Чак Хоган: The Standoff

“Mrs. Ables!” Banish yelled again.

He was aware of Perkins and the other agents around him turning and watching in confusion as he stood there aiming the gun. The helicopter beckoned. The EMTs were looking at her now. She was not moving. Banish called her one last time, yelling, dizzied.

“Mrs. Ables!”

She threw a fist suddenly and then an elbow with the same, good arm, and both EMTs collapsed to the ground. She turned fast, holding a gun. It was Ables himself. The wig hung ragged and low on his head and his face was darkened with soot, which obscured his identity. The clothes were shapeless on his small frame and soiled with ash, his left arm bent in its sling.

The surrounding agents all dropped and drew. The EMTs realized what was happening and scurried away.

Ables was staring at him darkly from behind the .45. “Watson,” he said. “You son of a bitch.”

Banish brought out his ID, ten yards away. “Banish,” he told him. “FBI. You’re under arrest.”

Ables’s face shook a moment, staring, then regained its outlaw composure. “Son of a bitch,” he said. His eyes glanced left and right. “Move and I’ll kill him!” he warned, then looked back to Banish. “I’m getting on that copter.”

Banish just shook his head.

He saw Fagin moving in front of the helicopter to his right. Fagin knocked on its bubble windshield and gave the pilot a quick thumbs-up sign and the pilot needed no more than that. He throttled up quickly and took the bird into the air.

The rotor wash whipped at Ables as the helicopter turned above, then dipped sharply down behind the tree cover and disappeared. Everything was quiet then except for the fire. Ables looked around desperately. More marshals and agents emerged from the woods and behind the cabin. Each had a gun or rifle out and was aiming at him. Ables saw them all and raised his arm a bit, reasserting himself, leveling the gun at Banish as though to shoot.

“You murdered my wife and my daughter,” he said loudly.

“You shot at policemen,” Banish said. “You killed a United States Marshal.”

“I was framed.”

“You wanted this,” Banish said, shaking his head. They were standing there pointing guns at each other. “This is what you wanted.”

Beyond Ables, the earth was rumbling, shouts and trampling footsteps approaching fast. Banish first saw the tops of heads, then bodies filling in around the vehicles, advancing upon the scene. The protesters had somehow broken free. They had rushed all the way up the new road and hundreds were now charging onto the mountaintop. If they overran the cabin, they would easily obscure Ables. Some of the nearby agents stepped back, greatly outnumbered, guns aimed. There was going to be shooting. Ables’s face showed that he knew exactly what was going on behind him and he grinned cockily. This was his dream fulfilled.

A body moved at the top of the road facing the stampeding crowd. It was Blood. He stopped in front of them and fired a single shotgun blast into the air, then recocked the weapon and aimed it at the mob, halting them all. The lead protesters stopped fast, others piling up quickly behind. “Not one more foot,” Blood announced. They stood there breathing heavily, pressing against one another, stunned, looking at the local sheriff standing up to them and beyond him to all the armed agents and Banish, and the figure standing there in the skirt and wig.

Ables realized what had happened behind him and his confidence failed. “Back off, all of you!” he shouted to the agents. “I’ll kill the FBI man!”

Not one man moved.

“Get back!” he shouted. “I’ll do it!”

No one retreated. Barely any motion from any of the men. Only Fagin moved. He started over toward Ables, in plain view from the right. His gun was up and aimed and obvious.

Ables saw him coming peripherally, and surely saw his black skin. “I’ll kill him!” Ables shouted, eyes on Banish. “I ain’t afraid to die!”

Fagin kept coming. Ables’s eyes darted from Fagin to Banish and quickly back and forth again. But Fagin just kept coming. Ables’s gun hand shook. His eyes twisted around and saw Fagin’s gun nearing his head. “I ain’t afraid to die!” he said.

Fagin stopped next to him, arm outstretched, his gun muzzle not six inches away from Ables’s left ear. “Here’s your big chance, then,” he said.

Ables’s face was a wide-open display of desperation. His eyebrows ran high as though trying to pull his head back from the muzzle. The .45 shook in his hand but stayed up.

Banish lowered his gun and tucked it loosely into his belt, then started forward.

Ables’s head turned just a little. His face could not comprehend what was happening as Banish approached him unarmed. The .45 remained high.

“After all your talk,” Banish said to him, halfway there.

Ables’s face clouded over in anger. “Son of a bitch,” he said, reasserting the .45.

Banish came closer until he was standing right in front of Ables, the muzzle of the .45 leveled flush at his heart. He watched Ables’s face under the dark wig, shaded with ash, small and weak-featured, and popping, and seething, and pathetic. He saw the flames reflected in his small black eyes. He saw the man standing there behind the gun. Behind all the rhetoric and the hatred, a small, pitiful man. In over his head and too blind to see it until just that moment. All the trouble he had caused, and all it had cost him.

Banish reached out and pushed Ables’s .45 away and stepped up to him. Ables was breathing fast. He was staring at Banish. Banish felt nothing for him. All the time and money spent, the man-hours, the equipment. Everything Banish and his men had gone through to arrive at this triumphant moment of surrender, to deliver this man from his home. “This is all it comes to,” Banish said. Fagin came around Ables and relieved him of the .45, ripping off his sling and pulling both his arms behind him. Ables grunted in pain. He twisted his head around to see the black-skinned man taking him into custody.

Banish turned Ables around to face the mob. He saw Deke Belcher pushing his way to the front of the crowd there. He saw Kearney standing next to Blood.

Banish pulled off Ables’s wig and tossed it to the ground. He could feel the spirit of the mob, palpably, its cresting triumph dying suddenly there in front of him like a ghost slipping free of a corpse. Here was their savior before them, revealed. Here was their tarnished soul.

Sheriff Blood turned back from the stilled crowd. They were mere bystanders now, as though snapped out of a trance and happening upon this strange scene. Blood came up in front of Ables and took a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. He pressed it to Ables’s thin chest.

“Served,” Blood said. “Notice of eviction.”

Fagin had handcuffs out and was snapping them tight around Ables’s wrists. “You have the right to remain silent,” he began loudly, adding under his breath, “you fuck.”

Banish stepped forward then. He felt a sad sense of piety looking out over the mob. There was no glory here. He eyed the thick stream of bodies stretching down the freshly cut road. “Go on home,” he told them. “Get out of here, all of you. It’s over.”

A lilting silence. Failure brought to the mob a small, ringing moment of true peace. Then the people in front started, reacting suddenly, buzzing again and looking to their left, Banish’s right. He turned. A figure was emerging from the woods. It was Rebecca, the fourteen-year-old daughter. She held the infant Amos in one arm, a .38 in the other. Marshals and agents were backing cautiously out of the way. She saw her father standing there in a skirt and handcuffs and was moving toward him, aiming mainly at Banish.