Deadline (62 page)

Sutter glanced across the room.

“What do you say, Charlie? Should we flip to see who does the honors?”

Charlie didn’t look happy with this arrangement. Apparently he assumed the job would be his. Sutter reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a quarter.

“Call it.” The quarter flipped over and over in the air, as if in slow motion. “Heads” Charlie called anxiously, clearly concerned he might lose. The quarter landed on the old, beat up, oil-cloth covered table, bouncing twice and awkwardly tripping over a big crease.

Sutter swept up the coin before Charlie could even see it. “Heads it is.” Sutter shook his head. “Charlie always wins the toss.”

Jake had the impression Sutter always made Charlie the winner—maybe because Charlie enjoyed this part of his work, or maybe so in case of a conviction, Sutter would only be an accomplice. That way Sutter might spend even less time away from his work or his retirement home.

Charlie drew his .44 Magnum, the barrel looking to Jake as wide as a cannon. He wondered why no gun had been drawn earlier, then realized they didn’t consider him a serious threat. The gun fit comfortably in Charlie’s right hand, as if it had spent a great deal of time there. He waved it toward the door. For the first time Jake could remember, Charlie smiled so broadly he could see his teeth.

“Time to take a walk, Woods.”

Jake knew he was probably going to die, and in a strange way felt he was ready to die for the first time in his life, yet not ready, because he now had a stronger reason for living than he’d ever known. If he did die, he was determined it wouldn’t be without a fight.

“See ya, boys. Don’t be gone too long now,” Sutter chuckled, walking toward the table and loosening his tie like he deserved to kick back after pulling off a major coup.

Jake knew there was no reason for a shooter to take him any further from the cabin than to avoid a mess some visitor was likely to see. And no doubt about it, the .44 would make a real mess. Jake had to make his move soon, somewhere between stepping out of Sutter’s range of sight and getting maybe thirty feet from the house. Charlie might toy with him first, and he might not. He couldn’t count on it, and even if he did, the first blow or shot would likely cripple him. He decided the moment he stepped out the door would be the moment of greatest surprise.

As Jake stepped out under the threshold, he looked back suddenly toward Sutter, successfully shifting Charlie’s eyes back also. Sutter was taking his first big suck on a fresh wine cooler. At the moment Charlie’s eyes left him, Jake swung his left arm up at the porch light, knocking it loose and shattering the bulb. The explosion of light was followed by intense blackness. Jake knew his only hope was that Charlie would be unable to see in the sudden dark long enough for him to get a lead into the trees.

Charlie didn’t wait more than a second to start shooting. He shot blindly into the black, seeing nothing but the image of the light bulb burned into his retinas. The sound of the .44 was deafening, especially the first two shots, fired while Jake was within ten feet. Charlie swore and yelled, and if he’d been able to see Jake, could easily have killed him. Had he been quiet he could have heard Jake running close alongside the house. But quiet Charlie was too angry to be still the one time he most needed to be.

The path most natural for an escapee to run—straight from the house toward the cars or the close edge of the woods—was riddled with gunshots and flying dirt clods. The getaway path’s logic was exactly what kept Jake from choosing it. Instead he ran laterally, pressed up against the side of the cabin.

By now Jake was beyond the edge of the house and running into increasingly thick trees. He slowed down enough not to hurt himself as he brushed off one tree and then the next, his hands and face breaking off the dead, brittle, quarter-inch branches of the trees, most of them Douglas firs.

He heard Sutter yell “Shut up,” and stopped in his tracks, just a moment too late. A few twigs broke under his feet. Two shots glanced by him, one to his right, the other making a dull thud two feet to his left. Quickly he stepped behind the nearest fir tree, closing his eyes tight to accelerate their adjustment to the dark.

His opponents had two distinct advantages over him. There were two of them; and they had guns. On the other hand, there were lots of trees for cover; and they would have to find him. There were eleven hours of darkness ahead, and the ones who best used the darkness would win this battle. The next minute, Jake surmised, was critical, a minute in which they were still by the front of the house with the lights from the inside retarding their night eyes. He was closing his or squinting and looking away from the house to cultivate his advantage.

He could hear Sutter and Charlie arguing and knew they weren’t listening for noise to shoot at. He moved slowly back from the tree and kept it squarely between him and the cabin. He backed into the next tree and stepped behind it, then repeated his backward motion. He tested the ground as he walked, seeking out the spongy, moss-covered soil, trying to avoid the crack of brittle branches and leaves. He looked into the darkness, willing his eyes to see more. He saw dimly, then stooped low and felt two pieces of dead wood, each about twelve inches long and an inch thick. The more he looked at them the more they took on shapes. It came back to him from Vietnam. You can see much better in the dark than you think, but you have to orient yourself to the subtle hues of the night. It’s an art more than a science, an art he once knew well, and now tried to regain.

He was now ninety feet from the house, seventy feet into the woods. He supposed his enemies to be on the edge of that circle of soft light emanating from the cabin. He figured his eyes were adjusted at least a minute ahead of theirs. Straining to make sure he didn’t hit overhanging limbs, he threw one of the pieces of wood about twenty feet, poising the other in ready position. As he’d hoped, the moment it hit the ground, a gun fired at it, and at that very moment, trusting the sound of the Magnum had desensitized their ears, Jake quickly moved back several feet the opposite direction. Even as he did so he threw the other piece, this time higher and farther along the same plane, so it would sound like he was moving the opposite way. Again the wood hit, this time both men fired at the sound, and again he moved backward several feet more.

The window of opportunity for such a bold effort was largely gone now. If they kept moving away from the house, soon they’d be seeing almost as well as he could. They might catch sight of his arm throwing the wood, or see the trajectory of the wood and fire not at its landing but at its launching. He could hear them rushing toward where they’d fired. He heard them talking and swearing. They supposed they had wounded him. They knew he was unarmed and that they should get him while he was close, while they still had their advantage.

He kicked himself for not buying another gun to keep in the car and for going into the cabin unarmed. But he’d never repaired the Browning, his other handgun, and you didn’t just haul your hunting rifle around in the trunk. Not that he could get to it now anyway. Besides, who would have thought it? These were supposed to be the good guys. How easily they’d deceived him. He had less confidence than ever in his ability to discern what was true.

What was his next move? From hunting and fishing he knew this area better than his pursuers, and the darkness favored the hunted more than the hunters. He’d almost certainly get away from them. But no. By the time he emerged some place miles away where he could call the police, Sutter and Mayhew would be long gone, never to reappear. He felt certain of it. One might show up in Miami, the other in Chicago. Or they’d stay around town and finish him off. More likely, someone else would be hired to take him out, and they’d get a nice telegram in Miami telling them he’d bit it. It might just look like another accident. And as Doc’s accident took Finney’s life, Jake’s could take Carly’s or Little Finn’s or anybody’s. He wasn’t going to let that happen. As they chased after him now, they’d think his only goal would be escape. They wouldn’t expect him to choose to face them rather than run. That might provide the element of surprise he needed.

Were they lying when they said they didn’t kill his friends? Certainly they’d killed other people’s friends. For the moment he chose to believe they were lying, that they had killed his friends too. While his instinct for self-preservation was strong, the thought of revenge for his friends—revenge on these arrogant phonies who had fooled him so completely—energized him to a new level. It was like being in Vietnam again, but this time he had something personal against the enemy.

He knew Victor Charlie might think he was serving his country, might have wondered about what was right. Not this Charlie. And not Sutter. They were serving themselves and the ruthless men they worked for. No one had drafted them. They’d volunteered for this noxious duty and happily made a career of it. They knew what was right. They just chose to violate it. They joked about right and wrong, made a mockery of justice. Maybe Jake had helped this “associate” of theirs with his columns against capital punishment. They wouldn’t be so lucky. They might not live to face trial. Then no one could get them off.

Jake found a dense, gnarly piece of hardwood that could serve as a club. He would pick up a new and better weapon every time he found it, abandoning the old unless he could carry both. Jake smelled something he’d forgotten had so distinct an odor. It was the smell of mud, and not far away.

He would find it now and take on his next advantage. He would blend into the darkness. And soon, very soon, it wouldn’t just be Charlie hunting Jake. Jake would be hunting Charlie. And he would kill him, or die trying.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

J
ake moved stealthily, now a hundred yards from the cabin. His pursuers still tracked him on the line of the wood he had thrown, leaving them now maybe sixty yards from him.

His nose led him down a mossy slope to a low spot that had become a sink hole. It was a bed of dark mud. He rubbed the soft cool camouflage over his clothes and face and arms. He applied it smoothly, over every inch of his body, to be sure it was uniform, that none of the worn white bleach marks of his jeans surfaced.

His white Nikes were mud polished now, but he had to watch them. When they scraped against a twig, a white glow showed through, all the more conspicuous in the darkness. He wished now he hadn’t dressed so casual for work. His brown loafers or black dress shoes would blend much better into the darkness. Still, the tennis shoes were ideal for moving. As long as they didn’t show up and get him killed.

Jake rested, sitting, getting his breathing under control. He felt as though he was in that Asian jungle again, but this time too cold rather than too hot. He tried to think of Sutter and Mayhew in subhuman terms, a technique that made war easier. That’s why they’d called the enemy dinks, slopes, and zipperheads. It was hardest to take a human life when you acknowledged it was human. You might pause and think, hesitate just a moment, and in the hesitation be killed. Mayhew and Sutter were vermin, scum, trash that needed to be disposed of. And he was the garbage man, the exterminator. He could see himself choking the life out of them, getting hold of their guns and blowing their brains out. He could do it. He
would
do it. He’d have to.

Jake noticed that what he’d thought was a moonless night really wasn’t. The clouds were thick, but he could see the sliver of a moon threatening to pierce them. It was already low over the western sky. He looked forward to it going down. Moonlight always favored the guys with the guns. He needed the full dark of night to execute his plan.

He was surprised how easily he could distinguish not only objects but shades of light and darkness. It was like a black and white television screen—there was no color, but there was contrast.

Jake studied the terrain. This whole area was muddy, showing footprints much more clearly than the mossy turf that left only slight foot impressions, or the floor litter of leaves and twigs that left no discernible tracks at all, unless you were Daniel Boone, and Sutter and Mayhew weren’t. From an eight-inch length of wood, just over an inch thick, he now fashioned a sort of dagger, sharpening it as best he could on a tapered rock. He would carry this tucked in his belt, the club in his right hand.

Suddenly he saw two flashlights coming at him from the house. The ground was wet enough Sutter and Charlie could easily see Jakes tracks going along the house and into the woods. They’d realize he’d never been where they were shooting. They’d know they’d been lured off the track, that Jake was farther out this direction. The tracks would vary from deep and obvious, to shallow, to nonexistent. Good news for a man who wanted to escape. A problem for him, since he needed to get them to this muddy area to execute his plan. He’d have to lure them here.

The two flashlight beams indicated the men were still traveling side by side, working their way his direction, finding an occasional footprint. It was slow going for them.

Jake refused to look directly at the flashlights as they moved slowly in expanding circles, Sutter and Charlie studying the ground for the next track. If they caught him in their beam he was dead. But there was a flip side. If he stayed outside those beams, he would see them much better than they could see him.

They were now forty yards away, looking behind trees big enough to obscure him, then stopping to listen. Jake practiced his reach to the bulky hilt of the rough dagger blade stuffed in his belt. He swung his makeshift club in the darkness to get used to its feel. It made a soft swoosh, like a sword, the sound accentuated by the darkness. If it hit its target, he imagined, it wouldn’t make the smooth, cutting sound of a blade piercing skin, but the dull thud of a bludgeon crunching bone.

A twig snapped under Jake’s feet. The men stood still and the flashlights turned his way, with only a too-thin young fir directly between him and them. The lights were about to shine directly on him when Jake heard a louder noise some distance away.

The flashlights moved in unison away from where he stood, and he quickly ducked behind a larger tree, just in time to watch two flashlight beams catch a pair of frightened eyes in the darkness. Five rounds of ammo exploded, three from a .44 Magnum, thunderously loud and made all the louder by the tranquil quiet of the dark.

The deer fell lifeless, dead before it hit the ground, innocent yet brutally condemned. It had died that he might live. Yet he still could die—and would, if he made the slightest mistake again.

While his enemies went to check out the deer, Jake walked another five feet away from them to a Douglas fir near the muddy clearing, its lowest branches twenty feet above the ground. He scraped his feet against the spongy carpet, quietly digging it up and leaving footprints in the soil underneath. These tracks would be obvious to Charlie and Sutter. Then, walking as softly as he could on clumps of moss and fallen needles, he worked his way to a different tree, a hemlock he’d carefully chosen.

The hemlock, at the very edge of the clearing, had been exposed to sunlight. Unlike the large firs that dominated this forest, it had strong limbs beginning six feet from the ground, allowing him an easy climb up. He could see that about thirty feet up, its branches barely intermingled with the Douglas fir he’d tromped around.

He picked up a heavy stick and stuck one end down the back of his pants. With his dagger in his belt and his club wedged in the front left side of his pants, he was loaded down, but his hands were free.

While Sutter and Charlie worked their way back from the deer to where they’d last seen his tracks, Jake scurried up the hemlock. At about thirty feet up, he edged his way out one thick branch and over to the fir’s adjoining branches. Then he climbed down to the fir’s lowest branches, positioning himself directly over the most obvious tracks he’d made. Then, when his enemies were standing still maybe seventy feet away, he took out the stick he’d stuck down the back of his pants and heaved it to the ground.

He heard the crackling and the thud he’d hoped for, and so had they. The .44 fired again. They moved rapidly, the two flashlights quickly closing in until they were just a few feet away. The two men weren’t talking, and he disciplined himself not to widen his eyes for a better look. They came right under the tree where Jake awaited them.

They were looking around now, checking out the torn turf and the muddy footprints, just as he’d hoped. He planned to fall right on one of them while reaching out to strike the other with his club. But something was wrong. This wasn’t two men side by side, each carrying a flashlight. It was one man, Sutter, holding a flashlight in each hand.

He’d underestimated them. Charlie must be holding back in case Jake attacked Sutter. Then Charlie would get the easy kill.

Sutter stopped now, studying the footprints, failing to see where they went from there. He pointed both lights to the ground, while Charlie hung back, somewhere in the darkness. If Sutter pointed one of his lights up to search the tree above him, Charlie would have an easy target. But there was no reason to. It would never occur to him to search branches twenty feet up an unclimbable tree. At least, that’s what Jake counted on.

Sutter had been beneath him several seconds, first kneeling, now standing again. Jake couldn’t expect to have another chance like this. He’d have to improvise. He heaved his trusty club nearly forty feet behind Sutter, hoping it would also fall behind Charlie, the next best thing to striking him in the head. Then he quickly pulled out his dagger and slid off the limb. As he fell, he heard a shot and hoped Charlie was shooting at the sound of the club, not at the shape now falling toward Sutter.

As a diving osprey might view a fish in the water below, Jake focused in on Sutter in the fleeting moment of the fall. Just before impact, Sutter pointed the flashlights and looked expectantly back to the gun fire, perhaps believing Charlie had finished the hunt.

A sudden move by Sutter and Jake would have fallen to the ground like a sky-diver with a defective parachute. But he froze, and Jake landed with his full weight on Sutter’s neck and shoulders, wrapping his arms around him as he fell. Sutter’s body folded under Jake’s weight. He heard the sickening sound of bones crunching as he pounded him into the ground, Sutter breaking Jake’s fall at a terrible price to himself.

Jake’s first act on the ground was to turn off one flashlight and heave the other away. He saw it land, blink out, then flicker. He reached into Sutter’s jacket to get his gun, but it wasn’t there. He frantically frisked him, unsure if Charlie would be misled by the thrown flashlight or would zero in on Jake at the bottom of the tree. He couldn’t find a gun, and he was running out of time.

Sutter was no longer in this fight, but he wasn’t completely unconscious. His soft moaning would draw Charlie to him, flashlight or not. Jake thought of taking the dagger and burying it in Suiter’s chest, but the weapon wasn’t sharp enough, and something restrained him from the impulse. Jake took the remaining flashlight, a long-handled metal type, like a night watchman’s, and cracked it hard across Sutter’s skull. The moaning stopped.

Jake moved away quickly. The only thing that saved him from a spate of .44s was the darkness and Charlie’s uncertainty as to which sounds were coming from Sutter and which from Jake. He didn’t think Charlie would relish explaining to his superiors how he killed his own man trying to get the other.

Jake stood behind the widest tree only twenty-five feet from Sutter and assessed his situation. He’d lost his club, gained a flashlight, and taken out half the enemy. He was still at a disadvantage, but now he had the luxury of focusing on only one enemy. That never happened in Vietnam. As long as you were outside your camp you never had an accurate count of the enemy. There could always be one more lurking in the shadows, ready to take you out the moment you thought you’d won. Jake finally had only one enemy to deal with.

His eyes were still burning, as if someone had taken a flash picture. He couldn’t keep himself from having them wide open as he was falling, and he’d seen too much flashlight close up. Jake saw a figure slowly materialize on the back side of the sputtering flashlight. Charlie’s gun was extended in the cold steady way of the professional. In the flickering glow, Charlie presented a clear profile. It would have been his last, Jake thought, if only he’d been able to find Sutter’s gun.

Charlie picked up the light and started pointing it around. Jake hid sideways behind his twenty-inch fir. There was no room for error. He’d have given his retirement funds for just three more inches.

The shaft of light kept flickering eerily in Charlie’s hand. The bad contact from Jake’s throw gave the impression the flashlight was trying to decide which side it would serve in the conflict. For a moment it worked perfectly again. It slowly swept a fifty-foot semicircle, came to Jake’s tree, and stopped. The sole light in this forest was focused directly on his tree, only thirty feet from where Charlie stood.

Jake sensed this might be it, that Charlie was seeing the edge of his mud-encrusted jacket, or that the climb and scuffle had made all sorts of scrapes on his white shoes and a part of them was showing at the bottom of the tree. He couldn’t lower his eyes to look lest the slightest movement give him away.

Then the light moved on again, with an air of uncertainty, flickering for a moment, to the soft curses of its holder. Now it was pointed at the ground, near Charlie’s feet. While he closed his eyes again to court the night vision, Jake imagined Charlie’s light shining on the pathetic pile of flesh and broken bone that was his partner.

He heard the whisper. “Michael.” There was no pretense out here anymore. Even if these two got away, at least he had a couple of first names to hand to Ollie, if that was worth anything. But it wasn’t enough. He didn’t want their names. He wanted them. He had to take them out.

Charlie let loose a cocky insulting laugh and spoke to Jake as if he knew right where he was. “You stupid idiot. You didn’t even get his gun. It was right here in his belt!”

His belt! If only he’d had a second longer to look.

“You’re a coward, Woods. Come on out and fight like a man.”

There was something ironic about being called a coward by a man who thirty minutes ago had led you out of a cabin unarmed to put a bullet through your head.

“You’re never going to make it, Woods. Come out and face me now or I raise the stakes. I know where your daughter lives. You probably don’t care if I kill your ex-wife, but I bet you don’t want me to kill your daughter, do you? That’s right, I followed you to their apartment one night. It’s on Elm, across from the 7-Eleven. Second floor, number 219. It’s not more than twenty minutes from here.”

He paused to let the revelation sink in. It had its desired effect. Jake was suddenly frightened to the bone.

“Think about it, Woods. There’s no phone in the cabin, probably no phone anywhere for miles. Think you can run and get a cop there before I kill your daughter? I bet I could stop for a Slurpee, rob that 7-Eleven, play a few video games, and still take her out an hour before the cops got there. Maybe I’ll drop by that retard’s house and blow him away too. I don’t think he got a good look at me, but you can’t be too careful. Yeah, I better take ’em both out. Maybe the retard first, then the girl. Or maybe I’ll flip to see which one goes first. A hundred to one you can’t stop me, Woods. But first, a little clean-up.”

Daring to peek around the tree, Jake could see Charlie, flashlight on the ground, pull something white out of his coat pocket. He jerked his head back and winced as he heard the shot, not as loud as a .44, followed immediately by another. For a moment he’d assumed they were aimed at him, at a protruding sleeve or pant-leg or shoe.