First Blood (Rambo: First Blood Series Book 1)

by David Morrell

8

“Just what’s the charge, Will?” “There’s two of them. Vagrancy and resisting arrest. But those are just to hold him while I find out if he’s wanted anywhere. My guess is theft someplace.” “We’ll take up the vagrancy first. You guilty, son?” Rambo said he wasn’t. “Do you have a job? Do you have more than ten dollars?” Rambo said he didn’t. “Then there’s no way around it, son. You’re a vagrant. That’ll cost you five days in jail or fifty dollars fine. Which will it be?” “I just told you I don’t have ten, so where the hell would I get fifty?”

“You think I got in the car because I was afraid of you?” “He won’t tell me his name.” “Why should I?” “Claims he has no I.D. cards.” “Why the hell do I need any?” “Listen, I can’t sit here all night while you two have it out with each other,” Dobzyn said. “My wife is sick, and I was supposed to be home to cook dinner for the kids at five. I’m late already. Thirty days in jail or two hundred dollars fine. What’ll it be, son?” “Two hundred? Christ, I just told you I don’t have more than ten.” “Then it’s thirty-five days in jail,” Dobzyn said and rose out of his chair, unbuttoning his sweater. “I was about to cancel the five days for vagrancy, but your attitude is intolerable. I have to go. I’m late.”

“Hey, Dobzyn,” he said, catching him as he went by. “I’m still waiting for you to ask me if I’m guilty of resisting arrest.”

9

Rambo was as cold as he had been in Dobzyn’s office, shivering. The lights in the ceiling were too close to his head; even so, the place seemed dark. Iron and cement. Christ, he should never have let Teasle bring him down. Walking across from the courthouse, he should have broken Teasle and escaped. Anything, even being on the run, was better than thirty-five days down here. What the hell else did you expect? he told himself. You asked for this, didn’t you? You wouldn’t back off. Damn right I wouldn’t. And I still won’t. Just because I’ll be locked up, doesn’t mean I’m finished. I’ll fight this as far as it goes. By the time he’s ready to let me out, he’ll be fucking glad to be rid of me.

Sure you’ll fight. Sure. What a laugh. Take a look at yourself. Already you’re shaking. Already you know what this place reminds you of. Two days in that cramped cell and you’ll be pissing down your pant legs. “You’ve got to understand I can’t stay in there.” He could not stop himself. “The wet. I can’t stand being closed in where it’s wet.” The hole, he was thinking, his scalp alive. The bamboo grate over the top. Water seeping through the dirt, the walls crumbling, the inches of slimy muck he had to try sleeping on.

“Turn around and bend over.” The kid really looked at him. “Get your jollies off somebody else. I won’t put up with any more of this.” “Yes you will. Aside from what you might have hid up it, I’m not interested in your rear end whatsoever. Just do what you’re told. Now reach back and spread your cheeks. Come on, it’s not a sight I enjoy. There. You know, when I worked in Louisville, I once had a prisoner with a three-inch knife in a leather case shoved up himself. It always beat me how he could sit down.”

As the kid walked slowly down to the shower stall, Teasle looked again at the lash marks on his back. It was almost six o’clock. The state police would be reporting soon.

10

That was the point of becoming a Green Beret. He could take anything. But each day in the jungle camp he grew weaker, and at last he was afraid that his body could not keep on. More work, more heavy work, less food, less sleep. What he saw went gray and blurred; he stumbled, moaning, talking to himself. After three days without food, they tossed a snake flopping into his hole to squirm in the dirt, and they watched as he twisted off its head and ate the body raw. He only managed to keep a little of it down. Not until later—a few minutes, a few days, the time was all the same—did he wonder if the snake was poisonous or not. That and the bugs he found in his hole and the chunks of garbage they occasionally threw down at him, that was all that gave him life the next few days—or weeks, he could not tell. Hauling a dead tree through the jungle back to camp, he was permitted to pick fruit and eat it, and by nightfall he had dysentery. He lay in a stupor in his hole, mired in his excrement, hearing them talk about his foolishness.

His drop into the north had been at the start of December, and it was now the start of May, they told him. How long he had been a prisoner he didn’t know. How long he had been on the run he didn’t know. But between then and now he had covered the distance between his drop area and this American base in the south, three hundred and ninety miles. And what had started him laughing was that he must have been in American territory for days, some of the soldiers he had heard in the night and hid from must have been Americans.

11

“You’ll sit on the chair. Galt, go up and bring Shingleton. I’ve made as many allowances as I can. We’ll cut his hair so fast it’ll be like we used sheep shears.”

It was all happening even faster now. He did not want to hurt anyone, but he knew that was coming, he could feel his anger spreading out of control. Instantly a man was rushing down the stairs, Galt half a flight behind. It was the man who had been sitting by the radio in the front office. Shingleton. He seemed huge now that he was standing, his head up near the bright lights in the ceiling.

“I think you’d better not touch me.” He was determined to keep control. There would be just the next five minutes and the continual touch of the scissors, and then it would be over, he would be all right. He started toward the chair, his feet slick in the water, and behind him Shingleton said, “Good God, where did you get all the scars on your back?” “In the war.” That was a weakness. He should not have answered. “Oh sure. Sure you did. In which army?” Rambo almost killed him right then.

Rambo squirmed. “You’re not shaving me. You’re not coming near me with that razor.” Then Galt was there handing it to Teasle, and Rambo watched the long blade flash in the lights, and remembered the enemy officer slicing his chest, and that was the end. He broke, grabbing the razor and standing, pushing them away. He fought the impulse to attack. Not here. Not in the goddamned police station. All he wanted was the razor away from them. But Galt was white-faced, eyes on the razor, and he was fumbling for his gun. “No, Galt!” Teasle shouted. “No guns!”

Even as he rounded the landing halfway up the stairs, the first shot came from behind him, whacking into the landing’s concrete wall.

“What’s going on?” somebody said in the hall behind him, and he turned to a policeman standing surprised, staring at Rambo naked, reaching for his gun. Four quick steps and Rambo chopped the flat edge of his hand across the bridge of the guy’s nose and caught the gun dropping from the guy’s hand as he fell. Somebody from downstairs was pushing at the wreck of the scaffold. Rambo fired twice, hearing Teasle cry out, hoping the shots would hold back Teasle long enough for him to reach the front door.

The man made the mistake of slowing down to look, because by the time he decided to speed up, Rambo had got to him and lunged him off the cycle. The man hit the street headfirst, his yellow crash helmet scraping across the pavement. Rambo swung onto the cycle, his bare hips on the hot black seat, and the cycle roared off, with him firing his last three bullets at Teasle, who had just rushed out the front door of the station and then ducked back in when he saw Rambo aiming.

One man came running off the corner to stop him, but Rambo kicked him away and then he was whipping left around the corner, and for now he was safe and he really got the cycle going.

12

Shingleton came rushing around the hall corner into the front room, over to Teasle. “Galt. He’s dead. God, his guts are hanging out,” he blurted as he came.

“Preston’s alive. I don’t know for how long. He’s got blood coming out his eyes.”

Orval had been his father’s best friend, and the three of them used to go out hunting together every Saturday of the season. Then, after Teasle’s father had been killed, Orval had become a second father to him. He was retired now, but he was in better shape than men half as young, and he had the best-trained pack of hounds in the county.

13

There was no way a cycle could outrun police cars. But a cycle could go where police cars couldn’t: the mountains.

At last he saw what he was looking for—a draw between two slopes up into the rocky hills—and he steered that way as the sirens began dying close behind him.

He would head for Mexico. He would hole up in Mexico in a little coast town and swim every day in the sea. But he had better not ever see that sonofabitch Teasle again.

He had promised himself that he was through hurting people, and now that sonofabitch had made him kill once more, and if Teasle kept pushing, Rambo was determined to give back a fight Teasle would wish to God he had never started.

PART TWO

1

“Moon or not, we still have to go after him now,” he told Orval. “We’ve chased him out of our jurisdiction, and the only way to keep after him is if we stay in pursuit. Once I wait till morning I have to turn the job over to the state police.” “Then give it to them. It’s a dirty job anyhow.” “No.”

“I don’t have much time, Orval. If we get up in there soon enough, the state police will have to let me stay in control. They’ll back me up and have cruisers watching the main roads down out of the hills and leave us to chase him across the high ground. But I’m telling you, I might just as well forget about catching him if you don’t chip in your dogs.”

Finally, just before Orval struck a match: “Could be, if I understood. What did this kid do to you, Will?” “He sliced one deputy nearly in half and beat another maybe blind.” “Yeah Will,” Orval said and struck the match, cupping it to light his cigarette. “But you didn’t answer me. What did this kid do to you?”

2

He had traveled almost five miles he could tell, and the distance had tired him: he still was not as fit as he had been before he was captured in the war, he still had not got over his weeks in the hospital. All the same, he remembered every trick of getting along, and if he could not run much farther without trouble, he had done five miles very well.

3

“So she left,” Orval said. Teasle did not want to talk about it. She was the one who had left, not the other way around, and that made it look as though he was in the wrong. Maybe he was. But she was too. Still, he could not bring himself to put blame on her just so Orval might not think poorly of him. He tried to explain it neutrally. “She might come back. She’s thinking about that. I haven’t let on much, but for a while there, we were arguing quite a bit.” “You’re not an easy man to get along with.” “Well, Christ, neither are you.” “But I’ve lived with the same woman forty years, and as far as I can guess, Bea hasn’t thought much about leaving. I know people must be asking you this a lot now, but considering what you and I are, I believe I have a right. What were the arguments about?” He almost did not answer. Talking about very personal things always embarrassed him, especially this which he had not yet reasoned out—who was right, whether he was justified. “Kids,” he said, and then since he had begun, he went on. “I asked her for at least one. I don’t care, boy or girl. It’s just that I’d like someone to be to me like I was to you. I—I don’t know how to explain it. I even feel stupid talking about it.”

“And what about who we’re after?” Orval said. “Are you taking it all out on him?” “No.” “You sure?” “You know I am. I don’t act tougher than I have to. You know as well as I do that a town stays safe because of the little things kept in control. You can’t do anything to prevent something big like a holdup or a murder. If somebody wants to do them bad enough, he will. But it’s the little things that make a town what it is, that you can watch to make it safe. If I had just grinned and took what the kid was handing me, fairly soon I might have got used to the idea and let other kids hand it to me, and in a little while I would have been letting other things go by. It’s me I was concerned about as much as the kid. I can’t allow myself to loosen up. I can’t keep order one time and not another.”

Abruptly five men were in sight, rushing between the trees and through the bushes in the pale cold light, but Teasle could not make out what color their uniforms were. They were talking to each other, one man tripped and swore, but Teasle could not identify the voices.

“What’s going on back there?” Shingleton laughed. “The state police had a fit over what you pulled.” He stopped to chew into a sandwich. “Like you said, I waited in that field last night, and they showed up ten minutes after you climbed into the woods. They were sweet Jesus mad over you taking advantage of the little daylight you had left so you could chase after the kid and stay in the game. It surprised me they figured it out so fast what you were up to.”

Shingleton grinned proudly and bit another mouthful off the sandwich. “I spent half the night at the station with them, and finally they agreed to play along with you. They’re going to block the roads down out of the hills and stay out of here. It took some amount of convincing to get them not to come in, I’ll tell you.”

“Any word from them who he is or what else he might be wanted for?” “They’re working on it. They said keep reporting on this radio. The first sign of trouble they say they’re coming in with everything they’ve got.”

“Something new the state police gave me,” Shingleton said, bringing out what looked like a dull gray cigarette case. “It gives off a radio signal. They said they want to know where you are at all times and made me carry it and gave the other half to the guy you asked to lend his helicopter.”

The radio was where Shingleton had set it in the low crook of a tree. Teasle flipped a switch on the control panel, and peering up at where the helicopter circled close, sunlight glinting off the shrieking blades, he said loud into the microphone, “Lang. Portis. All set up there?” “Whenever you are, Chief.” The voice was flat and scratchy. It sounded like it came from miles away.

“All right then,” Teasle said. “Let’s move it.” He had trouble hooking the microphone back onto the radio he was so excited.

4

He swung to his right where the grass sloped up to rocks and scattered trees and after that a cliff, and bracing his leg muscles, he ran.

5