The Devil's Good Boys, page 78
But, Gifford McGrath’s personal unified field theory stipulated that nobody else was permitted that luxury. More to the point, shooting my dad and coming after the rest of us was behavior I damn well intended to punish. Swiftly finishing the undercut, I stepped to the opposite side of the hemlock and cut toward it, aiming the big tree at the bulls-eye centerline of the chalet.
Thankfully, my old man kept the saw’s chain honed like a straight razor, and it sliced through bark and wood like Solingen steel through grizzly bear lard.
“McGrath, damn it! They’re almost here!”
“Cochise, run for the Jeep, I'll be right behind you.”
“You, asshole! I'm not leaving you!”
I cut steadily, sawdust a yellow fountain in the sunlight. They had to be drawing close, but I couldn't hear the approaching car over the roar of the saw. And my mood was such that I didn't care. You just don't get to shoot my old man and kidnap my cousin and threaten the rest of us, Harry, you son of a bitch. That is not okay. I intended this to be a lesson from the deepest, blackest bowels of a hell Spiker almost certainly didn’t believe in.
Finishing the cut, I stepped back and watched in awe as the hemlock slowly, ponderously, tipped.
It was approaching free-fall speed when it hit the house. This was a huge, thick, heavy tree, lots of inertial low-speed mass. It crashed into the roof dead center, and the damage was unimaginable. Much worse than I'd expected. All that tonnage plowed majestically, thunderously, through the chalet, not slowing down one little bit, proceeding all the way to ground floor.
The building caved in around it and the earth shook. Only one wall and part of a chimney remained standing.
Wow!
I'd never before done anything remotely like this. Part of me was shocked and appalled. Part was gleeful at the opportunity to take this swipe at Operation Group Forty’s psychopathic, gunslinging, evil-ass commander.
Jane and I looked at each other. Her eyes were huge.
“Run!” She left the lawn and sprinted up the switch-backed path ahead of me, carrying the bulging pillowcases. I followed with the rifle, chainsaw and athletic bag of money, legs pumping, lungs burning, heart hammering.
Behind us, approaching through a long corridor of trees on the opposite side of the wrecked house, I heard a car's engine. Staggering from oxygen debt, we tumbled over the summit and threw ourselves flat. Not a whit too soon nor a second to spare, either.
Sounds of a car pulling up and doors opening and slamming rose up to us. “What the fuck!” screamed Major Harry Spiker. “What the fuck!”
“A tree blew down on your house, man,” someone said.
We peeked around our green stone outcropping. Harry Spiker and five men stood beside a black 1966 Ford station wagon. In disbelief, the others spread out and slowly circled his ruined home. Pale, bloodless, unshaven and in apparent shock, Spiker stood still.
He wore khaki trousers and a black tee-shirt. His right arm was in a sling and his shoulder was swathed in fresh bandages from the inelegant pass-through of two .45 caliber slugs. His head was bandaged where he'd lost an ear to the McGraths' M1 carbine. He hobbled pitifully from the leg wound inflicted by my old man's .38-44. A cane had replaced his crutch. There was no getting around it: this pathetic, psychopathic yo-yo had become a bullet sponge for McGrath shooters.
Mouth open, frozen in place, his face was anguished.
One of his pals strolled around the house to the stump of the fallen hemlock and stood staring. This character was big and hard-looking, probably in his early forties with black-framed eyeglasses and a scarred, rawboned face. Like the others, he wore a suit and narrow tie. Sliding a big Smith & Wesson magnum revolver from a shoulder holster, he thoughtfully balanced it in his right hand.
“Hello!” he called to the others. “This tree didn't blow over, Harry! Come look at this! It was cut down, man.”
No kidding, Sherlock, I thought. This bozo deserved a Cheerio’s cereal box private eye Raymond Chandler/Phillip Marlowe decoder ring and magnifying glass.
“What?” Spiker hobbled painfully around the wrecked building and stared at the stump. Sherlock put his fingers on the wood. “It's warm, Harry! I smell chainsaw exhaust … and the air’s still full of floating sawdust, man. Hello, people! This just happened!”
Harry Spiker looked at the surrounding woods in dumb fury. “Who the fuck …? My fucking house, man! This is my fucking house!”
Awww, I thought. The presidential killer's personal space has been violated. How terrible!
“Somebody’s got it in for you, man,” Sherlock murmured.
Spiker went berserk. He began screaming at the forest, “I'll get you for this! Whoever you are, you fuck, I'll get you! I know it's you goddamn McGraths! You dirty fucks! You McGraths are all fucking dead!”
Then, as if the Lord God Almighty had decided to enter His creation and ramp up Spiker's suffering, a tendril of smoke curled up from within the wrecked home. Crackling orange flames followed.
“No!” screamed Spiker. “No, goddamn it! Oh, no!”
The chalet blew up in flames.
“Nooooo!”
“Settle down, Spiker,” drawled another of the men.
I hadn't noticed him until that moment. It was Texas Oil, Lyndon Johnson's wealthy brush-popper buddy. He had a Texas hill country accent, and in the daylight clearly was on the shady side of eighty. Tall and spare, still spry, his face was creased and leathery.
Whispering to Jane, I said, “Take a good look at that old man. He's some rich big shot.”
“I recognize him from the TV news,” she whispered. “I can't remember his name.”
Texas Oil beckoned the others to him and they moved further away from the mounting heat of the burning chalet. It was becoming fully involved, as a professional firefighter would describe it.
“Mind that propane tank,” Texas Oil warned in a calm, rasping drawl. “The peckerwood who did this is somewhere close by, gentlemen. I want you ol' boys to spread out and corral him. Careful now.”
All of them suddenly had blue-steel S&W revolvers in their hands. Texas Oil brandished a frontier-style Colt’s six-shooter and swiftly assigned quadrants for each to search. Motioning to Sherlock, he told him to climb up the grassy hogback where we were hidden.
“Oh crap, McGrath!” Jane's eyes were terrified. “We need to run! Let's go!”
“Find them!” screamed Harry Spiker. “Don't kill them! Bring them to me! I'll kill 'em myself!”
Sherlock thought that was a hoot.
Unworried and chuckling, gun in hand, Sherlock began picking his way up the steep switch-back path toward us. The others headed into the woods beyond the lawn on the other side of the house. Giving the matter no thought whatsoever – which suggests the extent of my deteriorating attitude toward these men’s sovereign place in the human brotherhood – I eased the Stoner around the green stone, keeping it hidden in the grass.
When Sherlock climbed into the space covered by my front sight, I squeezed off a full-auto burst. Center shot, knocked violently backwards, he rolled end-over-end down the slope, dead before he hit bottom.
Another of the men came running back and pointed in our direction. “Up there! Up there!” His eyes and mine locked in the same instant I got the Stoner's sight post on him and pressed the trigger. Hit amidships, the slugs rolled him ass over tea-kettle. Everybody else scattered.
“Omigod!” Jane whispered urgently, staring at me with shocked eyes. “Whoa, McGrath! You shot those guys!”
“Damn right! They want to kill our families!”
I was distracted, trying to line up Harry Spiker in the Stoner's iron sights. My instincts said cut the head off this pit viper and do it now. Meanwhile, Spiker was sprinting, limping, for a tree. I got the front post on the back of his head. Somehow sensing his bullseye status, Spiker let go with a terrified scream and dove behind the tree. The Stoner chewed up its bark.
The others scurried to cover. By now, flames were licking around the propane tank. Without warning, the tank's pressure plugs let go. A cloud of gas was released, after which came the ripping explosion of a powerful fuel-air bomb. Followed, in turn, by an over-pressure wave that flattened the closest man. Jane and I instinctively ducked behind the green stone.
A fusillade of bullets smashed into the summit around us. Bullets and stone fragments snapped and whistled through the air. Crouched behind the green stone, Jane had her hands over her ears, blue eyes squeezed shut.
Interestingly, everybody's revolver ran dry at once. Professional killers these boys may be, I was thinking, but they needed an introduction to the concept of fire discipline. Edging around my rock, I got the Stoner's front sight on their station wagon and hosed it, pounding bullets into the engine compartment, windows and tires. Slugs once again began slamming into the green stone as I ducked behind it and reloaded. The house and woodshed were burning furiously, flames licking upward, smoke rising into the summer sky. I gave them another full-auto burst to keep everybody’s head down.
Taking a regretful look around, I was unable to find Spiker. Damn, I’d dearly wanted to stick some more jacketed lead into him, but he'd disappeared. Such a pain in the ass, that guy. I grabbed the athletic bag and began breaking bank bands holding the greenbacks together. Most of them seemed to be twenty and hundred-dollar bills.
“What are you doing?” Jane cried.
“I'm gonna throw his money down into the fire! I want the bills to scatter so he sees them.”
“Wait! Are you crazy?”
Jane jerked the bag out of my hands. Digging into it, she began pulling out double handfuls of cash, again and again, depositing nearly all of Spiker's currency and bank records on the grass beside a half-empty pillowcase.
“Okay, go!”
I lofted the almost-empty bag over the green stone and down into the fire. The few remaining bills exploded upward in the superheated air, fluttering like ticker-tape or snowflakes. Very pretty, aesthetically pleasing. Tongues of flame licked into the sky and hungrily ate the floating greenbacks.
“My money! My money!” Spiker’s scream was rich with agony and horror, recalling Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
Chuckling and pleased, I whispered, “Time to go, Cochise.”
She was frantically shoveling salvaged currency into the bulging pillowcases. There was a helluva lot of it. Wow!
“Gimme a minute, McGrath!” she whispered urgently.
I kept their heads down with another burst from the Stoner. When she finished, we ran down to the Jeep. I laid the rifle on the floorboards but had to sprint back for the chainsaw. Behind the wheel, I turned the key, shoved it into low gear and depressed the clutch. We coasted for sixty yards with me riding the brake. When I released the clutch, the engine snarled and I poured the coals to it.
Jane Shaughnessy was hyperventilating, laughing and crying as mountain laurel and underbrush blurred past and swished against the Jeep. As for me, my hands were shaking, I was breathing hard and coping with enough pulsing adrenaline to loosen my teeth.
Neither of us spoke until we reached State Route 34 and began winding our way back through these low mountains to Gettysburg.
“Holy creeping shit, McGrath!” Jane exclaimed. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, baby! I thought they were going to kill us!”
“They would have, too, those bastards! Got real lively, didn't it?”
I was feeling pretty good about destroying Harry Spiker's house, whacking a couple of his scumbag-asshole pals and stealing his money. Now we'd see if Harry Spiker could take a joke! Absently I wondered aloud how much cash Jane had rescued.
“You shot two of those men, McGrath! I can't believe you did that! They are gonna get us!”
“We'll see.”
“They have to be furious.”
“Cochise, they were already mad. Besides, only one of those bozos got a look at us, and I put six bullets in his chest. For all the rest of them know, they had a visit from the Daughters of the American Revolution or Barnum and Bailey's Three Ring Circus.”
She nodded, thinking about that. “But they'll guess it was us! Spiker was screaming the name McGrath.”
I nodded, and to calm her fears, I opined, “He doesn’t suspect you and me, Cochise. We're teenagers, and nobody notices teenagers unless five hundred of us show up to protest something. Ten bucks says they're wondering who they tangled with.”
“Bullcrap, McGrath! They'll know exactly who it was!” She turned in her seat and regarded me. “Who else would it be?”
Good question. Probably true. Tough shit! I smiled winningly. “Glad you came?”
She swung a powerful roundhouse that connected painfully with my right shoulder.
“Owww!” I was laughing.
“McGrath, you asshole! Cutting down that tree was crazy, baby! You scared the absolute crap out of me.”
Me too. My hands still shook from adrenaline overload. “But we pulled it off.”
“Yeah, we sure did. Because we were lucky!”
“Cochise, be advised, I'm renaming you Wahatchee. That's Cherokee lingo for War Woman. I read that in a book.”
Not amused, she sat sideways staring at me. “I like Cochise just fine, McGrath. You and I need to dial it back, baby. You just killed two more guys. This is terrible! You could go to prison! “
I shrugged. “They’ll hide the bodies. They don’t want word of this getting out any more than we do.”
“And look at both of us right now!” she exclaimed. “Our hands are shaking and I think I wet my pants a little! That was way too crazy.”
“You might be right. I'll think about that.”
She slugged my shoulder again. “You do that! Think about it hard.” After another mile, she said, “Do you figure that's the end of it?”
“With those guys?” I could feel my elevated mood descending for a bumpy landing. “No way, Cochise. Major Harry Spiker is still alive and he’s got a beef with the McGraths. He and I have unfinished business. That bozo thinks he's after us ...”
I let my voice die away.
“McGrath ...?”
“… But he’s got it wrong! Now it's me who's after him! That dirty bastard! I’m not finished.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “It's a good thing we kept his money. You and I might need it.”
Chapter Sixteen
Shanghai McGrath
Present day
Homeland took over the Estoque's guest house, a welcome development from Shanghai's point of view. Twenty-three gunned-up, hard-nosed combat vets formed a figurative cordon around the ranch headquarters and kept Kingsley out of the McGraths' hair.
Over the next forty-eight hours, dozens of US senators, congressmen and congresswomen, aides, Pentagon brass and bureaucrats flew in to interrogate Kingsley about the Brotherhood of the Three Hundred and Operation Group Forty. More than a few walked around afterward looking dazed. A few wimpy souls were visibly terrified. Shanghai saw an otherwise dignified galoot in a three-piece Italian suit stagger outside and throw up. What a freaking wuss, he thought.
“These CIA and Homeland dudes are the tightest-ass idiots I've ever run across,” Shanghai told Barnabas and Juliette over lunch on the second day. “Mainly, I'm thinking of one of their head men, Braxton Bragg Jones. When I said good mornin’, Jones looked at me like I was something ugly stuck to his shoe.”
Barnabas was amused. “Elites like Jones exist in a bubble, Shanghai. They went to prep schools, military academies, ivy league universities, live in gated communities. From childhood to the grave, they’re told they’re smarter than everybody else. In their own minds, these people are Plato’s ‘guardians,’ the philosopher-kings. Born to rule, while folks at our level are fly-over boneheads, ignorant whiskey-tango yokels. To them, the best of us graduated from state colleges, and we’re fit only to be ordered around, used, despised –and feared.”
“You mean they ain’t salt-of-the-earth, regular folks like you and me?” Shanghai joked.
Barnabas shook his head. “Not even a little bit. And they don’t know much about us.”
Braxton Bragg Jones, better known as BBJ by Homeland's security detail, was bony-shouldered and skinny with deep-set, obsidian eyes, a neat beard and bushy black brows. Maybe forty-five, he projected disdain, impatience and princely entitlement.
Juliette and Shanghai finished the lunch dishes, and she excused herself to e-mail an updated account of her Butch and Sundance project to the Oregon Archaeological Society. She'd already boxed up most of the treasures she'd unearthed and Fed-Xed them off.
“C'mon, Shanghai,” Barnabas said, “I'm thinkin' you’d benefit from a rifle better suited to our predicament than a danged hundred-year-old Mannlicher.”
“I like the Mannlicher.”
“So did Papa Hemingway, which is neither here nor there, son. If we get in another fight, I want you backin' me up with somethin’ more than a bolt-action, Edwardian-era smoke pole.”
In the weapons room, he took a cut-down Bushmaster 5.56mm black rifle with a high-end Leupold scope from its wall rack. It was the same weapon he'd liberated from Pancho Agtuca the morning they burned the biker's truck.
“Here you go, son. While you were fixin' fence, I cleaned, lubed and zeroed this dang thing. It's got custom touches that surprised me. Made me suspect Pancho stole it off somebody who was real weapons-savvy. It's a semi-auto, got a custom Timney Calvin Elite trigger, Magpul stock and free-floatin’ cold, hammer-forged barrel. The scope is graduated out to five hundred meters. Nobody’d hunt grizzlies with this popper, but it’s a tack-drivin' machine.”
He also handed over a half-dozen thirty-round mags in a black computer shoulder bag. “Keep this close by.”
Walking out to his pickup with the rifle slung barrel-down, Shanghai intended to stow it in the truck, handy if trouble once again came calling. As misfortune would have it, he encountered Braxton Bragg Jones ten feet from the old flatbed.
BBJ saw the black rifle, dug in his heels and came to a halt. In a commanding voice, he thundered, “Hey! Hold up a damn moment, young man!”
