn’t really matter though. The fact was, there was only one possible way out. I took it.
I hurled myself through the door, aware of another burst of fire ripping through the wall and hearing the dulled impacts on the stove from the next room. Outside, the sky had clouded over. I didn’t have time to scan the tree line, but then I didn’t need to. If there was a halfway-competent hostile up there, I’d be dead long before I knew about him. I swiveled left and approached the back corner of the cabin. My gun had a seventeen-round capacity. I’d loosed four already, which left me with lucky thirteen, plus whatever was in the Rem.
I took the corner of the cabin low and hugged the west-facing wall. The shooter was still at the front of the cabin. I could tell by the efficient, machined sounds of another magazine clicking into place. There was a pause of twenty or so seconds while nobody shot. Then mother nature decided to bump the table.
A gap in the cloud cover rolled under the morning sun, casting alien, elongated shadows west for the briefest of seconds, like somebody opening and closing a lighted doorway. It showed me the top of the shooter’s shadow, putting him around ten feet from the front door, roughly dead center to the house. The inevitable trade-off was that it gave him my position too.
I didn’t hesitate, didn’t pause for conscious thought, just pointed the gun in the right direction as though there were nothing between us and fired a volley of six shots in a tight circle. The rounds went through my side of the cabin without complaint. I hoped they would pass through the other side as easily.
Fools seldom differ. A trail of exit holes mushroomed in the wooden siding two feet to my right. One glanced off the barrel of the Remington, knocking it out of my loose grip. I fell back to the corner. Stalemate once again.
Except that I had only seven bullets left. My opponent might have a thousand times that. All he had to do was wait me out.
But then I caught a break. As though toying with us, the sun cast its beam over the earth again. Once again it was fleeting, rolling over the dead grass and the sparse trees on the incline before disappearing behind the trees on the western ridge.
But before it did so, it glinted off of a wing mirror.
I squinted and made out a green pickup truck, partially obscured behind trees. Virtually invisible to the casual glance, but clear enough once you knew where to look. I made the range around seventy yards, which meant I hadn’t a chance in hell of hitting it with the Beretta. But with the Remington . . .
I glanced around the corner again fleetingly, just in case the shooter was there. It was clear, so I took a longer peek. The Remington was ten feet from my position.
A voice rang out, sure and clear.
“You can come on out, partner. I ain’t gonna hurt you.” The voice cleared one thing up. The smooth Southern delivery. The “partner” that sounded at once completely natural and carefully studied. It was Wardell all right. “Got to say, though,” he continued, “I’d be mighty grateful if you’d toss that weapon first.”
I ignored him, knowing that the aw-shucks good humor was about as trustworthy as a crocodile’s tears. I got down low and inched around the corner again. My outstretched left hand reached for the Remington. Five feet, three. My fingers closed around the barrel just as a hawk screeched from somewhere back in the tree line. Another burst of AK-47 fire ripped through the siding as I scrambled back for cover. I felt a sting an inch below my right eye and reached my hand up, plucking out a thin splinter of wood half dipped in crimson.