Four Blind Mice

pretty rich. Here — take the knife.
Take it!
Here you go!”
    The lawyer groaned loudly. I was pretty sure he’d been stabbed.
    The girls began to scream. Sherman was moaning in excruciating pain. Chaos had taken over inside the cabin.
    “Cockadau!” Harris suddenly yelled in Vietnamese. He sounded a little nuts.
    “
Cockadau
means kill,” Sampson told me.

Chapter 94
    SAMPSON AND I were up in a flash and sprinting full-out toward the cabin. We reached the front door together. He went in first with his gun drawn.
    “Police!” he yelled over the blaring rock music and TV. “Police! Hands in the air. Now!”
    I was right behind Sampson when Starkey opened up with an MP5. At the same time, Griffin fired a handgun from across the room. The two Asian women were screaming as they scampered out the cabin’s rear door. They had enough street smarts to get out of there fast. I saw that the smaller woman had a deep gash across her cheek. Her face was dripping blood.
    Marc Sherman lay on the floor, motionless. There were dark splatters of blood on the wall behind the lawyer’s body. He was dead.
    The big gun erupted again, noise and smoke filling the room. My ears were ringing.
    “Move out!” Sharkey yelled to the others.
    “Di di mau!” Brownley Harris shouted, and actually seemed to be laughing. Was he completely mad? Were they all insane?
    The three killers bolted out the back door. Warren Griffin covered the retreat with heavy fire. They didn’t want a final shootout inside the cabin. Starkey had other plans for his team.
    Sampson and I fired at the retreating men, but they made it out. We approached the back door slowly. Nobody was waiting there, and no more shots were fired at us for the moment.
    Suddenly there was the sound of shooting away from the cabin. Half a dozen hollow pops. I heard the shrill screams of the two women cut through the trees.
    I peeked my head around the corner of the cabin. I didn’t like what I saw. The two women hadn’t made it to their car. Both lay on the dirt road. They’d been shot in the back. Neither of them moved.
    I turned to Sampson. “They’ll come back for us. They’re going to take us out here in the woods.”
    He shook his head. “No, they’re not. We’re going to take
them
out. When we see them, we open up. No warnings, Alex. No prisoners. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    I did. This was an all-or-nothing fight. It was war, not police work. And we were playing by the same rules they were.

Chapter 95
    IT WAS AWFULLY quiet all of a sudden. Almost as if nothing had happened, as if we were alone in the woods. I could hear the distant roar of the Jacks River, and birds twittering in the trees. A squirrel scampered up the trunk of a hemlock.
    Otherwise, nothing moved. Nothing that I could see anyway.
    Eerie as hell.
    I was getting a really bad feeling — we were in a trap. They knew we would come here after them, didn’t they? This was their turf, not ours. And Sampson was right, this was war. We were in a combat zone, behind enemy lines. A firefight was coming our way. Thomas Starkey was in charge of the enemy, and he was good at this. All three of them were pros.
    “I think one woman is moving a little,” he said. “I’m going to check on her, Alex.”
    “We both go,” I said, but Sampson was already slipping away from the cover of the trees.
    “John?” I called, but he didn’t look back.
    I watched him run forward in a low crouch. Sampson was down close to the ground, moving fast. He was good at this — combat. He’d been there too.
    He was about halfway to where the women lay when gunfire erupted from the woods to his right.
    I still couldn’t see anybody, just wisps of gun smoke wafting up into tree branches.
    Sampson was hit, and he went down hard. I could see his legs and lower torso just over a bramble. One leg twitched. Then nothing.
    Sampson didn’t move anymore.
    I had to get to him somehow. But how? I crawled on my stomach to another tree. I felt weightless and unreal. Completely
unreal
. There was more gunfire. Pinging off rocks, thudding into nearby trees. I didn’t think I was hit, but they’d come damn close. The fire was heavy.
    I could see wisps of smoke from the rifles rising to my right. I could also smell gunpowder in the air.
    It struck me that we weren’t getting out of this one. I could see Sampson where he lay. He wasn’t moving. Not even a twitch. I couldn’t get to him. They had me pinned down.
My last