That’s what he’d told the half-dozen suspects he’d maced in the line of duty, watching as they spat and swore, silently wondering how they could be such babies.
He mentally apologized to all of them. This was awful.
A few more yards, and he breathed again. He was still sucking in fire and brimstone, but it wasn’t as bad.
It will pass. It will pass.
He felt the communicator vibrate in his pocket. They were coming. And they knew where he was. Streng clung to a nearby tree, used it to pull himself up, and realized he no longer held the Colt. No matter. He couldn’t hold off four Special Ops soldiers plus the grenade-launcher guy with just one handgun. His only hope was to make it to Wiley’s.
He tried to look around, but his eyes had swollen to slits and his vision was out of focus. Streng considered calling to Fran but didn’t want her to reveal her position to the enemy. He would have to go it alone.
The sheriff picked the most likely direction to run, then took off at a jog, hands out in front of him so he didn’t run into any trees.
He got four steps before hearing the SNAP!
At first he thought he’d simply caught his leg on something. Then the sickening realization hit him a second before the pain.
A bear trap.
Streng fell to his knee, hands seeking the trap, finding the terrible jaws slicing through the muscles of his calf, anchoring into bone.
Then came agony.
Streng buried his face in the crook of his arm, muffling his scream. This was worse than the pepper spray. Worse than the kidney mauling. His whole body quaked in anguish, and if he still had his Colt he would have put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
He stuck his fingers in the teeth, tried to pull it apart. It gave—an inch, two, three—and then snapped closed again, prompting another horrific scream.
Streng’s mind, insane with pain, struggled to form a lucid thought. He needed something to pry the trap open. Maybe a branch. His hands scoured the ground around him, finding nothing.
The Ka-Bar knife? Streng groped for the fanny pack, finding the Warthog, wedging it into the mechanism and trying to force it open.
No good. The handle was too short. No leverage.
Goddamn you, Wiley.
Streng hated his brother then, hated him more than anyone he’d ever known. He was the cause of this entire mess. And now Streng would be captured, and the pain would get even worse. They’d make him talk. Streng was tough, but Santiago would only have to gently nudge the trap with his foot and Streng would be aching to tell him where Wiley lived. Wiley would die. Fran and Duncan would die. And he would die.
Better if it were only him.
Streng sobbed, coughed, spat, and then raised the knife to his own throat, wishing it was Wiley’s. A bear trap. That son of a bitch. How could he? Especially knowing what their father went through, his leg trapped under that tree …
The sheriff paused. Maybe he didn’t have to die. Maybe he still could get away.
He tugged off his belt and cinched it under his knee.
Don’t think about it, Streng told himself. Dad did it. You can do it, too. And if you do, the pain will stop. You’re an old fart, anyway. Three weeks away from retirement. What do you need two legs for?
Streng brought the knife down. And he began.
The jaws of the trap had already done most of the work. Streng stuck the blade in where the teeth were already embedded, following an imaginary line around the circumference of the calf.
Almost like carving the meat off a ham hock, Streng thought.
The pain was still there, but he felt a curious detachment from what was happening. Detachment. Streng laughed at the double meaning of the word, but it wasn’t a laugh at all, it was a tortured sob, but he had to keep quiet, keep so quiet so they didn’t find him, and then the knife was through the flesh and the muscle and the tissue and he pulled and then screamed again because the leg was still caught.
The bone.
He recalled Dad’s story, how he used a rock to break his leg bone.
Streng didn’t have a rock. But the Ka-Bar Warthog was a heavy blade, razor sharp.
He began to chop.
The belt tourniquet wasn’t helping much. Streng’s fingers were slick with blood, and he’d become so dizzy it was a struggle to stay awake. He alternated knife blows with manually checking to see if the bone had been severed yet; the pain had become so all encompassing he couldn’t tell without touching.
Hack.
Feel.
Hack.
Feel.
Hack.
Feel.
Cut! The bone was cut!
Streng let out a strangled grunt of triumph, put his hands behind him, and tried to pull his leg away again—
—and screamed.
He was still caught.
He palpated the area with muddy fingers. The bone was severed. The flesh was severed. Why was he still—
Son of a gun, Streng thought. Another bone.
In all of Dad’s stories, he’d never mentioned that a leg had two bones in it.
Streng sought out his fanny pack, located the box of Magnum rounds. He broke it open, selected one, and wedged it in the hinge of his mouth, between two molars.
Bite the bullet, old man.
Moaning deep in his throat, Streng raised the Ka-Bar and hacked as fast as he could, not stopping to feel, not wanting to drag it out any longer.
He knew he had to keep quiet, but he couldn’t anymore. The scream came from deep within and went on and on like a foghorn. Streng hacked and hacked and screamed and hacked.
On the eighth hack his leg came free.
Streng didn’t pause to celebrate. He dropped the knife, grabbed two handfuls of dirt, and began to drag himself away from the trap. The pain had reached a point where it seemed like it wasn’t even happening to him anymore. It had become another entity, a doppelgänger of himself, a creature of pure suffering. He crawled alongside his pain, down on his belly, pushing himself forward with his remaining leg, determined to get away.
Noise, to his right. Streng squinted.
Ajax.
Streng considered his next move, and realized he only had one—release the belt on his leg and bleed to death.
He reached down, seeking the buckle.
“Aren’t you a big one?”
The voice came from the left. Streng stared, saw Wiley in his ghillie suit, holding a shotgun.
“Body armor,” Streng managed to say.
Wiley aimed at Ajax and squeezed the trigger.
Streng knew he was hallucinating, because it looked and sounded like Wiley fired eight shots within two seconds.
Ajax crumpled like a demoed building, spraying arterial blood so far that some of it hit Streng in the face.
“Body armor my ass,” Wiley said. He reached down and Streng felt himself being dragged.
Abruptly—and absurdly, considering the circumstance—everything became clear to Streng. He had always looked up to Wiley. Put his older brother on a pedestal. Through the haze of pain, Streng realized that he wasted thirty years trying to analyze why Wiley didn’t measure up to his standards, when he should have simply accepted him. Family shouldn’t judge. Family should forgive.
“I’m sorry,” Streng mumbled, hoping his brother heard him.
The sheriff was sure he heard Wiley say, “I’m sorry, too, Ace,” right before the pain reached a crescendo and he passed out.
Fran huddled close to Duncan and waited in the strange purple room for her father to come back.