CHAPTER ONE
“Mr. Larabee, have I done anything to
grievously offend you in the recent past? In the distant
past? If I have, please be assured that you have my full and unstinting
apologies for whatever transgression I have committed against you.” Ezra
considered his words for a second and then added, “Transgressions, for there
are very probably many of them. Was it my placing a pox upon you? Is your
health failing? If it is, I deeply and humbly offer my most genuine
contrition.”
Ezra Standish had spent the last twenty
minutes engaged in a fruitless siege against the fortress of
“Ezra,”
“But-”
“No buts,”
Ezra’s lips thinned in frustration- he
obviously wasn’t getting through to his superior. Time to try a different tack
then; if appeals to the gentler side of human nature failed with Mr. Larabee,
then perhaps cold, hard reason would win the day.
“Mr. Sanchez should go,” Ezra said after a
moment.
“Good
“Mr. Sanchez should go,” Ezra continued,
plowing doggedly over Larabee. “He’s more... spiritually equipped to deal with
this than I am.” He saw a dangerous light enter
“Ezra, Vin’s already given me this argument,”
“Can’t we write an epilogue, in which the
illustrious leader reconsiders his actions and reprieves his faithful
subordinate from certain... ah, death by having a claustrophobic sharpshooter
pull out a concealed weapon and threaten to hijack the plane- and shoot said
faithful subordinate, I might add- if the pilot does not land the craft
immediately?”
“No, Ez. We can’t.”
“But-”
“Absolutely no ‘but’s,
Ezra! Dammit, if you don’t get out of here and get to
the airport in the next thirty seconds, you won’t have to worry about Vin shooting you.”
“You promise?”
“Out, Ezra.” Tension crackled in the room, and in that instant,
Ezra knew he had lost for certain this time; he’d lost the war of reason and
words, and would almost certainly lose some blood if he didn’t get out soon. He
spun on his heel to make good his retreat, and collided with Nathan on the way
out of
The medic handed him a small plastic pharmacy
bag. Too dejected to examine the contents or verbally enquire about them, Ezra
merely raised an inquisitive eyebrow at the team’s EMT.
“Crushed Dramamine,” Jackson explained.
“It’ll help with motion sickness and probably put him to sleep. I’m sure he’ll
take it- would be dumb not to. He can take it in water or whatever.”
“Mr. Jackson,” Ezra said, reluctant hope
dawning within him at Jackson’s complicity, but knowing that Vin
would sooner shoot his own foot before voluntarily taking medication.
‘Voluntary’, Ezra realized, being the key word.
“Truly, Mr. Jackson, a stroke of brilliance.”
“Yeah, well, you’re gonna need it.”
DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT: 12:19PM GMT
“Mr. Tanner, may I get you a Coke?” Ezra
tried for the fifth time in as many minutes. Next to him, Vin Tanner jittered
in the confining airport seat near the gate, darting uneasy glances at the maw
that waited to swallow him, send him down its narrow gullet, and disgorge him
in something even... even smaller, God forbid.
“No Ez,” he said as calmly as he could
manage. “Don’t think I need any caffiene right now.
Hell, it’s probably the last thing I need.”
“From the amount of Coke cans in the office
recycling receptacle, and the strength of the industrial sewage you blithely
refer to as coffee,” Ezra said slowly, staring directly at Vin as though his
eyes could drill the words right into his brain, “I must conclude that you have
a caffiene addiction. You would probably feel better
if you ‘got your fix’, to use the modern parlance. I understand that it works
well for smokers, alcoholics, and those unfortunates who are addicted to ‘Who
Wants to be a Millionaire.’”
For the first time since they’d checked their
luggage, Vin cracked a smile. “Never did like that
show,” he reflected, glad to have something to take his mind off the plane that
loomed outside the terminal even now.
“Yes, neither do I- the questions are
repellently easy, and the music sounds like bits of Wagner played through a
synthesizer. Now, can I get you anything?”
“Guess I’ll take that Coke,” Vin said, wondering why Ezra was being so... so helpful. “I
won’t owe you for this, will I?” he asked suspiciously. “Like, I won’t have to
iron your shirts or anythin’?”
“Mr. Tanner, I would sooner let a rabid
Alsatian near my clothing,” Ezra assured him, placing a comradely hand on the
sharpshooter’s shoulder. “This one is on the house.”
“Thanks, Ez,” Vin
said gratefully to the undercover agent’s retreating back. The buzz and hum of
the crowd around them pretty much drowned out Ezra’s reply, but it sounded a
bit like a fervent “Thank you, God.”
TAMPA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT: 8:27PM EST
“What do you mean, ‘no available flights.’ Of course there must be available flights,” Ezra
snapped at the young woman behind the booking desk who simpered apologetically
and fiddled with her ball-point pen. She blinked elaborately-mascaraed eyes at him.
“I’m sorry, sir, but the airports in Fort
Myers, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach are not receiving incoming
traffic,” the young woman began tentatively, manicured nails clicking on either
her pen or the desktop.
“For the love of our dearest God, Vin, sit up
straight!” shouted Ezra at Vin, who’d begun to list seriously to his right in
his chair and come in danger of his face falling onto the laptop keyboard of
the hostile-looking businesswoman in the chair next to him. For the first time
since they’d taken off, Ezra began to doubt the wisdom of dumping three crushed
Dramamine pills into Vin’s Coke; the
sharpshooter had fallen into a deep sleep the second he’d collapsed into his
seat and only stirred when Ezra forced him from it after landing in Tampa.
Now, it appeared that he was quite content to
go back to sleep again. Ezra smothered a curse. At least Tanner hadn’t been
awake to hear the pilot’s announcement that several bomb threats had been
phoned into Miami International Airport three hours ago and that they were
being rerouted to Tampa International, a good six-hour drive from Miami.
A good six hours that Ezra had vainly tried
to cut down by persuading the hapless woman behind the booking desk that no
self-respecting terrorist would threaten to bomb tiny airports like the ones in
Fort Myers and West Palm Beach. Why would they? So why couldn’t they get a
flight there?
“It’s not that, sir,” the young woman
pleaded, remaining impervious to reason. “It’s that all these airports have
several shuttle flights to Miami and those planes have had to remain at the
airport, so there aren’t any places for incoming planes to go.”
“Oh, very well,” snarled Ezra. “Just what,
then, are we supposed to do?”
“The airline can book you into a hotel and
reconnect you to Miami tomorrow,” the young woman said.
“I have a very important seminar to attend
tomorrow. A government seminar. I cannot possibly wait
until tomorrow to fly to Miami.” Ezra wondered why he was being so insistent in
this- he hadn’t wanted to go to the damn seminar in the first place. They could
stay in Tampa- it had palm trees, water, and alligators, so it came close
enough to being Miami for Ezra.
Except
“You could rent a car and drive down,” the
young woman suggested.
“Yes!” Ezra seized on that- they would drive,
if they had to. “Where are the car rental desks?”
“Ground level, right next to the pick-up and
drop-off strip, ” the young woman replied, pointing in
the general direction. Ezra thanked her and seized Vin,
who was on the brink of falling face-first into the businesswoman’s briefcase.
The woman gave him a disparaging look, which Ezra ignored, having become
concerned with getting both his luggage and Mr. Tanner down to the car rental
desks.
Fortunately, a worker came by with both a
flat baggage trolley and a helpful expression. After a considering moment, Ezra
carefully situated his fellow agent on the trolley and picked up their
suitcases. Seeing the curious expression on the baggage handler’s
face, Ezra explained, “He’s much heavier than he looks.” The man nodded, as if
that explained everything.
Luck seemed to shine a little more brightly
after that; Ezra secured a car and piled both his luggage and his friend into
it. He picked up a road map and directions from the agent, who had interjected
some blather about being careful in ‘Alligator Alley’ if he was driving late at
night. Within a half-hour, he pulled out onto the Expressway, heading south to
I-75 and Miami, Vin snoring softly beside him.
CHAPTER TWO
I-75, BETWEEN NAPLES AND MIAMI: 12:38
EST
“I can’t fucking believe you drugged me, Ezra!”
The three crushed capsules of Dramamine had
eventually worn off somewhere between Fort Myers and Naples, and Vin had come to sudden and unusually voiciferous
life, vocally deriding Ezra for giving him motion-sickness pills disguised as a
friendly gesture.
“Yes, well, you didn’t have to spend six
hours being crowded by the third member of the Two Fat Ladies, who also
happened to be second cousin to the Bearded Woman,” Ezra said, rolling his
eyes. “You also didn’t have to listen to you snore. I’m surprised I wasn’t
driven to drink. And considering that I gave you the window seat- the window
seat, which you were too unconscious to appreciate, by the way- I rather
believe that I’m owed some thanks.”
“You fuckin’
drugged me, Ez,” repeated Vin, and something in the
sharpshooter’s tone made Ezra drag tired eyes from the road to search Tanner’s
face. The younger man was most definitely serious- not indignant this time, and Ezra belatedly realized that he’d transgressed
horribly.
He’d stepped all over a trust that Vin had, however reluctantly, given him, at some point in
their time together. For all Ezra’s ‘slitheriness’,
as Vin had once called it, he’d trusted the undercover
agent to some extent. Trusted him to watch his back, to make a passing attempt
at doing what was right. Trusted him with some things Tanner would never trust
with anyone else outside the six men he worked with.
Like how he disliked medication of any kind.
Ibuprofen, vitamin supplements, antibiotics... Dramamine.
And how he didn’t like not being aware of things going on
around him, even if being aware meant knowing that he was in the cramped
quarters of an airplane. Shame swept over Ezra- not a feeling he was
accustomed to, and so twice as strong for it- but even
as he began to apologize, he knew that the situation had progressed far beyond
‘I’m sorry.’
“Vin... I truly am deeply, deeply regretful
for doing that. I... I thought that I was doing it for the best.” The apology
sounded lame, hypocritical, and completely ineffective in Ezra’s own ears,
mostly because ‘for the best’ in this case meant ‘in Ezra Standish’s best
interests,’ not ‘in Vin Tanner’s best interests’.
Vin knew it too, Ezra thought; any of the others would
have offered him the pills and would not have been surprised when he refused.
They might not even have offered, for that matter. Standish chanced a quick
glance at Tanner; the dim illumination afforded by the stereo and air
conditioner console cast Vin’s features in strange
patterns of chiaroscuro, light and dark shifting subtly across his face. The
sharpshooter’s blue eyes glittered coldly when the light struck them, and Ezra
turned back to the road, knowing Vin wasn’t accepting
apologies any time soon.
Silence descended over the two men. Vin
scrunched into a corner, placing as much distance between himself and the
undercover agent as the small sports coupe allowed, resting his head against
the window and staring out into the infinite blackness that surrounded the
swamps to either side of the road. He drifted off into something like suspended
animation, not really sleeping but not awake either,
and tried not to think about Ezra actually fucking doping his drink.
He jerked from his dozing as he became aware
of the car slowing down and pulling over onto the narrow shoulder of the road. Vin sat up straighter and blinked the half-sleep from his
eyes but pointedly did not look at Ezra, who set the emergency brake and turned
the ignition off.
“I need to stretch my legs for a moment,”
Ezra said by way of explanation, not looking at Vin
either, undoing his seatbelt and climbing out. Vin
stayed where he was but rolled down the window to get some air. The humid, warm
stickiness of South Florida air oozed in, heavy with the smells of the swamp
and carrying the chirps of crickets and birds.
Vin waited patiently for Ezra to return, gazing off into
the distance and thinking about actually talking at the seminar in two days. He
had to give a speech! A shiver jolted up his spine at the thought of standing
in front of God only knew how many people and explaining the specific role that
he, as sniper, played in Team Seven’s operations. He vaguely remembered lugging
a bunch of charts and graphs and a huge easel to the taxi that would take him
to the airport. Had it gotten here okay? What if he left it in the taxi, all
the way back in Denver? Could you ship an easel overnight? Vin swallowed fear
at the prospect of standing up on the stage and saying, “Well, there’s supposed
t’ be a graph showin’ the relationship between kill
ratio an’ successful stings, but it got lost or I forgot to bring it, one of
the two.”
God help him. Did he have his notecards? Would he remember how to pronounce everything?
Josiah had helped him write his speech and Vin had
practically memorized the whole twenty minutes of it, but there would be no way
in hell he could remember the ten-dollar words Josiah had suggested unless he
had those notecards.
Desperation broke through the remains of the
Dramamine’s influence, and Vin resolved to go through
his luggage- he couldn’t rest until he found those notecards.
He craned his head to look in the back- just some of Ezra’s garment bags and
the one he had gotten off Nathan that contained his one decent suit- borrowed
from Ezra and not returned, as it happened. Luggage must be in the trunk; Vin grabbed the keys from the ignition and climbed out of
the car, walking around to the trunk and opening it.
His fingers fumbled on his suitcase’s zipper.
Cursing, he finally got the damn thing opened and... and
almost gasped with relief to see his notecards
sitting squarely on top of a T-shirt. “Thank God,” he mumbled, closing the
suitcase up and heading back to his seat, wondering what the hell was taking
Ezra so long.
“Ez, you comin’
tonight or tomorrow?” he asked of the night. Only a cricket responded with a
plaintive chirp.
“C’mon, Ez. It’s one in the mornin’ and
we’ve probably got us a ways to go yet. Let’s get movin,
huh?”
Nothing.
“Ezra, dammit, I
ain’t in the mood for this.”
Nothing.
“Ez?”
Real panic set in. Vin
called for Ezra again and again, receiving no answer each time. He ransacked
the car for a cell phone and finally found it. With frantic fingers, he dialed
911 and the second the operator picked up, said quickly, “Hi, I’m in the middle
of nowhere... my friend got out of the car and now he’s missing.”
“Where are you, sir?” the operator asked with
unwonted calmness.
“The hell if I know!” Vin
half-shouted, then forced himself to calm down. “We’re driving to Miami,” he
said, “I was asleep most of the way, so I don’t know where we are. In the
middle of a swamp, though.”
“I-75, sir?”
“Yeah, probably,” Vin
replied, sparing a moment to promise himself that he’d kill Ezra as soon as
emergency workers found him.
“We’ll have an emergency crew out as soon as
possible, sir,” the operator said. “Please stay by your car and keep the dome
and hazard lights on.”
“Thanks,” Vin said,
and hung up. Adrenaline made him want to jitter, to run around in frustrated
circles; he most certainly did not want to sit in the car and wait. He struck a
compromise and leaned against the side.
“You be needin’ help, mister?”
The voice came out of nowhere. Nerves strung
tightly by worry snapped; Vin flung himself away from
the car and whirled to confront the source of the voice, ready to fight. The
sight of an elderly black man in worn overalls jeans and a T-shirt that said
‘Where in the Hell is Yeehaw Junction?’ brought him
up short; the man had his hands upraised in a gesture of warding off attack.
Breathing heavily, Vin lowered his own and regarded
the old man.
“Might get you killed one day, doin’ that,” he managed to say calmly.
“Ain’t no matter if
I do,” the old man returned, smiling and exhibiting strangely white, perfect
teeth to the moonlight. “Eighty-six years is a mighty long time t’ be alive, but
if seein’ you whirl ‘round just like someone done
shocked ya with a live wire don’t give me a heart attack, I don’t believe nothin’ will.”
The deep, rich tones were somewhat soothing. Vin still watched the old man warily, but the old man didn’t
seem to notice his scrutiny. Instead, he asked, “You havin’ car trouble, young man?”
“No... a friend of
mine just... well, he just disappeared. Out there.
Emergency crews are comin’ soon.” Vin
gestured to the swamp just past the shoulder of the road. The old man’s gaze
followed Vin’s hand out into the darkness, and he
nodded sagely, shuffling out to the margin between sawgrass
and concrete.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if’n
they never find him,” the old man said. He glanced at Vin,
who now stared at him openly. “Sometimes you get drivers comin’
through here who ain’t seein’ straight,
they so tired from drivin’ all day. They drive right offa the road, go through the
fence, an’ get stuck in the mud, an’ don’t climb out ‘cause they fall asleep or
wake up an’ the car door won’t open. When they don’t show up at where they s’poseta be, po-lice get called.
They ax, ‘What’s the problem?’ an’ the people waitin’
for the driver say ‘They was drivin’
down by Alligator Alley to come see us.’ So they send out search n’ rescue
people, but they don’t find nothin’. No car, no body.
Just gone.”
“You sure know how to be encouragin’,
don’t ya,” muttered Vin.
“It’s the truth of things, son,” the old man
said serenely. “These swamps been here since the end
of the Ice Age- hell, maybe before. They been here longer than man’s been here,
the Big Cypress an’ the Everglades, an’ they’ll probably be here long after
this highway falls to dust. Indians say there’s vengeful spirits in them
swamps, hungry for any human dumb enough to fall into ‘em.
An’ maybe there are.”
Vin half-believed the old man, and didn’t particularly
want Ezra to get either trapped in the mud or taken by some vengeful spirit. A
dispirited glance up and down the road showed no signs of approaching life. The
only other human for miles around, other than Ezra, was the old man.
“I gotta find him,
sir,” Vin said. “You think you could help me?”
“Ain’t no way I’m goin’
out there, no sir,” the old man said firmly. “An’ you shouldn’t go out there
either. Gitcho’ self lost too,
an’ then where would you an’ your friend be?”
“Wasn’t thinkin’
of that, sir.” Vin
stepped around the old man and opened the trunk once more, pulled out a set of
jumper cables. He draped them on the hood and then went back to the trunk to
ransack Ezra’s suitcase. He found the undercover agent’s well-beloved silk
bathrobe with its monogram on the left breast and the ridiculous
velvety-rope-type thing with tassels on the end. Vin
clipped one end of the jumper cables to the left sleeve of the bathrobe, then
clipped the other end to the rope before tying the rope securely around his
wrist. It didn’t give him much of a radius to work with- twelve feet or so, but
how far could Ezra have gone?
CHAPTER THREE
Vin handed the hem of Ezra’s bathrobe to the old man and
told him to step as close to the edge of the shoulder as he could. The old man
did so, carefully toeing the line between cement and grass as though it were
some boundary he could not step over.
“Okay, I’m gonna start lookin’,”
Vin said. “When I tell ya to, move to the left or
right, okay? I’ll tell ya which way. Oh, an’ keep an eye out for an ambulance
or anythin’.”
“Sho’ thing,” the
old man said complacently. “You think this is really gonna work?”
“Won’t make much of a difference if it
doesn’t, I guess,” Vin replied as he navigated his way
down the embankment, keeping his body low for balance. He thanked God that he’d
worn jeans; the rough edges of sawgrass scraped
against the denim and he could feel the stabbing branches seeking his flesh
through the fabric. Other... less savory things probably would have had a field
day with him if he’d worn shorts- two seconds of thinking about that made Vin revert to concentrating on finding Ezra. Cautiously, he toed his way through the darkness, wincing when he stepped
into mud past his ankles and muffling a curse when the glop didn’t want to
relinquish its grip without a fight.
Vin pulled his foot free with a ‘schlurp’-ing
sound that made him shudder, and he wished that Ezra could have chosen to go
missing in a more convenient place, like a grocery store or a parking lot with
a PA system. “Hey, Ez! Ezra, you hear me?” he asked
the empty blackness once again.
No answer.
He turned to call up to the old man. “Hey,
step over to the left please, sir.” The old man complied and Vin
started to search a new area, feeling exhaustion pulling at him. Moving through
the mud had gotten unexpectedly difficult, and Vin had
to blink constantly to relieve the stinging of tired eyes. Mosquitos
took large, healthy bites out of his arm, and Vin didn’t
even want to think about what else had decided- or would decide- to make a
snack out of him.
Didn’t want to think about what would make a
snack out of Ezra, either. He’d once seen a gigantic alligator at the Denver
Zoo- big-ass motherfucker it was, too. He’d gone around feeding time and had
gotten there just before, so he saw the huge creature just lying there
half-asleep in the sun like a big, scaly rug. It seemed impossible that such a
gigantic animal could move so quickly- but the speed with which the gator had
fastened on the food its handlers had dropped into its cage had made Vin jump.
With dismal thoughts rapidly shading to
despair, Vin kept on, periodically asking the old man
to shift his position so he could search the areas where he thought Ezra could
be and calling out Standish’s name in tones varying from commanding to
pleading. The old man added his summons to Vin’s, his
loud, “Mistah Standish!” booming out like church
bells.
No answer.
The mud really started to pull after a while,
and the hours of Dramamine-induced sleep started to seem like a distant memory
of a brief catnap. He started to hear phantom sirens, jerking his head up at
what he thought was the sound of an ambulance or firetruck
in the distance, and cursing softly when he realized his imagination- or
desperation- had conjured it out of the whisperings of grass and the crying of
birds.
He couldn’t keep going. Ezra was probably
unconscious by now, Vin decided, unwilling to
contemplate the other, infinitely more frightening possibility. Tanner’s
pragmatism forced him to retreat back to the relative safety of the roadway,
where he could rest for a bit and figure out what to
do next, if he could do anything other than call 911 again and beg for help.
“I’m comin’ up,” he
told the old man.
“Take it easy, young man,” he admonished.
“Banks are slippery ‘round here.”
Vin found out the truth of the old man’s words first
hand; the seemingly secure root that his right foot used as a toehold was
covered with a malicious layer of slime. The rubber-soled shoe slipped on the
root and Vin lost his balance, landing hard on his
ribs and cracking his left wrist on a rock. He slid a little ways down the
embankment before he fetched up against something warm and soft.
Warm and soft, wearing something that felt,
against Vin’s exposed right arm, like expensive cotton
of the wrinkle-free persuasion. The kind of garment not
typically worn by the average swamp denizen, if any of them. Cautiously,
Vin reached out and brushed the sleeve, his hand working
its way up the arm to shake the person’s shoulder.
“Ez, is that you?”
An incoherent groan answered him, but Vin had heard that groan many times before, whether after an
unlucky enounter with a bullet, in the throes of a
hangover, or in response to J.D.’s argument that Shoney’s represented American
dining at its pinnacle.
“I found him!” Vin
called up to the old man, who crowed with joy. Vin
laughed, mostly from the sudden and giddy sense of relief, then turned back to
Ezra and tried to determine the extent of the undercover agent’s injuries. It
hurt Vin a little to have to poke and prod, to use
Ezra’s cries of pain as indicators of where his fellow agent had gotten hurt.
He weighed the risk of moving Ezra, not knowing enough about back injuries for
his own comfort.
“You ought not to move him,” the old man
shouted down to him, as if reading Vin’s thoughts.
“You got a blanket in there or anythin’?”
“There’s garment bags
in the back seat,” Vin responded doubtfully. They would have to do though; he
saw the dome light go on as the old man opened the back doors and pulled out
the garment bags. The old man shouted a warning, and an instant later, one
garment bag landed with a soft ‘thwap’ beside him,
followed by three more warnings and three more bags. Vin
piled the bags around Ezra, who didn’t respond except to groan a little more,
and Vin found himself briefly thanking Standish for overpacking.
Now, of course, they needed that damn
ambulance. Vin sat next to Ezra, a protective hand
resting atop the garment bags. He gazed up at the stars, bright and bold
without city lights to fight against, and breathed a quick prayer to God, to
the 911 people, to the ambulance. He tried not to fall asleep, but it got
harder as silent minutes wore on, and Vin wondered how
long he’d been down in that damn gully.
Too long.
The words repeated themselves like a mantra,
and Vin started to drift away on the rhythm of it- too
long, too long, too long.
Tooooooo lonnnnng, toooooooooooooo lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng....
too woo... woo-woo... woo-woo...
Woo-woo?
Vin wondered why the words had suddenly become so
high-pitched and obnoxious, and where were those lights coming from? He
blinked, caught in a sudden wash of blue and red lights; it took him a moment
to register the presence of human voices- human voices other than the old man. Vin wondered if he still held on to Ezra’s bathrobe. Vin hoped he did.
He held desperately onto Ezra’s bathrobe
rope-thingy when someone tried to remove it; a soft, yet firm voice reassured
him that it would be okay, he didn’t need to worry any more about getting lost
down there. Vin didn’t realize he’d spoken his fears out loud- the realization
came as a dull thing, a sort of “oh” that’s said more to fill a gap in
conversation after someone says something they think is exciting but really
isn’t.
Strong hands supported him, forced him to
stand, even though he didn’t really want to. Vin
sagged, made his body dead weight just to defy those who thought they could get
away with hauling him anywhere they wanted to.
“Rick, we’re gonna need another stretcher
over here. You got the other guy secured?”
“Yup. I’ll grab Wendy- they’ve got room in her rig. The
helicopters are down by the toll booth waiting.”
“We’ve got an ETA of fifteen minutes for
them. They’ll be ready?”
“Yup.”
The voices floated around him; Vin followed their paths absently, tracing each voice
through the tangle of conversation, but not really processing the words, as
conscious thought had gotten progressively more difficult.
Vin’s head lolled against his right shoulder, inclining
slightly backward so he could see down the
embankment out of which these people now dragged him. The new lights revealed
the absence of the garment bags and Ezra. Vin panicked
for a second, until the words of the people around him filtered through- Ezra
was already in an ambulance. He relaxed a little, and just before he drifted
off, he felt his body being lifted and placed flat onto a gurney, and he heard
the old man’s wild cackling in the background, disembodied and haunting.
“Ha ha! What once was lost now is found. Ha ha! Praise the Lord!”
When Vin came to, he
found himself staring at the featureless, unexciting ceiling of Miami General
Hospital, a doctor checking the IV stuck in his arm. He turned to look at her
and thought about asking her what time it was, because he didn’t have his
watch. When he tried to speak though, his voice rasped and he winced; she saw
it and got him a glass of water. Vin drank it greedily
and, having banished the sandpaper in his throat, finally asked.
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning, Tuesday the
thirteenth,” the doctor said matter-of-factly, glancing at her charts. “Mr.
Tanner, you should be free to go later this afternoon provided you feel more
alert- much of your problem was exhaustion and dehydration. You haven’t woken
up since we got you off the helicopter, and we gave you IV liquids to boost
your fluid level. I can discharge you around five, so I’d like you to get more
sleep if you can.”
Strangely, sleep was not something Vin would object to, but he had to see Ezra first, make sure
he was okay. “How’s Ez doin’? The man I came here
with?”
“Mr. Standish?” The doctor produced another
chart and skimmed over it. “Not too badly, considering he sustained a broken
ankle, a couple of sprained ribs, and a head contusion. He’s just down the hall
from you- would you like to see him?”
“Please.” The doctor helped him sit up; he
cast a quick glance at her chest and read ‘Melissa Perry’ on her nametag. Vin swung his legs over the bed and stood, his head swimming
a little in rebellion. With Dr. Perry at his side, he made his way out the door
and down the hall to the room where Ezra lay, reading a book with half his mind
to it, the other half engaged in contemplating actions beyond the walls of his
room.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Hey, Ez,” Vin said
as he entered the room. Standish’s eyes widened a little and he set the book
down on the bedside table.
“Good morning, Mr. Tanner. I must say... it’s
quite unusual to see you lying abed so late in the day.”
“Long night,” Vin
returned, sinking into the chair next to Ezra’s bed.
“Indeed,” Ezra said, and closed his eyes. The
southerner seemed to be engaged in some internal conflict, his mouth tightening
a little and his closed lids squinching even tighter.
At last he said, “Mr. Tanner- Vin... I would like to apologize for drugging
your Coke yesterday.” Vin opened his mouth to say
something, but Ezra kept on: “It was wrong of me to begin with... I should have
realized that when Nathan gave me that Dramamine, he was offering it to you as
a possibility and not to myself as a solution to an...
undesirable situation. And, in light of what
ultimately happened, such a measure was imprudent at best, disastrous at
worst.”
“You done, Ez?”
“Unfortunately, the state of my ankle does
not permit me to bow and scrape, Mr. Tanner, but I would also like to append my
deepest thanks for your slogging through the mud, muck, and the Holy Ghost only
knows what else to find me.”
A slow smile worked its way across Vin’s face. Ezra watched in suspense, uncertain as to what
it meant. At length, Vin explained.
“Was gonna tell you that you didn’t need t’
be apologizin’... Got my revenge
last night.” The puzzled look on Ezra’s face prompted him to continue.
“See, I used our garment bags to keep ya warm, an’ those Brioni
suits are smellin’ more like
armadillo crap than CK One, or whatever the hell you use.”
“It’s Polo, thank you very much, and
fortunately we’re in a large city that is well-equipped with dry cleaners.”
“Expensive ones,” Vin chipped in. “But.. if ya give my speech for me
tomorrow, I’ll pay for it myself.”
“Not a chance, Mr. Tanner. Not a chance.”
The rest of the day saw both patients
discharged and on the mend. Vin had to drive
everywhere, much to his dismay, as Ezra had the courtesy to break his right
ankle and the foresight to rent a stick shift. After two wrong turns and a
near-miss on a one-way street, they found the vast, sprawling hotel on the
northern fringes of South Beach; after three wrong elevator stops, they found
their room. Night life seemed an impossible dream; both Vin
and Ezra collapsed onto their respective beds.
They got welcomed on the second day to the
Westin Miami convention center by rumors of how members of Team Seven, the
“Best of the West,” had escaped death once again, having spent the first day of
the seminar in the hospital. Both men, eyeing the program for the first day,
congratulated themselves on avoiding at least one day of torture.
For Vin, though, the
day he wanted to avoid was the one he had to go to and now faced, spending his
last few minutes as an anonymous participant in the audience before the emcee
called him up to make an ass out of himself. It took conscious effort to not
flip through his notecards or otherwise fidget. Ezra
sat serenely next to him, thoughtfully chewing his salad, undisturbed by his
friend’s nervousness- but then, Vin thought sourly, he
wasn’t going to get up onstage and make an ass out of himself.
“Don’t worry about all that,” Ezra had
assured him on the way to the hotel yesterday. “Don’t think about the people
watching you- just think about presenting your material logically and clearly.”
The black look Vin had given him had prompted the
southerner to take another tack. “Pretend you’re just talking to the six of us
at the saloon.”
“Never used a graph at the
saloon, Ez.”
“If I thought getting you drunk would help,
I’d ransack every mini-bar in the hotel myself,” Ezra had said irritably.
“Please... just relax, Mr. Tanner. Approach this as... approach this as just
another operation.”
Just another operation. Vin wished that he could
have his assault rifle instead of that stupid pointer-thingy. He’d shoot the
emcee first- convenient, open, and solitary target. A little tricky, because
the podium blocked anything but an upper-body or head shot, but he could deal
with that. Next would be the man who’d convinced
A hostage situation began to play itself out
in Tanner’s head when the emcee, unknowing of the danger he could possibly have
been in had Vin Tanner been in possession of his rifle, stepped up to the
podium and announced, “Thank you, Mr. Niessen, for
that fascinating talk on paperwork and procedure. Next on our list of guest
speakers is Vincent Tanner. Mr. Tanner is a former covert arms specialist with
the Army and is currently working as sniper and weapons support for the famed
Team Seven, out of the ATF offices in Denver.”
Enthusiastic applause greeted the emcee’s
words, and Vin looked around for a convenient place to
melt through the floor. He gripped his notecards
tightly in his right hand, frozen to his chair, until Ezra dislodged him with a
whack of his crutch against Vin’s sore ankle. Tanner
bit back a curse and stood, vowing further revenge.
The distance between his table and the stage
stretched on forever, but suddenly, he ascended the stairs and crossed the
stage to shake the emcee’s hand. He turned to the podium, moving like a man in
a dream, staring out over the vast ocean of people who stared at him and only
him. The floodlights over the stage suddenly seemed very hot and very bright. Vin swallowed, desperately tried to refocus his attention on
his notecards.
He set them down on the podium and stared, a
scream threatening to rise in his throat.
The top one was smudged.
FOUR DAYS LATER, 9:02 AM GMT
“Really, Mr. Tanner, do stop agonizing about
your speech. It went well, it truly did. Well, once you got over the little
incident in which you almost put that poor man’s eye out with your pointer
after taking it from him, it went spectacularly well, I thought.”
“Quit bein’ nice,
Ez,” Vin moaned, resting his arms on his desk and
burying his face in them. “It sucked the worst kind of ass. It sucked more than
anything has possibly sucked before. I’ll never hear the end of it from the
rest of the guys- they have to have heard by now.”
“Mr. Tanner... you did well.” Ezra scowled
and contemplated finding some brandy to splash in his coffee- surely, surely he could be exempted from rules just this
once. There hadn’t been enough alcohol on the plane ride home to deal with Vin’s constant worrying and Ezra had finally threatened to
force-feed Vin the rest of the despised Dramamine in order to silence him.
“Before I desist in what is apparently a
fruitless attempt to salve your ego,” Ezra said slowly, preparing to launch his
final attack, “I should ask if you noticed the attentions of a Miss Delia
Rosenberg from the D.C office during the party that night.”
“Yeah..” Vin looked up from his desk. “What about Delia Rosenberg?”
“Oh, hey! You mean Delia Iceberg?” Buck asked as he strode in
with J.D. right behind him. “Damn! The woman’s sexy as hell, but colder than a
frozen turkey in Antarctica. You get anywhere with her, Vin?
Huh? Tell ol’ Buck all about it.”
“No way, Buck,” grunted Vin,
retreating to the cave formed by his crossed arms.
“Mr. Wilmington, Miss Rosenberg could not
keep her hands, much less her eyes, off our resident sharpshooter for the
duration of our sojourn there.”
“Jesus
“I please to aim, Mr. Tanner,” Ezra said
serenely. “Miss Rosenberg is notoriously difficult to impress- remember the
conference in Albany last year, when Buck tried to-”
“Hey, hey! We aren’t going there,” Buck warned the undercover
agent, shaking a forbidding finger to emphasize his point. “It’s bad enough Vin here has gone where Buck Wilmington hasn’t gone before-
you don’t need to rub it in.”
“Au contraire, Mr. Wilmington, I do. You have
not had the distinct pleasure of hearing Mr. Tanner agonize about the
stupendous ass he must have made of himself during his speech.”
“Did he?” Buck asked. Just as he did so, the
rest of the team filed in from the conference room, and Nathan glanced
curiously at the tall, moustached agent.
“Did he what?”
“Make an ass of himself giving his speech,”
Buck answered. With the topic of conversation now revealed, the entire team now
had a stake in the final, decisive answer. A heavy silence cloaked the room,
the seven men in it suspended in a timeless, breathless moment.
“No,” Ezra said at last. “No, he did not.”
“Ez?” Vin’s voice sounded somewhat
loud in the silence that still hung over them.
“Yes, Mr. Tanner?”
“You’re forgiven for the Dramamine.”
“Thank you, Mr. Tanner.”
THE END