Dead Men's Dust (27 page)

It should have ended then. My knife should have found his throat. He should have fallen to his knees gripping his wound, attempting to halt the flow. But as I’d always been cautioned, should-haves and could-haves have nothing to do with the reality of blood and snot combat.

Even as I stabbed at Cain’s throat, he was already lifting a hand. Instead of the soft tissue of his throat, I found a sinewy forearm. All right, I wounded him sorely. If he didn’t staunch the blood loss, then he would ultimately weaken and die. But he was still in the fight. And unfortunately, my KA-BAR was wedged in muscle and bone. And Cain’s blade was still free.

YOU’VE UNDOUBTEDLY HEARD THAT OLD STORY ABOUT HOW
at the moment of death your entire life flashes before your eyes. It’s not true. Well, not for me it wasn’t. I guess my life had been way too eventful for that. Not many people get the luxury of playing out a billion reminders before sinking into oblivion, not when death comes in an instant. Instead of the whole panoply of incidents from an event-filled thirty-nine years, only two things flashed through my mind. First, the face of my ex-wife, Diane. It wasn’t a genuine image, but one my mind conjured of future events. She was standing at my grave, but she wasn’t grieving. She wore a face of disgust, even anger. As if she’d always known that this was how it was going to end.

Second—and equally poignant—an image from only minutes before. John beseeching me, “Don’t leave me.”

On reflection, those two images whorled through my mind in less than a heartbeat, so I suppose the important facets of my life could’ve been played out within seconds. But I didn’t have the luxury of seconds. If I was to live at all, I had to act now.

I loosed the hilt of my KA-BAR. It was pointless attempting to wrench it free. While I tried, Cain could have cut enough of my hide
to fashion himself a new pair of boots. Instead, I stabbed my fingers at his eyes. It didn’t stop his knife from parting flesh and grating on bone, but it was enough to deflect it from my heart. It also forced us apart. It was a slow release, and I swear that I could feel every cold inch of steel as it sucked free of my chest. Cain went backward, eyes screwed tight as he tried to fight the response of tears invading his senses. I went to one knee, clutching at my chest.

Cain backed to the wall again, his shoulders brushing more bones on the floor. He scrubbed at his eyes, cursing me in short guttural snatches of sound. I remained kneeling, almost overwhelmed by the agony. His knife hadn’t killed me, but at that moment I wasn’t sure that the pain wouldn’t finish the task for him.

Ignoring the agony, I rose up to see where he was, and already Cain was coming for me. He was half blinded, but he didn’t need eyes to know I was at his mercy. He was armed. I wasn’t. I was severely wounded. It would be a matter of seconds to finish the job.

But would-be is a phrase that sits alongside should-haves and could-haves in combat. And the difference between Cain and me was that only I understood that at that moment. He hadn’t seen Rink step into the doorway behind him. Rink was bleeding from his belly. He had a gash across his chin, another across his arm. His face was plastered with gore from another wound across his forehead. But life seethed in his furnace-hot gaze.

Cain faltered. Something in my face must have alerted him. He stumbled to a halt. Swung around to face Rink.

“Drop the knife,” Rink roared as he lifted a gun and aimed it at Cain’s face.

Cain laughed. “You found my gun? I wondered where I dropped it.”

“Drop the knife, Cain,” Rink said again. He stepped closer, the gun trained between Cain’s eyes.

“Sorry. Can’t do it.”

“Drop it now or I blow your goddamn head off.”

“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” Cain said, as if he genuinely cared. “I really thought that I’d opened you up back there.” Cain sucked air through his teeth, noting that Rink’s throat was fully intact. “I didn’t realize that you got your arm in the way. I only cut your chin, eh? Suppose that’ll teach me for rushing the job.”

“Don’t try messing with me,” Rink warned. He looked unsteady on his feet. Loss of blood and what looked like a knock on the head were making him weak. “I know what you’re trying to do. Do you think you can get me with that pigsticker before I blow a hole in you?”

Cain glanced my way. I could see a smile begin across his face. “You know something, Rington, I believe I could.”

I knew it. Cain knew. Even Rink knew it. The gun was empty.

“Shoot him, Rink,” I shouted.

Rink pulled the trigger.

A click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

But it was enough. Cain almost swaggered as he advanced on Rink. As he did so, I was already moving. I snatched at the clutter on the floor, came up with the first thing my grasping fingers found, and with all my might I forced the broken end of a human rib into the soft flesh in the hollow of his throat.

The result was instantaneous. Cain shuddered, his knees gave way. He stumbled toward Rink, who was already coming at him. I snatched at his left arm even as Rink grappled with his right, pulling the knife from Cain’s listless grasp. Cain twisted toward me. His eyes were wide, as though caught in an epiphany of insight. His mouth was wide, too, but nothing issued forth but a gurgle. My own face was flat, emotionless, as I plucked my KA-BAR from his flesh.

We could have done it then. A frenzy of stabbing and slashing. Doling out as much torment as Cain had subjected his victims to. But neither of us succumbed to our base instincts. We did something immeasurably crueler. We allowed Cain to suffer the ignominy of a slow and painful death. If he hadn’t reveled in displaying the trophies taken
from his victims, I would have been left weaponless. No doubt about it…he’d have won the day.

Instead, he had to suffer his last few minutes of life in the knowledge that he’d messed up.

He collapsed to his knees. He searched our faces. We both grinned at him. Miraculously he found a laugh. But it was lost on us. He was simply pathetic. And he knew it.

He sobbed. Lifted a beseeching hand to me. I shook my head. He lifted faltering fingers to the half-inch stub of bone protruding from his throat.

His eyes said it all.

“You reap what you sow,” I told him.

Cain laughed a final time at the irony of it.

JUST AS I SUSPECTED, WALTER ARRIVED LIKE A CELEBRITY
at a Hollywood bash. There’s no show without Punch. He entered the chamber only after the storm troopers had given him the all clear. Medics were in the throes of strapping John to a gurney—belly down, of course—hooking up IV bags and inserting all manner of hypodermic contraptions into his failing system.

Sitting in the dust, clutching at a dressing on my chest, I watched it all with a strange sense of distraction.

Medics fussed over Rink, but I gave them as little notice as I did those working to save John. I was only concerned with Walter. I wasn’t worried that any of us would end up buried under the dirt as I once contemplated. Walter was seeing this through the right way. Showing his gratitude. Otherwise, the armed strike force wouldn’t have given ground to the medical team; they’d have simply shot us where we sat.

“What kept you?” I asked.

Walter came to stand beside me. He even gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. But his eyes were on Cain. We had left him where he’d come to rest, slouched on his knees, hands folded in his lap, head
tilted forward on his chest. Apart from the blood dripping on his breast, he looked like a supplicant at prayer.

“I didn’t want to step on your toes,” Walter said. “This was your gig, Hunter.”

I spat phlegm and dust and God knows what else on the floor.

“You could’ve come sooner. You were monitoring us all along. Why didn’t you send in your team before now?”

“And would you have thanked me if I had?”

“No,” I answered truthfully. “I suppose not.”

“Then all’s well that ends well.”

I gripped the dressing a paramedic had placed on my chest wound. Thought about how close Cain had come to finishing me. All’s well that ends well? “Yeah.”

Walter walked away from me then. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for my well-being, only that Cain held a more immediate fascination for him. He went and stood over Cain, stared down at him for a long time.

“He’s dead.”

“As disco,” I said.

“You know,” Walter said, “there’s many a profiler up at Quantico would’ve given their eyeteeth to speak to him before he died.”

“My heart bleeds for them,” I muttered. In hindsight, considering how close Cain’s knife had come to finishing me, they weren’t the most appropriate words. Even Walter glanced at me to see if I was serious. I slowly blinked.

Returning his attention to Cain, Walter went on, “Don’t know how he managed to elude us all this time.”

“Maybe you didn’t look hard enough.”

Walter nodded. Then, totally out of character for a man who’d ordered plenty of wet work but never gotten his own hands dirty, he gripped Cain’s hair and pulled back his head. A shadow crossed Walter’s face. He looked to the medics.

“See to this man,” he ordered.

I jerked. Walter stepped in front of me, pressing me down as Cain was loaded onto a gurney. “Don’t worry, Hunter. I’m going to bury him.”

“He
is
dead?” My words were more question than fact.

“We don’t bury the living,” he pointed out.

That wasn’t necessarily true, but I wasn’t of a mind to argue. Walter never talked straight.

As Cain was rushed away, Walter and I watched him go. Walter sighed, and I should have guessed what was coming. “We were looking in the wrong place.”

I squinted at him.

“It’s not him.”

“What?”

“It’s not him,” Walter repeated.

I experienced a moment’s panic. “What do you mean
it’s not him
? It’s definitely Cain.” To emphasize the point, I threw out a hand, inviting Walter to take in the sheer horror of his surroundings. Walter lifted a palm, a calming gesture, but I struggled up from the floor to stand beside him. My nose was inches from his. “Can’t you see what the son of a bitch did here?”

“Easy now, son,” Walter said. “It’s Cain all right. No doubt about it.”

“So what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s not Martin Maxwell.”

“What?” I stared into Walter’s face. Searching for the lie. Not that it helped. I didn’t know Martin Maxwell from Mickey Mouse. Only thing I was sure of was that I’d stopped the Harvestman.

“It’s the brother,” Walter explained.

“The brother? You mean…?”

“Uh-huh. Robert Swan. The musician.”

I got it then.

“You need a name to give to the press, Walter?” I said. “And you
want Swan to take the blame for this. To protect the good name of the Secret Service.”

“Yes.”

Thing is, at the end of the day, it didn’t much matter to me. Whoever Tubal Cain ended up being, it didn’t matter in the large scale of things. He was a demented killer regardless. One that I’d put down like a rabid dog. And for that I was thankful. If Walter needed to spin the world a line of bullshit, then so be it.

I grunted, looked Walter dead in the eye. He stood there expressionless. Then I nodded. “The musician? If you say so, Walter.”

Walter winked. “I say so.”

I turned my back on him and clutching my chest I limped toward the exit door. The bullet graze on my calf hurt worse than the chest wound. It was still night out, but the sky was ablaze with searchlights from the helicopters coming and going. As I reached the stairs, Rink joined me. He placed a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t determine whether it was to support his weight or mine. It didn’t matter. As always, we’d support each other.

“You going to be all right, Rink?”

“Fine and dandy,” he said, yet involuntarily his hand went to the dressings on his face and chin. “He got me good, Hunter. Slashed my gut, but luckily for me he only got the muscle. He came close to getting my throat, too. If I hadn’t been knocked cold when I banged my head, the son of a bitch might have really finished me off.”

“It was a close one,” I said. The cut on his chin wasn’t life-threatening, but if it had been an inch lower, my friend wouldn’t be beside me now. Most likely I wouldn’t have been alive, either.

“Too close,” Rink said.

With no sense of volition, I’d made it up the stairs and found myself standing ankle deep in the white sand. The cul-de-sac wasn’t large enough to accommodate all the choppers and personnel brought in by Walter, but there were a fair number of men and women in
jumpsuits and body armor. They stood around with their weapons cocked, as though Cain were still a threat.

Leaning on each other, Rink and I made our way to the cleft in the rocks. It was awkward walking through the gap shoulder to shoulder, but we made it.

Outside was as Rink had earlier described it—a three-ring circus. Helicopters dominated the sky. Hummers and SUVs prowled along the lip of the escarpment in the distance. Undoubtedly FBI and Secret Service, but this was now Walter’s gig, and he was calling all the shots. Everyone else had to make do with prowling on the periphery. The only thing that concerned me was the presence of the air ambulance Walter had had the foresight to call in. And even as I confirmed its presence, paramedics rushed past us with John strapped to the gurney.

“Think he’ll make it?” Rink asked.

I remembered the awful wounds on his back and couldn’t see how.

“It’s amazing what the doctors can do these days,” Rink said, his words sounding hollow. Even
he
doubted them.

“He’ll pull through,” I said softly. “He has to. Otherwise all of this will have been for nothing.”

“Not for nothing, my friend.” Rink slipped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into an embrace. “We’ve just stopped a monster. Me an’ you, Hunter. Just like the old days.”

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, WALTER ATTEMPTED TO
explain the thinking behind it all. In his take on the Harvestman, Martin Maxwell hadn’t gone off the rails. All right, he’d messed up his life when he’d gone playing with the governor’s wife’s lingerie, but that, it turned out, was his only transgression. Other than a sleazy penchant for women’s underwear, he wasn’t the fiend he was suspected of being.

Some would even argue that Maxwell was a decent enough fellow. After all, he’d sought out his less privileged brother. Taken him into the fold of his home. Given him the kind of life he’d been missing. But it appears that the man who would become Cain wasn’t one for gratitude. His was a soul festering with jealousy, and with dark fantasies and desires he couldn’t achieve as a no-name musician in a nation of musicians whose talents far outshone his. So Cain instead coveted something that could never be his. He stole the skills of his brother. Maybe Martin gave the knowledge willingly. He had to have taken the brother under his wing, for Cain’s skill with weapons, particularly the knife, didn’t come without many hours of practice. Or his understanding of tracking and surveillance. Or—and this was the
most troubling aspect of Walter’s take on Cain—how he could have known my name. But that was easy enough for Walter to explain: he simply left me out of the equation. As far as anyone would ever know, it was federal agents who’d taken Cain out.

In the end, I didn’t bother thinking about it. Let Walter play his games. It was what he did, after all. What better way to cover up the depraved actions of a government employee than to deny that he was one? Plausible denial. That was what Walter thrived on. If he wanted the world to believe that Martin Maxwell wasn’t their man, then so be it. He could feed them the bullshit about Robert Swan, but I knew the truth.

I had other, more important things on my mind.

John for one.

He was currently recuperating in a military hospital beyond the prying eyes of the media. As far as anyone was concerned, Cain had left no living victims. I was happy enough with the arrangement. It got Hendrickson’s men off his back. Walter promised me that on his recovery John would be placed in the witness protection program. In effect, he would disappear. New name, new identity, the works. The only time he’d be drawn back into the limelight would be if charges were brought against Hendrickson and Sigmund Petoskey for their part in the counterfeiting ring. Then John would be returned to obscurity.

It meant never going home for him. But given that he’d been gone so long, that his time with Louise Blake was now behind him as well, maybe it was for the best that John start over.

My next concern was for Rink. My best friend. Who’d given so much for me. Who had suffered as much as I had. We went off to the hospital together to be patched up. My chest wound turned out to be superficial, as did the wounds to Rink’s chin and arm, but the slash to the gut meant he had to undergo observation for a few days.

After Rink was cleared from any signs of complications, Walter extended his hospitality to the use of his Lear. A few hours later we
were back in Florida. We spent two days at Rink’s condominium in Tampa. The rain had passed and we spent those forty-eight hours reclining in the sun and drinking. Of course, it wasn’t all partying. There was a lot of healing to do.

Plus, we still had work to do. A certain briefcase liberated from a boat at Marina del Rey required our attention. Not to mention the seven hundred grand that was inside it. I’d no qualms about putting the money to good use; John had paid in blood and agony for this reward. As far as anyone was concerned, the cash had burned along with Rhet Carson’s yacht. The problem being, blood money never brings happiness. It was handed over to Walter as evidence that would help bring down John’s enemies.

As a sweetener for my time in the U.S., Walter transferred a sizable sum of money into a fund set up for Jennifer and the kids. This was cash from his department’s budget, so did not reek of agony and blood. It was clean. So was my conscience.

I spoke to Harvey Lucas. He told me he was looking after Louise Blake. Something in his tone made me smile. He was looking after her? I bet he was.

Job done, Rink was as affable as ever. The scars would forever be a reminder of how close to death he’d come, but he wasn’t overly upset. The scars on his face gave his rugged good looks even more appeal to the ladies. Or so Rink said. There were tears in our eyes when we said good-bye at the airport.

My final concern. And the most pressing. Going home. Wherever that turned out to be.