Killing Pilgrim (23 page)

He
was close enough to touch the rifle’s muzzle. He hadn’t been as cautious as he should have been. The shooting had stopped and the woods were quiet, dappled pale green with spots of sunlight. Insects, like motes of dust, danced in the light. He’d stepped between two trees only to see death’s small round eye staring at him.

Rebecca lowered the gun before he had a chance to react.

“You should be more careful when going out for a stroll in the woods. I heard the shots and came to see if it was you or him,” she said.

“I was the one doing the shooting.”

“So you couldn’t run him down?” she laughed.

Della Torre shrugged noncommittally. “I smoke too much.”

“It’ll kill you.”

“So they say. Thanks for getting the shooter.”

“It was a snatched shot. You were lucky I got him the first time. Quite something, a Krönlein shot. I’d only ever heard about them,” she said.

“A what?”

“Krönlein. A high-velocity bullet at close range. Blows the top of the head right open and pops the brain out in one whole piece. They’re rare.”

“Oh,” he said, remembering the instant of the man’s demise. He hadn’t even had time to register surprise. “His name was Elvis.”

“Was it?”

“That’s what the boy called him,” he said. “I mean, when they were talking and just before he was about to shoot me.”

“Did he?” Rebecca smiled. “Well, I guess there’s no longer any doubt that Elvis is well and truly dead.”

Della Torre couldn’t share the joke.

“Were there any others?” he asked, pushing his thoughts away from the bloody image.

“There’s the one by the Hilux. He’s not going anywhere fast. I don’t think there’s anyone else, but I’ll take a look around. Why don’t you go tell Julius that he can put the gun away.”

Della Torre nodded, though he wasn’t feeling very hopeful about catching Strumbić’s attention without getting shot.

He edged gingerly to the edge of the wood by the road, sheltering behind a tree.

“Julius,” he shouted. No response. “Julius.”

“Gringo?” came the faint reply.

“Don’t shoot. Do not shoot. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He made his way around the tree and into the light. Immediately he heard the rip of Strumbić’s machine gun.

“Stop shooting,” he yelled, his face pressed against gravel, tasting the dusty road. He shouted until he thought he’d stripped his throat raw.

From across the cornfield he heard Strumbić laugh hard and loud. And then, just as suddenly, he stopped.

Della Torre got up warily, ready to duck again, but Strumbić was quiet. He ran down the road in a semi-crouch, ready to dive onto the verge at any moment, his heart beating hard from the effort. He stopped at the still-smoking Mercedes, furious, gripping the Beretta hard, sore with temptation to fire it into the corn.

“What the fuck were you doing, Julius?” he said.

Strumbić remained crouched at the edge of the cornfield. “Sorry, didn’t realize it was you.”

“The fuck you didn’t. Liar,” della Torre said. “Come on. Get out of there. The shooter’s dead and we don’t have to worry about the others.”

“Can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Do me a favour, Gringo. Grab my bag out from the trunk and throw it over to me. And a bottle of water from the car.”

“Why don’t you just come and get them yourself?” Della Torre wasn’t having any of Strumbić’s games.

“Because I shat myself and I’d like to freshen up, if you don’t mind.”

“You what?”

“You heard me.”

Della Torre hooted. It came as a blessed relief after the terror of those minutes in the woods. “You got so scared that you shat yourself?”

“No. It only just happened. I was laughing so hard at you eating asphalt that, I don’t know, must have been the fucking lunch in Gospić, poisoning bastards.”

Della Torre couldn’t stop laughing.

“Okay, so it’s funny,” Strumbić allowed. “I thought I just needed to fart.”

Della Torre did as Strumbić asked, passing him the chamois cloth from the boot as well.

“I would be much obliged if you didn’t make this general knowledge,” Strumbić said.

“What’s it worth to you?”

“It’s worth me not murdering you in your sleep. And I’ll let you off the hook for those three cartons of Luckys you stole off me in the spring.”

“And your leather jacket?”

“I got that back. That and the Beemer. It’s just the money you owe me. But we won’t talk about that now.”

Della Torre gave Strumbić some privacy to clean himself up and change. Once Strumbić was decent again, they strolled to the Hilux, kicking up white dust along the broken asphalt and gravel road.

“So what happened?” Strumbić asked.

“Shooter got shot.”

“You?”

“No. Rebecca.”

“Any others?”

“Some guy by the Hilux I haven’t seen yet, and a boy.”

“Dead?”

“Not the boy.”

“You shoot the guy by the Hilux?”

“No.”

“But you let the boy go.”

“Good guess.”

Strumbić tapped his nose. “Never had you down for a killer. The redhead, on the other hand . . . Seems she doesn’t just eat men.”

Della Torre nodded. He’d met plenty of killers before, but never one like Rebecca.

There was a body slumped in the driver’s seat of the Hilux, head hanging out the window and black blood pooling on the dusty white ground.

Strumbić was the first to see it. “Shit. He moved.”

They ran, closing the distance fast. They pulled the man out of the car and lay him flat on the ground. He’d been shot in the head. The bullet had mashed his left cheek, destroying his eye and crushing part of the forehead, but the man was still breathing. They couldn’t tell if he was conscious, though he might have been talking. He was making a grumbling, moaning sound. It had a rhythm to it. Maybe he was praying. He was almost blue, he was so pale — where he wasn’t caked with blood.

“Can you hear us?” della Torre asked.

The man didn’t respond. Just kept making that small, regular moan.

“He’s not long for it,” said Strumbić.

“Unless we get him to a hospital.”

They heard a rustling in the wood. Both men crouched down behind the Hilux, guns at the ready.

“It’s just me,” Rebecca called.

“This one here’s still alive,” della Torre shouted back to her.

She rushed over to them. “He saying anything?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“I don’t think so. Nothing I can understand. We need to get him to a hospital, fast. Otherwise he isn’t going to make it.”

She stood over them, silently surveying the man on the ground.

“He’s not going to make it,” Rebecca said with finality.

“You don’t know. You’ve made a mess of his head, but he’s breathing and the bleeding seems to have slowed. If he’s lasted till now . . .” Della Torre, knee on the ground next to the man, turned to Strumbić. “How long to Zadar, do you think?”

“Hour. Drive fast, maybe less.”

“We’ll have to take him back to Gospić, then. They have a country hospital there.”

“No, he’s not going to make it. Can he talk now? Can we get something out of him?” Rebecca asked.

“I don’t think so. Medical attention and a month in hospital, and we might start getting some sense out of him. But not in the state he’s in now.”

“I’m afraid he’s not going to a hospital.”

Della Torre stood to confront her, but she just smiled, pulled out the Beretta that she’d tucked into the back of her shorts, the one from the car, under the driver’s seat, and operated the slide so that he could hear a bullet click into place. She bent down and shot the man through his open mouth. The man jerked, and fresh scarlet blood spread from under his head into the white dust.

“He didn’t make it.”

Both della Torre and Strumbić stood still, shocked at the execution. For a moment della Torre’s ears buzzed and he felt oddly light-headed, but he willed himself not to faint. And then he felt his back pocket to make sure his passport was there. His secret American passport, which he always travelled with, keeping it like a talisman against . . . against what, exactly? Against becoming an unidentified, abandoned corpse? At least the Americans always took an interest in their citizens. Especially dead ones in foreign countries.

“Let’s get the one from the woods,” Rebecca said.

She left her rifle in the Hilux and led the men back to where the shooter had been. Della Torre and Strumbić stumbled in her wake.

Rebecca carried the shooter’s equipment as well as his rifle and the machine gun back to the truck, while della Torre and Strumbić dragged the corpse by its feet, looking away from the mangled head, which was churning the dry leaves into a painted trail of blood and soil. They left the brain where it was.

When they had the two corpses lined up on the side of the road, they went through the vehicle. There were clothes in a couple of holdalls in the back of the Hilux, along with a handgun and boxes of ammunition. A bag of snack food was in the back seat: boxes of pretzel sticks, a loaf of bread, half a salami, and a block of cheese, along with a couple of boxes of biscuits. Strumbić found an unlabelled three-quarters-full glass bottle in the front.

“Slivovitz,” he said, having unscrewed the lid and sniffed. “Want some?”

Della Torre shook his head. Strumbić took a long pull from the bottle.

They wiped the blood off the front seat with one of the Bosnians’ shirts soaked with slivovitz, but otherwise the truck had been spared damage. Della Torre puzzled over the bullet’s exit path and then realized what Rebecca had done. She’d shot him through the open window. He’d been sitting on the other side of the truck. The impact of the bullet had pushed the man’s head out of the driver’s-side window so that almost none of his blood, other than a bit of fine spray from the initial wound, stained the interior. It left the truck all but unmarked. Was that intentional?

Whether it was or not, they needed another vehicle after the Merc’s demise. It looked like the Hilux would have to do.

The keys were in the ignition.

“Guess they correctly figured we’d pulled off somewhere earlier, and found themselves a nice ambush spot,” Rebecca said. She kicked the ground, raising a little cloud of white. “Must have been looking for our dust.”

She and Strumbić went through the men’s pockets. The driver’s licences confirmed they were from Bosnia, from the hills around Bihać, an hour’s drive northeast. Between them, they had a couple of hundred Deutschmarks and a fair stack of dinars. There were some photographs of women and babies and various slips of paper, stamps, and business cards. Nothing terribly meaningful. Elvis’s name really was Elvis. He’d been in his late twenties. The driver had been pushing forty.

“So what we do now?” Strumbić asked.

“Now we load them into the back of the Hilux and take them back to the Merc. See if you can find something to cover the floor so that they don’t make a mess of the truck.”

There were a couple of sleeping bags, which della Torre and Strumbić spread out over the truck bed. They shifted a couple of army surplus duffel bags to the side and lifted the men in, heads hanging out the door, as Rebecca wanted.

Strumbić looked over the sniper rifle that had destroyed the Merc and against which he’d been duelling. It was a heavy, brutal weapon. Della Torre had been right: .50-calibre bolt action with an attached duopod and a big scope.

“Some cannon,” Strumbić said. “Thank fucking god they didn’t know how to use it, or right now I’d be spread over three fields. Thank god it wasn’t Rebecca pulling the trigger.”

“We’ll drive these fellows to the Merc and give them a Viking funeral,” Rebecca said.

They all climbed into the Hilux, Rebecca taking the wheel. She drove carefully so that the bodies wouldn’t roll out.

When they got to the shot-up Merc, they shifted the corpses into the seats. It was surprisingly hard to fold them to fit, especially the driver. Harder still doing it without making a bloody mess of themselves. But they managed, and then shoved in the Bosnians’ possessions and wallets after della Torre wrote out their details in the small black notebook he always carried. Strumbić held on to the Bosnians’ Deutschmarks. The massive .50-calibre rifle they wedged into the Merc’s trunk.

They loaded the Hilux with their own bags. Strumbić suggested keeping the Bosnians’ food, but both della Torre and Rebecca vetoed him.

The Merc looked forlorn, the men awkwardly slumped in its interior. Rebecca borrowed Strumbić’s cigarette lighter and damped the rag della Torre had used to wipe the blood off the Hilux with another splash of slivovitz. Having stuffed it into the carburettor and fixed down the accelerator on the car, she lit the rag. They drove off just as the fire was building in the engine. They were around the bend before they heard the first small explosion. The second and its fireball followed soon after, releasing another billowing black plume into the clear blue sky.

Della Torre knew it wouldn’t take much investigation to figure out the Bosnians hadn’t been killed in the car, even after this inferno. But he doubted the police would make the effort. They’d stick to their first impressions. Separatist Serb gangsters killed some people foolish enough to be driving through this no man’s land.
UDBA
types who’d bullied their way through Gospić earlier in the day. The woman with them? Must have disappeared. Slovene whore, probably.