William Krueger - The Devil's bed

“You’ve made up your mind to kill me. It doesn’t matter what I say now or what the truth is.”

Moses considered her. “If you get down on your knees and beg for your life,” he said, “maybe I’ll grant it.”

The possibility of a way out seemed to break her anger. Bo saw her sway in her stance. Slowly she knelt and bowed her head. “Please, don’t kill me.”

“Admit that you lied. I want to hear you say it.”

“I lied,” she said in a voice gone suddenly soft.

Bo hit the lights. Moses blinked, blinded for a moment. Bo fired three times. Moses stumbled back. His weapon swung in Bo’s direction. Although the silencer deadened any report, the gun kicked in his hand, and Bo knew he was attempting to return fire. The shots went high, harmlessly drilling into the night sky. Then Moses collapsed and lay still near where the First Lady knelt.

Bo walked forward cautiously, his Sig trained on the still form of David Moses. He saw Moses’s handgun on the ground and kicked it away. The First Lady began to sob.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I…don’t think I can move.”

“Are you hit?”

“I don’t know…I don’t think so.” Her body shook as she wept.

Bo shifted the Sig to his left hand and reached out to the First Lady. “It’s all right now. It’s all over,” he said.

“Bo!” she cried.

Moses moved faster than Bo had ever seen a man move. From his prone position, he delivered a powerful kick, and Bo’s leg buckled. Even as he went down, Bo tried to bring the Sig to bear on Moses, but the man rolled quickly away. Bo hit the ground on his knees. Moses executed a knife-hand blow that deadened Bo’s arm, and the Sig dropped from his hand. In the same moment, Bo saw a flash of reflected light in Moses’s right hand. Moses whirled, and Bo felt the thrust of the knife blade in his back. Instinctively, he rammed his arm backward like a piston, hammering his elbow into Moses’s groin. He heard the man grunt in pain. Bo stumbled to his feet and turned to face the assailant. Moses lunged, leading with the knife. Bo parried with an arm bar. Although he deflected the blade from his body, he felt a deep slice across his forearm. He stepped left and delivered a kick that missed the knee joint that was its target, but nonetheless sent Moses stumbling backward. The man’s momentum carried him to the edge of the bluff. Moses tried to catch himself before he went over, balancing for an instant, arms flailing like the wings of a night bird desperate to fly. Then he plummeted. Bo staggered to the cliff edge and looked over. All he saw was the dark, unbroken canopy of the trees below, and all he heard was the rasp of his own heavy breathing.

He was growing faint. He looked down at his arm. In the illumination from the tractor lights he saw a bright red spurting, and he realized, a little distantly, that Moses’s knife had hit an artery. He was bleeding to death.

“Bo?”

The First Lady spoke behind him. He tried to answer, but all he could muster was a small grunt. He took a step away from the edge of the bluff, and his knees buckled. The First Lady knelt at his side.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

He fell against her, into her lap.

“Please,” he heard her say toward the sound of voices in the orchard. “Agent Thorsen’s badly hurt.”

Bo lay in her lap with his head turned toward the tractor. The headlights had been bright, but they didn’t seem so bright anymore. Whatever it was the First Lady was saying to him wasn’t very clear. Not even the pain was distinct. What was most real to Bo was the desire to sleep. It had been so long since he’d slept well. But now it was time. He could finally let go. His job was done.

Bo dreamed of walking through falling white. Snow, maybe. Or ashes. Behind him, his footprints disappeared as quickly as he left them. Ahead of him, the white became a gauzy curtain muting everything beyond it to vague dark shapes. He sensed that something bad was out there beyond what he could see, something to be afraid of although he couldn’t name it. If this is snow, he dreamed himself thinking, then it’s probably a wolf. If this is ashes…

He woke before he dreamed the ending to that thought, woke to a touch on his arm, in a room full of white sunlight, in a bed with snow white sheets. Nurse Maria Rivera, in an impeccably white uniform, was taking his pulse. Bo lay on his stomach.

“I thought you worked nights,” he said. He felt groggy, and his own voice sounded distant to him.

“I asked for days for a while.” She noted his heart rate on his chart.

Bo watched her, and he remembered the afternoon they spoke in her home. “It wasn’t your fault. Randy O’Meara, I mean. The man you knew as Max Ableman killed him.”

“I know. Put this under your tongue.” She stuck a digital thermometer in his mouth. When the thermometer beeped, she checked it and marked his chart.

“Do I have to be on my stomach?” Bo said.

“Not if you’re careful.” She helped him roll onto his side and propped him with a pillow placed so that it didn’t touch the bandaged wound in his back. He’d been lucky, they told him. The blade had missed anything vital, and the wound had been easily closed. Gauze wrapped his forearm where the damage done to the artery and tendons had been repaired in surgery. “Someone is here to see you,” she said.

Bo looked at the door. Stu Coyote stood in the threshold, a big, white-toothed grin on his broad Indian face. “Okay if I come in?”

“Sure. Thanks,” Bo said to Nurse Rivera as she left.

Coyote stood at Bo’s bedside. “For a national hero, you don’t look so tough.”

“National hero?”

“That’s what the media’s saying. But don’t let it go to your head. They said the same thing about Custer for a while. How’re you feeling?”

“I don’t. They shot me full of painkiller.”

Coyote drew a chair up and sat down. “You’re looking pretty healthy for a man who almost bled to death.”

“The First Lady’s all right?”

“Yeah. You know she saved your life?” He smiled at Bo’s look of surprise. “She put pressure on that wound and stopped the bleeding. Wouldn’t let go until the paramedics got there.”

“No kidding?”

“Damn straight.”

“How about Annie? Is she okay?”

“Annie, Earl, and Nicole Greene are fine. Moses was so quiet, they didn’t even wake up until they heard the shots in the orchard.”

“What about the other agents.”

Coyote’s eyes slid away. “Jake, Dusty Owens, Jon Rude.” He shook his head. “Also Lucy Aguilera from Manning’s team. She was on duty in the house.”

“How about Manning?”

“He took a round in the chest, but he’ll pull through.”

“And Moses?”

Coyote’s face turned hard. “He got away, Bo. Your shots didn’t kill him because he was wearing body armor. We found a mashed slug from your Sig in the grass. When he went over the edge, he fell almost fifty feet. Went through branches that slowed him down, and he landed in some bushes that must’ve broken his fall. In the dark, our guys had a tough time climbing down. By the time they did, Moses was gone. He left a trail of blood leading down to the river, so it looks like he was hurt pretty bad. We found an inflatable kayak hidden in some brush. We figure he probably meant to use it in his escape, but he was disoriented or didn’t have the strength to get to it and decided to try to swim. It’s a big river with a fast current. His chances of making it were pretty slim.”

“But they haven’t found a body?”

“Not yet.”

Bo closed his eyes. “I blew it, Stu.”

“You didn’t blow anything.”