Unforced Error (18 page)

“Good girl,” Rep said.

“Let's go,” Linda squealed.

“No,” Rep said, “let's stay here. That racket is going to draw a crowd fast, and this will be the last place they'll look.”

“Right,” Melissa said.

The three of them huddled in the darkest part of the silo they could find. Melissa and Rep stood back-to-back so that Melissa could try to untie Rep's hands. Actors in the endless run of 'fifties and 'sixties TV westerns that Melissa had watched while she was earning an A in
The Male Hero Construct in Post-War American Popular Culture
had repeatedly done this trick with admirable efficiency and adroitness. Often, they'd start at the commercial break and be done the moment the commercials were over. Melissa found the task considerably more daunting.

“Maybe I should try untying yours,” Rep said. “Are your fingernails getting in the way?”

“Not anymore,” Melissa said. “They're all gone.”

“Shhh!” Linda said. “Someone's coming!”

They all shut up. They all stopped moving. For that matter, they almost stopped breathing. Within a few seconds, a confused hubbub of voices reached them through the door. At first they could only pick up snatches, some of it in a language they didn't understand.

“Look at Lou! How did they manage that?”

“What the—”

“Hey—”

Then Lawrence's voice cut through the chatter. His tone was concerned but calm and clear.

“All right. He still has both guns and we heard the last shots less than four minutes ago, so they can't have gotten far. They're probably headed for the encampment. Twelve of you fan out and look for them in that direction. The other six stay here and make sure they haven't hidden in the brush somewhere so they can sneak back to the house while our backs are turned. If anyone asks what's going on, say it's a patrol and ambush exercise in preparation for the battle tomorrow.”

Without making a production of it, Melissa went back to work on the ropes around Rep's wrists. Rep felt a sudden let-down, and he sensed that Melissa shared it. Against all the odds, they'd managed to get rid of the guard. They were comparatively safe for—what? The next thirty minutes? Forty-five at the most? At some point, long before twilight, Lawrence was going to think to look in the silo, and he could hardly help finding them when he did. Staying in the silo was the only thing they could have done. It had given them a chance. If they'd run they'd be dead. There was plenty of light, and the muzzle velocity of a Spencer carbine is more than fast enough to negate a two-hundred-second head start, especially with the added burden of Rep's gimpy ankle. But unless Melissa got Rep untied in a hurry they were going to be right back in the soup. All they'd have to show for their improvisation and heroic effort would be a dramatic increase in Peter's survival prospects, for it was inconceivable that Lawrence would risk hanging around much longer after he'd gotten them out of the way.

Rep thought he felt a very slight loosening of one of the cords biting into his wrist. Maybe there was hope after all. Maybe they had a chance. And even if they didn't, their own deaths would still have accomplished something if Peter would just keep his head down for a few more hours.

That's when they heard the bugle.

It was very close—far too close to be coming from the encampment. It came, in fact, Rep realized in astonishment, from the top of the silo. Craning his neck so that he could see through the cracks that the opening roof had created before its motor seized up, he could make out a figure, black against the sunlight, standing at the top of the ladder outside the silo.

The bugle call was
CHARGE!
As a musical instrument, the bugle has severe limitations. Range, tonality, pitch—none of these are outstanding qualities. In one respect, however, it is unequalled. It is loud. Designed to be heard over the clatter of hooves, the rattle of fire from thousands of guns, the roar of cannon, it carries its message a long way.

Voices again came through the door, and this time they were quite clear.

“Whatinhellizat?”

For almost a minute the question had no answer but the penetrating notes of the bugle itself. The ladder was on the side of the silo opposite the door. Someone had to run halfway around the structure and then halfway back to report.

“It's Damon! The guy we're looking for! Up there on toppa that ladder!”

Linda's mouth gaped. She sank to her bottom, ducked her head, and bit into her own knee to keep from screaming.

“Don't shoot him!” Lawrence's voice. “We need him alive! Go up there after him!”

“Hey, what's that?”

“What's what?”

“Something's coming! And they look like they mean it, too!”

“Line up!”

Rep edged over to the doorway, dropped to his belly, and chanced a cautious look through.

“What are they doing?” asked Melissa, who had followed him.

“They're dressing the line,” Rep said.

Melissa looked. Lawrence was hastily forming the seventeen men who weren't scurrying up the ladder after Peter into a skirmish line. He wasn't actually barking “Dress right—dress!” but each man lined himself up with the man to his right, then went down on one knee and raised his carbine.

Looking beyond the line, she could see the black cloud racing over the ground a quarter-mile away that had provoked this reaction. No, it wasn't a cloud. And it wasn't black. It was horsemen, at least forty, some in blue and some in gray, sun glinting from the revolvers and sabers in their hands. They were riding—no, they weren't
riding
. They were
galloping
hell for leather, whipping their mounts furiously, digging their spurs into the animals' flanks, racing with heart-stopping abandon toward the bugle's call.

“Dragoons, as I live and breathe,” Melissa said.

The charge reminded Rep of a B-52 that he'd seen at an air show once, flying only two-hundred feet off the ground. It wasn't just breathtakingly beautiful and terrible at the same time; it was beautiful
because
it was terrible.

Lawrence's let's-pretend soldiers managed one ragged volley. This came when the horsemen were about two-hundred feet away—close enough for Rep to recognize Pendleton in the lead, a revolver in each fist and reins clenched between his teeth. A spattering of fire from the charging cavalry answered the carbines. One of Lawrence's men screamed and fell backwards, grabbing his side. Another dropped without a sound.

That was all the others needed. Some threw down their guns and raised their hands. The rest broke and ran.

What happened next was quite horrible. Rep remembered a line from Pakenham's history of the Boer War: “The charge of two hundred horsemen galloping across a plain is designed to be an irresistible force. It does not stop simply because the enemy would like to surrender.” Three prisoners would be taken this day.
Well
, Rep thought,
bad things happen in war.

As soon as the line broke Lawrence disappeared from the constricted view Rep and Melissa had. They learned only later that he had run to the blind side of the silo, where Peter was still blowing his bugle at the top of the ladder. Lawrence fired one revolver shot before Peter turned around and noticed him.

Pendleton found Lawrence less than a minute after that, his head burst like a melon by a bugle hurled from a height of forty feet.

***

Three hours later, in the reception area at Jackrabbit Press, Linda wiggled her fingers at Peter, who was dressed improbably in a gray uniform and just as improbably handling an oversized cigar. He handed the stogie to her and she took an outlandishly amateurish puff as the prelude to a ragged cough. It was a night when non-smokers did that kind of thing.

“So,” Melissa was saying to Henderson, “the reason everyone was all set was that you thought Rep and Linda and I were up to something?”

“Well, sure. I mean, that thing about where can I smoke? Honey, you're talking to an ex-smoker with teenagers. Anyone who gets within sniffing distance of you would know your last cigarette was many showers and mouthwashes ago. So I thought you guys must be planning on meeting Peter out here for some reason, and I figured I'd better get word to Red.”

“Thing is,” Pendleton said, “Peter had been with me for almost two days. When Karin said that you guys were messing around up here, he got his game face on and insisted on coming up here to make sure everything was all right. I let him do it, and got everyone ready to come on the double if he called us, because the only other thing I could've done was arrest him.”

“Why didn't you turn him over to the Kansas City police when he showed up and told you the story?” Rep asked.

“Well, I get a little bit tired of doing
all
those boys' work for 'em. I got them the right saber after they'd done gone an' got the wrong one, and I got it to the lab that found the blood. They were a little cross with me already, so I figured that was enough for someone who was off the clock. The way I saw it, if they wanted me to arrest Peter they should have asked me.”

“But didn't they think to look for Peter at the encampment?” Melissa asked.

“That they did, but for some reason they figured he'd be on the Yankee side. I volunteered to look on our side, but somehow I just couldn't turn him up. You know how it is: spend a coupla days jawin' with these city boys and one farmer with bad hair in gray looks pretty much like another one to you.”

“Why did you run out here to the encampment?” Linda asked Peter. “Why didn't you just stay with us at the hospital?”

“I thought I was endangering you,” Peter said. “It seemed like the best thing to do was tell the story to Red, so he could get the FBI on the thing. I knew Red would trust me not to run off, so he wouldn't have to lock me up. I was afraid Lawrence might be planning some kind of attack to coincide with the re-enactment tomorrow, and I knew Red was the only police officer who'd pay any attention to that. Telling you where I was going would have put you in a tight spot with the police. I just thought you three would have the sense to sit tight.”

“Unfortunately,” Rep said, “good sense isn't the outstanding characteristic of meddling amateurs who stick their noses in police business.”

“That's gospel truth, that is,” Pendleton said, playing the cracker-barrel rube shtick for all it was worth. “You can't have a copyright lawyer and a Ph.D in Literature and a book editor running around doing police work. You've got to let trained police officers figure out that a French poet was a Nazi collaborator and a marathon runner with hospital quality fluid bags must have something more important to do with them than keep his grass fresh and a silo has Baggies inside the top. They would've gotten around to it in two or three years, too, leastwise if no one committed any more murders in the meantime.”

Linda pulled Rep a bit shyly away from the laughter surrounding Pendleton, toward a quieter corner of the room.

“Do you think the story is going to break?” she asked. “About Peter and that actress from California?”

“I talked with my, um, my
contact
about half an hour ago,” Rep said. “She doesn't think so. She said that only two stringers showed any interest in it after the date-rape drug story got around. They're both lazy, and she said she knows of some microfilm on each of them about things they wouldn't want their moms to see. So she doesn't think they'll pursue it.”

“That's a miracle,” Linda said.

“That's what my contact said,” Rep nodded. “She called it the miracle of the loafs and the fiches.”

***

“It's funny,” Melissa said to Rep's back in February of the following year as he lugged a baby car seat down the stairs of the Damons' home. “I didn't pray in the silo. I was scared spitless, and I knew you were scared too, even though we were both keeping up a brave front, but I never thought of praying. Yet for the last month or so I've been praying fervently.”

Rep paused at the bottom of the stairs, set the car seat down, and turned to face his wife at the top as she prepared to carry down an overnight bag full of baby clothes. They were on their way to St. Luke's to bring Peter and Linda and their two-day old baby home.

“What were you praying for?” he asked.

“Some kind of bargain basement miracle,” she said. “I wanted an angel to come down for a talk with Peter, or something along those lines, so that he'd absolutely
know
, without any shadow of a doubt, that this baby was his.”

“I suppose that wouldn't have hurt anything, ” Rep said, “although it sounds a bit like the type of thing I've seen you make fun of in footnotes now and then.”

“Reduction in certainty is a symptom of wisdom. It really started with that woman from JACKS (AND JILLS!) OF ALL TRADES. She told me a story about a miter box her father made for her, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it was the first time in my adult life I could imagine the doctrine of the incarnation as anything more than a pretty story.”

“You mean in the home of a guy who thinks words are the sound of God laughing you had a carpenter named Jesse Davidovich tell you something that produced a spiritual insight, and you're still looking for angels? How much divine intercession do you think one Ph.D is entitled to?”

“I'm not sure whether to kiss you or throw this bag at you,” she said. “On a topic of this importance, I want all the certainty I can get.”

“Take a look at that kid's ears, then,” Rep told her. “Because I already have, and I can tell you one thing: his father is either Peter Damon or Prince Charles.”

“I pray for a miracle and I get an observant husband with an empiricist attitude,” Melissa said.

“Sounds like divine intervention to me,” Rep said.