Authors: Jonathon King
“OK, partner. Let’s check out the inside of Crandall’s mystery hole and then get the hell back out of here,” Harmon said. They started for the south side of the building and the instant he punched the button on the switch an unholy scream seemed to fill the air and Harmon looked stupidly down at the button like he’d done something wrong and could turn it back off.
Suddenly they were confronted by the sight of a young man, his face in agony, coming around the corner at them with an outstretched arm like he was offering them a bloodied portion of the devil himself. All manner of their mercenary past boiled up in Harmon’s memory and he could only think now in retrospect that Squires must have relaxed his weapon when he realized the bloodied kid was unarmed because they were both staring at the boy and wincing at the pitch of his wailing when another voice erupted behind them.
This time Squires tensed and swung, his gun at the ready, and when he saw a second young man come running around the west corner with a shotgun, the big man fired two quick rounds, dropping the assailant in his tracks. Harmon watched as the boy pitched forward and, almost without thought, he stuck out his foot and stopped the shotgun as it slid across the wooden deck by stepping on its barrel. For a moment there was silence, the crack of Squires’s pistol sucked out into the humid air around them. The only reason Harmon was not stupefied by the series of events was that he had never been stupefied by the actions of his friend or those of people in bad places and he now realized that’s exactly where they were: in a bad place. Just as automatically as he had pinned the sliding shotgun, he crouched and searched the immediate area. He and Squires were not unfamiliar with flanking military procedure. So when his friend turned at an angle and shouted: “Don’t move, asshole!” with his gun still raised but pointed down toward the water, Harmon was not surprised that another unfriendly was in sight. He looked past the big man’s legs at a bearded, scruffy-looking guy whose arms were now raised in surrender and without taking his eyes off the threat of the big handgun in the new player’s lifted hand, Harmon reached down for the shotgun.
It was when he felt for the wooden stock of the gun that his fingers touched an uneven surface of warm goop and when he shifted eyes to his feet he realized he was touching the back of a bloodied hand, the digits cleaved off like a rack of short ribs, the white stumps of bone glowing through the red syrup and the intact thumb still twitching as it tried to grip the shotgun stock.
“Jesus,” he heard himself say. And the gunfire began again.
I was inside the cocoon of the closed room but there was no mistaking the sound of gunfire outside. I heard Marcus’s screams and already knew I was responsible. The image of those severed fingers on the floor will be in my dreams. But then came some indecipherable yelling and two quick reports. A medium-caliber handgun, I thought. Not Buck’s big .45. And then I felt more than heard something or someone tumble onto the deck just on the other side of the wall and the sound of something metal skittering across the boards. I was standing, the generator inside was humming, the air conditioning clacked on, the computer indicator lights started popping on, glowing red and green. I took a step toward the window that showed damage from Buck and his crew’s attempts last night to get in but then flinched at the sound of another shot. This time it was the .45 and it repeated itself twice more and there was another thud that vibrated the floorboards. I crouched down in exasperation. There was carnage of some form going on ten feet away from me that I couldn’t see, could only hear, but I knew instinctively that its outcome was going to determine my fate and Sherry’s.
Again there was silence and I was afraid to move but then I remembered the open hatch in the corner and sneaked to it, my ear to its edge, hoping to hear, to get some clue what the hell was happening outside. Taking a chance, I moved my head into the opening, but the sunlight outside was still so new that very little penetrated under the raised decking and I could see little more than a black shimmer on the top of the water. When I strained, I heard nothing but a high-pitched keening like an animal in deep pain.
“Max?”
Sherry was trying to get up. She had somehow risen to a sitting position on the bed but her leg was locked straight and I needed to move to her, but hesitated. She tried to swing her damaged leg over the side and was just about to fall so I made a decision. I flipped the metal port closed with a clang and rushed to her side, catching her before she tumbled to the floor.
“Was that music that I heard, Max?” she said in a delirious whisper. “Are we home, Max?”
While the skinny peckerwood with the missing leg writhed around on the deck, Harmon let go of the boy and stepped over to kick the big .45 over the edge and into the swamp. He then looked down at the man who now had his stump of a knee in both hands and was kind of spinning on one hip like one of those break dancers on TV, though they didn’t leave a smear of blood behind when they did it. He stepped over to his partner, who appeared to have lost part of the side of his head. Harmon had seen dead men before and you didn’t have to take a goddamn pulse to tell. He did not mean to be callous. He and Squires had been through a lot together. But after what had been nearly a lifetime of war and violence, Harmon’s nature was to care only about family. Squires was not family. He picked up the big man’s Mk23, checked the load, and then realized, hell, he hadn’t even taken his own Colt out of his pocket yet. He took two more steps and looked down at the kid who had come sliding around the corner yelling, “Marrcussss!” until Squires shot him. The kid’s skin was already going pale. Chest wounds will do that. Harmon shook his head. Neither of these boys was older than his kids, sitting in their dorm rooms at Notre Dame, probably having a party while the campus got it together to enjoy the weekend.
He avoided the blood pool and went back to the older hick, who was now emitting a high keening sound of serious pain. Harmon thought for a minute about what the guy had said about unarmed police officers being locked inside the shack. Why the hell would he make something like that up? Then he thought about the idiot claim that there were drugs inside. The company didn’t deal in drugs. They dealt in oil, which was much more lucrative, though sometimes the way they obtained it and bargained for it and set prices for it wasn’t any more legal than the way drug suppliers did the same thing. In fact, Harmon had been working the company angle on this trip since the minute he’d gotten off the phone with Crandall. No doubt this place was clandestine as hell. Harmon knew enough about the business to understand the company was always looking for supply. They had ways of studying deep rock formations, ways of setting off subterranean explosions and then measuring and tracking the echo effects and movement of sound waves to tell them where the oil and natural gas deposits were. That kind of shit went on all the time all over the world. It’s just that in most of this particular part of the world, in an environmentally designated part of the Everglades, such exploration was illegal as hell. That’s why you need security to check out a lonely outpost after a hurricane. That’s why you would be ordered to check its infrastructure and report if it had been seen or uncovered by anyone. He stood and looked across the deck. That’s why you clean up after yourself.
The older peckerwood was still crying when Harmon heard the clank of metal on metal. It seemed to come from under him and he felt the vibration in his shoes. Was that a door? Was it proof that this asshole who had just killed his partner was telling the truth? Were there more men inside?
Harmon stood still for a moment, listening, assessing. He couldn’t divide his concentration now. He was alone. You focus on one situation at a time and if you can eliminate a distraction, that’s what you do.
With no more thought than that, Harmon stepped forward and shot the older man with the blown-off leg through the back of the head with Squires’s pistol. The end of the annoying whimpering. The fingerless boy took it easier. He was still wrapped up around his disfigured hand when Harmon put a round into his ear hole. Those chores done, he carefully walked around to the entrance of the cabin, noted the crowbar blade under the door, and used a single blast from the shotgun to blow away a six-inch hole around the metal tip. The hinges creaked as the door swung free and he entered at a crouch, weapon at the ready. No one greeted him. The place smelled of jerky and antiseptic, sweat and wet wood. One bed was partially disassembled on the opposite wall. A cooler and some trash were over in the corner. Sunlight was leaking through a rough opening in the roof, the damage he had seen from the air. Someone might have dropped through it, but there was nothing near it to indicate a man could have climbed unaided back out. There was no place to hide.
On the western wall he studied the door to the adjoining room. The red light was glowing on the electronic lock, and in all the confusion, he’d forgotten where he left the remote switch. He noted the damage around the door frame where attempts had been made to break in, unsuccessfully. The company was hiding its secrets well. Harmon tried the latch. Then he actually knocked.
“Hello?” he called out at the door, and even he realized how stupid he sounded. “Is anyone in there? This is the DEA, federal officers. Is anyone alive in there?”
I was still at Sherry’s side, easing her back onto the bed, repeating to her, “It’s OK, baby. It’s OK. We’re almost out of here, Sherry. We’re almost home.”
Her eyes were open but the way they were twitching in her head, the irises never stopping long enough to absorb the light, made me wonder what she was seeing or what those images were telling her. I didn’t think the pain was even registering anymore. She’d forgotten the leg, I thought. Now she was struggling with another demon and the only thing keeping her from it was her own internal strength.
Two more small-caliber gunshots sounded after I’d clapped the porthole door closed and both made me flinch. Then I heard the roar of the shotgun next door. But who was firing. Buck? Wayne? Was Marcus coming to pay me back for taking his fingers?
When I heard someone twisting the knob on the door, I pulled my knife and moved to the hinges. They’d have to come through here. I might wound one; everything else would fall from there. My face was close to the metal when I heard a stranger’s voice identify himself as a DEA agent.
“Is anyone alive in there?”
I let him wonder while I tried to sort out the possibilities. This place was obviously not a drug storage bin. Buck’s dreams were just that, a small-time thief’s dream of a big score. So why the hell would DEA be out here two days after a hurricane? It might have been a good flush technique, but I wasn’t going for it.
“Do you know Jim Born, the agent-in-charge for the Broward office?” I said, loud enough for him to hear it. There was a hesitation on the other side of the door.
“Yeah. But I just transferred in from Virginia. Look, you need to come out there with your hands raised, OK?” the voice said, exasperated. “If you’re armed, you need to throw your weapons out first. Understand?
Jim Born was an FDLE agent I’d been introduced to by Sherry. He hadn’t worked for DEA in several years.
“Fuck you,” I said. “There’s an officer from the Broward sheriff’s office in here so why don’t
you
come in
here
with your hands up and toss the shotgun and the handgun in first.” I was guessing the weapons based on the last sounds I’d heard. It might throw the guy, wondering how I knew.
Would some of Buck’s shithead friends have joined him on their merry looting party, maybe even started a shootout to cut down on the number of shares in the proceeds? That’d be a lot of homicide for a little profit. Or was this another group altogether? I didn’t have time to wait the guy out. Sherry was dying next to me. He didn’t know that. But I wasn’t taking the chance of having him come through the door with backup behind him. I’d be outflanked again. So I worked out logistics, coveted the high ground, and took a gamble. If it was someone with the ability to help us, friendly or not, I’d have to take the chance.
“You already know you can’t get through these windows. People have been trying to chop into them all night.
“And you probably also know there’s one other entrance. The escape hatch through the floor in here. So here’s the deal. You go below. I open the hatch. You show me some kind of identification. I let you come up.”
There was silence. A whispered discussion? A plan being prepared? I was flying blind but if I minimized the space, made it impossible to be rushed by bodies and force, I might at least be able to put more information together than I could through a door. I was hoping this guy was cagey enough to be thinking the same thing.
“Yeah, OK,” the voice said. “The surveillance intel shows that hatch. Open it and I’ll toss my badge up.”
I listened as intently as I could, heard one set of solid footsteps move away. The sound of the air conditioner drowned out anything once the voice moved to the outside. I got up, found the switch, and turned the machine off. I had not registered the coolness in the room until then. The chill in my skin had started with the first sound of gunfire and had stayed. I now moved to the hatch and yanked it open so I could at least hear or maybe see the ruffle of the water when one or three men sloshed under the decking. When I peered in over the edge there was already a telltale swirl, some kind of eddy on the dark surface that seemed to have been pushed up from the bottom. Then I heard the slosh of someone lowering themselves into the swamp.
“OK. Where’s this hatch?” The man’s voice echoed up from the porthole.
“West side. In between the last two stringers,” I said. There was more movement on the surface, expanding arcs of water like rings moving away from the plunk of a rock.
“Look. Tell me your name, friend. Let’s make this easier,” the voice said, loud now as if he was already in the room, his tone booming from the space between water and wood like it was coming from a wet basement.