Ellis put up a wan smile. “Thanks loads Lorton, but I don’t have any family.”
Dyze grinned like a gargoyle. “Oh yes ye do, Knocker Ellis. You’re a-lookin’ at ’em.”
CHAPTER 37
Chalk felt Tahereh would comply in order to survive, but he still had to break her. The cold water there at the landing had only begun the process.
He said, “Now everybody take it slow, and walk up onto dry land. Everybody move to the left of the truck. Easy now. That ramp’s slippery with the mud. Hold it there!”
Tahereh’s team, what was left of it, stopped ankle deep in the water.
Chalk watched Tahereh scrutinize the weeds for his hiding place. He said, “Get a couple of your boys to haul those bodies out of the water up on the bank. We’ll have to deal with them in a bit, once we’ve had our chat. And we still have you covered, so don’t try pulling any back-up guns. Yours, or off those stiffs either. Savvy?”
Tahereh nodded and glared at her man with the notched ear. Chalk did not shoot him. The leg wound was only skin deep, so he was still useful. The two other men grabbed the bodies and dragged them onto the bank.
“Okay,” said Chalk. “Now come on over, sweetheart, and have a cup of java. And for gosh sakes, don’t take it so hard. After all, surrender just means you’ve joined the winning side!”
Chalk showed himself for the first time. He imagined what Tahereh saw, a man in his sixties, thinning gray hair, a slight paunch, and a face with a scar at the hairline like the relic of an aborted scalping. Her eyes stopped on his left arm just below the shoulder. The minx smiled, noting he had been winged.
Slagget rose from the weeds, carrying his HK G-36C. He also had a custom stainless Mossberg Mariner shotgun, with a folding stock and pistol grip, on a sling over his shoulder.
Chalk chuckled watching Tahereh look around for the rest of the attackers. And there it was. The realization that she and her entire team had been bested by only two men. Beautiful. Wish I had that on camera. Perhaps there was more to the psychological side of torture than he had thought possible. He’d never gone up against a female soldier in any sense of the phrase. This would be interesting.
Chalk told Slagget, “Pat them down. And no funny business, Tahereh. You’ve come a long way baby, but I’m pissed as all hell to be here so I’ll still kill you if you make me. Count on it.”
Slagget frisked them professionally. Collected two knives from Tahereh. One in a wrist sheath. Another taped up-side-down against her spine. Chalk was pleased that Slagget did not linger over her breasts, crotch, or buttocks. Chalk wanted all of her to himself, his rightful property as boss. Slagget finished frisking Tahereh’s remaining squaddies. Eight more weapons, some sharp, some loud.
Chalk instructed, “Take a pew, dearie.” He gestured toward a wobbly old picnic table in the winter-brown grass by the landing’s pavement. They sat. Chalk pulled his pistol. He told Slagget, “First aid kit, if you wouldn’t mind, Bill.”
Slagget jogged fifty paces south to where they’d drawn Hiram’s skiff into a drainage ditch for cover. He grabbed the kit and hurried back.
Tahereh fixed him with her almondine eyes. “Why kill my men if you want to work with us, Mr. Maynard?”
“Why knock down the Twin Towers just because Euro Disney sucks? See? Life’s a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, stuffed in a chalupa. And Maynard’s my first name, baby. It’s Maynard Pilchard Chalk. Remember it. If you must know, we had to drop a few of your boys to keep things manageable. They were the convincers. To make sure that when I talked, you’d listen.”
Chalk straddled the picnic table’s bench facing her. Slagget kept them covered with his Heckler und Koch.
Ever the gentleman, Chalk asked Tahereh, “Would you kindly do the honors while I lay things out for you?” With some difficulty, he poured another cup of hot coffee.
Tahereh opened the first aid kit. Chalk put his hand over hers as she reached for a sharp-edged pair of medical shears to cut off the sleeves of his jacket and shirt. She looked into his pale green cobra’s eyes. He shook his head. Clacked his yellow teeth together twice. With her men lying dead around her, Tahereh capitulated. Did as ordered. She bit into the bloody sleeve of the man responsible for her losses and failures. Chalk was digging this bright spot in an otherwise lousy day.
With the entrance and exit holes in the coat slightly extended by her bite, she tore the sleeve off the rest of the way. She did the same with the shirt sleeve below.
Chalk fixated on her bloodstained lips, like she was a beautiful cannibal princess. Enormous brown eyes with thick lashes. Her ballistic vest swelled forward with natural promise. He seized a fistful of her thick black hair and drew her to him. It was not a kiss. He hungrily consumed the lower portion of her face, mauling her lips, her tongue. She shivered in his hands. Revulsion? At that moment he did not care.
One of Tahereh’s men growled as the kiss endured. Slagget reminded him not to move with a small shift of his gun. Tahereh was destroyed, completely in Chalk’s thrall. He wondered if any woman had ever hated him so much.
He released her, let her pull away from him. She gasped for air. He reveled in her rage, bewilderment, and the injury to her pride, so evident in her flushed cheeks and wide eyes. He said, “Get to it, chica.”
She wiped her mouth, wrenching her focus back to business. She reached for a single-dose styrette of morphine.
Chalk said, “That won’t be necessary.”
She pulled a bottle of mercurochrome from the kit. Opened it. Chalk could see she was tempted to dash it in his eyes. She remembered the vigilant Slagget and his gun, poured a small amount of the liquid over her fingers to clean them.
Chalk resumed his pitch, “So here it is, sweets. We’re all auslanders here. Have you met the locals yet? They’re lean, religious, mean, freakishly tough and persistent as hell. You know the kind. You probably are the kind, except for the scrawny part. Anyway, they’re not to be taken lightly. Now, you and I, we want the same thing. Better put, we want different things that are in the same place. You with me?”
In reply, Tahereh emptied the rest of the bottle of mercurochrome into his wounds. Chalk grimaced only a little as the liquid burned his raw, pierced flesh.
He continued. “I’ll take that as a yes. Now be reasonable. You already spent the gold for the device. So, you’re not ever getting the gold back. My reputation, and my life depend on making up for the bullshit my man got us all into with his heist. Trust me. When I see him, he’s a goner.”
Tahereh said, “Richard Blackshaw?”
Chalk raised his eyebrows. “So he dropped his alias with the pilot. Wow. I’m surprised. That was phenomenally stupid. Did you know he spent a couple years setting himself up as a rogue sleeper? Must have thought he was home free when he got on that plane. Regardless, kudos to you for getting to the aviator before we did. Nice work on him. He was pretty shot up when we got him off you. No matter. Here we all are.”
Tahereh pulled out a fat rolled elastic bandage used for sprains from the kit. She told Chalk, “Lift your arm.” He did. She inserted the flesh-toned roll into his armpit. “Lower it now, and clamp it firmly against your side.”
The wounds were too high on his arm for her to manually compress the brachial artery. She could not slow the blood flow with one hand and dress the wounds at the same time. The rolled bandage would hold some pressure on the pulsing blood vessel while she worked on him. She was not gentle packing the entrance wound with QuikClot gauze.