Suddenly a sound like metallic rain began to circle them-plink-plink-plink-plink!-and small holes began to appear in the truck's fenders like strange magic. "Someone's popping caps at us!" Phil shouted. "Get down!"

He dragged Eagle to the dirt. Christ, how many of them are there? His peripheral vision caught the white dots of muzzleflash on the far side of the house.

A fifth Creeker was running toward them, firing a pistol.

Phil ripped another burst of .45 off the MAC...

The Creeker went down with a garbled howl.

"Got him!" Eagle shouted with glee.

Then a sixth Creeker, much taller and less coordinated, turned the corner and advanced on them, too.

He was firing a pump shotgun.

"Jesus Christ!" Phil complained. "What, did they charter a f.u.c.king bus!" And when he aimed the MAC and squeezed- "s.h.i.t, man!" Eagle shrieked.

-nothing happened. The bolt locked open. The clip was empty. Phil swore under his breath. A mere few seconds had expended the MACs magazine. I wish to h.e.l.l these things would shoot for as long as they do in the movies! He s.n.a.t.c.hed Eagle's revolver and, using the truck as cover, drew a bead on the advancing Creeker. Steady, steady. This would be tough. Just when he'd acquired a decent target, the next shotgun round blew out the windshield. Another shot socked into the side of the truck, spraying pellets across the hood, then another tore through the pa.s.senger and driver's windows.

Phil sprang back up, aimed, fired.

The .38 caught the Creeker in the groin and dropped him, screaming, in the gra.s.s.

G.o.d, I hope that's all of them.

Getting out of here on foot would be h.e.l.l, but at least Eagle knew where they were. Phil turned. "All right, man, now we run our a.s.ses off-"

But when Phil turned, Eagle wasn't standing there. Instead, he was lying there- "Eagle! No!"

-gargling his own blood.

Frantic, Phil dropped to his knees. Eagle convulsed in the gra.s.s. That last shotgun round, Phil realized. It had blown through the pa.s.senger and driver's windows and caught Eagle high in the chest. Eagle reached up feebly, shivering. Bubbles of blood percolated at the holes in his chest as he tried to breathe.

Phil didn't know what to do. This was about the hardest type of wound to treat in the field. And moving him would be fatal. "Hang on, man," was all Phil could say.

"Aw, s.h.i.t, they really f.u.c.ked me over," Eagle's voice gurgled. He hacked up some blood, which looked like black syrup in the moonlight. "Can't move, can't hardly breathe..."

"Just sit tight," Phil implored. "If I try to carry you out of here, you'll never make it. I'll be back as soon as I can with an ambulance."

Eagle's hand shakily grabbed Phil's shirtsleeve. His eyes were gla.s.sing over. "Pop me, man. I'm f.u.c.kin' dyin'."

Phil knew he was right. Eagle would be dead in minutes, drowned in his own blood.

"You'll be all right, man. Just hang in there."

Blood bubbled out of Eagle's mouth with the words. "Kill me, Phil, I'm beggin'ya. Don't leave me alive...for them."

Phil stared down. "You're gonna be okay," he said, knowing it was a lie. "I got all the Creekers, so you just wait it out. I'll be back as fast as I can... But, look, Eagle, you gotta tell me something first. You gotta tell me where Natter's lab is."

The dying eyes gazed back up. "Natter? Lab?"

"Natter's dust lab. It's got to be out here somewhere. Tell me where it is, Eagle. Then I can pay them back for this s.h.i.t."

"The...lab..." was all Eagle could reply with any coherence. A high, wet whistling sound ensued as his chest heaved. He mumbled some words unintelligibly, then twitched. The hand gripping Phil's sleeve fell away...

Then Eagle died.

Phil sighed. Poor f.u.c.ker. An array of feelings collided: rage, sadness, confusion. Things like this shouldn't happen. Why did the world have to be so insane? Sure, Eagle was a penny-ante dust runner, a two-bit criminal who Phil was playing for a dupe, but he didn't deserve this. In spite of Phil's undercover role, and in spite of his unrestrained hatred of PCP, Eagle was still, in a way, Phil's friend...

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," he muttered.

click.

Phil's heart seemed to stop mid-beat. The click had sounded at his head. Someone c.o.c.king a pistol hammer...

Phil, still on his knees, dropped his own gun. Very slowly, his eyes turned up.

Yet another Creeker stood before him, with odd, knuckly double-jointed hands that seemed to wrap around the revolver he gripped. The right side of his skull possessed a swell large as a cantaloupe, and his entire head seemed to hang off a thin, extended neck. His nose sported but one nostril.

The hard steel tip of the pistol barrel nudged mockingly at Phil's temple...

I'm dead, Phil was able to contemplate. It was not an easy surmise to make, but Phil managed to do so with a surprising sense of calm.

But the Creeker kid paused. The scarlet eyes, which seemed twice the size of normal eyes, peered down at Eagle's corpse and the ma.s.sive, bleeding chest wound.

"Skeet-inner-to," the kid said. "Ona-prey-bee."

Creeker jibberish, Phil realized. The words oozed thick in their defect. But why doesn't he just kill me now?

Then the weird red eyes moved back to Phil's face. The gun, a Smith .38, wavered.

Mannona, the word suddenly drifted from the kid. And then another word: Onnamann.

Phil's thoughts seized in a sudden static. He blinked. What eventually occurred to him was this: he hadn't heard the words in his ears-he seemed to have heard them in his head.

The kid's red eyes stared at him.

What's he waiting for? Phil thought, but he didn't think for long. He used the extra second to his advantage and quickly snapped his hands up. The disarm technique they'd taught him in the academy worked to a tee. His left hand grabbed the barrel, his right hand grabbed the Creeker's wrist, then, simultaneously, he pushed, twisting the gun right out of the kid's hand.

The kid's face went wide with astonishment-the disarm had taken less than a second.

Phil stood up, training the gun between the Creeker's crooked eyes. "Where's Natter's lab, you ugly f.u.c.k?"

Fat lips like tumors parted. The kid blinked.

"Mannona," he repeated. Then he lunged.

Phil squeezed off a single round into the kid's forehead. The back of his skull erupted, emitting a splat of gore which landed yards behind him in the high gra.s.s.

Phil stared through shifting gun-smoke. G.o.dd.a.m.n. What a f.u.c.king night....

Then he turned for the path and jogged away.

Twenty-Four.

"You were supposed to be f.u.c.king careful!" Mullins leaned forward over his desk and bellowed. "You could've gotten yourself f.u.c.king killed!"

Phil shrugged. "Hey, this ain't Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I'm working undercover on a PCP case. s.h.i.t happens."

"Yeah, s.h.i.t happens. Well, your s.h.i.t almost stopped happening!" Mullins reseated himself. Somehow, he looked fatter when he was mad. He seemed to tick behind the desk, an irate Jabba the Hut in a police suit.

It had taken Phil till well-past dawn to find his way out of the woods. Then he hitched back to Sallee's for his car and made it to the station about a half-hour after Mullins came in, walking up, as always, from the convenience store so his car wouldn't be seen. Obviously, the chief was not too pleased upon learning of last night's bullet-fest at Blackjack's shanty.

"Are you all right?" Mullins finally got around to inquiring.

Phil, for the first time, sipped some of the chief's noxious coffee. It tasted like bilge, but after what he'd been through he didn't really care. He needed something-anything-in his system with a little kick. "Yeah, I'm all right. Still a little shaky, though, but at least I wasn't hurt."

"Yeah, and you're G.o.dd.a.m.n lucky, too. So what else are you trying to tell me? You're telling me you killed three or four Creekers last night?"

Phil frowned, slumped in his chair. "More like five or six."

"Jesus Christ," Mullins exclaimed, peering at him. "Who do you think you are, Wyatt f.u.c.king Earp?"

"Believe me, Chief, I'm not too happy about wasting all those Creekers, but it's not like I had much of a choice. It was a regular firefight out there. They were all over the place, and they had enough hardware on them to start their very own armory show."

"s.h.i.t," Mullins grumbled. "I wanted to keep all this out of the papers for as long as I could. But with you blowing six of them away like a one-man killing machine, I guess I gotta call county Technical Services and have them pick up the bodies. After the job you did up there, those county f.u.c.kers'll ask all kinds of questions."

"Save yourself the ha.s.sle, Chief," Phil pointed out. "You can bet Natter had all the bodies removed within an hour. And when I was jogging out of there, I could see a fire start up on the hill."

"They burned Blackjack's place, you mean."

"Yep, and I guarantee you they took all their dead out, too. No bodies, no shack, no evidence, no nothing. Probably just a whole lot of spent bra.s.s which the county won't give a flying f.u.c.k about because none of the Creekers have their fingerprints on file."

"You got that right. And Peters, you sure he was dead when you left?"

Phil gulped at the recollection. "Dead as dead can be. He took a shotgun blast full in the chest. Died in minutes." Phil's thoughts darkened further. "I guess I feel pretty s.h.i.tty about it."

"s.h.i.tty? Why? The guy was everything you hate. We oughta give those Creekers a trophy for putting that a.s.shole six feet under. Saves the state big-time tax dollars. He was a sc.u.mbag PCP dealer."

But was that really it? Was there no gray area? "Sure, Eagle was a criminal. But he was also a friend, a guy I grew up with, you know?"

"Oh, boo-hoo. You need a hanky for your tears?"

f.u.c.k you, Phil wished he could say. Part of the reason he's dead is because of me. It was a strange concoction of feelings; Phil really didn't know how he should feel.

"Only thing that p.i.s.ses me off about the Creekers killing his dope-dealing a.s.s is it cost you your only good tie to Natter's PCP net," Mullins said. "It took you weeks to get where you were. What are you gonna do now?"

"I still got Sullivan to lean on. The county's putting him in general pop. Give him a few weeks there, and he'll start singing like a canary."

"Yeah? Well, let me tell you something, Phil. We ain't got a couple of weeks. I can only keep a lid on this s.h.i.t for so long. It's too bad you couldn't get Natter's lab location out of Peters before he kicked the bucket."

"I tried," Phil lamented. He didn't feel very good about that, either. Pressing a guy for info as he lay dying in the dirt. "But he died before he could say anything. And that last Creeker too..." The imagery of the scene reemerged in his head. "It was really strange. He kept repeating this word: Mannona, or onnamann, or something like that."

"Creekers talk garbage all the time. Half of 'em can't talk at all. Their brains are all scrambled from all that family f.u.c.king they do out there in the boonies."

"Yeah, sure, but it was also pretty weird-I had a gun to this kid's head, and he still lunged."

"They're r.e.t.a.r.ds, Phil. They're all a bunch of inbred crazies. And you can bet your a.s.s before Natter sends them out on a job, he's got them dusted to the gills. You've seen what PCP does to people's heads. Turns 'em crazier than bedbugs in a wh.o.r.e's mattress."

It was another legitimate point that Mullins made, however ineloquently.

"I just don't know what the f.u.c.k you're gonna do now that Peters is dead. Who else have you got to sap info off of? No one."

"Relax, will you?" Phil requested. "I'm doing the best I can, which-and pardon me if this is offensive-is a lot better than before I came on."

Mullins nodded smugly. "Go ahead, rub it in. I ain't arguin' with ya. You're right, with you we're closer to Natter's dust op than we've ever been. But what good is that gonna do me-or you, for that matter-if you get yourself killed?"

"I'm not going to get killed, Chief. Trust me."

"Okay, killer. But tell me this. What's Susan gonna think when she hears about your little chopping party in the woods last night? Tell me that."

Phil looked crookedly back at Mullins. It, too, was a good question, but- "What do you mean, Susan?"

Mullins guffawed, slurping coffee and spitting tobacco juice at the same time. "Like they say, with age there's wisdom, right? Don't bulls.h.i.t me. You and Susan got something going; I can tell just by looking at her. She's got big-time hots for you, boy. And you got the same for her, and don't even think about telling me otherwise."

Was it that obvious? Phil almost wished it were so. But Mullins had made a sound inquiry. Susan would raise h.e.l.l if she knew how deep Phil had gotten into this mess. And if she found out about the firefight last night...

"So how about doing me a favor, Chief? How about clamming it up to Susan about this?"

"I hear ya," Mullins said, smiling. "And why don't you do me a favor, huh?"

"What's that?"

"You look like death warmed up on my grandma's wood stove. Go home, all right? Get some f.u.c.king sleep."

Good idea. Phil got up. "Thanks for the coffee; remind me to never drink it again. I'll call you tomorrow."

Phil made for the door. But before he left, Mullins stopped him with a fat wave of hand.

"Oh, and Phil?"