The Nature of the Beast (7 page)
The other half of the company security team was pretending to sweep the floor in a little seating alcove across from Charlie Craig’s room.
Still locked together, Jackson and Karen stepped inside the room.
Blood pounded in his ears; his breathing became shallow. He walked to the edge of the hospital bed and looked down at his father. He’d steeled himself for this moment but somehow was still not ready for the sight of his father, shriveled, shrunken, spotted like a fawn with mouth full of chiseled yellow teeth, the tubes and the bags and the army of machines blinking like an arcade.
Karen rescued him. “His mind just stopped working,” she said sadly, as if feeling the need to justify her decision.
“What do his doctors say?”
“They don’t come right out and say it, but between the lines… they think we should pull the plug, not leave him like this.” Her eyes swept his face like searchlights.
Jackson Craig nodded.
“You’ll know what’s right. I know you will,” Karen said.
He looked his sister in the eye. “I hope so,” he said.
“He’s running out of money,” she said. Anticipating her brother’s outrage, she explained, “He spent it. The house, the insurance, Medicare, Social Security.” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, “ she said. “Either way, it’s just about gone. Another couple of months and it’s on us.”
Jackson Craig rested a hand in the middle of her back and looked around, as if for the first time. Again she read his mind. “Six grand and change a month,” she said.
He whistled. “Quite a bite.”
She nodded gravely. “No kidding,” she said.
__
The Craig guy.
The Craig guy.
Just like the newspaper. There he was.
The man with the jacket under his arm stepped behind a prickly bush with big red flowers and waited for the final act to play out, but Craig and his sister wouldn
’
t act their parts.
They just stood off to one side of the front door, arm in arm, gabbing at one another for the longest time.
Yadda yadda yadda yadda.
Patience.
Patience. Gotta get close. Allow for velocity reduction from the silencer.
Gotta wait for them to come out into the street.
Take them there.
Wait, wait.
Forty yards.
Gotta be forty yards.
The front door of the place wavered in the harsh glare and then began to open in an erratic series of fits and starts.
With one arm Craig pulled his sister deeper into their alcove, allowing an elderly couple to shoulder their way out of the building and totter toward a green and white taxi waiting in the circular driveway.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait. Wait.
And then finally Craig and the sister woman were coming.
Still yakking.
Yaka yaka.
They stopped, walked out onto the grass and talked some more.
He reached inside the rolled up coat, snapped off the safety and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. Sweat rolled in streams down over his forehead, threatening to get in his eyes.
He wiped it away with his free hand and started hustling up the sidewalk.
Forty yards.
Forty yards.
Half a block away when the fat bitch in the flowered dress stepped out of the parked car.
She held one hand behind her back as she circled the front of the convertible and strolled directly into his path.
“
Excuse me, sir,
”
she said.
He didn
’
t hesitate.
He shot her twice.
The dull sound of the report was swallowed by the silencer.
He stepped over her twitching body and then angled sharply across the street.
Craig and his sister were touchy touchy on the lawn.
Soon it would be over.
Forty yards.
Forty yards.
Gilbert was perfecting his delivery, aiming for a spot somewhere between the insipid sincerity of Mr. Rogers and the Nerd Boy zeal of Bill Nye the Science Guy, trying to be up-beat and informative while doing everything he could to keep his building anxiety from leaking out onto his children.
“It’s a natural artesian spring.” He said the words as if he’d been waiting all his life to show them a genuine artesian spring. “Feel how cool the floor is.”
“It’s a freakin cave,” Becky said.
“A thousand feet below us this big underground stream runs into a stone wall. It forces itself upward through the rock until it makes its own hard rock tube. That’s how you get a spring way up here instead of down on the valley floor where it would normally run. Makes the cabin totally self-contained. Everything we need is…”
“This is sooooo bogus,” Becky whined. She stood in the middle of the small dug-out, making certain no part of what Gilbert like to call her ‘alienation suit’ touched any part of this black pit of death her father had dragged her a half mile uphill to see.
“The Piaute Indians found it ,” Gilbert said. “They used it for water and to store supplies for their annual migration south in the Fall.”
“Let’s migrate the hell...”
“Language,” Gilbert snapped.
“Heck…I was going to say ‘heck,’ “Becky claimed.
As happened so often these days, Gilbert found himself being challenged by his daughter. Her eyes dared him to claim she meant something else. Gilbert didn’t rise to the bait. He kept an enthusiastic smile plastered on his face and picked up the large blue duffle bag. “Let’s get these wildlife cameras up,” Gilbert said.
“Take a picture of a grizzly bear,” Michael shouted.
“This is sooooooo dumb,” Becky said.
Without warning, the lawn sprouted sprinklers. A hissing mist began to soak their shoes, forcing them to tiptoe back up onto the flagstone walkway, where they brushed at the tiny beads of the water, taking their time, as if neither of them wanted to say goodbye.
“Where’d you park,” Jackson Craig asked finally.
Karen straightened up, swiveled her head and then pointed east. “Coupla blocks that way. Over on Eldorado.”
He stepped around her and took her by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your car.”
Karen shook her head. “You don’t have to…” she began.
Suddenly, the unmistakable slap of shoes on pavement rose above the sound of the hissing water. Craig stiffened. Movement in his peripheral vision pulled his attention toward the nearest intersection, where a young woman was dodging cars and sprinting in their direction, crossing the four way stop at full gallop, reaching for something as she ran. Pointing. Shouting something he couldn’t make out. Instinctively, Jackson Craig reached for his weapon as the woman hurdled a curbside flower bed and rocketed in their direction.
He moved quickly, stepping between Karen and the sprinting woman, pushing his sister to the ground with one hand while bringing his weapon to bear with the other. As he thumbed the safety off, her voice tore the air like a chainsaw.
“Craaaaaaiiiig,” the woman running screamed. Pointing again.
Craig snapped a look in that direction. Just in time to see what appeared to be a homeless guy drop something thick and red onto the sidewalk. In time to see the wicked looking Ingram dangling from the end of his arm.
His blood began to eddy in his veins as he threw himself to the ground, covering his sister’s body with his own. Karen began to scream. The running woman got off a shot in the gunman’s direction before diving for the lawn in the half second before the Ingram filled the air with buzzing chunks of molten metal.
The young woman did a barrel-roll across the carefully tended lawn, finding shelter behind a raised flower bed. Hardly a second passed before she propped herself into the prone position and began firing at the guy with the MAC10. Craig raised his own automatic just as a burst from the Ingram exploded the plate glass front of the Pasadena Oaks Care Center. He ducked his head, covering his cowering sister as it rained glass. Bells began to ring. Glass continued to cascade. In and around the building, three separate alarms were sounding simultaneously. Shouts of fear and panic could be heard above the clanging mechanical melee. Beneath him, Karen was shaking uncontrollably. “Easy. Easy,” he whispered.
The guy with the machine pistol had ducked from view, disappearing between the solid line of parked cars on the far side of the street. Craig kept his weapon trained on the spot where he’d last seen the shooter, sweeping his eyes back and forth over the area, hoping to pick up any movement, a muzzle flash, a shadow…anything.
And then without warning a second burst of automatic weapon fire blazed from directly across the street. The shooter was moving their way. A steady stream of automatic weapon fire churned the beauty bark above the young woman’s head, sending shards of bark spinning upward into the loam laden air. Craig watched as she covered her head and tried to push herself down through the soil as the ground around her erupted.
“Stay down,” Craig shouted.
The shooter skittered across the sidewalk in a lumbering crouch, firing intermittently as he moved along, before finally disappearing around the stone garden wall that comprised the suburban street corner.
They waited. Nothing happened. More glass tinkled to the ground behind Jackson Craig. The young woman was lying on her back now. Reloading and looking to Jackson Craig for instructions. A siren whooped and wailed.
Jackson Craig was speaking into his radio. “Shots fired.” He recited the address. “Federal Officers under fire,” he said. “Suspect armed with an automatic weapon. I repeat…suspect armed with automatic weapon.”
As if on cue, the gunman poked the Ingram around the corner and let go another burst. Craig could see half a sweaty face as it peeked around the field-stone corner.
He snapped off a shot. The edge of the wall burst to powder. Craig thought he heard the gunman yelp but couldn’t be certain.
Several new sirens had joined the others. All of them moving in their direction.
“Stay down,” Craig shouted again.
She nodded her understanding and then rolled back over into firing position.
“Special Agent Craig,” a hoarse voice sounded from within the building.
The floor-sweeping half of the Secret Service surveillance team poked his head through the shattered doorway. He lay on his belly, eyes the size of pie plates.
“My partner…” he stammered.
Craig remembered the surveillance car along the sidewalk. Remembered the woman in the blue flowered dress. He rose to one knee and lifted Karen from the ground. “Get her out of harm’s way,” he said.
The agent reached out and took her in his arms.
“I’ll look after your partner,” Craig promised.
The guy didn’t argue. He bundled Karen tighter and crawled back through the shattered doorway. The alarms and sirens and bells and whistles had reached a screeching crescendo, making it nearly impossible to think clearly.
“Hey,” Jackson Craig shouted above the din.
The young woman looked back over her shoulder.
“We may have an officer down out there,” he shouted.
She nodded that she heard him.
“Cover me,” he instructed. “Whatever you do, don’t let that son-of-a-bitch come back around that corner with that Ingram.”
“Not a chance,” she said, settling herself deeper into the bark.
Intuitively, Craig knew he could trust her with his back. He took a deep breath and sprinted for the nearest parked car.
__
He dabbed at his cheek with a dirty paper napkin as he hurried along the sidewalk.
He fought the overwhelming impulse to crawl into the bushes and hide and instead kept on walking, using his fingernail to pick small pieces of imbedded rock from the wound.
All these gates and walls and pools and dogs...he
’
d never seen any place like this before.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere…
Approaching sirens wailed from every direction, preventing him from hearing the roar of the bus until it was right in his back pocket.
He
forced a smile onto his face and waved at the driver, who shook his head and pointed at the bus stop up the street.
He turned and ran, covering the distance to the bus kiosk before the roar overtook him.
The bus squeaked to a halt.
The door hissed open.
He stepped on board.
“
Two dollars,
”
the driver said closing the door.
He pulled out a five and tried to hand it to the driver.
The driver shook his head.
“
Exact change,
”
he said wearily.
He patted himself down but failed to find anything smaller than the five.
“
I…I don
’
t,
”
he stammered.
An angry voice rose from the back of the bus.
“
Let
’
s go dawg,
”
somebody yelled.
“
Get your white ass in a motherfucking seat.
”
He kept looking for small change.
In the back of the bus, one of a trio of Latinos rose to his feet.
“
We ain
’
t got all day, Holmes,
”
he shouted.
Twenty years driving for METRO taught the driver that this was just the kind of thing that got out of hand in a heartbeat, so he goosed the gas just enough to flop the kid back into his seat, smiled inwardly and wheeled the bus out into the street.