Ben looked back toward the hollow, then into the rookery. There, high up, a strange shape detached itself from Lonesome George’s penthouse nest near the trunk of the tree. Not a bird at all. It rolled over the branch on which the nest lay. Dangled down from a line for a moment like a giant, hairy spider. The spider fast-roped down until it lightly touched on the ground. It stood upright on two feet, and became Knocker Ellis. He wore a ghillie suit thatched mostly with bare branches like his nest hide. He carried an M40A3 rifle with a custom-milled, Inconel alloy, baffled noise suppressor. It was scoped with an ATN 2-6X68DNS 3A daytime eyepiece.
Ben said, “Fancy meeting you here.”
Ellis said, “Had to check the trap.”
Ben smiled. “For a man killed forty years ago, you seem to have all the latest toys.”
Knocker Ellis smiled back. “What? This old thing? Fell off a truck a few months back. Right after it was house-tuned in Quantico. Couple boxes of match ammo tumbled out along with it. You’re not the only man with friends in low places.”
Ben nodded, but inside, he was even more suspicious of Ellis. Only two hundred M40 sniper rifles had ever been made, in-house, by the Marine Corps itself. And they were all accounted for, supposedly. Did this quiet man have the kind of juice to get one of these guns for himself? Could Ellis have acquired it through Dick and his connections, or worse, through Chalk? Ben said, “A little close, that shot. With the elevation and this wind?”
Ellis said, “A hundred six yards? Kid stuff.”
“Speaking of, how’d you know he was a baddy?”
“How you figure I wasn’t aiming for you and missed? And that was rhetorical. I never miss. Fact is, from up there I saw this cat climb out of Miss Dotsy’s cuddy not a New York minute after you started patrolling in.”
Knocker Ellis bent next to the body. The head wound was draining from gravity, not a heartbeat. Blood in the muddy stream turned to thick liquid rust. Ellis reached under the corpse, picked up a knife.
Ben’s sense of vulnerability morphed into outrage. “My own goddamn Ginsu!”
“Cuts through bone and frozen food. It would do a number on a penny, too. Not to mention your fool neck.”
Ben had forgotten the gallows humor of war, dark jokes that helped discharge gigavolts of nerve-lightning built up from days of unrelieved mortal jeopardy.
Ben said, “They came to my place. A guy named Chalk. And this one. And another. I sequestered this one. Thought I had. He broke loose. They called him Kid.”
Knocker Ellis was not happy. “Wait, Chalk, you say?”
Ben looked closely at Ellis. “You know the name?”
Ellis covered, “No. Not at all. Just not sure I heard you right. Unusual name. Ben, you know what that visit was, don’t you? They were peeping things out with you. And now they know you’ve got skills.”
“I was supposed to give them a cup of tea? Ellis, they killed the Harrises to get to Pap and the gold. Tortured them.”
Ellis was quiet as he frisked the body. Then he said, “Good people. Always said hello.”
“I found Charlene. She was still alive. In a closet. They — you don’t want to know what they did with her. I found another one of their men. So that’s four we know about. This one’s dead. The one at the Harrises’—”
Ellis said, “Tell me you greased him.”
“Not exactly.”
Ellis was angry. “You saw firsthand what they do. They’re like cockroaches! They can run round for a week with their heads snapped off. Ben, I’m not sure there’s a place for mercy in all this. You’re not going pacifist on me, are you?”
Ben hesitated. “I mean you no judgment, but I’m not in the service anymore. Killing somebody here in civilian life, that’s the last house on the block for me.”
Ellis looked offended. “Oh. You’re welcome.” Ellis opened his hand. “If that’s the last house on the block, you better file a change of address before Maynard looks you up again.”
Ellis held a GPS. The one he had received from Dick Blackshaw. The one he had used to guide Ben to the oyster rock where they found Richard Willem Blackshaw dead with his treasure. Its screen glowed bright in the storm’s twilight. Ellis asked, “How’d the bastard get this?”
“Hell!” Ben closed his eyes, disgusted with himself. “I left it forward in the cuddy.”
Ellis checked the GPS closely. “Now it’s got Deep Banks Island logged in as a way point.” Ellis scrounged in among the reeds. After a moment he found something else lying next to a clotting patch of scalp. “And this is The Kid’s?” Knocker Ellis held out a blood-smeared satellite phone. “Guessing from the gray matter and hair, it wasn’t in his hip pocket at the time of death.”
Ben took the gory phone, and pressed a few buttons to bring up a call history. “He was talking on it four minutes ago.”
“Roughly when I notched him up.”
Ben was angry. “How do I know that phone was ever on this guy? Maybe you palmed it, smeared it just now. Maybe four minutes ago it was you up in that hide having a chat with somebody. See Ellis, I never said the guy’s name was Maynard. Just Chalk. In all the mess, I forgot his first name altogether till you reminded me.”
Ellis looked pissed. Upset enough that Ben might have hit close to home with his suspicions. Ellis opened the bolt of the rifle. A shell ejected. He closed the bolt, sliding another round home in the breach, and policed his brass. “You want to say that again? Not sure I heard you over this wind.”
Ben said, “You heard me plain.” He knew he should have frisked The Kid before going to Hiram’s and Charlene’s. Maybe he’d have found a phone. Maybe he would have known The Kid had no phone at all. And he should have checked Miss Dotsy’s cuddy cabin when he discovered The Kid had broken free. Ellis was right about one thing. Ben was going soft in peacetime, and it was killing people he cared about. He was certain of Ellis’s loyalty. Almost. “If the phone’s not yours, that Kid might have tipped Chalk.”
Ellis relaxed, shrugged. “Maybe. Or he might have been sucking on my full metal jacket when the call went through. Hard to talk without a brainstem and whatnot. Can’t say for sure. Let’s assume Chalk knows about this spot and his mind is going like a gerbil on a wheel. Don’t want to seem indelicate, but did Charlene Harris tell you anything?”
“Yes, but she was so badly hurt. Shocky.”
Ellis’s face clouded with disgust. “Understood. What did she say?”
Ben thought back to what seemed a hundred years ago, remembered Charlene’s wounded body, and her stalwart heart in the face of death. He regrouped.
“She didn’t want help. No doctor. No police. Said I should take care of this myself. Called me a picaroon. Before that she said LuAnna and I were in trouble. But she said there was nothing we could do.”
Ellis stopped him, “Hold it. After all that cheerleading, she said quit?”
“Right. No. Not exactly. She was dying. She knew it. What she said exactly was, there’s no point.”
Ellis and Ben stood in the rain and wind, thinking. Reviewing facts and stirring in their impressions.
Then something rose into Ben’s mind out of the horror of the last two hours. A spark of meaning in the madness. He said, “It was the laundry closet. Where they put her. You know, a louvered door. Slatted.”
Ellis said, “I know what louvered means. You think she heard them talking?”
Ben sorted a little more. “They thought she was dead, or as good as dead. It’s possible.”
Ellis smiled. “She didn’t mean for you to quit.”
Ben nodded. He got it. “She meant Point No Point. Where they’re bivouacked.”