“Clamp your hands on either side of your leg,” I yelled over the engines of the approaching airplane that was still obscured by the hangar. “You’re gonna be OK, Marlene.”
Her face blanched, shock beginning to set in.
Dwayne was fewer than twenty meters away, jogging quickly toward us, clutching his rifle with two hands in front of his chest at the port arms position, from which he could readily fire from the shoulder or hip. Running would’ve been pointless. There was no place to hide.
I turned and faced him.
He slowed to a walk and approached me warily, clearly wondering what the hell I was up to. His rifle was pointed at my chest. Then he flipped the rifle around and butt-stroked me hard in the stomach. I fell to my knees, unable to do anything at that moment, really, beyond groan in pain, while Dwayne turned his attention to his wife.
“Don’t you ever raise a hand to me again, Marlene, or so help me I’ll put you in your grave. Do you understand?”
“You shot me.”
“You had it coming.”
“Fuck you, Dwayne.”
“You don’t ever talk to me that way, Marlene. I’m your husband, goddammit.”
He raised his rifle to club her with the butt.
“There’s a way this can all go your way, Dwayne,” I yelled over the airplane engines that were growing louder by the second.
“The only way this’ll end is you dead,” he said.
I got off my knees. “You still want that uranium?”
“Yeah, right,” Dwayne sneered. “Like that’s gonna happen. You must think I’m pretty goddamn stupid.”
I stepped left. He quickly raised the rifle to his shoulder, shifting his footing, keeping the barrel trained on me.
“And you must think I’m stupid,” I said, taking another step left. “I knew what was in that canister from the start. Do you really think I would’ve given it all back, knowing how much that stuff’s worth on the black market?”
“You’re telling me you’ve still got the uranium,” Dwayne said like he didn’t believe me, his field of view never leaving his gun sights.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Another step left.
“Fine. Then where’s it at?”
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “You agree to let me go, and I’ll take you right to it. It’s all yours. Just let me go.”
He pivoted as I slowly circled him. The muzzle of his rifle was less than a foot from my face.
“I got a better idea, mate,” Dwayne said, reverting to his Crocodile Dundee alter-ego. “You tell me where the shit’s at, right now, then I’ll let you go.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your end of the deal?”
“That’s just it. You don’t.”
He was now turned away from the airplane that I knew would emerge at any second from behind the hangar.
“OK,” I said over the roar of the engines. “You got a deal. But before I tell you, I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
“How’s it feel to get what’s coming to you?”
From around the corner of the hangar, directly behind him, the nose of a twin-engine Cessna 421, white with red accent stripes, came rolling into view, loud as a freight train. Dwayne started to turn his head instinctively to the source of the deafening noise.
That’s when I rushed him.
My primary assignment when I played football at the academy was wide receiver, but I’d filled in enough at defensive back on the scout team to know how to properly tackle. You use your arms. You wrap them up low. With my wrists still handcuffed behind me, textbook technique wasn’t an option.
In truth, that was never the plan.
I slammed my shoulder into his waist, lifting him up and driving him forward — straight into the Cessna’s whirling starboard propeller. Envision a Cuisinart and a raw pot roast, pureed, with the lid off. That’s what Dwayne looked like.
Enough said.
I rolled as the wing passed over me, narrowly avoiding having my legs crushed by the right main landing gear. That I wasn’t shredded with him was, in itself, something of a miracle.
The pilot, a stocky blonde in her late twenties with those oversized aviator shades that are all the rage these days, hurriedly brought the Cessna to a stop. She shut down both engines, jumped out, her windscreen splattered with gore, and came rushing around the nose of the plane as I got to my feet. She gaped at what was left of Dwayne, bent at the waist, and vomited.
“Oh, my God.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Everything’s gonna be OK.”
Frozen with horror, she couldn’t stop staring at the killer’s shredded remains.
“What’s your name, cap’n?”
“… Hailey. It’s Hailey.”
“Hailey, I need you to call 911. Tell them we need paramedics. Think you can do that?”
“My phone’s in the plane.”
“Might be a good idea if you went and got it.”
Transfixed, she forced herself to turn away from the body and returned to the cockpit while I went to check on Marlene.
The receptionist was holding her lower leg with two bloody hands and staring blankly into space, like she’d just been through a war.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Marlene.”
Slowly, she raised her eyes to mine and thanked me. Then, softly, she began to cry.
I wished I could’ve comforted her, but my hands were still bound behind my back.
Some might wonder what it feels like, deep down, to kill another human being, especially in so gruesome a fashion. The easiest answer is that you typically rationalize your actions. You took out the garbage. Did the world a favor. Payback’s a bitch. In truth, I felt no satisfaction killing Dwayne Anderson, no sense of relief. Only exhaustion.
I sat down on the tarmac beside Marlene.
“Keep applying that pressure, Marlene. Help’s coming. Be here any minute.”
I tried not to think about Savannah and the child I would never know. The sun was out. It felt warm and good on my face. I turned my gaze to the snowcapped mountains to the south and a place called Voodoo Ridge, where my life’s journey had been changed forever. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what I’d had for breakfast that morning.
Three uniformed sheriff’s deputies were tasked with placing plastic tarps from their patrol vehicles over Dwayne Anderson’s mangled body parts, while a paramedic unit drove Marlene to South Lake Tahoe’s Barton Memorial Hospital. As the cops went about their grisly work, I rubbed circulation back into my newly unhooked wrists, courtesy of Detective Streeter and the universal handcuff key he carried in his pocket.
“We would’ve identified him eventually,” Streeter said. “You just beat us to the punch.”
I’d wanted to believe that he wasn’t merely spouting cop bluster, but there was no denying the fact he would’ve been investigating my homicide as well, had I not gotten lucky.
Woo came walking up from the hangar where the green van was parked, toting dead Dwayne’s .40-caliber Glock, bagged in a plastic Ziploc.
“Found it right where you said it would be,” Woo said.
I said nothing.
Streeter wanted me to drive with him to sheriff’s headquarters, to record chapter and verse everything that had led up to my confrontation with the man who’d killed Savannah, our baby, and Chad Lovejoy. I told him I would.
“You’ve been through hell,” he said. “We can do it later if you want.”
“Now’s as good a time as any. I need to be getting back to Rancho Bonita. My landlady misses me. Wish I could say the same for my cat.”