From a Dead Sleep (46 page)

Almost hyperventilating through a grimace of fear and agony, he verbally calmed himself down to clear his head. He dropped to his side and awkwardly pulled himself along the ground toward the passenger side of the car. With his knees and a single forearm propping him up as he crawled, he resembled a miller moth with a missing wing trying unsuccessfully to take flight.

He desperately needed backup, and he knew if he could get to his radio, he could call for help. It was a tall order. The garage of the house was on an incline, overlooking his Jeep. The man with silver hair could fire through the driver’s side window if he saw Lumbergh try to slide in along the passenger seat. The chief was pinned down.

“Just one of you?” he heard his assailant yell out, almost in morbid amusement. The attacker’s voice was deep and hollow above Lumbergh’s heavy breathing and a hint of an accent could be heard. “I know you hillbilly hicks aren’t used to a lot of action, but this is a goddamned insult!”

Lumbergh knew what the man was capable of, as evidenced by the two dead men he’d left behind at Sean’s place. But this twisted taunt proved to the chief the man was a pure sadist—someone who enjoyed violence and relished his participation in it.

“Who gave it up?” the man yelled. “Was it Valentino? Is that prick even alive? If he is, I lost fifty bucks!”

Lumbergh rested his head against the Jeep door and peered into the passenger mirror. He could see the distant image of the corner of the garage where the tall man had his back pressed up against it. He wore a dark blue jacket that deviated enough from the color of the forest to keep him from camouflaging in with the brushwood behind him.

When he noticed the man’s arms working in feverish movement, he realized that he was in the process of reloading his weapon. The rhetoric coming from the man with the silver hair was a distraction to buy some time.

Lumbergh managed to swallow through his dry throat and pulled himself up to his tottering feet before laying his arm across the warm hood of the Jeep. He took aim and fired at his assailant. Four rounds were let loose, but the man saw the offense coming and pivoted around the corner of the wall before the first one ever reached him. Gray dust clouded the air as a couple of the bullets ricocheted off of the wall where he took refuge.

Lumbergh tucked himself back down as a hail of gunfire was returned. Glass shattered above him from the demolition of the side window and much of the jagged shards dropped across his thin shoulders. The offense was overwhelming and he knew that if he couldn’t get inside his Jeep to retrieve a second magazine for his Glock, he had only six or seven rounds left. His heart pounded his chest and his mind raced in a thousand directions, searching for an idea that would get him through this alive.

A break in the gunfire let the chief hear an abrupt flash of static from his radio inside the Jeep. It was Jefferson trying to reach him, calling the chief ’s handle. A few seconds later, he tried again.

“Just heard back from Sean, Chief. Got a lot of news. Come back.”

The cursory though excited tone in the officer’s voice signaled that he hadn’t a clue of the dire situation his boss was in, which made sense, but drew a discouraged exhale from Lumbergh. With a sweat-laced wince folded across his face, he knew that with Jefferson in front of the radio back at the office, all it would take was a quick transmission to let him know where he was and that he needed help. In a mere minute his officer could have Lakeland officers on route. Without more ammo though, he wouldn’t last that long.

He checked the mirror again and saw that the man with the silver hair was perched up on one knee beside the garage, lying in wait for him to make a move. He noticed what looked like a blood stain along the man’s thigh and realized that one of his initial shots had connected. It explained why the man hadn’t been able to finish him off from the onset.

“Are you Moretti?” he yelled in hopes of breaking some of his attacker’s focus. “Or is he the pussy who took off in the Cadillac?”

While he spoke, he stuck his Glock between his knees and raised his good arm to pry his fingers under the handle of the passenger door. He carefully lifted up on it and felt the hinges give.

“He’s the pussy who took off in the Cadillac,” the man with the silver hair freely answered after dwelling only a couple of seconds on the question. Though the man tried to hide it, Lumbergh detected bitterness in his voice. Obviously he hadn’t expected his apparent boss to leave him behind.

“Well, it doesn’t really matter!” Lumbergh shouted. His voice trembled from the adrenaline bouncing through his veins. “We’ll get him after we take you down!”

A string of deep, hollow laughter echoed down from the top of the driveway. Lumbergh took the opportunity to scoot forward a little and let the door hang open no more than an inch, hoping the man with the silver hair wouldn’t notice. He didn’t seem to.

“Who’s
we
, hillbilly? You’re out here all alone, unless you’re hoping for the forest animals to come save you!” He ended the statement with bellowing laughter.

Little more than an arm’s length sat between Lumbergh and what he needed from the Jeep: The radio receiver, whose cord could be stretched outside to where he sat, and the spare clips for his gun. If he could rattle the man who had him pinned down, if only for a second or two, he could lay down some quick fire and snag what he needed from the Jeep. He relaxed his breathing and let his mind piece together the earlier words of his assailant along with what little he knew of Moretti. Though he wasn’t nearly as seasoned of a bullshitter as his brother-in-law, desperation urged him to give it a shot.

“Valentino gave you up, asshole!” he shouted, praying that his words had more meaning to the man than they had to him. “He gave it
all
up! Everything! You’ve got the FBI coming after you—the Las Vegas office working with the Denver bureau. Bringing your shit across state lines wasn’t the brightest of moves.”

He waited for a response but received none. He hoped he had struck a nerve of some kind. He continued. “A fleet of agents started pouring through these mountains this morning! They’re on to you, man! None of you are getting away!”

Without raising his arm into view, he pointed his gun to the sky and squeezed off two quick rounds, hoping the sudden shots and the echoes they’d create would force the assailant to take cover long enough to make his move. He swung open the Jeep’s door and lunged for his radio receiver. Without hesitation, an onslaught of bullet fire shredded through the windshield and side window. He felt the collision of bullets stream into his underarm. The high-pitched, agonizing cry that he heard didn’t seem to have come from him, but it did. His body crashed down along the running board of the Jeep before he fell to the dirt. He no longer felt his gun in his hand. Only incredible pain.

The deep cackling of the man who’d served him that pain replaced the sound of gunfire, but it was no less terrifying. Both of the moth’s wings had been clipped, and Lumbergh’s twisted face released groans and snarls of frustration and utter helplessness.

“I think you’re full of shit, hillbilly,” spoke the man whose voice now sounded closer.

Lumbergh knew he was being approached. He painfully twisted his neck from side to side as warm blood further dampened his shirt. He couldn’t find his gun.

The edge of the man’s imposing shadow advanced into Lumbergh’s view along the road and he tried his best to dig his heels into the dirt and gravel to slide along his back in the opposite direction. His lack of mobility heightened the sense of hopelessness that already accompanied his panicked state.

His mind darted straight to Diana and he knew that there would be no greater test of her steadfastness among crisis than his death. He saw her long, wavy hair dangling above him and smelled her scent through his own sweat. When the wide, crooked, and sadistic smile of the man with the silver hair rose above the hood of his Jeep, he felt as though he had been hit by another bullet, not of lead but of punishing angst.

The lenses of the man’s thinly framed glasses failed to shield his demonic eyes that seemed to read Lumbergh’s every thought with their glaring imposition. Lumbergh held his breath and waited for the man to raise his automatic. Instead he watched the impulsive widening of the man’s eyes and the eerie transition from his large grin to an awkward grimace. His shoulders slumped and he winced as he gracelessly spun around on the toes of his boots, lending his attention toward the front of the house.

The lodged shaft of a long and dark metallic arrow protruded squarely from between the man’s shoulder blades. Deep red fletchings that matched the color of the small but growing stain of blood from the arrow’s entry flared out its tail like flames.

An enraged, animalistic snarl filtered out through the man’s clenched teeth and he raised his automatic rifle and took quick aim before firing into the forest north of the house.

From that forest, Ron Oldhorse let the thick trunk of the tall pine he’d taken cover behind bear the brunt of the rapid bullet fire. Though his face remained characteristically stoic and emotionless, his mind couldn’t fathom how the man with the silver hair was still standing. He’d hit him dead center.

From the scene Oldhorse had come upon after running in the direction of the noisy barrage of gunfire that had erupted through the forest, he feared he’d arrived too late. The chief ’s Jeep had been turned into Swiss cheese, and a trail of bloodstained earth leading around to its hidden side was all he could see of the lawman. But if there was any chance Lumbergh was still breathing, he wasn’t about to leave him. Abandonment was not an option.

It shouldn’t have been an option years ago, the day a younger Ronald Wilson accidentally struck a young Bosnian Serb with a US military Jeep during an overseas peacekeeping operation. An angry mob in the town of Brčko in northern Bosnia kept him from attending to the woman’s severe wounds. Wilson was forced to speed away to protect himself and the men he was responsible for. He learned later that the woman had died without receiving treatment quickly enough. A mother of two. The fear of dying and the hopelessness he read in her eyes was a dark, persistent memory that Oldhorse hadn’t been able to move on from. It transformed him into the spiritual yet misunderstood man that he now was.

As he told Toby’s mother, Joan Parker, last night as she sat under a blanket that provided her no comfort, he would die before he left a lost and battered soul behind.

Keeping his shoulders tight to his sides, Oldhorse lifted an arm up and snagged a fresh arrow from his pack. He lowered its nock to the center of his bow’s taut string and breathed in through his nose. He waited for the intermittent discharges of the rifle to stop before he stole a glance around the splintered edge of the tree to see the man. He had moved in closer than Oldhorse had guessed, limping noticeably from a shot he had taken to his thigh. Only about twenty yards away. A used magazine dropped from the man’s hand to the ground and he quickly pulled a new one from his jacket pocket. Before he could shove it into the base of his rifle, Oldhorse was on the move.

Like a whisper in the wind, he wove through dense trees and scrub with the weaving locks of his long hair chasing him. He hoped to draw the man’s attention further away from the chief.

The man with the silver hair howled and shouted unintelligibly as he unloaded his rifle. The sweeping movement of his arm from side to side sent lead through the surrounding terrain like an enraged swarm of bees chasing a predator from its nest. From his lips poured incessant rage that sounded of a mixture of foreign tongue and unleashed fury. His face, contorted in anguish, glistened from sweat. Wheezing gusts of air escaped his flared nostrils.

His compressed gaze had lost track of the spry man who’d gotten the jump on him, but he knew he was close. He mouthed a silent promise to finish that quarrel. When he swung his body back toward the Jeep—off-balance and fatigued from the metal tip of the arrow wedged between his lungs—his eyes bulged in a display of perhaps the first grain of fear Alvar Montoya had ever experienced in his life.

“Hillbilly?” he muttered.

A half second later, his forehead imploded just above the bridge of his nose. Smoke drifted out from the hollow trail of the bullet nested in his cranium and he stumbled forward on random footing before collapsing to his knees and then his chest. Yards in front of him lay Chief Gary Lumbergh sprawled out along the bloodstained dirt road, his Glock held tightly at the end of his shaking, outstretched arm. Smoke rose from the barrel before his grip loosened and the gun fell from his hand.

“I’m from Chicago, asshole!” he groaned before his eyes squinted shut and he collapsed.

Thursday
(Two Days Later)

Chapter 51

“J
ust getting off the plane now, D,” he spoke into the receiver as he stepped in front of an obese, curly haired woman who was being pushed up the gateway carpet in a wheelchair.

“Hey! How ’bout a little patience,” the woman barked in protest at the large man who had crippled the momentum of the struggling flight attendant who was doing her best to guide the chariot forward.

Sean didn’t even hear her.

With his face cleanly shaven, his hair combed, and his large body clad in fresh clothes that let him resemble a vacationing tourist, he continued, “Yeah, I’m on a cellphone. A friend let me borrow it.”

Sean’s thick neck swiveled and he glanced back at Lisa who offered him a smile from down the jet bridge where she was stuck along with other passengers behind the slow-moving woman in the wheelchair. She was dressed in dark blue jeans that fit her well and a white shirt that was partially covered by an unbuttoned, ecru jacket. The strap of a small, red purse hung over her shoulder. From where Sean stood, the welt given to her from her attacker at the cottage was far less noticeable.

He stepped off into the terminal and continued his conversation with his sister.

“You know, when I told Mom that you saved a woman’s life, she said she was proud of you.”