A Rock and a Hard Place by Darryl Wimberley

Author:Darryl Wimberley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Fifteen

First light brought a small army to Oldtown Bridge. Half the Deacon Beach population came out with Channel 7 to see the carnage, and the other half came out to work on it. Medics and firemen and divers and police labored for an hour trying to recover Snake’s body from the van.

They got most of him.

Turned out that the explosion came after the van impacted the creek’s bed. The van plunged into shallow water on the driver’s side. Doc’s autopsy would later show that among other trauma Snake had taken a cypress knee through the liver as cleanly as if he had been gored by a bull. Or a rhino. Snake’s head was found still with its mismatched irises but singularly dispossessed of its body. The skull was bagged separately, tossed in with the other remains like a bowling ball thrown into an outsized athletic bag.

“I hope the fire didn’t kill him.” Barrett was in the middle of the shakes. Trembling worse than Hoyt Young’s famously nervous hands. He was leaning for support on Dick Hanson’s cruiser, nursing a cup of coffee.

“Got him with the shotgun, didn’t you? To the head? I doubt he felt a thing.”

Dick offered the comfort and Barrett appreciated it though they both knew that without a postmortem there was no way they could be sure. Dick had been one of the officers blocking the bridge. Hanson brought Bear the coffee from his own thermos. Barrett had scrounged some honey from the glove compartment of his cruiser; a nine-millimeter slug had cut right through the plastic bear’s rotund tummy.

Barrett turned the bottle over and over in his hands.

Taylor Folsom arrived, lungs laboring from the short incline which led down to the activity below the bridge.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Barrett observed silently. “He’s at work.”

“Found this.” Taylor waved a wad of bills from a water-soaked bag.

“He must have thrown it out when he made that turn on the bridge.”

“More likely came out on impact,” Barrett observed. “How much is it?”

“Fifteen, twenty thousand at least.”

“That’s a lot of lobster.” Hanson whistled.

“Assuming it came from lobster.” Barrett gulped his coffee without tasting it.

“Whatchyou mean?” Taylor asked.

“You see the weapon he was using?” Barrett directed the question to Dick.

“You mean this?” Dick pulled an Uzi from inside the cruiser. “One of the first things we retrieved,” he explained shortly.

Barrett took the weapon in his hands. He was surprised how heavy the Uzi was. TV and movie violence would lead you to believe these things were as light as toys but the implement Barrett now hefted in his not insubstantial hands must have weighed close to nine pounds. Not much lighter, really, than the woodstocked M-1 the marines had for ages used as hand-me-downs from World War Two.

But that’s where the similarity ended. The Uzi was a true submachine gun. Straight blowback. Fired from an open bolt. An excellent weapon, its reliability, accuracy, and rate of fire made the Uzi a continuing favorite among arms dealers.

Uziel Gal had designed and manufactured the Uzi for the Israeli military in 1951.

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