Dead Men's Harvest

Chapter 29

Deadened by the walls of the basement, the racket caused by our shoot-out wouldn’t have carried beyond the house, so there was no fear that the police would come with blue lights blazing. However, Baron must have found where I’d dropped the Galil because suddenly the house rattled to the clamour of machine gun rounds. I was trapped in the cellar, and even if Baron or the others didn’t have the bottle to come down and finish me off, the cops would be here soon. That’d be me done for: without the backing of Walter I’d be seen as the aggressor and dealt with accordingly. Either I’d be put down or carted off to prison for the remainder of my life.

The cops would have to be a concern for later, I decided.

Some of Baron’s rounds made it all the way down the stairwell and into the basement. They cut chunks out of the floor, throwing shards of concrete and red-hot metal everywhere. Something scored my left shin, and I jumped, slapping down on an oozing wound. I hobbled a few steps away, shoving bodily into a corner nearest the door. The rebounding bullets were still a concern but less likely to hit me now. The last time I’d been in a similar situation my enemy had lobbed a hand grenade at me: this time there was no steel hospital bed and mattress to save me. However, I did still hold an ace card.

‘Harvey, I need your help now!’

‘Wondered what all that hullaballoo was about,’ Harvey said in my ear.

From above there came the retort of a rifle. Someone screamed and I hoped it was Baron. It wasn’t very likely, but at least the machine gun fire stopped as the flow of battle surged to a new front. I didn’t wait to make sure, just bolted up the stairs and into the kitchen. A man was dead on the floor but he was too big to be Baron. The window was smashed. From outside I heard the repeated crack of Harvey’s rifle as he tracked fleeing men through the windows of the house. Someone fired back, but their bullets came nowhere near to him. He continued laying down cover and I went through the kitchen. Didn’t bother with the door, just hurdled out through the broken window and on to the gravel path.

‘I’m out,’ I said.

‘See you, brother.’

I looked for targets but saw none.

‘OK, start falling back.’

We pepper-potted out of there, taking turns to cover and run as we retreated through the garden. The lawn mower had fallen silent, but a new sound carried through the air: sirens from responding police cruisers. From further back in the grounds there was the roar of an engine, and the squeal of a vehicle making a harsh turn. I assumed that, like us, Baron wanted no part of the police investigation that would follow. I would have liked to take him out there and then, but at least this way Rink might get his wish.

We went over the wall with little finesse, just ran at it and leaped, caught the upper edge and swung over. Our rental had gone undiscovered and we clambered inside. Harvey drove, I sat in the front passenger seat, and we talked calmly. We kept to the speed limit; just two guys on a drive. Cop cars screamed past us heading for the front gates of the Hendrickson estate. By the time they arrived, gained entry and discovered what had happened we were well out of range of the cordon they set up around the crime scene.

Apart from Baron, nobody had any idea who was responsible for the slaughter, and it was reasonable to expect that he’d keep his mouth shut. That he’d made his escape was a given, so the chances of the police searching for Harvey and me were very slim. We headed out of town and pulled in at a hotel that was more upper-class than anything normally favoured by those fleeing justice. Cops tended to target the seedier flophouses first; they didn’t expect felons to lie low in five-star comfort. Forward planning meant that Harvey had pre-booked — under false details — so we weren’t like a couple of desperadoes when we turned up and locked ourselves in our room. Harvey even set up a charge account on a credit card, further enhancing our hide-in-plain-sight ethos. He requested a wake-up call and newspaper for the morning.

Our room was on the ground floor and we could come and go without having to bypass the checking-in counter. From the window we could see where we’d parked our rental. There was also a second vehicle that Harvey had ordered via a different rental company: just in case our first car had been noticed near to the shooting we’d planned to leave here in the second.

When the investigation got underway, it was probable that any mobile phone usage in the area would be scrutinised, so the mobiles we had would have to be dumped. Nevertheless I knew how the gears of bureaucracy could grind an investigation to a snail’s crawl so thought my phone was good for a while yet. Phoning Walter directly from it was foolish, because the numbers would show on the call log, but not when I went through the relay stations that filtered and encrypted the route. Ensconced in our rooms, I rang the CIA man.

‘You can strike Kurt Hendrickson off the list,’ I said when Walter picked up.

‘He’s dead? Hell, son! The Justice Department isn’t going to be happy when they find his trial won’t be going ahead. They were looking at a real media coup with this one.’

‘Don’t worry. Right now a higher power is judging his crimes. Where he’s heading, it’ll be worse than any hell-hole that the courts could send him to.’

‘I never took you for the religious type,’ Walter said.

‘You know what they say: there’s no atheists in trenches, Walt.’ Though I didn’t pray that regularly, I’d often taken the Lord’s name in vain. Maybe I should’ve got down on my knees and begged for forgiveness otherwise, when it was my time, I might be heading to the same hell-hole as Hendrickson and all the other evil men I’d killed. I told Walter what had gone down at Hendrickson’s house.

‘So you’ve no idea where Cain is,’ he summed up.

‘Drawn a blank,’ I said. ‘So it’s even more important that both John and Imogen are out of harm’s way.’

Anticipating my next question, Walter confirmed, ‘Imogen was collected by Hartlaub and Brigham. She’s out of Cain’s reach. There’s no one left who he can use to get to John, so you needn’t worry.’

‘I’m not sure about that. Walt, I need to speak to my brother.’

Walter’s silence gave me a sense of foreboding.

‘Walt?’

‘Uh, I’m just figuring on how best to arrange that, son.’

‘What’s the problem, Walt, and please… none of your usual bullshit.’

Walter coughed into the handset, then must have twisted away because I didn’t catch his next mumbled words.

‘Walter.’

‘I’m here, OK. Look, this won’t be easy to set up. We have him in deep hiding. It’s going to be a bitch getting you to see him without your involvement throwing problems our way.’

‘Seeing as I’m just a fucking crazy vigilante and all?’

‘There is that.’ He tried to temper his words so they sounded like a joke, but he meant them. ‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime I suggest you get some rest, recharge your batteries, you’ve been on the go for… what? Two days now?’

‘I’m fine,’ I lied. The truth was, now that the thrill of battle had subsided, I could have slept for a month. ‘Just arrange things for me, Walt. I want to speak to John.’

‘Get some sleep. Give me a call back in a few hours, OK.’

Walter hung up and I must have looked at the phone strangely. Harvey, currently sprawled on one of the beds, was watching me. His usually bright eyes were rheumy, like I wasn’t the only one in need of a nap. ‘There a problem, Hunter?’

‘I’m not sure…’

Placing the phone on the floor, I crushed it under my heel. Then I disassembled it further, separating the battery, the guts and the SIM card and tossing them into a waste basket.

‘Destroy your phone,’ I told Harvey. ‘Then we’re getting out of here.’

‘I need to sleep, man.’

‘Trust me, Harve, we need to get going.’

While he dismantled his handset, I went to the window that overlooked where our cars were parked. There was nothing unusual out there. So maybe the nasty feeling I’d just felt was wrong; but the niggling thought persisted that Walt was up to something. I crossed the room and opened the door. A narrow corridor led back into the hotel one way and to the car park the other. Going to a window, I peered out across the hotel lot on to the main road. Traffic regulations meant that stopping on the highway wasn’t allowed, but there were plenty of places where they could pull off the road and into one of the hotel courtyards across the way. A hundred yards up, its front end peeking out from behind a stand of trees, I spotted a navy-blue sedan with tinted windows.

Returning to the room, I said, ‘Harvey, we have to go now!’

We fast-walked out of the room, along the corridor and out through a revolving door into the car park. The rifle was still inside the first rental car but we had no time to fetch it. We hurried over to the second car and Harvey bleeped it open. He drove again, with me riding shotgun. We only made it as far as the exit ramp when the first police cruiser screeched up the ramp towards us, its lights flashing balefully.