Third Strike (24 page)

Then I heard the sounds of automobile engines, and I stepped around the cluster of oak brush to a spot where I could see the road and watch Zapata at the same time. A state-police cruiser came into sight, and I waved it down. Dom Agganis stepped out and came toward me as other cruisers pulled up behind his and other men stepped out, some of them in civilian garb—chinos and summer shirts hanging loose over their belts. Clearly feds in their Vineyard casual duds.

“Are you all right?” Agganis asked.

“I'm fine.”

“Any casualties?”

“A guy with a sore head. You might want a medic to look at him.”

“What happened here?”

I told him, and he nodded.

“All right,” he said. “We'll take it from here. You can start by handing over that Uzi.” He nodded back toward the cruisers. “There are guys from Washington here, and they'll want a report.”

I'd forgotten I had the Uzi. I gave it to him, along with the pistol that had belonged to the guard. “There's an armed missile in a launcher up yonder,” I said, pointing up the path. “You might want somebody who knows what he's doing to disarm it.”

“Good thought. Where's Coyne?”

I pointed west. “Deep Bottom Road. He went to check out another possible missile site. I heard what sounded like shots, and he doesn't answer his cell phone. I've got to get over there.”

“Leave that to us.” He put a big hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, and turned back to the cruiser, where Olive Otero stood with four feds. “Come on.”

When we got to them, he told everyone what I'd told him and said, “You take over here, Olive. Cuff Zapata and call an ambulance for the other guy. I'll be back.”

“I'm going with you,” I said.

“No you're not,” said one of the feds. “You're coming with us.” He showed me a grim face and a Secret Service shield.

“Fuck you,” I said, reaching for the door handle of Dom's cruiser.

“No,” said Agganis, stepping between me and the door. “Someone just tried to kill Joe Callahan, and these guys work for him. They need to know exactly what's been happening around here. You go with them.” His voice was gentle but firm. “We'll go find out what happened to Coyne.”

“I don't know who's over there,” I said, “but one of them may have the machine gun I heard.”

He waved two policemen over and told them to follow him. Then he turned the cruiser and drove away with other cops and federal agents following him.

Now it was raining a small misty rain. It had been raining for a while, but I'd barely noticed.

“Come with us, Mr. Jackson,” said a man in a summer shirt.

I hesitated, then got into a cruiser. One man drove, one sat beside him, and one sat on either side of me in the backseat. No one said much as we drove to state-police headquarters in Oak Bluffs.

Someone offered me a cigarette, but I shook my head.

I spent two hours at the station going over the events of the past few days, then going over them again, and then going over them yet again, sometimes remembering things I'd forgotten to mention before and sometimes forgetting to mention things I'd said earlier. When they finally got through with me, they seemed angry, but satisfied.

“All right,” said the chief among them. “Mike, here, will take you home now. We'll probably want to talk with you again. One thing. Don't talk with the press about this business. Let us get a handle on it first. It's a matter of national security.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, please, take me up to see what happened to Brady.”

“No. We'll take you home.”

“I'll need my truck. It's up where Brady is. My wife's car is in the garage.”

“Good. That'll make it easier for you to stay home. You can get your car tomorrow.”

“Come on,” said Mike. “Your wife is probably worrying about you.”

She probably was, and I didn't want her to. I worry her enough under normal circumstances.

“All right,” I said.

Mike drove me home in silence and left the house the same way.

The rain shower had passed over, and I was sitting on the balcony with a drink when Gloria Alvarez's car came into the yard and deposited Zee and the kids and a ton of beach stuff in the yard before driving away again. They'd had a long day on the sand.

“I'll be up as soon as I shower,” called Zee, waving at me.

After a while she came up, glass in hand. She was bright and clean and shiny, but her eyes were full of care. She gave me a kiss, then sat down and raised her glass. “Consider yourself clinked and tell me about your day, if you think I should know about it. Where's Brady?”

I wanted to tell her everything, and I did. When I was through, Zee shook her head and slid close to me. She put her arm around me. “You could have been killed. You scare me. Now I'm worried about Brady.”

“So am I. The plane landed, so Callahan is all right, but I can't remember whether I heard the shots before or after that.”

“Dom should tell us what happened. He shouldn't make us wait.”

I could imagine several reasons why he might not want to tell us anything. None of them was good.

Zee felt the tension in my body and tightened her arm around my waist. “I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone would want to harm Joe Callahan. He's such a good man.”

Being good never saved anyone, as the saints and martyrs can attest. “It's over now,” I said. “Callahan's safe.”

“But is Brady safe?” Zee had tears in her eyes. “If he isn't hurt, they won't charge him with anything, will they?”

I thought that, the law being what it is, Brady, and I, too, for that matter, could be charged with some crime or other, but I wasn't worried about that. I was worried about that flurry of shots that I'd heard.

“I imagine Brady's fine,” I lied. I felt I was on the lip of the Void, ready to fall.

We sat close together in the fading evening light and looked out over the gray waters of Nantucket Sound where the sailboats were easing toward harbor under the low dark sky. In spite of the sultry summer heat, the earth seemed without form, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

What had become of Brady?

I
was looking straight into the gaping muzzle of Harry Doyle's missile launcher.

Instinctively I ducked sideways and dropped into a crouch. In the same motion, I braced the Uzi against my hip and pointed it at him. “Drop that thing, Harry. Do it now.”

He looked directly at me, and his lip curled into a hateful smile. “Fuck you.”

Then he turned and pointed the business end of the Stinger at the sky.

Overhead, the drone of the plane materialized, grew louder, then faded, making another circle before it landed.

“Put it down,” I repeated.

Harry Doyle ignored me. He hunched his shoulder, squinted his eye, peered through the sight on his weapon, and tracked it across the sky above us like a skeet shooter swinging on a high-flying clay pigeon.

If he launched the missile in the general direction of Callahan's plane, the missile's heat-seeking guidance system would do the rest, and it would be all over.

I held the Uzi tight in both hands, held my breath, and pulled back on the trigger. The sudden burst of noise exploded in my ears.

The missile launcher fell from Doyle's shoulder onto the ground. His face and chest blossomed red. He windmilled his arms, staggered a few steps backward, then crashed into the underbrush. He twitched a couple times, then lay as still as death on the rain-soaked ground.

I let the Uzi fall from my hands. My entire body began to shiver and tremble. I tilted my head to look at the sky. The rain was cold on my face, and my mind was empty of thought or feeling.

A few minutes later, out of the wet silence, came the sudden deafening roar of a big engine, and then a jet airplane broke through the low clouds just a few hundred feet directly over my head. Its landing gear was down and its lights flashed bright colors in the rainy afternoon twilight. I watched it sink toward the slick runway of the Martha's Vineyard Airport. My fists and jaw were clenched tight as I waited for the blast and explosion of airplane and Stinger missile colliding in the air.

President Callahan's jet dropped toward the runway, touched down, bounced slightly, then slowed in a roar of backdraft and a screech of rubber-on-wet-tarmac. At the end of the runway it turned and taxied over to the terminal.

He had made it.

My entire body was a clenched fist. I didn't know how long I'd been holding my breath. I let it out in a big cathartic whoosh.

And then all the strength seeped out of me. My head felt like it wanted to lift off my neck and drift up into the sky. I let myself drop to the ground, and I sat there hugging my legs with my forehead on my knees.

I took a dozen slow, deep breaths and waited for the adrenaline overdose of the past few minutes to drain away. I was dizzy and nauseated and utterly exhausted. The rain, and the realization of what I'd just done, washed over me.

After a few minutes I forced myself to lift my head and look around.

Harry Doyle hadn't moved. He was sprawled on his back. His chest bloomed with red splotches. The Stinger missile launcher lay on the ground beside him.

I crawled over to him and pressed my fingers against his neck, searching for the pulse I knew I wouldn't find. Two of the Uzi bullets had hit him in the face—one just under the left side of his nose, the other above his right eye.

I wondered what destiny in Doyle's life had decreed that he should end it here in the rain on a scrubby-oak knoll on the southwestern side of Martha's Vineyard, a failed presidential assassin, killed in the nick of time by a wills-and-estates lawyer from Boston with an Uzi.

Callahan had made it. His plane wasn't shot down. That was the important thing.

I fished my cell phone from my pocket, pecked out the number for J.W.'s cell, hit Send, held it to my ear.

It bleated once, weakly. Then nothing.

I looked at it. The battery was dead.

Well, J.W. knew where I was. Assuming that he was all right, sooner or later he'd tell the police, and they'd come.

I had the Land Cruiser. But I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't leave the crime scene. The place where an assassin and his sentry had set up his ambush. The place where I'd given one a concussion, at least, and killed the other.

I made my way back down the path to where the sentry had been. He was still lying where I'd left him. I knelt beside him. I could see that he was breathing.

I poked his shoulder. “Are you awake?” I said.

His eyelids fluttered, but he said nothing.

I don't know how long I knelt there in the rain. My sense of time had deserted me, and I might have drifted off into some kind of postadrenaline stupor, when I heard in the distance the unmistakable
thump-thump
of helicopter blades.

A minute later the slamming of a car door jerked me upright.

The police was my first thought.

Harry Doyle's compatriots was my second thought. More men with Uzis and missiles. More assassins.

I still had Zee's Beretta in my pocket. I pulled it out and slipped behind some bushes.

Then I heard the static of a police radio and saw the strobing blue light flashing through the wet woods.

I put the Beretta back into my pocket, stepped out onto the opening, put both hands on top of my head, and shouted, “I'm Brady Coyne. I'm a friend. Don't shoot me.”

A uniformed cop came up the path. He held a police assault shotgun at his hip. He stopped when he saw me, raised his shotgun to his shoulder, and aimed it at the middle of my chest. “On the ground,” he said. “On your belly. Right now. Put your hands behind you.”

I did what he said.

Then there were two of them. The first one stood over me aiming the shotgun at my head. The other one patted my pockets, found the Beretta, took it out.

Then he grabbed my arm and hauled me onto my feet.

“Who are you?” said the cop with the shotgun. I'd never seen him before. He looked like he should still be in high school.

“My name is Brady Coyne,” I said. I pointed up the path. “There's a dead man up there. I killed him. He was going to shoot down the president's airplane.”

The two cops looked at each other. Then one of them went jogging up the path.

He came back a minute later. “There's a dead guy up there, all right,” he said to his partner. “And there's an Uzi and some kind of missile launcher, too.”

The other cop walked over to the edge of the clearing and spoke into his cell phone. Then they led me down the path and put me in the backseat of the cruiser that was parked a little way down the dirt roadway.

About ten minutes later another vehicle, this one an unmarked SUV of some kind, nosed its way up the road and pulled to a stop beside the cruiser. Dom Agganis got out of the front seat. Two men in chino pants and golf shirts stepped out of the back. They both had close-cropped hair and smooth faces and cold eyes. One was blond. The other looked Hispanic. They had broad chests and narrow waists and big biceps. FBI or Secret Service, I guessed.

They talked to the two uniformed cops for a minute. Agganis stood off to the side, apparently deferring to them. Then one of the cops opened the cruiser door, grabbed my arm, helped me out, and stood me there facing Agganis and the two guys in plain clothes.

Both of them flashed a badge at me and mumbled their names. All I caught was the title “Agent” before each name.

“You're Coyne?” said the light-haired one.

“Yes. Brady Coyne.”

“You're Jackson's pal.”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill that man?” He pointed his chin up in the direction of Harry Doyle.

“Yes.”

“Did he fire upon you?”

“No, not exactly. He—”

“Hang on a minute,” he said. He cleared his throat, told me I was being held on suspicion of murder, then recited the Miranda warning. “Do you understand?”

“I studied it in law school,” I said. “But, listen—”

“Do you understand?” he repeated.

“I understand. Yes. You're not arresting me, are you?”

“We're holding you for questioning. Obviously you are in jeopardy.”

“Obviously I did a good and necessary thing.”

“A man has been murdered,” he said.

“It wasn't murder.”

“So do you want a lawyer?”

“I am a lawyer.”

He rolled his eyes.

“I don't need a lawyer,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I ask you again. Did you shoot and kill that man?”

“I did, yes. You'd hardly call it murder, though.”

He almost smiled. “Tell me about it.”

“I don't know where to begin.”

“Begin at the beginning.”

I shrugged. “I'm not sure where the beginning is. When Larry Bucyck called me, I guess.”

“Larry Bucyck, who was murdered yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “Begin there.”

So I did. I began with Larry's phone call and concluded with our discovery of the crates that held the shoulder-mounted Stinger surface-to-air missile launchers.

“We'd heard Joe Callahan was coming to the island to mediate the strike,” I said. “We guessed those Stingers were intended to shoot down his plane. We told the Edgartown chief of police about it, showed him the circles on our map, and he went off to cover the northeastern approaches to the airport, but then the wind shifted. So J.W. and I figured we better try to cover the southwestern approaches. I left him off and came here. Whacked the guy with the Uzi on the head, snuck up on the other guy up there with the Stinger, Harry Doyle's his name, and when we heard the plane overhead, he pointed that thing up into the sky. So I shot him with the Uzi.”

When I finished my recitation, the two agents looked at me for a long minute without blinking. Then the Hispanic one turned to Agganis. “This make any sense to you?”

Agganis shrugged. “I knew about part of it. The rest of it fits, yes.”

“Okay,” said the blond agent, “except this man here killed that guy.” He turned to one of the uniformed officers. “I want you to take him to the station and hold him until we get there. We're going to have to talk to him some more.”

“I told you everything,” I said.

“You're a lawyer,” he said. “You know how it works.”

I shrugged, and they loaded me into the cruiser.

When we'd backed down to the road, the cop in the passenger seat turned around, pointed at J.W.'s old Land Cruiser that was still parked on the shoulder where I'd left it, and said, “That yours?”

“It's J.W. Jackson's. I was driving it.”

“Gimme the keys.”

I fished the keys from my pocket and handed them to him through the wire mesh that separated us. He slipped out of the cruiser, got into the Land Cruiser, and we all headed back to Edgartown.

They stuck me in an interrogation room, gave me a mug of coffee, and left me there to watch the hands on the wall clock creep around the dial. It reminded me of waiting for the end of the school day in one particularly boring last-period junior high school history class.

Finally the two agents showed up. They asked me to tell my story all over again, this time into a tape recorder. They interrupted me frequently for clarification and detail and chronology. They wanted to know everything.

I assumed some state and local cops, and some Secret Service agents, too, maybe, were watching and listening through the one-way glass.

After a while, their questions convinced me that they weren't going to prosecute me. They didn't seem very interested in what I'd done out there in the woods that afternoon. It was the assassination plot that they wanted to know about.

It was almost nine in the evening when they finally let me go. I told them I planned to head back to Boston the next day, that I'd be staying with the Jacksons that night, and gave them a card with my home and office numbers on it.

They gave me the keys to the Land Cruiser and told me it was parked in the side lot. Then they both shook my hand.

“Thank you,” said the blond agent. “Your country owes you.”

“You did good work,” said the Hispanic agent. “You and Jackson.”

“I'll be sure to tell him,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but, um, don't talk to the media about any of this, okay?”

I looked at him. “Why?”

It was his turn to look at me. “It's…sensitive.”

“You mean embarrassing?”

He gave his hand a little flip, as if to say it was obvious. “National security.”

I smiled. “I do believe in a free press.”

He opened his mouth to say something.