Prey

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Thursday September 15th

At exactly one o'clock that Thursday morning, Special Agent Henry Lightstone went through the motions of suddenly remembering that he had a flight to catch. The assistant manager at the Alaska Cargo office-who was apparently willing to do just about anything for Jennifer Alik-stepped in and offered to drive him out on his baggage cart to the loading ramp for Alaska Flight 394.

Entering the plane via the emergency access stairway, Lightstone managed to bypass the surveillance teams that FBI Agent A1 Grynard had placed at the security checkpoints.

Eight hours and twenty minutes later, at precisely 10:20 a.m., after passing through one time zone, and two more security checks without incident, Lightstone approached the Budget rental-car counter at San Diego International Airport. He signed for a small sedan in the name of Henry Allen Lightner, using one of his undercover credit cards that he hadn't gotten around to canceling.

Forty-five minutes later, Lightstone entered the Federal Building on "C" street, took the elevator up to the seventh floor, and walked into Dwight Stoner's office… completely unaware that he had been followed all the way from the Budget parking lot.

"Henry Lightstone. I'm here to see Dwight Stoner," he said, holding out his badge and credentials for inspection by the young blond receptionist.

"I'm sorry, sir," the young woman smiled apologetically, "but Agent Stoner left the office a little while ago. Was he expecting you?"

"Uh, no, not really. Do you know when he'll be back?"

"No, I don't. He received a call from an informant, and then he left right away."

"An informant?" Lightstone blinked. "Are you sure?"

"Well, uh, yes, I guess so. I mean-"

"When exactly did he get the call?"

"Oh, uh, earlier this morning," the receptionist said, looking flustered.

"I mean, what time?" Lightstone said impatiently.

"Oh, sure, let's see here," she said as she turned back the top page in her telephone memo book. "Yes, here it is. The call came in at exactly nine forty-six, a little over an hour ago."

"Did you happen to get the name of the informant?" Lightstone asked as he tried to read the barely legible script upside down.

"No, I didn't. She wouldn't give me her name. I asked her twice, but she said that-"

"She?" Lightstone's head came up. "Are you sure it was a woman?"

"Oh, yes, it was definitely a woman's voice," the young woman nodded. "She had a real strong accent. Sort of Germanic, I think."

Lightstone forced himself to remain calm. "Do you remember what was it, exactly, that she said to you?" he asked, feeling his blood pressure starting to rise as he remembered A1 Grynard's words: And Scoby hasn't checked back in from a routine contact with a female informant somewhere in southern Arizona.

"Well, let me think. Humm, first of all, when I asked who she was, she said that she didn't want to give me her name because it was not a big deal and she didn't think-"

"Listen, uh, Tracy," Lightstone interrupted as he quickly read the nameplate on the front of the desk, "this is very important. Do you have any idea of where Agent Stoner was to meet this informant?"

"No, he didn't say, but he might have written it down in the notebook on his desk. He usually-" she started to add, but Lightstone was already sprinting to Stoner's small office, where he rummaged around the top of the cluttered desk and then in the lower file drawer.

"Uh, sir, I'm really not supposed to let you do that," the young woman said as she came in through the doorway with a determined look on her face. But Lightstone already had the spiral-bound notebook opened to the last entry. A moment later he was out the door and running down the wide corridor to the elevator.

At six-foot-nine, and three hundred and ten pounds, Special Agent Dwight Stoner had long since become accustomed to the fact that his presence tended to intimidate people.

And while that sort of thing was perfectly okay when facing down defensive linebackers like Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, or malicious biker punks like Brendon Kleinfelter, it was often a disadvantage when the formidable special agent tried to interact with the general public.

Thus, when Dwight Stoner saw the momentary look of fear in the very attractive young woman's eyes, he immediately tried to compensate by relaxing his guard.

"I didn't mean to frighten you, ma'am," Stoner said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he held out his badge and credentials. "I'm Special Agent Dwight Stoner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I believe you called me this morning about an illegal rack?"

"Oh yes, Officer. Please come in." Carine Mueller said in a shaky voice, genuinely startled by the immense size of the federal agent. She decided immediately that she wouldn't let Sonny Chareaux draw the game out with this man the way he wanted to. "I was afraid that you might have changed your mind."

"Had to stop for gas, and then I made a wrong turn back at the junction." Stoner shrugged his massive shoulders apologetically. "Took me a while to find somebody who knew this part of the country well enough to give me directions."

"It was very kind of you to drive all the way out here," Mueller said as she led him in through the kitchen and out the back door, then started walking toward a large, decrepit barn at the far corner of her acre-sized lot. "My neighbor was so frightened."

"Is that Mr. Nakamura?" Stoner asked, observing the slender, nervous-looking Oriental man who stood next to the partially opened side door of the barn.

"Yes," Carine Mueller nodded. "He's such a nice man, and he and his wife are wonderful neighbors. But they haven't been in this country very long, and he was afraid that he'd be arrested if he kept it at his house. And he didn't know what to do, so I told him that he could keep it in our barn until you got here."

"Mr. Nakamura, I'm Special Agent Stoner, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," Stoner said as he walked up and slowly extended his large hand.

"Yes, I thank you very much that you come to help me," Kiro Nakamura-a Shotokan fourth-degree black belt-said in broken English, taking professional note of Dwight Stoner's limp as he returned the agent's handshake with his deliberately relaxed right hand.

"I understand you had a run-in with a poacher out here?"

"Yes," Nakamura nodded with wide-eyed enthusiasm. "He say that for very little money, I can have big animal trophy and family name in record book. I say yes, but now he want more money, and I not want," Nakamura stuttered, forcing his lethal hands to tremble visibly. "I am visitor in your country. Not want to go to jail."

"It's okay, Mr. Nakamura," Dwight Stoner said soothingly. "I'm here to help you, not to arrest you, okay?"

"Yes, okay, I like that." The Oriental man smiled happily as Stoner turned back to Carine Mueller.

"You said the rack is in the barn?"

"Yes, let me show you," Mueller said as she led the way into the dark, cobwebby barn that was filled with stacked boxes, trunks, gasoline cans, and a vast array of farm equipment that looked like it hadn't been touched in years.

"Ugghh, this place gives me the willies," she shuddered as she fumbled around in the semidarkness. "I almost never come out here. I hate spiders, and I can never remember where the light switch is."

"Is this it?" Stoner asked as he stepped between two head-high stacks of old cardboard boxes and looked down at the huge, eight-point elk rack that had been propped up against a pair of wooden ammo crates.

"Yes, that is what he want to sell to me," Kiro Nakamura said in an excited voice as he moved up past Stoner. "But then he say I no have papers, so I must pay more."

"What did you say the man's name was?" Stoner asked as he bent down to examine the record-sized rack more closely.

"Chareaux," said a familiar voice to Stoner's right.

"What-?"

Dwight Stoner started to come up and around just as Sonny Chareaux lunged forward and swung the baseball bat square across Stoner's right knee, causing the surprised special agent to roar in agony as he collapsed on the concrete floor.

As Stoner went down, Kiro Nakamura immediately moved in to grab for his shoulder-holstered. 45 SIG-Sauer automatic. Pulling Stoner's jacket aside with his right hand and reaching in his left, Nakamura unsnapped the restraining strap and had the heavy weapon halfway out of its holster when Dwight Stoner brought his head up with a savage look in his pain-filled eyes and closed his huge right hand around Nakamura's left wrist.

Reacting with blinding speed, Nakamura yelled out a guttural "Ki-ai!" as he drove the heel of his right palm into Stoner's nose, slamming the agent's head backward in a spray of blood. Yelling out again, Nakamura brought his tightly closed right hand around in a vicious back-fisted strike that caught Stoner square across the right eye and snapped his head around to the left. He then delivered a knife-hand thrust to the agent's exposed throat.

Stunned and nearly unconscious, Stoner dropped hard onto his knees with an agonized gasp, but somehow he managed to find the strength to snap Nakamura's wrist, causing the Oriental to release the SIG-Sauer pistol, which clattered to the floor.

Then, using the broken wrist for leverage, Stoner sent the injured karate master stumbling into Carine Mueller just as she was reaching into one of the boxes for her. 357 revolver.

"Get him… agghhhl" Mueller cried out in pain as her head struck the metal edge of a table saw, splitting the skin over her left eye. She cursed in her native-German as she fumbled around under the boxes, searching desperately for her weapon.

Dwight Stoner was still trying to recover from the savage blows to his nose and throat, and the agonizing pain in his shattered knee, when he saw movement out of the corner of his rapidly swelling eye. He barely managed to turn away in time to absorb the impact of the bat against his upper arm and shoulder rather than against his head. But the blow jarred him backward, and all he could do was to try to twist around and bring his massive forearms up to ward off Sonny Chareaux's next swing when…

Ka-booom!

… the sudden concussive detonation of a high-velocity pistol round going off in the contained area seemed to send ice picks through his eardrums. The 180-grain jacketed hollow-point bullet tore through the back of Sonny Chareaux's right hand and sent pieces of the bat flying in all directions.

Stunned by the impact of the expanding 10mm projectile, and groaning from the terrible pain of shattered bones and torn nerves, Chareaux stumbled forward. Then, turning around in a daze, one bloody hand clutched tight against his stomach, the Cajun poacher found himself staring into a very familiar face.

"I'd kill you right now," Henry Lightstone whispered as he centered the sights of the stainless-steel automatic between Chareaux's blinking eyes, "but I'd rather see you rot in jail."

"You!" Chareaux rasped, his eyes widening in disbelief. Then, in an incredible display of rage, the Cajun poacher lunged forward, his lips bared back, looking for all the world like the wounded Kodiak whose only thought had been to move forward and destroy.

Lightstone had already dropped the sights of the S amp;W automatic and was starting to squeeze off the first point-blank shot into the center of Sonny Chareaux's chest when Carine Mueller suddenly sprinted off across the debris-covered floor.

Reacting instinctively, because Chareaux was already crippled and thus presumably a lesser threat, Lightstone spun around in a crouch and triggered three concussive shots in the direction of the disappearing figure just as Dwight Stoner threw himself forward at Chareaux's legs and Kiro Nakamura came in fast with a spinning kick that sent the fifth 180-grain bullet streaking over Sonny Chareaux's head and through the main door of the barn as the stainless-steel automatic was knocked out of Lightstone's hands.

For a brief moment, the two bare-handed fighters paused to stare at each other in the dust-and debris-strewn semidarkness while Dwight Stoner and Sonny Chareaux continued to twist and grunt and roll across the cement floor, sending boxes and tools flying as they hit and elbowed and bit and tore at each other's throat.

Then, sensing an advantage, Nakamura suddenly stepped forward, missed with a lunging, high jump kick, absorbed and then spun away from Lightstone's combination block and punishing side elbow strike to his upper rib cage, came back all the way around with a roundhouse heel kick to the side of Lightstone's head… and then went down hard when the Okinawan-trained agent recovered, shifted his feet and twisted his hips sharply as he drove a punishing left-handed punch into his assailant's floating ribs and then immediately followed with a reverse-direction right-elbow strike that caught the Skotokan black belt square in the mouth and nose.

Behind his back, Henry Lightstone heard a horrible crunch of breaking bones-and then an agonized scream- but he didn't have time to look around because his seemingly indestructible opponent was already back on his feet and smiling in apparent amusement through bleeding lips and nose as his flickering eyes searched for yet another advantage in the dust-filled semidarkness.

Lightstone had instinctively brought his feet back into a balanced defensive stance, ready to counter Nakamura's next move, when the far side door of the barn burst open and a curly haired body-builder type appeared, holding a short-barreled H amp;K 9mm submachine gun.

"Come on, let's blow this place!" the body-builder yelled, putting a stream of 9mm bullets ripping through the rotten wooden walls of the barn-sending Lightstone and Nakamura diving for the floor… before he and Carine Mueller disappeared through the far side door.

Looking around frantically, Lightstone finally spotted the reflective stainless-steel finish of his 10mm Smith amp; Wesson on the floor about ten feet away and was starting toward it when he heard, and then saw, Kiro Nakamura coming in fast.

The full-powered front kick would have caught Lightstone square in the face-and either knocked him unconscious or broken his neck-had it not been for Dwight Stoner, who pulled himself up out of the semidarkness on one leg, caught Kiro Nakamura by the shirt in midair, and then slammed the Shotokan master back into the rough six-by-six support beam, with his feet dangling a good sixteen inches above the floor.

Reacting out of pure instinct, Nakamura drove his left fist into the huge agent's exposed neck and then shrieked in pain as the broken bones of his wrist grated against torn nerves.

"Shithead!" Dwight Stoner screamed, glaring into Nakamura's agonized eyes. Then, holding the struggling Shotokan black belt up and out with his left hand, the infuriated agent drove his huge fist into Nakamura's chest, sending him crashing into the wall in a shower of loose boards and flying tools. He landed facedown on the hard concrete.

But then, to the astonishment of both Stoner and Lightstone, the crippled Shotokan black belt slowly pushed and pulled himself back up to a sitting position against the wall and smiled once again through his now profusely bleeding mouth as he brought Henry Lightstone's stainless- steel automatic up in both trembling hands.

The splintered end of Sonny Chareaux's bat was lying on the cement floor about six feet away, and Lightstone was already going for it- knowing that he'd be too late, but trying anyway-when the roar of new gunfire reverberated through the barn.

In quick succession, three. 45-caliber jacketed hollow- point bullets caught Kiro Nakamura in the chest, neck, and forehead, slamming him backward into the broken and splintered wall boards like a rag doll.

As both Lightstone and Stoner spun around, they saw Larry Paxton standing on one crutch and braced against the doorway, a smoking SIG-Sauer pistol in his outstretched right hand.

"Karate, mah ass," the cut, bruised, battered, and seriously wounded agent grinned through his broken teeth.

"Where-?" Lightstone started to ask, looking around quickly as he crawled over and retrieved the stainless-steel automatic from the lap of the now-dead black belt. Then he remembered what the curly haired body-builder with the submachine gun had yelled:

Come on, let's blow this place!

"How the hell did you get here?" Dwight Stoner rasped through his swollen and bleeding lips as he stared up at Paxton.

"Thought you candy-asses might need help," Larry Paxton shrugged, wincing from the pain as he moved his left shoulder cautiously, "so I dragged my ass out of the swamp and-"

Then, in the light from the far open door, Lightstone saw the wires running to sticks of dynamite that had been taped to three of the ten-gallon gas cans sitting next to the tractor.

"This place is wired! Get out of here, now!" Lightstone yelled, and then frantically helped Paxton pull and drag their partner out of the barn and across the grass until, suddenly, the monstrous explosion behind their back sent the agents tumbling to the ground in a shower of shattered wood, broken tools, flaming gas cans, and the bloody remains of Sonny Chareaux and Kiro Nakamura.

"Okay, Lieutenant, here's what we've got so far," Sergeant Peter Balloch, senior homicide investigator for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, said as he spoke into the phone. "You got the recorder on?"

The tired voice at the other end of the line muttered something affirmative.

"Okay," Balloch sighed, "at approximately eleven twenty-five hours, this date, a Mrs. Wanda Perkins reported what she believed was a gunshot fired in the vicinity of her next-door neighbor's home. According to the informant, the neighbors were on vacation and the house was supposed to be vacant. A two-man car was dispatched to check it out. However, before the patrol got to the scene, the informant called back to say that she had just heard numerous gunshots-some of which she thought came from an automatic weapon, because they sounded like what she watched on TV-in or around her neighbor's barn. According to dispatch, she was still on the line when they heard one hell of an explosion in the background that basically blew the neighbor's barn all over the fucking neighborhood.

"What? Yes, Lieutenant, of course I know you're recording this. I asked you to, remember?" Balloch said, rolling his eyes skyward as he asked himself for perhaps the five hundredth time how the man had ever managed to pass the lieutenant's exam.

"Anyway," Balloch went on quickly before he said something on tape that he might actually regret, "when our guys arrived, they found four bodies. One of them has been positively identified as Sonny Chareaux. C-H-A-R-E-A-U-X. There should be some kind of warrant on file for him out of Louisiana."

Balloch paused as the man on the other end of the line apparently said something.

"Yes, I think that would be a real nice idea to call Louisiana and let them know," Balloch said, wondering if there was any chance that one of the captains might listen to the tape some day.

"Anyway," the homicide sergeant went on, "at least two of the other bodies have been tentatively identified as Dwight Stoner and Larry Paxton, federal agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Yeah, right. As far as suspects go, we've got witnesses who saw two Caucasians-one male, short, curly blond hair, armed with an automatic rifle of some kind, and one female with shoulder-length blond hair-take off in a silver van, no plate, in one direction. Yeah, right. And one Caucasian male, six feet plus, running away on foot in the opposite direction. Yeah, go ahead and put it out on the wire. I'll keep you posted if we pick up anything else."

Shaking his head sadly, Homicide Sergeant Peter Balloch hung up and then looked over at the man who was sitting in his favorite lounge chair.

"That about what you guys want?" he asked.

"I think so, buddy," Henry Lightstone nodded. "How long do you think you can keep it running?"

"The way that asshole handles things, probably not very long," Balloch said. "Probably depends on how much cooperation we get from your head honchos."

"John Marsh, Chief of our Law Enforcement Division, promised me that he'd be on a plane heading this way within six hours. And if he can pull it off, he'll have the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service with him."

"They know who you are?"

"Marsh knows my name, but we've never met," Lightstone shrugged.

"What about the big guy?"

"The way I understand it," Lightstone said, "all he knows is that he authorized Marsh and MeNulty to run a wild-card agent completely outside the parameters of the federal government's personnel rules and regulations."

"And seeing as how your entire operation has apparently gone headfirst right down the toilet, I assume that means both their asses are hanging out a mile?" Balloch guessed.

"Yeah, I imagine so," Lightstone nodded.

"So let me see if I understand this right," Balloch said as he settled back in the overstuffed chair and massaged a throbbing temple. "What you're trying to tell me is that the only people who can vouch for you being a real, honest-to- God federal agent-as opposed to someone who probably ought to be locked up for his own good-are these two basket cases here?" He gestured with his head over at the sprawled bodies of the two men.

Dwight Stoner was stretched out on Balloch's living room couch with his badly swollen leg tightly strapped into a temporary cloth brace. Larry Paxton lay semicomatose in the other chair, his left arm in a sling, his left leg tightly bandaged, his head back and eyes closed. He looked exactly like someone who had been shot out of the air, crashed his airplane into an alligator-infested swamp, then escaped an exploding barn with a three-hundred-and-ten-pound human anchor on the end of his one good arm. All within the past forty-eight hours.

"Outside of Snoopy-uh, Mike Takahara, the tech agent we haven't been able to contact-and maybe Scoby, if he's still alive, yeah, that's about it."

"Okay," Balloch nodded after a minute of quiet contemplation. "I can probably guarantee you twenty-four hours on my say-so, just 'cause I'm getting old and slow and grouchy, and nobody really wants to screw with me too much if they can avoid it. But after that, somebody like my lieutenant is liable to start counting on his fingers and wondering how come we've got only two bodies in the freezer instead of four. What'd you say the FBI guy's name was?"

"A1 Grynard. Assistant special agent in charge of their Anchorage office."

"What's he like?"

"Old, slow, grouchy and curious as hell about anything that even looks halfway suspicious," Lightstone said. "You two ought to get along just fine."

A pained expression appeared in Pete Balloch's eyes. "And you figure this guy's probably going to be down here checking up on all this?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'd bet money on it."

"Why?"

"Because as soon as he gets the word that Stoner and Paxton are dead, he's gonna think I'm the one who's responsible," Lightstone said.

"Oh."

"Ain't gonna blame him none, either," Larry Paxton muttered through his badly split lips. "Ah'm just about convinced of that mahself."

"Yeah, no shit," Dwight Stoner agreed from his sprawled position on the couch. "We shoulda hired Kleinfelter instead. Guy like that woulda caused us a whole lot less trouble."

"As it is, this A1 Grynard is already half convinced that I killed McNulty," Lightstone added, "because he found out Paul had me booked for buying illegal walrus ivory up in Anchorage when I was supposed to be buying dope. Told me not to leave town until he got everything straightened out."

"When was that?" Balloch asked.

Lightstone looked at his watch. "About twenty-four hours ago."

"He get everything straightened out?"

"I don't know, I didn't ask. Too busy trying to sneak out of town."

The veteran San Diego County sheriff's sergeant stared at Lightstone. "Jesus, I'm glad you work for somebody else. I'd hate like hell to be your supervisor." He paused. "So what're you guys going to do now?"

"First thing we've gotta do is find Mike before Alex does," Lightstone said.

"You really believe that these Chareaux assholes are going to try to take out a six-man federal-agent team, just because they got busted for illegal hunting?" Balloch asked in a disbelieving voice.

"It sure looks that way, except that it's brother, singular, now," Lightstone corrected. "Butch and Sonny are dead. But good old Alex, the one who's still running around out there, is the real freak. Likes to cut people up and watch them die. We know he's good for at least two Louisiana game wardens. Probably a whole lot more we don't know about."

"So you figure that if this Alex thinks you guys are out of the picture, then he- Hey, wait a minute." Pete Balloch's head suddenly came up. "How come only two names on the wire, instead of three?" the veteran homicide sergeant demanded suspiciously.

"Because I want him to think I'm still out there, or to at least wonder about it for a while," Lightstone said matter-of-factly.

"You want this asshole coming after you?"

"Not especially," Lightstone shrugged. "But Paul's dead, and if Mike and Carl are too, and he believes he got all three of us, then he's just going to take off. This way, if he thinks I'm the only one left, then maybe he'll leave his commando girlfriend at home and come after me himself."

Sergeant Peter Balloch blinked and then stared curiously at his longtime friend.

"You call that a plan?" he finally asked.

"You got a better one?"

"Yeah, I sure do," Balloch nodded. "Put out an APB and then sit back and let a couple hundred thousand cops hunt this bastard down."

Lightstone shook his head. "He'd just run off to Louisiana and hide out in the swamps for a few years, wait until everything cooled off, and then come back for me when I'm not paying attention. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder for a guy like Alex the rest of my life."

"So what are you going to do? Sit around like a piece of mangled bait, wait for him-and maybe his buddies with the dynamite and the H amp;K-to show up, and then take them all on by yourself?"

"Not exactly." Lightstone smiled as he glanced over at Stoner and Paxton. "I've got a couple of ghosts here to help out."

"No offense," Balloch said dubiously as he looked at the three nearly crippled agents, "but right now, you three guys don't look like you could defend yourselves from a couple of pissed-off Girl Scouts."

"If we find Mike or Carl, we'll be fine," Lightstone shrugged. "Besides, we've got some backup on the way. Eskimo kid named Woeshack. One of our rookie agent- pilots who can't fly worth a shit."

"That the guy you said crashed the plane up in Alaska?"

"Uh-huh."

"So what the hell is he going to do, outside of getting you all killed?"

"He's going to be our pilot," Lightstone smiled. "As soon as he manages to steal another plane."

"Ah."

Then, before Sergeant Pete Balloch could say anything more, the phone rang next to his hand.

"Yeah?" Balloch answered, and his voice dropped an octave as he said: "Ah, shit. Are they sure? When?" A long pause. "What about the other guy?" A longer pause. "Yeah, okay, thanks." He sighed as he put down the phone.

"Scoby?" Lightstone asked quietly.

"He's dead," Balloch nodded. "Some of your guys found him this morning. Six rounds in his vest and one in the head, execution style."

All three agents were silent until Lightstone finally said: "What about Mike?"

"No answer at his place, no sign of forced entry, and the neighbors haven't seen anything." Balloch shrugged. "The guys out there are willing to help, but they don't want to bust in and look around unless we can fax them a warrant."

"Tell them not to worry about it, we're heading that way anyway." Henry Lightstone shook his head as he slowly pulled himself to a standing position. He watched as a shaky Larry Paxton helped Stoner up onto one foot, then handed him the set of crutches. "Snoopy likes to cheat when he busts into computers, so I don't think he'll mind too much if we don't bother to get a warrant."