he Jet Ranger hurtled over the mountains and valley floors, Buseth and his four best men jammed into the chopper’s small cabin. The flight would take about 35 minutes. The sun was already well above the mountaintops when they sighted the town. Buseth ordered the pilot straight in, producing a massive dust cloud in the field next to the farmhouse. The men stormed inside, ignoring the old German shepherd locked in the bedroom.
“They’re not here!” one of them yelled.“It’s in here.” Stacey pointed at the mouth of a small cave. “It’s buried under the rocks.”
Bingham smirked—for the first time in a while. “Let’s go. And remember, the slightest move and I play butcher with your throat.”
Stacey needed to know something. In the cave he knew he might not come out of alive, and with nothing to lose, he asked his question. “How did you become so calloused that life has no value?”
“Power and money are the only things that matter,” Bingham countered. “With my pen, I have both. Now, dig it out—slowly.”
Stacey sidled up to the pile of rocks, leaving room to roll if his rival’s grip loosened. Bingham, anticipating the reward of his efforts, could no longer hold back from gloating. “After I infect you, you’ll beg me to kill you. First you’ll feel your joints start to get stiff; then the muscles’ll freeze like ice; and in the end, when it reaches your brain, you’ll still be able to think without being able to move. Those Vietnamese boys did me a big favor when they built this biological beauty. The contents of the pen could kill thousands. A few years ago in Africa, a few drops in a community water well nearly annihilated an entire village.”
Stacey slowly dug the paint can from its hiding place and removed its lid to reveal the pen. He thought of his friend Deek, a loving father, husband; he thought of the thousands who’d already suffered painful deaths—and the thousands more that would suffer. Who was he to make a difference?
Slowly raising his hand back up over his shoulder, he waggled the pen like a fat worm luring a fish. As he’d wagered, Bingham’s left hand disengaged from Stacey’s throat to grab it. In the instant Bingham’s fingers clamped down on the prize, Stacey yanked the pen from its cap, tucked his body and rolled away from the blade. Reversing his momentum, he then lunged back, drove the pen tip deep into Bingham’s leg, and once more rolled out of reach. Startled by the turn of events, Bingham’s eyes bugged out. Then as the chemical coursing through his veins took hold, he staggered toward his nemesis, his eyes now reflecting anger and pain, and his own pent-up fear of death.
“I’m a dead man,” he whispered, his voice raspy. “Do you realize what you’ve done? I’m a dead man.”
Wrenching the pen out and raising its poison tip, he limped forward, his feet dragging through the rocks and sand. Stacey backed away into the cave, the huge man’s lumbering silhouette drawing ever nearer.
Bingham came on, his mind flashing through the thousands of horrifying images painted in the recesses of his memory—the same images Melvin had transferred to disk. He stumbled toward his enemy, now backed to only a few feet from the narrowing walls of the cave. Bingham dropped to his knees and began wildly brandishing the pen in the hope of connecting with Stacey’s flesh.
The images he could still see now spun at drunken angles. Bingham continued to close the gap, his body torpid, his face writhing in agony and hate. “You’ll be joining me in hell, Stacey,” were his last words, as a deafening gunshot blast reported and echoed from wall to wall.
“I don’t think so.” A squeaky voice rang through the cavern. A flashlight beam played across Bingham’s body, still crouched in a statue-like pose, pen raised, ready to strike. “Melvin Phelps—or Briggs, if you prefer.” The man thrust his hand forward. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
Stacey took Melvin’s smaller hand and shook it vigorously. “Rick Stacey.”
“I know, Officer Stacey. You didn’t leave me much time to find this place. I almost didn’t get hidden before the two of you came in. Nice roll you did. I was afraid I was going to have to take a chance at shooting him with the knife at your neck.”
Noticing the blood oozing down from the wound, Melvin pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “Here,” he offered. “Hold it against the cut and you’ll be just fine.” Melvin motioned for Stacey to step around Bingham’s body. “Don’t touch him, we wouldn’t want you contaminated.”
Out in the sunlight, a chopper swooped in over the ancient volcano and set down next to the Mercury. Buseth jumped from the noisy bird and started on a run toward the two men. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Melvin’s prickly, abrasive tone deflected the question. “Just taking care of a problem you can’t seem to solve. Now, while you get your team here to finish up, I’ll take the chopper and deliver Officer Stacey to his grandma.”
Buseth raised his hand in the stop position. “You’re not going anywhere,” he fumed. Melvin pushed the button on his phone and handed it to Agent Buseth, who raised it to his ear. “...Yes sir. We should have it cleaned up by nightfall....Yes sir.” He hung up the phone.
“Have a couple of your men bring the Mercury and Officer Stacey’s squad car back to the farmhouse,” Melvin ordered. Then he and Stacey climbed in the chopper.
“My grandma’s okay?”
“She’s fine.”
As the helicopter lifted off the ground amid a blinding tornado of dust, Stacey turned and thanked his rescuer, and asked, “How did you find me?”
Melvin’s voice could be heard over the whine of the helicopter. “Simple. I followed you to the parking lot where you left your grandma’s car. After some research, I decided I’d keep an eye on your grandma. She was the weak link in Buseth’s plan. She’s quite the woman, you know. It took a bit to convince her I was one of the good guys. She’s been staying with a neighbor the last few days. When you snuck out of your folks’ house last night, I had a hard time keeping up with you. I must say I was surprised you hid the pen in my garage. It was a good thing the big car was easy to spot at four a.m., or I wouldn’t have found you again. We watched you pull the car onto the lava fields from the air. I knew you wouldn’t take the pen with you to your grandma’s. After you left, it took me a half hour to find your hiding spot. That’s when I hid myself in the rocks and waited.”
“It’s a good thing.” Stacey pondered his foe’s end. “What did the chemical do to Bingham?”
“You injected so much of it in his system it made his blood set like steel. I probably didn’t even need to shoot; he was nearly frozen when my pellets hit him.”
The chopper blew another cloud of dust as it landed in the lane leading up to the farmhouse. Grandma Stacey opened the screen door and stepped out on the back porch. Sig stood on one side of her, his head cocked, a painful lump above his ear, and grandma’s old shepherd stood—teetered, actually—on the other.
“Goodbye, Officer Stacey,” Melvin said. “I hope we meet again.” The bird lifted up and pulled away as Stacey ran to his grandmother’s waiting arms.
After a good, home-cooked meal and lots of catching up, Stacey hopped into the squad car and started for home.