Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

“Dr. Markowitz?” he shouted, when he’d regained his breath. “ U.S. marshal. Hello? Dr. Markowitz? I’m coming upstairs. Hands on your head, knees on the floor, or I will shoot! Dr. Markowitz?”

He worked his way slowly up the stairs, his attention committed to the two on the top landing, wondering if either of them had enough left in their tanks to extend the firefight. Two steps later he felt fairly certain the younger guy was dead, and a sense of outright anger flooded him, for he’d felt compelled to defend himself, and the kid had no sense of guns whatsoever.

The first one, the one now folded forward in a pose of contrite prayer, had been gut-shot and was losing blood badly. He was unconscious, though somehow balanced and stuck in this position. Larson reached the landing, kicked the weapons away. One tumbled downstairs, clattering as it landed. He glanced around for a phone. Perhaps they could medevac this one to the mainland.

In searching for the phone, Larson spotted Markowitz, recognizing him even from the back. He shouted to him, “Dr. Markowitz! Hands where I can see them, please.”

It was only then that Larson noticed the small trickle of red below the man’s curly white hair. He recalled the first shooter’s wild shots as Larson had taken out his knee, the sound of bullets penetrating walls. One of those bullets had found Markowitz.

“Dr. Markowitz!”

The old man still had his fingers on the keyboard, but they weren’t moving. He was dead as well. Whatever progress he’d made in decrypting Laena remained to be determined.

Larson quickly but thoroughly searched the house, closet by closet, room by room, in search of Penny. He looked for clues of the girl’s presence in the food stocked, the laundry washed, bath toys, beach toys: anything he could think of-but found no indication of a child. He returned upstairs to Markowitz, hoping for a disk or storage device, but was faced with only the laptop computer beneath the man’s hands. Larson disconnected the laptop and its power supply and took them with him. There would be hell to pay for leaving a shooting-but to remain behind and suffer through a day of statements and inquiry was unthinkable.

As he stole through the night toward the marina, Larson called Montgomery at the Useppa Inn and told him to call every law enforcement agency he could. And an air ambulance. Larson left behind the carnage, but not its aftershock. For along with Markowitz, Larson realized he’d lost his connection to the Romeros, and with it his best and perhaps only chance of finding Penny alive.

Having slept only two hours in the past twenty-four, Jimmy Oyer rose from his bunk at the back of the Peterbilt with the sour aftertaste of modafinil in his dry mouth and a raging temper bulging at his temples.

“What the fuck?” he screamed at whoever was banging on the driver’s side window. He cleared his eyes, squinted, and searched for his glasses. When he spotted the silver badge, he mumbled, “Oh, fuck it,” and climbed down and over the front seats to unlock and open the door. Cops!

A fist pounded on the window for a second time.

“Hold your horses…” he mumbled, collecting himself. He tried to think what he’d done wrong, if anything. There was that whore in the trailer park outside of Omaha, but he’d left her with an extra fifty after playing a little rough, and she’d told him that put things right enough. He fought against his clouded head. What kind of badge had that been? He hadn’t gotten a good look at the thing.

An interstate violation?

But hell, he’d stopped at every weigh station as required, and they’d signed off on this load-washers, dryers, dishwashers, and stovetops-so what the hell could the problem be?

He snorted and swallowed to clear his throat, found the lock, and opened the door.

“What is it?”

The guy reached up at him incredibly quickly-his hands like a point guard’s. Jimmy felt a line of heat on his exposed neck and clutched at it, as he found it hard to breathe. He sucked for air but it was his neck doing the breathing, not his nose or mouth. When he exhaled, he sprayed a mist of blood onto the window and door. He’d been cut! Coughing, he tried to call out, but it just sprayed more red rain.

The cop was a little guy with dark skin, a burned face, pinched eyes, and a three-day-old beard. He shoved Jimmy back and into the cab with incredible strength.

Jimmy carried a few extra pounds. His being lifted like this, up and over the seats and back onto the bunk, shocked him. He swung out with his right hand, but the intruder grabbed him by the wrist-with incredible strength-twisted and turned in one sharp motion, and Jimmy heard something snap as he felt more pain than he knew his arm could suffer. Then he was being bent and rolled over, and the little guy hog-tied him with the wire from the CB radio’s microphone.

Lying on his stomach like a rocking horse, in his own cab’s sleeper bed, Jimmy gasped wetly for air as he watched a pool of blood spread onto the bed pillow. His blood, from his neck.

As the guy left the cab, Jimmy’s lights were dimming. He rocked and groaned, but the pool beneath his head only widened with each passing second. Deep green and purple orbs formed at the edges of his eyesight, like holding a camera wrong and putting a finger in front of the lens. Jimmy regretted the whoring, regretted all the mistakes, wanted nothing more than to be home with his wife.

The greenish purple crept in from the edges, now nearly all he saw. He felt the cab door open. He heard the little guy straining with something. For just a flicker of a second Jimmy thought he saw a pretty little girl in the shotgun seat, silver tape around her eyes, a knotted rag in her mouth. But maybe that was just dreaming about his own kids.

Engulfed in sadness, drowning in his own blood, Jimmy Oyer succumbed to the sounds of Vince Gill on the four-hundred-watt stereo he’d paid for himself.

Larson swerved out of the way of some teenage trick-or-treaters as he drove the rental car around the bend in the road by the hotel’s golf course, running the wipers to clear the windshield of sea spray that had collected in only a matter of hours. The strobing blue and red emergency beacons caught his eye and filled the faces of dozens of onlookers, many in costume.

He’d picked up decent cell reception halfway across the bay. Neither Hope nor Tommy had answered their phones, leaving him pushing Tomelson’s charter boat to warp speed. Stomach acid bubbled in his throat. He saw himself as a murderous failure. He’d arrived with only noble intentions of saving his daughter, protecting Hope, carving out a future for them. Seeing himself as part of that future.

But this?

He pulled the car over and went the rest of the way on foot. Clearing the front corner, arriving at the hotel’s covered porch, he was met with bedlam.

He’d been gone a little shy of three hours. He returned to a different world, he realized.

Already a busy Halloween night, the emergency lights had brought the locals out like moths. Fifty or more had gathered, held back by the staff of college kids in their green golf shirts.

He found the dense Florida night air as suffocating as St. Louis in August. He tugged at his collar, only to realize it wasn’t the fabric constricting him. He strung his federal shield around his neck by the wallet’s string. It bounced against his chest. His throat tight, he cautioned himself not to give anything away. Practiced in the art of lying, the identity of a witness to protect, he crossed the porch, for the first time bringing attention to himself.

“You!” an older guy wearing a wrinkled khaki uniform called out. His khaki shirt was buttoned incorrectly, the collar opened beneath the loosened knot of black necktie.