Double blind

Chapter Eight

It took federal wildlife agent Wilbur Boggs a good five minutes to regain his senses after the accident.

Two or three minutes after that, he discovered that the force of the impact had broken the leather restraining strap on his shoulder holster, thereby sending his old and reliable government-issued Model 66. 357 revolver (he simply couldn't get used to the new 10mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistols that most of the agents in the Fish and Wildlife Service now carried) into at least twenty feet of cold muddy water… along with his binoculars, thermos bottle, lunch box, tackle box, fishing rod, ticket book, portable radio, and his badge case.

He would have discovered all of this earlier if he hadn't spent so much time staring in dismay at the bent and twisted mounts of his outboard motor that had nearly been torn loose from the transom, thereby severely damaging the back of his own boat — which he'd opted to use for his rendezvous with Lou Eliot because he knew Rustman's crew would spot his government-owned boat the moment he dropped it into the water.

Then, and in spite of Lt. Colonel John Rustman's optimistic predictions, it had taken Boggs almost four more hours to free his prop from the yards of tightly wrapped nylon netting and twisted ropes for several reasons.

One, the tightened ropes, twisted mounts, and his severely broken right hand prevented him from raising the outboard out of the water or disconnecting it from the ripped transom.

Two, the impact tore open his supposedly sink-proof tackle box, sending his wrenches and pliers and other potentially useful tools — not to mention his wallet — to the bottom of the lake, leaving him with only a pocketknife and the pair of nail clippers on his key chain.

And three, he had to do everything with his merely throbbing and trembling left hand, and he didn't dare drop the pocketknife overboard because he didn't even want to think about how long it might take him to cut all that rope and netting loose with nail clippers.

Boggs spent the first few minutes leaning over the side of the boat in an ultimately futile effort to cut through the tightened ropes that secured the netting and the boat to whatever anchors Rustman and his cohorts had placed in the bottom of the lake. Finally, he gave that up because he couldn't reach all of the ropes, and holding his head upside down made him feel dizzier than ever. So he cursed John Rustman, Lou Eliot, and especially Regis J. Smallsreed for the fifteen minutes it took him to pull off all of his clothes, put the life vest back on, and then awkwardly lower himself into the icy cold water with his forearms, and his one more or less good hand to try to work the ropes and netting loose from there.

Once in the water, he momentarily considered diving to the murky bottom to search for some of his tools, but some still-rational fragment of his mind warned him that if he did, he'd probably get caught in the netting and drown.

A second distinctively sharp, high-velocity gunshot — that didn't sound at all like a shotgun blast, but did sound exactly like the first one that had catapulted him into action at the end of what he assumed was Smallsreed's first round of shooting — caught his attention. He would have tried to pinpoint the location of that second shot if nothing else, but his head and his hand hurt like hell, and his feet and legs ached already in the icy water, so he decided not to worry about it until later.

After he got the boat loose.

It took seven trips into the frigid water before Wilbur Boggs finally managed to free his boat. During each trip, he wrapped his useless right arm around the motor housing, then carefully cut a few nylon strands at a time until his lower body grew numb. When that happened, he carefully slipped the knife into the Velcro-secured pouch on his life vest, heaved himself back into the boat, dried himself off as much as possible with his soggy underwear, socks, and shirt, pulled on his pants and jacket, and sat shivering in the chilly morning air until some feeling returned to his limbs and he could rationalize going back into the water at least one more time.

Several times during this physically and mentally exhausting process, Boggs sensed that someone was watching him. But he forced himself to block that out because he knew if he saw so much as a glimpse of Lou Eliot, or Lt. Colonel John Rustman, or — in a moment of wishful thinking — the Honorable Regis J. Smallsreed himself, he'd forget all about getting tangled in the net and drowning, and dive straight down into that murky, freezing water for his gun and proceed to kill the bastards.

For the first time in his life, Special Agent Wilbur Boggs felt that close to losing control completely.

But the worst was yet to come: Once he finally did manage to free his boat, he discovered what he should have expected, had he not been so disoriented and distracted by the combined effects of an almost certain concussion, a broken hand, a smashed nose, missing teeth, the icy cold water, and other assorted aches and pains far too numerous to name.

The motor wouldn't start.

Forcing himself to remain calm, Boggs awkwardly unlatched and removed the engine cover with one hand, checked the fuel lines, switch valve, plug wires, distributor cap, battery connections, and air filter, replaced and latched the cover, and then tried again.

Nothing.

That was when Wilbur Boggs began to laugh.

It wasn't a pleasant laugh. In fact, had any member of Lt. Colonel John Rustman's crew — except maybe Wintersole — heard that laugh, they almost certainly would have given the emotionally and physically drained federal wildlife agent a wide berth… because nothing in that laughter indicated the presence of a man with a tight grip on his sanity.

It took Boggs a good three or four minutes to stop laughing and wipe the tears out of his eyes… at which point the Fates mercifully gave him a glimpse of the small wooden paddle floating in the distance.

Under anything even remotely resembling normal circumstances, Wilbur Boggs could have retrieved the paddle in, at most, a couple of minutes. But after almost three hours of intermittent exposure to the icy lake water, he now doubted he could swim that far in one stretch, and he knew the life vest wouldn't keep him warm enough if he couldn't. So he used his good hand to paddle to the real paddle instead, stopping only twice to untangle the prop from pieces of rope and netting. Whereupon it all became, in a relative sense, much easier.

Shivering and cursing as he fought to keep the boat on a reasonably straight course, it took the numbed, exhausted, and furious agent nearly three more hours to reach shore. But that was all right, Boggs reminded himself during his rest breaks, because he felt relatively warm and dry now in his damp pants and jacket — but no socks or boots because he couldn't get them on one-handed — and he wasn't going to drown or die of exposure after all. Not only that, he'd discovered that his left hand didn't cramp up quite so much if he stuck the handle of the paddle under his armpit.

Piece of cake.

When he finally did manage to zigzag his way to the shore, dragging several yards of netting and rope and an assortment of miscellaneous lake debris in his wake, Wilbur Boggs simply could have abandoned his boat right there at the base of the launch ramp. No insurance rep in the state would have dared to question such a decision.

But Wilbur Boggs was, above all else, an exceedingly stubborn and persistent man, who refused to admit defeat. Consequently, he spent another forty-five minutes backing his truck down the ramp, cursing his blurred vision and the floor-mounted manual shift, fumbling with the release mechanism on the winch, wading into the cold water one more time to bring the boat around to the back of the partially submerged trailer, stepping on sharp rocks with his bare feet, and then slowly and painfully winching the boat up onto the trailer, cursing Lt. Colonel John Rustman, Lou Eliot, and the Honorable Regis J. Smallsreed with every agonizing turn of the crank.

And then, in the midst of that process, when he rammed his shin into the solid steel tow hitch, recoiled from the effects of the brain-searing impact, slipped on the slippery asphalt, smacked the back of his head against the trailer, and then lay there gasping and cursing on the cold, wet pavement until the pulsating bursts of pain in his shin and his hand and his head finally evened themselves out into some kind of endurable equilibrium, he still possessed the necessary willpower to pull himself up and go back to the task at hand.

Only when he finally drove toward his rural home nestled an hour away in a quiet little wooded grove, did the federal wildlife agent allow himself to laugh again.

Only this time, no one would mistake the nature of that laugh for madness.

Now, Special Agent Wilbur Boggs was quite furiously — and quite sanely — enraged.

Against all odds, or at least any odds an observant bookie might offer on this star-crossed federal law enforcement officer toward the end of that incredibly disastrous day, Wilbur Boggs managed to get all the way home, all the way up his driveway, and all the way through his front door, without a single other thing in his life going wrong.

Stumbling into his living room in a numbed daze at seven-thirty that Sunday evening, the physically and mentally depleted agent's blurred eyes immediately spotted the blinking red numeral on the glowing face of his answering machine: 1

One message.

Wilbur Boggs turned on the light and staggered forward to rewind the tape as quickly as possible, driven by the thought that Lou Eliot — his best hope in three long years to finally bring John Rustman and Regis J. Smallsreed to justice — had left a message explaining why he failed to appear at the rendezvous point at six-thirty that Sunday morning.

But the instant he heard the familiar voice emanating from the answering machine's cheap speaker, the federal wildlife agent began to comprehend the magnitude of the defeat he'd suffered at the hands of Lt. Colonel John Rustman and Congressman Regis J. Smallsreed.

Stunned and disbelieving, Wilbur Boggs punched the buttons of the infuriating machine again with the swollen, scarred, and quivering forefinger of his left hand — the one that probably wasn't broken — and re-played the message.

That's okay, Halahan, he thought grimly as he stood in his living room — dizzy, nauseous, and trembling with pain, hunger, and almost total exhaustion — and listened once again to the voice of the chief of the Law Enforcement Division's Special Operations Branch advising him that Charlie Team, a new team of covert agents, were being assigned a project in his area and would contact him when they got into town, you can't make my life any more miserable than it already is…

The answering machine began to swim out of focus.

'Cause that would be pretty damned hard to do.

Wilbur Boggs took a deep breath to steady himself, determined to nail that particular thought down before he lost it.

You just go right ahead and send that brand-new Special Ops team of yours out here, and I'll keep an eye on them, and help you with your congressional problem… and then you can help me with mine.

Boggs felt himself starting to go, and grabbed at the wall with his good hand to catch himself, knocking the lamp to the floor in the process, but not giving a damn because it was one of the few things his wife left when she'd moved out and filed for divorce three years ago.

Never liked the damned thing anyway.

However, the lamp's demise plunged the room into darkness — which he considered a more significant problem.

Steady there, Boggs, pay attention. Do something.

He knew he should call somebody. Right now, while he still could. Tell them about Lou Eliot. About how Lt. Colonel John Rustman's foreman had offered to turn over his boss, and the Honorable Regis J. Smallsreed, and some sleazy political bagman named Simon Whatley, and the other one — what was his name? The trained killer Rustman hired to scare the shit out of everyone?

Damn it, what was his name? Something bizarre… cold… empty. Something about winter?

Wintersole.

Yeah, that's it.

Sergeant Wintersole.

The memory suddenly flooded the federal agent's numbed mind. Gunshots. Loud, high-velocity rounds. Rifle or pistol, not shotgun. Definitely not shotgun. He'd never in his entire career heard of anyone hunting ducks with a high-powered rifle or pistol. And there weren't any deer around the marsh during duck season because the gunfire drove them off.

Two shots, far apart. Execution style?

Christ!

He had to call somebody, tell them about Lou Eliot and Wintersole. Tell them they had to hurry because…

Because what?

Because Rustman probably figured out his foreman had turned snitch and shot him, the poor bastard, Wilbur Boggs reasoned.

So there probably wasn't any need to hurry after all. They probably shot him, weighted his body down, and dumped him into one of the deep sections of Loggerhead Lake, where no one would ever find him, even if they used hooks or divers.

Boggs's head started to spin again, and he grabbed the wall in the dark with both hands to steady himself, then choked back an agonized scream. But the excruciating pain in his right hand helped clear his head and reminded him of something important. Something very important.

Charlie Team. Help was on the way.

Only that didn't sound like such a good idea anymore, sending Charlie Team, he suddenly realized. Not a good idea at all.

He had to call Halahan back, right away, and tell him not to send the kids, send somebody else — one of the experienced covert teams — because the situation at Lt. Colonel John Rustman's private hunting preserve for wealthy and influential assholes was a whole lot worse than he'd thought when he'd cheerfully suggested that training exercise to Freddy Moore.

Gotta let Halahan know what's going on. Wilbur Boggs smiled through his split and bloodied lips. Goddamned stubborn Irishman. He'll take care of everything. Good old Halahan.

The dazed and nearly unconscious federal agent then tried to decide if he could really drive another five miles to the local hospital, or if he dared to lie down on the couch and go to sleep — which he really wanted to do more than anything else he could think of at that particular moment — in the unlikely hope that he might feel better tomorrow. Or should he just say to hell with it and dial 911 while he still could?

Wilbur Boggs's instinct for survival, more than anything else, told him to forget the car and the couch and call for help.

He clutched the phone and struggled to remember if he'd ever gotten around to programming the automatic emergency button or if he needed to punch in the numbers on the increasingly dim and curiously blurred keypad. But then he felt himself start to fall again and reached out to catch himself. Only this time, the darkness completely disoriented him.

Desperately trying not to hit his broken hand again, he missed the wall and spun, ripping the phone cord out of the wall and wrapping it around himself in the process. He stumbled, pitched forward, and his head struck the lamp table.

Hard.

Don't you worry about making my life any more miserable than it already is, David, old buddy, Boggs mumbled, facedown to the carpet as the darkness overtook him. 'Cause that's gonna be pretty damned hard to do.