The staked Goat

standing up and reaching to his back pocket. He pulled out a clasp knife and tossed it to her. ”Finish him, then. Any way you want.”
    Jacquie opened the blade, slashing herself as she did so. She cursed, and the knife clattered to the floor.
    She pummeled me in the balls with her good hand. I clenched my teeth and built up toward a hell of a yell. Jacquie hopped off me and onto the floor to retrieve the knife. Ricker said, ”The hell with it,” and leveled his revolver on me.
    I heard the glass shatter but the tinkle of the shards was drowned out by the rifle coughing through its own silencer. Ricker’s chest opened in three places, the size of peaches, as the high-velocity bullets tumbled through him. He dropped the revolver. One of the rifle rounds struck Jacquie in the shoulder as she straightened up with the knife. It knocked her off balance as Ricker dropped to his knees at her feet, his chest a fountain of blood.
    She shrieked something in Vietnamese as her knife hand went up. She got rattled by the rest of the shooter’s magazine. She fell across my groin area, draped lifeless except for blood and the release of the continency muscles.
    I heard a door give way upstairs and more than one set of boots hit the floorboards above my head. Two MPs in combat fatigues preceded J.T. down the stairs.
    Kivens looked around at the mess and said, ”Goddamn fuck up.”
    ”I’m fine, J.T. Thanks for asking.”
    He waved a hand at me absently and put the other to his face. ”I know, I know.”
     

Nineteen
     
     
     
    T HE DRIVER HAD STOKED THE HEAT UP IN THE PARKED car. My shoes had been under the iron bed. Even wearing a pair of old Curl’s fatigue pants and one of his blankets around me, however, I was still shivering.
    I also had a splitting headache. They had moved Ricker’s pickup out of the driveway and replaced it with a nondescript Chevy van. There was a lot of quiet activity around the back of the van.
    Casey came over to our car. J.T., who was standing outside, spoke to him briefly. Casey went back to the van, and J.T. got back in the car next to me. I still didn’t have any real strength, or even feeling, back in my hands and feet. They had carried me out of the basement, cradled between two MPs like an oversized infant.
    J.T. asked me his twentieth question, which I answered the way I had the previous nineteen.
    By silence.
    ”Jesus, John, you might at least have thanked Casey. That was a hell of a piece of shooting he did.”
    I glared at J.T., then rested my head back against the seat to control my shaking. I hitched up the blanket a little.
    ”John, please—”
    I broke. ”You son of a bitch, J.T.! You pulled all those strings and called all those favors to get me a look at the files, and all the time you knew.”
    ”John, we didn’t know in the way—”
    ”Oh, c’mon, J.T. You knew like you were writing the script. You put me in that office like it was a clearing and I was a goat. You fucking staked me out to shoot a tiger.”
    J.T. turned gloomy. ”We didn’t want to shoot him.”
    ”That’s great. Terrific. Makes a big difference to the goat.”
    ”You don’t understand, John. I don’t know what happened to Al. Truly I don’t. He was more your friend than mine, but I want to find out who got him, too. We’ve known for a long time that there was something going on with the noncoms all through the corps. The MPs, I mean. But we weren’t sure just what. Some kind of world-wide network, linked in with the quartermasters and probably set up during ‘Nam, or even before. For all we know, it’s damn near eternal, passed on from one corrupt sergeant to the next, generation to generation. I was pretty sure Ricker was dirty because of his lifestyle. Not crazy or flamboyant, just higher than it should have been with his army pay. I thought he might be part of the network. We figured to let him take you and then tap his telephone calls.”
    ”You got a warrant for that?”
    J.T. screwed up his mouth. ”C’mon, John, this is the army, remember? We clean our own laundry.”
    ”Go ahead.”
    ”Well, he used only pay phones and a different one each time. So we put a bug on the cellar window there, and we hoped he’d tip something while you kept him talking.”
    ”But all he did was confirm that he, and Curl, and somebody else was in ‘the club.’ ”
    ”Yeah, I know.” The gloomy look again. ”And now we’ve got two unauthorized bodies.”
    ”What about old Curl?”
    J.T.