“Shut the car off, asshole. Put your hands on the back of your head, and get out easy,” the man said, slowly pulling back the car door and guiding me with the end of his sawed-off. I still couldn’t quite make him out, but the rifle caught enough light for me to see. “Walk. That way. Slow.” He indicated which way with the gun barrel and moved it from my neck to my back.
If I had ever been more frightened, I couldn’t remember when. I’d been involved in a few shootings, but they had just sort of happened. One minute there wasn’t shooting and the next minute there was. The first time happened up in the Cat-skills. I was in the room when a crooked town cop blew the head off his fellow blackmailer. The next time was a setup. I’d been lured to a meeting at a shuttered Miami Beach hotel during the Moira Heaton/Steven Brightman investigation. When I showed, an ex-U.S. marshal named Barto tried to kill me. I fired back. I think I hit him, but didn’t stick around to make sure. Then there was the shooting at Crispo’s bar in Red Hook when Carmella’s partner was killed and she took that bullet in her shoulder. At Frankie Motta’s house in Mill Basin, there were a few minutes of calm before the old mob capo and his former henchmen shot each other.
Being marched to your own execution was more than a little bit different. The string was going out of my legs and I didn’t think I had the strength to walk much further. A thousand things to say went through my head, but my mouth just didn’t seem capable of forming any words. On the other hand, the little voice, the one that never leaves me, had no trouble with words. “Be a man. Don’t beg. Don’t shit your pants. Be a man.”
I was so angry at myself for worrying not about my family, but about how I would look to strangers when they blew the back of my head off, that I nearly turned around and charged the guy holding the shotgun on me. Given another few seconds, I think that’s just what I would have done. Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to find out.
“Pull his car off the road. I’ll take it from here,” someone said, stepping out of the darkness in front of me.
“Crank, is that you?” I said, my voice cracking.
“That was awfully fucking stupid, coming up here like that. Good thing Tina called ahead.”
“Good thing,” I agreed.
“Come on inside.”
The cabin in the woods was just that, a cabin in the woods. There was a stone fireplace, a futon, a TV, a stereo, a small kitchen with a table and chairs, a bathroom, and not much else. There wasn’t any lab equipment that I could see and I hadn’t spotted any chemical drums on the walk up. Crank followed my eyes and smiled.
“We don’t cook the shit here, man. Biker don’t equate to moron, you know.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Tina says you wanna talk, so talk. You wanna beer?”
“Sure.”
He handed me a Coors. Panic makes your pants wet and your throat dry. I hadn’t realized how dry until the first sip of beer went down smooth as silk and cold as ice. From now on, Coors would definitely be my post-shotgun beer of choice. I wondered if they could work up an advertising campaign around that slogan.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
“Okay. You risked getting your ass shot off to check on my health?”
“That night at the ER, you said you had to lay your bike down when an SUV ran the light at Blyden and Van Camp, right?”
“Asshole blew right through the intersection without hesitating and didn’t even tap his brakes after I went down. Good thing I was paying attention.”
“Can you remember anything about the SUV? Color? What state the tags were from, how many people were in-”
“Pretty sure it was a pewter Yukon. New, I think. At least two people, men up front. New York plates. Sorry, but I was a little too busy to get the number.”
“That’s good, but how do you know there were two men up front?”
“Dome light was on. I can’t tell you anything about them. Everything happened so fucking fast, you know? Does that help?”
“More than you can know. Thanks a lot, Crank.”
I shook his hand. When I did, he pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “Don’t come back here no more, bud. Makes the boys nervous to have cop types around and that don’t do me no kinda good. We understand one another?”
“We do.”
I turned to go and then the world shook. Baboom! The explosion wasn’t in the cabin, but it was close enough to shake the place and blow out the windows. I bounced off the wall and saw the fireball rising up out of the woods about a hundred yards away. I thought I could feel the heat on my face, but I was probably imagining that. I ran over and helped Crank up off the floor.
“You gotta get outta here,” he barked. “The timing don’t look so good for you.”
“I didn’t-”
“I know you didn’t, but they’re not gonna believe that. Keep your head down by the door and listen. You’ll know what to do.”
Crank waited till I crouched down and then ran out the front door screaming, “He jumped out the window and headed toward the lake. Hammer, you get Blade and Cutter and get to the lake. Skank, you go check on the kitchen to see if anything’s left of Skinny and the equipment. I’ll check the woods to make sure he don’t double back.”
“Shit, Crank, ain’t nothin’ gonna be left a Skinny, not after-”
“Listen, Skank, get the fuck over there and check on Skinny or-”
“Okay, Crank. Jesus, fuckin’ Christ, who the fuck died and left you God?”
I listened to all the footsteps heading away from the cabin and the road where my car was parked.
Crank kicked the door with his heel. “Go now. Fire your gun when you get to your car.”
I didn’t hesitate. Taking off, I kept low as I could and close to the trees. My car wasn’t too far from where I left it. I didn’t bother checking the damage to the front end. As Crank asked, I fired off a few rounds. He didn’t have to explain. I was giving him cover for when his crew got curious about how I had escaped.
As I drove back into Janus, I thought about what Crank had said about the timing of the explosion. It was one hell of a coincidence that his meth lab just happened to blow up during my visit. I didn’t like it, not even a little. I called Pete Vandervoort. He was asleep, but when I told him about Crank’s lab being launched into low Earth orbit, he agreed to meet me in his office.
Given the sheriff’s looks, I was glad I’d avoided mirrors. And he was just tired. I’d crashed a car, had a shotgun stuck in my throat, and witnessed a recreation of the Trinity test. I had just about used up my yearly allowance of adrenaline and was now paying the price. I could literally feel myself crashing and unless he was hiding a fifty-five gallon drum of coffee somewhere, I wasn’t going to last much longer.
I described the SUV to him that Crank described it to me.
“We’ve got a winner!” I think I remember him saying.
I recall his mouth moving some more after that, but I had already retreated behind a wall of sleep.
You reach a certain age in life and you’ve woken up in a few strange beds, Even so, it can be a pretty jarring experience. Waking up in a jail cell kicked that jarring thing up to a whole different level. The bed wasn’t too terribly uncomfortable and the bleach and pine disinfectant aroma wasn’t quite as pleasant as my dad’s Old Spice aftershave, but I guess it had its charms. On the other hand, I didn’t find the cold metal toilet hanging off the wall very welcoming. I kind of felt like Otis the town drunk on the old Andy Griffith Show. I think I half-expected Barney Fife or Aunt Bee to show up with my breakfast.
My watch said it was 8:22 a.m., but the florescent lighting and lack of windows kept the place in a kind of perpetual dusk. I threw some cold water on my face. I might have dunked my head into the water had the sink been larger than the ones in aircraft rest rooms. I was about to try the door to make sure the sheriff didn’t have a frat house sense of humor. Just then he walked in and swung the door back open.