Dark of the Moon (24 page)

B
EFORE THEY SETTLED
in the trucks, Virgil and Stryker squeezed into standard-duty body armor. Though it wouldn’t stop any heavy loads, it’d be good against shotguns and pistols. Some of the DEA guys were wearing heavier stuff: they’d be the first in.

Stryker asked Virgil to drive: “I want to be able to work the radios to my guys—just in case.”

F
ROM THE
W
ORTHINGTON
on-ramp to the exit nearest Feur’s place was thirty-five minutes at legal interstate speeds, half an hour at the normal illegal driving pace. Pirelli, talking to his outside pacemaker, modulated the speed of the DEA trucks, seven of them, all blacked-out GMC Yukons.

“Keep spaced out, my happy ass,” Stryker said, watching the trucks ahead of them. “We look like a Shriner parade.”

“As long as Feur doesn’t have lookouts on the interstate, we’ll be okay,” Virgil said. A minute later, “Real purty day, ain’t it?”

“Sure is,” Stryker said cheerfully. He popped his safety belt, knelt on the seat, dug around in the back, and came up with the M-16. “If you see me firing this into a gopher hole, you just say to yourself, ‘Don’t bother about that—it’s just old Jim popping off a few rounds in an effort to get reelected.’”

“Gettin’ some smoke on your ass.”

“That’s right,” Stryker said.

“I still don’t think Feur did the Gleasons, Jimmy. I don’t think we’re out of the woods on that guy,” Virgil said.

“Whatever. I plan to take full credit on the meth lab, at least in the hometown papers,” Stryker said. He pulled the magazine out of the M-16, thumbed the cartridges a few times, said, “What have you got back there? Shotgun isn’t much use on a house.”

“Shotgun, Remington semiauto .30-06.”

“That’ll knock the corner off a brick,” Stryker said, with approval. “FMJs?”

“Yeah.”

“I got sixty rounds. Wish I had a couple more clips.”

“This is an arrest, not a war,” Virgil said.

“Whatever,” Stryker said. He slapped the mag back into the rifle, jacked a round into the chamber, clicked on the safety.

“I hope this thing works like Pirelli says,” Virgil said. “I can appreciate your needing to get reelected, but nailing that psycho is more important than keeping a few oil-field workers from taking their vitamin pills.”

Ahead, the GMCs slowed, and Virgil slowed with them, the speed dropping to fifty-five.
We really do look like a Shriner parade,
Virgil thought.
Hope nobody’s watching.

As far as they ever found out, nobody was. They were four miles from the exit when the speed picked up, and Pirelli called Virgil on his cell: “Feur got home fifteen minutes ago. Franks is coming up to the exit. We’re going in. You guys hang back a bit.”

“Ten-ninety-six,” Virgil said, and shut his phone.

“What does that mean?” Stryker asked. “I never heard of a ten-ninety-six.”

“Means, ‘Fuck you,’” Virgil said. He closed on the GMCs.

Stryker said, “I’m gonna try to crawl in the backseat. Stupid we’re both sitting up front.” He pulled the headrest out, tossed it in the back, and crawled awkwardly over the seat. “You want me to uncase the Remington?” he asked.

“Might as well,” Virgil said. “Hope to hell we don’t need it. There’re two magazines in the side sleeve, all set.”

F
OR THE FIRST MINUTE
or so north of the interstate, Virgil thought, it was unlikely that anyone ahead would notice them. Then they hit the gravel road and a plume of dust exploded from under the trucks’ wheels, along with a roaring sound, like a nearby train, and everybody behind the first two trucks slowed down. The interval grew, and drivers began to move into the left lane, one truck fishtailing, and Stryker shouted, “Watch that, watch that…”

“He can’t hear you,” Virgil shouted back.

“I can’t see a thing…” Stryker was holding on to the passenger seat, peering out from the back, into the thickening cloud of road dust.

T
HEY TOPPED
the rise south of Feur’s place, and if nobody had seen them yet, they would pretty soon; but they were also less than a minute out, closing fast, and when Virgil moved right to get out of the funnel of road dust, Stryker shouted, “Franks’ truck is in the yard, it’s in the yard…”

T
HE FIRST TWO
DEA trucks hit the yard, and the agents were out, shouting at Franks, who’d just gotten out of his truck. Franks may have said something, and a dog rocketed out of the truck and jumped one of the agents, who went down, rolling with the dog.

The third truck went past the driveway turnoff and set up on the road. The fourth stopped across the driveway, and the fifth stopped short, the agents out in the road. Virgil swerved around the back truck and put the Explorer in the ditch opposite the end of the driveway, and shouted, “Out the left side, left side,” and they both got under cover, saw running agents on the road, and then the gunfire.

There were two dogs out, one of them on an agent’s face, the other wheeling in the dirt in a fight around Franks’ truck, and then the screaming agent, dog on his face, managed to throw it off and another agent shot at it, missed, and the dog went for him, and another agent fired.

Four or five of them were in the yard when a machine gun stuttered from the house and one of the agents went down and the others started screaming and firing at the house, little pecks of paint and dust and wood popping off the front of the house, windows shattering. Franks, who’d been standing hands-over-head, turned toward the shed and hit the front door. The door popped open—unlocked—and Franks disappeared, and two agents were down.

Stryker was on the ground in the ditch, the M-16 to his shoulder, and he opened up on the top row of windows in the house, blowing out most of a magazine in a single hose job.

Virgil scrambled across the street, into the ditch on the far side, keeping a truck between himself and the house, and when he heard another machine gun open behind him, lurched out of the ditch, running toward the first truck in the yard. An agent was on the ground six feet from the truck and Virgil hooked him and dragged him behind it, the agent’s M-16 bumping along under his arm, hung on a sling.

The truck had fifty bullet holes in it, broken glass spraying all over, two tires gone. The agent was still alive, but his legs were torn to pieces, and he was fading. A brown-and-white dog, that might have been a pit bull, bleeding from its sides and head, scrambled around the truck, pulling with his front legs, back apparently broken, fixing on Virgil. Virgil loved dogs, but he didn’t even think about it and yanked his pistol and shot the dog twice.

H
EARD SOMEBODY SCREAMING.
Another agent, behind the other entry truck, was shouting at him, and Virgil saw a bloody patch in the dust behind him, but the agent was still operating and he pointed out between the trucks and Virgil saw a third agent down and he shouted back, and the other agent screamed, “You get him, I’ll unload on the house, I can’t move, I’m hit…”

Virgil shouted, “Do it,” and the agent rolled and opened up with his M-16, tearing across the windows, and Virgil kicked out from behind the truck’s wheel, grabbed the downed agent, and dragged him back, behind a tire. Another dog was coming for them, tongue out, bleeding, picked the agent with the gun, who was reloading, hit him just as he slapped the magazine in. But the dog got a piece of armor, not an arm, and tore at it and the agent found a pistol and put it at the dog’s head and fired. The dog lurched and turned and looked at Virgil, a doggy smile on its bloody face, and then it toppled over.

Virgil was behind the truck with two wounded agents, or maybe, he thought, one dead. He looked at the man, caught a breath. No: still alive. He popped open the back door of the truck, lifted the wounded agent inside, and a hail of bullets knocked out the far windows and then went on.

He picked up the second agent, the unconscious one, struggling against the weight, and threw him on top of the first. He threw the first man’s weapon on top of them, then crawled into the driver’s foot-well, gripped the steering wheel overhead, shifted the truck into reverse, and hit the gas pedal with his hand.

Felt something scratching at him, ignored it, backed straight across the driveway on two and then three rims, heard the volume of fire picking up from the DEA agents to give him cover, never tried to turn, backed entirely across the yard into the field, across the field fifty yards, eighty yards, bumping over rocks and small trees and brush, the truck rocking violently, a hundred yards, and then he hooked into the roadside ditch and hit the brake.

H
E CALLED
P
IRELLI
on his cell phone: Pirelli screamed, “How bad, how bad?”

“Two pretty bad,” Virgil shouted. “If you got a truck that works, get it down here. You gotta make a run like
right now.
”

“I’m calling the north team in, they’re coming right by…If you got anything you can fire at the house, hose it down, hose it down…”

Virgil got the M-16 in the back of the truck, with two magazines, began popping three-shot bursts at the house as he saw a dust funnel coming down the gravel road from the north, moving fast.

One of the north group was trying to run right past the house. When he got close, Virgil emptied the last of the magazine at the upper windows of the house, where most of the fire seemed to be coming from, dumped the mag, slapped another one in, and as the north truck passed the driveway, hosed the house again.

The north truck slid to a stop in the shelter of the ruined truck. An agent piled out, wild-eyed, and Virgil shouted, “You know where the hospital is?”

“Yes, yes, we scouted it…”

They carried the two downed agents to the working truck, and the north guy shouted, “How bad are you hit?”

Virgil looked down at himself: blood, but not his. The agent touched his forehead, and Virgil reached up. More blood, and this time it was his. Didn’t feel like much. “You go on,” Virgil shouted. “Go on.”

The agent took off, chased by a couple of slugs from the house when he broke from the cover of the wrecked truck.

Virgil dug through the back of the wrecked truck, found a box with six mags in it, stuck one in the rifle, stuck the others in his jacket pockets, darted across the road and into the ditch on the west side. From there, he was able to crawl through the swampy water toward Stryker’s Ford.

H
E COULD HEAR
Stryker still firing from behind the Explorer, and he cleared the truck and Stryker turned toward him and said, “Need more ammo.”

Virgil tossed him three of the mags he’d gotten from the truck, and Stryker shouted, “I think Pirelli’s hit, he’s in the ditch on the other side.”

“I’ll get him if you can dust off the house again,” Virgil shouted. “Let me get my kit.”

Virgil crawled into the truck and got his first-aid kit, then back out, crouched in the ditch, and shouted, “Anytime…”

Stryker popped up and unloaded a clip in one long burst and Virgil vaulted the narrow road, landing in the ditch on the other side, saw Pirelli with an M-16 shooting one-handed, blood soaking through his left shirtsleeve. Virgil crawled up and shouted, “How bad?”

“It hurts. I think it broke my shoulder,” Pirelli shouted back. Everybody was shouting. Virgil could hear men screaming all around the house and hundreds of rounds pumping out. The house seemed to be falling apart, but there was still fire incoming.

Virgil pulled a heavy pad and a roll of tape out of his kit, and he and Pirelli eased to the bottom of the ditch, Pirelli on his back. Virgil found a bloody wedge knocked out of Pirelli’s shoulder, just below the edge of his body armor. He jammed the pad under Pirelli’s shirt and wound two yards of tape around his shoulder, cinching it up tight, shouted, “No artery, don’t see any arterial bleeding,” and Pirelli nodded and said, “Reload me.”

N
OW THE FIRING
from the house had stopped, and an agent launched himself out of the east-side ditch to the car where the third wounded agent had been lying, the guy who’d covered Virgil while Virgil dragged the dead man’s body. Another burst of fire from the house, but the agent made it, and the DEA shooters pounded the window where the burst had come from.

Virgil, down in the ditch, reloaded Pirelli’s M-16 and then heard Stryker scream, “Watch out, watch out!” and Virgil looked up and saw, at the shed, Franks walking out through the shed door with a long revolver in one hand. He took three steps and shot at the agents behind the truck, no effort to cover himself, and the unwounded agent stumbled back away from the man on the ground, trying for his gun, and then somebody hit Franks with a burst, and Virgil could see his shirt shaking, but Franks stayed on his feet and fired another shot from the pistol and then he went down.

Distracted by the appearance of Franks, Pirelli had half risen to his knees, shouting, and now another burst of gunfire spattered around them and Pirelli went down again, flapping one arm, and Virgil shouted, “Get down,” but it was too late; Pirelli had been hit again. Virgil crawled down to him, and Pirelli sat up and said, “Got me,” and dropped back on the ground. Two holes: one in a leg and the other in the right arm. The one in the arm was bleeding hard, but not arterially; the arm was crooked and surely broken.

Virgil ripped open Pirelli’s pant leg: that hit was superficial, ripping away skin and a quarter-inch of meat.

“How bad?” Pirelli groaned.

“You’re not dead yet,” Virgil said. More tape to put pressure on the wounds; then Virgil said, “This is gonna hurt. I’ve gotta move you across the road and up the ditch where we can get you outa here.”

“Do it.”

He braced himself and grabbed Pirelli’s armor at the neckline, cocked himself, and shouted at Stryker, who said, “Ten seconds,” and disappeared, crawling down the ditch. Then Stryker flashed a hand, screamed, “Go!” and Virgil ran across the road, dragging Pirelli. Stryker popped up, twenty feet from his previous position, and burned another mag.