Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Something snapped me wide awake in the middle of the night. I lay frozen, listening. Wind was driving rain against the building, and some of it was blowing in through the screen on me. I was damp, felt the mist of exploded raindrops on my face. But that wasn’t what woke me.

The luminous hands of my watch read a few minutes after two. I turned my head until I could see the street through the porch screen. Rain was driving through the halo of the streetlights, but I couldn’t see anyone. The parked vehicles appeared to be as I remembered them before I went to sleep.

What had awakened me?

Then I heard it above the low moan of the wind, the sound of something dragging along, scraping against…

The 1911 automatic was under my pillow. I wrapped my fingers around it, automatically checked that the hammer was back and the thumb safety on.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I eased the afghan away from my legs.

There was that noise again! Something rubbing against the house, it sounded like.

And someone moaning.

I eased myself off the couch and, staying low, slipped past the chairs so I could see the walkway up to the house.

I froze, listening with every fiber of my being.

Scraping again, and a low moan. Right under me.

It was a man lying on the ground, pressed up against the house. At least, it looked a little like a man. Ah, he was wearing a ghillie suit. This was one of Grafton’s snake-eaters who was guarding the house.

With the pistol in hand, I slipped inside and threw the bolt to Grafton’s front door. Pulled it open as slowly as I could, staying very low. I took a deep breath, then eased through, still low.

In seconds I was over the moaning man. He had lost the headpiece of his outfit somewhere. He was white, with stubble for hair. No excess fat, lots of muscle. His eyes were closed, but he was still breathing. The rags and tatters of the ghillie garment were wet from the rain. Yet there was a large dark area on his right rear side, near his kidney.

I bent down, trying to see in the dim light. Blood. The stains appeared to be blood. I reached for him, trying to see where he was wounded. He moaned as I touched him, tried ineffectually to fend off my hands.

I tore the ghillie suit with both hands, trying to see.

He had been shot. At least twice. Probably while he was in his hide.

His assailant was probably still out there… right now!

My cell phone was in my pocket. The light was too bad to see the numbers. I grabbed the man, hoisted him up over my back and took him into the house, laid him on the couch, ran up the stairs to Grafton’s room.

Jake and Callie came awake as I burst in. “The guy guarding the house tonight has been shot. He’s downstairs on the couch.”

With that I went charging out. I took the stairs three at a time, half expecting to meet the would-be killer in the front room. There was certainly nothing to stop him from coming through the open front door.

No. The living room, kitchen, and porch were empty.

I closed the door, threw the dead bolt, then hurriedly checked the rest of the house.

I paused in the living room, trying to think. Hunkering down in the house and calling 911 wasn’t an option. Not unless we wanted to end up like the folks at the Greenbrier safe house. There had been only one man on guard duty tonight — and the attacker didn’t know that.

The back door was in the kitchen and led to an outside shower beside the house, a shower screened by an eight-foot board fence.

A man with a knife could merely cut the screen on the porch and come in that way. Or he could be waiting for us to come out. That the killer was still out there was a high probability. His target had to be Mikhail Goncharov, yet he didn’t know how many guards were out there. That was my edge.

I let myself out the back door, half expecting to stop a bullet at any second.

The rain beat at me. The wind was worse than I thought. My hands were shaking and I was breathing a mile a minute.

I didn’t even know where the wounded man’s hide was. Nor that the hunter was there. Or perhaps he was, waiting for someone to come looking.

I crawled on the wet sand around the house and stopped under the porch, where I could see the street.

You need to think about this logically, Tommy. The hunter discovered the snake-eater and shot him, but he didn’t know how many guards there were. Even if he did, he didn’t know where the others were. He couldn’t come toward the house until he found and eliminated them. So he was in a position where he could watch and wait until someone revealed himself.

I scanned the houses I could see on the opposite side of the street — the north side — inspected the cars, tried to remember what the houses had looked like on this side of the street, the south side. Most were built on piles and had some kind of skirting between the house and the ground to keep out critters. The hunter could be under any one of them if he found or made a hole in the skirting.

Except for the house on the south side of the street nearest the beach. It had been built too far out, on the dune, and the retreating beach had washed the dune from under it. It stood derelict now on its pilings, the ground floor at least ten feet above the sand. A few more winters or a hurricane would finish it off, cause it to collapse.

There, I thought. In that house or under it. From there he could see Grafton’s front yard and walkway and everything on the street. He could have watched the wounded man crawl toward Grafton’s. If I were him, I would wait there.

The wind was driving the rain in waves. By this time I was soaked and covered with sand… and still barefoot. I had forgotten to put on my shoes.

I watched the rain in the streetlights for a moment longer, scanned everything I could see. Okay, I was delaying the inevitable, trying to screw up my courage. The man inside needed medical attention, and the only way to get it to him was to call an ambulance or take him to the hospital. With a killer out there, neither option looked good.

I took a deep breath, then scurried forward and rounded the end of the fence, and ran into the next yard to the east. When I was completely hidden from that house at the end of the street, I slowed, made my way to the next fence, prepared to do it again.

If he was in or under the derelict home, he must have seen me dart around Grafton’s fence. This time he might be ready.

I went. Fast.

Made it, with a pounding heart. As I rounded the back of this house I decided the third time would be the charm — he’d pop me then. I was only about eighty yards from the place I thought he might be.

Shielded between two houses, I scaled the fence and dropped onto the other side. Got a ton of splinters in my hands and ripped my trousers. Sneaked around the corner of the house and did the fence trick again. Now only one house lay between me and the derelict.

I heard a dog barking in the house beside me. Terrific. Sounded like a small dog, a yapper. If I could hear it, the hunter could, too.

Oh, boy.

I just hoped the householder didn’t call the law and report a prowler. A patrol car in the street was the last thing I wanted.

I used both hands to chin myself on the fence, take a squint over the top. Heard something zing by my head. I knew damn well what it was and let go of the fence as if it were electrified with a thousand volts. A bullet. He had shot at me with some kind of silenced weapon.

I didn’t wait. I rounded the fence and sprinted by the front of the adjoining house in my best imitation of a juking halfback as two more bullets went by like angry bees. I didn’t stop. Kept going, across the sand toward the dark hulking presence of the derelict house as the driving rain pounded on my face.

He fired one more time, and I saw the muzzle flash. It wasn’t much, no more light than a firefly would make, but it was enough. He was in the derelict house, on the second story.

I dove under it and rolled to a stop. Blew on the pistol to clean the sand out of the hammer channel.

Getting into that house was a mistake. He was trapped in there. Unless he killed me.

Trapped unless he had a pal out here. That thought tightened every muscle in me.

In the darkness, amid the rain and wind, I could see nothing that moved. The beach seemed to reflect what little light there was, and it was empty.

I inspected the house above me. How had he gotten in there? The underside of the first floor was ten or eleven feet above the sand. It seemed to consist of joists and wires and plumbing — in the darkness it was hard to tell. There were three entrances to the house that I could see: one off the deck, a back door, and a front door. The problem was that the steps to these entrances were suspended at least six feet in the air. He must have jumped up to one of these sets of stairs, scrambled up, and gone in. Easy enough for me to do, too, except for one thing. He would probably shoot me as I came through the door.

I certainly didn’t want to take that chance.

Nor did I need to. With me under the house, he was trapped. If and when he came out, I would see him before he saw me. That would be my edge.

All I needed to do was sit.

I hunkered down behind one of the pillars, which gave me a bit of shelter from the wind and rain.

Minutes passed slowly, and I shivered. My shirt and trousers were wet and plastered to me, and I was wearing more sand than a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Not much insulation value in sand, I found.

I dialed Jake Grafton on my cell phone. After three wrong numbers I got him. I told him where the killer and I were.

“I can’t get anyone here until morning,” he said. “Can you keep him corked until then?”

“Yeah.”

“Callie is going to take this trooper to the hospital,” Grafton continued. He was the coolest man under pressure I had ever met. He sounded as if he were ordering breakfast at an IHOP. “We’ll put him in the car and she’ll drive away. I’ll come back in the house and stay with Goncharov.”

“Will he stay in the house, you think?”

“By God, he’d better,” Grafton exclaimed, then the connection broke. I stowed the phone in my pocket.

Five minutes later I saw them come out of their house half carrying the injured man. They got him into the back seat of Grafton’s car, then Grafton went back into the house and Callie drove away. I was glad to see that. Anyone entering that house would come face to face with one tough man armed with an MP-5.

The night passed slowly, agonizingly so. I shivered and slapped myself and listened to the wind… and waited.

Waiting is damned hard. You can’t relax; you must remain ready. Any second you may find yourself in a fight for your life. Yet it’s difficult to maintain the intensity over time. As the minutes pass you can feel the readiness leaking away.

A half hour passed, then another. Never had time seemed so heavy. Several times I thought I heard a noise from the house over my head, but perhaps not. With the wind and pounding of the rain it was hard to tell.

The night dragged as I sat shivering. The pounding of the rain being blown horizontally began to hurt after a while, but I was already doing everything I could to escape it.

I thought about everything as I fought to stay awake and alert — women, past misadventures, things I had done that I wished I hadn’t, things I hadn’t done that I wish I had. Every man should have a list of things to do before he dies, and I had mine. Things like kill the son of a bitch who sent killers to cut people up to make them talk, to kill them to keep them silent.

The preachers say you shouldn’t think evil thoughts — they rot the soul, corrode it. All I can tell you is that I got no heat from mine.

Just when I thought I was nearing my limit of endurance, the storm eased, the wind velocity dropped. Even the rain let up. I fought the drowsiness that overcame me when I ceased shivering.

I knew he knew I was still here. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did, to a certainty. He was upstairs waiting and I was waiting down here.

Waiting… for his nerve to break? For him to try something. Anything.

The sky was beginning to lighten up just enough for me to see the ocean and base of the clouds when something fell from the west side of the house into the sand. I heard the sound of it hitting, just a muffled plop. That jolted me to maximum alert. I spun and threw myself prone on the sand with the pistol out in front, ready to shoot. I couldn’t see what it was because of the piles that held up the house. There were perhaps two dozen.

It wasn’t a man that fell — I sensed that. Not loud enough. But what was it?

I wasn’t dumb enough to crawl closer to see. Maybe I wasn’t that curious. I knew if I waited I would get my shot.

The seconds ticked by. I turned my head back and forth, watching, but nothing moved.

A minute passed. Two. Three. The sky seemed to be turning lighter.

Something burned across my back like a hot iron. The shock of it drew a grunt from me. There was a soft plut of a noise, but perhaps I imagined it more than heard it. Instinctively I knew that I had been shot.

I rolled over, pistol held in both hands. I thumbed the safety off as I scanned the ground.

Another sound, louder this time, and an angry bee whizzed by my ear.

I saw him then, on the stairs down from the deck on the beach side of the house. The only reason I was still alive was that he was lying on the deck and shooting at me upside down. All I could see was the dark place where his head and shoulders blotted out the lighter gray of the sky.

I rushed my first shot, which didn’t seem as loud as I thought it should be. I settled down, began squeezing them off as quickly as I could line up the sights in that terrible light.

He might have shot at me again and I didn’t hear it — I don’t know — but after my fourth or fifth shot he lost the rifle. It fell from his hands.

I managed to rise. I walked toward him, the pistol pointed, ready to shoot again.

He didn’t move.

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I shot him again in the neck from a distance of about eight feet.

The rifle was a compact one with a silencer on the barrel. I picked it up, tossed it up on the deck, then hoisted myself up on the bottom rung of the deck stairs, which ended in midair. My back was on fire. Somehow I knew the bullet wasn’t in me; it must have grooved my back without hitting the bone.

Only when I was climbing the steps did I realize that there might have been two of those dudes in that house. My pistol was in my pocket, where it would do me no good.

One thing for certain — the shooter was really dead. Dead as hell. Blood all over the step where he had fallen. I grabbed his feet and tried to pull him back into the house out of sight of passersby on the beach. He weighed a ton, at least. With my back hurting like hell and heavy as he was, it was all I could do to get him through the door to the living room.

The house was gutted. Now I got the pistol out, stood listening. Heard wind coming through the broken windows in that ramshackle derelict, which couldn’t have been over ten years old. They must have just got it completed when the storms washed the beach out from under it.

I went through the house carefully. Someone had left a lot of trash in an upstairs bedroom — camped up there, it looked like — but I was the only living person in the house.

Downstairs I paused to look at the dead man. In novels after the hero kills somebody he is supposed to pause for some soul-searching and introspection, think a deep thought. No deep thought occurred to me. I wanted to kick the bastard, but he was dead and I didn’t feel like wasting the calories.

I was sitting on the steps outside when Jake Grafton came out from under the house. “How many were there?”

“One.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

“Help me up,” he said, and extended a hand.

I helped Grafton roll him over so we could look at his face. “Is this that CIA killer Royston was supposed to have hired?”

“Stu Vine?” Grafton studied the slack face with the staring eyes. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. Whoever he was, he rushed it. Shouldn’t have gone after the sniper in the hide. That was a silly mistake.”

“Maybe the challenge of it intrigued him.”

Grafton turned and studied my face. “Perhaps,” he admitted. He picked up the sniper rifle with the silencer. It was a Ruger with a 3×9 variable scope. “One of these new.17 calibers,” Jake Grafton said, then laid it on the floor. “Fires a seventeen-grain bullet, tiny little thing. He must have been planning for head shots.”

“Quiet, too. Played hell with my back.”

He inspected the wound. “Just a gouge. Bleeding some.”

“He got me facing one way, then tried to pop me in the back. Would have done better if he had been right side up.”

We were outside on the deck looking at the ocean when a police vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee, drove up. The officer rolled down his window. “You people aren’t supposed to be in that house. Didn’t you see the sign?”

Truly, I hadn’t. Would have ignored it if I had, but I didn’t tell him that.

“Come on,” the officer said. “That building is condemned. Get down out of there before it collapses with you in it.”

I jumped down facing him so he wouldn’t see the blood on my shirt or the pistol tucked into the small of my back. Grafton climbed down. When we were both on the sand the officer said, “Don’t let me catch you in there again.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake Grafton said.

Satisfied we were properly chastised, the officer drove on along the beach.

We walked back to the Graftons’, where the admiral worked on my back with iodine and Band-Aids. He used at least a dozen. When he had me fixed up, he went to call some friends about the corpse. After he hung up, he told me they would come get the dead man tonight after dark.

On that happy note we sat down on his porch to drink a beer even though it was only six in the morning. A bit later Callie called Grafton from three blocks away. He told her the coast was clear. The trooper had been shot twice, but he was on IVs and stable, Callie said. She told the people at the hospital she didn’t know him, didn’t know who shot him or where. A policeman came by the hospital and got her name, said he would call her later.

“We aren’t doing so good in this war,” I remarked to the admiral.

He didn’t deny it. He was always like that — upbeat, optimistic, bucking up the troops.