One Rule - No Surrender, page 8
part #2 of One Rule Series
"Lady, are you fuckin' kidding me? Do you have any fuckin' clue what you're up against?"
"Actually, I do. Do you know what you're up against?"
Her softly spoken words hung in the space between them. Pilgrim was cocking his head again, his disbelieving expression doubling down on itself.
"I'm curious about something," said Thalma. "You're sitting here threatening me, but why should I be afraid? I've taken out six of your people without working up a sweat. You send a three hundred pound man and a two hundred dog to kill me, and the man ends up at the bottom of a cliff and the dog is now my pet. Doesn't that suggest something to you?"
"Then you did kill Mikey?"
"At his insistence. So knowing what you know now, why aren't you afraid of me? Wouldn't that be logical?"
"I ain't afraid of no one. Not cops, not federal agents, and sure as hell not some girl who thinks she's Wonder Woman. I don't know how you beat Mikey, but he was just one man and you're just one snooty bitch. I got an army."
Pilgrim finished his coffee and stood up with a smirk as if he believed he'd scored a winning point on a debate team.
"When I see you again, baby doll," he said, "it's gonna get real."
After he left, Thalma drove over to Louis's garage. From behind the front desk, Maggie Iverson's smile of greeting turned flat as she noted Thalma's expression. She stepped out from behind the desk and met her at the door to the shop.
"What happened with the white power zombie?"
"He not only wanted me not to testify – he demanded fifteen thousand dollars in compensation for his hospitalized henchmen."
"What did you say?"
"I demanded thirty thousand in cash as compensation for their harassment and attack on me."
"Sounds like a productive meeting."
"I think it's time for Louis to go on a vacation somewhere safe."
"Good luck with that. The boy's knee-deep in vehicular heaven."
Thalma pushed through the door. Louis was a hooded man wielding his TIG welder on a length of pipe while his coworker, Joe Milner, was interred within a jeep chassis. The TIG sizzled and sprayed tiny flame, and smoke fled in thin columns into the ceiling vent fan. Louis set the welder tip down and flipped up his mask visor.
"Hey," he said. "How did it go with Herr Himmler?"
"As expected. We both asked for things there was no chance the other person would do, so..."
"So what happens next?"
"How do you feel about taking a vacation until this gets cleared up?"
"About as enthusiastic as the first time you suggested it."
"Louis..." Thalma moved closer to him, reaching for his arm. Her fingers stopped just short of his smoke and grease-encrusted coveralls. "I'm just talking about a week or two. I'm sure Joe can keep things going for that long."
"What are you going to do?"
"Eliminate the problem."
"How?"
"I'm not sure yet. But I promise you it will happen."
Louis braced his gloved hands on the worktable and bowed his head. Thalma thought he looked like a medieval warrior hanging his helmeted head after a long day of battle.
"Okay," he sighed. "Let me get through the day, give Joe a heads up, and we'll talk about it over dinner."
"Thank you." She longed to give his sooty face a kiss, but made herself back off. He tended to be self-conscious in front of Joe. "I'll have something special ready for you."
Out in the empty greeting room, Maggie stood perched against the front desk waiting for her.
"I can take him wherever you want and hang out with him until this is over," she said. "Or Murphy can handle that and I can stay with you here."
Thalma stopped herself from shaking her head. She still found the idea of accepting help alien and vaguely threatening, but she wasn't about to let her ego or inherent distrust of others compromise Louis's safety.
"Why don't you follow him home," she said, her voice heavy with reluctance. "We can talk about it over dinner."
"Good deal." Maggie grinned. "I could use some more home cooking. Your lasagna was delicious. I even had a dream about it last night."
"Not a nightmare, I hope."
"Not exactly. You were choking on it and I had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on you. Plus mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."
Thalma's half-smile retreated.
"I tend to have weird dreams. Sometimes lasagna is just lasagna, you know?"
LOUIS'S USUAL after-work routine – performing a postmortem on his day's triumphs and tragedies and his plans for tomorrow as he drove home – faltered in the face of once again needing to run and hide. Even if that was supposedly temporary.
He had so much to be grateful to Thalma for: a job that had him rising every morning with a cheery whistle, a gorgeous, million-dollar house by an even more gorgeous forest and lake. He always felt guilty thinking any negative thoughts about her. She supported him one thousand percent and without question would protect him with her life. She'd given him a paradise on earth.
But what the goddess giveth, the goddess could taketh away. Louis stroked his beard, frowning in the rearview mirror at Maggie following in her utility van a few car lengths back. That was life with Thalma. The highs were incredibly high, and the lows were mind-blowing. At any moment the magic rug could be yanked out from under you.
A rust-colored pickup shot out from a side road, ripping him from his reverie. He jerked the steering wheel sideways and skidded into the Baldwin Beach entrance. He hit the brakes and turned back expecting to see the errant motorist long-gone, but instead was smacked against his seat as the large truck slammed into his rear bumper. As his smaller pickup was driven off the road into the sandy embankment he knew who his assailants were and that he was in deep shit.
His rear window blew out and something burned across the top of his head. He hunched down, clutching the bottom of his steering wheel and punching the gas pedal. The pickup lurched forward, but trees blocked his path. The driver's side window exploded and glass rained down on him. Bursts of gunfire preceded hammer-taps on the cab. A glimpse in the side view mirror revealed armed men charging toward him and Maggie's blue van swooping in behind them.
A grinning bearded face appeared in the blown-out window. A pistol snaked in over the shattered glass. Louis reached for it, but the man stepped back out of his range, and Louis could only contemplate the beginning of infinity in the dark end of the barrel.
The top of the man's head evaporated in a misty cloud. He dropped from view. Men shouted warnings as Maggie roared in alongside his pickup.
A door in the van flew open.
"Get in!" Maggie shouted.
In the same moment the rust-colored pickup and another car rolled in on the other side of Louis's truck. Louis popped the handle and shoved his door open. The opening in Maggie's van had become his new Mecca. Safe sanctuary waited. But his body seemed to be moving far slower than his ambitions.
Shots rang out. Louis felt hard taps on his side and shoulder, as if someone was pushing him toward the open door. Yet while his mind raced ahead to diving into Maggie's van, commanding him to move, his body had grown sluggish, truculent. Maggie reared up, aiming an AR-15 over the top of his truck and spraying the area on full auto. Men cried out. Sporadic gun fire.
"Oh, fuck!" Maggie snarled as red blossomed on her right arm. Then she grabbed Louis's feebly extended hand by the wrist and hauled him into the van. The door slammed shut and he was cast in a welcome darkness.
"Just hold on, dude," she said.
Rounds slapped against the walls and spread spider webs on the bullet-resistant glass. Maggie sprang into the front seat and the big Vortec V8 powered them out of the sand and around their assailants' two vehicles with a throaty roar.
Louis dimly heard Maggie speaking on her cell phone, her voice carried away on an expanding cloud of darkness.
THALMA KNEW she had to stay cool, that she couldn't let herself think about Louis – couldn't think about anything but getting to the damn hospital as quickly as possible and in one piece. But while she willed herself to icy calm, a part of her raged. Just had to hold it together a little longer. Had to stay strong for Louis.
Maggie couldn't tell her anything about his condition other than that he'd been hit by an unknown number of rounds. She'd been on her way to the hospital when making the call – had wanted to give Thalma a quick heads-up in case they intended to also attack her.
Now Thalma was racing down Emerald Bay Highway, her only goal to get to the hospital – but then she spotted a rusty pickup and bright red muscle car parked in the sand near the Baldwin Beach entrance. Two men were wrestling a body into the rear of the truck beside at least one other body. The men who'd attacked Louis, maybe murdered him – she squashed that thought, gritting her teeth – were right in front of her. The only question was how she would destroy them.
Time dilated. She noted no cars approaching or behind her – typical lack of traffic out here after 6 on a weekday. The two men loading the body were turning slowly toward her, no doubt drawn by her high-revving engine. She started the window rolling down on the passenger side and palmed the Glock 20. Here we go.
The men were still standing near the tailgate, perhaps believing she was driving past, when she whipped her truck off the road. Spinning sideways in the sand and gravel she popped off four quick rounds through the open window. The two men dropped. She steered with the spin, skidding to a stop in a hydroplane-plume of sand. She smacked the shifter into reverse and flew backward just as the red muscle car started backing up. Her tailgate smashed into the car's trunk, ending that motion.
Thalma threw open her door and sprang out. A single bound carried her into the pickup bed where she continued her forward sprint, firing into the rear windshield as she ran, punching two neat lines of holes from one end to the other. A glance to her left showed no one in the rust-colored pickup's cab.
She leaped onto the muscle car, blowing holes through the roof. A hand holding a pistol curled out of the driver's window. She ripped the gun out of the hand and turned it on its owner, squeezing off multiple shots before hopping to the ground.
Inside the blood-spattered car, two men were conscious. One was raising a pistol with a quivering hand. Thalma shot him between the eyes. The other held up his hands woozily. She shot him between the eyes. Three of the others moaned and stirred weakly. Lance Pilgrim was not among them.
She placed two rounds in each head. The moaning and stirring stopped.
In the sudden, eerie silence, she noted the road was clear. She was fairly sure no one had driven by during her assault. So far, probably no witnesses. The longer she lingered, the more likely someone would see her.
On her way back to her truck she double-tapped both men lying at the rear of the rust-colored pickup and then jumped into her own truck and headed at a brisk but legal speed toward town. She needed to make one stop along the way to dispose of the handguns and any bullet cartridges that might be in the pickup bed. Despite every fiber in her body screaming for her to race to the hospital, she knew she couldn't do anything to help Louis there but what she did now could make the difference between facing arrest and remaining free to be with him.
Thalma pulled off into a parking area up a hill from the road that virtually no one ever used and buried the two handguns and the rounds she'd found in her cab under some rocks – wiping down the pistols with her blouse. The cartridges posed no fingerprint risk since she always loaded them with gloves.
She drove the rest of the way into town in a numbed fog, refusing to allow herself to speculate about Louis or think about the men she'd just killed.
She pulled into the hospital and parked beside Maggie's van. Seeing the bullet holes in its side hammered home the reality of Louis's attack like an ice pick into her skull.
Maggie met her in the lobby. She wore a bandage below her right shoulder.
"Come with me," she said, steering Thalma by the arm toward the nearest elevator. "He's in surgery right now. I don't know anything more than that – other than that he was definitely breathing when I carried him into the ER."
Thalma allowed herself to be pulled along because suddenly she had no strength in her legs or anywhere else for that matter. The elevator felt like a tomb.
"A bullet wound?" Thalma nodded to her bandaged arm.
"Yep. Clean through Missed bone and major vessels. I'll deal with it later."
At the nurses' station Thalma introduced herself and was told Louis was in surgery and that a doctor would talk to her as soon as they had news.
"Can I see him?"
"Um, not right now, Mrs. McDowell," said an older, heavy-set nurse with kind eyes. "I promise you, we will let you know the moment we know anything. There's coffee and cookies in the waiting room and there's a café in the hospital."
Thalma drifted back to where Maggie was sitting. A few other people sat around the room, their heads buried in newspapers or magazines. It seemed strange that life could go on blissfully while her world was imploding.
"Hey." Maggie patted her hand. "I have a good feeling about him. He didn't lose that much blood."
"Could you tell where he'd been hit?"
"Abdomen and thigh, I think. He was bleeding a little from the head, but I think that was a scalp wound."
Thalma's chest made a wheezing sound as she breathed in.
"I hate to say it, but the police will be showing up pretty soon," said Maggie. "Along with wounded gang members."
"Not the wounded gang members." Thalma stared straight ahead, a short reel of the fight playing in her head.
"You ran into them on the way here?" The girl lowered her voice. "You got them all?"
"I think so."
"Wow. Jesus." Maggie tugged a lock of hair from her forehead. "'Course, I took out at least two of them."
"Yeah. They were a mess when I showed up. That made it a lot easier." Thalma turned and met the younger woman's gaze directly for the first time since she'd arrived. "Thank you for that, by the way. Risking your life for him."
"Hey, I wanted to get out from behind the desk." She snorted out a laugh. "Now I'm thinking how much I miss paperwork."
Thalma slumped in her chair. A pair of nurses spoke with a doctor in surgical scrubs but they all moved on before she straightened up.
"I could've paid them off," she said in a low monotone. "The gang."
"Do you think that would've satisfied them?"
"I don't know. But I know Louis would be home right now eating dinner..." Thalma lowered her head, biting down hard enough to chip her teeth. "But I made it about my ego."
Maggie touched her shoulder. "You know what they say about hindsight."
Thalma chewed on the inside of her lower lip, unwilling to be consoled. She should've acted on her instincts – got Louis out of there right after her meeting with the asshole leader.
"Was the guy you had the meeting with there?" Maggie asked.
"No." Thalma felt grateful for that. His imminent death provided a welcome distraction from her thoughts about Louis. "I'll take care of him later."
The girl nodded. "Well, let me know if I can do anything. In the meantime, I need to call the cops and tell them we were attacked. I'm sure the hospital has already called them."
"What are you going to say?"
"I'm going to take full credit for the bloodbath – keep you out of it. But I need to know the basics of what you did."
Thalma told her.
"What weapon did you use and where did you double-tap them?" Maggie asked.
"Head shots. Glock 20. That's 10mm."
"I know." Maggie stared at the nurse's station, her eyes contracted in concentration. "Okay, got it."
"They may want to see the guns. They're buried outside town."
"Okay. I'll make a statement to them later with my attorney present."
"Thank you."
Thalma drew in a small breath of relief as Maggie made a perfunctory call to the Tahoe police about the ambush. Anything that distanced her from the shooting improved her chances of being there for Louis.
"They're already on their way," Maggie said, dropping the cell in her purse. "You want to get something to eat?"
"I should stay here."
"This could take a while. You need to keep up your strength. I know it's a cliché, but it's true. You can't tell me that body of yours doesn't need protein."
Thalma was about to tell the pesky blond to go mind her own fucking business, but her annoyance burned away before she could say the words. She shrugged instead.
"All right," she said.
They spotted three police officers stepping out of the elevator just as they entered the stairway exit.
"Close call," said Maggie. "Hopefully we can get something to eat before they track us down."
Downstairs, Maggie slipped away for a few minutes to her van to clean and seal her wound and inject herself with antibiotics from her medical kit ("I never leave home without it"). Then they both ordered double-helping dinners of chicken and roast beef and retired to a table at one end of the near-empty cafeteria. Maggie called Murphy as they ate and brought him up to speed.
"My condolences, Thalma." Murphy's voice was a near-whisper on the low speaker phone setting. "I can arrange for his protection or to have him transported to another hospital when he's stable if you believe he's in danger."
"I'm not sure." Thalma had been assuming that the massive casualties would make any immediate reprisal unlikely, but that could be a dangerous assumption. "I haven't cut off the head of the local snake yet."
"Perhaps you should let us handle that. I imagine the local gendarmes will be taking a hard look at you after this event."
Thalma thought about what that "hard look" might mean. Unless someone saw her, they didn't have anything linking her to the gunfight. And Maggie taking responsibility would reduce the heat further.
"You might be able to help me," she said, flashing on a memory of laying her hand on Murphy's wounds after they'd dropped from the plane - the glowing imagery, the sense of power flowing through her as she willed his injuries to heal. If she could get her hands on some LSD-35, why couldn't she do the same thing with Louis? "Remember the item we once had a conflict over? The item we consumed before leaving the plane?"
