The White Mountain (15 page)

Randall looked over at The
Devil Himself.  His left side was a shredded, mangled, and bloody mess, but he
was alive.  Randall took one more look outside, and then scrambled over to him. 

The Devil Himself gulped for
air like a fish on dry land.  His eyes were vacant, expressionless.  Left cheek
and scalp pockmarked with craters of ripped skin and shrapnel.

Randall put his hand on the
man’s good cheek, and turned his head to face him.  He whispered, “Hey.  Hey,
Devil, can you hear me?”

The Devil Himself blinked and
managed to nod.

“
Jeder für sich
, man. 
Didn’t have a choice.”

The Devil Himself coughed. 
Globs of blood dotted his face.  “I would’ve...same thing.”

Randall flashed another
glance over his shoulder.  The windows remained clear.  “Tell me who Ares is
and I’ll make it fast.”

“Doesn’t matter...you won’t—”

Randall grabbed a handful of clothing
and shook him.  “Tell me!  Who is it?”

The Devil Himself forced a
grin, whispered a partial answer, coughed once, and died.

Randall shook him, called the
corpse a liar.  Begged him, in a harried whisper, to come back to life and tell
him the rest.

He stood, checked the windows
again, and moved to a safer spot along the wall.

If it were true, if Ares was
who The Devil Himself had claimed, and if Mary stumbled on the answer before he
had a chance to warn her, he may have sent her to her death.  She would
disappear, evaporate in a puff of smoke, and nobody would ever find a trace. 
Chuck too, probably.

Chuck would know better,
wouldn’t he?  He’d tell her to leave it alone.  It was too big, too risky to
pursue.

But Mary...Mary and her damn
bullheaded need to fix things, to make them as they should be, no matter what
the stakes or the consequences—she wouldn’t be able to walk away.  Not with
Alice and Jesse in danger, not when there was a wrong to right.

I gotta get to D.C.
, he thought. 
I gotta pull her out
myself.  Forget the money, ‘cause we’re all dead if I don’t.

A floorboard creaked
overhead, followed by the soft
ba-bump
of another footstep.

Randall spun around and
shuffled along the wall until he was at the bottom of the basement stairs.

Fifteen steps that he’d
climbed countless times now appeared to be an insurmountable obstacle.  The
door above an ascent into Hell.  How quickly, and how quietly, could he get up there
before the man upstairs reached it?  Randall cocked an ear, listening for the
sound of another footstep, hoping to gauge a location.  How far down the ground
floor hallway had he been ten seconds ago?  It’d been difficult to tell from
the single creaking board. 

He could be near the kitchen,
or he could be right on the other side, separated by an inch of cheap, paneled
wood.

Randall waited a second
longer, and the hesitation cost him, as he listened to the old doorknob screech
while it turned.

Shit. Shit!  Okay, go!

Randall pushed himself away
from the wall, launching up the stairs in threes, landing on the tips of his
toes, quietly, like stepping on cotton, propelling himself upward.  He lifted
his .45 and fired twice through the door at chest level.

He heard a body slump to the
floor on the opposite side as he dropped, chest to stairs, waiting on some type
of retaliation.  It couldn’t have been that easy.  He held his breath and
counted, as he always had, to keep himself focused.  When no response came, he
inched closer to the landing, cocked his head sideways, and peeked under the
door.  A body blocked the other side.  Green shirt, buzz-cut hair so close he
could almost feel the warmth emanating from the skin.

Wait, no, that
is
something warm.

He pulled his head back, saw
the pool of blood seeping underneath the door, filling in the semi-circle
outline where his cheek had been.  Randall groaned, disgusted, and used his
t-shirt to wipe his face clean.  “Nasty,” he said.

Confident he was safe, he
opened the basement door and found Yankee Doodle on his back, staring at the
ceiling, dead and eliminated from the competition.  One entry wound over the
left lung, the other through his jugular vein.  Randall toed the body with a
boot tip and got no response.

“Deader than shit.”  Randall
began to shake, partly in relief, partly in anger and frustration.  “I got
you.  Son of a bitch, I got you.  Think you can come into my house?  Take
me
on?  You got
any idea
who I am? 
Any
idea?”  He clenched his jaws
together, drew his leg back and kicked Yankee Doodle’s lifeless body in the
ribs, then pounded on his own chest with each word as he screamed, “I am.  The
White.  
Fucking.
  Mountain!”

Randall screamed again and
punched the wall, leaving a row of knuckle-sized dents in the sheetrock.

The brief eruption calmed him
long enough to take stock of what he’d done.

He’d killed again.  For the second
time in two days, he’d taken a life at close range.   With Enigma, thinking it
was one of the others, he’d been so hyped up on adrenaline that he hadn’t taken
the time to dissect the situation.  As he paused and looked over Yankee Doodle,
somehow, up close and personal, it felt different.  What was it?  Guilt, maybe?

No, not
guilt
.  He
felt no remorse for the man on the floor.  Kill or be killed.

What it was—it felt
real
. 
More real than all the instances where he’d picked off a target from thousands
of yards away.  When they were nothing more than silhouettes in the crosshairs
of his scope, backlit by the sun or somewhat distorted by the glass of a
window, it was target practice.  Another day on the shooting range or at the
carnival, picking off tiny targets to win an oversized stuffed animal.

But, with a body at his feet,
leaking and growing cold, he didn’t have the option of pulling the trigger and
then slinking back into the jungle.  There was an aftermath to deal with.  Blood
to clean up, a body to dispose of, and two more attacking competitors coming
for him.

And, again, there was Mary. 
Clueless and about to trip and fall into a Mt. Everest-sized pile of shit if he
didn’t get to her fast enough.

The money, winning, it didn’t
matter anymore.

What mattered was fixing what
he was responsible for, putting the brakes on an out of control locomotive as
it hurtled down the tracks.

Back when he’d first agreed
to play the game, his dumbass decision to say yes seemed like a wise one.  Win,
and they could afford the treatment Alice needed for her meth addiction—get her
fixed, and get her gone, somewhere far away from the dangers of a relapse.  A
house near Kitty Hawk, like she’d always dreamed about.  Lose...well, losing
wasn’t an option.  But, in the months since he’d signed the agreement, she’d
shown strength he didn’t know she had, beating it on her own, saving their
little family.  And now he was the one ruining it with his inability to remove
himself from the contest.  It was either win and end it, or die and pray that
everything would be okay.

The latter was
not
an alternative. 
Saving Mary, saving himself, and saving his family were the only possible
outcomes.

Damn the money.  They could
keep it.

He tried to come up with a
plan of action, calculating how long everything would take.  Get Yankee Doodle
downstairs, wrap him up in the tarp with The Devil Himself.  Haul the bodies up
to Arrowhead Mountain and dump them down the brushy hillside like all the other
country-folk used to do when they needed to get rid of an ancient refrigerator
or washing machine. 

He knew the spot.  Halfway up
the mountain was a deserted logging road, unused and rarely maintained.  About
a mile in and off to the right, fifty yards into the trees, lay a pile of rusty
refuse perfect for hiding two dead men.  It wasn’t in a prime hunting area, so
the likelihood of somebody stumbling across the bodies was minimal.  It’d be
months before they were found, if ever.  And if they did, if they managed to
identify the bodies, everybody from the local law on up to the CIA would
probably high-five each other over the fact that a couple of high-value targets
were gone.  Two less dipshits on their list to worry about.

It would work, if only he had
more time.  Darkness was over fourteen hours away.  Way too long, way too
late.  Did he dare risk it in the daylight?

Not a chance.  Get caught and
everybody was screwed.

On the other hand, he could
get to D.C., snatch Mary, and get home before nightfall, and
then
go
dump the bodies.  Five hours up, an hour to find her, five hours back, and time
to clean up before the stars winked to life.

Done.  That’s the way it had
to be.

He didn’t know how long he’d
been standing there, but the grandfather clock chimed in the living room,
signaling the half-hour mark. 

7:30.  Half an hour to get
Yankee Doodle out of the way, mop up the blood, and then get on the road by
8AM.  In northern Virginia by 1PM, find Mary, fight some traffic, home by 7PM. 
Perfect.

Randall stepped over the pool
of blood, knelt, and grabbed Yankee Doodle under the arms.  He pushed up with
his legs, lifting, dragging the body around so that his back was to the open
basement stairwell.  He said, “Damn, son, did you weigh this much when you were
alive?”

He backed up and lowered
himself onto the top step, then heard a knock at the back door.

He stood still.  Had he
imagined it?  Had something fallen over in the kitchen?  A glass in the sink,
maybe?

The screen door rattled
again. 
Bam, bam, bam
, followed by a voice shouting, “Randall?  Randall,
open up!”

Henry Walls.

Randall looked down at the
dead man in his arms, at the pool of blood on the floor, then at the red stains
on his t-shirt.  Distraction was the only possibility.

He let go of Yankee Doodle
and stepped to the side.  The body bounced down a few steps and stopped
halfway, limp, twisted, and contorted. 

Randall sprinted over to the
coat closet under the stairs.  He stashed the gun beneath a bag of discarded
clothes meant for charity, and grabbed two jackets from their hangers.  He used
one to cover the pool of blood and put the other one on to hide his t-shirt.

Bam, bam, bam.
  “Randall!”

“Hang on, Henry,” he shouted
back.  “I’m coming.”

Randall swiftly moved into
the kitchen and washed his hands and his face.  Without a mirror handy, he
hoped he’d cleaned himself of all the blood.

Bam, bam, bam.
  “Any day now!”

Randall dried his hands,
crossed the kitchen, and went out to the breezeway.  He slung open the door to
find Walls standing there, already drenched in the morning’s heat and
humidity.  Randall, trying to be his usual self, said, “Well hellfire, Henry,
what in the world stung you in the ass, beating down my door like that?”

“That’s
Detective
Walls, Mr. Blevins.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn—I
mean, yeah, good morning, Detective Walls.  What brings you by?”

Walls angled his head back,
cocked it to the side.  “You okay, Randall?”

“Fine and dandy.  Something
wrong?”

“You’re whiter than milk. 
Sweaty, too.”

Randall wiped his forehead
with a sleeve.  “Pumping a little iron, that’s all.”  Randall feigned a bicep
flex.  “Gotta keep the guns oiled, don’t we?”

“In a jacket?  It’s already
eighty degrees out here.”

Stupid
, Randall thought. 
Don’t screw this
up.
  He ignored the question and asked, “What’s it you need, Hen—uh, Detective?”

Walls put his hands in his
pockets.  “Couple of questions for you, in regards to the victim.”

Randall leaned up against the
doorjamb, crossed his arms.  “I thought we cleared this up already.  Don’t know
a thing about him.”

“Let’s give it a shot
anyway.  That sound okay by you?”

“I reckon so.”

“I’ll start with an easy
one.  You’re a hundred percent positive you have no idea who he was?”

“A hundred and ten.”

“And you don’t know why he
would have your address and ‘The White Mountain’ written down on a slip of
paper?”

“Like I told y’all yesterday,
no, I don’t.”

“And the story about you
being on some sort of hit list is true?”

“Like a bear shitting in the
woods.”

“Uh-huh.  Uh-huh.  Okay,
okay, Randall?  Do you want to tell me why our John Doe vic got a really
interesting phone call this morning?”

“Interesting how?”

“Had that feller’s cell phone
on my desk, was gonna have it checked for prints.  The thing rings, and so
naturally I answer it, figuring it might be some of his kin.  Only I didn’t
have a chance to say anything before this voice comes on—kinda garbled, like
how you see in the movies—and it says...you want to take a guess what it said?”