House Standoff

by Mike Lawson

She’d picked Brian for this job because of the four men with her, he was the one who looked the least like an FBI agent. And she could tell that Brian was excited to be given an active role in Sonny’s arrest. He may have been a geek but he wasn’t a coward.

  McCord watched as Brian strolled toward the entrance of the building, pretending to talk on his cell phone as he did. Bunt’s men glanced over at him, then went back to bullshitting. Brian obviously didn’t strike them as a man who posed a threat. McCord noticed that Bunt’s men had left their rifles in their truck but all had sidearms in holsters on their belts. Nothing pissed her off more than the goddamn laws that allowed citizens to go around armed like it was fucking Tombstone in the 19th century.

  A couple of minutes after Brian entered the building, he called McCord and said, “Patterson’s office is on the ground floor. It’s got glass doors and you can see into the reception area. The Bunts aren’t in the reception area—they must be in Patterson’s office—but there’s a receptionist sitting at a desk. There’s a door at the back of the building. It’s not alarmed. If you drive around back, I can open it and let you in.”

  “Stand by,” McCord said. Turning to one of the other agents, she said, “Larry, I want you to get out of the car and stay here and watch Hiram’s men. Take off your windbreaker—”

  She meant the windbreaker identifying him as an FBI agent.

  “—and stick your gun under your shirt and in the back of your pants where it can’t be seen. I want you to call me if any of Bunt’s men enter the building.”

  “Got it,” Larry said as he took off the windbreaker and his holster and put his Glock where McCord had told him. Then Larry left the car and strolled over to a nearby bus stop bench and sat down and pretended to study his iPhone screen.

  Once Larry was in position, McCord said into her phone, “Okay, Brian. Go open the back door and wait for us.”

  “Well, Hiram, I have to tell you that things don’t look good,” Bill Patterson said.

  Patterson had been Hiram’s lawyer for the last twenty years and he’d represented him in his battles against the federal government as well as numerous other business-related disputes. And he’d represented Sonny, the time Sonny had been accused of assaulting a man in Rock Springs, the one he’d hit on the back of the head with a beer bottle. But this . . . This was first-degree murder and Hiram wasn’t sure that Patterson was the right man for the job.

  Patterson said, “They got the warrant to seize Sonny’s weapons based on someone breaking into Sonny’s house.”

  “What?” Hiram said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that someone broke into Sonny’s house, fired his hunting rifle into a rain barrel, and then turned the slug over to the FBI so they could compare it to the bullet that killed the BLM agent. Apparently, they got a match.”

  Sonny shouted, “Who the hell was it? Who the hell broke into my house?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” Patterson said.

  “Well, goddamnit, they can’t just break into my house and—”

  “Shut up, Sonny,” Hiram said.

  On the one-hour drive from Sonny’s house to Patterson’s office, Hiram and Sonny had hardly said a word to each other. Hiram, a man who didn’t normally talk all that much anyway, figured that there wasn’t really anything to talk about until he’d heard what the lawyer had to say. He hadn’t seen the point of asking Sonny a second time if he’d shot Jeff Hunter in the back.

  Hiram said to Patterson, “So what are you going to do?”

  Patterson noticed that Hiram didn’t say: Hey, there’s no way my boy would have killed that man. He appeared to have accepted the fact that his son might be a killer. Nor, he noticed, did Sonny leap up from his chair and proclaim his innocence. Sonny just sat there looking down at the floor as if he knew his world might be coming to an end.

  Patterson said, “Before the case even goes to trial, I’ll argue that because of the way the FBI obtained the warrant, any evidence resulting from it is inadmissible at a trial. It’s a legal thing called “fruit of the poisonous tree.” If that doesn’t work, then I’ll argue that if a person could break into Sonny’s house to test-fire his rifle then somebody could just as easily have broken in, used the weapon to kill the agent, and then put the rifle back. In other words, there’s a case to be made that someone is trying to frame Sonny for the crime. And because Sonny has an alibi for the time Hunter was killed, I think there’s a good possibility that I can create reasonable doubt and he won’t be convicted.”

  Hiram had never seriously questioned Sonny’s alibi because he’d never seriously considered that Sonny could have killed that man. Now he had to wonder if the alibi would hold up. The man who’d alibied Sonny was almost as useless as Sonny.

  McCord drove to the back of the building and stopped near an open door where Brian was standing. She and the other two agents got out of the car and she told Brian, “Get in the car. You’re going to drive us away when we bring Sonny out.” She could tell that Brian liked the idea of being the get-away driver, like the wheelman in a bank robbery. The main reason McCord wanted Brian to remain in the car was that he wasn’t armed and was a technician and not a trained agent.

  McCord and the other two agents walked down the hallway to Patterson’s office. McCord opened the double glass doors and stepped inside. As Brian had said, there was a receptionist, a middle-aged woman, sitting behind a desk. Behind the receptionist, McCord could see a closed door with a gold plaque on it saying: William S. Patterson. Attorney at Law.

  The receptionist jumped to her feet when the three FBI agents burst into the office. She said, “What are you—”

  McCord said, “FBI. Just stay where you are.” Turning to one of the two agents with her, she said, “Hank, you make sure she doesn’t call anyone.” Like Bunt’s four cowboys standing outside the building.

  McCord walked around the receptionist’s desk, the other agent following her, and threw open the door to Patterson’s office. Patterson, a beefy, red-faced man in his sixties, was sitting behind his desk. Hiram and Sonny Bunt were in chairs in front of his desk.

  McCord said, “Steven Bunt, I’m arresting you for the murder of Jeff Hunter. Stand up and put your hands behind your back.”

  Patterson said, “You can’t do this. Not here in my office, when I’m consulting with him as a client.”

  McCord said, “Yeah, I can. I have a warrant for his arrest. And if either of you tries to interfere, I’ll arrest you too.”

  Hiram said, “You goddamn bitch. You got no right to—”

  “Shut up,” McCord snapped, and the agent with her yanked Sonny out of his chair, spun him around, and handcuffed him.

  Hiram said, “Goddamnit, I’m not going to let you—”

  He didn’t complete the sentence. He stood up, his bad back making it hard for him to rise, and took a step toward the door. McCord figured he was probably going to get his men.

  McCord pointed a finger at his face and said, “Sit your ass down. I’m telling you, you interfere, and you’re going to be sitting in a cell next to your backshooting son.”

  Patterson said, “Hiram, calm down. Let me deal with this.” To McCord he said, “Where are you taking him?”

  “To the Natrona County Detention Center.”

  “Well, I’m coming with you,” Patterson said, “to make sure my client is treated properly.”

  “No, you’re not,” McCord said. “But you can meet me at the jail if you want.” To the agent with her, she said, “Let’s go.”

  The agent grabbed Sonny’s right arm and pulled him from the lawyer’s office. So far, Sonny hadn’t said a word; his face was pale and he looked as if he might vomit. McCord backed out of the office, keeping her eyes on Hiram. The old bastard had a gun on his hip and she wouldn’t have been totally surprised if he pulled it. The guy was so mad he was tremblin
g and McCord could just see him having a stroke.

  McCord’s team and Sonny left through the door they’d used to enter the building and Sonny was shoved into the backseat of the SUV. McCord said, “Brian, take off. Take a right. We have to pick up Larry.” Larry was the agent she’d left watching to make sure Hiram’s men stayed outside Patterson’s building.

  It didn’t sit well with McCord having to take Sonny out the back door. She felt as if she was sneaking him away. She would have preferred to go out the front door so the good citizens of Rock Springs could see her arresting Hiram Bunt’s shitbird kid, but knew it was wiser to avoid a confrontation with Bunt’s men. Besides, taking him out the back door was a minor irritation compared to the satisfaction she felt for arresting the coward who’d killed Jeff Hunter.

  As Brian was driving, he said, “Hey. When are we going to go back and pick up my drone?”

  McCord said, “Hell, I don’t know, Brian. We’ll figure it out later.”

  Brian said, “Do you know how much that drone cost? What if someone comes along and sees it? What if a cow steps on it?”

  “Shut up, Brian. You’re giving me a headache. Just drive the damn car.”

  24

  By the time Hiram got back to his ranch, his back hurt so badly from the one-hour drive from Rock Springs that he could barely get out of his truck. He was glad none of his ranch hands were there to see him shuffling toward the door, moving like a crippled old man.

  When his back hurt this badly, about the only thing that helped was lying on a flat, hard surface. He went into his office, and with some difficulty, got down onto the floor and onto his back. He’d have to call Lisa or the housekeeper to help him get back up.

  As he lay there staring up at the ceiling, he thought about his only son. Sonny had always been such a disappointment. He had no ambition, had failed out of college, and was constantly getting into some kind of scrape that Hiram had to bail him out of. And when it came to the ranch, he really had no interest in learning the business. He liked to hunt and fish, drink with his buddies, and ride around on his ATV, but that was about it. He acted more like a teenager than a grown man.

  When Hiram first heard that the BLM agent had been killed, he’d wondered, but only briefly, if Sonny might have done it. He’d heard about the fight and how Hunter had kicked Sonny’s ass, and he had no doubt that Sonny would have wanted to get back at Hunter for embarrassing him. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Sonny, knowing he wasn’t man enough to handle Hunter on his own, enlisted a couple of his shithead friends to help him beat the hell out of the man. But shooting him in the back? Nah, he’d thought, even Sonny wouldn’t do that.

  But now he knew he had.

  If Hunter had been a bigger fellow maybe the fight wouldn’t have shamed Sonny the way it had, but Hunter had been a little guy who had been taught how to fight. And Sonny knew the ranch hands were all snickering at him behind his back and every time he looked in a mirror in the days after the fight, he’d have been reminded of his defeat. The day he’d killed Hunter, he must have just snapped, unable to bear the humiliation any longer.

  Sonny lacked impulse control. Those were the words a high school counselor had used when Sonny had been suspended for breaking all the windows in a car belonging to some teacher who’d embarrassed him in class. Lack of impulse control was a fancy way of saying that Sonny did stupid things without thinking about what he was doing or what the consequences might be. So Hiram could imagine Sonny seeing Hunter alone on the open range and working himself into a rage, and then, without giving it two seconds of thought, grabbing his hunting rifle and shooting the man. Only afterward would he have given any consideration to the potential ramifications of what he had done—and, in the back of his mind, would be the thought that Hiram would be able to save him the way he always had in the past.

  But Hiram knew he wasn’t going to be able to save him this time.

  Maybe if his mother had lived Sonny would have turned out differently, but his mother had died when Sonny was ten. Or maybe if Sonny and his wife had had kids, or maybe if he’d married a woman with a spine, he would have changed for the better. And maybe if Hiram liked him, even a little bit, he’d be different. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  His cell phone rang. With some difficulty, he extracted it from the pocket of his jeans and saw it was Patterson calling.

  He answered saying, “Yeah, what is it?”

  The lawyer said, “The guy who broke into Sonny’s house is someone named Joe DeMarco. I got that from a clerk I know who works for the judge who signed the warrant. You got any idea who he is?”

  “Yeah, I know who he is,” Hiram said.

  While Hiram had been driving back from Rock Springs, he’d been seething with anger. Another man might have wept after learning that his son was a cowardly backshooter and was likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, but Hiram didn’t weep. He never wept. The last time he’d cried he’d been twelve years old. His dog had been dying from kidney failure and when his father told him he had to shoot it, he started crying—and his father slapped him and told him to quit acting like a girl. From that point on, the way Hiram dealt with grief or disappointment or adversity, was to get mad.

  When Sonny’s mother had died of cancer, he’d been mad at God. But since there wasn’t anything he could do to God, he took his anger out on his wife’s doctor, suing the man for malpractice. And when it came to Sonny being a backshooting killer, the only one he could get angry at other than Sonny, was himself.

  But now he had a better target for his anger: DeMarco.

  He’d been annoyed when he’d learned from Jim Turner that DeMarco was in town, poking into the writer’s death. His annoyance had mostly stemmed from the fact that DeMarco was an outsider and from D.C., and just about anyone from D.C. annoyed him. Then DeMarco had smarted off to him in the Grill in front of Lisa, and that had pissed him off, but not enough to do anything serious about it. But now, knowing what DeMarco had done when it came to Sonny, he could finally unleash all his pent-up fury—the fury he was feeling toward Sonny and toward himself and toward the fucking FBI.

  After he finished speaking to Patterson, he called his foreman, a man named Roy Kline, and told Roy to come to the house. Roy said he was ten miles away helping a veterinarian vaccinate a herd of cows, but Hiram said he didn’t care.

  Thirty minutes later, Roy arrived. Roy was a lean man with a weathered face and small eyes so dark they seemed more black than brown. He was almost sixty now, but unlike Hiram, still vigorous and strong. He was a good foreman, knew the business, and knew how to keep the cowboys in line. The other thing about Roy was that he had a mean streak; he liked hurting people and was now divorced because one of the people he’d liked hurting was his ex-wife. And when Hiram wanted to send a pointed message to some drifter hanging around Waverly or some drunken gas worker causing problems in town, he would dispatch Roy to deliver the message. There had been a time when Hiram dealt with those things himself, but those days were gone.

  Hiram, who was still lying on the floor, said, “Help me up.” He couldn’t talk to the man lying on his back, looking up at him.

  Roy reached out a work-hardened hand and pulled Hiram to his feet, and Hiram moved around behind his desk and slowly lowered himself into the fancy, ergonomic chair that Lisa had bought him.

  He said, “There’s this bastard from Washington in town, a guy named DeMarco, staying down at Sam Clarke’s motel. I want you to have a word with him.”

  25

  DeMarco was sitting in the Grill, celebrating Sonny’s arrest by having a martini.

  McCord had called half an hour earlier, this time to say it would be at least six months before the case went to trial and there was no point in DeMarco sticking around any longer.

  DeMarco had said, “But you don’t think Sonny killed Shannon, do you?”

  “No, but maybe I’m wrong. A
nd now that he’s in custody, I’ll be able to ask him where he was the night she died. But there’s no reason for you to remain in Waverly. Like I told you, you’re liable to get arrested for breaking into Sonny’s house, so if I were you, I’d skedaddle.”

  “I’ll think about it,” DeMarco had said, knowing he wouldn’t. The fact that he’d helped put Sonny Bunt behind bars was good, but that hadn’t been his primary objective. His primary objective was to determine who’d killed Shannon. And if McCord couldn’t prove that Sonny had killed her, then he needed to figure out what he was going to do next, knowing he couldn’t hang around Waverly, Wyoming forever.

  As he was sitting there sipping his martini, mulling things over, three men walked up to his table. They all had on work-worn jeans and scuffed cowboy boots. They were also wearing gloves, which seemed odd at first. Two of the men were husky young guys in their twenties; one of them had a large belt buckle showing a cowboy riding a bucking horse. The third man was a tough-looking old bastard with a lean, sun-wrinkled face. He said, “You think we’re going to allow you to break into a man’s house around here and get away with it. Stand up. We’re going to step outside and have a little talk.”

  McCord had been right: It hadn’t taken long for his role in the arrest of Sonny Bunt to become known. But she’d been wrong saying that the biggest threat he faced was going to jail. He had no doubt that the three men standing near his table worked for Hiram Bunt and he knew that they hadn’t come to make a citizen’s arrest—and he didn’t care. He’d been dying to hit someone ever since Shannon’s death.

  “Fuck off,” he said to the old cowboy.

  The man slapped the martini glass out of DeMarco’s hand and reached down and grabbed his shirt to yank him up from his chair, but DeMarco came out of the chair on his own accord—and smashed his right fist into the man’s jaw. The man went down—he appeared to be unconscious—but his two buddies were still in the game. One of them hit DeMarco on the side of the head, staggering him. He countered with a quick left jab, hitting the guy hard enough to break his nose, but while that was happening, the third cowboy hooked DeMarco in the ribs. When DeMarco turned to face the guy who’d hit his ribs, the man whose nose he’d broken threw a roundhouse right and hit DeMarco in the mouth, hard enough to knock him down. When he was on the floor, someone kicked him hard in the side with the pointed toe of a cowboy boot. DeMarco rolled to avoid a kick aimed at his head, but ended up beneath a table and he couldn’t get to his feet. He was thinking he needed to grab the kicker’s foot when he kicked again and see if he could pull the man to the ground where he could hit him. If he didn’t get back up on his feet, he was liable to end up in a hospital—or maybe a morgue if one of those kicks hit his head.