Chapter 14 Dues, Son. Dues. #3
“You know goddamned well they got that fuckin’ phone,” the man spat.
“The sheriff knows it too. This place—it’s got that yellow car that nobody can catch, and we saw that green Forester that’s raising hell all over the fuckin’ desert.
This place is behind it. Sheriff told me to come get the fuckin’ phone, ’cause his useless girlfriend told him it was gone. ”
Ooh. Good to know. Phase One, complete.
“Why?” George asked. “What’s on the fuckin’ phone? Why would you come in here and threaten my life over your boss’s phone?”
Another shot, and this one penetrated a little deeper into the Plexiglas.
George’s heart started hammering in his throat, and he thought dizzily that he’d never been this scared in his life.
Next to him, Ernie murmured, “Here, take the gun and step to the side where the Plexiglas is thicker.”
George did that, but he knew—and Ernie probably knew too—that the odds of the barrier between them and certain death wasn’t guaranteed to last one more shot.
But Daily’s hands were shaking, and sweat was pouring off his forehead in the cool of the early morning spring. It hit George that this man was afraid of something. Whatever his errand here, he was afraid.
George shifted the other way, so the steel-reinforced door was at his back, and hollered, “What’s on that phone, Deputy kiddie-fucker. What’s on that goddamned phone!”
Daily screamed, the gun exploding in rapid succession—and George, hidden from the Plexiglas—counted. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—
The Plexiglas blew inward at the eighth shot, and for a moment, all they could hear was the panicked click-click-click as the deputy fired desperately, hoping for one more bullet.
George stepped in view, stuck the muzzle of the gun through one of the large holes in the Plexiglas, and fired repeatedly, hitting the man center mass in his Kevlar, and he staggered back.
George stopped firing, and the deputy stared at him, his knees wobbly. Before he could fall to the ground, one more shot came through a hole in the Plexiglas, higher and slightly off center than George’s shots.
The man stared at Ernie, shocked, and his gun dropped from his hands as he fell, bleeding copiously from the neck into the oily dust and gravel coating the hardpan under the auto bay.
“Oh God,” George muttered, staring at Ernie standing with his own gun aimed through the glass.
“Cold blood,” Ernie muttered, looking faint. His gun hand dropped to his side, and he grabbed the counter, leaning heavily on the stool. “He’d kill us in cold blood. His brain is full of bugs.”
“He’s bleeding,” George said, his face, his hands, everything going numb. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
And then he heard the frightened whimper coming from the ground.
You’re a healer, George. Help him.
He barely heard Ernie calling his name as he stepped out of the cubicle and ran to kneel next to the fallen enemy, who was staring up at the overhang, eyes rolling wildly while his fingers scrabbled for his fallen gun.
George shoved the gun away with his foot before he crouched, and he pulled off his hoodie to press against the man’s neck.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit. Hell. Fuck.” The guy was bleeding out fast, and George knew from experience that ambulances could take twenty minutes to half an hour to get out here.
“Stop,” the dying man rasped. “Just… stop.”
“What?” George actually did stop moving, he was so surprised.
“Life’s not much good,” the man said. “Not if your guy’s got the phone.”
George stared at him blankly, trying to put that into context. His life wasn’t good if they had the phone? But….
His hands lifted from the wadded-up cloth before his brain fully processed. “The phone?”
“Pictures,” Deputy Daily said. “Me and the kids. So… pretty.”
George swallowed and lost his balance, falling on his ass. He thought, I need to put the bandage back. I need to apply pressure. Somebody should call an ambulance.
And then, as he watched in horror, the deputy started scrabbling at his own neck. Before George could stand up and get back into position, he’d ripped the hoodie away completely and was shoving his fingers in the wound at his neck, his movements growing weaker with every dig.
George made a sound in his throat, a moan of sorts, and he felt a hand at his arm, tugging him up.
He whirled, almost furious, when he saw Ernie, white-faced, gazing at him with sympathy. “I’m sorry,” Ernie said, still unsteady on his feet. “Bugs. I told you. Bugs.”
And George understood then, full realization settling in as to why this man’s life wouldn’t be worth anything if their plan worked. If the phone saw the light of day.
He might have turned back toward the bad man bleeding out at their feet—still he might have tried to help, but he saw Ernie wobble again and he thought, Ernie is my friend, and a good man.
And instead of crouching down to check the man’s breathing—it had almost stopped—he turned instead and held out his arms, and he and Ernie held each other, trembling, as they bled out their adrenaline, their fear, and their grief.
After a heartbeat, two, the corpse at their feet was done moving, and a faint voice emerged from the garage in the pit.
“If you are done, and the man is dead, I may have some ideas for what we should do. Quickly, yes?”
Ernie pulled back and scrubbed at his face. “Fuck,” he muttered. “His car can be tracked here.”
Dimitri appeared, shoving back the rollers that separated the undercarriage of the car engines from the vulnerable mechanics underneath so he could address them both.
“You can do two things,” he said. “You can let me strip the vehicle while you hide the body, or you can let me remove all the radio devices and GPS while you stash body in back.”
Ernie swallowed. “Get rid of the radio and GPS,” he said decisively.
“We’ll wrap the body and shove it in back.
I can dispose of the SUV with the body then, but I’ll need a ride home.
” He took a breath and frowned. “It’s fine.
Jason will be out my way—he’ll get me home.
George, you and Dimitri stay here and mind the store. ”
George nodded and looked at the body again. “What… what do you think he would have done if we hadn’t been here?” Because God, what he would have given to be anywhere else.
Nobody had an answer at that moment, but when they lifted the hatch (partly to pilfer from the weaponry in the back of the SUV because you didn’t randomly dump guns in the desert, even if they’d already established that bodies were fair game), they discovered two full containers of gasoline, with a shitton of rags.
George stared at the gallon containers in a sick sort of shock.
“Oh my God,” he said as he finished wrapping the body up in one of the many army surplus tarps that the garage went through in a year.
“He was going to kill us. He was going to burn this place down no matter who he found here.” He straightened up and without knowing what he was going to do, he swung his foot back and threw his weight into a kick into the corpse’s midsection. “You fucking worm!”
“Whoa there,” Ernie said, coming up to quell his rage. “You do nobody any good if you break a toe.”
“I hope he’s burning in hell,” George said, still stunned at how angry he was. That man… that man had been planning to kill them!
“Told ya,” Ernie said, a quiet sort of smugness at the corners of his mouth. “His brain was full of bugs.”
George shuddered. “Also a good fate for his corpse. I’ll leave it to you.”
Ernie shrugged. “I know a place,” he said, setting one of the gallons down in the garage—they could use it by the end of the day. “I’m just glad I’ll be able to find a ride.”
George drove the SUV over the pit so Dimitri could do his thing, and he and Ernie set about cleaning up—including running to grab one of Ernie’s old sweatshirts from the spare room so George could wash his hands and not look like a bit player in a horror movie.
They got the body in the back of the cruiser, and George finished dumping sand and gravel over the blood stain, effectively hiding it until they could power wash it out later, when they heard another set of wheels on the hardpan.
George nodded to Ernie to get in the cashier’s cube, the better to hide under the counter with guns, and he wandered to the side of the garage to meet whoever this was and hide all the bullet fractures in the once-bulletproof Plexiglas.
It was another goddamned cop. This one seemed tired, though, and he rolled his window down as George approached, taking his sunglasses off to be accessible.
“What can I do for you, Deputy?” George asked, and for the first time since he was in college, calling his parents and lying to them about his grades, he felt some of the benefits of a misspent youth. He had an adorably bland face, and he could lie like a champion.
“No worries here,” the man said. “I’m looking for another cruiser, actually. Dispatch said he was supposed to come out this way to check for an escaped fugitive, and Officer Daily hasn’t reported in a while. Even his cruiser’s GPS has gone offline.”
Wow—go Dimitri!
“Well, somebody did stop by to check on us,” George said guilelessly. As he spoke the radio at the deputy’s knees began to squawk like something big was going down. “We’ve been pretty quiet all morning, same old same old, lots of flat tires ’cause of the road construction, right?”
The man nodded in sympathy. “I get that. I was thinking maybe Tim had picked up a nail himself and maybe had you guys change his flat.”
“Well, we would have,” George said, “but he just stopped by for a minute, and then continued off down the road—west I think.”
At that moment, the noise on the radio grew to critical levels, with the finale being a shout of “Fuckin’ Cuthbert’s getting out of his vehicle, and that fuckin Forester ain’t stopping!”