by Scott Blade
She shot me a look that said something like YOU WOULD SAY THAT. But she didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “What about Princess Leia?”
We neared the exit gate. But she continued to talk. She said, “I thought guys from my generation had a thing about Princess Leia in the gold bikini?”
“She’s pretty nice. But Star Wars is a little before my age too. No, good ole Pamela was more my speed.”
She said, “That figures. You got a thing for the plastic look.”
I said, “Hey, nothing’s wrong with plastic. I had toys when I was a kid. They were made outta plastic.”
She shot me another look. This one I didn’t know what it said. It wasn’t quite an aggressive look or an I’m not surprised look, but more like something in the middle.
The guards at the gate recognized her car immediately and saluted. We slowed, in order to weave in and out of the staggered concrete barriers that blocked anyone from speeding through the gate.
We came face-to-face with a street full of the media. The day was turning into night. The sun, which was still just as hidden as it had been the whole day, was setting somewhere to the west. I knew that for sure because the overcast was turning into full dark, and fast.
I’d heard it all said about California: overcrowded, overpriced, and over-arrogant. But it does have one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. I’d seen the sun set from every hemisphere and, arguably, nothing beat the fast drop over the Pacific Ocean. Especially a California sunset from this part of the state, where I could see the mountains, the far-off coastline, and the ocean.
This wasn’t one of those occasions. Even without the overcast and the high altitude, I still would have been unable to see the sunset because of the crowds of reporters and cameramen.
As soon as the police cruiser cleared the gate, Romey switched on the light bar and the siren.
The blue lights flashed and rotated, ricocheting weakly back off the clouds and trees and snow. Some of the reporters moved, some stayed where they were, and others rushed to the front of the car. That’s when Romey hit the horn, which was a deafening, horrible sound, like a dying animal.
Once, I had been camping in the mountains in Yukon. It was early morning and I was lucky to be awake already, when a grizzly bear chased a buck into my camp. I watched the bear kill the buck and drag it off. The screams the deer made were best described as the horn on a police car—loud and bloodcurdling.
The brazen reporters pushed on the car and the hood, several of them knocking on the glass, vying for attention. They were all screaming questions at us. Romey kept screaming at them to back off.
I did nothing.
It took about five minutes to push all the way through them. It reminded me of being caught in protests in Yemen once. We had a team of four SEALs all in street clothes. We piled into a taxi, trying to escape the local police. That mission worked out.
Romey finally cleared through the reporters. But by the end of the line of them, many of them were piling into their vans and turning around to give chase.
I said, “Exactly how big is Hamber?”
“Why?”
“I’ve only seen the main strip and it’s tiny. If this is the entire town, these guys will find us pretty easily.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll take the back roads. Hamber is spread out.”
“Like LA?”
“Come on, Widow. This is a country town. It’s spread out like country towns are.”
“I’m from Mississippi. Remember? I know how that works.”
Romey sped up after we broke through the last barrier of people. The sirens wailed and the blue lights rotated and leapt from tree to tree.
She said, “I stayed in Jackson once. It’s a wicked small place.”
I stared over at her. She’d let out a deep Bostonian accent. I said, “You do speak like someone from Boston.”
She returned to her generic American accent and said, “It took years to get rid of it.”
The car bounced and wound around the road.
I looked back and saw the nearest media van about two-thirds of a mile behind us. Which was a nice head start, but on an empty country road, it would be very easy for them to spot us. I said, “Better speed up.”
“Don’t worry.”
Romey pushed the accelerator down harder and we jammed farther ahead. It was only a matter of minutes until we lost them. And then we were in the downtown area.
Romey switched off the sirens, but kept the light bar on.
I asked, “Why did you lose the accent?”
“When I first joined the Corps, the enlisted made fun of me.”
“I would guess that you wouldn’t be bothered by what others thought.”
“I’m not. But the officers did it too. Not in front of me, but behind my back. So when I was approved to go into the MPs, I took classes in my spare time. The kind of voice coaching, stand-in-front-of-people kind of thing.”
“Public speaking?”
“Right. They taught it as an elective at a junior college. It was one night a week. I didn’t care about the grade. I just went until I felt like I learned all the tips that I was going to learn. Then applied them.”
I nodded and stared out the windshield.
“How did you lose yours?”
I glanced over at her and said, “I didn’t.”
Romey turned the wheel and moved over to the fast lane. We drove through the old downtown area quickly. It was a Monday night in a small town, but it was the end of day shift for most people. The day workers had probably clocked out about an hour ago, meaning that most of them had already headed home. However, the roads still seemed a little too abandoned.
I asked, “Where’s everyone? Why are the streets so dead?”
“Hamber’s biggest employer is Lexigun.”
Which I already knew about.
“The owner died a couple of days ago. Today was his funeral. The employees are off for a day of mourning. He was a beloved figure here. His family can be traced back to the days of the first settlers who pushed out this way. Back in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Fifteen hundreds,” I said.
“What?”
“California was discovered and explored and settled way back in the sixteenth century, not the nineteenth.”
“There wasn’t an America in the seventeenth century.”
“Not true. There wasn’t the United States of America, but there were the Americas named after explorer Amerigo Vespucci soon after Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. And there was a California, as in the State of California.”
“Hell, if we’re going to be that specific, then actually the Native Americans had already discovered it. They were already here, right?”
I smiled and said, “Technically, Asians discovered it.”
“What?”
“Where do you think the natives came from? Twelve thousand years ago, they crossed from Siberia over a land bridge to Alaska.”
“You don’t got a girlfriend, do you, Widow?”
“It’s a little hard to keep one.”
“I bet.”
We turned off the highway down a two-lane road called Lamey Road. Romey drove on for another mile, weaving around the snaking road. I looked out the window and saw nothing but trees.
She slowed the car and came up to a three-way stop. She didn’t stop, but she did look every which way with great attention. There were no other cars in sight.
She took another left and after another mile, I saw streetlights. And then off back from the road, I saw house lights.
Each house was completely different from the next. Some were brick and big. Some had cheap siding and were smaller. But they were all quiet.
We crossed another stop. This one a four-way, but one of the roads led to a clear dead end.
She took the opposite direction and we came to a subdivision. There was a single, wooden sign off in the corner of the entrance. The name was generic, Hamber Pines. Which was pointless
because there were no pines anywhere in sight.
We drove into the subdivision and veered to the right.
Romey killed the light bar and took it slow.
The houses were all two-story cookie cutters. Nothing special about any of them. Each had the same brick, the same scarce trees, and the same lot sizes. There were only four basic designs. They appeared to be on a rotation; not one was next to its equivalent setup.
The only real differences between the houses were the vehicles in the driveways and the number addresses posted on the front porches, near the door.
Romey said, “Help me find it. I’ve never been here before.”
And she gave me the number address. I looked right and she looked left. I guessed that we were already on the right street because she only gave me the numbers.
Most subdivisions are addressed with odd numbers on one side and evens on the other side, like odds to the left and evens to the right. This one was all weird. Odds and evens were mixed in together. No reason to bank on an approach of following a pattern of looking on the odd-number side for Warren’s physical address.
After several minutes, Romey said, “There it is.”
We pulled up. She parked at the end of the drive and left the Mustang running.
She said, “Stay in the car.”
“What? No way!”
“Widow, you’re not a cop anymore.”
“What about this badge?” I asked and reached down and touched the laminate that she had given me earlier.
“It’s not really a badge. Warren will know that. Best if I go alone.”
“Not happening. Don’t even fight me on this.”
She nodded and said, “Okay. I’m not giving you a weapon.”
I nodded, didn’t mention the G2 in my jacket pocket.
She said, “Stay behind me a bit.”
We got out of the Mustang. I shut my door. She left hers ajar. We walked up the drive together, keeping our steps as quiet as we could, but not in a sneaky fashion. We didn’t want to alert anyone who might be watching that we were sneaking up on the house.
I stayed close to Romey. I was a couple of feet behind her. I reached into my jacket pocket and blindly selected the safety of the G2 to fire, in case I needed to deploy it fast. The G2 comes with an extra safety measure that requires a key to unlock the firing block, but I had dry fired it back at his office. This wasn’t a concern. But I didn’t really have to dry fire it. A Marine colonel wasn’t going to leave his backup weapon’s firing ability on safety lock.
I glanced down and followed Romey’s hand. In one quick movement, she unsnapped her gun holster. She kept one hand on the butt of her gun and the other she used to pull out a small flashlight. She didn’t switch it on, just kept it stationary. I saw her look at every visible corner of the house, the porch, and then she scanned the windows. She was a good cop.
I did the same. Basically, I double-checked each spot for something she might’ve missed. I saw no one.
The windows were all dark, except for a single, large window on the right front side of the house.
The porch light jumped on as Romey stepped up on the first step. It wasn’t from someone inside turning on a light. I figured that it was a motion sensor light. It was a bright light. It lit up the whole porch, the steps, and halfway down the driveway.
I scanned the windows and the corners again, fast. I still saw nothing. No sign of life.
Romey said, “Be ready.”
I wasn’t sure that she meant to say it to me or at me, like I was one of her guys. Maybe it was muscle memory. Maybe it was something that she said to Kelly just before they encountered a potentially dangerous situation.
I said, “You be careful.”
She stepped up onto the porch and moved slowly, but not too slowly, like she was stepping through a minefield only she didn’t want anyone to know she was stepping through a minefield.
She came up to the front door, which was a big white thing, with long, vertical glass windows on each side. There were drapes covering them. They didn’t budge as I would’ve expected if someone was home and wanted to peek out to see who was on his porch.
Off to the side was a long bench, painted white, like the door. On the other side was a series of potted plants. Nothing particular.
At one end of the porch, near the corner, I saw two bowls that were empty. I assumed that they were set out to feed a local neighborhood cat or maybe a stray.
Romey said, “Here goes.”
She rang the doorbell next to the door and waited.
I listened carefully. There was no answer and no sign of movement inside.
She rang the doorbell again. No answer.
Then she started knocking, hard. She said in a cop voice, “Colonel Warren. Open up.”
She waited several long moments and repeated the whole action. There was still no answer, no sign of movement.
She tried the same actions again. And again, there was no answer, no sign of movement.
She said, “What now?”
“We go in.”
She thought for a moment and said, “You know I can’t do that.”
I said, “You can’t. I can.”
“I don’t know, Widow.”
“Look, we know that Warren lied about leaving. We know that someone shot your guys from his office. We can’t wait for warrants.”
“I never did something like that before.”
I said, “You’re a good cop. You should stay out. Let me handle it.”
She said, “Maybe if we had probable cause, then I could enter.”
I said, “Give me a few minutes and I’ll find some probable cause.”
She nodded and said, “I still can’t give you a gun.”
“Don’t worry about it. I won’t need one.”
“What if the second shooter is in there? You could get shot at.”
I faced her and thought for a moment. I said, “Then at least you’ll have probable cause after.”
She smiled and said, “It’s not funny.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve been in many situations like this unarmed.”
“What kind of job did you have?”
“You help me find the guys who forced a good Marine to kill himself and take the fall for this and I’ll tell ya.”
She nodded and then she asked, “Should I stay here?”
“Yeah. You hear something, shoot the lock.”
“I should radio for backup. We can watch the house from the car. No one will get away.”
I said, “That’s a bad idea. Until we know more, let’s keep this to ourselves.”
“I know. If someone got to Turik, made him kill himself, and to Warren, then there’s no telling who else might be involved.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I’d already figured that part out. I think she did too. She was just saying it out loud. I’d worked with cops like that before. Some people think better when they hear themselves say the words out loud, in front of a colleague. I figured that it was her way of coming to terms with it, like she didn’t want me to think that she was crazy.
I said, “I’ll check around the back.”
She nodded.
CHAPTER 30
I LEFT ROMEY STANDING on the porch, under the light.
I approached the side of the house, hugging close to the brick wall. I went west, past the garage, which was a two-car thing with an automatic door. It was closed.
I didn’t want to walk on the other side of the house because in my experience, people always walked out of their house through the garage or the backdoor when trying to avoid someone who was standing at their front yard. And backdoors are usually built either at the exact center of a house or near the garage.
It would’ve been a bad idea to go the other way and risk someone exiting the backdoor, trying to flank us. They would certainly go around the garage. It was human nature.
I passed the driveway and looked around the neighborhood. No one was outside for several h
ouses. At the end of the street, from the direction that Romey had driven us in from, I saw a guy leaving his garage and heading to his car. The door was shutting behind him and the light inside disturbed the deadly quiet of the suburban street.
I waited near the corner of the garage until the neighbor’s garage door had shut all the way and he was in his car. Then I looked back at Romey. She was standing there, watching me.
I couldn’t pull the G2 out yet. I didn’t want her to see it. So, I had to take the chance of jumping around the corner. This would be the most dangerous part, I assumed.
I leapt around the side of the house like a kid jumping out from a hiding space to scare his little sister.
No one was there. No dark figures or bad guys with guns. But there was plenty of darkness. The only light nearby was from the neighbor’s backyard and it was dim. It was too dim to help me, which was fine by me. I liked to work alone and in the dark.
I stepped forward into the darkness and pulled out the G2. Kept my finger in the trigger housing, but the weapon pointed at the ground. I didn’t want to shoot someone by mistake, but I didn’t want to have gun safety measures standing in my way in a combat situation either.
I stepped quietly, but not slowly toward the back of the house. I slid along the wall until I came to a window into the garage. I tried to peer in, but saw nothing. There was no light. I forgot about the window and moved forward.
Ten seconds later, I came up to a chain-link fence. I stepped to the left and peered around the corner of the house into the backyard. I only had about a one-hundred-eighty-degree line of sight, if I counted what was already behind me.
I reached down and unlatched the gate’s locking mechanism. The thing creaked open, giving away my position to anyone who was close enough to hear it. I sped up the procedure and entered the backyard. I stopped and waited.
The yard was silent. The house was silent.
I set the gate back, slowly. I didn’t latch it back. I just leaned it shut.
I continued nonstop to the corner of the house and then around the side. There was still nothing but silence. The backyard was so silent that all I heard were my own footsteps in the shallow snow and grass.
In the distance, I could hear the hum of a heating unit, one of those big ones. The motor on it hummed quietly and the fan spun almost as quietly.
