Slash and Burn

Epilogue

I heard the screaming over the phone and knew that I’d failed my prime directive. I felt Kate’s death like a solid wedge of ice had been driven through my heart. Maybe in time I’d have come to love her as deeply as I had once loved my wife, but now she was gone. All I had left were the memories of those few hours we’d spent together. Maybe I should have screamed, too, but I couldn’t. I only wept silently.

Rink gripped my shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. I wiped my face. You can’t be a soldier and fight the kind of battles I have if you’re going to collapse under the weight of grief. There’d be no grieving yet. Not while there were still things to be done.

Clean-up was the immediate problem we all had to face, and I stepped up to the challenge. Anything to keep my mind off Kate.

Quicksilver Ranch burned like a nuclear reactor in meltdown, the flames fed by a wind that sprang up, and by the fuel we added to the buildings. The building laced with aviation fuel burned almost white-hot. We carried the dead there and flung them on the flames. I wished that Huffman was still alive when I dumped him in the fire.

After cleaning ourselves up, we appropriated a vehicle belonging to one of Huffman’s people and it took us as far as the outskirts of Dallas. On a road bridge we tossed our weapons into the river below. There was no ceremony to the action, just good sense. The vehicle made a fire of its own on a deserted parking lot, and we walked away headed for DFW airport.

Little Fork was a major problem, but I was pretty certain that nothing there could be tied to us. The fact that Imogen’s house had been burned down and the corpses of men found inside it was the biggest stumbling block. They would in turn be tied to the deaths of Jim Aitken, Judge Wallace and the guy I’d shot on the stairs at the restaurant. But it now looked like Larry Bolan was going to be held responsible for all three of those deaths. It also looked like he’d shot dead his younger brother, Trent, before heading off on the rampage that destroyed Quicksilver Ranch.

Kate’s passing was hard on us all. She’d died a hero, but she could never claim that accolade. Her death was put down to a random drive-by shooting that took an awful lot of setting up, but was managed by a man who’d always been in the business of covering the true nature of death. My old CIA contact, William Hayes Conrad IV, had been a great help in the past and he came through once again. I knew he would. When he helped me resolve the issue with the contract killer, Dantalion, he’d told me he couldn’t keep on condoning murder. But nothing of what we’d done was construed as such this time. The way things turned out, Walter made it known that a disagreement between factions of the criminal underworld had erupted into all-out war. Many suspected criminals had died in the process when enforcers from various syndicates started killing each other during a power struggle. The media had a ball with it, but as usual the news was only topical for a few days. We wouldn’t be earning any medals of commendation for our actions, but at least we were kept out of prison. Ruth Wicker, the enforcer who’d gone after and ultimately murdered Kate, was the only person who connected us to the war that was waged across Kentucky and Texas. But Walter covered that too. He sent in a clean-up crew that made Wicker disappear completely and her name — like Kate’s — was never added to the tally of the dead. Kate’s death was handled with more dignity, but it was still something that pained us all deeply. Sadly Kate would only be remembered as a statistic of a violent and senseless world, except in the hearts and minds of those who truly cared for her.

Imogen flew back to Maine to be near the Piers family plot where she could be close to Kate. I had failed to keep Kate safe, and now Imogen felt it was down to her to do that. She was still hurting from her loss, but she was buoyed by the knowledge that those responsible for murdering her lover and her sister were all dead.

With Rink and Harvey, I attended Kate’s funeral, standing barely six feet from where I had when we’d buried Jake. It was difficult letting her go, but what else could I do? I wondered what life could have been like if she’d survived. She had her career and I had mine, and it wasn’t something that could ever have worked. But I sure wished she was still around.