by J. M. Hayes
Heather threw herself the last few yards. He must have heard her coming because he started to turn as she joined him on the porch. She shoved the narrow end of the tube of pepper spray into the small of his back—not exactly the way it was intended to be used—and spoke with her most authoritative voice.
“Hands up or I’ll blow your spine right through your belly button.”
***
“Jesus! What’s happened here?” It was Doc Jones. The sheriff hadn’t heard him drive up again, though Doc’s Buick was only a few yards away.
Dust from the grenades was still settling. The sheriff’s ears rang and turned Doc’s voice distant and tinny.
“It’s Greer,” the sheriff said. “He just tried a frontal assault that didn’t work out real well.”
“Doctor, you’ve got to help him,” Neuhauser pleaded. He seemed on the verge of hysterics, so the sheriff reached over and took the gun out of his hand.
“I came over here as an MD, not a coroner, son.” Doc didn’t like to have his responsibilities explained to him. “Where’s he hit?”
“God, man. Can’t you see? Right there,” Neuhauser pointed at Greer’s bloody forehead.
“That’s no bullet wound,” Doc said. “He banged his head on something. Probably, whatever knocked him out.” Doc joined the sheriff, who was already kneeling beside the lieutenant. “Bullet holes,” Doc said, “that’s my first concern.”
“None on his torso,” the sheriff said, unfastening and removing the bandolier with its collection of grenades. None of them were quite like what he’d used in Vietnam, and they weren’t labeled in ways that meant anything to him.
“I don’t see any bullet wounds at all,” Doc said. “Just a gash on the tip of this steel-toed boot where it got grazed, maybe. And it looks like the heel got shot off, too, but no wounds.”
“His jacket caught on the fence,” the sheriff said, putting the grenades on the ground well out of Greer or Neuhauser’s reach. English opened the cylinder and dropped the bullets out of Neuhauser’s gun. “The steel bar that supported the top of the fence, that’s probably what hit him, and then he didn’t fall far. Not far enough for Chucky to have an angle on him from the back of the room.”
“Lucky man.” Doc peeled Greer’s eyelids up and shone a flashlight into the lieutenant’s pupils. “Mild concussion, probably, though I suppose I’d better get some x-rays and monitor him for brain swelling. But that can wait. I brought you a couple of volunteers, Englishman. And I brought my own gun, too.”
The sheriff noticed two old farmers, one with a deer rifle, the other a shotgun, standing back by Doc’s Buick.
“How can we help?” one of them asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Doc had told the sheriff he owned a gun, but English hadn’t seen the Luger before. He didn’t think Doc had fired the thing since he’d moved to Benteen County. And those old men. One of them, the one with the deer rifle, wore a billed cap pulled down low enough to scrunch his ears. That was to hide his hairless head because he was undergoing chemotherapy. If Doc had brought him from the clinic, it was probably because this was one of his bad days. The guy with the shotgun was a lot stronger, but they’d had to take his driver’s license away last year because his macular degeneration had gotten too bad. The man could probably still see well enough to point a shotgun at somebody, but he might not know who it was. And Neuhauser…. Greer’s buddy had put a gun to the back of the sheriff’s head. The sheriff needed help, but this was the stuff of desperation.
The sheriff went to the edge of the building. Preceded by his .38, he peered around the mangled fence at the shattered windows down in the stairwell.
“Chucky?”
No answer.
“Chucky. It’s me, Sheriff English. Answer me, son.”
Nothing.
“Anybody? Talk to me.”
The silence was overwhelming.
“Shit,” the sheriff said. “I think Greer flushed him. If he’s got a key to that door, he can get anywhere in the building. Or out of it.”
“You two,” he said to the elderly farmers. “You know where the inside door to this basement is?”
They nodded.
“It was locked when I last checked. Go make sure it still is. If Chucky tries to come through after you’re there, dissuade him. But remember, he’s got hostages. Don’t do anything foolish.”
“We understand,” the chemo patient said.
“And let me know anything that happens.”
The two turned and headed for the front of the building.
“Doc,” the sheriff said. “Neuhauser pulled a gun on me before. That’s how Greer managed all this mayhem.” Doc swung and covered the man with his old Luger. “Neuhauser might still be of some help if things go bad for me, but keep him in front of you.” He gave Neuhauser his bullets back, but handed the oversized pistol to Doc.
“What are you planning?” Doc asked.
“I can’t see that I have any choice but to go down there.”
“Chucky could be waiting for that. You could be dead before you hit the bottom of those stairs.”
“Then you’ll know where he is and you can tell the professionals when they get here.” He glanced at the parking lot, hoping to see a Kansas Highway Patrol car pulling in off of Main. Or a National Guard battalion might be nice—except they would all be in Iraq, or off patrolling the Mexican border.
“Chucky was talking to me. So was one of his hostages. Now nothing. And he hasn’t fired any shots since Greer tried to take him single-handed. I think he’s moving. And I’m afraid he knows there’s more than one way out.”
“But you’ve covered that.” Doc was paying attention, but he was keeping an eye, and the Luger, on Neuhauser.
“There’s another. The old furnace is down there. And a spider web of ducts with pipes that lead all through the building.”
Including over the former girl’s locker room, or so English had been told by a classmate who claimed to know. The boy had also said Michelle Nelson wasn’t a natural blond and Becky Prichard had a tattoo on her right hip. The sheriff had thought the boy was bragging, his stories the stuff of adolescent fantasy. Then Becky Prichard overfilled a tractor tire down at the Texaco a few years later and got blown over into the Buffalo Burger Drive-In parking lot. The explosion killed her instantly, and tore most of her clothes off. The tattoo was right where it was supposed to be. That meant those heating ducts really were navigable.
“Can we cover you, or something?” Doc’s voice made it clear he didn’t like the idea of the sheriff going down there, but realized it had to be done.
“No. Just be ready to come treat any wounded. But stay out until I tell you it’s safe.”
Doc nodded and the sheriff realized there were no more excuses to put this off.
“Neuhauser,” he asked, “you know which of those grenades does what?”
The man shook his head. “I was a private contractor in Iraq. We didn’t do grenades.”
The sheriff wondered if Neuhauser was lying, then shrugged and looked around the corner again. His guts churned. That’s how he’d felt, going into the field in Vietnam. Every time. Apparently, it wasn’t something you lost with age.
“Chucky,” he called. “Sheriff English again. I’m coming down there. I’m bringing my gun, but it’ll be in my holster.”
Nothing. Just the wind, sighing down the alley behind the school, chasing a swirl of dead leaves toward Nebraska.
The sheriff made sure he didn’t catch his own clothing on the jagged wire as he slipped inside the stairwell.
“Here I come,” he said, “ready or not.” That last part, he decided, probably applied to him at least as much as Chucky.
He lowered himself and sat on the concrete lip, dangling his feet in the well and diminishing the distance he’d have to drop. The bottom looked deeper than he remembered. He could hurt himself, jumping down there. The foolishness of that thought made him smil
e. He pushed off the edge.
***
It was Hailey.
Pam jumped back and Mad Dog swung around toward the door, expecting the embarrassment of being discovered in flagrante delicto by Galen. But Galen wasn’t there. No one was. Just a smiling timber wolf. Hailey shook her head, as if surprised that Mad Dog could have gotten himself in so much mischief in so little time.
“How’d she do that?” Pam said. She beat Mad Dog to the door and hugged Hailey, then she bent and stuck her head out to make sure someone else hadn’t opened the bin’s door. It left Mad Dog with an interesting view, but he was relieved to discover blood flow was actually returning to his brain. It was needed there, to puzzle out what was going on, and get them somewhere Galen couldn’t find them.
“I’ve never been able to keep her locked in or out of anyplace.” Mad Dog hugged the wolf, too, being careful not to brush against Pam. No sense tempting blood flow again. Hailey covered his face with kisses, then slipped away from both of them and ran back into the dusky corridor. She stopped, just before it twisted out of sight, and looked back over her silver-tipped shoulder. Come on, she seemed to be urging them, we’ve got to get going.
“I think she wants us to follow her,” Pam said. Mad Dog was sure of it. Pam crawled through the exit. More interesting views.
Mad Dog followed, glancing up and down the corridor. It weaved back and forth around a series of bins like theirs.
“Hey, what about your underwear?”
“Leave it,” she said. “It’s not very practical and it’s not like it makes me presentable.”
She was one hell of a distraction without it, but then he remembered how the cloth had seemed to emphasize what was underneath rather than hide anything.
“I chose that underwear for piano practice because the church is so self-righteous. A little invisible rebellion. I don’t want you to think that’s what I usually wear. So leave them, and close those doors behind you. If Galen comes back and can’t find anything but my undies, maybe he’ll think he missed the rapture.”
He might, indeed. Mad Dog grinned and shut the doors. Galen hadn’t left their clothes nearby. Nor had he left the pile from Mad Dog’s pockets. And apparently he’d overcome his aversion to Pam’s cooties enough to take her cell phone, too.
“Our clothes are probably in his office. But I noticed these hanging just inside the entrance to this corridor.” She handed him a pair of coveralls. Not bib overalls, but the kind that enveloped you from neck to ankles and wrists. She stepped into the blue ones. He was a little disappointed and a lot relieved when her body disappeared under the heavy fabric.
His were white, or they had been. Now they were covered with a camouflage of stains. They weren’t quite big enough for him. They ran out of material a couple of inches short on his arms and legs, but they’d been cut for someone with more weight around the middle and a broader posterior. Plenty of room for him, even after he relaxed the gut he suddenly realized he’d been sucking in ever since his clothes came off. He might be getting old, but apparently he wasn’t too old to try and show a pretty girl his best profile.
“Now we just need shoes,” she said. Hell, she still looked sexy, even in the most functional of work clothes, though knowing there was nothing but girl flesh under the fabric might have something to do with that.
“What’s Hailey doing with that other bin?” Mad Dog turned to where Pam was pointing. Hailey was a couple of bins down on the opposite side. She’d jumped up and was pawing at the latch—probably the same way she’d opened the outer door on her way to rescue them. Only she didn’t seem to be giving it her best effort. In fact, once she got Mad Dog’s attention, she sat in front of the door, looking from it to him. She whined.
“She wants you to open that one,” Pam said. “You don’t suppose Galen’s turned these things into prison cells, do you?”
Mad Dog couldn’t think of any other reason Hailey would want in there. Not unless that was where their clothes and belongings had gone.
There was only one way to find out. He finished opening the outer door, then hauled up on the bar that unlocked the inner one. How had Hailey managed to do that one? The latch was tight and he had to plant his feet and grab the bar with both hands and put some muscle into it. But it gave, and since the inner door wasn’t held in place by a few tons of grain, it swung open easily.
“Thank God,” someone said. “I thought I was dead.”
Mad Dog reached in and helped the young man out of his makeshift jail. The kid seemed dazed. He stumbled and practically fell into Pam’s arms and she eased him to the floor.
Mad Dog didn’t like the way she cuddled him to her and began making soothing noises, but now, at least, he knew what had happened to Mark Brown.
***
“Heather?” The burglar with the armful of notebooks and the pistol on his belt swung around and said in an accusing voice, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in school.”
“Chairman Wynn.” The former chairman of the Benteen County Board of Supervisors was pretty much the last person Heather would have expected to find breaking into cabins at the Bible camp. Even if he had been recalled, along with the rest of his compatriots, for financial irregularities associated with the failed get-rich-quick-wind-farm scheme, he wasn’t the criminal type. But that wasn’t the only reason it surprised her. He was also the father of the perpetual screw-up, Deputy Wynn-Some Lose-Some, whose misadventures had begun the day’s catastrophes.
“Why are you trying to scare an old man to death by pretending to stick a gun in his back?”
Heather flashed her badge as she pocketed the pepper spray. “I’m official, Mr. Chairman. Dad’s shorthanded today. I came back to help him celebrate his re-election, so I’m helping out. But what about you? I thought you were in Wichita with your son.”
“The doctors say he’s better than 50/50 to make it. And they’ve decided to keep him in a coma for a few days. I figured I could pace the halls and worry with his mama, or I could hop back in the Beechcraft and come home. Maybe find out what he was up to this morning.”
Heather felt a lot of sympathy for Wynn-Some’s father. Deputy Wynn had been creating problems, or exacerbating them, for years. And the Senior Wynn and his fellow supervisors might have misused county funds, but they’d meant well. They’d been caught in a con-artist’s scheme they thought might rescue the county from its continuing slide into insolvency. The senior Wynn had enough problems without being charged with burglarizing the Bible camp.
“You found this window already broken, right?”
It took him a moment to realize what she was offering. “Uh, right,” he said.
“I understand why you’d be interested in looking around here,” Heather said. “As soon as Dad and Mrs. Kraus told me about the accident, I wanted to come see why a bus load of kids would be coming here in the middle of the night.”
“I think they were on their way from here, not coming here,” he said. “I mean, you saw all those cars out in the lot.”
Heather had.
“I think they gathered here before my boy ran into….” He paused, recognizing that might not be the best choice of words, considering. “…encountered the bus,” he continued, “on its way somewhere else.”
She nodded at the notebooks. “You find something that tells us where?”
“Not where,” he said, “but maybe why.”
She let her eyebrows ask the question.
“You should take a look in there.” He gestured toward the candy-striped cabin. “That’s no kid’s camp infirmary. It’s a high-tech medical lab. They’ve got more newfangled gizmos than Doc has down at the clinic.”
She wanted to look and she trusted him, but she didn’t think a good deputy would turn her back on a suspect until she was done questioning him.
Chairman Wynn knelt on the brightly painted porch and spread the notebooks out. He opened one as she bent to join him. “Look here.”
He started flippin
g pages. Each one was headed by a first name and last initial—Butch B., Annie G., Mark G., Linda R., Chucky W. And lots more. Benteen County wasn’t a big place. Maybe a quarter of the current students attending Buffalo Springs High were listed. Several of them had been aboard that bus this morning.
She said as much, and he pointed at the series of abbreviated categories beneath each name. “This is medical information. See, this first row. BT means blood type, I think. I mean, A, B, O, AB. What else could it be? Especially since the next row, RH, is all pluses and minuses.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “You know what the others are? BP, that’s probably blood pressure. And BPM, pulse rate. But what are some of these others? HLA, for instance. That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Human leukocyte antigens,” he said.
She turned to him, surprised.
“I wouldn’t have known that,” he said, “if the doctors hadn’t run some tests on me this morning. They thought my son might need a liver transplant. HLA, that’s one of the key factors.”
“Oh.” Heather didn’t know what to say. A liver transplant, that was scary. But it struck her that all this might somehow link to the vials of supposed stem cells she’d left in the Gas — Food’s refrigerator, next to a stack of beer. Link, maybe, but to what end?
“You have any idea what this is all about?”
He shook his head. “Medical experiments on those kids. Or maybe it’s just a health study. But why conduct it out here? And why in secret? Who’s funding all this? That equipment in there is expensive. Why would anyone put those kids on that bus this morning?”
Good questions. Heather didn’t have answers, and didn’t have to pretend she did, because her cell phone rang.
It was the other Heather. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Deputy Heather said. “It’s just Chairman Wynn.”
“Not chairman anymore,” he said. Heather didn’t make the correction.
“Good,” her sister said. “’Cause you may want to come out here. The Gustafsons just drove in with Annie to pick up her car. And Mr. Gustafson, he’s real upset about where his daughter was last night. I think you’ll want to talk to him.”
