The Coptic Secret (8 page)

The sheer helplessness was maddening. The closet where he kept the double-barrel shotgun he used to frighten off rather than harm deer marauding the summer vegetable garden was too far away. He'd never make it unharmed through the fusillade. Gurt's weapon was no doubt in her purse, useless in the bedroom.

It was quiet, the calm of a hurricane's eye, Lang was sure. The only sound was the terrified sobs of the little boy clinging to Lang as though he might fall into the abyss if he let go.

The stillness was more frightening than the storm.

Lang peeled the little fingers loose and handed the trembling child to Gurt. "Try to keep him quiet. I'm going to try to get to the shotgun before they charge the house."

She took her son, jiggling him gently. "It is not likely you will make it."

Gurt the optimist.

Lang was already on his way, crawling commando fashion across a floor littered with a forest of sharp objects. "What else do you suggest, fighting them off with spoons?"

Lang stood and almost fell the last few feet, snatched open the door and was jamming shells into the twin barrels when the bullet-ridden door slammed open.

In a single motion, he swiveled and dropped into a squat, groaning at the pain the sudden movement caused.

He saw only a blur in the doorway framed by the night, a smudge of camo shirt and pants, white face and a weapon.

He pulled one trigger.

The image staggered backward as he was pulling the second.

The twin blasts rebounded from the enclosure of walls and set his ears ringing and his eyes watering from the sting of cordite.

The open threshold was empty. The riddled door moaned as it swung drunkenly on its remaining hinge.

Lang jammed two more shells into place, dragging his cast as he stumbled toward Gurt and Manfred.

Suddenly, the entire outside seemed to light up with a wavering orange glow.

Lang didn't have to guess what was coming. Molotov cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline, fumes compressed by gas-soaked rags for fuses. They would explode like napalm upon impact just as they had when used
sixty
years ago by Russian partisans against German tanks.

And this cabin was a lot more flammable than any Panzer.

Lang glanced around.

He saw no options.

VII.

Lamar County, Georgia

Five Minutes Earlier

Larry Henderson considered himself a farmer just like his daddy and his daddy's daddy.

In Grandpa's day, cotton had been the crop. He had come home from fighting the Germans to find a combination of boll weevil and long-fibered Indian cotton grown in Texas had pretty much put him out of business. Subsequent efforts at peanuts, soybeans and even a peach orchard had provided a subsistence living, mostly through government subsidies.

Then the BIG CORPORATIONS (Larry always thought of them in capital letters) had bought up thousands of acres on which to not plant anything and the bulk of the county's allotment shares went to them. Gave new meaning to the lines from that old song, "He don' plant 'taters n' he don' plant cotton and them that does is soon forgotten."

By the time Daddy come along, Grandpa had had to adapt. He and Daddy planted corn. Good, sweet corn that fermented in the crick that ran through the property. Boil off a gallon or two and Daddy always said it was the best white in middle Georgia, well aged if the customer got there late in the day.

Daddy sold enough to buy a secondhand Ford every other year to make the weekly run to Barnesville, Hawkinsville and all those other 'villes where the thirst for good white lightnin' was never quenched.

By the time Daddy passed away, the coalition of Baptist preachers and bootleggers wasn't as strong as it used to be and the county went wet. Folks stopped drinking white. Instead, they bought bourbon, vodka, scotch. Government whiskey with the stamp on the bottle's cap.

The corn business was as dead as cotton and it was time to adapt again.

That's when Larry learned about marijuana, that five-leaved devil's weed folks up in Atlanta paid good money for.

The crick nourished the plants the same as it had fermented the corn. And it didn't take half the tending to. It grew like a weed, mostly because it
was
a weed.

Problem was the trouble what went with it. In Grandpa and Daddy's day, the local sheriff would bust up a still every once in a while, particularly around election time. Oh, he'd let word slip out a day or so in advance so everybody could go hide in the woods and nobody got hurt. He even arrested Daddy a couple of times, before he let him go. After all, being jailed for making good whiskey wasn't a shame, not like breaking a real law.

But marijuana was different.

Folks did
get
hurt.

There were the dealers in Atlanta, the ones Larry sold wholesale to. Their big shiny cars might as well have a sign on them telling the world what they did for a living. He never could see their eyes, because of the sunglasses they wore day or night. How was a man supposed to do business when he couldn't see the other man's eyes?

Larry'd heard stories about how these men would kill someone over a few ounces. He hoped they were just rumors but something in his gut told him not.

And the damn DEA would come down from Atlanta and raise hell. Those stupid McCracken boys, down toward Macon, actually shot a federal man.

Then the shit really hit the fan.

The federals shot one of the McCrackens and confiscated their farm.

How the hell did the government expect a man to make an honest living with his land gone?

Fact
is,
he couldn't. That's why the McCrackens took to raiding other folks' farms, stealing their whole crop of marijuana. They didn't much care who got hurt in the process, either.

Larry didn't much blame the McCrackens as he did the federals for fooling around in what should have been a local law enforcement issue, one that could've been handled just like it was in Daddy's day.

No matter, the McCrackens were why Larry kept Daddy's old Remington pump twelve gauge loaded and handy. The blueing had worn
off
the barrel long ago and the butt plate been screwed back on so many times it tended to wobble. But the bore didn't have a pit in it, shiny and smooth as the day it came from the Sears store over to Barnsville, and constant cleaning kept the ejection mechanism working like new.

Tonight he was glad he'd kept the thing in order.

Momma had been watching her reality shows on the dish TV (there weren't enough subscribers out here to warrant cable). He'd been in the kitchen fiddling with a cranky carburetor from one of the two small tractors and tasting a little bit of the white he still made for home use when from somewhere on the other side of the tree line that marked the crick, somebody was shooting up a storm. A gunshot in the night usually meant someone was headlighting deer to put meat on the table, but what Larry heard sounded like a war.

It would have been none of his business, if he hadn't set out a hundred or so new seedlings near where all the ruckus was coming from, enough crop to make a year's mortgage payments to the bank.

Or maybe buy Mamma something nice.

He shoved the pint bottle in a hip pocket, picked up the Remington, scooped a handful of OO shot from the box, and stuffed them in a pocket.

Mamma was standing by the door. "You gotta go?"

Mamma, Darleen was her name, had dropped out of the tenth grade to marry Larry when she got pregnant with Little Larry. That had been over twenty-five years ago. Now Little Larry was dead two years, died in some godforsaken place Larry'd never heard of in Iraq. Little Darleen was away at Georgia Southern College, the
first
Henderson to graduate from high school, let alone go to college.

All because of the marijuana that Larry didn't intend to let somebody else, McCrackens or otherwise, fuck with.

Larry nodded. "Prolly jes' some drunk, shootin' an' raisin' hell."

Neither of them believed that for a minute.

Mamma stepped aside, brushing. Larry's cheek with her lips. "You be careful, y'hear?"

He couldn't miss the anxiety in her eyes. "I promise."

Neither believed that, either.

Defending your land was the most important thing a man could do for his family. That's why Great-Great- Grandpa Henderson was staring at the Yankee cannon when he had borrowed a pencil to scribble his name on a scrap of paper and pin it to the back of his homespun shirt before he charged up a hill in Pennsylvania, knowing he'd likely not see Georgia's red clay again. The same reason Grandpa lost two toes to frostbite standing his ground in the snow at a little Belgian town named Bastogne and Daddy had spent two tours in a stinking Southeast Asian jungle.

There hadn't been a war for Larry to go to before he was too old but he would've gone had there been. A man defended his land, either on it or to prevent the other fella from getting to it.

Outside, the katydids continued their argument and a couple bullfrogs down to the pond were trying to get laid by the sound of the baritone calls. Larry glanced at the Ford Galaxie parked in the yard, decided he could get where he wanted to go quicker and quieter on foot and set out at a trot toward the sound of the shots.

A second or two later, he heard footsteps beside him.

Without turning his head, he whispered, "Jerranto, there ain't no need f'you to get inta this."

Jerranto had just shown up lookin' for work a year back at a time Larry definitely needed help with the crop. Not like he could advertise in the paper for field hands to grow what was flourishing down by the crick. The fact Jerranto didn't have a work permit or other papers made it unlikely he'd go to the law.

Jerranto was dark skinned with a doe-eyed wife carrying a baby. Larry neither knew nor cared where they'd come from, though the Mexican accent was a pretty strong clue. He'd given them the old sharecropper's cabin on the other side of the pond and the man worked hard or harder than Larry. He asked no questions, tended to his own business and was happy when Larry gave him part of the cash he got from the folks up in Atlanta.

Larry glanced over his shoulder. The sliver of a moon gave enough light to see a white T-shirt and gleam from the old hammer-firing double-barrel twelve gauge Larry had given him to shoot squirrels and the occasional deer when meat got scarce.

"No need a'tall," Larry repeated. "The federals catch you an' you're goin' back. Plus, Maria's about to have another baby."

There was also enough light to see the flash of white teeth that was an answer. Jerranto spoke enough English to get by but when he just wasn't going to listen, he gave that smile.

The two men could see only the outline of the trees, but the woods here were as familiar as their own bedrooms. They splashed across the crick and came to the edge of the tree line just as the shooting finally stopped.

"Shit!" Larry grunted.

Jerranto called the name of one of those saints he rattled off whenever he was surprised.

VIII.

Lamar County, Georgia

Lang was sliding along the wall toward the remains of the door, using his shotgun as a crutch. He knew the weapon would be no defense against firebombs, but he couldn't stand idle while his son wept with fear.

Instead of the anticipated crash of glass and whoosh of flames, shooting started again, this time the unmistakable boom of shotguns. He peeked through the gap between door and frame and saw the figure of a man sprawled in a puddle of hissing flames.

There was a muzzle flash from his left directed not at the house but at the woods to the right. It was answered both left and right by a barrage of smooth bore replies.

There was a scream and the sound of an engine cranking. Its lights out, some form of SUV crossed in front of the cabin and headed for the twin ruts that served as a driveway, rear end swaying as its tires fought for purchase in the loose soil. From the woods to Lang's left, a figure emerged, took deliberate aim at the vehicle and fired. The SUV swerved drunkenly and smashed into a pine tree.

Then there was silence, a quiet exaggerated by what had gone before. Lang could hear only the hiss of a shattered radiator and Manfred's terrified moans.

Lang took the opportunity to look back into what had been the living/dining room, his anxiety overcoming curiosity. "Manfred OK?"

"He's fine," Gurt answered. "And thanks for asking about me."

By the guttering flames that had been intended for the cabin, Lang saw the figure, a man, calmly walk to the wreck of the SUV, open the driver's door and snatch out a limp form, which fell into a heap.

At the same time, another man, this one considerably

smaller than the first, became visible approaching from the right.

Lang raised his shotgun. "I wouldn't come any closer if I were you."

There was a snort that possibly could have been a laugh and the first man made a display of leaning his weapon against a tree and raising his hands. "And I'd say 'thank you' was I you."