the Viking Funeral (2001) (35 page)

"And if we been captured by this other dude, the White Angel?" Tremaine asked.

"It's not him," Jody said. "He's a right
-
wing extremist..
. A
n outlaw hiding from the government in the desert."

"But isn't the Colombian government a right-wing democracy?" Shane asked. "Wouldn't the White Angel be closer politically to them than to a buncha Marxist guerrillas?"

Nobody answered Shane's question. Finally Tremaine changed the subject.

"You're an asshole, ya know that, Jody?" he said. "We coulda had insurance. We had us some insurance, then we coulda got the fuck out of here."

Jody took a swing at him, knocking Tremaine back hard against the brick wall. In an instant, the two were at each other, snarling like animals.

"This is great," Shane muttered.

They came hurtling back toward him. Shane tried to get out of the way, but the room was small, so he was pinned as the two crashed hard against him. He caught an elbow in the head and went down under a pile of flying fists and sweating bodies. He finally managed to roll free and get up. He grabbed Jody, who had gained control and was now on top of Tremaine, pummeling him with both fists.

Shane yanked Jody off and threw him against the far wall. "We got enough trouble without this!" Shane shouted.

Tremaine wiped some blood off his mouth with the back of his hand, while Jody slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

"You fucking jerk-offs," Jody mumbled. "How'd I get stuck with such pussies?"

"You picked us!" Tremaine shot back.

They sat on opposite walls of the room, all staring at their feet.

An hour later the door opened and a tall, handsome Hispanic man they had never seen before entered the room. He was wearing a perfectly cut tan suit and a red silk ascot. He kept his jacket buttoned despite the oppressive heat inside the windowless, metal-roofed room. There were two armed guards beside him, but they weren't adolescent teenagers with bristling chin whiskers--these men had expressionless eyes like dark holes cut into cardboard.

"Good evening," the man said. His English was perfect, and he spoke with an American accent. "My name is Santander Cortez and I'm sorry you have been forcibly detained. I know you probably think that because of our business difficulties, I mean you harm, but let me assure you this is not the case. I hold Paco Brazos responsible for leaving me out of your cigarette transaction."

"You got that right," Jody said, standing.

"And you, I wager, are Mr. Dean?"

"Yes."

"I would like to discuss options with you, if that is convenient." He was smiling warmly.

"Sounds good."

"You other two gentlemen, if you'll please bear with me, I think everything can be amicably arranged. I'm sorry if this has been stressful. I'll be back to you two shortly." He motioned to Jody. "Mr. Dean?"

Jody moved across the room and exite
d w
ith the tall, handsome man. The door was locked behind them.

"Maybe we finally caught us a break,
"
Tremaine said.

"Yeah,
"
Shane answered. But one thing troubled him about Santander Cortez.

The man had a full head of snow-white hair.

Chapter
44.

FOUR HOURS PASSED, but Jody never returned.

The more Shane thought about it, the more he was sure that Santander Cortez was the White Angel. He sat in the dark, running their predicament over in his mind, studying it from every possible angle. The first thing he needed to do was pick up some coordination with the man silently brooding a few feet away.

"Tremaine...,
"
he said.

Tremaine raised his head and glowered at Shane.

"You and I need to work together if we plan on staying alive. We've gotta stop fighting and do some thinking.
"

"We' re fucked," Tremaine said softly. "What we gonna do to change that?"

"For starters, how about the answers to a few questions?"

Tremaine stared at Shane but didn't respond.

"I still wanna know how come you're not inked..
. W
hy you didn't get that Viking tattoo like the rest of us."

"I don't buy into that. That's white-boy shit."

"That's one reason, but you wanna hear another?"

Tremaine didn't answer.

"I think you're a department mole. Internal Affairs, or something."

Tremaine's lip curled into a snarl..
. O
r was it a grin? It was hard to tell in the dark room.

"I know you came aboard late, after Jody had already set up the Vikings," Shane continued. "Wanna hear my theory?"

Tremaine still didn't answer, so he went on.

"Somehow, you or somebody in IAD found out about the Vikings, so you got yourself assigned to SWAT. Then through your friendship with Rodriquez, you put a move on Jody and got picked to be the last Viking. But since you were workin' undercover, you weren't listed in Medwick's log. Cops hate tattoos. You didn't want a tattoo, 'cause you weren't really a Viking. You were only there to find out what they were doing and bust 'em. You were the only one in the unit who wasn't on drugs--same reason. How'm I doing so far?"

"You got a big imagination."

"Jody isn't coming back. He's gone. You and
I are next. We're all gonna die. There's no police to protect us up here, and there's no government to save us, just criminals, flies, and garbage."

"You doin' fake jacks on me now. Tryin' t'fuck with my mind."

"I'll tell you something else that doesn't quite stack up. Your jive ghetto bullshit reads like street cover to me. Every now and then when you get surprised, it slips. I think it's just camouflage for Jody, but Jody's gone, so you're wasting this hot-shit performance on me."

"Zat right?"

"Yep. And laugh this one off if you can...." Shane paused. "I'm workin' undercover, too. I think we're both department plants running games on each other. Problem is, there're no Vikings left to bullshit. So maybe we oughta come clean with each other--start from there."

"I saw you cap Sergeant Hamilton..
. S
aw her bleed out. No fuckin' way you're workin' undercover."

"It was rigged. She was wearing a vest."

"Ain't no vest gonna stop a Black Talon."

"You're wrong. It's called a level-three tactical vest..
. D
eveloped by the Pentagon. I'm working a special undercover assignment for Chief Filosiani."

"Bullshit."

"Listen, Tremaine, whether you're Internal Affairs or not, we still need to work together. There used to be six of us. Now it's just you and me."

"Okay, smart guy..
. S
o let's hear your plan."

Shane glanced around the room. "You suppose those shelves will come down? We could pry loose those heavy two-by-four supports underneath."

Tremaine looked up at heavy wooden shelves and the two-by-four frames holding them. "Yeah," he said. "So?"

Then he gave Tremaine the rest of his plan.

Chapter
45.

THE DOOR OPENED an hour later, and two of the hardened mercenaries entered the room. Shane and Tremaine were pressed flat against the wall. Each swung a three-foot-long two-by-four at his man. The two Colombians doubled over and went down. Shane and Tremaine sprung out and searched them for weapons but found none. Suddenly a volley of machine-gun fire exploded through the door from four backups positioned outside. The bullets whined and ricocheted around inside the small enclosure, sparking off walls like manic fireflies.

Shane felt hot pain sear in his thigh, then another slug hit him in the side of his neck.

A moment later he was pounced on by three men and went down in a pile. Their blows rained down on him; he was clubbed with a gun butt until his vision blurred. Consciousness hovered against a black mist that finally descended and swallowed him.

When he awoke, everything ached. He was alone in the room; Tremaine was gone. He pulled himself into a sitting position and took a quick, fuzzy-headed inventory of his bruised, bleeding body. He had a nasty-looking through
-
and-through on his upper thigh that was still leaking blood and had completely numbed his left leg. The slug was close to his abductor canal. Karmic payback.

The second bullet had grazed his neck, and he had a furrow an eighth of an inch deep running across the right side of his throat. The blood had crusted, but that wound had stopped bleeding. His lip was split and two front teeth were loose; his head ached, and everything else felt horrible.

He slumped onto the floor, and for the next hour felt the temperature slowly drop as the desert night cooled the tiny tin-roofed room until he was freezing. Then he sat with his arms wrapped around him, his teeth chattering. He didn't know how long he waited. He dozed off once but awoke with a start when the door flew open.

Four men rushed in, grabbed him, stood him up, and laced his hands behind his back with wire. Using pliers, they twisted the wire tight until it cut painfully through his skin. The
n t
hey pushed him brutally through the door.

He was stumbling ahead of them, one leg almost numb, lurching across the lit compound. Every time he slowed, somebody would give him a hard push, knocking him forward. They herded him past the parade ground toward a small wood-frame building.

The house was painted white with green shutters; it had a peaked roof and slanting porch. A bright redbrick chimney completed an out
-
of-place Iowa farmhouse look.

He was dragged and pushed up the steps, then shoved through the front door.

The living room was American Gothic with a turn-of-the-century rocker and quilted chairs. Framed fox-hunting paintings of jumping hounds and horses dressed the walls. The mercenaries shoved him through an oak and glass door into a small, cozy den and pushed him down onto the floor.

"Abajo solamente, no muevesthe guard ordered.

Shane nodded and waited for what would come next.

A few minutes later the tall Hispanic man walked into the room. He had removed the tan suit jacket; in its place was a blue three
-
quarter-length silk smoking jacket, belted at the waist. He wore sharply pleated tan pants and a white shirt. His bullshit red silk ascot was still peeking out from underneath. "This is not what I wanted. Please, will somebody remove those restraints?" he said in perfect American English, but now Shane could also hear something else in his speech. Flat Boston vowels tinged his accent.

The guards either knew what he was saying or had been through this so many times before that they knew what was required of them, because they rushed to Shane, pulled him up, and began clipping the wires.

"Gently, gently," Santander said. "We're civilized men; let's try to behave that way." He smiled at Shane as wire cutters snipped the restraints on his wrists.

"Perhaps the armchair," the white-haired man instructed.

The guards led Shane to the chair and motioned for him to sit, then backed off a short distance, their eyes like those of starving men staring at a steaming meal.

"What happened to Jody and Tremaine?" Shane said. The Hispanic man's smile widened, but he didn't answer. A grandfather clock tick-tocked from the corner of the room, its brass pendulum rhythmically slicing up the minutes.

"They are doing just fine," the white-haired man finally responded. "As will you. But first we must get to know one another..
. C
hat for a spell. I look forward to my all-too-infrequent civilized visitors."

"I'd like to believe that, Colonel."

"You should." He smiled. "You see, living out here in the desert, I don't have much opportunity to talk to men who have opinions formed by Western culture or world literature. These men are uneducated." He motioned to the four armed celadores. "They can endlessly discuss sex or the Old Testament, but as a steady diet, even those worthwhile subjects can become pretty stale."

"So you are a colonel, then." Shane's words seemed to surprise him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I called you Colonel, you didn't correct me."

He smiled slowly. "And what do you think that proves?"

"You're the White Angel?"

He began slowly turning a diamond ring on his index finger. "Since I'm a man who has, on occasion, targeted my enemies with extreme forms of death, I have been given many names: the 'White Angel,' the 'Crow,' and earlier, before my promotion to colonel, 'Captain Death.' Childishly colorful, but quite useful nonetheless, because these names strike fear into my enemies. Fear is a useful currency." He seemed to choose each word with great care, delighting in each syllable, like a man tasting a perfectly seasoned dish.

"You take yourself pretty seriously."