‘Chase’ Chapters 30-32 and Epilogue

“And here we are.”

“And here we are,” Justin repeated, as the trill of the helicopter sounded out the open door behind us.

 

CHAPTER 31

I LOOKED OUT the door and saw the little black bird come down out of the sky directly above the firing range, silver tatters of mist trailing behind like a wedding gown’s train.

Then the guns on the helicopter’s underbelly opened. Wide.

I dove to the plywood ground of the trailer as Justin lunged out the door.

I pressed myself into the corner as the chopper’s minigun tore the trailer in half. The sound of it was industrial, the scream of a table saw ripping a two-by-four. The floor I was hugging shook as if caught in a tornado, a violent storm of lead and tracers that tore the roof off the structure like a can opener.

I was still shaking, my deafened ears ringing, when the two guys grabbed me and dragged me out of the smoking, burned metal ruins of the trailer. Out onto the cool grass of the range I was dragged and dropped.

A hunting boot hit me in the face, the little metal lace hooks opening my lip like a razor.

“That’s for killing my friend, you son of a bitch,” I heard one of the three camo-clad bozos say through the ringing of my ears. “And crippling the other one. He’ll never walk again because of what you did.”

“My pleasure,” I yelled as I thumbed at my lip. “Anytime.”

“Hey,” Justin said, looking around. “The girl and the old man. Where the hell did they go?”

“Girl?”

“Yeah, the damn girl who was with him. She has a gun.”

“We’ll find her in a second,” said the slimmest of them.

“You must be Paul Haber,” I said. “The leader of this band of merry asswipes.”

“Now, now, Detective. I have a mission to run, and chasing you all the hell around these mountains has been quite a delay. Good-bye now. You can shoot him, Devine, any time you’re ready. We need to get going.”

 

CHAPTER 32

THAT’S WHEN I came out and said it.

“Your coordinates are wrong,” I said calmly. “I have them.”

“What?” Haber said, turning back to me.

“Eardley had them in his stomach. In a condom. Twenty-four numbers. He must have known you guys were close, so he swallowed them. You don’t have the right ones. I do.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Am I?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Fine. Go over there and get your head chopped off for nothing.”

“You gotta be shitting me, boss,” said the guy who had kicked me. “This mission is doomed, sir. I told you.”

“This mission is not doomed,” Haber said, as a high-pitched beep came through on their radios.

“Come in, you dummies. Dummies, come in. Over.”

I smiled. It was Rosalind.

“What the—?” Haber said.

“Listen up. My grandpa’s got your friend’s gun, and he’s got a bead on your head, mister. Now drop your gun or he’ll blast your head off.”

The sound of the silenced bullet that hit Haber’s head as he swung up with his rifle for the tree line beyond the range was insignificant, but what it did to his head was very significant. Half headless, he toppled over backward as if it were a trust team-building exercise. Not surprisingly, no one caught him.

“Now my grandpa’s got the bead on you other guys,” the girl’s voice said over the radio. “Drop your guns if you don’t want to get shot, too.”

They dropped their guns.

I stood and picked one up.

“Mr. Walke, I thought I told you to leave,” I said into Haber’s radio, as I saw the good old man emerge from the trees with his granddaughter and dog.

“Yeah, well, I don’t hear so well sometimes,” he radioed back.

 

EPILOGUE

IT WAS ABOUT two hours later when I drove my rental Chrysler 200 back down the mountain, around the line of the Pennsylvania State Trooper cars.

Joe Walke sat beside me, and Rosalind and Roxie slept in the back.

“I owe you my life, both of you,” I said to Mr. Walke, as we pulled up in front of a crumbling old Victorian in Marble Spring, a block behind the church.

“You’re good people, Mike. You would have done no different for us, were we in trouble. Good people are the same everywhere. They help each other.”

“They tuned you up pretty good, and you lost your truck and the ATVs. I feel terrible.”

“Ah, the vehicles are insured, and a crack or two to this old noggin ain’t nothing at all. I actually feel sorry for those stupid young men.”

“Sorry for them?”

“Look what we as a nation asked them to do. Go off to war, ride on helicopters, and kill people in some far-off hellhole. Then they come back, and we ignore them. Too busy playing with our phones. We couldn’t care less.

“Any wonder these kids would want to line their own pockets? Hell, everybody else seems to be doing the same thing these days.”

“Not everybody,” I said, and shook his hand.

“So long, Mike,” Mr. Walke said with a wink. He lifted his sleeping granddaughter out of the backseat. “You find yourself around these parts again, look me up. We’ll go down to the veterans’ hall for a jar or two.”

“Will do,” I said, smiling.

He’d just closed the rear door of the car when my phone, sitting there in the drink holder, started to ring. I’d glanced at it coming into town and had seen the screen filled with messages.

“Hello. Mike here,” I said.

“Sweet mother of hope, you’re alive,” Mary Catherine said. “Well, thanks for calling, Mike. We haven’t been worried sick about you or anything. What happened, the case went late? You decided to stay over in DC? That Parker woman wasn’t around, was she? You better hope not.”

“I stayed over in Pennsylvania, actually,” I said.

“Pennsylvania?”

“Well, it’s sort of a long story,” I said, glancing back up at the misty hills above the town as I followed the state road toward home.

 

—The End—