The gauge read less than twenty gallons. Lucy pushed us into a sharp one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. The Schweizer was maybe fifty feet below us and head on. The sun made it impossible to see who was inside, but I knew. I had not a single doubt, and when it was no more than five hundred feet from us and coming up on Lucy's side, I felt several rapid-fire jolts, like quick slaps, and we suddenly swerved. Lucy grabbed her pistol from her shoulder holster.
'They're shooting at us!' she exclaimed to me.
I thought of the submachine gun, the Calico missing from Sparkes's collection.
Lucy fought to open her door. She jettisoned it and it tumbled through the air, sailing down and away. She slowed our speed.
'They're firing!' Lucy got back on the air. 'Returning fire! Keep all traffic away from Wrightsville Beach area!'
'Roger! Do you request further assistance?'
'Dispatch land emergency crews, Wrightsville Beach! Expect casualty situation!'
As the Schweizer flew directly under us, I saw muzzle flashes and the tip of a barrel barely protruding from the copilot's window. I felt more quick jolts.
'I think they hit the skids,' Lucy almost screamed, and she was trying to position her pistol out her open door and fly at the same time, her shooting hand bandaged.
I instantly dug inside my pocketbook, dismayed to realize my.38 was still inside my briefcase, which remained safe inside the baggage compartment. Then Lucy handed me her pistol and reached behind her head for the AR-15 assault rifle. The Schweizer swooped around, to pursue us inland, knowing we were cornered because we would not risk the safety of people on the ground.
'We've got to go back over the water!' Lucy said. 'Can't shoot at them here. Kick your door open. Get it off the hinges and dump it!'
I somehow managed, the door ripping away as rushing air blasted me and the ground suddenly seemed closer. Lucy made another turn, and the Schweizer turned, too, as the needle on the fuel gauge slipped lower. This went on for what seemed forever, the Schweizer chasing us out to sea, and our trying to return to land so we could get down. It could not shoot up without hitting the rotor blades.
Then at an altitude of eleven hundred feet, when we were over water at a hundred knots, the fuselage got hit. Both of us felt the kicks right behind us, as close as the left rear passenger door.
'I'm turning right now,' Lucy said to me. 'Can you keep us straight at this altitude?'
I was terrified. We were going to die.
'I'll try,' I said, taking the controls.
We were heading straight toward the Schweizer. It couldn't have been more than fifty feet from us, and maybe a hundred feet below when Lucy pulled back the bolt, chambering a round.
'Shove the cyclic down! Now!' she yelled as me as she pushed the barrel of the rifle out her open door.
We were going down a thousand feet per minute, and I was certain we would fly right into the Schweizer. I tried to veer out of its path, but Lucy would have none of it.
'Straight at it!' she yelled.
I could not hear the gunfire as we flew directly over the Schweizer, so close I thought we would be devoured by its blades. She fired more, and I saw flashes, and then Lucy had the cyclic and was ramming it into a hard left, cutting it away from the Schweizer as it exploded into a ball of flames that rolled us almost over on our side. Lucy had the controls as I went into a crash position.
Then as suddenly as the violent shock waves had hit, they were gone, and I caught a glimpse of flaming debris showering into the Atlantic Ocean. We were steady and making a wide turn. I stared at my niece in stunned disbelief.
'Fuck you,' she said coldly as fire and broken fuselage rained into sparkling water.
She got on the air, as calm as I had ever seen her.
'Tower,' she said. 'Fugitive aircraft has exploded. Debris two miles off Wrightsville Beach. Negative survivors seen. Circling for signs of life.'
'Roger. Do you need assistance?' came the rattled response.
'A little late. But negative. Am returning to your location for immediate refuel.'
'Uh. Roger.' The omnipotent tower was stuttering. 'Proceed direct. Local authorities will meet you at ISO.'
But Lucy circled twice more, down to fifty feet as fire engines and police cars sped toward the beach with emergency lights flashing. Panicked swimmers were running out of the water, kicking and falling and fighting waves, arms flying, as if a great white shark were in pursuit. Floating debris rocked with the surge. Bright orange life jackets bobbed, but no one was in them.
ONE WEEK LATER, HILTON HEAD ISLAND
THE MORNING WAS overcast, the sky the same gray as the sea, when the few of us who had loved Benton Wesley assembled on an empty, undeveloped point on the plantation of Sea Pines.
We parked near condominiums and followed a path that led to a dune. From there we made our way through sand spurs and sea oats. The beach was more narrow here, the sand less firm, and driftwood marked the memory of many storms.
Marino was in a pinstripe suit he was sweating through, and a white shirt and dark tie, and I thought it might have been the first time I had ever seen him so properly dressed. Lucy was in black, but I knew I would not see her until later, for she had something very important to do.
McGovern had come and so had Kenneth Sparkes, not because they had known him, but because their presence was their gift to me. Connie, Benton's former wife, and their three grown daughters were a knot near the water, and it was odd looking at them now and feeling nothing but sorrow. We had no resentment, no animosity or fear left in us. Death had spent it all as completely as life had brought it about.
There were others from Benton's precious past, retired agents and the former director of the FBI Academy who long years before had believed in Benton's prison visits and research in profiling. Benton's expertise was an old, tired word now, ruined by TV and the movies, but once it had been novel. Once Benton had been the pioneer, the creator of a better way of understanding humans who were truly psychotic, or remorseless and evil.
There was no leader of a church, for Benton had not gone since I had known him, only a Presbyterian chaplain who had counseled agents in distress. His name was Judson Lloyd, and he was frail with only a faint new moon of white hair. Reverend Lloyd wore a clerical collar and carried a small black leather Bible. There were fewer than twenty of us gathered on the shore.
We had no music or flowers, no eulogies or notes in our heads, for Benton had made it clear in his will what he wanted done. He had left me in charge of his mortal remains, because as he had drafted himself, lt is what you are so good at, Kay. I know you will guard my wishes well.
He had desired no ceremony. He had not wanted the military burial he was entitled to, no police cars leading the way, no gun salutes or flag-draped casket. His simple request was to be cremated and scattered over the place he loved best, the civilized Never-Never-Land of Hilton Head, where we had sequestered ourselves together whenever we could, and had forgotten for the brevity of a dream what we battled.
I would always be sorry that he had spent his last days here without me, and I would never recover from the heartless irony that I had been detained by the butchery Carrie had wrought. It had been the beginning of the end that would be Benton's end.
It was easy for me to wish I had never gotten involved in the case. But had I not, someone else would be attending a funeral somewhere in the world, as others had in the past, and the violence would not have stopped. Rain began to fall lightly. It touched my face like cool, sad hands.
'Benton brought us together here this day not to say goodbye,' began Reverend Lloyd. 'He wanted us to gather strength from each other and go on doing what he had done. Upholding good and condemning bad, fighting for the fallen and holding it all inside, suffering the horrors alone because he would not bruise the gentle souls of others. He left the world better than he found it. He left us better than he found us. My friends, go do as he had done.'