Voodoo Ridge (36 page)

While Dwayne was starting to come to.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Marlene said, fumbling with the key.

Try as she might, she couldn’t persuade the key to fit.

Dwayne was groaning, beginning to move his legs.

“Get the gun, Marlene.”

“What?”

“The gun. It’s under the van. Forget about me. Get the gun.”

She scuttled over, got down on all fours and peered under the van.

Dwayne was starting to move his arms.

Marlene got down on her stomach and strained to snag the pistol. It lay inches beyond her fingertips. She tried to wriggle under the van to extend her reach, but she was simply too rotund to fit.

“I . . . just . . . can’t . . . get it.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Dwayne was rubbing his head as he came to, still trying to sit up, growing more agitated by the second. “Marlene, what the hell’re you doing?”

As he gazed groggily at his wife, distracted, I rolled to my knees and stood in one fluid motion, my wrists still handcuffed behind me, while Dwayne scraped himself off the concrete.

“You son of a bitch,” he said, now looking over at me, “I should’ve shot you dead the second you walked in here.”

Ignoring his wife as she stood, Dwayne staggered to his van and pulled out a bolt-action hunting rifle equipped with a web sling and recoil pad.

I rammed into him with my shoulder. He slammed face-first into the van’s running board.

Only this time, he didn’t relinquish the grip on his weapon.

Marlene was already running, halfway out the door.

I was right behind her.

The bullet tore through the leather of my jacket sleeve, missing flesh by an inch at most. As the booming echo of the gunshot receded, I heard the
click-clack, click-clack
of a spent shell being ejected and a fresh round being chambered. Before Dwayne could get off another shot, though, I’d exited the hangar.

Any sense of safety lasted about two seconds. Dwayne emerged almost immediately and began chasing us.

I could hear an airplane, a twin-engine by the sound of it. Though I couldn’t yet see it, I knew by the sound of it that the plane was likely taxiing out for takeoff from behind the long metal hangars ahead of me and to my left.

“Where’re you going, Logan?” Dwayne yelled, bringing his rifle to bear. “It’s over!”

Try running for your life alongside an out-of-shape, middle-aged woman, with your hands bound behind your back and a homicidal maniac on your heels. It’s not easy.

At Alpha, my buddy Buzz enjoyed reciting prose to younger operators when instructing them on ways to more effectively kill bad guys. Mother Goose rhymes were among his favorites:

For every evil under the sun,
There is a remedy, or there is none.
If there be one, seek till you find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

With sudden clarity, I realized that the one viable remedy to the evil on my tail lay in that airplane taxiing behind the hangar ahead of me.

I heard a gunshot. Then Marlene went down.

“He shot me,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “I can’t believe it. The son of a bitch shot me.”

A blood blossom spread across the back of her left calf where the bullet had entered, and the front of her shin where it exited. Maybe Dwayne was a bad shot, or maybe the sun was in his eyes. I didn’t know. What I did know, though, was that his next bullet would be mine.

“Clamp your hands on either side of your leg,” I yelled over the engines of the approaching airplane that was still obscured by the hangar. “You’re gonna be OK, Marlene.”

Her face blanched, shock beginning to set in.

Dwayne was fewer than twenty meters away, jogging quickly toward us, clutching his rifle with two hands in front of his chest at the port arms position, from which he could readily fire from the shoulder or hip. Running would’ve been pointless. There was no place to hide.

I turned and faced him.

He slowed to a walk and approached me warily, clearly wondering what the hell I was up to. His rifle was pointed at my chest. Then he flipped the rifle around and butt-stroked me hard in the stomach. I fell to my knees, unable to do anything at that moment, really, beyond groan in pain, while Dwayne turned his attention to his wife.

“Don’t you
ever
raise a hand to me again, Marlene, or so help me I’ll put you in your grave. Do you understand?”

“You shot me.”

“You had it coming.”

“Fuck you, Dwayne.”

“You don’t ever talk to me that way, Marlene. I’m your husband, goddammit.”

He raised his rifle to club her with the butt.

“There’s a way this can all go your way, Dwayne,” I yelled over the airplane engines that were growing louder by the second.

“The only way this’ll end is you dead,” he said.

I got off my knees. “You still want that uranium?”

“Yeah, right,” Dwayne sneered. “Like
that’s
gonna happen. You must think I’m pretty goddamn stupid.”

I stepped left. He quickly raised the rifle to his shoulder, shifting his footing, keeping the barrel trained on me.

“And you must think
I’m
stupid,” I said, taking another step left. “I knew what was in that canister from the start. Do you really think I would’ve given it all back, knowing how much that stuff’s worth on the black market?”

“You’re telling me you’ve still got the uranium,” Dwayne said like he didn’t believe me, his field of view never leaving his gun sights.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Another step left.

“Fine. Then where’s it at?”

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “You agree to let me go, and I’ll take you right to it. It’s all yours. Just let me go.”

He pivoted as I slowly circled him. The muzzle of his rifle was less than a foot from my face.

“I got a better idea, mate,” Dwayne said, reverting to his Crocodile Dundee alter-ego. “You tell me where the shit’s at, right now, then I’ll let you go.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your end of the deal?”

“That’s just it. You don’t.”

He was now turned away from the airplane that I knew would emerge at any second from behind the hangar.

“OK,” I said over the roar of the engines. “You got a deal. But before I tell you, I have a question.”

“What’s that?”

“How’s it feel to get what’s coming to you?”

From around the corner of the hangar, directly behind him, the nose of a twin-engine Cessna 421, white with red accent stripes, came rolling into view, loud as a freight train. Dwayne started to turn his head instinctively to the source of the deafening noise.

That’s when I rushed him.

My primary assignment when I played football at the academy was wide receiver, but I’d filled in enough at defensive back on the scout team to know how to properly tackle. You use your arms. You wrap them up low. With my wrists still handcuffed behind me, textbook technique wasn’t an option.

In truth, that was never the plan.

I slammed my shoulder into his waist, lifting him up and driving him forward—straight into the Cessna’s whirling starboard propeller. Envision a Cuisinart and a raw pot roast, pureed, with the lid off. That’s what Dwayne looked like.

Enough said.

I rolled as the wing passed over me, narrowly avoiding having my legs crushed by the right main landing gear. That I wasn’t shredded with him was, in itself, something of a miracle.

The pilot, a stocky blonde in her late twenties with those oversized aviator shades that are all the rage these days, hurriedly brought the Cessna to a stop. She shut down both engines, jumped out, her windscreen splattered with gore, and came rushing around the nose of the plane as I got to my feet. She gaped at what was left of Dwayne, bent at the waist, and vomited.

“Oh, my God.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Everything’s gonna be OK.”

Frozen with horror, she couldn’t stop staring at the killer’s shredded remains.

“What’s your name, cap’n?”

“. . . Hailey. It’s Hailey.”

“Hailey, I need you to call 911. Tell them we need paramedics. Think you can do that?”

“My phone’s in the plane.”

“Might be a good idea if you went and got it.”

Transfixed, she forced herself to turn away from the body and returned to the cockpit while I went to check on Marlene.

The receptionist was holding her lower leg with two bloody hands and staring blankly into space, like she’d just been through a war.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, Marlene.”

Slowly, she raised her eyes to mine and thanked me. Then, softly, she began to cry.

I wished I could’ve comforted her, but my hands were still bound behind my back.

Some might wonder what it feels like, deep down, to kill another human being, especially in so gruesome a fashion. The easiest answer is that you typically rationalize your actions. You took out the garbage. Did the world a favor. Payback’s a bitch. In truth, I felt no satisfaction killing Dwayne Anderson, no sense of relief. Only exhaustion.

I sat down on the tarmac beside Marlene.

“Keep applying that pressure, Marlene. Help’s coming. Be here any minute.”

I tried not to think about Savannah and the child I would never know. The sun was out. It felt warm and good on my face. I turned my gaze to the snowcapped mountains to the south and a place called Voodoo Ridge, where my life’s journey had been changed forever. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what I’d had for breakfast that morning.

T
HREE UNIFORMED
sheriff’s deputies were tasked with placing plastic tarps from their patrol vehicles over Dwayne Anderson’s mangled body parts, while a paramedic unit drove Marlene to South Lake Tahoe’s Barton Memorial Hospital. As the cops went about their grisly work, I rubbed circulation back into my newly unhooked wrists, courtesy of Detective Streeter and the universal handcuff key he carried in his pocket.

“We would’ve identified him eventually,” Streeter said. “You just beat us to the punch.”

I’d wanted to believe that he wasn’t merely spouting cop bluster, but there was no denying the fact he would’ve been investigating my homicide as well, had I not gotten lucky.

Woo came walking up from the hangar where the green van was parked, toting dead Dwayne’s .40-caliber Glock, bagged in a plastic Ziploc.

“Found it right where you said it would be,” Woo said.

I said nothing.

Streeter wanted me to drive with him to sheriff’s headquarters, to record chapter and verse everything that had led up to my confrontation with the man who’d killed Savannah, our baby, and Chad Lovejoy. I told him I would.

“You’ve been through hell,” he said. “We can do it later if you want.”

“Now’s as good a time as any. I need to be getting back to Rancho Bonita. My landlady misses me. Wish I could say the same for my cat.”

In the end, the Buddha believed, only three things matter: how much you loved; how gently you lived; and how gracefully you let go of those things not meant for you. Had I loved? Certainly. How much and how well, though, those were questions I wasn’t prepared emotionally to address at that moment. Had I led my life in a gentle manner? Not hardly, but I’d saved lives in the process, and that was a fair trade, in my opinion. The more pressing question was how, if ever, I’d get over losing Savannah. How does one accept that the seminal romantic relationship of your life, with a woman so beautiful, so complete, that you could think of nothing but her day and night, was never meant to be?

I didn’t know.

I doubted I ever would.

TWENTY-SIX

W
hether Kiddiot was oblivious to how I was getting along emotionally, or was trying to comfort me, I couldn’t say. He lay on my chest giving himself, not me, a bath that went on for easily a half hour. He may have been dumb, but at least he was well groomed.

I leafed through
Flying
magazine, pulled a copy of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” from my bookshelf but found it too depressing, tried to sleep, did 100 push-ups, scrambled three eggs and ate them watching an infomercial about how to dance your belly away, tried to sleep, took a hot shower, and stared out at the moon. Anything to stop from thinking about how close I’d come to saving Savannah’s life.

If only I’d been more observant when I had initially approached Dwayne Anderson’s van.

In the movies, there’s always that scene. You know the one: where the good guy stands over the bathroom sink, usually stripped to his chiseled waist, leans down to splash cold water on his face, then slowly looks up at himself in the mirror, staring into his own anguish-filled eyes, searching deep down for whatever the hell it is he’s supposed to find in there.

I gave it a shot. I splashed water on my face. I stood looking at myself in the mirror. All I got back was an overpowering realization that I’d succumbed to weakness, to whining, that I’d forgotten how to be a man.

I also noticed I needed a haircut.

It was after 0500 when I finally dozed off. I was awake for good at 0535.