Storm Surge (27 page)

“Mercer,”
Bohler
said. “You gave your word.”

“I gave my word I wouldn’t kill him,”
he said. “My word doesn’t bind her. She’s got a better argument than me
anyway.”

“Argument?”
Phillips said.

“That you need killing. Put the gun
down,
Bohler
.”

Bohler
made a disgusted sound and lowered
the machine gun to his side. “This is murder,” he said, “And you’re an
accessory to it.”

Phillips’ bravado was rapidly
evaporating. “I didn’t
do
anything to her. Or to you,” he said to
Sharon.

“You didn’t do anything to stop it,”
Sharon said.

“What the bloody
hell
was I
supposed to do?” Phillips snapped. “The man was an idiot. But he was…oh, bugger
it,” he said, his voice suddenly weary. He straightened up. “Go ahead. Do what
you want. I never should have come along on this bloody farce.”

“No,” Sharon said, “You shouldn’t
have.” She pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

She pulled the trigger again.

Still nothing.

Mercer came over and took the gun
gently from her hand. She was trembling visibly.

“You have to take the safety off,” he
said. “Otherwise the gun won’t fire.”

“You knew,”
Bohler
said.

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “I knew the gun
wouldn’t fire. I didn’t know if she’d pull the trigger, through.” He looked
over at Phillips. The man had gone completely white. Mercer looked back at
Sharon, who was staring down at her empty hand. “So,” he said, “how did it
feel?”

She looked up at him, a stricken look
on her face. “What?”

“How did it feel to pull the trigger,
thinking it was going to blow someone away?”

She shook her head, like a drunk
trying to clear the cobwebs from the brain. “I don’t know. I never…”

“You know,” Mercer insisted.

The trembling was worse now. “It
felt…it felt good,” she said. A tear ran down her face. “It felt good.”

Mercer nodded, as if he’d expected the
answer. “Yeah,” he said. “You have to get past that. A lot of people don’t.” He
stuck the gun in his waistband. “Take a few minutes to get
yourself
together,” he said. “We need to go.”

She looked up at him.
“We?”

“Yeah.
Next time, you’ll have the safety
off.”

“So what,” she said, “this was some
kind of test?”

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “But, you know,
you offered to take it.”

“Pretty shitty thing to do, Mercer,”
Bohler
said. “To someone you seem to care about.”

“Not as shitty as taking her along and
getting both of us killed because she froze up.”

“Jesus,” Phillips
said,
his voice a dry croak. “You are a cold bastard, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “I am.” He turned
to Sharon. “You’re probably going to hate me after this,” he said.
“If we live through it.”

“Probably,” Sharon whispered.

“Go on downstairs,” Mercer
said,
his voice still gentle. “Wait for me there.”

Slowly, as if she was sleepwalking,
she went to the stairs. She paused at the top and looked at Mercer. Then she
went down.

“She has every right to hate you,”
Bohler
said. “You’ve turned her into a killer.”

“No,” Mercer said. “I think our Mr.
Phillips and his friends did that when they threatened her daughter. I just
showed her what she could be.” He looked at Phillips.
“Given
the right conditions.”

The wind reached full force, shrieking
and howling around the nooks and crannies of the lighthouse. The storm was
back.

CHAPTER
SIXTY-FIVE

“You know,” Blake said, “I have a
daughter. She’d be a little older than you. I haven’t seen her much. You know…”
he smiled, “Business.”

“I bet she hates you,” Glory said, her
voice low and deadly. “I bet she wishes you were dead.”

Blake’s smile faded. “You’ve got quite
a mean mouth on you, little girl.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Blake got up and stood over her. She
was taped securely to an expensive chair with duct tape wound around her wrists
and ankles. She looked up at him. He drew back a hand as if to strike her.

“Right,” she sneered.
“Big man.
Tough guy.
Likes to hit little girls while they’re tied up.”

He got himself under control, picked
up the roll of duct tape. “I wanted to avoid having to tape your mouth shut,”
he said, “but…” From the next room, the bright jittery light of the plasma
cutter sputtered and died. Blake turned his head. “Montrose?” he called out.

There was a brief pause,
then
her voice came back. “We’re in.”

“Wait for me,” Blake ordered. He
looked down at the girl. “We’ll deal with you later.”

“After Kyle gets through with you,”
she said, “you won’t be dealing with anything.
Asshole.”

Blake just smiled. “We’ll see.”

***

After the quiet and the clear air, the
return of the banshee wind and the driving rain made Sharon want to weep. She
fought down the urge. Her daughter needed her. She trudged after Mercer through
the wind and the rain.
Once again.
Except this time,
they weren’t running from the danger. They were headed into it.

She looked down at the pistol in her hand,
the ugly hunk of metal feeling strangely natural in her grasp. She remembered
the rage that had come on her when she recognized the prisoner as one of the
men who were responsible for all this agony, the man who had simply walked off
and left her with the animal Mercer had killed. She remembered the look the
Englishman had given her as he left, one of total indifference. When Kyle had
put the gun in her hand, she recalled the feeling of
power,
of…the only word was
righteousness
. She felt
righteous
,
an avatar of vengeance, as she’d pulled the trigger. Mercer’s words, his
mantra, came back to her.

He needed killing
.

The Englishman had needed killing. And
yet, Mercer hadn’t let her do it. She couldn’t figure why. Then she felt a
brief flush of shame at the way she had kicked the helpless man, and an even
deeper one at the way she had enjoyed it, and she knew. He may have needed
killing. It may have been a righteous act. But there was nothing right or
needful about killing a helpless man. She shook her head. She was navigating in
a more complex moral universe than she could have ever imagined. It could be so
easy to lose one’s way, to become like the men who had taken her and Glory, who
lived by no rules, and no code.

You’re probably going to hate me after
this
, he had said,
and he was probably right. But right now, he was her only guide in this new
world. And following his lead was the only way she was going to get herself and
her daughter out of it alive. She remembered the tag line from a cheesy horror
movie she and her friends had gone to see at the old theater in her hometown.
“WHO WILL SURVIVE…” the poster had blared, “AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM?” She
wondered what would be left of her and Glory when this was all over.
If they survived at all.

CHAPTER
SIXTY-SIX

Inside, the room seemed dimly lit
after the harsh light of the cutter. The smell of burnt metal mixed with the
musty damp odors of the ruined house. Montrose stood by the safe, its door
open. “Step away,” Blake said calmly. Montrose complied, her eyes wary. He
walked over and looked inside. The book was there, on the top shelf, just as
his contact had said it would be. He slid it out. It was a black leather-bound
portfolio, about three inches thick. He placed it on the desk and flipped it open.

“That what you’re looking for?”
Montrose said.

Blake studied it. “Yes,” he said.
“It’s all here.”

“Okay,” Montrose said. “Now step away
from it.”

He looked up. Montrose was holding a
pistol on him.

“I don’t normally do shit like this,”
she said. “But then, this
ain’t
exactly been a normal
job, has it?”

“Montrose,” Blake said, “you’re being
stupid.”

“This whole
fuckin
’
job has been screwy from the get-go,” she said. “That shit about
threatenin
’ to kill me if I looked at the package…that
ain’t
right, Blake. And you
not
tellin
’
us about Moon…that was even more fucked up.
You were
gonna
kill us all from the start.”

“That’s not true,” Blake said evenly.
“We just needed extraordinary security.”

“And
rippin
’
off a U.S. Senator?
For a
fuckin
’
notebook?
At this point, I got what you could call trust issues, Blake.”

Blake spread his hands. “What can I do
to convince you?”

“You can tell me what’s in that
notebook that’s so important that you’re
willin
’ to
risk your own life for it. I know other people’s lives don’t mean squat to you.
At least I do now. But you put your own skin on the line in this little
wingding, and I want to know what makes that notebook worth it.”

“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I can’t do
that. It would be worth my own life to tell you that.”

“Dumbass,” Montrose said. “You don’t
tell me, I kill you now.”

“I don’t think so,” Blake said. “See,
while you were working on the safe, I took the firing pin out of your weapon.”

Montrose looked down at her pistol. As
she did, Blake brought his own pistol up from beneath the desk and shot her in
the throat. The impact knocked her backwards. Her finger jerked on the trigger
and her own weapon discharged as she fell, blowing a chunk of plaster out of
the ceiling behind Blake.

He stood up and crossed the room in
two quick strides to where Montrose lay on the floor. She had dropped the
pistol and had both hands at her throat as if trying to stanch the flow of
blood that was pumping out onto the floor. Her mouth was working like a fish’s
and she gurgled horribly as the blood jetted around her gore-slicked fingers.

"Made you look,” Blake said
softly. He put another bullet into the center of Montrose’s forehead and she
stopped thrashing. He looked down at her and shook his head as she died. “You
should have stuck with what you know,” he said.

CHAPTER
SIXTY-SEVEN

Moon figured they’d be coming down the
road, at least what road remained. The fallen trees and other wreckage in the
roadway made passage difficult, but off the road it was nearly impossible. He
had taken up a firing position behind the fallen trunk of an overturned live
oak tree. The ancient trunk was so huge that, lying on its side, it formed a
wooden rampart as high as Moon’s chest. He had taken branches and leaves and
stuck them into his clothing to break up his outline. The sky was getting
lighter; somewhere, above this tempest, dawn was breaking. He would have preferred
the cover of darkness, but with the resumption of the wind and obscuring rain,
he was confident that he wouldn’t be seen by his quarry. Not until it was too
late.

A bolt of lightning turned the world
white for a second, followed almost immediately by the clap of thunder. Moon
blinked his eyes, dazzled by the flash and the concussion. It sounded like the
bolt had hit almost on top of him. As his vision recovered, Moon thought he
could see a figure, moving slowly toward his position. He raised his weapon.
There was nothing there.
Another flash, another titanic
concussion.
He ducked his head instinctively,
then
popped back up. Too quickly, he realized. He froze, hoping no one had spotted
the movement. He definitely saw someone through the curtains of rain, but they
were too far away for a clear shot with the machine gun. Moon fought the
temptation to begin firing anyway. He considered the idea that he might have
been spotted, decided not to take the risk. It was a good firing position, but
Moon had no desire for a sustained firefight. That wasn’t his style. He had
made his reputation and racked up an impressive number of kills by using guile
and stealth. He was the one you never saw coming.

He wondered for a moment at Blake’s
decision to bring him out of hiding. He was supposed to be the clean-up man,
leaving no one behind who could be persuaded to reveal what had been done here.
There was always a possibility that one of the others would find themselves in
a jam, charged with crimes or hauled before some intelligence or oversight
committee, and be tempted to trade on the information that one U.S. Senator had
hired mercenaries to burglarize the home of another. There was an old saying:
“three can keep a secret if two are dead.” Blake didn’t seem to have done the
math. Or maybe he’d decided to worry later about whether Moon was supposed to
kill him, too. Or maybe he was planning to kill Moon himself. Well, Moon
thought, let him try. Better men than Blake had tried and gotten their throats
cut for their trouble.