Strawman's Hammock (21 page)

“Put it down!”

Anybody with a badge and gun says at one time or another that it's the unexpected event or circumstance that gets somebody's ass killed. And that was partly true. But far worse, for Barrett, were those situations where you
expected
to find trouble,
knew
what to anticipate, and got nailed anyway. Barrett and his partner were now faced with that second, heart-sickening situation.

“Hostage out front,” Barrett muttered into his radio.

Cricket had probably heard, anyway. But you didn't take chances in this situation.

“Put down the gun, Roberto,” Barrett commanded, and then again in Spanish.

“Fuck you,” the foreman replied, using his hostage as a shield as he edged deliberately for Gary's Humvee.

“Put it down now!”
Cricket had his own weapon leveled from the corner of the trailer.

“No closer! One step more, I kill him!”

Cricket had no intention of coming closer. He had no intention of taking a position that might put Barrett in crossing fire. What Cricket would do, what he and Barrett were trained to do, was to bracket his target at ninety degrees to his partner.

“I kill his fucking ass!” the Bull warned again, and Gary's terrified scream died in a larnyx crushed with a brown, scarred arm. His eyes bulged from their sockets.

Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.
“We didn't come to arrest you, Roberto,” Barrett stated as firmly and calmly as he could manage. “We just want to ask about your niece, that's all. That's all we came for.”

“Fuck you,” the Bull snarled, and began dragging Gary toward the Humvee.

Rule one in a hostage situation: Never—repeat,
never
—let the kidnapper take his hostage from the scene.

If you couldn't negotiate, you had to shoot. Or you could negotiate to get the shoot, to get that clear target.

Another scream gargled in Gary's throat.

“Roberto, use your head. You stay here, go inside the trailer if you like, we can talk. But we can't let you leave, señor.
Comprende?”

El Toro was only steps from the Humvee now.

“I understand perfect, you dick. Didn't come to arrest me! What you think I am, a fucking moron? But I am leaving,
hombre.
I am taking this shit with me and if you try and stop me—I kill his fucking ass. Now—do you understand?”

Barrett trained his weapon.

“Cricket?”

“Got you covered.”

Gary Loyd hung pale and bloated and helpless in the Bull's iron grip. They had reached the Humvee. The Bull kept his grip on Gary and eyes trained on Bear and Cricket as he reached with his gun hand to open the door.

“Heh?”

Jarold Pearson popped up from the Humvee's padded seat to shove his revolver into the Mexican's face. Two quick explosions rocked the reinforced cab. Barrett saw a spray of blood. And then his legs were pumping, as if on their own. He reached the Humvee. Two bodies on the ground outside. Barrett kicked the Bull's forty-five out of his twitching hand, his own weapon still trained on the fallen foreman. Jarold eased himself, pale but calm, from the Humvee's passenger seat. You could see on the warden's uniform the boundary between blood and fabric, a line of red and green delineated just above his well-knotted tie, where the door's ledge had blocked El Toro's splatter of flesh and blood.

“I'm fine,” the warden reassured Barrett before he could ask.

El Toro, on the other hand, was now unrecognizable, his shattered face pressed into what looked like a bloody gourd that lolled limp as a rag doll onto a shoulder slowly accommodating to an unnatural relaxation. Cricket kept his own weapon leveled as he kneeled to press a pair of fingers unnecessarily to the carotid along the side of Quiroga's neck.

“He's
good
and dead.”

“How about Gary. Gary? Gary, you all right?”

No reply. Gary Loyd lay on the damp earth, too, his knees pulled to his chest.

“He's not hit,” Jarold said confidently.

But he was in shock. Cricket left El Toro to do what he could to reassure the scion of the Loyd family. He took off his own coat to blanket the terror-struck man.

“Just take it easy, Gary. It's over.”

Meanwhile, Jarold was kneeled over the bull-like corpse. He pulled a pen from his olive jacket and slipped it beneath a link of silver chain visible inside the collar of the dead man's shirt.

“Something here, gentlemen.” Jarold used his pen to expose a familiar talisman. “Crucifix.”

There it was, a cheaply made cross of copper and rock looped around El Toro's neck.

Cricket walked over to inspect.

“I'm no jeweler, but isn't this damn near a twin to the one we found on his niece?”

Barrett nodded. “But that wouldn't be enough to make him a suspect.”

“He tried to kill us,” Cricket pointed out. “What the hell does that make him?”

Gary Loyd rolled into a nearly fetal retreat on the grass.

“What did he do? What did he do?” the younger Loyd cried, rocking side to side.

“Gary?” Barrett took his turn beside the recent hostage. “Gary, you're all right.… Gary?”

“What did he do?”
the younger man wailed, unconsoled. Holding his knees. Rocking sideways in the mud and rain.

Cricket rose. “Think we can take him in?”

Barrett frowned. “Better call an EMS.”

“I'm on it.” Cricket dug out his cell phone.

Barrett turned to Jarold Pearson.

“That was a hell of a move, Warden.”

The warden shrugged. “If he hadn't got a hostage I probably wouldn't have tried it.”

Cricket holstered his own handgun. “‘Probably,' the man says! ‘Probably'? Well, I have learned something definite this morning, gentlemen. For certain and sure.”

Cricket's tension eased in a snort of laughter.

“Never piss off a game warden.”

*   *   *

It was not lost on Barrett Raines that the man he had once humiliated had saved a life where Bear himself was impotent. Barrett watched closely to see how Jarold Pearson would react to his recent trauma. He'd seen men who remained cool as ice under fire fall to pieces when you asked 'em for a cigarette. Once the need for action ceased, everything else shut down, too. But Barrett was relieved to see that this did not seem to be the case with the game warden. Jarold simply walked, if stiffly, to the metal steps of the trailer and seated himself before the door.

“You all right, Jarold?”

“I think so,” Jarold removed his hat. His hands, Barrett noticed, though steady, became preoccupied with the bloodstained knot of his tie.

“It was a clean shoot. The man had a hostage for a shield. He showed every intent of using deadly force.”

Jarold nodded. “I'll be fine. Need any help with the scene?”

Barrett shook his head.

“Why don't you just take a break 'til the cavalry gets here? I'll just make double-sure we don't have anybody else inside the trailer.”

Barrett stepped up past the warden. The trailer's door opened with a nudge.

“FDLE!” Bear was irritated to see his own weapon trembling like a water-wand in his hand.

Slow down,
he told himself.
Just make sure the place is secure.

“FDLE. Is anyone here?”

He listened. His heart pounded blood through his ears.
Slow down. Slow down.
Bear could not make out a sound, not even the whistle of air through ductwork.

Barrett thumbed his handgun's safety again to make sure it was off. The place appeared unoccupied. No threat whatever. Barrett relaxed enough to note that the interior was surprisingly well kept. No filthy dishes in the stainless-steel sink. No ashtrays overflowing. Bear opened the fridge with a napkin and smelled the familiar aroma of marinating fajitas. There were no fajitas to be had in Lafayette County, that was for sure. The Bull would have had to prepare those himself.

The pushout was arranged in standard configuration, bedroom leading to bath leading to kitchen and then beyond to a space expandable on hydraulic joists and convertible from sitting room to extra beds. Barrett saw a couple of tapes on the sitting room's VCR. The titles were in Spanish and unfamiliar, but it was clear from the visuals that they were porn. He backtracked through the kitchen to check the bathroom. A damp towel was hung neatly; otherwise it was empty.

The bedroom door was closed. Barrett hesitated, then redrew his nine-millimeter.

“Anyone home?” He knocked.

No answer.

The door swung open to the toe of his Reebok. Barrett entered the room in a Weaver's stance. Nothing. The closet was open. Nothing there.

But Barrett felt a tightness suddenly close like a vice around his chest, and with that a shortness of breath. As if the room were suddenly emptied of air. And then the fear, the unreasoning combination of terror and vertigo. Barrett stumbled out of the bedroom, clawed to steady himself on the bathroom door.

Slow down, slow down.

Barrett looked through the windows to see outside. He counted to ten in deep, slow exhalations. The chest lightened. The heart stalled its awful hammer. Bear weaved dizzily on the bathroom door. He knew what had happened.

Claustrophobia. It usually hit Barrett in tight spaces, in an elevator, in crowds. But that wasn't what had triggered the panic this morning, Bear was certain of that. It was not the modest space of the trailer's bedroom that had unleashed the fear and vertigo that fought the rational portion of Bear's brain on this occasion. The trigger, this time, had come from something completely unexpected and primeval. Barrett's heart began to pound again as he edged once more into the bedroom's interior. He took a tentative sample of air into his nostrils.

And stumbled back, heart pounding.

“Slow down!” he said aloud. “Slow down.”

But he had been right; it was not the bedroom's cramped space that had triggered his claustrophohia.

The trigger this time was a smell.

A combination of smells, actually. There was a bowl on the nightstand beside the dead man's bed, just an ordinary cereal bowl, with a plaster of some sort heaped damply to the rim of its rude, metal cup to generate the odor from which Barrett retreated.

Barrett knew now where he had smelled this smell before.

Her dress was a cheap muslin, he remembered. Her blouse had been damp with perspiration and flannel. And around her neck was a kind of censer. When she bobbed her head an aroma came to him as powerful as sex, the same pungent odors as came now from the paste in Quiroga's bedroom. She always wore her garden of odors, this angel from Barrett's distant past.

Or witch.

A recollection had been jarred loose by the pungent and familiar odor in El Toro's bedroom.

He remembered the day his father was killed.

Barrett stepped back from the trailer's bedroom. His handgun went unremembered, limp in his hand, as he sank into a bolted chair. The day was before him, now, brought back with a conjure of dog fennel and herbs.

It had started outside in bright sunshine with the free play of wind and boyhood imagination. He was throwing darts. Not the store-bought darts familiar to barhoppers, of course. No, Barrett's was a boyhood invention. You took a corncob, then you sawed off the head of a nail. The sawed end of the nail got pushed or hammered into the base of the corncob; the other end made the point. You pressed a quill of chicken feathers into the crown of the corncob. Three or four would do.

Now you were ready. You could throw at targets. Or you could just throw the dart for distance or height, marveling at the swift spiral the feathers imparted, delighting in the corncob's distance and climb. He could remember the play, that morning, a rare and uncomplicated run of imagination. The corncob was a fighter plane, a spaceship. He was launched to Gainesville, to Valdosta, to Mars. Those flights were canceled rudely with his father's return.

Barrett recalled the smell of gasoline as his father drove up in his half-repaired sedan. He saw his mother emerge from the car, fresh stitches across her face, her jaw.

“Goddamn cost me thirty dollah,” Barrett's father raged. “How'm I s'pose to find thirty dollah?”

His mother did not answer. Her face was bruised, her jaw swollen. Her eyes were silver.

“Git in the house.” Randall Grant Raines was pulling off his belt, and his beaten wife obeyed mutely.

Barrett dropped the corncob and trailed his father and mother inside.

“Git back, you,” his father snarled, but Barrett came on anyway.

From the shade of the sagging porch, through the door, he saw his mother running.

“Randall, don't!”

Barrett ran into the bedroom. He remembered reaching for his father.

“Leave Mama alone.”

“Whelp,” the father sneered, and as Barrett came between man and wife the father picked up his son by the neck and strode for the closet.

Then came the part that Bear was always able to remember. The tight, hot, closet. Dirty clothes. Fear and sweat.

The baseball bat.

Barrett remembered the weight of the wood in his hand. He remembered, as in his dreams, kicking the door. But this time the door opened full. Barrett came out running. His father was fully occupied with Barrett's mother when the nine-year-old boy sprinted across the warped floor, screaming, the bat held high over his little head.

The father didn't even bother to turn around.

Barrett had never played baseball. One of the many curious absences in his boyhood life. So he did not know how to swing his brother's bat, except as an axe.

He ran hard, aiming at the small of his father's back. He could feel the hatred and fear as he swung the bat down—

Some malicious instinct for survival told Barrett's father to turn. He took the first blow high on the ribs.