Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Fagin stopped behind Banish’s shoulder, looking down. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

Banish dropped the tarp and walked away. He walked right out of the barn and into the rain.

Fagin picked up the tarp again. Charles Mellis’s eyes were still open. His face was drained white and his lips were wrinkled gray and curled back. There was a neat hole in his forehead and a dark spit-spray of dry brown blood on his cheek and much of his beard. Exit wound. Fagin tried to roll Mellis’s head over but rigor mortis was setting in. His neck turned as much as a board. Fagin felt the dead arm and found it still soft. He knelt down low and eyed the crusted, bloody pulp behind Mellis’s right ear, the burnt red hair and dislodged flap of exploded scalp.

Taber and Porter came in behind him, and Fagin stood. “Stay off the radio,” he said. “This one’s dead twelve hours. I’ll start back down and notify.” Then he pointed. “There’s a rat hole in back. Keep your eyes on it and stay fucking alert, both of you.”

Fagin exited into the blowing rain, the trees bending, his poncho whipping out hard. Banish was standing downhill from the barn.

“Flash burn at close range,” Fagin said, coming up behind him. “It wasn’t me. Whoever did it was standing right like I am here with you.” Fagin fashioned a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the back of Banish’s head above his right ear. Banish did not move. “Why would he do his own man?” Fagin said.

Banish said nothing. Fagin went around to see his face. Banish was looking far down land into the trees.

Blood was headed back to his Bronco through the rain when he saw Banish standing up on the mountain road just at the point where it began to curve and climb. Blood watched him a moment — Banish seemed to be watching the clustered umbrellas of the hundreds of protesters beyond the bridge, his face shadowed by the ashen burn — then tucked the papers he was holding into his sheriff’s coat and started along the slicked road toward him.

“Just missed the show,” Blood said, coming up. “Someone from WAR and some others came to the bridge for you. Wanted to make a citizen’s arrest, they announced. Here’s the warrant.” He pulled out the papers. “I accepted it on your behalf. Not just you, though, it names as well the Director of the FBI, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the President of the United States, the Director of the CIA, the Governor of Montana, and, proud to say, yours truly.”

Banish looked from the crowd on the other side of the bridge to the typed papers getting wet in Blood’s hand.

Blood said, “That’s some pretty fast company for me. But it was all just a big show of foolishness for the cameras. The arresting party all shook hands afterward.”

Banish was looking straight at him. “Mellis is dead,” he said.

Blood’s lighthearted mood plummeted. His soul, what he thought of as the character of his person, seemed to vanish suddenly and his throat clucked under a swallow. The rain turned up a notch at that point, lashing him, finding a way through his clothes to his skin, raising gooseflesh. He was holding Banish’s gaze because there was nowhere else to look. The rain slapped on his hat and it was all he could hear. It fell between them in lines as they stared. It fell all around. Puffs of their breath swirled. Mellis was dead. Blood didn’t need to ask how.

He began to shiver. He experienced a weakening chill. He had tasted Banish’s world and now felt sick. For the first time in his forty years, Blood wanted to be somebody somewhere else entirely.

“What do we do about this?” he said.

Banish shook his head. “You don’t have to do a thing.”

Blood looked away. The sound of the rain smashing his hat and the trees and the road grew louder in his ears, and he grew heavier beneath it. He turned back. “Why did your wife and daughter leave you?” he said.

“What?”

“I need to know what kind of man I am dealing with. I don’t know anything about you beyond what I read in the papers. Why did your wife and daughter leave you?”

Banish’s eyes became distant, pulling away, as though either making up an answer or trying to fit the unsay able into words.

“They were afraid of me,” he said.

Any number of questions might have followed, but Blood found neither the strength nor the inclination. None of them anyway would have been delicate enough to broach that admission without breaking something that was already quite fragile. That was what Blood had tasted here. The sway of absolute power and the havoc it wreaked.

There were shouts now and then from the disorganized civil disturbance thriving beyond the bridge, yells sent up like bright flares. Then all at once the calls came in tandem and in force. Banish turned his attention past Blood, looking out over the vast mob with dark consternation.

“Ables,” he said.

Blood turned. The umbrellas were beginning to scatter. A marshal was starting off the gloomy bridge toward them at a brisk jog. Banish said behind Blood, “Have the marshal take a Jeep and pick me up on the way.”

He said the last of it as he was sloshing off. Blood put the silly papers back into his coat and met the marshal, related the instructions, then continued on to his original, dry destination, the Bronco. He climbed inside and pulled the door shut on the rain, removing his plastic-covered hat and shaking it out over the passenger floorboard. The rain thumped on the roof and hood. He sat watching the various umbrellas collapsing and figures disappearing into cars, wet parkas and hunting mac ks and raincoats retreating.

He unzipped his coat and switched on the CB. He worked the squelch. He started up the Bronco for the heat, to keep the car un fogged and warm. Then it hit him again that Mellis was dead.

The realization, the truth of it, came like shivers, in waves. That Blood had helped to kill him. That Mellis had tried to kill Blood. These feds were probably used to killings and death, living with it as they did from time to time. But Blood had never before been a part of anything like that. He had never felt so bad or so stained. He sat there and wondered what would become of him.

This swirl of increasingly troubled thought was broken by the crackling of the car radio. “Watson,” it said his singly Blood recognized the voice from the mountain woods. That seemed like years and years ago.

Banish sat down at the console and Coyle called for quiet in the tent. Banish reached for the handset and flipped the switch. “This is Special Agent Bob Watson,” he said.

“Watson,” Ables said. “You son of a bitch.”

“Mr. Ables?”

“You bastards shot my wife.”

Banish stared at the radio. When he looked up, he found Fagin standing nearby, his stern face mouthing curses. Banish tightened his grip on the handset. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “someone stepped outside your house and warning shots were fired. It was never our intention—”

“Your assassins missed their mark.”

“How bad is she wounded, Mr. Ables? Can you give me some indication of where she was shot?”

“You sound concerned now, Watson.”

Banish licked his lips and took a steadying breath. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “why don’t you just come out now? We can end this thing right here before anyone else gets hurt. Your wife will receive immediate medical attention.”

There was a pause then, brief but unmistakable. “No,” Ables said.

Perkins, behind Banish, said “He hesitated” as Banish’s left hand darted out to shut him up.

“Mr. Ables, I can have an ambulance at your front door within thirty seconds. We have emergency medical technicians here, and helicopters equipped to airlift your wife to the hospital of your choosing.”