The Rackham Files (38 page)

The county pickup was parked so that with a ten-yard sprint, I could put it between me and the house. I gave Riley his orders and made sure he knew I'd be only a pace behind, then whacked his shoulder. He scuttled for the passenger's side, the harmless carbine in one hand, and piled into the pickup while I squatted, my twelve-gauge at ready, and let him slide behind the steering wheel. Only then did I ease into the cab with him, sliding down, stuffing my rain hat in my belt. "Okay, Riley," I said. "Roll down your window, give one toot, and start the engine."

He did it, no longer shaking as he stripped tape from the side window, his face impassive. I liked him shaky so I said, "Did I mention that this thing is semiauto? With sixteen rounds?" He blinked, whispered something to himself, shook his head. "Now give one toot again." He did. I thought I saw movement at one of the upstairs windows. "Aim the carbine up the slope toward the garden," I said.

He did it. I heard him mutter, "Bang bang; this ain't gonna fool anybody."

"Hand me the carbine slowly and burn rubber for the gate," I replied, "and give three toots on the way." I snatched the little weapon as he swung it into the cab, wondering if he entertained ideas of using it as a club. But he did a fine job of spewing gravel as I braced myself, leaning against the far door, aiming my persuader at his middle while we accelerated away.

I called for three more toots and got them, then told Riley to stop at the gate. "No panic braking! You don't want
me
to panic, do you?"

The pickup stopped. I made Riley give another three toots, had him gun the engine a few times. Nothing—at least nothing I had hoped to see.

I opened my door and eased out, keeping the cab between me and my house. My adrenal pump insisted that hours were whistling past me in a gale of confusion, so I spoke with deliberation. "Don't open your door but lean out and wave and shout," I told Riley. "As if a posse were coming from up the hill. I'm going to fire for effect."

Mine was a delicate problem in personnel management; if Riley thought I was shooting at him without provocation, sure as hell he'd panic. As Riley waved and hollered, I reached in and shifted the gear lever to neutral, then took the revolver from my raincoat and squeezed off three rounds toward my garden plot three hundred yards distant.

Almost immediately the lank Ellis appeared on my porch, swiveling his head and his scattergun, seeking the source of Riley's excitement. "Get 'em here on the double," I snarled.

"They're coming," Riley shouted, waving and pointing. "Let's go, let's go!" He pounded on the side of his door and gunned the engine, darting a glance at me, getting my nod. I should've expected that, in doing a little more than the minimum, the little scuffler was conning me, awaiting a lapse on my part. "Let's
go
," he repeated.

Ellis shouted something in reply, ducked into my house, and reappeared a moment later with Dennison right behind him. My heart pounded against my throat as I saw what Dennison dragged with him.

Naturally he would choose the hostage who seemed most likely to be manageable, but Dennison had made a mistake. He held Lance McKay by the hair with one hand, his sidearm drawn in the other. Both men began to run toward me crabwise, searching behind them, scanning for enemies as they came. Half-squatting, I thrust the revolver into my belt as Ellis came into range of my twelve-gauge. Dennison lagged behind, wrenching my nephew's head, Lance stumbling behind him as a shield against an imagined enemy. Squalling and cursing, Lance was anything but tractable.

I suppose Riley was waiting until he knew my attention was focused on Ellis, for without warning he gunned the pickup hard and let the clutch pedal thump upward. But Riley hadn't seen me snick the gear lever into neutral and of course the pickup didn't budge. I did, in a half-pivot toward Riley, who tumbled out the other side of the cab and hit running.

"Get 'im, Ellis, he's behind the cab!" Riley sang it over his shoulder as he loped down my access road toward distant blacktop. Ellis stared at him in astonishment, then caught sight of me as I peered over the side of the pickup. He made a stutter-step sideways, heading for a sycamore ten paces from me, and brought up his pumpgun.

My first round of double-ought buck took Ellis just above the belt buckle at a range of ten yards and jerked him backward like a marionette. Recoil aimed my second round higher, partly deflected by the airborne pumpgun, but the rest of the big pellets left him with no skull above the eyebrows. Ellis was already dead as he slid across the carpet of sycamore leaves.

Dennison had struggled within extreme range of my scattergun by now, but the twin thunderclaps of my twelve-gauge and Ellis's rag-doll collapse sent him scurrying behind the largest of my nearby sycamores. I had no confidence in a handgun I'd never sighted in and no time to cram the full clip into the carbine that lay on the floor of the pickup. Lacking pinpoint accuracy, I couldn't risk a shot while Lance screeched and flailed against his tormentor; at twenty-five yards a sawed-off shotgun's pattern is much too broad for precision shooting.

Dennison tried to quell Lance by shouting at him. I knew I had the bastard stopped if I could only get a moment to ransom his freedom for Lance's. "Lance!" I put every decibel I had behind it, making the same mistake as Dennison. "Lance, it's Uncle Harve! Calm down; you'll be okay!"

"Come beat him up! Owww, you better—" replied my nephew before Dennison whacked him with his pistol barrel. Lance heard me, all right; it was his tragedy that he never truly believed in ultimate control or ultimate punishment. But he believed in that pistol barrel and grabbed his head in both hands while screaming his head off.

Dennison's arms were possible targets. So was Lance. Then my nephew slumped, still squalling. From behind the tree came Dennison's voice, harsh with command: "You try for me and the kid gets it!" His muscular forearm clamped under Lance's chin, the pistol held to the boy's head.

"Stop it, Lance," I shouted and added, "Dennison, you won't outlive him by five seconds."

"Settle him down, then," the man responded, and it was as much a plea as demand. I felt an instant of hope, realizing that Dennison wanted to negotiate.

But only for that instant. Maybe Lance saw his father leap from my front porch, silver shreds of duct tape flapping at his ankles, jacking the slide of my big .45 Colt as he ran for the cover of a walnut tree. Or maybe Lance was only getting his second wind. I'll say this, with a lump in my throat: the little bugger never gave up. I think he bit down on Dennison's wrist.

The man snarled and jerked his left arm up, and then Lance was on all fours, slipping on leaves, and whether Dennison intended to merely wing my nephew or not, he fired from a range of ten feet. Shot through the back, Lance fell heavily and lay still.

I needed a clear shot, but as I stepped away from the safety of the pickup, Dennison backpedaled fast, keeping the sycamore between us, angling for a middle-size oak farther from me. There was a sizable chance that he'd make it until he heard the heavy bark of the Colt in Ern's hands.

Dennison turned toward the sound—a very long shot for a handgun; no wonder Ern missed—and I pulled my trigger again. It didn't nail Dennison but it sent him sprinting away. Ern advanced firing two-handed, each blast of the Colt a second after the last.

Dennison knew his weapons, all right. He managed to get thirty yards from my scattergun and then made a desperate lunge for the top of my eight-foot fence, snapping a shot at Ern before tossing his revolver aside. Ern did not flinch but raced forward. He had already fired five rounds without a strike, but number six caught Dennison just at the base of his neck as he struggled at the top of my fence. Dennison jerked, fell, then hung facing us with one sleeve caught on the top of the wire. Ern, eyes wide in a face whitened by rage, ran without hesitation to point-blank range and put his last round squarely into Dennison's heart.

By this time I had Lance in my arms, and as I ran to the house, I called, "Leave that garbage, Ern! Lance may not be hurt too badly."

My twelve-gauge slapping my back as I ran, I got Lance to the house, where Shar met me wailing. I relinquished her son to her and stood aside for Ern, who ran several paces behind me, sobbing.

Kate stood ashen-faced, my little target pistol in her hand, just inside my front door. The added weapon made me think of Riley, whose defection might not last. "Kate, we'll have to get Lance to a doctor," I said, breathing hard. "Can you tear down the book barrier double-quick?"

"I can try. Is Lance hurt badly?"

"Moaning and breathing. That's all I know," I said and wheeled back toward the pickup, checking the target pistol as I ran. I fairly clanked with my arsenal, but weapons weren't the items of hardware that concerned me most. I wanted that pickup.

The engine was still bumbling along, waiting for whoever got there first. I backed it furiously past two deaders, wondering how much radiation I'd taken during the attack.

When I ripped the plastic cover from my root cellar doors, I found Kate and Devon toppling a bookcase. Devon claimed he could shoot, so I stationed him in the pickup two paces from the root cellar entrance with the carbine, its full clip, and orders to fire one warning round if he saw anything suspicious. Then I hotfooted through my tunnel to the basement and to the keening little group of McKays surrounding my waterbed.

Lance lay on his back, breathing but glassy-eyed with shock. Midway up his naked breast on the right was a small purplish crater, trickling crimson, which Cammie kept wiping away with facial tissue while Shar tore at a roll of adhesive tape. It was good to know that the bullet wasn't lodged in Lance's body. It was very bad that the exit wound was bubbling as he breathed.

Lance's punctured lung canceled any thoughts I'd had of sealing my place up. In fifteen minutes we had all dressed as thoroughly as possible with our food in slender blanket rolls and a few other necessaries thrown into my old backpack. At my request, Kate scribbled directions to her place at Yountville, which I pocketed knowing I might never get that far.

The pickup had room for all the McKays, Devon, and the bikes as well. Devon kept the carbine in sight for the edification of any lurking 'jackers. Before backing the Lotus out I cut the bonds of Oliver, who lay still unconscious on my garage floor. Maybe I should've dumped him into the pickup, but on my list of priorities he was as expendable as a hangnail.

Kate didn't like sharing my passenger seat with two shovels, a backpack, and a hundred pounds of Spot—but then neither did he. I led the way past my gate, Ern driving the pickup while Shar cradled Lance in the cab. Poor kid was coughing some blood. Our plan, or more accurately Shar's decision, was for me to lead the way to Kaiser Hospital in Antioch in the forlorn hope that we would find it open. If not, Martinez also had a Kaiser Hospital. Wherever we found medical help, Shar would stay there with Lance while Ern and the rest of us headed for Yountville.

But those plans proved fruitless. I wasted five minutes trying to find a route to the hospital in Antioch, and it seemed to me that the number of wrecks and abandoned vehicles increased as we got within a mile of the place, as if they were deliberately aligned as roadblocks. It
would
look that way, of course, after fifty thousand people converged on the same point with life-threatening emergencies.

I might've got to the hospital by some judicious hops in the Lotus, but not with Lance and Shar both. And since I couldn't raise Kaiser/Antioch on the phone, we didn't know whether it still offered any hope.

We lit out for Martinez, using sidewalks and road shoulders when necessary and trying steadily to get the Martinez hospital on the phone. Kate said all she got was interference. Then we tried emergency numbers and got multiple busy signals. Ditto with police numbers. That was strange because we saw nobody on the streets, and it seemed unlikely that police circuits would be overloaded in a dead township. We finally got through to an emergency fire number, an exchange now manned by army engineers.

"Kaiser/Martinez was evacuated to Petaluma yesterday," said the sergeant, ready to break the connection.

I tried to picture that in my head; it would've been a big operation. "What route did they take, sergeant?"

"Staging area in Martinez just south of the railroad bridge. We ran a bunch of boxcars in and hauled everything movable in one load. There's another train scheduled late today into Concord, but with all those burn cases it's gonna be late. Don't expect to find any medical staff; we had to forcibly evacuate some. Can't risk losing trained people to fallout residuals."

I said, "We're in a pickup. Can we get across at Martinez? Ferry boat? Anything?"

"Not a chance. We're clearing the traffic bridges with 'dozers and wheel-loaders, just dumping vehicles into the bay, and with all that heavy equipment thrashing around, we can't allow any foot traffic. You get conscripted to a work detail for trying." His brusque rumble lowered slightly. "Off the record, I hear they're allowing foot traffic and bikes over the railroad bridge except when there's rolling stock on it. But if you try that with a car you'll wind up on a work detail. Just 'cause you don't see a sentry don't mean he don't see
you.
Signing off," he said, and the line went dead.

I waved Ern to a stop and told him what I'd learned. We could get to the railroad tracks near the bridge, but Lance would have to be my solitary passenger as I wave-hopped across Suisun Bay in the Lotus. Assuming I made it across, I would await the rest of the group on the Vallejo side, then take Shar and Lance to Napa at all possible speed.

Before leaving my place, I had buckled Spot's heavy ID collar on him, more as a mark of his domesticity than anything else. I didn't want him shot as a zoo runaway. Now I saw that the collar would come in handy, because Spot might not take kindly to seeing me drive away without him. True enough, Spot was a watchcat, not an attack cat. But if Cammie's soothing hands and voice weren't enough, he might put clawmarks on somebody when he saw me drive away. I gave that a lot of thought while seeking the nearest approach to the railroad bridge, that great greasy black steel span running parallel to the freeway bridge out of Martinez.