Safe and Sound (17 page)

“Okay,” Powell breathed. “Here we go.” He sliced through the wire.

Nothing happened for a moment. They all stood frozen, as if they couldn’t believe they were alive. Ben spoke up. “Can I take this thing off now?”

Riggio laughed. “Yeah, kid,” he said almost merrily. “You can take it off.” Powell was reaching for the vest when there was a sudden sharp noise. Marie uttered a quick, cutoff scream. Keller jumped as if he’d been hit with an electrical shock. The noise came again, an abrupt bang from far away, down the slope.

The sound of gunshots.

***

DeGroot straightened up. He took the pistol he had just used on the wounded FBI agent and tucked it in the back of his waistband. He moved through the smoke, among the bodies, looking for more who might be alive. He found no one.

He knew his time was running short. The FBI would be regrouping and coming back up after him, assuming there were any left in the vicinity. He glanced at his watch; only a few more hours of darkness.

He began surveying the remaining vehicles. His own rental was a total loss, of course. The poor unsuspecting sod whose credit information and identity he had appropriated to make the rental was about to get a nasty surprise on his next Visa bill.

DeGroot’s glance fell on the Jeep that Powell and Riggio had brought. Perfect. And there might be some useful information to be had. He walked toward it. As he
did, he stumbled over an object lying in the gravel. He looked down. A child’s toy frog. He kicked it out of his way and climbed into the Jeep. He took one last glance around the peaceful overlook he had so effectively turned into a killing zone and smiled as he started the engine.

***

“Sonofabitch,” Riggio said. “He got past us. Slipped right through the line.”

“You shouldn’t use bad words,” Ben said severely.

“Hush, baby,” Marie said, scooping him up in her arms. Ben wrapped his arms around her, clinging to her like an infant.

“So he’s down there, and we’re up here,” Powell said.

“He won’t stick around,” Riggio predicted. “Somebody down there hollered for help when the fireworks started. Guaranteed. He won’t wait around to get caught again.”

“Who the f—” Keller choked the curse back. “Who is that guy?”

“I’ll explain later,” Powell said. “We’ve gotta move.”

“Move where?” Keller insisted. “I’m not going anywhere with anyone until you tell me what’s going on. One minute I’m looking for a missing kid, and the next, some psycho has wired a five-year-old with explosives.”

“Jack,” Marie said, “He’s right. We need to get out of here. I want to go home.”

“Me, too,” Ben said.

“Can we at least get off the top of this mountain?” Powell suggested. “I feel like I’ve got a set of crosshairs painted on my forehead standing out here.”

“Okay,” Keller relented. He walked over and picked up the shotgun.

“I got point this time,” Riggio said. “Bobby, you trail. Keller, you stay in the middle and look after the woman and the boy.” As they fell into line, Keller noticed Marie staggering slightly under Ben’s weight. “Hey, big boy,” she grunted with the effort, “You’re getting too big for Mommy to carry. Can you walk?” Ben’s answer was to draw his arms and legs tighter around Marie’s torso and whimper.

“Here,” Keller said, “Take the shotgun. I’ll carry him.”

Marie looked at him for a moment. Ben turned his head to look at Keller as well. Then Ben slowly relaxed his grip on his mother and slid to the ground. He and Marie walked over together. Keller handed the shotgun to Marie over Ben’s head, then bent down to scoop the boy up in his arms.

“You won’t drop me, will you?” Ben said softly.

Marie answered before Keller could respond. “No,” she said. “No, he won’t drop you.” She looked back at Keller. “I was wrong to doubt you, Jack,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Uh…folks?” Powell spoke up. “We need to be going.”

“Lead on,” Marie said.

“You know how to use that shotgun, ma’am?” Riggio said pointedly.

Keller and Marie looked at one another for a moment before both of them started chuckling. This time it was Keller who answered. “Yeah,” he said, “you could say that.”

“I mean,” Riggio insisted, “you ever shot anybody?”

The chuckling stopped. “Yeah,” Marie said, her face expressionless. “I have.”

“Marie used to be a cop,” Keller said.

“Ah,” Riggio said, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t…”

“We can debate unconscious sexism later,” Marie said. “Let’s move.”

They worked their way back down the trail. As they reached the stream where the bodies of the FBI men still lay, Keller pulled Ben’s head against his shoulder. “Don’t look, Ben,” he urged. The small fires were dying down, sputtering fitfully. The horrible miasma of burned flesh still hung in the air.

Burning oh God they’re burning I’ve got to help them the whole goddamn world’s on fire…

“Hey,” Ben said, “you’re shaking.”

Keller’s mind snapped back to the present. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just some bad memories.”

“Are you scared?” Ben said.

Scared shitless, Keller thought, but he didn’t say it.

“You can’t be scared.” Ben sounded alarmed.

“Shh,” Keller said. “It’s okay to be scared. Only really stupid or really crazy people don’t get scared. But I’m not going to drop you. And I’m not going to let anybody hurt you, okay?”

Ben was silent for a moment. “That mean guy shot my dad,” he said in a small voice. “I think he…I think he might have killed my dad.” The boy’s small body began to shake with sobs. Keller held him tighter, not knowing what to say. After a few minutes, Ben spoke again, into Keller’s ear. “You get bad guys, right? It’s what you do, right?”

Keller could see it coming. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“I want you to get the bad guy that shot my dad, okay?”.

“We’ll talk about it later, Ben,” Keller said.

“You’ll get him,” Ben said, his voice suddenly drowsy. “You’ll get him.” By the time they reached the bottom of the trail, he was asleep.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DeGroot drove with one hand and flipped the Jeep’s glove box open with the other. He rummaged through the papers inside, his eyes flicking back and forth between the road and the dimly lighted glove box. The sudden turns and switchbacks in the road quickly made that idea unworkable. He had run into the opposite lane several times and almost crashed the guardrails at least twice before he gave up, fuming. He was going to need a place to go over the inside of the Jeep and gather what information there was to be gained. Then, he supposed, he needed to get rid of the Jeep. The FBI had probably sent in a description of the vehicle and a license plate number. He needed a quiet place, then a vehicle. In the cone of his headlights, he saw one of the wooden roadside signs that pointed the tourists toward the Parkway’s facilities. This one had a simple carved relief of a tent and the legend “1 mi.” A campsite, then. This had possibilities.

He took the indicated exit off the paved road and immediately found himself crunching over a narrow gravel path. A few more turns and he began to see more wooden signs, directing campers to various spaces. The Jeep’s headlights flashed off the chrome of vehicles in some of the spaces. A few dying campfires glowed dull orange in the dark. In the dim shadows at the edge of the light, he could barely make out the humped shapes of tents. There was no one up, no one stirring.

After passing a few of the tents, DeGroot found what he was looking for: an occupied site away from the others, with a Toyota 4 × 4 bakkie in the parking space. Perfect.

He killed the lights, then the engine. He waited a few moments, letting his eyes get used to the darkness. He watched the tent closely, waiting for signs that someone had noticed his arrival and was coming out of the tent to investigate. Nothing. He picked up the pistol he had taken off the FBI man and looked around the inside of the Jeep.

His eyes lighted on a bright yellow pillow in the back, where the little girl must have sat. He picked it up and noted with bemusement that the pillow was painted like a giant yellow sponge. A sponge with a very imbecilic-looking face. DeGroot looked at it for a moment and shook his head. Then slowly, gently, he opened the Jeep door. It creaked slightly as he slid out of the vehicle.

When he was completely out, he stopped and waited.

Nothing.

Somewhere, far off, he heard the call of a whippoorwill. He took the pistol in one hand and tucked the yellow pillow under his arm. As silently as he had moved through the forest before, he advanced on the tent.

It was a small tent, made for no more than two people. A couple of fishing rods were propped up on the picnic table by the fire pit. He’d be sure to take those with him. Tomorrow morning, he doubted that anyone would notice that the vehicle by the campsite wasn’t the one that had been there before. And no one would notice that the campers weren’t coming out of the tent. If anyone bothered to notice, they’d assume the campers had gone fishing, at least until the bodies started to get ripe. And by then, he’d be far away. He’d change vehicles again in a day or so, just to be safe.

He crouched down and fumbled for the zippered door on the tent. As his fingers located it, a horrible sound split the air. It sounded like the coughing roar of a chainsaw starting up, but there was a living quality to it, like the grunting respiration of some awful beast. It came from no more than two feet in front of DeGroot and he whipped the gun up to focus on the source of the awful din. Then he realized that it was and he almost laughed out loud with relief. DeGroot had spent enough nights in enough barracks and encampments to recognize the sound of snoring. This, he had to admit, was one of the more impressive examples he’d heard. He used the next great ripping inhalation to cover the sound of opening the zippered tent flap the rest of the way. There was a stirring on the right side of the tent and a vague mumble of complaint in the dark. DeGroot put the yellow pillow over the barrel of the pistol. He made out the shapes of two figures in sleeping bags. Another huge snore split the night, coming from the left-hand bag.

DeGroot leaned over the figure in the other bag. It was a pretty dark-haired girl, about twenty. She stirred restlessly as her tent mate gave out with the biggest snore yet. Her eyes popped open just as DeGroot pulled the trigger and put a bullet through the pillow and between her eyes. The snorer stirred restlessly at the sound. He didn’t wake up, though, and after DeGroot put a bullet in his temple, using the girl’s blood-soaked pillow to muffle the shot, he never would.

Afterward, he carefully zipped the tent flap back up. He took a flashlight that he had found in the tent and walked back to the Jeep. He checked his watch and glanced up through the trees. Daylight was coming on and he had a feeling that campers woke early. Some of them, at least.

Back in the Jeep, he leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He suddenly realized how tired he was. He wanted this mess done. But in this condition, he’d be prone to stupid mistakes. He didn’t know where his former partners would go. And he was still outnumbered. He couldn’t forget that. DeGroot was not a man to play long odds. Powell and Riggio knew he was coming after them now.

And there was the woman. DeGroot remembered the look in her eyes as she had demanded to know what he had done with her boy. A fighter. She’d be a handful. Like the lawyer. DeGroot had enjoyed the challenge of breaking that one. He found himself drifting, indulging himself in thoughts of how he’d go about breaking the woman, the sorts of pressure that could be brought to bear on a strong young body like that. Women were much stronger in many ways. They had to be able to bear the rigors of childbirth. They were naturally built to take more pain…

He sat up with a start. He realized, with a vague sense of unease, that he had become aroused. This was ridiculous. He was a professional. He didn’t take plea sure in what he did, beyond the satisfaction of a job well done. He did it because he knew how. It was a usable skill and profitable. He thought back to his session with the lawyer. A shiver of disgust ran through him as he remembered. He had felt the same thing then. He had even had an erection.

“Gaah,” he said out loud in disgust. “I’ve gone bossies, for sure. I need to get out of this fucking business.” But to do that was going to require capital. And while he had saved prudently from his previous employments, he knew it wasn’t enough to last him the rest of what he intended to be a long and peaceful and boring life. He might even go home and take up farming.

He reached inside his shirt and found the cord of a lanyard around his neck. He pulled on the cord and pulled out the object hanging on the lanyard. It was a slim plastic cylinder, about half the length of a ballpoint pen. It was colored a dull silver. DeGroot held it up before his face and looked at it. There’s the key, he thought. Or half of it, at least. He studied it for a moment, then sighed and slid it inside his shirt. He returned to his contemplation of the odds. Powell. Riggio. The woman. He had heard the blond man call her Marie. The blond man was Keller. The one who had threatened to gouge his eye out. He felt a flash of anger at that. I’ll see you again, boet, he promised. And when I do, you’ll learn that when you threaten to put a man’s eye out, you do it, and worse after. Unless you want him to come back and do worse to you. Oh yes, you’ll learn that, and I’ll take my time teaching you. It was a different feeling than he had had thinking about the women, and it didn’t raise in him any feeling of unease or disgust. In his profession, revenge was just good business. It kept other potential enemies respectful.