Killer Instincts v5 (9 page)

Jamie didn't respond. I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed or simply didn't know what to say.

Richard cleared his throat. "Y'know, maybe it's my Texan bias, but I still believe a man should never feel wrong taking the law into his own hands if he feels there isn't any other option, and blood needs to be answered with blood. So if you want to put them in the ground, you'll get no argument from me."

"All right, thank you. So where does that leave us?"

There was another awkward glance between Jamie and Richard that must have spoken volumes.

"I don't come cheap, " Richard said, "but for a hundred large, I can teach you a few things. How to shoot, how to hunt men, how to do unto others before they do unto you. Maybe I can give you the tools and training you need to get the job done right."

"Tools...you mean guns, ammo, gear?"

Richard nodded. "I have enough backchannel resources that it won't be a problem."

"Jamie took me out to shoot a handgun for the first time yesterday," I said.

Richard looked at Jamie. "How'd he do?"

"Not bad, actually. He's got a good eye and his hand will steady up with some practice. I can see him shaping up just fine after a few thousand rounds."

"Fair enough, what'd he use? Your old slab-sides?"

"Nah," Jamie replied, "broke him in on an old Smith Model 10 I've had tucked away for a while."

I noticed a narrowing of Richard's eyes. "Some notches on it?"

Jamie nodded, smiling.

Richard let out an evil-sounding chuckle. "Don't imagine that piece of iron has seen daylight in a while."

Jamie shook his head. "It's been a long time, but it ran through some round-nosed lead just fine. It was kept cleaned and oiled, action was still smooth as glass."

Richard laughed his malicious laugh again. "Quite the souvenir piece, that one."

Jamie just smiled and nodded. Whatever they were talking about, I could see they weren't going to share it with me right now.

I decided to change the subject. "So, what other resources can you provide?"

Richard turned to me again. "I might be able to put a few intelligence assets into play. Grease a few palms, hire a few tails and spotters. Benign talent that won't get in your way, make up for the fact that you're only one man and can't be everywhere at once."

"Can you trust these people?" I asked.

Richard let out a frighteningly cold laugh. "Hell, son. There's no trust involved. They know that if they cross me, they better make sure I'm in the ground, or I'll bury them myself. Besides, I pay damn well, or rather, you will. That hundred grand doesn't cover expenses."

Richard was one disturbing motherfucker, but he wasn't going to flinch at the task, that much was certain. I looked at Jamie; he looked back at me with a level gaze. I turned back to Richard and stuck my hand out over the table.

"Looks like you have yourself a new student."

Richard accepted the handshake. His hand was bony but cool, his grip strong and measured.

"Classes start when the check clears, son."

SIX

Three days after my meeting with Richard, I was flying into a tiny flyspeck on the ass-end of southern Texas known as the Terrell County Airport. I took a chartered jet from Bangor to Alexandria to San Antonio early that morning, and from there I hopped a taxi south across town to the smaller municipal airport. Richard had arranged for another quick charter flight, and within minutes of my arrival I was airborne once again, this time flying west in a twin-prop Cessna piloted by a man named Chuck, a former Air Force pilot and Vietnam vet. Although in his mid 60's, Chuck was as spry as any man half his age.

Flying in over the Terrell airport and Route 90, I saw I was going to be out in the middle of nowhere, as isolated and remote a region of the United States as you can find in 2001. We flew over a tiny knot of dilapidated buildings that Chuck informed me was Dryden. The place was a real-life ghost town, with only a handful of people maintaining a post office and a convenience store for the few ranchers and other isolated people who didn't want to drive further on to Sanderson, the county seat and a booming metropolis of 861 people. Coming from southern New England, having spent most of my life around Providence, Boston, and New York, I could barely fathom living in so isolated an environment.

Even before we touched down, I could see Richard leaning against a white Chevy Suburban parked next to the airfield, a broad-brimmed straw hat pulled down low over his eyes, wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and a white cotton shirt. What surprised me for a moment, as we taxied up next to him, was the gun belt and holster hanging from his hip, the butt of a large automatic pistol clearly evident. If Chuck thought anything of it he didn't bat an eye. The Cessna rolled to a stop a few meters away, and Richard reached up and tugged the corner of his hat in greeting. The other hand was hooked to his gun belt by a thumb resting a mere inch or two from that big automatic. Here was a man who didn't take a damn thing in this world for granted.

I climbed out of the Cessna, and Chuck helped me unload my luggage. Pack over one shoulder and duffel strap over the other, I shook Chuck's hand and thanked him for the smooth flight.

"No problem at all, son. Happy to give Richard's nephew a lift out here. Me and him go way back. You take care now, and enjoy your time away from big city life."

"Way back, eh?" I asked. "Ever work with him, you know, before he retired?"

Chuck gave me a grin as wide as the Texas panhandle. "Don't know what you're talking about, son. Besides, Richard is about as retired as an old rattlesnake. He might be a little slower with his bite, but he'll still put you down, you ain't careful."

"I'll keep it in mind, Chuck. You take care of yourself."

We shook hands again and two minutes later, Chuck's Cessna was turned around and rising back up into the west Texas sky.

"Chuck and I met several times back in the mid 70's," Richard explained. "After he got out of the Air Force. He flew spotter planes in Vietnam, buzzing the treetops and calling in air strikes, artillery, and naval gunfire while little men in black pajamas riddled his plane with AK-47s."

"That's got to take some nerve, putting yourself out there as a target while still concentrating on doing your job," I said.

"The kind of nerves that earn you the big bucks once you get out from under the thumb of Uncle Sam and start working for people who pay you what you're worth. Chuck banked himself a nice little nest egg over in Africa after the war, then came back here to live the slow life."

"Still can't keep himself out of the cockpit, though," I said.

"Man's gotta find himself ways to stay young," Richard replied.

We drove northwest along Route 90, passing through Sanderson in a matter of moments. A small, quiet throwback to the world circa twenty or thirty years ago. We turned north onto Route 285 just outside of town and followed a worn stretch of two-lane blacktop through battered-looking scrubland and rocky desert. The road followed a small river, fed from the endless number of little tributaries snaking out from between the countless low desert hills we were driving past.

After a few minutes of silence I turned to Richard. "What's with the gun? You're not exactly hiding the fact you're wearing one."

Richard didn't turn his head, he just glanced sideways at me through the corner of his eye, a small smile appearing on his lips. "Son, don't you know where you are? This is Texas. Older fellow such as myself would look out of place without a firearm on my hip. Why do you think I moved here, so many years ago? Most everyone in these parts still feels Texas should be its own sovereign nation, and in that nation, under God, the Almighty has made the right to bear arms a divine right, one that most people hold as near and dear to their hearts as that best-selling book of fiction they all love, the Bible."

Jamie had hinted at Richard's infamously flagrant atheism, but such comments didn't bother me one way or another.

"Well that's all well and good," I said, "but aside from just hanging off your belt and looking pretty, why would someone bother? This isn't exactly Tombstone."

"Oh, there's reasons. Plenty of folks around here carry them in case of snakes, or mountain lions, or in case coyotes get to close to the henhouse. Better to have a gun and not need it in those situations, than need a gun and not have it. Never mind that we're only a little distance from the border, and you never know if you're going to run into trouble. Or at least, that's what the locals think."

"Why, are the illegals violent?" I asked.

Richard laughed. "Of course not. Honest, hard-working people trying to make their lives better. But a lot of folks don't want them passing through here, harmless or not, so there's a lot of posturing. And truth be told, the two-legged coyotes they hire to get them over the border, some of them are pretty bad hombres. If they run into trouble with the border patrol and you're in between them and getting away, they'll turn you into buzzard meat sure as a skunk can stink."

"So we're that close to the border?" I asked.

Richard looked at me sideways. "Didn't you look at a map before you flew down here?"

I shrugged. "For a minute or two, I just saw we're in southern Texas."

Richard shook his head. "Not good at all, kid. You flew into unknown territory in the hands of a man you've never met before, to meet me in the middle of nowhere so we can go and drive off even further into the middle of nowhere, so you can live out here for a month?"

I didn't know what to say. "Well, you told me all the arrangements had been made. I figured you were good at this sort of thing."

Richard laughed at this. "I'm the best there is, but that doesn't mean I can't get my ticket to Dead City punched at any time. I've made more enemies than I can count, and one day someone's going to catch me in the right place at the right time and I'll be shaking Death's bony hand, wondering where my head went. What would you have done if you had shown up at that little airfield and I wasn't there?"

"I don't have a number to contact you, so I guess I'd have just hunkered down and waited."

Richard shook his head. "Tell me, why would I have been late? Ain't got anything better to do today, so I was there two hours early just to make sure if I got a flat or some other problem along the road, I'd still have time. I'll tell you now, if I am
ever
late to meet you, don't wait around like a dummy. I'm either dead in a ditch or trying my best to keep that from happening, so you do the same. Now, knowing that, if I hadn't been there, what would you have done? How much money did you bring with you?"

"Ten thousand dollars in twenties, just like you said. Two thousand on me, four in my backpack, four in the duffel, all of it well hidden."

Richard nodded. "All right, what are your options? Plane touches down, I'm not there."

I considered the problem while looking out over the rugged landscape as it passed by. "Either someone's gotten to you, or has tried to get to you. Either way, I have to write you off as a means of support. I also have to wonder if Chuck is in on the deal, as he'd be the only person other than myself who'd know where you were going to be that day."

Richard nodded again. "Good, go on."

"I don't know if I can trust Chuck, so I have to take him down quick. Knock him down with my pack or something else handy. Try to get him to talk. Regardless, I can't trust him to get me home. Assuming he's in on it, he'll probably have a gun in the plane. I'll get my hands on that."

"What next? How do you get away from the airport?" Richard asked.

"The airport attendant. I saw a truck parked over by one of those hangers as we drove by. There's probably someone around there during the day. I take the truck by gunpoint, tie up the owner in a broom closet somewhere so he won't get out any time soon, and start driving."

"Where are you going? You didn't do your job and study the territory before you got here. How are you getting back?"

I thought for a moment. "Between Chuck's plane and the truck I'll steal, someone's got to have a decent map of the area. I'll use that to figure out where I'm going next. I'll want to get back to San Antonio; it's the only territory I'm familiar with now."

Richard reached under the seat of the Suburban and handed me a battered state atlas. I flipped through it until I found where we were.

"All right, I'd avoid taking Route 90, since that's the most obvious way back and has the least traffic, meaning if someone wants to make a move on me there's less chance of witnesses. I want to be in public, so I'll drive up and hit Interstate 10, and then gun it for San Antonio. Looks like a five hour drive, six considering I've been sitting on planes all day and need to move around a little, but I could probably get back there by late tonight if I had to. Ditch the car somewhere secluded, get a taxi to the airport, and then get myself out on the next flight to wherever I can. From there I make my way back home."

Richard drove on in silence for a few moments, digesting what I'd said.

"Not bad for an amateur. Now here's the problem. You're assuming six hours on the road, then a taxi and a ticket at the airport. If you leave Chuck and that airfield attendant alive, especially if one or both of them are in on the deal, whoever went after me is going to eventually find them. Then they are going to figure out how you got away, and they'll either try to catch up with you, knowing what you're driving, or they'll just pass the information along to the police, who'll do the hard work for them. Easy enough to find you and kill you in some two-bit sheriff's station than run all over southern Texas looking to find you."

I looked at Richard. "So I'd have to kill them both?"

Richard shrugged. "It's all about weighing choices. If you figure Chuck was in on it, you'd want to punch his ticket for sure. If you think the attendant is innocent, you might not want that blood on your hands, but you also don't want him blabbing to anyone, so your best bet might be to bring him with you. Eventually you'll also want to dump the truck you took from the airport and steal another. One of the good things about these rural areas is that everyone's nice and trusting and many folks leave the keys in their cars, making a getaway swap simple. Ditch the attendant and his vehicle someplace where he won't be found for a bit, grab another car somewhere away from where you ditch the first vehicle, and maybe make a second swap further along just in case. When you're on the run, often you're not only trying to dodge your hunters, you're dodging the law as well."