Чак Хоган - The Standoff

He swung around so that Marshal Fagin stayed on the hot side of the bird, then tensed up his shoulders and dipped down into the gauntlet and white-knuckled it on through, muttering to himself as he went. Fagin got off fifty or so unanswered rounds this time, hanging out of the gun door and howling. Greg came out of the pass and realized that the resistance was finally, thank God, falling off. He pulled back on the throttle too sharply and jerked the bird up and clear of the heat. There, from above the dark canopy of tree cover, he noticed a strobe light pulsing faintly down land.

He radioed back to Marshal Fagin. Fagin’s reply filled his head and the gray flight helmet he wore. “Take her the fuck down!” he bellowed. This Fagin fellow was a psycho son of a bitch. Greg Ohmer eased back on the throttle and the UH-1 swooped wide and out.

Blood had his Browning up and was standing watch just inside the open doorway. Now that he was able to catch his breath, a clear sense of doom was settling over the barn and himself. It was a debacle. There would be a good load of finger-pointing after a thing like this, and Blood felt that his own performance had been lacking. He had a shotgun, Mellis had a handgun. He wished sorely that he had done more and wondered if he’d catch any blame. He turned then and looked behind him.

Banish was standing in the center of the barn. His hands were on his hips and his head was low and he was shaking it and blinking, plainly trying to encourage his eyes to see. Now and again he brought up a hand and felt his head. He had unstrapped the helmet and was feeling where Mellis’s bullet had glanced him. He was disoriented from the blow, which explained a good deal.

Blood heard the helicopter approaching. He turned and looked up as it slowed to a hover overhead, whipping back the treetops and shaking the ramshackle barn. He saw a man drop out of the open door and watched him rappel down. It was Fagin, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Land marshals emerged from the woods. A spotlight swung over from the helicopter, filling the entrance with blinding white, and Blood backed away inside.

He saw Banish clumsily exploring the barn, his hands helping him to see. It was dusty from disuse and appeared pretty much abandoned, filled with various pieces of refuse like a rusted-out sit-down mower and busted sawhorses, plucked-up tar shingles with nails still stuck in them, stacks of bug-infested wood off to the left, and a discarded plastic gasoline tank cracked up one side. It looked like the community junk house Banish was over by some old rolls of tarpaulin in back, still trying to see.

Fagin entered with the swirling, kicked-up bark trash from the helicopter wind, his rifle at the ready, the harsh spotlight lighting his back and darkening his front. “The fuck happened!” he bellowed. He saw Blood there and came up close enough for Blood to see his shadowed face beyond the light, see it full and big-eyed and hungry. It was the look some animals get after tasting blood. “I want some fucking answers,” he said.

Blood said, “It was a trap.”

“You’re goddamn fucking right it was a trap.” Fagin looked up and across at Banish. “The fuck’s wrong with him?”

Blood turned to look. Banish was pulling at the tarp now, trying to unroll it.

Fagin said, “Banish. Banish!”

Banish did not answer.

“Fucking mental,” said Fagin, stalking around. “Will someone please give me some goddamn fucking answers here?”

Blood remained looking at Banish, realizing then that he was not merely exploring. There was something wrapped up in the tarpaulin and Banish was trying to get at it. Blood started toward him, then Fagin grabbed his arm, stopping him, and Blood made ready to receive the riot act.

Fagin nodded at Blood’s leg. “You’re hit,” he said.

Blood looked down. His black uniform was split across the side of his left thigh and soaked darkly below. He hadn’t felt a thing until it was pointed out to him. After that, it began to burn fierce.

Blood pressed his hand above the cut and some dark red washed out. It was not very deep.

He started back toward Banish, favoring the leg. The barn was full of marshals now, and white light from the helicopter, and stirred-up, swirling dust. Fagin came up behind and they both watched Banish pulling at a tight swathe of white sheets rolled within the tarpaulin. His actions grew impatient and finally savage. He wrenched at the bedsheets with his bare hands until they tore apart and came free.

There was an awful puff of smell. Blood didn’t need more than a second to recognize the corpse’s face. It was a few days gone, lips wrinkled and black, skin sunken, gray. Contact wound through the T-shirt over the heart, eyes filmy and staring up at the rafters.

Fagin backed away covering his nose, saying sharply, “Jesus fucking Christ. ”

Banish just sat back. The Ables girl was lying there dead and stinking and his face got tight, then he made a little fist as though he was going to yell. Instead, he took the fist and pounded it once into the dirt ground.

The tent was in an uproar. Phones buzzing, men yelling. Fagin on his radio, spitting curses, and Perkins shaking his head into a telephone. Facsimile machines tonguing out sheets of paper, and men spreading maps on desks and scribbling onto the elaborate glass-wall diagram. The stale smell of dry sweat and the rumble of helicopters circling overhead. And Blood sitting quietly in the middle of it all, without pants, his wounded leg resting on one of the EMT’s chairs, the gash being washed and sewed.

They tied off the black thread and clipped it short. One EMT remained to bandage him while the other two gathered their emergency aid cases and moved through the crowd to the office where Banish was. Blood noticed Fagin coming off his radio across the tent room.

“Fucker got clean away,” Fagin said, looking around as though he wanted to hit something.

Perkins turned from the desk he was sitting on and spoke away from his phone. “Where did he get the gun?”

Fagin was pacing between desks, grinding a black-gloved fist into his opened hand. “All a setup,” he said. That aspect of it seemed to rile him most.

Perkins said, “But how could they know in the cabin—”

“A setup,” Fagin said, pacing faster, “the whole fucking thing. Swift and surgical. He releases Mellis with the in-laws. Shoots out the lights. Then in the downtime confusion before my men can get their NVDs on, he gators out twenty meters and plants the gun. Mellis false-flags Banish with his bullshit mine story — if there was a claymore mine on this mountain, it would be command-detonated and Ables would have lit it off with the rest of his fireworks — then leads him up to the gun site and fucking drops him cold. All fucking planned.”

A noisy crash from within Banish’s office then, like something being roughly overturned, and a raised, angry voice — Banish, swearing venomously. The two EMTs came hustling out. Only one still had his first-aid kit with him, holding it together awkwardly as though it were a suitcase come unlatched. Behind them, Banish’s continuing voice and the fluttering bird-wing sound of papers being hurled. The EMTs met the stunned glances of everyone turning to look their way, then tried to avoid all eyes and moved quietly off to the side.

Then Banish was standing in the canvas office doorway. He appeared strangely calm and stiff, hands open and empty at his sides and his feet spaced evenly apart. His black jumpsuit was off now and his clothes beneath were rumpled, his hair mussed from the removed helmet. The black spray pattern from Mellis’s gunfire speckled the right side of his face like soot.