John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

A strange smile came to Wilson’s face. He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Then he went to her, and crouched by her side. “Show me,” he said, taking the submachine gun from her.

She complied, sobbing in the way little kids do, taking shuddery breaths. She fumbled at the buttons to her blouse, and finally pulled it aside, baring the scar. Wilson ran his finger along the ridgeline of skin, then pressed his lips to it.

Burke felt like a voyeur. He turned away.

“I love you,” Wilson told her, his voice thick with emotion.

“I-” Her voice fell apart. The sobs came heavier.

“Shhhhh,” Wilson said. “I love you. I’ll always love you.”

In the corner of the room, a telephone rang. It was the last thing Burke expected to hear and the sound startled him.

Wilson kissed the top of Irina’s head and tried to dry her tears with his fingertips. Her weeping subsided. The phone continued to ring.

Finally, Wilson got to his feet. Burke couldn’t read the expression on his face. “It’s an extension from the house,” he said as he moved toward the ringing phone. He picked up the receiver. Listened. With a smile, he put the palm of his hand over the phone and turned to Burke. “Somebody named Kovalenko wants me to come out of the house with my hands in the air. He says he knows I’m in there.”

Burke didn’t know what to tell him.

Wilson said into the phone: “Give me a minute.” Then he hung up, and slowly crossed the room to the transmitter. Laying his fingertips on the laptop’s keyboard, he took a deep breath. And hesitated.

For a moment, it seemed to Burke that Wilson was screwing up his courage to derail the world. But that wasn’t it at all.

Wilson was sailing in a secret storm between one dream and another, tossed this way and that by the uncertainties of his own heart. Love and revenge waited in the darkness, sirens singing from the reefs surrounding his imagined Paradise. He’d risked everything, and it had come to this: Which reef would he wreck himself upon? Love… or Revenge?

Finally, he exhaled. Jerking the plug from the laptop, he closed the computer and gave it to Burke. “Don’t let them get this. It wouldn’t be good.”

Burke nodded.

“Get Irina out of here,” Wilson said. “Away from here, and away from the house. There’s a footpath behind the tower. It goes to the hot springs. She can show you the way.”

“No,” Irina cried. “I stay with you.”

Both Burke and Wilson ignored her. “And what do I do, once I’m there?” Burke asked.

“Get rid of the laptop,” Wilson said. “There are caves, and the one that’s farthest west has a cenote, about thirty feet inside the entrance.”

“A cenote?”

“A well. It’s actually a mine shaft. They used to mine silver here. Anyway, the well is a couple of hundred feet deep. So be careful. Way down, it’s filled with water. If you drop a rock in, and count to six, slowly, you’ll hear the splash. So toss the laptop in, and forget about it.”

Burke nodded. In truth, he wasn’t even sure he could walk. His ribs hurt, and his head was pounding. But he wasn’t going to argue. If Wilson was going to make a last stand, Burke didn’t want to be there for the finale.

“Irina, sweetheart. I want you to go with Mr. Burke,” Wilson said.

“No, no Jack,” she crooned. “Nooooo. I stay with you. I want-”

Wilson smiled teasingly. “Already? Just a week ago, you promised to obey. C’mon,” he cajoled, “you promised. Remember?”

Burke had no idea what was going through Irina’s mind, but suddenly, she stopped weeping. She nodded her head solemnly, and kissed Wilson on the lips. A long kiss that Wilson ended, drawing away, holding her face in his hands.

“Go on,” Wilson told her.

Irina turned. She was weeping again but she began to climb down. Burke was right behind her.

Wilson watched them descend from the tower, and begin running. Burke was practically dragging Irina, though Wilson could see that he was in pain. Irina kept her eyes turned toward the tower all the while. And then the two figures were gone, lost amid the trees.

The phone rang, and Wilson picked it up. A voice shouted at him over the thwop thwop thwop of a helicopter’s rotors: “I’m losing patience!”

“You’ll be lucky if that’s all you lose,” Wilson told him.

“ What?! Let me explain something to you,” the voice screamed. “You got one chance to walk out of that house alive. Either you come out, now – or I’m taking you out! Which way do you want it?”

Wilson nearly laughed. The uncertainties he’d felt a minute earlier were gone now, replaced with an unfamiliar clarity and calm. He was not going back to prison. He’d rather die. And would. Soon.

He could escape, of course – for a little while, anyway. He could lose himself in the trees, then make his way into the mountains. Like Geronimo. He could hide for a while, moving from place to place, scavenging food and shelter. But what was the point? Better to die like a man than live like a dog.

And it was, as they say, a good day to die – the right day to die. The solstice.

“Wilson!” The FBI agent’s voice crackled over the phone.

“I’m thinking…”

In fact, he’d made up his mind. But he had to get their attention before they turned their guns on the house and burned it to the ground. Irina would need the house. He could tell that she was going to love it here.

Grabbing the Ingram, he went to the window and smashed the glass. Without even bothering to aim, he fired a long burst in the direction of the helicopter – and then another. And another. The chopper swayed, jerked upwards, and turned toward the lookout tower.

Wilson laid the submachine gun on the floor. Straightening to his full height, he stripped to the waist, revealing the ghost shirt that was his flesh – the crudely etched crescent moon and dragonfly, the stars and birds, and the words in Paiute:

Through the broken window, he saw the helicopter bearing down on the tower. Slowly, he began to dance, singing a song without words.

Running through the trees, Burke and Irina stumbled over the rocky ground, heading toward the hot springs. They were almost there when a burst of submachine-gun fire shattered the morning air. The volley of shots was answered a moment later by the distant thwop of the helicopter, growing louder and more urgent.

My God, Burke thought. He’s drawing them to the tower. Irina was sobbing. Burke expected to hear a fusillade of gunfire, but what he heard instead was a zipper of noise, a sort of whoosh, followed by a blaze of light and a shock wave that threw the two of them to the ground.

Irina quaked in terror as a second explosion, and then a third, shook the trees around them. Looking up, they saw a pillar of black smoke churning into the sky. The tower was gone.

Irina screamed.

Burke grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the hot springs. “Wait for me,” he told her and, getting to his feet, ran toward the caves. It took him a minute to find the one Wilson had told him about.

It was dark and damp, and he moved gingerly into the blackness, feeling his way with his hand on the wall, sliding his feet across the floor. When his right foot found the edge of something, he gave the laptop a little toss. And listened.

There was no sound. And then, just as Wilson promised, he heard a splash.

Returning the way he’d come, he called out to Irina. But, of course, she wasn’t there. She was on her way back to the tower, Burke thought, or to what was left of it. Looking for love. Or what was left of it.