Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Helen, turn your lights on. Yeah, J.P., put the gun down, keep your finger off the trigger, and don’t blow any holes in anything.”

“Agh,” said J.P., sliding the Thompson delicately to the floor of the automobile. He managed to do it without sending fifty hardballs into the door.

“That doesn’t mean go to sleep,” said Les. “Keep your eyes open, keep on the scan. Helen, watch that speed, we don’t want to be pulled over by some small-town clown cop. He’d see the guns and we’d have to dump him.”

“Yes, yes, yes, Your Majesty,” said Helen.

Traffic was thin, and so was conversation.

Pulling into Evanston, Helen suddenly found a topic.

“Say, honey,” she said. “You know, suppose the Division had showed. Bang, bang, bang— lots of bullets winging. The ones they fire at us—”

“They aren’t going to fire at us. We jump ’em first and put ’em out of the fight. That’s the plan.”

“But plans never work. So the bullets they fire at us, they go on into that A&P — housewives, kids, old people — is that a good idea? It gets the newspapers all twisted against us. And it gets some little children killed.”

“Helen, this is what we do. You know this is what we do.”

“She has a point,” said J.P.

“Another country heard from,” said Les.

“You’re sort of loved, like Johnny. Especially now that you’re number one and you’ve got such a cool name. You’re a hero for a lot of bitter folks — that is, until you machine-gun a baby in a carriage.”

The prospect of a dead baby didn’t engage Les a bit; instead, he turned to an old slight, and he heated up fast. “I should have been number one before Charlie Floyd. I don’t know why they… Anyway, what’s the point?”

“All he’s saying,” said Helen, “is that getting civilians killed doesn’t do us any good. You have to risk it for a bank, because the banks are where they are, downtown or on Main Street. But if we get to pick the spot, let’s pick a spot where Mr. and Mrs. America aren’t buying their Ann Page biscuits for Sunday dinner.”

Les grumped up, locked his eyes off in the distance, and turned to stone. He said nothing, as they reached Dempster in South Evanston for their western turn, then left — southwest — on Niles Center Road, angling toward Melrose Park. America rolled numbly by, the other America, not theirs, as they’d gone outlaw, gone for flash, spurts of pure adrenaline, fast profit, lots of cash, pix in the rags, but death always looking over their shoulders. It was okay, except when they rolled by a cemetery on the right and that got Les to feeling mortal instead of immortal (it happened occasionally) and he said, “Hey, look at that.”

“I hear they have dead people in there,” said J.P.

“All of ’em,” said Helen.

“When it’s time, drop me there,” said Les, squinting at the sign as the headlights scanned them. “St. Peter’s, a Catholic place, would make Ma happy.”

“Nobody’s killing you,” said J.P.

“When you get that in writing, let me know,” said Les.

But both Helen and J.P. knew that if he suddenly jumped off topic, Les had reached a decision.

Finally, he said, “We’ll do the Como Inn, Lake Geneva, next. That’s off by itself in the woods. No babies die because Mommy had to have Ann Page biscuits!”

OUACHITA MOUNTAINS

ARKANSAS

The present

Arkansas 88: it was the road of his life, same as it ever was. Well, almost; he passed the old place where he’d been raised, where he’d waved good-bye to his father for the last time on the last day of 1955, neither of them knowing it, and saw the familiar land now going through some process called development where new houses rose like ghosts against the fields he’d once roamed with a .22 hunting rabbits. He felt nothing but the cash in his pocket the place had finally deposited.

Beyond that came a nowhere village called Ink, still just a spot in the road, with a convenience store now run by hardworking Koreans, and beyond that to another nowhere place called Nokana, neither place figuring much in a childhood that was drawn west to the county seat, called Blue Eye, where Sam Vincent, in a sort of way, had become his father after 1955; and he’d gone to high school, been an athlete of note, if still enduring the stares that said “Poor Bob Lee, he’s Earl’s boy. You know, Earl got killed in 1955” until he could stand it no more and left, on the first day of the rest of his life, for Parris Island on his sixteenth birthday in 1962. So this flat stretch of road to Mount Ida, and then Hot Springs, meant nothing until he reached a certain turnoff and headed north, into the green bulk of the mountains in front of him.

He rose, he rose, he rose against the incline, past the trees, in Jake Vincent’s SUV, towing a rented Honda Recon, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle that resembled a Harley after ten years’ worth of six-hundred-pound dead lifts and squats. At a certain point, the road quit. He parked, unhitched the Honda, opened the rear of the SUV, and removed a shovel, a pick, a crowbar, and a backpack containing a heavy flashlight newly primed with lithium batteries, six protein bars, four bottles of water, and a hunting knife, and secured all to the Recon cargo space by bungee cord.

He checked his watch. The sun was low in the west, pitching bright beams vertically in the west, the glow turning the edges of the ruffled clouds fiery. He took his iPhone out of his jacket — though still summer, it grew cold in the night the higher you went — and called Nick.

“I’m at road’s end, just about to head into the woods.”

“What do you figure?” asked Nick.

“An hour. But most of it’s uphill. I’ll be all right.”

“Call in every hour. I’ll alert the State cops if you miss two in a row.”

“Old lady! There ain’t another human within a hundred square miles.”

“That’s what they all say.”

He climbed aboard the Honda, turned the key, and it roared to life.

Braxton listened.

They heard the phone go off, even if the microphone didn’t. Put in a pocket, all its information was muffled. Then, softer, the crank of the Recon engine could be heard, the change in pitch as it went into gear, and the thumpa-thumpa of the man negotiating the mechanical billy goat over trails meant for bipeds. That was all.

“Okay,” said Braxton. “An hour. All we got to do is wait.”

Rawley nodded.

“Let’s go to the masks. I don’t want to be putting them on when he’s here.”

The two balaclavas came out; each man pulled his over his head, until his face was but a black blank with eye slots.

“Now the kit.”

“The kit” was a hypodermic needle, loaded with 50ccs of sodium pentothal — truth serum. The point wasn’t the truth. The point was to inject Bob fast and put him under. He’d be asleep for forty-eight hours, wake up with a hangover, fuzzy memories, inchoate fury, and no idea what had happened. They’d be long gone, the guns long gone, maybe in Mexico by that time, and they’d be three million dollars richer, in cash, and it would be another week or so before clown-ass Leon Kaye figured out they hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out chemically, even if Leon had paid for the full hit.

“I ain’t killing that guy,” Braxton had said to Rawley, who nodded in agreement. “He’s a hero. I don’t kill heroes. Bad for the reputation. It would be like killing LeBron.”

Still, if they had to, they could: Braxton had a Serbu shorty, a Remington 870 cut down to a total of eighteen inches, with a pistol grip fore at the pump and aft behind the trigger guard, with a SureFire WeaponLight aboard, laser-equipped to put a bright red dot on any area that was about to get carpet-bombed by double-aught buckshot. At close range, it would blow a hole in a whale. Then there was Rawley with his Smith & Wesson .500 revolver. It was a giant framed wheel gun with a magic half-inch bore width that launched Double Tap 350-grain XPD buffalo stoppers at about 3,032 pounds muzzle energy. What it hit invariably returned to its pure atomic state. It too was guided toward accuracy by electronic application, another fine item from the SureFire inventory, a laser unit that projected the same red dot of destruction on anything it was aimed at. In both cases, the red dots were enough to end any argument without difficulty.