“Get ZZ Top off me!”
Agent Swanson actually laughed at that. The other bikers were on Cutter, punching him and kicking him even as they pulled him off. A few minutes of that and he’d look like Fallon sans pickaxe.
“Gag the rat and cuff him!” Crank ordered. “We’ll let Deuce and Deadman deal with him.”
Then, as if on cue, the quiet of the woods was ripped wide open by the distinctive throaty rumble of twin Harleys. The two bikes pulled up almost to the front door. The woods again went silent. The door opened. Two more bikers joined us. They didn’t look any more fierce or rough than Crank and the four that were already here, but it was evident from the look in everyone’s eyes that these two were players: princes among the common scum. There was a round of ritualized hugs and handshakes between the boys. It had the feel of a meet and greet at a Masonic temple. The bikers kept their distance from Swanson. They seemed to regard him as an infectious disease.
“You got my cut?” Swanson said. “I can’t be here for the pleasantries.”
“Shut the fuck up, man,” said the shorter of the two princes. “Ya’ll get your money when I’m ready to give it to ya.”
Crank pointed at me. “That’s the ex-cop. He fingered Cutter as the rat.”
Cutter struggled against his restraints and tried to say something. One of the bikers kicked him in the ribs and told him to shut the fuck up. Apparently, I’d chosen the right fall guy. Neither the original gang nor the two princes acted at all surprised by the news of Cutter’s disloyalty. Swanson was fidgeting, clearly worried about witnessing what would surely happen to Cutter and me.
“Deuce, pay the cunt and get him outta here,” said Deadman, the short prince.
Deuce reached around his back and pulled out a duct-taped brown paper bag. Swanson’s eyes got big, but he didn’t reach for the stack. Deuce threw it on the cabin floor like scraps for the dog and Swanson couldn’t pick it up fast enough. The second the Fed grabbed the package, the world hit a speed bump. There was a flurry of activity outside: gunshots, shotgun blasts, tires skidding, running feet on gravel, motorcycles rumbling. The cabin flooded with blinding light from all sides.
“Inside the cabin, this is Special Agent William B. Stroby of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Combined Meth Task Force. The cabin is completely surrounded. You are all under arrest. Any attempt at escape will be futile and will result in additional charges. Please follow my instructions promptly and to the letter and no one will be injured. A failure to do so will force me to use all necessary means to effect your arrest. Open the cabin door and throw out all weapons. Then, when I give the word, I want you to knee-walk out of the cabin in single file with your hands clasped behind your heads. Any variation in this procedure or attempt at escape will result in your being fired upon. Starting now I want…”
As Stroby droned on, Deuce looked my way.
“We got us a bargaining chip,” he said, reaching for the butt of a handgun tucked into his pants.
“I don’t think so,” said Crank, pressing the muzzle of a Glock to Deuce’s head. “Prager, stand up.” With his free hand, Crank reached into his pants pocket and removed a cuff key. He handed it to Deuce.
“Uncuff him.”
“You fuckin’ mother-”
Crank slammed his boot into the side of Deuce’s knee. Something snapped and the prince crumbled, yelping in pain. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Crank then ordered one of the original bikers to undo my cuffs. He did so.
“Prager, get that hogleg from Deuce and come over here with me.”
I followed Crank’s instructions. Deuce’s gun was a Colt revolver. The barrel on the damned thing was the size of a deer femur.
“Jesus Christ! Will you look at this thing,” I said, pulling back the hammer. “Please, somebody move. I’d love to see what a bullet from this thing would do to you.”
Crank got a kick out of that, but then his face went all business. “All right, boys, all weapons out on the floor now.”
Stroby was still at it when Crank yelled out the door. Some of Shakespeare’s plays had less acts than this guy’s speech. Until that point I had been successful at focusing on saving my own neck and not letting my mind drift to Katy’s plight. If I got myself killed, Katy had no chance. But now that my freedom was at hand, it all came rushing back in.
“Stroby, will you please shut the fuck up!” I thought I heard some of the assault team laughing. “This is Agent Markowitz,” Crank yelled. “The code word is pelican and the color is green. I repeat, this is Markowitz. The code word is pelican and the color is green.”
Stroby shut up.
No one was stupid enough to make a run for it and within fifteen minutes, the weapons had been collected, the bikers and Swanson arrested, the tension gone. Crank-Markowitz-had an EMT look me over. He gave me something for the pain, but that ache in my kidney was going to require weeks of healing and something stronger than glorified aspirin to take the sting out. The EMT had some stuff with him to help me wash up. He even had some mouthwash. Still, I looked and smelled like last week’s garbage.
“You okay?” Markowitz asked, handing me back my cell phone and. 38.
“Define okay.” I checked my phone for messages. None. “Listen-”
“Yeah, pretty dumb question, huh?”
“I’ve heard dumber, but not many. Listen, I’ve gotta get outta here.”
“In a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to get clearance for you to leave from my C.O.”
“So, you want to tell me what the fuck this was all about? I mean, I can figure out that you’re a Fed and that you’ve been undercover in this meth ring, but why drag me into it?”
“I’m ATF and I didn’t drag you into it. You put yourself in it. Who told you to come looking for me? Who told you to show up the night I blew the lab?”
“ You blew the lab!”
“Sshhhhh! Keep it down, Prager. Technically, I’m not supposed to destroy evidence like that, but the case wasn’t ready yet and we were going to ship out a huge volume of product. I couldn’t let it hit the streets, not even for the case. This shit’s like a plague, a fucking cancer. If you thought crack was bad… You ever see what a tweaker looks like after a few months on this shit?”
“Okay, I get it, but why reinvolve me?” I asked, looking impatiently at my watch, wondering when his C.O. would clear me to leave.
“I didn’t reinvolve you. They’ve been keeping eyes out for you. They knew someone was leaking info to the cops and Feds. I told you that night the lab blew that your timing sucked. These kinda guys don’t believe in coincidence. You show up and their lab goes boom… When you got away, they started looking at me. I couldn’t afford that, so…”
“So you told them there was someone inside and a contact outside. I was the obvious candidate for the outside contact.”
“These guys are cutthroats, not geniuses, and they sample a little too much of the product. Too much and it makes you paranoid as all hell. I just fed their paranoia a bit. Yeah, so someone spotted you on the road leading to the cemetery earlier. Good thing I was around.”
“Tell that to my kidney.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Listen, Markowitz, I’m not joking. I gotta get outta-” My cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” I said and stepped a few feet away.
“Remember my voice, Moe?” It was Brightman.
“I remember.”
“You were pretty smug the last time we spoke. You feeling smug now?”
“Not at all.”
“Good, but you’re late,” he said.
“Late for what?”
He ignored that. “You were doing so well and then you seemed to disappear on us. Where have you been?”
“Before or after I found Fallon?”
“That, oh, well… how about after the cemetery?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“No.”
Brightman moved his mouth away from the phone, but not so far that I couldn’t hear him. “Hurt her,” he said. There was a second delay and then a woman screamed. He got back on the phone. “Don’t do that again, Moe. I want to kill her in front of you, but if you put me in a bad frame of mind, I’ll do it and they’ll never find her body.”