Last Call for the Living (21 page)

He was fine right where he was and figured whatever quality of round next in the chamber would do the job. He hazarded the buckshot at that range wouldn't be lethal, but it surely would do a number on Flock's face. Take him out of the equation.

Hicklin focused down the long muzzle at the single dot sight. His target was briefly outlined by a flicker of lightning. Hicklin drew a breath and exhaled slowly. He closed his left eye.

The butt jerked into his shoulder.

He knew instantly what round had been in the chamber.

It was a hell of a shot in such poor conditions. And lucky. Flock's body jumped to its left as if he'd been yanked off his feet by an invisible crook. His leg pancaked and Flock—minus most of his head—fell to the ground.

Hicklin had no time to spare as a double-fisted salvo strafed the thicket of laurel, Lipscomb showing excellent trigger control, even with his weak hand. Hicklin retreated into the forest, head down, bullets whining around him as a tit-for-tat dance of muzzle flashes could be seen from a cottage window.

While Lipscomb reloaded, Hicklin heard the generator sputter and flatline.

Be strong,
he wanted to tell Charlie. Not sure of his next move.
Don't do nothin' stupid.

*   *   *

Led by the
beam of his Maglite, Lang stumbled up an incline, negotiating downed trunks and rotten husks. A river of pine straw gave way to rocks slick from the recent rain. He looked back at the Titan, barely able to discern his pickup in the darkness below.

Tall pines and sapling branches served as obstacles to his ascent. At times he had to move laterally ten or twenty feet before he could continue. Every step appeared ominous. He hiked about fifty yards, pausing once when the terrain became more agreeable to smoke a cigarette, every minute that passed reminding him of his foolishness. His thoughts turned dour. An impulse to end it then and there. Against this tree or that.

A sorry-ass life, Tommy.

Here in the woods where it just rains and rains and rains.

The report from a shotgun dopplered down the mountainside. Lang froze. The sound seemed to come at him from all directions, an avalanche of echoes prickling his skin with alarm. Followed by small-arms fire and the boom of that 12-gauge again. An impression of the gunfight formed in his mind, somewhere northeast of his current position. Lang's heart began to gallop. He unholstered the Kimber and continued on, half a step slower, his eyes and ears tuned to the vast forest that surrounded him. He reached the edge of a brook. Slabs of limestone jutted from the ground in a peculiar uniformity. He cocked an ear but heard only the roar of rainwater draining downstream.

Moments later gunfire broke the eerie silence, .40- or .45-caliber handguns punctuated by the blast of a pump shotgun. Sounded like two armies talking across a pasture. Lang grew breathless, but he kept on, squinting at the faint beginnings of a hiking path just ahead. He kept the beam of the flashlight low and tried to ignore the pain in his chest.

The anxiety eventually passed. Replaced by urgency. His senses maxing out. The needle way past red.

He thumbed the safety on the Kimber. Played the flashlight across a carpet of pine needles. There was the sweet smell of kudzu flowers. Wet earth and citrus. Rain whispering down from the canopy.

Lang swore he heard the thrum of a helicopter.

*   *   *

Crews studied the
tilted landscape from an array of monitors inside a mobile command post, the static radio communications of two helicopter pilots bouncing back and forth over the intercom. There was microwave downlink equipment. Night-vision and resonance something-or-others that the techie fooled with. He liked to hum while he worked, tapping his feet, as if the sound track to the evening's activities played in his head.

The FLIR camera systems made everything look flat to Crews. The mountains and thick rolling forests in high-contrast gray scale. But between the weather and deserted terrain it rode her eyes hard. Either too much depth or too little. She felt lost in the images. Hadn't slept much. Spent too much time squinting under inadequate light.

Too many reports and files and memos. Not enough police work.

The wrinkles were coming in at the corner of each eye. She rubbed at them, exasperated, her mind wandering the channels dug by lack of sleep and undue stress. She caught her reflection in the computer monitor. Crow's-feet, bags under the eyes. She'd never bothered with creams or lotions or preserving treatments and didn't figure to start now. Unlike some women, Crews just accepted the face age gave her and got on with the business at hand.

A state trooper brought her coffee. Said it was Exit 149's finest. The kind that cost fifty cents, a little Styrofoam cup plopped down followed by a stream of foul black liquid. Who knew where the coffee came from or how long it'd been in the machine.

Crews didn't care.

She had a pair of helos on loan from the State Patrol Aviation Unit. They'd taken off from an operations center in Athens. Just ahead of the weather, the helicopters flew north, over the big hydroelectric dams to Tugaloo Lake, veering west at the Chattooga River toward the state parks, land forever protected in its natural state. She followed their progress on the monitors, saw what they saw, mainly Virginia and white pines that covered the earth in black bushy strokes. The occasional car traveled down the road, illuminated like a white mouse in a field after a controlled burn. She saw houses, churches, little specks of heat in all that gray. Some upstart developments near major intersections. A trailer park. Shiny rooftops and antennae.

Winding roads that just seemed to disappear.

The helos had run two by two for more than a week over those same woods. Jubilation County was just too damn big, haystack big, with a couple hard-core ex-cons serving as her needles.

One bird's nest in a forest of thousands.

The bird's nest with the money and guns and maybe even a hostage named Charlie Colquitt.

She broke the monotony of the FLIR flyovers by studying the case file. Leonard Lipscomb's jacket was an inch thick. A life of petty crime that graduated to misdemeanors and eventually a few felonies, armed robbery the crime that warranted a decade-long sentence without parole. God only knew what crimes a man like him had gotten away with. Lipscomb was career all the way.

Good behavior, my ass.

The helicopters made a final pass, dipping into a wild-looking valley, an ocean of tree-soaked mountains that led right to Jubilation County's northern border. A thousand more yards and they would technically be out of her jurisdiction.

The coffee cup was at her lips when Crews dropped it in her lap.

“Command, are you seeing this?”

Everyone in the mobile unit leaned in together, gathering over her shoulder. Crews could feel a collective breath being held.

“Copy, AU-One-Thirteen. Suppose we got some hunters up there?”

“Command, yeah … and some deer doing double taps with a .45?”

Specks of light flashed under a dense canopy. What looked like a one-story cabin, partially obscured and as remote as it got for those parts.

The signature of gunfire was unmistakable.

And then it was gone.

*   *   *

Hicklin looked up,
surprised to hear the faint whir of a chopper. The rain and wind intensified. If there was a helo in the area it sounded far off and way up, and dealing with some nasty weather conditions.

He heard Lipscomb bark an order at Charlie. Hicklin moved among the trees, practically blind, at times unable to see the hand in front of his face. Nothing to go by but the feel of the polymer pump of the shotgun.

“Hicklin? Hey, Hicklin?”

Lipscomb's voice carried out the front door like that of some cave dweller grunting a warning. A primitive sitting before a fire. Discarded bones in the dust.

“I'm here,” Hicklin replied from behind a column of oakwood.

“Show yourself!”

Wind gusts had loosened the branches of a Scotch pine he'd used to thatch the roof. A cover to keep those very helicopters that were in the neighborhood from taking notice. If the helos were even looking in the first place. Lucky bastards might of just stumbled onto the safe house. Hicklin wondered if with all their fancy cameras they could have seen that doozy of a gunfight. Be hard not to notice. At least twenty rounds exchanged direction. Not to mention what if some poor fool was out wandering the woods, even at such a late hour, and turned an ear upslope. Hicklin doubted it, though. Most of the day hikers and granola folks frolicked across ridges and mountains to the east, in the well-advertised parks and on trails where every view was breathtaking and the bears and ticks left you alone. Hicklin figured the only people on
his
mountain were convicts.

But it would not be a safe place for much longer.

“I'm right outside, Preach,” he said, right before relocating behind a crooked tree trunk that seemed to corkscrew out of the ground.

“Thanks for clarifying, son,” Lipscomb answered. “Got anything else as profound as
that
to say?”

His voice was bold, assured, like Lipscomb knew something Hicklin didn't. He fingered a soft pack from his breast pocket of his shirt, pulled the cigarette out with the filter tip between his teeth.

“I'm listening,” he called out.

“Way I see it, son, you have some interest in this here bank teller. Otherwise, I'd be talkin' to pinecones. Why you took him I may never know. Saw in the paper you reorganized that colored manager's head, so I guess you haven't gone completely crazy. But you really had no business engaging us.”

Lipscomb paused, as if awaiting an acknowledgment.

“Go on!”

“My guess,” he said, “is you stashed the money close by.”

An awkward silence followed like the delay on a satellite feed. Hicklin sucked the tip of the cigarette and dropped it on the ground. Mucus tickled his throat. He kept down an urge to cough.

We might as well be talking with string and two tin cups.

“I want my money!” Lipscomb said. “Far as I'm concerned, you can have bank teller here. Clock's ticking on you, Hick. Got some motherfuckers really pissed on this one. All the way to the top of the chain. First big score set up for us and you jump it all for yourself. You know I'm sure there's already a contract out on you? Brothers on both coasts know about you, boy.”

Another long silence followed, only broken by the sound of hundreds of pine trees creaking in protest of a gust of wind. Lipscomb finally spoke, the tone of his voice harsh and bristling.

“And to think I once thought of you like a son.”

*   *   *

Lang was wracked
with sweat, his legs trembling from overexertion.

He skirted a creek, hearing toads and salamanders and other night creatures as he passed. Stones were slick with moss. He negotiated an embankment, reaching for tree trunks to steady him. There hadn't been any gunfire for twenty minutes. The only sounds the far-off trickle of the stream, a rhythmic chant from birds on the wing high above him. Yet Lang thought he could still hear the report from the shotguns, like the battle was still ringing off the tree bark and rocks.

The beam of the flashlight quivered, its strength fading. Just what he needed.
Batteries run out and I'm up shit's creek.
He looked around, but the view was the same. Nothing but heavy timber. Deer droppings and mushrooms and hemlock. A hangnail of moon the color of ice, holding court before a parade of clouds.

The land eventually plateaued, the air cooler at that elevation. He came to a break in the trees where a path appeared. Lang amusingly expected a Cherokee with a war club to walk out from under the dogwoods, introduce himself. The flashlight sputtered. Lang saw faces in the tree bark, perceiving the weight of history in those old woods, the beam of his Maglite casting warped shadows. Forms and impressions.

All the damn people who might have walked this trail over the last thousand years.

And now you can add your name to the list, buddy.

Lang wondered if they had been as deranged as him.

The path gradually steepened, other trails converging at a kind of intersection. One path, the largest, caught his attention.
I'll be damned if you couldn't drive a truck down that one.

It wasn't long before Lang saw the tread marks.

Moments later, he came upon what looked like a great hunk of rock, parked at an angle. Behind it a narrow alley that wound down the mountain.

Lang held out a hand to touch it. The beam of the flashlight dimmed.

Shit.

He pulled the tarp off the Chevy step-side.

*   *   *

Hicklin reloaded from
the ammo caddy on the stock of the shotgun, figuring he could punch some rounds through the wall, distract Lipscomb and circle behind the cottage. But the more Hicklin thought about breaking in, the riskier a plan it seemed. Maybe if he could get close to Lipscomb, get him on the ground …

Both parties were blind and shooting at shadows. But trying to coax some life from the generator would be a waste of time. Fuck around with the injector in the dark, zero visibility. Making noise when noise was the enemy.

Nothing ever works out like you plan. Not in the real world anyhow.

None of his options sounded appealing or tactically sound. In fact, every consideration seemed stupid as hell.
Preacher don't play games,
Hicklin reminded himself. Lipscomb knew the angles, always thought two or three steps ahead. He played every situation to his advantage, whether it was a heist, a drug run or just convincing you to buy him lunch. Back inside even when Lipscomb fucked up, Hicklin got the feeling it was all part of some plan only he was privy to.

You could always just leave?