Marie was boarded into the back of an armored sheriff’s Bearcat, accepting a hand up from a hefty black deputy. No sooner had Lark ushered Battle into his Suburban than Burt slipped into my truck, a red PGA windbreaker twice his size billowing around him.
“This is going to be a good one,” he said. “It’s got some O.K. Corral going for it.”
“What I want,” I said, “is Daley Rideout in one piece.”
42
The road to Paradise was dirt washboard that kept our speeds down and a steady blizzard of dust blown by the vehicles ahead. I wore shooting glasses against the wind and sand, yellow lenses for low light. We were fourth back, behind the Bureau Suburbans, and ahead of the sheriff. I guessed ten FBI agents, including their SWAT, and ten deputies.
No surveillance drones in the sky that I could see. The gusting wind would keep them down, ditto law enforcement helicopters, in case Lark and the sheriffs had any airborne ideas.
The old boxing scar on my forehead burned, and the swirling black night seemed to sneer at my hopes. I wondered if Battle had fooled me. If his bargaining over Daley was cover for luring me away from her. And into an SNR ambush. Burt had sensed it, thus his Tombstone remark. And why not a trap? Battle had known full well that I’d deliver him to the police. His $200,000 hush money having failed, maybe an ambush was his only option. Send me to the sandman. Literally. Plenty of places out in this desert where the pesky PI would never be found. Ashes to ashes and sand to sand. Not too deep, boys. Let the sun and the critters do their work.
I had assumed that my multiagency backup would surprise him. Feds, no less. But maybe SNR had standing plans for such a raid.
We pulled into the floodlit center of the compound, the buildings forming a loose circle around us. Lark dropped to the ground, then Battle, who buttoned his coat in his oddly formal way and stood facing the farmhouse. The rest of us scrambled from our vehicles as a unit, everyone but Marie.
The farmhouse door swung open and out marched Connor Donald, followed by Eric Glassen and Adam Revell. Each wore chinos and black golf shirts and yellow shooting glasses, and each carried an M4 machine gun on a sling over his shoulder.
The shuffle of guns, safeties, and slides. My hand back and ready. Burt with his feet spread, the windbreaker rippling.
The three SNR men stopped ten feet short of their boss.
“Bring out the girl,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Donald, raising an open hand into the air.
Daley stepped onto the front porch between Flat-Top Woman and Tattooed Forearms, guns on their hips as before.
She wore the same shorts, flip-flops, and comedy hoodie. Same backpack. She pulled her rolling carry-on behind her and carried her backpacker guitar in its gig bag.
My heart sank.
She was ready for me.
They were ready for me.
Battle had ordered them to have her ready to go. How and when?
And what else had he ordered?
A rifle shot cracked from the darkness behind us and a sheriff’s deputy pitched forward. I hit the dirt as Daley broke away into the darkness and Flat-Top Woman and Tattooed Forearms drew their guns and were cut down by agents and deputies not thirty feet away. The Bearcat tore back toward the gate.
Then a barrage of fire from the main house, and more from the barn and the metal hangar and the row of bunkhouses behind us. Slugs clanged into the FBI Suburban and the sheriff’s vehicles, sparks flying and windows collapsing in the twang of ricochets. Battle strode toward the hangar as if invincible, Connor Donald and Adam Revell backpedaling beside him, M4s rattling rounds back at us.
Burt and I crawled under my truck and out the other side, jumped to our feet and zigzagged after Daley.
I made the darkness and saw her running through the swirling desert sand, not fifty yards away. From behind me came a fusillade of law enforcement return fire, and, looking over my shoulder, I saw their tracer rounds punching through the home and the metal hangar and the barn and bunkhouses. Teargas rockets arched and plummeted. Lark bellowed orders and men screamed in agony.
“Daley! Stop! I’m here to help you.”
In the sand-blasted dark I saw her stop and turn, then take off again toward the exit road.
We caught her halfway there and I took hold of both her shoulders to brake her, then pushed her to the ground as lightly as I could.
She rolled onto her back breathing hard, eyes wide and glittering behind her windblown hair, drawing one leg back to kick if we got too close.
Behind us the battle popped and sputtered on, but from the slowed rate of fire I knew that lives were being taken. The rhythm of First Fallujah, the tempo of death.
“I work for your sister. She hired me to bring you home. I’m Roland and this is Burt.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“That’s too damned bad,” I said. “There are men back there getting shot because of you.”
She scrambled upright and ran off again, but we caught her quickly, circled, and herded her to stop.
Burt cuffed her with a plastic tie, hands behind her. Tripped her backward with an outstretched boot and guided her rump-first onto the sand. Then stepped away.
“Take her to your car,” I said. “I’ll bring the truck if I can get it started.”
“Roland, the three of us can make the Eldo in twenty minutes,” Burt said.
I saw that the barn and the farmhouse had caught fire, the wind drawing the flames from the windows and whipping them back and forth like rags. I heard the slowing gunfire and the moaning of wounded men. I thought of Lark and Marie.
“I need to go help.”
“You’ve done your work. Not worth it, Champ.”
While the gunshots popped and the flames swept high above the floodlights and the smell of teargas wafted over us, I considered the fourteen-year-old girl handcuffed in the desert.
She considered me. I saw Penelope’s face. Penelope’s anger and suspicion. Was I looking at Penelope’s sister, or her daughter? Her sister, or living proof of the rape of a girl and the child she bore from it? Then where was Reggie Atlas? In that swirl of light brown hair? The firm jawline, maybe, or the expressive mouth?
“Burt, if I’m not there in thirty minutes, you and Daley hit the road. Don’t let her out of your sight. I’m ready for this to be over.”
“I won’t run away again,” she said.
“No,” said Burt. “You won’t.”
Building by building, wall by wall, I worked my way back into the battleground. Sporadic shooting to my left and right, someone wailing from inside the flame-clenched main house. I fell in with Lark and four of his SWAT men behind an armored Suburban as they waited for Battle and his lieutenants to come out of the big hangar.
The SWAT leader was calling to them through a powerful megaphone when the hangar door rolled up and two ATVs came howling into the barnyard. Battle drove one of them, with Eric Glassen on the passenger seat behind him, his M4 hacking away at us, rounds bouncing off the bulletproofed Suburban as the ATV skidded off into the darkness through tattoos of gunfire. Connor Donald followed, steering the other ATV with one hand and firing at us behind him like a cowboy as his mount bucked and bounced across the rough desert floor. The six of us piled into the armored SUV, Lark at the wheel. The back end slid hard and the tires threw up a rooster tail of dirt as I slammed the rear door shut.
We came up hard on Battle as Glassen tried to reload the M4, the Suburban’s powerful searchlights illuminating the scene like a stage. Battle tried a hard right turn, but Glassen’s weight sunk the back tires and the ATV rolled across the desert floor like some huge mechanical tumbleweed, the men flying off and the tires spinning fast as it turned over and over again, finally crashing to a stop against a hillock of rippled white sand. We slid to a stop. Glassen rose from the chaos, drawing his sidearm, when two of the SWAT men riddled him with bullets so powerful they kicked up dirt behind him before he even had time to fall. Alfred lay on his stomach, arms outstretched, as Lark and two of his men approached. The old man rolled over and groaned and tried to struggle up. A cell phone slipped from a suit coat pocket in a cascade of white sand, and I understood why it had taken the old man so long to pee, and why SNR had been ready to greet me. Marie’s phone, passed in their long, tearful embrace? It had to be. My pat-down had been a good one.