CHAPTER 20


 

Soon after Chalk and Slagget left, Orville Hurley, Ben’s neighbor, stopped by the saltbox with his dog to see that everything was okay. Hurley believed, as many Smith Islanders did, that since they had no police force, folks had to look out for each other. Lacking a well-regulated militia, Hurley was a self-appointed irregular. Hurley was not put out that Ben didn’t invite him in for coffee. Hurley didn’t pry about all the screaming. Ben was not bothered that Hurley still carried a shotgun with him.

To Ben, things seemed a little too cozy on Smith Island, what with Lorton Dyze personally delivering his mail, and Hurley dropping around armed to the teeth to check up. Why was no one saying exactly what was on his mind, or asking what was going on? It felt to Ben like everybody was aware of this crisis, but no one would speak about it. No one wanted to break the spell. All in a day’s work, apparently.

Ben’s call to Knocker Ellis’s home phone went unanswered. Not good. Where was he? Maybe trusting him was a mistake, and he was out on Deep Banks Island hiding the gold somewhere else. Ellis was full of surprises, like a piñata stuffed with grenades, pins pulled, zero candy. For the moment, Ben had to compartmentalize his misgivings before they grew into crippling obsessions.

Through his door he heard Chalk tell the other sidekick they were going back to Hiram and Charlene’s place. Ben’s blood chilled at that. He had to follow them. The Harrises were good people, like the guardian aunt and uncle he never had. Ben could not stroll up the path in plain sight. He was too busted up from subduing The Kid, and too careful for a frontal assault. He’d make it a sniper’s stalk, if he could.

Some of Ben’s left ribs ached like hell. If he inhaled too deeply, they stabbed him like tenpenny nails driven deep by John Henry’s sledgehammer. Opening his shirt, he saw the red, black and blue mottled bruise, but no flailing bones, like a total break. Broad as his palm. Already swelling. In hand-to-hand training, Ben had been taught his ribs were the babies. His upraised forearms and fists, the baby-sitters. Ben was rusty. During the scuffle, The Kid managed to thrust a knee hard into Ben’s floating ribs. Definitely shaken baby syndrome. If The Kid succeeded in working in another good shot, Ben would’ve been gargling blood from a punctured lung.

Once again, he dragged on his clammy wetsuit, favoring his ribs where he could. To don the close-fitting neoprene required agonizing contortions. On the upside, there would be streams and guts to swim on the route he was planning. Maybe the frigid water would numb the pain. With the zipper snugged-up under his chin, he found the wetsuit acted like a half-decent tape job, stabilizing his smashed-up flank.

To make this stalk unseen, Ben would need more than a wetsuit. He pulled out his homemade reed-patterned ghillie suit. In the best of sniper tradition, the enormous baggy pants, jacket, and hood were festooned with ragged strips of burlap to break up his profile, and conceal him from game when he hunted. Head to toe, the rig was streak-dyed with marsh tans and browns to help him blend in with the lower vegetation of his boggy surroundings.

Next he took a sturdy old bread knife from the kitchen drawer. Slipped it into a belt at the small of his back. The handle was carved like a braided loaf. It would make a decent grip even when wet. Chalk’s men were waiting for him. This was not a problem. Ben could bring them a good fight with just a knife. Part of him was looking forward to it.

At the back of the downstairs coat closet, Ben pushed a wooden panel aside. He took out a waterproof bag containing his straight-body Leica Televid 62 spotting scope. He’d toned down the scope’s original silver trim for field work with blotches of Krylon OD, Desert, and Travertine Tan. There were cheaper scopes, but none better for Ben. To a man who stayed alive by seeing more, farther, and better than the enemy, the expense was worth it. He stuffed a waterproof blowout kit in the right thigh patch pocket of the suit. He hoped he would not need it to treat a trauma, but he never patrolled without one.

Ben regretted that he had not stashed the gold bar in the closet from the beginning, but he hid it there now. If he did not make it home, at least LuAnna, who until today shared in all his secrets, would know where to look.

Ben checked on The Kid in the next room. Still unconscious from the choke hold Ben had crooked around the intruder’s muscled throat. He wondered if his prisoner had suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen. He decided it was fifty-fifty whether that would hurt or help The Kid’s charming personality.

He tugged the ropes binding The Kid hard and tight to an old oak chair. Ben did not give a damn if his hostage’s circulation suffered to the point of requiring amputation. Then he laid the chair on its back. Now The Kid could not knock it over, make noise, and draw a kindly neighbor in to offer help and get killed for his trouble. Last, he duct-taped a sock in The Kid’s mouth. Ben wondered if The Kid was allergic to Ginger. His nose might congest. He could suffocate. And that would be a damn shame, Ben felt. Just awful. Then the pretty-boy operative might miss his debut at the Angola prison farm as the human pin-cushion. Ben left Ginger growling low into The Kid’s face.

After scanning out all his ground-floor windows, Ben descended the stoop. He halted there, and did something unprecedented in his entire life. He locked his front door upon leaving.

Outside, the wind blew fifteen knots, gusting to thirty. Ben crept to the reeds at the water’s edge, glancing now and then down at his chest in case a red laser sighting dot appeared there; a gunman taking a center of body mass shot. If he did notice such a dot, he would try to dive for cover. With a well-trained shooter drawing a bead, very likely it would be the last thing he did.

He made it in one piece, no extra ventilation in his ghillie suit, no fresh holes in his head. Chalk had left no one behind to clip Ben. He was likely covering a smaller perimeter closer to the Harris place.

Ben vegged-up the ghillie with cut reeds. Wove them quickly into the suit’s loose mesh. A few practiced swipes of chilling mud on his face, and Ben dissolved into the wetlands.

He didn’t have to go too slowly at the beginning of his stalk. The grasses and other growth were high and waving like mad in the wind. The scrape and rattle of the cattails covered the sound of his movements. If anyone had been there to listen. Underfoot, the mud was laced through with bulrush roots which made it spongy. He had just shy of half a mile to patrol in.

Ben rose out of the first stream, frozen to the bone despite the wetsuit. His ribs throbbed as if Ron Bushy was pounding out the drum solo of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-da-Vida; the nineteen minute fifty-one second live version.

In the sodden ghillie rig he looked like a bedraggled scarecrow. Here, the band of reeds narrowed to just fifty feet. Beach on one side, and crabgrass yards on the other. Anyone looking out a second-floor window would still have trouble noticing the downpress and parting of the reeds as he slithered through. Just in case, Ben slowed his approach.

At the second gut, he stepped down into the water and touched the old plank submerged there. His head low, Ben eased along the secret wooden network. It was a more roundabout route this way, but he could stand a little straighter, could make better time.

Finally, Ben arrived within one hundred yards of the Harris place. His ribs pounded. He sat leaning at the back of the neighbor’s old tool shed. When he caught his breath, he slid in through the shed’s rear window. Prayed the rotting sill would hold his weight. The pain in his flank was all-consuming. His eyes adjusted to the dark. Cobwebs. Old paint cans. Curled Venetian blinds. A yellowed computer monitor with a shattered screen. People magazines dating from the years when nobody knew who shot J.R.. The stench of a wild animal den.

He took the Televid out of its waterproof pouch. Uncovered the mil-dot reticle. Aiming it through the shed’s front window, he started his survey of the Harris place, using the first wheel on top of the scope body for coarse focusing. Then the second wheel to refine the picture until it was eagle sharp. No one in sight outdoors. Chalk seemed to know his business.

If Ben were still in the service, this would be the time he’d pull out a small sketch kit and draw the terrain before him, with all the ranges from his hide to the enemy positions filled in. Many of his former superiors still had his sketches and range cards framed on their office walls, such was their functional beauty. Few understood that a sniper’s skill in the stalk was more often exploited for penetration deep behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, rather than for the spot, the shot, and the kill.

Ben’s stillness was nearly perfect as he made a very slow sweep, collapsing each sector of fire before him one by one. Depending on how Chalk put together his team, there was every possibility of a counter-sniper out there waiting for him to toll in close. Chalk had abandoned The Kid too easily. He was cocky. Sure of his resources. No doubt he was trying to draw Ben out.

He studied shadows, bushes, and trees for bumps that did not seem right. Scanned for glints of light on lenses, rings, wristwatches. Listened for brave talk and laughter on the wind. Tested the breeze for scents of smoke, sweat, gun oil, gunpowder, and blood. Still nothing. There was no sign of Chalk, or his friend. Worse, there was no sign of Hiram or Charlene Harris. No warm aromas of food that usually came from her kitchen, especially when she had guests.

Ben zeroed in on the house. Windows were the obvious vantage points, but not the only ones. If the interior lights were off, a man could perch four or five feet back from a window in shadows like a ghost, and pour down death from there unseen. Once Ben eliminated all the obvious hides for a watcher, he began looking where he would have chosen to wait, the less apparent, out-of-the-ordinary places. The roof line was clean. He scanned for any small crack knocked in the shingles, or attic wall, possibly a new gun loophole. There was nothing strange except the quiet.

As always happened to him on a stalk, Ben was momentarily struck by a false sense of security. No one was really standing guard. As if Chalk were not dangerous. Ben had just kidnapped and beaten the bejesus out of a complete stranger based on an intuitive sense probably corrupted by fatigue’s paranoia. In a place behind his navel and an inch or two below, the gnawing buzz known as bubble guts joined the pain in his flank. After ten more minutes, when nothing in front of him had been stirred by anything but wind, Ben got a new sensation. He was too late.

He stowed the Televid in its pouch. Slipped out the back window of the shed. His ribs were deadly. Still, he inched away flat on his belly. Kept the shed between himself and the Harris place.

Bracing once again for the cold, Ben slid into another small gut. It was only about two feet deep. Maybe three feet wide. No catwalk planks in this one. With only his nose and right eye above the water, Ben appeared to be a raft of detritus drifting slowly along. He was freezing. He was exhausted.

Something made a noise around the next curve. Ben held completely still. A rare river otter, thirty inches long, probably male, with brown fur and dark round eyes, lazily slew-tailed down the stream within four feet of where Ben lay. Ben stopped breathing. He was not worried about upsetting the playful creature. He did not want to startle it into giving away his position. Ben closed his eyes to prevent the animal from keying into facial features amongst his ghillie thatch and muddy war paint. The otter passed Ben without glimpsing him. When it was out of hearing around the downstream bend, Ben resumed his skull drag toward his target. After fifty feet, the gut joined with a stream.

Ben turned northeast into the stream. Pulled himself along the bottom, letting the incoming tide help. Stayed hard against the shore closest to the Harris house. He made his way thirty yards like this until he was underneath Hiram’s crab shanty, which jutted over the stream on stilts. Shoulders howling, ribs baying, Ben pulled himself up into the shanty through the trap door.

He slowed his breathing and took stock. He had noticed Hiram’s boat, the Palestrina, was out. So was his smaller outboard skiff. Unless Hiram had the skiff in tow abaft the Palestrina, Chalk was probably in one of the boats. Who was left inside?

The feeling of having come too late pressed in on Ben once more. He still could not rush. So far he had stalked within fifteen feet of the house’s corner. It had taken nearly forty minutes, a heartbeat compared to some missions. Another scan. This time with his naked eye. He saw nothing. Not even a lookout at the window. He must have missed something. At this point, a fatal bullet might be his only clue he had been seen.

He took off the ghillie suit. Kept the wetsuit on. Drew the knife. A final scan all round. He edged the crab shanty’s door open. No one fired at him. Ben sprinted to the nearest corner of the house. Hugged it. Waited for sign or sound he’d been detected. Still no alarms.

Now, the pain in Ben’s ribs made him want to rush against all his training. At the back of his mind lay a constant awareness of the bomb. He reminded himself over and over again that if he went slow, he would live long enough to think up a solution to handle the invaders and their toy. Act with haste now, and he might be killed along with two of his lifelong friends.

Creeping below the first-floor windows, Ben went to the waterside door of the house. Turned the knob. Not locked. It never was. Never needed to be until today. He listened. Still heard nothing. Then he eased the door open. A quick look into the tiny foyer and beyond, into the living room.

The Harris place looked like a slaughterhouse.

Abandoning all thought for his safety, Ben pushed into his friends’ living room. The walls, once a plain, clean white, were now hook-stroked with blood like a de Kooning fresco. Where was Hiram? Where was Charlene?

Then Ben heard footsteps upstairs. A man on the second floor yawned, contented as if just rising from sleep. As if he were a guest coming down for his morning coffee.

Ben stood in a daze of his own for a second, unable to reconcile the man’s ease with the horror of the living room. Ben moved swiftly and silently to the wall by the foot of the stairwell. He saw feet, then legs descending, reflected in the glass of a painting hung at the bottom of the stair. Another self-satisfied yawn. Apparently the guy had Goldilocksed his way through the upstairs bedrooms until he found a mattress that was just right. Then, as in the fairytale, he woke up and met the bear.

When the drowsy intruder was four steps from the bottom, Ben reached blind around the corner and grabbed a fistful of shirtfront. He yanked with all his might, rattling his own ribs like Lincoln Logs. The man gave a yelp of surprise, and crashed headfirst into the wall. The picture glass shattered. He bounced stunned into a broken heap on the floor. Ben dropped onto his back, both knees driving out all breath. Since the man’s left hand was pinned beneath his body, Ben controlled the right arm, attacking the thumb, levering it hard up between the scapulae. Ben pulled out a wallet and flipped it open. The license read Tug Parnell.

Ben got in low to Tug’s ear. “Chalk. Where?”

“Fuck you!”

Ben slowly torqued the thumb hoping Tug would talk; wrenched it back well past misery into agony. It made a soft snap, like a carrot just a few days past crisp. Tug Parnell cried out. There was a demon on his back and he knew he was dead.