“Okay, man,” the oldest guy said. “Let’s go.”
The flashlights went out, submerging the room into complete blackness. “We’ve only got about twenty feet of open ground,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Then we’re in the bush. Once we get there, we’re fine. Be careful, and good luck.”
Marsha touched my arm, and in the darkness I leaned over and kissed her quickly. There’d be more time for that later. I dropped to one knee, pulled the door open, and peered out.
Nothing.
I went out first, low, on my belly until I hit the gate. Vague black shapes followed me, their movements clumsy and slow. I crept across the slick grass, slithering side to side, hoping I’d get us back to the hole in the fence on the first try.
By the time I crossed the spread of open lawn, I realized I’d hit it wrong. We were on the wrong side of the big oak. Lonnie’d cut the hole on the left side, not the right. I hunkered down and followed the fence, hoping everyone was still behind me. Random night noises caught my ear: a siren in the distance, a tugboat’s deep whistle upriver.
The breathing of people behind me.
My senses seemed on edge, on fire. I felt the ground beneath me as if it were moving itself, breathing in and out as we crawled across it like fleas on a dog.
Finally I came to the hole. I pulled off to the side. Lonnie poked his head out from behind the tree.
“Got ’em,” I whispered. He held an index finger to his lips.
Kay Delacorte came up behind me. I leaned in to her. “Sit up on your butt, then slide legs first through the hole. Get out of the way and be quiet until we’re all through.”
I pulled a piece of the fence aside, Kay sat up, pushed herself up on her haunches, then slipped in the wet grass and raked her leg across the cut chain-link wire, ripping her pants and gashing her leg bad enough for me to see it even in the darkness.
Her squeal of pain cut the night air like a thunderclap.
I looked up. The sentry had turned our way, holding his rifle out in front of him.
“Damn,” I grunted. “Get on through.”
“Who is it?” the sentry called. Then, from inside the Winnebago, a spotlight came on, sweeping the area until it froze on the seven of us, lying there frozen on the grass.
“Move!” I shouted.
Kay tumbled through the fence just as the sentry fired. Marsha slithered forward on her belly. There was no time to do this gracefully; I jumped up, grabbed her by the waist, and threw her through the hole.
The sentry fired a second time, the round zinging off above my head. There was running, yelling from both our left and right. I lost sight of the sentry as I stared straight into the spotlight.
There was a clatter above me. Lonnie scrambled up the nine-foot fence with a mad rush. The chain link bent forward under his weight, which gave him something to hang on to. With one hand holding on to the fence, he managed to pull a pin on the smoke grenade and fling it straight at the Winnebago. Before that one landed, he’d cocked his arm and flung another.
There was a muffled whomp of an explosion, followed by another. Within a split second, we were engulfed in a choking purple-and-green cloud. My eyes burned, my throat ached. I coughed and spit, hard and disgustingly.
“This way!” I yelled. The last of the three men looked blinded.
Above me, Lonnie threw off two more smoke grenades to the right. There was a steady stream of gunfire now, all mixed in with screams and cries. The firing was coming from our left and right; with a little bit of luck, they were shooting each other.
The last man stood straight up. I ran over and grabbed him. He coughed and gagged, then threw up in front of me.
“C’mon, you can make it,” I yelled. Then I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him forward. When we got to the fence, I pushed down on his head and shoved him through. Then I dropped on my back and slid through the hole feet first.
I scrambled a few feet down into the undergrowth.
“Marsha!” I called. From the smoke and haze, I heard her call my name. Then Lonnie was next to me.
“We all here?” I asked.
“Yeah, five of them, two of us, right?”
I squinted my eyes and forced myself to focus on him through tears that were part chemically induced, part just from being plain damn overwhelmed.
“Yeah,” I gasped, breathless. “That’s it.”
He coughed and spit a wad himself. “Let’s get out of here.”
Getting down was a hell of a lot easier than getting up. The smoke drifted mostly upward, so by the time we’d gone halfway down the bluff, most of it had dissipated. A few minutes later we hit the mud bank. Marsha slipped and fell in the soft goo, but was laughing so hard she didn’t care. I found myself giggling as well, my heart beating like a jackhammer.
Lonnie jumped in the boat and started barking instructions to everybody. Kay limped in, blood running down her leg, and sat at the end of the boat holding a life jacket like a teddy bear. Then Marsha got in, followed by the three guys. The whopping of helicopter blades grew louder from somewhere, but we couldn’t see where. The gunfire lessened, and then seemed to stop. I untied the boat and pushed out hard, my two-hundred-dollar hiking boots sinking up to their laces. I jumped onboard; Lonnie fired the Merc up, and within a few moments we were out in the middle of the river, watching the heights above like dazed survivors of a great conflict reverently studying the battlefield as the smoke cleared.
Which I suppose wasn’t too far from the truth.
Marsha reclined on a beach chair near the edge of the surf, an unread newspaper folded on her lap, a drink nestled in a depression she’d created in the sand. On the other side of her beach chair, a black plastic boom box sat baking in the Bahamian sun as well, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones softly pouring from the pair of speakers. Marsha looked relaxed for the first time in days, and she’d managed to gain back part of the ten pounds she’d lost, thanks largely to my insistence that we eat everything in sight. I came up behind her and rattled the sack I had in my hand as a warning; she’d been a little jumpy lately. This time, though, she didn’t flinch. Maybe she was getting over it.
It had taken us a few days to quit buzzing. When the shooting started that Saturday night, the police assault team rushed in and took most of the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians without a fight. Expecting a final confrontation at dawn on Sunday, the boys in MUST had gone on an all-out, edge-of-your-seat alert. At the first crack of gunfire, they did their own remake of The Sands of Iwo Jima. By the time Marsha managed to raise Howard Spellman on her cellular phone about halfway up the river, it was all over. The Enochians, with all their fundamentalist rantings and Second Amendment ravings, folded faster than a squad of Iraqi draftees. In the assault, a dozen were wounded, most just slightly. A couple of hours later, after the last of Lonnie’s smoke drifted away and order was restored, three bodies were found in back of the morgue. In the wild, chaotic firing, they’d shot each other.
Police casualties: zip.
There was hell to pay for us, of course, mostly from the news media. How a penny-ante private investigator and a ragtag car repossessor managed to free five hostages when the police, the FBI, the National Guard, and the Boy Scouts were all held at bay was a subject of keen interest. The hardest ones to fend off were the tabloids. Marsha flat out refused to give interviews, but Kay Delacorte and the others were telling everybody to take a number, take a seat. Lonnie went to ground, as I expected. The last thing he wanted was anyone paying attention to him.