When Howell woke up, the priest was coming out of Lorna Kelly’s bedroom. He nodded to Howell.
“Father Harry, how are you?”
“I’m fine, m’boy, fine,” the priest answered.
Howell pointed toward the bedroom and raised his eyebrows.
“She’s asleep, bless her heart,” Father Harry said, “and you look as though you could use a few more winks, yourself.” He waved and went toward the kitchen.
At six o’clock Scotty woke him, and they went in to supper. All of them dined quietly in the old-fashioned kitchen on fried chicken, fresh corn and peas, cornbread muffins, and iced tea. Father Harry, alone, seemed to have been sipping something else. Howell remembered meals like this from his childhood, at the homes of family friends whose people were dying, except at those meals, the food had been brought by sympathetic neighbors. Apart from her family, there was no one to attend Lorna Kelly’s death but an alcoholic priest and two fugitives.
They lingered over coffee until the sun was nearly on the horizon. Scotty got her camera gear from her car, and Howell gave her the film. He went back into the house.
“Can I borrow a flashlight?” he asked Leonie.
“Sure,” she said. She went to a cupboard and brought back a large, six-volt model. “Listen,” she said, tentatively. “I’d like to see this again.” She looked up at him. “And I’d like it delivered in person.”
He smiled at her and touched her cheek. “I’ll be careful. There’s not much to this; we’re just going to go up there and perch in the woods and take some pictures and come back.”
“See that you do. The baby might want to meet his father one of these days.” She handed him a thermos of coffee and a paper bag. “You might get hungry.”
Howell nodded and turned to join Scotty. They left the Kellys’ backyard and entered the woods, picking their way through the trees and brush. The sun was below the treetops, and dusk was nearly upon them. They tried to hurry, to be in position before it got dark. They were climbing slightly.
Twenty minutes later, the ground leveled off, and they came to the edge of the airfield and stopped, still well into the trees. Howell looked at the windsock. He pointed to the little shack next to a couple of small aircraft near the end of the runway. “Let’s work our way down there. Any airplane is going to land in that direction, and it seems like a natural sort of meeting place, anyway.”
In the fading light, they circled a quarter of the way around the airfield, walking as quietly as possible and not using the flashlight. They saw no one, no cars, nothing that hadn’t been there when they arrived. In the trees near the end of the runway, perhaps thirty yards from the shed, they found a depression in the ground, well padded with pine needles.
“This looks good,” Howell said, masking the flashlight with his hand and playing it briefly over the ground. It was something like a sandtrap on a golf course. The ground seemed to fall away rapidly from there. In the last moments of light, Howell could see tops of trees below them, and, in the distance, the lake. “The pine needles won’t make much noise when we move around. A lot better than leaves. What’s the longest lens you’ve got?”
“A one-fifty to two-fifty zoom, but it’s not very fast.”
“My friend says it doesn’t have to be. That film will make it look like daylight.”
“Good.” She sighted through the camera toward the shed. “Jesus, I can’t see much. It’s just as well the film can. We’ve got six rolls; I’ll use the motor drive; we’ll practically have movies of this event.”
“I hope to God there is an event,” he said.
“They’re going to be here at three-thirty,” Scotty said, firmly. “That’s what the teletype said, and I believe it.”
Howell looked at his illuminated watch. “Just past nine,” he said. “A long wait.”
The wind whistled through the trees and rustled the pine leaves around them. Scotty snuggled up close and Howell put his arm around her.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to take this film back to Atlanta, write a big lead story, and hold up the Atlanta Constitution for the biggest raise in the history of the newspaper business.”
Howell laughed. “And what if they won’t sit still for it?”
“Then I’ll just call up AP or UPI or maybe the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the New York Times.”
Howell had once held that job himself. “They’d go for it, all right.”
“You think this story could get me on the Times?”
“It might. I think you’d be better off going back to the Constitution with it, though. Then, after you won your Pulitzer, you can accept the Times’s offer.”
She dug him in the ribs. “Listen, I’m serious about all this!”
“Jesus, don’t I know it!” he laughed. “I hope it comes off just the way you want it to.”
“Johnny, what do you want? What are you going to do after you finish the book?” She sounded as if she really wanted to know, so he told her everything he knew.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think maybe I’ve reached a point in my life where I should go back and figure out what’s happened to me, instead of always chasing what’s going to happen next.”
“Hey, there’s a country song in there somewhere. I think you ought to fool around with that a little and send it to Willie Nelson.”
“Aw, shut up.”
“Why don’t you go back to the Times?” she asked. “You said everybody could go back once.”
“Funny you should mention that,” he snorted. “I got an offer from the Times today. Nairobi.”
“Are you kidding? That’s great! You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what Nairobi means? It isn’t just the Serengeti Plain and the game parks, you know, you cover the whole continent. It’s Africa. The asshole of the planet. It’s flying to hell and back on poorly maintained, forty-year-old C-47s flown by half-trained African pilots; getting hassled by the police in South Africa; interviewing insane master sergeants who are suddenly running countries; having to look at the swollen bellies and pitiful eyes of starving kids; bribing customs officials in backwoods airports; having beggars hanging all over you every time you walk down a street; and finally, getting a bullet in the back of the head from some jungle corporal with a superiority complex and not enough reading skills to understand your press credentials. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Gee, you sound really interested.”
“Interested? Do you know the sadistic sons of bitches would probably make me learn Swahili? They’re sticklers for their boys knowing the language, they are.”
“I think it sounds fascinating.”
“That’s because you’re young and stupid.”
“I think you ought to take it.”
“They’d be stunned if I did, I can promise you that. This is just their way of saying I had my chance; I’m not going to Nairobi, and they know it.” Howell was tiring of this conversation. “Listen, why don’t you get some sleep; nothing’s going to happen for a while, yet.”
“Mmmmmmm,” she said, and snuggled closer. She was breathing slowly in a moment.
Howell leaned his head against hers and closed his eyes. He was bone tired. Nairobi. Christ! Over the next hours, he stirred himself every few minutes to have a look about him, but nothing happened. Around midnight, he laid the sleeping Scotty on her side and had some coffee from the thermos and a slice of pie from the paper bag. Then, feeling full and contented, he drifted off into a deeper sleep than he had bargained for.
The noise was familiar, almost too much so to be disturbing. Then Howell was wide awake, trying to remember the sound, to place its direction. A car door, that was it; he had heard a car door slam. Now there was another noise, a sound of metal scraping on metal. He turned to follow its direction.
There was only starlight to see by, but near the shed a car had parked, and its occupant, a large shape, was unlocking a padlock on the shed door. Cursing himself for sleeping so deeply, Howell put a hand over Scotty’s mouth and shook her awake. Holding a finger to his lips, he pointed toward the shed, some thirty yards away. They sat up on their knees, and Scotty began taking pictures.
“Is it Bo?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. He’s big enough. Easy on the film. Don’t use it up too soon.”
Scotty had squeezed off a dozen or more frames with the camera’s machine drive. She stopped. The man, who seemed to be wearing coveralls and a baseball cap, leaned against the fender of his car and waited. Howell and Scotty waited with him. The luminous hands of Howell’s watch read just past three AM.
For ten minutes they sat there, then there was a flash of headlights in the distance, and a very large truck began driving toward them along the road that paralleled the runway. It made a wide circle then pulled up next to the shack, a few feet off the edge of the grass landing strip. It was a moving van, and Howell thought he could read the name of a nationwide moving service painted on the side. Just before the headlights went out, they briefly illuminated Bo Scully, who shook hands with the driver and another man as they got down from the truck.
The two men, assisted by Bo, immediately went to the rear of the van, unlocked the doors, and unloaded half a dozen pieces of furniture. Scotty, looked at Howell with raised eyebrows, then shot another dozen frames. At twenty-five minutes past three, Bo went into the shack, and a moment later the runway lights came on, little spots of blue, reaching away down both sides of the grass strip. Then, a minute or two past the half hour, there was a distant hum, and Howell looked up to see a pair of white landing lights drifting toward the strip. Scotty finished a roll of film, handed it to Howell, and quickly reloaded.
The plane landed at what seemed so great a speed that Howell thought it would never stop, that it would crash through the shack and end up in the trees, on top of them. As it came noisily to a stop and began turning around at the very end of the strip, he was surprised to see that it had four engines and that, illuminated by Bo’s headlights, which had suddenly come on, it bore the insignia of the Georgia Air National Guard. Howell pointed at the plane; Scotty nodded and photographed the insignia, zooming in on it. It would have done little good to speak, because the roar of the four engines overpowered everything, and the propellers kicked up a hurricane of wind and pine straw. As the lighter ground debris blew away, they were able to see better.
The rear door of the airplane flew open, and somebody began kicking out what looked like small bales of cotton, wrapped in burlap. The two men from the truck and Bo quickly loaded them into the furniture van. Scotty handed Howell another roll of film, reloaded, and started to shoot again. Now the man on the plane was handing out what looked like four ordinary suitcases, then, finally, a canvas briefcase. Bo unzipped the briefcase and inspected the contents, apparently counting.
Bo gave the man on the plane a thumbs-up sign, and at that moment, somebody kicked Howell hard in the ass.
Howell turned angrily around to face a flashlight in his face, and, ahead of that, the barrel of a rifle, pointing at his head. His anger immediately turned to fear. The man behind the rifle was shouting, but Howell couldn’t make out what he was saying. He cupped a hand behind his ear to indicate this. The man leaned forward until the rifle barrel was nearly touching Howell’s forehead and shouted again.
“Get you hands up and throw that camera over here!”
Scotty seemed to have no trouble hearing him. She pushed the camera toward him, hard, like a basketball. It struck the flashlight, and Howell took the opportunity to grab for the rifle barrel and push it aside. As he did, a single shot went past his ear. The skin on the side of his head seemingly on fire, Howell kicked toward the other end of the rifle as hard as he could and thought he connected with a lower belly.
The man fell backwards, leaving the rifle with Howell, and, in the reflected glow of the car’s headlights, he could see the man struggling to one knee, clutching his middle. Howell got a better grip on the barrel with both hands and swung it as hard as he could, like a baseball bat, catching the man flush on the ear with the stock. He spun about, landed face down, and didn’t move.
Howell checked the weapon; it was an M-16 assault rifle with a long banana clip; he had qualified on it in the army. He felt for the automatic fire switch and looked back toward the group at the end of the runway. Even over the continuing roar of the airplane, the shot had been heard. The two men from the truck were running toward him. He pointed at the air over their heads, and fired a short burst. The two men immediately reversed course and began running for the truck.
Howell picked up the camera and shoved it at Scotty. He grabbed her and brought her ear close to his mouth. “Get back down to the Kellys’ and call the highway patrol station at Gainesville,” he yelled over the roar of the plane’s engines. “Tell them what’s happening!”
“I can’t leave you here!” she shouted back.
He held up the assault rifle. “Don’t worry, I’ve got them outgunned with this thing.” He handed her the flashlight. “Don’t use this unless you have to. Now, run!”
Scotty ran, and Howell turned back toward the airplane. Dirt flew in his face, and he realized that it wasn’t the wash from the propellers; somebody was shooting at him. He ran a few feet to his left, raised the automatic weapon, and got off a short burst, aimed at nothing in particular. To his surprise, one side of the furniture van suddenly dropped a few inches. He had hit the double tires at the right rear of the truck.
He ducked and ran back to his right, then took a moment to catch his breath. What the hell, if he could hit the truck, he ought be able to hit the plane. He popped his head up for a look.
The rear door of the plane slammed shut, and it started to move. Howell fired a burst and saw sparks fly off the runway under the plane. Too low. He raised his aim and held the trigger down. The weapon fired for two or three seconds, then stopped. Howell cocked it and tried to fire again. Nothing. He had emptied the clip. He ran back to the unconscious man and felt around him for another clip, but there was none.
Howell glanced back toward the runway and saw the airplane moving down the grass strip. His eyes widened; there was a lick of flame on the right wing. Dirt and leaves kicked up around him. They were firing again, and this time, he couldn’t fire back. He dropped the rifle and started to run.
He headed straight downhill, ninety degrees from the direction in which Scotty had run. Her chances would be better if he led them that way. He managed to cover thirty or forty yards before he tripped on something and fell headlong down the hill, which was steepening with every yard. He fetched up, hard, against a tree. He couldn’t breathe for a moment, then a breath came, and he tried to struggle to his feet. The woods around him were suddenly illuminated, and, a moment later, a huge noise and a rush of hot air told him the plane had exploded.
He glanced behind him just long enough to see a large, orange fireball rising above the trees, then he started to move down the hill again, taking care this time not to run blindly. His ribs ached from the collision with the tree, and the skin on the side of his head was still afire with the powder burn, but he was up and moving, and he reckoned that Bo and his friends were far too busy getting the drugs and the furniture van out of there to come after him.
He half ran, half walked down the steep hill, until he came to a stream. He stopped behind a tree and looked back up the hill. The glow from the burning airplane would backlight anybody coming after him. He saw no one. Suddenly, he was exhausted. He sat down beside the little stream and splashed water on his powder burns. It didn’t seem to help much. He drank some of the water, then some more. That helped.
After what he thought was ten or fifteen minutes, he got to his feet and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past four. The plane had landed just after three-thirty. Surely Scotty was at the Kellys’ by now, and the Georgia State Patrol was on its way. As if to confirm this, the distant scream of a siren reached him. It sounded as if it were closing on Sutherland County Airport.
He thought about returning to the airfield, but he was hurting, and it was uphill. He decided to follow the stream; he thought he knew where it met the main lakeside road. A few minutes later, he found he was right. The stream gurgled under a stone bridge and ran on down to the lake. Howell struggled up the embankment and made the road, clutching his arm to his side to keep his ribs from moving around. He’d give a lot for an elastic bandage, he thought.
He set himself as good a pace as he could manage and hiked down the road toward Sutherland. No cars passed, and the glow from the direction of the airfield had subsided. He made the crossroads in less than fifteen minutes and turned down the road toward the lake and the cabin. As he walked the last few yards and came around the bend, he was relieved to see Scotty’s car parked outside and a light on in the cabin.
He started up the stairs and stopped. Suddenly cautious, he climbed softly, staying near the edge of the steps to avoid creaking.
At the top, he leaned over the rail and looked through the window at the side of the landing, which gave him a view of the cabin’s living room. Scotty was sitting at his desk at the other end of the room, her head resting on her folded arms, asleep.
Howell was nearly overwhelmed with relief. She had made it. He opened the cabin door and crossed toward her. When he was halfway to the desk, a board creaked under his feet and Scotty sat up and turned. Her face was puffy and red on one side, and her left wrist was handcuffed to the chair.
“What took you so long?” a someone behind him asked.
Howell sagged at the sound of the familiar voice. He turned slowly around to find Bo Scully leaning against the wall behind the door. In one hand he was holding an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s; with the other, he was pointing a police riot shotgun, the same sort Howell had used to save Bo’s life at Minnie Wilson’s grocery store.