Michael Palmer - Fatal

From time to time, on one side or the other, a rusted mailbox or a rutted dual path marked the entrance to a dwelling that could have been fifty feet into the forest or five miles. It was into one of those driveways that Grimes suddenly turned. Had Matt been looking down at the road, he would have missed the move completely, but as it was, there was a brief jounce of the taillights just before they began moving at right angles to the road. By the time Matt reached the drive where he thought Grimes had turned, the lights were gone.

Helmet off, he rolled cautiously through the ebony forest. Though he was keeping the RPMs down, his engine noise still reverberated like heavy equipment. Had Grimes stopped? Had he set up an ambush somewhere up ahead? Matt cut the engine and listened. Nothing. For a time, he tried pushing the heavy bike ahead. Finally, realizing he really had no choice, he hit the starter and rumbled forward, his legs stretched out off the pegs for balance. The Kawasaki would have been a little quieter and easier to maneuver at slow speed, but he had needed the storage capacity of the hog for all the drugs and equipment he had brought out to the Slocumbs.

For five minutes he rolled on, every fiber tensed against a voice, an attack, or a gunshot. Then, flickering through the trees up ahead, he saw light. He turned the Harley around and with some difficulty backed it into the woods, far enough so it seemed undetectable from the road. Then he cut off some pine boughs with his Swiss Army knife and laid them across the chrome of the handlebars, gas cap, wheels, and engine. Cautiously, he advanced up the road.

The Viper was parked alongside a Land Rover in front of a dilapidated cabin. The cabin, rough-hewn with a small porch and chimney, occupied the center of a clearing that was surprisingly large — maybe four or five times the footprint of the structure itself. Two windows, both illuminated, faced the driveway, and there were more on the side.

Staying within the tree line, Matt made his way around to the side of the cabin. A shredded screen hung off one of the two windows, and several panes of the other appeared to be missing. He held his breath and tried unsuccessfully to make out the voices from inside. Then, on his hands and knees, he ventured out from his cover and across forty feet of dirt and pine needles, flattening his back against the wall of cabin. Painstakingly, he rolled over onto his knees again and pushed himself up so that he could just peer inside. Initially, he could see nothing other than the denim-shirted back of a massive man. From beyond the man he could hear Bill Grimes's distinctive pseudo-twang.

"I know what you're telling me, dear doctor," he was saying, "but I don't know if you're telling me the truth."

"I've told you all I know," Nikki said, her voice weary and hoarse. "If you don't believe me, that's your problem."

"Correction, my friend. That's your problem."

The huge man moved aside, and Matt dropped beneath the window. When he inched up again, he was looking into a grungy bedroom, no more than ten feet square. The ceiling was unfinished pine, and the walls unadorned. The gargantuan was still obstructing the view of the doorway where the chief was standing, but now Matt could see Nikki. She was unbound, dressed in green hospital scrubs, lying supine, eyes closed, on the bare mattress of a metal frame bed. Two pillows without covers were bunched under her head, and a grimy sheet was thrown over her legs. She looked gray and uncomfortable and absolutely spent, but he could see no evidence she had been beaten.

"I want to go over this one more time," Grimes was saying, "starting with the funeral. Who did you talk to there besides me? Well?"

Matt heard a scraping to his right moments before a man appeared. He was tall and wiry, wearing a cowboy hat and boots. A pistol was jammed beneath his broad belt at the small of his back. Matt dropped to his belly and forced himself against the cement foundation of the house. He was still in plain sight, though, no more than twenty feet away. The man tapped out a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on his zipper. The smoke instantly wafted to where Matt lay in the shadow of the house. Desperately, his mind sorted through possible responses should he be spotted. None of them made any sense.

The smoker took a few paces away from the house, tilted his head back, and blew a cloud up toward the dark sky above the clearing. Matt steeled himself. The angle between them had changed. Now, as soon as the man turned back toward the cabin door, it would be over. Matt prepared to bolt into the trees as soon as he was spotted. At that moment, from the woods beyond the cowboy and to his right, there was the crunching of brush and rustling of branches. Seconds later, a small, white-tailed doe burst through the undergrowth and loped across the clearing, not fifteen feet away. The man took several steps in pursuit, at the same time fumbling for his gun.

"Larry," the cowboy hollered. "Larry, get out here, quick!"

Matt could hear the huge man thump onto the porch.

"What? What?"

"Biggest fuckin' deer yew ever saw jes ran by close enough to lick the snot offa my nose. If my gun hadn't got stuck in my belt, we'd be eatin' venison right now."

"Verne, you are just a total jerk," Larry said, with essentially no mountain accent. "Get on in here. The chief wants you to drive him to town an' back. You an' me are gonna stay here tonight with the bitch. We need some coffee an' toilet paper an' shit to eat. The chief has some stuff he wants to get from the station, too — stuff that'll make her sing like a canary. Now get in here."

Matt held his breath until the two had disappeared into the cabin, then scrambled back to the safety of the forest. Grimes and Verne-the-Cowboy would be taking a ride to town and back. The trip would be twenty minutes each way, maybe twenty-five, allowing for time in the store. During those forty or so minutes, he had to find a way to overpower a man the size of a bus and get a barely conscious woman onto her feet, secured on the Harley, and away to safety. He regretted now that he had rejected the notion of stashing one of the Slocumbs' many pistols in his saddlebag. But in truth, he had never felt comfortable around guns of any kind, and he feared that this ineptness, coupled with his unpredictable temper, was a recipe for disaster.

He tried playing out a scenario wherein he somehow drew Larry outside, then knocked him out with a piece of wood or a wrench from his tool kit. The chances of actually disabling the beast with anything less potent than a hammer seemed slim, and there wasn't one in his tool kit.

What, then?

Grimes and Verne were crossing the porch, headed toward the Land Rover, when Matt began considering the saddlebags on his bike. The two large side bags and the carryall mounted behind the passenger seat were loaded with, among other things, drugs — his well-stocked house-call and emergency pharmacy, hastily augmented by a variety of medications purloined for possible use on Lewis Slocumb.

Matt suspected that he wasn't beyond killing a person to save his own life or that of someone close to him. But he also knew it wouldn't happen easily, and the internal consequences would be severe. Besides, the only drug he could count on to kill Larry was a muscle paralyzer like curare or Anectine, and he wasn't at all sure he had packed any. He needed something with a rapid onset that could be given intramuscularly and would disable Larry without killing him. Then he had to find a way to get it into the brute without being torn apart.

Verne started up the Rover and flicked on the headlights. As soon as they were headed down the drive, Matt switched his Timex to timer mode and began the countdown.

Forty minutes.

Ticking off the features of the drug he needed, he raced back to the bike, located his penlight, and rummaged furiously through the medications in the carryall, discarding one after another into the woods.