Darkside (61 page)

“Fuck that noise, man. Nobody here got wise. Why would they catch on now?”

“Because the Marines
are
the real deal, Booth. The grunts might fancy themselves Hollywood stone killers, but they expect their officers to have some personal standards beyond being physically fit. They'd catch on to you on the
first day in the barracks. Hell, troops'd see you do that thing with your teeth and know you were bent.”

“So how come I got through four years here, huh, smart guy?”

“Because they weren't looking, Booth. That's the problem when the Navy does social engineering instead of maintaining their standards. I still don't understand how a whacko like you even got in.”

Booth laughed that nasty laugh again, waving the big pistol around. “Blame it on the nuns, man. They wanted to score an Academy appointment. I was the only dude in the school who could do the math at the eight hundred SAT level.” He turned in his chair to check the bulge under the window shade, then turned back just as another shadow flicked across the shade.

“So what's the plan, Stan?” Booth asked. “You gonna make a scene, try to keep me from doing what I have to do?”

“Nope,” Jim said. “Markham lied to us from day one. Between you and me, she shouldn't graduate, either. I assume you're gonna open the window, drop her ass on the bricks, and then do the right thing?”

“Not quite, smart guy. Julie's just window dressing, so to speak. But you know, since I've got nothing to lose, why not take
your
ass with me?”

“Because you only have one round left, Booth. Like I said, I'm not going to interfere. Although there may be SWAT snipers up on the seventh wing waiting for you to check the window shade. But me? I'm your testimonial, Booth. I'm going to be the only one knows how you stood up and did it like a man. Because otherwise, the Dark Side here is going to tell a very different story, right?”

Booth looked at him for a long moment. He had the gun pointed in Jim's general direction. He's probably counting rounds, Jim thought. At that moment, Booth twitched his right wrist and the magazine dropped out of the .45; with his left hand, he jammed a new one into the weapon so quickly that Jim almost couldn't even see it happen. He watched
Booth rack the slide back and chamber a fresh round, ejecting the lone remaining round into the room.

“Guess what,
Jim
?” He said. “Got lots of rounds left now.”

Jim shook his head in wonder. “I have to admit, that was the fastest combat reload I've ever seen, Booth. You must have been practicing.” As in, Hello, TAC squad. He's back in business.

“Betcher ass I practiced. And now,” he said slowly, leveling the big gun at Jim again. “Now I think we'll see how much of a man you are, Mr. See-cure-it-tee.” Aiming carefully, he fired once, blasting one past Jim's right ear, so close that he could feel it. The window behind him exploded in a rain of glass. Jim hadn't moved, not because he was brave, but because it had happened so fast.

“Well, that was close,” Jim said, letting the listeners know he was still alive. And now would be a great time to make your move, guys, he thought.

Booth nodded approvingly and fired again, this time past the other ear. More glass. Jim began to sweat. He tried to calculate how quickly he could duck down behind the desk. Dyle fired again, the shock wave hurting Jim's ears as the round raised the hair on the top of his head and whacked into the wall behind him, ricocheting around inside the plaster after it hit the granite facade outside.

At that instant, a small dark shape crashed through the window behind Booth, followed by another. There was a blinding flash and a huge booming explosion, at which point Jim submarined in his chair, dropping out of sight behind the steel desk even as another round came howling right through the back of the chair he'd been sitting in, knocking it over. There was a second huge blast from the room across the way as a second flash-bang let go, and then a third. Then a rattling noise, followed by another big blast, but this one out in the passageway, then a howl of pain from the room where the Yard cop had been hiding. Silence ensued, punctuated only by noises from the roof. Jim was barely able to hear anything except the ringing in his ears. The entire area was
full of smoke. As he very carefully peered around the corner of the desk, shapes in blue jumpsuits appeared out of the smoky gloom across the way, pointing guns at everything, including Jim. Then he thought he heard a couple of shots way down the hall, and another window's worth of glass crashed into a room. As Jim, still behind the desk, got to his feet, hands in full view, the roar of the .45 came booming down the hallway, dropping the TAC guys to the deck en masse while bullets whacked all around them.

“The roof! He's going for the roof,” someone shouted, and Jim whirled, jumped over to the window, and looked outside. To his amazement, there was Booth, about ten windows down the hall, hanging by his fingertips from the fourth-deck ledge. Then he dropped like a cat, landing on the next ledge and grabbing the wall for an instant before letting go again and dropping to the next ledge. A TAC cop brushed Jim aside and leaned out to take a shot, but by then Booth had levered himself through a window on the second deck and disappeared. The TAC cop swore and made his report into a shoulder mike.

Jim brushed himself off, checked to make sure he hadn't peed his own pants, and went out into the hallway, where everyone was getting back up. It was hard to see or even breathe in all the gun smoke. Shoulder radios were chattering away everywhere. A big cop in full tactical gear, wearing a sergeant's shield, walked up to Jim.

“Nice going, Mr. Hall. You gave us all the time we needed. Got the girl. She's up on the roof with Branner.”

“She okay?”

“Yes, sir, she is,” the sergeant said, taking off his face mask and turning down the volume on his tactical radio. The other cops had fanned out down the passageway and were checking rooms. Jim's Yard cop came out of his room, obviously dazed, bleeding from the ears and nose. The TAC guys got him to sit down on the floor and sent for medical assistance. “One of our flash-bangs went slow fuse on us. Fucker picked it up and threw it back out the window just as we hauled the girl up onto the roof. Scared us all to death. Then
he caught the next one, and apparently pitched it out here, got your guy. That's how he got away.”

“No help from me,” Jim said. “I was trying for China after he combed my hair with that forty-five.”

“China's good,” the sergeant said with a grin. “Ah, and here comes Ms. Branner now.”

Jim turned, to see Branner's bottom easing backward through the window in the room where he'd been. Behind her were two TAC cops, who held a white-faced Julie Markham between them on the ledge until she, too, could climb through the window. One of the medics who had come up from the third floor took her in tow and wrapped a blanket around her. Branner turned to Jim and blew out her cheeks. “Some guys do all the work; some guys just sit and flap their jaws,” she said. The cops grinned.

“Agent Branner here was the one on the end of the rope,” the sergeant said. “She was the lightest one up there, so she hung out there to tie the harness on while you kept him busy.”

“Thank God you guys could hear us talking.”

“Yeah. And it was all recorded down in the ops van. We catch his ass, he's DA meat.”

The radio squawked out a relay call from the perimeter cops. “Suspect broke the perimeter,” someone yelled. “Academy cops say he's going into Lejeune Hall.”

Jim looked at Branner. “He's trying for his lab access.”

“No way—that's all flooded,” she said.

“Not anymore—they drained it, remember?” Jim said. He turned to the TAC sergeant. “Tell them to get people into the basement, down where the swimming pool piping is. There's a storage room, where they keep the chemicals for the pool. That's where he's been getting into the tunnels.”

The TAC cops got on it while Jim and Branner started trotting down the hallway. “Can he make it?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, turning down the cross corridor, suddenly aware of his burning back again. Funny how that .45 had taken the pain away, he thought. “If the approach
tunnels to the magazines did collapse, then the magazines still ought to be flooded—nowhere for the water to go, right?”

They ran down the stairs and outside, Branner flashing her badge as they raced through the perimeter of police vehicles and watching cops. When they finally got to Lejeune Hall, there were more cops milling around outside. By the time they worked their way down to the basement and found the storage room, the door was open and there were TAC squad guys poking flashlights down into the access hole. The big metal plate was still hanging askew, dimpled with bullet holes.

“Is it flooded?” Branner asked.

“Nope,” one of the cops said. “Can't really see shit down there, but it doesn't look flooded. Somebody better call Public Works. They've got crews down there.”

“So,” a TAC cop asked no one in particular, “who's volunteering to go down there after his ass?”

Before anyone could answer, there came a deep sustained rumbling sound from beneath their feet, with the clatter of individual pieces of falling masonry echoing up from the access hole. Then it became very still. The access hole exhaled a small cloud of damp cement dust out into the storage room.

“May be a moot point,” Jim said, staring at the hole. “With any luck, that right there was bye-bye, Dyle.”

 

Just after sundown, a subdued Ev Markham was staring out into Chesapeake Bay from the fantail of the
Not Guilty.
Liz and Julie were down below, doing something in the galley, and he was sipping some scotch and reflecting on the day's events. The boat was back alongside its moorings at the Annapolis Yacht Club after a two-hour cruise out on the Severn and its estuary. Ev was very proud of the way Julie was bearing up after her ordeal at the hands of Dyle Booth. She'd been virtually uninjured, unless you counted some bad
bruising around her midriff and knees from hanging out the window and a small knot on her head from the rescue exertions. He was mostly relieved that the whole thing was finally over, and that they now knew who'd been behind all the awful things happening at or around the Academy. He heard footsteps approaching out on the floating pier and swung around in his deck chair. It was the security officer, Jim Hall, and Agent Branner. He got up and unlatched the railing gate.

“Come on aboard,” he said. “Liz is down below. I'll get her.”

The two came up the plastic steps on the pier and walked onto
Not Guilty
's pristine deck. Hall was wearing a gray business suit, and Branner was wearing a form-fitting blue blazer over a gray skirt. She kicked off her low-heeled leather shoes as she stepped aboard, in deference to the shining deck. They both looked tired, and Ev offered them a drink, but they both declined.

“I'd love one,” Hall said, “but then I'd probably fall asleep right here on the boat. We just came by to give you and Julie a quick sitrep. She is here, isn't she?”

“Here they are now,” Ev said as Liz and Julie came up the companionway and out onto the stern lounge area. Liz repeated Ev's offer of a drink, but they again politely declined. Everyone sat down. Ev noticed that Hall was being careful not to rest his back against the curved Naugahyde sofa.

“I imagine there's been some paperwork to do after all this,” Liz said.

Branner smiled. “Many trees' worth,” she said. “Many trees. With all those cops out there this morning, there's paperwork about the paperwork. Plus, the Bureau got into it.”

“When will they want to see Julie?” Liz asked.

“With any luck, they won't,” Hall replied. He told them about a three-hour meeting with the commandant earlier that afternoon, after some semblance of order had been restored in Bancroft Hall. With the exception of the room that had been flash-banged, and several bullet holes and lots of bro
ken glass up and down the fourth-deck corridor, the actual damage had been minimal. The mids, disciplined as ever, had reoccupied their building, cleaned everything up, and returned to their routine.

“We went over the entire case with the supe and the dant during that meeting. I did the part about the tunnel runner, Branner here did the Dell case, and we jointly went over the parts where the two came together. Then we had a separate meeting with our cops, the town cops, and the Bureau people.”

“So it was Booth in the tunnels?” Liz asked. Ev noticed that Julie still appeared to be distracted, as if she were mulling something over. She'd been very quiet ever since they'd picked her up at the dispensary earlier.

“Yes,” Branner said. “And it was Booth terrorizing the back alleys of Annapolis with his vampire act. Mr. Hall here managed to get him to talk for the record, as it turned out, because the TAC squad always records its radiophone network anytime there's an incident.”

“We've been laying low all afternoon, Mr. Hall,” Ev said. “Liz suggested the boat because we could get away from any media and at least the landline telephones. We did call into Bancroft to tell them where Julie was, but no one seemed to want her back right away. Thanks to you, I assume?”

“What really happened to Brian Dell?” Liz asked.

“As best we can tell, Booth was hazing him, late at night. He made him do some bizarre things, such as wearing women's underwear, and perhaps even sexually assaulted him. Our best take on the matter is that Dell did in fact commit suicide after being humiliated one time too many. I suspect that Booth saw it happen, or even egged him on. But that's all we know, and, of course, that version came from Booth.”

“So it wasn't Dell who was gay, but this Dyle Booth?”

“I think Dyle Booth was just your basic sadist, as well as being someone who hated everything the Academy stood for. He was never really accepted by his classmates, so he ended up holding the entire program in contempt. If I can in
dulge in a little amateur psychology, I think all this violence at the end, these increasingly outrageous acts, was an indication that he knew he'd never make it in the Corps. He wasn't homosexual. He was just very badly bent.”