Rogue Angel - Footprints Part 63

David held up his useless hand. "What would you suggest I do? I can't handle my piece if my hand's useless."

"You won't be able to handle it, anyway, once you get a cast on it," Tom said.

David shrugged. "So just kill them all now and be done with it."

"If you'd done your job properly," Tom said, "they'd already be dead and we'd be finished with this thing."

David sighed. "Look, like I told Sheila, I did my best. They must have somehow gotten help to get free. I made sure that the tranquilizer drug you shot them with was strong enough to knock them out cold."

Annja looked at Tom. "You shot us last night?"

Tom smiled. "I suppose I ought to come clean about that. Name's Tom Slackmore. Former sniper with the Marines. It's kind of a skill of mine."

"That explains the gillie suit," Annja said.

Tom raised an eyebrow. "You know about gillie suits?"

"I met a Marines sniper once-a far better man that you'll ever be apparently-who taught me about what it meant to do his job. He had honor about him. Courage, too. Both of those traits seem absent in you."

Tom laughed. "Yeah, maybe you're right. I served my country and my country forgot about me. I got wounded in a little war no one ever wanted to know about, so they kicked me out and I wound up in this dump with nothing to show for all my hard work. You think honor's something special? It's not. At the end of the day, it doesn't get you a d.a.m.n thing, except a flag on your casket when you die."

"Touching," Annja said. "I'm sure that will go over real well with the judge and jury when you're brought up on charges."

Tom laughed louder. "And who exactly is going to do that?"

Annja smiled. "Day's not over yet."

David grunted. "This d.a.m.n thing's killing me."

Tom glanced at Sheila. "Get his gun."

David looked at him. Tom smiled again. "Relax. No sense in you having it if you can't even use it, right?"

"Yeah. Guess so."

Sheila unholstered the automatic pistol and slid it into her waistband. She looked at Tom. "What now?"

Tom motioned at David. "Didn't I tell you this guy was going to be trouble?"

"We needed him. How else could we bring the stuff in?"

"Yeah, well, he's a liability now."

David looked up. "What did you say?"

"Uh-oh," Annja said.

But her voice was drowned out by the sudden explosion in the dining room that took David clean off his feet as the shotgun barked once and cut him open at the midsection. He fell over backward and lay there in a spreading pool of blood.

Sheila gasped. "You know, I used to like him. A lot. Now you killed him!"

"You never did have good taste in men," Tom said. "And he's served his purpose."

"You just killed a cop," Annja said. "That's not going to go over well with the authorities."

Sheila stared at David's body. "She's right."

Tom shook his head. "What difference does it make? By the time anyone clues in we'll be long gone. They can chase us all they want but they'll never find us. Not with what we've got."

Annja looked at Sheila. "You could stop this right now. Just shoot him and be done with the whole thing. Jenny and I will back you up. We'll tell them that it was all his plan. That you were just a hapless wife who got herself mixed up in something she couldn't control."

"Hapless wife." Tom chuckled. "That's a good one."

Annja looked at him and then back at Sheila. "You can do it, Sheila. Just shoot him now and set us free. Come on. We can call in the State Police."

Sheila looked at her and frowned. "I can't do that. I love him."

Annja shook her head. "But I thought you just said you liked Dave."

"I did."

Annja sighed. "Man, things sure get weird in these small towns."

Sheila frowned. "Tom's my brother."

"Weirder still," Jenny said, rolling her eyes. "And people thought rednecks were inbred."

"Don't be gross," Tom said. "We only pretended to be husband and wife in public. It helped create the illusion we needed."

"Illusion for what?" Annja asked.

Tom shook his head. "Aren't you supposed to be some type of scholar? And aren't you a teacher or something?"

Jenny nodded. "I am a teacher."

"Well, both of you are a little dense."

"You should see it from our perspective," Annja said. "We've almost died several times in the past few days. People are stalking big foot and we don't know what the h.e.l.l is going on."

"Drugs," Tom said. "The ultimate entertainment product."

"This is all about drugs?"

Tom shrugged. "Does it need to be about anything else? We bring them in from Canada through the woods and hold them in the underground cavern you saw earlier today. The one that should have been your grave site until idiot boy over there wrecked the whole thing."

"And what happens after that? You sell them?" Annja asked.

Tom smiled. "Every few weeks we have a visitor come in to stock the hotel kitchen. They bring us supplies, they take back the drugs. And they leave us a little extra cabbage, as well."