Vertical Coffin

Chapter 48

I had to make up my mind fast. Do I pull over for this asshole in the John Deere hat and risk Sonny's life, or keep going and pray for the best? I decided to make a run for it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the truck closing in from the right. Smiley had sped across the hard-pack that rimmed the edge of the gully, but now he was back in the soft sand. I heard the truck shift back into four-wheel drive and start growling. I knew he wouldn't be able to keep up if I just kept going.

Suddenly the black Dodge braked to a stop and the Browning started chattering. One of the bullets hit the metal mast in the front of my rail, blowing the large welded bolt away. The bullet ricocheted and metal fragments stung the side of my face. One piece blew a pretty good hole in my forearm, knocking my hand off the wheel. The rail spun right and finally shuddered to a stop.

I heard the.45 popping and looked back to see that the guy in the John Deere hat was now firing the large semiautomatic pistol at the truck. Impossible to hit at that distance with a handgun.

I pulled up the AR-15. With blood running down my arm and dripping off my fingers, I aimed at the truck and squeezed off a burst, holding the trigger down until the C-mag was dry. Then the man in the checked shirt spun his sand rail around in a circle and roared up on Sonny's side.

"Follow me," he yelled. Now we were teammates.

"My friend is wounded. He needs help!" I shouted over the roar of both sets of straight pipes.

He waved for me to follow, then floored his sand rail and sped out in front of me.

My arm was bleeding and the blood made my grip slick on the steering wheel. I fought the rough terrain. The hard suspension on the sand rail kept jerking the wheel from my grasp. The man in the John Deere hat roared ahead of me, back into Cactus City, but he never stopped. He exited the far end, then turned right and drove down into a sandy gully. I followed, wondering where the hell we were going and if he'd heard me about needing a doctor. I glanced over at Sonny. He was holding on with both hands, a ghastly expression on his face.

"Where's my leg?" he yelled across to me, the sick realization turning his expression into a mask of horror.

The man in front of us drove his dune buggy up to a large bush, then stopped, jumped out, and pulled it aside to reveal a metal drainage pipe about five feet in diameter. I could see from the tire tracks leading inside, that he'd used this before. He pulled his rail into the pipe, then motioned me to follow. I pulled in behind him. He ran past me and replaced the bush. As he passed back again he shouted, "Follow me! Stay close!" He jumped in his rail and took off before I could reply. It was suddenly pitch black and my tires were chattering across the ridged metal. I navigated by following sparks from his exhaust.

The tunnel angled slowly to the right. I found that the rail would almost steer itself inside the pipe. All I had to do was keep it from climbing the walls and flipping over. After about a quarter mile we came out the other side. There was an old wood shed next to a concrete, windowless building that was about twenty feet square. The man stopped the dune buggy and jumped out. He still had the.45 in his hand, but no longer looked like he was going to shoot me.

"Come on," he said and motioned for us to follow him.

"He's lost his lower leg," I said.

The man came back and stared at Sonny, who was now white and pasty, going into shock. Then without a word the skinny man lifted Sonny out of the rail, threw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, and ran with him across the sand to the concrete building a short distance away. He had a padlock key and was struggling to get it out of his pocket, with Sonny still over his shoulder. He finally opened the place up and carried Sonny inside. I followed, bringing both AR-15s and our two remaining C-clips.

Once we were inside, the man put Sonny on a mat on the floor, then closed the door and threw a bolt, locking us in. With no windows, it was again pitch black.

"I can't see," I said.

"Shut up," he answered. "Ya sound like a feckin' pussy."

A match was struck and a Coleman lantern hissed, throwing a dim light into the area. I looked around. We were in some kind of old water-control building or pumping station. There were rusted pipes and valves everywhere. Off in the distance I could still hear bombs exploding.

"This here's a no-impact area, inside the gunnery range," he said. "I found it three years ago. I wait here durin' fire missions."

Then the man came over and looked at Sonny's stump. "This here boy's gonna have to be tough as stewed skunk ta get through what we gotta do. But we cain't wait, gotta fix this mess now." He reached down and pulled a piece of Sonny's pant leg away, exposing the bloody stump.

"Don't touch him," I said. "He needs a doctor."

"We don't get this fixed up now, this Mexican won't need no doc. He'll be upstairs with Jesus. I was a medic. Vietnam. Seventy-fifth Army Rangers," he said. "I seen a lot worse than this. But we gotta triage the fecker now."

He had a deep cracker accent-Virginia, or South Carolina. He took off his hat, revealing a snow white forehead above a tan line on his weathered face. Gray hair, growing long, covered his ears. His teeth were a mess and he hadn't shaved in at least a week.

"Gimme yer shirt," he said.

I took off the SWAT vest, then removed my shirt, leaving me in a T-shirt. My forearm didn't look so bad, now that I saw it in the light. It had more or less stopped bleeding.

The man started ripping my shirt into strips. Then he took off the tourniquet belt I'd put on Sonny's thigh.

"Gonna let this bleed out a little, clean her out some," he said, and Sonny looked at his newly shot-off right leg in horror. Blood started spouting out onto the floor around us. Then the man cinched up the belt again, stemmed the flow, pulled a pint of scotch out of a backpack, and handed it to Sonny.

"Get this down," he ordered.

Sonny took a sip.

"Not like that. Give yerself a party, boy."

So Sonny started swallowing the scotch until the bottle was empty. The man crossed to one of the valves and turned it. When the water started to flow, he washed his hands, then brought the lantern closer. He knelt down, and picked up Sonny's stump in both hands.

"Whatta you gonna do?" I asked, feeling a little sick as I looked at what was left of the leg.

"Cain't git no lard without boilin' the hog," he said softly.

"Ain't gonna be much fun, but I gotta tie off them bleeders, or this boy's gonna be tradin' his guitar for a harp."

He crossed to his backpack, pulled out a small nylon combat medic's bag, and returned to Sonny. "Keep this handy and gimme what I ask for."

For the next ten minutes, while Sonny screamed in pain, this man, whoever he was, searched Sonny's bloody stump for the main arteries, then one by one, pulled them out, then clamped and sutured them.

Somewhere in the middle of this Sonny stopped screaming. He had fainted.

The FA-18s had completed their run and were gone. It was strangely quiet in the little concrete room. Finally, the man completed this field surgery and bound up the stump with strips of my shirt. He did it all in thirty minutes.

"Help me move him over there to the bed," he said.

We carried Sonny to a futon by the far wall, laid him down and elevated his leg. I sat on the floor next to him while the man went back and washed Sonny's blood off his hands. Then he returned and slumped down next to us.

"Who the hell are you?" I asked.

"I'm the guy you stole that feckin' sand buggy from," he said, flat southern vowels ringing on poured concrete.

"I'm a police officer," I said.

"Then ya oughta know better," he replied.

He had iridescent blue eyes-the kind of eyes I'd sometimes seen on the criminally insane. Madness glinted there. Everything else screamed hillbilly. The bony hips and the lean frame with the bulging beer belly, an Adam's apple that looked like somebody had shoved a tennis ball down his throat.

"I'm Shane Scully," I said. "This is Sonny Lopez."

"Royal Mortenson," he answered, but made no move to shake hands.

"I've gotta get him to the hospital," I persisted.

"You go back out there before the twenty-three-fifty strafing run and Blackie will drop you with that big Browning. He's pretty damn good with that thing. Knows the terrain. He'll set up over at the wall, or north a' Cactus West where he can see us coming. Before we get to any of my through-holes, mother-fecker will rip us all new assholes."

"What the hell do you do out here?" I asked, wondering why he and Smiley were wandering around at night on an active gunnery range.

"I'm a scrapper," he said. "All this shit lyin' around out here-the fins on the inerts and stuff-is worth money."

He wiped his hand across his mouth, then pulled out a can of Skoal, took a pinch, and put it behind his lower lip.

"Aluminum on them fins of the two-thousand pounders is worth plenty." He pronounced it al-ow-min-eum.

"Depending on the market, I kin git ninety bucks a fin on them thousand-pound inerts. Sometimes I'll disarm some of the smaller unexploded stuff. A seventy-pound fin is worth thirty-five bucks a blade. Then, twice a week them Cobra assault choppers with twenty-millimeter cannons, swoop in here, blow up some dump truck. Brass cartridges coming down all over the place. Fifty cents a round, like it's raining money." He smiled at me, his brown, uneven teeth looking like a busted-down fence.

"And Smiley? Does he scrap too?"

"Who's that?"

"The guy in the black Dodge Ram."

"Ya mean Blackie? Blackie is a big feckin' problem. I'm out here pickin' up scrap, tryin' to make me a livin'. He's bringin' the EOD down on us."

"Don't you need a permit for this?"

"I got me a permit." He held up the.45. "The EOD don't got no problem with me, on account they know I'm an ex-Ranger and I'll do the right thing, by God. Yessir!"

"I was a Marine," I said, looking for some connection.

He seemed to think about that. Then he went on.

"Blackie's a problem cause he don't give a shit. I only take fins off the inerts and the low-yield ordnance. Them's the blue bombs and the yellow stripers. But we got a lotta UHE shit out here-that's undetonated high explosives, and it's stuff EOD doesn't want messed with."

"What's EOD?" I asked him.

"Explosive Ordnance Disposal. They shut this place down once a month and go searching for unexploded JADAM two-thousand pounders and up. Hot ordnance that didn't detonate. Them's the bombs got C-four packages in 'em. Gotta disarm the warhead to get a one-pound package out, but it's worth fifteen grand or more on the black market, especially now, with terrorists tryin' to buy it. I could mine C-four easy, but I never do it. I'm an American. Ain't gonna help no sand nigger terrorist assholes get shit to blow us up. That's why EOD kinda leaves me alone. Fifteen years out here and they coulda busted me easy, but they let me be. Blackie, he's a whole 'nother story, 'cause he's in the C-four business. He's out here three times a week pullin' warheads off the reds, takin' out C-four packs. I been tryin' to catch the fecker myself, but he's tricky, and smart as a windmill fixer."

That explained where Smiley got the C-4.

The strange man spit a stream of tobacco juice across the room into a Folgers coffee can. He hit it pretty much right in the center and it rang loudly. Bull's-eye.

"With Blackie puttin' the heat on, EOD's gonna end up throwin' me out, right along with him."

"How soon till we can we get out of here?" I asked.

"Now that I got the bleedin' stemmed, yer friend's probably gonna hold up for a while, but he's gonna be needin' some regular doctorin' soon, antibiotics, a proper stitchin'. 'Course, we try to get outta here now, Blackie's gonna make some trouble. That big Browning's got some bite to it." He looked at his watch. "Like I said, ain't got another firing mission until eleven-fifty. Warthogs gonna be takin' out a phony SAM site. That's our best chance fer gettin' outta here. While they kick ass on them targets on the east ridge, he's gotta keep his head down. That's when we go."