26
They came at nightfall. A soft breeze brought movement to the woods, hiding their approach, but Angel and Louis had been waiting for them, knowing that they would come. They had exchanged positions every hour to keep each other alert, and it was Angel who was watching the Mustang when the figures appeared, his sharp eyes picking up the slight change in the shadows cast by the swaying trees. He touched his partner’s sleeve, and Louis turned his attention from the house to the car. Silently, they watched the two men descend, their arms unnaturally extended by the guns in their hands, the suppressors like swollen tissue about to burst.
They were good: that was Louis’s first thought. There must be a vehicle nearby, but he hadn’t heard it, and Angel hadn’t picked them up until they were almost on top of the car. Anyone in the Mustang would have been dead before he realized what was happening. The two men melted back into the shadows again as they realized the Mustang was unoccupied, and even Louis had to strain to follow their progress. They wore no masks, which meant that they weren’t concerned about witnesses, because they would only be seen by whomever was in the house, and then for only as long as it took their victims to die.
Victims: that was the other matter. The situation at Bobby Jandreau’s house had been complicated by the arrival of Mel Nelson, his estranged girlfriend, two hours earlier. Incredible as it seemed, the spontaneous relationship advice offered that afternoon seemed to have made an impression. Louis had regarded the couple impassively as they talked in the living room for a time before Mel walked slowly over to Bobby, then knelt before him and embraced him. After that, they had retired to what Louis presumed was the bedroom, and they had not been seen since.
More distorted shadows. The gunmen were at the rear of the house now, where there was no chance of being seen by a neighbor at a window, or by someone taking a dog for a bedtime walk. One at either side of the door. A nod. Breaking glass. A figure poised to provide cover, the gun raised, as the other reached in through the hole to open the lock. Movement inside the house in response to the intrusion. A scream. The slamming closed of a bedroom door.
Louis took the first man with two shots to the back and a third, the killing shot, to the base of the skull. There was no warning, no invitation to turn with his hands held high, no chance to surrender. Such gestures were for the good guys in westerns, the ones who wore white hats and got the girl at the end. In real life, good guys who give chances to killers end up dead, and Louis, who had no idea if he was truly good or not, and could not have cared less, had no intention of dying for a romantic ideal. As the slain man fell, Louis’s gun was already swinging right. The second of the would-be killers was struggling to drag his hand back through the broken pane, his sleeve snagged on a jagged edge, his own body preventing him from responding to the approaching threat. But now there were two guns on him, and he froze for an instant as he acknowledged the impossibility of his own survival. There was sudden pain and then, fast upon it, sound, and he slumped against the wood, his left arm still hanging above his head, the glass erupting through the material of his jacket. He had just enough strength left to raise his gun, but it was pointing at nothing, and then nothing was all that there was.
The bedroom door remained closed. Angel called out to Jandreau as Louis began to detach the impaled man from the door.
‘Bobby Jandreau, can you hear me?’ he said. ‘My name is Angel. My partner and I were here earlier with Charlie Parker.’
‘I hear you,’ said Jandreau. ‘I have a gun.’
‘Well, that’s great,’ said Angel. ‘Go you. In the meantime, we got two bodies out here, and you and your girlfriend are only alive because of us. So do whatever you have to do, because we’re moving you out.’
There was the sound of whispered conversation from inside. Moments later, the door opened and Bobby Jandreau appeared in the gap, seated in his wheelchair and wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, his Beretta held uncertainly before him. He looked at Louis, who was dragging in the first of the bodies while Angel kept watch. It left a bloody trail along the pine floor.
‘We need trash bags and duct tape,’ said Louis. ‘A mop and water too, unless you think red goes well with the walls.’
Mel peered around the door. She seemed to be naked, apart from a strategically placed towel.
‘Ma’am,’ said Angel, nodding his head in acknowledgment of her. ‘You might want to put some clothes on. Playtime’s over . . .’
By the time Jandreau and his girlfriend were dressed, and had packed some clothes and toiletries into a bag, the two bodies were trussed in black garbage sacks and wrapped with tape. Jandreau stared at them from his chair. He had identified them instantly, even as death wrought its changes on them: Twizell and Greenham, both ex-Marines.
‘They were STA,’ he said. ‘Surveillance and Target Acquisition, eighty-four fifty-one military occupational specialty.’
Angel stared at him blankly.
‘Scout snipers,’ explained Louis. ‘They were slumming it tonight.’
‘They were one of two Marine sniper teams that we inserted into Al-Adhamiya,’ continued Jandreau. ‘It was just before—’
Well, that was it. That was the story. Bobby Jandreau wanted to talk now. He wanted to tell it all because his buddies had turned on him at last, but Angel told him to save it for later. Mel Nelson drove a big old truck with a cabin back, so they had her bring it around behind the house and they threw the bodies inside. Then they put Jandreau and Mel into the Mustang, first taking care to remove and disable the GPS, and Angel drove them to a motel just outside Bucksport while Louis, following Jandreau’s directions, took the truck to a disused granite quarry near Frankfort. There, using rope and chains from Jandreau’s garage, he weighted the bodies and dropped them into dark water. He was about to dump the GPS tracker in the Penobscot when he reconsidered. It really was a neat piece of gear, better than he could have constructed himself. He tossed it in the back of Mel’s truck and joined the others back at the motel.
And there, for want of anything better to do, they let Bobby Jandreau begin to tell his tale.