“My mistake,” he said, “was that I told the little punk what we had.”
Chad promptly demanded a higher percentage of the jackpot by virtue of his having led Dwayne to the crash site. Their argument turned violent.
“He picked up a rock.”
“So you capped him three times in the chest.”
“Self-defense.”
Hauling forty pounds of uranium down a snowy mountain single-handedly proved no easy task. Fortunately for Dwayne, he’d been a Boy Scout. He found a couple of stiff pine branches lying on the ground and made a travois like the Plains Indians once used, throwing his coat over the poles to serve as a makeshift cargo platform, then dragging the canister down to his van.
“Piece of cake when you got half a brain,” he said.
“And finding a buyer?”
“Easy as turning on my computer.”
He’d posted anonymous “uranium for sale” notices on a handful of anti-Semitic websites. Within a day, he said, he was in active negotiations with three prospective suitors. One group openly boasted in their e-mails of wanting to build a bomb big enough to wipe out Tel Aviv. They offered $100,000, to be wired directly to the bank account of Patriot Flow Professionals, Dwayne’s fledgling plumbing supply company.
Arrangements were made for the buyers to drive from Los Angeles and to pick up the uranium in Santa Maria. Everything was going smoothly, right on track, Dwayne said, until I balked at completing the delivery.
“Is that when you killed Savannah?”
I couldn’t believe how dispassionately I asked him the question.
“She killed herself,” Dwayne said. “She wouldn’t shut up. She kept trying to get away. I warned her. ‘One more time, and you’re gonna regret it.’ But she wouldn’t listen. That woman, she had a mouth on her, and if there’s one thing I can’t stomach…” He turned and looked over at Marlene who was standing near the van, muffling her sobs.
“You were never going to let her go, were you?”
He grinned.
“Remember that morning in Tahoe? When you first came walking up to me in the snow, all freaked out cuz she was gone, and you showed me her picture? Remember that?”
“I remember.”
“She was right there, man, right in the back of my van! I was inside, taping her up just before you showed up. So close and yet so far, right? Is that a fuckin’ hoot?”
Lying there, facedown, handcuffed, listening to him laugh, the killer of Savannah Carlisle and Chad Lovejoy, something cold and primitive came over me, an instinctive, reptilian-like response that prods one to move without thinking. I rolled, shifting my weight, and forcefully kicked the back of his right knee with my left foot.
He buckled and collapsed to the concrete floor.
Again I rolled, this time trying to scissors kick him in the face, but he rolled, too, and I failed to connect.
He got to his knees and drew his pistol.
Then he pulled the trigger.
TWENTY-FIVE
The round skipped off the hangar floor, kicking up shards of concrete between my feet, and punctured the van’s left front tire. The hiss of air escaping reminded me of the sound Kiddiot made when he was dissatisfied, which was often.
How Dwayne missed putting a bullet in me from can’t-miss range wasn’t a function of poor marksmanship. It was a function of his beleaguered wife picking up a T-handled airplane tow bar and swinging it at the side of his head like a baseball bat just as he fired.
The pistol skittered under the van as he pitched forward onto the concrete. Blood trickled out of his right ear.
He lay still.
Marlene unclipped a fat key ring dangling from one of her husband’s belt loops and singled out a short, thin handcuff key.
“I’m just so sorry,” she said, struggling to free my wrists. “Dear lord in heaven, please forgive me, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen. I just wanted to make a little money and make him happy so he’d stop beating me for once and blaming me for everything. That’s all, just a little money. I never wanted anybody to get hurt. Please, you have to believe me.”
“It’s all right, Marlene. We’ll sort everything out later.”
She was weeping, having trouble unlocking the handcuffs.
While Dwayne was starting to come to.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Marlene said, fumbling with the key.
Try as she might, she couldn’t persuade the key to fit.
Dwayne was groaning, beginning to move his legs.
“Get the gun, Marlene.”
“What?”
“The gun. It’s under the van. Forget about me. Get the gun.”
She scuttled over, got down on all fours and peered under the van.
Dwayne was starting to move his arms.
Marlene got down on her stomach and strained to snag the pistol. It lay inches beyond her fingertips. She tried to wriggle under the van to extend her reach, but she was simply too rotund to fit.
“I… just… can’t… get it.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Dwayne was rubbing his head as he came to, still trying to sit up, growing more agitated by the second. “Marlene, what the hell’re you doing?”
As he gazed groggily at his wife, distracted, I rolled to my knees and stood in one fluid motion, my wrists still handcuffed behind me, while Dwayne scraped himself off the concrete.
“You son of a bitch,” he said, now looking over at me, “I should’ve shot you dead the second you walked in here.”
Ignoring his wife as she stood, Dwayne staggered to his van and pulled out a bolt-action hunting rifle equipped with a web sling and recoil pad.
I rammed into him with my shoulder. He slammed face-first into the van’s running board.
Only this time, he didn’t relinquish the grip on his weapon.
Marlene was already running, halfway out the door.
I was right behind her.
The bullet tore through the leather of my jacket sleeve, missing flesh by an inch at most. As the booming echo of the gunshot receded, I heard the click-clack, click-clack of a spent shell being ejected and a fresh round being chambered. Before Dwayne could get off another shot, though, I’d exited the hangar.
Any sense of safety lasted about two seconds. Dwayne emerged almost immediately and began chasing us.
I could hear an airplane, a twin-engine by the sound of it. Though I couldn’t yet see it, I knew by the sound of it that the plane was likely taxiing out for takeoff from behind the long metal hangars ahead of me and to my left.
“Where’re you going, Logan?” Dwayne yelled, bringing his rifle to bear. “It’s over!”
Try running for your life alongside an out-of-shape, middle-aged woman, with your hands bound behind your back and a homicidal maniac on your heels. It’s not easy.
At Alpha, my buddy Buzz enjoyed reciting prose to younger operators when instructing them on ways to more effectively kill bad guys. Mother Goose rhymes were among his favorites:
With sudden clarity, I realized that the one viable remedy to the evil on my tail lay in that airplane taxiing behind the hangar ahead of me.
I heard a gunshot. Then Marlene went down.
“He shot me,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “I can’t believe it. The son of a bitch shot me.”
A blood blossom spread across the back of her left calf where the bullet had entered, and the front of her shin where it exited. Maybe Dwayne was a bad shot, or maybe the sun was in his eyes. I didn’t know. What I did know, though, was that his next bullet would be mine.