Keeping Watch (41 page)

“Jamie!” Allen shouted. “Jamie, what the hell is wrong with you? Stop it! Jerry, let him go.”

Jerry glanced to make sure that Ed was blocking the boy's retreat, and let go the collar, planting his boot at the bottom edge of the door. Jamie leapt away, his back to the wall and his head down, fists clenched, eyes blazing.

“Jamie,” Allen repeated, over and over until the angry black eyes flicked over to him for a moment. “Jamie, what the hell's wrong? You met Jerry last night. He's my brother. This is his house. What's the matter?”

“You didn't tell me he was a cop!” the boy spit out.

“Well, yeah, he is. Jerry's the sheriff up here. What's that got to do with it?”

The boy stared at Allen, too flabbergasted to answer. Jerry stepped forward, and the black eyes flew back to him, but the man was only moving clear of Allen in order to squat down to Jamie's level—incidentally laying himself open to attack from the boy's fists and feet.

“Jamie, the four of us have a lot of talking to do, but let me begin by saying that I'm not about to arrest anyone in my own house. My brother trusted me enough to come here with you. Can you just trust him enough to have some breakfast first?”

The dark gaze continued to blaze, then wavered and went to consult Allen; after a moment, the boy gave a sullen nod.

“You give me your word you won't try to run off?”

“Yeah.”

Jerry stood up and led the way to the kitchen. Jamie's eyes went to the unguarded door, then again to Allen, before he followed his host and jailer into the fragrant kitchen, where the sheriff began by slipping the silly apron over his uniform. He turned, the spatula cocked in one hand, and Allen nearly laughed aloud: Jerry couldn't have been more instantly disarming to the boy if he'd lain down on the floor and barked.

“How many pancakes can you eat?” he inquired, sounding eerily like their chronically cheerful Aunt Midge.

It turned out the boy could eat more than Ed, winning the informal contest hands down. While he poured and flipped and stirred up more batter, Jerry led the conversation into harmless channels, mostly about the orca that had interested the boy. The import of his uniform faded under the influence of homey food and chatter, and Jerry used an exaggerated quantity of soapsuds in the washing-up bowl to complete the domestic image.

When the last utensil was dried and in its drawer, Jerry untied his frilly apron and slipped it over his head, folded it with deliberation, and sat down, taking a chair across the table from his brother and the boy. Wariness returned, but not the fear and resentment. We are four men sitting in a kitchen discussing a problem, Jerry's attitude said, and Allen again suppressed a smile.

“All right, Jamie,” Jerry began, “we've got some serious thinking to do here. My brother has told me a bit about what's gone on, but I'd like to hear the details from you.” The mouth clamped down, and Jamie studied the table. Jerry sighed. “Okay, look. Two days ago, it was just you and Allen, and his partner in Seattle whose name he won't tell me. Then he got shot, and he had to come here for help. Now we've got ourselves a situation where, like it or not, we've got to depend on each other. Allen is trusting me not to turn him in, and trusting Ed not to sell him out. Ed's trusting us not to land him in prison for whatever he's got himself involved in, and they're asking me to ignore this uniform I'm wearing and not report a gunshot wound and a kidnapping. I trust my brother enough to know that he wouldn't ask me this without a damned good reason, so I've gone along with it so far. But, kid, in the end everything comes down to you. Whatever it is you're holding back, it's an axe over all our necks. I think you need us to protect you. We can't do that if we don't know the full extent of the problem.”

Jamie's gaze had risen, brought up by Jerry's calm and serious demeanor, half-hypnotized by the repetition and rhythm of his words. He was now staring in fascination at the skilled interrogator before him, as unable to pull away from Jerry's eyes as he had been unable to free himself from the man's hands. He seemed to be wrestling with some inner demon, torn between the absolute necessity of keeping it to himself and the terrible compulsion to let it out. His mouth tightened, his teeth clamped down on his lower lip as if to keep the words inside, and then the dark eyes suddenly filled. One tear freed itself to run down his cheek, then Jamie tore himself away from Jerry's gaze and flung his thin body into his rescuer's arms. Allen grunted with pain and tried to ease the clinging child over to his right side. When he could breathe again, he pressed the heaving shoulders against his chest and waited for the storm to pass.

It took a long time.

Eventually, when Jamie's gulps had abated and his shudders died down, Allen pushed him gently away, grasping one bony shoulder with his good hand and looking into the boy's eyes. Now was the time, he thought; now I'll hear him say that he's murdered his father, and we'll all be in the shit.

“Jamie, what have you done?”

“Not me,” the boy gulped, and swiped a fist across his nose. “My . . . my father.” The tears rose again; Jamie took a tremulous breath, and gave to Allen his final betrayal
(Couldn't be trusted. Not to bite.)
“I think my father . . . he kills people.”

BOOK FIVE

Trip Wires

Chapter 34

Allen had always liked it best when patrols were kept to a bare minimum: a night-ambush party stripped down to three men and their rifles, slipping into the green.

And he'd always hated the waiting, standing around the LZ in the fresh dawn, cooling his heels while the Hueys took their time, all pumped up and nowhere to go.

The three weeks between Jamie's tearful confession and the afternoon when Mark O'Connell came for his son were the worst of both worlds for a man who for twenty-six years had operated on his own: a staff of thousands, nothing to do but wait. He thought he'd go insane.

It couldn't be helped, any more than Saigon or HQ could be helped. He'd pulled Jerry into this, knowing what that would entail, knowing that there was no chance in hell that Jerry would agree to being one of a night-ambush party of three—he was an elected official, for Christ sake, picking up drunks before they drowned and filling out paperwork; what else could he do but bring in the brass?

But three weeks of it was about twenty days too much, even for Jerry. And so when Allen had told his brother that if Jerry didn't get him out from under this . . . bureaucratic bullshit, he'd just take Jamie and disappear, Jerry had believed him. Maybe not completely—he wouldn't think that Allen would up and abandon Rae—but the press of manpower and paper was getting to him, too, and so he'd allowed himself to take Allen at his word.

And now they were here, eased quietly away from the mob of badges, a night-ambush party of only a little more than three, all hand-chosen by Jerry, all taking personal leave for however long it took.

The house lay quiescent, hushed but for the eternal susurration of the rain and the similar patter of quick fingers on the keyboard upstairs. Allen was in the kitchen, working a painful set of reps on the five-pound dumbbell his arm had recently graduated to, wondering if it was too soon to make another pot of coffee, while upstairs, RageDaemon battled the enemy in splashes of electronic gore and the agonized if repetitive cries of the victims.

The borrowed safe house was a modern two-story wood cabin at the end of an ill-paved road on the western coast of the Washington mainland, the very definition of back of beyond. And since the Olympic Peninsula was a rain forest and it was now the last week of September, it had been raining when they drove up, it had rained every one of the seventy hours since, and it would probably rain every day for the next seven or eight months. Even in the so-called summer, a person would be hard-pressed to tell if the sun was actually shining, unless he was standing on the roof—between the drooping tree branches, the waist-high ferns, and the swaths of epiphytic moss connecting them, there didn't seem to be any room for air, much less sunshine. It was a frigid jungle: Vietnam with Gore- Tex.

He put the dumbbell down and went to rummage through the kitchen drawers, hoping he might come across a few more of the stale low-tar cigarettes he'd discovered the day before. No luck, and he was down to three. Maybe Jerry'd think to bring him some. Tomorrow was Allen's fifty-fifth birthday. If he had been home, Rae might have baked him a cake. If Jerry showed up with one from a bakery, he'd find it hard not to shove the thing into his brother's face.

The shack at the rainy end of nowhere had been Jerry's bright idea, located through the friend of a friend. Its owner was an Arizona native who had driven through the peninsula on an eerily sun-filled weekend two years before, seen the
FOR SALE
sign without stopping to consider what the thick layer of lichen on the sign's top edge meant, and bought the place on a whim as a summer vacation home for his family. The family had spent exactly sixteen days here, frantically slopping brilliant yellow and white paint on every surface, before his wife gave up on the transformative possibilities of cheerful curtains and threatened to divorce him, saying that the children's games had begun to take on macabre twists. The friend's friend had kept the place, no doubt aware that finding a second innocent to buy it would be on the thin side of impossible. He claimed to enjoy the peace and quiet; Allen suspected the man came here to drink himself into a stupor. God knew, if it weren't for the computer player upstairs, Allen would have been doing just that.

Once, Allen had been good at ambushes. Now, his mind seemed unable to settle down to it, to shut out the boredom and the incessant internal chatter of possibilities. Trying to concentrate in the presence of cops—federal and local from five states so far—had been like trying to sleep under an outgoing mortar launcher. And it was not much better out here, wondering what was going on in their absence.

Gina had been right when she'd smelled the presence of law enforcement around Mark O'Connell—the feds had been looking at him since almost exactly the same time Jamie's first email had reached Alice. When Allen snatched Jamie, it had acted like a stick thrust into the federal anthill; as soon as he and the boy surfaced, the badges had swarmed over them. They would have eaten Allen alive if it hadn't been for his connection with Jamie, a boy whose father did indeed kill people for a living—seven at least, they thought, by bullet and bomb—and on the side embezzle a shitload of money, all funneled offshore. Jamie O'Connell: a boy with sharp eyes and a quick brain, a child who'd had the good sense to keep quiet around his father, a kid whose testimony could bring the whole thing down. Jamie, whose only human bonds were with his father, Allen Carmichael, and Rachel Johnson—and Rachel wasn't playing.

The investigators had spent a lot of taxpayer dollars pulling the plane up from the sea bottom to determine that its pilot was not inside. They were spending a lot more trying to find some loose end left in O'Connell's tying-up process. The only one they'd found so far was Jamie.

The feds thought that if O'Connell came for his son, it would be because the man was afraid of what Jamie might tell them. That if he came, it would be with a car bomb—this hitman's preferred method—or by a sniper's scope from the top of a building, as he'd done twice in his career. But Allen had witnessed the pleasure on O'Connell's face when he'd pulled the shotgun's trigger, and he knew that testimony had nothing to do with it: O'Connell could no more allow Jamie his freedom than a cat could let the mouse between its paws run free. O'Connell would come, because he couldn't help himself.

However, Allen was half wishing that Jerry hadn't agreed, that the feds had just thrown Allen's ass in jail and taken over the whole situation. At least in jail a man's shoes didn't take on a greasy film of mildew overnight. And they gave you nice orange suits to wear instead of the drab green and brown flannel shirt he'd put on that morning. Maybe he'd ask Jerry to bring him something fluorescent to wear, or at least Hawaiian.

They'd decided that three weeks here ought to do it, but it was only three days in and Allen was already taking the cabinet drawers off their tracks in hopes of uncovering a pack of year-old cigarettes fallen down behind.
Three weeks,
he mused.
Jesus.
He remounted one drawer and reached for the next, doing the calculations: twenty-one days, minus the three they'd been here made eighteen, times twenty-four hours was (carry the three) four hundred thirty-two, plus the hour and a half short of precisely three days came to four hundred thirty-three and a half hours, times sixty made—

It happened faster and harder than any of them could have anticipated. Both doors, kitchen and front, smashed open within half a second of the other, locks shattering as two men stormed inside, guns in their hands as they cleared the door frames. Allen dropped the drawer and was reaching around for the Glock in his belt when the bullets hit him, spinning him around and throwing him against the sink as if he'd been kicked by an ox. The Glock fell from his lifeless hand, landing with a crack on the white enamel sink; as Allen sank down, his eyes registered the gun going past them, followed by the tiled edge of the sink, then the cabinet doors, and finally the cheerful green and white linoleum with the new red spatters.

Long before Allen hit the floor, the man with the weight lifter's build was hammering up the stairs on the heels of the slimmer man who'd broken through the front door. They knew where they were headed, and did not pause before the door on the right was down and the handsome blue-eyed man's gun was coming down on the figure at the computer. One moment of hesitation, words strangling in his throat as he stared in confusion at the slim, dark-haired figure rising from the monitor, a figure that was not his son but a small woman with a sleek Smith & Wesson in her hand. The man fired as he threw himself to the side, but the brief pause had allowed the weight lifter to reach the doorway, and when the woman's gun boomed, Allen's shooter went down. Two more shots, overlaid with shouts and the pounding of feet and shattering glass, then a volley of shots ripped through the rain-forest hush and all was chaos.

After ninety seconds, a single man emerged from the shouts and turmoil, flying down the stairs as he shouted into his cell phone. At the bottom he leapt for the kitchen and skidded to a halt, and a great deal of the urgency left him.

“Are you hit?” he asked the man on the floor.

Allen glared up at him from where he'd propped himself against the cabinet. “Stupid question,” he croaked. “Did you get him?”

“Got one of them, big guy with muscles, don't think he's going to make it. Here, let me help you up.”

Allen put out a hand, cursing. “Jesus, I think that bastard broke every rib in my body. You lost O'Connell?”

“Went out the window. I called for reinforcements—he won't get far.” Jerry seemed less interested in the failure of their trap than he was in Allen's injuries. The only blood appeared to be from where Allen's forehead had smacked into the edge of the sink, but his face was screwed up in pain. Jerry brushed his brother's fumbling fingers aside and ripped open the buttons on the plaid shirt to peer at the Kevlar vest beneath. It had trapped two rounds: One would have gone through Allen's stomach, the other his heart. Thank God for good aim, Allen thought, and had to firmly stifle the impulse to laugh. He reached for the vest straps, allowing Jerry to help him.

“Everyone okay?” Allen asked. He could smell the sweat and the gunpowder on his brother, and it seemed to him that Jerry's hands were almost as uncertain as his own.

“Annie was nicked in the leg, she'll be fine. Marty took one in the side, but it doesn't look too bad. I don't think O'Connell was hit, but the other guy, shit, he just wouldn't stop shooting. I don't know which one of us got him in the end. Christ,” he said, trying to make light of it. “My hands are shaking. I never had to shoot at anyone before.”

“Must be Howard. If you hadn't got him, we'd all be dead meat. He blew through here and shot me almost casually, like you'd kick a chair out of the way. Ow!”

“Here, let me get that.”

Gently, Jerry lifted the vest away from his brother's body. He tossed it on the counter and eased up the army-green T-shirt Allen wore underneath it. The skin was angry, and it wouldn't have surprised Jerry if he was right about the ribs. Jerry handed Allen an ice tray from the freezer.

“Get some cold onto that,” he suggested. “You going to be okay for a while?”

“Sure,” Allen assured him. Jerry left, to go upstairs and see to the injured. Allen put down the ice, retrieved the Glock from the sink, and took his waterproof jacket from its hook next to the door. Silently, he let himself out into the rain.

Ten paces, and the rain forest took over. Another ten, and the sounds of voices and equipment became distant, muted. In less than a minute, Allen was all by himself in the green. Just him and a man with blue eyes.

At first, the rain was an irritant. He kept feeling that if only someone would shut the damn hiss off for a minute, he could hear his quarry moving through the undergrowth. But then the instincts crept back in, and reminded him that acuteness of hearing was only necessary for the prey. Deer and rabbits had big ears; their hunters did not. And in this jungle, Allen would be the hunter.

O'Connell had gone out the upstairs window and sprinted straight across the cleared space for the trees, shoving in among them at full speed, wanting only to put distance between himself and the guns that had so suddenly erupted from the corners of an apparently empty house. He'd spent time in the woods, hunting deer (and mock-hunting his son, Allen reminded himself grimly), but he'd never been a target himself, as far as Allen knew. That was about to change.

Allen, following the man's northbound trail, saw the point at which O'Connell's mind clicked out of panic mode—far too soon for Allen's taste, since it was easier to follow a man who wasn't thinking clearly. Allen paused to shrug off his rustling jacket, and moved on through the wet, his eyes picking out the disturbed moss and the places where the fern fronds had shed their drops, his ears alert for any sound that wasn't a steady pat and hiss, his nose—or was he imagining this?—following the expensive cologne that he'd smelled in the marble bathroom and on the silken bed covering. Glock against his thigh, Allen slipped through the gloom between the ferns and the moss-thick trees, a shadow in the green.

Sudden motion at three o'clock: big, fast-moving—but two of them, and not men: elk.
What startled them?
Allen crouched a little more, setting aside the pain in his chest, trying to ignore the once-familiar chafe and bind of soaked clothing. The elk had been trotting off to the right, which meant O'Connell was dead ahead, maybe half a mile north.

But going where? The man had paused briefly, a quarter of a mile back, his footprints pressing into the moss with the delay. When he'd resumed, his path had angled slightly to the east. But he hadn't scuffed the ground with indecision, merely stood for a moment, then started up again.