Endangered Species (33 page)

It sounded like as good a plan as any. “Keep where I can see you.”

“Will do.”

The big man ran half-crouched across the road, his shadow a long black streak on the dusty gravel. Then he went down and up as he crossed the other ditch and began slipping from tree to tree at the edge of the plowed field.

Wager watched him and the house and the glimpses of yard and barn that he could see through the branches. His radio made the hollow hissing of empty channels and covered the sound of the evening wind. The eastern horizon was darker now; night’s shadow rose higher against the cloudless sky, and in the rearview mirror Wager could see a mountain’s silhouette begin to eat into the lower rim of the sun. Five minutes. Eight. Fifteen. Nothing on the radio, nothing at the house. The sun was completely down now, and the sky over the black mountains red with the dying fire of day. Max, a squatting and increasingly dim figure at the distant, graying edge of the plowed field, stayed motionless, his eyes on something that Wager couldn’t see.

Then suddenly the figure stood.

Wager popped out of the car to squint through the gloom at Max.

The man turned a pale blur of face his way and made two wide sweeps with his arm, then he plunged into the tree line. Wager started the car and pulled it rapidly for the driveway, slewing it across the dirt tracks to block as wide a path as he could. Then he grabbed the keys and jumped out, running for the far side of the house in case the plane came that way.

He had just reached the porch when he heard the shout of Max’s voice and an odd whining sound and the sudden, explosive pop of cylinders that ruptured the silence. The engine noise revved to an angry snarl and almost buried the cracking sound of a weapon.

Wager turned the corner and sprinted down the far side of the house. A weedy lawn stretched in shady gloom between the house and the tree line, and he could see the barn past the screen porch at the rear of the home. The deafening roar came from the black mouth of the gaping doors and then, wobbling and bobbing on the uneven ground, the cone of a whirling propeller, followed by the plane’s long nose. The wingtips barely cleared the doorframe, and Wager, pistol in hand, dropped to one knee to steady his Star PD in the palm of one hand while he squeezed the trigger with the other. Before he could fire, a rifle cracked from the corner of the house, and Wager felt the whip of hot air as a round sizzled just off his ear. Rolling, he fired blindly, the tail of the plane disappearing and the noise roaring slowly down the drive on the other side of the house. Another spurt of yellow slapped a second shot at him, and Wager rolled again, coming up on his feet and sprinting hard for the shelter of the house’s wall.

He yanked his radio and keyed the highway patrol channel, half-shouting over the racket that stopped moving up the drive. “Emergency—police officer—anybody: come back!” A humped silhouette leaned away from the black bulk of the house to fire another shot. Wager crouched in the weedy darkness at the foot of the wall. “Emergency—officer needs assistance—come back!”

An unhurried voice replied with its number as Wager crawled toward the corner of the house. “Who’s this and what kind of assistance you want?”

Wager told him as little as he needed to as fast as he could: Officers being shot at by fugitives, call FBI Agent Mallory immediately and tell him the airplane was on its way.

The rifle boomed again, its muzzle blast a slap of heat across his face as Wager fired twice in return. The first round straightened the figure and sent it diving for the stone foundation of the house. The second round went somewhere, and with a tiny corner of his mind Wager noted a miss and where it might land for the shooting forms that he’d have to fill out sometime. His ears heard the airplane’s engine roar, then back off to an idle, and then roar again, apparently in an awkward and cramped turn around Wager’s car. Then it fell to an idle again, and another corner of his mind sought some sound from Max—the pop of the man’s Smith and Wesson, a shout, something that would mean he had stopped the aircraft.

Then Wager was on top of the writhing, grunting figure at the corner of the house. Slapping at the man’s arms, Wager pulled his hands free and visible from his body and shoved his pistol against King’s wobbling head. “That’s Simon in the plane? He has the bomb?”

A cough and gasp of pain as Wager turned the man over and ran a fast hand down his body. “You gut-shot me—stomach.”

“Max—Max!”

No answer. At the front of the house, the engine idled, then it roared again, and the sound began to move slowly.

“The bastard’s going after Rocky Flats, isn’t he? He’s going to drop it on Rocky Flats!”

King, his lean and tanned face made even tauter by pain, shook his head and grunted something.

“What?”

“Not drop. Dive. Kamikaze. Dive into the place.”

“Jesus … Max!”

Wager saw a dark, lightless blur lumber past the front of the house and flicker between the trees. He fired two more rounds, cursing as the plane’s engine pulled it clumsily down the gravel road. It moved slowly and heavily out of range, a cloud of dust barely visible in the dusk, then it began to pick up speed.

“Max!”

“Shot.”

“What?”

“Your buddy,” King gasped. “Over there.” He bobbed his head toward the driveway. “Shot.”

Wager slapped handcuffs on King and ran for the blacker shadow huddled in the darkness of lilac bushes. It made a shape much smaller than Max, but it was his partner, clenched and still. Wager jammed a thumb against the man’s warm neck. “Max—Max!” He felt a weak pulse, but the big man made no sound.

The airplane engine was a distant, straining scream, and it seemed to pull with every decibel against the tug of earth as the sound slowly lifted. Wager, radio at his mouth as he called the highway patrol for a Flight for Life helicopter, saw the craft, a distant black silhouette against the smoky dark of the eastern sky. It struggled upward, visibly laboring in its gentle incline until it was clearly outlined against the cooler blue of the evening sky. Then its engine softened, and it turned in a wide arc to sail back over the farmhouse. In the clearer light of altitude, Wager could see a long silver canister tucked beneath the fuselage. The airplane’s wings wagged once in salute as it passed overhead and then aimed toward the fading red of sunset.

Wager’s radio popped with a tense voice. “Wager—this is Mallory. Came up on channel five.”

He switched the dial. “Mallory—the plane just took off. It’s headed for the Flats now. It just passed overhead. I saw the bomb—a long tube under the fuselage. He’s going to crash the bomb on the target. Read me? He’s going to crash the bomb on the target!”

“… All right. We’re on our way and Flats security’s been alerted. They’ll be looking for it.”

“Get a Flight for Life out here, quick. Officer wounded.”

The band was silent.

“Mallory—you hear me? Flight for Life chopper! My partner’s down!”

“First things first, Wager.”

Another long silence. From the lighter sky in the west Wager heard the plane’s motor fade slowly as it labored with the awkward and heavy cylinder. From the yard behind him, he heard King make quicker, more rhythmic groans. From Max he heard nothing, not even a labored breath.

Then he heard something else; the pat-pat-pat of a helicopter rotor driven by an engine straining to push it faster. Low on the western horizon he saw a cluster of quickly moving lights—red, white, green—that marked the flight of something.

“It’s on its way, Max. The chopper—hang in there, partner. They’re coming now.”

But it wasn’t the Flight for Life. It was the sculpted and deadly silhouette of a combat helicopter, and there were three of them, which sped just above the dark earth toward the sound of the droning airplane. They crossed the last remnant of sunburst, a close, intent formation whose sound faded rapidly.

At the green edge of night, Wager saw the tiny black dot of Simon’s airplane holding steady for the Flats, which, by now, must be coming up under its nose. Then the three thicker-looking dots strung out in a line and swung toward the plane. They hung against the sky for a moment, seemingly motionless and silent, then Wager saw a spurt of flame, followed by a soundless red-orange flash that billowed out and sprayed streaks of glowing fragments. A puff of thick smoke spread and hung like a ball of dirty cotton against the final glow of day, and the three dots began to circle the air where the plane had been.

9/27

0342

T
HE HOSPITAL CORRIDOR
had that exhausted silence that marks the late-night shift. Max and King had both been flown in by the Flight for Life. Both were still alive, both critically injured, and both went into surgery immediately. But Wager cared only about one; as far as he was concerned, the other could die on the table and save the state money.

He’d done the paperw ork to charge King with both murder and accessory. The man insisted, on the flight back, that Simon had killed Pauline Tillotson. Enraged—almost incoherent with anger—Simon had confronted her with being an informant and shoved her so hard she cracked her skull against the kitchen table. Then, to cover the murder and gain time for the attack on Rocky Flats, Simon had dragged her into the closet and set the house on fire.

“Why attack the Flats now?” asked Wager. “They’re closing the damn place—the government said they’re shutting it down.”

King grunted a short, painful laugh. “The government? You believe those bastards? … Five years, ten years … start it up again … Read their lips … Politicians!”

No, Wager had to admit he didn’t believe them. But he didn’t fully believe King, either. Of course, Simon wasn’t around to give his version of how Tillotson died. But it wouldn’t make any difference—shouldn’t make any difference. King was part of it, at least an accessory to Tillotson’s murder, participated in the attempt on Rocky Flats, shot a police officer. He wouldn’t go to the death room, maybe, but he’d be in jail. Where Gargan or somebody like him could make Simon and King heroes, one dead and the other jailed in the attempt to save the earth by killing its inhabitants.

The rest of the paperwork—a thick stack of documents—could wait until tomorrow.

Wager had tried to make Mallory wait too, but the agent wouldn’t be put off. He wanted to interview Wager even as he followed his partner’s gurney into the emergency room.

“You should have told me about that farm, Wager. You two people shouldn’t have gone out there alone!”

“I left a message, Mallory. I told you where I was going.”

“Some message: ‘Going after a lead to King. Will check in’!”

“As soon as we knew it was him, I called you.”

“Yeah. Well, I hope for your partner’s sake he makes it. For his sake and for his family’s. Now excuse me—I’ve got a news conference to attend.”

For Max’s sake, for his family’s sake, and for Wager’s.

He sighed and hauled himself off the waiting room couch one more time, walking nervously along the line of tiles that he’d paced a hundred times already. The sound of a well-oiled door hinge turned him quickly around. Max’s wife, Francine, was coming out of the intensive care unit. Her face was white and drawn and without makeup as she stared over a long, long distance at Wager. Then she nodded and smiled.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Gabe Wager Novels

E
ACH FAMILY HAS
its whore and its thief. It was a saying Detective Gabe Wager had heard as a kid when the doings of one relative or another had generated shocked and angry whispers among the women who kept track of each other’s nephews and nieces:
Cada familia tiene su puta y su ladrón
. But not all families had their cop, a fact that Wager and his relatives had been forced to live with for many years. So many that, eventually, he no longer paid much attention to the guarded politeness and the corny jokes from those who called him Cousin. Since he no longer let it bother him, he was surprised to discover that anyone else in his family still had trouble with it.

“He won’t talk to me. He says I’m the aunt of a cop.”

The voice on the telephone quavered with some half-controlled emotion, but Wager—rubbing his eyes and trying to ignore the whining clatter of computer printers, the sharp outbursts from police radios sitting in their desk chargers, the incessant electronic chirp from one or another of the surrounding telephones—didn’t know if his aunt’s emotion was anger at her son for being stubborn or at him for being what a social worker might call an unfit role model. “Tell him he’s the cousin of a cop. Tell him it’s a family disease.”

While he talked, he initialed the last page of a thick report he was packaging up for Assistant District Attorney Kolagny. The man should have gone into private practice long ago, like the rest of the ADAs who let the state pay them to learn enough criminal law so they could hang out their own shingles. But Kolagny was a slow learner—the kind who wouldn’t be able to feed himself without a guaranteed paycheck. Wager figured that in his own way Kolagny was serving the common weal by staying off the unemployment rolls. But it still meant that Wager had to send up four-square cases that even Kolagny couldn’t lose. And that called for extra work, and it wasn’t always successful.