Charlie One folded the sleeping bag tight around his shoulders and peered all around. It must be about three in the morning, and so far not so much as a squirrel had stirred. His neighbors’ yards were quiet, and the slice of road he could see was deserted. The troopers had walked around some, and he had seen their body armor and the clear WST insignia through his goggles. They had stayed put for a while, though, and nothing and no one had crossed his line of sight. What he really needed was chocolate or a few cookies, and his thoughts turned to the abundance of both in his kitchen cupboards only yards away. He should have thought about it before coming up, he chided himself. A lot of good they did in the cupboard. How or why he decided to move he wasn’t sure, but suddenly Charlie One was shrugging the sleeping bag off his back and climbing down the tree-house ladder with the rifle hanging by a strap over his shoulder and determination in his steps.
It was easy to cross the yard quietly with his goggles on. And he decided that he wouldn’t turn on the light, even when he was inside, as he wouldn’t need to—and, most important, it would be kind of cool to wear the goggles indoors.
He unlocked the back door with a key and crept into the kitchen. His wife kept a drawer full of spare plastic bags, and he picked one just the right size. He tiptoed to the cabinet and found what he was looking for: food supplies for the cold and hungry. Yes, it was mostly sugar and candy, but if a man was going to freeze his ass off for a noble reason he had the right to eat what he wanted. He added a couple of cans of soda for good measure and then snuck back out of the kitchen, locked the door, and made his way back to the tree house with a bagful of goodies. The tree house was a box with three walls and one open side—useful to keep an eye on the boys—topped by a peaked roof. Each wall had a window and the open side had a small platform that jutted out of the tree and held a narrow ladder and a railing. All in all, the man was very proud of it: kids should have tree houses, they should have adventures and campouts and the chance to get a little untamed. Come to think of it, grown-ups should too.
Charlie One stepped onto the ladder and his goggles bumped into a rung higher up, so he pushed them off his eyes to rest on top of his head and kept climbing. Soon there would be another check and he wanted to be in position.
The man picked up the sleeping bag off the floor and settled himself in his old spot. After a few minutes the voice of Charlie Seven started the round of checks and—as expected—all was well. A bird fluttered nearby and the branches swayed in the dark.
Charlie One didn’t know what to think: did he want the shooter to be hanging around town for them or the troopers to catch? Would he have preferred for the man to have left, become somebody else’s problem, and possibly murder elsewhere, in another small town just like Ludlow? The man gazed above the trees and above the mountains, where the stars shone in a stream like a river of silver dust. You didn’t get a sky like that in the big towns.
It wasn’t a reassuring thought, but the truth was that if the man who had shot Ty Edwards was still around, they’d have a much better chance of catching him in Ludlow. At least they knew he was there. If he left, he could have gone anywhere and started all over again, and those poor bastards would be just as defenseless as Ty had been. Chief Sangster had kept his mouth real zipped up about the investigation, but it was fairly clear from where Charlie One stood: only a nutjob shoots into a crowd. Unless, of course, the whole thing had been political, in which case—
“I’ve got something,” a voice hollered in his earpiece. “This is Charlie Five. I’ve got something.”
The man stiffened. His whole focus shifted to the thin voice coming from the west of town. He clicked the goggles back into place and squinted into the green darkness. His heart started going rabbit-fast, and every detail appeared to stand out: the mulchy scent of dead leaves all around him, his own perspiration under the thermals.
“What is it?” somebody else said.
“Someone’s moving, down in the street, real sneaky-like, and I could swear it was no trooper.”
“Which street and which direction?” one of the Charlies asked.
Charlie Five told them.
“Can you describe him?”
“No, he was moving too fast.”
“Was he armed?” Charlie One asked.
“I don’t know. Could have been. Didn’t see clearly enough.”
“Could be coming toward you, Four.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Where are you?”
“Standing by in my front room. I’m peeking through the drapes, but the road is clear.”
It occurred to Charlie One that most of the other volunteers were doing their volunteering from inside their warm homes, while he was out there looking over the neighborhood and peeing from a tree.
“Anything yet?” Five asked.
“Nope,” Four replied. “All clear.”
The man stood up and rested the butt of the rifle against his shoulder in the nook that seemed made for it.
“Got him!”
It was Four’s voice and the earpiece burst into a crackle of voices. Charlie One stood stock-still, his eyes trained on the part of town where he knew Charlie Four had just spotted their target. He couldn’t see him, of course. He was too far away, and yet it felt as if he could sense his movements through the dark, empty streets and across the deserted yards. He automatically cocked the bolt of the 10/22 and it sprang forward, ready to shoot.
“Where? Where is he?” Voices crossed and overlapped.
“Just cut across the alley. Running like the dickens, actually.”
If this creepy-crawly was heading toward Charlie Three, it meant he was moving away from the tree house. Charlie One’s heartbeat was so loud that the voices reaching him seemed to be filtered through it.
“We should call the chief,” somebody said, and someone else said they’d do it.
The man breathed in and out, in and out, and he waited. He waited for someone to say something, anything. From where he stood he could spot roofs peeking out from between the tops of the trees, and some stretches of ground. The green world he could see was motionless and utterly silent. He debated whether to climb down and join the others, whether they should all go toward Charlie Three and search every street and every yard that side of town.
“I called the chief. He was napping in his office. He’s on his way.”
“Three, do you see him?”
“No, no one came through here.”
“Shit.”
“Four, was he armed?”
“Couldn’t say, but I barely saw him. He sure was in a hurry.”
Fuck it, Charlie One said to himself and he climbed down the ladder as quickly as he could, swearing under his breath when he bumped the goggles, slipping on the rungs, and almost losing his balance on the icy ground. He straightened and made his way to the side gate. If they were going to trap the sucker, he was going to be right there.
“The chief said for everyone to stay right where we are.”
Shitshitshit. Charlie One froze with his hand on the gate. They’d gone behind the chief’s back with their little neighborhood watch project; nevertheless, the man was reluctant to out-and-out disobey the chief’s instructions.
“What’s going on?” Charlie Two murmured, as if their target could hear them.
“Don’t know. Just saw a couple of troopers running past,” someone replied.
Charlie One sighed. It was the troopers’ game now. Hesitant to go inside, turn on the lights, and wait to hear—like everyone else who hadn’t been keeping watch half the night—Charlie One decided to go back up to his sentry post and remain there until they heard, one way or the other.
There was no talk on the earpiece, and he could imagine six other men rooted where they stood—cold and tired and, sure, a little bit nervous, but mostly, secretly, so keyed up about the hunt that they could have gone on for hours.
Charlie One reached for the plastic bag, because all that excitement needed to be crow
ned with a cookie, and it was only when his hand didn’t find it where he had dropped it that he turned. Wearing the goggles that gave him a clear, green view of the inside of the tree house, Charlie One stared at the spot on the floor where he had left the plastic bag with its booty of candy and cookies. It wasn’t there. The man touched the bare wooden plank with his gloved hand, as if the bag had somehow become invisible. It wasn’t there.
What the heck? He leaned out of the platform and gaped at the ground below. Could he have accidentally pushed it off and made it fall all the way to the dirt? No, that was impossible. He would have heard it land and would have tripped on it when he had rushed down. How . . . ?
The man studied the floor of the tree house, as if it contained the meaning of life. And yet the one unassailable truth he found was that the bag was not there. He had left the platform for a couple of minutes, gone into his kitchen, come back, and put the bag on the floor by his feet. And now it was gone.
Something was warm and sticky on his skin under the layers and he felt a swooping in his gut, like falling off the ladder backward. He could see everything clearly with the goggles in place, like eerie daylight. You weren’t wearing the goggles when you climbed back up the ladder, remember that, brother? He wasn’t: he had pushed them up, because he kept banging them on the ladder as he climbed up. And when he had reached the top—the pitch-black top of the ladder, the deep murky gloom of the inside of the hut—he had turned with his back to the dark room and plopped himself down like a fool, and only when the alert had come through had he clicked the goggles back into place and . . . and there had been that awful smell of dead leaves and mulch and earth and sweat, and the rustle of the bird in the tree . . .
“Oh, man,” Charlie One said. “Oh, man.” He couldn’t say any more than that. His eyes searched the floor of the tree house and right there, under the back window, he spotted two muddy footprints. He had never gone near that window that night and, for sure, they were a man’s footprints, not a boy’s. Just outside the window the branches met and parted and curled and plunged all the way to the ground.
“Oh, man,” Charlie One repeated, and he didn’t know whether to stay or to run, to throw up or be gone. He didn’t know whether to tell, or to shut up about it forever. He had been looking at the stars, he had been looking at the damn stars.
Chapter 31
After the detectives had locked up the senior center for the night and gone back to the Miller house, Chief Sangster had stretched out on the sofa in his office. He lived a ten-minute drive away, but even that meager distance seemed too much when he had officers patrolling the streets. He wanted—or maybe needed—to stay where they could reach him with a holler.
The sofa was short and uncomfortable and was thus the fitting end to the most hideous day he’d had on the job since he’d moved to Ludlow. As a concession to anatomy versus gunmetal he had removed his belt—with the holster and the sidearm—and had draped it on the chair next to the sofa. He had locked his office door and lain down, still wearing his boots. Sleep found him as if it had been lying in wait for him, just around the corner, and the chief, with one foot on the ground and one arm thrown back, had fallen into a black pit without dreams.
Barely three hours later he unlocked the office door, tore through the main room, and hurried outside. The slap of icy air woke him up better than coffee. His eyes sought and found two uniformed men standing at the end of the street.
He ran toward them.
It had been a crazy idea, and yet it was exactly the kind of thing that he should have expected of his people. Chief Sangster strode toward the alley where the running man had last been seen. Every window was dark and every door was shut.
Three troopers had rushed ahead and three covered the street behind him. The alley cut through a block of houses and led straight to a patch of woods. There were no windows, side gates, or doors of any kind: if the guy had run into the alley, he must have come out at the other end where all Sangster could see was a wall of trees. If the runner had made it to the trees, they were going to need hounds and trackers more than the obliging local Special Weapons and Tactics section.
Sangster, eyes gritty and limbs stiff from his short sleep, swept the beam of his heavy flashlight across the trees. How long after the call had they made it there? How much time had the man had to disappear into the forest? Sangster wiped his clammy brow with the palm of his hand. Had there been anyone at all in the first place? What had the men really seen? A blur through cars and shrubs and shadows.
Could have been a man, could have been a deer.
He pointed the flashlight at the dirt by the end of the alley: all kinds of footprints stood out in the frozen mud, and there was no telling how old they were.
They searched the backs of the houses and a strip about a hundred feet deep into the forest, but there was no trail to follow, no prints to track.
After about an hour, the chief called the man who had woken him up from his brief sleep and politely asked him to haul his ass down to the station for a debrief. And to bring his friends with him.
Nobody had gone to bed, and a few minutes later seven men ambled up to the station.
The chief watched them arrive and suspected that each one of them had been holding on to a weapon most of the night. Thankfully, they had thought about it and left their firepower at home. Sangster believed in the right to bear arms, and yet he was also convinced that, given half a chance, some moron in the wrong place at the wrong time would have gotten shot for his sins. And one of the men in front of him would have gone to jail for it.
Sangster had made a fresh pot of coffee to show them he was not in a pissed-off mood, and once they were all settled in the main room, he spoke. His voice was croaky with tiredness but friendly enough.
“Guys, I need you to tell me exactly what you saw. Not what you think you saw, or what you perhaps could have, maybe, possibly seen. Only what you saw.”
It didn’t take long for the two men to brief him. The others drank their coffee and stood by in polite silence.
“Are you absolutely sure you saw a man, Billy?”
“That’s what I thought, Chief,” Charlie Five replied. “Hand on my heart.”
“What do you think now?”
Billy gawked at Charlie Four, and his friend shrugged.
In the bright light of the police station things felt different and all the certainties they had held, watching over their homes in the middle of the night, had faded to nothing.
They had seen a fast-moving blur . . . could have been a man, could have been a deer.
“Anybody else have anything to add?” The chief looked around the room.
The seven men filed out and walked back to their houses. Charlie One, his mouth dry and his guts clenched, walked a little more quickly than the others.
Once home, he made sure he’d double-bolted the door behind him.
What should he have said? That a ghost man had stolen his candy?
It was the stupidest thing, and he was never going to tell anyone about it. The ghost man was gone. And if he’d wanted to shoot Charlie One’s head off from the back of the tree house he could have done so at his leisure, anyway.
The following day, Charlie One went to the grocery store and quietly replaced the missing candy in the cupboard.
Chapter 32
Alice Madison pulled the Glock from her shoulder holster and sat on her unmade bed. It was 7 a.m. and the Miller house was creaking its way into a new day. The building’s clicks and whines as the furnace came to life had become pleasantly familiar.
Madison had slept. She would not have described it as sleeping well. Nevertheless, her eyes had been closed and she had been unconscious—with the kind of day they were expecting, it was as much as she could hope. She hadn’t gone running since Alki Beach on Thursday, and that was unusual; the brittle energy rattling around in her system made her restless and unsettled when she should have been focused and calm.
The solution, sh
e found, lay in the piece of high-strength nylon-based polymer in her hand. Madison hadn’t brought her full gun-cleaning kit, but that didn’t mean she could not field-strip her piece and make sure it was ready for whatever the day would bring. It was somewhat soothing, and Madison didn’t want to look too deeply into why that might be.
First, she cocked back the slide and peered inside—empty, good. Then she took out the magazine, pulled back the trigger, and gently moved the slide back one eighth of an inch. From there it was easy to draw it right out and extract the barrel with the recoil spring.
Madison was scrupulous about keeping her weapons in perfect working order—the backup piece was already in her ankle holster—and she didn’t find much in the Glock that needed cleaning or oiling. If anything, it was—as always—a little odd to see the various pieces lying there quite so inertly, as if they didn’t actually come together as a lethal whole.
Madison was a competition-level shooter who respected guns and understood the necessity of an armed law enforcement agency. And yet—and this was something she did not talk about with her colleagues—Madison did not believe that any Tom, Dick, or Harry should be able to walk into a sporting goods store and come out with a new tennis racket in one hand and a semiautomatic in the other. Madison reassembled her Glock with smooth, practiced gestures and returned it to its holster.
The navy-blue ballistic vest went over her fleece, and she tightened the straps on both sides. For the last two years she had worn a Tactical Unit vest with ceramic plates inserted into a soft structure. She didn’t wear it every day, and in fact it was hardly ever needed—except on days with a high potential for danger. And today definitely qualified.
Madison pulled down the vest so that it sat tight around her shoulders, and when she was satisfied she slipped on her holster. She didn’t check herself in the mirror; she knew what she would see.
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