Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (26 page)

I put my head down and tried to gain ground. The loose earth sent me skiing
six feet back downhill. Only the top of Daniel's head was visible above the
brush. He seemed to be stopped.

Gathering myself, I gave it all I had and sprinted up the hill. My hip
joints threatened to fall out of the sockets, but I kept my legs going. Daniel
was ten yards to my left. He hissed and held up a hand. I lowered my head and
thundered on. No stopping now. Daniel hissed more urgently. Ten more paces. I
only got two.

Fifteen feet to my left, Daniel had a ringside seat as I lumbered up hill
and stepped off into space. The last picture my mind snapped was that of Daniel
shaking his head sadly as I turned a complete somersault in midair and landed
flat on my back. The air whooshed from my body. My throat seemed to close.

The clearing was much the same as the others. A narrow strip along the
ridgeline. All similarities ended there. A hundred-foot-wide trench had been
gouged twenty feet deep through the center of the cut. They'd worked their way
about halfway down the length of the clearing. At the far end, the trench had
already been filled.

Two flatbed semis were backed up to the trench, adding their cargoes to the
hundreds of fifty-five-gallon drums that already filled the trench. Two
bulldozers, rumbling at idle, their black diesel smoke staining the air, stood
ready to cover and smooth the area.

Three hundred yards away perhaps a dozen men were working the area. Three
rolling barrels off each truck, four or five standing around the trench, the
dozer operators at the ready. Or at least, they had been working. Frozen in
time, they all stood stock-still and stared at me as I slowly slid to the
bottom of the hill. For an instant, no one moved.

I saw but didn't hear a shout as one of the men standing by the side of the
trench opened his mouth wide and pointed at me. All heads turned. The shouter
sprinted for one of the green pickups scattered around.

I rolled to my stomach. My lungs were still empty. Getting to my knees
seemed to take an eternity. I looked helplessly toward the top of the bank.
Daniel was nowhere to be seen. I cursed him.

Willing my legs under me, I tried vainly to scramble back up the bank. The
ground was too soft; the hill too steep. Instead of propelling me upward, my
feet sank into the hill, filling my sneakers with the loose dirt. I slid back
to the bottom.

I looked to my left. The top of the logging road was eighty yards away.
Behind me, in the clearing, one of the trucks screamed to life. I'd never make
it to the road. Silently cursing Daniel again, I tried to control my shaking
fingers and unzip my jacket, groping spastically for the automatic.

I was fully exposed, silhouetted against the red dirt of the hillside.
Waterman's last stand was going to be brief and bloody.

I rolled onto my back, pointing the automatic back toward the clearing. A
tree hit me in the face. Cursing again, I rolled to my right. Daniel was on his
knees at the top of the bank, holding the butt end of the uprooted tree.

"Grab on," he yelled.

I let go of the automatic, grabbed the dead tree, and started
hand-over-handing myself up the bank. Daniel stood and began to back up,
yarding me up the eight-foot embankment.

Halfway to the top, all hell broke loose. Although I couldn't hear the
sounds of gunfire, slugs began hissing into the bank on either side of me like
angry bees. I looked back. The green pickup was halfway across the clearing,
bouncing insanely across the furrowed ground, the driver firing out the window,
bearing down on the base of the embankment. I pulled and climbed.

As I threw my right leg over the top, a sudden sensation of heat told me
that a slug had passed within inches of my head. My right ear buzzed. Releasing
the tree, I grabbed both hands full of the thick grass that carpeted the top of
the knoll and rolled up and over the edge.

Daniel, who had been leaning back into the tree at a forty-five-degree
angle, fell heavily onto his back amid the scrub brush. The green pickup
skidded to a halt at the bottom of the bank. Another bullet sailed perilously
close to my head.

The driver, no longer impeded by the bouncing of the truck, braced his left
arm on the window frame and showed me a mouth full of yellow teeth. The bore of
his chrome automatic looked as big as a sewer pipe. My chest ached as he
brought his face right down into his shooting hand and sighted in. He grinned
again. I was paralyzed.

Then the windshield of the truck exploded. Daniel had righted himself and
lay prone on the ground beside me, using two hands, calmly squeezing off rounds
at the driver, who, unexpectedly faced with the prospect of return fire, went
wide-eyed, threw the truck into reverse, and bounced back more or less the way
he'd come.

The remnants of the windshield slid down over the hood as the truck picked
up speed. The driver, his attention welded to Daniel and me, steered with one
hand and fired repeatedly out through the gutted front window with the other.
He was still firing wildly when the rear of the truck struck a large stump,
spun wickedly to the right, and toppled over on its right side into the open
trench.

"Look at ‘em scurry," Daniel breathed.

He was right. The other workers, having witnessed our encounter with the
truck driver, had abandoned pursuit and were hunkered down behind the trucks
and machinery.

I wiped the sweaty side of my neck. My hand came away red. I stared
idiotically at my hand, rubbing the oily blood between my thumb and fingers. I
scraped more blood off my neck and stared some more.

"You lost an earlobe," Daniel said.

Before I could comprehend, the passenger door of the green pickup, now
pointing straight up in the ditch, opened, and the driver's head appeared
through the window.

I pulled the automatic up, flipped off the safety, and tried to rake the
truck. The automatic pulled violently up and to the right. The first few rounds
were low, puffing the dirt in front of the trench. The next five or so hit the
truck, shattering the passenger window. The rest could have been considered
out-of-season goose hunting. By the time the clip was empty, the little gun was
pointing nearly straight up. All heads had disappeared.

"We better get out of here," I panted.

"Good idea."

We lunged back down the mountain a hell of a lot faster than we'd come up,
picking our way among the maze of roots and snags that littered the ground,
keeping as far away from the road as the terrain would allow. Halfway down,
running out of control, I tripped over an exposed root and fell headlong into
Daniel's back, slamming us both to the ground.

I scrambled up and offered Daniel a hand. His nose was bleeding. Wiping it
with the back of his index finger, he shook his head and put the bloody finger
to his lips. We listened together. Nothing.

"They're not coming after us," he said finally. I silently agreed.

"It looked like maybe only the guy in the truck was armed."

"You think we discouraged them?"

"What you mean we, white man?"

I couldn't argue. Instead, I pulled him to his feet and pointed him back
down the mountain. Under control now, I watched my feet and followed.

We hadn't gone a quarter mile when the road, now two hundred yards to our
left, overflowed with the sounds of straining vehicles. We hunkered down in the
bushes, listening intently for sounds of pursuit.

While we listened and counted vehicles, I fumbled the exhausted clip from
the automatic and reached for one of the spares. There was only one in my pocket.
I'd lost the other two. Cursing myself now, I snapped the clip into place,
swinging the gun in a wide arc as if to frighten off would-be attackers.

"They're running," Daniel announced. I listened. He was right. I
could hear the trucks moving up through the gears as they hit the main road,
their labored roaring fading slowly into the distance.

"How many went by?" I asked as the silence settled in upon us.

"Four."

"How many were there?"

"I was too busy saving your ass to count," he answered. "But
the one in the ditch ain't goin' anywhere."

I changed the subject. "We need to get to a phone."

"No phone anyplace around here. We'll have to head back to that store
we passed about six miles back."

"It's time to call in the cavalry."

Daniel got to his feet and brushed himself off. When he got around to his
hair, he noticed that his hat was missing. I couldn't remember whether he'd had
it on when we'd started down the mountain. Daniel was disgusted. "The
cavalry, huh. You do have a way with words, Leo. You truly do."

Moving slowly now, we picked our way carefully back down the mountain, until
we came to the edge of the road. Daniel stepped into the ditch, poked his head
out between the bushes, and surveyed the road in both directions. Nothing. We
were directly across from the abandoned driveway where we'd parked the truck.

We trotted across. As Daniel disappeared up the drive, something beckoned me
to turn and take a last look at the hillside. The sight stopped me in my
tracks.

"Daniel!" I shouted.

I heard the sound of his feet on the loose gravel beside me. I couldn't drag
my eyes from the enormous plume of black smoke that was trying to rise from the
top of the hill. The plume shot up a couple of hundred feet and then flattened
out, refusing to drive with the wind, as if pulled back to earth by its own
opaque density.

"Jesus," I head Daniel mutter.

"They set the woods on fire."

"That ain't wood smoke. Woods are too wet to burn." He scratched
his head. "I never seen smoke looks like that."

This last comment snapped me to attention. I remembered Charles Hayden's
warnings. Involuntarily, I held my breath.

I squeezed "Let's go" out from between my teeth.

My tone got his attention. Exchanging as little air as possible, we hustled
back to the truck, rolled up the windows, and bounced back out onto the paved
road.

A mile up the road, driving far too fast for a particularly nasty corner, I
had to swerve to avoid crashing into three blue chemical drums that, having
burst on impact, were now spewing their gleaming, black, tarlike contents onto
the road.

"Looks like one of the trucks lost part of its load."

"Hurry," he said. "We gotta report this."

"Then we're gonna have a talk with this guy, Howard Short," I
said.

"After we report it," Daniel insisted. "This is bad stuff,
Leo."

He was right. First things first.

"First we had a deal you tried to screw us. Then we give you the
benefit of the doubt, cut you another deal, and now you try to screw us again.
I'm beginning to wonder about you, Hayden. I'm beginning to think Wendy was
right." The last part fried his brain.

"The deal didn't include murder, dammit," Charles Hayden snapped.
"I'm way outside my umbrella of authority here, Waterman. My ass is in a
sling. Not only is this guy Short found sitting there, big as life, in his
office with a bullet in his head, but he's an Ind" -  he remembered
Daniel - "Native American. The local authorities . . . I'm a public serv -
" He threw up his hands.

"A deal's a deal," I insisted.

"Another broken promise by the Great White Father," Daniel
solemnly intoned, shaking his head sadly. I tried not to laugh.

Hayden turned his back to us, running both hands through his thinning
razor-cut hair, staring out the front window of the little store as yet another
fire engine raced by to join the melee up the road.

Daniel bobbed his eyebrows up and down, grinning at me behind Hayden's back.
I forced my face to stay still. My ear throbbed. We waited.

It was now nearly ten at night, the purple sky straining its way toward
complete darkness. I felt as if I'd been sitting in the store for days.

It was a little after three-thirty when I'd first burst through the door of
the Lucky Seven Mini-Mart demanding to use the phone. I must have been a sight.
One look at me and the woman immediately bent down behind the counter. In my
confused state, I thought she was going for a gun and raised the automatic to
waist level. She came up with a baby.

"No, mister, please," she wailed. Two big tears plowed furrows
down her round cheeks. "Take whatever you want, but please - " She
stopped. "Daniel?" she said tentatively.

Daniel stepped around me. "Winona," he said, "take the baby
and go on back to the trailer. We got trouble here. Go." He pointed.

Winona needed no further encouragement. Clutching the baby to her chest, she
turned on her heel and hustled out the back of the store. I called Charles
Hayden.

He must have left my name with the receptionist. She immediately slipped me
through the system.

"What is it, Waterman? I've got a meeting."

"I've got your smoking gun."

"What? Christ. Who?"

"I don't know. They got away."

"What were they doing?"

"Dumping waste."

"What waste?"

"I don't know," I said again. "Barrels. They set them on
fire. You told me not to get anywhere near it." I could hear him gulp air.

"Where are you?"

"I need a deal."

"What deal? This is no time for that crap. Don't' you realize - "

"You'll keep both of us out of the hands of the local
authorities."

"How in hell am I going to arrange that?"

"Arrest us. You Feds have authority over the locals. I don't give a
shit. Do whatever it takes. When this is over, we go with you, or we just
go."

"I can't - Where are you?"

"Deal?"

He expelled the air he'd gulped earlier. "Deal," he said.

I put Daniel on the phone. He calmly gave Hayden directions. Daniel handed
the phone back to me.

"He wants to talk to you again." Mindlessly, I jammed the phone
onto my injured ear. I reeled around the store in pain. Transferring the pone
to my good ear, I said, "Hurry."